More secure, easier to use, and good performance. Also, has lots of BSD bells-and-whistles-stuff, which makes it easy to integrate in big networks, AND it looks good:)
You really should consider alternatives of WIndows AND Linux when you make blanket statements.
Perhaps the number crunching ability of the Athlon is the same, perhaps better, than the G4 in a price/performance compeition. Not even the most steadfast mac users can deny that the G4's inability to double-pump the FSB is holding it back from being the best proccessor on the block.
But you're forgetting you get other kinds of performance. You never crash, you seldom reboot (usually only for core component updates). Peripherals work without even touching the concept of "drivers." Even crazier, if you WANT to get into that stuff, you can. Apple has bent over backwards to make the end user AND the developer happy.
This kind of "performance" may not get you 6 more fps on your quake3 demos, nor will it make your Seti@Home group shoot up to the top, but it certainly makes life with a computer a lot more bearable. It's like everything good about using Linux or BSD without the bullshit.
I think people have gotten to caught up in a kind of pissing contest over who's computer can do a FFT faster and who's computer can push 17 more polys. Quite frankly, computers are damn fast these days. Be it 1.4 Ghz or 2.0 Ghz, it's very, very speedy. We need to stop caring so much about how our computers CAN do things and how they DO in fact, solve problems in our life. Computers are conveiance tools. Apple seems to be the only company that remebers this in their design strategies, and it shows.
Close mindededness gets you nowhere. You're like those people who used linux because it sounded cool, not because it was the best OS for the job. Use something because it's better, not because you think people will be impressed when you use it.
All their products are new. Nothing from 10 years ago exists. That's all old news. Apple has taken a good BSD distribution and made it into one of the most flexible, easy to use, and customizable OS's on the market. They have some of the best developer tools and developer API's created to date. They support interoperability with all OSs out there.
What more does it take to make you admit that Apple has made a superior product? Does Jesus have to come gliding down from the heavens, aglow with holy light, and say, "I use OS X!" before you'd at least consider trying it a a local store? Reading a bit about it? Considering the technical standpoint Apple has taken?
It's fine to dislike Apple hardware, there is plenty to harp on there (although it's still a nice machine). The software is so far beyond anything on linux or WinXP that it's not even amusing.
Now if only Apple could finish getting its OWN COMMUNITY to adopt.:P
When you code to take advantage of the altivec (which you can do quite often) then the G4 is a beastly processor, easily beating down just about everything on the market. The G4 is a powerful vector processing unit. For single-precision floating point, it's great! Most people forget it's got all that power available for integers, shorts and bytes, in proportionally longer increments.
That's an incredible performance boost, and the libraries to use it are trivially easy (just some C functions and a data type you can union with an array). Using Intel's SIMD requires ASM coding or the use of their compiler with several very obscure performance primitives, and it's a pain. Much harder than the altivec to use, and not everyone can apply it.
I've seen Java apps w/ altivec acceleration via the JNI. That was neat. AMD doesn't have SIMD that competes with either yet, from my reading and (admittedly limited) understanding of their new systems.
You keep trying to make these broad arguments that ignore pertinent details. Maybe you should do some reading before you continue here?
The apple case is easy to open, no screws, even during machine operation. The case is well laid out, and it's easy to get access to everything. It's great. I've never seen a PC case as easy to modify as the apple one.
Reality Master. Let's think about this. The iBook is obviously a reasonably fast laptop. I know this because two of my friends own them. They can play Warcraft III and Quake3 smoothly, they can compile quickly.
They're competitive in speed.
Now, on to features. It's really hard to find laptops with all the features that an iBook has. I'll name one area. 802.11b (digital spread-spectrum 2.4Ghz wireless networking). The iBook and tiBook (and all the desktop models, actually) have internal antenna whips that give them increble range on wireless. It's almost double the range of the little PCI cards. How about weight/battery life? An iBook and easily pull 5 hrs on 1 battery. That means less profile, less weight, less cost replacing old batteries. Hmm. How about target-disk mode? Maybe dell laptops w/ firewire do it, but I can't figure out how. You can plug a 6-to-6 firewire cable into another machine and you iBook and mount the iBook drive as a portable firewire hard drive. Fscking awesome for syncing your iBook. Just make the file system on the iBook's drive UFS, and bam, a fast file transfer to anyone who supports UFS.
Awesome, eh?
Apple sells a lot more than clock speed. Dell, Gateway, Sony and Compaq seldom do.
In terms of development, OS X is a very attractive deal. You don't have to work in C++ unless you want to (which is a good thing, C++ is a shitty language). The OPENSTEP library is one of the most famous in developer history, and it's only gotten better. Developing in Objective-C and the openstep environment is interesting. There is excellent object-archival and object-graph archival (like a more advanced form of java's serialization) that the librarys use to actually story GUI's. They have an elegant visual system for creating GUI's and object networks visually which is quite usefull for getting the View and Controller part of the MVC paradigm done.
Apple has excellent Java support, all the bells and whistles, and a Cocoa-Java bridge. Meaning Objective-C, Java, and Applescript code and interact and use the same object library. Very cool. However, they have not gone to 1.4 just yet. Apple says they'll switch in November/December with the iCal and iSync update (something I am looking forward to).
In terms of maintinence, it's kind of ridiculous. Macs never really need any work. I live in a dusty environment so I blow mine out every now and then. In software, the core system components are kept up-to-date with a nice automated software update package. You can easily use apt-get to get and update new BSD softwate (a project called "fink" at sourceforge).
Apple release security fixes for its core system components (which include OpenSSL and apache) very quickly. The LONGEST that it's ever taken is about three and a half days.
Hardware upgrades are just like a PC. Software upgrades are not really established. Some have been free (10.1). This most recent one cost money ($129 standard/family, $60 student).
In general, Apple has bent over backwards trying to make developers like macs.
Certainly, Apple could fall victim to that route. I own a NeXT Dimension, and it was a decent box, but it WAS NOT WORTH what NeXT charged for it. Even my father, who was a major hardware engineer at NeXT, would say, "We're overcharing for this stuff."
Apple is charging a lot, maybe a bit of overcharging. However... it's not nearly so pronounced as NeXT. And their lower-level models are more competitive, and their laptops are terrific.
I don't understand people here who bitch about Apple's hardware being underpowered. In terms of just the processor, the G4 is very competitive. In terms of the bus.. well certainly the Athlon wins hands down there, but the G4 certainly isn't as bad off as critics like to make it sound. Especially with the new "multi-bus" design which minimizes load on any given bus.
Apple is a hardware company because they sell something most MS users don't really understand. They sell ease-of-use and tight integration. On a mac, you never think about drivers. Especially in OS X, things just work. No questions asked. This is part of the apple user experience and it's REALLY hard to do in the open, fragmented world of PC hardware. As far as I can see, PC hardware is such a hit-or-miss proposition (I've build 2 computers now... one was awesome one was not-so-awesome because of the board) that you're safer buying package deals even if you have the expertice to build it personally.
Apple suffers from none of this. Even if they decide to go to an x86-based archtecture ( I hope not, maybe the G4 is a decent place to be, but the x86 architecture is so strangled by legacy bs that it's hardly doing what a fresh design can ), they will NEVER just run on any old PC out there. Apple can't provide the same user experience without some idea what kind of hardware they encounter.
Think about this next time you bash Apple, or Apple-the-company-that-wants-to-make-a-profit-like -any-other-company. I'm a proud linux-to-mac convert. I know all the options out there. I couldn't stand to have my home machien be anything but a mac. WinXP just annoys me, and I am sick-to-death of XFree86 being my primary windowing system.
I suppose this is a good time to plug my university's project, STAT. STAT is an open sourced IDS framework. It allows you to monitor arbitrary events and take arbitrary actions based on them. It's possible to extend the field of STAT's vision by writing extensions to STAT in the STATL language. It's also trivial to write responses to known exploits.
You can find more info about STAT at http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~rsg/STAT/
STAT already has 2 extensions, NetSTAT and USTAT that watch for common network and unix-level exploits. Other projects include making java-level IDS's and mobile agent IDS's. It's a great project and it blows everything else out of the water. If you're dissatisfied with IDS's as they are, check out STAT.
If you're "stuck" with hardware you like, it's not really being "stuck" now is it? Besides, it's not like hardware you would want to use it outside the grasp of a G4 owner. This is what PCI slots are for. OS X has decent hardware support given what it's for. If more of a demand appears, drivers can be written quickly (thanks to IOKit, which is a lot better than DriverKit for OpenStep Enterprise). I'm not really a systems programmer but it was so easy to make simple drivers I hardly needed more than a few days of research and examples to make an effective driver pair for some custom hardware I needed to test out.
As for being "stuck" with OS X. Oh no. I moved BECAUSE of OS X. However, nothing stops me from running linux on this box. I had it running for awhile but junked the partition for disk space because I am so happy with OS X.
Linux is nice and all, but I like a bit more of a slick user experience. It's like Neal Stephenson said... Sometimes I just want to go to disneyland:)
Yes, a human-sized copper mesh hamster ball.
That way, he'd be separated from society for the nutbar that he is, and also be able to avoid the evil zingy rays he fears so much.
Hmm, I wonder if these "electrically sensitive" people own hamsters. It may not work on the human scale, but I could make a killing selling them to the pets of these hysterics.
You should always profit from lunatics. That's the American way, anyways.
Actually, I was worried about this too, but then I started playing with Openstep/Cocoa. There are tons of tools to port projects in Cocoa striaght to GNUStep. Just run them and the do the work for you. Now, GNUStep IS missing some classes, but they're mostly in the user interface realm, and if you don't try to go crazy with a blizzard of interface toys, you can actually make something that ports with almost no work at all to a machine with GNUStep installed.
I think that's at least a start.
I think, personally, that a better course of action for Apple would be to release runtimes and libraries for Cocoa on all platforms, so just a recompile would move the apps from platform to platform.
Apple makes a large chunk of its change in hardware, and taking that away from them would ruin them. So they NEED to sell hardware, and OS X is the best incentive for that right now. It enticed me and I'm not regretting it. This dual 800 G4e was expensive, but (brace yourself) MY GOD this thing is the fastest computer I've EVERY TOUCHED. Even OSX's massive amount of graphics computations don't slow it down at all.
I do agree with you on one point, Apple needs to make its apps more portable.
It's nice to have a computer that just.. plain... works. I've put together dozens of x86 machines, and I've troubleshot even more. Let's be honest, there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
Apple's hardware isn't "Closed." It's proprietary. There is a difference. You CAN just by a motherboard or just a processor from apple, they just don't make it common knowledge that you can. Plus, lots of vendors sell that way too.
What exactly would you customize, that you can't customize now? It's not like there are lots of models of motherboard for each proc design anwyays! They use IBM drives and network cards. You can stick whatever PCI card in there that you like, whatever ram, whatever IDE, whatever SCSI card.
OH and what did they do to BeOS besides not buy it? NeXT was a better purchase choice.
Does that make yours a Maxi-brick?
Is it even meaninful to exchange petty little insults like this?
Sun laptops are notoriously breakable. Espeically the screens. I know several people with them, and those irritating little toys have broken on numerous occasions.
These days, the G4e is a more advanced processor. And SunOS isn't the paragon of power it used to be. - Paradox Man of the C!!!
Well.
Then let's replace the term X-Box with Box-X, the next major system that isn't going to suck.
The PS2 not only sucked, but it sucked and tried to lie about at. At worst, the X-box will be the 3DO all over again, die quietly, and MS won't care.
What's sad is that in this war between two monopolies, Microsoft and Sony, Sega is being shut out. They really need to make a wildly popular highly merchansidable collectable card game or something.:\
(By the way, if you think Sony isn't a monopoly, rethink that. Any company that makes my CD's, makes my CD player, and published the album I am listening to on said CD has a bit of an advantage, wouldn't you say?) - Paradox Man of the C!!!
Ok, folks. Please listen.
The PS2 isn't that great a system. In fact, check the specs on it. Stop looking at polygon count as the end-all-be-all of a console system. It's not. Quite frankly, the PS2 has been a major dissapointment.
So what if it has DVD capability? I can get a dvd player for $99 and a Dreamcast for $188. I can't get a PS2 and when I can it's like $250-$300. So I break even. The PS2 is by no means a "deal."
Gimme a break. Compare graphics. The PS2's grainy, aliased Dead or Alive 2 makes the DC version look like pure gold.
The PS2 suffers from something huge, low video memory. The dreamcast has tons, has a great display architecture and is easy to code for. I know PS2 developers who complain a hell of a lot because it's a very hard system to work with. There are a ton of games for DC. GREAT games, games like Grandia 2 and Soul Caliber.
So many people have bought the hype of PS2. You're saps. The PS2 is a dismal failure. The X-box, if it's even 3/4 of what MS says it is, is going to clean house. And lots of games that were only going to be released on PS2 are now on X-box as well. So there goes the exclusive titles. The only developer Sony really has to back them up right now is Square, which admittedly is a damn fine company.. but it's not enough. I don't buy a system just for square games.
I haven't talked to a single PS2 user, online or in person, who is really satisfied with the box. And there are no cool periphers yet for PS2, nor are any ones coming out in the near future! The DC has a keyboard, mouse, modem, ethernet card, light guns, even a fishing controller!
Gimme a break folks, I am ready to weep over the loss of one of the coolest consoles I've ever owned, the Dreamcast. Sega just didn't market it agressivly enough. Just a few "comparitave photo" commercials showing the jaggy lines of a PS2 title vs the smooth anti-aliasing in 640x480 (through the awesome vga adaptor for DC) would give people concrete evidence about the comparative qualities.
Err, I've been reading and working on stuff like this for awhile now. It's not a super new problem, nor is this an incredibly novel solution. I've run into some pretty amazing cloth demos, and if you've got the power to back you up, you can do a damn good job of approximating just about anything.
This dosen't seem all that cutting edge to me. - Paradox Man of the C!!!
What "closed aspect of the architecture" are you referring to? And with USB being the new standard, there is an utter plethora of peripherals.
Gimme a break. Your arguments are outdated. Apple did what they did because it was better. I like better. x86 is a Pile Of Crap(patent pending). It is old, and ugly, and generally folks at Intel and AMD are more concerned with getting the clock speed up, rather than revising the architecture to get better performance.
All I care about is being able to run OS X and Linux. Both of these desires are satisfied by a G4. Quit your wining dualbooter. - Paradox Man of the C!!!
I have about 8 billion under various soda cans in my places of residence if you want some. They may have moisture stains on them though. Cold soda cans drip! - Paradox Man of the C!!!
If the US is a mere thinking-man's experiment, and idea of government that can't possibly work in it's original format, I'd rather see that than to have them modify it on the fly into a paranoid socialist society, the way it is moving now.
I hope that:
A) This was a clever joke.
B) If not, your opinions are not widespread. Besides, carnivore does NOT address the problem. Anyone serious about blowing up a big building is going to encode their messages. By any media. THat's just common sense. And, as far as we know, we have ciphers that can't be broken reasonably right now (although the NSA might actually be laughing at us for such mediocre crypto).
What this means, then, is that Carnivore is most likely a blantant, pointless infringement upon the privacy of people who don't realize they need to encrypt their mail. They can, in theory, watch for anything they want and who knows what they will watch for, really.
I abhor blantant, pointless intrusions into the general populace's privacy. - Paradox Man of the C!!!
Cuz. Lots and LOTS of libraries have been written in C. Lots of things that we want to use. For instance, OpenGL is a C API, and a damn nice one for doing a wide variety of graphics work.
Can't use it in smalltalk, for better or for worse. With Objective-C++, you get the best of 2 worlds, the C/C++ world, and the power of Smalltalk's design as a OO language.
Which is why I say look at it. - Paradox Man of the C!!!
Slashdot Mirror
More secure, easier to use, and good performance. Also, has lots of BSD bells-and-whistles-stuff, which makes it easy to integrate in big networks, AND it looks good :)
You really should consider alternatives of WIndows AND Linux when you make blanket statements.
I think trying it expect it to suck is pretty much dooming it to suck, no matter how good it is. It's got a lot more than iCandy.
By the way, I'd like to go on record saying, "I don't have an oppinion."
Perhaps the number crunching ability of the Athlon is the same, perhaps better, than the G4 in a price/performance compeition. Not even the most steadfast mac users can deny that the G4's inability to double-pump the FSB is holding it back from being the best proccessor on the block.
But you're forgetting you get other kinds of performance. You never crash, you seldom reboot (usually only for core component updates). Peripherals work without even touching the concept of "drivers." Even crazier, if you WANT to get into that stuff, you can. Apple has bent over backwards to make the end user AND the developer happy.
This kind of "performance" may not get you 6 more fps on your quake3 demos, nor will it make your Seti@Home group shoot up to the top, but it certainly makes life with a computer a lot more bearable. It's like everything good about using Linux or BSD without the bullshit.
I think people have gotten to caught up in a kind of pissing contest over who's computer can do a FFT faster and who's computer can push 17 more polys. Quite frankly, computers are damn fast these days. Be it 1.4 Ghz or 2.0 Ghz, it's very, very speedy. We need to stop caring so much about how our computers CAN do things and how they DO in fact, solve problems in our life. Computers are conveiance tools. Apple seems to be the only company that remebers this in their design strategies, and it shows.
Close mindededness gets you nowhere. You're like those people who used linux because it sounded cool, not because it was the best OS for the job. Use something because it's better, not because you think people will be impressed when you use it.
:P
All their products are new. Nothing from 10 years ago exists. That's all old news. Apple has taken a good BSD distribution and made it into one of the most flexible, easy to use, and customizable OS's on the market. They have some of the best developer tools and developer API's created to date. They support interoperability with all OSs out there.
What more does it take to make you admit that Apple has made a superior product? Does Jesus have to come gliding down from the heavens, aglow with holy light, and say, "I use OS X!" before you'd at least consider trying it a a local store? Reading a bit about it? Considering the technical standpoint Apple has taken?
It's fine to dislike Apple hardware, there is plenty to harp on there (although it's still a nice machine). The software is so far beyond anything on linux or WinXP that it's not even amusing.
Now if only Apple could finish getting its OWN COMMUNITY to adopt.
When you code to take advantage of the altivec (which you can do quite often) then the G4 is a beastly processor, easily beating down just about everything on the market. The G4 is a powerful vector processing unit. For single-precision floating point, it's great! Most people forget it's got all that power available for integers, shorts and bytes, in proportionally longer increments.
That's an incredible performance boost, and the libraries to use it are trivially easy (just some C functions and a data type you can union with an array). Using Intel's SIMD requires ASM coding or the use of their compiler with several very obscure performance primitives, and it's a pain. Much harder than the altivec to use, and not everyone can apply it.
I've seen Java apps w/ altivec acceleration via the JNI. That was neat. AMD doesn't have SIMD that competes with either yet, from my reading and (admittedly limited) understanding of their new systems.
You keep trying to make these broad arguments that ignore pertinent details. Maybe you should do some reading before you continue here?
The apple case is easy to open, no screws, even during machine operation. The case is well laid out, and it's easy to get access to everything. It's great. I've never seen a PC case as easy to modify as the apple one.
It's more than just a pretty face.
Reality Master. Let's think about this. The iBook is obviously a reasonably fast laptop. I know this because two of my friends own them. They can play Warcraft III and Quake3 smoothly, they can compile quickly.
They're competitive in speed.
Now, on to features. It's really hard to find laptops with all the features that an iBook has. I'll name one area. 802.11b (digital spread-spectrum 2.4Ghz wireless networking). The iBook and tiBook (and all the desktop models, actually) have internal antenna whips that give them increble range on wireless. It's almost double the range of the little PCI cards. How about weight/battery life? An iBook and easily pull 5 hrs on 1 battery. That means less profile, less weight, less cost replacing old batteries. Hmm. How about target-disk mode? Maybe dell laptops w/ firewire do it, but I can't figure out how. You can plug a 6-to-6 firewire cable into another machine and you iBook and mount the iBook drive as a portable firewire hard drive. Fscking awesome for syncing your iBook. Just make the file system on the iBook's drive UFS, and bam, a fast file transfer to anyone who supports UFS.
Awesome, eh?
Apple sells a lot more than clock speed. Dell, Gateway, Sony and Compaq seldom do.
In terms of development, OS X is a very attractive deal. You don't have to work in C++ unless you want to (which is a good thing, C++ is a shitty language). The OPENSTEP library is one of the most famous in developer history, and it's only gotten better. Developing in Objective-C and the openstep environment is interesting. There is excellent object-archival and object-graph archival (like a more advanced form of java's serialization) that the librarys use to actually story GUI's. They have an elegant visual system for creating GUI's and object networks visually which is quite usefull for getting the View and Controller part of the MVC paradigm done.
Apple has excellent Java support, all the bells and whistles, and a Cocoa-Java bridge. Meaning Objective-C, Java, and Applescript code and interact and use the same object library. Very cool. However, they have not gone to 1.4 just yet. Apple says they'll switch in November/December with the iCal and iSync update (something I am looking forward to).
In terms of maintinence, it's kind of ridiculous. Macs never really need any work. I live in a dusty environment so I blow mine out every now and then. In software, the core system components are kept up-to-date with a nice automated software update package. You can easily use apt-get to get and update new BSD softwate (a project called "fink" at sourceforge).
Apple release security fixes for its core system components (which include OpenSSL and apache) very quickly. The LONGEST that it's ever taken is about three and a half days.
Hardware upgrades are just like a PC. Software upgrades are not really established. Some have been free (10.1). This most recent one cost money ($129 standard/family, $60 student).
In general, Apple has bent over backwards trying to make developers like macs.
Certainly, Apple could fall victim to that route. I own a NeXT Dimension, and it was a decent box, but it WAS NOT WORTH what NeXT charged for it. Even my father, who was a major hardware engineer at NeXT, would say, "We're overcharing for this stuff."
Apple is charging a lot, maybe a bit of overcharging. However... it's not nearly so pronounced as NeXT. And their lower-level models are more competitive, and their laptops are terrific.
I don't understand people here who bitch about Apple's hardware being underpowered. In terms of just the processor, the G4 is very competitive. In terms of the bus.. well certainly the Athlon wins hands down there, but the G4 certainly isn't as bad off as critics like to make it sound. Especially with the new "multi-bus" design which minimizes load on any given bus.
e -any-other-company. I'm a proud linux-to-mac convert. I know all the options out there. I couldn't stand to have my home machien be anything but a mac. WinXP just annoys me, and I am sick-to-death of XFree86 being my primary windowing system.
Apple is a hardware company because they sell something most MS users don't really understand. They sell ease-of-use and tight integration. On a mac, you never think about drivers. Especially in OS X, things just work. No questions asked. This is part of the apple user experience and it's REALLY hard to do in the open, fragmented world of PC hardware. As far as I can see, PC hardware is such a hit-or-miss proposition (I've build 2 computers now... one was awesome one was not-so-awesome because of the board) that you're safer buying package deals even if you have the expertice to build it personally.
Apple suffers from none of this. Even if they decide to go to an x86-based archtecture ( I hope not, maybe the G4 is a decent place to be, but the x86 architecture is so strangled by legacy bs that it's hardly doing what a fresh design can ), they will NEVER just run on any old PC out there. Apple can't provide the same user experience without some idea what kind of hardware they encounter.
Think about this next time you bash Apple, or Apple-the-company-that-wants-to-make-a-profit-lik
I suppose this is a good time to plug my university's project, STAT. STAT is an open sourced IDS framework. It allows you to monitor arbitrary events and take arbitrary actions based on them. It's possible to extend the field of STAT's vision by writing extensions to STAT in the STATL language. It's also trivial to write responses to known exploits.
You can find more info about STAT at
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~rsg/STAT/
STAT already has 2 extensions, NetSTAT and USTAT that watch for common network and unix-level exploits. Other projects include making java-level IDS's and mobile agent IDS's. It's a great project and it blows everything else out of the water. If you're dissatisfied with IDS's as they are, check out STAT.
If you're "stuck" with hardware you like, it's not really being "stuck" now is it? Besides, it's not like hardware you would want to use it outside the grasp of a G4 owner. This is what PCI slots are for. OS X has decent hardware support given what it's for. If more of a demand appears, drivers can be written quickly (thanks to IOKit, which is a lot better than DriverKit for OpenStep Enterprise). I'm not really a systems programmer but it was so easy to make simple drivers I hardly needed more than a few days of research and examples to make an effective driver pair for some custom hardware I needed to test out.
:)
As for being "stuck" with OS X. Oh no. I moved BECAUSE of OS X. However, nothing stops me from running linux on this box. I had it running for awhile but junked the partition for disk space because I am so happy with OS X.
Linux is nice and all, but I like a bit more of a slick user experience. It's like Neal Stephenson said... Sometimes I just want to go to disneyland
Showing your intelligence through blind distaste for perfectly serviceable computer hardware.
Way to go proving yourself outside the norm, buddy. Clearly, you have a good grasp of the situation.
Yes, a human-sized copper mesh hamster ball.
That way, he'd be separated from society for the nutbar that he is, and also be able to avoid the evil zingy rays he fears so much.
Hmm, I wonder if these "electrically sensitive" people own hamsters. It may not work on the human scale, but I could make a killing selling them to the pets of these hysterics.
You should always profit from lunatics. That's the American way, anyways.
Actually, I was worried about this too, but then I started playing with Openstep/Cocoa. There are tons of tools to port projects in Cocoa striaght to GNUStep. Just run them and the do the work for you. Now, GNUStep IS missing some classes, but they're mostly in the user interface realm, and if you don't try to go crazy with a blizzard of interface toys, you can actually make something that ports with almost no work at all to a machine with GNUStep installed.
I think that's at least a start.
I think, personally, that a better course of action for Apple would be to release runtimes and libraries for Cocoa on all platforms, so just a recompile would move the apps from platform to platform.
Apple makes a large chunk of its change in hardware, and taking that away from them would ruin them. So they NEED to sell hardware, and OS X is the best incentive for that right now. It enticed me and I'm not regretting it. This dual 800 G4e was expensive, but (brace yourself) MY GOD this thing is the fastest computer I've EVERY TOUCHED. Even OSX's massive amount of graphics computations don't slow it down at all.
I do agree with you on one point, Apple needs to make its apps more portable.
It's nice to have a computer that just.. plain... works. I've put together dozens of x86 machines, and I've troubleshot even more. Let's be honest, there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
Apple's hardware isn't "Closed." It's proprietary. There is a difference. You CAN just by a motherboard or just a processor from apple, they just don't make it common knowledge that you can. Plus, lots of vendors sell that way too.
What exactly would you customize, that you can't customize now? It's not like there are lots of models of motherboard for each proc design anwyays! They use IBM drives and network cards. You can stick whatever PCI card in there that you like, whatever ram, whatever IDE, whatever SCSI card.
OH and what did they do to BeOS besides not buy it? NeXT was a better purchase choice.
Does that make yours a Maxi-brick?
Is it even meaninful to exchange petty little insults like this?
Sun laptops are notoriously breakable. Espeically the screens. I know several people with them, and those irritating little toys have broken on numerous occasions.
These days, the G4e is a more advanced processor. And SunOS isn't the paragon of power it used to be.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Well.
:\
Then let's replace the term X-Box with Box-X, the next major system that isn't going to suck.
The PS2 not only sucked, but it sucked and tried to lie about at. At worst, the X-box will be the 3DO all over again, die quietly, and MS won't care.
What's sad is that in this war between two monopolies, Microsoft and Sony, Sega is being shut out. They really need to make a wildly popular highly merchansidable collectable card game or something.
(By the way, if you think Sony isn't a monopoly, rethink that. Any company that makes my CD's, makes my CD player, and published the album I am listening to on said CD has a bit of an advantage, wouldn't you say?)
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Ok, folks. Please listen.
The PS2 isn't that great a system. In fact, check the specs on it. Stop looking at polygon count as the end-all-be-all of a console system. It's not. Quite frankly, the PS2 has been a major dissapointment.
So what if it has DVD capability? I can get a dvd player for $99 and a Dreamcast for $188. I can't get a PS2 and when I can it's like $250-$300. So I break even. The PS2 is by no means a "deal."
Gimme a break. Compare graphics. The PS2's grainy, aliased Dead or Alive 2 makes the DC version look like pure gold.
The PS2 suffers from something huge, low video memory. The dreamcast has tons, has a great display architecture and is easy to code for. I know PS2 developers who complain a hell of a lot because it's a very hard system to work with. There are a ton of games for DC. GREAT games, games like Grandia 2 and Soul Caliber.
So many people have bought the hype of PS2. You're saps. The PS2 is a dismal failure. The X-box, if it's even 3/4 of what MS says it is, is going to clean house. And lots of games that were only going to be released on PS2 are now on X-box as well. So there goes the exclusive titles. The only developer Sony really has to back them up right now is Square, which admittedly is a damn fine company.. but it's not enough. I don't buy a system just for square games.
I haven't talked to a single PS2 user, online or in person, who is really satisfied with the box. And there are no cool periphers yet for PS2, nor are any ones coming out in the near future! The DC has a keyboard, mouse, modem, ethernet card, light guns, even a fishing controller!
Gimme a break folks, I am ready to weep over the loss of one of the coolest consoles I've ever owned, the Dreamcast. Sega just didn't market it agressivly enough. Just a few "comparitave photo" commercials showing the jaggy lines of a PS2 title vs the smooth anti-aliasing in 640x480 (through the awesome vga adaptor for DC) would give people concrete evidence about the comparative qualities.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Err, I've been reading and working on stuff like this for awhile now. It's not a super new problem, nor is this an incredibly novel solution. I've run into some pretty amazing cloth demos, and if you've got the power to back you up, you can do a damn good job of approximating just about anything.
This dosen't seem all that cutting edge to me.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
What "closed aspect of the architecture" are you referring to? And with USB being the new standard, there is an utter plethora of peripherals.
Gimme a break. Your arguments are outdated. Apple did what they did because it was better. I like better. x86 is a Pile Of Crap(patent pending). It is old, and ugly, and generally folks at Intel and AMD are more concerned with getting the clock speed up, rather than revising the architecture to get better performance.
All I care about is being able to run OS X and Linux. Both of these desires are satisfied by a G4. Quit your wining dualbooter.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
I have about 8 billion under various soda cans in my places of residence if you want some. They may have moisture stains on them though. Cold soda cans drip!
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
If the US is a mere thinking-man's experiment, and idea of government that can't possibly work in it's original format, I'd rather see that than to have them modify it on the fly into a paranoid socialist society, the way it is moving now.
I hope that:
A) This was a clever joke.
B) If not, your opinions are not widespread. Besides, carnivore does NOT address the problem. Anyone serious about blowing up a big building is going to encode their messages. By any media. THat's just common sense. And, as far as we know, we have ciphers that can't be broken reasonably right now (although the NSA might actually be laughing at us for such mediocre crypto).
What this means, then, is that Carnivore is most likely a blantant, pointless infringement upon the privacy of people who don't realize they need to encrypt their mail. They can, in theory, watch for anything they want and who knows what they will watch for, really.
I abhor blantant, pointless intrusions into the general populace's privacy.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Cuz. Lots and LOTS of libraries have been written in C. Lots of things that we want to use. For instance, OpenGL is a C API, and a damn nice one for doing a wide variety of graphics work.
Can't use it in smalltalk, for better or for worse. With Objective-C++, you get the best of 2 worlds, the C/C++ world, and the power of Smalltalk's design as a OO language.
Which is why I say look at it.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Maybe I have this wrong. Maybe not.
Isn't reference counting just another form of garbage collection?
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!