I like Netflix, but I find their streaming quality to be quite poor, despite having a fast network connection. Have tried on multiple computers through the web browser, as well as on an LG blu-ray player with Netflix support, and have also tried at a friend's house on her computer via FIOS. Quality varies, but at best (which is rare) it's ok; it's never what I consider great, and many times it's horrible, pretty much unwatchable in my opinion. (Specifically, quite noticeable blocking in large areas of similar colors, and that's even when the picture is reasonably good.) In addition, it's not uncommon for Netflix to pause to lower (or raise) the quality level, which is hugely frustrating (unless it's finally stepping up from a really low quality).
By contrast, I often rent movies on my Apple TV, it generally takes about 20-30 seconds before it's buffered enough to let me start watching, it _never_ pauses during playback, and the quality is quite good in my opinion; certainly worlds better than Netflix. (Disclaimer: I almost always rent standard-def, because usually I'm quite happy with the quality of Apple's standard def (42" TV) and the "high" def from Apple isn't enough better as to be worth the extra buck per rental.) I don't know _why_ Netflix's streaming quality is so much worse, but it sure is.
People feel good about owning stuff that other people wish they could own too. And people who don't see the value in paying a premium for that denigrate such devices as being overpriced toys.
There's nothing wrong with any of this, but it's important to recognize that this dynamic has nothing to do with what your average TrueGeek would consider the "functional" aspects of the device.
Well sure, the average true geek would realize that the appeal of the iPad is primarily... the appeal of the iPad. I happen to find the iPad hugely functional and am glad I rarely need carry around a laptop anymore, but of course I'm no true geek.
Meant to moderate the parent up and accidentally moderated it down. Sorry. Can't find a way to correct my moderation, so posting in the same thread in order to blow away my moderation.
The problem I had with the Lynch movie was simply that it was too compressed and you got jerked from event to event, sweeping past so much of the story. The actual look and feel I really enjoyed. (At the time - I haven't seen it recently, so maybe I would feel differently now.) The mini-series had so much more time to tell the story, so I was hoping for better.
But a huge problem with the miniseries was the size: the portrayals were so small. Dune the book was big, the deserts were vast, the halls were immense. In the miniseries even in the desert there was no sense of scale - the frame was always filled with the characters. There is a banquet scene set in a big hall, but we're treated to a tight shot with a few characters that looks like it could have been filmed on a soundstage the size of a nice office.
> The public is a very easily bored creature, just look what happened after Apollo 11. > "Well, we made it to the moon! Wait, why are we going back? we DID that already." [...] > A trip to the moon would get interest going, get money flowing so they can DO the important stuff.
This seems contradictory. If we went to the moon and then quickly lost interest (and financing) before, why wouldn't the same happen again?
>Deep space voyages, while important, won't inspire anyone. Landing on the Moon or Mars? That will.
Not that I proclaim to know what would truly be best either scientifically or in terms of inspiring humankind, but to ME regular progress seems far more useful scientifically AND far more inspiring than big steps separated by many decades. High up on my personal "inspiration" meter would be an increasing collection of permanent space stations (some small, some larger) that humans visit regularly, spreading through the galaxy, some in open space, some near other planets/moons, providing support for widening scientific exploration and evidence of regular accomplishment.
#1 is getting pretty good with the mid-range and better SLRs; to the point where I think dynamic range is a very close second at this point, although I don't think the general public currently has an appreciation for its utility. There is enough visibility of HDR photography that I'm hopeful it will get more attention.
Plenty of room for improvement in many areas, of course (better location management, lower weight, better battery life, faster performance, quieter shutters, better video, better white balance, etc. - and I'd _love_ to see biometric sensor on the shutter button such that the camera could mark a photo as taken by me vs taken by a friend or a family member on my camera), but in terms of really enabling photography, I think those two are easily the biggest wins (and many of the other things have little to do with actual image capture).
Who says you can't resell MP3s? Amazon does. (For their music, obviously, but that's what's under discussion.) Their terms of service prohibit you from reselling or giving away music that you purchase from their music download store. (Hmm. You also can't modify it in any way.) The music labels may be yielding on copy protection, at least for the moment, but they seem to be trying to kill the used music market. Forget about leaving your extensive music collection to your heirs in your will.
> [...] you agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, > lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content. [...]
Contrast this with the iTunes store, which doesn't have such restrictions. (Or if it does, they are in such legalize that I didn't recognize them.)
And reportedly Amazon's terms of service don't allow re-downloading of transfer of ownership. And this is different from Itunes? As far as transfer of ownership, yes, this is different from the iTunes Music Store. At least, as far as I have been able to tell. I can't find anything in the ITMS terms of service or terms of use that prevent transfer of ownership.
Of course, it's hard to transfer ownership of tracks with DRM, because they are tied to your ITMS account - for those there is no actual way to transfer items short of transferring your entire account. But the DRM-free items don't have that restriction, obviously.
Personally, I find this restriction very significant. With the Amazon MP3 store, there is no (legal) used music market, much as the music labels previously attempted to prevent the sale of used CDs. People were up in arms about that; I'm not sure why they don't seem to think it's a big deal when it's not tied to a physical piece of metal and plastic. I doubt many of us would be fine with software companies telling us we can't transfer ownership of software we buy, just because we purchased it as an electronic download instead of buying a physical box. Perhaps the big difference is that people feel they aren't very likely to want to sell their music collections; certainly I'm not planning to sell mine. And on a per-track or even per-album basis it's not so much money. But there are times I would want to sell an old album I don't want/need anymore, and I'd like to leave my music collection to my wife when I die. (Well, assuming I get married, of course.)
(Obligatory "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer here, so if I'm misinterpreting things, please let me know, but it seems pretty straightforward to me.)
Note that the terms of service prevent you from legally reselling or even giving away music that you purchase from the Amazon music download store. The music labels may be losing hope (for the moment) of having DRM everywhere, but they are apparently trying to get rid of the market for used music, much like they have in the past tried to banish the sales of used CDs.
Many people will not care, but there are reasons you might. Say you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, then later it's released in a surround-sound format, or as a high-quality remaster, and you purchase the new version. Now you own two copies, but you have no legal right to sell the old copy you no longer need, or even to give it away to a friend.
Alternatively, maybe you want to will your music collection to your spouse or your kids or a friend when you die. (Maybe they want the music, maybe they just want to sell it and get money for it.) Nope, can't do it - your music collection apparently dies (legally) when you do.
Maybe you lose your job and have a desperate need of money. Well, too bad - selling your music just isn't legally an option.
Maybe you want to buy some music as a gift for someone else. You have to just give them money and tell them to buy it themselves, because you're legally prevented from transferring the license to the music.
After checking it out some, I was getting pretty excited about the Amazon MP3 store, but this is a big issue for me. The iTunes music store has had much of the same effective restriction for their music with DRM, although you could at least transfer your ITMS account in total to someone else. But as far as I can tell from the iTunes terms of service and terms of sale, they don't actually prevent transfer of ownership, and thus with their DRM-free stuff you really could sell it or will it to someone (one of the reasons I've started buying DRM-free albums from the ITMS).
> [...] you agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, > lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content. [...]
"In Japan and Korea, where there is net neutrality and much greater competition among broadband providers than in the United States, there are also higher broadband speeds," he said."
Call me crazy, but I would think it's the "greater competition among broadband providers" that is spurring the higher broadband speed.
You could replace 'net neutrality' with 'rice paddies' in that quote and it would still be accurate. Not to argue your actual point, but you could replace 'broadband providers' instead of 'net neutrality' in that quote, and it would still be accurate.
> i don't see why they would have a gmail-like interface, since > they think their is better
That would in fact appear to be the point of the post to which you were responding, except that they were making that point about Google.
The two services have different user experiences and nothing I see makes it onerous for a user to choose a different service if they don't like Google's. One can choose Yahoo's service and still exchange email quite happily with people who chose Google's service instead.
I myself have hardly touched either service, as I still want certain benefits of a desktop client. Thus I don't have an opinion as to which user experience is better, I just don't see why Google should be under some obligation (or even expectation) to provide the same UI as everyone else.
Transcend has a couple of products in this space that I find relatively compelling: The Digital Album, and the PhotoBank.
I'm about to spend a few weeks in Britain, carrying a digital SLR and a few lenses. I'd love to take my iBook, but it's hard to justify the weight and space for a sightseeing trip where I'll be walking and taking the train a lot - given the weight and space I'm devoting to camera, I just couldn't see taking the laptop. I looked into a lot of devices - I really wanted to go the iPod route since I'll have that with me anyway, but those solutions are way slow and battery hungry. Some other products either seemed unappealing or were expensive compared to what I ended up purchasing - Transcend's Digital Album.
I paid $350 for the Digital Album (from target.com - via Amazon, actually). It is a small, battery-powered device (claims 4-5 hours battery life on the preinstalled but apparently-replaceable rechargeable battery) with a 20 GB drive and a color screen for reviewing the photos. Can feed a TV (NTSC or PAL) and play slideshows. Handles U.S., European and British power with a funky power plug that converts for the target outlet. USB2 for talking to the computer (shows up as an external drive on Mac OS X; I believe it does the same on Windows). Has ports that supposedly handle a whole slew of card types. I've used it with CompactFlash - if I remember correctly, it took about 2 minutes or so to copy 200 MB from a fairly fast card (SanDisk Ultra II 512 MB card).
It seems to work pretty well, with a few UI disappointments (for instance, choosing to delete something prompted me with an alert that made me a bit nervous it was going to delete the entire drive). It can also record 10-second audio annotations for images. Can play MP3s, but frankly the interface made it look like that would be painful. I really wish it had more than 20 GB - it's not so hard to fill that over any extended period if you're taking lots of photos at a high pixel count, especially if you shoot RAW. I shoot some RAW but mostly JPEG, so I expect this to suffice for my immediate trips. Since I can view the photos on it, I'll be able to go through and prune some if I need the space.
Transcend also has their PhotoBank device, with similar basic feature set except that it doesn't have the color screen for reviewing photos, doesn't feed a TV, and doesn't do stuff like play MP3s. But it's cheaper at $250, and there is a 40 GB version for $340.
I considered buying the PhotoBank, but decided I really liked the idea of being able to visually confirm that it had successfully copied the photos from my camera card, and I may want to show photos taken during the trip to people I visit while still on the trip, hence my decision to go with the Digital Album.
I was actually really excited by the Cars teaser. I think the animation really fit the subject (the animated cars looked great, in my opinion), and based on Pixar's prior teasers, I don't expect this teaser actually gives more than the merest glimpse of what to expect - it certainly didn't reveal any story.
Indeed, MacNN on Friday (apparently crediting USA Today for the info) gave a very brief synopsis that indicates that Cars will not really revolve around racing (though it seems pretty obvious there will be some racing).
MILD SPOILER ALERT - here is the synopsis they gave:
"The movie centers on speed-obsessed race car Lightning McQueen, who gets lost on his way to the track. He lands in Radiator Springs, a downtrodden town off fabled Route 66 that has been bypassed by the interstate. There, he learns about what really matters from the cars of the 1950s and '60s."
The July/August issue of Sound & Vision magazine, which arrived in my mailbox a couple of days ago, so it may not yet be on stands, has a ten page article comparing XM and Sirius. I merely skimmed the article, but I did notice that they thought the sound quality of XM is much better than the sound quality of Sirius, at least for their setups (but that Sirius claims it's still tweaking the sound).
Just wanted to avoid being left out, especially since we were one of the early supporters: OmniWeb also has full support for PNG, including alpha, and has for quite some time, like back in the 2.x days (I guess maybe we didn't support alpha early on, but we've supported it for a long time now.)
OmniWeb 4 is a fully native web browser for Mac OS X, written in Objective-C against the Cocoa APIs. (Prior versions supported NeXTstep/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody.)
> So why did NeXT use Mach in the first place? I'm speculating again. I guess they > started out from OSF/1, and the OSF/1 developers had your goals (a) and (b) in mind.
As a historical correction: NeXT's usage of Mach predates OSF/1. When NeXTstep was unveiled and was using Mach, it was considered a very bold move (and many condemned it as a bad move). I'm not sure just why NeXT adopted Mach - my understanding is that it was _after_ their decision to go with Mach that they approached Tevanian about coming on board (but I may well be wrong).
OSF was originally going to use something else (IBM's AIX if I recall correctly), but eventually punted and moved over to Mach before release of OSF/1 (word on the street was that it was because IBM was unable to improve AIX's threading performance sufficiently). At that point, NeXT's choice of Mach began looking a lot better.
And still no floppy drive. I mean, okay, I can see that a few people don't use it, and others need more then 1.44 MB. So bundle a SuperDrive on some models, then, and have a low-end unit without the floppy if you want.
With any but the low end model, you can add a floppy drive when you order from the Apple Store (USB-based, either standard or SuperDrive - or Zip).
Slashdot Mirror
I like Netflix, but I find their streaming quality to be quite poor, despite having a fast network connection. Have tried on multiple computers through the web browser, as well as on an LG blu-ray player with Netflix support, and have also tried at a friend's house on her computer via FIOS. Quality varies, but at best (which is rare) it's ok; it's never what I consider great, and many times it's horrible, pretty much unwatchable in my opinion. (Specifically, quite noticeable blocking in large areas of similar colors, and that's even when the picture is reasonably good.) In addition, it's not uncommon for Netflix to pause to lower (or raise) the quality level, which is hugely frustrating (unless it's finally stepping up from a really low quality).
By contrast, I often rent movies on my Apple TV, it generally takes about 20-30 seconds before it's buffered enough to let me start watching, it _never_ pauses during playback, and the quality is quite good in my opinion; certainly worlds better than Netflix. (Disclaimer: I almost always rent standard-def, because usually I'm quite happy with the quality of Apple's standard def (42" TV) and the "high" def from Apple isn't enough better as to be worth the extra buck per rental.) I don't know _why_ Netflix's streaming quality is so much worse, but it sure is.
People feel good about owning stuff that other people wish they could own too. And people who don't see the value in paying a premium for that denigrate such devices as being overpriced toys.
There's nothing wrong with any of this, but it's important to recognize that this dynamic has nothing to do with what your average TrueGeek would consider the "functional" aspects of the device.
Well sure, the average true geek would realize that the appeal of the iPad is primarily... the appeal of the iPad. I happen to find the iPad hugely functional and am glad I rarely need carry around a laptop anymore, but of course I'm no true geek.
Meant to moderate the parent up and accidentally moderated it down. Sorry. Can't find a way to correct my moderation, so posting in the same thread in order to blow away my moderation.
The problem I had with the Lynch movie was simply that it was too compressed and you got jerked from event to event, sweeping past so much of the story. The actual look and feel I really enjoyed. (At the time - I haven't seen it recently, so maybe I would feel differently now.) The mini-series had so much more time to tell the story, so I was hoping for better.
But a huge problem with the miniseries was the size: the portrayals were so small. Dune the book was big, the deserts were vast, the halls were immense. In the miniseries even in the desert there was no sense of scale - the frame was always filled with the characters. There is a banquet scene set in a big hall, but we're treated to a tight shot with a few characters that looks like it could have been filmed on a soundstage the size of a nice office.
> The public is a very easily bored creature, just look what happened after Apollo 11.
> "Well, we made it to the moon! Wait, why are we going back? we DID that already."
[...]
> A trip to the moon would get interest going, get money flowing so they can DO the important stuff.
This seems contradictory. If we went to the moon and then quickly lost interest (and financing) before, why wouldn't the same happen again?
>Deep space voyages, while important, won't inspire anyone. Landing on the Moon or Mars? That will.
Not that I proclaim to know what would truly be best either scientifically or in terms of inspiring humankind, but to ME regular progress seems far more useful scientifically AND far more inspiring than big steps separated by many decades. High up on my personal "inspiration" meter would be an increasing collection of permanent space stations (some small, some larger) that humans visit regularly, spreading through the galaxy, some in open space, some near other planets/moons, providing support for widening scientific exploration and evidence of regular accomplishment.
With respect to digital sensors, at least:
1. Better low-light / high-ISO performance.
2. Better dynamic range.
#1 is getting pretty good with the mid-range and better SLRs; to the point where I think dynamic range is a very close second at this point, although I don't think the general public currently has an appreciation for its utility. There is enough visibility of HDR photography that I'm hopeful it will get more attention.
Plenty of room for improvement in many areas, of course (better location management, lower weight, better battery life, faster performance, quieter shutters, better video, better white balance, etc. - and I'd _love_ to see biometric sensor on the shutter button such that the camera could mark a photo as taken by me vs taken by a friend or a family member on my camera), but in terms of really enabling photography, I think those two are easily the biggest wins (and many of the other things have little to do with actual image capture).
-andrew
From the Amazon MP3 Music Terms of Service:
> [...] you agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share,
> lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content. [...]
Contrast this with the iTunes store, which doesn't have such restrictions. (Or if it does, they are in such legalize that I didn't recognize them.)
iTunes Store Terms of Service
iTunes Store Terms of Sale
-andrew
Of course, it's hard to transfer ownership of tracks with DRM, because they are tied to your ITMS account - for those there is no actual way to transfer items short of transferring your entire account. But the DRM-free items don't have that restriction, obviously.
Personally, I find this restriction very significant. With the Amazon MP3 store, there is no (legal) used music market, much as the music labels previously attempted to prevent the sale of used CDs. People were up in arms about that; I'm not sure why they don't seem to think it's a big deal when it's not tied to a physical piece of metal and plastic. I doubt many of us would be fine with software companies telling us we can't transfer ownership of software we buy, just because we purchased it as an electronic download instead of buying a physical box. Perhaps the big difference is that people feel they aren't very likely to want to sell their music collections; certainly I'm not planning to sell mine. And on a per-track or even per-album basis it's not so much money. But there are times I would want to sell an old album I don't want/need anymore, and I'd like to leave my music collection to my wife when I die. (Well, assuming I get married, of course.)
-andrew
Note that the terms of service prevent you from legally reselling or even giving away music that you purchase from the Amazon music download store. The music labels may be losing hope (for the moment) of having DRM everywhere, but they are apparently trying to get rid of the market for used music, much like they have in the past tried to banish the sales of used CDs.
Many people will not care, but there are reasons you might. Say you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, then later it's released in a surround-sound format, or as a high-quality remaster, and you purchase the new version. Now you own two copies, but you have no legal right to sell the old copy you no longer need, or even to give it away to a friend.
Alternatively, maybe you want to will your music collection to your spouse or your kids or a friend when you die. (Maybe they want the music, maybe they just want to sell it and get money for it.) Nope, can't do it - your music collection apparently dies (legally) when you do.
Maybe you lose your job and have a desperate need of money. Well, too bad - selling your music just isn't legally an option.
Maybe you want to buy some music as a gift for someone else. You have to just give them money and tell them to buy it themselves, because you're legally prevented from transferring the license to the music.
After checking it out some, I was getting pretty excited about the Amazon MP3 store, but this is a big issue for me. The iTunes music store has had much of the same effective restriction for their music with DRM, although you could at least transfer your ITMS account in total to someone else. But as far as I can tell from the iTunes terms of service and terms of sale, they don't actually prevent transfer of ownership, and thus with their DRM-free stuff you really could sell it or will it to someone (one of the reasons I've started buying DRM-free albums from the ITMS).
The Amazon MP3 Music Terms of Use:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=dm_fo_eula/104-3500699-5015933?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200154280
iTunes Store Terms of Service: http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/service.html
iTunes Store Terms of Sale: http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/sales.html
-andrew
Call me crazy, but I would think it's the "greater competition among broadband providers" that is spurring the higher broadband speed.
You could replace 'net neutrality' with 'rice paddies' in that quote and it would still be accurate. Not to argue your actual point, but you could replace 'broadband providers' instead of 'net neutrality' in that quote, and it would still be accurate.
> i don't see why they would have a gmail-like interface, since
> they think their is better
That would in fact appear to be the point of the post to which you were responding, except that they were making that point about Google.
The two services have different user experiences and nothing I see makes it onerous for a user to choose a different service if they don't like Google's. One can choose Yahoo's service and still exchange email quite happily with people who chose Google's service instead.
I myself have hardly touched either service, as I still want certain benefits of a desktop client. Thus I don't have an opinion as to which user experience is better, I just don't see why Google should be under some obligation (or even expectation) to provide the same UI as everyone else.
-andrew
Transcend has a couple of products in this space that I find relatively compelling: The Digital Album, and the PhotoBank.
p ?ModNo=29 a l_album.html
p ?ModNo=11 b ank.html
I'm about to spend a few weeks in Britain, carrying a digital SLR and a few lenses. I'd love to take my iBook, but it's hard to justify the weight and space for a sightseeing trip where I'll be walking and taking the train a lot - given the weight and space I'm devoting to camera, I just couldn't see taking the laptop. I looked into a lot of devices - I really wanted to go the iPod route since I'll have that with me anyway, but those solutions are way slow and battery hungry. Some other products either seemed unappealing or were expensive compared to what I ended up purchasing - Transcend's Digital Album.
http://www.transcendusa.com/products/ModDetail.as
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/digit
I paid $350 for the Digital Album (from target.com - via Amazon, actually). It is a small, battery-powered device (claims 4-5 hours battery life on the preinstalled but apparently-replaceable rechargeable battery) with a 20 GB drive and a color screen for reviewing the photos. Can feed a TV (NTSC or PAL) and play slideshows. Handles U.S., European and British power with a funky power plug that converts for the target outlet. USB2 for talking to the computer (shows up as an external drive on Mac OS X; I believe it does the same on Windows). Has ports that supposedly handle a whole slew of card types. I've used it with CompactFlash - if I remember correctly, it took about 2 minutes or so to copy 200 MB from a fairly fast card (SanDisk Ultra II 512 MB card).
It seems to work pretty well, with a few UI disappointments (for instance, choosing to delete something prompted me with an alert that made me a bit nervous it was going to delete the entire drive). It can also record 10-second audio annotations for images. Can play MP3s, but frankly the interface made it look like that would be painful. I really wish it had more than 20 GB - it's not so hard to fill that over any extended period if you're taking lots of photos at a high pixel count, especially if you shoot RAW. I shoot some RAW but mostly JPEG, so I expect this to suffice for my immediate trips. Since I can view the photos on it, I'll be able to go through and prune some if I need the space.
Transcend also has their PhotoBank device, with similar basic feature set except that it doesn't have the color screen for reviewing photos, doesn't feed a TV, and doesn't do stuff like play MP3s. But it's cheaper at $250, and there is a 40 GB version for $340.
http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.as
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/photo
I considered buying the PhotoBank, but decided I really liked the idea of being able to visually confirm that it had successfully copied the photos from my camera card, and I may want to show photos taken during the trip to people I visit while still on the trip, hence my decision to go with the Digital Album.
-andrew
I was actually really excited by the Cars teaser. I think the animation really fit the subject (the animated cars looked great, in my opinion), and based on Pixar's prior teasers, I don't expect this teaser actually gives more than the merest glimpse of what to expect - it certainly didn't reveal any story.
Indeed, MacNN on Friday (apparently crediting USA Today for the info) gave a very brief synopsis that indicates that Cars will not really revolve around racing (though it seems pretty obvious there will be some racing).
MILD SPOILER ALERT - here is the synopsis they gave:
"The movie centers on speed-obsessed race car Lightning McQueen, who gets lost on his way to the track. He lands in Radiator Springs, a downtrodden town off fabled Route 66 that has been bypassed by the interstate. There, he learns about what really matters from the cars of the 1950s and '60s."
-andrew
The July/August issue of Sound & Vision magazine, which arrived in my mailbox a couple of days ago, so it may not yet be on stands, has a ten page article comparing XM and Sirius. I merely skimmed the article, but I did notice that they thought the sound quality of XM is much better than the sound quality of Sirius, at least for their setups (but that Sirius claims it's still tweaking the sound).
Just wanted to avoid being left out, especially since we were one of the early supporters: OmniWeb also has full support for PNG, including alpha, and has for quite some time, like back in the 2.x days (I guess maybe we didn't support alpha early on, but we've supported it for a long time now.)
OmniWeb 4 is a fully native web browser for Mac OS X, written in Objective-C against the Cocoa APIs. (Prior versions supported NeXTstep/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody.)
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb
> So why did NeXT use Mach in the first place? I'm speculating again. I guess they
> started out from OSF/1, and the OSF/1 developers had your goals (a) and (b) in mind.
As a historical correction: NeXT's usage of Mach predates OSF/1. When NeXTstep was unveiled and was using Mach, it was considered a very bold move (and many condemned it as a bad move). I'm not sure just why NeXT adopted Mach - my understanding is that it was _after_ their decision to go with Mach that they approached Tevanian about coming on board (but I may well be wrong).
OSF was originally going to use something else (IBM's AIX if I recall correctly), but eventually punted and moved over to Mach before release of OSF/1 (word on the street was that it was because IBM was unable to improve AIX's threading performance sufficiently). At that point, NeXT's choice of Mach began looking a lot better.
And still no floppy drive. I mean, okay, I can see that a few people don't use it, and others need more then 1.44 MB. So bundle a SuperDrive on some models, then, and have a low-end unit without the floppy if you want.
With any but the low end model, you can add a floppy drive when you order from the Apple Store (USB-based, either standard or SuperDrive - or Zip).