Dude, do you even know what "recompiling" means? Your entire post is nonsense.
Linux apps are ALREADY recompilable and compatible for mac. All of them, just about. There were only problems when OS X beta first hit, and that was mostly because people had been writing their Makefiles poorly.
Modern computer software is almost never CPU-tied. The only problem is you have to recompile to run on different CPUs, which means you have to have source code. Linux apps, conveniently, you usually do, meaning transitioning between CPU archs as a linux user is effortless in a way it will not be for OS X users. The only problem with linux/unix software on OS X is that GUI apps don't share quite the same API, which means they have to be run in an X server app, which is sort of kind of like wine, only 100% compatible and 100% ugly.
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
I assure you, no. The reasons inkscape is broken on my mac have nothing whatsoever to do with processors. I don't know what the holdup on openoffice 2.0 is, but I think it's less to do with chips and more to do with APIs. If there's some incompatibility between OO2 and Apple X11 I'm sure it would be fixed by now if someone felt like using a word processor inside the X11 battlemech were worth it.
What you're saying is kind of like "no more second-class windows versions of popular OS apps" because Cygwin exists there.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
That does have interesting implications. But it's going to require a LOT of work to make that work, above and beyond what Wine's already doing. Wine will have to be practically rewritten for cocoa. Otherwise we'll be running the partially-incompatible wine translation layer inside the compatible-but-awkward X11 translation layer. Eww. I don't really expect wine for os x to get to the point your average person can run it for a long time, and I don't expect it to really work ever unless Apple themselves decide to put some work into it.
And Wine doesn't mean much to me personally. Again, great for Apple, great for switchers, not so much for anyone who's already invested in the mac. Windows apps are half the reason windows isn't worth using. The only thing it's really got worth keeping are games, and well, not only are those what Wine is worst at, that's what that little multicolored box plugged into my TV is for.
This is-- it's hard to tell-- possibly a good business decision for Apple. It's probably good for the seemingly quite large contingent of people here on slashdot who say over and over they have always wanted macs but never actually get one. For those of you in the "let's run linux on a toaster!" contingent this is fantastic, since you now have the fun challenge open to you of screwing with Darwin and getting an unauthorized port of Mac OS/x86 running on your athlons or whatever you kids are using these days.
For Apple's actual customers, this fucking sucks.
I've been using macs for... I can't even keep track. Somewhere between thirteen and sixteen years now. Shortly into this, I had to deal with a painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched from the 680x0 to the PowerPC architecture. This was necessary. The 680x0 was not a growable architecture; the PPC architecture was (and still is). The PPC represented such a massive boost in power that the 680x0 could be emulated with more speed than the fastest mac 680x0s themselves offered. But it was still hard. Mac users had to deal with the obnoxiousness of fat binaries vs ppc vs 68k for years, and the slowdown when those 68k apps were running, and the 68k binaries never quite went away all the way up until OS X. Getting PPC binaries was in theory just a matter of recompiling, but sometimes relatively essential apps had been made by developers who had disappeared off the face of the planet, or had made their programs dependent on legacy programming tools without ppc support, or were just plain lazy. In practice FAT binaries were a luxury because devs generally either had compiled for 68k long ago and didn't feel like recompiling, or were compiling on PPC and didn't feel like going to the bother of compiling and distributing FAT just for the convenience of the users of a discontinued architecture.
Awhile after this, I had to deal with another painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched to OS X. This too was necessary, and we'd known it was coming for years; most of us were getting quite impatient, since we'd been waiting since Spindler for an OS where we could for(int *p=0;;*(p++)=0); without having to reboot. But it wasn't effortless. Aside from random complaints about the spatial finder or migrane-inducing cutesy interference bar patterns everywhere, the mac software library was kind of messed up for a long time. Classic was not really usable except in an emergency, especially not since the early versions of OS X dealt so horribly with RAM starvation and Classic was a big RAM demand. Classic also didn't work with a lot of apps, especially in the A/V area. So this wasn't like the 68k switch, where having the wrong binary meant a little bit of slowdown; the software library had to start over at zero. Yeah, we got Word and IE and the other big apps relatively quickly, but that does not a software library make. You need support apps. You need Adiums and VLCs and Colliloquys. You know, the little programs that maybe aren't in day to day usage and maybe not everyone -- but everyone needs one of these apps eventually, and when you need them, you need them. Unless like me you were lucky enough to know how to escape into UNIX-land and use the software library there, for a long time you would find yourself periodically screwed. But, this was necessary, and this passed. It took five years or so, but the software library has now gotten to the point where if I suddenly find myself thinking "hmm, I need an app that does blah" I can look on versiontracker and more likely than not find it.
Except now this new transition is going to make that library restart once again at zero.
And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers. When the whole thing's done, in three years or whenever, we'll have a marginally faster computer, maybe a few tens of percents faster. Or rather so long as you weren't using any Altivec-heavy apps (since SSE is a poor replacement) and as long
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices
Personally, I do not think online-playable games are the place to look for real change in video games. Online games require infrastructure-- sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. Sometimes you can cut down almost entirely on how much infrastructure you need by some clever design, such as Spore uses. But in general you're going to have additional costs for an online-play game. And the greater those costs are, the more risk-adverse the developer-- or more specifically the people funding the developer-- will become. MMORPGs in particular, since they require a fantastic amount of infrastructure, are probably the most homogenous, unsurprising, boring portion of the entire game market.
But we are seeing some interesting backlash against the whole risk-averse thing, and some really interesting things are beginning to emerge. Interestingly, most of the really interesting things right now seem to be in the budget title area. The game I probably got the most out of that I've gotten recently is this absolutely bizarre nintendo DS thing called "electroplankton". I imported this from Japan about a month ago on the assumption that it would never be released in America, only to find a couple weeks ago that... it's planned to come out in America now. But anyway. It isn't really even a game, exactly. It's just ten little generative music toys where you mess with the touchscreen and automatically generated music results. But it's fun as hell. I play with this thing for days at a time without getting bored, while if you passed me your average full-price FPS I'd spend eight hours playing through the single player campaign once and then throw it away forever, since I'd seen all there was to see (of course, I paid full price for electroplankton since I imported, but anyhow).
I don't think this kind of reaction is unique to me. I'm curious what's going to happen when people start to realize they have more fun with quick cheap katamari damacy or tetris like games, than they do with the current trendy video games that are basically high-budget interactive movies that, were we judging them by the standards of movies and not video games, would not be very good ones.
Now that they've said it isn't in there, if it turns out later that they were lying and it is in there, isn't that class-action-lawsuit worthy material?
Because I for one consider a chip which purposefully takes control of my computer away from me and gives it to someone else without my authorization to be broken.
So if your point was just "all government is evil always", why not just say that to begin with instead of fiddling around with this "the consumers will police it" nonsense?
So... are people doing less business with businesses that are careless with personal information now?
Have they ever shown signs of doing this? At all?
No?
So what, exactly, is the difference between "letting consumers police poor corporate identity safety policies" and "as a nation, doing nothing whatsoever about the corporate identity safety policy problem whatsoever"?
I mean maybe there's this great libertarian fantasyland somewhere where people suddenly call up their rental car places and say "I want verifiable evidence that you shredded your copy of my credit report rather than putting it in a dumpster, and I'm canceling my business with you immediately if you don't!". However in the real world people just want to rent a car, and if you do call up your rental car company and say "by the way, what did you do with my credit report?" and they say "we shredded it", you do not have a way of telling whether or not they are telling the truth. A grand jury, however, does.
- The vast majority of studies estimate the installed base of the macintosh at somewhere around three to five percent. - One study estimates it at sixteen percent.
The conclusion is:
- The studies estimating at three to five percent must have been doing something wrong
There isn't any violation, technically, but IMHO the spirit of the GPL has been broken
Why yes, yes it has.
In fact, not just that-- the letter of the GPL has been broken as well.
However this is not a problem since Konqueror is under the LGPL, not the GPL.
The above is not just nitpicking your post. There is quite a serious distinction here. This is in fact exactly one of the reasons why Richard M. Stallman strongly recommends people use the GPL rather than the LGPL-- because normal, in-spirit, recommended uses of the LGPL can seriously violate the spirit of the GPL, and Richard M. Stallman wants to preserve the spirit of the GPL. From the LGPL preamble:
We call this license the "Lesser" General Public License because it does Less to protect the user's freedom than the ordinary General Public License. It also provides other free software developers Less of an advantage over competing non-free programs. These disadvantages are the reason we use the ordinary General Public License for many libraries. However, the Lesser license provides advantages in certain special circumstances.
However, Apple has pretty well I'd say covered the spirit of the LGPL, which was after all more or less specifically designed to allow free software which proprietary software developers can make use of, as clients of a sort, without having to enter the free software world themselves. And this was in a way part of the dialogue of the Safari project beginning-- had Konqueror decided to use the GPL rather than the LGPL, Apple almost certainly would not have used KHTML as the basis for Safari, because the GPL, in spirit and in letter, is too demanding to be useful for Apple's purposes.
Why would Intel care what the Cell's doing in the game console market? Intel's never been a player in the game console market, and never will be. The one time that the x86 was used in a video game console it was more because the manufacturer had quasipolitical reasons than because of anything else, it was widely regarded as a mistake, and it was even rumored to have made Intel rather unhappy in the end because they allegedly had to keep one PIII line open that was doing nothing but making XBox chips.
The demands of the video game console market (one cheap, special-purpose, stable, embedded-friendly chip whose core has many potential vendors), just don't fit with Intel's moving target "make the greatest PC chip we can for awhile, then drop it" business model.
Meanwhile the PPC's tearing up the console market ATM, but the Cell is currently set to only appear in the Sony Playstation line. Meanwhile the Cell, in the opinion of many people including me, may be a great chip for games but is unsuitable for a general purpose PC such as Apple or Dell makes. It really probably isn't much of a threat to Intel at all except maybe in the high-performance computing area.
I seriously doubt they'll be able to pull it off. OS X is a very portability-friendly OS and the parts most crucial to creating a port are open source in the form of "Darwin".
If Apple wants to keep unauthorized ports of OS X from occurring, they've so far screwed that all to hell at almost every level. I'll be very surprised if we don't see an unauthorized port of OS X to the XBox 360.
Perhaps this is why the government requires you to obtain a license to operate a car, and uses a separate licensing system to attempt to track exactly who owns every car in the U.S...
Holy crap! Where did you get the idea of comparing OS's to cars?!? Genius.
If metaphors were cars this would be the big honking overcrowded city bus that everyone's ridden and smells vaguely of urine.
I'm finding this discussion interesting
on
Korean MSN Site Hacked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So the idea is that Microsoft may not be responsible for the security and user safety of online services with their name on it because they may not personally be the ones actually running it?
Well then I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I am considering paying for or signing up for a Microsoft-branded online service.
So I think it's more than OOo compatibility when it comes to businesses
It's the only thing that matters to me. The only thing that is important from my perspective about the new MSWORD is whether or not I am going to be forced to buy it.
Watch the video - the entire file format is completely open.
Honestly, I am not going to believe it until I see it.
Microsoft has lied before.
It's quite possible they don't intend to open their file formats at all, they just intend to make the Washington Post and its readers think they've opened their file formats. In the meantime, if Microsoft actually wanted to "end the era of closed file formats", all they'd have to do is, you know, actually comply with the letter of the antitrust decision currently handed down against them in the E.U. and the spirit of the toothless antitrust "settlement" currently in effect against them in the U.S.. Mysteriously, they haven't.
Man. If you could go back in time to 1980 and tell everyone that in 25 years, European governments would be spearheading an initiative called "Operation Spam Zombies", and that this name was not in any way meant to be humorous, the looks on peoples faces would be priceless.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, do you even know what "recompiling" means? Your entire post is nonsense.
/unix software on OS X is that GUI apps don't share quite the same API, which means they have to be run in an X server app, which is sort of kind of like wine, only 100% compatible and 100% ugly.
Linux apps are ALREADY recompilable and compatible for mac. All of them, just about. There were only problems when OS X beta first hit, and that was mostly because people had been writing their Makefiles poorly.
Modern computer software is almost never CPU-tied. The only problem is you have to recompile to run on different CPUs, which means you have to have source code. Linux apps, conveniently, you usually do, meaning transitioning between CPU archs as a linux user is effortless in a way it will not be for OS X users. The only problem with linux
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
I assure you, no. The reasons inkscape is broken on my mac have nothing whatsoever to do with processors. I don't know what the holdup on openoffice 2.0 is, but I think it's less to do with chips and more to do with APIs. If there's some incompatibility between OO2 and Apple X11 I'm sure it would be fixed by now if someone felt like using a word processor inside the X11 battlemech were worth it.
What you're saying is kind of like "no more second-class windows versions of popular OS apps" because Cygwin exists there.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
That does have interesting implications. But it's going to require a LOT of work to make that work, above and beyond what Wine's already doing. Wine will have to be practically rewritten for cocoa. Otherwise we'll be running the partially-incompatible wine translation layer inside the compatible-but-awkward X11 translation layer. Eww. I don't really expect wine for os x to get to the point your average person can run it for a long time, and I don't expect it to really work ever unless Apple themselves decide to put some work into it.
And Wine doesn't mean much to me personally. Again, great for Apple, great for switchers, not so much for anyone who's already invested in the mac. Windows apps are half the reason windows isn't worth using. The only thing it's really got worth keeping are games, and well, not only are those what Wine is worst at, that's what that little multicolored box plugged into my TV is for.
I'll have compatibility headaches either way. So why not? :P
Yeah, pretty much. I've been sitting here for awhile staring at macnn and fuming.
This is-- it's hard to tell-- possibly a good business decision for Apple. It's probably good for the seemingly quite large contingent of people here on slashdot who say over and over they have always wanted macs but never actually get one. For those of you in the "let's run linux on a toaster!" contingent this is fantastic, since you now have the fun challenge open to you of screwing with Darwin and getting an unauthorized port of Mac OS/x86 running on your athlons or whatever you kids are using these days.
For Apple's actual customers, this fucking sucks.
I've been using macs for... I can't even keep track. Somewhere between thirteen and sixteen years now. Shortly into this, I had to deal with a painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched from the 680x0 to the PowerPC architecture. This was necessary. The 680x0 was not a growable architecture; the PPC architecture was (and still is). The PPC represented such a massive boost in power that the 680x0 could be emulated with more speed than the fastest mac 680x0s themselves offered. But it was still hard. Mac users had to deal with the obnoxiousness of fat binaries vs ppc vs 68k for years, and the slowdown when those 68k apps were running, and the 68k binaries never quite went away all the way up until OS X. Getting PPC binaries was in theory just a matter of recompiling, but sometimes relatively essential apps had been made by developers who had disappeared off the face of the planet, or had made their programs dependent on legacy programming tools without ppc support, or were just plain lazy. In practice FAT binaries were a luxury because devs generally either had compiled for 68k long ago and didn't feel like recompiling, or were compiling on PPC and didn't feel like going to the bother of compiling and distributing FAT just for the convenience of the users of a discontinued architecture.
Awhile after this, I had to deal with another painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched to OS X. This too was necessary, and we'd known it was coming for years; most of us were getting quite impatient, since we'd been waiting since Spindler for an OS where we could for(int *p=0;;*(p++)=0); without having to reboot. But it wasn't effortless. Aside from random complaints about the spatial finder or migrane-inducing cutesy interference bar patterns everywhere, the mac software library was kind of messed up for a long time. Classic was not really usable except in an emergency, especially not since the early versions of OS X dealt so horribly with RAM starvation and Classic was a big RAM demand. Classic also didn't work with a lot of apps, especially in the A/V area. So this wasn't like the 68k switch, where having the wrong binary meant a little bit of slowdown; the software library had to start over at zero. Yeah, we got Word and IE and the other big apps relatively quickly, but that does not a software library make. You need support apps. You need Adiums and VLCs and Colliloquys. You know, the little programs that maybe aren't in day to day usage and maybe not everyone -- but everyone needs one of these apps eventually, and when you need them, you need them. Unless like me you were lucky enough to know how to escape into UNIX-land and use the software library there, for a long time you would find yourself periodically screwed. But, this was necessary, and this passed. It took five years or so, but the software library has now gotten to the point where if I suddenly find myself thinking "hmm, I need an app that does blah" I can look on versiontracker and more likely than not find it.
Except now this new transition is going to make that library restart once again at zero.
And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers. When the whole thing's done, in three years or whenever, we'll have a marginally faster computer, maybe a few tens of percents faster. Or rather so long as you weren't using any Altivec-heavy apps (since SSE is a poor replacement) and as long
Lik-Sang.com. It's eventually getting a U.S. release now, though it's still listed as a "to be determined" release date.
Yes, but I couldn't find it.
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices
Ouch, man, have you ever actually ever seen an online game going on? Breaking down prejudices is the last thing going on. What are you, some kind of mexican jew lizard?
Personally, I do not think online-playable games are the place to look for real change in video games. Online games require infrastructure-- sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. Sometimes you can cut down almost entirely on how much infrastructure you need by some clever design, such as Spore uses. But in general you're going to have additional costs for an online-play game. And the greater those costs are, the more risk-adverse the developer-- or more specifically the people funding the developer-- will become. MMORPGs in particular, since they require a fantastic amount of infrastructure, are probably the most homogenous, unsurprising, boring portion of the entire game market.
But we are seeing some interesting backlash against the whole risk-averse thing, and some really interesting things are beginning to emerge. Interestingly, most of the really interesting things right now seem to be in the budget title area. The game I probably got the most out of that I've gotten recently is this absolutely bizarre nintendo DS thing called "electroplankton". I imported this from Japan about a month ago on the assumption that it would never be released in America, only to find a couple weeks ago that... it's planned to come out in America now. But anyway. It isn't really even a game, exactly. It's just ten little generative music toys where you mess with the touchscreen and automatically generated music results. But it's fun as hell. I play with this thing for days at a time without getting bored, while if you passed me your average full-price FPS I'd spend eight hours playing through the single player campaign once and then throw it away forever, since I'd seen all there was to see (of course, I paid full price for electroplankton since I imported, but anyhow).
I don't think this kind of reaction is unique to me. I'm curious what's going to happen when people start to realize they have more fun with quick cheap katamari damacy or tetris like games, than they do with the current trendy video games that are basically high-budget interactive movies that, were we judging them by the standards of movies and not video games, would not be very good ones.
Now that they've said it isn't in there, if it turns out later that they were lying and it is in there, isn't that class-action-lawsuit worthy material?
Because I for one consider a chip which purposefully takes control of my computer away from me and gives it to someone else without my authorization to be broken.
So if your point was just "all government is evil always", why not just say that to begin with instead of fiddling around with this "the consumers will police it" nonsense?
I don't quite think so. Notice the "18% of all software sold" and the "16% of all computer users" given in that quote are separate statistics.
So... are people doing less business with businesses that are careless with personal information now?
Have they ever shown signs of doing this? At all?
No?
So what, exactly, is the difference between "letting consumers police poor corporate identity safety policies" and "as a nation, doing nothing whatsoever about the corporate identity safety policy problem whatsoever"?
I mean maybe there's this great libertarian fantasyland somewhere where people suddenly call up their rental car places and say "I want verifiable evidence that you shredded your copy of my credit report rather than putting it in a dumpster, and I'm canceling my business with you immediately if you don't!". However in the real world people just want to rent a car, and if you do call up your rental car company and say "by the way, what did you do with my credit report?" and they say "we shredded it", you do not have a way of telling whether or not they are telling the truth. A grand jury, however, does.
Given the data points:
- The vast majority of studies estimate the installed base of the macintosh at somewhere around three to five percent.
- One study estimates it at sixteen percent.
The conclusion is:
- The studies estimating at three to five percent must have been doing something wrong
D...id I miss something here?
Why yes, yes it has.
In fact, not just that-- the letter of the GPL has been broken as well.
However this is not a problem since Konqueror is under the LGPL, not the GPL.
The above is not just nitpicking your post. There is quite a serious distinction here. This is in fact exactly one of the reasons why Richard M. Stallman strongly recommends people use the GPL rather than the LGPL-- because normal, in-spirit, recommended uses of the LGPL can seriously violate the spirit of the GPL, and Richard M. Stallman wants to preserve the spirit of the GPL. From the LGPL preamble:However, Apple has pretty well I'd say covered the spirit of the LGPL, which was after all more or less specifically designed to allow free software which proprietary software developers can make use of, as clients of a sort, without having to enter the free software world themselves. And this was in a way part of the dialogue of the Safari project beginning-- had Konqueror decided to use the GPL rather than the LGPL, Apple almost certainly would not have used KHTML as the basis for Safari, because the GPL, in spirit and in letter, is too demanding to be useful for Apple's purposes.
Apple was not making things useful for KDE, but they were fullfilling all their obligations.
Yet, Konqueror is now Acid2 compliant, where it was before. Could this effect not be considered useful for KDE?
Why would Intel care what the Cell's doing in the game console market? Intel's never been a player in the game console market, and never will be. The one time that the x86 was used in a video game console it was more because the manufacturer had quasipolitical reasons than because of anything else, it was widely regarded as a mistake, and it was even rumored to have made Intel rather unhappy in the end because they allegedly had to keep one PIII line open that was doing nothing but making XBox chips.
The demands of the video game console market (one cheap, special-purpose, stable, embedded-friendly chip whose core has many potential vendors), just don't fit with Intel's moving target "make the greatest PC chip we can for awhile, then drop it" business model.
Meanwhile the PPC's tearing up the console market ATM, but the Cell is currently set to only appear in the Sony Playstation line. Meanwhile the Cell, in the opinion of many people including me, may be a great chip for games but is unsuitable for a general purpose PC such as Apple or Dell makes. It really probably isn't much of a threat to Intel at all except maybe in the high-performance computing area.
Find another theory.
I seriously doubt they'll be able to pull it off. OS X is a very portability-friendly OS and the parts most crucial to creating a port are open source in the form of "Darwin".
If Apple wants to keep unauthorized ports of OS X from occurring, they've so far screwed that all to hell at almost every level. I'll be very surprised if we don't see an unauthorized port of OS X to the XBox 360.
a car can potentially kill you
Perhaps this is why the government requires you to obtain a license to operate a car, and uses a separate licensing system to attempt to track exactly who owns every car in the U.S...
Cuz, y'know, C|Net owns Apple and all, so they'd know.
Drugs can potentially kill you.
Holy crap! Where did you get the idea of comparing OS's to cars?!? Genius.
If metaphors were cars this would be the big honking overcrowded city bus that everyone's ridden and smells vaguely of urine.
So the idea is that Microsoft may not be responsible for the security and user safety of online services with their name on it because they may not personally be the ones actually running it?
Well then I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I am considering paying for or signing up for a Microsoft-branded online service.
Not to my customers.
So I think it's more than OOo compatibility when it comes to businesses
It's the only thing that matters to me. The only thing that is important from my perspective about the new MSWORD is whether or not I am going to be forced to buy it.
Watch the video - the entire file format is completely open.
Honestly, I am not going to believe it until I see it.
Microsoft has lied before.
It's quite possible they don't intend to open their file formats at all, they just intend to make the Washington Post and its readers think they've opened their file formats. In the meantime, if Microsoft actually wanted to "end the era of closed file formats", all they'd have to do is, you know, actually comply with the letter of the antitrust decision currently handed down against them in the E.U. and the spirit of the toothless antitrust "settlement" currently in effect against them in the U.S.. Mysteriously, they haven't.
Man. If you could go back in time to 1980 and tell everyone that in 25 years, European governments would be spearheading an initiative called "Operation Spam Zombies", and that this name was not in any way meant to be humorous, the looks on peoples faces would be priceless.