Moral of the story: nuclear weapons do not have the effects people believe. Most people wildly exaggerate their destructive powers. I've read reports from The Business about what's likely to happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and let me tell you, it churned my stomach. The things I was expecting to happen never happened. The things I never imagined could happen would happen, and would have consequences far beyond what I could foresee.
You've piqued my curiosity. Besided the non-intuitive economic absurdity of "wealth creation" via population reduction, can you point me to any other essays or discussions regarding other "absurdist conclusions?" Assuming they're not classified, of course...
If you're concerned about grossing me out, I just saw the German "plastination" touring exhibit here in Chicago. I handed that just fine...
Expectant mothers are suggested to take folate supplements because they DO have a tumor growing inside of them. It just happens to be developing hands and toes and a genetic predisposition towards either windows, unix, or macs.
That has got to be the funniest definition of pregnancy I've ever read, and me without mod points...
Acrylic and iPhoto are in two totally different marketspaces. MS's new app is designed to be a modern day "SuperPaint" and will compete with Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter, etc. iPhoto is mostly focused on image file tweaking and organization, similar to what iTunes does with music files. Now, if Apple's planning on adding a Paint/Draw module to iWork, then that app might be what Acrylic might be competing against someday...
And OS 9 junkies hated the fact that this mecanism is based on the file extension...
As a former OS 9 junkie, I personally liked the mechanism, but when the concept was introduced with OS 8.6 with CarbonLib soon after The Steve's return, they used a "bundle bit" to make the system more Mac-like. The ".app" extension found on OS X bundles was originally intended to be optional if a bundle bit and PkgInfo file were found, but some of the NeXT veterans tried to mandate file extensions with a very infamous technote that Apple had to quickly pull...
Bundles/packages really are a good compromise between flat file systems and resource forks. While I still think the Resource Manager was a brilliant concept, several shortsighted design decisions made during the early '80's rendered it unscalable (confusion between 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit offsets) and insecure (read: virus prone), hence the migration to bundles even on HFS volumes under OS X.
try porting to that universal binary using XCode and then sell yourself as someone who's actually gone and done the whole codewarrior to xcode thing.
Not a bad suggestion, but the CW issues related to InDesign and QuarkXPress and they have to take the lead first. Also, in the case of Quark, I'm no longer a registered developer, so I no longer have access to their resources.
What I was doing for the last couple of months (for different reasons) was re-writing an old Carbon/Sound Manager app to work as Cocoa/QuickTime. However, being a complete rewrite, I can't provide much "CW->XC" advice that's marketable. And I don't have either the personal resources (read: cash) or industry contacts to get hold of an Mac/Intel Development Kit, so I won't be able to make the project x86-native until next year...
You are extremely lucky to be developing Mac applications for a living. I envy you.
Actually, I'm about to be laid off; the customer who was funding our Mac development was bought out.
My pessimism is partly due to not expecting any new Mac development for the next 12-18 months while this change over shakes out. (The change over expenses from OS 9 to OS X may have helped weaken our customer in the first place.) Also, the key parts of my professional experience have been with CodeWarrior, and while I've worked with Virtual Studio and XCode, I've never found them as easy to work with as CW or the older THINK tools. (I was a big THINK Pascal shareware programmer back in the day.)
Either the question is very poorly worded or the submitter (and the editors) have no clue what they're asking.
The former. My responses to messages in this thread might help reveal what my concerns are.
Not mentioned is that fact that so many people were afraid of Microsoft acquiring a "monoculture" that the very thing happened via x86 and Intel. (And no, AMD doesn't count as diversity. They can be musculed out of being in Dell boxes, they have to resort to using "part number" to cover up the MHz issues that PPC also suffered from, and Intel "adpoted" their 64 bit extensions, preventing a much needed fork from occuring.)
Open Transport is just a poor attempt at reinventing the wheel. It made sense before TCP/IP was the only game in town, but it belongs in the bit bucket, in favor of modern network stacks built around IP.
Blast it, I got my "Opens" mixed up. (Open this, "i" that, is it really that hard to make distict product names any more?) That should have read "OpenFirmware." The x86 Macs are going to use BIOS just like Wintel systems. From my limited experience with PCs, BIOS misbehavior is one of the big tech support bugaboos of the platform. (Whereas OpenFirmware issues were relatively rare.) But then again, the BIOS issue may be simply due to the sheer number of PC vendors who can't see eye-to-eye, and Apple may make a "one BIOS to rule them all" to side step this.
OT was already on it's way out with OS X in favor of BSD's implementation. OT was designed as a generic networking layer, which is overkill now that everybody standarized (or should that be homogenized?) on IP, even in applications spaces where IP was not originally intented to be used...
Do you really think that PPC and OpenTransport are what make a Mac a Mac?
There are a lot of things that made a Mac a Mac long before those two technologies were introduced.
I think my biggest concern is that there is no longer any practical differention in the hardware between Macs and PCs. As such, there's going to be common perception (correct or not) that most of these new Macs will "Just Be Able To Run Windows."
I wasn't kidding about my first Mac job. The vast majority of software developed anymore are small, vertical market apps, made by companies that don't care a whit about UI and the "end user experience." They just want to make a product that fill a perceived need and ignore any technological hurdles that would require sizeable QA or re-enginering expense. The only thing presure such companies had to even bother with funding Mac development was the expense and PR issues of Mac users complaining about lack of Mac support. This pressure is NOW GONE, despite what some of the Pollyanna's out there are saying. And the developers who entered into this already on the Mac have just seen their QA requirements double for at least the next few years.
Think of OS X's current support for Java, JavaScript, and many other web technologies. I've read and heard of too many (admitted anecdotal) cases where a Mac user was shut out of using a web site unless they used IE, or were even told outright to run VPC. This was despite the case that much of the time, a change of the browser identity string reported to the server made the website work normally. I don't consider it a healthy thing that the prefered browser on Mac, Safari, has to "pretend" to be IE or Mozilla to be even given access to most servers out there.
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe can back the x86 initiative now, since they have pre-existing code bases that already run under the Aqua UI. However, once MS finishes VPC and Longhorn, how much market pressure will still be left for them to continure with Mac Office? Working for an ad agency in the US midwest, I've had techs tell me to my face that they would gladly remove Macs for the organization just to consolidate tech down to one OS/UI. The creatives and other types who historically used the Mac will just be told to swallow the changes and migrate to Wintel, since they can run their old apps in a switch boot at some point in the future (once all the Mac software becomes x86 only.) After all, they won't complain since "most people... only care about what tools at their disposal." (Even if they did, they'd be ignored; IT has more power than creatives and other "labor" in typical organizations.)
Did the Mac stop being a Mac when those technologies were replaced with other, better technologies or dropped altogether?
I really should have seen the writing on the wall when OS X introduced the command line as part of the OS as well as encourage archaic technical concepts like file name extensions and file paths, but I rationalized it away that most end users still wouldn't see such details. But, for the next couple of years, the number of end user questions to sites like MacFixIt and MacInTouch revealed the beginning of UI quirks related the fragility of shell scripts (like the infamous Installer bugs that wiped drives or couldn't update Apple apps that were moved out of the Applications folder) and the decay of the Finder as a useable app. Such details DO perculate upwards into the user space, since it subtlely influces the design behavior of programs. I already know my recent work with QuarkXPress is now worthless from a resume standpoint; they were still using Carbon and CodeWarrior. (And I found the InDesign APIs too Window-ish for my tastes.)
I've read through the "Universal Binary" document Apple provided to help developers migrate to x86. It seems like every chapter is written to explain that the x86 architecure contains pitfall after pitfall that will make an app crash where I wouldn't on a PPC box. Depr
If it applies to your own MP3 collection, I'm shocked there has not been more outrage about this. What right does Apple have to restrict how you use YOUR music?!
I've already mentioned this before, and it looks like I'm going to have to mention it again. It was not Apple's original idea to "prevent" music uploading from MP3 players, but it was the natural result of two factors:
iTunes was originally a third-party sound player called SoundJam, which was originally made to work with players like the Diamond Rio. The original Rios, being very small capacity propretary flash devices, didn't have the circuitry and UI to handle uploading files back to a host computer.
The RIO was challenged in US court by the RIAA as encouraging piracy, but the court found in favor of Diamond partly because the RIAA's argument made no sense for a device that couldn't upload, only download.
Apple's continued "hiding" of the song files from the rest of the file system is simply legal cover to defend themselves from the RIAA. Do you really think Apple could have gotten the Music Store off the ground if the iPod more openly supported uploading?
No, I think it's going to use "whuffie" for the in-game currency. Of course, earning it via your reputation in an ad-hoc-cracy sounds like the same old "level grind" to me...
there's some talk about an unused Ogg iTunes icon embedded in Tiger.
That icon's been present in the last few releases of iTunes. It seems to have devolved into a running gag at this point. During the OS 9 era, iTunes included icons for MODs, S3Ms, and other "sound module/track" formats.
The rationale once seemed to be that since iTunes is playing files via QuickTime, iTunes could potentially play OGG or WMA files via a new codec component provided by a third party. Apple used to encourage developers to create codecs and make them available for distribution via QuickTime Update. There has been some effort at making an OGG codec, and the the first verison of WMA (then called NetPlay, IIRC) used QuickTime hooks for the Mac version of the player.
However, Apple hasn't done much with QuickTime Update and it appears to be going the way of QuickTime TV. (Does anybody out there use stuff like Axel, On2, or ZyGoVideo?) It seems there is no market or widespread enough interest in third-party enhancements to QuickTime...
It should, but it doesn't. According to RFC 3330, the "ordinary" implementation only pays attention to 127.0.0.1. The whole 24-bit block is reserved for loopbacks, but the various Internet standards bodies made no requirement that implementations use it. The only enforced requirement is that such addresses don't appear in packets on the backbone/network.
The flash doesn't appear to be perfectly faithful to what I remember being the ending of FF III/6j. I noticed (despite not having played FFIII in years) a couple of differences:
The Pokemon Pockets (nee Terra's adopted children) fly away along with the Game Gear (nee Cid). This wasn't a plot point in the American release. I remember Terra and Locke surviving the plunge on the airship and making it back on deck on their own, without being levitated back on...
There were flash backs of game content intermixed with the individual character escape sequences. One of these flashbacks has PocketStation/PSP (nee Kafka) absorb the PS2 (nee the Emperor) instead of throwing him off the Floating Continent.
Were there any serious subplots omitted from the US SNES release that were in the original Japanese version? Could I see these if I got the PS1 remake?
Obviously, this is Steve getting revenge on Motorola for dragging its feet in PowerPC development.
You do understand that Motorola dragging its feet was in revenge for Apple killing of the Mac cloning program, right? Moto did have a clone line (using the "Tanzania" mobo, IIRC) and they invested some serious R&D capital into the StarMax product series. They didn't even get the buyout offer Apple provided to Power Computing. As a result, Moto refocused their PowerPC processor line towards embedded systems and portable devices, reducing effort into implementing desktop machine friendly technologies like DDR memory and high speed data bus interconnects.
What if you're a bottled water company, and it's announced you accidentally put human waste in your water over the past year.
What if you put recycled human waste in your water on purpose? (Sorry, it's a PDF.)
The company didn't really exist; it was a marketing experiment. But there was so much positive demand to the campaign that a limited edition run of the stuff was actually made.
One night, I was writing a new memory manager on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the whole VI session just disappeared. All of it.
You forgot the "beep beep beep beep" noises...
(For the record, I'm a OS X user, but even I though that one ad really hurt Apple's campaign.)
I did mean rasa. But Safari's spell checker knows both words, and "a" & "o" look the same when you are skimming in Preview mode. For any additional snide remarks, please consult my.sig...
Go play the Bejeweled 2 and Insaniquarium web versions on OS X and get back to me after you find out how it install the ActiveX plugin they require to run.
Well, that's unfortunate. I hadn't visited PopCap for a couple months, and all of the new games are ActiveX, instead of Java. A pity. I used to play Lucky Penny Poker alot, and I got Alchemy when I was a.Mac subscriber...
Blast it... another candidate for MacInTouch's "Mac Marginalization" page!
Pop-Cap's web based games run just fine on OS X, or is this source for the "enhanced" engine that runs outside of a web browser? (Though, the Omni Group also made that engine work on OS X, as well...)
...so that PBS stations here in the States will play? No, that's not a snide joke. I have fond memories of watching Dr. Who while I was in high school on WBGU out of Bowling Green, Ohio. (It came on after Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser.)
Also, is this series in continuity with the previous series? Or are they going for a tabula rosa to avoid the kinds of problems that plague series like Star Trek? (For example, Enterprise.) I'd hate to see the new series go in a weird direction in 12 years or so when the Doctor regenerates into the Valeyard.
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You've piqued my curiosity. Besided the non-intuitive economic absurdity of "wealth creation" via population reduction, can you point me to any other essays or discussions regarding other "absurdist conclusions?" Assuming they're not classified, of course...
If you're concerned about grossing me out, I just saw the German "plastination" touring exhibit here in Chicago. I handed that just fine...
That has got to be the funniest definition of pregnancy I've ever read, and me without mod points...
I see you are a fellow VHEMT sympathizer. Welcome aboard...
Acrylic and iPhoto are in two totally different marketspaces. MS's new app is designed to be a modern day "SuperPaint" and will compete with Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter, etc. iPhoto is mostly focused on image file tweaking and organization, similar to what iTunes does with music files. Now, if Apple's planning on adding a Paint/Draw module to iWork, then that app might be what Acrylic might be competing against someday...
And I must be losing my edge for inserting that apostrophe...
Whoa, /.'s peanut gallery must be losing it's edge when it can mention DHMO without remembering to link to this site...
As a former OS 9 junkie, I personally liked the mechanism, but when the concept was introduced with OS 8.6 with CarbonLib soon after The Steve's return, they used a "bundle bit" to make the system more Mac-like. The ".app" extension found on OS X bundles was originally intended to be optional if a bundle bit and PkgInfo file were found, but some of the NeXT veterans tried to mandate file extensions with a very infamous technote that Apple had to quickly pull...
Bundles/packages really are a good compromise between flat file systems and resource forks. While I still think the Resource Manager was a brilliant concept, several shortsighted design decisions made during the early '80's rendered it unscalable (confusion between 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit offsets) and insecure (read: virus prone), hence the migration to bundles even on HFS volumes under OS X.
Not a bad suggestion, but the CW issues related to InDesign and QuarkXPress and they have to take the lead first. Also, in the case of Quark, I'm no longer a registered developer, so I no longer have access to their resources.
What I was doing for the last couple of months (for different reasons) was re-writing an old Carbon/Sound Manager app to work as Cocoa/QuickTime. However, being a complete rewrite, I can't provide much "CW->XC" advice that's marketable. And I don't have either the personal resources (read: cash) or industry contacts to get hold of an Mac/Intel Development Kit, so I won't be able to make the project x86-native until next year...
Actually, I'm about to be laid off; the customer who was funding our Mac development was bought out.
My pessimism is partly due to not expecting any new Mac development for the next 12-18 months while this change over shakes out. (The change over expenses from OS 9 to OS X may have helped weaken our customer in the first place.) Also, the key parts of my professional experience have been with CodeWarrior, and while I've worked with Virtual Studio and XCode, I've never found them as easy to work with as CW or the older THINK tools. (I was a big THINK Pascal shareware programmer back in the day.)
The former. My responses to messages in this thread might help reveal what my concerns are.
Not mentioned is that fact that so many people were afraid of Microsoft acquiring a "monoculture" that the very thing happened via x86 and Intel. (And no, AMD doesn't count as diversity. They can be musculed out of being in Dell boxes, they have to resort to using "part number" to cover up the MHz issues that PPC also suffered from, and Intel "adpoted" their 64 bit extensions, preventing a much needed fork from occuring.)
Blast it, I got my "Opens" mixed up. (Open this, "i" that, is it really that hard to make distict product names any more?) That should have read "OpenFirmware." The x86 Macs are going to use BIOS just like Wintel systems. From my limited experience with PCs, BIOS misbehavior is one of the big tech support bugaboos of the platform. (Whereas OpenFirmware issues were relatively rare.) But then again, the BIOS issue may be simply due to the sheer number of PC vendors who can't see eye-to-eye, and Apple may make a "one BIOS to rule them all" to side step this.
OT was already on it's way out with OS X in favor of BSD's implementation. OT was designed as a generic networking layer, which is overkill now that everybody standarized (or should that be homogenized?) on IP, even in applications spaces where IP was not originally intented to be used...
There are a lot of things that made a Mac a Mac long before those two technologies were introduced.
I think my biggest concern is that there is no longer any practical differention in the hardware between Macs and PCs. As such, there's going to be common perception (correct or not) that most of these new Macs will "Just Be Able To Run Windows."
I wasn't kidding about my first Mac job. The vast majority of software developed anymore are small, vertical market apps, made by companies that don't care a whit about UI and the "end user experience." They just want to make a product that fill a perceived need and ignore any technological hurdles that would require sizeable QA or re-enginering expense. The only thing presure such companies had to even bother with funding Mac development was the expense and PR issues of Mac users complaining about lack of Mac support. This pressure is NOW GONE, despite what some of the Pollyanna's out there are saying. And the developers who entered into this already on the Mac have just seen their QA requirements double for at least the next few years.
Think of OS X's current support for Java, JavaScript, and many other web technologies. I've read and heard of too many (admitted anecdotal) cases where a Mac user was shut out of using a web site unless they used IE, or were even told outright to run VPC. This was despite the case that much of the time, a change of the browser identity string reported to the server made the website work normally. I don't consider it a healthy thing that the prefered browser on Mac, Safari, has to "pretend" to be IE or Mozilla to be even given access to most servers out there.
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe can back the x86 initiative now, since they have pre-existing code bases that already run under the Aqua UI. However, once MS finishes VPC and Longhorn, how much market pressure will still be left for them to continure with Mac Office? Working for an ad agency in the US midwest, I've had techs tell me to my face that they would gladly remove Macs for the organization just to consolidate tech down to one OS/UI. The creatives and other types who historically used the Mac will just be told to swallow the changes and migrate to Wintel, since they can run their old apps in a switch boot at some point in the future (once all the Mac software becomes x86 only.) After all, they won't complain since "most people... only care about what tools at their disposal." (Even if they did, they'd be ignored; IT has more power than creatives and other "labor" in typical organizations.)
Did the Mac stop being a Mac when those technologies were replaced with other, better technologies or dropped altogether?
I really should have seen the writing on the wall when OS X introduced the command line as part of the OS as well as encourage archaic technical concepts like file name extensions and file paths, but I rationalized it away that most end users still wouldn't see such details. But, for the next couple of years, the number of end user questions to sites like MacFixIt and MacInTouch revealed the beginning of UI quirks related the fragility of shell scripts (like the infamous Installer bugs that wiped drives or couldn't update Apple apps that were moved out of the Applications folder) and the decay of the Finder as a useable app. Such details DO perculate upwards into the user space, since it subtlely influces the design behavior of programs. I already know my recent work with QuarkXPress is now worthless from a resume standpoint; they were still using Carbon and CodeWarrior. (And I found the InDesign APIs too Window-ish for my tastes.)
I've read through the "Universal Binary" document Apple provided to help developers migrate to x86. It seems like every chapter is written to explain that the x86 architecure contains pitfall after pitfall that will make an app crash where I wouldn't on a PPC box. Depr
Maybe it's just the shear Dadaism of it, or that the poster used one too many Inherently Funny Words...
I've already mentioned this before, and it looks like I'm going to have to mention it again. It was not Apple's original idea to "prevent" music uploading from MP3 players, but it was the natural result of two factors:
Apple's continued "hiding" of the song files from the rest of the file system is simply legal cover to defend themselves from the RIAA. Do you really think Apple could have gotten the Music Store off the ground if the iPod more openly supported uploading?
No, I think it's going to use "whuffie" for the in-game currency. Of course, earning it via your reputation in an ad-hoc-cracy sounds like the same old "level grind" to me...
That icon's been present in the last few releases of iTunes. It seems to have devolved into a running gag at this point. During the OS 9 era, iTunes included icons for MODs, S3Ms, and other "sound module/track" formats.
The rationale once seemed to be that since iTunes is playing files via QuickTime, iTunes could potentially play OGG or WMA files via a new codec component provided by a third party. Apple used to encourage developers to create codecs and make them available for distribution via QuickTime Update. There has been some effort at making an OGG codec, and the the first verison of WMA (then called NetPlay, IIRC) used QuickTime hooks for the Mac version of the player.
However, Apple hasn't done much with QuickTime Update and it appears to be going the way of QuickTime TV. (Does anybody out there use stuff like Axel, On2, or ZyGoVideo?) It seems there is no market or widespread enough interest in third-party enhancements to QuickTime...
It should, but it doesn't. According to RFC 3330, the "ordinary" implementation only pays attention to 127.0.0.1. The whole 24-bit block is reserved for loopbacks, but the various Internet standards bodies made no requirement that implementations use it. The only enforced requirement is that such addresses don't appear in packets on the backbone/network.
Were there any serious subplots omitted from the US SNES release that were in the original Japanese version? Could I see these if I got the PS1 remake?
You do understand that Motorola dragging its feet was in revenge for Apple killing of the Mac cloning program, right? Moto did have a clone line (using the "Tanzania" mobo, IIRC) and they invested some serious R&D capital into the StarMax product series. They didn't even get the buyout offer Apple provided to Power Computing. As a result, Moto refocused their PowerPC processor line towards embedded systems and portable devices, reducing effort into implementing desktop machine friendly technologies like DDR memory and high speed data bus interconnects.
What if you put recycled human waste in your water on purpose? (Sorry, it's a PDF.)
The company didn't really exist; it was a marketing experiment. But there was so much positive demand to the campaign that a limited edition run of the stuff was actually made.
You forgot the "beep beep beep beep" noises...
(For the record, I'm a OS X user, but even I though that one ad really hurt Apple's campaign.)
M-yb- y-- m--n t-b-l- r-s-.
I did mean rasa. But Safari's spell checker knows both words, and "a" & "o" look the same when you are skimming in Preview mode. For any additional snide remarks, please consult my .sig...
Well, that's unfortunate. I hadn't visited PopCap for a couple months, and all of the new games are ActiveX, instead of Java. A pity. I used to play Lucky Penny Poker alot, and I got Alchemy when I was a .Mac subscriber...
Blast it... another candidate for MacInTouch's "Mac Marginalization" page!
Pop-Cap's web based games run just fine on OS X, or is this source for the "enhanced" engine that runs outside of a web browser? (Though, the Omni Group also made that engine work on OS X, as well...)
Also, is this series in continuity with the previous series? Or are they going for a tabula rosa to avoid the kinds of problems that plague series like Star Trek? (For example, Enterprise.) I'd hate to see the new series go in a weird direction in 12 years or so when the Doctor regenerates into the Valeyard.