Apple pushed back, and is forcing you to choose a "Pro" version of their machine if you're doing "Pro" things with it. Either go along with this thinking, or don't -- and use a last generation notebook that you can pick up cheaper than ever right now. By the time IT wears out, firewire will be much less attractive an option for you anyway, I suspect.
The ubiquity of FireWire on Macs was a compelling feature and a competitive advantage.
I would have been slightly annoyed if the new MacBook lacked FireWire 800, but dropping FireWire entirely is inexplicable.
As far as I'm concerned, Apple no longer makes a "Pro" laptop.
Dropping FireWire on the MacBook and matte displays on the MacBook Pro was, as someone else put it, a one-two punch.
If anyone else made Mac laptops, I'd look elsewhere.
In fact, I probably will anyway.
If you've already got an Intel Mac stick with it.
There is nothing here worth getting angry about.
Intel Macs have been around for a couple of years now, so a fair amount of users are just now looking to replace an iBook or PowerBook.
They will find the MacBook wanting.
For those people with a FireWire video camera, Steve Jobs has another "really sweet solution": buy a new camera.
If users are angry, it's because they're realizing that their investment in a closed platform may have been ill advised.
It's one thing to pine for a headless iMac or a tablet.
It's another thing to find out that the only supplier of Mac laptops is unceremoniously ditching FIreWire and matte displays for inferior technologies.
MS Office Home and Student is legit to use if you're not a student
Although you don't have to be a student to use the Home and Student edition, keep in mind that it is not licensed for commercial use of any kind, including non-profits.
Warner Bros. is also releasing an animated version of the actual comics on iTunes. The first chapter is available for free (for a limited time, I think). Alan Moore's name is absent from the credits of this one too.
Unfortunately for the many companies like Google, who've already been awarded patents, the algorithms are already disclosed.
Which is why you will probably see some sort of transition period where currently existing software patents aren't just immediately invalidated, but I suspect will be grandfathered in
Assuming there is even a grain of truth to this story, grandfathering existing patents is a virtual certainty, but I'm not sure that that's the fairest remedy.
Patent owners might have gone the trade secret route had they known the patents wouldn't hold up.
(Incidentally, I don't share your uneasiness with that prospect going forward.)
However, having decided that software is not patentable, why should we let them add to their ill-gotten gains?
It's not fair to everyone else.
To me, [the network] would seem to be where most of our time is wasted...
As always, it depends.
I can think of two cases offhand in which bandwidth was cheaper than JavaScript/DOM.
Using JavaScript to zebra stripe a large table basically hanged the browser for five seconds, so we added a class to every other row and used CSS.
Adding and deleting rows to a large table was extremely slow, so we rendered all of the extra rows hidden by default, then unhid them as necessary.
(Not a general solution, but it worked for our purposes.)
Like the author of the article, I have a tendency to dabble with a variety of programming languages.
I haven't used Ada seriously, but I am intrigued by it, especially in contrast to the looser languages that are currently popular.
A lot of bytes have been spilled on the topic of static and dynamic typing, bondage & discipline vs. unit testing, etc.
While these discussions often devolve to religious wars, I do think that language matters.
Never mind Sapir-Whorf or Turing, some languages are simply more or less pleasurable or powerful for certain tasks.
That said, often the language itself is not the dominant factor in choosing the language.
As nice as (Ada | Erlang | Haskell | Lisp | Ruby) is, it's not going to be my first choice if another language has a readily available library that will make it easier to write the program.
I can write web applications in Lisp, but I probably won't.
There is probably a parser generator for Ada, but I'd rather use Flex and Bison, or maybe ANTLR.
And when it comes to my first choice, independent of problem domain, I'll usually pick Python, in part because of its extensive library.
Apple simply built internal Cocoa replacements for all the Carbon software whose absence could threaten the platform
A more cynical view is that Apple leveraged its control of the O/S to gain a competitive advantage.
The Ars article on which this thread is based is really a pretty balanced look at the situation.
Saying that Adobe was warned, or that it bet on Apple going out of business, is neither fair nor balanced.
If you look at similar applications, Adobe's handling of Photoshop is not unreasonable.
Look at Maya, LightWave, or, for that matter, Final Cut Pro.
According to Wikipedia, "A register file is an array of processor registers in a central processing unit (CPU)."
AMD64's sixteen 64-bit registers make for a larger register file than IA32's eight 32-bit registers.
Several sources have confirmed to me that Adobe found out that Apple was dropping support for 64-bit Carbon at the same time everyone else outside Apple did: on the first day of WWDC 2007.
Cities that have installed speed cameras are discovering motorists are driving slower, which is decreasing revenues from fines. So they're turning the cameras off.
If your business is selling an operating system, you will not like GNU, but that's tough on you.
If your business is something else, GNU can save you from being pushed into the expensive business of selling operating systems.
I'm reminded of this quote every time I see hospitals, schools, etc. deal with deployments of expensive (usually Oracle-based) database software.
There are hundreds of very similar organizations around the country that could get together and commission a world-class, free-software product to fulfill their needs.
It just seems like so much waste to pay so many Oracle/Sybase/SQL Server VARs to reinvent the wheel.
If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all.
List boxes have always been ugly in Firefox.
I don't think the theme has any control over this.
Buttons look pretty good in 3.0 beta 3, but there are some nasty rendering artifacts on in the tab labels.
I agree with you that the details can make or break the experience.
I keep trying to use Emacs shortcuts (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, etc.) in this text area, but this isn't a native control.
From what I've seen in the last fifteen minutes, 3.0 beta 3 is a big improvement.
I've been pretty frustrated with Safari's performance.
I'm not a kung fu memory master, but I do know that top shows up to 400 MB RPRVT and close to 2 GB VSIZE after it has been open for a while, even with only one or two tabs open.
Sometimes when I close a tab it hangs indefinitely with a beach ball, so I have to force quit.
If Firefox can spare me that annoyance, I'll forgive a few UI quirks.
it looks to be a standards thing that MS will just happen to be the first to support
Please direct me to the standard that describes the behavior of IE 6, 7, and 8.
Someone had it right in the last article that this is just as bad as the <brokenLikeWord95> tags in OOXML.
Construing this situation charitably, it may not be painfully clear from the perspective of the Microsoft monopoly how repugnant this is, but the Web Standards Project should know better.
Everyone else recognizes this as classic embrace and extend.
From the user standpoint, it's a distinction without a difference. In most fonts, Latin "py" is not readily distinguishable from Cyrillic "ru." However, I would argue that confusion is more likely with the proposed Cyrillic domain names than with the current all-ASCII system. I am sympathetic to the desire for more localization, but the ramifications of a change like this should be considered very carefully.
What I don't want is a real computer which is so hobbled by bad input that it's only good for music, internet and video.
I think the type of device we're most likely to see come out of rumors like this is a bigger iPod touch.
Although it may support some kind of handwriting recognition, I would expect an on-screen keyboard to be the primary mode of input.
I've had mixed feelings about the redesign of Apple's wireless keyboard, but it would go very nicely with a tablet.
I would be quite interested in a product like this.
The touch-screen interface on the iPhone and iPod touch is a credible alternative to a stylus, and that's with a 3.5" screen.
It is a bit Fisher Price at first, but it's intuitive.
I don't think it's correct to call the Mac port native, either.
It uses Cider, which is basically the same thing.
In some cases, it is possible to use one game's Cider wrapper (e.g., Heroes of Might and Magic V) to run other Windows games, although a no-CD crack may be required.
I've also read on some forums that the registration program for the Mac version of Madden NFL '08 does not recognize it as a Mac version. You have to register as if you're running Windows.
I upgraded an iMac at work and, after ensuring that the VPN client is compatible, a MacBook at home.
The iMac at home stays on 10.4 until I have a Leopard-compatible SuperDuper.
Time Machine looks cool and all, but I really like having a bootable backup.
In my case, OSXPlanet, GeekTool, MenuShade, and Butler have various levels of breakage.
In the case of Butler, I'm trying out Spotlight as an application launcher (much faster than in 10.4), and I'm looking into System Events with AppleScript for keyboard macros.
SSHKeychain seems to work, but 10.5 has a similar built-in feature that I'm trying out.
Think still works, but only within a single virtual desktop.
I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature.
the complete absence of any alt-tab equivalent is horrid
Personally, I've gotten used to Cmd-Tab on the Mac (and I love that it works in tandem with the mouse), but you might be interested in Witch, a donationware utility that lets you Alt-Tab your way through the windows of all applications.
Browsing back and forth is Command-Left and Command-Right, but that is also the shortcut to go to the beginning/end of line (when typing into a form field, for example).
All of the browsers I've tried accept Command-[ and Command-] as shortcuts for browsing back and forth.
That's funny, because hassle is the first thing that Office documents bring to mind.
My wife recently got a Word 2007 document at work that she couldn't open.
(She has Word 2003, but IT hadn't installed the compatibility pack.)
I opened it in NeoOffice and sent her a PDF copy.
In my experience, using different applications (or different versions of the same application) with a document is error prone.
If the recipient actually needs to edit, go ahead and send the source; otherwise, do what everyone else here is recommending: send a PDF.
I have two Macs at home, so I spent some time researching how to synchronize their data. For iCal, I settled on the publish and subscribe feature using WebDAV with the built-in Apache server. The desktop publishes its calendars to.ics files in a DAV-enabled folder, and the laptop downloads them once a day. It works well enough, but it would be nice to see the set up process simplified in 10.5.
Exactly. I actually RTFA (both of Pogue's and both of Valleywag's), and I kept looking for the stinging indictment of Pogue as a reviewer who "writes whatever you tell him to." Advance reviews are bogus because of golden samples and lavish press junkets. They are not bogus because the manufacturer might change the pricing at the last minute.
I've always treated "UNIX" as the trademark and "Unix" as the generic designation. I've never seen anyone who was aware of the distinction (let alone cared) use "unix."
I think the Wikipedia article on Unix-like sums it up nicely (although I never use the term "Unix-like"), especially regarding Eric Raymond's three categories: trademark, genetic, and functional.
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The ubiquity of FireWire on Macs was a compelling feature and a competitive advantage. I would have been slightly annoyed if the new MacBook lacked FireWire 800, but dropping FireWire entirely is inexplicable.
As far as I'm concerned, Apple no longer makes a "Pro" laptop. Dropping FireWire on the MacBook and matte displays on the MacBook Pro was, as someone else put it, a one-two punch. If anyone else made Mac laptops, I'd look elsewhere. In fact, I probably will anyway.
Intel Macs have been around for a couple of years now, so a fair amount of users are just now looking to replace an iBook or PowerBook. They will find the MacBook wanting. For those people with a FireWire video camera, Steve Jobs has another "really sweet solution": buy a new camera.
If users are angry, it's because they're realizing that their investment in a closed platform may have been ill advised. It's one thing to pine for a headless iMac or a tablet. It's another thing to find out that the only supplier of Mac laptops is unceremoniously ditching FIreWire and matte displays for inferior technologies.
Although you don't have to be a student to use the Home and Student edition, keep in mind that it is not licensed for commercial use of any kind, including non-profits.
Warner Bros. is also releasing an animated version of the actual comics on iTunes. The first chapter is available for free (for a limited time, I think). Alan Moore's name is absent from the credits of this one too.
Assuming there is even a grain of truth to this story, grandfathering existing patents is a virtual certainty, but I'm not sure that that's the fairest remedy. Patent owners might have gone the trade secret route had they known the patents wouldn't hold up. (Incidentally, I don't share your uneasiness with that prospect going forward.) However, having decided that software is not patentable, why should we let them add to their ill-gotten gains? It's not fair to everyone else.
As always, it depends. I can think of two cases offhand in which bandwidth was cheaper than JavaScript/DOM. Using JavaScript to zebra stripe a large table basically hanged the browser for five seconds, so we added a class to every other row and used CSS. Adding and deleting rows to a large table was extremely slow, so we rendered all of the extra rows hidden by default, then unhid them as necessary. (Not a general solution, but it worked for our purposes.)
Like the author of the article, I have a tendency to dabble with a variety of programming languages. I haven't used Ada seriously, but I am intrigued by it, especially in contrast to the looser languages that are currently popular. A lot of bytes have been spilled on the topic of static and dynamic typing, bondage & discipline vs. unit testing, etc. While these discussions often devolve to religious wars, I do think that language matters. Never mind Sapir-Whorf or Turing, some languages are simply more or less pleasurable or powerful for certain tasks.
That said, often the language itself is not the dominant factor in choosing the language. As nice as (Ada | Erlang | Haskell | Lisp | Ruby) is, it's not going to be my first choice if another language has a readily available library that will make it easier to write the program. I can write web applications in Lisp, but I probably won't. There is probably a parser generator for Ada, but I'd rather use Flex and Bison, or maybe ANTLR. And when it comes to my first choice, independent of problem domain, I'll usually pick Python, in part because of its extensive library.
A more cynical view is that Apple leveraged its control of the O/S to gain a competitive advantage. The Ars article on which this thread is based is really a pretty balanced look at the situation. Saying that Adobe was warned, or that it bet on Apple going out of business, is neither fair nor balanced. If you look at similar applications, Adobe's handling of Photoshop is not unreasonable. Look at Maya, LightWave, or, for that matter, Final Cut Pro.
According to Wikipedia, "A register file is an array of processor registers in a central processing unit (CPU)." AMD64's sixteen 64-bit registers make for a larger register file than IA32's eight 32-bit registers.
Actually, John Gruber claims that's not true:
From the GNU Manifesto:
I'm reminded of this quote every time I see hospitals, schools, etc. deal with deployments of expensive (usually Oracle-based) database software. There are hundreds of very similar organizations around the country that could get together and commission a world-class, free-software product to fulfill their needs. It just seems like so much waste to pay so many Oracle/Sybase/SQL Server VARs to reinvent the wheel.List boxes have always been ugly in Firefox. I don't think the theme has any control over this. Buttons look pretty good in 3.0 beta 3, but there are some nasty rendering artifacts on in the tab labels.
I agree with you that the details can make or break the experience. I keep trying to use Emacs shortcuts (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, etc.) in this text area, but this isn't a native control.
From what I've seen in the last fifteen minutes, 3.0 beta 3 is a big improvement. I've been pretty frustrated with Safari's performance. I'm not a kung fu memory master, but I do know that top shows up to 400 MB RPRVT and close to 2 GB VSIZE after it has been open for a while, even with only one or two tabs open. Sometimes when I close a tab it hangs indefinitely with a beach ball, so I have to force quit. If Firefox can spare me that annoyance, I'll forgive a few UI quirks.
Please direct me to the standard that describes the behavior of IE 6, 7, and 8. Someone had it right in the last article that this is just as bad as the <brokenLikeWord95> tags in OOXML.
Construing this situation charitably, it may not be painfully clear from the perspective of the Microsoft monopoly how repugnant this is, but the Web Standards Project should know better. Everyone else recognizes this as classic embrace and extend.
From the user standpoint, it's a distinction without a difference. In most fonts, Latin "py" is not readily distinguishable from Cyrillic "ru." However, I would argue that confusion is more likely with the proposed Cyrillic domain names than with the current all-ASCII system. I am sympathetic to the desire for more localization, but the ramifications of a change like this should be considered very carefully.
I think the type of device we're most likely to see come out of rumors like this is a bigger iPod touch. Although it may support some kind of handwriting recognition, I would expect an on-screen keyboard to be the primary mode of input. I've had mixed feelings about the redesign of Apple's wireless keyboard, but it would go very nicely with a tablet.
I would be quite interested in a product like this. The touch-screen interface on the iPhone and iPod touch is a credible alternative to a stylus, and that's with a 3.5" screen. It is a bit Fisher Price at first, but it's intuitive.
I don't think it's correct to call the Mac port native, either. It uses Cider, which is basically the same thing. In some cases, it is possible to use one game's Cider wrapper (e.g., Heroes of Might and Magic V) to run other Windows games, although a no-CD crack may be required. I've also read on some forums that the registration program for the Mac version of Madden NFL '08 does not recognize it as a Mac version. You have to register as if you're running Windows.
I upgraded an iMac at work and, after ensuring that the VPN client is compatible, a MacBook at home. The iMac at home stays on 10.4 until I have a Leopard-compatible SuperDuper. Time Machine looks cool and all, but I really like having a bootable backup.
In my case, OSXPlanet, GeekTool, MenuShade, and Butler have various levels of breakage. In the case of Butler, I'm trying out Spotlight as an application launcher (much faster than in 10.4), and I'm looking into System Events with AppleScript for keyboard macros. SSHKeychain seems to work, but 10.5 has a similar built-in feature that I'm trying out. Think still works, but only within a single virtual desktop. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature.
Personally, I've gotten used to Cmd-Tab on the Mac (and I love that it works in tandem with the mouse), but you might be interested in Witch, a donationware utility that lets you Alt-Tab your way through the windows of all applications.
All of the browsers I've tried accept Command-[ and Command-] as shortcuts for browsing back and forth.
That's funny, because hassle is the first thing that Office documents bring to mind. My wife recently got a Word 2007 document at work that she couldn't open. (She has Word 2003, but IT hadn't installed the compatibility pack.) I opened it in NeoOffice and sent her a PDF copy.
In my experience, using different applications (or different versions of the same application) with a document is error prone. If the recipient actually needs to edit, go ahead and send the source; otherwise, do what everyone else here is recommending: send a PDF.
I have two Macs at home, so I spent some time researching how to synchronize their data. For iCal, I settled on the publish and subscribe feature using WebDAV with the built-in Apache server. The desktop publishes its calendars to .ics files in a DAV-enabled folder, and the laptop downloads them once a day. It works well enough, but it would be nice to see the set up process simplified in 10.5.
Exactly. I actually RTFA (both of Pogue's and both of Valleywag's), and I kept looking for the stinging indictment of Pogue as a reviewer who "writes whatever you tell him to." Advance reviews are bogus because of golden samples and lavish press junkets. They are not bogus because the manufacturer might change the pricing at the last minute.
You may be interested in OmniGraffle as a native replacement for Visio.
I've always treated "UNIX" as the trademark and "Unix" as the generic designation. I've never seen anyone who was aware of the distinction (let alone cared) use "unix." I think the Wikipedia article on Unix-like sums it up nicely (although I never use the term "Unix-like"), especially regarding Eric Raymond's three categories: trademark, genetic, and functional.