Fink really is something great, it's a huge effort and almost all installed packages are patched by Fink in order to compile. Installing a package using Fink does take a while, but the simple fact that it works is already simply amazing. It's great to be able to compare GIMP to Photoshop for instance, or to play with various other X11 or unix tools. Another great thing is that when you're done playing a simple "rm -rf/sw" will get rid of Fink completely (and a minor edit to your.rc). But it's staying on my Mac. Another great thing is that when you find an error in a package, and report it, the patch is quite often there the next day. Combine this with OroborOSX, XonX and FinkCommander and you'll have a dream machine.
Unfortunately that's not funny, its plain sad, and I've seen it happen many times. My father and father-in-law both use PC's and can't seen to get anything done on my Mac. Yes, even if you open up Mozilla for them. They look with wide open eyes, move slowly with the mouse not daring to click on anything. And can't seem to find the menu bar:-)
Yet for some unknown reason, if you put an average highschool computer user who's grown up on a windows PC all his life in front of a mac, and open up netscape, they can't seem to figure out how to make it work, despite it having an identical interface to the PC version. The reason I was given was becasue "It's a mac, I don't know how to use a mac"
I'm still using my eMate as a sort of nice phone number and addresses organisers today. When entering a new address I mainly use handwriting and it's still recognised perfectly. It has the 2.0 version of Newton OS which has much better handwriting algorithms than previous versions. One thing I like very much about the way handwriting recognition works are "gestures". Using special gestures one can change spacing between words, insert spacing, erase things, select words. I think this will also be present in Ink.
Apple HAS sold midrange towers in the past and stopped for a very good reason: They didn't sell. All the pro's in the creative industry want macs as high-end as possible (the dual 1G G4 is rather popular at the moment). All the other professionals that don't need high end stuff get a low-end tower or an iMac...
Most people here seem to have skipped their Information Science lessons me thinks. There's a lot of throwing of the word "random" and "information" and "compression" but most people don't seem to know what they are.
In fact, TRUE RANDOM DATA (e.g. white noise) has the most information (the highest entropy) and is the most difficult to compress. Loss less that is. Funny thing here is if you count lossful compression (such as mp3 coding), random data is in fact easy to "compress", because you simply code it badly and upon decoding obtain new (but different) random data (e.g. white noise).
So, you can not compress TRUE RANDOM DATA. It has the highest entropy of all data (highest information density).
If you compress file A into a file B of 50% the size of A, then file B is MORE RANDOM than file A. The entropy of A is lesser than that of file B. You could also view this as: the information density of file B is higher than file A.
The problem is that if A is a legible text file, we seem to think that A has information and B hasn't.
My conclusion is that this company can not compress TRUE RANDOM DATA 100 to 1. If you read their press release they talk about "Practically Random Information Sequences". With this they probably mean things like audio, video, and the lot. Not random at all.
Somehow this reminds me of a joke from my student days. When a transmitter sends a string of zero's and one's to a receiver somewhere there's a fat chance some of the one's turn into zero's and the other way around. This is a problem. But there's a simple solution, simply make the transmitter and receiver terribly bad so that ALL data is received badly. All one's turn into zero's and the other way around. Place an inverter after the receiver, and there you have it, perfect transmission!
The flaw here of course is that under the worst possibly conditions only 50% of the data is received badly....
A has lesser entropy than B now! This is something people forget. In fact B is more random than A!
100% random data has the highest entropy and is impossible to compress lossless. The data they claim to compress they call "semi random" which must mean it's not random at all.
>But if they have managed to compress a movie in avi of 6gb to 600M thats not a
>'whoawhoawhao' thingy since divx already does this.
Well, I feel anyone who uses "rm -rf" in scripts running with root privileges should be extremely careful. I feel this is a "unix beginners" error, not something you'd expect from a major company like Apple.
Why didn't they simply use mv to move the old version to the trash?
Welcome to "The Power of Unix".... Now only if we learn how to use it properly...
Maybe this was a scheme to get rid of all those OS 9 partitions people somehoww just keep using?:-)
Have been using Macs since 1987 and dragging a disk to the trash has never felt right to me... there's no LOGIC! But then again there's no logic in many parts of the pre-OS X versions of the Mac OS. Chooser? When does one copy/move a file? memory management (or lack thereof) Hmm, I won't continue. And yes, my current desktop is OS X.
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Fink really is something great, it's a huge effort and almost all installed packages are patched by Fink in order to compile. Installing a package using Fink does take a while, but the simple fact that it works is already simply amazing. It's great to be able to compare GIMP to Photoshop for instance, or to play with various other X11 or unix tools. Another great thing is that when you're done playing a simple "rm -rf /sw" will get rid of Fink completely (and a minor edit to your .rc). But it's staying on my Mac. Another great thing is that when you find an error in a package, and report it, the patch is quite often there the next day. Combine this with OroborOSX, XonX and FinkCommander and you'll have a dream machine.
Unfortunately that's not funny, its plain sad, and I've seen it happen many times. My father and father-in-law both use PC's and can't seen to get anything done on my Mac. Yes, even if you open up Mozilla for them. They look with wide open eyes, move slowly with the mouse not daring to click on anything. And can't seem to find the menu bar :-)
Yet for some unknown reason, if you put an average highschool computer user who's grown up on a windows PC all his life in front of a mac, and open up netscape, they can't seem to figure out how to make it work, despite it having an identical interface to the PC version. The reason I was given was becasue "It's a mac, I don't know how to use a mac"
I'm still using my eMate as a sort of nice phone number and addresses organisers today. When entering a new address I mainly use handwriting and it's still recognised perfectly. It has the 2.0 version of Newton OS which has much better handwriting algorithms than previous versions. One thing I like very much about the way handwriting recognition works are "gestures". Using special gestures one can change spacing between words, insert spacing, erase things, select words. I think this will also be present in Ink.
Apple HAS sold midrange towers in the past and stopped for a very good reason: They didn't sell. All the pro's in the creative industry want macs as high-end as possible (the dual 1G G4 is rather popular at the moment). All the other professionals that don't need high end stuff get a low-end tower or an iMac...
Most people here seem to have skipped their Information Science lessons me thinks. There's a lot of throwing of the word "random" and "information" and "compression" but most people don't seem to know what they are.
In fact, TRUE RANDOM DATA (e.g. white noise) has the most information (the highest entropy) and is the most difficult to compress. Loss less that is. Funny thing here is if you count lossful compression (such as mp3 coding), random data is in fact easy to "compress", because you simply code it badly and upon decoding obtain new (but different) random data (e.g. white noise).
So, you can not compress TRUE RANDOM DATA. It has the highest entropy of all data (highest information density).
If you compress file A into a file B of 50% the size of A, then file B is MORE RANDOM than file A. The entropy of A is lesser than that of file B. You could also view this as: the information density of file B is higher than file A.
The problem is that if A is a legible text file, we seem to think that A has information and B hasn't.
My conclusion is that this company can not compress TRUE RANDOM DATA 100 to 1. If you read their press release they talk about "Practically Random Information Sequences". With this they probably mean things like audio, video, and the lot. Not random at all.
Somehow this reminds me of a joke from my student days. When a transmitter sends a string of zero's and one's to a receiver somewhere there's a fat chance some of the one's turn into zero's and the other way around. This is a problem. But there's a simple solution, simply make the transmitter and receiver terribly bad so that ALL data is received badly. All one's turn into zero's and the other way around. Place an inverter after the receiver, and there you have it, perfect transmission!
The flaw here of course is that under the worst possibly conditions only 50% of the data is received badly....
A has lesser entropy than B now! This is something people forget. In fact B is more random than A!
100% random data has the highest entropy and is impossible to compress lossless. The data they claim to compress they call "semi random" which must mean it's not random at all.
>But if they have managed to compress a movie in avi of 6gb to 600M thats not a
>'whoawhoawhao' thingy since divx already does this.
However, they claim it's lossless.
Well, I feel anyone who uses "rm -rf" in scripts running with root privileges should be extremely careful. I feel this is a "unix beginners" error, not something you'd expect from a major company like Apple.
:-)
Why didn't they simply use mv to move the old version to the trash?
Welcome to "The Power of Unix".... Now only if we learn how to use it properly...
Maybe this was a scheme to get rid of all those OS 9 partitions people somehoww just keep using?
Have been using Macs since 1987 and dragging a disk to the trash has never felt right to me... there's no LOGIC! But then again there's no logic in many parts of the pre-OS X versions of the Mac OS. Chooser? When does one copy/move a file? memory management (or lack thereof) Hmm, I won't continue. And yes, my current desktop is OS X.