If you're basing business decisions on reviews you read in glossy software industry magazines, your business is in trouble from a lot more than just potentially unstable software. Please turn over technology purchasing decisions to someone less naive and go back to chasing your secretary.
The only halfway reliable source of information about software is the experience of other users, and preferably not the user who made the purchasing decision. Before you buy mission-critical software, talk to other professionals you respect who have used it.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I agree that it would be foolish to base a product buying decision on a single review. But reviews are a good tool to use, amongst many others. The more different sources of information you can access, the better off you are.
We don't live in a perfect world. What if you don't know anyone else who uses the product(s) you are considering? What if you don't have time to fully evaluate every option? In the real world many business decisions are made on the basis of incomplete information and against tight deadlines. In this world you sometimes have to rely more on third party opinions than you would ideally like. It can really hurt you if the third party represents themselves as unbiased but actually aren't.
It isn't like you really need to trust reviews...because most of the time you spend reading reviews your looking for the best investment of your money...and in this case, the software is free, so the only investment is the downloading and learning of the software. And yes, that can be a HUGE investment, but it you would still need to invest that time into commercial software anyway.
Actually downloading and even learning the software is often a tiny proportion of the investment you'll put into software. If I am going to (say) run my business on a Linux computer, then I could be risking everything I have on the reliability of the system. If the reviews that are out there are telling me Linux is highly reliable when in fact it isn't, then I could stand to loose a great deal more than just some download and learning time.
Of course, I'm not saying Linux actually is unreliable, just that the impact of biased reviews can be huge, even for free software.
Just change the GPL you use so that it refers to script as well as binary redistribution? Then you can submit the new GPL back to the GNU foundation. I mean, the GPL itself is Open Source, right? So consider this a bug fix to the GPL and go for it.
Having not spent any amount of time in Britain, and only knowing a few people from there myself, I cannot say how exactly they feel about violence, but probably more strongly than the American people do, who are somewhat self-righteous about sex.
Dude, British Columbia is in Canada, not Britain. Canadian attitudes to these things are close to American ones (said as someone who has lived in all three countries).
OK, a strange thing is that after sitting at an iMac for a couple of months at work, I don't mind the little hockey puck. It is actually surprisingly comfortable once you swallow the automatic distaste. I bought a tangerine iMac for my girlfriend (who is not a geek, see previous article...) and she actually likes is better than a full sized one.
A friend of mine (no name, no pack drill) works in the industrial design department at Apple. He tells me they did a lot of user testing on the iMac "hockey puck" mouse. The interesting thing is they tested mainly on women and children. That's why the mouse is so small - its not designed to be a good fit for large, male hands.
Is this smart? Depends on your point of view. But think about Apple's primary markets for iMacs: home users and schools. What percentage of those markets do you think are women or children? I think its a brilliant piece of design.
Of course, not having 3 buttons for quake3 is the real crime there. But then again, I don't play quake3 on her imac.
And for a very small amount you can buy a larger third party mouse with scroll wheels, multiple buttons. Ideal if you are a male professional user or games geek. Gotta love that USB:-)
The demise of Hypercard was correctly ordained. Although Hypercard was one of the heroic precursors to whole idea of graphical browsers, Apple did not have the right networked vision at the time,and so Hypercard was totally displaced in the grand scheme of things by HTML/Mosaic and follow-ons (and at a time when Next did have a networked vision...)
Certainly the lack of network-savvy hurt HyperCard, although the engineering team had some very impressive Net features in HyperCard 3.0 that Steve nixed. But this is missing the real point. The strength of HyperCard was not the runtime features, but the fact that it made program construction easy for a whole new class of users. People who would never build a full GUI app. in C or C++ could become "real" GUI programmers, building utilities quickly and easily in HyperCard. In many ways the community of stack hackers was very similar to the community of Linux hackers today, with a lot of code sharing going on. But these were primarily end users, not programmers.
Myst was originally a Mac-only game, written in HyperCard. When it was ported to Windows, it was converted into a Director movie because HyperCard (as you imply) does no run under Windows. Interestingly, Director's Lingo scripting language was originally based on HyperCard's scripting language, HyperTalk.
How can this be? The GCC is GPL'd. Can you simply get a copy from a paying member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP herein)? If Apple required ADP members to sign an agreement disallowing them from distributed the GCC port, then Apple didn't have any legal right under copyright law to give those ADP members copies of it, per section 6 of the GPL.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. The gcc and other GNU-based development tools that Apple ships with Mac OS X are part of the Darwin core. This is Open Source and freely downloadable here. This can be freely distributed, along with the rest of the Darwin project (basically the Mach kernel and BSD software layer of Mac OS X). The full Mac OS X Developer Preview that you get with a paid ADC membership includes the complete software layers (Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz etc.) that live on top of Darwin.
Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "gcc-based".
Huh? Steve normally fails to get it. He was opposed to 3.5" floppies (the engineers pushed them through, impressively enough); more than 64KB of RAM in the original Mac; networks; laser printers; well-documented, accessable hardware; Hypercard (as noted); IIRC color; and there are probably a fair number of other things I'm forgetting as well.
He's a nutcase, he's just really persuasive.
Well, speaking as someone who has worked closely with Steve for a number of years, I can say this is just not true. You are confusing focus with "getting it". Most of the technologies you mention Steve didn't want because he was focusing on a particular product at the time (either that, or you're just plain wrong - for example about laser printers). By focusing on a specific goal he often had to nix other people's pet projects.
Now, you may not agree with the decisions he makes, but then you are probably not the type of customer he is trying to build a product for. I have always found that he is very insightful and really on top of the technology. HyperCard was one of the few times I've seen him completely fail to see the potential of a product.
Hmmm... replying to my own message. I must be cracking up;-)
Anyway, I forgot to mention Java. The Macintosh Runtime for Java SDK includes all the usual Java development tools (javac, javah etc.). You can download it for free here. You should also check out the MRJ developer's home page here. It includes links to a number of freeware and open source Java projects for the Mac.Java also lets Mac developers take advantage of Open Source software developed for other platforms, of course.
Yeah, the demise of Hypercard has been a real low point in the history of Macintosh. HC used to be the best amateur-hacker environment around, and it also attracted a lot of people to the Mac. The Mac is not the same without it. It seems like HC fell out of favor just when the Web came around-- maybe because HC failed to very integrate with the Web, or maybe because html offered another easy outlet for part-time geeks
Now here's a topic I have a great deal of firsthand knowledge of. HyperCard was ultimately cancelled by Apple because Steve Jobs didn't see the potential of this product - he believed it competed with InterfaceBuilder that Apple inherited (along with Steve) from NeXT.
At the time the project was cancelled, the HyperCard team were working on a ground-up re-write of the software using QuickTime as its runtime. It had all the modern features that HyperCard developers wanted (full color, full multimedia, no built-in limits etc.) and it would produces stacks that ran everywhere that QuickTime ran. Steve just didn't see the potential for an end-user programming environment, and cancelled it. He thought it was nothing more than a rolodex app.
Its one of the few occasions where I've seen Steve really fail to "get it".
Are there any free development environments for MacOS?
Apple's MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) is a command-line based development environment that can be downloaded for free from Apple here. MPW is a very UNIX-like environment and includes C and C++ compilers, as well as linkers, assemblers and editors etc.
If someone is going to develop a program to give away, I can see why they wouldn't want to shell out $500 for VC++ or CodeWarrior.
VC++ no longer supports Macintosh development, I believe, so its not a viable option anyway. There is a low-cost version of CodeWarrior available, which can be used for non-commercial (i.e. Open Source freeware) development. Check out the Metrowerks site for details (its currently down, though).
If there was a port of gcc to MacOS (there may be, I'm not sure),
Mac OS X comes with a complete gcc-based development environment, but you currently need to have a (paid) membership in the Apple Developer Program to get it. However, a public beta is due later this summer, and it should be very cheap or free to get the OS with development tools then.
there still would be the lack of a good IDE to develop with. A project like Kdevelop for macintosh would provide the ease of use and incentives that the Mac programmer would need to start writing open source.
Defintely check out MPW, particularly if you are coming from a UNIX background.
Actually, Christianity and Judaism are two great examples of this. Just because the bible tells a story in a particular manner doesn't mean that the story isn't wrought entirely of symbolism.
So I'll admit to enough ignorance of Judaism to leave that alone. But the entire basis of Christianity is that God manifested himself on earth as Jesus Christ and directly intervened in all sorts of ways. The majority of the New Testament is taken up with accounts of what Jesus did, ranging from teaching up through miracles. If you don't believe any oif that, I fail to see how you could describe yourself as Christian.
In short - the Christian God is clearly a highly interventionist God. And let's not even start on prayer, saints, miracles, the voice of god etc.
Religions throughout time have used metaphors to get their points across. Look through ancient greek mythology, or norse mythology and you will find tons of it.
Understood, but they also claim that their Gods directly intervene in the world. None more so than the Ancient Greeks or the Norse Gods. If all those stories are nothing more than fables and metaphors, then they aren't really religions...
You are response has absolutely nothing to do with my post. You saw the word "eye" in my post and assumed I was talking about the fully formed eye creationist argument. That is not the ID contention.
Yes, you are right, I did misread the original post. Please accept my apologies for that. By the way, if you don't believe that the fully-formed eye is an ID contention, you perhaps ought to read more ID literature. Its the most common ID contention I can find (try searching for it on google.com)
My post centered on the light sensitive spot which is irreducibly complex and has no precursor, but even the fully formed eyes of all kinds do not have not one precursor as well, but that is a different topic.
Sorry, but I disagree with that last statement. Fully formed eyes have many thousands of precursors. This is actually the heart of the matter, not a "different topic". You make the claim that the light-sensing structures in the eye are "irreducibly complex" but I am explaining that there are many examples of related but simpler light-sensing structures in other creatures.
When light strikes the retina a photon is absorbed by an organic molecule called 11-cis-retinal, causing it to rearrange within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in shape of retinal forces a corresponding change in shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which it is tightly bound. As a consequence of the protein's metamorphosis, the behavior of the protein changes in a very specific way. It goes on and on like this. It fulfills the definition of irreducible complexity, and a challenge from Darwin himself:
I am not arguing that the eye is not an amazing and complex structure. But if you want to argue this is an example of "irreducible complexity" you had better define that term, because there is no reason to believe that the eye is irreducibly complex. In fact, all the evidence points the other way, that there is a clear chain of increasing complexity in the formation of eye cell structures.
From everything you have said here (I'm sure you actually have better arguments), you are confusing "complex" with "irreducibly complex".
Re:while I'm not familiar with Behe's work...
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Calculating God
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I do think that two important pieces of the argument from design are being left out in your summary. The first is that objects that appear to be designed do imply some sort of designer.
Nonsense. What about the "face on Mars" picture? This was an image from the Viking orbiter that looked remarkably like a carved face on the surface of Mare. To some, it even looked like the face of Christ! It had to be designed, right? It sure looked like it - even to me. By your argument, it therefore must have been designed.
Of course, when the Mars pathfinder probe flew over the same spot a few years later, and photographed the same region, it became clear that the particular angle of the light that had caused a random jumble of rocks to look like a face.
The second is whether that designer needs to be some sort of deity. The complexity of life does imply that there is some sort of design process at work.
Again, no. There are lots of examples of extremley complex systems that arise out of random formation processes, without any form of designer. I strongly suggest you study Chaos Theory, and Emergent Systems Theory, especially how Neural Nets work. A complex system does not imply a designer.
Which isn't to say all complex systems lack designers, just that complexity is not in itself any indication of the process that formed the system.
I don't think the concepts of science and God need to be mutually exclusive. The Sentiment that God created everything does not have to mean that he waved his hand and POOF, we had life. All things need a way of working out and a way of developing. The concept of God setting the wheels in motion, defining the rules to it all (science), and guiding the progress is just as likely as life just spontaneously formulating out of a bunch of amino acids hanging out together on the lava rock.
Of course this is an arguable point of view. What is interesting is that no major religion (that I'm aware of, please feel free to correct me) has the concept of a creator God/Gods who just sets things in motion and then sits back. All religions with a creator have an interventionist God - and that starts to get very hard to reconcile with the notions of science.
The reason we don't see the "hands off" God is that such a being would be completely irrelevant to everything. You can't have judgement days or afterlives or all the other imaginary things that organized religions like to use as threats to enable their power. A hands off God who started the Big Bang then never intervened in the world would be exactly the same as no God at all, except for the act of creation. Would you worship that?
But as I mentioned in a previous post it's not only about unlikely events. It is also about design parameters, what makes x a designed object and y not a random object. For example, the light-sensitive structure of the eye is irreducibly complex, it could not have come about via small single steps or it would not function. Behe uses the illustration of a mouse trap. Take one piece away and you don't have a mouse trap anymore. So we have future usefulness rather then past usefulness. Very intriguing.
Sorry, but you are wrong about the eye. There are examples of creatures with "eyes" of all sorts from single light-sensitive cells, right up to complex eyes and all the steps in between. The eye is clearly not "irreducibly complex" because all the intermediate steps also exist in nature.
This is a very old saw that the "Intelligent Design" community persist in trotting out. The fact that it is demonstrably false only shows that you ID folks really ought to try to understand scientific rationality if you want to argue against it.
I think Star Wars I was only dissapointing to some people because they expected so much.
Let's not forget, folks, the Star Wars films are meant primarily for children. When I saw the original Star Wars in '77 I was 13. It had a huge impact on me and many of my generation. It was fresh and original. When I saw TPM, I was a lot older (you do the math:-), and it just didn't have the same force (excuse the pun).
Most of those complaining are of my generation - but people, the film is not meant for us. Go ask kids in their early teens what they thought and they'll give you a much better reaction. Even to Jar Jar Binks.
I don't think TPM was a great film, but I am sure that if the original movie was released now, my thirty-something self would think it sucked too.
Just the same I don't know of anyone who does any serious heavy computing on a laptop.
I'm a software engineer working on the OS for a major computer manufacturer. I do all my development work on my laptop, whether I am travelling or not. It has plenty of power - I can rebuild the entire OS from source on my machine.
Perhaps you are looking at the wrong sort of laptop?
At the end of 1999 the Gates foundation stood at more than $17 billion. Gates is currently moving funds into the foundation at the rate of more than $1 billion a quarter. He has said on a number of occasions that he plans to donate 98% of his personal wealth - presumably most of it will go to the foundation.
but that's the same percentage of net worth as my $120 donation to my alma mater. That's not even taking into account living expenses -- as a grad student, my gift cuts into my budget, but I'm sure that Bill Gates can "manage" to live on what he still has left.
Of course he can, but that isn't the point. The original poster claimed that all of the high tech super-rich are money grubbing bastards who never do any good in the world. I was simply pointing out that this isn't universally true.
I don't know the details of these rich execs' personal finances, but I do know that no one deserves billions of dollars. Not when so many people are starving around the world...when people die because they have no access to healthcare....
Which is why the Gates Foundation is focused on third world healthcare issues.
when children attend schools that are wholly inadequate...et cetera...
Which is why the work Woz is doing is so great. et cetera
Look, I agree that more should be done. I agree that many people on the high tech industry (myself included) are overpaid. I think it is the duty of the super rich to put something back into the community. I just hope that people are gracious enough to acknowledge that there are a lot of people who are really doing something good. I happen to believe that Gates will do a huge amount of real good in the world through his Foundation, and I am ready to praise him when it is due, even if I hate some of the things Microsoft has done.
A general slam on the personalities in the high tech industry is inappropriate IMHO. Flame those who deserve it and acknowledge the real good that others are doing.
When these Billionaire Boys get too much cash, the only thing they can think to do is make more. MSFT spent their cash trying to take over the world to make more cash. Oracle spent their cash trying to destroy MSFT so they could take over the world to make more cash.
Steve Wozniak made a fortune from Apple - he's probably a billionaire, certainly a multimillionaire. He left Apple and is now a high school teacher in the Valley.
Bill Atkinson - the architect of QuickDraw and HyperCard took his millions and is now a photographer.
Paul Allen pumped his billions into sports, high tech research and a spectacular museum dedicated to Jimmy Hendrix and the music of the Seattle area.
Bill gates has given away more money to charitable causes than any human being in history. His foundation is now the largest single source of funds for research into the prevention of third world disease.
I think QuickTime in Mac OS X runs under Cocoa, not Carbon. I could be mistaken. If it was in Carbon, they'd have gotten all of it working by now. The Cocoa port is taking longer.
No, I've used QuickTime for Mac OS X and I know several of the QuickTime engineers. Its definately Carbon, not Cocoa. In fact, the first release of Carbon was in fact a port of the QTML layer to Mac OS X.
Since the core of the OS X is unix. Does this mean that quicktime will be ported to other *nix systems?(i.e. linux)
No. QuickTime runs on top of the Carbon API layer on Mac OS X. The Carbon layer is effectively the previous Mac OS 9 API and libraries running on top of the Mac OS X BSD and Quartz layers. Moving QuickTime from Carbon/Quartz to another UNIX is no easier than moving it from Mac OS 9 to another UNIX.
If you ported Carbon and Quartz from Mac OS X to (say) Linux, then you could relatively easily move QuickTime over to Linux, but that would be a massive effort and isn't going to happen any time soon.
From starting with 'case preserving' but 'case insensitive' filenames... ??? WTF???
Excuse me for being overly indoctrinated with Li/*nix -- but something seems wrong with this.
I think you may have slightly misunderstood the thrust of the original article. The point was Apple has no choice in this. Everyone realises that its a less-than-perfect situation, but the new Mac OS X has to be able to work with the filesystems from Mac OS 9. This is an absolutely essential feature. Because HFS and HFS+ (the Mac OS 9 filesystems) are indeed both 'case preserving' and 'case insensitive', Mac OS X has to be able to handle this sort of filesystem. As Wilfredo says, in practice its not nearly as large a problem as it would appear at first glance. Which isn't to say its never a problem, of course...
If your foundation is not stable, then anything you build will also be unstable. I feel this to be the case with this filesystem.
This seems like a pretty large leap. The use of HFS+ as a Mac OS X filesystem is not at all "unstable". I have three machines running Mac OS X with pure HFS+ filesystems throughout. This really isn't an issue at all. The filesystem is about the most stable part of the entire OS:-)
Apple might consider spending a little effort on keeping some of its biggest supporters -- developers -- happy.
Don't forget that Mac OS X is (very approximately) the combination of two previous operating systems: Mac OS 9 and OpenStep. The Mac OS 9 developers outnumber the OpenStep developers by about 1000:1
Stepwise represents only the OpenStep developers, not the Mac OS 9 developers. Apple has given the OpenStep developers a forward path through the Cocoa API layer, and several of the complaints in the Stepwise article are actually bogus.
But at the end of the day, Apple has limited resources and is trying to ship an OS within a time limit. It makes much more sense for the company to focus on getting Mac OS 9 developers on board (via the Carbon API layer) even if this is at the expense of some of the support they might, in an ideal world, give to the OpenStep community.
Apple is putting a huge effort into supporting its developer base, its just choosing where to prioritize. It knows that right now its Mac OS 9 developers are more important. Seems like a pretty sensible strategy to me.
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If you're basing business decisions on reviews you read in glossy software industry magazines, your business is in trouble from a lot more than just potentially unstable software. Please turn over technology purchasing decisions to someone less naive and go back to chasing your secretary.
The only halfway reliable source of information about software is the experience of other users, and preferably not the user who made the purchasing decision. Before you buy mission-critical software, talk to other professionals you respect who have used it.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I agree that it would be foolish to base a product buying decision on a single review. But reviews are a good tool to use, amongst many others. The more different sources of information you can access, the better off you are.
We don't live in a perfect world. What if you don't know anyone else who uses the product(s) you are considering? What if you don't have time to fully evaluate every option? In the real world many business decisions are made on the basis of incomplete information and against tight deadlines. In this world you sometimes have to rely more on third party opinions than you would ideally like. It can really hurt you if the third party represents themselves as unbiased but actually aren't.
It isn't like you really need to trust reviews...because most of the time you spend reading reviews your looking for the best investment of your money...and in this case, the software is free, so the only investment is the downloading and learning of the software. And yes, that can be a HUGE investment, but it you would still need to invest that time into commercial software anyway.
Actually downloading and even learning the software is often a tiny proportion of the investment you'll put into software. If I am going to (say) run my business on a Linux computer, then I could be risking everything I have on the reliability of the system. If the reviews that are out there are telling me Linux is highly reliable when in fact it isn't, then I could stand to loose a great deal more than just some download and learning time.
Of course, I'm not saying Linux actually is unreliable, just that the impact of biased reviews can be huge, even for free software.
Just change the GPL you use so that it refers to script as well as binary redistribution? Then you can submit the new GPL back to the GNU foundation. I mean, the GPL itself is Open Source, right? So consider this a bug fix to the GPL and go for it.
Having not spent any amount of time in Britain, and only knowing a few people from there myself, I cannot say how exactly they feel about violence, but probably more strongly than the American people do, who are somewhat self-righteous about sex.
Dude, British Columbia is in Canada, not Britain. Canadian attitudes to these things are close to American ones (said as someone who has lived in all three countries).
OK, a strange thing is that after sitting at an iMac for a couple of months at work, I don't mind the little hockey puck. It is actually surprisingly comfortable once you swallow the automatic distaste. I bought a tangerine iMac for my girlfriend (who is not a geek, see previous article...) and she actually likes is better than a full sized one.
A friend of mine (no name, no pack drill) works in the industrial design department at Apple. He tells me they did a lot of user testing on the iMac "hockey puck" mouse. The interesting thing is they tested mainly on women and children. That's why the mouse is so small - its not designed to be a good fit for large, male hands.
Is this smart? Depends on your point of view. But think about Apple's primary markets for iMacs: home users and schools. What percentage of those markets do you think are women or children? I think its a brilliant piece of design.
Of course, not having 3 buttons for quake3 is the real crime there. But then again, I don't play quake3 on her imac.
And for a very small amount you can buy a larger third party mouse with scroll wheels, multiple buttons. Ideal if you are a male professional user or games geek. Gotta love that USB :-)
The demise of Hypercard was correctly ordained. Although Hypercard was one of the heroic precursors to whole idea of graphical browsers, Apple did not have the right networked vision at the time,and so Hypercard was totally displaced in the grand scheme of things by HTML/Mosaic and follow-ons (and at a time when Next did have a networked vision...)
Certainly the lack of network-savvy hurt HyperCard, although the engineering team had some very impressive Net features in HyperCard 3.0 that Steve nixed. But this is missing the real point. The strength of HyperCard was not the runtime features, but the fact that it made program construction easy for a whole new class of users. People who would never build a full GUI app. in C or C++ could become "real" GUI programmers, building utilities quickly and easily in HyperCard. In many ways the community of stack hackers was very similar to the community of Linux hackers today, with a lot of code sharing going on. But these were primarily end users, not programmers.
*ahem*
Myst was a Director movie.
k., wondering how HyperCard ran under Win3.1.
Myst was originally a Mac-only game, written in HyperCard. When it was ported to Windows, it was converted into a Director movie because HyperCard (as you imply) does no run under Windows. Interestingly, Director's Lingo scripting language was originally based on HyperCard's scripting language, HyperTalk.
How can this be? The GCC is GPL'd. Can you simply get a copy from a paying member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP herein)? If Apple required ADP members to sign an agreement disallowing them from distributed the GCC port, then Apple didn't have any legal right under copyright law to give those ADP members copies of it, per section 6 of the GPL.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. The gcc and other GNU-based development tools that Apple ships with Mac OS X are part of the Darwin core. This is Open Source and freely downloadable here. This can be freely distributed, along with the rest of the Darwin project (basically the Mach kernel and BSD software layer of Mac OS X). The full Mac OS X Developer Preview that you get with a paid ADC membership includes the complete software layers (Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz etc.) that live on top of Darwin.
Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "gcc-based".
I was unclear. Sorry.
Huh? Steve normally fails to get it. He was opposed to 3.5" floppies (the engineers pushed them through, impressively enough); more than 64KB of RAM in the original Mac; networks; laser printers; well-documented, accessable hardware; Hypercard (as noted); IIRC color; and there are probably a fair number of other things I'm forgetting as well.
He's a nutcase, he's just really persuasive.
Well, speaking as someone who has worked closely with Steve for a number of years, I can say this is just not true. You are confusing focus with "getting it". Most of the technologies you mention Steve didn't want because he was focusing on a particular product at the time (either that, or you're just plain wrong - for example about laser printers). By focusing on a specific goal he often had to nix other people's pet projects.
Now, you may not agree with the decisions he makes, but then you are probably not the type of customer he is trying to build a product for. I have always found that he is very insightful and really on top of the technology. HyperCard was one of the few times I've seen him completely fail to see the potential of a product.
Hmmm... replying to my own message. I must be cracking up ;-)
Anyway, I forgot to mention Java. The Macintosh Runtime for Java SDK includes all the usual Java development tools (javac, javah etc.). You can download it for free here. You should also check out the MRJ developer's home page here. It includes links to a number of freeware and open source Java projects for the Mac.Java also lets Mac developers take advantage of Open Source software developed for other platforms, of course.
Yeah, the demise of Hypercard has been a real low point in the history of Macintosh. HC used to be the best amateur-hacker environment around, and it also attracted a lot of people to the Mac. The Mac is not the same without it. It seems like HC fell out of favor just when the Web came around-- maybe because HC failed to very integrate with the Web, or maybe because html offered another easy outlet for part-time geeks
Now here's a topic I have a great deal of firsthand knowledge of. HyperCard was ultimately cancelled by Apple because Steve Jobs didn't see the potential of this product - he believed it competed with InterfaceBuilder that Apple inherited (along with Steve) from NeXT.
At the time the project was cancelled, the HyperCard team were working on a ground-up re-write of the software using QuickTime as its runtime. It had all the modern features that HyperCard developers wanted (full color, full multimedia, no built-in limits etc.) and it would produces stacks that ran everywhere that QuickTime ran. Steve just didn't see the potential for an end-user programming environment, and cancelled it. He thought it was nothing more than a rolodex app.
Its one of the few occasions where I've seen Steve really fail to "get it".
Are there any free development environments for MacOS?
Apple's MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) is a command-line based development environment that can be downloaded for free from Apple here. MPW is a very UNIX-like environment and includes C and C++ compilers, as well as linkers, assemblers and editors etc.
If someone is going to develop a program to give away, I can see why they wouldn't want to shell out $500 for VC++ or CodeWarrior.
VC++ no longer supports Macintosh development, I believe, so its not a viable option anyway. There is a low-cost version of CodeWarrior available, which can be used for non-commercial (i.e. Open Source freeware) development. Check out the Metrowerks site for details (its currently down, though).
If there was a port of gcc to MacOS (there may be, I'm not sure),
Mac OS X comes with a complete gcc-based development environment, but you currently need to have a (paid) membership in the Apple Developer Program to get it. However, a public beta is due later this summer, and it should be very cheap or free to get the OS with development tools then.
there still would be the lack of a good IDE to develop with. A project like Kdevelop for macintosh would provide the ease of use and incentives that the Mac programmer would need to start writing open source.
Defintely check out MPW, particularly if you are coming from a UNIX background.
Actually, Christianity and Judaism are two great examples of this. Just because the bible tells a story in a particular manner doesn't mean that the story isn't wrought entirely of symbolism.
So I'll admit to enough ignorance of Judaism to leave that alone. But the entire basis of Christianity is that God manifested himself on earth as Jesus Christ and directly intervened in all sorts of ways. The majority of the New Testament is taken up with accounts of what Jesus did, ranging from teaching up through miracles. If you don't believe any oif that, I fail to see how you could describe yourself as Christian.
In short - the Christian God is clearly a highly interventionist God. And let's not even start on prayer, saints, miracles, the voice of god etc.
Religions throughout time have used metaphors to get their points across. Look through ancient greek mythology, or norse mythology and you will find tons of it.
Understood, but they also claim that their Gods directly intervene in the world. None more so than the Ancient Greeks or the Norse Gods. If all those stories are nothing more than fables and metaphors, then they aren't really religions...
You are response has absolutely nothing to do with my post. You saw the word "eye" in my post and assumed I was talking about the fully formed eye creationist argument. That is not the ID contention.
Yes, you are right, I did misread the original post. Please accept my apologies for that. By the way, if you don't believe that the fully-formed eye is an ID contention, you perhaps ought to read more ID literature. Its the most common ID contention I can find (try searching for it on google.com)
My post centered on the light sensitive spot which is irreducibly complex and has no precursor, but even the fully formed eyes of all kinds do not have not one precursor as well, but that is a different topic.
Sorry, but I disagree with that last statement. Fully formed eyes have many thousands of precursors. This is actually the heart of the matter, not a "different topic". You make the claim that the light-sensing structures in the eye are "irreducibly complex" but I am explaining that there are many examples of related but simpler light-sensing structures in other creatures.
When light strikes the retina a photon is absorbed by an organic molecule called 11-cis-retinal, causing it to rearrange within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in shape of retinal forces a corresponding change in shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which it is tightly bound. As a consequence of the protein's metamorphosis, the behavior of the protein changes in a very specific way. It goes on and on like this. It fulfills the definition of irreducible complexity, and a challenge from Darwin himself:
I am not arguing that the eye is not an amazing and complex structure. But if you want to argue this is an example of "irreducible complexity" you had better define that term, because there is no reason to believe that the eye is irreducibly complex. In fact, all the evidence points the other way, that there is a clear chain of increasing complexity in the formation of eye cell structures.
From everything you have said here (I'm sure you actually have better arguments), you are confusing "complex" with "irreducibly complex".
I do think that two important pieces of the argument from design are being left out in your summary. The first is that objects that appear to be designed do imply some sort of designer.
Nonsense. What about the "face on Mars" picture? This was an image from the Viking orbiter that looked remarkably like a carved face on the surface of Mare. To some, it even looked like the face of Christ! It had to be designed, right? It sure looked like it - even to me. By your argument, it therefore must have been designed.
Of course, when the Mars pathfinder probe flew over the same spot a few years later, and photographed the same region, it became clear that the particular angle of the light that had caused a random jumble of rocks to look like a face.
The second is whether that designer needs to be some sort of deity. The complexity of life does imply that there is some sort of design process at work.
Again, no. There are lots of examples of extremley complex systems that arise out of random formation processes, without any form of designer. I strongly suggest you study Chaos Theory, and Emergent Systems Theory, especially how Neural Nets work. A complex system does not imply a designer.
Which isn't to say all complex systems lack designers, just that complexity is not in itself any indication of the process that formed the system.
I don't think the concepts of science and God need to be mutually exclusive. The Sentiment that God created everything does not have to mean that he waved his hand and POOF, we had life. All things need a way of working out and a way of developing. The concept of God setting the wheels in motion, defining the rules to it all (science), and guiding the progress is just as likely as life just spontaneously formulating out of a bunch of amino acids hanging out together on the lava rock.
Of course this is an arguable point of view. What is interesting is that no major religion (that I'm aware of, please feel free to correct me) has the concept of a creator God/Gods who just sets things in motion and then sits back. All religions with a creator have an interventionist God - and that starts to get very hard to reconcile with the notions of science.
The reason we don't see the "hands off" God is that such a being would be completely irrelevant to everything. You can't have judgement days or afterlives or all the other imaginary things that organized religions like to use as threats to enable their power. A hands off God who started the Big Bang then never intervened in the world would be exactly the same as no God at all, except for the act of creation. Would you worship that?
But as I mentioned in a previous post it's not only about unlikely events. It is also about design parameters, what makes x a designed object and y not a random object. For example, the light-sensitive structure of the eye is irreducibly complex, it could not have come about via small single steps or it would not function. Behe uses the illustration of a mouse trap. Take one piece away and you don't have a mouse trap anymore. So we have future usefulness rather then past usefulness. Very intriguing.
Sorry, but you are wrong about the eye. There are examples of creatures with "eyes" of all sorts from single light-sensitive cells, right up to complex eyes and all the steps in between. The eye is clearly not "irreducibly complex" because all the intermediate steps also exist in nature.
This is a very old saw that the "Intelligent Design" community persist in trotting out. The fact that it is demonstrably false only shows that you ID folks really ought to try to understand scientific rationality if you want to argue against it.
I think Star Wars I was only dissapointing to some people because they expected so much.
Let's not forget, folks, the Star Wars films are meant primarily for children. When I saw the original Star Wars in '77 I was 13. It had a huge impact on me and many of my generation. It was fresh and original. When I saw TPM, I was a lot older (you do the math :-), and it just didn't have the same force (excuse the pun).
Most of those complaining are of my generation - but people, the film is not meant for us. Go ask kids in their early teens what they thought and they'll give you a much better reaction. Even to Jar Jar Binks.
I don't think TPM was a great film, but I am sure that if the original movie was released now, my thirty-something self would think it sucked too.
Just the same I don't know of anyone who does any serious heavy computing on a laptop.
I'm a software engineer working on the OS for a major computer manufacturer. I do all my development work on my laptop, whether I am travelling or not. It has plenty of power - I can rebuild the entire OS from source on my machine.
Perhaps you are looking at the wrong sort of laptop?
Sure, Gates gave a billion dollars at one time,
At the end of 1999 the Gates foundation stood at more than $17 billion. Gates is currently moving funds into the foundation at the rate of more than $1 billion a quarter. He has said on a number of occasions that he plans to donate 98% of his personal wealth - presumably most of it will go to the foundation.
but that's the same percentage of net worth as my $120 donation to my alma mater. That's not even taking into account living expenses -- as a grad student, my gift cuts into my budget, but I'm sure that Bill Gates can "manage" to live on what he still has left.
Of course he can, but that isn't the point. The original poster claimed that all of the high tech super-rich are money grubbing bastards who never do any good in the world. I was simply pointing out that this isn't universally true.
I don't know the details of these rich execs' personal finances, but I do know that no one deserves billions of dollars. Not when so many people are starving around the world...when people die because they have no access to healthcare....
Which is why the Gates Foundation is focused on third world healthcare issues.
when children attend schools that are wholly inadequate...et cetera...
Which is why the work Woz is doing is so great. et cetera
Look, I agree that more should be done. I agree that many people on the high tech industry (myself included) are overpaid. I think it is the duty of the super rich to put something back into the community. I just hope that people are gracious enough to acknowledge that there are a lot of people who are really doing something good. I happen to believe that Gates will do a huge amount of real good in the world through his Foundation, and I am ready to praise him when it is due, even if I hate some of the things Microsoft has done.
A general slam on the personalities in the high tech industry is inappropriate IMHO. Flame those who deserve it and acknowledge the real good that others are doing.
When these Billionaire Boys get too much cash, the only thing they can think to do is make more. MSFT spent their cash trying to take over the world to make more cash. Oracle spent their cash trying to destroy MSFT so they could take over the world to make more cash.
Steve Wozniak made a fortune from Apple - he's probably a billionaire, certainly a multimillionaire. He left Apple and is now a high school teacher in the Valley.
Bill Atkinson - the architect of QuickDraw and HyperCard took his millions and is now a photographer.
Paul Allen pumped his billions into sports, high tech research and a spectacular museum dedicated to Jimmy Hendrix and the music of the Seattle area.
Bill gates has given away more money to charitable causes than any human being in history. His foundation is now the largest single source of funds for research into the prevention of third world disease.
Yeah, shame on those billionaire boys.
I think QuickTime in Mac OS X runs under Cocoa, not Carbon. I could be mistaken. If it was in Carbon, they'd have gotten all of it working by now. The Cocoa port is taking longer.
No, I've used QuickTime for Mac OS X and I know several of the QuickTime engineers. Its definately Carbon, not Cocoa. In fact, the first release of Carbon was in fact a port of the QTML layer to Mac OS X.
.Since the core of the OS X is unix. Does this mean that quicktime will be ported to other *nix systems?(i.e. linux)
No. QuickTime runs on top of the Carbon API layer on Mac OS X. The Carbon layer is effectively the previous Mac OS 9 API and libraries running on top of the Mac OS X BSD and Quartz layers. Moving QuickTime from Carbon/Quartz to another UNIX is no easier than moving it from Mac OS 9 to another UNIX.
If you ported Carbon and Quartz from Mac OS X to (say) Linux, then you could relatively easily move QuickTime over to Linux, but that would be a massive effort and isn't going to happen any time soon.
From starting with 'case preserving' but 'case insensitive' filenames ... ??? WTF???
Excuse me for being overly indoctrinated with Li/*nix -- but something seems wrong with this.
I think you may have slightly misunderstood the thrust of the original article. The point was Apple has no choice in this. Everyone realises that its a less-than-perfect situation, but the new Mac OS X has to be able to work with the filesystems from Mac OS 9. This is an absolutely essential feature. Because HFS and HFS+ (the Mac OS 9 filesystems) are indeed both 'case preserving' and 'case insensitive', Mac OS X has to be able to handle this sort of filesystem. As Wilfredo says, in practice its not nearly as large a problem as it would appear at first glance. Which isn't to say its never a problem, of course...
If your foundation is not stable, then anything you build will also be unstable. I feel this to be the case with this filesystem.
This seems like a pretty large leap. The use of HFS+ as a Mac OS X filesystem is not at all "unstable". I have three machines running Mac OS X with pure HFS+ filesystems throughout. This really isn't an issue at all. The filesystem is about the most stable part of the entire OS :-)
just ask the guys at Stepwise who wrote this....
Apple might consider spending a little effort on keeping some of its biggest supporters -- developers -- happy.
Don't forget that Mac OS X is (very approximately) the combination of two previous operating systems: Mac OS 9 and OpenStep. The Mac OS 9 developers outnumber the OpenStep developers by about 1000:1
Stepwise represents only the OpenStep developers, not the Mac OS 9 developers. Apple has given the OpenStep developers a forward path through the Cocoa API layer, and several of the complaints in the Stepwise article are actually bogus.
But at the end of the day, Apple has limited resources and is trying to ship an OS within a time limit. It makes much more sense for the company to focus on getting Mac OS 9 developers on board (via the Carbon API layer) even if this is at the expense of some of the support they might, in an ideal world, give to the OpenStep community.
Apple is putting a huge effort into supporting its developer base, its just choosing where to prioritize. It knows that right now its Mac OS 9 developers are more important. Seems like a pretty sensible strategy to me.