Anyway, this does bring up briefly the important distinction between software and hardware. This is something I have been wondering about lately: what is software, and what is hardware? How can you define them? After all, "software" does exist in the physical worlds, whether as bumps in a CD or magnetic direction in a hard disk. So what is a clear and universal definition for "hardware" and "software?"
No, it really is simply. Hardware is the set of physical parts that store, retrieve and execute instructions. Software is the particular set of instructions that the machine executes.
The fact that you may use a physical storage mechanism (hard disc, CD-ROM, net connection, whatever) to hold the software does not turn the instructions into a piece of hardware.
Its like a story. A story is the actual sequence of events, characters, ideas etc. A story is a piece of software. Writing a story down on a piece of paper may produce a book, but it doesn't change the nature of the story itself - its still that collection of abstract parts.
Turing likely isn't there. Neither are Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton.
Yes, but Turing was a Computer Scientist - his theories formed the basis of most of modern computer science. Einstein and Newton's contributions are much, much less relevant to computing.
Being a great theorist does not make you an inventor. (Though Turing did do some hands-on stuff during the war.)
"Did do some hands-on stuff during the war"? Boy, when they come to handing out the prize for Understatement of the Millenium, you'll be right up there with the guy who said "that Hitler, he's not a very nice man".
Turing helped build the Colossus system that cracked the German Enigma codes. This action alone shortened World War II considerably, and may even have won it for Britain and America. He then went on to design and help construct the first digital stored-program computer in the world. This isn't even starting to talk about his major theoretical contributions, which you so casually dismiss.
I know Woz personally, and I have met several of the eminent computer scientist who worked with Turing. I have the greatest respect for Woz, and I'm truly glad he's been inducted, but Turing was a far more important figure in the history of computing even that Steve.
No, there's actually an even more subtle distinction. The pay-per-view DVD scheme (scam) was called DIVX. The hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG-4 codec is called DivX. (notice the difference in capitalization.)
You are of course correct. The capitalization is different. Yet another mistake in the BBC article...
DIVX and DivX are not related to each other.
I have never understood why the DivX people used that name. It causes confusion (as above) and why on earth would you name your cool new technology after a lame failed technology? Just doesn't make any sense...
Remember that a VHS video recorder also significantly reduces picture quality. Yet I'd bet that 90% of the public not only is not bothered by it, they are not even aware of it.
I think this is a great point. Its amazing how many people have put up with the often stunningly low quality of many consumer VHS machines. What is interesting is how DVD has started to take off. A number of my (geek and non-geek) friends have got DVD and boy, they do notice the lack of quality in VHS after that.
I suspect as more folks get exposed to high quality video sources (DVD, Net, Digital cable done right etc.) their tolerance for poor quality VHS will drop.
Where are the specs on the MP4 format? By encoding, do they mean from MPEG2 -> MP4? The "hacked" codec from M$, does anyone have it out there (source?)??
"MP4" is really called MPEG-4 Version 2. The full spec. can be found here.
MPEG-4 defines how to compress and decompress raw video into the MPEG-4 bitstream format. "Encoding" refers to the compress half of this process. If you are converting from one compression form (e.g. MPEG-2) to another (e.g. MPEG-4) you are "transcoding".
The Microsoft codec, whether hacked or not, is based on an early draft of the MPEG-4 format and is incompatible with real MPEG-4 bitstreams.
Boy, that BBC article is riddled with errors. The format is known as MPEG-4, not MP4. If you recall, MP3 is actually MPEG-1 Layer III audio encoding. MPEG-2 is a video and audio encoding format (as used on DVDs). MPEG-3 was never released. MPEG-4 is the successor video and audio compression format to MPEG II, not the successor to MP3.
DivX is not, as reported "the name of a failed technology that tried to create limited-life video cassettes", it was an attempt to create time-limit DVD discs, that's an important distinction.
The MPEG-4 standard is based on the QuickTime file format. It was only formalized in March of 2000, more than six months after the Microsoft "codec" was released. So the Microsoft "MP4" codec is an incomplete implementation of an earlier draft spec of the format and is not compatible with real MPEG-4 bitstreams. See this link for the real scoop on MPEG-4.
It has been my understanding that Apple began using the track pad simply because it was cheaper than the mini-trackball they used to use on the older PowerBooks.
Not sure where you get this from, but there isn't a significant price differential at the OEM level.
IMHO, track pads are inferior to the older trackballs but are much better than that little nipple that IBM and Toshiba place in the center of the keyboard. Gawd, how I hate those.
I agree about those little sticks. They're damn hard to use. Trackpads however, are much better than trackballs (IMHO, of course). Apart from the fact that I can program the tapping sequence response of my trackpad, it has the additional advantage of not getting dirty.
A track pad without buttons sounds like a major headache to me. I suspect that this is just another cost-cutting measure disguised as innovation to make it palatable.
Who makes a trackpad without buttons? Certainly not Apple. The PowerBook and iBook lines ship with a one-button trackpad, plus the ability to program the tap-sequences of the trackpad to simulate other operations. No cost-cutting in evidence here.
Give me a mouse with two buttons and a wheel.
What like the one I have plugged into my PowerBook's USB port right now? That's the beauty of USB - I can choose the input device I use. Cool.,
IIRC, office LANs started taking over the world (well, according to the commercials) as soon as Xerox released their coax Ethernet. Actually LANs probably started cropping up long before that, but it seems like they were pretty prevelant in the 70's, and Macs didn't appear until the early 80's IIRC.
Not really. There were very few office LANs in existence before the mid 1980's. Ethernet was mainly used to connect minicomputers to their peripherals before that (and even then, serial lines were much more common).
Macs were the first mass market machines to have Local Area Networking built-in. It wasn't Ethernet, but it was easier to network Macs for years before it was easy to do it to Intel-based PCs. I think the claim is good, at least from the mass market perspective.
Note that I'm too young to actually have experienced any of this, so a lot of it could be wrong.
Without wanting to sound too old (too late, too late...) I was around for this stuff.
Also, if the Mac GUI os they epitome of usabilty Why are they shitcanning it for OSX?
Ummm... they're not. Probably the major attraction of OS X is its the stability and power of Unix with the Mac OS GUI on top of it. Okay, so Apple have take the opportunity to polish the look a little, but when you use a Mac OS X machine, it is quite noticeably a Macintosh. Its the same UI experience, just better.
How can anyone consider Mac OS to be an "alternative" to Windows. I know I switched to linux because I got sick of it. Can someone sit at their computer and say "I'm sick of crashing. I'll just install MacOS." No. They have to go out and fork over a grand to get a Mac. MacOS cannot be considered an alternative until it supports multiple platforms. A better competition would be Linux vs. BSD, or BeOS, or OS/2, or anything else that can be installed on x86. This is like saying you want to install Windows 98 on a Sun SPARC...it just can't be done.
And yet around a third of people buying iMacs are ex-Windows users, so clearly there are a lot of people who do think the Mac experience is a real alternative to Windows.
How can they do a Mac vs. Linux article and not mention BSD-based Mac OS X?
That's a great question...
I don't follow Apple very closely, so I don't know if OS X is officially released yet, but I would think that either way it would factor heavily into this comparison.
Mac OS X DP4 (that's Developer Preview #4) was released to developers last week at Apple's annual World Wide Developer's Conference. In the conference keynote speech, Steve Jobs announced that a public beta of Mac OS X would be available this summer, and it would ship pre-installed on Apple hardware starting in January.
Mac OS X looks very good so far. Its got the Mach kernel, with BSD on top (all opened sourced as Darwin). Above this sits three API layers: Cocoa - dervied from the NextStep operating system; Carbon - essentially the legacy Mac OS APIs; and Java - the JDK 1.3.
On top of these API layers is Aqua, which is the new improved Macintosh UI. This is gives a single, high quality user experience to the OS.
The Eazel work is potentially very interesting, but its still going to be just another of many Linux UIs. Apple hardware will have full-on BSD with a single, elegant, easy-to-use UI. Its going to be a compelling experience to use one of these new Macs.
Is it just me or is most of the stuff that Neilson says just common sense?
You are right. By "common sense" I think you mean simple and logical. This sounds right. The best ideas are usually just this (c.f. Occam's Razor).
What is interesting is to be able to say why a simple and logical idea is the way it is and what implications that idea has. This is the field of expertise. Virtually every field that has experts is like this - the basic ideas are simple and can be understood by anyone. The expertise comes in being able to analyze the ideas, explain exactly what they are, and explaining what impact flows from them.
The test of a great idea is that once you have discovered it people say "well, obviously that is so, it just has to be that way". Then we call it common sense. The genius comes in being the first to see such an "obvious" rule. Newton's laws of gravity seem blatantly obvious to us now, but the guy was still a genius for figuring that out.
A user interface should let you: Run programs Alter system settings Allow your programs to communicate with each other (drag and drop, calling up a browser when you click on a URL)
A few more things an OS should let you do:
Store documents
Locate documents
Find the program you want to run
Open documents
Connect to external devices
Locating external devices
Allocate memory to a task
Stop programs running
Manage screen real estate
Arbitrate CPU time between running programs
Plus many others. And OS is a complex beast that has to do a lot of things.
A user interface should be:
Intuitive - no learning curve
Unfortunately there is no such thing as a UI without a learning curve. All UIs are learnt. Sit down with a truly novice user some time.
The question is how easy is a particular UI, and the answer is complex and depends heavily on the skills, knowledge and previous experience of the user trying to learn it, as well as on the nature of the UI and its documentation.
Be physically easy to use (single key-strokes and mouse use - you shouldn't have to let go of the mouse to use the keyboard for the basic UI)
With the caveat that what one user finds easy, another might not. Not to mention that not everything can be accessed by simple operations, so you have to choose some things to be a single click, and other require several clicks to make happen. The question is which operations do you make easy and which hard? That's what UI design is all about...
The starting point for this discussion has to be the meta-point that there is no single "right" user interface. I need a command-line and a set of UNIX-like command-line tools that support pipes and redirection. Without these I am less productive. I am a software developer. But what is a highly appropriate user interface for me will not be useful to many other users.
That aside, its worthwhile looking at the broadest category of users. If you are developing a UI for the majority of users, you need to understand their requirements. They are not developers or geeks. The probably want to run a limited number of productivity apps (typified by Microsoft Office or Star Office). They will want to access the Internet (run Mozilla or iCab or Internet Explorer). They may want to play games on their machine. They want to organize and access their documents. They may want to do some cool things like edit their desktop video.
For this class of user, you can measure the appropriateness of the UI by looking at how much the UI allows the user to get their tasks done, and how much it gets in their way.
Note this is not the same as ease of learning, though it is also good if the user can figure out how to do new tasks quickly. That's why consistency of basic commands and operations as enforced by GUIs like the Mac OS is a good thing for most users. Once I've learnt that Cmd-C/Cmd-V cuts and pastes in Word, I know it will also do that in Mozilla.
But you only learn a UI once (assuming you have a functional memory:-), but you use it all the time. That's why its important that beyond ease of learning you have ease of use.
A good UI should be easy to configure. I don't mean skins. I mean, for example, if I have 25 apps installed on my system and I regularly use 5, I should be able to put aliases to those 5 apps in an easy to reach place, and the other 20 apps should be accessible, but not as in my face.
Another facet of a good UI is giving me control of those things I want control of, and hiding the details I don't want to deal with. I may care a great deal about the fonts I use in my documents, and require fine control of them. I may not care if the printer driver uses PostScript or spaghetti to get my fonts onto paper. I should at least be able to specify to the UI when I want control and when it shouldn't bother me with unneccesary detail.
i don't think i see the connection, but damn that prof seems wierd.
No connection - it just reminded me of my weird psych prof. Which just goes to show how weird human psychology is. Which is probably the exact point the prof. was trying to make...
reminds me of in high school when we spelled out [creative] stuff on the scoreboards. oh well, i never got caught
Which reminds me of one of my psychology lecturers at university. He was a bit odd. Quiet, withdrawn manner. Always seemed to behave strangely around female students. Never looked you in the eye when he talked to you.
We had these huge lecture theatres with three-storey high roll-over blackboards. Now, normally there was stuff from other lectures left on the boards. One day, we noticed that every time this guy lectured, it said "Love me" at the top of the boards. This happened three of four lectures in a row, and only in the lectures with this guy. So a couple of us snuck in before the next lecture and hid at the back. Sure enough, this prof. came in 10 minutes before the start of the lecture, wrote "Love me" on the board, rolled it to the top and left the lecture hall. At the start of the class, he came in an taught the whole lecture without mentioning the message, just as he had every week.
I don't think I ever completed his course. Too damn weird.
Personally I'm not really sure if we should begin the history of computers at the dawn of logical/mathematical thinking. If we do, are not all things which perform a logical function computers? Example: I used this stick to say that I am 2 1/2 sticks tall. Is the stick a computer?
In the early 60's Donald Michie, professor of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University, built a computer called MENACE that could play a killer game of Tic-Tac-Toe (or "Noughts and Crosses" as it is called in the UK). It learnt to improve its play strategy as it played games.
The really cool bit? This computer was a series of matchboxes and colored beads. No electronics at all. Clearly there is a wide class of machines that perform logical operations that can be classed as computers, and we should be careful to define computers by what they do, not the materials they are composed of.
I'd say that in your example your fingers don't count as a computer because its your brain (which is the computer) that is doing the counting - your fingers are acting as a memory sub-system.
Remember, this is a country with an official secrets act, and no free speech protection.
The USA has broadly similar powers that the Official Secrets Act grants the UK government. All countries have certain information that is protected for reasons of national interest. The US is not significantly more open than the UK in this respect.
The lack of a formal right to Free Speech in the UK is detrimental, but it really isn't the issue here. The issue is that UK libel laws are stricter than the US laws. This isn't all bad. For example, it is much harder in the UK to use media power to unfairly smear and attack an individual. In the US you can use media power to libel someone and then hide behind a Free Speech defense, even when the victim doesn't have equal access to the media to put their side of the story.
Quicktime is limited to 2 Gigs, as is AVI. New versions will get around this (with the OpenDMI spec), but for the moment you need a proprietary solution to this problem...
No, QuickTime up to version 3.0 was limited to 4GB files. But upgrade to QuickTime 4.0 or later, it now supports 64-bit file offsets allowing capture and editing of files larger than 4GB. Of course, QuickTime capture software needs to be rewritten to use the new 64-bit QuickTime APIs. Apple's FinalCut Pro software supports greater than 2GB files. I'm not sure about third party applications.
Also, there is still a 2 GB file size limit on Mac/PC. This is the biggest obstacle any beginner (inexperienced) editor runs across because you usually don't hit that wall no matter how hard you're pushing a system.
I can't speak for Windows systems - are they still limited to 2GB files? But Mac OS doesn't have that limit any more. Using the HFS+ file system introduced in Mac OS 8.6, you can now store files up to 2^63 bytes in size. Which is 8,589, 934 GB. When you run out of that, you'll have one awesome movie:-)
But this is wrong - mail ordered goods are taxed - if the customer is in the same state as the vendor (or the vendor has a significant physical presence in the customer's state).
I can't speak for everyone else, but I have always wanted consistent laws and rules. We have tax laws in place which deal with interstate commerce. I just placed an order with Dell across the net... as we::: gasp::: paid sales taxes!
Absolutely. Consistency is great because it means you can shop online and always know the tax implications and it is much simpler (and therefore cheaper) for websites to administer. But the current rules are complex - you only pay sales tax in those states where the company has a significant physical presence. How, when I shop online, do I know which stores have a presence in my state? I usually have no way of knowing until I have completed a transaction. And sales tax vary from state to state, so it is hard for me to know how much tax I need to pay.
The current situation is inconsistent and unfair, which is why I support a uniform sales tax for all net sites. Obiviously net slaes would be exempot from state sales taxes, so the net effect for customers should be zero.
Who do you give the taxes to? The physical state the buyer's in, or the one the seller's in, or perhaps the federal government? You can't give it back to the Net itself; there's no governing body to give it to. Giving it to the states raises unbelieveably complex questions about verification, distribution of the proceeds to the appropriate states, and such.
Let's assume you give it to the federal government (which you no doubt want to do). What about sales between people who are outside the U.S. government's borders? If you're treating the Net as one big stste, these people should be taxed. But since neither party is physically located within the US, it's not fair to tax them (I think it might even be construed as demanding tribute in some places; that's an act of war). In other words, you have to discriminate by physical location. That's hardly fair.
Yes, I agree that a uniform net sales tax couldn't be distributed back to individual states. Pure eCommerce companies don't really exist in individual States anyway, so it wouldn't make any sense to do that. So, yes, I would advocate these going back to the Federal government.
You're point about international tax isn't new. This already applies in the mail order world. We have international tax laws to deal with this. if I mail order goods from France, I don't pay sales tax in France. The same system could be applied to Internet sales.
This is imperfect, but in practice its probably the best (only?) solution while we still maintain soveriegn countries as a concept.
Let's assume you're lunatic enough to try and tax every single transaction. What currency do you use? The US dollar is certainly fine for US citizens, but what about other places which don't use that currency? You have to start dealing with exchange rates. These fluctuate wildly enough that there's no reasonable way to keep up.
No, there are already well-defined international laws that deal with this. The US doesn't have a right to tax transactions outside its borders, and nor should it. The only problem is cross-border transactions. There are ways of dealing with this, but the net is going to bring a lot of attention to this issue because it will make international business much more common. I don't know what a good long term solution here is, but I suspect this will be one impetus to the continuing dissolution of the idea of the nation state.
Exactly what gets taxed and what doesn't? Different states have different laws about what can and cannot be taxed (many states, for example, do not tax medicines).
If its a federal tax, then the federal government would have to decide what gets taxed and at what rate. No problem there.
That last point brings up another problem: do you tax delivery of products? For now it's impossible to e-mail, say, a toaster to someone, so physical delivery is still a necessity. Do you tax this?
No, its a sales tax, you tax the sale of products.
This is a lot of why the Net should not be taxed. One, it's impossible to do in a fair manner.
I don't see you've made this point at all. The only problematic case is commerce crossing international boundaries. But that is exactly analogous to the current State-based sales tax laws. By your argument, if international sales taxes are unfair, then inter-state sales taxes are doubly so. At least my proposal takes care of the majority of the problematic cases...
There are never perfectly fair laws. All law is a generalization and will have exception. This is the real world. While we must strive for better laws, if you want to avoid all unfairness in every law the only option is completely unregulated anarchy. Humanity progressed beyonf that concept several thousand years ago.
Two, it makes buying and selling products much, much more complex, thereby discouraging its use.
I don't see this at all. If there is a uniform sales tax, it is easy to calculate the cost of goods. At present, I have to figure out if the seller is in the same state as me, and only if they are, ad the particular state's sales tax. This is a much bigger effort to track than simply in the US or out of the US. I would suggest my flat tax proposal would be much simpler for both buyer and sller.
Three, Wal-Mat and Target don't give a damn about the taxes; they just want to artificially inflate their e-commerce prices and blame it on taxes.
Well, I can't pretend to know the intentions of those two corporations, and I suspect you can't either. Do Target or Wal-Mart even have asignificant online presence yet? Are they planning to? This seems like a bogus argument. Even assuming their intentions are ill-concieved, it doesn't mean what they are proposing is wrong. Just because Hitler made the trains run on time, doesn't make punctuality a bad thing.
Because e-commerce is so popular, they think people will stand for it (that's why regional encoding on DVD's works, incidentally; people don't realize that it's used to artificially inflate prices so they keep paying more than they have to).
Oh, I agree the DVD regional encoding is pernicious. I just don't think this is a comparable case at all.
Re:Please answer these questions?
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SuSE For PPC
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· Score: 1
2) How will this result in cheaper PPC systems?
In theory, a manufacturer other than Apple could use the PPC processor and build their own Linux system around it. Having a number of distros to choose from may slightly increase the chances of this happening. It should be possible to put together a low cost headless PPC server for less than anything Apple sells.
The reason I think this is unlikely to happen is there probably isn't a large enough market to justify anyone doing this commercially. You'd need to design your own motherboard and all the rest of the packaging that goes into producing a complete system. It probably wouldn't be cost effective to do this unless you were fairly certain of shipping several tens of thousands of these boxes.
Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I would really like to know the answers.
There are no dumb questions. Sometimes there are dumb answers.
What you're suggesting is treating the net in the same way as everything else - by taxing it. I don't know where I stand in the debate of taxing vs. not taxing, but that part of your argument is backwards. The revolutionary thing to do would be to not tax it at all.
Doing something just because it is "revolutionary" is a really poor reason for doing it. Just ask the Russians...
Again, why should the net have this unfair advantage? When most of retail sales shift to eCommerce (and they will), why shouldn't the net have a sales tax on it? What else will replace the lost revenue from all the bricks and mortar sales taxes that are no longer generated?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, this does bring up briefly the important distinction between software and hardware. This is something I have been wondering about lately: what is software, and what is hardware? How can you define them? After all, "software" does exist in the physical worlds, whether as bumps in a CD or magnetic direction in a hard disk. So what is a clear and universal definition for "hardware" and "software?"
No, it really is simply. Hardware is the set of physical parts that store, retrieve and execute instructions. Software is the particular set of instructions that the machine executes.
The fact that you may use a physical storage mechanism (hard disc, CD-ROM, net connection, whatever) to hold the software does not turn the instructions into a piece of hardware.
Its like a story. A story is the actual sequence of events, characters, ideas etc. A story is a piece of software. Writing a story down on a piece of paper may produce a book, but it doesn't change the nature of the story itself - its still that collection of abstract parts.
Turing likely isn't there. Neither are Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton.
Yes, but Turing was a Computer Scientist - his theories formed the basis of most of modern computer science. Einstein and Newton's contributions are much, much less relevant to computing.
Being a great theorist does not make you an inventor. (Though Turing did do some hands-on stuff during the war.)
"Did do some hands-on stuff during the war"? Boy, when they come to handing out the prize for Understatement of the Millenium, you'll be right up there with the guy who said "that Hitler, he's not a very nice man".
Turing helped build the Colossus system that cracked the German Enigma codes. This action alone shortened World War II considerably, and may even have won it for Britain and America. He then went on to design and help construct the first digital stored-program computer in the world. This isn't even starting to talk about his major theoretical contributions, which you so casually dismiss.
I know Woz personally, and I have met several of the eminent computer scientist who worked with Turing. I have the greatest respect for Woz, and I'm truly glad he's been inducted, but Turing was a far more important figure in the history of computing even that Steve.
No, there's actually an even more subtle distinction. The pay-per-view DVD scheme (scam) was called DIVX. The hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG-4 codec is called DivX. (notice the difference in capitalization.)
You are of course correct. The capitalization is different. Yet another mistake in the BBC article...
DIVX and DivX are not related to each other.
I have never understood why the DivX people used that name. It causes confusion (as above) and why on earth would you name your cool new technology after a lame failed technology? Just doesn't make any sense...
Remember that a VHS video recorder also significantly reduces picture quality. Yet I'd bet that 90% of the public not only is not bothered by it, they are not even aware of it.
I think this is a great point. Its amazing how many people have put up with the often stunningly low quality of many consumer VHS machines. What is interesting is how DVD has started to take off. A number of my (geek and non-geek) friends have got DVD and boy, they do notice the lack of quality in VHS after that.
I suspect as more folks get exposed to high quality video sources (DVD, Net, Digital cable done right etc.) their tolerance for poor quality VHS will drop.
Where are the specs on the MP4 format? By encoding, do they mean from MPEG2 -> MP4? The "hacked" codec from M$, does anyone have it out there (source?)??
"MP4" is really called MPEG-4 Version 2. The full spec. can be found here.
MPEG-4 defines how to compress and decompress raw video into the MPEG-4 bitstream format. "Encoding" refers to the compress half of this process. If you are converting from one compression form (e.g. MPEG-2) to another (e.g. MPEG-4) you are "transcoding".
The Microsoft codec, whether hacked or not, is based on an early draft of the MPEG-4 format and is incompatible with real MPEG-4 bitstreams.
Boy, that BBC article is riddled with errors. The format is known as MPEG-4, not MP4. If you recall, MP3 is actually MPEG-1 Layer III audio encoding. MPEG-2 is a video and audio encoding format (as used on DVDs). MPEG-3 was never released. MPEG-4 is the successor video and audio compression format to MPEG II, not the successor to MP3.
DivX is not, as reported "the name of a failed technology that tried to create limited-life video cassettes", it was an attempt to create time-limit DVD discs, that's an important distinction.
The MPEG-4 standard is based on the QuickTime file format. It was only formalized in March of 2000, more than six months after the Microsoft "codec" was released. So the Microsoft "MP4" codec is an incomplete implementation of an earlier draft spec of the format and is not compatible with real MPEG-4 bitstreams. See this link for the real scoop on MPEG-4.
It has been my understanding that Apple began using the track pad simply because it was cheaper than the mini-trackball they used to use on the older PowerBooks.
Not sure where you get this from, but there isn't a significant price differential at the OEM level.
IMHO, track pads are inferior to the older trackballs but are much better than that little nipple that IBM and Toshiba place in the center of the keyboard. Gawd, how I hate those.
I agree about those little sticks. They're damn hard to use. Trackpads however, are much better than trackballs (IMHO, of course). Apart from the fact that I can program the tapping sequence response of my trackpad, it has the additional advantage of not getting dirty.
A track pad without buttons sounds like a major headache to me. I suspect that this is just another cost-cutting measure disguised as innovation to make it palatable.
Who makes a trackpad without buttons? Certainly not Apple. The PowerBook and iBook lines ship with a one-button trackpad, plus the ability to program the tap-sequences of the trackpad to simulate other operations. No cost-cutting in evidence here.
Give me a mouse with two buttons and a wheel.
What like the one I have plugged into my PowerBook's USB port right now? That's the beauty of USB - I can choose the input device I use. Cool.,
IIRC, office LANs started taking over the world (well, according to the commercials) as soon as Xerox released their coax Ethernet. Actually LANs probably started cropping up long before that, but it seems like they were pretty prevelant in the 70's, and Macs didn't appear until the early 80's IIRC.
Not really. There were very few office LANs in existence before the mid 1980's. Ethernet was mainly used to connect minicomputers to their peripherals before that (and even then, serial lines were much more common).
Macs were the first mass market machines to have Local Area Networking built-in. It wasn't Ethernet, but it was easier to network Macs for years before it was easy to do it to Intel-based PCs. I think the claim is good, at least from the mass market perspective.
Note that I'm too young to actually have experienced any of this, so a lot of it could be wrong.
Without wanting to sound too old (too late, too late...) I was around for this stuff.
Also, if the Mac GUI os they epitome of usabilty Why are they shitcanning it for OSX?
Ummm... they're not. Probably the major attraction of OS X is its the stability and power of Unix with the Mac OS GUI on top of it. Okay, so Apple have take the opportunity to polish the look a little, but when you use a Mac OS X machine, it is quite noticeably a Macintosh. Its the same UI experience, just better.
How can anyone consider Mac OS to be an "alternative" to Windows. I know I switched to linux because I got sick of it. Can someone sit at their computer and say "I'm sick of crashing. I'll just install MacOS." No. They have to go out and fork over a grand to get a Mac. MacOS cannot be considered an alternative until it supports multiple platforms. A better competition would be Linux vs. BSD, or BeOS, or OS/2, or anything else that can be installed on x86. This is like saying you want to install Windows 98 on a Sun SPARC...it just can't be done.
And yet around a third of people buying iMacs are ex-Windows users, so clearly there are a lot of people who do think the Mac experience is a real alternative to Windows.
How can they do a Mac vs. Linux article and not mention BSD-based Mac OS X?
That's a great question...
I don't follow Apple very closely, so I don't know if OS X is officially released yet, but I would think that either way it would factor heavily into this comparison.
Mac OS X DP4 (that's Developer Preview #4) was released to developers last week at Apple's annual World Wide Developer's Conference. In the conference keynote speech, Steve Jobs announced that a public beta of Mac OS X would be available this summer, and it would ship pre-installed on Apple hardware starting in January.
Mac OS X looks very good so far. Its got the Mach kernel, with BSD on top (all opened sourced as Darwin). Above this sits three API layers: Cocoa - dervied from the NextStep operating system; Carbon - essentially the legacy Mac OS APIs; and Java - the JDK 1.3.
On top of these API layers is Aqua, which is the new improved Macintosh UI. This is gives a single, high quality user experience to the OS.
The Eazel work is potentially very interesting, but its still going to be just another of many Linux UIs. Apple hardware will have full-on BSD with a single, elegant, easy-to-use UI. Its going to be a compelling experience to use one of these new Macs.
Is it just me or is most of the stuff that Neilson says just common sense?
You are right. By "common sense" I think you mean simple and logical. This sounds right. The best ideas are usually just this (c.f. Occam's Razor).
What is interesting is to be able to say why a simple and logical idea is the way it is and what implications that idea has. This is the field of expertise. Virtually every field that has experts is like this - the basic ideas are simple and can be understood by anyone. The expertise comes in being able to analyze the ideas, explain exactly what they are, and explaining what impact flows from them.
The test of a great idea is that once you have discovered it people say "well, obviously that is so, it just has to be that way". Then we call it common sense. The genius comes in being the first to see such an "obvious" rule. Newton's laws of gravity seem blatantly obvious to us now, but the guy was still a genius for figuring that out.
A user interface should let you: Run programs Alter system settings Allow your programs to communicate with each other (drag and drop, calling up a browser when you click on a URL)
A few more things an OS should let you do:
Store documents
Locate documents
Find the program you want to run
Open documents
Connect to external devices
Locating external devices
Allocate memory to a task
Stop programs running
Manage screen real estate
Arbitrate CPU time between running programs
Plus many others. And OS is a complex beast that has to do a lot of things.
A user interface should be:
Intuitive - no learning curve
Unfortunately there is no such thing as a UI without a learning curve. All UIs are learnt. Sit down with a truly novice user some time.
The question is how easy is a particular UI, and the answer is complex and depends heavily on the skills, knowledge and previous experience of the user trying to learn it, as well as on the nature of the UI and its documentation.
Be physically easy to use (single key-strokes and mouse use - you shouldn't have to let go of the mouse to use the keyboard for the basic UI)
With the caveat that what one user finds easy, another might not. Not to mention that not everything can be accessed by simple operations, so you have to choose some things to be a single click, and other require several clicks to make happen. The question is which operations do you make easy and which hard? That's what UI design is all about...
The starting point for this discussion has to be the meta-point that there is no single "right" user interface. I need a command-line and a set of UNIX-like command-line tools that support pipes and redirection. Without these I am less productive. I am a software developer. But what is a highly appropriate user interface for me will not be useful to many other users.
That aside, its worthwhile looking at the broadest category of users. If you are developing a UI for the majority of users, you need to understand their requirements. They are not developers or geeks. The probably want to run a limited number of productivity apps (typified by Microsoft Office or Star Office). They will want to access the Internet (run Mozilla or iCab or Internet Explorer). They may want to play games on their machine. They want to organize and access their documents. They may want to do some cool things like edit their desktop video.
For this class of user, you can measure the appropriateness of the UI by looking at how much the UI allows the user to get their tasks done, and how much it gets in their way.
Note this is not the same as ease of learning, though it is also good if the user can figure out how to do new tasks quickly. That's why consistency of basic commands and operations as enforced by GUIs like the Mac OS is a good thing for most users. Once I've learnt that Cmd-C/Cmd-V cuts and pastes in Word, I know it will also do that in Mozilla.
But you only learn a UI once (assuming you have a functional memory :-), but you use it all the time. That's why its important that beyond ease of learning you have ease of use.
A good UI should be easy to configure. I don't mean skins. I mean, for example, if I have 25 apps installed on my system and I regularly use 5, I should be able to put aliases to those 5 apps in an easy to reach place, and the other 20 apps should be accessible, but not as in my face.
Another facet of a good UI is giving me control of those things I want control of, and hiding the details I don't want to deal with. I may care a great deal about the fonts I use in my documents, and require fine control of them. I may not care if the printer driver uses PostScript or spaghetti to get my fonts onto paper. I should at least be able to specify to the UI when I want control and when it shouldn't bother me with unneccesary detail.
i don't think i see the connection, but damn that prof seems wierd.
No connection - it just reminded me of my weird psych prof. Which just goes to show how weird human psychology is. Which is probably the exact point the prof. was trying to make...
reminds me of in high school when we spelled out [creative] stuff on the scoreboards. oh well, i never got caught
Which reminds me of one of my psychology lecturers at university. He was a bit odd. Quiet, withdrawn manner. Always seemed to behave strangely around female students. Never looked you in the eye when he talked to you.
We had these huge lecture theatres with three-storey high roll-over blackboards. Now, normally there was stuff from other lectures left on the boards. One day, we noticed that every time this guy lectured, it said "Love me" at the top of the boards. This happened three of four lectures in a row, and only in the lectures with this guy. So a couple of us snuck in before the next lecture and hid at the back. Sure enough, this prof. came in 10 minutes before the start of the lecture, wrote "Love me" on the board, rolled it to the top and left the lecture hall. At the start of the class, he came in an taught the whole lecture without mentioning the message, just as he had every week.
I don't think I ever completed his course. Too damn weird.
Personally I'm not really sure if we should begin the history of computers at the dawn of logical/mathematical thinking. If we do, are not all things which perform a logical function computers? Example: I used this stick to say that I am 2 1/2 sticks tall. Is the stick a computer?
In the early 60's Donald Michie, professor of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University, built a computer called MENACE that could play a killer game of Tic-Tac-Toe (or "Noughts and Crosses" as it is called in the UK). It learnt to improve its play strategy as it played games.
The really cool bit? This computer was a series of matchboxes and colored beads. No electronics at all. Clearly there is a wide class of machines that perform logical operations that can be classed as computers, and we should be careful to define computers by what they do, not the materials they are composed of.
I'd say that in your example your fingers don't count as a computer because its your brain (which is the computer) that is doing the counting - your fingers are acting as a memory sub-system.
Remember, this is a country with an official secrets act, and no free speech protection.
The USA has broadly similar powers that the Official Secrets Act grants the UK government. All countries have certain information that is protected for reasons of national interest. The US is not significantly more open than the UK in this respect.
The lack of a formal right to Free Speech in the UK is detrimental, but it really isn't the issue here. The issue is that UK libel laws are stricter than the US laws. This isn't all bad. For example, it is much harder in the UK to use media power to unfairly smear and attack an individual. In the US you can use media power to libel someone and then hide behind a Free Speech defense, even when the victim doesn't have equal access to the media to put their side of the story.
Quicktime is limited to 2 Gigs, as is AVI. New versions will get around this (with the OpenDMI spec), but for the moment you need a proprietary solution to this problem...
No, QuickTime up to version 3.0 was limited to 4GB files. But upgrade to QuickTime 4.0 or later, it now supports 64-bit file offsets allowing capture and editing of files larger than 4GB. Of course, QuickTime capture software needs to be rewritten to use the new 64-bit QuickTime APIs. Apple's FinalCut Pro software supports greater than 2GB files. I'm not sure about third party applications.
Also, there is still a 2 GB file size limit on Mac/PC. This is the biggest obstacle any beginner (inexperienced) editor runs across because you usually don't hit that wall no matter how hard you're pushing a system.
I can't speak for Windows systems - are they still limited to 2GB files? But Mac OS doesn't have that limit any more. Using the HFS+ file system introduced in Mac OS 8.6, you can now store files up to 2^63 bytes in size. Which is 8,589, 934 GB. When you run out of that, you'll have one awesome movie :-)
But this is wrong - mail ordered goods are taxed - if the customer is in the same state as the vendor (or the vendor has a significant physical presence in the customer's state).
I can't speak for everyone else, but I have always wanted consistent laws and rules. We have tax laws in place which deal with interstate commerce. I just placed an order with Dell across the net... as we ::: gasp ::: paid sales taxes!
Absolutely. Consistency is great because it means you can shop online and always know the tax implications and it is much simpler (and therefore cheaper) for websites to administer. But the current rules are complex - you only pay sales tax in those states where the company has a significant physical presence. How, when I shop online, do I know which stores have a presence in my state? I usually have no way of knowing until I have completed a transaction. And sales tax vary from state to state, so it is hard for me to know how much tax I need to pay.
The current situation is inconsistent and unfair, which is why I support a uniform sales tax for all net sites. Obiviously net slaes would be exempot from state sales taxes, so the net effect for customers should be zero.
Who do you give the taxes to? The physical state the buyer's in, or the one the seller's in, or perhaps the federal government? You can't give it back to the Net itself; there's no governing body to give it to. Giving it to the states raises unbelieveably complex questions about verification, distribution of the proceeds to the appropriate states, and such.
Let's assume you give it to the federal government (which you no doubt want to do). What about sales between people who are outside the U.S. government's borders? If you're treating the Net as one big stste, these people should be taxed. But since neither party is physically located within the US, it's not fair to tax them (I think it might even be construed as demanding tribute in some places; that's an act of war). In other words, you have to discriminate by physical location. That's hardly fair.
Yes, I agree that a uniform net sales tax couldn't be distributed back to individual states. Pure eCommerce companies don't really exist in individual States anyway, so it wouldn't make any sense to do that. So, yes, I would advocate these going back to the Federal government.
You're point about international tax isn't new. This already applies in the mail order world. We have international tax laws to deal with this. if I mail order goods from France, I don't pay sales tax in France. The same system could be applied to Internet sales.
This is imperfect, but in practice its probably the best (only?) solution while we still maintain soveriegn countries as a concept.
Let's assume you're lunatic enough to try and tax every single transaction. What currency do you use? The US dollar is certainly fine for US citizens, but what about other places which don't use that currency? You have to start dealing with exchange rates. These fluctuate wildly enough that there's no reasonable way to keep up.
No, there are already well-defined international laws that deal with this. The US doesn't have a right to tax transactions outside its borders, and nor should it. The only problem is cross-border transactions. There are ways of dealing with this, but the net is going to bring a lot of attention to this issue because it will make international business much more common. I don't know what a good long term solution here is, but I suspect this will be one impetus to the continuing dissolution of the idea of the nation state.
Exactly what gets taxed and what doesn't? Different states have different laws about what can and cannot be taxed (many states, for example, do not tax medicines).
If its a federal tax, then the federal government would have to decide what gets taxed and at what rate. No problem there.
That last point brings up another problem: do you tax delivery of products? For now it's impossible to e-mail, say, a toaster to someone, so physical delivery is still a necessity. Do you tax this?
No, its a sales tax, you tax the sale of products.
This is a lot of why the Net should not be taxed. One, it's impossible to do in a fair manner.
I don't see you've made this point at all. The only problematic case is commerce crossing international boundaries. But that is exactly analogous to the current State-based sales tax laws. By your argument, if international sales taxes are unfair, then inter-state sales taxes are doubly so. At least my proposal takes care of the majority of the problematic cases...
There are never perfectly fair laws. All law is a generalization and will have exception. This is the real world. While we must strive for better laws, if you want to avoid all unfairness in every law the only option is completely unregulated anarchy. Humanity progressed beyonf that concept several thousand years ago.
Two, it makes buying and selling products much, much more complex, thereby discouraging its use.
I don't see this at all. If there is a uniform sales tax, it is easy to calculate the cost of goods. At present, I have to figure out if the seller is in the same state as me, and only if they are, ad the particular state's sales tax. This is a much bigger effort to track than simply in the US or out of the US. I would suggest my flat tax proposal would be much simpler for both buyer and sller.
Three, Wal-Mat and Target don't give a damn about the taxes; they just want to artificially inflate their e-commerce prices and blame it on taxes.
Well, I can't pretend to know the intentions of those two corporations, and I suspect you can't either. Do Target or Wal-Mart even have asignificant online presence yet? Are they planning to? This seems like a bogus argument. Even assuming their intentions are ill-concieved, it doesn't mean what they are proposing is wrong. Just because Hitler made the trains run on time, doesn't make punctuality a bad thing.
Because e-commerce is so popular, they think people will stand for it (that's why regional encoding on DVD's works, incidentally; people don't realize that it's used to artificially inflate prices so they keep paying more than they have to).
Oh, I agree the DVD regional encoding is pernicious. I just don't think this is a comparable case at all.
2) How will this result in cheaper PPC systems?
In theory, a manufacturer other than Apple could use the PPC processor and build their own Linux system around it. Having a number of distros to choose from may slightly increase the chances of this happening. It should be possible to put together a low cost headless PPC server for less than anything Apple sells.
The reason I think this is unlikely to happen is there probably isn't a large enough market to justify anyone doing this commercially. You'd need to design your own motherboard and all the rest of the packaging that goes into producing a complete system. It probably wouldn't be cost effective to do this unless you were fairly certain of shipping several tens of thousands of these boxes.Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I would really like to know the answers.
There are no dumb questions. Sometimes there are dumb answers.
What you're suggesting is treating the net in the same way as everything else - by taxing it. I don't know where I stand in the debate of taxing vs. not taxing, but that part of your argument is backwards. The revolutionary thing to do would be to not tax it at all.
Doing something just because it is "revolutionary" is a really poor reason for doing it. Just ask the Russians...
Again, why should the net have this unfair advantage? When most of retail sales shift to eCommerce (and they will), why shouldn't the net have a sales tax on it? What else will replace the lost revenue from all the bricks and mortar sales taxes that are no longer generated?