This guy really seems to want to slag off the system and certainly has personal biases. Even more is sounds like he made the review without try to learn the system, since there is no such thing as zero learning curve. A few excerpts:
One won't get far using a Macintosh from day-to-day without a word processor, for example, and the effective choices are limited to the iWork and Microsoft Office suites. Only the latter has features that professionals find themselves using with regularity (like edit tracking). While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all. A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing.
Office is expensive where ever you are and while there are alternatives if you are working in an office environment, then it is the defacto standard like it or not. I would certainly appreciate a different pricing for home users, but that isn't going to happen. The Mac comes with iPhoto which does the basics, though there is Graphic Converter which will allow you to essential editing and Gimp, though the latter still has an awkward UI. Then again with words like 'serious', well then you are never going to be satisfied with anything less than Photoshop.
We also ran into problems in trying to get work done. I really should have, as a reporter, been able to show you the difference in quality between VLC and Apple's DVD Player. I couldn't because the OS would not let me take a screenshot while a DVD was playing. And, as mentioned, we couldn't get a hold of a decent word processor and had to do the bulk of our note-taking in a WordPad-like application
If you limit yourself to the Apple screen capture then you will have issues, but there 'Snapz Pro' that will do the job and you actually get the video image, rather than a green zone as has happened on some Windows systems.
At the end he makes the conclusion:
But Scot and I are very different computer users (and perhaps members of very different tax brackets). For myself, I can't justify the cost of buying an expensive new system that does less than my ugly, hodge-podge, dual-boot Windows/Linux system, no matter how pleasantly it does the tasks it can.
Is this any different than having bootcamp with Mac/Windows? No OS is going to do everything and you are never going to satisfy everyone. The fact that not everything is available for free should not be an issue and it should be noted that you can get a lot more free for any given OS, MacOS X included, than trying to accessorise your car in the same way.
I'll admit you can't beat Linux for the shear range of freeware available, but the Mac has its own share of freeware, donation ware and cheap solutions. There are certainly solutions that you have to pay for and if they are worth it you will contribute to the development, by paying a few dollars, but if they aren't worth it then they are left to die and you quickly search out an alternative. What ever you have to say about buying software, at least you aren't promised free software only to pay out of your teeth, or the privacy of your computer, which I see happen too often on the MS-Windows side.
MacPorts and Fink provide access to a large range of open source solutions, but they are clearly aimed at the IT savy. As for replacing hardware when it is no longer good enough, well this is not different to replacing your video player when it no longer does the job. If you have a non-compact computer then you can upgrade it all you like, but a compact computer such as a portable will always have limited upgradability, and the target audience really doesn't seem to mind. What makes a good computer depends on who you are and what you are doing with it, but the greater public once something that just works, and does not want to play around with the innards of their system unless they are forced to.
[i]And from the looks of that giant glass pipe lit by a blowtorch, my money's on the researchers being 100% Wasted while thinking this one up, too.[/i]
This approach has worked for music, why not for science;)
Don't know what type of Macs are being used, but Office is still not a universal binary. The other issue is that at $500 a license it is not cheap. Now multiply that by 25000 Macs and you are looking at $12 500 000. Okay they probably don't pay full price, so lets say $200 a license and we are still talking millions of dollars worth. At that price paper looks like a great solution and it doesn't even need upgrades;)
One thing that I have always wondered is whether when doing concurrent programming we make the mistake of trying to be efficient with memory and great with our concurrent model. What I mean by this is that instead of ensuring that a thread is using local variables where possible, we try sharing too much amongst them. If a unit of work can be made to run without regards for the existence of another (no shared resources), then it is much easier to write. Reducing the amount of data sharing as much as possible makes it easier and also potentially faster, since every time two or more threads needs to interact, because of data sharing (accessing the same list for example), you are going to create potential complications and potential performance hits, while one thread needs to wait for the other.
Someone mentioned that building a house is highly parallelised process. Having followed the construction of a house recently, I realise that is only true when the tasks don't interact. If the tasks depend on each other, then communication can slow each other down, miscommunication can happen and in some cases tasks have to wait for the seemingly separate task to finish first. In many ways writing concurrent software is not much different.
All the transmitting devices I have seen are FM based, and as some a number of people have mentioned trying to find an empty frequency is not always easy. Given that there are more free AM channels, I have always wondered why some of these devices don't support AM.
I have the iTrip and it works well enough, though it is really only a backup solution. I prefered solution is cabeled:
- In my living room I have my stereo system next to my TV, with an AUX cable going under the carpet to where my sofa is, which I plug my iPod into
- In my car I still have a tape player, so I just use cassette adaptor
- I have one friend who added an AUX cable to his car stereo, which can be used for iPods and the likes Everywhere else the iTrip does the job, but you do need to be need to be close to the stereo's FM pickup and be sure to choose a station where there is static.
The best way to create more pirates is by trying to provide to much control over copyrighted works. What I mean is that if copyright becomes to complicated for the average member of public, then they will just give up trying to play nice with copyright holders.
The parent makes a good point, and it is for this reason I dislike laws such as this. Trying to apply anologies doesn't always work, so I'm not going to try to. On the other hand how do you decide when something is public and when something is private, especially when it is in public space. I know some cafés that offer free internet and leave a notice on the wall with then SSID and the password to be used. For me this is a simple way of indicating that presence within the café is needed to have access. Maybe an alternative approach would be to have routers have a sign on page built in, where the terms of service can be specified. In fact I believe even home routers should have something like this by default, so people are aware of which networks are free for use and which ones aren't - this would be irrespective of encryption being used.
I think part of the problem is that Apple makes the OS and the hardware. You've got the OS telling you it's displaying millions of colors when Apple knows the hardware isn't really doing it.
The hardware might not really be doing it, but the hardware is telling the system it is really doing it. The systems tells the user what the hardware is telling it. Certainly this is not an excuse, but is the approach of dithering any more different that three different coloured sub-pixels (RGB) creating the illusion of a single colour any more different?
the economics of why gray/black markets form, or were they just being deliberately disingenuous?
I think most people just pay and don't think twice about the price of buying a 50-pack of DVDs. Also given that the quality of readily available DVDs can be called into question, I would hardly want to consider the quality of black market DVDs.
Start litigating Microsoft, you're not working in the shareholder's favor by sitting idle and letting these blatant IP violations go unpunished.
I would be more interested in finding out what these patents are and working around them where possible. If there are nasty patents, equivalent to LZW, then they should be paraded by the OSS community, so everyone is aware of what other technologies we use could be in danger.
Ignoring any issues IE, or any other browser for that matter, may or may not have with regards to security the developers make a fair remark. In many ways this is like offering a high street bank the best cameras and locks only to have them not used. Browsers offer methods of data encryption that help provide security, but if the bank doesn't use them it doesn't really matter what was provided, it does matter, and cause concern, that they don't use them.
The other issue is that public wireless networks (the ones where you don't provide a key) suffer from is the fact that over the air encryption is almost zero. The ideal solution would be a randomly generated public key/private key solution for these types of networks. Certainly this does suffer from the issue if the attacker was there when the connection was established, then they will have both keys, though this does reduce drive-by attackers.
When dealing with important data such as banking, it is important to have the right security at every level. It is the layering of security systems that make it harder for the attcker to get at you information. You leave one part out of the system and they potentially have a side-door to getting to your information.
Little Johnny could come across his teacher's MySpace page and come to the conclusion that drinking is perfectly acceptable. Although kids usually learn that from their parents first.
Is there an under age drinking law that also applies to non-alchohic drinks now?;)
I could make the same argument about many things, such as "Rich people make money due to boredom". There are many reasons that people do things and not wanting to do nothing applies to many of these.
My god. If I changed my.sig to "I'm inserting my virtual penis into your unwilling virtual vagina", would I become the worlds most prolific serial virtual rapist? That would be virtually awesome!
What if I'm a guy and my avatar is female or vice versa? Hmm...
Usability. This is what makes a good product better. You can have all the functionality in the world, but if it is complicated to get at then it doesn't matter, since its as if it wasn't there.
I was sort of hoping that Apple would support Java 6 in OS X
If you have an account on the Apple Developer Connection web site (free membership), then Java SE 6.0 Release 1 Developer Preview 6 is already available. It will probably be another few months until it is available to the general public.
Trust me, once any OS X port of OOo starts getting font handling and input methods correct, it'll slow down as well. This is true especially for Asian and other foreign languages. The bottleneck is in Apple's ATSUI and how it mismatches to the underlying OOo code. Has nothing to do with Java at all. Speed in a vaporware demo is one thing; carrying speed into a functional product is something different completely.
That's something that is interesting to know. Are there other issues, due to architecture issues, design issues in the OS API or OpenOffice code base that you see standing out and need fixing to improve NeoOffice?
Avoiding GOTOs is often facilitated by alternative designs and the language being used. Languages such as Java and C++ offer try/catch statements, while C requires a GOTO to emulate this functionality. If you delve down to the assembly level, then many operations the don't use GOTOs in the higher-level language are using them when converted to assembly, though in this case they are JMP statements. For example your call to a function at the assembly level would involve pushing some values onto the stack and then jumping to the offset where the subroutine is located.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy really seems to want to slag off the system and certainly has personal biases. Even more is sounds like he made the review without try to learn the system, since there is no such thing as zero learning curve. A few excerpts:
One won't get far using a Macintosh from day-to-day without a word processor, for example, and the effective choices are limited to the iWork and Microsoft Office suites. Only the latter has features that professionals find themselves using with regularity (like edit tracking). While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all. A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing.
Office is expensive where ever you are and while there are alternatives if you are working in an office environment, then it is the defacto standard like it or not. I would certainly appreciate a different pricing for home users, but that isn't going to happen. The Mac comes with iPhoto which does the basics, though there is Graphic Converter which will allow you to essential editing and Gimp, though the latter still has an awkward UI. Then again with words like 'serious', well then you are never going to be satisfied with anything less than Photoshop.
We also ran into problems in trying to get work done. I really should have, as a reporter, been able to show you the difference in quality between VLC and Apple's DVD Player. I couldn't because the OS would not let me take a screenshot while a DVD was playing. And, as mentioned, we couldn't get a hold of a decent word processor and had to do the bulk of our note-taking in a WordPad-like application
If you limit yourself to the Apple screen capture then you will have issues, but there 'Snapz Pro' that will do the job and you actually get the video image, rather than a green zone as has happened on some Windows systems.
At the end he makes the conclusion:
But Scot and I are very different computer users (and perhaps members of very different tax brackets). For myself, I can't justify the cost of buying an expensive new system that does less than my ugly, hodge-podge, dual-boot Windows/Linux system, no matter how pleasantly it does the tasks it can.
Is this any different than having bootcamp with Mac/Windows? No OS is going to do everything and you are never going to satisfy everyone. The fact that not everything is available for free should not be an issue and it should be noted that you can get a lot more free for any given OS, MacOS X included, than trying to accessorise your car in the same way.
I'll admit you can't beat Linux for the shear range of freeware available, but the Mac has its own share of freeware, donation ware and cheap solutions. There are certainly solutions that you have to pay for and if they are worth it you will contribute to the development, by paying a few dollars, but if they aren't worth it then they are left to die and you quickly search out an alternative. What ever you have to say about buying software, at least you aren't promised free software only to pay out of your teeth, or the privacy of your computer, which I see happen too often on the MS-Windows side.
MacPorts and Fink provide access to a large range of open source solutions, but they are clearly aimed at the IT savy. As for replacing hardware when it is no longer good enough, well this is not different to replacing your video player when it no longer does the job. If you have a non-compact computer then you can upgrade it all you like, but a compact computer such as a portable will always have limited upgradability, and the target audience really doesn't seem to mind. What makes a good computer depends on who you are and what you are doing with it, but the greater public once something that just works, and does not want to play around with the innards of their system unless they are forced to.
[i]And from the looks of that giant glass pipe lit by a blowtorch, my money's on the researchers being 100% Wasted while thinking this one up, too.[/i]
;)
This approach has worked for music, why not for science
Don't know what type of Macs are being used, but Office is still not a universal binary. The other issue is that at $500 a license it is not cheap. Now multiply that by 25000 Macs and you are looking at $12 500 000. Okay they probably don't pay full price, so lets say $200 a license and we are still talking millions of dollars worth. At that price paper looks like a great solution and it doesn't even need upgrades ;)
One thing that I have always wondered is whether when doing concurrent programming we make the mistake of trying to be efficient with memory and great with our concurrent model. What I mean by this is that instead of ensuring that a thread is using local variables where possible, we try sharing too much amongst them. If a unit of work can be made to run without regards for the existence of another (no shared resources), then it is much easier to write. Reducing the amount of data sharing as much as possible makes it easier and also potentially faster, since every time two or more threads needs to interact, because of data sharing (accessing the same list for example), you are going to create potential complications and potential performance hits, while one thread needs to wait for the other.
Someone mentioned that building a house is highly parallelised process. Having followed the construction of a house recently, I realise that is only true when the tasks don't interact. If the tasks depend on each other, then communication can slow each other down, miscommunication can happen and in some cases tasks have to wait for the seemingly separate task to finish first. In many ways writing concurrent software is not much different.
And the public thought that "Moebius Strip", though it sounded fun at first, hinted too much at something German.
;)
Nah, it was just they thought the discussion would go on for ever
All the transmitting devices I have seen are FM based, and as some a number of people have mentioned trying to find an empty frequency is not always easy. Given that there are more free AM channels, I have always wondered why some of these devices don't support AM.
I have the iTrip and it works well enough, though it is really only a backup solution. I prefered solution is cabeled:
- In my living room I have my stereo system next to my TV, with an AUX cable going under the carpet to where my sofa is, which I plug my iPod into
- In my car I still have a tape player, so I just use cassette adaptor
- I have one friend who added an AUX cable to his car stereo, which can be used for iPods and the likes
Everywhere else the iTrip does the job, but you do need to be need to be close to the stereo's FM pickup and be sure to choose a station where there is static.
The best way to create more pirates is by trying to provide to much control over copyrighted works. What I mean is that if copyright becomes to complicated for the average member of public, then they will just give up trying to play nice with copyright holders.
Sounds like we will need to change the topic icon to Bill's borg image, at least when talking about the UK
The parent makes a good point, and it is for this reason I dislike laws such as this. Trying to apply anologies doesn't always work, so I'm not going to try to. On the other hand how do you decide when something is public and when something is private, especially when it is in public space. I know some cafés that offer free internet and leave a notice on the wall with then SSID and the password to be used. For me this is a simple way of indicating that presence within the café is needed to have access. Maybe an alternative approach would be to have routers have a sign on page built in, where the terms of service can be specified. In fact I believe even home routers should have something like this by default, so people are aware of which networks are free for use and which ones aren't - this would be irrespective of encryption being used.
I think part of the problem is that Apple makes the OS and the hardware. You've got the OS telling you it's displaying millions of colors when Apple knows the hardware isn't really doing it.
The hardware might not really be doing it, but the hardware is telling the system it is really doing it. The systems tells the user what the hardware is telling it. Certainly this is not an excuse, but is the approach of dithering any more different that three different coloured sub-pixels (RGB) creating the illusion of a single colour any more different?
The fact that he worked out a 'Javascript hack' wasn't the issue. The issue was that people actually wanted to listen to their radio stations ;)
the economics of why gray/black markets form, or were they just being deliberately disingenuous?
I think most people just pay and don't think twice about the price of buying a 50-pack of DVDs. Also given that the quality of readily available DVDs can be called into question, I would hardly want to consider the quality of black market DVDs.
Start litigating Microsoft, you're not working in the shareholder's favor by sitting idle and letting these blatant IP violations go unpunished.
I would be more interested in finding out what these patents are and working around them where possible. If there are nasty patents, equivalent to LZW, then they should be paraded by the OSS community, so everyone is aware of what other technologies we use could be in danger.
At the same time, you cannot protect numbers. They do not belong to anybody.
Yup, this was the reason Intel stopped using purely numerical names for their processors.
Ignoring any issues IE, or any other browser for that matter, may or may not have with regards to security the developers make a fair remark. In many ways this is like offering a high street bank the best cameras and locks only to have them not used. Browsers offer methods of data encryption that help provide security, but if the bank doesn't use them it doesn't really matter what was provided, it does matter, and cause concern, that they don't use them.
The other issue is that public wireless networks (the ones where you don't provide a key) suffer from is the fact that over the air encryption is almost zero. The ideal solution would be a randomly generated public key/private key solution for these types of networks. Certainly this does suffer from the issue if the attacker was there when the connection was established, then they will have both keys, though this does reduce drive-by attackers.
When dealing with important data such as banking, it is important to have the right security at every level. It is the layering of security systems that make it harder for the attcker to get at you information. You leave one part out of the system and they potentially have a side-door to getting to your information.
Little Johnny could come across his teacher's MySpace page and come to the conclusion that drinking is perfectly acceptable. Although kids usually learn that from their parents first.
;)
Is there an under age drinking law that also applies to non-alchohic drinks now?
I could make the same argument about many things, such as "Rich people make money due to boredom". There are many reasons that people do things and not wanting to do nothing applies to many of these.
My god. If I changed my .sig to "I'm inserting my virtual penis into your unwilling virtual vagina", would I become the worlds most prolific serial virtual rapist? That would be virtually awesome!
What if I'm a guy and my avatar is female or vice versa? Hmm...
So ... will it support VoIP?
Not this version. If you read the conclusion section of the ArsTechnica article, you will see that this is on the roadmap, but when is another matter.
How is MS Office for mac better again?
Usability. This is what makes a good product better. You can have all the functionality in the world, but if it is complicated to get at then it doesn't matter, since its as if it wasn't there.
I was sort of hoping that Apple would support Java 6 in OS X
If you have an account on the Apple Developer Connection web site (free membership), then Java SE 6.0 Release 1 Developer Preview 6 is already available. It will probably be another few months until it is available to the general public.
Trust me, once any OS X port of OOo starts getting font handling and input methods correct, it'll slow down as well. This is true especially for Asian and other foreign languages. The bottleneck is in Apple's ATSUI and how it mismatches to the underlying OOo code. Has nothing to do with Java at all. Speed in a vaporware demo is one thing; carrying speed into a functional product is something different completely.
That's something that is interesting to know. Are there other issues, due to architecture issues, design issues in the OS API or OpenOffice code base that you see standing out and need fixing to improve NeoOffice?
Small correction, to ensure that it gets through:
I'm applying for a patent on "A system of tubes, that carries information globally, so as to assist the procurement of pr0n, electronically."
Avoiding GOTOs is often facilitated by alternative designs and the language being used. Languages such as Java and C++ offer try/catch statements, while C requires a GOTO to emulate this functionality. If you delve down to the assembly level, then many operations the don't use GOTOs in the higher-level language are using them when converted to assembly, though in this case they are JMP statements. For example your call to a function at the assembly level would involve pushing some values onto the stack and then jumping to the offset where the subroutine is located.