the Xbox team wanted to deliver a machine for the most enthusiastic gamers who don't really care how much they have to pay.
That attitude is what gets you into the position that Apple is in now, and it forgets the lessons of VHS vs. Beta, and Microsoft vs. Apple: good enough wins marketshare, while producing quality dooms you to a niche market.
Quality might prove successful in the production of some things, eg cars, but where one's success depends on the production of third parties, and those third parties are rewarded by the popularity of the underlying platform, ubiquity is better than quality. If Mercedes required a non-standard gas to operate, would people buy them, regardless of their quality? Look to the acceptance of alternative fuel vehicles for your answer.
Since PCs depended on software developers, ubiquity in the marketplace, and the subsequent larger rewards for developers, is largely responsible for Windows 95% marketshare. And the availability of PS2 games is the reason people buy Playstations rather than the X-Box--the quality is irrelevant if you don't have anything to run on it.
In the time it took for you to post a response, you could have checked to see that I did, in fact, register as dephex/microsoft with bogus info. I suggested that as an example in my original post.
As for your second question, if this were adopted as a standard, it would save me from having to register every time I wanted to read a nytimes article on a system that they hadn't already implanted a cookie, which happens often enough that it's a pain in my ass, but not often enough for me to remember my arbitrary username/pass that I have set up legitimately. Since I use more than one computer, I do have to worry about it beyond the initial trouble.
And finally, if you don't like the system, don't adopt it.
Registration for NY Times articles drives me crazy. Call me a Karma Whore, but here's a RFC: NY Times reg.
username shall be firstword of 'submitter name'
password shall be firstword of 'headline.'
For example, registration in this case is username 'dephex' and pass 'microsoft'. Story submitters will please register according to these guidelines when they sumbit stories to/., and save us all a lot of hassle.
Except Sony is no Netscape Corp. MS is stronger than they were, but Sony has the advantage of examination of MS practices and tactics. And you can be sure that Sony has thought and thought and thought about the next 18 months...
Christ, this story has been up for 2 hours and we *still* don't have a "for another $100 I had sure better get another button on my mouse!" joke? What's Slashdot coming too? Next thing you know, they'll admit that OSDN is run on an AppleSeed cluster of Tangerine iMacs!
This does look good, but should one be concerned that it hasn't been updated in nearly a year? Are there newer/better versions available? Has anyone taken the code and made it more feature-ful/stable/faster in the last year?
Where? I just got a TiBook and don't seem to see it anywhere..
It's not. Appleworks is only included on 'i' hardware: iBooks and iMacs. It's not on TiBooks or G4 towers. Why, I don't know, since it doesn't cost anything for Apple to bundle the image since they own the app.
Welcome. You're off to a great start--you even capitalize 'Mac' right. For the record: "Mac" is a brand of computer. MAC describes a logical network interface.
As to community, here's my daily MacWeb cycle, FWIW:
Also, subscribe to MacWorld for it's business-as-usual approach, and MacAddict for it's screaming fanaticism--although I've never met the staff, I wouldn't be surprised if they wore "Don't trust anyone over 30" buttons.
Hope you and other new users found that interesting. Don't forget the Genius Bar at the retail store--it's designed as a resource, not just as a data dump, but also a social gathering. I've often observed members of the community help each other when the Geniuses were busy, and your Unix feedback is decidedly helpful to long-time Mac Heads.
I will argue this point with you (here on Slashdot, why not? I don't get around to reading SW boards): According to Yoda in the Phantom Menace, there are only 2 Sith, ever
Now, I might be corrected--for instance, I've only watched TPM twice, haven't read any of the books, and, as I said above haven't hit any of the sites, etc. So if there is direct evidence to the contrary, I'm sure that you'll let me know.
But Yoda doesn't actually say that--he says "Always two there are--a master, and a student." I think that he is referring to the martial and spiritual training that all of Sith or Jedi caliber go through. Consider the duality of Luke and Obi-Wan; later, Luke and Yoda. In TPM we have the duality of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, and in fact the stipulation that Qui could not receive another student since he already had one.
Bottom line--I think Yoda was speaking in generalities of the warrior profession, and to draw specific conclusions about the Sith from this statement is a mistake.
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 1
To correct this gripe: Physically go to the machine and use the little gui tool. Not an option when the server is inaccessible, as is usually the case with a regular unix server.
Actually, you can use the GUI Server Admin tool on any OS X client on the subnet (not any X Server, but X client.) Point the tool at the IP of the Server that you want to configure, and away you go--same access as you would normally get from that tool. And I might be wrong about the subnet limitation.
So if that's one of your main gripes, you might give it another look. The application switching I can't help you with, any more than to say that it's maybe more habit than "what's better", but I don't want to go any further down that Road of Flame.
Re:Mac nuts Vs Linux nuts
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 4, Informative
For the record, I'm a Mac Nut. So I hope you will admire my restraint, and in fact my sacrifice of mod points, in my response.
Although I really do feel that criticism of OS X, the Mac, and Apple in general is good and healthy, when things are simply "ain't so" I have to speak up. When you say that the opensource presence in OS X is "zip... nada... nothing", you are ignoring the fact that the core of OS X is Darwin, and Darwin is, in fact, Open Source.
Sure, I realize that that excludes a lot of what makes OS X attractive vis a vis Linux, including Aqua and other layers, but the sum total of Darwin is a lot more than "zip." You do have the source for the network implementation, the I/O interfaces, memory usage, etc etc, and it is fairly well documented. Further, Apple accepts submissions back to the source just like any open-license software. If the omission of open code from OS X was one of the primary things keeping you away, you might want to take another look.
Re:To The Pain - The Reference
on
To The Pain
·
· Score: 1
So the question is--were you able to quote that from memory, or did you check the tape?
Buried in this article is this note: and switched off the second supporting processor of the dual machines. Which means that the Dual 1Gs were only run as single Gig machines--and would therefore be much faster in the real world, so cost comparisons should be made accordingly.
You mean, like doctoring video evidence? And look where that got them--another two years of trial and a near capitulation by their opponents.
I certainly wouldn't put it past MSFT to strip out all their comment lines, at the least; you would have a hard time arguing that the comment lines are necessary for building the binary, it would be difficult to tell if a comment had been removed, as they're neither legally nor technically required, and it would stall investigation of the code that much more.
Well, maybe not everyone already knew that TiVO uses a PPC even though you did, wise guy. But this does beg the question: if TiVO already uses PPC, why don't they just use Darwin? Wouldn't that mean that they could pick up some advantages, like Quick Time Streaming Server and robust Firewire support? (Forgive if Firewire is already robustly supported in Linux; that's not a troll, just ignorance.)
Matter of fact, there would be some interesting possibilities in a TiVO/Apple convergence...
Just because you were duped into making this mistake, doesn't mean that we're all as stupid as you. Please don't include me in your sweeping generalizations of computer-user idiocy. Your mistakes are your own.
I think what you're looking for is (was) called the Audrey from Compaq. It did a lot of those things.
Unfortunately, no one bought one. Why it died is hard to say: it seems like no one has yet hit that magical balance between price and features. I wouldn't be about to spend $3000 for something to help make me grocery lists; then again, I wouldn't want to spend even $500 for something that helps me organize my calendar.
I've been watching this industry to, because I would really like somethign that would call PeaPod automatically when I run low--but so far, I do just as well with an iBook and an 802.11 card. Cost more than the Audrey, but a LOT less than this device--and I can play Unreal on it and learn to program in Objective C. So we're still waiting.
I wasn't impressed. Some random stranger on a forum posting that the source will be on the second CD doesn't do much to convince me that this is Sony's official line.
What would convince me is if they included it in their press release, but I didn't see it there, either. I wouldn't take this post as a guarantee of, frankly, antything at all.
Well, I would like to think that's more Mac-o-phile, but maybe that's just trolling.
In any event, on to your points:
Mac OS X does not have substantial marketshare, at this point; I'm not kidding myself. However, I might argue that it is on more desktops than Linux, and really, I don't mean to troll. But at least I can quantify how many installs of Mac OS X were made last year (simply by counting how many Macs shipped since OS X came pre-installed), and that is a much trickier thing to do with Linux--especially because it's an easier guess as to how many people can simply reboot to play a Windows game if they are a potential Linux-game customer (many if not most Linux users have a Windows partition; even with VPC that's not really an option for Mac users without a whole 'nother machine.)
There is no question, even in this Mac-o-phile's mind, that many companies couldn't make a profit making Mac-only, or even Linux-only, games. I don't mean to say that anybody should try. But as to mandates: Loki could have made their mandate "Bringing games to Unix!" and counted both Linux users and Mac OS X users as potential customers. Instead, it was narrowly defined as Linux-only--and see where that got them. Say what you will about MacPlay, but they haven't declared Chap 11.
And to respond to another poster in this thread--I wouldn't even expect a Linux shop to try to compete with Mac porting shops--however, if they had released Tribes2 for Mac OS X, or Heavy Gear for OS X, they wouldn't have competed with any other Mac porting house--as no other Mac porting house had released those titles. And, unlike any Linux port, a Mac port very likely would have been placed in 27 retail locations throughout the country, with traffic of 800,000 potential game-hungry customers per month, and furthermore, a quality game would be screaming from those shelves--rather unlike the din of competition at Best Buy. Did Loki's site get 800,000 hits/month?
And, btw, MacSoft is still alive and well, but at www.wizworks.com/macsoft, a subsidiary of Infogrames, if my understanding is correct. They have a bunch of stuff coming out even now.
You'll get no argument from me about Bungie. They even said that making cross-plat games was not hard, as they had learned to write disciplined code; well, that couldn't last. And by most accounts, Halo kinda blows. (Which is a troll.)
The programmers should go to work for MacPlay. MacPlay, a Mac porting house, has committed itself to only bringing games to Mac OS X from here on out, and it would seem to me that the experience that the Loki porters developed bringing DirectX games to Linux would directly translate to bringing DirectX games to Mac OS X. (Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.)
In fact, it's still a little beyond me why Loki was able to bring some games to Linux but not Mac OS X--once the games were on Linux, I would've thought that the expanded marketshare of the games-hungry Mac market would've been attractive. And Mac users are willing to pay. Personally, I would've given my right nostril to play Tribes2 or Heavy Gear on my Mac. That just seems like an opportunity lost.
In fact, I would still pay to play these games--if Loki needs to divest it's assets, they might consider selling their codebase to MacPlay (naturally, MacPlay would still need to acquire the license for the Mac market.)
The bottom line: Apple is trying to get some gaming cred, MacPlay and others are furiously hard at work bringing PC titles to the Mac, and Mac OS X programmers can be hard to find. I would love to have Loki's talent in the Mac development community.
I don't know about you'all, but the first thing that occurred to me was that for this to really take off, IPv6 would become that much more necessary. Now you could address 30ft cubes in the 3D bioshpere with unique IPs? We would pretty quickly run out of IPv4, I would think.
Embedded software. When was the last time your TV crashed on you? Granted, the software is an order of magniture smaller than for PCs, but the consequence of a big bug in a released piece of consumer electronics is huge (people demand their money back), so it needs to be more rigorously tested.
That's an interesting point, but I think it misses one of the chief ways that computers differ from consumer electronics: end-user modification. When was the last time that you downloaded shareware into your TV set? Ever edit the registry of your stove, or even your phone? I think that computer manufacturers do their best to certify their machines as stable out of the box, but when you go modifying the fundamental ways in which it operates the stability can't be guaranteed.
And this would be a problem for suing Microsoft over poor security--they would claim that their default install was perfectly secure. It wasn't until you operated it out of spec (you noted that the "enable attachments" button was to be considered beta and not fit for anything besides experimental use in the click-through, right?) that problems started occurring. So the fault is really yours, after all.
If so, what's Jobs going to do next Monday at the keynote? It certainly seems like Apple has been infringing a lot lately, if the patent holds up. And, will Gates license it?
Slashdot Mirror
the Xbox team wanted to deliver a machine for the most enthusiastic gamers who don't really care how much they have to pay.
That attitude is what gets you into the position that Apple is in now, and it forgets the lessons of VHS vs. Beta, and Microsoft vs. Apple: good enough wins marketshare, while producing quality dooms you to a niche market.
Quality might prove successful in the production of some things, eg cars, but where one's success depends on the production of third parties, and those third parties are rewarded by the popularity of the underlying platform, ubiquity is better than quality. If Mercedes required a non-standard gas to operate, would people buy them, regardless of their quality? Look to the acceptance of alternative fuel vehicles for your answer.
Since PCs depended on software developers, ubiquity in the marketplace, and the subsequent larger rewards for developers, is largely responsible for Windows 95% marketshare. And the availability of PS2 games is the reason people buy Playstations rather than the X-Box--the quality is irrelevant if you don't have anything to run on it.
In the time it took for you to post a response, you could have checked to see that I did, in fact, register as dephex/microsoft with bogus info. I suggested that as an example in my original post.
As for your second question, if this were adopted as a standard, it would save me from having to register every time I wanted to read a nytimes article on a system that they hadn't already implanted a cookie, which happens often enough that it's a pain in my ass, but not often enough for me to remember my arbitrary username/pass that I have set up legitimately. Since I use more than one computer, I do have to worry about it beyond the initial trouble.
And finally, if you don't like the system, don't adopt it.
Registration for NY Times articles drives me crazy. Call me a Karma Whore, but here's a RFC: NY Times reg.
For example, registration in this case is username 'dephex' and pass 'microsoft'. Story submitters will please register according to these guidelines when they sumbit stories to
Does this violate the DMCA?
Except Sony is no Netscape Corp. MS is stronger than they were, but Sony has the advantage of examination of MS practices and tactics. And you can be sure that Sony has thought and thought and thought about the next 18 months...
Christ, this story has been up for 2 hours and we *still* don't have a "for another $100 I had sure better get another button on my mouse!" joke? What's Slashdot coming too? Next thing you know, they'll admit that OSDN is run on an AppleSeed cluster of Tangerine iMacs!
This does look good, but should one be concerned that it hasn't been updated in nearly a year? Are there newer/better versions available? Has anyone taken the code and made it more feature-ful/stable/faster in the last year?
Where? I just got a TiBook and don't seem to see it anywhere..
It's not. Appleworks is only included on 'i' hardware: iBooks and iMacs. It's not on TiBooks or G4 towers. Why, I don't know, since it doesn't cost anything for Apple to bundle the image since they own the app.
Welcome. You're off to a great start--you even capitalize 'Mac' right. For the record: "Mac" is a brand of computer. MAC describes a logical network interface.
As to community, here's my daily MacWeb cycle, FWIW:
Also, subscribe to MacWorld for it's business-as-usual approach, and MacAddict for it's screaming fanaticism--although I've never met the staff, I wouldn't be surprised if they wore "Don't trust anyone over 30" buttons.
Hope you and other new users found that interesting. Don't forget the Genius Bar at the retail store--it's designed as a resource, not just as a data dump, but also a social gathering. I've often observed members of the community help each other when the Geniuses were busy, and your Unix feedback is decidedly helpful to long-time Mac Heads.
I will argue this point with you (here on Slashdot, why not? I don't get around to reading SW boards): According to Yoda in the Phantom Menace, there are only 2 Sith, ever
Now, I might be corrected--for instance, I've only watched TPM twice, haven't read any of the books, and, as I said above haven't hit any of the sites, etc. So if there is direct evidence to the contrary, I'm sure that you'll let me know.
But Yoda doesn't actually say that--he says "Always two there are--a master, and a student." I think that he is referring to the martial and spiritual training that all of Sith or Jedi caliber go through. Consider the duality of Luke and Obi-Wan; later, Luke and Yoda. In TPM we have the duality of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, and in fact the stipulation that Qui could not receive another student since he already had one.
Bottom line--I think Yoda was speaking in generalities of the warrior profession, and to draw specific conclusions about the Sith from this statement is a mistake.
To correct this gripe: Physically go to the machine and use the little gui tool. Not an option when the server is inaccessible, as is usually the case with a regular unix server.
Actually, you can use the GUI Server Admin tool on any OS X client on the subnet (not any X Server, but X client.) Point the tool at the IP of the Server that you want to configure, and away you go--same access as you would normally get from that tool. And I might be wrong about the subnet limitation.
So if that's one of your main gripes, you might give it another look. The application switching I can't help you with, any more than to say that it's maybe more habit than "what's better", but I don't want to go any further down that Road of Flame.
For the record, I'm a Mac Nut. So I hope you will admire my restraint, and in fact my sacrifice of mod points, in my response.
Although I really do feel that criticism of OS X, the Mac, and Apple in general is good and healthy, when things are simply "ain't so" I have to speak up. When you say that the opensource presence in OS X is "zip
Sure, I realize that that excludes a lot of what makes OS X attractive vis a vis Linux, including Aqua and other layers, but the sum total of Darwin is a lot more than "zip." You do have the source for the network implementation, the I/O interfaces, memory usage, etc etc, and it is fairly well documented. Further, Apple accepts submissions back to the source just like any open-license software. If the omission of open code from OS X was one of the primary things keeping you away, you might want to take another look.
So the question is--were you able to quote that from memory, or did you check the tape?
Buried in this article is this note: and switched off the second supporting processor of the dual machines. Which means that the Dual 1Gs were only run as single Gig machines--and would therefore be much faster in the real world, so cost comparisons should be made accordingly.
Courts frown on such tricks
You mean, like doctoring video evidence? And look where that got them--another two years of trial and a near capitulation by their opponents.
I certainly wouldn't put it past MSFT to strip out all their comment lines, at the least; you would have a hard time arguing that the comment lines are necessary for building the binary, it would be difficult to tell if a comment had been removed, as they're neither legally nor technically required, and it would stall investigation of the code that much more.
An apparent example of this is TiVo.
Well, maybe not everyone already knew that TiVO uses a PPC even though you did, wise guy. But this does beg the question: if TiVO already uses PPC, why don't they just use Darwin? Wouldn't that mean that they could pick up some advantages, like Quick Time Streaming Server and robust Firewire support? (Forgive if Firewire is already robustly supported in Linux; that's not a troll, just ignorance.)
Matter of fact, there would be some interesting possibilities in a TiVO/Apple convergence...
you just gave them control of your computer
Just because you were duped into making this mistake, doesn't mean that we're all as stupid as you. Please don't include me in your sweeping generalizations of computer-user idiocy. Your mistakes are your own.
I think what you're looking for is (was) called the Audrey from Compaq. It did a lot of those things.
Unfortunately, no one bought one. Why it died is hard to say: it seems like no one has yet hit that magical balance between price and features. I wouldn't be about to spend $3000 for something to help make me grocery lists; then again, I wouldn't want to spend even $500 for something that helps me organize my calendar.
I've been watching this industry to, because I would really like somethign that would call PeaPod automatically when I run low--but so far, I do just as well with an iBook and an 802.11 card. Cost more than the Audrey, but a LOT less than this device--and I can play Unreal on it and learn to program in Objective C. So we're still waiting.
You saw the log in at the top of this page, right?
I wasn't impressed. Some random stranger on a forum posting that the source will be on the second CD doesn't do much to convince me that this is Sony's official line.
What would convince me is if they included it in their press release, but I didn't see it there, either. I wouldn't take this post as a guarantee of, frankly, antything at all.
Well, I would like to think that's more Mac-o-phile, but maybe that's just trolling.
In any event, on to your points:
And, btw, MacSoft is still alive and well, but at www.wizworks.com/macsoft, a subsidiary of Infogrames, if my understanding is correct. They have a bunch of stuff coming out even now.
You'll get no argument from me about Bungie. They even said that making cross-plat games was not hard, as they had learned to write disciplined code; well, that couldn't last. And by most accounts, Halo kinda blows. (Which is a troll.)
The programmers should go to work for MacPlay. MacPlay, a Mac porting house, has committed itself to only bringing games to Mac OS X from here on out, and it would seem to me that the experience that the Loki porters developed bringing DirectX games to Linux would directly translate to bringing DirectX games to Mac OS X. (Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.)
In fact, it's still a little beyond me why Loki was able to bring some games to Linux but not Mac OS X--once the games were on Linux, I would've thought that the expanded marketshare of the games-hungry Mac market would've been attractive. And Mac users are willing to pay. Personally, I would've given my right nostril to play Tribes2 or Heavy Gear on my Mac. That just seems like an opportunity lost.
In fact, I would still pay to play these games--if Loki needs to divest it's assets, they might consider selling their codebase to MacPlay (naturally, MacPlay would still need to acquire the license for the Mac market.)
The bottom line: Apple is trying to get some gaming cred, MacPlay and others are furiously hard at work bringing PC titles to the Mac, and Mac OS X programmers can be hard to find. I would love to have Loki's talent in the Mac development community.
I don't know about you'all, but the first thing that occurred to me was that for this to really take off, IPv6 would become that much more necessary. Now you could address 30ft cubes in the 3D bioshpere with unique IPs? We would pretty quickly run out of IPv4, I would think.
Embedded software. When was the last time your TV crashed on you? Granted, the software is an order of magniture smaller than for PCs, but the consequence of a big bug in a released piece of consumer electronics is huge (people demand their money back), so it needs to be more rigorously tested.
That's an interesting point, but I think it misses one of the chief ways that computers differ from consumer electronics: end-user modification. When was the last time that you downloaded shareware into your TV set? Ever edit the registry of your stove, or even your phone? I think that computer manufacturers do their best to certify their machines as stable out of the box, but when you go modifying the fundamental ways in which it operates the stability can't be guaranteed.
And this would be a problem for suing Microsoft over poor security--they would claim that their default install was perfectly secure. It wasn't until you operated it out of spec (you noted that the "enable attachments" button was to be considered beta and not fit for anything besides experimental use in the click-through, right?) that problems started occurring. So the fault is really yours, after all.
"Can't be much work in Seattle these days..."
If so, what's Jobs going to do next Monday at the keynote? It certainly seems like Apple has been infringing a lot lately, if the patent holds up. And, will Gates license it?