No you're not, you're only pretending to be one. You exposed yourself by not mentioning any of the synergistic advantages you get from SaaS in The Cloud.
I think you could turn this into a pretty interesting philosophical discussion about design, and what 'great design' in a product such as a car means: timeless (so you don't have to change it), or mercurial (adapting to current trends and fashion). I'm not sure either one is 'better' or 'right', but for me, great design involves taking risks, creating something that distinguishes itself from competitors, and appeals to your target audience. Mercedes already settled on a design that works well for them, and they stick with it, which is good for them. That doesn't make them the prime example of a car manufacturer that is known for their great design though.
Personally, I'm a really big fan of Peugeots (French cars) from 5 to 20 years back. I don't like the current models, the 7 and 8 series, since they are simply copying both themselves and the competition now, but if you go back to the 4 series (especially the 404 and 504), the 5 series (especially the 205) and the 6 series (especially the 206, 306 and the -in my opinion- best looking Peugeot ever made: the 406 coupe), you'll see that every generation introduces completely different design cues, yet all of the cars I mentioned have designs that are timeless. You might not like them (taste is subjective), but except for maybe the 4 series, none of these cars look extremely dated. That's what makes good design for me.
Apple has already started moving to cloud based services, so most likely the data center will be for those. It will also mean that the future iPhones, iPads and Mac computers will be even more locked down than previously. For example if you take a picture, it's directly uploaded "to the cloud". This is a huge privacy violation and means you don't really own your data anymore.
So either you care about this 'privacy' you are talking about and you just don't use or buy anything that stores your files 'in the cloud', or you don't bother about where your holiday pictures and e-mails are stored and enjoy the benefits of automatically backed-up storage that is accessible everywhere, from different devices, without setting up and running your own private data center. I don't see the problem here. Meanwhile everyone and their mother have long moved on and doesn't have the same privacy paranoia as you apparently do: e-mail is stored at the ISP or hosted and accessed through a commercial entity such as GMail or Hotmail, address books, bookmarks and preferences are synced through some kind of vendor synchronization service built into computers and phones, dropbox or mobileme is used to backup, store and publish data, and so on, and so forth. Hate to burst your bubble dude, but most people don't care much where their data resides, as long as they have the impression no-one is digging through it or re-distributing it. Real privacy doesn't exist anyway, your name is in hundreds of databases, be it governmental, utility, commercial, whatever. If you want to be 100% sure no-one gets to know anything about you and your data, just don't connect to the internet, don't use a phone, don't send e-mails, and don't give out any personal information to any company, etc. I think you'll have a really hard time. Personally, I always get a little annoyed by privacy whiners, not because I don't value privacy, but because the majority of the people complaining about privacy invasion happily keep public facebook profiles online, twitter every move they make, hand out their personal data without a problem if it gets them a $1 cheeseburger discount, etc.
Anyway, what you're saying about a 'cloud based iPhone/iPad/Mac' is pure speculation, and as long as it isn't enforced you *have* to use such products, I don't see the problem.
Eh? Of all the European car makers you pick Mercedes as having great designs? The last 10 generations of Mercedes' all looked almost exactly the same, there's almost no design in them at all if you compare them to a 10 year old Mercedes. Same holds for BMW by the way, most BMW models have also been very subtle evolutions of previous models. That doesn't make them bad cars by the way, but if you want an example of car makers that pay a lot of attention to design (whether you like their designs or not), you should be looking at (e.g.) French cars like the new Citroens and Renaults, they have usually distinctive designs, or Italian cars (Alfa Romeo, Fiat).
The focus is typical american crap, overly soft suspension, steering wheel response of a dead fish, etc.
That's odd, because over here (Europe) the Focus is widely regarded as one of the best mid-size front-wheel drive platforms if it comes to suspension and handling. Don't they sell the sporty versions in the US, the Rallye or (even better) the ST? The Focus ST scored very high marks here and I think up to now there haven't been a lot of cars in the same class that got better reviews. Maybe the new Renault Megane RS, but I don't think you can buy that in the US.
Maybe the US Focus is modified compared to the EU version or something, otherwise I don't get the 'typical american crap' part of your comment. When I'm in the US I always wonder why an american car maker such as Ford seems to sell mostly craptastic, oversize, inefficient and ugly models in their own area, while (in my opinion) better models such as the Focus and the Fiesta (which is a great car is all you need is something small, efficient and fun to drive) apparently only sell well in Europe. Note that I'm not a Ford fan at all, but the Focus and Fiesta are simply pretty good cars overall.
That argument only makes sense if you expect to be running already-existing x86 software on your tablet, and personally I don't think that's what the market is asking for. In terms of 'software that makes good use of a mobile touchscreen platform', more software has been written for other architectures than for all x86-based platforms combined. Android is meant to be architecture independent (Java), WP7 idem dito (CIL and Silverlight), and about everything else is ARM.
As soon as Microsoft introduces a 'Windows Tablet 7'-edition that runs on ARM (it *will* happen, I'm pretty sure of this), x86 for mobile devices will not make any sense at all anymore, except for the very rare occasions where you really want desktop Windows with desktop applications on your tablet, and using a laptop is somehow not an option.
H.264 is unlikely to be "officially" available on Linux in the near future due to patent concerns.
That's funny because Chrome on Linux plays H264, every major distribution has ffmpeg in their mainline repositories, and the Linux nvidia drivers implement a fully hardware accelerated H264 decoding pipeline. By your logic it would bee 'unlikely that ffmpeg or the nvidia drivers will be 'officially' available on Linux in the near future', while in reality, they have been for years. Did you know jpeg and RSA also have patent concerns? And what makes you think VP8 or WebM don't infringe on any h64 patents? Did you ever use the Flash plugin on Linux? On my Atom-based HTPC it can't even play SD video because it doesn't use GPU acceleration at all.
or 3) Slow down the development of a native cross-platform FF H.264 solution by making it less people depending on it. Effectively making windows a requirement to watch H.264 video's.
Maybe you missed something but Firefox doesn't want a native cross-platform FF H.264 solution, because that would mean they would have to pony up licensing fees. So instead of going with the somewhat less 'ideal' -but pragmatic- solution of providing plugins/extensions that use available OS codecs for the most-used platforms that firefox runs on, they choose to not support H264 at all, and hope that even though the whole world already moved on some day all of a sudden Theora or VP8 will be the de-facto standard codec. Effectively marginalizing the usefulness of their browser on the major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux) that all have H264 codecs available and together cover about 98% of all computer users who want to play browser video.
I used to be a big Firefox fan, but I've recently switched to Chrome as well, partly because of the stupid attitude Firefox developers have with respect to h264. I know enough about video codecs and h264 to be pretty sure that alternative 'free' codecs like vp8 or theora (note: I'm not saying 'open' since h264 is also an open standard) are 99% guaranteed to infringe on many of the exact same patents implemented by h264, and that not supporting h264 (through OS codecs) because it is patent-encumbered is a red herring and profoundly stupid from Firefox' perspective. The h264 train has departed long ago, every major OS supports it natively and efficiently, it's built into hardware, and frankly, it's simply the best codec that's available right now. Licensing issues are not an issue for Firefox if they just use OS codecs, and I definitely don't want a browser that implements 5 different and probably inefficient video codecs anyway, so why not just be a bit pragmatic about it and include a plugin or extension that optimally uses the technology provided by the OS. I'm pretty sure almost every Firefox user would just install the plugin and get on with their work.
Twitter is one of the greatest new forms of communications in the last 20 years.
I stopped reading after that comment, you must be completely out of your mind if you really thing blasting out 140-character blurbs that are only indexable/searchable by stupid free-form hashtags to random sets of people who are 'following' you constitutes 'one of the greatest forms of communications over the last 20 years'. Twitter is not about communication, at least not two-way communication, it's broadcasting, and a very limited and in most cases useless implementation of it. As soon as you try following over 10 people or want to know stuff about some hashtag, the big mess of unrelated, unconnected, context-less crap you get everytime you hit refresh all but blocks out the tiny bits of useful information you sometimes find in some peoples' tweets. Or do you only send private tweets, in which case you're simply using Twitter as an alternative to SMS text-messages.
Twitter has only one use, which is as a broadcast mechanism for people who actually have something interesting to say (less than 1% of people I guess), and it's a pretty poor implementation of it because the 1% useful stuff gets drowned in the 99% of useless crap. For actual communication with people you know something like Facebook is a million times better because it provides message history, context, a network of connections instead of just 'followers' and 'following', etc. For communicating with people you don't know (yet) you might as well just use an e-mail. For broadcasting interesting stuff you'd first have to have interesting stuff in the first place, which doesn't hold for the vast majority of stuff. If you're a rock star or a politician running for president, a Twitter account is great, because you can pretend caring about keeping your fans 'up-to-date' by having an associate make up some tweets every now and then. If you really have something interesting to say and use twitter functionally: yes, Twitter is the 'greatest form of communications of the last 20 years', for you and the rest of the 0.1% of people who fall in the same category.
My first experiences with twitter were just like yours, then I thought 'I got it' and changed my mind, and I thought twitter was great so I started following people. Then I found out how useless it is because tweets have no context, and I'd be wading through worthless tweets (even the ones from interesting people) just to find out why the fuck they were (re-)tweeting someone. Finally I gave up with the conclusion that Twitter is a useless hyped-up fad for about everything. You give a whole list of examples of how great twitter is for this and that, but litteraly none of these are not better served by other communication channels. Communicating with friends? Use a social networking site. Communicating with and updating customers? Use your freaking corporate website. Sending pictures and links? Every common communication method right now has that (Facebook, website, blog, e-mail). The stupid 'I can find out everything about the earthquake' example I see people mention so often? Before you'd know there even was an earthquake somewhere, news sites all over the world would be reporting on it already, or do you randomly search for #earthquake all day? And even if you'd find out before some topic hits news sites, what kind of actual useful information can you filter out by looking at 10,000 tweets saying "OMG THERE'S AN EARTHQUAKE HERE #earthquake"?
Really, twitter will go down by it's own success, the whole idea of people sharing everything is stupid, because it will inevitably lead to an overload of irrelevant or useless information, drowning the useful bits. There's a reason we have journalists, editors, reporters, newspapers, news channels and 50 different ways of private communication, and the reason is to filter out useless information, because our minds have limited capacity. Twitter is in no way 'the greatest form of communication in 20 years'. It's just 'a way' of 'some form of communication' that is 'great in a few situations' but 'useless in most'.
We run simulations that are numerically intensive on SPARC, which are developed and tested on x86. We recently did some extensive benchmarking since the machines in the field (sold to customers) with Sun hardware in there were hitting real-time constraints in computation time, while our run-of-the-mill C2D and Xeon workstations were not even close to hitting any performance constraints. The 8-core M3000 was up to three times slower than a $500 C2D developer laptop, and up to TEN TIMES slower than a quad-core Xeon at 2.5 Ghz. We're talking about parallelized computations (ie: the Xeon shows around 3x speedup compared to running the same code single-threaded) that are almost completely FPU and memory-bound, ie: the typical 'heavy duty numerical work' case. If there's ONE area where SPARC hardware sucks so much it hurts, it's performance in FPU-intensive code.
Samsung, LG, HTC, Moto et al. seem more interested in a race to the top providing the best high end phone. Even in Wintel land, its a race to the top with Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba and so forth competing for the best product in each price category. Heuwei and others seem more interested in providing the best low end phone possible.
The race to the bottom is about the platform itself, not about a few individual manufacturers and their high-end models based on Android. If it turns out in a few years that you have 95 craptastic el-cheapo Android phones on the market for every 5 high-end ones, you guess what most people will be buying. The cheap craptastic ones. It's would be just like Wintel land, where the vast majority of laptops sold are sub-$700, and all of them have crappy build quality, crappy batteries, crappy screens, etc. People buying a laptop just look at the GHzs and the GBs and then choose the least expensive option they can find. That's a race to the bottom for you: flooding the market with so many cheap options that price and volume become the leading factors in the design of your product.
Wasn't the 1st gen iPod also the first MP3 player with a HDD, the first player that could store GB's of music, and the first player that had a graphical LCD with a graphical user interface?
Not trying to troll or start a flamewar, I just can't remember there was anything remotely like the first iPod when it was brand new.
Aside from the multitouch phone, that describes pretty much any Nokia smartphone in the last 5 years.
Wait, are you using Nokia as an example of 'great smartphones we had before the iPhone was released'? Nokia, of all cellphone manufacturs?? You mean NOKIA, which is now struggling to stay relevant because they didn't have a single real touchscreen smartphone worth a dime until the N900 came along? Nokia, who only introduced their first decent touchscreen phone less than two years ago?
That's hilarious... I've owned at least 6 Nokia phones over the last 10 year, and if there is ANY phone brand that has missed the smartphone boat completely, it's Nokia. Their dumbphones and feature phones are great and I loved them, but please, if Nokia is what you first think of when someone takes the first iPhone as the benchmark for all later smartphones, you either don't know Nokia, or you don't know the iPhone. The last Nokia I bought was a 5800, which is only 1 or 1.5 years old, and while it was a pretty decent phone for calling and texting, it can't hold a candle to even the first generation iPhone. The browser was near-unusable (slow, buggy, didn't render many sites properly), the touchscreen was pretty unresponsive (resistive) and there were almost no applications available that used the touchscreen properly (which wasn't surprising because it was the first S60r5 phone, which was the first symbian version to even support touchscreens in the first place).
I have to concur with the PP, people get used to revolutionary products so fast they assume there was nothing revolutionary about it in the first place. The iPhone is a good example, but there are many more.
I have atom based machines that can play 1080p video without a hiccup but try to make a 320p youtube video full screen and watch it stutter and spurt...
Yes that really cracks me up with my Atom Ion-based HTPC as well. Watch a 1080p movie in XBMC with silk-smooth framerates, then open an SD Youtube Flash video in Firefox and the whole thing grinds to a halt. The best part of it is when you go back to XBMC and open the same video using the Youtube plugin, and all of a sudden everything is silk-smooth again, apparently the YouTube XBMC plugin rips the video out of the flv or uses the HTML5 source and pipes it through its own codec. Which goes to show how much Flash actually sucks for delivering web video.
The grandparent is too harsh but I think Apple still is hyped. They keep wearing a suit ten times the man inside, sure the company has grown but so equally has their hype. I know many people that are buying Apple products they'd never ever consider buying if it wasn't made by Apple, and I don't mean because their products are that revolutionary different. And in that sense, the stock market is not wrong. Are the consumers wrong? Well, I think this old chestnut fits: "The market can be wrong longer than you can be right."
Right now Apple can pick any market they want and have a burst start of loyal fans, press coverage and 3rd party developers. No chicken or egg problems that there's no users because there's no apps and there's no app developers because there's no users. Other companies spend years doing it, even running with losses to get into the market and still only get to be a player. Apple comes in with its new iShiny and gets to command an instant premium and actually casts a shadow of doom over the other players that their market is about to disappear.
Call it what you want, but that asset is real. Most companies out there would kill to have anything like it. And I'm pretty sure that it's going to keep earning Apple lots of money in the future too. In a way Apple has become the master of self-fulfilling prophecies, they come in convincing everybody this is how it will be and then that is exactly what happens. But the core of that power is hype, not fraudulent marketing kind of hype but the kind of hype that's apparently taken root in quite many people's heads.
Well, over the years I've become a real Apple fan, and I've never regretted any Apple product I've ever bought. But I have to admit that some of their stuff isn't so great or special, or overpriced. For example the AppleTV just doesn't interest me at all (well, maybe just to hack it, the hardware and price are interesting). Or the Mac Mini, which is a great machine, but simply too expensive for what it offers beyond similar hardware (just the form factor). So like any company in existence, they don't do *everything* right.
That said, compared to all the other computer hardware and software I've bought and/or used, the Apple gear really stands out and in some ways is miles ahead of anything the acres, dells and lenovo's have to offer. I'm not a specs fetishist like some people, so I don't care if I have a 2.8 Ghz i7 instead of a 3 Ghz one. I don't play games, so I don't need an HD 5870. But I do value seamless hardware/software integration, troublesome and easy operation, the combination of a great GUI and a UNIX shell, nice looking, quality built hardware that lasts 5 years without falling apart, silent operation. Or a smartphone that's both extremely easy to use and still very powerful (the walled garden argument doesn't fly with me, in practice it's really a red herring), with great software support, a large and active software and development ecosystem based on design principles that are modern, pragmatic and efficient. From my professional point of vew (as a software engineer) there's a lot to like about the way Apple designed and implemented OS X and iOS, and I think you won't find many software guys who dispute that.
So, clearly, Apple is doing a lot of things right. It's not magical, it's most of the time not revolutionary (though you could argue the 1st iPhone and the app store were), but it's almost always better than the competition. The focus, determination and execution of Apple's efforts in the mobile market are really astounding from a business point of view, and I think a lot of people simply don't recognize how well planned apples strategy with iOS has been up to now, most likely they have been working on this for over a decade, which now allows them to churn out devices ranging from pmps to phones to tablets at yearly intervals, with no real competition able to keep up.
So as much as I dislike fanboyism, evangelism or superlatives like 'magical' or 'revolutionary', I think it
Dude, Apple has taken over half of all the money made in the smartphone market, they basically created the entire market for consumer tablets, their Mac business has been growing faster than the entire PC industry year-over-year, for the last 10 years, they have launched the most successful online music store, they've owned a very significant part of the PMP market since 2001, they have been raking in profits around $2 billion a quarter the last few years, their sales have been largely unaffected by the global downturn, their stock price has increased 50-fold in less than 10 years, their competitors are scrambling to imitate about everything they have created over the last decade, and still you keep insisting that it's just hype, it's inflated, that everyone is living in a reality distortion field, they are overrated and they are rolling on hipster hype?
Really, if you honestly believe all this yourself, you are the one living in a reality distortion field, and I sincerely think you should get your head checked. Not liking Apple stuff is perfectly fine, but you'd have to be a first-class idiot to be so myopic and unable to look beyond your own little world to think like this. I really feel sorry for you if you're so jaded you can't get over the fact not everyone is like you when it comes to computer and gadgetry preferences.
OSX's reputation was stained by lacking in API flexibility some even say the API is less substantial than Windows because its an incomplete API - not being an Apple programmer I dont know, but whats publicized in the news I do.
Yes and no. The API's that were mentioned a lot in the news were in fact not publicly available/finalized until a while ago, and you could consider them 'incomplete' in the sense that they only support a few NVidia cards used in a lot of Macs. No ATI cards, and no pre-9-series NVidia cards IIRC. That said, they are API's that provide a complete H264 pipeline, from front to back, so if you are able to use them you basically have your decoder on a silver platter, which is different from (e.g) DXVA on Windows, which is more like a set of GPU accelerated video pipeline building blocks. They are more like VDPAU on Linux.
Anyway, all that doesn't actually matter that much, since Adobe had plenty of other options to implement GPU accelerated video using public API's for years and years. GLSL comes to mind, which has been a supported option since the very first Macs that actually had the hardware to do GPU accelerated video. OpenCL would have been another option, which was added as a private API in 10.5 and publicly in 10.6. Both options would have been portable to other systems and GPU-independent. Instead of just getting to work or buying/commissioning someone else to develop a GPU decoder, Adobe decided to bitch and moan on every possible occasion how Apple was 'actively limiting their development options'. Meanwhile many other video encoding/transcoding software on OS X has had GPU acceleration for years. Just like the Linux version of Flash player and the desperate clinging to Carbon for Photoshop has shown, Adobe is either lazy, or they tried to take on too many products for too many platforms at once. Now they want to bring Flash to mobile, I wish them good luck getting that to work well on all these different devices and mobile OS's, seeing that they don't seem to be able support any desktop platform properly for Flash, except Windows 32-bit.
Well at the very least HTML5 content will integrate with the rest of the DOM, instead of running in a closed black-box plugin. In other words the animated content is not *embedded* in the document, it *is* the document. I'd expect that this would at the very least make navigation, history and bookmarking much more predictable.
Anyway, I'm still amazed by the way this whole discussion goes everywhere. As if replacing Flash for all things that don't need Flash automatically implies Flash should die completely. Personally, as a software engineer and as a Linux and OS X user, I despise Flash from the bottom of my heart, for various reasons: it's inefficiently coded, full of bugs and security issues, and it runs like shit on anything except Windows. I really don't have a single good thing to say about it. But then again, I don't play web games or go to 'fashion websites' (since when did they become an important part of the internet?), and most of the time I blacklist companies or sites that think making their websites animate and play sounds make the content better, or the site more enjoyable to use (it *never*, *ever* does, literally). But hey, if someone else likes that kind of stuff, go ahead and use Flash, I don't see a problem with that. Just don't use Flash for useful stuff like playing video or implementing a navigation bar with onmouseovers, since there are much better alternatives for that.
The world isn't black and white, and the fact that Flash content doesn't play on iOS doesn't mean it doesn't have it's use on desktops. Apple never said it didn't want Flash on OS X, even though there it is also one big piece of inefficient crap.
[quote]Windows 7 is the first consumer desktop OS which is readily available and accepted in 64 bit.[/quote]
From Wikipedia:
- Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" was released on October 26, 2007, [..] full support for 64-bit applications - Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009
Or you place v1.0.1 of the DLL in the same folder as App_A.exe. App_A will find v1.0.1 of the DLL before going to the shared location *IF* it's written properly
What's the point of having shared libraries if only the application itself can load them, and can only load single, checksummed version of it?
In "MSI packaging Land" this is called "Application Isolation".
In the rest of the world we call it 'static linking':-P
The RIAA knows that they won't find much sympathy anywhere if they ask for a carte-blanche on traffic spying just to catch a few illegal MP3's, so they just throw in child pornography, for good measure.
Seriously, child pornography is the new Godwin for justifying invading privacy and getting constitutional exemptions.
Actually, 19 of the top 20 [openscreenproject.org] handset manufacturers have signed up to work with Adobe to bring native versions of Flash to their devices.
Translation: 19 out of 20 manufacturers that have Android 2.2+ handsets on the market or on their roadmap will not actively block it from the phone, when Adobe finally releases a Flash player that works on anything besides a Nexus One, an HTC Desire or a Droid 2.
Flash 10.1 is already out for Android 2.2, and is coming out on every single platform (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Meego (moblin + maemo), Blackberry, etc) except Apple's iOS
Translation: there's a beta out that works for 3 handsets, and Adobe still has plans to bring Flash player to every single piece of hardware on earth, just like they had 5 years ago. There is no ETA for Flash player on anything besides Android, and it has already been confirmed that neither WM, S^3 or Meego will have Flash Player when they launch.
It actually already runs pretty well on the iPhone too...
Translation: there's a stop-gap unsupported version that somewhat runs on iPhone OS but doesn't support all features, and, most importantly, doesn't even do video. What you get is exactly what Apple wants to block Flash for: your battery runs down within 30 minutes, your phone gets really hot, and most Flash content is almost impossible to interact with since it was written for mouse+kb input.
... except that Steve Jobs banhammered Flash CS5 iPhone apps on the eve of Adobe's Creative Suite 5 launch
Translation: except that Steve Jobs banhammered all middleware solutions for writing iPhone applications, since they would be detrimental to the user experience, and the way Apple wants to support and update their OS and application ecosystem.
Instead of the possibility of a write once-run everywhere solution that's good enough with Flash, you'll now have to suck up significant resources just to build an iOS port
Translation: instead of trying to provide a free lunch for hordes of cheap-ass developers who want to 'write crap once, deploy everywhere' they *gasp* might have to learn something different, that's much more powerful, flexible and efficient. Customers everywhere don't give a shit, they already have a million native games and applications in the App Store already, which -on average- have significantly higher quality then any other mobile app store or any Flash content on full-blown PC's. So apparantly lack of Flash is not stopping anyone from creating good stuff on iOS.
you'll now have to suck up significant resources just to build an iOS port
Translation: writing great applications takes time and resources, providing developers with options to deploy generic stuff that is not specifically written to the hardware & software primarily benefits developers, not end-users.
It's good for protecting and providing business for native iPhone coders, but still, it's a headache and a resource-sink
Translation: if you don't have the time or resources to write great software for multiple platforms, pick one that works best for you and deploy to that.
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Wait a minute. I'm a manager...
No you're not, you're only pretending to be one. You exposed yourself by not mentioning any of the synergistic advantages you get from SaaS in The Cloud.
I think you could turn this into a pretty interesting philosophical discussion about design, and what 'great design' in a product such as a car means: timeless (so you don't have to change it), or mercurial (adapting to current trends and fashion). I'm not sure either one is 'better' or 'right', but for me, great design involves taking risks, creating something that distinguishes itself from competitors, and appeals to your target audience. Mercedes already settled on a design that works well for them, and they stick with it, which is good for them. That doesn't make them the prime example of a car manufacturer that is known for their great design though.
Personally, I'm a really big fan of Peugeots (French cars) from 5 to 20 years back. I don't like the current models, the 7 and 8 series, since they are simply copying both themselves and the competition now, but if you go back to the 4 series (especially the 404 and 504), the 5 series (especially the 205) and the 6 series (especially the 206, 306 and the -in my opinion- best looking Peugeot ever made: the 406 coupe), you'll see that every generation introduces completely different design cues, yet all of the cars I mentioned have designs that are timeless. You might not like them (taste is subjective), but except for maybe the 4 series, none of these cars look extremely dated. That's what makes good design for me.
Apple has already started moving to cloud based services, so most likely the data center will be for those. It will also mean that the future iPhones, iPads and Mac computers will be even more locked down than previously. For example if you take a picture, it's directly uploaded "to the cloud". This is a huge privacy violation and means you don't really own your data anymore.
So either you care about this 'privacy' you are talking about and you just don't use or buy anything that stores your files 'in the cloud', or you don't bother about where your holiday pictures and e-mails are stored and enjoy the benefits of automatically backed-up storage that is accessible everywhere, from different devices, without setting up and running your own private data center. I don't see the problem here. Meanwhile everyone and their mother have long moved on and doesn't have the same privacy paranoia as you apparently do: e-mail is stored at the ISP or hosted and accessed through a commercial entity such as GMail or Hotmail, address books, bookmarks and preferences are synced through some kind of vendor synchronization service built into computers and phones, dropbox or mobileme is used to backup, store and publish data, and so on, and so forth. Hate to burst your bubble dude, but most people don't care much where their data resides, as long as they have the impression no-one is digging through it or re-distributing it. Real privacy doesn't exist anyway, your name is in hundreds of databases, be it governmental, utility, commercial, whatever. If you want to be 100% sure no-one gets to know anything about you and your data, just don't connect to the internet, don't use a phone, don't send e-mails, and don't give out any personal information to any company, etc. I think you'll have a really hard time. Personally, I always get a little annoyed by privacy whiners, not because I don't value privacy, but because the majority of the people complaining about privacy invasion happily keep public facebook profiles online, twitter every move they make, hand out their personal data without a problem if it gets them a $1 cheeseburger discount, etc.
Anyway, what you're saying about a 'cloud based iPhone/iPad/Mac' is pure speculation, and as long as it isn't enforced you *have* to use such products, I don't see the problem.
Eh? Of all the European car makers you pick Mercedes as having great designs? The last 10 generations of Mercedes' all looked almost exactly the same, there's almost no design in them at all if you compare them to a 10 year old Mercedes. Same holds for BMW by the way, most BMW models have also been very subtle evolutions of previous models. That doesn't make them bad cars by the way, but if you want an example of car makers that pay a lot of attention to design (whether you like their designs or not), you should be looking at (e.g.) French cars like the new Citroens and Renaults, they have usually distinctive designs, or Italian cars (Alfa Romeo, Fiat).
The focus is typical american crap, overly soft suspension, steering wheel response of a dead fish, etc.
That's odd, because over here (Europe) the Focus is widely regarded as one of the best mid-size front-wheel drive platforms if it comes to suspension and handling. Don't they sell the sporty versions in the US, the Rallye or (even better) the ST? The Focus ST scored very high marks here and I think up to now there haven't been a lot of cars in the same class that got better reviews. Maybe the new Renault Megane RS, but I don't think you can buy that in the US.
Maybe the US Focus is modified compared to the EU version or something, otherwise I don't get the 'typical american crap' part of your comment. When I'm in the US I always wonder why an american car maker such as Ford seems to sell mostly craptastic, oversize, inefficient and ugly models in their own area, while (in my opinion) better models such as the Focus and the Fiesta (which is a great car is all you need is something small, efficient and fun to drive) apparently only sell well in Europe. Note that I'm not a Ford fan at all, but the Focus and Fiesta are simply pretty good cars overall.
That argument only makes sense if you expect to be running already-existing x86 software on your tablet, and personally I don't think that's what the market is asking for. In terms of 'software that makes good use of a mobile touchscreen platform', more software has been written for other architectures than for all x86-based platforms combined. Android is meant to be architecture independent (Java), WP7 idem dito (CIL and Silverlight), and about everything else is ARM.
As soon as Microsoft introduces a 'Windows Tablet 7'-edition that runs on ARM (it *will* happen, I'm pretty sure of this), x86 for mobile devices will not make any sense at all anymore, except for the very rare occasions where you really want desktop Windows with desktop applications on your tablet, and using a laptop is somehow not an option.
H.264 is unlikely to be "officially" available on Linux in the near future due to patent concerns.
That's funny because Chrome on Linux plays H264, every major distribution has ffmpeg in their mainline repositories, and the Linux nvidia drivers implement a fully hardware accelerated H264 decoding pipeline. By your logic it would bee 'unlikely that ffmpeg or the nvidia drivers will be 'officially' available on Linux in the near future', while in reality, they have been for years. Did you know jpeg and RSA also have patent concerns? And what makes you think VP8 or WebM don't infringe on any h64 patents? Did you ever use the Flash plugin on Linux? On my Atom-based HTPC it can't even play SD video because it doesn't use GPU acceleration at all.
or 3) Slow down the development of a native cross-platform FF H.264 solution by making it less people depending on it. Effectively making windows a requirement to watch H.264 video's.
Maybe you missed something but Firefox doesn't want a native cross-platform FF H.264 solution, because that would mean they would have to pony up licensing fees. So instead of going with the somewhat less 'ideal' -but pragmatic- solution of providing plugins/extensions that use available OS codecs for the most-used platforms that firefox runs on, they choose to not support H264 at all, and hope that even though the whole world already moved on some day all of a sudden Theora or VP8 will be the de-facto standard codec. Effectively marginalizing the usefulness of their browser on the major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux) that all have H264 codecs available and together cover about 98% of all computer users who want to play browser video.
+1 there
I used to be a big Firefox fan, but I've recently switched to Chrome as well, partly because of the stupid attitude Firefox developers have with respect to h264. I know enough about video codecs and h264 to be pretty sure that alternative 'free' codecs like vp8 or theora (note: I'm not saying 'open' since h264 is also an open standard) are 99% guaranteed to infringe on many of the exact same patents implemented by h264, and that not supporting h264 (through OS codecs) because it is patent-encumbered is a red herring and profoundly stupid from Firefox' perspective. The h264 train has departed long ago, every major OS supports it natively and efficiently, it's built into hardware, and frankly, it's simply the best codec that's available right now. Licensing issues are not an issue for Firefox if they just use OS codecs, and I definitely don't want a browser that implements 5 different and probably inefficient video codecs anyway, so why not just be a bit pragmatic about it and include a plugin or extension that optimally uses the technology provided by the OS. I'm pretty sure almost every Firefox user would just install the plugin and get on with their work.
Twitter is one of the greatest new forms of communications in the last 20 years.
I stopped reading after that comment, you must be completely out of your mind if you really thing blasting out 140-character blurbs that are only indexable/searchable by stupid free-form hashtags to random sets of people who are 'following' you constitutes 'one of the greatest forms of communications over the last 20 years'. Twitter is not about communication, at least not two-way communication, it's broadcasting, and a very limited and in most cases useless implementation of it. As soon as you try following over 10 people or want to know stuff about some hashtag, the big mess of unrelated, unconnected, context-less crap you get everytime you hit refresh all but blocks out the tiny bits of useful information you sometimes find in some peoples' tweets. Or do you only send private tweets, in which case you're simply using Twitter as an alternative to SMS text-messages.
Twitter has only one use, which is as a broadcast mechanism for people who actually have something interesting to say (less than 1% of people I guess), and it's a pretty poor implementation of it because the 1% useful stuff gets drowned in the 99% of useless crap. For actual communication with people you know something like Facebook is a million times better because it provides message history, context, a network of connections instead of just 'followers' and 'following', etc. For communicating with people you don't know (yet) you might as well just use an e-mail. For broadcasting interesting stuff you'd first have to have interesting stuff in the first place, which doesn't hold for the vast majority of stuff. If you're a rock star or a politician running for president, a Twitter account is great, because you can pretend caring about keeping your fans 'up-to-date' by having an associate make up some tweets every now and then. If you really have something interesting to say and use twitter functionally: yes, Twitter is the 'greatest form of communications of the last 20 years', for you and the rest of the 0.1% of people who fall in the same category.
My first experiences with twitter were just like yours, then I thought 'I got it' and changed my mind, and I thought twitter was great so I started following people. Then I found out how useless it is because tweets have no context, and I'd be wading through worthless tweets (even the ones from interesting people) just to find out why the fuck they were (re-)tweeting someone. Finally I gave up with the conclusion that Twitter is a useless hyped-up fad for about everything. You give a whole list of examples of how great twitter is for this and that, but litteraly none of these are not better served by other communication channels. Communicating with friends? Use a social networking site. Communicating with and updating customers? Use your freaking corporate website. Sending pictures and links? Every common communication method right now has that (Facebook, website, blog, e-mail). The stupid 'I can find out everything about the earthquake' example I see people mention so often? Before you'd know there even was an earthquake somewhere, news sites all over the world would be reporting on it already, or do you randomly search for #earthquake all day? And even if you'd find out before some topic hits news sites, what kind of actual useful information can you filter out by looking at 10,000 tweets saying "OMG THERE'S AN EARTHQUAKE HERE #earthquake"?
Really, twitter will go down by it's own success, the whole idea of people sharing everything is stupid, because it will inevitably lead to an overload of irrelevant or useless information, drowning the useful bits. There's a reason we have journalists, editors, reporters, newspapers, news channels and 50 different ways of private communication, and the reason is to filter out useless information, because our minds have limited capacity. Twitter is in no way 'the greatest form of communication in 20 years'. It's just 'a way' of 'some form of communication' that is 'great in a few situations' but 'useless in most'.
Wait, what? You're kidding, right?
We run simulations that are numerically intensive on SPARC, which are developed and tested on x86. We recently did some extensive benchmarking since the machines in the field (sold to customers) with Sun hardware in there were hitting real-time constraints in computation time, while our run-of-the-mill C2D and Xeon workstations were not even close to hitting any performance constraints. The 8-core M3000 was up to three times slower than a $500 C2D developer laptop, and up to TEN TIMES slower than a quad-core Xeon at 2.5 Ghz. We're talking about parallelized computations (ie: the Xeon shows around 3x speedup compared to running the same code single-threaded) that are almost completely FPU and memory-bound, ie: the typical 'heavy duty numerical work' case. If there's ONE area where SPARC hardware sucks so much it hurts, it's performance in FPU-intensive code.
Where is this happening?
Samsung, LG, HTC, Moto et al. seem more interested in a race to the top providing the best high end phone. Even in Wintel land, its a race to the top with Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba and so forth competing for the best product in each price category. Heuwei and others seem more interested in providing the best low end phone possible.
The race to the bottom is about the platform itself, not about a few individual manufacturers and their high-end models based on Android. If it turns out in a few years that you have 95 craptastic el-cheapo Android phones on the market for every 5 high-end ones, you guess what most people will be buying. The cheap craptastic ones. It's would be just like Wintel land, where the vast majority of laptops sold are sub-$700, and all of them have crappy build quality, crappy batteries, crappy screens, etc. People buying a laptop just look at the GHzs and the GBs and then choose the least expensive option they can find. That's a race to the bottom for you: flooding the market with so many cheap options that price and volume become the leading factors in the design of your product.
Wasn't the 1st gen iPod also the first MP3 player with a HDD, the first player that could store GB's of music, and the first player that had a graphical LCD with a graphical user interface?
Not trying to troll or start a flamewar, I just can't remember there was anything remotely like the first iPod when it was brand new.
Aside from the multitouch phone, that describes pretty much any Nokia smartphone in the last 5 years.
Wait, are you using Nokia as an example of 'great smartphones we had before the iPhone was released'? Nokia, of all cellphone manufacturs?? You mean NOKIA, which is now struggling to stay relevant because they didn't have a single real touchscreen smartphone worth a dime until the N900 came along? Nokia, who only introduced their first decent touchscreen phone less than two years ago?
That's hilarious... I've owned at least 6 Nokia phones over the last 10 year, and if there is ANY phone brand that has missed the smartphone boat completely, it's Nokia. Their dumbphones and feature phones are great and I loved them, but please, if Nokia is what you first think of when someone takes the first iPhone as the benchmark for all later smartphones, you either don't know Nokia, or you don't know the iPhone. The last Nokia I bought was a 5800, which is only 1 or 1.5 years old, and while it was a pretty decent phone for calling and texting, it can't hold a candle to even the first generation iPhone. The browser was near-unusable (slow, buggy, didn't render many sites properly), the touchscreen was pretty unresponsive (resistive) and there were almost no applications available that used the touchscreen properly (which wasn't surprising because it was the first S60r5 phone, which was the first symbian version to even support touchscreens in the first place).
I have to concur with the PP, people get used to revolutionary products so fast they assume there was nothing revolutionary about it in the first place. The iPhone is a good example, but there are many more.
I have atom based machines that can play 1080p video without a hiccup but try to make a 320p youtube video full screen and watch it stutter and spurt...
Yes that really cracks me up with my Atom Ion-based HTPC as well. Watch a 1080p movie in XBMC with silk-smooth framerates, then open an SD Youtube Flash video in Firefox and the whole thing grinds to a halt. The best part of it is when you go back to XBMC and open the same video using the Youtube plugin, and all of a sudden everything is silk-smooth again, apparently the YouTube XBMC plugin rips the video out of the flv or uses the HTML5 source and pipes it through its own codec. Which goes to show how much Flash actually sucks for delivering web video.
Holy crap, that's insane! If I open that and move the mouse my whole desktop freezes and I get 130% CPU load under Linux :-S
Is this some kind of sick joke by Sprint or did they seriously think people would enjoy 'using' this abomination??
The grandparent is too harsh but I think Apple still is hyped. They keep wearing a suit ten times the man inside, sure the company has grown but so equally has their hype. I know many people that are buying Apple products they'd never ever consider buying if it wasn't made by Apple, and I don't mean because their products are that revolutionary different. And in that sense, the stock market is not wrong. Are the consumers wrong? Well, I think this old chestnut fits: "The market can be wrong longer than you can be right."
Right now Apple can pick any market they want and have a burst start of loyal fans, press coverage and 3rd party developers. No chicken or egg problems that there's no users because there's no apps and there's no app developers because there's no users. Other companies spend years doing it, even running with losses to get into the market and still only get to be a player. Apple comes in with its new iShiny and gets to command an instant premium and actually casts a shadow of doom over the other players that their market is about to disappear.
Call it what you want, but that asset is real. Most companies out there would kill to have anything like it. And I'm pretty sure that it's going to keep earning Apple lots of money in the future too. In a way Apple has become the master of self-fulfilling prophecies, they come in convincing everybody this is how it will be and then that is exactly what happens. But the core of that power is hype, not fraudulent marketing kind of hype but the kind of hype that's apparently taken root in quite many people's heads.
Well, over the years I've become a real Apple fan, and I've never regretted any Apple product I've ever bought. But I have to admit that some of their stuff isn't so great or special, or overpriced. For example the AppleTV just doesn't interest me at all (well, maybe just to hack it, the hardware and price are interesting). Or the Mac Mini, which is a great machine, but simply too expensive for what it offers beyond similar hardware (just the form factor). So like any company in existence, they don't do *everything* right.
That said, compared to all the other computer hardware and software I've bought and/or used, the Apple gear really stands out and in some ways is miles ahead of anything the acres, dells and lenovo's have to offer. I'm not a specs fetishist like some people, so I don't care if I have a 2.8 Ghz i7 instead of a 3 Ghz one. I don't play games, so I don't need an HD 5870. But I do value seamless hardware/software integration, troublesome and easy operation, the combination of a great GUI and a UNIX shell, nice looking, quality built hardware that lasts 5 years without falling apart, silent operation. Or a smartphone that's both extremely easy to use and still very powerful (the walled garden argument doesn't fly with me, in practice it's really a red herring), with great software support, a large and active software and development ecosystem based on design principles that are modern, pragmatic and efficient. From my professional point of vew (as a software engineer) there's a lot to like about the way Apple designed and implemented OS X and iOS, and I think you won't find many software guys who dispute that.
So, clearly, Apple is doing a lot of things right. It's not magical, it's most of the time not revolutionary (though you could argue the 1st iPhone and the app store were), but it's almost always better than the competition. The focus, determination and execution of Apple's efforts in the mobile market are really astounding from a business point of view, and I think a lot of people simply don't recognize how well planned apples strategy with iOS has been up to now, most likely they have been working on this for over a decade, which now allows them to churn out devices ranging from pmps to phones to tablets at yearly intervals, with no real competition able to keep up.
So as much as I dislike fanboyism, evangelism or superlatives like 'magical' or 'revolutionary', I think it
Do you really think $10k of liquid assets makes someone 'rich'? I know people who make $10k a month and are still not able to buy a Ferrari.
Dude, Apple has taken over half of all the money made in the smartphone market, they basically created the entire market for consumer tablets, their Mac business has been growing faster than the entire PC industry year-over-year, for the last 10 years, they have launched the most successful online music store, they've owned a very significant part of the PMP market since 2001, they have been raking in profits around $2 billion a quarter the last few years, their sales have been largely unaffected by the global downturn, their stock price has increased 50-fold in less than 10 years, their competitors are scrambling to imitate about everything they have created over the last decade, and still you keep insisting that it's just hype, it's inflated, that everyone is living in a reality distortion field, they are overrated and they are rolling on hipster hype?
Really, if you honestly believe all this yourself, you are the one living in a reality distortion field, and I sincerely think you should get your head checked. Not liking Apple stuff is perfectly fine, but you'd have to be a first-class idiot to be so myopic and unable to look beyond your own little world to think like this. I really feel sorry for you if you're so jaded you can't get over the fact not everyone is like you when it comes to computer and gadgetry preferences.
OSX's reputation was stained by lacking in API flexibility some even say the API is less substantial than Windows because its an incomplete API - not being an Apple programmer I dont know, but whats publicized in the news I do.
Yes and no. The API's that were mentioned a lot in the news were in fact not publicly available/finalized until a while ago, and you could consider them 'incomplete' in the sense that they only support a few NVidia cards used in a lot of Macs. No ATI cards, and no pre-9-series NVidia cards IIRC. That said, they are API's that provide a complete H264 pipeline, from front to back, so if you are able to use them you basically have your decoder on a silver platter, which is different from (e.g) DXVA on Windows, which is more like a set of GPU accelerated video pipeline building blocks. They are more like VDPAU on Linux.
Anyway, all that doesn't actually matter that much, since Adobe had plenty of other options to implement GPU accelerated video using public API's for years and years. GLSL comes to mind, which has been a supported option since the very first Macs that actually had the hardware to do GPU accelerated video. OpenCL would have been another option, which was added as a private API in 10.5 and publicly in 10.6. Both options would have been portable to other systems and GPU-independent. Instead of just getting to work or buying/commissioning someone else to develop a GPU decoder, Adobe decided to bitch and moan on every possible occasion how Apple was 'actively limiting their development options'. Meanwhile many other video encoding/transcoding software on OS X has had GPU acceleration for years. Just like the Linux version of Flash player and the desperate clinging to Carbon for Photoshop has shown, Adobe is either lazy, or they tried to take on too many products for too many platforms at once. Now they want to bring Flash to mobile, I wish them good luck getting that to work well on all these different devices and mobile OS's, seeing that they don't seem to be able support any desktop platform properly for Flash, except Windows 32-bit.
Well at the very least HTML5 content will integrate with the rest of the DOM, instead of running in a closed black-box plugin. In other words the animated content is not *embedded* in the document, it *is* the document. I'd expect that this would at the very least make navigation, history and bookmarking much more predictable.
Anyway, I'm still amazed by the way this whole discussion goes everywhere. As if replacing Flash for all things that don't need Flash automatically implies Flash should die completely. Personally, as a software engineer and as a Linux and OS X user, I despise Flash from the bottom of my heart, for various reasons: it's inefficiently coded, full of bugs and security issues, and it runs like shit on anything except Windows. I really don't have a single good thing to say about it. But then again, I don't play web games or go to 'fashion websites' (since when did they become an important part of the internet?), and most of the time I blacklist companies or sites that think making their websites animate and play sounds make the content better, or the site more enjoyable to use (it *never*, *ever* does, literally). But hey, if someone else likes that kind of stuff, go ahead and use Flash, I don't see a problem with that. Just don't use Flash for useful stuff like playing video or implementing a navigation bar with onmouseovers, since there are much better alternatives for that.
The world isn't black and white, and the fact that Flash content doesn't play on iOS doesn't mean it doesn't have it's use on desktops. Apple never said it didn't want Flash on OS X, even though there it is also one big piece of inefficient crap.
[quote]Windows 7 is the first consumer desktop OS which is readily available and accepted in 64 bit.[/quote]
From Wikipedia:
- Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" was released on October 26, 2007, [..] full support for 64-bit applications
- Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009
Or you place v1.0.1 of the DLL in the same folder as App_A.exe. App_A will find v1.0.1 of the DLL before going to the shared location *IF* it's written properly
What's the point of having shared libraries if only the application itself can load them, and can only load single, checksummed version of it?
In "MSI packaging Land" this is called "Application Isolation".
In the rest of the world we call it 'static linking' :-P
The RIAA knows that they won't find much sympathy anywhere if they ask for a carte-blanche on traffic spying just to catch a few illegal MP3's, so they just throw in child pornography, for good measure.
Seriously, child pornography is the new Godwin for justifying invading privacy and getting constitutional exemptions.
Actually, 19 of the top 20 [openscreenproject.org] handset manufacturers have signed up to work with Adobe to bring native versions of Flash to their devices.
Translation: 19 out of 20 manufacturers that have Android 2.2+ handsets on the market or on their roadmap will not actively block it from the phone, when Adobe finally releases a Flash player that works on anything besides a Nexus One, an HTC Desire or a Droid 2.
Flash 10.1 is already out for Android 2.2, and is coming out on every single platform (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Meego (moblin + maemo), Blackberry, etc) except Apple's iOS
Translation: there's a beta out that works for 3 handsets, and Adobe still has plans to bring Flash player to every single piece of hardware on earth, just like they had 5 years ago. There is no ETA for Flash player on anything besides Android, and it has already been confirmed that neither WM, S^3 or Meego will have Flash Player when they launch.
It actually already runs pretty well on the iPhone too ...
Translation: there's a stop-gap unsupported version that somewhat runs on iPhone OS but doesn't support all features, and, most importantly, doesn't even do video. What you get is exactly what Apple wants to block Flash for: your battery runs down within 30 minutes, your phone gets really hot, and most Flash content is almost impossible to interact with since it was written for mouse+kb input.
... except that Steve Jobs banhammered Flash CS5 iPhone apps on the eve of Adobe's Creative Suite 5 launch
Translation: except that Steve Jobs banhammered all middleware solutions for writing iPhone applications, since they would be detrimental to the user experience, and the way Apple wants to support and update their OS and application ecosystem.
Instead of the possibility of a write once-run everywhere solution that's good enough with Flash, you'll now have to suck up significant resources just to build an iOS port
Translation: instead of trying to provide a free lunch for hordes of cheap-ass developers who want to 'write crap once, deploy everywhere' they *gasp* might have to learn something different, that's much more powerful, flexible and efficient. Customers everywhere don't give a shit, they already have a million native games and applications in the App Store already, which -on average- have significantly higher quality then any other mobile app store or any Flash content on full-blown PC's. So apparantly lack of Flash is not stopping anyone from creating good stuff on iOS.
you'll now have to suck up significant resources just to build an iOS port
Translation: writing great applications takes time and resources, providing developers with options to deploy generic stuff that is not specifically written to the hardware & software primarily benefits developers, not end-users.
It's good for protecting and providing business for native iPhone coders, but still, it's a headache and a resource-sink
Translation: if you don't have the time or resources to write great software for multiple platforms, pick one that works best for you and deploy to that.