Apple is, like Cisco, primarily a software company. It's Apple's software that sells its hardware, so while their revenue model is based on hardware sales, it's the software that makes them happen. No matter how nice Apple's hardware might be, without their software they'd sell no more than any other boutique hardware vendor, and once they burned through their cash reserves and liquid assets they'd just be another Alienware waiting to be bought by Dell or HP.
Focussing on their hardware, whether it's the iMac or iPhone, is definitely missing the point. This guy definitely gets it.
One thing that I would like to see more of is details of the ad-hoc licensing. My google-fu is failing me there.
On the other hand, usability issues that get fixed quickly under OS X, are often left to languor under Linux.
That's an ongoing problem with open source software, even on OS X. Camino, the "usability" oriented Gecko browser on OS X, has years-old issues.
On the gripping hand, Apple still hasn't cleaned up Finder, though I congratulate them for finally ditching Metal. The "Cocoa-ized" Leopard Finder has major regressions (for example, it no longer tracks different views of different folders).
Safari on Windows has a long way to go.
Their passive-aggressive relationship with multiple mouse buttons is a crying shame.
They haven't had a decent keyboard since Jobs took over.
And they badly need a new input handler and API. They could call it "Core Input", and have applications register with it to receive events like "menu request" or "next page" instead of having to track mouse and keyboard actions and having three hundred different ways of saying "I want to use control-meta-cokebottle-left-fish as page down" in as many different preference panes. They could even hook it in to Automator and Applescript...
Usenet is older than the web, it's older than the Internet proper, it's arguably older than any implementation of the Internet protocol (it started in 1981, the same year IP was defined), and well into the '90s it was bigger than the whole Internet.
Has new code been added to allow for citrate metabolisation, or was the mutation much smaller, maybe removing a blockage from existing but dormant code?
That's what they're going to work on next.
The press release is fascinating and infuriatingly incomplete at the same time.
That's an excellent reflection of the experiment, then! Welcome to science. It's like that. Lay back and enjoy it.
People do sit pretty far back. But HD is 1920x1080.
Or 1280x720, or 1280x1020, with chroma subsampling further reducing the effective resolution. But more to the point, as you say, "People do sit pretty far back." so you DO need bigger text to be legible regardless of the resolution.
They are structured document formats that support hotlinks both internal and external. They implement the concept envisioned by Vannevar Bush and prototyped (and given the name hypertext) by Ted Nelson.
PDF, in particular, seems like a strange choice -- it's mostly GhostScript, right?
Ghostscript is an open source implementation of one of the technologies underlying the original design of PDF, but no... PDF is not just encapsulated postscript. PDFs can contain all kinds of content, including editable forms and just about everything else associated with hypertext.
Flash might be considered more questionable than PDF, except that it's basically a collateral descendant of hypercard and is widely used to implement websites.
Why torture yourself to save a few bucks, or have all of the hardware for a great practical application wrapped in a useless interface that hardly allows you to work the thing?
My phone, after rebates, cost me $50. It's not a smartphone, it doesn't need to be, but the difference is not just a few bucks... and my phone has a replacable battery, a real keypad, and iSync likes it just fine.
I do my smart stuff on a separate PDA, which also syncs nicely, and has a better screen than the iPhone, and has multiple times the runtime of any cellphone... and hasn't lost data or required me to migrate to new software since I got my first PDA in 2000. I've been through four carriers at three jobs in that time, and none of them were compatible with each other. Don't know what I'm going to do when it dies, though, given Palm's slow suicide. I can't see a single handheld on the market now (phone or otherwise) that I really like.
Not excluding the iPhone and iPod touch.
Put another way, would every other manufacturer be trying to put out an iPhone killer if they didn't see it as a major threat?
Wrong question. The right question is, "would every other manufacturer be trying to put out an iPhone killer if it wasn't a major threat". The answer to that question is "well, sure, companies make really stupid decisions all the time". Heard anything about "Mac mini killers" lately from the companies who thought that the size of the Mac mini rather than the fact that it was the cheapest way to get a Mac was the real draw?
Or look at the companies trying to make iPod-alikes instead of making the best music player they could, because they have no clue what's really the key to the iPod's success.
The big question here is what happens when the commercial vendors of this stuff are gone?
What stuff?
Development tools? Anything less than a full IDE is pre-doomed, and Microsoft owns the IDE. The only place you could see competition for IDEs was on the Mac, and Apple killed that with XCode. As you say, Eclipse is not an "open source" story, it's an "IBM vs Microsoft" story.
Or software in general? You were talking about window managers... so far as I know there are no proprietary window managers, there haven't been since Motif and CDE died a much-deserved death... because they were *worse* than the open source ones. The two biggest players in the X11 desktop game are open source, yes, but they're both commercial products created and maintained by people who are paid to do it.
Outside "software for geeks", where are the big players open source products that have "put down" the commercial vendors?
If the display only generated the specific million colors that you can distinguish, you'd be right, but there's nothing like a 1:1 match between the RGB color map and what you can see.
Gee, I'm being paid for working on open source software. Open source doesn't mean "people doing it for free in their spare time".
What's really killing "professional developer tools" isn't open source. It's the fact that it's a business where you're making cabinets for carpenters. It's always been like that... "professional" editors and development environments have mostly been short lived, and a new editor that's only moderately better than what people have now (and that's always been the case for this class of software) is guaranteed to have a short lifespan. If open source didn't copy what you were doing, Microsoft would put it in Visual Studio and Apple would put it in XCode and the result would be the same for you.
The only way you can stay around long term is to build in incompatibilities that lock people into your compiler, like Borland did for many years. If you don't have a compiler, you barely have a product at all.
PS: the ones doing it for free aren't the "whores".
I'm talking about TCP and IP, which you've mentioned, which are low-level Internet protocols. It's right there in the name -- Internet Protocol. I'm not really sure what the rest has to do with the WWW.
Well, the first set of names I gave you were precursor networking protocols and platforms. You objected to them, so I came up with some higher layers. The point is that at EVERY layer there is ALWAYS a period where you have competing proprietary and public schemes, some of which eventually become standards.
[re: battling hypertext formats.] Yeah, we have HTML, and HTML, and, oh, HTML.
We have XHTML, WML, PDF, OOXML, Flash,...
I think at Windows 95, you can pretty much mark it as mainstream.
From 1974 to 1995 means it took 21 years to go from the first attempt at a hypertext format to it becoming mainstream, and even in 1995 there were still at least three major competitors to HTML... which is one of the reasons Microsoft broke their deal with the DoJ and put IE in Windows.
And hypertext is much simpler than VR. And VR, even just for avatars, is MUCH more complex than you seem to think.
Have you actually *done* any building in ActiveWorlds, There, or Second Life? It doesn't sound like it.
Actually, you're talking about the Internet. There's a difference.
Oh, OK, you're talking about NAPLPS vs that French teletext system versus ANSI graphics? Or are you talking about finger vs FTP vs gopher?
And [3d graphics] is pretty solved. Read triangle from file here, upload to OpenGL here. Add lighting, shaders, effects. Add scripting.
2d graphics was pretty solved by the mid '80s. We were still having Battling Browsers in 2000... um, make that 2005. Arguably even 2008.
That's like putting off the HTML spec until we have antialiased fonts.
Who's "putting it off"? The first hypertext formats were in the '70s, by the time HTML showed up there'd been half a dozen "this one's for real" standards brought up over the past half dozen years. Adobe is still holding a rearguard action with PDF and Microsoft's got their new "One Note" Windows-only-standard.
Hell, we *still* don't have a standard structured text document format, and the first markup formats for structured documents are older than Xanadu.
"Arbitrary constructs" meaning, what, meshes?
Arbitrary texture libraries, arbitrary skeletons, arbitrary animation and reverse kinematic rules, arbitrary mesh flexibility, arbitrary mesh layers (some worlds only allow one layer, others have up to a dozen and others let you combine arbitrary numbers of meshes that can move independently).
VRML is 14 years old. Not that I think VRML is necessarily a good spec, but... It's 14 years old!
Xanadu is over 30 years old, and we STILL have battling hypertext formats.
Windows 95 was released in (can you guess?) 1995, and every copy came bundled with a browser.
One that violated and continues to violate the standards it's claiming to implement.
it seems even that first step of coming up with a spec which could one day become a standard hasn't been done yet.
Well, actually, there's at least three projects I know of working on specs that could one day become standards. Guess what that means? Did I mention Battling Formats?
No, seriously, it's early days yet, the "excitement" is just starting!
If it were from Nokia or Microsoft, it wouldn't have all the features that make people want to own an iPhone.
The high end Nokias are pretty damn nice phones, and have some pretty damn nice features, and work together pretty damn well. And, well, the lack of a keypad and the clumsy text entry are not "doing things well", they're shiny chrome. I can take notes at a meeting on my Palm, or on a Microsoft mobile phone, I've seen people trying that on the iPhone and it's not pretty.
And *as a phone* it's just a phone, one that you can't easily use one-handed and that you can't use at all by feel.
Not everything that Apple does is good just because it's Apple. I wrote off the Mac years ago, and it took me some time to accept OS X as Apple turning around the stuff that had driven me away from them. But there's a core fascination with Apple just because it *is* Apple, and even when I was completely dismissive of them I kept watching to see what the hell crazy stuff they were going to do next.
THe iPhone is nice, It'd be cool one if someone gave it to me, just like It'd be kind of cool to have Nokia 9000 series phones when they were "everything that was shiny". But except for a month or so after it appeared in that James Bond flick the shininess of the Nokia 9000 series didn't made people who don't care about smartphones (that is, most people) keep paying attention to it.
The point is that smartphones are bloody expensive, most people don't really need or even strongly want one, and it's only that this one's by Apple is making people forget that like all smartphones it's really a geek toy.
There aren't multiple World Wide Webs. There's just one.
And it took years of work to make that happen, to bring together TCP/IP, UUCP, BITNET, BBSes, FIDO, the various online services like Compuserve and Delphi, and later AOL and MSN, and have it all fall together into the World Wide Web.
There aren't multiple "Email Networks" -- again, just one.
In the '80s your email address could be "USER AT MIT-AI", "c.user%ucbcory@UCBVAX", "cn=Random User, ou=Staff, o=Your Company, c=us", "...!ihnp4!mhuxa!user", and so on. They all developed separately and grew together.
3d is a pretty complex problem and the technology to make arbitrary constructs and avatars from different sources work well with any kind of realism is still under active and rapid development. It's hard enough getting it to work at all, let alone limiting it to some sort of common subset of all the possible ways people are making it happen.
There are a number of standards being developed, but we're in early years yet.
Most smartphones are even more expensive month-to-month. What's your point?
Smartphones are bloody expensive? Most people don't have any reason to care about smartphones? If this was from Nokia or Microsoft the only people who would care would be the yuppies who can actually justify the cost?
Slashdot Mirror
They should still be able to beat 1980 floppy boot times using a CD-ROM.
Yes, I know they're doing a lot more than in 1980.
That's the problem. How much of what they're doing is necessary?
Apple is, like Cisco, primarily a software company. It's Apple's software that sells its hardware, so while their revenue model is based on hardware sales, it's the software that makes them happen. No matter how nice Apple's hardware might be, without their software they'd sell no more than any other boutique hardware vendor, and once they burned through their cash reserves and liquid assets they'd just be another Alienware waiting to be bought by Dell or HP.
Focussing on their hardware, whether it's the iMac or iPhone, is definitely missing the point. This guy definitely gets it.
One thing that I would like to see more of is details of the ad-hoc licensing. My google-fu is failing me there.
On the other hand, usability issues that get fixed quickly under OS X, are often left to languor under Linux.
That's an ongoing problem with open source software, even on OS X. Camino, the "usability" oriented Gecko browser on OS X, has years-old issues.
On the gripping hand, Apple still hasn't cleaned up Finder, though I congratulate them for finally ditching Metal. The "Cocoa-ized" Leopard Finder has major regressions (for example, it no longer tracks different views of different folders).
Safari on Windows has a long way to go.
Their passive-aggressive relationship with multiple mouse buttons is a crying shame.
They haven't had a decent keyboard since Jobs took over.
And they badly need a new input handler and API. They could call it "Core Input", and have applications register with it to receive events like "menu request" or "next page" instead of having to track mouse and keyboard actions and having three hundred different ways of saying "I want to use control-meta-cokebottle-left-fish as page down" in as many different preference panes. They could even hook it in to Automator and Applescript...
I'm sick of boot times measured in minutes.
What is this, 1980?
The first false positive is Usenet.
ALL of Usenet, for Time Warner at least.
Usenet is older than the web, it's older than the Internet proper, it's arguably older than any implementation of the Internet protocol (it started in 1981, the same year IP was defined), and well into the '90s it was bigger than the whole Internet.
There's no "only" about this.
Because what they're doing is dropping Usenet, all or part.
Has new code been added to allow for citrate metabolisation, or was the mutation much smaller, maybe removing a blockage from existing but dormant code?
That's what they're going to work on next.
The press release is fascinating and infuriatingly incomplete at the same time.
That's an excellent reflection of the experiment, then! Welcome to science. It's like that. Lay back and enjoy it.
People do sit pretty far back. But HD is 1920x1080.
Or 1280x720, or 1280x1020, with chroma subsampling further reducing the effective resolution. But more to the point, as you say, "People do sit pretty far back." so you DO need bigger text to be legible regardless of the resolution.
Time for a new poll, perhaps? What's going to be the first false positive?
How are these hypertext?
They are structured document formats that support hotlinks both internal and external. They implement the concept envisioned by Vannevar Bush and prototyped (and given the name hypertext) by Ted Nelson.
PDF, in particular, seems like a strange choice -- it's mostly GhostScript, right?
Ghostscript is an open source implementation of one of the technologies underlying the original design of PDF, but no... PDF is not just encapsulated postscript. PDFs can contain all kinds of content, including editable forms and just about everything else associated with hypertext.
Flash might be considered more questionable than PDF, except that it's basically a collateral descendant of hypercard and is widely used to implement websites.
Why torture yourself to save a few bucks, or have all of the hardware for a great practical application wrapped in a useless interface that hardly allows you to work the thing?
My phone, after rebates, cost me $50. It's not a smartphone, it doesn't need to be, but the difference is not just a few bucks... and my phone has a replacable battery, a real keypad, and iSync likes it just fine.
I do my smart stuff on a separate PDA, which also syncs nicely, and has a better screen than the iPhone, and has multiple times the runtime of any cellphone... and hasn't lost data or required me to migrate to new software since I got my first PDA in 2000. I've been through four carriers at three jobs in that time, and none of them were compatible with each other. Don't know what I'm going to do when it dies, though, given Palm's slow suicide. I can't see a single handheld on the market now (phone or otherwise) that I really like.
Not excluding the iPhone and iPod touch.
Put another way, would every other manufacturer be trying to put out an iPhone killer if they didn't see it as a major threat?
Wrong question. The right question is, "would every other manufacturer be trying to put out an iPhone killer if it wasn't a major threat". The answer to that question is "well, sure, companies make really stupid decisions all the time". Heard anything about "Mac mini killers" lately from the companies who thought that the size of the Mac mini rather than the fact that it was the cheapest way to get a Mac was the real draw?
Or look at the companies trying to make iPod-alikes instead of making the best music player they could, because they have no clue what's really the key to the iPod's success.
Guess we need to get ready to pump up the greenhouse gasses to compensate.
The big question here is what happens when the commercial vendors of this stuff are gone?
What stuff?
Development tools? Anything less than a full IDE is pre-doomed, and Microsoft owns the IDE. The only place you could see competition for IDEs was on the Mac, and Apple killed that with XCode. As you say, Eclipse is not an "open source" story, it's an "IBM vs Microsoft" story.
Or software in general? You were talking about window managers... so far as I know there are no proprietary window managers, there haven't been since Motif and CDE died a much-deserved death... because they were *worse* than the open source ones. The two biggest players in the X11 desktop game are open source, yes, but they're both commercial products created and maintained by people who are paid to do it.
Outside "software for geeks", where are the big players open source products that have "put down" the commercial vendors?
If the display only generated the specific million colors that you can distinguish, you'd be right, but there's nothing like a 1:1 match between the RGB color map and what you can see.
Gee, I'm being paid for working on open source software. Open source doesn't mean "people doing it for free in their spare time".
What's really killing "professional developer tools" isn't open source. It's the fact that it's a business where you're making cabinets for carpenters. It's always been like that... "professional" editors and development environments have mostly been short lived, and a new editor that's only moderately better than what people have now (and that's always been the case for this class of software) is guaranteed to have a short lifespan. If open source didn't copy what you were doing, Microsoft would put it in Visual Studio and Apple would put it in XCode and the result would be the same for you.
The only way you can stay around long term is to build in incompatibilities that lock people into your compiler, like Borland did for many years. If you don't have a compiler, you barely have a product at all.
PS: the ones doing it for free aren't the "whores".
I'm talking about TCP and IP, which you've mentioned, which are low-level Internet protocols. It's right there in the name -- Internet Protocol. I'm not really sure what the rest has to do with the WWW.
...
Well, the first set of names I gave you were precursor networking protocols and platforms. You objected to them, so I came up with some higher layers. The point is that at EVERY layer there is ALWAYS a period where you have competing proprietary and public schemes, some of which eventually become standards.
[re: battling hypertext formats.] Yeah, we have HTML, and HTML, and, oh, HTML.
We have XHTML, WML, PDF, OOXML, Flash,
I think at Windows 95, you can pretty much mark it as mainstream.
From 1974 to 1995 means it took 21 years to go from the first attempt at a hypertext format to it becoming mainstream, and even in 1995 there were still at least three major competitors to HTML... which is one of the reasons Microsoft broke their deal with the DoJ and put IE in Windows.
And hypertext is much simpler than VR. And VR, even just for avatars, is MUCH more complex than you seem to think.
Have you actually *done* any building in ActiveWorlds, There, or Second Life? It doesn't sound like it.
Actually, you're talking about the Internet. There's a difference.
Oh, OK, you're talking about NAPLPS vs that French teletext system versus ANSI graphics? Or are you talking about finger vs FTP vs gopher?
And [3d graphics] is pretty solved. Read triangle from file here, upload to OpenGL here. Add lighting, shaders, effects. Add scripting.
2d graphics was pretty solved by the mid '80s. We were still having Battling Browsers in 2000... um, make that 2005. Arguably even 2008.
That's like putting off the HTML spec until we have antialiased fonts.
Who's "putting it off"? The first hypertext formats were in the '70s, by the time HTML showed up there'd been half a dozen "this one's for real" standards brought up over the past half dozen years. Adobe is still holding a rearguard action with PDF and Microsoft's got their new "One Note" Windows-only-standard.
Hell, we *still* don't have a standard structured text document format, and the first markup formats for structured documents are older than Xanadu.
"Arbitrary constructs" meaning, what, meshes?
Arbitrary texture libraries, arbitrary skeletons, arbitrary animation and reverse kinematic rules, arbitrary mesh flexibility, arbitrary mesh layers (some worlds only allow one layer, others have up to a dozen and others let you combine arbitrary numbers of meshes that can move independently).
VRML is 14 years old. Not that I think VRML is necessarily a good spec, but... It's 14 years old!
Xanadu is over 30 years old, and we STILL have battling hypertext formats.
Windows 95 was released in (can you guess?) 1995, and every copy came bundled with a browser.
One that violated and continues to violate the standards it's claiming to implement.
it seems even that first step of coming up with a spec which could one day become a standard hasn't been done yet.
Well, actually, there's at least three projects I know of working on specs that could one day become standards. Guess what that means? Did I mention Battling Formats?
No, seriously, it's early days yet, the "excitement" is just starting!
If it were from Nokia or Microsoft, it wouldn't have all the features that make people want to own an iPhone.
The high end Nokias are pretty damn nice phones, and have some pretty damn nice features, and work together pretty damn well. And, well, the lack of a keypad and the clumsy text entry are not "doing things well", they're shiny chrome. I can take notes at a meeting on my Palm, or on a Microsoft mobile phone, I've seen people trying that on the iPhone and it's not pretty.
And *as a phone* it's just a phone, one that you can't easily use one-handed and that you can't use at all by feel.
Not everything that Apple does is good just because it's Apple. I wrote off the Mac years ago, and it took me some time to accept OS X as Apple turning around the stuff that had driven me away from them. But there's a core fascination with Apple just because it *is* Apple, and even when I was completely dismissive of them I kept watching to see what the hell crazy stuff they were going to do next.
THe iPhone is nice, It'd be cool one if someone gave it to me, just like It'd be kind of cool to have Nokia 9000 series phones when they were "everything that was shiny". But except for a month or so after it appeared in that James Bond flick the shininess of the Nokia 9000 series didn't made people who don't care about smartphones (that is, most people) keep paying attention to it.
The point is that smartphones are bloody expensive, most people don't really need or even strongly want one, and it's only that this one's by Apple is making people forget that like all smartphones it's really a geek toy.
There aren't multiple World Wide Webs. There's just one.
And it took years of work to make that happen, to bring together TCP/IP, UUCP, BITNET, BBSes, FIDO, the various online services like Compuserve and Delphi, and later AOL and MSN, and have it all fall together into the World Wide Web.
There aren't multiple "Email Networks" -- again, just one.
In the '80s your email address could be "USER AT MIT-AI", "c.user%ucbcory@UCBVAX", "cn=Random User, ou=Staff, o=Your Company, c=us", "...!ihnp4!mhuxa!user", and so on. They all developed separately and grew together.
3d is a pretty complex problem and the technology to make arbitrary constructs and avatars from different sources work well with any kind of realism is still under active and rapid development. It's hard enough getting it to work at all, let alone limiting it to some sort of common subset of all the possible ways people are making it happen.
There are a number of standards being developed, but we're in early years yet.
And it's under NDA. So no obvious live feeds.
Ah, apart from http://www.apple.com/ca/press/2008_06/snow_leopard.html then.
I guess you missed the announcement of the next keynote, all about SnowLeopard... Starting right now, in fact :)
And who's covering it? Nobody.
Most smartphones are even more expensive month-to-month. What's your point?
Smartphones are bloody expensive? Most people don't have any reason to care about smartphones? If this was from Nokia or Microsoft the only people who would care would be the yuppies who can actually justify the cost?
So, is *anyone* providing coverage of Snow Leopard?
Only if you can get a cellphone company to subsidize them, I suspect.