Nah, it's probably OpenGL inside a minimal Cocoa shell.
OK, point taken, but what I mean is that it's not running GDI/DirectX under an emulator like the other recent quote-ports-unquote of games to the Mac have been.:)
If they have elements of Spore running on the iPhone that likely means it's native Cocoa, and not running under Wine on steroids. That's better news than anything else in the announcement, I think.
I've used and supported devices using ActiveSync, and it's not my idea of a good time. At one point ActiveSync decided to use 192.168.55.0/24 (if I recall correctly) and so all of a sudden everyone with a Pocket PC couldn't get to one of our internal test-floor subnets.
Luckily, they will probably only implement the parts needed to sync with Exchange and not the whole complex mess that made it SO much fun on the Pocket PC.
What happens when Microsoft wants to make a iPhone version of IE (iE?)?
That depends on whether it supported ActiveX or Silverlight or not, since you could use those tools to bypass the iPhone store. But I don't see Microsoft doing that... they never did when they were distributing IE for the Mac.
I might see Microsoft making a port of the mobile version of Windows Media Player. That might raise a few eyebrows at Apple.
I thought I had just gone through explaining how you didn't need distros to get choice.
You can do everything you want to do with a distro using ports and packages. FreeBSD has a "hell of a package management system". The FreeBSD core doesn't include the GUI (even X11 is optional) and you can build less than the core (PicoBSD, for example, which we used to make automatic "ghost"-like Windows NT install floppies at ABB).
Basically, almost all the options you're talking about are possible with FreeBSD... including going with a bleeding-edge version or sticking with a stable one. You could build a fancy GUI installer if you wanted... the installer just builds the file systems and unpacks the core tarballs and packages in place... or you could install the core by hand by mounting a new disk and running the appropriate fdisk, disklabel, mkfs, and tar operations by hand.
What you don't get is the option of ending up with a system where you have to learn how to admin it all over again. You don't get battling package tools. You don't discover that yast has blown away half of/etc behind your back. I am more than happy to skip the stuff you don't get.
that everything needs to be compiled from source (ala gentoo) or that everything is precompiled for somebody else's needs (ala debian)
If you want to compile from source, you can, that's how Ports works. If you want to use precompiled versions you can install packages. You don't need to have multiple distros to be able to configure the system the way you need, you start with a core OS (which you can rebuild from source if you *really* want) and then add packages. There are people who do canned FreeBSD installs and ISOs, similar to Linux distros, but without the distro drama.
(especially as stupid license nazis stop us sharing code *shakes fist*)
But what about the guy who sends a "Hey John, what's up?" e-mail to his bud, Airman John Doe at john.doe@mildenhall.com.
That's a completely different issue, and these days it's a minor one.
To put it into perspective, by 1999 I was getting so much spam to my personal domain that I was going over my bandwidth cap just turning around the "RCPT TO" lines for non-existent accounts pulled from spammers parsing Usenet message-IDs as emou addresses. Within a couple of years I was not inly using an RBL but blocking entire countries just to avoid the bandwidth cost of dealing with spam, but luckily bandwidth has giotten cheap enough I don't need to worry TOO much about that any more. I get tremendous quantities of mail that I have to just throw away at the server. If every grunt in the US Army decided that my system was where their buddy John Doe was at, I don't think I'd notice.
And in 1999 my box was at most a Pentium 100 with 16M of RAM... it might have still been the original 486/50 I started with. Even today it's no powerhouse. CPU power was never an issue. I *am* running a small site, and if I can handle this kind of traffic then if anyone's actually burdened by even a high volume of misdirected mail they need to fire their email software.
And what do you do as a network administrator of a site with a customer at widgets.net or widgets.us or widgets.info when a bunch of your users keep inadvertently sending e-mail to your (or his) competitor at widgets.com?
That's a tougher one.
I'd add a filter to my email server that bounces internal mail going to widgets.com unless it's got some override token set by the user.
But I realize I'm not your average bear... by the time I left ABB I was doing things a lot more complex than that in our local email server. What the average network admin could do, using random commercial email software, I don't know.
Certainly nobody should send sensitive information unencrypted over non-secure channels, but it sounds like the biggest problem here was the volume of the traffic.
Didn't the DoD come up with the solution to this in the '80s? Remember the Orange Book?
That's the solution: you need mandatory access control when you're dealing with classified material. If you're sending material from a classified computer, or moving it from a classified zone on a compartmentalized computer system, then it should be encrypted automatically. If the computer system does not implement MAC then it needs to be treated as if all the data on it was at the level of the maximally classified data it's allowed to contain.
C2 security isn't good enough for stuff like this.
If video footage of a crime in-the-act is caught, should it reasonably be expected that all of the above information about the digital camcorder be provided to validate the evidence? The storage media also?.. and the computer used to view and process?
No, but they'd reasonably ask to see the actual footage... not the result of a face recognition system and a copy of the suspect's driver's license. And if photography were only a decade or three old, and had been known to photograph the wrong person?
I suspect that the demands are probably more than they need, and I suspect they don't expect to get all they're asking for, but I don't think it's unreasonable to demand more details than you would of a videotape.
Wont it always be true that raytracing is slower, uses more ram etc.
That's not a given. A few years back a university in Germany demonstrated a dedicated raytracing engine that was getting a video-game quality realtime raytraced scenes. The thing is that this processor was only running at 66 MHz and only had 352 Mb/s memory bandwidth. Today's GPUs are running 8 times as fast, have 100 times as many transistors (which translates to more parallel ray computations), and many times the memory bandwidth.
By concentrating on hardware designed for raytracing instead of using general purpose hardware and algorithms optimized for that hardware Philip Slusallek was able to get real-time raytracing for a fraction of teh computational cost.
By delaying the acceptance of these devices this means that there are fewer of the early models on the market. Since early models would be more likely to have exploitable bugs in their DRM, this may improve the average quality of the DRM (HDCP, etc) over the long term.
If that's all the bill states, and it's enforced fairly and objectively, then it's meaningless, because the evidence, objectively presented, does not contradict the theory of natural selection.
I suspect that the intent is that the word "objectively" will be read as "subjectively" by the courts.
When it comes to matters of religion and philosophy, kids are going to take a cue from their parents, and make their own conclusions, just like we did.
When it comes to matters of religion and philosophy, kids generally get more input from peers and schools than homes. This is not saying that parents aren't doing a good job of communicating to their kids, or that this is necessarily a problem, but anyone who has actually had kids knows this.
what I was told about evolution 20 years ago is different than now.
Why on earth would you expect anything different? That's how science works. that's pretty close to the definition of what the scientific method is. If a theory doesn't get changed and modified as new information comes in, it's not science, it's religion.
Dawkins really must believe he's the first person in history to question the existence of God [...] how would anyone idolize him?
Wow. Two straw men in one paragraph!
1. What on earth does evolution have to do with the existence of God? What's more wonderful, a static creation that requires continual handholding, or a dynamic one that recreates itself continuously once set in motion?
2. What on earth makes you think that people are idolizing him?
I largely agree with you, but too many companies who SHOULD know better have started sending deep links to accounts.
If a guy shows up at your front door and says he's a police officer, do you take his word for it and let him in or ask to see some ID? Do you know what a real police badge looks like?
Me, I don't let anyone in to my house unless I called 'em, even if they're the police. People need to learn to do the same thing with email.
And, unfortunately. companies from Microsoft on down are training them differently.
Anti-phishing is a front and feature, NOT part of the rendering code. Camino and Safari are the two leading browsers on the Mac.
I woudl imagine Kmelion (the Wintel equivalent of Camino - a gecko-based lightweight browser) has no anti-phishing either.
My opinion is that anti-phishing is like anti-virus... a bunch of hacks tracking often-phished sites. It's best to learn to be non-phishable.
I do applaud Paypal for sticking to their guns about never sending deep links to accounts in emails. I wish other companies like Microsoft would do the same. I used to hammer in to my users that smart companies would never send deep links like that, so if they got mail from Microsoft or anyone else that asked them to download something or enter a password "on faith" it was a fraud (either a virus or phishing), but lo and behold Microsoft started doing it. *sigh*
In another message I already noted that I thought it might sell better than Woz thinks.
The message you were replying to stated that I hoped it wouldn't start a long-term trend of similarly crippled laptops from other companies. Which is a whole different story.
That would be true, if the Air was the only or the cheapest laptop to come with OS X.
One might as well say that the presence of computers more expensive than the Mac mini proves that people really want the Mac hardware.:) All Apple's computers have severe deficiencies, one way or another.
People have a variety of requirements beyond the OS, but it's the OS that primarily distinguishes Apple's products from the competition, and without the OS Apple's not even in the competition.
I can't say if the new Air will do the same thing for the notebook market or not.
Hopefully it will have as much effect on the market as the iMac and Mini. To wit: a sporadic scatter of me-too products every time a new version comes out, which don't sell very well because the bottom line is that these are not really very good designs and without OS X they just don't have much traction.
All those comments could have come right from here.:)
Personally I think the Macbook Air may sell well, because Apple's proven they can get users to suffer through all kinds of hardware deficiencies to get their software.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, it's probably OpenGL inside a minimal Cocoa shell.
:)
OK, point taken, but what I mean is that it's not running GDI/DirectX under an emulator like the other recent quote-ports-unquote of games to the Mac have been.
If they have elements of Spore running on the iPhone that likely means it's native Cocoa, and not running under Wine on steroids. That's better news than anything else in the announcement, I think.
I've used and supported devices using ActiveSync, and it's not my idea of a good time. At one point ActiveSync decided to use 192.168.55.0/24 (if I recall correctly) and so all of a sudden everyone with a Pocket PC couldn't get to one of our internal test-floor subnets.
Luckily, they will probably only implement the parts needed to sync with Exchange and not the whole complex mess that made it SO much fun on the Pocket PC.
What happens when Microsoft wants to make a iPhone version of IE (iE?)?
That depends on whether it supported ActiveX or Silverlight or not, since you could use those tools to bypass the iPhone store. But I don't see Microsoft doing that... they never did when they were distributing IE for the Mac.
I might see Microsoft making a port of the mobile version of Windows Media Player. That might raise a few eyebrows at Apple.
I thought I had just gone through explaining how you didn't need distros to get choice.
/etc behind your back. I am more than happy to skip the stuff you don't get.
You can do everything you want to do with a distro using ports and packages. FreeBSD has a "hell of a package management system". The FreeBSD core doesn't include the GUI (even X11 is optional) and you can build less than the core (PicoBSD, for example, which we used to make automatic "ghost"-like Windows NT install floppies at ABB).
Basically, almost all the options you're talking about are possible with FreeBSD... including going with a bleeding-edge version or sticking with a stable one. You could build a fancy GUI installer if you wanted... the installer just builds the file systems and unpacks the core tarballs and packages in place... or you could install the core by hand by mounting a new disk and running the appropriate fdisk, disklabel, mkfs, and tar operations by hand.
What you don't get is the option of ending up with a system where you have to learn how to admin it all over again. You don't get battling package tools. You don't discover that yast has blown away half of
AFAIK bsd code cant be clinked to gpl code
That does not happen to be the case.
Whats the advantage of not having any distros?
What's the advantage of having multiple distros?
that everything needs to be compiled from source (ala gentoo) or that everything is precompiled for somebody else's needs (ala debian)
If you want to compile from source, you can, that's how Ports works. If you want to use precompiled versions you can install packages. You don't need to have multiple distros to be able to configure the system the way you need, you start with a core OS (which you can rebuild from source if you *really* want) and then add packages. There are people who do canned FreeBSD installs and ISOs, similar to Linux distros, but without the distro drama.
(especially as stupid license nazis stop us sharing code *shakes fist*)
What on earth does that refer to?
Ummm... Doctor Evil... they already released their iPhone compatible media standard, and it's an actual standard codec: H.264 - MPEG4 part 10.
Want to try again?
But what about the guy who sends a "Hey John, what's up?" e-mail to his bud, Airman John Doe at john.doe@mildenhall.com.
That's a completely different issue, and these days it's a minor one.
To put it into perspective, by 1999 I was getting so much spam to my personal domain that I was going over my bandwidth cap just turning around the "RCPT TO" lines for non-existent accounts pulled from spammers parsing Usenet message-IDs as emou addresses. Within a couple of years I was not inly using an RBL but blocking entire countries just to avoid the bandwidth cost of dealing with spam, but luckily bandwidth has giotten cheap enough I don't need to worry TOO much about that any more. I get tremendous quantities of mail that I have to just throw away at the server. If every grunt in the US Army decided that my system was where their buddy John Doe was at, I don't think I'd notice.
And in 1999 my box was at most a Pentium 100 with 16M of RAM... it might have still been the original 486/50 I started with. Even today it's no powerhouse. CPU power was never an issue. I *am* running a small site, and if I can handle this kind of traffic then if anyone's actually burdened by even a high volume of misdirected mail they need to fire their email software.
And what do you do as a network administrator of a site with a customer at widgets.net or widgets.us or widgets.info when a bunch of your users keep inadvertently sending e-mail to your (or his) competitor at widgets.com?
That's a tougher one.
I'd add a filter to my email server that bounces internal mail going to widgets.com unless it's got some override token set by the user.
But I realize I'm not your average bear... by the time I left ABB I was doing things a lot more complex than that in our local email server. What the average network admin could do, using random commercial email software, I don't know.
Certainly nobody should send sensitive information unencrypted over non-secure channels, but it sounds like the biggest problem here was the volume of the traffic.
Didn't the DoD come up with the solution to this in the '80s? Remember the Orange Book?
That's the solution: you need mandatory access control when you're dealing with classified material. If you're sending material from a classified computer, or moving it from a classified zone on a compartmentalized computer system, then it should be encrypted automatically. If the computer system does not implement MAC then it needs to be treated as if all the data on it was at the level of the maximally classified data it's allowed to contain.
C2 security isn't good enough for stuff like this.
If video footage of a crime in-the-act is caught, should it reasonably be expected that all of the above information about the digital camcorder be provided to validate the evidence? The storage media also? .. and the computer used to view and process?
No, but they'd reasonably ask to see the actual footage... not the result of a face recognition system and a copy of the suspect's driver's license. And if photography were only a decade or three old, and had been known to photograph the wrong person?
I suspect that the demands are probably more than they need, and I suspect they don't expect to get all they're asking for, but I don't think it's unreasonable to demand more details than you would of a videotape.
Wont it always be true that raytracing is slower, uses more ram etc.
That's not a given. A few years back a university in Germany demonstrated a dedicated raytracing engine that was getting a video-game quality realtime raytraced scenes. The thing is that this processor was only running at 66 MHz and only had 352 Mb/s memory bandwidth. Today's GPUs are running 8 times as fast, have 100 times as many transistors (which translates to more parallel ray computations), and many times the memory bandwidth.
By concentrating on hardware designed for raytracing instead of using general purpose hardware and algorithms optimized for that hardware Philip Slusallek was able to get real-time raytracing for a fraction of teh computational cost.
Ah, but what is the legal definition of "scientific"?
Subject to games played with the legal definition of "objective", of course.
But, for every day it doesn't the more and more we move away from being lined up.
How do you know? We might be drifting into alignment. There's several degrees of uncertainty as to how precisely the system is aligned.
By delaying the acceptance of these devices this means that there are fewer of the early models on the market. Since early models would be more likely to have exploitable bugs in their DRM, this may improve the average quality of the DRM (HDCP, etc) over the long term.
Winner, MPAA. Loser, consumer.
If that's all the bill states, and it's enforced fairly and objectively, then it's meaningless, because the evidence, objectively presented, does not contradict the theory of natural selection.
I suspect that the intent is that the word "objectively" will be read as "subjectively" by the courts.
When it comes to matters of religion and philosophy, kids are going to take a cue from their parents, and make their own conclusions, just like we did.
When it comes to matters of religion and philosophy, kids generally get more input from peers and schools than homes. This is not saying that parents aren't doing a good job of communicating to their kids, or that this is necessarily a problem, but anyone who has actually had kids knows this.
what I was told about evolution 20 years ago is different than now.
Why on earth would you expect anything different? That's how science works. that's pretty close to the definition of what the scientific method is. If a theory doesn't get changed and modified as new information comes in, it's not science, it's religion.
Dawkins really must believe he's the first person in history to question the existence of God [...] how would anyone idolize him?
Wow. Two straw men in one paragraph!
1. What on earth does evolution have to do with the existence of God? What's more wonderful, a static creation that requires continual handholding, or a dynamic one that recreates itself continuously once set in motion?
2. What on earth makes you think that people are idolizing him?
I largely agree with you, but too many companies who SHOULD know better have started sending deep links to accounts.
If a guy shows up at your front door and says he's a police officer, do you take his word for it and let him in or ask to see some ID? Do you know what a real police badge looks like?
Me, I don't let anyone in to my house unless I called 'em, even if they're the police. People need to learn to do the same thing with email.
And, unfortunately. companies from Microsoft on down are training them differently.
Anti-phishing is a front and feature, NOT part of the rendering code. Camino and Safari are the two leading browsers on the Mac.
I woudl imagine Kmelion (the Wintel equivalent of Camino - a gecko-based lightweight browser) has no anti-phishing either.
My opinion is that anti-phishing is like anti-virus... a bunch of hacks tracking often-phished sites. It's best to learn to be non-phishable.
I do applaud Paypal for sticking to their guns about never sending deep links to accounts in emails. I wish other companies like Microsoft would do the same. I used to hammer in to my users that smart companies would never send deep links like that, so if they got mail from Microsoft or anyone else that asked them to download something or enter a password "on faith" it was a fraud (either a virus or phishing), but lo and behold Microsoft started doing it. *sigh*
In another message I already noted that I thought it might sell better than Woz thinks.
The message you were replying to stated that I hoped it wouldn't start a long-term trend of similarly crippled laptops from other companies. Which is a whole different story.
This all still means "still earning money off these products", which is what the OP was snarking about.
I agree that there are people who really like Apple's hardware, but enough to run the company on, if they didn't have the OS? I'm REALLY doubtful.
That would be true, if the Air was the only or the cheapest laptop to come with OS X.
:) All Apple's computers have severe deficiencies, one way or another.
One might as well say that the presence of computers more expensive than the Mac mini proves that people really want the Mac hardware.
People have a variety of requirements beyond the OS, but it's the OS that primarily distinguishes Apple's products from the competition, and without the OS Apple's not even in the competition.
I can't say if the new Air will do the same thing for the notebook market or not.
Hopefully it will have as much effect on the market as the iMac and Mini. To wit: a sporadic scatter of me-too products every time a new version comes out, which don't sell very well because the bottom line is that these are not really very good designs and without OS X they just don't have much traction.
Woz is, according to the article you obviously didn't read, still employed by and invested in Apple.
All those comments could have come right from here. :)
Personally I think the Macbook Air may sell well, because Apple's proven they can get users to suffer through all kinds of hardware deficiencies to get their software.