That's the *big* feature. Screw the user interface tweakage, being able to forget about release pools and the rest of the manual storage management twaddle is going to be amazing.
Zune is nothing but a Pocket PC with a hard drive.
I've owned four Pocket PCs over the last 6 years. They've all had MP3 playing support. Most had Wifi support. But they aren't terribly good as MP3 players... the OS is too heavy and complex for a handheld, it very much needs to be treated as a desktop OS stripped down, not something built from the ground up to run an embedded application. It even runs programs by copying them from "file system" RAM to "program" RAM. Very strange beast.
The Pocket PC really had the potential of being an ultralight laptop replacement OS, if Microsoft had kept working on it that way they'd have "Tablet PCs" that really *were* cost-competitive with laptops. But no, they put everything into beating the (already self-destructing) Palm and trying to take on the cellphone world.
They might pull it off, if they can bring back Derek Brown and Beth Goza into the team and pull in some serious iPod geeks and *listen* to what they have to say and *do* it... even if it means drinking their own blood (like Microsoft did when they replaced their own letter recogniser with one that emulated Graffiti).
If they bull ahead with what I'm seeing in those screen shots, though, they're so doomed.
Those are not strictly OS related problem and are mostly due to the stupidity of the user and a lack of properly programmed firewall.
While I agree that running any applications that use the MS HTML control or similar mechanisms to display untrusted documents, keeping track of which applications those are seems an unreasonably difficult thing to expect of a typical user.
The latter part of the comment, however, is simply false. No firewall can prevent Windows applications from using Microsoft's documented and standardised and *utterly* insecure API for displaying HTML and other rich text documents.
W2K with SP2 and SR1 is secure and stable thank you very much.
Not if you use Internet Explorer, any version of Outlook, Windows Media Player, Realplayer, Microsoft Word or Excel.
All of these programs have built into their design, at a low level, in a way that can't be fixed without breaking existing third-party software, mechanisms to allow untrusted documents and objects to execute code with the full rights of the application itself. Because Microsoft decided that sandboxes slowed things down too much.
Sorry, but Microsoft has prior art for promising and then shedding features, and not delivering a promised operating system. MS-DOS version 4 was going to be the multitasking DOS, with technology from Microsoft Xenix, back when Digital Research's MP/M was the threat. That worked so well they skipped right to MS-DOS 5, and hived Xenix off to some of the contractors who'd been working on it.
Then there was OS/2, oh, never mind, we'll come out with something better real soon now, we don't need IBM. Just wait for OUR 32-bit object-oriented desktop... what, 16-bit Windows Explorer on NT 4? You must be imagining it.
But on that topic... I will give Microsoft props for copying IBM's look and feel guidelines for Windows, instead of copying Apple's. Pity they forgot to follow them when they did Windows 95...
If you watch the WWDC keynote telecast (and the accompanying "PC guy" intro video, both of which are available on the Apple Web site), you'll notice immediately that Apple is more than a little preoccupied with Windows Vista.
Vista is an embarassment to Microsoft, and a source of cheap entertainment to everyone who isn't hooked on Windows. Every new announcement about Cairo-I-mean-Longhorn-I-mean-Vista has put the final release date further off, has reduced the promised features, until the final release seems more like a fat Windows 2000/XP service pack.
Apple's new features might be unexciting to geeks, but does anyone expect them to get cut before release? Does anyone expect them to have features like this? It's certainly possible that Apple could use the TPM module to lock down the kernel like that, but Microsoft's already done it... pretty soon the only way to modify the kernel will be by embedding a virus in a video or image file, using the kernel hooks for Windows Media Player the put in to lock down the DRM.
[Microsoft] is at least deferential to its customers in public, about as far from smug as is humanly possible, and it very rarely takes pointed shots at the competition.
Ballmer: Linux is a virus, Linux is Communism,... ah, forget it. Ballmer's an easy target.
But I'd still take that over Bill Gates' slippery innuendoes. "With Linux you have to pay for virus protection." Please, Bill.
And, really, I don't care how deferential Microsoft is being when they pull pranks like this. And given my own experience with Microsoft support when it came to licenses (their support line gave me bad advice on how to handle client licenses, then demanded I get a support contract before they'd help me fix it), they can be as nice as they want when they ask me to piss in the Windows Genuine Advantage cup but it's not going to make me feel any better about the latest outbreak of Palladium poisoning in Vista.
He even took a shot at Vista's glass-like logo, because it looks too much like an OS X icon. Whatever. Microsoft is pushing a "glass" theme in Vista, and the logo represents that.
Microsoft is pushing a theme inspired by early releases of OS X, and the logo represents that. Whatever.
Give us better PDA's, make a tablet computer that is useable and affordable.
We used to *have* better PDAs, but Sony got out of the market.
I was skeptical of the first few generations of Clies, but the SJ series were brilliant. Pity they lost the plot after that and quit the business.
I don't know what they were huffing when they decided to abandon the jog wheel (hello, Sony, that's your bloody signature!) and try to turn PDAs into insanely expensive MP3 players, but I hope the FDA's clamped down on it.
I've got cat5 through the attic to every room in my house... it was a one-time expense and took a long weekend and less than $100 for the cable and wallplates. I just use Wifi for my laptop, and even there I plug in when I'm going to be in one place long enough to plug in my power cord. Ethernet's faster and has less packet loss (which does matter, even with TCP or loss-insensitive UDP like streaming audio).
When the iMac was first introduced, people went gaga over the fact that the monitor, computer, and speakers were all in one enclosure, thus eliminating the need for two bulky pieces of hardware and multiple cables.
Yeh, "gaga" is the word. Goofy idea. The only goofier design was that horrid 8-bit-era thing whose name I've gratefully blanked that included a printer. And put the power supply for the whole system in the printer, so when the printer (the most fragile part of the system) broke, the whole thing became junk.
The iMac sucked. I have all the parts of an iMac except the monitor and analog board that I was going to get working again... never did. Anyone want it?
The only all-in-one computers that make sense are laptops.
Let me stick the hot computer in another damn room, especially now I can use an LCD monitor. Having one cable to the monitor for power and video, OK, though it took Apple 5 years and 4 redesigns to get that right (STANDARD connectors on the business end of the cable, thanks), but if the monitor breaks let me replace it, if the computer breaks let me plug another in, let me use a KVM so I can switch from my Mac to my Wintendo...
... but even with nuclear power (the only viable large-scale alternative to fossil fuels) with perfect radiation-free reactors (let's say cold fusion worked, or Larry Niven's stasis field fusion tube) you'd still need to build the plants and wires and you'd still have the heat output problem, plus beaming power through the air to your wireless devices wouldn't be healthy for you.
Wireless won't replace wired until wireless devices can be powered through the air.
My portable Bluetooth mouse goes through charges so fast I've gone back to a wired mouse. My keyboard seems to last OK, but it's got 6 Alkaline double-A batteries in it, not two rechargable AAAs (high amp hour, right).
I tried using a combo-PDA-phone-MP3-player, but all that meant was that when I needed to use my PDA or phone I couldn't because I'd been playing music and it complained too much about being low on juice.
The wire that charges my phone is more annoying to me than the one that powers my wired mouse, because I have to pay attention to it.
I don't know the OpenBSD reasoning, because it seems like having language in the license to explicitly defang "sneak patents" in Open Source software would be a good idea. The FSF seems to agree:
(We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)
The fact that a license is incompatible with the GPL is simply a fact. It may be that the GPL has a problem, it may be that the other license has a problem, it may be that copyright law itself has a problem.
Apple didn't pull a gun on you. They didn't even pull a cellphone on you.
I'll tell you something, if a genuinely *professional* police officer mistakes a cellphone for a gun, even if he's in the middle of an arrest and so has reason to be jumpy, he *will* apologise. Have some class and do the same, eh?
Apple had the opportunity to correct people on those statements ahead of time and didn't.
Um, sure they did. They said that they weren't closing the source, they just hadn't released those components yet. Now they have.
I was skeptical of Apple, too, and after a quick run through of the seven stages of grief I ended up accepting the conventional wisdom that Apple was going to let the source releases end with a whimper.
I was, apparently, wrong about that. I'm glad I quit mouthing off about it in the middle of "Denial", and didn't get stuck on "Anger" like some of the community.:)
Did it ever occur to you that Apple's recent release of the sources comes well after the kernel was hacked to bypass the TPM AND due to the outcry from their userbase and others alike?
When the "missing sources" were first announced *last year*, well before any of the current flap, Apple representatives said that they hadn't withdrawn XNU... they just hadn't released it yet.
Did it ever occur to you through all the subsequent chest-beating that Apple was actually telling the truth? Why doesn't it occur to you now that they might have been? I realise that like all public corporations they are practically required by the SEC to act amorally and unethically, but their track record has been pretty damned good up to now... and it seems like it's continuing that way.
Is the idea of an honest corporation really so scary that you've suppressed your memory of the facts?
I know a fair number of people who don't know how their browser works and who just accept that using the internet means looking at hundreds of adverts a day.
I know how my browser works and I don't mind looking at hundreds of ads a day.
But not served up from my own computer. Windows is already too far down the path to the world where you don't own your own hardware or information... you just rent access to it. If you're going to work that way, why have all the heat generating crap in your own house? The personal-computer-versus-web-terminal balance flips way over to the web-terminal side.
Web terminals, with something like LBX (preferably) or remote desktop (ick) over a broadband link to a shared server (or, for LBX, many shared servers) for the few things that regular web pages aren't good enough for... and a Playstation/XBox/Nintendo for gaming? Running Windows locally? Why? Let someone else be responsible for keeping that stuff working.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the *big* feature. Screw the user interface tweakage, being able to forget about release pools and the rest of the manual storage management twaddle is going to be amazing.
Apple wouldn't release a generic OS X even for developers-only.
Apple has announced that Leopard will be Universal (PPC + Intel) but it'll still require an Intel Mac, it won't run on random Intel hardware.
Boy, that screen looks familiar.
Zune is nothing but a Pocket PC with a hard drive.
I've owned four Pocket PCs over the last 6 years. They've all had MP3 playing support. Most had Wifi support. But they aren't terribly good as MP3 players... the OS is too heavy and complex for a handheld, it very much needs to be treated as a desktop OS stripped down, not something built from the ground up to run an embedded application. It even runs programs by copying them from "file system" RAM to "program" RAM. Very strange beast.
The Pocket PC really had the potential of being an ultralight laptop replacement OS, if Microsoft had kept working on it that way they'd have "Tablet PCs" that really *were* cost-competitive with laptops. But no, they put everything into beating the (already self-destructing) Palm and trying to take on the cellphone world.
They might pull it off, if they can bring back Derek Brown and Beth Goza into the team and pull in some serious iPod geeks and *listen* to what they have to say and *do* it... even if it means drinking their own blood (like Microsoft did when they replaced their own letter recogniser with one that emulated Graffiti).
If they bull ahead with what I'm seeing in those screen shots, though, they're so doomed.
Those are not strictly OS related problem and are mostly due to the stupidity of the user and a lack of properly programmed firewall.
While I agree that running any applications that use the MS HTML control or similar mechanisms to display untrusted documents, keeping track of which applications those are seems an unreasonably difficult thing to expect of a typical user.
The latter part of the comment, however, is simply false. No firewall can prevent Windows applications from using Microsoft's documented and standardised and *utterly* insecure API for displaying HTML and other rich text documents.
W2K with SP2 and SR1 is secure and stable thank you very much.
Not if you use Internet Explorer, any version of Outlook, Windows Media Player, Realplayer, Microsoft Word or Excel.
All of these programs have built into their design, at a low level, in a way that can't be fixed without breaking existing third-party software, mechanisms to allow untrusted documents and objects to execute code with the full rights of the application itself. Because Microsoft decided that sandboxes slowed things down too much.
You can get Tiger *now*.
Sorry, but Microsoft has prior art for promising and then shedding features, and not delivering a promised operating system. MS-DOS version 4 was going to be the multitasking DOS, with technology from Microsoft Xenix, back when Digital Research's MP/M was the threat. That worked so well they skipped right to MS-DOS 5, and hived Xenix off to some of the contractors who'd been working on it.
Then there was OS/2, oh, never mind, we'll come out with something better real soon now, we don't need IBM. Just wait for OUR 32-bit object-oriented desktop... what, 16-bit Windows Explorer on NT 4? You must be imagining it.
But on that topic... I will give Microsoft props for copying IBM's look and feel guidelines for Windows, instead of copying Apple's. Pity they forgot to follow them when they did Windows 95...
If you watch the WWDC keynote telecast (and the accompanying "PC guy" intro video, both of which are available on the Apple Web site), you'll notice immediately that Apple is more than a little preoccupied with Windows Vista.
... ah, forget it. Ballmer's an easy target.
Vista is an embarassment to Microsoft, and a source of cheap entertainment to everyone who isn't hooked on Windows. Every new announcement about Cairo-I-mean-Longhorn-I-mean-Vista has put the final release date further off, has reduced the promised features, until the final release seems more like a fat Windows 2000/XP service pack.
Apple's new features might be unexciting to geeks, but does anyone expect them to get cut before release? Does anyone expect them to have features like this? It's certainly possible that Apple could use the TPM module to lock down the kernel like that, but Microsoft's already done it... pretty soon the only way to modify the kernel will be by embedding a virus in a video or image file, using the kernel hooks for Windows Media Player the put in to lock down the DRM.
[Microsoft] is at least deferential to its customers in public, about as far from smug as is humanly possible, and it very rarely takes pointed shots at the competition.
Ballmer: Linux is a virus, Linux is Communism,
But I'd still take that over Bill Gates' slippery innuendoes. "With Linux you have to pay for virus protection." Please, Bill.
And, really, I don't care how deferential Microsoft is being when they pull pranks like this. And given my own experience with Microsoft support when it came to licenses (their support line gave me bad advice on how to handle client licenses, then demanded I get a support contract before they'd help me fix it), they can be as nice as they want when they ask me to piss in the Windows Genuine Advantage cup but it's not going to make me feel any better about the latest outbreak of Palladium poisoning in Vista.
He even took a shot at Vista's glass-like logo, because it looks too much like an OS X icon. Whatever. Microsoft is pushing a "glass" theme in Vista, and the logo represents that.
Microsoft is pushing a theme inspired by early releases of OS X, and the logo represents that. Whatever.
Give us better PDA's, make a tablet computer that is useable and affordable.
We used to *have* better PDAs, but Sony got out of the market.
I was skeptical of the first few generations of Clies, but the SJ series were brilliant. Pity they lost the plot after that and quit the business.
I don't know what they were huffing when they decided to abandon the jog wheel (hello, Sony, that's your bloody signature!) and try to turn PDAs into insanely expensive MP3 players, but I hope the FDA's clamped down on it.
WiFi'd peripherals just work.
Except when they don't.
I've got cat5 through the attic to every room in my house... it was a one-time expense and took a long weekend and less than $100 for the cable and wallplates. I just use Wifi for my laptop, and even there I plug in when I'm going to be in one place long enough to plug in my power cord. Ethernet's faster and has less packet loss (which does matter, even with TCP or loss-insensitive UDP like streaming audio).
When the iMac was first introduced, people went gaga over the fact that the monitor, computer, and speakers were all in one enclosure, thus eliminating the need for two bulky pieces of hardware and multiple cables.
Yeh, "gaga" is the word. Goofy idea. The only goofier design was that horrid 8-bit-era thing whose name I've gratefully blanked that included a printer. And put the power supply for the whole system in the printer, so when the printer (the most fragile part of the system) broke, the whole thing became junk.
The iMac sucked. I have all the parts of an iMac except the monitor and analog board that I was going to get working again... never did. Anyone want it?
The only all-in-one computers that make sense are laptops.
Let me stick the hot computer in another damn room, especially now I can use an LCD monitor. Having one cable to the monitor for power and video, OK, though it took Apple 5 years and 4 redesigns to get that right (STANDARD connectors on the business end of the cable, thanks), but if the monitor breaks let me replace it, if the computer breaks let me plug another in, let me use a KVM so I can switch from my Mac to my Wintendo...
... but even with nuclear power (the only viable large-scale alternative to fossil fuels) with perfect radiation-free reactors (let's say cold fusion worked, or Larry Niven's stasis field fusion tube) you'd still need to build the plants and wires and you'd still have the heat output problem, plus beaming power through the air to your wireless devices wouldn't be healthy for you.
Wireless won't replace wired until wireless devices can be powered through the air.
My portable Bluetooth mouse goes through charges so fast I've gone back to a wired mouse. My keyboard seems to last OK, but it's got 6 Alkaline double-A batteries in it, not two rechargable AAAs (high amp hour, right).
I tried using a combo-PDA-phone-MP3-player, but all that meant was that when I needed to use my PDA or phone I couldn't because I'd been playing music and it complained too much about being low on juice.
The wire that charges my phone is more annoying to me than the one that powers my wired mouse, because I have to pay attention to it.
I don't know the OpenBSD reasoning, because it seems like having language in the license to explicitly defang "sneak patents" in Open Source software would be a good idea. The FSF seems to agree:
(We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)
The fact that a license is incompatible with the GPL is simply a fact. It may be that the GPL has a problem, it may be that the other license has a problem, it may be that copyright law itself has a problem.
Apple didn't pull a gun on you. They didn't even pull a cellphone on you.
I'll tell you something, if a genuinely *professional* police officer mistakes a cellphone for a gun, even if he's in the middle of an arrest and so has reason to be jumpy, he *will* apologise. Have some class and do the same, eh?
Apple had the opportunity to correct people on those statements ahead of time and didn't.
:)
Um, sure they did. They said that they weren't closing the source, they just hadn't released those components yet. Now they have.
I was skeptical of Apple, too, and after a quick run through of the seven stages of grief I ended up accepting the conventional wisdom that Apple was going to let the source releases end with a whimper.
I was, apparently, wrong about that. I'm glad I quit mouthing off about it in the middle of "Denial", and didn't get stuck on "Anger" like some of the community.
Did it ever occur to you that Apple's recent release of the sources comes well after the kernel was hacked to bypass the TPM AND due to the outcry from their userbase and others alike?
When the "missing sources" were first announced *last year*, well before any of the current flap, Apple representatives said that they hadn't withdrawn XNU... they just hadn't released it yet.
Did it ever occur to you through all the subsequent chest-beating that Apple was actually telling the truth? Why doesn't it occur to you now that they might have been? I realise that like all public corporations they are practically required by the SEC to act amorally and unethically, but their track record has been pretty damned good up to now... and it seems like it's continuing that way.
Is the idea of an honest corporation really so scary that you've suppressed your memory of the facts?
I feel automatic memory management is redundant in most situations.
Yeh, let's bring back allocating memory on a big sheet of graph paper on the wall of the coding pen!
Anyone who can piss Dick Cheney off can't be all bad.
:)
I was under the impression that pising Dick Cheney off was easier than pissing Rush Limbaugh or Ralph Nader off... when they're in the same room.
Here's a /. article about the lack of news about rumors about WWDC.
/. will vanish up its own fundamental orifice.
One more layer of recursion here and maybe
I know a fair number of people who don't know how their browser works and who just accept that using the internet means looking at hundreds of adverts a day.
I know how my browser works and I don't mind looking at hundreds of ads a day.
But not served up from my own computer. Windows is already too far down the path to the world where you don't own your own hardware or information... you just rent access to it. If you're going to work that way, why have all the heat generating crap in your own house? The personal-computer-versus-web-terminal balance flips way over to the web-terminal side.
Web terminals, with something like LBX (preferably) or remote desktop (ick) over a broadband link to a shared server (or, for LBX, many shared servers) for the few things that regular web pages aren't good enough for... and a Playstation/XBox/Nintendo for gaming? Running Windows locally? Why? Let someone else be responsible for keeping that stuff working.
Well, iTunes won't burn to an ISO, but it'll burn to a CD-RW and you can erase that.
And Applescript or Automator can automate it. I'm sure there's some kind of scheme on Windows to do the same thing.
Just don't forget to copy the album cover over. The rest of the track info remains intact.
If they're only "copy-protection technologies", then why are they making goofy claims about holding 25 GB on a disc?
"Lossy Encryption"
we all know that Microsoft are the experts when it comes to detecting and correcting software vulnerabilities.
:)
Trolling for "funny" mods?