Personally I like the idea of the computer being a blind brick with only an ethernet port that you connect to from any X Terminal you want, but I didn't think Mac users would have much use for that concept. I'm kind of glad to see that changing... I guess with Apple's X11 people are realising that most applications don't need memory-speed access to the display.:)
Doesn't lock the computer in place, you have to get a different one for each laptop (you can drop any Thinkpad in the building into my dock, and I can drop my Thinkpad in any dock in teh building), and it's less reliable than a single dedicated connector (still using the dock I got 3 laptops ago).
Apple's making a big deal about the fact that they've standardised the iPod dock layout and that's only *one* cable to keep track of... why not do the same thing for the 'books?
What do you really need the docking port for though?
Even if I decide that I'm willing to put up with Apple's horrid mouse and keyboard (no, the mighty mouse is NOT a viable replacement for a real multi-button mouse, tried it and took it back), that still leaves power, video, network [1], firewire drive [2], PDA cradle [3], and cable lock [4].
Even if it was just power, video, and cable lock, that's two connections too many.
[1] gigabit switched ethernet versus 54M shared wireless... not even a challenge. [2] even if I trusted Apple's USB drive support, it's still going to need its own connection... the speed of a shared USB port is the speed of the slowest device actively using it. [3] Which is the device I don't want my hard drive to be sharing the root hub with. [4] Apple's traditionally made the most stealable computers.
Providing a Windows API in Mac OS X involved the same operations whether you call it "native", "compatibility middleware", or "wakalixes": you're still emulating Win32 on top of UNIX. Everything in OS X, Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz, Aqua, Rosetta, Classic, is running on top of a 4.4BSD Single Server under Mach 3. It's not making any significant use of the Mach 3 enhancements, though, and isn't all that different from the 4.3BSD/Mach 2.5 design in NeXTstep. The key point is that it's a single-server design, all traditional OS services are provided by the monolithic 4BSD kernel inside the Mach "microkernel".
Windows under this OS would be no more native than Classic applications under OS X on the Power PC are.
I don't think they should have the same types of protection as recognized journalists.
Why not?
If a person writes in a diary does that make them a reporter? Does that put them on the same level as Melville, or Hemmingway?
If a person writes in a newspaper, does that put them on the same level as Woodward, or even Judith Miller? This is a ludicrous argument.
And if a pulitzer prize winning journalist starts a blog, and blogs something Big, they're a journalist... shouldn't they still be protected? But... it's still a blog...
It's not who they are, it's what they do. If what they're doing is journalism, then it's protected. If it's not, then it's not. Is publishing anonymous rumors without applying eny editorial control "journalism"? Or even "blogging"?
The reason Apple is 'so great' is because they control the whole experience. What you are buying is the hardware + apps +OS.
Put down the crack pipe.
The reason Apple is great is primarily because they have great software and they control the software environment. Their hardware is and has always been a crapshoot, and they don't even have that good a track record of designing their hardware to best take advantage of their software.
If you get what Dan Knight calls a "Road Apple", Apple's control of the whole experience makes you feel like you're in the hands of a clumsy dominatrix.
Remember folks, this was way - way back before anyone was even thinking about streaming video or music over the internet, as a matter of fact, back then, you had special video hardware to do the mpeg decoding. In 97 it was impressive to be able to stream multiple video streams on a LAN.
The Rolling Stones went live on the Internet in 1994, and they weren't even the first...
On June 24, 1993, Severe Tire Damage became the first band to perform live on the internet. Performing from the patios of Xerox PARC, they were broadcast onto the Internet Multicast Backbone (the "MBone"). They were seen and heard live as far away as Australia. Anna Karlin was with the band then. MBone engineering was by Ron Frederick and Steve Deering of the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC.
can you point me to where you can find something with the same size, noise factors as the Mac Mini for less?
If you're one of the few people who really need that, the Aopen mini PC running Linux... $399.
In practice my Mac mini... plus its external drive, external USB hub, and three external power supplies, is about as bulky and noisy as my daughter's small form factor PC. It also cost more, has a slower video card, MUCH slower hard drive, and supports less RAM. And I bought that PC a year before the mini came out.
I'd have happily paid the price of the mini for a copy of OS X I could run on a generic PC... even if I had to pay extra for the PC afterwards... simply because all the "cuteness" of the mini has negative value to me.
Have you noticed how iPods tend to be smaller than their competition, at least at the time of release?
My iPod Shuffle, which is still the smallest iPod, was almost exactly the same size as the cheap Korean MP3 player it replaced. Which isn't surprising, since they used many of the same parts.
Just look at the Mac Mini. When it was released, NO vendor had a desktop anything like it
For the very good reason that the Mac mini is overpriced and underpowered, and the lack of an expansion slot that was perhaps excusable in the original version is crippling in the new one... for an extra $100 over the already pricy original model you get a faster CPU... but you need it just to make up for the lack of a decent GPU.
I bought a Mac mini because OS X is worth the premium I paid over a conventional PC, but I'd much rather have had a larger box that I could actually upgrade. And the core duo? You'll get better overall performance for similar money with an Athlon 64 and a GPU that doesn't suck.
The Nano is another recent product that still has no competition.
The shuffle is a much more cost effective device, and I much prefer its user interface. But the shuffle is all off-the-shelf parts. The main difference between it and a number of comparably priced Korean players that were already on the market was that you couldn't simply drag and drop files onto it and play them. I bought the shuffle by accident (at the time, Apple's web store was effectively operating on a one-click basis if you were logged into iTMS when you visited it), but I kept it because I'd become accustomed to using iTunes. Otherwise I'd have returned it and got one of the Korean products that supported USB host mode for dumping music directly to a flash drive.
To comment that Apple includes fewer hardware features than competing brands is ignoring the fact they continually push new technologies that other companies blindly ignore.
Nah, I'm not ignoring it. I'm discounting it. Apple's hardware innovation is neither as dramatic as some people insist, nor as uniformly good.
They sometimes push new technologies. Other times they are pushed, as with PCI. Often they find themselves innovating into a corner, as happened with the "one button mouse".
I have an iPod shuffle, but I have it only because it's a close match for my previous MP3 player, with virtually identical hardware and similar software down to the "screenless" user interface... which I'd already had for a couple of years when Steve Jobs insisted that flash music players were a waste of money a year before they came out with the shuffle.
The main reason it's so hard to "trust Microsoft" isn't that there's particularly anything evil about them, it's that their system is such a dysfunctional ecosystem of poorly understood and poorly documented components it's virtually impossible to track problems down.
Mac OS X is not only better documented, the components themselves are more exposed to inspection.
if one were to toy around with the thought that Macs would rise to take a significant portion of the operating systems used, what would that mean?
It would mean pretty much the same thing as having Linux rise to a significant portion of the operating systems used. They're both UNIX plus a bunch of bloated applications and toolkits: Quartz and Cocoa and the Apple frameworks on the one side; and Gnome and KDE and the associated massive libraries on the other.
From the point of view of a command line user who mostly uses X11 or Aqua to run a bunch of shell windows and a web browser, the main difference is that you can actually get third-party software for Macs. That's about it.
Apple's hardware isn't all that exceptional. It tends to cost more and have fewer features than competing brands... the idea of spending extra for a Mac or an iPod and then replacing the native software with open source code that runs just as well (or better!) on more powerful, less expensive, and often better designed hardware from other vendors just blows my mind.
I will acknowledge that there is some advantage to the iPod... not because the hardware is so good, but because the hardware has remained consistent enough for an accessories market to thrive.
But, still, if it wasn't for Apple's software I would have neither an iPod nor a Mac.
Maybe in a few centuries that kind of jesuitical argument will be valid. That's how long it took "jesuitical" to simply mean over-precise hair splitting without any derogatory connotations relating to the Society of Jesus or the Catholic Church in general.
You just assumed from the start I was trying to advocate the use of gay as a derogatory term.
That's because you are.
it IS POSSIBLE for two words to have DIFFERENT AND UNRELATED meanings.
But in this case that's not what we're looking at. The derogatory use of the term "gay" by young people both inside and outside the gaming community isn't unrelated to the use of the term by self-identified homosexuals. The etymology is direct, obvious, and uncontested. If the gay community hadn't used that term, then you wouldn't be saying that a game, player, character class, or incident was "gaaaay".
Personally I feel that people who have a problem with certain words deserve worse then to be insulted.
Personally, I feel that people who can honestly say things like this are missing something fundamental in their emotional makeup, and should seriously consider seeing a therapist about it.
Do people who consider themselves 'gay' and use that term to describe themselves even realize that the original meaning of the word simply meant "happy"?
I doubt you could find a self-identified gay man or lesbian who isn't exquisitely aware of this.
Tell you what, why don't you try applying that logic to words like "nigger", "wop", "kike", "chink", and so on. Get on WoW and complain about Blizzard being "jew cheap" about loot. Does the idea make you uncomfortable? It should. It makes me uncomfortable writing about it. But if using "gay" in a derogatory manner doesn't make you just as uncomfortable then you've got a problem.
They shipped Active Desktop, which is where they started integrating IE (or rather, the HTML control that's almost the whole of IE) so deeply into the OS that it couldn't be disabled or removed without heroic measures, in 1997.
Every new OS release since them has been an opportunity for them to step back from the brink and turn IE into just another application. Not only have they not turned back, but they have run faster and faster with every step.
I wish them joy of their damnation, their salvation is in no-one's hands but their own.
Slashdot Mirror
99c ... good, the record companies don't get their foot in the door to use price to play games with popularity.
... bad, instead of being a law that would have been a small wall aaginst the rising tide of DRM, it's become part of that flood.
Franch law
Not everything that's good for APple is good for Apple's customers.
You think a change in processor architecture will change those items?
I think the idea of referring to them as having "good and careful design", at least as far as security is concerned, is hilarious.
Wasn't there a recent spate of OS X exploits, including a virsus or trojan of some sort?
There is no such thing as a "safe" file.
Changing processor architectures changes NOTHING about the good and careful design of the Darwin/BSD/OSX software stack.
You're excluding Safari, Finder, Mail, and LaunchServices from your definition of that stack then?
It's not the x86, it's Safari and Launchservices.
Stupid beggars. Microsoft proved that trick never works in 1998.
Personally I like the idea of the computer being a blind brick with only an ethernet port that you connect to from any X Terminal you want, but I didn't think Mac users would have much use for that concept. I'm kind of glad to see that changing... I guess with Apple's X11 people are realising that most applications don't need memory-speed access to the display. :)
What's wrong with this?
Doesn't lock the computer in place, you have to get a different one for each laptop (you can drop any Thinkpad in the building into my dock, and I can drop my Thinkpad in any dock in teh building), and it's less reliable than a single dedicated connector (still using the dock I got 3 laptops ago).
Apple's making a big deal about the fact that they've standardised the iPod dock layout and that's only *one* cable to keep track of... why not do the same thing for the 'books?
What do you really need the docking port for though?
Even if I decide that I'm willing to put up with Apple's horrid mouse and keyboard (no, the mighty mouse is NOT a viable replacement for a real multi-button mouse, tried it and took it back), that still leaves power, video, network [1], firewire drive [2], PDA cradle [3], and cable lock [4].
Even if it was just power, video, and cable lock, that's two connections too many.
[1] gigabit switched ethernet versus 54M shared wireless... not even a challenge.
[2] even if I trusted Apple's USB drive support, it's still going to need its own connection... the speed of a shared USB port is the speed of the slowest device actively using it.
[3] Which is the device I don't want my hard drive to be sharing the root hub with.
[4] Apple's traditionally made the most stealable computers.
There's XScale, of course, but they're a bit hot and high end for the flash players. Does Intel have a really low power ARM chip?
Providing a Windows API in Mac OS X involved the same operations whether you call it "native", "compatibility middleware", or "wakalixes": you're still emulating Win32 on top of UNIX. Everything in OS X, Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz, Aqua, Rosetta, Classic, is running on top of a 4.4BSD Single Server under Mach 3. It's not making any significant use of the Mach 3 enhancements, though, and isn't all that different from the 4.3BSD/Mach 2.5 design in NeXTstep. The key point is that it's a single-server design, all traditional OS services are provided by the monolithic 4BSD kernel inside the Mach "microkernel".
Windows under this OS would be no more native than Classic applications under OS X on the Power PC are.
I don't think they should have the same types of protection as recognized journalists.
Why not?
If a person writes in a diary does that make them a reporter? Does that put them on the same level as Melville, or Hemmingway?
If a person writes in a newspaper, does that put them on the same level as Woodward, or even Judith Miller? This is a ludicrous argument.
And if a pulitzer prize winning journalist starts a blog, and blogs something Big, they're a journalist... shouldn't they still be protected? But... it's still a blog...
It's not who they are, it's what they do. If what they're doing is journalism, then it's protected. If it's not, then it's not. Is publishing anonymous rumors without applying eny editorial control "journalism"? Or even "blogging"?
The reason Apple is 'so great' is because they control the whole experience. What you are buying is the hardware + apps +OS.
Put down the crack pipe.
The reason Apple is great is primarily because they have great software and they control the software environment. Their hardware is and has always been a crapshoot, and they don't even have that good a track record of designing their hardware to best take advantage of their software.
If you get what Dan Knight calls a "Road Apple", Apple's control of the whole experience makes you feel like you're in the hands of a clumsy dominatrix.
The Rolling Stones went live on the Internet in 1994, and they weren't even the first...
can you point me to where you can find something with the same size, noise factors as the Mac Mini for less?
If you're one of the few people who really need that, the Aopen mini PC running Linux... $399.
In practice my Mac mini... plus its external drive, external USB hub, and three external power supplies, is about as bulky and noisy as my daughter's small form factor PC. It also cost more, has a slower video card, MUCH slower hard drive, and supports less RAM. And I bought that PC a year before the mini came out.
I'd have happily paid the price of the mini for a copy of OS X I could run on a generic PC... even if I had to pay extra for the PC afterwards... simply because all the "cuteness" of the mini has negative value to me.
Have you noticed how iPods tend to be smaller than their competition, at least at the time of release?
My iPod Shuffle, which is still the smallest iPod, was almost exactly the same size as the cheap Korean MP3 player it replaced. Which isn't surprising, since they used many of the same parts.
Just look at the Mac Mini. When it was released, NO vendor had a desktop anything like it
For the very good reason that the Mac mini is overpriced and underpowered, and the lack of an expansion slot that was perhaps excusable in the original version is crippling in the new one... for an extra $100 over the already pricy original model you get a faster CPU... but you need it just to make up for the lack of a decent GPU.
I bought a Mac mini because OS X is worth the premium I paid over a conventional PC, but I'd much rather have had a larger box that I could actually upgrade. And the core duo? You'll get better overall performance for similar money with an Athlon 64 and a GPU that doesn't suck.
The Nano is another recent product that still has no competition.
The shuffle is a much more cost effective device, and I much prefer its user interface. But the shuffle is all off-the-shelf parts. The main difference between it and a number of comparably priced Korean players that were already on the market was that you couldn't simply drag and drop files onto it and play them. I bought the shuffle by accident (at the time, Apple's web store was effectively operating on a one-click basis if you were logged into iTMS when you visited it), but I kept it because I'd become accustomed to using iTunes. Otherwise I'd have returned it and got one of the Korean products that supported USB host mode for dumping music directly to a flash drive.
To comment that Apple includes fewer hardware features than competing brands is ignoring the fact they continually push new technologies that other companies blindly ignore.
Nah, I'm not ignoring it. I'm discounting it. Apple's hardware innovation is neither as dramatic as some people insist, nor as uniformly good.
They sometimes push new technologies. Other times they are pushed, as with PCI. Often they find themselves innovating into a corner, as happened with the "one button mouse".
I have an iPod shuffle, but I have it only because it's a close match for my previous MP3 player, with virtually identical hardware and similar software down to the "screenless" user interface... which I'd already had for a couple of years when Steve Jobs insisted that flash music players were a waste of money a year before they came out with the shuffle.
Do I trust Apple? Not anymore than Microsoft.
Trust but verify.
The main reason it's so hard to "trust Microsoft" isn't that there's particularly anything evil about them, it's that their system is such a dysfunctional ecosystem of poorly understood and poorly documented components it's virtually impossible to track problems down.
Mac OS X is not only better documented, the components themselves are more exposed to inspection.
if one were to toy around with the thought that Macs would rise to take a significant portion of the operating systems used, what would that mean?
It would mean pretty much the same thing as having Linux rise to a significant portion of the operating systems used. They're both UNIX plus a bunch of bloated applications and toolkits: Quartz and Cocoa and the Apple frameworks on the one side; and Gnome and KDE and the associated massive libraries on the other.
From the point of view of a command line user who mostly uses X11 or Aqua to run a bunch of shell windows and a web browser, the main difference is that you can actually get third-party software for Macs. That's about it.
Apple's hardware isn't all that exceptional. It tends to cost more and have fewer features than competing brands... the idea of spending extra for a Mac or an iPod and then replacing the native software with open source code that runs just as well (or better!) on more powerful, less expensive, and often better designed hardware from other vendors just blows my mind.
I will acknowledge that there is some advantage to the iPod... not because the hardware is so good, but because the hardware has remained consistent enough for an accessories market to thrive.
But, still, if it wasn't for Apple's software I would have neither an iPod nor a Mac.
Maybe in a few centuries that kind of jesuitical argument will be valid. That's how long it took "jesuitical" to simply mean over-precise hair splitting without any derogatory connotations relating to the Society of Jesus or the Catholic Church in general.
You just assumed from the start I was trying to advocate the use of gay as a derogatory term.
That's because you are.
it IS POSSIBLE for two words to have DIFFERENT AND UNRELATED meanings.
But in this case that's not what we're looking at. The derogatory use of the term "gay" by young people both inside and outside the gaming community isn't unrelated to the use of the term by self-identified homosexuals. The etymology is direct, obvious, and uncontested. If the gay community hadn't used that term, then you wouldn't be saying that a game, player, character class, or incident was "gaaaay".
Personally I feel that people who have a problem with certain words deserve worse then to be insulted.
Personally, I feel that people who can honestly say things like this are missing something fundamental in their emotional makeup, and should seriously consider seeing a therapist about it.
Do people who consider themselves 'gay' and use that term to describe themselves even realize that the original meaning of the word simply meant "happy"?
I doubt you could find a self-identified gay man or lesbian who isn't exquisitely aware of this.
Tell you what, why don't you try applying that logic to words like "nigger", "wop", "kike", "chink", and so on. Get on WoW and complain about Blizzard being "jew cheap" about loot. Does the idea make you uncomfortable? It should. It makes me uncomfortable writing about it. But if using "gay" in a derogatory manner doesn't make you just as uncomfortable then you've got a problem.
They shipped Active Desktop, which is where they started integrating IE (or rather, the HTML control that's almost the whole of IE) so deeply into the OS that it couldn't be disabled or removed without heroic measures, in 1997.
Every new OS release since them has been an opportunity for them to step back from the brink and turn IE into just another application. Not only have they not turned back, but they have run faster and faster with every step.
I wish them joy of their damnation, their salvation is in no-one's hands but their own.