I take it that the only "real work" is stuff that involves heavy number crunching, or moving pixels around?
Well, I'm assuming you have a sensible reason for buying a $2000 Powermac G5 instead of a $500 Mac mini. Anything not-pixel-pushing that's going to get reasonable performance under Rosetta is going to get reasonable performance on a mini, so that pretty much leaves number-crunching. No?
If all you're doing is compiling and running code that doesn't itself involve pixel-pushing, and you reckon you'll get better performance from an Intel processor, you can get WAY more cost-effective hardware than any kind of Macintosh by running some free UNIX on a clone.
It's only 2-3X faster, which means that running apps under Rosetta will be like running 68000 apps on the first Powermacs, slower on existing applications than the products they replace. That's OK for keyboard-bound apps like Office, but it's not going to be enticing for people actually doing real work for at least 6 months.
The MacBook is closer to being a realistic upgrade right now, because the faster memory bus makes a bigger difference.
The other problem with this statement is the way everyone cries foul when Microsoft default installs an app with Windows and then complains that a Windows default install doesn't have any applications. Make up your mind! You can't have it both ways.
No "everyone" doesn't do this. Different people are complaining about different things.
The problem is that databases and other non-file data stores are more brittle than files. The more complexity there is in the metadata, the easier it is to lose information, and the more you're locked in to one specific form of metadata.
And databases came first. back in the 60s and even well into the 70s, a "file" was seen as a column in a table, or a table, in a database. As databases became more powerful, data stores tried to follow... you had RMS on DEC operating systems, "typed" data sets and files, systems like Pick, Apple's "resource forks", and Be's BeFS. No matter how the data's stored, eventually anything more than a shopping list (oh, yes, there are very complex shopping lists: address books, customer databases, and lots and lots of indexes into collections of flat files like Harvest and Spotlight and Google) becomes a flat block of text with embedded links to other blocks of text.
Whether those links are "see chapter 10" or "#include stdio.h" or "import io"... those links are not links to databases, they're links to files.
---
The idea that an unstructured block of data was the default was a breakthrough. The idea that a command line interface could be relatively terse and simple so that mere humans could learn to use it, that was a breakthrough too. UNIX cut through an enormous amount of user interface trash and laid bare what was, for the end of the '60s, at least as dramatic an improvement in UI design as GUIs were for the '70s. It's a linguistic interface, not a gestural one, but the first linguistic interface that provided concurrency (through the & background scheme, then through shell layers and job control) and the complete OPPOSITE of the normal "user submits a command, user waits for a response" that every other system in the world used.
I implemented a UNIX shell with explicit backgrounding on RSX-11 and showed it to my boss, and he was astonished. Even though RSX has an ability to hit return and get a new prompt at any time, so you already have the ability to "interrupt" a program and do something else, he'd never used that other than to treat that MCR prompt as an "I'm still busy" message. But being able to take something that was going to take a long time and throw it off into the background under his control was great.
Given the hardware limitations of the time, I submit that the UNIX shell and the UNIX plain-text-file pipes-and-filters job-control environment is close to the very best user interface that could be developed. It's the "tabbed browser" of the command line world. Alas, X-Windows came along and people stopped really using and understanding the shell, and X11's high-latency message based interface became the standard for the UNIX world.
It's really X11, a non-UNIX-like window system developed for UNIX and VMS at MIT in the '80s, that Lanier should be complaining about. Because UNIX itself doesn't suffer from the flaws that he's attributing to it. UNIX is small, tight, fast, responsive, and concurrent, a UNIX shell is a team of willing slaves that does WHAT you want WHEN you want it, and you NEVER have to wait for them unless you choose to.
---
File systems with UNIX semantics, by the way, work well. That's the problem with NFS. NFS is *not* a UNIX file system, and its semantics make it a huge nightmare for applications developed on REAL UNIX file systems. It was a hack-job designed to make it possible to implement a reasonably fast and efficient file system in the kernel on a 68000-based Sun workstation in the '80s. It should have been turfed long since and again IT'S NOT UNIX, IT'S NOT UNIX FAULT.
---
For structured data, databases are great. Using a file system for database operations was a result of UNIX coming from an era before there was a really common way to talk about relational operations linguistically. Bad as SQL is, at least it gives us a framework to deal with the problem. But for hierarchical randomly interrelated data the filesystem model works well.
Google is an index, it's not the data itself. The data that gives google its value is in a file system.
The break-even point for you would be 25 songs in a month
I've recently been burning fresh backups of my purchased songs. I'm back to May 2005, with 6 CDs filled, with 10-15 tracks per CD. That's at most 11 per month, and that doesn't count the free samples every Tuesday... which I pick up at least a couple of times a month. I bought more to start with, but it's kind of tapered off over time...
I still buy more music on CDs and rip it than I buy from iTMS, but the stuff I bought from iTMS gets a lot of play. 6 of my top 10 tracks came from there. Of the top 50, that's 16 ripped from my CD collection, 20 from iTMS, and 14 direct from the artist's website (plus or minus a couple each way, I don't recall exactly where each track came from originally).
Right now I've got 744 songs in my collection, which if purchased at iTunes would cost more than 12 years of subscription fees (assuming the price doesn't go up).
Which means that Yahoo got 1/12th the money from you than Apple would have. And iTMS isn't making any great profit for Apple, so who's paying for the difference? Under the counter kickbacks from Microsoft?
Meanwhile I've got several thousand songs in my collection, and I've probably got more music from MP3blogs and podcasts than you've got altogether. Music isn't a scarce resource, you don't need to worry about how much you can afford to buy... finding stuff you like and stuff that'll expand your mind is a much more interesting worry to have.
I can get an endless stream of music that I've never heard before from pandora.com, from last.fm, and when I find something I like enough to keep I can buy it from iTunes, or direct from the artist, or if it's only available as a CD from Amazon, and with most free streams it's just a click of a button. There's more material there than I could ever listen to... why should I pay to subscribe to a service that's only got music from the labels?
Are you arguing for the hidden-variable interpretation of QM, or the multiple world interpretation of QM? It's not clear to me which you're describing.
Also, whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls. - makali
HA! I fully support your proposed audio-cock technology. - jwz
Um, the iTunes interface is just a column browser. The column browser is actually a Xerox design that showed up in Smalltalk in the late '70s, along with the windowing user interface that Apple uses. Column browsers are widely used for both hierarchical and relational information in virtually every part of the computer industry, and the idea that Apple owns the concept of using column browsers in music players is ludicrous.
Not to mention that there's at least one bloke who claims he's got an earlier patent on the idea, and Apple owes him money.
#1 and #3 are the same complaint - that instead of having a syntactically distinct component part of the name is used to distinguish who is responsible for an object.
A/UX made no attempt to provide a transitional environment to a new API. It ran multiple System 6 environments, for the Finder, for the Terminal, for whatever graphical applications you were running. I'm also not sure how much of the virtual memory capabilities of System V were made available to manage partitions... some of the System V releases of that period were still swappers rather than pagers, and swapping would have been MUCH easier to implement for classic partitions. Anyway, it wasn't the "new OS" that I was talking about, it wasn't trying to be one. It was just a "proof by existence" that they had the technology to build a classic virtual machine in the early '90s.
I've got a NeXTstation and an SE/30 running A/UX sitting next to each other. The NeXTstation has the same amount of RAM as the SE/30, but doesn't carry the horrid legacy of "partitions" around. It's also got modern demand-paged virtual memory from its 4.3 BSD roots. It's definitely more efficient... but it also runs applications as large as a complete System 6 system and application partition together without bogging down, and it was by no means the most efficient base they could have used.
BeOS is often brought up at this point, and I used to be moderately enthusiastic about the design (though the way they brought things together and the way they based internal APIs on C++ objects meant they were pretty much doomed from the start, unless they found someone like Apple to take them over) until I ran both BeOS and Rhapsody on the same computer... and BeOS was horribly swappy on a box that Rhapsody was quite happy with.
No, he's arguing that Copyrights are government interference.
Whether that's desirable, or whether it's undesirable, or whether it's too much or too little, is a different debate. Whether government intevention is desirable or not is not the point.
The point is that ANY market that depends on copyrights, patents, or any related tools is a government mandated and controlled market. It's ludicrous to cheer on this as a demonstration that government intervention in a "free market" can be a good thing. This market has not been "free" in anyone's memory.
Without the DMCA and other strong copyright and licensing regulation there wouldn't be any point to the kind of DRM in the "Sony Rootkit", or Windows Media Player 9 and later, or Palladium, because there wouldn't have been any laws criminalizing reverse engineering. You'd buy the CD and pick up the patch to Windows to disable the DRM at the checkout counter.
This kind of after-the-fact bandaid on a few of the worst excesses of government interference in the market is hardly proof that the government needs to be involved.
One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM.
Apple was running a classic virtual machine under System V UNIX in the *early* nineties. But classic Mac OS was born doomed, the API guaranteed that nobody would ever be able to do multitasking under Mac OS without using fixed partitions... which was a performance killer for low-memory systems even with demand paging. They should have replaced the API by 1990 with one that used opaque handles like UNIX, or required explicit locking of handles during use. That would have allowed a single classic application alongside multiple New API applications, which would have been good enough for a transition if it had been started early enough.
Given that the classic environment in A/UX was System 6, they were actually on the way there. But System 7 incorporated The Grand Maltitasking Charade by default and they couldn't really go back after that.
IE in Windows and IE on the Mac are completely different environments.
The biggest problem with IE is not IE itself, but rather the fact that the SAME display, access, and access control code is used for the browser and the desktop. IE on the Mac has never had that "advantage", and a few years back IE was my preferred browser on the Mac even while I had IE for Windows banned at the office.
That paper doesn't seem to say anything about the relationship of (for example) Fossa Fossana to other civets, rather it's using the divergence of Cryptoprocta and Fossa to set bounds on how recently any single period of colonization could have occurred.
Without including non-malagasay civets in the study you can't rule out separate colonization. The only related carnivores they include in the study are Crocuta and Suricata.
If you like to explore music, Napster (or similar Microsoft DRM subscription services) are the way to go.
Gee, I get a bigger variety from 3hive, last.fm, and pandora. And it's free. And legal. And hooked in to sales for the stuff I like enough to actually keep, one way or another. Subscription music is just one channel for exploring music, and since it locks me in to Windows (hey, Napster, you get to gripe about Apple not supporting your format when you start shiping players for Mac and Linux, NOT ONE SECOND BEFORE) why should I care about it?
I don't have a 60G iPod. Apple's got iPods in a variety of sizes from 512M to 60G. The latest ones they introduced are 2G and 4G. The $300 iPod's 30G, and people buying that may not have 30G of music (I certainly don't) because (here's a clue) NOBODY IS FORCING YOU TO FILL YOUR HARD DISK.
Oh, and there's a boatload of music for sale direct from artists that doesn't show up as "online music sales". I was just invited to take a poll on what music I listened to from Apple, and they didn't even have an option for "direct from artist". So take the online sales figures you see with a grain of salt.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it that the only "real work" is stuff that involves heavy number crunching, or moving pixels around?
Well, I'm assuming you have a sensible reason for buying a $2000 Powermac G5 instead of a $500 Mac mini. Anything not-pixel-pushing that's going to get reasonable performance under Rosetta is going to get reasonable performance on a mini, so that pretty much leaves number-crunching. No?
If all you're doing is compiling and running code that doesn't itself involve pixel-pushing, and you reckon you'll get better performance from an Intel processor, you can get WAY more cost-effective hardware than any kind of Macintosh by running some free UNIX on a clone.
iMac that's as powerful as a PowerMac?
Only if you don't mind getting "Rev A.".
And... only if you recompile.
It's only 2-3X faster, which means that running apps under Rosetta will be like running 68000 apps on the first Powermacs, slower on existing applications than the products they replace. That's OK for keyboard-bound apps like Office, but it's not going to be enticing for people actually doing real work for at least 6 months.
The MacBook is closer to being a realistic upgrade right now, because the faster memory bus makes a bigger difference.
I don't recall my Divine Comedy that well...
The other problem with this statement is the way everyone cries foul when Microsoft default installs an app with Windows and then complains that a Windows default install doesn't have any applications. Make up your mind! You can't have it both ways.
No "everyone" doesn't do this. Different people are complaining about different things.
The problem is that databases and other non-file data stores are more brittle than files. The more complexity there is in the metadata, the easier it is to lose information, and the more you're locked in to one specific form of metadata.
And databases came first. back in the 60s and even well into the 70s, a "file" was seen as a column in a table, or a table, in a database. As databases became more powerful, data stores tried to follow... you had RMS on DEC operating systems, "typed" data sets and files, systems like Pick, Apple's "resource forks", and Be's BeFS. No matter how the data's stored, eventually anything more than a shopping list (oh, yes, there are very complex shopping lists: address books, customer databases, and lots and lots of indexes into collections of flat files like Harvest and Spotlight and Google) becomes a flat block of text with embedded links to other blocks of text.
Whether those links are "see chapter 10" or "#include stdio.h" or "import io"... those links are not links to databases, they're links to files.
---
The idea that an unstructured block of data was the default was a breakthrough. The idea that a command line interface could be relatively terse and simple so that mere humans could learn to use it, that was a breakthrough too. UNIX cut through an enormous amount of user interface trash and laid bare what was, for the end of the '60s, at least as dramatic an improvement in UI design as GUIs were for the '70s. It's a linguistic interface, not a gestural one, but the first linguistic interface that provided concurrency (through the & background scheme, then through shell layers and job control) and the complete OPPOSITE of the normal "user submits a command, user waits for a response" that every other system in the world used.
I implemented a UNIX shell with explicit backgrounding on RSX-11 and showed it to my boss, and he was astonished. Even though RSX has an ability to hit return and get a new prompt at any time, so you already have the ability to "interrupt" a program and do something else, he'd never used that other than to treat that MCR prompt as an "I'm still busy" message. But being able to take something that was going to take a long time and throw it off into the background under his control was great.
Given the hardware limitations of the time, I submit that the UNIX shell and the UNIX plain-text-file pipes-and-filters job-control environment is close to the very best user interface that could be developed. It's the "tabbed browser" of the command line world. Alas, X-Windows came along and people stopped really using and understanding the shell, and X11's high-latency message based interface became the standard for the UNIX world.
It's really X11, a non-UNIX-like window system developed for UNIX and VMS at MIT in the '80s, that Lanier should be complaining about. Because UNIX itself doesn't suffer from the flaws that he's attributing to it. UNIX is small, tight, fast, responsive, and concurrent, a UNIX shell is a team of willing slaves that does WHAT you want WHEN you want it, and you NEVER have to wait for them unless you choose to.
---
File systems with UNIX semantics, by the way, work well. That's the problem with NFS. NFS is *not* a UNIX file system, and its semantics make it a huge nightmare for applications developed on REAL UNIX file systems. It was a hack-job designed to make it possible to implement a reasonably fast and efficient file system in the kernel on a 68000-based Sun workstation in the '80s. It should have been turfed long since and again IT'S NOT UNIX, IT'S NOT UNIX FAULT.
---
For structured data, databases are great. Using a file system for database operations was a result of UNIX coming from an era before there was a really common way to talk about relational operations linguistically. Bad as SQL is, at least it gives us a framework to deal with the problem. But for hierarchical randomly interrelated data the filesystem model works well.
Google is an index, it's not the data itself. The data that gives google its value is in a file system.
The break-even point for you would be 25 songs in a month
I've recently been burning fresh backups of my purchased songs. I'm back to May 2005, with 6 CDs filled, with 10-15 tracks per CD. That's at most 11 per month, and that doesn't count the free samples every Tuesday... which I pick up at least a couple of times a month. I bought more to start with, but it's kind of tapered off over time...
I still buy more music on CDs and rip it than I buy from iTMS, but the stuff I bought from iTMS gets a lot of play. 6 of my top 10 tracks came from there. Of the top 50, that's 16 ripped from my CD collection, 20 from iTMS, and 14 direct from the artist's website (plus or minus a couple each way, I don't recall exactly where each track came from originally).
Right now I've got 744 songs in my collection, which if purchased at iTunes would cost more than 12 years of subscription fees (assuming the price doesn't go up).
Which means that Yahoo got 1/12th the money from you than Apple would have. And iTMS isn't making any great profit for Apple, so who's paying for the difference? Under the counter kickbacks from Microsoft?
Meanwhile I've got several thousand songs in my collection, and I've probably got more music from MP3blogs and podcasts than you've got altogether. Music isn't a scarce resource, you don't need to worry about how much you can afford to buy... finding stuff you like and stuff that'll expand your mind is a much more interesting worry to have.
I can get an endless stream of music that I've never heard before from pandora.com, from last.fm, and when I find something I like enough to keep I can buy it from iTunes, or direct from the artist, or if it's only available as a CD from Amazon, and with most free streams it's just a click of a button. There's more material there than I could ever listen to... why should I pay to subscribe to a service that's only got music from the labels?
It's still the least appealing product name since the Ford Probe.
Well, they've killed off Palm.
...
I just got mail advertising a Windows Powered Treo 700w.
So they're not losing them *all*.
On the other hand, I agree that's the least appealing product name since the Ford Probe.
Hidden variable not supported by Aspect experiment.
EWG multiple universe model should be experimentally indistinguishable from the Copenhagen interpretation.
Are you arguing for the hidden-variable interpretation of QM, or the multiple world interpretation of QM? It's not clear to me which you're describing.
Also, whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls. - makali
HA! I fully support your proposed audio-cock technology. - jwz
Um, the iTunes interface is just a column browser. The column browser is actually a Xerox design that showed up in Smalltalk in the late '70s, along with the windowing user interface that Apple uses. Column browsers are widely used for both hierarchical and relational information in virtually every part of the computer industry, and the idea that Apple owns the concept of using column browsers in music players is ludicrous.
Not to mention that there's at least one bloke who claims he's got an earlier patent on the idea, and Apple owes him money.
#1 and #3 are the same complaint - that instead of having a syntactically distinct component part of the name is used to distinguish who is responsible for an object.
A/UX made no attempt to provide a transitional environment to a new API. It ran multiple System 6 environments, for the Finder, for the Terminal, for whatever graphical applications you were running. I'm also not sure how much of the virtual memory capabilities of System V were made available to manage partitions... some of the System V releases of that period were still swappers rather than pagers, and swapping would have been MUCH easier to implement for classic partitions. Anyway, it wasn't the "new OS" that I was talking about, it wasn't trying to be one. It was just a "proof by existence" that they had the technology to build a classic virtual machine in the early '90s.
I've got a NeXTstation and an SE/30 running A/UX sitting next to each other. The NeXTstation has the same amount of RAM as the SE/30, but doesn't carry the horrid legacy of "partitions" around. It's also got modern demand-paged virtual memory from its 4.3 BSD roots. It's definitely more efficient... but it also runs applications as large as a complete System 6 system and application partition together without bogging down, and it was by no means the most efficient base they could have used.
BeOS is often brought up at this point, and I used to be moderately enthusiastic about the design (though the way they brought things together and the way they based internal APIs on C++ objects meant they were pretty much doomed from the start, unless they found someone like Apple to take them over) until I ran both BeOS and Rhapsody on the same computer... and BeOS was horribly swappy on a box that Rhapsody was quite happy with.
No, he's arguing that Copyrights are government interference.
Whether that's desirable, or whether it's undesirable, or whether it's too much or too little, is a different debate. Whether government intevention is desirable or not is not the point.
The point is that ANY market that depends on copyrights, patents, or any related tools is a government mandated and controlled market. It's ludicrous to cheer on this as a demonstration that government intervention in a "free market" can be a good thing. This market has not been "free" in anyone's memory.
Without the DMCA and other strong copyright and licensing regulation there wouldn't be any point to the kind of DRM in the "Sony Rootkit", or Windows Media Player 9 and later, or Palladium, because there wouldn't have been any laws criminalizing reverse engineering. You'd buy the CD and pick up the patch to Windows to disable the DRM at the checkout counter.
This kind of after-the-fact bandaid on a few of the worst excesses of government interference in the market is hardly proof that the government needs to be involved.
One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM.
Apple was running a classic virtual machine under System V UNIX in the *early* nineties. But classic Mac OS was born doomed, the API guaranteed that nobody would ever be able to do multitasking under Mac OS without using fixed partitions... which was a performance killer for low-memory systems even with demand paging. They should have replaced the API by 1990 with one that used opaque handles like UNIX, or required explicit locking of handles during use. That would have allowed a single classic application alongside multiple New API applications, which would have been good enough for a transition if it had been started early enough.
Given that the classic environment in A/UX was System 6, they were actually on the way there. But System 7 incorporated The Grand Maltitasking Charade by default and they couldn't really go back after that.
IE on the Mac doesn't take part in the ActiveDesktop Cluster**** that's been the biggest security problem on the net for the past 7 years, so...
Out of curiousity, just how insecure has IE on the Mac been?
About as insecure as any other normal browser, and maybe a quintillion times as secure as IE on Windows.
You shoudl be able to run iCab on OS 8/9.
IE in Windows and IE on the Mac are completely different environments.
The biggest problem with IE is not IE itself, but rather the fact that the SAME display, access, and access control code is used for the browser and the desktop. IE on the Mac has never had that "advantage", and a few years back IE was my preferred browser on the Mac even while I had IE for Windows banned at the office.
I got email from apple pointing me to a survey about where the music on my computer came from.
A *huge* part of that was from individual artists websites, and none of the categories they listed covered that option.
That paper doesn't seem to say anything about the relationship of (for example) Fossa Fossana to other civets, rather it's using the divergence of Cryptoprocta and Fossa to set bounds on how recently any single period of colonization could have occurred.
Without including non-malagasay civets in the study you can't rule out separate colonization. The only related carnivores they include in the study are Crocuta and Suricata.
After a bit more searching I've found a much better study published in 2003: Yoder, A.D. and J.J. Flynn. Origin of Malagasy Carnivora. In: The Natural History of Madagascar (S. M. Goodman and J. Benstead, eds.) University of Chicago Press, pp. 1253-1256. which does make a compelling case.
you're talking about people buying online vs. locally, and you're talking about buying music at Borders?
Are you familiar with the past tense?
If you like to explore music, Napster (or similar Microsoft DRM subscription services) are the way to go.
Gee, I get a bigger variety from 3hive, last.fm, and pandora. And it's free. And legal. And hooked in to sales for the stuff I like enough to actually keep, one way or another. Subscription music is just one channel for exploring music, and since it locks me in to Windows (hey, Napster, you get to gripe about Apple not supporting your format when you start shiping players for Mac and Linux, NOT ONE SECOND BEFORE) why should I care about it?
I don't have a 60G iPod. Apple's got iPods in a variety of sizes from 512M to 60G. The latest ones they introduced are 2G and 4G. The $300 iPod's 30G, and people buying that may not have 30G of music (I certainly don't) because (here's a clue) NOBODY IS FORCING YOU TO FILL YOUR HARD DISK.
Oh, and there's a boatload of music for sale direct from artists that doesn't show up as "online music sales". I was just invited to take a poll on what music I listened to from Apple, and they didn't even have an option for "direct from artist". So take the online sales figures you see with a grain of salt.