Why can't they seem to get it right, after all this time? It should work like a real radio. You type in the address of the station, and you hear the streaming audio. No mucking about with settings.
Instead, we get redirected to web pages full of ads, pop-ups asking us what proprietary format we can listen to ("don't you know?") and reminders that we could hear the bleeding music if we just "upgrade" by shelling out $4.95 a month.
It's no surprise that Internet radio hasn't taken off, really.:-/
> Virtual desktops are for logically grouping/partitioning windows (more typically, whole applications).
> Virtual desktops are, basically, a poor man's multi monitor setup.
> The two solve different problems.
But when you click on an application's icon in the Dock, it brings all the application's windows to the front. That's pretty much all the 'logical grouping' I need, and if I really need to see just that app, I can command-option-click the icon to hide everything else.
In other words, virtual desktops solve a 'problem' that I don't seem to have!:)
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.
As I read it, the word you makes other sources irrelevant to the question. It's the copies that you make which must be readable.
You may be right about needing litigation to settle it, but my point is that an interpretation that broad is not really reasonable, because virtually no person (user, judge, jury) would interpret that to mean that you can't lock up your own copy.
It's sort of analogous to modifying GPLed code. You can make whatever modifications you like for your personal use and keep them secret, as long as you don't try to distribute that version to others without the source to the changes. That's how I read this FDL clause - I'm perfectly free to keep my copy under lock and key and let whomever I like in to see it, but I'm not free to give a copy to somebody with a password on it. Otherwise it would be like requiring me to make my copy available 24/7 to anyone who asks, e.g. store it on a web server, which is not reasonable.
"There is an anti-DRM provision that is so non-specific that placing a copy of a GNU FDL document in a system with login security could be a violation. It says something like "you may not use technical means to keep people from reading this document". Period. I disapprove of DRM as much as RMS, this is a matter of the license construction being a problem rather than the license goal."
Pardon me, Mr. Perens, but I don't see that this provision would prevent someone with login access from distributing the document or making it available to someone without access, which is to say the security system secures the storage of a particular copy of the document, and not the content of it, as long as the secured system doesn't add any license conditions or prohibit users from extracting the document.
The actual license reads "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."
Ergo, putting the document in a secure storage system in no way "obstructs" people from reading or copying from other sources. Otherwise, keeping a copy in a library would be a violation just because the doors are locked after-hours!
> Folks, this is an Urban Legend! I am really surprised y'all were taken in by a submission > pointing to a website that marked it as a USER SUBMITTED article with no newspaper reference!
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but that Snopes article doesn't say anywhere that either of these stories has been determined to be false...?
Not to mention that the Best Buy story includes a cite from the Baltimore Sun, and it was JUST published last month, so it wouldn't be surprising if few people were familiar with it.
>> Why the heck didn't the gov't just ignore the whiners and pull the $1 bill?
> Because politicians like to stay in office. > > If it were just a few whiners who didn't like $1 coins, it would be different, >but in fact the overwhelming majority of the US population prefers bills to coins.
Which is curious, since a dollar now is worth about what a quarter was worth in 1970, and people didn't complain about carrying around quarters in 1970, to my knowledge.
What would happen if dollar coins and $2 bills were common, and the dollar bill were retired? I don't think most people would even notice or care after a couple-three months.
> I've been in NM for the last 2 years and I can safely tell you that there is no enlightenment here.
The last time there was enlightenment in Albuquerque, it moved to Redmond, Washington!
Which reminds me of a story told in "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire." Gates' friend Carl Edmark used to hang out with him in high school.
In their sophomore year, Edmark had a summer job working in a Seattle bank. One day, an elderly woman came in and deposited several thousand-dollar bills into her account. Edmark had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before. That night, he told Gates. "Well, let's get one," Gates said. The next day, he gave Edmark a huge wad of twenty-dollar bills, and Edmark took the money to one of the bank's managers, who gave him a thousand dollar bill.
That night, Edmark and Gates went to Dick's, a popular hamburger hangout noted for serving the greasiest fries in town. The two boys ordered cheeseburgers and fries. When the order came, Gates nonchalantly opened his wallet and handed the cashier the crisp thousand-dollar bill. She looked at the bill, then looked up at Gates, repeating her eye motion several times. Finally she went to get the manager.
"Got anything smaller?" the manager asked with a straight face when he came out. Gates, looking five years younger than his age, shook his head solemnly. "No, nothing else," he said, determined to play out the scene for all it was worth.
"Well, after lunch we might have been able to break this. But not now," replied the manager.
Gates and Edmark burst into laughter. They finally paid for their food with a couple of bucks and headed off in [Gates's] Mustang into the night.
>> I think previous experience with RMS shows that he'd write a 32,000 page diatribe portraying any non-free efforts as the anti-Christ sent by the Demon to murder all of us, and our children as well.
That's highly amusing, but you might want to look up "straw man" in your dictionary of philosophy.
I have to admit that I've never tried XP (I worked as a programmer before it came along), and I've only read a little about it. You're right, my example is not XP (I didn't mean to imply that it was), but it is pair programming of a different kind.
Two programmers, working on the same problem, in the same capacity-- the essential point being that the code passes both sets of eyes before it goes out. In our case, it didn't have to be checked every 5 seconds; every 5-15 minutes was sufficient.
The principle is the same, but tuned to accommodate our working style.
It comes down to doing it in the most reasonable manner for any pair of programmers. Sometimes you can work in tandem, other times you need long breaks from the other guy.
You don't necessarily have to have one programmer literally looking over the other's shoulder-- in my experience, it's more natural and makes more sense to discuss the problem with the other programmer, work separately for a while and then meet again to go over the results.
In one case, another programmer (senior to me) was describing how he was getting stock quote information over the wire and handling the fractions using floating-point calcs. He didn't like the implementation or the performance very much, and while he was telling me this, his phone rang.
While he was on the phone, I looked over his code and a few minutes later when he hung up, I handed him an integer version. By working on the problem alternately, we came up with a better solution (and the senior put in a good word for me with the boss, saying I had "a good eye for optimization)."
It all depends on what you're used to and what you're willing to try as a fresh approach.
it's kind of like the issue of funding education... throwing money at schools doesn't automatically mean the kids will get a better education, but the flip side is that it's much harder to give them a good education with no money.
>> For years I thought that all Unix machines involved hovering around in 3D over a virtual landscape of your files and folders...
The ironic thing is that if Lex really did know UNIX, she would've canned the file browser, jumped to a command line and locked those nasty raptors out in no time flat!:)
(Obligatory Simpsons reference, episode 4F21, The Secret War of Lisa Simpson)
Narrator: "The moon. For several years, she has fascinated many. But will man ever walk on her fertile surface? Democratic hopeful Adlai Stevenson says so."
[cut to a shot of Adlai Stevenson at some sort of press conference]
Stevenson: "I have no objection to man walking on the moon."
...
Narrator: "The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them?"
I finally found the developer document I was looking for... this is a much more detailed description of how Mac OS X does its windowing. Evidently the window server's system interface is being kept private at the moment.:(
...a whole bunch of people pretending to be experts and just talking out of their ass. Sometimes Mac people are really assholes.
Easy there! I agree that some people can be really rude, and throw more heat than light. Just ignore the assholes, and try to filter the signal out of the noise. I'm certainly no expert, but in the spirit of mutual enlightenment, I'm trying to share what I've learned from Apple's site.
Ya know, no one answered my original message...
Looking over the thread, I thought most of your questions were answered (some rudely)...
Q: If you could get Darwin running on such a homemade PowerPC (not made from old Mac parts, but built from 'scratch')... could you then take the pre-compiled parts of aqua out of Mac OS X and run this on your homemade powerpc computer?
A: If Darwin runs, Quartz and Aqua should run too. They're basically just a bunch of PPC libraries and some services (a.k.a. system routines).
Q: Doesn't darwin handle all of the interaction directly with the hardware?
A: Yes, through the I/O Kit. The drivers are abstracted through it.
Q: If the aqua binaries can run on your homemade powerpc, shouldn't everything
work just fine?
A: Theoretically, yes. No guarantees until someone tries it and makes it work.
Q: what if you wrote a powerPC emulator to run on Darwin-x86. Could you then run Mac OS X with the emulator even though you didn't have the Mac ROMs?
A: Since Mac ROMs aren't necessary to run Mac OS X, it should work. Old World machines will still have the ROMs, but no OS X system routines are contained in ROM.
Q: what if you got Darwin running on an x86 chip with a PowerPC emulator? Could you, theoretically, get aqua to run on such a system?
A: If you got Darwin running and you can emulate PPC instructions in the proper environment (cf. Mac-on-Linux), Aqua would probably run just fine.
Q: Does OS X access the Mac ROMS directly or does it go through Darwin?
A: OS X (including Darwin) doesn't access the ROMs or Open Firmware after booting. Open Firmware just does a self-test, initializes devices, and builds a device tree. Then it passes control to BootX, which starts the kernel and drivers. Firmware is then out of the picture.
Hope this helps! I'm still learning too, and I would love to try to get OS X running on a home-built PPC.
- MFN
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Heh heh! I always thought the world was divided into two groups: "population bifurcators" and "non-population bifurcators.":)
It's possible to do graphics in OS X without using Quartz.
I'd be very surprised if that's the case! Quartz interfaces with the I/O Kit, which is what talks to the hardware. It provides the drawing context for everything that appears on the display.
Aqua is the entire user interface (the windowing system is a subset of the user interface).
Sorry to be difficult, but I don't think that's entirely accurate. If you count the Core Graphic Services as part of Quartz (Apple does), then OpenGL, Quicktime and [Carbon] Quickdraw all depend on Quartz. Ars Technica has a good overview of the relationships.
This is only relevant because you could replace Aqua with a different interface using Quartz. Without Quartz, there is no Aqua. The reverse isn't true.
Here are some excerpts from Apple's own documentation, the Quartz Primer:
"Quartz offers a sophisticated two-dimensional drawing engine and an advanced windowing environment...
"Quartz is a powerful graphics system that delivers a rich imaging model, on-the-fly rendering, anti-aliasing, and compositing of two-dimensional graphics. At the heart of the Mac OS X graphics and windowing environment, Quartz supports a wide range of features, from low-level event handling and cursor management to the distinctive look and feel of Aqua, Mac OS X's new graphical user interface."
"Quartz has two parts, Core Graphics Rendering and Core Graphics Services. The Core Graphics Services layer consists of the window server. The window server is a single system-wide process that coordinates low-level windowing behavior and enforces a fundamental uniformity in window appearance."
I think it's safe to say that Quartz is both the windowing system and its API. Aqua is the Mac OS X standard interface elements, their style, and their behavior as implemented with Quartz and the Interface Builder.
Actually, I find it thought-provoking when applied to large app development. Probably because I've been playing with Smalltalk recently.
The most interesting aspect to me is the modularity of objects, and with dynamic binding you can code them and run them independently of the whole application.
So, thinking along these lines-- you could start with the smallest executable and add objects as needed. You could have a framework that doesn't need to be "finished" just to run it. Some apps are already doing this by using plug-ins for a lot of their functionality.
For example, "He gave the object to whomever he chose." is incorrect because 'whom' is the object case of that interrogative pronoun but is being used here as a predicate nominative (a repetition of the subject) of the verb 'to give'.
That would be true, except that "whomever" is not a repetition of the subject of the verb 'to give,' it is the object of the preposition "to." The prepositional phrase "to whomever he chose" is correct, because "he chose whom? Whomever." "Whom" isn't doing the giving.
Now, if the object of the first clause becomes the subject of a second clause, then the nominative supersedes the accusative, e.g. "Give it to whoever wants it," but "don't give it to whomever you prefer."
I had to correct this one on an examination we were giving to prospective employees. They were to identify the grammatical error in one of four sentences. This was one of two errors!
Slashdot Mirror
> so it's no longer " My computer"?
:)
> Such arrogance, Bill!
"All your computer are belong to us!"
Why can't they seem to get it right, after all this time? It should work like a real radio. You type in the address of the station, and you hear the streaming audio. No mucking about with settings.
:-/
Instead, we get redirected to web pages full of ads, pop-ups asking us what proprietary format we can listen to ("don't you know?") and reminders that we could hear the bleeding music if we just "upgrade" by shelling out $4.95 a month.
It's no surprise that Internet radio hasn't taken off, really.
- MFN
> Virtual desktops are for logically grouping/partitioning windows (more typically, whole applications).
> Virtual desktops are, basically, a poor man's multi monitor setup.
> The two solve different problems.
But when you click on an application's icon in the Dock, it brings all the application's windows to the front. That's pretty much all the 'logical grouping' I need, and if I really need to see just that app, I can command-option-click the icon to hide everything else.
In other words, virtual desktops solve a 'problem' that I don't seem to have! :)
"Good against the remote is one thing, but good against the localhost...?"
"No! PanicStruck is a peaceful server, we have no firewalls! You can't!"
"That's no moon... it's a MOV file."
"It's too big to be a MOV file!"
"Help me, Obi-Wan BitTorrent... you're my only hope!"
"I used to bullseye fanfilms with my T1 back home, they're not much bigger than 250MB."
You may be right about needing litigation to settle it, but my point is that an interpretation that broad is not really reasonable, because virtually no person (user, judge, jury) would interpret that to mean that you can't lock up your own copy.
It's sort of analogous to modifying GPLed code. You can make whatever modifications you like for your personal use and keep them secret, as long as you don't try to distribute that version to others without the source to the changes. That's how I read this FDL clause - I'm perfectly free to keep my copy under lock and key and let whomever I like in to see it, but I'm not free to give a copy to somebody with a password on it. Otherwise it would be like requiring me to make my copy available 24/7 to anyone who asks, e.g. store it on a web server, which is not reasonable.
I know! Let's ask Eben Moglen! :)
- Nickster
Pardon me, Mr. Perens, but I don't see that this provision would prevent someone with login access from distributing the document or making it available to someone without access, which is to say the security system secures the storage of a particular copy of the document, and not the content of it, as long as the secured system doesn't add any license conditions or prohibit users from extracting the document.
The actual license reads "You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute."
Ergo, putting the document in a secure storage system in no way "obstructs" people from reading or copying from other sources. Otherwise, keeping a copy in a library would be a violation just because the doors are locked after-hours!
- Nickster
> Folks, this is an Urban Legend! I am really surprised y'all were taken in by a submission
> pointing to a website that marked it as a USER SUBMITTED article with no newspaper reference!
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but that Snopes article doesn't say anywhere that either of these stories has been determined to be false...?
Not to mention that the Best Buy story includes a cite from the Baltimore Sun, and it was JUST published last month, so it wouldn't be surprising if few people were familiar with it.
>> Why the heck didn't the gov't just ignore the whiners and pull the $1 bill?
> Because politicians like to stay in office.
>
> If it were just a few whiners who didn't like $1 coins, it would be different,
>but in fact the overwhelming majority of the US population prefers bills to coins.
Which is curious, since a dollar now is worth about what a quarter was worth in 1970, and people didn't complain about carrying around quarters in 1970, to my knowledge.
What would happen if dollar coins and $2 bills were common, and the dollar bill were retired? I don't think most people would even notice or care after a couple-three months.
- Nickster
> I've been in NM for the last 2 years and I can safely tell you that there is no enlightenment here.
The last time there was enlightenment in Albuquerque, it moved to Redmond, Washington!
Which reminds me of a story told in "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire." Gates' friend Carl Edmark used to hang out with him in high school.
> My really cool ATI EGA Wonder could do 800x600x16 in 1984.
*Ahem* - ATI didn't even exist in 1984.
I think you made your point, but if you can't manage your anger then you have no business engaging in public discourse.
Goodbye.
>> I think previous experience with RMS shows that he'd write a 32,000 page diatribe portraying any non-free efforts as the anti-Christ sent by the Demon to murder all of us, and our children as well.
That's highly amusing, but you might want to look up "straw man" in your dictionary of philosophy.
I have to admit that I've never tried XP (I worked as a programmer before it came along), and I've only read a little about it. You're right, my example is not XP (I didn't mean to imply that it was), but it is pair programming of a different kind.
Two programmers, working on the same problem, in the same capacity-- the essential point being that the code passes both sets of eyes before it goes out. In our case, it didn't have to be checked every 5 seconds; every 5-15 minutes was sufficient.
The principle is the same, but tuned to accommodate our working style.
It comes down to doing it in the most reasonable manner for any pair of programmers. Sometimes you can work in tandem, other times you need long breaks from the other guy.
You don't necessarily have to have one programmer literally looking over the other's shoulder-- in my experience, it's more natural and makes more sense to discuss the problem with the other programmer, work separately for a while and then meet again to go over the results.
In one case, another programmer (senior to me) was describing how he was getting stock quote information over the wire and handling the fractions using floating-point calcs. He didn't like the implementation or the performance very much, and while he was telling me this, his phone rang.
While he was on the phone, I looked over his code and a few minutes later when he hung up, I handed him an integer version. By working on the problem alternately, we came up with a better solution (and the senior put in a good word for me with the boss, saying I had "a good eye for optimization)."
It all depends on what you're used to and what you're willing to try as a fresh approach.
it's kind of like the issue of funding education... throwing money at schools doesn't automatically mean the kids will get a better education, but the flip side is that it's much harder to give them a good education with no money.
(no, not James Earl Jones...)
A not-so-secret cameo is Hotblack Desiato's bodyguard, the guy who threatens Ford at the Restaurant. It's David Prowse!
>> For years I thought that all Unix machines involved hovering around in 3D over a virtual landscape of your files and folders...
:)
The ironic thing is that if Lex really did know UNIX, she would've canned the file browser, jumped to a command line and locked those nasty raptors out in no time flat!
Half right, half wrong...
Apple didn't invent it, they licensed it from George Gerpheide. Apple was the first to market a laptop with a touchpad.
If you want a source for this tidbit, click away.
(Obligatory Simpsons reference, episode 4F21, The Secret War of Lisa Simpson)
Narrator: "The moon. For several years, she has fascinated many. But will man ever walk on her fertile surface? Democratic hopeful Adlai Stevenson says so."
[cut to a shot of Adlai Stevenson at some sort of press conference]
Stevenson: "I have no objection to man walking on the moon."
...
Narrator: "The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them?"
Heh heh...
- MFN
I finally found the developer document I was looking for... this is a much more detailed description of how Mac OS X does its windowing. Evidently the window server's system interface is being kept private at the moment. :(
- MFN
Easy there! I agree that some people can be really rude, and throw more heat than light. Just ignore the assholes, and try to filter the signal out of the noise. I'm certainly no expert, but in the spirit of mutual enlightenment, I'm trying to share what I've learned from Apple's site.
Ya know, no one answered my original message...
Looking over the thread, I thought most of your questions were answered (some rudely)...
Q: If you could get Darwin running on such a homemade PowerPC (not made from old Mac parts, but built from 'scratch')... could you then take the pre-compiled parts of aqua out of Mac OS X and run this on your homemade powerpc computer?
A: If Darwin runs, Quartz and Aqua should run too. They're basically just a bunch of PPC libraries and some services (a.k.a. system routines).
Q: Doesn't darwin handle all of the interaction directly with the hardware?
A: Yes, through the I/O Kit. The drivers are abstracted through it.
Q: If the aqua binaries can run on your homemade powerpc, shouldn't everything work just fine?
A: Theoretically, yes. No guarantees until someone tries it and makes it work.
Q: what if you wrote a powerPC emulator to run on Darwin-x86. Could you then run Mac OS X with the emulator even though you didn't have the Mac ROMs?
A: Since Mac ROMs aren't necessary to run Mac OS X, it should work. Old World machines will still have the ROMs, but no OS X system routines are contained in ROM.
Q: what if you got Darwin running on an x86 chip with a PowerPC emulator? Could you, theoretically, get aqua to run on such a system?
A: If you got Darwin running and you can emulate PPC instructions in the proper environment (cf. Mac-on-Linux), Aqua would probably run just fine.
Q: Does OS X access the Mac ROMS directly or does it go through Darwin?
A: OS X (including Darwin) doesn't access the ROMs or Open Firmware after booting. Open Firmware just does a self-test, initializes devices, and builds a device tree. Then it passes control to BootX, which starts the kernel and drivers. Firmware is then out of the picture.
Hope this helps! I'm still learning too, and I would love to try to get OS X running on a home-built PPC.
- MFN
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Heh heh! I always thought the world was divided into two groups: "population bifurcators" and "non-population bifurcators." :)
It's possible to do graphics in OS X without using Quartz.
I'd be very surprised if that's the case! Quartz interfaces with the I/O Kit, which is what talks to the hardware. It provides the drawing context for everything that appears on the display.
Aqua is the entire user interface (the windowing system is a subset of the user interface).
Sorry to be difficult, but I don't think that's entirely accurate. If you count the Core Graphic Services as part of Quartz (Apple does), then OpenGL, Quicktime and [Carbon] Quickdraw all depend on Quartz. Ars Technica has a good overview of the relationships.
This is only relevant because you could replace Aqua with a different interface using Quartz. Without Quartz, there is no Aqua. The reverse isn't true.
Here are some excerpts from Apple's own documentation, the Quartz Primer:
"Quartz offers a sophisticated two-dimensional drawing engine and an advanced windowing environment...
"Quartz is a powerful graphics system that delivers a rich imaging model, on-the-fly rendering, anti-aliasing, and compositing of two-dimensional graphics. At the heart of the Mac OS X graphics and windowing environment, Quartz supports a wide range of features, from low-level event handling and cursor management to the distinctive look and feel of Aqua, Mac OS X's new graphical user interface."
"Quartz has two parts, Core Graphics Rendering and Core Graphics Services. The Core Graphics Services layer consists of the window server. The window server is a single system-wide process that coordinates low-level windowing behavior and enforces a fundamental uniformity in window appearance."
Sounds like a job for a window manager to me. Here's what they say Aqua is: "Aqua is, in a nutshell, the beautifully functional look and feel of Mac OS X."
I think it's safe to say that Quartz is both the windowing system and its API. Aqua is the Mac OS X standard interface elements, their style, and their behavior as implemented with Quartz and the Interface Builder.
- MFN
Actually, I find it thought-provoking when applied to large app development. Probably because I've been playing with Smalltalk recently.
The most interesting aspect to me is the modularity of objects, and with dynamic binding you can code them and run them independently of the whole application.
So, thinking along these lines-- you could start with the smallest executable and add objects as needed. You could have a framework that doesn't need to be "finished" just to run it. Some apps are already doing this by using plug-ins for a lot of their functionality.
Anyway, it sounds appealing to me!
- MFN
For example, "He gave the object to whomever he chose." is incorrect because 'whom' is the object case of that interrogative pronoun but is being used here as a predicate nominative (a repetition of the subject) of the verb 'to give'.
That would be true, except that "whomever" is not a repetition of the subject of the verb 'to give,' it is the object of the preposition "to." The prepositional phrase "to whomever he chose" is correct, because "he chose whom? Whomever." "Whom" isn't doing the giving.
Now, if the object of the first clause becomes the subject of a second clause, then the nominative supersedes the accusative, e.g. "Give it to whoever wants it," but "don't give it to whomever you prefer."
I had to correct this one on an examination we were giving to prospective employees. They were to identify the grammatical error in one of four sentences. This was one of two errors!
- MFN