An April 1 announcement from Apple actually sort of makes sense, because Apple was incorporated on April 1, 1976. That makes tomorrow Apple's 29th "birthday."
This overlooks that slashdot is a geek website.:-) Tomorrow will be Apple's 30th birthday (since birthday counting is zero based) though it is only the 29th anniversary of Apple's birthday (which is what most people who haven't had to debug overflow and off-by-one errors celebrate.
Once Apple makes a significant marketshare in the European Union, Microsoft won't be a monopoly anymore. A half-hearted effort to expand in Europe will probably do more to help Microsoft than help themselves.
I'd hoped that this wouldn't need further explanation since it would be off-topic to the discussion at hand.
My post was an attempt to describe (in a humorous manner) why automatons are bad at handling no win situations.
The morning snooze alarm is a "no win" situation of the mildest form. If you haven't already accounted for the possibility that you'll need the snooze, you will either be late and compromise your appointments or you'll be on time and a mental mess while you're trying to subsist on less sleep than you needed.
In my mind, the "idiot automoton" idea is well embodied by Clippy. When I have to use a machine with Clippy (or a help daemon like him) it's almost insulting how reliably he misunderstands my intentions. Unlike HAL 9000, Clippy seems to have a bit of ego about himself. He wants to show off his features which makes him even more frustrating to deal with.
On the subject of the tubes; the Teri Schiavo case is in my mind as the ultimate "no win" situation. While this topic only entered national scrutiny two weeks ago, I have been following the case since roughly 2002 and have become somewhat jaded to the emotional outbursts on both sides. Sorry if my comment seems callous, but this is a heartbreaking case no matter who wins. (Destroy Terri or destroy the legal system's power to resolve disputes).
As a side note, about a year and a half ago I was thinking about the issue of being a single man with no trustworthy life partner, spiritual beliefs that disagreed with my parents, and what might happen if I were to wind up in a situation like Terri. Routinely, I do have seizures that (while innocuous and would pass) freak out strangers around me and wind me up in the emergency room sitting in a corner for two hours with multi-thousand dollar ambulance and "observation" bills for a service I didn't ask for or need. My medic-alert bracelets are ignored. And every legal opinion I've received says I'm duty bound to pay for these "services". So when thinking about the case of Terri Schiavo I've been considering how I can take my own life should I wind up in a situation where I can't respond. Maybe be able to get out a call to home and be able to screech out my code word which would ??? no profit.
But again, this comes down to an automaton trying to intervene in a no-win situation.
I'd really hate to see her hired by Microsoft to come up with the next mobile version of Clippy.
"You've hit my snooze alarm again and haven't updated to Longhorn service pack 2. It looks like you are in a purely vegetative state; prepare to have your tubes removed."
There was a quote from Russel T. Davies (the co-producer, and writer of the leaked episode) that I'll paraphrase because I can't track it down right now. But the essence of it was that despite others panic about the leak, he didn't see it as a bad thing.
His logic was that only the hardcore fans will go to the trouble to download the episode, and that if it doesn't meet their expectations they'll only watch it 20 times instead of 30. New viewers will not be motivated to download it in the first place, and it's the opinion of these new viewers that will judge whether any version of Doctor Who is a success.
It sounds like Mr. Davies really "gets" both the mentality of ardent series fan(atics) as well as the potential uses of the internet. I know he didn't have anything to do with the leak itself, but I bet he's glad that it wasn't just ignored. There'd be more worry if the show was leaked and people said "Don't bother with it". The leak did stir things up and should give him a wonderful headstart into editing, marketing, and leverage of the rest of the season.
As a disclaimer, I am a Dr. Who fan. A friend tricked* me into watching the new episode. And, though I think it will stir up controversy among fans of older Doctors, I think it will be a wonderful new show that has the potential of rivaling Babylon 5 in terms of pacing, subtlety, and a larger tapestry of story arcs. (Seeds were planted in "Rose" but I have no idea how they'll be followed up in later episodes though).
* I really don't like to listen to spoilers or see things in advance, but when my friend told me that he had the Fox movie (which I still hadn't seen) and I watched it. I firgured out early on that this wasn't the Fox movie, but I just couldn't stop at that point.
I will say that the MS/Windows habit of trying to iconify every possible command is not progress.
I notice this especially in toolbars that attempt to cram the most common commands into tiny space. It may be "common" to use File:Open or File:Save, but these are probably the worst candidates for "useful" toolbar icons. You probably already have the shortcut ingrained in your hand motion already, and if you're using the mouse, the toolbar is hardly a twitch away from the menubar (where Open and Save's position are well known). On the Mac, I almost never see these two icons in default toolbar arrangements (there was a directive against doing this in Inside Macintosh long ago I think).
Even worse is when toolbars have only a fixed size. On today's smaller displays the physical resolution can go well above 96dpi. On those monitors I find small icons useless unless they are common ones (like "Find") or are sigils themselves (like "Play" or "Eject").
While Apple gets a lot of heat about making cosmetic eye candy, one thing they changed in OS X that goes unnoticed is that they upped the default icon size to 128x128 (and still let developers make smaller versions). Thus it makes it easy to make good looking, recognizable, icons that will scale up to almost 256x256 (with antialiasing) without starting to look choppy. While I don't expect toolbars to ever need 128x128, other places that use icons in the Mac OS (the app's "About" box, or the toolbar) really do benefit from these larger sizes.
I don't find Window's icons useless, but I think my habits of using them well are just because they frequently use the same (or similar) elements in their icon design. It WOULD probably throw me off somewhat for a developer to use a purple handle on their magnifying glass for their Find feature. Just because I have an expectation, and at the tighter dpi's my eyes don't want to work to decode whether purple has any significance in that icon. Windows has a good language for icons, but it doesn't scale up well to those tighter dpi's. I don't find Windows useless, but the differences from the Mac icons run deeper more than just cosmetics.
Expanding the acronym to it's full length might help (There Aint No Such Thing As AFree Lunch).
Unlike most acronyms posted on slashdot, this one actually seems to have been coined as a fad and hip bit of slang well before the personal computer. (My origins don't go back much further than that so I can't comment on it's real coinage).
Of course, this type of language research in the past has been helped by the need for people to write things down in physical form. If this isn't a scam where the poster waves their copyright or something (which is very possible), I suspect that these motives to monitor evolution of thought and language might be their noble (but naive) purpose for offering this service.
On the surface, copyright seems inappropriate for a religion or spiritual practice that is trying to spread their ideas.
But sometimes people see deeper thought and ideas in a work than the creator may have seen. The people who take the Jedi faith as a religion. Or those who read Charles Schultz's Peanuts as a daily existenialism lesson. Should George and Charles loose their royalties and copyrights just because people see deeper lessons than the creator perhaps intended in the work.
On the other hand, I think the whole 12-step philosophy is quite similar to a cult organization. They take people who have low self-esteem, problems fitting in with their community, issues of maturity and self-control, and get people to conform to a behavior modification program (under the pretense of fixing a drinking/eating/sex/other problem) and then get them to evangelize to others. The 12 Step organizations use their control over copyright to make money and maintain control over the organization. Though fundamentally the steps themselves don't seem all that different from the tenets of Extreme Programming if you substitute Behavioral Problem = Programming Problem, God = XP Philosophy and Personal Inventory = Unit Testing.
Copyright is definitely a weapon that religions and cults use to control their faith and followers. Perhaps it'd be better to train people to see this as a sign of bad faith on the part of the group. Hmmm.
So will Nabisco and Keebler and other makers of those engineered, aeresol-cheeze products now be make foods that are smarter and more useful than the consumers who eat them? This could open up all sorts of ethical issues.
One of the things that many companies are only now coming to realize is that when you get lawyers involved, you may not have the option to keep your embarassing source code private. When that subpoena arrives, you may not have the option of pulling out legally embrassing source. Taking out the cripple homosexual lawyer joke. Trying to firm up exactly which BBS that 1992 I/O polling code came from that you always intended to rewrite but never bothered since it was "free" (as in jail time) and decided to keep using it.
Just as IBM is being asked to pull out 30 years worth of source code for SCO, your company might be asked to do the same by some company abusing the legal system. If your whole source evolution may be viewable, that suggests that only a ground-up rewrite can hide some of your nastier ethical and social improprieties. The best option in this situation is making it open-source from the start (even basing on open source code) and black box testing against your old code. Making it open will do a lot to keep it clean and test it hard.
True, your company may have signed all sorts of legal entanglements with your old source, but you'll probably have to rebuild it all from scratch anyway in eighteen months or whenever Longhorn is finally unleashed. Starting over is inevitable; get a jump on things and start that re-construction effort from scratch now with an open source driver. Whatever changes you have to make for Longhorn, you'll be starting from a trunk of source that's stable in execution and legality.
What is the real agenda behind these rumors? Normally elusive, unnamed "Microsoft Partners" assure us that in the next release every feature will be fixed, every security hole patched, and every wish list fulfilled. Rarely do the rumor mongers say "It's true, they're only going to make a half-assed effort on this."
Is this CSS 2 people trying to pressure Microsoft into releasing a CSS 2 compliant browser? That's unlikely. Traditionally their focus is spreading rumors that they've seen a beta version of the next big release and that it has "perfect" CSS 2 compliance. Therefore, people will want to be ready to transition to CSS 2 compliance now since its arrival is inevitable.
Is this Microsoft trying to sabotage acceptance of CSS level 2? Possible, but they rarely do this by saying one of their own products is a dog. They fund studies and research and industry pundits to rail against the problems with whatever feature they don't want to implement.
So I'm a bit at a loss of who is left that would actively be trying to diss CSS 2 and also diss Microsoft's development process? Any rumor mongers want to start a rumor?
If that many people still see their OS as viable and are willing to use it... then should the OS companies really be holding a gun to their head in what can only be an attempt to wring more money from them?
That sounds reasonable, but major software upgrades aren't about popularity or making money; they're about making changes that break things. Sometimes the changes make a new feature possible, but often times they bring instability, data corruption, or regressive preformance issues.
Apple's difficulty to getting people to upgrade (since the days of System 6!) have given them a perspective that they market each major upgrade (a.k.a. burdensome incompatibility) with flashy new features, programmer optimizations, and cosmetic improvements that all could have been added to older releases but are saved and introduced as the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Their marketing actually makes many people eager to pay for a set of major changes and incompatabilities each year. (All the Mac rumor sites are awash in speculation over the release date, pricing, and last minute features for Tiger.)
Microsoft's attempts to do this with Windows don't work nearly as well. Programmers willingly forgo new api's on their projects to reach a bigger market. Any cosmetic changes are made available by third-parties for older machines and many people demand a way to regress changes to the older, less-flashy version. Free code doesn't isn't always persuasive either. The major incompatabilities of services packs make some people choose not to stay current if it means that they don't have to hassle with making changes where they have no interest in making changes. If the changes benefit MS, they should be paying me to sabotage (err upgrade) my own system is how one of my previous bosses looked at it.
One of the disadvantages to free software is that there is no automatic way to transition the data, email, porn, and games over to a free software OS in a way that sates the desire people have to not have to screw with their computer. There do appear to be some software projects that are working on these issues, but I bet a partial hardware upgrade (e.g. new hard drive with Linux, transition tools, and way to make a complete archival backup of the old system) would be more along the lines of what Joe Artist or Grandpa Smith would want.
I thought that Google had doctored up this obvious territorial infringement on the Mac OS X desktop as a warning shot fired across Apple's bow since Apple is apparently making a big deal out of searching interfaces and algorithms with it's forthcoming Spotlight technology in it's next operating system.
When Sir Isaac Newton looked at the continuous spectrum of white light dispersed through a prism, his superstitious mind couldn't bear to name only six colors. Being that six was a number of the devil and that there were seven planets and seven notes he added the dark blue "indigo" color in as one of his fundamental colors of light to round out the number of colors to seven.
For centuries, Indigo used to be a very valuable dye; the exclusive looking deep blue color was a sign of wealth. Of course that "exclusivity" went down the toilet when they developed synthetic indigo in 1905 and everyone with a new pair of blue jeans could have some of that exclusivity.
It sounds like a good name for a Microsoft product.
I'm a Cocoa developer, but I don't really see why Carbon should go away. It has a different orientation to objects than Cocoa does, but (unlike old versions of VB) killing Carbon off wouldn't make the people who hate Cocoa like it any more. There doesn't seem to be as much new developer interest in Carbon, but it's capable of evolving just as the Mac OS does. After all, much of Carbon could be reduced to wrappers around Core Foundation code.
If anything, Apple appears to have been making toolbox independent additions to the Mac with Core Foundation. They add procedural code as a base below the higher level toolboxes. Then spend the time to perfect the higher level API's while also working out the bugs and implementation details in the Core. All three areas keep advancing.
True, most of Carbon's functionality is already available in Core and Cocoa, but the transition cost and learning curve are the bigger problems. Old developers don't want to make that jump yet. Fortunately, it appears that keeping Carbon around keeps the toolbox development healthier and requires just a bit of abstraction in its development for two different object-oriented development models.
Like Arnold to a Democrat, you can practically hear it calling the DFI heatsink a girly-man.
These sort of topical quotes really frustrate me. The reviewer is trying to get some of the psuedo-hip language that the technically incompetent magazines try and sprinkle around to make their reviews readable to the technically incompetent.
Wasn't calling someone a "girley man" a common insult of the Satruday Night Live characters Hans and Frans rather than one of Arnold Schwarzenager's? No doubt he's said it in his political career after an overzealous speech writer put it down, but Arnold's not who made the line famous.
So in trying to be hip and clever the writer has completely clouded his point here. While I expect this "entertaining review" at the expense of accuracy in the ad-driven magazines I prefer it when the tech sites can leave out these kind of remarks.
The ongoing series with Sylvester McCoy was cancelled in 1989 purportedly due to low ratings. (but costs, internal politics, or greed about movie possibilities have been posed as well)
The 1996 television movie with Paul McGann as the Doctor fighting Y2K in San Francisco had reasonable ratings in the UK but not in the US.
The March 12, 1999 Comic Relief sketch "And The Curse of Fatal Death" was done with Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor and Julia Sawahla as his companion. (Don't read more about the cast or credits of this show without some humorous spoilers). With humor that you'd only understand if you also understood Dr. Who, it did remarkably well for a ten-year-old cancelled series.
Also in 1999, Russell T. Davies controversial Queer As Folk uses a gay Dr. Who fan as a major character and mines a bit of nostalgia by including clips from classic Dr. Who episodes like Pyramids of Mars.
The 1999 Rowan Atkinson parody was far more consistent, spirited, and entertaining than the dour 1996 telemovie that tried to re-invent just about everything about the Doctor.
But my bet is that Russell T. Davies ability to stir up controversy, personal Who fandom, and ability to write good characterization is what has really gotten Doctor Who back on the air. I think the Doctor and Rose need to say a big "Thank you" to Vince Tyler.
I misunderstood the title of this article, but the idea of putting a bluetooth device on a gun and making it only fire if you are "within range" of your tag sounds like a good idea after the Atlanta manhunt this weekend where the accused stole the gun from a deputy in the courthouse and shot the judge (as well as others). Not a foolproof item, but it might help somewhat.
Once again, they are just using rumors to support their own speculations.
Apple's new fiscal year starts on April 1st, and if they are expecting to announce a great financial report they will likely have a satellite conference call. They typically go out of their way to avoid making new product announcements to the cynical accounting journalists who participate in Apple's "beleaguered" conference calls.
If Apple is going to make even a June 30 release date they will start pushing plans hard in advance to make sure nothing slips. This includes making sure the dependencies like WebCore and Quicktime are ready to go far in advance of the things that depend on them.
Apple has officially end-of-lifed "Shake". Unless they want to exit this arena, NAB is a likely place and time to reintroduce its replacement. Whether the new Shake replacement is actually introduced then or whether it requires Tiger says more about Apple marketing than Tiger's development cycle.
Apple usually updates all it's hardware if software will make it sell better. If just the iMacs and eMacs are getting a software update on April 18, this says more that it's NOT the OS that will be getting the change. Something else aimed at the home and education crowds perhaps, but not something to make those considering a PowerMac favor the lower-end products.
Apple has announced Automater, Dashboard, and Spotlight would be extensible. It's quite likely they will provide downloads on their website. It's not suprising that their web developers would be getting this ready to go (even if it is three months away) nor that they'd take it down (since there's nothing actually available on those pages).
A Quicktime update may be released as part of Tiger, but it's release cycle is far different since it has to work on old systems and Windows as well as the Mac. Their work depends on being widely marketed independently of the Mac's current OS. Correlations between expected Quicktime and Tiger releases is completely a Marketing decision.
My two "Mac the Knife" coffee mugs from the rumor column in MacWeek will probably rake in more on eBay after this ruling.
Gosh, I feel so sorry that the rumor mongers secrets will be revealed when they didn't want them to be, but it's all in my best interest of making money!
Slashdot Mirror
Tomorrow will be Apple's 30th birthday (since birthday counting is zero based)
though it is only the 29th anniversary of Apple's birthday (which is what most people who haven't had to debug overflow and off-by-one errors celebrate.
Once Apple makes a significant marketshare in the European Union, Microsoft won't be a monopoly anymore. A half-hearted effort to expand in Europe will probably do more to help Microsoft than help themselves.
The speed of sound is much slower than the speed of light and that the noise generated is just an attempt to fill an unexpected void.
Hmmm, this seems like a term that Apple fans will gladly use to describe Microsoft.
I'd hoped that this wouldn't need further explanation since it would be off-topic to the discussion at hand.
My post was an attempt to describe (in a humorous manner) why automatons are bad at handling no win situations.
The morning snooze alarm is a "no win" situation of the mildest form. If you haven't already accounted for the possibility that you'll need the snooze, you will either be late and compromise your appointments or you'll be on time and a mental mess while you're trying to subsist on less sleep than you needed.
In my mind, the "idiot automoton" idea is well embodied by Clippy. When I have to use a machine with Clippy (or a help daemon like him) it's almost insulting how reliably he misunderstands my intentions. Unlike HAL 9000, Clippy seems to have a bit of ego about himself. He wants to show off his features which makes him even more frustrating to deal with.
On the subject of the tubes; the Teri Schiavo case is in my mind as the ultimate "no win" situation. While this topic only entered national scrutiny two weeks ago, I have been following the case since roughly 2002 and have become somewhat jaded to the emotional outbursts on both sides. Sorry if my comment seems callous, but this is a heartbreaking case no matter who wins. (Destroy Terri or destroy the legal system's power to resolve disputes).
As a side note, about a year and a half ago I was thinking about the issue of being a single man with no trustworthy life partner, spiritual beliefs that disagreed with my parents, and what might happen if I were to wind up in a situation like Terri. Routinely, I do have seizures that (while innocuous and would pass) freak out strangers around me and wind me up in the emergency room sitting in a corner for two hours with multi-thousand dollar ambulance and "observation" bills for a service I didn't ask for or need. My medic-alert bracelets are ignored. And every legal opinion I've received says I'm duty bound to pay for these "services". So when thinking about the case of Terri Schiavo I've been considering how I can take my own life should I wind up in a situation where I can't respond. Maybe be able to get out a call to home and be able to screech out my code word which would ??? no profit.
But again, this comes down to an automaton trying to intervene in a no-win situation.
"You've hit my snooze alarm again and haven't updated to Longhorn service pack 2. It looks like you are in a purely vegetative state; prepare to have your tubes removed."
His logic was that only the hardcore fans will go to the trouble to download the episode, and that if it doesn't meet their expectations they'll only watch it 20 times instead of 30. New viewers will not be motivated to download it in the first place, and it's the opinion of these new viewers that will judge whether any version of Doctor Who is a success.
It sounds like Mr. Davies really "gets" both the mentality of ardent series fan(atics) as well as the potential uses of the internet. I know he didn't have anything to do with the leak itself, but I bet he's glad that it wasn't just ignored. There'd be more worry if the show was leaked and people said "Don't bother with it". The leak did stir things up and should give him a wonderful headstart into editing, marketing, and leverage of the rest of the season.
As a disclaimer, I am a Dr. Who fan. A friend tricked* me into watching the new episode. And, though I think it will stir up controversy among fans of older Doctors, I think it will be a wonderful new show that has the potential of rivaling Babylon 5 in terms of pacing, subtlety, and a larger tapestry of story arcs. (Seeds were planted in "Rose" but I have no idea how they'll be followed up in later episodes though).
* I really don't like to listen to spoilers or see things in advance, but when my friend told me that he had the Fox movie (which I still hadn't seen) and I watched it. I firgured out early on that this wasn't the Fox movie, but I just couldn't stop at that point.
Even worse is when toolbars have only a fixed size. On today's smaller displays the physical resolution can go well above 96dpi. On those monitors I find small icons useless unless they are common ones (like "Find") or are sigils themselves (like "Play" or "Eject").
While Apple gets a lot of heat about making cosmetic eye candy, one thing they changed in OS X that goes unnoticed is that they upped the default icon size to 128x128 (and still let developers make smaller versions). Thus it makes it easy to make good looking, recognizable, icons that will scale up to almost 256x256 (with antialiasing) without starting to look choppy. While I don't expect toolbars to ever need 128x128, other places that use icons in the Mac OS (the app's "About" box, or the toolbar) really do benefit from these larger sizes.
I don't find Window's icons useless, but I think my habits of using them well are just because they frequently use the same (or similar) elements in their icon design. It WOULD probably throw me off somewhat for a developer to use a purple handle on their magnifying glass for their Find feature. Just because I have an expectation, and at the tighter dpi's my eyes don't want to work to decode whether purple has any significance in that icon. Windows has a good language for icons, but it doesn't scale up well to those tighter dpi's. I don't find Windows useless, but the differences from the Mac icons run deeper more than just cosmetics.
Unlike most acronyms posted on slashdot, this one actually seems to have been coined as a fad and hip bit of slang well before the personal computer. (My origins don't go back much further than that so I can't comment on it's real coinage).
Of course, this type of language research in the past has been helped by the need for people to write things down in physical form. If this isn't a scam where the poster waves their copyright or something (which is very possible), I suspect that these motives to monitor evolution of thought and language might be their noble (but naive) purpose for offering this service.
But sometimes people see deeper thought and ideas in a work than the creator may have seen. The people who take the Jedi faith as a religion. Or those who read Charles Schultz's Peanuts as a daily existenialism lesson. Should George and Charles loose their royalties and copyrights just because people see deeper lessons than the creator perhaps intended in the work.
On the other hand, I think the whole 12-step philosophy is quite similar to a cult organization. They take people who have low self-esteem, problems fitting in with their community, issues of maturity and self-control, and get people to conform to a behavior modification program (under the pretense of fixing a drinking/eating/sex/other problem) and then get them to evangelize to others. The 12 Step organizations use their control over copyright to make money and maintain control over the organization. Though fundamentally the steps themselves don't seem all that different from the tenets of Extreme Programming if you substitute Behavioral Problem = Programming Problem, God = XP Philosophy and Personal Inventory = Unit Testing.
Copyright is definitely a weapon that religions and cults use to control their faith and followers. Perhaps it'd be better to train people to see this as a sign of bad faith on the part of the group. Hmmm.
So will Nabisco and Keebler and other makers of those engineered, aeresol-cheeze products now be make foods that are smarter and more useful than the consumers who eat them? This could open up all sorts of ethical issues.
Just as IBM is being asked to pull out 30 years worth of source code for SCO, your company might be asked to do the same by some company abusing the legal system. If your whole source evolution may be viewable, that suggests that only a ground-up rewrite can hide some of your nastier ethical and social improprieties. The best option in this situation is making it open-source from the start (even basing on open source code) and black box testing against your old code. Making it open will do a lot to keep it clean and test it hard.
True, your company may have signed all sorts of legal entanglements with your old source, but you'll probably have to rebuild it all from scratch anyway in eighteen months or whenever Longhorn is finally unleashed. Starting over is inevitable; get a jump on things and start that re-construction effort from scratch now with an open source driver. Whatever changes you have to make for Longhorn, you'll be starting from a trunk of source that's stable in execution and legality.
What is the real agenda behind these rumors? Normally elusive, unnamed "Microsoft Partners" assure us that in the next release every feature will be fixed, every security hole patched, and every wish list fulfilled. Rarely do the rumor mongers say "It's true, they're only going to make a half-assed effort on this."
Is this CSS 2 people trying to pressure Microsoft into releasing a CSS 2 compliant browser? That's unlikely. Traditionally their focus is spreading rumors that they've seen a beta version of the next big release and that it has "perfect" CSS 2 compliance. Therefore, people will want to be ready to transition to CSS 2 compliance now since its arrival is inevitable.
Is this Microsoft trying to sabotage acceptance of CSS level 2? Possible, but they rarely do this by saying one of their own products is a dog. They fund studies and research and industry pundits to rail against the problems with whatever feature they don't want to implement.
So I'm a bit at a loss of who is left that would actively be trying to diss CSS 2 and also diss Microsoft's development process? Any rumor mongers want to start a rumor?
Apple's difficulty to getting people to upgrade (since the days of System 6!) have given them a perspective that they market each major upgrade (a.k.a. burdensome incompatibility) with flashy new features, programmer optimizations, and cosmetic improvements that all could have been added to older releases but are saved and introduced as the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Their marketing actually makes many people eager to pay for a set of major changes and incompatabilities each year. (All the Mac rumor sites are awash in speculation over the release date, pricing, and last minute features for Tiger.)
Microsoft's attempts to do this with Windows don't work nearly as well. Programmers willingly forgo new api's on their projects to reach a bigger market. Any cosmetic changes are made available by third-parties for older machines and many people demand a way to regress changes to the older, less-flashy version. Free code doesn't isn't always persuasive either. The major incompatabilities of services packs make some people choose not to stay current if it means that they don't have to hassle with making changes where they have no interest in making changes. If the changes benefit MS, they should be paying me to sabotage (err upgrade) my own system is how one of my previous bosses looked at it.
One of the disadvantages to free software is that there is no automatic way to transition the data, email, porn, and games over to a free software OS in a way that sates the desire people have to not have to screw with their computer. There do appear to be some software projects that are working on these issues, but I bet a partial hardware upgrade (e.g. new hard drive with Linux, transition tools, and way to make a complete archival backup of the old system) would be more along the lines of what Joe Artist or Grandpa Smith would want.
I thought that Google had doctored up this obvious territorial infringement on the Mac OS X desktop as a warning shot fired across Apple's bow since Apple is apparently making a big deal out of searching interfaces and algorithms with it's forthcoming Spotlight technology in it's next operating system.
For centuries, Indigo used to be a very valuable dye; the exclusive looking deep blue color was a sign of wealth. Of course that "exclusivity" went down the toilet when they developed synthetic indigo in 1905 and everyone with a new pair of blue jeans could have some of that exclusivity.
It sounds like a good name for a Microsoft product.
If anything, Apple appears to have been making toolbox independent additions to the Mac with Core Foundation. They add procedural code as a base below the higher level toolboxes. Then spend the time to perfect the higher level API's while also working out the bugs and implementation details in the Core. All three areas keep advancing.
True, most of Carbon's functionality is already available in Core and Cocoa, but the transition cost and learning curve are the bigger problems. Old developers don't want to make that jump yet. Fortunately, it appears that keeping Carbon around keeps the toolbox development healthier and requires just a bit of abstraction in its development for two different object-oriented development models.
Wasn't calling someone a "girley man" a common insult of the Satruday Night Live characters Hans and Frans rather than one of Arnold Schwarzenager's? No doubt he's said it in his political career after an overzealous speech writer put it down, but Arnold's not who made the line famous.
So in trying to be hip and clever the writer has completely clouded his point here. While I expect this "entertaining review" at the expense of accuracy in the ad-driven magazines I prefer it when the tech sites can leave out these kind of remarks.
- The ongoing series with Sylvester McCoy was cancelled in 1989 purportedly due to low ratings. (but costs, internal politics, or greed about movie possibilities have been posed as well)
- The 1996 television movie with Paul McGann as the Doctor fighting Y2K in San Francisco had reasonable ratings in the UK but not in the US.
- The March 12, 1999 Comic Relief sketch "And The Curse of Fatal Death" was done with Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor and Julia Sawahla as his companion. (Don't read more about the cast or credits of this show without some humorous spoilers). With humor that you'd only understand if you also understood Dr. Who, it did remarkably well for a ten-year-old cancelled series.
- Also in 1999, Russell T. Davies controversial Queer As Folk uses a gay Dr. Who fan as a major character and mines a bit of nostalgia by including clips from classic Dr. Who episodes like Pyramids of Mars.
The 1999 Rowan Atkinson parody was far more consistent, spirited, and entertaining than the dour 1996 telemovie that tried to re-invent just about everything about the Doctor.But my bet is that Russell T. Davies ability to stir up controversy, personal Who fandom, and ability to write good characterization is what has really gotten Doctor Who back on the air. I think the Doctor and Rose need to say a big "Thank you" to Vince Tyler.
My is this news for nerds? Aren't most porn actors and sock puppets non-union anyway?
I misunderstood the title of this article, but the idea of putting a bluetooth device on a gun and making it only fire if you are "within range" of your tag sounds like a good idea after the Atlanta manhunt this weekend where the accused stole the gun from a deputy in the courthouse and shot the judge (as well as others). Not a foolproof item, but it might help somewhat.
I use iChat via a
How will these updated terms of service be presented to me so I can be sure to discontinue my use rather than agree to this absurd policy?
My two "Mac the Knife" coffee mugs from the rumor column in MacWeek will probably rake in more on eBay after this ruling.
:-)
Gosh, I feel so sorry that the rumor mongers secrets will be revealed when they didn't want them to be, but it's all in my best interest of making money!
Hmm, where have I heard that argument before.