And on the other hand he would be almost merciless in terms of rejecting their work until he felt it had reached the level of perfection that was good enough to go into – in this case, the Macintosh.
So what the hell happened with System 7 and then OS 8? So much for "perfection."
Jobs left Apple in May 1985. System 7 was released on May 13, 1991. Unless someone wrote down his ideas and preserved them on the infamous "colored note cards" he had zero influence over System 7.
System 7 was 32-bit clean and multitasking on full-time. But it wasn't popular because formerly "high end" 2MB Macs with 20MB hard drives were now the minimum requirements and seemed slow compared to System 6.
Steve Job's only influence so soon after his return on Mac OS 7.7 was to rename to Mac OS 8 and kill clone support. It was a nice evolution of classic Mac OS 7 so people liked it, but rename it Mac OS 8 and viola, no more contractual obligation to the clone makers. A dick move indeed, but irrelevant to the quality of the software itself.
Perhaps you mean the buggy, unstable, defunct System 8 code named Copland which Apple started in March 1994? It was the failed overhaul of System 7 software with a nanokernel, preemptive multitasking, new Finder, and so on. Apple bought NeXT (and brought Steve Jobs back) precisely because they couldn't get it perfected and stable. If anything that sort of supports Steve's philosophy "Real artists ship".
Whether Jobs has evolved into vision-driven designer or whether he's still a bullying brat is irrelevant. These three software releases aren't really examples of anything he had significant influence over.
Linux has been a great win for what people use it for. Developing it to fit the needs of non-developers is a crap shoot; developers aren't casual users. Here are some things I've thought were missing.
Quicken isn't proper double entry book keeping, but it's ease of use wins non-accountants over. It's hard to get that balance right though; even Intuit had to buy Mint when it's attempt to jump start it's Mac version failed to deliver. Other Linux tools have felt like a thin veneer over double entry hell to me. Trust such tools with my financial life? No.
An automated software updater? Cute names probably works against keeping ignorant users up to date. "I know it's been years, but I won't trade in my Karmic Koala for a Natty Narwhal!" Software updates are critical for stability and security, but the Linux update tools I've seen either don't cover enough or they are way too difficult for a casual user to operate. Demanding re-installation basically means sending them back to Windows.
How about training software instead of documentation? Despite the web's illusion otherwise, Mac and Windows users are not very advanced. It's one thing to offer a simple unified interface, but software to train the ignorant bosses of the world how to send email, backup, and print? Of the few such Linux attempts I've seen, some fail by mixing interfaces. But all have failed by going to the command line at some point. Even though they say "just type this, you don't have to understand it", the user's whole experience rides on them NOT making a typo. Way too fragile.
Linux is unparalleled in meeting the needs of it's developers, but without people making apps for their ignorant bosses, middle school kids, and reluctant grandparents, it's audience with (perhaps rightfully) stay self-serving.
I see it similar to the Etude music player on the iPhone. It's a MIDI player that highlights the notes on the sheet music and on a simulation of a piano keyboard as the music is being played.
The Cat in the Hat eBook has several modes, one of which highlights the text as a voice reads the words. Another of which lets the kid touch something in the drawing, says the word and highlights it in the text (if it's in the passage on that page).
Neither replaces an audio performance (like an iTunes song or an audio book), and neither of which replace the physical static medium (like a piece of sheet music or a book), but both make a nice interactive presentation to help the viewer's brain make the connection of these very different sensations.
The iPhone OS is pretty new so it's hard to know what will be found, if investigated. But if based on recent legal precedents, change won't come from US legal action.
At the end of 2008, Apple's Macintosh "walled garden" practices were brought before Judge William Alsup in the Apple vs Psystar case. Psystar filed counterclaims insisting that Apple's EULA was invalid because it was "tying" Mac OS X to Apple hardware. They were basically laughed out of court.
You can read Groklaw's analysis of that ruling, but my armchair lawyering just can't see too much difference between the OS X "walled garden" and the iPhone OS "walled garden" legally.
sopssa wrote: "Open Source: Nobody restricts where you can install the application, and you get the source code too -- the best situation."
No, open source is about "source" code, not the applications or products you build with it. It doesn't guarantee you'll be able to run the compiled products on a platform, since that would also promise open source programmers will fix all the bugs that stop you from running their code on a platform. You've got the source, but that's only half the battle.
sopssa continued: "Proprierary software: You dont get the source code, but nobody is restricting where or if you can install it, as long as its freeware or you have paid for it."
First, proprietary software is not code. Licensing proprietary code or software often demands where you can deploy it in the license, but without that license the law says "nowhere". Heck, even some open source code such as GCC places demands on how the licensed code is deployed; you don't agree with the terms of the license and you again have no freedom to deploy it.
sopossa concludes: "Apple: Not only will you not get the source code and in most cases you have to pay for it, Apple is in total control what applications the user is allowed to install. They dont even give you the option to decide yourself."
Again, this conflates source and product, but I get the sense that sopssa's real complaint is about the locked down practices of saying what you can run on your Apple products. Even then you do have options; if it's a personal itch you need to scratch you can jailbreak or become a developer and deploy to a small handful of iProducts. But if you want to make "the next big thing" available to all platform users Apple does demand to play by our rules or go to a different playground.
When viewed as a fledgling platform that's still struggling with performance and security, that's not an unreasonable demand. When viewed as a multi-billion dollar, uber-popular computing platform, it is downright offensive. I vacillate between these perspectives regularly, but fortunately Apple's products are the only computing product around.
If Adobe becomes wildly successful on Android, Apple might change their mind about adoption. But Apple has made it clear they aren't going to be the pioneer with Flash on a mobile platform.
Not saying this is good or bad, unlike the iPad, It looks like two separate computers. The touch screen looks like the weakest part of the implementation, but I like this idea for a smart tablet dock. Your dock has the facility to backup your tablet's data; that seems much simpler than syncing through iTunes.
But in the video the netbook / keyboard base still maintains power when the screen is undocked; I'd think it'd quickly go to sleep instead.
How the base will react if someone else docks their tablet into the wrong base. Will it die? Will it enter a locked security state? Will it switch over to host the new tablet's data without problem?
The quick reloading of the web page is neat, but it is not the same page with local mods. The Flash banner ad at the top of the page doesn't load. And if you were on Slashdot entering your comment when you undocked, you'd lose all the words in your well-constr
... My question is this: does anyone there actually own something that could be seen as a precursor to this machine ?... I mean, the iPod was launched in an existing portable MP3-player market, the iPhone was launched in an existing (even crowded) mobile phone market. This makes me wonder, since I do not have anything that looks like an iPad already (I don't need it) - is there a widespread need for this product ?...
The larger bookstore chains in the US all have floor space dedicated to eBook readers. Barnes & Noble (and subsidiaries like WaldenBooks) are all pushing the B&N branded "Nook". Competitors like Borders show off the Sony eReaders and their kin. They typically have a functional unit tethered to a display stand that's loaded with eBooks. Some smaller stores have non-functional display units. And some just have paper flyers.
Though eBook readers are more common to see in airports rather than coffee shops, the segment of the American public that visits bookstores is aware of what they are and what the current versions have to offer. Certainly over Christmas 2009 these things were promoted well beyond stores' capability to deliver them, but whether that was due to low supplies or high demand isn't clear. They did appear to outstrip sales expectations over Christmas.
I'm a long time Mac user. Firefox developers are asking the wrong question of Mac users by focusing this discussion on continued support; of course, everyone wants their platform supported as long as possible.
But if you ask about whether Firefox should feel more like a "native" Mac app, you'd get a lot of Mac faithful saying "ditch Tiger if that's standing in the way". For example, ATSUI is the legacy text engine from the days of OpenDoc and System 7.5; apps that still use it under Mac OS X draw fire from Mac users because it's not integrated as well as CoreText or the Cocoa Text Engine. They don't make this text engine distinction directly, but it's clear they don't consider ATSUI to be Mac-like anymore with the "bugs" they file and complaints they have about lack of integration e.g. "Why doesn't the command-control-d shortcut to look up something in the dictionary work?"
Based on the goals of the Firefox roadmap, 4.0 looks like a "must-reluctantly-kill-Tiger" release just based on its lofty memory isolation goals; that's a feature you do not want to compromise the quality of.
Keep the bug fixes and security updates of the 3.x Firefox platform able to work with Tiger. This helps Mac users. This helps support people. This helps propagate a good standards compliant browser to as many people with legacy hardware as possible. But a major release number like 4.0 is a good end-user aware point for removing significant backwards compatibility.
Do what you can to hold it together, Mr. Scott! Bones, give him a hand.
Damn it Jim, I'm a Doctor, not an avid media composer!
Spock, what can we do?
We can try routing transporters through the ship's phasers while accelerating to warp speed. Thereby causing a blue shift and broadcasting our image over the heads of our audience.
Can we skip the phasers and just use the transporter?
That wouldn't be logical Captain.
Scotty, I want every available man working on Spock's "blu ray" plan in time for release of the third season.
Gopher servers? That's the last time I recall content taking a complete backseat to presentation.
When a user could properly integrate content from alt.sex.pictures into his hypertext archive of rejected "Penthouse Letters" submissions, the true utility of the html web was clear: the consolidation of location, information, and presentation.
Acid3 loads fine for me. On my G4 laptop it (still) fails speed metrics on Test 26 and 65 but by a much smaller margin than before. On my Intel Mac Pro, it says no failures or performance problems and to check whether it was pixel perfect to the reference rendering. I guess Acid 3 is passing on some of the faster Mac hardware, but it's not quite "universal" yet.
If you have "Open safe downloads" wisely turned off, you will need to find the file you downloaded (probably named WebKit-SVN-r#####.dmg) and open it. The disk image will mount and you will see a gold version of the Safari compass icon labelled WebKit. If your browser auto-opens "safe" downloads, just switch to the Finder and you'll see that gold WebKit icon all alone in a window.
Drag the gold WebKit icon into your Applications folder. It will not conflict or erase Safari since it has a different name. You are now done with the install image; you can eject and trash the.dmg file from your download folder.
To use the nightly builds of webkit, launch the gold WebKit app rather than Safari. The first time you will be warned by Mac OS X's security feature saying this was an app downloaded from the internet, go ahead and approve the launch. You may also be warned about the incompatibility of some browser plugins. Everything else should seem identical to Safari.
Now, you'll only be using the webkit libraries when browsing with that gold WebKit icon. To prove this to yourself, you can visit the Acid3 test page using both Safari and Webkit without quitting either and see very different results. Safari still has major incompatibilities while WebKit seems almost perfect.
Finally, when you are ready to uninstall WebKit, quit the app and drag the gold colored icon from the applications folder to the trash. Or, drag a new version that you download the next day on top to replace the old nightly.
An even better argument for the external display on the Mac is the ability to turn the orientation of an external display 90 degrees (system preferences:displays). So you can then have a display that's taller than it is wide, which can be very nice during some types of code refactoring.
So the NYC green group wants to get their message out as widely as possible about reducing, reusing, and recycling. Why does it need a registered trademark?
Oh right, it's a revenue stream which they can sell their endorsement to others and say "The NYC Green group approves of this TV set." Once you've paid NYC, you can market your products with our endorsement. You don't think NYC is making a cool apple-like logo precisely because it's a popular brand? I can't wait to go into Beast Buy and get my Green Zune... with an Apple logo on it. Or get a 7inch Windows XP EEE PC... with an Apple logo on it.
If this was just about branding their billboards with a cute image to promote green habits, the chance of brand confusion would be minimal. But if this wasn't about brand co-promotion, advertising and selling endorsements, NYC wouldn't need a registered trademark for their green campaign in the first place.
Apple _promised_ all of the employees a free iPhone at launch; they didn't receive one at launch.
I recall two weeks after launch one Apple employee still hadn't received hers and we were teasing her that as soon as they had enough to "refurbish" then the employees would be getting theirs. What sort of amazed me were her stories of the number of Apple employees who couldn't wait for their free phones and went out and bought a new one. I guess the free one will be for Christmas presents or something.
The price drop was probably pretty hard psychologically on the Apple employees.
I have read none of the previous books. I watched the Harry Potter 5 movie that just came out and was pleasantly surprised it had a mostly self-sufficient story (i.e. enough was presented in the movie itself to enjoy but if you were a Potter fan you'd get more from it). It was only when I found that four of my friends were closet Potter fanatics did I consider learning anything more about this series.
Of course, I have more of an interest in the darker characters and the storylines dealing with fear and death than I do with the "coming of age" and "discovering your hidden talents" stories that were apparently much more common in the first books and movies. My friends discussions had spoilers flying about the events of Harry Potter 6. So only Harry Potter 7 really held anything like expectation for me.
My friends took me to a Harry Potter release party at midnight. That was an interesting story by itself, but one I won't relate here. I wound up with a copy of the book and only a vague knowledge of anything that had gone on previously other than the recently released movie and one big spoiler from the sixth book. Three words along the lines of X kills Y.
And I thought the book was pretty enjoyable. The 700 odd pages were easy to get through. I enjoyed the way the book starts out focused on the darker parts of the story. It went into questionable territory when much was made about a wedding for wizards and all the preparations and the comedy of the people who showed up. It started to get a bit tiring in all of that until a magical lynx showed up with a message that sends everything straight to hell. I couldn't put the book down at that point.
What I really liked were the challenging ways it gets the reader to look at authorities like a teacher, the media, or the government, and to at least look at it with something less than blind trust. Be prepared to read below the obvious. Don't be prepared to just give up because going along with an abusive power will ultimately be bad for you in the end.
There's a lot that happens in the story. For real espionage enthusiasts there will be a number of mistakes that the author seems to make that I fully expected to blow up on the main characters but did not. There are a couple of events that seem just a bit too coincidental but fortunately it's small and wound up speeding the plot along in what otherwise would have taken a long, long road that didn't really seem to hold much interest.
I very much enjoyed the tale of journey to the end even if I didn't really think the end was terribly fulfilling in itself. Of course my interest are the darker storylines and I was a bit surprised that certain characters made it to the end even though they had set themselves up as characters that would see more redemption and meaning if they died. Yes, that's morbid of me. And no, I don't have much empathy with most of the characters (not having read the first six books).
The Obi-Wan factor: I think this is an overused plot device where the hero gets things explained to him by a dead mentor. There was little of this in the book, but there was one chapter where it was used completely and totally and undermined some of the regret of not being able to talk to a particular loved one you really need to talk to. On the plus side, it could be interpreted as imagination rather than a ghostly visitation, and the advice delivered is really more to wrap together loose ends that otherwise wouldn't have explanation. It delievers a story that the dreaming character might have invented to make all the pieces fit in a way that makes everything okay. Or it might be a ghost that's finally free to relate the way the mysteries fit together. Personally, I was let down by this a bit since I would like to see this technique used in fewer children's stories. Death isn't like just being in an area with bad cell phone reception so you can't always call. As far as being integral to the plot though, it was not.
I'd definitely like my nephews to read these stories when they are o
Paper documentation (e.g. a book from bookstore) is a big reassurance to people just thinking about going to Linux (or Macintosh or whatever). If they can find a consistent voice on paper that answers 90% of their questions they have before they get started, they seem much more likely to actually go through and make the jump.
The chorus of online help about Linux is massive; this is not always helpful though. There are date issues since people don't always date their advice or take it down / update it when new advice supercedes it. Some Linux writing isn't meant as a tutorial but as argument about future direction (x feature is easy to use because it could be a massive security hole in the future!). And that's not even accounting for the huge disparity in writing quality, mastery of the language (is C or English their native tongue?), and tone of voice (serious & objective vs. playful & fun).
Currently, the two or three paper books about Ubuntu are good deal sealers for those looking at a simple desktop alternative. For more experienced people trying technologies for web serving and programming, the number of LAMP books that test with RedHat and Suse make those good selections. And for those who just want to experiment with something other than Windows but don't find those books appealing, I encourage them to look into a Macintosh and the many good books on it that are available. At least getting them into the Posix world is a good step forward.
As far as what actually displays the text, 80 columns is just a convenient default in this era of GUIs and IDEs. But the idea of 80 columns as a standard starts kicking over an ant hill of all sorts of other standards and conventions about code formatting (comments, tabs & white space, where do brackets go).
The last step of submitting code back to most projects these days is to format it according to the standard rules of the project. At least to me that's always seemed to be a non-productive workaround for lazy programmers. In most languages white space is meaningless and the burden of formatting is a burden on all of the programmers individually.
When the world of typewriter users started making adjustments to desktop publishing, a similar set of problems came up. How many spaces do we need to indent? How long should our lines run? Should we single-space or double-space? They quickly deduced the proper way to solve this was to let the computer (under direction of the editor or typesetter) to add the formatting. All the users needed to do was to submit the text in a way that such automatic tools wouldn't jam the automation.
In many ways, programmers don't want to make that jump for their own tools though. They've been using VT100 terminals, diff, and simply demanding everyone adhere to the same "sensible" standards for formatting. In these days of object oriented programming where names of classes start getting longer (Cocoa, Java, Ruby, to name a few) the standards seem more of a burden, but no one really feels the need to demand the code formatting be made independent of the code itself.
As horrible as it sounds, perhaps a tool that parses code into machine formatted XML for exchange and extracts it into code for use or viewing, is what's needed so that programmers can place the burden of "formatting" on the machine rather than the programmer. Technically it seems possible (with dynamic color coding and syntax checking that exists already). And yes, it sounds like a heinous burden both on storage and on users who prefer lightweight tools like dumb terminals. But it would simply be an extra step for a tool to extract the source into each person's personally preferred format rather than saying a certain convention will always work.
I wish programmers would wake up and realize that when they set standards like certain column length and white space conventions, they are actually working against automation and having the computer help them out. It sounds a lot like the old typewriter users who insisted "I don't need these fancy computers to help me out!"
luminax wrote:
Democrats do not have the balls to impeach Cheney, let alone Bush, etc.
Actually, it's questionable whether they could impeach Cheney. The Consitution outlines the procedure for impeachment of the President (presided by the Chief Justice) and everyone else (presided by the Vice-President) so that means Cheney will preside over his own impeachment hearing. And as for impeaching Bush, an escape maneuver was already perfected by Nixon and Ford.
Personally, I'm hoping that a person will be elected in 2008 that will actually carry out a major house cleaning and reform policy. We've been screwed by the current administration and previous administrations because of a lack of accountability and transparency. Whether Democrat or Republican, this clean up needs to happen in a big way.
While I'd like to see a number of members of the current administration serve time, nothing will change without real reform rather than just idle talk.
It doesn't work for sporting goods which have little holograms on them saying "Officially Licensed [Org] Merchandise". Consumers don't know what they should be looking for. If they know they need to see a hologram for official merchandise, the ones who care don't know what it's supposed to look like and won't know the difference between a cheap bubblegum card quality hologram and the official one. All it really does is raise the price of the merchandise and raise a bit more money for the packaging houses (you don't think Microsoft would eat the cost themselves do you?)
I thought these sorts of experiments went by the term "death ray"? I'd be afraid to sit on a metal bench in Starbucks or waiting for the bus without a nagging fear, "Do I smell something burning? Is it my brain?" Or at least those were my biases before I read the article at least:-)
"Accordinding to the article, Microsoft's reasoning is 'because of security issues with virtualization technology'. Sounds suspiciously like a 'Mac penalty' cost that Microsoft is trying to justify." Pardon my ignorance, but is Microsoft suggesting that running software under virtualization is less secure? That seems backwards to me, especially when running a new operating system that may have unfound bugs. You can lock up the virtual environment, but you won't lock the machine its running on. I can understand if they were to argue that virtualization is a premium feature like on-the-fly hard disk encryption, but instead it's suggesting it's some kind of deficiency in Windows when it's run in this manner.
Is it to limit liability? The standard end user license agreement already disclaims any liability in case of data loss or corrruption so requiring certain versions of the software to avoid data loss actually seems like a legally weaker argument. It sounds like the operating system was designed with known security holes in it. If someone claimed data loss from running under a virtualized environment, this double standard in the EULA might get a judge to throw it out altogether.
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So what the hell happened with System 7 and then OS 8? So much for "perfection."
Jobs left Apple in May 1985. System 7 was released on May 13, 1991. Unless someone wrote down his ideas and preserved them on the infamous "colored note cards" he had zero influence over System 7.
System 7 was 32-bit clean and multitasking on full-time. But it wasn't popular because formerly "high end" 2MB Macs with 20MB hard drives were now the minimum requirements and seemed slow compared to System 6.
Steve Job's only influence so soon after his return on Mac OS 7.7 was to rename to Mac OS 8 and kill clone support. It was a nice evolution of classic Mac OS 7 so people liked it, but rename it Mac OS 8 and viola, no more contractual obligation to the clone makers. A dick move indeed, but irrelevant to the quality of the software itself.
Perhaps you mean the buggy, unstable, defunct System 8 code named Copland which Apple started in March 1994? It was the failed overhaul of System 7 software with a nanokernel, preemptive multitasking, new Finder, and so on. Apple bought NeXT (and brought Steve Jobs back) precisely because they couldn't get it perfected and stable. If anything that sort of supports Steve's philosophy "Real artists ship".
Whether Jobs has evolved into vision-driven designer or whether he's still a bullying brat is irrelevant. These three software releases aren't really examples of anything he had significant influence over.
Linux has been a great win for what people use it for. Developing it to fit the needs of non-developers is a crap shoot; developers aren't casual users. Here are some things I've thought were missing.
Quicken isn't proper double entry book keeping, but it's ease of use wins non-accountants over. It's hard to get that balance right though; even Intuit had to buy Mint when it's attempt to jump start it's Mac version failed to deliver. Other Linux tools have felt like a thin veneer over double entry hell to me. Trust such tools with my financial life? No.
An automated software updater? Cute names probably works against keeping ignorant users up to date. "I know it's been years, but I won't trade in my Karmic Koala for a Natty Narwhal!" Software updates are critical for stability and security, but the Linux update tools I've seen either don't cover enough or they are way too difficult for a casual user to operate. Demanding re-installation basically means sending them back to Windows.
How about training software instead of documentation? Despite the web's illusion otherwise, Mac and Windows users are not very advanced. It's one thing to offer a simple unified interface, but software to train the ignorant bosses of the world how to send email, backup, and print? Of the few such Linux attempts I've seen, some fail by mixing interfaces. But all have failed by going to the command line at some point. Even though they say "just type this, you don't have to understand it", the user's whole experience rides on them NOT making a typo. Way too fragile.
Linux is unparalleled in meeting the needs of it's developers, but without people making apps for their ignorant bosses, middle school kids, and reluctant grandparents, it's audience with (perhaps rightfully) stay self-serving.
I see it similar to the Etude music player on the iPhone. It's a MIDI player that highlights the notes on the sheet music and on a simulation of a piano keyboard as the music is being played.
The Cat in the Hat eBook has several modes, one of which highlights the text as a voice reads the words. Another of which lets the kid touch something in the drawing, says the word and highlights it in the text (if it's in the passage on that page).
Neither replaces an audio performance (like an iTunes song or an audio book), and neither of which replace the physical static medium (like a piece of sheet music or a book), but both make a nice interactive presentation to help the viewer's brain make the connection of these very different sensations.
The iPhone OS is pretty new so it's hard to know what will be found, if investigated. But if based on recent legal precedents, change won't come from US legal action.
At the end of 2008, Apple's Macintosh "walled garden" practices were brought before Judge William Alsup in the Apple vs Psystar case. Psystar filed counterclaims insisting that Apple's EULA was invalid because it was "tying" Mac OS X to Apple hardware. They were basically laughed out of court.
You can read Groklaw's analysis of that ruling, but my armchair lawyering just can't see too much difference between the OS X "walled garden" and the iPhone OS "walled garden" legally.
sopssa wrote: "Open Source: Nobody restricts where you can install the application, and you get the source code too -- the best situation."
No, open source is about "source" code, not the applications or products you build with it. It doesn't guarantee you'll be able to run the compiled products on a platform, since that would also promise open source programmers will fix all the bugs that stop you from running their code on a platform. You've got the source, but that's only half the battle.
sopssa continued: "Proprierary software: You dont get the source code, but nobody is restricting where or if you can install it, as long as its freeware or you have paid for it."
First, proprietary software is not code. Licensing proprietary code or software often demands where you can deploy it in the license, but without that license the law says "nowhere". Heck, even some open source code such as GCC places demands on how the licensed code is deployed; you don't agree with the terms of the license and you again have no freedom to deploy it.
sopossa concludes: "Apple: Not only will you not get the source code and in most cases you have to pay for it, Apple is in total control what applications the user is allowed to install. They dont even give you the option to decide yourself."
Again, this conflates source and product, but I get the sense that sopssa's real complaint is about the locked down practices of saying what you can run on your Apple products. Even then you do have options; if it's a personal itch you need to scratch you can jailbreak or become a developer and deploy to a small handful of iProducts. But if you want to make "the next big thing" available to all platform users Apple does demand to play by our rules or go to a different playground.
When viewed as a fledgling platform that's still struggling with performance and security, that's not an unreasonable demand. When viewed as a multi-billion dollar, uber-popular computing platform, it is downright offensive. I vacillate between these perspectives regularly, but fortunately Apple's products are the only computing product around.
If Adobe becomes wildly successful on Android, Apple might change their mind about adoption. But Apple has made it clear they aren't going to be the pioneer with Flash on a mobile platform.
Not saying this is good or bad, unlike the iPad, It looks like two separate computers. The touch screen looks like the weakest part of the implementation, but I like this idea for a smart tablet dock. Your dock has the facility to backup your tablet's data; that seems much simpler than syncing through iTunes.
But in the video the netbook / keyboard base still maintains power when the screen is undocked; I'd think it'd quickly go to sleep instead.
How the base will react if someone else docks their tablet into the wrong base. Will it die? Will it enter a locked security state? Will it switch over to host the new tablet's data without problem?
The quick reloading of the web page is neat, but it is not the same page with local mods. The Flash banner ad at the top of the page doesn't load. And if you were on Slashdot entering your comment when you undocked, you'd lose all the words in your well-constr
... My question is this: does anyone there actually own something that could be seen as a precursor to this machine ? ... I mean, the iPod was launched in an existing portable MP3-player market, the iPhone was launched in an existing (even crowded) mobile phone market. This makes me wonder, since I do not have anything that looks like an iPad already (I don't need it) - is there a widespread need for this product ?...
The larger bookstore chains in the US all have floor space dedicated to eBook readers. Barnes & Noble (and subsidiaries like WaldenBooks) are all pushing the B&N branded "Nook". Competitors like Borders show off the Sony eReaders and their kin. They typically have a functional unit tethered to a display stand that's loaded with eBooks. Some smaller stores have non-functional display units. And some just have paper flyers.
Though eBook readers are more common to see in airports rather than coffee shops, the segment of the American public that visits bookstores is aware of what they are and what the current versions have to offer. Certainly over Christmas 2009 these things were promoted well beyond stores' capability to deliver them, but whether that was due to low supplies or high demand isn't clear. They did appear to outstrip sales expectations over Christmas.
I'm a long time Mac user. Firefox developers are asking the wrong question of Mac users by focusing this discussion on continued support; of course, everyone wants their platform supported as long as possible.
But if you ask about whether Firefox should feel more like a "native" Mac app, you'd get a lot of Mac faithful saying "ditch Tiger if that's standing in the way". For example, ATSUI is the legacy text engine from the days of OpenDoc and System 7.5; apps that still use it under Mac OS X draw fire from Mac users because it's not integrated as well as CoreText or the Cocoa Text Engine. They don't make this text engine distinction directly, but it's clear they don't consider ATSUI to be Mac-like anymore with the "bugs" they file and complaints they have about lack of integration e.g. "Why doesn't the command-control-d shortcut to look up something in the dictionary work?"
Based on the goals of the Firefox roadmap, 4.0 looks like a "must-reluctantly-kill-Tiger" release just based on its lofty memory isolation goals; that's a feature you do not want to compromise the quality of.
Keep the bug fixes and security updates of the 3.x Firefox platform able to work with Tiger. This helps Mac users. This helps support people. This helps propagate a good standards compliant browser to as many people with legacy hardware as possible. But a major release number like 4.0 is a good end-user aware point for removing significant backwards compatibility.
Scotty, what's going on with the viewscreen?
It's breaking up Cap'n.
Do what you can to hold it together, Mr. Scott! Bones, give him a hand.
Damn it Jim, I'm a Doctor, not an avid media composer!
Spock, what can we do?
We can try routing transporters through the ship's phasers while accelerating to warp speed. Thereby causing a blue shift and broadcasting our image over the heads of our audience.
Can we skip the phasers and just use the transporter?
That wouldn't be logical Captain.
Scotty, I want every available man working on Spock's "blu ray" plan in time for release of the third season.
Aye Aye captain.
You misunderstand; it's the fees that are unlimited rather than the service provided.
A "limited" account would have a cap on how much Verizon could potentially charge you per month.
Gopher servers? That's the last time I recall content taking a complete backseat to presentation.
When a user could properly integrate content from alt.sex.pictures into his hypertext archive of rejected "Penthouse Letters" submissions, the true utility of the html web was clear: the consolidation of location, information, and presentation.
Acid3 loads fine for me. On my G4 laptop it (still) fails speed metrics on Test 26 and 65 but by a much smaller margin than before. On my Intel Mac Pro, it says no failures or performance problems and to check whether it was pixel perfect to the reference rendering. I guess Acid 3 is passing on some of the faster Mac hardware, but it's not quite "universal" yet.
On a mac, it's simple to install and remove the WebKit nightly. It's literally just dragging and dropping a specially built application.
Now, you'll only be using the webkit libraries when browsing with that gold WebKit icon. To prove this to yourself, you can visit the Acid3 test page using both Safari and Webkit without quitting either and see very different results. Safari still has major incompatibilities while WebKit seems almost perfect.
Finally, when you are ready to uninstall WebKit, quit the app and drag the gold colored icon from the applications folder to the trash. Or, drag a new version that you download the next day on top to replace the old nightly.
An even better argument for the external display on the Mac is the ability to turn the orientation of an external display 90 degrees (system preferences:displays). So you can then have a display that's taller than it is wide, which can be very nice during some types of code refactoring.
So the NYC green group wants to get their message out as widely as possible about reducing, reusing, and recycling. Why does it need a registered trademark?
... with an Apple logo on it. Or get a 7inch Windows XP EEE PC ... with an Apple logo on it.
Oh right, it's a revenue stream which they can sell their endorsement to others and say "The NYC Green group approves of this TV set." Once you've paid NYC, you can market your products with our endorsement. You don't think NYC is making a cool apple-like logo precisely because it's a popular brand? I can't wait to go into Beast Buy and get my Green Zune
If this was just about branding their billboards with a cute image to promote green habits, the chance of brand confusion would be minimal. But if this wasn't about brand co-promotion, advertising and selling endorsements, NYC wouldn't need a registered trademark for their green campaign in the first place.
Someone used their cell phone while the pilot had the fasten seatbelt sign turned on.
Apple _promised_ all of the employees a free iPhone at launch; they didn't receive one at launch.
I recall two weeks after launch one Apple employee still hadn't received hers and we were teasing her that as soon as they had enough to "refurbish" then the employees would be getting theirs. What sort of amazed me were her stories of the number of Apple employees who couldn't wait for their free phones and went out and bought a new one. I guess the free one will be for Christmas presents or something.
The price drop was probably pretty hard psychologically on the Apple employees.
How well does it work with the Wine versus Windows comparison?
I have read none of the previous books. I watched the Harry Potter 5 movie that just came out and was pleasantly surprised it had a mostly self-sufficient story (i.e. enough was presented in the movie itself to enjoy but if you were a Potter fan you'd get more from it). It was only when I found that four of my friends were closet Potter fanatics did I consider learning anything more about this series.
Of course, I have more of an interest in the darker characters and the storylines dealing with fear and death than I do with the "coming of age" and "discovering your hidden talents" stories that were apparently much more common in the first books and movies. My friends discussions had spoilers flying about the events of Harry Potter 6. So only Harry Potter 7 really held anything like expectation for me.
My friends took me to a Harry Potter release party at midnight. That was an interesting story by itself, but one I won't relate here. I wound up with a copy of the book and only a vague knowledge of anything that had gone on previously other than the recently released movie and one big spoiler from the sixth book. Three words along the lines of X kills Y.
And I thought the book was pretty enjoyable. The 700 odd pages were easy to get through. I enjoyed the way the book starts out focused on the darker parts of the story. It went into questionable territory when much was made about a wedding for wizards and all the preparations and the comedy of the people who showed up. It started to get a bit tiring in all of that until a magical lynx showed up with a message that sends everything straight to hell. I couldn't put the book down at that point.
What I really liked were the challenging ways it gets the reader to look at authorities like a teacher, the media, or the government, and to at least look at it with something less than blind trust. Be prepared to read below the obvious. Don't be prepared to just give up because going along with an abusive power will ultimately be bad for you in the end.
There's a lot that happens in the story. For real espionage enthusiasts there will be a number of mistakes that the author seems to make that I fully expected to blow up on the main characters but did not. There are a couple of events that seem just a bit too coincidental but fortunately it's small and wound up speeding the plot along in what otherwise would have taken a long, long road that didn't really seem to hold much interest.
I very much enjoyed the tale of journey to the end even if I didn't really think the end was terribly fulfilling in itself. Of course my interest are the darker storylines and I was a bit surprised that certain characters made it to the end even though they had set themselves up as characters that would see more redemption and meaning if they died. Yes, that's morbid of me. And no, I don't have much empathy with most of the characters (not having read the first six books).
The Obi-Wan factor: I think this is an overused plot device where the hero gets things explained to him by a dead mentor. There was little of this in the book, but there was one chapter where it was used completely and totally and undermined some of the regret of not being able to talk to a particular loved one you really need to talk to. On the plus side, it could be interpreted as imagination rather than a ghostly visitation, and the advice delivered is really more to wrap together loose ends that otherwise wouldn't have explanation. It delievers a story that the dreaming character might have invented to make all the pieces fit in a way that makes everything okay. Or it might be a ghost that's finally free to relate the way the mysteries fit together. Personally, I was let down by this a bit since I would like to see this technique used in fewer children's stories. Death isn't like just being in an area with bad cell phone reception so you can't always call. As far as being integral to the plot though, it was not.
I'd definitely like my nephews to read these stories when they are o
Paper documentation (e.g. a book from bookstore) is a big reassurance to people just thinking about going to Linux (or Macintosh or whatever). If they can find a consistent voice on paper that answers 90% of their questions they have before they get started, they seem much more likely to actually go through and make the jump.
The chorus of online help about Linux is massive; this is not always helpful though. There are date issues since people don't always date their advice or take it down / update it when new advice supercedes it. Some Linux writing isn't meant as a tutorial but as argument about future direction (x feature is easy to use because it could be a massive security hole in the future!). And that's not even accounting for the huge disparity in writing quality, mastery of the language (is C or English their native tongue?), and tone of voice (serious & objective vs. playful & fun).
Currently, the two or three paper books about Ubuntu are good deal sealers for those looking at a simple desktop alternative. For more experienced people trying technologies for web serving and programming, the number of LAMP books that test with RedHat and Suse make those good selections. And for those who just want to experiment with something other than Windows but don't find those books appealing, I encourage them to look into a Macintosh and the many good books on it that are available. At least getting them into the Posix world is a good step forward.
So far, it's worked well.
As far as what actually displays the text, 80 columns is just a convenient default in this era of GUIs and IDEs. But the idea of 80 columns as a standard starts kicking over an ant hill of all sorts of other standards and conventions about code formatting (comments, tabs & white space, where do brackets go).
The last step of submitting code back to most projects these days is to format it according to the standard rules of the project. At least to me that's always seemed to be a non-productive workaround for lazy programmers. In most languages white space is meaningless and the burden of formatting is a burden on all of the programmers individually.
When the world of typewriter users started making adjustments to desktop publishing, a similar set of problems came up. How many spaces do we need to indent? How long should our lines run? Should we single-space or double-space? They quickly deduced the proper way to solve this was to let the computer (under direction of the editor or typesetter) to add the formatting. All the users needed to do was to submit the text in a way that such automatic tools wouldn't jam the automation.
In many ways, programmers don't want to make that jump for their own tools though. They've been using VT100 terminals, diff, and simply demanding everyone adhere to the same "sensible" standards for formatting. In these days of object oriented programming where names of classes start getting longer (Cocoa, Java, Ruby, to name a few) the standards seem more of a burden, but no one really feels the need to demand the code formatting be made independent of the code itself.
As horrible as it sounds, perhaps a tool that parses code into machine formatted XML for exchange and extracts it into code for use or viewing, is what's needed so that programmers can place the burden of "formatting" on the machine rather than the programmer. Technically it seems possible (with dynamic color coding and syntax checking that exists already). And yes, it sounds like a heinous burden both on storage and on users who prefer lightweight tools like dumb terminals. But it would simply be an extra step for a tool to extract the source into each person's personally preferred format rather than saying a certain convention will always work.
I wish programmers would wake up and realize that when they set standards like certain column length and white space conventions, they are actually working against automation and having the computer help them out. It sounds a lot like the old typewriter users who insisted "I don't need these fancy computers to help me out!"
Actually, it's questionable whether they could impeach Cheney. The Consitution outlines the procedure for impeachment of the President (presided by the Chief Justice) and everyone else (presided by the Vice-President) so that means Cheney will preside over his own impeachment hearing. And as for impeaching Bush, an escape maneuver was already perfected by Nixon and Ford.
Personally, I'm hoping that a person will be elected in 2008 that will actually carry out a major house cleaning and reform policy. We've been screwed by the current administration and previous administrations because of a lack of accountability and transparency. Whether Democrat or Republican, this clean up needs to happen in a big way.
While I'd like to see a number of members of the current administration serve time, nothing will change without real reform rather than just idle talk.
It doesn't work for sporting goods which have little holograms on them saying "Officially Licensed [Org] Merchandise". Consumers don't know what they should be looking for. If they know they need to see a hologram for official merchandise, the ones who care don't know what it's supposed to look like and won't know the difference between a cheap bubblegum card quality hologram and the official one. All it really does is raise the price of the merchandise and raise a bit more money for the packaging houses (you don't think Microsoft would eat the cost themselves do you?)
I thought these sorts of experiments went by the term "death ray"? I'd be afraid to sit on a metal bench in Starbucks or waiting for the bus without a nagging fear, "Do I smell something burning? Is it my brain?" Or at least those were my biases before I read the article at least :-)
Is it to limit liability? The standard end user license agreement already disclaims any liability in case of data loss or corrruption so requiring certain versions of the software to avoid data loss actually seems like a legally weaker argument. It sounds like the operating system was designed with known security holes in it. If someone claimed data loss from running under a virtualized environment, this double standard in the EULA might get a judge to throw it out altogether.