A large potion of the 30% Apple takes is then passed on to the bank that processed the transaction. The banks normally charge a percentage of the sale or a flat fee if the amount is small.
The transaction fee on a.99c song would normally make up more money than Apple is taking from it so they must have negotiated a much better deal with the bank.
Apple also delays billing you for songs you purchase for up to a couple of days. This way if you download more than one song the transaction cost is diluted and Apple takes more of the 30% cut.
When you factor the other costs of running the service Apple makes comparitively little from it. They profit from scale and are the only online distributor able to.
Mac OS 10.4 was a huge release not for your average user, but for the developer. The main features were a massive leap forward in the APIs and OS services available. They were designed to provide a base for future OS development for many years to come. Apple also added a small amount of eye-candy to Mac OS X 10.4 to sell a few boxes. Mac OS X 10.5 will be where we see many Apple supplied applications begin leveraging this new base.
A friend of mine in Apple DTS although always tight-lipped on what's actually being worked on said that while Microsoft is cutting features and still struggling to ship Vista, Apple's OS development is actually accelerating. Given the additions to Cocoa I actually believe it.
Roll on WWDC 2006.
Re:Will it improve the quality of US anime?
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
It's all matter of opinion. As far as I'm concerned Pixar is the second best animation studio in the world. Only surpassed by Studio Ghibli.
>Third: I bet a case of beer that SonyEricsson [sonyericsson.com] will include iTunes [apple.com] in their cell phones during 2006. The demand is huge and they know they will have to do it, sooner or later. Nokia will also include iTunes as soon as they realize how Real sucks bigtime.
You think Sony-Ericsson will produce a mobile that uses iTunes sometime in 2006?
You got your bet.
SonyEricsson might be a join venture and not wholy a part of Sony but I can't possibly imagine them working with Apple on this one. Too much conflict of interest.
Winning a case of beer in time for next Christmas is not quite as good as winning a case of beer in time for this Christmas, but I'll take it.
I think that's where your experience is differing from many others here. You are using XCode for C++ and Java when the IDE has grown up from a tool designed around Cocoa development.
I have tried Java dev in XCode, nothing serious, just my part time uni course work and I would agree with you XCode 1.5 isn't a great environment for Java dev. Version 2 is much better but it is still catching up with other common IDEs that focus on Java.
For Cocoa dev I love the environment, especially the new visual modelling tools.
It's useful to get a non-Cocoa developer's perspective of the tools.
You don't need to reboot, but you do need to exit and reload Terminal.app for it to take effect.
The defaults tool is the command line interface into Apple's preferences system. Typically an application only reads the defaults when it's first opened. In all other cases I think it is a good idea to close the application you are editing the defaults for if doing so over the CLI. However Terminal.app is kind of an exception;)
I know this feature has worked since about 10.2. It works on my PowerMac G5 (10.3.8) and iBook (10.4 pre-release).
I don't agree with much of what you have said but maybe I can ease some pain. Focus follows mouse is a feature I sorely miss on Mac OS X. Fortunately it exists in a limited form in Terminal.app.
Moving the mouse over a terminal window makes that window accept key input, it doesn't change the window layer order.
As for the UNIX behavour of selected text automatically being set to the clip board, I hate this. Tying these two actions together is destructive. You can do so much more with a selection than copy it to the clip board. Most often when I'm selecting some text it isn't because I want to copy or cut it, but want to change some property of the text. Selections can also be manipulated by drag and drop in Mac OS. Auto copying is bad.
As for having to use the keyboard on Mac OS, you don't, and you don't have to resort to using the Edit menu either.
Select some text then drag that text to a new location, as default that will move the block of text (like cutting and pasting it somewhere else but without replacing what was on the clipboard). If you drag the text selection to a different document the text will be copied to the new document.
If what you wanted to do was duplicate the selected text, then this takes slightly longer as you'll either have to reach for the option (alt) key for use the context menu.
Expose solves the window layering problem. Other solutions are: command+tab to cycle between apps, command+tilde to cycle between windows in the current app, or use the Windows menu.
Many things in Mac OS work differently as the author of the linked article points out. You can learn them and be more productive or stick with you X-Windows way of thinking.
Beneath the easy to use Mac OS interface are other ways of accessing functions that are more efficient for those willing to learn them: keyboard shortcuts, modifier keys, scripts. You can even change most of these. Favourite app not have a shortcut for a frequently used menu item? Use System Preferences: Keyboard and Mouse: Keyboard Shortcuts and add one.
Multi-button mice on Mac OS X allow the behavour of the extra buttons to be configured. You can usually attach Applescripts to buttons so you could probably even get the behavour you want with some inventive scripting.
To add to that, there weren't really all that many classic Mac OS viruses either. About 30 or so, plus variants in the whole life of the Mac.
The most recent one that I remember was the autostart worm which hooked into Quicktime's autostart feature. That was easily defeated by toggling a check box.
The most harmful virus ever released for the Mac randomly changed the names, and type/creator codes for your files making them practically useless.
The most ammusing wasn't really a virus at all, but an extension that caused any floppy disc inserted into the mac to be immediately and automatically ejected to the sound of aaaachooo.
Scrollwheels are only a good idea when you don't care about RSI. To use one without putting too much strain on my finger I have to remove my hand from its normal mouse holding position. If I'm moving my hand away from that normal position I might as well use a Griffin PowerMate which is bigger, easier to turn and doesn't put strain on my hand.
So mouse scroll-wheels are a good idea with terrible ergonomics. Microsoft has a history of this...
Just like the Microsoft moulded mouse - great as long as you are right handed. Apple's mice have always been symetrical, and having only one button means that I can still use my primary pinky for 'left' clicking on things.
Or the Microsoft natural keyboard a rip off of the Apple Adjustable keyboard. The MS keyboard forces your wrists into a certain angle whether you feel comfortable with it or not. The Apple keyboard would angle in the middle anywhere from 0 to 30 degrees, could change in elevation, had wrist rests (which were removable) and a separate numeric keypad good for lefties and righties.
Take a look at the brick of a controller that MS ship with the X-Box in comparison with others. It's just a bigger clunkier mish-mash of the Dreamcast and Nintendo controllers.
No I don't trust MS to make anything ergonomic so I'll avoid Microsoft human-computer input devices until they can show they finally get it.
True, or translation for us Brits.... once [sic, read: if] the US dollar rises over the Pound.
Yeah right. That's going to happen. The pound is so strong against the dollar right now it's silly.
Importing stuff from the US makes sense to comsumers here, especially now the Internet makes it easy.
US companies have ritually shafted us for years with their foreign price fixing and they're not happy when we won't take it and import instead.
I can import Levis 501s for $32 that's £17.13. Here they cost £45. Even if Customs and Excise notice and charge me duty I'm still paying less than half the price they set here. Typically I get my American friends to bring a new pair over for me when they visit.
Electronics and Computers too. A friend of mine flew over from Birmingham, UK to New York City for a break a couple of years ago. He bought a Powerbook G4 whilst there. He said the money he saved covered the cost of his flight.
I'm pretty sure we have laws governing free market to stop this crap.
Re:Apple stole the iMac Mini idea from ePC
on
Mac mini Dissection
·
· Score: 1
Because Linux is open source, whereas Darwin um is open source. Because with OS X you are stuck with Aqua, as long as you aren't prepared to tinker and run rooted or rootless X11 and choose a different window manager other than the one Apple supplies. Because OS X behaves in certain ways which tend to be very consistent but if you don't like them you can certainly start using native X11 apps to get back the inconsistency that you love. Linux distros offer more choice but really they are just a parallel to the many forms of BSD of which Mac OS is one that you can run on a Mac. Because Linux runs on several different architectures and um so does Darwin.
Seriously I get the point you are trying to make, I just disagree with all the examples you give. But I can see 2 reasons for a Mac owner to put Linux on their machine. First if they specifically want to learn how to use Linux, second if you dig the spirit of the GPL and want to involve yourself in it from the system level to user level.
Who knows? The Guide v2 used Random and Ford for it's own purposes. I'm very afraid of what it's up to, and you never can tell what might happen in a plural sector such as here.
I blame marketing, this is what happens when you let them drive a company.
Longhorn's graphics acceleration is more than just a Quartz Extreme equivalent. The full graphics pipeline is on the graphics card. No 2D rendering is done outside the graphics card.
Apple's effort of offloading graphics tasks to the graphics card has been implemented incrementally. Right now not all parts of the pipeline are accelerated. 3D is fully accelerated through OpenGL, DVD playback and 2D window compositing are accelerated. 2D rendering is not.
Quartz 2D acceleration is a feature of Mac OS X 10.4 which is to be released in the first half of this year. Other graphics accelerations are being added to Tiger too, ImageUnits and VideoUnits put the use of pixel shaders in advanced graphics cards into the hands of 2D developers, so 3rd party programmers can feel some of the love too.
Longhorn's acceleration is broadly equivalent of Quartz Extreme and accelerated Quartz 2D. But because Microsoft are doing it in one go it may end up having some architectural benefit, I don't know. Comparisons of the two systems have been drawn and debated pretty heavily, but considering only one of these systems is in the wild I try not to be drawn into it.
So Windows users will get accelerated graphics sometime in 2006. That will be at least 6 months after Mac users get equivalent acceleration. Also noting that we'll have had partial acceleration in the form of 2D compositing for over 2 years by then.
I believe that the mention of digital watches is a nod in the direction of the great (late) humourist Douglas Adams who was a long time Macintosh user and vocal supporter.
The Mot Timeport was a brilliant phone. Full of useful features. I got it because it was the first tri-band phone, had an in-built dictaphone function, modem and IrDA.
It's also interesting to note rumours of an updated StarTAC style handset:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000713022463/
If this was the phone to include iTunes I'd buy one without question. I loved my original StarTACs and went through several versions of them before the Timeport came out.
3) Profit! Because the iPod has made Apple money hand over fist, so a fone that has the same general function (could this be the flash iPod everyone is talking about?) will likely be a giant seller, in Japan.
There's a little more to it than that. At LAN parties we have a pretty good mix of platforms, and the only games that get played are ones we can all play together.
The knock on effect of stopping Mac support on a game tracker for us is to stop 2 windows users per mac user from playing the game too.
Cross-platform support is a important feature in this kind of networking product. If they drop support for any used platform then the numbers for all the others will suffer too.
Apple is cool with geeks now which is why you get a lot of this. I don't think the increase of slashdot members using macs has had any impact on the signal/noise ratio on/. which has been steadily declining for many years now on its own.
The mod system is supposed to fix this signal issues, but thanks to fanboi culture both on Mac and Linux side it's flawed.
Meta-modding is the solution to that so if you want the signal/noise ratio to improve meta-mod more.
Windows does allow you to adjust its on screen graphics for higher resolution screens. You can change the DPI setting for the font engine: Control Panel ->Display -> Settings Tab -> Advanced
You can also set the size of Windows widgets in the same Display control panel -> Appearance Tab -> Advanced.
Mac OS X has similar window and UI scaling functions built in but not available for the user to change, for now it's 72 dpi, same as it always has been.
Problems arise from two things: sloppy programming on the Windows side assuming that 1 twip = 15 pixels (a 96 dpi resolution) meaning that control layouts get buggered up when set to any other resolution.
Second clueless web page authors. Most will mix unit types on pages and use resolution independant units such as pixels for images and resolution dependant units for fonts such as points. This means when the resolution setting is anything other than 96 dpi the layout gets screwed. Thanks to this almost all Mac browsers assume 96 dpi for web pages so they don't look like ass when the system default is 72 dpi.
I think the main thing holding us back from a resolution independant interface for a desktop OS is the pull of having to provide support for legacy apps.
While BeOS was very advanced in some areas at the time Apple was looking at buying it it was sorely lacking in others. Areas like localisation, language services and typography. Despite this it was still an attractive proposition, but Jean-Louise and co. killed it by being too greedy. Believing that they were Apple's only real option to get out of its mess they asked for more money than they were worth.
As it happened Apple chose to buy NeXT instead and paid even more for them. I believe that Be were offering themselves for $300M and that NeXT was bought for $400M.
At the end of it all I think that Apple totally made the right choice. Steve returned the focus needed for Apple to succeed again. OpenStep provided a very solid foundation for Mac OS X, arguably a better one than BeOS, then Apple managed to acquire a number of key people from Be who have helped add some of the show case BeOS technologies into Mac OS X. In essence it got both.
If you look at where we are now with the current builds of 10.4 with CoreImage, CoreData and Spotlight it's difficult to imagine that things could have worked out better if Apple had gone with Be. Certainly the dev tools inherited and evolved from NeXT have enabled Apple to develop the OS at a faster rate than the competition and they've managed with with less resources.
tf rocks. I've used zMud on a friend's PC but if you're going to spend any time mudding stick with the terminal. So if you're going to use a mud client pick an old UNIX one.
Mac OS X's terminal app is very good and tinyfugue works well.
Once you get used to its scripting language and the way triggers work it can save your ass in a game.
zMud offers a lot including a mapper that you won't find on any Mac client as far as I know. But quite a few MUDs aren't really mappable on a 2d grid anyway, but then maybe I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to text adventures.
Slashdot Mirror
A large potion of the 30% Apple takes is then passed on to the bank that processed the transaction. The banks normally charge a percentage of the sale or a flat fee if the amount is small.
.99c song would normally make up more money than Apple is taking from it so they must have negotiated a much better deal with the bank.
The transaction fee on a
Apple also delays billing you for songs you purchase for up to a couple of days. This way if you download more than one song the transaction cost is diluted and Apple takes more of the 30% cut.
When you factor the other costs of running the service Apple makes comparitively little from it. They profit from scale and are the only online distributor able to.
Mac OS 10.4 was a huge release not for your average user, but for the developer. The main features were a massive leap forward in the APIs and OS services available. They were designed to provide a base for future OS development for many years to come. Apple also added a small amount of eye-candy to Mac OS X 10.4 to sell a few boxes. Mac OS X 10.5 will be where we see many Apple supplied applications begin leveraging this new base.
A friend of mine in Apple DTS although always tight-lipped on what's actually being worked on said that while Microsoft is cutting features and still struggling to ship Vista, Apple's OS development is actually accelerating. Given the additions to Cocoa I actually believe it.
Roll on WWDC 2006.
It's all matter of opinion. As far as I'm concerned Pixar is the second best animation studio in the world. Only surpassed by Studio Ghibli.
>Third: I bet a case of beer that SonyEricsson [sonyericsson.com] will include iTunes [apple.com] in their cell phones during 2006. The demand is huge and they know they will have to do it, sooner or later. Nokia will also include iTunes as soon as they realize how Real sucks bigtime.
You think Sony-Ericsson will produce a mobile that uses iTunes sometime in 2006?
You got your bet.
SonyEricsson might be a join venture and not wholy a part of Sony but I can't possibly imagine them working with Apple on this one. Too much conflict of interest.
Winning a case of beer in time for next Christmas is not quite as good as winning a case of beer in time for this Christmas, but I'll take it.
>Apple could easily be gone in ten years, but there will be a continuity of Open Source software until the next ice age.
In ten years time Apple will still be there... going out of business as usual.
I think that's where your experience is differing from many others here. You are using XCode for C++ and Java when the IDE has grown up from a tool designed around Cocoa development.
I have tried Java dev in XCode, nothing serious, just my part time uni course work and I would agree with you XCode 1.5 isn't a great environment for Java dev. Version 2 is much better but it is still catching up with other common IDEs that focus on Java.
For Cocoa dev I love the environment, especially the new visual modelling tools.
It's useful to get a non-Cocoa developer's perspective of the tools.
You don't need to reboot, but you do need to exit and reload Terminal.app for it to take effect.
;)
The defaults tool is the command line interface into Apple's preferences system. Typically an application only reads the defaults when it's first opened. In all other cases I think it is a good idea to close the application you are editing the defaults for if doing so over the CLI. However Terminal.app is kind of an exception
I know this feature has worked since about 10.2. It works on my PowerMac G5 (10.3.8) and iBook (10.4 pre-release).
I don't agree with much of what you have said but maybe I can ease some pain. Focus follows mouse is a feature I sorely miss on Mac OS X. Fortunately it exists in a limited form in Terminal.app.
Open the terminal and run:
Moving the mouse over a terminal window makes that window accept key input, it doesn't change the window layer order.
As for the UNIX behavour of selected text automatically being set to the clip board, I hate this. Tying these two actions together is destructive. You can do so much more with a selection than copy it to the clip board. Most often when I'm selecting some text it isn't because I want to copy or cut it, but want to change some property of the text. Selections can also be manipulated by drag and drop in Mac OS. Auto copying is bad.
As for having to use the keyboard on Mac OS, you don't, and you don't have to resort to using the Edit menu either.
Select some text then drag that text to a new location, as default that will move the block of text (like cutting and pasting it somewhere else but without replacing what was on the clipboard). If you drag the text selection to a different document the text will be copied to the new document.
If what you wanted to do was duplicate the selected text, then this takes slightly longer as you'll either have to reach for the option (alt) key for use the context menu.
Expose solves the window layering problem. Other solutions are: command+tab to cycle between apps, command+tilde to cycle between windows in the current app, or use the Windows menu.
Many things in Mac OS work differently as the author of the linked article points out. You can learn them and be more productive or stick with you X-Windows way of thinking.
Beneath the easy to use Mac OS interface are other ways of accessing functions that are more efficient for those willing to learn them: keyboard shortcuts, modifier keys, scripts. You can even change most of these. Favourite app not have a shortcut for a frequently used menu item? Use System Preferences: Keyboard and Mouse: Keyboard Shortcuts and add one.
Multi-button mice on Mac OS X allow the behavour of the extra buttons to be configured. You can usually attach Applescripts to buttons so you could probably even get the behavour you want with some inventive scripting.
To add to that, there weren't really all that many classic Mac OS viruses either. About 30 or so, plus variants in the whole life of the Mac.
The most recent one that I remember was the autostart worm which hooked into Quicktime's autostart feature. That was easily defeated by toggling a check box.
The most harmful virus ever released for the Mac randomly changed the names, and type/creator codes for your files making them practically useless.
The most ammusing wasn't really a virus at all, but an extension that caused any floppy disc inserted into the mac to be immediately and automatically ejected to the sound of aaaachooo.
Scrollwheels are only a good idea when you don't care about RSI. To use one without putting too much strain on my finger I have to remove my hand from its normal mouse holding position. If I'm moving my hand away from that normal position I might as well use a Griffin PowerMate which is bigger, easier to turn and doesn't put strain on my hand.
So mouse scroll-wheels are a good idea with terrible ergonomics. Microsoft has a history of this...
Just like the Microsoft moulded mouse - great as long as you are right handed. Apple's mice have always been symetrical, and having only one button means that I can still use my primary pinky for 'left' clicking on things.
Or the Microsoft natural keyboard a rip off of the Apple Adjustable keyboard. The MS keyboard forces your wrists into a certain angle whether you feel comfortable with it or not. The Apple keyboard would angle in the middle anywhere from 0 to 30 degrees, could change in elevation, had wrist rests (which were removable) and a separate numeric keypad good for lefties and righties.
Take a look at the brick of a controller that MS ship with the X-Box in comparison with others. It's just a bigger clunkier mish-mash of the Dreamcast and Nintendo controllers.
No I don't trust MS to make anything ergonomic so I'll avoid Microsoft human-computer input devices until they can show they finally get it.
True, or translation for us Brits. ... once [sic, read: if] the US dollar rises over the Pound.
Yeah right. That's going to happen. The pound is so strong against the dollar right now it's silly.
Importing stuff from the US makes sense to comsumers here, especially now the Internet makes it easy.
US companies have ritually shafted us for years with their foreign price fixing and they're not happy when we won't take it and import instead.
I can import Levis 501s for $32 that's £17.13. Here they cost £45. Even if Customs and Excise notice and charge me duty I'm still paying less than half the price they set here. Typically I get my American friends to bring a new pair over for me when they visit.
Electronics and Computers too. A friend of mine flew over from Birmingham, UK to New York City for a break a couple of years ago. He bought a Powerbook G4 whilst there. He said the money he saved covered the cost of his flight.
I'm pretty sure we have laws governing free market to stop this crap.
Because Linux is open source, whereas Darwin um is open source. Because with OS X you are stuck with Aqua, as long as you aren't prepared to tinker and run rooted or rootless X11 and choose a different window manager other than the one Apple supplies. Because OS X behaves in certain ways which tend to be very consistent but if you don't like them you can certainly start using native X11 apps to get back the inconsistency that you love. Linux distros offer more choice but really they are just a parallel to the many forms of BSD of which Mac OS is one that you can run on a Mac. Because Linux runs on several different architectures and um so does Darwin.
Seriously I get the point you are trying to make, I just disagree with all the examples you give. But I can see 2 reasons for a Mac owner to put Linux on their machine. First if they specifically want to learn how to use Linux, second if you dig the spirit of the GPL and want to involve yourself in it from the system level to user level.
Who knows? The Guide v2 used Random and Ford for it's own purposes. I'm very afraid of what it's up to, and you never can tell what might happen in a plural sector such as here.
I blame marketing, this is what happens when you let them drive a company.
Longhorn's graphics acceleration is more than just a Quartz Extreme equivalent. The full graphics pipeline is on the graphics card. No 2D rendering is done outside the graphics card.
Apple's effort of offloading graphics tasks to the graphics card has been implemented incrementally. Right now not all parts of the pipeline are accelerated. 3D is fully accelerated through OpenGL, DVD playback and 2D window compositing are accelerated. 2D rendering is not.
Quartz 2D acceleration is a feature of Mac OS X 10.4 which is to be released in the first half of this year. Other graphics accelerations are being added to Tiger too, ImageUnits and VideoUnits put the use of pixel shaders in advanced graphics cards into the hands of 2D developers, so 3rd party programmers can feel some of the love too.
Longhorn's acceleration is broadly equivalent of Quartz Extreme and accelerated Quartz 2D. But because Microsoft are doing it in one go it may end up having some architectural benefit, I don't know. Comparisons of the two systems have been drawn and debated pretty heavily, but considering only one of these systems is in the wild I try not to be drawn into it.
So Windows users will get accelerated graphics sometime in 2006. That will be at least 6 months after Mac users get equivalent acceleration. Also noting that we'll have had partial acceleration in the form of 2D compositing for over 2 years by then.
I believe that the mention of digital watches is a nod in the direction of the great (late) humourist Douglas Adams who was a long time Macintosh user and vocal supporter.
It's already been done...
It was called OpenDoc.
Apple killed after it flopped because software developers apparently don't like the idea of creating totally interoperable software components.
The Mot Timeport was a brilliant phone. Full of useful features. I got it because it was the first tri-band phone, had an in-built dictaphone function, modem and IrDA.
It's also interesting to note rumours of an updated StarTAC style handset:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000713022463/
If this was the phone to include iTunes I'd buy one without question. I loved my original StarTACs and went through several versions of them before the Timeport came out.
The last line should read:
3) Profit! Because the iPod has made Apple money hand over fist, so a fone that has the same general function (could this be the flash iPod everyone is talking about?) will likely be a giant seller, in Japan.
There's a little more to it than that. At LAN parties we have a pretty good mix of platforms, and the only games that get played are ones we can all play together.
The knock on effect of stopping Mac support on a game tracker for us is to stop 2 windows users per mac user from playing the game too.
Cross-platform support is a important feature in this kind of networking product. If they drop support for any used platform then the numbers for all the others will suffer too.
Apple is cool with geeks now which is why you get a lot of this. I don't think the increase of slashdot members using macs has had any impact on the signal/noise ratio on /. which has been steadily declining for many years now on its own.
The mod system is supposed to fix this signal issues, but thanks to fanboi culture both on Mac and Linux side it's flawed.
Meta-modding is the solution to that so if you want the signal/noise ratio to improve meta-mod more.
Windows does allow you to adjust its on screen graphics for higher resolution screens. You can change the DPI setting for the font engine: Control Panel ->Display -> Settings Tab -> Advanced
You can also set the size of Windows widgets in the same Display control panel -> Appearance Tab -> Advanced.
Mac OS X has similar window and UI scaling functions built in but not available for the user to change, for now it's 72 dpi, same as it always has been.
Problems arise from two things: sloppy programming on the Windows side assuming that 1 twip = 15 pixels (a 96 dpi resolution) meaning that control layouts get buggered up when set to any other resolution.
Second clueless web page authors. Most will mix unit types on pages and use resolution independant units such as pixels for images and resolution dependant units for fonts such as points. This means when the resolution setting is anything other than 96 dpi the layout gets screwed. Thanks to this almost all Mac browsers assume 96 dpi for web pages so they don't look like ass when the system default is 72 dpi.
I think the main thing holding us back from a resolution independant interface for a desktop OS is the pull of having to provide support for legacy apps.
While BeOS was very advanced in some areas at the time Apple was looking at buying it it was sorely lacking in others. Areas like localisation, language services and typography. Despite this it was still an attractive proposition, but Jean-Louise and co. killed it by being too greedy. Believing that they were Apple's only real option to get out of its mess they asked for more money than they were worth.
As it happened Apple chose to buy NeXT instead and paid even more for them. I believe that Be were offering themselves for $300M and that NeXT was bought for $400M.
At the end of it all I think that Apple totally made the right choice. Steve returned the focus needed for Apple to succeed again. OpenStep provided a very solid foundation for Mac OS X, arguably a better one than BeOS, then Apple managed to acquire a number of key people from Be who have helped add some of the show case BeOS technologies into Mac OS X. In essence it got both.
If you look at where we are now with the current builds of 10.4 with CoreImage, CoreData and Spotlight it's difficult to imagine that things could have worked out better if Apple had gone with Be. Certainly the dev tools inherited and evolved from NeXT have enabled Apple to develop the OS at a faster rate than the competition and they've managed with with less resources.
A few of the original ones were Mac using goth/punk/indie geeks. :D
Automator.app isn't really a graphical way of writing scripts. The best way of looking at it is a graphical equivalent to pipes on the command line.
Although these sort of automation tasks can be done using AppleScript, AppleScript itself is much more versatile as you might expect.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/automator.html
Saying much more than that would probably be breaking my NDA. But there is probably more information to be found on the usual rumour sites.
tf rocks. I've used zMud on a friend's PC but if you're going to spend any time mudding stick with the terminal. So if you're going to use a mud client pick an old UNIX one.
Mac OS X's terminal app is very good and tinyfugue works well.
Once you get used to its scripting language and the way triggers work it can save your ass in a game.
zMud offers a lot including a mapper that you won't find on any Mac client as far as I know. But quite a few MUDs aren't really mappable on a 2d grid anyway, but then maybe I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to text adventures.