Uh...Since when have YOU used iChat? Do you have some super-secret connexions within Apple to get you 10.2?
Yes. It's the super-secret Developer Program. The one that includes super-secret developer seeds. The last one I got was 6C106, which I've been running full-time ever since I got it. The golden master was 6C115, so this build is pretty close to finished. There's some debugging code in iChat itself that probably got ifdef'd out in the release, but other than that, it's totally release quality.
In fact, I'm using iChat right this second to converse with some co-workers in Australia. I love it.
Okay, it seems we disagree. I'm going to give you three reasons why I think Mozilla is inferior to MS IE. To keep things fair, I'm comparing IE 6 under Windows 2000 to Mozilla 1 on the same computer. Remember, I'm not talking about Mozilla prereleases here. I'm talking about version 1.0, the currently shipping version of the product.
I'm not trying to throw these particular issues open for debate. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet they've been thoroughly documented elsewhere anyway. Instead, I'd like you to counter with reasons why you think Mozilla is superior. Since we're debating the meaning and value of standards compliance qua standards compliance elsewhere, I think it's best if we just leave that out of this discussion altogether.
1. Mozilla is slow, slow.
Opening a new instance of the browser takes ten to twenty seconds. Opening a new browser window inside the same instance takes three to five seconds. That's inexcusable in my book. Rendering speed is kind of moot if it takes too darned long to even get the window open.
2. The toolbar is "broken."
The Mozilla toolbar lacks a "home" button, and it squeezes the address bar in to the right of the four main (and huge) buttons, leaving it severely truncated and unable to completely display long URLs.
3. Text editing in textarea widgets is inconsistent.
I noticed this one when I tried to use Mozilla to post to Slashdot. The textarea widget seemed fundamentally buggy.
Okay, those are the first three that pop into my head. Now, your turn.
Isn't it in our interest to kill an MS cash cow? They are too darned powerful for comfort.
I personally try to stay away from anti-Microsoft agendas, no matter what their motivation. I'm just a little concerned about the effect of a power vacuum. If Microsoft were to vanish tomorrow (or partially vanish, say from the office software market), how sure are you that what would rise up to take its place would be better than the status quo? I'm not saying you should or shouldn't act in a certain way; I'm just explaining my opinion on the subject.
But look at it from a different perspective: MS Office, for all its market penetration, is pretty dreadful software. It's complex and inconsistent, and I frequently find myself struggling to get work done in spite of it. There's a lot of room for improvement in office software, and there are a lot of users who would benefit from it. Of course, that means there are also a lot of people who will form a negative impression if the alternative product-- whatever it happens to be-- should stumble.
I think you and I are saying the same thing, only for different reasons. Which is fine by me.
A usable and pretty high-level XML word-processer is the killer app.
Lately one of my core responsibilities at my job has been taking documentation from another company, which came to us as part of an acquisition of one of the other company's business units, and revising and reformatting it for publication. To do this I have to do simple things, like replace certain trademarks with other trademarks, but also some complex things. For instance, the company that sold us the software and IP produced their documents on an odd-sized sheet of paper, about 10" square. Our corporate style calls for a different size page, along with different typesetting and layout and whatnot. Converting 2,000 pages of documentation this way is not a trivial task.
So I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about word processors, and page layout apps. The other company did everything with FrameMaker on UNIX. Since it's not 1991 any more, we do things with Adobe InCopy, for galley production, and InDesign, for pagination. Getting the documents from one format to another is a tedious process.
My boss's boss wanted to know why we didn't just do everything in MS Word, so documents could be emailed around the company using that "track changes" feature. We had to explain the difference between formatted documents, like what Word products, and structured documents, like you get out of FrameMaker or InCopy.
After that little run-in, I think an XML-based word processor would be a terrible idea. People who use word processors aren't looking to create structured documents. They just want to bang out a memo, or a fax cover sheet, or a letter to grandma. Forcing those users to work in a structured environment would be murder, and would result in a terrible user experience.
On the other hand, I think there's a place in certain environments-- like mine, for instance-- for a structured document processor. Such a program would have only the most basic formatting features, like the ability to italicize text. It would also be able to import style sheets and apply paragraph-level styles to parts of the document, structuring it implicitly. I've managed to turn Microsoft Word into that kind of tool by setting up my own document template and style sheet, so the suits at the C-level can create documents that we can bring into InDesign. But the best tool for this that I've found so far is really InCopy.
I know I'm rambling, but my point is simply to say that formatted documents and structured documents are very different things, and a tool for producing one doesn't automatically equate into a tool for producing the other. An XML word processor might end up being a very poor word processor indeed.
I don't want to put words in Bruce's mouth, but I'm sure he was trying to say that the road to open source respectability lies through a quality suite of productivity applications. The business world runs on Microsoft Office-- for better or for worse-- and as long as no such software is available on other platforms, those platforms will be unable to penetrate into corporate IT. If the goal is to create a platform that is adopted by a significant fraction of the computer market, an office productivity suite is the only way to get there.
Of course, if I'm misinterpreting Bruce's comments, he'll be on here in about three seconds correcting me.
If the standard is ignored, it doesn't reflect reality. Your point is circular.
No, it isn't. Because one of either the standards or the browsers came first. If the standard retroactively defines what is and what isn't acceptable to be different from what the browsers do, then the standard is useless.
Standards are not being defended by anyone here as an a priori good....
Yes, they are. Perhaps you haven't been following the threads closely enough. That position is precisely what I'm arguing against. Standards are not an a priori good, and browsers that claim compliance with de jure standards while abandoning compatibility with de facto standards are flawed.
Cars have VIN numbers for a reason. It's both illegal and virtually impossible to change the VIN number on a car. Every car built in or imported into the US has a VIN number on it in no fewer than three places. The first two are documented, but the third (and, if there are more, the rest) are carefully concealed, and their locations vary from one make, model, and year to the next. It is exceedingly difficult to find and change all the VIN numbers on a car without dismantling the car completely, which is usually more effort than it's worth.
Same with MAC addresses. It should be impossible to change them, period.
I'd like to think that when serial numbers become common in consumer level hardware, we'll have an Apex that will produce hardware that will let customers dial in their own.
And I'd like to think that reasonable people will come to an agreement that immutable hardware serial numbers are very useful, and that having them will solve a world of problems for both creators and consumers of media, software, and information.
I'd also like to think that the lunatic fringe that oppose such technologies will remain just that: fringe.
Why is installing software on more than one computers a bad thing?
Two reasons: principle, and economics.
On the one hand, Apple asks you to buy one copy of the software per computer (except in the case of this 5-pack, of course). If you're not willing to comply with that request, then you should not use the software at all. Using it on two computers without paying for two copies is like taking two newspapers from the machine after putting in only one quarter: it's stealing.
On the other hand, Apple spends a fortune developing this software, but sells it at a much lower price because they're expecting to sell a certain number of copies. That number is based on how many Macs are out there now, and what fraction of the owners will want to use the new software. See, they're counting Macs, not people or families or little groups of warezing teens. If they sell too few copies of OS X 10.2, they won't make their money back, and there won't be a Mac OS X 10.3. So using two copies when you only pay for one indirectly deprives you of future products that you'd like to have.
And, of course, there's the best reason of all: because your momma told you so, idiot.
You know, whoever posts this is a low-down, dirty troll, but at least he/she/whatever is creative. I'd rather see this kind of trolling than the "BSD is dying" and "frost piss" crapflooding.
Besides, this poster provides lots of laughs. "fosters the creativity of content authors," indeed. What content authors actually use Windows, anyway? Apple may own 2% of the market, but everybody knows they own the creative industries.
Haven't you ever thought about the irony of Microsoft's market position? They're the #1 operating system in the world, in number of units, but their software is almost universally terrible. In what kind of world does that make sense?
Then I came up with my own hypothesis: popular software tends to suck. Think about it. The most popular software products in the world-- like, say, Windows-- are always awful pieces of work. There's clearly a connection here. I haven't identified the exact mechanism yet; maybe it has something to do with the products growing too fast or something. But the connection is undeniable!
If Mac OS X ever grows beyond a few million users, it'll start to suck. Keep the user base small! Keep Macs expensive! Keep out the riff-raff!
No, the only thing MAC addresses should be is unique. The fact that a copy protection system relied on their being immutable doesn't mean they should be. Not one bit.
Uh... how can your MAC address be guaranteed to be unique (which it must be) if you can change it? MAC addresses are set at the factory, and mustn't change. That's why copy protection systems have been based on them.
There's absolutely no reason in the world for MAC addresses to change.
The problem with this is that there are well-known ways to change the MAC address of your built-in Ethernet adapter. This is how kracks for popular software like Maya for Windows work.
The license host ID number has to be immutable. MAC addresses should be, but aren't.
This is true - but the standard *would* reflect reality if it wasn't for a monopoly (which, by the way, are illegal in the US) saying otherwise;)
Remember, we're talking about browsers here, not operating systems. Microsoft's browser won the market through a hard fight. The first few versions of IE were terrible, but around version 5 it started kicking Netscape's little butt around pretty seriously.
You can't seriously look at IE 5 or 6 and say that their dominance of the market is due only to unfair business practices on the part of Microsoft. Those two versions of IE are the best browsers running, plain and simple.
When Netscape was in more control, they didn't have another agenda to push. It was simply "Use Netscape!" but they didn't care what else you did.
Bullshit. Every company has an agenda: use our products or services instead of our competitors'. That was true of Netscape as well.
For that matter, everybody-- person or company, whichever-- has an agenda. Anybody who claims otherwise merely has a secret agenda.
As for harm... how much PNG do you see on the web? Not much. Could that be partly because IE's support is lacking? If IE doesn't support it right, people won't use it.
You're trying to call the limited use of a graphics file format a harm? That's a stretch. Who cares if the graphics are PNGs or JPEGs or TIFFs or ASCII-art. There's zero harm in your example, except possibly to the licensors of the PNG format, if there were any. There aren't, so... so what?
Mozilla tries to be something different, something BETTER: A standards compliant browser.
Okay, so now we're getting down to brass tacks. You believe compliance with standards is an absolute good, and therefore any browser that complies with standards is prima facie better than any browser that doesn't. I think that's wrong. Browsers, like many things, derive value from utility. Mozilla has no value to me, because I find it to be of no use, due to the fact that it fails to render pages correctly. I don't care about the finger-pointing match. I don't care if the browser is at fault or the web page. Since it doesn't work, Mozilla is of no value.
And I can make fully standards compliant pages that IE can't render correctly. IE is actually quite lacking when you start pushing the boundaries.
You have a browser which is used by (let's just say for argument) virtually everybody. After the browser has already reached almost total market penetration, somebody comes along a develops a standard. The standard calls for browsers to work differently from how the absurdly popular browser does things.
Now, is the browser broken, or is the standard broken?
Standards are valuable, just like everything else, only to the extent that they're useful. If the standard doesn't reflect reality, it should be ignored.
Nobody is going to like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. These sorts of problems wouldn't exist if computers had a unique serial number in them.
I work a lot with SGI computers. Software on SGIs is licensed with FlexLM, and FlexLM depends on this thing called the license host ID number. On an SGI, that host number is burned into a special chip on the midplane called the NIC, for number-in-a-can. (Yeah, another instance of an overloaded acronym.) SGI's have had these for years and years.
When you get a software license, you provide the vendor with your license host ID, which is that number-in-a-can number. The vendor generates a license that will only be valid on your computer. Because the NIC is a piece of hardware, you can wipe your disks to your heart's content, and your license keys (as long as you keep copies of them) will continue to work.
It's a pretty foolproof system. I don't know precisely how it works, but there are at least two NICs in each computer, and new components are shipped from the factory in a special blank state, such that the old, failed part can be replaced with the new part and the system will flash the new NIC chip with the system's license host ID at power-up. Or something like that. All I know for sure is that I've had virtually every piece of my SGIs replaced at one time or another, and I've never had a problem with the license host ID.
I want to re-emphasize that this is not a new thing. SGIs have had NIC chips on them for as long as I can remember. Computers from other vendors may have them, too, but I couldn't say.
Now, if PCs had NIC chips in them, or the equivalent, the sort of problem described in the article would never arise. Copy-protected music files could be linked to a specific license host ID, which is stored in hardware. Wipe your drives, upgrade your machine, whatever, as long as you keep the same license host ID, the licensed stuff on your computer will continue to work.
Of course, you'd be unable to move your music files from one computer to another, but that's the whole point of the system, isn't it?
Now, how do you think the Slashdot audience would respond if somebody-- anybody-- advocated putting NIC-like technology in personal computers?
I think we're all going to have to acknowledge that some form of copy protection for media is necessary. The question then becomes, how do we (and I don't literally mean "we," but you get my point) devise a system that protects the media to the extent necessary, but that ensures as much convenience to the user as possible?
Next time somebody advocates something like the Pentium unique serial number scheme from a few years back, don't be quite so quick to flame them.
Don't confuse "the web" with "the Internet." Microsoft makes, and in some ways, controls, the most popular web browser. They can introduce new tags or scripting language features that aren't part of the "standards." So what? Those features will have to be defined, obviously, because content providers will have to know what they are to incorporate them in their pages. At that point, anybody is free to implement them.
Not too long ago, Netscape had that power. Remember "blink?" Netscape did what they wanted, and standards could go to hell. And it was good, because it gave us better browsers. (Well, except maybe for "blink.") The world didn't end. The web didn't collapse. None of us became slaves to Netscape. Hell, Netscape's not even around any more, except in name.
So I think you're wrong. There is no danger associated with one company calling the shots in HTML and JavaScript development. That situation has been the status quo in the past, and no harm arose.
As for standards, I say screw 'em. We have all the standards we need: IE is the reference implementation for the HTML protocol, the DOM, and the JavaScript language.
If the Mozilla guys had decided to just implement compatibility with IE instead of trying to take some kind of moral high ground, the Mozilla browser would be popular today, rather than having a number of users so small as to be statistically insignificant.
This, ultimately, is the failure of open source not-for-profit software. Since there's no motivation on the part of developers to create software that users want, they'll choose to create software that they themselves want, rendering it useless to everybody else. In this case, users want web browsers that work perfectly. In this case, "work perfectly" is defined as "renders all pages correctly." If one browser (say, IE) renders a page correctly while another (say, Mozilla) doesn't, then the other browser is at fault. The Mozilla developers' cries of standards mean nothing to anybody except other Mozilla developers.
Microsoft doesn't usually produce very good software. Windows has lots of serious flaws in it, as do Office and their other apps. Even IE is not free of serious faults. But it's vastly superior to Mozilla by the only standard that counts: it works in situations where Mozilla fails.
It was a generalisation, granted. If I said "the content companies that make up 80%+ of revenue" would you feel better about it?
Not unless you could back that number up with some kind of source citation. I'm getting pretty sick of people throwing around qualifiers like "90%" and, in your case, "80%+," implying a degree of precision that they couldn't possibly support.
I'm not even sure you could confidently say "most" in this context. There are an awful lot of content providers out there.
We have a product that's basically built like that. We have the database code in a small number of mutually exclusive DSOs, one for Informix, one for Oracle, and one for Sybase.
It was really a terrible idea, in retrospect. Last summer, it took us five months to write the Sybase database key. Five months! Just to re-implement code that was already there in the other DSOs!
I think we might have been a lot happier if we'd chosen ODBC from the start, but I'm just guessing about that, because I don't really know much about ODBC. I'm just thinking that it must have been better than what we decided to do.
"Content" companies don't believe you should have control over the device you use to access web pages (or movies, or music..). For the user to grant or deny "permission" is a ludicrous concept to them.
You know, it doesn't help your case for you to make broad and obviously false statements like that. Seriously, "content companies don't believe you should have control over the device..." isn't the sort of thing that leads to productive dialogue. It's as if I said, "lpontiac can't tie his (or her, whatever) own shoes." It's just silly.
Now, a more accurate statement would be, "some content providers (notably Example, and also Example) don't want people to see their web sites unless they also see their advertisements." But you didn't say that, did you? No, you decided instead to take the low road, spicing up a generalization with references to Palladium, DRM, and the DMCA.
Now, if you want to have a constructive dialogue on this, we can speculate on what the effects might be of popular web sites denying access to users who employ ad filtering techniques or software. Or we could talk about whether AOL has the right to include or exclude features in or from their software based on business decisions. (They do, by the way.) But making snarky remarks doesn't get us anywhere worth going.
I'm sorry, friend, but you just ended up sounding like an idiot. If you had a point there, it was lost on me.
The parent comment was posted by an AC, and as such probably isn't being read by many people. Since I don't have mod points today, I'll just quote the comment here in its entirety. Don't moderate me up; moderate the parent.
There is absolutely nothing intrinsically good about following W3C standards. The W3C has done a remarkable job of hijacking the web standards process, but it is not clear that W3C micromanagement has actually resulted in technically superior standards, rather than politically advantageous ones.
The W3C (amongst others) is responsible for having created a baroque web of overly complex standards, resulting in ambiguous specifications, bugs in the various implementations, and a stagnant culture where developers spend their time conforming to W3C specs rather than developing new features and doing what _they_ think is important.
I think that comment is a little flamebaity, but essentially correct. I've expressed the opinion on several occasions that standards for web markup become meaningless when the browser with 90% market share (or whatever bignum) doesn't implement them. People who say, "This web site doesn't work in IE because IE is broken," will have to accept the fact that the vast majority of users out there will simply choose to go to other web sites, rather than be told that the most widely used browser is faulty.
So I think the parent poster hit it right on the money: there is absolutely nothing intrinsically good about following W3C standards.
Simply put, the present-day Pentium4 processor kicks the G4's *ass.
You can state that sort of comparison either accurately or simply, but not both at the same time.
For example, I find that the G4 kick's the Pentium 4's ass, because the Pentium 4 can't run OS X. If it doesn't run OS X, it's not a computer, as far as I'm concerned. So by my criteria, the G4 kicks the Pentium's ass.
If your criteria is how well the processor runs Windows, then obviously the Pentium beats the G4.
If you care about running MSC.Nastran, then the Pentium 4 beats the G4 because there's no version of Nastran for the G4. On the other hand, if you care about running BLAST, then the G4 is 12-15 times faster than the Pentium 4, so in that case G4 wins.
So simply put, it's not possible to "simply put" this sort of thing.
Now, getting back to my point, a dual-processor G4 running at 867 MHz will feel faster-- more responsive and interactive-- than an otherwise identical single-processor machine.
I was going on the assumption that the new heat sink-- which is disproportionately large compared to the one in the dual 1 GHz Quicksilvers-- is there to accommodate four processors. Otherwise, it's overkill.
What's your specific complaint? Dell is the biggest manufacturer of PCs, and the machine was equipped with that I believe is the fastest Pentium processor available. How was the test unfair?
I got into the office this morning at 10:00, and I had a full charge on the battery. I used it all day to run OmniWeb, Mail.app, Word, Photoshop, InDesign, and maybe a few other things. I put it to sleep between 12:30 and 1:30, then finally plugged it into the wall at 3:30. I had 23% battery left then, according to the menu item, which probably would have lasted me about half an hour longer.
That's 4:30, +/- 30 minutes. I had the screen at full brightness, using the automatic power management setting in System Prefs (which, I believe, spins down the drive and cycles the processor speed), with my AirPort card off. I haven't timed it with AirPort on, but I'm guessing that might take 60-90 minutes off the battery life. But that's totally a guess.
If you only get 3 hours out of Jaguar, I'll be disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh...Since when have YOU used iChat? Do you have some super-secret connexions within Apple to get you 10.2?
Yes. It's the super-secret Developer Program. The one that includes super-secret developer seeds. The last one I got was 6C106, which I've been running full-time ever since I got it. The golden master was 6C115, so this build is pretty close to finished. There's some debugging code in iChat itself that probably got ifdef'd out in the release, but other than that, it's totally release quality.
In fact, I'm using iChat right this second to converse with some co-workers in Australia. I love it.
Okay, it seems we disagree. I'm going to give you three reasons why I think Mozilla is inferior to MS IE. To keep things fair, I'm comparing IE 6 under Windows 2000 to Mozilla 1 on the same computer. Remember, I'm not talking about Mozilla prereleases here. I'm talking about version 1.0, the currently shipping version of the product.
I'm not trying to throw these particular issues open for debate. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet they've been thoroughly documented elsewhere anyway. Instead, I'd like you to counter with reasons why you think Mozilla is superior. Since we're debating the meaning and value of standards compliance qua standards compliance elsewhere, I think it's best if we just leave that out of this discussion altogether.
1. Mozilla is slow, slow.
Opening a new instance of the browser takes ten to twenty seconds. Opening a new browser window inside the same instance takes three to five seconds. That's inexcusable in my book. Rendering speed is kind of moot if it takes too darned long to even get the window open.
2. The toolbar is "broken."
The Mozilla toolbar lacks a "home" button, and it squeezes the address bar in to the right of the four main (and huge) buttons, leaving it severely truncated and unable to completely display long URLs.
3. Text editing in textarea widgets is inconsistent.
I noticed this one when I tried to use Mozilla to post to Slashdot. The textarea widget seemed fundamentally buggy.
Okay, those are the first three that pop into my head. Now, your turn.
Isn't it in our interest to kill an MS cash cow? They are too darned powerful for comfort.
I personally try to stay away from anti-Microsoft agendas, no matter what their motivation. I'm just a little concerned about the effect of a power vacuum. If Microsoft were to vanish tomorrow (or partially vanish, say from the office software market), how sure are you that what would rise up to take its place would be better than the status quo? I'm not saying you should or shouldn't act in a certain way; I'm just explaining my opinion on the subject.
But look at it from a different perspective: MS Office, for all its market penetration, is pretty dreadful software. It's complex and inconsistent, and I frequently find myself struggling to get work done in spite of it. There's a lot of room for improvement in office software, and there are a lot of users who would benefit from it. Of course, that means there are also a lot of people who will form a negative impression if the alternative product-- whatever it happens to be-- should stumble.
I think you and I are saying the same thing, only for different reasons. Which is fine by me.
A usable and pretty high-level XML word-processer is the killer app.
Lately one of my core responsibilities at my job has been taking documentation from another company, which came to us as part of an acquisition of one of the other company's business units, and revising and reformatting it for publication. To do this I have to do simple things, like replace certain trademarks with other trademarks, but also some complex things. For instance, the company that sold us the software and IP produced their documents on an odd-sized sheet of paper, about 10" square. Our corporate style calls for a different size page, along with different typesetting and layout and whatnot. Converting 2,000 pages of documentation this way is not a trivial task.
So I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about word processors, and page layout apps. The other company did everything with FrameMaker on UNIX. Since it's not 1991 any more, we do things with Adobe InCopy, for galley production, and InDesign, for pagination. Getting the documents from one format to another is a tedious process.
My boss's boss wanted to know why we didn't just do everything in MS Word, so documents could be emailed around the company using that "track changes" feature. We had to explain the difference between formatted documents, like what Word products, and structured documents, like you get out of FrameMaker or InCopy.
After that little run-in, I think an XML-based word processor would be a terrible idea. People who use word processors aren't looking to create structured documents. They just want to bang out a memo, or a fax cover sheet, or a letter to grandma. Forcing those users to work in a structured environment would be murder, and would result in a terrible user experience.
On the other hand, I think there's a place in certain environments-- like mine, for instance-- for a structured document processor. Such a program would have only the most basic formatting features, like the ability to italicize text. It would also be able to import style sheets and apply paragraph-level styles to parts of the document, structuring it implicitly. I've managed to turn Microsoft Word into that kind of tool by setting up my own document template and style sheet, so the suits at the C-level can create documents that we can bring into InDesign. But the best tool for this that I've found so far is really InCopy.
I know I'm rambling, but my point is simply to say that formatted documents and structured documents are very different things, and a tool for producing one doesn't automatically equate into a tool for producing the other. An XML word processor might end up being a very poor word processor indeed.
I don't want to put words in Bruce's mouth, but I'm sure he was trying to say that the road to open source respectability lies through a quality suite of productivity applications. The business world runs on Microsoft Office-- for better or for worse-- and as long as no such software is available on other platforms, those platforms will be unable to penetrate into corporate IT. If the goal is to create a platform that is adopted by a significant fraction of the computer market, an office productivity suite is the only way to get there.
Of course, if I'm misinterpreting Bruce's comments, he'll be on here in about three seconds correcting me.
I know it's not really a fair comparison, but iChat is by far the best IM client. Nothing can touch it for sheer elegance and ease of use.
If the standard is ignored, it doesn't reflect reality. Your point is circular.
No, it isn't. Because one of either the standards or the browsers came first. If the standard retroactively defines what is and what isn't acceptable to be different from what the browsers do, then the standard is useless.
Standards are not being defended by anyone here as an a priori good....
Yes, they are. Perhaps you haven't been following the threads closely enough. That position is precisely what I'm arguing against. Standards are not an a priori good, and browsers that claim compliance with de jure standards while abandoning compatibility with de facto standards are flawed.
Cars have VIN numbers for a reason. It's both illegal and virtually impossible to change the VIN number on a car. Every car built in or imported into the US has a VIN number on it in no fewer than three places. The first two are documented, but the third (and, if there are more, the rest) are carefully concealed, and their locations vary from one make, model, and year to the next. It is exceedingly difficult to find and change all the VIN numbers on a car without dismantling the car completely, which is usually more effort than it's worth.
Same with MAC addresses. It should be impossible to change them, period.
I'd like to think that when serial numbers become common in consumer level hardware, we'll have an Apex that will produce hardware that will let customers dial in their own.
And I'd like to think that reasonable people will come to an agreement that immutable hardware serial numbers are very useful, and that having them will solve a world of problems for both creators and consumers of media, software, and information.
I'd also like to think that the lunatic fringe that oppose such technologies will remain just that: fringe.
Why is installing software on more than one computers a bad thing?
Two reasons: principle, and economics.
On the one hand, Apple asks you to buy one copy of the software per computer (except in the case of this 5-pack, of course). If you're not willing to comply with that request, then you should not use the software at all. Using it on two computers without paying for two copies is like taking two newspapers from the machine after putting in only one quarter: it's stealing.
On the other hand, Apple spends a fortune developing this software, but sells it at a much lower price because they're expecting to sell a certain number of copies. That number is based on how many Macs are out there now, and what fraction of the owners will want to use the new software. See, they're counting Macs, not people or families or little groups of warezing teens. If they sell too few copies of OS X 10.2, they won't make their money back, and there won't be a Mac OS X 10.3. So using two copies when you only pay for one indirectly deprives you of future products that you'd like to have.
And, of course, there's the best reason of all: because your momma told you so, idiot.
You know, whoever posts this is a low-down, dirty troll, but at least he/she/whatever is creative. I'd rather see this kind of trolling than the "BSD is dying" and "frost piss" crapflooding.
Besides, this poster provides lots of laughs. "fosters the creativity of content authors," indeed. What content authors actually use Windows, anyway? Apple may own 2% of the market, but everybody knows they own the creative industries.
God, I hope not.
Haven't you ever thought about the irony of Microsoft's market position? They're the #1 operating system in the world, in number of units, but their software is almost universally terrible. In what kind of world does that make sense?
Then I came up with my own hypothesis: popular software tends to suck. Think about it. The most popular software products in the world-- like, say, Windows-- are always awful pieces of work. There's clearly a connection here. I haven't identified the exact mechanism yet; maybe it has something to do with the products growing too fast or something. But the connection is undeniable!
If Mac OS X ever grows beyond a few million users, it'll start to suck. Keep the user base small! Keep Macs expensive! Keep out the riff-raff!
(HHOS)
No, the only thing MAC addresses should be is unique. The fact that a copy protection system relied on their being immutable doesn't mean they should be. Not one bit.
Uh... how can your MAC address be guaranteed to be unique (which it must be) if you can change it? MAC addresses are set at the factory, and mustn't change. That's why copy protection systems have been based on them.
There's absolutely no reason in the world for MAC addresses to change.
The problem with this is that there are well-known ways to change the MAC address of your built-in Ethernet adapter. This is how kracks for popular software like Maya for Windows work.
The license host ID number has to be immutable. MAC addresses should be, but aren't.
This is true - but the standard *would* reflect reality if it wasn't for a monopoly (which, by the way, are illegal in the US) saying otherwise ;)
Remember, we're talking about browsers here, not operating systems. Microsoft's browser won the market through a hard fight. The first few versions of IE were terrible, but around version 5 it started kicking Netscape's little butt around pretty seriously.
You can't seriously look at IE 5 or 6 and say that their dominance of the market is due only to unfair business practices on the part of Microsoft. Those two versions of IE are the best browsers running, plain and simple.
When Netscape was in more control, they didn't have another agenda to push. It was simply "Use Netscape!" but they didn't care what else you did.
Bullshit. Every company has an agenda: use our products or services instead of our competitors'. That was true of Netscape as well.
For that matter, everybody-- person or company, whichever-- has an agenda. Anybody who claims otherwise merely has a secret agenda.
As for harm... how much PNG do you see on the web? Not much. Could that be partly because IE's support is lacking? If IE doesn't support it right, people won't use it.
You're trying to call the limited use of a graphics file format a harm? That's a stretch. Who cares if the graphics are PNGs or JPEGs or TIFFs or ASCII-art. There's zero harm in your example, except possibly to the licensors of the PNG format, if there were any. There aren't, so... so what?
Mozilla tries to be something different, something BETTER: A standards compliant browser.
Okay, so now we're getting down to brass tacks. You believe compliance with standards is an absolute good, and therefore any browser that complies with standards is prima facie better than any browser that doesn't. I think that's wrong. Browsers, like many things, derive value from utility. Mozilla has no value to me, because I find it to be of no use, due to the fact that it fails to render pages correctly. I don't care about the finger-pointing match. I don't care if the browser is at fault or the web page. Since it doesn't work, Mozilla is of no value.
And I can make fully standards compliant pages that IE can't render correctly. IE is actually quite lacking when you start pushing the boundaries.
You have a browser which is used by (let's just say for argument) virtually everybody. After the browser has already reached almost total market penetration, somebody comes along a develops a standard. The standard calls for browsers to work differently from how the absurdly popular browser does things.
Now, is the browser broken, or is the standard broken?
Standards are valuable, just like everything else, only to the extent that they're useful. If the standard doesn't reflect reality, it should be ignored.
Nobody is going to like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. These sorts of problems wouldn't exist if computers had a unique serial number in them.
I work a lot with SGI computers. Software on SGIs is licensed with FlexLM, and FlexLM depends on this thing called the license host ID number. On an SGI, that host number is burned into a special chip on the midplane called the NIC, for number-in-a-can. (Yeah, another instance of an overloaded acronym.) SGI's have had these for years and years.
When you get a software license, you provide the vendor with your license host ID, which is that number-in-a-can number. The vendor generates a license that will only be valid on your computer. Because the NIC is a piece of hardware, you can wipe your disks to your heart's content, and your license keys (as long as you keep copies of them) will continue to work.
It's a pretty foolproof system. I don't know precisely how it works, but there are at least two NICs in each computer, and new components are shipped from the factory in a special blank state, such that the old, failed part can be replaced with the new part and the system will flash the new NIC chip with the system's license host ID at power-up. Or something like that. All I know for sure is that I've had virtually every piece of my SGIs replaced at one time or another, and I've never had a problem with the license host ID.
I want to re-emphasize that this is not a new thing. SGIs have had NIC chips on them for as long as I can remember. Computers from other vendors may have them, too, but I couldn't say.
Now, if PCs had NIC chips in them, or the equivalent, the sort of problem described in the article would never arise. Copy-protected music files could be linked to a specific license host ID, which is stored in hardware. Wipe your drives, upgrade your machine, whatever, as long as you keep the same license host ID, the licensed stuff on your computer will continue to work.
Of course, you'd be unable to move your music files from one computer to another, but that's the whole point of the system, isn't it?
Now, how do you think the Slashdot audience would respond if somebody-- anybody-- advocated putting NIC-like technology in personal computers?
I think we're all going to have to acknowledge that some form of copy protection for media is necessary. The question then becomes, how do we (and I don't literally mean "we," but you get my point) devise a system that protects the media to the extent necessary, but that ensures as much convenience to the user as possible?
Next time somebody advocates something like the Pentium unique serial number scheme from a few years back, don't be quite so quick to flame them.
Don't confuse "the web" with "the Internet." Microsoft makes, and in some ways, controls, the most popular web browser. They can introduce new tags or scripting language features that aren't part of the "standards." So what? Those features will have to be defined, obviously, because content providers will have to know what they are to incorporate them in their pages. At that point, anybody is free to implement them.
Not too long ago, Netscape had that power. Remember "blink?" Netscape did what they wanted, and standards could go to hell. And it was good, because it gave us better browsers. (Well, except maybe for "blink.") The world didn't end. The web didn't collapse. None of us became slaves to Netscape. Hell, Netscape's not even around any more, except in name.
So I think you're wrong. There is no danger associated with one company calling the shots in HTML and JavaScript development. That situation has been the status quo in the past, and no harm arose.
As for standards, I say screw 'em. We have all the standards we need: IE is the reference implementation for the HTML protocol, the DOM, and the JavaScript language.
If the Mozilla guys had decided to just implement compatibility with IE instead of trying to take some kind of moral high ground, the Mozilla browser would be popular today, rather than having a number of users so small as to be statistically insignificant.
This, ultimately, is the failure of open source not-for-profit software. Since there's no motivation on the part of developers to create software that users want, they'll choose to create software that they themselves want, rendering it useless to everybody else. In this case, users want web browsers that work perfectly. In this case, "work perfectly" is defined as "renders all pages correctly." If one browser (say, IE) renders a page correctly while another (say, Mozilla) doesn't, then the other browser is at fault. The Mozilla developers' cries of standards mean nothing to anybody except other Mozilla developers.
Microsoft doesn't usually produce very good software. Windows has lots of serious flaws in it, as do Office and their other apps. Even IE is not free of serious faults. But it's vastly superior to Mozilla by the only standard that counts: it works in situations where Mozilla fails.
It was a generalisation, granted. If I said "the content companies that make up 80%+ of revenue" would you feel better about it?
Not unless you could back that number up with some kind of source citation. I'm getting pretty sick of people throwing around qualifiers like "90%" and, in your case, "80%+," implying a degree of precision that they couldn't possibly support.
I'm not even sure you could confidently say "most" in this context. There are an awful lot of content providers out there.
We have a product that's basically built like that. We have the database code in a small number of mutually exclusive DSOs, one for Informix, one for Oracle, and one for Sybase.
It was really a terrible idea, in retrospect. Last summer, it took us five months to write the Sybase database key. Five months! Just to re-implement code that was already there in the other DSOs!
I think we might have been a lot happier if we'd chosen ODBC from the start, but I'm just guessing about that, because I don't really know much about ODBC. I'm just thinking that it must have been better than what we decided to do.
"Content" companies don't believe you should have control over the device you use to access web pages (or movies, or music..). For the user to grant or deny "permission" is a ludicrous concept to them.
You know, it doesn't help your case for you to make broad and obviously false statements like that. Seriously, "content companies don't believe you should have control over the device..." isn't the sort of thing that leads to productive dialogue. It's as if I said, "lpontiac can't tie his (or her, whatever) own shoes." It's just silly.
Now, a more accurate statement would be, "some content providers (notably Example, and also Example) don't want people to see their web sites unless they also see their advertisements." But you didn't say that, did you? No, you decided instead to take the low road, spicing up a generalization with references to Palladium, DRM, and the DMCA.
Now, if you want to have a constructive dialogue on this, we can speculate on what the effects might be of popular web sites denying access to users who employ ad filtering techniques or software. Or we could talk about whether AOL has the right to include or exclude features in or from their software based on business decisions. (They do, by the way.) But making snarky remarks doesn't get us anywhere worth going.
I'm sorry, friend, but you just ended up sounding like an idiot. If you had a point there, it was lost on me.
The parent comment was posted by an AC, and as such probably isn't being read by many people. Since I don't have mod points today, I'll just quote the comment here in its entirety. Don't moderate me up; moderate the parent.
There is absolutely nothing intrinsically good about following W3C standards. The W3C has done a remarkable job of hijacking the web standards process, but it is not clear that W3C micromanagement has actually resulted in technically superior standards, rather than politically advantageous ones.
The W3C (amongst others) is responsible for having created a baroque web of overly complex standards, resulting in ambiguous specifications, bugs in the various implementations, and a stagnant culture where developers spend their time conforming to W3C specs rather than developing new features and doing what _they_ think is important.
I think that comment is a little flamebaity, but essentially correct. I've expressed the opinion on several occasions that standards for web markup become meaningless when the browser with 90% market share (or whatever bignum) doesn't implement them. People who say, "This web site doesn't work in IE because IE is broken," will have to accept the fact that the vast majority of users out there will simply choose to go to other web sites, rather than be told that the most widely used browser is faulty.
So I think the parent poster hit it right on the money: there is absolutely nothing intrinsically good about following W3C standards.
Simply put, the present-day Pentium4 processor kicks the G4's *ass.
You can state that sort of comparison either accurately or simply, but not both at the same time.
For example, I find that the G4 kick's the Pentium 4's ass, because the Pentium 4 can't run OS X. If it doesn't run OS X, it's not a computer, as far as I'm concerned. So by my criteria, the G4 kicks the Pentium's ass.
If your criteria is how well the processor runs Windows, then obviously the Pentium beats the G4.
If you care about running MSC.Nastran, then the Pentium 4 beats the G4 because there's no version of Nastran for the G4. On the other hand, if you care about running BLAST, then the G4 is 12-15 times faster than the Pentium 4, so in that case G4 wins.
So simply put, it's not possible to "simply put" this sort of thing.
Now, getting back to my point, a dual-processor G4 running at 867 MHz will feel faster-- more responsive and interactive-- than an otherwise identical single-processor machine.
I was going on the assumption that the new heat sink-- which is disproportionately large compared to the one in the dual 1 GHz Quicksilvers-- is there to accommodate four processors. Otherwise, it's overkill.
What's your specific complaint? Dell is the biggest manufacturer of PCs, and the machine was equipped with that I believe is the fastest Pentium processor available. How was the test unfair?
I got into the office this morning at 10:00, and I had a full charge on the battery. I used it all day to run OmniWeb, Mail.app, Word, Photoshop, InDesign, and maybe a few other things. I put it to sleep between 12:30 and 1:30, then finally plugged it into the wall at 3:30. I had 23% battery left then, according to the menu item, which probably would have lasted me about half an hour longer.
That's 4:30, +/- 30 minutes. I had the screen at full brightness, using the automatic power management setting in System Prefs (which, I believe, spins down the drive and cycles the processor speed), with my AirPort card off. I haven't timed it with AirPort on, but I'm guessing that might take 60-90 minutes off the battery life. But that's totally a guess.
If you only get 3 hours out of Jaguar, I'll be disappointed.