The HD in the iPod alone cosst more than the iPod.
That's not true at all. It would cost you more, maybe, but not Apple. They have an OEM agreement. Based on other OEM agreements that I've participated in, I'd guess that Apple is getting the drives for about 70% less than retail prices. (Standard retail markup is between 20% and 30%, and OEM discounts can be a much as half of wholesale prices.)
Profit margins on the iPod hardware itself are probably around 50%. Just educated guessing, of course, and I'm not bothering with costs like distribution, marketing, and software. I'm just talking pure hardware.
off-on-a-tangent-time: to me, truly "free" software means adding no stipulations of any kind, unlike the GPL.
I'd just like to chime in with a "hear, hear." I agree completely, and in the face of the vocal proponents of the GPL, it's nice to see that people other than myself hold this opinion.
Wait, I take it back: R2-D2 and C3P0 looked good... oh yeah, they were real! My bad.
Um... yeah.
Remember the scene where Anakin and Padme showed up at the moisture farm, and 3P0 greeted 'em? 3P0 was composited in. That shot was originally filmed with a puppet 3P0 without skins, TPM-style. When GL decided to cut the scene where 3P0 got skins, he made ILM go back and composite a new skinned 3P0 into those scenes.
Never fucking noticed, did ya?
People bitch and bitch about how bad this shot looked, or that one. They don't seem to realize that there were over 2,000 effects shots in that movie. For every shot you noticed, there were 200 that you didn't. Some little stuff-- my friend who shall remain nameless painted sparks and fire on the falling column during the Yoda/Dooku duel-- and some big stuff-- Palpatine's office was an entirely CG set. Even the desk.
Basically I'm saying this: quit your whining. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Filmmaker: "Please have a look at this script, it's specially printed for you on green paper with some transparent parts for the so called `special effects'".
Okay, while Sydneysiders do seem to make up a disproportionate fraction of Slashdot readers, I'll go ahead and spell this one out for the rest of the planet.
Aussie money is printed on plastic-coated paper in various colors. Each bank note has a little transparent plastic "window" in it as a counterfeit-countermeasure. (Heh.)
So green pieces of paper with little transparent bits are Aussie $100 notes. So the joke is that the mayor is being bribed by the W brothers.
One example I like a lot is that the UI guidelines require that menus be a maximum of two layers deep, to keep the user from having to open up many sub-menus. This makes sense, but some commands are better organized into a more heirarchical system.
Um. That's simply not true. Submenus are hard for users to navigate. They require the user to have more knowledge about what options live where, and they require a much greater degree of mouse dexterity. For the handicapped, or the very young, or the elderly, hierarchical submenus are very tough to use.
In this example, the Mac UI guidelines are absolutely correct, in my opinion.
I'd have to move the mouse to the top of the screen and open up several menus every time I wanted to use a command
First of all, I guess you don't realize that moving the mouse to the top of the screen is much easier than the common alternatives, such as moving it to the top of the window or moving it to a menu palette somewhere on the screen. A user can simply slam the mouse forward and hit the menu bar every time. In this way, the top-of-the-screen menu bar can be considered to be infinitely tall; the user doesn't have to worry about where the mouse pointer needs to be in the vertical axis to hit its target. Just push forward until the pointer stops moving. Top-of-the-window or toolchest-style menus are harder targets to hit, and therefore harder to use.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "open up several menus." The guideline declares that every menu option should either be in the top-level menu, or located in a narrowly defined submenu. In other words, having a submenu called "tools" is in flagrant violation of the HI guidelines.
So it seems like the truth is just the opposite. If the GIMP were organized like a HI-compliant Mac app, you'd hardly ever have to open more than one menu, and never more than two.
The ads do a great job of elaborating on this. And I see they "real folks" as far more credible spokespersons than a bunch of celebrities.
Francis Ford Coppola was once quoted as saying, "Somewhere out there there's a six year old girl with a camcorder who's changing the future of film."
When they intro'd the new iMac, Apple showed a video at the keynote address. (QuickTime version available here.) It's an amazing little piece with tons of production value.
In it, they featured interviews with Seal, Annie Lebovitz, and, yes, Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola talks about how the iMac and the digital media tools give regular people the kind of creative power that was once reserved only for big, famous filmmakers like himself. At the end of the video, he says, "I look at something like this [the new iMac] and I think, oh, I want three million of them. So I can put them with, you know, three million young people."
The fact that Apple never turned that into a commercial spot in wide release is just a crime. It's a really moving piece.
You are clearly in the minority. The classic Mac desktop moved the concept of ease of use and user interface consistency out of the lab and into the mass market. I keep a copy of the original Macintosh User Interface Guidelines on my bookshelf just to remind me that most of the good work in user interface design was done back in the early 1980s, and most of what has come since has consisted of giant leaps backwards.
Re:moving slowly...open the source!!
on
PalmOS 5 Turns Gold
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Mozilla - a failure in that it was slow in making software, however the final result is excellent
"Excellent" by what standard? It's slower and buggier than IE on Mac and PC, Opera on PC, and OmniWeb on Mac. It's superior in any meaningful way only to previous versions of itself.
Gnome and KDE - solid environments that have been very successful.
Slow, overwhelmingly complex desktops that are inferior in terms of ease of use and user experience to the Windows desktop, the classic Mac desktop, and the Mac OS X desktop. These can be considered successful only when compared to CDE or other truly unpleasant desktops.
OpenOffice - another star of Open Source development.
Buggy, slow, hard to use, and feature-incomplete. If that's what you guys think of as a star, I'd hate to see what you call failures.
Re:moving slowly...open the source!!
on
PalmOS 5 Turns Gold
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
That is only to recoup the costs of closed source development. Costs that would not exist were the source open.
And neither would the product. When are you people going to realize that the open source, non-commercial model doesn't work for large-scale software projects? The fact that it has resulted in good software on occasion (Apache) doesn't negate its overwhelming failures. (Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, StarOffice)
As a side note, there really is no O2 replacement.... the O2 was a really nifty box for rendering OpenGL direct to NTSC/PAL video out without having to go thru hoops or do any software/hardware hackery.
Yes, that's true, but Fuel also has a lot going for it in this department. Since Fuel has built-in V12 graphics-- I think there's a V10 option as well-- you can use the DVI output on the graphics card, and then convert to any kind of video signal you need with an external device. It's not as elegant a broadcast graphics solution as O2 with the built-in composite video out, but it will output HD resolutions, so it's a trade-off.
An entry-level Fuel comes in at around the same price that a top-of-the-line O2 did.
Well, I wouldn't be so sure that Crais and Talon are dead any more than I'd assume Scorpius died in the explosion.
The difference, of course, is that they found fragments of Talyn's hull after their escape. That's kind of like finding body parts after an accident. It makes the possibility of resurrection somewhat less likely.
Besides, I think Talyn was getting to be a burden on the writers. They kept having to come up with reasons why he couldn't just fly in and blast the hell out of everything to save the day.
That said, I think the writers could stand to take a page from Joss Whedon's playbook. Take a cool supporting character, give her lots of screen-time to connect with the audience, and then kill her off mercilessly. Gotta keep the viewers on their toes....
Of course, there are plenty of plot holes. Like why....
I'm pretty sure that all of these things fall into the category of stuff that makes the show possible. If the show were totally realistic, you never could have gotten a suspenseful, engaging story out of it.
Besides, the stuff you mentioned just isn't that big a deal, unless you go looking for things to complain about. While everything you said is valid, none of it jumped off the screen and prevented me from enjoying the show.
Or equally as good, when will the cable companies come up with a decent pricing format?
Guh. We've been over this ground before, but I don't feel like finding a link to the old thread now. When you buy cable TV service from the cable company, you're buying the bandwidth and the wires and all of that transport-layer stuff. You're not actually buying the program content itself. That's paid for by advertising. (Except for premium channels, of course.)
The fact that you only watch 5 of the 50 channels doesn't really make any difference to the cable company. It costs them the same to provide you with the wires and whatnot. So it doesn't really make sense for them to charge you by the channel.
If *you* weren't so uptight you'd have thought the analogy somewhat funny.
Um... except it wasn't. It's only funny if it's both witty and apt. Yours was only witty in the sense that you used the word "masturbation." And, as I pointed out, it wasn't apt at all.
In other words, you can't run, say, iTunes in Darwin for Intel/AMD.
I know this is trollfodder (not you; the guy two posts above you) but here it is anyway.
As was pointed out to me just the other day, you can just barely run Darwin for Intel at all. The list of supported hardware is incredibly short. Behold:
Supported Hardware: -------------------
IDE:
Only the PIIX4 IDE controllers have been found to work.
Attached devices must be UDMA/33 compatible or better. Ethernet:
Intel 8255x 10/100 ethernet controllers are supported. Video:
You must have a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. Almost all
modern graphics cards are VESA 2.0 compliant. However, emulators
such as vmware do not have VESA 2.0 compliant emulated video cards. Successfully tested hardware:
All 440BX motherboards tested have worked with their internal
IDE controllers.
IBM ThinkPad A21m (with onboard Intel ethernet) Known to not be supported:
All AMD and VIA based systems.
Has it ever occured to you that when someone asks for an apple they want an apple and not your opinion of oranges?
Dude, Ask Slashdot (which is what this is, no matter how it was filed) isn't supposed to be a search engine. If all the poor guy wanted was a list of Perl/Cocoa bindings, he could have used Google.
The great thing about Ask Slashdot is that you get opinions, editorials, and suggestions for alternatives.
And then, of course, you get guys like yourself who moderate suggestions off-topic, or who post vulgar messages complaining of same.
:sigh: Just relax a little, and let the free flow of ideas wash over you.
Yeah. There are several, in various stages of incompleteness.
But why don't you just read the tutorial and learn to program Cocoa with Objective C? Programming Cocoa apps with Objective-C, using Project Builder and Interface Builder, is, I dare say, easier than writing Perl scripts that call Cocoa functions would be. You don't even need to be terribly familiar with C to write simple apps.
Don't get me wrong. I love Perl as much as the next guy. But I don't like writing GUI code. It's a pain in the ass, no matter how nice the programming language might be. The combination of Interface Builder and Objective C makes whipping up little Cocoa apps easy as pie, and fun, too.
You can find the Objective-C Cocoa tutorial in PDF form here. It's also included with the OS X developer's tools under/Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/ObjCTutorial.
Or you could use Omniweb, from a group which isn't afraid to use native widgets.
Right on. Not only is it prettier than any other browser, but it's faster, too. I use it on a 400 MHz G3 iMac, and a 500 MHz G3 iBook. Release 4.1 beta 7 is the fastest thing going, and renders 99% of all web sites perfectly. It isn't without flaws, but I'm not willing to trade speed or overall quality of the experience for perfect standards compliance. Speedwise, it spanks both IE and Chimera.
The ads causing a page to be non-function is a good reason to a) stop using the site....
There's another way to phrase that. I believe it more accurately reflects what most users will think.
"Mozilla can't display some sites correctly. Your only alternative is not to browse those sites."
Right or wrong, that's how it looks to the public. "The site is broken" or "the ad is broken" don't mean anything at all to anybody, because it works just fine in the browser than nn% of surfers use.
This is called a "de-facto standard," and the Mozilla team is just going to have to find a way to deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The HD in the iPod alone cosst more than the iPod.
That's not true at all. It would cost you more, maybe, but not Apple. They have an OEM agreement. Based on other OEM agreements that I've participated in, I'd guess that Apple is getting the drives for about 70% less than retail prices. (Standard retail markup is between 20% and 30%, and OEM discounts can be a much as half of wholesale prices.)
Profit margins on the iPod hardware itself are probably around 50%. Just educated guessing, of course, and I'm not bothering with costs like distribution, marketing, and software. I'm just talking pure hardware.
off-on-a-tangent-time: to me, truly "free" software means adding no stipulations of any kind, unlike the GPL.
I'd just like to chime in with a "hear, hear." I agree completely, and in the face of the vocal proponents of the GPL, it's nice to see that people other than myself hold this opinion.
Thanks.
Wait, I take it back: R2-D2 and C3P0 looked good... oh yeah, they were real! My bad.
Um... yeah.
Remember the scene where Anakin and Padme showed up at the moisture farm, and 3P0 greeted 'em? 3P0 was composited in. That shot was originally filmed with a puppet 3P0 without skins, TPM-style. When GL decided to cut the scene where 3P0 got skins, he made ILM go back and composite a new skinned 3P0 into those scenes.
Never fucking noticed, did ya?
People bitch and bitch about how bad this shot looked, or that one. They don't seem to realize that there were over 2,000 effects shots in that movie. For every shot you noticed, there were 200 that you didn't. Some little stuff-- my friend who shall remain nameless painted sparks and fire on the falling column during the Yoda/Dooku duel-- and some big stuff-- Palpatine's office was an entirely CG set. Even the desk.
Basically I'm saying this: quit your whining. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Filmmaker: "Please have a look at this script, it's specially printed for you on green paper with some transparent parts for the so called `special effects'".
Okay, while Sydneysiders do seem to make up a disproportionate fraction of Slashdot readers, I'll go ahead and spell this one out for the rest of the planet.
Aussie money is printed on plastic-coated paper in various colors. Each bank note has a little transparent plastic "window" in it as a counterfeit-countermeasure. (Heh.)
So green pieces of paper with little transparent bits are Aussie $100 notes. So the joke is that the mayor is being bribed by the W brothers.
Get it? Huh? Get it? Hah!
(More info about Aussie money can be found here.
One example I like a lot is that the UI guidelines require that menus be a maximum of two layers deep, to keep the user from having to open up many sub-menus. This makes sense, but some commands are better organized into a more heirarchical system.
Um. That's simply not true. Submenus are hard for users to navigate. They require the user to have more knowledge about what options live where, and they require a much greater degree of mouse dexterity. For the handicapped, or the very young, or the elderly, hierarchical submenus are very tough to use.
In this example, the Mac UI guidelines are absolutely correct, in my opinion.
I'd have to move the mouse to the top of the screen and open up several menus every time I wanted to use a command
First of all, I guess you don't realize that moving the mouse to the top of the screen is much easier than the common alternatives, such as moving it to the top of the window or moving it to a menu palette somewhere on the screen. A user can simply slam the mouse forward and hit the menu bar every time. In this way, the top-of-the-screen menu bar can be considered to be infinitely tall; the user doesn't have to worry about where the mouse pointer needs to be in the vertical axis to hit its target. Just push forward until the pointer stops moving. Top-of-the-window or toolchest-style menus are harder targets to hit, and therefore harder to use.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "open up several menus." The guideline declares that every menu option should either be in the top-level menu, or located in a narrowly defined submenu. In other words, having a submenu called "tools" is in flagrant violation of the HI guidelines.
So it seems like the truth is just the opposite. If the GIMP were organized like a HI-compliant Mac app, you'd hardly ever have to open more than one menu, and never more than two.
That's it. I've lost complete faith in Slashdot as a news source.
I agree with you, and I empathize, but nevertheless my first reaction to reading this was a loud "BWAH-HA-HA-HA!"
Slashdot! Heh! As a news source! Heh, heh. Oh, mercy.
My favorite part of the ads? The fact that they're trying to win over PC users without using direct insults.
;-)
Um... "It was a horrid little machine" is pretty direct.
The ads do a great job of elaborating on this. And I see they "real folks" as far more credible spokespersons than a bunch of celebrities.
Francis Ford Coppola was once quoted as saying, "Somewhere out there there's a six year old girl with a camcorder who's changing the future of film."
When they intro'd the new iMac, Apple showed a video at the keynote address. (QuickTime version available here.) It's an amazing little piece with tons of production value.
In it, they featured interviews with Seal, Annie Lebovitz, and, yes, Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola talks about how the iMac and the digital media tools give regular people the kind of creative power that was once reserved only for big, famous filmmakers like himself. At the end of the video, he says, "I look at something like this [the new iMac] and I think, oh, I want three million of them. So I can put them with, you know, three million young people."
The fact that Apple never turned that into a commercial spot in wide release is just a crime. It's a really moving piece.
The Mac User Interface Guidlines are a travesty that held back UI development for years.
In what way?
Hmm. Why am I bothering to ask a follow-up question of a fucking AC?
You are clearly in the minority. The classic Mac desktop moved the concept of ease of use and user interface consistency out of the lab and into the mass market. I keep a copy of the original Macintosh User Interface Guidelines on my bookshelf just to remind me that most of the good work in user interface design was done back in the early 1980s, and most of what has come since has consisted of giant leaps backwards.
Mozilla - a failure in that it was slow in making software, however the final result is excellent
"Excellent" by what standard? It's slower and buggier than IE on Mac and PC, Opera on PC, and OmniWeb on Mac. It's superior in any meaningful way only to previous versions of itself.
Gnome and KDE - solid environments that have been very successful.
Slow, overwhelmingly complex desktops that are inferior in terms of ease of use and user experience to the Windows desktop, the classic Mac desktop, and the Mac OS X desktop. These can be considered successful only when compared to CDE or other truly unpleasant desktops.
OpenOffice - another star of Open Source development.
Buggy, slow, hard to use, and feature-incomplete. If that's what you guys think of as a star, I'd hate to see what you call failures.
That is only to recoup the costs of closed source development. Costs that would not exist were the source open.
And neither would the product. When are you people going to realize that the open source, non-commercial model doesn't work for large-scale software projects? The fact that it has resulted in good software on occasion (Apache) doesn't negate its overwhelming failures. (Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, StarOffice)
As a side note, there really is no O2 replacement.... the O2 was a really nifty box for rendering OpenGL direct to NTSC/PAL video out without having to go thru hoops or do any software/hardware hackery.
Yes, that's true, but Fuel also has a lot going for it in this department. Since Fuel has built-in V12 graphics-- I think there's a V10 option as well-- you can use the DVI output on the graphics card, and then convert to any kind of video signal you need with an external device. It's not as elegant a broadcast graphics solution as O2 with the built-in composite video out, but it will output HD resolutions, so it's a trade-off.
An entry-level Fuel comes in at around the same price that a top-of-the-line O2 did.
Lose Jool if someone needs to go.
;-)
No way, man. Have you seen that chick's bellybutton? One of the best special effects on television.
Well, I wouldn't be so sure that Crais and Talon are dead any more than I'd assume Scorpius died in the explosion.
The difference, of course, is that they found fragments of Talyn's hull after their escape. That's kind of like finding body parts after an accident. It makes the possibility of resurrection somewhat less likely.
Besides, I think Talyn was getting to be a burden on the writers. They kept having to come up with reasons why he couldn't just fly in and blast the hell out of everything to save the day.
That said, I think the writers could stand to take a page from Joss Whedon's playbook. Take a cool supporting character, give her lots of screen-time to connect with the audience, and then kill her off mercilessly. Gotta keep the viewers on their toes....
Of course, there are plenty of plot holes. Like why....
I'm pretty sure that all of these things fall into the category of stuff that makes the show possible. If the show were totally realistic, you never could have gotten a suspenseful, engaging story out of it.
Besides, the stuff you mentioned just isn't that big a deal, unless you go looking for things to complain about. While everything you said is valid, none of it jumped off the screen and prevented me from enjoying the show.
Or equally as good, when will the cable companies come up with a decent pricing format?
Guh. We've been over this ground before, but I don't feel like finding a link to the old thread now. When you buy cable TV service from the cable company, you're buying the bandwidth and the wires and all of that transport-layer stuff. You're not actually buying the program content itself. That's paid for by advertising. (Except for premium channels, of course.)
The fact that you only watch 5 of the 50 channels doesn't really make any difference to the cable company. It costs them the same to provide you with the wires and whatnot. So it doesn't really make sense for them to charge you by the channel.
If *you* weren't so uptight you'd have thought the analogy somewhat funny.
Um... except it wasn't. It's only funny if it's both witty and apt. Yours was only witty in the sense that you used the word "masturbation." And, as I pointed out, it wasn't apt at all.
You missed the mark, friend.
In other words, you can't run, say, iTunes in Darwin for Intel/AMD.
I know this is trollfodder (not you; the guy two posts above you) but here it is anyway.
As was pointed out to me just the other day, you can just barely run Darwin for Intel at all. The list of supported hardware is incredibly short. Behold:
Supported Hardware:
-------------------
IDE:
Only the PIIX4 IDE controllers have been found to work.
Attached devices must be UDMA/33 compatible or better.
Ethernet:
Intel 8255x 10/100 ethernet controllers are supported.
Video:
You must have a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. Almost all
modern graphics cards are VESA 2.0 compliant. However, emulators
such as vmware do not have VESA 2.0 compliant emulated video cards.
Successfully tested hardware:
All 440BX motherboards tested have worked with their internal
IDE controllers.
IBM ThinkPad A21m (with onboard Intel ethernet)
Known to not be supported:
All AMD and VIA based systems.
Has it ever occured to you that when someone asks for an apple they want an apple and not your opinion of oranges?
Dude, Ask Slashdot (which is what this is, no matter how it was filed) isn't supposed to be a search engine. If all the poor guy wanted was a list of Perl/Cocoa bindings, he could have used Google.
The great thing about Ask Slashdot is that you get opinions, editorials, and suggestions for alternatives.
And then, of course, you get guys like yourself who moderate suggestions off-topic, or who post vulgar messages complaining of same.
:sigh: Just relax a little, and let the free flow of ideas wash over you.
Kick ass! I have a defender!
Everything is proceeding as planned... mwah-ha-ha.
1. There's more to life than web markup standards.
2. Try the betas. While version 4.0 left a lot to be desired, 4.1 beta 7 is much, much better.
Yeah. There are several, in various stages of incompleteness.
/Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/ObjCTutorial.
But why don't you just read the tutorial and learn to program Cocoa with Objective C? Programming Cocoa apps with Objective-C, using Project Builder and Interface Builder, is, I dare say, easier than writing Perl scripts that call Cocoa functions would be. You don't even need to be terribly familiar with C to write simple apps.
Don't get me wrong. I love Perl as much as the next guy. But I don't like writing GUI code. It's a pain in the ass, no matter how nice the programming language might be. The combination of Interface Builder and Objective C makes whipping up little Cocoa apps easy as pie, and fun, too.
You can find the Objective-C Cocoa tutorial in PDF form here. It's also included with the OS X developer's tools under
Or you could use Omniweb, from a group which isn't afraid to use native widgets.
Right on. Not only is it prettier than any other browser, but it's faster, too. I use it on a 400 MHz G3 iMac, and a 500 MHz G3 iBook. Release 4.1 beta 7 is the fastest thing going, and renders 99% of all web sites perfectly. It isn't without flaws, but I'm not willing to trade speed or overall quality of the experience for perfect standards compliance. Speedwise, it spanks both IE and Chimera.
OmniWeb is my dad.
The ads causing a page to be non-function is a good reason to a) stop using the site....
There's another way to phrase that. I believe it more accurately reflects what most users will think.
"Mozilla can't display some sites correctly. Your only alternative is not to browse those sites."
Right or wrong, that's how it looks to the public. "The site is broken" or "the ad is broken" don't mean anything at all to anybody, because it works just fine in the browser than nn% of surfers use.
This is called a "de-facto standard," and the Mozilla team is just going to have to find a way to deal with it.