Nope, sorry. OmniWeb 4.1 beta is faster than Chimera. It launches faster (2 bounces as opposed to about 8 for Chimera) and it renders a lot faster. It's also rock-solid stable-- I haven't used Chimera enough to speak for its stability.
But OmniWeb has this one tiny feature that I simply will not live without: you can filter web addresses based on regular expressions. For instance, I have images2.slashdot.org filtered; no more banners or... uh... whatever you call those big square things that I see in the middle of an article when I'm not using OmniWeb.
errrr... I assume you're referring to ATSUI text rendering, which has been available in the Carbon API for quite some time.
I'm no Carbon expert, but according to Apple's release notes, 10.1.5 includes support for Quartz text rendering in Carbon apps. I don't know literally what that means, but it's obviously not ATSUI/Carbon, since that was available before 10.1.5.
Ya know, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, but I got a 300 MHz iBook to reliably play one of Apple's MPEG-4 example movies in full screen. I was quite impressed with that. This update is rocking my world, so far.
That's amazing. I tried QT 6 this morning, under 10.1.4, and found it pretty damn lacking. Even the 300 kbps streaming sample movie couldn't play more than 1 or 2 frames per second, even though my network was wide open.
Just now I tried it under 10.1.5. What a difference a point release makes!
There's a picture of the wrong way to draw the dogcow that several people thought was a scanned image of ZZ [Scott Zimmerman]. Actually, completely independently of the Tech Note, I'd been using a program called Mac-a-Mug, designed to make mug shots, and came across a set of hair that looked frighteningly like ZZ's. After fiddling around with the program a bit I was able to come up with a good rendition of ZZ's head, and I shoved it into the Tech Note without his ever knowing about it. The expression (and color) of his face when he learned about the picture is a memory I'll always cherish.
Maybe because it already happened before but was killed because Apple did not want to sell Mac OS for x86?
Sure, the Star Trek project. That project failed for the obvious reasons:
1. Apple didn't think it likely that PC vendors would choose to bundle a Mac OS for Intel with their systems, and Apple didn't like the odds of trying to sell an after-market OS to customers that already had one for their computers.
2. Apple didn't want to start a political battle with Motorola by appearing to endorse Intel's CPUs over the PowerPC.
3. Apple was-- and is-- a hardware company, not a software company. Porting the OS to another platform would do nothing but reduce Apple's hardware revenues, which would very quickly be self-defeating.
Same reasons Apple wouldn't want to port OS X to any other architecture. So the question stands: why would anybody assume that Apple would want to port their OS to a non-Apple hardware platform?
But if what you say about training is true, I'm confident that they could save money by redesigning the user interface and help menus.
Before you say that, I'd recommend that you go take a look at an Inferno. I have no idea how you could do that, but I really can't see any other way for you to understand how this application's user interface works.
Anything that can be put in a manual can be put in a help file. And anything that can be put in a help file can be put in context sensitive help file.
But context-sensitive help is fundamentally flawed. It's great if you want to know what this button does, because you can just point to the button and get information. But if you're in the middle of a complex user interface with a thousand functions and you want to know where the modular keyer button is, context-sensitive help won't... um... help. See, in that situation, your context has no relation to what you actually want help with.
Unless this week of training teaches people about something other than simply using the software, it sounds to me like your Infero software wizards have crippled an amazingly useful piece of software with a terrible interface.
But you're wrong. The Inferno interface is not terrible. It's fantastic. It allows a trained individual to do what he wants to do faster and more effectively than any other similar application.
The distinguishing thing is that Inferno (and the other applications in its family, like Fire, Smoke, and Flame) wastes no screen space. It has no menus. No floating palettes. There are no icons. Buttons abound, but they're all labeled with plain text labels. Sometimes the labels are cryptic, but once you learn their meanings, they're never ambiguous. The software comes with its own keyboard, on which each key is mapped to one or more specific functions. The primary modes of the application are literally at the operator's fingertips all the time.
In this way, I think the Inferno user interface is vaguely comparable to the cockpit of a fighter jet. An ordinary guy, like myself, could never climb into a fighter cockpit and figure anything out just by looking at the controls. Does that mean the plane has a lousy human interface? Of course not. In fact, just the opposite. Aircraft cockpit design has evolved over decades to be as efficient as we know how to make it. Just because it's no good for you or me doesn't mean it's no good for the pilots who actually fly the thing.
I guess I'm just saying this: it is not necessary that applications be easy to use for everyone. It is only necessary that they be easy to use for the people that need to use them.
The source of this questioning is probably the Darwin 1.4.1 ISO image for x86 that's available....
Sure, Darwin has been available for IA-32 for a long time. But Darwin isn't OS X. The question remains, why would anybody think Apple would port their flagship operating system-- meaning OS X, not Darwin-- to a different architecture? Isn't that kind of like asking when Tivo is going to port their software to Replay TV's hardware?
But hey, who cares -- I use Mail.app anyway and what a great update!
So far, I agree. Mail.app feels significantly peppier on my iMac (400 MHz G3). I've got about 130 MB of mail on my IMAP server, so I guess I'm exercising Mail.app a little bit. It was never slow, but it feels quite a bit faster now.
No. MPEG4 is not "DVD Quality" Its FAR SUPERIOR to DVD.
I don't think that's really a very accurate statement, in any frame of reference.
There exist some extremely high quality MPEG-2 encoders. Some of them are used to produce DVDs-- particularly of the Superbit variety-- and some are used to compress over-the-air HDTV. These are a far cry from the software encoders some people use to generate movies on their PCs.
MPEG-4 is still very immature. It's impossible to fairly compare MPEG-4 encoding to MPEG-2 encoding in any meaningful way. Especially when you fail to control for data rates.
The only remotely objective comparisons of MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 I've seen to date have taken MPEG-2 source material (usually from DVD) and re-encoded it with MPEG-4. That doesn't really tell you anything. I haven't had the time, or the gear, to take uncompressed reference material and pass it through MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoders. That's a test I'd like to see.
What it sounds like you're saying is that bad MPEG-4 encoding is superior to bad MPEG-2 encoding. I won't argue with you there. But that's not sound basis for making a blanket judgment like yours.
Any news on when Mac OS for intel based systems is planned?
Okay, from you posting history you don't appear to be a troll, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and treat your question seriously.
The answer, of course, is "never." Duh.
But what I'm much more interested in is why you, and lots of other people and trolls, seem to think that such a thing might happen? Even the phrasing of your question-- when is it planned?-- implicitly assumes that such a port will appear eventually.
Fucking damnit, a brilliant post fucked because I didn't preview it. There you have it, folks.
Don't be too hard on yourself. I thought the part about "insists that everything that even sat next to GNU software in the refrigerator must now be called GNU/whatever it used to be called" was pretty funny.
This same institute backed destabilizing, unworkable '80s missile defense....
You are aware, are you not, that the Reagan administration's emphasis on missile defense technology forced the Soviets to spend billions on research into their own missile defense systems? And that that level of unsustainable spending contributed directly to the collapse of the Soviet economy, and the eventual dissolution of the USSR as a political entity?
Good software shouldn't need a manual. The manual should be inside in the help pages, in context-sensitive help, and simply in the overall intuitiveness of the user interfaces.
The best piece of application software I've ever seen is Discreet's Inferno. It's complex and opaque, and the book is almost 1000 pages long. The software comes bundled with a full week of one-on-one on-site training from a Discreet trainer. The closest thing to online help it has is the fact that the manual comes with the software both in paper form and as a PDF on the CD.
The software costs about $650,000.
Why is it the best I've ever seen? Because, once an artist gets properly trained on it and gains just a little experience, it's just astounding. If you ever have the fortune of seeing an experienced Inferno artist use his system, pay close attention. It's almost too fast for the eye to follow. And the results are simply the best you'll ever see. Work finished on an Inferno is regularly held up as the standard to which all other effects work is compared.
My point is this: well-designed software does not have to be intuitive or self-explanatory, despite with Henry V.009 seems to think. It is a myth, and a harmful one at that, to think that software must be obvious to the inexperienced user. It's just fine to assume that the user operating the software will be highly trained, especially if the software does something complex.
Oh, I don't know. I'm still a big fan of Mr. Bunny's Big Cup of Java. My copy includes this salient piece of wisdom:
Implementation details are beyond the scope of the Java virtual machine specification. One should not assume that every virtual machine implementation contains a giant squid.
The author's web site, mrbunny.com, is pretty funny, too. It includes this:
My editor, Gary Swanberg, has been taking authorship credit for my book "Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX", publicly claiming that I do not exist. [
Editor's note: he doesn't.] I wish to address his claims.
First, Swanberg could not possibly have written the ActiveX book. He knows nothing about raising rabbits, and very little about animal husbandry in general. Sure, he can program a computer, but bunnies, particularly talking bunnies, are completely beyond him. In fact, he tried to cut Mr. Bunny from the book entirely. "Rabbits can't talk," he said. "They use telepathy to put thoughts into our heads. Why do you think their ears are so big?"
This is common knowledge, I guess, but the SGI Indy owner's guide included this warning: Do not dangle the mouse by the cord, or throw the mouse at co-workers.
It's actually more secure than a DVD-ROM, since most people aren't going to be able to just plug a RAID array into their computer and the data isn't compressed nearly as much as on DVD, so a 2.5 hour feature film weighs in around 30 GB or thereabout.
I had no intention of implying that one movie is delivered on one DVD. Quite the contrary. The movie comes on a stack of DVD-ROMs. The operator loads them one at a time, following the prompts on the AMS console. The data gets copied from the DVD-ROMs to the internal drive array on the AMS, where it's staged for presentation.
I've never seen a system in a commercial theater that depends on operators swapping out hard drive canisters. Drives are just too fragile. It's better to leave them where they are and copy the data onto them via removable media or transmission medium.
As for security, the data is encrypted the same way no matter how it's delivered. You can copy that data off the DVDs, if you really want to, but it will be useless to you.
The big advatage of Digital is being freed from having only a set number of titles you can run. Digitial takes up no space, doesn't wear out (media, not projectors) and you can run any title at any time.
That might be true if we were using eericson's digital cinema system, but that's not at all how it works in my neighborhood.
The d-cinemas I've been to all use the Technicolor Digital Cinema system, which consists of an embedded computer system with hard drive storage and a point-and-drool interface. The system interfaces with audio processors, a digital projector, and an automation system. Movies are loaded into the system on DVD-ROMs, although Technicolor also advertises satellite or broadband delivery as options.
Each auditorium has one AMS system showing one feature on one projector. The box essentially has no in and no out except for encrypted transports, making it pretty secure from piracy. There is, of course, always the possibility that somebody will steal the DVD-ROMs and crack the encryption, but you can never get rid of every possible weak link.
A system like the one you describe-- in which the content lives on a central data storage system that feeds multiple projectors in a theater complex-- would probably never be practical. It'd be too big and expensive, or too insecure, or both.
Digital cinema is really, practically, no different from traditional film cinema. Take the canisters/discs up to the projection booth, load 'em in the projector, and play the movie. When the run is finished, put the reels/discs back in the canisters/FedEx envelope and send 'em back to the distributor.
...IE hasn't significantly improved for a whole generation.
That kind of hyperbole just makes you sound like a moron. IE hasn't existed, in any form, for anywhere near a generation. You should know better.
Sure that's the case now.. but it sets the precedant: who's to say that Apple won't decide that if you want to watch any res of trailer at all, you need to buy the Pro version.
Oh, that would just be terrible! You'd have to pay somebody to get something in return! You'd have to choose between giving them money, and going without! Agony!
Funny - tell the 90% of people who use Windows because that they're not prisoners of a monopoly.
Okay, genius, please describe for us your vision of the perfect world. It's wrong for Apple to charge for QuickTime, evidently, so would you say that they should just give it away instead? Where is the line? At what point, and under what circumstances, does it become okay for a company to charge for its products?
(The difference between my iBook with 640 and his iMac with a gig is quite noticeable too, though I bet that the hard drive speed also comes into play here.)
I'm too lazy to look it up and provide proof, but I believe there are significant differences in cache size and bus speed between the laptops and the desktops, as well.
Man, you're really bothered about this. I think you're being silly.
I'm offended and annoyed because I'm being asked to pay Apple for a trailer being produced by LucasFilm. Why is this? Do I have to buy three pints of milk before I'm allowed orange juice? Do I have to pay for new vacuum cleaner if I want to change my door locks? No, I don't, because they are not related.
First of all, you don't have to pay Apple a dime. I have two Macs-- a laptop and a desktop-- and I watch movie trailers in QuickTime on both. Because I don't have a QuickTime Pro license for the laptop, I watch only the lower resolution versions. I still get to watch the trailers for free, and you could, too. Apple doesn't charge a penny.
Even if Apple did charge for the privilege of watching the Star Wars trailers, they'd be completely within their rights to do so. LucasFilm produced them, but Apple distributes them, and they're free to charge a fee for that distribution if they want to. You might as well be asking why you have to pay the grocery store for the milk, when they don't own the cow.
So when LucasFilm announce that they're abandoning their policy of making trailers available in several different formats, and is taking the unique move of going Apple only, it annoys me, because it means I am excluded.
You are no more or less excluded than people who have no computers at all. Just like people who own no television are excluded from seeing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you want to see the content, get a Mac or a PC and watch all you want. Poof. Problem solved.
And finally, although LucasFilm have never admitted being paid off, they have never denied it either, only saying that "they work extremely closely with Apple".
Oh, well then it must be true. Sheesh.
But you've got to have principles, otherwise a few years from now we'll wake up and find QuickTime's got a monopoly and that if we want to watch movies on our computer, we have to pay a tax to Apple.
Have you so little faith in free market economics? If what you say had even the slightest grain of truth to it-- if the slippery slope were anything less than a rhetorical trick to play upon the weak-minded-- then we'd all have been prisoners of monopoly after monopoly long ago. It just doesn't work that way, dude.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Surely Chimera should be your dad.
Nope, sorry. OmniWeb 4.1 beta is faster than Chimera. It launches faster (2 bounces as opposed to about 8 for Chimera) and it renders a lot faster. It's also rock-solid stable-- I haven't used Chimera enough to speak for its stability.
But OmniWeb has this one tiny feature that I simply will not live without: you can filter web addresses based on regular expressions. For instance, I have images2.slashdot.org filtered; no more banners or... uh... whatever you call those big square things that I see in the middle of an article when I'm not using OmniWeb.
No, sorry, OmniWeb is truly my dad.
errrr... I assume you're referring to ATSUI text rendering, which has been available in the Carbon API for quite some time.
I'm no Carbon expert, but according to Apple's release notes, 10.1.5 includes support for Quartz text rendering in Carbon apps. I don't know literally what that means, but it's obviously not ATSUI/Carbon, since that was available before 10.1.5.
Ya know, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, but I got a 300 MHz iBook to reliably play one of Apple's MPEG-4 example movies in full screen. I was quite impressed with that. This update is rocking my world, so far.
That's amazing. I tried QT 6 this morning, under 10.1.4, and found it pretty damn lacking. Even the 300 kbps streaming sample movie couldn't play more than 1 or 2 frames per second, even though my network was wide open.
Just now I tried it under 10.1.5. What a difference a point release makes!
From History of the Dogcow, Part 1, by Mark ("The Red") Harlan:
Maybe because it already happened before but was killed because Apple did not want to sell Mac OS for x86?
Sure, the Star Trek project. That project failed for the obvious reasons:
1. Apple didn't think it likely that PC vendors would choose to bundle a Mac OS for Intel with their systems, and Apple didn't like the odds of trying to sell an after-market OS to customers that already had one for their computers.
2. Apple didn't want to start a political battle with Motorola by appearing to endorse Intel's CPUs over the PowerPC.
3. Apple was-- and is-- a hardware company, not a software company. Porting the OS to another platform would do nothing but reduce Apple's hardware revenues, which would very quickly be self-defeating.
Same reasons Apple wouldn't want to port OS X to any other architecture. So the question stands: why would anybody assume that Apple would want to port their OS to a non-Apple hardware platform?
But if what you say about training is true, I'm confident that they could save money by redesigning the user interface and help menus.
Before you say that, I'd recommend that you go take a look at an Inferno. I have no idea how you could do that, but I really can't see any other way for you to understand how this application's user interface works.
Anything that can be put in a manual can be put in a help file. And anything that can be put in a help file can be put in context sensitive help file.
But context-sensitive help is fundamentally flawed. It's great if you want to know what this button does, because you can just point to the button and get information. But if you're in the middle of a complex user interface with a thousand functions and you want to know where the modular keyer button is, context-sensitive help won't... um... help. See, in that situation, your context has no relation to what you actually want help with.
Unless this week of training teaches people about something other than simply using the software, it sounds to me like your Infero software wizards have crippled an amazingly useful piece of software with a terrible interface.
But you're wrong. The Inferno interface is not terrible. It's fantastic. It allows a trained individual to do what he wants to do faster and more effectively than any other similar application.
The distinguishing thing is that Inferno (and the other applications in its family, like Fire, Smoke, and Flame) wastes no screen space. It has no menus. No floating palettes. There are no icons. Buttons abound, but they're all labeled with plain text labels. Sometimes the labels are cryptic, but once you learn their meanings, they're never ambiguous. The software comes with its own keyboard, on which each key is mapped to one or more specific functions. The primary modes of the application are literally at the operator's fingertips all the time.
In this way, I think the Inferno user interface is vaguely comparable to the cockpit of a fighter jet. An ordinary guy, like myself, could never climb into a fighter cockpit and figure anything out just by looking at the controls. Does that mean the plane has a lousy human interface? Of course not. In fact, just the opposite. Aircraft cockpit design has evolved over decades to be as efficient as we know how to make it. Just because it's no good for you or me doesn't mean it's no good for the pilots who actually fly the thing.
I guess I'm just saying this: it is not necessary that applications be easy to use for everyone. It is only necessary that they be easy to use for the people that need to use them.
The source of this questioning is probably the Darwin 1.4.1 ISO image for x86 that's available....
Sure, Darwin has been available for IA-32 for a long time. But Darwin isn't OS X. The question remains, why would anybody think Apple would port their flagship operating system-- meaning OS X, not Darwin-- to a different architecture? Isn't that kind of like asking when Tivo is going to port their software to Replay TV's hardware?
But hey, who cares -- I use Mail.app anyway and what a great update!
So far, I agree. Mail.app feels significantly peppier on my iMac (400 MHz G3). I've got about 130 MB of mail on my IMAP server, so I guess I'm exercising Mail.app a little bit. It was never slow, but it feels quite a bit faster now.
In reply to my own comment, the answer is no. IE doesn't use Quartz text rendering under 10.1.5 yet. OmniWeb is my dad.
This update lets Carbon apps use Quartz text antialiasing, which everybody knows is the very best thing about Quartz.
In about five minutes, I'll let you know if IE takes advantage of this feature yet. I'm betting that it won't without an update.
No. MPEG4 is not "DVD Quality" Its FAR SUPERIOR to DVD.
I don't think that's really a very accurate statement, in any frame of reference.
There exist some extremely high quality MPEG-2 encoders. Some of them are used to produce DVDs-- particularly of the Superbit variety-- and some are used to compress over-the-air HDTV. These are a far cry from the software encoders some people use to generate movies on their PCs.
MPEG-4 is still very immature. It's impossible to fairly compare MPEG-4 encoding to MPEG-2 encoding in any meaningful way. Especially when you fail to control for data rates.
The only remotely objective comparisons of MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 I've seen to date have taken MPEG-2 source material (usually from DVD) and re-encoded it with MPEG-4. That doesn't really tell you anything. I haven't had the time, or the gear, to take uncompressed reference material and pass it through MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoders. That's a test I'd like to see.
What it sounds like you're saying is that bad MPEG-4 encoding is superior to bad MPEG-2 encoding. I won't argue with you there. But that's not sound basis for making a blanket judgment like yours.
And me without any mod points. +1, Funny. ;-)
Any news on when Mac OS for intel based systems is planned?
Okay, from you posting history you don't appear to be a troll, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and treat your question seriously.
The answer, of course, is "never." Duh.
But what I'm much more interested in is why you, and lots of other people and trolls, seem to think that such a thing might happen? Even the phrasing of your question-- when is it planned?-- implicitly assumes that such a port will appear eventually.
What possesses you to think such a thing?
Fucking damnit, a brilliant post fucked because I didn't preview it. There you have it, folks.
Don't be too hard on yourself. I thought the part about "insists that everything that even sat next to GNU software in the refrigerator must now be called GNU/whatever it used to be called" was pretty funny.
This same institute backed destabilizing, unworkable '80s missile defense....
You are aware, are you not, that the Reagan administration's emphasis on missile defense technology forced the Soviets to spend billions on research into their own missile defense systems? And that that level of unsustainable spending contributed directly to the collapse of the Soviet economy, and the eventual dissolution of the USSR as a political entity?
Just spreading around a little knowledge.
Good software shouldn't need a manual. The manual should be inside in the help pages, in context-sensitive help, and simply in the overall intuitiveness of the user interfaces.
.009 seems to think. It is a myth, and a harmful one at that, to think that software must be obvious to the inexperienced user. It's just fine to assume that the user operating the software will be highly trained, especially if the software does something complex.
The best piece of application software I've ever seen is Discreet's Inferno. It's complex and opaque, and the book is almost 1000 pages long. The software comes bundled with a full week of one-on-one on-site training from a Discreet trainer. The closest thing to online help it has is the fact that the manual comes with the software both in paper form and as a PDF on the CD.
The software costs about $650,000.
Why is it the best I've ever seen? Because, once an artist gets properly trained on it and gains just a little experience, it's just astounding. If you ever have the fortune of seeing an experienced Inferno artist use his system, pay close attention. It's almost too fast for the eye to follow. And the results are simply the best you'll ever see. Work finished on an Inferno is regularly held up as the standard to which all other effects work is compared.
My point is this: well-designed software does not have to be intuitive or self-explanatory, despite with Henry V
Once, just to see if anybody noticed, I included this notice on the last page of some internal-only documentation:
"This page inadvertently left blank."
I don't think anybody caught it.
This is common knowledge, I guess, but the SGI Indy owner's guide included this warning: Do not dangle the mouse by the cord, or throw the mouse at co-workers.
Ah, the old dogcow tech note. Source of what I consider to be the funniest quote ever:
Like any talented dog, it can do flips. Like any talented cow, it can do precision bitmap alignment.
For some reason, hardly anybody else cracks up at this the same way I do. I like to think that this is because everybody else is crazy.
It's actually more secure than a DVD-ROM, since most people aren't going to be able to just plug a RAID array into their computer and the data isn't compressed nearly as much as on DVD, so a 2.5 hour feature film weighs in around 30 GB or thereabout.
I had no intention of implying that one movie is delivered on one DVD. Quite the contrary. The movie comes on a stack of DVD-ROMs. The operator loads them one at a time, following the prompts on the AMS console. The data gets copied from the DVD-ROMs to the internal drive array on the AMS, where it's staged for presentation.
I've never seen a system in a commercial theater that depends on operators swapping out hard drive canisters. Drives are just too fragile. It's better to leave them where they are and copy the data onto them via removable media or transmission medium.
As for security, the data is encrypted the same way no matter how it's delivered. You can copy that data off the DVDs, if you really want to, but it will be useless to you.
The big advatage of Digital is being freed from having only a set number of titles you can run. Digitial takes up no space, doesn't wear out (media, not projectors) and you can run any title at any time.
That might be true if we were using eericson's digital cinema system, but that's not at all how it works in my neighborhood.
The d-cinemas I've been to all use the Technicolor Digital Cinema system, which consists of an embedded computer system with hard drive storage and a point-and-drool interface. The system interfaces with audio processors, a digital projector, and an automation system. Movies are loaded into the system on DVD-ROMs, although Technicolor also advertises satellite or broadband delivery as options.
Each auditorium has one AMS system showing one feature on one projector. The box essentially has no in and no out except for encrypted transports, making it pretty secure from piracy. There is, of course, always the possibility that somebody will steal the DVD-ROMs and crack the encryption, but you can never get rid of every possible weak link.
A system like the one you describe-- in which the content lives on a central data storage system that feeds multiple projectors in a theater complex-- would probably never be practical. It'd be too big and expensive, or too insecure, or both.
Digital cinema is really, practically, no different from traditional film cinema. Take the canisters/discs up to the projection booth, load 'em in the projector, and play the movie. When the run is finished, put the reels/discs back in the canisters/FedEx envelope and send 'em back to the distributor.
...IE hasn't significantly improved for a whole generation.
That kind of hyperbole just makes you sound like a moron. IE hasn't existed, in any form, for anywhere near a generation. You should know better.
Sure that's the case now.. but it sets the precedant: who's to say that Apple won't decide that if you want to watch any res of trailer at all, you need to buy the Pro version.
Oh, that would just be terrible! You'd have to pay somebody to get something in return! You'd have to choose between giving them money, and going without! Agony!
Funny - tell the 90% of people who use Windows because that they're not prisoners of a monopoly.
Okay, genius, please describe for us your vision of the perfect world. It's wrong for Apple to charge for QuickTime, evidently, so would you say that they should just give it away instead? Where is the line? At what point, and under what circumstances, does it become okay for a company to charge for its products?
Let's see what you really have to say.
(The difference between my iBook with 640 and his iMac with a gig is quite noticeable too, though I bet that the hard drive speed also comes into play here.)
I'm too lazy to look it up and provide proof, but I believe there are significant differences in cache size and bus speed between the laptops and the desktops, as well.
Man, you're really bothered about this. I think you're being silly.
I'm offended and annoyed because I'm being asked to pay Apple for a trailer being produced by LucasFilm. Why is this? Do I have to buy three pints of milk before I'm allowed orange juice? Do I have to pay for new vacuum cleaner if I want to change my door locks? No, I don't, because they are not related.
First of all, you don't have to pay Apple a dime. I have two Macs-- a laptop and a desktop-- and I watch movie trailers in QuickTime on both. Because I don't have a QuickTime Pro license for the laptop, I watch only the lower resolution versions. I still get to watch the trailers for free, and you could, too. Apple doesn't charge a penny.
Even if Apple did charge for the privilege of watching the Star Wars trailers, they'd be completely within their rights to do so. LucasFilm produced them, but Apple distributes them, and they're free to charge a fee for that distribution if they want to. You might as well be asking why you have to pay the grocery store for the milk, when they don't own the cow.
So when LucasFilm announce that they're abandoning their policy of making trailers available in several different formats, and is taking the unique move of going Apple only, it annoys me, because it means I am excluded.
You are no more or less excluded than people who have no computers at all. Just like people who own no television are excluded from seeing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you want to see the content, get a Mac or a PC and watch all you want. Poof. Problem solved.
And finally, although LucasFilm have never admitted being paid off, they have never denied it either, only saying that "they work extremely closely with Apple".
Oh, well then it must be true. Sheesh.
But you've got to have principles, otherwise a few years from now we'll wake up and find QuickTime's got a monopoly and that if we want to watch movies on our computer, we have to pay a tax to Apple.
Have you so little faith in free market economics? If what you say had even the slightest grain of truth to it-- if the slippery slope were anything less than a rhetorical trick to play upon the weak-minded-- then we'd all have been prisoners of monopoly after monopoly long ago. It just doesn't work that way, dude.