BeOS is dead. You can't buy an computer/OS (in a week) except Tiger with OS wide database driven search. You can still download BeOS but it is essentially, like latin, dead.
As per Briefcase: Briefcase doesn't allow you to synch: multiple computers iPods phones
As per Microsoft and remote control functionality: They would be sued if they did three things (which they HAVE done before) integrated a third party remote control implementation without licensing, purchasing, or compensation agreements (see Stacker) integrated a homebrew remote control implementation and released an OS update to break third party implementations (see Quicktime) integrated a homebrew remote control implementation and threatened OEMs with higher prices if they bundled third party implementations (see Compaq and Gateway)
Apple does none of those things (to my knowledge).
BeOS, Xerox, Amiga, Geos, all of them had 'firsts' that Apple now can 'claim' not because Apple was necessarily better, but because Apple survived and they did not.
Windows has always had the possibility of doing great things, but they rarely exercised that option. It seems, in hindsight, that Windows was more an exercise in accessibility than an exercise in usability. Apple, traditionally, has been much more useful, but due to pricing, availability, or compatibility, has had much more limited accessibility.
Spotlight does the exact same thing that Google does, except it does it to your hard drive instead of the internet.
1) Index and catalog all your files 2) Provide an interface to find all those files
IE, if you have a PC, try out Google Desktop, to find out what it might be like. Even better, if you use Thunderbird, create a 'saved search', and that's half of Spotlight's promise since it can do a saved search on everything on your computer (Google Desktop++)
If you use computers, you should care. Apple has consistently 'led the market' in computing, meaning if you watch Apple now, you will have an idea of what will be a big deal in a few years in general.
It's not necessarily the case that Apple can get 'credit', so much as Apple was first to 'get it right'. If not Apple, then someone else would have, it was just the fact that Apple was first that it matters. Examples include:
Windows, mice, folders, desktop metaphor in 1983 with the Lisa and 1984 with the Macintosh -> Windows 1.0 in 1985
Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7 -> Windows for Workgroups and Windows 3.11 in 1992
Quicktime, also introduced in 1990 with System 7 -> Video for Windows/AVI in Windows 3.1/3.11 in 1992
Color support, which allowed for Photoshop and other image programs, in 1988 with System 6 (Photoshop came out in 1990) -> Windows 3.0 in 1990 (And Photoshop in 1992)
Desktop publishing, Word, and WYSIWYG came out for Mac in 1985 -> Windows version in 1989
See a trend yet?
So what features does Tiger have that will probably be common in a few years? 'Quartz' 3d accelerated OS 'Spotlight' integrated OS wide database driven search 'Core Image/Video' hardware accelerated image and video libraries 'iSync' computer to computer 'synchronization' (bookmarks, preferences, etc) 'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS 'Target Disk Mode', which transforms your system into a 'plain' Firewire hard disk when it is booted. 'Xgrid' transparent, p2p distributed computing built into the OS
Who knows, maybe only half of these things are big deals, but I suspect most of them will become 'standard' by the time Longhorn ships.
Apple's iPod has been able to play/hold non-compressed non lossy songs since day 1.
Take your $20 discman and throw it into the trash Take your rack of CDs and import them as WAV, or if you want, lossless compressed ALE, into iTunes Plug in an iPod and you have your 'rack of CDs' in the palm of your hand.
I got the impression from Part I of the same article series that:
A Mac mini is cheaper than most (all?) PPC reference boards The development environment on a Mac mini is cheaper (free) than the toolkits for the PPC reference boards (?) The Mac mini as a reference board is ALSO very powerful, with all the major ports (USB, modem, ethernet, Firewire, DVI, sound) for the price.
That, and you can do stuff with a 1.25GHz PPC you can't do with an 80MHz 486, like voice recognition.
I was under the impression that the Mac mini costs less than most (all?) PowerPC ref boards. This impression from reading Part I of the same article series.
Plus you get: USB Ethernet DVI Firewire Modem Sound
The whole premise of the article is: An embedded view of the Mac Mini
So for $499 you get an entire solution as an embedded computer; developer tools, OS, and hardware.
For your $98+$40+$40 (case, mb, hard drive, video card, and CPU), where are your developer tools, OS, ram, and SIZE?
Can you place your $178 (+ram, OS, development tools), inside a car? A backpack? A handheld?
The point of the embedded development system is that you can use your tools and hardware from your development environment and transfer it into production. IE, an embedded PowerPC.
Where is the LOW POWER embedded Pentium 4 or embedded Athlon? Your proposed solution would be to develop on a $200 Intel PC for a $80 PowerPC solution.
The Mac mini proposed solution would be to develop on a $499 PowerPC for the same $80 PowerPC solution.
Your idea works great... if you're developing for the XBox. For all the other PowerPC devices (like say the TiVo, or maybe the GameCube, or the future PS3, Revolution, or XBox2), it seems kind of backward.
Three points: Pay MORE taxes, and you STILL force the hand of government to choose between security (more vehicles, more armed forces, more infrastructure) and general welfare (more health care, more education, more infrastructure).
Generally speaking, more or less taxes doesn't change the government's burden I think nearly as much as it changes their efficiency.
Point 2: Pay more taxes, and everyone loses. You assume that the government, and not the individual, is better equipped to spend our money than we are, but you don't actually say why. Does our government currently not have enough resources to: Fund legislation? Provide services? Create sinecures? Enact public works?
Pay NO taxes, and everyone loses, I agree, but you said pay LESS taxes, and that I will have to disagree.
Point 3: Taxes are a privilege, and not a right, of the government. The government exists only to serve the people (even if it doesn't feel that way, that's why it was created), and as such only get our money because we haven't decided to take it back. So long as our government serves us reasonably well, it can stay. It has no RIGHT to our money, as it exists only because we have allowed it. That we have given it too much power is because people are stupid, not because of any divine providence or manifest destiny.
Does that mean he's purchased the 400+ song collection of U2 availalbe on the iTMS? It's called a 'digital box set', but it purports to have everything they have ever recorded.
The GIMP gets negative dollars because the time spent learning GIMP could instead be spent using Photoshop Elements. If you've only got, say $6/hr earning potential, then GIMP is your cup of tea. If you're earning $12/hr, then Photoshop Elements is much, much, better.
Yes, and in this case if Jobs is the customer, then his programmers/developers have the duty of customer relations. They should have promised to him 16, given him 25, and then marketing can project 18.
If a customer has unrealistic expectations, it is marketing, sales, and customer support who are to blame for not managing expectations.
If Apple advertised iPods with 28 hours and you got 25, you would be upset; instead iPods are advertised with 18 and can sometimes get 25, and then you are pleasantly surprised.
In the multi-menubar model you have to target a small area, maybe 100 pixels by 12 pixels in size; a menu-item. If the menu item is out of reach, then you have to click twice anyway.
In the fixed menu model you have a possibly huge target area: The entire window, followed by a click on the menu, which is now 100 pixels by a million pixels in size (Fitt's law strikes again).
With Expose, you no longer worry about windows overlapping windows. Every window gets displayed, so your target becomes much easier to hit, though this is balanced by the possibility of hundreds of windows making each individual window smaller.
I would rather someone do a study and say "Multimenus are more efficient than single menus".
I think that's exactly what Apple did in designing their OS, and that is why they still do so today.
Altivec is more than 2-5x faster than the CPU, if you're strictly coding an Altivec codepath.
At the least, Altivec deals with a 128bit data path; if you're processing bytes, that's 16x the data bandwidth, if you're processing floats that's 4x. Of course there's local inefficiencies so you won't really see the max, but on data intensive parts you can come close.
Also you seem to have forgotten we're talking about CoreImage and CoreVideo; the userbase won't NEED to code for pixel shaders vs altivec vs normal. The whole point of these libraries is that they handle that for you, so you code to CoreImage, and it will handle the CPU, Altivec, and GPU rendering paths.
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True, in XP Pro, not true in XP Home.
So Microsoft gets a first in one, but not in the other, and for Apple's benefit, they don't separate their OS into pro/home, just server/pc.
BeOS is dead. You can't buy an computer/OS (in a week) except Tiger with OS wide database driven search. You can still download BeOS but it is essentially, like latin, dead.
As per Briefcase: Briefcase doesn't allow you to synch:
multiple computers
iPods
phones
As per Microsoft and remote control functionality:
They would be sued if they did three things (which they HAVE done before)
integrated a third party remote control implementation without licensing, purchasing, or compensation agreements (see Stacker)
integrated a homebrew remote control implementation and released an OS update to break third party implementations (see Quicktime)
integrated a homebrew remote control implementation and threatened OEMs with higher prices if they bundled third party implementations (see Compaq and Gateway)
Apple does none of those things (to my knowledge).
I don't disagree that Apple isn't first.
But Apple is still here.
BeOS, Xerox, Amiga, Geos, all of them had 'firsts' that Apple now can 'claim' not because Apple was necessarily better, but because Apple survived and they did not.
Windows has always had the possibility of doing great things, but they rarely exercised that option. It seems, in hindsight, that Windows was more an exercise in accessibility than an exercise in usability. Apple, traditionally, has been much more useful, but due to pricing, availability, or compatibility, has had much more limited accessibility.
It shouldn't be useless.
That's like saying, "Isn't Google sorta useless?"
Spotlight does the exact same thing that Google does, except it does it to your hard drive instead of the internet.
1) Index and catalog all your files
2) Provide an interface to find all those files
IE, if you have a PC, try out Google Desktop, to find out what it might be like. Even better, if you use Thunderbird, create a 'saved search', and that's half of Spotlight's promise since it can do a saved search on everything on your computer (Google Desktop++)
If you use computers, you should care. Apple has consistently 'led the market' in computing, meaning if you watch Apple now, you will have an idea of what will be a big deal in a few years in general.
It's not necessarily the case that Apple can get 'credit', so much as Apple was first to 'get it right'. If not Apple, then someone else would have, it was just the fact that Apple was first that it matters. Examples include:
Windows, mice, folders, desktop metaphor in 1983 with the Lisa and 1984 with the Macintosh -> Windows 1.0 in 1985
Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7 -> Windows for Workgroups and Windows 3.11 in 1992
Quicktime, also introduced in 1990 with System 7 -> Video for Windows/AVI in Windows 3.1/3.11 in 1992
Color support, which allowed for Photoshop and other image programs, in 1988 with System 6 (Photoshop came out in 1990) -> Windows 3.0 in 1990 (And Photoshop in 1992)
Desktop publishing, Word, and WYSIWYG came out for Mac in 1985 -> Windows version in 1989
See a trend yet?
So what features does Tiger have that will probably be common in a few years?
'Quartz' 3d accelerated OS
'Spotlight' integrated OS wide database driven search
'Core Image/Video' hardware accelerated image and video libraries
'iSync' computer to computer 'synchronization' (bookmarks, preferences, etc)
'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS
'Target Disk Mode', which transforms your system into a 'plain' Firewire hard disk when it is booted.
'Xgrid' transparent, p2p distributed computing built into the OS
Who knows, maybe only half of these things are big deals, but I suspect most of them will become 'standard' by the time Longhorn ships.
I dunno, a 60gb iPod can store about 200 CDs if:
CDs are ~600mb each
ALE compressed lossless music is ~300mb a CD
60gb ~= 200 CDs
So really, if your computer can store 400 CDs, then your iPod can cycle half of them at any one time.
What are you talking about?
Apple's iPod has been able to play/hold non-compressed non lossy songs since day 1.
Take your $20 discman and throw it into the trash
Take your rack of CDs and import them as WAV, or if you want, lossless compressed ALE, into iTunes
Plug in an iPod and you have your 'rack of CDs' in the palm of your hand.
I got the impression from Part I of the same article series that:
A Mac mini is cheaper than most (all?) PPC reference boards
The development environment on a Mac mini is cheaper (free) than the toolkits for the PPC reference boards (?)
The Mac mini as a reference board is ALSO very powerful, with all the major ports (USB, modem, ethernet, Firewire, DVI, sound) for the price.
That, and you can do stuff with a 1.25GHz PPC you can't do with an 80MHz 486, like voice recognition.
I was under the impression that the Mac mini costs less than most (all?) PowerPC ref boards. This impression from reading Part I of the same article series.
Plus you get:
USB
Ethernet
DVI
Firewire
Modem
Sound
The article's point is that the $499 Mac mini becomes a powerful "embedded" development platform.
Can you take your $300 PC and turn it into an embedded device, OR develop for an embedded system with it?
The Mac mini's advantage is that many embedded devices use PowerPC.
Read the article for more information. Cheap is only ONE part of the equation. Accessible is the other part.
The whole premise of the article is: An embedded view of the Mac Mini
So for $499 you get an entire solution as an embedded computer; developer tools, OS, and hardware.
For your $98+$40+$40 (case, mb, hard drive, video card, and CPU), where are your developer tools, OS, ram, and SIZE?
Can you place your $178 (+ram, OS, development tools), inside a car? A backpack? A handheld?
The point of the embedded development system is that you can use your tools and hardware from your development environment and transfer it into production. IE, an embedded PowerPC.
Where is the LOW POWER embedded Pentium 4 or embedded Athlon? Your proposed solution would be to develop on a $200 Intel PC for a $80 PowerPC solution.
The Mac mini proposed solution would be to develop on a $499 PowerPC for the same $80 PowerPC solution.
Your idea works great... if you're developing for the XBox. For all the other PowerPC devices (like say the TiVo, or maybe the GameCube, or the future PS3, Revolution, or XBox2), it seems kind of backward.
This is where we fundamentally disagree.
I don't believe that the government can serve people better if it wasn't forced to make cuts.
I believe the government can serve people better even with cuts because I don't think it's doing a great job right now.
Three points:
Pay MORE taxes, and you STILL force the hand of government to choose between security (more vehicles, more armed forces, more infrastructure) and general welfare (more health care, more education, more infrastructure).
Generally speaking, more or less taxes doesn't change the government's burden I think nearly as much as it changes their efficiency.
Point 2: Pay more taxes, and everyone loses. You assume that the government, and not the individual, is better equipped to spend our money than we are, but you don't actually say why. Does our government currently not have enough resources to:
Fund legislation?
Provide services?
Create sinecures?
Enact public works?
Pay NO taxes, and everyone loses, I agree, but you said pay LESS taxes, and that I will have to disagree.
Point 3: Taxes are a privilege, and not a right, of the government. The government exists only to serve the people (even if it doesn't feel that way, that's why it was created), and as such only get our money because we haven't decided to take it back. So long as our government serves us reasonably well, it can stay. It has no RIGHT to our money, as it exists only because we have allowed it. That we have given it too much power is because people are stupid, not because of any divine providence or manifest destiny.
Arguable as to the cause, but not to the result. If you use Linux or Mac, you will have less exploits, period.
Likewise if you use a slightly less popular bank or credit union, you will be less likely to get successfully 'phished'.
I think the whole point of Linux/Fedora Core 3 not being 'laptop ready' is that he did nothing wrong :)
If it's laptop ready, it should work. If it doesn't work, then it isn't ready.
Does that mean he's purchased the 400+ song collection of U2 availalbe on the iTMS? It's called a 'digital box set', but it purports to have everything they have ever recorded.
The world seems pretty happy with iTunes, the colored iMac, the iPod, and the iPod mini.
How would the world be better off if Apple chose BeOS over Jobs? It's not immediately obvious to me.
What does 'technically better' mean?
Easier to develop for?
I do believe NeXT has a time honored history there.
Easier to extend?
Again I think NeXT had the advantage.
Supports more platforms?
NeXT again has the advantage.
Easier to refactor?
No way to determine.
Supports more hardware?
Probably a draw.
Uses less memory?
I'm not sure this is relevant.
Uses less CPU?
Probably BeOS here.
What measures do you consider important?
It's new to this guy
$700 Photoshop
$90 Photoshop Elements
-$90 GIMP
The GIMP gets negative dollars because the time spent learning GIMP could instead be spent using Photoshop Elements. If you've only got, say $6/hr earning potential, then GIMP is your cup of tea. If you're earning $12/hr, then Photoshop Elements is much, much, better.
Yes, and in this case if Jobs is the customer, then his programmers/developers have the duty of customer relations. They should have promised to him 16, given him 25, and then marketing can project 18.
If a customer has unrealistic expectations, it is marketing, sales, and customer support who are to blame for not managing expectations.
If Apple advertised iPods with 28 hours and you got 25, you would be upset; instead iPods are advertised with 18 and can sometimes get 25, and then you are pleasantly surprised.
Fitt's law still holds.
In the multi-menubar model you have to target a small area, maybe 100 pixels by 12 pixels in size; a menu-item. If the menu item is out of reach, then you have to click twice anyway.
In the fixed menu model you have a possibly huge target area: The entire window, followed by a click on the menu, which is now 100 pixels by a million pixels in size (Fitt's law strikes again).
With Expose, you no longer worry about windows overlapping windows. Every window gets displayed, so your target becomes much easier to hit, though this is balanced by the possibility of hundreds of windows making each individual window smaller.
I would rather someone do a study and say "Multimenus are more efficient than single menus".
I think that's exactly what Apple did in designing their OS, and that is why they still do so today.
Altivec is more than 2-5x faster than the CPU, if you're strictly coding an Altivec codepath.
At the least, Altivec deals with a 128bit data path; if you're processing bytes, that's 16x the data bandwidth, if you're processing floats that's 4x. Of course there's local inefficiencies so you won't really see the max, but on data intensive parts you can come close.
Also you seem to have forgotten we're talking about CoreImage and CoreVideo; the userbase won't NEED to code for pixel shaders vs altivec vs normal. The whole point of these libraries is that they handle that for you, so you code to CoreImage, and it will handle the CPU, Altivec, and GPU rendering paths.
Yes, so what is your point?
A 167MHz FSB makes the computer unusable?