The article speaks for itself, but essentially Joel's point is, "If it ain't broke, it's going to take you a heck of a lot longer to rewrite something inferior than you could've ever expected." Old code has tons of lessons learned that you'll never tease out. New code is easy to read and can implement every buzz word you'll find on O'Reilly Net right now, but it won't be battle-tested.
If you're still able to even think about throwing out your old investment and moving to CGI and BSD, however, I'm thinking your site isn't doing much very fancy. If you don't have much customization invested in your propriatary system, what Joel and I are saying is moot, especially at the licensing fees you're mentioning.
I'd also point out the title is very misleading. It's not Java that's the issue -- it's your system's architecture. Java is just as capable as creating a, "largely static site that is generated (written out to cache) from a new, simpler content management system," as language X. This is quite similar to the discussion we had about whether Java is an SUV just a while back (if it is an SUV, btw, that's not a bad thing). Your programmers' skillset is what's most important. If they already have a familiarity with Java, why ditch it?
So, keeping true to the post that says the recommendations here come out our arse, here's another pulled from the same place:
I'd recommend trying to refactor your current codebase to do two things. First, try to implement your static page idea using your current system. Two, take out as much of the crappy, non-scalable system that happens to be written in Java as possible. You don't name the system, but the whole advantage of Java is that it doesn't need to be platform-specific (if done right). Ditch Solaris. Create a server-farm of cheap x86 hardware with Linux or BSD with a JVM installed. Reread your license -- if you have thirty "clients" (new Linux servers) making static pages from one legacy server's dynamic content, can you pay a lower fee?
PS -- Who said Java was good for prototyping? Visual Basic (and vbscript/ASP or *gulp* ColdFusion), sure. REALbasic, sure. Java? Are you folks mad?!!;^)
I get so fed up with RIAA FUD that "trading music == illegal activity, no matter what". There's a pretty pointed bit in the linked story, above, about an SBC advert that said, in part, "Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like."
That doesn't mean the users are being told to do anything illegal (admittedlty nor does the ad educate users in how to trade legally, but anyhow...). Here's my letter to SBC (disclosure -- I do own SBC stock):
===
Mr. Bingol:
I wanted to comment quickly on a quote I read in an article on SBC and the RIAA today.
> A record industry official pointed to a past print advertisement from SBC's Pacific Bell unit that read, in part: "Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever."...
> An SBC spokesman, Selim Bingol, said the advertisement was irrelevant. "It's ludicrous to suggest that an ad that has not appeared for many months has anything to do with today's debate," he said. "We are opposing these subpoenas because under the R.I.A.A.'s interpretation, they are a threat to consumer privacy and safety."
Though I agree with your statement, I'd like to point out that the ad says nothing that explicitly insinuates anything but a legal venture on the part of your customers. Services such as Furthurnet (http://www.furthurnet.net) offer legally downloadable music files from bands that allow taping and trading of their shows -- everywhere from The Black Crowes and The Grateful Dead and Phish to some much more fringe bands (like "The Screaming Cheetah Wheelies") that people might be interested in downloading.
There *are* gigabytes of free, high-quality, and legal music out there. Putting together a song library over the Internet is certainly a great use of the services you provide your customers, and doesn't "cost" the RIAA a dime in "lost revenue".
Thanks for your time, and best of luck with your work.
When making sites for a line office at NOAA (US gov't office), I always wrote for two browsers. You have to write for Internet Explorer because it'd bring, even in NOAA where NS 4.7 was pretty much forced on you, 90% of your hits, and Mozilla/Netscape 6+ "for everyone else".
The most important thing about Mozilla, and what impressed me most with the excellent browser, is that Mozilla's behavor was the same across platforms when it came to Javascript, CSS, and other rendering. More importantly, rendering errors showed the same behavior in the same version of Mozilla, regardless of platform! That's impressive.
Sure, fonts, icons, etc are *slightly* different, but I made some pretty dhtml intensive stuff (click "Query Storms") that behaved exactly the same on Linux on Windows, Linux, and both Mac OS 8-9 & OS X.
You basically have two choices. Make a Google-like site with such simple html that it'll render correctly everywhere, even in Lynx, or program higher-end, thicker client, dhtml jive for IE and Moz. That covers the vast majority of your hits (IE) and will give the option to most anyone on an alternative OS to, at worst, download a free browser that'll behave exactly as you'd expect (Moz). (Okay, three choices -- make two sites. One's dumbed down for lynx, the other for IE/Moz.) Now you've covered Mac, Linux, and heavens knows what else just by testing, give or take, on Windows. Mozilla's good enough that it is a platform.
Check for DOM (document.all and document.layers), give a warning to anyone who doesn't conform, and feel good that you've give people who *need* to see your pages an option without wasting hours and hours testing and writing for browsers that will make up a very low volume of your visits. Yes, you potentially exclude Granny Smith on dial-up with Mac OS 8.1 or Joe Apple Diehard who only uses Safari and won't even touch Camino, but let's face it, you're better off spending that time writing a new site and reaching 99% of a new audience anyhow.
Good luck!
Guess he understands time-space warping too
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Adrian Lamo Surrenders
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· Score: 3, Interesting
From The Reg: Under the terms of his release, Lamo's future wanderings will be confined to the northeastern half of California, and southern New York state, unless he gets prior approval of the court to travel elsewhere.
Hrm. Wandering from NE Cali to south NY w/out going anywhere inbetween would seem about as easy a commute as getting from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
Then they tell the fellow he can't use a computer but has to get full-time employment! I imagine anyone savvy enough to Slashdot can see the irony there.;^)
To completely switch gears, did anyone else find it weird that a paper would have SS#'s for people who have written op-ed pieces [for Lamo to find]? I suppose that implies they were *paid* for the pieces, but it still seems a bit strange.
The first version of 1.4.1 for OS X was obviously shooting for enterprise users. Headless apps worked well, and there was even a new way of opening apps that wouldn't create icons on the dock to support headless apps in a seamless, usre friendly fashion.
As a shareware client app developer who targets the Mac, I've been watching Apple's JVM from a different angle. 1.3.1 was a nice VM, and with the Aqua look and feel I've had some comments that assumed my Java application was native.
Now as a client app maker, I was looking forward to Java 1.4.1 on OS X for, of all things, mousewheel support. I got that, but I also got a number of issues with any look and feel *other* than Aqua. Menus didn't paint correctly at times, text sometimes didn't paint the way I expected in JTextAreas, and after a few checks I decided it was better to continue to shoot for the 1.3.1 VM rather than rip my code apart to get around OS X-specific quirks. Headless apps might have worked great, but Swing, Java's "de facto GUI toolset of choice" didn't. Comments about JBuilder (it seems the most popular client apps in Java other than Limewire are Java IDEs for all those headless app makers) in this thread help support that.
If you didn't catch that, I said I targetted 1.3.1 even after the 1.4.1 release. That's right, Apple had enough problems in 1.4.1 (my spin) that they left two nearly mutually exclusive JVMs on each OS X system after upgrade. New Macs wouldn't ship with just 1.4.1. Developer tools allowed and allow developers to force applications to run under just 1.3.1 if they'd prefer. Apple wasn't (isn't?) quite ready to put all the eggs in one basket. Aside -- I wonder if Panther will ship with just 1.4.1?
From what I've seen of this VM after a few minutes of testing suggest that I might be able to release a new version of my app that uses the latest VM installed, which would be great. That said, the Kunststoff Look & Feel, a relatively trivial extension of the standard Swing Metal (or "Java") Look & Feel still ain't happy out of the box. A few lines from its song when running my app under 1.4.1, new update, below:
apple.awt.EventQueueExceptionHandler Caught Throwable: java.awt.image.RasterFormatException: y lies outside raster
at sun.awt.image.IntegerInterleavedRaster.createWrita bleChild(IntegerInterleavedRaster.java:462)
at sun.awt.image.IntegerInterleavedRaster.createChild (IntegerInterleavedRaster.java:516)
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext$Gradient. getRaster(FastGradientPaintContext.java:53)
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext$Gradient. access$100(FastGradientPaintContext.java:37)
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext.getRaster (FastGradientPaintContext.java:142)
at apple.awt.CSurfaceData.setupPaint(CSurfaceData.jav a:718)
Fwiw, here are the versions of the old 1.4.1 and the new: prompt% java -version java version "1.4.1_01" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-39) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-14, mixed mode)
prompt% java -version java version "1.4.1_01" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-69.1) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-24, mixed mode)
Interesting to note that Apple is still behind. 1.4.1_02 and 1.4.1_05 have been released by Sun for some time now. Not a big deal, but a little evidence that, though OS X's "built-in" Java support is the best you'll find in an OS, it's hardly "latest and greatest".
The casinos are offering a game, a distraction, a form of entertainment. Do I get mad when my Playstation "cheats" and scores on some insane 99-yard bomb after getting to 3rd and 24 in NCAA 2004? Heck yeah. But if I don't like the odds, I don't have to play.
Same thing here. The rules say don't count cards. You can until you get caught. Now it's easier to get caught. Though we'd love to think the customer is always right, it's certainly the owner of the establishment's right to toss whoever they'd like. And the bottom line is, as always, it seems, vote with dollars. Don't like cameras counting cards? Go to the casino that doesn't do it!
The real issue isn't how this changes the game, but how this changes privacy. If they can tell you had 7 drinks before hopping back into your Hummer that you quickly plow into the side of the Bellagio -- or that you were playing and arrived and left three tables with the same woman, who wasn't your sig other, well, now, that's a little scary, isn't it?
But even reusing characters is, in many ways, a cop-out. Same reason so many TV shows start with a known character from another show (you know, Joni loves Chaci (sp?) Syndrome). Perhaps it's a very novel and creative show, but the point is that people are still banking on that name recognition and brand familiarity.
To me, that's by definition not as original as creating a new game from scratch. I'll readily admit that I haven't tried Wario Ware, but just hearing Wario conjures up certain connotations -- and from the description on IGN Pocket, we do have a relatively kid-friendly, arcade action game, as random as it might be.
The bottom line is that Nintendo, even when they have something quite nearly wholly original, has to tag the game with a character simply for name recognition, aka "$$$". This is no Incredible Crisis, for better or worse.
And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, what does ole johnC do from QuakeCon?
John Carmack: I thought it would be kind of neat if we took the DOOM renderer, and we had a team take previous games-don't touch the game, just revamp it graphically. Just take Quake II, and just use the DOOM engine to make brand new graphic models and everything. But don't spend time messing with the gameplay because we know that is pretty good. Just release it as Quake II Remix with brand new graphics technology and sell it at a middle-level price instead of a boutique price.
I thought that was a pretty good idea.
Super. As if updating Resident Evil for GameCube wasn't enough, now we might have the exact same freakin' gameplay from Quake 2 back again. Goldeneye, Team Fortress, Action Quake, SOCOM were all great strides over the state of current fps. Be a little adventurous! Least Carmack's fair enough that he's not looking for people to pay more than $20 or so for it.
Even if the point seems so small to you as to be useless, gaming companies simply aren't, as a whole, taking all that many risks. Perhaps the US is so steeped in capitalism that we just don't care any more, but I think the article points out fairly well that there is very little pure originality for pure originality's sake.
Apple integrates the many apps together with publically accessible APIs, so that other people may do the same.
Careful how you bash Microsoft. It's fun, and I'm using Jaguar this minute to post, but nobody does a better job exposing APIs to the public than Microsoft and COM.
Guess how long it takes to make a web browser in Visual Basic 6? Seconds if you know what control to use (Microsoft Internet Control) -- and seconds if you don't; there's a pre-built form you can add from the Project-Add Form menu item. How long to add Media Player? Seconds. How about automate Excel or Word? Those are a little more complicated, but only b/c of their more complicated APIs.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like Microsoft's silly claims that they can't take IE out of Windows OS. I hate the way they embrace and extend. I hate the way they aggresively go after smaller businesses and spend them out of existence. (imo, etc)
But when it comes to making something quickly that communicates between two application engines, whether first or third party, you won't get any more robust a solution than VB6. MS loves opening up their APIs. Means every one of your users will also have to pay the Windows Tax.
Certainly it's cheaper to get the Xserve sans OS X. From the article -- "We're the only Apple reseller on the planet with a licence to install a non-Apple operating system," says Staats.
Regardless I always thought the whole Apple advantage was the way having hardware and OS under one roof allowed you to make great "gestaltic" solutions. Why pay the Xserve premium and get G4 powered rack hardware to install an OS that's available for cheaper, and argueably better supported, x86 hardware? (And I've been a Mac user for over a decade and even tried out YDL and LPPC a couple of times... this isn't flame bait.)
Still, either Yellow Dog must be doing *something* better than Red Hat is (maintenance price?) or they must be running something that was designed *explicitly for* AltiVec.
CD drives last a lot longer than that, I think.
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Lindows Webstation
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· Score: 1
lifetime of an average CD drive is about a week without break and at full speed and only thanks to stopping frequently and lowering read speed,
Interesting stats at tubegirl nonwithstanding (ack!), I find the claim of a week tops for a CD drive incredibly low. I mean, I've got the thing running tunes from mp3 and straight audio CDs pretty much 8+ hours a day at work, and have left the blamed things on overnight more than once. And my home tower used the same 4x CD drive for years until I finally shelled out for a CD-R a few months ago. Admittedly, mp3 & audio CDs aren't full-speed affairs, but a week just sounds way too low.
Also wonder how much space the OS really needs. If you've got a CD worth of 0s and 1s, that's less than a gig we're talking about, so you could, in theory, keep it all in RAM with just a quick upgrade.
At any rate, as long as they didn't completely cheese out buying crappy drives, I'd imagine it'd last a while after all, and it's hard to get much more secure than that. Hacked? Hrm, for the time being, just reset power!;^)
(Fwiw, I have heard pretty bad stories about some CD-R drives going bad overly quickly when they're used as your main/only drive and running at high speeds. Perhaps you were referring to that?)
I tend to agree with the assertion that you don't need sendmail on OS X; that's what Mail.app is for.
The only time I've had a problem with my ISP's own smtp server, Mail.app automatically asked if I didn't want to use smtp.mac.com to send my mail. I don't have a.Mac account, so I was awfully impressed with OS X's desire to get my mail through, rain, sleet, hail, or whatever the bytes were doing today.
That said, Commando-ing the command line is nearly always a good thing. Setting up a sendmail server is pretty neat for people who might not use Mail.app (wacky mutt users!) or are Darwin diehards -- or just command-line curious. Between Fink and apps like this, you can do what you used to have to be a BSD expert to achieve.
But check Mail.app out again if you're using something else now. It's a much better app now than it was in OS X 10.0, when it was a pretty simple tech preview of the Address Book and spellcheck Cocoa textareas. And with Panther, the app seems to only be getting better.
"We're not even close", says the market.
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The Impending IP Crisis
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How much does it cost me to get an IP address for a year? About $150 including server space.
Where I used to work (on-site gov't contractor) each machine had a "real IP". That's nothing 192.168.1.* can't fix. The issue is with the way people purchase huge blocks of IPs at once. If we'd stop selling 134.*.*.* to one entity, we'd be fine for a while longer.
From one of the linked articles: In one solution, a single IP address is assigned to an entire network, which then gives out its own addresses to the devices attached to it.
But such approaches are not long-term solutions, said Alex Lightman, chairman of a conference... to discuss the next generation of IP addressing, known as Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6.
I think Mr. Lightman is being a bit alarmist. There's no reason any ISP needs more than one IP.
At any rate, as long as any schmoe can go and purchase an IP at an ISP/web host for nuttin', I can't imagine we're even close to out and that there aren't millions of IPs that we can consolidate before we get so alarmist.
Welp, I admit it. Looks like I was wrong. An AOL-supported Mozilla is dead.
What does this mean for the OS X AOL client? That's the one thing (Gecko-based OS X client is already out there) that made me think AOL'd keep going. Looks like IE 7 (or whatever) is going to have some really neat stuff. Enough that the MS licensing agreement with AOL makes it a good idea for AOL to kill Gecko as a back-up engine for its software.
Maybe the Safari embeddable engine is easy enough to use that AOL is going that way. Or maybe AOL OS X's engine will just fold up into proprietary software. The MPL allows that.
I don't feel *that* badly. AOL, whether it meant to or not, pulled the plug, strangely enough, immediately after Moz became the best browser on the market. That's good timing from where I'm sitting -- which is in front of a monitor, posting with Mozilla/Firebird.
Check the 970's specs on page two of this article at IBM [pdf]. Looks like the 970 sucks juice like you wouldn't believe. (Compare to the G3. No wonder iBooks and their 5-6 hour battery life (and I can attest to that) are the last Macs to use 'em)
Power consumption's not an issue with towers. BIG issue with laptops. PowerPC 970 laptops are not going to happen this week. This is a server chip, folk. Xserve, perfect fit. PowerMac, why not? Laptops, a dual G4 would be neat, but I don't think we'll see that or a G5 "to go". I'd like to eat crow on this one, but I don't *think* I will.
Does anyone really think Microsoft killed IE for OS X because of Safari? That's backwards. Safari was created in large part to make IE unessential. It's a smart move by Apple, and all MS has done is make the obvious official.
IE for Mac - Great in OS 9; so slow that it was almost unusable in OS X. In comparison to other browsers it felt more like a beta release.
Obviously you've already blacked OS X 10.0 out of your head, where IE was pretty much the only application that didn't seem like it hadn't made it out of alpha testing just just. And yes, I did use OmniWeb then. There was a reason OmniWeb was so popular for a while; it was the only non-MS browser we could even consider using (admittedly its spellchecking textareas is pretty cool). Heck, it was nearly the only non-MS application that was reasonably usable and OS X native, Mail.app included.
Regardless, MS software for the Mac has always been top rate in my experience. IE Mac was leaps and bounds better than anything else on OS 9, and was even more standards compliant than the contemporary IE 5 on Windows! IE for OS X still handles many sites better than Safari, and I occasionally go back when all else fails. Outlook Express is still my favorite mail handler I've used short of Em@iler. Office on the Mac has also been a top rate product for years.
Hey, it's fun to bash Windows. It's arguably an unfair, predatory monopoly. But the MacBU really does do great work for our "other OS". I'm sorry to see IE go, strangely enough.
I said it was deprecated not dead. Deprecated means that Apple is not going to support new developments for OS 9.
But you're just playing into the original point. On OS 9, the "commercial powers that be" have killed development, yet there's still a sizable community. I'd have to imagine the OS 9 community is as large or larger than the Linux desktop community. But has anyone stepped up to keep Mozilla going? They don't even have to code all that much; "just" fix bugs that occur in the OS 9 build system (which is kinda nasty, but that's beside the point).
A fairly large community was not able to keep Mozilla afloat on their platform without AOL's money. Now that nobody in AOL is tasked with making the OS 9 build, it's dead. Money leaves, product dies.
Mozilla will continue on Linux even if AOL pulls support all together (though Konqueror ain't bad), but I'd predict that the speed with which Mozilla would move along would slow considerably.
And if there's no reason for AOL to use Gecko in its Windows client and Netscape keeps as small a percentage of the browser market as it does (making there little money to be made there), the reasons for a commercial company with a bottom line to keep Mozilla subsidized drops by a huge margin. As I see it, the only reason AOL would want to keep Moz around is for the OS X AOL client -- its already shipping, which shows a huge investment -- and for a partnership with some flavor of Unix for the long-term grand-plan of an "AOL OS". If Safari becomes as easy to use when programming as the Microsoft Internet Control, I think OS X AOL uses the Safari engine in their client and the short-term value to AOL for keeping Mozilla around is nearly nil.
Though I don't see how it's different than when I use the Microsoft Internet Control in VB6 for free, my first thought when I heard IE was going to AOL royalty free was, "Scary that Mozilla belongs to 'em."
My second: Maybe the Mac OS X AOL client, which already uses Gecko, will keep Mozilla around.
Now the real question will be whether Apple's Safari (and its spin on khtml) can modularize like IE's engine (the Internet Control) to the point that Mozilla is moot on OS X as well. If that happens, Mozilla is in real trouble. Think I'm kidding? Seen any recent builds of Mozilla for Mac OS 9 recently? Not that you'll ever kill Mozilla completely, but if AOL pulls funding it won't be the same fast moving [sic; think about how big a project it really is!] project it is now.
In any event, this move makes the OS X client release seem a much smarter move. "See, we don't need you [someplace you don't exist]; we could trash you on Windows too! And then partner with Lindows!" Good leverage.
from here: In a nutshell, you can play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.
Anybody know what that means, exactly? Neat concept, but on a quick browse of Apple's site, I wasn't real sure what the restrictions were.
Also wonder when we'll see Win-iTunes. iPod went "both ways" officially. Will Apple move a little iLife over to the enemy to make a little more cash?
I've always been impressed with descriptions of Window's technologies while they're being developed. Like it or not, Microsoft has -- and can afford to pay and retain -- some of the smartest minds in the field. I'd love to work with these guys, who seem to be open to using standards and who don't have so much FUD in their eyes or are so egotistical they can't learn from the *nixes.
The problem is that all these bright ideas go through Microsoft's "profit maximization machine" at some point and we get "embrace and extend" and other fun phonomena. I'll stop before I get back into that tired rant.
At any rate, here are two lessons learned -- by MS -- from *nixes, quoted from the article on the command line server. "Windows core technology guru Rob Short" says... We'll be able to patch probably two thirds of the components without shutting the system down. That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
Later a quote on Linux: [Question] Why is there no command line only version?
[Short's answer] We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter.
Hrm, is there a suit in the works? XP already piles windows into the taskbar after you, say, open up three Windows Explorer windows or Mozilla or what-have-you.
Sure, these are piles of windows, not files, and you can't cut them into separate decks (how long before we're playing a new type of solitaire on Mac desktops?), but it's funny watching two giants -- or at least two commerical OS makers -- rush to get this paradigm into different parts of their GUIs first. I doubt Apple could win a suit against Microsoft for the windows piling, but it's a pretty similar beast.
Any prior art in this one? Seems like Linux likes to anticipate cool features in some obscure application somewhere. Anybody seen other piles of things similar to piles?
As an aside, I can see why Apple had the idea of piles first. One day I selected all of the email addresses in my Em@iler address book and "drug and dropped" them to BBEdit Lite. I missed, and they landed on the desktop in, that's right, a giant pile of text clippings. Took me forever to get them off for some reason -- seems I could only grab so many at a time. Gotta imagine something similar happened to somebody brighter than me at Apple and *poof*, piles are patented.
I wasn't disappointed. The perfect consumer laptop
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New iBooks and Apple Store
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When reading the specs I initially thought about the same thing. Even though the high end is 80% faster than my 500 MHz iBook and has 24 more megs of VRAM, there isn't anything screaming for me to upgrade. No Airport extreme, no G4, no screamin' fast Firewire upgrades, no higher screen resolution, no G4, and sure as heck no Superdrive, not that I expected one.
But for a new/prospective Mac user, the iBook continues to be a great value. The things really do have five hours of battery life. The design is wonderful, especially the 12" model, which is noticibly smaller and easier to carry than most of the x86 notebooks I see coworkers and students lugging around. And 802.11 reception with the built-in antennae puts PCMIA cards to shame. What's more, the 32 meg video card means you get to take advantage of Quartz Extreme. All together, the performance of OS X on a new iBook -- 80% faster than the iBook I'm using now (which, though slow, is my daily-use PC, not the 2 GHz P4 with WinXP sitting next to it) *plus* Quartz Extreme -- has to be decent for your typical home user, which is what the "i" in iBook is all about.
The only place I can fault my old iBook is the speed of running complicated Java apps, like Java-based IDEs, which suggests to me I was in the market for a *Power*book all along, whether I come around to admitting it or not. Same with anything that needs a G4. If you're editing video 50% of the time your laptop's powered on, you need a Powerbook. For consumer needs -- email, browsing, word processing -- the iBook was and is the perfect laptop.
And heck, when was not wanting to upgrade a bad thing? It's nice to finally have a Mac that doesn't feel horribly obsolete in a few years!
It's worth mentioning that even Sun comes down hard on AWT/Swing, and shows some of its flaws in their own report, The AWT Focus Subsystem.
Sun even has the guts to plainly state that Windows GUI techs in C++ and VB are improvements over Java options in the following section:
In addition, many developers noted that the APIs for FocusEvent and WindowEvent were insufficient because they did not provide a way for determining the "opposite" Component involved in the focus or activation change...
Since Microsoft Windows provides this functionality for free, developers migrating from Microsoft Windows C/C++ or Visual Basic to Java had been frustrated by the omission. (emph mine)
I believe Windows.Forms in.NET continues the intuitive GUI design Windows developers came to expect in the VB IDEs.
C# certainly took lessons from Java, and now Sun is returning the favor. The above document deals mostly with changes to GUI techs in Java 1.4 and flaws in 1.3 and prior, but this new survey at Sun makes me hopeful that Sun might, indeed, go back to the drawing board.
As Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. said in The Mythical Man-Month, always "Plan to Throw One Away"!
Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient.
Why is Gecko allowed to undergo fairly hefty changes? Easy. Apple's release of Safari brought attention to KHTML. Heck, Mac rumor sites had all but crowned Chimera (now Camino), based on Gecko, into the OS as the default browser. Then wham, out of left field, here's Safari.
Why did such a large company go away from what the open source community considered the gold standard, Mozilla and its technologies? KHTML was a smaller codebase than Gecko, and easier for a new project to make completely their own. That's right, there was a better open source alternative out there most people had never really thought about.
People started talking about KHTML, Safari, Mozilla, and Gecko. Apple managed to shine a new light on what had been seen as acceptable without question because of, get this, a lack of competition (!) in the open source browser community. Until the little man came on the scene, Mozilla and its Gecko brethren had a near monopoly on the "not-IE" browser market.
So the next time someone wants to know what Apple's given the open source community after taking BSD for the core of its new OS, you'll know what to tell them. Not only has Apple open sourced Darwin and checked their improvements back into KHTML, they've also provided a competitive peer for Mozilla and other open source projects.
Nice round numbers, all multiples of $5 billion, and all numbers that are well short of anything resembling a reasonable amount to start making a dent in the current system.
I googled up this recent article that says OPEC is producing 24.5 million barrels of oil a day. At $40 a barrel, that's $980 million a day spent on oil around the world. Let's say we take a quarter of that into the US (it's more, iirc). That's a quarter billion a day in oil alone, without touching infrastructure, etc.
$100 billion is going to "... shift the balance of power from foreign oil producers to US energy consumers within a decade"?? Forget it. "The White House should ask for $5 billion - roughly $30,000 for each of the nation's 176,000 filling stations - to get the ball rolling"?? Get the ball rolling? The authors of this article want station owners to install something for which there's zero consumer demand -- and then only have the government subsidize enough to get the ball rolling?
How much is the government going to pay to give everyone a car that uses this new fuel? And once everyone's driving, what is the government going to do about all the other products that use petroleum? Cars in driveways are just the beginning, and filling stations aren't even that.
These numbers might sound big to us individually, but taken in context they are a drop in the bucket. If switching from oil to hydrogen was that easy, we'd've done it long ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like I need to bring Joel Spolsky's excellent article, Things You Should Never Do, Part I, to a new readership.
;^)
The article speaks for itself, but essentially Joel's point is, "If it ain't broke, it's going to take you a heck of a lot longer to rewrite something inferior than you could've ever expected." Old code has tons of lessons learned that you'll never tease out. New code is easy to read and can implement every buzz word you'll find on O'Reilly Net right now, but it won't be battle-tested.
If you're still able to even think about throwing out your old investment and moving to CGI and BSD, however, I'm thinking your site isn't doing much very fancy. If you don't have much customization invested in your propriatary system, what Joel and I are saying is moot, especially at the licensing fees you're mentioning.
I'd also point out the title is very misleading. It's not Java that's the issue -- it's your system's architecture. Java is just as capable as creating a, "largely static site that is generated (written out to cache) from a new, simpler content management system," as language X. This is quite similar to the discussion we had about whether Java is an SUV just a while back (if it is an SUV, btw, that's not a bad thing). Your programmers' skillset is what's most important. If they already have a familiarity with Java, why ditch it?
So, keeping true to the post that says the recommendations here come out our arse, here's another pulled from the same place:
I'd recommend trying to refactor your current codebase to do two things. First, try to implement your static page idea using your current system. Two, take out as much of the crappy, non-scalable system that happens to be written in Java as possible. You don't name the system, but the whole advantage of Java is that it doesn't need to be platform-specific (if done right). Ditch Solaris. Create a server-farm of cheap x86 hardware with Linux or BSD with a JVM installed. Reread your license -- if you have thirty "clients" (new Linux servers) making static pages from one legacy server's dynamic content, can you pay a lower fee?
PS -- Who said Java was good for prototyping? Visual Basic (and vbscript/ASP or *gulp* ColdFusion), sure. REALbasic, sure. Java? Are you folks mad?!!
I get so fed up with RIAA FUD that "trading music == illegal activity, no matter what". There's a pretty pointed bit in the linked story, above, about an SBC advert that said, in part, "Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like."
l e?AID=/20030916/ZNYT01/309160363
...
That doesn't mean the users are being told to do anything illegal (admittedlty nor does the ad educate users in how to trade legally, but anyhow...). Here's my letter to SBC (disclosure -- I do own SBC stock):
===
Mr. Bingol:
I wanted to comment quickly on a quote I read in an article on SBC and the RIAA today.
From: http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic
> A record industry official pointed to a past print advertisement from SBC's Pacific Bell unit that read, in part: "Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever."
> An SBC spokesman, Selim Bingol, said the advertisement was irrelevant. "It's ludicrous to suggest that an ad that has not appeared for many months has anything to do with today's debate," he said. "We are opposing these subpoenas because under the R.I.A.A.'s interpretation, they are a threat to consumer privacy and safety."
Though I agree with your statement, I'd like to point out that the ad says nothing that explicitly insinuates anything but a legal venture on the part of your customers. Services such as Furthurnet (http://www.furthurnet.net) offer legally downloadable music files from bands that allow taping and trading of their shows -- everywhere from The Black Crowes and The Grateful Dead and Phish to some much more fringe bands (like "The Screaming Cheetah Wheelies") that people might be interested in downloading.
There *are* gigabytes of free, high-quality, and legal music out there. Putting together a song library over the Internet is certainly a great use of the services you provide your customers, and doesn't "cost" the RIAA a dime in "lost revenue".
Thanks for your time, and best of luck with your work.
Ruffin Bailey, SBC stockholder
When making sites for a line office at NOAA (US gov't office), I always wrote for two browsers. You have to write for Internet Explorer because it'd bring, even in NOAA where NS 4.7 was pretty much forced on you, 90% of your hits, and Mozilla/Netscape 6+ "for everyone else".
The most important thing about Mozilla, and what impressed me most with the excellent browser, is that Mozilla's behavor was the same across platforms when it came to Javascript, CSS, and other rendering. More importantly, rendering errors showed the same behavior in the same version of Mozilla, regardless of platform! That's impressive.
Sure, fonts, icons, etc are *slightly* different, but I made some pretty dhtml intensive stuff (click "Query Storms") that behaved exactly the same on Linux on Windows, Linux, and both Mac OS 8-9 & OS X.
You basically have two choices. Make a Google-like site with such simple html that it'll render correctly everywhere, even in Lynx, or program higher-end, thicker client, dhtml jive for IE and Moz. That covers the vast majority of your hits (IE) and will give the option to most anyone on an alternative OS to, at worst, download a free browser that'll behave exactly as you'd expect (Moz). (Okay, three choices -- make two sites. One's dumbed down for lynx, the other for IE/Moz.) Now you've covered Mac, Linux, and heavens knows what else just by testing, give or take, on Windows. Mozilla's good enough that it is a platform.
Check for DOM (document.all and document.layers), give a warning to anyone who doesn't conform, and feel good that you've give people who *need* to see your pages an option without wasting hours and hours testing and writing for browsers that will make up a very low volume of your visits. Yes, you potentially exclude Granny Smith on dial-up with Mac OS 8.1 or Joe Apple Diehard who only uses Safari and won't even touch Camino, but let's face it, you're better off spending that time writing a new site and reaching 99% of a new audience anyhow.
Good luck!
From The Reg:
;^)
Under the terms of his release, Lamo's future wanderings will be confined to the northeastern half of California, and southern New York state, unless he gets prior approval of the court to travel elsewhere.
Hrm. Wandering from NE Cali to south NY w/out going anywhere inbetween would seem about as easy a commute as getting from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
Then they tell the fellow he can't use a computer but has to get full-time employment! I imagine anyone savvy enough to Slashdot can see the irony there.
To completely switch gears, did anyone else find it weird that a paper would have SS#'s for people who have written op-ed pieces [for Lamo to find]? I suppose that implies they were *paid* for the pieces, but it still seems a bit strange.
The first version of 1.4.1 for OS X was obviously shooting for enterprise users. Headless apps worked well, and there was even a new way of opening apps that wouldn't create icons on the dock to support headless apps in a seamless, usre friendly fashion.
:a bleChild(IntegerInterleavedRaster.java:462)d (IntegerInterleavedRaster.java:516). getRaster(FastGradientPaintContext.java:53). access$100(FastGradientPaintContext.java:37)r (FastGradientPaintContext.java:142)v a:718)
As a shareware client app developer who targets the Mac, I've been watching Apple's JVM from a different angle. 1.3.1 was a nice VM, and with the Aqua look and feel I've had some comments that assumed my Java application was native.
Now as a client app maker, I was looking forward to Java 1.4.1 on OS X for, of all things, mousewheel support. I got that, but I also got a number of issues with any look and feel *other* than Aqua. Menus didn't paint correctly at times, text sometimes didn't paint the way I expected in JTextAreas, and after a few checks I decided it was better to continue to shoot for the 1.3.1 VM rather than rip my code apart to get around OS X-specific quirks. Headless apps might have worked great, but Swing, Java's "de facto GUI toolset of choice" didn't. Comments about JBuilder (it seems the most popular client apps in Java other than Limewire are Java IDEs for all those headless app makers) in this thread help support that.
If you didn't catch that, I said I targetted 1.3.1 even after the 1.4.1 release. That's right, Apple had enough problems in 1.4.1 (my spin) that they left two nearly mutually exclusive JVMs on each OS X system after upgrade. New Macs wouldn't ship with just 1.4.1. Developer tools allowed and allow developers to force applications to run under just 1.3.1 if they'd prefer. Apple wasn't (isn't?) quite ready to put all the eggs in one basket. Aside -- I wonder if Panther will ship with just 1.4.1?
From what I've seen of this VM after a few minutes of testing suggest that I might be able to release a new version of my app that uses the latest VM installed, which would be great. That said, the Kunststoff Look & Feel, a relatively trivial extension of the standard Swing Metal (or "Java") Look & Feel still ain't happy out of the box. A few lines from its song when running my app under 1.4.1, new update, below:
apple.awt.EventQueueExceptionHandler Caught Throwable
java.awt.image.RasterFormatException: y lies outside raster
at sun.awt.image.IntegerInterleavedRaster.createWrit
at sun.awt.image.IntegerInterleavedRaster.createChil
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext$Gradient
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext$Gradient
at com.incors.plaf.FastGradientPaintContext.getRaste
at apple.awt.CSurfaceData.setupPaint(CSurfaceData.ja
Fwiw, here are the versions of the old 1.4.1 and the new:
prompt% java -version
java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-39)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-14, mixed mode)
prompt% java -version
java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-69.1)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-24, mixed mode)
Interesting to note that Apple is still behind. 1.4.1_02 and 1.4.1_05 have been released by Sun for some time now. Not a big deal, but a little evidence that, though OS X's "built-in" Java support is the best you'll find in an OS, it's hardly "latest and greatest".
The casinos are offering a game, a distraction, a form of entertainment. Do I get mad when my Playstation "cheats" and scores on some insane 99-yard bomb after getting to 3rd and 24 in NCAA 2004? Heck yeah. But if I don't like the odds, I don't have to play.
Same thing here. The rules say don't count cards. You can until you get caught. Now it's easier to get caught. Though we'd love to think the customer is always right, it's certainly the owner of the establishment's right to toss whoever they'd like. And the bottom line is, as always, it seems, vote with dollars. Don't like cameras counting cards? Go to the casino that doesn't do it!
The real issue isn't how this changes the game, but how this changes privacy. If they can tell you had 7 drinks before hopping back into your Hummer that you quickly plow into the side of the Bellagio -- or that you were playing and arrived and left three tables with the same woman, who wasn't your sig other, well, now, that's a little scary, isn't it?
But even reusing characters is, in many ways, a cop-out. Same reason so many TV shows start with a known character from another show (you know, Joni loves Chaci (sp?) Syndrome). Perhaps it's a very novel and creative show, but the point is that people are still banking on that name recognition and brand familiarity.
To me, that's by definition not as original as creating a new game from scratch. I'll readily admit that I haven't tried Wario Ware, but just hearing Wario conjures up certain connotations -- and from the description on IGN Pocket, we do have a relatively kid-friendly, arcade action game, as random as it might be.
The bottom line is that Nintendo, even when they have something quite nearly wholly original, has to tag the game with a character simply for name recognition, aka "$$$". This is no Incredible Crisis, for better or worse.
And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, what does ole johnC do from QuakeCon?
John Carmack: I thought it would be kind of neat if we took the DOOM renderer, and we had a team take previous games-don't touch the game, just revamp it graphically. Just take Quake II, and just use the DOOM engine to make brand new graphic models and everything. But don't spend time messing with the gameplay because we know that is pretty good. Just release it as Quake II Remix with brand new graphics technology and sell it at a middle-level price instead of a boutique price.
I thought that was a pretty good idea.
Super. As if updating Resident Evil for GameCube wasn't enough, now we might have the exact same freakin' gameplay from Quake 2 back again. Goldeneye, Team Fortress, Action Quake, SOCOM were all great strides over the state of current fps. Be a little adventurous! Least Carmack's fair enough that he's not looking for people to pay more than $20 or so for it.
Even if the point seems so small to you as to be useless, gaming companies simply aren't, as a whole, taking all that many risks. Perhaps the US is so steeped in capitalism that we just don't care any more, but I think the article points out fairly well that there is very little pure originality for pure originality's sake.
Apple integrates the many apps together with publically accessible APIs, so that other people may do the same.
Careful how you bash Microsoft. It's fun, and I'm using Jaguar this minute to post, but nobody does a better job exposing APIs to the public than Microsoft and COM.
Guess how long it takes to make a web browser in Visual Basic 6? Seconds if you know what control to use (Microsoft Internet Control) -- and seconds if you don't; there's a pre-built form you can add from the Project-Add Form menu item. How long to add Media Player? Seconds. How about automate Excel or Word? Those are a little more complicated, but only b/c of their more complicated APIs.
(And yes, I know about cocoa and embedding browsers)
Don't get me wrong. I don't like Microsoft's silly claims that they can't take IE out of Windows OS. I hate the way they embrace and extend. I hate the way they aggresively go after smaller businesses and spend them out of existence. (imo, etc)
But when it comes to making something quickly that communicates between two application engines, whether first or third party, you won't get any more robust a solution than VB6. MS loves opening up their APIs. Means every one of your users will also have to pay the Windows Tax.
Certainly it's cheaper to get the Xserve sans OS X. From the article -- "We're the only Apple reseller on the planet with a licence to install a non-Apple operating system," says Staats.
Regardless I always thought the whole Apple advantage was the way having hardware and OS under one roof allowed you to make great "gestaltic" solutions. Why pay the Xserve premium and get G4 powered rack hardware to install an OS that's available for cheaper, and argueably better supported, x86 hardware? (And I've been a Mac user for over a decade and even tried out YDL and LPPC a couple of times... this isn't flame bait.)
Still, either Yellow Dog must be doing *something* better than Red Hat is (maintenance price?) or they must be running something that was designed *explicitly for* AltiVec.
lifetime of an average CD drive is about a week without break and at full speed and only thanks to stopping frequently and lowering read speed,
;^)
Interesting stats at tubegirl nonwithstanding (ack!), I find the claim of a week tops for a CD drive incredibly low. I mean, I've got the thing running tunes from mp3 and straight audio CDs pretty much 8+ hours a day at work, and have left the blamed things on overnight more than once. And my home tower used the same 4x CD drive for years until I finally shelled out for a CD-R a few months ago. Admittedly, mp3 & audio CDs aren't full-speed affairs, but a week just sounds way too low.
Also wonder how much space the OS really needs. If you've got a CD worth of 0s and 1s, that's less than a gig we're talking about, so you could, in theory, keep it all in RAM with just a quick upgrade.
At any rate, as long as they didn't completely cheese out buying crappy drives, I'd imagine it'd last a while after all, and it's hard to get much more secure than that. Hacked? Hrm, for the time being, just reset power!
(Fwiw, I have heard pretty bad stories about some CD-R drives going bad overly quickly when they're used as your main/only drive and running at high speeds. Perhaps you were referring to that?)
I tend to agree with the assertion that you don't need sendmail on OS X; that's what Mail.app is for.
.Mac account, so I was awfully impressed with OS X's desire to get my mail through, rain, sleet, hail, or whatever the bytes were doing today.
The only time I've had a problem with my ISP's own smtp server, Mail.app automatically asked if I didn't want to use smtp.mac.com to send my mail. I don't have a
That said, Commando-ing the command line is nearly always a good thing. Setting up a sendmail server is pretty neat for people who might not use Mail.app (wacky mutt users!) or are Darwin diehards -- or just command-line curious. Between Fink and apps like this, you can do what you used to have to be a BSD expert to achieve.
But check Mail.app out again if you're using something else now. It's a much better app now than it was in OS X 10.0, when it was a pretty simple tech preview of the Address Book and spellcheck Cocoa textareas. And with Panther, the app seems to only be getting better.
How much does it cost me to get an IP address for a year? About $150 including server space.
Where I used to work (on-site gov't contractor) each machine had a "real IP". That's nothing 192.168.1.* can't fix. The issue is with the way people purchase huge blocks of IPs at once. If we'd stop selling 134.*.*.* to one entity, we'd be fine for a while longer.
From one of the linked articles:
In one solution, a single IP address is assigned to an entire network, which then gives out its own addresses to the devices attached to it.
But such approaches are not long-term solutions, said Alex Lightman, chairman of a conference... to discuss the next generation of IP addressing, known as Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6.
I think Mr. Lightman is being a bit alarmist. There's no reason any ISP needs more than one IP.
At any rate, as long as any schmoe can go and purchase an IP at an ISP/web host for nuttin', I can't imagine we're even close to out and that there aren't millions of IPs that we can consolidate before we get so alarmist.
Welp, I admit it. Looks like I was wrong. An AOL-supported Mozilla is dead.
What does this mean for the OS X AOL client? That's the one thing (Gecko-based OS X client is already out there) that made me think AOL'd keep going. Looks like IE 7 (or whatever) is going to have some really neat stuff. Enough that the MS licensing agreement with AOL makes it a good idea for AOL to kill Gecko as a back-up engine for its software.
Maybe the Safari embeddable engine is easy enough to use that AOL is going that way. Or maybe AOL OS X's engine will just fold up into proprietary software. The MPL allows that.
I don't feel *that* badly. AOL, whether it meant to or not, pulled the plug, strangely enough, immediately after Moz became the best browser on the market. That's good timing from where I'm sitting -- which is in front of a monitor, posting with Mozilla/Firebird.
Check the 970's specs on page two of this article at IBM [pdf]. Looks like the 970 sucks juice like you wouldn't believe. (Compare to the G3. No wonder iBooks and their 5-6 hour battery life (and I can attest to that) are the last Macs to use 'em)
Power consumption's not an issue with towers. BIG issue with laptops. PowerPC 970 laptops are not going to happen this week. This is a server chip, folk. Xserve, perfect fit. PowerMac, why not? Laptops, a dual G4 would be neat, but I don't think we'll see that or a G5 "to go". I'd like to eat crow on this one, but I don't *think* I will.
Last post!
Does anyone really think Microsoft killed IE for OS X because of Safari? That's backwards. Safari was created in large part to make IE unessential. It's a smart move by Apple, and all MS has done is make the obvious official.
IE for Mac - Great in OS 9; so slow that it was almost unusable in OS X. In comparison to other browsers it felt more like a beta release.
Obviously you've already blacked OS X 10.0 out of your head, where IE was pretty much the only application that didn't seem like it hadn't made it out of alpha testing just just. And yes, I did use OmniWeb then. There was a reason OmniWeb was so popular for a while; it was the only non-MS browser we could even consider using (admittedly its spellchecking textareas is pretty cool). Heck, it was nearly the only non-MS application that was reasonably usable and OS X native, Mail.app included.
Regardless, MS software for the Mac has always been top rate in my experience. IE Mac was leaps and bounds better than anything else on OS 9, and was even more standards compliant than the contemporary IE 5 on Windows! IE for OS X still handles many sites better than Safari, and I occasionally go back when all else fails. Outlook Express is still my favorite mail handler I've used short of Em@iler. Office on the Mac has also been a top rate product for years.
Hey, it's fun to bash Windows. It's arguably an unfair, predatory monopoly. But the MacBU really does do great work for our "other OS". I'm sorry to see IE go, strangely enough.
I said it was deprecated not dead. Deprecated means that Apple is not going to support new developments for OS 9.
But you're just playing into the original point. On OS 9, the "commercial powers that be" have killed development, yet there's still a sizable community. I'd have to imagine the OS 9 community is as large or larger than the Linux desktop community. But has anyone stepped up to keep Mozilla going? They don't even have to code all that much; "just" fix bugs that occur in the OS 9 build system (which is kinda nasty, but that's beside the point).
A fairly large community was not able to keep Mozilla afloat on their platform without AOL's money. Now that nobody in AOL is tasked with making the OS 9 build, it's dead. Money leaves, product dies.
Mozilla will continue on Linux even if AOL pulls support all together (though Konqueror ain't bad), but I'd predict that the speed with which Mozilla would move along would slow considerably.
And if there's no reason for AOL to use Gecko in its Windows client and Netscape keeps as small a percentage of the browser market as it does (making there little money to be made there), the reasons for a commercial company with a bottom line to keep Mozilla subsidized drops by a huge margin. As I see it, the only reason AOL would want to keep Moz around is for the OS X AOL client -- its already shipping, which shows a huge investment -- and for a partnership with some flavor of Unix for the long-term grand-plan of an "AOL OS". If Safari becomes as easy to use when programming as the Microsoft Internet Control, I think OS X AOL uses the Safari engine in their client and the short-term value to AOL for keeping Mozilla around is nearly nil.
Though I don't see how it's different than when I use the Microsoft Internet Control in VB6 for free, my first thought when I heard IE was going to AOL royalty free was, "Scary that Mozilla belongs to 'em."
My second: Maybe the Mac OS X AOL client, which already uses Gecko, will keep Mozilla around.
Now the real question will be whether Apple's Safari (and its spin on khtml) can modularize like IE's engine (the Internet Control) to the point that Mozilla is moot on OS X as well. If that happens, Mozilla is in real trouble. Think I'm kidding? Seen any recent builds of Mozilla for Mac OS 9 recently? Not that you'll ever kill Mozilla completely, but if AOL pulls funding it won't be the same fast moving [sic; think about how big a project it really is!] project it is now.
In any event, this move makes the OS X client release seem a much smarter move. "See, we don't need you [someplace you don't exist]; we could trash you on Windows too! And then partner with Lindows!" Good leverage.
from here:
In a nutshell, you can play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.
Anybody know what that means, exactly? Neat concept, but on a quick browse of Apple's site, I wasn't real sure what the restrictions were.
Also wonder when we'll see Win-iTunes. iPod went "both ways" officially. Will Apple move a little iLife over to the enemy to make a little more cash?
I've always been impressed with descriptions of Window's technologies while they're being developed. Like it or not, Microsoft has -- and can afford to pay and retain -- some of the smartest minds in the field. I'd love to work with these guys, who seem to be open to using standards and who don't have so much FUD in their eyes or are so egotistical they can't learn from the *nixes.
The problem is that all these bright ideas go through Microsoft's "profit maximization machine" at some point and we get "embrace and extend" and other fun phonomena. I'll stop before I get back into that tired rant.
At any rate, here are two lessons learned -- by MS -- from *nixes, quoted from the article on the command line server. "Windows core technology guru Rob Short" says...
We'll be able to patch probably two thirds of the components without shutting the system down. That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
Later a quote on Linux:
[Question] Why is there no command line only version?
[Short's answer] We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter.
Hrm, is there a suit in the works? XP already piles windows into the taskbar after you, say, open up three Windows Explorer windows or Mozilla or what-have-you.
Sure, these are piles of windows, not files, and you can't cut them into separate decks (how long before we're playing a new type of solitaire on Mac desktops?), but it's funny watching two giants -- or at least two commerical OS makers -- rush to get this paradigm into different parts of their GUIs first. I doubt Apple could win a suit against Microsoft for the windows piling, but it's a pretty similar beast.
Any prior art in this one? Seems like Linux likes to anticipate cool features in some obscure application somewhere. Anybody seen other piles of things similar to piles?
As an aside, I can see why Apple had the idea of piles first. One day I selected all of the email addresses in my Em@iler address book and "drug and dropped" them to BBEdit Lite. I missed, and they landed on the desktop in, that's right, a giant pile of text clippings. Took me forever to get them off for some reason -- seems I could only grab so many at a time. Gotta imagine something similar happened to somebody brighter than me at Apple and *poof*, piles are patented.
When reading the specs I initially thought about the same thing. Even though the high end is 80% faster than my 500 MHz iBook and has 24 more megs of VRAM, there isn't anything screaming for me to upgrade. No Airport extreme, no G4, no screamin' fast Firewire upgrades, no higher screen resolution, no G4, and sure as heck no Superdrive, not that I expected one.
But for a new/prospective Mac user, the iBook continues to be a great value. The things really do have five hours of battery life. The design is wonderful, especially the 12" model, which is noticibly smaller and easier to carry than most of the x86 notebooks I see coworkers and students lugging around. And 802.11 reception with the built-in antennae puts PCMIA cards to shame. What's more, the 32 meg video card means you get to take advantage of Quartz Extreme. All together, the performance of OS X on a new iBook -- 80% faster than the iBook I'm using now (which, though slow, is my daily-use PC, not the 2 GHz P4 with WinXP sitting next to it) *plus* Quartz Extreme -- has to be decent for your typical home user, which is what the "i" in iBook is all about.
The only place I can fault my old iBook is the speed of running complicated Java apps, like Java-based IDEs, which suggests to me I was in the market for a *Power*book all along, whether I come around to admitting it or not. Same with anything that needs a G4. If you're editing video 50% of the time your laptop's powered on, you need a Powerbook. For consumer needs -- email, browsing, word processing -- the iBook was and is the perfect laptop.
And heck, when was not wanting to upgrade a bad thing? It's nice to finally have a Mac that doesn't feel horribly obsolete in a few years!
It's worth mentioning that even Sun comes down hard on AWT/Swing, and shows some of its flaws in their own report, The AWT Focus Subsystem.
.NET continues the intuitive GUI design Windows developers came to expect in the VB IDEs.
Sun even has the guts to plainly state that Windows GUI techs in C++ and VB are improvements over Java options in the following section:
In addition, many developers noted that the APIs for FocusEvent and WindowEvent were insufficient because they did not provide a way for determining the "opposite" Component involved in the focus or activation change...
Since Microsoft Windows provides this functionality for free, developers migrating from Microsoft Windows C/C++ or Visual Basic to Java had been frustrated by the omission. (emph mine)
I believe Windows.Forms in
C# certainly took lessons from Java, and now Sun is returning the favor. The above document deals mostly with changes to GUI techs in Java 1.4 and flaws in 1.3 and prior, but this new survey at Sun makes me hopeful that Sun might, indeed, go back to the drawing board.
As Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. said in The Mythical Man-Month , always "Plan to Throw One Away"!
Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient.
Why is Gecko allowed to undergo fairly hefty changes? Easy. Apple's release of Safari brought attention to KHTML. Heck, Mac rumor sites had all but crowned Chimera (now Camino), based on Gecko, into the OS as the default browser. Then wham, out of left field, here's Safari.
Why did such a large company go away from what the open source community considered the gold standard, Mozilla and its technologies? KHTML was a smaller codebase than Gecko, and easier for a new project to make completely their own. That's right, there was a better open source alternative out there most people had never really thought about.
People started talking about KHTML, Safari, Mozilla, and Gecko. Apple managed to shine a new light on what had been seen as acceptable without question because of, get this, a lack of competition (!) in the open source browser community. Until the little man came on the scene, Mozilla and its Gecko brethren had a near monopoly on the "not-IE" browser market.
So the next time someone wants to know what Apple's given the open source community after taking BSD for the core of its new OS, you'll know what to tell them. Not only has Apple open sourced Darwin and checked their improvements back into KHTML, they've also provided a competitive peer for Mozilla and other open source projects.
Nice round numbers, all multiples of $5 billion, and all numbers that are well short of anything resembling a reasonable amount to start making a dent in the current system.
I googled up this recent article that says OPEC is producing 24.5 million barrels of oil a day. At $40 a barrel, that's $980 million a day spent on oil around the world. Let's say we take a quarter of that into the US (it's more, iirc). That's a quarter billion a day in oil alone, without touching infrastructure, etc.
$100 billion is going to "... shift the balance of power from foreign oil producers to US energy consumers within a decade"?? Forget it. "The White House should ask for $5 billion - roughly $30,000 for each of the nation's 176,000 filling stations - to get the ball rolling"?? Get the ball rolling? The authors of this article want station owners to install something for which there's zero consumer demand -- and then only have the government subsidize enough to get the ball rolling?
How much is the government going to pay to give everyone a car that uses this new fuel? And once everyone's driving, what is the government going to do about all the other products that use petroleum? Cars in driveways are just the beginning, and filling stations aren't even that.
These numbers might sound big to us individually, but taken in context they are a drop in the bucket. If switching from oil to hydrogen was that easy, we'd've done it long ago.