People are willing to pay extra for a Mac because it just works and makes you more productive.
If by productive you mean, "Up and running quickly," then I'd agree 100%. The OS and the iApps are great one-button-friendly environments where anybody can start harnessing the power of their new PC within an hour of pulling the box inside of their front door.
But more productive overall? We've got two routes here: Apps that are included with a new box, and all apps available for the system. I'm going to assume the same standards I was using before and that I assume you were: the OS and bundled apps. If you want to comapre app by app, you can put together a realtively competitive suite in either OS if you're savvy enough.
Mac OS and a Mac's bundled software is easy to use, but lacks many of the power-user features people might expect. Here are the three that get to me most often.
* File navigation is a pain in the Finder. Windows Explorer, simply by providing a command line integrated with the GUI (alt-d) really puts the finder to shame. And Windows' File Dialog box (when opening and saving) has all sorts of keyboard and mouse shortcuts for quickly getting functions done that the Finder can't touch.
* Keyboard navigation is often overlooked in Apple's products, and as a software developer I'm a big fan of not using the mouse and slowing myself down.
* Apple's refusal to allow multi-document interfaces keeps things easy for the newbie, but there are still times where I'd like to have child windows running within a parent. Same reason people enjoy VirtualPC or Mac-on-Linux, but it holds for applications as simple as SQurirreL SQL, which, being Java, luckily can still do MDI.
Hey, when I get home I fire up my Mac. I like the OS/environment quite a bit more than Windows overall. But when I'm programming, the above three (plus speed of applications -- when programming GUI'd Java apps, the Mac is at a real speed disadvantage) make me sell back out to Bill.
TextWrangler is a tweener that's not all that practical. The problem boils down to the fact that BBEdit Lite is free, BBEdit is worth the money if you need an UltraEdit equivalent on the Mac, and the in-between niches are already fairly well taken up by other free alternatives. Luckily for BareBones, I think they just have to pick out some bits of BBEdit and they can "release" TextWrangler more or less for free. It's not like they're really out anything for releasing this, and it brings the flagship a little more exposure (and highlights some of its lesser known features).
Most of the features (which can be found listed in comparison to BBEdit Lite here) aren't things you'll need in a true text editor. I mean come on, how much code do you hack that's in Unicode? Rather, of the people that do hack code, how many of *them* need Unicode? And if you're hacking Unicode and need spellcheck (ie, not coding at all), well, you're better off (if only b/c you saved $50) just using TextEdit (Apple's free text/rtf editor) anyway.
The feature of TextWrangler I like the most is "Optional Emacs keybinding support". Heh. If you want Emacs keybinding, I think I can find something that'll do that in an even more Emacs-like fashion.
If you need a powerful text editor that's Mac friendly, shell out for BBEdit. I just can't see there being much middle ground. But again, from BareBones point of view, they're out next to nothing and get to have all the coverage of a "brand new text editor".
First off, just to clear this up... soon to get easier with the X11 on Max OS X
X has been on X for quite some time. You could fink it if you wanted, or, if you want something even easier, you could XonX it or xdarwin it.
What's new, of course, is Apple's X11. That Apple would Aquafy X11 is really a great step forward, and hopefully means that -- and this is key -- Apple will start shipping Macs with X11 preinstalled.
Just as OS X's built in Java Virtual Machine makes OS X a first-rate Java deployment platform as Java apps look and act native without a single end user consideration about VMs, soon OS X could be a first-rate, well-integrated client-side deployment platform for open source software. Most importantly, this will continue to add new developers to open source movements, and that can't be bad. Even if Apple doesn't share everything they do, the fact that you'll have people used to making client-side apps increasingly contributing to open source projects is a great thing.
Not to mention that I've been impressed with what Apple's give back to the oss community, even though they technically often have no reason at all to do so. They've made Darwin open source, and have worked with the BSDs to share code that they have no pressing legal reason making them do so. Safari's updates to KHTML continue to be checked back in to the Konquerer source code by this paid Apple employee, which is another great move.
The only way I see Apple's new love of oss possibly being a bad thing is that Apple tends to hire the best away from open source projects and slap them onto Apple-first ones. Though this is great in that these people feel connected to the oss community, it has to shift their attention away from Linux and other F/free *NIXes a bit.
But more developers, especially good client-app developers, is a good thing, and having Apple return their contributions to the community is icing on the cake.
I think you can follow links to the rest of the review as easily I as I can paste them.:^)
I believe the most interesting bit is how well the dual processor 533 G4 holds up against the 800 MHz and 1 GHz G4 upgrades with many tasks. In Quake 3 and many other tasks that can take advantage of multiprocessing, the 533 DP comes out ahead of one or both of the two upgrades (depending on how efficient the DP support is).
Apple has not done the entry level any favors taking out the second processor, I'm afraid.
Though it doesn't go into technology much, I expect there's a lot of potential in mass OCR tech and good speech recognition (faster to read a book aloud than to transcribe it correctly).
Was thinking about voice recognition today while lamenting that I haven't done more to type in my copy of The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas, copyright 1910.
Here are two problems that came to mindn why I probably won't be able to use voice recog soon: 1.) Works who have been lucky enough to actually have their copyright lapse are often pretty old works. Their English (let's use English just b/c it's the lang I'm using) isn't exactly today's English, and sometimes even spellings, etc, change. Try reading anything from the 1800s and before.
2.) Names (so any protracted dialog) and other tough-to-translate stuff is going to be a pain to proofread. My book in particular has quite a bit of French in it (lots of "Parbleu" and French names with crazy accents all over the place).
I'd like to say voice recog could produce a "new version" with "updated spellings", but I just don't think that'd fly.
So once voice recog is commonplace for, say, office use (still quite a ways off) and affordable (not sure there, but I haven't heard of a friend using it yet, even just to play) we'll still have a ways to go before we can get true literature into PG simply by reading.
As an aside, at the same time I've been thinking about simply taping me reading the book and donating *that* via mp3 (or Ogg or whatever the heck). For the time being anyone who wants can listen in the car, and as soon as voice recog is up to snuff, voila. Just run it on my recording, proofread (easier said than done), and you're ready to go!
I thought I was looking forward to this announcement. I'd been eying an 867 G4 dual processor Powermac built-to-order with a Superdrive for a while, but wanted to hold on to my cash and wait for the next speed bump, hoping a DP 1 GHz model at yesterday's 867 DP price was right around the corner.
Well, the speed bump hasn't come. The entry level model, incredibly, has less "power to burn" now than before, with a single 1 GHz G4 processor. Sure the price is lower, but from what I've seen at the Durham, NC Apple store comparing single processor e & iMacs against the DP Powermacs, OS X still needs that second processor and its extra processor power. Now I have to shell out for the much more expensive to "Faster" Powermac to get the power I want (programming Java with iTunes and other apps running in the background, running iDVD, and, well, okay, I admit it, playing Doom3).
You can get 867 DP Powermacs for cheap at MacMall et al now, sure, but with built-to-order Superdrive? Nope. Entry-level options that include Superdrives have just gotten a lot worse, not better.
(Mind you, the "true power Powermac users" still get a great speed bump. I just wish it'd trickled down to people looking at the look end. And if I can hide the receipt from the rest of the fam, it might do exactly as Apple intended as have me throw down an extra $200 on my next Macintosh [to get the DP].)
Bring out yer dead? Hope not -- I'm using it.
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Is Client-Side Java Dead?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Swing (Sun's tech that lets you create GUIs the same xplat) stinks. But even Sun admits it, and (see the same link) they are doing something about it. Swing is no longer "a way for database apps to display debugging information in X11".
I'm still hoping for a Swing replacement from Sun that'll ship with its java virtual machines, but until then we have IBM's SWT which ties the widgets much more closely to native counterparts and Apple's attempts to merge Swing directly to native GUI widgets. We're nowhere close to Windows.Forms yet, but Swing's not so bad that you can't get the hang [notice I didn't say Swing] of things quickly.
The point being that you have options. Once you get the hang of Window Managers (doesn't take long) and creating some sort of Model for everything (from sorting tables to adding new values to lists), you can do complicated layouts that work xplat more quickly in the text editor of your choice than you could hack up a static UI (ie, that doesn't resize well) in the Visual Basic IDE -- which, as everyone knows, is really what makes VB GUIs "so easy".
(Aside: Even more importantly would be a standards-compliant parallel to what Microsoft's Web Forms does for IE... a quick, smart widget toolkit for the web. A "JWeb Forms" for JSP would do a lot to enable smart web-enabled UIs to Java web services.)
And there's nothing about Java that stops it from being a great client-side language short of Swing. Moore's Law and clever JIT VMs have pretty much done away with any show-stopping speed issues. Another hurdle is the fact that Java only compiles to bytecodes, making [even commercial] apps trivial to decompile, but if you look at VB 7 (aka, VB.NET) and C#, Java's most closely related competitors, they've got the same problems.
And sure, Java is more "Write once, test everywhere" than "... run everywhere", but you're not going to find an easier port from one platform to the next than Java. It commoditzes the user's operating system, and that's a great thing.
And heck, I'm using it. At least I'm putting my money where the keyboard is.
Okay, we've got the first post on Apple's Discussion boards at (Posted Jan 8, 03 3:35 am) and the bug report has made it to Slashdot by 4:37 EST, I assume. The "world" knows about this problem, and has for hours.
I'm upset for a number of reasons. Hey, this is a beta, sure. As a software developer myself, a huge bug that doesn't turn up until you let someone else take a look is, unfortunately, expected. The Chinaman (Big Lebowski screenplay here if you missed the reference)... ur, bug's not the issue here, dude.
Here's what's wrong -- we've got 300,000 people who prefer mice with one button a hair's breath away from erasing pretty important folders. We can hardly expect they've backed everything up. Here are three reasons Apple's more than just dropped the ball...
1.) Fire up Software Update in OS X. We've come to expect IE updates here. There's nothing about a Safari update. 2.) Go back to apple.com/safari. Try to download. Same version they released right after the keynote. No fix offered. 3.) There's not even a mention about the problem on the Safari project lead's blog, though there are mentions that they've fixed the appearence of VersionTracker's front page (Admittedly, I sent that bug in yesterday with probably literally thousands of others). Can they really not be aware of the directory-erasing problem?
Look, this is worse than MSN Messenger going down for five hours due to human error. So what if I can't IM? I'll finally get some work done. With Safari, there are people reporting that they're losing their iPhoto set-ups, their Documents folders, and even their entire home directory. Expecting Joe iPhoto user to reattach symbolic links is a bit much, folks.
It's embarassing, even if this is some sort of strange hoax (which it certainly doesn't seem to be) that Apple's not on top of things. More than mud in Apple's eye, this is nearly scandal.
In the software section of the website detailing the new, tiny Powerbook, IE is off of OS X's Dock and Safari is on. Keynote is a PowerPoint replacement made by Apple.
What you should be wondering is not just whether Apple is trying to compete with Microsoft (and to end its dependence on MS for such a key piece of its OS as the browser) but if Microsoft has started warning Apple that it's going to leave. IE is still listed on the same software page, which doesn't mention Safari by name. There's some posturing going on here, and I'm not real sure what the motives are.
Fwiw, been testing Safari. Super-fast with a clean interface, but doesn't do nearly as good/mature a job displaying hard core dhtml as Mozilla, and therefore Chimera. Good freshman effort, but Apple better not stop at version 1.0.
For legal to own and trade music, try Furthurnet
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P2P Software for the Mac?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Furthurnet is probably my favorite that runs on OS X. Bands that allow taping (and they're more numerous than you'd think. Phish, The Dead, and The Black Crowes are there, but so is everything from Louis Armstrong to the Beasties) are traded freely on this app, and I've grabbed more than 35 gigs of tunes. Most serious traders use Shorten format (.shn), which is a lossless compression format that brings that patch from the soundboard right down onto your Mac's hard drive, no questions asked. You can translate these into aiff or wav files pretty easily, and burn CDs right from iTunes.
Furthurnet's UI and search protocol (borrowed originally from Gnutella, I believe) could use a little spiffing up, but it's a GPL'd, ad-free application that works great once you're used to it. I haven't gotten online yet and failed to find at least one show within a few minutes of searching for whatever artist strikes my fancy (though admittedly Doc Watson is about as esoteric as I get).
Course if you're just looking for warez, I haven't helped at all, but if you want some great tunes for free via your new-found love of the Mac, you can't get any better than Furthurnet.
"PS" If Limewire is running too slowly, it might be a "Java problem". Make sure your app has an Aqua look & feel to take advantage of Apple's JVM's hardware accelerated GUI widgets. Having a video card that supports Quartz Extreme would help a bit as well.
"PPSS" In what little spare time I find I have (when I'm not writing this post), I've been trying to port Furthurnet to Mac OS 9-. Had some luck, but nothing to release just yet. So if you're not using OS X, upgrade.:^D
The electronic stamp - a pattern of bits attached to the message - costs the sender some amount of money. The recipient (or the recipient's mail software) can examine the value of the stamp and, based on that, decide whether to read the message.
Super. Look folks, I still get hoards of snail mail spam every day that I have to sift through, the printing fees of some of which far exceeds the 30 for postage. Will we get as many spams about pleasing pudenda under this scheme? Probably not, but we'll still get spam.
And what's more, if and when this becomes the standard, we'll have to start paying to send all these quick emails to our friends and relatives. Yet another marketing scheme conquers what was once a free (and Free) Internet. I suppose it's time to start implementing POP4 based on Gnutella.
Spam filters are getting more and more intelligent every day. If they aren't good enough for you and you don't want spam, don't give out your private email address. But please oh please don't give away the last remnant of the free Internet. I see Microsoft and AOL warming up to getting thrown into the briar patch again.
I recently got fed up with an inefficiently-run government contracting position and decided if I wanted thinks right I was going to have to follow the proverb and do it myself. I've set up the home office about a month ago, and here are a few of the lessons/insights I got real quick.
1.) Getting started takes a LONG time. Even if you hack at home now in your free time, you're going to need a few days to get your office right. Getting your workstation to exactly mimic the productive suite you were used to at work will take a while. Getting a website to feature past experience and show off your new wares is going to take a while too (but will pay off in the long run). Now add overhead for buying office supplies and, much more importantly, registering your company with your local gov't to reduce liability, and you'll see you're not going into business immediately. Plan for at least a month of downtime at the start (or sprinkled around your first code) for you to get the infrastructure to *start* ready to go. (aka, "MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SOME MONEY SAVED FOR FOOD AND RENT!!!":^D)
2.) You're doing it *all* now. I'm able to finish bits of code much more quickly without the distractions of the water cooler (and intrusions into my cube), but once I'm done, now what? Marketing is no longer "the communications department's job". Nor is tech support someone else's responsibility. Nor polling the customer to see if I've hit the mark. Nor is handling the overhead if a customer is upset. All docs, all testing, all support, all "everything you didn't worry about when you were coding" is your responsibility. It's all you. Note that the side lesson is that if you can bring anyone with you -- or if you can use past contacts as subcontractors, that's a huge help while landing and when you finally land a big fish.
3.) Good luck finding the customer. Don't get the unrealistic idea that you're going to be able to spend all your time coding. As another poster pointed out, if you've already got work lined up, enjoy! But I recently spent about two and a half work-days on a 4 month job proposal which didn't get selected ("lack of previous experience" -- and I've been working in the field before this for 4 years! New companies are certainly at a disadvantage). That's time "down the drain" (though certainly I can cut and paste some of one proposal into the next), and you have to consider this as part of the cost of finding a guaranteed customer. In my "downtime" I'm writing a trialware application, but unlike contracts there's no guarantee anybody's going to want to buy. Don't underestimate how much work your current company is doing for you by finding the work.
4.) Multiply everything by three -- Time for projects, costs for supplies, costs for advertising and submitting proposals. I'm sure if you've worked more than a few years "in the real world" you've learned this one already (boy, I sure did), but it's worth keeping in mind. You're your manager now too, you know! Don't say you can name that tune in two months when it's going to take six. Having a poor experience with your first customer isn't going to help you find that second and third job.
That's the short lesson from my first month of working out of the home. It's fun, I get a ton done, all the code is done up to my personal expectations and written efficiently, but I'm still looking for my first "real" customer. Best of luck.
In a pretty regularly rerun interview with Campbell by Bill Moyers, Lucas is also interviewed and explores quite a bit that he "took" from Campbell for Star Wars, or at least where he agrees with Campbell's work. I remember catching it a while back on PBS (public TV in the US), and it was pretty interesting, though it peeved me Campbell acted like this was some discovery of his (see more at the end of this post).
Here's a copy of DVD. From the description on that site: Joseph Campbell: The Power Of Myth
Year: 2002 On Video: October 2, 2001 Starring: Joseph Campbell Bill Moyers George Lucas Genre: Documentary Synopsis: An interview with master storyteller and mythology professor Joseph Campbell. Features an interview with George Lucas exploring the mythology of Star Wars.
And all of this came from Carl Jung, who coined the term archetype, and had written volumes on the Wise Old Man years before Campbell was out of diapers.
If you recall, pre-Spawn Todd M. was working for Marvel. Believe me, nobody could touch his artwork in The Amazing Spider-Man (I believe there were other titles that came before). Before long, Todd was pencilling and inking, and understandably grew tired of his "new 9-to-5 box" (suggesting not his hours so much as the stagnation of his job).
Btw, and totally off-topic, even here Todd had webs flying like crazy around Spidey, especially when he was hanging upside-down, etc. The precursor to the chains...
His art was popular enough Marvel did their best to keep him, and gave him his own mag, "Spider-Man", sans prefix. I believe Todd got to write a few of these as well. But he didn't like the fact that his creative whims with Spidey were still kept in check by Marvel, and, iirc, Marvel was having a hard time paying him what he was worth.
*POOF* Todd goes solo and creates Spawn. What artist doesn't dream of a title where they have complete control, cradle to grave? It was several issues before Todd even let someone else do some artwork in the mag. I remember being surprised the first time I saw two names signed to a cover -- How could Todd let someone else control his "baby"?
Anyhow, heck, who in any field doesn't dream of being able to have final say-so on what happens at their job? If you want it done right [and have nobody to blame but you], do it yourself.
I would agree that Spawn's plot was often fairly juvenille (I haven't read in years, I'm afraid), but that's hardly the point. Todd can draw and dream up some pretty cool looking beasts, Spawn and Spidey being his two most popular. And this ability is so strong his success has bled right into other markets.
McFarlane is the Michael Jordan (or insert ball player of your generation) of comics, and what roundball player doesn't have a few inspirational pics of [a younger] Jordan tacked up on the wall?
The most important ramification of this move is that it decreases the need for people to role-play and meet others online to enjoy UO. People who make bows for catch fish for hours on hours in the early years of UO (and I was one) simply don't make [purely online-fantasy] friends easily! And that's what you have to do to really get ahead in UO, and is something that so many gripers here who played UO years ago haven't quite gotten. (That said, it took me money months and hours than I care to admit to figure it out myself.)
Once you partner up with a guild or just an experienced player, believe me, your scores will shoot up to what these folk are paying an extra $30 for in no time flat. Rich (in the virtual sense) UO characters/players abound, and freely give out the kinds of equipment and experience a newbie needs to get the kinds of scores you pay for now. A little online searching, emailing, and ICQ'n used the be the prerequisite for a good UO character, now $30 is -- but they won't have as much fun playing by themselves as old timers do adventuring with the people who gave them their start.
And heck, remember how long it takes you to get from an 85 skill to an 100 skill. I haven't played for about a year, but that's where you really put in your time. I'm not too worried about these people buying their way to 85.
Quick last point -- This kind of social gaming (Multi-User Shared Hallucination or MUSH) isn't for everyone. Obviously EA is trying to get make money than MUSH with this and other recent moves. The proverbial "casual gamer" isn't a MUSHer, but maybe some casual gamers will pay their $30 and get hooked. And that's a good thing [if they don't have gpa's or jobs to worry about:^D].
"The Myth of Superman" (& Star Trek too)
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Star Trek: Pick A Plot
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· Score: 5, Informative
Umberto Eco points this out in his article The Myth of Superman (I'm afraid a quick google only turned up this synopsis, not the whole text). Here are some key quotes from that link, and, I assume, the article (come on, it's been nearly six years since I've read it!:^D Maybe I did earn that B.A. degree after all...). I try to recall a few more important bits below.
Traditional mythic heroes were governed by a law, therefore these heroes were predictable and held no suprises for the audience.
... and...
Authors preferences are not considered when writing a novel. They are forced to write along the guidelines of a cultural model. In this case, "authors. ..construct on a small scale 'analogous' models which mirror the larger one."
Basically the deal was that if you started at A and went to B, you might pass through C or D or E but your story must end up at A again or you'll have spoiled the myth.
There's only so much a mythical figure can do (or mythos o' figures). Here are some of the more horrendous deviations from the "A leads to B leads to A again" that I can think of off-hand (a little Spidey-centric, I'm afraid):
* The brilliant folk at Marvel kill off Aunt May. (She's back now) * The brilliant folk at Marvel decide Spider-Man is really a clone. (The clones have all disappeared now) * The brilliant folk at DC kill off Superman and then have several return. (I think we're back to one, but I don't read Superman) * Patrick Duffy leaves Dallas.:^) (Last season was a dream!) * Felix Lieter (sp) has his leg eaten by a shark in Licensed To Kill. (Haven't fixed that yet, but they did ditch Dalton, even if it isn't his fault that movie stunk to high heaven)
This is why, I believe, these fictional stories rarely do things that are irreversable, like have Peter Parker age [much] or main characters get married (last I looked, Marvel was still struggling with that one, even having MJ disappear). It's also why shows tend to die after the leading man & woman get romanticly involved -- see Moonlighting. Or why they die when they switch tone -- see all those Carol Burnett[-esque] episodes later on in Magnum, P.I.
So, in one sense, the reason Star Trek is always the same is the same reason everyone was on pins and needles when Diane left Cheers.:^) Anyhow, it's no surprise Star Trek is often similar. It's part of the myth that "resonates with our archetypes". Hey, someone much smarter than me said that. Stop making fun.:^)
From the press release: All new Macs sold since January 2002 have had Mac OS X factory-set as the default operating system. Over 75 percent of customers using these Macs have elected to keep Mac OS X as their default operating system...
Is nobody at Apple paying attention to this number? When Jobs acted like this was a good thing at the last MacWorld Expo in NY, my jaw hit the floor. In spite of the fact that Mac OS X is the default boot OS on new Macs, Mac users were going out of their way to switch to OS 9 as their boot-up OS.
This means a lot, if you think about it.
* Obviously one-fourth of new Mac users are not using any OS X specific applications. There's no "Futuristic box" in OS 9 to parallel Classic in OS X.:^)
* This quarter of new Mac buyers aren't happy with the "Classic from within X" compromise, for whatever reason.
* This number doesn't count the people who simply don't know how to switch to OS 9 as their default boot disk. That might sound crazy, but in one usability test for our software, we had a user insert the CD upside-down, and not by accident but by ignorance. You can, unfortunately, never underestimate your spectrum of users. Think of how many new Mac users, if they knew of OS 9, might prefer it.
* This also means that the number of OS 9-only users is still pretty solid. Take the users of all the Macs out there now that are still running that won't run OS X -- even if all the people buying new Macs are old Mac users you're only reducing their numbers by 75% the number of new Macs sold. That's pretty slow. Heaven forbid some of that nearly 25% are new Mac users are choosing to boot into OS 9 from the start! It's a hard sale for Apple. The most users in the Mac market, believe it or not, are still on OS 9 or below.
Regardless, and in a complete Jekell/Hyde move, I think Apple's doing the right thing, at least from the point of view of Apple's continued financial success. People must be forced to move to the new OS for a couple of reasons. First, if the users move, the pushers (software developers) will follow. Second, if Apple wants to move to x86, they aren't going to be bringing Classic along with them.
I've actually been thinking about this a bit, and couldn't decide if I fell on the, "There's no way Apple's duplicating their efforts on x86; it's just not economic. They're already late releasing OS X and its updates as is," side or if I figured that "Motorola and IBM just aren't getting it together with the PowerPC; it might be time to jump ship".
I usually end up thinking that if Apple used x86, the OS would lose all its tricks that are G4 specific (particularly things that used the AltiVec instruction set). These are the things that it's used to make Photoshop run faster -- not to mention iMovie, iDVD, etc -- if the OS swapped over to another processor architecture. If a Mac is slow now, wait until it loses the one ace up its sleeve when it comes to digital video. Seems that'd shoot Apple's new niche (one-stop digital hub) all to heck.
Not to mention what the switch would mean for third parties that would have to recompile (again!) for the new platform. I doubt the Classic environment is making its way to x86! Not a big deal in itself, and a break from Classic would be super, but hang on... That probably means Carbon, the compatibility layer that helps apps written for Classic run natively on OS X, is also out. Now we're talking problems. Legacy 3rd party code is out the window in many cases.
I do wonder if Apple's gone so far as to utilize whatever's the equivalent of MMX in the Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon's instruction set to overcome the problems it'd suffer by switching (pardon the pun). I still can't imagine Carbon's x86 compatible. Cocoa ("new improved NextStep") would probably be all that would make the jump.
I suppose it can't be that tough to port if you limit to Cocoa, though. As people have pointed out before, Darwin's got an x86 version now and NextStep (the OS Apple bought that was supposed to turn into OS X a little more quickly) ran on x86 hardware. I always thought it'd be silly to duplicate all the effort of the tweaks Apple put into Next for PowerPC as they were already way behind on OS X without clear x86 plans, but perhaps those tweaks aren't as fancy or ugly as I'd assumed.
I still don't think this means Apple's leaving hardware, any way you slice it. There will be something, even in x86 Macs if they show up, that makes it so that you can't run OS X without quite a bit of custom hardware that Apple controls.
From the rebuttal, linked above... The point he's making seems to be that, sure, RadHat likes to be a big name in its field, like Starbucks or Microsoft or McDonalds, but no, it's not going to illegally wield monopoly powers. Then we move on to yet another possible reason why people might dislike RedHat and compare it to Microsoft:
That gets me a bit closer to the fear; a lock on 3rd party ISV support. Folks are afraid that they will only be able to get enterprise level apps on Red Hat Linux or Red Hat Linux Advanced Server. If that's the case, the question should be, "When will Red Hat become the Sun of Linux?".... And it's easy to answer. Right about the time we get into the hardware market. Current estimates put that two days after never.
You know, that's not such a bad idea at all. What if RedHat did get into the hardware market and wrote open source drivers for hardware that they'd patented -- and then would only provide enterprise support for these boxen? Sounds like a great idea to me, at least from a "free as in I still gotta eat" point of view. Pretty danged slick. I wonder if he just threw that out for some random reason, or if the idea has really been thrown around inside RedHat a time or two.
Annual minimum royalties are payable upon signature and each following year in January and are fully creditable against annual royalties. US$ 15 000.00 per calendar year.
Now that's a pain. I emailed them to see if I could get a "hobbyist license" for more per app, but without the $15k minimum (wanted to make "iTunes 3 for Classic Mac OS"). They allow you to release up to 5000 units of a game that uses mp3s royalty free, so I was hopeful. The reply? No dice. (I was impressed they sent a reply!)
DO ask for demos of working apps from previous jobs/schools. If they don't have anything working to show, they can't take a project, even a simple one, cradle to grave. You want self-starters who don't need constant supervision.
DO NOT make them solve brain-teasers on the spot, regardless of what joelonsoftware.com might say. I love brain teasers personally, but trying to get all the members of U2 across a bridge two at a time doesn't exactly translate. Reread number 1, and if they gave you their stuff, you're safe.
DO ask them to review code from your shop and tell you what they'd do differently. Whitespace, comments, logic that should be pulled into functions or other objects -- these are the kinds of things a good programmer will notice. A good potential team member will even point them out, point blank.
DO NOT discriminate because they haven't programmed in your particular programming language, unless the work is very short term. They're all dialects of the same language. Good code is good code, even VB! (Note that I didn't say "working code" -- I *mean* good, commented, well laid out, non-repetitive code) The only exceptions are pointers and object oriented code. Some people just can't get it. Test them [by showing them code to review] if you use either.
DO look for someone who gets passionate about a topic during your interview.
DO NOT for one second think that someone who claims they have 10 years experience in C, VB, Java, and FORTRAN means it. Ask what they've done which each language. If they can't tell you in enough detail that you can envision it, that's a "no hire".
DO, for heaven's sake, call their references.
And most importantly (and this is something olde Joel gets right), "Maybe" means "Don't hire". If you can't strongly recommend the candidate after the interview, don't hire him/her. Mistakes at hiring time will cost you for months and maybe years. It's worth spending the extra month or two to find someone worth their salt. Oh, man, it's worth it.
I've been eagerly waiting for some Mac OS X guru to spit out the answer, but in the meanwhile perhaps some Linux guru can tell us how we'd do this in XWindows? Maybe we could try and hack it in Darwin w/ X11.
For those who have posted that it seems that Apple wouldn't do this deliberately, I believe the point of the article is that they have. If you steal the right components from certain versions of OS 9, *poof*, you've got monitor spanning on iBook hardware. This is a limitation created by software -- purposefully. The extensions the link has you moving around are similar to trading for different versions of dll's on Windows, and basically the hack makes OS 9 treat the iBook hardware in a more generic, non-disabled fashion.
I haven't tried the OS 9 hack on my 'book just yet, but if the page ain't lying, Apple has disabled spanning on the iBook in software though the hardware could do it. Wouldn't be the first time Apple didn't want you to access hardware that's in your system -- remember when Apple removed the Mezzanine slot from the Rev. C (iirc) iMac so that you couldn't install a Voodoo2 any more?
And isn't a Celeron chip just a Pentium III with a poor yield? Intel just smacks out half the cache and *poof*, same chip in a lower price range -- great for over-clocking once you learn that's what's going on (though my 533 didn't behave). And there was also the PDA with flash-rom disabled in a recent/. story.
Point is, yes Virginia, companies purposefully disable or don't advertise features of hardware quite often so that they can pitch it to a "lower niche audience". But danged if I don't enjoy my iBook anyway.:^)
In spite of his constant hawking of his "OS X Missing Manual" in his articles, Tim O'Reilly brings up an important point on the subject:
[Apple sold about 800,000 Macs last quarter, so Microsoft's whining that they've only sold 300,000 copies of Office X this year seems only to show how spoiled they've gotten. ("We're only getting 20% penetration. These bozos must be doing something wrong!")]
Think of it this way: Microsoft's share in the Mac word processing niche is larger than Apple's share in the personal computing market by a factor of three to four, and this is with Apple giving away AppleWorks on all of its consumer models. And Office ain't cheap ($435 new, $260 to upgrade)!
Admittedly, however, if you listened to Steve Jobs at the last MacWorld Expo, you'd've heard that even *new* Mac buyers are using OS 9 as their boot-up OS nearly 40% (iirc) of the time. An OS X only product is going to feel a pinch in the transition period.
Regardless, Microsoft is doing well on Mac. Their browser's on the desktop, their Office suite has been updated or purchased anew by 15% of OS X users and older versions sit on many more machines. I haven't understood the whole Office vs. OpenOffice threats recently -- Apple needs Microsoft to keep people switching and Microsoft needs Apple if only to provide the semblence of a commercial rival. Not bad for a division that's tucked in with "the consumer division [not the Office division] that makes mice, trackballs, WebTV, and the Xbox".
[No one wanted to buy a DivX disc that phoned home to validate and no porn movie maker really wanted to go that route because they know their audience.
Having to phone home has got to be the Achilles' Heel for this kind of stuff. I sure as hell don't want it, and I imagine most people would feel the same way, even if they aren't watching dirty movies.]
I believe you missed the point here. The original DivX (not to be confused with "get bootleg movies" DivX that uses mpeg with mp3 sound) died because it was a pain in the arse. People were used to going to the store to rent *and* return movies. They'd adjusted -- typically by just renting another when they went back, "saving" a trip.
People were not used to having to plug in a player to a phone outlet. Who has a phone outlet beside their TV? Heck, I still owe DirecTV for a few movies the receiver let me buy without a phone cord stuck in the back. (Someday I'll hook it up.) Who wants to rearrange their living room to save one trip to the Blockbuster [to return the movie]?
When things aren't a pain in the arse, like they aren't with Media Player in this example, people will blissfully (and to finish the cliche, ignorantly) go on reporting information on their computers to any server that'll listen on the Net. Heck, people on the up-and-up might concede that Microsoft is doing them a service -- for free!!
I think the article's mention of MS looking for a "honey-pot" might be closer to being on the money, however. At the very least, *you* decided to rip illegal CDs with Media Player, not Microsoft. MS is doing all they can to keep tabs on what you've done legally or otherwise, and I'm sure they'll be happy to help the authorities find a suspected pirate. Though I doubt the authorities are going to ask.
Finally, most/many porn users really don't care who knows. You think the mailman doesn't know that that brown wrapper's in your box holds Hustler? You think the porn industry's "pay-per-view" systems are suffering because people have to have an account? How about the Playboy channel? These places all keep tabs, and millions of honest porn lovers keep getting their fix.
It's not the anonymity that killed DivX; it was the paradigm shift (aka, "trouble hooking the danged thing up"). Sounds like you might be confusing "right to privacy" with "right to pirate", which is quite different. Really, what's the harm in Microsoft selling the information that I own a Britney Spears album? I mean, not that I do.:^)
You don't need GPL to get creative with gaming by a long shot, and the good "freeware" game writers had already moved on to the latest and greatest by the time Q1 & 2 were released as GPL.
What made Quake so great was the ease with which it could be customized. Take Team Fortress for instance. A better multiplayer fps has yet to be released. Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life and even Return to Castle Wolfenstein are commercial releases that do very little innovation on a theme developed by people that didn't get paid a cent.
The point being that Quake 1-3 were so open to gameplay modification that the GPL doesn't entice people who are donating free time to making games any more than the games did on initial release. Heck, Quake 3 even releases the same tools id created to make the games to end users. Why do I need to look at the code to combine z-Machine interpreters when Quake 3 already has the hooks for my customizations?
The same thing's going to happen with Doom 3, I'd imagine. Quite simply, all the "opening/freeing" of the Quake code did was make it possible for hardcore programmers to bring it to other platforms. The gameplay talent already have all the tools they needed to move to the next level and more recent games. That's part of the beauty of the way id programs.
Slashdot Mirror
People are willing to pay extra for a Mac because it just works and makes you more productive.
If by productive you mean, "Up and running quickly," then I'd agree 100%. The OS and the iApps are great one-button-friendly environments where anybody can start harnessing the power of their new PC within an hour of pulling the box inside of their front door.
But more productive overall? We've got two routes here: Apps that are included with a new box, and all apps available for the system. I'm going to assume the same standards I was using before and that I assume you were: the OS and bundled apps. If you want to comapre app by app, you can put together a realtively competitive suite in either OS if you're savvy enough.
Mac OS and a Mac's bundled software is easy to use, but lacks many of the power-user features people might expect. Here are the three that get to me most often.
* File navigation is a pain in the Finder. Windows Explorer, simply by providing a command line integrated with the GUI (alt-d) really puts the finder to shame. And Windows' File Dialog box (when opening and saving) has all sorts of keyboard and mouse shortcuts for quickly getting functions done that the Finder can't touch.
* Keyboard navigation is often overlooked in Apple's products, and as a software developer I'm a big fan of not using the mouse and slowing myself down.
* Apple's refusal to allow multi-document interfaces keeps things easy for the newbie, but there are still times where I'd like to have child windows running within a parent. Same reason people enjoy VirtualPC or Mac-on-Linux, but it holds for applications as simple as SQurirreL SQL, which, being Java, luckily can still do MDI.
Hey, when I get home I fire up my Mac. I like the OS/environment quite a bit more than Windows overall. But when I'm programming, the above three (plus speed of applications -- when programming GUI'd Java apps, the Mac is at a real speed disadvantage) make me sell back out to Bill.
TextWrangler is a tweener that's not all that practical. The problem boils down to the fact that BBEdit Lite is free, BBEdit is worth the money if you need an UltraEdit equivalent on the Mac, and the in-between niches are already fairly well taken up by other free alternatives. Luckily for BareBones, I think they just have to pick out some bits of BBEdit and they can "release" TextWrangler more or less for free. It's not like they're really out anything for releasing this, and it brings the flagship a little more exposure (and highlights some of its lesser known features).
Most of the features (which can be found listed in comparison to BBEdit Lite here) aren't things you'll need in a true text editor. I mean come on, how much code do you hack that's in Unicode? Rather, of the people that do hack code, how many of *them* need Unicode? And if you're hacking Unicode and need spellcheck (ie, not coding at all), well, you're better off (if only b/c you saved $50) just using TextEdit (Apple's free text/rtf editor) anyway.
The feature of TextWrangler I like the most is "Optional Emacs keybinding support". Heh. If you want Emacs keybinding, I think I can find something that'll do that in an even more Emacs-like fashion.
If you need a powerful text editor that's Mac friendly, shell out for BBEdit. I just can't see there being much middle ground. But again, from BareBones point of view, they're out next to nothing and get to have all the coverage of a "brand new text editor".
First off, just to clear this up...
soon to get easier with the X11 on Max OS X
X has been on X for quite some time. You could fink it if you wanted, or, if you want something even easier, you could XonX it or xdarwin it.
What's new, of course, is Apple's X11. That Apple would Aquafy X11 is really a great step forward, and hopefully means that -- and this is key -- Apple will start shipping Macs with X11 preinstalled.
Just as OS X's built in Java Virtual Machine makes OS X a first-rate Java deployment platform as Java apps look and act native without a single end user consideration about VMs, soon OS X could be a first-rate, well-integrated client-side deployment platform for open source software. Most importantly, this will continue to add new developers to open source movements, and that can't be bad. Even if Apple doesn't share everything they do, the fact that you'll have people used to making client-side apps increasingly contributing to open source projects is a great thing.
Not to mention that I've been impressed with what Apple's give back to the oss community, even though they technically often have no reason at all to do so. They've made Darwin open source, and have worked with the BSDs to share code that they have no pressing legal reason making them do so. Safari's updates to KHTML continue to be checked back in to the Konquerer source code by this paid Apple employee, which is another great move.
The only way I see Apple's new love of oss possibly being a bad thing is that Apple tends to hire the best away from open source projects and slap them onto Apple-first ones. Though this is great in that these people feel connected to the oss community, it has to shift their attention away from Linux and other F/free *NIXes a bit.
But more developers, especially good client-app developers, is a good thing, and having Apple return their contributions to the community is icing on the cake.
From xlr8yourmac.com come a few benchmarks.
:^)
Straight benchmarks
"Real-world" apps
Quake 3 and friends
I think you can follow links to the rest of the review as easily I as I can paste them.
I believe the most interesting bit is how well the dual processor 533 G4 holds up against the 800 MHz and 1 GHz G4 upgrades with many tasks. In Quake 3 and many other tasks that can take advantage of multiprocessing, the 533 DP comes out ahead of one or both of the two upgrades (depending on how efficient the DP support is).
Apple has not done the entry level any favors taking out the second processor, I'm afraid.
Though it doesn't go into technology much, I expect there's a lot of potential in mass OCR tech and good speech recognition (faster to read a book aloud than to transcribe it correctly).
Was thinking about voice recognition today while lamenting that I haven't done more to type in my copy of The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas, copyright 1910.
Here are two problems that came to mindn why I probably won't be able to use voice recog soon:
1.) Works who have been lucky enough to actually have their copyright lapse are often pretty old works. Their English (let's use English just b/c it's the lang I'm using) isn't exactly today's English, and sometimes even spellings, etc, change. Try reading anything from the 1800s and before.
2.) Names (so any protracted dialog) and other tough-to-translate stuff is going to be a pain to proofread. My book in particular has quite a bit of French in it (lots of "Parbleu" and French names with crazy accents all over the place).
I'd like to say voice recog could produce a "new version" with "updated spellings", but I just don't think that'd fly.
So once voice recog is commonplace for, say, office use (still quite a ways off) and affordable (not sure there, but I haven't heard of a friend using it yet, even just to play) we'll still have a ways to go before we can get true literature into PG simply by reading.
As an aside, at the same time I've been thinking about simply taping me reading the book and donating *that* via mp3 (or Ogg or whatever the heck). For the time being anyone who wants can listen in the car, and as soon as voice recog is up to snuff, voila. Just run it on my recording, proofread (easier said than done), and you're ready to go!
I thought I was looking forward to this announcement. I'd been eying an 867 G4 dual processor Powermac built-to-order with a Superdrive for a while, but wanted to hold on to my cash and wait for the next speed bump, hoping a DP 1 GHz model at yesterday's 867 DP price was right around the corner.
Well, the speed bump hasn't come. The entry level model, incredibly, has less "power to burn" now than before, with a single 1 GHz G4 processor. Sure the price is lower, but from what I've seen at the Durham, NC Apple store comparing single processor e & iMacs against the DP Powermacs, OS X still needs that second processor and its extra processor power. Now I have to shell out for the much more expensive to "Faster" Powermac to get the power I want (programming Java with iTunes and other apps running in the background, running iDVD, and, well, okay, I admit it, playing Doom3).
You can get 867 DP Powermacs for cheap at MacMall et al now, sure, but with built-to-order Superdrive? Nope. Entry-level options that include Superdrives have just gotten a lot worse, not better.
(Mind you, the "true power Powermac users" still get a great speed bump. I just wish it'd trickled down to people looking at the look end. And if I can hide the receipt from the rest of the fam, it might do exactly as Apple intended as have me throw down an extra $200 on my next Macintosh [to get the DP].)
Swing (Sun's tech that lets you create GUIs the same xplat) stinks. But even Sun admits it, and (see the same link) they are doing something about it. Swing is no longer "a way for database apps to display debugging information in X11".
I'm still hoping for a Swing replacement from Sun that'll ship with its java virtual machines, but until then we have IBM's SWT which ties the widgets much more closely to native counterparts and Apple's attempts to merge Swing directly to native GUI widgets. We're nowhere close to Windows.Forms yet, but Swing's not so bad that you can't get the hang [notice I didn't say Swing] of things quickly.
The point being that you have options. Once you get the hang of Window Managers (doesn't take long) and creating some sort of Model for everything (from sorting tables to adding new values to lists), you can do complicated layouts that work xplat more quickly in the text editor of your choice than you could hack up a static UI (ie, that doesn't resize well) in the Visual Basic IDE -- which, as everyone knows, is really what makes VB GUIs "so easy".
(Aside: Even more importantly would be a standards-compliant parallel to what Microsoft's Web Forms does for IE... a quick, smart widget toolkit for the web. A "JWeb Forms" for JSP would do a lot to enable smart web-enabled UIs to Java web services.)
And there's nothing about Java that stops it from being a great client-side language short of Swing. Moore's Law and clever JIT VMs have pretty much done away with any show-stopping speed issues. Another hurdle is the fact that Java only compiles to bytecodes, making [even commercial] apps trivial to decompile, but if you look at VB 7 (aka, VB.NET) and C#, Java's most closely related competitors, they've got the same problems.
And sure, Java is more "Write once, test everywhere" than "... run everywhere", but you're not going to find an easier port from one platform to the next than Java. It commoditzes the user's operating system, and that's a great thing.
And heck, I'm using it. At least I'm putting my money where the keyboard is.
Okay, we've got the first post on Apple's Discussion boards at (Posted Jan 8, 03 3:35 am) and the bug report has made it to Slashdot by 4:37 EST, I assume. The "world" knows about this problem, and has for hours.
I'm upset for a number of reasons. Hey, this is a beta, sure. As a software developer myself, a huge bug that doesn't turn up until you let someone else take a look is, unfortunately, expected. The Chinaman (Big Lebowski screenplay here if you missed the reference)... ur, bug's not the issue here, dude.
Here's what's wrong -- we've got 300,000 people who prefer mice with one button a hair's breath away from erasing pretty important folders. We can hardly expect they've backed everything up. Here are three reasons Apple's more than just dropped the ball...
1.) Fire up Software Update in OS X. We've come to expect IE updates here. There's nothing about a Safari update.
2.) Go back to apple.com/safari. Try to download. Same version they released right after the keynote. No fix offered.
3.) There's not even a mention about the problem on the Safari project lead's blog, though there are mentions that they've fixed the appearence of VersionTracker's front page (Admittedly, I sent that bug in yesterday with probably literally thousands of others). Can they really not be aware of the directory-erasing problem?
Look, this is worse than MSN Messenger going down for five hours due to human error. So what if I can't IM? I'll finally get some work done. With Safari, there are people reporting that they're losing their iPhoto set-ups, their Documents folders, and even their entire home directory. Expecting Joe iPhoto user to reattach symbolic links is a bit much, folks.
It's embarassing, even if this is some sort of strange hoax (which it certainly doesn't seem to be) that Apple's not on top of things. More than mud in Apple's eye, this is nearly scandal.
In the software section of the website detailing the new, tiny Powerbook, IE is off of OS X's Dock and Safari is on. Keynote is a PowerPoint replacement made by Apple.
What you should be wondering is not just whether Apple is trying to compete with Microsoft (and to end its dependence on MS for such a key piece of its OS as the browser) but if Microsoft has started warning Apple that it's going to leave. IE is still listed on the same software page, which doesn't mention Safari by name. There's some posturing going on here, and I'm not real sure what the motives are.
Fwiw, been testing Safari. Super-fast with a clean interface, but doesn't do nearly as good/mature a job displaying hard core dhtml as Mozilla, and therefore Chimera. Good freshman effort, but Apple better not stop at version 1.0.
Furthurnet is probably my favorite that runs on OS X. Bands that allow taping (and they're more numerous than you'd think. Phish, The Dead, and The Black Crowes are there, but so is everything from Louis Armstrong to the Beasties) are traded freely on this app, and I've grabbed more than 35 gigs of tunes. Most serious traders use Shorten format (.shn), which is a lossless compression format that brings that patch from the soundboard right down onto your Mac's hard drive, no questions asked. You can translate these into aiff or wav files pretty easily, and burn CDs right from iTunes.
:^D
Furthurnet's UI and search protocol (borrowed originally from Gnutella, I believe) could use a little spiffing up, but it's a GPL'd, ad-free application that works great once you're used to it. I haven't gotten online yet and failed to find at least one show within a few minutes of searching for whatever artist strikes my fancy (though admittedly Doc Watson is about as esoteric as I get).
Course if you're just looking for warez, I haven't helped at all, but if you want some great tunes for free via your new-found love of the Mac, you can't get any better than Furthurnet.
"PS" If Limewire is running too slowly, it might be a "Java problem". Make sure your app has an Aqua look & feel to take advantage of Apple's JVM's hardware accelerated GUI widgets. Having a video card that supports Quartz Extreme would help a bit as well.
"PPSS" In what little spare time I find I have (when I'm not writing this post), I've been trying to port Furthurnet to Mac OS 9-. Had some luck, but nothing to release just yet. So if you're not using OS X, upgrade.
The electronic stamp - a pattern of bits attached to the message - costs the sender some amount of money. The recipient (or the recipient's mail software) can examine the value of the stamp and, based on that, decide whether to read the message.
Super. Look folks, I still get hoards of snail mail spam every day that I have to sift through, the printing fees of some of which far exceeds the 30 for postage. Will we get as many spams about pleasing pudenda under this scheme? Probably not, but we'll still get spam.
And what's more, if and when this becomes the standard, we'll have to start paying to send all these quick emails to our friends and relatives. Yet another marketing scheme conquers what was once a free (and Free) Internet. I suppose it's time to start implementing POP4 based on Gnutella.
Spam filters are getting more and more intelligent every day. If they aren't good enough for you and you don't want spam, don't give out your private email address. But please oh please don't give away the last remnant of the free Internet. I see Microsoft and AOL warming up to getting thrown into the briar patch again.
I recently got fed up with an inefficiently-run government contracting position and decided if I wanted thinks right I was going to have to follow the proverb and do it myself. I've set up the home office about a month ago, and here are a few of the lessons/insights I got real quick.
:^D)
1.) Getting started takes a LONG time. Even if you hack at home now in your free time, you're going to need a few days to get your office right. Getting your workstation to exactly mimic the productive suite you were used to at work will take a while. Getting a website to feature past experience and show off your new wares is going to take a while too (but will pay off in the long run). Now add overhead for buying office supplies and, much more importantly, registering your company with your local gov't to reduce liability, and you'll see you're not going into business immediately. Plan for at least a month of downtime at the start (or sprinkled around your first code) for you to get the infrastructure to *start* ready to go. (aka, "MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SOME MONEY SAVED FOR FOOD AND RENT!!!"
2.) You're doing it *all* now. I'm able to finish bits of code much more quickly without the distractions of the water cooler (and intrusions into my cube), but once I'm done, now what? Marketing is no longer "the communications department's job". Nor is tech support someone else's responsibility. Nor polling the customer to see if I've hit the mark. Nor is handling the overhead if a customer is upset. All docs, all testing, all support, all "everything you didn't worry about when you were coding" is your responsibility. It's all you. Note that the side lesson is that if you can bring anyone with you -- or if you can use past contacts as subcontractors, that's a huge help while landing and when you finally land a big fish.
3.) Good luck finding the customer. Don't get the unrealistic idea that you're going to be able to spend all your time coding. As another poster pointed out, if you've already got work lined up, enjoy! But I recently spent about two and a half work-days on a 4 month job proposal which didn't get selected ("lack of previous experience" -- and I've been working in the field before this for 4 years! New companies are certainly at a disadvantage). That's time "down the drain" (though certainly I can cut and paste some of one proposal into the next), and you have to consider this as part of the cost of finding a guaranteed customer. In my "downtime" I'm writing a trialware application, but unlike contracts there's no guarantee anybody's going to want to buy. Don't underestimate how much work your current company is doing for you by finding the work.
4.) Multiply everything by three -- Time for projects, costs for supplies, costs for advertising and submitting proposals. I'm sure if you've worked more than a few years "in the real world" you've learned this one already (boy, I sure did), but it's worth keeping in mind. You're your manager now too, you know! Don't say you can name that tune in two months when it's going to take six. Having a poor experience with your first customer isn't going to help you find that second and third job.
That's the short lesson from my first month of working out of the home. It's fun, I get a ton done, all the code is done up to my personal expectations and written efficiently, but I'm still looking for my first "real" customer. Best of luck.
In a pretty regularly rerun interview with Campbell by Bill Moyers, Lucas is also interviewed and explores quite a bit that he "took" from Campbell for Star Wars, or at least where he agrees with Campbell's work. I remember catching it a while back on PBS (public TV in the US), and it was pretty interesting, though it peeved me Campbell acted like this was some discovery of his (see more at the end of this post).
Here's a copy of DVD. From the description on that site:
Joseph Campbell: The Power Of Myth
Year: 2002
On Video: October 2, 2001
Starring: Joseph Campbell
Bill Moyers
George Lucas
Genre: Documentary
Synopsis: An interview with master storyteller and mythology professor Joseph Campbell. Features an interview with George Lucas exploring the mythology of Star Wars.
And all of this came from Carl Jung, who coined the term archetype, and had written volumes on the Wise Old Man years before Campbell was out of diapers.
If you recall, pre-Spawn Todd M. was working for Marvel. Believe me, nobody could touch his artwork in The Amazing Spider-Man (I believe there were other titles that came before). Before long, Todd was pencilling and inking, and understandably grew tired of his "new 9-to-5 box" (suggesting not his hours so much as the stagnation of his job).
Btw, and totally off-topic, even here Todd had webs flying like crazy around Spidey, especially when he was hanging upside-down, etc. The precursor to the chains...
His art was popular enough Marvel did their best to keep him, and gave him his own mag, "Spider-Man", sans prefix. I believe Todd got to write a few of these as well. But he didn't like the fact that his creative whims with Spidey were still kept in check by Marvel, and, iirc, Marvel was having a hard time paying him what he was worth.
*POOF* Todd goes solo and creates Spawn. What artist doesn't dream of a title where they have complete control, cradle to grave? It was several issues before Todd even let someone else do some artwork in the mag. I remember being surprised the first time I saw two names signed to a cover -- How could Todd let someone else control his "baby"?
Anyhow, heck, who in any field doesn't dream of being able to have final say-so on what happens at their job? If you want it done right [and have nobody to blame but you], do it yourself.
I would agree that Spawn's plot was often fairly juvenille (I haven't read in years, I'm afraid), but that's hardly the point. Todd can draw and dream up some pretty cool looking beasts, Spawn and Spidey being his two most popular. And this ability is so strong his success has bled right into other markets.
McFarlane is the Michael Jordan (or insert ball player of your generation) of comics, and what roundball player doesn't have a few inspirational pics of [a younger] Jordan tacked up on the wall?
The most important ramification of this move is that it decreases the need for people to role-play and meet others online to enjoy UO. People who make bows for catch fish for hours on hours in the early years of UO (and I was one) simply don't make [purely online-fantasy] friends easily! And that's what you have to do to really get ahead in UO, and is something that so many gripers here who played UO years ago haven't quite gotten. (That said, it took me money months and hours than I care to admit to figure it out myself.)
:^D].
Once you partner up with a guild or just an experienced player, believe me, your scores will shoot up to what these folk are paying an extra $30 for in no time flat. Rich (in the virtual sense) UO characters/players abound, and freely give out the kinds of equipment and experience a newbie needs to get the kinds of scores you pay for now. A little online searching, emailing, and ICQ'n used the be the prerequisite for a good UO character, now $30 is -- but they won't have as much fun playing by themselves as old timers do adventuring with the people who gave them their start.
And heck, remember how long it takes you to get from an 85 skill to an 100 skill. I haven't played for about a year, but that's where you really put in your time. I'm not too worried about these people buying their way to 85.
Quick last point -- This kind of social gaming (Multi-User Shared Hallucination or MUSH) isn't for everyone. Obviously EA is trying to get make money than MUSH with this and other recent moves. The proverbial "casual gamer" isn't a MUSHer, but maybe some casual gamers will pay their $30 and get hooked. And that's a good thing [if they don't have gpa's or jobs to worry about
Umberto Eco points this out in his article The Myth of Superman (I'm afraid a quick google only turned up this synopsis, not the whole text). Here are some key quotes from that link, and, I assume, the article (come on, it's been nearly six years since I've read it! :^D Maybe I did earn that B.A. degree after all...). I try to recall a few more important bits below.
...
.construct on a small scale 'analogous' models which mirror the larger one."
:^) (Last season was a dream!)
:^) Anyhow, it's no surprise Star Trek is often similar. It's part of the myth that "resonates with our archetypes". Hey, someone much smarter than me said that. Stop making fun. :^)
Traditional mythic heroes were governed by a law, therefore these heroes were predictable and held no suprises for the audience.
... and
Authors preferences are not considered when writing a novel. They are forced to write along the guidelines of a cultural model. In this case, "authors. .
Basically the deal was that if you started at A and went to B, you might pass through C or D or E but your story must end up at A again or you'll have spoiled the myth.
There's only so much a mythical figure can do (or mythos o' figures). Here are some of the more horrendous deviations from the "A leads to B leads to A again" that I can think of off-hand (a little Spidey-centric, I'm afraid):
* The brilliant folk at Marvel kill off Aunt May. (She's back now)
* The brilliant folk at Marvel decide Spider-Man is really a clone. (The clones have all disappeared now)
* The brilliant folk at DC kill off Superman and then have several return. (I think we're back to one, but I don't read Superman)
* Patrick Duffy leaves Dallas.
* Felix Lieter (sp) has his leg eaten by a shark in Licensed To Kill. (Haven't fixed that yet, but they did ditch Dalton, even if it isn't his fault that movie stunk to high heaven)
This is why, I believe, these fictional stories rarely do things that are irreversable, like have Peter Parker age [much] or main characters get married (last I looked, Marvel was still struggling with that one, even having MJ disappear). It's also why shows tend to die after the leading man & woman get romanticly involved -- see Moonlighting. Or why they die when they switch tone -- see all those Carol Burnett[-esque] episodes later on in Magnum, P.I.
So, in one sense, the reason Star Trek is always the same is the same reason everyone was on pins and needles when Diane left Cheers.
From the press release:
:^)
All new Macs sold since January 2002 have had Mac OS X factory-set as the default operating system. Over 75 percent of customers using these Macs have elected to keep Mac OS X as their default operating system...
Is nobody at Apple paying attention to this number? When Jobs acted like this was a good thing at the last MacWorld Expo in NY, my jaw hit the floor. In spite of the fact that Mac OS X is the default boot OS on new Macs, Mac users were going out of their way to switch to OS 9 as their boot-up OS.
This means a lot, if you think about it.
* Obviously one-fourth of new Mac users are not using any OS X specific applications. There's no "Futuristic box" in OS 9 to parallel Classic in OS X.
* This quarter of new Mac buyers aren't happy with the "Classic from within X" compromise, for whatever reason.
* This number doesn't count the people who simply don't know how to switch to OS 9 as their default boot disk. That might sound crazy, but in one usability test for our software, we had a user insert the CD upside-down, and not by accident but by ignorance. You can, unfortunately, never underestimate your spectrum of users. Think of how many new Mac users, if they knew of OS 9, might prefer it.
* This also means that the number of OS 9-only users is still pretty solid. Take the users of all the Macs out there now that are still running that won't run OS X -- even if all the people buying new Macs are old Mac users you're only reducing their numbers by 75% the number of new Macs sold. That's pretty slow. Heaven forbid some of that nearly 25% are new Mac users are choosing to boot into OS 9 from the start! It's a hard sale for Apple. The most users in the Mac market, believe it or not, are still on OS 9 or below.
Regardless, and in a complete Jekell/Hyde move, I think Apple's doing the right thing, at least from the point of view of Apple's continued financial success. People must be forced to move to the new OS for a couple of reasons. First, if the users move, the pushers (software developers) will follow. Second, if Apple wants to move to x86, they aren't going to be bringing Classic along with them.
I've actually been thinking about this a bit, and couldn't decide if I fell on the, "There's no way Apple's duplicating their efforts on x86; it's just not economic. They're already late releasing OS X and its updates as is," side or if I figured that "Motorola and IBM just aren't getting it together with the PowerPC; it might be time to jump ship".
I usually end up thinking that if Apple used x86, the OS would lose all its tricks that are G4 specific (particularly things that used the AltiVec instruction set). These are the things that it's used to make Photoshop run faster -- not to mention iMovie, iDVD, etc -- if the OS swapped over to another processor architecture. If a Mac is slow now, wait until it loses the one ace up its sleeve when it comes to digital video. Seems that'd shoot Apple's new niche (one-stop digital hub) all to heck.
Not to mention what the switch would mean for third parties that would have to recompile (again!) for the new platform. I doubt the Classic environment is making its way to x86! Not a big deal in itself, and a break from Classic would be super, but hang on... That probably means Carbon, the compatibility layer that helps apps written for Classic run natively on OS X, is also out. Now we're talking problems. Legacy 3rd party code is out the window in many cases.
I do wonder if Apple's gone so far as to utilize whatever's the equivalent of MMX in the Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon's instruction set to overcome the problems it'd suffer by switching (pardon the pun). I still can't imagine Carbon's x86 compatible. Cocoa ("new improved NextStep") would probably be all that would make the jump.
I suppose it can't be that tough to port if you limit to Cocoa, though. As people have pointed out before, Darwin's got an x86 version now and NextStep (the OS Apple bought that was supposed to turn into OS X a little more quickly) ran on x86 hardware. I always thought it'd be silly to duplicate all the effort of the tweaks Apple put into Next for PowerPC as they were already way behind on OS X without clear x86 plans, but perhaps those tweaks aren't as fancy or ugly as I'd assumed.
I still don't think this means Apple's leaving hardware, any way you slice it. There will be something, even in x86 Macs if they show up, that makes it so that you can't run OS X without quite a bit of custom hardware that Apple controls.
From the rebuttal, linked above... The point he's making seems to be that, sure, RadHat likes to be a big name in its field, like Starbucks or Microsoft or McDonalds, but no, it's not going to illegally wield monopoly powers. Then we move on to yet another possible reason why people might dislike RedHat and compare it to Microsoft:
That gets me a bit closer to the fear; a lock on 3rd party ISV support. Folks are afraid that they will only be able to get enterprise level apps on Red Hat Linux or Red Hat Linux Advanced Server. If that's the case, the question should be, "When will Red Hat become the Sun of Linux?".... And it's easy to answer. Right about the time we get into the hardware market. Current estimates put that two days after never.
You know, that's not such a bad idea at all. What if RedHat did get into the hardware market and wrote open source drivers for hardware that they'd patented -- and then would only provide enterprise support for these boxen? Sounds like a great idea to me, at least from a "free as in I still gotta eat" point of view. Pretty danged slick. I wonder if he just threw that out for some random reason, or if the idea has really been thrown around inside RedHat a time or two.
Annual minimum royalties are payable upon signature and each following year in January and are fully creditable against annual royalties.
US$ 15 000.00 per calendar year.
Now that's a pain. I emailed them to see if I could get a "hobbyist license" for more per app, but without the $15k minimum (wanted to make "iTunes 3 for Classic Mac OS"). They allow you to release up to 5000 units of a game that uses mp3s royalty free, so I was hopeful. The reply? No dice. (I was impressed they sent a reply!)
Fwiw, here's a list of the licensees.
DO ask for demos of working apps from previous jobs/schools. If they don't have anything working to show, they can't take a project, even a simple one, cradle to grave. You want self-starters who don't need constant supervision.
DO NOT make them solve brain-teasers on the spot, regardless of what joelonsoftware.com might say. I love brain teasers personally, but trying to get all the members of U2 across a bridge two at a time doesn't exactly translate. Reread number 1, and if they gave you their stuff, you're safe.
DO ask them to review code from your shop and tell you what they'd do differently. Whitespace, comments, logic that should be pulled into functions or other objects -- these are the kinds of things a good programmer will notice. A good potential team member will even point them out, point blank.
DO NOT discriminate because they haven't programmed in your particular programming language, unless the work is very short term. They're all dialects of the same language. Good code is good code, even VB! (Note that I didn't say "working code" -- I *mean* good, commented, well laid out, non-repetitive code) The only exceptions are pointers and object oriented code. Some people just can't get it. Test them [by showing them code to review] if you use either.
DO look for someone who gets passionate about a topic during your interview.
DO NOT for one second think that someone who claims they have 10 years experience in C, VB, Java, and FORTRAN means it. Ask what they've done which each language. If they can't tell you in enough detail that you can envision it, that's a "no hire".
DO, for heaven's sake, call their references.
And most importantly (and this is something olde Joel gets right), "Maybe" means "Don't hire". If you can't strongly recommend the candidate after the interview, don't hire him/her. Mistakes at hiring time will cost you for months and maybe years. It's worth spending the extra month or two to find someone worth their salt. Oh, man, it's worth it.
I've been eagerly waiting for some Mac OS X guru to spit out the answer, but in the meanwhile perhaps some Linux guru can tell us how we'd do this in XWindows? Maybe we could try and hack it in Darwin w/ X11.
/. story.
:^)
For those who have posted that it seems that Apple wouldn't do this deliberately, I believe the point of the article is that they have. If you steal the right components from certain versions of OS 9, *poof*, you've got monitor spanning on iBook hardware. This is a limitation created by software -- purposefully. The extensions the link has you moving around are similar to trading for different versions of dll's on Windows, and basically the hack makes OS 9 treat the iBook hardware in a more generic, non-disabled fashion.
I haven't tried the OS 9 hack on my 'book just yet, but if the page ain't lying, Apple has disabled spanning on the iBook in software though the hardware could do it. Wouldn't be the first time Apple didn't want you to access hardware that's in your system -- remember when Apple removed the Mezzanine slot from the Rev. C (iirc) iMac so that you couldn't install a Voodoo2 any more?
And isn't a Celeron chip just a Pentium III with a poor yield? Intel just smacks out half the cache and *poof*, same chip in a lower price range -- great for over-clocking once you learn that's what's going on (though my 533 didn't behave). And there was also the PDA with flash-rom disabled in a recent
Point is, yes Virginia, companies purposefully disable or don't advertise features of hardware quite often so that they can pitch it to a "lower niche audience". But danged if I don't enjoy my iBook anyway.
In spite of his constant hawking of his "OS X Missing Manual" in his articles, Tim O'Reilly brings up an important point on the subject:
[Apple sold about 800,000 Macs last quarter, so Microsoft's whining that they've only sold 300,000 copies of Office X this year seems only to show how spoiled they've gotten. ("We're only getting 20% penetration. These bozos must be doing something wrong!")]
Think of it this way: Microsoft's share in the Mac word processing niche is larger than Apple's share in the personal computing market by a factor of three to four, and this is with Apple giving away AppleWorks on all of its consumer models. And Office ain't cheap ($435 new, $260 to upgrade)!
Admittedly, however, if you listened to Steve Jobs at the last MacWorld Expo, you'd've heard that even *new* Mac buyers are using OS 9 as their boot-up OS nearly 40% (iirc) of the time. An OS X only product is going to feel a pinch in the transition period.
Regardless, Microsoft is doing well on Mac. Their browser's on the desktop, their Office suite has been updated or purchased anew by 15% of OS X users and older versions sit on many more machines. I haven't understood the whole Office vs. OpenOffice threats recently -- Apple needs Microsoft to keep people switching and Microsoft needs Apple if only to provide the semblence of a commercial rival. Not bad for a division that's tucked in with "the consumer division [not the Office division] that makes mice, trackballs, WebTV, and the Xbox".
[No one wanted to buy a DivX disc that phoned home to validate and no porn movie maker really wanted to go that route because they know their audience.
:^)
Having to phone home has got to be the Achilles' Heel for this kind of stuff. I sure as hell don't want it, and I imagine most people would feel the same way, even if they aren't watching dirty movies.]
I believe you missed the point here. The original DivX (not to be confused with "get bootleg movies" DivX that uses mpeg with mp3 sound) died because it was a pain in the arse. People were used to going to the store to rent *and* return movies. They'd adjusted -- typically by just renting another when they went back, "saving" a trip.
People were not used to having to plug in a player to a phone outlet. Who has a phone outlet beside their TV? Heck, I still owe DirecTV for a few movies the receiver let me buy without a phone cord stuck in the back. (Someday I'll hook it up.) Who wants to rearrange their living room to save one trip to the Blockbuster [to return the movie]?
When things aren't a pain in the arse, like they aren't with Media Player in this example, people will blissfully (and to finish the cliche, ignorantly) go on reporting information on their computers to any server that'll listen on the Net. Heck, people on the up-and-up might concede that Microsoft is doing them a service -- for free!!
I think the article's mention of MS looking for a "honey-pot" might be closer to being on the money, however. At the very least, *you* decided to rip illegal CDs with Media Player, not Microsoft. MS is doing all they can to keep tabs on what you've done legally or otherwise, and I'm sure they'll be happy to help the authorities find a suspected pirate. Though I doubt the authorities are going to ask.
Finally, most/many porn users really don't care who knows. You think the mailman doesn't know that that brown wrapper's in your box holds Hustler? You think the porn industry's "pay-per-view" systems are suffering because people have to have an account? How about the Playboy channel? These places all keep tabs, and millions of honest porn lovers keep getting their fix.
It's not the anonymity that killed DivX; it was the paradigm shift (aka, "trouble hooking the danged thing up"). Sounds like you might be confusing "right to privacy" with "right to pirate", which is quite different. Really, what's the harm in Microsoft selling the information that I own a Britney Spears album? I mean, not that I do.
You don't need GPL to get creative with gaming by a long shot, and the good "freeware" game writers had already moved on to the latest and greatest by the time Q1 & 2 were released as GPL.
What made Quake so great was the ease with which it could be customized. Take Team Fortress for instance. A better multiplayer fps has yet to be released. Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life and even Return to Castle Wolfenstein are commercial releases that do very little innovation on a theme developed by people that didn't get paid a cent.
The point being that Quake 1-3 were so open to gameplay modification that the GPL doesn't entice people who are donating free time to making games any more than the games did on initial release. Heck, Quake 3 even releases the same tools id created to make the games to end users. Why do I need to look at the code to combine z-Machine interpreters when Quake 3 already has the hooks for my customizations?
The same thing's going to happen with Doom 3, I'd imagine. Quite simply, all the "opening/freeing" of the Quake code did was make it possible for hardcore programmers to bring it to other platforms. The gameplay talent already have all the tools they needed to move to the next level and more recent games. That's part of the beauty of the way id programs.