It's only a matter of time before they open source OS X and everything else they have software wise, Apple is a hardware company.
Half right. They are making money using hardware, which is precisely why they won't open-source all of their software: Having it only on their hardware is the very reason why people buy hardware from them. Open-sourcing it would kill their hardware business.
We can certainly speculate that they'll slightly better than the GC, since that is what the hardware is.
Uhm... You working at Nintendo? ATI? IBM's chip business? Didn't think so. You can speculate all day long, but you don't know jack shit, just like everyone else. You don't know the Wii's specs.
Maybe to let us advance on our own? Maybe for reasons beyond us?
"Ignore it, you don't understand anyway" is a typical reaction from a religious person, but not really an answer to my question.
But, really, your question is silly. You could always ask why God didn't do something. e.g. "Why didn't God make flying kangaroos that build castles out of clouds and eat only bubble gum, that would have been cool!".
But that's not what I asked, now is it? The point is this: Let's assume god exists. He obviously wanted to tell us something. But instead of simply telling us (which he could have done, since he's allmighty), he decided to dumb it down until it was sure to lead to 2000 years of religious violence.
That doesn't make too much sense to me. None at all, actually.
Daring Fireball has an interesting article on this. As it stands, it is unclear whether the actual internal MacBook wifi card (you know, the one everyone who owns a MacBook uses) is vulnerable as they used a third-party card for their demo, despite of the fact that all MacBooks come with an internal wifi card.
But did Krebs see the exploit work against a MacBook's built-in AirPort card? He says he stands by his reporting, but he did not report that the exploit works against the MacBook's built-in AirPort driver; he reported that Maynor and Ellch told him that it works against the MacBook's built-in AirPort driver. "I stand by that they told me the built-in driver is expoitable" is very different than "I stand by that the built-in driver is exploitable".
If it's true that this exploit does work against the MacBook's built-in AirPort driver, it's one of the most serious security exploits ever discovered against Mac OS X. Basing their demo video on a third-party card makes matters worse, not better, because it creates the perception that the majority of MacBook users are safe because they aren't using third-party cards
Ah yes, the approaching launch of the dominant console
...said the Nintendo fanboy before the launch of the N64.
...said the Atari fanboy before the launch of the 5200.
We don't know how this generation is going to play out. We don't know how good the PS3 will do. We don't know how good the graphics are. We don't know how the Wii games will look, and most of us don't know how they'll play. We don't know how adults and non-gamers will respond to the Wii. We don't know if the PS3 is going to be worth it for them.
We know nothing, and history only tells us one thing: Unexpected things do happen.
Just because Apache is secure doesn't mean that the Mac is also secure.
That isn't what I said, either. I was pointing out that obscurity does not mean that people won't try to hack you, especially since right now, writing a Mac virus gives you about a hundred times more exposure than writing a Windows virus (everyone's done that already, nobody cares anymore).
Macs are more secure than windows boxes. They aren't perfect, but you can't attribute the fact that there are no real exploits to only their market share.
Apparently the Wii Remote is going to operate using Bluetooth.
It's unclear whether it uses bluetooth to communicate with the locator bar, or with the console itself. Either way, to get all the data from it, you'll probably need to hook the bar up to your computer, too.
I like Animal Crossing and Brain Age. Beyond that though, there are slim pickings when it comes to picking out a more "mature" game.
Define "mature". You mean "mature" as in "Project Rub" (i.e. has sexual content)? Or "mature" as in "Nintendogs" (i.e. targets older people as well as younger ones)? Or "mature" as in "Metroid Prime" (i.e. violence)?
If you take your Wii hat off and put yourself in the mindset of a typical consumer, you're not going for Pokemon, you're going for GTA, Halo, or Metal Gear.
Uhm... Typical consumers actually do go for Pokémon, as sales numbers clearly have shown. Typical consumers do not go for GTA, Halo or Metal Gear. Typical adolescent gamers go for those games.
After all the talk about 'innovation' are gamers going to want to spend full price for slightly upgraded GameCube games with pointing/swinging control added in 2007 and on?
Are you seriously using the "not enough new shit for the price" argument against Nintendo?
Have you actually considered the alternatives? Sony? MS? Even higher prices, and even less new shit? Same games with higher res at twice the price? Does that truly sound better to you than what Nintendo has to offer?
Apple's copy-protection technology makes media companies into its servants
That may be true, but Doctorow is conveniently forgetting that it was the media companies who wanted the copy protection in the first place. If Apple could have sold unprotected AAC files, they probably would have done that instead, even if it technically kind of divorces the iTunes Music Store from the iPod - in the user's mind, the two would still be connected due to the integration between iTunes and the iPod.
If you want the best experience (usability-wise), you buy an iPod and use the iTunes Music Store, regardless of the DRM.
A 2D adventure game could very well look better and handle better than most 3D games if done properly.
The problem with that reasoning is that a 2D game would actually cost more than a comparable 3D game. 3D is not more expensive than 2D. It's the other way around.
Combined with it simply being Windows, for many people it is the best choice
I'd argue that for people who know Windows (and I don't mean that in a "I know where to click to get on the Intarwebs" sense), a Windows box can be the best choice. But that doesn't apply to most people. People want to surf the internet, check their mails, chat with their friends and maybe write a letter a few times a year. You don't need Windows to do that. In fact, an Ubuntu or Mac box can do that just as well as a Windows box, and without all the security problems (because people don't install working anti virus apps, and if they do, they quickly grow tired of updating them).
And yes, most people don't care about commercial games. They may play a few casual games - flash games, maybe the card games that come with all OSes - but no commercial PC games. The market for commercial PC games is at most 20% of the home PC market - it's mostly teens and twens who have really hot new machines and go to an actual shop to buy actual shrink-wrapped games which they then install on their dedicated gaming rigs with new graphics cards and big screens. That description fits very few PC users.
You mean, cannot abandon it, because loyalty remains with the applications
That is simply not true for 95% of all Windows users. Most people I know who own Windows computers use them for four things:
Web (that includes browsing and webmail)
Chatting (MSN, mostly)
Downloading and listening to music (often using the same P2P app for both)
The occasional letter in Word
There is simply no application on Windows that they use for which there is no replacement on Linux or Macs. Almost everyone could switch to an Ubuntu box and be happy with it. But people don't because Windows came on their computers, and it works well enough. They don't care. That's why Windows isn't going away.
Where's the good email client? Where's the web browser (Newt's Cape isn't going to cut it, as good as it is)? And for god's sake, where's the J2ME runtime?
And where is your point?
The Newton is dead. Obviously, Apple would not use the Newton OS for a modern appliance.
Every time I use my symbian phone to make a call, check my email, or play some genesis games I always think, wow this would be so much better if I made an iCall, checked my iMail, and played some iGenesis! And if they could raise the free RAM needed from 10MB to 80MB, it'd be just like an apple desktop.
What you're describing is what Microsoft does: Port Windows to anything that contains electricity on some way, shape or form. Apple works differently: Look at the iPod. Look at the Newton. They define how a system needs to work, then they write software to do it. Microsoft works the other way around: The port Windows, and the device gets to do whatever Windows does.
IMHO, the problem with Linux for the desktop is users have no loyalty. Once something better comes along they drop thier old distro like a bad habbit. This ultimately makes it impossible for a distro company to be profitable more than a few years.
Watch natural selection at work. It's a good thing. The problem with Windows is that its users do not abandon it if they find something better. Hence, no incentive for Microsoft to improve Windows (see: Vista).
Distros most certainly can have staying power, if they keep working on themselves and improving their distros. If they don't, good riddance.
Having used almost all currently available cell phone OSes (Palm OS on a Treo, Symbian on a P800, Mobile Windows on friends' phones and some weird choices like Ogo), I can say with some authority that they all suck. Well, "suck" may be a bit strong a word, but each of them has both huge shortcomings and lots of small areas where they simply don't pay enough attention to details.
What smart phones really need is for Apple to fix them. This probably won't happen, so the next best thing is a Linux based OS which allows us programmers to fix what the big companies don't seem to be capable of fixing.
Two words telling where it's a good idea to get a full-screen window: Tabbed browsing.
I'm afraid I don't follow. Most modern screens are so big that you simply never want to see a web page rendered to the full width. Either the page is rigid, so you're going to get a ton of white space, or it flows with the width, so the text part is going to be so wide that you can't read it anymore.
If your problem is that you don't get enough vertical space for your tabs, well, you're not using the right browser:-)
There's one application on my PC where I want 100% screen usage: IntelliJ. But that's simply because it doesn't really support multiple windows, like Xcode does.
Because maximizing your window is stupid if the UI does not support "windows in windows", as Windows does (too many windows in that sentence:-).
Okay, first of all, you can maximize windows. Hold down Option when clicking on the resize button, I think. But really, you don't need that. Most Mac applications resize the window to fit the content of the window. Maximizing windows on Windows drives me absolutely mad, especially if I'm working in Photoshop and want to see several images at the same time. On the Mac, I just zoom to fit and put them next to each other. On windows, I have to resize each image manually until the window fits the content. It's just insane UI design.
On the Mac, I usually use several apps at the same time, checking out windows from several apps at the same time, dragging and dropping between windows from different apps. Hence, zoom to fit makes perfect since, as you don't want to hide other applications.
This reminds me of, I think, ejecting a CD. What a pain that was when I got an imac. No hardware button on the machine, none I could see on iTunes or anywhere on screen.
You're most likely making this up, because:
Everyone knows that you drag the CD to the Trash on a Mac. It's the number one complaint about Macs, and the single most unintuitive thing about them. It comes up in all discussions about Mac UI eventually (like Godwin's law).
You're wrong. There's a prominent "Eject" button in iTunes.
You're wrong. There are Eject commands in the Finder in:
The Finder Menu
The Disk's context menu
Each Finder Window's disk list on the left
The "wheel" dropdown
You're wrong. There's an Eject key on the keyboard
The first generation of Apple products generaly comes with some issues, so it's wiser to wait for the first revision.
This is kind of an overreaction. Having bought maybe two dozen first-gen Apple products from PowerBooks to iMacs to iPods, I've never had a "first gen" problem. Neither has any of my friends. And if there is a problem, Apple will replace the machine, no questions asked (well, not lots of questions - they do need to know your serial number:-).
Of course, it's still an annoyance, as you need backups (which you should do anyway) and will be without your computer for a week or more (if you're not near an Apple Store), but it's not the end of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Half right. They are making money using hardware, which is precisely why they won't open-source all of their software: Having it only on their hardware is the very reason why people buy hardware from them. Open-sourcing it would kill their hardware business.
Uhm... You working at Nintendo? ATI? IBM's chip business? Didn't think so. You can speculate all day long, but you don't know jack shit, just like everyone else. You don't know the Wii's specs.
So god is some kind of insane scientist, chasing lab rats through mazes? That's the first religious idea that actually makes sense to me :-)
"Ignore it, you don't understand anyway" is a typical reaction from a religious person, but not really an answer to my question.
But that's not what I asked, now is it? The point is this: Let's assume god exists. He obviously wanted to tell us something. But instead of simply telling us (which he could have done, since he's allmighty), he decided to dumb it down until it was sure to lead to 2000 years of religious violence.
That doesn't make too much sense to me. None at all, actually.
Daring Fireball has an interesting article on this. As it stands, it is unclear whether the actual internal MacBook wifi card (you know, the one everyone who owns a MacBook uses) is vulnerable as they used a third-party card for their demo, despite of the fact that all MacBooks come with an internal wifi card.
...said the Nintendo fanboy before the launch of the N64.
...said the Atari fanboy before the launch of the 5200.
We don't know how this generation is going to play out. We don't know how good the PS3 will do. We don't know how good the graphics are. We don't know how the Wii games will look, and most of us don't know how they'll play. We don't know how adults and non-gamers will respond to the Wii. We don't know if the PS3 is going to be worth it for them.
We know nothing, and history only tells us one thing: Unexpected things do happen.
That isn't what I said, either. I was pointing out that obscurity does not mean that people won't try to hack you, especially since right now, writing a Mac virus gives you about a hundred times more exposure than writing a Windows virus (everyone's done that already, nobody cares anymore).
Macs are more secure than windows boxes. They aren't perfect, but you can't attribute the fact that there are no real exploits to only their market share.
Yeah, that's also why all those hacked servers always run Apache, right?
Claiming that it's only because less people use Macs is bullshit.
It's unclear whether it uses bluetooth to communicate with the locator bar, or with the console itself. Either way, to get all the data from it, you'll probably need to hook the bar up to your computer, too.
Define "mature". You mean "mature" as in "Project Rub" (i.e. has sexual content)? Or "mature" as in "Nintendogs" (i.e. targets older people as well as younger ones)? Or "mature" as in "Metroid Prime" (i.e. violence)?
Uhm... Typical consumers actually do go for Pokémon, as sales numbers clearly have shown. Typical consumers do not go for GTA, Halo or Metal Gear. Typical adolescent gamers go for those games.
Are you seriously using the "not enough new shit for the price" argument against Nintendo?
Have you actually considered the alternatives? Sony? MS? Even higher prices, and even less new shit? Same games with higher res at twice the price? Does that truly sound better to you than what Nintendo has to offer?
Isn't god, like, all mighty? Why didn't he just make people understand instead of dumbing everything down to the point where it became pure stupidity?
That may be true, but Doctorow is conveniently forgetting that it was the media companies who wanted the copy protection in the first place. If Apple could have sold unprotected AAC files, they probably would have done that instead, even if it technically kind of divorces the iTunes Music Store from the iPod - in the user's mind, the two would still be connected due to the integration between iTunes and the iPod.
If you want the best experience (usability-wise), you buy an iPod and use the iTunes Music Store, regardless of the DRM.
The problem with that reasoning is that a 2D game would actually cost more than a comparable 3D game. 3D is not more expensive than 2D. It's the other way around.
Yeah, there is one reason: Because people buy the machine with the most checkboxes checked. They aren't going to use those features. Ever.
"I buy the box with the most features" is not the same as "I use this box for anything other than surfing myspace."
I'd argue that for people who know Windows (and I don't mean that in a "I know where to click to get on the Intarwebs" sense), a Windows box can be the best choice. But that doesn't apply to most people. People want to surf the internet, check their mails, chat with their friends and maybe write a letter a few times a year. You don't need Windows to do that. In fact, an Ubuntu or Mac box can do that just as well as a Windows box, and without all the security problems (because people don't install working anti virus apps, and if they do, they quickly grow tired of updating them).
And yes, most people don't care about commercial games. They may play a few casual games - flash games, maybe the card games that come with all OSes - but no commercial PC games. The market for commercial PC games is at most 20% of the home PC market - it's mostly teens and twens who have really hot new machines and go to an actual shop to buy actual shrink-wrapped games which they then install on their dedicated gaming rigs with new graphics cards and big screens. That description fits very few PC users.
That is simply not true for 95% of all Windows users. Most people I know who own Windows computers use them for four things:
There is simply no application on Windows that they use for which there is no replacement on Linux or Macs. Almost everyone could switch to an Ubuntu box and be happy with it. But people don't because Windows came on their computers, and it works well enough. They don't care. That's why Windows isn't going away.
And where is your point?
The Newton is dead. Obviously, Apple would not use the Newton OS for a modern appliance.
What you're describing is what Microsoft does: Port Windows to anything that contains electricity on some way, shape or form. Apple works differently: Look at the iPod. Look at the Newton. They define how a system needs to work, then they write software to do it. Microsoft works the other way around: The port Windows, and the device gets to do whatever Windows does.
Watch natural selection at work. It's a good thing. The problem with Windows is that its users do not abandon it if they find something better. Hence, no incentive for Microsoft to improve Windows (see: Vista).
Distros most certainly can have staying power, if they keep working on themselves and improving their distros. If they don't, good riddance.
Having used almost all currently available cell phone OSes (Palm OS on a Treo, Symbian on a P800, Mobile Windows on friends' phones and some weird choices like Ogo), I can say with some authority that they all suck. Well, "suck" may be a bit strong a word, but each of them has both huge shortcomings and lots of small areas where they simply don't pay enough attention to details.
What smart phones really need is for Apple to fix them. This probably won't happen, so the next best thing is a Linux based OS which allows us programmers to fix what the big companies don't seem to be capable of fixing.
I'm afraid I don't follow. Most modern screens are so big that you simply never want to see a web page rendered to the full width. Either the page is rigid, so you're going to get a ton of white space, or it flows with the width, so the text part is going to be so wide that you can't read it anymore.
If your problem is that you don't get enough vertical space for your tabs, well, you're not using the right browser :-)
There's one application on my PC where I want 100% screen usage: IntelliJ. But that's simply because it doesn't really support multiple windows, like Xcode does.
Because maximizing your window is stupid if the UI does not support "windows in windows", as Windows does (too many windows in that sentence :-).
Okay, first of all, you can maximize windows. Hold down Option when clicking on the resize button, I think. But really, you don't need that. Most Mac applications resize the window to fit the content of the window. Maximizing windows on Windows drives me absolutely mad, especially if I'm working in Photoshop and want to see several images at the same time. On the Mac, I just zoom to fit and put them next to each other. On windows, I have to resize each image manually until the window fits the content. It's just insane UI design.
On the Mac, I usually use several apps at the same time, checking out windows from several apps at the same time, dragging and dropping between windows from different apps. Hence, zoom to fit makes perfect since, as you don't want to hide other applications.
You're most likely making this up, because:
Troll much?
This is kind of an overreaction. Having bought maybe two dozen first-gen Apple products from PowerBooks to iMacs to iPods, I've never had a "first gen" problem. Neither has any of my friends. And if there is a problem, Apple will replace the machine, no questions asked (well, not lots of questions - they do need to know your serial number :-).
Of course, it's still an annoyance, as you need backups (which you should do anyway) and will be without your computer for a week or more (if you're not near an Apple Store), but it's not the end of the world.