I think many posters here are forgetting that last year Apple patented their theme engine software. IMHO, this cease and desist letter is intended as much to protect this patented IP, as it is to protect their trademark/trade dress.
"There are several schools of thought on why Apple hasn't ported its OS to the Intel platform. One holds that it would drain away too much money from Apple's hardware sales. Personally, I doubt this because they'd easily recover the loss with increased software sales. "
You haven't bothered to do the simple arithmetic to see why this is mistaken.
Apple makes a hefty profit on every high end box they sell (several hundred to a thousand dollars). They would have to sell as many as ten Mac OS X Intel CDs for every high end box sale they lost. Apple (quite correctly) doesn't think that there will be 10 intel buyers of thier OS for every lost high end machine sale. So no OS X for ix86.
"It says nothing about the direct action of government departments or officials, nor of goverment funded projects."
The key bit is "Congress shall make no law."
In the U.S., _all_ funding for _every_ branch and department of the Federal Government (executive, legislative, and judiciary) must be explicitly authorized by Congress.
Therefore, any action of _any_ government agency, etc, is the direct result of a law made by Congress (specifically, the budget, at a minimum, but of course other laws may be involved too, such as those determining the purview of various agencies, etc.). So any behavior, by any Federal government person or agency, that has any of the bad effects stated in the First Ammendment, is the result of a law made by Congress, and therefore, prohibited by the First Ammendment.
Actually, no logical proof can ever be given that has anything whatsoever to say about whether humans are conscious, or not, nor can consciousness be "explained."
The reason is simple. Any logical argument based on reality (i.e., observation of the real world) must take as axiomatic the existence of observors to make the observations. Moreover, these observors must be interchangable, since no single observor could ever hope to recapitulate all the experiments necessary to bring (for example) neuroscience to it's current state, and each observor's observations much be comparable to those of all other observors.
All of science is, of necessity, based on a whopping metaphysical assumption: there exist numerous observors, with essentially identical awareness. No scientist would accept observations from unconscious observors, so all observors are also assumed to be similarly conscious.
Science _assumes_ the existence of numerous, essentially identical, conscious observors. Having made this assumption, science can no more "explain" consciousness, than a geometer can "explain" parallel lines - they're just axiomatic.
"Is there any pressure to use Objective C for development ?"
There are several options.
1. Use the Cocoa (aka. "Yellow Box", NeXT) frameworks. This requires either Objective C or Java (that is, the Java _language_ with bindings to the Cocoa runtime, not to the Java VM or runtime, although MacOS X does come with a Java 2 VM/JIT and JDK for developers).
2. Use Carbon (a MacOS 8.x/9.x Toolbox wrapper library around MacOS X APIs). This option lets you use C, C++, and, when Digitool is done with their port, Common Lisp. If you're really adventurous, you can also use Dylan (which compiles to C on MacOS X) Carbon lets developers port existing MacOS 8.x/9.x code with minimal modification, and it's the path most big names are taking (MS, Adobe, even Apple itseft for many things).
3. Do pure Java development for the Java 2 platform.
In addition, you'll probably see various free scheme's ported at some point.
So, to summarize:
Framework/Platform -> Languages
Cocoa -> Objective C, Java
Carbon -> C/C++, Dylan, Common Lisp (port in progress)
"those "damn blue guys" are actually pretty famous performance artists."
Ironically, the Blue Man Group is featured on Apple's web site, because they use PowerPC Macs exclusively in their show.
I guess maybe Intel marketing should have checked this out before hiring them %;^)^
grande 2 percent caramel machiatto to go
on
The New Geography
·
· Score: 1
"you're just you, an interesting biological organism, sitting here on this rock spinning around an average star in some far off corner of the milky way drinking a latte at a starbucks , and that's all."
"Technological changes have always caused a few temporary problems in the work force, but they free people up to do other things."
Such as take a lower paying job, become under, or unemployed. You live in a world where 2/3 of the people do not have enough food, adequate housing or health care. Exactly how is it that moving jobs to Mexico, (whose maquiladoras are some of the worst offenders in the world for dangerous, toxic working conditions, low wages and no benefits), constitutes progress for _most_ people, not just the wealthy minority?
Oh, that's right, middle class americans get to buy a cheaper TV! Well at least we all have our priorities straight - after all it's OK if Mexican children are poisoned by the toxic waste dumped into their water by the factory their parents work at , just so long at we can knock a few bucks off the price of a TV.
"To deny progress would mean that we have attained the pinnacle of human development, something I would like to think we have never experienced."
To deny progress would mean that some people, at some place and time in the past, have already acheived the best possible human world. That doesn't necessarily mean that _we_ personally have achieved it, as it could have been a very long time ago.
Some anthropologists have seriously argued for the upper paleolithic, a time when inhabited regions where abundant in plant and animal food, as the best time for _all_ people alive. People living at that time worked only 3 or 4 hours a day, had abundant leisure time to relax, sleep, engage in crafts, art and body decoration, etc. People were healthy, ate much better than the overwhelming majority of people on the planet today, as determined by forensic examination of their skeletal remains.
Chesterton was merely saying that the notion of progress is silly, because we can't possibly avoid being here, now. The evangelists of progress simply spin a necessity into a virtue. It is especially disingenuous to ignore the two thirds of our fellow human beings who have enjoyed essentially none of the benefits of the last centuty of progress, but are faced with the daily threat of hunger or starvation, and death by epidemic disease (over half of all the people who have _ever_ lived, died of malaria alone).
We should look a little farther than our hi-tech enclaves when we make pronouncements about the good of progress.
FWIW, this puppy is badly broken on the mac (MacOS 9.0.4). For example, when you select the "Customize Sidebar" option, it lets you add things to your sidebar list, but when you click on "OK" nothing happens - the customization window doesn't close, the sidebar isn't changed. Hitting Cmd-W doesn't work either. The only option is to hit "Cancel," which, of course leaves your sidebar un-customized.
Added to this rather major annoyance (you have no quick access to top bookmarks if you cant customize the sidebar) Netscape 6 takes over 25 seconds to launch on a 300 MHz G3, which, though not Apple's fastest, is certainly a mainstream machine. By comparison, IE 5 takes less than 10 seconds to launch and load a home page on the same machine.
This is really a beta release, and should have been presented as such. Thank god I have a cable modem, so I didn't waste too much time downloading the installer.
"I'm so glad we have copyright, you don't want communist-lackeys like Leonardo creating things, or Mozart, or Bach, we need the truly great products of a copyright and profit driven art, would we have what we have today if it wasn't for copyright? Britney Spears, Christine Aguillera, Boyzone, 5ive? "
It's worth remembering that the great artists you mention all required wealthy patrons. So let's be clear - if you eliminate copyright laws, you require a system of patronage of individual artists by the wealthy, or support by the state/taxpayers. You think you don't like a world with proprietary sotwere? What about a world where all the most talented artists were on the payroll of the very wealthy? Do you think you would have anything resembling free expression in the arts?
Otherwise, the poster who said that _all_ artists would have to spend most of their time in other jobs to pay the rent is right. Copyright allows artists to focus on creating art and not have to worry about a day job. I think that any problems can be dealt with by ensuring strict time limits.
"The assertion that a strong Christian belief system is fundamental to a sound economy is just plain nonsense."
True. Although the argument has been made that protestantism played an important role in the historical development of capitalism (especially by Max Weber), there is clearly no relationship between christianity and a thriving capitalist economy. One only need look at Japan, possibly the worlds largest creditor nation (i.e., the most money has been borrowed from them by other nations) for a clear counter example. The US runs a consistent multi-billion dollar annual trade defecit with Japan. Some of the most market savy, and immensely profitable companies in the world are Japanese firms.
I add, for those who don't know this, that Japan is overwhelmingly buddhist and shinto, and christians make up only a tiny minority of japanese. Clearly, a nation doesn't need to be christian to have a thriving economy.
In the article referenced, the author states that motion blur would not be good in games because it would create imprecise locations for game objects, making determination of hits impossible. Here's a quote:
"The lack of motion blur with current rendering techniques is a huge setback for smooth playback. Even if you could put motion blur into games, it really is not a good idea whatsoever. We live in an analog world, and in doing so, we receive information continuously. We do not perceive the world through frames. In games, motion blur would cause the game to behave erratically. An example would be playing a game like Quake II, if there was motion blur used, there would be problems calculating the exact position of an object, so it would be really tough to hit something with your weapon. With motion blur in a game, the object in question would not really exist in any of the places where the "blur" is positioned."
This is just a failure to distinguish between a software *model* and it's screen rendering or *view* (Smalltalk programmers will see this at once). It is perfectly possible to maintain a precise location for an object in the game's model of the it's world, while only *rendering* a motion blurred version of the object. This would allow extremely fast moving objects (projectiles, shrapnel, etc.) to be rendered realistically, while still keeping the game's internal world model as precise as necessary to determine hits, collisions, etc.
In this context, it should be noted that movie special effects make *extensive* use of motion blur to produce extremely realistic renderings of non-existent scenes using very low frame rates. Motion blur should really be seen as the key to realistic rendering, since frame rates will never reach the threshold necessary to freeze extremely fast moving objects. After all, in the real world, one needs a very high speed strobe to freeze a bullet. Frame rates, especially in demanding frames (lots of objects, lots of motion) are not going to hit the 1000 fps mark any time soon. If fast moving objects are to be rendered realistically, then they'll have to be done with motion blur, just as film professionals, like ILM, discovered years ago.
Judging by my kids response to the program at their school, I think that DARE is amazingly effective against smoking.
They hounded me so much, that I was forced to quit (good thing too).
Russian attempt to crack US Navy Security?
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 1
Considering that the US Navy recently announced that they would be using a _future_ MS OS to control the next generation of aircraft carriers
<http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0807/news- navy-08-07-00.asp>
the possibility exists that these were Russian crackers looking for access to US military networks.
"Torjans are executables, not documents Well, how then do you classify VB scripts then? They are pretty much like a document, being plaintext and all. They are even more like a document when they come embedded in a Word or Excel document. "
Part of the problem with executable email attachements (a la Outlook) is that they effectively destroy the distinction between passive data, and active executables. Once data becomes executable the possibilities for compromising a system are greatly multiplied, because there is a whole range of files which the user doesn't expect to _do_ anything, just sit there on disk, but which can actually do pretty much anything the user has permissions for on that system. On most Windows machines, unfortunately by default, that means pretty much anything.
"I think you just produced a piece of content by accident."
But note that in producing his 2 lines of uploaded content, he first had to download many thousands of bytes of information first (i.e., the comments page we're all reading).
So his point is still correct: The overwhelming majority of users suck down more content than they produce. They are information *consumers* primarily, and the network architecture reflects this fact, particularly the disparity between upstream and downstream bandwith of most ISPs and stock hardware (modems).
For the p2p model to compete with the client/server model, upstream and downstream bandwidth would need to be the same, or nearly the same.
This is false. Open the 'Appearance' control panel (MacOS 8.0 and later), click on the 'Fonts' tab. There's a pop-up that lets you set the minimum font size threshold for anti-aliased screen fonts. Anything that size or larger that appears on screen is anti-aliased.
(Of course printed fonts have been anti-aliased on the mac since the mid '80s.)
"JPython, for instance, is Python that compiles to Java bytecode. I don't think there's any reason this concept couldn't spread to other languages."
Because other languages have different object models which can not be translated into Java bytecodes without a huge hit in execution speed.
The JVM constrains what type of language you can compile from and still hope for reasonable execution speed. Languages with a great deal of reflection (e.g., Smalltalk, Common Lisp) are pretty much screwed.
You need a better VM if you really want cross-language capability. The JVM won't do it.
"if someone does provide a decent cheap/free X server for OSX then a huge number of apps suddenly become instantly accessible to Mac users."
Which no one will want to use, since there are already existing Mac apps which fill that need.
Put it another way. Tenon has had an X server for MacOS (7, 8, 9) for many years (Xtools is news only because it runs under MacOS X which has a BSD layer). They even ported numerous X apps to run with it. Yet there was no stampede in the Mac community to use Tenon's X server to run X apps.
Why? Because if you're used to native Mac apps, then X apps look really ugly, inconsistent in GUI, flaky and slow. The only real use for an X server on MacOS (7, 8, 9 *and* X) is to run remote X apps. For local apps, there are already existing Mac applications that do the job as well or better.
In addition, there are other alternatives for running remote X apps as well, such as VNC (there's a java client which should run under MacOS X as well).
I just downloaded Tenon's Xtools and installed it on MacOS X PB. Apart from the fact that In the course of literally less than 5 minutes it crashed twice (OK, so it's beta software, but really - the X server died just launching xcalc!) I now see clearly how Apple was very wise to not go the X server route for MacOS X.
I was among those who though that Xtools might be useful, even a threat to Aqua (if enough X apps were ported, etc.).
However, my brief experience with it only served to remind me just how ugly X is, what a throwback to the 80's in terms of GUI sophistication, and how buggy the whole X experience is (I've used XFree on Linux ix86 and LinuxPPC too).
Bottom line, X will never be a serious contender for the Mac desktop because X itself is so damned ugly, flaky and slow. Xtools might however be useful for running remote X apps on a local mac, or running open source X apps locally whre no Aqua port yet exists.
Slashdot Mirror
For the USPTO page on Apple's theme engine patent see: U.S. Patent # 6,104,391
Apple has at least one other theme related patent from around the same time, IIRC.
"There are several schools of thought on why Apple hasn't ported its OS to the Intel platform. One holds that it would drain away too much money from Apple's hardware sales. Personally, I doubt this because they'd easily recover the loss with increased software sales. "
You haven't bothered to do the simple arithmetic to see why this is mistaken.
Apple makes a hefty profit on every high end box they sell (several hundred to a thousand dollars). They would have to sell as many as ten Mac OS X Intel CDs for every high end box sale they lost. Apple (quite correctly) doesn't think that there will be 10 intel buyers of thier OS for every lost high end machine sale. So no OS X for ix86.
"It says nothing about the direct action of government departments or officials, nor of goverment funded projects."
The key bit is "Congress shall make no law."
In the U.S., _all_ funding for _every_ branch and department of the Federal Government (executive, legislative, and judiciary) must be explicitly authorized by Congress.
Therefore, any action of _any_ government agency, etc, is the direct result of a law made by Congress (specifically, the budget, at a minimum, but of course other laws may be involved too, such as those determining the purview of various agencies, etc.). So any behavior, by any Federal government person or agency, that has any of the bad effects stated in the First Ammendment, is the result of a law made by Congress, and therefore, prohibited by the First Ammendment.
Actually, no logical proof can ever be given that has anything whatsoever to say about whether humans are conscious, or not, nor can consciousness be "explained."
The reason is simple. Any logical argument based on reality (i.e., observation of the real world) must take as axiomatic the existence of observors to make the observations. Moreover, these observors must be interchangable, since no single observor could ever hope to recapitulate all the experiments necessary to bring (for example) neuroscience to it's current state, and each observor's observations much be comparable to those of all other observors.
All of science is, of necessity, based on a whopping metaphysical assumption: there exist numerous observors, with essentially identical awareness. No scientist would accept observations from unconscious observors, so all observors are also assumed to be similarly conscious.
Science _assumes_ the existence of numerous, essentially identical, conscious observors. Having made this assumption, science can no more "explain" consciousness, than a geometer can "explain" parallel lines - they're just axiomatic.
"Is there any pressure to use Objective C for development ?"
There are several options.
1. Use the Cocoa (aka. "Yellow Box", NeXT) frameworks. This requires either Objective C or Java (that is, the Java _language_ with bindings to the Cocoa runtime, not to the Java VM or runtime, although MacOS X does come with a Java 2 VM/JIT and JDK for developers).
2. Use Carbon (a MacOS 8.x/9.x Toolbox wrapper library around MacOS X APIs). This option lets you use C, C++, and, when Digitool is done with their port, Common Lisp. If you're really adventurous, you can also use Dylan (which compiles to C on MacOS X) Carbon lets developers port existing MacOS 8.x/9.x code with minimal modification, and it's the path most big names are taking (MS, Adobe, even Apple itseft for many things).
3. Do pure Java development for the Java 2 platform.
In addition, you'll probably see various free scheme's ported at some point.
So, to summarize:
Framework/Platform -> Languages
Cocoa -> Objective C, Java
Carbon -> C/C++, Dylan, Common Lisp (port in progress)
Java 2 -> Java (duh!)
Hope this helps
"those "damn blue guys" are actually pretty famous performance artists."
Ironically, the Blue Man Group is featured on Apple's web site, because they use PowerPC Macs exclusively in their show.
I guess maybe Intel marketing should have checked this out before hiring them %;^)^
"you're just you, an interesting biological organism, sitting here on this rock spinning around an average star in some far off corner of the milky way drinking a latte at a starbucks , and that's all."
Actually, my latte has caramel syrup in it too.
"Technological changes have always caused a few temporary problems in the work force, but they free people up to do other things."
Such as take a lower paying job, become under, or unemployed. You live in a world where 2/3 of the people do not have enough food, adequate housing or health care. Exactly how is it that moving jobs to Mexico, (whose maquiladoras are some of the worst offenders in the world for dangerous, toxic working conditions, low wages and no benefits), constitutes progress for _most_ people, not just the wealthy minority?
Oh, that's right, middle class americans get to buy a cheaper TV! Well at least we all have our priorities straight - after all it's OK if Mexican children are poisoned by the toxic waste dumped into their water by the factory their parents work at , just so long at we can knock a few bucks off the price of a TV.
"To deny progress would mean that we have attained the pinnacle of human development, something I would like to think we have never experienced."
To deny progress would mean that some people, at some place and time in the past, have already acheived the best possible human world. That doesn't necessarily mean that _we_ personally have achieved it, as it could have been a very long time ago.
Some anthropologists have seriously argued for the upper paleolithic, a time when inhabited regions where abundant in plant and animal food, as the best time for _all_ people alive. People living at that time worked only 3 or 4 hours a day, had abundant leisure time to relax, sleep, engage in crafts, art and body decoration, etc. People were healthy, ate much better than the overwhelming majority of people on the planet today, as determined by forensic examination of their skeletal remains.
Chesterton was merely saying that the notion of progress is silly, because we can't possibly avoid being here, now. The evangelists of progress simply spin a necessity into a virtue. It is especially disingenuous to ignore the two thirds of our fellow human beings who have enjoyed essentially none of the benefits of the last centuty of progress, but are faced with the daily threat of hunger or starvation, and death by epidemic disease (over half of all the people who have _ever_ lived, died of malaria alone).
We should look a little farther than our hi-tech enclaves when we make pronouncements about the good of progress.
FWIW, this puppy is badly broken on the mac (MacOS 9.0.4). For example, when you select the "Customize Sidebar" option, it lets you add things to your sidebar list, but when you click on "OK" nothing happens - the customization window doesn't close, the sidebar isn't changed. Hitting Cmd-W doesn't work either. The only option is to hit "Cancel," which, of course leaves your sidebar un-customized.
Added to this rather major annoyance (you have no quick access to top bookmarks if you cant customize the sidebar) Netscape 6 takes over 25 seconds to launch on a 300 MHz G3, which, though not Apple's fastest, is certainly a mainstream machine. By comparison, IE 5 takes less than 10 seconds to launch and load a home page on the same machine.
This is really a beta release, and should have been presented as such. Thank god I have a cable modem, so I didn't waste too much time downloading the installer.
"I'm so glad we have copyright, you don't want communist-lackeys like Leonardo creating things, or Mozart, or Bach, we need the truly great products of a copyright and profit driven art, would we have what we have today if it wasn't for copyright? Britney Spears, Christine Aguillera, Boyzone, 5ive? "
It's worth remembering that the great artists you mention all required wealthy patrons. So let's be clear - if you eliminate copyright laws, you require a system of patronage of individual artists by the wealthy, or support by the state/taxpayers. You think you don't like a world with proprietary sotwere? What about a world where all the most talented artists were on the payroll of the very wealthy? Do you think you would have anything resembling free expression in the arts?
Otherwise, the poster who said that _all_ artists would have to spend most of their time in other jobs to pay the rent is right. Copyright allows artists to focus on creating art and not have to worry about a day job. I think that any problems can be dealt with by ensuring strict time limits.
The "vetican?"
Is that where Roman Catholic pets go for their rabies shots? Try 'Vatican.'
"The assertion that a strong Christian belief system is fundamental to a sound economy is just plain nonsense."
True. Although the argument has been made that protestantism played an important role in the historical development of capitalism (especially by Max Weber), there is clearly no relationship between christianity and a thriving capitalist economy. One only need look at Japan, possibly the worlds largest creditor nation (i.e., the most money has been borrowed from them by other nations) for a clear counter example. The US runs a consistent multi-billion dollar annual trade defecit with Japan. Some of the most market savy, and immensely profitable companies in the world are Japanese firms.
I add, for those who don't know this, that Japan is overwhelmingly buddhist and shinto, and christians make up only a tiny minority of japanese. Clearly, a nation doesn't need to be christian to have a thriving economy.
"Get you're mind out of the 1950s, McCarthy boy."
"you're" = contraction of "you are," so you just wrote:
"Get you are mind out of the 1950s, McCarthy boy."
If you're going to post on grammar, please make sure that you don't make grammatical errors in your own post. It tends to confuse the issue.
In the article referenced, the author states that motion blur would not be good in games because it would create imprecise locations for game objects, making determination of hits impossible. Here's a quote:
"The lack of motion blur with current rendering techniques is a huge setback for smooth playback. Even if you could put motion blur into games, it really is not a good idea whatsoever. We live in an analog world, and in doing so, we receive information continuously. We do not perceive the world through frames. In games, motion blur would cause the game to behave erratically. An example would be playing a game like Quake II, if there was motion blur used, there would be problems calculating the exact position of an object, so it would be really tough to hit something with your weapon. With motion blur in a game, the object in question would not really exist in any of the places where the "blur" is positioned."
This is just a failure to distinguish between a software *model* and it's screen rendering or *view* (Smalltalk programmers will see this at once). It is perfectly possible to maintain a precise location for an object in the game's model of the it's world, while only *rendering* a motion blurred version of the object. This would allow extremely fast moving objects (projectiles, shrapnel, etc.) to be rendered realistically, while still keeping the game's internal world model as precise as necessary to determine hits, collisions, etc.
In this context, it should be noted that movie special effects make *extensive* use of motion blur to produce extremely realistic renderings of non-existent scenes using very low frame rates. Motion blur should really be seen as the key to realistic rendering, since frame rates will never reach the threshold necessary to freeze extremely fast moving objects. After all, in the real world, one needs a very high speed strobe to freeze a bullet. Frame rates, especially in demanding frames (lots of objects, lots of motion) are not going to hit the 1000 fps mark any time soon. If fast moving objects are to be rendered realistically, then they'll have to be done with motion blur, just as film professionals, like ILM, discovered years ago.
Judging by my kids response to the program at their school, I think that DARE is amazingly effective against smoking.
They hounded me so much, that I was forced to quit (good thing too).
Considering that the US Navy recently announced that they would be using a _future_ MS OS to control the next generation of aircraft carriers- navy-08-07-00.asp>
<http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0807/news
the possibility exists that these were Russian crackers looking for access to US military networks.
"Torjans are executables, not documents Well, how then do you classify VB scripts then? They are pretty much like a document, being plaintext and all. They are even more like a document when they come embedded in a Word or Excel document. "
Part of the problem with executable email attachements (a la Outlook) is that they effectively destroy the distinction between passive data, and active executables. Once data becomes executable the possibilities for compromising a system are greatly multiplied, because there is a whole range of files which the user doesn't expect to _do_ anything, just sit there on disk, but which can actually do pretty much anything the user has permissions for on that system. On most Windows machines, unfortunately by default, that means pretty much anything.
"I think you just produced a piece of content by accident."
But note that in producing his 2 lines of uploaded content, he first had to download many thousands of bytes of information first (i.e., the comments page we're all reading).
So his point is still correct: The overwhelming majority of users suck down more content than they produce. They are information *consumers* primarily, and the network architecture reflects this fact, particularly the disparity between upstream and downstream bandwith of most ISPs and stock hardware (modems).
For the p2p model to compete with the client/server model, upstream and downstream bandwidth would need to be the same, or nearly the same.
"MacOS STILL doesn't have antialiased fonts."
This is false. Open the 'Appearance' control panel (MacOS 8.0 and later), click on the 'Fonts' tab. There's a pop-up that lets you set the minimum font size threshold for anti-aliased screen fonts. Anything that size or larger that appears on screen is anti-aliased.
(Of course printed fonts have been anti-aliased on the mac since the mid '80s.)
"JPython, for instance, is Python that compiles to Java bytecode. I don't think there's any reason this concept couldn't spread to other languages."
Because other languages have different object models which can not be translated into Java bytecodes without a huge hit in execution speed.
The JVM constrains what type of language you can compile from and still hope for reasonable execution speed. Languages with a great deal of reflection (e.g., Smalltalk, Common Lisp) are pretty much screwed.
You need a better VM if you really want cross-language capability. The JVM won't do it.
"On a side note, which is better: C++ or Lisp?"
Oh, that's easy - Lisp is much better, especially Common Lisp.
"Not a single mention of Columbine. Good job, Katz!"
You didn't read his article carefully:
"If the Net really turned kids' hearts dark, the streets would be awash in blood. "
Which is, of course, an only thinly veiled reference to Columbine.
"if someone does provide a decent cheap/free X server for OSX then a huge number of apps suddenly become instantly accessible to Mac users."
Which no one will want to use, since there are already existing Mac apps which fill that need.
Put it another way. Tenon has had an X server for MacOS (7, 8, 9) for many years (Xtools is news only because it runs under MacOS X which has a BSD layer). They even ported numerous X apps to run with it. Yet there was no stampede in the Mac community to use Tenon's X server to run X apps.
Why? Because if you're used to native Mac apps, then X apps look really ugly, inconsistent in GUI, flaky and slow. The only real use for an X server on MacOS (7, 8, 9 *and* X) is to run remote X apps. For local apps, there are already existing Mac applications that do the job as well or better.
In addition, there are other alternatives for running remote X apps as well, such as VNC (there's a java client which should run under MacOS X as well).
I just downloaded Tenon's Xtools and installed it on MacOS X PB. Apart from the fact that In the course of literally less than 5 minutes it crashed twice (OK, so it's beta software, but really - the X server died just launching xcalc!) I now see clearly how Apple was very wise to not go the X server route for MacOS X.
I was among those who though that Xtools might be useful, even a threat to Aqua (if enough X apps were ported, etc.).
However, my brief experience with it only served to remind me just how ugly X is, what a throwback to the 80's in terms of GUI sophistication, and how buggy the whole X experience is (I've used XFree on Linux ix86 and LinuxPPC too).
Bottom line, X will never be a serious contender for the Mac desktop because X itself is so damned ugly, flaky and slow. Xtools might however be useful for running remote X apps on a local mac, or running open source X apps locally whre no Aqua port yet exists.