It's kind of funny. The only reason really to think PowerBook isn't as cheesy a name as, say, PowerPoint is the misassumption that the name PowerBook is related to PowerPC, and yet I suspect your puncturing of that myth will probably mean people will feel there's all the more reason to keep the old name.
Had the PowerBook been released five years earlier, I wonder if it'd have been the SuperBook. Had it been released, for the very first time, a year ago, would it have been the Notebook Extreme? We have no way of knowing...
I'm pretty sure people said the same of Apple before the NeXT people took over (that was carefully worded and I'm still sure someone's going to point out Apple bought NeXT - yes, they did, but NeXT's people took over Apple, I mean, they became the senior people and stuff.) Right now, with John Lasseter being Disney's Chief Creative Officer, and Jobs both on the board and being Disney's largest shareholder, it looks like, at least nominally, a replay.
Now, that said, there are differences, chief among them being that neither Jobs nor Lasseter is a former CEO of Disney, and as such are not necessarily as familiar with the culture and market as Jobs was with Apple.
Disney, like Apple in the mid-nineties, has lost its way. For the past 30 years, it's not really had any significant direction, and has concentrated largely on media takeovers and lobbying for copyright extentions to protect Mickey Mouse, arguably a brand that has fizzled out anyway over the last decade. There's still a lot of good coming out of it, clearly there are good people in parts that are trying to find good things and pump Disney money into them, whether it's Pixar or Miramax (Pulp Fiction.) While I'm not necessarily going to argue that Jobs or Lasseter are the right people for the job, it certainly needs a fresh approach, and Jobs and Lasseter may, ultimately, be the right people to do that.
Or alternatively, you could call them and tell them what actually happened. That way they can diagnose the fault, and fix it. In the event that the person you talk to is someone who reads Slashdot and is therefore convinced that someone experimenting with different commands on their computer is actually doing something illegal, immoral, or just "against the Man(tm)" and that Apple is perfectly within their rights to not honour a warranty under such circumstances, you ask to speak to their supervisor.
There is no reason why typing commands at a prompt should completely brickify a computer. Result in data loss? Yeah. Mean you have to reinstall the OS? That's fine. But render a computer utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not. We're not talking about plugging the AC cable into the Firewire slot here, or dropping it from the top of the Empire State Building, we're just talking about experimenting with the subsystem that boots the computer in order to try to, legitimately, boot another operating system.
This isn't a slam against Apple here. I suspect these machines do, indeed, have a by-pass somewhere in them to restore the firmware (there's already a supposed fix circulating which may actually be the solution), and there are plenty of companies that also make it relatively easy to brick their systems (would it be too fucking much to add a $5 ROM to your $800 laptops that contains a "good" version of the firmware in case there's a problem with the flash?); far from it: I have great difficulty believing Apple would refuse to honour a warranty over such an issue, and I suspect, ultimately, they'll have a KB article up soon enough ensuring users can fix the issue themselves. In the event they do not, I'd be surprised if they're not seeing this as a design flaw, rather than a user issue.
There are quite a few phones where you can do that with the thing running (the Motorola Graphite (Flare) (which took full size SIMs, only phone I ever had that did) and Motorola V66 to name but two I've personally owned.) So it's not even that impressive even if "nothing breaks" after you have swapped SIMs "while the phone is on".
Of course, at this point in the conversation, the original point by both you and the GP has been missed completely... I don't think swapping a flash ROM counts as being a 31337 h4x0r, just someone willing to take a risk once in a while, and it's just cool that it worked.
SCSI was slowly dying from the original Power Macs in 1994 through the first iMac and Blue & White G3, the first machines to ship without it. By that time, Macs were already using internal IDE hard disks and optical drives. It wasn't as if this was some sort of a surprise. Also, SCSI usage was most definitely not increasing; it was decreasing drastically.
SCSI usage wasn't increasing as percentage of the market, but it was increasing in pure numeric terms. The same is true of Firewire. As I said, the situation is directly comparable.
With FireWire, it is *the* transport of choice, and usually the only transport, for all DV and HDV cameras, decks, and other video equipment, and is increasingly used on high end DTV and HDTV equipment and other high end audio/video equipment
As SCSI was for a variety of technologies, including scanners. Just like SCSI, it's replacable. We've already seen USB2 and Gigabit Ethernet + SAN start to encroach on a major chunk of Firewire's market. Firewire, for the most part, is becoming limited to a particular subset of the high-end. That's simply not sustainable. And it's particularly not sustainable if Apple's not going to keep the technology up to date, particularly in an environment in which todays uses are rapidly becoming obsolete.
I'm sure FireWire will eventually, like anything, be replaced by another standard. But for now, it's here to stay for quite some time.
Apple is no longer shipping iPods with Firewire cables. The latest flash-based iPods have no support for Firewire whatsoever. The latest Intel-based Macs have specifically dropped Firewire 800 in favour of the older, slower, less competitive FW400 standard. High-speed USB is widely supported on PCs, which means most consumer DV equipment is likely to migrate to it. Some already does.
If this doesn't scream "Being phased out", I don't know what would.
Sure, it'll continue to exist on high end workstations. But, you know, SCSI lives on in my employer's server room too, and like I said earlier, Apple made PCI SCSI cards available for long after they, realistically, dropped the standard. While I'm not saying they will, I suspect it'll generate nothing approaching an outcry if, in a year, at the very least the iMac, Mac mini, and iBook-replacement, all shipped without built-in Firewire.
The FAQ entry is far too optimistic. It's based upon flawed speculation whose grounds are as firm as a similar entry in favour of SCSI in the late nineties. SCSI being dropped was a major surprise at the time, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of Mac users have never even touched their firewire ports.
I don't really like that entry in the FAQ. Pretty much the same (or contextually similar) arguments could have been made for SCSI in the late nineties. SCSI usage was increasing, the system was used by the bulk of scanners and many other critical systems, and it was supported in all new Macs.
Until it wasn't. Suddenly the iMac comes out, and has no SCSI. Almost immediately the Blue and White G3s come out, sans SCSI (with lip-service paid in the form of an optional plug in card) Firewire is supposedly the replacement, but it isn't really, no Mac ships with Firewire hard-disks or optical media, it's IDE that's the replacement. In the space of months, SCSI goes from being central to the Mac experience to being an optional extra. The system is not directly replaced, it's just dropped. The "External peripheral that needs a large amount of bandwidth" capability is maintained by introducing Firewire, but there's little evidence right now that high-speed USB or high-speed Ethernet couldn't be used in a similar way, especially with SAN becoming increasingly mainstream.
Firewire support being capped at FW400 is a big deal. It represents a net downgrade of the technology, and suggests Apple doesn't see themselves using it, either by choice or by their increasing reliance on Intel, at some point in the future. Unless this is a temporary aberation, brought about by short term needs to get a box, any box, out there, I think it's safe to suggest that Apple isn't planning on further development of the technology.
I think the important aspect of the story is that all Apple has are prototypes with all that entails. You'd expect, for example, one month before they're due to ship, Apple would know enough about the final design to give us some idea of battery life on the things. The serious news about this is that these are prototypes as opposed to pre-production models. It wouldn't be news if they were simply pre-production. It is news that they're not even that.
There's also other interesting information in the article, namely that it looks like they're very much tied to Intel's decisions regarding supportable technologies. Firewire 800, for example, is missing not because it's deemed unnecessary, but because Intel doesn't want to support it. Conversely, 802.11a is supported over Apple's historic objections, so it goes both ways. Hopefully this will mean better support for 802.11a in general in the near future. But it does appear that Apple is less in control of its destiny than it's been in the past, and may well lose its role of first-move innovator that it was over, say, optical media, Firewire, USB, 802.11, and other technologies.
Re:I don't think many people too Gibson seriously.
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WMF Flaw not a Backdoor
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The design has been in the system since the late eighties. It's arguable "the code changed" with NT5 (I don't have enough information to hand to comment), possibly in a way that magnified a small flaw into a major one, but it's absolutely true we're talking about a prehistoric feature, designed at the time Windows machines were largely standalone, and any changes with NT5 would have simply been consequences of the insecure nature of the 1980s design, not some extra code inserted into NT for no apparent reason whatsoever.
We're talking here about a file format designed in the late eighties, based upon the original Win16 API, with support for callbacks, designed then, not in 1999, to be written in 80x86 assembly language. You bet implementing that in a modern OS would cause security problems. We can be armchair operating system designers here and say that Microsoft should have adopted something more akin to EPS, complete with sandboxed programming environment, back when it became viable, but it's one thing to say "Microsoft, you suck!", it's another to claim they're Sonying our machines.
If I had to find a paranoid, Microsoft is evil, reason for this, I'd say follow the anti-trust behaviour trail. They continued to support, and encourage the use of, a major file format with a key feature couldn't be fully supported on any operating system that didn't implement a significant part of Win16? I wonder why that would be!
Well, you can read that many ways. Personally, if I saw an actual door built into the back of my house, I would assume it was intentionally put there. On the other hand, if I leaned against a wall and it fell down, then I'd assume that wall was badly built.
This is more of a hole than a door.
Re:I don't think many people too Gibson seriously.
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WMF Flaw not a Backdoor
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No, it isn't. To believe this is a backdoor, you have to believe that people thought Windows computers were going to be hooked into a giant, international, network back in 1985-1990 (and that WMF and the 8086/x86 architecture would still be relevent by the time that network came into being.) You have to believe that people would have implemented this, documented it, and not thought that there was more than a little bit of a risk that it would be identified. You would have to believe that there were no legitimate reasons for implementing a technology in this way in the every-byte-counts WMF-is-a-hack-anyway environment that was the late eighties.
I mean, if I worked for Microsoft, given the context, I can tell you right now that had I invented WMF, I probably would have made a similar error in the name of "flexibility", and I would have assumed that computers in five years time would be using real-time EPS (that's embeddable PostScript, the initials standing for Encapsulated Post Script, for you young'uns, that's what we were all talking about then as being the future of vector formats)
renderers, not WMF, seeing it as a short-term hack until processing power became powerful enough. I certainly would have been surprised to see it still in operating systems in 2006. I'd have been surprised to see the ix86 range in computers in 2006.
Bad faith on Microsoft's part? Bullshit. Microsoft made no effort to hide this one. It made sense they implemented it that way given the context. It was an error, a short-termist attitude which has undermined many a Microsoft product. Until the late nineties, Microsoft was routinely making such errors, the most infamous being the support for embeddable, automatically run, Visual Basic scripts in Word documents. Why this is being treated as any different to every security error Microsoft has made in the past is beyond me.
Re:I don't think many people too Gibson seriously.
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WMF Flaw not a Backdoor
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My point was that the wine people's goal was to reimplement. Not audit.
Yeah, but let's be clear here: this wasn't obvious. If a similar bug went unseen in, say, XFree86/X.org for five years, there'd be no suggestion of a conspiracy. The argument would be that "many eyeballs" had missed the bug, so it must have been obscure, and at the same time can't have been deliberate because whoever implemented it implemented it for the world to see.
How did it get into Wine? Well, there are two ways it could have done. One involves Microsoft documenting the behaviour of the relevent calls, which, the TFA implies, they did. They did it in the context of the printing subsystem, but it was, certainly, documented, and the reasons explained in that documentation make sense. This is almost certainly how the behaviour got into Wine.
The other possibility is that there are a lot of WMFs around that make use of the feature, and after debugging, the Wine people found it worth implementing for compatabilities sake. We can safely assume that if there are that many WMFs around that us4e the feature, and they're not trojans or viruses (which we can assume they're not otherwise the Wine people wouldn't be trying to be compatable), then, again, Microsoft's reasons for incorporating the feature are, on the face of it, legitimate, and they're implementing something many programmers find useful.
As usual Steve Gibson, like his brother Mel*, is seeing conspiracies that appear to have more to do with his dislike for those he disagrees, and, even more probably, his wish to attract a large audience of people who dislike them even more, with than any real bad faith on (Microsoft)'s part. Unlike Mel, he doesn't seem to be that successful, probably because the vast majority of the audience are a little more open minded, their open intelligence and open-mindedness often being the reason they dislike the dominant operating system seller in the first place.
* Yes, I know he's not his brother, I'm just making a point.
MS agrees since they have just CLONED (again) the MAC OS.
Unless you're telling me they've finally fixed the menus, that the UI is app-centric, that documents are associated with applications on an individual basis, and that they've rebuilt NT upon some kind of Unix-like environment, I don't think so (and I think they'd have lost quite a bit if they've switched to the Unix-like environment though I welcome the improvement in the shell that implies)
It will be a wonderful day when MS makes the effort, but I have a feeling that by "clone" what you meant was "Added transparency and textures to the UI", two relatively minor upgrades and hardly representative of cloning an entire OS.
In terms of home users, they want home users who want something a bit different, like those who were willing to pay a bit extra for a BMW or a SAAB.
I'm not buying an Apple unless I can use another OS on it.
I'm kind of the opposite. I'm not buying another copy of Mac OS X until I can run it on a Thinkpad. I'm on the verge of switching back to GNU/Linux just to get away from the awful Apple hardware.
FWIW, you've got your wish. It is almost certain Windows will be running natively on the new Macs within a few days. Right now though, I doubt Apple is going to launch any legal way of letting me run OS X on my choice of compatable hardware.
You know what? Whenever I've pointed out that OS X is not 100% secure, that it only takes one bug, and that there have been huge holes in OS X in the recent past (such as the "A redirect to a.sit containing an executable that's associated with a common file type you're likely to open from the Finder causes the.sit to be downloaded, extracted, and the associations set up without any intervention on your part, by Safari - fixed about a year ago with that "This is the first time you have tried to run XXX..." thing), I've been flamed by Mac users and rarely, if ever, come across anyone who agreed with me. And I'm not talking about writing flamebait, I'm talking about common sense advice, y'know, "Don't buy a Mac simply because it's supposedly more secure than Windows, because it's not immune, and it's largely been lack of numbers that have caused people to avoid attacking it thus-far. You'll still need to be vigilant."
Given that, it's not hard for me to agree with the BBC writer's conclusion that Mac users are, generally, prone to illogical and ultimately dangerous smugness when it comes to the security of their systems.
That's not a page you'd see if you updated iTunes the usual way, eg. via Software Update. Software Update pointedly did not report anything about this new feature, and the description made it look like a minor update (which is what most of us would have guessed from the version number change too):
With iTunes 6, you can preview, buy, and download over 2,000 music videos and hit TV shows on the iTunes Music Store and sync your music and purchased videos with iPod to enjoy on the go. To watch purchased videos, you must have QuickTime 7.0.3 or later and Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
iTunes 6.0.2 includes stability and performance improvements over iTunes 6.0.1.
Note: After purchasing music from the iTunes Music Store with iTunes 6 or later, you will also need to upgrade your other computers that purchase music from the iTunes Music Store to the latest version of iTunes.
I'm not sure how on earth anyone can read the above and say "Ah! iTunes 6.0.2 also sends data to a remote server about each and every song you listen to, regardless of where you got it."
It's unreasonable to expect people to check product pages and search knowledge bases every time a minor (as in 6.0.1 to 6.0.2) update occurs, especially if Apple is claiming to tell you what the "improvements" are in the update. For myself, this is one of the reasons I don't automatically hit the Update button until a few days after the fix has been released (which is why I was able to copy and paste the above), but you know, I do that because I don't trust Apple, I've had enough experience now to know they are not greater than Microsoft and Dell in reliability and honesty, despite the knee-jerk Macnut response to each and every criticism, and so, yes, I don't necessarily believe them. The funny thing is though that I still didn't expect them to actually try to pull the wool over my eyes, as in this particular stunt.
XP is based upon Win2K which in turn is based upon NT. NT was a ground-up rewrite, though some of the code from NT made it into the Windows 95, and some code - the Win16 subsystem that provides compatability with 16-bit apps under NT - came from the DOS/Windows (Windows 1.0-3.11) part (just as NT also contained OS/2 code.)
You can't lump NT in with Win3.0 and 9x, and W2K certainly wasn't a complete rewrite after NT.
Except you'd be yelling "Hooray" instead of "Throw the bum out".
Er, no, we wouldn't. We'd be furious. Like I said, liberals have a history of holding our own people to a higher standard than we hold the right to. Gore and Kerry, both of whom are good, honourable, people would almost certainly have won had they gotten the liberal support they deserved, but that deserted them because they weren't quite "perfect". Clinton's attempts to defend himself against attacks over Monica Lewinsky were only interrupted by liberal attacks on his attempts to effect regime change in Iraq, which were hurting innocent people on the ground without causing much movement.
Speak to liberals, and they are the people most furious at Hilary Clinton's attempts to wade into the sex and violence in games debate. We expect that bullshit from the enemy, not people who claim to represent us.
The Liberals have always been two-faced. To be fair, so are the Conservatives except that their faces are reversed.
Nope, just conservatives. The difference between liberals and conservatives on issues of hypocracy is this: when we, liberals, see people supposedly representing us doing things we consider wrong, we criticise them: we don't care about appearing to be united, we condemn abuses of human rights no matter who is committing them. You right-wing bastards, on the other hand, condemn liberals, but never, ever, criticise your own. You talk incessantly about how liberals represent "big government", but when your own governments create draconian laws and treat the constitution and rule of law as toilet paper, you'll do everything you can to pretend it's justified, condemning liberals every time as unamerican, and every time trying to compare minor misdeeds by so-called liberals that were condemned at the time by the vast majority of liberals, to major misdeeds by your own side you refuse completely to condemn.
Liberals often lose elections because we care about being perfect more than we care about being united.
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This has nothing to do with Bush. Indeed, if Clinton was still in power and doing it, liberals would be yelling harder. We've never, ever, shrunk from treating people who claim to be on our side with tougher standards than we treat our open opponents, and we've lost a fair few elections because of that.
This has nothing to do with Bush. Indeed, if Clinton was still in power and doing it, liberals would be yelling harder. We've never, ever, shrunk from treating people who claim to be on our side with tougher standards than we treat our open opponents, and we've lost a fair few elections because of that.
Yes and no. I'm still underwhelmed. My journal explains why, but in essense, the Powerbook G5 does not exist because IBM had no reason to develop a low power version after Apple's announcement of a switch to ix86. We have absolutely no way of knowing what the performance of a Powerbook based upon a modern processor would have been.
And to continue the thread of dishonesty and misrepresentation, this entire issue was another example. Jobs went up on stage with a graph that supposedly showed how crap the G5 was in a laptop. His graph compared the low power version of the G4, the low-power laptop-oriented Pentiums used in the MacBooks, and... the desktop version of the G5.
And gosh, didn't the desktop G5 look awful compared to the laptop processors. What a big fucking surprise! As if to add insult to injury, the graph was bullshit. I mean, seriously bullshit. One axis had "Performance per Watt" as an axis (no units, no actual mathematical or physical mapping to the real world), and it had numbers on it. And no, none of the numbers were "1".
So yeah, I'd imagine the MacBook will be faster than the Powerbook G4. Hey, I bet it's going to be better than the Mac 128k too! Whoop!
That, in some ways is a secondary issue. Yes, the MacBook almost certainly represents a huge improvement on the existing Powerbook range. But I wonder if it really is "4X", and I have my doubts, severe doubts, that this in any way justifies the switch.
Steve Jobs wasn't "singled out" for this, he just happened to be the subject when the issue was raised.
The fact is that lies and deception are (a) common and (b) shouldn't be. It is completely legitimate to (a) criticise liars and decievers, even if you haven't done so and (b) (as the submitter did) highlight lies and deceptions to reduce their impact. If Joe Blow tells me that Blow Inc's Widgets are "99% plutonium free", by which he means that 1% of each widget is plutonium, rather than that they contain 100 times less plutonium than his competitors as would be the most likely initial reading, I'll tell people. I'll not sit there and say "Hey, there are probably a lot of people who think that his widgets contain less plutonium than everyone else's" simply because of some misplaced "moral code" that says I shouldn't be seen to be apparently critical of someone for doing something that a lot of other people do.
The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5, despite Job's attempts to imply otherwise. Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents. I've written in my journal that I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year: read between the lines Jobs spoke and you find that Apple actually was struggling to come up with convincing evidence that justifies the Intel switch. Nonetheless, Jobs used wording that implied massive (2-4X!) improvements in performance, which, surprise surprise, are clearly massive exaggerations and, in the context of comparing this year's Pentiums to last year's G5s, are actually covers for practical failure on their side.
If you're going to use wording that implies massive (and 2-4X really is massive) improvements in performance, don't expect your honesty and virtue to be unquestioned when we subsequently find that no such improvements have actually occurred. If Michael Dell does the same thing, we'll criticise him too. If Intel's CEO does, we'll do the same thing. Today it's Steve Jobs.
I think the GP was responding to the claim that if you write something in Objective C for Mac, you're going to have to rewrite the entire thing in C++ if you want to port it. The fact that "very few people use (GNUstep) compared to GTK or QT" is irrelevent to that assertion. No, if you port from OS X, you do not have to rewrite in C++. You can stick to Objective C and use the GNUstep framework for the port.
The Mac OS X kernel and device drivers are written in C++.
I'm sure a lot of the userland is written in Objective C, but ultimately the OS is a collaboration between the three languages. A lot of it is almost certainly written in C++ - the Finder, for example, which is a Carbon app and unlikely to be written in Objective C as a result.
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Had the PowerBook been released five years earlier, I wonder if it'd have been the SuperBook. Had it been released, for the very first time, a year ago, would it have been the Notebook Extreme? We have no way of knowing...
Now, that said, there are differences, chief among them being that neither Jobs nor Lasseter is a former CEO of Disney, and as such are not necessarily as familiar with the culture and market as Jobs was with Apple.
Disney, like Apple in the mid-nineties, has lost its way. For the past 30 years, it's not really had any significant direction, and has concentrated largely on media takeovers and lobbying for copyright extentions to protect Mickey Mouse, arguably a brand that has fizzled out anyway over the last decade. There's still a lot of good coming out of it, clearly there are good people in parts that are trying to find good things and pump Disney money into them, whether it's Pixar or Miramax (Pulp Fiction.) While I'm not necessarily going to argue that Jobs or Lasseter are the right people for the job, it certainly needs a fresh approach, and Jobs and Lasseter may, ultimately, be the right people to do that.
There is no reason why typing commands at a prompt should completely brickify a computer. Result in data loss? Yeah. Mean you have to reinstall the OS? That's fine. But render a computer utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not. We're not talking about plugging the AC cable into the Firewire slot here, or dropping it from the top of the Empire State Building, we're just talking about experimenting with the subsystem that boots the computer in order to try to, legitimately, boot another operating system.
This isn't a slam against Apple here. I suspect these machines do, indeed, have a by-pass somewhere in them to restore the firmware (there's already a supposed fix circulating which may actually be the solution), and there are plenty of companies that also make it relatively easy to brick their systems (would it be too fucking much to add a $5 ROM to your $800 laptops that contains a "good" version of the firmware in case there's a problem with the flash?); far from it: I have great difficulty believing Apple would refuse to honour a warranty over such an issue, and I suspect, ultimately, they'll have a KB article up soon enough ensuring users can fix the issue themselves. In the event they do not, I'd be surprised if they're not seeing this as a design flaw, rather than a user issue.
Of course, at this point in the conversation, the original point by both you and the GP has been missed completely... I don't think swapping a flash ROM counts as being a 31337 h4x0r, just someone willing to take a risk once in a while, and it's just cool that it worked.
If this doesn't scream "Being phased out", I don't know what would.
Sure, it'll continue to exist on high end workstations. But, you know, SCSI lives on in my employer's server room too, and like I said earlier, Apple made PCI SCSI cards available for long after they, realistically, dropped the standard. While I'm not saying they will, I suspect it'll generate nothing approaching an outcry if, in a year, at the very least the iMac, Mac mini, and iBook-replacement, all shipped without built-in Firewire.
The FAQ entry is far too optimistic. It's based upon flawed speculation whose grounds are as firm as a similar entry in favour of SCSI in the late nineties. SCSI being dropped was a major surprise at the time, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of Mac users have never even touched their firewire ports.
Until it wasn't. Suddenly the iMac comes out, and has no SCSI. Almost immediately the Blue and White G3s come out, sans SCSI (with lip-service paid in the form of an optional plug in card) Firewire is supposedly the replacement, but it isn't really, no Mac ships with Firewire hard-disks or optical media, it's IDE that's the replacement. In the space of months, SCSI goes from being central to the Mac experience to being an optional extra. The system is not directly replaced, it's just dropped. The "External peripheral that needs a large amount of bandwidth" capability is maintained by introducing Firewire, but there's little evidence right now that high-speed USB or high-speed Ethernet couldn't be used in a similar way, especially with SAN becoming increasingly mainstream.
Firewire support being capped at FW400 is a big deal. It represents a net downgrade of the technology, and suggests Apple doesn't see themselves using it, either by choice or by their increasing reliance on Intel, at some point in the future. Unless this is a temporary aberation, brought about by short term needs to get a box, any box, out there, I think it's safe to suggest that Apple isn't planning on further development of the technology.
There's also other interesting information in the article, namely that it looks like they're very much tied to Intel's decisions regarding supportable technologies. Firewire 800, for example, is missing not because it's deemed unnecessary, but because Intel doesn't want to support it. Conversely, 802.11a is supported over Apple's historic objections, so it goes both ways. Hopefully this will mean better support for 802.11a in general in the near future. But it does appear that Apple is less in control of its destiny than it's been in the past, and may well lose its role of first-move innovator that it was over, say, optical media, Firewire, USB, 802.11, and other technologies.
We're talking here about a file format designed in the late eighties, based upon the original Win16 API, with support for callbacks, designed then, not in 1999, to be written in 80x86 assembly language. You bet implementing that in a modern OS would cause security problems. We can be armchair operating system designers here and say that Microsoft should have adopted something more akin to EPS, complete with sandboxed programming environment, back when it became viable, but it's one thing to say "Microsoft, you suck!", it's another to claim they're Sonying our machines.
If I had to find a paranoid, Microsoft is evil, reason for this, I'd say follow the anti-trust behaviour trail. They continued to support, and encourage the use of, a major file format with a key feature couldn't be fully supported on any operating system that didn't implement a significant part of Win16? I wonder why that would be!
This is more of a hole than a door.
I mean, if I worked for Microsoft, given the context, I can tell you right now that had I invented WMF, I probably would have made a similar error in the name of "flexibility", and I would have assumed that computers in five years time would be using real-time EPS (that's embeddable PostScript, the initials standing for Encapsulated Post Script, for you young'uns, that's what we were all talking about then as being the future of vector formats) renderers, not WMF, seeing it as a short-term hack until processing power became powerful enough. I certainly would have been surprised to see it still in operating systems in 2006. I'd have been surprised to see the ix86 range in computers in 2006.
Bad faith on Microsoft's part? Bullshit. Microsoft made no effort to hide this one. It made sense they implemented it that way given the context. It was an error, a short-termist attitude which has undermined many a Microsoft product. Until the late nineties, Microsoft was routinely making such errors, the most infamous being the support for embeddable, automatically run, Visual Basic scripts in Word documents. Why this is being treated as any different to every security error Microsoft has made in the past is beyond me.
How did it get into Wine? Well, there are two ways it could have done. One involves Microsoft documenting the behaviour of the relevent calls, which, the TFA implies, they did. They did it in the context of the printing subsystem, but it was, certainly, documented, and the reasons explained in that documentation make sense. This is almost certainly how the behaviour got into Wine.
The other possibility is that there are a lot of WMFs around that make use of the feature, and after debugging, the Wine people found it worth implementing for compatabilities sake. We can safely assume that if there are that many WMFs around that us4e the feature, and they're not trojans or viruses (which we can assume they're not otherwise the Wine people wouldn't be trying to be compatable), then, again, Microsoft's reasons for incorporating the feature are, on the face of it, legitimate, and they're implementing something many programmers find useful.
As usual Steve Gibson, like his brother Mel*, is seeing conspiracies that appear to have more to do with his dislike for those he disagrees, and, even more probably, his wish to attract a large audience of people who dislike them even more, with than any real bad faith on (Microsoft)'s part. Unlike Mel, he doesn't seem to be that successful, probably because the vast majority of the audience are a little more open minded, their open intelligence and open-mindedness often being the reason they dislike the dominant operating system seller in the first place.
* Yes, I know he's not his brother, I'm just making a point.
Reading this is like driving through some busy highway and finding that almost everyone has a red Toyota Camry.
It will be a wonderful day when MS makes the effort, but I have a feeling that by "clone" what you meant was "Added transparency and textures to the UI", two relatively minor upgrades and hardly representative of cloning an entire OS.
Oh great, car analogies again.FWIW, you've got your wish. It is almost certain Windows will be running natively on the new Macs within a few days. Right now though, I doubt Apple is going to launch any legal way of letting me run OS X on my choice of compatable hardware.
Given that, it's not hard for me to agree with the BBC writer's conclusion that Mac users are, generally, prone to illogical and ultimately dangerous smugness when it comes to the security of their systems.
It's unreasonable to expect people to check product pages and search knowledge bases every time a minor (as in 6.0.1 to 6.0.2) update occurs, especially if Apple is claiming to tell you what the "improvements" are in the update. For myself, this is one of the reasons I don't automatically hit the Update button until a few days after the fix has been released (which is why I was able to copy and paste the above), but you know, I do that because I don't trust Apple, I've had enough experience now to know they are not greater than Microsoft and Dell in reliability and honesty, despite the knee-jerk Macnut response to each and every criticism, and so, yes, I don't necessarily believe them. The funny thing is though that I still didn't expect them to actually try to pull the wool over my eyes, as in this particular stunt.
You can't lump NT in with Win3.0 and 9x, and W2K certainly wasn't a complete rewrite after NT.
Speak to liberals, and they are the people most furious at Hilary Clinton's attempts to wade into the sex and violence in games debate. We expect that bullshit from the enemy, not people who claim to represent us.
Nope, just conservatives. The difference between liberals and conservatives on issues of hypocracy is this: when we, liberals, see people supposedly representing us doing things we consider wrong, we criticise them: we don't care about appearing to be united, we condemn abuses of human rights no matter who is committing them. You right-wing bastards, on the other hand, condemn liberals, but never, ever, criticise your own. You talk incessantly about how liberals represent "big government", but when your own governments create draconian laws and treat the constitution and rule of law as toilet paper, you'll do everything you can to pretend it's justified, condemning liberals every time as unamerican, and every time trying to compare minor misdeeds by so-called liberals that were condemned at the time by the vast majority of liberals, to major misdeeds by your own side you refuse completely to condemn.Liberals often lose elections because we care about being perfect more than we care about being united.
This has nothing to do with Bush. Indeed, if Clinton was still in power and doing it, liberals would be yelling harder. We've never, ever, shrunk from treating people who claim to be on our side with tougher standards than we treat our open opponents, and we've lost a fair few elections because of that.
This has nothing to do with Bush. Indeed, if Clinton was still in power and doing it, liberals would be yelling harder. We've never, ever, shrunk from treating people who claim to be on our side with tougher standards than we treat our open opponents, and we've lost a fair few elections because of that.
And to continue the thread of dishonesty and misrepresentation, this entire issue was another example. Jobs went up on stage with a graph that supposedly showed how crap the G5 was in a laptop. His graph compared the low power version of the G4, the low-power laptop-oriented Pentiums used in the MacBooks, and... the desktop version of the G5.
And gosh, didn't the desktop G5 look awful compared to the laptop processors. What a big fucking surprise! As if to add insult to injury, the graph was bullshit. I mean, seriously bullshit. One axis had "Performance per Watt" as an axis (no units, no actual mathematical or physical mapping to the real world), and it had numbers on it. And no, none of the numbers were "1".
So yeah, I'd imagine the MacBook will be faster than the Powerbook G4. Hey, I bet it's going to be better than the Mac 128k too! Whoop!
That, in some ways is a secondary issue. Yes, the MacBook almost certainly represents a huge improvement on the existing Powerbook range. But I wonder if it really is "4X", and I have my doubts, severe doubts, that this in any way justifies the switch.
The fact is that lies and deception are (a) common and (b) shouldn't be. It is completely legitimate to (a) criticise liars and decievers, even if you haven't done so and (b) (as the submitter did) highlight lies and deceptions to reduce their impact. If Joe Blow tells me that Blow Inc's Widgets are "99% plutonium free", by which he means that 1% of each widget is plutonium, rather than that they contain 100 times less plutonium than his competitors as would be the most likely initial reading, I'll tell people. I'll not sit there and say "Hey, there are probably a lot of people who think that his widgets contain less plutonium than everyone else's" simply because of some misplaced "moral code" that says I shouldn't be seen to be apparently critical of someone for doing something that a lot of other people do.
The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5, despite Job's attempts to imply otherwise. Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents. I've written in my journal that I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year: read between the lines Jobs spoke and you find that Apple actually was struggling to come up with convincing evidence that justifies the Intel switch. Nonetheless, Jobs used wording that implied massive (2-4X!) improvements in performance, which, surprise surprise, are clearly massive exaggerations and, in the context of comparing this year's Pentiums to last year's G5s, are actually covers for practical failure on their side.
If you're going to use wording that implies massive (and 2-4X really is massive) improvements in performance, don't expect your honesty and virtue to be unquestioned when we subsequently find that no such improvements have actually occurred. If Michael Dell does the same thing, we'll criticise him too. If Intel's CEO does, we'll do the same thing. Today it's Steve Jobs.
I think the GP was responding to the claim that if you write something in Objective C for Mac, you're going to have to rewrite the entire thing in C++ if you want to port it. The fact that "very few people use (GNUstep) compared to GTK or QT" is irrelevent to that assertion. No, if you port from OS X, you do not have to rewrite in C++. You can stick to Objective C and use the GNUstep framework for the port.
I'm sure a lot of the userland is written in Objective C, but ultimately the OS is a collaboration between the three languages. A lot of it is almost certainly written in C++ - the Finder, for example, which is a Carbon app and unlikely to be written in Objective C as a result.
This is a license, not a contract. Yes, there's a difference.