But... I would imagine a full size jet liner weighing how many tons dry, would still be enough of an impact at over 400 mph to bring down the WTC.
Untrue. NPR had an interesting interview with a structural engineer the evening of the eleventh. His professional opinion was that the force of the impact was insignificant in comparison to the weight that the steel structure had to hold up every day. The plane simply disintegrated. The fire was what caused the collapse.
Remember that infrastructure was designed to support thousands (millions?) of tons constantly, and it was able to support those top floors for a considerable amount of time after the impact. The only thing heavy enough to collapse the WTC was, well, the WTC. Without the fire, the towers would have stood and the loss of life wouldn't have been anywhere near as great.
Tru' dat. My personal concern is not that the RIAA will win this fight. As you said, they are inevitably doomed. My concern is that the RIAA/MPAA will sue enough people and get enough crap laws passed that tech development in the U.S. gets shackled. Countries like Taiwan will NOT be tied down by such nonsense, and that puts them in a much better position in the global market.
Much of the economic development of the past two hundred years has been fueled by technology. If we drive out our technologists because they're afraid to write software, then we've crippled ourselves while the rest of the world moves ahead. That's just plain stupid.
Cut Apple some slack. Both of these issues are with third party software, and have nothing to do with the fundamental "goodness" of the OS. The exact same issues exist in the Linux world.
IIRC, Apache, Sendmail, and Bind have had a couple of security holes crop up in the past. Plus I guarantee that every time there's a major kernel upgrade it breaks a few programs. That's not a bad thing, it's just the price of progress. True, you don't see this kind of thing as often with Linux, but Linus isn't pushing out kernel upgrades at the frantic pace that he used to.
I'm not worried about it. Holes will be plugged, bugs will be fixed, and software will be rewritten. OS X is just going through some of the growing pains that other systems (like Linux) went through earlier.
I'm not really suprised by 10.1 breaking X. In order to get the speed increases that I've been hearing about, they probably had to retouch darn near everything all the way down to the kernel level. That includes the BSD layer, so I wouldn't be surprised if anything written at that level has problems. Even Apple's own dev tools that came with 10.0 are broken.
While losing X is irritating, I have a hard time getting angry at Apple. OS X was a real dog, and they absolutely needed to get performance up to snuff. Besides which, I'm sure that this glitch will be corrected shortly. Until then, you can get by with Aqua. It's not that bad.:)
While the GeForce3 is a pretty sweet card, I find the new marketing tactics of NVidia distasteful. The GeForce3 Ti-200 and GeForce2 Ti are actually slower cards[tomshardware.com] gussied up with new drivers and a new name. Not only that, but they timed the release [tomshardware.com] of their new Detonator XP drivers to spoil the release of the Radeon 8500.
I know that "business is war" and all that, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
This is great news. I've had a theory about the inevitable doom of Microsoft for some time now, and it seems to be holding up.
Let's look at the facts:
Microsoft is a publicly held corporation.
Stockholders demand continual proft growth.
There are only three ways to increase profit: Lower overhead, charge more per person, or sell to more people.
Microsoft has already sold Windows to virtually everyone that has purchased a PC. The remaining 8 percent are either Mac users or Free software users, and won't buy Windows anyways.
PC sales are declining.
This creates an interesting dynamic. Microsoft needs to make more money, but they already have really fat margins and a monopoly. Solution? Charge their existing customers more money. Since consumers purchase according to a cost/benefit tally, Microsoft must convince consumers that the benefit of paying more money for upgrades outweighs the costs.
Inevitably, the continually increasing cost will outweigh the benefits. That's what you're seeing now. Windows 2000 is "good enough", and people just don't want to pay any more. Microsoft is trying to force people to upgrade, and people are starting to consider alternatives with a better cost/benefit ratio. End result? Linux and MacOS will thrive because they are more affordable alternatives. The Microsoft monopoly will eventually fade away and Unix will inherit the earth.
At least, I hope it was a joke. There is nothing to attack in Afghanistan.. The Taliban banned the internet a while back because it permitted access to "immoral content". Afghanistan doesn't have an information infrastructure, much less one that connects to the big wide world.
Check out the.af domain sometime. Totally barren. That's what makes this whole thing so ridiculous.
I'm afraid that I don't see your point. Apple is now just another commercial unix vendor, much like Sun or IBM. The only difference is that they're targeting the desktop market instead of servers. How does this threaten the open source community, or specifically, BSD?
Are BSD coders going to drop everything and start hacking on Darwin? Not likely. Darwin is pretty nifty, but projects like OpenBSD have different goals. People might lose interest in Linux PPC, but that will only happen if Apple puts out a superior (and free) product.
Besides which, Apple's been a pretty good neighbor. They've given a lot back to FreeBSD and GCC, and that says a lot. The traditional way of squashing a technology is "embrace and extend", but that requires your extensions to be closed-source. Darwin is totally open, and the contributions to GCC and FreeBSD are anything but closed.
Your rant seems more born from fear than reason. Why are you scared of OS X? It's a full-featured unix that my mom can use. Why is that threatening?
All five buttons always work under OS 9, because MS was nice enough to give us a system extension. The way that OS X deals with the mouse, button support is a little more spotty. As far as I can tell, it depends on the application. For example: OmniWeb uses the left and right buttons, scroll wheel, and scroll wheel button. Same with Mail. IE uses the left and right buttons and the scroll wheel. iTunes only uses the left and right buttons (No scroll wheel! Argh!). Sadly, the forward and back buttons don't seem to work in OS X yet. Of course, it could be the difference between Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa apps. I need to experiment with it more.
Darnit Taco, please join the present. I'm currently using an Intellimouse Explorer on my Mac, and I've got five mouse buttons plus a scroll wheel. They all work quite well, thank you. If you really want a multi-button mouse for your iBook, just plug one into the USB port. You don't even have to reboot.
I know you meant it as a joke, but statements like that smell a lot like a troll. Please try not to taunt your audience.
The ideal thing, for me, would be for some motherboard manufacturer to produce a G5 board compatible with ATX form factor and supporting all the PC usuals (ATA100, lots of PCI slots, AGP, etc).
What you would come up with is... a Mac! The Macintosh already uses ATA 100, PCI, AGP, etc. Theoretically you could take ANY PCI card and have it work on a Mac, if you just had the right drivers. The only real difference between Macs and PCs is the processor and chipset.
Yeah, many Middle Eastern leaders are denouncing this. That's merely a "cover your ass" move and it's almost a brainstem function for governmental leaders. Actions speak louder than words, and today was a pretty big action by somebody.
This was an Act of War by any standard definition. If it was a radical terrorist group, then then anyone harboring him has two choices:
Give up the responsible party.
Go to war with the United States.
Frankly, neither Afghanistan or Palestine seems likely to take option 1. Personally, I hope that it's just a cell that we can vent our wrath upon instead of a state-backed thing. Because if there is even a hint of national backing, then may God have mercy on their souls.
Fair enough. However, I already ceded the point that it's both impractical and unethical. That's not what I'm interested in. What really interests me is the security implications of something like this. Are there good defenses against this unauthorized use of your resources? If you turn off checksumming, does that leave you vulnerable to another form of attack?
We've already decided that this is useless for real computation. What are the other ramifications?
One of the big things that's coming out today, or the last two years, has been EverQuest, which is a 3-D virtual reality game. There's other ones called Asheron's Call and Altima Online.
Altima Online!
Drive your Nissan Altima around in a virtual world populated with thousands of boring commuter automobiles! Avoid parking tickets! Quest for cheap gasoline! Rack up mileage! Altima Online, coming soon to a PC near you.
Both valid points, but I think that it's foolish to dismiss this out of hand. First of all, it's a pretty slick hack. Very inventive, if nothing else. Secondly, it brings up some very interesting questions. Can this ever be made practical? What would it take? Would it be ethical to make it work? Can this be used to augment a DOS attack, or something similar? If so, how do we defend against it?
Maybe I'm talking out of my ass here. I don't know TCP/IP very well. However, I know that others of you out there really know your stuff. I'd like to hear from you.
I find it interesting that BeFS is mentioned so prominently by each of the developers as a goal for an FS to aspire to, yet the OS itself has basically died even though it was given away for free. What does this tell us?
This tells us that no matter how technically brilliant your OS is, you need developers. We went through this before with OS/2. OS/2 was much better than Windows in all sorts of ways. IBM failed to get third-party developers on board. No developers = no apps = no users. When Windows 95 came out, it sucked but was universally adopted because Microsoft was able to leverage their existing Windows developers.
Personally, I really wanted to see the BeOS succeed. It was fast, pretty, versatile, and thoroughly modern. I couldn't make the switch, though, because the apps and drivers I wanted simply didn't exist. From what I understand, this was because Be didn't work on cultivating those third-party developers that are so important.
For an interesting contrast, look at Linux. Linux is so darn developer friendly that we've got 3+ full GUI environments, 4+ journaled file systems, a bunch of web browsers, a couple of Office suites, and device support up the wazoo. We've even got some decent games (thanks, Loki!). Be didn't have any of that, despite their incredible technology. Again, developers = apps = users.
I'm really sorry to see the BeOS gone. It really was ahead of its' time. Fortunately, the whirlwind nature of Open Source development means that a lot of the good ideas in the BeOS will probably make it into another OS eventually. Good ideas never die, they just go into hibernation every now and then.
I'm a software engineer who is almost completely burned out. The only thing holding me back from considering a career shift to teaching is the miserable pay. I'd have to take a pay cut of at least 50%, and as the sole support of a family of four there's no way I can do that.
I think you've hit the nail right on the head. The only thing holding a LOT of highly qualified people (like you) back is the money. The wages truly are horrible, especially in comparison to the societal value of the job.
It stands to reason that the people that make the best teachers will be successful in other careers as well. If those other jobs pay more, then people will not go into teaching. Fun fact: The higher you score on standardized tests, the less likely you are to become a teacher. If you do become a teacher, the higher your scores are, the more likely that you'll leave teaching early. This isn't to bash teaching (or teachers), it's just to illustrate that the best and the brightest tend to go elsewhere.
Now, the obvious solution to me would be to offer pay commensurate with experience and ability. Higher wages all around, but especially for those with more experience/education and those that performed well. You'd be able to go teach without worrying about feeding the family, and we might actually attract "the best and the brightest" to teach our kids. The problem with that is twofold. First, our schools are sadly underfunded. Have you ever looked at an elementary school budget? It's just sad. Secondly (and possibly most important), "merit pay" has been opposed by teacher's unions and school administrators for quite a long time. There's a lot of teachers that wouldn't make the cut if we started grading them on their education/experience and job performance.
I think that teaching is a great and noble profession. I just think it's sad that our system doesn't produce the caliber of teachers that our students deserve.
I haven't seen something this silly since my dog got stuck in the cat door.
"Many in the music community are concerned..."
Well, it's a bit late for that. CD-Rs are so incredibly cheap, pervasive, and useful that there's no way people will surrender them. Since you can burn WAY more than just copyrighted material, they don't even have a legal leg to stand on if they want to impose a "tax".
Not only are the horses gone, but the barn door has been ripped off of its' hinges and burned. They should have been worried about this five years ago.
I think the most interesting use of this would be in research psychology. There's been a movement to come up with a good descriptive model for personality for some time now. There's some giant obstacles to overcome, though.
First of all, the study of personality and human behavior is incredibly young. Freud got the ball rolling little more than a century ago, and he set us off on the wrong foot. Like any new science, we're still at the "darts at a dartboard" exploratory stage. It's really hard to come up with a universal descriptive model when we're still drowning in the data.
Secondly, what (human) language are they going to base this on? Language is culture, and different languages describe the world (and people) in very different ways. We might come up with a descriptive markup that works very well when applied to Americans in American society but totally breaks down in Japan. How are they going to make sure that it's broad enough to be global without being so vague that it's useless?
I wish them well, though. Psychology has been badly in need of something like this for a long time, and even if version 1.0 sucks it gives us something to build off of.
Good point. However, my infatuation with OS X stems not from any single thing I can point to and say "that's a Mac thing". The compelling reasons to switch were because it:
Gave me all my Unix tools. (Unix)
Gave me Quicktime, Photoshop, and a bunch of games. (Windows)
Gave me DVD support. (Windows)
Gave me two mouse buttons and a scroll-wheel. (Just about everything but the MacOS)
Gave me a command prompt. (Again, anything but the MacOS)
In short, it allowed me to take the Unix plunge without losing all of the applications that I previously had in Windows.
Naturally, after I got into it there were other things that I liked about OS X. I love the Quartz display layer and all of its' PDF goodness. I love Cocoa. I love the elegance of the dock. However, there's very few "Mac" things that I can point to and say, "I like that. Don't throw that out."
Anyway, calling you a bigot was childish and I'd like to apologize for that. Even if I disagree on a few points, it was an excellent article and I encourage you (and the rest of the Ars crew) to keep up the good work.
Any part of the Mac OS user experience that exactly duplicates the experience on another platform ceases to be a compelling reason to buy a Mac.
I totally disagree. I had absolutely no interest in Macs until OS X, and the reason I switched was because it acts just like a *nix. I can pull up bash, run emacs, grep, sed, awk, etc. Duplicating the unix experience was a very compelling reason for me to buy a Mac. Naturally, little things like Quicktime, games, and DVD support sweetened the deal.:)
As far as metadata is concerned, I think that Mr. Siracusa is right. The current unix way of handling metadata sucks. Unfortunately, the future does not lie with the old "Mac Way", which is arguably a good deal more elegant. Steve Jobs knows this, which is why his new OS is based on unix, despite its' occasional warts (like file extensions). Apple has done what it had to do to survive in this new world. I just hope that a lot of the old Mac partisans will stop trying to cling to the past and join us for the ride.
Slashdot Mirror
But... I would imagine a full size jet liner weighing how many tons dry, would still be enough of an impact at over 400 mph to bring down the WTC.
Untrue. NPR had an interesting interview with a structural engineer the evening of the eleventh. His professional opinion was that the force of the impact was insignificant in comparison to the weight that the steel structure had to hold up every day. The plane simply disintegrated. The fire was what caused the collapse.
Remember that infrastructure was designed to support thousands (millions?) of tons constantly, and it was able to support those top floors for a considerable amount of time after the impact. The only thing heavy enough to collapse the WTC was, well, the WTC. Without the fire, the towers would have stood and the loss of life wouldn't have been anywhere near as great.
Tru' dat. My personal concern is not that the RIAA will win this fight. As you said, they are inevitably doomed. My concern is that the RIAA/MPAA will sue enough people and get enough crap laws passed that tech development in the U.S. gets shackled. Countries like Taiwan will NOT be tied down by such nonsense, and that puts them in a much better position in the global market.
Much of the economic development of the past two hundred years has been fueled by technology. If we drive out our technologists because they're afraid to write software, then we've crippled ourselves while the rest of the world moves ahead. That's just plain stupid.
Cut Apple some slack. Both of these issues are with third party software, and have nothing to do with the fundamental "goodness" of the OS. The exact same issues exist in the Linux world.
IIRC, Apache, Sendmail, and Bind have had a couple of security holes crop up in the past. Plus I guarantee that every time there's a major kernel upgrade it breaks a few programs. That's not a bad thing, it's just the price of progress. True, you don't see this kind of thing as often with Linux, but Linus isn't pushing out kernel upgrades at the frantic pace that he used to.
I'm not worried about it. Holes will be plugged, bugs will be fixed, and software will be rewritten. OS X is just going through some of the growing pains that other systems (like Linux) went through earlier.
I'm not really suprised by 10.1 breaking X. In order to get the speed increases that I've been hearing about, they probably had to retouch darn near everything all the way down to the kernel level. That includes the BSD layer, so I wouldn't be surprised if anything written at that level has problems. Even Apple's own dev tools that came with 10.0 are broken.
While losing X is irritating, I have a hard time getting angry at Apple. OS X was a real dog, and they absolutely needed to get performance up to snuff. Besides which, I'm sure that this glitch will be corrected shortly. Until then, you can get by with Aqua. It's not that bad. :)
While the GeForce3 is a pretty sweet card, I find the new marketing tactics of NVidia distasteful. The GeForce3 Ti-200 and GeForce2 Ti are actually slower cards[tomshardware.com] gussied up with new drivers and a new name. Not only that, but they timed the release [tomshardware.com] of their new Detonator XP drivers to spoil the release of the Radeon 8500.
I know that "business is war" and all that, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
This is great news. I've had a theory about the inevitable doom of Microsoft for some time now, and it seems to be holding up.
Let's look at the facts:
This creates an interesting dynamic. Microsoft needs to make more money, but they already have really fat margins and a monopoly. Solution? Charge their existing customers more money. Since consumers purchase according to a cost/benefit tally, Microsoft must convince consumers that the benefit of paying more money for upgrades outweighs the costs.
Inevitably, the continually increasing cost will outweigh the benefits. That's what you're seeing now. Windows 2000 is "good enough", and people just don't want to pay any more. Microsoft is trying to force people to upgrade, and people are starting to consider alternatives with a better cost/benefit ratio. End result? Linux and MacOS will thrive because they are more affordable alternatives. The Microsoft monopoly will eventually fade away and Unix will inherit the earth.
At least, I hope it was a joke. There is nothing to attack in Afghanistan.. The Taliban banned the internet a while back because it permitted access to "immoral content". Afghanistan doesn't have an information infrastructure, much less one that connects to the big wide world.
Check out the .af domain sometime. Totally barren. That's what makes this whole thing so ridiculous.
I'm afraid that I don't see your point. Apple is now just another commercial unix vendor, much like Sun or IBM. The only difference is that they're targeting the desktop market instead of servers. How does this threaten the open source community, or specifically, BSD?
Are BSD coders going to drop everything and start hacking on Darwin? Not likely. Darwin is pretty nifty, but projects like OpenBSD have different goals. People might lose interest in Linux PPC, but that will only happen if Apple puts out a superior (and free) product.
Besides which, Apple's been a pretty good neighbor. They've given a lot back to FreeBSD and GCC, and that says a lot. The traditional way of squashing a technology is "embrace and extend", but that requires your extensions to be closed-source. Darwin is totally open, and the contributions to GCC and FreeBSD are anything but closed.
Your rant seems more born from fear than reason. Why are you scared of OS X? It's a full-featured unix that my mom can use. Why is that threatening?
All five buttons always work under OS 9, because MS was nice enough to give us a system extension. The way that OS X deals with the mouse, button support is a little more spotty. As far as I can tell, it depends on the application. For example: OmniWeb uses the left and right buttons, scroll wheel, and scroll wheel button. Same with Mail. IE uses the left and right buttons and the scroll wheel. iTunes only uses the left and right buttons (No scroll wheel! Argh!). Sadly, the forward and back buttons don't seem to work in OS X yet. Of course, it could be the difference between Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa apps. I need to experiment with it more.
Darnit Taco, please join the present. I'm currently using an Intellimouse Explorer on my Mac, and I've got five mouse buttons plus a scroll wheel. They all work quite well, thank you. If you really want a multi-button mouse for your iBook, just plug one into the USB port. You don't even have to reboot.
I know you meant it as a joke, but statements like that smell a lot like a troll. Please try not to taunt your audience.
The ideal thing, for me, would be for some motherboard manufacturer to produce a G5 board compatible with ATX form factor and supporting all the PC usuals (ATA100, lots of PCI slots, AGP, etc).
What you would come up with is... a Mac! The Macintosh already uses ATA 100, PCI, AGP, etc. Theoretically you could take ANY PCI card and have it work on a Mac, if you just had the right drivers. The only real difference between Macs and PCs is the processor and chipset.
First of all, thanks for the links.
Yeah, many Middle Eastern leaders are denouncing this. That's merely a "cover your ass" move and it's almost a brainstem function for governmental leaders. Actions speak louder than words, and today was a pretty big action by somebody.
This was an Act of War by any standard definition. If it was a radical terrorist group, then then anyone harboring him has two choices:
Frankly, neither Afghanistan or Palestine seems likely to take option 1. Personally, I hope that it's just a cell that we can vent our wrath upon instead of a state-backed thing. Because if there is even a hint of national backing, then may God have mercy on their souls.
If that's the case, then why are people complaining about having their CPU time stolen? I get the impression that this slows down your machine a bit.
Fair enough. However, I already ceded the point that it's both impractical and unethical. That's not what I'm interested in. What really interests me is the security implications of something like this. Are there good defenses against this unauthorized use of your resources? If you turn off checksumming, does that leave you vulnerable to another form of attack?
We've already decided that this is useless for real computation. What are the other ramifications?
One of the big things that's coming out today, or the last two years, has been EverQuest, which is a 3-D virtual reality game. There's other ones called Asheron's Call and Altima Online.
Altima Online!
Drive your Nissan Altima around in a virtual world populated with thousands of boring commuter automobiles! Avoid parking tickets! Quest for cheap gasoline! Rack up mileage! Altima Online, coming soon to a PC near you.
Most of the posts here have been of two schools:
Both valid points, but I think that it's foolish to dismiss this out of hand. First of all, it's a pretty slick hack. Very inventive, if nothing else. Secondly, it brings up some very interesting questions. Can this ever be made practical? What would it take? Would it be ethical to make it work? Can this be used to augment a DOS attack, or something similar? If so, how do we defend against it?
Maybe I'm talking out of my ass here. I don't know TCP/IP very well. However, I know that others of you out there really know your stuff. I'd like to hear from you.
I find it interesting that BeFS is mentioned so prominently by each of the developers as a goal for an FS to aspire to, yet the OS itself has basically died even though it was given away for free. What does this tell us?
This tells us that no matter how technically brilliant your OS is, you need developers. We went through this before with OS/2. OS/2 was much better than Windows in all sorts of ways. IBM failed to get third-party developers on board. No developers = no apps = no users. When Windows 95 came out, it sucked but was universally adopted because Microsoft was able to leverage their existing Windows developers.
Personally, I really wanted to see the BeOS succeed. It was fast, pretty, versatile, and thoroughly modern. I couldn't make the switch, though, because the apps and drivers I wanted simply didn't exist. From what I understand, this was because Be didn't work on cultivating those third-party developers that are so important.
For an interesting contrast, look at Linux. Linux is so darn developer friendly that we've got 3+ full GUI environments, 4+ journaled file systems, a bunch of web browsers, a couple of Office suites, and device support up the wazoo. We've even got some decent games (thanks, Loki!). Be didn't have any of that, despite their incredible technology. Again, developers = apps = users.
I'm really sorry to see the BeOS gone. It really was ahead of its' time. Fortunately, the whirlwind nature of Open Source development means that a lot of the good ideas in the BeOS will probably make it into another OS eventually. Good ideas never die, they just go into hibernation every now and then.
I'm a software engineer who is almost completely burned out. The only thing holding me back from considering a career shift to teaching is the miserable pay. I'd have to take a pay cut of at least 50%, and as the sole support of a family of four there's no way I can do that.
I think you've hit the nail right on the head. The only thing holding a LOT of highly qualified people (like you) back is the money. The wages truly are horrible, especially in comparison to the societal value of the job.
It stands to reason that the people that make the best teachers will be successful in other careers as well. If those other jobs pay more, then people will not go into teaching. Fun fact: The higher you score on standardized tests, the less likely you are to become a teacher. If you do become a teacher, the higher your scores are, the more likely that you'll leave teaching early. This isn't to bash teaching (or teachers), it's just to illustrate that the best and the brightest tend to go elsewhere.
Now, the obvious solution to me would be to offer pay commensurate with experience and ability. Higher wages all around, but especially for those with more experience/education and those that performed well. You'd be able to go teach without worrying about feeding the family, and we might actually attract "the best and the brightest" to teach our kids. The problem with that is twofold. First, our schools are sadly underfunded. Have you ever looked at an elementary school budget? It's just sad. Secondly (and possibly most important), "merit pay" has been opposed by teacher's unions and school administrators for quite a long time. There's a lot of teachers that wouldn't make the cut if we started grading them on their education/experience and job performance.
I think that teaching is a great and noble profession. I just think it's sad that our system doesn't produce the caliber of teachers that our students deserve.
I haven't seen something this silly since my dog got stuck in the cat door.
"Many in the music community are concerned..."
Well, it's a bit late for that. CD-Rs are so incredibly cheap, pervasive, and useful that there's no way people will surrender them. Since you can burn WAY more than just copyrighted material, they don't even have a legal leg to stand on if they want to impose a "tax".Not only are the horses gone, but the barn door has been ripped off of its' hinges and burned. They should have been worried about this five years ago.
I think the most interesting use of this would be in research psychology. There's been a movement to come up with a good descriptive model for personality for some time now. There's some giant obstacles to overcome, though.
First of all, the study of personality and human behavior is incredibly young. Freud got the ball rolling little more than a century ago, and he set us off on the wrong foot. Like any new science, we're still at the "darts at a dartboard" exploratory stage. It's really hard to come up with a universal descriptive model when we're still drowning in the data.
Secondly, what (human) language are they going to base this on? Language is culture, and different languages describe the world (and people) in very different ways. We might come up with a descriptive markup that works very well when applied to Americans in American society but totally breaks down in Japan. How are they going to make sure that it's broad enough to be global without being so vague that it's useless?
I wish them well, though. Psychology has been badly in need of something like this for a long time, and even if version 1.0 sucks it gives us something to build off of.
Good point. However, my infatuation with OS X stems not from any single thing I can point to and say "that's a Mac thing". The compelling reasons to switch were because it:
- Gave me all my Unix tools. (Unix)
- Gave me Quicktime, Photoshop, and a bunch of games. (Windows)
- Gave me DVD support. (Windows)
- Gave me two mouse buttons and a scroll-wheel. (Just about everything but the MacOS)
- Gave me a command prompt. (Again, anything but the MacOS)
In short, it allowed me to take the Unix plunge without losing all of the applications that I previously had in Windows.Naturally, after I got into it there were other things that I liked about OS X. I love the Quartz display layer and all of its' PDF goodness. I love Cocoa. I love the elegance of the dock. However, there's very few "Mac" things that I can point to and say, "I like that. Don't throw that out."
Anyway, calling you a bigot was childish and I'd like to apologize for that. Even if I disagree on a few points, it was an excellent article and I encourage you (and the rest of the Ars crew) to keep up the good work.
Bingo. Well said
From the article:
Any part of the Mac OS user experience that exactly duplicates the experience on another platform ceases to be a compelling reason to buy a Mac.
I totally disagree. I had absolutely no interest in Macs until OS X, and the reason I switched was because it acts just like a *nix. I can pull up bash, run emacs, grep, sed, awk, etc. Duplicating the unix experience was a very compelling reason for me to buy a Mac. Naturally, little things like Quicktime, games, and DVD support sweetened the deal. :)
As far as metadata is concerned, I think that Mr. Siracusa is right. The current unix way of handling metadata sucks. Unfortunately, the future does not lie with the old "Mac Way", which is arguably a good deal more elegant. Steve Jobs knows this, which is why his new OS is based on unix, despite its' occasional warts (like file extensions). Apple has done what it had to do to survive in this new world. I just hope that a lot of the old Mac partisans will stop trying to cling to the past and join us for the ride.
All excellent points, but you forgot the most important thing:
They're really cute.
Absolutely right. Touche.