It is correct to say that "nothing can guarantee a lossless compression ratio." You have chosen to interpret this as "nothing which is compressed can be guaranteed to be lossless," which is entirely different.
The more entropy in a dataset, the less you will be able to compress it without loss. Perfectly random data is not compressible at all.
If lossless compression could be guaranteed for any data, why wouldn't you just feed the output of that compressor back into itself? Iterate over that until you can losslessly compress any file down to 0 bits, and you've got yourself a hot product.
I suppose I'm way into TangentLand here, but conductivity is not why gold is used for connectors. Gold is a pretty mediocre conductor; not terrible, but many things (notably silver) are better. The real value is that gold doesn't oxidize, so the connecting surface tends to be cleaner.
So gold _cables_ are actually pretty silly, as I suspect the grandparent was trying to imply. Copper or silver cables with gold connectors actually make a bit of sense.
play bought tunes on a non-iPod player such as Archos or Rio
stream bought tunes to a SliMP3 or Audiotron
burn bought tunes on an MP3-CD for use in the car or a DVD player
Yep. Kinda sucks that you bought a player without upgradable firmware to deal with new formats, eh? You were thinking that maybe for the rest of time no one would ever use an audio codec beyond mp3?
play bought tunes on your Windows or Linux PC
Why, your copy of scp broken? Or are you complaining that these platforms don't have software to decode aac? That's certainly not true for Windows (given Quicktime). Either way, I'd imagine it'd change quickly enough.
switch to another client other than iTunes (e.g. Audion) for your Mac music experience
Wrong. As with any civilized operating system, codecs are handled by standard system libraries, not by individual applications. Any mac application gets everything Quicktime can do for free; "mp3 player" applications are really just playlist managers.
broadcast bought tunes using Shoutcast
Same problem as with hardware players, but even easier still to solve.
So out of curiosity, how do you feel about ogg vorbis? Would you have been as offended if Apple had released everything in that "nonstandard" format that your existing devices wouldn't play?
Years ago, my mother always wanted to talk to people about what I do, in standard mother fashion. The problem was, she could never remember the term "sysadmin," as it wasn't particularly meaningful to her.
So several times she ended up telling people that I was a Sisyphus.
I told her this was pretty accurate, and far more descriptive.
Though the two have a high correlation, the problem technically comes not from open source/freeness, but from software which is developed by individuals to scratch their own itches. Such software will always be prone to asymptotically approaching "done."
Scratching your own itch is great for getting people to start projects, and get core functionality working well, and sometimes put a simplistic interface on them. But once the project has reached the level of "pretty good," it becomes more compelling to scratch a new and different itch than to put finishing touches on something which already basically works.
This is why free software has a tendency to hover around 85% complete. It gets to that point very quickly, and its progress is monotonic, but that's about where it tends to be neglected in favor of some other project that's <85% there.
The solution is to have the last 15% be completed by some different development methodology. The most obvious choice is corporations making finished products out of an individual's personal tools. This is essentially what Apple, IBM, and arguably Red Hat are doing.
It works out well for everyone: individual developers are free to pursue new projects as they desire, corporations get a free head start on products, and users get polished software quickly.
Decisions of the security council, even those based upon votes of the permanent members, can be overruled by a vote of the general assembly. The procedure is referred to as "uniting for peace", though it's ironically been used more often to approve war.
The resolution would never have achieved a simple majority in the security council, it would never have been approved by all the permanent members of the council, and it would never have been supported in the general assembly. This is not a matter of France, or Russia, or any other particular country foiling the US, this is a matter of nearly every other nation in the world believing that the US is wrong. I don't know what more "checks" you would like to thwart the desires of an overwhelming majority.
Do your assertions that the UN should back up their own resolutions include the numerous resolutions against Israel?
Actually, Apple has never used the DMCA. Other World Computing, to whom Apple sent a cease and desist, claimed at first that Apple cited the DMCA. But they never provided any documents from Apple which cited it, and they later backed down from that claim. I'm not aware of any other circumstance in which Apple has cited the DMCA, and I'm certain they've never brought any litigation based on it.
Apple seems willing to use litigation against specific infringements of their intellectual property (like people who copy their images for X11 wm themes), but not to institute systemic DRM. Their official opinion is that piracy is a behavioural problem, not a technical problem.
All this seems to support the grandparent's description of a "customer-friendly, honesty-based stance on Digital Rights Management."
If you'd said "don't blame the OS for crappy apps," or "don't blame the hardware for crappy apps," I might agree with you. But you specifically brought up the term "platform," which implies that we're talking about the whole package that's actually available to the user. Application quality is extremely relevant to that discussion.
The software you recommend appears to have a list price of $999.99. Compared to iDVD's price of free, that's a substantial downside. For that additional thousand bucks, you could buy a copy of Final Cut Pro, and once again leapfrog the functionality of the Windows software.
> Note: the Dell with 2.4GHz proc, 512MB 1 DIMM, > GF4 4200, 60GB, 1920x1200, Extra Battery,... is still > only $3000 compared to apples $3300 for the 17" AlBook.
Yeah, but you lose the builtin 802.11g/b, gigabit ethernet, firewire 800 and 400, auto-adjusting backlit keyboard, dvd burner, and 33% thinner form.
I'm not saying the Dell's a terrible deal, I'm quite envious of the higher density display. But the 17" alBook certainly holds its own.
Some portion of users will have problems with any update, often for reasons unrelated to it. Watching the general flow of problem reports, this particular one seems safer than average.
That said, I spent about an hour in single-user mode when my update got horked in the middle. The installer had been sitting there chewing cpu forever, claiming to be almost done, but making no further progress. I ktraced it, and it appeared to be endlessly looping through calling gettimeofday() as fast as it could. I did what seemed like the only thing available to me: -9'd the installer, and restarted.
This worked out poorly.
Panics on startup, but I was able to get into single-user mode. After a while spent dicking around with manually loading kexts and such, I finally gave up on getting networking up from there, and had a friend burn me the 10.2.4 updater on a cd, and tried to install it again.
Unfortunately, the cli installer was choking on it, for some reason I don't understand. (It was copying parts of the installer to/tmp, but creating directories without write perms, and then failing to write things into them. I tried suspending it at the right moment and chmodding, but probably got the timing wrong.)
I finally just dug through the package, got friendly with pax, and manually removed both the kernel extension caches; problem solved.
There's a much easier way to send mail from multiple addresses: in the account config, specify as many addresses as you like, comma-separated. They'll all appear in the account pop-up menu at compose time, using the first by default.
It's quite useful, though I can't imagine how anyone's expected to figure out that it's there. And still not quite as flexible as being able to just edit the From: field directly, of course.
You mean that article that was completely wrong? I can't believe how many people fell for that.
LG Electronics announced that Apple had cancelled their contract to manufacture 15" imacs. The same day, Hon Hai Precision Industry happily announced that Apple had awarded the contract to them.
These machines are a huge success for Apple, and they're nowhere near cancelling the line. They simply switched from one Taiwanese supplier to another.
I can't believe how many people fell for that. LG Electronics announced that Apple had cancelled their contract to manufacture 15" imacs. The same day, Hon Hai Precision Industry happily announced that Apple had awarded the contract to them.
These machines are a huge success for Apple, and they're nowhere near cancelling the line. They simply switched from one Taiwanese supplier to another.
Nope, it really is garbage. I continue to be amazed when the company that contributed so much to the idea of UI standards releases software which so blatantly ignores them.
As many people have pointed out, there are several ways to disable this. My personal choice has been demetallifizer, as it will globally fix all cocoa applications.
(Of course, it crosses my mind that brushed aluminum applications are incredibly ugly...as mac applications go. They still tend to look and behave better than any X11 applications.)
If you really want to change something as fundamental as windowing, you don't want to do it on a per-application level. That gives you both inconsistency, and the ability only to do this hierarchical organization trick only with windows from one app.
The more general solution to this is multiple desktops. You can then put all you browser windows relating to a project on one desktop, along with all your editor sessions in which you're taking notes, and all the mail messages which have useful reference material, and your IM conversations with your colleagues, etc, etc. You can then switch between any number of such categorized constellations of windows, and easily move windows from one to another (or to all).
Allow me to suggest CodeTek's VirtualDesktop, which is as good a multiple desktop implementation as any I've ever used with X11, and then some.
You seem to hold Apple's developers in very high regard, if you feel that they've whipped this up in the past week or so.
Safari has been in development for around a year. This is notably longer than Chimera has existed.
There are several other links in this discussion to Apple's stated reasoning for choosing khtml. Those reasons pretty much all come to simplicity: it's about a tenth the code of even just gecko.
That smaller code size tends to make the finished product a bit zippier, but even more important is that it greatly increases the speed and flexibility with which they can improve upon it.
And standards compliance will only become _better_ with more commonly-used renderers. The harder it is for designers to write only for their favorite browser, instead of for the standard, the better.
You may want to look into vuescan, third-party driver for a huge variety of scanners. Yes, it costs something like $40, which is admittedly about the price of a cheap new scanner. But that sounds better to me than rebooting.
Speed: I spent a lot of time benchmarking UFS against HFS+ on osx about two years ago. Each was a little faster for some things, but they generally turned out to be comparable. You could argue that hfs+ suffers when compared against filesystems specifically designed for speed, eg reiser, but it's certainly not outside the normal range of speeds for unix filesystems. In nearly all cases, you're bottlenecking on your storage device.
Journalling: As you point out, no longer a valid complaint.
Compression and encryption can be handled nicely by using disk images, rather than filesystems directly on disks. I keep a compressed, AES-encrypted copy of my home directory on my ipod, created and accessed using nothing beyond the standard gui tools.
Incorrect, actually. This may have been true in the 1.* versions, I don't recall; but 2.0 allows for edge-flipping desktops, switchable to happen either all the time, or only when you're dragging a window.
It also addressed all my other concerns with the earlier version of the software, and happens to include a very good focus-follows-mouse implementation.
While it's not an answer to the remote-display problem, I think that this tool takes care of just about everything else anyone could miss from X11 window managers. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Computer displays are always actually 2D, but they're sometimes used to depict 3D environments. As you point out, all windowing systems already do this. As you fail to infer, using 3D-rendering hardware allows them to do it better.
The primary thing for which it's used in osx is compositing, which allows you to do proper layering of semiopaque objects. In addition to the obvious draw of simple prettiness, this really is a functional feature. Things like subtle drop shadows and opacity changes give very strong focus recognition, and transparent windows allows one to focus on multiple sets of data more quickly.
While it might happen accidentally (updating components you had changed), the odds of them doing it intentionally are fairly small.
I'm not trying to make an argument that Apple is so innately pure that they would never do such a thing. They do things like sell ibooks and imacs which theoretically have the hardware to do monitor spanning, but have this feature disabled for product marketing purposes.
However, they pretty much only do these things when they feel it's in their best interest. And the number of people who would make a purchasing decision based upon the ability to hack in quartzgl support for pci video is almost precisely zero, slashdot notwithstanding. Hence, no real incentive for them to intentionally thwart such things.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, compact flash is considerably slower than usb 1.1 anyway. So there's no real reason to bother with either firewire or usb2 for this application.
It is correct to say that "nothing can guarantee a lossless compression ratio." You have chosen to interpret this as "nothing which is compressed can be guaranteed to be lossless," which is entirely different.
The more entropy in a dataset, the less you will be able to compress it without loss. Perfectly random data is not compressible at all.
If lossless compression could be guaranteed for any data, why wouldn't you just feed the output of that compressor back into itself? Iterate over that until you can losslessly compress any file down to 0 bits, and you've got yourself a hot product.
I suppose I'm way into TangentLand here, but conductivity is not why gold is used for connectors. Gold is a pretty mediocre conductor; not terrible, but many things (notably silver) are better. The real value is that gold doesn't oxidize, so the connecting surface tends to be cleaner.
So gold _cables_ are actually pretty silly, as I suspect the grandparent was trying to imply. Copper or silver cables with gold connectors actually make a bit of sense.
play bought tunes on a non-iPod player such as Archos or Rio
stream bought tunes to a SliMP3 or Audiotron
burn bought tunes on an MP3-CD for use in the car or a DVD player
Yep. Kinda sucks that you bought a player without upgradable firmware to deal with new formats, eh? You were thinking that maybe for the rest of time no one would ever use an audio codec beyond mp3?
play bought tunes on your Windows or Linux PC
Why, your copy of scp broken? Or are you complaining that these platforms don't have software to decode aac? That's certainly not true for Windows (given Quicktime). Either way, I'd imagine it'd change quickly enough.
switch to another client other than iTunes (e.g. Audion) for your Mac music experience
Wrong. As with any civilized operating system, codecs are handled by standard system libraries, not by individual applications. Any mac application gets everything Quicktime can do for free; "mp3 player" applications are really just playlist managers.
broadcast bought tunes using Shoutcast
Same problem as with hardware players, but even easier still to solve.
So out of curiosity, how do you feel about ogg vorbis? Would you have been as offended if Apple had released everything in that "nonstandard" format that your existing devices wouldn't play?
Years ago, my mother always wanted to talk to people about what I do, in standard mother fashion. The problem was, she could never remember the term "sysadmin," as it wasn't particularly meaningful to her.
So several times she ended up telling people that I was a Sisyphus.
I told her this was pretty accurate, and far more descriptive.
Though the two have a high correlation, the problem technically comes not from open source/freeness, but from software which is developed by individuals to scratch their own itches. Such software will always be prone to asymptotically approaching "done."
Scratching your own itch is great for getting people to start projects, and get core functionality working well, and sometimes put a simplistic interface on them. But once the project has reached the level of "pretty good," it becomes more compelling to scratch a new and different itch than to put finishing touches on something which already basically works.
This is why free software has a tendency to hover around 85% complete. It gets to that point very quickly, and its progress is monotonic, but that's about where it tends to be neglected in favor of some other project that's <85% there.
The solution is to have the last 15% be completed by some different development methodology. The most obvious choice is corporations making finished products out of an individual's personal tools. This is essentially what Apple, IBM, and arguably Red Hat are doing.
It works out well for everyone: individual developers are free to pursue new projects as they desire, corporations get a free head start on products, and users get polished software quickly.
Decisions of the security council, even those based upon votes of the permanent members, can be overruled by a vote of the general assembly. The procedure is referred to as "uniting for peace", though it's ironically been used more often to approve war.
The resolution would never have achieved a simple majority in the security council, it would never have been approved by all the permanent members of the council, and it would never have been supported in the general assembly. This is not a matter of France, or Russia, or any other particular country foiling the US, this is a matter of nearly every other nation in the world believing that the US is wrong. I don't know what more "checks" you would like to thwart the desires of an overwhelming majority.
Do your assertions that the UN should back up their own resolutions include the numerous resolutions against Israel?
Actually, Apple has never used the DMCA. Other World Computing, to whom Apple sent a cease and desist, claimed at first that Apple cited the DMCA. But they never provided any documents from Apple which cited it, and they later backed down from that claim. I'm not aware of any other circumstance in which Apple has cited the DMCA, and I'm certain they've never brought any litigation based on it.
Apple seems willing to use litigation against specific infringements of their intellectual property (like people who copy their images for X11 wm themes), but not to institute systemic DRM. Their official opinion is that piracy is a behavioural problem, not a technical problem.
All this seems to support the grandparent's description of a "customer-friendly, honesty-based stance on Digital Rights Management."
If you'd said "don't blame the OS for crappy apps," or "don't blame the hardware for crappy apps," I might agree with you. But you specifically brought up the term "platform," which implies that we're talking about the whole package that's actually available to the user. Application quality is extremely relevant to that discussion.
The software you recommend appears to have a list price of $999.99. Compared to iDVD's price of free, that's a substantial downside. For that additional thousand bucks, you could buy a copy of Final Cut Pro, and once again leapfrog the functionality of the Windows software.
> Note: the Dell with 2.4GHz proc, 512MB 1 DIMM, ... is still
> GF4 4200, 60GB, 1920x1200, Extra Battery,
> only $3000 compared to apples $3300 for the 17" AlBook.
Yeah, but you lose the builtin 802.11g/b, gigabit ethernet, firewire 800 and 400, auto-adjusting backlit keyboard, dvd burner, and 33% thinner form.
I'm not saying the Dell's a terrible deal, I'm quite envious of the higher density display. But the 17" alBook certainly holds its own.
Remember, there are people out there who actually _create_ content, not just consume it.
Some portion of users will have problems with any update, often for reasons unrelated to it. Watching the general flow of problem reports, this particular one seems safer than average.
/tmp, but creating directories without write perms, and then failing to write things into them. I tried suspending it at the right moment and chmodding, but probably got the timing wrong.)
That said, I spent about an hour in single-user mode when my update got horked in the middle. The installer had been sitting there chewing cpu forever, claiming to be almost done, but making no further progress. I ktraced it, and it appeared to be endlessly looping through calling gettimeofday() as fast as it could. I did what seemed like the only thing available to me: -9'd the installer, and restarted.
This worked out poorly.
Panics on startup, but I was able to get into single-user mode. After a while spent dicking around with manually loading kexts and such, I finally gave up on getting networking up from there, and had a friend burn me the 10.2.4 updater on a cd, and tried to install it again.
Unfortunately, the cli installer was choking on it, for some reason I don't understand. (It was copying parts of the installer to
I finally just dug through the package, got friendly with pax, and manually removed both the kernel extension caches; problem solved.
There's a much easier way to send mail from multiple addresses: in the account config, specify as many addresses as you like, comma-separated. They'll all appear in the account pop-up menu at compose time, using the first by default.
It's quite useful, though I can't imagine how anyone's expected to figure out that it's there. And still not quite as flexible as being able to just edit the From: field directly, of course.
You mean that article that was completely wrong? I can't believe how many people fell for that.
LG Electronics announced that Apple had cancelled their contract to manufacture 15" imacs. The same day, Hon Hai Precision Industry happily announced that Apple had awarded the contract to them.
These machines are a huge success for Apple, and they're nowhere near cancelling the line. They simply switched from one Taiwanese supplier to another.
You mean that article that was completely wrong?
I can't believe how many people fell for that. LG Electronics announced that Apple had cancelled their contract to manufacture 15" imacs. The same day, Hon Hai Precision Industry happily announced that Apple had awarded the contract to them.
These machines are a huge success for Apple, and they're nowhere near cancelling the line. They simply switched from one Taiwanese supplier to another.
As many people have pointed out, there are several ways to disable this. My personal choice has been demetallifizer, as it will globally fix all cocoa applications.
(Of course, it crosses my mind that brushed aluminum applications are incredibly ugly...as mac applications go. They still tend to look and behave better than any X11 applications.)
I hate to keep plugging the same product (and no, I don't have any affiliation with the authors), but:
Use CodeTek's VirtualDesktop. In addition to the obvious feature of multiple desktops, it can also give you good, systemwide focus-follows-mouse.
If you really want to change something as fundamental as windowing, you don't want to do it on a per-application level. That gives you both inconsistency, and the ability only to do this hierarchical organization trick only with windows from one app.
The more general solution to this is multiple desktops. You can then put all you browser windows relating to a project on one desktop, along with all your editor sessions in which you're taking notes, and all the mail messages which have useful reference material, and your IM conversations with your colleagues, etc, etc. You can then switch between any number of such categorized constellations of windows, and easily move windows from one to another (or to all).
Allow me to suggest CodeTek's VirtualDesktop, which is as good a multiple desktop implementation as any I've ever used with X11, and then some.
You seem to hold Apple's developers in very high regard, if you feel that they've whipped this up in the past week or so.
Safari has been in development for around a year. This is notably longer than Chimera has existed.
There are several other links in this discussion to Apple's stated reasoning for choosing khtml. Those reasons pretty much all come to simplicity: it's about a tenth the code of even just gecko.
That smaller code size tends to make the finished product a bit zippier, but even more important is that it greatly increases the speed and flexibility with which they can improve upon it.
And standards compliance will only become _better_ with more commonly-used renderers. The harder it is for designers to write only for their favorite browser, instead of for the standard, the better.
You may want to look into vuescan, third-party driver for a huge variety of scanners. Yes, it costs something like $40, which is admittedly about the price of a cheap new scanner. But that sounds better to me than rebooting.
I'm afraid that doesn't explicitly ask to use mozilla; you need to use -a to specify an opening application.
open -a
Speed: I spent a lot of time benchmarking UFS against HFS+ on osx about two years ago. Each was a little faster for some things, but they generally turned out to be comparable. You could argue that hfs+ suffers when compared against filesystems specifically designed for speed, eg reiser, but it's certainly not outside the normal range of speeds for unix filesystems. In nearly all cases, you're bottlenecking on your storage device.
Journalling: As you point out, no longer a valid complaint.
Compression and encryption can be handled nicely by using disk images, rather than filesystems directly on disks. I keep a compressed, AES-encrypted copy of my home directory on my ipod, created and accessed using nothing beyond the standard gui tools.
Incorrect, actually. This may have been true in the 1.* versions, I don't recall; but 2.0 allows for edge-flipping desktops, switchable to happen either all the time, or only when you're dragging a window.
It also addressed all my other concerns with the earlier version of the software, and happens to include a very good focus-follows-mouse implementation.
While it's not an answer to the remote-display problem, I think that this tool takes care of just about everything else anyone could miss from X11 window managers. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Computer displays are always actually 2D, but they're sometimes used to depict 3D environments. As you point out, all windowing systems already do this. As you fail to infer, using 3D-rendering hardware allows them to do it better.
The primary thing for which it's used in osx is compositing, which allows you to do proper layering of semiopaque objects. In addition to the obvious draw of simple prettiness, this really is a functional feature. Things like subtle drop shadows and opacity changes give very strong focus recognition, and transparent windows allows one to focus on multiple sets of data more quickly.
While it might happen accidentally (updating components you had changed), the odds of them doing it intentionally are fairly small.
I'm not trying to make an argument that Apple is so innately pure that they would never do such a thing. They do things like sell ibooks and imacs which theoretically have the hardware to do monitor spanning, but have this feature disabled for product marketing purposes.
However, they pretty much only do these things when they feel it's in their best interest. And the number of people who would make a purchasing decision based upon the ability to hack in quartzgl support for pci video is almost precisely zero, slashdot notwithstanding. Hence, no real incentive for them to intentionally thwart such things.