It's my understanding that one of the major pieces of 10.5, slated to come out this year, is a total revamping of the Finder.
I agree that the Finder is the weakest part of the OS. Although, as was mentioned in the grandparent, I believe, the Finder is not written in Cocoa; it's still a straight Carbon port from OS9 that has been beefed up, sure, but still probaby has its fair share of OS9-ish stuff in there.
So the lateness has to do with DRM. Well, that's great and all, but that doesn't explain why nobody has seen real code running on mostly-real PS3s. If all was fine and good with this exception, I would think you'd have seen a lot of playable demos at the various shows; they wouldn't have to show the *final* machine (wasn't it Microsoft showing off the 360 games on modified G5s?) but at least people would have something to get excited about.
All anyone is talking about is the unit itself and the various components. The gamer in me says "I don't care about the hardware...I wanna see the games!" Surely Sony could have delivered *that* much, unless there was some other problem they're not talking about.
I don't recall the specifics, but there were two types of PowerPC machines, CHiRP and PReP (don't remember what any of that means). IIRC the PowerPC version worked on PReP machines, and Macs were supposed to be, but I don't know if they were completely, CHiRP. For some reason, again lost in the mists of time, those two worlds couldn't be bridged.
...VMWare to come out with their VMWare Workstation (or even the player) for the Mac. Even VirtualPC, if/when it ever comes to the Intel Mac, should run Windows "well enough" for everything I would do with a PC (short of gaming, which wouldn't be very useful on a portable or a mini anyway).
I'm becoming more and more a fan of virtualization; why deal with dual booting and configuring the disk when you can just run the client OS as a task in the main operating system. Also, if you trash your copy of Windows, just restore it from a snapshot or recreate it from a "good" image.
But, OTOH, kudos to him if he has in fact gotten it to work.
Actually, I own the GC, PS2, original xbox, a DS, a gamer rig for the PC, and keep both a Dreamcast and N64 handy. The problem was that apart from Zelda, there was nothing I liked the looks of. I used to go into the local EBGames/Gamestop almost every day, then it became every weekend, now it's once in a blue moon.
As a GC owner, I'm looking forward to Zelda Twilight Princess, but other than that, I can't think of any other game I'm supposed to be looking forward to or is making any kind of movement on the Excite-o-Meter. DNF? I gave up looking forward to that years and *years* ago. Shenmue 3 (yes, I played and loved 1 & 2)? Who knows if that will ever see the light of day.
The malaise stretches across the board: Nobody's talking about a new GTA game (GTA: Akron maybe?), no Dooms or Quakes or Half Lifes, or even Katamari Damarcys; no AAA titles to make me even inquisitive.
Comments on/. have been along the same way; lots of retro talk, but no buzz (planted or not) about anything. Anything! We're in a stasis; the 360 is here but there's nothing exciting coming down the pipe, the PS3 has been delayed, taking whatever launch titles we were hoping for with it, and the Revolution...well, that thing is so nebulous I can't even form an opinion of it (controller notwithstanding).
In short, you (the game industry) got nothin', and now we all know it.
I had plenty of experience with Netware up to 3.12 and in the 199?-1995 timeframe, it was, for a lot of people, the only place where they could store their stuff, the only option being a floppy. At my university, an IBM PS/2 Model 95 running NW with the Mac storage option (whatever it was called) with TCP/IP as well as IPX serviced a hundred and fifty machines, a mix of PCs and 80s and early 90s Macs. NW also handled all the printers (5 or so) and even a couple of early model plotters (if I recall, Lotus 123 1a would only print the graphs to plotters, but I may be wrong about that).
Good times.
It seems that, more than any other OS, Netware is something whose time has clearly passed; everything Netware provided is now available on the user's desktop, regardless of what it boots to. If I remember correctly, NW has been expanded to also be an application server platform for databases, web servers (I believe Apache can run on it), but it seems that it's a more radical configuration than the most offbeat Unix platform. A friend of mine described programming NLMs as nothing like he'd ever done, and nothing he'd ever like to do again.
I was thinking of taking a look at Axapta; it's the only one of the various products that's even available to try (via fancy MSDN contract); Peoplesoft, Siebel and Oracle won't even show you screenshots without a rep calling you.
I'd heard that Axapta filled a niche in their product line not served by Great Plains, but I have no idea what it is. It seems like Microsoft bought a number of second and third tier companies in hopes of competing against SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle and Siebel. Even during Oracle's grab of PS there was talk of MS trying to get SAP...why they didn't I don't know as that is the only real competition to Oracle now. *Shrug*
Axapta is a company Microsoft bought, along with Great Plains and Solomon Financials, to compete with the likes of Peoplesoft, Siebel and Oracle (which of course, now owns the other two). This is complicated business ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that involves yearly contracts, dedicated servers, etc.
Basically: Now you can integrate Axapta (or whatever they're calling it now) with Outlook. Considering the amount of setup, care and feeding of Axapta and its ilk, integration with Outlook was probably not on the feature wishlist. Probably somebody at Microsoft got creative with VBA in Outlook and this is the result.
...you can still them at work at the Museum of Science and Industry. For all the changes that place has been going through, they've left the west balcony pretty much undisturbed, which means that the physics displays are still running on their original TI-994/As. You can even see them through a clear panel; some are black, some are that strange ash color (did these actually exist for purchase?)
As an added bonus, they're showing the Game On exhibit again (all video games from Spacewar to the present) for a double dose of nostalgia.
...which is what I think they were getting at. I bought every id game from wolfenstein3d to...wolfenstein redux. I did not buy doom 3 nor quake 4 and have no desire to do so; I'm just not interested in either one anymore. Walk, get spooked, shoot, repeat. Graphics look awesome but it seems to me just a rehash of the games I played in the early 90s.
Same thing with GTA...GTA 3 was fun, Vice City was *really* fun, SA was neither here nor there for me. Besides, where can they go with it?
I went nuts with Unreal Tournament, even designing some levels, but UT3 and 4 didn't impress (why they take away the *best* weapon in the game (snipers rifle) is beyond me). I still play the original UT because it "felt right". Years after the fact and I'm still haunting the halls of CTF-November.
The only franchises that I've seen work over time are the "story"-type ones of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and the like. If Doom had a story (I mean a *real* story, a la Half-Life) I might be interested to see "what happens next", but they didn't do that.
Sadly, the one true franchise that relies on a continuous story, Shenmue, doesn't seem like it'll see the light of day.
People will come back for more if there's a reason to come back for more. In the age of OpenGL-based desktops, dual core processors, gigabytes of ram, SLI video cards, etc. etc., graphics are no longer the "more" and any franchise that doesn't see that is doomed.
Presumably now all the building blocks are in place to do some *real* cutting edge interface design/research. OpenGL-based toolkits, check. Dual-core, dual-processor machine, check. SLI video cards, check. 4+ gig of memory, check. *Now* let the fun begin.
Seriously though, while those specs I mentioned are pretty high, they're not totally out of reach or relegated to a Pixar workstation or whatever. I would like to think that there is a sea of PhD dissertations ready to be written on what could be the next interface we all use, replacing the desktop metaphors. With the machine I mentioned, a researcher's flights of fantasy could really become working reality, and while not everything is going to pan out, it's important to try. No longer can anyone hide behind the "hardware/operating system isn't up to the task" bullsh*t.
You've got the machine, you've got the OS, you've got the toolkits. Stop following Apple's cues...start leading with your own.
She mentioned the untapped nostalgia market. Well, with MAME, NES emulators, N64 emulators, etc., the "nostalgia" is already there, a click away. The problem is that it's more for quick amusement...doing the remember when. Sure it's fun to fire up some of these games, but I'm not sure I'd want to play all the way through, especially since I did so several times on the original consoles.
I'm okay Nintendo downplaying the whole graphics war; they're right in saying that the game play is what matters most. Hell, I'll play a game with stick figures if it's fun. The problem is that a lot of ther earier games *were* fun, and while I'll always have fond memories of the first time Mario moved around a 3d world, I'm not sure I need to revisit it again.
I sent a telegram as a novelty to my girlfriend many years ago; what she got wasn't the yellowish paper adorned with logos and glued letters, but a dot matrix printout. It was about as unglamorous as you could get. Yes, it did say Western Union on it, but I wouldn't have been surprised if they hadn't already been using the internet to transmit it.
All in all, it was truly a telegram in name only (had to pay, fill out a form, etc). It totally lacked any of the style or magic you may have expected.
...DNF has been the longest running joke in gaming because the company never really commited to it either way; they wouldn't come right out and say it was cancelled, but there wasn't exactly a derth of announcements for an Xmas 199X-20XX release.
That said, it's definitely more low key than the whole Daikatana fiasco, which came right out and promised a revolution in gaming, John Romero was gonna make me his b**ch, etc. That kind of bravado is just *asking* for a response, and Ion Storm was unable to deliver the goods; the backlash was guaranteed.
Here, though, they've promised, well, nothing. They never even promised that the game was going to be released. Assuming that they stick with the Duke Nukem 'Don't take it too seriously' creed, I'll forgive them subpar graphics so long as it's a solid, funny, and slightly twisted game.
Frankly, we need a dose of humor, especially in the FPS genre. In that respect, they've already delivered, many many many many many times over.
The thing I'm *most* worried about is that Steve Jobs is to Apple as Edwin Land is to Polaroid. In a nutshell: Polaroid was Land's company through and through. The problem was that after Land died, so did Polaroid, just a lot more slowly.
While I strangely have no such issues with Gates and Microsoft, I'm genuinely concerned that when Steve goes to that great bitbucket in the sky, we really won't have any visionaries left to push the computing/entertainment/whatever world ahead a step.
I don't believe stopping your car counts as action; slowing down (or even stopping) to watch a traffic accident does not mean you have liability because you didn't help. It's more like, you started to pull the vicim out of the car, decided you didn't want her blood on your outfit, and bailed. I believe the test is an explicit decision to cease assistance; if the sight of blood makes you pass out, and you do pass out while helping her, then you have not opened yourself up to liability.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US you are obliged to assist all you can once you begin to help; if you see someone go off the road and keep going, you're just being callous. However, if you stop and try to help, but decide that you don't want to get your shoes muddy, you can be sued. You have a legal obligation to finish what you started.
I wonder if Disney will continue to sell Renderman and associated tools. Do other studios, like Dreamworks, buy and use Renderman so as to not need to reinvent the wheel? Theoretically given what Renderman can do, it's not a crazy idea to buy the tools of the competition and then try to do better with them. I could imagine some paranoid at Disney not wanting to give them that chance.
Rightly or wrongly, most people see the future in Apple products. Microsoft's slogan is (was?) "Where do you want to go today?" and for a lot of people that's "wherever Apple takes us". Apple's the company that *tries* things. And, the Cube notwithstanding, they have been pretty much on the mark. I'm not saying they invent everything, mp3 players were around before the iPod, but they were the ones who made its appeal universal. OSX is clearly standing on the shoulders of giants, but Apple was able to take it just that bit further that I could give my folks a Mac and walk away without worrying about whether they'd be able to use it.
Compare this to Dell, whose mantra is "as cheap as possible" or Microsoft, whose mantra changes from day to day.
To be fair, both Dell and Microsoft have problems that Apple would probably love to have (massive volume). But since Apple doesn't have said problems, they're more free to do whatever they want, and what they want is to sell more of their own stuff which looks farther afield from the rest of the industry.
...Dev Studio and its tangents. My day job is developing windows software, and if I can run Dev Studio at full speed on the machine, I'll do it, cause that program is slow enough on my P4, and almost unusable on VirtualPC for my current Mac. Of course, as soon as I could, I'd switch back to OSX.
Apple is still a hardware company, and if I can use the MacBook all the time instead of this POS Dell I've got, then I'm still happy regardless of what OS is on the screen.
C++ is more like Perl...
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...in that there's often more than one (or one dozen) ways to do something. I think a lot of scorn heaped on C++ is due to the fact that the scorner at some point opened up an STL file (or anything generated by Microsoft's ATL) and ran screaming. And frankly, they're right...that's some imposing syntax and not at all friendly to read or understand.
But what I've told people again and again is that *you* don't have to write it that way. Don't understand multiple inheritence? Fine...*don't use it*. Don't get templates? Fine...*don't use them*. We still use VC6 and its template functionality isn't even complete!
The truth is, you can have bizzare WTF moments in *any* language. A lot of what people attribute to the failure of a language is the failure of a programmer to properly explain what his/her code does in a straightforward way *using the code itself*. The best code is clean and concise and C++ gives you as much opportunity to do this as any language. Sure you can have multi-thousand line functions in C++, but this isn't a failure of the language to somehow magically break it apart for you into better organized bits, it's a failure to understand that a language, *any* language, whether purely written or even spoken, is to convey a message, a story, and without careful attention to detail, can become an unholy mess (like this post).
Actually, I think FireWire was a hit; when it came out USB was at 1.1...far too slow for external disks. Now that USB has caught up, there doesn't seem to be such a pressing need for the original FireWire. My only disappointment is that there isn't more things taking advantage of FireWire 800.
Anybody who had software that required a dongle howled...I remember a chain of dongles hanging off the keyboard of some video editing macs I used. We waited quite a while for some of the companies to come out with a USB one. Apple did throw folks like us a bone with the G3 with its one ADB port, but it was clearly stated from them that this was it, USB from now on.
...because if there is anyone in the industry who could be described as an oracle to what the future holds, he's it. But more than just predicting it, he directs the company to make it. The NeXT machine heralded the future back in 1988....Unix-based, security-focused OS with a great GUI and awesome development tools. Did he actually write any of it? No, but unlike another operating system (*cough* Linux) that has awesome tech but remains a bit... unfocused... and an operating system that seems focused on the wrong things (*cough* Windows) Steve Jobs had/has a clear vision of what he wanted, and where things should go. And frankly, whether you like him as a person or not, he seems to have been pretty much correct.
Consider this example: The original iMac had no floppy drive and used USB ports instead of ADB. People *howled*, but time has proven him right...the iMac did more to jumpstart widespread adoption of USB than anything else (I had two PCs that had USB ports that went to the junkyard without ever having been used). On top of everything else, I'm sure companies did a good business for awhile selling ADB-to-USB converters and USB-based floppy drives.
Jobs is the only guy who has the cajones to risk alienating everyone to push the tech world further, and the world always catches up. *That* is why he is deservedly famous.
BTW, contrast this to Wozniak who is also decidely famous, but as the wizard who made it all work. It's too bad the two of them didn't collaborate on more things...maybe those warp drives wouldn't be so far off after all...
Slashdot Mirror
It's my understanding that one of the major pieces of 10.5, slated to come out this year, is a total revamping of the Finder.
I agree that the Finder is the weakest part of the OS. Although, as was mentioned in the grandparent, I believe, the Finder is not written in Cocoa; it's still a straight Carbon port from OS9 that has been beefed up, sure, but still probaby has its fair share of OS9-ish stuff in there.
So the lateness has to do with DRM. Well, that's great and all, but that doesn't explain why nobody has seen real code running on mostly-real PS3s. If all was fine and good with this exception, I would think you'd have seen a lot of playable demos at the various shows; they wouldn't have to show the *final* machine (wasn't it Microsoft showing off the 360 games on modified G5s?) but at least people would have something to get excited about.
All anyone is talking about is the unit itself and the various components. The gamer in me says "I don't care about the hardware...I wanna see the games!" Surely Sony could have delivered *that* much, unless there was some other problem they're not talking about.
I don't recall the specifics, but there were two types of PowerPC machines, CHiRP and PReP (don't remember what any of that means). IIRC the PowerPC version worked on PReP machines, and Macs were supposed to be, but I don't know if they were completely, CHiRP. For some reason, again lost in the mists of time, those two worlds couldn't be bridged.
...VMWare to come out with their VMWare Workstation (or even the player) for the Mac. Even VirtualPC, if/when it ever comes to the Intel Mac, should run Windows "well enough" for everything I would do with a PC (short of gaming, which wouldn't be very useful on a portable or a mini anyway).
I'm becoming more and more a fan of virtualization; why deal with dual booting and configuring the disk when you can just run the client OS as a task in the main operating system. Also, if you trash your copy of Windows, just restore it from a snapshot or recreate it from a "good" image.
But, OTOH, kudos to him if he has in fact gotten it to work.
Actually, I own the GC, PS2, original xbox, a DS, a gamer rig for the PC, and keep both a Dreamcast and N64 handy. The problem was that apart from Zelda, there was nothing I liked the looks of. I used to go into the local EBGames/Gamestop almost every day, then it became every weekend, now it's once in a blue moon.
As a GC owner, I'm looking forward to Zelda Twilight Princess, but other than that, I can't think of any other game I'm supposed to be looking forward to or is making any kind of movement on the Excite-o-Meter. DNF? I gave up looking forward to that years and *years* ago. Shenmue 3 (yes, I played and loved 1 & 2)? Who knows if that will ever see the light of day.
/. have been along the same way; lots of retro talk, but no buzz (planted or not) about anything. Anything! We're in a stasis; the 360 is here but there's nothing exciting coming down the pipe, the PS3 has been delayed, taking whatever launch titles we were hoping for with it, and the Revolution...well, that thing is so nebulous I can't even form an opinion of it (controller notwithstanding).
The malaise stretches across the board: Nobody's talking about a new GTA game (GTA: Akron maybe?), no Dooms or Quakes or Half Lifes, or even Katamari Damarcys; no AAA titles to make me even inquisitive.
Comments on
In short, you (the game industry) got nothin', and now we all know it.
I had plenty of experience with Netware up to 3.12 and in the 199?-1995 timeframe, it was, for a lot of people, the only place where they could store their stuff, the only option being a floppy. At my university, an IBM PS/2 Model 95 running NW with the Mac storage option (whatever it was called) with TCP/IP as well as IPX serviced a hundred and fifty machines, a mix of PCs and 80s and early 90s Macs. NW also handled all the printers (5 or so) and even a couple of early model plotters (if I recall, Lotus 123 1a would only print the graphs to plotters, but I may be wrong about that).
Good times.
It seems that, more than any other OS, Netware is something whose time has clearly passed; everything Netware provided is now available on the user's desktop, regardless of what it boots to. If I remember correctly, NW has been expanded to also be an application server platform for databases, web servers (I believe Apache can run on it), but it seems that it's a more radical configuration than the most offbeat Unix platform. A friend of mine described programming NLMs as nothing like he'd ever done, and nothing he'd ever like to do again.
I was thinking of taking a look at Axapta; it's the only one of the various products that's even available to try (via fancy MSDN contract); Peoplesoft, Siebel and Oracle won't even show you screenshots without a rep calling you.
I'd heard that Axapta filled a niche in their product line not served by Great Plains, but I have no idea what it is. It seems like Microsoft bought a number of second and third tier companies in hopes of competing against SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle and Siebel. Even during Oracle's grab of PS there was talk of MS trying to get SAP...why they didn't I don't know as that is the only real competition to Oracle now. *Shrug*
Axapta is a company Microsoft bought, along with Great Plains and Solomon Financials, to compete with the likes of Peoplesoft, Siebel and Oracle (which of course, now owns the other two). This is complicated business ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that involves yearly contracts, dedicated servers, etc.
Basically: Now you can integrate Axapta (or whatever they're calling it now) with Outlook. Considering the amount of setup, care and feeding of Axapta and its ilk, integration with Outlook was probably not on the feature wishlist. Probably somebody at Microsoft got creative with VBA in Outlook and this is the result.
...you can still them at work at the Museum of Science and Industry. For all the changes that place has been going through, they've left the west balcony pretty much undisturbed, which means that the physics displays are still running on their original TI-994/As. You can even see them through a clear panel; some are black, some are that strange ash color (did these actually exist for purchase?)
As an added bonus, they're showing the Game On exhibit again (all video games from Spacewar to the present) for a double dose of nostalgia.
...which is what I think they were getting at. I bought every id game from wolfenstein3d to ...wolfenstein redux. I did not buy doom 3 nor quake 4 and have no desire to do so; I'm just not interested in either one anymore. Walk, get spooked, shoot, repeat. Graphics look awesome but it seems to me just a rehash of the games I played in the early 90s.
Same thing with GTA...GTA 3 was fun, Vice City was *really* fun, SA was neither here nor there for me. Besides, where can they go with it?
I went nuts with Unreal Tournament, even designing some levels, but UT3 and 4 didn't impress (why they take away the *best* weapon in the game (snipers rifle) is beyond me). I still play the original UT because it "felt right". Years after the fact and I'm still haunting the halls of CTF-November.
The only franchises that I've seen work over time are the "story"-type ones of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and the like. If Doom had a story (I mean a *real* story, a la Half-Life) I might be interested to see "what happens next", but they didn't do that.
Sadly, the one true franchise that relies on a continuous story, Shenmue, doesn't seem like it'll see the light of day.
People will come back for more if there's a reason to come back for more. In the age of OpenGL-based desktops, dual core processors, gigabytes of ram, SLI video cards, etc. etc., graphics are no longer the "more" and any franchise that doesn't see that is doomed.
Presumably now all the building blocks are in place to do some *real* cutting edge interface design/research. OpenGL-based toolkits, check. Dual-core, dual-processor machine, check. SLI video cards, check. 4+ gig of memory, check. *Now* let the fun begin.
Seriously though, while those specs I mentioned are pretty high, they're not totally out of reach or relegated to a Pixar workstation or whatever. I would like to think that there is a sea of PhD dissertations ready to be written on what could be the next interface we all use, replacing the desktop metaphors. With the machine I mentioned, a researcher's flights of fantasy could really become working reality, and while not everything is going to pan out, it's important to try. No longer can anyone hide behind the "hardware/operating system isn't up to the task" bullsh*t.
You've got the machine, you've got the OS, you've got the toolkits. Stop following Apple's cues...start leading with your own.
She mentioned the untapped nostalgia market. Well, with MAME, NES emulators, N64 emulators, etc., the "nostalgia" is already there, a click away. The problem is that it's more for quick amusement...doing the remember when. Sure it's fun to fire up some of these games, but I'm not sure I'd want to play all the way through, especially since I did so several times on the original consoles.
I'm okay Nintendo downplaying the whole graphics war; they're right in saying that the game play is what matters most. Hell, I'll play a game with stick figures if it's fun. The problem is that a lot of ther earier games *were* fun, and while I'll always have fond memories of the first time Mario moved around a 3d world, I'm not sure I need to revisit it again.
I sent a telegram as a novelty to my girlfriend many years ago; what she got wasn't the yellowish paper adorned with logos and glued letters, but a dot matrix printout. It was about as unglamorous as you could get. Yes, it did say Western Union on it, but I wouldn't have been surprised if they hadn't already been using the internet to transmit it.
All in all, it was truly a telegram in name only (had to pay, fill out a form, etc). It totally lacked any of the style or magic you may have expected.
...DNF has been the longest running joke in gaming because the company never really commited to it either way; they wouldn't come right out and say it was cancelled, but there wasn't exactly a derth of announcements for an Xmas 199X-20XX release.
That said, it's definitely more low key than the whole Daikatana fiasco, which came right out and promised a revolution in gaming, John Romero was gonna make me his b**ch, etc. That kind of bravado is just *asking* for a response, and Ion Storm was unable to deliver the goods; the backlash was guaranteed.
Here, though, they've promised, well, nothing. They never even promised that the game was going to be released. Assuming that they stick with the Duke Nukem 'Don't take it too seriously' creed, I'll forgive them subpar graphics so long as it's a solid, funny, and slightly twisted game.
Frankly, we need a dose of humor, especially in the FPS genre. In that respect, they've already delivered, many many many many many times over.
The thing I'm *most* worried about is that Steve Jobs is to Apple as Edwin Land is to Polaroid. In a nutshell: Polaroid was Land's company through and through. The problem was that after Land died, so did Polaroid, just a lot more slowly.
While I strangely have no such issues with Gates and Microsoft, I'm genuinely concerned that when Steve goes to that great bitbucket in the sky, we really won't have any visionaries left to push the computing/entertainment/whatever world ahead a step.
I don't believe stopping your car counts as action; slowing down (or even stopping) to watch a traffic accident does not mean you have liability because you didn't help. It's more like, you started to pull the vicim out of the car, decided you didn't want her blood on your outfit, and bailed. I believe the test is an explicit decision to cease assistance; if the sight of blood makes you pass out, and you do pass out while helping her, then you have not opened yourself up to liability.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US you are obliged to assist all you can once you begin to help; if you see someone go off the road and keep going, you're just being callous. However, if you stop and try to help, but decide that you don't want to get your shoes muddy, you can be sued. You have a legal obligation to finish what you started.
I wonder if Disney will continue to sell Renderman and associated tools. Do other studios, like Dreamworks, buy and use Renderman so as to not need to reinvent the wheel? Theoretically given what Renderman can do, it's not a crazy idea to buy the tools of the competition and then try to do better with them. I could imagine some paranoid at Disney not wanting to give them that chance.
Rightly or wrongly, most people see the future in Apple products. Microsoft's slogan is (was?) "Where do you want to go today?" and for a lot of people that's "wherever Apple takes us". Apple's the company that *tries* things. And, the Cube notwithstanding, they have been pretty much on the mark. I'm not saying they invent everything, mp3 players were around before the iPod, but they were the ones who made its appeal universal. OSX is clearly standing on the shoulders of giants, but Apple was able to take it just that bit further that I could give my folks a Mac and walk away without worrying about whether they'd be able to use it.
Compare this to Dell, whose mantra is "as cheap as possible" or Microsoft, whose mantra changes from day to day.
To be fair, both Dell and Microsoft have problems that Apple would probably love to have (massive volume). But since Apple doesn't have said problems, they're more free to do whatever they want, and what they want is to sell more of their own stuff which looks farther afield from the rest of the industry.
...Dev Studio and its tangents. My day job is developing windows software, and if I can run Dev Studio at full speed on the machine, I'll do it, cause that program is slow enough on my P4, and almost unusable on VirtualPC for my current Mac. Of course, as soon as I could, I'd switch back to OSX.
Apple is still a hardware company, and if I can use the MacBook all the time instead of this POS Dell I've got, then I'm still happy regardless of what OS is on the screen.
...in that there's often more than one (or one dozen) ways to do something. I think a lot of scorn heaped on C++ is due to the fact that the scorner at some point opened up an STL file (or anything generated by Microsoft's ATL) and ran screaming. And frankly, they're right...that's some imposing syntax and not at all friendly to read or understand.
But what I've told people again and again is that *you* don't have to write it that way. Don't understand multiple inheritence? Fine...*don't use it*. Don't get templates? Fine...*don't use them*. We still use VC6 and its template functionality isn't even complete!
The truth is, you can have bizzare WTF moments in *any* language. A lot of what people attribute to the failure of a language is the failure of a programmer to properly explain what his/her code does in a straightforward way *using the code itself*. The best code is clean and concise and C++ gives you as much opportunity to do this as any language. Sure you can have multi-thousand line functions in C++, but this isn't a failure of the language to somehow magically break it apart for you into better organized bits, it's a failure to understand that a language, *any* language, whether purely written or even spoken, is to convey a message, a story, and without careful attention to detail, can become an unholy mess (like this post).
Actually, I think FireWire was a hit; when it came out USB was at 1.1...far too slow for external disks. Now that USB has caught up, there doesn't seem to be such a pressing need for the original FireWire. My only disappointment is that there isn't more things taking advantage of FireWire 800.
Anybody who had software that required a dongle howled...I remember a chain of dongles hanging off the keyboard of some video editing macs I used. We waited quite a while for some of the companies to come out with a USB one. Apple did throw folks like us a bone with the G3 with its one ADB port, but it was clearly stated from them that this was it, USB from now on.
...because if there is anyone in the industry who could be described as an oracle to what the future holds, he's it. But more than just predicting it, he directs the company to make it. The NeXT machine heralded the future back in 1988....Unix-based, security-focused OS with a great GUI and awesome development tools. Did he actually write any of it? No, but unlike another operating system (*cough* Linux) that has awesome tech but remains a bit ... unfocused ... and an operating system that seems focused on the wrong things (*cough* Windows) Steve Jobs had/has a clear vision of what he wanted, and where things should go. And frankly, whether you like him as a person or not, he seems to have been pretty much correct.
Consider this example: The original iMac had no floppy drive and used USB ports instead of ADB. People *howled*, but time has proven him right...the iMac did more to jumpstart widespread adoption of USB than anything else (I had two PCs that had USB ports that went to the junkyard without ever having been used). On top of everything else, I'm sure companies did a good business for awhile selling ADB-to-USB converters and USB-based floppy drives.
Jobs is the only guy who has the cajones to risk alienating everyone to push the tech world further, and the world always catches up. *That* is why he is deservedly famous.
BTW, contrast this to Wozniak who is also decidely famous, but as the wizard who made it all work. It's too bad the two of them didn't collaborate on more things...maybe those warp drives wouldn't be so far off after all...