Stephen Levy often plays fast and loose with the facts in order to make a more entertaining book (hence all the "hey cool" but impossible anecdotes in "Hackers").
The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).
Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?
You're both fucked. I've seen plenty of prior art on all this. Now, maybe I should patent not worrying about this patent, as my OS (OS X) doesn't feel the need to put every single bleeding window in the taskbar, anyway. I have 72 open windows -- and only three items in my dock. I'd be getting things done really efficiently if I didn't keep using Expose to show me them all tiled nicely beside one another...mmm, useful AND beautiful.
You should try a spin on OS X 10.3. The dock counters your second problem -- blinking alerts -- by bouncing transparent alert messages just into your view. It counters your third problem with its Option-TAB switching...shows a transparency with BIG ICONS in the middle of the screen everything currently open, which you can TAB until you find the one you want OR you can click on it.
It's a pretty clean desktop. I wish I could dump my crotechety old win2k box at work!
Autopr0n, you've been reading slashdot for a while now. You should know the ipod battery is in fact quite replacable, and if not you should be ashamed of yourself. In fact, I just change the battery in my ipod...not because it was dying, but because I found one with higher capacity in the same form factor. I get an extra hour.
This would be such a classic Steve Jobs thing, too. Have all AAPL employees send in a busted iPod. Cash in all the rebates. And crush all of the Jukeboxes into a big cube. Send the cube back to Dell for "recycling."
I think the point here is that when 60% of the music player market is held by the company with the highest priced gear, price is not the deciding factor. I too have used some nice hard drive players, but not one of them has caused me to regret my iPod purchase.
HOWEVER: it should be VERY interesting to see what happens to this market when the Walkman player hits the streets. Sony can make a good interface. They make sturdy, pleasant looking products -- that credit card design is HOT. Sony Connect (ATRAC3 or no) isn't a bad service, certainly it's better than fucking MusicMatch. And finally, their product is going to be way cheaper than Apple's shit.
This is going to be trouble for Apple. Sony has major brand recognition, major marketting and coming late to the party isn't going to hurt them at all. There are lots of people who prefer Sony's looks to Apple's...not everybody, of course, but enough to take a big bite out of their core audience.
No, but I'll guess pert-near 50% of BMW owners have an iPod kicking around somewheres.
Funny...Apple's now had promotional deals with both BMW and Volkswagen. I wonder why German car manufacturers are attracted to the iPod?
Oh that's right -- the sturdy design and useful interface. American manufacturers are probably looking into development deals with one of these Microsoft monstrosities that crash all the time and take both hands to operate.
I would not trade my working 3G, 30 gig ipod for a larger device with a worse interface.
However -- if I has a broken 1G 5 gig ipod, I might consider this. New device for $100? That's not bad at all. Certainly the iPod isn't worth anything to me.
Of course, if the only problem with the iPod was a dead battery, I'd spend $30 on a new long-life lithium ion and send Dell here.
I used Toaster on my Amiga to do video overlays, segues, etc. When the Amiga's look started to get tired, my options did not include BeOS nor Linux, as neither had, nor HAVE, any decent real time video editing and output software. I could have gone with Windows, or Apple. Fuck Windows -- I get enough of that shit at the office.
Well, not exactly true. Actually, not true at all. First off, Apple traded a few million dollars in stock for the right to bring their programmers -- already well versed in graphical user interfaces, having done work on them in college -- to the Xerox PARC, where he saw a prototype system with NO relation to the Star. In fact, this system didn't even have a file management UI. Apple invented that, and it was Xerox who stole quite a bit of the UI that eventually showed up on the Star, thanks to the close ties between Apple and Xerox. Besides the concept of visual file management, Apple also invented the concept of icons that WERE things and could have actions performed on them...in the Xerox model, icons DID things, like physical buttons. Windowing existed solely to permit multiple command lines.
Apple "won" the Xerox case because what Xerox was doing -- moving a cursor around on a screen and manipulate windows and buttons -- they didn't invent, anyway. It had been done in colleges for years.
Apple vs. Microsoft, on the other hand, was a big deal. Apple HAD invented something new. They HAD created a new interface. But, in hopes of getting Microsoft as an application developer for their new OS, they accidentally licensed them core technologies and were vague enough to infer that they'd licensed the whole system. A more vitriolic and pro-mac argument can be found here.
RIght. Anybody can polish a turd, but it takes Steve Jobs to polish it, feed it to you, and make you smile while telling your friends how it was SO worth the hundred dollars you paid for it.
Remember man, reality distortion field. There is no turd.
Commodore will do poorly. Apple will feel no pressure whatsoever and will not change their pricing, as it is already quite fair. And Slashdotters will continue to be befuddled at their inability to understand the music player market, affect the profitability of Microsoft's OS division or impress girls with their knowledge of regular expressions.
It's not really SID, you insensitive clod, it's SID inside a DRM wrapper.
And the best games on the C=64 were Maniac Mansion, Racing Construction Set, Boot Camp and Winter Games II. I can still hear the Epyx national anthem, playing on the wind.
So did the Apple, if you remember. In fact, it could be said that Apple's devotion to Microsoft BASIC is the reason we have Windows today.
The basic premise is this: in exchange for the rights to license AppleBASIC from Microsoft, some pinhead (who had been tasked with the deal because Jobs didn't think the Apple II had a future) gave the software company full rights to the Macintosh look and feel. Viola! Windows, all nice and legal -- and basically for free.
Are there people who care whether their pixels have pointy edges or something?
Yes. Pixel size has a large effect on the final picture. The widely spaced, slightly more rectangular pixels on a TV serve to soften and darken the image when compared to a computer monitor. An LCD will display the image even more sharply. This is not as big an issue going forward as it is going backward. An image designed to look smooth on a TV might look like blocky crap on an LCD...hence why emulators often have interpolation modes to make your display more TV-like. Furthermore, pixel "squareness" changes the resolution as well. Consider the issue of a 4:3 aspect ratio. On a PC, you acheive that with 320 horizontal pixels and 240 vertical ones. On an NTSC TV, you achieve the SAME aspect with 352 horizontal pixels -- meaning that if you have an NTSC TV signal, you either have to crop or resample the video before it will display with proper aspect on a computer monitor. PAL signals use the same horizontal resolution and visual aspect ratio, but due to yet another difference in pixel size they squeeze 288 vertical pixels into their video (which means British television is slightly higher resolution than American TV, but we get 5 more frames per second than them). This is of course ignoring further differences due to interlacing and so on.
The whole point of this is that different viewing tasks and different available components call for different display formats. The computing industry needed to tell the display industry that it wanted square pixels in 4:3 or 16:9 formats. Hence, VGA/XGA/SXGA monitors etc, as opposed to NTSC/PAL/SCART/HDTV, etc.
Word. I *consistantly* make the same mistakes in my code, often due to differences in the half dozen languages I write in. Minor differences that compile but mean something different at runtime. Such as the difference between an SQL Server timestamp and a timestamp in, well, every other language. Or the difference between = and ==, which becomes a major problem when your View code is in VB and your Model code is in C#. Copy logic from one to the other without thinking carefully and suddenly you're not testing something, you're enforcing it.
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Um, I think the C64 had prior art. Run-Stop-Restore, motherfuckers!
Stephen Levy often plays fast and loose with the facts in order to make a more entertaining book (hence all the "hey cool" but impossible anecdotes in "Hackers").
The GUI was invented aways back in the 1960s. At first, it was just a cursor, but it was definitely driven by a puck with a button on it. There's you're mouse, years before PARC. PARC, which was a research center, by the way, not a product development center, created a graphical interface for performing actions featuring windows and icons. This was brought to the attention of Steve Jobs, who thought it was neat and traded several million dollars worth of Apple stock to Xerox in exchange for a "field trip" with his developers to PARC. Apple didn't license the technology per se -- there was nothing to license at that point, there was no product yet -- but they also didn't use Xerox's idea. They took the interface for performing actions and used the basic premise to create an interface for managing objects. They turned icons as verbs into icons as nouns, inventing in the process such things as the first Desktop, the first file management system (Finder) and the first graphical forms, controls and alerts (Xerox's interface was basically a CLI in a window with buttons).
Microsoft's "patent for double clicking" pertains only to hardware buttons on palm sized devices, and only to the specific use of timed accesses. Sounds like double clicking, but it isn't -- the patent is on using one hardware button on a handheld to perform three distinct actions using three distinct input methods, not on any of the three methods. Want to avoid the patent? Make sure YOUR handheld device only uses two of the three methods. Of course, this doesn't make for quite so sensational an article as "OMG M$ Patentz dbl click," which is probably why you don't know about it. Or, like Mr. Levy, do you prefer spreading colorful and entertaining fictions so long as the outline is correct?
You're both fucked. I've seen plenty of prior art on all this. Now, maybe I should patent not worrying about this patent, as my OS (OS X) doesn't feel the need to put every single bleeding window in the taskbar, anyway. I have 72 open windows -- and only three items in my dock. I'd be getting things done really efficiently if I didn't keep using Expose to show me them all tiled nicely beside one another...mmm, useful AND beautiful.
You should try a spin on OS X 10.3. The dock counters your second problem -- blinking alerts -- by bouncing transparent alert messages just into your view. It counters your third problem with its Option-TAB switching...shows a transparency with BIG ICONS in the middle of the screen everything currently open, which you can TAB until you find the one you want OR you can click on it.
It's a pretty clean desktop. I wish I could dump my crotechety old win2k box at work!
Autopr0n, you've been reading slashdot for a while now. You should know the ipod battery is in fact quite replacable, and if not you should be ashamed of yourself. In fact, I just change the battery in my ipod...not because it was dying, but because I found one with higher capacity in the same form factor. I get an extra hour.
This would be such a classic Steve Jobs thing, too. Have all AAPL employees send in a busted iPod. Cash in all the rebates. And crush all of the Jukeboxes into a big cube. Send the cube back to Dell for "recycling."
I think the point here is that when 60% of the music player market is held by the company with the highest priced gear, price is not the deciding factor. I too have used some nice hard drive players, but not one of them has caused me to regret my iPod purchase.
HOWEVER: it should be VERY interesting to see what happens to this market when the Walkman player hits the streets. Sony can make a good interface. They make sturdy, pleasant looking products -- that credit card design is HOT. Sony Connect (ATRAC3 or no) isn't a bad service, certainly it's better than fucking MusicMatch. And finally, their product is going to be way cheaper than Apple's shit.
This is going to be trouble for Apple. Sony has major brand recognition, major marketting and coming late to the party isn't going to hurt them at all. There are lots of people who prefer Sony's looks to Apple's...not everybody, of course, but enough to take a big bite out of their core audience.
No, but I'll guess pert-near 50% of BMW owners have an iPod kicking around somewheres.
Funny...Apple's now had promotional deals with both BMW and Volkswagen. I wonder why German car manufacturers are attracted to the iPod?
Oh that's right -- the sturdy design and useful interface. American manufacturers are probably looking into development deals with one of these Microsoft monstrosities that crash all the time and take both hands to operate.
I would not trade my working 3G, 30 gig ipod for a larger device with a worse interface.
However -- if I has a broken 1G 5 gig ipod, I might consider this. New device for $100? That's not bad at all. Certainly the iPod isn't worth anything to me.
Of course, if the only problem with the iPod was a dead battery, I'd spend $30 on a new long-life lithium ion and send Dell here.
I used Toaster on my Amiga to do video overlays, segues, etc. When the Amiga's look started to get tired, my options did not include BeOS nor Linux, as neither had, nor HAVE, any decent real time video editing and output software. I could have gone with Windows, or Apple. Fuck Windows -- I get enough of that shit at the office.
Well, not exactly true. Actually, not true at all. First off, Apple traded a few million dollars in stock for the right to bring their programmers -- already well versed in graphical user interfaces, having done work on them in college -- to the Xerox PARC, where he saw a prototype system with NO relation to the Star. In fact, this system didn't even have a file management UI. Apple invented that, and it was Xerox who stole quite a bit of the UI that eventually showed up on the Star, thanks to the close ties between Apple and Xerox. Besides the concept of visual file management, Apple also invented the concept of icons that WERE things and could have actions performed on them...in the Xerox model, icons DID things, like physical buttons. Windowing existed solely to permit multiple command lines.
Apple "won" the Xerox case because what Xerox was doing -- moving a cursor around on a screen and manipulate windows and buttons -- they didn't invent, anyway. It had been done in colleges for years.
Apple vs. Microsoft, on the other hand, was a big deal. Apple HAD invented something new. They HAD created a new interface. But, in hopes of getting Microsoft as an application developer for their new OS, they accidentally licensed them core technologies and were vague enough to infer that they'd licensed the whole system. A more vitriolic and pro-mac argument can be found here.
Actually, I was talking about the OS upgrades. Tiger looks to be a very shiny turd indeed. Dare I say best operating system ever? I might.
Whoa there. When the man said it was a "UNIX workalike," that's not what he meant!
RIght. Anybody can polish a turd, but it takes Steve Jobs to polish it, feed it to you, and make you smile while telling your friends how it was SO worth the hundred dollars you paid for it.
Remember man, reality distortion field. There is no turd.
A few predictions:
Commodore will do poorly. Apple will feel no pressure whatsoever and will not change their pricing, as it is already quite fair. And Slashdotters will continue to be befuddled at their inability to understand the music player market, affect the profitability of Microsoft's OS division or impress girls with their knowledge of regular expressions.
No, the people who hacked on old Commodores are more likely to be using Safari. What, you wanted me to go from the Amiga to fucking Windows?
It's not really SID, you insensitive clod, it's SID inside a DRM wrapper.
And the best games on the C=64 were Maniac Mansion, Racing Construction Set, Boot Camp and Winter Games II. I can still hear the Epyx national anthem, playing on the wind.
Well, the Plus-4 WAS the first "digital hub." And it could be argued that SID-studio was the precursor to GarageBand.
Shit, I once played a coffeehouse with a 128 as a backup band.
Or like calling your for-pay DRM music service "Napster."
So did the Apple, if you remember. In fact, it could be said that Apple's devotion to Microsoft BASIC is the reason we have Windows today.
The basic premise is this: in exchange for the rights to license AppleBASIC from Microsoft, some pinhead (who had been tasked with the deal because Jobs didn't think the Apple II had a future) gave the software company full rights to the Macintosh look and feel. Viola! Windows, all nice and legal -- and basically for free.
Moderators have small penises
I'd mark that +1, Insightful. But alas, I get no mod points. My dick is too big.
Are there people who care whether their pixels have pointy edges or something?
Yes. Pixel size has a large effect on the final picture. The widely spaced, slightly more rectangular pixels on a TV serve to soften and darken the image when compared to a computer monitor. An LCD will display the image even more sharply. This is not as big an issue going forward as it is going backward. An image designed to look smooth on a TV might look like blocky crap on an LCD...hence why emulators often have interpolation modes to make your display more TV-like. Furthermore, pixel "squareness" changes the resolution as well. Consider the issue of a 4:3 aspect ratio. On a PC, you acheive that with 320 horizontal pixels and 240 vertical ones. On an NTSC TV, you achieve the SAME aspect with 352 horizontal pixels -- meaning that if you have an NTSC TV signal, you either have to crop or resample the video before it will display with proper aspect on a computer monitor. PAL signals use the same horizontal resolution and visual aspect ratio, but due to yet another difference in pixel size they squeeze 288 vertical pixels into their video (which means British television is slightly higher resolution than American TV, but we get 5 more frames per second than them). This is of course ignoring further differences due to interlacing and so on.
The whole point of this is that different viewing tasks and different available components call for different display formats. The computing industry needed to tell the display industry that it wanted square pixels in 4:3 or 16:9 formats. Hence, VGA/XGA/SXGA monitors etc, as opposed to NTSC/PAL/SCART/HDTV, etc.
Word. I *consistantly* make the same mistakes in my code, often due to differences in the half dozen languages I write in. Minor differences that compile but mean something different at runtime. Such as the difference between an SQL Server timestamp and a timestamp in, well, every other language. Or the difference between = and ==, which becomes a major problem when your View code is in VB and your Model code is in C#. Copy logic from one to the other without thinking carefully and suddenly you're not testing something, you're enforcing it.
A total sausage fest.
Yeah, like Slashdot's really the place to find fine cuts of roast beef.
Makes me cringe because I know the difference. I'm very, very sorry. I normally proof read slashdot posts (strange occurance, heh?)