even better, a supersonic weapon could hit your opponent before he heard it coming, since it would travel faster than both its own noise and a sonar return.
This would be extremely difficult. Sound travels very very fast in water. Over 3.5 times as fast as through air.
The only real missile today that moves at greater than Mach 3 are ICBMs, and even only because they are assisted by gravity and rockets through a near vacuum.
Re:The first exploit.
on
Cracking OSX
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· Score: 1
Every other *nix out there also has single user mode.
Of course, nothing is stopping a user from pulling the plug, starting the machine, and holding down the Option key on boot, which brings up the Open Firmware Startup Disk selection. Just start it up from an OS 9 system folder, or an OS 9 system CD, and you have that box running an OS that totally ignores *nix permissions.
If your really that paranoid, there are ways of enabling an Open Firmware password, so someone will need that password to boot at all. Of course, that is extremely unsupported and Apple would rather you don't do that, fearing the technical support nightmare.
Thats even ignoring the physical attack methods, removing the drive, or the whole computer.
So.. apple releases OS X for x86 and becomes a major software company as WELL as a hardware company. The software side of the company alone has already been proven to be viable as a money-maker, so where's the problem?
Unfortunately, It's not so easy for Apple. Microsoft has ~90% market share, and so they get lots and lots of money from selling software only. This doesn't mean Apple can.
If Apple started selling OS X for x86, sales of Apple hardware would dry up quickly. Apple pays for the development of the Mac OS from sales of hardware.
All of a sudden, Apple is selling software alone to 5% of the market. Microsoft is selling software to 90% of the market. Discounting other factors (such as the price of the software, or M$ relying on it's cash reserves to sell at a loss), Microsoft can spend 18x more on developing Windows than Apple can spend on it's OS. As I said, today Apple makes up for that difference through Hardware sales.
If Apple goes the software only route, that kind of inequality in development spending will quickly kill the Mac OS as a viable competitor to Windows. The Software-only strategy can work for Apple, but it needs to have a critical mass of market share first, so it can sell enough copies to keep development in pace with Windows. Needless to say, 5% is not nearly enough.
Unfortunately, if Apple goes software only with that 5%, the market share will increase, but not fast enough to avoid this outcome. This isn't like AMD vs. Intel, where you can throw a handful of AMD machines on your network, and nobody ever really notices a difference. Migrating to the x86 Mac OS would not be such a painless upgrade.
In short, Apple needs to continue to offer compelling hardware, either PPC, or a proprietary can't-be-cloned x86 box, until it gets that critical mass of marketshare that will enable it to compete in the Software-only market.
At my high school, last year I took part in a Cisco networking course, all about how to design, implement, and maintain networks (of course, using Cisco technology every step of the way), how TCP/IP works, structure of a packet, and other stuff.
While I lost interest right about where it said "ISDN is the prefered method of adding high speed internet connections to homes, remote sites, etc" and "Some users who are willing to buy expensive modems have 33.3 connections, but not everyone will...." but a lot of other students found it extremely useful, and it got them interested these fields.
(the other half of the class who decided it was just too hard for them and spent the rest of the year playing TetriNet)
That Cisco class would have worked out quite well, had the information been more current, but as it stands, I still learned a lot, and I hear things are better this year.
In short, it does work, and a lot of students are interested in taking advantage of Cisco's offer of $30,000/year right out of high school, or continuing to take Cisco sponsored coursework through college and earning more later on.
While this is definitely a nifty achievement for OS X users, it really is going the wrong direction.
One of the MacOS's greatest strengths is consistency, the fact that if you know how to use one app, you know how to use practically any other.
Apple is making this mistake too with it's Classic environment. Older applications don't get the Aqua look or behavior, but appear right alongside the Aqua (and now, X) apps. This is a large step backwards for the mac GUI.
Both Classic and X-Windows should not be running side by side in Aqua, but each contained within it's own single window, so the different environments with their different ways of doing things are kept separate, making life easier on the user.
Napster (and file sharing in general) shouldn't be banned because "it has useful and legal uses, despite the fact that some people will use it illegally".
Of course, I'm sure for some reason that argument doesn't work when "Just because the existance of Carnivore gives the FBI the *ability* to illegally tap your email, it shouldn't be destroyed because it can also be used to *legally* tap your email, if you are suspected and the authorities have the necessary warrent"
All I hear is that the very existance of Carnivore will make make the FBI become even more aggressive... yet I shudder to think of what might happen when anyone who wants to do Bad Shit can communite openly on the internet, and the FBI doesn't have the tools to intercept that.
There are no differences between Wiretaps and carnivore. Not one.
And yet people accept the existance of wiretaps without whining. I think that even if the FBI is required to have a warrent (maybe it already works that way, I'm not sure) this technology will still be labeled as evil, even when it can only be used under the same circumstances as wiretaps. Heh.
Even better, MacOS X will support it as well, and has simply astounding support for internationalization.
I am a fairly new programmer, but I have written a few small freeware utilities in OS X using the Cocoa/NextStep frameworks. One thing that I quickly discovered is that the OS has the absolute best support for non-english languages that I have seen or heard of anywhere. Anyone who wants to try to top this is going to have more than a little difficulty at it.
First, for my utility, someone offered to translate it into german for me. It was incredibly easy to internationalize, and the APIs were excellent. When I ship an updated version in about a week and a half, it should support English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. There will not be seperate downloads, but one single self-contained bundle (folder of resources and executables appearing to the user to be a single application icon). It will even load different UI windows to better support differences in language layouts (right to left, left to right, etc)
When the user of any language opens my app, the OS will determine if his language is supported, and if not, choose the best substitute (the user can set the substitute order).
A single OS X install supports many languages, and unlike the Classic MacOS or windows, does not require a special language installation. The language used is determined on a user by user basis, so one person can log in as english, and another person can sit down right afterwards, and log in using Japanese. Very Very cool. During the process of testing my apps, I even had some applications open in my native english, and some opened in German at the same time. Logging out not necessary (although already open apps do not take on the change).
All in all, some extremely good news for non-english computer users.
This is the kind of thing an army that needs to move a force quickly would love.
It took 6 months to build up the force that invaded Iraq. With these ships, you could have probably cut two months off that time.
Aircraft simply can't come close to moving the volume of material that ships can, and cutting 2 weeks off the time it takes to move a small army to someplace on the other side of the world has extremely significant strategic impact.
Apple lost legal control of their Look and Feel about 10-13 years ago (different circumstances, same result). When Apple lost that control, Microsoft was free to copy Apple's interface innovations, which eventually came extremely close to killing Apple.
Now Apple has a new L&F, one that truly makes them stand out from the crowd. Apple has betted it's entire existence on OS X being able to appear superior to Windows, and the Aqua L&F is a huge part of that. If Apple loses legal control of it again, than they have lost their best chance at being able to thrive in this industry, and they will either be forced to remain a niche player for another 10 years, or they will die.
According to Akamai, the company that serves the live streams for Apple's QuickTime TV, at its peak the [MacWorld San Francisco] keynote had 35,407 simultaneous viewers accessing 5.3 gigabits per second of video at broadband rates. This tops Apple's previous personal best of 21,000 simultaneous viewers at last summer's Macworld Expo in New York City. -- From a MacWorld article
That's a lot of traffic. I was watching that stream, and the quality was superb. A very good showing for live streaming of live events.
And of course, the server software is free, and there is no charge per stream, like Real does (or used to do? what about WMP?)
Well, just drag it out, realease it, see the 'poof' and it's gone. Oh, and delete/Applications/Internet Explorer to really get rid of it
Uninstalling IE just became easier:)
2 Important points come up from this, for those looking to understand the Mac and MacOS X.
First: Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is an incredible product in every respect. This product symbolizes what Microsoft could have been had they not become such a Monopoly. It's very fast, renders everything perfectly, and (to my knowledge) is one of the most standards compliant browsers out there (yes, this IS a microsoft product!). Internet Explorer 5 Mac is my prefered browser under the Classic MacOS, although I prefer OmniWeb under MacOS X.
And about the uninstalling part, yes, it's true.
With MacOS X, Apple is bring Bundles to the table. Bundles are folders that appear to be single application icons to the user. This folder contains the application executable (perhaps several executables, each optimized for a different CPU or something), all of the resources, help files, images, frameworks, shared libraries, etc. And yet, to the user, it's just a single icon.
Apple is pushing this concept very hard, becase for 95% of apps, it removes the need for an installer. Just Drag&Drop to install the app. Just drag the app to the trash, and it's deleted, along with all of it's support files. Drag the single icon to move it. If you haven't figured it out yet, I really love this feature. =)
AFAIK WINE just makes programs think they're running on a windows-based machine. No actual translating of hardware calls involved, because WINE passes x86 code on to be executed by an x86 CPU.
Macs today use PowerPC chips, and trying to execute x86 code on those doesn't work so well. PPC ports of Linux have Mac-On-Linux, which essentially boots a standard mac system folder (very similar to MacOS X's Classic environment) so you can use MacOS applications. The Mac applications are compiled into ppc binaries.
Neither MOL nor WINE are emulators. They don't translate hardware calls.
If Mac users want to run anything x86, Connectix VirtualPC is the solution. It's quite fast (the recent 4.0 release at least doubles speed, real world) for an emulator, and it's compatibility is simply astounding. It emulates hardware only, so your really free to install any OS you want in VirtualPC, from BeOS, to Linux, to any Windows, to any other *nix, regardless of what system software shipped with your copy of VirtualPC.
To understand this, you need to know why Mac users want to use LinuxPPC. It's really quite simple, when I got my machine (the last of the Beige G3's) there was no reason anyone sane would buy Apple hardware to run Linux. x86 machines were faster and cheaper. Today, some Linux users on these boards think the hardware looks real damn cool, but thats still about the extent of it.
Mac users wanted to use Linux because they had grown beyond the Classic MacOS. I was in this situation last september. The mac did everything I really wanted it to do, I wasn't interested in serving anything over the net, but I wanted to get some more experience that would be useful in non-mac dominated world. Some experience with Linux/*nix was the key, so I installed LinuxPPC.
For about 2 weeks, I was in heaven. I didn't know anything about how to use it, but the nerd inside of me was freaking out with glee. The included documentation was excellent, and I was quickly learning my way around. Then the MacOS X public came out. I bought it the first day, and when it arrived a week later.
I booted into LinuxPPC a few more times, but by that time, the novelty had worn off. I was by no means a sysadmin, but I could find my way around a shell. It really came down to the fact that if I wanted to get any real work done, I had to reboot back into the MacOS. I didn't have any reason to be using linux except for my own education.
OS X quickly filled both of those goals, I could sit there reading through the grep man page, with Photoshop running in the background. Needless to say, I stopped using LinuxPPC very very quickly, and by now, I haven't booted into it in 3 months. Within the next few weeks I'll be reformatting my drive to reclaim those 4 gigs of partitions.
When OS X Final comes out, and the OS X X-Windows implementations get a little more solid, I'll be installing one of them, and Linux will really have lost everything it had for me.
But thats my story. Those mac users who switched to Linux and were able to stay there and be productive may have a very different story. OS X is still not nearly as customizable as Linux, and despite Darwin, not nearly as open. You can't turn off the Genie effect or anything like that (doesn't bother me though, I actually like it). When some X-Windows implemtation gets fixed up a little bit more, maybe this will help OS X a bit, but then your just going from X Windows to X Windows. Most mac users don't have the same feelings against Apple that x86 linux users have against M$, so coming 'back to the mainstream' probablly isn't a moral curse.
There really is no single reason for using LinuxPPC. Some will find OS X fills their linux needs, some wont. In my case, and in the case of many Mac users who are just use Linux as a hobby, instead of a productive tool, OS X is the greatest thing that ever happened to my computer.
Because Apple doesn't own sorenson, they just use it in Quicktime. Sorenson is actually owned by Sorenson Media, Inc.
It doesn't matter how open Apple feels, you need to convince Sorenson Media itself that you want it.
On to the Off-Topic rant, while I understand there is some animosity towards Quicktime for not being distributed on Linux, I really have to say it's a great technology. Both WMP and Real lock you into using their own software, litigate like mad whenever anyone else decodes their own formats, etc, on and on...
Quicktime supports a huge number of formats (and for $30, lets you encode many of them, which is a real deal!), many of which are supported by Real and WMP through the Quicktime install itself. I also find the Player application is just so much nicer to use than either WMP or Real. Your not bombarded with adds, and while some people (mostly MacOS User Interface advocates) decry the interface, it is MUCH less offensive than either Real or WMP, especially with the improvments made in the upcoming Quicktime 5.
There are really only a handfull of nations out there where the citizens can truly force changes if they make the effort (without resorting to widespread violence), and despite the current state of the system, the US is still one of those nations.
Of course, the key words there are 'make the effort.'
I have a question to all you Slashdot readers out there...
How many of you have actually gone out and demonstrated, tried to get into a real conversation with an elected offical about your views, in short, gone out and made an effort to change things...
...and how many of you spend your days sitting in your cushy chair writing slashdot posts about how every day you are losing rights.
Whining won't preserve your rights. Sitting in your chair writing Slashdot posts won't change things. How many of you (If you are a US Citizen) have gone out and done something real, and how many of you are/. hypocrites?
I whine and moan about how my children won't know freedom... and I have never done anything about it. I bet you haven't either.
More resurrections than you can shake a stick at...
From Diabloii.net
[On] Monday, January 8, we will be reviving all hardcore characters who died between December 19th and January 1st. The restored hardcore characters will be revived with the experience, skills and items possessed as of Tuesday, December 19th. This restore will be automatic and players do not need to contact Blizzard to request that their character be restored. Note: Only dead hardcore characters that died between December 19th and January 1st will be revived.
Guess this was important enough to make a real exception. So much for "Blizzard will not, and does not have the capability to restore any deceased Hardcore characters."
Note: Blizzard Entertainment is in no way responsible for your Hardcore character. If you choose to create and play a Hardcore character, you do so at your own risk. Blizzard is not responsible for the death and loss of your hardcore characters for any reason incluiding Internet lag, bugs, Acts of God, your little sister, or any other reason whatsoever. Consult the End User License Agreement for more details. Blizzard will not, and does not have the capability to restore any deceased Hardcore characters. Don't even ask. La-la-la-la-la, we can't hear you.....
Hundreds of Hardcore characters have died due to bugs, and to the best of my knowledge not a single one has EVER been resurrected.
They're all dead for as long as dead people stay dead.
In fact, they're meaningless right now, even without thinking about the plight of people with pacemakers: one of those pulses would probably kill many people simply because they happen to be in planes or lifts/elevators at the time.
On the other hand, if something bad was going down, maybe hidden safe away in the corner of an elevator isn't such a bad thing.
I believe, for elevators to be allowed past inspection, they must have a mechanically operated brake shoes that activates if the elevator passes a certan speed(or meets some other mechanically determined criteria). The EMP probablly wouldn't affect those, you'd freak out, and see your life flash before your eyes, then you'd be stopped halfway up the shaft.
Who knows, maybe they've moved these emergency systems to rely on electronics now... in which case, nice knowing you.
I've spent years playing myth, and I can really say that the 3d world was only half of what made the game great, and so revolutionary.
The article totally fails to menton, that in the age of Warcraft me-too's they went out and did something *totally* different. Myth was the RTS first game to make use of a 3D world, but that wasn't really revolutionary, everyone knew where things were going, and Bungie beat them to the punch.
Myth was so enchanting for me because it truly broke the mold of RTS gameplay. In every other *craft out there, one gathered resources, built infastructure, built units, clicked on a bad guy, and hoped it died. In Myth there was no resource gathering, no base building, and no unit construction. You were given your units at the start of the game, and that was all you got.
This was the first RTS game I played that ever required skills beyond building a base fast. The 3D environment and other game mechanics made formation important, as well as suprise, and choosing where on the battefield you wish to fight. Combat tatics, in other games nothing more than Click on the guy, and your rabble starts shooting. Now it required planning, foresight, an intuition to decide what your enemy was going to do, because if you lost your units, you were out of the game. No producing more.
Myth's multiplayer component really complimented this gameplay style. In most *craft games, allies are just two seperate armies who don't shoot at each other. In Myth, allies were part of the same team. 3 Team members did not get 3 armies. They got one. The designated captain had to deal out units and assign them roles. Since they each had only a subset of the army to control, they had to depend heavily on others to do their job correctly. One player couldn't dominate everything.
Of course, other stuff was good too. The sound was simply exceptional, and, a far cry from most games, it had a real story *gasp!*
Obviosuly, while I'm glad Myth made this list somewhere (simply because I played it obsessivly for 2.5 years, more than any other game, ever) I think choosing it for being 'The First RTS game with a 3d world' is terribly shortsighted, and really, meaningless. Perhaps these guys should remove their 3d cards and THEN, just to break the mold, go looking to decide the most revolutionary games based on Gameplay...
(Note: I'm not claiming that Myth was the first game with the no-construction/all-combat game style. It's just the first I played, and it was a really really good one.)
Seeems that after the Infinity engine, Bioware has learned how to make portable code. (I've heard rumors that the Infinity code is a mess from a portabily standpoint)
Most likely horribly unportable... Graphic Simulations started the Mac port of Baulders Gate last year, with the origonal release date of January 2000 announced. Slowly that got pushed back, and back, and back, until it was only released a few months ago... without the Multiplayer component.
Mac users are still waiting for the free multiplayer upgrade.
I don't know if unable programmers had anything to due with this schedule, but it has obviously been a nightmare for them regardless.
I have a hard time calling something Vapor that I've been running on 30 days uptime, but what do I know? I guess a "product" without a release date just isn't something comprehensible.
Welcome to Darwin!
[localhost:~] vidboi% uptime
12:09PM up 23 days 23:10, 9 users, load averages: 1.03, 1.07, 1.08
Taco, I hope your not implying that 2.4 is not vapour, and MacOS X is....
Slashdot Mirror
even better, a supersonic weapon could hit your opponent before he heard it coming, since it would travel faster than both its own noise and a sonar return. This would be extremely difficult. Sound travels very very fast in water. Over 3.5 times as fast as through air. The only real missile today that moves at greater than Mach 3 are ICBMs, and even only because they are assisted by gravity and rockets through a near vacuum.
Every other *nix out there also has single user mode.
Of course, nothing is stopping a user from pulling the plug, starting the machine, and holding down the Option key on boot, which brings up the Open Firmware Startup Disk selection. Just start it up from an OS 9 system folder, or an OS 9 system CD, and you have that box running an OS that totally ignores *nix permissions.
If your really that paranoid, there are ways of enabling an Open Firmware password, so someone will need that password to boot at all. Of course, that is extremely unsupported and Apple would rather you don't do that, fearing the technical support nightmare.
Thats even ignoring the physical attack methods, removing the drive, or the whole computer.
Unfortunately, It's not so easy for Apple. Microsoft has ~90% market share, and so they get lots and lots of money from selling software only. This doesn't mean Apple can.
If Apple started selling OS X for x86, sales of Apple hardware would dry up quickly. Apple pays for the development of the Mac OS from sales of hardware.
All of a sudden, Apple is selling software alone to 5% of the market. Microsoft is selling software to 90% of the market. Discounting other factors (such as the price of the software, or M$ relying on it's cash reserves to sell at a loss), Microsoft can spend 18x more on developing Windows than Apple can spend on it's OS. As I said, today Apple makes up for that difference through Hardware sales.
If Apple goes the software only route, that kind of inequality in development spending will quickly kill the Mac OS as a viable competitor to Windows. The Software-only strategy can work for Apple, but it needs to have a critical mass of market share first, so it can sell enough copies to keep development in pace with Windows. Needless to say, 5% is not nearly enough.
Unfortunately, if Apple goes software only with that 5%, the market share will increase, but not fast enough to avoid this outcome. This isn't like AMD vs. Intel, where you can throw a handful of AMD machines on your network, and nobody ever really notices a difference. Migrating to the x86 Mac OS would not be such a painless upgrade.
In short, Apple needs to continue to offer compelling hardware, either PPC, or a proprietary can't-be-cloned x86 box, until it gets that critical mass of marketshare that will enable it to compete in the Software-only market.
These kinds of programs are already out there.
At my high school, last year I took part in a Cisco networking course, all about how to design, implement, and maintain networks (of course, using Cisco technology every step of the way), how TCP/IP works, structure of a packet, and other stuff.
While I lost interest right about where it said "ISDN is the prefered method of adding high speed internet connections to homes, remote sites, etc" and "Some users who are willing to buy expensive modems have 33.3 connections, but not everyone will...." but a lot of other students found it extremely useful, and it got them interested these fields.
(the other half of the class who decided it was just too hard for them and spent the rest of the year playing TetriNet)
That Cisco class would have worked out quite well, had the information been more current, but as it stands, I still learned a lot, and I hear things are better this year.
In short, it does work, and a lot of students are interested in taking advantage of Cisco's offer of $30,000/year right out of high school, or continuing to take Cisco sponsored coursework through college and earning more later on.
While this is definitely a nifty achievement for OS X users, it really is going the wrong direction. One of the MacOS's greatest strengths is consistency, the fact that if you know how to use one app, you know how to use practically any other. Apple is making this mistake too with it's Classic environment. Older applications don't get the Aqua look or behavior, but appear right alongside the Aqua (and now, X) apps. This is a large step backwards for the mac GUI. Both Classic and X-Windows should not be running side by side in Aqua, but each contained within it's own single window, so the different environments with their different ways of doing things are kept separate, making life easier on the user.
I find this quite interesting...
Napster (and file sharing in general) shouldn't be banned because "it has useful and legal uses, despite the fact that some people will use it illegally".
Of course, I'm sure for some reason that argument doesn't work when "Just because the existance of Carnivore gives the FBI the *ability* to illegally tap your email, it shouldn't be destroyed because it can also be used to *legally* tap your email, if you are suspected and the authorities have the necessary warrent"
All I hear is that the very existance of Carnivore will make make the FBI become even more aggressive... yet I shudder to think of what might happen when anyone who wants to do Bad Shit can communite openly on the internet, and the FBI doesn't have the tools to intercept that.
There are no differences between Wiretaps and carnivore. Not one.
And yet people accept the existance of wiretaps without whining. I think that even if the FBI is required to have a warrent (maybe it already works that way, I'm not sure) this technology will still be labeled as evil, even when it can only be used under the same circumstances as wiretaps. Heh.
MacOS 9 already supports Hebrew.
Even better, MacOS X will support it as well, and has simply astounding support for internationalization.
I am a fairly new programmer, but I have written a few small freeware utilities in OS X using the Cocoa/NextStep frameworks. One thing that I quickly discovered is that the OS has the absolute best support for non-english languages that I have seen or heard of anywhere. Anyone who wants to try to top this is going to have more than a little difficulty at it.
First, for my utility, someone offered to translate it into german for me. It was incredibly easy to internationalize, and the APIs were excellent. When I ship an updated version in about a week and a half, it should support English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. There will not be seperate downloads, but one single self-contained bundle (folder of resources and executables appearing to the user to be a single application icon). It will even load different UI windows to better support differences in language layouts (right to left, left to right, etc)
When the user of any language opens my app, the OS will determine if his language is supported, and if not, choose the best substitute (the user can set the substitute order).
A single OS X install supports many languages, and unlike the Classic MacOS or windows, does not require a special language installation. The language used is determined on a user by user basis, so one person can log in as english, and another person can sit down right afterwards, and log in using Japanese. Very Very cool. During the process of testing my apps, I even had some applications open in my native english, and some opened in German at the same time. Logging out not necessary (although already open apps do not take on the change).
All in all, some extremely good news for non-english computer users.
This is the kind of thing an army that needs to move a force quickly would love. It took 6 months to build up the force that invaded Iraq. With these ships, you could have probably cut two months off that time. Aircraft simply can't come close to moving the volume of material that ships can, and cutting 2 weeks off the time it takes to move a small army to someplace on the other side of the world has extremely significant strategic impact.
Apple lost legal control of their Look and Feel about 10-13 years ago (different circumstances, same result). When Apple lost that control, Microsoft was free to copy Apple's interface innovations, which eventually came extremely close to killing Apple.
Now Apple has a new L&F, one that truly makes them stand out from the crowd. Apple has betted it's entire existence on OS X being able to appear superior to Windows, and the Aqua L&F is a huge part of that. If Apple loses legal control of it again, than they have lost their best chance at being able to thrive in this industry, and they will either be forced to remain a niche player for another 10 years, or they will die.
I can't really say that I blame them.
... the game's back on." "Lets go and get some more chips and dip"
...but I dont see anything wrong with selling EQ items for big bucks (:
According to Akamai, the company that serves the live streams for Apple's QuickTime TV, at its peak the [MacWorld San Francisco] keynote had 35,407 simultaneous viewers accessing 5.3 gigabits per second of video at broadband rates. This tops Apple's previous personal best of 21,000 simultaneous viewers at last summer's Macworld Expo in New York City. -- From a MacWorld article
That's a lot of traffic. I was watching that stream, and the quality was superb. A very good showing for live streaming of live events.
And of course, the server software is free, and there is no charge per stream, like Real does (or used to do? what about WMP?)
Well, just drag it out, realease it, see the 'poof' and it's gone. Oh, and delete /Applications/Internet Explorer to really get rid of it :)
Uninstalling IE just became easier
2 Important points come up from this, for those looking to understand the Mac and MacOS X.
First: Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is an incredible product in every respect. This product symbolizes what Microsoft could have been had they not become such a Monopoly. It's very fast, renders everything perfectly, and (to my knowledge) is one of the most standards compliant browsers out there (yes, this IS a microsoft product!). Internet Explorer 5 Mac is my prefered browser under the Classic MacOS, although I prefer OmniWeb under MacOS X.
And about the uninstalling part, yes, it's true.
With MacOS X, Apple is bring Bundles to the table. Bundles are folders that appear to be single application icons to the user. This folder contains the application executable (perhaps several executables, each optimized for a different CPU or something), all of the resources, help files, images, frameworks, shared libraries, etc. And yet, to the user, it's just a single icon.
Apple is pushing this concept very hard, becase for 95% of apps, it removes the need for an installer. Just Drag&Drop to install the app. Just drag the app to the trash, and it's deleted, along with all of it's support files. Drag the single icon to move it. If you haven't figured it out yet, I really love this feature. =)
AFAIK WINE just makes programs think they're running on a windows-based machine. No actual translating of hardware calls involved, because WINE passes x86 code on to be executed by an x86 CPU. Macs today use PowerPC chips, and trying to execute x86 code on those doesn't work so well. PPC ports of Linux have Mac-On-Linux, which essentially boots a standard mac system folder (very similar to MacOS X's Classic environment) so you can use MacOS applications. The Mac applications are compiled into ppc binaries. Neither MOL nor WINE are emulators. They don't translate hardware calls. If Mac users want to run anything x86, Connectix VirtualPC is the solution. It's quite fast (the recent 4.0 release at least doubles speed, real world) for an emulator, and it's compatibility is simply astounding. It emulates hardware only, so your really free to install any OS you want in VirtualPC, from BeOS, to Linux, to any Windows, to any other *nix, regardless of what system software shipped with your copy of VirtualPC.
Who'd they lose?
Me.
To understand this, you need to know why Mac users want to use LinuxPPC. It's really quite simple, when I got my machine (the last of the Beige G3's) there was no reason anyone sane would buy Apple hardware to run Linux. x86 machines were faster and cheaper. Today, some Linux users on these boards think the hardware looks real damn cool, but thats still about the extent of it.
Mac users wanted to use Linux because they had grown beyond the Classic MacOS. I was in this situation last september. The mac did everything I really wanted it to do, I wasn't interested in serving anything over the net, but I wanted to get some more experience that would be useful in non-mac dominated world. Some experience with Linux/*nix was the key, so I installed LinuxPPC.
For about 2 weeks, I was in heaven. I didn't know anything about how to use it, but the nerd inside of me was freaking out with glee. The included documentation was excellent, and I was quickly learning my way around. Then the MacOS X public came out. I bought it the first day, and when it arrived a week later.
I booted into LinuxPPC a few more times, but by that time, the novelty had worn off. I was by no means a sysadmin, but I could find my way around a shell. It really came down to the fact that if I wanted to get any real work done, I had to reboot back into the MacOS. I didn't have any reason to be using linux except for my own education.
OS X quickly filled both of those goals, I could sit there reading through the grep man page, with Photoshop running in the background. Needless to say, I stopped using LinuxPPC very very quickly, and by now, I haven't booted into it in 3 months. Within the next few weeks I'll be reformatting my drive to reclaim those 4 gigs of partitions.
When OS X Final comes out, and the OS X X-Windows implementations get a little more solid, I'll be installing one of them, and Linux will really have lost everything it had for me.
But thats my story. Those mac users who switched to Linux and were able to stay there and be productive may have a very different story. OS X is still not nearly as customizable as Linux, and despite Darwin, not nearly as open. You can't turn off the Genie effect or anything like that (doesn't bother me though, I actually like it). When some X-Windows implemtation gets fixed up a little bit more, maybe this will help OS X a bit, but then your just going from X Windows to X Windows. Most mac users don't have the same feelings against Apple that x86 linux users have against M$, so coming 'back to the mainstream' probablly isn't a moral curse.
There really is no single reason for using LinuxPPC. Some will find OS X fills their linux needs, some wont. In my case, and in the case of many Mac users who are just use Linux as a hobby, instead of a productive tool, OS X is the greatest thing that ever happened to my computer.
Unfortunatly, no open-sorenson from Apple.
Because Apple doesn't own sorenson, they just use it in Quicktime. Sorenson is actually owned by Sorenson Media, Inc.
It doesn't matter how open Apple feels, you need to convince Sorenson Media itself that you want it.
On to the Off-Topic rant, while I understand there is some animosity towards Quicktime for not being distributed on Linux, I really have to say it's a great technology. Both WMP and Real lock you into using their own software, litigate like mad whenever anyone else decodes their own formats, etc, on and on...
Quicktime supports a huge number of formats (and for $30, lets you encode many of them, which is a real deal!), many of which are supported by Real and WMP through the Quicktime install itself. I also find the Player application is just so much nicer to use than either WMP or Real. Your not bombarded with adds, and while some people (mostly MacOS User Interface advocates) decry the interface, it is MUCH less offensive than either Real or WMP, especially with the improvments made in the upcoming Quicktime 5.
There are really only a handfull of nations out there where the citizens can truly force changes if they make the effort (without resorting to widespread violence), and despite the current state of the system, the US is still one of those nations.
Of course, the key words there are 'make the effort.'I have a question to all you Slashdot readers out there...
How many of you have actually gone out and demonstrated, tried to get into a real conversation with an elected offical about your views, in short, gone out and made an effort to change things......and how many of you spend your days sitting in your cushy chair writing slashdot posts about how every day you are losing rights.
Whining won't preserve your rights. Sitting in your chair writing Slashdot posts won't change things. How many of you (If you are a US Citizen) have gone out and done something real, and how many of you are /. hypocrites?
I whine and moan about how my children won't know freedom... and I have never done anything about it. I bet you haven't either.
More resurrections than you can shake a stick at...
From Diabloii.netGuess this was important enough to make a real exception. So much for "Blizzard will not, and does not have the capability to restore any deceased Hardcore characters."
Hundreds of Hardcore characters have died due to bugs, and to the best of my knowledge not a single one has EVER been resurrected.
They're all dead for as long as dead people stay dead.
On the other hand, if something bad was going down, maybe hidden safe away in the corner of an elevator isn't such a bad thing.
I believe, for elevators to be allowed past inspection, they must have a mechanically operated brake shoes that activates if the elevator passes a certan speed(or meets some other mechanically determined criteria). The EMP probablly wouldn't affect those, you'd freak out, and see your life flash before your eyes, then you'd be stopped halfway up the shaft.
Who knows, maybe they've moved these emergency systems to rely on electronics now... in which case, nice knowing you.
I've spent years playing myth, and I can really say that the 3d world was only half of what made the game great, and so revolutionary.
The article totally fails to menton, that in the age of Warcraft me-too's they went out and did something *totally* different. Myth was the RTS first game to make use of a 3D world, but that wasn't really revolutionary, everyone knew where things were going, and Bungie beat them to the punch.
Myth was so enchanting for me because it truly broke the mold of RTS gameplay. In every other *craft out there, one gathered resources, built infastructure, built units, clicked on a bad guy, and hoped it died. In Myth there was no resource gathering, no base building, and no unit construction. You were given your units at the start of the game, and that was all you got.
This was the first RTS game I played that ever required skills beyond building a base fast. The 3D environment and other game mechanics made formation important, as well as suprise, and choosing where on the battefield you wish to fight. Combat tatics, in other games nothing more than Click on the guy, and your rabble starts shooting. Now it required planning, foresight, an intuition to decide what your enemy was going to do, because if you lost your units, you were out of the game. No producing more.
Myth's multiplayer component really complimented this gameplay style. In most *craft games, allies are just two seperate armies who don't shoot at each other. In Myth, allies were part of the same team. 3 Team members did not get 3 armies. They got one. The designated captain had to deal out units and assign them roles. Since they each had only a subset of the army to control, they had to depend heavily on others to do their job correctly. One player couldn't dominate everything.
Of course, other stuff was good too. The sound was simply exceptional, and, a far cry from most games, it had a real story *gasp!*
Obviosuly, while I'm glad Myth made this list somewhere (simply because I played it obsessivly for 2.5 years, more than any other game, ever) I think choosing it for being 'The First RTS game with a 3d world' is terribly shortsighted, and really, meaningless. Perhaps these guys should remove their 3d cards and THEN, just to break the mold, go looking to decide the most revolutionary games based on Gameplay...
(Note: I'm not claiming that Myth was the first game with the no-construction/all-combat game style. It's just the first I played, and it was a really really good one.)
Seeems that after the Infinity engine, Bioware has learned how to make portable code. (I've heard rumors that the Infinity code is a mess from a portabily standpoint) Most likely horribly unportable... Graphic Simulations started the Mac port of Baulders Gate last year, with the origonal release date of January 2000 announced. Slowly that got pushed back, and back, and back, until it was only released a few months ago... without the Multiplayer component. Mac users are still waiting for the free multiplayer upgrade. I don't know if unable programmers had anything to due with this schedule, but it has obviously been a nightmare for them regardless.
I have a hard time calling something Vapor that I've been running on 30 days uptime, but what do I know? I guess a "product" without a release date just isn't something comprehensible.
Welcome to Darwin!
Taco, I hope your not implying that 2.4 is not vapour, and MacOS X is....[localhost:~] vidboi% uptime 12:09PM up 23 days 23:10, 9 users, load averages: 1.03, 1.07, 1.08