Telling Apple about it puts pressure on Apple to change it. Telling potential buyers (especially on Slashdot where the number of potential buyers is relatively slim) is pretty useless, but that's my opinion.
You see, changing the font size might matter to you, but it really doesn't matter to me. If I'm in Moz and a site's font is too small, I hit cmd-+, its that easy. Do I need the font in System Preferences to be a different size? Nope. Maybe you do - but chances are, potential buyers probably won't share all of a particular user's complaints - but they might get a bad feeling just because someone is complaining. Apple, on the other hand, cares about every complaint it gets. Whether it does something about it is another matter, but it does care.
Yep. Chances are, this particular poster that you're referring to doesn't actually own a Mac w/ OS X. Just jumping on the bandwagon of everything should be as tweakable as Enlightenment or my Pinto.
-- if red on the A/C controls indicated "cooler" and blue indicated "warmer" -- if the colors on the A/C controls were green and yellow -- if the largest knob/button on the stereo didn't control volume or tuning (instead controlling bass or fade, maybe?) -- if shifting from one gear to the next, instead of requiring motion in the general forward/back motion, required motion in the general left/right direction (imagine the standard H on its side)
I could go on (if I kept trying).
These are the types of tweaks that are really wanting to be done...
When this is the case, you should contact Apple, either directly or via their feedback form, and inform them of your opinions.
Maybe they'll listen, maybe not. Either way, though, posting in a Slashdot forum, while it may make someone feel good, will not actually help in any meaningful way.
Any effort to reassert their control is just going to piss people off.
Yep, usually the folks that aren't purchasing their computers from Apple in the first place. If you own a Mac and run OS X and have something that you'd like to be able to do but because of Apple's so-called API restrictions, can't, then by all means, fill out Apple's feedback form and complain.
If you don't own a Mac or are not running OS X, then do us all a favor and don't contribute to this conversation.
Yep, for the most part. Most of the ones I've seen that are of any quality, though, also cost some coin. Not that there's anything wrong with that, obviously.
Some slap-happy journalist at Wired interviews a few folks and makes a broad statement about Apple being anti-tweaking. Talking about APIs not being open - hell, many of the OS 9 APIs weren't open, people just had ResEdit to tweak the hell outta things - big difference!
Apple's lawyers may turn the other cheek, but its engineers have taken a more active approach. To prevent interface changes in OS 10.2, known as Jaguar, the software prevents programs from taking up certain bits of screen real estate. For example, the API that allows for custom menus and icons on the right side of the top menu bar, next to the clock, prohibits all but Apple-approved menu items.
Aww, c'mon. Let's not rehash this. What the hell is an "Apple approved" menu item?!? Its not like a developer has to get an "Official Apple Menu Item" seal for his app or anything - just that previously there were multiple APIs for placing something in the menubar, now there is one definitive API. Big deal!
Apple isn't losing any users, at least not ones that will spend $$ (after all, Apple's a business - they care about the Mac culture, yes, but they care more about the $$). Professionals that use Macs want stability. So many of the hacks for OS 9 would demote the stability of the OS to the ranks of Win9x or worse. Combining hacks would be even worse. Heck, even legit plugins for things like Photoshop could wreck your system. Apple knows this, so they're trying real hard to develop a system that provides what will hopefully become 'legendary' stability.
Keep in mind, also, that Apple may be keeping its private-APIs private, not only to prevent instability from encroaching on the system, but also to prevent competitors (read: Microsoft) from easily stealing enhancements made to OS X. Obviously Microsoft can also steal an idea and reimplement it, but Apple doesn't have to make that easy on them. I understand that having the API isn't equivalent to having the source, but defining an API isn't exactly a piece-of-cake, either. It takes a lot of careful thought and a tremendous amount of time to develop a stable API and corresponding documentation.
OK, maybe I haven't been paying attention, but as far as I know, Verizon is using CDMA2000 (1xRTT, right?) and Sprint PCS is using CDMA2000 (I'm sure about that one), AT&T has a TDMA network (and some small bit of a GSM network) - so who's planning on deploying WCDMA? I've heard bad reports on wCDMA in Europe & Japan, compared to CDMA2000, so what's the scoop here? GSM compatibility is nice, but the Sony Ericcson phones seem pretty suave to me (T68i, anyone?)
I was under the impression that Intel had purposefully designed the USB protocol to be processor bound. This type of connectivity is already provided by Firewire, so I don't particularly see why this would be beneficial, unless devices somehow don't need to be explicitly USB On-the-go compatible or (more likely), the chipset/firmware for USB On-the-go is cheaper to produce/license than Firewire is.
In any case, my chips are still on Firewire - its a solid, fast and proven interconnect technology. With transfer speeds in excess of 38MB per sec. (76% of theoretical max of 50MB/sec) - I'd say they're doing quite decent. I'm not sure what USB2 is up to these days, but last I heard, they were still a far cry from their goal of even being faster than Firewire, in real world applications.
Incidentally - I don't mean to start a flame war on the benefits of Firewire v. USB - so don't get started. The transfer speed I threw out above is a valid benchmark for a external RAID array (that has drives fast enough to support that transfer rate and a equivalent RAID configuration to boot). I don't follow USB2 developments closely, so if I'm mistaken on its real-world speeds, forgive me and don't waste/. bandwidth by flaming me:).
Whoa! Hold on there... I agree that much of the "cool stuff" in OS X is closed-source and guarded closely by Apple. However, saying they are stealing, even with your disclaimer, is a bit of a stretch, dontcha think? Remember, much of the new GUIness is based on NeXTStep, which Apple bought out or whatever. Quartz, the PDF based display system is entirely written by Apple - it isn't anything like Display Postscript or the other kinda-sorta similar systems out there.
So, while many of the things that make OS X, well, OS X are in fact closed-source, they weren't stolen from anyone - Apple has a good number of very, very talented software developers working for 'em -- give them some credit, it is deserved.
Non-elected officials (FBI/justice dept.) are refusing oversight by our elected officials (congress) - dunno about you, but I'm thinking that there's something to hide there. Its not like they're being asked to compromise national security and make public their actions -- a 'secure' committee with specific oversight duties has been around for quite a while (to monitor the CIA/NSA/FBI/etc.) -- they are the ones that would know, so don't provide any 'security concerns' BS. Don't even cite the possibility of leaks - thats all smoke and mirrors.
Agreed on all points. USB certainly wasn't going anywhere, despite being an Intel technology, until Apple did something with it. Firewire is certainly an Apple pioneered technology, but, nicely enough, it is an IEEE standard which is important, in the grand scheme of things:)
It appears that the Wintel world will be owing a debt of gratitude to Apple once again, with Bluetooth technology being introduced as the next 'big thing' - I've heard it referred to as 'wireless USB' - which is pretty accurate:) I guess that would make UWB 'wireless Firewire':)
And - incidentally, as far as I know, 'factoring' isn't provably hard, either (in a mathematical sense). Just a note passing on some info I think I picked up somewhere along the line..:)
Thanks for this very, very informational and enlightening comment. Makes me sleep a little better, at least. I had a sense that this was pretty much the case, from questions I've asked at the circulation desk, here in Madison, WI. They were pretty confident that no records were kept on past checkouts or anything like that... too much data, they said.
Amen to that... both CA and IRL are looking quite promising, actually. CA because of Toronto & Vancouver - two very cool towns, IRL because my fiancee is Irish and we both like it there. Not to mention that, last I heard, they're hard-up for workers in the tech-sector. Can't beat that:)
True, to some extent. But keep in mind that Motorola sells to Apple - and Apple will certainly attempt to keep Motorola's prices down to a minimum as well (not anything like $5/cpu, but you get the idea).
What's most important here, I think, is that Intel/Windows has created a culture that believes that when Intel releases a new CPU, everyone needs to upgrade. This is great for Intel, as it guarantees an ROI for their research.
The Mac crowd, however, is not like this. Mac owners will typically keep their Macs for 3-5 yrs w/o upgrading. OS X isn't doing much to change that, as every release of OS X is progressively faster than the previous release on the same hardware. While people may need to upgrade now to take advantage of OS X's best features, an upgrade now will mean no more upgrades for the next few years.
I think Motorola was aware of this and realized that for the amount of R&D they needed to compete effectively with Intel/AMD, they weren't able to sell enough CPUs to make up for the cost of bringing a new chip to market.
While they do say it isn't currently possible to generate the crystal fobs using available techniques, they also say that reversing the pattern of dots to create a fob *is* prohibitively hard - this is the key. What they're going for here is something that is as easy to manufacture as credit cards, but a few orders of magnitude more difficult to forge/copy/etc. Anyone who's been paying attention over the past few years realizes that magnetic stripe cards are pathetically easy to forge and magnetic stripes are easily read using devices that can be had on the grey market. Once you've read a magnetic stripe, you can recreate the credit card that originated it with ease.
This is what this technology is meant to prevent. First, you'd need the laser equipment to read the fob to get the dot pattern. Then, to be sure, you'd need to make sure that you illuminate the fob from all sides, since the dot pattern is different depending on where the laser is shown from. Next, you need a fabrication facility to create these crystal fobs (currently not available, I imagine that'll change, too) and finally, you need a boatload of math to figure out what set of microscopic bubbles works together to form the set of dot patterns you scanned previously.
This last bit, the forcing function, if you will, is the clincher. I imagine that the reversal of the dot patterns to a layout of microscopic bubbles in the fob is an f(x) that's particularly difficult to reverse, at least on the order of factoring the product of large primes (if not more difficult).
Possible? Maybe - eventually, certainly. More secure than credit cards? You betcha. Especially since credit card fraud/theft is amazingly low-tech these days... this type of technology would greatly raise the bar.
Kicking around Photoshop or Illustrator isn't the mark of Apple's high-end desktop machines. Kicking around FCP, DVD Studio Pro, MPEG-2/4 encoding, After Effects rendering, Premiere, etc. is what Apple needs faster processors for. Never mind being able to combat the MHz/GHz mindshare that Intel is building.
Slashdot Mirror
Telling Apple about it puts pressure on Apple to change it. Telling potential buyers (especially on Slashdot where the number of potential buyers is relatively slim) is pretty useless, but that's my opinion.
You see, changing the font size might matter to you, but it really doesn't matter to me. If I'm in Moz and a site's font is too small, I hit cmd-+, its that easy. Do I need the font in System Preferences to be a different size? Nope. Maybe you do - but chances are, potential buyers probably won't share all of a particular user's complaints - but they might get a bad feeling just because someone is complaining. Apple, on the other hand, cares about every complaint it gets. Whether it does something about it is another matter, but it does care.
Amen. Finally a poster on /. with some sense. Its about time. :)
Yep. Chances are, this particular poster that you're referring to doesn't actually own a Mac w/ OS X. Just jumping on the bandwagon of everything should be as tweakable as Enlightenment or my Pinto.
Losers.
Or, more appropriately:
...
-- if red on the A/C controls indicated "cooler" and blue indicated "warmer"
-- if the colors on the A/C controls were green and yellow
-- if the largest knob/button on the stereo didn't control volume or tuning (instead controlling bass or fade, maybe?)
-- if shifting from one gear to the next, instead of requiring motion in the general forward/back motion, required motion in the general left/right direction (imagine the standard H on its side)
I could go on (if I kept trying).
These are the types of tweaks that are really wanting to be done
Exactly. Like journalists at Wired. Wonderful article.
Basically.
Please. iPhoto? Don't think so. iDVD? Nope, don't think so.
And none of these apps are using "unpublished" APIs, not so far as I can tell.
When this is the case, you should contact Apple, either directly or via their feedback form, and inform them of your opinions.
Maybe they'll listen, maybe not. Either way, though, posting in a Slashdot forum, while it may make someone feel good, will not actually help in any meaningful way.
Yep, usually the folks that aren't purchasing their computers from Apple in the first place. If you own a Mac and run OS X and have something that you'd like to be able to do but because of Apple's so-called API restrictions, can't, then by all means, fill out Apple's feedback form and complain.
If you don't own a Mac or are not running OS X, then do us all a favor and don't contribute to this conversation.
Yep, for the most part. Most of the ones I've seen that are of any quality, though, also cost some coin. Not that there's anything wrong with that, obviously.
Some slap-happy journalist at Wired interviews a few folks and makes a broad statement about Apple being anti-tweaking. Talking about APIs not being open - hell, many of the OS 9 APIs weren't open, people just had ResEdit to tweak the hell outta things - big difference!
Aww, c'mon. Let's not rehash this. What the hell is an "Apple approved" menu item?!? Its not like a developer has to get an "Official Apple Menu Item" seal for his app or anything - just that previously there were multiple APIs for placing something in the menubar, now there is one definitive API. Big deal!
Apple isn't losing any users, at least not ones that will spend $$ (after all, Apple's a business - they care about the Mac culture, yes, but they care more about the $$). Professionals that use Macs want stability. So many of the hacks for OS 9 would demote the stability of the OS to the ranks of Win9x or worse. Combining hacks would be even worse. Heck, even legit plugins for things like Photoshop could wreck your system. Apple knows this, so they're trying real hard to develop a system that provides what will hopefully become 'legendary' stability.
Keep in mind, also, that Apple may be keeping its private-APIs private, not only to prevent instability from encroaching on the system, but also to prevent competitors (read: Microsoft) from easily stealing enhancements made to OS X. Obviously Microsoft can also steal an idea and reimplement it, but Apple doesn't have to make that easy on them. I understand that having the API isn't equivalent to having the source, but defining an API isn't exactly a piece-of-cake, either. It takes a lot of careful thought and a tremendous amount of time to develop a stable API and corresponding documentation.
Musta been a slow news day at Wired.
OK, maybe I haven't been paying attention, but as far as I know, Verizon is using CDMA2000 (1xRTT, right?) and Sprint PCS is using CDMA2000 (I'm sure about that one), AT&T has a TDMA network (and some small bit of a GSM network) - so who's planning on deploying WCDMA? I've heard bad reports on wCDMA in Europe & Japan, compared to CDMA2000, so what's the scoop here? GSM compatibility is nice, but the Sony Ericcson phones seem pretty suave to me (T68i, anyone?)
Am I missing something here?
I was under the impression that Intel had purposefully designed the USB protocol to be processor bound. This type of connectivity is already provided by Firewire, so I don't particularly see why this would be beneficial, unless devices somehow don't need to be explicitly USB On-the-go compatible or (more likely), the chipset/firmware for USB On-the-go is cheaper to produce/license than Firewire is.
/. bandwidth by flaming me :).
In any case, my chips are still on Firewire - its a solid, fast and proven interconnect technology. With transfer speeds in excess of 38MB per sec. (76% of theoretical max of 50MB/sec) - I'd say they're doing quite decent. I'm not sure what USB2 is up to these days, but last I heard, they were still a far cry from their goal of even being faster than Firewire, in real world applications.
Incidentally - I don't mean to start a flame war on the benefits of Firewire v. USB - so don't get started. The transfer speed I threw out above is a valid benchmark for a external RAID array (that has drives fast enough to support that transfer rate and a equivalent RAID configuration to boot). I don't follow USB2 developments closely, so if I'm mistaken on its real-world speeds, forgive me and don't waste
Cheers.
Whoa! Hold on there ... I agree that much of the "cool stuff" in OS X is closed-source and guarded closely by Apple. However, saying they are stealing, even with your disclaimer, is a bit of a stretch, dontcha think? Remember, much of the new GUIness is based on NeXTStep, which Apple bought out or whatever. Quartz, the PDF based display system is entirely written by Apple - it isn't anything like Display Postscript or the other kinda-sorta similar systems out there.
So, while many of the things that make OS X, well, OS X are in fact closed-source, they weren't stolen from anyone - Apple has a good number of very, very talented software developers working for 'em -- give them some credit, it is deserved.
Cheers.
My bad - must have been, then, that it was done before the US Patriot Act was passed. Sorry got those two facts messed up!
Cheers.
Non-elected officials (FBI/justice dept.) are refusing oversight by our elected officials (congress) - dunno about you, but I'm thinking that there's something to hide there. Its not like they're being asked to compromise national security and make public their actions -- a 'secure' committee with specific oversight duties has been around for quite a while (to monitor the CIA/NSA/FBI/etc.) -- they are the ones that would know, so don't provide any 'security concerns' BS. Don't even cite the possibility of leaks - thats all smoke and mirrors.
Agreed on all points. USB certainly wasn't going anywhere, despite being an Intel technology, until Apple did something with it. Firewire is certainly an Apple pioneered technology, but, nicely enough, it is an IEEE standard which is important, in the grand scheme of things :)
:) I guess that would make UWB 'wireless Firewire' :)
It appears that the Wintel world will be owing a debt of gratitude to Apple once again, with Bluetooth technology being introduced as the next 'big thing' - I've heard it referred to as 'wireless USB' - which is pretty accurate
Exactly.
.. :)
And - incidentally, as far as I know, 'factoring' isn't provably hard, either (in a mathematical sense). Just a note passing on some info I think I picked up somewhere along the line
What's ironic is that the ad you speak of was created before 9/11 and long before the Patriot Act was passed. Doh.
Thanks for this very, very informational and enlightening comment. Makes me sleep a little better, at least. I had a sense that this was pretty much the case, from questions I've asked at the circulation desk, here in Madison, WI. They were pretty confident that no records were kept on past checkouts or anything like that ... too much data, they said.
Amen to that ... both CA and IRL are looking quite promising, actually. CA because of Toronto & Vancouver - two very cool towns, IRL because my fiancee is Irish and we both like it there. Not to mention that, last I heard, they're hard-up for workers in the tech-sector. Can't beat that :)
Cheers.
The scary thing is this: a disturbing number of Americans would answer a resounding Yes to both of your questions.
This frightens me.
True, to some extent. But keep in mind that Motorola sells to Apple - and Apple will certainly attempt to keep Motorola's prices down to a minimum as well (not anything like $5/cpu, but you get the idea).
.. :)
What's most important here, I think, is that Intel/Windows has created a culture that believes that when Intel releases a new CPU, everyone needs to upgrade. This is great for Intel, as it guarantees an ROI for their research.
The Mac crowd, however, is not like this. Mac owners will typically keep their Macs for 3-5 yrs w/o upgrading. OS X isn't doing much to change that, as every release of OS X is progressively faster than the previous release on the same hardware. While people may need to upgrade now to take advantage of OS X's best features, an upgrade now will mean no more upgrades for the next few years.
I think Motorola was aware of this and realized that for the amount of R&D they needed to compete effectively with Intel/AMD, they weren't able to sell enough CPUs to make up for the cost of bringing a new chip to market.
Just my thoughts, though
While they do say it isn't currently possible to generate the crystal fobs using available techniques, they also say that reversing the pattern of dots to create a fob *is* prohibitively hard - this is the key. What they're going for here is something that is as easy to manufacture as credit cards, but a few orders of magnitude more difficult to forge/copy/etc. Anyone who's been paying attention over the past few years realizes that magnetic stripe cards are pathetically easy to forge and magnetic stripes are easily read using devices that can be had on the grey market. Once you've read a magnetic stripe, you can recreate the credit card that originated it with ease.
... this type of technology would greatly raise the bar.
This is what this technology is meant to prevent. First, you'd need the laser equipment to read the fob to get the dot pattern. Then, to be sure, you'd need to make sure that you illuminate the fob from all sides, since the dot pattern is different depending on where the laser is shown from. Next, you need a fabrication facility to create these crystal fobs (currently not available, I imagine that'll change, too) and finally, you need a boatload of math to figure out what set of microscopic bubbles works together to form the set of dot patterns you scanned previously.
This last bit, the forcing function, if you will, is the clincher. I imagine that the reversal of the dot patterns to a layout of microscopic bubbles in the fob is an f(x) that's particularly difficult to reverse, at least on the order of factoring the product of large primes (if not more difficult).
Possible? Maybe - eventually, certainly. More secure than credit cards? You betcha. Especially since credit card fraud/theft is amazingly low-tech these days
Cheers.
Kicking around Photoshop or Illustrator isn't the mark of Apple's high-end desktop machines. Kicking around FCP, DVD Studio Pro, MPEG-2/4 encoding, After Effects rendering, Premiere, etc. is what Apple needs faster processors for. Never mind being able to combat the MHz/GHz mindshare that Intel is building.
Cheers.