I agree about the concept album, and I hate buying single songs without any context. They are still there, you just have to look harder for them. I don't know if you listen to hip hop, but if you do, you should check out Prince Paul's "A Prince Among Thieves" or Masta Ace's "Disposable Arts".
"A Prince among Thieves" is a story of an aspiring rapper who needs money to finish his demo, who's best friend talks him into selling drugs to help pay for it. Tons of well-known rappers play all the characters in the story.
Disposable Arts is about a guy who gets released from jail, who gets himself out of the streets by going to the school of disposable arts to learn the hip-hop game.
Both came out in the last few years, and both form a complete story from start to finish, with amazing beats & rhymes.
IOKit - super fast & easy object oriented driver development
System wide XML configuration (except for things like apache and samba that have their own configuration files)
Cocoa - Comprehensive well designed object oriented development API. That's not so new, as it is an extension of the OpenStep APIs, but still something that has yet to be equalled anywhere else.
Expose - super fast and intuitive window management.
It would be a different issue if the competitors were genuinely open and unencumbered standards. They are not, the cost of server licenses for streaming video is ridiculous. There is no reason they should cost one penny more than Apache.
Two things:
Regarding OS X being UNIX, how do you define UNIX? POSIX APIs? Check. Standard set of UNIX utilities included? Check. Runs most UNIX apps? Check. Standard UNIX filesystem layout? Check. Code derived from BSD? Check. UNIX was UNIX long before X11, but if you want an X server that is available as well. Check. What definition of UNIX does it not meet for you?
Regarding Apple's cash position, they actually have around 3.4 billion (yes, with a b) in the bank, according to their latest SEC filing. And they are profitable, so that is going up.
I didn't bother mentioning Linux since it's available for both.:)
I can certainly understand having two different notebooks for different purposes, but I don't know if I can let you get away with saying the sony is "pretty much double everything the powerbooks are".:) The processor does have double the Mhz, and without getting into the whole Mhz argument (I'm definitely not claiming the powerbook is faster) I've never had a speed issue with my powerbook, and it's only the 667 - I hear the Ghz powerbooks rock. However, one of my co-workers has one of those Sony's, and it is a *beast*! 8.4 pounds with the optical drive in, (vs 5.4 for the powerbook) almost twice as thick as the powerbooks, an inch wider and 2 inches deeper. I guess it is double the volume.:) The screen is only slightly bigger than the powerbooks, unless of course you check out the new 17" powerbooks, but that ain't cheap.;) The video card is also much nicer on the powerbooks - 64 meg radeon 9000 vs 32 meg radeon 7500. Anyway, they both have their advantages - the sony is faster and has a bigger screen, but the powerbook has better video and is WAY more portable. And personally, I think the powerbooks look about a trillion times better than the sonys.
Anecdotal evidence: like I mentioned, my co-worker has one of those sonys, and it seems like a pretty nice machine, but he drools over my powerbook.:)
Anyway, different strokes for different folks. The powerbooks aren't for everyone, especially if you aren't a mac guy.
Actually, according to Toshiba's site, it's.6/.75, which I assume means.6 at the thin end and.75 at the other end. Still pretty sweet but "half an inch thick" is misleading.
2.6 lbs
Also a pretty sweet number, but no optical drive and half the battery life of a powerbook. Put a real battery and a dvd drive in there and see how light it is.:)
and double your MHz
BZZZT! Take a look at Apple's web page. All the powerbooks come with either 867Mhz or 1.0Ghz G4s. And since they don't have the power consumption of a P3, you actually get to use them at that speed when on the road.
Anyway, that is a pretty sexy notebook, but I don't think it compares. For $300 more than the toshiba, you can have a powerbook that has a larger, higher resolution screen, twice the battery life, and a dvd-rom/cd burner. Not only that, but it is just a quarter inch thicker,.5 inches deeper, and 1.5 inches wider (to accomodate the 15.2 inch widescreen.) Plus you get built in firewire and gigabit ethernet, and a real video card (64 meg Radeon mobility vs. 16MB Trident CyberALLADIN-T). The only real advantage the Toshiba has is the weight - 2.6 pounds is incredible, but you pretty much have to choose weight or battery, and I'll take battery life any day of the week.
Strictly hardware-wise, I'd say the powerbook stomps all over the toshiba, and that doesn't even get me started on how much cooler OS X is than XP, but that's much more a matter of opinion.
What about the Mac file formats? Even the iPod, a frickin MP3 player had to have some format reverse engineered (the index? don't remember). It's not like Apple deliberately throw up these roadblocks (though they have a history of abusing the legal system), it's just a natural consequence of lockin, which is what characterizes these kind of platforms.
Actually, iPod uses MP3 (it's the HFS+ filesystem that people needed, and there is source code for HFS+ in darwin) and now you can use it as FAT32, so you don't even need HFS+ anymore. And their mail application uses mbox. And their calendar application uses iCal format (RFC2445). Calendar sharing and idisk is based on WebDAV. And their address book application exports as vCards. And QuickTime 6 is centered around MPEG4 instead of the Sorenson codec. And the (open source) quicktime streaming server uses RTSP. And Rendezvous is based on zeroconf networking (an IETF standard) and is open source.
Seems to me like Apple is doing a pretty damn good job of sticking to industry standard formats and protocols.
Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG]
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't consider a DVD (as a distribution medium) lossy, but the whole point of the article was compression formats, not distribution formats.
As you pointed out, DVD users MPEG-2, which is a lossy compression format. Thats why you often see crappy artifacts when you watch DVD on a high end TV. My roommate has a 42" HDTV, and watching poorly encoded DVDs can be quite annoying due to the artifacts.
So, yes, I would consider DVD's lossy, even though they can be perfectly copied many times - the loss just happened before the copy was made.
Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG]
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
1. Original VHS -> VHS -> VHS -> VHS
3 generations of lossy copying.
2. Original CD -> Tape -> Tape -> Tape
3 generations of lossy copying.
3. Original JPEG -> save as JPEG -> save as JPEG
2 generations of lossy image manipulation.
Hence the term lossy
While that is an interesting way of looking at it, you are the one misusing the term "lossy".
When it comes to compression, lossy has a specific meaning - it means you can NOT recreate the original input bit-for-bit. With lossless compression, you CAN recreate the original input bit for bit. It has nothing to do with percieved quality.
In the future, please make sure you know what you are talking about before accusing others of ignorance.:)
Don't forget about them contributing back patches to Apache, FreeBSD, and GCC. Especially with GCC they are trying to get all their Obj-C extensions merged back into the main tree.
The whole point of server OSes is that you don't have to be at the console to update. Apple (and Microsoft, for that matter) can take their Software Update control panels/web sites and shove them, because they're useless for me in a corporate IT environment. I want to push my updates, damn it.
Actually, you can install Apple's updates remotely using commandline tools. If you run Software Update on one machine, you will be able to find the update package in/tmp. (I don't remember offhand where it goes exactly).
Once you have the package, it's fairly simple to install by hand. Inside the wrapper folder they consist of a pre-install script, a pax archive, and a post-install script. It should be fairly easy to write a script to run the pre-install script, unpax the archive to disk, and run the post-install script.
Because of that, Cocoa is even further from Linux than native Windows APIs. The closest thing to Cocoa on Linux is Qt, but they still have such substancial differences that easy porting is not an option.
Actually, the closest thing to Cocoa on UNIX is GNUStep. It is an open source implementation of the Cocoa APIs (formerly OpenStep), and it aims to be source-compatible, so that Cocoa apps would work with a simple recompile.
This still doesn't get us any closer to Office for UNIX, because Office is written to the Carbon APIs, which is an updated version of the old Mac Toolbox.
I've done a lot of work with Lyris for a company called SKYLIST, who does list hosting, management, and Lyris customization and integration. I would highly recommend Lyris to anyone with list hosting needs.
As far as managing mailing lists goes, Lyris is definitely the best software I've seen - it's fast, reliable, stable, handles bounces well, and has a nice web interface for managing everything. It is also extremely scalable. That's the great part.
Unfortunately, I've also had some less than pleasant experiences trying to customize and extend Lyris. It has a number of hooks for extending it, and has it's own protocol (LCP) for communicating with the server that has bindings in Perl, Java, ASP, and PHP coming soon. However, the programming interfaces depend on a lot of knowledge about how Lyris does things internally, so expect a LOT of trial and error when doing anything interesting. That's the only bad part.
Overall, if you're handling important lists, and don't want to spend too much time on administration, and can afford it (it can get pricey for the high end versions) I would highly recommend Lyris.
To survive they need to write their own browser, email program, Office compliant word processor, etc. No other company is going to give them what they need, neither will some well meaning ronin programmers. If they don't figure this out they'll just continue the slide towards becomming another generic PC manufacture and I'll never be able to buy my parents a computer they can easily use.
I think you're on the right track here, and I think Apple agrees with you. Take a look at iTunes (mp3 player, net radio, cd ripping & burning, all in one simple window), iMovie (same but for movies), and iDVD. Their plan is to become the 'digital hub', as they put it. There are also rumors of an upcoming iPhoto (or something like that) to do the same for digital photography.
I think they're moving in the right direction here. Microsoft already provides them with a great browser (on OS 9 anyway, the OS X version still needs work) and they have their own office suite. But everyone has browsers and office suites. Apple needs to go further. They are working on enabling people to do things they could never do on their computers before, like making movies & CDs. (Not that these things couldn't be done before, but now your Grandma will think they're easy.) They are hoping for another revolution like desktop publishing, which they still pretty much dominate. This is where they can gain an advantage, unless of course Microsoft keeps ripping off their applications. (I hear that XP has a video editor very similar to iMovie.)
Anyway, I completely agree with your opinion, I just think you're looking at the "killer apps" from a couple years ago, not the ones for the future.
Well, maybe that's cause if you had one, you wouldn't be able to call them spammers without reason. Wouldn't something like that be useful for perfomance testing something like sendmail? Or maybe a large product announcement list for one's customers?
Take a look at http://www.dummiesdaily.com. They have a tip of the day feature, where they send you daily tips on your topic of interest. They have over 300,000 unique subscribers - they mention this on the "About" page.
There's a nice, big list of over 200,000 email addresses, used for legitimate purposes. There is a such thing as a "opt-in" list.
For what it's worth, a company owned by a friend of mine hosts a ton of discussion & announcement lists using Lyris ListManager. They work very closely with Lyris (http://www.lyris.com), and I can tell you that Lyris does NOT condone spam. In fact, they also sell a product designed to help STOP spam. So please, get your facts straight before making accusations.
Well, it means that the application _can_ bundle all the libraries it uses, but it doesn't _have_ to. I believe early betas of OS X, OmniWeb (really cool browser) used to make you install OmniFoundation.framework or something like that, which contained a bunch of code that was shared across Omni's apps.
However, it definitely makes things easier to install if the frameworks are included with the application. I'm not sure if the loader is smart enough to only load one copy of OmniFoundation if two of Omni's applications are running - I think it is, but I could be wrong.
I agree that the Mac OS X does things is pretty cool, but you're slightly off. Applications are distributed as folders, but the GUI treats these folders as single objects (although there is a command to open the package). From the command line, they still look like folders. You launch them like 'open OmniWeb.app'.
Shared libraries are treated much the same way - they go in folders called 'OpenGL.framework' or whatever. They contain the library, the headers, other resources, and can contain multiple versions of the framework, which are versioned with a major/minor scheme - minor upgrades don't contain API changes, while major versions do - this way, programs can still use the right version of a framework if an incompatible one is installed, but can still benefit from framework upgrades.
I really do wish Linux and other UNIXes would move to this scheme - it's really nice.
Actually, NeXT didn't necessarily bundle all the packages inside the app, although some applications did. I never owned a NeXT box, but most of this works the same way in Mac OS X, which I do use.
Most shared libraries on NeXT/Mac OS X are installed as frameworks. These frameworks are basically directories with.framework suffix, like OpenGL.framework.
Each framework contains a folder called Versions - this folder contains all the installed versions of a framework, which includes shared libraries, the headers necessary to use them, and any other necessary resources. They are versioned with a major/minor numbering system - minor versions get bumped for compatible upgrades, and major versions get bumped for API changes and the like. Programs know what version they were linked against, so if you install a new, incompatible version, the program can still use the old version. This pretty much eliminates DLL hell - you can install new versions without breaking old stuff.
Apple's frameworks go in/System/Library/Frameworks, local frameworks go in/Library/Frameworks/, user-installed frameworks go in ~/Library/Frameworks, and application frameworks can go in the application bundle. I'm not really sure of the precedence though.
It's a really cool system, and makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend in Apple to install many unix shared libraries the regular way instead of as frameworks, to increase compatibility - makes many more things 'just compile'. I'd be much happier if more unix systems went to frameworks instead.
They are not selling the dev tools with every version of Mac OS X. Just this "sort of beta version" that they reciently released.
Man, I must have gotten really lucky!! My retail version of OS X had the developer CD in it! Must have been an accident! Man, it's happened to thousands of other people as well! Apple must have really screwed that one up!
Apple is the penulitmate closed OS. Not only will they not publish the source code (understandable for a corporate effort), but they don't want you developing for it unless you only use what they give you, which seems to be less than even MS does.
First off, they have opensourced everything but the GUI of OS X.
Second, _every_ copy of Mac OS X comes with a copy of the latest version of the development tools that NeXT used to sell for thousands of dollars. Not only that, but the IDE is just a GUI sitting on top of Jam and GCC (currently 2.95, but they just got 3.0 building & have been submitting their changes back to the FSF).
Seems to me that they have gotten VERY developer friendly lately.
No, they are not using a user mode server. They decided to move that into kernel space to deal with the performance issues. Even without the user mode server, Mach offers a lot of benefits. Try browsing the darwin-development mailing list archives at http://www.darwinfo.org for more info.
The fact that if I really, really needed something in my OS I could get the CVS sources and fix it seems like the only way to exist
How many times have you done this? I hear this argument all the time (and I've even argued it myself) but I've met almost nobody who has ever done it. It sounds great, but the truth is that it takes a lot of time and a lot of expertise to add new features to an operating system.
I've got plenty of work to do on my own - I don't have time to rewrite my OS. What I want is an operating system that works well and stays out of my way. With the exception of some stability issues, OS 9 has been that for me, and from what I've seen OS X will be even better. Linux is a great server platform - I code on it all day long, but all the editing happens over the network from my mac, because it just works, and I don't need to write my own features.
Besides, OS X is NeXTStep dumbed-down to the need of the average person who buys his machine at the supermarket and does AOL pr0n with it. Linux is for people who know what they're doing. The two groups don't overlap to such a great degree.
From what I've seen OS X is a lot more than a "dumbed-down" NeXTStep. It has been updated to use BSD 4.4 rather than 4.3. It has gone from Mach 2.5 to 3.0. It has a brand new object-oriented modern driver API. It has a brand-new display server based on pdf, with built in transparency, anti-aliasing, and warping capabilities. Some of NeXTStep's UI elements are gone, but there are a lot of new ones as well. I like most of them, but of course others may not. For the most part, it is a huge upgrade from NeXTStep/OpenStep.
As far as the intellegence of mac users goes, I think you would be suprised at just what mac users know. Most of the Mac users I know are very intelligent, and know how to use linux and windows just fine. The difference is that we looked at the alternatives and made an informed decision based on what works for us, rather that spitting out the typical platform BS and blindly choosing which OS has our favorite propaganda. Most mac users I know don't use macs because they don't know any better, they use macs because they do.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree about the concept album, and I hate buying single songs without any context. They are still there, you just have to look harder for them. I don't know if you listen to hip hop, but if you do, you should check out Prince Paul's "A Prince Among Thieves" or Masta Ace's "Disposable Arts".
"A Prince among Thieves" is a story of an aspiring rapper who needs money to finish his demo, who's best friend talks him into selling drugs to help pay for it. Tons of well-known rappers play all the characters in the story.
Disposable Arts is about a guy who gets released from jail, who gets himself out of the streets by going to the school of disposable arts to learn the hip-hop game.
Both came out in the last few years, and both form a complete story from start to finish, with amazing beats & rhymes.
IOKit - super fast & easy object oriented driver development
System wide XML configuration (except for things like apache and samba that have their own configuration files)
Cocoa - Comprehensive well designed object oriented development API. That's not so new, as it is an extension of the OpenStep APIs, but still something that has yet to be equalled anywhere else.
Expose - super fast and intuitive window management.
The darwin streaming server does MOV, MPEG4 and 3GPP over the standard RTSP protocol and is completely free (and open source under the APSL). See here: http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streami ng/
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-07/sunf lash.20030717.1.html
Two things: Regarding OS X being UNIX, how do you define UNIX? POSIX APIs? Check. Standard set of UNIX utilities included? Check. Runs most UNIX apps? Check. Standard UNIX filesystem layout? Check. Code derived from BSD? Check. UNIX was UNIX long before X11, but if you want an X server that is available as well. Check. What definition of UNIX does it not meet for you?
Regarding Apple's cash position, they actually have around 3.4 billion (yes, with a b) in the bank, according to their latest SEC filing. And they are profitable, so that is going up.
I didn't bother mentioning Linux since it's available for both. :)
:) The processor does have double the Mhz, and without getting into the whole Mhz argument (I'm definitely not claiming the powerbook is faster) I've never had a speed issue with my powerbook, and it's only the 667 - I hear the Ghz powerbooks rock. However, one of my co-workers has one of those Sony's, and it is a *beast*! 8.4 pounds with the optical drive in, (vs 5.4 for the powerbook) almost twice as thick as the powerbooks, an inch wider and 2 inches deeper. I guess it is double the volume. :) The screen is only slightly bigger than the powerbooks, unless of course you check out the new 17" powerbooks, but that ain't cheap. ;) The video card is also much nicer on the powerbooks - 64 meg radeon 9000 vs 32 meg radeon 7500. Anyway, they both have their advantages - the sony is faster and has a bigger screen, but the powerbook has better video and is WAY more portable. And personally, I think the powerbooks look about a trillion times better than the sonys.
:)
I can certainly understand having two different notebooks for different purposes, but I don't know if I can let you get away with saying the sony is "pretty much double everything the powerbooks are".
Anecdotal evidence: like I mentioned, my co-worker has one of those sonys, and it seems like a pretty nice machine, but he drools over my powerbook.
Anyway, different strokes for different folks. The powerbooks aren't for everyone, especially if you aren't a mac guy.
Half an inch thick
.6/.75, which I assume means .6 at the thin end and .75 at the other end. Still pretty sweet but "half an inch thick" is misleading.
:)
.5 inches deeper, and 1.5 inches wider (to accomodate the 15.2 inch widescreen.) Plus you get built in firewire and gigabit ethernet, and a real video card (64 meg Radeon mobility vs. 16MB Trident CyberALLADIN-T). The only real advantage the Toshiba has is the weight - 2.6 pounds is incredible, but you pretty much have to choose weight or battery, and I'll take battery life any day of the week.
Actually, according to Toshiba's site, it's
2.6 lbs
Also a pretty sweet number, but no optical drive and half the battery life of a powerbook. Put a real battery and a dvd drive in there and see how light it is.
and double your MHz
BZZZT! Take a look at Apple's web page. All the powerbooks come with either 867Mhz or 1.0Ghz G4s. And since they don't have the power consumption of a P3, you actually get to use them at that speed when on the road.
Anyway, that is a pretty sexy notebook, but I don't think it compares. For $300 more than the toshiba, you can have a powerbook that has a larger, higher resolution screen, twice the battery life, and a dvd-rom/cd burner. Not only that, but it is just a quarter inch thicker,
Strictly hardware-wise, I'd say the powerbook stomps all over the toshiba, and that doesn't even get me started on how much cooler OS X is than XP, but that's much more a matter of opinion.
What about the Mac file formats? Even the iPod, a frickin MP3 player had to have some format reverse engineered (the index? don't remember). It's not like Apple deliberately throw up these roadblocks (though they have a history of abusing the legal system), it's just a natural consequence of lockin, which is what characterizes these kind of platforms.
Actually, iPod uses MP3 (it's the HFS+ filesystem that people needed, and there is source code for HFS+ in darwin) and now you can use it as FAT32, so you don't even need HFS+ anymore. And their mail application uses mbox. And their calendar application uses iCal format (RFC2445). Calendar sharing and idisk is based on WebDAV. And their address book application exports as vCards. And QuickTime 6 is centered around MPEG4 instead of the Sorenson codec. And the (open source) quicktime streaming server uses RTSP. And Rendezvous is based on zeroconf networking (an IETF standard) and is open source.
Seems to me like Apple is doing a pretty damn good job of sticking to industry standard formats and protocols.
As you pointed out, DVD users MPEG-2, which is a lossy compression format. Thats why you often see crappy artifacts when you watch DVD on a high end TV. My roommate has a 42" HDTV, and watching poorly encoded DVDs can be quite annoying due to the artifacts.
So, yes, I would consider DVD's lossy, even though they can be perfectly copied many times - the loss just happened before the copy was made.
2. Original CD -> Tape -> Tape -> Tape 3 generations of lossy copying.
3. Original JPEG -> save as JPEG -> save as JPEG
2 generations of lossy image manipulation.
Hence the term lossy
While that is an interesting way of looking at it, you are the one misusing the term "lossy".
When it comes to compression, lossy has a specific meaning - it means you can NOT recreate the original input bit-for-bit. With lossless compression, you CAN recreate the original input bit for bit. It has nothing to do with percieved quality.
In the future, please make sure you know what you are talking about before accusing others of ignorance. :)
Don't forget about them contributing back patches to Apache, FreeBSD, and GCC. Especially with GCC they are trying to get all their Obj-C extensions merged back into the main tree.
Actually, you can install Apple's updates remotely using commandline tools. If you run Software Update on one machine, you will be able to find the update package in /tmp. (I don't remember offhand where it goes exactly).
Once you have the package, it's fairly simple to install by hand. Inside the wrapper folder they consist of a pre-install script, a pax archive, and a post-install script. It should be fairly easy to write a script to run the pre-install script, unpax the archive to disk, and run the post-install script.
Jonathan Ives, Apple's lead product designer.
Actually, the closest thing to Cocoa on UNIX is GNUStep. It is an open source implementation of the Cocoa APIs (formerly OpenStep), and it aims to be source-compatible, so that Cocoa apps would work with a simple recompile.
This still doesn't get us any closer to Office for UNIX, because Office is written to the Carbon APIs, which is an updated version of the old Mac Toolbox.
http://www.apple.com/itools/redirects/itools/index .html
for a tour of the interface - looks pretty sweet to me.
As far as managing mailing lists goes, Lyris is definitely the best software I've seen - it's fast, reliable, stable, handles bounces well, and has a nice web interface for managing everything. It is also extremely scalable. That's the great part.
Unfortunately, I've also had some less than pleasant experiences trying to customize and extend Lyris. It has a number of hooks for extending it, and has it's own protocol (LCP) for communicating with the server that has bindings in Perl, Java, ASP, and PHP coming soon. However, the programming interfaces depend on a lot of knowledge about how Lyris does things internally, so expect a LOT of trial and error when doing anything interesting. That's the only bad part.
Overall, if you're handling important lists, and don't want to spend too much time on administration, and can afford it (it can get pricey for the high end versions) I would highly recommend Lyris.
To survive they need to write their own browser, email program, Office compliant word processor, etc. No other company is going to give them what they need, neither will some well meaning ronin programmers. If they don't figure this out they'll just continue the slide towards becomming another generic PC manufacture and I'll never be able to buy my parents a computer they can easily use.
I think you're on the right track here, and I think Apple agrees with you. Take a look at iTunes (mp3 player, net radio, cd ripping & burning, all in one simple window), iMovie (same but for movies), and iDVD. Their plan is to become the 'digital hub', as they put it. There are also rumors of an upcoming iPhoto (or something like that) to do the same for digital photography.
I think they're moving in the right direction here. Microsoft already provides them with a great browser (on OS 9 anyway, the OS X version still needs work) and they have their own office suite. But everyone has browsers and office suites. Apple needs to go further. They are working on enabling people to do things they could never do on their computers before, like making movies & CDs. (Not that these things couldn't be done before, but now your Grandma will think they're easy.) They are hoping for another revolution like desktop publishing, which they still pretty much dominate. This is where they can gain an advantage, unless of course Microsoft keeps ripping off their applications. (I hear that XP has a video editor very similar to iMovie.)
Anyway, I completely agree with your opinion, I just think you're looking at the "killer apps" from a couple years ago, not the ones for the future.
Well, maybe that's cause if you had one, you wouldn't be able to call them spammers without reason. Wouldn't something like that be useful for perfomance testing something like sendmail? Or maybe a large product announcement list for one's customers?
Take a look at http://www.dummiesdaily.com. They have a tip of the day feature, where they send you daily tips on your topic of interest. They have over 300,000 unique subscribers - they mention this on the "About" page.
There's a nice, big list of over 200,000 email addresses, used for legitimate purposes. There is a such thing as a "opt-in" list.
For what it's worth, a company owned by a friend of mine hosts a ton of discussion & announcement lists using Lyris ListManager. They work very closely with Lyris (http://www.lyris.com), and I can tell you that Lyris does NOT condone spam. In fact, they also sell a product designed to help STOP spam. So please, get your facts straight before making accusations.
Well, it means that the application _can_ bundle all the libraries it uses, but it doesn't _have_ to. I believe early betas of OS X, OmniWeb (really cool browser) used to make you install OmniFoundation.framework or something like that, which contained a bunch of code that was shared across Omni's apps.
However, it definitely makes things easier to install if the frameworks are included with the application. I'm not sure if the loader is smart enough to only load one copy of OmniFoundation if two of Omni's applications are running - I think it is, but I could be wrong.
I agree that the Mac OS X does things is pretty cool, but you're slightly off. Applications are distributed as folders, but the GUI treats these folders as single objects (although there is a command to open the package). From the command line, they still look like folders. You launch them like 'open OmniWeb.app'.
Shared libraries are treated much the same way - they go in folders called 'OpenGL.framework' or whatever. They contain the library, the headers, other resources, and can contain multiple versions of the framework, which are versioned with a major/minor scheme - minor upgrades don't contain API changes, while major versions do - this way, programs can still use the right version of a framework if an incompatible one is installed, but can still benefit from framework upgrades.
I really do wish Linux and other UNIXes would move to this scheme - it's really nice.
Actually, NeXT didn't necessarily bundle all the packages inside the app, although some applications did. I never owned a NeXT box, but most of this works the same way in Mac OS X, which I do use.
.framework suffix, like OpenGL.framework.
/System/Library/Frameworks, local frameworks go in /Library/Frameworks/, user-installed frameworks go in ~/Library/Frameworks, and application frameworks can go in the application bundle. I'm not really sure of the precedence though.
Most shared libraries on NeXT/Mac OS X are installed as frameworks. These frameworks are basically directories with
Each framework contains a folder called Versions - this folder contains all the installed versions of a framework, which includes shared libraries, the headers necessary to use them, and any other necessary resources. They are versioned with a major/minor numbering system - minor versions get bumped for compatible upgrades, and major versions get bumped for API changes and the like. Programs know what version they were linked against, so if you install a new, incompatible version, the program can still use the old version. This pretty much eliminates DLL hell - you can install new versions without breaking old stuff.
Apple's frameworks go in
It's a really cool system, and makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend in Apple to install many unix shared libraries the regular way instead of as frameworks, to increase compatibility - makes many more things 'just compile'. I'd be much happier if more unix systems went to frameworks instead.
They are not selling the dev tools with every version of Mac OS X. Just this "sort of beta version" that they reciently released.
Man, I must have gotten really lucky!! My retail version of OS X had the developer CD in it! Must have been an accident! Man, it's happened to thousands of other people as well! Apple must have really screwed that one up!
Apple is the penulitmate closed OS. Not only will they not publish the source code (understandable for a corporate effort), but they don't want you developing for it unless you only use what they give you, which seems to be less than even MS does.
First off, they have opensourced everything but the GUI of OS X.
Second, _every_ copy of Mac OS X comes with a copy of the latest version of the development tools that NeXT used to sell for thousands of dollars. Not only that, but the IDE is just a GUI sitting on top of Jam and GCC (currently 2.95, but they just got 3.0 building & have been submitting their changes back to the FSF).
Seems to me that they have gotten VERY developer friendly lately.
No, they are not using a user mode server. They decided to move that into kernel space to deal with the performance issues. Even without the user mode server, Mach offers a lot of benefits. Try browsing the darwin-development mailing list archives at http://www.darwinfo.org for more info.
How many times have you done this? I hear this argument all the time (and I've even argued it myself) but I've met almost nobody who has ever done it. It sounds great, but the truth is that it takes a lot of time and a lot of expertise to add new features to an operating system. I've got plenty of work to do on my own - I don't have time to rewrite my OS. What I want is an operating system that works well and stays out of my way. With the exception of some stability issues, OS 9 has been that for me, and from what I've seen OS X will be even better. Linux is a great server platform - I code on it all day long, but all the editing happens over the network from my mac, because it just works, and I don't need to write my own features.
Besides, OS X is NeXTStep dumbed-down to the need of the average person who buys his machine at the supermarket and does AOL pr0n with it. Linux is for people who know what they're doing. The two groups don't overlap to such a great degree.
From what I've seen OS X is a lot more than a "dumbed-down" NeXTStep. It has been updated to use BSD 4.4 rather than 4.3. It has gone from Mach 2.5 to 3.0. It has a brand new object-oriented modern driver API. It has a brand-new display server based on pdf, with built in transparency, anti-aliasing, and warping capabilities. Some of NeXTStep's UI elements are gone, but there are a lot of new ones as well. I like most of them, but of course others may not. For the most part, it is a huge upgrade from NeXTStep/OpenStep.
As far as the intellegence of mac users goes, I think you would be suprised at just what mac users know. Most of the Mac users I know are very intelligent, and know how to use linux and windows just fine. The difference is that we looked at the alternatives and made an informed decision based on what works for us, rather that spitting out the typical platform BS and blindly choosing which OS has our favorite propaganda. Most mac users I know don't use macs because they don't know any better, they use macs because they do.