Meanwhile NCSA stopped development on Mosaic and sold/liscensed the code to Spyglass from which MS liscensed (not baught, MS has to pay Spyglass royalties for several technologies)
Yeah, Microsoft licensed the code from Spyglass for a percentage of the revenue, then gave the browser away for free. Spyglass wasn't too happy about that.
And then there's the thing about Netscape creating proprietary standards...
That seems to get forgotten a lot nowadays - but then, that _is_ the past, and Netscape is no longer quite the same company that could add to the html standard at a whim simply because _they_ were the standard. That and IE 5 for the Mac are the only good things to come out of Microsoft's foray into the browser market.
There is a trick to this - those studies are the result of examining a whole lot of individual Napster users. At least when we see one pro-Napster user on a pro-Napster site, we can judge that individual result based on the source. When we see a study, we don't know any more about the subjects of the study than the entity that sponsored the study wants to disclose.
Ahem, Funny you should bring that up. You do know that the "rich" pay most of the tax burden, right? The top 1% pays roughly 32%, the top 5% roughly 50%...and the bottom 50% only pays something like 5%.
If you're going to bring up the percentage of taxes paid by the "top 1%", you should also mention what percentage of the wealth of this country is held by that top 1%. If the top 1% accounts for 32% of tax monies, but holds 90%+ of the wealth, that hardly constitutes an unfair burden on the rich...
3) I'll wonder why people didn't make a fuss like this over BeOS. It is also rather easy to use and Unix-ish, and at least they "get it" somewhat.
I was pretty excited about BeOS, but then they never ported it to run on any PowerPC other than the 603's and the 604's. Hard to stay excited about an OS you can't run on your box (I had a 601, and followed it with a G3 later).;) In the Mac rags there was a fair amount of excitement about Be, and it was widely expected to be licensed or bought by Apple. The excitement petered out both because of the NeXT purchase and Be's decision to drop later PowerPC support (likely due to Apple's waning marketshare - if they had cared that much about PowerPC support, I expect they would have reverse-engineered G3 support in much the same way Linux did. The marketshare issue would have made it appear to be not worth the effort).
When I was working in the terminal in the Beta (and enjoying it immensely, I might add), I found myself trying to use the middle mouse button to paste frequently. There is a convenience factor to middle-button paste, certainly, but command-c copy and command-v paste has the advantage of working across different applications without the disadvantage of losing what you want to paste when you highlight what you're pasting over.;) I'm also not sure how effective middle-button paste is for copying and pasting things like images and sound/movie files across applications.
I'd imagine that whatever the worthiness of the patent for 1-click may be, the name itself could be better argued as a trademark. By licensing the technology, they get to use the name "1-click" without trouble (or at any rate, that is the name they're using). They might have considered the association with Amazon to be something that could help their own web sales. That doesn't change my disappointment with Apple for lending some credibility to that "patent", but it would be a valid reason for the licensing that wouldn't necessarily require Apple to take the patent seriously themselves.
By this definition you are saying that the way Americans are voting is unscientific and unreliable.
Perhaps they should elect their president with a scientific poll?
It would increase voter turnout for non-Presidential elections, at the very least. Still, there is the problem of people who want to be politically vocal but who happened to eat out the evening the pollster called for their vote...
Then, on a helpdesk contract, I had to spend 20 godawful minutes explaining to someone how to right-click and get the Properties for a shortcut on a Win98 desktop. I repeat, twenty (20) minutes.
Amen! Most PC users don't even realize they have more than one mouse button - it's easier to ask someone to hold down the "control" key while they click than to explain the concept of the "right-click" to them. Apple had the right idea for the majority of users by staying with a single-button mouse.
Power users who want more mouse buttons know how to hook a new one up, and can buy them pretty easily. Apple really should offer one or more alternative mice in their build-to-order, though. I wouldn't have minded an option to leave the mouse out for a $10 or $20 price break.
Nothing should change. Network Solutions made it clear long ago, when they had the monopoly on registrations, that they weren't making distinctions between.com,.org, and.net. You can be sure that if someone did manage to register microsoft.org or ibm.org, they would have to hand those domains over pretty quickly. This is because there ceased to be a distinction on the registrar's side a long time ago. People who registered.com because it's the popular TLD or.org or.net because they couldn't get their first choice shouldn't be penalized because someone is pining for the old days when somebody cared. How much does the public care? Not a whit. I worked for an ISP, and about 50% of the time when I was setting up a new customer I had to argue with them to convince them that their email address would end in ".net", not ".net.com".
It doesn't even occur to most people that there are TLDs apart from ".com". It's like losing a trademark - if the public begins to perceive it as a generic term instead of a reference to something more specific, the trademark is lost. Well, ".com" is now the generic TLD, because the registrar never felt the need to tell anyone different.
I believe MS have the patent on the anti-aliased fonts.
If you're talking about "ClearType", that's based on an old Apple patent (dating back to the Apple II) for anti-aliasing by splitting pixels. Hardly innovation. If they have gotten a patent for it, then it's a patent that should never have been granted.
(Gasp!) What a shocker!!!! I never heard that side of the story before, let alone have I heard it over and over and over by whiney crybabies who simply can't accept that a faceless corporation might not be the bad guy in every single case.
But obviously we don't have a problem with people who believe the faceless corporation is the good guy in every case.
The simple fact of the matter is that the coffee was at a temperature that caused severe burns after only a few seconds of skin contact. Since this was a product intended for consumption, and since the coffee was being sold at a fast food place where marketing typically indicates that food purchased there is intended for immediate consumption, it can most certainly be argued that McDonald's had created a perception that the coffee should be safe to handle when purchased.
Food is usually not purchased from McDonald's because of any high expectation of quality. People go to McDonald's and other fast food places because they are convenient. If you can demonstrate that McDonald's coffee sales have decreased significantly since they reduced the serving temperature of their coffee, then you might be able to make an argument that customers came to McDonald's for coffee because they loved the high temperature. And in any event, if you're going to make a food product physically dangerous, even if it is for the sake of improving flavor, the customer needs to know to tread lightly around the danger. Especially if you're a fast food company that has isolated a single product out of their lineup as a "wait before you consume it" product rather than one that's ready to eat as soon as you buy it.
Re:I fail to see what the big deal is...
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
Read the article before responding to it. Cyber Patrol was the target of previous Mattel complaints, but this is software being installed with children's games and the like that surreptitiously attempts to connect to the Internet, communicate the software being run, how often it's used, and what version it is, and then downloads a JPEG depending on whether the server deems it necessary. On Mattel's side, there isn't any personal information being transmitted. Against Mattel, however, is the fact that the software is installed without notification, and makes a connection to their server without asking for permission from the user. The main point of the article is that it isn't hard for software that does more to violate privacy to be installed. And to be honest, I would call software that monitors how often the games are run a violation of privacy, if permission had not been sought prior to installation (though it wouldn't surprise me if the license agreement contains language that would allow a lawyer to say permission had been obtained when the software package was opened).
The article itself was good, but the thing most people will read is the title. "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed" is quite different from "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed?" for instance, or "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Disabled". Either of the last two seem more appropriate to the article, considering the article's contents.
So if someone is responding to the article, then yes, the article is a good one and examines a controversy that makes for an interesting read. The title, however, seems to contradict the majority of the research presented in the article, and could be the subject of complaints if it seems likely to mislead readers. Not a good thing.
The UCITA has only been recently passed into law in Virginia, and hasn't, to my knowledge, been made law anyplace else. And even if it becomes a national law, the law can't apply to something retroactively - licenses after the law is passed would be subject to it (and/or benefit from it), but not those that pre-date its passage into law. Of course, even then, it might be argued that a license would have to include a clause indicating that it could be changed later, if it wants to survive a court battle, UCITA or no. So no, in my non-Lawyer opinion, the GPL couldn't be revoked, even if UCITA is passed into law in an appropriate jurisdiction. Applying UCITA retroactively to a pre-existing condition would be unconstitutional.
John Carmack said that only about 15k of Quake 3 is platform-specific, when the first test came out. Bungie has certainly done well, and they don't seem to think their focus on cross-platform simultaneous releases has been a waste of resources. It might take a little more to start the project off, but once you have the engine firmly cross-platform, you end up releasing for two platforms (with an easy way to port to other platforms if desired) for less effort than it would have taken to write for one specific platform at the outset and port to another one later.
One thing to bear in mind is that while the Mac market is smaller, there is less competition in that part of the marketplace. Releasing for Windows means advertising in a lot of magazines and fighting for recognition against a slew of other games. Releasing for Mac involves fewer platform-specific magazines to advertise in, not to mention that most of the hype for the Windows side would spill over to the Mac side, and it also means that you're releasing to a market starved for current titles.
Valve may have done the right thing - it is true that the Mac community might have held a grudge if Half-Life had been a bad port. If it had been a good port, though, they might have been able to make up any losses in future sales, since they would have established themselves in the Mac market as a provider of good games.
Andrew Meggs did announce that he would be taking the money Sierra paid for the work done so far on the Half Life port and using it to buy an Athlon-based PC. He said he had sworn off Mac development previously and should have stayed away, basically.
Ah well. More bad news for those of us that play games on Macs and PCs, but are more likely to buy them for Macs (it's psychological, probably, but games seem so much more comfortable to me on the Mac). At least some other games I've been looking forward to are still on track for the Mac. Not to mention that I can always express my disappointment by grabbing a pirated copy of Half-Life for the PC.:/
Dvorak once again reminds me of why I've never liked his articles much. He has a real "either/or" perspective on...well, everything. He mentions that Linux serves well for midrange solutions, but rather than concede that that could be a good thing, he argues that Linux is flawed because it isn't always the best choice for the high-end - and therefore needs to cater to the low-end. Setting aside my own opinions on where Linux is and where it should go, I really wouldn't look at the middle-range as a bad place to be. If Linux does work well in the middle range, it's not a mark against it, as Dvorak seems to imply. Certainly, if Linux were to start targeting only the low end, giving up on the high end and dismissing the middle-end as unimportant, it would have to sacrifice a lot of its greatest strengths. And an OS that's grown _because_ it is a good midrange sollution wouldn't be improving its chances by looking for greener pastures somewhere downhill.
Dvorak once again reminds me of why I've never liked his articles much. He has a real "either/or" perspective on...well, everything. He mentions that Linux serves well for midrange solutions, but rather concede that that could be a good thing, he argues that Linux is flawed because it isn't always the best choice for the high-end - and therefore needs to cater to the low-end. Setting aside my own opinions on where Linux is and where it should go, I really wouldn't look at the middle-range as a bad place to be. If Linux does work well in the middle range, it's not a mark against it, as Dvorak seems to imply. Certainly, if Linux were to start targeting only the low end, giving up on the high end and dismissing the middle-end as unimportant, it would have to sacrifice a lot of its greatest strengths. And an OS that's grown _because_ it is a good midrange sollution wouldn't be improving its chances by looking for greener pastures somewhere downhill.
If I were to copy Microsoft Office and start selling those copies, it would still be Microsoft Office on those CDs. Same thing when copying Red Hat CDs. The difference is that the Microsoft license doesn't allow me to legally copy and distribute Office CDs, but the GPL does. If you don't make changes to the content of the CD, then it is Red Hat Linux on that CD.
If changes are made it could be argued that the name should be changed, but if it's just a download-redistribute matter, then it's Red Hat Linux, plain and simple.
Apple isn't doing anything different from what was done when the Pentium 3 came out, from both Intel and the trade press. Photoshop tests were run with the P3 against the G3, and they used filters that were optimized for the Katmai extensions. Now they're running the G4 with Altivec against the P3 with Katmai, and you're crying foul? You should know by now benchmarks are useless anyway.;)
Mostly what I gleaned from the keynote is that the floating point on the G4 is better than the P3. That was the big emphasis. Since integer on the G3 has been faster than the P3 for a while now anyway, I figure the P3 won't do terribly well in general benchmarks. I'm sure they won't be as nice as Apple's been touting, but those demos were pretty darn impressive - they not only compared Photoshop filters, but also SETI @ Home and picture encryption-decryption in the keynote demos.
This was spread by the Microsoft employee who was posing as a consultant to discredit AOL. The trick of it is, after Microsoft denied having anything to do with the "consultant" emails, they said that the allegations were correct and that AOL was exploiting a buffer overflow to keep MS out of their AIM network. After some posturing about what a failure of security it was to exploit such a bug, they conceded it was possible that what they were looking at may not be a bug after all, but a feature of some sort. In other words, they're miffed and guessing at what's giving them trouble, and the pop media is picking up on it and taking Microsoft's word for it.
That was hilarious.:) My compliments to the author.
The problem with the font size has to do with the number of dots the OS thinks it's displaying per inch. Without digging up the article I read on the subject in TidBITS, it basically means that a 12-point font will look bigger on a Windows box than it will under MacOS or most UNIX variants. If it looks good in Netscape under the MacOS, for instance, it's because you're using a font size of 14 points or more - if you have it set to 12 points (like I usually do), the page in question is nigh-unreadable.
Naturally, Microsoft optimized the page for viewing under Windows - whether they intended to slight users of other operating systems is of course something we can only speculate about. I would expect it was an intentional slight, but that's only because I always assume the worst where Microsoft is concerned.:)
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Hey, at least they have the head covering and mouthpiece...
Yeah, but they had open windows in the palace and no airlock on the garden. Fix one nitpick, create another...
Meanwhile NCSA stopped development on Mosaic and sold/liscensed the code to Spyglass from which MS liscensed (not baught, MS has to pay Spyglass royalties for several technologies)
Yeah, Microsoft licensed the code from Spyglass for a percentage of the revenue, then gave the browser away for free. Spyglass wasn't too happy about that.
And then there's the thing about Netscape creating proprietary standards...
That seems to get forgotten a lot nowadays - but then, that _is_ the past, and Netscape is no longer quite the same company that could add to the html standard at a whim simply because _they_ were the standard. That and IE 5 for the Mac are the only good things to come out of Microsoft's foray into the browser market.
There is a trick to this - those studies are the result of examining a whole lot of individual Napster users. At least when we see one pro-Napster user on a pro-Napster site, we can judge that individual result based on the source. When we see a study, we don't know any more about the subjects of the study than the entity that sponsored the study wants to disclose.
Ahem, Funny you should bring that up. You do know that the "rich" pay most of the tax burden, right? The top 1% pays roughly 32%, the top 5% roughly 50%...and the bottom 50% only pays something like 5%.
If you're going to bring up the percentage of taxes paid by the "top 1%", you should also mention what percentage of the wealth of this country is held by that top 1%. If the top 1% accounts for 32% of tax monies, but holds 90%+ of the wealth, that hardly constitutes an unfair burden on the rich...
3) I'll wonder why people didn't make a fuss like this over BeOS. It is also rather easy to use and Unix-ish, and at least they "get it" somewhat.
I was pretty excited about BeOS, but then they never ported it to run on any PowerPC other than the 603's and the 604's. Hard to stay excited about an OS you can't run on your box (I had a 601, and followed it with a G3 later). ;) In the Mac rags there was a fair amount of excitement about Be, and it was widely expected to be licensed or bought by Apple. The excitement petered out both because of the NeXT purchase and Be's decision to drop later PowerPC support (likely due to Apple's waning marketshare - if they had cared that much about PowerPC support, I expect they would have reverse-engineered G3 support in much the same way Linux did. The marketshare issue would have made it appear to be not worth the effort).
When I was working in the terminal in the Beta (and enjoying it immensely, I might add), I found myself trying to use the middle mouse button to paste frequently. There is a convenience factor to middle-button paste, certainly, but command-c copy and command-v paste has the advantage of working across different applications without the disadvantage of losing what you want to paste when you highlight what you're pasting over. ;) I'm also not sure how effective middle-button paste is for copying and pasting things like images and sound/movie files across applications.
I'd imagine that whatever the worthiness of the patent for 1-click may be, the name itself could be better argued as a trademark. By licensing the technology, they get to use the name "1-click" without trouble (or at any rate, that is the name they're using). They might have considered the association with Amazon to be something that could help their own web sales. That doesn't change my disappointment with Apple for lending some credibility to that "patent", but it would be a valid reason for the licensing that wouldn't necessarily require Apple to take the patent seriously themselves.
By this definition you are saying that the way Americans are voting is unscientific and unreliable.
Perhaps they should elect their president with a scientific poll?
It would increase voter turnout for non-Presidential elections, at the very least. Still, there is the problem of people who want to be politically vocal but who happened to eat out the evening the pollster called for their vote...
Then, on a helpdesk contract, I had to spend 20 godawful minutes explaining to someone how to right-click and get the Properties for a shortcut on a Win98 desktop. I repeat, twenty (20) minutes.
Amen! Most PC users don't even realize they have more than one mouse button - it's easier to ask someone to hold down the "control" key while they click than to explain the concept of the "right-click" to them. Apple had the right idea for the majority of users by staying with a single-button mouse.
Power users who want more mouse buttons know how to hook a new one up, and can buy them pretty easily. Apple really should offer one or more alternative mice in their build-to-order, though. I wouldn't have minded an option to leave the mouse out for a $10 or $20 price break.
By that logic nothing will ever change.
Nothing should change. Network Solutions made it clear long ago, when they had the monopoly on registrations, that they weren't making distinctions between .com, .org, and .net. You can be sure that if someone did manage to register microsoft.org or ibm.org, they would have to hand those domains over pretty quickly. This is because there ceased to be a distinction on the registrar's side a long time ago. People who registered .com because it's the popular TLD or .org or .net because they couldn't get their first choice shouldn't be penalized because someone is pining for the old days when somebody cared. How much does the public care? Not a whit. I worked for an ISP, and about 50% of the time when I was setting up a new customer I had to argue with them to convince them that their email address would end in ".net", not ".net.com".
It doesn't even occur to most people that there are TLDs apart from ".com". It's like losing a trademark - if the public begins to perceive it as a generic term instead of a reference to something more specific, the trademark is lost. Well, ".com" is now the generic TLD, because the registrar never felt the need to tell anyone different.
If you're talking about "ClearType", that's based on an old Apple patent (dating back to the Apple II) for anti-aliasing by splitting pixels. Hardly innovation. If they have gotten a patent for it, then it's a patent that should never have been granted.
(Gasp!) What a shocker!!!! I never heard that side of the story before, let alone have I heard it over and over and over by whiney crybabies who simply can't accept that a faceless corporation might not be the bad guy in every single case.
But obviously we don't have a problem with people who believe the faceless corporation is the good guy in every case.
The simple fact of the matter is that the coffee was at a temperature that caused severe burns after only a few seconds of skin contact. Since this was a product intended for consumption, and since the coffee was being sold at a fast food place where marketing typically indicates that food purchased there is intended for immediate consumption, it can most certainly be argued that McDonald's had created a perception that the coffee should be safe to handle when purchased.
Food is usually not purchased from McDonald's because of any high expectation of quality. People go to McDonald's and other fast food places because they are convenient. If you can demonstrate that McDonald's coffee sales have decreased significantly since they reduced the serving temperature of their coffee, then you might be able to make an argument that customers came to McDonald's for coffee because they loved the high temperature. And in any event, if you're going to make a food product physically dangerous, even if it is for the sake of improving flavor, the customer needs to know to tread lightly around the danger. Especially if you're a fast food company that has isolated a single product out of their lineup as a "wait before you consume it" product rather than one that's ready to eat as soon as you buy it.
Read the article before responding to it. Cyber Patrol was the target of previous Mattel complaints, but this is software being installed with children's games and the like that surreptitiously attempts to connect to the Internet, communicate the software being run, how often it's used, and what version it is, and then downloads a JPEG depending on whether the server deems it necessary. On Mattel's side, there isn't any personal information being transmitted. Against Mattel, however, is the fact that the software is installed without notification, and makes a connection to their server without asking for permission from the user. The main point of the article is that it isn't hard for software that does more to violate privacy to be installed. And to be honest, I would call software that monitors how often the games are run a violation of privacy, if permission had not been sought prior to installation (though it wouldn't surprise me if the license agreement contains language that would allow a lawyer to say permission had been obtained when the software package was opened).
The article itself was good, but the thing most people will read is the title. "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed" is quite different from "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed?" for instance, or "Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Disabled". Either of the last two seem more appropriate to the article, considering the article's contents.
So if someone is responding to the article, then yes, the article is a good one and examines a controversy that makes for an interesting read. The title, however, seems to contradict the majority of the research presented in the article, and could be the subject of complaints if it seems likely to mislead readers. Not a good thing.
The UCITA has only been recently passed into law in Virginia, and hasn't, to my knowledge, been made law anyplace else. And even if it becomes a national law, the law can't apply to something retroactively - licenses after the law is passed would be subject to it (and/or benefit from it), but not those that pre-date its passage into law. Of course, even then, it might be argued that a license would have to include a clause indicating that it could be changed later, if it wants to survive a court battle, UCITA or no. So no, in my non-Lawyer opinion, the GPL couldn't be revoked, even if UCITA is passed into law in an appropriate jurisdiction. Applying UCITA retroactively to a pre-existing condition would be unconstitutional.
I dunno, I think more people are still waiting for an actual 1.0 version of Windows....
John Carmack said that only about 15k of Quake 3 is platform-specific, when the first test came out. Bungie has certainly done well, and they don't seem to think their focus on cross-platform simultaneous releases has been a waste of resources. It might take a little more to start the project off, but once you have the engine firmly cross-platform, you end up releasing for two platforms (with an easy way to port to other platforms if desired) for less effort than it would have taken to write for one specific platform at the outset and port to another one later.
One thing to bear in mind is that while the Mac market is smaller, there is less competition in that part of the marketplace. Releasing for Windows means advertising in a lot of magazines and fighting for recognition against a slew of other games. Releasing for Mac involves fewer platform-specific magazines to advertise in, not to mention that most of the hype for the Windows side would spill over to the Mac side, and it also means that you're releasing to a market starved for current titles.
Valve may have done the right thing - it is true that the Mac community might have held a grudge if Half-Life had been a bad port. If it had been a good port, though, they might have been able to make up any losses in future sales, since they would have established themselves in the Mac market as a provider of good games.
Andrew Meggs did announce that he would be taking the money Sierra paid for the work done so far on the Half Life port and using it to buy an Athlon-based PC. He said he had sworn off Mac development previously and should have stayed away, basically.
:/
Ah well. More bad news for those of us that play games on Macs and PCs, but are more likely to buy them for Macs (it's psychological, probably, but games seem so much more comfortable to me on the Mac). At least some other games I've been looking forward to are still on track for the Mac. Not to mention that I can always express my disappointment by grabbing a pirated copy of Half-Life for the PC.
Sorry about the double-post.
Dvorak once again reminds me of why I've never liked his articles much. He has a real "either/or" perspective on...well, everything. He mentions that Linux serves well for midrange solutions, but rather than concede that that could be a good thing, he argues that Linux is flawed because it isn't always the best choice for the high-end - and therefore needs to cater to the low-end. Setting aside my own opinions on where Linux is and where it should go, I really wouldn't look at the middle-range as a bad place to be. If Linux does work well in the middle range, it's not a mark against it, as Dvorak seems to imply. Certainly, if Linux were to start targeting only the low end, giving up on the high end and dismissing the middle-end as unimportant, it would have to sacrifice a lot of its greatest strengths. And an OS that's grown _because_ it is a good midrange sollution wouldn't be improving its chances by looking for greener pastures somewhere downhill.
Dvorak once again reminds me of why I've never liked his articles much. He has a real "either/or" perspective on...well, everything. He mentions that Linux serves well for midrange solutions, but rather concede that that could be a good thing, he argues that Linux is flawed because it isn't always the best choice for the high-end - and therefore needs to cater to the low-end. Setting aside my own opinions on where Linux is and where it should go, I really wouldn't look at the middle-range as a bad place to be. If Linux does work well in the middle range, it's not a mark against it, as Dvorak seems to imply. Certainly, if Linux were to start targeting only the low end, giving up on the high end and dismissing the middle-end as unimportant, it would have to sacrifice a lot of its greatest strengths. And an OS that's grown _because_ it is a good midrange sollution wouldn't be improving its chances by looking for greener pastures somewhere downhill.
If I were to copy Microsoft Office and start selling those copies, it would still be Microsoft Office on those CDs. Same thing when copying Red Hat CDs. The difference is that the Microsoft license doesn't allow me to legally copy and distribute Office CDs, but the GPL does. If you don't make changes to the content of the CD, then it is Red Hat Linux on that CD.
If changes are made it could be argued that the name should be changed, but if it's just a download-redistribute matter, then it's Red Hat Linux, plain and simple.
Apple isn't doing anything different from what was done when the Pentium 3 came out, from both Intel and the trade press. Photoshop tests were run with the P3 against the G3, and they used filters that were optimized for the Katmai extensions. Now they're running the G4 with Altivec against the P3 with Katmai, and you're crying foul? You should know by now benchmarks are useless anyway. ;)
Mostly what I gleaned from the keynote is that the floating point on the G4 is better than the P3. That was the big emphasis. Since integer on the G3 has been faster than the P3 for a while now anyway, I figure the P3 won't do terribly well in general benchmarks. I'm sure they won't be as nice as Apple's been touting, but those demos were pretty darn impressive - they not only compared Photoshop filters, but also SETI @ Home and picture encryption-decryption in the keynote demos.
This was spread by the Microsoft employee who was posing as a consultant to discredit AOL. The trick of it is, after Microsoft denied having anything to do with the "consultant" emails, they said that the allegations were correct and that AOL was exploiting a buffer overflow to keep MS out of their AIM network. After some posturing about what a failure of security it was to exploit such a bug, they conceded it was possible that what they were looking at may not be a bug after all, but a feature of some sort. In other words, they're miffed and guessing at what's giving them trouble, and the pop media is picking up on it and taking Microsoft's word for it.
That was hilarious. :) My compliments to the author.
:)
The problem with the font size has to do with the number of dots the OS thinks it's displaying per inch. Without digging up the article I read on the subject in TidBITS, it basically means that a 12-point font will look bigger on a Windows box than it will under MacOS or most UNIX variants. If it looks good in Netscape under the MacOS, for instance, it's because you're using a font size of 14 points or more - if you have it set to 12 points (like I usually do), the page in question is nigh-unreadable.
Naturally, Microsoft optimized the page for viewing under Windows - whether they intended to slight users of other operating systems is of course something we can only speculate about. I would expect it was an intentional slight, but that's only because I always assume the worst where Microsoft is concerned.