Of course, they can change course whenever they like and impose whatever corporate strategy they want.
Well, no.... If the end users don't buy it, Apple will go out of buisness.
I do agree that it would be bad if Apple was the only choice available, but it is definitely good to have them around.
For example, I think everybody would agree that the adoption of USB on computers was a good thing, but remember that USB was really floundering until Apple put it on the first iMac. There were very few USB peripherals available at the time, and everybody lambasted Apple for it. But people bought iMacs anyway, and created an instant market of people looking to buy USB stuff and they didn't have any alternative.
Think about it, for the longest time, virtually every USB device came in translucent plastic! Without Apple, we might still be bemoaning the poor adoption rate of USB. It might have been abandoned by now.
Try Babylon 5. The first season is out on DVD now. Some of the earlier episodes are weak, but by the time you hit Season 3, it becomes some of the best SF ever made. The buildup over several seasons is subtle and amazing. Check out Walter Koenig as Bester, he proves that he is a good actor that was given nothing to do in ST.
Boy, when did I advocate SUVs? If you ask me, most people should drive wagons and hatchbacks. Sedans and SUVs are rediculous.
They don't make computers like they used to either. Funny that. I mean, I've got an old Apple II that still runs like a dream. I see 3-4 year old PCs that are falling appart.
If your Beetle runs so much better than a modern car, maybe we should bring back leaded gasoline too.
It is all relative. My father has a 1990 Ford Tempo that runs smooth and doesn't burn any oil. Does that mean Tempos were good cars? Besides, I doubt that your '71 Beetle has made it 30+ years without an engine rebuild. Furthermore, I doubt you can say you'd rather be in an accident in your Beetle as compared to a modern car (even a POS). Those Beetle's are well known as death traps.
BTW, for cars sold with a PZEV rating, the emissions system must be warrentied for 10 years.
I believe that 80% (by weight) of cars are recycled. There is too much valuble material that is very easy to recover. Auto recycling is one of the better success stories for the concept of recycling. Some of the resistance of using composite body panels (a la Saturn), is that those body panels are not as easily recycled as steel (both at the manufacturing end, and the post-consumer level).
For that matter, you may also not realize that your car is largely made from recycled materials too. I toured Ford's casting plant in Cleveland a few years ago, and they had a five story high pile of scrap metal that they melt down to make engine blocks. They just melt some of it down, check the chemistry, adjust the chemistry, and cast the blocks. If they needed to lower the carbon content, they would throw in some old railroad rails (which are steel and lower in carbon).
By the way, I'm personally of the opinion that nobody should be driving a car >10 years old. The improvements in emisssions technology and safety have been dramatic, and your old car can be recycled and turned into new ones.
Steve Jobs said in his presentation that he envisions people writing programs to auto-generate Keynote files. That is why they chose XML. Apple intends it to be open and easy to use.
The thing about Keynote that sets it apart (in my mind), is that it is a presentation program that is geared towards computer presentations, rather than slides or overheads. I doubt Apple considers Keynote a "core" application, but rather a showpiece for what you can do with Quartz, Quartz Extreme (for the Open GL effects), and the Cocoa API. They throw in the professionally designed slide templates as a bonus.
In the case of iDVD, I know Apple is in something of a bind. They have to pay a licencing fee for every copy. That is why you can only get it preinstallled on Macs with the internal DVD-R drive, and full downloads are not available.
As far as iDVD goes, I could see them charging for upgrades, or if you want to use it with a non-OEM/External DVD-R drive. That would actually be an improvement over the current situation.
Antibiotics are overprescribed, and Ritalin is sometimes as well (though to be fair, if you have real ADHD, it's a wonder drug... the difference is like night and day)
I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, though I don't have the hyperactivity aspect. I've done some reading up and NIH has determined that about 7% of the US population has ADHD, whereas only about 2% is recieving treatment for it. One common misconception is that you outgrow it, more than half of people with ADHD will continue to have symptoms into adulthood.
The problem comes from a diagnosis standpoint. The only kids who get diganosed routinely are the ones with severe hyperactivity. If you don't have the hyperactivity, and are merely inattentive, diagnosis is rare. I got to graduate school and was only diagnosed after I stopped taking classes and couldn't fall back on my steel trap of a brain to get me good grades on tests. I've had the symptoms for a long time, but I never knew that was what ADHD was.
Many people slip through the cracks. A lot of them end up using drugs (esp. Cocaine, which has similar effects to Ritalin). ADHD also appears to have a heredetary component, so children of ADHD parents are likely to have ADHD. Because ADHD adults often have trouble holding down jobs, their kids often do not grow up in the best home situations, and their problems get blamed on that.
Speaking of wonder drugs, Eli Lilly just got Strattera approved. It is the first non-stimulant drug for ADHD that appears to work just as well as Ritalin. If it really does work, Ritalin will be wiped off the map, because it is such a pain in the ass to get prescriptions (Ritalin is considered a controlled substance, so you can't get refills, you need to get a new prescription every month).
Apple provides libraries for doing double precision math with the Altivec unit. See here.
The theoretical peak performance for 33 XServes in the test done here was actually 495 GFLOPS, BTW. I don't know what the theoretical performance of double precision on Altivec is, though. LINPACK is all linear algebra (IIRC), so it would see some benefit.
I will admit that there are plenty of applications where the G4 is not the best processor available. I for one will certainly be happy to see the IBM PPC 970, but you shouldn't discount the XServe until the test is actually run.
Well, there is also the issue that they were using test code that Apple distributes to show off what the G4 chip can do. So that 217 GFLOP speed is dependent on having highly Altivec optimized code.
OTOH, if you can take advantage of it, that would put this cluster at #250 in the Top 500 list of supercomputers. In fact, it is just a tick behind an IBM NetFinity cluster with 512x733MHz Pentium IIIs. Not bad for 66x1GHz G4s.
Im too poor to be a macphile but seriously, browsing with one mouse button in IE was driving me fucking nuts. It took me a minute to find the button that was going to give me a context menu. Sigh. I always thought that it was just an old joke/troll but seriously, why?
Very simple... To prevent poor programming. Contextual menus should speed access to features, but is should not be the only way to access a feature. If you force developers to consider single button mice, then they must provide all options in the regular menus, as well as contextual menus.
There are plenty of people in this world that I would not want to have to explain the difference between a right/middle/left click.
Microsoft Powerpoint X makes this mistake on MacOS X. If you want to group objects together, the only way to do it (unless you customize your menus) is to use context menus.
I believe that ultimately the issue was one of patent licencing fees.
Apple has to pay a fee to include an MPEG-2 encoder in iDVD. Apple recoups that fee when you buy a Superdrive equipped Mac. Apple could sell iDVD, but that looks bad when all the other iApps are free. Plus it is a support nightmare for Apple. As far as Apple is concerned, if you want to burn DVDs on a non-Apple DVD-R drive, you can use Toast Titanium, or you can shell out for DVD Studio Pro ($1000).
This applies to Quicktime, too. If you want an MPEG-2 encoder for Quicktime you have to buy it ($20). That cost is above and beyond the Quicktime Pro cost (which includes MP4).
Actually Apple has stated on the record that they don't think that the Tablet PC has any future. The inclusion of Inkwell into MacOS X probably represents a hedge against Tablets becoming popular.
People are using Inkwell to a degree. Many design people use Wacom tablets for everything and switching to the keyboard to enter a small amount of text can be a pain. Those people are using Inkwell now. Almost nobody else is benefiting from it now.
Re:Isn't everything in OS X late-binding?
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2
Even so, lately the iBook has been taking several seconds to login, where it used to be about 2 seconds when we first got it. Not sure why, but cleaning out ~/Library always seems to help. If not that, then it's probably something in/System or/Library. I'm not too thrilled that OS X seems to exhibit its own version of "registry rot," slowing down over time. I'd like to say that sort of problem only afflicts MS users but it's not my experience with OS X. Hopefully they're working hard on fixing and optimizing this stuff - and before it gets to a point where I do think it's too slow!
MacOS X has three mainenance scripts called "daily", "weekly", and "monthly". They are scheduled (in crontab) to run in the middle of the night by default. These scripts clean out a lot of the cruft that can accumulate over time.
The problem is if your Mac is asleep or off when the script is scheduled, they don't run. You either need to redo the crontab file to schedule the scripts for when the computer is on, or use MacJanitor to invoke them manually. Try MacJanitor, if it takes an obscene amount of time to run the scripts, then they've probably never been run.
This is an external battery pack with 130 W*h capacity. For comparison, the 12" iBook has a 47 W*h battery. So you could extend the iBook's battery life from 4-5 hours to 15-18 hours. It supplements the internal battery.
The downside? It weighs ~3 pounds, about 60% as heavy as the iBook.
Still, I can see the appeal for people who have frequent long flights.
What Motorola calls "Altivec" and Apple calls "Velocity Engine" is part of the "Book E" PPC-spec from a few years back. "Altivec" is Motorola's trademark, and therefore IBM cannot call their implementation "Altivec" without licencing the name from Motorola.
The vector processing unit in the IBM PPC970 is identical to Altivec. Only the name is different.
Actually, they bump the 256MB iBook to 640MB for $40, because you can't actually configure an iBook with 512MB.
I agree, though. $40 to take the TiBook to a gig is a steal. Especially since the 512MB in the TiBook means 2x256MB, so you have to replace both modules to get to 1GB.
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I hate to tell you this, but paint is basically a brush on plastic coating these days.
Well, no.... If the end users don't buy it, Apple will go out of buisness.
I do agree that it would be bad if Apple was the only choice available, but it is definitely good to have them around.
For example, I think everybody would agree that the adoption of USB on computers was a good thing, but remember that USB was really floundering until Apple put it on the first iMac. There were very few USB peripherals available at the time, and everybody lambasted Apple for it. But people bought iMacs anyway, and created an instant market of people looking to buy USB stuff and they didn't have any alternative.
Think about it, for the longest time, virtually every USB device came in translucent plastic! Without Apple, we might still be bemoaning the poor adoption rate of USB. It might have been abandoned by now.
I say good riddance to the floppy. I've had more of them go bad on me than I care to count.
Try Babylon 5. The first season is out on DVD now. Some of the earlier episodes are weak, but by the time you hit Season 3, it becomes some of the best SF ever made. The buildup over several seasons is subtle and amazing. Check out Walter Koenig as Bester, he proves that he is a good actor that was given nothing to do in ST.
They don't make computers like they used to either. Funny that. I mean, I've got an old Apple II that still runs like a dream. I see 3-4 year old PCs that are falling appart.
If your Beetle runs so much better than a modern car, maybe we should bring back leaded gasoline too.
It is all relative. My father has a 1990 Ford Tempo that runs smooth and doesn't burn any oil. Does that mean Tempos were good cars? Besides, I doubt that your '71 Beetle has made it 30+ years without an engine rebuild. Furthermore, I doubt you can say you'd rather be in an accident in your Beetle as compared to a modern car (even a POS). Those Beetle's are well known as death traps.
BTW, for cars sold with a PZEV rating, the emissions system must be warrentied for 10 years.
For that matter, you may also not realize that your car is largely made from recycled materials too. I toured Ford's casting plant in Cleveland a few years ago, and they had a five story high pile of scrap metal that they melt down to make engine blocks. They just melt some of it down, check the chemistry, adjust the chemistry, and cast the blocks. If they needed to lower the carbon content, they would throw in some old railroad rails (which are steel and lower in carbon).
By the way, I'm personally of the opinion that nobody should be driving a car >10 years old. The improvements in emisssions technology and safety have been dramatic, and your old car can be recycled and turned into new ones.
The thing about Keynote that sets it apart (in my mind), is that it is a presentation program that is geared towards computer presentations, rather than slides or overheads. I doubt Apple considers Keynote a "core" application, but rather a showpiece for what you can do with Quartz, Quartz Extreme (for the Open GL effects), and the Cocoa API. They throw in the professionally designed slide templates as a bonus.
As far as iDVD goes, I could see them charging for upgrades, or if you want to use it with a non-OEM/External DVD-R drive. That would actually be an improvement over the current situation.
I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, though I don't have the hyperactivity aspect. I've done some reading up and NIH has determined that about 7% of the US population has ADHD, whereas only about 2% is recieving treatment for it. One common misconception is that you outgrow it, more than half of people with ADHD will continue to have symptoms into adulthood.
The problem comes from a diagnosis standpoint. The only kids who get diganosed routinely are the ones with severe hyperactivity. If you don't have the hyperactivity, and are merely inattentive, diagnosis is rare. I got to graduate school and was only diagnosed after I stopped taking classes and couldn't fall back on my steel trap of a brain to get me good grades on tests. I've had the symptoms for a long time, but I never knew that was what ADHD was.
Many people slip through the cracks. A lot of them end up using drugs (esp. Cocaine, which has similar effects to Ritalin). ADHD also appears to have a heredetary component, so children of ADHD parents are likely to have ADHD. Because ADHD adults often have trouble holding down jobs, their kids often do not grow up in the best home situations, and their problems get blamed on that.
Speaking of wonder drugs, Eli Lilly just got Strattera approved. It is the first non-stimulant drug for ADHD that appears to work just as well as Ritalin. If it really does work, Ritalin will be wiped off the map, because it is such a pain in the ass to get prescriptions (Ritalin is considered a controlled substance, so you can't get refills, you need to get a new prescription every month).
The theoretical peak performance for 33 XServes in the test done here was actually 495 GFLOPS, BTW. I don't know what the theoretical performance of double precision on Altivec is, though. LINPACK is all linear algebra (IIRC), so it would see some benefit.
I will admit that there are plenty of applications where the G4 is not the best processor available. I for one will certainly be happy to see the IBM PPC 970, but you shouldn't discount the XServe until the test is actually run.
OTOH, if you can take advantage of it, that would put this cluster at #250 in the Top 500 list of supercomputers. In fact, it is just a tick behind an IBM NetFinity cluster with 512x733MHz Pentium IIIs. Not bad for 66x1GHz G4s.
Very simple... To prevent poor programming. Contextual menus should speed access to features, but is should not be the only way to access a feature. If you force developers to consider single button mice, then they must provide all options in the regular menus, as well as contextual menus.
There are plenty of people in this world that I would not want to have to explain the difference between a right/middle/left click.
Microsoft Powerpoint X makes this mistake on MacOS X. If you want to group objects together, the only way to do it (unless you customize your menus) is to use context menus.
Voila, you can search invisible files. All this update does is set the default search to visible files only, as it should be.
Whoops, scratch that bit about Quicktime. There is a $20 decoder for MPEG-2 for sale, not an encoder.
Apple has to pay a fee to include an MPEG-2 encoder in iDVD. Apple recoups that fee when you buy a Superdrive equipped Mac. Apple could sell iDVD, but that looks bad when all the other iApps are free. Plus it is a support nightmare for Apple. As far as Apple is concerned, if you want to burn DVDs on a non-Apple DVD-R drive, you can use Toast Titanium, or you can shell out for DVD Studio Pro ($1000).
This applies to Quicktime, too. If you want an MPEG-2 encoder for Quicktime you have to buy it ($20). That cost is above and beyond the Quicktime Pro cost (which includes MP4).
That only works if you turn Energy Saver off. It is enabled by default, methinks... :-P
People are using Inkwell to a degree. Many design people use Wacom tablets for everything and switching to the keyboard to enter a small amount of text can be a pain. Those people are using Inkwell now. Almost nobody else is benefiting from it now.
The MacOS X kernel is called xnu, and is a hybrid Mach/BSD thingy.
MacOS X has three mainenance scripts called "daily", "weekly", and "monthly". They are scheduled (in crontab) to run in the middle of the night by default. These scripts clean out a lot of the cruft that can accumulate over time.
The problem is if your Mac is asleep or off when the script is scheduled, they don't run. You either need to redo the crontab file to schedule the scripts for when the computer is on, or use MacJanitor to invoke them manually. Try MacJanitor, if it takes an obscene amount of time to run the scripts, then they've probably never been run.
I've personally never seen an airplane power port in coach class yet. They are certainly not ubiquitous.
The downside? It weighs ~3 pounds, about 60% as heavy as the iBook.
Still, I can see the appeal for people who have frequent long flights.
What, like the IBM microdrive? You can put that in a PDA. Same for the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive the iPod uses.
The vector processing unit in the IBM PPC970 is identical to Altivec. Only the name is different.
Dumbass. Everyone knows 3rd parties are cheaper.
I agree, though. $40 to take the TiBook to a gig is a steal. Especially since the 512MB in the TiBook means 2x256MB, so you have to replace both modules to get to 1GB.