Can you boot from it? Newer Macs can boot off of an iPod, which means you can install OS X on it, sit down at any Mac made in the last couple of years, hook it up, reboot, and have your setup up and running in around a minute.
I guess it doesn't matter with the Treo; it would probably be too painfully slow to run a system off of a USB drive anyway.
Where do you think the MPEG-4 file format came from? It's QuickTime's file format, or something very close; Apple submitted it to MPEG. So this won't really be a very large change for QuickTime.
This isn't going to do a damn thing for Linux; the QuickTime file format was already completely documented. The problem is codecs, and as you point out, MPEG-4 does nothing to prevent encapsulation of stuff encoded with proprietary codecs.
Now, if everyone starts using the video codec frequently called MPEG-4 (not to be confused with the file format specification called MPEG-4) along with MP3 sound tracks, maybe we'll finally get fully standards-based video. But Sorenson 3 is a damn tough codec to beat on quality.
You're ignoring the "where they want to go" part of your own statement. Smaller planes flying to smaller airports will put people closer to their final destinations. Direct flights everywhere will save people the frustration involved in layovers. Less reliance on major hubs will relieve congestion and delays. All things considered, in most cases you'd probably have much shorter total travel times (including time to get to/from airport and to get through the airport onto the plane and into the air), and a major reduction in the sort of circumstances that bring on "air rage".
Run the planes on hydrogen. That makes crashes much less dangerous too. NYC would almost certainly still have its two tallest buildings if those planes had been fueled with hydrogen.
Flying cars would probably be a good deal safer. There's a lot more room in the sky than on the highways. You wouldn't have to come anywhere near other vehicles or anything else you could crash into. You wouldn't be in a situation where getting distracted for a couple of seconds could kill people. And it would be much easier to implement computer control over everything. Now that I think about it, in light of recent events, you'd probably want mandatory computer control, so people couldn't fly the things into buildings....
As they discovered while trying to sneak up on subs during WWII, paint doesn't work. No matter what color you paint an aircraft, when it's far away it shows up as a black dot. You need illumination, which for this application would definitely be more trouble than it was worth.
I shipped a trunk via UPS a couple of years ago, full of assorted stuff, including a (very well padded) TV. When it arrived at the other end, there was a hole nearly large enough for me to put my hand through in the back of the trunk. This is quite a sturdy wooden trunk we're talking about here. They must have rammed it with a forklift or something. The TV inside, was, of course broken. They paid for the TV, but they insisted they wouldn't pay for the trunk itself, because the insurance didn't cover the "shipping vessel".
I also know of at least two cases of them breaking computers in transit. In one case, they banged a machine around so much that the heatsink detached and bounced around the case, knocking stuff off the logicboard.
A friend of mine ordered a computer that was delivered via UPS. They showed up when he wasn't home, and left the box sitting outside his house. It ended up getting rained on.
I'm aware of the problems. They don't justify holding back progress. If everyone used your logic, the entire Industrial Revolution never would have happened. Surely you won't deny that average standards of living have improved quite a lot as a result of that.
And it's certainly not good for the economy (again, long-term) to have huge numbers of people doing what is, essentially, busy-work. Humans are the single most valuable resource a society has, and are far more versatile than any machine yet developed. Human effort shouldn't be waisted on menial tasks. If there are people with no other skills, teach them other skills. Don't make them waste their lives doing things machines could to better, faster and cheaper!
This argument has been made over and over, and it doesn't make any more sense now than it did 150 years ago. Yes, new technologies can take jobs from people. This is a problem, but it's a short-term problem. Long-term, people find new jobs, and increased manufacturing efficiency raises standards of living for everyone.
Apple is not suing people for creating shiny interfaces. Apple is suing people for creating interfaces with white and light-gray stripes on menus and titlebars, rounded blue scrollbars and buttons, close/minimize/zoom buttons that look like little red/yellow/green drops of liquid, etc. Most of the themes that Apple has gone after actually stole bitmaps directly from Mac OS X, and many even included the Apple logo! That's about as clear-cut as copyright violation can get; no argument over "trade dress" or similar topics is required.
Since you bring up cars, it has, in fact, been ruled illegal to directly copy the design of another car.
OS X has no trouble opening different files of the same type with different apps. In fact, this is easier to do than in OS 9; you get info on the file, switch to the "Open with Application" panel, and pick an app.
Macs maintain value very well. You can easily pay $800 or $900 for a machine 3 or more years old, especially on eBay. This is great if you've got a Mac to sell, but rather less great if you're looking to buy one....
I just bought a Samsung SyncMaster 760V TFT (17", 1280x1024). Not quite as nice as those displays, but I only paid $650, which is less than I spent on a 17" CRT 4 years ago.... It's really an incredible screen, and Mac OS X running on this thing could cause keyboard damage (from all the drool, you know). The crispness and the brightness (and the totally lack of flicker!) are just amazing, and anyone who tells you that an LCD can't match the color of a CRT hasn't seen the most recent batch.
If you spend a large fraction of your day staring at a screen, the time to migrate is now.
Trademark isn't the same thing as copyright. You get to own a trademark for as long as you're actively using it; they don't expire. But Swift wouldn't own this trademark. Simply using something in a fictional story doesn't establish a trademark. You have to do business with/under than name.
Google's approach really works, at least on me. I visit sites advertised on Google on quite a regular basis. The ads are always highly relevant, and the fact that a company takes out an ad at Google rather than spending the money on one of the more offensive types of ads tells me that I might not mind doing business with that company. Plus, I'm familiar with Google's pricing structure. It doesn't price the small guys out of the market; it provides a nice advertising solution no matter what your budget.
You picked a bad example. Nobody is really reimplementing QuickTime on Linux. People are trying to reimplement QuickTime playback, but QuickTime is far more than that. Apple wants media playback formats to be as open as possible (which is why Apple is so supportive of MPEG-4), because the company feels it provides the best tools for creating such media (stuff like Final Cut Pro), and content creators benefit from standardized distribution formats.
Aqua, on the other hand.... I don't see how Mac users benefit from having pseudo-Auqa interfaces on other platforms, or pseudo-Auqa interfaces on OS X, rather than the real thing.
This "Apple is struggling desperately to stay alive thing" is a little silly. You seem to have things reversed. There's more to the Mac than a nice theme, and Microsoft just doesn't seem to understand it well enough to copy it properly. This doesn't look like it'll change.
The generic PC makers, on the other hand, really are continually on the brink of disaster. If Gateway went away tomorrow, few people would even care.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you boot from it? Newer Macs can boot off of an iPod, which means you can install OS X on it, sit down at any Mac made in the last couple of years, hook it up, reboot, and have your setup up and running in around a minute.
I guess it doesn't matter with the Treo; it would probably be too painfully slow to run a system off of a USB drive anyway.
Where do you think the MPEG-4 file format came from? It's QuickTime's file format, or something very close; Apple submitted it to MPEG. So this won't really be a very large change for QuickTime.
This isn't going to do a damn thing for Linux; the QuickTime file format was already completely documented. The problem is codecs, and as you point out, MPEG-4 does nothing to prevent encapsulation of stuff encoded with proprietary codecs.
Now, if everyone starts using the video codec frequently called MPEG-4 (not to be confused with the file format specification called MPEG-4) along with MP3 sound tracks, maybe we'll finally get fully standards-based video. But Sorenson 3 is a damn tough codec to beat on quality.
You're ignoring the "where they want to go" part of your own statement. Smaller planes flying to smaller airports will put people closer to their final destinations. Direct flights everywhere will save people the frustration involved in layovers. Less reliance on major hubs will relieve congestion and delays. All things considered, in most cases you'd probably have much shorter total travel times (including time to get to/from airport and to get through the airport onto the plane and into the air), and a major reduction in the sort of circumstances that bring on "air rage".
Run the planes on hydrogen. That makes crashes much less dangerous too. NYC would almost certainly still have its two tallest buildings if those planes had been fueled with hydrogen.
Flying cars would probably be a good deal safer. There's a lot more room in the sky than on the highways. You wouldn't have to come anywhere near other vehicles or anything else you could crash into. You wouldn't be in a situation where getting distracted for a couple of seconds could kill people. And it would be much easier to implement computer control over everything. Now that I think about it, in light of recent events, you'd probably want mandatory computer control, so people couldn't fly the things into buildings....
As they discovered while trying to sneak up on subs during WWII, paint doesn't work. No matter what color you paint an aircraft, when it's far away it shows up as a black dot. You need illumination, which for this application would definitely be more trouble than it was worth.
Lots of Mac browsers do, including OmniWeb, iCab, and the Mac version of IE. I doubt Apple has any desire at all to sue over it.
I shipped a trunk via UPS a couple of years ago, full of assorted stuff, including a (very well padded) TV. When it arrived at the other end, there was a hole nearly large enough for me to put my hand through in the back of the trunk. This is quite a sturdy wooden trunk we're talking about here. They must have rammed it with a forklift or something. The TV inside, was, of course broken. They paid for the TV, but they insisted they wouldn't pay for the trunk itself, because the insurance didn't cover the "shipping vessel".
I also know of at least two cases of them breaking computers in transit. In one case, they banged a machine around so much that the heatsink detached and bounced around the case, knocking stuff off the logicboard.
A friend of mine ordered a computer that was delivered via UPS. They showed up when he wasn't home, and left the box sitting outside his house. It ended up getting rained on.
There's a Mac OS version now, but the OS X version is "Pending". That's a little annoying. Still, maybe I'll plat around with the core stuff.
I'm aware of the problems. They don't justify holding back progress. If everyone used your logic, the entire Industrial Revolution never would have happened. Surely you won't deny that average standards of living have improved quite a lot as a result of that.
And it's certainly not good for the economy (again, long-term) to have huge numbers of people doing what is, essentially, busy-work. Humans are the single most valuable resource a society has, and are far more versatile than any machine yet developed. Human effort shouldn't be waisted on menial tasks. If there are people with no other skills, teach them other skills. Don't make them waste their lives doing things machines could to better, faster and cheaper!
This argument has been made over and over, and it doesn't make any more sense now than it did 150 years ago. Yes, new technologies can take jobs from people. This is a problem, but it's a short-term problem. Long-term, people find new jobs, and increased manufacturing efficiency raises standards of living for everyone.
Apple is not suing people for creating shiny interfaces. Apple is suing people for creating interfaces with white and light-gray stripes on menus and titlebars, rounded blue scrollbars and buttons, close/minimize/zoom buttons that look like little red/yellow/green drops of liquid, etc. Most of the themes that Apple has gone after actually stole bitmaps directly from Mac OS X, and many even included the Apple logo! That's about as clear-cut as copyright violation can get; no argument over "trade dress" or similar topics is required. Since you bring up cars, it has, in fact, been ruled illegal to directly copy the design of another car.
OS X has no trouble opening different files of the same type with different apps. In fact, this is easier to do than in OS 9; you get info on the file, switch to the "Open with Application" panel, and pick an app.
A couple of minutes with a hex editor and you'll be able to play DVDs in OS X.
The drag to trash thing is there mostly for legacy reasons. You can just select the disk and choose File -> Eject, or hit command-e.
None of the Macs that'll run OS X are stuck at 640x480. Even the oldest of them will do 800x600 with 16 bit color.
Macs maintain value very well. You can easily pay $800 or $900 for a machine 3 or more years old, especially on eBay. This is great if you've got a Mac to sell, but rather less great if you're looking to buy one....
Not quite. Apple is a heavy backer of (and contributer to) the MPEG-4 standard.
Mac OS X has a web sharing feature, but it simply fires up Apache (with some nice reasonable defaults). That's probably the best approach.
I just bought a Samsung SyncMaster 760V TFT (17", 1280x1024). Not quite as nice as those displays, but I only paid $650, which is less than I spent on a 17" CRT 4 years ago.... It's really an incredible screen, and Mac OS X running on this thing could cause keyboard damage (from all the drool, you know). The crispness and the brightness (and the totally lack of flicker!) are just amazing, and anyone who tells you that an LCD can't match the color of a CRT hasn't seen the most recent batch.
If you spend a large fraction of your day staring at a screen, the time to migrate is now.
Trademark isn't the same thing as copyright. You get to own a trademark for as long as you're actively using it; they don't expire. But Swift wouldn't own this trademark. Simply using something in a fictional story doesn't establish a trademark. You have to do business with/under than name.
In spite of what Apple says, OS X runs fine on a lot of 604 hardware, and with 10.1 it's even reasonably snappy.
Google's approach really works, at least on me. I visit sites advertised on Google on quite a regular basis. The ads are always highly relevant, and the fact that a company takes out an ad at Google rather than spending the money on one of the more offensive types of ads tells me that I might not mind doing business with that company. Plus, I'm familiar with Google's pricing structure. It doesn't price the small guys out of the market; it provides a nice advertising solution no matter what your budget.
You picked a bad example. Nobody is really reimplementing QuickTime on Linux. People are trying to reimplement QuickTime playback, but QuickTime is far more than that. Apple wants media playback formats to be as open as possible (which is why Apple is so supportive of MPEG-4), because the company feels it provides the best tools for creating such media (stuff like Final Cut Pro), and content creators benefit from standardized distribution formats.
Aqua, on the other hand.... I don't see how Mac users benefit from having pseudo-Auqa interfaces on other platforms, or pseudo-Auqa interfaces on OS X, rather than the real thing.
This "Apple is struggling desperately to stay alive thing" is a little silly. You seem to have things reversed. There's more to the Mac than a nice theme, and Microsoft just doesn't seem to understand it well enough to copy it properly. This doesn't look like it'll change.
The generic PC makers, on the other hand, really are continually on the brink of disaster. If Gateway went away tomorrow, few people would even care.