Well, I'd call myself a hardcore Mac fan, at least until something better comes along. I like Aqua, and I like it because I think it's good UI, not just because I like the candy coating. I think the new UI is more consistent and better designed that what the Mac has now. Remember that the existing Mac OS was never designed for running multiple programs at once. That was hacked in later. It was never designed for color. That was hacked in later. It was never designed for large screens (the typical screen these days has 4 times the area of the 512x384 screen that Mac OS was originally designed for. And it was never designed for computer as fast as today's. Much of the flash is just a logical extension of things that have been in Mac OS for years (like window zooming, menu blinking, and shadows under windows).
Mac OS X is certainly different from Mac OS, and will take some getting used to, but I think it has an excellent UI. Of course I reserve final judgment until I've had a chance to use it for a few weeks.
User interface is about much, much more than pretty widgets. This is something quite a few people have trouble understanding. Good UI design is hard, often harder than writing the code that the UI is designed to let the user interact with. It requires tons of knowledge about how humans think and the assumptions they make.
Go check out http://www.mackido.com/Interface for some basic information. You'll see that much more goes into designing a UI than you ever thought. (The site is somewhat Mac biased, but gives some good information.)
According to a ZDNet story, an internal Microsoft memo seen by Sm@rt Reseller claims that Windows 2000, shipping this Thursday, has "63,000 potential known defects". 21,000 of these are "postponed" bugs, which the memo claims could be "real problems." A Microsoft spokeswomen explained that "bugs are inherent in computer science," and that Windows 2000 has been more heavily tested than any other product in Microsoft's history.
Sorry, I needed to do that. I usually don't complain about grammar issues, but this was just too much.
And if this is what the Chinese govt. want to spend their money on, instead of more tanks. Good for them!
[humor] We'll see if you don't change your tune when the commie bastards rain death upon the children of America from their orbiting laser death stations! [/humor]
No, but seriously, China is going to be a major power in the next century. Possibly more major than the US. It's important that we maintain good relations, lest we end up in another cold war. Perhaps joint space exploration projects could be just the thing we need? It could also be just the thing we need to get space exploration back in high-gear -- it's been on the decline since Apollo.
Well, perhaps things won't be quite that easy. But even given the differences the US and China have, I'm having trouble figuring out how anyone could think this was a bad thing.
QuickTime is not a codec. QuickTime is not even a movie player. QuickTime is an entire media architecture, and there isn't really anything else like it out there. It supports every type of media you can imagine (images, movies, audio, MIDI, 3D, panoramas, vector-based animations). It supports dozens of of formats. It has its own built-in little language, so you can make interactive stuff in it (it has built-in Flash support too). It has its own complex file format that allows you to combine any supported formats in one file (so, for example, you could have a Sorenson encoded movie with a music track in MIDI, the lyrics for that track in MP3, and in-movie controls in Flash). It probably contains more code than the Linux kernel.
And it was never written with portability in mind. QuickTime was only ported to Windows by implementing a nice chunk of the Mac OS API on it. Porting QuickTime to Linux would be a very, very big undertaking.
However, QuickTime will run on Mac OS X, which is less similar (from a technical perspective) to current Mac OS versions that Linux is. It's possible that porting QT from Mac OS X to Linux wouldn't be such a problem.
Alternatively, it might be possible to write something that just played QT- encapsulated Sorenson video streams with QDesign audio tracks (which is what virtually all streaming QT content is compressed with) and didn't do everything else QT does. The QuickTime file format and streaming protocol are both open, so this would be possible with no help from Apple if someone wants to license the relevant codecs from Sorenson and QDesign.
54% of people with Internet connections in the US use AOL (I know, isn't that scary?). If AOL chucks IE in favor of Mozilla, Mozilla will instantly gain majority marketshare.
They'd need to make strict laws regulating what information can be collected, who can see it, what it can be used for, and how long it can be kept. Until that's done, there's just no way I'll be comfortable with information about me being collected, even though I know there's only a very small chance an actual human will ever see it.
For Macs there's WebFree, which can block ads in IE and Communicator, or the rather nice but also rather beta iCab browser, which has ad filtering abilities built in.
Someone always brings this up, and it's just plain wrong. The fee is $0.25/device, no matter how many ports. There are 8 companies that hold patents on technologies used in Firewire. Apple is just one of them, and Apple's share of that fee is unknown. Moreover, Firewire is a standard; IEEE 1394. USB is not.
As for USB 2.0 killing off Firewire, this is very unlikely. First, Firewire is peer-to-peer. USB 2.0 is not. This means USB 2.0 is worthless for consumer electronics. In a few years, every digital device in your house is going to have a Firewire port, at least if companies like Sony and Panasonic have anything to say about it, and you'll want your PC to have one too. And USB 2.0 faster? Another joke. 800Mb/s Firewire is planned for later this year, and Firewire can provide dedicated bandwidth to specific tasks which is really important for digital video.
The best option for consumer systems is really IDE for internal drives, Firewire for external drives/cameras/etc., and USB for keyboards/mice/modems.
You're forgetting something -- AOL. Here's a scary statistic: 54% of the people online in the US use AOL (this number is from a recent NY Times article on the merger). Now remember, the AOL client software has a built in web browser. Most AOL users use that.
Previously, AOL has agreed to use IE because it gets AOL a spot on the Windows desktop. But do you really think that MS would threaten to kick AOL off the Windows desktop over this issue in the middle of an antitrust trial?
The cold is just one of the many diseases this can supposedly stop. The article says "Pleconaril (prounounced plah-CONN-ah-rill) is the latest in a short list of medicines that kill viruses. This drug, in fact, blocks an entire category of them, a collection of 169 distinctly different nasties that together cause more human disease than any other."
This sounds like it could be a very big deal for developing nations, not just "the cushy part of the world". The problem is the price -- the company wants $50-100 for a single treatment. I wonder what their costs actually are, and if they'll lower prices once they've paid for development.
Metrowerks makes by far the most popular development environment for the Mac. Symantec used to, but during Apple's transition from 68K to PPC chips, Metrowerks got there first with PPC support, and Symantec was late. Symantec's product is no longer even available. Metrowerks probably realizes that with Mac OS X on the way, someone could do to them what they did to Symantec if they're not careful.
It will require significant resources to bring CodeWarrior to Mac OS X, so it's possible that Linux development had to be scaled back. Of course the fact that Mac OS X runs on PPC, while Linux is mostly used on x86 machines probably plays some part in this as well.
can anyone give insight as to why they won't at least port and provide provide, say, a binary of their quick time player/plug in for Linux.
QuickTime isn't very portable; it was ported to Windows by implementing quite a bit of the Mac OS API there. It would cost Apple quite a bit to port to Linux, and wouldn't help their quest to take over streaming media much because Linux isn't all that popular on the desktop.
But the Quick Time file format is open, so you could write your own, if you could get the codecs from their respective owners.
Firewire is not an Apple technology. Apple was one of, IIRC, 8 companies that was involved in the development of Firewire, and one of 8 that holds patents on the technologies involved. The $0.25 is paid into a pool. What portion of this Apple get is unknown.
USB 2 is an inferior technology. It isn't peer-to-peer, so it can't be used in consumer electronics, and it can't provide dedicated bandwidth, so it isn't good for digital video or other real-time applications. It also isn't technically a standard, like Firewire, AKA IEEE-1394 is. Perhaps most notably, it's total vaporware. USB 2 looks like standard Intel FUD designed to stop the adoption of Firewire, which is certainly in Intel's best interst; a peer-to-peer technology scares Intel, because it could cut the computer of of the picture, replacing it with smart appliances.
Does QT Server stream not only Quicktime Encoded MPEG-1 streams, but also data that conforms to the standard *.MPG file format? It may! It may not! The general theme though is that while the QT player might be able to handle that variant of.MPG, no other player can, so you're stuck with Apple's ad, and inevitable lack of functionality.
This is not a problem. Go right here for documentation for the QuickTime file format.
On a related note, is there a consensus on the license for Apple's Darwin Streaming Server? Is it open enough?
It's basically GPL with a few clauses thrown in by the Apple legal team to allow Apple to remove code from distribution if someone decides to sue them over it. IIRC, there's also a clause that requires you to send Apple a URL for any publicly distributed changes you make.
The reason is the OS X is being positioned as a desktop OS, as a companion to OS X Server by Apple. As such OS X is unlikely to have support for large numbers of users and may contain a variety of cripplings so as to not encroach on the OS X Server 'market space'.
Mac OS X Server has no future. Apple announced yesterday that it is adopting a single OS strategy. The future will probably be a package of server software that Apple will sell for installation on Mac OS X "Client", in much the way AppleShare IP is sold for the current Mac OS. As such, I doubt Apple will cripple anything in Client. How could they do it anyway? The entire core of the OS is open source! If Apple tried to cripple the OS, it would take about three hours for someone to fix.
The currently seeded Mac OS X, you mean. Jobs said that he was demoing the latest of several internal betas yesterday. I wonder when/if Apple will seed this to developers.
A final beta is expecting this spring. I'm sure at least that will be seeded.
Actually, there are some rather major departures from current Mac interface in OS X. The most notable are the single window file manager (though it can be made to spawn multiple windows like the Mac's current file manager) and the lack of drive icons on the desktop; they've been moved to a window. The the dock is also something totally new, and even the window widgets have been rearanged and changed. The control panels folder is gone, replaced with a single app to set system such system options, and the Mac OS System Folder is gone, replaced with a more NeXTStep like system tree (which is hidden be default, because the OS is designed to the user doesn't have to mess with it).
About the only thing in the Mac OS X interface that's similar to the existing Mac OS interface is the menu bar. I've been watching the Mac newsgroups though, and so far the response is very positive, which I can't say I was expecting (though I certainly like the changes).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'd call myself a hardcore Mac fan, at least until something better comes along. I like Aqua, and I like it because I think it's good UI, not just because I like the candy coating. I think the new UI is more consistent and better designed that what the Mac has now. Remember that the existing Mac OS was never designed for running multiple programs at once. That was hacked in later. It was never designed for color. That was hacked in later. It was never designed for large screens (the typical screen these days has 4 times the area of the 512x384 screen that Mac OS was originally designed for. And it was never designed for computer as fast as today's. Much of the flash is just a logical extension of things that have been in Mac OS for years (like window zooming, menu blinking, and shadows under windows).
Mac OS X is certainly different from Mac OS, and will take some getting used to, but I think it has an excellent UI. Of course I reserve final judgment until I've had a chance to use it for a few weeks.
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User interface is about much, much more than pretty widgets. This is something quite a few people have trouble understanding. Good UI design is hard, often harder than writing the code that the UI is designed to let the user interact with. It requires tons of knowledge about how humans think and the assumptions they make.
Go check out http://www.mackido.com/Interface for some basic information. You'll see that much more goes into designing a UI than you ever thought. (The site is somewhat Mac biased, but gives some good information.)
--
According to a ZDNet story, an internal Microsoft memo seen by Sm@rt Reseller claims that Windows 2000, shipping this Thursday, has "63,000 potential known defects". 21,000 of these are "postponed" bugs, which the memo claims could be "real problems." A Microsoft spokeswomen explained that "bugs are inherent in computer science," and that Windows 2000 has been more heavily tested than any other product in Microsoft's history.
Sorry, I needed to do that. I usually don't complain about grammar issues, but this was just too much.
--
Yes!
l e.com
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?hostppclinux.app
"ppclinux.apple.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) (PPC/Linux) on Linux"
--
And if this is what the Chinese govt. want to spend their money on, instead of more tanks. Good for them!
[humor]
We'll see if you don't change your tune when the commie bastards rain death upon the children of America from their orbiting laser death stations!
[/humor]
No, but seriously, China is going to be a major power in the next century. Possibly more major than the US. It's important that we maintain good relations, lest we end up in another cold war. Perhaps joint space exploration projects could be just the thing we need? It could also be just the thing we need to get space exploration back in high-gear -- it's been on the decline since Apollo.
Well, perhaps things won't be quite that easy. But even given the differences the US and China have, I'm having trouble figuring out how anyone could think this was a bad thing.
--
Darwin Streaming Server for QT runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X Server, and Solaris.
Also of inetrest is the documentation for the QuickTime file format.
--
QuickTime is not a codec. QuickTime is not even a movie player. QuickTime is an entire media architecture, and there isn't really anything else like it out there. It supports every type of media you can imagine (images, movies, audio, MIDI, 3D, panoramas, vector-based animations). It supports dozens of of formats. It has its own built-in little language, so you can make interactive stuff in it (it has built-in Flash support too). It has its own complex file format that allows you to combine any supported formats in one file (so, for example, you could have a Sorenson encoded movie with a music track in MIDI, the lyrics for that track in MP3, and in-movie controls in Flash). It probably contains more code than the Linux kernel.
And it was never written with portability in mind. QuickTime was only ported to Windows by implementing a nice chunk of the Mac OS API on it. Porting QuickTime to Linux would be a very, very big undertaking.
However, QuickTime will run on Mac OS X, which is less similar (from a technical perspective) to current Mac OS versions that Linux is. It's possible that porting QT from Mac OS X to Linux wouldn't be such a problem.
Alternatively, it might be possible to write something that just played QT- encapsulated Sorenson video streams with QDesign audio tracks (which is what virtually all streaming QT content is compressed with) and didn't do everything else QT does. The QuickTime file format and streaming protocol are both open, so this would be possible with no help from Apple if someone wants to license the relevant codecs from Sorenson and QDesign.
--
54% of people with Internet connections in the US use AOL (I know, isn't that scary?). If AOL chucks IE in favor of Mozilla, Mozilla will instantly gain majority marketshare.
--
They'd need to make strict laws regulating what information can be collected, who can see it, what it can be used for, and how long it can be kept. Until that's done, there's just no way I'll be comfortable with information about me being collected, even though I know there's only a very small chance an actual human will ever see it.
--
For Macs there's WebFree, which can block ads in IE and Communicator, or the rather nice but also rather beta iCab browser, which has ad filtering abilities built in.
--
Blank DVD media + rental = more than price of movie.
Maybe in a few years they'll have to worry, but not yet.
--
Someone always brings this up, and it's just plain wrong. The fee is $0.25/device, no matter how many ports. There are 8 companies that hold patents on technologies used in Firewire. Apple is just one of them, and Apple's share of that fee is unknown. Moreover, Firewire is a standard; IEEE 1394. USB is not.
As for USB 2.0 killing off Firewire, this is very unlikely. First, Firewire is peer-to-peer. USB 2.0 is not. This means USB 2.0 is worthless for consumer electronics. In a few years, every digital device in your house is going to have a Firewire port, at least if companies like Sony and Panasonic have anything to say about it, and you'll want your PC to have one too. And USB 2.0 faster? Another joke. 800Mb/s Firewire is planned for later this year, and Firewire can provide dedicated bandwidth to specific tasks which is really important for digital video.
The best option for consumer systems is really IDE for internal drives, Firewire for external drives/cameras/etc., and USB for keyboards/mice/modems.
--
One word: Firewire.
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No, because MS never lost ownership of the domain. MS didn't actually have to pay this guy anything, but it would have been rather bad PR not to.
--
You're forgetting something -- AOL. Here's a scary statistic: 54% of the people online in the US use AOL (this number is from a recent NY Times article on the merger). Now remember, the AOL client software has a built in web browser. Most AOL users use that.
Previously, AOL has agreed to use IE because it gets AOL a spot on the Windows desktop. But do you really think that MS would threaten to kick AOL off the Windows desktop over this issue in the middle of an antitrust trial?
--
The cold is just one of the many diseases this can supposedly stop. The article says "Pleconaril (prounounced plah-CONN-ah-rill) is the latest in a short list of medicines that kill viruses. This drug, in fact, blocks an entire category of them, a collection of 169 distinctly different nasties that together cause more human disease than any other."
This sounds like it could be a very big deal for developing nations, not just "the cushy part of the world". The problem is the price -- the company wants $50-100 for a single treatment. I wonder what their costs actually are, and if they'll lower prices once they've paid for development.
--
Metrowerks makes by far the most popular development environment for the Mac. Symantec used to, but during Apple's transition from 68K to PPC chips, Metrowerks got there first with PPC support, and Symantec was late. Symantec's product is no longer even available. Metrowerks probably realizes that with Mac OS X on the way, someone could do to them what they did to Symantec if they're not careful.
It will require significant resources to bring CodeWarrior to Mac OS X, so it's possible that Linux development had to be scaled back. Of course the fact that Mac OS X runs on PPC, while Linux is mostly used on x86 machines probably plays some part in this as well.
--
can anyone give insight as to why they won't at least port and provide provide, say, a binary of their quick time player/plug in for Linux.
QuickTime isn't very portable; it was ported to Windows by implementing quite a bit of the Mac OS API there. It would cost Apple quite a bit to port to Linux, and wouldn't help their quest to take over streaming media much because Linux isn't all that popular on the desktop.
But the Quick Time file format is open, so you could write your own, if you could get the codecs from their respective owners.
--
Firewire is not an Apple technology. Apple was one of, IIRC, 8 companies that was involved in the development of Firewire, and one of 8 that holds patents on the technologies involved. The $0.25 is paid into a pool. What portion of this Apple get is unknown.
USB 2 is an inferior technology. It isn't peer-to-peer, so it can't be used in consumer electronics, and it can't provide dedicated bandwidth, so it isn't good for digital video or other real-time applications. It also isn't technically a standard, like Firewire, AKA IEEE-1394 is. Perhaps most notably, it's total vaporware. USB 2 looks like standard Intel FUD designed to stop the adoption of Firewire, which is certainly in Intel's best interst; a peer-to-peer technology scares Intel, because it could cut the computer of of the picture, replacing it with smart appliances.
--
Does QT Server stream not only Quicktime Encoded MPEG-1 streams, but also data that conforms to the standard *.MPG file format? It may! It may not! The general theme though is that while the QT player might be able to handle that variant of .MPG, no other player can, so you're stuck with Apple's ad, and inevitable lack of functionality.
This is not a problem. Go right here for documentation for the QuickTime file format.
--
On a related note, is there a consensus on the license for Apple's Darwin Streaming Server? Is it open enough?
It's basically GPL with a few clauses thrown in by the Apple legal team to allow Apple to remove code from distribution if someone decides to sue them over it. IIRC, there's also a clause that requires you to send Apple a URL for any publicly distributed changes you make.
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I've heard Apple frequently calls him in as a consultant.
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The reason is the OS X is being positioned as a desktop OS, as a companion to OS X Server by Apple. As such OS X is unlikely to have support for large numbers of users and may contain a variety of cripplings so as to not encroach on the OS X Server 'market space'.
Mac OS X Server has no future. Apple announced yesterday that it is adopting a single OS strategy. The future will probably be a package of server software that Apple will sell for installation on Mac OS X "Client", in much the way AppleShare IP is sold for the current Mac OS. As such, I doubt Apple will cripple anything in Client. How could they do it anyway? The entire core of the OS is open source! If Apple tried to cripple the OS, it would take about three hours for someone to fix.
--
The currently seeded Mac OS X, you mean. Jobs said that he was demoing the latest of several internal betas yesterday. I wonder when/if Apple will seed this to developers.
A final beta is expecting this spring. I'm sure at least that will be seeded.
--
Actually, there are some rather major departures from current Mac interface in OS X. The most notable are the single window file manager (though it can be made to spawn multiple windows like the Mac's current file manager) and the lack of drive icons on the desktop; they've been moved to a window. The the dock is also something totally new, and even the window widgets have been rearanged and changed. The control panels folder is gone, replaced with a single app to set system such system options, and the Mac OS System Folder is gone, replaced with a more NeXTStep like system tree (which is hidden be default, because the OS is designed to the user doesn't have to mess with it).
About the only thing in the Mac OS X interface that's similar to the existing Mac OS interface is the menu bar. I've been watching the Mac newsgroups though, and so far the response is very positive, which I can't say I was expecting (though I certainly like the changes).
--