If you look at the numbers, the shift from desktops to laptops started a bit earlier on the Mac. Probably because Apple got the battery life situation under control sooner (Intel wasn't doing so well there a couple years ago), and support for wireless networking was really solid. Plus, Mac users tend to pick up on these sorts of trends a bit sooner; they're mostly a self-selected group, which means they're more likely to actually care about computing than the Wintel masses, and as such they're typically a bit ahead of the curve, on average.
Moreover, it's suspended from the top. If you cut it a mile from the bottom, a mile of it flutters down. The rest hovers, of if the cable was under tension, rises. Depending on how easy it is to splice whatever material is eventually used (we haven't got one strong enough yet), it might even be possible to repair the thing.
SpaceshipOne does, in fact, use kerosene, as do quite a few other small low-cost designs. It's easier to work with than liquid hydrogen.
Of course, even if the idea of selling suborbital flights to rich people is wildly more successful than anyone remotely expects, total usage will be absolutely tiny compared to the global oil market.
If the Supreme Court mandates something, regardless of its constitutional correctness, there is no recourse for the rest of the Federal government, nor the States.
Nah. If all else fails, there's always court-packing.
That's not quite the same thing. Apple actually does have direct sales operations, and your 'AppleDirect' could easily be confused with those. TigerDirect does not, in contrast, have an operating system.
And they could distribute HD stuff, even before the various disputes over the next-generation DVD format get settled. They've already got some HD trailers posted. (Don't bother trying to play the 1080p versions unless you've got a dual processor G5.)
The headline probably means code defined as "a system of signals, such as sounds, light flashes, or flags, used to send messages." Rather than computer code.
Nah, that just adds text to the 'comments' field (which is now called the 'Spotlight comments' field, I guess just to emphasize that it is, in fact, indexed by Spotlight). That's not the same thing as actually adding custom metadata fields.
Keep in mind (as per the ArsTechnica article posted earlier) that extended file system metadata doesn't automatically get indexed by Spotlight. There needs to be a Spotlight plugin that knows about it. (Although, sooner or later someone will probably just write a plug-in that imports any extended file system metadata for any file.)
Dashboard widgets are generally XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, and they have no more access to your system than web pages. They can include native code as well, but the system will ask you before it lets that run.
Spotlight can search network-based home directories.
Given the way it works, it doesn't seem like there are any really major technical barriers to giving Spotlight full client/server support. When the user queries against a network volume, just send the query to the server. The server searches the part of its local file system which corresponds to the share the user has mounted, and returns all the files the user has permission to see. Spotlight already understands and respects permissions (unlike, say, Google Desktop Search), and can be told to only search a subset of the file system. So really, this doesn't seem very complex.
Now, if you want Spotlight to work for, for instance, SMB shares, that might be problematic. But is WinFS going to support that anyway? That doesn't seem like the kind of thing Microsoft would be very interested in supporting.
These automated security reports really do more harm than good, a lot of the time. At least in the wrong hands. I had to deal with a lot of stress over such a report from an internal source. I was running an OS X server and a bunch of clients on a private subnet, for a department which needed some things that the IT department couldn't be bothered to set up for them. I had authorization at the highest levels, but the IT guys always hated me for going around them.
So, one day I get a call that there's a serious problem with traffic coming from the server's IP, and if I don't come talk to IT's network guys tomorrow, they'll shut things down. Of course, they don't bother to tell me what the problem is in the e-mail; I think they were deliberately trying to sound vague and ominous.
Anyway, I go in, and they hand me this 40 page report that claims to show hundreds of security problems, mostly with software that isn't even installed on the server -- or can't even be run on OS X. They also claim the server seems to be infected with something, which would have been a neat trick, given the total lack of OS X viruses. The report was basically used as a prop by the IT guys to 'put me in my place'. They wouldn't let me leave with a copy either, presumably because they realized (once they figured out I knew what I was talking about; I think they had previously assumed that since I wasn't in the IT department, I must be clueless) I could go through point by point and knock everything down.
Anyway, I pretty much blew them off. I watched network traffic with snort for awhile to see if there was any kind of actual problem (portscans originating from my IPs, or something along those lines), and I never found anything but a couple of false positives. Eventually, I just adjusted the firewall settings a bit so the IT guys couldn't see what I was doing. (Isn't that was firewalls are for? Keeping idiots you don't trust out of your network?) That seemed to solve the problem. Could have been nasty if they'd actually tried to take that report to someone to 'prove' that I didn't know what I was doing, though. I'm not sure I could have explained the report's bogusness to someone without the right technical background.
The block diagram for the Power Mac G5 seems to suggest that USB, BlueTooth and AirPort sit on PCI, but SATA, ATA (for the internal optical drive) and FireWire do not.
But they're not usually wrong about the status of OS X releases, toward the end. Apple tells these things to developers, and there are enough developers that the info always leaks.
But from the release notes I've seen, it looks like 10.2 and 10.3 are more or less identical from an API point of view, at least for the average application.
They're not. There are some pretty big differences, most notably Bindings, which only work on 10.3, and can save developers a huge amount of drudge word implementing a GUI. Thing is, most apps presently on the market predate Bindings, and switching an app over is a lot of work, so the technology hasn't been widely adopted and a lot of apps still work on 10.2.
With Core Data (which basically takes all the drudge work out of data modeling), Tiger is introducing something almost as significant. Maybe more significant for some apps.
If you're writing an new OS X app now, you'd be crazy not to use Core Data and Bindings -- they'll literally save you hundreds of hours.
Maybe large development houses have the luxury of investing all those hours to support older systems, but small operations and one-man projects generally don't. So, expect to see a lot of new apps from the small guys be Tiger-only.
Not every user has $129 to spend on OS upgrades every 12-24 months... but on the other hand, not every developer has hundreds of hours to waste implementing functionality on 10.2 that you get 'for free' on 10.3. Given the incredible new features for developers in 10.4, I'd expect there to be a lot of Tiger-only software.
Hell, I've been waiting for Tiger to even start writing a shareware app I'm planning. Some of the new stuff, particularly Core Data and the improved SeachKit, are going to save me absolutely huge amounts of time and make my app better. Sure, it'll be Tiger-only, but I'm willing to trade off compatibility for quality and convenience. Otherwise I'd be a Windows user....
What? That doesn't make any sense. They probably canceled because they realized they were offering to pay people to commit crimes (releasing viruses on the Internet), which is very likely an illegal act itself.
Or, more likely, they planned to cancel the thing all along, and it was just a publicity stunt. Seems to have worked pretty well.
Either way, it tells us absolutely nothing about the practicality of writing an OS X virus.
Look at how Apple is marketing the mini. What they're pushing more than anything else is the software bundle, and what regular users can do with it. It's almost as if the hardware is irrelevant. That explains why the small size is significant, but at the same time, not really the point of the thing; a small, unobtrusive device is a sort of physical representation of the fact that hardware is fading into the background.
Even the tiny box the Mac mini ships in is sort of reminiscent of software packaging. It's almost as if Apple is selling a really slick bundle of software that just, you know, happens to run itself without any need for the user to supply a computer separately. And at this price point, a lot of consumers who want to get into digital media might consider buying the thing basically as a media creation appliance, with the intention of keeping their existing computers for "computer stuff."
Basically, everything has gotten fast enough now that for most users in the consumer market, hardware performance just doesn't matter anymore. Design, quiet operating, operating system and software bundle are much more important, and Apple gets that, even if some performance-enthusiast tech-heads don't.
I'm pretty sure that if anyone wanted to run an internal combustion engine in the same small enclosed space where I was trying to breath, I wouldn't be too happy about that either.
All the journalist has to do in that case to avoid being held in contempt is go in, and testify under oath that the source was anonymous. If the government wants to try him for perjury, they can give it a shot, but they'll have to prove it.
The thing about these flash players, though, is that they don't have the capacity to hold your entire library. The process of selecting and transferring files as you describe is fairly labor-intensive.
With the iPod shuffle, you can tell iTunes to automatically select just the right number of songs to fill it up, at random, taking your song ratings into account.
Well, it doesn't blow away MPEG-4, because it's part of MPEG-4. H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10. The codec implemented in QuickTime now that people refer to as MPEG-4 is actually MPEG-4 Part 2. MPEG-4 is a big standard.
H.264 is also one of the required codecs (and will probably be the preferred codec) for both rival high-def DVD standards. It's an amazing codec; it really does deliver amazing quality all the way from cell phone streams up through broadcast quality video (at bit rates that residential broadband connections can handle), up to 1080p high-definition (at bit rates similar to what MPEG-4 achieves with standard definition video).
Apple only uses open standards when they are forced to do so by the market.
No, sorry, who forced Apple to support MPEG-4? They were on board right from the start. The MPEG-4 file format is based on QuickTime's file format. This is even more true of FireWire and ZeroConf. Who forced Apple to base their new directory system on LDAP? Who forced Apple to open their kernel? Who forces Apple to contribute to various open source projects? Who forces Apple to use Open Firmware for their hardware? Who forces Apple to allow Final Cut Pro to export project information in XML?
So you don't think that WMA or WMV locks in customers either, then?
Not if Microsoft makes it trivial for people to convert them to open formats, no. I don't know if this is the case, as I haven't used WMP much.
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Nah, it's more fun for the bad people, because they don't feel guilty about whispering and passing notes.
If you look at the numbers, the shift from desktops to laptops started a bit earlier on the Mac. Probably because Apple got the battery life situation under control sooner (Intel wasn't doing so well there a couple years ago), and support for wireless networking was really solid. Plus, Mac users tend to pick up on these sorts of trends a bit sooner; they're mostly a self-selected group, which means they're more likely to actually care about computing than the Wintel masses, and as such they're typically a bit ahead of the curve, on average.
Moreover, it's suspended from the top. If you cut it a mile from the bottom, a mile of it flutters down. The rest hovers, of if the cable was under tension, rises. Depending on how easy it is to splice whatever material is eventually used (we haven't got one strong enough yet), it might even be possible to repair the thing.
SpaceshipOne does, in fact, use kerosene, as do quite a few other small low-cost designs. It's easier to work with than liquid hydrogen.
Of course, even if the idea of selling suborbital flights to rich people is wildly more successful than anyone remotely expects, total usage will be absolutely tiny compared to the global oil market.
If the Supreme Court mandates something, regardless of its constitutional correctness, there is no recourse for the rest of the Federal government, nor the States.
Nah. If all else fails, there's always court-packing.
That's not quite the same thing. Apple actually does have direct sales operations, and your 'AppleDirect' could easily be confused with those. TigerDirect does not, in contrast, have an operating system.
And they could distribute HD stuff, even before the various disputes over the next-generation DVD format get settled. They've already got some HD trailers posted. (Don't bother trying to play the 1080p versions unless you've got a dual processor G5.)
The headline probably means code defined as "a system of signals, such as sounds, light flashes, or flags, used to send messages." Rather than computer code.
Nah, that just adds text to the 'comments' field (which is now called the 'Spotlight comments' field, I guess just to emphasize that it is, in fact, indexed by Spotlight). That's not the same thing as actually adding custom metadata fields.
Keep in mind (as per the ArsTechnica article posted earlier) that extended file system metadata doesn't automatically get indexed by Spotlight. There needs to be a Spotlight plugin that knows about it. (Although, sooner or later someone will probably just write a plug-in that imports any extended file system metadata for any file.)
And, of course, the whole 'useful little utilities you can pop up over your fully-fledge apps' thing dates back to 1981.
Dashboard widgets are generally XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, and they have no more access to your system than web pages. They can include native code as well, but the system will ask you before it lets that run.
Apple was doing this with System 7.1 on the Quadra AV models in 1993.
Spotlight can search network-based home directories.
Given the way it works, it doesn't seem like there are any really major technical barriers to giving Spotlight full client/server support. When the user queries against a network volume, just send the query to the server. The server searches the part of its local file system which corresponds to the share the user has mounted, and returns all the files the user has permission to see. Spotlight already understands and respects permissions (unlike, say, Google Desktop Search), and can be told to only search a subset of the file system. So really, this doesn't seem very complex.
Now, if you want Spotlight to work for, for instance, SMB shares, that might be problematic. But is WinFS going to support that anyway? That doesn't seem like the kind of thing Microsoft would be very interested in supporting.
These automated security reports really do more harm than good, a lot of the time. At least in the wrong hands. I had to deal with a lot of stress over such a report from an internal source. I was running an OS X server and a bunch of clients on a private subnet, for a department which needed some things that the IT department couldn't be bothered to set up for them. I had authorization at the highest levels, but the IT guys always hated me for going around them.
So, one day I get a call that there's a serious problem with traffic coming from the server's IP, and if I don't come talk to IT's network guys tomorrow, they'll shut things down. Of course, they don't bother to tell me what the problem is in the e-mail; I think they were deliberately trying to sound vague and ominous.
Anyway, I go in, and they hand me this 40 page report that claims to show hundreds of security problems, mostly with software that isn't even installed on the server -- or can't even be run on OS X. They also claim the server seems to be infected with something, which would have been a neat trick, given the total lack of OS X viruses. The report was basically used as a prop by the IT guys to 'put me in my place'. They wouldn't let me leave with a copy either, presumably because they realized (once they figured out I knew what I was talking about; I think they had previously assumed that since I wasn't in the IT department, I must be clueless) I could go through point by point and knock everything down.
Anyway, I pretty much blew them off. I watched network traffic with snort for awhile to see if there was any kind of actual problem (portscans originating from my IPs, or something along those lines), and I never found anything but a couple of false positives. Eventually, I just adjusted the firewall settings a bit so the IT guys couldn't see what I was doing. (Isn't that was firewalls are for? Keeping idiots you don't trust out of your network?) That seemed to solve the problem. Could have been nasty if they'd actually tried to take that report to someone to 'prove' that I didn't know what I was doing, though. I'm not sure I could have explained the report's bogusness to someone without the right technical background.
The block diagram for the Power Mac G5 seems to suggest that USB, BlueTooth and AirPort sit on PCI, but SATA, ATA (for the internal optical drive) and FireWire do not.
But they're not usually wrong about the status of OS X releases, toward the end. Apple tells these things to developers, and there are enough developers that the info always leaks.
But from the release notes I've seen, it looks like 10.2 and 10.3 are more or less identical from an API point of view, at least for the average application.
They're not. There are some pretty big differences, most notably Bindings, which only work on 10.3, and can save developers a huge amount of drudge word implementing a GUI. Thing is, most apps presently on the market predate Bindings, and switching an app over is a lot of work, so the technology hasn't been widely adopted and a lot of apps still work on 10.2.
With Core Data (which basically takes all the drudge work out of data modeling), Tiger is introducing something almost as significant. Maybe more significant for some apps.
If you're writing an new OS X app now, you'd be crazy not to use Core Data and Bindings -- they'll literally save you hundreds of hours.
Maybe large development houses have the luxury of investing all those hours to support older systems, but small operations and one-man projects generally don't. So, expect to see a lot of new apps from the small guys be Tiger-only.
Not every user has $129 to spend on OS upgrades every 12-24 months... but on the other hand, not every developer has hundreds of hours to waste implementing functionality on 10.2 that you get 'for free' on 10.3. Given the incredible new features for developers in 10.4, I'd expect there to be a lot of Tiger-only software.
Hell, I've been waiting for Tiger to even start writing a shareware app I'm planning. Some of the new stuff, particularly Core Data and the improved SeachKit, are going to save me absolutely huge amounts of time and make my app better. Sure, it'll be Tiger-only, but I'm willing to trade off compatibility for quality and convenience. Otherwise I'd be a Windows user....
What? That doesn't make any sense. They probably canceled because they realized they were offering to pay people to commit crimes (releasing viruses on the Internet), which is very likely an illegal act itself.
Or, more likely, they planned to cancel the thing all along, and it was just a publicity stunt. Seems to have worked pretty well.
Either way, it tells us absolutely nothing about the practicality of writing an OS X virus.
You're missing the point.
Look at how Apple is marketing the mini. What they're pushing more than anything else is the software bundle, and what regular users can do with it. It's almost as if the hardware is irrelevant. That explains why the small size is significant, but at the same time, not really the point of the thing; a small, unobtrusive device is a sort of physical representation of the fact that hardware is fading into the background.
Even the tiny box the Mac mini ships in is sort of reminiscent of software packaging. It's almost as if Apple is selling a really slick bundle of software that just, you know, happens to run itself without any need for the user to supply a computer separately. And at this price point, a lot of consumers who want to get into digital media might consider buying the thing basically as a media creation appliance, with the intention of keeping their existing computers for "computer stuff."
Basically, everything has gotten fast enough now that for most users in the consumer market, hardware performance just doesn't matter anymore. Design, quiet operating, operating system and software bundle are much more important, and Apple gets that, even if some performance-enthusiast tech-heads don't.
I'm pretty sure that if anyone wanted to run an internal combustion engine in the same small enclosed space where I was trying to breath, I wouldn't be too happy about that either.
All the journalist has to do in that case to avoid being held in contempt is go in, and testify under oath that the source was anonymous. If the government wants to try him for perjury, they can give it a shot, but they'll have to prove it.
The thing about these flash players, though, is that they don't have the capacity to hold your entire library. The process of selecting and transferring files as you describe is fairly labor-intensive.
With the iPod shuffle, you can tell iTunes to automatically select just the right number of songs to fill it up, at random, taking your song ratings into account.
Well, it doesn't blow away MPEG-4, because it's part of MPEG-4. H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10. The codec implemented in QuickTime now that people refer to as MPEG-4 is actually MPEG-4 Part 2. MPEG-4 is a big standard.
H.264 is also one of the required codecs (and will probably be the preferred codec) for both rival high-def DVD standards. It's an amazing codec; it really does deliver amazing quality all the way from cell phone streams up through broadcast quality video (at bit rates that residential broadband connections can handle), up to 1080p high-definition (at bit rates similar to what MPEG-4 achieves with standard definition video).
Apple only uses open standards when they are forced to do so by the market.
No, sorry, who forced Apple to support MPEG-4? They were on board right from the start. The MPEG-4 file format is based on QuickTime's file format. This is even more true of FireWire and ZeroConf. Who forced Apple to base their new directory system on LDAP? Who forced Apple to open their kernel? Who forces Apple to contribute to various open source projects? Who forces Apple to use Open Firmware for their hardware? Who forces Apple to allow Final Cut Pro to export project information in XML?
So you don't think that WMA or WMV locks in customers either, then?
Not if Microsoft makes it trivial for people to convert them to open formats, no. I don't know if this is the case, as I haven't used WMP much.