That was for a permanent and reliable shift in architecture across the board. Apple knew that the new machines all had the same architecture since Apple makes all their own hardware, and this emulation layer was only to allow older software to operate while application developers got a version designed for the new architecture to market. At that point, if you wrote software for the Mac, you moved to the new architecture.
I'm not convinced that the same story will play out for Microsoft. There are so many companies producing x86 and x86_64 machines that to coordinate them all to begin producing ARM machines instead would be a difficult, protracted, and expensive venture. I would expect it to take far longer than Apple's relatively recent transition from PPC to Intel given the number of players in the coordination. I doubt the software vendors will begin producing ARM software en masse until ARM hardware is prevalent, delaying the process even further.
I think we'll end up with multiple, fairly incompatible versions of Windows for each architecture until it's clear whether or not ARM is really going to take hold on the the desktop.
The difference there is that iOS and Mac OS X have different names. If Apple came out with "Apple OS" for all their devices (desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, etc.) and released "Pages for Apple OS", then it would cause the same problem that the parent is noting. As it stands, there is a pretty clear distinction that the iOS and OS X version of Pages are not interchangeable, and I have yet to encounter anyone that couldn't figure out why.
I have an AMD processor that is roughly equivalent to a P4 that can run Windows 7 easily on a gig of RAM.
I think the key there is "a gig of RAM". I might be wrong (I've never actually installed anything above XP on any of my machines), but as I understand it insufficient RAM is the biggest culprit for performance problems in Vista and above. Mine has 512 MB, which XP is perfectly content with.
I have yet to see a system that could effectively run XP that couldn't also run Windows 7.
Really? Because I'm fairly certain the P4 w/ 512MB of RAM and an integrated Intel video card that I have at home won't run Windows 7 anywhere near "effective". XP Pro runs without any noticeable slowdowns, even when watching Flash video (YouTube, Hulu, etc.).
More topically, I would wager that the average person has no idea the difference between 2.5G, 3G, EDGE, or regular voice access. Non-technical people are just going to see two maps and notice that the red one has a lot more red than the blue one has blue. I'm not sure the fine print at the bottom of those ads stating that voice coverage is different is even large enough to be readable unless you have an HDTV.
... People who might be working on a Mac or some kind of *nix box....
MS Office is available for Mac as well, and has been for nearly a decade. It's even available at the Apple Store when you buy a Mac. The *nix install base is really the compatibility problem, although (as mentioned several times above) OpenOffice has rendered that nearly non-existent.
It's not just previous generations that prefer tube amps to transistors. The differences are not obvious until you try to overdrive them, at which point they break up very differently. Tube amps distort with a lot of coloring overtones that you just don't get from a transistor amp, which tends to sound crunchy and just plain distorted. The advantage of transistors is reliability as tubes will eventually blow out and need replacing. When I play my guitar, I almost always use tube amps for recording and personal playing for pleasure due to the better sound, but I usually use a solid-state amp for gigging due to the reliability.
The difference is that the various versions of Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.) are actually different and not the same thing with different features disabled. People who like Gnome will run Ubuntu, those who like KDE will run Kubuntu, older hardware will run Xubuntu for lower memory usage (or people who just like XFCE), Edubuntu comes bundled with education-specific software that is only useful (for the most part) to educators and students, and on down the line. Other than having useful features disabled in the cheaper versions, I can't see any appreciable difference between the different versions of Windows the way there is in the different versions of Ubuntu.
It's also worth noting that though the installer seems to work well, there is no "Uninstall" option, either in the KDE folder in the Start Menu or a KDE item that can be removed from Add/Remove Programs. I installed it on my XP box here at work to play around with it and I saw what I wanted to see to satisfy my curiousity, and I'm not sure how to go about getting rid of it (save just deleting C:\Program Files\KDE, which may or may not actually delete everything). I understand that this is pre-release, beta software, but there still ought to be a way to uninstall it.
I think you hit on exactly why kids aren't programming so much any more, that being the fact that computers don't ship with a basic programming language whose results can be easily seen anymore. When I was a kid, I had an old IBM PC-AT, which came with QBasic. Sure, it was QBasic, but I think that having that was better than having nothing at all because it at least taught me that I could make the computer do what I wanted it to do, not what someone else told me I could pay them money to have it do. I find the built in C compilers in Linux and OS X (if you install developer tools) fill this nicely, so long as you know they're there (I'm assuming you do if you know enough to be running Linux).
There's really nothing like that thrill of writing your first program, seeing it work, and knowing that you made the computer do that.
I got an XM radio and subscription about 4 months ago, and even though the FM antenna isn't hooked up to my radio in my current car (I got a different car about 2 months ago), I haven't really cared. I used to listen to FM talk radio constantly, switching between WJFK 106.7 and WTOP 107.7 here in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Now everything I could possible want to listen to in the car is covered by either my XM service or my probably too large CD collection. At this point, I honestly wouldn't notice if every FM station in America suddenly stopped broadcasting. Satellite radio is one of those services (like my cell phone) that I don't know how I ever lived without now that I have it.
And between the major satellite services, I think XM is definitely the way to go. I sampled both services before signing up, and XM really offers a better channel lineup than Sirius for my tastes. The dealbreakers were XM's inclusion of a dedicated punk channel and The Opie and Anthony Show (spread the virus!). Even though Sirius has Howard Stern (who I believe is way past his prime) and the NFL, XM has 3 divisions of college sports (ACC, PAC-10, and Big Ten) for football and basketball, the NHL, Major League Baseball, and Nascar (if you're into that, I've never been interested). By far the best investment I've made in the entertainment genre.
I interpreted his comment as meaning an additional $200 on top of what you would pay for a comparable PC, not that one could purchase a Mac for $200. Although the Mac Mini does start at $499, and is more than enough for basic web, email, word processing, and the like. Plus the form-factor is amazing. I have a 14-inch iBook, and I think it was worth every penny of the $1200 i paid for it.
this is partially in line with your post, but mostly a response to your sig (remarkably on topic).
there is a difference between trading mp3's and cable theft that makes it a distinction between theft and infringement.
when you rip a cd to your hard drive, and somebody downloads that ripped mp3, your cd and ripped mp3 work just like they did before the download. you can listen to em all you want at the original quality, no problem. with cable however, if you get an illegal hookup, your use of the signal can degrade signal quality all through your neighborhood. if you have cable, you may notice that in some areas, there is sometime a little static at around 6-7pm. this is because everybody who just got home from work is watching tv, and there's only so much signal to go around. mp3's can be copied over and over again, with no degradation.
since the download of an mp3 does not diminish the stock of available music, then it is not theft. it is infringement of the copyright. the cable situation is theft, since your use of your illegal cable detracts from the available pool of cable signal.
I've always found it interesting that most people don't read the comments at all. Quite frankly, the comments are most of the reason I keep coming here. If I just wanted to read the articles, I would be reading the publications that/. links to instead of/. itself. I come here to see what other (relatively) normal people have to say about this stuff.
True, the hardware is called SPARC and the company is called Sun. However, the reason the submitter wrote "SPARC's Solaris" is because he/she was making a distiction between the SPARC and x86 versions, so they were correct.
if microsoft were to try to stop them, lycoris could simply pull up the case of microsoft v. apple, where apple lost in exactly the same situation, the court deciding that you couldn't prevent someone from creating a similar "look and feel". microsoft won't do anything about this... it would be just like flushing money down the toilet for the hell of it: pointless.
perhaps i'm just naive or ignorant, but how would the government being able to snoop on a voip call be any different from a wiretap on your hard line phone? it would have the same effect, and i'm assuming that if the government were allowed to snoop on voip calls, they would be subject to the same guidelines that they have to follow when tapping a regular phone line. can someone with more information clarify please?
this just in from the associated press:
a new study has confirmed that by charging people, you can get money. this revolutionary new business model is being adapted to other businesses around the world as we speak.
my bank, suntrust, is somewhere in between. it leans toward the saintly side because the entire actual online banking system works perfectly on mozilla, but their website itself gives a message saying that browsers of the netscape 6/mozilla family aren't supported (netscape 4.* is supported). i'm not sure why this is.
it seems to me that it would be easier to make the company's website compatible across the board than it would to do the same for the complex system for managing accounts. oh well. i'm a satisfied with it anyway.
1. Any of various simple submicroscopic parasites of plants, animals, and bacteria that often cause disease and that consist essentially of a core of RNA or DNA surrounded by a protein coat. Unable to replicate without a host cell, viruses are typically not considered living organisms.
2. A disease caused by a virus.
2. Something that poisons one's soul or mind: the pernicious virus of racism.
3. Computer Science. A computer virus.
A perfect example of this is "Dawson's Creek" on the WB network. All of the characters in the show wear clothes exclusively from American Eagle Outfitters. This is mentioned in the credits of the show, and this fact was also passed on to me during my new hire orientation (I work part-time at AE).
IIRC, movies are a protected form of expression. If you think of a video game as an interactive movie (not a strech given the strong plotlines of many video games), would this not fall into the same or similar category? Games are, after all, works of fiction.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I don't really care if Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are installed with the default Windows install, I just want the option to uninstall them. I have no use for IE (I have Mozilla) and limited use for Media Player (I use Winamp for audio), which I would replace if I could find a suitable replacement MPEG/AVI player. An uninstall option. That's all I ask for.
Actually, not anymore (thank God), since I got a new hard drive running as C and did a fresh install of WinXP Pro.
Almost makes me glad that my XP install went haywire for no reason (prolly something my little sister did).
I had not read the bit on CNet about the distributed computing system that was being included with KaZaA until today. I find this interesting since the reason I switched from KaZaA to BearShare several weeks ago was because my whole computer became sluggish the moment I started KaZaA up, and 1ghz Thuderbirds aren't supposed to be sluggish. I don't know if this is what caused it, but I'm glad I stopped using it when I did nevertheless.
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That was for a permanent and reliable shift in architecture across the board. Apple knew that the new machines all had the same architecture since Apple makes all their own hardware, and this emulation layer was only to allow older software to operate while application developers got a version designed for the new architecture to market. At that point, if you wrote software for the Mac, you moved to the new architecture.
I'm not convinced that the same story will play out for Microsoft. There are so many companies producing x86 and x86_64 machines that to coordinate them all to begin producing ARM machines instead would be a difficult, protracted, and expensive venture. I would expect it to take far longer than Apple's relatively recent transition from PPC to Intel given the number of players in the coordination. I doubt the software vendors will begin producing ARM software en masse until ARM hardware is prevalent, delaying the process even further.
I think we'll end up with multiple, fairly incompatible versions of Windows for each architecture until it's clear whether or not ARM is really going to take hold on the the desktop.
The difference there is that iOS and Mac OS X have different names. If Apple came out with "Apple OS" for all their devices (desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, etc.) and released "Pages for Apple OS", then it would cause the same problem that the parent is noting. As it stands, there is a pretty clear distinction that the iOS and OS X version of Pages are not interchangeable, and I have yet to encounter anyone that couldn't figure out why.
I think the key there is "a gig of RAM". I might be wrong (I've never actually installed anything above XP on any of my machines), but as I understand it insufficient RAM is the biggest culprit for performance problems in Vista and above. Mine has 512 MB, which XP is perfectly content with.
Really? Because I'm fairly certain the P4 w/ 512MB of RAM and an integrated Intel video card that I have at home won't run Windows 7 anywhere near "effective". XP Pro runs without any noticeable slowdowns, even when watching Flash video (YouTube, Hulu, etc.).
More topically, I would wager that the average person has no idea the difference between 2.5G, 3G, EDGE, or regular voice access. Non-technical people are just going to see two maps and notice that the red one has a lot more red than the blue one has blue. I'm not sure the fine print at the bottom of those ads stating that voice coverage is different is even large enough to be readable unless you have an HDTV.
If I remember correctly, Windows NT 4 (maybe Windows 95/98 too) was version 4 and Windows XP was version 5. More versioning info is here on Wikipedia.
MS Office is available for Mac as well, and has been for nearly a decade. It's even available at the Apple Store when you buy a Mac. The *nix install base is really the compatibility problem, although (as mentioned several times above) OpenOffice has rendered that nearly non-existent.
It's not just previous generations that prefer tube amps to transistors. The differences are not obvious until you try to overdrive them, at which point they break up very differently. Tube amps distort with a lot of coloring overtones that you just don't get from a transistor amp, which tends to sound crunchy and just plain distorted. The advantage of transistors is reliability as tubes will eventually blow out and need replacing. When I play my guitar, I almost always use tube amps for recording and personal playing for pleasure due to the better sound, but I usually use a solid-state amp for gigging due to the reliability.
The difference is that the various versions of Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.) are actually different and not the same thing with different features disabled. People who like Gnome will run Ubuntu, those who like KDE will run Kubuntu, older hardware will run Xubuntu for lower memory usage (or people who just like XFCE), Edubuntu comes bundled with education-specific software that is only useful (for the most part) to educators and students, and on down the line. Other than having useful features disabled in the cheaper versions, I can't see any appreciable difference between the different versions of Windows the way there is in the different versions of Ubuntu.
It's also worth noting that though the installer seems to work well, there is no "Uninstall" option, either in the KDE folder in the Start Menu or a KDE item that can be removed from Add/Remove Programs. I installed it on my XP box here at work to play around with it and I saw what I wanted to see to satisfy my curiousity, and I'm not sure how to go about getting rid of it (save just deleting C:\Program Files\KDE, which may or may not actually delete everything). I understand that this is pre-release, beta software, but there still ought to be a way to uninstall it.
I think you hit on exactly why kids aren't programming so much any more, that being the fact that computers don't ship with a basic programming language whose results can be easily seen anymore. When I was a kid, I had an old IBM PC-AT, which came with QBasic. Sure, it was QBasic, but I think that having that was better than having nothing at all because it at least taught me that I could make the computer do what I wanted it to do, not what someone else told me I could pay them money to have it do. I find the built in C compilers in Linux and OS X (if you install developer tools) fill this nicely, so long as you know they're there (I'm assuming you do if you know enough to be running Linux). There's really nothing like that thrill of writing your first program, seeing it work, and knowing that you made the computer do that.
I got an XM radio and subscription about 4 months ago, and even though the FM antenna isn't hooked up to my radio in my current car (I got a different car about 2 months ago), I haven't really cared. I used to listen to FM talk radio constantly, switching between WJFK 106.7 and WTOP 107.7 here in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Now everything I could possible want to listen to in the car is covered by either my XM service or my probably too large CD collection. At this point, I honestly wouldn't notice if every FM station in America suddenly stopped broadcasting. Satellite radio is one of those services (like my cell phone) that I don't know how I ever lived without now that I have it.
And between the major satellite services, I think XM is definitely the way to go. I sampled both services before signing up, and XM really offers a better channel lineup than Sirius for my tastes. The dealbreakers were XM's inclusion of a dedicated punk channel and The Opie and Anthony Show (spread the virus!). Even though Sirius has Howard Stern (who I believe is way past his prime) and the NFL, XM has 3 divisions of college sports (ACC, PAC-10, and Big Ten) for football and basketball, the NHL, Major League Baseball, and Nascar (if you're into that, I've never been interested). By far the best investment I've made in the entertainment genre.
I interpreted his comment as meaning an additional $200 on top of what you would pay for a comparable PC, not that one could purchase a Mac for $200. Although the Mac Mini does start at $499, and is more than enough for basic web, email, word processing, and the like. Plus the form-factor is amazing. I have a 14-inch iBook, and I think it was worth every penny of the $1200 i paid for it.
this is partially in line with your post, but mostly a response to your sig (remarkably on topic).
there is a difference between trading mp3's and cable theft that makes it a distinction between theft and infringement.
when you rip a cd to your hard drive, and somebody downloads that ripped mp3, your cd and ripped mp3 work just like they did before the download. you can listen to em all you want at the original quality, no problem. with cable however, if you get an illegal hookup, your use of the signal can degrade signal quality all through your neighborhood. if you have cable, you may notice that in some areas, there is sometime a little static at around 6-7pm. this is because everybody who just got home from work is watching tv, and there's only so much signal to go around. mp3's can be copied over and over again, with no degradation.
since the download of an mp3 does not diminish the stock of available music, then it is not theft. it is infringement of the copyright. the cable situation is theft, since your use of your illegal cable detracts from the available pool of cable signal.
I've always found it interesting that most people don't read the comments at all. Quite frankly, the comments are most of the reason I keep coming here. If I just wanted to read the articles, I would be reading the publications that /. links to instead of /. itself. I come here to see what other (relatively) normal people have to say about this stuff.
True, the hardware is called SPARC and the company is called Sun. However, the reason the submitter wrote "SPARC's Solaris" is because he/she was making a distiction between the SPARC and x86 versions, so they were correct.
if microsoft were to try to stop them, lycoris could simply pull up the case of microsoft v. apple, where apple lost in exactly the same situation, the court deciding that you couldn't prevent someone from creating a similar "look and feel". microsoft won't do anything about this... it would be just like flushing money down the toilet for the hell of it: pointless.
perhaps i'm just naive or ignorant, but how would the government being able to snoop on a voip call be any different from a wiretap on your hard line phone? it would have the same effect, and i'm assuming that if the government were allowed to snoop on voip calls, they would be subject to the same guidelines that they have to follow when tapping a regular phone line. can someone with more information clarify please?
this just in from the associated press:
a new study has confirmed that by charging people, you can get money. this revolutionary new business model is being adapted to other businesses around the world as we speak.
my bank, suntrust, is somewhere in between. it leans toward the saintly side because the entire actual online banking system works perfectly on mozilla, but their website itself gives a message saying that browsers of the netscape 6/mozilla family aren't supported (netscape 4.* is supported). i'm not sure why this is.
it seems to me that it would be easier to make the company's website compatible across the board than it would to do the same for the complex system for managing accounts. oh well. i'm a satisfied with it anyway.
From dictionary.com:
virus
n. pl. viruses
1. Any of various simple submicroscopic parasites of plants, animals, and bacteria that often cause disease and that consist essentially of a core of RNA or DNA surrounded by a protein coat. Unable to replicate without a host cell, viruses are typically not considered living organisms.
2. A disease caused by a virus.
2. Something that poisons one's soul or mind: the pernicious virus of racism.
3. Computer Science. A computer virus.
(emphasis mine)
A perfect example of this is "Dawson's Creek" on the WB network. All of the characters in the show wear clothes exclusively from American Eagle Outfitters. This is mentioned in the credits of the show, and this fact was also passed on to me during my new hire orientation (I work part-time at AE).
MTV's Road Rules 11 also had the members of the show dressed in AE clothing as reported in the most recent edition of the AEZine.
It's happening sooner than you think.
IIRC, movies are a protected form of expression. If you think of a video game as an interactive movie (not a strech given the strong plotlines of many video games), would this not fall into the same or similar category? Games are, after all, works of fiction.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I don't really care if Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are installed with the default Windows install, I just want the option to uninstall them. I have no use for IE (I have Mozilla) and limited use for Media Player (I use Winamp for audio), which I would replace if I could find a suitable replacement MPEG/AVI player. An uninstall option. That's all I ask for.
Actually, not anymore (thank God), since I got a new hard drive running as C and did a fresh install of WinXP Pro. Almost makes me glad that my XP install went haywire for no reason (prolly something my little sister did).
I had not read the bit on CNet about the distributed computing system that was being included with KaZaA until today. I find this interesting since the reason I switched from KaZaA to BearShare several weeks ago was because my whole computer became sluggish the moment I started KaZaA up, and 1ghz Thuderbirds aren't supposed to be sluggish. I don't know if this is what caused it, but I'm glad I stopped using it when I did nevertheless.