Since I agree with the majority here that Zeta, while surely a nice successor to BeOS, is more or less dead in the water due to the lack of drivers and applications, I should also offer a thought on a way for yT to actually succede in the marketplace: OEM deals.
If Linspire (formerly Lindows) can get Wallmart deals with an easy Linux on Wallmart PC's, then anyone can. If yT were to find a cheap chinese brand PC maker who would sell PC's with Zeta preinstalled, yT could then concentrate on porting Linux apps to the OS and possibly getting some developers to write software for it as well.
It would provide them with a base to start from.
Since Zeta is supposed to be the king of multimedia it would be extremely wise for them to get something like Cubase and Premiere ported or written for the OS in order to show off its strengths. YAOP (Yet Another Office Package) is not going to save yT's ass since OOo is already good enough on Linux and Windows and office stuff doesn't provide anyone with an incentive to fork out 99.- Zeta will succede or fail on the strength of its multimedia features. period.
Brazil has been doing this for years. They slowed down when oil was cheaper in the 90's after liberalising their economy, but now they're ramping up production again.
And, for the love of god, ethanol is a renewable resource that lessens any producing nation's dependence on crisis stricken countries full of religious fanatics and other nutcases. And the best thing about it is that literally any nation that isn't pure desert can jump on board, and very poor afican nations like Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia etc that lie in the tropics and sub tropics can get in on the act and produce ethanol as well from plants with high sugar content (sugar cane, fruit, etc) and get themselves out of the bind they are now in.
In fact, this is an idea to make some fantastic cash if you get in on the market now!
While Bill Gates is thrashing about in frustration because the online music market didn't bend over and do the usual market submissive act to Microsoft, I'm pretty sure he's going to lose the next market, video, as well. Bill Gates' biggest problem is that he hasn't realised, in 10 years of OS dominance, what ease of use is. Sit Mac OSX and WindowsXP next to one another, and note the difference after a short while. He just doesn't get it.
The same thing with DRMed WMP files and the really bad interface on WMP, where Microsoft thinks it is doing the users a favour by allowing all sorts of skins to be used. Compare that with iTunes' simplicity.
Steve Jobs may be an arrogant prick who deserves a kick in the balls by all the people he's insulted over the years, but he's right on the money when it comes to understanding what the market and above all, the consumer, likes: simplicity.
99% of the world neither cares nor knows what DRM is or how their phone or iPod works. All they really want to do is simply put some songs on the device and press play. They don't care about wireless, bluetooth or whatever. The iPod's simplicity is why it stole the market from Creative, not because of features, and Creative's executive are still moaning about how their devices have more features.
The video device from Apple will be the same, and will fit in just as easily with Apple's online store as the iPod does.
And Microsoft will still be flapping about like a fish out of water, and Bill Gates will still be promising to defeat Apple.
Firstly, although I'm a Mac OSX user, and don't even have a PC capable of running XP let alone Longhorn, I think these screenshots show that Longhorn has indeed evolved since the first screenshots came out with alpha builds last year where that huge fugly task column/widget bar thingamajig was on the right hand corner taking up almost 20% of the screen.
It seems that since then Microsoft has toned Longhorn down to better fit within an XP user's experience, so as not to overburden upgraders. This is probably fairly important for business users.
Also, I am fairly sure that the transparency seen in these screenshots of window borders is just one of many default skins available and it won't probably be the default.
I am just as sure that the weird UI glitches, such as having the menu bar under the tabs in Explorer, plus the somewhat blocky and unseeming tabs themselves are all still in beta. They will probably change before Longhorn becomes a release candidate.
Otherwise, I kind of like it. The rounded corners are smaller than those in OSX, which I find good. The Start button is now fully anti-aliased as are all the window icons in the task bar.
How it all performs is imposible to tell from screenshots of course, so time will tell.
Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.
That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.
Starship Titanic had one of the funniest text engines ever, and Douglas Adams was on the development team. The only thing I can of think against it today is that so many people have atrocious spelling due to their heavy reliance on spelling checkers etc.
If you're looking for people who are sick and tired of Apple's policies, here's one. I'm dropping Mac OSX. I'll be getting a PC and be dual booting Windows and Linux. They may possibly be worse than OSX, but they are much more consistent.
I know this is the first Windows port of the Expression programme since the interface is exactly the same as the older version, but this isn't the first time MS has released a funky vector editing tool that acts like a vector/pixel hybrid. On the Office 2000 CD there was an optional install of a software, PhotoEdit, I think it was called, which did very much the same thing except that it was extremely slow, so slow in fact that drawing a single vector curve with some special effect on it brought my 1.8GHz Dell to a standstill back in 2002.
So why is Microsoft trying this again. Obviously it is the first or second attempt (Microsoft products usually take 3 attempts to be successful) by Microsoft to grab marketshare form casual Photoshop and Illustrator users.
Coupled with Microsoft's Metro format, which is supposed to be a PDF killer -might work on windows since Acrobat reader is such a piece of bloated crap, won't work in prepress where PDF is really strong except that it already offers extend and embrace PDF compatibility - this should really be the writing on the wall for Adobe to watch their backs on Windows.
Granted, if Acrylic and whatever other graphics apps that Microsoft releases in the future are successful, it will take years to chip away at Adobe's dominance, but, as we all know, Microsoft has both the cash and the patience and the will to do it. The first users will probably be home users and beginning artists. Corel Draw will be this app's first victim.
It is certainly an incentive for Adobe to get their apps to native x86 OSX as soon as possible.
I pray that Quark will finally release the source code, or at least sell it cheaply, of mTropolis, the multimedia tool that was rated as the best thing out there ever. That way it could finally get moved to modern platforms, such as WinXP, OSX and Linux. Quark, in Fred "The Iranian bastard" Ibrahimi's infinite wisdom, bought the product from mFactory, then spent about a year developing a new version but never doing any marketing or advertising whatsoever, and then killed the product outright, claiming that not enough people were buying it.
The stupid bastards then refused to release or sell the code at a decent price (They wanted over a milllion plus final control of any later product and a guarantee that user would no longer swear and curse at Quark in public for being the bunch of stupid greedy blind fuckups that they are). That situation never changed, and even though Quark finally got rid of Ibrahimi (may his soul burn in hell for all eternity, or better yet, may he have to answer user support calls in hell for all eternity), nothing has changed.
Quark is still just as dumb and stupid and greedy as they always were.
From CNET, news: After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that." However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
How long do Apple think it will take PC hackers to crack OSX's protection scheme (hint: it will, like most current OSX installers, probably be in the installer software)? I give it about a day. I'm pretty sure that by the time Intel based Macs are released, OSX will be running on commodity PCs.
That might be good for Apple's OS marketshare, but it sure as hell won't be good for Apple's hardware business.
If this actually starts to pan out, i.e. other studies point to the same numbers (and I'm not convinced because Google and other web studies point to a number more like the currently accepted 3%) then it means that there is a huge market for Macintosh software that is being neglected by software publishers.
It would mean that all those vertical market apps that have been windows only would make money for the developers if they were ported to the Mac.
Novell's eDirectory is far and away the easiest DS to manage. I wonder if Novell's Linux push with its excellent directory and print services will give people like me who adminned Netware a new chance in the industry.
Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII. There is a well recorded event during the nuclear research in Germany during WWII where an accident happened and many researchers died of radiation poisoning. And while I don't know for sure, I assume that the western researchers also knew of the dangers of radiation, since even Marie Curie had suffered from radiation poisoning. Most probably no one expected there to be so much from a bomb, however.
Also you have to remember this was a very, very dirty war. It was pretty much no holds barred. Gas attacks of various kinds, of example, were used.
Poison gas was NOT used by any side in WWII. It was in WWI where poison gasses were used by both sides.
A "Halteoese" ("oe" instead of German diaresis on the "o") is simply a "holding ring", and since the bomb is supposed to fall to earth on a parachute, the AS/12/44 probably stands for "AbwurfSchirm" or drop parachute.
The date is probably the mark of the parachute type. Nothing more.
Why is it that we alwasy assume that more "advanced" extraterrestrial life has anything even close to our moral structure? What if other life had Hitlers who won?
On an evolutionary timescale, it doesn't matter if a single Hitler won or not, no matter how barbaric he was. (He would not have been the first leader to systematically slaughter an entire people either) It would require a constant stream of Hitler like leaders for it to make a dent in evolutionary history.
Look at Ghengiz Khan, who was no less barbaric and even more successful than Hitler. After he dies his Empire fell apart.
I would in fact even argue that evolution doesn't favour dictators.
While a device this size is a fantastic idea, if it works as a notepad and sketchbook while playing mp3's, and would be an ideal device for students as it's far less bulky than regular Tablets, I somehow have the feeling that it is going to die a silent death because Nokia is not known for its intuition in the market.
Remember the NGage? While Nokia makes very good mobile phones, they almost always seem to lack a feeling of just how gadgets and devices should be used. For instance, if the screen is too small on this device, people won't use it for making long notes or sketches. If the memory is too frugal people won't load songs and other data onto it.
I wish somehow that Apple would make a device like this. I think they would "get it right", i.e. big enough for a student to use productively but not so big as to be bulky, with enough memory for data storage and built in iTunes for songs.
When one looks at how the whole gaming world is switching to various PPC derivatives in the XBox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Revolution, and how that will push PPC prices down, I seriously doubt that Apple will be wanting to use x86 variants. It just doesn't make sense.
Considering the hush hush attitude, my gues is that Apple is either looking at XScale (ARM) or Pentium M chips for a future iPod or a new type of tablet/remote device. That is the area where Intel shines. PPC is the future in commodity CPUs in desktops and laptops.
Mention Communism in a sentence somewhere. You get extra points if you make a positive factual comparison of Cuba and the USA on things like medical care and literacy, leaving the others blurting words like freedom, democracy and human rights. If you then mention Guantanamo and legal rights of people imprisoned there, you win the jackpot.
In Pol Pot's Cambodia where between two and three million people were slaughtered by one of the most fanatical communist regimes this planet has ever seen, children were told to report on their parents.
Someone should send this to the press. They'll have field day with this.
Actually, I think this console looks quite good, and I'm pretty sure that it will sell very well, as it has the specs to offer some fantastic performance.
What I do wonder though, with Microsoft's switch to PPC in the console and pushing the XBox Live system, is whether Microsoft is planning to sometime start offering online versions of its Office, Browser and IM suites. I know that Microsoft was trying to offer online versions of Office to Internet Cafes back in 2000 but dropped the plans when nobody was interested, and I also know that Microsoft NEVER drops an idea, but simply keeps it in revision to offer in some future version or in another shape in the future.
Considering that Microsoft would love to lock in users with an online subscription fee, i.e. one can't use the browser, IM or office if one isn't forking over those monthly dollars to the company, and that the XBox 360 offers Microsoft the opportunity to control the whole platform, from the hardware to the software to the OS to the content in one package for the first time in Microsoft's history.
Expect a Microsoft keyboard and mouse for this console and Microsoft will be up and running, without any 3rd party OEMs to have to worry about, and with total control over what 3rd party content goes into the machine.
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So, if marrying an Egyptian makes him a terrorist, would marrying a Southerner make me a racist retard with a love of white bedsheets?
Since I agree with the majority here that Zeta, while surely a nice successor to BeOS, is more or less dead in the water due to the lack of drivers and applications, I should also offer a thought on a way for yT to actually succede in the marketplace: OEM deals.
If Linspire (formerly Lindows) can get Wallmart deals with an easy Linux on Wallmart PC's, then anyone can. If yT were to find a cheap chinese brand PC maker who would sell PC's with Zeta preinstalled, yT could then concentrate on porting Linux apps to the OS and possibly getting some developers to write software for it as well.
It would provide them with a base to start from.
Since Zeta is supposed to be the king of multimedia it would be extremely wise for them to get something like Cubase and Premiere ported or written for the OS in order to show off its strengths. YAOP (Yet Another Office Package) is not going to save yT's ass since OOo is already good enough on Linux and Windows and office stuff doesn't provide anyone with an incentive to fork out 99.- Zeta will succede or fail on the strength of its multimedia features. period.
And for media pros without the skill, time or inclination to do that, here's BeOS!
I seriously doubt that Media pros will be using an OS for which there are almost no professional applications.
An OS lives and dies by the amount and quality of applications available for it. I just don't see anything around for Be or yT.
Brazil has been doing this for years. They slowed down when oil was cheaper in the 90's after liberalising their economy, but now they're ramping up production again.
And, for the love of god, ethanol is a renewable resource that lessens any producing nation's dependence on crisis stricken countries full of religious fanatics and other nutcases. And the best thing about it is that literally any nation that isn't pure desert can jump on board, and very poor afican nations like Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia etc that lie in the tropics and sub tropics can get in on the act and produce ethanol as well from plants with high sugar content (sugar cane, fruit, etc) and get themselves out of the bind they are now in.
In fact, this is an idea to make some fantastic cash if you get in on the market now!
While Bill Gates is thrashing about in frustration because the online music market didn't bend over and do the usual market submissive act to Microsoft, I'm pretty sure he's going to lose the next market, video, as well. Bill Gates' biggest problem is that he hasn't realised, in 10 years of OS dominance, what ease of use is. Sit Mac OSX and WindowsXP next to one another, and note the difference after a short while. He just doesn't get it.
The same thing with DRMed WMP files and the really bad interface on WMP, where Microsoft thinks it is doing the users a favour by allowing all sorts of skins to be used. Compare that with iTunes' simplicity.
Steve Jobs may be an arrogant prick who deserves a kick in the balls by all the people he's insulted over the years, but he's right on the money when it comes to understanding what the market and above all, the consumer, likes: simplicity.
99% of the world neither cares nor knows what DRM is or how their phone or iPod works. All they really want to do is simply put some songs on the device and press play. They don't care about wireless, bluetooth or whatever. The iPod's simplicity is why it stole the market from Creative, not because of features, and Creative's executive are still moaning about how their devices have more features.
The video device from Apple will be the same, and will fit in just as easily with Apple's online store as the iPod does.
And Microsoft will still be flapping about like a fish out of water, and Bill Gates will still be promising to defeat Apple.
You're right.
Firstly, although I'm a Mac OSX user, and don't even have a PC capable of running XP let alone Longhorn, I think these screenshots show that Longhorn has indeed evolved since the first screenshots came out with alpha builds last year where that huge fugly task column/widget bar thingamajig was on the right hand corner taking up almost 20% of the screen.
It seems that since then Microsoft has toned Longhorn down to better fit within an XP user's experience, so as not to overburden upgraders. This is probably fairly important for business users.
Also, I am fairly sure that the transparency seen in these screenshots of window borders is just one of many default skins available and it won't probably be the default.
I am just as sure that the weird UI glitches, such as having the menu bar under the tabs in Explorer, plus the somewhat blocky and unseeming tabs themselves are all still in beta. They will probably change before Longhorn becomes a release candidate.
Otherwise, I kind of like it. The rounded corners are smaller than those in OSX, which I find good. The Start button is now fully anti-aliased as are all the window icons in the task bar.
How it all performs is imposible to tell from screenshots of course, so time will tell.
Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.
That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.
Starship Titanic had one of the funniest text engines ever, and Douglas Adams was on the development team. The only thing I can of think against it today is that so many people have atrocious spelling due to their heavy reliance on spelling checkers etc.
If you're looking for people who are sick and tired of Apple's policies, here's one. I'm dropping Mac OSX. I'll be getting a PC and be dual booting Windows and Linux. They may possibly be worse than OSX, but they are much more consistent.
I know this is the first Windows port of the Expression programme since the interface is exactly the same as the older version, but this isn't the first time MS has released a funky vector editing tool that acts like a vector/pixel hybrid. On the Office 2000 CD there was an optional install of a software, PhotoEdit, I think it was called, which did very much the same thing except that it was extremely slow, so slow in fact that drawing a single vector curve with some special effect on it brought my 1.8GHz Dell to a standstill back in 2002.
So why is Microsoft trying this again. Obviously it is the first or second attempt (Microsoft products usually take 3 attempts to be successful) by Microsoft to grab marketshare form casual Photoshop and Illustrator users.
Coupled with Microsoft's Metro format, which is supposed to be a PDF killer -might work on windows since Acrobat reader is such a piece of bloated crap, won't work in prepress where PDF is really strong except that it already offers extend and embrace PDF compatibility - this should really be the writing on the wall for Adobe to watch their backs on Windows.
Granted, if Acrylic and whatever other graphics apps that Microsoft releases in the future are successful, it will take years to chip away at Adobe's dominance, but, as we all know, Microsoft has both the cash and the patience and the will to do it. The first users will probably be home users and beginning artists. Corel Draw will be this app's first victim.
It is certainly an incentive for Adobe to get their apps to native x86 OSX as soon as possible.
I pray that Quark will finally release the source code, or at least sell it cheaply, of mTropolis, the multimedia tool that was rated as the best thing out there ever. That way it could finally get moved to modern platforms, such as WinXP, OSX and Linux. Quark, in Fred "The Iranian bastard" Ibrahimi's infinite wisdom, bought the product from mFactory, then spent about a year developing a new version but never doing any marketing or advertising whatsoever, and then killed the product outright, claiming that not enough people were buying it.
The stupid bastards then refused to release or sell the code at a decent price (They wanted over a milllion plus final control of any later product and a guarantee that user would no longer swear and curse at Quark in public for being the bunch of stupid greedy blind fuckups that they are). That situation never changed, and even though Quark finally got rid of Ibrahimi (may his soul burn in hell for all eternity, or better yet, may he have to answer user support calls in hell for all eternity), nothing has changed.
Quark is still just as dumb and stupid and greedy as they always were.
From CNET, news: After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
How long do Apple think it will take PC hackers to crack OSX's protection scheme (hint: it will, like most current OSX installers, probably be in the installer software)? I give it about a day. I'm pretty sure that by the time Intel based Macs are released, OSX will be running on commodity PCs.
That might be good for Apple's OS marketshare, but it sure as hell won't be good for Apple's hardware business.
IBM's recent opening of the Cell specification seemed to be totally lack sense, given that both Sony and Toshiba are crazy about the chip.
Intel could very well make a Cell clone based on those specs. The Cell would be the perfect chip for Apple's future if you ask me.
If this actually starts to pan out, i.e. other studies point to the same numbers (and I'm not convinced because Google and other web studies point to a number more like the currently accepted 3%) then it means that there is a huge market for Macintosh software that is being neglected by software publishers.
It would mean that all those vertical market apps that have been windows only would make money for the developers if they were ported to the Mac.
Freenet (Sorry, it's only in German) has a lengthy article about it.
Novell's eDirectory is far and away the easiest DS to manage. I wonder if Novell's Linux push with its excellent directory and print services will give people like me who adminned Netware a new chance in the industry.
Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII.
There is a well recorded event during the nuclear research in Germany during WWII where an accident happened and many researchers died of radiation poisoning. And while I don't know for sure, I assume that the western researchers also knew of the dangers of radiation, since even Marie Curie had suffered from radiation poisoning. Most probably no one expected there to be so much from a bomb, however.
Also you have to remember this was a very, very dirty war. It was pretty much no holds barred. Gas attacks of various kinds, of example, were used.
Poison gas was NOT used by any side in WWII. It was in WWI where poison gasses were used by both sides.
A "Halteoese" ("oe" instead of German diaresis on the "o") is simply a "holding ring", and since the bomb is supposed to fall to earth on a parachute, the AS/12/44 probably stands for "AbwurfSchirm" or drop parachute.
The date is probably the mark of the parachute type. Nothing more.
Why is it that we alwasy assume that more "advanced" extraterrestrial life has anything even close to our moral structure? What if other life had Hitlers who won?
On an evolutionary timescale, it doesn't matter if a single Hitler won or not, no matter how barbaric he was. (He would not have been the first leader to systematically slaughter an entire people either) It would require a constant stream of Hitler like leaders for it to make a dent in evolutionary history.
Look at Ghengiz Khan, who was no less barbaric and even more successful than Hitler. After he dies his Empire fell apart.
I would in fact even argue that evolution doesn't favour dictators.
While a device this size is a fantastic idea, if it works as a notepad and sketchbook while playing mp3's, and would be an ideal device for students as it's far less bulky than regular Tablets, I somehow have the feeling that it is going to die a silent death because Nokia is not known for its intuition in the market.
Remember the NGage? While Nokia makes very good mobile phones, they almost always seem to lack a feeling of just how gadgets and devices should be used. For instance, if the screen is too small on this device, people won't use it for making long notes or sketches. If the memory is too frugal people won't load songs and other data onto it.
I wish somehow that Apple would make a device like this. I think they would "get it right", i.e. big enough for a student to use productively but not so big as to be bulky, with enough memory for data storage and built in iTunes for songs.
When one looks at how the whole gaming world is switching to various PPC derivatives in the XBox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Revolution, and how that will push PPC prices down, I seriously doubt that Apple will be wanting to use x86 variants. It just doesn't make sense.
Considering the hush hush attitude, my gues is that Apple is either looking at XScale (ARM) or Pentium M chips for a future iPod or a new type of tablet/remote device. That is the area where Intel shines. PPC is the future in commodity CPUs in desktops and laptops.
Mention Communism in a sentence somewhere. You get extra points if you make a positive factual comparison of Cuba and the USA on things like medical care and literacy, leaving the others blurting words like freedom, democracy and human rights. If you then mention Guantanamo and legal rights of people imprisoned there, you win the jackpot.
In Pol Pot's Cambodia where between two and three million people were slaughtered by one of the most fanatical communist regimes this planet has ever seen, children were told to report on their parents.
Someone should send this to the press. They'll have field day with this.
Actually, I think this console looks quite good, and I'm pretty sure that it will sell very well, as it has the specs to offer some fantastic performance.
What I do wonder though, with Microsoft's switch to PPC in the console and pushing the XBox Live system, is whether Microsoft is planning to sometime start offering online versions of its Office, Browser and IM suites. I know that Microsoft was trying to offer online versions of Office to Internet Cafes back in 2000 but dropped the plans when nobody was interested, and I also know that Microsoft NEVER drops an idea, but simply keeps it in revision to offer in some future version or in another shape in the future.
Considering that Microsoft would love to lock in users with an online subscription fee, i.e. one can't use the browser, IM or office if one isn't forking over those monthly dollars to the company, and that the XBox 360 offers Microsoft the opportunity to control the whole platform, from the hardware to the software to the OS to the content in one package for the first time in Microsoft's history.
Expect a Microsoft keyboard and mouse for this console and Microsoft will be up and running, without any 3rd party OEMs to have to worry about, and with total control over what 3rd party content goes into the machine.
Welcome to a Microsoft world.