I just read your other post, and I think I'll stick with my comment that you are trolling. You installed "thousands of fonts", some of which were obviously corrupt, and then Safari started acting up, which begs the question whether you replaced system fonts with your own. And you blame your corrupt fonts on the OS? Not bad, and even better from a supposed technically inclined user.
As to your Taskbar comment, that indicates a) you have a preference for it, whihc is your good right, but your comment about Expose being a flashy hack immediately brings you down to troll level. Expose allows you to see, as you might know, the current application's windows (F10 by default), all application windows (F9 by default), or the Desktop (F11 by default). All of those can be changed if you like. Added to which there is added functionality such as being able to hide or quit apps from Expose and the Task switcher, drag and drop to the Expose windows etc.
If you don't like that, it's your preference, and mine to disagree, but calling it a flashy hack is simply asking to get flamed as there just as many people who hate the task bar.
Now, if you said you prefer virtual desktops, as is implemented in most Linux GUIs, then I would understand.
As it is, it just makes you look like you don't like the OS works, which says nothing about how good or bad the OS is.
(And please, how is the Font manager in the OS bad? Which other OS has a better built in Font manager?)
What makes you think you can't "do stuff" with a Mac? Or Linux, or Windows, for that matter.
It's an excellent, well designed, stable, powerful OS coupled with excellent quality hardware and all the applications you need are there unless your definition of doing stuff means playing Half Life.
Ease of use: The OS is very stable, as stable as anything in the Linux world. The apps are generally of better quality than stuff found in the Linux world, although you can use those on OSX as well. The GUI and applications all use the same user interface, which means that you don't have wildly differing interfaces such as is the case of GTK+ and KDE apps. (Think GIMP and OpenOffice and tell me why most apps don't even follow the GNOME HCI guidlines).
The OS is incredibly easy to configure compared to the various competing KDE/Gnome distros (which is exactly the problem there). And if you need the terminal and wish to do stuff by hand, it's there, and you're free to do what you like with the system's innnards as it's OSS and well documented.
The OS, apps and hardware are tightly integrated, which means that problems like hardware compatibility don't exist.
The software and hardware are both of high quality, which really means something if you've used Dell or no name brands.
It goes way byond things like Eye Candy, which says to me that you've never actually used the OS for a period of time yourself.
This is so plainly a troll or flamebait that modding it up as interesting can only be done by the opposite of a Mac zealot; a Windows only person, or a Linux zealot. I'm guessing its a Linux fanatic, due to the Gentoo comment.
OSX has its faults, but none of them are show stoppers, the apps definitely do not crash wildly and the GUI is most certainly not crippled and there is no way in hell that configuration is anywhere as difficult or problematic as in your average Linux distro.
It's not that easy to answer. Generally, the only way to have any idea of when Apple will be releasing new hardware is by following the rumour sites (Thinksecret, Appleinsider etc) and using large pinches of salt. Of those, Thinksecret, the one with the best record on accuracy, is being sued by Apple, so the chances of their being "in the know", in future are slim.
The register is no good as they make all sorts of wild claims which almost never come true.
Usually Apple releases new hard- and software on two regular occasions: Macworld (just past, this january) and the Mac developer conference, in the middle of the year. Buying a new Mac just before then is usually not the best of ideas.
The only way to do this, if you're seriously interested in wasting a lot of time, is to spend time on the Appleinsider forums, noting occasional leaks before Apple C and D's them, and keeping up with current industry trends.
That means, at present: The chances of an Apple G5 Powerbook being released soon are very slim, as far as I can see. The chances that Apple will first release upgraded G4 Powerbooks with the new Motorola G4 and "Freescale" processors is much higher, since those would take the G4 above 1,5GHz.
If you have the patience, wait until the developers conference is over in the middle of the year. I'm sure Apple will have announced something by then.
The most surprising thing, to me, is that someone actually gave Raskin and his mania $2 million to mess around and do something with this bullshit that nobody wants and nobody will ever use.
I say bullshit, because Raskin is still stuck in the days of the custom CLI based computers, such as C64, Amiga, Osbourne etc, not having realised that that time is long gone and, to compound that, has an obsessive personality that is even worse than Stallmans, with a feeling of self importance that no one else on the planet, with the exception of his brainwashed kids, sees.
I have an idea that the reason Raskin was given the money was because someone realised that the interfaces to cellphones are very bad and in need of some improvement, which they are, and, since cellphones have keypads (ooh laa laa!) and are therefore a good target for Raskin's bullshit.
The thing is, cellphones could definitely use a user interface improvement, as the current method of scrolling through a tiny screen and pressing an ok/not ok button is difficult and time consuming, but the idea of zoom and boom, as Raskin's newest idea is implemented, is not going to be the slightest improvement on this, especially for your average user that is flumoxed by modern guis.
God, the guy is like chewing gum, he just won't go away.
I'm not actually surprised that so-called journalists, especially the technical kind, get good salaries. If you look at the painful clowns running the show at ZDNet, and most technical publications for that matter, including such wonder rags, such as the Register, you know that the Agenda is almost the most important thing. The actual realities of the tech world be damned as long as you have someone passing you your monthly wad of cash.
And this story is no different.
As many have noted, Sony did exactly this kind of hyping the last time around when the PS2, with its emotion engine, was supposed to be the future of all things computing. As everyone knows, the PS2 was a real pain to code for, and the actual performance was not better than the PC's of the day. The Cell will undoubtedly suffer from the same problems when it comes to coding real applications. Concurrency and parrallelism do not an easier coding experience make.
I have no doubt that this thing will be good, but I absolutely doubt that it will have much or any effect on the x86 world of computing. The G4 processor, when it came out with the Altivec SIMD processsor, which was apparently better than SSE at the time didn't turn Apple into the next Microsoft overnight either, did it?
So, I expect that the x86 world will continue to thrive and that Apple will stick some of these Cell processors, having as they do a PPC 970, aka G5, in their core, in some of their machines and will make the usual wild RDF claims about how hot it is while it will be used by only a small fraction of actual Mac developers in reality, the Mac having to maintain backward compatibility only slightly less then the x86 world does.
"An experiment onboard the Huygens probe didn't run as planned because someone forgot to turn it on. The team lead for the experiment has put eighteen years of his life into the project, just to watch it not happen after a seven year ride to its destination on Titan."
They forgot to turn on a communications channel, not the experiment.
CowboyNeal: Is this the way you check your stories and enhance your journalistic ethos? Maybe just fucking reading what you post before you do it would help gain slashdot some of the credibility it has lost with massive spelling errors let through by semi-literate editors, regular dupe postings by timothy and tacho and the moronic and childish agenda of most of the editors when it comes to the platform of choice.
This whole Boeing FUD campaign of the 7E7 competeing against the A380 ignores the fact that they are not in competition for the same market.
Airbus is developing the A350, a newer version of the A330 with composite wings and the same highly efficient engines of the 7E7 to compete against the 7E7. The A350 will offer the same specs with other advantages that the 7E7 does not have: It shares a type rating with the A330, which means that airlines save money on pilot and crew traning, maintenance and parts.
This measn that all those airlines which now use the A330 can switch to the A350 with little retraining, which is a significant factor in purchasing decisions.
I think Boeing's managers are not sleeping well at the moment.
I've seen the usual round of slashdot trolling in this thread, that happens every time some piece of new technology is invented or some scientific landmark is achieved outside the US. Likewise, there's a good number of anti-American trolls here who like to have a good laugh when something fucks up in the US.
Then there's the rest of us.
I see that quite a few Americans, when feeling nationally challenged because the biggest civil aircraft in the world is no longer American, like to point out how the Boeing 7E7 is more comfortable, takes less time to board and exit, and is more practical, in that it can fly between smaller airports, than the A380.
At the same time, the European pundits point out that the A380 can fly huge amounts of passengers over a longer distance, etc.
And a good number of pundits try to paint this as a clash of philosophies, in that the efficient small craft versus the huge megajumbo craft is what will happen in the future.
I think they miss out the point: These two craft are aimed at significantly different markets. No one will buy an A380 to fly from Paris to London (a few hundred kilometers) or buy a 7E7 to fly from Singapore to London. Sure, long haul routes with low passenger frequencies, such as from Buenos Aires to London will probably not see an A380 and some high frequency long haul non hub routes will not see an 7E7, but that is the general aim of the market. These aircraft do not really compete.
The real competition to the 7E7 is still to come, and has been announced, in the form of the A350, which is a modernised A330, with newer non bleed engines like those of the 7E7, new wings and more composites.
And this is where the real compeition between Airbus and Boeing is being fought: The family of planes.
One of the major reasons that Airbus has been so successful is that it has built almost all of its planes in modularised form in order to optimise components, which means that Pilots trained on an A318 can fly the whole small Airbus family - A318, A319, A320 and A321. It also means that technicians can service all of these planes if trained on one, and that spares etc are shared amongst all of them, lowering the cost to both airlines and manufacturers.
There is a similar thing in the A330 and A340, and even the A380 uses a similar cockpit layout to the A340. And the A350 will be usable by those who have used A330s in the past.
I think a large amount of Boeing's marketing criticism against Airbus is simply because Boeing missed the boat on the new large market. They were actually doing design and market studies togethr with Airbus in the mid 90's until they pulled out because British Airways, their supposed launch customer, wasn't interested. Boeing then went on with a number of utter rubbish campaigns, from the idea of stretched 747X which was then shelved when it failed to garner enough attention, to a ridiculous Sonic Cruiser concept, which was more of a marketing exercise to take attention away from the A380, until they finally realised that they had to come up with a new product and started the far more realistic and achievable 7E7.
Airbus's planes have been less spectacular than Boeing's, but they offered real advantages in cost (Training, maintenance, spares). Boeing's leadership is where the blame lies for spending so much time on hairbrained campaigns and FUD instead of doing some real product development.
I really don't understand the fucking idiots here who go so apeshit about how the GPL robs them of their fucking freedom. It is so simple their children would understand it: If you don't like it, don't fucking use it!.
The fact is that the Dutch were pressuring everyone to accept the text of the proposal. This makes me suspiscious, because, as I pointed out in a recent post, the Dutch have become even more America's whore in recent years than the English have. What do the Dutch have to gain from selling out the EU to the Americans? Are they so scared of the Germans and the French and did America make some really big promises about saving Holland economically and politically, or did they just offer to give the Dutch nice old age homes in Arizona?
I remember trying one of these self heating coffees, bought from a kiosk while on the way to work in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1997. One broke a seal, pressed a tab, waited a minute, and then got really disgustingly sweet black HOT coffee that tasted like shit. Given that the kiosks in Switzerland sell fresh coffee and croissants in any case, the idea didn't last long. I think I saw these things the last time in 1998 in kiosks here.
It's amazing that they're still trying to flog these things though. The coffee tastes about as stale as it is.
I live in Switzerland, where, as a matter of course, most EU policies are implemented even though Switzerland is not part of the EU.
Already now it is law that logs of all communications must be kept by ISP's, telcos etc for around 6 months. This new law will make it legal for these fucking bastards to listen in on my private conversations without any problems and tape it as well.
There goes my privacy. There goes business secrets, and above all...
There goes my ISP's bill spiralling upwards because someone has to pay for the fucking storage.
So much for Europe being a bastion of liberal values. The Europeans are only liberal as long as they can take the piss out of the US.
If you're reading this Alek, I just thought that you could make a little bit of money off your lights, enough to pay for better or more hosting bandwidth and have some fun at the same time: Each year, when you're about to set up your web-controllable lights, why don't you organise a light party at your house at the same time the story gets posted to slashdot and other sites, say over a weekend when people have time.
If you organised the lights so that some kinds of funky patterns could be made via the web, you could make some good money with music, drinks and a grill outside for people who turn up to watch the show.
I know that the idea of a tablet Mac has been discussed to death and even rebirth, it's been around so often, but the sheer amount of interest in a tablet mac, one with that special Apple touch and attention to detail garners such an enormous amount of interest every time it's mentioned that I seriously wonder why Apple hasn't decided to take a risk and Just Do It(TM).
The fact that not only is TFA's server/.'ed, but also the mirrors and the fact that almost every second user created prototype on Mac fan sites is a tablet or PDA style device shows that the interest certainly is there. An Apple Tablet could have a design and features that would finally make the tablet concept kick off, since it's an utter niche product on the Windows side of things.
Think about it. What could Apple do to make people want a Tablet and what would its target market be? My ideas, by no means perfect, would be: 1. A device that is bigger than current PDA's but smaller than current Windows Tablets, i.e. somewhere around ISO A6 size, or just a bit bigger than the old Newton. This would make it easier to hold (current Tablets are too heavy and too big to hold in one hand while writing with a Pen) and at the same time have enough space for a useful interface and space to sketch on for artists. 2.Very good handwriting recognition. This is important. I think they were getting there when they killed the Newton. 3.An OSX variant with a simplified interface which is more geared towards using a Pen. This would mean perhaps larger controls and a Dock replacement, perhaps a sliding Dock so that necessary apps are within easy reach. 4.A touch screen that enables users to use their fingers as well as a pen. (Therefore the larger controls) 5.Wireless videoand audio streaming. I know Apple has been working on a protocol that is supposed to be good for video streaming. This would or could perhaps tie in with other Apple products such as the iPod and Airport Express where this Tablet could be used as a remote control. This is why being able to use it with one's fingers would be important. 6.Other software and hardware tie ins with Apple products and software, such as the ability to use it as a monitor on movie sets with firewire or usb connectivity, or a cut down version of FCP or iMovie that allows one to cut small video clips. Perhaps a small paint application as well, or a sound editor. 7.It should be shipped with applications that leverage the platform such as a simple sketching application for students and artists, a Apple writing application that makes taking notes as easy or easier than WinXP TE's note taker. Perhaps make the sharing of sketches and notes and media simple via Rendezvous. 8.Apple should make Frameworks for this OS variant available in XCode in order to allow developers to come up with nifty applications as they have for the classic OSX. Java should be included as well to make it interesting for current mobile developers. 9.The target market would be students for artwork and note taking, home consumers for its tie in with Airport Express and iTunes and the iPod, industrial users for use as a digital notepad and checklist, and enterprise users for its note taking and sketching abilities and the ability to make presentations.
This is all a wet dream of course, but I think I'm not alone in wishing for a Tablet with that special Apple touch.
What makes me raise my eyebrows on occasion is the way that the Netherlands seems to be on a particularly anti-european or pro-american (depending on your viewpoint) bent in recent years. The Dutch military choosing the American Apache helicopter instead of the Eurocopter Tiger. The Dutch military choosing the american M-16 rifle for some reason that no one can quite fathom. The Dutch choosing to participate in the F-35 JSF fighter consortium which hasn't really brought them any benefits. The Dutch signing on to the Iraq war fiasco, which wasn't even very popular in Holland at the time. And now the great Microsoft deal of the century when just about every other country in the world, let alone Europe, is at least looking at Open Source alternatives.
There are probably some good business and political reasons behind this but more often than not, the Dutch decisions seem to me to some kind of attempt to deliberately put the Germans and the French at a distance. I can understand that in a way as Holland is smaller than those two and could fear being overruled by them, but it mostly comes across as the epitomy of the old saying "Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face", i.e. doing something on principle even though it has no benefit to one.
Sadly, a lot of stuff in the EU seems to happen like this where national self interest can torpedo some very good projects (and bad as well, to be fair).
When I read about this a couple of days ago on the BBC site, my first thought was, "Wow, Gibson had it so right". This is exactly how Gibson envisaged "Jacking in" with the "Trodes" in Neuromancer all those years ago (1983). On the one hand I find it amusing that Gibson completely missed the wireless revolution, and on the other I find it perhaps telling that I find it amusing, perhaps a measure of how much Gibson did get right.
I wonder how long and how many years it will take before the resolution of these trodes becomes high enough for any user to control implements and for sensors to be able to read images and thoughts directly from the brain, and VICE VERSA, i.e. how long it will be before high resolution images, video and perhaps even holograms can be sent directly to the brain, bypassing eyes etc?
I grew up without computers (I had my first programmable calculator in 1980), writing at school and university was done by hand and reading was done out of books. My grammar and spelling has, in general, been quite good over the years and I do notice that the younger computer generation, i.e. those who grew up with them tend to be worse at spelling and grammar than the older generation. On the other hand, they can generally type much better than I can.
That I suppose, is life. Skills change to suite current requirements.
You write: When I worked at Quark, we had a heated rivalry with Aldus Corp (now Adobe) and their product, PageMaker. Quark introduced several key desktop publishing features in version 3.0 that essentially cemented our lead over PageMaker in the DTP market. Had Aldus been able to get a hold of our source code, Quark's trade secrets, along with the enormous amount of money we had invested in R&D to develop QuarkXPress 3 would have been for naught. Aldus would simply have copied our algorithms and updated their product to match ours.
Joe, you neglect to mention the rest of the story and the other side of the closed source coin:
What fucking happened to Quark Express after its version 3 triumph? As with any monopoly, it essentially sat on its hhuge fat arse and didn't do anything until it released version 4 almost 6 or 7 years later.
6 or 7 years!!!!!!!!!!
Quark simply ignored any user problems and sat on its fat behind until they themselves decided that they could make some more money with an essentially useless and horribly expensive upgrade to Quark 4 and then years later Quark 5.
Quark only started panicking when Adobe started stealing Quark's customers left, right and center with Indesign.
The problem with closed source is that it offers the clever innovator that first made a bale of cash with his product absolutely no incentive to improve it later on. Look at Quark Express and look at Microsoft as a whole. I wouldn't exactly call Microsoft innovating, as much as they love to throw that word around.
So where'e the middle ground? Or does the fact that you work for Microsoft make you blind to alternatives?
Slashdot Mirror
I just read your other post, and I think I'll stick with my comment that you are trolling. You installed "thousands of fonts", some of which were obviously corrupt, and then Safari started acting up, which begs the question whether you replaced system fonts with your own. And you blame your corrupt fonts on the OS? Not bad, and even better from a supposed technically inclined user.
As to your Taskbar comment, that indicates a) you have a preference for it, whihc is your good right, but your comment about Expose being a flashy hack immediately brings you down to troll level. Expose allows you to see, as you might know, the current application's windows (F10 by default), all application windows (F9 by default), or the Desktop (F11 by default). All of those can be changed if you like. Added to which there is added functionality such as being able to hide or quit apps from Expose and the Task switcher, drag and drop to the Expose windows etc.
If you don't like that, it's your preference, and mine to disagree, but calling it a flashy hack is simply asking to get flamed as there just as many people who hate the task bar.
Now, if you said you prefer virtual desktops, as is implemented in most Linux GUIs, then I would understand.
As it is, it just makes you look like you don't like the OS works, which says nothing about how good or bad the OS is.
(And please, how is the Font manager in the OS bad? Which other OS has a better built in Font manager?)
What makes you think you can't "do stuff" with a Mac? Or Linux, or Windows, for that matter.
It's an excellent, well designed, stable, powerful OS coupled with excellent quality hardware and all the applications you need are there unless your definition of doing stuff means playing Half Life.
Ease of use: The OS is very stable, as stable as anything in the Linux world. The apps are generally of better quality than stuff found in the Linux world, although you can use those on OSX as well. The GUI and applications all use the same user interface, which means that you don't have wildly differing interfaces such as is the case of GTK+ and KDE apps. (Think GIMP and OpenOffice and tell me why most apps don't even follow the GNOME HCI guidlines).
The OS is incredibly easy to configure compared to the various competing KDE/Gnome distros (which is exactly the problem there). And if you need the terminal and wish to do stuff by hand, it's there, and you're free to do what you like with the system's innnards as it's OSS and well documented.
The OS, apps and hardware are tightly integrated, which means that problems like hardware compatibility don't exist.
The software and hardware are both of high quality, which really means something if you've used Dell or no name brands.
It goes way byond things like Eye Candy, which says to me that you've never actually used the OS for a period of time yourself.
This is so plainly a troll or flamebait that modding it up as interesting can only be done by the opposite of a Mac zealot; a Windows only person, or a Linux zealot. I'm guessing its a Linux fanatic, due to the Gentoo comment.
OSX has its faults, but none of them are show stoppers, the apps definitely do not crash wildly and the GUI is most certainly not crippled and there is no way in hell that configuration is anywhere as difficult or problematic as in your average Linux distro.
It's not that easy to answer. Generally, the only way to have any idea of when Apple will be releasing new hardware is by following the rumour sites (Thinksecret, Appleinsider etc) and using large pinches of salt. Of those, Thinksecret, the one with the best record on accuracy, is being sued by Apple, so the chances of their being "in the know", in future are slim.
The register is no good as they make all sorts of wild claims which almost never come true.
Usually Apple releases new hard- and software on two regular occasions: Macworld (just past, this january) and the Mac developer conference, in the middle of the year. Buying a new Mac just before then is usually not the best of ideas.
The only way to do this, if you're seriously interested in wasting a lot of time, is to spend time on the Appleinsider forums, noting occasional leaks before Apple C and D's them, and keeping up with current industry trends.
That means, at present: The chances of an Apple G5 Powerbook being released soon are very slim, as far as I can see. The chances that Apple will first release upgraded G4 Powerbooks with the new Motorola G4 and "Freescale" processors is much higher, since those would take the G4 above 1,5GHz.
If you have the patience, wait until the developers conference is over in the middle of the year. I'm sure Apple will have announced something by then.
From TFA "I've even seen screenshots of major commercial aeroplanes with Windows 2000-based operating systems,"
Please tell me this is not true.
The most surprising thing, to me, is that someone actually gave Raskin and his mania $2 million to mess around and do something with this bullshit that nobody wants and nobody will ever use.
I say bullshit, because Raskin is still stuck in the days of the custom CLI based computers, such as C64, Amiga, Osbourne etc, not having realised that that time is long gone and, to compound that, has an obsessive personality that is even worse than Stallmans, with a feeling of self importance that no one else on the planet, with the exception of his brainwashed kids, sees.
I have an idea that the reason Raskin was given the money was because someone realised that the interfaces to cellphones are very bad and in need of some improvement, which they are, and, since cellphones have keypads (ooh laa laa!) and are therefore a good target for Raskin's bullshit.
The thing is, cellphones could definitely use a user interface improvement, as the current method of scrolling through a tiny screen and pressing an ok/not ok button is difficult and time consuming, but the idea of zoom and boom, as Raskin's newest idea is implemented, is not going to be the slightest improvement on this, especially for your average user that is flumoxed by modern guis.
God, the guy is like chewing gum, he just won't go away.
I'm not actually surprised that so-called journalists, especially the technical kind, get good salaries. If you look at the painful clowns running the show at ZDNet, and most technical publications for that matter, including such wonder rags, such as the Register, you know that the Agenda is almost the most important thing. The actual realities of the tech world be damned as long as you have someone passing you your monthly wad of cash.
And this story is no different.
As many have noted, Sony did exactly this kind of hyping the last time around when the PS2, with its emotion engine, was supposed to be the future of all things computing. As everyone knows, the PS2 was a real pain to code for, and the actual performance was not better than the PC's of the day. The Cell will undoubtedly suffer from the same problems when it comes to coding real applications. Concurrency and parrallelism do not an easier coding experience make.
I have no doubt that this thing will be good, but I absolutely doubt that it will have much or any effect on the x86 world of computing. The G4 processor, when it came out with the Altivec SIMD processsor, which was apparently better than SSE at the time didn't turn Apple into the next Microsoft overnight either, did it?
So, I expect that the x86 world will continue to thrive and that Apple will stick some of these Cell processors, having as they do a PPC 970, aka G5, in their core, in some of their machines and will make the usual wild RDF claims about how hot it is while it will be used by only a small fraction of actual Mac developers in reality, the Mac having to maintain backward compatibility only slightly less then the x86 world does.
In other words, it'll be business as usual.
"An experiment onboard the Huygens probe didn't run as planned because someone forgot to turn it on. The team lead for the experiment has put eighteen years of his life into the project, just to watch it not happen after a seven year ride to its destination on Titan."
They forgot to turn on a communications channel, not the experiment.
CowboyNeal: Is this the way you check your stories and enhance your journalistic ethos? Maybe just fucking reading what you post before you do it would help gain slashdot some of the credibility it has lost with massive spelling errors let through by semi-literate editors, regular dupe postings by timothy and tacho and the moronic and childish agenda of most of the editors when it comes to the platform of choice.
Fuckheads.
There is such a thing as a metric ton. Just use Google and you'll learn much.
This whole Boeing FUD campaign of the 7E7 competeing against the A380 ignores the fact that they are not in competition for the same market.
Airbus is developing the A350, a newer version of the A330 with composite wings and the same highly efficient engines of the 7E7 to compete against the 7E7. The A350 will offer the same specs with other advantages that the 7E7 does not have: It shares a type rating with the A330, which means that airlines save money on pilot and crew traning, maintenance and parts.
This measn that all those airlines which now use the A330 can switch to the A350 with little retraining, which is a significant factor in purchasing decisions.
I think Boeing's managers are not sleeping well at the moment.
I've seen the usual round of slashdot trolling in this thread, that happens every time some piece of new technology is invented or some scientific landmark is achieved outside the US. Likewise, there's a good number of anti-American trolls here who like to have a good laugh when something fucks up in the US.
Then there's the rest of us.
I see that quite a few Americans, when feeling nationally challenged because the biggest civil aircraft in the world is no longer American, like to point out how the Boeing 7E7 is more comfortable, takes less time to board and exit, and is more practical, in that it can fly between smaller airports, than the A380.
At the same time, the European pundits point out that the A380 can fly huge amounts of passengers over a longer distance, etc.
And a good number of pundits try to paint this as a clash of philosophies, in that the efficient small craft versus the huge megajumbo craft is what will happen in the future.
I think they miss out the point: These two craft are aimed at significantly different markets. No one will buy an A380 to fly from Paris to London (a few hundred kilometers) or buy a 7E7 to fly from Singapore to London. Sure, long haul routes with low passenger frequencies, such as from Buenos Aires to London will probably not see an A380 and some high frequency long haul non hub routes will not see an 7E7, but that is the general aim of the market. These aircraft do not really compete.
The real competition to the 7E7 is still to come, and has been announced, in the form of the A350, which is a modernised A330, with newer non bleed engines like those of the 7E7, new wings and more composites.
And this is where the real compeition between Airbus and Boeing is being fought: The family of planes.
One of the major reasons that Airbus has been so successful is that it has built almost all of its planes in modularised form in order to optimise components, which means that Pilots trained on an A318 can fly the whole small Airbus family - A318, A319, A320 and A321. It also means that technicians can service all of these planes if trained on one, and that spares etc are shared amongst all of them, lowering the cost to both airlines and manufacturers.
There is a similar thing in the A330 and A340, and even the A380 uses a similar cockpit layout to the A340. And the A350 will be usable by those who have used A330s in the past.
I think a large amount of Boeing's marketing criticism against Airbus is simply because Boeing missed the boat on the new large market. They were actually doing design and market studies togethr with Airbus in the mid 90's until they pulled out because British Airways, their supposed launch customer, wasn't interested. Boeing then went on with a number of utter rubbish campaigns, from the idea of stretched 747X which was then shelved when it failed to garner enough attention, to a ridiculous Sonic Cruiser concept, which was more of a marketing exercise to take attention away from the A380, until they finally realised that they had to come up with a new product and started the far more realistic and achievable 7E7.
Airbus's planes have been less spectacular than Boeing's, but they offered real advantages in cost (Training, maintenance, spares). Boeing's leadership is where the blame lies for spending so much time on hairbrained campaigns and FUD instead of doing some real product development.
I really don't understand the fucking idiots here who go so apeshit about how the GPL robs them of their fucking freedom. It is so simple their children would understand it: If you don't like it, don't fucking use it!.
Stupid fucking bastards.
The fact is that the Dutch were pressuring everyone to accept the text of the proposal. This makes me suspiscious, because, as I pointed out in a recent post, the Dutch have become even more America's whore in recent years than the English have. What do the Dutch have to gain from selling out the EU to the Americans? Are they so scared of the Germans and the French and did America make some really big promises about saving Holland economically and politically, or did they just offer to give the Dutch nice old age homes in Arizona?
I remember trying one of these self heating coffees, bought from a kiosk while on the way to work in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1997. One broke a seal, pressed a tab, waited a minute, and then got really disgustingly sweet black HOT coffee that tasted like shit. Given that the kiosks in Switzerland sell fresh coffee and croissants in any case, the idea didn't last long. I think I saw these things the last time in 1998 in kiosks here.
It's amazing that they're still trying to flog these things though. The coffee tastes about as stale as it is.
I live in Switzerland, where, as a matter of course, most EU policies are implemented even though Switzerland is not part of the EU.
Already now it is law that logs of all communications must be kept by ISP's, telcos etc for around 6 months. This new law will make it legal for these fucking bastards to listen in on my private conversations without any problems and tape it as well.
There goes my privacy. There goes business secrets, and above all...
There goes my ISP's bill spiralling upwards because someone has to pay for the fucking storage.
So much for Europe being a bastion of liberal values. The Europeans are only liberal as long as they can take the piss out of the US.
He does too. Watch him raise the RDF in court while he claims that steve.jobs is his copyrighted name.
A Sense of humour would do you some good, you know?
If you're reading this Alek, I just thought that you could make a little bit of money off your lights, enough to pay for better or more hosting bandwidth and have some fun at the same time: Each year, when you're about to set up your web-controllable lights, why don't you organise a light party at your house at the same time the story gets posted to slashdot and other sites, say over a weekend when people have time.
If you organised the lights so that some kinds of funky patterns could be made via the web, you could make some good money with music, drinks and a grill outside for people who turn up to watch the show.
I know that the idea of a tablet Mac has been discussed to death and even rebirth, it's been around so often, but the sheer amount of interest in a tablet mac, one with that special Apple touch and attention to detail garners such an enormous amount of interest every time it's mentioned that I seriously wonder why Apple hasn't decided to take a risk and Just Do It(TM).
/.'ed, but also the mirrors and the fact that almost every second user created prototype on Mac fan sites is a tablet or PDA style device shows that the interest certainly is there. An Apple Tablet could have a design and features that would finally make the tablet concept kick off, since it's an utter niche product on the Windows side of things.
The fact that not only is TFA's server
Think about it. What could Apple do to make people want a Tablet and what would its target market be? My ideas, by no means perfect, would be:
1. A device that is bigger than current PDA's but smaller than current Windows Tablets, i.e. somewhere around ISO A6 size, or just a bit bigger than the old Newton. This would make it easier to hold (current Tablets are too heavy and too big to hold in one hand while writing with a Pen) and at the same time have enough space for a useful interface and space to sketch on for artists.
2.Very good handwriting recognition. This is important. I think they were getting there when they killed the Newton.
3.An OSX variant with a simplified interface which is more geared towards using a Pen. This would mean perhaps larger controls and a Dock replacement, perhaps a sliding Dock so that necessary apps are within easy reach.
4.A touch screen that enables users to use their fingers as well as a pen. (Therefore the larger controls)
5.Wireless videoand audio streaming. I know Apple has been working on a protocol that is supposed to be good for video streaming. This would or could perhaps tie in with other Apple products such as the iPod and Airport Express where this Tablet could be used as a remote control. This is why being able to use it with one's fingers would be important.
6.Other software and hardware tie ins with Apple products and software, such as the ability to use it as a monitor on movie sets with firewire or usb connectivity, or a cut down version of FCP or iMovie that allows one to cut small video clips. Perhaps a small paint application as well, or a sound editor.
7.It should be shipped with applications that leverage the platform such as a simple sketching application for students and artists, a Apple writing application that makes taking notes as easy or easier than WinXP TE's note taker. Perhaps make the sharing of sketches and notes and media simple via Rendezvous.
8.Apple should make Frameworks for this OS variant available in XCode in order to allow developers to come up with nifty applications as they have for the classic OSX. Java should be included as well to make it interesting for current mobile developers.
9.The target market would be students for artwork and note taking, home consumers for its tie in with Airport Express and iTunes and the iPod, industrial users for use as a digital notepad and checklist, and enterprise users for its note taking and sketching abilities and the ability to make presentations.
This is all a wet dream of course, but I think I'm not alone in wishing for a Tablet with that special Apple touch.
What makes me raise my eyebrows on occasion is the way that the Netherlands seems to be on a particularly anti-european or pro-american (depending on your viewpoint) bent in recent years. The Dutch military choosing the American Apache helicopter instead of the Eurocopter Tiger. The Dutch military choosing the american M-16 rifle for some reason that no one can quite fathom. The Dutch choosing to participate in the F-35 JSF fighter consortium which hasn't really brought them any benefits. The Dutch signing on to the Iraq war fiasco, which wasn't even very popular in Holland at the time. And now the great Microsoft deal of the century when just about every other country in the world, let alone Europe, is at least looking at Open Source alternatives.
There are probably some good business and political reasons behind this but more often than not, the Dutch decisions seem to me to some kind of attempt to deliberately put the Germans and the French at a distance. I can understand that in a way as Holland is smaller than those two and could fear being overruled by them, but it mostly comes across as the epitomy of the old saying "Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face", i.e. doing something on principle even though it has no benefit to one.
Sadly, a lot of stuff in the EU seems to happen like this where national self interest can torpedo some very good projects (and bad as well, to be fair).
When I read about this a couple of days ago on the BBC site, my first thought was, "Wow, Gibson had it so right". This is exactly how Gibson envisaged "Jacking in" with the "Trodes" in Neuromancer all those years ago (1983). On the one hand I find it amusing that Gibson completely missed the wireless revolution, and on the other I find it perhaps telling that I find it amusing, perhaps a measure of how much Gibson did get right.
I wonder how long and how many years it will take before the resolution of these trodes becomes high enough for any user to control implements and for sensors to be able to read images and thoughts directly from the brain, and VICE VERSA, i.e. how long it will be before high resolution images, video and perhaps even holograms can be sent directly to the brain, bypassing eyes etc?
I grew up without computers (I had my first programmable calculator in 1980), writing at school and university was done by hand and reading was done out of books. My grammar and spelling has, in general, been quite good over the years and I do notice that the younger computer generation, i.e. those who grew up with them tend to be worse at spelling and grammar than the older generation. On the other hand, they can generally type much better than I can.
That I suppose, is life. Skills change to suite current requirements.
You write: When I worked at Quark, we had a heated rivalry with Aldus Corp (now Adobe) and their product, PageMaker. Quark introduced several key desktop publishing features in version 3.0 that essentially cemented our lead over PageMaker in the DTP market. Had Aldus been able to get a hold of our source code, Quark's trade secrets, along with the enormous amount of money we had invested in R&D to develop QuarkXPress 3 would have been for naught. Aldus would simply have copied our algorithms and updated their product to match ours.
Joe, you neglect to mention the rest of the story and the other side of the closed source coin:
What fucking happened to Quark Express after its version 3 triumph? As with any monopoly, it essentially sat on its hhuge fat arse and didn't do anything until it released version 4 almost 6 or 7 years later.
6 or 7 years!!!!!!!!!!
Quark simply ignored any user problems and sat on its fat behind until they themselves decided that they could make some more money with an essentially useless and horribly expensive upgrade to Quark 4 and then years later Quark 5.
Quark only started panicking when Adobe started stealing Quark's customers left, right and center with Indesign.
The problem with closed source is that it offers the clever innovator that first made a bale of cash with his product absolutely no incentive to improve it later on. Look at Quark Express and look at Microsoft as a whole. I wouldn't exactly call Microsoft innovating, as much as they love to throw that word around.
So where'e the middle ground? Or does the fact that you work for Microsoft make you blind to alternatives?
It's not guns that kill people, it's robots.