Sorry it took so long for a reply (just saw your post).
In regard to piracy of Mac OS/X on x86, here's what I think: Let people copy it if they want to. As a matter of fact, if I were Apple I'd give Mac OS/X away *for free* to x86 users. Why? Because I don't think Apple can make money only on hardware sales, but on innovative applications as well.
Give Mac OS/X for free, and have people buy the iApps and all the other cool Apple creations (like the iPod).
As you said, people would just pirate OS/X, but if it was free to download (or a very small price on a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, say, $20 bucks), I very much doubt people would not obtain it by legal means.
This could also give a much-needed boost to OS/X. If Apple can convince "only" 50 million PC users to install OS/X, then this is already a market at least 5 times larger than they have now. And I'm pretty sure the offset in market share into a software-driven x86 market would more than makeup Apple's current hardware-driven business.
Once they have that market, they can exploit it with custom products, gadgets, subscription services, etc. They could even make money making OS/X a nice media delivery platform (they have a head start already with the iPod and its desktop interface counterpart).
What else would I do? I'd integrate all the libraries needed to run Linux into OS/X, so that OS/X would inmediatelly gain acceptance at the enterprise level, the geek level, and the "linux media hype" level. I'd also contribute the code for Aqua and all the nice GUI back to the Linux community. In other words, take advantage of all the momentum going for Linux. Imagine this: The fastest growing server OS (Linux) with the most advanced GUI environment (OS/X). This would be a killer combination that could scare even Microsoft. Throw into the mix OpenOffice, Java, Mozilla, mySQL, PHP, etc, and Apple all of a sudden has a potent weapon aginst the wintel monopoly.
I myself would be the absolute very first one rushing to download OS/X for my x86 box. And I have the feeling the millions of Linux and Windows geeks would do the same right away as well. And once they do, the rest of the "Average Joe" herd would just follow the geeks and what the media says its the next cool thing. The adoption to *trully* "switch" would be speeded up by the fact that a PC from Dell/IBM/HP/Sony/etc would cost over 100 bucks less with OS/X than with Windows, and right off the bat users get a desktop environment that they simply could not get from a plain Linux box.
Heck, I'd go all the way and rename the product "Apple Linux". I can almost gurantee that within a year or even six months this would become the dominant Linux distribution. And this, is A Good Thing, since people would finally get a choice of OS (Red Hat Linux, Mandrake, Apple Linux, etc) and yet have all of them run the same applications.
Infonaut, first of all I should point out that I respect your comments (and I'm not being sarchastic), but maybe there was one point I didn't get across well: I'm not saying that Apple should stop innovating, what I saying is that it should innovate in *another* space (more specifically, the PC space).
Can you imagine what would have happened if any of the 500 Million PC users could get their hands on the iApps or the iPod? I bet *that* would be a good switching campaign. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go as far as to say that had Apple released the iPod software for both Windows and Macs, that by now they could have sold 10 times as many iPods (yes, I know you can use the iPod with Windows, but not with Apple's kick-ass software).
So my point is, Apple should switch, forget about hardware for a while, port OS/X to the x86 platform in order to make it trully easy for users to switch, and *then* once they have a good market share in the x86 space they can start influencing hardware OEM makers to make hardware the way Apple wants it to be designed.
As for the transition period, the options are: (1) emulation (slow but doable, specially on fast PCs), and (2) sell a plug-in PCI card with a PPC to run legacy code on the PPC card and new code on the x86 CPU. And remember, when users swithced from the 68xxx to the PPC, the change went relatively swiftly, the same could be said more or less of OS9 to OS/X, so one more "traumatic" transition for developers should not be too much of a problem for a company like Apple, which has some of the most loyal developers on the planet right now.
This is a sad day for Mac users, but this is nothing more than business reality.
Adobe gets most of their money from the PC market, and the truth is that regardless of all the hype Steve Jobs has made recently regarding the Mac G4's, almost all benchmarks comparing a top of the line G4 to a top of the line PC simply give the PC a winning mark by a landslide in graphics and video tests.
Now let's not get into a flame war over this, I love Macs too, but hey, if I have to render a large project, and it takes half the time to do so on a PC, then I will use a PC even if its user interface is not as nice as the Mac.
This is why for some time now I've been advocating that Mac OS/X be ported to the x86 architecture. It's the only way Mac OS/X will be able to run on equal footing to Windows. Let's face it, Apple being the only major consumer of Power PC chips for consumer (I know, IBM uses them on large servers too) is not a good incentive to innovate, while on the PC market AMD, Intel, and Transmeta are always killing each other to come up with the fastest and "bestest" processor, and at the cheapest possible price.
Macs either move to the x86 architecture or they are dead. And *please*, I know many fanatics will argue that "what makes Macs great is the amazing integration between hardware and software, something which cannot be acchieved or guaranteed in a commodity-based PC market", however not only is this not true (Apple for example could publish open APIs to have hardware vendors support in order to support all needed integration, and it could also build Mac PCs itself if it chooses to), but simply getting stuck with the past. Yes, it'd be great to control the hardware and the software, but right now business reality is telling Apple that this is not the time to do so.
So, let's get on with it: I know this is a blow to Apple, and I know many Mac users will cry foul to Adobe, but I also think this is a necessary blow to Apple (and mostly, Steve Jobs) to let them know that things are simply moving really fast in the PC world in comparisson to Apple.
Heck, you can already buy WiFi "g" for PCs much cheaper than on the Mac already, plus all PCs nowdays come with USB 2.0, and FireWire is almost standard or really cheap to add (20 to 40 bucks or so). About the *only* things Apple has going for itself right now is (1) FireWire 800 (and I bet you'll eventually find it cheaper on PCs), (2) the iApps, which are very easy to use, but I bet Microsoft or someone else will copy them soon enough, (3) the iPod (competitors are getting close also on copying it and improving it as well), and (4) Mac OS/X, which is a nice piece of work.
So Steve: Port Mac OS/X to x86 *soon* before you let Apple die in obsolescence. It's just you versus *thousands* of companies making products for the PC commodity market, a market which due to competition is making products better and cheaper all the time. The choice is clear, evolve or die.
What I *really* hope the anounce is support for AMD's x86-64 architecture.
This would be great for AMD since I'm sure many users would gladly upgrade their motherboards/CPU to run both Windows and OS/X, and it'd be good for Apple for several reasons, among them:
- Compete with Windows on equal hardware, thus now having a chance to prove it is better or not than Windows on identical hardware.
- Allow an easy upgrade path from the x86 croud to the OS/X world, since it is easier to buy a motherboard and CPU and continue running your Windows apps, than buying a whole new machine just to run OS/X on it.
- It'd give Apple a head start on the x86 race on Windows own's turf. I can imagine the headlines "Apple beats Microsoft at shipping a 64-bit x86 OS", which is the kind of things Steve Jobs likes to do.
- It'd bring Apple to the commodity pricing world of the PC. This is bad for Apple for hardware upgrades, since users would stop buying peripherals from Apple, and instead buy them from third parties, but it'd be good for Apple's software business which could potentially grow tremendously, thus the bottom line is possitive for Apple.
- It'd end the perception that the Apple machines are slower than Windows-based machines, since now they can be compared on identical hardware running at identical speeds (we'll also finally know if Steve Jobs's claims of superior software technology are true for the first time...)
On a side note, I hope that Steve Jobs doesn't give himself to temptation and releases OS/X for the x86-64 arquitecture ONLY. There are several millions x86-32 PCs out there which could easily be upgraded to OS/X with a simple software install without buying new 64-bit hardware, so let's hope they're smart about it...
Finally, please, PLEASE Steve, simple admit that a two-button mouse (along with scroll well which also serves as a third button) is simply better than a single-button Apple mouse, and get on with it!!! A one-button mouse SUCKS!!!
I still remember the very first time I saw Mosaic: I was at a computer lab and a friend just told me about this "cool" thing that just came out. Needless to say, me being a geek and all, it took me only 5 minutes later to create my first web page (back then, HTML was *ultra* simple). I also vividly remember saying to my friend "this is the future of the Internet".
I actually remember that at one point it was possible to view *ALL* the websites on the planet (tell that to the younger generation today!), and how every single day was very exciting to discover new things (the birth of yahoo, altavista, ebay, and amazon come to mind).
That day I saw mosaic is on my list of days I could never forget, like the challenger explossion, the berlin wall coming down, the wall trade center attacks, and recently the columbia tragedy...
PC prices are so cheap nowdays, that I'm wondering how come no company has come up with a "PC on a PCI card" which you can drop into a mac, and use as a normal PC instead of emulating it...
Whoever does this just needs to make sure to allow the mac user to keep using the same keyboard, mouse, ethernet, hard drive (a partition for the PC or some form of file sharing), and USB ports, and if possible to loop-back the PC video signal to display it into a window inside the Mac via some kind of utility. after that, it'd be a good hack to allow cut-copy-paste between the two environments (easy to program using a simple socket-based cut-copy-paste driver on the PC and Mac side).
And remember, all a user needs for basic tasks is a simple 1Ghz celeron or athlon, 128 or 256 MB RAM, and an 8/16/32 MB video chipset. Something like this could be easily be sold for $300 dollars, and my guess is that it'd sell like hot cakes. The only challenge when you think about it is the software I described above, and even then there are ways to simplify things, like requiring the user to buy a dedicated hard drive for the PC side (about 60 bucks for 30GB).
So, any takers???
Side note: There was something like this once made for the Commodore Amiga 2000, but at the time it was a rather slow 80286 if I recall correctly.
Who would have imagined that after 20 years the C= 64 is STILL being sold in places like china? (last I read it was selling a MILLION units a year).
But that's not all, the machine was hacked so much *in software* that near the end of its life in the western world hackers could display 640 x 480 (oe 640 x 400?) high resolution graphics on a chip hardwired to produce only 320 x 240 (I think those are the numbers if I recall correctly, might be 320 x 200). Hackers also broke the sprite (i.e.: high-speed moving/animated graphics blocks) barrier from 8 (or 16?) to basically an unlimited number. Hackers also figured out a way to display graphics in the "overscan" area (i.e.: the black area around the display), thus increasing even more the resolution. You can also find software-based synthesizers that could extend the number of sound voices to 6 (or 8?). There were also hacks to make it seem as if it could display hundreds of colors (as opposed to 16).
Up to this day millions are still used for all kinds of control applications (robotics, telecom, industrial, etc).
I guess we could call this machine the world's most hacked machine ever (and pretty close in second place was probably the Commodore Amiga).
Today's ERP systems (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, etc) suffer from the exact same problem: they promise you the moon (and many times actually deliver it), but once you depend on it you're completely stuck with it. In the case of SAP (and the same case happens to other ERP systems) if later you want to change something it's going to cost you big. Plus you usually pay very high consulting and maintenance fees.
The same can be said of other packaged applications which do not make public their data storage formats and/or communication protocols.
This is why I think it is such a big deal to have (1) a true cross-platform executable platform (i.e.: java), (2) a true cross-platform communications protocol and data interchange (i.e.: XML), and whenever possible (3) a comprehensible and standards-compliant-as-possible data repository (i.e.: mySQL, Postgress).
Note that regardless of the article being viased or not 9as some other readers here point out), the reality is that many IT managers are beginning to realize this now. This is why the huge push to Linux, Java, PHP, and XML, and many Open-Source technologies.
It is also why Linux, XML, and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) has had such a success, and why many IT managers are thinking twice about Microsoft.Net.
First right off the bat: I'm a Java programmer but also script in a few scripting languages.
Now that that's out of the way...
The problem with scripting large enterprise-class applications has nothing to do with being productive right off the bat, but rather with maintenance in the future. I'm sure many here can remember at least once in their lives glancing over someone else's Perl code, just to see a whole bunch of confusing syntax being used.
Don't get me wrong, there *is* a role for scripting jobs (like for example, for gluing executables in different languages quickly), but I just don't see it at the enterprise level.
Note also that scripters (remember, I am one of them also) also suffer from "script coolness", which translates to "doing the job in the fewest amount of lines of code and keyboard strokes", thus making the code difficult to read for others.
Similarly, in languages like Perl, there's countless ways of doing the same thing, and although in some areas this is good, when it comes for someone else reading your code that can become a nightmare, since maybe ther're used to doing things in a different ways. This is something that is much more restricted in "traditional" languages like C, C++, VB, Java, Delphi, etc (side note, YES, I know the obsfucated C contest, but that's usually the exception).
Note that I'm not saying that *everyone* who scripts does it in a way hard for others to undertand, I'm just saying that it is much more common to see this behavior in scripts than in traditional code (where we also find many cases of obsfucation).
So maybe what we need is a scripting tool that is very simple and fast, as opposed to extremelly powerful and complex. However, by doing so then script writers could probably no longer do a million things in a few lines of code, so maybe this is unlikely to happen (or doom to fail), since it will kill the spirit of scripting languages in the first place.
Botton line: Use object-orientes languages for large, complex apps, and scripts for small and self-contained tasks.
I think the original poster is right about we needing keys for the most frequently done operations. My take is that we need extra keys that do the following:
- Copy - Cut - Paste - Undo - Help
Optional keys: - Volume up - Volume down - Mute/Unmute - Play - Stop - Record - Fast forward - Fast rewind - Next (chapter/song/video) - Previous (chapter/song/video)
I also wonder how many people actually use the ALT, CTRL, SHIFT and similar keys on THE RIGHT SIDE of the keyboards (for as long I can remember I have NEVER pressed any of those keys on the right side, I only used their sister keys on the left side of the space bar).
Give us a "do not contact" list system first!!!
on
U.S. Endorses ENUM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As any educated slashdot reader knows, the instant (and I literaly mean 1 second later) that ENUM becomes operational there will be millions of spam messages targeted to those poor souls.
So, I recommend lawmakers first create a global "do not contact me" list where anyone can go in and declare their ENUM "spam-less".
Of course, this will NOT stop spammers from moving their operations to other countries were such laws do not apply and then send you spam anyways.
In other words, I think the ENUM idea is a great idea, but one which spam will very likely kill. Just imagine, once a single spammer gets a hold of my "universal address" there is NO WAY I will be able to stop such spam. Today at least I can get a different email address and get done with it, but once you have your ENUM tied to your home address, personal website, home phone, fax, work phone, cell phone, beeper, etc, changing emails/numbers/addresses all of a sudden becomes VERY hard. As a matter of fact I wouldn't be surprised if the spam community is actually lobbying to get ENUM approved.
Note that I *wish* I was wrong (and if I'm proven wrong you can trust me that I'll be the first one to be happy about it), but my take on this is that something like ENUM will only work effectively in the long future when all countries agree on a worldwide do-no-call list with legal penalties regardless of in which country you are.
- The bluetooth wireless gaming will be AWESOME (I can already imagine finding people on the streets, airports, bus, trains and playing with them with no cables).
- Integration of gaming, radio, mp3, agenda, sound recorder, cell phone, address book and [limited] internet is a HUGE plus (will this be the future of PDAs?)
- Ability to play Java games.
Dislikes:
- The screen resolution is a joke.
- No camera.
- No Palm OS compatibility.
- Size (I'd have made the unit as wide as the screen itself, and then make the screen larger to the sides, and to save space have the joypad or the keypad slide out from underneath.
Overall, if the price is right (under US$200) I'll buy it.
Most anyone I know is of the opinion that manned space exploration should go on, and although my adventurous romantic side wants the same, my rational side begs to differ.
Most costs associated with space travel have to do with the fact that space ships are manned. Take humans away and all of a sudden the costs plummet.
A good accountant not familiar with the space industry would say that that's not the case, but once you realize that a huge amount of money actually goes to researchers and engineers whose sole purpose is to make the astronauts safe and to provide for all their needs (and space-taking) in space, you'd quickly realize that the money should go somewhere else.
But where should the money go? I suggest to better autonomous robots, to research in remote virtual environments, to better artificial intelligence. Research in these areas would lead to smaller vehicles (or the same size but with bigger payload, cheaper vehicles (since the human safety aspect could be discarded), longer missions (a robot can live in space for as long as we can supply an energy source to it), more complex missions (a robot-based mission to mars is way less complicated than a human one), and probably get more research done (a robot never needs sleep and can do several things simultaneously and with a low error percentage).
Of course, for the time being a robot will never get close to human intuition when it comes to improvising or noticing "funny but interesting things" that could be of crucial importance but that a robot would never notice. This is why we need to invest heavily on new and novel ways to think about artificial intelligence.
Who knows, maybe in the future once we have mastered the heavens with robots it'd be safer, cheaper, and more practical to flight humans again. But in any case, the long range future of space exploration belongs to intelligent machines who will be our direct descendants as they succeed us by the pure laws of evolution.
And on a side note, I'm pretty much certain that such machines will have feelings just as we do (or maybe even more so), and in a sense they truly will be humans, just not flesh-based, and they will be better than us in every way. I wish they could read this sometime in the future, so that they know there many of us alive who would feel very proud to be alive and experience the time when such events will happen.
They include a 1.5Gb drive in order to protect the industry's lucrative tape business.
Think about it, why would you ever buy a tape again when you can record countless hours of a 100Gb drive and then transfer your data to an even larger drive on your PC and keep reusing the drive on the camera??? (this is what's happening today with digital photography)
This is the end of tape as we know it, and the industry is trying to hold on to it for as long as it can, even though it is doomed to disappear in favor of networks and huge drives or solid state media.
How have you stayed intouch with tech these years?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I was wondering, even though you were not allowed near a machine or the Internet, how did you keep up to date with the latest developments on tech-related issues?
This I'm sure will be the first question that will come to mind when anyone considers paying for your services as a security expert. i.e.: how can you help a company when you have been "out of the loop" all these years? I figure that since most security concerns are usually on the social engineering side that this will not be a big deal, but when it comes to other more technical aspects, how will you be able to help them?
No system is secure: Social Engineering. Education
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think Microsoft decided to go all the way with a full OS-Software-Hardware security solution without first asking the question "What are the sources of security problems on a computer?", to which 99% of the cases the answer would have to be (1) social engineering and (2) user's naiveness.
By Social Engineering I refer to the oldest form of hacking: convince someone to do something for you on his/her machine. No hardware, software, or operating system can protect a user from this today.
By user's naiveness I mean that most users (who naturally are not tech-savy) simply open every email attachment they get, or simply click on "yes" or "ok" on every pop up they see without first reading. Combine this with Social Engineering and I really don't see how Microsoft will stop the wave of attacks against windows machines.
The only thing I have seen so far that works to a good degree is Java's sandbox model, where in a sense every program is an island unto itself, and if it wants to communicate with other programs it needs explicit permissions or use well-document open-standards-based protocols. However even this suffers from user's naiveness sindrome.
Bottom line: Security is an EDUCATIONAL issue. Create awareness and teach people the basics of security (don't give your credit card number to ANYONE who calls you, don't open attachments from people you don't know, use an updated virus scanner, patch the latest discovered holes in your OS, use a firewall, etc), if we manage to do this (a daunting task), I think we can get MUCH farther in the security arena than instead taking all our freedom away in a completelly-controlled and restrictive environment.
After having read Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, I see more and more how amazing his book is. This DNA-fractal mechanism is exactly what he talks about in his book when he explains how all this complexity we see in life and the universe itself actually arise from much simpler structures which simply apply a simple computation over and over again (in this case, like a Fractal Computation) to obtain complex behavior.
If such patterns are indeed found in DNA, it will only provide more evidence to support Wolfram's theories (and I trully hope a Nobel prize is waiting for him).
I think considering the circunstances, every nation on Earth should sign a waiver allowing a nuclear weapon to be sent to a far-away asteroid for testing purposes.
After all, the reason treaties banning nuclear space weapons were signed was to protect mankind, and in this particular case it so happens that protecting mankind is the reason to send a test nuclear weapon to an asteroid.
I was thinking, many of the options we have are merely theoretical. I'd like NASA to spend a few of my tax dollars actually *testing* out 2 or 3 of these ideas on a real asteroid to see if they really work.
For example, will a near nuclear blast really be absorved by the meteor without it changing its course? How much of a force will it be needed to push an asteroid with rockets or the like?
So let's test now so that when the real thing comes and we launch our savior to space, we don't find out in the last minute that it fails.
On a side note, this shouldn't be a NASA-only effort, I think the European Space Agency and many other countries should ship in as well, as this concerns all of mankind.
In the old days, it was a big deal when we went from a 100 Mhz chip to a 150Mhz one. Today though a 50Mhz difference means nothing.
Don't you all think it is time for Intel and AMD to stop bringing out a new chip which is 0.000005% faster than the previous one, and instead start coming out with chips ONLY when they make a noticiable performance difference???
In other words, I hope that the next chip after the 3Ghz one is a 3.5Ghz one, then 4Ghz, 5Ghz, etc. And by the time we get to a 10Ghz chip they should start making them in 1Ghz increments.
Sure, I know clock cycles is not the whole story to performance, but geez, I see people upgrading their 1.9 Ghz systems to 2Ghz systems for several hundred bucks like if that's going to make a noticiable difference (on the other hand, it is probably because of *those* people that Intel/AMD do what they do)!!!
First of all, I suggest you learn Java above anything else, and here's why:
1. Learning Java automatically frees you from having to develop for a specific platform. If you know Java you can develop for Windows, Linux, Solaris or any other OS. In other words, you can target 99% of all available platforms. As an example, now all you need to learn in Linux is simply "how to get around" in the command line, but for actual development you won't have to dig in and learn all the Linux libraries, or all the Windows libraries, or all the solaris libraries, etc...
2. Learning Java gives you a consisten way to access most new technologies. Once you now Java you can for example use Jave Server Pages very easily afterwards (and therefore save a step by not having to learn a new technology like PHP (which is GREAT by the way, but I'm giving you the path of least resistance here)).
3. Likewise, if you know Java you can access mySQL, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, or any other database with the same JDBC interface. This gives you access to 99% of all databases in the world, without having to learn any one in particular (besides the obvious administration tasks).
4. Java also gives you direct access to Web Services (I recommend a product called GLUE by a company called The Mind Electric, above Sun's own implementation of Web Services). With Java and GLUE *anything* you code or have coded before can be transformed into a Web Service automagically, with no coding. And for new Web Services projects you can also tweak to your heart's desire. It is the absolute easiest, most powerfull Web Services tool in the market (believe me, I've tried them *all*, even the.Net tools).
5. Java also gives you consistent APIs for anything from GUIs to sounds, to networking across all platforms. As an example, we developed a *HUGE* Java-based distributed application with Java, using everything from JSPs to Swing and custom socket programming, and to our customer's surprised, after the whole application was developed and tested on Windows, we tried "for the heck of it" to copy the class files to a Linux machine. Guess what? The darn thing work 100% perfect (after we modified a small configuration file with directory names and things like that of course)!!! No recompilation, no code tweaking, no nothing. As a matter of fact the customer quickly opened her eyes, decided to stop paying licenses to Microsoft, dropped Windows, and is now using a farm of Linux machines with the new app. In the future, should some new OS that is better than Linux come out, she'll have the chance again to simply move the class files and everything should work.
6. Java protects you from the future. You bet that as soon as Grid Computing takes off that IBM, Sun, Bea, Oracle, HP and others will provide a Grid Services API for Java, and again since you already have the Java foundation, all you need to learn is the new API for Grid Computing and forget about the details of where it will run.
Note that other technologies like PHP are great, but it does not integrate all the functionality that Java offers you, and certainly not across so many platforms. However if all you want to do is dynamic websites, PHP is also a GREAT choice for the job.
As for C and C++, the biggest drawback is how easy it is to create bugs, how problematic it can be to port applications (little endian, big endian, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, order of operations left-to-right or right-to-left, etc), and it just simply does not behave the same across platforms. Sure a very experienced programmer can greatly reduce these hurdles, but why bother really if Java gives you garbage collection, no pointers, a small and simple syntax? In other words, it gives you what you need to get the job done.
Note that TONS of people will tell you how Java is "slow". This was true 4, or maybe 3 years ago during the dark ages of Applets, but nowdays with Just-In-Time compilers, and Dynamic Compilation, I dare anyone to compare performace of a typical C/C++ application to that of a typical Java application. Is Java still slower, maybe yes (specially in the GUI department), but remember that Moore's Law is on your side: today *any* PC you buy will run Java apps more than well enough for your needs. As for big server farms, I rather have a 15% performance loss than having to maintain the same app over many different operating systems, or even modify the app everytime the same operating system comes up with a new release, or than having to spends hours or days hunting down bugs lurking in hard-to-decipher C++ code.
Bottom line: Java gives you simplicity, access to 99% of all Operating Systems, databases, Web Services, and media and networking APIs you'll ever need, so learn it and shield yourself from the deep technical details and instead concentrate on your business solutions.
Side note for other geeks: Yes, I *do* know the importance of sometimes you having no choice but diging in into the tech details of things, but that's something I asume the person I'm trying to help here already knows from his own experience.
Read your own post. You're comparing TrueSpace version 1.0 and 2.0 (the versions you said you tried) to the latest incarnations of the other high-end tools.
For your information, TrueSpace is past version 5 already. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 were released about 5 years ago.
As for your sarchastic "WOWs", you should know that TrueSpace was actually called Caligari on the Amiga before being ported to the PC, and back then it had a native real-time 3D interface for all operations, making the tool's impressive modeling tools dating WAY back the tools later appearing on the other packages you refer to here.
Please learn your history before you post flame-type comments.
On a side note, to teach you some more, LightWave was also born on the Amiga as part of Newteks's Video Toaster.
Oh, and before I forget, you should learn the difference between a tool offering native 3D modeling, versus a tool supporting native XYZ modeling with a 3D window for preview and basic operations. TrueSpace is a tool offering native 3D modeling AND in the latest version also native XYZ modeling, as well as native 3D+ZYZ modeling.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello again Infonaut,
Sorry it took so long for a reply (just saw your post).
In regard to piracy of Mac OS/X on x86, here's what I think: Let people copy it if they want to. As a matter of fact, if I were Apple I'd give Mac OS/X away *for free* to x86 users. Why? Because I don't think Apple can make money only on hardware sales, but on innovative applications as well.
Give Mac OS/X for free, and have people buy the iApps and all the other cool Apple creations (like the iPod).
As you said, people would just pirate OS/X, but if it was free to download (or a very small price on a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, say, $20 bucks), I very much doubt people would not obtain it by legal means.
This could also give a much-needed boost to OS/X. If Apple can convince "only" 50 million PC users to install OS/X, then this is already a market at least 5 times larger than they have now. And I'm pretty sure the offset in market share into a software-driven x86 market would more than makeup Apple's current hardware-driven business.
Once they have that market, they can exploit it with custom products, gadgets, subscription services, etc. They could even make money making OS/X a nice media delivery platform (they have a head start already with the iPod and its desktop interface counterpart).
What else would I do? I'd integrate all the libraries needed to run Linux into OS/X, so that OS/X would inmediatelly gain acceptance at the enterprise level, the geek level, and the "linux media hype" level. I'd also contribute the code for Aqua and all the nice GUI back to the Linux community. In other words, take advantage of all the momentum going for Linux. Imagine this: The fastest growing server OS (Linux) with the most advanced GUI environment (OS/X). This would be a killer combination that could scare even Microsoft. Throw into the mix OpenOffice, Java, Mozilla, mySQL, PHP, etc, and Apple all of a sudden has a potent weapon aginst the wintel monopoly.
I myself would be the absolute very first one rushing to download OS/X for my x86 box. And I have the feeling the millions of Linux and Windows geeks would do the same right away as well. And once they do, the rest of the "Average Joe" herd would just follow the geeks and what the media says its the next cool thing. The adoption to *trully* "switch" would be speeded up by the fact that a PC from Dell/IBM/HP/Sony/etc would cost over 100 bucks less with OS/X than with Windows, and right off the bat users get a desktop environment that they simply could not get from a plain Linux box.
Heck, I'd go all the way and rename the product "Apple Linux". I can almost gurantee that within a year or even six months this would become the dominant Linux distribution. And this, is A Good Thing, since people would finally get a choice of OS (Red Hat Linux, Mandrake, Apple Linux, etc) and yet have all of them run the same applications.
Infonaut, first of all I should point out that I respect your comments (and I'm not being sarchastic), but maybe there was one point I didn't get across well: I'm not saying that Apple should stop innovating, what I saying is that it should innovate in *another* space (more specifically, the PC space).
Can you imagine what would have happened if any of the 500 Million PC users could get their hands on the iApps or the iPod? I bet *that* would be a good switching campaign. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go as far as to say that had Apple released the iPod software for both Windows and Macs, that by now they could have sold 10 times as many iPods (yes, I know you can use the iPod with Windows, but not with Apple's kick-ass software).
So my point is, Apple should switch, forget about hardware for a while, port OS/X to the x86 platform in order to make it trully easy for users to switch, and *then* once they have a good market share in the x86 space they can start influencing hardware OEM makers to make hardware the way Apple wants it to be designed.
As for the transition period, the options are: (1) emulation (slow but doable, specially on fast PCs), and (2) sell a plug-in PCI card with a PPC to run legacy code on the PPC card and new code on the x86 CPU. And remember, when users swithced from the 68xxx to the PPC, the change went relatively swiftly, the same could be said more or less of OS9 to OS/X, so one more "traumatic" transition for developers should not be too much of a problem for a company like Apple, which has some of the most loyal developers on the planet right now.
This is a sad day for Mac users, but this is nothing more than business reality.
Adobe gets most of their money from the PC market, and the truth is that regardless of all the hype Steve Jobs has made recently regarding the Mac G4's, almost all benchmarks comparing a top of the line G4 to a top of the line PC simply give the PC a winning mark by a landslide in graphics and video tests.
Now let's not get into a flame war over this, I love Macs too, but hey, if I have to render a large project, and it takes half the time to do so on a PC, then I will use a PC even if its user interface is not as nice as the Mac.
This is why for some time now I've been advocating that Mac OS/X be ported to the x86 architecture. It's the only way Mac OS/X will be able to run on equal footing to Windows. Let's face it, Apple being the only major consumer of Power PC chips for consumer (I know, IBM uses them on large servers too) is not a good incentive to innovate, while on the PC market AMD, Intel, and Transmeta are always killing each other to come up with the fastest and "bestest" processor, and at the cheapest possible price.
Macs either move to the x86 architecture or they are dead. And *please*, I know many fanatics will argue that "what makes Macs great is the amazing integration between hardware and software, something which cannot be acchieved or guaranteed in a commodity-based PC market", however not only is this not true (Apple for example could publish open APIs to have hardware vendors support in order to support all needed integration, and it could also build Mac PCs itself if it chooses to), but simply getting stuck with the past. Yes, it'd be great to control the hardware and the software, but right now business reality is telling Apple that this is not the time to do so.
So, let's get on with it: I know this is a blow to Apple, and I know many Mac users will cry foul to Adobe, but I also think this is a necessary blow to Apple (and mostly, Steve Jobs) to let them know that things are simply moving really fast in the PC world in comparisson to Apple.
Heck, you can already buy WiFi "g" for PCs much cheaper than on the Mac already, plus all PCs nowdays come with USB 2.0, and FireWire is almost standard or really cheap to add (20 to 40 bucks or so). About the *only* things Apple has going for itself right now is (1) FireWire 800 (and I bet you'll eventually find it cheaper on PCs), (2) the iApps, which are very easy to use, but I bet Microsoft or someone else will copy them soon enough, (3) the iPod (competitors are getting close also on copying it and improving it as well), and (4) Mac OS/X, which is a nice piece of work.
So Steve: Port Mac OS/X to x86 *soon* before you let Apple die in obsolescence. It's just you versus *thousands* of companies making products for the PC commodity market, a market which due to competition is making products better and cheaper all the time. The choice is clear, evolve or die.
What I *really* hope the anounce is support for AMD's x86-64 architecture.
This would be great for AMD since I'm sure many users would gladly upgrade their motherboards/CPU to run both Windows and OS/X, and it'd be good for Apple for several reasons, among them:
- Compete with Windows on equal hardware, thus now having a chance to prove it is better or not than Windows on identical hardware.
- Allow an easy upgrade path from the x86 croud to the OS/X world, since it is easier to buy a motherboard and CPU and continue running your Windows apps, than buying a whole new machine just to run OS/X on it.
- It'd give Apple a head start on the x86 race on Windows own's turf. I can imagine the headlines "Apple beats Microsoft at shipping a 64-bit x86 OS", which is the kind of things Steve Jobs likes to do.
- It'd bring Apple to the commodity pricing world of the PC. This is bad for Apple for hardware upgrades, since users would stop buying peripherals from Apple, and instead buy them from third parties, but it'd be good for Apple's software business which could potentially grow tremendously, thus the bottom line is possitive for Apple.
- It'd end the perception that the Apple machines are slower than Windows-based machines, since now they can be compared on identical hardware running at identical speeds (we'll also finally know if Steve Jobs's claims of superior software technology are true for the first time...)
On a side note, I hope that Steve Jobs doesn't give himself to temptation and releases OS/X for the x86-64 arquitecture ONLY. There are several millions x86-32 PCs out there which could easily be upgraded to OS/X with a simple software install without buying new 64-bit hardware, so let's hope they're smart about it...
Finally, please, PLEASE Steve, simple admit that a two-button mouse (along with scroll well which also serves as a third button) is simply better than a single-button Apple mouse, and get on with it!!! A one-button mouse SUCKS!!!
I still remember the very first time I saw Mosaic: I was at a computer lab and a friend just told me about this "cool" thing that just came out. Needless to say, me being a geek and all, it took me only 5 minutes later to create my first web page (back then, HTML was *ultra* simple). I also vividly remember saying to my friend "this is the future of the Internet".
I actually remember that at one point it was possible to view *ALL* the websites on the planet (tell that to the younger generation today!), and how every single day was very exciting to discover new things (the birth of yahoo, altavista, ebay, and amazon come to mind).
That day I saw mosaic is on my list of days I could never forget, like the challenger explossion, the berlin wall coming down, the wall trade center attacks, and recently the columbia tragedy...
PC prices are so cheap nowdays, that I'm wondering how come no company has come up with a "PC on a PCI card" which you can drop into a mac, and use as a normal PC instead of emulating it...
Whoever does this just needs to make sure to allow the mac user to keep using the same keyboard, mouse, ethernet, hard drive (a partition for the PC or some form of file sharing), and USB ports, and if possible to loop-back the PC video signal to display it into a window inside the Mac via some kind of utility. after that, it'd be a good hack to allow cut-copy-paste between the two environments (easy to program using a simple socket-based cut-copy-paste driver on the PC and Mac side).
And remember, all a user needs for basic tasks is a simple 1Ghz celeron or athlon, 128 or 256 MB RAM, and an 8/16/32 MB video chipset. Something like this could be easily be sold for $300 dollars, and my guess is that it'd sell like hot cakes. The only challenge when you think about it is the software I described above, and even then there are ways to simplify things, like requiring the user to buy a dedicated hard drive for the PC side (about 60 bucks for 30GB).
So, any takers???
Side note: There was something like this once made for the Commodore Amiga 2000, but at the time it was a rather slow 80286 if I recall correctly.
The best to place to find a C=64, Amiga, Apple, or Atari computer nowdays is at ebay. Do a search and you'll find some amazing deals.
Who would have imagined that after 20 years the C= 64 is STILL being sold in places like china? (last I read it was selling a MILLION units a year).
But that's not all, the machine was hacked so much *in software* that near the end of its life in the western world hackers could display 640 x 480 (oe 640 x 400?) high resolution graphics on a chip hardwired to produce only 320 x 240 (I think those are the numbers if I recall correctly, might be 320 x 200). Hackers also broke the sprite (i.e.: high-speed moving/animated graphics blocks) barrier from 8 (or 16?) to basically an unlimited number. Hackers also figured out a way to display graphics in the "overscan" area (i.e.: the black area around the display), thus increasing even more the resolution. You can also find software-based synthesizers that could extend the number of sound voices to 6 (or 8?). There were also hacks to make it seem as if it could display hundreds of colors (as opposed to 16).
Up to this day millions are still used for all kinds of control applications (robotics, telecom, industrial, etc).
I guess we could call this machine the world's most hacked machine ever (and pretty close in second place was probably the Commodore Amiga).
Today's ERP systems (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, etc) suffer from the exact same problem: they promise you the moon (and many times actually deliver it), but once you depend on it you're completely stuck with it. In the case of SAP (and the same case happens to other ERP systems) if later you want to change something it's going to cost you big. Plus you usually pay very high consulting and maintenance fees.
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The same can be said of other packaged applications which do not make public their data storage formats and/or communication protocols.
This is why I think it is such a big deal to have (1) a true cross-platform executable platform (i.e.: java), (2) a true cross-platform communications protocol and data interchange (i.e.: XML), and whenever possible (3) a comprehensible and standards-compliant-as-possible data repository (i.e.: mySQL, Postgress).
Note that regardless of the article being viased or not 9as some other readers here point out), the reality is that many IT managers are beginning to realize this now. This is why the huge push to Linux, Java, PHP, and XML, and many Open-Source technologies.
It is also why Linux, XML, and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) has had such a success, and why many IT managers are thinking twice about Microsoft
First right off the bat: I'm a Java programmer but also script in a few scripting languages.
Now that that's out of the way...
The problem with scripting large enterprise-class applications has nothing to do with being productive right off the bat, but rather with maintenance in the future. I'm sure many here can remember at least once in their lives glancing over someone else's Perl code, just to see a whole bunch of confusing syntax being used.
Don't get me wrong, there *is* a role for scripting jobs (like for example, for gluing executables in different languages quickly), but I just don't see it at the enterprise level.
Note also that scripters (remember, I am one of them also) also suffer from "script coolness", which translates to "doing the job in the fewest amount of lines of code and keyboard strokes", thus making the code difficult to read for others.
Similarly, in languages like Perl, there's countless ways of doing the same thing, and although in some areas this is good, when it comes for someone else reading your code that can become a nightmare, since maybe ther're used to doing things in a different ways. This is something that is much more restricted in "traditional" languages like C, C++, VB, Java, Delphi, etc (side note, YES, I know the obsfucated C contest, but that's usually the exception).
Note that I'm not saying that *everyone* who scripts does it in a way hard for others to undertand, I'm just saying that it is much more common to see this behavior in scripts than in traditional code (where we also find many cases of obsfucation).
So maybe what we need is a scripting tool that is very simple and fast, as opposed to extremelly powerful and complex. However, by doing so then script writers could probably no longer do a million things in a few lines of code, so maybe this is unlikely to happen (or doom to fail), since it will kill the spirit of scripting languages in the first place.
Botton line: Use object-orientes languages for large, complex apps, and scripts for small and self-contained tasks.
Can someone post if it is possible to dual-boot Linux and Windows on this puppy? Then this would be a killer machine for the price!!!
I think the original poster is right about we needing keys for the most frequently done operations. My take is that we need extra keys that do the following:
- Copy
- Cut
- Paste
- Undo
- Help
Optional keys:
- Volume up
- Volume down
- Mute/Unmute
- Play
- Stop
- Record
- Fast forward
- Fast rewind
- Next (chapter/song/video)
- Previous (chapter/song/video)
I also wonder how many people actually use the ALT, CTRL, SHIFT and similar keys on THE RIGHT SIDE of the keyboards (for as long I can remember I have NEVER pressed any of those keys on the right side, I only used their sister keys on the left side of the space bar).
As any educated slashdot reader knows, the instant (and I literaly mean 1 second later) that ENUM becomes operational there will be millions of spam messages targeted to those poor souls.
So, I recommend lawmakers first create a global "do not contact me" list where anyone can go in and declare their ENUM "spam-less".
Of course, this will NOT stop spammers from moving their operations to other countries were such laws do not apply and then send you spam anyways.
In other words, I think the ENUM idea is a great idea, but one which spam will very likely kill. Just imagine, once a single spammer gets a hold of my "universal address" there is NO WAY I will be able to stop such spam. Today at least I can get a different email address and get done with it, but once you have your ENUM tied to your home address, personal website, home phone, fax, work phone, cell phone, beeper, etc, changing emails/numbers/addresses all of a sudden becomes VERY hard. As a matter of fact I wouldn't be surprised if the spam community is actually lobbying to get ENUM approved.
Note that I *wish* I was wrong (and if I'm proven wrong you can trust me that I'll be the first one to be happy about it), but my take on this is that something like ENUM will only work effectively in the long future when all countries agree on a worldwide do-no-call list with legal penalties regardless of in which country you are.
Likes:
- The bluetooth wireless gaming will be AWESOME (I can already imagine finding people on the streets, airports, bus, trains and playing with them with no cables).
- Integration of gaming, radio, mp3, agenda, sound recorder, cell phone, address book and [limited] internet is a HUGE plus (will this be the future of PDAs?)
- Ability to play Java games.
Dislikes:
- The screen resolution is a joke.
- No camera.
- No Palm OS compatibility.
- Size (I'd have made the unit as wide as the screen itself, and then make the screen larger to the sides, and to save space have the joypad or the keypad slide out from underneath.
Overall, if the price is right (under US$200) I'll buy it.
Most anyone I know is of the opinion that manned space exploration should go on, and although my adventurous romantic side wants the same, my rational side begs to differ.
Most costs associated with space travel have to do with the fact that space ships are manned. Take humans away and all of a sudden the costs plummet.
A good accountant not familiar with the space industry would say that that's not the case, but once you realize that a huge amount of money actually goes to researchers and engineers whose sole purpose is to make the astronauts safe and to provide for all their needs (and space-taking) in space, you'd quickly realize that the money should go somewhere else.
But where should the money go? I suggest to better autonomous robots, to research in remote virtual environments, to better artificial intelligence. Research in these areas would lead to smaller vehicles (or the same size but with bigger payload, cheaper vehicles (since the human safety aspect could be discarded), longer missions (a robot can live in space for as long as we can supply an energy source to it), more complex missions (a robot-based mission to mars is way less complicated than a human one), and probably get more research done (a robot never needs sleep and can do several things simultaneously and with a low error percentage).
Of course, for the time being a robot will never get close to human intuition when it comes to improvising or noticing "funny but interesting things" that could be of crucial importance but that a robot would never notice. This is why we need to invest heavily on new and novel ways to think about artificial intelligence.
Who knows, maybe in the future once we have mastered the heavens with robots it'd be safer, cheaper, and more practical to flight humans again. But in any case, the long range future of space exploration belongs to intelligent machines who will be our direct descendants as they succeed us by the pure laws of evolution.
And on a side note, I'm pretty much certain that such machines will have feelings just as we do (or maybe even more so), and in a sense they truly will be humans, just not flesh-based, and they will be better than us in every way. I wish they could read this sometime in the future, so that they know there many of us alive who would feel very proud to be alive and experience the time when such events will happen.
They include a 1.5Gb drive in order to protect the industry's lucrative tape business.
Think about it, why would you ever buy a tape again when you can record countless hours of a 100Gb drive and then transfer your data to an even larger drive on your PC and keep reusing the drive on the camera??? (this is what's happening today with digital photography)
This is the end of tape as we know it, and the industry is trying to hold on to it for as long as it can, even though it is doomed to disappear in favor of networks and huge drives or solid state media.
I was wondering, even though you were not allowed near a machine or the Internet, how did you keep up to date with the latest developments on tech-related issues?
This I'm sure will be the first question that will come to mind when anyone considers paying for your services as a security expert. i.e.: how can you help a company when you have been "out of the loop" all these years? I figure that since most security concerns are usually on the social engineering side that this will not be a big deal, but when it comes to other more technical aspects, how will you be able to help them?
I think Microsoft decided to go all the way with a full OS-Software-Hardware security solution without first asking the question "What are the sources of security problems on a computer?", to which 99% of the cases the answer would have to be (1) social engineering and (2) user's naiveness.
By Social Engineering I refer to the oldest form of hacking: convince someone to do something for you on his/her machine. No hardware, software, or operating system can protect a user from this today.
By user's naiveness I mean that most users (who naturally are not tech-savy) simply open every email attachment they get, or simply click on "yes" or "ok" on every pop up they see without first reading. Combine this with Social Engineering and I really don't see how Microsoft will stop the wave of attacks against windows machines.
The only thing I have seen so far that works to a good degree is Java's sandbox model, where in a sense every program is an island unto itself, and if it wants to communicate with other programs it needs explicit permissions or use well-document open-standards-based protocols. However even this suffers from user's naiveness sindrome.
Bottom line: Security is an EDUCATIONAL issue. Create awareness and teach people the basics of security (don't give your credit card number to ANYONE who calls you, don't open attachments from people you don't know, use an updated virus scanner, patch the latest discovered holes in your OS, use a firewall, etc), if we manage to do this (a daunting task), I think we can get MUCH farther in the security arena than instead taking all our freedom away in a completelly-controlled and restrictive environment.
How about "Microzilla", seems to convey that it is a micro version of Mozilla.
After having read Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, I see more and more how amazing his book is. This DNA-fractal mechanism is exactly what he talks about in his book when he explains how all this complexity we see in life and the universe itself actually arise from much simpler structures which simply apply a simple computation over and over again (in this case, like a Fractal Computation) to obtain complex behavior.
If such patterns are indeed found in DNA, it will only provide more evidence to support Wolfram's theories (and I trully hope a Nobel prize is waiting for him).
I think considering the circunstances, every nation on Earth should sign a waiver allowing a nuclear weapon to be sent to a far-away asteroid for testing purposes.
After all, the reason treaties banning nuclear space weapons were signed was to protect mankind, and in this particular case it so happens that protecting mankind is the reason to send a test nuclear weapon to an asteroid.
I was thinking, many of the options we have are merely theoretical. I'd like NASA to spend a few of my tax dollars actually *testing* out 2 or 3 of these ideas on a real asteroid to see if they really work.
For example, will a near nuclear blast really be absorved by the meteor without it changing its course? How much of a force will it be needed to push an asteroid with rockets or the like?
So let's test now so that when the real thing comes and we launch our savior to space, we don't find out in the last minute that it fails.
On a side note, this shouldn't be a NASA-only effort, I think the European Space Agency and many other countries should ship in as well, as this concerns all of mankind.
In the old days, it was a big deal when we went from a 100 Mhz chip to a 150Mhz one. Today though a 50Mhz difference means nothing.
Don't you all think it is time for Intel and AMD to stop bringing out a new chip which is 0.000005% faster than the previous one, and instead start coming out with chips ONLY when they make a noticiable performance difference???
In other words, I hope that the next chip after the 3Ghz one is a 3.5Ghz one, then 4Ghz, 5Ghz, etc. And by the time we get to a 10Ghz chip they should start making them in 1Ghz increments.
Sure, I know clock cycles is not the whole story to performance, but geez, I see people upgrading their 1.9 Ghz systems to 2Ghz systems for several hundred bucks like if that's going to make a noticiable difference (on the other hand, it is probably because of *those* people that Intel/AMD do what they do)!!!
First of all, I suggest you learn Java above anything else, and here's why:
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1. Learning Java automatically frees you from having to develop for a specific platform. If you know Java you can develop for Windows, Linux, Solaris or any other OS. In other words, you can target 99% of all available platforms. As an example, now all you need to learn in Linux is simply "how to get around" in the command line, but for actual development you won't have to dig in and learn all the Linux libraries, or all the Windows libraries, or all the solaris libraries, etc...
2. Learning Java gives you a consisten way to access most new technologies. Once you now Java you can for example use Jave Server Pages very easily afterwards (and therefore save a step by not having to learn a new technology like PHP (which is GREAT by the way, but I'm giving you the path of least resistance here)).
3. Likewise, if you know Java you can access mySQL, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, or any other database with the same JDBC interface. This gives you access to 99% of all databases in the world, without having to learn any one in particular (besides the obvious administration tasks).
4. Java also gives you direct access to Web Services (I recommend a product called GLUE by a company called The Mind Electric, above Sun's own implementation of Web Services). With Java and GLUE *anything* you code or have coded before can be transformed into a Web Service automagically, with no coding. And for new Web Services projects you can also tweak to your heart's desire. It is the absolute easiest, most powerfull Web Services tool in the market (believe me, I've tried them *all*, even the
5. Java also gives you consistent APIs for anything from GUIs to sounds, to networking across all platforms. As an example, we developed a *HUGE* Java-based distributed application with Java, using everything from JSPs to Swing and custom socket programming, and to our customer's surprised, after the whole application was developed and tested on Windows, we tried "for the heck of it" to copy the class files to a Linux machine. Guess what? The darn thing work 100% perfect (after we modified a small configuration file with directory names and things like that of course)!!! No recompilation, no code tweaking, no nothing. As a matter of fact the customer quickly opened her eyes, decided to stop paying licenses to Microsoft, dropped Windows, and is now using a farm of Linux machines with the new app. In the future, should some new OS that is better than Linux come out, she'll have the chance again to simply move the class files and everything should work.
6. Java protects you from the future. You bet that as soon as Grid Computing takes off that IBM, Sun, Bea, Oracle, HP and others will provide a Grid Services API for Java, and again since you already have the Java foundation, all you need to learn is the new API for Grid Computing and forget about the details of where it will run.
Note that other technologies like PHP are great, but it does not integrate all the functionality that Java offers you, and certainly not across so many platforms. However if all you want to do is dynamic websites, PHP is also a GREAT choice for the job.
As for C and C++, the biggest drawback is how easy it is to create bugs, how problematic it can be to port applications (little endian, big endian, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, order of operations left-to-right or right-to-left, etc), and it just simply does not behave the same across platforms. Sure a very experienced programmer can greatly reduce these hurdles, but why bother really if Java gives you garbage collection, no pointers, a small and simple syntax? In other words, it gives you what you need to get the job done.
Note that TONS of people will tell you how Java is "slow". This was true 4, or maybe 3 years ago during the dark ages of Applets, but nowdays with Just-In-Time compilers, and Dynamic Compilation, I dare anyone to compare performace of a typical C/C++ application to that of a typical Java application. Is Java still slower, maybe yes (specially in the GUI department), but remember that Moore's Law is on your side: today *any* PC you buy will run Java apps more than well enough for your needs. As for big server farms, I rather have a 15% performance loss than having to maintain the same app over many different operating systems, or even modify the app everytime the same operating system comes up with a new release, or than having to spends hours or days hunting down bugs lurking in hard-to-decipher C++ code.
Bottom line: Java gives you simplicity, access to 99% of all Operating Systems, databases, Web Services, and media and networking APIs you'll ever need, so learn it and shield yourself from the deep technical details and instead concentrate on your business solutions.
Side note for other geeks: Yes, I *do* know the importance of sometimes you having no choice but diging in into the tech details of things, but that's something I asume the person I'm trying to help here already knows from his own experience.
Read your own post. You're comparing TrueSpace version 1.0 and 2.0 (the versions you said you tried) to the latest incarnations of the other high-end tools.
For your information, TrueSpace is past version 5 already. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 were released about 5 years ago.
As for your sarchastic "WOWs", you should know that TrueSpace was actually called Caligari on the Amiga before being ported to the PC, and back then it had a native real-time 3D interface for all operations, making the tool's impressive modeling tools dating WAY back the tools later appearing on the other packages you refer to here.
Please learn your history before you post flame-type comments.
On a side note, to teach you some more, LightWave was also born on the Amiga as part of Newteks's Video Toaster.
Oh, and before I forget, you should learn the difference between a tool offering native 3D modeling, versus a tool supporting native XYZ modeling with a 3D window for preview and basic operations. TrueSpace is a tool offering native 3D modeling AND in the latest version also native XYZ modeling, as well as native 3D+ZYZ modeling.