Leverage your software to increase your support services by making it difficult to use, install, and buggy as hell.
I agree somewhat with your viewpoint, but think you might be going a little overboard. I think it might be more appropriate to say that Red Hat is possibly not as motivated to make things intuitive because of the support revenue. However, I doubt they're intentionally making the software buggy or hard to use. It's probably reasonably to say that there's potential for conflict of interest.
Microsoft has encouragement to improve the quality of their software because support services add to their overhead
Depends on the situation. For consumers, yes, it is a burder. For businesses, it's called "professional services," which brings in big bucks.
Apple has consistently said that they would release OS X client in January of 2001! Since when did they ever promise earlier?
It was promised earlier, actually -- take a look at the press release archives. However, it's not nearly as late as some would have you believe. Some people say it's taken them four years (time since the NeXT acquisition), which just isn't true, since Apple shipped most everything that was promised for Rhapsody in the form of Mac OS X Server nearly two years ago. Darwin was unveiled at the same time.
However, I agree that Mac OS X is not vaporware, as I am typing this from OSX public beta. Vaporware typically means something that doesn't exist, or something that the general public does not have access to.
This article seems to be giving completely the wrong impression of Dreamcast sales in the US. Though they don't specify, I suspect at least some of their data is based on Japanese sales, which have been much worse than US sales.
Some comments don't quite make sense:
Despite Dreamcast's advanced technology and record-setting introduction in September 1999 -- it sold 500,000 units in that month alone -- Sony's PlayStation 2 this year broke that record and all but obliterated Dreamcast's lead.
Eh? Sony sold 500,000 PS2s in one day, but haven't sold very many since then. In fact, there has been at least one article I read on how Dreamcast sales have increases dramatically due to PS2 shortages. Following Thanksgiving weekend, Dreamcast sales were up 82%, putting it in second place in the market share game, right behind PlayStation 1. Now all this may change when PS2 production starts to meet demand, but that's no excuse for misleading the public.
As of Nov. 18, Sega's share of the North American market for game consoles had fallen to 17.5 percent
A fine date to choose. Right before Thanksgiving weekend, when sales just exploded. This article was published today, why are they using data that is 40 days old?
It is not clear how much the companies make selling hardware
They usually take a loss. That's pretty common knowledge, I thought.
Overall, Dreamcast is doing very well right now, at least in the US. So it's hard to see how a Nintendo acquisition would make sense. So either there is some sort of weird bias on the part of the authors (which seems unlikely), or they do not realize that they are drastically misrepresenting the situation. I'm no Dreamcast loyalist or anything like that (these things only cost $150, most people can afford one), but I hate to see people get away with causing confusion via inaccurate journalism.
And why would Nintendo want Sega right now? They are already developing Game Cube, and have a very successful business thanks to Pokemon, GameBoy and the occasional epic title like Zelda. It would be a shame if Dreamcast got buried in purely political issues, since it's home to so many fascinatingly original game design ideas (Crazy Taxi, Seaman, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, etc).
When you buy a PC today, the specs include memory and CPU and not much else. We're pretty close to the day where CPU won't matter for personal workstations [...] Memory is similarly stagnating; unless you work with Photoshop or its ilk, chances are you have no use for >256MB.
I don't know if I buy this. People are always going to find good ways to waste memory and CPU. Games, for example, are among the most hardware-intensive applications out there. And that's just consumers. On the pro side, you have to do compiling, 3D rendering, real-time video and audio manipulation, encryption/decryption and scientific analysis. Plus, web sites will continue to get more and more complicated as bandwidth and other various technologies improve.
I agree. The Newton was too big and too expensive, but it was way ahead of its time. The first time I used a Palm Pilot, I was floored to find out that you couldn't just write anywhere on the screen, but rather had to write in one little box and only one letter at a time. This is probably why I still haven't bought a Palm. There's no way to take notes on it, as far as I can tell.
With the Newton, you could just start writing and the thing would do handwriting recognition for whole words or sentences at a time. The original model (MessagePad 100) didn't do this version well, but the model I had, MessagePad 120, did a quite amazing job of it. And you wrote normal letters, not Graffitti-speak.
I just skimmed through the 709 comments on this page. The odd thing is that most or all of the ones that got modded up centered around the idea of "forget programming, teach him to be a good human being." It's good to know there are people out there with their priorities straight, but it does completely miss the question at a hand. How would you feel if took a Java course and the instructor just lectured you about morality all day long? Personally, I'd be pretty frustrated.
From reading the story into, it seems very clear to me that this person has an opportunity to tutor this child prodigy in technology, not humanity 101. That appears to be why the kid came to this individual in the first place. His parents are responsible for raising him. This person's responsibility is teaching him about programming. If other life lessons come up along the way, so be it. But he probably wouldn't be asking for advice on that at Slashdot.:)
How ironic. Today Xerox was trading at 6 dollars all time low, and Xerox was forced to sell part of it to a Japanese company. Does this sound like "The Theives won the war?"
For the eighteen-bazillionth time, Apple didn't just come in and start stealing ideas from clueless Xerox, as "Pirates of Silicon Valley" depicts. Jobs gave Xerox a whole bunch of Apple stock, and more importantly, Xerox understood Apple's intent. They may have not known how popular this stuff would be, but they knew the deal. I believe Woz talks about this on his site.
There will almost certainly be some sort of convergence for gaming playing in the future, but I don't think we should assume that the desktop computer is the source of the gravity. The PlayStation 2 is essentially a computer. Not only does it have decent CPU power and a DVD drive, but it has a FireWire port and two USB ports. That stuff is there for something.
Now, consider the marketing component. With the exception of Apple and Gateway, TV ads for computer hardware are pretty rare. And I never see ads for computer software. By contrast, Sony has blanketed the earth with PlayStation ads. They could easily make the PS2 the most advertised computer system ever -- essentially buying its way into the space. I know it has been said a thousand times, but you cannot beat the simplicity of a console. This is very attractive to a lot of people. I'm sure Microsoft figured this all out around the time the PS2 specs were announced, which is probably why the XBox will be coming out a year after the PS2.
As far as an actual crash, I think that's fairly unlikely. There's going to have to be some shakeout over the next two years: PS2, Dreamcast, Nintendo's GameCube and XBox can't all be significant. But at the same time, it's fairly obvious that the demographics for video games have expanded dramatically in the last five years or so. There's nothing abnormal about a 35-year-old man with a PlayStation. It's totally acceptable. I'm not sure the same could have been said about the NES in the 80s. And girls are progressively getting more interested in games as well. There are more people playing video games than there have ever been.
Yes, desktop computer graphics will significantly surpass PS2 in time, but apparently most people don't really care. Sony is selling oodles and oodles of PS1s this Christimas, even though it has the most fugly graphics of any platform in circulation right now.
How many parents will spend $450+ on a PS2 for their kids, when a decent PC with a good video card will display better graphics, surf the web, do word processing, and play DVD's?
Well, the PS2 lists for $300, and it does play DVDs. As far as better graphics, I don't know if they will be significantly better enough for the parents to tell the difference. You can't beat the simplicity of a console. And what makes you think a PS2 will never do work processing? It has a FireWire port and two USB ports. Surely those are in there for something...
Andreas Pfeiffer, the author of the article, states:
By now, we have a pretty good idea of what the Web is all about and what it can offer.
This makes as much sense as kissing some girl on the playground in second grade, and looking at wedding rings the next day.
If you've tried DSL or cable, you'll realize that it makes the current Web much more bearable than a dial-up connection -- it does NOT, however, suddenly turn your computer into an interactive TV set. It is not the promised revolution -- it just makes for a pleasant Web experience, period. There's certainly not enough here to spark a new revolution -- yet.
So the web is not a revolution until it is like TV? Does anyone think this is a bit backwards?
And on a usability level, the Web is evolving less and less. We are refining, of course, and Web sites are getting better -- but there will be no more quantum leaps here, either
That's it. No more ridiculious statements like this. Your speaking license is revoked.
By implication, this also means that whatever hasn't exploded on the market yet will probably take a long time to go significantly beyond its current levels of market adoption, at least in relative terms.
What?
It's just that -- little by little -- the Web is becoming a mature market, and as such
The web has only be popularized in the last five years, and only become truly mainstream in the last two. How is this mature? It took us, what, 20 years to get past punchcards?
What if the market out there just was becoming a little bit bored with all that overhyped Internet excitement?
Again with this stuff. Maybe the baby boomers will become less interested (which I doubt, but let's play "what if"), and go back to TV. But despite that, their kids have grown up on the internet/web. My friend's son had his own computer by the time he was two. Computers are an integral part of his life, in the way that everyone else thinks of cars, phones or credit cards.
Not to sound horrible here, but we all manage to live with spam pretty well, it's not like it's all that much of a hassle. I just keep a variety of email addresses to give out for different purposes.
You might possibly be able to convince me to see your viewpoint if 90% of my spam wasn't out-and-out fraud/get rich quick/pyramid schemes. A lot of these things that the spammers are pushing are flat out illegal (under U.S. law), and some people are uninformed enough to buy into them. So maybe port filtering is not the answer, but I don't think spam is okay to live with, at least not the type I'm accustomed to receiving. This is people abusing the system. And unless we continue to fight back in force, it will get worse. There is no doubt in my mind about that.
Taken from a purely business perspective, it would make a lot of sense for Apple to sell Windows boxes [...] But this was never seriously considered for largely religious reasons.
I don't know if its a religious issue as much as that's just not what Apple's about. Apple's history is filled with instances where they could have just gone the safe route and made more cash, but instead chose to step outside of the lines and create something truly unique. Jobs (and many people in Apple, for that matter) really cares about making changing the landscape dramatically rather than being a grey box factory. It's maddening how so many large corporations can have so little imagination.
The PC industry really should thank their lucky stars for Apple's willness to continually redefine the rules. Otherwise, I have this sneaking suspicion we'd still being using 5 1/4" floppies, serial ports for everything, and possibly have nothing more advanced than TVWM for GUIs.
Last year Linux became the number two computer operating system behind Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, according to International Data Corp.
I'm all for more choices in the OS marketplace, but this statement is quite vague and misleading. It needs to be qualified. It doesn't break it down by server (which is what this article focuses on) and desktop. It also doesn't discuss the methodology for coming to this conclusion. Knowing whether it is market share or installed base makes a huge difference.
But say something enough and people will apparently believe it and use it in their conversations, regardless of whether it really means what they think it means.
Hm. OK, I did a little searching, and am now a bit curious as to how it came out.
I think it it first arrived in Mac OS 7.5. I believe it came with a manual all about OpenDoc. CyberDog was included, along with some rudimentary demo apps for word processing and such. As far as developer docs on the subject, though, I'm afraid I can't help.
Wow, that's cool. I didn't know that Apple gave Xerox stock. I understood that Xerox (this was at the PARC center, I know it's redundant, it just sounds stupid otherwise) was letting pretty much anyone use what they made (this is comming from the biography on Steve Jobs, I forget which one)
You'll have to do a bit of searching, but if I remember correctly, Steve Wozniak discusses this at his site -- http://woz.org. He started getting a lot of emails when Pirates aired, and I believe he covered this topic in at least one email that was posted to the site.
As Carmack mentioned in another post, supporting the Mac is significantly easier to some respects because the platform is standardized. When a developer says "we support a PowerMac G4" you can be pretty sure what that entails, and can test your software on a nearly identical machine as your customers will have. That's not necessarily the case with the infinite variety of wintel clones out there. Furthermore, Apple has solid OpenGL support at this point (don't know where Linux is in this respect). Plus, the Mac version did sell considerably better, which may have had something to do with the fact that most Linux users have Windows on their hard drive as well.
The situation should improve with OSX, because the APIs are far better than Mac OS 9, the environment is far more stable than Mac OS 9, and the development tools are free.
not trying to troll, just trying to point out that Microsoft did NOT invent the GUI, that was Xerox, but Apple had the first commercial one.
And furthermore, Apple had Xerox's permission to use those concepts, contrary to the way it was depicted in "Pirates of Silicon Valley." Apple gave Xerox tons of stock to be able to work with their engineers. I suppose that aspect was not dramatic enough to be included in the movie. Unfortunately, now most of the country has a distorted version of history implanted in their minds.
The other thing they want is application integration. For instance, if they go to file/open, and open a text document, they want an editor. If they then open an MP3 file, a player should show up. You should be able to click a button in your spreadsheet program and have it sent via e-mail to everyone in your address book.
I know how elistist this sounds, but you pretty much just described OpenDoc. It was a document-centric application technology that shipped as part of some previous versions of Mac OS. There were container applications that could open spreadsheets, word processing docs, graphics, etc. There was even a component-based internet client called CyberDog. It became apparently that the world wasn't really ready to take this concept on yet, though.
Now, from what it sounds like from reading this article, an ex-Apple guy is championing a similar concept at Microsoft.
Actually, IE on the Mac is notoriously slow at rendering Slashdot. iCab, OmniWeb, Netscape and Mozilla all render Slashdot in a few seconds.
Hmmm, I haven't had the same results as you have with complex pages in Mozilla. It's not surprising that iCab, OmniWeb and Netscape would render faster, though. For the most part, all they care about is HTML, and it one case - CSS (albeit poorly). You can't see it on Slashdot, but on sites that use CSS extensively (which are rapidly becoming quite common), you'll be wishing for the MacIE rendering engine. And that sophitication doesn't come without extra consumption of resources.
Yes, I was just looking at less than a week-old build of Mac OSX, and the dock sucks; you can't deal with multiple windows effectively at all. It's only fine if you're working on at most two apps simultaneously
While this is clearly a very objective, well thought out statement, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Automatic thumbnail creation of mimized windows is a stroke of genious, IMHO. And I've been working with quite a few more than two apps at once. Furthermore, minimization is not the only way to do window management. Project Builder, for instance, has only one main window, but a list of open documents between which you can swich. You can split the display multiple times to show more than one document at once, and you can override this behavior and use separate window if you like.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems like a pretty big technological/biotech event.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Leverage your software to increase your support services by making it difficult to use, install, and buggy as hell.
I agree somewhat with your viewpoint, but think you might be going a little overboard. I think it might be more appropriate to say that Red Hat is possibly not as motivated to make things intuitive because of the support revenue. However, I doubt they're intentionally making the software buggy or hard to use. It's probably reasonably to say that there's potential for conflict of interest.
Microsoft has encouragement to improve the quality of their software because support services add to their overhead
Depends on the situation. For consumers, yes, it is a burder. For businesses, it's called "professional services," which brings in big bucks.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
As for Macromedia Generator, its still by far the leader in this area as it does more than output Flash
Generator is also expensive and only runs on Solaris and Windows (last time I checked).
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
In early 1998(if I have my dates correct) Apple released Mac OS X Server, a direct descendant of NeXTSTEP with some Macintosh beautification.
Mac OS X Server shipped on March 16, 1999, same day Darwin was announced.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Apple has consistently said that they would release OS X client in January of 2001! Since when did they ever promise earlier?
It was promised earlier, actually -- take a look at the press release archives. However, it's not nearly as late as some would have you believe. Some people say it's taken them four years (time since the NeXT acquisition), which just isn't true, since Apple shipped most everything that was promised for Rhapsody in the form of Mac OS X Server nearly two years ago. Darwin was unveiled at the same time.
However, I agree that Mac OS X is not vaporware, as I am typing this from OSX public beta. Vaporware typically means something that doesn't exist, or something that the general public does not have access to.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Some comments don't quite make sense:
Despite Dreamcast's advanced technology and record-setting introduction in September 1999 -- it sold 500,000 units in that month alone -- Sony's PlayStation 2 this year broke that record and all but obliterated Dreamcast's lead.
Eh? Sony sold 500,000 PS2s in one day, but haven't sold very many since then. In fact, there has been at least one article I read on how Dreamcast sales have increases dramatically due to PS2 shortages. Following Thanksgiving weekend, Dreamcast sales were up 82%, putting it in second place in the market share game, right behind PlayStation 1. Now all this may change when PS2 production starts to meet demand, but that's no excuse for misleading the public.
PC Data's market share numbers for the week ending Nov 25:
As of Nov. 18, Sega's share of the North American market for game consoles had fallen to 17.5 percent
A fine date to choose. Right before Thanksgiving weekend, when sales just exploded. This article was published today, why are they using data that is 40 days old?
It is not clear how much the companies make selling hardware
They usually take a loss. That's pretty common knowledge, I thought.
Overall, Dreamcast is doing very well right now, at least in the US. So it's hard to see how a Nintendo acquisition would make sense. So either there is some sort of weird bias on the part of the authors (which seems unlikely), or they do not realize that they are drastically misrepresenting the situation. I'm no Dreamcast loyalist or anything like that (these things only cost $150, most people can afford one), but I hate to see people get away with causing confusion via inaccurate journalism.
And why would Nintendo want Sega right now? They are already developing Game Cube, and have a very successful business thanks to Pokemon, GameBoy and the occasional epic title like Zelda. It would be a shame if Dreamcast got buried in purely political issues, since it's home to so many fascinatingly original game design ideas (Crazy Taxi, Seaman, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, etc).
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
When you buy a PC today, the specs include memory and CPU and not much else. We're pretty close to the day where CPU won't matter for personal workstations [...] Memory is similarly stagnating; unless you work with Photoshop or its ilk, chances are you have no use for >256MB.
I don't know if I buy this. People are always going to find good ways to waste memory and CPU. Games, for example, are among the most hardware-intensive applications out there. And that's just consumers. On the pro side, you have to do compiling, 3D rendering, real-time video and audio manipulation, encryption/decryption and scientific analysis. Plus, web sites will continue to get more and more complicated as bandwidth and other various technologies improve.
Then there's the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence...
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
I agree. The Newton was too big and too expensive, but it was way ahead of its time. The first time I used a Palm Pilot, I was floored to find out that you couldn't just write anywhere on the screen, but rather had to write in one little box and only one letter at a time. This is probably why I still haven't bought a Palm. There's no way to take notes on it, as far as I can tell.
With the Newton, you could just start writing and the thing would do handwriting recognition for whole words or sentences at a time. The original model (MessagePad 100) didn't do this version well, but the model I had, MessagePad 120, did a quite amazing job of it. And you wrote normal letters, not Graffitti-speak.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
I just skimmed through the 709 comments on this page. The odd thing is that most or all of the ones that got modded up centered around the idea of "forget programming, teach him to be a good human being." It's good to know there are people out there with their priorities straight, but it does completely miss the question at a hand. How would you feel if took a Java course and the instructor just lectured you about morality all day long? Personally, I'd be pretty frustrated.
:)
From reading the story into, it seems very clear to me that this person has an opportunity to tutor this child prodigy in technology, not humanity 101. That appears to be why the kid came to this individual in the first place. His parents are responsible for raising him. This person's responsibility is teaching him about programming. If other life lessons come up along the way, so be it. But he probably wouldn't be asking for advice on that at Slashdot.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
How ironic. Today Xerox was trading at 6 dollars all time low, and Xerox was forced to sell part of it to a Japanese company. Does this sound like "The Theives won the war?"
For the eighteen-bazillionth time, Apple didn't just come in and start stealing ideas from clueless Xerox, as "Pirates of Silicon Valley" depicts. Jobs gave Xerox a whole bunch of Apple stock, and more importantly, Xerox understood Apple's intent. They may have not known how popular this stuff would be, but they knew the deal. I believe Woz talks about this on his site.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
There will almost certainly be some sort of convergence for gaming playing in the future, but I don't think we should assume that the desktop computer is the source of the gravity. The PlayStation 2 is essentially a computer. Not only does it have decent CPU power and a DVD drive, but it has a FireWire port and two USB ports. That stuff is there for something.
Now, consider the marketing component. With the exception of Apple and Gateway, TV ads for computer hardware are pretty rare. And I never see ads for computer software. By contrast, Sony has blanketed the earth with PlayStation ads. They could easily make the PS2 the most advertised computer system ever -- essentially buying its way into the space. I know it has been said a thousand times, but you cannot beat the simplicity of a console. This is very attractive to a lot of people. I'm sure Microsoft figured this all out around the time the PS2 specs were announced, which is probably why the XBox will be coming out a year after the PS2.
As far as an actual crash, I think that's fairly unlikely. There's going to have to be some shakeout over the next two years: PS2, Dreamcast, Nintendo's GameCube and XBox can't all be significant. But at the same time, it's fairly obvious that the demographics for video games have expanded dramatically in the last five years or so. There's nothing abnormal about a 35-year-old man with a PlayStation. It's totally acceptable. I'm not sure the same could have been said about the NES in the 80s. And girls are progressively getting more interested in games as well. There are more people playing video games than there have ever been.
Yes, desktop computer graphics will significantly surpass PS2 in time, but apparently most people don't really care. Sony is selling oodles and oodles of PS1s this Christimas, even though it has the most fugly graphics of any platform in circulation right now.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
How many parents will spend $450+ on a PS2 for their kids, when a decent PC with a good video card will display better graphics, surf the web, do word processing, and play DVD's?
Well, the PS2 lists for $300, and it does play DVDs. As far as better graphics, I don't know if they will be significantly better enough for the parents to tell the difference. You can't beat the simplicity of a console. And what makes you think a PS2 will never do work processing? It has a FireWire port and two USB ports. Surely those are in there for something...
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Andreas Pfeiffer, the author of the article, states:
By now, we have a pretty good idea of what the Web is all about and what it can offer.
This makes as much sense as kissing some girl on the playground in second grade, and looking at wedding rings the next day.
If you've tried DSL or cable, you'll realize that it makes the current Web much more bearable than a dial-up connection -- it does NOT, however, suddenly turn your computer into an interactive TV set. It is not the promised revolution -- it just makes for a pleasant Web experience, period. There's certainly not enough here to spark a new revolution -- yet.
So the web is not a revolution until it is like TV? Does anyone think this is a bit backwards?
And on a usability level, the Web is evolving less and less. We are refining, of course, and Web sites are getting better -- but there will be no more quantum leaps here, either
That's it. No more ridiculious statements like this. Your speaking license is revoked.
By implication, this also means that whatever hasn't exploded on the market yet will probably take a long time to go significantly beyond its current levels of market adoption, at least in relative terms.
What?
It's just that -- little by little -- the Web is becoming a mature market, and as such
The web has only be popularized in the last five years, and only become truly mainstream in the last two. How is this mature? It took us, what, 20 years to get past punchcards?
What if the market out there just was becoming a little bit bored with all that overhyped Internet excitement?
Again with this stuff. Maybe the baby boomers will become less interested (which I doubt, but let's play "what if"), and go back to TV. But despite that, their kids have grown up on the internet/web. My friend's son had his own computer by the time he was two. Computers are an integral part of his life, in the way that everyone else thinks of cars, phones or credit cards.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Not to sound horrible here, but we all manage to live with spam pretty well, it's not like it's all that much of a hassle. I just keep a variety of email addresses to give out for different purposes.
You might possibly be able to convince me to see your viewpoint if 90% of my spam wasn't out-and-out fraud/get rich quick/pyramid schemes. A lot of these things that the spammers are pushing are flat out illegal (under U.S. law), and some people are uninformed enough to buy into them. So maybe port filtering is not the answer, but I don't think spam is okay to live with, at least not the type I'm accustomed to receiving. This is people abusing the system. And unless we continue to fight back in force, it will get worse. There is no doubt in my mind about that.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Taken from a purely business perspective, it would make a lot of sense for Apple to sell Windows boxes [...] But this was never seriously considered for largely religious reasons.
I don't know if its a religious issue as much as that's just not what Apple's about. Apple's history is filled with instances where they could have just gone the safe route and made more cash, but instead chose to step outside of the lines and create something truly unique. Jobs (and many people in Apple, for that matter) really cares about making changing the landscape dramatically rather than being a grey box factory. It's maddening how so many large corporations can have so little imagination.
The PC industry really should thank their lucky stars for Apple's willness to continually redefine the rules. Otherwise, I have this sneaking suspicion we'd still being using 5 1/4" floppies, serial ports for everything, and possibly have nothing more advanced than TVWM for GUIs.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
From the article:
Last year Linux became the number two computer operating system behind Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) competing NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, according to International Data Corp.
I'm all for more choices in the OS marketplace, but this statement is quite vague and misleading. It needs to be qualified. It doesn't break it down by server (which is what this article focuses on) and desktop. It also doesn't discuss the methodology for coming to this conclusion. Knowing whether it is market share or installed base makes a huge difference.
But say something enough and people will apparently believe it and use it in their conversations, regardless of whether it really means what they think it means.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Hm. OK, I did a little searching, and am now a bit curious as to how it came out.
I think it it first arrived in Mac OS 7.5. I believe it came with a manual all about OpenDoc. CyberDog was included, along with some rudimentary demo apps for word processing and such. As far as developer docs on the subject, though, I'm afraid I can't help.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Wow, that's cool. I didn't know that Apple gave Xerox stock. I understood that Xerox (this was at the PARC center, I know it's redundant, it just sounds stupid otherwise) was letting pretty much anyone use what they made (this is comming from the biography on Steve Jobs, I forget which one)
You'll have to do a bit of searching, but if I remember correctly, Steve Wozniak discusses this at his site -- http://woz.org. He started getting a lot of emails when Pirates aired, and I believe he covered this topic in at least one email that was posted to the site.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
As Carmack mentioned in another post, supporting the Mac is significantly easier to some respects because the platform is standardized. When a developer says "we support a PowerMac G4" you can be pretty sure what that entails, and can test your software on a nearly identical machine as your customers will have. That's not necessarily the case with the infinite variety of wintel clones out there. Furthermore, Apple has solid OpenGL support at this point (don't know where Linux is in this respect). Plus, the Mac version did sell considerably better, which may have had something to do with the fact that most Linux users have Windows on their hard drive as well.
The situation should improve with OSX, because the APIs are far better than Mac OS 9, the environment is far more stable than Mac OS 9, and the development tools are free.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
not trying to troll, just trying to point out that Microsoft did NOT invent the GUI, that was Xerox, but Apple had the first commercial one.
And furthermore, Apple had Xerox's permission to use those concepts, contrary to the way it was depicted in "Pirates of Silicon Valley." Apple gave Xerox tons of stock to be able to work with their engineers. I suppose that aspect was not dramatic enough to be included in the movie. Unfortunately, now most of the country has a distorted version of history implanted in their minds.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
The other thing they want is application integration. For instance, if they go to file/open, and open a text document, they want an editor. If they then open an MP3 file, a player should show up. You should be able to click a button in your spreadsheet program and have it sent via e-mail to everyone in your address book.
I know how elistist this sounds, but you pretty much just described OpenDoc. It was a document-centric application technology that shipped as part of some previous versions of Mac OS. There were container applications that could open spreadsheets, word processing docs, graphics, etc. There was even a component-based internet client called CyberDog. It became apparently that the world wasn't really ready to take this concept on yet, though.
Now, from what it sounds like from reading this article, an ex-Apple guy is championing a similar concept at Microsoft.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Actually, IE on the Mac is notoriously slow at rendering Slashdot. iCab, OmniWeb, Netscape and Mozilla all render Slashdot in a few seconds.
Hmmm, I haven't had the same results as you have with complex pages in Mozilla. It's not surprising that iCab, OmniWeb and Netscape would render faster, though. For the most part, all they care about is HTML, and it one case - CSS (albeit poorly). You can't see it on Slashdot, but on sites that use CSS extensively (which are rapidly becoming quite common), you'll be wishing for the MacIE rendering engine. And that sophitication doesn't come without extra consumption of resources.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
The Dock is supposed to replace the application switcher
Yes.
the Apple menu
Not really, that's the Favorites folder. Used in combination with the Go menu. It's almost there, but the Go menu is only available in the Finder.
launcher
No. That's call the Applications folder.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Yes, I was just looking at less than a week-old build of Mac OSX, and the dock sucks; you can't deal with multiple windows effectively at all. It's only fine if you're working on at most two apps simultaneously
While this is clearly a very objective, well thought out statement, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Automatic thumbnail creation of mimized windows is a stroke of genious, IMHO. And I've been working with quite a few more than two apps at once. Furthermore, minimization is not the only way to do window management. Project Builder, for instance, has only one main window, but a list of open documents between which you can swich. You can split the display multiple times to show more than one document at once, and you can override this behavior and use separate window if you like.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
This comment would be great, if it actually made some sort of concrete point rather than just quote somebody else's opinion.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson