The text below is from the TeaTemplateLanguage.pdf file (240k). This information does not seem to be on any of the site's pages (requires a bit more digging), so I think it makes sense to bring up to the surface a bit here...
Why use Tea?
In general, neither developers nor page designers author Tea templates. The goal is that they be written and maintained by technical producers who are liaisons between developers and designers.
Tea resulted from several years of experience with other web page building mechanisms. Most web-based applications start out with HTML tags embedded in code, whether it be C, Perl, or Java. This approach is adequate for small or first-time projects because it doesn't take very long to develop.
[...]
Rather than embedding an existing language into something like an ASP or JSP, Tea is a language specially designed to meet the requirements of a templating system. It is safe, simple, efficient, and powerful.
In one instance, Tea is integrated with a special servlet. This servlet gives Tea templates control over page building, while retaining strong ties to a back-end application written by a Java developer. While this servlet provides functionality similar to that of JSPs, Tea enforces correct model-view separation because of the intentional language limitations. Although this is also the suggested separation model in JSPs, it cannot be enforced.
They also seem to put an emphasis on simplicity. The loops and output statements are really clean. The aforementioned PDF sheds a lot of light on this. Another interesting note:
Tea templates compile into Java class files and execute just the same within a Java Virtual Machine. The Tea compiler does not generate intermediate Java files and hand them off to a Java compiler, but it instead generates the class files directly. Still, the resulting class files are as efficient as any handwritten Java code.
Because no Java compiler is used, Tea can be distributed much more easily. All that's required is a Java2 runtime environment. Sun's JRE can be used, but the SDK isn't necessary.
The bad thing is that the IDE only runs on Windows.
I think Palm is making a mistake in playing Handspring's game with the "iMac" principle of computer design, which seems to be "cheerfully colored case == better!" Frankly, I think I might be embarrassed to whip one of these M100s out on the subway or wherever
Exactly! What would people would say if you had a PDA that was in a color other than black? Just think about what a metallic blue or gold case suggests about you to the casual onlooker. I won't even mention anything about the silver case. Yikes.
Black casings forever, I say!
I think Palm is making a mistake in playing Handspring's game with the "iMac" principle of computer design, which seems to be "cheerfully colored case == better!"
Again, agreed. I definitely subscribe more to the "Model-T" principle of computer design.
By making it all curvy, like an iMac, and colorful (like an iMac), and giving the user the ability to change the color to match their mood (like a Nokia cell-phone), 3Com is letting the rest of the competition know that they have simply run out of technological ideas, and are ready to be replaced as the leader in the PDA market.
So it is your belief, then, that 100% of Palm's core engineering department was deployed to put colored cases on the devices? And you do not think that Palm is continuing to develop technological advances in parallel with the redesigned casings? I hope you're not one of those people that feel that every single device, OS and application in the world should have the visual appeal of a lead pipe. Heaven forbid we think of humans as visual beings. Careful not to make the industrial design too bold or creative, it might steal cycles from the processor.
BTW: What's up with the car industry? Why all the color choices? Isn't VW just telling their competition that they've run out of technological ideas? Why can't all cars just be beige and shaped like a 80's Volvo?
The [Newton's] handwriting sucked for most things. Great for notes, useless for anything else
Verus what? Graphiti? Where you have to write things out one letter at a time in a tiny little box? After using a Newton, this aspect of the Palm experience immediately turned me off to them. I've been trying to become interested ever since. I don't think most people really realize that with a Newton, you could write anywhere on the screen and have the thing recognize it.
I honestly don't know what you mean about the handwriting recognition. I thought the MessagePad 120 did an exceptional job of recognizing my handwriting. What I will grant you is that the Newton was too big and too expensive. If Palm had just taken the Newton and shrunk it and reduced the price, I would have been onboard right away. But I feel the Palm had a significantly less efficient UI than the Newton, large due to the constraints of Graphiti.
I say let the Linux community write the X11 stuff. After all, they know it better then Apple.
This just isn't practical. Apple's brand name and product perception is incredibly important to the company, and rightfull so. In fact, nobody really realized this (or did anything about it) until Jobs returned. Their marketing campaign was a disaster prior to him bringing Chiat-Day back on. But I digress...
The point is that each product that Apple releases reflects them as a company, as a result, having a bunch of hackers slap together some X11 stuff just isn't an option. Things can be worked on and released in such a manner for GNOME, but it just doesn't make sense for QuickTime.
I think the main issue is that Apple doesn't believe there's a signficant market for QuickTime on Linux. Obviously, all of its hardware customers need it, and it has to support Windows, but I think it's hard to justify the Linux issue when so much of the installed based is servers.
While it is nice that the machine has GigE, I can only assume that it is connected to their PCI bus in some manner. [...] Hope you weren't planning on doing anything else at the same time...
During the keynote, the machine seemed to have no problem pumping 16MB of video per second down the pipe to Final Cut Pro for live manipulation.
I agree with most of what you said. But the Cube is not even remotely close to gorgeous.
I suppose that's fairly subjective.
The iMac looks idiotic
That's just troll material.
and the G4s are no different looking from any other computer on earth
In terms of dimensions and proportions, you are correct. In terms of display, colors, materials and functionality, the G4 cases are quite different.
Apple keeps telling us how they want to make the computer an attractive home appliance, but the best they can do is use colored plastic and make them a little rounder? That doesn't cut it in my book. As far as I'm concerned all these computers have the same "Toaster and TV set combo" look as any other computer that's out there.
I would imagine there are much more bold and daring designs sitting on the drawing board, but Apple does have to be somewhat realistic about accommodating 1) hardware needs (heat issues, for example 2) appealing to a broad audience 3) production costs/time. That said, they are certainly more daring in their designs than any other major manufacturer in the industry.
I can't say I see that my personal freedom is being restricted by such a practice. I can still easily access the games.
I can access the games as well, that's not what concerns me individually. What I concerned about is it sets a bad precedent. The more laws that are passed that restrict personal freedom (of any variety), the easier it gets to pass them each time, and the more wide-reaching they become. In the US, we allegedly have freedom of speech, but there are so many exceptions to wade through, that some times it's hard to remember it's actually a first amendment right.
If you _honestly_ think that all parents will stop all kids under 15 (for example) from any contact with these games, you're sadly deluded.
I do not. I understand some amount of people that shouldn't see this stuff will, but I don't think it's worth the price of blatant censorship to prevent this. It's simply a matter of how much one feels that they need to the government to protect them and tell them what to do.
My take on what seem like the most interesting things...
The Cube
It kicks ass in a Matrix-style way. It's just gorgeous, and is an engineering marvel as well. In case anyone missed it, the thing has no fan. As a result, it's incredibly quiet -- just ask anybody with a previous generation iMac (which was the first to go fanless). This is possible because of the low power consumption/heat output of the PPC. And while this thing won't fit in a rack, it does allow one to create a space-efficient (and sightly) server farm.
MP G4s
Apple is today selling dual G4s for the same price it sold single processor machines for yesterday. This is impressive. Certain applications will take more advantage of the second processor than others -- Photoshop and Final Cut Pro should fly -- but this is a good move regardless. I would like to hear what Carmack has to say about this. In addition, the motherboards now have gigabit ethernet standard. And thanks to Darwin's SMP, Mac OS X should fly on this thing.
Mouse/keyboard
It took them a while, but Apple appears to have fixed the problems with both its mouse and keyboard. I'll have to reserve final judgement until I hold the thing, but the mouse seems good. What not everyone realizes is that the idea behind the hockey puck mouse was that it could easily fit in a child's hand. The idea with this new mouse is that smaller hands can rest their palm on the back, but not have trouble reach the mouse button in the front (since the whole thing is a button). We're back to a full-size keyboard too.
BTW: From what I understand, ALL new Apple desktop models come with the new mouse and keyboard. This includes the $799 iMac...
$799 iMac
Apple will start selling a $799 iMac in the new Indigo color in September. This machine does not have DVD or FireWire, but it's technologically superior to the $999 machine that Apple sells today. And even if you don't like Mac OS, this thing could make one bad-ass xterm machine. Not only is it cheap and has ethernet and a great sound system (how many $799 machines can claim that?), but it looks cool too. There are a bunch of other revisions to the iMac product line, including several new colors, but none significant as this.
iMovie 2
While this may not affect many slashdotters, it's worth noting that Apple has done an amazing job with iMovie. It's essentially at the forefront and defining this new desktop DV editing industry as it goes. Sony seems to be struggling to keep up. iMovie is the first piece of software to make DV editing so accesible. This is a brilliant move on Apple's part, because users will eventually graduate to Final Cut and a G4. I feel this is a strategy similar to how Microsoft leveraged FrontPage to breed ASP developers.
Apple is continually eliminating obstacles that stand between it and its critics. And while some poeple still feel that one company making both the OS and the hardware is bad, Apple has proved that it understands it customers and its market. It is also one of the only major computing companies companies to take previous proprietary software (Darwin, QuickTime Streaing, OpenPlay, NetSprocket) and move it to an open source license that is approved of by the OSI. And note that it can afford to do this because it derives most of its revenue from hardware.
The company is far from perfect, but substainial progress has been made in the last three years, and Apple deserves credit for that today. The industry would be much duller and stagnant without them.
What the heck?! Can't get through to apple.com. Gee, must me the/. effect.
Actually, ironically, it may be that slashdot itself is feeling the effects of the Jobs keynote. I can't remember the last time it took so long for slashdot to load.
And I know it was a joke, but for a site to really be slashdotted, by definition, the recipient site must have less hardware and bandwidth than slashdot itself. This certainly isn't the case with Apple.
The "Honey, I shrunk the supercomputer" slogan -- could this be a tacit admission that Disney and Apple are becoming one?
If there is a deal in the works (which seems quite unlikely), this doesn't really prove anything. Steve Jobs works very closely with Disney in a variety of ways -- most notably through Pixar. Revenues from movies such as Toy Story and Bug's Life are split 50/50 between Disney and Pixar. Jobs also frequently uses Disney imagery during Photoshop benchmarking tests at keynotes.
OSx public beta in September! This is actually a disappointment; they had planned to release it today.
Ummmm, no they didn't. Maybe the rumor sites planned on it being released today, but Apple never said anything about it. I suspect it will be available to the public at Seybold SF (August 28).
If you think violence in videogames doesn't affect children, then you are living in a fantasy world. Media, of which videogames are one facet, have an incredible effect on children.
Personally, I don't dispute this. Children exposed to violence at an early age probably turn out to be a little more screwed up than others.
However, the question is whether you are willing to gradually give up more and more personal freedoms and allow censorship in order to prevent this from happening. I am not. You can either decide to take personal responsibility for protecting your children from that which you feel they should be protected from, or let the government dictate to you how things should be. As everyone knows, freedom of speech is not meant to protect popular ideas. It it to protect the unpopular ones -- or in this case, the politically incorrect ones.
The games are put behind a curtain? Doesn't that seem a little ominous to anyone else?
or does all the extra flash provided by Aqua and such seem rather boring? i dunno, it reminds me of my old BBS days where we'd go through and change every menu into a big, fancy ANSI piccy,..
So let me get this straight, you're comparing ascii art to Aqua?:)
- Scott ------ Scott Stevenson
Re:Too little too late. Macs will slowly die off.
on
MacOSX and X11
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· Score: 2
Where to start....
New imac= $1,000 new Dell home system with monitor and external speakers= $900. Go ahead, argue with it.
The iMac has built-in ethernet, built-in FireWire (for video editing), etc, and built-in speakers.
For years now, the stability of Apple computers has given rise to a wonderful run of cigarette breaks for the people who've sat in front of them. Now, Apple's adoption of BSD/NeXT technology is supposed to solve that by finally (finally!!) making some version of MacOS stable.
When was the last time you actually used Mac OS 9? They're fixed a lot of stuff. The OS is quite stable now. It's not Unix, but it's worlds better than the Mac OS architecture of 3 years ago.
not notice that the capability exists to have one of those ultra-powerful G4 machines serve multiple workstations thereby hammering Apple's bottom line.
Ummm... what? Do you understand Apple's business model?
Apple is a company that operates in a few niche markets selling its own hardware to run its own operating system in a hothouse market with no direct competition.
If you consider the consumer (do you realize how well the iMac does?) or entire graphics/publishing industry to be niche. These seem less "niche" to me than development or servers.
he destroyed all the competition from licensees who were building Apples faster and cheaper
And worse. The Motorola machines, for example, were an abomination. People would buy what would claim to be a Mac, discover it had all kinds of hardware and software compatibility issues, and get a bad impression of the Mac as a result. This was damaging the brand name. Apple makes the whole widget. This has always been the lure. This is why things like PowerPC, FireWire, the new filesystem and USB were intergrated so quickly. My partner has a W2k machine with USB ports, and hasn't gotten a single USB device to work perfectly yet.
it's pretty easy to imagine Steve Jobs waking up in a cold sweat from dreams involving people thinking of Apples as application servers with apps running on anything but Apple hardware
I really don't think you understand Apple's markets or customers. Applications like Excel or Word can operate in a vaccum. They are pretty much self-contained. Publishing or multimedia production, however, requires considerably more infrastructure and support apps -- color management, font management, video support, codecs, etc, etc. You can't do all this stuff on the server side.
Additionally, how many consumers will buy a G4 as their application server?
Why not? If they know how to configure their modem or soundcard, why not instead of using some GUI tool which makes things difficult?
How many people really know how to or enjoy configuring a modem or sound card? Certainly not the masses at large. Some relatively small percentage, perhaps. I believe the masses would much rather use a GUI, and would feel that a command/line text file approach would qualify as "making things difficult."
Sometimes I seriously wonder if people realize that the slashdot population is absolutely nothing like the rest of the world.
Because it makes making changes to the system easier. For instance I've got two soundcards installed in my machine, a PCI and a ISA soundcard which both of which I can use under linux. Say I want to change how one of the cards is configured for whatever reason. All I have to do is make a backup copy of config.modules and make the needed changes to the orginal config.modules with a text editor.
Okay, granted, that's a logical reason for you. But do you feel that this is a reasonable approach for the average mainstream consumer/gamer?
Granted, this is a slightly different issue than my original post, but still applies to the overall topic of linux gaming.
What if the price was on a scale? That is, after the first fifteen domains registered the price goes up? It would be hard to enforce, as you could have each employee in a company register fifteen domains or something equally ridiculous. Then there's the situation of legimate use. For example, my organization has a lot of domains, but we intend to use them all (make real web sites out of them). People have offered to buy them, but we have turned them down.
Maybe the solution, therefore, would be to limit how quickly you could transfer the ownership to another entitiy? That way, the "squatters" couldn't buy a good domain one day, and then sell it at a 4000% markup the next, never having intent to use it themselves. No immediate gradification.
The problem (and how Linux cannot fall into the same trap) is that Apple refuses to bend the needs of the OS towards developers' needs. All the standards for UI and UI consistency across apps doesn't do a heap of good when iD is trying to port Quake III Arena to the system, which has its own UI.
I have to admit, I don't really get this point. I don't see how having interface guidelines impeded Quake III development. I also don't see how this situation is signficantly more difficult than the Windows side of things.
Apple has to get off its bandwagon and start positioning OpenGL within the system (as they are doing in MacOS X) NOW to developers, instead of continuting to push stale standards like QuickDraw (Apple's Vietnam, next to OpenDoc).
Ummm, okay.
First, Apple has been pushing OpenGL as the primary Mac 3D API for more than a year and a half. Here is the original press release. It has been standard issue since last October.
And as for QuickDraw being "Apple's Vietnam", QuickDraw is actually the foundation for 2D graphics on all versions of Mac OS prior to X (Mac OS X uses Quartz). Every single Mac application ever created uses it. QuickDraw 3D, however, was a good 3D API. There was no other reasonable alternative when Apple created it. Some Mac developers feel that it is easier to developer for QD3D, but Apple realizes that OpenGL is the standard, so it is (wisely) backing it. And unlike OpenGL, QuickDraw 3D has a standard file format (3DMF). ------ Scott Stevenson
Dreamcast is really best thought of as a WinCE based, Java capable, net console, that also plays some pretty kickass games for a 128bit graphics system with a total of only 24MB of RAM.
Dreamcast is not WinCE-based, it is WinCE-capable. Each piece of software can opt to use WinCE as its operating system, or an alternative. I believe most shipping games use an alternative.
The GUI setup utilities don't have all the options you want. (Linuxconf, Control Panel, etc...) [...] Go online, find documentation, and modify the actual config files. Not particularly hard, provided you have the brains to use a text editor.
I think you're mixing up cause and effect here. The Linux configuration tools don't have all the options because the creators of such software know you can always revert back to console tools if you have to. In my opinion, this encourages bad software and interface design.
Sure, many people -- if forced to, and with proper training -- can go in and manually edit a text file to bend the computer to their will, but why? These are types of things that computers are really good at automating. One of the alleged advantages of the computer, in fact, is that it unburdens the human from such menial tasks, and frees us up to question the meaning of the universe and such.
It will exceed [the feature set of IE Mac] in some areas, e.g. MathML, XML namespaces, MNG.
When I say "feature set" I mean the feature set of the browser, not the rendering engine. Mac IE has stuff like the scrapbook, print preview -- a lot of stuff that is really useful that probably won't find its way into Mozilla anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you find another PC oriented 22" LCD? Whats the big deal about the Apple one? Besides how cool it looks...
There weren't any other 22" LCD screens as of last year. That's why the Cinema Display was such a big deal. Has that changed?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
The text below is from the TeaTemplateLanguage.pdf file (240k). This information does not seem to be on any of the site's pages (requires a bit more digging), so I think it makes sense to bring up to the surface a bit here...
Why use Tea?
In general, neither developers nor page designers author Tea templates. The goal is that they be written and maintained by technical producers who are liaisons between developers and designers.
Tea resulted from several years of experience with other web page building mechanisms. Most web-based applications start out with HTML tags embedded in code, whether it be C, Perl, or Java. This approach is adequate for small or first-time projects because it doesn't take very long to develop.
[...]
Rather than embedding an existing language into something like an ASP or JSP, Tea is a language specially designed to meet the requirements of a templating system. It is safe, simple, efficient, and powerful.
In one instance, Tea is integrated with a special servlet. This servlet gives Tea templates control over page building, while retaining strong ties to a back-end application written by a Java developer. While this servlet provides functionality similar to that of JSPs, Tea enforces correct model-view separation because of the intentional language limitations. Although this is also the suggested separation model in JSPs, it cannot be enforced.
They also seem to put an emphasis on simplicity. The loops and output statements are really clean. The aforementioned PDF sheds a lot of light on this. Another interesting note:
Tea templates compile into Java class files and execute just the same within a Java Virtual Machine. The Tea compiler does not generate intermediate Java files and hand them off to a Java compiler, but it instead generates the class files directly. Still, the resulting class files are as efficient as any handwritten Java code.
Because no Java compiler is used, Tea can be distributed much more easily. All that's required is a Java2 runtime environment. Sun's JRE can be used, but the SDK isn't necessary.
The bad thing is that the IDE only runs on Windows.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
I think Palm is making a mistake in playing Handspring's game with the "iMac" principle of computer design, which seems to be "cheerfully colored case == better!" Frankly, I think I might be embarrassed to whip one of these M100s out on the subway or wherever
Exactly! What would people would say if you had a PDA that was in a color other than black? Just think about what a metallic blue or gold case suggests about you to the casual onlooker. I won't even mention anything about the silver case. Yikes.
Black casings forever, I say!
I think Palm is making a mistake in playing Handspring's game with the "iMac" principle of computer design, which seems to be "cheerfully colored case == better!"
Again, agreed. I definitely subscribe more to the "Model-T" principle of computer design.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Pretty see-through colors don't increase useability
None of the pictures of ZDNet depict see-through cases.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
By making it all curvy, like an iMac, and colorful (like an iMac), and giving the user the ability to change the color to match their mood (like a Nokia cell-phone), 3Com is letting the rest of the competition know that they have simply run out of technological ideas, and are ready to be replaced as the leader in the PDA market.
So it is your belief, then, that 100% of Palm's core engineering department was deployed to put colored cases on the devices? And you do not think that Palm is continuing to develop technological advances in parallel with the redesigned casings? I hope you're not one of those people that feel that every single device, OS and application in the world should have the visual appeal of a lead pipe. Heaven forbid we think of humans as visual beings. Careful not to make the industrial design too bold or creative, it might steal cycles from the processor.
BTW: What's up with the car industry? Why all the color choices? Isn't VW just telling their competition that they've run out of technological ideas? Why can't all cars just be beige and shaped like a 80's Volvo?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
The [Newton's] handwriting sucked for most things. Great for notes, useless for anything else
Verus what? Graphiti? Where you have to write things out one letter at a time in a tiny little box? After using a Newton, this aspect of the Palm experience immediately turned me off to them. I've been trying to become interested ever since. I don't think most people really realize that with a Newton, you could write anywhere on the screen and have the thing recognize it.
I honestly don't know what you mean about the handwriting recognition. I thought the MessagePad 120 did an exceptional job of recognizing my handwriting. What I will grant you is that the Newton was too big and too expensive. If Palm had just taken the Newton and shrunk it and reduced the price, I would have been onboard right away. But I feel the Palm had a significantly less efficient UI than the Newton, large due to the constraints of Graphiti.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
I say let the Linux community write the X11 stuff. After all, they know it better then Apple.
This just isn't practical. Apple's brand name and product perception is incredibly important to the company, and rightfull so. In fact, nobody really realized this (or did anything about it) until Jobs returned. Their marketing campaign was a disaster prior to him bringing Chiat-Day back on. But I digress...
The point is that each product that Apple releases reflects them as a company, as a result, having a bunch of hackers slap together some X11 stuff just isn't an option. Things can be worked on and released in such a manner for GNOME, but it just doesn't make sense for QuickTime.
I think the main issue is that Apple doesn't believe there's a signficant market for QuickTime on Linux. Obviously, all of its hardware customers need it, and it has to support Windows, but I think it's hard to justify the Linux issue when so much of the installed based is servers.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
While it is nice that the machine has GigE, I can only assume that it is connected to their PCI bus in some manner. [...] Hope you weren't planning on doing anything else at the same time...
During the keynote, the machine seemed to have no problem pumping 16MB of video per second down the pipe to Final Cut Pro for live manipulation.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
I agree with most of what you said. But the Cube is not even remotely close to gorgeous.
I suppose that's fairly subjective.
The iMac looks idiotic
That's just troll material.
and the G4s are no different looking from any other computer on earth
In terms of dimensions and proportions, you are correct. In terms of display, colors, materials and functionality, the G4 cases are quite different.
Apple keeps telling us how they want to make the computer an attractive home appliance, but the best they can do is use colored plastic and make them a little rounder? That doesn't cut it in my book. As far as I'm concerned all these computers have the same "Toaster and TV set combo" look as any other computer that's out there.
I would imagine there are much more bold and daring designs sitting on the drawing board, but Apple does have to be somewhat realistic about accommodating 1) hardware needs (heat issues, for example 2) appealing to a broad audience 3) production costs/time. That said, they are certainly more daring in their designs than any other major manufacturer in the industry.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
I can't say I see that my personal freedom is being restricted by such a practice. I can still easily access the games.
I can access the games as well, that's not what concerns me individually. What I concerned about is it sets a bad precedent. The more laws that are passed that restrict personal freedom (of any variety), the easier it gets to pass them each time, and the more wide-reaching they become. In the US, we allegedly have freedom of speech, but there are so many exceptions to wade through, that some times it's hard to remember it's actually a first amendment right.
If you _honestly_ think that all parents will stop all kids under 15 (for example) from any contact with these games, you're sadly deluded.
I do not. I understand some amount of people that shouldn't see this stuff will, but I don't think it's worth the price of blatant censorship to prevent this. It's simply a matter of how much one feels that they need to the government to protect them and tell them what to do.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
My take on what seem like the most interesting things...
The Cube
It kicks ass in a Matrix-style way. It's just gorgeous, and is an engineering marvel as well. In case anyone missed it, the thing has no fan. As a result, it's incredibly quiet -- just ask anybody with a previous generation iMac (which was the first to go fanless). This is possible because of the low power consumption/heat output of the PPC. And while this thing won't fit in a rack, it does allow one to create a space-efficient (and sightly) server farm.
MP G4s
Apple is today selling dual G4s for the same price it sold single processor machines for yesterday. This is impressive. Certain applications will take more advantage of the second processor than others -- Photoshop and Final Cut Pro should fly -- but this is a good move regardless. I would like to hear what Carmack has to say about this. In addition, the motherboards now have gigabit ethernet standard. And thanks to Darwin's SMP, Mac OS X should fly on this thing.
Mouse/keyboard
It took them a while, but Apple appears to have fixed the problems with both its mouse and keyboard. I'll have to reserve final judgement until I hold the thing, but the mouse seems good. What not everyone realizes is that the idea behind the hockey puck mouse was that it could easily fit in a child's hand. The idea with this new mouse is that smaller hands can rest their palm on the back, but not have trouble reach the mouse button in the front (since the whole thing is a button). We're back to a full-size keyboard too.
BTW: From what I understand, ALL new Apple desktop models come with the new mouse and keyboard. This includes the $799 iMac...
$799 iMac
Apple will start selling a $799 iMac in the new Indigo color in September. This machine does not have DVD or FireWire, but it's technologically superior to the $999 machine that Apple sells today. And even if you don't like Mac OS, this thing could make one bad-ass xterm machine. Not only is it cheap and has ethernet and a great sound system (how many $799 machines can claim that?), but it looks cool too. There are a bunch of other revisions to the iMac product line, including several new colors, but none significant as this.
iMovie 2
While this may not affect many slashdotters, it's worth noting that Apple has done an amazing job with iMovie. It's essentially at the forefront and defining this new desktop DV editing industry as it goes. Sony seems to be struggling to keep up. iMovie is the first piece of software to make DV editing so accesible. This is a brilliant move on Apple's part, because users will eventually graduate to Final Cut and a G4. I feel this is a strategy similar to how Microsoft leveraged FrontPage to breed ASP developers.
Apple is continually eliminating obstacles that stand between it and its critics. And while some poeple still feel that one company making both the OS and the hardware is bad, Apple has proved that it understands it customers and its market. It is also one of the only major computing companies companies to take previous proprietary software (Darwin, QuickTime Streaing, OpenPlay, NetSprocket) and move it to an open source license that is approved of by the OSI. And note that it can afford to do this because it derives most of its revenue from hardware.
The company is far from perfect, but substainial progress has been made in the last three years, and Apple deserves credit for that today. The industry would be much duller and stagnant without them.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
What the heck?! Can't get through to apple.com. Gee, must me the /. effect.
Actually, ironically, it may be that slashdot itself is feeling the effects of the Jobs keynote. I can't remember the last time it took so long for slashdot to load.
And I know it was a joke, but for a site to really be slashdotted, by definition, the recipient site must have less hardware and bandwidth than slashdot itself. This certainly isn't the case with Apple.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
The "Honey, I shrunk the supercomputer" slogan -- could this be a tacit admission that Disney and Apple are becoming one?
If there is a deal in the works (which seems quite unlikely), this doesn't really prove anything. Steve Jobs works very closely with Disney in a variety of ways -- most notably through Pixar. Revenues from movies such as Toy Story and Bug's Life are split 50/50 between Disney and Pixar. Jobs also frequently uses Disney imagery during Photoshop benchmarking tests at keynotes.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
OSx public beta in September! This is actually a disappointment; they had planned to release it today.
Ummmm, no they didn't. Maybe the rumor sites planned on it being released today, but Apple never said anything about it. I suspect it will be available to the public at Seybold SF (August 28).
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Scott Stevenson
Well APPL must read /.
Why not? There are thousands of employees there, some portion of which are working on open source projects.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
If you think violence in videogames doesn't affect children, then you are living in a fantasy world. Media, of which videogames are one facet, have an incredible effect on children.
Personally, I don't dispute this. Children exposed to violence at an early age probably turn out to be a little more screwed up than others.
However, the question is whether you are willing to gradually give up more and more personal freedoms and allow censorship in order to prevent this from happening. I am not. You can either decide to take personal responsibility for protecting your children from that which you feel they should be protected from, or let the government dictate to you how things should be. As everyone knows, freedom of speech is not meant to protect popular ideas. It it to protect the unpopular ones -- or in this case, the politically incorrect ones.
The games are put behind a curtain? Doesn't that seem a little ominous to anyone else?
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Scott Stevenson
or does all the extra flash provided by Aqua and such seem rather boring? i dunno, it reminds me of my old BBS days where we'd go through and change every menu into a big, fancy ANSI piccy,..
:)
So let me get this straight, you're comparing ascii art to Aqua?
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Scott Stevenson
Where to start....
New imac= $1,000
new Dell home system with monitor and external speakers= $900. Go ahead, argue with it.
The iMac has built-in ethernet, built-in FireWire (for video editing), etc, and built-in speakers.
For years now, the stability of Apple computers has given rise to a wonderful run of cigarette breaks for the people who've sat in front of them. Now, Apple's adoption of BSD/NeXT technology is supposed to solve that by finally (finally!!) making some version of MacOS stable.
When was the last time you actually used Mac OS 9? They're fixed a lot of stuff. The OS is quite stable now. It's not Unix, but it's worlds better than the Mac OS architecture of 3 years ago.
not notice that the capability exists to have one of those ultra-powerful G4 machines serve multiple workstations thereby hammering Apple's bottom line.
Ummm... what? Do you understand Apple's business model?
Apple is a company that operates in a few niche markets selling its own hardware to run its own operating system in a hothouse market with no direct competition.
If you consider the consumer (do you realize how well the iMac does?) or entire graphics/publishing industry to be niche. These seem less "niche" to me than development or servers.
he destroyed all the competition from licensees who were building Apples faster and cheaper
And worse. The Motorola machines, for example, were an abomination. People would buy what would claim to be a Mac, discover it had all kinds of hardware and software compatibility issues, and get a bad impression of the Mac as a result. This was damaging the brand name. Apple makes the whole widget. This has always been the lure. This is why things like PowerPC, FireWire, the new filesystem and USB were intergrated so quickly. My partner has a W2k machine with USB ports, and hasn't gotten a single USB device to work perfectly yet.
it's pretty easy to imagine Steve Jobs waking up in a cold sweat from dreams involving people thinking of Apples as application servers with apps running on anything but Apple hardware
I really don't think you understand Apple's markets or customers. Applications like Excel or Word can operate in a vaccum. They are pretty much self-contained. Publishing or multimedia production, however, requires considerably more infrastructure and support apps -- color management, font management, video support, codecs, etc, etc. You can't do all this stuff on the server side.
Additionally, how many consumers will buy a G4 as their application server?
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Scott Stevenson
Why not? If they know how to configure their modem or soundcard, why not instead of using some GUI tool which makes things difficult?
How many people really know how to or enjoy configuring a modem or sound card? Certainly not the masses at large. Some relatively small percentage, perhaps. I believe the masses would much rather use a GUI, and would feel that a command/line text file approach would qualify as "making things difficult."
Sometimes I seriously wonder if people realize that the slashdot population is absolutely nothing like the rest of the world.
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Scott Stevenson
Because it makes making changes to the system easier. For instance I've got two soundcards installed in my machine, a PCI and a ISA soundcard which both of which I can use under linux. Say I want to change how one of the cards is configured for whatever reason. All I have to do is make a backup copy of config.modules and make the needed changes to the orginal config.modules with a text editor.
Okay, granted, that's a logical reason for you. But do you feel that this is a reasonable approach for the average mainstream consumer/gamer?
Granted, this is a slightly different issue than my original post, but still applies to the overall topic of linux gaming.
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Scott Stevenson
Just some ideas of the top of my head...
What if the price was on a scale? That is, after the first fifteen domains registered the price goes up? It would be hard to enforce, as you could have each employee in a company register fifteen domains or something equally ridiculous. Then there's the situation of legimate use. For example, my organization has a lot of domains, but we intend to use them all (make real web sites out of them). People have offered to buy them, but we have turned them down.
Maybe the solution, therefore, would be to limit how quickly you could transfer the ownership to another entitiy? That way, the "squatters" couldn't buy a good domain one day, and then sell it at a 4000% markup the next, never having intent to use it themselves. No immediate gradification.
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Scott Stevenson
The problem (and how Linux cannot fall into the same trap) is that Apple refuses to bend the needs of the OS towards developers' needs. All the standards for UI and UI consistency across apps doesn't do a heap of good when iD is trying to port Quake III Arena to the system, which has its own UI.
I have to admit, I don't really get this point. I don't see how having interface guidelines impeded Quake III development. I also don't see how this situation is signficantly more difficult than the Windows side of things.
Apple has to get off its bandwagon and start positioning OpenGL within the system (as they are doing in MacOS X) NOW to developers, instead of continuting to push stale standards like QuickDraw (Apple's Vietnam, next to OpenDoc).
Ummm, okay.
First, Apple has been pushing OpenGL as the primary Mac 3D API for more than a year and a half. Here is the original press release. It has been standard issue since last October.
And as for QuickDraw being "Apple's Vietnam", QuickDraw is actually the foundation for 2D graphics on all versions of Mac OS prior to X (Mac OS X uses Quartz). Every single Mac application ever created uses it. QuickDraw 3D, however, was a good 3D API. There was no other reasonable alternative when Apple created it. Some Mac developers feel that it is easier to developer for QD3D, but Apple realizes that OpenGL is the standard, so it is (wisely) backing it. And unlike OpenGL, QuickDraw 3D has a standard file format (3DMF).
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Scott Stevenson
Dreamcast is really best thought of as a WinCE based, Java capable, net console, that also plays some pretty kickass games for a 128bit graphics system with a total of only 24MB of RAM.
Dreamcast is not WinCE-based, it is WinCE-capable. Each piece of software can opt to use WinCE as its operating system, or an alternative. I believe most shipping games use an alternative.
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Scott Stevenson
The GUI setup utilities don't have all the options you want. (Linuxconf, Control Panel, etc...) [...] Go online, find documentation, and modify the actual config files. Not particularly hard, provided you have the brains to use a text editor.
I think you're mixing up cause and effect here. The Linux configuration tools don't have all the options because the creators of such software know you can always revert back to console tools if you have to. In my opinion, this encourages bad software and interface design.
Sure, many people -- if forced to, and with proper training -- can go in and manually edit a text file to bend the computer to their will, but why? These are types of things that computers are really good at automating. One of the alleged advantages of the computer, in fact, is that it unburdens the human from such menial tasks, and frees us up to question the meaning of the universe and such.
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Scott Stevenson
It will exceed [the feature set of IE Mac] in some areas, e.g. MathML, XML namespaces, MNG.
When I say "feature set" I mean the feature set of the browser, not the rendering engine. Mac IE has stuff like the scrapbook, print preview -- a lot of stuff that is really useful that probably won't find its way into Mozilla anytime soon.
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Scott Stevenson