Surely the base reason for this is that the UNIX pholosophy is not to waste valuable computing resource of GUIs and graphical processes when you don't need to.
I don't have details on the Windows stuff discussed here, but at least in the Mac OS X world, moving GUI stuff off of the main CPU and onto the GPU (using Quartz Extreme, starting in Jaguar/10.2) freed up the CPU to do more important things. The whole system was faster as a result.
The only reason it would be doing extra work is because programs are wastefully written to use these humongous colorspaces with useles eyecandy of gradiatians and similar crapola.
It's my belief that the vast majority of computer users do not feel this way. You're free to have this opinion, of course, but I think it makes sense in this case to write software with the assumption that most users are going to want to have access to 32-bit color -- if for no other reason than regularly view photos, video, and web sites. Those just don't work well in 16 color mode.
As far as performance goes, I think modern hardware is up to the task. Even mobile phones have 16-bit color (or more) nowadays.
This is why I find Mac so infuriating; I KNOW I can do what I want if the machine would only give me access to the parts I need and twice as many options. The level of frustration created by 'user friendly' design is only made worse by the various cute pictures and noise
I could see this as fair criticism for earlier versions of Mac OS, but I have a hard time seeing how this really still applies in Mac OS X. There's very little in the way of impassible walls put between you and the guts of the system.
But even OS X is not as scalable as one might like because it is really an intuitive Apple GUI grafted on to a separate powerful *nix CLI core. Although novice Mac users can "graduate" to the command line, the transition is not smooth -- using Finder does not teach one how to use ls, cd, mv, cp, rm, etc.
I think the reason for this is that there's very little benefit in "graduating" to the CLI for the vast majority of the population. The number of people that use computers for anything other than email, web, photos and video is extremely small.
In any case, the Finder isn't doing ls, cd, mv, etc behind the scenes. It uses a seprate set of APIs for file system manipulations. To me, there's no clear benefit to exposing the "translated" representations of file system manipulation at the user level (even as a preference) because there are so few people that would benefit from it. It would take engineering resources to implement and maintain and would result in a larger code base.
If anything, Apple is moving away from the filesystem being the focal point of the user's experience with Spotlight. I think this makes a lot of sense as we acquire massive amounts of files. As Jobs pointed out at the WWDC keynote, daily minute usage of the Finder could drop substantially with the introduction of Tiger.
Do you know if this addition is from Apple or from the GNUStep people? If it's not an Apple sanctioned addition to the language, it probably won't be in the Cocoa spec.
So it's OK for "our" apps to copy the look and feel of a competitor we don't like, yet not OK for an "outsider" to copy the look and feel of a competitor palatable to many of us?
How is that supposed to be read -- "...provides conclusive evidence... of the possibility of cross-seeding"? How can anything provide a conclusive evidence of a possibility of such a thing?
I see your point, but I think the intention was something along these lines:
"Bounce not only provides conclusive evidence of Martian meteorites on Earth, but also supports the possibility of cross-seeding."
While I agree with a lot of what you say, and feel very much the same as you about the reality shows and such, I don't believe turning off the TV will get kids interested in math and science. At the most fundamental level, we're truly individuals. People get excited by and gravitate towards different things. Science and math isn't all there is to existence (although some scientists may disagree:). It's true that math and science attempt to explain existence in human terms, but so do art, philsophy and even meditation.
a good start is to raise the children in the omission of the wave of "crap" television
Agreed.
In my opinion, math and science are already kid-friendly
My bet is that it seems that way to you because you have an unusual amount of natural talent for it. Your demonstrated ability to express your ideas is further evidence of this. When one has such a talent, it's not necessarily easy to imagine what it would be like to live life without it.
I believe that at some point, modern education systems are going to figure out that learning is a not a one-size-fits-all affair. Standardized, structured learning fits perfectly with some people. Others simpy can't relate to it, so they retreat to TV or other interests. Parents pushing harder on the kids only increases the amount of frustration.
I think real strides in education will take place when we recognize that there's more than one core concept of learning, and that not every intelligent individual is necessarily a good teacher.
Why use a primitive language (C, C++) that is nothing but a glorified assembler that likes to pretend it is a high-level language to write apps? Granted, there is muchos macho appeal to work in
To a certain point, I agree. But there is a performance hit when using a higher level language. It's less of an issue on web servers because you take the hit "all at once" when the page loads. Desktop GUI apps have to constantly handle user events and deal with things like live resizing.
When software companies come out with products that are slower and take more system resources than the previous version, customers aren't necessarily thrilled. So higher level languages don't work for everything, but they can make software more reliable in many cases. I think it comes down to a case-by-case basis.
And writing core OS components in higher level languages... well, I just don't think we're there yet.
Go here and click the demo link to see what it's all about. The popup is relatively small and un-intrusive, so stop exaggerating things and find out for yourself.
I disagree. I did just check out the demo and I find it distracting even before you mouse over.
I completely sympathize with the journalists in this case. To a casual observer, it can appear as if the author manually added the link. This can discredit the author without even receiving anything in return. In any case, it's enough of a distraction to make an article harder to read.
I can't help but think of the scene from A Bug's Life where Hopper illustrates what would happen if the ants figured out that they vastly outnumber the grasshoppers.
It makes no sense to sell a $15 or $20 CD's songs, of which there are between 10 and 20, for 99c each, simply because in that case, there is no incentive to buy the CD. Volume discounting makes perfect sense
Increasing the price of individual items isn't exactly a discount.:) And they're not even selling you anything real. There are no material goods that are cheaper to produce at a bulk rate.
In any case, the cat is already out of the bag. Charging 2 - 3 times as much as the price people are used to paying just isn't going to fly.
Maybe the good songs are worth 2.99, maybe the sucky one are worth only 0.25 [...] When the price of the song drops to the bid price, the bidder gets the song. If the bidder wants the song sooner, then they will have to up their bid.
This is just way too complicated for somebody who wants the latest Britney single.
Availability of Mac hardware from multiple vendors
On one hand, I completely understand the idea of not being tied down to one vendor. On the other, what good is multiple vendors if none of them offer the OS I want? It's a pretty easy decision for me.
Now, if they ported OS X to i386 arch, they'd have 10 fold the developers and 100 fold the customers...
Next did exact that but it didn't actually work. Same with Be and OS/2. It's hard enough to compete for attention against Windows on desktop x86, it's even harder to actually make money doing it. There's a huge difference between potential and actual customers.
Not to mention the integration with the hardware is what makes many of the attractive features of Mac OS X possible in the first place.
and in the case of Eric, direct fascists: Eric moderates the Cocoa-dev mailing list, and anyone he doesn't like gets the boot. [...] The worst of it is that all of this is taking place with the implicit nod of Cupertino: for example, Cocoa-dev is run by Apple themselves.
I think you've got your lists mixed up. Erik doesn't moderate cocoa-dev. He did moderate cocoa-pro, but that list was decomissioned when I took over Cocoa Dev Central from him. He's been a friend of me for a while, so he can't be too bad.:)
I trade emails with Scott Anguish occasionally and have met Aaron once. Neither strike me as rude. Aaron was extremely friendly, in fact. Scott A. has always gone out of his way to help people on the lists I've been on.
I believe you're right. I hadn't read up on KDE licenses. I had though it had more of a BSD flavor to it.
Unless they were going to write a rendering engine from scratch they had to choose between Gecko and KHTML
Or they could have licensed Opera.:)
The annoying thing about the KHTML thing was that they kept it secret for so long, and when they did "give back" it was in the form of a huge patch dump that took volunteers ages to work through.
This is a reasonable comment, but there are worse things than getting piles of free source code from commercial entities. If open source projects expect contributions only on ideal terms, there's simply going to be less code coming in.
There was even duplicated bugfixing going on there etc - in other words given the choice between working with the OSS community and letting Jobs go "tada!" in front of his followers, they chose the latter.
Again, I hear what you're saying about the bugs, but consider the possibility that there's more to "tada" than you think. You comments suggest to me that you think of Apple as a code machine in this context. Not everyone sees software as just code. I think free software will thrive in a community that recognizes more than one software culture and development methodology.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the base reason for this is that the UNIX pholosophy is not to waste valuable computing resource of GUIs and graphical processes when you don't need to.
I don't have details on the Windows stuff discussed here, but at least in the Mac OS X world, moving GUI stuff off of the main CPU and onto the GPU (using Quartz Extreme, starting in Jaguar/10.2) freed up the CPU to do more important things. The whole system was faster as a result.
- Scott
The only reason it would be doing extra work is because programs are wastefully written to use these humongous colorspaces with useles eyecandy of gradiatians and similar crapola.
It's my belief that the vast majority of computer users do not feel this way. You're free to have this opinion, of course, but I think it makes sense in this case to write software with the assumption that most users are going to want to have access to 32-bit color -- if for no other reason than regularly view photos, video, and web sites. Those just don't work well in 16 color mode.
As far as performance goes, I think modern hardware is up to the task. Even mobile phones have 16-bit color (or more) nowadays.
- Scott
This is why I find Mac so infuriating; I KNOW I can do what I want if the machine would only give me access to the parts I need and twice as many options. The level of frustration created by 'user friendly' design is only made worse by the various cute pictures and noise
I could see this as fair criticism for earlier versions of Mac OS, but I have a hard time seeing how this really still applies in Mac OS X. There's very little in the way of impassible walls put between you and the guts of the system.
- Scott
But even OS X is not as scalable as one might like because it is really an intuitive Apple GUI grafted on to a separate powerful *nix CLI core. Although novice Mac users can "graduate" to the command line, the transition is not smooth -- using Finder does not teach one how to use ls, cd, mv, cp, rm, etc.
I think the reason for this is that there's very little benefit in "graduating" to the CLI for the vast majority of the population. The number of people that use computers for anything other than email, web, photos and video is extremely small.
In any case, the Finder isn't doing ls, cd, mv, etc behind the scenes. It uses a seprate set of APIs for file system manipulations. To me, there's no clear benefit to exposing the "translated" representations of file system manipulation at the user level (even as a preference) because there are so few people that would benefit from it. It would take engineering resources to implement and maintain and would result in a larger code base.
If anything, Apple is moving away from the filesystem being the focal point of the user's experience with Spotlight. I think this makes a lot of sense as we acquire massive amounts of files. As Jobs pointed out at the WWDC keynote, daily minute usage of the Finder could drop substantially with the introduction of Tiger.
- Scott
It's confusing and convoluted as hell.
In what way? What are you going to find in Applications other than applications?
there are applications left and right
Unless you're actively moving things around, all of your applications will end up in one place -- Applications.
- Scott
Do you know if this addition is from Apple or from the GNUStep people? If it's not an Apple sanctioned addition to the language, it probably won't be in the Cocoa spec.
It's in the Apple docs for Objective-C.
- Scott
You can implement rather complex GUIs without writing a single line of code yourself (more so now thanks to the contoller objects supported
Recently wrote an article on this, for those that are interested:
Introduction to Bindings
- Scott
but where exactly is the project builder clone
Project Center
- Scott
So it's OK for "our" apps to copy the look and feel of a competitor we don't like, yet not OK for an "outsider" to copy the look and feel of a competitor palatable to many of us?
People don't buy Word because of the interface.
- Scott
How is that supposed to be read -- "...provides conclusive evidence ... of the possibility of cross-seeding"? How can anything provide a conclusive evidence of a possibility of such a thing?
I see your point, but I think the intention was something along these lines:
"Bounce not only provides conclusive evidence of Martian meteorites on Earth, but also supports the possibility of cross-seeding."
- Scott
While I agree with a lot of what you say, and feel very much the same as you about the reality shows and such, I don't believe turning off the TV will get kids interested in math and science. At the most fundamental level, we're truly individuals. People get excited by and gravitate towards different things. Science and math isn't all there is to existence (although some scientists may disagree :). It's true that math and science attempt to explain existence in human terms, but so do art, philsophy and even meditation.
a good start is to raise the children in the omission of the wave of "crap" television
Agreed.
In my opinion, math and science are already kid-friendly
My bet is that it seems that way to you because you have an unusual amount of natural talent for it. Your demonstrated ability to express your ideas is further evidence of this. When one has such a talent, it's not necessarily easy to imagine what it would be like to live life without it.
I believe that at some point, modern education systems are going to figure out that learning is a not a one-size-fits-all affair. Standardized, structured learning fits perfectly with some people. Others simpy can't relate to it, so they retreat to TV or other interests. Parents pushing harder on the kids only increases the amount of frustration.
I think real strides in education will take place when we recognize that there's more than one core concept of learning, and that not every intelligent individual is necessarily a good teacher.
Best Regards,
- Scott
Am I the only one that read that as:
Space Technology to Conquer Everquest
Nope.
- Scott
Actually don't they make you pay for your patches?
No. People get confused because of the number system.
"Jaguar" 10.2 = Mac OS X 2.0
"Panther" 10.3 = Mac OS X 3.0
These are major releases with substantial new features that come out once per year.
10.2.1 - 10.2.x are free updates
10.3.1 - 10.3.x are free updates
These are usually bug fixes. There are also security updates and patches to various included apps and components which are also free.
I actually have a packing slip from Apple that says "Mac OS X 1.0", but I guess they decided to go with the other system.
- Scott
Why use a primitive language (C, C++) that is nothing but a glorified assembler that likes to pretend it is a high-level language to write apps? Granted, there is muchos macho appeal to work in
To a certain point, I agree. But there is a performance hit when using a higher level language. It's less of an issue on web servers because you take the hit "all at once" when the page loads. Desktop GUI apps have to constantly handle user events and deal with things like live resizing.
When software companies come out with products that are slower and take more system resources than the previous version, customers aren't necessarily thrilled. So higher level languages don't work for everything, but they can make software more reliable in many cases. I think it comes down to a case-by-case basis.
And writing core OS components in higher level languages... well, I just don't think we're there yet.
- Scott
Go here and click the demo link to see what it's all about. The popup is relatively small and un-intrusive, so stop exaggerating things and find out for yourself.
I disagree. I did just check out the demo and I find it distracting even before you mouse over.
I completely sympathize with the journalists in this case. To a casual observer, it can appear as if the author manually added the link. This can discredit the author without even receiving anything in return. In any case, it's enough of a distraction to make an article harder to read.
- Scott
I can't help but think of the scene from A Bug's Life where Hopper illustrates what would happen if the ants figured out that they vastly outnumber the grasshoppers.
- Scott
Nonsense. "Artists" survive due to the marketing abilities of the record companies and the RIAA. They need the RIAA more than the RIAA needs them.
If all the artists left the RIAA's labels, who would be making more money -- the artists or the RIAA?
Artists can always sell music online or tickets to their shows. The RIAA needs something to sell.
- Scott
It makes no sense to sell a $15 or $20 CD's songs, of which there are between 10 and 20, for 99c each, simply because in that case, there is no incentive to buy the CD. Volume discounting makes perfect sense
:) And they're not even selling you anything real. There are no material goods that are cheaper to produce at a bulk rate.
Increasing the price of individual items isn't exactly a discount.
In any case, the cat is already out of the bag. Charging 2 - 3 times as much as the price people are used to paying just isn't going to fly.
- Scott
Maybe the good songs are worth 2.99, maybe the sucky one are worth only 0.25 [...] When the price of the song drops to the bid price, the bidder gets the song. If the bidder wants the song sooner, then they will have to up their bid.
This is just way too complicated for somebody who wants the latest Britney single.
- Scott
First of all: Apple Computer holds no copyright over the works they distribute via ITMS. The record labels hold the copyrights to the music.
But this is just symantecs. The record labels entrust the protection of the copyright to Apple.
- Scott
Availability of Mac hardware from multiple vendors
On one hand, I completely understand the idea of not being tied down to one vendor. On the other, what good is multiple vendors if none of them offer the OS I want? It's a pretty easy decision for me.
Best Regards,
- Scott
Now, if they ported OS X to i386 arch, they'd have 10 fold the developers and 100 fold the customers...
Next did exact that but it didn't actually work. Same with Be and OS/2. It's hard enough to compete for attention against Windows on desktop x86, it's even harder to actually make money doing it. There's a huge difference between potential and actual customers.
Not to mention the integration with the hardware is what makes many of the attractive features of Mac OS X possible in the first place.
- Scott
and in the case of Eric, direct fascists: Eric moderates the Cocoa-dev mailing list, and anyone he doesn't like gets the boot. [...] The worst of it is that all of this is taking place with the implicit nod of Cupertino: for example, Cocoa-dev is run by Apple themselves.
:)
I think you've got your lists mixed up. Erik doesn't moderate cocoa-dev. He did moderate cocoa-pro, but that list was decomissioned when I took over Cocoa Dev Central from him. He's been a friend of me for a while, so he can't be too bad.
I trade emails with Scott Anguish occasionally and have met Aaron once. Neither strike me as rude. Aaron was extremely friendly, in fact. Scott A. has always gone out of his way to help people on the lists I've been on.
- Scott
Who keeps moderating this stuff interesting?
:)
Clearly not you, but maybe not everyone shares your viewpoints? Should only reasonable people be given moderator points?
What's the point of slashdot if only one school of thought is socially acceptable? I can get that on TV.
- Scott
Well yes, legally they had to.
:)
I believe you're right. I hadn't read up on KDE licenses. I had though it had more of a BSD flavor to it.
Unless they were going to write a rendering engine from scratch they had to choose between Gecko and KHTML
Or they could have licensed Opera.
The annoying thing about the KHTML thing was that they kept it secret for so long, and when they did "give back" it was in the form of a huge patch dump that took volunteers ages to work through.
This is a reasonable comment, but there are worse things than getting piles of free source code from commercial entities. If open source projects expect contributions only on ideal terms, there's simply going to be less code coming in.
There was even duplicated bugfixing going on there etc - in other words given the choice between working with the OSS community and letting Jobs go "tada!" in front of his followers, they chose the latter.
Again, I hear what you're saying about the bugs, but consider the possibility that there's more to "tada" than you think. You comments suggest to me that you think of Apple as a code machine in this context. Not everyone sees software as just code. I think free software will thrive in a community that recognizes more than one software culture and development methodology.
- Scott