The point is that it's not "special relativity", in the sense of "relativity using the Lorentz transformations", that makes the difference; it's "relativity", in the sense of "all inertial reference frames are equally good". I'm not enough of an expert on the history of physics to say to what extent relativity, in the latter sense, was appreciated prior to Einstein (i.e., whether "Galilean relativity" was a common notion prior to special relativity); it sounds as if it wasn't.
From that, I'm willing to give Einstein credit for banishing privileged reference frames. However, saying "there are no privileged reference frames" is separate from saying that boosts affect the time coordinate, so it's not as if special relativity, in particular, is necessary to understand that Ptolemaic theory is the same as Copernican theory, just in a more annoying reference frame; relativity, in the second sense, suffices. Perhaps it took Einstein's work on Lorentzian relativity to get people to realize that Galilean relativity also existed, but, again, that's a different matter.
Newtonian mechanics did away with the idea of privileged reference frames for space, but said there existed an absolute clock that all observers could agree upon. So the Newtonian privileged reference frame is "the one in which all clocks agree." Newton wouldn't have phrased it that way, though: what we now call a privileged reference frame he just accepted to be the natural course of things -- he had no observations indicating the universe could be any other way.
Einstein came along and said there exists no privileged reference frame for space or time: we exist in a universe where observers can disagree about both.
Hope this helps!
Nope, it doesn't help. It's not as if switching from Galilean transformations to Lorentz transformations was necessary to make Ptolemaic theory just as valid as Copernican theory; even with Galilean relativity they're both valid.
If you can get the Chrome browser on your work computer, you can do that already.
Hell, if you have Windows, Mac OS X, or {fill in your other x86 UN*X}+Wine on your work computer, you can do that already. I think the person to whom you were responding may have known that and just tossed in a bit of snark.
I believe that the privileged frame in Newtonian mechanics is "absolute space". Whatever the hell meaning that has in an expanding universe.
Except that Newton's laws apply in all inertial frames, not just "absolute space"; if you wanted an "absolute space", you could pick any inertial frame and call it "absolute space" and treat all other inertial frames as moving with respect to that frame. Did the notion of Galilean relativity and the Galilean transformation fully exist, in a sense similar to Einsteinian relativity (special relativity) and the Lorentz transformation, before special relativity, or did that formulation come about only after special relativity (as sort of a back-formation)?
This bears repeating: according to special relativity, there are no privileged frames of reference.
So what are the privileged frames of reference in Newtonian mechanics? (If there are no privileged frames of reference in special relativity, the answer is presumably not "inertial frames of reference", as those exist in special relativity as well.)
Basically, researchers have found gut flora with the NDM-1 gene in it. Which might actually be good for not killing off your intestinal flora with antibiotics (which I personally did and was f'd for years until I took probiotics). But more importantly, they've found strains of polio and all sorts of other nasty diseases that are mostly nonexistent nowadays (or at least not causing mass epidemics anymore) with the NDM-1 gene.
The polio virus picked up that gene from bacteria? NDM-1 codes for a beta-lactamase, which chops up beta-lactams; beta-lactams mess up the construction of bacterial cell walls. Do they also mess up the construction of viral protein coats? If not, maybe the bacterially-caused other nasty diseases could get worse with the NDM-1 gene, but polio is another matter.
It's my experience that the Augmentin works better.
To quote the person to whom you're responding:
Augmentin is amoxicillin. It just includes another drug that can inhibit the bacteria's resistance to the amoxicillin.
The second sentence may describe what's happening there. (It also somewhat contradicts the flat "is" statement of the first; perhaps it was better stated as "Augmentin is amoxicillin plus another drug that can inhibit the bacteria's resistance to the amoxicillin".)
I was responding to "This also shortly after apple realized that ALAC was going to fail", if your intent was to connect the two, rather than just citing them as two independent cases where Apple were either using somebody else's open-source code or open-sourcing something of theirs.
If apple end up using Speex then, in hypothetical idealist opensouce theory, the line is drawn and only companies more closed (source) than apple can use the codec which is not many.
I presume you mean "only companies more closed (source) than Apple would refuse to consider the codec" or something such as that, as no sane theory would argue that Apple's adoption of the open-source Speex codec would prevent companies more open-source-friendly than Apple from using it. Whether Apple's use of it would encourage other companies to use it is another matter.
Apple doesn't have to share source code, but the license includes attribution, which doesn't appear to have happened (if it did, we'd have known that from the day Siri was first available).
We would if somebody'd bothered to fire up System Preferences^W^WSettings on an iOS 5 device and then go to General -> About -> Legal and scroll through all that crap looking for the text in question and found it. (I don't have an iOS 5 device to check it on.)
That's Apple's prerogative, but it should be very clear that they're now very much in the Microsoft territory of knowing who to buy over what to write.
Or, to put it another way, knowing when to buy and when to write - which I'd apply to Apple, Microsoft, and other tech companies as well. (Note that one of the main competitors to iOS was developed by a company that was bought by the company that's now developing it.) Perhaps buying technology is the sign of a company losing its innovative mojo; it might also be the sign of a company that's gotten big enough that they can deal with the dictum that "not all the smart people in the world work for you" by buying some of the companies that have those other smart people rather than just by buying their products.
Appears that Xiph came out on top for speech codecs.
...in the opinion of a spin-off from SRI; it might've been easier for them to go with an open source codec than to license a non-open-source codec. Remember, Apple bought the company that developed Siri; they didn't develop it themselves from Day One.
I'm not saying that the availability of the codec as open source was one of the reasons for the choice and that, if the open-source availability weren't an advantage, it would have lost to some closed-source codec; I'm just saying that one shouldn't assume this was an Apple decision (meaning the open-sourceness of it might have been irrelevant or perhaps a disadvantage) and draw conclusions from that assumption.
For a sales site it is required that both types of users be able to use the site. No OS is *required* to be friendly to a certain type of user. In fact it would be beneficial to the non-tech end user if the computer was an appliance that just ran a fixed set of apps. OSX/iOS with a locked App Store is quite close to bringing this kind of device to the market soon.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a fixed set of apps" or "locked App Store". The current App Stores are "locked" in that you need Apple's approval to sell an app on the App Store, and the iOS App Store is "locked" in that it's the only place you can get apps for an un-jailbroken machine running iOS, but they're not "locked" in the sense that the current set of apps on it is the only set of apps that will ever be sold on it. The set of apps you can run on a machine running Mac OS X or iOS is larger than the set of apps that come with Mac OS X or iOS, so the set of apps the machines come with is not a fixed set of apps that are the only apps that the machine will ever be able to run.
When I hear "appliance that just [runs] a fixed set of apps", I think of a machine that comes with the only apps it'll ever run; that's not what a machine running Mac OS X or iOS is. Apple does sell machines of that sort, such as the AirPort {Express,Extreme} (which don't run particularly user-visible apps) and the Apple TV (which currently has a fixed set of "apps", although the functions it can perform can be extended with software updates), but the Apple TV might, at some point, be another iOS platform supported by the App Store.
One might argue that a Chromebook is such an "appliance", but, well, there's this programming language out there called "JavaScript", and a whole bunch of places that upload JavaScript code, so even that is arguably not a fixed-function appliance.
Americans fear their government more now than at any time in history. Kind of funny if your from foreignland.
If US citizens feared the government just half as much as they did 100 years ago, then we wouldn't have HUD. We wouldn't have the TSA. The FDA would only regulate selling drugs with incorrect labels, and there would be no banned substances list. We wouldn't have government schools. We wouldn't have the DMV. We wouldn't have Food Stamps or Welfare. We wouldn't have government backed student loans or government backed car companies. Our cars would not need to pass emission testing, and would not be limited by cafe standards. Our showers could put out any amount of water that the customer chose, and we wouldn't have laws regulating what method we use for generating light in our houses. And no one would even think of trying to implement government health care.
I suspect your list of a lot of stuff they have in foreignland (often more of which they have in foreignland) is also kind of funny if you're from foreignland.
Mach is microkernel and used in many different server-client architecture OS's.
XNU is Server-Client OS like NT
If by "is" you mean "not really", that statement is true of both Darwin and NT.:-)
NT is a bit more microkernelish than Darwin (with the client-server whatever whatever whatever process, csrss, doing, as I understand it, functions such as mapping Windows paths to NT paths and CreateProcess), but it's not as if file system and networking functions run in server processes in either OS (not even kernel-mode server processes). Yes, there are kernel threads that handle some of those functions, but they're not exactly server threads.
XNU operating system (what follows Server-Client architecture) what OS X and iOS use is combination Mach microkernel, FreeBSD's networking and filesystem functions as servers
No, they don't. They function as built-in parts of XNU or as loadable kernel modules, invoked through procedure calls.
And the networking code, VFS layer, and some of the file systems that plug into it may be BSD-derived but they ain't just lightly-breated-on FreeBSD code.
I'm sure I'm opening myself up for an onslaught here, but I thought all their OSX-based stuff was basically just a very elaborate FreeBSD distro.
You were mistaken. OS X's kernel is a combination of some Mach-derived code modified by Apple, some BSD-derived code modified by Apple, some Sun-written code modified by Apple, and some Apple-written code. Its libc (or libSystem) is a combination of some mostly-FreeBSD-derived code modified to varying degrees by Apple and some Apple-written code. The rest of the UN*X userland is a combination of BSD-derived code, GNU code, other upstream code, and Apple-written code. (In some places it goes with GNU code rather than BSD code, e.g. using Bash rather than the Almquist shell as its Bourne shell and GNU Make rather than BSD make as its make.)
I used "BSD-derived" deliberately; most of the BSD-derived code might have come from FreeBSD, but at least some of it came from other BSDs.
It's best thought of as its own BSD-flavored UN*X, related to but not the same as other BSD-flavored UN*Xes.
Isn't that a Linux meme, not a Windows meme? If so, then, given that Linux (unlike Windows) does run on S/390 and z/Architecture, it could probably be done....
Seriously, this is like announcing an iPod dock for MGB motor cars (only arguably less useful). It doesn't hold interest for that many people and the audience that it potentially COULD affect are not likely to install it...
And, yes, presumably they wouldn't be offering this if they didn't think it's useful to be able to run Windows on x86 blade servers plugged into IBM mainframes.
On the other hand - one could turn that process, of fighting a bunch of broken software, into something positive, in the form of improvements to the software in question, or just learning more about one's computer.
"Improvements to the software in question" is, for those in a position to make those improvements, the best response. If you have to fight your system to get it to do the right thing, and you do so by changing the system so that you, and others who follow you, don't have to fight it, that's a Good Thing.
As for "just learning more about one's computer", I don't want a system where I have to learn stuff about it just to get it to do stuff that it should be able to do without my help. I may want to learn about various configuration files and devices and drivers out of curiosity - on my own time and schedule.
I'm not fighting xorg.conf when I can help it - but I've been on a kick lately where I try not to allow myself any complacency when my computer doesn't work the way I want it to. I have to run Windows at work, so I found ways to make it more comfortable (mostly the right kind of cygwin setup, put a bunch of programs on the PATH, and set up a terminal window bound to a hotkey "Quake Console" style...). DBUS kept bitching at me during boot-up about deprecated SYSFS rules, so I learned how to fix those. (Really, though, DBUS itself could have made that a bit easier, I think...) If I'm working on a project and using some semi-broken tool in that work, I find out why it's semi-broken, try to fix it, and submit a patch. I was working with an assembler that was generating the wrong opcodes for certain instructions, so I found the problem and fixed it. I was working with kdenlive and getting really bad framerates out of the live feed from my DV camera - did a little digging and found the problem. I am trying to adopt a stance of not backing down from these kinds of issues - and that's been good times so far. It feels good to confront that kind of crap and beat it.:)
Exactly. The key here is that cases where you have to beat your system into shape are problems that need to be fixed, ideally in a fashion so that other people don't have to beat their systems into shape to solve the same problems.
I am a computer hobbyist, interested to a certain degree in computers for their own sake. For someone who is just interested in the computer as a means to some end, my approach would be completely unreasonable, and some of these issues I have to deal with would similarly be unreasonable.
Yup. And even for some of us where the end is "developing software", having to learn how to, say, beat some low-level part of the window system into shape gets in the way of, say, learning about something more connected to what we're developing.
It is not that they want a separate line, but rather that they want to have the software on the two seemingly separate lines converge.
(Or, rather, that your guess is that they want that.)
Apple's consumer strategy is based around the idea that people are passive consumers of entertainment and software written by others,
Most people don't write software and probably would never do so even if Linux had 100% market share for personal computers, so, yes, most consumers will only be using "software written by others".
Most users would probably mostly watch movies made by others, read books and articles written by others, and listen to music made by others, too. However, there's probably a higher fraction of the consumer base who might make home movies or make music at home, for example.
and the App Store enforces that model of behavior.
A MacBook that was locked down and designed for passive consumption would probably be highly successful, if people were still able to write their emails and essays on it (and that is the extent of production that is expected of consumers who use MacBooks).
Why would Apple want to maintain separate operating systems, when they could have one operating system that is configured at install time for two lines of computers (i.e. the consumer installations are configured for lock-down, and "pro" installations are not)?
Because they have different user bases, perhaps? Perhaps iOS on an iPad is enough for one user base, and people who buy Macs do so because they want something that's not an iPad, because they don't want to run everything in full screen mode, or they have more files than fit well into the iOS UI's "all documents for a given app are in a single pile" model, or....
Jobs' comments about cars and trucks may sum up Apple's model - most people would find tables running iOS sufficient, and, for the rest of them, there are Macs.
(Note that a lot of the lower-level code is shared between the OSes.)
Part of it for me (if not all of it) is that my usage habits are set, I don't really like the newer mouse gestures, it's like learning all over again though I am sure newbies like these things I prefer the "old" way of doing things.
If by "the newer mouse gestures" you mean the change of scrolling direction, you can reverse that on Lion. At least in my experience, Mac OS X has been pretty good (not perfect, but pretty good) about letting me turn off the Shiny New Wonderful.
If what I think is going is going on you may see an exodus, unless developing for the platform, yes serious people do use Mac's, however I am not going to move to Lion even if it is only $29.
I'll probably move to Lion at some point; for me, that's mainly gated by Intuit plucking their corporate head from their ass and somehow allowing me to continue to access my old Quicken database under Lion for historical reasons. (I had to move to Quicken Essentials, even on Snow Leopard, because Quicken for Mac 2007 was consistenly trashing the database, and I figured there was no chance in hell that there'd ever be a bug-fix release for that.)
The App Store is hardly a reason for me not to update, given that I have it on my Snow Leopard machine. Launchpad is hardly a reason for me not to update, as I could and did largely ignore it on my work machine running Lion (occasionally I might hit the wrong button or click the wrong Dock icon and find myself there, but I could escape pretty quickly; heck, the same thing happens occasionally with Expose on Snow Leopard). Multi-touch gestures are probably not a big reason not to update, especially as I think I can disable most of them if they annoy me. Full-screen apps aren't a reason not to update, as I don't have to click the "full screen" button. Resume and Auto-Save probably won't be an issue, either. I liked Conversations in Mail at work, so that would be a reason to update. And, hey, select() finally works on BPF devices in Lion!
Slashdot Mirror
My work computers run Windows XP, IE6 and Firefox 3.5 - no Flash in either browser. How can I run Angry Birds on that shitheap?
By going to Rovio's Angry Birds shop's page for Angry Birds PC Version and paying USD 4.95 or whatever the local price is for you? There's nothing there to indicate that it runs in a Web browser as a Flash game.
The point is that it's not "special relativity", in the sense of "relativity using the Lorentz transformations", that makes the difference; it's "relativity", in the sense of "all inertial reference frames are equally good". I'm not enough of an expert on the history of physics to say to what extent relativity, in the latter sense, was appreciated prior to Einstein (i.e., whether "Galilean relativity" was a common notion prior to special relativity); it sounds as if it wasn't.
From that, I'm willing to give Einstein credit for banishing privileged reference frames. However, saying "there are no privileged reference frames" is separate from saying that boosts affect the time coordinate, so it's not as if special relativity, in particular, is necessary to understand that Ptolemaic theory is the same as Copernican theory, just in a more annoying reference frame; relativity, in the second sense, suffices. Perhaps it took Einstein's work on Lorentzian relativity to get people to realize that Galilean relativity also existed, but, again, that's a different matter.
Newtonian mechanics did away with the idea of privileged reference frames for space, but said there existed an absolute clock that all observers could agree upon. So the Newtonian privileged reference frame is "the one in which all clocks agree." Newton wouldn't have phrased it that way, though: what we now call a privileged reference frame he just accepted to be the natural course of things -- he had no observations indicating the universe could be any other way.
Einstein came along and said there exists no privileged reference frame for space or time: we exist in a universe where observers can disagree about both.
Hope this helps!
Nope, it doesn't help. It's not as if switching from Galilean transformations to Lorentz transformations was necessary to make Ptolemaic theory just as valid as Copernican theory; even with Galilean relativity they're both valid.
If you can get the Chrome browser on your work computer, you can do that already.
Hell, if you have Windows, Mac OS X, or {fill in your other x86 UN*X}+Wine on your work computer, you can do that already. I think the person to whom you were responding may have known that and just tossed in a bit of snark.
I believe that the privileged frame in Newtonian mechanics is "absolute space". Whatever the hell meaning that has in an expanding universe.
Except that Newton's laws apply in all inertial frames, not just "absolute space"; if you wanted an "absolute space", you could pick any inertial frame and call it "absolute space" and treat all other inertial frames as moving with respect to that frame. Did the notion of Galilean relativity and the Galilean transformation fully exist, in a sense similar to Einsteinian relativity (special relativity) and the Lorentz transformation, before special relativity, or did that formulation come about only after special relativity (as sort of a back-formation)?
This bears repeating: according to special relativity, there are no privileged frames of reference.
So what are the privileged frames of reference in Newtonian mechanics? (If there are no privileged frames of reference in special relativity, the answer is presumably not "inertial frames of reference", as those exist in special relativity as well.)
Basically, researchers have found gut flora with the NDM-1 gene in it. Which might actually be good for not killing off your intestinal flora with antibiotics (which I personally did and was f'd for years until I took probiotics). But more importantly, they've found strains of polio and all sorts of other nasty diseases that are mostly nonexistent nowadays (or at least not causing mass epidemics anymore) with the NDM-1 gene.
The polio virus picked up that gene from bacteria? NDM-1 codes for a beta-lactamase, which chops up beta-lactams; beta-lactams mess up the construction of bacterial cell walls. Do they also mess up the construction of viral protein coats? If not, maybe the bacterially-caused other nasty diseases could get worse with the NDM-1 gene, but polio is another matter.
It's my experience that the Augmentin works better.
To quote the person to whom you're responding:
The second sentence may describe what's happening there. (It also somewhat contradicts the flat "is" statement of the first; perhaps it was better stated as "Augmentin is amoxicillin plus another drug that can inhibit the bacteria's resistance to the amoxicillin".)
You miss the point, its adoption that matters.
I was responding to "This also shortly after apple realized that ALAC was going to fail", if your intent was to connect the two, rather than just citing them as two independent cases where Apple were either using somebody else's open-source code or open-sourcing something of theirs.
If apple end up using Speex then, in hypothetical idealist opensouce theory, the line is drawn and only companies more closed (source) than apple can use the codec which is not many.
I presume you mean "only companies more closed (source) than Apple would refuse to consider the codec" or something such as that, as no sane theory would argue that Apple's adoption of the open-source Speex codec would prevent companies more open-source-friendly than Apple from using it. Whether Apple's use of it would encourage other companies to use it is another matter.
Apple doesn't have to share source code, but the license includes attribution, which doesn't appear to have happened (if it did, we'd have known that from the day Siri was first available).
We would if somebody'd bothered to fire up System Preferences^W^WSettings on an iOS 5 device and then go to General -> About -> Legal and scroll through all that crap looking for the text in question and found it. (I don't have an iOS 5 device to check it on.)
That's Apple's prerogative, but it should be very clear that they're now very much in the Microsoft territory of knowing who to buy over what to write.
Or, to put it another way, knowing when to buy and when to write - which I'd apply to Apple, Microsoft, and other tech companies as well. (Note that one of the main competitors to iOS was developed by a company that was bought by the company that's now developing it.) Perhaps buying technology is the sign of a company losing its innovative mojo; it might also be the sign of a company that's gotten big enough that they can deal with the dictum that "not all the smart people in the world work for you" by buying some of the companies that have those other smart people rather than just by buying their products.
Appears that Xiph came out on top for speech codecs.
...in the opinion of a spin-off from SRI; it might've been easier for them to go with an open source codec than to license a non-open-source codec. Remember, Apple bought the company that developed Siri; they didn't develop it themselves from Day One.
I'm not saying that the availability of the codec as open source was one of the reasons for the choice and that, if the open-source availability weren't an advantage, it would have lost to some closed-source codec; I'm just saying that one shouldn't assume this was an Apple decision (meaning the open-sourceness of it might have been irrelevant or perhaps a disadvantage) and draw conclusions from that assumption.
False equivalency.
For a sales site it is required that both types of users be able to use the site. No OS is *required* to be friendly to a certain type of user. In fact it would be beneficial to the non-tech end user if the computer was an appliance that just ran a fixed set of apps. OSX/iOS with a locked App Store is quite close to bringing this kind of device to the market soon.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a fixed set of apps" or "locked App Store". The current App Stores are "locked" in that you need Apple's approval to sell an app on the App Store, and the iOS App Store is "locked" in that it's the only place you can get apps for an un-jailbroken machine running iOS, but they're not "locked" in the sense that the current set of apps on it is the only set of apps that will ever be sold on it. The set of apps you can run on a machine running Mac OS X or iOS is larger than the set of apps that come with Mac OS X or iOS, so the set of apps the machines come with is not a fixed set of apps that are the only apps that the machine will ever be able to run.
When I hear "appliance that just [runs] a fixed set of apps", I think of a machine that comes with the only apps it'll ever run; that's not what a machine running Mac OS X or iOS is. Apple does sell machines of that sort, such as the AirPort {Express,Extreme} (which don't run particularly user-visible apps) and the Apple TV (which currently has a fixed set of "apps", although the functions it can perform can be extended with software updates), but the Apple TV might, at some point, be another iOS platform supported by the App Store.
One might argue that a Chromebook is such an "appliance", but, well, there's this programming language out there called "JavaScript", and a whole bunch of places that upload JavaScript code, so even that is arguably not a fixed-function appliance.
If US citizens feared the government just half as much as they did 100 years ago, then we wouldn't have HUD. We wouldn't have the TSA. The FDA would only regulate selling drugs with incorrect labels, and there would be no banned substances list. We wouldn't have government schools. We wouldn't have the DMV. We wouldn't have Food Stamps or Welfare. We wouldn't have government backed student loans or government backed car companies. Our cars would not need to pass emission testing, and would not be limited by cafe standards. Our showers could put out any amount of water that the customer chose, and we wouldn't have laws regulating what method we use for generating light in our houses. And no one would even think of trying to implement government health care.
I suspect your list of a lot of stuff they have in foreignland (often more of which they have in foreignland) is also kind of funny if you're from foreignland.
Mach is microkernel and used in many different server-client architecture OS's.
XNU is Server-Client OS like NT
If by "is" you mean "not really", that statement is true of both Darwin and NT. :-)
NT is a bit more microkernelish than Darwin (with the client-server whatever whatever whatever process, csrss, doing, as I understand it, functions such as mapping Windows paths to NT paths and CreateProcess), but it's not as if file system and networking functions run in server processes in either OS (not even kernel-mode server processes). Yes, there are kernel threads that handle some of those functions, but they're not exactly server threads.
XNU operating system (what follows Server-Client architecture) what OS X and iOS use is combination Mach microkernel, FreeBSD's networking and filesystem functions as servers
No, they don't. They function as built-in parts of XNU or as loadable kernel modules, invoked through procedure calls.
And the networking code, VFS layer, and some of the file systems that plug into it may be BSD-derived but they ain't just lightly-breated-on FreeBSD code.
I'm sure I'm opening myself up for an onslaught here, but I thought all their OSX-based stuff was basically just a very elaborate FreeBSD distro.
You were mistaken. OS X's kernel is a combination of some Mach-derived code modified by Apple, some BSD-derived code modified by Apple, some Sun-written code modified by Apple, and some Apple-written code. Its libc (or libSystem) is a combination of some mostly-FreeBSD-derived code modified to varying degrees by Apple and some Apple-written code. The rest of the UN*X userland is a combination of BSD-derived code, GNU code, other upstream code, and Apple-written code. (In some places it goes with GNU code rather than BSD code, e.g. using Bash rather than the Almquist shell as its Bourne shell and GNU Make rather than BSD make as its make.)
I used "BSD-derived" deliberately; most of the BSD-derived code might have come from FreeBSD, but at least some of it came from other BSDs.
It's best thought of as its own BSD-flavored UN*X, related to but not the same as other BSD-flavored UN*Xes.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Mainframes.
Isn't that a Linux meme, not a Windows meme? If so, then, given that Linux (unlike Windows) does run on S/390 and z/Architecture, it could probably be done....
Seriously, this is like announcing an iPod dock for MGB motor cars (only arguably less useful). It doesn't hold interest for that many people and the audience that it potentially COULD affect are not likely to install it...
O RLY? Just Google it.
And, yes, presumably they wouldn't be offering this if they didn't think it's useful to be able to run Windows on x86 blade servers plugged into IBM mainframes.
On the other hand - one could turn that process, of fighting a bunch of broken software, into something positive, in the form of improvements to the software in question, or just learning more about one's computer.
"Improvements to the software in question" is, for those in a position to make those improvements, the best response. If you have to fight your system to get it to do the right thing, and you do so by changing the system so that you, and others who follow you, don't have to fight it, that's a Good Thing.
As for "just learning more about one's computer", I don't want a system where I have to learn stuff about it just to get it to do stuff that it should be able to do without my help. I may want to learn about various configuration files and devices and drivers out of curiosity - on my own time and schedule.
I'm not fighting xorg.conf when I can help it - but I've been on a kick lately where I try not to allow myself any complacency when my computer doesn't work the way I want it to. I have to run Windows at work, so I found ways to make it more comfortable (mostly the right kind of cygwin setup, put a bunch of programs on the PATH, and set up a terminal window bound to a hotkey "Quake Console" style...). DBUS kept bitching at me during boot-up about deprecated SYSFS rules, so I learned how to fix those. (Really, though, DBUS itself could have made that a bit easier, I think...) If I'm working on a project and using some semi-broken tool in that work, I find out why it's semi-broken, try to fix it, and submit a patch. I was working with an assembler that was generating the wrong opcodes for certain instructions, so I found the problem and fixed it. I was working with kdenlive and getting really bad framerates out of the live feed from my DV camera - did a little digging and found the problem. I am trying to adopt a stance of not backing down from these kinds of issues - and that's been good times so far. It feels good to confront that kind of crap and beat it. :)
Exactly. The key here is that cases where you have to beat your system into shape are problems that need to be fixed, ideally in a fashion so that other people don't have to beat their systems into shape to solve the same problems.
I am a computer hobbyist, interested to a certain degree in computers for their own sake. For someone who is just interested in the computer as a means to some end, my approach would be completely unreasonable, and some of these issues I have to deal with would similarly be unreasonable.
Yup. And even for some of us where the end is "developing software", having to learn how to, say, beat some low-level part of the window system into shape gets in the way of, say, learning about something more connected to what we're developing.
Henrik Casimir called, he wants a word with you.
(And, before anybody replies, yes, I know, he's calling from the Great Beyond.)
Yep, vacuum is nothing.
Henrik Casimir called, he wants a word with you.
It is not that they want a separate line, but rather that they want to have the software on the two seemingly separate lines converge.
(Or, rather, that your guess is that they want that.)
Apple's consumer strategy is based around the idea that people are passive consumers of entertainment and software written by others,
Most people don't write software and probably would never do so even if Linux had 100% market share for personal computers, so, yes, most consumers will only be using "software written by others".
Most users would probably mostly watch movies made by others, read books and articles written by others, and listen to music made by others, too. However, there's probably a higher fraction of the consumer base who might make home movies or make music at home, for example.
and the App Store enforces that model of behavior.
"Enforces"? The only way to "enforce" that would be to, say, keep such dangerous software-writing tools as Xcode out of the App store and keep such dangerous movie-editing and music-manipulating tools as iMovie and Garage Band out of the App Store.
A MacBook that was locked down and designed for passive consumption would probably be highly successful, if people were still able to write their emails and essays on it (and that is the extent of production that is expected of consumers who use MacBooks).
Yeah, it's not as if Apple has a line of software for consumers to use when making home movies and music.
Why would Apple want to maintain separate operating systems, when they could have one operating system that is configured at install time for two lines of computers (i.e. the consumer installations are configured for lock-down, and "pro" installations are not)?
Because they have different user bases, perhaps? Perhaps iOS on an iPad is enough for one user base, and people who buy Macs do so because they want something that's not an iPad, because they don't want to run everything in full screen mode, or they have more files than fit well into the iOS UI's "all documents for a given app are in a single pile" model, or....
Jobs' comments about cars and trucks may sum up Apple's model - most people would find tables running iOS sufficient, and, for the rest of them, there are Macs.
(Note that a lot of the lower-level code is shared between the OSes.)
Part of it for me (if not all of it) is that my usage habits are set, I don't really like the newer mouse gestures, it's like learning all over again though I am sure newbies like these things I prefer the "old" way of doing things.
If by "the newer mouse gestures" you mean the change of scrolling direction, you can reverse that on Lion. At least in my experience, Mac OS X has been pretty good (not perfect, but pretty good) about letting me turn off the Shiny New Wonderful.
If what I think is going is going on you may see an exodus, unless developing for the platform, yes serious people do use Mac's, however I am not going to move to Lion even if it is only $29.
I'll probably move to Lion at some point; for me, that's mainly gated by Intuit plucking their corporate head from their ass and somehow allowing me to continue to access my old Quicken database under Lion for historical reasons. (I had to move to Quicken Essentials, even on Snow Leopard, because Quicken for Mac 2007 was consistenly trashing the database, and I figured there was no chance in hell that there'd ever be a bug-fix release for that.)
The App Store is hardly a reason for me not to update, given that I have it on my Snow Leopard machine. Launchpad is hardly a reason for me not to update, as I could and did largely ignore it on my work machine running Lion (occasionally I might hit the wrong button or click the wrong Dock icon and find myself there, but I could escape pretty quickly; heck, the same thing happens occasionally with Expose on Snow Leopard). Multi-touch gestures are probably not a big reason not to update, especially as I think I can disable most of them if they annoy me. Full-screen apps aren't a reason not to update, as I don't have to click the "full screen" button. Resume and Auto-Save probably won't be an issue, either. I liked Conversations in Mail at work, so that would be a reason to update. And, hey, select() finally works on BPF devices in Lion!