Though I wholly agree that PNG is a better format, you're not going to see major sites switching over to png any time soon. Why? The market support isn't their. I'm not about to cut-out 90% of my audience simply because it's the "right thing" to do.
Comparing the GIF/PNG issue to WindowsNT/Linux battle is not an accurate comparisson. A web browser could care little if your server is running WindowsNT, Linux, MacOS X, etc. It does care, though, if it is getting a png or a gif.
You shouldn't have to... LZW is a compression algorithm and there is no way to tell if a given image was compressed with a program that licensed the algorithm from Unisys.
There's been a lot of talk about Unisys forcing you to disclose what program(s) you use to create your GIFs. I really don't think this is feasible. On my Mac, I have at least 10 different programs capable of saving GIFs or compressing images with LZW--everything from Photoshop 5.5 to GIF Builder to Quark. Gods, if you count programs that use QuickTime, that number pops up to 25-30.
Ach... quit your kvetching. The new agreement is far better than the prior agreement; at least NSI kowtow'd to the US Government and is no longer claiming the WHOIS database is its (and only its) property.
Now the real problem with NSI lately has been getting them to actually update the WHOIS database. Been six weeks and I still haven't gotten an update on my NIC handle (NT1213).
This is a serious problem.
Notably, the fax option works, but paper is soooo 1985;-) Seriously though, has anyone had any luck with online change requests?
Is anyone else catching the irony, here? NYT is just adding to a vicious circle by requiring people like me, who don't have an NYT password, to *gasp* register for an NYT password!!!
I remember an article on/. a few weeks back. The NYT had an article on Online Privacy, but you had to register to read it. Now that's ironic.
Just waiting for MacOS 9's keychain. Let's you store all your various passwords in one, tightly encrypted and portable keychain which you can unlock with one master password. Just hope MacOS 9's vioce recognition passwords carry through to keychain!
My bad on the original icon sizes... not enough sleep.
And I think you're right on the 48x48px size. The current version of the MacOS (8.6) supposedly has support for them in some parts of the OS, but no one is using them yet.
Why introduce yet another useless and daunting paradigm change? Why do you/need/ 3 dimessions in a UI? KISS it man. Even though dedicated hardware would do the rendering and pixel pushing, what keeps track of everything? It'd probably require a wholly new filesystem.
I remember Apple's now-defunct HotSauce meta-format which allowed you to 'fly-through' virtual information spaces. It was cool, but damned near impossible to use efficiently.
Hell... add the temporal fourth dimension--the ultimate in undo!:-)
Apple's MacOS X server pages have a few scree shots. The UI forthe next release of Server and the initial release of Consumer are supposedly going to be even better.
MacOS X Consumer better have an option for the current, 64x64px icons instead of those huge ones. I like my desktop real estate.
Regardless, anything is better than Windows' UI. Lotta chrome. All those clouds in the UI on Win98? And you guys criticize the iMac and iBook for violating form-follows-function?;-)
Actually, let's just spam NSI back. Send out masses of email to NSI offering yourself as a free target for commercial email from NSI. I'm sure NSI's servers are capable of handling the/. effect in terms of http, but how about blowing out their SMTP servers?:-)
I live in extreme southwest North Dakota, a rather rural and desolate place. The closest bookstore (and Starbucks) is in Bismarck, a 180 mile drive. Closest Sam Goody is 70 miles away and the nearest place I can buy a new Mac (yeah, that's flamebait but I do Linux as well) is in Fargo, nearly 400 miles away.
Let's see... keeping the math simple for we Mac people, a top of the line Mac configured as a Photoshop über-station is about US$5000. 5% of that is US$250. Guess I'll be phoning that order in to Apple...
Companies like Dell who sell big-sticker items via the Web are going to be majorly po'd at this one. Who's going to pay for the luxury of online build-to-order when it's going to jack the price up by 5%?
Other random thoughts:
Are shareware authors exempt? I routinely register about US$300 in shareware (e.g. Anarchie, Summary, GraphicConvertor, IPNet Router) online each year. I'd rather give the authors another 5%.
Two words: Porn Sites. Yup. They're going to take a hit as well.
US Post Office. You can buy stamps online, so are those stamps subject to the tax?
What if I buy a CD from Amazon.co.uk because it's unavailable in the US?
What if I access my banking account online and set-up an automatic, monthly bill payment? That's an online transaction, after all.
Theough this bill is probably dead due to constitutional, states' rights issues (kudos to those who pointed out Art. I Sec. 9!) it's still a harbinger of things to come. Ye olde Consitution has taken a lot of hits in the past decade and I wouldn't be suprised if the rat bastards tried to grease this bit of government expansion through the Oval Office.
Time to break out the laser printers my friends--write your congressmen... actually, write Clinton and tell him to veto it. Why? Porn sites;-)
I've never seen a more stellar example of FUD. Okay:
You don't need a floppy drive with an eject button on the Mac because our OS knows that when you unmount a removable volume, you want it off your desktop and out of your machine. Besdies, when was the last time you actually used a floppy, let alone a floppy with a laptop? If you need the floppy, buy a USB SuperDisk drive and hook it up.
PCMICA, video mirroring, RAM, graphics card, IrDA, etc.: This product is meant for the home consumer and education channel. You want the power? Then drop another $600 and get a PowerBook G3.
Resolution. You're going to run something in excess of 800x600 on a 12" screen? What are you, some kind of masochist? At 800x600, a 12" diagonal means a resolution of about 83 dpi. At 1204x768, that jumps to 107 dpi. 107dpi on a 12" screen? Are you planning on using a magnifying glass to read that screen?
Fire. About 4 PowerBook 5300s ever caught on fire; the problem was with bad batteries supplied by a 3rd party dealer. If I'm not mistaken, one of the big PC manufacturers also had problems of the same kind, also caused by a third party supplier. G3s run substantially cooler than any chip derived from an x86 chip, thus no need for the bulky and power sucking cooling fans.
I noticed that you neglected to mention that the iBook, along with every shipping Apple product has 10/100 ethernet out-of-the-box.
Know how to connect an Apple CPU to the Internet via ethernet? Plug-in an RJ-45 cable and reboot. There. Done. You guys just don't get it, do you? Apple's chief selling point on the iMac and iBook is ease-of-use. People will pay more for a stylish, easy to use computer. Gateway is even using the same damned pitch to counter el cheapo PCs.
FUD off.
Better than 'Photography'
on
35mm Handbook
·
· Score: 1
Though I haven't read it yet, this book looks like a far better value than "Photography", a fairly common textbook used for Intro to Photog. courses. US$60 and very light on the meat. Glad my money went to Amazon.com where I hold shares and not the Barnes and Noble Juggernaut.
Switching back to OS 8.5 isn't necessary. Just command-option-escape the Finder when the SETI@home client is running as an application. When the screensaver kicks in, it doesn't launch a whole new set of processes-It just uses the preëxisting state of the application.
MacBench is an industry standard MacOS benchmark utility authored by Ziff-Davis. Rather than being a fantasy realm test like the ByteMark, MacBench actually uses realworld tests identical to what MS Word, Quark Xpress, Photoshop, etc. would present.
The core of the OS is not new, but major portions of the OS -are- new code. As I said, the MacOS 8.x comaptibility box is new code as is the Java layer as is the whole GUI.
BTW, I'm not anti-Unix. I've got MKLinux (and BeOS 4.0 I might add) running on my Mac in addition to MacOS 8.6. Linux is just fine for sever tasks, but there is simply no way it has the pre-press functionality of the MacOS oreven WindowsNT.
My preference is to use the best tool for the job. The MacOS is the best for any visual design task, Linux is the best for serving, and Windows... well... Windows is the best for minesweeper, solataire and porn;-)
Has anyone been able to reproduce with with NeXT/OpenStep? From what I've read, a large portion of the MacOS X Server problem is Apache's interaction with Mach 2.5. MacOS X is the direct child of OpenStep and, hence, the same problem with the Mach kernel might rear its header under OpenStep. Of course this assumes that the bug is legacy from older versions of Mach and wasn't introduced in Mach 2.5
Additonally, I remember recent QuickTime 4.0b bashing. Many of the comments should have been moderated-out as they were nothing more than flames. However, many of the comments should have been forwarded directly to Apple so they could actually fix the bug!
Does anyone remember back to the days of Windows 1.0? It wasn't even usable. How about the early releases of Linux? More usable than Windows 1.0, but hardly enterprise worthy.
MacOS X Server 1.0 is just that---a 1.0 release. It's going to have a few bugs, most minor and a few major. If you don't like it, don't use it. Better yet, fix it yourself. It's OpenSource, after all.
Actually by IPIX's defintion, they must be prepared to sue Apple Computer, Macromedia, Strata, NewTek, etc as well. Although the QTVR authoring studio (a generally excllent program), Apple offers QTVR Make Panorama, which can convert panoramic picts from 3d programs (e.g. Bryce) into a QTVR movie.
I do hope you all realise that QuickTime 4.0 is -just- a preview release right now. Apple released it basically as a public beta in order to root out some of the annoying little bugs that everyone is kvetching about.
My Mac is still dead due to a corrupted drive (DIE ADAPTEC! DIE!) so I haven't had the chance to check it on the Mac side. BUT, I did download QuickTime 4.0 on a Windows95 machine. It played the 320x240 trailer without a hitch and it's only a P-90. I consider that pretty good.
For more, non-apple info on QuiokTime 4.0 check out this article at AppleInsider:
Slashdot Mirror
Though I wholly agree that PNG is a better format, you're not going to see major sites switching over to png any time soon. Why? The market support isn't their. I'm not about to cut-out 90% of my audience simply because it's the "right thing" to do.
Comparing the GIF/PNG issue to WindowsNT/Linux battle is not an accurate comparisson. A web browser could care little if your server is running WindowsNT, Linux, MacOS X, etc. It does care, though, if it is getting a png or a gif.
You shouldn't have to... LZW is a compression algorithm and there is no way to tell if a given image was compressed with a program that licensed the algorithm from Unisys.
There's been a lot of talk about Unisys forcing you to disclose what program(s) you use to create your GIFs. I really don't think this is feasible. On my Mac, I have at least 10 different programs capable of saving GIFs or compressing images with LZW--everything from Photoshop 5.5 to GIF Builder to Quark. Gods, if you count programs that use QuickTime, that number pops up to 25-30.
Ach... quit your kvetching. The new agreement is far better than the prior agreement; at least NSI kowtow'd to the US Government and is no longer claiming the WHOIS database is its (and only its) property.
Now the real problem with NSI lately has been getting them to actually update the WHOIS database. Been six weeks and I still haven't gotten an update on my NIC handle (NT1213).
This is a serious problem.
Notably, the fax option works, but paper is soooo 1985 ;-) Seriously though, has anyone had any luck with online change requests?
In case any of you are interested at all about the Keychain and MacOS 9's voice passwords, AppleInsider has it all in its MacOS 9.0 archive:
http://www.appleinsider.com/macos9.0.shtm l
Is anyone else catching the irony, here? NYT is just adding to a vicious circle by requiring people like me, who don't have an NYT password, to *gasp* register for an NYT password!!!
I remember an article on /. a few weeks back. The NYT had an article on Online Privacy, but you had to register to read it. Now that's ironic.
Just waiting for MacOS 9's keychain. Let's you store all your various passwords in one, tightly encrypted and portable keychain which you can unlock with one master password. Just hope MacOS 9's vioce recognition passwords carry through to keychain!
My bad on the original icon sizes... not enough sleep.
And I think you're right on the 48x48px size. The current version of the MacOS (8.6) supposedly has support for them in some parts of the OS, but no one is using them yet.
I remember Apple's now-defunct HotSauce meta-format which allowed you to 'fly-through' virtual information spaces. It was cool, but damned near impossible to use efficiently.
Hell... add the temporal fourth dimension--the ultimate in undo! :-)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/screenshots.htm l>
MacOS X Consumer better have an option for the current, 64x64px icons instead of those huge ones. I like my desktop real estate.
Regardless, anything is better than Windows' UI. Lotta chrome. All those clouds in the UI on Win98? And you guys criticize the iMac and iBook for violating form-follows-function? ;-)
Actually, let's just spam NSI back. Send out masses of email to NSI offering yourself as a free target for commercial email from NSI. I'm sure NSI's servers are capable of handling the /. effect in terms of http, but how about blowing out their SMTP servers? :-)
Here's a thought:
Let's see... keeping the math simple for we Mac people, a top of the line Mac configured as a Photoshop über-station is about US$5000. 5% of that is US$250. Guess I'll be phoning that order in to Apple...
Companies like Dell who sell big-sticker items via the Web are going to be majorly po'd at this one. Who's going to pay for the luxury of online build-to-order when it's going to jack the price up by 5%?
Other random thoughts:Are shareware authors exempt? I routinely register about US$300 in shareware (e.g. Anarchie, Summary, GraphicConvertor, IPNet Router) online each year. I'd rather give the authors another 5%.
Two words: Porn Sites. Yup. They're going to take a hit as well.
US Post Office. You can buy stamps online, so are those stamps subject to the tax?
What if I buy a CD from Amazon.co.uk because it's unavailable in the US?
What if I access my banking account online and set-up an automatic, monthly bill payment? That's an online transaction, after all.
Theough this bill is probably dead due to constitutional, states' rights issues (kudos to those who pointed out Art. I Sec. 9!) it's still a harbinger of things to come. Ye olde Consitution has taken a lot of hits in the past decade and I wouldn't be suprised if the rat bastards tried to grease this bit of government expansion through the Oval Office.
Time to break out the laser printers my friends--write your congressmen... actually, write Clinton and tell him to veto it. Why? Porn sites ;-)
- You don't need a floppy drive with an eject button on the Mac because our OS knows that when you unmount a removable volume, you want it off your desktop and out of your machine. Besdies, when was the last time you actually used a floppy, let alone a floppy with a laptop? If you need the floppy, buy a USB SuperDisk drive and hook it up.
- PCMICA, video mirroring, RAM, graphics card, IrDA, etc.: This product is meant for the home consumer and education channel. You want the power? Then drop another $600 and get a PowerBook G3.
- Resolution. You're going to run something in excess of 800x600 on a 12" screen? What are you, some kind of masochist? At 800x600, a 12" diagonal means a resolution of about 83 dpi. At 1204x768, that jumps to 107 dpi. 107dpi on a 12" screen? Are you planning on using a magnifying glass to read that screen?
- Fire. About 4 PowerBook 5300s ever caught on fire; the problem was with bad batteries supplied by a 3rd party dealer. If I'm not mistaken, one of the big PC manufacturers also had problems of the same kind, also caused by a third party supplier. G3s run substantially cooler than any chip derived from an x86 chip, thus no need for the bulky and power sucking cooling fans.
I noticed that you neglected to mention that the iBook, along with every shipping Apple product has 10/100 ethernet out-of-the-box.Know how to connect an Apple CPU to the Internet via ethernet? Plug-in an RJ-45 cable and reboot. There. Done. You guys just don't get it, do you? Apple's chief selling point on the iMac and iBook is ease-of-use. People will pay more for a stylish, easy to use computer. Gateway is even using the same damned pitch to counter el cheapo PCs.
FUD off.
Though I haven't read it yet, this book looks like a far better value than "Photography", a fairly common textbook used for Intro to Photog. courses. US$60 and very light on the meat. Glad my money went to Amazon.com where I hold shares and not the Barnes and Noble Juggernaut.
Never know... did Intel ever fix that floating point bug in the Pentium? (Yuck, yuck)
Seriously though, SETI's made a huge error: They didn't realise just how geeky the Internet still is.
Switching back to OS 8.5 isn't necessary. Just command-option-escape the Finder when the SETI@home client is running as an application. When the screensaver kicks in, it doesn't launch a whole new set of processes-It just uses the preëxisting state of the application.
MacBench is an industry standard MacOS benchmark utility authored by Ziff-Davis. Rather than being a fantasy realm test like the ByteMark, MacBench actually uses realworld tests identical to what MS Word, Quark Xpress, Photoshop, etc. would present.
Config:
:: PPC 604e @ 211 MHz
:: 128 MB RAM
MacBench score running MacOS 8.5.1: 603
MacBench score running MacOS 8.6.0: 637
Speed increase due to the MacOS 8.6.0 nanonkernel: 5.34%
Eat me.
The core of the OS is not new, but major portions of the OS -are- new code. As I said, the MacOS 8.x comaptibility box is new code as is the Java layer as is the whole GUI.
;-)
BTW, I'm not anti-Unix. I've got MKLinux (and BeOS 4.0 I might add) running on my Mac in addition to MacOS 8.6. Linux is just fine for sever tasks, but there is simply no way it has the pre-press functionality of the MacOS oreven WindowsNT.
My preference is to use the best tool for the job. The MacOS is the best for any visual design task, Linux is the best for serving, and Windows... well... Windows is the best for minesweeper, solataire and porn
Additonally, I remember recent QuickTime 4.0b bashing. Many of the comments should have been moderated-out as they were nothing more than flames. However, many of the comments should have been forwarded directly to Apple so they could actually fix the bug!
Does anyone remember back to the days of Windows 1.0? It wasn't even usable. How about the early releases of Linux? More usable than Windows 1.0, but hardly enterprise worthy.
MacOS X Server 1.0 is just that---a 1.0 release. It's going to have a few bugs, most minor and a few major. If you don't like it, don't use it. Better yet, fix it yourself. It's OpenSource, after all.
Actually by IPIX's defintion, they must be prepared to sue Apple Computer, Macromedia, Strata, NewTek, etc as well. Although the QTVR authoring studio (a generally excllent program), Apple offers QTVR Make Panorama, which can convert panoramic picts from 3d programs (e.g. Bryce) into a QTVR movie.
Apple QuickTime Authoring Tools
I do hope you all realise that QuickTime 4.0 is -just- a preview release right now. Apple released it basically as a public beta in order to root out some of the annoying little bugs that everyone is kvetching about.
My Mac is still dead due to a corrupted drive (DIE ADAPTEC! DIE!) so I haven't had the chance to check it on the Mac side. BUT, I did download QuickTime 4.0 on a Windows95 machine. It played the 320x240 trailer without a hitch and it's only a P-90. I consider that pretty good.
For more, non-apple info on QuiokTime 4.0 check out this article at AppleInsider :
Apple to Announce QuickTime 4 Preview Release