I think it's safe to say that TeX and LaTeX own the typesetting domain.
It is safe to say, since no prepress militia will hunt you down. It is, however, incorrect.
Postcript owns most of the printing+typesetting domain (fed largely by DTP layout apps like Quark which output nice postscript). Some shops now use a lot of pdf, but most applications do not produces pdfs with embedding graphical elements at prepress quality.
Why should every application developer either do without spell checking, or each have to develop their own incompatible system?
Applications may display text with which users interact. It may be in English, or Italian, or Dutch. Whatever language it is in, users may want to check spelling of text. Thus, the text object, under the hood, let's users interact with it. Making each development team responsible for spelling means that it will either not be done at all (which is a shame), or be done inconsistently (which is equally unfortunate).
Spellbound may be fine. Firefox with it may be better than Firefox without it. Doesn't the very fact that Spellbound was written indicate a more pervasive problem?
Building from the ground up would not work. It would need to be supported by compressive forces.
A space elevator would be a bundle of cables (or ribbons) built from an artificial satellite, lowered into the atmosphere, captured, and then anchored to structures on the ground. Actually to provide balance, the orbital structure needs to be in geosynchronous and as building proceeds on the tether which grows toward the ground, additional mass needs to grow outward into higher orbit to balance it. The tensile strength of the material must be enormous, and though cables grown from carbon nanotube are theoretically capable of use for this purpose are far beyond current capabilities.
Basically once the first filaments is in place, capable of supporting itself against the stress of both gravity and atmospheric buffeting, light robots would travel up and down repeatedly for years, adding more strands until the cable could support useful payloads.
Thus, power, huge amounts of mass, and a lot of space infrastructure needs to be in place before the elevator could be built. Once operational, however, it would be by far the most effective way of getting to and from space.
Using only compressive forces, e.g. building a tall skinny tower is not possible. Even carbon nanotubes would collapse under their own weight before reaching only a small fraction of the required height. Worse, even given an infinitely rigid structural material they would crush the foundation on which they rested (basically punching through the crust).
I forgot about that in when posting earlier, that is a good point.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, weak binding enables one to create a single body of linked code which depends on calling functions which may never be bound.
Basically, at compile time certain symbols are marked weak, meaning that they appear in the symbol table but their absense is not an error.
At run-time you can call functions to query libraries for the presence of various functions. By noting their presence (or absense) the code then can call functions conditionally.
On most unices one can dynamically load a library by name, to work around version issues. Darwin can do this as well, but we tend to use that only for plugin architectures, etc. Weak binding is the standard for this kind of solution.
I would count this as a disadvantage - they release stuff before it's finished, and force you to upgrade by making most of the libraries marginally incompatible so that oops, this only runs on 10.2 and up - soon 10.3 will be the price of entry. They keep trying to scuttle security patches for "old" versions (AKA less than a year old) to force people to upgrade too.
Your statements are patently false.
Situations where X only runs on 10.2 and up, or Y only runs on 10.3 and up result from adding new functionality, not from breaking old functionality. Frameworks in Macos X support multiple simultaneous versions without conflict.
The reason that so many new packages require new versions of the OS is that the development tools and libraries are improving. Targeting 10.1 or 10.2 requires that developers forgo functionality which can dramatically reduce their effort. For instance using Cocoa Bindings (introduced in Panther) a developer can avoid writing much common code. The authors of Delicious Library say that when they first read about Cocoa Bindings they decided to give it a try:
"We rewrote everything in a day or two--I think we deleted over a thousand lines of code that just wasn't needed any more.
WebKit, Array Controllers, and scores of other new objects have been introduced over the past few years. In each case the general result is deriving more functionality out of far less code.
This is not the result of Apple un-fucking things. This is the result of Apple producing software that improves the system by adding new functionality that is easier for both developers and end-users.
Apple typically releases free updates and security patches for several years. Jaguar (10.2) came out in 2002, the last major upgrade 10.2.8 was released in mid 2003, I see that 10.2.8 was still covered by the security update several weeks ago.
It is clear that you don't know what you are talking about.
Actually desktop widgets were part of the old MacOS. They were not re-implemented in earlier Macos X implementations.
A third party developer wrote Konfabulator which enabled users create and run JavaScript applets. He called them widgets too.
Is Dashboard a knock-off? Apple did introduce desktop widgets first. And their re-introduction and design makes sense. With WebKit and Java as integral parts of the base OS: css, html, and javascript make the most sense, and of course they will still call them widgets.
The fact that Konfabulator called them widgets is a knock-off of Apple's original widgets. The fact that the widgets in javascript makes some people suspicious that Apple stole the idea.
I don't know the principles on either side, so cannot say definitively what happened. I just think bald claims that Apple stole the idea are perhaps overstated.
It is an addition to the Cocoa framework and to Xcode which supports a very nice object persistence layer. In a nutshell Cocoa uses the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. TO develop an app, one defines ones application data as model objects, build an interface of windows, widgets, etc, and provide controllers which mediate communication between the user and the data model.
In Panther, Apple introduced "Bindings" which obviated the need to actually write most controller objects. Using bindings, the developer can associate object relationships (targets, and actions) between the View and Model layers by essentially using path names. This still enables a clean isolation between the interface and the application data layers, but requires little code (or sometimes none).
In Tiger they added "Core Data". This allows the developer to describe their model data objects, and the object relationships. At run time, using this model description, the model objects are associated with serialized objects on disk in: XML file format binary file format SQLite-based database format
This repository of frozen objects is lazily loaded, and only those objects which are actually required are unarchived and made live. Think NeXT EOF redux, but easier and not tied to WebObjects.
XCode is integrated with a graphical display that lets you explore the object model graph, and also graph the layout of your source code.
This stuff is very sweet. I've been playing with it off and on, and definitely miss Tiger whenever I need to boot back into Panther. (Yes, it's a legal copy. No I won't break my NDA.)
Apple says they don't run it for profit because, right now, they know they can't. But by the time they can, they will. You do the math:
I did do the math. Why don't you do the english? Apple does show a profit. However, they have balanced that by increased spending on improving the store, expanding into new markets, adding the free song of the week, adding additional free downloads of song samplers like the 13 song compilation album I downloaded last week.
Will do-good Apple then drop it's prices just to not make money anymore, like they said they wouldn't? Are you kidding, the share holders would lynch Steve Jobs at the next meeting!
No, they will not. They will keep prices reasonable because it will indirectly generate much larger revenue down in other parts of their company. It has already done so consistently for the past several years, and seems very likely to continue. Are you kidding? They would lynch steve if price increases reduced customer satisfaction.
As an analogy Gillette and Schick, sell handles and starter packs cheap, and make a profit from the user on repeat purchase of the blades. Apple has a more complex marketing plan.
iTunes Player builds market awareness that apple software (even on a PC) is nice to use. iPod + iTunes Store is a nice shopping experience and showcases Apple integration and ease of use. It produces happy customers who now are inclined to see what using an Apple computer would be like. Face it, the real money is in software sales and in computer sales. Even though iPod revenue increased by 500% and Macintosh sales by a mere 26% in the past quarter music is only 40% of the pie.
The introduction of the Mac Mini at this particular point is time is not coincidental.
I don't think you get it. Imagine apple wins, say, 97% of the player market. And you can only shop at iTunes, what will that do for prices? And service?
I, in turn, don't think you get it. My guess is that it would mean low prices and great service for iPod+iTunes customers.
Why?
Because iTunes is not a goal but a means to an end.
The iTunes store was never intended, and will probably never be intended to be a profit center for Apple. As a share-holder, I have read all their investor communications and usually also listen in on their quarterly conference call for investors.
Though initially operating at a loss, iTunes has lately been slightly profitable, and could prove to be significantly more profitable if that were goal. However, they have instead focused on expanding the catalag, keeping prices low, expanding the infrastructure, opening more stores, and adding functionality. Questions about iTunes profitability both current and future have always been answered with statements that Apple has no plan to derive direct profit from iTunes, i.e. telling investors not to count on it being a source of future revenue since Apple does not operate it towards that end.
iTunes is a vehicle for encouraging people to buy iPods. iPods provide a direct revenue stream which last year accounted for 40% of gross revenues for Apple. iPods are also intended to broaden consumers exposure to Apple hardware and software, and result in increasing the Macos X user base.
This appears to be a winning strategy. In the earnings conference call last week, Apple posted %500 growth in iPod sales and %26 growth in the core Macintosh business. This makes sound business sense. Margins on the high end iPod lineup are above industry average as are margins on the top end of their computer line. Margins on the 20GB iPod, the new flash iPods, Mac Mini, and the low end of the iBook and iMac line are not as good. However, these low margin sales also stand to increase high margin software sales, accessories, and broadening the overall Macintosh user base.
I can think of no instance where Apple would benefit more from increasing iTunes prices than from continuing this policy.
Song sales, iPod sales, computer sales, and software seem like different beasts. However, Jobs' and Apple strategy for the past few years has been to define a niche for marketing and pricing them together, which appears to be working better than directly targeting each. iTunes is a loss leader to get people to come to their stores and check out what Apple has to offer.
As both a customer, shareholder, and a Unix geek, I am very pleased by this approach.
As a Unix guy since the early 80s I enjoy Macos X both as a user and administrator more than any other flavor of Unix I've ever used. (Until Macos X you could not pay me to use a mac, or any Microsoft OS for that matter.) As a general computer user I benefit from their application software which is very pleasant to use. As an investor, I have no complaints.
You are arguing from a gut, emotional level rather than a rational one. As a result, except for one point, I find them unconvincing. In your opening paragraph the statement "I'm sure Apple is very aware that this is the only reason why they are still around." makes me highly suspicious of your statements.
Looking at the financial performance of Apple suggests a different reason for their continued existence. After the tech market collapse, Steve Jobs told investors that Apple would innovate their way out of recession. What followed? Financially they showed 5 continuous years of steady revenue performance and improving margins. The combination of software and hardware releases (expecially on their powerbook line) made powerbooks extremely popular platforms for Java and general unix developers. Xserve and Xserve Raid became popular in high performance and scientific computing. Oracle began migrating from EMC et al to Apple for storage. 2 Xserve grids appear in the top 500 supercomputer list published in Oct 2004. Imac, both the G5 and G4 models, were rated extremely highly by both users and the trade press (even wintel focused editors). iTunes and iPod were introduced and not only dominated the hard drive based mp3 market but stole market share from the flash player market.
If, 5 years ago anyone claimed the following, people would think they were on crack. Bill Joy and many of his colleagues at Sun will soon do most of their development on Macs. Apple hardware will appear at #7 in the supercomputer benchmarks. Apple will market the best price performer in the small and mid range enterprise raid arena. Apple will beat both the large media conglomerates and every hardware company (including Sony) at both online music sales and portable audio appliances.
During this period I know of no other consumer focused computer company that continuously posted profits over this time period. I suggest that a steady stream of new products, the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry, and continuous profitability (when the rest of the sector was rocky) are sufficient to explain why they are still around. I love that Darwin is open source, and have submitted changes to both userland and kernel code. However, stating that Apple is around only because they rely on open source appears unfounded, and makes me wonder if you are on crack.
1. Re: "Ogg Vorbis", you cite the famous "c't" magazine codec study from August 2002. It used a double blind format and is laudable for its attention to detail and rigorous testing design. However, the authors did poorly at their reporting and analysis of the data. Statistical analysis of the results show that at 64kbps mp3 clearly was inferior to all other formats tested. No other conclusions could reliably be drawn from that test. A concise statistical analysis of the test results was written by Stan Seibert at the University of Texas. It concludes:
In summary, the only really conclusive result of this test is that the big loser at 64 kbps is MP3. (Unfortunately, we already knew that.) It also shows that Ogg Vorbis is not the winner at either bitrate, though a casual inspection of the numbers might lead one to think so. The average user cannot really tell the difference between any of the high-end codecs, so vendors should use other criteria when selecting a codec for applications targeting those types of users.
Mr. Seeibert's analysis can be found at: "No other operating system creator around, not Microsoft and certainly not Linux or FreeBSD, would even dream about writing something that limits your graphics card purely for marketing reasons." This is peculiarly naive, and has long been common practice in the hardware business. My favorite example is the old vax upgrade procedure. Mid range and high end VAXen used the same logic board. To upgrade to the faster CPU clock speed a DEC field service engineer would remove a resistor (by physically cutting the pins). As f
I have seen posts like this so many times that I've finally gotten sick of it. I'd like to address each of your points separately.
But then we all know that Apple doesn't do too well when it comes to including free standards, don't we:
Um, no, I don't know that. On what basis do you claim to "know" this? Looking at the track record, I see several examples of Apple defining and publishing new standards for others to use. Firewire (IEE-1394) and Rendezvous (zero conf networking) immediately come to mind. Over the past 5 years I see numerous examples of Apple migrating from proprietary formats and subsystems to open alternatives. They've demoted Netinfo in preference for OpenLDAP and Kerberos. They've replaced custom mail tools with postfix, cyrus, and apache+squirrelmail. Each release of Macos X has bundled more open source tools and development libraries not fewer. They also feed source patches back upstream to the initial authors even when not legally required. I honestly don't see evidence to support this broad claim and find much which flatly contradicts it.
Those iPod still don't have Ogg Vorbis support. Rio and a bunch of other people have it, so it can't be rocket science. Some times, I just don't get Apple. This is on my duh list right up there with non-activated spanning on the iBook.
You use the lack of Ogg Vorbis support as narrower evidence that Apple is against open formats. Rather than being compelling, I find it rather weak. Apple supports both variable and fixed bit rate mp3. It supports 3 of Audible's formats for books. It supports lossless encoding via the popular WAV and AIFF formats as well as a proprietary "Apple Lossless" compression codec. Finally it supports AAC with and without DRM.
When apple got into the music space, they could not have done so without some form of DRM. None of the record companies would do so without DRM. When Microsoft entered the space they defined a proprietary format from the ground up for use by windows media player. Apple, on the other hand, added an encryption layer on top of the AAC standard which is part of the MPEG2 and MPEG4 standards. Though certainly not conclusive, this does suggest that Apple would rather work with standard formats than invent its own.
About Ogg in particular, the claim that apple refuses to support it because it is against open formats is rather far fetched. It seems far more likely that Ogg is merely irrelevant to them. What would they gain by supporting it? Users could play Ogg Vorbis encoded tracks on their player. Since Ogg vorbis is rarely used by Apple or Windows users this is a very small number of users.
Also there is a fairly simple work around for those users affected by this. If the user ripped to Ogg at a high bit rate, transcoding to another format would result in little loss of quality, and both batch and individual tools are available to do so. If the user encoded at a low bit rate, they can re-rip to a supported format (they do own the music don't they?). In the end. Supporting Ogg would benefit such a small number of users that Apple has better things for their developers to do. Live with it, but don't look for a conspiracy. I'd far rather that Apple focus their time on improving functionality that will be useful to a large number of customers than add new formats that very few will ever use.
Re: monitor spanning support on the iBook, "Duh", right back at you. Apple is also a hardware company. Not supporting this configuration out of the box provides greater incentive for those who want that functionality to spend several hundred dollars by purchasing a PowerBook. This is marketing not malice. If you want this feature but don't want to spend more upgrade the firmware yourself.
Yes, I am both an Apple customer and own stock in the company. I think my statements are based on common sense rather than the words of an apologist, you be the judge.
I can't help it. I haven't seen anything that says there is support for PNG or SVG formats. Worrisome, it is.
Your worry is unfounded.
One of the features of Cocoa applications which dates back to NeXTStep is the idea of a filter service. Basically, each application can declare types that it can read, and types that it can write. if there is at least one application which has declared support for reading png, and writing any format understood by another application than the latter application can accept a drag and dropped data item of that type.
So, for instance, if any declared filter service can read png and write tiff, then a user can drag a png into Pages and have the conversion done automagically.
The core philosophy of Cocoa programming is to write the application system logic to do a particular job well, and leave everything else in the hands of the application framework and the OS. Pages handles the most common basic types, and ignores the rest. By doing so so the developers focus their energy on the development tasks which directly affect functionality.
It so happens that png conversion is supported behind the scenes out of the box. I do not know if svg is similarly supported. However, if such support is missing, all it takes is for one developer to write an applet which can read svg and write another supported format. Once that filter service is installed every cocoa app gets the support for free.
Thus, writing code to have Pages natively support more image types is counter productive and results in bloat. Better to stick with a smaller number of formats, and delegate the rest.
From that link you can buy a kit, containing a bare circuit board and components to solder onto it.
The cost of the kit is $150 + shipping. On the order page it says:
This MP3 player circuit board contain all the components require to build the new MP3 Player design. After the board is assembled, a hard disk drive, standard 72-pin SIMM memory, and power source are needed to make a complete player.
So after adding a hard drive, cobbling together a useful power supply, and building a case for it, you are already well over $200.
Though it is fun to build things, you'd end up with a really crappy mp3 player, with an even lousier interface.
This reminds me of those ass-hats that make outdoor planters out of car or truck tires. Planting the flowers in the ground or in a simple raised bed would be far better looking.
The "ooh, look what I built" factor, in this case is overshadowed by the question "why?"
Why build something so lame and shoddy when for the same (or far less) money one can buy something far better, far more enjoyable to use.
You are right, but that is older hat for most Unices than for the code base this descended from.
NeXTStep through OPENSTEP 4.0 were based on BSD 4.3 + Mach, thus still had 4GB limits on everything including file system partitions, etc. As OPENSTEP became Darwin, the core OS got refreshed with elements from a much more recent version of Mach and with BSD4.4 code from NetBSD and FreeBSD. The Bulk of that code from 10.0-10.2 was from FreeBSD 4.x. Panther began synching with the FreeBSD 5.x series. 64-bit indirect addressing came from there.
In Panther, an interim compiler flag and mach-o cpu type were added to support large primary address spaces (64 bit pointers). When running on the powermac G5 the vm subsystem is 64-bit, and executables compiled with that flag got large VM address spages and 64 bit pointers.
Starting with Tiger, the interim compiler flag and mach-o type which support 64 bit direct addresses will be replaced by the long term versions.
The point is that Panther on G5s already allows large address spaces for both primary and secondary storage. Thus is already 64-bit aware.
You are correct. Unfortunately this is because you are mistaken.
Darwinports does work on the BSDs, and Solaris as well as on darwin. The new default installation structure is to install files under private directory spaces, but these are not intended to be used from those locations and must be activated by linking the files into canonical paths for use (e.g./opt/local or/usr/local).
Some potentially dramatic speed improvements are in store for those with Multiple CPUs.
The Darwin kernel in Panther and before has two funnels one for the network stack and another for the rest of the kernel. Funnels are a kind of lock that prevent multiple threads from executing particular code simultaneously. Multiple threads may acquire a particular funnel simultaneously, but the kernel ensure that only one thread at a time is active. While a lock limits code re-entrancy, a funnel limits co-residency.
It is similar to the old Big Giant Lock in the FreeBSD kernel (slightly better than 2 Big Honkin' Locks). Tiger will roll out more fine grained locking which should have the greatest impact in improving IO perfromance
off_t and other file related quantities have long been 64 bits. For normal compilation caddr_t and friends are still 32 bits.
gcc 3.3 on the mac defined a transitional 64 bit binary format, via the flag "-arch ppc64". This defined a fake mach-o host architecture which used 64-bit pointers but otherwise was identical from an opcode perspective to the ppc970 processor subtype.
With the advent of gcc4.0 as64, nm64, and otool64 executables are present. Also "-arch ppc970" may now be specified explicitly to gcc.
I'm not aware of any significant ways in which Tiger will not truly be 64-bit. In some low level areas only 48 address address bits are significant. Since actually building or powering 64 bits worth of storage is currently impossible (even in theory) I don't see that anyone will miss them.
The power supply appears to be about twice the size of the standard apple power brick (those nice square ones used by powerbooks, ibooks, and ipods.). It is rectangular rather than square and the cord appears to be long enough to enable you to place it in an unobtrusive location.
BTW: I had originally cut and pasted the wrong dimensions. The unit is 6.5x6.5x2".
Add a USB ethernet to make dual homed firewall? Add external Firewire storage to make big file server? Wow! Great price point to introduce non Apple users to the platform. What a great box.
The internet as we know it grew from the arpanet backbone. Arpanet officialy adopted TCP/IP in 1982. In 1985 NSFNET was concieved. The National Science Foundation provided funding to extend networking for academic environments as long as all qualified users on campus had access. This was intended to promote its uses outside of the computer science and hard science departments where arpanet access had previously been isolated. Commercial traffic on the backbone was excluded until 1991.
Prior to 1991 purely commercial enterprises relied on leased lines, or on uucp based networking which provided a hiearchical store and forward architecture for email, file transfer, and remote command execution based on periodic telephone calls among interconnected sets of nodes each of which would typically call or accept calls from only a handful of nodes (a few lower in the tree and typically 1 closer to the root).
Only after 1991 did companies and individuals have unfettered access to the global TCP/IP backbone.
They plan to accept deposits and about 2 years before flights begin. If you want to sign up for an early flight, register on their website and they will send you an email when early reservations begin.
The underlying legal ground is "Fair Use" of a copyrighted work. Is such cases, courts evaluate the following: Does the new work have commercial purpose? How much of the copyrighted material does it use? How does it affect the market value of the original? What is the nature and purpose of the original?
Typically, this is also conditioned by the tone and nature of the derived work. If the new work is clearly intended as satire, parody, or commentary (especially political commentary), then its protection under fair use is unlikely to be challenged.
Thus using short sections of a script or scripts (even verbatim) for the purpose of obvious parody is unlikely to get one in trouble. For examples of this type of use refer to "Scary Movie N" or "Not Another Teenage Movie", which are almost entirely derived from other recent films. In some cases, entire scenes or sections of dialog are used verbatim. However the underlying context clearly reveals their use as parody, and the resulting work does not appear to affect the market value of the works from which they derive their material.
On the other hand, using longer sequences of material is questionable, especially if only a single work is being used as source material. Staging a Machinima of "Forest Gump", or "Saving Private Ryan", which is not clearly and entirely a parody would likely put the creators of the new work in jeopardy. In such a case your only sane recourse would be to attempt to gain permission from the original creators.
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I think it's safe to say that TeX and LaTeX own the typesetting domain.
It is safe to say, since no prepress militia will hunt you down.
It is, however, incorrect.
Postcript owns most of the printing+typesetting domain (fed largely by DTP layout apps like Quark which output nice postscript). Some shops now use a lot of pdf, but most applications do not produces pdfs with embedding graphical elements at prepress quality.
Why should every application developer either do without spell checking, or each have to develop their own incompatible system?
Applications may display text with which users interact. It may be in English, or Italian, or Dutch. Whatever language it is in, users may want to check spelling of text. Thus, the text object, under the hood, let's users interact with it. Making each development team responsible for spelling means that it will either not be done at all (which is a shame), or be done inconsistently (which is equally unfortunate).
Spellbound may be fine. Firefox with it may be better than Firefox without it. Doesn't the very fact that Spellbound was written indicate a more pervasive problem?
Building from the ground up would not work. It would need to be supported by compressive forces.
A space elevator would be a bundle of cables (or ribbons) built from an artificial satellite, lowered into the atmosphere, captured, and then anchored to structures on the ground. Actually to provide balance, the orbital structure needs to be in geosynchronous and as building proceeds on the tether which grows toward the ground, additional mass needs to grow outward into higher orbit to balance it. The tensile strength of the material must be enormous, and though cables grown from carbon nanotube are theoretically capable of use for this purpose are far beyond current capabilities.
Basically once the first filaments is in place, capable of supporting itself against the stress of both gravity and atmospheric buffeting, light robots would travel up and down repeatedly for years, adding more strands until the cable could support useful payloads.
Thus, power, huge amounts of mass, and a lot of space infrastructure needs to be in place before the elevator could be built. Once operational, however, it would be by far the most effective way of getting to and from space.
Using only compressive forces, e.g. building a tall skinny tower is not possible. Even carbon nanotubes would collapse under their own weight before reaching only a small fraction of the required height. Worse, even given an infinitely rigid structural material they would crush the foundation on which they rested (basically punching through the crust).
I forgot about that in when posting earlier, that is a good point.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, weak binding enables one to create a single body of linked code which depends on calling functions which may never be bound.
Basically, at compile time certain symbols are marked weak, meaning that they appear in the symbol table but their absense is not an error.
At run-time you can call functions to query libraries for the presence of various functions. By noting their presence (or absense) the code then can call functions conditionally.
On most unices one can dynamically load a library by name, to work around version issues. Darwin can do this as well, but we tend to use that only for plugin architectures, etc. Weak binding is the standard for this kind of solution.
Your statements are patently false.
Situations where X only runs on 10.2 and up, or Y only runs on 10.3 and up result from adding new functionality, not from breaking old functionality. Frameworks in Macos X support multiple simultaneous versions without conflict.
The reason that so many new packages require new versions of the OS is that the development tools and libraries are improving. Targeting 10.1 or 10.2 requires that developers forgo functionality which can dramatically reduce their effort. For instance using Cocoa Bindings (introduced in Panther) a developer can avoid writing much common code. The authors of Delicious Library say that when they first read about Cocoa Bindings they decided to give it a try:
WebKit, Array Controllers, and scores of other new objects have been introduced over the past few years. In each case the general result is deriving more functionality out of far less code.
This is not the result of Apple un-fucking things. This is the result of Apple producing software that improves the system by adding new functionality that is easier for both developers and end-users.
Apple typically releases free updates and security patches for several years. Jaguar (10.2) came out in 2002, the last major upgrade 10.2.8 was released in mid 2003, I see that 10.2.8 was still covered by the security update several weeks ago.
It is clear that you don't know what you are talking about.
Actually desktop widgets were part of the old MacOS. They were not re-implemented in earlier Macos X implementations.
A third party developer wrote Konfabulator which enabled users create and run JavaScript applets. He called them widgets too.
Is Dashboard a knock-off? Apple did introduce desktop widgets first. And their re-introduction and design makes sense. With WebKit and Java as integral parts of the base OS: css, html, and javascript make the most sense, and of course they will still call them widgets.
The fact that Konfabulator called them widgets is a knock-off of Apple's original widgets. The fact that the widgets in javascript makes some people suspicious that Apple stole the idea.
I don't know the principles on either side, so cannot say definitively what happened. I just think bald claims that Apple stole the idea are perhaps overstated.
It is an addition to the Cocoa framework and to Xcode which supports a very nice object persistence layer. In a nutshell Cocoa uses the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. TO develop an app, one defines ones application data as model objects, build an interface of windows, widgets, etc, and provide controllers which mediate communication between the user and the data model.
In Panther, Apple introduced "Bindings" which obviated the need to actually write most controller objects. Using bindings, the developer can associate object relationships (targets, and actions) between the View and Model layers by essentially using path names. This still enables a clean isolation between the interface and the application data layers, but requires little code (or sometimes none).
In Tiger they added "Core Data". This allows the developer to describe their model data objects, and the object relationships. At run time, using this model description, the model objects are associated with serialized objects on disk in:
XML file format
binary file format
SQLite-based database format
This repository of frozen objects is lazily loaded, and only those objects which are actually required are unarchived and made live. Think NeXT EOF redux, but easier and not tied to WebObjects.
XCode is integrated with a graphical display that lets you explore the object model graph, and also graph the layout of your source code.
This stuff is very sweet. I've been playing with it off and on, and definitely miss Tiger whenever I need to boot back into Panther. (Yes, it's a legal copy. No I won't break my NDA.)
Apple says they don't run it for profit because, right now, they know they can't. But by the time they can, they will. You do the math:
I did do the math. Why don't you do the english? Apple does show a profit. However, they have balanced that by increased spending on improving the store, expanding into new markets, adding the free song of the week, adding additional free downloads of song samplers like the 13 song compilation album I downloaded last week.
Will do-good Apple then drop it's prices just to not make money anymore, like they said they wouldn't? Are you kidding, the share holders would lynch Steve Jobs at the next meeting!
No, they will not. They will keep prices reasonable because it will indirectly generate much larger revenue down in other parts of their company. It has already done so consistently for the past several years, and seems very likely to continue. Are you kidding? They would lynch steve if price increases reduced customer satisfaction.
As an analogy Gillette and Schick, sell handles and starter packs cheap, and make a profit from the user on repeat purchase of the blades. Apple has a more complex marketing plan.
iTunes Player builds market awareness that apple software (even on a PC) is nice to use. iPod + iTunes Store is a nice shopping experience and showcases Apple integration and ease of use. It produces happy customers who now are inclined to see what using an Apple computer would be like. Face it, the real money is in software sales and in computer sales. Even though iPod revenue increased by 500% and Macintosh sales by a mere 26% in the past quarter music is only 40% of the pie.
The introduction of the Mac Mini at this particular point is time is not coincidental.
Since the Zen software sucks why would one want to?
I don't think you get it. Imagine apple wins, say, 97% of the player market. And you can only shop at iTunes, what will that do for prices? And service?
I, in turn, don't think you get it. My guess is that it would mean low prices and great service for iPod+iTunes customers.
Why?
Because iTunes is not a goal but a means to an end.
The iTunes store was never intended, and will probably never be intended to be a profit center for Apple. As a share-holder, I have read all their investor communications and usually also listen in on their quarterly conference call for investors.
Though initially operating at a loss, iTunes has lately been slightly profitable, and could prove to be significantly more profitable if that were goal. However, they have instead focused on expanding the catalag, keeping prices low, expanding the infrastructure, opening more stores, and adding functionality. Questions about iTunes profitability both current and future have always been answered with statements that Apple has no plan to derive direct profit from iTunes, i.e. telling investors not to count on it being a source of future revenue since Apple does not operate it towards that end.
iTunes is a vehicle for encouraging people to buy iPods. iPods provide a direct revenue stream which last year accounted for 40% of gross revenues for Apple. iPods are also intended to broaden consumers exposure to Apple hardware and software, and result in increasing the Macos X user base.
This appears to be a winning strategy. In the earnings conference call last week, Apple posted %500 growth in iPod sales and %26 growth in the core Macintosh business. This makes sound business sense. Margins on the high end iPod lineup are above industry average as are margins on the top end of their computer line. Margins on the 20GB iPod, the new flash iPods, Mac Mini, and the low end of the iBook and iMac line are not as good. However, these low margin sales also stand to increase high margin software sales, accessories, and broadening the overall Macintosh user base.
I can think of no instance where Apple would benefit more from increasing iTunes prices than from continuing this policy.
Song sales, iPod sales, computer sales, and software seem like different beasts. However, Jobs' and Apple strategy for the past few years has been to define a niche for marketing and pricing them together, which appears to be working better than directly targeting each. iTunes is a loss leader to get people to come to their stores and check out what Apple has to offer.
As both a customer, shareholder, and a Unix geek, I am very pleased by this approach.
As a Unix guy since the early 80s I enjoy Macos X both as a user and administrator more than any other flavor of Unix I've ever used. (Until Macos X you could not pay me to use a mac, or any Microsoft OS for that matter.) As a general computer user I benefit from their application software which is very pleasant to use. As an investor, I have no complaints.
Looking at the financial performance of Apple suggests a different reason for their continued existence. After the tech market collapse, Steve Jobs told investors that Apple would innovate their way out of recession. What followed? Financially they showed 5 continuous years of steady revenue performance and improving margins. The combination of software and hardware releases (expecially on their powerbook line) made powerbooks extremely popular platforms for Java and general unix developers. Xserve and Xserve Raid became popular in high performance and scientific computing. Oracle began migrating from EMC et al to Apple for storage. 2 Xserve grids appear in the top 500 supercomputer list published in Oct 2004. Imac, both the G5 and G4 models, were rated extremely highly by both users and the trade press (even wintel focused editors). iTunes and iPod were introduced and not only dominated the hard drive based mp3 market but stole market share from the flash player market.
If, 5 years ago anyone claimed the following, people would think they were on crack. Bill Joy and many of his colleagues at Sun will soon do most of their development on Macs. Apple hardware will appear at #7 in the supercomputer benchmarks. Apple will market the best price performer in the small and mid range enterprise raid arena. Apple will beat both the large media conglomerates and every hardware company (including Sony) at both online music sales and portable audio appliances.
During this period I know of no other consumer focused computer company that continuously posted profits over this time period. I suggest that a steady stream of new products, the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry, and continuous profitability (when the rest of the sector was rocky) are sufficient to explain why they are still around. I love that Darwin is open source, and have submitted changes to both userland and kernel code. However, stating that Apple is around only because they rely on open source appears unfounded, and makes me wonder if you are on crack.
1. Re: "Ogg Vorbis", you cite the famous "c't" magazine codec study from August 2002. It used a double blind format and is laudable for its attention to detail and rigorous testing design. However, the authors did poorly at their reporting and analysis of the data. Statistical analysis of the results show that at 64kbps mp3 clearly was inferior to all other formats tested. No other conclusions could reliably be drawn from that test. A concise statistical analysis of the test results was written by Stan Seibert at the University of Texas. It concludes:
Mr. Seeibert's analysis can be found at: "No other operating system creator around, not Microsoft and certainly not Linux or FreeBSD, would even dream about writing something that limits your graphics card purely for marketing reasons." This is peculiarly naive, and has long been common practice in the hardware business. My favorite example is the old vax upgrade procedure. Mid range and high end VAXen used the same logic board. To upgrade to the faster CPU clock speed a DEC field service engineer would remove a resistor (by physically cutting the pins). As f
Um, no, I don't know that. On what basis do you claim to "know" this? Looking at the track record, I see several examples of Apple defining and publishing new standards for others to use. Firewire (IEE-1394) and Rendezvous (zero conf networking) immediately come to mind. Over the past 5 years I see numerous examples of Apple migrating from proprietary formats and subsystems to open alternatives. They've demoted Netinfo in preference for OpenLDAP and Kerberos. They've replaced custom mail tools with postfix, cyrus, and apache+squirrelmail. Each release of Macos X has bundled more open source tools and development libraries not fewer. They also feed source patches back upstream to the initial authors even when not legally required. I honestly don't see evidence to support this broad claim and find much which flatly contradicts it.
You use the lack of Ogg Vorbis support as narrower evidence that Apple is against open formats. Rather than being compelling, I find it rather weak. Apple supports both variable and fixed bit rate mp3. It supports 3 of Audible's formats for books. It supports lossless encoding via the popular WAV and AIFF formats as well as a proprietary "Apple Lossless" compression codec. Finally it supports AAC with and without DRM.
When apple got into the music space, they could not have done so without some form of DRM. None of the record companies would do so without DRM. When Microsoft entered the space they defined a proprietary format from the ground up for use by windows media player. Apple, on the other hand, added an encryption layer on top of the AAC standard which is part of the MPEG2 and MPEG4 standards. Though certainly not conclusive, this does suggest that Apple would rather work with standard formats than invent its own.
About Ogg in particular, the claim that apple refuses to support it because it is against open formats is rather far fetched. It seems far more likely that Ogg is merely irrelevant to them. What would they gain by supporting it? Users could play Ogg Vorbis encoded tracks on their player. Since Ogg vorbis is rarely used by Apple or Windows users this is a very small number of users.
Also there is a fairly simple work around for those users affected by this. If the user ripped to Ogg at a high bit rate, transcoding to another format would result in little loss of quality, and both batch and individual tools are available to do so. If the user encoded at a low bit rate, they can re-rip to a supported format (they do own the music don't they?). In the end. Supporting Ogg would benefit such a small number of users that Apple has better things for their developers to do. Live with it, but don't look for a conspiracy. I'd far rather that Apple focus their time on improving functionality that will be useful to a large number of customers than add new formats that very few will ever use.
Re: monitor spanning support on the iBook, "Duh", right back at you. Apple is also a hardware company. Not supporting this configuration out of the box provides greater incentive for those who want that functionality to spend several hundred dollars by purchasing a PowerBook. This is marketing not malice. If you want this feature but don't want to spend more upgrade the firmware yourself.
Yes, I am both an Apple customer and own stock in the company. I think my statements are based on common sense rather than the words of an apologist, you be the judge.
Your worry is unfounded.
One of the features of Cocoa applications which dates back to NeXTStep is the idea of a filter service. Basically, each application can declare types that it can read, and types that it can write. if there is at least one application which has declared support for reading png, and writing any format understood by another application than the latter application can accept a drag and dropped data item of that type.
So, for instance, if any declared filter service can read png and write tiff, then a user can drag a png into Pages and have the conversion done automagically.
The core philosophy of Cocoa programming is to write the application system logic to do a particular job well, and leave everything else in the hands of the application framework and the OS. Pages handles the most common basic types, and ignores the rest. By doing so so the developers focus their energy on the development tasks which directly affect functionality.
It so happens that png conversion is supported behind the scenes out of the box. I do not know if svg is similarly supported. However, if such support is missing, all it takes is for one developer to write an applet which can read svg and write another supported format. Once that filter service is installed every cocoa app gets the support for free.
Thus, writing code to have Pages natively support more image types is counter productive and results in bloat. Better to stick with a smaller number of formats, and delegate the rest.
The cost of the kit is $150 + shipping.
On the order page it says:
So after adding a hard drive, cobbling together a useful power supply, and building a case for it, you are already well over $200.
Though it is fun to build things, you'd end up with a really crappy mp3 player, with an even lousier interface.
This reminds me of those ass-hats that make outdoor planters out of car or truck tires. Planting the flowers in the ground or in a simple raised bed would be far better looking.
The "ooh, look what I built" factor, in this case is overshadowed by the question "why?"
Why build something so lame and shoddy when for the same (or far less) money one can buy something far better, far more enjoyable to use.
You are right, but that is older hat for most Unices than for the code base this descended from.
NeXTStep through OPENSTEP 4.0 were based on BSD 4.3 + Mach, thus still had 4GB limits on everything including file system partitions, etc. As OPENSTEP became Darwin, the core OS got refreshed with elements from a much more recent version of Mach and with BSD4.4 code from NetBSD and FreeBSD. The Bulk of that code from 10.0-10.2 was from FreeBSD 4.x. Panther began synching with the FreeBSD 5.x series. 64-bit indirect addressing came from there.
In Panther, an interim compiler flag and mach-o cpu type were added to support large primary address spaces (64 bit pointers). When running on the powermac G5 the vm subsystem is 64-bit, and executables compiled with that flag got large VM address spages and 64 bit pointers.
Starting with Tiger, the interim compiler flag and mach-o type which support 64 bit direct addresses will be replaced by the long term versions.
The point is that Panther on G5s already allows large address spaces for both primary and secondary storage. Thus is already 64-bit aware.
You are correct.
/opt/local or /usr/local).
Unfortunately this is because you are mistaken.
Darwinports does work on the BSDs, and Solaris as well as on darwin. The new default installation structure is to install files under private directory spaces, but these are not intended to be used from those locations and must be activated by linking the files into canonical paths for use (e.g.
Some potentially dramatic speed improvements are in store for those with Multiple CPUs.
The Darwin kernel in Panther and before has two funnels one for the network stack and another for the rest of the kernel. Funnels are a kind of lock that prevent multiple threads from executing particular code simultaneously. Multiple threads may acquire a particular funnel simultaneously, but the kernel ensure that only one thread at a time is active. While a lock limits code re-entrancy, a funnel limits co-residency.
It is similar to the old Big Giant Lock in the FreeBSD kernel (slightly better than 2 Big Honkin' Locks). Tiger will roll out more fine grained locking which should have the greatest impact in improving IO perfromance
Panther is most of the way there.
off_t and other file related quantities have long been 64 bits.
For normal compilation caddr_t and friends are still 32 bits.
gcc 3.3 on the mac defined a transitional 64 bit binary format, via the flag "-arch ppc64". This defined a fake mach-o host architecture which used 64-bit pointers but otherwise was identical from an opcode perspective to the ppc970 processor subtype.
With the advent of gcc4.0 as64, nm64, and otool64 executables are present. Also "-arch ppc970" may now be specified explicitly to gcc.
I'm not aware of any significant ways in which Tiger will not truly be 64-bit. In some low level areas only 48 address address bits are significant. Since actually building or powering 64 bits worth of storage is currently impossible (even in theory) I don't see that anyone will miss them.
The power supply appears to be about twice the size of the standard apple power brick (those nice square ones used by powerbooks, ibooks, and ipods.). It is rectangular rather than square and the cord appears to be long enough to enable you to place it in an unobtrusive location.
BTW: I had originally cut and pasted the wrong dimensions.
The unit is 6.5x6.5x2".
Yes, it does support an internal wireless card but my example was to make it into a firewall.
In the context of a firewall, wireless networking would be far less secure.
Add a USB ethernet to make dual homed firewall?
Add external Firewire storage to make big file server?
Wow!
Great price point to introduce non Apple users to the platform.
What a great box.
The internet as we know it grew from the arpanet backbone.
Arpanet officialy adopted TCP/IP in 1982. In 1985 NSFNET was concieved. The National Science Foundation provided funding to extend networking for academic environments as long as all qualified users on campus had access. This was intended to promote its uses outside of the computer science and hard science departments where arpanet access had previously been isolated. Commercial traffic on the backbone was excluded until 1991.
Prior to 1991 purely commercial enterprises relied on leased lines, or on uucp based networking which provided a hiearchical store and forward architecture for email, file transfer, and remote command execution based on periodic telephone calls among interconnected sets of nodes each of which would typically call or accept calls from only a handful of nodes (a few lower in the tree and typically 1 closer to the root).
Only after 1991 did companies and individuals have unfettered access to the global TCP/IP backbone.
Thus, the internet as we know it is less than 25.
They plan to accept deposits and about 2 years before flights begin. If you want to sign up for an early flight, register on their website and they will send you an email when early reservations begin.
http://www.virgingalactic.com/when.asp
http://www.virgingalactic.com/when.asp
It's a difficult question with no clear answer.
The underlying legal ground is "Fair Use" of a copyrighted work. Is such cases, courts evaluate the following:
Does the new work have commercial purpose?
How much of the copyrighted material does it use?
How does it affect the market value of the original?
What is the nature and purpose of the original?
Typically, this is also conditioned by the tone and nature of the derived work. If the new work is clearly intended as satire, parody, or commentary (especially political commentary), then its protection under fair use is unlikely to be challenged.
Thus using short sections of a script or scripts (even verbatim) for the purpose of obvious parody is unlikely to get one in trouble. For examples of this type of use refer to "Scary Movie N" or "Not Another Teenage Movie", which are almost entirely derived from other recent films. In some cases, entire scenes or sections of dialog are used verbatim. However the underlying context clearly reveals their use as parody, and the resulting work does not appear to affect the market value of the works from which they derive their material.
On the other hand, using longer sequences of material is questionable, especially if only a single work is being used as source material. Staging a Machinima of "Forest Gump", or "Saving Private Ryan", which is not clearly and entirely a parody would likely put the creators of the new work in jeopardy. In such a case your only sane recourse would be to attempt to gain permission from the original creators.
Longhorn will have to be 64-bits.
Otherwise by the time it ships the clock bits will wrap around. (rimshot).