It's amazing how many articles think Gekko is based on a G3. At least this one mentioned 'unspecified' modifictions (which ain't true).
cube.ign.com has a great interview with two of the designers of the chip, and it's really informative. Part 2 is even better, where they talk about the competition's chips:)
The interviews really shed some light onto the chip's functionality; it's engineered for gaming and a far cry from the off-the-shelf XBox CPU. Additionally, they mention that IBM detailed the chips at Hot Chips and the Embedded Processor Forum. Can anyone dig that info up?
I recently got a Samsung Tantus 27" HDTV monitor. The thing freaks me out. This is an affordable HDTV, and comes in a larger size. I was looking at buying an OK normal TV, but when I saw this thing there was no way I was going to throw away money at the old stuff.
The best part is that it's not made by Sony:) Unlike most non-Sony TVs, it doesn't suck.
DVD Video on it is just incredible. It also lets you see exactly how CRAPPY some DVDs are. The Unbreakable DVD has the worst encoding I've ever seen- at times it's like watching an 8-bit dithered QuickTime movie. I can see every single fault of every DVD, but OTOH, and I see some amazing detail come out that I've never realized that was there (and I am a pure video junkie- it just doesn't get through on those olde archaic teles). As more people get HDTVs I guess the encoding quality bar will raise.
But by far and wide, the best reason is to hook up a Gamecube:) I haven't gotten the component video cables yet, but I picked up a cheap S-Video cable from Toys R Us (about $10 CDN, say $2 USD) and the graphical quality is just mind blowing. The difference between using composite video and S-Video is truly striking on this TV, not as much on regular TVs. I used to think that the N64 had great graphics, and on a classic TV, it does. But on this it's very obvious that it's 320x240- I can see every pixel clearly (as said above, there are no visible scan lines).
It's a mixed bag of joy, but for the price of this thing it's a total waste of money to buy a normal TV. This is leaps and bounds better and worth every penny I paid. If you don't have the cash, wait. You'll be happier:)
If Photoshop were only $20.00, then nearly everyone would purchase a legitimate copy because they would feel it was worth the money and (most importantly) they could actually afford it! What a concept!
Photoshop is $600 for a reason. It's the best pixel pusher on the planet, and the price is well deserved. You don't need Photoshop. 90% of the people who use it (including people who pirate it) don't need Photoshop. If Adobe sold Photoshop for $20, that would be a lot like a certain company releasing a certain web browser for free.
I'm glad that Photoshop is $600, because there's already enough people who won't buy my software because they say "Sorry, but I already have Photoshop."
You don't need Photoshop, or half the shit people pirate. Pay for and use software you can afford. If people keep pirating Photoshop instead of buying cheaper alternatives, there won't be any more alternatives.
Not including RS232C is a step backwards, in my opinion. The cost to implement it is insignificant and it provides interoperability between, literally, thousands of machines.
You can say the same thing about floppy disks. Really, serial ports are useless when you have USB. It's a brain-dead interface with no expandability (in terms of functionality- that's what USB is fore), the fact that our Apple//es had them just underscores how obsolete they are. There's nothing stopping you from putting in a PCI card if you need it. But hardware vendors won't make devices for those ports, so there's no point in shipping Macs with them.
I have one of the original Beige G3/233s, and yes, OS X is shit on it. I really don't care.
The Biege G3's is part of Apple's "Old World" machines. The only thing they have in common with iMac and newer (Blue & White G3, G4s) is the PCI bus and the cpu. Those are Apple's "New World" machines.
The Beige G3s have ADB, SCSI, and serial ports. Serial ports are pretty non-existent in OS X, since these were the last machines (and only G3s) to have them. You can't buy any hardware that will work with them anymore (except for modems with adapters). Ethernet was always the preferred method for network printing. ADB was hacked onto the Blue & White G3s because Apple monitors needed it for ColorSync, it's not even a proper implementation of ADB. No hardware vendors are supporting ADB in OS X, there's just no point when you have USB, and USB cards are cheap (I had one in my G3).
The Public Beta fried my G3's sound hardware (my fault, I was determined to get audio working on it...). Later my G3 became an unfortunate victim during a move... I've got a G4 now and it's schweet (shit happens... move on, be happy).
It's actually a pretty shitty operation for Apple to be supporting these machines. They need their own set of drivers and share no commonality between their New World machines (New and Old World are very appropriate names). It's more of Apple keeping their promise to support all G3s than anything else. I'm not saying that it doesn't suck, but any beige G3 is underpowered for OS X anyway (I did upgrade mine to 400 Mhz, which made it fast enough, but whatever).
Yeah, not the greatest position to be in, but a beige G3 is almost an obsolete machine when it comes to hardware anyway. Every other Old World Macintosh is fairly obsolete.
...at least as far as I know, is that it's hard to program for
The problem is, this is exactly what killed the N64. That, and it was very, very expensive to ship cartridges compared to the competition.
However, the PS2 has the market now, it's not as much of an issue as when it was first released. Developers are going to program for it anyway. The downside is that you may end up with better games on competitors systems, since they're much easier to develop for.
The fact that it plays PS1 games is a HUGE factor in its success, IMHO. My other sister (who's kids have an N64) are not getting a new console this year because of the investment required to build up a new library of games.
I don't get this argument. I have my Gamecube and N64 hooked up. I've got two games for the Gamecube, and I'm in no rush to build a library for it (I could spend all my money now, but I'd rather not). I've got a fat library of N64 games, and Dreamcast games (uh yeah, I've got my DC hooked up to that TV too).
So I don't get it. If your TV has only one AV input, well yeah, that sucks. How many other people are in this boat? If you still have your PS1, backwards compatibility doesn't make/that/ big of a deal, does it? Personally, I'd prefer to have to two CD trays you get for having two separate consoles hooked up:)
If you have a PS1 and want a PS2, well, duh. But if you've got an N64 and don't want to replace it, I don't get it. It's not like you have to stop using it, hook it up through your VCR or something.
Back to the article, the hard disk icon is bad. People don't want to manage files. They don't even want to think about filing. A more ideal solution would be a database like storage system where the user could always find what they wanted easily, and saving was transparent. Then you'd need 'undo' and 'drafts' to make up for that, which is something that people understand easily. This is trading efficiency for usefulness. What else are we going to do with our 1 GHz machines?
BTW, I should mention that the source of that idea is Jeff Raskin... I think.
This is starting to sound like the arguments my car freak friends have about standard versus automatic transmissions. What they don't seem to get is that drivers like me don't care about optimum performance
Disclaimer, I'm a sports car geek, and I drive a 6-speed.
The one argument that can be said, and this applies to computers, is that people turn their brains off too often. Manual transmission gives you better performance because it gives you direct control over the engine- it's all up to you. Driving is an active activity, but most people in North America (well, every region of NA has its habits,) take driving as 'I'm sitting in this lane until my exit shows up, and I'll ignore everything around me.' North America has the worst trained drivers...
These people also like to install in-dash DVD-Video players, because they find the act of driving... boring or something. They'd rather watch a movie while they drive--turning their brains off.
To relate this to computers, a computer is not like using a TV or a toaster. It's a tool and needs to be used like a tool- with an active brain. I remember back in the day when computers were rare, and I'd do vector artwork on computers, people thought it was cheating. "But the computer does everything for you!" Maybe there were thinking of Print Shop, but that's the reputation computers have. It does stuff for you.
It takes learning to use computers, and most people are very afraid to learn outside of their 'domain' (there domain being their profession). And this is one of the biggest problems I've had with Microsoft guis. "Let's show the user everything, let's make everything one click away. We'll make enough toolbars that can fill up the screen. Is there a task to do? We'll try an do it for them!" That really kills a user's need to explore, and people won't become better computer users that way. Most people don't even know what Style Sheets in Word are, and they're arguably the only good reason to use Word (once you turn off all that automatic formatting crap).
Not that our way (um, Unix) is better in that people should learn it. Raw Unix just wasn't designed for users. This article was about mainstream guis... that points to Microsoft:) Mac users are known for becoming experts with their computers, whereas Windows users are always asking me to fix their computers... free up hard drive space... "do I need more memory?"
My mother understands Adobe Illustrator much better than she understands Word, and Illustrator is a far more complicated program. She gets pretty clueless about some of the aspects in Word sometimes. She's often able to figure out Illustrator on her own.
Back to the article, the hard disk icon is bad. People don't want to manage files. They don't even want to think about filing. A more ideal solution would be a database like storage system where the user could always find what they wanted easily, and saving was transparent. Then you'd need 'undo' and 'drafts' to make up for that, which is something that people understand easily. This is trading efficiency for usefulness. What else are we going to do with our 1 GHz machines?
But this desktop idea is just stupid. How many people do you know have cluttered real desktops and digital desktops?
Scott's essay says: I don't mind AppleScript. I wish the system were open to other languages
Actually, the system is open to other languages
He also says that Be's BMessage system is more advanced, and then goes on to explain it. His explanation makes me wonder, does he even know how AppleScript works? There are several things in his essay (which is very well done and an overall very balanced view, especially for an ex-Mac hater) where he complains about OS X saying "Be had it," where he knows 100% about Be and about 10% of OS X:P
If you replace "BMessage" with "AppleEvent" in his description, you basically end up with a description of the AppleEvent model, and AppleScript is just a front-end to that model.
It's cooler in OS X's Cocoa environment, where you don't have to use AppleEvents, the Cocoa objects are the AppleScript objects. If you do
tell app "My Cocoa App"
myString = "foobar"
count myString
end tell
Unfortunately, with Cocoa apps I've noticed in a few places the behavior of some things are a little broken from traditional AppleScript... hopefully they'll get around to fixing them... and I'll file some bug reports.
And other Objective-C objects/Cocoa objects (including view objects with AppleScript Studio) behave that way. Plenty of coolness and advanced-ness there, IMO. Try to hack that with C++:)
Also similar is the cropping example about picture clippings. Mac OS had that since 7.5, it's just that the Preview app doesn't let you drag & drop clippings:P The very cool SimpleImage X does, though.
Apple has a habit for leaving blatant holes in their stuff to leave room for developers (unlike MS, who wishes to be the only developer). Sort of like how the AppleScript Script Editor app didn't have search and replace for years:P
The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.
I've been using OS X since it was Rhapsody DR2, back in 1998. And that was using Mach fine. NeXT has always been using Mach fine.
Rhapsody couldn't change screen resolutions without logging out and back in. Rhapsody had no video hardware acceleration. Rhapsody through up all over my couch when I tried to get it to work with my modem (Apple never did finish the serial port drivers). The Workspace Manager was a haphazard hack between the Finder and the old NeXT Workspace Manager. Network configuration sucked compared to the Mac OS. The kernel wasn't based on Mach 3 and it didn't even have Carbon. Well duh, Carbon was never part of the design spec for Rhapsody. The other kernel options they had at the time included NT and NuKernel (Copland's). What, would you expect them to build their OS on the '96 Linux kernel?
The old Apple execs' idea was to do what Steve Jobs called a "brain transplant," replace the Mac OS with NeXT outright. Goodbye Mac OS, developers must rewrite their apps for NeXT's Objective-C OO framework (otherwise be doomed to the Blue Box/Classic).
That was one of the first things that Steve killed. Mac OS X was created out of the Rhapsody project to include Carbon, which gave the developers access to the old Mac OS APIs (90% of it anyway, a lot of the old stuff from 1984 was too old and creaky, and had to go). The Rhapsody project would have been doomed like the Be OS.
One of the biggest faults with the Be OS is that it demands everyone to rewrite their apps to the Be OS framework. There's nothing harder than porting an app from one object oriented framework to another- you basically have to rewrite. Carbon gave Rhapsody raw access to the GUI Toolbox. Carbon is what took OS X so long, it was barely ready for prime time when the OS X public beta hit (Carbon apps crashed left and right, due to bugs in Carbon).
That's what took OS X so long. It was basically re-invented when Steve came along. The old Mac OS had been completely neglected by the old management, Steve breathed new life into it, realizing that it was their greatest asset (OS 9 is a far cry from System 7.5). Apple was working on two OS's at once. Apple would have been doomed if they were shipping iMacs running System 7.5. As such, OS X wasn't needed as badly as it was back in '95. They bought themselves time.
The original MacOS only supported one app at a time, and the addition of "multitasking" was a horrible hack internally. No memory protection, no process dispatching, no interprocess communication,
This is plain uneducated. Co-operative multitasking IS multitasking, not a hack. It's just in no way desirable for modern systems (the Apple Lisa had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection. It was also $10K in 1983. The Mac was not $10K, and succeeded). Apple has had advanced, object oriented interprocess communication since System 7.0 shipped 10 years ago. Pipes are all well and good for single-minded Unix utilities, but they don't cut it when you want to automate Photoshop with Quark Xpress to build catalog pages off of client-supplied content. And in fact, this is the preferred way to do IACC in OS X, not pipes or NeXT's PDO (distributed objects). And believe it or not, the Macs did have memory protection with the PowerPCs, just not enough, because the very old OS APIs depended on read/write access to low memory globals (things like mouse position and the current text highlight colors were globals). So if you wrote to NULL, your Mac was toast.
Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS
Apple had several OS projects, starting after System 6 (which was released in 1986). First, there was Blue and Pink (named after colours of post-it notes that their design specs were made on). Blue notes were enhancements and upgrades to the existing OS, which became System 7. Pink was a new Object-Oriented OS, presumably based on the Mac's Smalltalk "heritage," and would have rivaled NeXTSTEP (out of the Pink OO focus at Apple we did get the MacApp framework, which spawned "clones" like Borland's and Microsofts frameworks. The Be OS framework is a clone of NeXT). But they started talking to IBM about software/hardware alliances, and decided to spin off a company to finish the OS. They built some cool shit (my brother worked at IBM at the time and saw running demos of it), but Taligent (the company) tanked. They made Copland because they could see where Taligent was going (Copland was an extension to Blue, basically). Then there was Rhapsody (ditch Blue.) Then there was OS X (what idiot wanted to ditch Blue?? It's our bread and butter.)
Keep in mind how much Apple's plans have changed (and failed). The PowerPC was supposed to displace Intel, run on PReP and then CHRP hardware, and run every OS under the sun, including Sun, NT, AIX, Taligent, and of course, the Mac OS's successor (which wasn't going to be Taligent anymore). The only OS vendor that came to the party was Be. Realizing that no-one was coming, there wasn't much point of continuing clones, because it was just sucking money out of Apple (people often forget why Mac clones were made).
I once wrote an entire dial-up PPP implementation for the MacOS, called "Simple PPP". It was not fun.
Yes, unfortunately hardware serial port access was one of the areas where Apple was screwed with the classic Mac OS. Apple designed a great system there, but idiot developers thought there would never be more than two serial ports, and hard coded the hardware addresses into their code. So for ages, the SerialBus architecture was useless (daisy-chainable serial devices like USB- the only application was LocalTalk networking, because no one wanted to make proprietary hardware at the time), and Apple was stuck with two serial ports with next-to-no API for. Eventually they made the Communications Toolbox (which took many years for developers to adopt, because they didn't care to rewrite their lovely, hacked code), and OpenTransport, which took over TCP/IP networking and PPP.
So now we have Unix running Mach. It worked in 1990 on NeXT, it works now on OS X. Much rejoicing.
Apple really is the best thing for BSD. Here's a company whose very core depends on BSD. It's in their best interest to make it the best OS you can get-period. The way I see it, Apple owns the future of BSD. Of course Jordan would want to go there...
I use FreeBSD at work. It's awesome. I also use OS X daily at home and at work. And really, I can't see much difference between the Darwin core (pure opensource) and FreeBSD in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, except that several of the utilities and bsd apis are dated (no localtime_r, for example). That's not a big deal really, it's Apple's goal to keep Darwin in sync with FreeBSD, and anything that you are missing (as an application developer), there's not too much stopping you from getting sources and compiling it yourself.
My point is, Apple is shipping a fully capable open source OS. I'm talking about Darwin, not OS X. This is what Jordan is working on. If anything, it aims to succeed FreeBSD. FreeBSD is nice and all, but it's got everything that makes a modern Unix, which is exactly what keeps its market penetration small. It doesn't have the attention that Linux has to keep it growing.
The difference that Darwin has is the incredible number of NEW ideas that make a NEW OS. Darwin isn't just another BSD. Apple has learned a lot having several OS projects fail (you have to admit, you do learn a lot that way), and the good stuff has gotten into the Darwin core.
There are things like XML and Unicode support at the base level of the OS. XML is used to describe everything in the sytem, it's basically the conf file format of OS X for everything that doesn't have too many legacy dependancies (for example, fstab is still there, but from what I can tell, it isn't the source of the information at boot time- NetInfo generates it. mount et. al will use fstab still). High-level, object-oriented frameworks are available with at the base level of the OS through CoreFoundation. CoreFoundation is basically the core of the OpenStep Foundation framework without Objective-C. It's pure C. Everything in the core of OS X is written with CoreFoundation- it provides the XML and Unicode support (this means kernel modules, etc). Every string you use is a Unicode-capable string. The powerful array and dictionary 'classes' you use can be converted to and from XML (simple data archiving and unarchving, and human readable too). And you can download and install CoreFoundation onto Linux/FreeBSD if you want to.
I can hear people in the background yelling 'OMG! They're butchering BSD!' No, their upgrading and replacing some very old systems with new ones. They're replacing them with things that fit the needs of modern workstations, not just servers. Things like 'ls' and 'more' aren't touched. They're user utilities, and pretty irrelevant at the OS level (and fairly irrelevant for Apple anyway, because a cool ls isn't too useful in OS X).
You can check out Darwin yourselves from www.opensource.apple.com. You'd probably have more fun with Linux/FreeBSD for a few years, though. While Darwin doesn't have everything it needs to make a long-time *nix user happy, it does have everything it needs to bring all the power of Unix to the masses.
Even before Rhapsody was remade into Mac OS X, I remember Mac OS Rumors article about a rumor (surprise surprise) that what is now Darwin would be available free to universities, simply because Avie Tevanian wanted to give back to the community (as the BSD license doesn't force you). Well, they gave everything back to everyone, and then some.
I'm not saying that Apple is all good, but so many people really underestimate what Darwin is and what it stands for.
The problem with dynamic typing is that its not as fast as static typing. I'm writing a bunch of numerical code (for scientific research and consulting), and I use C (or C++ sometimes) but never Objective-C...when you need high performance, you want everything static if possible.
Yes, that is an issue with dynamic typing but that comes with the complexity of your app. Today's programs are far too complex to write in assembly, but assembly can be much faster. Static typing doesn't make things faster, that's just an implementation issue.
In Objective-C's case, only the first time you send a message to another object takes some extra lookup time. From then on, it's cached. It's just like using a virtual table. Object Oriented programming was NEVER designed for speed. That's the tradeoff. If you try to make a balancing act of that of speed vs. OO, you're missing the point and wasting your time. If you need the speed, write the back-end in C (but not C++).
As ESR has said in his Python introduction piece (I think it was in there, sorry if I'm misquoting), most programs nowadays don't even need compiled speed. 90% of the stuff joe user does is I/O bound, not CPU bound. Of course you can be a really sloppy programmer and waste the CPU, but that's not the language's fault:)
Objective-C is a real Object Oriented Language. To quote Alan Kay, "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." Objective-C is the closest thing to Smalltalk in compiled form.
C is a very nice, compact, clean language. People have historically abused it and produced ugly code, but for a well disciplined programmer, C's a dream. Except that it's not Object Oriented.
C++ was designed by committee. Its most fundamental spec is that it is insanely strongly typed. Templates are a hack to bring dynamic programming to a strongly typed environment. Exceptions are a hack to provide messaging in an environment that doesn't allow object A to talk to object B without knowing what the type of B is.
Objects that communicate with each other is the most fundamental thing in object oriented programming. You can't drop foreign objects into an OOP system when that system needs to know the exact type of those objects- prepare to start editing code. Great code re-use. C++ does NOT offer code re-use anymore than C does.
You like Qt's slots mechanism? They're a hack to give C++ something that every other OO language (inc. java, but not easily) can do naturally, make two objects talk to each other without knowing their type!
Objective-C is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language, which is a much better setup for OO programming. There's only one core syntatic addition to C, and that's to support OO programming. Not the billion-and-one keywords and obtuse syntaxes that C++ is full of (just how do you overload that operator again?). The syntax you describe is the best part. Compare this code,
object->runProcess(processType, duration);
[object runProcess:processType untilDate:time];
Not the greatest example, but the point is that you focus on the messages that the objects are sending to each other (which are very descriptive in Obj-C), not the types of the objects (which in many cases in OO programming, is irrelevant, unlike procedural programming). Compiler warnings of 'unrecognized selector' (unrecognized method) are more valuable than unknown type.
The sad thing is, I didn't think there was much wrong with C++ until I started using Objective-C several years ago. I just thought, that's the way OO programming is. Take a stab at smalltalk (www.squeak.org), and you'll see just how different things can be.
I hate questions like this...
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
they just mean that someone somewhere is ignorant and/or snobby.
If I throw a urinal into a museum, or yell "DADA!" out in the streets, everyone agrees that it's art (because it's been established as so).
But if I band together some talented artists, animators, and ingenious programmers, and create something truly remarkable like Deus Ex or Halo, people question it.
Such things (vidgames) would not exist without human creativity. They're physical manifestation of human creativity. If that's not art, what is?
I've always wondered about this. Apple had MrC, their super-optimizing compiler which they used for OS 9 and all of their other code. It's freely downloadable (in binary form), so you can use it yourself- but as I understand it, you have to update your code so that it works (I've never tried it, but I think it's mostly simple compiler incompatibilities). MrC was well known for giving apps a performance boost.
OS X is built with Apple's version of gcc. That always bugged me. I mean, gcc's great and everything, but going from MrC to gcc doesn't sound like a great idea... I can see a number of reasons why they'd want to use gcc, but I don't think performance is one of them:(
Does anyone know if Apple's gcc is pushing ahead in PPC optimizations? IIRC, their gcc's code base is pretty far apart from the main trunk.
Well, Robert X. Cringley has an article on the subject. Although, as usual, the topic of the article is more twisted than to say it has 'one subject'.
He mentions that Sony is taking/took a $1 billion hit on it, about $100 per machine.
The other thing you have to keep in mind, is that successful games make a lot of revenue. Part of the cost of developing the game is the development platform, which they'd have to pay Nintendo/Sony for (last I heard, MS was giving away kits for free, and just plain funding people to make games for the X-Box). And on top of that, they make licensing fees.
Nintendo (Yamauchi, check the depths of cube.ign.com for quotes) has said that Nintendo is in the business of making games- not gaming hardware. The hardware is just an enabler for people to buy their games. So they take a loss, and make it up on the games. It may work better for Nintendo than others, since they have their own very strong in-house game development houses. That is their business, games. That's what they try to make money from. It's not the computer industry:P
probably lead me to pick up a Cube after the holidays. But even after an hour's worth of hands-on I'm not exactly dying to do so.
I don't think Nintendo's going for a strong launch. They don't really need to come running out the door screaming HEY LOOKIE AT WHAT WE GOT!
They've got the same stuff that they've had all along; their franchises. And that value is stronger than ever now that Pokemon is so strongly established (they haven't even announced a pokemon game yet!). They already know how well their franchises are going to work (Zelda '2' for the N64 sold like hell, even though the game was a piece of ass). Now's a good time to show off some new stuff, like Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin (which looks amazing).
The N64 had a lot of flaws. It was notoriously difficult to develop for (although it sounds like the PS2 is worse), and the cartridges where incredibly expensive for developers. It was just much more cost effective(and in many ways, more rewarding) for developers to develop for the PSX. So Nintendo was quiet at the time and worked on the Gamecube in the background. The N64 was a flop in Japan and enjoyed moderate success in the states. The best thing they could do for it was to replace it:P
No more cartridges, no more pain-in-the-ass programming. They built it as a platform from the ground up to play games. The PS/2 and the X-Box aren't for that- they're made to take over your living room (pah, AOL vs MSN). The Gamecube ends up being a lot cheaper than the others too.
I expect that they intend to sell quite a few right now without trying too hard- they've got the kids cornered (who can expect Pokemon), and it's much cheaper. The launch titles at least prove that the system is capable; I don't expect most people to say 'it sucks' and dismiss it entirely (of course, some people will anyway. PIII RULEZ d00d!).
Next year, we can probably expect Zelda, Mario, and Metroid. Wow. And I can't begin to imagine what form F-Zero would be like on this thing. And then there's whatever Rare will make for the system. And then you have some very strong third party support.
Nintendo's drawing power is their franchises. There's no point in putting them all out at launch. Let Microsoft use up Halo, let Sony use up MGS2 to fight Nintendo. Nintendo already sounds like it has the next couple of years down solid. What are Sony and Microsoft going to deliver that's bigger than what they're doing this year? (I suspect that's there's an answer to this- I'll admit that I'm a bit ignorant here).
So why buy one now? Because duh, you like playing games! (and you don't think consoles suck because they're consoles). There's not much point in buying a PSX or N64 right now. The DC's a great choice (now that it's soooo cheap), but it doesn't have any long term potential. The 'cube is going to be fun now, and it won't be letting up any time soon. And the price is good.
If I'm not mistaken, QuickDraw DOES use Quartz internally in OSX.
No, it's not the same:/
QuickDraw ports are limited to the QuickDraw type manager and QuickDraw manipulations. It's possible to make one pixmap and use it as both a Quartz 2D port and a QD port (which is something Apple hasn't really documented), but they're using QuickDraw operations on their pixmaps (and on the window ports).
That's why QuickDraw anti-aliasing looks like crap and CoreGraphics anti-aliasing doesn't. They're using different rendering algorithms. One's QuickDraw type (duh), the other is the funky new stuff.
Computer crimes as terrorism? It just seems to be a magic word that lets government agencies get whatever law they want passed nowadays.
I mean, it's already a crime. And even then, the crime you're commiting is probably already a crime- like disrupting a business.
What happened to intelligent law enforcement? Like getting Al Capone on tax evasion- where DID he get all that money from? People are already doing illegal things, there's no point in throwing more laws at the problem.
For some reason, they're using QuickDraw to do the rendering, not Quartz 2D. As mentioned here, QuickDraw is fine if you want to be compatible with OS 9, but if you're targeting OS X, duh.
Perhaps it makes the port of their Qt/Mac easier to maintain. But if you are really targeting OS X, use the OS X APIs...
Apple's CoreFoundation does a great job of dealing with Unicode and XML. It's an OO library written in C, and as such it has string objects and an xml parser/generator that works with its array and dictionary objects. It does an excellent job of abstracting Unicode messiness when working with XML.
I've found CF a bit cumbersome to use by itself. A wrapper in an OO language like C++ or Objective-C is very convenient. Your Objective-C wrapper is commonly called the Cocoa Foundation framework:)
It's been ported to Linux and FreeBSD, and I'd recommend it to anyone doing Unicode or XML work. The parser is currently non-validating, but there are so many other 'gifts' that come with CF that makes it worthwhile.
I'm sure Darwin is quite zippy, but it has bugs and it does have slowness that crops up.
But it's not just Aqua that's slow, the frameworks & libs and lots of crap was slow in 10.0. Most annoying of all is sound. Music playing would take a hit on the CPU, making iTunes and games run too slow to be useful (iTunes would take 13% of the CPU, most of the time).
This is on a G4/733 too:P
And it was a bloody RAM hog. With 256 Megs of RAM, I get nothing but trashing and trashing after I launch a few (albeit not light) apps. At work I use a G3/400 with 512 MB, and it's so much smoother.
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cube.ign.com has a great interview with two of the designers of the chip, and it's really informative. Part 2 is even better, where they talk about the competition's chips :)
The interviews really shed some light onto the chip's functionality; it's engineered for gaming and a far cry from the off-the-shelf XBox CPU. Additionally, they mention that IBM detailed the chips at Hot Chips and the Embedded Processor Forum. Can anyone dig that info up?
The best part is that it's not made by Sony :) Unlike most non-Sony TVs, it doesn't suck.
DVD Video on it is just incredible. It also lets you see exactly how CRAPPY some DVDs are. The Unbreakable DVD has the worst encoding I've ever seen- at times it's like watching an 8-bit dithered QuickTime movie. I can see every single fault of every DVD, but OTOH, and I see some amazing detail come out that I've never realized that was there (and I am a pure video junkie- it just doesn't get through on those olde archaic teles). As more people get HDTVs I guess the encoding quality bar will raise.
But by far and wide, the best reason is to hook up a Gamecube :) I haven't gotten the component video cables yet, but I picked up a cheap S-Video cable from Toys R Us (about $10 CDN, say $2 USD) and the graphical quality is just mind blowing. The difference between using composite video and S-Video is truly striking on this TV, not as much on regular TVs. I used to think that the N64 had great graphics, and on a classic TV, it does. But on this it's very obvious that it's 320x240- I can see every pixel clearly (as said above, there are no visible scan lines).
It's a mixed bag of joy, but for the price of this thing it's a total waste of money to buy a normal TV. This is leaps and bounds better and worth every penny I paid. If you don't have the cash, wait. You'll be happier :)
Photoshop is $600 for a reason. It's the best pixel pusher on the planet, and the price is well deserved. You don't need Photoshop. 90% of the people who use it (including people who pirate it) don't need Photoshop. If Adobe sold Photoshop for $20, that would be a lot like a certain company releasing a certain web browser for free.
I'm glad that Photoshop is $600, because there's already enough people who won't buy my software because they say "Sorry, but I already have Photoshop."
You don't need Photoshop, or half the shit people pirate. Pay for and use software you can afford. If people keep pirating Photoshop instead of buying cheaper alternatives, there won't be any more alternatives.
You can say the same thing about floppy disks. Really, serial ports are useless when you have USB. It's a brain-dead interface with no expandability (in terms of functionality- that's what USB is fore), the fact that our Apple //es had them just underscores how obsolete they are. There's nothing stopping you from putting in a PCI card if you need it. But hardware vendors won't make devices for those ports, so there's no point in shipping Macs with them.
The Biege G3's is part of Apple's "Old World" machines. The only thing they have in common with iMac and newer (Blue & White G3, G4s) is the PCI bus and the cpu. Those are Apple's "New World" machines.
The Beige G3s have ADB, SCSI, and serial ports. Serial ports are pretty non-existent in OS X, since these were the last machines (and only G3s) to have them. You can't buy any hardware that will work with them anymore (except for modems with adapters). Ethernet was always the preferred method for network printing. ADB was hacked onto the Blue & White G3s because Apple monitors needed it for ColorSync, it's not even a proper implementation of ADB. No hardware vendors are supporting ADB in OS X, there's just no point when you have USB, and USB cards are cheap (I had one in my G3).
The Public Beta fried my G3's sound hardware (my fault, I was determined to get audio working on it...). Later my G3 became an unfortunate victim during a move... I've got a G4 now and it's schweet (shit happens... move on, be happy).
It's actually a pretty shitty operation for Apple to be supporting these machines. They need their own set of drivers and share no commonality between their New World machines (New and Old World are very appropriate names). It's more of Apple keeping their promise to support all G3s than anything else. I'm not saying that it doesn't suck, but any beige G3 is underpowered for OS X anyway (I did upgrade mine to 400 Mhz, which made it fast enough, but whatever).
Yeah, not the greatest position to be in, but a beige G3 is almost an obsolete machine when it comes to hardware anyway. Every other Old World Macintosh is fairly obsolete.
The problem is, this is exactly what killed the N64. That, and it was very, very expensive to ship cartridges compared to the competition.
However, the PS2 has the market now, it's not as much of an issue as when it was first released. Developers are going to program for it anyway. The downside is that you may end up with better games on competitors systems, since they're much easier to develop for.
I don't get this argument. I have my Gamecube and N64 hooked up. I've got two games for the Gamecube, and I'm in no rush to build a library for it (I could spend all my money now, but I'd rather not). I've got a fat library of N64 games, and Dreamcast games (uh yeah, I've got my DC hooked up to that TV too).
So I don't get it. If your TV has only one AV input, well yeah, that sucks. How many other people are in this boat? If you still have your PS1, backwards compatibility doesn't make /that/ big of a deal, does it? Personally, I'd prefer to have to two CD trays you get for having two separate consoles hooked up :)
If you have a PS1 and want a PS2, well, duh. But if you've got an N64 and don't want to replace it, I don't get it. It's not like you have to stop using it, hook it up through your VCR or something.
BTW, I should mention that the source of that idea is Jeff Raskin... I think.
Disclaimer, I'm a sports car geek, and I drive a 6-speed.
The one argument that can be said, and this applies to computers, is that people turn their brains off too often. Manual transmission gives you better performance because it gives you direct control over the engine- it's all up to you. Driving is an active activity, but most people in North America (well, every region of NA has its habits,) take driving as 'I'm sitting in this lane until my exit shows up, and I'll ignore everything around me.' North America has the worst trained drivers...
These people also like to install in-dash DVD-Video players, because they find the act of driving... boring or something. They'd rather watch a movie while they drive--turning their brains off.
To relate this to computers, a computer is not like using a TV or a toaster. It's a tool and needs to be used like a tool- with an active brain. I remember back in the day when computers were rare, and I'd do vector artwork on computers, people thought it was cheating. "But the computer does everything for you!" Maybe there were thinking of Print Shop, but that's the reputation computers have. It does stuff for you.
It takes learning to use computers, and most people are very afraid to learn outside of their 'domain' (there domain being their profession). And this is one of the biggest problems I've had with Microsoft guis. "Let's show the user everything, let's make everything one click away. We'll make enough toolbars that can fill up the screen. Is there a task to do? We'll try an do it for them!" That really kills a user's need to explore, and people won't become better computer users that way. Most people don't even know what Style Sheets in Word are, and they're arguably the only good reason to use Word (once you turn off all that automatic formatting crap).
Not that our way (um, Unix) is better in that people should learn it. Raw Unix just wasn't designed for users. This article was about mainstream guis... that points to Microsoft :) Mac users are known for becoming experts with their computers, whereas Windows users are always asking me to fix their computers... free up hard drive space... "do I need more memory?"
My mother understands Adobe Illustrator much better than she understands Word, and Illustrator is a far more complicated program. She gets pretty clueless about some of the aspects in Word sometimes. She's often able to figure out Illustrator on her own.
Back to the article, the hard disk icon is bad. People don't want to manage files. They don't even want to think about filing. A more ideal solution would be a database like storage system where the user could always find what they wanted easily, and saving was transparent. Then you'd need 'undo' and 'drafts' to make up for that, which is something that people understand easily. This is trading efficiency for usefulness. What else are we going to do with our 1 GHz machines?
But this desktop idea is just stupid. How many people do you know have cluttered real desktops and digital desktops?
Actually, the system is open to other languages
He also says that Be's BMessage system is more advanced, and then goes on to explain it. His explanation makes me wonder, does he even know how AppleScript works? There are several things in his essay (which is very well done and an overall very balanced view, especially for an ex-Mac hater) where he complains about OS X saying "Be had it," where he knows 100% about Be and about 10% of OS X :P
If you replace "BMessage" with "AppleEvent" in his description, you basically end up with a description of the AppleEvent model, and AppleScript is just a front-end to that model.
It's cooler in OS X's Cocoa environment, where you don't have to use AppleEvents, the Cocoa objects are the AppleScript objects. If you do
tell app "My Cocoa App"
myString = "foobar"
count myString
end tell
You're basically telling the Cocoa app
myString = [NSString stringWithCString:"foobar"]
[myString length]
Unfortunately, with Cocoa apps I've noticed in a few places the behavior of some things are a little broken from traditional AppleScript... hopefully they'll get around to fixing them... and I'll file some bug reports.
And other Objective-C objects/Cocoa objects (including view objects with AppleScript Studio) behave that way. Plenty of coolness and advanced-ness there, IMO. Try to hack that with C++ :)
Also similar is the cropping example about picture clippings. Mac OS had that since 7.5, it's just that the Preview app doesn't let you drag & drop clippings :P The very cool SimpleImage X does, though.
Apple has a habit for leaving blatant holes in their stuff to leave room for developers (unlike MS, who wishes to be the only developer). Sort of like how the AppleScript Script Editor app didn't have search and replace for years :P
The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.
I've been using OS X since it was Rhapsody DR2, back in 1998. And that was using Mach fine. NeXT has always been using Mach fine.
Rhapsody couldn't change screen resolutions without logging out and back in. Rhapsody had no video hardware acceleration. Rhapsody through up all over my couch when I tried to get it to work with my modem (Apple never did finish the serial port drivers). The Workspace Manager was a haphazard hack between the Finder and the old NeXT Workspace Manager. Network configuration sucked compared to the Mac OS. The kernel wasn't based on Mach 3 and it didn't even have Carbon. Well duh, Carbon was never part of the design spec for Rhapsody. The other kernel options they had at the time included NT and NuKernel (Copland's). What, would you expect them to build their OS on the '96 Linux kernel?
The old Apple execs' idea was to do what Steve Jobs called a "brain transplant," replace the Mac OS with NeXT outright. Goodbye Mac OS, developers must rewrite their apps for NeXT's Objective-C OO framework (otherwise be doomed to the Blue Box/Classic).
That was one of the first things that Steve killed. Mac OS X was created out of the Rhapsody project to include Carbon, which gave the developers access to the old Mac OS APIs (90% of it anyway, a lot of the old stuff from 1984 was too old and creaky, and had to go). The Rhapsody project would have been doomed like the Be OS.
One of the biggest faults with the Be OS is that it demands everyone to rewrite their apps to the Be OS framework. There's nothing harder than porting an app from one object oriented framework to another- you basically have to rewrite. Carbon gave Rhapsody raw access to the GUI Toolbox. Carbon is what took OS X so long, it was barely ready for prime time when the OS X public beta hit (Carbon apps crashed left and right, due to bugs in Carbon).
That's what took OS X so long. It was basically re-invented when Steve came along. The old Mac OS had been completely neglected by the old management, Steve breathed new life into it, realizing that it was their greatest asset (OS 9 is a far cry from System 7.5). Apple was working on two OS's at once. Apple would have been doomed if they were shipping iMacs running System 7.5. As such, OS X wasn't needed as badly as it was back in '95. They bought themselves time.
The original MacOS only supported one app at a time, and the addition of "multitasking" was a horrible hack internally. No memory protection, no process dispatching, no interprocess communication,
This is plain uneducated. Co-operative multitasking IS multitasking, not a hack. It's just in no way desirable for modern systems (the Apple Lisa had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection. It was also $10K in 1983. The Mac was not $10K, and succeeded). Apple has had advanced, object oriented interprocess communication since System 7.0 shipped 10 years ago. Pipes are all well and good for single-minded Unix utilities, but they don't cut it when you want to automate Photoshop with Quark Xpress to build catalog pages off of client-supplied content. And in fact, this is the preferred way to do IACC in OS X, not pipes or NeXT's PDO (distributed objects). And believe it or not, the Macs did have memory protection with the PowerPCs, just not enough, because the very old OS APIs depended on read/write access to low memory globals (things like mouse position and the current text highlight colors were globals). So if you wrote to NULL, your Mac was toast.
Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS
Apple had several OS projects, starting after System 6 (which was released in 1986). First, there was Blue and Pink (named after colours of post-it notes that their design specs were made on). Blue notes were enhancements and upgrades to the existing OS, which became System 7. Pink was a new Object-Oriented OS, presumably based on the Mac's Smalltalk "heritage," and would have rivaled NeXTSTEP (out of the Pink OO focus at Apple we did get the MacApp framework, which spawned "clones" like Borland's and Microsofts frameworks. The Be OS framework is a clone of NeXT). But they started talking to IBM about software/hardware alliances, and decided to spin off a company to finish the OS. They built some cool shit (my brother worked at IBM at the time and saw running demos of it), but Taligent (the company) tanked. They made Copland because they could see where Taligent was going (Copland was an extension to Blue, basically). Then there was Rhapsody (ditch Blue.) Then there was OS X (what idiot wanted to ditch Blue?? It's our bread and butter.)
Keep in mind how much Apple's plans have changed (and failed). The PowerPC was supposed to displace Intel, run on PReP and then CHRP hardware, and run every OS under the sun, including Sun, NT, AIX, Taligent, and of course, the Mac OS's successor (which wasn't going to be Taligent anymore). The only OS vendor that came to the party was Be. Realizing that no-one was coming, there wasn't much point of continuing clones, because it was just sucking money out of Apple (people often forget why Mac clones were made).
I once wrote an entire dial-up PPP implementation for the MacOS, called "Simple PPP". It was not fun.
Yes, unfortunately hardware serial port access was one of the areas where Apple was screwed with the classic Mac OS. Apple designed a great system there, but idiot developers thought there would never be more than two serial ports, and hard coded the hardware addresses into their code. So for ages, the SerialBus architecture was useless (daisy-chainable serial devices like USB- the only application was LocalTalk networking, because no one wanted to make proprietary hardware at the time), and Apple was stuck with two serial ports with next-to-no API for. Eventually they made the Communications Toolbox (which took many years for developers to adopt, because they didn't care to rewrite their lovely, hacked code), and OpenTransport, which took over TCP/IP networking and PPP.
So now we have Unix running Mach. It worked in 1990 on NeXT, it works now on OS X. Much rejoicing.
I use FreeBSD at work. It's awesome. I also use OS X daily at home and at work. And really, I can't see much difference between the Darwin core (pure opensource) and FreeBSD in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, except that several of the utilities and bsd apis are dated (no localtime_r, for example). That's not a big deal really, it's Apple's goal to keep Darwin in sync with FreeBSD, and anything that you are missing (as an application developer), there's not too much stopping you from getting sources and compiling it yourself.
My point is, Apple is shipping a fully capable open source OS. I'm talking about Darwin, not OS X. This is what Jordan is working on. If anything, it aims to succeed FreeBSD. FreeBSD is nice and all, but it's got everything that makes a modern Unix, which is exactly what keeps its market penetration small. It doesn't have the attention that Linux has to keep it growing.
The difference that Darwin has is the incredible number of NEW ideas that make a NEW OS. Darwin isn't just another BSD. Apple has learned a lot having several OS projects fail (you have to admit, you do learn a lot that way), and the good stuff has gotten into the Darwin core.
There are things like XML and Unicode support at the base level of the OS. XML is used to describe everything in the sytem, it's basically the conf file format of OS X for everything that doesn't have too many legacy dependancies (for example, fstab is still there, but from what I can tell, it isn't the source of the information at boot time- NetInfo generates it. mount et. al will use fstab still). High-level, object-oriented frameworks are available with at the base level of the OS through CoreFoundation. CoreFoundation is basically the core of the OpenStep Foundation framework without Objective-C. It's pure C. Everything in the core of OS X is written with CoreFoundation- it provides the XML and Unicode support (this means kernel modules, etc). Every string you use is a Unicode-capable string. The powerful array and dictionary 'classes' you use can be converted to and from XML (simple data archiving and unarchving, and human readable too). And you can download and install CoreFoundation onto Linux/FreeBSD if you want to.
I can hear people in the background yelling 'OMG! They're butchering BSD!' No, their upgrading and replacing some very old systems with new ones. They're replacing them with things that fit the needs of modern workstations, not just servers. Things like 'ls' and 'more' aren't touched. They're user utilities, and pretty irrelevant at the OS level (and fairly irrelevant for Apple anyway, because a cool ls isn't too useful in OS X).
You can check out Darwin yourselves from www.opensource.apple.com. You'd probably have more fun with Linux/FreeBSD for a few years, though. While Darwin doesn't have everything it needs to make a long-time *nix user happy, it does have everything it needs to bring all the power of Unix to the masses.
Even before Rhapsody was remade into Mac OS X, I remember Mac OS Rumors article about a rumor (surprise surprise) that what is now Darwin would be available free to universities, simply because Avie Tevanian wanted to give back to the community (as the BSD license doesn't force you). Well, they gave everything back to everyone, and then some.
I'm not saying that Apple is all good, but so many people really underestimate what Darwin is and what it stands for.
Yes, that is an issue with dynamic typing but that comes with the complexity of your app. Today's programs are far too complex to write in assembly, but assembly can be much faster. Static typing doesn't make things faster, that's just an implementation issue.
In Objective-C's case, only the first time you send a message to another object takes some extra lookup time. From then on, it's cached. It's just like using a virtual table. Object Oriented programming was NEVER designed for speed. That's the tradeoff. If you try to make a balancing act of that of speed vs. OO, you're missing the point and wasting your time. If you need the speed, write the back-end in C (but not C++).
As ESR has said in his Python introduction piece (I think it was in there, sorry if I'm misquoting), most programs nowadays don't even need compiled speed. 90% of the stuff joe user does is I/O bound, not CPU bound. Of course you can be a really sloppy programmer and waste the CPU, but that's not the language's fault :)
C is a very nice, compact, clean language. People have historically abused it and produced ugly code, but for a well disciplined programmer, C's a dream. Except that it's not Object Oriented.
C++ was designed by committee. Its most fundamental spec is that it is insanely strongly typed. Templates are a hack to bring dynamic programming to a strongly typed environment. Exceptions are a hack to provide messaging in an environment that doesn't allow object A to talk to object B without knowing what the type of B is.
Objects that communicate with each other is the most fundamental thing in object oriented programming. You can't drop foreign objects into an OOP system when that system needs to know the exact type of those objects- prepare to start editing code. Great code re-use. C++ does NOT offer code re-use anymore than C does.
You like Qt's slots mechanism? They're a hack to give C++ something that every other OO language (inc. java, but not easily) can do naturally, make two objects talk to each other without knowing their type!
Objective-C is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language, which is a much better setup for OO programming. There's only one core syntatic addition to C, and that's to support OO programming. Not the billion-and-one keywords and obtuse syntaxes that C++ is full of (just how do you overload that operator again?). The syntax you describe is the best part. Compare this code,
object->runProcess(processType, duration);
[object runProcess:processType untilDate:time];
Not the greatest example, but the point is that you focus on the messages that the objects are sending to each other (which are very descriptive in Obj-C), not the types of the objects (which in many cases in OO programming, is irrelevant, unlike procedural programming). Compiler warnings of 'unrecognized selector' (unrecognized method) are more valuable than unknown type.
The sad thing is, I didn't think there was much wrong with C++ until I started using Objective-C several years ago. I just thought, that's the way OO programming is. Take a stab at smalltalk (www.squeak.org), and you'll see just how different things can be.
If I throw a urinal into a museum, or yell "DADA!" out in the streets, everyone agrees that it's art (because it's been established as so).
But if I band together some talented artists, animators, and ingenious programmers, and create something truly remarkable like Deus Ex or Halo, people question it.
Such things (vidgames) would not exist without human creativity. They're physical manifestation of human creativity. If that's not art, what is?
OS X is built with Apple's version of gcc. That always bugged me. I mean, gcc's great and everything, but going from MrC to gcc doesn't sound like a great idea... I can see a number of reasons why they'd want to use gcc, but I don't think performance is one of them :(
Does anyone know if Apple's gcc is pushing ahead in PPC optimizations? IIRC, their gcc's code base is pretty far apart from the main trunk.
My browser has inline spell checking, and damnit, all browsers should.
Actually, every Mac OS X Cocoa-based app has inline spell checking. The point is to fix (and gripe about) the problem at the source.
He mentions that Sony is taking/took a $1 billion hit on it, about $100 per machine.
The other thing you have to keep in mind, is that successful games make a lot of revenue. Part of the cost of developing the game is the development platform, which they'd have to pay Nintendo/Sony for (last I heard, MS was giving away kits for free, and just plain funding people to make games for the X-Box). And on top of that, they make licensing fees.
Nintendo (Yamauchi, check the depths of cube.ign.com for quotes) has said that Nintendo is in the business of making games- not gaming hardware. The hardware is just an enabler for people to buy their games. So they take a loss, and make it up on the games. It may work better for Nintendo than others, since they have their own very strong in-house game development houses. That is their business, games. That's what they try to make money from. It's not the computer industry :P
I don't think Nintendo's going for a strong launch. They don't really need to come running out the door screaming HEY LOOKIE AT WHAT WE GOT!
They've got the same stuff that they've had all along; their franchises. And that value is stronger than ever now that Pokemon is so strongly established (they haven't even announced a pokemon game yet!). They already know how well their franchises are going to work (Zelda '2' for the N64 sold like hell, even though the game was a piece of ass). Now's a good time to show off some new stuff, like Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin (which looks amazing).
The N64 had a lot of flaws. It was notoriously difficult to develop for (although it sounds like the PS2 is worse), and the cartridges where incredibly expensive for developers. It was just much more cost effective(and in many ways, more rewarding) for developers to develop for the PSX. So Nintendo was quiet at the time and worked on the Gamecube in the background. The N64 was a flop in Japan and enjoyed moderate success in the states. The best thing they could do for it was to replace it :P
No more cartridges, no more pain-in-the-ass programming. They built it as a platform from the ground up to play games. The PS/2 and the X-Box aren't for that- they're made to take over your living room (pah, AOL vs MSN). The Gamecube ends up being a lot cheaper than the others too.
I expect that they intend to sell quite a few right now without trying too hard- they've got the kids cornered (who can expect Pokemon), and it's much cheaper. The launch titles at least prove that the system is capable; I don't expect most people to say 'it sucks' and dismiss it entirely (of course, some people will anyway. PIII RULEZ d00d!).
Next year, we can probably expect Zelda, Mario, and Metroid. Wow. And I can't begin to imagine what form F-Zero would be like on this thing. And then there's whatever Rare will make for the system. And then you have some very strong third party support.
Nintendo's drawing power is their franchises. There's no point in putting them all out at launch. Let Microsoft use up Halo, let Sony use up MGS2 to fight Nintendo. Nintendo already sounds like it has the next couple of years down solid. What are Sony and Microsoft going to deliver that's bigger than what they're doing this year? (I suspect that's there's an answer to this- I'll admit that I'm a bit ignorant here).
So why buy one now? Because duh, you like playing games! (and you don't think consoles suck because they're consoles). There's not much point in buying a PSX or N64 right now. The DC's a great choice (now that it's soooo cheap), but it doesn't have any long term potential. The 'cube is going to be fun now, and it won't be letting up any time soon. And the price is good.
No, it's not the same :/
QuickDraw ports are limited to the QuickDraw type manager and QuickDraw manipulations. It's possible to make one pixmap and use it as both a Quartz 2D port and a QD port (which is something Apple hasn't really documented), but they're using QuickDraw operations on their pixmaps (and on the window ports).
That's why QuickDraw anti-aliasing looks like crap and CoreGraphics anti-aliasing doesn't. They're using different rendering algorithms. One's QuickDraw type (duh), the other is the funky new stuff.
Qt isn't using the funky new stuff.
I mean, it's already a crime. And even then, the crime you're commiting is probably already a crime- like disrupting a business.
What happened to intelligent law enforcement? Like getting Al Capone on tax evasion- where DID he get all that money from? People are already doing illegal things, there's no point in throwing more laws at the problem.
Perhaps it makes the port of their Qt/Mac easier to maintain. But if you are really targeting OS X, use the OS X APIs...
I've found CF a bit cumbersome to use by itself. A wrapper in an OO language like C++ or Objective-C is very convenient. Your Objective-C wrapper is commonly called the Cocoa Foundation framework :)
It's been ported to Linux and FreeBSD, and I'd recommend it to anyone doing Unicode or XML work. The parser is currently non-validating, but there are so many other 'gifts' that come with CF that makes it worthwhile.
Hey, it was good enough to build an OS on.
But it's not just Aqua that's slow, the frameworks & libs and lots of crap was slow in 10.0. Most annoying of all is sound. Music playing would take a hit on the CPU, making iTunes and games run too slow to be useful (iTunes would take 13% of the CPU, most of the time).
This is on a G4/733 too :P
And it was a bloody RAM hog. With 256 Megs of RAM, I get nothing but trashing and trashing after I launch a few (albeit not light) apps. At work I use a G3/400 with 512 MB, and it's so much smoother.
I can't wait to install 10.1 :)