Once they've made "Numbers," and now that they have Keynote and Pages, Apple will have two office suites that are Mac-only. Each has few users compared to MS Office, so it represents a lot of money being thrown at a small customer base. It's an odd strategy they seem to have, unless they plan to kill off AppleWorks.
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Re:This gives them complete price coverage
on
Apple Updates iPod
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And when you combine it with the educational discount, it's more like $349 for the 40gb iPod Photo. Sweet.
Well, this is the fucking Pentagon (your department of war on other countries) that wants to have a complete database of every tiny little thing about American citizens.
Heh. You have no idea what you're talking about. From DARPA's own TIA page:
The goal of the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists - and decipher their plans - and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts.
Is DARPA developng a domestic surveillance capability to create dossiers on each and every American?
No. The goal of the TIA program is to develop information technologies that will provide important capabilities to detect foreign terrorist threats before they attack Americans.
So DARPA specifically denies your assertion. Now you may think DARPA is lying... But lacking proof, you might as well joing the Area 51/cattle mutilation crowd. Assuming you haven't already.
Couldn't disagree more. Java may fail to specify firm contracts regarding internal class method dependencies, but final is no way to address this problem. Your solution solves a potential problem with method overriding, but at the cost of creating a whole bunch of other intractable problems, such as not being able to specialize a class at all! A very arrogant thing for a coder to disallow.
For an in-depth essay on why final really does suck, see here.
Here's one. Check out Semantica by Semantic Research. These tools let you create, edit and view semantic networks, and they're all written in 100% pure Java. Download Semantica Reader 3.0 (beta) if you want to give it a spin.
Let them go Opteron or 970... either way, I'm happy. The G4 is really showing some age and I'd like to see Apple move on. The irritating perception that Apple is slower than a similar x86 box will probably go away once they get to 64 bit computing.
The chick in the BBC article is holding up a disc with an enclosure... Is that just a jewel case, or a mandatory cartridge? If it's a cartridge, it will merely be a niche product much like DVD-RAM.
Wouldn't it be more practical to equip passenger seats in planes with outlets?
Uh, that would require the airlines to spend money for everyone who flies, even if they don't have a laptop. This solution puts the onus on the laptop owner, where it belongs.
A smart Linux distributor with an eye towards the consumer desktop market would try to leverage Wine as an API migration path from Windows to Linux. It can be much like Carbon's role in MacOS X.
MacOS developers invested a ton of time and money into the old Mac APIs. Carbon is a transitional bridge for developers to get their application running natively within the OS X framework using the old Mac APIs.
So the analogy is clear. Wine can function as a bridge that transitions users from Windows to Linux, while honoring the commitment developers made to the Windows APIs. That means happy end users, since they are liberated from the Microsoft lock-in; and happy developers, since they don't have to throw all their hard work away. I'm surprised distributors like Mandrake don't try to leverage this opportunity.
I actually did write to my senators about this. I chose to write a physical letter rather than an email, primarily because I believe email is still a quirky novelty to most elected officials.
This is the meat of my letter, which I sent to Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxter of California:
As a constituent of yours, I'd like to alert you to a disturbing bill that may already be working its way through Congress. This bill, called The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), was originated by Senator Fritz Hollings.
It requires that any "digital interactive technology" that is used in conjunction with copyrighted material must "utilize certified security technologies" approved by the federal government. This could include VCR tapes, compact discs, and the devices that run them, as well as all computers and software. Any of these devices will have to include encryption so that the information they contains can't be copied. The act would make it illegal to remove or alter the security technology, to transmit content where the security technology has been modified or removed, or to manufacture or distribute any digital device or software that does not incorporate the technology. It would become a civil offense to create or sell any kind of computer system that is free of this impediment.
The SSSCA could have very harmful effects on the world of open source software, which is fundamentally based on the freedom to legally share software under public licenses. By making it a crime to reverse-engineer software to develop compatible open-source products, open source software and access to its underlying source code may be in jeopardy. If this bill becomes law, the open source software industry may be destroyed. This loss combined with the cost of implementing the SSSCA itself could be staggering. It could have a very chilling affect on the Californian and even the national economy.
Even more importantly, I believe this bill encroaches individuals' freedom. The bill is motivated by motion picture and television studios that seek to end piracy of their movies and other forms of entertainment. As worthy as that goal may be, this legislation is not the right way to achieve it. It is no coincidence that many of the studios in question also happen to be among Sen. Hollings' highest campaign contributors. The heavy-handed approach to copyright protection that this legislation embodies empowers large media companies at the expense of the public. I believe they have more than enough control over the way people like ourselves share information as it is.
I very much hope you will oppose this extreme bill, just as I do. This may appear to be an issue that only affects or interests technical people, but I think anyone who values technology and values their liberty would oppose it. I like to think Californian Democrats value both.
I encourage all of you who are Americans to write to your own senators. It's very satisfying to fight for what you believe in.
Interesting that this came out just now. It was only last week that I bought a Sony Mavica CD300, which uses 8cm CD-Rs and/or CD-RWs for its storage media. Which is really cool since it's massive, cheap, PC-compatible storage. No muss, no fuss.
The camera also has USB connectivity, and can function as a 8cm CD-RW drive (!) -- a beautiful feature I'd love to see adopted on the Philips MP3 player.
Slashdot Mirror
Once they've made "Numbers," and now that they have Keynote and Pages, Apple will have two office suites that are Mac-only. Each has few users compared to MS Office, so it represents a lot of money being thrown at a small customer base. It's an odd strategy they seem to have, unless they plan to kill off AppleWorks.
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And when you combine it with the educational discount, it's more like $349 for the 40gb iPod Photo. Sweet.
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Yah, no one ever used those little 3.5" disks either...
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Looks like you've got a good start.
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Depends on the platform. I'd say it's pretty challenging on OS X, which doesn't offer that installation option -- it's all or nothing.
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Been thinking about upgrading that tiny, tiny 30gb hard drive in my G4 Powerbook for quite a while.
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Steve Jobs thinks that Apple and OS X will be the dominant platform.
Not true. He usually compares Apple to BMW, a company with a tiny market share that doesn't dominate its market.
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On a decnet computer IE will load in just a second or two
Yeah? How about on LANtastic or VINES?
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Well, this is the fucking Pentagon (your department of war on other countries) that wants to have a complete database of every tiny little thing about American citizens.
Heh. You have no idea what you're talking about. From DARPA's own TIA page:
The goal of the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists - and decipher their plans - and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts.
I also urge you to read question 5 from the FAQ:
Is DARPA developng a domestic surveillance capability to create dossiers on each and every American?
No. The goal of the TIA program is to develop information technologies that will provide important capabilities to detect foreign terrorist threats before they attack Americans.
So DARPA specifically denies your assertion. Now you may think DARPA is lying... But lacking proof, you might as well joing the Area 51/cattle mutilation crowd. Assuming you haven't already.
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For an in-depth essay on why final really does suck, see here.
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Java just isn't popular on the desktop, because you never know what crazy JVM version someone's going to have on their system.
Wrong. Java applications can be distributed with their own private JVMs. Check out InstallAnywhere for more details.
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Wow. I really can never get enough of your pompous, John Agar-like speculation. You've made my day.
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Why 1000x? Is this anything other than an a number they just pulled out of their ass?
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Wouldn't it be more practical to equip passenger seats in planes with outlets?
Uh, that would require the airlines to spend money for everyone who flies, even if they don't have a laptop. This solution puts the onus on the laptop owner, where it belongs.
Q
A smart Linux distributor with an eye towards the consumer desktop market would try to leverage Wine as an API migration path from Windows to Linux. It can be much like Carbon's role in MacOS X.
MacOS developers invested a ton of time and money into the old Mac APIs. Carbon is a transitional bridge for developers to get their application running natively within the OS X framework using the old Mac APIs.
So the analogy is clear. Wine can function as a bridge that transitions users from Windows to Linux, while honoring the commitment developers made to the Windows APIs. That means happy end users, since they are liberated from the Microsoft lock-in; and happy developers, since they don't have to throw all their hard work away. I'm surprised distributors like Mandrake don't try to leverage this opportunity.
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Is that iWalk thing you dopes fell for. Photoshopped Apple 'product' shots are a time-honored tradition. Do you guys ever check your sources?
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I actually did write to my senators about this. I chose to write a physical letter rather than an email, primarily because I believe email is still a quirky novelty to most elected officials.
This is the meat of my letter, which I sent to Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxter of California:
As a constituent of yours, I'd like to alert you to a disturbing bill that may already be working its way through Congress. This bill, called The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), was originated by Senator Fritz Hollings.
It requires that any "digital interactive technology" that is used in conjunction with copyrighted material must "utilize certified security technologies" approved by the federal government. This could include VCR tapes, compact discs, and the devices that run them, as well as all computers and software. Any of these devices will have to include encryption so that the information they contains can't be copied. The act would make it illegal to remove or alter the security technology, to transmit content where the security technology has been modified or removed, or to manufacture or distribute any digital device or software that does not incorporate the technology. It would become a civil offense to create or sell any kind of computer system that is free of this impediment.
The SSSCA could have very harmful effects on the world of open source software, which is fundamentally based on the freedom to legally share software under public licenses. By making it a crime to reverse-engineer software to develop compatible open-source products, open source software and access to its underlying source code may be in jeopardy. If this bill becomes law, the open source software industry may be destroyed. This loss combined with the cost of implementing the SSSCA itself could be staggering. It could have a very chilling affect on the Californian and even the national economy.
Even more importantly, I believe this bill encroaches individuals' freedom. The bill is motivated by motion picture and television studios that seek to end piracy of their movies and other forms of entertainment. As worthy as that goal may be, this legislation is not the right way to achieve it. It is no coincidence that many of the studios in question also happen to be among Sen. Hollings' highest campaign contributors. The heavy-handed approach to copyright protection that this legislation embodies empowers large media companies at the expense of the public. I believe they have more than enough control over the way people like ourselves share information as it is.
I very much hope you will oppose this extreme bill, just as I do. This may appear to be an issue that only affects or interests technical people, but I think anyone who values technology and values their liberty would oppose it. I like to think Californian Democrats value both.
I encourage all of you who are Americans to write to your own senators. It's very satisfying to fight for what you believe in.
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Not to mention that fusion power, like every power source ever designed, will still generate heat pollution.
I'd be very interested to see a proposal for a power source that has no pollution of any kind. Quite the engineering challenge.
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The camera also has USB connectivity, and can function as a 8cm CD-RW drive (!) -- a beautiful feature I'd love to see adopted on the Philips MP3 player.
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