No, it has a lot to do with Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) and AppleEvents -- features that has been replicated elsewhere. The AppleScript bits exist because Apple has a hardon for a bad programming language that they invented.
AppleScript and Automator sound like they deliver the features this new Microsoft shell is hoping to provide.
No. Are you mentally retarded? How could you read this entire story and comments and come to that conclusion? Way to live up to the "One Mouse Button" stereotype.
Monad is a command shell. It is interactive. It's designed to make certain tasks more straight-forward than scripting like AppleScript or VBScript. It has absoltely nothing to do with a friendly GUI frontend like Automator.
In retrospect, every midrange company designing their own RISC architecture was financial stupidity on a gross scale. It was based on the idea that high-end, high-margin computing would be the driving force in the industry, and that turned out to be plainly false.
> How does that work?
It didn't. It killed DEC, killed SGI, and almost killed HP and Sun.
I'm sorry -- I confused shadow copy with some backup feature. And, if WebDAV changed, I hadn't noticed. But you sound like you know of what you speak, so I will defer on all points.
Well, I think the real trolls are the single-platform guys who wade into a cross-platform discussion without having any comparative knowledge.
In Apple's favor, I will say that Automator is a cool "4GL" tool, but it has very little to do with AppleScript. (You could make the same thing on Windows or KDE.)
None of these AppleScript features are unique or interesting, so please stop telling us about them. Maybe they were in 1994, but the world has moved on.
Also, AppleScript itself is the worst programming language ever invented. Please don't damage your brain by using it.
Minor corrections: WebDAV, Shadow copy. and Side-by-Side DLLs were certainly in W2K; the DualView features were widely supported in vendor video drivers; and I don't know if there was any real difference in the camera/scanner support other than the Wizard.
Sure, the eternal life idea was corny, and presenting that as Anikan's motivation completely failed. But there was other dialog which presented the Dark Side as more sophisticated and balanced than the Jedis' holier-than-thou one-sided views. Which at least finally left the door open for the idea that maybe the Republic was ineffectual and corrupt, and maybe the Dark Side was the right answer at the right time. And that at least give the Emperor's character some motiviation, if not for Darth Vader.
The biggest general problem with the Star Wars films is that this Force business is about as deep as a puddle. Therefore, there's nothing the characters can say about it that you haven't heard 100 times before -- "Embrace your Fear|Anger... Feel the Power of the Dark Side... blah blah blah" -- it was already tired and boring at the end of Empire Strikes Back, and even Return of the Jedi's big conflict fell flat as a result.
Except (A) OS 9 support was disabled and there was no hardware revision, and (B) the minor differences between G4 towers would not have been expensive for Apple to support anyway.
I'm not suggesting that Apple support G5s or consumer machines under OS9, but, let's face it, DTP (Quark) users basically have carried Apple for a long time, so in my view Apple owes them more than a 12 month transition cycle.
(Keep this in mind if you think PPC support is going to stick around for a while, Mac users.)
One of the high-points of the last film was that Palpatine's Dark Side dialog had at least a little worldly substance behind it, and wasn't just corny cliches (like your post:)
*Apple* was forced to continue making and shipping old G4s that could run OS9, mainly so people could keep using Quark.
Oh, poor little Apple -- There was never any technical reason for removing OS 9 support from the G4 towers -- Apple was just hyperagressively pushing people onto OS X. Two years is a ridiculously short period for a migration.
Anyway, If understand the problem correctly, it wasn't so much the lack of Quark, but expensive network systems that only worked with a specific version of Quark 4. (I know people still on OS 9 because of unsupported a/v hardware under OS X.)
The problem is you then have OpenFirmware emulation baked into system years after Mac users stopped caring about OF. And by 2006, EFI will be mainstream, so other than these developer boxes, BIOS is a non-issue for Mac users.
I actually expect driver code to change quite a bit, if only because vendors will want to keep their Windows and Mac drivers closer together.
As far up arrow behavior, it seems predictible to me.. but that's because I encountered the feature with DOSKEY, and the Unix shells I used had no such feature at all.
Another nice feature of CMD is the ability to use wildcards for directory names:
why would you pay more for a computer to effectively ruin the experience of using it?
So, does Apple charge more for hardware, or don't they? What's the latest MacZealot story?:)
I personally think that many Apple models are quite competitive price-wise. A PowerBook 15 is priced almost identical to a similar ThinkPad, and while they are both very nice computers, if I could run Windows on a PowerBook, why the hell not? It's a topnotch box in every respect other than the legacy G4 CPU.
(Trick question. Answer is the one mouse button. But I would certainly think about it for a good while.)
Hey -- in the midst of that Apple/Konq flamewar Apple apparently offered to put a portability layer in WebCore. It's since been ported GTK: http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/
I would love to see a KHTML/WebCore for Windows. The dhtml kinda sucks, but it's very lightweight and renders nicely. Rather than question your web design skills or business acumenity, I say if you want to port Konqueror or WebCore to Win32, that would be fuckin excellent. Go for it.
Because if you are breaking everything else, you might as well break the boot process along with it. Sun is just delaying the inevitable (x86 boxes that boot with EFI), Apple has another year so they don't need to do the same.
Uhh, yeah, thanks for the highly technical explaination, but you're wrong. Most IE bugs have nothing to do with how much code is shared, or how deeply it is rooted, but instead attack buggy integration features like ActiveX Zone security.
But you have to realize there's always going to be some "sharing". Look at Firefox -- XUL, Java Applets, Flash or custom plugins -- all of these have been used to "break out" of the browser and infect the local machine. You could gimp your browser, but the real answer is probably some better form of OS access controls.
Sorry, I read it in the print WSJ, which I think are pay-only online.
Jobs doesn't trash DRM at all there -- he simply argues that systems will be broken, so it's not worth investing a massive engineering effort into something that's never going to be 100% effective.
It seems highly likely that Apple will use TCPA features to keep OSX/Intel off generic PC hardware. The trusted boot-up features seem directly applicable to preventing OS piracy.
> let Firefox/Opera do all the R&D and find out what the "must-haves"
Interesting argument because it took Mozilla Firefox & Opera about 5 years to match the functionality of Internet Explorer 5.0. Things like CSS support and a solid DHTML implementation are "must-haves" and IE had them long before anyone else. (of course since then it's been surpassed).
If MS starts taking the development of IE seriously, they could easily lap the competition again. Starting a standards-fight with a monopoly is dangerous business, because there's a huge number of standards and implementing them all can be very expensive. Imagine a future "W3C checklist" where MS has twice as many ticks as Mozilla. It certainly could be possible.
Hopefully this is just marketing-speak for eliminating the "zone" system altogether.
There's really two very different applications for IE -- the primary one is as an Internet Browser where it should simply be impossible to break out of the sandbox. The "Zones" tried to do this but were a massive technical failure. When you say "ActiveX is the problem", you really mean "Those stoopid broken Security Zones that let ActiveX rape the system are the problem".
The secondary applicaiton is as a local library that's used for Windows applications. This needs full access to system APIs so that one can use DHTML as a GUI toolkit. There's nothing wrong with this idea at all -- Apple and Mozilla have adopted similar systems -- it's all in the implementation details.
The ideal solution would be to just create two seperate binaries -- IE-Internet and IE-Local, and make damn sure that it's virtually impossible to break the sandbox in IE-Internet. Then just include the proper magic to make sure the right binary is used at the right time. (The only downside is that Plugin installation will probably be more difficult, but I think Firefox shows that's not a horrendous problem.)
I cannot imagine today's developers saying "we'll just write a Windows app and let the OSX users use that plus pay several hundred dollars for a Windows license and additional software".
For massmarket software, sure. But for most niche software, Mac ports have never been a big priority for most vendors, and that's basically what has always happened. Think about it -- if you have a piece of software that might only sell 1000 copies on Mac, it's probably cheaper for the Mac users to buy an emulator than to fund a port of the software. That's why VirtualPC/SoftWindows/etc have always been a popular part of the Mac toolkit.
The difference is that in the future, Mac users will be able to use this stuff with very little performance penalty.
And a year later, Dell had Pentium-IIIs, RAMBUS, and the latest workstation video; while SGI was still stuck with Pentium-IIs and their custom chipset, which cost twice as much and lost every benchmark.
The only way Apple can make this work is if they stick with stock Intel machines and match Dell speedbump-for-speedbump.
Don't forget the iseries and the pseries both use the power4/5 and 970s
Apple would have an idea about IBM's roadmap before making such a decision. Ever since IBM got behind Linux, their mainstream server strategy has been heavily Intel. PSeries is getting driven up more and more into a highend giganto server niche. And that means bigger, hotter, more expensive POWER chips. Meanwhile the PC market is going solidly towards laptops, and PPC just wasn't even attempting to compete.
It is funny that you got modded "troll" for a statement that would have been "insightful" yesterday. Get with the program, pal:)
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dir "../.." does work.
The problem is that many DOS commands don't require any spaces between the parameters (dir../w works, for example).
No, it has a lot to do with Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) and AppleEvents -- features that has been replicated elsewhere. The AppleScript bits exist because Apple has a hardon for a bad programming language that they invented.
AppleScript and Automator sound like they deliver the features this new Microsoft shell is hoping to provide.
No. Are you mentally retarded? How could you read this entire story and comments and come to that conclusion? Way to live up to the "One Mouse Button" stereotype.
Monad is a command shell. It is interactive. It's designed to make certain tasks more straight-forward than scripting like AppleScript or VBScript. It has absoltely nothing to do with a friendly GUI frontend like Automator.
I've programmed XBASE and Lotus Notes Macros (shudder). With Me Tell jcr AppleScript equals "PAAIINNNN!" :)
In retrospect, every midrange company designing their own RISC architecture was financial stupidity on a gross scale. It was based on the idea that high-end, high-margin computing would be the driving force in the industry, and that turned out to be plainly false.
> How does that work?
It didn't. It killed DEC, killed SGI, and almost killed HP and Sun.
I'm sorry -- I confused shadow copy with some backup feature. And, if WebDAV changed, I hadn't noticed. But you sound like you know of what you speak, so I will defer on all points.
Well, I think the real trolls are the single-platform guys who wade into a cross-platform discussion without having any comparative knowledge.
In Apple's favor, I will say that Automator is a cool "4GL" tool, but it has very little to do with AppleScript. (You could make the same thing on Windows or KDE.)
Attn Mac Zealots:
None of these AppleScript features are unique or interesting, so please stop telling us about them. Maybe they were in 1994, but the world has moved on.
Also, AppleScript itself is the worst programming language ever invented. Please don't damage your brain by using it.
Minor corrections: WebDAV, Shadow copy. and Side-by-Side DLLs were certainly in W2K; the DualView features were widely supported in vendor video drivers; and I don't know if there was any real difference in the camera/scanner support other than the Wizard.
Sure, the eternal life idea was corny, and presenting that as Anikan's motivation completely failed. But there was other dialog which presented the Dark Side as more sophisticated and balanced than the Jedis' holier-than-thou one-sided views. Which at least finally left the door open for the idea that maybe the Republic was ineffectual and corrupt, and maybe the Dark Side was the right answer at the right time. And that at least give the Emperor's character some motiviation, if not for Darth Vader.
... Feel the Power of the Dark Side ... blah blah blah" -- it was already tired and boring at the end of Empire Strikes Back, and even Return of the Jedi's big conflict fell flat as a result.
The biggest general problem with the Star Wars films is that this Force business is about as deep as a puddle. Therefore, there's nothing the characters can say about it that you haven't heard 100 times before -- "Embrace your Fear|Anger
Except (A) OS 9 support was disabled and there was no hardware revision, and (B) the minor differences between G4 towers would not have been expensive for Apple to support anyway.
I'm not suggesting that Apple support G5s or consumer machines under OS9, but, let's face it, DTP (Quark) users basically have carried Apple for a long time, so in my view Apple owes them more than a 12 month transition cycle.
(Keep this in mind if you think PPC support is going to stick around for a while, Mac users.)
One of the high-points of the last film was that Palpatine's Dark Side dialog had at least a little worldly substance behind it, and wasn't just corny cliches (like your post :)
*Apple* was forced to continue making and shipping old G4s that could run OS9, mainly so people could keep using Quark.
Oh, poor little Apple -- There was never any technical reason for removing OS 9 support from the G4 towers -- Apple was just hyperagressively pushing people onto OS X. Two years is a ridiculously short period for a migration.
Anyway, If understand the problem correctly, it wasn't so much the lack of Quark, but expensive network systems that only worked with a specific version of Quark 4. (I know people still on OS 9 because of unsupported a/v hardware under OS X.)
The problem is you then have OpenFirmware emulation baked into system years after Mac users stopped caring about OF. And by 2006, EFI will be mainstream, so other than these developer boxes, BIOS is a non-issue for Mac users.
I actually expect driver code to change quite a bit, if only because vendors will want to keep their Windows and Mac drivers closer together.
As far up arrow behavior, it seems predictible to me .. but that's because I encountered the feature with DOSKEY, and the Unix shells I used had no such feature at all.
Another nice feature of CMD is the ability to use wildcards for directory names:
cd C:\Program*
gets you to where you might expect.
why would you pay more for a computer to effectively ruin the experience of using it?
:)
So, does Apple charge more for hardware, or don't they? What's the latest MacZealot story?
I personally think that many Apple models are quite competitive price-wise. A PowerBook 15 is priced almost identical to a similar ThinkPad, and while they are both very nice computers, if I could run Windows on a PowerBook, why the hell not? It's a topnotch box in every respect other than the legacy G4 CPU.
(Trick question. Answer is the one mouse button. But I would certainly think about it for a good while.)
Hey -- in the midst of that Apple/Konq flamewar Apple apparently offered to put a portability layer in WebCore. It's since been ported GTK: http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/
I would love to see a KHTML/WebCore for Windows. The dhtml kinda sucks, but it's very lightweight and renders nicely. Rather than question your web design skills or business acumenity, I say if you want to port Konqueror or WebCore to Win32, that would be fuckin excellent. Go for it.
Because if you are breaking everything else, you might as well break the boot process along with it. Sun is just delaying the inevitable (x86 boxes that boot with EFI), Apple has another year so they don't need to do the same.
Uhh, yeah, thanks for the highly technical explaination, but you're wrong. Most IE bugs have nothing to do with how much code is shared, or how deeply it is rooted, but instead attack buggy integration features like ActiveX Zone security.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda ... I agree.
But you have to realize there's always going to be some "sharing". Look at Firefox -- XUL, Java Applets, Flash or custom plugins -- all of these have been used to "break out" of the browser and infect the local machine. You could gimp your browser, but the real answer is probably some better form of OS access controls.
Sorry, I read it in the print WSJ, which I think are pay-only online.
Jobs doesn't trash DRM at all there -- he simply argues that systems will be broken, so it's not worth investing a massive engineering effort into something that's never going to be 100% effective.
It seems highly likely that Apple will use TCPA features to keep OSX/Intel off generic PC hardware. The trusted boot-up features seem directly applicable to preventing OS piracy.
> let Firefox/Opera do all the R&D and find out what the "must-haves"
Interesting argument because it took Mozilla Firefox & Opera about 5 years to match the functionality of Internet Explorer 5.0. Things like CSS support and a solid DHTML implementation are "must-haves" and IE had them long before anyone else. (of course since then it's been surpassed).
If MS starts taking the development of IE seriously, they could easily lap the competition again. Starting a standards-fight with a monopoly is dangerous business, because there's a huge number of standards and implementing them all can be very expensive. Imagine a future "W3C checklist" where MS has twice as many ticks as Mozilla. It certainly could be possible.
Hopefully this is just marketing-speak for eliminating the "zone" system altogether.
There's really two very different applications for IE -- the primary one is as an Internet Browser where it should simply be impossible to break out of the sandbox. The "Zones" tried to do this but were a massive technical failure. When you say "ActiveX is the problem", you really mean "Those stoopid broken Security Zones that let ActiveX rape the system are the problem".
The secondary applicaiton is as a local library that's used for Windows applications. This needs full access to system APIs so that one can use DHTML as a GUI toolkit. There's nothing wrong with this idea at all -- Apple and Mozilla have adopted similar systems -- it's all in the implementation details.
The ideal solution would be to just create two seperate binaries -- IE-Internet and IE-Local, and make damn sure that it's virtually impossible to break the sandbox in IE-Internet. Then just include the proper magic to make sure the right binary is used at the right time. (The only downside is that Plugin installation will probably be more difficult, but I think Firefox shows that's not a horrendous problem.)
I cannot imagine today's developers saying "we'll just write a Windows app and let the OSX users use that plus pay several hundred dollars for a Windows license and additional software".
For massmarket software, sure. But for most niche software, Mac ports have never been a big priority for most vendors, and that's basically what has always happened. Think about it -- if you have a piece of software that might only sell 1000 copies on Mac, it's probably cheaper for the Mac users to buy an emulator than to fund a port of the software. That's why VirtualPC/SoftWindows/etc have always been a popular part of the Mac toolkit.
The difference is that in the future, Mac users will be able to use this stuff with very little performance penalty.
And a year later, Dell had Pentium-IIIs, RAMBUS, and the latest workstation video; while SGI was still stuck with Pentium-IIs and their custom chipset, which cost twice as much and lost every benchmark.
The only way Apple can make this work is if they stick with stock Intel machines and match Dell speedbump-for-speedbump.
Don't forget the iseries and the pseries both use the power4/5 and 970s
:)
Apple would have an idea about IBM's roadmap before making such a decision. Ever since IBM got behind Linux, their mainstream server strategy has been heavily Intel. PSeries is getting driven up more and more into a highend giganto server niche. And that means bigger, hotter, more expensive POWER chips. Meanwhile the PC market is going solidly towards laptops, and PPC just wasn't even attempting to compete.
It is funny that you got modded "troll" for a statement that would have been "insightful" yesterday. Get with the program, pal