I love posts like this. "Many" think, "some" say. The proper form for first person is "I". A fair generalization is that the Mac community has always been plagued by loyal but evidentally miserable users who complain about every change that Apple makes
No, I think it's a fair generalization the Mac community is filled with normal people that have normal minor gripes and don't spend all day obsessing over how great their computer vendor is.
It's funny -- if you visit a site like Ars Technica where the Maccies feel safe -- they all seem like perfectly rational people who ocassionally gripe about ugly toolbar buttons or buggy networking or single mouse buttons. It's really only in advocacy fora like slashdots where the lunatic fringe of Mac users argue that 100% of Apple's decisions are right 100% of the time, because otherwise some winidiot might not go buy a Mac tomorrow.
OK, I'm exaggerating. Some businesses will scarf up PowerPC Macs, either because they've committed to buying them already,
I could see this helping their business sales in the short term. If I were a Mac IT Manager, I'd be stockpiling discounted G5 boxes and staying put on 10.4/PPC and Adobe CS for the next 3 years waiting for everything to blow over. By 2008, I can come out of my bomb shelter and see if Apple and their ISV market survived the nuclear option -- if not, there's always Windows.
Somewhere I read that VAX sales quadrupled after Compaq cancelled the platform. Similar thing could happen for PowerMacs.
Changing away from PPC now doesn't mean that adopting it eleven (?) years ago was a mistake
Eleven years ago, the PPC was more than competitive with Intel chips. But you have to admit that, if they were going to have eat the transition costs anyway, the entire G4/G5 era was a mistake.
I have no idea what's going on with Apple. They are generally anti-DRM,
What's going on with Apple is very good marketing spin. They are the world's leading provider of DRMed media, and really the only object lesson that this might all work -- yet somehow come out smelling like a rose.
I've seen and read various comments from Steve Jobs (who also runs a movie studio) on the topic, and it's clear that he is not at all anti-DRM -- He claimed that the nextgen DVD standard must be "uncopyable" for example. But at the same time he's rather pragmatic about it and argues that you don't need to turn the world on its head to achive perfect digital security (as WinTel is apparently trying to do.) But, if this catches on, I agree, Apple will surely adopt it.
You must, but hardly anyone does. Regardless, if your requirements that all communication must be encrypted, you should be doing it on the transport level with IPSec rather than hacking together application-level solutions like SSH, HTTPS, etc.
That doesn't quite make the case, but you know, Microsoft themselves probably doesn't know at this point exactly how Longhorn will work, so it's probably worth just waiting and seeing.
I can imagine that the Windows kernel will have strict enforcement of this signed driver policy (right now its all user space -- people have written their own driver installers that bypass the signature check). However they will also have to significantly loosen the signing process -- People want to play $LATEST_GAME today, not in 3 months when the driver is certified. So WinSupersite's stability argument is bunko.
[Longhorn] will run with a reduced graphics interface and various other portions of the system will not work at all on non-Trusted hardware
Do you have a citation for this?
I can see how some media features might be disabled on non-Trusted systems (this is even true of W2K/XP), but it seems to be a bit of stretch to think MS would gimp the touted graphical features because of unrelated missing hardware.
This is a complete non-statement. Hardware DRM was always intended to be optional. PCs are backwards-compatible, so you always can run an OS that knows nothing about DRM chips.
The problem only comes when you are required to (or want to) use an application that uses Hardware DRM, in which case you will need to turn it on.
Personally, I think the "OMG Telnet!" thing has gone way overboard when you are talking about internal networks.
Sure you _should_ use encrypted protocols, but when you look at a realworld network, it's full of NFS, SMB, FTP, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, RPC, 5250/3270 and a gazillion other things that pass sensitive information in plaintext. Telnet is just the tip of the iceburg and the easiest to replace. Ultimate one should be looking at IPSec or VPN rather than making a big deal about SSH vs Telnet.
Now, if you are typing a root password onto a Internet host, that's another story, but I sincerely hope you don't have thousands of developers with root access somewhere.
Don't worry, I'm going after the SPA's motivations (which appear to be nothing more than delusional).
As I mentioned in another post, I was in the same boat with my ancient G3 Lombard. Sure it's functional, but maybe its because I'm surrounded by 2+ Ghz PCs all day, I have a hard time believing that machines of that vintage are a very viable portion of the installed base. (Eventually sucked it up and bought a used AlBook.)
watch them become a combination of designer and geek
That somewhat describes me, but I know many longtime Mac users that are still solidly "clueless designer types". In fact that's the single great incentive of the Mac platform -- you can do your work and there's no real need to "geek out".
questions that the typical disposable-PC person won't even dream of
You're completely wrong. There's an enormous number of PC People who get into DIY hardware building, playing around with Linux, MCSE-type studies and so on. ANY personal computer is a potential geek-playground, so it's fundementally silly to claim that Macs are somehow better in this regard.
----------------
As far as relative longevities go, Apple machines tend to be better built than your average PC Clone. I have a sneaking suspcion that they last longer simply because they come with better power supplies and mobo components, and not because of any software magic.
It is true that Apple's business model is "Selling high profit machines less frequently", while the PC world is based on "Selling low profit machines more frequently". Claiming that expensive old slow machines is a good thing is certainly debatable. (For example, I also have a 1999 G3 Powerbook and for me it's almost uselessly slow.)
SETI@home (etc) is frequently installed by system administrators on groups of office or lab computers. I don't think you can come to any conclusion about individual users from those figures.
Here's the problem -- Even if you assume that a huge secret installed base exists, the only way it can be justified is to include a bunch of really ancient machines. In Apple's case that means G3 computers that shipped with 32MB of memory and run MacOS 8 or 9.
Well guess what? People running a legacy OS on obsolete hardware just do not buy software. I don't see why the Software Publishers Alliance are trying to count non-customers, it just doesn't make sense.
Furthermore, it's well known that the Mac sofware market is stronger than the conventional 2.5% number reflects, especially in certain segments like graphics. It doesn't do anyone any good to invent meaningless bullshit.
That whooshing sound over your head was the point you missed about being a Mac user.
No, it is YOU who missed the point of being a Mac user. The whole point is to trust Apple to take care of your computing experience.
Apple Fans aren't inherantly anti-Intel, they are anti-[AnythingNotMac]. If Apple decides that Intel is the future, Apple Fans will largely believe that it must be the the best and correct choice.
The exact same thing happened 10 years ago when the Mac userbase went from being virulantly anti-IBM to pro-IBM after one press release.
All things considered, the 68K-to-PPC transition went pretty well (except for the Engineering/Math apps) -- I think most of the core userbase just upgraded their Photoshop and got on with life.
The thing Apple really botched was the NuBus->PCI transition. The system software was a terrible kludge, the networking barely worked, and performance was terrible because low-level stuff was running through emulation. There was a year or more when System 7 was completely crashy and unstable, and it wasn't really resolved until MacOS 8 shipped in 1997.
This is right about the same time that NT4.0 workstation was hitting the market and certain professional users started to jump ship to a "real OS".
As a matter of historical record, Apple tried very hard to sell themselves to IBM in the early 90s and almost agreed to a merger deal. This was covered in the WSJ and elsewhere outside the traderags. Dvorak says some wacky stuff, but that rumor was right on.
Microsoft stated that they own the CPU design for the Xbox360 and could move it to another manufacturing partner. I don't see why Apple couldn't get the same deal from IBM.
If this is a FTC requirement, it wasn't put into place until after ever brandname computer company (including Apple) had settled a class-action lawsuit.
Re:Spoiler Warning: Star Wars movies have it too
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I was thinking the exact same thing -- the entire sequence seemed like a live action version of a bad SNES game. It wouldn't suprise me if Lucas only put it in there just to sell a video game, much like the Podracing scene in Ep1.
OK, this is pretty random. We had a JScript ASP app that was leaking memory. Turns out the programmer was destroying COM objects with a VBish statement: myCOMObj = null;
When in fact the correct syntax is: delete myCOMObj;
I've also seen COM+ apps hang because the object lifecycle wasn't handled correctly. Sorry if this seems trivial. If there's any more complicated problems with COM+, I'd make the $300 phone call rather than kvetch on message boards.
My reading of that is that parts of IIS will be written in mangaged.NET code. The impression is that IIS will become more modular, not more integrated.
But I don't know enough about the internals to really compare the "pipelines" with Apache modules -- and apparently, neither does anyone else here.
Slashdot Mirror
I love posts like this. "Many" think, "some" say. The proper form for first person is "I". A fair generalization is that the Mac community has always been plagued by loyal but evidentally miserable users who complain about every change that Apple makes
No, I think it's a fair generalization the Mac community is filled with normal people that have normal minor gripes and don't spend all day obsessing over how great their computer vendor is.
It's funny -- if you visit a site like Ars Technica where the Maccies feel safe -- they all seem like perfectly rational people who ocassionally gripe about ugly toolbar buttons or buggy networking or single mouse buttons. It's really only in advocacy fora like slashdots where the lunatic fringe of Mac users argue that 100% of Apple's decisions are right 100% of the time, because otherwise some winidiot might not go buy a Mac tomorrow.
When was the G5 king?
The G5 beat Dell in price/performance -- on an unofficial SPEC benchmark that was prepared by Apple. No wonder people dismissed it.
According to the official SPEC scores, the G5 was never close, and Apple never submitted their rather poor numbers.
OK, I'm exaggerating. Some businesses will scarf up PowerPC Macs, either because they've committed to buying them already,
I could see this helping their business sales in the short term. If I were a Mac IT Manager, I'd be stockpiling discounted G5 boxes and staying put on 10.4/PPC and Adobe CS for the next 3 years waiting for everything to blow over. By 2008, I can come out of my bomb shelter and see if Apple and their ISV market survived the nuclear option -- if not, there's always Windows.
Somewhere I read that VAX sales quadrupled after Compaq cancelled the platform. Similar thing could happen for PowerMacs.
Changing away from PPC now doesn't mean that adopting it eleven (?) years ago was a mistake
Eleven years ago, the PPC was more than competitive with Intel chips. But you have to admit that, if they were going to have eat the transition costs anyway, the entire G4/G5 era was a mistake.
I have no idea what's going on with Apple. They are generally anti-DRM,
What's going on with Apple is very good marketing spin. They are the world's leading provider of DRMed media, and really the only object lesson that this might all work -- yet somehow come out smelling like a rose.
I've seen and read various comments from Steve Jobs (who also runs a movie studio) on the topic, and it's clear that he is not at all anti-DRM -- He claimed that the nextgen DVD standard must be "uncopyable" for example. But at the same time he's rather pragmatic about it and argues that you don't need to turn the world on its head to achive perfect digital security (as WinTel is apparently trying to do.) But, if this catches on, I agree, Apple will surely adopt it.
You must, but hardly anyone does. Regardless, if your requirements that all communication must be encrypted, you should be doing it on the transport level with IPSec rather than hacking together application-level solutions like SSH, HTTPS, etc.
That doesn't quite make the case, but you know, Microsoft themselves probably doesn't know at this point exactly how Longhorn will work, so it's probably worth just waiting and seeing.
I can imagine that the Windows kernel will have strict enforcement of this signed driver policy (right now its all user space -- people have written their own driver installers that bypass the signature check). However they will also have to significantly loosen the signing process -- People want to play $LATEST_GAME today, not in 3 months when the driver is certified. So WinSupersite's stability argument is bunko.
[Longhorn] will run with a reduced graphics interface and various other portions of the system will not work at all on non-Trusted hardware
Do you have a citation for this?
I can see how some media features might be disabled on non-Trusted systems (this is even true of W2K/XP), but it seems to be a bit of stretch to think MS would gimp the touted graphical features because of unrelated missing hardware.
This is a complete non-statement. Hardware DRM was always intended to be optional. PCs are backwards-compatible, so you always can run an OS that knows nothing about DRM chips.
The problem only comes when you are required to (or want to) use an application that uses Hardware DRM, in which case you will need to turn it on.
Personally, I think the "OMG Telnet!" thing has gone way overboard when you are talking about internal networks.
Sure you _should_ use encrypted protocols, but when you look at a realworld network, it's full of NFS, SMB, FTP, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, RPC, 5250/3270 and a gazillion other things that pass sensitive information in plaintext. Telnet is just the tip of the iceburg and the easiest to replace. Ultimate one should be looking at IPSec or VPN rather than making a big deal about SSH vs Telnet.
Now, if you are typing a root password onto a Internet host, that's another story, but I sincerely hope you don't have thousands of developers with root access somewhere.
Don't worry, I'm going after the SPA's motivations (which appear to be nothing more than delusional).
As I mentioned in another post, I was in the same boat with my ancient G3 Lombard. Sure it's functional, but maybe its because I'm surrounded by 2+ Ghz PCs all day, I have a hard time believing that machines of that vintage are a very viable portion of the installed base. (Eventually sucked it up and bought a used AlBook.)
watch them become a combination of designer and geek
That somewhat describes me, but I know many longtime Mac users that are still solidly "clueless designer types". In fact that's the single great incentive of the Mac platform -- you can do your work and there's no real need to "geek out".
questions that the typical disposable-PC person won't even dream of
You're completely wrong. There's an enormous number of PC People who get into DIY hardware building, playing around with Linux, MCSE-type studies and so on. ANY personal computer is a potential geek-playground, so it's fundementally silly to claim that Macs are somehow better in this regard.
----------------
As far as relative longevities go, Apple machines tend to be better built than your average PC Clone. I have a sneaking suspcion that they last longer simply because they come with better power supplies and mobo components, and not because of any software magic.
It is true that Apple's business model is "Selling high profit machines less frequently", while the PC world is based on "Selling low profit machines more frequently". Claiming that expensive old slow machines is a good thing is certainly debatable. (For example, I also have a 1999 G3 Powerbook and for me it's almost uselessly slow.)
SETI@home (etc) is frequently installed by system administrators on groups of office or lab computers. I don't think you can come to any conclusion about individual users from those figures.
Here's the problem -- Even if you assume that a huge secret installed base exists, the only way it can be justified is to include a bunch of really ancient machines. In Apple's case that means G3 computers that shipped with 32MB of memory and run MacOS 8 or 9.
Well guess what? People running a legacy OS on obsolete hardware just do not buy software. I don't see why the Software Publishers Alliance are trying to count non-customers, it just doesn't make sense.
Furthermore, it's well known that the Mac sofware market is stronger than the conventional 2.5% number reflects, especially in certain segments like graphics. It doesn't do anyone any good to invent meaningless bullshit.
Read this post, and wait until next week to see if it's bullshit or not:c id=12723681
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151621&
(And Apple was a big "win" for IBM Semi -- it's doubtful if they could have sold Microsoft if they weren't already doing business with Apple.)
Funny you got modded as flamebait, when you just stated exactly what Apple suggested to the Konqueror team.
I believe Apple Webcore has the most developers, so it make sense to have at least one Unix project based off their tree.
Here's a port of WebCore back to *nix APIs (obviously not QT/KDE-based however):
http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/
That whooshing sound over your head was the point you missed about being a Mac user.
No, it is YOU who missed the point of being a Mac user. The whole point is to trust Apple to take care of your computing experience.
Apple Fans aren't inherantly anti-Intel, they are anti-[AnythingNotMac]. If Apple decides that Intel is the future, Apple Fans will largely believe that it must be the the best and correct choice.
The exact same thing happened 10 years ago when the Mac userbase went from being virulantly anti-IBM to pro-IBM after one press release.
All things considered, the 68K-to-PPC transition went pretty well (except for the Engineering/Math apps) -- I think most of the core userbase just upgraded their Photoshop and got on with life.
The thing Apple really botched was the NuBus->PCI transition. The system software was a terrible kludge, the networking barely worked, and performance was terrible because low-level stuff was running through emulation. There was a year or more when System 7 was completely crashy and unstable, and it wasn't really resolved until MacOS 8 shipped in 1997.
This is right about the same time that NT4.0 workstation was hitting the market and certain professional users started to jump ship to a "real OS".
As a matter of historical record, Apple tried very hard to sell themselves to IBM in the early 90s and almost agreed to a merger deal. This was covered in the WSJ and elsewhere outside the traderags. Dvorak says some wacky stuff, but that rumor was right on.
Microsoft stated that they own the CPU design for the Xbox360 and could move it to another manufacturing partner. I don't see why Apple couldn't get the same deal from IBM.
If this is a FTC requirement, it wasn't put into place until after ever brandname computer company (including Apple) had settled a class-action lawsuit.
I was thinking the exact same thing -- the entire sequence seemed like a live action version of a bad SNES game. It wouldn't suprise me if Lucas only put it in there just to sell a video game, much like the Podracing scene in Ep1.
OK, this is pretty random. We had a JScript ASP app that was leaking memory. Turns out the programmer was destroying COM objects with a VBish statement:
myCOMObj = null;
When in fact the correct syntax is:
delete myCOMObj;
I've also seen COM+ apps hang because the object lifecycle wasn't handled correctly. Sorry if this seems trivial. If there's any more complicated problems with COM+, I'd make the $300 phone call rather than kvetch on message boards.
ASP will be integrated into IIS
.NET code. The impression is that IIS will become more modular, not more integrated.
My reading of that is that parts of IIS will be written in mangaged
But I don't know enough about the internals to really compare the "pipelines" with Apache modules -- and apparently, neither does anyone else here.