My favorite was Limbaugh and other gasbags (also a couple of congressmen, if I recall correctly) liked to blame Enron, et al., on Clinton, and not because if any lack of government oversight. With a straight face (which I could never muster) they said that all the dirty CEOs acted that way because of Clinton's social behavior. Those poor innocent CEOs (and staunch conservatives) apparently (they claim) were using Clinton as a role model and if Clinton could act bad, then so could they.
lol I haven't ever actually heard that argument from then... but rather than being disappointed in that kind of convoluted twisting of logic, I'd be more disappointed at anyone not realizing they've got a sound theory and are still so obsessed with Clinton that they're automatically drawn to using him as an example... I'd be really interested in any links you could point me to.
There's truth to the statement that if bad behavior isn't punished or corrected it can then be seen as "acceptable behavior"... if a law (or rule) isn't enforced, it loses it's meaning. IE, if you aren't punished for lying in a courtroom, there's no real reason for a lot of people to tell the truth and the effectiveness of the courts goes lower than it already is. If you aren't punished for Enron's behavior (and massively) it eventually becomes accepted...
The tragedy of the Clinton case is three fold: he was asked questions that were none of the courts' business, the investigation became a chase on Clinton instead of the principles of the courts, and he decided to lie (or mislead) the questions instead of just not answering.
IE, I'm not a Clinton fan, but for both his sake and the countries I wish he had bucked up and just chosen not to answer. At the worst he could have been held in contempt, and somehow I think him being held in contempt, right? And somehow I think that would have played out a hell of a lot better in public opinion in the long run versus what came after.
Take the whole Virtual PC thing. I switch from Linux to OS X on the desktop, and get all excited about Virtual PC - now for those few Windows Apps I *need* to run (like Sharkport for my PS2, Ultima VII in DOS mode - you know, the important stuff), I can have that. Then - Microsoft buys Connectix. OK, I say. Then RealPC announces "We're comin' back - and better!" I see light at the end of the tunnel.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I don't think VirtualPC is the posterchild for your argument. More than anything, the VPC situation is just, well, a bummer... but not anything clandestine. All you have to do is look at it from the companies angles:
Connectix:
The bottom has fallen out of their market as PC's have continued diving into commmodity pricing at jaw-dropping levels. They make awesome software, just breathtaking stuff, and have incredibly bright people there. But at one time the average low-end PC was $1.5k+, and Macs spanked PC's in speed... which meant for 1/3 to half the price you could just pickup VPC and get about 1/3 to half the speed that you'd get by simply buying a PC.
Now Macs are pretty far behind, with the low end configs not even having caches, and for about half the price of a PC or the exact same price you get 1/3 to 1/4 of the speed you'll get from a real box. This narrows their market dramatically, as a lot of people go from having a mac with VPC to just having a mac and a pc... which means you're after the convenience users... IE, guys using it on their laptop, etc. Still a valid market, just much smaller.
So what's connectix been doing? Using the underlying technology for VPC to go into one of the major growth markets right now... resource consolidation. Instead of having 5 older servers running 3 operating systems, have one "currently spec'd" server emulating them. The problem of course is that it's a very dynamic market, and just like Bungie, it takes money to make money. They (I don't know this for sure) were probably running low on the resources they'd need to really succeed... that or they have enough tech that they want to sell out or get an investment.
Microsoft:...is having real problems due getting clients to upgrade their older MS-bought tech to MS's newer stuff. There are a lot of reasons, due to price, compatibility, what have you. Same sort of situation with a lot of their client software (windows, office).
So MS wants to move a lot of people to their new server offerings, but one of the things holding them back is that there are is a lot of entrenched stuff out there that won't run correctly on their newer system. Fine, with server speeds going up sell them a solution that will run both OS's... and even better, if they happen to have a bunch of older unix or linux stuff lying around, emulate that too. Score.
So they're faced with a decision that any MBA knows... the cost of developing it yourself in time to market and actual $$$, and buying/licensing the tech. Connectix had great tech, and all of its core products that are worth anything are all built on the same tech... which means it probably wasn't realistic just to pick up their tech portfolio for emulation-related stuff. At the same time, Connectix wasn't big enough or diverse enough to buy one part and leave the rest...
Nothing too clandestine there, just basic good business (and I hate some of what MS does)... VPC just isn't a big enough deal to be on their radar, which is where the bummer is. And trust me, while I don't use VPC much at all anymore (since I just bought a PC) I've been where you are, and it sucks. Most notably when Quark bought mtropolis for it's tech, and killed the project shortly thereafter... $12k in licenses down the drain after I'd been counting on having the software available and improving.
If RealPC can do its "direct hardware technology" right, I could even play Half-Life I (and hope that HL2 gets ported to OS X) in a Virtual Window (yes, I'm sure I'd have to grab more RAM, but it'
Entourage isn't bad, really. If you've ever used Outlook Express and liked it, Entourage is right up your alley.
I paid the $500 for the suite, and have actually moved to free alternatives. I actually LIKE the interface and capabilities of entourage, I just can't stand the architecture.
Everything (contact, email message, etc) is stored in a proprietary database structure that is INCREDIBLY prone to corruption... you lose that database, you lose EVERYTHING and it's hard to know when things have started going downhill. It just got to be insane trying to keep it running well on 6 machines.
The comparisons to BMW and other luxury car makes is very apropos. Neither BMW nor Mercedes nor Rolls Royce nor Jaguar nor Ferrari nor Acura nor Infiniti nor Lexus have a very large chunk of the automotive market. But all do just fine for themselves.
I hate that analogy, even though I've heard it bandied about by a lot of mac peeps. Here's the reason why... the analogy would hold weight IF Apple made x86 boxes. Gasoline is the standard for cars, or x86. If Apple made premium x86 boxes (or windows) they'd be a BMW... alienware/etc are the BMW's of the computing world, while Dell makes the for tauras.
As it stands, Apple makes something that uses its own infrastructure... you can't just fill up anywhere. Apple makes hydrogen cars.
It's done, bro. Version 2.0.2. Try using it. Unfortunately, many designers are just plain stuck with Quark because they refuse to try anything else
FYI, while what you say has a lot of truth, there ARE those who have looked and been interested in switching but just couldn't for one reason or another. One 5-10 person shop I'm thinking of ran into a problem where the xtensions they needed for the specific kinds of textbooks they put out don't work with indesign... since 95% of what they do are those textbooks, no go.
Quark 6 was promised around that time. About two or three years ago.
Yeah, it was promised a long time ago. From what I've heard, though, some of what happened wasnt just with Quark... a LOT of developers got really pissed off at Apple right about then. Much of it was centered around feeling that Apple had misrepresented the maturity of 10.1, and that they were misrepresenting just "how easy" it was to get a very complex OS9 program over to OSX via Carbon... especially due to all of the bugs and missing functionality (a lot having to do with printing).
Since a lot of it was supposed to be fixed in 10.2, a bunch of them just said "ok, we'll ship it for 10.2"... when exactly did photoshop 7 come out for OSX?
Enter Metrowerks, a then little known company who provided the first practical development tools, with zero support from Apple who favored Symantec. Today they own the market (MPW is dead; Apple's free tools are kind of usable, for shareware-level projects.) Symantec waited a year or so before releasing their own PowerPC tools: they made a big announcement and confidently expected us all to rush to them. What happened? Heard of Symantec development tools on Mac lately?
Whatever happened to MrC? Apple and Symantec started a joint venture for some next-gen PPC compiler, that supposedly had wicked speed but never really saw the light of day. I remember reading it just kicked the tar out of everything (including metroworks) in terms of speed... and I know Apple hired some of the original team, but have never heard what happened to the original project or where the code went.
While i'll admit that Metroworks absolutely saved Apple's ass in the 68k-PPC conversion, I don't think you can apply the same analogy to indesign......for the simple reason that most of the print world works on a much different upgrade schedule than the rest of us (especially apple's core market now- consumers). IE, go to any decent sized print shop or even the recent printing conventions over the last 2 years and 99% will say something to the effect of:
"Oh yeah I like OSX. It has a lot of promise. I use it at home. But we still use OS9 at work and probably will for another few years..."
So they weren't DYING for an OSX Quark, as none of their workflows were ready for it anyways. If anything, most of the negative sides of this to Quark have simply been losing some potential upgrades to v5... as most didn't want to upgrade wholesale if they'd just have to do it anyways when they did decide to go to OSX.
Your I.T. people are idiots! I was personally responsible for supporting over 700 macs and had little to no problem doing it. Now the Microsoft people will say that they can do that, but I try to remind them that if you have an SMS person, NT/Active Directory Admin person AND a desktop support person, that counts as THREE PEOPLE.
I don't think you quite understand the situation. Supporting what you supported and supporting a pre-press ecosystem are just entirely different beasts. IE, the problem isn't keeping the apps running, it's keeping all the different components working and communicating as they're supposed to.
In other words, app x uses driver xy to print to rip z. Rip z doesn't like the output of driver xy for whatever reason, and things are slightly wrong... so you make app x use driver xz. But app y when printing to rip z has problems using driver xz, and needs to use xy... and your trapping program will ONLY output xy, not xz, so you have to come up with workarounds...
In short... you do NOT fuck with the pre-press workflow. It's a cardinal rule of anyone who's done it. You get it working, and you don't upgrade stuff willy nilly.
IE, if supporting macs as client machines is to dragging an icon to install software, supporting macs as clients in a decent sized prepress environment is to building and installing gentoo on your machine.
Once you have it working, you just don't fuck with it unless you're doing it for fun and not profit.
My school used Quark and kept OS 9 arround just for quark but when it came down to it they really wanted to move to OS X for next fall and they will. When they started planning it there was no word of Quark coming out of OS X so they've already bought Adobe inDesign licenses. Too late for Quark.
I find it odd that you used Quark at your school to begin with... One of the big reasons why pagemaker even has the market it does is that they've historically given decent discounts to educational institutions, while Quark has just decided it doesn't care about that market.
IE, almost everything I ever got when I was working on notre dame, or loyola projects was all in pagemaker for the simple reason that volume licenses were a lot cheaper.
Adobe's inDesign has effectively gobbled up all of the old Quark marketshare, since it has had OSX presence for over a year now...
Bullshit. inDesign has effectively gobbled up those in the printing world who have gone to an OSX-only production environment... and those are very few and far between in the printing world. It's biggest "gobbling up" of share has been at the expense of pagemaker.
Make no mistake- all inDesign does is actually make the product a contender, whereas pagemaker wasn't even on the map before. I hate Quark as much as the next guy, but you're just way off on this one.
Quark is going to have to play *serious* catch-up.
Notsomuch. They're pretty much feature-for-feature, with Quark often getting the nod for things people really use every day (just slightly) and indesign having a little more razzle dazzle that doesn't get used every day.
Quark made a *huge* mistake by taking this long to get to OSX.
Oh, did they? Or did they just decide that their development schedule and Apple's didn't coincide? There might be some revisionist history going on here... before 10.2, printing in OSX had major issues, to the point where Adobe doesn't even go through a lot of Apple's stuff.
Quark may simply have decided that their core customer base wasn't going to be moving to OSX for at least 2-3 years, especially given the currently massive adversiting industry slump, and that going after the small amount of early adopters just wasn't their game considering their product worked in classic and most of their users would be using classic anyways for various apps.
There are going to be ~100 posts about "Oh who cares, I hate Quark. Everyone should use Indesign. Indesign rocks. It's going to father my babies. Quark stole my babies, and doesn't answer their phones. Apple doesn't need Quark."
Apple does need Quark, just as Apple needs Photoshop no matter what uber-imaging-app might come out next week. Apple not having an OSX version of Quark has hurt them, and hurt OSX.
So if you dig OSX, or have to do print at all... no matter what your feelings on Quark (either the company or the product) this is good news.
Damn I hope it isn't half-assed though. But it will hopefully put the push on the rest of the printing eco-system to catch up over the next year and give OSX some momentum there.
OSX is the first (desktop) Apple OS that has true pre-emptive multitasking. This and its new memory management model (System 9 and lower memory management was just archaic) are two big reasons that if you are a Mac User still using System 9, you should Run to get OSX.
Unless, of course, you depend on an Application which doesn't run in OSX well, or your hardware doesn't support it well (or at a decent speed), or your production workflow just isn't ready for OSX for all of the above. Your advice is like telling someone whose favorite game is GTA that they should dump their playstation and grab an xbox.
OSX is great and all, but I just downgraded an ibook from OSX to OS9 after the person who owns it had been wanting OSX for 6 months or so (500MHz processor, 384ram, etc).
They went from infrequent crashes to large amounts of kernel panics, mostly due to wake from sleep. Their music notation software doesn't run that well in classic. Printing worked great before, but was sporadic with OSX and as of 10.2.5 won't print at all, and yes everything was tried...
Of course Apple said to do another clean install, which was eventually done... except back to OS9. No issues whatsoever now except for the occasional IE crash.
Re:Interesting note about some tips
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Mac OS X Hints
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· Score: 1
I find that kind of visual feedback useful and cannot image why Apple would have created such a feature and then fail to include a simple checkbox to activate it in the dock preferences pane.
Could be any of a hundred reasons... IE, the coders implimented, but found there are some issues with the functionality with certain configs/software... Or, just as likely they implimented the functionality and during focus testing got lots of feedback from users where "I don't know what's wrong! One of my icons is now translucent! Is something wrong?" and decided not to include it until they've improved the feature to cut back on percieved confusion.
IE, you can edit some files which'll stop the finder from hiding the unix guts... Apple could have put a GUI on that, and allowed users to do it from the finder. Of course that sort of thing could cause chaos too, and caused them not to include.
Or, if you follow a lot of Apple dev, they might be looking at including it in a future release... but for whatever reason didn't have the wherewithal to write up decent documentation for it, and decided to sit on it until they did...
The last one, following their history probably has no chance in hell... but it could still be any of a hundred reasons.:)
Re:Ill get it out of the way
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Mac OS X Hints
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· Score: 1
Tip 1. Throw apple mouse in trash, plug in 2 button scroll wheel. Now can we have an intelligent conversation?
Heh. Granted it gets a little over done... and while I do use an intellimouse explorer on my desktop... where it just kills me is my powerbook. The control key is tiny, and moved over one as the function key takes its place... which means I feel like I'm constantly fumbling around for it.
I'd love to see some good, 3rd party add on to take care of it. Like a very then bad with a small wire going to the USB port, or even (gasp) a place where I could drop it off and they'd split the huge clicker on it into two. On Powerbook's it just plain sucks.
At this point though, if/when Apple actually does go to two buttons it'll make for probably larger news than they'd like... kinda like how the xbox controllers.
With modern information systems, we could go to direct democracy, but let people give their votes to proxies, at least for the senate. Maybe we would only let the 100 people with the most proxies vote, but that would certainly allow for much easier diversity than our presant system.
The problem of course is that we're a democratic republic, not a true democracy... states have rights. While it would be much more "democratic" to go to a system where everyone goes down, votes on their president while a computer tallies up the 250 million votes and spits out the winnner... what would the downsides be?
As one of the founding father's said, you run the risk of having a country "of the cities, by the cities, and for the cities..." which still holds validity today. For example, if such a system as the above was put in place... a presidential hopeful could run on the promise of moving all of the california power plants outside of the state, and turning arizona into a landfill for CA's garbage, etc.
Actually I am, at the end of this month. Went through the same thing, it's being jacked to $60+ dollars, an in fact they tried to back-charge me for a month. I'd been looking at DSL anyways, and for $70 I can get double the upspeed. The only downside has been the longish wait for install, but considering the AT&T told me it would be 1 week and it ended up being 2.5 months till they got it working, I'll take honesty in how long it'll take anyday.
2. They were underselling the service in the first place. You were being UNDERCHARGED for that service, hence why Excite@home went kaput. Hence why AT&T sold off their broadband unit. It's VERY EXPENSIVE to provide you that service, and the only reason it's not gone up more is because of obvious common carrier laws in effect in different states. Just to bring the techs out to your door for initial install is about 6-12 months worth of service to recoup, that they must eat if you decide to cancel. Let's not even talk about tech-support.
Says who? The financial docs I have seen all pointed to @home doing fairly well, being profitable, the whole bit. The problem was that they made the large deal of buying excite for a few billion or so, which went from iffy to worthless and swamped them with huge debt. Kinda like AOL/Time Warner.
I can understand that it might take awhile to recoup the costs of sending out a tech for an install, but consider how clueless the tech's were that have been here, I'm not crying any tears for them... they have to send out tech's for regular cable service for an installation too, and I don't see cable companies going broke left and right.
As for AT&T, my understanding is that they got out of a lot of services due to some deals they're trying to put through, and the FCC said "ok, fine, if you want to do that you have to not do some of this"... AT&T is refocusing.
Take your business elsewhere. You'll find that there is no place in hell or earth that will give you as as fast a connection comparitively to your doorstep. Period.
Wow, ok. Who the hell are you exactly? All you have to do is look a little north west, or, well, much more north at canandians, or Japan of all places.
Some rumor sites claim the PPC prices will be lower than Motorola's G4. Who knows for sure? I would think IBM would offer the lowest prices possible to speed adoption of the chip
Sure, maybe in a year or so... but IBM has a new fab to pay for, and until they get all the new production kinks worked out of the 970, those who HAVE TO HAVE IT will pay what they'll pay for it, and they'd be crazy to throw that money away.
You also have to look at the machines this thing will probably be going into, IBM still sells servers with PPC 604e's for 10's of thousands of dollars. I think people are setting themselves up for this thing to cost the same as a G4, and while it may eventually as a first run it'd be doubtful... wouldn't it?
However I think stock price is one of the least indicators about how well a company is doing - and certainly has nothing to do with the price of mac hardware.
The stock price is an indicator of how well wall street (and the public) think the company is doing, as well as its potential future prospects. It's a little sad right now, as basically wall street doesn't value Apple's current hardware business whatsoever, and all the rise (and now its fallen back a bunch) has been due to potential profits if the music service really hits.
You could say "who cares what wall street thinks", and if they were a private company you'd be right. But since they aren't, not worrying about your stock price is a good way to wittle yourself down to get acquired or become so cash strapped you stumble and drop away eventually.
When you buy a new car, do you look for the one with the engine featuring the highest RPM ? (thougth not)
The MHz of the processor counts only within a given architecture. IE, a 2GHz P4 will be slower than a 4GHz P4, but may have comparable speed to a 1.4GHz G4. This, of course, means that the 4GHz P4 will spank the 1.4GHz G4.
Not trying to flame here, but seriously, do you really think the amount of Ghz is what really counts nowdays ?
Another problem is the dreadful quality problems with clones. I worked phone support for several thousand MacOS installs, spread across anything from the first model powermacs to the newest G4s at the times.
Some were outright terrible, I'll give you that... and probably the head of the pack of them were the motorola ones. The components were just awful, and even the NIC cards varied from batch to batch- ie, order 10 moto clones and half would have one NIC and the others another that would have weird problems.
Some of them had excellent quality though. Specifically the PowerComputing lines, which were faster than what Apple shipped while being cheaper... yes the case was a little chincier, but the components were good. I still use one.
The other was a smaller outfit called MacTell or something close to that. Their stuff was ugly as hell, looked just like a PC, but was fast, cheap, and took a beating better than anything Apple had to offer. One of their "sales trick demos" at the time was kinda cool- the sales guy would pick up the tower from the table, then drop it straight to floor. Then put it back (without even opening it), plug it in and run their software demos.
There needs to be something else - iDVD is cute, but not mass-market enough. There's nothing right now that the average user needs more CPU for.
Sigh. You might be right in that having dual 1.42GHz G4's with 2megs of cache each is a system that no one is going to be pushing to its max except for perhaps 1% of the userbase.
The problem of course is that 99.9999% of the userbase just doesn't have that speed, or access to it... but rather 800MHz G4's with NO CACHE/et all. I can max those out without even trying... all I have to do is try to play a newer game or play itunes with the equalizer while listing a large directory in the finder.
If Apple's low end iMac/eMac had a 1.42GHz processor with a 2meg cache, it wouldn't be such a bad state of things... but they can't, as they're butchering the G4 just to get it to 1.42GHz in the towers with a 15lbs heat sink and fans that'd let you test the aerodynamics of a cessna.
Remeber folks, this is the man who is responsible for the aisles and aisles of "blueberry" and "lime" and other fruit colored office suplies in the past few years.
No, people BUYING translucent blueberry-accented phones are responsible for the aisles and aisles of them.
Honestly, I don't know what I'd do with a dual 2GHz G4 at the moment... apart from the two folding@home clients I'm running, I'm using perhaps 10 - 20% of the CPU on this machine, and that's running OS X and a heap of graphics apps...
Without you being able to dual 2GHz G4's in your $3500 tower, Apple can't put much of anything in their low to mid range boxes without cannibalizing sales of the pro machines even more than they already are.
You having dual 2GHz would mean that iMacs, iBooks, eMacs, etc could be much faster... and they DO need the speed, especially when they cost up to $2k.
Re:Why emulate windows?
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Ximian's Back
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I noticed in the screenshots that there's a taskbar on the bottom. Dare I ask why? Emulating an OS that most people who have used agree is confusing and not intuitive. Windows hasn't kept the location of its network settings constant since, well, forever, I think.
Because, even while windows probably doesn't have the best UI paradigm, and probably isn't the most intuitive... hundreds of millions of people use it in one form or another, and are used to it. MDI is considered to be a poor interface paradigm compared to something like OS9 or OSX, yet I see people get all fucked up sometimes on a mac if they are really used to the windows paradigm... it might not be as good, but its what they know and they've trained themselves (consciously or unconsciously) to get it.
It's the same reason Indesign allows you to remap the key combos to quark's, or wordperfect allows you to use word's... in all those cases the companies are trying to increase adoption by making the user feel comfortable and at home.
I've read about IBM's $1billion investment in Linux stuff over the last few years (or perhaps that is an on-going thing) but the focus of that money seemed to be very much based on server technologies... helping Linux scale on their machines, perhaps as a replacement for AIX at some point, etc. This all makes sense to me, as IBM makes a ton of their money now on integration services, and services as a whole.
But it's fairly obvious that redhat isn't cutting it, gnome isn't cutting it, KDE isn't cutting it, xfree isn't cutting it. I'm not knocking the projects- their work is valid. But in my experience in using them, as well as OSX, XP and NT they have a long way to go. A long, long way... and a lot of the steps seemed to need to be drastic architectural changes in how they simply work for the end user... hence a lot of dev time.
Since IBM sells services, they don't seem to have a lot of incentive to put money in MS's coffers or for really wanting their end users to be using an OS. The $100 the client spends on the OS is simply money IBM can't charge for, and gives MS a ton of leverage IBM might prefer them not to have... or in the case of servers, they'd prefer Sun not to have.
So... if IBM feels its worth it to spend $1billion on Linux in the high end, I would have to think just spending half of that on making one kick-ass open source distro specifically in the vein of OSX would be worth their while, wouldn't it?
Hell, don't even spend half of that... or a 3rd. No new next-gen OS... the graphical capabilities of OS2/Warp would be just fine. Just make it good, easy to install, easy to use, fast, and have a uniform feeling... and open source. Let all the other projects cannibalize it to their hearts content. Let XP and OSX spend all the money getting the next gen UI's... and let those who really want the premium cost pay for them.
Have any companies with large projects made any overtures for something like this? I'd have to imagine it's in IBM's best interests... they can charge what they do now for integrating 1000 MS desktops, but without the MS tax it might double the revenue (or allow them to lower prices)... not withstanding all the other goodness that'd come with it.
If it serves no utility other than "looking pretty" or "sounding good", it's bloat in a WM. Skinning. Translucent icons. Glowing/popping/spinning animted icons. Playing audio whenever you perform some particular manipulation.
Funny. I remember hearing the exact same argument about guis when the Macintosh first appeared in 1984.
You raise a good point, in that one man's bloat is another man's necessary feature. The problem, of course is that original poster makes a good point also, even if they didn't convey it in a way that allow you to grock it.
Since you raised the Mac, let's look at OSX. Someone could say that Aqua, pure and simple, is bloat. All you want to do is convey a window on the screen, and here are these double buffered monstronsities that pull the windowmanager into a generating chug.
Aqua (or rather, Quartz) is new capability... and as such, I wouldn't consider it "bloat". But the fact that the menu's are transparent... I'd consider that bloat. It doesn't add anything (they aren't transparent enough to really be able to see anything behind them) but it does detract, in the sense that menu's are harder to read (pinstriping doesn't help) and the CPU has to waste a heck of a lot more cycles just to display a simple menu... all in the sake of prettiness.
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My favorite was Limbaugh and other gasbags (also a couple of congressmen, if I recall correctly) liked to blame Enron, et al., on Clinton, and not because if any lack of government oversight. With a straight face (which I could never muster) they said that all the dirty CEOs acted that way because of Clinton's social behavior. Those poor innocent CEOs (and staunch conservatives) apparently (they claim) were using Clinton as a role model and if Clinton could act bad, then so could they.
lol I haven't ever actually heard that argument from then... but rather than being disappointed in that kind of convoluted twisting of logic, I'd be more disappointed at anyone not realizing they've got a sound theory and are still so obsessed with Clinton that they're automatically drawn to using him as an example... I'd be really interested in any links you could point me to.
There's truth to the statement that if bad behavior isn't punished or corrected it can then be seen as "acceptable behavior"... if a law (or rule) isn't enforced, it loses it's meaning. IE, if you aren't punished for lying in a courtroom, there's no real reason for a lot of people to tell the truth and the effectiveness of the courts goes lower than it already is. If you aren't punished for Enron's behavior (and massively) it eventually becomes accepted...
The tragedy of the Clinton case is three fold: he was asked questions that were none of the courts' business, the investigation became a chase on Clinton instead of the principles of the courts, and he decided to lie (or mislead) the questions instead of just not answering.
IE, I'm not a Clinton fan, but for both his sake and the countries I wish he had bucked up and just chosen not to answer. At the worst he could have been held in contempt, and somehow I think him being held in contempt, right? And somehow I think that would have played out a hell of a lot better in public opinion in the long run versus what came after.
Take the whole Virtual PC thing. I switch from Linux to OS X on the desktop, and get all excited about Virtual PC - now for those few Windows Apps I *need* to run (like Sharkport for my PS2, Ultima VII in DOS mode - you know, the important stuff), I can have that. Then - Microsoft buys Connectix. OK, I say. Then RealPC announces "We're comin' back - and better!" I see light at the end of the tunnel.
...is having real problems due getting clients to upgrade their older MS-bought tech to MS's newer stuff. There are a lot of reasons, due to price, compatibility, what have you. Same sort of situation with a lot of their client software (windows, office).
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I don't think VirtualPC is the posterchild for your argument. More than anything, the VPC situation is just, well, a bummer... but not anything clandestine. All you have to do is look at it from the companies angles:
Connectix:
The bottom has fallen out of their market as PC's have continued diving into commmodity pricing at jaw-dropping levels. They make awesome software, just breathtaking stuff, and have incredibly bright people there. But at one time the average low-end PC was $1.5k+, and Macs spanked PC's in speed... which meant for 1/3 to half the price you could just pickup VPC and get about 1/3 to half the speed that you'd get by simply buying a PC.
Now Macs are pretty far behind, with the low end configs not even having caches, and for about half the price of a PC or the exact same price you get 1/3 to 1/4 of the speed you'll get from a real box. This narrows their market dramatically, as a lot of people go from having a mac with VPC to just having a mac and a pc... which means you're after the convenience users... IE, guys using it on their laptop, etc. Still a valid market, just much smaller.
So what's connectix been doing? Using the underlying technology for VPC to go into one of the major growth markets right now... resource consolidation. Instead of having 5 older servers running 3 operating systems, have one "currently spec'd" server emulating them. The problem of course is that it's a very dynamic market, and just like Bungie, it takes money to make money. They (I don't know this for sure) were probably running low on the resources they'd need to really succeed... that or they have enough tech that they want to sell out or get an investment.
Microsoft:
So MS wants to move a lot of people to their new server offerings, but one of the things holding them back is that there are is a lot of entrenched stuff out there that won't run correctly on their newer system. Fine, with server speeds going up sell them a solution that will run both OS's... and even better, if they happen to have a bunch of older unix or linux stuff lying around, emulate that too. Score.
So they're faced with a decision that any MBA knows... the cost of developing it yourself in time to market and actual $$$, and buying/licensing the tech. Connectix had great tech, and all of its core products that are worth anything are all built on the same tech... which means it probably wasn't realistic just to pick up their tech portfolio for emulation-related stuff. At the same time, Connectix wasn't big enough or diverse enough to buy one part and leave the rest...
Nothing too clandestine there, just basic good business (and I hate some of what MS does)... VPC just isn't a big enough deal to be on their radar, which is where the bummer is. And trust me, while I don't use VPC much at all anymore (since I just bought a PC) I've been where you are, and it sucks. Most notably when Quark bought mtropolis for it's tech, and killed the project shortly thereafter... $12k in licenses down the drain after I'd been counting on having the software available and improving.
If RealPC can do its "direct hardware technology" right, I could even play Half-Life I (and hope that HL2 gets ported to OS X) in a Virtual Window (yes, I'm sure I'd have to grab more RAM, but it'
Entourage isn't bad, really. If you've ever used Outlook Express and liked it, Entourage is right up your alley.
I paid the $500 for the suite, and have actually moved to free alternatives. I actually LIKE the interface and capabilities of entourage, I just can't stand the architecture.
Everything (contact, email message, etc) is stored in a proprietary database structure that is INCREDIBLY prone to corruption... you lose that database, you lose EVERYTHING and it's hard to know when things have started going downhill. It just got to be insane trying to keep it running well on 6 machines.
The comparisons to BMW and other luxury car makes is very apropos. Neither BMW nor Mercedes nor Rolls Royce nor Jaguar nor Ferrari nor Acura nor Infiniti nor Lexus have a very large chunk of the automotive market. But all do just fine for themselves.
I hate that analogy, even though I've heard it bandied about by a lot of mac peeps. Here's the reason why... the analogy would hold weight IF Apple made x86 boxes. Gasoline is the standard for cars, or x86. If Apple made premium x86 boxes (or windows) they'd be a BMW... alienware/etc are the BMW's of the computing world, while Dell makes the for tauras.
As it stands, Apple makes something that uses its own infrastructure... you can't just fill up anywhere. Apple makes hydrogen cars.
It's done, bro. Version 2.0.2. Try using it. Unfortunately, many designers are just plain stuck with Quark because they refuse to try anything else
FYI, while what you say has a lot of truth, there ARE those who have looked and been interested in switching but just couldn't for one reason or another. One 5-10 person shop I'm thinking of ran into a problem where the xtensions they needed for the specific kinds of textbooks they put out don't work with indesign... since 95% of what they do are those textbooks, no go.
Quark 6 was promised around that time. About two or three years ago.
Yeah, it was promised a long time ago. From what I've heard, though, some of what happened wasnt just with Quark... a LOT of developers got really pissed off at Apple right about then. Much of it was centered around feeling that Apple had misrepresented the maturity of 10.1, and that they were misrepresenting just "how easy" it was to get a very complex OS9 program over to OSX via Carbon... especially due to all of the bugs and missing functionality (a lot having to do with printing).
Since a lot of it was supposed to be fixed in 10.2, a bunch of them just said "ok, we'll ship it for 10.2"... when exactly did photoshop 7 come out for OSX?
Enter Metrowerks, a then little known company who provided the first practical development tools, with zero support from Apple who favored Symantec. Today they own the market (MPW is dead; Apple's free tools are kind of usable, for shareware-level projects.) Symantec waited a year or so before releasing their own PowerPC tools: they made a big announcement and confidently expected us all to rush to them. What happened? Heard of Symantec development tools on Mac lately?
...for the simple reason that most of the print world works on a much different upgrade schedule than the rest of us (especially apple's core market now- consumers). IE, go to any decent sized print shop or even the recent printing conventions over the last 2 years and 99% will say something to the effect of:
Whatever happened to MrC? Apple and Symantec started a joint venture for some next-gen PPC compiler, that supposedly had wicked speed but never really saw the light of day. I remember reading it just kicked the tar out of everything (including metroworks) in terms of speed... and I know Apple hired some of the original team, but have never heard what happened to the original project or where the code went.
While i'll admit that Metroworks absolutely saved Apple's ass in the 68k-PPC conversion, I don't think you can apply the same analogy to indesign...
"Oh yeah I like OSX. It has a lot of promise. I use it at home. But we still use OS9 at work and probably will for another few years..."
So they weren't DYING for an OSX Quark, as none of their workflows were ready for it anyways. If anything, most of the negative sides of this to Quark have simply been losing some potential upgrades to v5... as most didn't want to upgrade wholesale if they'd just have to do it anyways when they did decide to go to OSX.
Your I.T. people are idiots! I was personally responsible for supporting over 700 macs and had little to no problem doing it. Now the Microsoft people will say that they can do that, but I try to remind them that if you have an SMS person, NT/Active Directory Admin person AND a desktop support person, that counts as THREE PEOPLE.
I don't think you quite understand the situation. Supporting what you supported and supporting a pre-press ecosystem are just entirely different beasts. IE, the problem isn't keeping the apps running, it's keeping all the different components working and communicating as they're supposed to.
In other words, app x uses driver xy to print to rip z. Rip z doesn't like the output of driver xy for whatever reason, and things are slightly wrong... so you make app x use driver xz. But app y when printing to rip z has problems using driver xz, and needs to use xy... and your trapping program will ONLY output xy, not xz, so you have to come up with workarounds...
In short... you do NOT fuck with the pre-press workflow. It's a cardinal rule of anyone who's done it. You get it working, and you don't upgrade stuff willy nilly.
IE, if supporting macs as client machines is to dragging an icon to install software, supporting macs as clients in a decent sized prepress environment is to building and installing gentoo on your machine.
Once you have it working, you just don't fuck with it unless you're doing it for fun and not profit.
My school used Quark and kept OS 9 arround just for quark but when it came down to it they really wanted to move to OS X for next fall and they will. When they started planning it there was no word of Quark coming out of OS X so they've already bought Adobe inDesign licenses. Too late for Quark.
I find it odd that you used Quark at your school to begin with... One of the big reasons why pagemaker even has the market it does is that they've historically given decent discounts to educational institutions, while Quark has just decided it doesn't care about that market.
IE, almost everything I ever got when I was working on notre dame, or loyola projects was all in pagemaker for the simple reason that volume licenses were a lot cheaper.
Adobe's inDesign has effectively gobbled up all of the old Quark marketshare, since it has had OSX presence for over a year now...
Bullshit. inDesign has effectively gobbled up those in the printing world who have gone to an OSX-only production environment... and those are very few and far between in the printing world. It's biggest "gobbling up" of share has been at the expense of pagemaker.
Make no mistake- all inDesign does is actually make the product a contender, whereas pagemaker wasn't even on the map before. I hate Quark as much as the next guy, but you're just way off on this one.
Quark is going to have to play *serious* catch-up.
Notsomuch. They're pretty much feature-for-feature, with Quark often getting the nod for things people really use every day (just slightly) and indesign having a little more razzle dazzle that doesn't get used every day.
Quark made a *huge* mistake by taking this long to get to OSX.
Oh, did they? Or did they just decide that their development schedule and Apple's didn't coincide? There might be some revisionist history going on here... before 10.2, printing in OSX had major issues, to the point where Adobe doesn't even go through a lot of Apple's stuff.
Quark may simply have decided that their core customer base wasn't going to be moving to OSX for at least 2-3 years, especially given the currently massive adversiting industry slump, and that going after the small amount of early adopters just wasn't their game considering their product worked in classic and most of their users would be using classic anyways for various apps.
There are going to be ~100 posts about "Oh who cares, I hate Quark. Everyone should use Indesign. Indesign rocks. It's going to father my babies. Quark stole my babies, and doesn't answer their phones. Apple doesn't need Quark."
Apple does need Quark, just as Apple needs Photoshop no matter what uber-imaging-app might come out next week. Apple not having an OSX version of Quark has hurt them, and hurt OSX.
So if you dig OSX, or have to do print at all... no matter what your feelings on Quark (either the company or the product) this is good news.
Damn I hope it isn't half-assed though. But it will hopefully put the push on the rest of the printing eco-system to catch up over the next year and give OSX some momentum there.
OSX is the first (desktop) Apple OS that has true pre-emptive multitasking. This and its new memory management model (System 9 and lower memory management was just archaic) are two big reasons that if you are a Mac User still using System 9, you should Run to get OSX.
Unless, of course, you depend on an Application which doesn't run in OSX well, or your hardware doesn't support it well (or at a decent speed), or your production workflow just isn't ready for OSX for all of the above. Your advice is like telling someone whose favorite game is GTA that they should dump their playstation and grab an xbox.
OSX is great and all, but I just downgraded an ibook from OSX to OS9 after the person who owns it had been wanting OSX for 6 months or so (500MHz processor, 384ram, etc).
They went from infrequent crashes to large amounts of kernel panics, mostly due to wake from sleep. Their music notation software doesn't run that well in classic. Printing worked great before, but was sporadic with OSX and as of 10.2.5 won't print at all, and yes everything was tried...
Of course Apple said to do another clean install, which was eventually done... except back to OS9. No issues whatsoever now except for the occasional IE crash.
I find that kind of visual feedback useful and cannot image why Apple would have created such a feature and then fail to include a simple checkbox to activate it in the dock preferences pane.
:)
Could be any of a hundred reasons... IE, the coders implimented, but found there are some issues with the functionality with certain configs/software... Or, just as likely they implimented the functionality and during focus testing got lots of feedback from users where "I don't know what's wrong! One of my icons is now translucent! Is something wrong?" and decided not to include it until they've improved the feature to cut back on percieved confusion.
IE, you can edit some files which'll stop the finder from hiding the unix guts... Apple could have put a GUI on that, and allowed users to do it from the finder. Of course that sort of thing could cause chaos too, and caused them not to include.
Or, if you follow a lot of Apple dev, they might be looking at including it in a future release... but for whatever reason didn't have the wherewithal to write up decent documentation for it, and decided to sit on it until they did...
The last one, following their history probably has no chance in hell... but it could still be any of a hundred reasons.
Tip 1. Throw apple mouse in trash, plug in 2 button scroll wheel.
Now can we have an intelligent conversation?
Heh. Granted it gets a little over done... and while I do use an intellimouse explorer on my desktop... where it just kills me is my powerbook. The control key is tiny, and moved over one as the function key takes its place... which means I feel like I'm constantly fumbling around for it.
I'd love to see some good, 3rd party add on to take care of it. Like a very then bad with a small wire going to the USB port, or even (gasp) a place where I could drop it off and they'd split the huge clicker on it into two. On Powerbook's it just plain sucks.
At this point though, if/when Apple actually does go to two buttons it'll make for probably larger news than they'd like... kinda like how the xbox controllers.
With modern information systems, we could go to direct democracy, but let people give their votes to proxies, at least for the senate. Maybe we would only let the 100 people with the most proxies vote, but that would certainly allow for much easier diversity than our presant system.
The problem of course is that we're a democratic republic, not a true democracy... states have rights. While it would be much more "democratic" to go to a system where everyone goes down, votes on their president while a computer tallies up the 250 million votes and spits out the winnner... what would the downsides be?
As one of the founding father's said, you run the risk of having a country "of the cities, by the cities, and for the cities..." which still holds validity today. For example, if such a system as the above was put in place... a presidential hopeful could run on the promise of moving all of the california power plants outside of the state, and turning arizona into a landfill for CA's garbage, etc.
1. You can unsubscribe if you are unhappy.
Actually I am, at the end of this month. Went through the same thing, it's being jacked to $60+ dollars, an in fact they tried to back-charge me for a month. I'd been looking at DSL anyways, and for $70 I can get double the upspeed. The only downside has been the longish wait for install, but considering the AT&T told me it would be 1 week and it ended up being 2.5 months till they got it working, I'll take honesty in how long it'll take anyday.
2. They were underselling the service in the first place. You were being UNDERCHARGED for that service, hence why Excite@home went kaput. Hence why AT&T sold off their broadband unit. It's VERY EXPENSIVE to provide you that service, and the only reason it's not gone up more is because of obvious common carrier laws in effect in different states. Just to bring the techs out to your door for initial install is about 6-12 months worth of service to recoup, that they must eat if you decide to cancel. Let's not even talk about tech-support.
Says who? The financial docs I have seen all pointed to @home doing fairly well, being profitable, the whole bit. The problem was that they made the large deal of buying excite for a few billion or so, which went from iffy to worthless and swamped them with huge debt. Kinda like AOL/Time Warner.
I can understand that it might take awhile to recoup the costs of sending out a tech for an install, but consider how clueless the tech's were that have been here, I'm not crying any tears for them... they have to send out tech's for regular cable service for an installation too, and I don't see cable companies going broke left and right.
As for AT&T, my understanding is that they got out of a lot of services due to some deals they're trying to put through, and the FCC said "ok, fine, if you want to do that you have to not do some of this"... AT&T is refocusing.
Take your business elsewhere. You'll find that there is no place in hell or earth that will give you as as fast a connection comparitively to your doorstep. Period.
Wow, ok. Who the hell are you exactly? All you have to do is look a little north west, or, well, much more north at canandians, or Japan of all places.
Some rumor sites claim the PPC prices will be lower than Motorola's G4. Who knows for sure? I would think IBM would offer the lowest prices possible to speed adoption of the chip
Sure, maybe in a year or so... but IBM has a new fab to pay for, and until they get all the new production kinks worked out of the 970, those who HAVE TO HAVE IT will pay what they'll pay for it, and they'd be crazy to throw that money away.
You also have to look at the machines this thing will probably be going into, IBM still sells servers with PPC 604e's for 10's of thousands of dollars. I think people are setting themselves up for this thing to cost the same as a G4, and while it may eventually as a first run it'd be doubtful... wouldn't it?
However I think stock price is one of the least indicators about how well a company is doing - and certainly has nothing to do with the price of mac hardware.
The stock price is an indicator of how well wall street (and the public) think the company is doing, as well as its potential future prospects. It's a little sad right now, as basically wall street doesn't value Apple's current hardware business whatsoever, and all the rise (and now its fallen back a bunch) has been due to potential profits if the music service really hits.
You could say "who cares what wall street thinks", and if they were a private company you'd be right. But since they aren't, not worrying about your stock price is a good way to wittle yourself down to get acquired or become so cash strapped you stumble and drop away eventually.
When you buy a new car, do you look for the one with the engine featuring the highest RPM ? (thougth not)
The MHz of the processor counts only within a given architecture. IE, a 2GHz P4 will be slower than a 4GHz P4, but may have comparable speed to a 1.4GHz G4. This, of course, means that the 4GHz P4 will spank the 1.4GHz G4.
Not trying to flame here, but seriously, do you really think the amount of Ghz is what really counts nowdays ?
You obviously haven't used MacOS X's finder.
Another problem is the dreadful quality problems with clones. I worked phone support for several thousand MacOS installs, spread across anything from the first model powermacs to the newest G4s at the times.
Some were outright terrible, I'll give you that... and probably the head of the pack of them were the motorola ones. The components were just awful, and even the NIC cards varied from batch to batch- ie, order 10 moto clones and half would have one NIC and the others another that would have weird problems.
Some of them had excellent quality though. Specifically the PowerComputing lines, which were faster than what Apple shipped while being cheaper... yes the case was a little chincier, but the components were good. I still use one.
The other was a smaller outfit called MacTell or something close to that. Their stuff was ugly as hell, looked just like a PC, but was fast, cheap, and took a beating better than anything Apple had to offer. One of their "sales trick demos" at the time was kinda cool- the sales guy would pick up the tower from the table, then drop it straight to floor. Then put it back (without even opening it), plug it in and run their software demos.
There needs to be something else - iDVD is cute, but not mass-market enough. There's nothing right now that the average user needs more CPU for.
Sigh. You might be right in that having dual 1.42GHz G4's with 2megs of cache each is a system that no one is going to be pushing to its max except for perhaps 1% of the userbase.
The problem of course is that 99.9999% of the userbase just doesn't have that speed, or access to it... but rather 800MHz G4's with NO CACHE/et all. I can max those out without even trying... all I have to do is try to play a newer game or play itunes with the equalizer while listing a large directory in the finder.
If Apple's low end iMac/eMac had a 1.42GHz processor with a 2meg cache, it wouldn't be such a bad state of things... but they can't, as they're butchering the G4 just to get it to 1.42GHz in the towers with a 15lbs heat sink and fans that'd let you test the aerodynamics of a cessna.
Remeber folks, this is the man who is responsible for the aisles and aisles of "blueberry" and "lime" and other fruit colored office suplies in the past few years.
No, people BUYING translucent blueberry-accented phones are responsible for the aisles and aisles of them.
Honestly, I don't know what I'd do with a dual 2GHz G4 at the moment... apart from the two folding@home clients I'm running, I'm using perhaps 10 - 20% of the CPU on this machine, and that's running OS X and a heap of graphics apps...
Without you being able to dual 2GHz G4's in your $3500 tower, Apple can't put much of anything in their low to mid range boxes without cannibalizing sales of the pro machines even more than they already are.
You having dual 2GHz would mean that iMacs, iBooks, eMacs, etc could be much faster... and they DO need the speed, especially when they cost up to $2k.
I noticed in the screenshots that there's a taskbar on the bottom. Dare I ask why? Emulating an OS that most people who have used agree is confusing and not intuitive. Windows hasn't kept the location of its network settings constant since, well, forever, I think.
Because, even while windows probably doesn't have the best UI paradigm, and probably isn't the most intuitive... hundreds of millions of people use it in one form or another, and are used to it. MDI is considered to be a poor interface paradigm compared to something like OS9 or OSX, yet I see people get all fucked up sometimes on a mac if they are really used to the windows paradigm... it might not be as good, but its what they know and they've trained themselves (consciously or unconsciously) to get it.
It's the same reason Indesign allows you to remap the key combos to quark's, or wordperfect allows you to use word's... in all those cases the companies are trying to increase adoption by making the user feel comfortable and at home.
I've read about IBM's $1billion investment in Linux stuff over the last few years (or perhaps that is an on-going thing) but the focus of that money seemed to be very much based on server technologies... helping Linux scale on their machines, perhaps as a replacement for AIX at some point, etc. This all makes sense to me, as IBM makes a ton of their money now on integration services, and services as a whole.
But it's fairly obvious that redhat isn't cutting it, gnome isn't cutting it, KDE isn't cutting it, xfree isn't cutting it. I'm not knocking the projects- their work is valid. But in my experience in using them, as well as OSX, XP and NT they have a long way to go. A long, long way... and a lot of the steps seemed to need to be drastic architectural changes in how they simply work for the end user... hence a lot of dev time.
Since IBM sells services, they don't seem to have a lot of incentive to put money in MS's coffers or for really wanting their end users to be using an OS. The $100 the client spends on the OS is simply money IBM can't charge for, and gives MS a ton of leverage IBM might prefer them not to have... or in the case of servers, they'd prefer Sun not to have.
So... if IBM feels its worth it to spend $1billion on Linux in the high end, I would have to think just spending half of that on making one kick-ass open source distro specifically in the vein of OSX would be worth their while, wouldn't it?
Hell, don't even spend half of that... or a 3rd. No new next-gen OS... the graphical capabilities of OS2/Warp would be just fine. Just make it good, easy to install, easy to use, fast, and have a uniform feeling... and open source. Let all the other projects cannibalize it to their hearts content. Let XP and OSX spend all the money getting the next gen UI's... and let those who really want the premium cost pay for them.
Have any companies with large projects made any overtures for something like this? I'd have to imagine it's in IBM's best interests... they can charge what they do now for integrating 1000 MS desktops, but without the MS tax it might double the revenue (or allow them to lower prices)... not withstanding all the other goodness that'd come with it.
If it serves no utility other than "looking pretty" or "sounding good", it's bloat in a WM. Skinning. Translucent icons. Glowing/popping/spinning animted icons. Playing audio whenever you perform some particular manipulation.
Funny. I remember hearing the exact same argument about guis when the Macintosh first appeared in 1984.
You raise a good point, in that one man's bloat is another man's necessary feature. The problem, of course is that original poster makes a good point also, even if they didn't convey it in a way that allow you to grock it.
Since you raised the Mac, let's look at OSX. Someone could say that Aqua, pure and simple, is bloat. All you want to do is convey a window on the screen, and here are these double buffered monstronsities that pull the windowmanager into a generating chug.
Aqua (or rather, Quartz) is new capability... and as such, I wouldn't consider it "bloat". But the fact that the menu's are transparent... I'd consider that bloat. It doesn't add anything (they aren't transparent enough to really be able to see anything behind them) but it does detract, in the sense that menu's are harder to read (pinstriping doesn't help) and the CPU has to waste a heck of a lot more cycles just to display a simple menu... all in the sake of prettiness.