When was the last time you actually dialled a number on your mobile? If you have your address book in there the rotary dial would just be for entering new numbers, and would work fine (I've always heard it called rotary over here).
This mock-up is obviously fake because it's an ugly train-wreck between an iPod and a phone, however if this was done right it'd be a beautiful thing to use :
A tall screen which takes up most of the front of the device, and can be used in either orientation (orientation could be sensed with a motion sensor) A clickwheel (no other buttons required) Phone functions iPod functions (including all the syncing plus 8GB or so of storage) Build in SD card slot for expansion/transferring photos from a camera Better doc reader functions than the ipod (PDFs etc) Touch screen keyboard for typing text messages
All this could be done easily with a similar interface to the ipod - simple menu choices which can be scrolled through with the clickwheel, and context sensitive uses for the clickwheel.
That's like selling me a car and telling me that if I refuse to put a spoiler on the back that I won't be allowed to drive it.
No, it's like someone selling you a crappy car not once, not twice, but several times, complete with the spoiler you don't like (a very strange analogy : ). Then you decide the next year to go back to the same dealer and buy the same crappy model and complain that it's crappy and has a spoiler you didn't want !?!?!?!?!
If you don't like their attitude, choose a fucking alternative and make the world a better place.
If you can't live without your games or application x which is 'essential', continue to deal with Microsoft Windows and take your lumps (and don't expect them to treat you well if you still come back for more).
The abuse is in an internet that hasn't moved in 6 years (till given a push by Firefox/Opera/Safari).
For MS, the internet is the enemy, it's a rival platform. That's why they tried to strangle it once they had a good hold with IE, not for some short term advantage, but to protect the Windows monopoly.
In the long term, that model will WIN, unless businesses figure out how to make that work for them.
Consider for a moment the choice which confronts media producers at the moment. If they can't make money from selling content, they need to do something about it, or they'll simply cease to exist. So, they could either
1> Make sure freeloading is punished (unlikely, requires more draconian laws and a lot of effort) 2> Tie all content up with DRM so that it's difficult to copy (requires more effort and a system like iTMS) 3> Make extensive and intrusive advertising so intermingled with their content that you can't separate the two (already happening)
In your best of all possible worlds where free downloading has 'won' the battle and DRM and sanctions prove ineffective, which option do you think they're going to choose? Personally I'd prefer to step up and pay for content that I believe in, and not have product placement, obnoxious 'interactive ads', and interstitial ads every few minutes, call me old-fashioned. That way I don't have to tolerate the crap that passes for advertising nowadays.
Yup, that's probably true. But we're hell of a good time. *shrugs*
You don't produce any content, but you expect it to land on your doorstep for free in perpetuity? *shrugs*. Hope you enjoy your brave new world of 'entertainment' tailor-made for those who think quality content can be produced for free.
Re: women overcomsuming media? It's axiomatic. Women overconsume all media. Google it. Re: women less likely to download? This isn't peer knowledge. This is the industry standard. Google it as well. It's free!
Axiomatic - evidently not or it wouldn't have been questioned. Axioms are implicitly agreed, not unilateral. Women overconsume media? - er, what? I can't be bothered to ask what this is supposed to mean. Industry standard - this means an agreed manner of doing/making things, not an internet-fact you pulled out of thin air. Hold well to the company line - which company?
Downloading gets me little trouble if I'm not sharing.
The inherent stupidity of your position is all contained in this one line.
There is potentially a revolution in content distribution and thus production coming, which could democratise content production (by opening distribution to all players) and weaken the domination of huge media conglomerates. As a self-proclaimed freeloader, you're making it easier for those companies to monopolise production and keep to an advertising-only model, though updated for the web (ie intrusive and pervasive). If no one pays, the content will keep coming, but will it be any sort of content you want ?
If you're idiot enough to sign with a record label which takes all the money from digital sales, YOU WON'T GET ANY MONEY FROM DIGITAL SALES. This isn't fair, and it isn't right, but to try to blame iTunes (or other online distributors) for this state of affairs is just bizarre.
If the artist were to change label to one who specialises in digital downloads (cdbaby for example), they might find they get 50% of the sale price. If the fault lies with iTunes how would that be possible? If I were an artist I know which way I'd be moving when my contract next came up.
Societally, we have alot of collective experience modeling the types of problems you've described, and it would really only be a matter of modifying the initial parameters of our weather simulations to match those of Jupiter.
The problem being that Jupiter does not have a constellation of satellites collecting data 24/7 and a huge number of ground-stations recording weather conditions at regular intervals all round its surface.
Without that data, what would you plug into your simulation, guesses?
God you're a dull blight on the Apple stories on slashdot.
Market Share is
1> Notoriously unreliable 2> Massively wayed by business (POS, Offices) purchases 3> Is growing for Macs, as it is for Linux, by very small amounts, making any measure of the two almost impossible, and trends difficult to distinguish from short term fluctuations. 4> WHO CARES!
It's not worth arguing about. Given that most boxes with Linux on them are bought with Windows, any market share figures for Linux are a nonsense. Even installed base would be hard to estimate (I assume that's what you're actually talking about).
Really, and what happens when you don't buy software, what happens when it's free and they proclaim 'if you read this you are not allowed to do x, y z' in a EULA that is so long no one could be reasonably expected to read it? I didn't realise iTunes was paid for.
For the exact same reasons proclaiming 'if you read this you owe me money' is not a contract, an unread and unintelligible (for the customer) EULA is not a contract either. There's a reason contracts have to be signed in front of witnesses, and EULAs simply don't meet that kind of standard.
By your argument a screensaver could have a EULA which said 'we will take over your computer and spam with it until your connection is cut off' and there would be nothing you could legally do about that. After all, you got the screensaver and the screensaver maker got a spam-bot. That's bullshit.
In software engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and well understood.
Until you give it to the users, or ask it to interact with another program, then it's a different story. The actions of users/other programs are often poorly understood and unforseen, and I'd argue they are analogous to the weather in this situation - they introduce inputs that the programmer would dismiss as impossible or garbage, and promptly crash that 'perfect' program. I'd agree there is a huge difference between contruction and software engineering, but which profession is more rigourous?
The result is that standardized computer algorithms and formats are rarely incorrect.
Algorithms and formats are often incorrect when they actually come to be used because of a misunderstood or misstated problem. Look at the language used to present these pages - HTML, hardly an elegant format. I suppose you could call it correct for some very sloppy values of correct, but really, given the purpose it's being used for (presentation of complex styled text) it is woefully inadequate, and also overengineered in some ways. This problem is inherent in any complex system used by many people, things simply can't be 'correct' for all uses, and often they're not even close. I wonder if that's why the phrase 'Broken as designed' originated in computer programming?
Lastly, formats usually become obsolete because companies want you to buy their new program, not for technical reasons (see Photoshop, Illustrator, Word etc etc). You're trying to factor the human out of programming, and thus ignoring all that is good and bad about it.
The scary thing is, it would be relatively easy to write a trojan which passed itself around all the ichat contacts and all the mail contacts of an OS X user, using standard OS X APIs.
It would need to persuade the user to enter their password once, but if it came with a reasonably convincing email message, and seemed suitably innocuous (perhaps a screensaver would do as people might imagine it has to be executable), many people I know would open it (in spite of warnings that it is an application). From there it can easily open the address book for contacts, access previous emails, etc etc.
The only thing it would need would be access to some open SMTP relays (you can't get at the keychain without permission), and it could spam away in the background, spreading itself to other users via email or ichat.
Once that has happened once though (and savvy users wouldn't even fall for it the first time) I can't imagine it working again.
Maybe next time try not picking up a gun and getting caught in combat.
Many of these people were not in combat or anywhere near it. For example the UK citizens who were snatched in Pakistan or others rounded up by the Northern Alliance. They were suspects, not proven combatants, but they were tortured all the same.
were in bed with an Iraqi dictator while criticizing the "human rights" behavior
Are you purposely wallowing in hypocrisy or do you just not know that the US (+ UK + many others) supplied arms and backed Saddam during one of the most bloody wars of the 80's (Iran/Iraq war), and only turned against him at the end of it when his delusions of grandeur became an irritant? Millions died in that little sideshow of the Great Game. Seen the photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam on a trade mission? The very same Rumsfeld who architected this bungled attempt at an occupation. The same one who will lead you to invade Iran too, with disastrous results.
I suppose you hate the French as well as the UN - I'm surprised and dissapointed at all the narrow ignorance I read on predominantly American sites like this one. The UN is corrupt, and needs to be fixed, however the likes of John Bolton aren't going to do it, and this kind of posturing about UN corruption isn't going to help either - the current US administration is riddled with corruption, are you complaining as vociferously about that?
Most of them hate America out of jealousy and spite.
I'd be willing to bet you know no-one who hates America. You are in no position to judge their motives; in order to understand you'd have to be a little more frank with yourself and accept that an empire has its costs, amongst them the enmity of those you have subjugated.
Even a huge number of desirable web apps do not work as well with non-MS browsers.
Name them.
All the web-apps I use have to work around the years old bugs of IE, they don't deliver because of IE but in spite of it. This is 2005 and MSIE can't even render PNGs properly or render CSS 2. Last time I heard that kind of crap was about 4 years ago, I thought people had stopped coming out with it, but obviously not. Web apps which have made news over the last few years have conspicuously not based on IE - gmail, flikr, delicious, rss, podcasts spring to mind. This is what MS was afraid of and why they crushed Netscape.
It's hillarious that people are arguing which is better. Which is better is not relevant
On the contrary, it's relevant for a lot of people. If everyone had attitudes like yours we'd still be living with DOS (Windows was a direct reaction to Mac OS). Hell even DOS was bought from someone else and was a poor copy. Things like a global spell-check (try it on your post) or address book make a lot of difference in some peoples' computing life.
Are you as satisfied as you sound with the pitiful state of OS software and browsers over the last few years?
2 things keep MS dominant Their aggressive (often illegal) tactics, OEM contracts, bundling, buyouts, embrace and extend Ignorance amongst the buying public
Thankfully the last of those is starting to change - it's something to be welcomed, but feel free to keep your head in the sand and sneer at alternatives like it's 1999.
If I owned a farm and had a bumper crop of corn one year, should I be penalized for being successful? What if I have ten farmers, all working cooperatively? What is the demarcation line for government or anyone to step in because 'success' has been too great.
The government might well decide to have a look at your business practices... If you owned a farm and attempted to buy out, intimidate, and crush your rival farmers, if you then locked down the distribution market with illegal contracts to make it very difficult for competitors to gain a foothold. Just as Microsoft has done in the software market.
A perfectly free market would be a perfectly amoral market.
Jobs will get something though. Microsoft will allow, and maybe help, the Cocoa compatibility layer to run on Windows XP/Vista, maybe through the existing download layer with iTunes, but extended so that pretty much any Apple software will run with a Mac flavor on Windows XP.
Tell me, why would a control freak notorious for micro-managing details to get the perfect experience, and the people who currently buy and appreciate the software that produces, want to move that software to a platform where the mantra is 'good enough'? Where preferences dialogs sometimes have 10 stacked tabs, and the average hour of use involves clicking 'next' 20 times in pointless dialogs. Where the only address books are built into different applications. Where there isn't even a proper command line? Even if the code for Vista wasn't such a mess, and the management process so borked at MS, this suggestion isn't even credible.
If Apple were stupid enough to try this they'd be squashed like a bug by MS, who are still as ruthless as ever when it comes to killing competitors. What if cocoa applications didn't gain access to all the latest and greatest features till after they had been polished and released for.NET applications to use. That would be very unfortunate for any attempt to move cocoa to a hosted framework on XP/Vista wouldn't it? But very handy for Microsoft who could slowly choke any attempt to migrate.
OS X would as you predict die, and cocoa shortly after, its air supply cut off by MS, as they have done in the past so many times. And what would Apple be able to do about it?
Personally, if I could develop software on the Aqua gui,
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. GUIs are not skin deep; they're not some pretty texture you add to all the windows. The process of constructing a UI is constructing a self-consistent world for the user to live in, where they know their way around because all apps act the same way. The entire operating system and all the support APIs (like the open/save dialogs, the use of metadata, the ubiquitous scripting, the underlying unix services etc etc), are all important, and all tied in with what makes the GUI of an operating system a joy to use or a trial.
If the choice is between Windows NT SP4 and some bastard son of cocoa on Windows as you propose, I'd choose Linux, which I've hardly used before but which would at least leave me with some hope for the future. Windows is broken, by design, and a prettier UI won't make up for the many problems that make it so.
The proper course for Apple in these difficult waters is to keep releasing updates to the great foundation they have, fixing the bugs, and gradually move to a postition of strength in a few years from which they can start making deals with selected OEMs to ship OS X as standard on their boxes, with all drivers included out of the box. That way they can move to being a vendor of high-end hardware and leave the low-end to the sharks, but make a cut on the software for it, just like MS does. And avoid the nightmare of trying to support all possible combinations of all hardware.
If someone untrusted has admin access to your machine, it's really game over for security. They can replace applications, dlls, run programs and change settings at will, they don't need to go to the trouble of replacing a running dll with a specially patched version via this API.
heh heh, I was just kidding, it's a favourite slogan at MS. An array of over 2000 screenshots is a perfect example of the problem of having too much choice and too little discrimination.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you actually dialled a number on your mobile? If you have your address book in there the rotary dial would just be for entering new numbers, and would work fine (I've always heard it called rotary over here).
This mock-up is obviously fake because it's an ugly train-wreck between an iPod and a phone, however if this was done right it'd be a beautiful thing to use :
A tall screen which takes up most of the front of the device, and can be used in either orientation (orientation could be sensed with a motion sensor)
A clickwheel (no other buttons required)
Phone functions
iPod functions (including all the syncing plus 8GB or so of storage)
Build in SD card slot for expansion/transferring photos from a camera
Better doc reader functions than the ipod (PDFs etc)
Touch screen keyboard for typing text messages
All this could be done easily with a similar interface to the ipod - simple menu choices which can be scrolled through with the clickwheel, and context sensitive uses for the clickwheel.
Sites that put state into the url annoy me more.
Not exactly sure how you arrive at XP as "MS-DOS"-like.
Maybe he means they stayed true to the 'Quick and Dirty' philosophy of QDOS ?
That's like selling me a car and telling me that if I refuse to put a spoiler on the back that I won't be allowed to drive it.
No, it's like someone selling you a crappy car not once, not twice, but several times, complete with the spoiler you don't like (a very strange analogy : ). Then you decide the next year to go back to the same dealer and buy the same crappy model and complain that it's crappy and has a spoiler you didn't want !?!?!?!?!
If you don't like their attitude, choose a fucking alternative and make the world a better place.
If you can't live without your games or application x which is 'essential', continue to deal with Microsoft Windows and take your lumps (and don't expect them to treat you well if you still come back for more).
The abuse is in an internet that hasn't moved in 6 years (till given a push by Firefox/Opera/Safari).
For MS, the internet is the enemy, it's a rival platform. That's why they tried to strangle it once they had a good hold with IE, not for some short term advantage, but to protect the Windows monopoly.
In the long term, that model will WIN, unless businesses figure out how to make that work for them.
Consider for a moment the choice which confronts media producers at the moment. If they can't make money from selling content, they need to do something about it, or they'll simply cease to exist. So, they could either
1> Make sure freeloading is punished (unlikely, requires more draconian laws and a lot of effort)
2> Tie all content up with DRM so that it's difficult to copy (requires more effort and a system like iTMS)
3> Make extensive and intrusive advertising so intermingled with their content that you can't separate the two (already happening)
In your best of all possible worlds where free downloading has 'won' the battle and DRM and sanctions prove ineffective, which option do you think they're going to choose? Personally I'd prefer to step up and pay for content that I believe in, and not have product placement, obnoxious 'interactive ads', and interstitial ads every few minutes, call me old-fashioned. That way I don't have to tolerate the crap that passes for advertising nowadays.
Yup, that's probably true. But we're hell of a good time. *shrugs*
You don't produce any content, but you expect it to land on your doorstep for free in perpetuity? *shrugs*. Hope you enjoy your brave new world of 'entertainment' tailor-made for those who think quality content can be produced for free.
Re: women overcomsuming media? It's axiomatic. Women overconsume all media. Google it.
Re: women less likely to download? This isn't peer knowledge. This is the industry standard. Google it as well. It's free!
Axiomatic - evidently not or it wouldn't have been questioned. Axioms are implicitly agreed, not unilateral.
Women overconsume media? - er, what? I can't be bothered to ask what this is supposed to mean.
Industry standard - this means an agreed manner of doing/making things, not an internet-fact you pulled out of thin air.
Hold well to the company line - which company?
Downloading gets me little trouble if I'm not sharing.
The inherent stupidity of your position is all contained in this one line.
There is potentially a revolution in content distribution and thus production coming, which could democratise content production (by opening distribution to all players) and weaken the domination of huge media conglomerates. As a self-proclaimed freeloader, you're making it easier for those companies to monopolise production and keep to an advertising-only model, though updated for the web (ie intrusive and pervasive). If no one pays, the content will keep coming, but will it be any sort of content you want ?
Next up, TV tuner and DVR?
These two items are rendered obsolete by iTMS/FrontRow, there is no need for broadcast content if it can all be sold on-demand.
I too am waiting for iTMS to serve content at a higher resolution, and to start to serve video to the rest of the world too, not just the US.
Large animals are too big to live off scavenging alone.
If you're idiot enough to sign with a record label which takes all the money from digital sales, YOU WON'T GET ANY MONEY FROM DIGITAL SALES. This isn't fair, and it isn't right, but to try to blame iTunes (or other online distributors) for this state of affairs is just bizarre.
If the artist were to change label to one who specialises in digital downloads (cdbaby for example), they might find they get 50% of the sale price. If the fault lies with iTunes how would that be possible? If I were an artist I know which way I'd be moving when my contract next came up.
All the science that the Mars rovers have done could have been done by a human team in the first day of their expedition.
A human team which would have cost enough to send 30 missions like the rover ones to Mars?
Societally, we have alot of collective experience modeling the types of problems you've described, and it would really only be a matter of modifying the initial parameters of our weather simulations to match those of Jupiter.
The problem being that Jupiter does not have a constellation of satellites collecting data 24/7 and a huge number of ground-stations recording weather conditions at regular intervals all round its surface.
Without that data, what would you plug into your simulation, guesses?
the artist gets more from me if i buy from allofmp3
No, the artist gets nothing from you if you buy from allofmp3.com
Even if they did get paid, how much would they get paid, 0.0001 cents per song?
As the chances of you getting caught buying from allofmp3 are slim, who cares if it is illegal or not, is it moral?
God you're a dull blight on the Apple stories on slashdot.
Market Share is
1> Notoriously unreliable
2> Massively wayed by business (POS, Offices) purchases
3> Is growing for Macs, as it is for Linux, by very small amounts, making any measure of the two almost impossible, and trends difficult to distinguish from short term fluctuations.
4> WHO CARES!
It's not worth arguing about. Given that most boxes with Linux on them are bought with Windows, any market share figures for Linux are a nonsense. Even installed base would be hard to estimate (I assume that's what you're actually talking about).
When you buy a software license,
Really, and what happens when you don't buy software, what happens when it's free and they proclaim 'if you read this you are not allowed to do x, y z' in a EULA that is so long no one could be reasonably expected to read it? I didn't realise iTunes was paid for.
For the exact same reasons proclaiming 'if you read this you owe me money' is not a contract, an unread and unintelligible (for the customer) EULA is not a contract either. There's a reason contracts have to be signed in front of witnesses, and EULAs simply don't meet that kind of standard.
By your argument a screensaver could have a EULA which said 'we will take over your computer and spam with it until your connection is cut off' and there would be nothing you could legally do about that. After all, you got the screensaver and the screensaver maker got a spam-bot. That's bullshit.
In software engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and well understood.
Until you give it to the users, or ask it to interact with another program, then it's a different story. The actions of users/other programs are often poorly understood and unforseen, and I'd argue they are analogous to the weather in this situation - they introduce inputs that the programmer would dismiss as impossible or garbage, and promptly crash that 'perfect' program. I'd agree there is a huge difference between contruction and software engineering, but which profession is more rigourous?
The result is that standardized computer algorithms and formats are rarely incorrect.
Algorithms and formats are often incorrect when they actually come to be used because of a misunderstood or misstated problem. Look at the language used to present these pages - HTML, hardly an elegant format. I suppose you could call it correct for some very sloppy values of correct, but really, given the purpose it's being used for (presentation of complex styled text) it is woefully inadequate, and also overengineered in some ways. This problem is inherent in any complex system used by many people, things simply can't be 'correct' for all uses, and often they're not even close. I wonder if that's why the phrase 'Broken as designed' originated in computer programming?
Lastly, formats usually become obsolete because companies want you to buy their new program, not for technical reasons (see Photoshop, Illustrator, Word etc etc). You're trying to factor the human out of programming, and thus ignoring all that is good and bad about it.
Could you try copying a 17MB file and see how long it takes for us.
Thanks
The scary thing is, it would be relatively easy to write a trojan which passed itself around all the ichat contacts and all the mail contacts of an OS X user, using standard OS X APIs.
It would need to persuade the user to enter their password once, but if it came with a reasonably convincing email message, and seemed suitably innocuous (perhaps a screensaver would do as people might imagine it has to be executable), many people I know would open it (in spite of warnings that it is an application). From there it can easily open the address book for contacts, access previous emails, etc etc.
The only thing it would need would be access to some open SMTP relays (you can't get at the keychain without permission), and it could spam away in the background, spreading itself to other users via email or ichat.
Once that has happened once though (and savvy users wouldn't even fall for it the first time) I can't imagine it working again.
niché : a clichéd niche?
Maybe next time try not picking up a gun and getting caught in combat.
Many of these people were not in combat or anywhere near it. For example the UK citizens who were snatched in Pakistan or others rounded up by the Northern Alliance. They were suspects, not proven combatants, but they were tortured all the same.
were in bed with an Iraqi dictator while criticizing the "human rights" behavior
Are you purposely wallowing in hypocrisy or do you just not know that the US (+ UK + many others) supplied arms and backed Saddam during one of the most bloody wars of the 80's (Iran/Iraq war), and only turned against him at the end of it when his delusions of grandeur became an irritant? Millions died in that little sideshow of the Great Game. Seen the photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam on a trade mission? The very same Rumsfeld who architected this bungled attempt at an occupation. The same one who will lead you to invade Iran too, with disastrous results.
I suppose you hate the French as well as the UN - I'm surprised and dissapointed at all the narrow ignorance I read on predominantly American sites like this one. The UN is corrupt, and needs to be fixed, however the likes of John Bolton aren't going to do it, and this kind of posturing about UN corruption isn't going to help either - the current US administration is riddled with corruption, are you complaining as vociferously about that?
Most of them hate America out of jealousy and spite.
I'd be willing to bet you know no-one who hates America. You are in no position to judge their motives; in order to understand you'd have to be a little more frank with yourself and accept that an empire has its costs, amongst them the enmity of those you have subjugated.
Even a huge number of desirable web apps do not work as well with non-MS browsers.
Name them.
All the web-apps I use have to work around the years old bugs of IE, they don't deliver because of IE but in spite of it. This is 2005 and MSIE can't even render PNGs properly or render CSS 2. Last time I heard that kind of crap was about 4 years ago, I thought people had stopped coming out with it, but obviously not. Web apps which have made news over the last few years have conspicuously not based on IE - gmail, flikr, delicious, rss, podcasts spring to mind. This is what MS was afraid of and why they crushed Netscape.
It's hillarious that people are arguing which is better. Which is better is not relevant
On the contrary, it's relevant for a lot of people. If everyone had attitudes like yours we'd still be living with DOS (Windows was a direct reaction to Mac OS). Hell even DOS was bought from someone else and was a poor copy. Things like a global spell-check (try it on your post) or address book make a lot of difference in some peoples' computing life.
Are you as satisfied as you sound with the pitiful state of OS software and browsers over the last few years?
2 things keep MS dominant
Their aggressive (often illegal) tactics, OEM contracts, bundling, buyouts, embrace and extend
Ignorance amongst the buying public
Thankfully the last of those is starting to change - it's something to be welcomed, but feel free to keep your head in the sand and sneer at alternatives like it's 1999.
If I owned a farm and had a bumper crop of corn one year, should I be penalized for being successful? What if I have ten farmers, all working cooperatively? What is the demarcation line for government or anyone to step in because 'success' has been too great.
The government might well decide to have a look at your business practices... If you owned a farm and attempted to buy out, intimidate, and crush your rival farmers, if you then locked down the distribution market with illegal contracts to make it very difficult for competitors to gain a foothold. Just as Microsoft has done in the software market.
A perfectly free market would be a perfectly amoral market.
Jobs will get something though. Microsoft will allow, and maybe help, the Cocoa compatibility layer to run on Windows XP/Vista, maybe through the existing download layer with iTunes, but extended so that pretty much any Apple software will run with a Mac flavor on Windows XP.
.NET applications to use. That would be very unfortunate for any attempt to move cocoa to a hosted framework on XP/Vista wouldn't it? But very handy for Microsoft who could slowly choke any attempt to migrate.
Tell me, why would a control freak notorious for micro-managing details to get the perfect experience, and the people who currently buy and appreciate the software that produces, want to move that software to a platform where the mantra is 'good enough'? Where preferences dialogs sometimes have 10 stacked tabs, and the average hour of use involves clicking 'next' 20 times in pointless dialogs. Where the only address books are built into different applications. Where there isn't even a proper command line? Even if the code for Vista wasn't such a mess, and the management process so borked at MS, this suggestion isn't even credible.
If Apple were stupid enough to try this they'd be squashed like a bug by MS, who are still as ruthless as ever when it comes to killing competitors. What if cocoa applications didn't gain access to all the latest and greatest features till after they had been polished and released for
OS X would as you predict die, and cocoa shortly after, its air supply cut off by MS, as they have done in the past so many times. And what would Apple be able to do about it?
Personally, if I could develop software on the Aqua gui,
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. GUIs are not skin deep; they're not some pretty texture you add to all the windows. The process of constructing a UI is constructing a self-consistent world for the user to live in, where they know their way around because all apps act the same way. The entire operating system and all the support APIs (like the open/save dialogs, the use of metadata, the ubiquitous scripting, the underlying unix services etc etc), are all important, and all tied in with what makes the GUI of an operating system a joy to use or a trial.
If the choice is between Windows NT SP4 and some bastard son of cocoa on Windows as you propose, I'd choose Linux, which I've hardly used before but which would at least leave me with some hope for the future. Windows is broken, by design, and a prettier UI won't make up for the many problems that make it so.
The proper course for Apple in these difficult waters is to keep releasing updates to the great foundation they have, fixing the bugs, and gradually move to a postition of strength in a few years from which they can start making deals with selected OEMs to ship OS X as standard on their boxes, with all drivers included out of the box. That way they can move to being a vendor of high-end hardware and leave the low-end to the sharks, but make a cut on the software for it, just like MS does. And avoid the nightmare of trying to support all possible combinations of all hardware.
That's the only thing I would use it for - checking websites locally. Much easier than having a PC around just to work around bugs in Windows IE.
Does anyone know if it's possible to see websites hosted on OS X from inside the parallels virtual machine?
If someone untrusted has admin access to your machine, it's really game over for security. They can replace applications, dlls, run programs and change settings at will, they don't need to go to the trouble of replacing a running dll with a specially patched version via this API.
heh heh, I was just kidding, it's a favourite slogan at MS. An array of over 2000 screenshots is a perfect example of the problem of having too much choice and too little discrimination.