There is no way they'll let you download songs from your computer, this is a phone company we're talking about.
And 1GB is enough for 1000 songs only at a bit-rate that will make them sound like they're played underwater. The original ipod had 4GB, and claimed to fit 1000 songs.
What I think is interesting is the famous 1984 commercial that went against the current computer monopoly
Apple has done lots of evil things since then, however that 1984 commercial was not a protest against a monopoly or a successful big company, it was a protest against the stultifying world view of the corporation IBM (MS was nowhere at that point) which viewed customers as peons to be kept subjugated and milked for cash; which had an army of suits to sell its latest wares and was only interested in selling boring big-iron to businesses. At that point Personal Computers had just started to happen. It was anti-authoritarian and anti-conformist. Quite a good commercial too, as these things go, and a nice reference to a book that captured the century and its problems well.
I imagine SJ and others at Apple still feel they carry that flag, and having one very popular product doesn't change that, it just makes it more difficult to continue to break new ground. What *is* amusing was that they did a deal with that same evil corporation later (which hasn't change so much) to get CPUs : )
Take for example the difficulty in getting Linux to run on Mac hardware,
Ever heard of YDL, the official supplier of Linux on Apple hardware? There are a few different versions of Linux on PPC (ie Apple hardware).
Then they *actively* discouraged other vendors and companies from interfacing with their software and seemingly refused to grant licenses at a reasonable rate - they would probably be taken to court. As it is, there are a variety of WMV capable players out there and a number of music services that utilize the format for content delivery.
This is interesting behaviour, and I believe it's been prompted by the experiences of Steve Jobs in the past, at Apple and at Next, seeing better technology crushed by the MS juggernaut and forced out of the market by any means necessary (legal or not). If Apple had opened the iPod to WMA, that would be the default format now and MS would rule online music. If they had opened Fairplay and allowed others to use it, MS would have co-opted it with their own 'good enough' free software player and extended it (thus becoming the default implementation of Fairplay). Look at what happened to Sun, who licensed Java to MS only to see it knifed. So now Apple are playing the same kind of hard game back, and choosing the moment to open the service. I imagine eventually they'll open it up to other players, once they are assured that MS can not try to co-opt the standard. If Apple don't and they end up with a monopoly of online music and try to force other players out of the market, I hope they get sued.
My point in all of this is that Mac users have to put up with this, and Apple has no market force to correct it. The reason? Apple has a monopoly on the Mac.
If Mac users don't like their software they can always change to Linux or Windows (on another machine). Most people change OS when they change machines, and at no other time. And yeah, market forces have done a lot to correct the problems with Windows and Office haven't they? Things are so much better on that side of the fence (cough). Our model of capitalism doesn't remotely approximate a free and rational market, why talk as if it does? Will a free and rational market ever exist? Lastly, a monopoly in itself is not evil or illegal, the abuse of a monopoly to dictate conditions in other markets is illegal and evil.
That is plenty of multimedia entertainment for the average person, and while the pricetag is slightly higher than an ipod mini, it is more than made up for in the video playback along with the aforementioned wifi and telephony capabilities.
Your iPaq is also HUGE compared to a nano, and even compared to the bigger ipod, which has way more storage. There really is no competition for most people who don't want to enter PDA details on the go and don't want or need the wifi.
You shouldn't get obsessed with the CRUD side of things as the only feature. I think the author DHH specifically states in one of those tutorial videos that the CRUD stuff is just a minor footnote on p.236 or something, the implication being that the other stuff is more important.
Namely, the tools that encourage you to use MVC, the lack of a compile stage when testing, the built in testing frameworks and interactive console, the built in development web-server, the support for partial pages as snippets of code, the lack of a separate template language (uses Ruby), the lack of configuration files and SQL to map objects to the database (though it appears you won't care about that side of things:), AJAX libraries built in, and finally the nice language it's written in.
There are some missing links it'd be nice to have (a mature security/login framework for example) but overall it's a nice integrated package for doing web applications that does a lot of the groundwork for you so that you can concentrate on creating the bits that are unique to your application. There's a nice example of a site further up this page which almost withstood a slashdotting on a DSL line, and includes things like incremental search of content.
Depending on your needs, knowledge and expectations, it might not be the best platform for you - you shouldn't expect it to be a panacea. However, regardless of your needs, maybe it's worth downloading it and checking out the way it works. Ruby is a fun language, and is worth checking out on its own.
You cannot intuit your way to understanding
on
What is Ruby on Rails?
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· Score: 3, Informative
You're talking in generalities about complicated things you're not familiar with - it's not very productive.
Ruby - OOP language which is really quite elegant, tidy, and intuitive and has a bunch of standard APIs Ruby on Rails - Additional structure and helpers for building a web application, written in Ruby
The only way you'll find out if you like it is to try doing something with it - if you seriously want to make a web application or something, you could get an idea of how to use it by watching the tutorial video.
Yep. Apple and the big media networks stand to make a lot of money selling TV shows and news clips and eventually films if they can persuade enough networks/producers to sign up. Yes the resolution is not great, but it's much better than most videos available for download from websites (news.bbc.co.uk or the comedy channel in the US).
Now I'd rather something I could play full screen on a monitor, and I think they'll be forced to provide that eventually if they want people to start buying en masse, but this could signal a revolution in TV similar to that brought by iTunes in the world of online music. Easy ordering, massive catalogue, and low prices all led to mass market adoption. Critically, Apple already have the installed base of ITMS customers who have entered their credit details and are just a click away from impulse purchases.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out against Microsoft's Media PC thing-me-bob.
No really, from a business perspective, you would have to be brain damaged to create an application or system of any sort and not hope that it can run in as many platforms (meaning customers that are willing to pay) as possible!
What, brain damaged like someone who only produces web-pages for IE (most corporate Intranets)? Most business is brain-damaged, or at least monomaniacal about profits.
So you mean to tell me that there is some.NET developer at the PDC or elsewhere that would not grin once he/she sees their application running on Linux or Mac OS X?
I imagine most would frown and then shrug - those markets are irrelevant to most developers and not worth the extra work (and there would be some, even just in testing). I type this from an OS X machine, but your view is unrealistic -.NET is designed to tie people to windows (not now, but later once they've adopted it).
Because I don't find selling an OS on a machine to be illegal.
Of course it's not illegal to sell an OS on a machine. I'm not quite sure how you reach that disingenuous reading. What is illegal is to restrict trade by threatening sanctions on unrelated products (ie all your machines have Windows on them or else). MS have been convicted for doing just that, in the US, no less. It's illegal for reasons I happen to agree with, I just wish they were actually punished for it.
I sincerely doubt Apple could have dominated the industry - some variety might have been nice though. MS has been bloodthirsty from the start, and always will be - they're a corporation in the mould of IBM. Why must one company dominate the industry? It's that lack of imagination (I must win and that means the death of all others) which sucks capitalism of its morality.
The quote from Balmer is an outburst of which there are many many examples going back to the foundation of Microsoft - all with the same idea of cutting the oxygen supply of competitors and collecting money from all the world (Windows everywhere etc). It's a pervasive, pernicious vision. Personally I wouldn't choose to work with Steve Jobs, or defend him as a manager; there were many alternatives in the 90's, not just apple, all crushed by MS (Be, Next and OS/2).
So, right now, with every state and federal government agency continually breathing down their necks, your take on it is that Microsoft is actually writing "illegal" contracts?
Anti-trust action in the US has now been dropped (as the grandparent noted MS have been linked to massive payments to politicians) - how is every gov agency breathing down their neck??!? A few states timidly challenging the entire monopoly they have in office suites? They got a free ride in the US.
They have recently been taken to court for restrictive OEM contracts in Japan though and given their history I would not be surprised to see their strong-arm tactics continue - they have not been bothered by the laws of the countries they operate in in the past, why should they change until they're caught?
To return to the original point, the illegal machiavellian tactics of MS are to blame for the monoculture we have in the OS market - we are only just recovering, as the tentative offerings at Dell you link to illustrate. To claim they got there on merit is not credible.
Would breaking up MS have made OS X run on more, and cheaper hardware?
No, but it would have
Led to a browser market with full growth and several competitors, rather than a period of stagnation that we're only just recovering from (no thanks to MS).
Allowed Be to continue making a great OS without being crushed by illegal OEM contracts.
Perhaps meant that we'd have no OS X, as there would still be a Next, and we'd have a thriving OS market with many competitors and an even playing field. Today the situation is not even close to that.
Since this thread started with the question "Why does Windows XP still dominate the OS market?" how about sticking with that subject?
People use Windows because it comes with their hardware. It comes with their hardware because MS has stitched up hardware vendors tight with illegal contracts. Windows dominates precisely because Microsoft has consistently attempted to 'cut off the oxygen supply' of any and all competitors, no matter how small. That's how they operate, and it's illegal and amoral. To quote Balmer - "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I've done it before and I'll do it again."
Split your game engine into a generic CPU-orientated thread, plus 6 threads designed to work well with the various cores in Cell.
What are you going to put on 6 different threads that all have to talk to each other and share data now and then? Remembering that the use of the co-processors on the cell is very limited, and completely different in design than the triple core approach of the x-box? Your approach would work for x-box/PC games, but not with Cell.
It's a bit of a hassle, and there will have to be platform specific tweaks, but I don't think that's what's really getting to developers. I think they're not used to having to deal with the issues related to multi-threading, and that's what scares them.
Can you blame them ? They're being asked to use a technique (multi-threading) which often causes programmers a lot of pain even when they're working in small teams, in an environment where they have large teams, sometimes with rapid turnover, working to impossible deadlines over several years, often with inherited spaghetti code. It's the the worst possible environment for trying to write multi-threaded code and keep the bugs under control. Add to that the complication of the CELL architecture which isn't actually a normal multi-core system at all (which is what he was complaining about).
More detail:In essence, the asymmetric nature of the CELL processor means that two separate tool chains are needed to create an application for the CELL processor. Programmers coding for the CELL processor need to think in terms of software modules and separate tool chains are needed to deal with PPE modules and SPE modules.
The SPE modules are really very basic and have to be programmed separately, it's not as if you just split your program into an 'audio', AI, and a few drawing threads and you're done. Things just aren't that simple. In some ways the CELL would be more useful for scientific calculations than for games. It's more like a sophisticated Altivec unit (1 or more) than several cores.
Universities don't teach the return on their R&D. They productize it. Before you talk about economics, and university research's role in it, learn something about it first.
The return on their R&D research money comes in research progress and teaching (not necessarily directly linked to that funding). I'm sure they do 'productize' it as well sometimes, however the tangible products and commercial spin offs are just part of the benefit of this research, not the whole thing as you imply. Not everything can be broken down into a tangible economic benefit.
their hugely profitable enterprises, subsidized at taxpayer expense. Where is the delivery of I2 to the rest of us,
Your original complaint was that I2 wasn't coming fast enough - it will not come until the industry is ready to accept change and there is an overwhelming case for making the change. This can't and shouldn't be pushed by University or Govt research groups, they do the research, sometimes produce spin-offs, and then it's up to industry to pick things up and run with it. While I'm sure you'd like to believe big govt siphons off all the valuable rights to this I2 thing and leaves the people stuck on the old Internet, where is this happening? They are still at the research stage, and in the meantime Universities have the kind of projects who can benefit from a vastly faster internet. We all benefit in the long run.
So take a hint, and show some gratitude, instead of your jealous spite. We're not cranking out this tech for your thanks, but you could at least show some dignity when you accept our gifts.
An interesting characterisation - 'jealous spite'. Much as you'd like that to be true, I'm neither feeling jealous or spiteful, about you, America or who invented the internet. I was saying it's a silly argument to get into, boasting about 'our' technology and largesse as if you had a huge hand in it, and using the royal 'we' really don't make you personally look better.
The same kind of rhetoric of innate greatness and ingrate foreigners came from British settlers 'civilising' India, or even the New World. Perhaps some humility is in order.
And the I2 is about 80% funded by universities, which are largely funded by public money, government and otherwise. Where's the return to the public?
The return to the public is in research and education (which is what universities do). Where else would you expect it? Serving inane comments on Slashdot quicker? Supporting the latest dot.com fad? When the industry is ready to embrace new standards (hint, this is not a rational or controllable process) they will come to the mass-market. Not before.
I'm afraid your free market ideology is blinding you to the benefits of public research and public funding. The 'all power to the poeple' line is very seductive, but research takes time, and the best research is not calibrated, and is not predictable. It does not obey the laws of the market and will never do so.
(foreigners are welcome to ride for free, as usual;) What a tired old canard. Where did the tags your writing is surrounded with come from? (hint, not the USA).
because apple could have told them to go to fucking hell. and held their ground or even smearing the record labels in advertising.
I wonder who leaked this story to the NYT?
It does put Apple in a better position for the coming negotiations, doesn't it. Seems to me Apple are playing exactly the game that you've outlined, in advance. You may recall similar stories about possible price rises last year.
as a software developer I find myself having to jump hurdles and roadblocks in OSX far more often than I do in win32 or linux.
Interesting, what exactly would you say those road-blocks were as opposed to developing on Linux or Windows? Is it things you're simply not used to, or things which are worse?
but if you are travelling on business it is nice to remember that you should be in the office by 8am wherever you are
Yeah, shame different countries, and even different companies, have completely different working hours and practices, which renders this point moot. In the UK or France you'd be too early for work, in Japan too late. You're still going to have to ask - what time do I come in to the office. You just won't have to fiddle with your watch all the time when you change zones.
As more and more people change zones during their working day and hold teleconferences with people around the globe, this will become more of an issue.
Personally I think it's easier to remember NYC is 5 hours ahead and just calculate from that, calculations like that will still work, (based off your current time), it's just that there would no longer be confusion over someone saying meeting at 10am when other people have to calculate what that means to them.
How many people are going to actually know what "Vista" means, anyway? I'd put 20 on people thinking that the newest incarnation of Windows is some spanish distribution.
It's an English word and has been for several centuries. I can't believe the amount of wilful ignorance I've seen on this topic. Are you proud to not know what this means, to think 'oh, that's something Spanish'? If you don't know, perhaps you should look the damn word up and stop being so intellectually lazy.
Vista is a beautiful word, and suggests opening up horizons, plus goes with all their bumf about 'where do you want to go today'. Hell, I don't even use Windows, but it sounds fine to me.
As to the other options, how can you say ugly acronyms (windows eXPerience, please) and '2000' are better?.
The symbols you're using +/- or ± are used to show the amount of error possible, so you're saying that you have x number of people plus or minus 40. The correct usage would have a figure and then the possible error, ie 40 +/- 2 if it could be from 38-42.
There is a symbol for roughly equal to which is a wiggly equals sign or an equals sign with a wiggly mark above it.
Look at any study with "new" computer users and you will see that most of them have a lot of trouble adjusting to a "right click". Have you ever worked in technical support? I have and I can tell you that I had to explain what "right click" meant many times to users.
Perhaps double-click is a usability flaw as well then - many new users have big problems with that (when to double-click or just click, and how fast to click to get a double). Some people I know often double click links on the web because they don't know better.
This is up to the application, and all good applications will do this.
I believe the app can choose whether they're greyed out or not by specifying valid file types, but it can't actually hide the documents, which is what he wants.
1) Compatible control keys. Switching between Mac and Windows this drives me nuts. I have to consciously think
OS X is not Windows, strangely enough, some people even choose it above Windows because it is different.
2) Save button on toolbars. I don't think any of the Apple software ever gives you the option to include a Save button.
Learn to use Cmd-S, buttons for every command is a Windows thing, though it has crept in in some programs like MS Word.
3) A multi button mouse. And you thought I'd say two.
Plug in your PC mouse.
Only show relevant file types in open and save dialogs. For those who like seeing every file that's every existed in their Documents folder, give them a checkbox to show all files.
This is debatable, but the only one of his points which might have some foundation - it would be handy to be able to winnow files in the open dialog. Presumably the justification is that files should always be visible, even if they're not directly available in a certain program.
In fact in Tiger you can do this in a neat way with Smart Folders (create one for only word documents, one for images etc, then put them in your sidebar or someplace easy to find from the open dialog).
Sort folders to top of directory listings I know that we don't go folder mining as much since we got Spotlight, so I won't labor on about this one.
Click the 'Kind' column in column view, or smart folders again.
More context sensitive help. I notice since I first raised this two years ago, more of it has crept into OS X. So I guess at least I can't be flamed for this one!
I assume this means tooltips. Don't like them myself, as I feel they encourage GUI designers to litter the screen with cryptic buttons with the excuse that users can use tool-tips to decode them.
Now why is it that I can list all the features I want Leopard to have and as long as none of them are from Windows, its cool? But dare suggest OS X needs a feature already in Windows and the world comes down on you.
Additional features are not always welcome, efficient or even necessary.
What's far more important than an extensive feature list is that features are well integrated, consistent and well thought out - throughout an operating system and the applications. If I have one major criticism of Apple recently it's that they have forgotten to keep things simple and consistent in their myriad home-grown apps.
And if you can take the heat, what would you like to see Apple borrow from Windows?
There are undoubtedly a few ideas in Windows (which haven't already been borrowed already : ) which would be great on OS X. Some parts of the Finder could do with help for a start (Network, thumbnail browsing etc). Any long time Windows users like to suggest some? (No, things which are just different don't count, there has to some things which work better).
Sometimes I think Slashdot articles would be more thoughtful and insightful if the editors just linked to comments from previous stories rather than uninformed nonsense like this.
If you want to talk about trade laws keeping them down, then please inform the rest of us about what they actually have to trade...My personal analysis of Africa's situation is that they're mostly at the hunter-gatherer step zero, not step one.
There's very little point in arguing given your blithe ignorance. Africa is a vast continent, and your knowledge seems to start and end with anecdotal snippets seen on American television. I'm sorry but to try to say African Nations are at 'hunter-gatherer' stage is laughable.
Nobody in the UN cared about millions getting killed
I'm curious as to why the UN should be like a red rag to a bull for most Americans on this website. All large political organisations are corrupt (including the US Senate etc), the politicians in the US (and Europe) have turned a blind eye to regimes like Musharef in Pakistan for the sake of expediency, and to torture and yet when it comes to the UN it seems to be beneath contempt for most Americans, even though many of its goals are laudable and sometimes its programmes are very effective (eg WHO).
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way they'll let you download songs from your computer, this is a phone company we're talking about.
And 1GB is enough for 1000 songs only at a bit-rate that will make them sound like they're played underwater. The original ipod had 4GB, and claimed to fit 1000 songs.
What I think is interesting is the famous 1984 commercial that went against the current computer monopoly
Apple has done lots of evil things since then, however that 1984 commercial was not a protest against a monopoly or a successful big company, it was a protest against the stultifying world view of the corporation IBM (MS was nowhere at that point) which viewed customers as peons to be kept subjugated and milked for cash; which had an army of suits to sell its latest wares and was only interested in selling boring big-iron to businesses. At that point Personal Computers had just started to happen. It was anti-authoritarian and anti-conformist. Quite a good commercial too, as these things go, and a nice reference to a book that captured the century and its problems well.
I imagine SJ and others at Apple still feel they carry that flag, and having one very popular product doesn't change that, it just makes it more difficult to continue to break new ground. What *is* amusing was that they did a deal with that same evil corporation later (which hasn't change so much) to get CPUs : )
It even enforces DRM practices on non-DRM music.
In what way?
Take for example the difficulty in getting Linux to run on Mac hardware,
Ever heard of YDL, the official supplier of Linux on Apple hardware? There are a few different versions of Linux on PPC (ie Apple hardware).
Then they *actively* discouraged other vendors and companies from interfacing with their software and seemingly refused to grant licenses at a reasonable rate - they would probably be taken to court. As it is, there are a variety of WMV capable players out there and a number of music services that utilize the format for content delivery.
This is interesting behaviour, and I believe it's been prompted by the experiences of Steve Jobs in the past, at Apple and at Next, seeing better technology crushed by the MS juggernaut and forced out of the market by any means necessary (legal or not). If Apple had opened the iPod to WMA, that would be the default format now and MS would rule online music. If they had opened Fairplay and allowed others to use it, MS would have co-opted it with their own 'good enough' free software player and extended it (thus becoming the default implementation of Fairplay). Look at what happened to Sun, who licensed Java to MS only to see it knifed.
So now Apple are playing the same kind of hard game back, and choosing the moment to open the service. I imagine eventually they'll open it up to other players, once they are assured that MS can not try to co-opt the standard. If Apple don't and they end up with a monopoly of online music and try to force other players out of the market, I hope they get sued.
My point in all of this is that Mac users have to put up with this, and Apple has no market force to correct it. The reason? Apple has a monopoly on the Mac.
If Mac users don't like their software they can always change to Linux or Windows (on another machine). Most people change OS when they change machines, and at no other time. And yeah, market forces have done a lot to correct the problems with Windows and Office haven't they? Things are so much better on that side of the fence (cough). Our model of capitalism doesn't remotely approximate a free and rational market, why talk as if it does? Will a free and rational market ever exist? Lastly, a monopoly in itself is not evil or illegal, the abuse of a monopoly to dictate conditions in other markets is illegal and evil.
Once the iPod fad fades
Yeah, no wireless, less space than a nomad. Lame.
That is plenty of multimedia entertainment for the average person, and while the pricetag is slightly higher than an ipod mini, it is more than made up for in the video playback along with the aforementioned wifi and telephony capabilities.
Your iPaq is also HUGE compared to a nano, and even compared to the bigger ipod, which has way more storage. There really is no competition for most people who don't want to enter PDA details on the go and don't want or need the wifi.
You shouldn't get obsessed with the CRUD side of things as the only feature. I think the author DHH specifically states in one of those tutorial videos that the CRUD stuff is just a minor footnote on p.236 or something, the implication being that the other stuff is more important.
:), AJAX libraries built in, and finally the nice language it's written in.
Namely, the tools that encourage you to use MVC, the lack of a compile stage when testing, the built in testing frameworks and interactive console, the built in development web-server, the support for partial pages as snippets of code, the lack of a separate template language (uses Ruby), the lack of configuration files and SQL to map objects to the database (though it appears you won't care about that side of things
There are some missing links it'd be nice to have (a mature security/login framework for example) but overall it's a nice integrated package for doing web applications that does a lot of the groundwork for you so that you can concentrate on creating the bits that are unique to your application. There's a nice example of a site further up this page which almost withstood a slashdotting on a DSL line, and includes things like incremental search of content.
Depending on your needs, knowledge and expectations, it might not be the best platform for you - you shouldn't expect it to be a panacea. However, regardless of your needs, maybe it's worth downloading it and checking out the way it works. Ruby is a fun language, and is worth checking out on its own.
You're talking in generalities about complicated things you're not familiar with - it's not very productive.
2 _with_sound.mov
Ruby - OOP language which is really quite elegant, tidy, and intuitive and has a bunch of standard APIs
Ruby on Rails - Additional structure and helpers for building a web application, written in Ruby
The only way you'll find out if you like it is to try doing something with it - if you seriously want to make a web application or something, you could get an idea of how to use it by watching the tutorial video.
http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/rails_take
Are they serious about video on the ipod?
No
About selling video on the ITMS
Yep. Apple and the big media networks stand to make a lot of money selling TV shows and news clips and eventually films if they can persuade enough networks/producers to sign up. Yes the resolution is not great, but it's much better than most videos available for download from websites (news.bbc.co.uk or the comedy channel in the US).
Now I'd rather something I could play full screen on a monitor, and I think they'll be forced to provide that eventually if they want people to start buying en masse, but this could signal a revolution in TV similar to that brought by iTunes in the world of online music. Easy ordering, massive catalogue, and low prices all led to mass market adoption. Critically, Apple already have the installed base of ITMS customers who have entered their credit details and are just a click away from impulse purchases.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out against Microsoft's Media PC thing-me-bob.
No really, from a business perspective, you would have to be brain damaged to create an application or system of any sort and not hope that it can run in as many platforms (meaning customers that are willing to pay) as possible!
.NET developer at the PDC or elsewhere that would not grin once he/she sees their application running on Linux or Mac OS X?
.NET is designed to tie people to windows (not now, but later once they've adopted it).
What, brain damaged like someone who only produces web-pages for IE (most corporate Intranets)? Most business is brain-damaged, or at least monomaniacal about profits.
So you mean to tell me that there is some
I imagine most would frown and then shrug - those markets are irrelevant to most developers and not worth the extra work (and there would be some, even just in testing). I type this from an OS X machine, but your view is unrealistic -
Because I don't find selling an OS on a machine to be illegal.
Of course it's not illegal to sell an OS on a machine. I'm not quite sure how you reach that disingenuous reading. What is illegal is to restrict trade by threatening sanctions on unrelated products (ie all your machines have Windows on them or else). MS have been convicted for doing just that, in the US, no less. It's illegal for reasons I happen to agree with, I just wish they were actually punished for it.
I sincerely doubt Apple could have dominated the industry - some variety might have been nice though. MS has been bloodthirsty from the start, and always will be - they're a corporation in the mould of IBM. Why must one company dominate the industry? It's that lack of imagination (I must win and that means the death of all others) which sucks capitalism of its morality.
The quote from Balmer is an outburst of which there are many many examples going back to the foundation of Microsoft - all with the same idea of cutting the oxygen supply of competitors and collecting money from all the world (Windows everywhere etc). It's a pervasive, pernicious vision. Personally I wouldn't choose to work with Steve Jobs, or defend him as a manager; there were many alternatives in the 90's, not just apple, all crushed by MS (Be, Next and OS/2).
So, right now, with every state and federal government agency continually breathing down their necks, your take on it is that Microsoft is actually writing "illegal" contracts?
Anti-trust action in the US has now been dropped (as the grandparent noted MS have been linked to massive payments to politicians) - how is every gov agency breathing down their neck??!? A few states timidly challenging the entire monopoly they have in office suites? They got a free ride in the US.
They have recently been taken to court for restrictive OEM contracts in Japan though and given their history I would not be surprised to see their strong-arm tactics continue - they have not been bothered by the laws of the countries they operate in in the past, why should they change until they're caught?
To return to the original point, the illegal machiavellian tactics of MS are to blame for the monoculture we have in the OS market - we are only just recovering, as the tentative offerings at Dell you link to illustrate. To claim they got there on merit is not credible.
No, but it would have
Since this thread started with the question "Why does Windows XP still dominate the OS market?" how about sticking with that subject?
People use Windows because it comes with their hardware. It comes with their hardware because MS has stitched up hardware vendors tight with illegal contracts. Windows dominates precisely because Microsoft has consistently attempted to 'cut off the oxygen supply' of any and all competitors, no matter how small. That's how they operate, and it's illegal and amoral. To quote Balmer - "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I've done it before and I'll do it again."
Why do you defend such sociopaths?
Split your game engine into a generic CPU-orientated thread, plus 6 threads designed to work well with the various cores in Cell.
:In essence, the asymmetric nature of the CELL processor means that two separate tool chains are needed to create an application for the CELL processor. Programmers coding for the CELL processor need to think in terms of software modules and separate tool chains are needed to deal with PPE modules and SPE modules.
What are you going to put on 6 different threads that all have to talk to each other and share data now and then? Remembering that the use of the co-processors on the cell is very limited, and completely different in design than the triple core approach of the x-box? Your approach would work for x-box/PC games, but not with Cell.
It's a bit of a hassle, and there will have to be platform specific tweaks, but I don't think that's what's really getting to developers. I think they're not used to having to deal with the issues related to multi-threading, and that's what scares them.
Can you blame them ? They're being asked to use a technique (multi-threading) which often causes programmers a lot of pain even when they're working in small teams, in an environment where they have large teams, sometimes with rapid turnover, working to impossible deadlines over several years, often with inherited spaghetti code. It's the the worst possible environment for trying to write multi-threaded code and keep the bugs under control. Add to that the complication of the CELL architecture which isn't actually a normal multi-core system at all (which is what he was complaining about).
More detail
The SPE modules are really very basic and have to be programmed separately, it's not as if you just split your program into an 'audio', AI, and a few drawing threads and you're done. Things just aren't that simple. In some ways the CELL would be more useful for scientific calculations than for games. It's more like a sophisticated Altivec unit (1 or more) than several cores.
La la la, I can't hear you.
What, Global Warming? Why should I care when there's money to be made, la la la.
Universities don't teach the return on their R&D. They productize it. Before you talk about economics, and university research's role in it, learn something about it first.
The return on their R&D research money comes in research progress and teaching (not necessarily directly linked to that funding). I'm sure they do 'productize' it as well sometimes, however the tangible products and commercial spin offs are just part of the benefit of this research, not the whole thing as you imply. Not everything can be broken down into a tangible economic benefit.
their hugely profitable enterprises, subsidized at taxpayer expense. Where is the delivery of I2 to the rest of us,
Your original complaint was that I2 wasn't coming fast enough - it will not come until the industry is ready to accept change and there is an overwhelming case for making the change. This can't and shouldn't be pushed by University or Govt research groups, they do the research, sometimes produce spin-offs, and then it's up to industry to pick things up and run with it. While I'm sure you'd like to believe big govt siphons off all the valuable rights to this I2 thing and leaves the people stuck on the old Internet, where is this happening? They are still at the research stage, and in the meantime Universities have the kind of projects who can benefit from a vastly faster internet. We all benefit in the long run.
So take a hint, and show some gratitude, instead of your jealous spite. We're not cranking out this tech for your thanks, but you could at least show some dignity when you accept our gifts.
An interesting characterisation - 'jealous spite'. Much as you'd like that to be true, I'm neither feeling jealous or spiteful, about you, America or who invented the internet. I was saying it's a silly argument to get into, boasting about 'our' technology and largesse as if you had a huge hand in it, and using the royal 'we' really don't make you personally look better.
The same kind of rhetoric of innate greatness and ingrate foreigners came from British settlers 'civilising' India, or even the New World. Perhaps some humility is in order.
And the I2 is about 80% funded by universities, which are largely funded by public money, government and otherwise. Where's the return to the public?
;)
The return to the public is in research and education (which is what universities do). Where else would you expect it? Serving inane comments on Slashdot quicker? Supporting the latest dot.com fad? When the industry is ready to embrace new standards (hint, this is not a rational or controllable process) they will come to the mass-market. Not before.
I'm afraid your free market ideology is blinding you to the benefits of public research and public funding. The 'all power to the poeple' line is very seductive, but research takes time, and the best research is not calibrated, and is not predictable. It does not obey the laws of the market and will never do so.
(foreigners are welcome to ride for free, as usual
What a tired old canard. Where did the tags your writing is surrounded with come from? (hint, not the USA).
because apple could have told them to go to fucking hell. and held their ground or even smearing the record labels in advertising.
I wonder who leaked this story to the NYT?
It does put Apple in a better position for the coming negotiations, doesn't it. Seems to me Apple are playing exactly the game that you've outlined, in advance. You may recall similar stories about possible price rises last year.
as a software developer I find myself having to jump hurdles and roadblocks in OSX far more often than I do in win32 or linux.
Interesting, what exactly would you say those road-blocks were as opposed to developing on Linux or Windows? Is it things you're simply not used to, or things which are worse?
but if you are travelling on business it is nice to remember that you should be in the office by 8am wherever you are
Yeah, shame different countries, and even different companies, have completely different working hours and practices, which renders this point moot. In the UK or France you'd be too early for work, in Japan too late. You're still going to have to ask - what time do I come in to the office. You just won't have to fiddle with your watch all the time when you change zones.
As more and more people change zones during their working day and hold teleconferences with people around the globe, this will become more of an issue.
Personally I think it's easier to remember NYC is 5 hours ahead and just calculate from that, calculations like that will still work, (based off your current time), it's just that there would no longer be confusion over someone saying meeting at 10am when other people have to calculate what that means to them.
And presumably you would buy OS X to do so?
How many people are going to actually know what "Vista" means, anyway? I'd put 20 on people thinking that the newest incarnation of Windows is some spanish distribution.
It's an English word and has been for several centuries. I can't believe the amount of wilful ignorance I've seen on this topic. Are you proud to not know what this means, to think 'oh, that's something Spanish'? If you don't know, perhaps you should look the damn word up and stop being so intellectually lazy.
Vista is a beautiful word, and suggests opening up horizons, plus goes with all their bumf about 'where do you want to go today'. Hell, I don't even use Windows, but it sounds fine to me.
As to the other options, how can you say ugly acronyms (windows eXPerience, please) and '2000' are better?.
The symbols you're using +/- or ± are used to show the amount of error possible, so you're saying that you have x number of people plus or minus 40. The correct usage would have a figure and then the possible error, ie 40 +/- 2 if it could be from 38-42.
There is a symbol for roughly equal to which is a wiggly equals sign or an equals sign with a wiggly mark above it.
Look at any study with "new" computer users and you will see that most of them have a lot of trouble adjusting to a "right click". Have you ever worked in technical support? I have and I can tell you that I had to explain what "right click" meant many times to users.
Perhaps double-click is a usability flaw as well then - many new users have big problems with that (when to double-click or just click, and how fast to click to get a double). Some people I know often double click links on the web because they don't know better.
This is up to the application, and all good applications will do this.
I believe the app can choose whether they're greyed out or not by specifying valid file types, but it can't actually hide the documents, which is what he wants.
1) Compatible control keys. Switching between Mac and Windows this drives me nuts. I have to consciously think
OS X is not Windows, strangely enough, some people even choose it above Windows because it is different.
2) Save button on toolbars. I don't think any of the Apple software ever gives you the option to include a Save button.
Learn to use Cmd-S, buttons for every command is a Windows thing, though it has crept in in some programs like MS Word.
3) A multi button mouse. And you thought I'd say two.
Plug in your PC mouse.
Only show relevant file types in open and save dialogs. For those who like seeing every file that's every existed in their Documents folder, give them a checkbox to show all files.
This is debatable, but the only one of his points which might have some foundation - it would be handy to be able to winnow files in the open dialog. Presumably the justification is that files should always be visible, even if they're not directly available in a certain program.
In fact in Tiger you can do this in a neat way with Smart Folders (create one for only word documents, one for images etc, then put them in your sidebar or someplace easy to find from the open dialog).
Sort folders to top of directory listings I know that we don't go folder mining as much since we got Spotlight, so I won't labor on about this one.
Click the 'Kind' column in column view, or smart folders again.
More context sensitive help. I notice since I first raised this two years ago, more of it has crept into OS X. So I guess at least I can't be flamed for this one!
I assume this means tooltips. Don't like them myself, as I feel they encourage GUI designers to litter the screen with cryptic buttons with the excuse that users can use tool-tips to decode them.
Now why is it that I can list all the features I want Leopard to have and as long as none of them are from Windows, its cool?
But dare suggest OS X needs a feature already in Windows and the world comes down on you.
Additional features are not always welcome, efficient or even necessary.
What's far more important than an extensive feature list is that features are well integrated, consistent and well thought out - throughout an operating system and the applications. If I have one major criticism of Apple recently it's that they have forgotten to keep things simple and consistent in their myriad home-grown apps.
And if you can take the heat, what would you like to see Apple borrow from Windows?
There are undoubtedly a few ideas in Windows (which haven't already been borrowed already : ) which would be great on OS X. Some parts of the Finder could do with help for a start (Network, thumbnail browsing etc). Any long time Windows users like to suggest some? (No, things which are just different don't count, there has to some things which work better).
Sometimes I think Slashdot articles would be more thoughtful and insightful if the editors just linked to comments from previous stories rather than uninformed nonsense like this.
If you want to talk about trade laws keeping them down, then please inform the rest of us about what they actually have to trade...My personal analysis of Africa's situation is that they're mostly at the hunter-gatherer step zero, not step one.
There's very little point in arguing given your blithe ignorance. Africa is a vast continent, and your knowledge seems to start and end with anecdotal snippets seen on American television. I'm sorry but to try to say African Nations are at 'hunter-gatherer' stage is laughable.
As to what various nations in Africa have to sell, perhaps you'd like to read this article, or this one.
Nobody in the UN cared about millions getting killed
I'm curious as to why the UN should be like a red rag to a bull for most Americans on this website. All large political organisations are corrupt (including the US Senate etc), the politicians in the US (and Europe) have turned a blind eye to regimes like Musharef in Pakistan for the sake of expediency, and to torture and yet when it comes to the UN it seems to be beneath contempt for most Americans, even though many of its goals are laudable and sometimes its programmes are very effective (eg WHO).