Apple's the company that can make these things work.
They tried. Remember the Newton?
The thing is, anytime Apple launches a new product they gamble not only the development money, but a large portion of their reputation. iPod paid off, Newton didn't, and so forth. When Apple introduced the iPod, there was clearly a market for music players, and they were able to do it far better than the competion. When it comes to making a tablet, the decision must include at least the following considerations: 1) how many people want it: Thousands or millions? 2) Can Apple completely blow the other players away, and make a major technical leap? Apple's handwriting recognition is good, but is it that much better than any of the others? 3) How does it play with the Mac, and enhance the market position of their core products?
You may want such a device, but until millions of people want it, Apple may well be better off working on whatever it is they've already got in the pipeline for the next year and a half.
Heck, I'd love to see Apple sell a true 1080p HD portable projector, but if only five thousand people want it they'd lose money doing it.
Trouble is, you're rare enough that it's not worth doing. You can be sure that Apple is intensely aware of how the Tablet PCs are selling, and there just isn't that much demand for that form factor. It would take something compellingly different to make it fly, beyond just being a Mac without a keyboard. Now, if Samsung came up with a 300 DPI display or something to go with it, that might do the trick, but I'm not holding my breath for that.
Well, thread farming isn't that big a deal. All it really means is that in a multi-threaded process, you don't create and destroy threads, you keep a few of them around and idle in case you need them in the future. If Apple adds some explicit support for this in the frameworks, that's great, but you really can already do this today.
If they go rather further and come up with some kind of auto-threading technology that spots opportunities for multithreading and spins off threads automagically, that would be very cool, but that's not what I would call thread farming. That would be more like auto-parallelization.
There are many more secret sessions than there were in any previous WWDC, I'm pretty sure. We only had about twenty for Tiger, and not even that many last year when the Intel transition was announced. This time around, Apple's had a bit more than a year (so far) with the 64-bit and Intel issues already out of the way, with Quartz 2D extreme pretty close to finished, most of the work for resolution independance in place, and Quartz Composer available for very easy integration into Cocoa apps.
Upshot: I'm expecting Leopard to be a far bigger jump than Tiger was.
you can't seem to understand the difference between marxism & scientology,
Can't tell the difference? How do you make that stretch?
Scientology is a scam whose purpose is to con money out of its followers. Marxism is a veneer of sophistry over Marx's hatred of mankind, and his desire to enslave. Marxism has run its course and been thoroughly discredited by the body count racked up by its adherents, while Scientology is only about halfway through its decline, and has probably killed under a hundred people altogether.
So, although they are both irredeemably evil, there are substantial differences between Marxism and Scientology.
PS - little cluestick for you so you don't look so utterly stupid next time (talking in general terms here, not about Marx).
Oh yeah, I really need help from my AC stalker on how to look smarter. Grow up, kid.
Misanthopy and philosophy are not exclusive.
Who said they were? Marx was a misanthope, and he was not a philospher. Kant was a misanthrope, and he was a philospher.
Trading in options, futures, and other derivative instruments should be reserved strictly for Ph.D's with their own Beowulf cluster, or
Oh, please. Trading options isn't brain surgery. Just like any other securities, do your research to decide which way you think they're going to move, and don't sell naked calls or buy on margin.
I trade options on AAPL shares a couple of times every month, and I do it with the portion of my money that I don't mind risking for the higher returns. Mostly though, I just sell covered calls that are two or three dollars out of the money, and buy more shares with the premium. If the stock has a down day, then I jump on it and close out the position early instead of waiting for expiration.
I have been telling people for years that if they must run Windows, they should run it under VMWare on Linux or *BSD. The only way to run a broken OS safely, is to run it under emulation on a working OS.
. He actually argued with me at one point that Apple's Spotlight was inferior search technology because it requires plug-ins to tell it how to read third-party file formats.
He was probably echoing something that some clown from MIcrosoft sputtered in reaction to Spotlight.
The funny thing about that is that it's Spotlight that sent MS back to the drawing board on this whole searching buiness. Their previous plan was that third party developers would have to conform their way of storing documents to work with the filesystem-as-RDMBS model, unlike the spotlight model where you write an importer that decides what metadata matters for your particular document types.
Right after spotlight was shown, MS went out in a panic to buy something that looked like it, and they grabbed an app that did full-text indexing of mailboxes.
Right now there's some zombie network sending around a stock market scam, of which I am getting roughly 300 copies per hour, even though spamassassin correctly classifies virtually all other unwanted mail.
If you're talking about spam with the pump & dump message in an image, and random-words text, I'm getting about a dozen of those a day. They're one of three types that's getting through my filters currently. 300 copies per hour would make me just about ready to kill somebody.
I have long avoided webs of trust because they seem difficult to manage, but I've come to believe that they are the only way to solve this spam problem.
Well, I'm also in favor of hiring goons to change the cost/benefit equation for the spammers.
The fumble I'm talking about is when IBM decided to make their computers difficult to clone with the PS/2 OS/2 gambit. IBM tried to get the PC world to take a hard right turn, and everyone else continued with DOS. I never suggested that MS had any foresight in this matter.
I think you misunderstand the relationship between MS, Dell, and the customers. MS is where nearly all of the profit in the PC industry goes, and Dell is the chump that gets to try to make money selling the cheapest possible hardware and shaving all the pennies they can on the support costs.
There was another Karl Marx? How did Karl Marx the philosopher come to grips with having the same name as the snivelling misanthrope who wrote the communist manifesto and laid the groundwork for the two greatest mass murderers of all time?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's the company that can make these things work.
They tried. Remember the Newton?
The thing is, anytime Apple launches a new product they gamble not only the development money, but a large portion of their reputation. iPod paid off, Newton didn't, and so forth. When Apple introduced the iPod, there was clearly a market for music players, and they were able to do it far better than the competion. When it comes to making a tablet, the decision must include at least the following considerations: 1) how many people want it: Thousands or millions? 2) Can Apple completely blow the other players away, and make a major technical leap? Apple's handwriting recognition is good, but is it that much better than any of the others? 3) How does it play with the Mac, and enhance the market position of their core products?
You may want such a device, but until millions of people want it, Apple may well be better off working on whatever it is they've already got in the pipeline for the next year and a half.
Heck, I'd love to see Apple sell a true 1080p HD portable projector, but if only five thousand people want it they'd lose money doing it.
-jcr
I'd love an Apple tablet
Trouble is, you're rare enough that it's not worth doing. You can be sure that Apple is intensely aware of how the Tablet PCs are selling, and there just isn't that much demand for that form factor. It would take something compellingly different to make it fly, beyond just being a Mac without a keyboard. Now, if Samsung came up with a 300 DPI display or something to go with it, that might do the trick, but I'm not holding my breath for that.
-jcr
Well, thread farming isn't that big a deal. All it really means is that in a multi-threaded process, you don't create and destroy threads, you keep a few of them around and idle in case you need them in the future. If Apple adds some explicit support for this in the frameworks, that's great, but you really can already do this today.
If they go rather further and come up with some kind of auto-threading technology that spots opportunities for multithreading and spins off threads automagically, that would be very cool, but that's not what I would call thread farming. That would be more like auto-parallelization.
-jcr
There are many more secret sessions than there were in any previous WWDC, I'm pretty sure. We only had about twenty for Tiger, and not even that many last year when the Intel transition was announced. This time around, Apple's had a bit more than a year (so far) with the 64-bit and Intel issues already out of the way, with Quartz 2D extreme pretty close to finished, most of the work for resolution independance in place, and Quartz Composer available for very easy integration into Cocoa apps.
Upshot: I'm expecting Leopard to be a far bigger jump than Tiger was.
-jcr
It's amazing what you can do with a $0.99 bottle of super-glue!
Yeah, like getting yourself tossed in jail for vandalizing other people's property! Woo, hoo!
-jcr
I think the only way to go is the legal route.
Exactly. The neighbor is creating a nuisance, so you sue for a court order to make him knock it off. This is what tort law is all about.
-jcr
you can't seem to understand the difference between marxism & scientology,
Can't tell the difference? How do you make that stretch?
Scientology is a scam whose purpose is to con money out of its followers. Marxism is a veneer of sophistry over Marx's hatred of mankind, and his desire to enslave. Marxism has run its course and been thoroughly discredited by the body count racked up by its adherents, while Scientology is only about halfway through its decline, and has probably killed under a hundred people altogether.
So, although they are both irredeemably evil, there are substantial differences between Marxism and Scientology.
PS - little cluestick for you so you don't look so utterly stupid next time (talking in general terms here, not about Marx).
Oh yeah, I really need help from my AC stalker on how to look smarter. Grow up, kid.
Misanthopy and philosophy are not exclusive.
Who said they were? Marx was a misanthope, and he was not a philospher. Kant was a misanthrope, and he was a philospher.
-jcr
MS have been there, done that.
No, they haven't. Read up on Spotlight's integration with the filesystem. A separate indexing app isn't the same thing, not by a long shot.
-jcr
Trading in options, futures, and other derivative instruments should be reserved strictly for Ph.D's with their own Beowulf cluster, or
Oh, please. Trading options isn't brain surgery. Just like any other securities, do your research to decide which way you think they're going to move, and don't sell naked calls or buy on margin.
I trade options on AAPL shares a couple of times every month, and I do it with the portion of my money that I don't mind risking for the higher returns. Mostly though, I just sell covered calls that are two or three dollars out of the money, and buy more shares with the premium. If the stock has a down day, then I jump on it and close out the position early instead of waiting for expiration.
-jcr
Quants use programs and math to kick ass on the trading floor.
Correction:
Quants use programs and math to try to kick ass on the trading floor.
-jcr
Apple, however, charged a small fortune for their compiler/development tools (MPW),
That was an extremely small fortune. Last I recall, MPW was only a couple hundred bucks.
-jcr
Maybe learn how to use windows?
Exactly!
I have been telling people for years that if they must run Windows, they should run it under VMWare on Linux or *BSD. The only way to run a broken OS safely, is to run it under emulation on a working OS.
-jcr
. He actually argued with me at one point that Apple's Spotlight was inferior search technology because it requires plug-ins to tell it how to read third-party file formats.
He was probably echoing something that some clown from MIcrosoft sputtered in reaction to Spotlight.
The funny thing about that is that it's Spotlight that sent MS back to the drawing board on this whole searching buiness. Their previous plan was that third party developers would have to conform their way of storing documents to work with the filesystem-as-RDMBS model, unlike the spotlight model where you write an importer that decides what metadata matters for your particular document types.
Right after spotlight was shown, MS went out in a panic to buy something that looked like it, and they grabbed an app that did full-text indexing of mailboxes.
-jcr
Right now there's some zombie network sending around a stock market scam, of which I am getting roughly 300 copies per hour, even though spamassassin correctly classifies virtually all other unwanted mail.
If you're talking about spam with the pump & dump message in an image, and random-words text, I'm getting about a dozen of those a day. They're one of three types that's getting through my filters currently. 300 copies per hour would make me just about ready to kill somebody.
I have long avoided webs of trust because they seem difficult to manage, but I've come to believe that they are the only way to solve this spam problem.
Well, I'm also in favor of hiring goons to change the cost/benefit equation for the spammers.
-jcr
You don't really know the difference between philosphy and misanthropy, do you?
Marx was no philosopher.
-jcr
Is this wise?
Yes, if it works.
Decreasing the half-life means increasing the radioactivity.
Yeah, so you shield it, just like you'd shield a reactor. Next question?
-jcr
The fumble I'm talking about is when IBM decided to make their computers difficult to clone with the PS/2 OS/2 gambit. IBM tried to get the PC world to take a hard right turn, and everyone else continued with DOS. I never suggested that MS had any foresight in this matter.
-jcr
I think you misunderstand the relationship between MS, Dell, and the customers. MS is where nearly all of the profit in the PC industry goes, and Dell is the chump that gets to try to make money selling the cheapest possible hardware and shaving all the pennies they can on the support costs.
-jcr
Then please explain MS's 95% marketshare versus Apple's 5%?
They caught IBM's fumble, and inherited the mediocrity franchise. They then used illegal tactics to remove possible competitors.
Next question?
-jcr
Last I checked, Karl Marx never killed anybody
No, he left that to his followers, kind of like L. Ron Hubbard.
-jcr
See, there you go, off the deep end.
-jcr
OTOH there was a philosopher called Karl Marx
There was another Karl Marx? How did Karl Marx the philosopher come to grips with having the same name as the snivelling misanthrope who wrote the communist manifesto and laid the groundwork for the two greatest mass murderers of all time?
-jcr
It's not an excuse at all, it's an observation, and a highly accurate one at that.
-jcr
I consider I've won the argument
Wishing doesn't make it so. Which, BTW, is a good thing to remember when considering history.
-jcr
There's no comparison to be made
Yes there is, actually.
Kennedy didn't have to have his presidency handed to him by his daddy's Supreme Court judges
No, he had it handed to him by the mob, by the Chicago graveyard vote, and the ballot-box stuffers his daddy employed in West Virginia.
Nixon knew the election had been stolen, but he chose to let it go because he thought it would be bad for the country to fight it.
-jcr