Personally, I use LaTeX for about 90% of my document preparation needs. XML, however, is a completely different beast that works better for some things, worse for others, and will work for somethings that LaTeX simply isn't designed to do.
If I want to set operating system preferences or default variables, an XML file can serve for this quite nicely in a similar manner to plists. This is *not* something that LaTeX is even designed for.
Similarly, there are some things that XML is just better at. Apple's Keynote uses XML and using LaTeX for something like that, while doable, would just be silly.
Re:The trouble is, x86s really are faster
on
Apple Responds to Adobe
·
· Score: 2, Informative
1) XML parsing is memory, cache, and possibly hard-disk *intensive* depending one exactly what you are doing. It is more I/O intensive than anything.
2) If you are getting 20% slower per MHz, either your math is screwy or your configuration is.
3) There are very fast XML parsers for the mac on the market. Find one.
4) That you claim they are 20% slower per MHz against both Intel and AMD processors, which do not run at the same speed per MHz throws your credability off.
2) Many problems *can* take advantage of multiple processors, if for no other reason than that of getting bigger timeslices. Many graphics problems--particularly those dealing with video editing--thread quite nicely thank-you-very-much.
2a) It is not "effectively a single processor machine" for all intents and purposes. Pick an any operating system book to see why, examine the BSD scheduling system for details.
3) Many problems *can* take advantage of altivec (as opposed to that pentium monstrosity).
4) Clockrate *really* doesn't matter--burn that into your brain. Compare performance of the chip(s), not clockrate.
5) Usability counts--it doesn't matter how fast your box is if I can get mine to actually behave correctly.
As an anonymous coward pointed out in the other forum: Check out the comparisons between a 933 MHz and a dual 1 GHz mac w/ AE--they are very close, indicating that AE isn't utilizing the second processor at all.
Also, I do not believe AE is altivec enabled.
So, in short, it was a single 1.25 GHz G4 without any help from AltiVec.
Next, I don't trust any benchmarking review which reads like an advertisement for Dell--which the original article does.
I seem to recall that, awhile back before Quartz Extreme, it was mentioned that Adobe had thrown their own rendering layer on top of Photoshop in their Mac version. This would imply that now Quartz Extreme is there that the graphics card is doing everything/twice/.
The idea that the PC version is a "port" of the Mac version is at least 10 years old--I think they have had time to optimize in that span of time, considering their further work with Intel.
There is also configuration to worry about, but that is a problem in all benchmarking.
OpenSource does not have a major disadvantage that Apple does: Apple has to test the security update to make sure it doesn't break anything and prepare the distribution for release (which geeks normally take care of on their own in the OSS community).
I just purchased a new 12" PowerBook and it is *signifcantly* faster than my 600 MHz iBook. That being said, I found the iBook to be quite snappy, how much RAM do you have?
1) MS does do things very similar to this, or has traditionally.
2) MS is an illegal monopoly.
3) Apple isn't doing this, it is an independant alumni who doesn't like MS.
4) As another poster pointed out, no-one is forcing the removal of all MS products--they are only saying "don't purchase new ones". This is a *huge* and fundamental difference.
5) Not using MS products in the school for four years would not harm their education. Education should be concept-centric, not tools-centric. Most CS educations I've seen deal very little with MS.
First, let me prefix this by saying that I am a strong MacOS X advocate and ran a dual boot Linux/MacOS 9 system before MacOS X came out.
I have always been against Windows as a system, but for some uses Linux and MacOS X just don't have the software support.
1) Learning how to program Windows computers with a windows compiler can be valuable. I am not familiar with the process, but that is actually a mark against me from a hiring point of view.
2) Not all of the software that some groups need exists. OrCAD, for instance, still doesn't have a version for Linux of MacOS X. Neither do several PCB-cutter control software packages that are in use--these integrate with hardware and would be a pain to replace.
Sorry, xcircuit + SPICE just doesn't cut it.
3) According to the Autodesk website, AutoCAD has not been ported to Linux. Do you really want to put your faith for these things to WINE? Particularly when they involve hardware integration? This also makes support flakey if something isn't working correctly "...go under your Start menu..." "Um, I'm running this under emmulation." "We don't have support for that configuration option..."
With the "that's so expensive! You can get more storage than that for $11k and more an actual computer to boot!"
This is not an offering from Apple that is designed to compete for storage in the home, except maybe for those individuals running a small business. This is not just a "bunch of storage," this is a high-quality server solution that is designed to compete with Sun and IBM.
This thing has a battery backup module for the cache, dual and *independant* RAID controllers, redundent *cooling* (incidentally, these are self regulating as well), and redundent power supplies. It also all fits inside of a 3U case, which is phenomenal, and hot-swapable drives.
Personally I use pro Fit or R, depending on the circumstances.
pro Fit is very nice and gives professional looking output, it is inexpensive (though not free), and is fairly easy to use for most tasks. It will also do curve fitting and other nice things through an easy-to-use graphical interface.
R is a statistical package which works fairly well for most plotting needs, though I have found it to be a little more obnoxious to use than pro Fit and much much more difficult to configure to get it to plot things the way you want (at least until you get familiar with the commands--it is a command line package). OTOH, it will do statistical analysis and such niceties as principle component analysis on your data.
They have exactly *zero* reason to release iTunes, Safari, or any number of other things for Windows. They have very good reasons for releasing a utility such as this.
If they released iTunes w/ iPod support for windows, what does it gain them? There is already a company (SoundJam IIRC), producing software that interfaces with the iPod, so they aren't going to sell more of those, they aren't going to turn a profit from it if they give it away for free (they already sell a "windows" version of the iPod), and they aren't going to influence more people to buy macs (more the reverse, actually).
If they release Safari, what does it gain them? They would be going into a situation where there is a monopoly on the browser and they have no quick way to fix it, and by providing an *outstanding* browser on the Mac, they give windows users one more reason to Switch.
Finally, Safari and more and more of iTunes have been written in ObjC w/ Cocoa. This would make porting slightly difficult, since they would have to be rewritten almost from the ground up (Apple would not likely use OpenSTEP to make the switch just yet).
Meanwhile, this utility gives a clear and very public way for Windows XP users to move their documents over to the Mac, easing the Switch when they do decide to make it. It is one more reason *to* make the switch: they are easing the transition. It also gives them the ability to take greater advantage of a.Mac account and give them more incentive to buy into that, which is just icing on the cake for Apple.
Repeat to yourself over and over again until you burn it into your memory: Apple is a Hardware Company, Apple is a Hardware Company...
Apple is in the business of Making Money. Apple releases free but closed software to help them make money that improves direct compatiability with Windows XP. Therefore they are not a friend of open source.
There seems to be something missing in here, like a coherent thought process or evidence...
Pay attention now, I'm going to look at their feature chart (something you obviously have never done).
I will show a list of things that TextWranger has that TextEdit does not and never will (this is not a complete list, this is just a few things that matter):
0) Default to text, rather than rich text. 1) regexp searching (!!!!!!) 2) Multi-file search 3) Plug-In Support 4) Sorting 5) Zap Gremlins 6) Entab/Detab 7) Save in a variety of file formats. 8) Unicode 9) Will save with Unix line-breaks (if you do *any* kind of shell scripting or hand-modifying files, this is a/necessity/.) 10) Auto-indent 11) SYNTAX COLORING 12) Can function as an external editor w/ project builder. 13) Emacs Keybinding (your choice) 14) Will open any file up to 2GB in size (RAM restricting, of course) 15) View directory listings. 16) FTP SUPPORT!
If these things aren't important to you, then don't buy it--no one is forcing you to.
In the meantime, however, this is like comparing Preview to Photoshop--not that one of them can't edit, its that one of them is *so much more powerful* than the other one.
You know, emacs might be able to do everything BBEdit can for me, I don't know. That being said, I like having my Ultimate Text Editor look and feel like a MacOS X app (which XEmacs does not, even when running under Apple's X11), I like having its lower memory footprint, I like how easy it is to use and configure... and I like that I don't have to spend more time with it or "try harder" in order to use it.
My clients, customers, professors, and friends don't care one whit if I spent $150 on my text editor, they do care if I deliver my products on time and that they look clean and professional. I may be able to make it look as clean and as professional with X/Emacs, but I will have to "try harder" and "spend more time" with it in order to get the same level of quality I get now and out of the box from BBEdit.
1) As others have mentioned, ease of use. This software is *dramatically* easier to use.
2) It will run under MacOS X without an X11, xemacs won't and anything that runs in a terminal is automatically a few marks down on the ease-of-use scale. (I like the ability to click where I want my cursor).
3) It is a lot prettier and conforms to the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines.
4) Did I mention ease of use? Figuring out how to do things with BBedit is much easier than figuring out how to do things with emacs.
5) The defaults aren't as strict. The defaults on emacs can be very strict as to the way it will structure things for you, BBEdit will let you do what you like without any configuration.
6) I don't even know if emacs can do the gremlin-blasting and ASCIIification as nicely or as quickly as BBEdit can.
7) The find-replace &c functions in BBEdit are easier to use (back to this same argument again) and much more intuitive to work with.
8) There is no screen splitting, nor any real need for it.
9) It feels faster. Not sure if it actually is, though I wouldn't doubt it since it runs natively under MacOS X while emacs goes through LISP (Lots of Insanely Stupid Parentheses).
10) You can have the most powerful piece of software in the world, but if it is difficult to use or requires specialized knowledge, the only way it is going to get used is if the user has a pressing need for something that it offers (see MatLab or Mathematica). For a text editor, it doesn't matter to me if emacs will slice cheese and make fries if this other text editor will do everything I need it to (which does not include a cheese grater) more intuitively and simply coming out of the box.
"Citibank is trying to get a gag order for new vulnerabilities found in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs of ATM transactions..."
Now that it has been posted on/. there are probably thousands of geeks downloading it as we speak. I think we can safely say that it is "in the wild"
The other week I was doing disease modeling: I had written a Python program that would model the disease (using the 4th order Runge Kutta to numerically approximate the SIR model, if anyone cares) and then outputting it via the command line to a text file. I then had BBEdit open to look at the data and so I could bring it into pro Fit if the results looked interesting.
BBEdit is coded in such a way that it would automatically detect the change and update the text for me, making my life easier and preventing me from writing another script.
Not to say that this is universally good or that the above approach doesn't have flaws, but only that you *can* take advantage of something like this on a lot of levels--especially in a Un*x OS.
1) Make sure you are connected to the internet. 2) Click on your clock, select "Open Date & Time..." 3) Click on "Network Time" tab. 4) Click on "Set Time Now"
Why do you need to wait for apple to update the time on your clock?
"I'm also not sure where that equation comes from. There's absolutely nothing which allows you to derive math from the situation... You cannot write an equation to tell what that person is going to do..."
Hence the stochastic part of the equation--it is kind of a "fudge factor" to take guesses.
What the original poster confused was ranking and searching. A tool that ranks the songs and plays those more frequently that you play more frequently can be bad, depending on implementation, and cause you to continuously play through the same playlist of < 20 songs. This is particularly true of the self-reinforcing designs where it counts when it plays it as well as when you select it.
Mathematics can also be used to tell what *people* will do, rather than any one individual, through the techniques of social modeling, group theory, and other methods.
That being said: I haven't checked his equation for correctness, though the formatting is standard.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'll just stick with LaTeX."
Personally, I use LaTeX for about 90% of my document preparation needs. XML, however, is a completely different beast that works better for some things, worse for others, and will work for somethings that LaTeX simply isn't designed to do.
If I want to set operating system preferences or default variables, an XML file can serve for this quite nicely in a similar manner to plists. This is *not* something that LaTeX is even designed for.
Similarly, there are some things that XML is just better at. Apple's Keynote uses XML and using LaTeX for something like that, while doable, would just be silly.
1) XML parsing is memory, cache, and possibly hard-disk *intensive* depending one exactly what you are doing. It is more I/O intensive than anything.
2) If you are getting 20% slower per MHz, either your math is screwy or your configuration is.
3) There are very fast XML parsers for the mac on the market. Find one.
4) That you claim they are 20% slower per MHz against both Intel and AMD processors, which do not run at the same speed per MHz throws your credability off.
That "tool" is Final Cut Express/Pro and is not built for benchmarking, and has been widely adopted in both industry and home markets.
Um.
1) its x86, not x65.
2) Many problems *can* take advantage of multiple processors, if for no other reason than that of getting bigger timeslices. Many graphics problems--particularly those dealing with video editing--thread quite nicely thank-you-very-much.
2a) It is not "effectively a single processor machine" for all intents and purposes. Pick an any operating system book to see why, examine the BSD scheduling system for details.
3) Many problems *can* take advantage of altivec (as opposed to that pentium monstrosity).
4) Clockrate *really* doesn't matter--burn that into your brain. Compare performance of the chip(s), not clockrate.
5) Usability counts--it doesn't matter how fast your box is if I can get mine to actually behave correctly.
As an anonymous coward pointed out in the other forum: Check out the comparisons between a 933 MHz and a dual 1 GHz mac w/ AE--they are very close, indicating that AE isn't utilizing the second processor at all.
Also, I do not believe AE is altivec enabled.
So, in short, it was a single 1.25 GHz G4 without any help from AltiVec.
Next, I don't trust any benchmarking review which reads like an advertisement for Dell--which the original article does.
I seem to recall that, awhile back before Quartz Extreme, it was mentioned that Adobe had thrown their own rendering layer on top of Photoshop in their Mac version. This would imply that now Quartz Extreme is there that the graphics card is doing everything /twice/.
The idea that the PC version is a "port" of the Mac version is at least 10 years old--I think they have had time to optimize in that span of time, considering their further work with Intel.
There is also configuration to worry about, but that is a problem in all benchmarking.
OpenSource does not have a major disadvantage that Apple does: Apple has to test the security update to make sure it doesn't break anything and prepare the distribution for release (which geeks normally take care of on their own in the OSS community).
I just purchased a new 12" PowerBook and it is *signifcantly* faster than my 600 MHz iBook. That being said, I found the iBook to be quite snappy, how much RAM do you have?
Which, IIRC, has a CRT monitor and is superior to the original iMac in nearly every way.
1) MS does do things very similar to this, or has traditionally.
2) MS is an illegal monopoly.
3) Apple isn't doing this, it is an independant alumni who doesn't like MS.
4) As another poster pointed out, no-one is forcing the removal of all MS products--they are only saying "don't purchase new ones". This is a *huge* and fundamental difference.
5) Not using MS products in the school for four years would not harm their education. Education should be concept-centric, not tools-centric. Most CS educations I've seen deal very little with MS.
First, let me prefix this by saying that I am a strong MacOS X advocate and ran a dual boot Linux/MacOS 9 system before MacOS X came out.
I have always been against Windows as a system, but for some uses Linux and MacOS X just don't have the software support.
1) Learning how to program Windows computers with a windows compiler can be valuable. I am not familiar with the process, but that is actually a mark against me from a hiring point of view.
2) Not all of the software that some groups need exists. OrCAD, for instance, still doesn't have a version for Linux of MacOS X. Neither do several PCB-cutter control software packages that are in use--these integrate with hardware and would be a pain to replace.
Sorry, xcircuit + SPICE just doesn't cut it.
3) According to the Autodesk website, AutoCAD has not been ported to Linux. Do you really want to put your faith for these things to WINE? Particularly when they involve hardware integration? This also makes support flakey if something isn't working correctly "...go under your Start menu..." "Um, I'm running this under emmulation." "We don't have support for that configuration option..."
With the "that's so expensive! You can get more storage than that for $11k and more an actual computer to boot!"
This is not an offering from Apple that is designed to compete for storage in the home, except maybe for those individuals running a small business. This is not just a "bunch of storage," this is a high-quality server solution that is designed to compete with Sun and IBM.
This thing has a battery backup module for the cache, dual and *independant* RAID controllers, redundent *cooling* (incidentally, these are self regulating as well), and redundent power supplies. It also all fits inside of a 3U case, which is phenomenal, and hot-swapable drives.
Personally I use pro Fit or R, depending on the circumstances.
pro Fit is very nice and gives professional looking output, it is inexpensive (though not free), and is fairly easy to use for most tasks. It will also do curve fitting and other nice things through an easy-to-use graphical interface.
R is a statistical package which works fairly well for most plotting needs, though I have found it to be a little more obnoxious to use than pro Fit and much much more difficult to configure to get it to plot things the way you want (at least until you get familiar with the commands--it is a command line package). OTOH, it will do statistical analysis and such niceties as principle component analysis on your data.
They have exactly *zero* reason to release iTunes, Safari, or any number of other things for Windows. They have very good reasons for releasing a utility such as this.
.Mac account and give them more incentive to buy into that, which is just icing on the cake for Apple.
If they released iTunes w/ iPod support for windows, what does it gain them? There is already a company (SoundJam IIRC), producing software that interfaces with the iPod, so they aren't going to sell more of those, they aren't going to turn a profit from it if they give it away for free (they already sell a "windows" version of the iPod), and they aren't going to influence more people to buy macs (more the reverse, actually).
If they release Safari, what does it gain them? They would be going into a situation where there is a monopoly on the browser and they have no quick way to fix it, and by providing an *outstanding* browser on the Mac, they give windows users one more reason to Switch.
Finally, Safari and more and more of iTunes have been written in ObjC w/ Cocoa. This would make porting slightly difficult, since they would have to be rewritten almost from the ground up (Apple would not likely use OpenSTEP to make the switch just yet).
Meanwhile, this utility gives a clear and very public way for Windows XP users to move their documents over to the Mac, easing the Switch when they do decide to make it. It is one more reason *to* make the switch: they are easing the transition. It also gives them the ability to take greater advantage of a
Repeat to yourself over and over again until you burn it into your memory: Apple is a Hardware Company, Apple is a Hardware Company...
Lets see...
Apple is in the business of Making Money.
Apple releases free but closed software to help them make money that improves direct compatiability with Windows XP.
Therefore they are not a friend of open source.
There seems to be something missing in here, like a coherent thought process or evidence...
Um, No.
/necessity/.)
Pay attention now, I'm going to look at their feature chart (something you obviously have never done).
I will show a list of things that TextWranger has that TextEdit does not and never will (this is not a complete list, this is just a few things that matter):
0) Default to text, rather than rich text.
1) regexp searching (!!!!!!)
2) Multi-file search
3) Plug-In Support
4) Sorting
5) Zap Gremlins
6) Entab/Detab
7) Save in a variety of file formats.
8) Unicode
9) Will save with Unix line-breaks (if you do *any* kind of shell scripting or hand-modifying files, this is a
10) Auto-indent
11) SYNTAX COLORING
12) Can function as an external editor w/ project builder.
13) Emacs Keybinding (your choice)
14) Will open any file up to 2GB in size (RAM restricting, of course)
15) View directory listings.
16) FTP SUPPORT!
If these things aren't important to you, then don't buy it--no one is forcing you to.
In the meantime, however, this is like comparing Preview to Photoshop--not that one of them can't edit, its that one of them is *so much more powerful* than the other one.
Next time, RTFM.
My friend who is running Debian in dual boot will be so upset to hear this.
When exactly did they kill it and why was everyone not informed?
You know, emacs might be able to do everything BBEdit can for me, I don't know. That being said, I like having my Ultimate Text Editor look and feel like a MacOS X app (which XEmacs does not, even when running under Apple's X11), I like having its lower memory footprint, I like how easy it is to use and configure... and I like that I don't have to spend more time with it or "try harder" in order to use it.
My clients, customers, professors, and friends don't care one whit if I spent $150 on my text editor, they do care if I deliver my products on time and that they look clean and professional. I may be able to make it look as clean and as professional with X/Emacs, but I will have to "try harder" and "spend more time" with it in order to get the same level of quality I get now and out of the box from BBEdit.
1) As others have mentioned, ease of use. This software is *dramatically* easier to use.
:-)
2) It will run under MacOS X without an X11, xemacs won't and anything that runs in a terminal is automatically a few marks down on the ease-of-use scale. (I like the ability to click where I want my cursor).
3) It is a lot prettier and conforms to the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines.
4) Did I mention ease of use? Figuring out how to do things with BBedit is much easier than figuring out how to do things with emacs.
5) The defaults aren't as strict. The defaults on emacs can be very strict as to the way it will structure things for you, BBEdit will let you do what you like without any configuration.
6) I don't even know if emacs can do the gremlin-blasting and ASCIIification as nicely or as quickly as BBEdit can.
7) The find-replace &c functions in BBEdit are easier to use (back to this same argument again) and much more intuitive to work with.
8) There is no screen splitting, nor any real need for it.
9) It feels faster. Not sure if it actually is, though I wouldn't doubt it since it runs natively under MacOS X while emacs goes through LISP (Lots of Insanely Stupid Parentheses).
10) You can have the most powerful piece of software in the world, but if it is difficult to use or requires specialized knowledge, the only way it is going to get used is if the user has a pressing need for something that it offers (see MatLab or Mathematica). For a text editor, it doesn't matter to me if emacs will slice cheese and make fries if this other text editor will do everything I need it to (which does not include a cheese grater) more intuitively and simply coming out of the box.
Yes, many of us consider that worth paying for
"Citibank is trying to get a gag order for new vulnerabilities found in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs of ATM transactions..."
/. there are probably thousands of geeks downloading it as we speak. I think we can safely say that it is "in the wild"
Now that it has been posted on
This has the potential to be a good thing.
The other week I was doing disease modeling: I had written a Python program that would model the disease (using the 4th order Runge Kutta to numerically approximate the SIR model, if anyone cares) and then outputting it via the command line to a text file. I then had BBEdit open to look at the data and so I could bring it into pro Fit if the results looked interesting.
BBEdit is coded in such a way that it would automatically detect the change and update the text for me, making my life easier and preventing me from writing another script.
Not to say that this is universally good or that the above approach doesn't have flaws, but only that you *can* take advantage of something like this on a lot of levels--especially in a Un*x OS.
" Here's waiting for a fix VERY soon."
1) Make sure you are connected to the internet.
2) Click on your clock, select "Open Date & Time..."
3) Click on "Network Time" tab.
4) Click on "Set Time Now"
Why do you need to wait for apple to update the time on your clock?
"I'm also not sure where that equation comes from. There's absolutely nothing which allows you to derive math from the situation... You cannot write an equation to tell what that person is going to do..."
Hence the stochastic part of the equation--it is kind of a "fudge factor" to take guesses.
What the original poster confused was ranking and searching. A tool that ranks the songs and plays those more frequently that you play more frequently can be bad, depending on implementation, and cause you to continuously play through the same playlist of < 20 songs. This is particularly true of the self-reinforcing designs where it counts when it plays it as well as when you select it.
Mathematics can also be used to tell what *people* will do, rather than any one individual, through the techniques of social modeling, group theory, and other methods.
That being said: I haven't checked his equation for correctness, though the formatting is standard.
Idealogy is all fine and good when you are coding for OSS or when you hold 95% of the market, when you hold 5% you don't have that luxury.
Blatantly, where do you get the idea that Macs are hugely more expensive? This an old myth and is now a fallacy, let it die.