It's not in the public interest to see what kind of computers are coming out, perhaps delaying their purchase? That didn't help anyone?
No, it really does not help anyone make a purchase decision to know when new models are coming out. It actually is detremental to both the person making the decision and the company making the products. Here's why. First, products are often delayed. Often they are not available right after they are announced. If you need a new PowerBook, you should buy one - not wait around in the hopes that some information from MacOS Rumors is correct and that the new one will be "super duper" and available in 4 months. You'll end up waiting 6 months and get something with a rev. A motherboard that might have quality problems.
I buy a lot of Macintoshes and I have for the past 10 years. It is easier to buy them now than it was when advanced information was available from rumor sites. Another reason is that rumor site information is not very accurate. Personally I prefer to buy Mac models that have been out for a while. Back in the day (1990 -1998) I had a rule that I only bought discontinued models. That way whatever problems or issues existed were already known. Now, Apple's quality is better, so I will buy something after its been on the market for as little as 3 or 4 months. But I really think that anyone who is using rumor sites to base their purchase decisions is not doing themselves a favor at all.
Great, watermarked files. The guy or gal who violated NDA in this case called Nick De Plume on the phone and read him the information from one of these "watermarked files".
I do understand how digitial watermarking works. It does "plug the analog hole". You can print out the document and re-scan it and it will still have the watermark. But that doesn't mean that it will plug the "human hole". If I call Nick De Plume and tell him something like (I'm making this up - it is not real info) "PowerBook G5s will be announced at WWDC this year." there is no watermark for that.
If UTSA violates the first amendment, then Nick De Plume is off the hook, and Apple will not really be able to enforce NDAs except perhaps by more spying on its employees, planting false info, etc. Apple will either want to become more hard on people internally, or else re-think their policies and become more open about what they are working on. I think this outcome is bad for Apple, good for free speech.
If UTSA is constitutional, then Nick De Plume can be criminally prosecuted and potentially go to jail. He will have to give up his sources who will be fired from Apple. Apple will be better off because they can be relatively open with their employees and basically say "We will punish those who mistreat confidential information, but we can let you know those things you need to know in order to do your job and those who are doing the right thing are not under suspicion. We don't need to spy on you." Plus, I think that would pretty much put an end to the rumor sites. I consider that to be good for Apple and good for "the Mac community".
On the other hand, I think that outcome while good for Apple and the majority of its employees who are not violating their NDAs, is bad for America as a whole. I can't see how this type of ruling would not prevent companies or government bodies from silencing anyone who wants to speak out against any kind of wrongdoing. I can easily imagine the Bush administration or some corporations using these laws to punish whistle blowers.
Well, it was the version of Office that Microsoft shipped in 1998. And yes, I got the name right, and yes, it was a Mac version of Office, but that's not really the point. The point is that in all the businesses I've worked in - which are all software companies where you would expect people to be very savvy, maybe 1 or 2 people in the whole organization use all the "latest features" of Office. And those people aren't really influential in purchase decisions.
Everywhere I've worked, IT just installs whatever version of Office they want you to have on your computer. Most people use the basic features of the programs (Word, Excel, whatever) and don't use the advanced features because they are difficult to use. The *one feature* they care about is interoperability.
Up until now, when I've tried to open an Word document in anything but Word, it has also come out mangled. That is the only reason why I bother using Word. If there was another word processor that was either free, or not fee but easier to use, and it really had interoperability with Word (including that things look right going both ways), then I'd switch to it in a second. The day that Open Office achieves this level of interoperability is the day that MS will lose a big chunk of marketshare for MS Office.
Also, there is this new thing called a compiler. It lets you write computer code in a "high level language" and then translates it for you into assembly language for whatever chip you are targetting.
MacOS X graphics subsystem (Quartz) is GPU accelerated. While the G5 is pretty damn fast, part of the speed of the demo you saw may have been partially accelerated by the GPU.
In regard to the GPP, I think there obviously is *some* market for Mac games. You go to the Apple store and there is a shelf of Mac games there. I'm certainly planning to buy The Sims 2 when it comes out for Mac. I think there is a history of Apple not promoting games for Mac and Mac people not being gamers which fed each other. In the very beginning, Apple really discouraged game development because the computer press called the graphical user interface "game like" and claimed it was not good for business use. Apple worked really hard to overcome that perception and really never was able to do so until the success of Windows. So, discouraging games was probably a good idea back prior to 1992.
I think he means "poor performance" financially, not the console itself. XBox has been a huge financial failure for Microsoft. Right now, they don't care because everything they do loses money except for Windows, Office, and Exchange. Now, if something happened to some or all of those cash cows (Linux on the desktop perhaps?), then I'm sure Microsoft would start caring about XBox loses (and MSN loses, and MSNBC loses, and MSN Search loses, etc.) real quick.
I think I read that to be that that their motive *wasn't* profit. I think the article meant that Microsoft's motive was to gain marketshare at the expense of taking huge losses on the product - otherwise the sentance really makes no sense. It was kind of ambiguous, though.
I totally thought "Sega" when I read this article. They are going to market real early with their console and a lot of people will be like "Let's wait for PS3." If Sony can bring the PS3 onto the market on schedule, it could be real bad for Microsoft. The way I see it, Sony doesn't even have to beat MS to market, they just can't afford to not meet their announced schedule.
Oh, and if MS is late with the XBox 2, that could hurt them I think. I think a lot of the console market has to do with number of titles you run and also whether you are meeting people's expectations or not.
The consistant thing about these kind of boxes is that they were always used to predict something that has already happened rather than something that will actually happen in the future.
I mean if this were for real, you'd think they would list some of the box's predictions for next week or something.
Oh, according to the article it is the case that all significant events cause the same thing to happen to the random numbers. So, you might know something was going to happen: tsunami, terrorist attack, perhaps a volcano eruption... but you would never know what it was unless someone can come up with a way to interpret the details of the phenomenon on the machine. I'm sure that can be done for past events, but I'm skeptical about future ones:-)
I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read this. Killer features, indeed. The only feature of Office I (or most people) care about is that you can make a document and give it to someone and they can open it and it will look right. Most people can't figure out how to use the features that were in Office 98.
Microsoft makes money on Windows, Office, and Exchange. Most of the other stuff they do is a money loser: MSN, X-Box, Hot Mail, Windows CE, hardware. The other stuff may be strategic and it may help to prop up Windows, but still its mostly a money sink.
If Microsoft were to lose Windows and Office monopoly because of competition, Microsoft would not be a profitable company - not by any stretch. What could cause them to lose Windows and Office. Open source.
All that really has to happen is for Linux to get more usable. And a lot of that has to do with drivers. Once that happens, the big PC vendors will migrate the Linux faster than you can say "Linux Torvalds". The layoffs from Microsoft will be similar in relative magnitude to the layoffs at IBM in the late 80s. I say relative because MS has far fewer employees than IBM did.
Let me say that I would not want to own a house in or around Redmond when this happens. I also would not want to have a lot of MS stock when it happens either.
Within 5 years Linux will become the dominant desktop OS. MacOS X will have a marketshare perhaps double what it is today. Windows will have a smaller marketshare, but will still be around as Microsoft focuses on it as a "core business" for those who can't or won't migrate to Linux.
For $699, you get a LED (dim) LCD (crappy image) projector.
For $765, you can buy an InFocus X1a which has a much brighter lamp and will be nicer for movies and presentations. Plus, IMHO LCD projectors really suck because of the "screen door" effect. The X1a is a DLP projector which produces a more clear image.
Actually, I've been *really* wanting an antique Kellogg 925 bakelite phone vintage 1930s. The problem is that I no longer even have a landline to use it on. This would be cool.
Re:question about atari 2600 naming
on
Atari 2600 Mac Mod
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Apple I was priced at $666.66, not $666.00. I also remember that this price was arrived at via some formula involving the price of all the parts, not picked arbitrarily. When they discovered that the formula produced this number, someone suggested they change it, but Jobs wanted to leave it alone because it was a memorable number.
That said, I think its pretty doubtful that Jobs and Woz had influence over the part number designations at Atari. First of all because Woz never worked for Atari. He designed breakout as a favor to Jobs, but its was work that was assigned to Jobs. At the time Woz designed breakout he was working at HP.
So, did Steve Jobs have the power to influence the product designation of the 2600? I think its pretty doubtful, considering the various descriptions of his work at Atari that I have read. It seems like he was Nolan Bushnell's "eyes and ears" into the engineering department. During the period when Jobs worked there, Nolan had been asked not to visit the engineers and "bother them" because often his suggestions were taken as orders of how things should be done. So, he was asked not to drop in anymore. Because he was a curious person and wanted to know how things were going, he had Steve Jobs give him reports about what was happening. From what I have read, this was Jobs's main role at Atari and he was otherwise not very popular there.
Steve Wozniak was not an employee of Atari. He did some work that ended up being for Atari, but he did it as a personal favor to Steve Jobs who was an employee at Atari.
Yes, we all know that it is extremely bad form for a politician to get excited about anything, even at a rally which is an event whose purpose is to get people excited. Anyone who gets excited at a rally is obviously unamerican and unfit for public office.
I think if you want to use Qt to write internal tools for your organization (i.e. which are not distributed outside your organization), Troll Tech would still require you to buy a commercial license.
OK, so that gets us into an argument about what we mean by "distribute". However, imagine a case where you are writing a tool with Qt that would only run on one computer - and maybe it is the same computer you developed the tool with. So, in this case, you clearly aren't distributing it, but if you are using this tool to run your business, then you need to get a commerical Qt license. As for the "how are the going to catch you?" argument, let's say you had a former employee who turns you into the BSA for running unlicensed software.
I think you would either need the Qt commercial license in that case or you'd be prosecuted (fined?).
However, the nice thing about this is that if you want to convince your company to use Qt, you can now get a GPL license for evaluation instead of the commercial eval which (as I recall) is time bombed.
Re:question about atari 2600 naming
on
Atari 2600 Mac Mod
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I know that it was originally called the VCS. It was renamed the 2600 at the time that the Atari 5200 shipped. (2600 is 1/2 of 5200...)
Also the 7800 is 5200 + 2600, even though the 7800 didn't play 5200 games.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not in the public interest to see what kind of computers are coming out, perhaps delaying their purchase? That didn't help anyone?
No, it really does not help anyone make a purchase decision to know when new models are coming out. It actually is detremental to both the person making the decision and the company making the products. Here's why. First, products are often delayed. Often they are not available right after they are announced. If you need a new PowerBook, you should buy one - not wait around in the hopes that some information from MacOS Rumors is correct and that the new one will be "super duper" and available in 4 months. You'll end up waiting 6 months and get something with a rev. A motherboard that might have quality problems.
I buy a lot of Macintoshes and I have for the past 10 years. It is easier to buy them now than it was when advanced information was available from rumor sites. Another reason is that rumor site information is not very accurate. Personally I prefer to buy Mac models that have been out for a while. Back in the day (1990 -1998) I had a rule that I only bought discontinued models. That way whatever problems or issues existed were already known. Now, Apple's quality is better, so I will buy something after its been on the market for as little as 3 or 4 months. But I really think that anyone who is using rumor sites to base their purchase decisions is not doing themselves a favor at all.
Great, watermarked files. The guy or gal who violated NDA in this case called Nick De Plume on the phone and read him the information from one of these "watermarked files".
I do understand how digitial watermarking works. It does "plug the analog hole". You can print out the document and re-scan it and it will still have the watermark. But that doesn't mean that it will plug the "human hole". If I call Nick De Plume and tell him something like (I'm making this up - it is not real info) "PowerBook G5s will be announced at WWDC this year." there is no watermark for that.
One of two things will happen with this.
If UTSA violates the first amendment, then Nick De Plume is off the hook, and Apple will not really be able to enforce NDAs except perhaps by more spying on its employees, planting false info, etc. Apple will either want to become more hard on people internally, or else re-think their policies and become more open about what they are working on. I think this outcome is bad for Apple, good for free speech.
If UTSA is constitutional, then Nick De Plume can be criminally prosecuted and potentially go to jail. He will have to give up his sources who will be fired from Apple. Apple will be better off because they can be relatively open with their employees and basically say "We will punish those who mistreat confidential information, but we can let you know those things you need to know in order to do your job and those who are doing the right thing are not under suspicion. We don't need to spy on you." Plus, I think that would pretty much put an end to the rumor sites. I consider that to be good for Apple and good for "the Mac community".
On the other hand, I think that outcome while good for Apple and the majority of its employees who are not violating their NDAs, is bad for America as a whole. I can't see how this type of ruling would not prevent companies or government bodies from silencing anyone who wants to speak out against any kind of wrongdoing. I can easily imagine the Bush administration or some corporations using these laws to punish whistle blowers.
This question ("Who is a journalist") is totally irrelevant. I think the case comes down to whether the UTSA is constitutional or not.
Like we're really going to have a position in the US as stupid sounding as a "Chancellor".
Never heard of Office 98, either.
Well, it was the version of Office that Microsoft shipped in 1998. And yes, I got the name right, and yes, it was a Mac version of Office, but that's not really the point. The point is that in all the businesses I've worked in - which are all software companies where you would expect people to be very savvy, maybe 1 or 2 people in the whole organization use all the "latest features" of Office. And those people aren't really influential in purchase decisions.
Everywhere I've worked, IT just installs whatever version of Office they want you to have on your computer. Most people use the basic features of the programs (Word, Excel, whatever) and don't use the advanced features because they are difficult to use. The *one feature* they care about is interoperability.
Up until now, when I've tried to open an Word document in anything but Word, it has also come out mangled. That is the only reason why I bother using Word. If there was another word processor that was either free, or not fee but easier to use, and it really had interoperability with Word (including that things look right going both ways), then I'd switch to it in a second. The day that Open Office achieves this level of interoperability is the day that MS will lose a big chunk of marketshare for MS Office.
How about NT 4.x for PowerPC?
Also, there is this new thing called a compiler. It lets you write computer code in a "high level language" and then translates it for you into assembly language for whatever chip you are targetting.
The Pippin used a PowerPC chip.
MacOS X graphics subsystem (Quartz) is GPU accelerated. While the G5 is pretty damn fast, part of the speed of the demo you saw may have been partially accelerated by the GPU.
In regard to the GPP, I think there obviously is *some* market for Mac games. You go to the Apple store and there is a shelf of Mac games there. I'm certainly planning to buy The Sims 2 when it comes out for Mac. I think there is a history of Apple not promoting games for Mac and Mac people not being gamers which fed each other. In the very beginning, Apple really discouraged game development because the computer press called the graphical user interface "game like" and claimed it was not good for business use. Apple worked really hard to overcome that perception and really never was able to do so until the success of Windows. So, discouraging games was probably a good idea back prior to 1992.
poor performance
I think he means "poor performance" financially, not the console itself. XBox has been a huge financial failure for Microsoft. Right now, they don't care because everything they do loses money except for Windows, Office, and Exchange. Now, if something happened to some or all of those cash cows (Linux on the desktop perhaps?), then I'm sure Microsoft would start caring about XBox loses (and MSN loses, and MSNBC loses, and MSN Search loses, etc.) real quick.
I think I read that to be that that their motive *wasn't* profit. I think the article meant that Microsoft's motive was to gain marketshare at the expense of taking huge losses on the product - otherwise the sentance really makes no sense. It was kind of ambiguous, though.
I totally thought "Sega" when I read this article. They are going to market real early with their console and a lot of people will be like "Let's wait for PS3." If Sony can bring the PS3 onto the market on schedule, it could be real bad for Microsoft. The way I see it, Sony doesn't even have to beat MS to market, they just can't afford to not meet their announced schedule.
Oh, and if MS is late with the XBox 2, that could hurt them I think. I think a lot of the console market has to do with number of titles you run and also whether you are meeting people's expectations or not.
The consistant thing about these kind of boxes is that they were always used to predict something that has already happened rather than something that will actually happen in the future.
:-)
I mean if this were for real, you'd think they would list some of the box's predictions for next week or something.
Oh, according to the article it is the case that all significant events cause the same thing to happen to the random numbers. So, you might know something was going to happen: tsunami, terrorist attack, perhaps a volcano eruption... but you would never know what it was unless someone can come up with a way to interpret the details of the phenomenon on the machine. I'm sure that can be done for past events, but I'm skeptical about future ones
killer features from Office 2003
I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read this. Killer features, indeed. The only feature of Office I (or most people) care about is that you can make a document and give it to someone and they can open it and it will look right. Most people can't figure out how to use the features that were in Office 98.
Microsoft makes money on Windows, Office, and Exchange. Most of the other stuff they do is a money loser: MSN, X-Box, Hot Mail, Windows CE, hardware. The other stuff may be strategic and it may help to prop up Windows, but still its mostly a money sink.
If Microsoft were to lose Windows and Office monopoly because of competition, Microsoft would not be a profitable company - not by any stretch. What could cause them to lose Windows and Office. Open source.
All that really has to happen is for Linux to get more usable. And a lot of that has to do with drivers. Once that happens, the big PC vendors will migrate the Linux faster than you can say "Linux Torvalds". The layoffs from Microsoft will be similar in relative magnitude to the layoffs at IBM in the late 80s. I say relative because MS has far fewer employees than IBM did.
Let me say that I would not want to own a house in or around Redmond when this happens. I also would not want to have a lot of MS stock when it happens either.
Within 5 years Linux will become the dominant desktop OS. MacOS X will have a marketshare perhaps double what it is today. Windows will have a smaller marketshare, but will still be around as Microsoft focuses on it as a "core business" for those who can't or won't migrate to Linux.
I think you mean: /*Copyright (c) 1981 Apple Computer, Inc. All rights reserved.*/
For $699, you get a LED (dim) LCD (crappy image) projector.
For $765, you can buy an InFocus X1a which has a much brighter lamp and will be nicer for movies and presentations. Plus, IMHO LCD projectors really suck because of the "screen door" effect. The X1a is a DLP projector which produces a more clear image.
Earlier today and it also included a money order for something I bought from eBay.
Actually, I've been *really* wanting an antique Kellogg 925 bakelite phone vintage 1930s. The problem is that I no longer even have a landline to use it on. This would be cool.
The Apple I was priced at $666.66, not $666.00. I also remember that this price was arrived at via some formula involving the price of all the parts, not picked arbitrarily. When they discovered that the formula produced this number, someone suggested they change it, but Jobs wanted to leave it alone because it was a memorable number.
That said, I think its pretty doubtful that Jobs and Woz had influence over the part number designations at Atari. First of all because Woz never worked for Atari. He designed breakout as a favor to Jobs, but its was work that was assigned to Jobs. At the time Woz designed breakout he was working at HP.
So, did Steve Jobs have the power to influence the product designation of the 2600? I think its pretty doubtful, considering the various descriptions of his work at Atari that I have read. It seems like he was Nolan Bushnell's "eyes and ears" into the engineering department. During the period when Jobs worked there, Nolan had been asked not to visit the engineers and "bother them" because often his suggestions were taken as orders of how things should be done. So, he was asked not to drop in anymore. Because he was a curious person and wanted to know how things were going, he had Steve Jobs give him reports about what was happening. From what I have read, this was Jobs's main role at Atari and he was otherwise not very popular there.
Steve Wozniak was not an employee of Atari. He did some work that ended up being for Atari, but he did it as a personal favor to Steve Jobs who was an employee at Atari.
Yes, we all know that it is extremely bad form for a politician to get excited about anything, even at a rally which is an event whose purpose is to get people excited. Anyone who gets excited at a rally is obviously unamerican and unfit for public office.
I think if you want to use Qt to write internal tools for your organization (i.e. which are not distributed outside your organization), Troll Tech would still require you to buy a commercial license.
OK, so that gets us into an argument about what we mean by "distribute". However, imagine a case where you are writing a tool with Qt that would only run on one computer - and maybe it is the same computer you developed the tool with. So, in this case, you clearly aren't distributing it, but if you are using this tool to run your business, then you need to get a commerical Qt license. As for the "how are the going to catch you?" argument, let's say you had a former employee who turns you into the BSA for running unlicensed software.
I think you would either need the Qt commercial license in that case or you'd be prosecuted (fined?).
However, the nice thing about this is that if you want to convince your company to use Qt, you can now get a GPL license for evaluation instead of the commercial eval which (as I recall) is time bombed.
I know that it was originally called the VCS. It was renamed the 2600 at the time that the Atari 5200 shipped. (2600 is 1/2 of 5200...)
Also the 7800 is 5200 + 2600, even though the 7800 didn't play 5200 games.
You would be surprised about how important $5 million in revenue is to a company like MCI. Weren't they just in bancruptcy?