Running the Real Player in Classic (emulation) is kind of a pain. Unfortunately, my favorite radio program "This American Life" has everything in Real format (at least it's not Windows Media.)
My belief is that it is the responsibility of the company making a product to ensure that it is easy enough to use. If it fails in the marketplace due to being too difficult to use, they have no one to blame but themselves.
"Easy to Use" is difficult but very possible to achieve. However, "Ease of Use" is somewhat difficult to market.
Take two examples: Apple Computer and Tivo.
Apple has historically done a great job of making their products easy to use. They make sure that the documentation is brief and easy to understand.
Tivo is also very well designed and very easy to use.
Both of these companies have a very exact attention to detail. Both of them have very loyal customers. Unfortunately for both Apple and Tivo the quality of the end user experience isn't apparent until after you buy and use the product. "Oh, here's a slightly cheaper PC it has a high Megahertz procesor - I'll buy it instead."
I say this as a long time Microsoft detractor and Mac fan.
This is a very significant change. I think it is as significant as when Gates decided that the company should focus on the internet. Since then, Microsoft has made efforts to improve their internet technology, integrate it into the OS, and evangelize it. I'm not saying their technology is always great, but their efforts have moved them to the point where they are a very significant player in areas where they weren't such as web servers (IIs sucks, but is a pretty widely used web server), browsers, web development, etc.
I think Gates correctly recognized security as being a weakness that the competition can exploit. Their main competitors that can attack them on security being Linux, Sun, and IBM (I'm referring to both MVS and IBM's new Linux initiatives) in the OS space and Oracle and IBM in database space. There are others.
Gates is definately a smart businessman and I think he's making a good call for Microsoft here. It's really about protecting their OS business and recognzing that Passport can't succeed without a perception that it is at least reasonable secure. The security holes they have had in the past have been very bad publicity for MS.
Will this initiative succeed?
I think Microsoft has demonstrated in the past that when they put their collective attention on a problem (such as internet integration), they can make significant progress in a relatively short time. However, security is harder and more runs counter to their corporate culture of keeping their costs very low and getting product out the door regularly and quickly. (Again, these terms "regularly" and "quickly" are relative to the rest of the industry.)
In order to do what Gates wants, they are going to have to evolve to be more like IBM. I've worked at both Microsoft and IBM doing dev work on actual products. The differences between the two in terms of their overall development processes are very different. IBM's processes are more focused on producing quality products than are Microsoft's. My experience is that IBM is willing to spend more money and time on really getting a product "right" than Microsoft. Microsoft has a much greater degree of urgency about getting things done. For small software companies, urgency about getting things done is very important, but I think Gates knows that Microsoft has enough of an established business (understatement) to slow down a bit and concentrate more on quality.
The good thing about the current culture is that they can respond to new innovative products somewhat quickly. Once they start caring more about security and quality, it will be harder for them to use their OS to squash competitors. If they can't integrate new technology into the OS at the drop of a hat, then the best they can do is have a product dev group create a competing application to whatever the new hot thing is and compete head to head. I think it will be easier for the third parties to win under this scenerio. What MS gets in return is a greater ability to compete effectively against competitors who have eluded them in the past such as Intuit, Oracle, and Linux.
I was a TA in a course on Statistics and Research Methodology. Once, two students turned in completely word-for-word identical papers which were short research write-ups done as homework for a grade.
The two students claimed that they didn't know they couldn't work together. Of course, they are allowed to work together, but they needed to each have written a paper.
The professor and I decided that since they claimed that they had worked on the paper together, they should each get half the points for doing the paper. The paper had gotten a B+ the first time I graded it, so we cut the points in half and each student got a high F.
They both were able to pass the course, but the grade on that homework did affect their grade totals for that semester.
Apple has a thing called HeaderDoc which is another one of these systems that reads your header files and generates HTML documentation.
HeaderDoc requires that you enter some tagged info as comments in the headers. It is implemented as a set of Perl scripts.
Apple is using it on many of their open source projects (Darwin, etc.)
What does this really mean? FireWire is available in PCs, and plug-and-play is more a function of software. I don't see how Apple's hardware does anything more than create image.
Here's an example. My PC which has USB support and runs Win2K Professional doesn't recognize the USB keyboard until windows is done starting up. During boot there are several screens where you can press keys to change something in the bootup sequence. Unfortunately, since the USB drivers aren't loaded, the keyboard doesn't work yet at that time. So, if I need to change anything during the boot sequence, I've got to plug in a PS2 keyboard.
I bought an original iMac when they first came out. The Apple keyboard worked fine from day 1 including during the boot sequence. True, *some* third party keyboards had problems in the first couple of months that the iMac was out. Not all had problems, though. I bought a MacAlly iKey as soon as they hit the market and it still works great.
Because Apple owns the hardware and the software, they have a lot more control over the total user experience than anyone on the PC side. They get the details right a lot more often than Microsoft, Dell, Compaq, or anyone else I can think of on the PC side.
"Apple Turn Over" (the hack you mentioned) runs under MacOS 9, not MacOS X.
I'm not saying that MacOS X couldn't be hacked to do the same thing, it is just harder because there's a bit more to doing under X. For one thing, you have to be in kernel space instead of user space. The way that guy did it was that he moved the framebuffer location offscreen, then performed transformations to the image into video memory. Under X certain things are a bit harder to get to such as the FBBA (Frame Buffer Base Address). Under 9, you can drop into MacsBug and set the FBBA very easily. Any app can do it. Under X, you'll have to write a KEXT to do that and debugging said KEXT is somewhat involved - you need two machines.
Just by making Office for Macintosh, Microsoft is the *second* most important development house for Mac.
When I say this to Windows guys they think for a second and then reply "... second after Apple?" and I reply "No, after Adobe."
I never got tired of saying that when I worked at Microsoft.
If they make an Office for Linux, it will be an important application. Believe it or not, it will go a long way to putting Linux on a lot more desktops in the business world and in education.
I agree. I also think the car should have a computer in it that can monitor your speed against your GPS coordinates and the laws there. It should automatically issue you a ticket and withdraw the money from your bank account if you go over the speed limit. Maybe it could also monitor for change langes without signaling, running red lights, etc. and give the police the ability to remotely turn off your engine.
If we had all this, the costs of law enforcement would be greatly reduced. The police could spend their time on solving crimes like murder, etc. instead of babysitting bad drivers.
Q: How was the concert?
A: Fine until some jerk started a denial of service attack on the band over 802.11.
Issues not previously discussed
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The two limiting issues I see with this as a product are battery life/recharge time and how it handles curbs.
Every day I drive 30 minutes, pay to park, board a ferry boat, ride the ferry for an hour, then walk 15 minutes to work from the boat. Could I use a Segway? If it made it easier to get around in Downtown Seattle, then yes, I could. The major difference between walking and riding is the way you deal with curbs. I have a very good friend who is in an electric wheelchair. He certainly gets around, but he has to travel a little further to find the places where there are curb cuts. I'm imagining that if I'm riding a Segway on the sidewalk (if I'm in the street I'd probably be run over), then I'm having to actively look for curb cuts and/or lift the Segwey over curbs. I'm really skeptical about how well that will work.
Also, how long will it take to recharge? If it takes six hours (like some reports say), then that's probably too long to be useful in some cases. Also, if I run out of juice somewhere, what do I do? drag it?
I guess I'm on the fence as to what I think of it. It seems like pretty cool technology that might fit into people's lives, but I'm not totally sure until I actually get a chance to use one and find out how well it handles curbs, stairs, bumps, etc and the power issue.
I have a cable modem. Connected to it, I have a firewall/hub. Connected to that I have my wife's desktop computer which is off mostly and an Apple Airport base station. I then have a laptop that uses Airport (802.11b) and my wife has a laptop that uses 802.11b. I life to surf the web sitting outside on the deck, or while in the family room, or from bed. I didn't want to have to pull cat 5 through the walls - so I got Airport. It's great.
I have a password protected network. My neighbors aren't that close and aren't very technical anyway. I have no interest in sharing my bandwidth with them.
Now, here comes the cable company saying I'm breaking the law!
When I first got the cable modem, I needed to get an extra IP (one for the Airport base station, one for the desktop computer). I was willing to pay the $4 per month. The only way to order the extra IP was through a webform on their site which was broken. After spending *hours* on the phone trying to get them to fix the problem with *their form*, I finally broke down and spent the money on the firewall so that my wife could use her desktop computer without unplugging the Airport base station.
It just strikes me as complete unfair that people who can't be bothered to provide working solutions for their customers them complaign when people do what is necessary to make their service useful.
Jerks.
The email client that comes with MacOS X has a really cool feature. It is called "Bounce to Sender". When I get spam, I bounce it back to the sender. To the spammer, it looks like my email address is not a valid address - and they remove me from their list. Not because I've asked them to remove me and they are nice guys, but because it looks like an invalid address.
I haven't seen this feature on other email clients, but obviously clients with this feature could be written for any and all platforms.
It really does work. I've had this email address for years and I don't do anything else to limit the amount of spam I get. I get a *really* small amount of spam compared to my work email that uses Outlook (where I can't just bounce the email, so I just delete the spam.) I get probably 10 spams/day at work (after not answering any spam and working there 2 years) and maybe 1 every 2 weeks on my mac.com email (where I use bounce - I've had the account about 3 years.)
Software engineering is like any other kind of engineering. You *can* create a realistic schedule that you can follow. I have worked on a large number of software projects. Some hit their dates, others did not. I have identified certain preconditions that have to be met if you want to hit your date. (Not that these are profound, pretty much everyone would agree this is common sense stuff -- it's just that often times conditions aren't met which causes late projects.)
First, the customer (whoever if calling out the requirements) can't be changing the requirments insanely. This one should be obvious, but I've experienced a large number of situations where management changes the basic premise of what they want regularly and are surprised when this impacts the schedule.
Any external dependencies have to be met in the timeline called out in the schedule. I worked on a project where we had to deliver a server that talks to our customer's other servers using a proprietary protocol. The customer asks, "Can we have it by x date?" Our response, "Yes, if you can give us the documentation to your protocol and access to a testbed by x-y date." They delivered their end of the bargain (extremely) late causing us to be late. ("But you said you could hit the date!") Go figure!
The third precondition is that the program manager should not be an idiot. This person needs to have the following characteristics. They need to be very technical. People who are former developers usually do okay. As a rule, people whose total background is as a marketing assistant or a receptionist(!) usually do not make good program managers. (The receptionist I had as a PM didn't do too bad because she understood that she didn't know anything about it and let me - the lead dev - call the shots.) This person should have been around the block a few times and should agressively track down any risky issue or "gotchas" in the process as soon as it is uncovered. This person should be tenatious in doing this.
If you have those three preconditions met, then typically you can hit your date.
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Troll Tech has released Qt for MacOS X. They even have an aqua style. Qt apps look just fine on MacOS X.
I think that prosecutors should be criminally liable if they prosecute you and they know you are innocent.
Running the Real Player in Classic (emulation) is kind of a pain. Unfortunately, my favorite radio program "This American Life" has everything in Real format (at least it's not Windows Media.)
My belief is that it is the responsibility of the company making a product to ensure that it is easy enough to use. If it fails in the marketplace due to being too difficult to use, they have no one to blame but themselves.
"Easy to Use" is difficult but very possible to achieve. However, "Ease of Use" is somewhat difficult to market.
Take two examples: Apple Computer and Tivo.
Apple has historically done a great job of making their products easy to use. They make sure that the documentation is brief and easy to understand.
Tivo is also very well designed and very easy to use.
Both of these companies have a very exact attention to detail. Both of them have very loyal customers. Unfortunately for both Apple and Tivo the quality of the end user experience isn't apparent until after you buy and use the product. "Oh, here's a slightly cheaper PC it has a high Megahertz procesor - I'll buy it instead."
"Tivo? I can buy this VCR and a tape for less..."
mouse down mouse up key down key up disk insert
Microsoft isn't in Seattle. They are in Redmond which is not part of the city of Seattle.
Family Guy is the worst show on TV ever. It should be canceled.
When I was ten, I cut a virtual watermelon in half with this virtual sword during a virtual family reunion.
I'm starting a new company with VC money to try to get on the leading edge of the convergence between cell phones and insulin pumps.
You are right - you can't. It's hard enough to supervise my six year old all the time.
I say this as a long time Microsoft detractor and Mac fan.
This is a very significant change. I think it is as significant as when Gates decided that the company should focus on the internet. Since then, Microsoft has made efforts to improve their internet technology, integrate it into the OS, and evangelize it. I'm not saying their technology is always great, but their efforts have moved them to the point where they are a very significant player in areas where they weren't such as web servers (IIs sucks, but is a pretty widely used web server), browsers, web development, etc.
I think Gates correctly recognized security as being a weakness that the competition can exploit. Their main competitors that can attack them on security being Linux, Sun, and IBM (I'm referring to both MVS and IBM's new Linux initiatives) in the OS space and Oracle and IBM in database space. There are others.
Gates is definately a smart businessman and I think he's making a good call for Microsoft here. It's really about protecting their OS business and recognzing that Passport can't succeed without a perception that it is at least reasonable secure. The security holes they have had in the past have been very bad publicity for MS.
Will this initiative succeed?
I think Microsoft has demonstrated in the past that when they put their collective attention on a problem (such as internet integration), they can make significant progress in a relatively short time. However, security is harder and more runs counter to their corporate culture of keeping their costs very low and getting product out the door regularly and quickly. (Again, these terms "regularly" and "quickly" are relative to the rest of the industry.)
In order to do what Gates wants, they are going to have to evolve to be more like IBM. I've worked at both Microsoft and IBM doing dev work on actual products. The differences between the two in terms of their overall development processes are very different. IBM's processes are more focused on producing quality products than are Microsoft's. My experience is that IBM is willing to spend more money and time on really getting a product "right" than Microsoft. Microsoft has a much greater degree of urgency about getting things done. For small software companies, urgency about getting things done is very important, but I think Gates knows that Microsoft has enough of an established business (understatement) to slow down a bit and concentrate more on quality.
The good thing about the current culture is that they can respond to new innovative products somewhat quickly. Once they start caring more about security and quality, it will be harder for them to use their OS to squash competitors. If they can't integrate new technology into the OS at the drop of a hat, then the best they can do is have a product dev group create a competing application to whatever the new hot thing is and compete head to head. I think it will be easier for the third parties to win under this scenerio. What MS gets in return is a greater ability to compete effectively against competitors who have eluded them in the past such as Intuit, Oracle, and Linux.
I was a TA in a course on Statistics and Research Methodology. Once, two students turned in completely word-for-word identical papers which were short research write-ups done as homework for a grade. The two students claimed that they didn't know they couldn't work together. Of course, they are allowed to work together, but they needed to each have written a paper. The professor and I decided that since they claimed that they had worked on the paper together, they should each get half the points for doing the paper. The paper had gotten a B+ the first time I graded it, so we cut the points in half and each student got a high F. They both were able to pass the course, but the grade on that homework did affect their grade totals for that semester.
If I were your opponent and you started talking about Open Source, I would label you as an "out of touch techno-geek". I would win.
I can't think of any software category that there isn't some kind of reasonable offering for the Mac.
Apple has a thing called HeaderDoc which is another one of these systems that reads your header files and generates HTML documentation. HeaderDoc requires that you enter some tagged info as comments in the headers. It is implemented as a set of Perl scripts. Apple is using it on many of their open source projects (Darwin, etc.)
What does this really mean? FireWire is available in PCs, and plug-and-play is more a function of software. I don't see how Apple's hardware does anything more than create image. Here's an example. My PC which has USB support and runs Win2K Professional doesn't recognize the USB keyboard until windows is done starting up. During boot there are several screens where you can press keys to change something in the bootup sequence. Unfortunately, since the USB drivers aren't loaded, the keyboard doesn't work yet at that time. So, if I need to change anything during the boot sequence, I've got to plug in a PS2 keyboard. I bought an original iMac when they first came out. The Apple keyboard worked fine from day 1 including during the boot sequence. True, *some* third party keyboards had problems in the first couple of months that the iMac was out. Not all had problems, though. I bought a MacAlly iKey as soon as they hit the market and it still works great. Because Apple owns the hardware and the software, they have a lot more control over the total user experience than anyone on the PC side. They get the details right a lot more often than Microsoft, Dell, Compaq, or anyone else I can think of on the PC side.
"Apple Turn Over" (the hack you mentioned) runs under MacOS 9, not MacOS X. I'm not saying that MacOS X couldn't be hacked to do the same thing, it is just harder because there's a bit more to doing under X. For one thing, you have to be in kernel space instead of user space. The way that guy did it was that he moved the framebuffer location offscreen, then performed transformations to the image into video memory. Under X certain things are a bit harder to get to such as the FBBA (Frame Buffer Base Address). Under 9, you can drop into MacsBug and set the FBBA very easily. Any app can do it. Under X, you'll have to write a KEXT to do that and debugging said KEXT is somewhat involved - you need two machines.
Hey, watch it or we'll all boycott Outback Steak House! ;-)
Just by making Office for Macintosh, Microsoft is the *second* most important development house for Mac. When I say this to Windows guys they think for a second and then reply "... second after Apple?" and I reply "No, after Adobe." I never got tired of saying that when I worked at Microsoft. If they make an Office for Linux, it will be an important application. Believe it or not, it will go a long way to putting Linux on a lot more desktops in the business world and in education.
I agree. I also think the car should have a computer in it that can monitor your speed against your GPS coordinates and the laws there. It should automatically issue you a ticket and withdraw the money from your bank account if you go over the speed limit. Maybe it could also monitor for change langes without signaling, running red lights, etc. and give the police the ability to remotely turn off your engine. If we had all this, the costs of law enforcement would be greatly reduced. The police could spend their time on solving crimes like murder, etc. instead of babysitting bad drivers.
Q: How was the concert? A: Fine until some jerk started a denial of service attack on the band over 802.11.
The two limiting issues I see with this as a product are battery life/recharge time and how it handles curbs. Every day I drive 30 minutes, pay to park, board a ferry boat, ride the ferry for an hour, then walk 15 minutes to work from the boat. Could I use a Segway? If it made it easier to get around in Downtown Seattle, then yes, I could. The major difference between walking and riding is the way you deal with curbs. I have a very good friend who is in an electric wheelchair. He certainly gets around, but he has to travel a little further to find the places where there are curb cuts. I'm imagining that if I'm riding a Segway on the sidewalk (if I'm in the street I'd probably be run over), then I'm having to actively look for curb cuts and/or lift the Segwey over curbs. I'm really skeptical about how well that will work. Also, how long will it take to recharge? If it takes six hours (like some reports say), then that's probably too long to be useful in some cases. Also, if I run out of juice somewhere, what do I do? drag it? I guess I'm on the fence as to what I think of it. It seems like pretty cool technology that might fit into people's lives, but I'm not totally sure until I actually get a chance to use one and find out how well it handles curbs, stairs, bumps, etc and the power issue.
I have a cable modem. Connected to it, I have a firewall/hub. Connected to that I have my wife's desktop computer which is off mostly and an Apple Airport base station. I then have a laptop that uses Airport (802.11b) and my wife has a laptop that uses 802.11b. I life to surf the web sitting outside on the deck, or while in the family room, or from bed. I didn't want to have to pull cat 5 through the walls - so I got Airport. It's great. I have a password protected network. My neighbors aren't that close and aren't very technical anyway. I have no interest in sharing my bandwidth with them. Now, here comes the cable company saying I'm breaking the law! When I first got the cable modem, I needed to get an extra IP (one for the Airport base station, one for the desktop computer). I was willing to pay the $4 per month. The only way to order the extra IP was through a webform on their site which was broken. After spending *hours* on the phone trying to get them to fix the problem with *their form*, I finally broke down and spent the money on the firewall so that my wife could use her desktop computer without unplugging the Airport base station. It just strikes me as complete unfair that people who can't be bothered to provide working solutions for their customers them complaign when people do what is necessary to make their service useful. Jerks.
The email client that comes with MacOS X has a really cool feature. It is called "Bounce to Sender". When I get spam, I bounce it back to the sender. To the spammer, it looks like my email address is not a valid address - and they remove me from their list. Not because I've asked them to remove me and they are nice guys, but because it looks like an invalid address. I haven't seen this feature on other email clients, but obviously clients with this feature could be written for any and all platforms. It really does work. I've had this email address for years and I don't do anything else to limit the amount of spam I get. I get a *really* small amount of spam compared to my work email that uses Outlook (where I can't just bounce the email, so I just delete the spam.) I get probably 10 spams/day at work (after not answering any spam and working there 2 years) and maybe 1 every 2 weeks on my mac.com email (where I use bounce - I've had the account about 3 years.)
Software engineering is like any other kind of engineering. You *can* create a realistic schedule that you can follow. I have worked on a large number of software projects. Some hit their dates, others did not. I have identified certain preconditions that have to be met if you want to hit your date. (Not that these are profound, pretty much everyone would agree this is common sense stuff -- it's just that often times conditions aren't met which causes late projects.) First, the customer (whoever if calling out the requirements) can't be changing the requirments insanely. This one should be obvious, but I've experienced a large number of situations where management changes the basic premise of what they want regularly and are surprised when this impacts the schedule. Any external dependencies have to be met in the timeline called out in the schedule. I worked on a project where we had to deliver a server that talks to our customer's other servers using a proprietary protocol. The customer asks, "Can we have it by x date?" Our response, "Yes, if you can give us the documentation to your protocol and access to a testbed by x-y date." They delivered their end of the bargain (extremely) late causing us to be late. ("But you said you could hit the date!") Go figure! The third precondition is that the program manager should not be an idiot. This person needs to have the following characteristics. They need to be very technical. People who are former developers usually do okay. As a rule, people whose total background is as a marketing assistant or a receptionist(!) usually do not make good program managers. (The receptionist I had as a PM didn't do too bad because she understood that she didn't know anything about it and let me - the lead dev - call the shots.) This person should have been around the block a few times and should agressively track down any risky issue or "gotchas" in the process as soon as it is uncovered. This person should be tenatious in doing this. If you have those three preconditions met, then typically you can hit your date.