This perhaps reflects Adobe-Apple tensions that may have begun when Apple elected to use Adobe's "portable document format" as it if it were a truly open standard. I don't know how Adobe lost control of PDF, but since then, it has done everything in its power to reassert control over that by creating new versions with features that attempt to make previous versions incompatible, at least with Adobe's own software. So in my view, Adobe created a capable open standard and then did everything they could think of to interfere with its use in that mode.
I'm probably quite naive about all this, but If Apple learned from that experience never to again play with Adobe again, one can hardly blame them.
Life with Windows: IT Nazism Who wants to be a full peer anyway? Maybe the corp. will provide a locked down desktop machine for use when peer status is required.
Life with OS X: what's the big deal? It's locked up by default and almost self-updating.
Naah. Makes too much sense. Not macho enough. What fun is that?
I run a Mac laptop as my everyday desktop machine, and it goes with me wherever I go. No problem with malware at all.
Of course, such a laptop ought to be relatively secure, since it usually is on DHCP and has no stable IP address. If one avoids playing with junk attachments, it should be safe, even if it's not a Mac, shouldn't it?
Even if a bolide impact or some other disaster doesn't get us, the Earth has a finite lifetime. Somewhere on the web I found this quote: "A truly intelligent species will outlive its home star."
As another has poined out, Sherlock was here first, and a long time ago at that. But Google is so good that a multi-search engine approach is less important now on the web side.
Instead of having a Google search of one's email on a remote server, I'd much rather have that capability locally. Someone (Jobs?) has observed that it is easier to find things on the web than on one's own hard drive. We can try for logical organizations of our files in folders and with mnemonic file names, but eventually many users will need something more powerful like a library card catalog. Essentially this is a collection of metadata describing the literature, in addition to hierarchical organization. Imagine being to have a single file appear in many different folders (catagories). The Mac is out ahead on this but still hasn't gotten there. Perhaps Spotlight will take a big step in this direction?
This is what I love about the Mac OS X: click: spatial Finder for my DeskPad folder; click: column view for drilling down; click: list view for all the details.
At http://zoe.nu you can check out an Email client-server that does what Gmail does, but right on your own computer where you have many GB of disk space free. That includes serving your Email up over the web (if you have a static IP address, of course). It may not have the Google search engine, but the one it has seems pretty powerful and quick.
Now doesn't that make more sense than Gmail, and especially for anyone who is sensitive about storing Email on a commercial server? It's only for Mac OS X right now, but perhaps there are similar products that run on other systems?
When I was in my 20s or 30s, I would certainly have gone with the cheapskate do-it-yourself route. That's the way I did everything back then, learning by doing, but I no longer have the patience for it, and I don't feel the least bit guilty about it. I don't tear my car apart any more when it need attention, nor do much in the way of home improvements, either. And I don't feel locked in to Chrysler just because I get a better trade-in from the dealer I've been buying from for 15 years.
Heres' what I'd like to see, though. Microsoft should finally wise up to the fact that Unix enjoys an unbeatable advantage over any other underlying OS on the internet. That would lead them to give up on their displaced DEC/VMS guys. And then they would grab a Linux kernel, or SCO Unix, and put Windows on top of it. Why not? Apple did essentially the same thing. Then we'd really have choice without incompatibility! And the GUI's could shoot it out to their heart's content, while maintaining POSIX compliance. Would anyone miss VMS/Windows NT?
Re:Forshadowing of Apple's 20 year problem
on
Macintosh's 1984 Debut
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your analysis tells us little while perpetuating the myth that Mac's were expensive. For Pete's sake, it cost $2500 for a KAYPRO with two floppies and no hard drive back then! And as expensive as the original Laserwriter was, it undersold by a large amount other comparable laser printers. Perhaps you aren't aware that the initial asking price for a Lisa was $10,000. That was a mistake, but the Mac was created to show that the price of an IBM PC could buy a lot more.
It's pretty clear to me that corporate greed, resulting in Steve Jobs departure, was what hobbled the Mac in its competition with PCs from 1985 to 1998. Meanwhile, the world wide web was developed on NeXT hardware, catching Microsoft (and Apple) flatfooted. A related lesson I draw from this is the abysmal failure of the myth that technical expertise has no place in the executive suite and that a good manager can manage anything.
The best antidote to Edward Tufte is David Byrne's Book: Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. To some degree, Byrne is spoofing Tufte here, and he shows pretty convincingly that PowerPoint is what you make of it.
I didn't see many folks here recommending Keynote in place of PowerPoint, but Byrne might well adopt it. That's because it is even more concerned with style over substance than PowerPoint. Which is not to dismiss Keynote. All slideware has the ultimate goal of allowing one to collect whatever bits of graphics and text one would like on a series of frames, and I for one think that is a very useful set of requirements for a software tool. PowerPoint, at least, works quite well for large format posters, as well. But a slide program isn't a page layout program for printed media, and it shouldn't be used that way.
Perhaps the most useful capability of PowerPoint is "save as a web page", which actually makes a set of web pages and links between them that create a web presentation in a jiffy.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but good software is good software, no matter who develops it. PowerPoint is now over 15 years old and it has just continued to get better and better. It's well out ahead of whatever is second best, even if it is not "foolproof".
Last year the fastest cheapest processor we could find for our numerical simulation work was an Intel Gateway 3GHz, which cost about $2500, and has been wildly successful in attracting users away from older Sun workstations, around which it runs rings and Linux.
This year, we will upgrade to a dual processor system, with an eye toward eventual clustering of larger numbers of them. In comparing dual Xeons with dual G5s, we find that the test numbers are a tossup (Macworld reports PCs are faster; while PCmag resports Macs are a bit faster, which they call "about even"). One thing that isn't much discussed is the big jump in bus speed for the G5, which approaches 1GHz, compared with a typical 400MHz for Intel systems. This should be a boon to I/O intensive jobs.
Surprisingly, the deciding factor may be price: we get bids of about $4k for a dual Xeon system that is equipped comparably with a dual G5 that bids at $3k. So if the top Macs aren't definitively faster, they are at least certifiably cheaper! Who knew?
But Apple would clearly prefer to be fastest rather than cheapest, and hence their advertising approach stresses speed for the money rather than money for the speed. One person's miles per gallon is another's liters per 100km...
This continuing competition is clearly a win-win situation for consumers. May it continue...
I think it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is: Is a server machine a personal computer? If not, then the dual G5 2GHz is the first 64 bit personal computer and the fastest personal computer (or at least was for a while). You appear to be comparing it with server hardware not available in a form suitable as a personal computer.
It is also one of the cheapest top of the line personal computers at 3k$ versus about 4k$ for a comparably equipped dual Xeon.
Maybe this will only be a problem until mp4 replaces mp3 as the "MPEG" standard. We might expect MS and Real to eventually adopt the mp4 standard as an alternate source format, unless they are so bitter about Apple's success that they refuse to implement it. But that might be self-defeating if it truly is a better performing format.
I'm not sure why Apple tried to get "ahead of the curve" on file formats, but I assume it must have to do with the higher quality (or smaller size for given quality) of mp4s vs mp3s.
The iTunes store sells mp4 (MPEG4) files, which is the new and higher quality open format that supercedes mp3 (MPEG = Motion Picture Experts Group). iTunes will also play mp3's. So it is backward compatible in an open "industry-standard" sense. The fact that it won't play proprietary formats such as Window's Media Player or Real Audio is a necessary cost of adopting open industry standard formats. Apple's approach is the right path away from the literal "tower of babel" of proprietary audio formats. It'll be worth the extra work to be free of the monopolistic proprietary approach you've suffered under with WMP.
The Earth doesn't really influence the Sun, but when our magnetic field flips, it goes through a period with the magnetic poles sticking out near the equator, and a much weaker than normal magnetic field. The solar wind will come closer to the upper atmosphere, perhaps into it, and the auroras will appear as haloes centered on those equatorial magnetic poles, so that they will be seen at middle to lower latitudes. Should make quite a light show over populated areas, at the very least.
Magnetic navigation will be problematic. The Earth will be unprotected by a magnetic field, like Venus, and there should be some interesting storm effects when the Sun gets active, though not much has been done to study or predict this to date. Don't believe what you see in the movie "The Core".
There isn't enough force developed to make a perceptible change in our orbit, even over geologic time.
However, hundreds of tons of our upper atmosphere is ejected into space and, to some degree, carried off downstream in the solar wind, during these events. So, a small part of our planet has it's orbit profoundly altered by these events. The loss rate is modest and partly compensated by acquired material from dust and meteorites. But this could influence atmospheric composition over geologic time. The plume coming from Venus has been detected near Earth.
Big bright red aurora was filling the northern sky in the DC area, just a while ago, around 7-8pm EST. There were some weak rays aligned with the magnetic field, pointing toward the northern horizon.
The most equatorward auroras tend to be diffuse and red, produced by low energy electrons kicked up by more eneregetic ions precipitating into the atmosphere from the inner magnetosphere.
Is the AppleTalk 45sec timeout for a missing volume fixed? Ever try to walk off with a powerbook that has a shared volume mounted? Good luck trying to take notes in your next meeting!
Or how about giving the Finder the ability to transfer files using ftp or scp? In both directions? Is that there yet? How can they call the Finder a Unix GUI when it can't do this stuff?
Good to hear the TextEdit and Preview are improved, But what about giving us a simple html editor? Did they do that yet? It was there for a while in the public beta, and was removed in favor of rtf.
How about Mail.app? Does it deal with mail servers that aren't accessible a bit more gracefully? Can a message be dragged to a folder yet? Does dragging attachments off a message work more reliably? Can folder titles be live edited yet?
I did notice some weirdness with my PowerBook G4 internet connection, which went away when I switched to a different location that is based on using my Airport(s).
Also I noticed that my second monitor arrangement went away.
I was thinking that these things must be complex and difficult to test every option. Still it sounds like they screwed up on this one. Ah well...
I'm so old I can remember writing with a pad of paper and pencil, and doing multiple drafts! So there! Back then we composed computer programs with punch cards and later a line editor, if we were lucky. When I first used a screen editor (VMS EDT for me), it was an epiphany, and email came hot on its heels. Being able to delete and insert in place, and even cut and paste, while looking at a whole screenful (i.e. about a paragraph in those days) was a huge innovation.
Those developments didn't make me look back fondly on pencil and pad, and WIMPy editors don't make me look back fondly on keyboard operated editors like vi. I agree that formatting is a pain in the butt when one is writing, but the presence of formatting tools doesn't require one to use them, and I have grown to appreciate an outlining tool for anything longer than a couple of pages.
Of course one doesn't need Word for an outliner, but there is one in there, and formatting tools as well. So what's not to like? Why NOT use a single program to go from outlining to writing to formatting the final document?
Apart from the fact that Word crashes too much and ruins imported graphics far too often, that is?
Let's say you've been migrating to your laptop, and your old desktop is getting kind of superfluous. Perhaps you are still using it for a backup repository and as a web site. But it's getting kind of dated and stale, because you are on your third laptop since you started migrating. But it works ok for what you are doing with it. At some point it will fail and not be worth repairing. What do you do then? Buy the latest and greatest new desktop when you are doing everything on your laptop? Hardly.
This is just the device you need. It is the perfect base station for a laptop computing lifestyle! Not more capable than it needs to be, and far easier to use than a full up desktop PC or Mac. And it provides a permananent presence on the web for you, plus the ability to get at all your files if you should need them while traveling or just away from the office.
But unlike the mechanic's tools, this one is a chameleon with few limits in the uses to which it can be put. If kids with uncensored network communicators in their hands turn out clueless, they will have only themselves to blame.
But I don't think that's what's happening in Maine, so far...
Slashdot Mirror
This perhaps reflects Adobe-Apple tensions that may have begun when Apple elected to use Adobe's "portable document format" as it if it were a truly open standard. I don't know how Adobe lost control of PDF, but since then, it has done everything in its power to reassert control over that by creating new versions with features that attempt to make previous versions incompatible, at least with Adobe's own software. So in my view, Adobe created a capable open standard and then did everything they could think of to interfere with its use in that mode.
I'm probably quite naive about all this, but If Apple learned from that experience never to again play with Adobe again, one can hardly blame them.
I believe that bit about eternity is a Woody Allen quote. Did he credit it? Pretty annoying if not...
Life with Windows: IT Nazism
Who wants to be a full peer anyway? Maybe the corp. will provide a locked down desktop machine for use when peer status is required.
Life with OS X: what's the big deal? It's locked up by default and almost self-updating.
Admittedly, I have no experience carrying a PC laptop around and connecting it here and there.
Naah. Makes too much sense. Not macho enough. What fun is that?
I run a Mac laptop as my everyday desktop machine, and it goes with me wherever I go. No problem with malware at all.
Of course, such a laptop ought to be relatively secure, since it usually is on DHCP and has no stable IP address. If one avoids playing with junk attachments, it should be safe, even if it's not a Mac, shouldn't it?
Post-it notes!? Heck! I put 'em in my address database so I can look them up and copy/paste them....
And hackers can find them more easily that way, also...
Even if a bolide impact or some other disaster doesn't get us, the Earth has a finite lifetime. Somewhere on the web I found this quote: "A truly intelligent species will outlive its home star."
As another has poined out, Sherlock was here first, and a long time ago at that. But Google is so good that a multi-search engine approach is less important now on the web side.
Instead of having a Google search of one's email on a remote server, I'd much rather have that capability locally. Someone (Jobs?) has observed that it is easier to find things on the web than on one's own hard drive. We can try for logical organizations of our files in folders and with mnemonic file names, but eventually many users will need something more powerful like a library card catalog. Essentially this is a collection of metadata describing the literature, in addition to hierarchical organization. Imagine being to have a single file appear in many different folders (catagories). The Mac is out ahead on this but still hasn't gotten there. Perhaps Spotlight will take a big step in this direction?
This is what I love about the Mac OS X: click: spatial Finder for my DeskPad folder; click: column view for drilling down; click: list view for all the details.
What's not to like about having a choice?
At http://zoe.nu you can check out an Email client-server that does what Gmail does, but right on your own computer where you have many GB of disk space free. That includes serving your Email up over the web (if you have a static IP address, of course). It may not have the Google search engine, but the one it has seems pretty powerful and quick.
Now doesn't that make more sense than Gmail, and especially for anyone who is sensitive about storing Email on a commercial server? It's only for Mac OS X right now, but perhaps there are similar products that run on other systems?
When I was in my 20s or 30s, I would certainly have gone with the cheapskate do-it-yourself route. That's the way I did everything back then, learning by doing, but I no longer have the patience for it, and I don't feel the least bit guilty about it. I don't tear my car apart any more when it need attention, nor do much in the way of home improvements, either. And I don't feel locked in to Chrysler just because I get a better trade-in from the dealer I've been buying from for 15 years.
Heres' what I'd like to see, though. Microsoft should finally wise up to the fact that Unix enjoys an unbeatable advantage over any other underlying OS on the internet. That would lead them to give up on their displaced DEC/VMS guys. And then they would grab a Linux kernel, or SCO Unix, and put Windows on top of it. Why not? Apple did essentially the same thing. Then we'd really have choice without incompatibility! And the GUI's could shoot it out to their heart's content, while maintaining POSIX compliance. Would anyone miss VMS/Windows NT?
Your analysis tells us little while perpetuating the myth that Mac's were expensive. For Pete's sake, it cost $2500 for a KAYPRO with two floppies and no hard drive back then! And as expensive as the original Laserwriter was, it undersold by a large amount other comparable laser printers. Perhaps you aren't aware that the initial asking price for a Lisa was $10,000. That was a mistake, but the Mac was created to show that the price of an IBM PC could buy a lot more.
It's pretty clear to me that corporate greed, resulting in Steve Jobs departure, was what hobbled the Mac in its competition with PCs from 1985 to 1998. Meanwhile, the world wide web was developed on NeXT hardware, catching Microsoft (and Apple) flatfooted. A related lesson I draw from this is the abysmal failure of the myth that technical expertise has no place in the executive suite and that a good manager can manage anything.
I didn't see many folks here recommending Keynote in place of PowerPoint, but Byrne might well adopt it. That's because it is even more concerned with style over substance than PowerPoint. Which is not to dismiss Keynote. All slideware has the ultimate goal of allowing one to collect whatever bits of graphics and text one would like on a series of frames, and I for one think that is a very useful set of requirements for a software tool. PowerPoint, at least, works quite well for large format posters, as well. But a slide program isn't a page layout program for printed media, and it shouldn't be used that way.
Perhaps the most useful capability of PowerPoint is "save as a web page", which actually makes a set of web pages and links between them that create a web presentation in a jiffy.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but good software is good software, no matter who develops it. PowerPoint is now over 15 years old and it has just continued to get better and better. It's well out ahead of whatever is second best, even if it is not "foolproof".
Last year the fastest cheapest processor we could find for our numerical simulation work was an Intel Gateway 3GHz, which cost about $2500, and has been wildly successful in attracting users away from older Sun workstations, around which it runs rings and Linux.
This year, we will upgrade to a dual processor system, with an eye toward eventual clustering of larger numbers of them. In comparing dual Xeons with dual G5s, we find that the test numbers are a tossup (Macworld reports PCs are faster; while PCmag resports Macs are a bit faster, which they call "about even"). One thing that isn't much discussed is the big jump in bus speed for the G5, which approaches 1GHz, compared with a typical 400MHz for Intel systems. This should be a boon to I/O intensive jobs.
Surprisingly, the deciding factor may be price: we get bids of about $4k for a dual Xeon system that is equipped comparably with a dual G5 that bids at $3k. So if the top Macs aren't definitively faster, they are at least certifiably cheaper! Who knew?
But Apple would clearly prefer to be fastest rather than cheapest, and hence their advertising approach stresses speed for the money rather than money for the speed. One person's miles per gallon is another's liters per 100km...
This continuing competition is clearly a win-win situation for consumers. May it continue...
I think it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is: Is a server machine a personal computer? If not, then the dual G5 2GHz is the first 64 bit personal computer and the fastest personal computer (or at least was for a while). You appear to be comparing it with server hardware not available in a form suitable as a personal computer.
It is also one of the cheapest top of the line personal computers at 3k$ versus about 4k$ for a comparably equipped dual Xeon.
Maybe this will only be a problem until mp4 replaces mp3 as the "MPEG" standard. We might expect MS and Real to eventually adopt the mp4 standard as an alternate source format, unless they are so bitter about Apple's success that they refuse to implement it. But that might be self-defeating if it truly is a better performing format.
I'm not sure why Apple tried to get "ahead of the curve" on file formats, but I assume it must have to do with the higher quality (or smaller size for given quality) of mp4s vs mp3s.
The iTunes store sells mp4 (MPEG4) files, which is the new and higher quality open format that supercedes mp3 (MPEG = Motion Picture Experts Group). iTunes will also play mp3's. So it is backward compatible in an open "industry-standard" sense. The fact that it won't play proprietary formats such as Window's Media Player or Real Audio is a necessary cost of adopting open industry standard formats. Apple's approach is the right path away from the literal "tower of babel" of proprietary audio formats. It'll be worth the extra work to be free of the monopolistic proprietary approach you've suffered under with WMP.
The Earth doesn't really influence the Sun, but when our magnetic field flips, it goes through a period with the magnetic poles sticking out near the equator, and a much weaker than normal magnetic field. The solar wind will come closer to the upper atmosphere, perhaps into it, and the auroras will appear as haloes centered on those equatorial magnetic poles, so that they will be seen at middle to lower latitudes. Should make quite a light show over populated areas, at the very least.
Magnetic navigation will be problematic. The Earth will be unprotected by a magnetic field, like Venus, and there should be some interesting storm effects when the Sun gets active, though not much has been done to study or predict this to date. Don't believe what you see in the movie "The Core".
There isn't enough force developed to make a perceptible change in our orbit, even over geologic time.
However, hundreds of tons of our upper atmosphere is ejected into space and, to some degree, carried off downstream in the solar wind, during these events. So, a small part of our planet has it's orbit profoundly altered by these events. The loss rate is modest and partly compensated by acquired material from dust and meteorites. But this could influence atmospheric composition over geologic time. The plume coming from Venus has been detected near Earth.
Big bright red aurora was filling the northern sky in the DC area, just a while ago, around 7-8pm EST. There were some weak rays aligned with the magnetic field, pointing toward the northern horizon.
The most equatorward auroras tend to be diffuse and red, produced by low energy electrons kicked up by more eneregetic ions precipitating into the atmosphere from the inner magnetosphere.
Is the AppleTalk 45sec timeout for a missing volume fixed? Ever try to walk off with a powerbook that has a shared volume mounted? Good luck trying to take notes in your next meeting!
Or how about giving the Finder the ability to transfer files using ftp or scp? In both directions? Is that there yet? How can they call the Finder a Unix GUI when it can't do this stuff?
Good to hear the TextEdit and Preview are improved, But what about giving us a simple html editor? Did they do that yet? It was there for a while in the public beta, and was removed in favor of rtf.
How about Mail.app? Does it deal with mail servers that aren't accessible a bit more gracefully? Can a message be dragged to a folder yet? Does dragging attachments off a message work more reliably? Can folder titles be live edited yet?
Anyone know about such stuff?
I did notice some weirdness with my PowerBook G4 internet connection, which went away when I switched to a different location that is based on using my Airport(s).
Also I noticed that my second monitor arrangement went away.
I was thinking that these things must be complex and difficult to test every option. Still it sounds like they screwed up on this one. Ah well...
I'm so old I can remember writing with a pad of paper and pencil, and doing multiple drafts! So there! Back then we composed computer programs with punch cards and later a line editor, if we were lucky. When I first used a screen editor (VMS EDT for me), it was an epiphany, and email came hot on its heels. Being able to delete and insert in place, and even cut and paste, while looking at a whole screenful (i.e. about a paragraph in those days) was a huge innovation.
Those developments didn't make me look back fondly on pencil and pad, and WIMPy editors don't make me look back fondly on keyboard operated editors like vi. I agree that formatting is a pain in the butt when one is writing, but the presence of formatting tools doesn't require one to use them, and I have grown to appreciate an outlining tool for anything longer than a couple of pages.
Of course one doesn't need Word for an outliner, but there is one in there, and formatting tools as well. So what's not to like? Why NOT use a single program to go from outlining to writing to formatting the final document?
Apart from the fact that Word crashes too much and ruins imported graphics far too often, that is?
Let's say you've been migrating to your laptop, and your old desktop is getting kind of superfluous. Perhaps you are still using it for a backup repository and as a web site. But it's getting kind of dated and stale, because you are on your third laptop since you started migrating. But it works ok for what you are doing with it. At some point it will fail and not be worth repairing. What do you do then? Buy the latest and greatest new desktop when you are doing everything on your laptop? Hardly.
This is just the device you need. It is the perfect base station for a laptop computing lifestyle! Not more capable than it needs to be, and far easier to use than a full up desktop PC or Mac. And it provides a permananent presence on the web for you, plus the ability to get at all your files if you should need them while traveling or just away from the office.
I want one to go with my PowerBook G4!
But unlike the mechanic's tools, this one is a chameleon with few limits in the uses to which it can be put. If kids with uncensored network communicators in their hands turn out clueless, they will have only themselves to blame.
But I don't think that's what's happening in Maine, so far...