It's not about the geeks; it's about the non-geek users. The business people. There's so much bitching and moaning about MS on this board, and then a tool comes along that could help loosen the stranglehold in the corporate world. It's not just an alternative, it's arguably much *better* than what's out there now (Windows). Most people are sheep; they want to use what's comfortable. If it looks + acts like Windows, they'll be comfortable. MS can bluff all they want about piracy, but they know as well as anyone that you can't copyright a look + feel (remember Apple's lawsuit?).
It comes down to marketing....if Lycoris can get a toehold, this could be big.
One of my biggest pet peeves about Linux was that it was always a bear to configure + use. Sure, the command line is useful sometimes - but usually not. KDE + Gnome have come a long way towards putting a decent UI on top of the kernel, and now the user experience is much better. Lycoris goes a step further - there's something to be said for a distro that looks + acts a lot like windows. People who don't know computers (the suits, mostly) are afraid of them. They know Windows, and they're comfortable with it. Give them something that looks + acts like Windows, and they have a much easier time accepting it than something that looks nothing like Windows. While some might complain that it's selling out/pandering to the Windows crowd, I think this distro (if marketed properly) could make some significant inroads into Windoze-land.
The bill isn't going to kill the DSL providers. They're already dead. They were killed because the telcos wanted them to die. The letter of the law says that other companies (Covad) have to have access, but it doesn't say anything about the phone companies making life easy for the DSL companies. That's the real problem - the two were never on an equal footing. This bill won't help that at all, but it's not the end of the world either.
More and more consumers are getting into content creation with their fancy new camcorders + dvd burners (think iMac). Video requires huge amounts of CPU *and* bandwidth. Encoding a DVD still takes a long time....
I'm a Java developer as well, and I can never get enough speed. Life's too short to wait for recompiles or application startup. If you're a println() debugger like everyone else I know, you recompile many times a day. Until those compiles are instant, I'm waiting for the computer. Computers won't be fast enough until you never have to wait for the computer to finish anything. Unfortunately that's a long way away....
What would be really great would be AMD getting their chips into more brand-name PC's (i.e. Dell). Even if the AMD chips are better/faster/cheaper, they don't mean squat to the suits who only know the big names like Intel, Dell, and Microsoft. *That* is what will ensure AMD's position in the market.
Also, I'd really love to see the chipmakers work on power consumption, not MHz. I don't care how fast the thing goes, if the cooling fans I need to hook to it sound like an airplane, I'm not interested. This is one area where Motorola has really shined - the G3/G4 chips from the AIM alliance require a few watts, not a few dozen watts like the AMD + Intel behemoths. Say all you want about clockspeed; the 1Ghz G3's from IBM draw 5 watts. That's it. 5. A 1.8Ghz Athlon draws 90 watts - that's 18x as much power for a lot less than 18x speed. Sure, power is cheap. So was gasoline back in the 70's. Look what happened, though - prices went up and suddenly nobody wanted those 400HP Dodge Chargers. Nowadays, we have cars that perform much better than the muscle cars of the 70's with a much smaller power budget. Net result: everything works a little better. Right now I feel like AMD + Intel are the muscle car industry of the 70's. You can always make something go faster by shoving more power into it. There's a lot to be said for elegant design + engineering, though, and in the long run that's where your performance is going to come from. AMD hasn't done a whole lot on that front that impresses me.
Sure. It's not hard to find a drive that will sustain 30MB/second reads. That's 1GB every 33 seconds. A 100GB drive will take 3300 seconds to read; there are 3600 seconds in an hour. So you're looking at about an hour, not weeks. Keep in mind that as capacity goes up, so does information density. That correlates to higher read speeds (more data passes over the read head per time unit), so the total time to read the drive will remain an hour or two, not days/weeks/etc.
While it's been awhile since I've done anything in the 3D world, it seems to me that the slow parts were the drawing itself, not the API calls. As I understand it, what they've created is essentially an adaptor that passes calls from one API (D3D) to another (OpenGL). There will be some places that require a bunch of work, but I'm willing to bet that most of the translation is pretty simple. There might be a 1-5% performance hit with the D3D->OpenGL translation layer, but I wouldn't expect a huge performance gap.
This is similar to what VMWare does for the Win32 API, isn't it? Performance there is a bit slower, but it's perfectly acceptable. As a mac guy, this is absolutely fantastic.
The parent is correct. I used to work for the company he founded. Although I didn't have nearly as much contact with our VC's as he did, I'm convinced that a lot of the bad decisions that hurt the company were pushed down from the VCs. They really are vultures, driven by their desire for a 1000% ROI within the first 2 years of their investment. They don't give a shit about you. Read that again. They don't give a shit about you. They're investors, and they care about their money. That's all.
My experience at the parent poster's organization is a stark contrast to my experience at another employer, which was privately financed from the start. We didn't have the luxury of $5 million in the bank - our revenues had to support us. We didn't get fancy hardware, expensive chairs, catered lunches, or any of the other usual dotcom goodies. Most importantly, we weren't bloated with extra people sucking on our payroll. Instead, we busted our butts with what we had and got by on the bare minimum. We made our own decisions, and at the end of the day the company was sold to another one. VC's didn't get a dime, and the employees were very well compensated.
While it's much more difficult to survive without venture cap funding, it's worth it. You make your own decisions and don't have to kowtow to the whims of VC's - none of whom know your business as well as you do. Take as little funding as possible from the VC's. Dip into your savings, take a bank loan, hit up your friends + family. Don't hit up the VC's. You're the one taking a risk, shouldn't you be the one making the decisions and reaping the rewards?
FYI there's a JBoss book on the way from Sam's. It promises to be pretty useful; you can get more info about it and other JBoss documentation at http://www.jboss.org/doco.jsp
Yes! A good place to start would be a book about Ant, the make replacement originally build for the tomcat servlet engine. Ant is a fantastic tool that's light-years beyond make, but it's still a bit of a mystery to many people. A book that has some nontrivial examples would be fantastic. For example, how do you set up dependencies among projects? It seems easy, but to do it right can be a pain in the butt. Another thing to explore would be autogenerated Ant scripts. There's precious little written about that on the web, but the potential is enormous. I've done some pretty in-depth work with Ant, and it's a fantastic tool - once you figure out what you can do with it.
To back up the parent, fire DOES happen. Once upon a time I worked at a small software company in Waltham. I got a phone call one Sat. morning:
"Hey, did you hear about the fire?"
"No, what fire?"
"The office building burned down last night"
It was a shock, to say the least. Sure enough, a squatter had been evicted from the building, so he got revenge by torching the place. We were one of about a dozen businesses - including the local newspaper and an Armed Forces recruiting center - that was in the building. Almost nothing survived.
We had tape backups of all our servers. Guess what - tapes are made of plastic. Plastic melts. We found a few tapes after the fire was put out, but they're not so useful after they've been torched.
I agree 100%. In other news, TBL didn't use the NeXT platform to develop the WWW because NeXT had virtually no market share, and everyone's favorite game, DOOM, also wasn't developed on the NeXT because it had virtually no market share. I will be updating the history books accordingly.
You mentioned JBuilder, so I'm gonna plug the experiement I did yesterday. I have a heavily-upgraded PowerMac 7600 (pushing 6 years old) that I've installed OS X.1 on. Currently the machine is running a G4/450 accelerator. It's not exactly a speed demon, but it still manages to surprise me on occassion. I use JBuilder every day at work on a 733Mhz Pentium 3/RDRAM with a graphics accelerator. We develop under JDK 1.3, the same version that is included with OS X.
Yesterday I decided to install JBuilder on the powermac to see if it would actually be useful. To my surprise, the JBuilder UI is actually *faster* on my powermac than it is on the Pentium - noticeably so. This is running at the same resolution (1024x768), same bit depth (24-bit) and with anti-aliased fonts in the editor on the powermac. This was using the 'metal' look and feel; the Aqua-native look and feel was, regrettably, slow. Even so, I was pretty amazed. Compiles are slower on the powermac, which didn't surprise me that much, considering the Powermac's high-speed bus (50Mhz, woohoo) and slower disk.
I'm going to be gunning for a new DP Powermac for work. If an upgraded 6 year old machine can keep up with last year's Pentiums, I can't wait to see a DP G4 with fast disks....
Not only is Applescript unbelievably easy to write, it's easy to execute, too - drop an Applescript or three into the "Speakable Items" folder on the Mac, and your Applescripts are suddenly voice commands for your computer. This brings you a long way toward full voice command of your computer, depending on what you need.
"Computer, update website"
(computer executes the 'update website' applescript, which would probably be very similar to the parent post's Applescript"
Since Applescript is easy, powerful, and voice-activated like this, you can do some amazing stuff on the mac with very little effort. It impresses the hell out of other people, too.
(FWIW, the PC emulator VirtualPC is Applescriptable - you can have a LOT of fun with that: imagine the above Applescript, but add the part where the script fires up VirtualPC and loads your webpage in IE for Windows to make sure it looks good on that platform too. All this while you're playing Oni)
Java can be pretty darn quick these days, too. While it's not as fast as hand-tuned assembler yet, the newest JVMs (like Sun's Hotspot JVM) can really fly. Factor in the time it takes to develop in C/C++ and the time it takes to develop in Java, and you'll find that by implementing in Java you have an awful lot of time left over to optimize your code/develop better algorithms, etc. A better algorithm will always beat out a bad algorithm written in a "faster" language on a faster computer.
First off, I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article was, so maybe I'm way off base. In any case:
I've been using Apple computers since 1981, and I've been priveledged to know several employees in the past few years. Apple has never been about world domination or shareholder profits. Apple has been about doing things in a better way. As trite as it may sound, "Think Different" is an excellent description of the company. "Good enough" isn't good enough at Apple, especially under someone like Jobs. The average consumer only cares about "good enough"; that's why they purchase less-expensive Fords instead of BMWs. Apples aren't for everyone, in the same way that luxury cars aren't for everyone.
There have been many, many missteps along the path, but Apple has managed to stumble along for almost 25 years now. Why? They get things right. The iMac wasn't an accident; neither were the original powerbook, the mouse, the black-on-white display, USB, Firewire, the WIMP paradigm, the laser printer, or any number of other innovations. Apple didn't come up with many of these advancements, but they improved on them and pushed them into the mainstream. Even some of Apple's failed endeavours are brilliant - look at the later models of the Newton, or OpenDoc. While it wasn't an Apple product, everything to do with NeXT should be considered as well, for that company was brought about by many of the same people. NeXTStep is *still* one of the most advanced operating systems in the world, and it's what, 10 years old? Had the rest of the world been as advanced as NeXTStep, the WWW would be a much more exciting place - read up on some of the stuff that our buddy Tim was forced to leave out because it couldn't be implemented on other platforms.
That is what Apple is about. Steve Case can have his AOL (I was using AOL before it was AOL - it used to be called "Applelink", and it was a blast to use on my Apple IIGS). Apple doesn't care about being the only player in the market, it cares about being the best. If Apple and the digital hub are ahead of the consumers, so be it. The consumers will catch up. They're starting to already. As today's teenagers enter the workforce, the catching-up process will accelerate. Today's teens aren't afraid of technology, they embrace it. Even those in the middle class have already started to "get it". Look how long the adoption of the DVD player took. Now compare it to the VCR, the television, and the telephone. Apple might be a bit ahead of the curve, but it won't take long for the consumers to catch up.
I don't dare suggest that the Mac will replace Windoze systems anytime soon, but it sure won't go away. Apple's products aren't necessarily for everyone, but there's a damn good reason why the company has such a rabid following.
All good points, but the original is still correct: it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE to get software right. NASA does a pretty good job of it, english-to-metric conversions notwithstanding. About the space shuttle's software:
"...the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors."
It's not that humans can't get software right, it's that we don't choose to get it right. We're too sloppy, as another poster pointed out.
Andy Inhatko wrote a column that's floating around online about how he wired his house with omnidirectional microphones plugged into his mac. He wrote a few Applescripts, downloaded a few more, and now he can control his computer from anywhere in the house.
"Andy, you have new mail"
"Is it important?"
(computer looks up the sender in a list of ppl that Andy has designated as 'important')
"Yes"
"Read it to me"
(computer reads Andy the email)
It's not that hard to do with the Mac's 5 year old speech recognition tools.
While there's a fair amount of setup required and it's not a universal solution (the computer can only respond to predefined queries), it's pretty damn cool. I've set up something similar with my macs, and it's enough to make people say, "whoa".
System 7 on a 10+ year old mac will boot damn fast...like 15 seconds from power on, if that. I don't know how fast it will boot on my G4/7600, but I bet it's faster than XP. (Yup, 7.5/7.6 will run on that box)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about the geeks; it's about the non-geek users. The business people. There's so much bitching and moaning about MS on this board, and then a tool comes along that could help loosen the stranglehold in the corporate world. It's not just an alternative, it's arguably much *better* than what's out there now (Windows). Most people are sheep; they want to use what's comfortable. If it looks + acts like Windows, they'll be comfortable. MS can bluff all they want about piracy, but they know as well as anyone that you can't copyright a look + feel (remember Apple's lawsuit?).
It comes down to marketing....if Lycoris can get a toehold, this could be big.
One of my biggest pet peeves about Linux was that it was always a bear to configure + use. Sure, the command line is useful sometimes - but usually not. KDE + Gnome have come a long way towards putting a decent UI on top of the kernel, and now the user experience is much better. Lycoris goes a step further - there's something to be said for a distro that looks + acts a lot like windows. People who don't know computers (the suits, mostly) are afraid of them. They know Windows, and they're comfortable with it. Give them something that looks + acts like Windows, and they have a much easier time accepting it than something that looks nothing like Windows. While some might complain that it's selling out/pandering to the Windows crowd, I think this distro (if marketed properly) could make some significant inroads into Windoze-land.
The bill isn't going to kill the DSL providers. They're already dead. They were killed because the telcos wanted them to die. The letter of the law says that other companies (Covad) have to have access, but it doesn't say anything about the phone companies making life easy for the DSL companies. That's the real problem - the two were never on an equal footing. This bill won't help that at all, but it's not the end of the world either.
More and more consumers are getting into content creation with their fancy new camcorders + dvd burners (think iMac). Video requires huge amounts of CPU *and* bandwidth. Encoding a DVD still takes a long time....
I'm a Java developer as well, and I can never get enough speed. Life's too short to wait for recompiles or application startup. If you're a println() debugger like everyone else I know, you recompile many times a day. Until those compiles are instant, I'm waiting for the computer. Computers won't be fast enough until you never have to wait for the computer to finish anything. Unfortunately that's a long way away....
What would be really great would be AMD getting their chips into more brand-name PC's (i.e. Dell). Even if the AMD chips are better/faster/cheaper, they don't mean squat to the suits who only know the big names like Intel, Dell, and Microsoft. *That* is what will ensure AMD's position in the market. Also, I'd really love to see the chipmakers work on power consumption, not MHz. I don't care how fast the thing goes, if the cooling fans I need to hook to it sound like an airplane, I'm not interested. This is one area where Motorola has really shined - the G3/G4 chips from the AIM alliance require a few watts, not a few dozen watts like the AMD + Intel behemoths. Say all you want about clockspeed; the 1Ghz G3's from IBM draw 5 watts. That's it. 5. A 1.8Ghz Athlon draws 90 watts - that's 18x as much power for a lot less than 18x speed. Sure, power is cheap. So was gasoline back in the 70's. Look what happened, though - prices went up and suddenly nobody wanted those 400HP Dodge Chargers. Nowadays, we have cars that perform much better than the muscle cars of the 70's with a much smaller power budget. Net result: everything works a little better. Right now I feel like AMD + Intel are the muscle car industry of the 70's. You can always make something go faster by shoving more power into it. There's a lot to be said for elegant design + engineering, though, and in the long run that's where your performance is going to come from. AMD hasn't done a whole lot on that front that impresses me.
no.
I invented pants.
duh.
next question?
Sure. It's not hard to find a drive that will sustain 30MB/second reads. That's 1GB every 33 seconds. A 100GB drive will take 3300 seconds to read; there are 3600 seconds in an hour. So you're looking at about an hour, not weeks. Keep in mind that as capacity goes up, so does information density. That correlates to higher read speeds (more data passes over the read head per time unit), so the total time to read the drive will remain an hour or two, not days/weeks/etc.
oops....I meant WINE, not VMWare. VMWare is emulation, WINE is not emulation (ha, ha).
While it's been awhile since I've done anything in the 3D world, it seems to me that the slow parts were the drawing itself, not the API calls. As I understand it, what they've created is essentially an adaptor that passes calls from one API (D3D) to another (OpenGL). There will be some places that require a bunch of work, but I'm willing to bet that most of the translation is pretty simple. There might be a 1-5% performance hit with the D3D->OpenGL translation layer, but I wouldn't expect a huge performance gap.
This is similar to what VMWare does for the Win32 API, isn't it? Performance there is a bit slower, but it's perfectly acceptable. As a mac guy, this is absolutely fantastic.
The parent is correct. I used to work for the company he founded. Although I didn't have nearly as much contact with our VC's as he did, I'm convinced that a lot of the bad decisions that hurt the company were pushed down from the VCs. They really are vultures, driven by their desire for a 1000% ROI within the first 2 years of their investment. They don't give a shit about you. Read that again. They don't give a shit about you. They're investors, and they care about their money. That's all.
My experience at the parent poster's organization is a stark contrast to my experience at another employer, which was privately financed from the start. We didn't have the luxury of $5 million in the bank - our revenues had to support us. We didn't get fancy hardware, expensive chairs, catered lunches, or any of the other usual dotcom goodies. Most importantly, we weren't bloated with extra people sucking on our payroll. Instead, we busted our butts with what we had and got by on the bare minimum. We made our own decisions, and at the end of the day the company was sold to another one. VC's didn't get a dime, and the employees were very well compensated.
While it's much more difficult to survive without venture cap funding, it's worth it. You make your own decisions and don't have to kowtow to the whims of VC's - none of whom know your business as well as you do. Take as little funding as possible from the VC's. Dip into your savings, take a bank loan, hit up your friends + family. Don't hit up the VC's. You're the one taking a risk, shouldn't you be the one making the decisions and reaping the rewards?
FYI there's a JBoss book on the way from Sam's. It promises to be pretty useful; you can get more info about it and other JBoss documentation at http://www.jboss.org/doco.jsp
Yes! A good place to start would be a book about Ant, the make replacement originally build for the tomcat servlet engine. Ant is a fantastic tool that's light-years beyond make, but it's still a bit of a mystery to many people. A book that has some nontrivial examples would be fantastic. For example, how do you set up dependencies among projects? It seems easy, but to do it right can be a pain in the butt. Another thing to explore would be autogenerated Ant scripts. There's precious little written about that on the web, but the potential is enormous. I've done some pretty in-depth work with Ant, and it's a fantastic tool - once you figure out what you can do with it.
oh hush. Everyone knows BSD is dying, it deosn't matter anyway.
To back up the parent, fire DOES happen. Once upon a time I worked at a small software company in Waltham. I got a phone call one Sat. morning:
"Hey, did you hear about the fire?"
"No, what fire?"
"The office building burned down last night"
It was a shock, to say the least. Sure enough, a squatter had been evicted from the building, so he got revenge by torching the place. We were one of about a dozen businesses - including the local newspaper and an Armed Forces recruiting center - that was in the building. Almost nothing survived.
We had tape backups of all our servers. Guess what - tapes are made of plastic. Plastic melts. We found a few tapes after the fire was put out, but they're not so useful after they've been torched.
Like it or not, fire happens.
I agree 100%. In other news, TBL didn't use the NeXT platform to develop the WWW because NeXT had virtually no market share, and everyone's favorite game, DOOM, also wasn't developed on the NeXT because it had virtually no market share. I will be updating the history books accordingly.
</sarcasm>
Yesterday I decided to install JBuilder on the powermac to see if it would actually be useful. To my surprise, the JBuilder UI is actually *faster* on my powermac than it is on the Pentium - noticeably so. This is running at the same resolution (1024x768), same bit depth (24-bit) and with anti-aliased fonts in the editor on the powermac. This was using the 'metal' look and feel; the Aqua-native look and feel was, regrettably, slow. Even so, I was pretty amazed. Compiles are slower on the powermac, which didn't surprise me that much, considering the Powermac's high-speed bus (50Mhz, woohoo) and slower disk.
I'm going to be gunning for a new DP Powermac for work. If an upgraded 6 year old machine can keep up with last year's Pentiums, I can't wait to see a DP G4 with fast disks....
"Computer, update website" (computer executes the 'update website' applescript, which would probably be very similar to the parent post's Applescript"
Since Applescript is easy, powerful, and voice-activated like this, you can do some amazing stuff on the mac with very little effort. It impresses the hell out of other people, too.
(FWIW, the PC emulator VirtualPC is Applescriptable - you can have a LOT of fun with that: imagine the above Applescript, but add the part where the script fires up VirtualPC and loads your webpage in IE for Windows to make sure it looks good on that platform too. All this while you're playing Oni)
Java can be pretty darn quick these days, too. While it's not as fast as hand-tuned assembler yet, the newest JVMs (like Sun's Hotspot JVM) can really fly. Factor in the time it takes to develop in C/C++ and the time it takes to develop in Java, and you'll find that by implementing in Java you have an awful lot of time left over to optimize your code/develop better algorithms, etc. A better algorithm will always beat out a bad algorithm written in a "faster" language on a faster computer.
First off, I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article was, so maybe I'm way off base. In any case:
I've been using Apple computers since 1981, and I've been priveledged to know several employees in the past few years. Apple has never been about world domination or shareholder profits. Apple has been about doing things in a better way. As trite as it may sound, "Think Different" is an excellent description of the company. "Good enough" isn't good enough at Apple, especially under someone like Jobs. The average consumer only cares about "good enough"; that's why they purchase less-expensive Fords instead of BMWs. Apples aren't for everyone, in the same way that luxury cars aren't for everyone.
There have been many, many missteps along the path, but Apple has managed to stumble along for almost 25 years now. Why? They get things right. The iMac wasn't an accident; neither were the original powerbook, the mouse, the black-on-white display, USB, Firewire, the WIMP paradigm, the laser printer, or any number of other innovations. Apple didn't come up with many of these advancements, but they improved on them and pushed them into the mainstream. Even some of Apple's failed endeavours are brilliant - look at the later models of the Newton, or OpenDoc. While it wasn't an Apple product, everything to do with NeXT should be considered as well, for that company was brought about by many of the same people. NeXTStep is *still* one of the most advanced operating systems in the world, and it's what, 10 years old? Had the rest of the world been as advanced as NeXTStep, the WWW would be a much more exciting place - read up on some of the stuff that our buddy Tim was forced to leave out because it couldn't be implemented on other platforms.
That is what Apple is about. Steve Case can have his AOL (I was using AOL before it was AOL - it used to be called "Applelink", and it was a blast to use on my Apple IIGS). Apple doesn't care about being the only player in the market, it cares about being the best. If Apple and the digital hub are ahead of the consumers, so be it. The consumers will catch up. They're starting to already. As today's teenagers enter the workforce, the catching-up process will accelerate. Today's teens aren't afraid of technology, they embrace it. Even those in the middle class have already started to "get it". Look how long the adoption of the DVD player took. Now compare it to the VCR, the television, and the telephone. Apple might be a bit ahead of the curve, but it won't take long for the consumers to catch up.
I don't dare suggest that the Mac will replace Windoze systems anytime soon, but it sure won't go away. Apple's products aren't necessarily for everyone, but there's a damn good reason why the company has such a rabid following.
</ramble>
(from an article on fastcompany.com)
"...the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors."
It's not that humans can't get software right, it's that we don't choose to get it right. We're too sloppy, as another poster pointed out.
Price, Quality, Time to Market. Choose any 2.
No, the poster is comparing apples with lemons
Andy Inhatko wrote a column that's floating around online about how he wired his house with omnidirectional microphones plugged into his mac. He wrote a few Applescripts, downloaded a few more, and now he can control his computer from anywhere in the house.
"Andy, you have new mail"
"Is it important?"
(computer looks up the sender in a list of ppl that Andy has designated as 'important')
"Yes"
"Read it to me"
(computer reads Andy the email)
It's not that hard to do with the Mac's 5 year old speech recognition tools.
While there's a fair amount of setup required and it's not a universal solution (the computer can only respond to predefined queries), it's pretty damn cool. I've set up something similar with my macs, and it's enough to make people say, "whoa".
System 7 on a 10+ year old mac will boot damn fast...like 15 seconds from power on, if that. I don't know how fast it will boot on my G4/7600, but I bet it's faster than XP. (Yup, 7.5/7.6 will run on that box)