Just to go along with my other comments, the GT tookit (heavily used by KDE apps) makes porting KDE style software to full Aqua apps very easy. As I said, I expect a lot more of that to happen.
Everyone who expects OpenOffice to make its way to full Aqua interface really ought to wonder whether KOffice won't make it first. Porting KOffice would likely be much easier than porting OpenOffice. (Not that I'm saying it will happen, mind you)
I was thinking about it, and it may be that we can expect more KDE elements to make its way to OSX. With the excellent X11 for OSX and the failure of the "Switch" campaign, it may be that Apple thinks getting Linux users to switch might be wise. He can't compete in price/performance at the moment for desktop. However he can't help but notice the raving for OSX at O'Reilly and here at Slashdot of late. Further the laptops are selling quite well amongst Unix users. (A place where Apple can compete better)
Anyway, if I were to make a prediction it is that there will be more cross-pollination between KDE and Apple. (There are several elements in Konquerer and other KDE features that I'd like to see in the Finder)
Wow. You have to hand it to Steve. Great disinformation to make people expect the worst (paid upgrades) and then doesn't do it. Then the rumors that had been around (Chimera browser) are partially right and we get elements of Konquerer in OSX. Also, contrary to rumors, there were new machines building on where Apple is still as strong, if not stronger, than the PC world: the laptop market.
(Remember that laptop CPUs typically don't run as fast as desktop equivalents - especially when on battery. Most OSX laptops are as fast as PC equivalents. So the CPU gap doesn't apply)
I can't wait to download the new iApps (sorry, iLife) as well.
That's a great excuse. But three years? Sounds like there is Dilbert-styled politics going on. I had a friend who worked for Word Perfect just before they went to hell. The work environment totally sounded like Dilbert. I hope that whatever team is doing that at Apple isn't in that kind of situation.
I'd love it if the new Appleworks was an Office killer and used all those cool OSX features. I have my doubts, however. That it is taking this long. . . Even a total rewrite shouldn't be that complex - especially if they are using Cocoa.
Of course the same folks who are doing HDTV styled video feeds are also the ones who need a lot more processing power than the G4 offers.
However when the 970 systems come out in late summer it should be rather good for Apple if they already have FireWire 800. (Is that what they are calling it instead of Firewire 2?) Apple might be posed to regrow into the graphics market if they have a dual 970 system for intense graphics. Hopefully Steve won't drop the ball on this one as my friends tell me a *lot* of former Mac folks are leaving due both to cost and speed.
Rendezvous is one of those technologies that could really give Apple an edge over XP. I believe it is largely opensource though, so at minimum it could be used by Linux/BSD.
The problem that Apple's face over and over again is having some cool technology that internal politics keeps from turning into a real product that is useful. Anyone remember OpenDoc? QuickdrawGX? Apple keeps trying to encourage other companies to use their technologies that differentiate Apple from the crowd. However Apple is typically the worst. Look at Appleworks. It has been nearly 3 years since OSX was at a level you could do a lot of development for. Yet Appleworks is still a horrible rushed Carbon port. And it makes use of none of the cool technologies.
I pointed out Apple's Mail as an excellent example earlier as well. One point I should make. Unlike Bayesian filters that go through your POP server before you do, the fact Apple's is integrated into the Mail client makes all the difference. You can go into the spam folder and if there is a message that isn't spam, you tell the program and it updates the Bayesian tables. If you find one that Mail missed, you just right click and tell it that it is junk mail.
Apple has it set up in a very friendly way. It prompts you initially for mail it thinks is spam. At that point it has preliminary training from Apple plus whatever you give it. At a certain point it figures it is accurate enough and goes off on its own automatically.
As I mentioned, after a little training myself, it has yet to make a mistake. It is amazing what that does to your workflow!
Don't get me wrong. OSX Mail isn't a perfect mail client. It isn't aware of the blockquote HTML tag, for instance. And I hate how it uses a drawer that isn't resizable for its folders. Unlike the old Claris Mail it doesn't have scriptable triggers for certain mail events either. (Of course neither do most mail clients, especially on other platforms) But other than that it really is very, very impressive.
I believe that Apple's spam filter in their default client is Bayesian. I've written a lot of Bayesian and vector space categorizers in my time. Yet I'm still amazed at how well Apple eliminates the spam. Thus far I've not had one mistake. The difference between using my Mac at home and using Outlook on my PC at work is night and day. I have hundreds of pieces of spam that get through Outlook's spam filters. (Rule based I believe)
Maybe Stevie's next announcement is the logical next step in the digital hub: the firewire based TV recorder that also records HDTV and is designed for real high bandwidth video. . .
OK, probably not. But one can always dream.
For practical purposes Firewire is good enough. But it is a place that will put Apple ahead of PCs in terms of hardware, even if it is meaningless as compared to the CPU problem. Realistically the new Firewire won't start to be significant for a few years.
and the company hasn't yet settled on a manufacturer for their as-yet undesigned Insanely Great next chip
It is being manufactured in IBM's plant. The name of the chip is the 970 and is roughly equivalent to the AMD Hammer in performance. (A little less, but reportedly cheaper and with less power) This has been all over the news the last while. I think most people expect systems to start shipping in September and to effectively close the performance gap. Where have you been?
By that logic then should MS not have charged folks running Win95 to upgrade to WinXP?
The point is that the applications and operating system do what they claimed to. Upgrades cost money for almost all programs. Minor revisions Apple gives away for free. Major upgrades (as I expect iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD will be) they charge for.
Other than apparently no longer bundling them, what is Apple doing differently from any other company. Horrors - charging money for upgrades.
[i]The mouse pointers and fonts can be easily fixed if you know what you're doing. [/i]
That has ever been the bane of Linux and is partially why it is such a poor choice for the desktop. Geeks say, "yes, but you can do that by doing. .." and then list off a done of archane processes no regular human would remember or expect to know unless someone told them.
I like Linux and OpenBSD a lot. Use them a fair bit. But lets be honest. Typically installing software, doing updates, and so forth are *difficult*. Further getting things the way you want is as well. The problem is that Geeks who are used to doing that stuff have made fairly difficult things second nature. They are sufficiently used to it that they have a blind spot when it comes to the difficulties involved.
Making a good desktop computer involves much more than a nice windowing system. It means never having to play with a dozen text files listing archane commands. It means not having to buy an O'Reilly book when you want to do something. It means things work in an intuitive, expect fashion. Both Apple and Microsoft realize this.
Linux is powerful. But easy? Ha.
I've not used Lindows, but I halfway wonder what will happen when Grandma wants to run something that requires an upgrade.
How is that better for Apple in the long term? If you are switching to InDesign, then that is one more reason why you can switch to Windows. After all it does run on both systems. If you are going to have to make such a big switch, then why not go for Windows as part of the switch? The problem of fonts and so forth is admittedly an argument against it. However Motorola's dropping the ball on the G5 and the wait for the 970 is an argument for Windows.
Even though I use XP every day, I think that OSX is the best operating system out there. (With admittedly some rough edges, especially in the Finder and Project Builder) However the reasons to switch aren't as strong as Apple needs, mainly due to killer apps and hardware speeds.
As such, didn't BeOS do this quite well many years ago? I'm no BeOS fan, but the file system was one of the very, very nice things about it. (And not the developer is working for Apple and rumors have been going around that many of these sorts of features may end up in OSX in a few years)
I personally think that having more document management features ought to be part of any OS. However the fact of the matter is that such systems have been around quite a long time. Many also have nice hooks to Windows and Outlook that let you do things in a very sophisticated fasion. Most also have very good web integration, allowing you to access your files from many computers or even on the road.
So I must ask what the point of all this is. Sometimes it seems like OpenSource folks rediscover the wheel and want to use it as evidence for how great OpenSource is. I encourage the project. It would be an other reason to adopt KDE if it gets rolled into the main system in a debugged fashion. But to suggest that this is as groundbreaking as some have is silly.
Here's a better paper related to the two above. It goes a little more in depth and gives some of the graphs I vaguely remembered.
http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/npg/8/npg8/357.pdf
Quoting from the conclusion:
While the effects of chaos eventually lead to loss of predictability, this may happen only over long time scales. Exponential-on-average error growth does not necessarily imply rapid error growth. In the short term it is model error which dominates, and which must be considered in any scheme of quality control.
Edward Lorenz' "butterfly effect" analogy is vastly overstated. First off while this effect does happen in certain nonlinear systems, to assume that this is what is going on in the weather everywhere is in lack of a proof. While this may have been true in the models being used at the time, the fact that the models were chaotic doesn't imply that real weather is. I half suspect that the reason the butterfly effect was pushed so much was to explain why all those models condradicted one an other as as much as a real guess about the nature of weather.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to applying chaos theory to weather. And in some situations it probably fits. However most of us who did physics studied lots of systems that stabilized or didn't behave chaotically. Even some chaotic "systems" had a range where they weren't chaotic. (Using the term system and range or starting point loosely)
I don't have the article handy, but New Scientist had an article a few months ago that compared the predictions of nonlinear behavior with measurement of how the weather corresponded to models. The article strongly argued that the problem was poor models and not chaos. The following is a similar paper.
It's very nice to say that some problems are in principle "unknowable." However, as I said, that is sometimes a crutch of late in science. Hard isn't undoable.
It has really hurt Apple though, which in turn affects many other things. A lot of people think that the two things holding Apple back from large increases in market share were no Quark for OSX (and a crappy version 5) and then Motorola's falling down on the G5. (Which, now that Motorola cancelled it, would get a vote from me for vaporware - however the cancelation sort of neglegates a true "vapor" label)
Here's hoping IBM delivers the 970 soon and that Quark won't release something as bad as I think they will. Not because I'll use Quark, but I know how the "trickle down" effect works. By the same reasoning I didn't own Global Crossing or Enron stock, but their screw ups affected me nonetheless.
While Halo changed platforms, most of the code remained the same. I believe it was more the low level stuff that needed modified or optimized for the XBox that was different. But that isnt't *that* big a deal. (Or shouldn't be, depending on what MS' tools are like)
Speaking of which, the Mac "port" is supposed to be out shortly. I have an XBox I do most of my gaming on though. And Halo2 is definitely coming out soon. Still, it is cool.
That card is way cool. Almost cool enough to make me save up for a cheap Athalon system in addition to my PowerMac.
Let me tell you. This is the [b]real[/b] reason HDTV never caught on. (1) a lack of software and (2) a lack of VCR like functions. Once these HDTV recording cards start hitting the market in mass I will predict HDTV will start catching on.
Once again the fact Hollywood wouldn't embrace the technology means that they are late comers and don't get to put their greedy hands on how it all works.
While that is true in the desktop, the situation on laptops is more complex as the chips don't typically run at full speed and sometimes shift speeds. I've gotten quite frustrated with my old laptop over those issues. I *know* it should be faster than it is, but it lags significantly as compared to a similar speed desktop.
The G3 and G4 are very low power, rendering some of the heat and power considerations to change. While I've not used any Apple laptops, I understand that they are much, much more speed competitive with equivalent PC laptops.
So privacy = expectation of privacy? Are you *sure* thats how you want to define things? i.e. two people having sex in their car on a public stree. They expect it is private. They get a ticket from the cops. Who is right?
That's rather the point. You aren't paying the city to securely remove it. If you want someone to securely remove it you should hire a company that does that. It will entail it being kept on your property and then transfers possession of it as property to the company in question who has a legal duty to keep it secure. If you have things you don't even want to trust to an other company you should destroy it yourself.
If you abandon anything (and that is what garbage is) then you should be surprised when someone uses it. What right do you have to tell people what to do with things that are no longer your property?
The issue isn't your privacy. The issue is that you put things in public that you didn't want public but were too lazy to do anthing about it.
E&M radiation from your house is different because it is from your property and hasn't been abandoned. i.e. the E&M radiation tells about things going on in your house in a manner different from abandoned garbage.
As a few others mentioned, moving between lossy compression formats is generally a *bad* idea.
Can the iPod easily be upgraded to play OGG files? I know that most of the software is on the hard drive. So in theory it ought to. I assume everyone has sent Apple feedback on this issue.
Fairly good rumor has it that the next iPod will have a good color screen. I admit that I'm not sure how useful it would be to have the iPod acting like a TV. What would you use it for? However I know that some of the iPod competitors have this.
Personally I'd rather have a mic jack on it over either Ogg play or a color screen. But that's me. . .
Lets see, so Apple will let you theme your case but not let you theme your desktop. . .
Is it just me or is something wrong here?
(And yes I know there are hacks to theme OSX, but Apple dislikes them and they tend not to work that well)
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone who expects OpenOffice to make its way to full Aqua interface really ought to wonder whether KOffice won't make it first. Porting KOffice would likely be much easier than porting OpenOffice. (Not that I'm saying it will happen, mind you)
Anyway, if I were to make a prediction it is that there will be more cross-pollination between KDE and Apple. (There are several elements in Konquerer and other KDE features that I'd like to see in the Finder)
(Remember that laptop CPUs typically don't run as fast as desktop equivalents - especially when on battery. Most OSX laptops are as fast as PC equivalents. So the CPU gap doesn't apply)
I can't wait to download the new iApps (sorry, iLife) as well.
I'd love it if the new Appleworks was an Office killer and used all those cool OSX features. I have my doubts, however. That it is taking this long. . . Even a total rewrite shouldn't be that complex - especially if they are using Cocoa.
However when the 970 systems come out in late summer it should be rather good for Apple if they already have FireWire 800. (Is that what they are calling it instead of Firewire 2?) Apple might be posed to regrow into the graphics market if they have a dual 970 system for intense graphics. Hopefully Steve won't drop the ball on this one as my friends tell me a *lot* of former Mac folks are leaving due both to cost and speed.
The problem that Apple's face over and over again is having some cool technology that internal politics keeps from turning into a real product that is useful. Anyone remember OpenDoc? QuickdrawGX? Apple keeps trying to encourage other companies to use their technologies that differentiate Apple from the crowd. However Apple is typically the worst. Look at Appleworks. It has been nearly 3 years since OSX was at a level you could do a lot of development for. Yet Appleworks is still a horrible rushed Carbon port. And it makes use of none of the cool technologies.
Apple has it set up in a very friendly way. It prompts you initially for mail it thinks is spam. At that point it has preliminary training from Apple plus whatever you give it. At a certain point it figures it is accurate enough and goes off on its own automatically.
As I mentioned, after a little training myself, it has yet to make a mistake. It is amazing what that does to your workflow!
Don't get me wrong. OSX Mail isn't a perfect mail client. It isn't aware of the blockquote HTML tag, for instance. And I hate how it uses a drawer that isn't resizable for its folders. Unlike the old Claris Mail it doesn't have scriptable triggers for certain mail events either. (Of course neither do most mail clients, especially on other platforms) But other than that it really is very, very impressive.
I believe that Apple's spam filter in their default client is Bayesian. I've written a lot of Bayesian and vector space categorizers in my time. Yet I'm still amazed at how well Apple eliminates the spam. Thus far I've not had one mistake. The difference between using my Mac at home and using Outlook on my PC at work is night and day. I have hundreds of pieces of spam that get through Outlook's spam filters. (Rule based I believe)
OK, probably not. But one can always dream.
For practical purposes Firewire is good enough. But it is a place that will put Apple ahead of PCs in terms of hardware, even if it is meaningless as compared to the CPU problem. Realistically the new Firewire won't start to be significant for a few years.
It is being manufactured in IBM's plant. The name of the chip is the 970 and is roughly equivalent to the AMD Hammer in performance. (A little less, but reportedly cheaper and with less power) This has been all over the news the last while. I think most people expect systems to start shipping in September and to effectively close the performance gap. Where have you been?
The point is that the applications and operating system do what they claimed to. Upgrades cost money for almost all programs. Minor revisions Apple gives away for free. Major upgrades (as I expect iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD will be) they charge for.
Other than apparently no longer bundling them, what is Apple doing differently from any other company. Horrors - charging money for upgrades.
That has ever been the bane of Linux and is partially why it is such a poor choice for the desktop. Geeks say, "yes, but you can do that by doing. . ." and then list off a done of archane processes no regular human would remember or expect to know unless someone told them.
I like Linux and OpenBSD a lot. Use them a fair bit. But lets be honest. Typically installing software, doing updates, and so forth are *difficult*. Further getting things the way you want is as well. The problem is that Geeks who are used to doing that stuff have made fairly difficult things second nature. They are sufficiently used to it that they have a blind spot when it comes to the difficulties involved.
Making a good desktop computer involves much more than a nice windowing system. It means never having to play with a dozen text files listing archane commands. It means not having to buy an O'Reilly book when you want to do something. It means things work in an intuitive, expect fashion. Both Apple and Microsoft realize this.
Linux is powerful. But easy? Ha.
I've not used Lindows, but I halfway wonder what will happen when Grandma wants to run something that requires an upgrade.
Even though I use XP every day, I think that OSX is the best operating system out there. (With admittedly some rough edges, especially in the Finder and Project Builder) However the reasons to switch aren't as strong as Apple needs, mainly due to killer apps and hardware speeds.
I personally think that having more document management features ought to be part of any OS. However the fact of the matter is that such systems have been around quite a long time. Many also have nice hooks to Windows and Outlook that let you do things in a very sophisticated fasion. Most also have very good web integration, allowing you to access your files from many computers or even on the road.
So I must ask what the point of all this is. Sometimes it seems like OpenSource folks rediscover the wheel and want to use it as evidence for how great OpenSource is. I encourage the project. It would be an other reason to adopt KDE if it gets rolled into the main system in a debugged fashion. But to suggest that this is as groundbreaking as some have is silly.
http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/npg/8/npg8/357.pdf Quoting from the conclusion: While the effects of chaos eventually lead to loss of predictability, this may happen only over long time scales. Exponential-on-average error growth does not necessarily imply rapid error growth. In the short term it is model error which dominates, and which must be considered in any scheme of quality control.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to applying chaos theory to weather. And in some situations it probably fits. However most of us who did physics studied lots of systems that stabilized or didn't behave chaotically. Even some chaotic "systems" had a range where they weren't chaotic. (Using the term system and range or starting point loosely)
I don't have the article handy, but New Scientist had an article a few months ago that compared the predictions of nonlinear behavior with measurement of how the weather corresponded to models. The article strongly argued that the problem was poor models and not chaos. The following is a similar paper.
It's very nice to say that some problems are in principle "unknowable." However, as I said, that is sometimes a crutch of late in science. Hard isn't undoable.
Here's hoping IBM delivers the 970 soon and that Quark won't release something as bad as I think they will. Not because I'll use Quark, but I know how the "trickle down" effect works. By the same reasoning I didn't own Global Crossing or Enron stock, but their screw ups affected me nonetheless.
Speaking of which, the Mac "port" is supposed to be out shortly. I have an XBox I do most of my gaming on though. And Halo2 is definitely coming out soon. Still, it is cool.
And being less believable than macrumors is really accomplishing something!
That card is way cool. Almost cool enough to make me save up for a cheap Athalon system in addition to my PowerMac. Let me tell you. This is the [b]real[/b] reason HDTV never caught on. (1) a lack of software and (2) a lack of VCR like functions. Once these HDTV recording cards start hitting the market in mass I will predict HDTV will start catching on. Once again the fact Hollywood wouldn't embrace the technology means that they are late comers and don't get to put their greedy hands on how it all works.
The G3 and G4 are very low power, rendering some of the heat and power considerations to change. While I've not used any Apple laptops, I understand that they are much, much more speed competitive with equivalent PC laptops.
So privacy = expectation of privacy? Are you *sure* thats how you want to define things? i.e. two people having sex in their car on a public stree. They expect it is private. They get a ticket from the cops. Who is right?
If you abandon anything (and that is what garbage is) then you should be surprised when someone uses it. What right do you have to tell people what to do with things that are no longer your property?
The issue isn't your privacy. The issue is that you put things in public that you didn't want public but were too lazy to do anthing about it.
E&M radiation from your house is different because it is from your property and hasn't been abandoned. i.e. the E&M radiation tells about things going on in your house in a manner different from abandoned garbage.
Can the iPod easily be upgraded to play OGG files? I know that most of the software is on the hard drive. So in theory it ought to. I assume everyone has sent Apple feedback on this issue.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
Fairly good rumor has it that the next iPod will have a good color screen. I admit that I'm not sure how useful it would be to have the iPod acting like a TV. What would you use it for? However I know that some of the iPod competitors have this.
Personally I'd rather have a mic jack on it over either Ogg play or a color screen. But that's me. . .
Lets see, so Apple will let you theme your case but not let you theme your desktop. . . Is it just me or is something wrong here? (And yes I know there are hacks to theme OSX, but Apple dislikes them and they tend not to work that well)