Actually, the majority of the images you see when zoomed in on Google Earth and Google Maps, as well as Microsoft Virtual Earth, are from aeriel photography. i.e. taken from planes. Check with Google if you don't believe me.
Commercially available satellite imagery does not have the resolution to show you a photo of your house from orbit. Images used by the 'intelligence' communitity and the military have higher resolution, but not at the magnification that they'd like you to think they have.
Why not start a campaign to get NBC to reinstate, or continue, to sell their programs through iTunes?
I'd much rather have them via iTunes at a high resolution (come on... at least DVD quality please!) than have to risk getting busted downloading it via Bittorrent.
If NBC get enough of a response from their customers/the public then they're likely to re-evaluate their current stance.
The New Zealand Government is going to save a bucket load of cash by using Neo Office instead of Microsoft Office. Plus they've got peace of mind that not going to get stung for going over their licences or be reported for piracy, etc.
Why not donate a significant amount to the Neo Office project each year to encourage development and/or place a bounty on features that they'd like to see included or fixed.
If every district/county/state/country did something like that we'd have the best of breed open source software in the world available for everyone to use for free.
Even though some software is free as is beer, the reason for this is so that it can truely be free as in freedom. Free as in beer doesn't stop you contributing back whatever you can to benefit everyone.
I'm no tree-hugging GPL/GNU beardy freak, but I do appriecate the efforts these guys have made for the Mac Platform and have been thinking about donating myself - even though I only downloaded and used it once to open a single document.
Let's face it, the fact the Google is great for finding things online is where they started out, but it's not what they're in business for. The business is to sell advertising space. Pure and simple. All other services they provide are to maintain brand loyalty and keep you using their website.
Google is a glorified advertising business.
Wikipedia is in it for the information. They want to share knowledge by leaveraging the power of the masses.If the billions of people who are online visit and read Wikipedia and find something that is missing or wrong they can edit or add to it.
If the billions of people who use Google continue to use Google they use make Google more money, whilst hopefully finding what they were looking for (as long as they're not in a country with censored results searching for sensitive keywords).
How long is it going to be before Google and other companies like them are forced to turn over search records for the population to governments on a regular basis. Just think, merely searching for 'falun gong' (or whatever it's called) in China could get you locked up if they can match the IP, time and date with a person. Google have been forced to hand over search data by the USA for anti-terror purposes.
They did this with a third party wi-fi card and third party drives. MacBooks do not ship with these cards . Apple do not sell these cards. The MacBook "Airport" wi-fi is not open to this attack. This is completely bogus. Just a cheap way for them to get attention saying that they've "Hacked the MacBook" Whoop-de-doo. No story here.
In other news, America's security open to attack with thousands of illegal immigrants cross the borders every day.
I can't understand why it's illegal to gamble. Everyone likes a flutter every now and again. It doesn't harm people. Admitidly there are a few sad cases of people who don't know when to stop. With the underground gambling that goes on the scene can be very ugly. If it was all above board and legal it could be properly regulated.
Is this a hold over from Americas purtianical past? If enough people feel something should be legal why isn't it? Why crimialise the majority of adult males who have bet online, played card games with their pals or participated in a sports related bet at one time or another?
I am constantly surprised that there is no real policitical will for gambling to be made legal in the USA. One thing I can tell you is that the businesses in Las Vegas definately don't want it legal everywhere else because it would remove their own (near) exclusive money making operation.
I'm not sure I agree with your comment.
Much of the Quartz display model is based on PDF. This is an outgrowth of NeXTSTEP (the forerunner of OS X) using 'Display Postscript' for it's display, from what I understand Quartz's similarity to PDF allowed Apple to implement PDF as a first class citizen on the Mac.
Being able to convert ODF, which does contain formatting information along with content, to Quartz layout information would be very similar to converting it to PDF. So in effect you're accusing me of saying converting a ODF document to PDF is nonsense. Am I right?
Apple relies upon Microsoft making Mac software enormously, at least at present. The presence of Mac Office in the market place is a boon for Apple. One of the probable reasons for the current lack of a Spreadsheet in the iWork suite (which only includes Pages & Keynote) is an agreement between Microsoft and Apple.
OpenOffice.org also does not run natively on Mac OS X. There is a clunky X11 version which is slow and horrible. I've heard of Koffice running on OS X but not seen it working myself.
So, with no native applications using ODF on the Mac it's not surprising that Apple aren't a current supporter. I agree that AppleWorks and iWork should add on support for it in the future. I would be great to see an ODF framework released for the Mac that can translate between PDF/Quartz and ODF that would allow documents to be saved in and imported via ODF easliy for all applications in the future. This would be a huge boon for OS X, just like native support for PDF was to me when OS X was first released.
Sorry to say this was on Digg last week which is why i thought it was either a dupe or old news. The display is a rear projection - not part of the input device. All looks very nice and the recent Apple patent s do appear to be based on this work, at least in part.
I know that the cost of production is low when they make millions of each item, but that all adds up. Also, if they make millions of a DVD that's a dud then they're lumbered with them and have to dispose of them. They're eliminating risk, which should have a cost value attached. Also, if a DVD is unexpectidly very popular they sell out of them and have to have more copies rushed to the stores at a higher duplication cost to avoid waiting in a queue. Also, they reduce warehouse costs, fuel for distribution and manpower. Big costs all around when added up.
I should point out that in any sales environment it's the retail end that makes the biggest cut of the profit. By selling direct they're making a hell of a lot more by removing the retailler from the chain even if they sell the film at half of the price of a DVD - which they should be in my opinion.
As for the bandwidth costs, if you're going to use a Bittorrent style model you should factor in a method of rewarding those users who upload your content to other peers in the form of credits or discounts for free films or merchandise. I'd say that's a no brainer to make this model work.
The reason that people turned to P2P in the real world wasn't that the technology was 'cool', it's because you can get stuff for free - without paying and it doens't matter what quality it is because it was free.
Are these companies stupid? Do they think we're stupid? Why ask us to pay the same price, or similar to a store purchased DVD when there's no manufacturing, packaging or physical distribution to pay for? If anything an electronic copy of a movie or song should cost less to the consumer - much less.
I can understand people paying a similar amount for a 'premium item' like a just aired TV show or something that is similar to pay-per-view like a sports game. But, expecting people to pay full price for something that comes without the same quality of packaging as a movie that can be bought in a store is rediculous.
And to top it off they're using a Bittorrent style system where their customers are the ones paying for the bandwidth! If I upload your show to another customer for you it comes out of my quota of data from my ISP for the month and costs you nothing! What's in it for me huh?
These outfits really need to figure out that an electronic product should be *LESS* not that same price or more!
Don't forget these movies are likely to be compressed to a lower quality than a regular DVD as well.
I fall into the 5% who don't use a PC:-) The only IBM part in the computer i used to type my post was the PPC970 (aka G5) CPU thank you very much.
I've worked in the field of arcade games for some time and know that when someone tries to release a pacman game with pacman style graphics, sound and gameplay with a similar sounding name they can get sued by Namco for passing off, copyright infringement, etc. The fact that some people get away with it - or even down right steal the ROM's and use MAME doesn't make it legal.
I'm pretty sure that reverse engineering a cloe of the IBM BIOS as you mention is different from copying the 'look and feel' of a game - at least in some countries. I don't think that a patent is required to protect the idea entirely, although they'd probably have got one in the USA anyway if they'd bothered at the time (funny how things change).
I managed to visit his site - it was/.'d earlier. To my total lack of surprise the web developer who is the supposed victim in this is also passing off his own version of Pacman under the Pacman name - which also belongs to Namco.
How about he sends any money he gets from Fuddruckers to Namco eh? Not something I think that the slashdot crowd would like, but if you're going to defend someones rights then you need to defend all legal rights and he is currently infringing Namco's from what I can see. No I don't work for Namco and I can see he's not charging for the games. Trademarks aren't like novel, movie & song names - they are protected names under iternational law. As it stands if he created a game just like Pacman or just like Burgertime and gave them similar sounding names he'd be liable for 'passing off' at least.
In this world of open source clones of virtually everything I think I need to be very careful getting this point across to the slashdot crowd. Years ago I argued on this site (possibly under a different nic) that creating a clone of a commercial program as an open source implementation was wrong because it would devalue the hard work by the original creators who were only trying to make a living. At least invest some of your own originality into a project.
Guess I'm slowly turning into a troll... i'll go now.
I'm sorry to say that the game that the Flash developer created is based upon a copyrighted arcade game (by Namco I think). He has not credited the owner of the copyright nor asked permission to make his own re-creation of their game. He even used the exact same name. If he wants to be so righteous about it he can first either get permission or remove the game from the web.
The same would go for a Tetris or Pacman 'clone. Sorry to say that many of the games that we all think of as generic were designed and programmed by someone and they own it.
As for his actions simply denying access and popping up a message saying that the content is unauthorised due to hot-linking policies asking Fuddruckers to contact him would have been a lot more productive. Was he within his rights to do what he did - yes. Was it a professional thing to do - no. As it stands he is either immature or looking for publicity.
Carmack came out against the current crop of PowerPC CPU's to be used in the X360 and PS3 that are very different from the CPU's that Apple have been using in their PowerPC based computers. The PPC's in the consoles do not support out of order execution and a raft of other features. IBM have designed simpler cores that are being packaged on multi-core chips that can be run quicker and in parallel.
Carmack has plenty to bash Apple for in regard to their OpenGL implementation I'm sure - just browse the Apple developers OpenGL mailing list sometime.
but, it's all because of poor programming on legacy embedded code in various weapons systems left over from the cold war. every time the leap second occurs the men in the bunkers think that something somewhere is going to trigger. plus, don't forget some of the crap they put in orbit that we don't know about. this is just a cheap way of not having to service assets in space that we can no longer reach easily whilst the shuttles are grounded - and that includes the military birds too.
i'm joking/speculating/revealing the truth (delete as applicable)
Re:apple need to bump up the entry level spec
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 1
Fair enough, you have a good point, that some people such as yourself do not need the extras i mentioned and do not want to have to pay for them. One of the points of my post was that if apple made at least some of these parts user installable or replacable on the Mac mini it wouldn't be such a big deal, because you could upgrade later. That, sadly, isn't the case with the Mac mini. Secondly, if Apple bumped up the low-end spec across the board it wouldn't need to cost the end users much more at all because of economies of scale.
A problem I have with this is most of the options are items that are standard on most other machines and when you are offered options they are much higher spec - such as *really good* video cards, *huge amounts of ram* (that don't cost twice as much as you'd pay elsewhere like apple's do), etc.
Apple gouge their customers for many items that they can not add themselves later. On a PC you can opt for an external DVD writer latter without any drawbacks. On the Mac if you don't have an Apple SuperDrive you don't enjoy the benefits of iDVD, etc. (unless you install unsupported 3rd party hacks). Apple won't even upgrade your drive to a superdrive if your combo breaks. All other Mac's allow you to add a airport card when you come to need it, the Mac mini doesn't at all.
In addition to my previous post I'd like to try to gett across another less indentified reason why I think Mac's are not being used by more businesses - the lack of expandability and re-configurability of their machines. You can replace the bits that break, but never upgrade them (apart from HDD and RAM). You can't walk into a store and buy a replacement part - you need to go to a particular dealer and have them install it or send your machine off to Apple. I've had a friend need to send his iBook off to have one of the feet replaced - and he's an engineer - they wouldn't send it to him! Once your applecare runs out your machine is basically uneconomical to repair (even after you've bought the 3 year extended option). With a PC you could put in a new mobo and CPU replug in your video and other cards, ram (maybe) and hdd and be good to go. If you're mobo died you'd have plenty of places to go to get a new one with very little down time - not so with a mac.
Don't forget I'm a fanboi - I'm typing this on my 17" powerbook which is my main machine - that I really think is an excellent machine. It's just over a year old and is only very slightly slower than the latest model - which is just wrong! The resolution on Powerbooks is not as high as the top PC laptops (1440x900 at 17" - I want and *need* more!) and the resolution on iBooks (at the moment- pending the new ones apparently) is just appalling for a modern machine.
Sorry to vent all of this out here. Apple make great machines, great software and have excellent ideas.... I just want to see more progress getting much higher specs on the new machines (not just then Intel CPU) and more easily available (and cheaper!) upgrades and parts.
apple need to bump up the entry level spec
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
OK, so i'm an apple fanboi, but one with some perspective i'd like to think. But, I'm fed up with Apple advertising machines with too little RAM as standard, combo drives instead of SuperDrives as standard, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth as extras, etc. I know it reduces the sticker price for their advertising, but once you add on these extras, which lets face it are pretty much standard on most portables these days, the price is a hell of a lot higher - almost double when looking at the Mac mini.
Apple should be pushing the minimal spec upwards, not stripping everything off so that it can get it's headlines saying *Mac's are now affordable*
The kind of people who are prepared to put down the cash for a Mac are prepared to pay that bit extra, but walking into a store thinking you're going to spend £350 to get a machine that does everything you've heard about and find out that it's actually closer to £500 or £600 (can't be arsed to check the exact prices atm), is disappointing. It makes me think of Dell and other company's tactics. If you know from the start you're looking at almost double that then you can budget for it easier.
I took a friend and their kids to the Apple store and they came out wanting a Mac mini because they thought that it was under £350. Once I'd factored in the SuperDrive (for making DVD's), Airport (for using it in the bedroom upstairs) - because you can't fit it yourself and bluetooth because if you're having the Airport installed you might as well and all kids these days have Bluetooth capable phones and some extra RAM as 256 Mb just isn't enough, it was a *LOT* more. I opted for a good 3rd party TFT display from elsewhere (19" TFT for £179), as Apple seem to think that plonking down £550 for their entry level display is fine for everyone. I'm glad that they reduced the price of the keyboards after the mini came out. I had to buy one for my Powerbook for nearly £50, now they're about £20 i think.
So, to wrap up my rant, up the minimum spec and put the price up *a bit* to make up for it. removing the need for build to order for simple and very popular options should have some benefits of scale to reduce the need to gouge everyone for a bit a ram, a modern optical drive and some wireless comms, or at least make it easier for people to actally install or swap out these components like most PC vendors do.
I believe that Apple are using Music videos as a catalyst to start their video service off. They already have good relations with the recording companies due to the success of the iTMS. Music videos are virtually advertisements for their product.
Watching the latest movies on a portable device is not where the market will be at, unless you can plug it into your TV, Plasma/TFT or Projector. The market will be with TV shows and Video-Podcasts.
Music videos are simply a way of getting the ball running.
I agree with you. However, Slashdot is not the best forum for your request. There is an option in iTunes for sending feedback to Apple. Please by all means use it. I have sent several requests and much feedback to Apple this way, including asking for iPod playback of FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.
I agree with the comment 'more is less' and the reverse 'less is more' when it comes to PDA's. After playing with a Linux based PDA I could see the attraction of being able to port stuff over from the desktop, but it didn't ever seem to fit into the form factor if you know what I mean. I was thinking of a cut down Darwin similar to PicoBSD or something. As long as the interface looks as pretty as OS X and is smooth and responsive then I don't care (well I do, but you know what I mean).
I've used both PocketPC (or WinCE as it was) and Palm. Both have their problems. just a few of them pointed out by the article. What I really want is a brand new Newton from Apple. The original Newtons were lightyears ahead of their time and can still hold their own today. I think the problem with the Newton was everyone concentrated on the handwriting recognition, easy to understand it was the only machine of it's type available and the handwriting interface was the primary method for inputting information. But if you look at how people use PDA's these days it's mainly for brief notetaking and looking up info, not writing esays on. Another problem with the original Newton's was the size of the thing, now they'd be able to make a smaller model with a higher resolution screen and more compact battery more easily (not saying that I wouldn't be up for a sub-notebook sized Newton that doesn't fit in my pocket for reading off as well or instead of the pocket sized one - hell make both!).
Apple could easily steal the entire PDA market from Palm and the PocketPC folks by bringing out a decent colour version of the NewtonOS on modern hardware that plays videos, works with a digital camera and works like an iPod. Just use the same principles as OS X design.... shiney, easy to use, comes with InkWell already and a Darwin/BSD/Unix/whatever core underneath (hey aren't Palm working on a Linux underneath PalmOS machine???). Especailly with them getting into bed with Intel recently, it could use the XScale.
I've downloaded the Einstein Newton emulator but sadly can't use it as I'm missing the NewtonOS ROM, I don't have a Newton to copy it from:-( I used a friends Newton for a short time and loved it. If anyone has the ROM...... you know what to do. testrobotSPAMSPAMSPAM@gmail.com
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the majority of the images you see when zoomed in on Google Earth and Google Maps, as well as Microsoft Virtual Earth, are from aeriel photography. i.e. taken from planes. Check with Google if you don't believe me.
Commercially available satellite imagery does not have the resolution to show you a photo of your house from orbit. Images used by the 'intelligence' communitity and the military have higher resolution, but not at the magnification that they'd like you to think they have.
Why not start a campaign to get NBC to reinstate, or continue, to sell their programs through iTunes?
I'd much rather have them via iTunes at a high resolution (come on... at least DVD quality please!) than have to risk getting busted downloading it via Bittorrent.
If NBC get enough of a response from their customers/the public then they're likely to re-evaluate their current stance.
The New Zealand Government is going to save a bucket load of cash by using Neo Office instead of Microsoft Office. Plus they've got peace of mind that not going to get stung for going over their licences or be reported for piracy, etc.
Why not donate a significant amount to the Neo Office project each year to encourage development and/or place a bounty on features that they'd like to see included or fixed.
If every district/county/state/country did something like that we'd have the best of breed open source software in the world available for everyone to use for free.
Even though some software is free as is beer, the reason for this is so that it can truely be free as in freedom. Free as in beer doesn't stop you contributing back whatever you can to benefit everyone.
I'm no tree-hugging GPL/GNU beardy freak, but I do appriecate the efforts these guys have made for the Mac Platform and have been thinking about donating myself - even though I only downloaded and used it once to open a single document.
Let's face it, the fact the Google is great for finding things online is where they started out, but it's not what they're in business for. The business is to sell advertising space. Pure and simple. All other services they provide are to maintain brand loyalty and keep you using their website.
Google is a glorified advertising business.
Wikipedia is in it for the information. They want to share knowledge by leaveraging the power of the masses.If the billions of people who are online visit and read Wikipedia and find something that is missing or wrong they can edit or add to it.
If the billions of people who use Google continue to use Google they use make Google more money, whilst hopefully finding what they were looking for (as long as they're not in a country with censored results searching for sensitive keywords).
How long is it going to be before Google and other companies like them are forced to turn over search records for the population to governments on a regular basis. Just think, merely searching for 'falun gong' (or whatever it's called) in China could get you locked up if they can match the IP, time and date with a person. Google have been forced to hand over search data by the USA for anti-terror purposes.
They did this with a third party wi-fi card and third party drives. MacBooks do not ship with these cards . Apple do not sell these cards. The MacBook "Airport" wi-fi is not open to this attack. This is completely bogus. Just a cheap way for them to get attention saying that they've "Hacked the MacBook" Whoop-de-doo. No story here.
In other news, America's security open to attack with thousands of illegal immigrants cross the borders every day.
I can't understand why it's illegal to gamble. Everyone likes a flutter every now and again. It doesn't harm people. Admitidly there are a few sad cases of people who don't know when to stop. With the underground gambling that goes on the scene can be very ugly. If it was all above board and legal it could be properly regulated.
Is this a hold over from Americas purtianical past? If enough people feel something should be legal why isn't it? Why crimialise the majority of adult males who have bet online, played card games with their pals or participated in a sports related bet at one time or another?
I am constantly surprised that there is no real policitical will for gambling to be made legal in the USA. One thing I can tell you is that the businesses in Las Vegas definately don't want it legal everywhere else because it would remove their own (near) exclusive money making operation.
What about the "Print as PDF" feature that is native in Mac OS X?
Much of Mac OS Xs' display technology (Quartz) is based upon PDF which grew out of "Display Postscript" on NeXTstep & Openstep.
There won't be a Microsoft of Linux until Microsoft decide to release a Linux distribution of their own, which is extremely unlikely to happen. Ever.
I'm not sure I agree with your comment. Much of the Quartz display model is based on PDF. This is an outgrowth of NeXTSTEP (the forerunner of OS X) using 'Display Postscript' for it's display, from what I understand Quartz's similarity to PDF allowed Apple to implement PDF as a first class citizen on the Mac. Being able to convert ODF, which does contain formatting information along with content, to Quartz layout information would be very similar to converting it to PDF. So in effect you're accusing me of saying converting a ODF document to PDF is nonsense. Am I right?
Apple relies upon Microsoft making Mac software enormously, at least at present. The presence of Mac Office in the market place is a boon for Apple. One of the probable reasons for the current lack of a Spreadsheet in the iWork suite (which only includes Pages & Keynote) is an agreement between Microsoft and Apple.
OpenOffice.org also does not run natively on Mac OS X. There is a clunky X11 version which is slow and horrible. I've heard of Koffice running on OS X but not seen it working myself.
So, with no native applications using ODF on the Mac it's not surprising that Apple aren't a current supporter. I agree that AppleWorks and iWork should add on support for it in the future. I would be great to see an ODF framework released for the Mac that can translate between PDF/Quartz and ODF that would allow documents to be saved in and imported via ODF easliy for all applications in the future. This would be a huge boon for OS X, just like native support for PDF was to me when OS X was first released.
Sorry to say this was on Digg last week which is why i thought it was either a dupe or old news. The display is a rear projection - not part of the input device. All looks very nice and the recent Apple patent s do appear to be based on this work, at least in part.
I know that the cost of production is low when they make millions of each item, but that all adds up. Also, if they make millions of a DVD that's a dud then they're lumbered with them and have to dispose of them. They're eliminating risk, which should have a cost value attached. Also, if a DVD is unexpectidly very popular they sell out of them and have to have more copies rushed to the stores at a higher duplication cost to avoid waiting in a queue. Also, they reduce warehouse costs, fuel for distribution and manpower. Big costs all around when added up.
I should point out that in any sales environment it's the retail end that makes the biggest cut of the profit. By selling direct they're making a hell of a lot more by removing the retailler from the chain even if they sell the film at half of the price of a DVD - which they should be in my opinion.
As for the bandwidth costs, if you're going to use a Bittorrent style model you should factor in a method of rewarding those users who upload your content to other peers in the form of credits or discounts for free films or merchandise. I'd say that's a no brainer to make this model work.
The reason that people turned to P2P in the real world wasn't that the technology was 'cool', it's because you can get stuff for free - without paying and it doens't matter what quality it is because it was free.
Are these companies stupid? Do they think we're stupid? Why ask us to pay the same price, or similar to a store purchased DVD when there's no manufacturing, packaging or physical distribution to pay for? If anything an electronic copy of a movie or song should cost less to the consumer - much less.
I can understand people paying a similar amount for a 'premium item' like a just aired TV show or something that is similar to pay-per-view like a sports game. But, expecting people to pay full price for something that comes without the same quality of packaging as a movie that can be bought in a store is rediculous.
And to top it off they're using a Bittorrent style system where their customers are the ones paying for the bandwidth! If I upload your show to another customer for you it comes out of my quota of data from my ISP for the month and costs you nothing! What's in it for me huh?
These outfits really need to figure out that an electronic product should be *LESS* not that same price or more!
Don't forget these movies are likely to be compressed to a lower quality than a regular DVD as well.
personally, I'd like a Mac OS X version. I use Windows at work, but only because I have to.
I fall into the 5% who don't use a PC :-) The only IBM part in the computer i used to type my post was the PPC970 (aka G5) CPU thank you very much.
I've worked in the field of arcade games for some time and know that when someone tries to release a pacman game with pacman style graphics, sound and gameplay with a similar sounding name they can get sued by Namco for passing off, copyright infringement, etc. The fact that some people get away with it - or even down right steal the ROM's and use MAME doesn't make it legal.
I'm pretty sure that reverse engineering a cloe of the IBM BIOS as you mention is different from copying the 'look and feel' of a game - at least in some countries. I don't think that a patent is required to protect the idea entirely, although they'd probably have got one in the USA anyway if they'd bothered at the time (funny how things change).
I managed to visit his site - it was /.'d earlier. To my total lack of surprise the web developer who is the supposed victim in this is also passing off his own version of Pacman under the Pacman name - which also belongs to Namco.
How about he sends any money he gets from Fuddruckers to Namco eh? Not something I think that the slashdot crowd would like, but if you're going to defend someones rights then you need to defend all legal rights and he is currently infringing Namco's from what I can see. No I don't work for Namco and I can see he's not charging for the games. Trademarks aren't like novel, movie & song names - they are protected names under iternational law. As it stands if he created a game just like Pacman or just like Burgertime and gave them similar sounding names he'd be liable for 'passing off' at least.
In this world of open source clones of virtually everything I think I need to be very careful getting this point across to the slashdot crowd. Years ago I argued on this site (possibly under a different nic) that creating a clone of a commercial program as an open source implementation was wrong because it would devalue the hard work by the original creators who were only trying to make a living. At least invest some of your own originality into a project.
Guess I'm slowly turning into a troll... i'll go now.
I'm sorry to say that the game that the Flash developer created is based upon a copyrighted arcade game (by Namco I think). He has not credited the owner of the copyright nor asked permission to make his own re-creation of their game. He even used the exact same name. If he wants to be so righteous about it he can first either get permission or remove the game from the web.
The same would go for a Tetris or Pacman 'clone. Sorry to say that many of the games that we all think of as generic were designed and programmed by someone and they own it.
As for his actions simply denying access and popping up a message saying that the content is unauthorised due to hot-linking policies asking Fuddruckers to contact him would have been a lot more productive. Was he within his rights to do what he did - yes. Was it a professional thing to do - no. As it stands he is either immature or looking for publicity.
Ok, I'll feed you little troll....
Carmack came out against the current crop of PowerPC CPU's to be used in the X360 and PS3 that are very different from the CPU's that Apple have been using in their PowerPC based computers. The PPC's in the consoles do not support out of order execution and a raft of other features. IBM have designed simpler cores that are being packaged on multi-core chips that can be run quicker and in parallel.
Carmack has plenty to bash Apple for in regard to their OpenGL implementation I'm sure - just browse the Apple developers OpenGL mailing list sometime.
but, it's all because of poor programming on legacy embedded code in various weapons systems left over from the cold war. every time the leap second occurs the men in the bunkers think that something somewhere is going to trigger. plus, don't forget some of the crap they put in orbit that we don't know about. this is just a cheap way of not having to service assets in space that we can no longer reach easily whilst the shuttles are grounded - and that includes the military birds too.
i'm joking/speculating/revealing the truth (delete as applicable)
Fair enough, you have a good point, that some people such as yourself do not need the extras i mentioned and do not want to have to pay for them. One of the points of my post was that if apple made at least some of these parts user installable or replacable on the Mac mini it wouldn't be such a big deal, because you could upgrade later. That, sadly, isn't the case with the Mac mini. Secondly, if Apple bumped up the low-end spec across the board it wouldn't need to cost the end users much more at all because of economies of scale.
A problem I have with this is most of the options are items that are standard on most other machines and when you are offered options they are much higher spec - such as *really good* video cards, *huge amounts of ram* (that don't cost twice as much as you'd pay elsewhere like apple's do), etc.
Apple gouge their customers for many items that they can not add themselves later. On a PC you can opt for an external DVD writer latter without any drawbacks. On the Mac if you don't have an Apple SuperDrive you don't enjoy the benefits of iDVD, etc. (unless you install unsupported 3rd party hacks). Apple won't even upgrade your drive to a superdrive if your combo breaks. All other Mac's allow you to add a airport card when you come to need it, the Mac mini doesn't at all.
In addition to my previous post I'd like to try to gett across another less indentified reason why I think Mac's are not being used by more businesses - the lack of expandability and re-configurability of their machines. You can replace the bits that break, but never upgrade them (apart from HDD and RAM). You can't walk into a store and buy a replacement part - you need to go to a particular dealer and have them install it or send your machine off to Apple. I've had a friend need to send his iBook off to have one of the feet replaced - and he's an engineer - they wouldn't send it to him! Once your applecare runs out your machine is basically uneconomical to repair (even after you've bought the 3 year extended option). With a PC you could put in a new mobo and CPU replug in your video and other cards, ram (maybe) and hdd and be good to go. If you're mobo died you'd have plenty of places to go to get a new one with very little down time - not so with a mac.
Don't forget I'm a fanboi - I'm typing this on my 17" powerbook which is my main machine - that I really think is an excellent machine. It's just over a year old and is only very slightly slower than the latest model - which is just wrong! The resolution on Powerbooks is not as high as the top PC laptops (1440x900 at 17" - I want and *need* more!) and the resolution on iBooks (at the moment- pending the new ones apparently) is just appalling for a modern machine.
Sorry to vent all of this out here. Apple make great machines, great software and have excellent ideas.... I just want to see more progress getting much higher specs on the new machines (not just then Intel CPU) and more easily available (and cheaper!) upgrades and parts.
OK, so i'm an apple fanboi, but one with some perspective i'd like to think. But, I'm fed up with Apple advertising machines with too little RAM as standard, combo drives instead of SuperDrives as standard, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth as extras, etc. I know it reduces the sticker price for their advertising, but once you add on these extras, which lets face it are pretty much standard on most portables these days, the price is a hell of a lot higher - almost double when looking at the Mac mini.
Apple should be pushing the minimal spec upwards, not stripping everything off so that it can get it's headlines saying *Mac's are now affordable*
The kind of people who are prepared to put down the cash for a Mac are prepared to pay that bit extra, but walking into a store thinking you're going to spend £350 to get a machine that does everything you've heard about and find out that it's actually closer to £500 or £600 (can't be arsed to check the exact prices atm), is disappointing. It makes me think of Dell and other company's tactics. If you know from the start you're looking at almost double that then you can budget for it easier.
I took a friend and their kids to the Apple store and they came out wanting a Mac mini because they thought that it was under £350. Once I'd factored in the SuperDrive (for making DVD's), Airport (for using it in the bedroom upstairs) - because you can't fit it yourself and bluetooth because if you're having the Airport installed you might as well and all kids these days have Bluetooth capable phones and some extra RAM as 256 Mb just isn't enough, it was a *LOT* more. I opted for a good 3rd party TFT display from elsewhere (19" TFT for £179), as Apple seem to think that plonking down £550 for their entry level display is fine for everyone. I'm glad that they reduced the price of the keyboards after the mini came out. I had to buy one for my Powerbook for nearly £50, now they're about £20 i think.
So, to wrap up my rant, up the minimum spec and put the price up *a bit* to make up for it. removing the need for build to order for simple and very popular options should have some benefits of scale to reduce the need to gouge everyone for a bit a ram, a modern optical drive and some wireless comms, or at least make it easier for people to actally install or swap out these components like most PC vendors do.
I believe that Apple are using Music videos as a catalyst to start their video service off. They already have good relations with the recording companies due to the success of the iTMS. Music videos are virtually advertisements for their product.
Watching the latest movies on a portable device is not where the market will be at, unless you can plug it into your TV, Plasma/TFT or Projector. The market will be with TV shows and Video-Podcasts.
Music videos are simply a way of getting the ball running.
I agree with you. However, Slashdot is not the best forum for your request. There is an option in iTunes for sending feedback to Apple. Please by all means use it. I have sent several requests and much feedback to Apple this way, including asking for iPod playback of FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.
I agree with the comment 'more is less' and the reverse 'less is more' when it comes to PDA's. After playing with a Linux based PDA I could see the attraction of being able to port stuff over from the desktop, but it didn't ever seem to fit into the form factor if you know what I mean. I was thinking of a cut down Darwin similar to PicoBSD or something. As long as the interface looks as pretty as OS X and is smooth and responsive then I don't care (well I do, but you know what I mean).
I've used both PocketPC (or WinCE as it was) and Palm. Both have their problems. just a few of them pointed out by the article. What I really want is a brand new Newton from Apple. The original Newtons were lightyears ahead of their time and can still hold their own today. I think the problem with the Newton was everyone concentrated on the handwriting recognition, easy to understand it was the only machine of it's type available and the handwriting interface was the primary method for inputting information. But if you look at how people use PDA's these days it's mainly for brief notetaking and looking up info, not writing esays on. Another problem with the original Newton's was the size of the thing, now they'd be able to make a smaller model with a higher resolution screen and more compact battery more easily (not saying that I wouldn't be up for a sub-notebook sized Newton that doesn't fit in my pocket for reading off as well or instead of the pocket sized one - hell make both!).
:-( I used a friends Newton for a short time and loved it. If anyone has the ROM...... you know what to do. testrobotSPAMSPAMSPAM@gmail.com
Apple could easily steal the entire PDA market from Palm and the PocketPC folks by bringing out a decent colour version of the NewtonOS on modern hardware that plays videos, works with a digital camera and works like an iPod. Just use the same principles as OS X design.... shiney, easy to use, comes with InkWell already and a Darwin/BSD/Unix/whatever core underneath (hey aren't Palm working on a Linux underneath PalmOS machine???). Especailly with them getting into bed with Intel recently, it could use the XScale.
I've downloaded the Einstein Newton emulator but sadly can't use it as I'm missing the NewtonOS ROM, I don't have a Newton to copy it from