Userbase was probably a necessary condition, but I doubt it was a sufficient one. Had Mac OS X been flaky, ugly, underfeatured, or hard to develop for, then I doubt it would have succeeded even with Apple's userbase. Had Apple not worked hard to get developers on board, there would have been few apps and no-one would have upgraded to it.
I also think that having Steve Jobs helped. With him back, people could believe that Apple was back in the running; otherwise, there was a real risk people would desert the sinking ship and get PCs. Even if he hadn't done anything, his presence was a good PR boost.
Luckily, with hindsight we can see that he did indeed bring Apple to new heights and the future is again rosy. But hindsight is a dangerous tool, and however tempting it is to think that things had to turn out the way they did, I don't think it would have taken much for Apple to be no longer with us.
Re:At last, Iain M Banks gets a bit of recognition
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And his Use of Weapons is absolutely excellent: a wide range of great sci-fi ideas and settings, a complex and deep structure, but at its root a really deep psychological study of the biological urge to survive, no matter what -- and its effects.
Even more than most Banks, it's not always an easy read, but it's compulsive and ultimately very rewarding.
Re: Wow! think of all them IP addresses.
on
The Next Net
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I believe IPv6 has something like 50 addresses for every square foot of land on the earth.
Actually, I believe the figure's much bigger - something like 6.2 x 10^22. (My own calculation, confirmed by one web page, though others give widely varying results. That's based on a figure of 197 million square miles, incl. sea.)
But that's not the point, because the addresses aren't evenly spread. Once you allocate some of the most significant values to various organisation, protocols, or special values, then you start to lose a good number of those. And if you split the rest hierarchically (by country/region, ISP/organisation, and/or topology), then you'll find large numbers becoming unavailable.
Of course, there's such a big number to start with that that'll still leave plenty for everyone. But the number-per-square-foot value doesn't necessarily tell you very much.
Surely the whole point of touch-typing is that you can do it without looking at the keyboard, by feel.
So a projector shouldn't be needed at all. And worse still, there's no feel, so no way to judge where the 'keys' would be. So how can you 'touch-type' with this?
Well, in my church, we like to learn new songs occasionally -- ones that (shock, horror) aren't in the books!
Actually, books do have one advantage. I play in one of the worship bands, and for long songs and hymns with many verses, I sometimes find it hard to keep track of which verse we're on. The noise of people closing their books at the end can be a jolly useful hint!
It was built before overhead projectors were commonly used for showing the words of songs, so they didn't leave anywhere for a screen. Covering the back wall is a big wooden cross -- we used to project words onto the wall on one side of this, but it was cramped and could only be seen from one side.
But recently, someone had a bright idea. We now have a video projector, and a large screen which descends to cover the cross and surrounding design -- when it's not being used for words, they project a picture of what's underneath it. It's not perfect (the alignment and colour are very slightly out), but it's a good solution which allows everyone to see the words without getting rid of the focal point.
Sure, their products suck. But on its own, that wouldn't be a problem, because people would be free to choose the best product for the job. MS would be under the same commercial imperatives as anyone else: make good products, or die.
But their business practices suck too. Because of that, the market isn't free to pick the best products.
They pay people (individuals, dealers, companies, governments) to use their sucky products, by offering discounts and other incentives -- even giving them away if necessary. They pay competitors not to make competing products, by buying them off. They pay masses in marketing to make their products seem less sucky. They pay lawyers to find ways to prevent competitors making better products. They pay dealers and distributors not to bundle competitors' products. They pay lawmakers to prevent competitors being able to compete fairly. They pay training companies to ensure that there's more expertise for their products. They pay their own developers to break competing products in various underhand ways. They pay anything they can to support their products.
And so, ultimately, we all pay...
In short, it's their immoral and illegal business practices which make their dodgy products popular. Prevent those, and their products wouldn't be a problem.
I think we should make use of this mistake, and introduce some new distinctions. Things that are completely and totally mad could be 'rediculous', whereas things that are very strange could be 'greeniculous', and things that are just a bit odd could be 'blueiculous'. Could be very useful, and would certainly make the point...
In the end, you never know who's right, so none of the comments are worth reading.
Well, there is one way: run it yourself, and see what you think!
Discussion can serve a purpose, too. In this case, either our standards differ markedly, or our experiences do. (Or both.) It might be interesting to discover which, and why.
FWIW, my experiences seem to fit into the general advice I read and hear from other Mac users: that below 256MB is painful, 256MB is okay, 512MB is a bit better, and above that only really benefits if you're doing something heavy (e.g. editing video or big audio files). But of course everyone's requirements differ.
Well, 512 millibits would indeed be a joke, but if you meant 'MB' for megabytes, then your definition of 'joke' must be different from mine...
I used to run it in half that, and it worked just fine thanks. When I added a load more, it got a lot faster for editing huge audio files or having lots of heavy apps open, but for general use there wasn't that much difference. I wouldn't recommend using less than 256MB, but it's perfectly comfortable with that amount.
Other comments have the DRM implications covered, but one aspect that particularly worries me is the implication that an image of text is as good as the text itself. Which is crap.
As I said in another recent comment, an image might work well if you're reading on a large screen, with a large window, reasonable resolution, a fast processor, reasonable storage or bandwidth, and so on. But there are umpteen other circumstances in which images would be inconvenient or impossible, yet text would work fine.
And that's not to mention the malleability of plain text. If you have an image, you're stuck not only with the font, rendering, layout, colours, resolution &c they give you, but you're also stuck with the formatting, spelling, &c. You can't convert between British English and American English spellings, or do other automated translations. You can't cut'n'paste quotes. You can't read the text out loud. You can't easily split a work into chapters, or join stories into collections. You can't search, index, or compare. You can't do so many other useful things.
(And of course, there's the obvious fact that plain text takes an order or two of magnitude less storage or bandwidth.)
Plain text is so incredibly versatile. I'm surprised they expect people to be so willing to give up those freedoms.
That's why the things MS claims are a part of Windows and are necessary are, after a fashion. They aren't necessary for everything, but other things depend on them. Like the help system breaks if IE goes away. Why? Well help files are HTML based, and call IE, or rather the MSHTML engine that it uses, to render.
I think you're confusing the ability to render HTML with one particular browser.
Mac OS X, for example, handles this well. There's a supplied browser (Safari), but it's just another application, not embedded into the OS at all. What is embedded into the OS is the ability to launch the user's chosen browser to display HTML; this might be Safari, Mozilla, Firefox, IE, OmniWeb, or whatever you choose. The OS has no preference; and any other app can just say 'show this HTML' without knowing or caring which app is involved.
In short, apps need to know that something can display HTML; they don't need to know what. And of course the same applies to other types of data: text, graphics, video, audio, whatever. If you need application X to handle it, then your OS is badly designed.
Simple means versatile. And that's what the web should be.
If I have to navigate through Flash, JavaScript menus, or whatever, then I'm stuffed if I have a mobile phone. But I'm also going to have a bad time if I have a palmtop. Or a desktop machine running over a slow internet connection (POTS, mobile, broadband with very heavy traffic, &c). Or a small screen. Or if I have a big screen but a small browser window because I'm doing other things too. Or if I'm running over a terminal connection and using Lynx. (Or for some other reason.) Or if I'm blind and am using a screen reader. Or an partially sighted and am using other accessibility software. Or if I'm disabled and have trouble using a pointing device. Or if I'm running on a machine without Flash or the possibility of installing it (e.g. a locked-down corporate machine, or a minority platform). Or...
Any one of those might be highly unlikely, but take all those possibilities together, and I suspect you're talking about a significant number of users.
And of course, once you talk about restricting a site to a particular browser and/or OS, then you're cutting out still more.
The point is that the less you require of your browser, the more possibilities you're opening up: more platforms, more types of machine, more types of user and usage, more possibilities for presentation, more scope for automated reading or other apps, &c. And a simple site means faster rendering and navigation for everyone, mainstream or not.
Of course, this means that web designers have to give up something they cherish deeply: control. They like to govern exactly what you'll see (pixel-for-pixel if possible), exactly how you can interact with the site, the entire look and feel. And that's what works against versatility.
As with other digital battlegrounds (e.g. DRM), it boils down to who has control: can/should the site owner restrict your use of a site, or is the user free to use it in their own way. I think this is one of the fundamental issues of our time.
As with several other digital technologies, it's at worst a matter of different artefacts. Sure, there's the possibility of encoding artefacts: blocking, ringing, &c. But you lose dust, scratches, hairs, and that ghastly jitter.
And anyway, as others have said, cinemas that pride themselves on picture quality are likely to make sure that encoding artefacts are kept to a bare minimum.
Personally, I'm less worried about that than about the limited resolution, especially temporal resolution. Look at film today when the camera pans at anything other than a crawl: everything goes blurry and you lose all sense of detail and depth. A decent refresh rate will make up for a lot of encoding artefacts IMO.
My other worry is colour. LCDs aren't known for their good colour balance or accuracy, which is why I gather most folk in the publishing industry are sticking with CRTs for the time being...
Well, AppleWorks is effectively dead now -- hasn't had any proper updates for several years now. And it was showing its age even then...
A fairer comparison might be to Pages or Keynote, though of course they haven't released a spreadsheet yet. (I'd be prepared to put down good money that they're working on one, though!)
Actually, if we're being precise here, the real problem isn't the unit; it's the verb.
If your mileage varies, it means that sometimes it's high, and other times it's low. It doesn't remain constant.
But that's not how the phrase is usually used -- to warn that the mileage you get might not be the same as the mileage I get. In other words, that your mileage may DIFFER from mine.
Many slashdotters probably eat certain types of food, too, but can you see a cookery story getting posted here?
And anyway, many slashdotters aren't remotely interested in sports. Many of us don't even live in the same country as you, and would have trouble following that particular sport anyway even if we wanted to. (The badly-named 'World' Series notwithstanding...)
Actually, I think this is a psychologically interesting situation.
On the one hand, the release of the new episodes (1-3) hasn't actually changed anything in the older episodes (4-6). Not a frame of celluloid nor a word of dialogue has been changed as a result. (I know the special editions did change a few things, but that's a separate matter.) In fact, AFAIK not even any of the meaning of 4-6 has changed at all. We might have found out some more details, but there's been no big retcon job on any of it.
So we should be able to say "If you don't like the newer ones, don't watch them." The older ones should be just as good or bad as they've always been.
But somehow, it doesn't work like that. Without having physically changed, our perception of the older films has been altered. They hold different associations for us.
We like to think that we can be objective about what we see and hear, but all the time we're filtering it through a maze of preconceptions, associations, connections, memories, moods, worries, impressions, and other subconscious and unconscious factors. I find a situation like this interesting because it makes that a little clearer!
I learnt on the Archie's predecessor, the BBC Micro.
And while it wasn't exactly open-source, both the OS and BASIC ROMs were easy enough to disassemble, and at least one book was published with commented disassembly of them. Plus there were some extremely good, very technical manuals covering just about every aspect. With the help of those, I was able to do some pretty neat stuff, including rewriting some parts of the OS.
The Beeb was a very underrated machine. While it was more expensive than plain games machines like the Spectrum, it was incredibly expandable. (Mine ended up connected to a musical keyboard and synth module, doing some sequencing; you could also connect up everything from teletext adapters to co-processors of various kinds.) And the OS, while packed into a single 16KB ROM (with other 16KB ROMS for the disk filing system, BASIC, word processors, and loads of other languages and tools), was extremely well designed for its time. They positively encouraged you to extend its capabilities, providing well-defined points for hooking in your own code and allowing lots of different utilities to interact.
I don't think I've understood any machine since anywhere near as well as I understood the Beeb (and I've spent time on an Archie, a couple of Ataris, and now a Mac). It was incredibly good training ground!
Of course, working from a disassembly is only practical for small quantities of code, preferably where it was written in assembly to start with. I'm not suggesting people try that today! But in some ways, it's a shame they can't...
Personally, I worry about the number of conspiracy theories floating around these days. Surely it can't be coincidence that after most major pieces of news, a conspiracy theory emerges? I suspect that there's a group of people constructing these conspiracy theories for their own nefarious purposes! I think we should be told!!!
Isn't there research showing that in the case of human interactions, it tends to form lots of smallish, self-contained subnetworks with many strong connections within each one, but only a few connections between them?
This seems to match what I see on the net. You get groups of people tied together by their blogs, mailing lists, &c (even sites like this!), but without too much strong interaction otherwise.
I can't be bothered to analyse it formally, but I suspect that n.log(n) might be a natural value for such a network-of-networks.
Slashdot Mirror
I also think that having Steve Jobs helped. With him back, people could believe that Apple was back in the running; otherwise, there was a real risk people would desert the sinking ship and get PCs. Even if he hadn't done anything, his presence was a good PR boost.
Luckily, with hindsight we can see that he did indeed bring Apple to new heights and the future is again rosy. But hindsight is a dangerous tool, and however tempting it is to think that things had to turn out the way they did, I don't think it would have taken much for Apple to be no longer with us.
Even more than most Banks, it's not always an easy read, but it's compulsive and ultimately very rewarding.
Actually, I believe the figure's much bigger - something like 6.2 x 10^22. (My own calculation, confirmed by one web page, though others give widely varying results. That's based on a figure of 197 million square miles, incl. sea.)
But that's not the point, because the addresses aren't evenly spread. Once you allocate some of the most significant values to various organisation, protocols, or special values, then you start to lose a good number of those. And if you split the rest hierarchically (by country/region, ISP/organisation, and/or topology), then you'll find large numbers becoming unavailable.
Of course, there's such a big number to start with that that'll still leave plenty for everyone. But the number-per-square-foot value doesn't necessarily tell you very much.
So a projector shouldn't be needed at all. And worse still, there's no feel, so no way to judge where the 'keys' would be. So how can you 'touch-type' with this?
Well, in my church, we like to learn new songs occasionally -- ones that (shock, horror) aren't in the books!
Actually, books do have one advantage. I play in one of the worship bands, and for long songs and hymns with many verses, I sometimes find it hard to keep track of which verse we're on. The noise of people closing their books at the end can be a jolly useful hint!
It was built before overhead projectors were commonly used for showing the words of songs, so they didn't leave anywhere for a screen. Covering the back wall is a big wooden cross -- we used to project words onto the wall on one side of this, but it was cramped and could only be seen from one side.
But recently, someone had a bright idea. We now have a video projector, and a large screen which descends to cover the cross and surrounding design -- when it's not being used for words, they project a picture of what's underneath it. It's not perfect (the alignment and colour are very slightly out), but it's a good solution which allows everyone to see the words without getting rid of the focal point.
Sure, their products suck. But on its own, that wouldn't be a problem, because people would be free to choose the best product for the job. MS would be under the same commercial imperatives as anyone else: make good products, or die.
But their business practices suck too. Because of that, the market isn't free to pick the best products.
They pay people (individuals, dealers, companies, governments) to use their sucky products, by offering discounts and other incentives -- even giving them away if necessary. They pay competitors not to make competing products, by buying them off. They pay masses in marketing to make their products seem less sucky. They pay lawyers to find ways to prevent competitors making better products. They pay dealers and distributors not to bundle competitors' products. They pay lawmakers to prevent competitors being able to compete fairly. They pay training companies to ensure that there's more expertise for their products. They pay their own developers to break competing products in various underhand ways. They pay anything they can to support their products.
And so, ultimately, we all pay...
In short, it's their immoral and illegal business practices which make their dodgy products popular. Prevent those, and their products wouldn't be a problem.
Well, there is one way: run it yourself, and see what you think!
Discussion can serve a purpose, too. In this case, either our standards differ markedly, or our experiences do. (Or both.) It might be interesting to discover which, and why.
FWIW, my experiences seem to fit into the general advice I read and hear from other Mac users: that below 256MB is painful, 256MB is okay, 512MB is a bit better, and above that only really benefits if you're doing something heavy (e.g. editing video or big audio files). But of course everyone's requirements differ.
Well, 512 millibits would indeed be a joke, but if you meant 'MB' for megabytes, then your definition of 'joke' must be different from mine...
I used to run it in half that, and it worked just fine thanks. When I added a load more, it got a lot faster for editing huge audio files or having lots of heavy apps open, but for general use there wasn't that much difference. I wouldn't recommend using less than 256MB, but it's perfectly comfortable with that amount.
As I said in another recent comment, an image might work well if you're reading on a large screen, with a large window, reasonable resolution, a fast processor, reasonable storage or bandwidth, and so on. But there are umpteen other circumstances in which images would be inconvenient or impossible, yet text would work fine.
And that's not to mention the malleability of plain text. If you have an image, you're stuck not only with the font, rendering, layout, colours, resolution &c they give you, but you're also stuck with the formatting, spelling, &c. You can't convert between British English and American English spellings, or do other automated translations. You can't cut'n'paste quotes. You can't read the text out loud. You can't easily split a work into chapters, or join stories into collections. You can't search, index, or compare. You can't do so many other useful things.
(And of course, there's the obvious fact that plain text takes an order or two of magnitude less storage or bandwidth.)
Plain text is so incredibly versatile. I'm surprised they expect people to be so willing to give up those freedoms.
Mac OS X, for example, handles this well. There's a supplied browser (Safari), but it's just another application, not embedded into the OS at all. What is embedded into the OS is the ability to launch the user's chosen browser to display HTML; this might be Safari, Mozilla, Firefox, IE, OmniWeb, or whatever you choose. The OS has no preference; and any other app can just say 'show this HTML' without knowing or caring which app is involved.
In short, apps need to know that something can display HTML; they don't need to know what. And of course the same applies to other types of data: text, graphics, video, audio, whatever. If you need application X to handle it, then your OS is badly designed.
If I have to navigate through Flash, JavaScript menus, or whatever, then I'm stuffed if I have a mobile phone. But I'm also going to have a bad time if I have a palmtop. Or a desktop machine running over a slow internet connection (POTS, mobile, broadband with very heavy traffic, &c). Or a small screen. Or if I have a big screen but a small browser window because I'm doing other things too. Or if I'm running over a terminal connection and using Lynx. (Or for some other reason.) Or if I'm blind and am using a screen reader. Or an partially sighted and am using other accessibility software. Or if I'm disabled and have trouble using a pointing device. Or if I'm running on a machine without Flash or the possibility of installing it (e.g. a locked-down corporate machine, or a minority platform). Or...
Any one of those might be highly unlikely, but take all those possibilities together, and I suspect you're talking about a significant number of users.
And of course, once you talk about restricting a site to a particular browser and/or OS, then you're cutting out still more.
The point is that the less you require of your browser, the more possibilities you're opening up: more platforms, more types of machine, more types of user and usage, more possibilities for presentation, more scope for automated reading or other apps, &c. And a simple site means faster rendering and navigation for everyone, mainstream or not.
Of course, this means that web designers have to give up something they cherish deeply: control. They like to govern exactly what you'll see (pixel-for-pixel if possible), exactly how you can interact with the site, the entire look and feel. And that's what works against versatility.
As with other digital battlegrounds (e.g. DRM), it boils down to who has control: can/should the site owner restrict your use of a site, or is the user free to use it in their own way. I think this is one of the fundamental issues of our time.
And anyway, as others have said, cinemas that pride themselves on picture quality are likely to make sure that encoding artefacts are kept to a bare minimum.
Personally, I'm less worried about that than about the limited resolution, especially temporal resolution. Look at film today when the camera pans at anything other than a crawl: everything goes blurry and you lose all sense of detail and depth. A decent refresh rate will make up for a lot of encoding artefacts IMO.
My other worry is colour. LCDs aren't known for their good colour balance or accuracy, which is why I gather most folk in the publishing industry are sticking with CRTs for the time being...
A fairer comparison might be to Pages or Keynote, though of course they haven't released a spreadsheet yet. (I'd be prepared to put down good money that they're working on one, though!)
If your mileage varies, it means that sometimes it's high, and other times it's low. It doesn't remain constant.
But that's not how the phrase is usually used -- to warn that the mileage you get might not be the same as the mileage I get. In other words, that your mileage may DIFFER from mine.
And anyway, many slashdotters aren't remotely interested in sports. Many of us don't even live in the same country as you, and would have trouble following that particular sport anyway even if we wanted to. (The badly-named 'World' Series notwithstanding...)
On the one hand, the release of the new episodes (1-3) hasn't actually changed anything in the older episodes (4-6). Not a frame of celluloid nor a word of dialogue has been changed as a result. (I know the special editions did change a few things, but that's a separate matter.) In fact, AFAIK not even any of the meaning of 4-6 has changed at all. We might have found out some more details, but there's been no big retcon job on any of it.
So we should be able to say "If you don't like the newer ones, don't watch them." The older ones should be just as good or bad as they've always been.
But somehow, it doesn't work like that. Without having physically changed, our perception of the older films has been altered. They hold different associations for us.
We like to think that we can be objective about what we see and hear, but all the time we're filtering it through a maze of preconceptions, associations, connections, memories, moods, worries, impressions, and other subconscious and unconscious factors. I find a situation like this interesting because it makes that a little clearer!
And while it wasn't exactly open-source, both the OS and BASIC ROMs were easy enough to disassemble, and at least one book was published with commented disassembly of them. Plus there were some extremely good, very technical manuals covering just about every aspect. With the help of those, I was able to do some pretty neat stuff, including rewriting some parts of the OS.
The Beeb was a very underrated machine. While it was more expensive than plain games machines like the Spectrum, it was incredibly expandable. (Mine ended up connected to a musical keyboard and synth module, doing some sequencing; you could also connect up everything from teletext adapters to co-processors of various kinds.) And the OS, while packed into a single 16KB ROM (with other 16KB ROMS for the disk filing system, BASIC, word processors, and loads of other languages and tools), was extremely well designed for its time. They positively encouraged you to extend its capabilities, providing well-defined points for hooking in your own code and allowing lots of different utilities to interact.
I don't think I've understood any machine since anywhere near as well as I understood the Beeb (and I've spent time on an Archie, a couple of Ataris, and now a Mac). It was incredibly good training ground!
Of course, working from a disassembly is only practical for small quantities of code, preferably where it was written in assembly to start with. I'm not suggesting people try that today! But in some ways, it's a shame they can't...
Personally, I worry about the number of conspiracy theories floating around these days. Surely it can't be coincidence that after most major pieces of news, a conspiracy theory emerges? I suspect that there's a group of people constructing these conspiracy theories for their own nefarious purposes! I think we should be told!!!
This seems to match what I see on the net. You get groups of people tied together by their blogs, mailing lists, &c (even sites like this!), but without too much strong interaction otherwise.
I can't be bothered to analyse it formally, but I suspect that n.log(n) might be a natural value for such a network-of-networks.