Actually, **Windows** has a hole in its API's that mozilla relied on.
That's still a Mozilla bug. Windows cannot be expected to know whether the API call came as a result of the user typing something deliberate, or because a untrustworthy web page said to do so. That knowledge rests in the application, not the OS. In fact, some might even argue that if the user typed the "shell:" command in the browser's address bar, it should probably work!
It does make Linux a safer OS. However, the responsibility to use a potentially dangerous API correctly - even if the API is poorly designed - rests on the application.
It' s been quite awhile since Apple shipped a drive that won't read DVDs.
The April 2003 eMac (M9150LLA) comes with a CD-ROM drive. If Apple ships Tiger by April of 2005 on a DVD then they would be refusing to support a two-year old computer with an 800 MHz G4 and up to 1 GB of PC133 RAM.
What amazes me [is that the Apple II] stayed at 1MHz, and was able to sell machines.
Many games of that era relied on hard-coded instruction loops for delays. Using a faster chip would've rendered such games unplayable. You can see this effect with some emulators available today if you let them run as quickly as possible.
What the hell happened to Moore's Law?
As somebody already pointed out, successive generations came with more RAM, floppy drives, and accessories like 80-column video adaptors. The//c was also quite a bit smaller than others. You were getting more computer for the same money all through those years, just not in raw CPU speed.
If I want a QuickTime movie as my background, with the page content painted over the top...why do I need to build the whole thing in Director? The browser should be able to sort this out.
If your browser allows a QuickTime movie to be used as a CSS background-image, or as a value to the BODY BACKGROUND attribute, then you get your wish. Firefox lets you use animated GIFs in such contexts.
As with any advanced browser feature, however, you're limited by the least capable browser you target. This is no different than some browsers not properly supporting PNG.
A _FINAL_ decision regarding the OBJECT and EMBED tags.
HTML 4.01 doesn't list EMBED. Final enough for you?
For your Mac, take a look at this card. I bought the DVR version in January and its been relatively good (the software annoys me sometimes).
I have the G4/G5 version, and it's good value for the money. I won't actually watch TV on it, because the software takes a second or two to switch from channel to channel. I bought it to archive old video tapes, and my 733 MHz PowerMac G4 will not always do it flawlessly at the highest resolution, even without trying to compress the output in real time. (When it "fails", it captures the video at 15 fps rather than 30 fps, which is unacceptable for my purposes.) What I can say, however, is that their tech support is highly responsive, including direct email exchanges with their driver developer although they were not able to solve the problem for me. Note also that the audio input is not compatible with Garage Band (which requires a 44.1 KHz input.)
Strange how people allways bitch about it when OOo imports a word document incorrectly but they never mention that Word doesn't read sxw.
What's strange about that? Like it or not (and I hate it), the Word.doc formats are the de facto standard. Do you complain that browsers only render HTML and not some markup language you invented yesterday? It's just as "strange" as the iPod not supporting Ogg Vorbis.
The only drawback is the lack of a good, free office package: OpenOffice.org for OS X just isn't there yet, and it looks like we're going to have to wait at least a year. Apple should have addressed this problem earlier.
They did. They struck a deal with Microsoft that resulted in Office v.X, which is like it or not the premier office software package. Yes, I did see the word "free" in your post, but is Apple really in that business?
Apple has provided free apps like iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, and others, but they are limited to the entry level. Even when Apple stepped in when it felt that third parties were not doing well, things like Final Cut Pro/Express, SoundTrack, and even Garage Band are not free. For simple word processing, TextEdit.app (about the level of WordPad) comes free, and Appleworks comes bundled with the lower end Mac models. LyX is also available on the Mac for certain niche purposes.
The way I see it, active support of OpenOffice.org for the Mac will mean the withdrawal of Office v.X, and perhaps even a file format war to destroy it. Would that be a good thing for Apple?
Some cities have helpful street signs that actually tell you what the next cross street is. Some cities don't, and you won't find out that you're in the wrong lane until you're right at the intersection. This is when the worst drivers make a right turn from the left lane, and endanger everybody else. The good drivers, on the other hand, waste time finding a way to U-turn.
Now, if only we had a device that could tell you to change lanes before you're at the intersection...
the last thing I need is a 3d representation of the buildings...
I wouldn't say that's the last thing one would need. If you're looking for a place you've never been to before, and the building happens to be distinctive (but you don't know it yet), then seeing it identified on the 3D map can help you find it in real life. It can also help you make a quick decision to take the empty parking space just before you get close enough to read the door number.
Alternatively, the realistic display can be used to rehearse your route on a quick virtual drive. Personally, I remember directions much better if I've been there just once, and a quick virtual drive might just be all I need to avoid having to look at the map while actually driving.
This report suggests that 80 million of China's 1.5 billion citizens live below the poverty line.
The article you cited also says that the poverty line is "officially defined as earning less than $100 per year." Needless to say, there are a lot more than that unfortunate 80 million who will not be buying iPods that start at $300 each.
I don't understand why it doesn't just leave the prebinding to be done the first time the program is run.
Because while installing a program, you can walk away and do something else. The first time you run a program, presumably you plan to do some work with it. Therefore, it's better to spend 15 minutes of idle time than 15 minutes of user waiting time.
I wonder if anyone is researching special filesystems for compact flash storage.
The field is well-researched and a patent minefield. Newcomers beware.
It seems to me it would be possible to design a filesystem that spreads data around the media to avoid (as much as possible) overwriting the same storage blocks.
This is a gross simplification, but flash is not rewritable in-place like RAM or hard disk is. It must be erased in relatively large block sizes for the space to be writable again.
To answer your question, it's not only possible, but routinely done.
It all comes down to poulation density. Where there are people, it is economically feasible to add services, cause there's a chance you'll make money back on your investment. [...] Folks in New York expect to have cell-phone coverage when driving along I-70 in Southern Utah!
Even then, you'd have to explain why folks in NYC don't have phones with advanced data services that are still able to work in rural Utah. Population density is certainly one factor, but not the only factor at all. For example, most urban Japanese workers spend considerable amounts of time on a train, rather than driving, to and from work. That means they actually have time to use wireless data services.
Simple, smaller area to provide coverage = lower cost. That's why in places like South Korea you can get a LOT of bandwith a whole lot cheaper than here (U.S.).
It's not that simple. The urban Japanese worker probably spends at least an hour in a train every day, while the urban American might be driving. The urban Japanese living space is much smaller (yes, even compared to a US metropolis), so bulky PCs are not as desirable. Housing costs are also sky-high, which means many people no longer hope to own a home, and therefore would have more disposable income to spend on gadgets.
Sure, hardware will be so cheap it will be as-if it were free. But it will be running free software as well. I'm sure of that.
I doubt it. How many people are really running Linux on the PS2 or X-Box? Even without legal impediments, having to reverse-engineer these boxes means that free software will trail commercial software for a year or even years. Note also that people have been saying that the X-Box is merely a specialized PC ever since its announcement, yet the X-Box still isn't the cheap PC people promised it would be.
What vendors have found now is that they cannot compete (or, eventually will not be able to compete) with free software on general purpose hardware. All this means is that they will move to proprietary hardware. This is most evident in markets like game consoles and cell phones, where being old is as good as being dead. However, it can artificially be made true for many other markets, including the desktop PC.
I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- and it took another 300$ in upgrades to make it useable (to say nothing of the ~200$ worth of parts I'm permaborrowing to make it functional for entertainment purposes). That's a four year old machine.
Can you discuss why you didn't just buy an eMac for about $800? Honestly curious. Your $800 investment doesn't even include the cost of MacOS X yet.
Well, the used Mac market only reflects how out-of-wack the new Mac market is.
Somebody just paid, if memory serves, $104M for a painting. Markets don't have to make sense. The money you get from selling your old Mac is still real. You are exhibiting what some critics of the iPod often fail to understand: the iPod is not "overpriced", because people are buying it. The price is whatever the market will bear.
If Apple introduces a 2Ghz "G5 Mini" for $1000, as discussed on the rumor sites, those old PMacs would cost $200 just like the old PC workstations.
Sure. Until it happens, so what? Consider also what a $1,000 G5 will do to the eMac and iMac when guessing Apple's intentions.
in the PC world, you are usually paying a premium for things like SCSI/SATA and huge cases -- the machines aren't priced by CPU speed.
I wasn't talking about CPUs only. The point remains: buying a $400 PC every year doesn't put you in the "top end".
Objectively, how is a five year-old 2x500Mhz Mac any better in 2004 than a five year-old 2x500Mhz PC?
You can sell one for more money than the other on eBay. Four such Macs are currently getting $625, $550, $465, and $51.50. 500 MHz Pentium III computers are getting between $89.95 and $9.99. It's not particularly easy to search for a dual PIII (any ever made?), but that should give you the picture.
A PC user might pay less to replace a cheap machine every year and always have top-end kit.
If you need or want to stay in the "top end", then you cannot be buying "cheap machines" every year.
I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability.
You're in the minority. Most people's data are not worth the expense of dramatically more reliable hardware. In fact, they apparently aren't even worth the trouble to making regular back-ups for.
If I have a slow hard drive... eh. No biggie. I wait an extra second.
No, a slow hard drive can preclude entire applications, such as video capturing.
I'll be buying these just as soon as I can afford them.
You can believe them when they say DRM won't lock you out of your media. And they won't change the terms of service on their DRM after you've already purchased the media, like Apple did.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Apple changed the DRM policy on newly purchased songs, not on the songs you have already purchased. I'm not sure if iTunes 4.5 would allow you to burn previously-purchased songs 10 times (as opposed to the new limit of 7), but I'm pretty sure you can avoid upgrading iTunes to keep the old deal.
Personally, I don't know why Apple changed that limit. It's not as if people would really be using iTunes to mass produce CDs whether the limit is 10 or 7. It might have to do with getting the record labels to agree to expanding the number of authorized machines from 3 to 5. In any case, I believe you are free not to upgrade iTunes.
There are situations where a bubble sort is faster than a merge sort or a quicksort. It has almost no setup overhead, so if you're sorting sufficiently small arrays (and what I remember from CS101 is that "sufficiently small" goes up to about 1000 members) bubble sort is actually significantly faster.
You remember wrong. According to sortchk,
for random data sets Quicksort is comparable to Bubblesort at 10 items. At 100 items, Bubblesort requires 4x to 7x more comparisons, and 5x to 13x more data moves, depending on the variant of Quicksort. At 1,000 items, Bubblesort requires some 32x more comparisons and some 255x more data moves.
I don't disagree if what you want to say is that there are special case data sets where Bubblesort can be the best performer. However, it should not be the "default" algorithm of choice.
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That's still a Mozilla bug. Windows cannot be expected to know whether the API call came as a result of the user typing something deliberate, or because a untrustworthy web page said to do so. That knowledge rests in the application, not the OS. In fact, some might even argue that if the user typed the "shell:" command in the browser's address bar, it should probably work!
It does make Linux a safer OS. However, the responsibility to use a potentially dangerous API correctly - even if the API is poorly designed - rests on the application.
The April 2003 eMac (M9150LLA) comes with a CD-ROM drive. If Apple ships Tiger by April of 2005 on a DVD then they would be refusing to support a two-year old computer with an 800 MHz G4 and up to 1 GB of PC133 RAM.
And spend all my step 3 Profits on bandwidth?
Many games of that era relied on hard-coded instruction loops for delays. Using a faster chip would've rendered such games unplayable. You can see this effect with some emulators available today if you let them run as quickly as possible.
What the hell happened to Moore's Law?
As somebody already pointed out, successive generations came with more RAM, floppy drives, and accessories like 80-column video adaptors. The //c was also quite a bit smaller than others. You were getting more computer for the same money all through those years, just not in raw CPU speed.
How do you resolve the above stereotype with the fact that most the porn *origninates* in the States?
Logically, such a contradiction can be explained by a common human failing called hypocrisy.
If your browser allows a QuickTime movie to be used as a CSS background-image, or as a value to the BODY BACKGROUND attribute, then you get your wish. Firefox lets you use animated GIFs in such contexts.
As with any advanced browser feature, however, you're limited by the least capable browser you target. This is no different than some browsers not properly supporting PNG.
A _FINAL_ decision regarding the OBJECT and EMBED tags.
HTML 4.01 doesn't list EMBED. Final enough for you?
I have the G4/G5 version, and it's good value for the money. I won't actually watch TV on it, because the software takes a second or two to switch from channel to channel. I bought it to archive old video tapes, and my 733 MHz PowerMac G4 will not always do it flawlessly at the highest resolution, even without trying to compress the output in real time. (When it "fails", it captures the video at 15 fps rather than 30 fps, which is unacceptable for my purposes.) What I can say, however, is that their tech support is highly responsive, including direct email exchanges with their driver developer although they were not able to solve the problem for me. Note also that the audio input is not compatible with Garage Band (which requires a 44.1 KHz input.)
What's strange about that? Like it or not (and I hate it), the Word .doc formats are the de facto standard. Do you complain that browsers only render HTML and not some markup language you invented yesterday? It's just as "strange" as the iPod not supporting Ogg Vorbis.
They did. They struck a deal with Microsoft that resulted in Office v.X, which is like it or not the premier office software package. Yes, I did see the word "free" in your post, but is Apple really in that business?
Apple has provided free apps like iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, and others, but they are limited to the entry level. Even when Apple stepped in when it felt that third parties were not doing well, things like Final Cut Pro/Express, SoundTrack, and even Garage Band are not free. For simple word processing, TextEdit.app (about the level of WordPad) comes free, and Appleworks comes bundled with the lower end Mac models. LyX is also available on the Mac for certain niche purposes.
The way I see it, active support of OpenOffice.org for the Mac will mean the withdrawal of Office v.X, and perhaps even a file format war to destroy it. Would that be a good thing for Apple?
Some cities have helpful street signs that actually tell you what the next cross street is. Some cities don't, and you won't find out that you're in the wrong lane until you're right at the intersection. This is when the worst drivers make a right turn from the left lane, and endanger everybody else. The good drivers, on the other hand, waste time finding a way to U-turn.
Now, if only we had a device that could tell you to change lanes before you're at the intersection...
I wouldn't say that's the last thing one would need. If you're looking for a place you've never been to before, and the building happens to be distinctive (but you don't know it yet), then seeing it identified on the 3D map can help you find it in real life. It can also help you make a quick decision to take the empty parking space just before you get close enough to read the door number.
Alternatively, the realistic display can be used to rehearse your route on a quick virtual drive. Personally, I remember directions much better if I've been there just once, and a quick virtual drive might just be all I need to avoid having to look at the map while actually driving.
There are other alternatives
Of course there are. You can take a taxi.
That's a feature, by the way. If they could keep pace, they'd tax it.
The article you cited also says that the poverty line is "officially defined as earning less than $100 per year." Needless to say, there are a lot more than that unfortunate 80 million who will not be buying iPods that start at $300 each.
Because while installing a program, you can walk away and do something else. The first time you run a program, presumably you plan to do some work with it. Therefore, it's better to spend 15 minutes of idle time than 15 minutes of user waiting time.
The field is well-researched and a patent minefield. Newcomers beware.
It seems to me it would be possible to design a filesystem that spreads data around the media to avoid (as much as possible) overwriting the same storage blocks.
This is a gross simplification, but flash is not rewritable in-place like RAM or hard disk is. It must be erased in relatively large block sizes for the space to be writable again.
To answer your question, it's not only possible, but routinely done.
Even then, you'd have to explain why folks in NYC don't have phones with advanced data services that are still able to work in rural Utah. Population density is certainly one factor, but not the only factor at all. For example, most urban Japanese workers spend considerable amounts of time on a train, rather than driving, to and from work. That means they actually have time to use wireless data services.
It's not that simple. The urban Japanese worker probably spends at least an hour in a train every day, while the urban American might be driving. The urban Japanese living space is much smaller (yes, even compared to a US metropolis), so bulky PCs are not as desirable. Housing costs are also sky-high, which means many people no longer hope to own a home, and therefore would have more disposable income to spend on gadgets.
I doubt it. How many people are really running Linux on the PS2 or X-Box? Even without legal impediments, having to reverse-engineer these boxes means that free software will trail commercial software for a year or even years. Note also that people have been saying that the X-Box is merely a specialized PC ever since its announcement, yet the X-Box still isn't the cheap PC people promised it would be.
What vendors have found now is that they cannot compete (or, eventually will not be able to compete) with free software on general purpose hardware. All this means is that they will move to proprietary hardware. This is most evident in markets like game consoles and cell phones, where being old is as good as being dead. However, it can artificially be made true for many other markets, including the desktop PC.
Can you discuss why you didn't just buy an eMac for about $800? Honestly curious. Your $800 investment doesn't even include the cost of MacOS X yet.
GarageBand requires an audio input source to support 44.1 KHz samples. I have an obscure TV tuner card whose audio input is similarly unsupported.
Somebody just paid, if memory serves, $104M for a painting. Markets don't have to make sense. The money you get from selling your old Mac is still real. You are exhibiting what some critics of the iPod often fail to understand: the iPod is not "overpriced", because people are buying it. The price is whatever the market will bear.
If Apple introduces a 2Ghz "G5 Mini" for $1000, as discussed on the rumor sites, those old PMacs would cost $200 just like the old PC workstations.
Sure. Until it happens, so what? Consider also what a $1,000 G5 will do to the eMac and iMac when guessing Apple's intentions.
in the PC world, you are usually paying a premium for things like SCSI/SATA and huge cases -- the machines aren't priced by CPU speed.
I wasn't talking about CPUs only. The point remains: buying a $400 PC every year doesn't put you in the "top end".
You can sell one for more money than the other on eBay. Four such Macs are currently getting $625, $550, $465, and $51.50. 500 MHz Pentium III computers are getting between $89.95 and $9.99. It's not particularly easy to search for a dual PIII (any ever made?), but that should give you the picture.
A PC user might pay less to replace a cheap machine every year and always have top-end kit.
If you need or want to stay in the "top end", then you cannot be buying "cheap machines" every year.
You're in the minority. Most people's data are not worth the expense of dramatically more reliable hardware. In fact, they apparently aren't even worth the trouble to making regular back-ups for.
If I have a slow hard drive... eh. No biggie. I wait an extra second.
No, a slow hard drive can preclude entire applications, such as video capturing.
I'll be buying these just as soon as I can afford them.
And that's why not many people are selling it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Apple changed the DRM policy on newly purchased songs, not on the songs you have already purchased. I'm not sure if iTunes 4.5 would allow you to burn previously-purchased songs 10 times (as opposed to the new limit of 7), but I'm pretty sure you can avoid upgrading iTunes to keep the old deal.
Personally, I don't know why Apple changed that limit. It's not as if people would really be using iTunes to mass produce CDs whether the limit is 10 or 7. It might have to do with getting the record labels to agree to expanding the number of authorized machines from 3 to 5. In any case, I believe you are free not to upgrade iTunes.
You remember wrong. According to sortchk, for random data sets Quicksort is comparable to Bubblesort at 10 items. At 100 items, Bubblesort requires 4x to 7x more comparisons, and 5x to 13x more data moves, depending on the variant of Quicksort. At 1,000 items, Bubblesort requires some 32x more comparisons and some 255x more data moves.
I don't disagree if what you want to say is that there are special case data sets where Bubblesort can be the best performer. However, it should not be the "default" algorithm of choice.