People cheering the demise of the "old technology" 3.5" floppy by typing messages on a keyboard layout that was designed in 1874 (to minimize jamming of manual typewriters) and moving these messages across a protocol (TCP/IP) that was defined in 1978 -- two years prior to the introduction of the 3.5" floppy
TCP/IP works just fine for its intended purposes today. Floppies don't. Look, nobody is going to take your precious floppy drives from you. I suspect you'll be able to buy new ones for many years. But they have long since been obsoleted by superior alternatives, and for new hardware it's time to move on.
Only compared to WinNT/2000 or Linux, neither of which were intended for normal users. Mac OS 7/8/9 was only slightly inferior to Win9x technically (and better in some areas, for example they had some multiprocessing support).
Firewire? Big whoop. Sure, Apple had it first, but was it a big advance over a lot of other similar technologies?
Yes. My floppy replacement is a bus-powered 5 GB Firewire drive that's the size of a deck of cards. What "similar technology" could support that before USB2?
color monitors (Steve didn't like color until much later)
Wasn't Steve gone around the Mac II era? Regardless, the Mac did it right from the beginning, supporting multiple monitors and color correction a decade before Windows had anything remotely comparable.
Let's not even get into all the software innovations that began on the PC
Actually I'd like to see these alleged innovations. Desktop publishing, nope. Simple networking, nope. Internet, nope. (The first web browser was a NextStep app). Games, ok, you can have that one.
Let's also remember that Apple for years was too incompetent to create a modern operating system
And when was Cairo due? Copland was a disaster, no question. But they were able to completely start over and still ship OS X before XP.
They dont like us and there's a good reason- we cost them money when we use more than the normal user!
I'm not sure about that, we also use less of their expensive tech support. And even if excessive bandwidth use is a problem, it's far more reasonable (and effective) to simply limit bandwidth than to dictate that home networks aren't allowed.
apps written for Linux will work pretty well on MacOS, but it's actually utterly impossible to do the reverse with a Wine style/scale reverse engineering project
This is the problem with literalist geeks who focus on a tree while ignoring the forest. Intel never claimed that a P4 makes your bandwidth higher. They claimed the Internet was faster -- which it was.
Actually I'd have to say you're ignoring the forest for the trees there. The "average end user" was/is on dialup, where transfer time is nearly always far greater than rendering time even on a slow CPU. Maybe a P4 would make for a tiny performance improvement, but nowhere near the extent that Intel implied.
Of course it would be even easier to pick on Microsoft's current ads ("Hey, let's run a database query and spam our customers! However could we have done this without.NET?") Marketroids are constantly walking the line between mere deception and outright lies, no matter who they work for.
Quartz extreme is supported on any AGP video card for mac
Except the ATI Rage 128, because it can't do non-power-of-2 texture sizes. Although Macs with those cards can easily be upgraded to a Radeon 8500 or 9000.
How can Apple get away with bald-faced lying to the public like this?
Because it's not a complete lie. There are a number of real-world tasks where G4s beat Pentiums due to Altivec (e.g. distributed.net's RC5 cracker). It is weasel-like, but no more so than Intel's assertion that a P4 makes the Internet faster.
Can't they just sell on the merits of their hardware and software, and just stick to the truth?
Marketroids...truth...that just doesn't work.
Re:What the People In Charge don't mention,
on
Copyright Rumblings
·
· Score: 1
Free entertainment is bad for the economy.
Not true. This is a form of the broken window fallacy, i.e. the theory that the economy benefits if I go around throwing rocks through windows, because window repairmen will be paid to fix them. This is false because the money that is spent paying repairmen would otherwise have been put to more productive uses. More detail here. Likewise, free entertainment means that people have more money to spend on other areas. While it would hurt Time Warner, the overall economy would actually benefit.
I am the oppsoite of a capitalist; I don't believe a strong government should exist to force people to behave in ways to stimulate the economy
Not sure what you mean here. I do consider myself a capitalist, and I oppose a strong government "forcing" people to stimulate the economy. The essence of capitalism is voluntary exchange of goods and services.
Java is closed because Sun have set themselves up as the absolute arbiters of what will be permitted with the language.
That's just not true. Look at the Java bindings for Cocoa in Mac OS X. You can write Mac apps entirely in Java that have full access to the native APIs. The difference is that Apple fully supports pure Java development as well. MS could easily have done the same thing, but instead they tried to hijack the entire Java platform and got shot down.
Rogers Sessions took the time to investigate every single one of the projects on the JVM languages page.
Not exactly, note this gem he hid in his "analysis":
Tied for third place were the categories Freeware and School/Hobby projects at 19 entries each. Both of these categories include technologies that show the feasibility of generating JBC from sources other than Java (a capability that is not in dispute), but do not include actual supported implementations that would be used in a large commercial project.
Yeah, who would want to use free software written by hobbyists for anything important?
If your legitamite mail frequently has "Buy for between $30-$70/ea.", all it can do is protect your legit mail by allowing such things to pass through.
No, what will happen is that those particular words will not be indicators of spam for you. But it's unlikely that those words are the only indicators in your spam messages. According to the article most messages end up in the "spam" or "not spam" categories by a very wide margin, so even if some of the words traditionally associated with spam appear frequently in your legit mail, it's not going to break the filter.
What if you are a person who deals with financial data over e-mail? What if you routinely help people with their web pages? What if you send long blocks of code?
Then the filter will adapt to the types of legitimate messages you receive, that's the entire point.
These users aren't going to go out and install the latest Bayesian filters on their system, and the major email readers won't (and probably shouldn't) come with them automatically activated.
Sure they should. The mail client for Mac OS X does. It starts off in "training" mode where it only flags what it thinks is spam but keeps it in your inbox. Once you're satisfied that it's working (you train it by correcting its spam/nonspam decisions), you switch to "automatic" mode and spam goes into a Junk folder.
Sooner rather than later you're going to find that the labels on your tabs are truncated to the point of being unusable.
Fortunately, tabs do not preclude opening more than one window. Which is easier, managing 2 windows with 6 tabs each, or 12 separate windows? Never mind, I know what your answer is, but I disagree.
If you don't like the keyboard cycle shortcut, use the Window menu, or the dock menu, or use minimized windows.
All of these scale worse than tabs, except for the Window menu, which is inherently slower because you have to first hit the menu (granted Fitt's Law helps here), and then locate the correct item.
I'll repeat myself just one more time: learn how to use the computer. Do not sit down at a Mac and try to use it like you would use Windows.
Rather than attacking people, why don't you stop and think about why so many people prefer tabs? As mentioned above, not having to futz with moving and sizing new windows is a key advantage. Due to the nature of web browsing, it's rarely the case that I want to see two pages side by side. Instead, I'd rather consolidate lots of pages into one window so that they don't obstruct my other apps. For example, I'm typing this message into Chimera with 6 tabs open (with all titles easily distinguishable). Because I only have one Chimera window, Terminal, Mail, Fire, Project Builder, and Finder windows are visible and easily accessible. This would be much harder to achieve if I had to deal with 6 browser windows.
Maybe in theory tabs break all sorts of UI guidelines. But in practice they work quite well for many users. Rather than assuming the users are wrong, why not consider that the guidelines may not be perfect?
Right, to pirate music over Rendezvous you'll have to use one of the other dozen ways of transferring files under OS X. I really don't understand Apple's motivation here. The only thing that makes any sense is that they're trying to not get sued by the RIAA (who already hates them because of the iPod).
And because Apple created it, they have the right to tell you not to do that with it.
I disagree. Until the DMCA and other unbalanced legislation, copyright has never dictated how you can *use* a product that you have legally acquired, and I fail to see any reason why it should.
This is why DRM is needed - to make it just as difficult to make an illegal copy of digital data as it is for hard copy data
And I have no objections at all if publishers want to release DRM-crippled products. The problem comes when said publishers subsequently demand laws to make criminals out of people who use tools that *could* be used to violate copyright, even though they have entirely legitimate uses (such as restoring the fair use rights that DRM schemes invariably remove).
Women are as likely as men to have a work ethic and work as part of a team.
Actually my entirely unscientific experience is that women are more likely to have those attributes. Every one of the (too few) female developers I've worked with has been excellent at the "boring" but vital tasks like writing (understandable) documentation, testing, and dealing with users. From an evolutionary and biological standpoint this makes perfect sense.
Slashdot Mirror
TCP/IP works just fine for its intended purposes today. Floppies don't. Look, nobody is going to take your precious floppy drives from you. I suspect you'll be able to buy new ones for many years. But they have long since been obsoleted by superior alternatives, and for new hardware it's time to move on.
Only compared to WinNT/2000 or Linux, neither of which were intended for normal users. Mac OS 7/8/9 was only slightly inferior to Win9x technically (and better in some areas, for example they had some multiprocessing support).
Firewire? Big whoop. Sure, Apple had it first, but was it a big advance over a lot of other similar technologies?
Yes. My floppy replacement is a bus-powered 5 GB Firewire drive that's the size of a deck of cards. What "similar technology" could support that before USB2?
color monitors (Steve didn't like color until much later)
Wasn't Steve gone around the Mac II era? Regardless, the Mac did it right from the beginning, supporting multiple monitors and color correction a decade before Windows had anything remotely comparable.
Let's not even get into all the software innovations that began on the PC
Actually I'd like to see these alleged innovations. Desktop publishing, nope. Simple networking, nope. Internet, nope. (The first web browser was a NextStep app). Games, ok, you can have that one.
Let's also remember that Apple for years was too incompetent to create a modern operating system
And when was Cairo due? Copland was a disaster, no question. But they were able to completely start over and still ship OS X before XP.
I'm not sure about that, we also use less of their expensive tech support. And even if excessive bandwidth use is a problem, it's far more reasonable (and effective) to simply limit bandwidth than to dictate that home networks aren't allowed.
Like GNUstep?
Alternatively, you could write your Mac app in Cocoa and port to Linux with GNUstep.
Actually I'd have to say you're ignoring the forest for the trees there. The "average end user" was/is on dialup, where transfer time is nearly always far greater than rendering time even on a slow CPU. Maybe a P4 would make for a tiny performance improvement, but nowhere near the extent that Intel implied.
Of course it would be even easier to pick on Microsoft's current ads ("Hey, let's run a database query and spam our customers! However could we have done this without
Except the ATI Rage 128, because it can't do non-power-of-2 texture sizes. Although Macs with those cards can easily be upgraded to a Radeon 8500 or 9000.
Because it's not a complete lie. There are a number of real-world tasks where G4s beat Pentiums due to Altivec (e.g. distributed.net's RC5 cracker). It is weasel-like, but no more so than Intel's assertion that a P4 makes the Internet faster.
Can't they just sell on the merits of their hardware and software, and just stick to the truth?
Marketroids...truth...that just doesn't work.
Not true. This is a form of the broken window fallacy, i.e. the theory that the economy benefits if I go around throwing rocks through windows, because window repairmen will be paid to fix them. This is false because the money that is spent paying repairmen would otherwise have been put to more productive uses. More detail here. Likewise, free entertainment means that people have more money to spend on other areas. While it would hurt Time Warner, the overall economy would actually benefit.
I am the oppsoite of a capitalist; I don't believe a strong government should exist to force people to behave in ways to stimulate the economy
Not sure what you mean here. I do consider myself a capitalist, and I oppose a strong government "forcing" people to stimulate the economy. The essence of capitalism is voluntary exchange of goods and services.
That's just not true. Look at the Java bindings for Cocoa in Mac OS X. You can write Mac apps entirely in Java that have full access to the native APIs. The difference is that Apple fully supports pure Java development as well. MS could easily have done the same thing, but instead they tried to hijack the entire Java platform and got shot down.
Not exactly, note this gem he hid in his "analysis":
Yeah, who would want to use free software written by hobbyists for anything important?
Mac OS X 10.2.3, 800 Mhz G4, gcc 3.1, JDK 1.3.1
./a.out
% time
100000000./a.out 1.87s user 0.03s system 90% cpu 2.090 total
% time java Test
100000000
java loop 2.24s user 0.10s system 86% cpu 2.713 total
Welcome back, how was your coma?
No, what will happen is that those particular words will not be indicators of spam for you. But it's unlikely that those words are the only indicators in your spam messages. According to the article most messages end up in the "spam" or "not spam" categories by a very wide margin, so even if some of the words traditionally associated with spam appear frequently in your legit mail, it's not going to break the filter.
Then the filter will adapt to the types of legitimate messages you receive, that's the entire point.
Sure they should. The mail client for Mac OS X does. It starts off in "training" mode where it only flags what it thinks is spam but keeps it in your inbox. Once you're satisfied that it's working (you train it by correcting its spam/nonspam decisions), you switch to "automatic" mode and spam goes into a Junk folder.
Fortunately, tabs do not preclude opening more than one window. Which is easier, managing 2 windows with 6 tabs each, or 12 separate windows? Never mind, I know what your answer is, but I disagree.
If you don't like the keyboard cycle shortcut, use the Window menu, or the dock menu, or use minimized windows.
All of these scale worse than tabs, except for the Window menu, which is inherently slower because you have to first hit the menu (granted Fitt's Law helps here), and then locate the correct item.
I'll repeat myself just one more time: learn how to use the computer. Do not sit down at a Mac and try to use it like you would use Windows.
Rather than attacking people, why don't you stop and think about why so many people prefer tabs? As mentioned above, not having to futz with moving and sizing new windows is a key advantage. Due to the nature of web browsing, it's rarely the case that I want to see two pages side by side. Instead, I'd rather consolidate lots of pages into one window so that they don't obstruct my other apps. For example, I'm typing this message into Chimera with 6 tabs open (with all titles easily distinguishable). Because I only have one Chimera window, Terminal, Mail, Fire, Project Builder, and Finder windows are visible and easily accessible. This would be much harder to achieve if I had to deal with 6 browser windows.
Maybe in theory tabs break all sorts of UI guidelines. But in practice they work quite well for many users. Rather than assuming the users are wrong, why not consider that the guidelines may not be perfect?
Right, to pirate music over Rendezvous you'll have to use one of the other dozen ways of transferring files under OS X. I really don't understand Apple's motivation here. The only thing that makes any sense is that they're trying to not get sued by the RIAA (who already hates them because of the iPod).
I disagree. Until the DMCA and other unbalanced legislation, copyright has never dictated how you can *use* a product that you have legally acquired, and I fail to see any reason why it should.
You mean I'll be able to "encrypt" my private documents so that nobody can see them without some sort of "password"? I can't wait!
It can help you just as much as it can help Hollywood.
I've yet to hear of any alleged benefit that DRM gives consumers that isn't easily attainable with non-DRM systems.
And I have no objections at all if publishers want to release DRM-crippled products. The problem comes when said publishers subsequently demand laws to make criminals out of people who use tools that *could* be used to violate copyright, even though they have entirely legitimate uses (such as restoring the fair use rights that DRM schemes invariably remove).
curl
Actually my entirely unscientific experience is that women are more likely to have those attributes. Every one of the (too few) female developers I've worked with has been excellent at the "boring" but vital tasks like writing (understandable) documentation, testing, and dealing with users. From an evolutionary and biological standpoint this makes perfect sense.
Not exactly.
Just quoting this at +2 and confirming that it works.