100 years from now, they will laugh at us for our crazy notions about strings, chaos, and the human genome.
I doubt it. It depends, of course. Some students laugh about "the aether" or "phlogiston" now, but mainly, I think, they see them as being reasonable (testable) hypotheses that turned out to be wrong.
I don't think Newton seems as 'silly as "turtles all the way down"' today. Science tends to get refined and corrected, complete upendings are far rarer than the press (or folks who like using the term "paradigm shift") would have you believe.
You need to go to religion for really dumb theories.
GameSprockets were nice, but they were if anything an attempt by a small and relatively unsupported group within Apple to counteract the general anti-game bias of the rest of the company.
E.g. the Mac OS deliberately made life difficult for anyone who wanted to take over the entire screen. Perhaps *the most popular* game sprocket feature was a bunch of API calls that made this possible.
Similarly, GameSprockets' InputSprocket tried to solve the "no joystick standard" issue, which really should have been dealt with at OS level (i.e. joysticks should have been treated the same as tablets or trackballs).
To the extent that some GameSprockets technology has made it into the mainstream OS, the demise of Gamesprockets has been a good thing. To the extent that some of the functionality is just gone... oh well.
At the time when many people were playing Doom 1 and 2, I was playing Marathon 1 and 2.
No, you were playing "Pathways into Darkness" at pathetically low framerates. Go check your history -- Wolf3D shipped in 92. Ultima Underworld also shipped in 92. PiD and DOOM shipped in 93.
Almost all the best games from 1990 through to the present either (a) never shipped on the Mac, (b) shipped later, (c) weren't well-supported on the Mac (e.g. System Shock had fatal bugs that never got fixed), and/or (d) had patches, expansions, or sequels that never made it to the Mac.
Then there's abominations such as EverQuest that shipped 2 years late on the Mac, didn't have the same range of features as the PC version, and restricted Mac players to retarded servers.
The typical gamer does not actually need to play every game 3 months earlier and does not spend tons of money upgrading their machine every year.
Actually, I tend to play games *later* than most people. I particularly like picking up six month old PC games for $10-20 when the alternative is picking up 6 month old PC games ported to the Mac that still sell for $50.
Given a choice, I'll play a game on a Mac. It tends to be a far more pleasant experience (e.g. World of Warcraft runs better on Macs than PCs).
Do OpenGL, QuickTime, OpenPlay, and OpenAL not count as compelling advantage?
Over DirectX?
They are all very easy to use APIs, and if you write a game on the Mac using them it is trivial to port it to Windows or *NIX.
Yes, by using these APIs you can quickly port to 5% of the desktop gaming market and 0% of the console market. By writing to DirectX (which, I am sorry to say, is easier to use than the Open* equivalents) you can target Windows and X-Box.
OSX offers no compelling advantages, and many disadvantages, as a platform to game developers. Apple has neglected or actively discouraged game developers over a long period of time -- starting with a refusal to produce a joystick standard (so there is still no standard joystick interface after 20 years) through refusing to enable low res graphics back in the early 90s when every hit game (Doom, etc.) relied on them to achieve acceptable frame rates.
Apple's current initiative is actually probably the best move they could make vis-a-vis games.
Currently, a typical Mac gamer owns a PC to play games on. In my case, I upgrade my PC more frequently than my Mac, even though I use my Mac for *paying work*, and the only reason is game performance. Apple can capture a chunk of this money by producing computers that run their OS and the games I want to play.
Whether I have to reboot into Windows or run in a compatibility box, I'd rather upgrade one computer every twelve-eighteen months than upgrade my PC twice and my Mac one every two years.
If Apple released OSX for random PC boxes it would instantly lose its hardware margin, and it might never get significant volume on software. And, frankly, Apple's hardware innovations are as important as its software innovations -- would you like to see Apple out of the hardware market?
And the link argues that there is *no* mass market digital camera that can match a 35mm analog camera with positive transparency film (which he argues is equivalent to a 25MP camera).
I'm taking the line that the pro-level digital cameras match or exceed the quality of 35mm film cameras for output quality. This is a pretty debatable stance.
Actually I'd say you've got this backwards. You can buy a pretty decent 35mm camera for $100. For $300 you can buy an analog camera that you probably can't beat with a digital for output quality for under $5000.
Most people are going to care more about the immediacy and convenience of digital, or the lower cost of film, or the higher capacity of digital.
Unix (which Linux inherits much from, and in software aquired traits can be inherited:-> ) has been in a much nastier environment than Windows for much longer. Recall that the Morris Worm targeted Unix and Vax systems...
I think that's overstating it. The fact is that far more potential hackers have access to and familiarity with Windows than UNIX, and that this has been the case for some time. I'm not trying to defend Windows...
Like any statistic, it's being used to support the viewpoint of the author
Yes, authors of articles frequently cite evidence and other images that detract from their articles. Statistics alone are used to bolster otherwise bankrupt arguments.
I mod TFA as -1 flamebait. Or a late April 1 post.
What has Microsoft given us? It has given us Windows, sure, it was buggy earlier and a lot of things didn't work like they were supposed to (plug and play springs to mind) but it was a pioneering effort.
XP is such a joy when it comes to simply connecting a device and watching the pretty little bubble detecting it and saying "its installed and ready for use" makes the slightly high price absolutely worth it.
I am sure it is a business model for companies such as Sun and Oracle to just sue Microsoft whenever their profits are down due to insanely stupid and useless products that no one is buying.
Lets be fair and honest about this. Here is a company that single handedly created the market for Personal Computers, brought computing to ordinary folks like you and me, made it affordable by encouraging mass acceptance and constantly strives to provide us ease of use in every sphere it touches.
By "first" you mean the Xerox PARC mouse, I assume -- which wasn't the first by a long stretch. It also, with three buttons, did less than the Mac mouse did with one button -- so Apple wasn't dumbing down anything at the time.
Even today, the right mouse button is mainly used in games and for context menus. The latter is nice, but of almost no use to non-power users. It makes a huge difference in games, though.
This is basically a real doll with a motor... would renting these things out in electric brothels even be technically illegal? New laws will no doubt have to be passed.
I'm *guessing* that Illustrator has a few more users than Inkscape, so this is a rather self-defeating definition of minority.
Direct dragging of the view (it doesn't have to be via the space bar, but this does seem to be common to a great many graphics programs, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Freehand, and so forth) needs to be available via some method other than the middle mouse button, since this is absent on many laptops (let's ignore the Mac's default single-button mouse).
We started this project because we want to make the best vector editor in the world. If you want to help us, you're welcome.... If you just want to rant or whine without (I'm sure) reading our keyboard chart even once - then I'm simply not interested, sorry.
A laudable goal. But to be the best, you actually need to be better than other programs. In Illustrator, for example, you never need to read the keyboard chart because you are informed of the keyboard shortcut for any command when you mouse over it.
tons of comments from people who LOVE its interface are the best response to such doomsayers
To do good work you need to pay attention to people who disagree with you (as well as those who agree with you). E.g. it may be very convenient to scroll with the middle mouse button, but it won't hurt to allow the spacebar to do it too.
In general, ignoring standards and conventions which have either been explicitly established and followed or which have simply happened organically is just stupid. Maybe your system is a little more consistent (with itself) but... unless you're planning on replacing every other program your users will work with, you'll just be hurting yourself in the long run.
I doubt Adobe Photoshop is going to switch to your zooming and panning conventions any time soon, I don't think your program will replace Photoshop, and I don't see why users of Photoshop and your program should need to remember two sets of keyboard shortcuts for the same operation.
As for the rest, Inkscape didn't do anything (it launched but had no Windows) for me (even after I reinstalled X11) so its usability is currently nil for me.
With more applications and services moving off the desktop and into the network, the battleground is increasingly shifting online.
I don't think high end 2d (e.g. Photoshop), 3d (e.g. Maya), and video/film editing (e.g. Final Cut Pro) is going online any time soon. I think Microsoft has a good deal to fear from its bread-and-butter apps becomes web-based, but it will be a little while longer for Apple.
And, in fact, On Location was available for the Mac before Jean Louis Gassee left Apple to form Be. (Apple's developer CDs used to include On Location indices.) So while BeFS did something you needed a DA/Init combo to do on the Mac (and similar but inferior products were available for Windows), it wasn't Earthshaking.
The reporter is missing the point and Google is correct that thier culture (of which the CFO is but one case study) is much more important than the current quarter's results.
Intel does a lot more for the software community than AMD does by virtue of its market dominance. It produces compilers and chipsets to support its cpu business. AMD tries to cherrypick the most profitable aspect of Intel's business while doing as little of the unprofitable support stuff as possible.
This is an absolutely classic Hertz/Avis kind of thing. Macdonalds does enormous R&D to figure out where to put its franchises. Burger King puts its franchises across the street from Macdonalds. One can imagine Macdonalds trying to tie up potential Burger King leases before acquiring a site for one of its stores.
I don't see that Intel is obligated to interoperate with AMD at all. They could simply design their compiler to refuse to run on an AMD box. They could design their compiler to write programs that refuse to run on an AMD box.
AMD, in turn, could produce CPUs that claimed to be Intel CPUs.
This is no different from Ford deciding to use odd shaped cup holders and selling expensive replacement cupholders to prevent Repco from undercutting them.
What would be truly unethical and illegal would be what Microsoft did to Borland with Windows 95 betas -- incorrectly report errors after detecting a program compiled with a Borland compiler.
If Intel produces crashing code for AMDs -- that's basically a form of libel. Aside from that, I just don't see the problem.
If all I wanted to do was run Windows applications at full native speed, I can buy a Windows box to do that right now. It's CHEAPER to buy a Windows box. Even if you already have a Mac it's cheaper.
Here's a counter-argument. If you're someone who likes using a Mac and likes playing games then, like me, you own both a Mac and a PC/Console. In my case, even though I use a Mac for paying work, I end up upgrading my PC more often. So in a typical three year period I might buy 2 PCs and one Mac.
Now I can just upgrade my Mac every two years and be ahead.
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Like your shiny brushed metal interface on OSX? Guess where that came from? You're right, DR16.
QuickTime 4 predates DR16. It's possible that Apple copied the idea of brushed metal from DR15.
Anyway, I see that DR17 has borrowed a few ideas from Apple.
100 years from now, they will laugh at us for our crazy notions about strings, chaos, and the human genome.
I doubt it. It depends, of course. Some students laugh about "the aether" or "phlogiston" now, but mainly, I think, they see them as being reasonable (testable) hypotheses that turned out to be wrong.
I don't think Newton seems as 'silly as "turtles all the way down"' today. Science tends to get refined and corrected, complete upendings are far rarer than the press (or folks who like using the term "paradigm shift") would have you believe.
You need to go to religion for really dumb theories.
GameSprockets were nice, but they were if anything an attempt by a small and relatively unsupported group within Apple to counteract the general anti-game bias of the rest of the company.
... oh well.
E.g. the Mac OS deliberately made life difficult for anyone who wanted to take over the entire screen. Perhaps *the most popular* game sprocket feature was a bunch of API calls that made this possible.
Similarly, GameSprockets' InputSprocket tried to solve the "no joystick standard" issue, which really should have been dealt with at OS level (i.e. joysticks should have been treated the same as tablets or trackballs).
To the extent that some GameSprockets technology has made it into the mainstream OS, the demise of Gamesprockets has been a good thing. To the extent that some of the functionality is just gone
At the time when many people were playing Doom 1 and 2, I was playing Marathon 1 and 2.
No, you were playing "Pathways into Darkness" at pathetically low framerates. Go check your history -- Wolf3D shipped in 92. Ultima Underworld also shipped in 92. PiD and DOOM shipped in 93.
Almost all the best games from 1990 through to the present either (a) never shipped on the Mac, (b) shipped later, (c) weren't well-supported on the Mac (e.g. System Shock had fatal bugs that never got fixed), and/or (d) had patches, expansions, or sequels that never made it to the Mac.
Then there's abominations such as EverQuest that shipped 2 years late on the Mac, didn't have the same range of features as the PC version, and restricted Mac players to retarded servers.
The typical gamer does not actually need to play every game 3 months earlier and does not spend tons of money upgrading their machine every year.
Actually, I tend to play games *later* than most people. I particularly like picking up six month old PC games for $10-20 when the alternative is picking up 6 month old PC games ported to the Mac that still sell for $50.
Given a choice, I'll play a game on a Mac. It tends to be a far more pleasant experience (e.g. World of Warcraft runs better on Macs than PCs).
Do OpenGL, QuickTime, OpenPlay, and OpenAL not count as compelling advantage?
Over DirectX?
They are all very easy to use APIs, and if you write a game on the Mac using them it is trivial to port it to Windows or *NIX.
Yes, by using these APIs you can quickly port to 5% of the desktop gaming market and 0% of the console market. By writing to DirectX (which, I am sorry to say, is easier to use than the Open* equivalents) you can target Windows and X-Box.
OSX offers no compelling advantages, and many disadvantages, as a platform to game developers. Apple has neglected or actively discouraged game developers over a long period of time -- starting with a refusal to produce a joystick standard (so there is still no standard joystick interface after 20 years) through refusing to enable low res graphics back in the early 90s when every hit game (Doom, etc.) relied on them to achieve acceptable frame rates.
Apple's current initiative is actually probably the best move they could make vis-a-vis games.
Currently, a typical Mac gamer owns a PC to play games on. In my case, I upgrade my PC more frequently than my Mac, even though I use my Mac for *paying work*, and the only reason is game performance. Apple can capture a chunk of this money by producing computers that run their OS and the games I want to play.
Whether I have to reboot into Windows or run in a compatibility box, I'd rather upgrade one computer every twelve-eighteen months than upgrade my PC twice and my Mac one every two years.
If Apple released OSX for random PC boxes it would instantly lose its hardware margin, and it might never get significant volume on software. And, frankly, Apple's hardware innovations are as important as its software innovations -- would you like to see Apple out of the hardware market?
Oops that should be "higher cost of film".
And the link argues that there is *no* mass market digital camera that can match a 35mm analog camera with positive transparency film (which he argues is equivalent to a 25MP camera).
I'm taking the line that the pro-level digital cameras match or exceed the quality of 35mm film cameras for output quality. This is a pretty debatable stance.
Actually I'd say you've got this backwards. You can buy a pretty decent 35mm camera for $100. For $300 you can buy an analog camera that you probably can't beat with a digital for output quality for under $5000.
Most people are going to care more about the immediacy and convenience of digital, or the lower cost of film, or the higher capacity of digital.
Check this link:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmgoingaway.htm
Unix (which Linux inherits much from, and in software aquired traits can be inherited :-> ) has been in a much nastier environment than Windows for much longer. Recall that the Morris Worm targeted Unix and Vax systems...
I think that's overstating it. The fact is that far more potential hackers have access to and familiarity with Windows than UNIX, and that this has been the case for some time. I'm not trying to defend Windows...
Like any statistic, it's being used to support the viewpoint of the author
Yes, authors of articles frequently cite evidence and other images that detract from their articles. Statistics alone are used to bolster otherwise bankrupt arguments.
I mod TFA as -1 flamebait. Or a late April 1 post.
What has Microsoft given us? It has given us Windows, sure, it was buggy earlier and a lot of things didn't work like they were supposed to (plug and play springs to mind) but it was a pioneering effort.
XP is such a joy when it comes to simply connecting a device and watching the pretty little bubble detecting it and saying "its installed and ready for use" makes the slightly high price absolutely worth it.
I am sure it is a business model for companies such as Sun and Oracle to just sue Microsoft whenever their profits are down due to insanely stupid and useless products that no one is buying.
Lets be fair and honest about this. Here is a company that single handedly created the market for Personal Computers, brought computing to ordinary folks like you and me, made it affordable by encouraging mass acceptance and constantly strives to provide us ease of use in every sphere it touches.
OK it HAS to be a joke.
By "first" you mean the Xerox PARC mouse, I assume -- which wasn't the first by a long stretch. It also, with three buttons, did less than the Mac mouse did with one button -- so Apple wasn't dumbing down anything at the time.
Even today, the right mouse button is mainly used in games and for context menus. The latter is nice, but of almost no use to non-power users. It makes a huge difference in games, though.
This is basically a real doll with a motor... would renting these things out in electric brothels even be technically illegal? New laws will no doubt have to be passed.
Luckily you are in a minority
... If you just want to rant or whine without (I'm sure) reading our keyboard chart even once - then I'm simply not interested, sorry.
... unless you're planning on replacing every other program your users will work with, you'll just be hurting yourself in the long run.
I'm *guessing* that Illustrator has a few more users than Inkscape, so this is a rather self-defeating definition of minority.
Direct dragging of the view (it doesn't have to be via the space bar, but this does seem to be common to a great many graphics programs, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Freehand, and so forth) needs to be available via some method other than the middle mouse button, since this is absent on many laptops (let's ignore the Mac's default single-button mouse).
We started this project because we want to make the best vector editor in the world. If you want to help us, you're welcome.
A laudable goal. But to be the best, you actually need to be better than other programs. In Illustrator, for example, you never need to read the keyboard chart because you are informed of the keyboard shortcut for any command when you mouse over it.
tons of comments from people who LOVE its interface are the best response to such doomsayers
To do good work you need to pay attention to people who disagree with you (as well as those who agree with you). E.g. it may be very convenient to scroll with the middle mouse button, but it won't hurt to allow the spacebar to do it too.
In general, ignoring standards and conventions which have either been explicitly established and followed or which have simply happened organically is just stupid. Maybe your system is a little more consistent (with itself) but
I doubt Adobe Photoshop is going to switch to your zooming and panning conventions any time soon, I don't think your program will replace Photoshop, and I don't see why users of Photoshop and your program should need to remember two sets of keyboard shortcuts for the same operation.
As for the rest, Inkscape didn't do anything (it launched but had no Windows) for me (even after I reinstalled X11) so its usability is currently nil for me.
With more applications and services moving off the desktop and into the network, the battleground is increasingly shifting online.
I don't think high end 2d (e.g. Photoshop), 3d (e.g. Maya), and video/film editing (e.g. Final Cut Pro) is going online any time soon. I think Microsoft has a good deal to fear from its bread-and-butter apps becomes web-based, but it will be a little while longer for Apple.
Australian prices include sales tax (10%) for starters.
99.99 (repeating) would be nice!
I don't think anything is that reliable.
And, in fact, On Location was available for the Mac before Jean Louis Gassee left Apple to form Be. (Apple's developer CDs used to include On Location indices.) So while BeFS did something you needed a DA/Init combo to do on the Mac (and similar but inferior products were available for Windows), it wasn't Earthshaking.
The reporter is missing the point and Google is correct that thier culture (of which the CFO is but one case study) is much more important than the current quarter's results.
This sounds nice. It also sounds like Enron.
AMD's market share peaked a year or two back. So ... it's not like AMD is currently gaining market share.
Now there's quite a bit of evidence that this is at least partly due to dirty tricks by Intel, but that's another story.
Well let's see:
Word 5.1 (emulated) outperformed Word 6 (native) in any serious performance test (loading and saving files, search and replace, etc.)
WriteNow 4.0 (emulated) outperformed both.
Studio/32 (emulated) remained the best bitmap editor on the planet. I continued using it cheerfully for years.
Intel does a lot more for the software community than AMD does by virtue of its market dominance. It produces compilers and chipsets to support its cpu business. AMD tries to cherrypick the most profitable aspect of Intel's business while doing as little of the unprofitable support stuff as possible.
This is an absolutely classic Hertz/Avis kind of thing. Macdonalds does enormous R&D to figure out where to put its franchises. Burger King puts its franchises across the street from Macdonalds. One can imagine Macdonalds trying to tie up potential Burger King leases before acquiring a site for one of its stores.
I don't see that Intel is obligated to interoperate with AMD at all. They could simply design their compiler to refuse to run on an AMD box. They could design their compiler to write programs that refuse to run on an AMD box.
AMD, in turn, could produce CPUs that claimed to be Intel CPUs.
This is no different from Ford deciding to use odd shaped cup holders and selling expensive replacement cupholders to prevent Repco from undercutting them.
What would be truly unethical and illegal would be what Microsoft did to Borland with Windows 95 betas -- incorrectly report errors after detecting a program compiled with a Borland compiler.
If Intel produces crashing code for AMDs -- that's basically a form of libel. Aside from that, I just don't see the problem.
He goes on to suggest that investors should move their money away from phone companies to NeuStar -- a company that vends telephone numbers.
Cough.
It seems to me that the obvious place to converge points of content would be email addresses -- which will make phone numbers obsolete as well.
Simple experiment:
Pick up an iPod and hold it in your hand. Work the controls.
Now go and do the same with one of the rival products... Any of them.
Which feels better in your hand? Be honest.
Apple's designs are more than skin deep. Their rivals' products look, feel (and in many cases work) like cheap, banged together noname brand crap.
If all I wanted to do was run Windows applications at full native speed, I can buy a Windows box to do that right now. It's CHEAPER to buy a Windows box. Even if you already have a Mac it's cheaper.
Here's a counter-argument. If you're someone who likes using a Mac and likes playing games then, like me, you own both a Mac and a PC/Console. In my case, even though I use a Mac for paying work, I end up upgrading my PC more often. So in a typical three year period I might buy 2 PCs and one Mac.
Now I can just upgrade my Mac every two years and be ahead.