Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7
More like System 3 if not System 2 (and hardware support from the first Mac). The ANU Math department's Macs were running AppleTalk over their existing phone lines in 1985. System 7 added personal file sharing.
Color support, which allowed for Photoshop and other image programs, in 1988 with System 6
I was pretty sure this was wrong, so I checked.
1. Original MacOS supported 16 colors (but no hardware support).
2. Mac II shipped in 1987. Internal color representation was 48-bit (we're only just seeing mainstream support for this). Two graphics cards were initially offered, one supporting 16 colors from a 32-bit palette and another supporting 256. A 24-bit card soon became available.
Excuse me for skipping over the early years of OS X, which included bizarre missteps like "Yellow Box" and "Rhapsody,"
Rhapsody was a code name for OS X. "Yellow Box" became Cocoa + Carbon. "Blue Box" became classic. Where's the bizarre misstep? (Aside from Aqua, the main difference between 10.0 and Rhapsody DR1 is that Classic runs in a Window.)
Alas, despite the wait, Tiger is a minor revision, like all previous OS X updates.
Um, OK.
I guess you need to gratuitously change the UI graphics to count as a major update. I guess by this standard the last major Windows update was Windows 95.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes, in my opinion, only two major new features, Spotlight and Dashboard, and both were clearly influenced by other existing products and services.
If Spotlight and Dashboard were the only two major new features in Tiger, I'd probably agree (although the integration of Spotlight into the system and user interface is beyond anything else out there).
Core Data and Core Graphics (which I guess he is too clueless to understand) seem far more significant to me, but don't rate a mention in the article. Perhaps because they don't appear on Apple's Tiger overview page (you need to actually click on "Developer Tools" to find out about them).
Automator looks like an impressive concept -- although whether it will find a target audience remains to be seen.
But Exposé is a weird solution, requiring you to hit various "hot keys" (read: A function keys) in order to trigger its display
Or gestures. But I guess you'd have had to use it and not just watch a demo to know that.
If Hollywood chooses to use BitTorrent to distribute films (legally) but fights to shut down illegal distribution (via BitTorrent) this is no different from it distributing films by video and shutting down video pirates.
BitTorrent is a technology, not a legal or moral imperative.
Perhaps Linux can replace Windows without becoming a platform.
What operating system does your car run? How about your toaster? How about your house's electrical system? How about your phone?
We're used to the concept of cars, electrical devices, and phones "just working", perhaps the key is to get computers to the point where "software" "just works" on "computers" the way "computers" "just work" when you "plug them into the wall".
Note that this is not the same as the "appliance computer" idea, since that said everyone had to use the same Model-T computer.
It's also not the same as the Java Virtual Machine, since that said everyone had to use the same Model-T virtual computer.
Some of the more recent Debian-derived distros (Knoppix being the first prominent case) are going in the direction. Here's some software, stick it in "a computer" and watch it go. Neat.
There will always be computers used for more specialised purposes that can't be treated as appliances, but the majority of email/web/im/word users could use a nicely configured linux distro and be happy.
ntil iWork, for example, their was no such thing as typing in a serial number in an Apple product.
Final Cut Pro Final Cut Express QuickTime Pro
And (although I don't own copies) I strongly suspect: Logic Shake Motion
All require serial numbers. (Final Cut Pro has quite an annoying un-Mac-like installation too; you can't just drag if to your new machine the way you can with 99% of Mac apps.)
If he didn't give "The Phantom Menace" an A I might have some respect for him.
The problem is he had to see Matrix 2 to realise that The Matrix was philosophically bankrupt. If he were truly insightful he'd have realised that from the get go.
...most of the reviews I've read did show game performance of the dual core Pentiums. Maybe I just don't read the wicked sites he talks about. Only one review (amazingly enough, I think it was theregister.co.uk) raved about how great it was to encode video while playing Doom3...
This is a proof about the limits of logic not the limits of computers. Incompleteness states that within any system of logic there will be statements that are true or false that cannot be proven (true or false) -- by Turing machine, human being, or God.
My wife operates a VR research lab (they still exist) and all the new hardware is just great for them. Unfortunately, it only addresses one of the concerns which must be addressed before we can all live in the world of "Snow Crash". The basic problems for mainstream VR are as follows:
1) The headsets really haven't "tipped" price-wise. Kind of like LCD screens for a long time, they stay expensive (around $10k) while slowly improving in features (e.g. resolution, motion tracking). Until they get "good enough" the prices won't trend downwards. (There are cheap headsets, but they make you sick pretty fast. Even the pricey ones make you sick after 30 mins or so... so you won't be playing WoW in them.)
2) The big issues w.r.t. UI remain unsolved. E.g. a lot of VR setups involve complex motion tracking and setting aside a room for subjects to walk around in. Usually a second person watches the subject to prevent them from, say, running into a wall... There are rigs that allow you to suspend the subject to allow them to walk through theoretically infinite landscapes... we're talking six figures though.
3) Behavior capture. The solutions to tracking movement remain pretty experimental and invasive. All the stuff we've talked about so far will, at best, get you walking around in a virtual landscape, capture your head movements (kind of), and maybe capture some of your arm and finger movements. Even assuming your $500,000 suspension rig captures all your body movements perfectly, we still to capture facial expression and lip synch. (So far, spacial 3d audio is pretty primitive too... Teamspeak is a long way from a person's voice emanating from their position in a shared world with lots of people.)
4) Force Feedback. All this VR is going to seem pretty lame when you can walk through solid objects or your hand passes through an item you're trying to manipulate. Arguably, this is a subset of item (3) above, but in fact just allowing people to walk around in an unlimited expanse is a big enough problem...
There are plenty of finer grained issues to deal with, but the rendering of VR scenes (at least, so far) has turned out to be the easy part. At the moment, if you wanted to play WoW in VR you'd need to set aside a large room, buy an expensive HMD, and a really expensive suspension rig. (Luckily, WoW lets you run straight through people so the UI will match this perfectly.)
Hardly. Most game-style rendering today is mostly smoke and mirrors
Agreed, but...
Most movies and videos are produced using "smoke and mirrors" too. E.g. typically the lighting is changed for every camera shot, reflectors, gels and masks are used to highlight or darken parts of shots, actors are coated with makeup to compensate for the incredibly artificial lighting, etc. etc. etc. And then everything is shot on a sound stage or in front of a facade or on a virtual set.
If you point a video camera at a city skyline, most of the detail is lost. Even film resolution is rapidly being overhauled by digital.
Games are sold like movies (OR books to an extent). Lousy movies don't have cheaper tickets -- they just don't stay in the theater as long, come out on DVD/video sooner, etc.
For me the question is piracy. If the disks in the PSP can't be easily pirated, then Sony will be able to keep prices high (the way Nintendo does with catridges). If they keep prices high this will stifle the budget games market.
Frankly, a really neat trick for PSP would have been backwards compatibility with PS1 and either a system for legally copying over your old PS1 games (e.g. via 1GB memory stick) OR a slew of cheap PS1 titles. This might still be in the works.
Pretty much the only stuff that happens on time is either totally assembly-lined OR has enormous slack deliberately built into the estimation process OR both.
E.g. "How long will this Oil Change take?" will either be "about 30 mins" (in which case come back in an hour) or "come back this afternoon" (i.e. it will take half an hour sometime during the day).
Actually System 7 was massively slower than System 6, so any machine (such as the IIci) which shipped with 6.0.x was never as fast with post 7 systems as it was with pre 7 systems.
Of the projects I mentioned: the web, cisco, BSD, and mach, ALL were projects conducted by academics in the course of their academic research.
Of the projects mentioned by the parent: Linux, GNU, and Google -- google was based on the PhD thesis work of the two founders, and GNU was academic research. Linus did Linux for fun.
Apple's great contribution is probably the popularization of ideas originated primarily by Douglas Englebart -- an academic at UC Berkeley.
Microsoft's start came from BASIC -- developed at Dartmouth College -- and developed using Harvard's hardware. Later they essentially stole DOS and copied VAX/VMS. So no -- technical at least -- innovation there.
The first web browser would have been Tim Berners Lee's (along with the first web server) at CERN. This browser was also graphical, so Mosaic wasn't even the first *graphical* web browser. See grandparent.
The most useful thing I ever learned about game design is this (paraphrased):
A good game consists of some activity that the player finds enjoyable together with an excuse for doing it repeatedly.
I don't remember the name of the originator or I would provide it.
The movie industry had already been around for seventy-odd years when William Goldman said of it that "nobody knows anything" about what makes a good or successful movie. What we do know is that if you make a really successful game then the safest bet is to keep on making minor variations of it (Hollywood has figured this out with movies).
Any more specific advice on game design (such as "that you need cool graphics" or whatever) simply falls into the "imitate a successful design" category. There will always be good games that don't follow such advice, just as there a great movies that don't follow one or more of the rules for making movies (e.g. Star Wars is a great movie with terrible dialog and at best mediocre acting).
...except for all the others. (Winston Churchill, I'm probably misquoting slightly.)
Hillary Clinton is a savvy politician. She (and Bill) were successful by embracing right-wing policies that don't really matter (such as the death penalty or the alleged shocking immorality of video games or naughty lyrics in rap music... wait that was Tipper Gore) while standing firm on policies that do matter (such as helping the disadvantaged) to avoid the former being used as "wedge" issues by their political rivals.
Hillary's message isn't pitched at us, it's pitched at "white guys who drive pickup trucks and have confederate flag bumper stickers" (to paraphrase Howard Dean). For Democrats to get anywhere today they need to get votes from the people they want to help (poor Southerners) as well as the people who approve of their social program ("do anything you like as long as you aren't hurting someone else"). The support of the latter is a given, so they pitch to the former.
Every Apple laptop for some time has had decent 3D support, so I don't know what you're referring to. (Apple's had ATI Rage 128s back when you were lucky to get 16-bit color on a Wintel laptop.) The current cheapest machines from Apple have an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with dedicated VRAM -- unlike many PC laptops and desktops.
Re:Author is on crack
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 4, Informative
So you didn't RTFA of course, which addresses exactly this point.
If all the best programmers are working on one platform, where will the exciting software be in a few years?
Name five significant Windows applications that started life on Windows. My list ends at Word (debatable since the Windows version started out as a port of the Mac version) and 3D Studio Max. Access, perhaps, if you consider Access significant. All the others -- Powerpoint, Excel, Premiere, Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, Illustrator, Freehand, XPress, Pagemaker, and so forth date back to the explosion of hacker creativity spawned by the Mac, the LaserWriter, and the Mac II... well except for the web which started out on NextStep.
Re:Why has corporate America avoided Macs?
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 4, Informative
For years Mac's windowing/subwindowing functions required multiple open windows on a screen to explore subdirectories.
This has been untrue since System 5, circa 1989. Certainly pre Windows 3.0.
Mac designers were so proud of multitasking that windows didn't maximize automatically -- hardly making efficient use of screen real-estate.
This is a bizarre remark... drug induced?
1) Macs had overlapping Windows before they had threading.
2) The first multi-tasking implementation (beyond desk accessories) involved multiple virtual screens (no overlapping applications).
Many applications remember the state you set them in when you last used them and reinstate it when launched. Some don't. The same applies in Windows, with the exception that (a) it's easy to force maximization if you know a bit, and (b) Windows maximizes windows to fill the screen whereas the Mac maximizes windows to show as much as possible, but no more than required. I don't see how the latter is a less efficient use of screen real estate than filling the screen with a largely empty window.
So... um... WRONG.
Mac never attempted to price their machines competitively for corporate America
I assume by "Mac" the writer means "Apple". In fact, Apple has offered many price-competitive computers, e.g. the Classic, the SE, the IIcx, the IIsi (the Mac mini being the most extreme example). It's not like the IBM XT was priced under the Apple II.
In any study of TCO I've read (e.g. from Gartner) you'll see Macs have a lower TCO than Wintel boxes. I would assume TCO matters to corporate America -- but only when comparing non-Apple options.
Slashdot Mirror
Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7
More like System 3 if not System 2 (and hardware support from the first Mac). The ANU Math department's Macs were running AppleTalk over their existing phone lines in 1985. System 7 added personal file sharing.
Color support, which allowed for Photoshop and other image programs, in 1988 with System 6
I was pretty sure this was wrong, so I checked.
1. Original MacOS supported 16 colors (but no hardware support).
2. Mac II shipped in 1987. Internal color representation was 48-bit (we're only just seeing mainstream support for this). Two graphics cards were initially offered, one supporting 16 colors from a 32-bit palette and another supporting 256. A 24-bit card soon became available.
3. It ran on System 4.1.
Mac II specs
I wonder when Paul Thurrot's time will be...
Excuse me for skipping over the early years of OS X, which included bizarre missteps like "Yellow Box" and "Rhapsody,"
Rhapsody was a code name for OS X. "Yellow Box" became Cocoa + Carbon. "Blue Box" became classic. Where's the bizarre misstep? (Aside from Aqua, the main difference between 10.0 and Rhapsody DR1 is that Classic runs in a Window.)
Alas, despite the wait, Tiger is a minor revision, like all previous OS X updates.
Um, OK.
I guess you need to gratuitously change the UI graphics to count as a major update. I guess by this standard the last major Windows update was Windows 95.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes, in my opinion, only two major new features, Spotlight and Dashboard, and both were clearly influenced by other existing products and services.
If Spotlight and Dashboard were the only two major new features in Tiger, I'd probably agree (although the integration of Spotlight into the system and user interface is beyond anything else out there).
Core Data and Core Graphics (which I guess he is too clueless to understand) seem far more significant to me, but don't rate a mention in the article. Perhaps because they don't appear on Apple's Tiger overview page (you need to actually click on "Developer Tools" to find out about them).
Automator looks like an impressive concept -- although whether it will find a target audience remains to be seen.
But Exposé is a weird solution, requiring you to hit various "hot keys" (read: A function keys) in order to trigger its display
Or gestures. But I guess you'd have had to use it and not just watch a demo to know that.
Content thumbnail icons have been in Mac OS since ... um System 7, I believe.
I see no contradiction.
If Hollywood chooses to use BitTorrent to distribute films (legally) but fights to shut down illegal distribution (via BitTorrent) this is no different from it distributing films by video and shutting down video pirates.
BitTorrent is a technology, not a legal or moral imperative.
Perhaps Linux can replace Windows without becoming a platform.
What operating system does your car run? How about your toaster? How about your house's electrical system? How about your phone?
We're used to the concept of cars, electrical devices, and phones "just working", perhaps the key is to get computers to the point where "software" "just works" on "computers" the way "computers" "just work" when you "plug them into the wall".
Note that this is not the same as the "appliance computer" idea, since that said everyone had to use the same Model-T computer.
It's also not the same as the Java Virtual Machine, since that said everyone had to use the same Model-T virtual computer.
Some of the more recent Debian-derived distros (Knoppix being the first prominent case) are going in the direction. Here's some software, stick it in "a computer" and watch it go. Neat.
There will always be computers used for more specialised purposes that can't be treated as appliances, but the majority of email/web/im/word users could use a nicely configured linux distro and be happy.
...to point out that what he did say seemed equally bizarre and hypocritical.
ntil iWork, for example, their was no such thing as typing in a serial number in an Apple product.
Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Express
QuickTime Pro
And (although I don't own copies) I strongly suspect:
Logic
Shake
Motion
All require serial numbers. (Final Cut Pro has quite an annoying un-Mac-like installation too; you can't just drag if to your new machine the way you can with 99% of Mac apps.)
If he didn't give "The Phantom Menace" an A I might have some respect for him.
The problem is he had to see Matrix 2 to realise that The Matrix was philosophically bankrupt. If he were truly insightful he'd have realised that from the get go.
...most of the reviews I've read did show game performance of the dual core Pentiums. Maybe I just don't read the wicked sites he talks about. Only one review (amazingly enough, I think it was theregister.co.uk) raved about how great it was to encode video while playing Doom3...
This is a proof about the limits of logic not the limits of computers. Incompleteness states that within any system of logic there will be statements that are true or false that cannot be proven (true or false) -- by Turing machine, human being, or God.
My wife operates a VR research lab (they still exist) and all the new hardware is just great for them. Unfortunately, it only addresses one of the concerns which must be addressed before we can all live in the world of "Snow Crash". The basic problems for mainstream VR are as follows:
... so you won't be playing WoW in them.)
... Teamspeak is a long way from a person's voice emanating from their position in a shared world with lots of people.)
1) The headsets really haven't "tipped" price-wise. Kind of like LCD screens for a long time, they stay expensive (around $10k) while slowly improving in features (e.g. resolution, motion tracking). Until they get "good enough" the prices won't trend downwards. (There are cheap headsets, but they make you sick pretty fast. Even the pricey ones make you sick after 30 mins or so
2) The big issues w.r.t. UI remain unsolved. E.g. a lot of VR setups involve complex motion tracking and setting aside a room for subjects to walk around in. Usually a second person watches the subject to prevent them from, say, running into a wall... There are rigs that allow you to suspend the subject to allow them to walk through theoretically infinite landscapes... we're talking six figures though.
3) Behavior capture. The solutions to tracking movement remain pretty experimental and invasive. All the stuff we've talked about so far will, at best, get you walking around in a virtual landscape, capture your head movements (kind of), and maybe capture some of your arm and finger movements. Even assuming your $500,000 suspension rig captures all your body movements perfectly, we still to capture facial expression and lip synch. (So far, spacial 3d audio is pretty primitive too
4) Force Feedback. All this VR is going to seem pretty lame when you can walk through solid objects or your hand passes through an item you're trying to manipulate. Arguably, this is a subset of item (3) above, but in fact just allowing people to walk around in an unlimited expanse is a big enough problem...
There are plenty of finer grained issues to deal with, but the rendering of VR scenes (at least, so far) has turned out to be the easy part. At the moment, if you wanted to play WoW in VR you'd need to set aside a large room, buy an expensive HMD, and a really expensive suspension rig. (Luckily, WoW lets you run straight through people so the UI will match this perfectly.)
Hardly. Most game-style rendering today is mostly smoke and mirrors
Agreed, but...
Most movies and videos are produced using "smoke and mirrors" too. E.g. typically the lighting is changed for every camera shot, reflectors, gels and masks are used to highlight or darken parts of shots, actors are coated with makeup to compensate for the incredibly artificial lighting, etc. etc. etc. And then everything is shot on a sound stage or in front of a facade or on a virtual set.
If you point a video camera at a city skyline, most of the detail is lost. Even film resolution is rapidly being overhauled by digital.
Games are sold like movies (OR books to an extent). Lousy movies don't have cheaper tickets -- they just don't stay in the theater as long, come out on DVD/video sooner, etc.
For me the question is piracy. If the disks in the PSP can't be easily pirated, then Sony will be able to keep prices high (the way Nintendo does with catridges). If they keep prices high this will stifle the budget games market.
Frankly, a really neat trick for PSP would have been backwards compatibility with PS1 and either a system for legally copying over your old PS1 games (e.g. via 1GB memory stick) OR a slew of cheap PS1 titles. This might still be in the works.
Pretty much the only stuff that happens on time is either totally assembly-lined OR has enormous slack deliberately built into the estimation process OR both.
E.g. "How long will this Oil Change take?" will either be "about 30 mins" (in which case come back in an hour) or "come back this afternoon" (i.e. it will take half an hour sometime during the day).
Actually System 7 was massively slower than System 6, so any machine (such as the IIci) which shipped with 6.0.x was never as fast with post 7 systems as it was with pre 7 systems.
Of the projects I mentioned: the web, cisco, BSD, and mach, ALL were projects conducted by academics in the course of their academic research.
Of the projects mentioned by the parent: Linux, GNU, and Google -- google was based on the PhD thesis work of the two founders, and GNU was academic research. Linus did Linux for fun.
Apple's great contribution is probably the popularization of ideas originated primarily by Douglas Englebart -- an academic at UC Berkeley.
Microsoft's start came from BASIC -- developed at Dartmouth College -- and developed using Harvard's hardware. Later they essentially stole DOS and copied VAX/VMS. So no -- technical at least -- innovation there.
The first web browser would have been Tim Berners Lee's (along with the first web server) at CERN. This browser was also graphical, so Mosaic wasn't even the first *graphical* web browser. See grandparent.
The most useful thing I ever learned about game design is this (paraphrased):
A good game consists of some activity that the player finds enjoyable together with an excuse for doing it repeatedly.
I don't remember the name of the originator or I would provide it.
The movie industry had already been around for seventy-odd years when William Goldman said of it that "nobody knows anything" about what makes a good or successful movie. What we do know is that if you make a really successful game then the safest bet is to keep on making minor variations of it (Hollywood has figured this out with movies).
Any more specific advice on game design (such as "that you need cool graphics" or whatever) simply falls into the "imitate a successful design" category. There will always be good games that don't follow such advice, just as there a great movies that don't follow one or more of the rules for making movies (e.g. Star Wars is a great movie with terrible dialog and at best mediocre acting).
The whole series is about 500 hours long from top to bottom, and it's story is pure joy.
I've played the whole series from top to bottom and it's more like 100 hours -- not to denigrate it for that.
Actually, I think Fallout and Fallout 2 (from the same people) were far better.
...except for all the others. (Winston Churchill, I'm probably misquoting slightly.)
... wait that was Tipper Gore) while standing firm on policies that do matter (such as helping the disadvantaged) to avoid the former being used as "wedge" issues by their political rivals.
Hillary Clinton is a savvy politician. She (and Bill) were successful by embracing right-wing policies that don't really matter (such as the death penalty or the alleged shocking immorality of video games or naughty lyrics in rap music
Hillary's message isn't pitched at us, it's pitched at "white guys who drive pickup trucks and have confederate flag bumper stickers" (to paraphrase Howard Dean). For Democrats to get anywhere today they need to get votes from the people they want to help (poor Southerners) as well as the people who approve of their social program ("do anything you like as long as you aren't hurting someone else"). The support of the latter is a given, so they pitch to the former.
Every Apple laptop for some time has had decent 3D support, so I don't know what you're referring to. (Apple's had ATI Rage 128s back when you were lucky to get 16-bit color on a Wintel laptop.) The current cheapest machines from Apple have an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with dedicated VRAM -- unlike many PC laptops and desktops.
WWW -- PhD student at CERN
Mach -- Carnegie-Mellon
BSD -- UC Berkeley
Cisco -- Stanford
So you didn't RTFA of course, which addresses exactly this point.
If all the best programmers are working on one platform, where will the exciting software be in a few years?
Name five significant Windows applications that started life on Windows. My list ends at Word (debatable since the Windows version started out as a port of the Mac version) and 3D Studio Max. Access, perhaps, if you consider Access significant. All the others -- Powerpoint, Excel, Premiere, Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, Illustrator, Freehand, XPress, Pagemaker, and so forth date back to the explosion of hacker creativity spawned by the Mac, the LaserWriter, and the Mac II... well except for the web which started out on NextStep.
For years Mac's windowing/subwindowing functions required multiple open windows on a screen to explore subdirectories.
... um ... WRONG.
This has been untrue since System 5, circa 1989. Certainly pre Windows 3.0.
Mac designers were so proud of multitasking that windows didn't maximize automatically -- hardly making efficient use of screen real-estate.
This is a bizarre remark... drug induced?
1) Macs had overlapping Windows before they had threading.
2) The first multi-tasking implementation (beyond desk accessories) involved multiple virtual screens (no overlapping applications).
Many applications remember the state you set them in when you last used them and reinstate it when launched. Some don't. The same applies in Windows, with the exception that (a) it's easy to force maximization if you know a bit, and (b) Windows maximizes windows to fill the screen whereas the Mac maximizes windows to show as much as possible, but no more than required. I don't see how the latter is a less efficient use of screen real estate than filling the screen with a largely empty window.
So
Mac never attempted to price their machines competitively for corporate America
I assume by "Mac" the writer means "Apple". In fact, Apple has offered many price-competitive computers, e.g. the Classic, the SE, the IIcx, the IIsi (the Mac mini being the most extreme example). It's not like the IBM XT was priced under the Apple II.
In any study of TCO I've read (e.g. from Gartner) you'll see Macs have a lower TCO than Wintel boxes. I would assume TCO matters to corporate America -- but only when comparing non-Apple options.
Hmm. Isn't a typical current GPU just the kind of parallel processor you might use for something like this?