OpenDoc... now that would be in the running for worst product that shipped.
It was a resource glutton. It was buggy as hell. It never worked. It never had a chance of working*. It used up oodles of disk space. It had no useful third party support. Cyberdog was a cute proof of concept, but I don't know anyone who used it as their primary browser.
* OpenDoc's document model assumed that, basically, every conceivable program was something like Quark XPress. I.e. documents consist of (mostly) non-overlapping rectangles, each filled with some form of 2D content. So you could write OpenDoc parts that worked like Illustrator or 3D Studio Max, but you couldn't write OpenDoc containers that worked like Illustrator or 3D Studio Max.
I think there's more to it than great products or R&D to improve the customer experience, although those are certainly major factors. I think there's a bunch of mutually reinforcing components to the Apple Cult, all of which certainly benefit from product quality and customer service, but which separate Apple from other companies that produce great products (e.g. Gillette, Disney, BMW).
One issue is sunken cost. If you pay a lot for something -- anything, unless it totally sucks, you tend to cleave to it. (I may love Gillette Razors, but when I run out of blades there's nothing stopping me from trying Schick.)
Another is mutual exclusiveness (which ties into sunken cost). By choosing product A, getting familiar with product A, and buying things that are compatible with product A, you make switching to product B far more difficult. (If I drive a BMW there's no real financial reason not to switch to Acura for my next car. It's not like I was planning to move the leather seats and stereo from my BMW into my new Acura.)
Another is self-image. Apple is very good at projecting itself as a cool, individualistic, creative company that produces products for cool, individualistic, creative people. Microsoft tries desperately to create this image for itself (look at ANY of its mainstream TV ads for the last ten years) and fails to achieve this. Plenty of computers appear in TV shows and movies as product placement, but Macs appear in TV shows (e.g. Seinfeld, Buffy, etc.) because the folks making the shows use them. (In both examples, Apple actually paid or provided new computers to the shows to put current models in.) Here's a rough guide: if the folks in a TV Show or an ad are using your product and the logo is taped over, it's not paid product placement. If you see a website screenshot in an ad, it's probably in Safari and showing Aqua widgets. If you see a computer in a furniture ad, it's usually a Mac. (Heck many websites are essentially ads for Aqua. Look, we're desperately trying to look as cool as Apple... dialog boxes.)
There's always self-presentation too. Since Apple products are expensive and stylish they're great conspicuous consumption -- especially when a MacBook Pro is cheaper than a couple of Louis Vuitton purses, looks better (in my opinion), lasts longer, and gets more use. (How many of us can afford the *clothes* -- or *shoes* -- in Sex in the City? I owned Carrie's laptop though.)
Apple also manages -- and this is a neat trick -- to always be the underdog. (At least post IBM PC.) Even when it dominates a market (as with iPod and iTunes) it somehow manages to be the "in thing" and simultaneously the underdog. (Thank you French courts, thank you constant idiotic remarks from Microsoft, thank you Apple Records, thank you Wall Street doomsayers.)
Apple has always had a lot of geek cred too. Sure, semi-technical folks (the kind of people who consider hacking an AUTOEXEC.BAT file or using RegEdit makes them an elite hacker) prefer PCs, but uber-geeks have almost always preferred Macs (at least to PCs, if not Suns or Lisp Machines). Part of this probably stems -- ironically -- from Macs being harder to develop for than PCs. (At least until RealBasic came out.)
Certainly, Bethesda's earlier games fit the bill. You were a character in a completely static world, the only thing that changed was you. But that's Bethesda. (And, frankly, that's their *technology*. I think they would cheerfully make their world's dynamic if they didn't need to write the code and build the content.)
In general, game design is a struggle between richness of content and quantity of content. Ideally you want both, but practically you tend to settle for one or the other. Some "eastern" games, such as Final Fantasy VII say, try to give you the feeling of a very rich and varied setting, but in fact are "tunnels of fun" where you have very few real options at any given time. Some "western" games, such as Daggerfall, try to provide the illusion of an entire world in which you can do anything, at the cost of the entire world being essentially static and boring. It's a tradeoff.
I've played Western RPGs (e.g. many of Bioware's games) and *designed* games where the character(s) are simply part of larger events. I can't speak sweepingly of "eastern" RPGs, since I haven't played that many of them, but I suspect such sweeping generalizations are probably just as wrong there. The fact is that if something you do has some large effect (e.g. destroying a town) either you need to create the entire town before it's destroyed AND the entire town afterwards, or contrive a far more linear story where, say, you only see some parts of the town before it's destroyed and some parts after. You'll see "western" (and I suspect "eastern") games which take different approaches to this omnipresent problem.
The Final Fantasy games that I've played (VII, VIII, IX, X) are all kind of samish in their plots, but is that an "eastern" thing or just Square sticking to a successful formula?
Anyone think that the code which generates a "click to read more" link on a post that has been cut short should not be used if the link will be longer than the amount of the article being cut off?
Since it involves no moving parts, holographic data storage will be far more reliable than existing hard disk technologies. IBM has already demonstrated the possibility of holding 1 GB of data in a crystal the size of a sugar cube and of data access rates of one trillion bits per second. The major challenge ahead is expected to be the development of a rewritable form of holographic storage.
Claiming the G5 is the fastest CPU on Earth in 2003 and that the Core Duo is 2x faster in 2006 doesn't require any contradiction or lies. But Apple never said any such thing.
Claiming that X is "up to 2x faster" than Y and Y is "up to 2x faster" than X is also perfectly doable without lying (the P4 is faster than the G5 at integer ops, much faster in some cases; the G5 is faster than the P4 at floating point ops, much faster in some cases; so there you go).
To survive in this world, it helps to learn:
1) "Up to 50% off everything in the store" means that there is one item somewhere in the store that is being sold at 50% off.
2) "50% off marked prices" doesn't mean that they didn't double all the marked prices.
Right. And KDE isn't trying to clone Windows 2000.
Trying to clone a well-designed GUI isn't exactly the worst thing in the world. It's probably better than trying to imitate NeXTStep since NeXTStep was designed in the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit era and had several features designed specifically to be original instead of good. (Or so it seemed to many outside observers.) Indeed one of the best design features of Mac OS (menubar at the top of the screen with effectively infinite target depth) has been eschewed by many OSes mainly to avoid lawsuits. (I don't want to start a flame war with people arguing that menus bound to windows are better... they're just wrong;) )
The problem with missing isn't that it won't happen, but that it happens in a twitch game for reasons out of your control. My problem with D&D has always been that it is too abstract for a role-playing game (and a lot of its rules don't make sense either as rules or in terms of what they represent in the world).
If you're playing a twitch game then you should miss because you aimed badly or mistimed your attack (this is why you miss in Quake).
The idea of interpreting "intimidate" and "diplomacy" as being taunt and detaunt skills is hilarious. What it really points to is that they don't implement physics or combat well enough to prevent monsters from murdering squishies using realistic tactics (if you want to kill him you'll have to go through ME.)
So first of all, this is "1001 discoveries made by people who were living in Islamic dominated countries at the time" versus actual Islamic discoveries. Otherwise, the Theory of Evolution, say, is a "Christian discovery".
Next, here's an example of some of the discoveries:
Al-Biruni, the 14th century physicist was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth and its tilt 600 years before Galileo. Other discoveries provided a scientific explanation for tide changes, equinoxes, seasons, why the sky is blue and why rainbows occur.
Well let's see. This was done by Eratosthenes around 220BC. So file that one under pagan discoveries. Of course, a 14th century physicist discovering something 600 years before Galileo implies a far greater achievement -- the discovery of time travel, since he would have had to go 500 years back in time to do something 600 years before Galileo.
They even claim that Mohammed invented the toothbrush.
All in all, a poor piece of scholarship all round, and the worst part of it is that attribution of scientific discoveries to a religion (of any kind), since religions by their nature represent the attribution of cause to imagined entities as an alternative to actually trying to make hypotheses, test them, and build on the ones that work and discard the ones that fail.
You are aware that in Photoshop you can change shadow parameters and have an interactive preview... That a layer style can consist of any number of layered components (shadows, highlights, overlays, etc.) which can be flipped on and off, have their opacity changed, etc. all with live previews. That you can copy the style from one layer to another. That you can encapsulate it in the UI where it will preview itself with an icon.
Oh, and this is all scriptable in Photshop, both visually (via recording your actions) and programmatically (via JavaScript).
Yeah, it might be a little less convenient to do this in aptly named GIMP.
The GIMP is so laughably pathetic compared to Photoshop that only someone who hasn't actually done anything significant with either would compare the two.
It's just lucky for NASA that there's no difference between US/Imperial and metric time, or that might be a source of problems in itself.
Re:Could you at least TRY to get the story right?
on
No EFI Support for Vista
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If Apple actually comes out with a 64-bit machine (like most modern PCs), I'm sure 64-bit Vista will boot on it just fine. This is one of those cases where the problem isn't how far behind MS is on their support for EFI, but how far behind Apple is on their choice of x86 chips. I have no idea why Apple let itself get talked into dumping a 64-bit architecture, just to get what basically amounts to some fast dual-core P3s, but they did.
Nice example of self-contradiction. Apple has come out with 64-bit machines -- they're called G5s -- as you allude to in the last sentence quoted.
What's more Conroe and Merom are supposed to be pin-compatible with the Pentium D and T series CPUs, so you'll be able to plug 'em into your 32-bit Intel Macs when they're available. (Exactly how 64-bit the resulting system will be is another question.)
Apple released 32-bit computers because... they had no choice. Intel's available chip lines were 32-bit and given that Intel can't suppy Apple with enough parts to meet MacBook demand, it seems unlikely that AMD would have been a viable alternative.
So here's the thing: Apple will be shipping 64-bit x86 boxen with EFI by the time Vista comes out, and it may well be possible to turn your existing 32-bit x86 boxen with EFI into 64-bit boxen fairly easily. The real question is why? Is supporting EFI in Vista such a difficult thing to do, or is Microsoft nervous about the impact on marketshare of dual-booting Macs?
My guess is that there will be a good virtual machine implementation on the Mac within six months, allowing Mac users to run Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc. in VMs under 10.4 -- making all of this discussion pretty pointless.
It appears that the original article has been changed since originally posted. It currently reads:
"On February 22, a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast set his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control, which would allow the attacker to take charge of the computer and delete files and folders or install applications.
"Participants were given local client access to the target computer and invited to try their luck."
Other related blog entries have noted the update.
Even so, the article fails to mention that this vulnerability relies on extra work on the part of the system administrator to create the accounts and open ssh.
OS X (as of 10.4? 10.3.?) has a very good, simple security feature which causes a dialog box to appear the first time a program is run (this program is running for the first time -- are you sure?).
It seems to me that this needs to be implemented for executable scripts. It's a simple fix and would deal with all the obvious points of entry -- you're trying to feed stuff to a shell from a place heretofore unseen; confirm it with the user.
Yes, the bug itself needs to be fixed (with the archive handling functionality -- oh while they're at it can they support late model zip files? thanks) but the OS should also treat ANY script with as much suspicion as it currently treats executables.
Exactly -- and then there were the various abortive attempts to make Neuromancer. I didn't even go into the crap that occurs when the owner of a prospective hot property (such as the movie rights to Snowcrash) gets a whiff of the possibility of actually getting a project made.
Take a look at "Total Recall". The original story is about a typical Philip K. Dick protagonist -- i.e. a passive, pathetic, loser. Now, let's make that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in that role.
Imagine if (using contemporary actors) Kevin Spacey had been the lead and, say, Laura Linney played his wife. All of a sudden, the idea that this really IS just a VR dream would make sense...
Slashdot Mirror
OpenDoc... now that would be in the running for worst product that shipped.
It was a resource glutton. It was buggy as hell. It never worked. It never had a chance of working*. It used up oodles of disk space. It had no useful third party support. Cyberdog was a cute proof of concept, but I don't know anyone who used it as their primary browser.
* OpenDoc's document model assumed that, basically, every conceivable program was something like Quark XPress. I.e. documents consist of (mostly) non-overlapping rectangles, each filled with some form of 2D content. So you could write OpenDoc parts that worked like Illustrator or 3D Studio Max, but you couldn't write OpenDoc containers that worked like Illustrator or 3D Studio Max.
...there's a simple answer, and it's wrong.
... dialog boxes.)
(H. L. Mencken, paraphrased.)
I think there's more to it than great products or R&D to improve the customer experience, although those are certainly major factors. I think there's a bunch of mutually reinforcing components to the Apple Cult, all of which certainly benefit from product quality and customer service, but which separate Apple from other companies that produce great products (e.g. Gillette, Disney, BMW).
One issue is sunken cost. If you pay a lot for something -- anything, unless it totally sucks, you tend to cleave to it. (I may love Gillette Razors, but when I run out of blades there's nothing stopping me from trying Schick.)
Another is mutual exclusiveness (which ties into sunken cost). By choosing product A, getting familiar with product A, and buying things that are compatible with product A, you make switching to product B far more difficult. (If I drive a BMW there's no real financial reason not to switch to Acura for my next car. It's not like I was planning to move the leather seats and stereo from my BMW into my new Acura.)
Another is self-image. Apple is very good at projecting itself as a cool, individualistic, creative company that produces products for cool, individualistic, creative people. Microsoft tries desperately to create this image for itself (look at ANY of its mainstream TV ads for the last ten years) and fails to achieve this. Plenty of computers appear in TV shows and movies as product placement, but Macs appear in TV shows (e.g. Seinfeld, Buffy, etc.) because the folks making the shows use them. (In both examples, Apple actually paid or provided new computers to the shows to put current models in.) Here's a rough guide: if the folks in a TV Show or an ad are using your product and the logo is taped over, it's not paid product placement. If you see a website screenshot in an ad, it's probably in Safari and showing Aqua widgets. If you see a computer in a furniture ad, it's usually a Mac. (Heck many websites are essentially ads for Aqua. Look, we're desperately trying to look as cool as Apple
There's always self-presentation too. Since Apple products are expensive and stylish they're great conspicuous consumption -- especially when a MacBook Pro is cheaper than a couple of Louis Vuitton purses, looks better (in my opinion), lasts longer, and gets more use. (How many of us can afford the *clothes* -- or *shoes* -- in Sex in the City? I owned Carrie's laptop though.)
Apple also manages -- and this is a neat trick -- to always be the underdog. (At least post IBM PC.) Even when it dominates a market (as with iPod and iTunes) it somehow manages to be the "in thing" and simultaneously the underdog. (Thank you French courts, thank you constant idiotic remarks from Microsoft, thank you Apple Records, thank you Wall Street doomsayers.)
Apple has always had a lot of geek cred too. Sure, semi-technical folks (the kind of people who consider hacking an AUTOEXEC.BAT file or using RegEdit makes them an elite hacker) prefer PCs, but uber-geeks have almost always preferred Macs (at least to PCs, if not Suns or Lisp Machines). Part of this probably stems -- ironically -- from Macs being harder to develop for than PCs. (At least until RealBasic came out.)
The east/west dichotomy is simply wrong.
Certainly, Bethesda's earlier games fit the bill. You were a character in a completely static world, the only thing that changed was you. But that's Bethesda. (And, frankly, that's their *technology*. I think they would cheerfully make their world's dynamic if they didn't need to write the code and build the content.)
In general, game design is a struggle between richness of content and quantity of content. Ideally you want both, but practically you tend to settle for one or the other. Some "eastern" games, such as Final Fantasy VII say, try to give you the feeling of a very rich and varied setting, but in fact are "tunnels of fun" where you have very few real options at any given time. Some "western" games, such as Daggerfall, try to provide the illusion of an entire world in which you can do anything, at the cost of the entire world being essentially static and boring. It's a tradeoff.
I've played Western RPGs (e.g. many of Bioware's games) and *designed* games where the character(s) are simply part of larger events. I can't speak sweepingly of "eastern" RPGs, since I haven't played that many of them, but I suspect such sweeping generalizations are probably just as wrong there. The fact is that if something you do has some large effect (e.g. destroying a town) either you need to create the entire town before it's destroyed AND the entire town afterwards, or contrive a far more linear story where, say, you only see some parts of the town before it's destroyed and some parts after. You'll see "western" (and I suspect "eastern") games which take different approaches to this omnipresent problem.
The Final Fantasy games that I've played (VII, VIII, IX, X) are all kind of samish in their plots, but is that an "eastern" thing or just Square sticking to a successful formula?
Anyway, I'm rambling... Mod me incoherent!
Anyone think that the code which generates a "click to read more" link on a post that has been cut short should not be used if the link will be longer than the amount of the article being cut off?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDSS
Since it involves no moving parts, holographic data storage will be far more reliable than existing hard disk technologies. IBM has already demonstrated the possibility of holding 1 GB of data in a crystal the size of a sugar cube and of data access rates of one trillion bits per second. The major challenge ahead is expected to be the development of a rewritable form of holographic storage.
Funny, I looked the same place you did.
Claiming the G5 is the fastest CPU on Earth in 2003 and that the Core Duo is 2x faster in 2006 doesn't require any contradiction or lies. But Apple never said any such thing.
Claiming that X is "up to 2x faster" than Y and Y is "up to 2x faster" than X is also perfectly doable without lying (the P4 is faster than the G5 at integer ops, much faster in some cases; the G5 is faster than the P4 at floating point ops, much faster in some cases; so there you go).
To survive in this world, it helps to learn:
1) "Up to 50% off everything in the store" means that there is one item somewhere in the store that is being sold at 50% off.
2) "50% off marked prices" doesn't mean that they didn't double all the marked prices.
No. Moving. Parts.
WTF does SLI have to do with this?
Surely if they can do this on two video cards, they can do it half as fast on one (framerates 5x faster are fine by me...).
So your metric (closer to Mac OS) is a false one.
;) )
Right. And KDE isn't trying to clone Windows 2000.
Trying to clone a well-designed GUI isn't exactly the worst thing in the world. It's probably better than trying to imitate NeXTStep since NeXTStep was designed in the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit era and had several features designed specifically to be original instead of good. (Or so it seemed to many outside observers.) Indeed one of the best design features of Mac OS (menubar at the top of the screen with effectively infinite target depth) has been eschewed by many OSes mainly to avoid lawsuits. (I don't want to start a flame war with people arguing that menus bound to windows are better... they're just wrong
Ah the good old days. Running Mac software (barely) on an Amiga which had non-square pixels and a flickering display.
Won't be long before folks figure out how to replace the ads with porn.
The problem with missing isn't that it won't happen, but that it happens in a twitch game for reasons out of your control. My problem with D&D has always been that it is too abstract for a role-playing game (and a lot of its rules don't make sense either as rules or in terms of what they represent in the world).
If you're playing a twitch game then you should miss because you aimed badly or mistimed your attack (this is why you miss in Quake).
The idea of interpreting "intimidate" and "diplomacy" as being taunt and detaunt skills is hilarious. What it really points to is that they don't implement physics or combat well enough to prevent monsters from murdering squishies using realistic tactics (if you want to kill him you'll have to go through ME.)
When PHP has robust Unicode support ... maybe.
Oops my arithmetic stinks. The time travel would only need to be 400 years. Not such an achievement after all.
So first of all, this is "1001 discoveries made by people who were living in Islamic dominated countries at the time" versus actual Islamic discoveries. Otherwise, the Theory of Evolution, say, is a "Christian discovery".
Next, here's an example of some of the discoveries:
Al-Biruni, the 14th century physicist was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth and its tilt 600 years before Galileo. Other discoveries provided a scientific explanation for tide changes, equinoxes, seasons, why the sky is blue and why rainbows occur.
Well let's see. This was done by Eratosthenes around 220BC. So file that one under pagan discoveries. Of course, a 14th century physicist discovering something 600 years before Galileo implies a far greater achievement -- the discovery of time travel, since he would have had to go 500 years back in time to do something 600 years before Galileo.
They even claim that Mohammed invented the toothbrush.
All in all, a poor piece of scholarship all round, and the worst part of it is that attribution of scientific discoveries to a religion (of any kind), since religions by their nature represent the attribution of cause to imagined entities as an alternative to actually trying to make hypotheses, test them, and build on the ones that work and discard the ones that fail.
You are aware that in Photoshop you can change shadow parameters and have an interactive preview... That a layer style can consist of any number of layered components (shadows, highlights, overlays, etc.) which can be flipped on and off, have their opacity changed, etc. all with live previews. That you can copy the style from one layer to another. That you can encapsulate it in the UI where it will preview itself with an icon.
Oh, and this is all scriptable in Photshop, both visually (via recording your actions) and programmatically (via JavaScript).
Yeah, it might be a little less convenient to do this in aptly named GIMP.
The GIMP is so laughably pathetic compared to Photoshop that only someone who hasn't actually done anything significant with either would compare the two.
If only they'd fix Opera.
It's just lucky for NASA that there's no difference between US/Imperial and metric time, or that might be a source of problems in itself.
If Apple actually comes out with a 64-bit machine (like most modern PCs), I'm sure 64-bit Vista will boot on it just fine. This is one of those cases where the problem isn't how far behind MS is on their support for EFI, but how far behind Apple is on their choice of x86 chips. I have no idea why Apple let itself get talked into dumping a 64-bit architecture, just to get what basically amounts to some fast dual-core P3s, but they did.
... they had no choice. Intel's available chip lines were 32-bit and given that Intel can't suppy Apple with enough parts to meet MacBook demand, it seems unlikely that AMD would have been a viable alternative.
Nice example of self-contradiction. Apple has come out with 64-bit machines -- they're called G5s -- as you allude to in the last sentence quoted.
What's more Conroe and Merom are supposed to be pin-compatible with the Pentium D and T series CPUs, so you'll be able to plug 'em into your 32-bit Intel Macs when they're available. (Exactly how 64-bit the resulting system will be is another question.)
Apple released 32-bit computers because
So here's the thing: Apple will be shipping 64-bit x86 boxen with EFI by the time Vista comes out, and it may well be possible to turn your existing 32-bit x86 boxen with EFI into 64-bit boxen fairly easily. The real question is why? Is supporting EFI in Vista such a difficult thing to do, or is Microsoft nervous about the impact on marketshare of dual-booting Macs?
My guess is that there will be a good virtual machine implementation on the Mac within six months, allowing Mac users to run Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc. in VMs under 10.4 -- making all of this discussion pretty pointless.
I agree -- what you need is a Newton MP2000.
Comes in the second-last paragraph...
"unknown form of energy"
I thought you only encounter that phrase in Star Trek episodes.
With infinite storage...
1) Invent infinite storage device.
2) ???
3) Profit!
It appears that the original article has been changed since originally posted. It currently reads:
"On February 22, a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast set his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control, which would allow the attacker to take charge of the computer and delete files and folders or install applications.
"Participants were given local client access to the target computer and invited to try their luck."
Other related blog entries have noted the update.
Even so, the article fails to mention that this vulnerability relies on extra work on the part of the system administrator to create the accounts and open ssh.
OS X (as of 10.4? 10.3.?) has a very good, simple security feature which causes a dialog box to appear the first time a program is run (this program is running for the first time -- are you sure?).
It seems to me that this needs to be implemented for executable scripts. It's a simple fix and would deal with all the obvious points of entry -- you're trying to feed stuff to a shell from a place heretofore unseen; confirm it with the user.
Yes, the bug itself needs to be fixed (with the archive handling functionality -- oh while they're at it can they support late model zip files? thanks) but the OS should also treat ANY script with as much suspicion as it currently treats executables.
Exactly -- and then there were the various abortive attempts to make Neuromancer. I didn't even go into the crap that occurs when the owner of a prospective hot property (such as the movie rights to Snowcrash) gets a whiff of the possibility of actually getting a project made.
Take a look at "Total Recall". The original story is about a typical Philip K. Dick protagonist -- i.e. a passive, pathetic, loser. Now, let's make that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in that role.
Imagine if (using contemporary actors) Kevin Spacey had been the lead and, say, Laura Linney played his wife. All of a sudden, the idea that this really IS just a VR dream would make sense...