They had some great developers, but more often than not, it seemed they were thwarted by bad business processes and/or decision makers up top.
There is that, yes. Commodore's business people were horribly inept. Remember the TED fiasco? How many dollars went into developing a platform and 2 new systems that didn't even survive a year in the marketplace?
Compared to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Boston, and so on, Tokyo isn't going to take up that much data. And all of those cities are within a few hours of each other on the east coast and sit in the same "NE" region on most navigation DVDs.
Cheapest Power Mac: $1999 Trying to amke an equivelent Dell (dual 3.0 GHz vs dual 2GHz, but probably pretty close if my AMD experiance is worth anything) I ger over $2200.
Or, you could get a single Athlon 64/3800 or 4000 from HP for about 1200, and pocket the change. And why the hell not? There are some scenarios where the Apple will be faster, but in most cases, the AMD will be just as fast if not faster.
But, you will surely cry, it's not a Dual. Fair enough. A dual Opteron workstation on HP.com starts at 1899. The PowerMac is perhaps the biggest ripoff in the Apple line up. Look at the graphics card it comes with! I mean, come on. The iMac is a much better deal.
Well, since it has bluetooth, in theory you should be able to sync your addressbook and calendar via BT.
In theory.
In practice, I find that linux is really lacking in this area. The *best* application I can seem to find is KMobileTools, but it won't work via BT unless I jump through some hoops, and then I have to do that every time I want to do anything on the phone.
If anyone has any alternatives, and yes I know about gscmxx, please me know.
Re:Alternate reality Apple
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Apple survived mainly because their rivals were horribly inept at marketing.
And let's be clear on one thing... when I say rivals, I mean rival, and I mean Commodore. Atari, nah... they had a half baked 16bit computer that wasn't going anywhere.
But the Amiga, that had a lot of potential. If you were around back then, and got a chance to play with the Amiga 500 that sold for... what... 299? And got a fully multitasking OS that just sailed along on the same hardware that the early versions of MacOS could barely get up and wheeze on, you knew they were on to something.
Unfortunately, nobody else did, because Commodore couldn't market condoms to sailors on shore leave.
hey, and in regards to your comment about using mplayer for DivX, it is easy to google and find it as a solution for OS X, and tell me if it was really all that hard to install? Drag and drop from a dmg.. that's soooo haaarrrd. The app installation model is heads and shoulders about everying else. Ok, maybe dependencies aren't handled that well, but the vast majority of installs don't have specific dependency needs as they were designed for OS X in the first place.
Hey fucktard, will the average OSX user know to look for Mplayer at all?
What were you looking for when you tried OS X? The same thing you saw in Linux?
Of course, you would like to work the same way you used to and the current evolution of desktop switching isn't to your standards..
And, really, who are you to tell me how to work? If you know a better way of writing code, compiling, and watching the output easily, let me know. And apple+tabbing around isn't that graceful. Expose isn't that useful. It's nice to jump to a second desktop and having the windows set up so I can see everything at once.
Of course, you would like to work the same way you used to and the current evolution of desktop switching isn't to your standards.. and you have to run mplayer instead of quicktime to run divx files (big whoop, dude, really.. you have a perfectly workable solution..give off on that one)
And installing a mixer is a perfectly workable solution to Zawinski's problem. Now who's more likely to fix their problem... a linux user needing a mixer, or an OSX user having trouble with Quicktime? Hrm.
Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Energy Saver. Configure to your heart's desire.
Fantastic. However, you didn't read all that well. I know it works, I know it works well. But how can I tell it to not have my computer go to sleep if I'm not actually using it but it is doing processing in the background. Such as, maybe, downloading files.
I can see how those could be useful, yes. In fact, there are a few different virtual desktop managers available for OS X. A quick Google search does wonders, but this appears to be the one most recently updated.
Did you read my comments about how they don't work all that well, or did you just blindly point me at the solution I already use, which I mentioned in my original comment?
I just made the switch from Linux to OSX, and after a few weeks, I went screaming back to Linux.
The apple folks who like to talk about usability and the "it just works" shit should be severely beaten. For the prosecution I present:
- The dock. What a hideous piece of crap this is. My trash can is on the dock. So are my running applications. So are my non-running applications. But not all of my non-running applications. To get to those, I have to go into the applications folder, which has a nice alias on the desktop that Apple didn't create. Those useful programs that you only use once in a blue moon? Go dig for them... go dig.
- Driver support. I have a cheapo webcam that came with an Earthlink subscription years ago. I plug it into linux and it works. I plug it into my Mac and it does nothing. No drivers available.
- Quicktime. It plays 8 seconds of video and stops. Every time. MPlayer for OSX handles the same files fine.
- Sleep. It does it whether or not I want it to. Downloading a big file, it'll go to sleep. How the hell does one stop that? Other than that, sleep works great. Or not.
- Virtual Desktops. Man, I never thought I'd miss them so much. And even the very good replacement I found, Desktop Manger, has flaws. If I leave the adium buddy list open on one desktop, go to another desktop, and mouse over the where the buddy list is on the non-visible desktop, I see tool tips. Among other bugs, that's the most annoying.
- Java apps. Either swallow the menubar for the active window or don't. Don't do it in some cases and not in others. Get your act together. I know I can code to specifically do that, but I shouldn't have to. Write once, run anywhere and all that.
I could go on and on. But I won't. Btw, Jamie, a $30 dollar sound blaster live will let you play multiple sound streams with no mixing required.
Of course... the Prius probably doesn't have a problem with the power windows falling down and refusing to get up, like my Jetta did. And most 1999-2002 Jettas did at some point. Brilliant move on VWs part to use plastic retaining clips that warp in heat to hold those suckers up.
Even if you're checking in stuff weekly, you're still checking it into a local source control system. I promise you that... anyone's who dealt with "weekly" checkins, and lost 4 days of code on an early Friday morning is motivated to do this stuff.
Either that, or the developers at Apple are dumbasses who love living on the edge. And I don't think they are.
They just don't want to play nice. That's their right.
And when I'm interviewing people, I have a bias toward people with broad interests. Literature, music, philosophy, sports, and foreign languages are always a plus. Not only is that a good indicator that they have enough curiosity to get interested in what we do, but it also gives them common ground for connecting with people in the rest of the company. That communication is vital for building really kick-ass technical products.
I'm always amazed at the number of people who get their comp sci. degrees and yet can't write a coherent paragraph in an interdepartment email. I guess it's because they don't want to waste time with those "useless" skills like writing and communications.
If you're using the BitKeeper server, you should be agreeing to their terms of use. I think the author of bitkeeper was a bit miffed that he was completly bypassing the terms of usabe by writing his own client. You're very specifically using their client which is designed to work with their server.
In this case, they're 100% right. What happens if Tridge's client sucks? What happens if it corrupts older files? The Linux kernel, in case you hadn't heard, is a bit of a high profile project. If word gets out that that damn BitKeeper source control system has corrupted 6 months worth of work, that's bad publicity. And who would know if it was really the official client or Tridge's client?
Bottom line, Tridge's a bit of a dick for not playing nice. Let people protect their reputations, and don't screw with their abilities to feed their family.
So many questions, all very good. All I can honestly say is that you get explanations as the show goes on. Of course, more questions are raised, but that is part of the charm of the whole thing.
I can't figure out why BG is so popular, it's nothing like the orriginal (Which ROCKED).
I loved the original BSG... when it was first on and I was a kid... and in fact, I think I saw it in reruns.
But when you look at the original now, you have to just shake you head and think... who wrote this garbage? A lot of the episodes just made no sense (I know, I'll send wave after wave of suicide cylon fighers to attack the Galactica, and when they succeed, I won't follow it up with another attack to finish it. Brilliant!), and others were just blatant ripoffs of standard drama show storylines.
The only good thing about the original is that it existed and could be reworked into the very good show that's on now.
That's good for you and all, but I think there's a larger point that needs to be made...
What, really, is the difference between downloading a TV show you missed of LokiTorrent and recording it with your VCR? I've done it a few times, I'm guilty. Did I really hurt anyone? My VCR skips commercials (mostly), so that can't be an argument. It's not like the stuff I'm downloading is even available for me to purchase (or in some cases, to even see again)... but I suppose to the MPAA, I'm still some sort of terrorist.
Thanks. Whenever ones raves about how great this show, it's good to remind them that it copied a character from Startrek Voyager
I must have missed the bit where Jeri Ryan's character only existed in the bald doctor's head and tried to manipulate him into betraying humanity. So sorry.
But as you can also see, Sun doesn't have a lot interest in helping other plattforms. Sun had the OS/2 sources for StarOffice. They didn't release it. Why not?
Because there were exactly 47 users of OS/2 left once Sun bought the Staroffice product. Mind you, as one of the 47 I was pretty crushed, but I do understand sometimes people make those decisions that make business sense.
That's just a lame excuse for "We are the mighty Sun, but we don't help those Mac faggots, because Apple is now competing with us in servers. We neither helped those OS/2 idiots when we released the StarOffice 5.2 source. We had the OS/2 sources of StarOffice 5.1, but OS/2 is from IBM and they are competing with us either. We didn't want to release the source of Win32 StarOffice, too, but Windows is too big to ignore."
Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that porting from X11 on Linux/Solaris to X11 on Mac is much much easier than actually creating an Aqua port.
too bad Commodore went bust before the whole "If we're dying we'll try a last minute boost and make our software open source" craze kicked in) in the formative years of my programming life, but YMMV.
Another one like me.:) Could you imagine if Commodore had open sourced AmiDOS and the Workbench? Apple would have had a real preemptive multitasking operating system that ran on a 68xxx based CPU.
It's amazing that a little computer company from West Chester, PA could do what Apple took 2 decades to figure out.
I believe KDE 3.3 does that already. And it has done it for quite a while I think...
You just need to hunt for the option. It's in the control panel somewhere. Of course, that's like saying there's a very valuable rock in Wyoming, go find it.:)
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They had some great developers, but more often than not, it seemed they were thwarted by bad business processes and/or decision makers up top.
There is that, yes. Commodore's business people were horribly inept. Remember the TED fiasco? How many dollars went into developing a platform and 2 new systems that didn't even survive a year in the marketplace?
Compared to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Boston, and so on, Tokyo isn't going to take up that much data. And all of those cities are within a few hours of each other on the east coast and sit in the same "NE" region on most navigation DVDs.
Cheapest Power Mac: $1999 Trying to amke an equivelent Dell (dual 3.0 GHz vs dual 2GHz, but probably pretty close if my AMD experiance is worth anything) I ger over $2200.
Or, you could get a single Athlon 64/3800 or 4000 from HP for about 1200, and pocket the change. And why the hell not? There are some scenarios where the Apple will be faster, but in most cases, the AMD will be just as fast if not faster.
But, you will surely cry, it's not a Dual. Fair enough. A dual Opteron workstation on HP.com starts at 1899. The PowerMac is perhaps the biggest ripoff in the Apple line up. Look at the graphics card it comes with! I mean, come on. The iMac is a much better deal.
Well, since it has bluetooth, in theory you should be able to sync your addressbook and calendar via BT.
In theory.
In practice, I find that linux is really lacking in this area. The *best* application I can seem to find is KMobileTools, but it won't work via BT unless I jump through some hoops, and then I have to do that every time I want to do anything on the phone.
If anyone has any alternatives, and yes I know about gscmxx, please me know.
Apple survived mainly because their rivals were horribly inept at marketing.
And let's be clear on one thing... when I say rivals, I mean rival, and I mean Commodore. Atari, nah... they had a half baked 16bit computer that wasn't going anywhere.
But the Amiga, that had a lot of potential. If you were around back then, and got a chance to play with the Amiga 500 that sold for... what... 299? And got a fully multitasking OS that just sailed along on the same hardware that the early versions of MacOS could barely get up and wheeze on, you knew they were on to something.
Unfortunately, nobody else did, because Commodore couldn't market condoms to sailors on shore leave.
Point is, Divx is NOT mainstream, so not having support for it shouldn't be a big surprise.
I like that. That surely means that there's no way I could go to Circuit City and buy a DiVX capable DVD player? Or download movie trailers in DiVX?
hey, and in regards to your comment about using mplayer for DivX, it is easy to google and find it as a solution for OS X, and tell me if it was really all that hard to install? Drag and drop from a dmg.. that's soooo haaarrrd. The app installation model is heads and shoulders about everying else. Ok, maybe dependencies aren't handled that well, but the vast majority of installs don't have specific dependency needs as they were designed for OS X in the first place.
Hey fucktard, will the average OSX user know to look for Mplayer at all?
What were you looking for when you tried OS X? The same thing you saw in Linux?
Of course, you would like to work the same way you used to and the current evolution of desktop switching isn't to your standards..
And, really, who are you to tell me how to work? If you know a better way of writing code, compiling, and watching the output easily, let me know. And apple+tabbing around isn't that graceful. Expose isn't that useful. It's nice to jump to a second desktop and having the windows set up so I can see everything at once.
Of course, you would like to work the same way you used to and the current evolution of desktop switching isn't to your standards.. and you have to run mplayer instead of quicktime to run divx files (big whoop, dude, really.. you have a perfectly workable solution..give off on that one)
And installing a mixer is a perfectly workable solution to Zawinski's problem. Now who's more likely to fix their problem... a linux user needing a mixer, or an OSX user having trouble with Quicktime? Hrm.
Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Energy Saver. Configure to your heart's desire.
Fantastic. However, you didn't read all that well. I know it works, I know it works well. But how can I tell it to not have my computer go to sleep if I'm not actually using it but it is doing processing in the background. Such as, maybe, downloading files.
I can see how those could be useful, yes. In fact, there are a few different virtual desktop managers available for OS X. A quick Google search does wonders, but this appears to be the one most recently updated.
Did you read my comments about how they don't work all that well, or did you just blindly point me at the solution I already use, which I mentioned in my original comment?
I just made the switch from Linux to OSX, and after a few weeks, I went screaming back to Linux.
The apple folks who like to talk about usability and the "it just works" shit should be severely beaten. For the prosecution I present:
- The dock. What a hideous piece of crap this is. My trash can is on the dock. So are my running applications. So are my non-running applications. But not all of my non-running applications. To get to those, I have to go into the applications folder, which has a nice alias on the desktop that Apple didn't create. Those useful programs that you only use once in a blue moon? Go dig for them... go dig.
- Driver support. I have a cheapo webcam that came with an Earthlink subscription years ago. I plug it into linux and it works. I plug it into my Mac and it does nothing. No drivers available.
- Quicktime. It plays 8 seconds of video and stops. Every time. MPlayer for OSX handles the same files fine.
- Sleep. It does it whether or not I want it to. Downloading a big file, it'll go to sleep. How the hell does one stop that? Other than that, sleep works great. Or not.
- Virtual Desktops. Man, I never thought I'd miss them so much. And even the very good replacement I found, Desktop Manger, has flaws. If I leave the adium buddy list open on one desktop, go to another desktop, and mouse over the where the buddy list is on the non-visible desktop, I see tool tips. Among other bugs, that's the most annoying.
- Java apps. Either swallow the menubar for the active window or don't. Don't do it in some cases and not in others. Get your act together. I know I can code to specifically do that, but I shouldn't have to. Write once, run anywhere and all that.
I could go on and on. But I won't. Btw, Jamie, a $30 dollar sound blaster live will let you play multiple sound streams with no mixing required.
Personally I can't wait for the KDE response which scolds the Firefox developers for having such huge and stupid security holes in their browser.
Maybe the Firefox team should get rid of the glass walls before they start chucking stones at other people.
Of course... the Prius probably doesn't have a problem with the power windows falling down and refusing to get up, like my Jetta did. And most 1999-2002 Jettas did at some point. Brilliant move on VWs part to use plastic retaining clips that warp in heat to hold those suckers up.
Even if you're checking in stuff weekly, you're still checking it into a local source control system. I promise you that... anyone's who dealt with "weekly" checkins, and lost 4 days of code on an early Friday morning is motivated to do this stuff.
Either that, or the developers at Apple are dumbasses who love living on the edge. And I don't think they are.
They just don't want to play nice. That's their right.
And when I'm interviewing people, I have a bias toward people with broad interests. Literature, music, philosophy, sports, and foreign languages are always a plus. Not only is that a good indicator that they have enough curiosity to get interested in what we do, but it also gives them common ground for connecting with people in the rest of the company. That communication is vital for building really kick-ass technical products.
I'm always amazed at the number of people who get their comp sci. degrees and yet can't write a coherent paragraph in an interdepartment email. I guess it's because they don't want to waste time with those "useless" skills like writing and communications.
Tridge is wrong on this one...
If you're using the BitKeeper server, you should be agreeing to their terms of use. I think the author of bitkeeper was a bit miffed that he was completly bypassing the terms of usabe by writing his own client. You're very specifically using their client which is designed to work with their server.
In this case, they're 100% right. What happens if Tridge's client sucks? What happens if it corrupts older files? The Linux kernel, in case you hadn't heard, is a bit of a high profile project. If word gets out that that damn BitKeeper source control system has corrupted 6 months worth of work, that's bad publicity. And who would know if it was really the official client or Tridge's client?
Bottom line, Tridge's a bit of a dick for not playing nice. Let people protect their reputations, and don't screw with their abilities to feed their family.
So many questions, all very good. All I can honestly say is that you get explanations as the show goes on. Of course, more questions are raised, but that is part of the charm of the whole thing.
I can't figure out why BG is so popular, it's nothing like the orriginal (Which ROCKED).
I loved the original BSG... when it was first on and I was a kid... and in fact, I think I saw it in reruns.
But when you look at the original now, you have to just shake you head and think... who wrote this garbage? A lot of the episodes just made no sense (I know, I'll send wave after wave of suicide cylon fighers to attack the Galactica, and when they succeed, I won't follow it up with another attack to finish it. Brilliant!), and others were just blatant ripoffs of standard drama show storylines.
The only good thing about the original is that it existed and could be reworked into the very good show that's on now.
That's good for you and all, but I think there's a larger point that needs to be made...
What, really, is the difference between downloading a TV show you missed of LokiTorrent and recording it with your VCR? I've done it a few times, I'm guilty. Did I really hurt anyone? My VCR skips commercials (mostly), so that can't be an argument. It's not like the stuff I'm downloading is even available for me to purchase (or in some cases, to even see again)... but I suppose to the MPAA, I'm still some sort of terrorist.
Thanks. Whenever ones raves about how great this show, it's good to remind them that it copied a character from Startrek Voyager
I must have missed the bit where Jeri Ryan's character only existed in the bald doctor's head and tried to manipulate him into betraying humanity. So sorry.
But as you can also see, Sun doesn't have a lot interest in helping other plattforms. Sun had the OS/2 sources for StarOffice. They didn't release it. Why not?
Because there were exactly 47 users of OS/2 left once Sun bought the Staroffice product. Mind you, as one of the 47 I was pretty crushed, but I do understand sometimes people make those decisions that make business sense.
That's just a lame excuse for "We are the mighty Sun, but we don't help those Mac faggots, because Apple is now competing with us in servers. We neither helped those OS/2 idiots when we released the StarOffice 5.2 source. We had the OS/2 sources of StarOffice 5.1, but OS/2 is from IBM and they are competing with us either. We didn't want to release the source of Win32 StarOffice, too, but Windows is too big to ignore."
Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that porting from X11 on Linux/Solaris to X11 on Mac is much much easier than actually creating an Aqua port.
too bad Commodore went bust before the whole "If we're dying we'll try a last minute boost and make our software open source" craze kicked in) in the formative years of my programming life, but YMMV.
:) Could you imagine if Commodore had open sourced AmiDOS and the Workbench? Apple would have had a real preemptive multitasking operating system that ran on a 68xxx based CPU.
Another one like me.
It's amazing that a little computer company from West Chester, PA could do what Apple took 2 decades to figure out.
I believe KDE 3.3 does that already. And it has done it for quite a while I think...
You just need to hunt for the option. It's in the control panel somewhere. Of course, that's like saying there's a very valuable rock in Wyoming, go find it.
I would just like to point out that Turbo Pascal != Delphi, unless I'm very mistaken.
Delphi was Object Pascal... Turbo Pascal wasn't.