Has anyone yet produced a digital camera with a setting to automatically take pictures at various different f-stops and exposure lengths in the course of a few seconds? My camera has the ability to change both manually, but a lot of the time, the subject will change too much before I can tell my camera to change to a certain f-stop and shutter speed. Automatically, it attempts to find the best one using light settings and a few interesting algorithms, but it doesn't always pick the best settings to use. Why can't it try a few settings around each other, store them to my iPod, and give me the chance to sort and find the one I want?
It means that the entire nation could get its collective ass together and pitch in on a project that benefits everyone. This is an amazing accomplishment.
America could do the same damned thing, except the collective ass is a lot larger, and the people with the collective asses try to turn it into an empirical thing; okay, who gets what services at what cost.
Imagine if that entire country went VoIP, hired a cellphone company to make wireless handsets that talk internet protocol in the 802.11x range, and became a completely wireless nation. Help is always a handset away. Nobody is more than a few numbers from everyone else.
I wish I could move there, but I doubt there's much work for a software developer in a country nobody's heard of until today.
Why not scrap 5 of the lowest success rate programs and do both at the same time. For that matter, set up a few more launch sites so we can have more than two shuttle crews in space at a time. Having more hands on deck to build ISS could never hurt.
But, it's a pipe dream. Our government has no interest in space while the war on terror is still in vogue.
Every company has its margins. Software simply can't be perfect out the door because in order to create perfect software, you have to have an infinite amount of time; a resource none of us can afford.
So while Tiger was released well before its ready, it still Just Works. Apple's engineers will work towards fixing the little bugs (as long as you TELL THEM THEY EXIST and stop whining on Slashdot about it **pet peeve**), and Tiger will get better and better.
If Safari didn't load some websites because of a broken rendering model or if zoom in the Finder caused OS X to lock up as solid as a Windows 98 box with 16MB of RAM in the summer's heat, then yes, I'd agree it's a problem. Otherwise it's an interface qualm, and barely a nuisance. Personally, I never even remember where I last put a window. Just as long as the window is there when I need it, I'm happy.
I understand what you are saying, but I believe the "speed" persay is a powerful indicator of how active the people want to be in their government, and how much we value our privacy.
The problem with removing the Patriot Act as one huge lump, is that it leaves a lot of non-virtual holes in our constitution about where privacy should be granted, and where it should not be. The Patriot Act makes it quite clear where America stands in these lights. While we repeal the Patriot Act part by part, we add other acts that universally grant us privacy.
This isn't as good as something like a constitutional amendment laying out the statutes of privacy, but it does guarentee our rights to certain things. The main problem with repealing the Patriot Act is that privacy laws typically take a lot of time to go through rigorous testing by both the opposition and the support. Things like search and ceazure didn't happen over night; they spent years brooding on the desks of representitives in many different states, before finally someone brought the debate to the forefront.
Therefore, as a recap, I believe we have no way to uniformally repeal the Patriot Act, and be assured at the end of the day that we are still Americans and that a hefty part of our rights still stand. I believe that as the Patriot Act is evil in the fact it cuts deeply into territory which it shouldn't stand, it also leaves lots of ground to be battled around it, and verifies that we do, in fact, have certain rights. I believe that in the very immediate future, these rights will come to the forefront as the different agents in America try to further and further press issues like Electronic Data Distribution. We are finally at the point where we know what we need; now's the time our politicians deliver. And I think they made the first step towards that today. Hopefully it won't be the last.
Just because all of the sponsors are dems, doesn't mean Bush has nothing to do with it. This kind of bill could say a lot of things.
a) The Dems have a bombshell next race, will win, and want to ensure their next candidate will stay in office for a good, long time.
b) Bush's politics have extended beyond his party, which is favorable in some dealings, but very, very unfavorable in others. I'll leave that as an excersize to the reader.
And that's just what I can come up with off the top of my head. Just don't think that because someone is a democrat or a republician, doesn't mean they support Bush.
I'm not saying I like the Patriot Act, but I really think that we should be rational in our removal of this disturbance, as we weren't rational with our creation of it in the first place.
The Patriot Act was a fast acting, country sweeping bill that made it to law simply because the governing agencies that wanted it, wanted it now, and nobody was going to stand in their way in the wake of what had just happened in our country.
That being said, if we act too strongly and remove the whole thing at once, we are setting ourselves up to the whole situation again, perhaps worse; next time they will have access to our bank statements, our cars (onboard nav computers telling the government where we are going, where we've been, etc), our schools, our whole livelihood could be changed.
That being said, if we are slow about pulling this law back out, and amending our laws so that such a catastrophy like 9/11 and the Patriot Act won't happen again, we will be more prepared for the next government incursion into privacy.
The whole thing needs to go. But we need to be able to explicitly say why each piece of it should go, and until we are unable to do that legally, the Patriot Act must stand as to keep what freedoms we still have. I have full confidence in our government to restore our constitution to its former glory, but we can't do that by making hair-triggered decisions like the Patriot Act, or its repeal.
Well, one can only thank goodness for bureaucracy in this case; this amendment will be in the house subcommitties for at least the next 5 years unless someone fast tracks it.. but wouldn't that look a bit too suspicious?
Besides, this isn't the first time this has came up; someone's tried to repeal every amendment, someone's tried to repeal almost every right granted to us by the constitution at some point. It's gotten so far now that people don't even care about their rights, and are being stripped of them anyways by laws that blatently don't check out against it.
Situations like the Patriot Act should have never happened. And whoever called it the "Patriot Act" should spend the rest of their days in Guantanamo with the rest of the detainees. There is nothing patriotic about giving up your rights to privacy.
Yes, but walking into a library at a liberal arts college and asking for a specific publishing about Cellular Automation Theory isn't exactly the way to get things done. Sure, the lady gives me a link to a website, but then that website links to another website, and all you end up with are other documents that reference the original document.
Of course, this cleared up really quick when I came to my University and asked for the same document; they actually had the original scientific journal it was published in, and I was able to go in and get a xerox of it.
Ended up that this section of my neural net research led me nowhere, but I would have failed completely if not for the bigger library. And of course, I'm only citing the most recent occurances.. I remember this happening to me a lot, especially in high school, where the librarians are simply book-babysitters, and trying to find something about computers and computer theories is like trying to find a specific grain of sand in a huge stockpile of sugar..
Google is brand new to the world. As a result of just going public (not even a year has past yet!) they have a lot more capital, a deficit in developers, and a virtually infinite playing field (all of Google's machines, databases of random cataloged things.. it's a virtual goldmine for dataminers!).
Gmail is good because AJAX is exactly the statement I would expect from someone trying to spread this opinion. Gmail is good because they took a simple concept, and implemented in a way that's friendly to users, and conducive to web-browsers. No special clients (if you don't want). AJAX is simply the technology that afforded this in a reliable, quick manner. It's like saying "The Saturn V was good because of its engines" or something equivalent; it's not one aspect of it, it's the whole package.
AJAX as a technology has revolutionized the internet, and is probably the primary warring grounds for the next Browser Revolution. Like CSS and Java[ECMA?]script were before it. No more waiting for servers to serve up entire webpages to update a counter. No more clicking a button and going to the next page, praying that your data was correctly posted, and that you won't have to go back and retype it. It is simply a means to an end.
Who cares about a career fair? Microsoft is inheirently going to have more people at their booth because they do more than one thing with their company; Google is primarily in the business of data mining and advertising. Microsoft is in the business of Gaming Systems, Operating Systems, Input devices, Office suites, Imaging applications, hell, you name it and Microsoft has something you could do for them.
It's called Diversification. Google's doing it right now. Microsoft did it ten years ago. IBM as a company has recently shifted towards slimming down the size of their company to be an Open Source Support vendor / processor design company. You're really comparing a Taxi company to Wal*Mart to Kinkos here..
Couldn't agree more, and you touched on the core issue as well.
Google needs Time. Something they can't buy, something they can't be granted any other way. They need this service to be open, so that they can hear these complaints, so that they can change. You can't be dynamic in a lab; you don't know what things the user will want. The very rudaments you can add in, yes, which is where I believe it stands now, but give it time, more complex things will come.
I can't wait personally. I've had many a research project go under due to the inability to find accurate information (and not just links to where information should be). Now if only they'd hurry up and scan in physical library books...
My guess is dropping this product into Beta will give users the ability to request such features, at which time they can be added.
I actually see this as being one of the huge advantages of Gmail Beta; they release a core set of services which they believe to be agnostic, and then ask which services will be preferred to be added, instead of wasting their time coding something that won't go to use.
For Google Scholar, it's in a very, very premature mode. Give them a couple of months, request some features, and I'm sure you'll start to see them crop up. In the meanwhile, use whatever other free services (none that I can think of offhand other than painstakingly selective googling), or use Google Scholar as is. 'nough said.
Where I come from, there's this really interesting College called Berea College. Ever heard of it? I didn't think so.
Like most other community colleges, this is a really cheap place to go to school and get a degree. Unlike most community colleges, this place is free to attend if you fall below a certain income bracket, or graduate from their lab school (like I did, Berea Community Schools).
The fact is, they actually pay you to work there, give you an easy, 10 hr a week job to do (so you actually feel like you're earning your education), and at the same time you're getting an $80,000 education.
The main problem with this school is accredidation; credits don't transfer to and from this school very easily.
There is nothing stopping anyone from applying to the school. Their application process is a bit more detailed than most, but at the same time they really want to feel like you belong there, and that they aren't wasting their money on you.
This kind of school isn't really all that hard to start. Get a bunch of left minded people together, get the money to build a few buildings and dormitories, have the professors teach, have the students live and graduate like any other university. The only problem is getting your degree accepted by other institutions (accrediation) and especially by other businesses.
A lot of people have ice makers in their home, which provides ice cheaply enough.. though one nit pick I had myself is that he wasn't adding any salt to the water!!! He could have dropped the water down at least another ten degrees, stretch out Newton's Law of Cooling the best you can.
Had a similar idea, though closed circuit, and involving an old fuel pump from a car..
To afford a practical light on what you're saying, Processing Unit specification isn't really happening as drastically as you may think.
Many companies have realized that Multithreading is just the next step into building faster machines. Single thread apps are virtually going the way of the dodo as almost every application we use could make use of having multiple threads. And those that don't will co-exist well with other applications that do.
More specialized chips like the Cell processor being pimped by IBM are really the light of the future in this area. Taking que from the graphics card industry, it simply incorporates multiple, highly parallel float/vector units. Your "Physics Processing Unit" could run dearly inside of this, along with nearly any other vector code.
AIPU's are a bit different; AI code usually deals with lots of branches, which almost would be better handled by its own processor. If a branch miss happens, the entire pipeline being flushed is a disaster. While I believe that this can be dealt with on-chip with the CPU, better branch predictors and trace caches, it's very hard to integrate these features into anything to save power, and thus, it would almost be better off chip.
Current generation console chips simply reflect that the GHz wars are over. At this point, no matter how much faster we scale up the processors, we can't get the same amount of work done as having 2, 3, or 7+1 cores. We should look forward to newer desktop machines that reflect this processing wall.
I would doubt if most drivers take anything more than an Endian switch and a few tweaks here and there to deal with the register differences, most of which can be done by a good compiler.
Most companies who haven't released their specs to Apple, on the other hand, will be out in the dark when it comes to writing new device drivers. Apple's gone out of their way to make it easy two switch between the platforms, device drivers are not going to be something to slow them down.
That's one of the advantages of running a microkernel like Mach; *everything* plugs in to it, so making a driver work shouldn't take much mucking around inside of the kernel wondering why something completely doesn't work.
Darwin's an interesting animal. It's a hybrid of FreeBSD and the Mach micro-kernel. I'd almost go as far as saying FreeBSD is a module *within* Mach, but that's not entirely true.
Darwin drivers, as they exist, should work for Mac OS X, but not many exist. And I wouldn't look for this to change as time goes on either.
As I'm sure 8 million people will tell you, Apple's not in the market for OS dominance. They're in it for an awesome platform. This means both hardware AND software superiority.
In other words, device drivers for your generic Intel hardware --WONT BE MADE-- *shock and amazement*.
But, that probably won't stop the hackers from trying their best to boot it on Whiteboxen. And I'm sure they'll succeed, but the lengths they go at to succeed won't be worth it to the average user.
I've used Outlook 2k1. Unless the entire product has gone and done a COMPLETE 180 degrees, new design team, less code bloat, less confusing options and hard to set up nothings, I doubt if it's gotten any better.
That being said, I'm open to try it, but I don't have a machine capable of running it. I've been Windows Free for quite a while now.
Well see, processor speed really has nothing to do with bloat.
This machine I'm typing on has a cool 128 MB of ram. Loading an application that requires 25 software libraries to do something as simple as sort a list or add a funky widget toolbar is not something this machine can withstand with ease. Running thin, streamlined apps is something that keeps my machine enjoyable to use.
That said, the Open Source world is far from listening to our calls to reduce bloat; instead they drive forward, coding the same application over and over, disorganized libraries, untracable dependencies, all and all just masses of code lumped together. While this bulk of code has thousands of useful features, many of them are hidden from sight behind a terminal which scares people away, and the few that make it through to the desktop are often behind clunky software libraries that people are constantly at war building and defending.
I hope this post doesn't come off as a troll because I really love and enjoy Linux and the BSDs that gracefully allowed Mac OS X to come into being, but I seriously hope that we get better at organizing our efforts as developers and software engineers and not continue forever honing our programming skills. While an app may not be perfect, it can Just Work, and we can fix the bugs as we go. For the critial apps, good design begets good implementation. We should embrace these lessons as we look to the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone yet produced a digital camera with a setting to automatically take pictures at various different f-stops and exposure lengths in the course of a few seconds? My camera has the ability to change both manually, but a lot of the time, the subject will change too much before I can tell my camera to change to a certain f-stop and shutter speed. Automatically, it attempts to find the best one using light settings and a few interesting algorithms, but it doesn't always pick the best settings to use. Why can't it try a few settings around each other, store them to my iPod, and give me the chance to sort and find the one I want?
It means that the entire nation could get its collective ass together and pitch in on a project that benefits everyone. This is an amazing accomplishment.
America could do the same damned thing, except the collective ass is a lot larger, and the people with the collective asses try to turn it into an empirical thing; okay, who gets what services at what cost.
Imagine if that entire country went VoIP, hired a cellphone company to make wireless handsets that talk internet protocol in the 802.11x range, and became a completely wireless nation. Help is always a handset away. Nobody is more than a few numbers from everyone else.
I wish I could move there, but I doubt there's much work for a software developer in a country nobody's heard of until today.
Aqua, on the other hand, was fleshed out in 3 years, and keeps getting better.
You know, Aqua, Mac OS X's Desktop Environment. NeXT might have built the system, but the engineers at Apple made it soar.
...reasonably priced, non-DRM'd, long lasting battery...
Pick two, then we'll talk.
Why not scrap 5 of the lowest success rate programs and do both at the same time. For that matter, set up a few more launch sites so we can have more than two shuttle crews in space at a time. Having more hands on deck to build ISS could never hurt.
But, it's a pipe dream. Our government has no interest in space while the war on terror is still in vogue.
Ahh.. I guess humor fails us all at 5am.
All of your base are belong to us doesn't sound like such bad grammar.
Every company has its margins. Software simply can't be perfect out the door because in order to create perfect software, you have to have an infinite amount of time; a resource none of us can afford.
So while Tiger was released well before its ready, it still Just Works. Apple's engineers will work towards fixing the little bugs (as long as you TELL THEM THEY EXIST and stop whining on Slashdot about it **pet peeve**), and Tiger will get better and better.
If Safari didn't load some websites because of a broken rendering model or if zoom in the Finder caused OS X to lock up as solid as a Windows 98 box with 16MB of RAM in the summer's heat, then yes, I'd agree it's a problem. Otherwise it's an interface qualm, and barely a nuisance. Personally, I never even remember where I last put a window. Just as long as the window is there when I need it, I'm happy.
I understand what you are saying, but I believe the "speed" persay is a powerful indicator of how active the people want to be in their government, and how much we value our privacy.
The problem with removing the Patriot Act as one huge lump, is that it leaves a lot of non-virtual holes in our constitution about where privacy should be granted, and where it should not be. The Patriot Act makes it quite clear where America stands in these lights. While we repeal the Patriot Act part by part, we add other acts that universally grant us privacy.
This isn't as good as something like a constitutional amendment laying out the statutes of privacy, but it does guarentee our rights to certain things. The main problem with repealing the Patriot Act is that privacy laws typically take a lot of time to go through rigorous testing by both the opposition and the support. Things like search and ceazure didn't happen over night; they spent years brooding on the desks of representitives in many different states, before finally someone brought the debate to the forefront.
Therefore, as a recap, I believe we have no way to uniformally repeal the Patriot Act, and be assured at the end of the day that we are still Americans and that a hefty part of our rights still stand. I believe that as the Patriot Act is evil in the fact it cuts deeply into territory which it shouldn't stand, it also leaves lots of ground to be battled around it, and verifies that we do, in fact, have certain rights. I believe that in the very immediate future, these rights will come to the forefront as the different agents in America try to further and further press issues like Electronic Data Distribution. We are finally at the point where we know what we need; now's the time our politicians deliver. And I think they made the first step towards that today. Hopefully it won't be the last.
Just because all of the sponsors are dems, doesn't mean Bush has nothing to do with it. This kind of bill could say a lot of things.
a) The Dems have a bombshell next race, will win, and want to ensure their next candidate will stay in office for a good, long time.
b) Bush's politics have extended beyond his party, which is favorable in some dealings, but very, very unfavorable in others. I'll leave that as an excersize to the reader.
And that's just what I can come up with off the top of my head. Just don't think that because someone is a democrat or a republician, doesn't mean they support Bush.
I'm not saying I like the Patriot Act, but I really think that we should be rational in our removal of this disturbance, as we weren't rational with our creation of it in the first place.
The Patriot Act was a fast acting, country sweeping bill that made it to law simply because the governing agencies that wanted it, wanted it now, and nobody was going to stand in their way in the wake of what had just happened in our country.
That being said, if we act too strongly and remove the whole thing at once, we are setting ourselves up to the whole situation again, perhaps worse; next time they will have access to our bank statements, our cars (onboard nav computers telling the government where we are going, where we've been, etc), our schools, our whole livelihood could be changed.
That being said, if we are slow about pulling this law back out, and amending our laws so that such a catastrophy like 9/11 and the Patriot Act won't happen again, we will be more prepared for the next government incursion into privacy.
The whole thing needs to go. But we need to be able to explicitly say why each piece of it should go, and until we are unable to do that legally, the Patriot Act must stand as to keep what freedoms we still have. I have full confidence in our government to restore our constitution to its former glory, but we can't do that by making hair-triggered decisions like the Patriot Act, or its repeal.
Well, one can only thank goodness for bureaucracy in this case; this amendment will be in the house subcommitties for at least the next 5 years unless someone fast tracks it.. but wouldn't that look a bit too suspicious?
Besides, this isn't the first time this has came up; someone's tried to repeal every amendment, someone's tried to repeal almost every right granted to us by the constitution at some point. It's gotten so far now that people don't even care about their rights, and are being stripped of them anyways by laws that blatently don't check out against it.
Situations like the Patriot Act should have never happened. And whoever called it the "Patriot Act" should spend the rest of their days in Guantanamo with the rest of the detainees. There is nothing patriotic about giving up your rights to privacy.
Yes, but walking into a library at a liberal arts college and asking for a specific publishing about Cellular Automation Theory isn't exactly the way to get things done. Sure, the lady gives me a link to a website, but then that website links to another website, and all you end up with are other documents that reference the original document.
Of course, this cleared up really quick when I came to my University and asked for the same document; they actually had the original scientific journal it was published in, and I was able to go in and get a xerox of it.
Ended up that this section of my neural net research led me nowhere, but I would have failed completely if not for the bigger library. And of course, I'm only citing the most recent occurances.. I remember this happening to me a lot, especially in high school, where the librarians are simply book-babysitters, and trying to find something about computers and computer theories is like trying to find a specific grain of sand in a huge stockpile of sugar..
Google is brand new to the world. As a result of just going public (not even a year has past yet!) they have a lot more capital, a deficit in developers, and a virtually infinite playing field (all of Google's machines, databases of random cataloged things.. it's a virtual goldmine for dataminers!).
Gmail is good because AJAX is exactly the statement I would expect from someone trying to spread this opinion. Gmail is good because they took a simple concept, and implemented in a way that's friendly to users, and conducive to web-browsers. No special clients (if you don't want). AJAX is simply the technology that afforded this in a reliable, quick manner. It's like saying "The Saturn V was good because of its engines" or something equivalent; it's not one aspect of it, it's the whole package.
AJAX as a technology has revolutionized the internet, and is probably the primary warring grounds for the next Browser Revolution. Like CSS and Java[ECMA?]script were before it. No more waiting for servers to serve up entire webpages to update a counter. No more clicking a button and going to the next page, praying that your data was correctly posted, and that you won't have to go back and retype it. It is simply a means to an end.
Who cares about a career fair? Microsoft is inheirently going to have more people at their booth because they do more than one thing with their company; Google is primarily in the business of data mining and advertising. Microsoft is in the business of Gaming Systems, Operating Systems, Input devices, Office suites, Imaging applications, hell, you name it and Microsoft has something you could do for them.
It's called Diversification. Google's doing it right now. Microsoft did it ten years ago. IBM as a company has recently shifted towards slimming down the size of their company to be an Open Source Support vendor / processor design company. You're really comparing a Taxi company to Wal*Mart to Kinkos here..
Couldn't agree more, and you touched on the core issue as well.
Google needs Time. Something they can't buy, something they can't be granted any other way. They need this service to be open, so that they can hear these complaints, so that they can change. You can't be dynamic in a lab; you don't know what things the user will want. The very rudaments you can add in, yes, which is where I believe it stands now, but give it time, more complex things will come.
I can't wait personally. I've had many a research project go under due to the inability to find accurate information (and not just links to where information should be). Now if only they'd hurry up and scan in physical library books...
My guess is dropping this product into Beta will give users the ability to request such features, at which time they can be added.
I actually see this as being one of the huge advantages of Gmail Beta; they release a core set of services which they believe to be agnostic, and then ask which services will be preferred to be added, instead of wasting their time coding something that won't go to use.
For Google Scholar, it's in a very, very premature mode. Give them a couple of months, request some features, and I'm sure you'll start to see them crop up. In the meanwhile, use whatever other free services (none that I can think of offhand other than painstakingly selective googling), or use Google Scholar as is. 'nough said.
Who said he had the dump the water outside? I think it'd be a much more viable solution to run a line into a nearby drain in the house.
Where I come from, there's this really interesting College called Berea College. Ever heard of it? I didn't think so.
Like most other community colleges, this is a really cheap place to go to school and get a degree. Unlike most community colleges, this place is free to attend if you fall below a certain income bracket, or graduate from their lab school (like I did, Berea Community Schools).
The fact is, they actually pay you to work there, give you an easy, 10 hr a week job to do (so you actually feel like you're earning your education), and at the same time you're getting an $80,000 education.
The main problem with this school is accredidation; credits don't transfer to and from this school very easily.
There is nothing stopping anyone from applying to the school. Their application process is a bit more detailed than most, but at the same time they really want to feel like you belong there, and that they aren't wasting their money on you.
This kind of school isn't really all that hard to start. Get a bunch of left minded people together, get the money to build a few buildings and dormitories, have the professors teach, have the students live and graduate like any other university. The only problem is getting your degree accepted by other institutions (accrediation) and especially by other businesses.
A lot of people have ice makers in their home, which provides ice cheaply enough.. though one nit pick I had myself is that he wasn't adding any salt to the water!!! He could have dropped the water down at least another ten degrees, stretch out Newton's Law of Cooling the best you can.
Had a similar idea, though closed circuit, and involving an old fuel pump from a car..
To afford a practical light on what you're saying, Processing Unit specification isn't really happening as drastically as you may think.
Many companies have realized that Multithreading is just the next step into building faster machines. Single thread apps are virtually going the way of the dodo as almost every application we use could make use of having multiple threads. And those that don't will co-exist well with other applications that do.
More specialized chips like the Cell processor being pimped by IBM are really the light of the future in this area. Taking que from the graphics card industry, it simply incorporates multiple, highly parallel float/vector units. Your "Physics Processing Unit" could run dearly inside of this, along with nearly any other vector code.
AIPU's are a bit different; AI code usually deals with lots of branches, which almost would be better handled by its own processor. If a branch miss happens, the entire pipeline being flushed is a disaster. While I believe that this can be dealt with on-chip with the CPU, better branch predictors and trace caches, it's very hard to integrate these features into anything to save power, and thus, it would almost be better off chip.
Current generation console chips simply reflect that the GHz wars are over. At this point, no matter how much faster we scale up the processors, we can't get the same amount of work done as having 2, 3, or 7+1 cores. We should look forward to newer desktop machines that reflect this processing wall.
I would doubt if most drivers take anything more than an Endian switch and a few tweaks here and there to deal with the register differences, most of which can be done by a good compiler.
Most companies who haven't released their specs to Apple, on the other hand, will be out in the dark when it comes to writing new device drivers. Apple's gone out of their way to make it easy two switch between the platforms, device drivers are not going to be something to slow them down.
That's one of the advantages of running a microkernel like Mach; *everything* plugs in to it, so making a driver work shouldn't take much mucking around inside of the kernel wondering why something completely doesn't work.
Hate to buzz you incorrect but.. **BUZZ**.
Darwin's an interesting animal. It's a hybrid of FreeBSD and the Mach micro-kernel. I'd almost go as far as saying FreeBSD is a module *within* Mach, but that's not entirely true.
Darwin drivers, as they exist, should work for Mac OS X, but not many exist. And I wouldn't look for this to change as time goes on either.
As I'm sure 8 million people will tell you, Apple's not in the market for OS dominance. They're in it for an awesome platform. This means both hardware AND software superiority.
In other words, device drivers for your generic Intel hardware --WONT BE MADE-- *shock and amazement*.
But, that probably won't stop the hackers from trying their best to boot it on Whiteboxen. And I'm sure they'll succeed, but the lengths they go at to succeed won't be worth it to the average user.
I've used Outlook 2k1. Unless the entire product has gone and done a COMPLETE 180 degrees, new design team, less code bloat, less confusing options and hard to set up nothings, I doubt if it's gotten any better.
That being said, I'm open to try it, but I don't have a machine capable of running it. I've been Windows Free for quite a while now.
Well see, processor speed really has nothing to do with bloat.
This machine I'm typing on has a cool 128 MB of ram. Loading an application that requires 25 software libraries to do something as simple as sort a list or add a funky widget toolbar is not something this machine can withstand with ease. Running thin, streamlined apps is something that keeps my machine enjoyable to use.
That said, the Open Source world is far from listening to our calls to reduce bloat; instead they drive forward, coding the same application over and over, disorganized libraries, untracable dependencies, all and all just masses of code lumped together. While this bulk of code has thousands of useful features, many of them are hidden from sight behind a terminal which scares people away, and the few that make it through to the desktop are often behind clunky software libraries that people are constantly at war building and defending.
I hope this post doesn't come off as a troll because I really love and enjoy Linux and the BSDs that gracefully allowed Mac OS X to come into being, but I seriously hope that we get better at organizing our efforts as developers and software engineers and not continue forever honing our programming skills. While an app may not be perfect, it can Just Work, and we can fix the bugs as we go. For the critial apps, good design begets good implementation. We should embrace these lessons as we look to the future.