Microsoft has everyone talking about the wide selection of players that support WMA as being better for you. What a load of crap.
WMA is a proprietary, closed format that can only be implemented via deals directly with Microsoft. Sure a lot of players support it now, but what about five years from now? Or in 18 months when Microsoft comes out with "WMA-Enhanced" or "WMA-Palladium"?
You can argue that AAC isn't an open standard, but it's at least a standard promoted by the MPEG LA. You can hate it for not being free, but it's an industry standard instead of a single company's product format.
Free is best, but industry standard trumps single-company product in this case.
If you've played this on an Xbox you might be thrilled with this. But the graphics seem pretty uninspiring and the whole thing feels sluggish. This is on a machine that handles UT2003 and SWG just fine.
I would have expected the textures and whatnot to look better than on the Xbox's now-outdated video capabilities. Too bad it didn't come out on PCs when originally planned, it would have been great.
When I first saw this new logo (out of the corner of my eye), I had a moment of alarm as I thought the LCD on my iBook was cracked.
I didn't like it when Apple went from the rainbow to the solid. But now I like the solid a lot - Jobs was right to change the logo. In time I suppose the new version will grow on me. Or maybe be short-lived. Who knows.
My problem is simply that HFS is not as proven a solution as UFS. Filesystems are things you don't every want to have to worry about.
Apple has been using HFS Plus on their systems since Mac OS 8.1 (since 1997). It uses B-trees like ReiserFS. How many people are using ReiserFS on linux?
Why didn't linux use UFS? What's this ext2 thing? Didn't linux "rip out one of [unix's] pillars" for something not part of the original unix? Heck, UFS is a newcomer to the original unix file system with 14-character file names. How long does a filesystem have to be in use to be a "proven solution"? 20 years? 30 years?
There may be technical reasons not to use it (case-sensitivity, for example), but rejecting HFS Plus because it's something different is silly.
I was using Courier which works pretty well. But the configuration is a mess, and there have been some performance issues when using SSL (Outlook Express was ornery, for example).
Switching to Dovecot was pretty easy and I noticed an immediate performance increase. The support of Maildirs is a must-have.
Quick note: Microsoft's mac department doesn't port, they write from the ground up.
They tried doing just a port at one point, and brought the Mac community Word 6. It was so god-awful that Microsoft was losing customers in droves. That's when they created the current MacBU which writes good stuff. Office v.X is arguably much better than its Windows counterpart.
In my state we use optical scan ballots and it seems to be an ideal balance between verifiable paper trail and machine counting. Once the ballot is marked the optical scanning does indeed work well and is very quick.
The ballot is placed inside an opaque folder to hide the actual votes, but an end sticks out. A poll assistant aids the voter in feeding the machine, which sucks the ballot in and counts it. If there's a problem the ballot doesn't get sucked in and corrective action can be taken.
What could be done to improve the process is a screen-based marking station. Do away with the pen and use a touch screen in its place. This would eliminate the "stray mark" problem.
After a voter touches up a ballot, print it out in the booth. Voter then verifies it and submits it to the counting machine. If the ballot is incorrectly marked the voter would take it to the poll taker as a spoiled ballot and have it destroyed and try again.
This two-phase process has the added benefit of increasing the difficulty of hacking the system, since there are now two separate components instead of a single box to compromise.
FireWire is a faster/better way to transfer files because of the sustained I/O involved (don't be fooled by the USB 2.0 FUD). The iPod is also a bootable FireWire HD, so you get dual-use out of the extra cost.
The iPod plays AAC which may not seem like a big deal but it is the successor to MP3 so I suspect you'll be seeing more and more content that way, DRM issues aside. There is also audible.com support if you like that sort of thing. You can also do contacts and calendaring on the iPod. Sounds kind of useless but it turns out to be handy, particularly if you're always carring around your portable music.
I'd take points off of the Nomad simply because it has Microsoft's proprietary WMA in it. Ish, don't encourage them.
Look at their numbers they are comparing the G5 to the P4 3.0 and Xeon 3.06. What about the new 3.2's?
How dare Apple! But then they only had the G5 2GHz. Maybe they should wait for the 3GHz, then the comparison will be fairer?
The fact that everyone is nitpicking these benchmarks shows how close the performance is. And with such a huge "megahertz" disparity between the Xeon and the G5 shows how much power the G5 has to offer.
I just don't see how Apple is having millions of downloads and sales every month from software that isn't on _that_ many computers.
Or maybe, just maybe, everything you hear about Apple's market share is skewed against them by the analysts' methods. Comparing new sales each quarter doesn't factor in the installed base.
I implemented this exact thing on Mac OS in the 1980s and we did the "what if you're drunk" test. You can't log in. In fact, being hung over or sick can also screw up the timing. Tuning it to find the acceptable threshhold of pickiness is tricky.
I think it's not a bad idea, because it's based both on biometrics and something changeable (password). Any system based purely on biometrics does not allow for altering of the access "code" if it gets compromised.
Hell, Apple made people pay for a point release (Jaguar) - and Mac fans willingly do so.
I tire of this FUD. Just because you have issues with the numbering nomenclature does not change the reality that Jaguar was a significant release of Mac OS X.
The sins of Microsoft for charging big money for crap like Windows ME deserves a class-action lawsuit. You could argue Windows 98 was not much better than Windows 95.
In the linux world, how dare RedHat charge for their shipping of each version of RedHat. All they do is add new versions of packages and maybe change the kernel. (That's all sarcasm, btw. And consider RedHat as the archetype commercial linux distro.)
There are plenty of costs associated with managing releases from a company standpoint and Apple has been very generous in its updating of Mac OS X. We got disk journaling as a freebie, as an example. With Jaguar, maybe Apple's mistake was not manipulating people with marketing. Should they have called it "Mac OS Y"? Would that make you feel better about spending money? Or are the new features and performance what you want to spend money on?
Ask Google (the company) about why PowerPC might be attractive. Lots of x86 servers means lots of power draw, which would be significantly lower if they were all PowerPC-based servers.
I also take issue with the "Tier 3 Linux port", considering great ppc linux distros like Yellowdog, SuSE, etc.
I'm no EE so maybe I'm way off, but I don't understand why a single mobo maker (e.g., Abit, Asus, Tyan) couldn't make just one PowerPC-based mobo, since all the other parts (IDE, PCI/AGP, et al) are the same. I would think minor changes to the clocking of the board and the right kind of CPU socket is all that's needed. Oh yeah, it would also need Open Firmware for booting.
Sure the market is tiny compared to the x86 mobo market. But there's also no competition. Linux works great on the PowerPC so it would be easy to support a board like this. Someone take a risk and create the market!
Apple's got some great stuff in their Human Interface Design guidelines. And before anyone screams about hating Aqua, there is a lot of general-purpose information there regarding why things should be done certain ways.
Sun completely screwed up by hyping the applet model for Java while letting companies like Netscape poorly implement their own JVMs. This did as much harm to Java as Microsoft's corrupted version.
Killer apps are starting to appear, however, thanks to JNLP. It offers network delivery of apps but lets them run in their own JVM separate from any crippling browser environment.
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Microsoft has everyone talking about the wide selection of players that support WMA as being better for you. What a load of crap.
WMA is a proprietary, closed format that can only be implemented via deals directly with Microsoft. Sure a lot of players support it now, but what about five years from now? Or in 18 months when Microsoft comes out with "WMA-Enhanced" or "WMA-Palladium"?
You can argue that AAC isn't an open standard, but it's at least a standard promoted by the MPEG LA. You can hate it for not being free, but it's an industry standard instead of a single company's product format.
Free is best, but industry standard trumps single-company product in this case.
If you've played this on an Xbox you might be thrilled with this. But the graphics seem pretty uninspiring and the whole thing feels sluggish. This is on a machine that handles UT2003 and SWG just fine.
I would have expected the textures and whatnot to look better than on the Xbox's now-outdated video capabilities. Too bad it didn't come out on PCs when originally planned, it would have been great.
When I first saw this new logo (out of the corner of my eye), I had a moment of alarm as I thought the LCD on my iBook was cracked.
I didn't like it when Apple went from the rainbow to the solid. But now I like the solid a lot - Jobs was right to change the logo. In time I suppose the new version will grow on me. Or maybe be short-lived. Who knows.
My problem is simply that HFS is not as proven a solution as UFS. Filesystems are things you don't every want to have to worry about.
Apple has been using HFS Plus on their systems since Mac OS 8.1 (since 1997). It uses B-trees like ReiserFS. How many people are using ReiserFS on linux?
Why didn't linux use UFS? What's this ext2 thing? Didn't linux "rip out one of [unix's] pillars" for something not part of the original unix? Heck, UFS is a newcomer to the original unix file system with 14-character file names. How long does a filesystem have to be in use to be a "proven solution"? 20 years? 30 years?
There may be technical reasons not to use it (case-sensitivity, for example), but rejecting HFS Plus because it's something different is silly.
I was using Courier which works pretty well. But the configuration is a mess, and there have been some performance issues when using SSL (Outlook Express was ornery, for example).
Switching to Dovecot was pretty easy and I noticed an immediate performance increase. The support of Maildirs is a must-have.
Quick note: Microsoft's mac department doesn't port, they write from the ground up.
They tried doing just a port at one point, and brought the Mac community Word 6. It was so god-awful that Microsoft was losing customers in droves. That's when they created the current MacBU which writes good stuff. Office v.X is arguably much better than its Windows counterpart.
In my state we use optical scan ballots and it seems to be an ideal balance between verifiable paper trail and machine counting. Once the ballot is marked the optical scanning does indeed work well and is very quick.
The ballot is placed inside an opaque folder to hide the actual votes, but an end sticks out. A poll assistant aids the voter in feeding the machine, which sucks the ballot in and counts it. If there's a problem the ballot doesn't get sucked in and corrective action can be taken.
What could be done to improve the process is a screen-based marking station. Do away with the pen and use a touch screen in its place. This would eliminate the "stray mark" problem.
After a voter touches up a ballot, print it out in the booth. Voter then verifies it and submits it to the counting machine. If the ballot is incorrectly marked the voter would take it to the poll taker as a spoiled ballot and have it destroyed and try again.
This two-phase process has the added benefit of increasing the difficulty of hacking the system, since there are now two separate components instead of a single box to compromise.
FireWire is a faster/better way to transfer files because of the sustained I/O involved (don't be fooled by the USB 2.0 FUD). The iPod is also a bootable FireWire HD, so you get dual-use out of the extra cost.
The iPod plays AAC which may not seem like a big deal but it is the successor to MP3 so I suspect you'll be seeing more and more content that way, DRM issues aside. There is also audible.com support if you like that sort of thing. You can also do contacts and calendaring on the iPod. Sounds kind of useless but it turns out to be handy, particularly if you're always carring around your portable music.
I'd take points off of the Nomad simply because it has Microsoft's proprietary WMA in it. Ish, don't encourage them.
That's not a sword. Now this is a sword!
Look at their numbers they are comparing the G5 to the P4 3.0 and Xeon 3.06. What about the new 3.2's?
How dare Apple! But then they only had the G5 2GHz. Maybe they should wait for the 3GHz, then the comparison will be fairer?
The fact that everyone is nitpicking these benchmarks shows how close the performance is. And with such a huge "megahertz" disparity between the Xeon and the G5 shows how much power the G5 has to offer.
I just don't see how Apple is having millions of downloads and sales every month from software that isn't on _that_ many computers.
Or maybe, just maybe, everything you hear about Apple's market share is skewed against them by the analysts' methods. Comparing new sales each quarter doesn't factor in the installed base.
I implemented this exact thing on Mac OS in the 1980s and we did the "what if you're drunk" test. You can't log in. In fact, being hung over or sick can also screw up the timing. Tuning it to find the acceptable threshhold of pickiness is tricky.
I think it's not a bad idea, because it's based both on biometrics and something changeable (password). Any system based purely on biometrics does not allow for altering of the access "code" if it gets compromised.
xlr8yourmac.com is probably the place to go for something like this. They've got articles on converting a Beige G3 and converting a Blue & White G3.
Apple's machines seem to use different voltages than what's on a standard ATX power supply, at least in some machines.
The sins of Microsoft for charging big money for crap like Windows ME deserves a class-action lawsuit. You could argue Windows 98 was not much better than Windows 95.
In the linux world, how dare RedHat charge for their shipping of each version of RedHat. All they do is add new versions of packages and maybe change the kernel. (That's all sarcasm, btw. And consider RedHat as the archetype commercial linux distro.)
There are plenty of costs associated with managing releases from a company standpoint and Apple has been very generous in its updating of Mac OS X. We got disk journaling as a freebie, as an example. With Jaguar, maybe Apple's mistake was not manipulating people with marketing. Should they have called it "Mac OS Y"? Would that make you feel better about spending money? Or are the new features and performance what you want to spend money on?
Ask Google (the company) about why PowerPC might be attractive. Lots of x86 servers means lots of power draw, which would be significantly lower if they were all PowerPC-based servers.
I also take issue with the "Tier 3 Linux port", considering great ppc linux distros like Yellowdog, SuSE, etc.
I'm no EE so maybe I'm way off, but I don't understand why a single mobo maker (e.g., Abit, Asus, Tyan) couldn't make just one PowerPC-based mobo, since all the other parts (IDE, PCI/AGP, et al) are the same. I would think minor changes to the clocking of the board and the right kind of CPU socket is all that's needed. Oh yeah, it would also need Open Firmware for booting.
Sure the market is tiny compared to the x86 mobo market. But there's also no competition. Linux works great on the PowerPC so it would be easy to support a board like this. Someone take a risk and create the market!
Apple's got some great stuff in their Human Interface Design guidelines. And before anyone screams about hating Aqua, there is a lot of general-purpose information there regarding why things should be done certain ways.
Killer apps are starting to appear, however, thanks to JNLP. It offers network delivery of apps but lets them run in their own JVM separate from any crippling browser environment.
Some catalogs of JNLP apps show the potential: