That means iSync just hooks into the Palm HotSync which does the real work.
You have that backwards. The iSync conduit for HotSync just takes data out of the Palm in the Palm's format, converts it to SyncML, and hands it over to iSync. iSync does the real work of synchronizing Palm databases to iCal and Address Book. Does it really, really well, too, in my experience.
So, long story short, yes, you need Palm's HotSync software to make your Palm work with iSync. But you don't need to use the Palm Desktop software-- clunky and buggy, with a UI that was fine when it was still called Claris Organizer but that never quite made it into the 21st century.
Of course he can't use $CURRENT_VERSION with $YEAR_OLD_HARDWARE
$CURRENT_VERSION = "10.2.4"; $YEAR_OLD_HARDWARE = "circa 1999 blueberry iBook with 300 MHz G3 and 192 MB of RAM";
That's my setup, pal. Works great. My expectations were low, low, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Jaguar runs really well on 3-1/2-year-old kit.
You have confused "market share" with "total sales."
Look, imagine if there were Apple and one other personal computer company, let's say Dell. Imagine that Apple and Dell both sold 10 computers this year. Apple's average margin was 20%, and Dell's was 10%. Both made a profit, although Apple made more of a profit than Dell, and both have exactly 50% market share. Okay?
Next year, the number of people who want to buy computers-- which last year was 20-- skyrockets. Let's say there's something new that gives people a reason to buy a computer, like, say, the Internet. Next year, Apple sells 20 computers-- double the previous year's number-- but Dell sells a whopping 100 computers, or 10 times the previous year's number.
Now the total number of computers in the world is 140-- 30 are Macs and 110 are Dells. Apple's market share is down to 21.4%. But guess what? Apple's sales figures doubled, and they maintained their average margin of 20%.
Market share means the fraction of all the computers in the world that came from your company. It has nothing to do with the number of computers sold this year that came from your company. Market share is irrelevant to a company's success, as long as the company continues to make money. Apple is making money-- on the long-term curve; the last two quarters have been slightly bad, but the previous 16 were very good-- so nobody gives a flying twitch about market share.
And God knows I'd never recommend those Mac blade servers for compute considering the price/performance.
1. Apple doesn't make blade servers. They make xServe, which is a one-rack-unit, dual-processor server. Blade servers are entirely different animals.
2. If you were running BLAST, or another piece of software that was vectorized for your protection, you would be snatching up xServes like they're going out of style.
I was told something when xServe first came out that I can't confirm, but it comes from a reliable source in the computer media industry, and it sounds plausible to me. Apple built xServe exclusively for Genentech. Genentech committed to buy enough of them to pay for all of Apple's development costs before Apple even started working on it. So every xServe that Apple sells to a customer other than Genentech is kind of like icing on the cake.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not; I'm not sure. But it would explain a lot of things.
I haven't had any problems with the Palm Desktop software though I can't seem to sync it with the iCal program.
Are you using iSync? Setting up iSync to work with a Palm is a little bit draconian, but it's worth it.
First you have to install Palm Desktop and iSync. (Doesn't matter which you do first.) Then you have to install the iSync Palm package, which installs a new conduit for your HotSync software. Then you have to jump through a couple of tiny hoops-- click here, click there-- and you're ready to go.
Palm in cradle or connected to USB cable like so, hit the sync button on the Palm, HotSync fires up, then iSync fires up. iSync synchronizes your Address Book addresses on your computer to your Address Book database on your Palm, then syncs your iCal calendar(s) on your computer to your Date Book and To Do databases on your Palm. Works fine.
Come to think of it, making a Palm work with iSync is just about the most complicated thing the average person might want to do with his Mac, and it's easy if you just follow the page of instructions that comes with iSync.
(I wonder whether any Palm devices support SyncML, or whatever that synchronization protocol is that iSync and the Bluetooth phones support. It would be a hell of a lot simpler than having to go through HotSync.)
As for the lock-ups and crashes - i'm not Apple tech support, but i'm not about to tell anyone how rock solid Mac OS X is.. that's old news - so this guy either is a doorknob, or his machine is physically broken.
Or, more likely, he's trying to use Mac OS 9.
Why else would he be installing any software for his Palm at all? I recently upgraded my girlfriend's iBook-- an original one in blueberry, with a 300 MHz G3-- from OS 9 to OS X. Under OS 9, she was using IE, Palm Desktop, and Microsoft Word most of the time, and it was locking up pretty regularly. That's just how life was under OS 9. Under OS X, she uses Safari, iCal/Address Book/iSync, and TextEdit. Her laptop is absolutely balls-out bulletproof now. You know something else? It's as fast running OS X as it was running OS 9, and in some ways faster. I put 10.1 on it some time ago, but it was too sluggish for her to be happy with. But 10.2.4 runs like a dream on 3-1/2-year-old hardware.
If this doorknob were using OS X instead of OS 9, and iCal/Address Book/iSync instead of Palm Desktop, he'd be in business.
However, it does a very piss-poor job of managing who has the rights to digital media without some method of enforcement.
That's not true at all. Media rights started with the idea of rights and clearances, and rights management systems were originally just databases for storing information about who had which rights to do what, when, under what terms. Digital rights management is the same thing, only digital.
See, DRM really has nothing to do with consumers. It's, to use the popular jargon, a B-2-B thing. Let's say you're an advertising agency. You want to make a commercial for your client, Foo's Widgets. You want to use "Oh Baby Oh Baby" by the Fabhouse Five in the commercial. So you contact TuneCo, the owner of the distribution rights to that song, and you buy the right to use it in your commercial. That rights package is really complicated; it'll tell you how much of the song you can use, whether you can edit the song and if so how, whether you have to attribute the song, where the commercial can be run, what time of day it can be run, a maximum number of times it can be run in a given window... it's complicated. And if you violate your rights, it's going to cost your agency a bloody fortune.
Ergo, DRM. A DRM system will tell you everything you need to know. For instance, the system might include one of those expert system interfaces, where it asks you certain questions. How much of the song, in minutes and seconds, are you using? Are you editing the song at all? And it'll crunch for a second and tell you if you're within the rights that you bought.
So DRM actually has nothing to do with encryption or access control or copy protection. Those things properly belong in a different class altogether, one called digital rights enforcement, or DRE. DRE and DRM can be used together, but they don't have to be.
So when anybody points at a copy protection system and says, "That's DRM," they're not just overgeneralizing. They're just plain wrong.
Nobody "really needs" iSCSI. iSCSI isn't real yet. It's still one of those "coming soon" things, like Infiniband. And we saw how well Infiniband worked out.
iSCSI is just another way of solving a problem that's already been solved in any number of other ways. You need to attach a computer to some storage. Okay. You can use direct-attach FireWire storage. That has the advantage of being absolutely bullet-proof. Or you can use Fibre Channel to attach to a switched fabric. That works fine, too; just present a LUN to the Mac and let it format and mount it. Or you can use a network storage technology, like AppleShare or NFS. Those work fine, too, and the Power Macs, PowerBooks, and xServes are all shipping with 1000BASE-T, so that's not a problem.
There are any number of ways to ameliorate your so-called "real need" for iSCSI. These work today. Use them.
There's a related anecdote in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. He talks about being shown the blueprints for a uranium processing facility and asked to evaluate them for safety. They had to make sure that the system could be run safely, that there was no possibility that too much uranium could collect in one place to achieve criticality and explode. It was a big job.
Now, in those days Feynman was just a kid, in his 20's or early 30's or something, and he had no idea how to read a blueprint. So he's looking at this thing and it's just making no sense at all, and right in the middle of the sheet there's a thing that kinda looks like a window. So, figuring what the hell, he puts his finger right on it and says, "What happens if this valve gets stuck?" He's expecting somebody to say, "That's not a valve, sir, that's a window," but instead everybody gets quiet and thinks for a minute. Finally, one of the guys says, "My God, sir, you're absolutely right! We'll have that fixed immediately!"
From reading his books, you kinda get the impression that Feynman lived his whole life that way, just pretending he knew what was going on and plunging ahead.
I've given up reading the classifieds and taken to reading the obituaries instead. The way I see it, sooner or later somebody in a job I'm qualified for is bound to keel over, and when they do... bam!
Morbid, yes, but them's the breaks in our current economic climate.
(The next logical step, of course, is... well, let's just say there's a next logical step and leave it at that, okay?)
Apple's Java 1.4.1 is in developer preview now. If you want it, you can get yourself an ADC account-- they're free; sign up here-- and go to the "Download Software" area of the ADC site.
Java 1.4.1 is at developer preview 8 right now, so it's not Sir Crashalot or anything, but it's not finished, either. No lifeguard on duty; swim at your own risk.
My examples were just to show that tabs aren't new, and the various implementations (good or bad) only show we're bound to see them continue.
That's specious reasoning at best. One example of a bad user interface-- two if you count Mozilla/Opera/Chimera tab-based MDI-- does not a trend make.
If anything, the overall trend is away from MDI toward SDI. Microsoft Word for Windows used to be an MDI application; as of Office 2000, it wasn't. The same is true of lots of Windows applications. MDI doesn't work, so it's being abandoned.
There are no real examples of MDI on the Mac, of course, because the Mac HIG always proscribed MDI in favor of SDI.
I'd like to know whence your authority on Safari comes, tho, but only to satisfy my own curiousity.
A three-way combination of inside info, extensive knowledge of Apple's UI guidelines over the years, and a level of confidence bordering on hubris.
I'm now wondering how long it will be before we see HTML that opens a new tab
Oh, sure, let's go right back to the bad old days of browser-specific HTML. "I'm sorry, but you must use a browser with a shitty multiple-document interface implementation in order to view this site." That'd be great...;-)
Is there a reason for this change? seems silly to me.
Let's ignore for the moment the fact that every single change is going to seem silly to somebody. If I had to make a guess, mostly because I'm too lazy to go looking through the documentation, I'd say that Apple maybe wanted to free up some key chords. They had a bit of a problem with Adobe over command-H (hide) and command-option-H (hide others), so I can see their point. Let's keep the key chords to a minimum. It's simply not necessary for every single OS function to be represented by a key chord.
The HIG, as I recall, doesn't mention tabs as evil.
There's tabs and then there's tabs. Tabs as a UI control are okay; there's a section of the HIG describing how to use them. But tabbed browsing is simply one implementation of a multiple-document interface (MDI). The HIG does specifically call out MDI as being evil.
See, the Mac got where it is today by establishing a fairly simple desktop metaphor and sticking with it. The metaphor says one document, one window. Windows on the screen are like pieces of paper on the desktop.
we can look to Excel for tabbed worksheets as a long standing example
A long-standing bad example, you mean. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who would be willing to go on record as saying that tabbed worksheets are a good UI.
and to Airport Admin for a more recent usage [also the Apple web site]
I don't mean to be rude, but if we're going to have a constructive conversation about tabbed browsing you're going to have to wrap your head around the fact that tabs qua tabs and tabs as an MDI implementation are two completely different things.
Safari will have tabs...sooner or later
Safari will not have tabs. Not as the default, not as an option for power users, not at all. If somebody else wants to construct a browser that implements some kind of MDI interface, they're free to do so. Hell, they can even use WebKit to do it, once it's released. But Apple will not release a browser that so flagrantly violates the standards that got them where they are today.
(Sorry, I guess that got a little strident. I'm watching The West Wing as I write this, and Sorkin always pushes my prose over toward the purple end of the spectrum.)
Slashdot Mirror
That means iSync just hooks into the Palm HotSync which does the real work.
You have that backwards. The iSync conduit for HotSync just takes data out of the Palm in the Palm's format, converts it to SyncML, and hands it over to iSync. iSync does the real work of synchronizing Palm databases to iCal and Address Book. Does it really, really well, too, in my experience.
So, long story short, yes, you need Palm's HotSync software to make your Palm work with iSync. But you don't need to use the Palm Desktop software-- clunky and buggy, with a UI that was fine when it was still called Claris Organizer but that never quite made it into the 21st century.
Of course he can't use $CURRENT_VERSION with $YEAR_OLD_HARDWARE
$CURRENT_VERSION = "10.2.4";
$YEAR_OLD_HARDWARE = "circa 1999 blueberry iBook with 300 MHz G3 and 192 MB of RAM";
That's my setup, pal. Works great. My expectations were low, low, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Jaguar runs really well on 3-1/2-year-old kit.
You have confused "market share" with "total sales."
Look, imagine if there were Apple and one other personal computer company, let's say Dell. Imagine that Apple and Dell both sold 10 computers this year. Apple's average margin was 20%, and Dell's was 10%. Both made a profit, although Apple made more of a profit than Dell, and both have exactly 50% market share. Okay?
Next year, the number of people who want to buy computers-- which last year was 20-- skyrockets. Let's say there's something new that gives people a reason to buy a computer, like, say, the Internet. Next year, Apple sells 20 computers-- double the previous year's number-- but Dell sells a whopping 100 computers, or 10 times the previous year's number.
Now the total number of computers in the world is 140-- 30 are Macs and 110 are Dells. Apple's market share is down to 21.4%. But guess what? Apple's sales figures doubled, and they maintained their average margin of 20%.
Market share means the fraction of all the computers in the world that came from your company. It has nothing to do with the number of computers sold this year that came from your company. Market share is irrelevant to a company's success, as long as the company continues to make money. Apple is making money-- on the long-term curve; the last two quarters have been slightly bad, but the previous 16 were very good-- so nobody gives a flying twitch about market share.
And God knows I'd never recommend those Mac blade servers for compute considering the price/performance.
1. Apple doesn't make blade servers. They make xServe, which is a one-rack-unit, dual-processor server. Blade servers are entirely different animals.
2. If you were running BLAST, or another piece of software that was vectorized for your protection, you would be snatching up xServes like they're going out of style.
I was told something when xServe first came out that I can't confirm, but it comes from a reliable source in the computer media industry, and it sounds plausible to me. Apple built xServe exclusively for Genentech. Genentech committed to buy enough of them to pay for all of Apple's development costs before Apple even started working on it. So every xServe that Apple sells to a customer other than Genentech is kind of like icing on the cake.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not; I'm not sure. But it would explain a lot of things.
I haven't had any problems with the Palm Desktop software though I can't seem to sync it with the iCal program.
Are you using iSync? Setting up iSync to work with a Palm is a little bit draconian, but it's worth it.
First you have to install Palm Desktop and iSync. (Doesn't matter which you do first.) Then you have to install the iSync Palm package, which installs a new conduit for your HotSync software. Then you have to jump through a couple of tiny hoops-- click here, click there-- and you're ready to go.
Palm in cradle or connected to USB cable like so, hit the sync button on the Palm, HotSync fires up, then iSync fires up. iSync synchronizes your Address Book addresses on your computer to your Address Book database on your Palm, then syncs your iCal calendar(s) on your computer to your Date Book and To Do databases on your Palm. Works fine.
Come to think of it, making a Palm work with iSync is just about the most complicated thing the average person might want to do with his Mac, and it's easy if you just follow the page of instructions that comes with iSync.
(I wonder whether any Palm devices support SyncML, or whatever that synchronization protocol is that iSync and the Bluetooth phones support. It would be a hell of a lot simpler than having to go through HotSync.)
As for the lock-ups and crashes - i'm not Apple tech support, but i'm not about to tell anyone how rock solid Mac OS X is.. that's old news - so this guy either is a doorknob, or his machine is physically broken.
Or, more likely, he's trying to use Mac OS 9.
Why else would he be installing any software for his Palm at all? I recently upgraded my girlfriend's iBook-- an original one in blueberry, with a 300 MHz G3-- from OS 9 to OS X. Under OS 9, she was using IE, Palm Desktop, and Microsoft Word most of the time, and it was locking up pretty regularly. That's just how life was under OS 9. Under OS X, she uses Safari, iCal/Address Book/iSync, and TextEdit. Her laptop is absolutely balls-out bulletproof now. You know something else? It's as fast running OS X as it was running OS 9, and in some ways faster. I put 10.1 on it some time ago, but it was too sluggish for her to be happy with. But 10.2.4 runs like a dream on 3-1/2-year-old hardware.
If this doorknob were using OS X instead of OS 9, and iCal/Address Book/iSync instead of Palm Desktop, he'd be in business.
However, it does a very piss-poor job of managing who has the rights to digital media without some method of enforcement.
That's not true at all. Media rights started with the idea of rights and clearances, and rights management systems were originally just databases for storing information about who had which rights to do what, when, under what terms. Digital rights management is the same thing, only digital.
See, DRM really has nothing to do with consumers. It's, to use the popular jargon, a B-2-B thing. Let's say you're an advertising agency. You want to make a commercial for your client, Foo's Widgets. You want to use "Oh Baby Oh Baby" by the Fabhouse Five in the commercial. So you contact TuneCo, the owner of the distribution rights to that song, and you buy the right to use it in your commercial. That rights package is really complicated; it'll tell you how much of the song you can use, whether you can edit the song and if so how, whether you have to attribute the song, where the commercial can be run, what time of day it can be run, a maximum number of times it can be run in a given window... it's complicated. And if you violate your rights, it's going to cost your agency a bloody fortune.
Ergo, DRM. A DRM system will tell you everything you need to know. For instance, the system might include one of those expert system interfaces, where it asks you certain questions. How much of the song, in minutes and seconds, are you using? Are you editing the song at all? And it'll crunch for a second and tell you if you're within the rights that you bought.
So DRM actually has nothing to do with encryption or access control or copy protection. Those things properly belong in a different class altogether, one called digital rights enforcement, or DRE. DRE and DRM can be used together, but they don't have to be.
So when anybody points at a copy protection system and says, "That's DRM," they're not just overgeneralizing. They're just plain wrong.
No matter what you say, *someone* will disagree.
That's bullshit.
You, like most Slashdot posters (and presumably readers) have no idea what DRM is.
DRM is not encryption. DRM is not copy protection. DRM is not access control.
Do a damn Google search and spend five minutes learning what "DRM" really means before posting, okay?
The term you're evidently groping for is RFE: request for enhancement.
It's even got the same number of letters as "bug." Handy, no?
Since when did the term become "globalize?" I was under the impression that the word was still "internationalize."
While we can debate whether double-clicking a GUI installer or "sudo apt-get install perl" is easier
[bigspender:~] twirlip% sudo apt-get install perl
Password:
sudo: apt-get: command not found
Hmm. Looks like double-clicking wins.
Nobody "really needs" iSCSI. iSCSI isn't real yet. It's still one of those "coming soon" things, like Infiniband. And we saw how well Infiniband worked out.
iSCSI is just another way of solving a problem that's already been solved in any number of other ways. You need to attach a computer to some storage. Okay. You can use direct-attach FireWire storage. That has the advantage of being absolutely bullet-proof. Or you can use Fibre Channel to attach to a switched fabric. That works fine, too; just present a LUN to the Mac and let it format and mount it. Or you can use a network storage technology, like AppleShare or NFS. Those work fine, too, and the Power Macs, PowerBooks, and xServes are all shipping with 1000BASE-T, so that's not a problem.
There are any number of ways to ameliorate your so-called "real need" for iSCSI. These work today. Use them.
The point is, if it shouldn't be done, don't allow it to be done. Duh.
/boot/vmlinuz /vmlinuz
# mv
# reboot
Ooooops.
There's a related anecdote in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. He talks about being shown the blueprints for a uranium processing facility and asked to evaluate them for safety. They had to make sure that the system could be run safely, that there was no possibility that too much uranium could collect in one place to achieve criticality and explode. It was a big job.
Now, in those days Feynman was just a kid, in his 20's or early 30's or something, and he had no idea how to read a blueprint. So he's looking at this thing and it's just making no sense at all, and right in the middle of the sheet there's a thing that kinda looks like a window. So, figuring what the hell, he puts his finger right on it and says, "What happens if this valve gets stuck?" He's expecting somebody to say, "That's not a valve, sir, that's a window," but instead everybody gets quiet and thinks for a minute. Finally, one of the guys says, "My God, sir, you're absolutely right! We'll have that fixed immediately!"
From reading his books, you kinda get the impression that Feynman lived his whole life that way, just pretending he knew what was going on and plunging ahead.
I've given up reading the classifieds and taken to reading the obituaries instead. The way I see it, sooner or later somebody in a job I'm qualified for is bound to keel over, and when they do... bam!
Morbid, yes, but them's the breaks in our current economic climate.
(The next logical step, of course, is... well, let's just say there's a next logical step and leave it at that, okay?)
Bastard! Your comment was even funnier than mine, though I doubt as many people will get it.
Touche.
This follows on earlier reports that she was prematurely aging, including developing arthritis.
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy-- um, I mean Dolly.
Apple's Java 1.4.1 is in developer preview now. If you want it, you can get yourself an ADC account-- they're free; sign up here-- and go to the "Download Software" area of the ADC site.
Java 1.4.1 is at developer preview 8 right now, so it's not Sir Crashalot or anything, but it's not finished, either. No lifeguard on duty; swim at your own risk.
obviously, if you want to be super 31337, you can just type sudo diskutil repairpermissions / in console.
;-)
Actually, the super 31337 among us just copied-and-pasted what you'd already typed.
Oh, boy. Here we go again. Raise your hand if you're unclear on what Cocoa and Carbon mean. Okay, now pay attention:
[localhost:~] twirlip% otool -L Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
Carbon.framework
QuickTime.framework
PowerPlant.framework
DesktopServicesPriv.framework
URLMount.framework
DiskArbitration.framework
DiskImages.framework
CoreFoundation.framework
IOKit.framework
SystemConfiguration.framework
Security.framework
libSystem.B.dylib
thats 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 distinct ips
Great. Every goddamn atom in your computer has its own bloody IP address. Tell me again why this is important?
My examples were just to show that tabs aren't new, and the various implementations (good or bad) only show we're bound to see them continue.
;-)
That's specious reasoning at best. One example of a bad user interface-- two if you count Mozilla/Opera/Chimera tab-based MDI-- does not a trend make.
If anything, the overall trend is away from MDI toward SDI. Microsoft Word for Windows used to be an MDI application; as of Office 2000, it wasn't. The same is true of lots of Windows applications. MDI doesn't work, so it's being abandoned.
There are no real examples of MDI on the Mac, of course, because the Mac HIG always proscribed MDI in favor of SDI.
I'd like to know whence your authority on Safari comes, tho, but only to satisfy my own curiousity.
A three-way combination of inside info, extensive knowledge of Apple's UI guidelines over the years, and a level of confidence bordering on hubris.
I'm now wondering how long it will be before we see HTML that opens a new tab
Oh, sure, let's go right back to the bad old days of browser-specific HTML. "I'm sorry, but you must use a browser with a shitty multiple-document interface implementation in order to view this site." That'd be great...
Is there a reason for this change? seems silly to me.
Let's ignore for the moment the fact that every single change is going to seem silly to somebody. If I had to make a guess, mostly because I'm too lazy to go looking through the documentation, I'd say that Apple maybe wanted to free up some key chords. They had a bit of a problem with Adobe over command-H (hide) and command-option-H (hide others), so I can see their point. Let's keep the key chords to a minimum. It's simply not necessary for every single OS function to be represented by a key chord.
The HIG, as I recall, doesn't mention tabs as evil.
There's tabs and then there's tabs. Tabs as a UI control are okay; there's a section of the HIG describing how to use them. But tabbed browsing is simply one implementation of a multiple-document interface (MDI). The HIG does specifically call out MDI as being evil.
See, the Mac got where it is today by establishing a fairly simple desktop metaphor and sticking with it. The metaphor says one document, one window. Windows on the screen are like pieces of paper on the desktop.
we can look to Excel for tabbed worksheets as a long standing example
A long-standing bad example, you mean. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who would be willing to go on record as saying that tabbed worksheets are a good UI.
and to Airport Admin for a more recent usage [also the Apple web site]
I don't mean to be rude, but if we're going to have a constructive conversation about tabbed browsing you're going to have to wrap your head around the fact that tabs qua tabs and tabs as an MDI implementation are two completely different things.
Safari will have tabs...sooner or later
Safari will not have tabs. Not as the default, not as an option for power users, not at all. If somebody else wants to construct a browser that implements some kind of MDI interface, they're free to do so. Hell, they can even use WebKit to do it, once it's released. But Apple will not release a browser that so flagrantly violates the standards that got them where they are today.
(Sorry, I guess that got a little strident. I'm watching The West Wing as I write this, and Sorkin always pushes my prose over toward the purple end of the spectrum.)