Why did you exploit that security hole? Because it was there.
Windows is just plain super-exploitable. This is due, of course, to its legacy of rush-to-market-driven design which have left its underpinnings looking like the sub-basement of a centuries-old office building.
Other types of servers certainly do get hacked, but generally these are exploits of weaknesses in older versions of Apache or sendmail. But the last place I worked the Windows servers got hacked constantly. Worms got in through IIS holes and crashed one box a lot. The guy taking care of the box would just reboot and look for memory leaks. The IS girl identified the worms and patched IIS. Two weeks later the server was infected again by a new variant.
Every news story I hear stresses "All computers are vulnerable to viruses and you need to have virus scanning software installed." Then they go on to explain for the unwashed masses how to dial 1-800-symantec. The American media simply asks no questions about the reasons for these holes. They don't ask the simple question you're asking.
Today I heard a quote from the MS executive before Congress, in which he states as a matter of fact "There is no such thing as a 100% secure networked computer." Where's that innovative spirit, Microsoft? These are *designed machines* for chrissake. We know a lot about security now. We've learned a lot from the mistakes of Microsoft. Strip it down again and again, and you will have systems secure from exploitability.
Well-administered Mac, BSD, and Linux systems excel in security, and generally speaking the script kiddies and cyberterrorists don't target these systems because they're too obscure.
I would be really surprised if anyone at your local TV station cared a lick about depth or accuracy in reporting. Everyone from the guy who sweeps the place up to the cute chick who reads the news only cares about getting their check at the end of the week and not rocking the boat. Conscientious, thoughtful, deeply probing reporting? In-depth research? Such things would probably be considered "anti-American" nowadays.
RIAA hands the copy to the UPI. UPI hands the copy to your local newswriters. Local newswriters hand the copy to the talking heads. The talking heads deliver the corporate message straight into your warm safe home. Your loving family gathers around the TV and trembles in fear. The world sure is a sick place, you think. You're glad to have your warm safe home. Just so as not to be associated with a sick pornographer you take a vow not to ogle your teenage daughter's precocious girlfriends. You think perhaps you should buy a CD tomorrow just so "they" can see you're a good citizen.
We aren't living in a Totalitarian state (yet) but things are definitely leaning that way. First step is to vilify every fringe temptation, create new categories of thought crime. Social pressure will provide all the leverage necessary. Citizens quickly learn to be afraid of social vilification for admitting their own natural predilections (even to themselves). They form groups against the things they suppress in themselves. Everyone then must declare "I'd never do such a thing," and to prove it they stone the next sinner they can find.
Similar to the instincts of our political types, when after 9-11 they fell over themselves trying to demonstrate the appropriate level of "moral outrage" for the benefit of their constituencies (and the administration began to advance the decades-old Bush Agenda). Even Dennis Miller bought into it. When the smoke began to clear America woke up to find itself embroiled in a half-dozen new untenable quagmires around the world. Her hipocrisy had grown to greater and more embarassing heights. America needs a good honest cry and a long period of genuine solemnity, but she's been too busy blindly acting out to begin her grieving.
So given the current social environment, is it just me, or does it seem that every form of "crime" against Capitalism now throw the shadow of "terrorism"? Somehow the DMCA, the Patriot Act, and the willy-nilly assignation of "enemy combatant" to hundreds of sequestered prisoners all hang together in the periphery of our awareness whenever questions of rights and retribution come up nowadays.
Especially in relation to crimes against Capitalism.
Because, as we have begun to see, Capitalist pressures are now the only thing necessary to lead us into war - to summon the angel of death. When we see our foreign policies being determined by Dow, Boeing, Haliburton, Raytheon, Exxon, and Enron it lends some additional tangible weight to the activities of the RIAA, MPAA, the BSA, and the SCO.
Times are dark, so resist, be happy, and joyfully undermine them every chance you get.
It's a weakness because it limits the applications to such Alices and Bobs where between actual original photons may be reliably transmitted.
There is some reason to suspect that quantum states are transmissible from one photon to the next ad infinitum. (Don't forget that all forms of data transmission involve direct physical linkage, even in the form of waves.) I would not rule out the ability of future quantum computers to be able to suss out such subtle states by the use of markers in data. Given the metaphysical interconnectedness of all matter / energy it would be fairly impossible to prevent "leakage" from occurring. But generally speaking, outside of a given quantum communication system information will be quickly obscured by the background noise of the physical universe. Still, as quantum snooping computers evolve more sophisticated forms of quantum encryption will become necessary.
Of course this sense comes from a very crude understanding of quantum mechanics, so feel free to deride my Star Trek-ish scientific sensibilities.
Wow, I like Zoom a lot. It's a nice compact and basic curses window that runs Z-Code, and the full-screen mode is really nice. Oh well, I started "MacFrotz" so I guess I ought to bring it up to standard. Styled text and all that...
I've been turning the idea over in my mind to add a flag to dfrotz itself that would output everything tagged (as XML for example). This would make its output suitable for use in any client whatsoever. That's one idea.
On the other hand frotz has a backslash command facility used for debugger-style output (type \help in MacFrotz for a list of commands). Extending this would be very easy. Thus any client could query frotz for the current location, inventory, etc., and then display that information any way it chooses.
One could make enhanced versions of adventures with all the items graphically displayed in an inventory window. Not that one would.
I already added a floating history panel with some movement buttons, but it relies on some faulty text-parsing code. I've heard about MUD clients that generate maps on the fly. Again, one could add all these facilities to a Z-Machine interpreter. It would make getting around in the glass maze a lot easier to see it in 3D, for example.
Naturally such facilites could be extended to the authoring of Z-Code. Hmm.... More coffee....
I got into messing with REALbasic yesterday (yeah, yeah, don't worry... i know how to use it.) and whipped together a nifty front-end for "dfrotz" (the dumb version of Frotz?). It can run an unlimited number of adventure files, and has some other wacky features tailored for the standard Infocom games. Anyhow you can download the beta application from this page:
MacFrotz! (includes the dfrotz binary and source code).
Not sure if this version requires ncurses.
The information fields are parsed out of the raw text, so it sometimes prints odd values in non-Infocom games. Hey, it's a beta. Nothing a bit of poking into the dfrotz source can't fix.
I haven't looked too closely at the frotz build docs, but maybe there's a "machine readable" out put version of frotz in there someplace. If not, maybe an XML output mode would be handy.... Hmm, more caffeine....
Gotta love REALbasic. Had an idea 24 hours ago. Today it's alive and kicking and pretty darned complete.
If you like Infocom adventures you should Download Frotz! 2.4.1. This interpreter installs into/usr/local/bin and runs in the Terminal. It would be nice to have a Cocoa front-end for this. Perhaps some cool Mac Geek will find the time....
Frotz! 2.4.3 is also available in source code form if you're into building from source. You just have to make sure you have the ncurses library installed (Fink helps). I had to rename the "init_process" function (in src/common/process.c and src/main.c) to "my_init_process" before it would build. Some kind of symbol conflict with libSystem....
I have Jaguar running on a beige G3 / 333 and it runs very well. However, when using the ADB mouse there is an unfortunate delay between a mouse click and the system taking notice of the click, often resulting in missed drags.
To remedy this I installed a cheap USB card (no extra drivers required!) and now use a USB mouse instead. The system works perfectly, albeit noticeably slower. More RAM and a 32MB ATI card would go a long way towards improving performance. A RAID card would likely boost performance even more. And upgrading the processor to a G4 wouldn't hurt either.
The one insurmountable bottleneck on these old boxes is the slow (66MHz) system BUS. Anything to reduce the amount of data processing in-general will help its performance. I was able to get a marked performance increase in the Window Manager by turning off window-shadows using a nice haxie by Unsanity.
Apple as a platform isn't just dying, it's already dead. Apple as a company is not. Apple occupies a comfortable niche in the computer market because of its dedicated following and strong video processing capabillities. As long as this remains true, apple will continue to profit and continue to stick around.
There is a lot more going on than video. I own several Macs and I never do video. I use them mostly for programming and web development. An old iMac running Jaguar is my web server. I'm into programming shell scripts, perls scripts, PHP and such, and the stuff I write on the Mac can be deployed on any Linux / BSD / you-name-it web server. Since they all run Apache I can do precise staging right on my desktop. I wouldn't try that with a Windows laptop. Macs don't have Cold Fusion, ASP, and Frontpage tools. Thank God.
However, as a platform, it is long dead. Remember back when Apple dominated the pc market? They were the first company and had the upper-hand. All they had to do was cling to their market share like Microsoft does now. But they didn't fight dirty enough and now they lack the leverage they need to ever reclaim it, no matter how super-special their latest offering might be (and btw, I'm sorry, but for my money, I still I get way more value out of intel or amd's latest offering than Apple's).
I wouldn't consider any Wintel machine a better value than a Mac G4 tower - let alone G5. But that's just me. I have used both Mac and Windows extensively, and I just get more done on the Mac. I consistently find better software on the Mac side for anything you'd want to do. I find the Mac UI far easier to deal with on a daily basis. Windows programs are generally inconsistent with one another, which hurts productivity. Windows programs are not as thoughtully designed - with notable exceptions - as Mac programs. The best thing about a Wintel machine is that it can run OSs other than Windows, but Linux isn't anywhere near the usability of even Windows. Don't even get me started on the security issues of Windows. What a hassle. Who has the time to deal with email worms, BIOS settings, IRQ conflicts, DLL hell, the friggin' Registry, the BSOD, and all the junk in the system tray?
My point is, Wintel machines get in the way far too often for my taste. My Macs just work, and I get a good user-experience every hour of every day. Why would I trade that just to join up with the unwashed majority? Again, that's just me. Then again I also have no desire to attend a Jerry Springer taping or a Gallagher show, and both are apprently very popular.
Apple no longer even dominates the educational market like it used to. No *serious* gamer uses one, and don't get me started on the desktop market.
Lacking Dominance is not the same thing as being Dead.
You might want to talk to Peter Cohen about Mac games. He reviews them for MacWorld and can be found in the forums at MacCentral.com. He's a serious gamer. Yes, he owns a PC and plays games on it. And consoles. And Macs. There are some excellent Mac games that aren't on the PC or consoles. I don't play a lot of games on my Mac myself because I'm too busy programming one. It's built on SDL/OpenGL, which as you know makes writing cross-platform games a breeze.
Apple isn't dying; it's already dead. A band of dedicated followers and their continued innovation in other fields (think ipod/itunes) will continue to keep apple alive as a company, but I strongly doubt it will ever be taken seriously as a computing platform again.
It is taken quite seriously by me, in fact more seriously than Intel. I've been involved with computers for over 25 years as a programmer. The first time I saw 8086 assembly code and compared it to 68000 assembly code I became enlightened. The Intel processor architectures were hideous and hackish, while Motorola processors were elegant and clean. If you compare the processor architecture alone, including waste heat, power consumption, and transistor count, i
"We do not do these things because they are easy. No, no, no, no. That would be very very bad. No, indeed. We do them precisely because they are very very hard."
I have a theory that Windows users actually enjoy these virus attacks for the same reason that Americans allow themseslves to be fooled into supporting baseless wars: because it makes their dull lives seem more interesting.
If everyone switched to invulnerable systems like Jaguar they'd have no excuse to put off that annual financial report.
As a dedicated user and programmer of Jaguar I find most of what you describe already present. Panther (10.3) will bring us even closer....
instant on
I put the computer to sleep and never shut it down. It comes on in under two seconds, ready to go. Programs like EyeTV can wake the computer up unattended to record TV programs, then the computer can go back to sleep.
stateless - just pick up where I left off any time, instantly
I hear you. This would be like the Palm OS. You start up a program and everything is just as you left it. Even if you're in the middle of a game it's just right there. Some modern document-based programs can be configured to behave this way, bringing up the last set of open documents. It would be interesting if this became a standard.
totally responsive. I *never* wait while computer crunches, trying to draw windows, etc. And I mean *never*. Things that take time just take time without affecting anything else.
I won't claim I never have to wait for something, but I can't remember the last time I had to wait for the GUI to be responsive. On my Dual-867 G4 everything is super-responsive. I can be burning a CD, loading ten tabbed websites in Safari, and run two instances of gcc compiling code, and the GUI is just as responsive as if nothing were happening in the background. You really have to love modern OS task scheduling.
bug free - things work they way they should, always, no exceptions. A computer should compute as reliably as a housebrick is a housebrick.
Things have really improved in this area. I have one or two applications that occasionally crash. And frankly there are a dozen alternatives for any of my standard programs, so if one sucks I've got another on deck. But the main thing is that the system itself almost never crashes. No BSOD, no kernel32.dll panics. (And no porn-sucking trojans from god-knows-where!) This is especially great for development. My programming speed has easily tripled since I no longer need to reboot if my program crashes. It's made me kinda reckless and more experimental, truth be told - but I like it.
intuitive - I'm gonna have a hard time explaining this one, but basically I end up in a lot of situations where I feel like the computer should have common sense. Like if I just saved 5.mp3s in a row to the same place, it should "just know" where to save the sixth. That's not a good explanation... what I mean is the computer should know what I want to do and help me do it....
This is a common complaint by the majority of computer users who have been abused by the inconsistency and complexity of unruly OSs. Many tasks require too many steps, getting lost in layers of tabs, or poking in menus to check what the shortcuts are because of lax standards.
Fortunately, modern OSs are better at balancing flexibility with heuristics. Rather than useless wizards and condescending alert boxes they simply provide smarter default actions. Apple has always been tops in consistency, intuitiveness, elegance, and simplicity. But the OS is still being incrementally improved with every release. For example, under Jaguar file dialogs open up to the last place you saved / loaded with the savename filled-in, focused, and highlighted. All you need do is type a savename and hit Return.
Smart defaults are the future, plus quick access to Recent actions, locations, and items where and when you need them. Modern OSs like Jaguar do a fairly seamless job of it. The next generation, beginning with Panther, extends the paradigm in new yet familiar ways. For example, "instant" filters will become ubiquitous in the OS. (That's where the results are coming up instantly as you type text into a search box.) This feature is being added to the Finder. XCode has it. iTunes has had it forever. Waiting for search results in your filesystem or database is becoming passe. I think most of your complaints will be moot by the time 10.5 rolls around.
...can get you far. They provide what seems to me the simplest recovery method available. Of course you have to be using C++.
Personally I use throw/catch only sparingly, and once my program has been thoroughly beaten-on and seems robust all my assert()s get conditional'ed out for the final build. But then I'm writing games, so there's not really any such thing as a graceful error recovery. I just have to make sure the engine can hold up for an hour or two.
Slashdot Mirror
With XCode running distributed compiles I can get my work done yesterday.
Silly. Replace the mice in your kiosks with cheap conventional mice and stop whining.
But does the G5 insanely kick-ass or kick insane ass?
The crackers' ethos can be summed up thus:
Why did you exploit that security hole?
Because it was there.
Windows is just plain super-exploitable. This is due, of course, to its legacy of rush-to-market-driven design which have left its underpinnings looking like the sub-basement of a centuries-old office building.
Other types of servers certainly do get hacked, but generally these are exploits of weaknesses in older versions of Apache or sendmail. But the last place I worked the Windows servers got hacked constantly. Worms got in through IIS holes and crashed one box a lot. The guy taking care of the box would just reboot and look for memory leaks. The IS girl identified the worms and patched IIS. Two weeks later the server was infected again by a new variant.
Every news story I hear stresses "All computers are vulnerable to viruses and you need to have virus scanning software installed." Then they go on to explain for the unwashed masses how to dial 1-800-symantec. The American media simply asks no questions about the reasons for these holes. They don't ask the simple question you're asking.
Today I heard a quote from the MS executive before Congress, in which he states as a matter of fact "There is no such thing as a 100% secure networked computer." Where's that innovative spirit, Microsoft? These are *designed machines* for chrissake. We know a lot about security now. We've learned a lot from the mistakes of Microsoft. Strip it down again and again, and you will have systems secure from exploitability.
Well-administered Mac, BSD, and Linux systems excel in security, and generally speaking the script kiddies and cyberterrorists don't target these systems because they're too obscure.
See what you think of the UPI as it still exists.
I would be really surprised if anyone at your local TV station cared a lick about depth or accuracy in reporting. Everyone from the guy who sweeps the place up to the cute chick who reads the news only cares about getting their check at the end of the week and not rocking the boat. Conscientious, thoughtful, deeply probing reporting? In-depth research? Such things would probably be considered "anti-American" nowadays.
RIAA hands the copy to the UPI. UPI hands the copy to your local newswriters. Local newswriters hand the copy to the talking heads. The talking heads deliver the corporate message straight into your warm safe home. Your loving family gathers around the TV and trembles in fear. The world sure is a sick place, you think. You're glad to have your warm safe home. Just so as not to be associated with a sick pornographer you take a vow not to ogle your teenage daughter's precocious girlfriends. You think perhaps you should buy a CD tomorrow just so "they" can see you're a good citizen.
We aren't living in a Totalitarian state (yet) but things are definitely leaning that way. First step is to vilify every fringe temptation, create new categories of thought crime. Social pressure will provide all the leverage necessary. Citizens quickly learn to be afraid of social vilification for admitting their own natural predilections (even to themselves). They form groups against the things they suppress in themselves. Everyone then must declare "I'd never do such a thing," and to prove it they stone the next sinner they can find.
Similar to the instincts of our political types, when after 9-11 they fell over themselves trying to demonstrate the appropriate level of "moral outrage" for the benefit of their constituencies (and the administration began to advance the decades-old Bush Agenda). Even Dennis Miller bought into it. When the smoke began to clear America woke up to find itself embroiled in a half-dozen new untenable quagmires around the world. Her hipocrisy had grown to greater and more embarassing heights. America needs a good honest cry and a long period of genuine solemnity, but she's been too busy blindly acting out to begin her grieving.
So given the current social environment, is it just me, or does it seem that every form of "crime" against Capitalism now throw the shadow of "terrorism"? Somehow the DMCA, the Patriot Act, and the willy-nilly assignation of "enemy combatant" to hundreds of sequestered prisoners all hang together in the periphery of our awareness whenever questions of rights and retribution come up nowadays.
Especially in relation to crimes against Capitalism.
Because, as we have begun to see, Capitalist pressures are now the only thing necessary to lead us into war - to summon the angel of death. When we see our foreign policies being determined by Dow, Boeing, Haliburton, Raytheon, Exxon, and Enron it lends some additional tangible weight to the activities of the RIAA, MPAA, the BSA, and the SCO.
Times are dark, so resist, be happy, and joyfully undermine them every chance you get.
This is exactly what led to the extinction of private investigators back in the twentieth century. They are extinct aren't they?
There is some reason to suspect that quantum states are transmissible from one photon to the next ad infinitum. (Don't forget that all forms of data transmission involve direct physical linkage, even in the form of waves.) I would not rule out the ability of future quantum computers to be able to suss out such subtle states by the use of markers in data. Given the metaphysical interconnectedness of all matter / energy it would be fairly impossible to prevent "leakage" from occurring. But generally speaking, outside of a given quantum communication system information will be quickly obscured by the background noise of the physical universe. Still, as quantum snooping computers evolve more sophisticated forms of quantum encryption will become necessary.
Of course this sense comes from a very crude understanding of quantum mechanics, so feel free to deride my Star Trek-ish scientific sensibilities.Check again. It was Jeff Goldblum, but perhaps he was pulling his best Nordine impression.
Wow, I like Zoom a lot. It's a nice compact and basic curses window that runs Z-Code, and the full-screen mode is really nice. Oh well, I started "MacFrotz" so I guess I ought to bring it up to standard. Styled text and all that...
I've been turning the idea over in my mind to add a flag to dfrotz itself that would output everything tagged (as XML for example). This would make its output suitable for use in any client whatsoever. That's one idea.
On the other hand frotz has a backslash command facility used for debugger-style output (type \help in MacFrotz for a list of commands). Extending this would be very easy. Thus any client could query frotz for the current location, inventory, etc., and then display that information any way it chooses.
One could make enhanced versions of adventures with all the items graphically displayed in an inventory window. Not that one would.
I already added a floating history panel with some movement buttons, but it relies on some faulty text-parsing code. I've heard about MUD clients that generate maps on the fly. Again, one could add all these facilities to a Z-Machine interpreter. It would make getting around in the glass maze a lot easier to see it in 3D, for example.
Naturally such facilites could be extended to the authoring of Z-Code. Hmm.... More coffee....
I got into messing with REALbasic yesterday (yeah, yeah, don't worry... i know how to use it.) and whipped together a nifty front-end for "dfrotz" (the dumb version of Frotz?). It can run an unlimited number of adventure files, and has some other wacky features tailored for the standard Infocom games. Anyhow you can download the beta application from this page:
MacFrotz! (includes the dfrotz binary and source code).
Not sure if this version requires ncurses.
The information fields are parsed out of the raw text, so it sometimes prints odd values in non-Infocom games. Hey, it's a beta. Nothing a bit of poking into the dfrotz source can't fix.
I haven't looked too closely at the frotz build docs, but maybe there's a "machine readable" out put version of frotz in there someplace. If not, maybe an XML output mode would be handy.... Hmm, more caffeine....
Gotta love REALbasic. Had an idea 24 hours ago. Today it's alive and kicking and pretty darned complete.
Enjoy!
Get it on Freshmeat
If you like Infocom adventures you should Download Frotz! 2.4.1. This interpreter installs into /usr/local/bin and runs in the Terminal. It would be nice to have a Cocoa front-end for this. Perhaps some cool Mac Geek will find the time....
Frotz! 2.4.3 is also available in source code form if you're into building from source. You just have to make sure you have the ncurses library installed (Fink helps). I had to rename the "init_process" function (in src/common/process.c and src/main.c) to "my_init_process" before it would build. Some kind of symbol conflict with libSystem....
You can play Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the web but I don't think it allows you to save the game.
Fortunately you can download the HHGG data file (option-click) right off the web and play it in Frotz!
As for other Infocom and Z-engine games, here are some links to resources straight out of the Mac Frotz readme file:
...that things that are TRUE are much funnier than things which are just attempts at being funny?
Barrack had me addicted. I hope they'll port this soon too!
I have Jaguar running on a beige G3 / 333 and it runs very well. However, when using the ADB mouse there is an unfortunate delay between a mouse click and the system taking notice of the click, often resulting in missed drags.
To remedy this I installed a cheap USB card (no extra drivers required!) and now use a USB mouse instead. The system works perfectly, albeit noticeably slower. More RAM and a 32MB ATI card would go a long way towards improving performance. A RAID card would likely boost performance even more. And upgrading the processor to a G4 wouldn't hurt either.
The one insurmountable bottleneck on these old boxes is the slow (66MHz) system BUS. Anything to reduce the amount of data processing in-general will help its performance. I was able to get a marked performance increase in the Window Manager by turning off window-shadows using a nice haxie by Unsanity.
It would have been much funnier if more than 10% of it had been accurate or true.
Although I can certainly relate if he was talking about the Mac OS 8 experience.
Poor fella doesn't know that "Mac" has become too ambiguous.
Mac OS X just plain rocks.
Apple as a platform isn't just dying, it's already dead. Apple as a company is not. Apple occupies a comfortable niche in the computer market because of its dedicated following and strong video processing capabillities. As long as this remains true, apple will continue to profit and continue to stick around.
There is a lot more going on than video. I own several Macs and I never do video. I use them mostly for programming and web development. An old iMac running Jaguar is my web server. I'm into programming shell scripts, perls scripts, PHP and such, and the stuff I write on the Mac can be deployed on any Linux / BSD / you-name-it web server. Since they all run Apache I can do precise staging right on my desktop. I wouldn't try that with a Windows laptop. Macs don't have Cold Fusion, ASP, and Frontpage tools. Thank God.
However, as a platform, it is long dead. Remember back when Apple dominated the pc market? They were the first company and had the upper-hand. All they had to do was cling to their market share like Microsoft does now. But they didn't fight dirty enough and now they lack the leverage they need to ever reclaim it, no matter how super-special their latest offering might be (and btw, I'm sorry, but for my money, I still I get way more value out of intel or amd's latest offering than Apple's).
I wouldn't consider any Wintel machine a better value than a Mac G4 tower - let alone G5. But that's just me. I have used both Mac and Windows extensively, and I just get more done on the Mac. I consistently find better software on the Mac side for anything you'd want to do. I find the Mac UI far easier to deal with on a daily basis. Windows programs are generally inconsistent with one another, which hurts productivity. Windows programs are not as thoughtully designed - with notable exceptions - as Mac programs. The best thing about a Wintel machine is that it can run OSs other than Windows, but Linux isn't anywhere near the usability of even Windows. Don't even get me started on the security issues of Windows. What a hassle. Who has the time to deal with email worms, BIOS settings, IRQ conflicts, DLL hell, the friggin' Registry, the BSOD, and all the junk in the system tray?
My point is, Wintel machines get in the way far too often for my taste. My Macs just work, and I get a good user-experience every hour of every day. Why would I trade that just to join up with the unwashed majority? Again, that's just me. Then again I also have no desire to attend a Jerry Springer taping or a Gallagher show, and both are apprently very popular.
Apple no longer even dominates the educational market like it used to. No *serious* gamer uses one, and don't get me started on the desktop market.
Lacking Dominance is not the same thing as being Dead.
You might want to talk to Peter Cohen about Mac games. He reviews them for MacWorld and can be found in the forums at MacCentral.com. He's a serious gamer. Yes, he owns a PC and plays games on it. And consoles. And Macs. There are some excellent Mac games that aren't on the PC or consoles. I don't play a lot of games on my Mac myself because I'm too busy programming one. It's built on SDL/OpenGL, which as you know makes writing cross-platform games a breeze.
Apple isn't dying; it's already dead. A band of dedicated followers and their continued innovation in other fields (think ipod/itunes) will continue to keep apple alive as a company, but I strongly doubt it will ever be taken seriously as a computing platform again.
It is taken quite seriously by me, in fact more seriously than Intel. I've been involved with computers for over 25 years as a programmer. The first time I saw 8086 assembly code and compared it to 68000 assembly code I became enlightened. The Intel processor architectures were hideous and hackish, while Motorola processors were elegant and clean. If you compare the processor architecture alone, including waste heat, power consumption, and transistor count, i
...and that if you really want to get with Natalie Portman it helps to be an emotionally unbalanced mass-murderer.
(1) Never ship anything until you receive payment in full.
(2) Never pay for anything until the shipment arrives in good condition.
Voila, problem solved.
Adopting my best Indian accent...
"We do not do these things because they are easy. No, no, no, no. That would be very very bad. No, indeed. We do them precisely because they are very very hard."
Seriously....
I have a theory that Windows users actually enjoy these virus attacks for the same reason that Americans allow themseslves to be fooled into supporting baseless wars: because it makes their dull lives seem more interesting.
If everyone switched to invulnerable systems like Jaguar they'd have no excuse to put off that annual financial report.
instant on
I put the computer to sleep and never shut it down. It comes on in under two seconds, ready to go. Programs like EyeTV can wake the computer up unattended to record TV programs, then the computer can go back to sleep.
stateless - just pick up where I left off any time, instantly
I hear you. This would be like the Palm OS. You start up a program and everything is just as you left it. Even if you're in the middle of a game it's just right there. Some modern document-based programs can be configured to behave this way, bringing up the last set of open documents. It would be interesting if this became a standard.
totally responsive. I *never* wait while computer crunches, trying to draw windows, etc. And I mean *never*. Things that take time just take time without affecting anything else.
I won't claim I never have to wait for something, but I can't remember the last time I had to wait for the GUI to be responsive. On my Dual-867 G4 everything is super-responsive. I can be burning a CD, loading ten tabbed websites in Safari, and run two instances of gcc compiling code, and the GUI is just as responsive as if nothing were happening in the background. You really have to love modern OS task scheduling.
bug free - things work they way they should, always, no exceptions. A computer should compute as reliably as a housebrick is a housebrick.
Things have really improved in this area. I have one or two applications that occasionally crash. And frankly there are a dozen alternatives for any of my standard programs, so if one sucks I've got another on deck. But the main thing is that the system itself almost never crashes. No BSOD, no kernel32.dll panics. (And no porn-sucking trojans from god-knows-where!) This is especially great for development. My programming speed has easily tripled since I no longer need to reboot if my program crashes. It's made me kinda reckless and more experimental, truth be told - but I like it.
intuitive - I'm gonna have a hard time explaining this one, but basically I end up in a lot of situations where I feel like the computer should have common sense. Like if I just saved 5 .mp3s in a row to the same place, it should "just know" where to save the sixth. That's not a good explanation... what I mean is the computer should know what I want to do and help me do it....
This is a common complaint by the majority of computer users who have been abused by the inconsistency and complexity of unruly OSs. Many tasks require too many steps, getting lost in layers of tabs, or poking in menus to check what the shortcuts are because of lax standards.
Fortunately, modern OSs are better at balancing flexibility with heuristics. Rather than useless wizards and condescending alert boxes they simply provide smarter default actions. Apple has always been tops in consistency, intuitiveness, elegance, and simplicity. But the OS is still being incrementally improved with every release. For example, under Jaguar file dialogs open up to the last place you saved / loaded with the savename filled-in, focused, and highlighted. All you need do is type a savename and hit Return.
Smart defaults are the future, plus quick access to Recent actions, locations, and items where and when you need them. Modern OSs like Jaguar do a fairly seamless job of it. The next generation, beginning with Panther, extends the paradigm in new yet familiar ways. For example, "instant" filters will become ubiquitous in the OS. (That's where the results are coming up instantly as you type text into a search box.) This feature is being added to the Finder. XCode has it. iTunes has had it forever. Waiting for search results in your filesystem or database is becoming passe. I think most of your complaints will be moot by the time 10.5 rolls around.
...can get you far. They provide what seems to me the simplest recovery method available. Of course you have to be using C++.
Personally I use throw/catch only sparingly, and once my program has been thoroughly beaten-on and seems robust all my assert()s get conditional'ed out for the final build. But then I'm writing games, so there's not really any such thing as a graceful error recovery. I just have to make sure the engine can hold up for an hour or two.
I'm still waiting for R.J. Mical to finish his top-secret game project.