Seems like the publisher of GraphicPower is ticked-off mostly because his feelings are hurt. He considers his site to be a "serious" site, which I don't doubt. Someone at Apple considers his site, MacInTouch, MacFixIt, and others to be "rumor" sites, which is a major stretch, no matter what hacks their editors may be. How-ever poorly Apple has decided to characterize its decision I don't think it's a bad one.
MacFixIt is a great site, but it's not the "legitimate" press, in Apple's view. Its editor gets dozens of emails daily informing him of troubleshooting issues end-users are having. He takes this information and distills it, and eventually it makes it into the next edition of "Sad Macs, Bombs, and Disasters." The site is an avocation and a research tool. As far as I know its editors do not belong to any reporters' union or press club.
Of the dozens of Mac Sites I regularly visit, only a scant few actually break stories based on press-releases received directly from Apple. Most of them include a short blurb and a link to ZDNet, the Wall Street Journal, or even MacCentral (MacWorld's breaking news site). With enough time on my hands even I could do that.
I believe the use of the term "rumor sites" was a political misstep by Apple, but will I miss GraphicPower or Scott McCarty? Hardly. I'd prefer to visit the sites that are run by mature individuals with a sense of humility, who can deal with Apple's oft-quirky timing and Jobsian mode of expression. Let these little pissed-off people go find something to do that's less dangerous to their fragile egos.
That's exactly the point we need to spread far and wide. Sites can enforce their policies themselves by using the myriad of technical solutions available. For example, if a web surfer comes to their site without getting a cookie from the front page then they are redirected to the front page. If they want to allow deep linking then they provide hidden pages for their partners to use that require authentication before redirecting to the linked page.
If a company begins establishing policies for the use of their network resources then they're simply creating a private network, and should take advantage of the technical resources available to secure the kind of privacy and use that they want. Going to court is a waste of time and money that they should have paid me to actually solve their problem!
I'd be a little surprised if the Danish court actually argued against these kinds of solutions in their ruling.
I assume none of the Windows-based solutions have any means to update the firmware of the iPod itself, which is too bad. But maybe these folks can go the their local Apple Store and ask one of the Geniuses(TM) to take care of it...?
Looks like the Javascript Prompt bug persists. If you're using any version of IE5 for MacOSX put this in the address-line and see the bug of which I speak:
javascript:x=prompt("This Text Should Appear")
Explorer is getting about one bullet-item per-month upgrade, just to keep us hoping. Meanwhile several browsers are poised to overtake Explorer in standards-compliance and standards-implementation, and have already overtaken Explorer in features we like, like disabling ad banners and popups.
The fact that IE 5.2 sets the Home Page to MSN is a sure sign that MicroSoft can't let go of its old nasty little indulgences. As if switching the whole west coast to MSN didn't get our attention.
This movie portrays what the net boom was all about. Consultants and partners who got bought out for way too much, expectations of success in a sea of able competitors, and the inevitable reality-check that comes way too late.
The way graphics cards get DVD video onto the screen without going through the screen RAM is a nifty trick called "gen-locking" or "chroma-locking." The DVD data goes to the graphics card in a separate channel and is combined with the video from the raster chip before being sent to the screen. So the ugly shade of green (my ATI card uses pure magenta) that you get in your screenshots is the key color.
Apple has perfectly sound reasons for restricting their ADC membership to those who are legally capable of signing an NDA. So while you may not be able to participate as a member in the ADC you are certainly welcome to participate in the wider informal Apple developer community where information flows freely.
It's an attitutde problem. Life is as exciting as we choose to make it, but our attitudes about life make it seem narrow and confining. If we were as open to trying things in life as we were in games I think a lot of us would be more fulfilled and engaged. Is it just that games give us the ability to take chances without the fear of consequences? Maybe. Nobody ever died for real playing a video game, no one was *really* humiliated for real because they did something stupid in EverQuest. Maybe it's more of an ego problem than an attitude problem....
Now that the iPod supports vCards for its contact lists it should be just as easy to make a hack that turns XML headlines into vCards and drops them into the Contacts folder. Then you could even put some paragraphs of the news into the vCard as well.
Now that Macs are Unix machines I have this gut feeling that Windows is now the only bizarro operating system remaining in popular use. Mark my words: It won't be long before reporters start referring to Microsoft as "the beleaguered niche OS licensor."
Jason X is the next-generation killer-OS with all the power of Unix and a stunning hockey-mask interface we call Hockwa. Created by the mysterious undead developer Jason Vorhees of Crystal Lake Software, Jason X is guaranteed never to crash, whether stabbed, incinerated, trampled, drawn-and-quartered, or submerged in acid. Slash through documents! Tear through graphics! Nail those presentations! Jason X renders other operating systems... into little bloody bits!
"I've been using the beta of Jason X for awhile now, and I can say it truly rocks!" - Johnny Depp
"I used to be nervous and dress really bad, but Jason X has made me ultra cool!" - Crispin Glover
Not everyone agrees:
"I still prefer Windows, especially since they killed Netscape." - Jamie Lee Curtis
"They think Jason X will be the next big thing? Ha! IN YOUR DREAMS!!" - Robert Englund
I suppose Linux developers might have a look at the Darwin core, but there are already a large number of Linux distros for PPC that are based on Red Hat. It was just a matter of time before Red Hat adopted their work.
The word "fanatic" comes up an awful lot in talking about Mac users. I've actually never known anyone who would qualify as a fanatic with regard to their choice of computer, but I've certainly known some fans.
As a long-time fan of Apple products, I own a G4/450, a 2001 iBook, a Power Mac 8500, and an iPod. At work I use a G4 to do web development. All my Macs run Mac OS X (Including my trusty old 8500, which I bought in 1995 for nearly $4K, and have subsequently upgraded to a 400MHz G3.)
I've been a programmer now since 1978, when at the tender age of 11 I first discovered that computers were k3w7 and that I could make them do what I wanted. What I wanted to do back then was to make games, and I wrote a lot of them on my Atari 400, and a couple on my Amiga 1000. So as you might imagine, when the Mac first came out in 1984 I wouldn't go near it. It had no color support, it was expensive, and it had a tiny screen. So I stuck with my Amiga, which at the time had a better OS, better sound hardware, better graphics hardware....
When in 1995 I decided to rejoin the geek universe I took a look around at what was available and found that the Mac OS had stayed true to its principles of elegance and simplicity, while Windows had only grown more convoluted and directionless. The scattering of DLLs all over the place combined with a central overwrought registry, plus the lack of true plug and play were a foreshadowing of what I could expect to contend with if I decided to focus my programming efforts on the Windows platform.
But what really swayed me even more was my experience with the Motorola processor architecture. When I was an Atari geek I learned to program in 6502 Assembly, a very simple and direct little chip. My first exposure to x86 Assembly Language made me wretch and cringe, but I was able to dive right into the 680x0 architecture and program the metal with ease. The 680x0 was simply a more modern and well-planned processor. The instruction set was elegant and - well - beautiful. If I was going to get my hands dirty programming in Assembly language I didn't want to have to work around the limitations of the x86 instruction set, registers, and paged memory architecture.
In my last programming job I was given a PC running Windows 2000 to use. "Fine," thought I, "This is going to be much easier. Microsoft has made a stable OS that's slightly neater than Win95 and it'll be a breeze to get used to." My god, was I wrong. I've used all manner of GUI in the last 25 years, so I can adapt very easily to any environment, easily learn where things are and how they work. But my experience with Windows was constantly frustrating. The tools I used for writing embedded perl, text editors, web dev suites, shareware FTP clients, you name it... Every tool I used was full of bugs, or it took over the screen, or its editing shortcuts were inconsistent, or its menu layout was inconsistent. There seemed to be very few "standards" that developers could adhere to.
I wanted to have fun with the system, so I downloaded shareware, which I've always found fun on the Mac side. Wouldn't you know it, there are dozens of any type of shareware program. Many of them were half-assed, half-finished, or just posted to get me onto a SPAM list. Trying to find a decent shareware application for any purpose took much too long and led me to several crappy pieces of software. This is an example of why "there's more software" is a meaningless selling point for Wintel boxes.
Eventually I brought my own Mac into work and used the PC as its stand.
So obviously I'm a Mac fan.
The "fanatic" element is something that comes up in the Mac community for a couple of reasons. Mac users have always been in the minority, using a far better designed platform, have had to watch everyone in the world blindly scooping up Windows licenses, oblivious to the fact that Windows is far more complicated than any OS needs to be. I've personally never tried to convince a PC owner to dump their machine and get a Mac. However, in many cases PC users have seen me work with my Mac, flying through various tasks with ease, and have been impressed enough to make the switch.
Perhaps what makes Mac users seem "fanatical" is their unflinching devotion to a platform that the other 95% don't use. It's as if 95% of the people in the world think the sky is green, because that's what they've been told, while only 5% have raised their eyes to see that it's blue. The 95% take their view for granted, and label the other 5% as fanatics.
Hell, you'd be lucky to find 5 text editors in Windows that behaved consistently and used the same keyboard shortcuts and modifier keys. I could never get used to the inconsistencies in Windows - never mind the aesthetic void. It amazes me how many of those users who never tried anything else but the MS Way still put up with it to this day.
Have you ever seen the instruction set architecture of the Intel processor family? It's kludges and spaghetti all the way from the candy coated XP shell down to the chewy x86 center. To experienced geeks like me it feels like a sticky film coating every PC. For elegance and thoughtful design you have to go to processors that were born in the 80s and 90s -- and the non-Microsoft OSs that run on them.
If you commit a non-destructive act with the intent of someone else getting harmed it doesn't make you any less culpable.
Microsoft didn't integrate IE into the core of the OS because it was a technically superior solution. They integrated it with the specific intent of being able to say "it's part of the OS." There are many ways to implement an internet browser, a file browser, etc. A smart developer has open-ended thinking, tries to work in a modular fashion, and develops code that avoids too many dependencies.
Sure, everyone appreciates having a browser that can be used as its own development platform. Microsoft made sure you'd be grateful to them and not Netscape by undermining Netscape's opportunity to develop a viable browser platform.
History has shown that Netscape has never been too savvy when it comes to recognizing opportunities or seeing the potential of their technology. They got too rich too fast, and turned lazy in short order. However it still doesn't justify MS's disgusting design decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like the publisher of GraphicPower is ticked-off mostly because his feelings are hurt. He considers his site to be a "serious" site, which I don't doubt. Someone at Apple considers his site, MacInTouch, MacFixIt, and others to be "rumor" sites, which is a major stretch, no matter what hacks their editors may be. How-ever poorly Apple has decided to characterize its decision I don't think it's a bad one.
MacFixIt is a great site, but it's not the "legitimate" press, in Apple's view. Its editor gets dozens of emails daily informing him of troubleshooting issues end-users are having. He takes this information and distills it, and eventually it makes it into the next edition of "Sad Macs, Bombs, and Disasters." The site is an avocation and a research tool. As far as I know its editors do not belong to any reporters' union or press club.
Of the dozens of Mac Sites I regularly visit, only a scant few actually break stories based on press-releases received directly from Apple. Most of them include a short blurb and a link to ZDNet, the Wall Street Journal, or even MacCentral (MacWorld's breaking news site). With enough time on my hands even I could do that.
I believe the use of the term "rumor sites" was a political misstep by Apple, but will I miss GraphicPower or Scott McCarty? Hardly. I'd prefer to visit the sites that are run by mature individuals with a sense of humility, who can deal with Apple's oft-quirky timing and Jobsian mode of expression. Let these little pissed-off people go find something to do that's less dangerous to their fragile egos.
Chalk up this error to a snoozing editor. Apache comes alphabetically just before Apple on the topics list.
That's exactly the point we need to spread far and wide. Sites can enforce their policies themselves by using the myriad of technical solutions available. For example, if a web surfer comes to their site without getting a cookie from the front page then they are redirected to the front page. If they want to allow deep linking then they provide hidden pages for their partners to use that require authentication before redirecting to the linked page.
If a company begins establishing policies for the use of their network resources then they're simply creating a private network, and should take advantage of the technical resources available to secure the kind of privacy and use that they want. Going to court is a waste of time and money that they should have paid me to actually solve their problem!
I'd be a little surprised if the Danish court actually argued against these kinds of solutions in their ruling.
I assume none of the Windows-based solutions have any means to update the firmware of the iPod itself, which is too bad. But maybe these folks can go the their local Apple Store and ask one of the Geniuses(TM) to take care of it...?
Looks like the Javascript Prompt bug persists. If you're using any version of IE5 for MacOSX put this in the address-line and see the bug of which I speak:
javascript:x=prompt("This Text Should Appear")
Explorer is getting about one bullet-item per-month upgrade, just to keep us hoping. Meanwhile several browsers are poised to overtake Explorer in standards-compliance and standards-implementation, and have already overtaken Explorer in features we like, like disabling ad banners and popups.
The fact that IE 5.2 sets the Home Page to MSN is a sure sign that MicroSoft can't let go of its old nasty little indulgences. As if switching the whole west coast to MSN didn't get our attention.
This movie portrays what the net boom was all about. Consultants and partners who got bought out for way too much, expectations of success in a sea of able competitors, and the inevitable reality-check that comes way too late.
Get it at Amazon!
The way graphics cards get DVD video onto the screen without going through the screen RAM is a nifty trick called "gen-locking" or "chroma-locking." The DVD data goes to the graphics card in a separate channel and is combined with the video from the raster chip before being sent to the screen. So the ugly shade of green (my ATI card uses pure magenta) that you get in your screenshots is the key color.
Those guys driving by and yelling were the cast of American Grafitti.
Apple has perfectly sound reasons for restricting their ADC membership to those who are legally capable of signing an NDA. So while you may not be able to participate as a member in the ADC you are certainly welcome to participate in the wider informal Apple developer community where information flows freely.
Sorry, dude, but the adaptor comes with the eMac. No millions of dollars spent here.
Wow, too bad they dumped InDesign before they figured out that InDesign supports Quark keyboard shortcuts as a preference option.
Check out the /Library/Audio/Plugins folder.
It's an attitutde problem. Life is as exciting as we choose to make it, but our attitudes about life make it seem narrow and confining. If we were as open to trying things in life as we were in games I think a lot of us would be more fulfilled and engaged. Is it just that games give us the ability to take chances without the fear of consequences? Maybe. Nobody ever died for real playing a video game, no one was *really* humiliated for real because they did something stupid in EverQuest. Maybe it's more of an ego problem than an attitude problem....
Now that the iPod supports vCards for its contact lists it should be just as easy to make a hack that turns XML headlines into vCards and drops them into the Contacts folder. Then you could even put some paragraphs of the news into the vCard as well.
Get to it, hackers!
I don't care what anyone says, my G4/450 is still faster than any Pentium!
Now that Macs are Unix machines I have this gut feeling that Windows is now the only bizarro operating system remaining in popular use. Mark my words: It won't be long before reporters start referring to Microsoft as "the beleaguered niche OS licensor."
True enough, but how do internet broadcasters recoup the cost of their bandwidth?
Jason X is the next-generation killer-OS with all the power of Unix and a stunning hockey-mask interface we call Hockwa. Created by the mysterious undead developer Jason Vorhees of Crystal Lake Software, Jason X is guaranteed never to crash, whether stabbed, incinerated, trampled, drawn-and-quartered, or submerged in acid. Slash through documents! Tear through graphics! Nail those presentations! Jason X renders other operating systems... into little bloody bits!
"I've been using the beta of Jason X for awhile now, and I can say it truly rocks!" - Johnny Depp
"I used to be nervous and dress really bad, but Jason X has made me ultra cool!" - Crispin Glover
Not everyone agrees:
"I still prefer Windows, especially since they killed Netscape." - Jamie Lee Curtis
"They think Jason X will be the next big thing? Ha! IN YOUR DREAMS!!" - Robert Englund
Stay tuned kids!
Did you try deleting the Contacts folder?
I haven't tried it, but I suspect it would work.
After many diplomatic disastrous decisions, and a terrorist attack (that turned a completely dumb president in a great stadist)
I think you meant to write "sadist."
I suppose Linux developers might have a look at the Darwin core, but there are already a large number of Linux distros for PPC that are based on Red Hat. It was just a matter of time before Red Hat adopted their work.
The word "fanatic" comes up an awful lot in talking about Mac users. I've actually never known anyone who would qualify as a fanatic with regard to their choice of computer, but I've certainly known some fans.
As a long-time fan of Apple products, I own a G4/450, a 2001 iBook, a Power Mac 8500, and an iPod. At work I use a G4 to do web development. All my Macs run Mac OS X (Including my trusty old 8500, which I bought in 1995 for nearly $4K, and have subsequently upgraded to a 400MHz G3.)
I've been a programmer now since 1978, when at the tender age of 11 I first discovered that computers were k3w7 and that I could make them do what I wanted. What I wanted to do back then was to make games, and I wrote a lot of them on my Atari 400, and a couple on my Amiga 1000. So as you might imagine, when the Mac first came out in 1984 I wouldn't go near it. It had no color support, it was expensive, and it had a tiny screen. So I stuck with my Amiga, which at the time had a better OS, better sound hardware, better graphics hardware....
When in 1995 I decided to rejoin the geek universe I took a look around at what was available and found that the Mac OS had stayed true to its principles of elegance and simplicity, while Windows had only grown more convoluted and directionless. The scattering of DLLs all over the place combined with a central overwrought registry, plus the lack of true plug and play were a foreshadowing of what I could expect to contend with if I decided to focus my programming efforts on the Windows platform.
But what really swayed me even more was my experience with the Motorola processor architecture. When I was an Atari geek I learned to program in 6502 Assembly, a very simple and direct little chip. My first exposure to x86 Assembly Language made me wretch and cringe, but I was able to dive right into the 680x0 architecture and program the metal with ease. The 680x0 was simply a more modern and well-planned processor. The instruction set was elegant and - well - beautiful. If I was going to get my hands dirty programming in Assembly language I didn't want to have to work around the limitations of the x86 instruction set, registers, and paged memory architecture.
In my last programming job I was given a PC running Windows 2000 to use. "Fine," thought I, "This is going to be much easier. Microsoft has made a stable OS that's slightly neater than Win95 and it'll be a breeze to get used to." My god, was I wrong. I've used all manner of GUI in the last 25 years, so I can adapt very easily to any environment, easily learn where things are and how they work. But my experience with Windows was constantly frustrating. The tools I used for writing embedded perl, text editors, web dev suites, shareware FTP clients, you name it... Every tool I used was full of bugs, or it took over the screen, or its editing shortcuts were inconsistent, or its menu layout was inconsistent. There seemed to be very few "standards" that developers could adhere to.
I wanted to have fun with the system, so I downloaded shareware, which I've always found fun on the Mac side. Wouldn't you know it, there are dozens of any type of shareware program. Many of them were half-assed, half-finished, or just posted to get me onto a SPAM list. Trying to find a decent shareware application for any purpose took much too long and led me to several crappy pieces of software. This is an example of why "there's more software" is a meaningless selling point for Wintel boxes.
Eventually I brought my own Mac into work and used the PC as its stand.
So obviously I'm a Mac fan.
The "fanatic" element is something that comes up in the Mac community for a couple of reasons. Mac users have always been in the minority, using a far better designed platform, have had to watch everyone in the world blindly scooping up Windows licenses, oblivious to the fact that Windows is far more complicated than any OS needs to be. I've personally never tried to convince a PC owner to dump their machine and get a Mac. However, in many cases PC users have seen me work with my Mac, flying through various tasks with ease, and have been impressed enough to make the switch.
Perhaps what makes Mac users seem "fanatical" is their unflinching devotion to a platform that the other 95% don't use. It's as if 95% of the people in the world think the sky is green, because that's what they've been told, while only 5% have raised their eyes to see that it's blue. The 95% take their view for granted, and label the other 5% as fanatics.
Hell, you'd be lucky to find 5 text editors in Windows that behaved consistently and used the same keyboard shortcuts and modifier keys. I could never get used to the inconsistencies in Windows - never mind the aesthetic void. It amazes me how many of those users who never tried anything else but the MS Way still put up with it to this day.
Have you ever seen the instruction set architecture of the Intel processor family? It's kludges and spaghetti all the way from the candy coated XP shell down to the chewy x86 center. To experienced geeks like me it feels like a sticky film coating every PC. For elegance and thoughtful design you have to go to processors that were born in the 80s and 90s -- and the non-Microsoft OSs that run on them.
If you commit a non-destructive act with the intent of someone else getting harmed it doesn't make you any less culpable.
Microsoft didn't integrate IE into the core of the OS because it was a technically superior solution. They integrated it with the specific intent of being able to say "it's part of the OS." There are many ways to implement an internet browser, a file browser, etc. A smart developer has open-ended thinking, tries to work in a modular fashion, and develops code that avoids too many dependencies.
Sure, everyone appreciates having a browser that can be used as its own development platform. Microsoft made sure you'd be grateful to them and not Netscape by undermining Netscape's opportunity to develop a viable browser platform.
History has shown that Netscape has never been too savvy when it comes to recognizing opportunities or seeing the potential of their technology. They got too rich too fast, and turned lazy in short order. However it still doesn't justify MS's disgusting design decisions.