1) Performance features - for example an application in silverlight that pulls HD image formats in small chunks, allowing you to zoom into 100mb images instantly. (This is just one example)
2) HD Video - that is VC1 compliant as well. Also the ability to support live and multi-cast streaming of HD Video (great for lowbandwidth servers hosting live events, and still providing an HD video of the event.)
3) Easier - By the nature of how Silverlight is designed it is easier to design for and work with. You are basically just managaging Vista type XAML from WPF. No secret formats, etc.
4) Agnostic programming - Silverlight you not only get a rich vector/bitmap based environment, but it is completely language agnostic and you can use anything from C# to VB to Python.
5) Web Page interoperability - Silverlight is designed to within the context of the Web Page. For example you could hvae 10 Silverlight buttons on the page, and they are all separate from each otehr, but tied together via common code in JScript. This would be 'heavy' to do in Flash, and it wouldn't be easy to split the buttons apart, so you would ahve to design all the buttons in one Flash control, consuming the page with Plash, instead of just working with the page. Think of Silverlight as a cool new picture type that is also programmable, handles events, and animation when used like this.
6) Features - Silverlight 1.0 is on par with Flash in terms of features, and has several Flash just cannot do. Silverlight 2.0 brings in a whole set of.NET controls, etc that surpass anything Flash can do.
7) Back to Performance - Flash is a dog on non-Windows OSes. So far Silverlight is showing to be semi-equally fast on Windows and OS X, with low memory consumption on both. The same Flash applet running on Windows could use a couple of MB and running on OS X jump to 30MB and peg the CPU. Flash is NOT as crossplatform as developers would like to lead people to believe because of performance issues like this.
8) Security - Silverlight is more secure than Flash (see recent Flash updates), the reason Silverlight is more secure because it runs inside an additional sandbox and is also managed code, it is.NET based.
9) Structure XAML - The nature of how Silverlight is designed is based on Vista's WPF/XAML system. Vista uses XAML from everything from on screen display to printing (XAML is like OS X's Display PDF but with a chunk more features.) This means that Windows developers can easily move from Windows programming.NET 3.0 to Silverlight or the other way around. The XAML construct is also very intelligently designed, as it is more than just a graphical description format, as it has inherent events and animations, where Display PDF (or SVG as some like to compare) is inherently a static graphical format with no concept of advanced layers, animations, hit testing, events, etc. (As printing technology moves to eInk that is dynamic, XAML is ready to print to and produce output on these devices already, even though this is a years off concept.)
Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps, and Microsoft is also fully producing the OS X version as well as supporting as many browsers as they can at the same time, including Firefox, etc. So if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only, instead it has potential to be far more crossplatform than Flash. (Microsoft also just announced Silverlight for non Windows Mobile phones to be an alternative to Flash Lite.)
sigh. how, exactly, would this help Apple lock-in content?
Ok, the sigh = I'm a Fanboi and I don't get why people beat up on my Hero
This would help Apple in MANY ways, as Flash is ALSO a development platform, as well as being content distribution. So no games written in Flash will be available, and no Video content that is not Apple 'approved' will not be available.
the alternatives they support are published, open industry standards
Um, except for their DRM variations, and the fact they also don't support the mainstream alternatives either for audio or video distribution. Let's just contrast this with a Windows Mobile Phone. Can iPhone do DivX, WMA, VC1, etc?
And since most of the online content providers that are NOT iTunes, use these other formats, leaving iPhone locked into iTunes and Apple. Also VC1 is an industry HD standard (even though it has SD formats as well), and Apple has no plans to provide support, ever.
"3G" doesn't mean what you think it does. the current iPhone has a "3G" connection
Wow, really into hair spliting... Yes, technically EDGE is 3G, but most people reference 3G with comparison to the relative bandwidth since Edge would then be an unofficial 2.75G, not 3G. (3G's meaning has changed from its original design specifications, when you talk 3G, you better mean 3G bandwidth. PERIOD)
the current flash player is very poor... Apple tries hard to sell kludge-free products.
I am not a big fan of Flash in this regard, but sadly the DESKTOP Flash player is only a dog on non-Windows platforms. OS X being the worest performer for flash content.
Flash and Flash Lite are very, very different things
Sure, technically they are different, but not like you seem to think. Flash Lite handles Flash 8 and Video content flawlessly. The reason it is called Flash Lite, is because it can run under BREW and on tons of mobile Phone OSes, including Windows Mobile.
Also why is this important, I never claimed there were identical, and sadly you won't be able to do either on the iPhone...
show me. first, remember that Flash Lite is not Flash. so which phone are you referring to?
Even though they are different, they RUN the same freaking content up to Flash 8 specifications.
Which phone? How about almost any phone, pick a Motorola, Nokia, Windows Mobile, etc. Almost all of them have a version of Flash Lite. This is OLD news for everyone outside of the Apple distortion field?
The rest of your conclusions about Apple being good at subsets, blah blah, are wrong since you are referencing something that isn't even subset limited like Flash Lite.
Hey lets even make this more of an argument, Apple planning on supporting Silverlight? It was just announced that it won't be limited to Windows Mobile, and be ported to several Phone OSes. And again, like Flash, not only does it provide Video and content, it is a development platform for making applications and games.
i pick products based on what works for me
Really, so an iPhone with less features and more money worked for you how again? Sadly my 3 year old Motorola literally has more features than the iPhone, and all of the Windows Mobile phones have 10x the features of an iPhone. (A Windows Mobile Phone can even remote into your desktop or servers and lets you control them as if you were sitting in front of them. iPhone is way out of its league in this type of 'meets my needs' argument. Gasp!
So is this just Apple trying to lock in content, or are there real reasons behind this?
I know the non-3G connection would make Flash horrid. I also know that Flash can be a pig on non-optimized platforms, which is sad since Flash Lite can run on Phones with 100mhz processors.
I think this is pretty much a non-issue. Apple and iPhone fans will do what Jobs tells them to do and will abandon Flash aspirations if told to do so.
The rest of the world is already using phones that have Flash and also out feature an iPhone.
I know the iPhone multi-touch interface is interesting in concept, but not as practical as people would like to believe. This is why non-fanbois pick up phones like this one:
The promise of Singularity, as I understood it, was the possibility of constructing an O/S kernel with all of the modularity advantages of a microkernel without all of the process communication issues typical to this kernel type.
This is underplaying its role; it is an OS slate with solid ideas that can be used to pound new OS theories through without having to deal with any lineage to prior models.
However the microkernel issues that you are referring to are ideas that Microsoft tackled 16 years ago and is a corner milestone of Windows NT. Singularity does build on these concepts, but this aspect of the OS is old theory from NT that Microsoft has also made a design aspect of Singularity.
So if you are 'now' looking for an OS technology that has microkernel modularity without the performance and communication issues, then you need to go look at Windows NT, since this is how NT was designed. (When I say Windows NT, I am talking about the core kernel architecture that sits under Win32/Win64 etc.)
NT is not classified as a true microkernel, and is best described as a hybrid kernel or a client/server kernel due to the layered kernel API isolation that doesn't have monolithic multi-tasking issues and doesn't have the overhead of a true microkernel due to the light and layered kernel API.
I'm surprised that people with some interest in OSes to this day don't realize simple concepts like this about NT. You can argue than the Win32 subsystem sucks, blah, blah, but very few, if any OS engineers or theorist would make fun of the NT kernel/architecture itself.
NT for its time was the best of theory that currently existed in 1992, Singularity is Microsoft's Research team throwing out new OS theory ideas for the entire industry, and unlike NT, you can learn from what they are working on, read the code, and even be inspired to develop your own OS based on their theories and concepts. With NT, Microsoft only presented the concepts of what NT was doing and how it implemented concepts and theories, especially the hybrid kernel concept, but beyond this, we never got to the actual code, so Singularity is a nice move for Microsoft to enrich the entire computing world, even if you can't take the code line by line and redistribute it.
Yeah, because two little, tinny speakers 6" apart really shouts GIVE ME STEREO SOUND
You have obviously never heard the sound from most HP laptops or Toshiba's. I agree the two speakers in Macs tend to be on the low end, but even system sounds with stereo just offer a bit of realisim.
I have a 2002 Toshiba Laptop with the tiny speakers you talk about that was designed by Harman/Kardon and it can overpower most boomboxes from the 80s, with a Bose approach to sound, even delivering kinestetic levels of bass.
Even the Macbook Pro can't touch the sound quality of a Cheap HP laptop, let alone do they offer 4.1 built in sound like you can get in high end PC Notebooks. (And I am talking about 4.1 speakers on the laptop, not external connections, as almost all PCs have 7.1 digital out.)
If Apple is the 'god' of hardware, then why do they cheat their users every chance they get?
I would love a Mac Book with a Video card faster than my 2005 Laptop. And for being the self proclaimed 'best' for video editing/desktop publishing they finally added 1920x1200, which again my laptop from 2005 had, even my 15" Toshiba from 2002 had 1600x1200. Nice to see Apple do 'hi-res' displays six years later.
I also would love to have one that I could actually use to watch TV and listen to music on the internal speakers. Whoops, internal TVs are not an option either.
Do you not realize how much Apple cheats its customers and then tells them it is the best and a sense of 'class' to oown one. Even the 'i' marketing concept goes back to centuries old psychology to enforce the self importance - go reference iMage (Image)...
This is smoke and mirror stuff and sadly people either don't care or are led into it like sheep.
Apple sounded the trumpets that killed or help kill the consumer CLI, non-color displays, legacy ports, floppy drives, and wired Internet connections.
It's trying to kill ethernet networking and optical media. Most users need only a power cable to charge it. It's supposed to work with a network, giving you access to files, media, software installers, and printers without ever plugging anything in. It'll probably catch on sooner or later, even if it's something of a fumble right now.
Ok, there are a couple of things in here I agree with 100%, but the majority of this is so out of left field I don't even understand why you would accredit this to Apple, or their 'leadership'.
1) Doing away with optical? Bill Gates said almost two years ago that Optical HD/Blu would be an interesting battle, but insignificant, as online distribution would surpass them both. (i.e. See XBox 360 that has had HD Movie Downloads for almost 3 years)
2) They may be trying to kill 'wired' networking, but there is nothing on the horizon that is going to offer wireless speeds of 1gb soon, and by not have a port 'capable' of even handling 1gb wired connections is a problem for people that are doing video editing and shoving huge amounts of data to servers or other workstations. Also why do you credit Apple for 'moving' past wired, yet with most of their technologies like the iPhone they don't even care about high-speed connectivity? This seems more like their excuse to remove a feature than a play a role of hardware leadership.
3) Consumer CLI? Hmm. You do realize that with OS X, you have more odds of needing the CLI to perform functions than you do with Windows XP or Vista? If you look at OS X pinned to BSD, you can only control about 80% of the OS from the GUI, yet with Windows you are in the 95% range, even on servers. (PS if you don't believe this, go talk to an Apple Server administrator, they will show you how much a CLI is still used in the Mac World.) Hiding something doesn't mean they removed the need for it. Your argument could have been better made on System 1-9 than OS X.
4) non-color displays: Ok, I assume you are not old enough to remember the Apple marketing of the 'purity' of the grayscale display in contrast to color displays of th
This is easy to fix, tell her she can't play movies on it without packing a drive that is as big as the laptop, and like the 1980s it only has one internal speaker, because stereo is too hard to make look good.
The loss of the internal DVD is understandible if they are making an UMPC, but they aren't. Like other companies, Apple could have given up 2mm of thickness and kept this feature.
The lack of critical features like a Network cconnector, firewire, or even having two freaking speakers for stereo is just plain stupid.
Who really would want to give up these features for a 2mm (at most) thickness difference? Even if I was completely locked to Apple and OSX I would have a lot of questions about why even do these products if they are half baked.
Not exactly his invention, suggest you do a little history review. Refining it and how it was used and the observatons discovered by his 'telescopes' are what is important.
Galileo was brilliant, scary brilliant, but even he 'embraced' and 'extended' technology. I suppose this now makes him a fraud and evil in your eyes?
PS I don't dispute Galileo's contributions; however, I would make a really good side bet that MORE people in the world know 'Microsoft' than know 'Galileo' - Even though this would be very sad, even though it is probably true.
So people already having aids with be out of luck, regardless of what TFA says.
I get you don't have a freaking clue what you are talking about, buy why don't you and just be quiet?
Cell to cell migration is the key of HIV 'progression' and reoccurance. If a vaccine is made that with drug therapy makes the 'new' cells unable to be infected, then it wouldn't be a cure, but the drugs and other treatments could drop the HIV levels in the system to virtually NIL without 'worry' that it will resurge. This would be a permanent form of remission.
Vaccine concepts do not have to be an entire organism, it can be at the cellular level, so that unaffected cells become immune to replication. Think outside the box of 5th grader understanding.
PS I have no knowledge of lab at Alberta, but if they are even close to being on the right track of identifying a natural gene in humans that can surpress infection, then this is a MAJOR milestone and even if they can't bring it to fruition, will lead the road for others to do so.
As for Gene therapy, there are a lot of people talking in these posts that have NO idea what they talking about, in that it is somewhat easier and more effective than they seem to think. It is already used in several common applications.
Additionally, the gene does not have to be turned on, just like with Prozac, a virtually pure chemical form of flipping a corresponding gene in the body, that produces the same result. So a drug could be made to mimic the function of the gene.
1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms 2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms 3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms 4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms 5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms 6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms 7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms The results are generated by using the Sunspider JS benchmark suite.
This looks great, but everyone should notice a couple of things that may not be obvious.
1) Sunspider JS benchmark is designed by Apple developers and they use it to show the world how much faster Safari is, however Opera seems to outpace the Safari developers even with their own tests. However, yes some of the benchmarks used are 'picked' to favor Safari, and some are 'extended' to hurt IE.
2) Sunspider over does the tests of the Append String performance problem to make IE look worse than it really is. IE's JScript is coded as JScript was designed, and because of this, it doesn't optimize string append operations by using newer code. So by using this text extra, it artificially make IE look horribly slow. IE8 and possible additional IE7 releases are spending time optimizing the base JSCript code from the original implementations/specifications.
3) If you remove the 'string' routine from the test, IE7, consistently outperforms Firefox 2.0, and is very close to even Safari for with the results were cherry picked.
4) Some of the numbers are quite questionable as to the validity. For example IE7 is given 72375 in this article, and yet the slowest machine our tech lab has ever benchmarked is 2x the speed, and this is on a very old AMD 1ghz machine that barely runs Vista in which the test yeilded the horrible results. So where did they get the 72375 number from? A Pentium 200?
Again reference this link so see that even this person's results are no where near the 75K ms time reported for IE.
So it is quite questionable and inaccurate to try to portray IE7 as 10x slower, when without the 'emphasized' string append slowdown in IE7, it is faster than FireFox 2.0 and within a few 'ms' of even Safari and the new FireFox 3.0 results.
Good job to the FireFox team, btw.. Also does anyone have benchmarks of the new FireFox using a non-Apple test suite?
But I think the greater point in everyones ranting is that Microsoft paid and Congress accepted and will be leveraging the new platform for a specific purpose. A purpose for which the Silverlight platform is intended to address.
It is a tit/tat situation, true. However, this is the case of industry and technology, people didn't complain when Apple gave schools money and computers in mass numbers to get their product into the mainstream. It was a win win for Apple, the schools, and kids getting a chance to see use new technology at the time.
Also if MS blows the Silverlight implementation, it will be egg on their face and Silverlight in general. And if MS shows non-MS people how empowering Silverlight is or advantages it can give developers, then it will again be a win win win, for MS, LoC, Developers, and users looking up content.
Would people be happier if the LoC paid Adobe 10 million to develop it for them in flash, getting money and free stuff isn't always evil, right?
You are looking back at an early HDR concept (something still somewhat new to digital imaging).
There are several technical specification documents on the MS HD format. It offers a lot in one format that we don't have, and some things that don't exist in any format. I don't have quick links for you, but do some more searching or even search microsoft.com and you will find the details you seek.
It can drop back to same quality size levels as current JPG, do better compression with virtually no visual difference, handle HDR, handle RAW transfer for cameras to drop data from the cmos to the storage device faster. So you get both good losey and non-losey storage, etc...
It is worth the read, as it has some interesting aspects that would replace TIFF in addition to GIF, PNG and JPEG because it handles the different features of all these formats...
I can't say it is going to be the end all to be all, but for now it is the most complete and interesting.
plain text? - Ok, fine then pick a standard ACSII, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc... People will still bitch. xml? - That is what silverlight uses for crying out loud. pdf? - And the images are STORED as JPG or TIFF once again. The same freaking result.
What is the most horrible thing that could be? Gasp, the UI is built by Microsoft technology? Would you be more happy with Flash Instead? You simply can't do as light or rich UI without a technology like Silverlight unless you buy into Adobe and Flash, which still has many parts undocumented, in contrast to Silverlight.
Silverlight also implies two things. 1) The images will all be part of the new JPEG standard(See Microsoft HD Photo approved as Next JPEG Standard) 2) The video will also be a standard, VC-1.
What would you rather have content stored in?
These are 'the' two leading standards of the day with the expection of MPEG4 which doesn't perform as well as VC1 and there are additional licensing issues with real MPEG4 content.
Sony was an example of units from YEARS ago. Go look at several of the new models in the PC world, they are within 1-2mm of the thickness of the Airbook, have 2x faster processors, and have integraded Geforce 8600 with 256mb dedicated VRAM. They also have other 'features' like firewire, multiple output/input for audio video, and get this. STEREO speakers - 80s technology even...
The MacBook Air is a marketing can, and crap design with horrible perform. And when you 'tout' the 3100 Intel Graphic as good, you have lived in the Mac world way too long, when my 5 year old laptop outbenches the Intel 3100 in both business and 3D applications. But I guess graphics aren't important to Mac users, you buy PCs if you want graphical performance for things like AI/Photoshop/3D engineering/Video Creation, right?
The UMPC wsa a contrasted topic, just as I could have used WinCE, but UMPC is approaching PDA sizes and running the standard versions of the Windows OSes.
The iPhone and iTouch are NOT Apple's version of the UMPC, they are Apple's poor attempt at the Palm and Windows Pocket PC market, except you can get smaller devices that do more if you buy a Pocket PC, as it is running a full OS with open developer support. UMPCs are running FULL versions of XP and Vista, not a watered down OS, or a limited core OS. Buy Vista on the shelf and install on a UMPC. Try that on your iPodTouch....
Beyond the normal protections of corporate and true trade secrets, personal privacy in the US is gone as you once knew it.
Since 2001, pre 9/11, all data from the main fibers of AT&T and other companies have been 'split' (advantage of fiber that you can easily do this), so that a copy of all communications whether data or voice communications in the US has been saved by the NSA and FBI.
So when people wonder why some politicians roll over to the leaders like Bush and Cheney, remember that they have more dirt on EVERYONE than anyone in history could have anticipated. Hoover would be envious, and not because they are wearing a better dress...
Privacy boils down to 'what' is truly important to protect and what isn't. I see friends locking up their PCs like they have the secrets to the H bomb on it, and when I ask, they are like, oh just some letters, resumes, photos, etc and will give friends unfettered access to their desktops because nothing is 'that' important.
Most people's information is NOT worth hackers time to steal nor hitting their computers is worth it. Getting access to a computer to use it for Spam and other things is more important than 'WHAT' is on the computer.
Yes it is cute, but it is very limited in speed and graphics.
1) People forget the Sony Laptops that have been around for almost 10 yearss, that are 'technically' smaller than the Mac Air.
2) The same people cheering the Mac Air, are the same people here that dumped about the UMPC concept of a moving between a laptop and a PDA. And 13" with tiny keyboard is NOT much differnt than the 10" screen with tiny keyboards, especially when the UMPC have full TabletPC capabilities so you can just use a pen.
So if we are going to see all the 'compare' to air articles, then we need to go back and compare Air to all the Sony's and the UMPCs as well.
Click advertising has and never will be a successful marketing mechanism for the internet as a whole. Sure there are some products and some sites that it works, but these are rare.
Just like television and other successful forms of ad generated industries it is all about product placement and brand recognition that has to be used.
The smartest advertising sites have ads for Coke, or Honda where the advertisers DON'T expect the person to click, but to just view. Just like TV...
After 100 years of influention psychology in advertising for brand recognition, it is scary that a 'bright' new technology doesn't understand the simplicity.
No matter if you go back to the begining of a 'want' instead of a 'need' consumer base that boomed in the 50s or even the first 'marketing' firms based on Freud during the 'need' based economy in the US prior to that, nothing has changed.
Do you think Burma-Shave would have worked if people had to get out of their cars and pick up a flyer on the product at each sign?
Sure things are faster and harder to notice on the internet, but still, you got 5 secs to grab someone's attention, don't disturb or annoy them and DON'T make them do anything and you have a successful ad. PERIOD.
Some of the best advertising that is working on the internet is from youtube type of sites providing commericial content. You can watch any TV show in the world legally, and at your own schedule and you have 4 or 5 15secs pauses of ads. Yet people are 'use' to it, and the ads are becoming the most successful because they live up to the simple rules from the above paragraph.
This can be done with static site and news as well, heck even do a cute Flash/Silverlight video on the page, just don't use sound and don't expand over crap to disturb the person. Product recognition is not a conscious thing anyway, so determining it by ad clicks requires concious involvement. Bad Idea, Bad Model, and Bad Method to test advertising success.
I just wanted to point out that this is really a matter of taste and what you're used to, and not something that's inherently incorrect (or correct).
Although I do agree that there is a level of subjective preference on this issue, there is something you are overlooking.
Apple finally caught up with Windows by finally offering sub-pixel rendering, which is good for LCD and CRT displays, as on the CRTs the color anti-aliasing is an improved image 99% of the time.
So in terms of how they anti-alias the fonts, they are can and do the same thing.
But in terms of Typography, OS X rendering gets sloppy, as it will not always uphold pixel definition. This is where the hinting system that MS uses does leave the fonts looking less burry, but it also preserves the fonts and makes them adhere to pixel boundaries on both display and output.
This is something that you can see if you render sans-serif fonts the easiest - on OS X if you zoom in, a letter like (i) that should only take a single pixel position for the vertical line of the i will 'sometimes' only take one pixel, and will sometimes depending on leading take one and 1/2 pixels or be anti-aliased into the surrounding pixel regions.
So everyone could argue what looks best for them, and with some people, the darker look of the OS X fonts is easier to read, espeically on poor contrast displays or older eyes.
However, if you are into typography and depend on accuracy, especially on High DPI displays OS X fails. For output devices that also depend on the quality of the 'hinting' Windows again will produce the highest quality or 'cleanest' font because if fully respects the pixel grid.
Wow Apple software not running properly on a Windows OS, say it isn't so...
Apple's software development for Windows is like a Toyota dealer fixing your Ferrari. It took Apple 10 years to get a QuickTime installer for WIndows that didn't try to lock the UI, because that is how they always did it on Macs, even though Windows users hadn't seen it since the Win3.1 days.
At least when MS develops Apple software, they get real Mac user and real developers and products like Office are some of the most polished applications for Macs. Apple could at least hire a team of 10 people that use or 'get' Windows at the very least, instead of this cross platform inferior designed crap that barely runs.
RTM has been available to beta testers, the ISO, the installation EXE, and even the WU enabler since the 6th.
MSDN and Technet should also have access to it now as well today. (Besides the fact that a majority of MSDN and Technet people have had beta access as well.)
This story is pure trash, and is just mis-informing more people, but hey it is MS so I guess that is ok to give people bad information...
There has been some movement to Macs and OSX, but the dual-boot is a key in some of this migration.
There is also a part of the market that likes the iPod and Mac hardware and doesn't even understand the concept of an OS.
From the two there is a small uprising of people from the Mac world using Vista more than OSX on Mac Hardware. It is not quite as rare as you think, especially with Leopard requiring as much or more hardware to run well than Vista. (1GB RAM, and even Newer GPU than Vista)
When have I used OSX? Wow, is that a loaded question. Well of course in your belief system for someone to have the opinions I do must not use OSX. Sadly, I probably use it more than 90% of the people on SlashDot, and know quite a bit about it terms of OS architecture, as this is something I teach.
OS X is what it is, a BSD interface to a nice MACH kernel with a psuedo Mac interface strapped on. In the end, Apple is spending more time working AROUND the dated architectual concepts that BSD is based on, and sadly there are newer OS theories and technologies out there, like NT. (Yes NT is fundamentally a newer OS architecture based on newer theories.)
The fact that there are people that prefer Vista over OSX on Mac hardware is not hard to understand when people can see on the same hardware they are faster and applications and gaming is faster under Vista. This is leaving people in Vista most of the time.
Feature for feature OS X offers nothing that Vista doesn't have or cannot do. However, technically due to the WDDM in Vista, it can do things OS X won't be able to do without a full re-write of the video subsystem, and this will be required to get better gaming performance out of OS X.
Then there are the Games, just do a search anywhere, or on any gaming forum that has native binaries for OSX and Windows. Customers are POed that they get 1/2 the frame rates in OSX in a LOT of games. (Yes all OpenGL stuff and optimized for both OSes.) OS X just doesn't have the architecture to game as fast as Windows. (This would be a heavy driver and video implementation topic if we go here. Basically Vista pumps stuff directly through, even in desktop mode, unlike the hybrid double buffing methods like OS X and Linux use.)
Then do a search on any of the CS3 or newer products from Adobe, running Intel native binaaries on OSX is still slower than running the same Adobe product under Vista on the same hardware.
Now I'm not going to guarantee you that this is all mainstream news, and that all Mac users even realize these people exist, but don't assume that just because people buy Macs that they mindlessly believe Jobs is a god and everything OS X is perfect.
Also look up how often 'Leoptard' is now being used...
OSX doesn't suck, but I'll also argue that Vista doesn't suck either, as much as many here and in the IT world would like to believe.
In an age of copy protected floppies and copy protection on games and virtually every type of software, MS still shipped DOS and Win 3.1 unprotected. Friends would install it, and even geeks would go, wow, a GUI that works and I can even multi-task my DOS applications.
Corporation and distributor fraud has been at the heart of the MS movement for Geniune. Yes, they are stupid about it, as WGA has screwed users more than it ever should have with XP and Vista, but prior to WGA, even if you were a legit OEM MFR of computers you often had a 50% chance of getting pirate copies of Win9x/Win2K and especially Office.
I know from being an OEM and buying through distribution channels that 50% of the product that came through the door was not legit. It was so bad that even employees at some of the larger vendors, would place your MS software orders to their 'friends' and invoice it separately without your knowledge or the knowledge of some of the distributors.
This also wasn't from fly by night wholesalers. Our corporate IT people also had problems, even orders from companies like CDW and others had a large chance of being fake.
So MS added WGA and activation, this cut down the problem, but put a strain on legitimate users. MS would have been served to just put more monitoring and pressure in the distribtution channels, but again there are retailers and OEMs that would take advantage shady 'good' deals, and the customers would again be using forged copies, not even knowing that their local shop was screwing over people.
SP1 lightens WGA, and MS has internal plans to further lighten WGA on the websites and for allowing updates. They are looking into taking the burden of WGA off the end-user. I would look for more OEM tools and OEM activation, and keeping Corporate IT activation systems intact and WGA for consumers going away eventually.
This is a good thing and now SlashDot makes the article read like Vista is 'hackable' in a 'bad' way, instead of a 'good' way.
Also remember MS has already put out enough copies of Vista, that they probably don't care about the few *nix users hacking it for a VM or dual install, nor even the OSX Mac base.
Counting the entire sales history of Macs as total base, and the entire *nix installation base, Vista is still millions of copies ahead and still growing, and THIS is even if you only count the retail copies sold, not even the OEM portion which is substantially even larger.
MS can afford for people to Hack Vista, especially when there are cliches in the Mac community that love the hardware, but like Vista better than OSX and use it as their primary OS and great if they hack and install Vista, and find out that it runs better on Mac hardware than OSX. MS has a win win, even if the people don't like Vista, and it didn't cost MS anything for the % that did prefer Vista. (See online articles comparing Vista to Leopard or running native Intel binaries under OSX compared to Vista. (Adobe products and OpenGL games are great selling points for Vista, all running faster under Vista than OSX on the same machine.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why?
.NET controls, etc that surpass anything Flash can do.
.NET based.
.NET 3.0 to Silverlight or the other way around. The XAML construct is also very intelligently designed, as it is more than just a graphical description format, as it has inherent events and animations, where Display PDF (or SVG as some like to compare) is inherently a static graphical format with no concept of advanced layers, animations, hit testing, events, etc. (As printing technology moves to eInk that is dynamic, XAML is ready to print to and produce output on these devices already, even though this is a years off concept.)
1) Performance features - for example an application in silverlight that pulls HD image formats in small chunks, allowing you to zoom into 100mb images instantly. (This is just one example)
2) HD Video - that is VC1 compliant as well. Also the ability to support live and multi-cast streaming of HD Video (great for lowbandwidth servers hosting live events, and still providing an HD video of the event.)
3) Easier - By the nature of how Silverlight is designed it is easier to design for and work with. You are basically just managaging Vista type XAML from WPF. No secret formats, etc.
4) Agnostic programming - Silverlight you not only get a rich vector/bitmap based environment, but it is completely language agnostic and you can use anything from C# to VB to Python.
5) Web Page interoperability - Silverlight is designed to within the context of the Web Page. For example you could hvae 10 Silverlight buttons on the page, and they are all separate from each otehr, but tied together via common code in JScript. This would be 'heavy' to do in Flash, and it wouldn't be easy to split the buttons apart, so you would ahve to design all the buttons in one Flash control, consuming the page with Plash, instead of just working with the page. Think of Silverlight as a cool new picture type that is also programmable, handles events, and animation when used like this.
6) Features - Silverlight 1.0 is on par with Flash in terms of features, and has several Flash just cannot do. Silverlight 2.0 brings in a whole set of
7) Back to Performance - Flash is a dog on non-Windows OSes. So far Silverlight is showing to be semi-equally fast on Windows and OS X, with low memory consumption on both. The same Flash applet running on Windows could use a couple of MB and running on OS X jump to 30MB and peg the CPU. Flash is NOT as crossplatform as developers would like to lead people to believe because of performance issues like this.
8) Security - Silverlight is more secure than Flash (see recent Flash updates), the reason Silverlight is more secure because it runs inside an additional sandbox and is also managed code, it is
9) Structure XAML - The nature of how Silverlight is designed is based on Vista's WPF/XAML system. Vista uses XAML from everything from on screen display to printing (XAML is like OS X's Display PDF but with a chunk more features.) This means that Windows developers can easily move from Windows programming
Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps, and Microsoft is also fully producing the OS X version as well as supporting as many browsers as they can at the same time, including Firefox, etc. So if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only, instead it has potential to be far more crossplatform than Flash. (Microsoft also just announced Silverlight for non Windows Mobile phones to be an alternative to Flash Lite.)
sigh. how, exactly, would this help Apple lock-in content?
Ok, the sigh = I'm a Fanboi and I don't get why people beat up on my Hero
This would help Apple in MANY ways, as Flash is ALSO a development platform, as well as being content distribution. So no games written in Flash will be available, and no Video content that is not Apple 'approved' will not be available.
the alternatives they support are published, open industry standards
Um, except for their DRM variations, and the fact they also don't support the mainstream alternatives either for audio or video distribution. Let's just contrast this with a Windows Mobile Phone. Can iPhone do DivX, WMA, VC1, etc?
And since most of the online content providers that are NOT iTunes, use these other formats, leaving iPhone locked into iTunes and Apple. Also VC1 is an industry HD standard (even though it has SD formats as well), and Apple has no plans to provide support, ever.
"3G" doesn't mean what you think it does. the current iPhone has a "3G" connection
Wow, really into hair spliting... Yes, technically EDGE is 3G, but most people reference 3G with comparison to the relative bandwidth since Edge would then be an unofficial 2.75G, not 3G. (3G's meaning has changed from its original design specifications, when you talk 3G, you better mean 3G bandwidth. PERIOD)
the current flash player is very poor... Apple tries hard to sell kludge-free products.
I am not a big fan of Flash in this regard, but sadly the DESKTOP Flash player is only a dog on non-Windows platforms. OS X being the worest performer for flash content.
Flash and Flash Lite are very, very different things
Sure, technically they are different, but not like you seem to think. Flash Lite handles Flash 8 and Video content flawlessly. The reason it is called Flash Lite, is because it can run under BREW and on tons of mobile Phone OSes, including Windows Mobile.
Also why is this important, I never claimed there were identical, and sadly you won't be able to do either on the iPhone...
show me. first, remember that Flash Lite is not Flash. so which phone are you referring to?
Even though they are different, they RUN the same freaking content up to Flash 8 specifications.
Which phone? How about almost any phone, pick a Motorola, Nokia, Windows Mobile, etc. Almost all of them have a version of Flash Lite. This is OLD news for everyone outside of the Apple distortion field?
The rest of your conclusions about Apple being good at subsets, blah blah, are wrong since you are referencing something that isn't even subset limited like Flash Lite.
Hey lets even make this more of an argument, Apple planning on supporting Silverlight? It was just announced that it won't be limited to Windows Mobile, and be ported to several Phone OSes. And again, like Flash, not only does it provide Video and content, it is a development platform for making applications and games.
i pick products based on what works for me
Really, so an iPhone with less features and more money worked for you how again? Sadly my 3 year old Motorola literally has more features than the iPhone, and all of the Windows Mobile phones have 10x the features of an iPhone. (A Windows Mobile Phone can even remote into your desktop or servers and lets you control them as if you were sitting in front of them. iPhone is way out of its league in this type of 'meets my needs' argument. Gasp!
SIGH....
So is this just Apple trying to lock in content, or are there real reasons behind this?
I know the non-3G connection would make Flash horrid. I also know that Flash can be a pig on non-optimized platforms, which is sad since Flash Lite can run on Phones with 100mhz processors.
I think this is pretty much a non-issue. Apple and iPhone fans will do what Jobs tells them to do and will abandon Flash aspirations if told to do so.
The rest of the world is already using phones that have Flash and also out feature an iPhone.
I know the iPhone multi-touch interface is interesting in concept, but not as practical as people would like to believe. This is why non-fanbois pick up phones like this one:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/smartphone/details.mspx?id=e03c4483-a898-4ebb-a0e8-5f58c7547269&backUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fwindowsmobile%2Fsmartphone%2Fdefault.mspx&WT.mc_ID=wmhome_attTilt
Which makes the iPhone look like a toy...
The promise of Singularity, as I understood it, was the possibility of constructing an O/S kernel with all of the modularity advantages of a microkernel without all of the process communication issues typical to this kernel type.
This is underplaying its role; it is an OS slate with solid ideas that can be used to pound new OS theories through without having to deal with any lineage to prior models.
However the microkernel issues that you are referring to are ideas that Microsoft tackled 16 years ago and is a corner milestone of Windows NT. Singularity does build on these concepts, but this aspect of the OS is old theory from NT that Microsoft has also made a design aspect of Singularity.
So if you are 'now' looking for an OS technology that has microkernel modularity without the performance and communication issues, then you need to go look at Windows NT, since this is how NT was designed. (When I say Windows NT, I am talking about the core kernel architecture that sits under Win32/Win64 etc.)
NT is not classified as a true microkernel, and is best described as a hybrid kernel or a client/server kernel due to the layered kernel API isolation that doesn't have monolithic multi-tasking issues and doesn't have the overhead of a true microkernel due to the light and layered kernel API.
I'm surprised that people with some interest in OSes to this day don't realize simple concepts like this about NT. You can argue than the Win32 subsystem sucks, blah, blah, but very few, if any OS engineers or theorist would make fun of the NT kernel/architecture itself.
NT for its time was the best of theory that currently existed in 1992, Singularity is Microsoft's Research team throwing out new OS theory ideas for the entire industry, and unlike NT, you can learn from what they are working on, read the code, and even be inspired to develop your own OS based on their theories and concepts. With NT, Microsoft only presented the concepts of what NT was doing and how it implemented concepts and theories, especially the hybrid kernel concept, but beyond this, we never got to the actual code, so Singularity is a nice move for Microsoft to enrich the entire computing world, even if you can't take the code line by line and redistribute it.
Yeah, because two little, tinny speakers 6" apart really shouts GIVE ME STEREO SOUND
You have obviously never heard the sound from most HP laptops or Toshiba's. I agree the two speakers in Macs tend to be on the low end, but even system sounds with stereo just offer a bit of realisim.
I have a 2002 Toshiba Laptop with the tiny speakers you talk about that was designed by Harman/Kardon and it can overpower most boomboxes from the 80s, with a Bose approach to sound, even delivering kinestetic levels of bass.
Even the Macbook Pro can't touch the sound quality of a Cheap HP laptop, let alone do they offer 4.1 built in sound like you can get in high end PC Notebooks. (And I am talking about 4.1 speakers on the laptop, not external connections, as almost all PCs have 7.1 digital out.)
If Apple is the 'god' of hardware, then why do they cheat their users every chance they get?
I would love a Mac Book with a Video card faster than my 2005 Laptop. And for being the self proclaimed 'best' for video editing/desktop publishing they finally added 1920x1200, which again my laptop from 2005 had, even my 15" Toshiba from 2002 had 1600x1200. Nice to see Apple do 'hi-res' displays six years later.
I also would love to have one that I could actually use to watch TV and listen to music on the internal speakers. Whoops, internal TVs are not an option either.
Do you not realize how much Apple cheats its customers and then tells them it is the best and a sense of 'class' to oown one. Even the 'i' marketing concept goes back to centuries old psychology to enforce the self importance - go reference iMage (Image)...
This is smoke and mirror stuff and sadly people either don't care or are led into it like sheep.
Apple sounded the trumpets that killed or help kill the consumer CLI, non-color displays, legacy ports, floppy drives, and wired Internet connections.
It's trying to kill ethernet networking and optical media. Most users need only a power cable to charge it. It's supposed to work with a network, giving you access to files, media, software installers, and printers without ever plugging anything in. It'll probably catch on sooner or later, even if it's something of a fumble right now.
Ok, there are a couple of things in here I agree with 100%, but the majority of this is so out of left field I don't even understand why you would accredit this to Apple, or their 'leadership'.
1) Doing away with optical? Bill Gates said almost two years ago that Optical HD/Blu would be an interesting battle, but insignificant, as online distribution would surpass them both. (i.e. See XBox 360 that has had HD Movie Downloads for almost 3 years)
2) They may be trying to kill 'wired' networking, but there is nothing on the horizon that is going to offer wireless speeds of 1gb soon, and by not have a port 'capable' of even handling 1gb wired connections is a problem for people that are doing video editing and shoving huge amounts of data to servers or other workstations. Also why do you credit Apple for 'moving' past wired, yet with most of their technologies like the iPhone they don't even care about high-speed connectivity? This seems more like their excuse to remove a feature than a play a role of hardware leadership.
3) Consumer CLI? Hmm. You do realize that with OS X, you have more odds of needing the CLI to perform functions than you do with Windows XP or Vista? If you look at OS X pinned to BSD, you can only control about 80% of the OS from the GUI, yet with Windows you are in the 95% range, even on servers. (PS if you don't believe this, go talk to an Apple Server administrator, they will show you how much a CLI is still used in the Mac World.) Hiding something doesn't mean they removed the need for it. Your argument could have been better made on System 1-9 than OS X.
4) non-color displays: Ok, I assume you are not old enough to remember the Apple marketing of the 'purity' of the grayscale display in contrast to color displays of th
. My wife drools over those commercials
This is easy to fix, tell her she can't play movies on it without packing a drive that is as big as the laptop, and like the 1980s it only has one internal speaker, because stereo is too hard to make look good.
The loss of the internal DVD is understandible if they are making an UMPC, but they aren't. Like other companies, Apple could have given up 2mm of thickness and kept this feature.
The lack of critical features like a Network cconnector, firewire, or even having two freaking speakers for stereo is just plain stupid.
Who really would want to give up these features for a 2mm (at most) thickness difference? Even if I was completely locked to Apple and OSX I would have a lot of questions about why even do these products if they are half baked.
>>Galileo's invention was universe-shattering
Not exactly his invention, suggest you do a little history review. Refining it and how it was used and the observatons discovered by his 'telescopes' are what is important.
Galileo was brilliant, scary brilliant, but even he 'embraced' and 'extended' technology. I suppose this now makes him a fraud and evil in your eyes?
PS I don't dispute Galileo's contributions; however, I would make a really good side bet that MORE people in the world know 'Microsoft' than know 'Galileo' - Even though this would be very sad, even though it is probably true.
So people already having aids with be out of luck, regardless of what TFA says.
I get you don't have a freaking clue what you are talking about, buy why don't you and just be quiet?
Cell to cell migration is the key of HIV 'progression' and reoccurance. If a vaccine is made that with drug therapy makes the 'new' cells unable to be infected, then it wouldn't be a cure, but the drugs and other treatments could drop the HIV levels in the system to virtually NIL without 'worry' that it will resurge. This would be a permanent form of remission.
Vaccine concepts do not have to be an entire organism, it can be at the cellular level, so that unaffected cells become immune to replication. Think outside the box of 5th grader understanding.
PS I have no knowledge of lab at Alberta, but if they are even close to being on the right track of identifying a natural gene in humans that can surpress infection, then this is a MAJOR milestone and even if they can't bring it to fruition, will lead the road for others to do so.
As for Gene therapy, there are a lot of people talking in these posts that have NO idea what they talking about, in that it is somewhat easier and more effective than they seem to think. It is already used in several common applications.
Additionally, the gene does not have to be turned on, just like with Prozac, a virtually pure chemical form of flipping a corresponding gene in the body, that produces the same result. So a drug could be made to mimic the function of the gene.
(or just glance below):
1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms
The results are generated by using the Sunspider JS benchmark suite.
This looks great, but everyone should notice a couple of things that may not be obvious.
1) Sunspider JS benchmark is designed by Apple developers and they use it to show the world how much faster Safari is, however Opera seems to outpace the Safari developers even with their own tests. However, yes some of the benchmarks used are 'picked' to favor Safari, and some are 'extended' to hurt IE.
2) Sunspider over does the tests of the Append String performance problem to make IE look worse than it really is. IE's JScript is coded as JScript was designed, and because of this, it doesn't optimize string append operations by using newer code. So by using this text extra, it artificially make IE look horribly slow. IE8 and possible additional IE7 releases are spending time optimizing the base JSCript code from the original implementations/specifications.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx
3) If you remove the 'string' routine from the test, IE7, consistently outperforms Firefox 2.0, and is very close to even Safari for with the results were cherry picked.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html
4) Some of the numbers are quite questionable as to the validity. For example IE7 is given 72375 in this article, and yet the slowest machine our tech lab has ever benchmarked is 2x the speed, and this is on a very old AMD 1ghz machine that barely runs Vista in which the test yeilded the horrible results. So where did they get the 72375 number from? A Pentium 200?
Again reference this link so see that even this person's results are no where near the 75K ms time reported for IE.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html
So it is quite questionable and inaccurate to try to portray IE7 as 10x slower, when without the 'emphasized' string append slowdown in IE7, it is faster than FireFox 2.0 and within a few 'ms' of even Safari and the new FireFox 3.0 results.
Good job to the FireFox team, btw.. Also does anyone have benchmarks of the new FireFox using a non-Apple test suite?
But I think the greater point in everyones ranting is that Microsoft paid and Congress accepted and will be leveraging the new platform for a specific purpose. A purpose for which the Silverlight platform is intended to address.
It is a tit/tat situation, true. However, this is the case of industry and technology, people didn't complain when Apple gave schools money and computers in mass numbers to get their product into the mainstream. It was a win win for Apple, the schools, and kids getting a chance to see use new technology at the time.
Also if MS blows the Silverlight implementation, it will be egg on their face and Silverlight in general. And if MS shows non-MS people how empowering Silverlight is or advantages it can give developers, then it will again be a win win win, for MS, LoC, Developers, and users looking up content.
Would people be happier if the LoC paid Adobe 10 million to develop it for them in flash, getting money and free stuff isn't always evil, right?
You are looking back at an early HDR concept (something still somewhat new to digital imaging).
There are several technical specification documents on the MS HD format. It offers a lot in one format that we don't have, and some things that don't exist in any format. I don't have quick links for you, but do some more searching or even search microsoft.com and you will find the details you seek.
It can drop back to same quality size levels as current JPG, do better compression with virtually no visual difference, handle HDR, handle RAW transfer for cameras to drop data from the cmos to the storage device faster. So you get both good losey and non-losey storage, etc...
It is worth the read, as it has some interesting aspects that would replace TIFF in addition to GIF, PNG and JPEG because it handles the different features of all these formats...
I can't say it is going to be the end all to be all, but for now it is the most complete and interesting.
You are kidding right?
plain text? - Ok, fine then pick a standard ACSII, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc... People will still bitch.
xml? - That is what silverlight uses for crying out loud.
pdf? - And the images are STORED as JPG or TIFF once again. The same freaking result.
Actually that is NOT the point either.
What is the most horrible thing that could be? Gasp, the UI is built by Microsoft technology? Would you be more happy with Flash Instead? You simply can't do as light or rich UI without a technology like Silverlight unless you buy into Adobe and Flash, which still has many parts undocumented, in contrast to Silverlight.
Silverlight also implies two things.
1) The images will all be part of the new JPEG standard(See Microsoft HD Photo approved as Next JPEG Standard)
2) The video will also be a standard, VC-1.
What would you rather have content stored in?
These are 'the' two leading standards of the day with the expection of MPEG4 which doesn't perform as well as VC1 and there are additional licensing issues with real MPEG4 content.
Sony was an example of units from YEARS ago. Go look at several of the new models in the PC world, they are within 1-2mm of the thickness of the Airbook, have 2x faster processors, and have integraded Geforce 8600 with 256mb dedicated VRAM. They also have other 'features' like firewire, multiple output/input for audio video, and get this. STEREO speakers - 80s technology even...
The MacBook Air is a marketing can, and crap design with horrible perform. And when you 'tout' the 3100 Intel Graphic as good, you have lived in the Mac world way too long, when my 5 year old laptop outbenches the Intel 3100 in both business and 3D applications. But I guess graphics aren't important to Mac users, you buy PCs if you want graphical performance for things like AI/Photoshop/3D engineering/Video Creation, right?
The UMPC wsa a contrasted topic, just as I could have used WinCE, but UMPC is approaching PDA sizes and running the standard versions of the Windows OSes.
The iPhone and iTouch are NOT Apple's version of the UMPC, they are Apple's poor attempt at the Palm and Windows Pocket PC market, except you can get smaller devices that do more if you buy a Pocket PC, as it is running a full OS with open developer support. UMPCs are running FULL versions of XP and Vista, not a watered down OS, or a limited core OS. Buy Vista on the shelf and install on a UMPC. Try that on your iPodTouch....
Beyond the normal protections of corporate and true trade secrets, personal privacy in the US is gone as you once knew it.
Since 2001, pre 9/11, all data from the main fibers of AT&T and other companies have been 'split' (advantage of fiber that you can easily do this), so that a copy of all communications whether data or voice communications in the US has been saved by the NSA and FBI.
So when people wonder why some politicians roll over to the leaders like Bush and Cheney, remember that they have more dirt on EVERYONE than anyone in history could have anticipated. Hoover would be envious, and not because they are wearing a better dress...
Privacy boils down to 'what' is truly important to protect and what isn't. I see friends locking up their PCs like they have the secrets to the H bomb on it, and when I ask, they are like, oh just some letters, resumes, photos, etc and will give friends unfettered access to their desktops because nothing is 'that' important.
Most people's information is NOT worth hackers time to steal nor hitting their computers is worth it. Getting access to a computer to use it for Spam and other things is more important than 'WHAT' is on the computer.
Tinfoils hats may be necessary...
Ok, Time to Talk MacBook Air...
Yes it is cute, but it is very limited in speed and graphics.
1) People forget the Sony Laptops that have been around for almost 10 yearss, that are 'technically' smaller than the Mac Air.
2) The same people cheering the Mac Air, are the same people here that dumped about the UMPC concept of a moving between a laptop and a PDA. And 13" with tiny keyboard is NOT much differnt than the 10" screen with tiny keyboards, especially when the UMPC have full TabletPC capabilities so you can just use a pen.
So if we are going to see all the 'compare' to air articles, then we need to go back and compare Air to all the Sony's and the UMPCs as well.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/01/macbook-air-rel.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/02/12/fanboy-reviewer-problems
For people in the Mac only world, the MacBook Air is great, but for people in the 'rest' of the computer industry, it is nothing new or unique.
Click advertising has and never will be a successful marketing mechanism for the internet as a whole. Sure there are some products and some sites that it works, but these are rare.
Just like television and other successful forms of ad generated industries it is all about product placement and brand recognition that has to be used.
The smartest advertising sites have ads for Coke, or Honda where the advertisers DON'T expect the person to click, but to just view. Just like TV...
After 100 years of influention psychology in advertising for brand recognition, it is scary that a 'bright' new technology doesn't understand the simplicity.
No matter if you go back to the begining of a 'want' instead of a 'need' consumer base that boomed in the 50s or even the first 'marketing' firms based on Freud during the 'need' based economy in the US prior to that, nothing has changed.
Do you think Burma-Shave would have worked if people had to get out of their cars and pick up a flyer on the product at each sign?
Sure things are faster and harder to notice on the internet, but still, you got 5 secs to grab someone's attention, don't disturb or annoy them and DON'T make them do anything and you have a successful ad. PERIOD.
Some of the best advertising that is working on the internet is from youtube type of sites providing commericial content. You can watch any TV show in the world legally, and at your own schedule and you have 4 or 5 15secs pauses of ads. Yet people are 'use' to it, and the ads are becoming the most successful because they live up to the simple rules from the above paragraph.
This can be done with static site and news as well, heck even do a cute Flash/Silverlight video on the page, just don't use sound and don't expand over crap to disturb the person. Product recognition is not a conscious thing anyway, so determining it by ad clicks requires concious involvement. Bad Idea, Bad Model, and Bad Method to test advertising success.
I just wanted to point out that this is really a matter of taste and what you're used to, and not something that's inherently incorrect (or correct).
Although I do agree that there is a level of subjective preference on this issue, there is something you are overlooking.
Apple finally caught up with Windows by finally offering sub-pixel rendering, which is good for LCD and CRT displays, as on the CRTs the color anti-aliasing is an improved image 99% of the time.
So in terms of how they anti-alias the fonts, they are can and do the same thing.
But in terms of Typography, OS X rendering gets sloppy, as it will not always uphold pixel definition. This is where the hinting system that MS uses does leave the fonts looking less burry, but it also preserves the fonts and makes them adhere to pixel boundaries on both display and output.
This is something that you can see if you render sans-serif fonts the easiest - on OS X if you zoom in, a letter like (i) that should only take a single pixel position for the vertical line of the i will 'sometimes' only take one pixel, and will sometimes depending on leading take one and 1/2 pixels or be anti-aliased into the surrounding pixel regions.
So everyone could argue what looks best for them, and with some people, the darker look of the OS X fonts is easier to read, espeically on poor contrast displays or older eyes.
However, if you are into typography and depend on accuracy, especially on High DPI displays OS X fails. For output devices that also depend on the quality of the 'hinting' Windows again will produce the highest quality or 'cleanest' font because if fully respects the pixel grid.
Wow Apple software not running properly on a Windows OS, say it isn't so...
Apple's software development for Windows is like a Toyota dealer fixing your Ferrari. It took Apple 10 years to get a QuickTime installer for WIndows that didn't try to lock the UI, because that is how they always did it on Macs, even though Windows users hadn't seen it since the Win3.1 days.
At least when MS develops Apple software, they get real Mac user and real developers and products like Office are some of the most polished applications for Macs. Apple could at least hire a team of 10 people that use or 'get' Windows at the very least, instead of this cross platform inferior designed crap that barely runs.
Over 100 million users, so probably no.
But I understand where you are coming from, with user base numbers this large, it beyond what OSX geeks and SlashDot trolls can comprehend.
Next in news, Vista is a flop even though it is the second most popular OS in history...
Where does this crap come from?
RTM has been available to beta testers, the ISO, the installation EXE, and even the WU enabler since the 6th.
MSDN and Technet should also have access to it now as well today. (Besides the fact that a majority of MSDN and Technet people have had beta access as well.)
This story is pure trash, and is just mis-informing more people, but hey it is MS so I guess that is ok to give people bad information...
Connect(.microsoft.com) and download the enabler for Service Pack 1 Refresh 2 and
Actually connect has the RTM downloads for SP1, the WU enabler and even the ISOs and distribution packages.
So whether anything changed from Refresh 2 doesn't matter, as the RTM is available.
There has been some movement to Macs and OSX, but the dual-boot is a key in some of this migration.
There is also a part of the market that likes the iPod and Mac hardware and doesn't even understand the concept of an OS.
From the two there is a small uprising of people from the Mac world using Vista more than OSX on Mac Hardware. It is not quite as rare as you think, especially with Leopard requiring as much or more hardware to run well than Vista. (1GB RAM, and even Newer GPU than Vista)
When have I used OSX? Wow, is that a loaded question. Well of course in your belief system for someone to have the opinions I do must not use OSX. Sadly, I probably use it more than 90% of the people on SlashDot, and know quite a bit about it terms of OS architecture, as this is something I teach.
OS X is what it is, a BSD interface to a nice MACH kernel with a psuedo Mac interface strapped on. In the end, Apple is spending more time working AROUND the dated architectual concepts that BSD is based on, and sadly there are newer OS theories and technologies out there, like NT. (Yes NT is fundamentally a newer OS architecture based on newer theories.)
The fact that there are people that prefer Vista over OSX on Mac hardware is not hard to understand when people can see on the same hardware they are faster and applications and gaming is faster under Vista. This is leaving people in Vista most of the time.
Here is a link for example that has drawn people to consider Vista over OSX on a Mac.
http://happybeggar.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=99&Itemid=2
Or go search and pick your own random article.
Heck even go to some of the bigger OS X people in the industry and look at what they said...
http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/01/running_vista_o.html
Feature for feature OS X offers nothing that Vista doesn't have or cannot do. However, technically due to the WDDM in Vista, it can do things OS X won't be able to do without a full re-write of the video subsystem, and this will be required to get better gaming performance out of OS X.
Here is one of the original articles sparking the Vista curiosity in the Mac universe.
And this was comparing Vista to Tiger, let alone Leopard that hasn't yet lived up to the speed or stability of Tiger.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/microsoft-vista-faster-on-a-mac-pro-than-apples-own-os-x-232402.php
Then there are the Games, just do a search anywhere, or on any gaming forum that has native binaries for OSX and Windows. Customers are POed that they get 1/2 the frame rates in OSX in a LOT of games. (Yes all OpenGL stuff and optimized for both OSes.) OS X just doesn't have the architecture to game as fast as Windows. (This would be a heavy driver and video implementation topic if we go here. Basically Vista pumps stuff directly through, even in desktop mode, unlike the hybrid double buffing methods like OS X and Linux use.)
Then do a search on any of the CS3 or newer products from Adobe, running Intel native binaaries on OSX is still slower than running the same Adobe product under Vista on the same hardware.
Now I'm not going to guarantee you that this is all mainstream news, and that all Mac users even realize these people exist, but don't assume that just because people buy Macs that they mindlessly believe Jobs is a god and everything OS X is perfect.
Also look up how often 'Leoptard' is now being used...
OSX doesn't suck, but I'll also argue that Vista doesn't suck either, as much as many here and in the IT world would like to believe.
Does anyone think MS really cares?
In an age of copy protected floppies and copy protection on games and virtually every type of software, MS still shipped DOS and Win 3.1 unprotected. Friends would install it, and even geeks would go, wow, a GUI that works and I can even multi-task my DOS applications.
Corporation and distributor fraud has been at the heart of the MS movement for Geniune. Yes, they are stupid about it, as WGA has screwed users more than it ever should have with XP and Vista, but prior to WGA, even if you were a legit OEM MFR of computers you often had a 50% chance of getting pirate copies of Win9x/Win2K and especially Office.
I know from being an OEM and buying through distribution channels that 50% of the product that came through the door was not legit. It was so bad that even employees at some of the larger vendors, would place your MS software orders to their 'friends' and invoice it separately without your knowledge or the knowledge of some of the distributors.
This also wasn't from fly by night wholesalers. Our corporate IT people also had problems, even orders from companies like CDW and others had a large chance of being fake.
So MS added WGA and activation, this cut down the problem, but put a strain on legitimate users. MS would have been served to just put more monitoring and pressure in the distribtution channels, but again there are retailers and OEMs that would take advantage shady 'good' deals, and the customers would again be using forged copies, not even knowing that their local shop was screwing over people.
SP1 lightens WGA, and MS has internal plans to further lighten WGA on the websites and for allowing updates. They are looking into taking the burden of WGA off the end-user. I would look for more OEM tools and OEM activation, and keeping Corporate IT activation systems intact and WGA for consumers going away eventually.
This is a good thing and now SlashDot makes the article read like Vista is 'hackable' in a 'bad' way, instead of a 'good' way.
Also remember MS has already put out enough copies of Vista, that they probably don't care about the few *nix users hacking it for a VM or dual install, nor even the OSX Mac base.
Counting the entire sales history of Macs as total base, and the entire *nix installation base, Vista is still millions of copies ahead and still growing, and THIS is even if you only count the retail copies sold, not even the OEM portion which is substantially even larger.
MS can afford for people to Hack Vista, especially when there are cliches in the Mac community that love the hardware, but like Vista better than OSX and use it as their primary OS and great if they hack and install Vista, and find out that it runs better on Mac hardware than OSX. MS has a win win, even if the people don't like Vista, and it didn't cost MS anything for the % that did prefer Vista. (See online articles comparing Vista to Leopard or running native Intel binaries under OSX compared to Vista. (Adobe products and OpenGL games are great selling points for Vista, all running faster under Vista than OSX on the same machine.)