I'd say SF provides the bulk of it's inspiration the same way the real world does. By demonstrating how *not* to do something, and inviting an inventive mind to find a better way.
I've had a few ideas I might try to implement someday inspired by books I've read, but for the most part I think SciFi is just a conduit to get people thinking about their own neat ideas, and general concepts. Most actual tech in scifi is either far-future pie in the sky stuff and incredibly huge projects or, more often these days, obvious (if sometimes flawed) extrapolations of the current bleeding edge of tech.
I'm skeptical as to how well this will work. The mac community is different, chiefly in that there is some sense of community. A certain desire to support companies that develop for the platform. I know there are a decent number of people who actually bought ambrosia games despite already having the pirated codes to use them.
The Wintel world is a much bigger place, so you're fishing from a bigger pond, but I don't think the fish will be so generous about going after the bait on the hook when there're plenty of other ways to get a worm without having a big barbed spike driven thru your cheek in the form of money....wow, that metaphor came out badly.
Apparently, the increase in heat output from processors made by Sun Microsystems and others has increased to the point it's affecting global temperatures!
It's a heat crisis! Everyone needs to turn off their computers and let the world cool down for a while.
It seems ironic to me that they felt the need to do such a horrible job of compositing the actor over his beautifully rendered counterpart.
Come on people, you don't need this kind of photo-trickery, and when you do it that badly, it really takes away more than it adds. If you're not going to spend the resources to do it right, just don't do it.
Note that MacOS X has a library called vDSP which is as much as twice as fast as vBigDSP on split data. Source code is not available, making it difficult to port to Linux.
So unless you're writing something for OSX and linux, want to use the same libs on both and are willing to sacrifice a 2x speed increase, you'd be well advised not to use this library package for FFTs on OSX.
They're pulling to the 1.3 mozilla trunk for the version of geko they embed in camino right now, and they introduced a whole slew of bugs when they did so. You might want to stick to the.7 release for a month or so unless you're a real masochist.
I used to use the Chimera nightly builds almost exclusively, but these days I stick to the.7 release or safari, and just check the nightlies when something I'm interested in gets mentioned on bugzilla.
You can get info on it here: http://www.maconlinux.org/ It's a complete VM, so you actually need a copy of the OS you want to run in it, unlike WINE. It is verry well done, arguably better in some ways than Apple's own "Classic" VM in OSX.
And GNUstep isn't all that close to Apple's stuff, largely because so much of Apple's stuff is still in flux, I'd say GNUstep is going to be a work in progress for a very long time. So, no you can't run Darwin binaries on LinuxPPC, unless you want to run Darwin or OSX in MacOnLinux.
Low base RAM configurations are a good thing in this case.
Noone in their right minds buys RAM thru Apple, they charge insane markups. Having one supplier is convenient, but not worth that kind of price imho.
This way, if someone buys a rack full of XServes, they can spend under $10K filling them up with ram instead of two or three times that buying preinstalled RAM from Apple.
Configurability is always a good thing, and this specific package looks very attractive for people who want to do some fairly large scale low budget vector computing.
By offering more processors for the dollar, this configuration really plays to the platform's strengths in computational clusters for applications that can use Altivec.
They include alot of big improvements in almost every beta release. I think it's a sign of Apple's good quality standards (well, that and an interest in avioding support issues) that they're still calling them betas, alot of companies release far buggier and less feature complete software as 1.0 versions.
How can this comment be moderated as a 3, then moderated down as overrated, when a practically identical comment is immediately after it and moderated to a 5 without any overrated modifiers?
I don't mean to whine, but this just boggles my mind.
Actually, if you follow the rumor mill, Apple did give serious consideration to putting dual processors in notebooks. They appearantly decided not to for the moment.
It's just as well in my opinion. Dual processors wouldn't actually boost speeds that much for the kinds of applications most people run on notebooks, even high end notebooks. A bit of photoshop work is one thing and might benefit a bit, but noone runs a renderfarm of laptops or serves a big database intensive site from one. And the cost would be prohibitively high, not to mention the power supply and heat problems.
It might be possible to build a dual processor notebook, but it would involve alot of compromises, and there wouldn't be much of a market.
I was actaully a little worried that when a Macs switched to the PPC970, memory fast enough for it's initial 450MhzDDR bus would be prohibitively expensive. They might have been forced to increase the bus multiplier to maintain their target price point, or they might have just needed really expensive RAM.
With this 400mhz bus and a bit of upwards evolution, this shouldn't be a problem by the time 970 based macs are released. yay
I've been waiting for this for months (from before java 1.4.1 even existed actually, when all I wanted was a small update to fix some bus with the previous JVM). It fixes alot of bugs in good ole fashioned AWT, from what I understand. Most were nothing I couldn't work arround, but it was still a pain.
Hopefully this will provide a serious speed boost too. It's a good day to be a mac java developer.
It is, however, different from Camino, whose development is not based on the perspective of a single vendor.
This is just plain not true in my experience. Chimera, now Camino, is developed by a small team of employees securely loyal to the company.
They are not especially receptive to patches concerning anything they're not allready looking at doing, and they have been known to ignore user input in favor of following the Netscape party line.
The most obvious and complained about example is there splash screen. It ties up memory, noticablly slows down launch times, leaks memory, and impedes usability when users are waiting for the browser to launch, There have been many complaints about it on bugzilla, and far more on various mailing lists and bulletin boards. Patches to add a prefrence to disable it have been submitted. Yet they continue to prioritize branding their browser above user needs. The splash screen is still there, and the only way to disable is if to hack arround in the application's contents, and exploit a known bug in apple's NSImage object by substituteing the wrong kind of data.
There are other examples. Key behaviors that follow Netscape precedent at the expense of usability and Apple HIG compliance, tab options and layout, etc...
The source may be open, but the project isn't especially open to outside direction. I like the browser alot, and really look forward to the.8 release, but I have to say the browser is just as corporate controlled as Safari.
It's an interesting idea, especially for the mirroring information, but I really don't think that kind of functionality belongs in a DNS.
There's alot to be said for keeping something that basic to the working of the internet as we know it as simple as possible.
Also, if I understand correctly, that kind of thing would increase the load on the domain servers, especially with that sub-site idea. And I just can't see any widespread adoption of that kind of thing anytime soon.
No, they use the same key combos as Camino. Cmd-W closes a tab, or the window if there are no tabs, while Cmd-Shift-W closes the window if there are tabs (and oddly does nothing when no tabs are open, that's probably not optimum behavior).
They just hadn't finished implementing their custom menu/command keys in beta62. In beta64, you can just open a tab and look in the file menu to see what I mean, the key combos are properly shown.
One interesting tidbit is that they've announced that this will be the last Chimera/Camino release to be based on the 1.0 Mozilla branch. They'll finally be pulling up to the current Mozilla 1.3 branch, which should fix alot of bugs(Including one I find really annoying, which both Chimera and Safari share, the inability to copy/paste japanese text with most carbon apps, yay!), as well as provide some performance increase.
This leaves only one big feature on my wishlist for Camino: Native text fields, with spell checking and all. Safari has spell checking, but it still has to be manually enabled for each field, which I consider a bug.
Safari meanwhile is advancing at a breakneck pace. Beta62 had tabs, although there were some really annoying bugs (like the close tab command occasionally closing the whole window instead. DOH!). Hopefully today's b64 will fix that, in addition to adding tab support to bookmarks.
I can't help but think that this is the kind of jump in technology that Apple is uniquely positioned to popularize.
One day, they'll simply announce that they'll only sell 3D displays from then on. There will be alot of customers buying 3rd party monitors for a while, just like there were when they switched to all LCDs, but plenty of customers will buy the displays just 'cause they come with their Macs.
Meanwhile Apple gets to drop selling plain old LCDs, which by then will be a low profit margin commodity, just as CRTs were when they dropped them, and move to selling only higher end/higher profit displays. And selling them in more volume than anyone else is likely to be at the time, because of their access to all Mac customers.
And Apple is well positioned for the move on the software side too. They have already re-implemented their entire windowing system in OpenGL. It would be relatively trivial to add 3D window positioning and widgets. (And damn cool in some ways too, there will certainly be some useless eye candy, but some simple obvious things like being able to look behind a window just by moving your head a bit, would by really cool imho).
Other large volume computer companies, like Dell, would undoubtedly follow in Apple's footsteps, looking for the same advantages, but none of them have the secure vertical niche that Apple has.
Well, if you're felling ambitious, you could allways try porting the hdiutil command line utility from the Darwin source to whatever platforms you need. Then you could use UIFS images (mac.dmg files) on multiple platforms. Actually someone probably ought to do that anyway, from what I understand it's a pretty nifty flexible device image format.
If you're not looking to do quite so much work, it would be pretty trivial to just use a plain old.iso image encrypted by GPG, and include a script to decrypt the image then mount it for each platform.
You can find out online which players claim to support which formats. But even among players that support DVD-R (and/or other burnable DVD and CD formats), there is alot of variation.
The media you buy, and the software package you use to burn can matter alot.
Until support for this kind of thing matures to the point of everything being compatible with everything else, I'd recommend you just burn a few test DVDs and VCDs to take to the store and test on the models you're interested in. It prevents nasty surprises and incompatibilities with your burning setup. I certainly plan to when I get my next player.
I believe they mean that they disable the pubilcaly accessible API for accessing the keyboard, and use their own private API to make it more difficult for another app to intercept your password.
It sounds like a reasonable precaution.
They just forgot to re-enable an semi-deprecated function for getting modifier keys afterwards. Sounds like a fairly minor bug, and I'm sure it'll be fixed in the next point release now that it's gotten coverage on/.
One thing I really liked about this article was that, possibly for the first time out of the many switcher articles I recall, the writer doesn't confuse his ignorance of a platform's abilities with limitations of that platform's abilities.
I was shocked that he actually bothered to learn how to set up NFS on a mac without spending at least a paragraph or two whining about how long it took him, or that he had to download some 3rd party software if he wanted to configure it with a GUI. Most 'switchers' probably wouldn't have even figured it out before they wrote their article, and instead would have complained "macs can't do NFS", propagating FUD, just because they don't know how.
As for the rest, yes, it isn't really all that radical. For the most part he just uses the same Microsoft apps on a different platform. However if you look at it realistically, that's what alot of businesspeople have to do to get by.
Sure, he could have tried Keynote and/or OpenOffice, perhaps some time in the future he will. Berating him for using basically the same software package he's allways used isn't very realistic.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say SF provides the bulk of it's inspiration the same way the real world does. By demonstrating how *not* to do something, and inviting an inventive mind to find a better way.
I've had a few ideas I might try to implement someday inspired by books I've read, but for the most part I think SciFi is just a conduit to get people thinking about their own neat ideas, and general concepts. Most actual tech in scifi is either far-future pie in the sky stuff and incredibly huge projects or, more often these days, obvious (if sometimes flawed) extrapolations of the current bleeding edge of tech.
I'm skeptical as to how well this will work. The mac community is different, chiefly in that there is some sense of community. A certain desire to support companies that develop for the platform.
...wow, that metaphor came out badly.
I know there are a decent number of people who actually bought ambrosia games despite already having the pirated codes to use them.
The Wintel world is a much bigger place, so you're fishing from a bigger pond, but I don't think the fish will be so generous about going after the bait on the hook when there're plenty of other ways to get a worm without having a big barbed spike driven thru your cheek in the form of money.
Apparently, the increase in heat output from processors made by Sun Microsystems and others has increased to the point it's affecting global temperatures!
It's a heat crisis!
Everyone needs to turn off their computers and let the world cool down for a while.
It seems ironic to me that they felt the need to do such a horrible job of compositing the actor over his beautifully rendered counterpart.
Come on people, you don't need this kind of photo-trickery, and when you do it that badly, it really takes away more than it adds. If you're not going to spend the resources to do it right, just don't do it.
So unless you're writing something for OSX and linux, want to use the same libs on both and are willing to sacrifice a 2x speed increase, you'd be well advised not to use this library package for FFTs on OSX.
They're pulling to the 1.3 mozilla trunk for the version of geko they embed in camino right now, and they introduced a whole slew of bugs when they did so. You might want to stick to the .7 release for a month or so unless you're a real masochist.
.7 release or safari, and just check the nightlies when something I'm interested in gets mentioned on bugzilla.
I used to use the Chimera nightly builds almost exclusively, but these days I stick to the
Since you'd be removing part of you're cooling system, I'd say " hot swapping" is an even more appropriate term than ever.
You can get info on it here: http://www.maconlinux.org/
It's a complete VM, so you actually need a copy of the OS you want to run in it, unlike WINE.
It is verry well done, arguably better in some ways than Apple's own "Classic" VM in OSX.
And GNUstep isn't all that close to Apple's stuff, largely because so much of Apple's stuff is still in flux, I'd say GNUstep is going to be a work in progress for a very long time.
So, no you can't run Darwin binaries on LinuxPPC, unless you want to run Darwin or OSX in MacOnLinux.
Low base RAM configurations are a good thing in this case.
Noone in their right minds buys RAM thru Apple, they charge insane markups. Having one supplier is convenient, but not worth that kind of price imho.
This way, if someone buys a rack full of XServes, they can spend under $10K filling them up with ram instead of two or three times that buying preinstalled RAM from Apple.
Configurability is always a good thing, and this specific package looks very attractive for people who want to do some fairly large scale low budget vector computing.
By offering more processors for the dollar, this configuration really plays to the platform's strengths in computational clusters for applications that can use Altivec.
They include alot of big improvements in almost every beta release. I think it's a sign of Apple's good quality standards (well, that and an interest in avioding support issues) that they're still calling them betas, alot of companies release far buggier and less feature complete software as 1.0 versions.
How can this comment be moderated as a 3, then moderated down as overrated, when a practically identical comment is immediately after it and moderated to a 5 without any overrated modifiers?
I don't mean to whine, but this just boggles my mind.
Hmm... Does this make anyone else think of the blip-verts in Max Headroom?
I can just see the advertising agency actually making something like that after this study.
Actually, if you follow the rumor mill, Apple did give serious consideration to putting dual processors in notebooks. They appearantly decided not to for the moment.
It's just as well in my opinion. Dual processors wouldn't actually boost speeds that much for the kinds of applications most people run on notebooks, even high end notebooks. A bit of photoshop work is one thing and might benefit a bit, but noone runs a renderfarm of laptops or serves a big database intensive site from one. And the cost would be prohibitively high, not to mention the power supply and heat problems.
It might be possible to build a dual processor notebook, but it would involve alot of compromises, and there wouldn't be much of a market.
I was actaully a little worried that when a Macs switched to the PPC970, memory fast enough for it's initial 450MhzDDR bus would be prohibitively expensive. They might have been forced to increase the bus multiplier to maintain their target price point, or they might have just needed really expensive RAM.
With this 400mhz bus and a bit of upwards evolution, this shouldn't be a problem by the time 970 based macs are released. yay
I've been waiting for this for months (from before java 1.4.1 even existed actually, when all I wanted was a small update to fix some bus with the previous JVM). It fixes alot of bugs in good ole fashioned AWT, from what I understand. Most were nothing I couldn't work arround, but it was still a pain.
Hopefully this will provide a serious speed boost too.
It's a good day to be a mac java developer.
They are not especially receptive to patches concerning anything they're not allready looking at doing, and they have been known to ignore user input in favor of following the Netscape party line.
The most obvious and complained about example is there splash screen. It ties up memory, noticablly slows down launch times, leaks memory, and impedes usability when users are waiting for the browser to launch, There have been many complaints about it on bugzilla, and far more on various mailing lists and bulletin boards. Patches to add a prefrence to disable it have been submitted. Yet they continue to prioritize branding their browser above user needs. The splash screen is still there, and the only way to disable is if to hack arround in the application's contents, and exploit a known bug in apple's NSImage object by substituteing the wrong kind of data.
There are other examples. Key behaviors that follow Netscape precedent at the expense of usability and Apple HIG compliance, tab options and layout, etc...
The source may be open, but the project isn't especially open to outside direction. I like the browser alot, and really look forward to the
It's an interesting idea, especially for the mirroring information, but I really don't think that kind of functionality belongs in a DNS.
There's alot to be said for keeping something that basic to the working of the internet as we know it as simple as possible.
Also, if I understand correctly, that kind of thing would increase the load on the domain servers, especially with that sub-site idea. And I just can't see any widespread adoption of that kind of thing anytime soon.
No, they use the same key combos as Camino. Cmd-W closes a tab, or the window if there are no tabs, while Cmd-Shift-W closes the window if there are tabs (and oddly does nothing when no tabs are open, that's probably not optimum behavior).
They just hadn't finished implementing their custom menu/command keys in beta62.
In beta64, you can just open a tab and look in the file menu to see what I mean, the key combos are properly shown.
One interesting tidbit is that they've announced that this will be the last Chimera/Camino release to be based on the 1.0 Mozilla branch. They'll finally be pulling up to the current Mozilla 1.3 branch, which should fix alot of bugs(Including one I find really annoying, which both Chimera and Safari share, the inability to copy/paste japanese text with most carbon apps, yay!), as well as provide some performance increase. This leaves only one big feature on my wishlist for Camino: Native text fields, with spell checking and all. Safari has spell checking, but it still has to be manually enabled for each field, which I consider a bug. Safari meanwhile is advancing at a breakneck pace. Beta62 had tabs, although there were some really annoying bugs (like the close tab command occasionally closing the whole window instead. DOH!). Hopefully today's b64 will fix that, in addition to adding tab support to bookmarks.
I can't help but think that this is the kind of jump in technology that Apple is uniquely positioned to popularize.
One day, they'll simply announce that they'll only sell 3D displays from then on. There will be alot of customers buying 3rd party monitors for a while, just like there were when they switched to all LCDs, but plenty of customers will buy the displays just 'cause they come with their Macs.
Meanwhile Apple gets to drop selling plain old LCDs, which by then will be a low profit margin commodity, just as CRTs were when they dropped them, and move to selling only higher end/higher profit displays. And selling them in more volume than anyone else is likely to be at the time, because of their access to all Mac customers.
And Apple is well positioned for the move on the software side too. They have already re-implemented their entire windowing system in OpenGL. It would be relatively trivial to add 3D window positioning and widgets. (And damn cool in some ways too, there will certainly be some useless eye candy, but some simple obvious things like being able to look behind a window just by moving your head a bit, would by really cool imho).
Other large volume computer companies, like Dell, would undoubtedly follow in Apple's footsteps, looking for the same advantages, but none of them have the secure vertical niche that Apple has.
Well, if you're felling ambitious, you could allways try porting the hdiutil command line utility from the Darwin source to whatever platforms you need. Then you could use UIFS images (mac .dmg files) on multiple platforms. Actually someone probably ought to do that anyway, from what I understand it's a pretty nifty flexible device image format.
If you're not looking to do quite so much work, it would be pretty trivial to just use a plain old .iso image encrypted by GPG, and include a script to decrypt the image then mount it for each platform.
You can find out online which players claim to support which formats. But even among players that support DVD-R (and/or other burnable DVD and CD formats), there is alot of variation.
The media you buy, and the software package you use to burn can matter alot.
Until support for this kind of thing matures to the point of everything being compatible with everything else, I'd recommend you just burn a few test DVDs and VCDs to take to the store and test on the models you're interested in. It prevents nasty surprises and incompatibilities with your burning setup. I certainly plan to when I get my next player.
I believe they mean that they disable the pubilcaly accessible API for accessing the keyboard, and use their own private API to make it more difficult for another app to intercept your password.
/.
It sounds like a reasonable precaution.
They just forgot to re-enable an semi-deprecated function for getting modifier keys afterwards. Sounds like a fairly minor bug, and I'm sure it'll be fixed in the next point release now that it's gotten coverage on
One thing I really liked about this article was that, possibly for the first time out of the many switcher articles I recall, the writer doesn't confuse his ignorance of a platform's abilities with limitations of that platform's abilities.
I was shocked that he actually bothered to learn how to set up NFS on a mac without spending at least a paragraph or two whining about how long it took him, or that he had to download some 3rd party software if he wanted to configure it with a GUI. Most 'switchers' probably wouldn't have even figured it out before they wrote their article, and instead would have complained "macs can't do NFS", propagating FUD, just because they don't know how.
As for the rest, yes, it isn't really all that radical. For the most part he just uses the same Microsoft apps on a different platform. However if you look at it realistically, that's what alot of businesspeople have to do to get by.
Sure, he could have tried Keynote and/or OpenOffice, perhaps some time in the future he will. Berating him for using basically the same software package he's allways used isn't very realistic.