I'm not excusing Apple's behaviour -- there's a whole heap of things that they've kept undocumented/private which annoy me in current versions of OS X.
However, my impression is that much of the video rendering systems within the OS have been in flux over the course of OS X's development. Remember, QuickDraw's still in active use. QD's really in need of replacement, and will be deprecated in Tiger.
From what I've seen, The Core[whatever] frameworks in Tiger will finally put this issue to bed, and provide all the APIs a developer could want... Quartz 2D Extreme looks like it'll round things out, with some nice things like full resolution-independence for each application individually.
For those who understand these things better than I, there's the WWDC's graphics 'State of the Union' presentation available here.
It's generally a nice look at how OS X's video architecture's finally coming together.
Indeed. What's worrying isn't that perfectly innocent user behaviour triggers detection. Rather, that string (or even filename pattern-matching) is a dumb way to detect.
Spyware makers will start (if they haven't already) randomizing the filenames, registry keys, etc. Then your anti-spyware software's gotta start doing what it should've in the first place -- something smart.
I guess I was trying to think about looking at the differences between Linux and Windows behind a veil of ignorance -- with no knowledge of how these two approaches would actually turn out in real life, no idea that one would end up a monopoly, or even any real detail on how these implementations would actually work out for the user.
My hypothetical Bill & Linus would talk about nothing more than the structure or architecture of their approaches. We, as the (again, hypothetical) knowledgable but independent participant get to think about which we like best.
I'd expect that we'd be able to pick apart Bill's plan much more than Linus's. Sure, IRL, neither guy had it all mapped out from the start. But in this imaginary world, they're describing Windows and Linux as they exist now, even though neither OS exists yet in this alternatice reality.
Isn't Bill's title 'Chief Software Architect' these days? I'd love to witness him and Linus discussing the finer points of OS design over a few beers. From what I (possibly mis-) understand about Bill's role in things, I'd imagine Linus could out-geek Bill any day of the week... so maybe Bill could be replaced by whoever is the OS uberfuhrer at MS.
Imagine there is no Windows yet, and there is no Linux either. You're sat in a bar with two guys called Bill and Linus. Bill looks kinda nervous, and Linus has an accent you can't quite place. But that's not important right now. All three of you know enough about programming practices and software design to be able to hold a decent conversation about it.
So anyway, after a few pints of beer, Linus and Bill go on to describe these great plans they have for an operating system. Linus proceeds to describe what we know as a modern Linux distro, and Bill goes into a load of detail about this thing he's planning on calling 'Windows', and describes the architecture of what we'd recognise as Windows 2000 or XP.
Now, whose ideas would sound better to you? Bill's or Linus's? I dunno about you, but I'd agree with Linus.
Sadly, RMS was unable to join the conversation. The doormen wouldn't let him into the bar in the first place. And Bill only bought drinks for himself.
Seeing how fast you could go round a corner no-handed on our bikes... picking tighter & tighter corners until leg-shredding was the rule not the exception.
Picking scabs off your legs. I had one on my knee once that I swear was the exact shape of the British Isles. Complete with the Orkneys. Man, that one wept and bled for months.
Playing catch from the front garden to the back. Losing tennis balls in the gutter. Flicking ice cream at road signs...
I tend to work for a living so I can buy stuff. Occasionally, that 'stuff' includes an Apple product.
I don't really see what the problem is, especially considering this point wouldn't even be raised if I said I was spending a similar amount of money on nvidia's latest and greatest.
HL2 didn't appear because a bunch of guys sat at Valve for 5 years, ate pizza and thought really hard for a bit and went home each day whistling joyously.
Have you ever done any software development? It might not look like ploughing a field, building a skyscraper, or making a cake. But Jesus H. Christ there is so much labour being mixed in order to produce that product (to apply a little philosophy for a sec).
If you want their product, you compensate them for it. The commercial gaming industry asks for cash in return. F/OSS requires sharing of improvements as compensation.
HL2 isn't an ephemeral 'idea'. It's the product of an immense amount of toil. Go read a few of the hundreds of articles out there and get an idea of what's involved in producing a software product.
(n.b: I speak only for myself here): If the result of my labour is code, my ownership of that code should allow me to decide under what terms it should be distributed. That's my right. If I decide you can use my product for a fee, it's up to you to take me up on that offer.
Now, if you were to produce something of equivalent functionality yourself then that's great. I applaud your achievement. Shortly before seeing if there's something I can do to make my product better than yours. I wouldn't (and I believe *shouldn't*) start bitching about 'patent this' and 'intellectual property' that.
See the difference? Rationalise it all you want. A game like HL2 is a genuine product of labour. Not just some intellectual product.
Re:Complacency? Probably not in this case...
on
Firefox News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Can't use Fast User Switching when acting as a domain client, sadly.
So it'd be a complete log-out for the active user.
The platform's already there. They just used it to make a browser (and Thunderbird, each Suite component, Venkman, etc.)
XUL enabled Firefox to happen. Not the other way around.
Firefox wouldn't be the only thing that's deathly slow on a 3 year old machine;-). Besides, I also use Firefox on a 3 year old iMac (a whole 500MHz G3!) and it's certainly not deathly slow.
I've been using GPRS for about a year (in the UK). It's handy for low-bandwidth stuff. Web browsing's nice with images disabled - email's also perfectly usable.
However, general-purpose 3G is great. Our company's got a few 3G cards on Orange (a UK network operator - related link), and the speed makes totally wireless, (almost) ubiquitous internet access a reality.
As for faster bluetooth: I use BT for device-to-device syncing. It's reassuring to know that my Mac, PC, PDA and mobile's data are synchronised fully with minimal intervention on my part. Additionally, it's good for peripherals (I love my Logitech Cordless Desktop MX), and for the occasional transfer of phonebook entries to friends (no more reading out and repeating) numbers. For how I use it, BT does the job just fine.
Range is acceptable for the purpose it serves too. Just enough to discover your mate's *somewhere* in the crowded pub because BT shows their phone;)
My iMac runs as a firewall/NAT system for my WLAN, in addition to day-to-day use. Has a VNC server running over the WLAN (through an SSH tunnel, naturally), and a few Samba shares also.
Installed without a hitch, and everything's intact after the restart.
I'm yet to test a couple of things (printer, bluetooth), since I need to get a new USB cable for the Mac-to-USB Hub connection. My rabbit had a field day yesterday and gnawed the old cable. D'oh.
(it's true. Rabbits are evil. Especially red-eyed pure white albino freakazoids like mine. If she weren't so damn cute I'd have turned her into a tasty stew after I saw the damage;))
Umm... and how will walking through an RFID scanner with someone else's passport be prevented?
The photo's on the passport for a reason. RFID would be useless in the situation you describe.
All a would-be 'eeevil dooooeer' would have to do is mug some US traveller and saunter though. Because as you seem to suggest, anyone with a US passport is beyond reproach, right?
These 'Sony Centres' in the UK are franchise arrangements -- not run by Sony themselves. Basically, they're just resellers with rights to brand themselves under the Sony name, and with a unified look.
If this move by Sony involves establishing stores owned and controlled directly by themselves (a la Apple), there's going to be a lot of pissed-off franchise holders.
Anti-virus protection & firewalling are what the OS should be doing in order to keep itself working -- like journalling helps keep filesystems consistent and working.
The apps people object to being bundled are additiona abilities, above and beyond what the OS needs to stay alive.
I don't want to have to hold my machine's hand just to keep it alive. I don't want to have to install and learn additional software to keep what I already have working.
I understand the need for software updates -- that's the nature of the software beast. What I object to is the stack of 3rd party subsciption software Windows makes me require just to stop it falling over.
(warning: the following comment may be regarded as OS X zealotry. It's not -- it's just a comparison between my two most-used systems - Windows and OS X).
I can take a new Mac out of the box, hook it up to the net, and just let Software Update do its thing however often it needs. I don't have to construct a safe environment -- it already seeks to give me that. Of course there's going to be vulns discovered. So I appreciate the work that OSS contributors and Apple put into securing network services across all supported platforms.
Great Satan of Taperecorders, The: This describes AMD. Some years back, two staffers at The Register were astonished to find the PR flunky calmly switching on a tape recorder as we interviewed an executive at a very expensive restaurant. We started singing and refused to chat properly unless the machine was switched off. It was. AMD is also sometimes called Chimpzilla, after its CEO Jerry Sanders III compared his company to a chimpanzee and Intel to a gorilla.
I haven't tried it recently. Digital satellite, with its plethora of timeslip channels and 'Second Chance Sundays' sorta sidelined my VCR quite a few years ago. And once I got a HD-based PVR and standalone DVD recorder (Sky+ and a Toshiba DR-1), VCRs with PDC have found their way into the attic.
I wouldn't be surprised if PDC is much more reliable these days. Having to provide EPG data for digital broadcasts has proably forced broadcasters to improve the IT side of their scheduling... and so maybe their PDC accuracy.
My analogue's from the Crystal Palace transmitter. If that VCR was still hooked up, I'd give PDC a try:) (and that's another point -- PDC, like Teletext, needs a good signal. It's quite possible to have a fine TV picture, but still get garbled teletext/intermittent PDC)
IIRC, it wasn't Gemstar's VideoPlus+ system that caused that problem -- it was Programme Direct Control (PDC) signals.
VP+ was that system where a code was printed in TV listings magazines. You then entered that code into the remote of a VP+ capable VCR, and that code was translated into the channel, start and stop times for the programme to be recorded.
PDC, similar to Teletext, embedded data in an unused area of the screen. The idea was that broadcasters could signal the precise start & stop times of their shows, allowing PDC-enabled VCR's to adjust their timer-recordings appropriately.
Channel 4 was the only broadcaster to make a good attempt at PDC, and even then it was unreliable. There was a page on C4's Teletext service (p799 I think...) which let you view the PDC signal events in real-time. No idea if it's still working. Incidentally, Channel 4 were also the only broadcaster to implement PAL-Plus. The idea of PAL-Plus was to allow broadcasters to transmit shows in anamorphic widescreen, and the embedded P+ signal let a suitable TV automatically switch to the correct mode (adding vertical bars if the screen was 4:3, or leaving untouched if 16:9). All on standard analogue transmissions.
This was all a good decade or so before digital services made this sort of thing commonplace.
(who remembers playing Bamboozle on C4 teletext? Or what about Digitiser, the gaming and tech pages? Or, back in the early eighties, getting BBC Micro code from Ceefax? I gotta say, without the Beeb I wouldn't have ended up starting out in computing as early as I did)
Re:I don't think he worries about warranties
on
iMac G5 Porn Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Redundant? Not at all redundant.
Kodawarisan's a bona-fide loon - in the best possible way. He had a PowerBook 17" in pieces within a week or two of them being released.
And he doesn't do things by halves. He literally dismantles every single part that can possibly be dismantled. Proper hardcore hardware pr0n.
I can guarantee he drove his parents insane as a child. Every single Christmas present would be broken by New Year:)
I think it'd be a real benefit for massive amounts of RAM to be commonplace, even for the home user. It'd free up system designers to do things a little differently.
(please don't flame me for using the following as an example -- it's simply one system with which I'm familiar, and works in a way that would benefit from 'excessive' RAM)
OS X's document-centric approach to applications means that you rarely need to close programs. The only on-screen overhead a running app has over a closed app is a small black triangle below/beside the app's Dock icon. After working like this for a while, you forget what 'application startup-time' is. Apps become just another widget to click - a service of the system rather than a mental context-switch (if you catch my drift).
So, with oodles of RAM, your common apps and data are always a nanosecond or two away.
(incidentally, this is why my puny 500MHz G3 iMac is still usable. It's stacked up with RAM to the point that my apps rarely get closed and are available with only a smige of lag. Certainly not as quick as new machines, but with a perceived speed that belies the machine's actual power).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not excusing Apple's behaviour -- there's a whole heap of things that they've kept undocumented/private which annoy me in current versions of OS X.
However, my impression is that much of the video rendering systems within the OS have been in flux over the course of OS X's development. Remember, QuickDraw's still in active use. QD's really in need of replacement, and will be deprecated in Tiger.
From what I've seen, The Core[whatever] frameworks in Tiger will finally put this issue to bed, and provide all the APIs a developer could want... Quartz 2D Extreme looks like it'll round things out, with some nice things like full resolution-independence for each application individually.
For those who understand these things better than I, there's the WWDC's graphics 'State of the Union' presentation available here.
It's generally a nice look at how OS X's video architecture's finally coming together.
Indeed. What's worrying isn't that perfectly innocent user behaviour triggers detection. Rather, that string (or even filename pattern-matching) is a dumb way to detect.
Spyware makers will start (if they haven't already) randomizing the filenames, registry keys, etc. Then your anti-spyware software's gotta start doing what it should've in the first place -- something smart.
I guess I was trying to think about looking at the differences between Linux and Windows behind a veil of ignorance -- with no knowledge of how these two approaches would actually turn out in real life, no idea that one would end up a monopoly, or even any real detail on how these implementations would actually work out for the user.
My hypothetical Bill & Linus would talk about nothing more than the structure or architecture of their approaches. We, as the (again, hypothetical) knowledgable but independent participant get to think about which we like best.
I'd expect that we'd be able to pick apart Bill's plan much more than Linus's. Sure, IRL, neither guy had it all mapped out from the start. But in this imaginary world, they're describing Windows and Linux as they exist now, even though neither OS exists yet in this alternatice reality.
Isn't Bill's title 'Chief Software Architect' these days? I'd love to witness him and Linus discussing the finer points of OS design over a few beers. From what I (possibly mis-) understand about Bill's role in things, I'd imagine Linus could out-geek Bill any day of the week... so maybe Bill could be replaced by whoever is the OS uberfuhrer at MS.
Hell, let's throw Avie Tevanian in there too...
Hehe :-)
Nah, but seriously...
My answer's this little thought experiment:
Imagine there is no Windows yet, and there is no Linux either. You're sat in a bar with two guys called Bill and Linus. Bill looks kinda nervous, and Linus has an accent you can't quite place. But that's not important right now. All three of you know enough about programming practices and software design to be able to hold a decent conversation about it.
So anyway, after a few pints of beer, Linus and Bill go on to describe these great plans they have for an operating system. Linus proceeds to describe what we know as a modern Linux distro, and Bill goes into a load of detail about this thing he's planning on calling 'Windows', and describes the architecture of what we'd recognise as Windows 2000 or XP.
Now, whose ideas would sound better to you? Bill's or Linus's? I dunno about you, but I'd agree with Linus.
Sadly, RMS was unable to join the conversation. The doormen wouldn't let him into the bar in the first place. And Bill only bought drinks for himself.
I seem to have wandered OT... Apologies.
Ahhh... but you should hear it in its original Russian!
Good times, good times...
...and learning 6502 assembly in the evenings!
Seeing how fast you could go round a corner no-handed on our bikes... picking tighter & tighter corners until leg-shredding was the rule not the exception.
Picking scabs off your legs. I had one on my knee once that I swear was the exact shape of the British Isles. Complete with the Orkneys. Man, that one wept and bled for months.
Playing catch from the front garden to the back. Losing tennis balls in the gutter. Flicking ice cream at road signs...
Indeed.
I tend to work for a living so I can buy stuff. Occasionally, that 'stuff' includes an Apple product.
I don't really see what the problem is, especially considering this point wouldn't even be raised if I said I was spending a similar amount of money on nvidia's latest and greatest.
Very odd.
HL2 didn't appear because a bunch of guys sat at Valve for 5 years, ate pizza and thought really hard for a bit and went home each day whistling joyously.
Have you ever done any software development? It might not look like ploughing a field, building a skyscraper, or making a cake. But Jesus H. Christ there is so much labour being mixed in order to produce that product (to apply a little philosophy for a sec).
If you want their product, you compensate them for it. The commercial gaming industry asks for cash in return. F/OSS requires sharing of improvements as compensation.
HL2 isn't an ephemeral 'idea'. It's the product of an immense amount of toil. Go read a few of the hundreds of articles out there and get an idea of what's involved in producing a software product.
(n.b: I speak only for myself here): If the result of my labour is code, my ownership of that code should allow me to decide under what terms it should be distributed. That's my right. If I decide you can use my product for a fee, it's up to you to take me up on that offer.
Now, if you were to produce something of equivalent functionality yourself then that's great. I applaud your achievement. Shortly before seeing if there's something I can do to make my product better than yours. I wouldn't (and I believe *shouldn't*) start bitching about 'patent this' and 'intellectual property' that.
See the difference? Rationalise it all you want. A game like HL2 is a genuine product of labour. Not just some intellectual product.
Can't use Fast User Switching when acting as a domain client, sadly.
So it'd be a complete log-out for the active user.
Wouldn't that end up as Chinese Whispers? :-)
Funny, I read things the other way round...
;-). Besides, I also use Firefox on a 3 year old iMac (a whole 500MHz G3!) and it's certainly not deathly slow.
The platform's already there. They just used it to make a browser (and Thunderbird, each Suite component, Venkman, etc.)
XUL enabled Firefox to happen. Not the other way around.
Firefox wouldn't be the only thing that's deathly slow on a 3 year old machine
GPRS? 3G's better.
;)
I've been using GPRS for about a year (in the UK). It's handy for low-bandwidth stuff. Web browsing's nice with images disabled - email's also perfectly usable.
However, general-purpose 3G is great. Our company's got a few 3G cards on Orange (a UK network operator - related link), and the speed makes totally wireless, (almost) ubiquitous internet access a reality.
As for faster bluetooth: I use BT for device-to-device syncing. It's reassuring to know that my Mac, PC, PDA and mobile's data are synchronised fully with minimal intervention on my part. Additionally, it's good for peripherals (I love my Logitech Cordless Desktop MX), and for the occasional transfer of phonebook entries to friends (no more reading out and repeating) numbers. For how I use it, BT does the job just fine.
Range is acceptable for the purpose it serves too. Just enough to discover your mate's *somewhere* in the crowded pub because BT shows their phone
My iMac runs as a firewall/NAT system for my WLAN, in addition to day-to-day use. Has a VNC server running over the WLAN (through an SSH tunnel, naturally), and a few Samba shares also.
;))
Installed without a hitch, and everything's intact after the restart.
I'm yet to test a couple of things (printer, bluetooth), since I need to get a new USB cable for the Mac-to-USB Hub connection. My rabbit had a field day yesterday and gnawed the old cable. D'oh.
(it's true. Rabbits are evil. Especially red-eyed pure white albino freakazoids like mine. If she weren't so damn cute I'd have turned her into a tasty stew after I saw the damage
Umm... and how will walking through an RFID scanner with someone else's passport be prevented?
The photo's on the passport for a reason. RFID would be useless in the situation you describe.
All a would-be 'eeevil dooooeer' would have to do is mug some US traveller and saunter though. Because as you seem to suggest, anyone with a US passport is beyond reproach, right?
These 'Sony Centres' in the UK are franchise arrangements -- not run by Sony themselves. Basically, they're just resellers with rights to brand themselves under the Sony name, and with a unified look.
If this move by Sony involves establishing stores owned and controlled directly by themselves (a la Apple), there's going to be a lot of pissed-off franchise holders.
To my mind, there's a clear distinction.
Anti-virus protection & firewalling are what the OS should be doing in order to keep itself working -- like journalling helps keep filesystems consistent and working.
The apps people object to being bundled are additiona abilities, above and beyond what the OS needs to stay alive.
I don't want to have to hold my machine's hand just to keep it alive. I don't want to have to install and learn additional software to keep what I already have working.
I understand the need for software updates -- that's the nature of the software beast. What I object to is the stack of 3rd party subsciption software Windows makes me require just to stop it falling over.
(warning: the following comment may be regarded as OS X zealotry. It's not -- it's just a comparison between my two most-used systems - Windows and OS X).
I can take a new Mac out of the box, hook it up to the net, and just let Software Update do its thing however often it needs. I don't have to construct a safe environment -- it already seeks to give me that. Of course there's going to be vulns discovered. So I appreciate the work that OSS contributors and Apple put into securing network services across all supported platforms.
Chimpzilla... already taken. It's AMD:
Great Satan of Taperecorders, The: This describes AMD. Some years back, two staffers at The Register were astonished to find the PR flunky calmly switching on a tape recorder as we interviewed an executive at a very expensive restaurant. We started singing and refused to chat properly unless the machine was switched off. It was. AMD is also sometimes called Chimpzilla, after its CEO Jerry Sanders III compared his company to a chimpanzee and Intel to a gorilla.
c.f. Intel: Chipzilla.
The Quick Guide to The Register Jargon
Not gonna argue with your points... many of which are very valid.
But maybe a little tip you might find useful. If an app hangs and the menu's kaput, hit Cmd+Opt+Esc to bring up the Force Quit window.
Wait... Microsoft, the company, have produced this incredible view into the 'future' in an on-site 'demo' mock-up house?
Great for them. I'm hardly surprised that such a massive corporation has managed this feat.
And your argument is that because Steve Jobs personally hasn't invented this first, that somehow Apple (the company) is lagging?
Ohhhh kaaaay.
Good stuff.. glad it worked well for someone! :)
:) (and that's another point -- PDC, like Teletext, needs a good signal. It's quite possible to have a fine TV picture, but still get garbled teletext/intermittent PDC)
I haven't tried it recently. Digital satellite, with its plethora of timeslip channels and 'Second Chance Sundays' sorta sidelined my VCR quite a few years ago. And once I got a HD-based PVR and standalone DVD recorder (Sky+ and a Toshiba DR-1), VCRs with PDC have found their way into the attic.
I wouldn't be surprised if PDC is much more reliable these days. Having to provide EPG data for digital broadcasts has proably forced broadcasters to improve the IT side of their scheduling... and so maybe their PDC accuracy.
My analogue's from the Crystal Palace transmitter. If that VCR was still hooked up, I'd give PDC a try
IIRC, it wasn't Gemstar's VideoPlus+ system that caused that problem -- it was Programme Direct Control (PDC) signals.
VP+ was that system where a code was printed in TV listings magazines. You then entered that code into the remote of a VP+ capable VCR, and that code was translated into the channel, start and stop times for the programme to be recorded.
PDC, similar to Teletext, embedded data in an unused area of the screen. The idea was that broadcasters could signal the precise start & stop times of their shows, allowing PDC-enabled VCR's to adjust their timer-recordings appropriately.
Channel 4 was the only broadcaster to make a good attempt at PDC, and even then it was unreliable. There was a page on C4's Teletext service (p799 I think...) which let you view the PDC signal events in real-time. No idea if it's still working. Incidentally, Channel 4 were also the only broadcaster to implement PAL-Plus. The idea of PAL-Plus was to allow broadcasters to transmit shows in anamorphic widescreen, and the embedded P+ signal let a suitable TV automatically switch to the correct mode (adding vertical bars if the screen was 4:3, or leaving untouched if 16:9). All on standard analogue transmissions.
This was all a good decade or so before digital services made this sort of thing commonplace.
(who remembers playing Bamboozle on C4 teletext? Or what about Digitiser, the gaming and tech pages? Or, back in the early eighties, getting BBC Micro code from Ceefax? I gotta say, without the Beeb I wouldn't have ended up starting out in computing as early as I did)
Redundant? Not at all redundant.
:)
Kodawarisan's a bona-fide loon - in the best possible way. He had a PowerBook 17" in pieces within a week or two of them being released.
And he doesn't do things by halves. He literally dismantles every single part that can possibly be dismantled. Proper hardcore hardware pr0n.
I can guarantee he drove his parents insane as a child. Every single Christmas present would be broken by New Year
Never fear!
.mdb file :-)
Your votes will be safe.
Just so long as no-one holds the [Shift] key as they double-click the
Spot on.
I think it'd be a real benefit for massive amounts of RAM to be commonplace, even for the home user. It'd free up system designers to do things a little differently.
(please don't flame me for using the following as an example -- it's simply one system with which I'm familiar, and works in a way that would benefit from 'excessive' RAM)
OS X's document-centric approach to applications means that you rarely need to close programs. The only on-screen overhead a running app has over a closed app is a small black triangle below/beside the app's Dock icon. After working like this for a while, you forget what 'application startup-time' is. Apps become just another widget to click - a service of the system rather than a mental context-switch (if you catch my drift).
So, with oodles of RAM, your common apps and data are always a nanosecond or two away.
(incidentally, this is why my puny 500MHz G3 iMac is still usable. It's stacked up with RAM to the point that my apps rarely get closed and are available with only a smige of lag. Certainly not as quick as new machines, but with a perceived speed that belies the machine's actual power).
As long as it doesn't say:
REALITY.SYS not found. Universe halted.
'cos having that appear in place of every view of the outside world might cause a wave of terror.