Nah. You'd still have to wait for all the video game companies, plus some other various and sundry franchises, to start writing their games for OS X. (That would be just as easy as porting to OS X/PPC.)
I think that the main things that keep Windows selling selling so well are Half-Life 2 and Microsoft Access.
And people who have a near-sexual fascination with big numbers followed by two-and-three-letter acronyms. Especially the ones who don't have a strong grasp on what those numbers do.
(Oh, and Linux people who buy Dells for some cokehead reason, but I like to pretend such things don't happen.)
Not sure anyone like Kinko's does this. If they do, the price for several thousand pages will almost certainly be greater than the cost of buying an auto-feed scanner.
I assume if you've collected that much research, you work for a university or some sort of research institution. My undergrad college of 1,100 students had like three of these, including one that was part of some ginormous Xerox do-everything-and-then-collate-and-bind-it-(if-you 're-printing, -of-course) machine that was sitting out so that anyone with a campus ID could use it. Maybe it's time to talk to the powers that be about buying some equipment?
Agreed. That, and it's really nothing new. There have always been classes of speech to which children are not privy. I'm sure plenty of states have similar restrictions on the sale of R-rated movies to children. And the Supreme Court has ruled that children leave their free speech at the door when they go to school.
Frankly, I can respect that. I think it's fair for parents to be allowed a chance to at least try to restrict their children's access to certain kinds of information.
(Though I gotta admit, there are some definite limits - I fully support gay kids getting a hold of support materials despite their phobe parents' wishes, for example - but I have no idea where exactly those limits are.)
Heh, doesn't everyone ignore those little speech bubbles? Windows spams me more than the v1@gr@ people.
My personal favorite: On a Windows XP box at work which has no USB2.0 bus that, I get a warning from Windows about having plugged a high-speed USB device into a low-speed USB port every time I plug my USB2 key in.
Come on, that's not helping me. That's just mocking me for not having the latest hardware.
Battle Arena Toshinden: Kind of klunky, too big on the supernatural moves. Check out Virtua Fighter or Tekken.
Ridge Racer: Four tracks. Really, four different paths around one track. Super-unrealistic controls. Easy. Done with it in a weekend. Why o why not Gran Turismo? It deserves two places in the list more than RR deserves one.
Jumping Flash: This game is simply awesome, especially considering how early in the PS1's life the game came out. It's too bad it didn't get more recognition.
And then there are some people who actually do like things like extra drive bays and PCI slots.
Of course, the number of those people who are also interested in getting a very cheap computer is so small as to be insignificant when pulled from Apple's already tiny market share.
All those late 80s macro viruses were a) the lurching, wheezing failed offspring of real viruses and b) for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SYSTEM.
There hasn't been a big OS X virus yet. It's coming, but I seriously doubt that there will be one as damaging as most Windows viruses anytime soon. Keep in mind that Windows is a line of OSes that at one time used 8-bit XOR for password encryption. Every virus that I've read about in detail has taken advantage of an obviously-placed gigantic red button labeled "0w|\| M3" such as the above.
So true. Having been a grader as an undergrad, I understand the attraction of Scantron-type systems. BUT I can also say that I don't remember nearly as much from the classes that used multiple-choice tests as I do from the classes that required you to actually show some command of the material.
It's a lot harder to grade, I realize, but the best tests in my opinion are the ones that have four essay questions, all of which require a great deal of thought on the part of the student.
Memorizing facts is nothing. If you can't use what you know, you haven't learned a thing.
I can't count the number of times I've gotten into discussions where another programmer made some boneheaded UI decision and wrote it into the program without consulting the people for whom he is writing the program, then comes and asks everyone what they think of it. He'll then proceed to whine about how long it will take to fix all the problems everyone has with simply figuring out how to work the damn thing, and tries to blame anyone but himself and make excuses.
Every programmer in the world needs to have a poster that says something to the effect of, "Are you writing this program to be used by people, or are you just banging on the keyboard aimlessly?"
Privitization did nothing to cause the problems in NO.
Nor did they do anything to alleviate the problem.
You sir have a very fucked up idea of what private companys are supposed to do.
I would suggest that it's a perfectly accurate idea of what private companies are supposed to do. They are supposed to make money. It isn't in their interest to provide transportation and shelter to people who don't have the means to evacuate themselves. In fact, it's generally in direct conflict with their entire reason for existing, especially for publicly-traded companies.
The whole point is that there are certain things which should not be privatized because privatization dramatically hinders (or prohibits) those things from being useful when they are most needed. A private "public" transportation system cannot be mobilized for a mass evacuation as easily as one that is under the direct control of the government. (Yeah yeah bureaucracy blah blah. I said "can not", not "is not.") If the interstate highway system were privately managed, it would not have all the features that make it so useful for national defense, because including those features increases the bottom line.
This is a government debacle, which is only being saved BECAUSE private companys are donating time and money before the government even spent a cent on relief efforts.
We've done well on disaster relief efforts in the past. Don't blame a debacle that is the direct result of the Bush administration and Congress mangling FEMA beyond all recognition, turning our entire homeland security system into a giant bureaucracy that can barely stand up under its own weight, and massively cutting our first response capabilities by cutting funding for everything disaster and emergency-related under the sun on the entire government in general.
This is the CURRENT government fucking up. If it were behaving as it should have, and as it has in the past, those private companies would have had their place, but they wouldn't have been there first because they couldn't have gotten there first - the National Guard would have been there from the beginning.
The keyword you're looking for are "ruggedized." If he's going to be in a really dusty place, you might want to look into getting one that's envrionmentally sealed, but those aren't the best things because they generally have very low-power CPUs, rubber chiclet keyboards, and the like in order to get rid of all openings in the case.
The only major consumer line I know of is Panasonic Toughbooks.
Nah, I agree. There are times when "Yes" and "No" are barely acceptable - namely, when you are asked a very short, simple question by the dialog. But really, if the whole point is to use your computer quickly, even a short dialog should avoid them. Why make the person read a sentence like "The action you are about to perform cannot be undone. Are you sure you want to do this?" in order to figure out what every dialog is for when you can give the familiar user a chance to do things so much more quickly by allowing him to read two buttons - "Delete" and "Cancel", "Delete" and "Don't Delete," something like that. If you are forcing the user to read the dialog in order to know the correct answer, you might as well have buttons labeled A, B, and C, and tell the user what each does in the dialog text.
That said, it's not enough. Prime example: In Quicken (2006 for Mac, anyway), if you are in the middle of the account creation wizard, and click the Cancel button, Quicken pops up a sheet with the usual "Are you sure you want to do this?" type question, and gives you the buttons "Cancel" and "Close." There are plenty of people out there (myself included) whose first instinct is to click the "Cancel" button because Cancel is the first button I clicked and Cancel is what I want to do. Of course, it's also the wrong answer.
True. But a lot of major projects are GPL, and I would guess that a lot of them may not be able to switch licenses due to copyright-segmentation issues. Even if they stick with older GPLs, they will take a hit due to the GPL earning a bad reputation.
At least it isn't definite. Personally, I think the FSF would do better to attack software patents by showing the absurdity of the thing by getting the whole FOSS community to mobilize on patenting everything under the sun.
Not only its largest corporate sponsor, but its main developer.
Also, the FSF would be making GNOME and Mono unusable by their largest coprorate sponsor and provider of development muscle, Novell.
This can't last long, but it sure can burn a lot of bridges in the process. This is either going to cripple the GNU project as many of its flagship projects are forced to leave the FSF in order to remain relevant, or it is going to cripple the entire open source community as it loses all its strongest supporters and ceases to remain relevant.
Agreed. As far as I'm concerned, word processors might as well be a dime a dozen. The office I work at doesn't subsist on memos that took ten minutes to write and fifteen minutes to beautify. It subsists on spreadsheets - and while I can't talk about 00.org 2.0 (We're stuck in NeoOffice-land, so we'll get to use a decent port of OO.o 2.0 in about seven years), I would be damn impressed if they got the spreadsheet app up to snuff as compared to Excel so quickly.
If they got the database app to the point of being a semi-resasonable replacement for Access, I'd probably be forced to stop clinging to the foolish belief that our universe behaves according to consistent physical laws.
. ..some stereo vision software. It just found the 3D coordinates of points in a pair of images taken from webcams. The lesson I learned? Ambitious projects make bad senior pojects. Choosing that project was probably the stupidest thing I've ever done, with the possible exception of picking up smoking.
I spent the whole year programming until 2 or 3AM every night, and then I'd get up at 6 or 7 the next morning. For a whole damn year. I still barely finished the project in time to graduate. If I hadn't had the wherewithall to make a schedule for the year and start staying up late the moment I realized how tight my very first deadline was, I probably wouldn't have had a chance.
The other kids who did boring crap (like tooling around with feedforward neural networks and producing graphs about convergence time versus various properties of the network's topology) graduated with good grades, too. And they slept more, didn't hate their lives, and got to go out drinking with their friends. Me? I pretty much wasted my entire senior year on that damn project.
Pick something that's not too ambitious. I recommend something that involves modifying existing software, and something that you can easily scale up should you prove to have more time to work on it. It's much harder to go the other way should you find you're running out of time, and there's no guarantee your professors will give you an "A for effort" should you fail to complete the project.
You should spend your senior year hanging out with your friends on the last year you'll all be together, not rotting in front of some computer terminal. You've got the rest of your life to make OCR software and write optimizing compilers and such.
Heh, except that the folks who are looking at buying laptops aren't paying attention to the things that will make a good ruggedized computer. They're looing for nice big megahertz numbers, they're wondering why they can't get PowerBook G5s, and they're thinking about how you can get more performance for your dollar on a PC than with a Mac.
Heh, those numbers aren't what I expected at all, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
The next numbers I'd want to see (and which I am again too lazy to look for) are how much of that 50% increase in desktop sales are due to the Mac Mini, which I am sure is not a candidate for a G5 CPU, either.
That said, I don't think Apple just waited too long. I have a feeling they've been working on the switch to x86 (at least as part of a contingency plan) since not long after the G5 came out at the latest. I'm sure craploads of non-Darwin OS X code needed to be modified, what with the switch from OpenFirmware to a BIOS and the endianness and all. The writing has probably been on the wall for anyone who is in the know on Apple's dealings with IBM and Motorola for quite some time.
Just like the z80 was all but dead when everyone quit making desktop computers that ran CP/M? I guess all those countless TI calculators, Game Boys, cell phones, and the like don't count. Come to think of it, I think I have 4 devices that use a z80 sitting on my desk right now. I bought two of them in the past year.
There are craploads of things out there that use PPC chips that are not Apple computers. It most certainly does have a lot of life left in it.
Probably more on the desperate side. Laptops are now slightly more than 50% of the market. I don't have any numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more for Macs, where you don't get people buying big gaming desktops and the cheapest desktop isn't less than half the price of the cheapest laptop.
The G5 is power-hungry, hot, and decidedly not suitable for mobile and low-power applications. It probably never will be, given how little pull Apple has with CPU manufacturers. And the G4 is more than ready for retirement.
Academic arguments on the relative advantages of PPC and x86 just don't play into the issue. If Apple wants to continue to sell computers, they really have no choice but to jump ship on PPC.
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Nah. You'd still have to wait for all the video game companies, plus some other various and sundry franchises, to start writing their games for OS X. (That would be just as easy as porting to OS X/PPC.)
I think that the main things that keep Windows selling selling so well are Half-Life 2 and Microsoft Access.
And people who have a near-sexual fascination with big numbers followed by two-and-three-letter acronyms. Especially the ones who don't have a strong grasp on what those numbers do.
(Oh, and Linux people who buy Dells for some cokehead reason, but I like to pretend such things don't happen.)
Not sure anyone like Kinko's does this. If they do, the price for several thousand pages will almost certainly be greater than the cost of buying an auto-feed scanner.
u 're-printing, -of-course) machine that was sitting out so that anyone with a campus ID could use it. Maybe it's time to talk to the powers that be about buying some equipment?
I assume if you've collected that much research, you work for a university or some sort of research institution. My undergrad college of 1,100 students had like three of these, including one that was part of some ginormous Xerox do-everything-and-then-collate-and-bind-it-(if-yo
Agreed. That, and it's really nothing new. There have always been classes of speech to which children are not privy. I'm sure plenty of states have similar restrictions on the sale of R-rated movies to children. And the Supreme Court has ruled that children leave their free speech at the door when they go to school.
Frankly, I can respect that. I think it's fair for parents to be allowed a chance to at least try to restrict their children's access to certain kinds of information.
(Though I gotta admit, there are some definite limits - I fully support gay kids getting a hold of support materials despite their phobe parents' wishes, for example - but I have no idea where exactly those limits are.)
Yeah, I'm sure those have all sorts of safeguards because, ya know, military organizations have always been careful to avoid leaking radiological material and other toxic agents into the environment .
In this case we have the earth releasing CO2 into the air, something we really don't have the means to stop.
Not true! This man has the solution.
Ignore that that. I suck.
Heh, doesn't everyone ignore those little speech bubbles? Windows spams me more than the v1@gr@ people.
My personal favorite: On a Windows XP box at work which has no USB2.0 bus that, I get a warning from Windows about having plugged a high-speed USB device into a low-speed USB port every time I plug my USB2 key in.
Come on, that's not helping me. That's just mocking me for not having the latest hardware.
Battle Arena Toshinden: Kind of klunky, too big on the supernatural moves. Check out Virtua Fighter or Tekken.
Ridge Racer: Four tracks. Really, four different paths around one track. Super-unrealistic controls. Easy. Done with it in a weekend. Why o why not Gran Turismo? It deserves two places in the list more than RR deserves one.
Jumping Flash: This game is simply awesome, especially considering how early in the PS1's life the game came out. It's too bad it didn't get more recognition.
Resident Evil: At least it was better than RE2.
Tomb Raider: Curvy polygons. Meh.
Crash: Agreed. Yum. Same for FFVII
Haven't played the rest. . .
And then there are some people who actually do like things like extra drive bays and PCI slots.
Of course, the number of those people who are also interested in getting a very cheap computer is so small as to be insignificant when pulled from Apple's already tiny market share.
All those late 80s macro viruses were a) the lurching, wheezing failed offspring of real viruses and b) for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SYSTEM.
There hasn't been a big OS X virus yet. It's coming, but I seriously doubt that there will be one as damaging as most Windows viruses anytime soon. Keep in mind that Windows is a line of OSes that at one time used 8-bit XOR for password encryption. Every virus that I've read about in detail has taken advantage of an obviously-placed gigantic red button labeled "0w|\| M3" such as the above.
So true. Having been a grader as an undergrad, I understand the attraction of Scantron-type systems. BUT I can also say that I don't remember nearly as much from the classes that used multiple-choice tests as I do from the classes that required you to actually show some command of the material.
It's a lot harder to grade, I realize, but the best tests in my opinion are the ones that have four essay questions, all of which require a great deal of thought on the part of the student.
Memorizing facts is nothing. If you can't use what you know, you haven't learned a thing.
It needs to be taught in schools.
I can't count the number of times I've gotten into discussions where another programmer made some boneheaded UI decision and wrote it into the program without consulting the people for whom he is writing the program, then comes and asks everyone what they think of it. He'll then proceed to whine about how long it will take to fix all the problems everyone has with simply figuring out how to work the damn thing, and tries to blame anyone but himself and make excuses.
Every programmer in the world needs to have a poster that says something to the effect of, "Are you writing this program to be used by people, or are you just banging on the keyboard aimlessly?"
Privitization did nothing to cause the problems in NO.
Nor did they do anything to alleviate the problem.
You sir have a very fucked up idea of what private companys are supposed to do.
I would suggest that it's a perfectly accurate idea of what private companies are supposed to do. They are supposed to make money. It isn't in their interest to provide transportation and shelter to people who don't have the means to evacuate themselves. In fact, it's generally in direct conflict with their entire reason for existing, especially for publicly-traded companies.
The whole point is that there are certain things which should not be privatized because privatization dramatically hinders (or prohibits) those things from being useful when they are most needed. A private "public" transportation system cannot be mobilized for a mass evacuation as easily as one that is under the direct control of the government. (Yeah yeah bureaucracy blah blah. I said "can not", not "is not.") If the interstate highway system were privately managed, it would not have all the features that make it so useful for national defense, because including those features increases the bottom line.
This is a government debacle, which is only being saved BECAUSE private companys are donating time and money before the government even spent a cent on relief efforts.
We've done well on disaster relief efforts in the past. Don't blame a debacle that is the direct result of the Bush administration and Congress mangling FEMA beyond all recognition, turning our entire homeland security system into a giant bureaucracy that can barely stand up under its own weight, and massively cutting our first response capabilities by cutting funding for everything disaster and emergency-related under the sun on the entire government in general.
This is the CURRENT government fucking up. If it were behaving as it should have, and as it has in the past, those private companies would have had their place, but they wouldn't have been there first because they couldn't have gotten there first - the National Guard would have been there from the beginning.
You lose sir, good bye.
Shut up.
The keyword you're looking for are "ruggedized." If he's going to be in a really dusty place, you might want to look into getting one that's envrionmentally sealed, but those aren't the best things because they generally have very low-power CPUs, rubber chiclet keyboards, and the like in order to get rid of all openings in the case.
The only major consumer line I know of is Panasonic Toughbooks.
Nah, I agree. There are times when "Yes" and "No" are barely acceptable - namely, when you are asked a very short, simple question by the dialog. But really, if the whole point is to use your computer quickly, even a short dialog should avoid them. Why make the person read a sentence like "The action you are about to perform cannot be undone. Are you sure you want to do this?" in order to figure out what every dialog is for when you can give the familiar user a chance to do things so much more quickly by allowing him to read two buttons - "Delete" and "Cancel", "Delete" and "Don't Delete," something like that. If you are forcing the user to read the dialog in order to know the correct answer, you might as well have buttons labeled A, B, and C, and tell the user what each does in the dialog text.
That said, it's not enough. Prime example: In Quicken (2006 for Mac, anyway), if you are in the middle of the account creation wizard, and click the Cancel button, Quicken pops up a sheet with the usual "Are you sure you want to do this?" type question, and gives you the buttons "Cancel" and "Close." There are plenty of people out there (myself included) whose first instinct is to click the "Cancel" button because Cancel is the first button I clicked and Cancel is what I want to do. Of course, it's also the wrong answer.
True. But a lot of major projects are GPL, and I would guess that a lot of them may not be able to switch licenses due to copyright-segmentation issues. Even if they stick with older GPLs, they will take a hit due to the GPL earning a bad reputation.
At least it isn't definite. Personally, I think the FSF would do better to attack software patents by showing the absurdity of the thing by getting the whole FOSS community to mobilize on patenting everything under the sun.
Not only its largest corporate sponsor, but its main developer.
Also, the FSF would be making GNOME and Mono unusable by their largest coprorate sponsor and provider of development muscle, Novell.
This can't last long, but it sure can burn a lot of bridges in the process. This is either going to cripple the GNU project as many of its flagship projects are forced to leave the FSF in order to remain relevant, or it is going to cripple the entire open source community as it loses all its strongest supporters and ceases to remain relevant.
Or heck, go all expensive and buy a folding bike, and keep it under your desk.
Agreed. As far as I'm concerned, word processors might as well be a dime a dozen. The office I work at doesn't subsist on memos that took ten minutes to write and fifteen minutes to beautify. It subsists on spreadsheets - and while I can't talk about 00.org 2.0 (We're stuck in NeoOffice-land, so we'll get to use a decent port of OO.o 2.0 in about seven years), I would be damn impressed if they got the spreadsheet app up to snuff as compared to Excel so quickly.
If they got the database app to the point of being a semi-resasonable replacement for Access, I'd probably be forced to stop clinging to the foolish belief that our universe behaves according to consistent physical laws.
. . .some stereo vision software. It just found the 3D coordinates of points in a pair of images taken from webcams. The lesson I learned? Ambitious projects make bad senior pojects. Choosing that project was probably the stupidest thing I've ever done, with the possible exception of picking up smoking.
I spent the whole year programming until 2 or 3AM every night, and then I'd get up at 6 or 7 the next morning. For a whole damn year. I still barely finished the project in time to graduate. If I hadn't had the wherewithall to make a schedule for the year and start staying up late the moment I realized how tight my very first deadline was, I probably wouldn't have had a chance.
The other kids who did boring crap (like tooling around with feedforward neural networks and producing graphs about convergence time versus various properties of the network's topology) graduated with good grades, too. And they slept more, didn't hate their lives, and got to go out drinking with their friends. Me? I pretty much wasted my entire senior year on that damn project.
Pick something that's not too ambitious. I recommend something that involves modifying existing software, and something that you can easily scale up should you prove to have more time to work on it. It's much harder to go the other way should you find you're running out of time, and there's no guarantee your professors will give you an "A for effort" should you fail to complete the project.
You should spend your senior year hanging out with your friends on the last year you'll all be together, not rotting in front of some computer terminal. You've got the rest of your life to make OCR software and write optimizing compilers and such.
Huh, Java wasn't the first to the game. Remember a little-known language called "interpreted?"
Java was just the first thing that made it feasible to do serious commercial, closed-source cross-platform development.
Heh, except that the folks who are looking at buying laptops aren't paying attention to the things that will make a good ruggedized computer. They're looing for nice big megahertz numbers, they're wondering why they can't get PowerBook G5s, and they're thinking about how you can get more performance for your dollar on a PC than with a Mac.
Heh, those numbers aren't what I expected at all, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
The next numbers I'd want to see (and which I am again too lazy to look for) are how much of that 50% increase in desktop sales are due to the Mac Mini, which I am sure is not a candidate for a G5 CPU, either.
That said, I don't think Apple just waited too long. I have a feeling they've been working on the switch to x86 (at least as part of a contingency plan) since not long after the G5 came out at the latest. I'm sure craploads of non-Darwin OS X code needed to be modified, what with the switch from OpenFirmware to a BIOS and the endianness and all. The writing has probably been on the wall for anyone who is in the know on Apple's dealings with IBM and Motorola for quite some time.
Just like the z80 was all but dead when everyone quit making desktop computers that ran CP/M? I guess all those countless TI calculators, Game Boys, cell phones, and the like don't count. Come to think of it, I think I have 4 devices that use a z80 sitting on my desk right now. I bought two of them in the past year.
There are craploads of things out there that use PPC chips that are not Apple computers. It most certainly does have a lot of life left in it.
So was Apples move speculative or desperate?
Probably more on the desperate side. Laptops are now slightly more than 50% of the market. I don't have any numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more for Macs, where you don't get people buying big gaming desktops and the cheapest desktop isn't less than half the price of the cheapest laptop.
The G5 is power-hungry, hot, and decidedly not suitable for mobile and low-power applications. It probably never will be, given how little pull Apple has with CPU manufacturers. And the G4 is more than ready for retirement.
Academic arguments on the relative advantages of PPC and x86 just don't play into the issue. If Apple wants to continue to sell computers, they really have no choice but to jump ship on PPC.