Apple has a long way to go with application support before they are going to be a huge option among corporate users.
In particular, there absolutely has to be some work put into either making Filemaker Pro into something more than a toy (Filemaker 7 was a huge step in the right direction, but there are still far too many simple things that are either impossible or a complete PITA in Filemaker) or work on coming out with something a bit more similar to Microsoft Access.
That said, Apple would do well to push itself at companies that have to do a lot of in-house development. It's true that they'd be up against massive existing codebases that would be incompatible, but good god is it easy to bang out applications with little to no effort using Cocoa.
With the new flash readers as stock on most new computers, these may be unpopular by next year.
Only among that miniscule segment of the population that only has to deal with computers made in the past year, year and a half and are only made by manufacturers that include a certain feature set.
But seeing as how a USB key is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a new computer or a flash drive for all my friends, I think I'll stick with that.
Seriously. When I was TAing the intro-level CS classes at my college, I'd say 30-50% of the freshmen in the CS program were dropping it by the end of the year. But those who were dropping it were generally the ones who had heard that you could get easy money in CS, and decided to get out once they discovered the program they had entered was going to require a lot of actual work.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ones who were once dropping it after a term are now simply not enrolling at all, because they've moved on to the next supposed "easy money" major. If this is the case, I would expect that the number of junior and senior level CS majors hasn't changed nearly as much.
I'd like to thank the team for it, too. After Myst III (which I finished in a weekend) and Myst Uru (a platform jumper!?), I was ready to turn my back on the Myst series forever.
I bought Myst IV in anticipation of a long business trip, and it turned out to be a very pleasant surprise.
Re:The days of myst are over
on
Myst IV Postmortem
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I doubt that they can, but I don't think that it is because of the graphics of the rest of the world catching up. The problem is that the entire culture of the gaming community has changed.
The best adventure games have always been an intellectual pursuit as much as they were a diversion - while a loosely-collected string of autonomous puzzles like The Seventh Guest tends to get boring rather quickly, a simple slideshow of pretty pictures isn't all that interesting, either.
But a game centered on difficult (often skull-crushing) puzzles has a necessarily slow pace. Most modern gamers, though, have been raised on video games that provide a large portion of their entertainment through a constant cycle of climax and denouement. My suggestion would be that if you've been raised on such a rapidly-paced form of entertainment, it becomes very difficult to remain immersed in a game whose challenge-reward cycle may be 100 times slower. It's the same with movies - most people I know who were raised on action movies tend to consider more slow-paced, thoughtful movies such as your average Orson Welles flick to be dreadfully boring.
I agree that Myst's success was largely due to its graphics, but the adventure game genre was dying out long before that.
I imagine the problem is because the OO.o binaries I downloaded were provided in the form of an application bundle, which isn't conducive to having a single executable that can varying runtime behaviors.
It would have been a lot better to provide the OO.o binaries as standard Unix-style executables stored at some standard place on the hard drive, and then provide a separate set of OSX-style apps that act as covers which just fire up X11 and then can send the proper command-line arguments to the OO.o executable or use the correct hard link or what have you.
But I suppose that just wouldn't be the Apple Way(TM).
What, has the world suddnely become a bizzaro parallel universe where it's impossible to componentize frameworks or use shared libraries?
Somebody better make sure that the operating system developers realize that they are all living in violation of the laws of nature, and make them quit before they destroy the fabric of space-time.
This is something that I agree that OO.o sorely needs. I imagine that many users find it particularly annoying that if they want to, say, create a new spreadsheet, they must launch OO.o, which puts them in Writer, then go to File->New Spreadsheet in order to get to Calc. Possibly it is different on other platforms - the OS X port is certainly messy in a lot of other ways - and possibly there is a way to create a set of executables that open different portions of OO.o, which is good. But it's the default behavior on my port, and it's nothing but asinine.
Normally I'm very dedicated to using OSS, and am willing to put up with a rough GUI and give a Free project some slack. But OO.o makes even Microsoft Office seem clean and intelligible, and that's frightening.
In a development culture where there is a very direct connection between loss of user base and loss of developer base, maybe the biggest thing that OO.o needs to do to attract developers is quit focusing so hard on creeping featurism and put some serious time into giving the interface a major overhaul.
It may be that a research shop that uses Macs could afford to do this, but considering that I've heard of research groups choosing Macs because they can be cheaper after you factor in the cost of custom software development, I doubt that that is necessarily the case.
Besides, you could probably pick up an eMachine or similar for less than the cost of a copy of VirtualPC and a copy of Windows.
I can't say I don't care about the inclusion of better search features in my desktop OS. I hate waiting for a long search on a huge hard drive, and I do use search rather often.
But I chose my OS for a lot of reasons that easily trump fast metadata searching, so this supposed "desktop search battle" doesn't really figure into my life at all.
Relativity is pretty much my basis for saying Slack is in decline.
When I started using Linux back in the mid-late '90s, Slackware was _THE_ distribution.
Nowadays, while Slackware is still going strong in its own right, but not too many people actually use it. I think I'm the only one I know who still does.
Linux may be a kernel, but linux distributions are operating systems.
It turns out that all the BSD babies have kernels as well.
Linux distributions can all run pretty much the same software, and in many ways all the major linux distros are far more similar to each other than the various BSDs are to each other.
I think what I'm trying to say is, I really have no idea what you're trying to get at, here.
The same thing that allows the OSS community to produce so much ground work so efficiently is what keeps many (most?) projects from becoming particularly polished. The great majority of OSS programmers like to just sit down and hack stuff out, and aren't particularly interested in the overhead and extra effort involved in maintaining a high degree of internal coordination and consistency. Plus, since most OSS developers are working on a volunteer basis, you can't really force anyone to conform to anyone else's standards.
I haven't been a member of the OSS community for very long - about a decade - but I get the impression that this is largely a fairly recent cultural development that coincides rather closely with the rise of Linux. If you look further back at older projects such as BSD Unix and XFree86, you may notice that there isn't nearly as much of this explosion of forks and competing projects. BSD only has five OSS offspring that I can think of - Free, Open, Net, Darwin, and Dragonfly. Of these, all have very different goals - FreeBSD is aimed at being a high performance Unix for commodity hardware. OpenBSD is designed to be rock-solid secure and stable. NetBSD is insanely portable. Darwin has its own kernel and is largely a move by Apple to get OSS help in developing its own operating system, and Dragonfly is aimed at scalability.
Compare this with the Linux community, where there are oodles of different distributions - many with only minor differences in architecture or philosophy - in a constant state of flux. Many of the Linux distributions that I have used as my primary OS over the years have all but disappeared (Yggdrasil), and many others appear to be in a state of rapid decline (Slackware).
Again, this is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, this culture leads to a tremendous amount of exploration and innovation - consider the plethora of package management philosophies you have to choose from in the linux world, or the huge pile of GUI toolkits available to software developers. On the other hand, this leads to a whole mess of duplicated (some would say wasted) effort - consider how many different packages of the same program many software projects have to maintain and how most major distributions roll their own packages of all the most popular software, or how you may find yourself installing several UI libraries (all of which, you must admit, mostly do the exact same thing) in order to use all the applications you want.
The projects that escape this - Mozilla, the Linux kernel, Mono, etc. - mostly do so because they get a lot of corporate backing, which provides a lot of paid developers and business discipline which can exert a degree of control over the swarm of amateur and hobbyist programmers who are constantly coming and going.
The most fun example of this in my experience is when I make a request for a feature or modification to the functionality of a program, and the programming staff (who, naturally, aren't the ones who are using the tools they produce day in and day out) dismiss the request without much discussion by claiming, in essence, that they know what's best and the users don't know what they want. It's not uncommon for this to take the form of them responding to a complaint about some aspect of the software that everyone who uses it finds infuriating with some permuntation of the classic, "That's a feature, not a bug."
(disclaimer - I should admit that my job responsibilities include a bit of programming and maintenance, and I can't claim to be innocent of having done this in the past, either.)
On the other hand, mocking a guy who has his own Linux distribution for saying one of the most boneheaded things imaginable about computer security in an interview is just giving him what he was asking for.
Most people don't even understand the concept of privileged vs. non-privileged accounts - keep in mind that this is a concept that was first introduced to the world of Windows only a few years ago, and even then Microsoft hasn't exactly tried very hard to explain to people what their Administrator account is. (And Mac OS does everything it can to hide root's existence.) And because of that, I don't make fun of normal folks who don't understand superuser accounts and how they relate to computer security. I try to explain the concept in the simplest terms possible, though I don't even try that very hard because I realize it's a fool's errand. (I can't even get people I know to quit running every random *.exe that's emailed to them.)
But when a modern geek, especially a linux gee, starts claiming that there's no reason to avoid doing everything as root, even if he is talking about desktop systems, I reserve the right to think he's an idiot, and say so.
I gotta say, I'm excited about that. My Mac's habit of automatically saving every PDF I view on the web to my desktop is just about as annoying as the 30 seconds I spend listening to the surface getting peeled off of all my hard disk platters by the Acrobat Reader plug-in every time I click a PDF link on Windows.
No kidding. I'm about to move to a new place, and I've been looking at how I'm going to get internet access. Personally, I don't want to pay for cable TV or land phone service, because I don't watch much TV and I already own a cellular phone.
Right now there doesn't seem to be anybody who offers naked service for either broadband internet access option. But if naked DSL were available in my area, and if it were even 10,15 bucks cheaper than a Cable/Internet "Value Pack", that would be what I choose, hands down. As it stands, though, if I get DSL, I also have to pay a bunch of money for what is effectively nothing - I have no use for a land line, and I probably would not plug a telephone in even if I did have a land line, because the only people who would be calling me on that phone are telemarketers.
As it stands, I am definitely going with cable because while cable TV isn't something I would otherwise pay for, it's at least something I would use.
(try including about a quarter of the game as content specifically for dead people)
This actually reminds me a bit of an old adventure game (sort of) called Cosmology of Kyoto. When you died, you'd get transported to other worlds (the different "hells and heavens" of the Japanese Buddhist cosmology - a different one depending on whether you've been a good boy lately), and you'd tool around there until you get killed somehow, then come back to the main world at some "respawn point."
It might be interesting to have a game that includes this, possibly with a concept of karma so that depending on whether you've been good or bad in your current life, you move up or down the cosmological ladder.
It would accomplish one of the goals of permadeath, which is to make death inconvenient. You wouldn't necessarily be able to get back to where you were after dying - you might move in teh wrong direction on your next death. So if a member of your party dies in the middle of a quest, you aren't going to be able to wait for that member ot respawn before you continue on that quest - the player is effectively out of the story.
I'm not sure how to get around the tendency this system would probably have to just completely destroy any sense of community that builds up among players - it might take a long time for someone to get back to the plane of existence his friends are on.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . is when I open a website in a new tab, and the site resizes my whole FireFox window.
All for a $@#% Flash site, too.
At least it doesn't use frames, I guess.
Apple has a long way to go with application support before they are going to be a huge option among corporate users.
In particular, there absolutely has to be some work put into either making Filemaker Pro into something more than a toy (Filemaker 7 was a huge step in the right direction, but there are still far too many simple things that are either impossible or a complete PITA in Filemaker) or work on coming out with something a bit more similar to Microsoft Access.
That said, Apple would do well to push itself at companies that have to do a lot of in-house development. It's true that they'd be up against massive existing codebases that would be incompatible, but good god is it easy to bang out applications with little to no effort using Cocoa.
Unless flash cards have suddenly magically become a heck of a lot larger than your average USB, I fail to see how that response at all relevant.
Except for my !$#@%^ Palm Tungsten.
What the hell is Palm thinking?
With the new flash readers as stock on most new computers, these may be unpopular by next year.
Only among that miniscule segment of the population that only has to deal with computers made in the past year, year and a half and are only made by manufacturers that include a certain feature set.
But seeing as how a USB key is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a new computer or a flash drive for all my friends, I think I'll stick with that.
Seriously. When I was TAing the intro-level CS classes at my college, I'd say 30-50% of the freshmen in the CS program were dropping it by the end of the year. But those who were dropping it were generally the ones who had heard that you could get easy money in CS, and decided to get out once they discovered the program they had entered was going to require a lot of actual work.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ones who were once dropping it after a term are now simply not enrolling at all, because they've moved on to the next supposed "easy money" major. If this is the case, I would expect that the number of junior and senior level CS majors hasn't changed nearly as much.
I'd like to thank the team for it, too. After Myst III (which I finished in a weekend) and Myst Uru (a platform jumper!?), I was ready to turn my back on the Myst series forever.
I bought Myst IV in anticipation of a long business trip, and it turned out to be a very pleasant surprise.
I doubt that they can, but I don't think that it is because of the graphics of the rest of the world catching up. The problem is that the entire culture of the gaming community has changed.
The best adventure games have always been an intellectual pursuit as much as they were a diversion - while a loosely-collected string of autonomous puzzles like The Seventh Guest tends to get boring rather quickly, a simple slideshow of pretty pictures isn't all that interesting, either.
But a game centered on difficult (often skull-crushing) puzzles has a necessarily slow pace. Most modern gamers, though, have been raised on video games that provide a large portion of their entertainment through a constant cycle of climax and denouement. My suggestion would be that if you've been raised on such a rapidly-paced form of entertainment, it becomes very difficult to remain immersed in a game whose challenge-reward cycle may be 100 times slower. It's the same with movies - most people I know who were raised on action movies tend to consider more slow-paced, thoughtful movies such as your average Orson Welles flick to be dreadfully boring.
I agree that Myst's success was largely due to its graphics, but the adventure game genre was dying out long before that.
Will the community fork OOo becuase of this? Maybe.
Maybe? It's already happened.
Hmm. . . I suspected that.
I imagine the problem is because the OO.o binaries I downloaded were provided in the form of an application bundle, which isn't conducive to having a single executable that can varying runtime behaviors.
It would have been a lot better to provide the OO.o binaries as standard Unix-style executables stored at some standard place on the hard drive, and then provide a separate set of OSX-style apps that act as covers which just fire up X11 and then can send the proper command-line arguments to the OO.o executable or use the correct hard link or what have you.
But I suppose that just wouldn't be the Apple Way(TM).
What, has the world suddnely become a bizzaro parallel universe where it's impossible to componentize frameworks or use shared libraries?
Somebody better make sure that the operating system developers realize that they are all living in violation of the laws of nature, and make them quit before they destroy the fabric of space-time.
This is something that I agree that OO.o sorely needs. I imagine that many users find it particularly annoying that if they want to, say, create a new spreadsheet, they must launch OO.o, which puts them in Writer, then go to File->New Spreadsheet in order to get to Calc. Possibly it is different on other platforms - the OS X port is certainly messy in a lot of other ways - and possibly there is a way to create a set of executables that open different portions of OO.o, which is good. But it's the default behavior on my port, and it's nothing but asinine.
Normally I'm very dedicated to using OSS, and am willing to put up with a rough GUI and give a Free project some slack. But OO.o makes even Microsoft Office seem clean and intelligible, and that's frightening.
In a development culture where there is a very direct connection between loss of user base and loss of developer base, maybe the biggest thing that OO.o needs to do to attract developers is quit focusing so hard on creeping featurism and put some serious time into giving the interface a major overhaul.
How many mod points can you milk out of this thread?
You, sir, have earned my deepest respect.
It may be that a research shop that uses Macs could afford to do this, but considering that I've heard of research groups choosing Macs because they can be cheaper after you factor in the cost of custom software development, I doubt that that is necessarily the case.
Besides, you could probably pick up an eMachine or similar for less than the cost of a copy of VirtualPC and a copy of Windows.
I can't say I don't care about the inclusion of better search features in my desktop OS. I hate waiting for a long search on a huge hard drive, and I do use search rather often.
But I chose my OS for a lot of reasons that easily trump fast metadata searching, so this supposed "desktop search battle" doesn't really figure into my life at all.
Relativity is pretty much my basis for saying Slack is in decline.
When I started using Linux back in the mid-late '90s, Slackware was _THE_ distribution.
Nowadays, while Slackware is still going strong in its own right, but not too many people actually use it. I think I'm the only one I know who still does.
Linux may be a kernel, but linux distributions are operating systems.
It turns out that all the BSD babies have kernels as well.
Linux distributions can all run pretty much the same software, and in many ways all the major linux distros are far more similar to each other than the various BSDs are to each other.
I think what I'm trying to say is, I really have no idea what you're trying to get at, here.
I think that, for some of us, it would help OO.o's native files weren't such bloat-monsters.
The same thing that allows the OSS community to produce so much ground work so efficiently is what keeps many (most?) projects from becoming particularly polished. The great majority of OSS programmers like to just sit down and hack stuff out, and aren't particularly interested in the overhead and extra effort involved in maintaining a high degree of internal coordination and consistency. Plus, since most OSS developers are working on a volunteer basis, you can't really force anyone to conform to anyone else's standards.
I haven't been a member of the OSS community for very long - about a decade - but I get the impression that this is largely a fairly recent cultural development that coincides rather closely with the rise of Linux. If you look further back at older projects such as BSD Unix and XFree86, you may notice that there isn't nearly as much of this explosion of forks and competing projects. BSD only has five OSS offspring that I can think of - Free, Open, Net, Darwin, and Dragonfly. Of these, all have very different goals - FreeBSD is aimed at being a high performance Unix for commodity hardware. OpenBSD is designed to be rock-solid secure and stable. NetBSD is insanely portable. Darwin has its own kernel and is largely a move by Apple to get OSS help in developing its own operating system, and Dragonfly is aimed at scalability.
Compare this with the Linux community, where there are oodles of different distributions - many with only minor differences in architecture or philosophy - in a constant state of flux. Many of the Linux distributions that I have used as my primary OS over the years have all but disappeared (Yggdrasil), and many others appear to be in a state of rapid decline (Slackware).
Again, this is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, this culture leads to a tremendous amount of exploration and innovation - consider the plethora of package management philosophies you have to choose from in the linux world, or the huge pile of GUI toolkits available to software developers. On the other hand, this leads to a whole mess of duplicated (some would say wasted) effort - consider how many different packages of the same program many software projects have to maintain and how most major distributions roll their own packages of all the most popular software, or how you may find yourself installing several UI libraries (all of which, you must admit, mostly do the exact same thing) in order to use all the applications you want.
The projects that escape this - Mozilla, the Linux kernel, Mono, etc. - mostly do so because they get a lot of corporate backing, which provides a lot of paid developers and business discipline which can exert a degree of control over the swarm of amateur and hobbyist programmers who are constantly coming and going.
The most fun example of this in my experience is when I make a request for a feature or modification to the functionality of a program, and the programming staff (who, naturally, aren't the ones who are using the tools they produce day in and day out) dismiss the request without much discussion by claiming, in essence, that they know what's best and the users don't know what they want. It's not uncommon for this to take the form of them responding to a complaint about some aspect of the software that everyone who uses it finds infuriating with some permuntation of the classic, "That's a feature, not a bug."
(disclaimer - I should admit that my job responsibilities include a bit of programming and maintenance, and I can't claim to be innocent of having done this in the past, either.)
It says clearly in the synopsis on the main page that this tariff is on music downloaded from vendors like the iTunes music store.
On the other hand, mocking a guy who has his own Linux distribution for saying one of the most boneheaded things imaginable about computer security in an interview is just giving him what he was asking for.
Most people don't even understand the concept of privileged vs. non-privileged accounts - keep in mind that this is a concept that was first introduced to the world of Windows only a few years ago, and even then Microsoft hasn't exactly tried very hard to explain to people what their Administrator account is. (And Mac OS does everything it can to hide root's existence.) And because of that, I don't make fun of normal folks who don't understand superuser accounts and how they relate to computer security. I try to explain the concept in the simplest terms possible, though I don't even try that very hard because I realize it's a fool's errand. (I can't even get people I know to quit running every random *.exe that's emailed to them.)
But when a modern geek, especially a linux gee, starts claiming that there's no reason to avoid doing everything as root, even if he is talking about desktop systems, I reserve the right to think he's an idiot, and say so.
I gotta say, I'm excited about that. My Mac's habit of automatically saving every PDF I view on the web to my desktop is just about as annoying as the 30 seconds I spend listening to the surface getting peeled off of all my hard disk platters by the Acrobat Reader plug-in every time I click a PDF link on Windows.
No kidding. I'm about to move to a new place, and I've been looking at how I'm going to get internet access. Personally, I don't want to pay for cable TV or land phone service, because I don't watch much TV and I already own a cellular phone.
Right now there doesn't seem to be anybody who offers naked service for either broadband internet access option. But if naked DSL were available in my area, and if it were even 10,15 bucks cheaper than a Cable/Internet "Value Pack", that would be what I choose, hands down. As it stands, though, if I get DSL, I also have to pay a bunch of money for what is effectively nothing - I have no use for a land line, and I probably would not plug a telephone in even if I did have a land line, because the only people who would be calling me on that phone are telemarketers.
As it stands, I am definitely going with cable because while cable TV isn't something I would otherwise pay for, it's at least something I would use.
(try including about a quarter of the game as content specifically for dead people)
This actually reminds me a bit of an old adventure game (sort of) called Cosmology of Kyoto. When you died, you'd get transported to other worlds (the different "hells and heavens" of the Japanese Buddhist cosmology - a different one depending on whether you've been a good boy lately), and you'd tool around there until you get killed somehow, then come back to the main world at some "respawn point."
It might be interesting to have a game that includes this, possibly with a concept of karma so that depending on whether you've been good or bad in your current life, you move up or down the cosmological ladder.
It would accomplish one of the goals of permadeath, which is to make death inconvenient. You wouldn't necessarily be able to get back to where you were after dying - you might move in teh wrong direction on your next death. So if a member of your party dies in the middle of a quest, you aren't going to be able to wait for that member ot respawn before you continue on that quest - the player is effectively out of the story.
I'm not sure how to get around the tendency this system would probably have to just completely destroy any sense of community that builds up among players - it might take a long time for someone to get back to the plane of existence his friends are on.