You do make a fair point.. I recall Photoshop taking a year to port, however, as it turns out, the delay was because they used carbon instead of cocoa (I didn't realise it at the time though, because I only got into Apple coding a year later).However, you are possibly right that it was pretty close most of the time (except in cases of byte ordering probably, in which case additional work would have been needed, however, such changes could probably practically be done with temporary compatibility flags in the compiler during writes/reads to external outputs)
Computers for starters.. Long term, we can run Android apps on Intel computers at full speed. On Apple, that won't be possible without an emulator, recompile, or switching the computer to ARM.
Ah yes, the classic Fandroid response of "Just around the corner it's gonna get better!!!"
Apple's program execution is nothing special. ART eliminates the disadvantages of using portable code, and allows the execution system to be far more flexible than Apple's. Android is using a slower system at the moment, but, better solutions do take more effort (one giant leap for mankind).
99% of Android users don't install other ROMs on their phone.
Where'd you get that figure? Anyone who purchased the humble bundles did. Part of the Apple Store's intention is to actively block competitors. That is even dodgier when you consider that Apple has stolen products in the past (which, after doing so, they will be competing against you). Also, if the hacker community wasn't there, we would have no good way to make videos of the product we developed for iPhone (we tried a video camera, it was terrible).
That to get any visibility you have to go through Google Play which has many the same terms as the Apple App Store.
Humble bundle gets plenty of visibility, and its a separate system. Also,if you spend 2 months developing software, you WILL be able to run it on the platform ultimately. On the Apple App store, you basically need to discard or Cydia the software if it isn't approved.
Finally, in 2009, it was estimated that Cydia was installed by 10% of the iPhone userbase (could be biased, from the Cydia website). And so, their app's obviously do have PLENTY of visibility on iPhone. The fact though that Cydia constantly breaks though is "hostile" towards unapproved apps. It shouldn't be necessary.
You can't afford $99? For any decent programmer that's not even 3 hours of pay.
That's $99 without any guarantee you will ever be able to sell the software you are developing on another iPhone (unless you go to Cydia). That sounds fantastic! There are so many developers on Cydia, who have developed great Apps, that Apple has screwed. I'm sure many Cydia developers LOVE Apple as much as you do.
Then maybe they should have gotten their phone replaced or put it in a case? How is it Apple's fault that someone drops their phone and is dumb enough to cut themselves on the glass?
Why is it an airplane's company fault if a pilot accidentally hits the wrong button causing the plane to crash? In the Airplane industry, they call this "Human Factors". The glass backing is an inexcusably poor design. The guy who I saw was cut, was just picking up his dropped phone . Basically, if you drop it on its back, it is designed to shatter, and if you are lucky, there are sharp glass fragments on the ground for other people to step on. Apple must have known that making the back out of glass (instead of Plastic or other materials), but instead, they decided to use an extremely fragile material (obviously weighing up whether the Apple Fanbase would care or not), and they ignored human factors in the process of designing the phone (all for the interest of making a good looking phone).
It kind of is. Of course, this excludes the fact that Android Apps are actually portable (unlike iPhone apps), and ultimately, when Google implements ART instead of Dalvik, Android will be significantly more competitive in performance (these benchmarks don't test the hardware exclusively, but the software environment also).
We can also install other Android builds easily on the Nexus phones, and so are able to do things, which are impossible on Apple (without risking completely messing up the phone on upgrades, such as screen recording).
Long term, Android is a better solution, and is is a more open environment, is less hostile to develop for, and I've found that my Nexus 5 is so snappy anyway, that the speed is irrelevent at this time. And yes, I have 3 other people in the office who are iPhone fans and my Nexus 5 has helped convert 2 of them, who are sick of all the small annoyances by Apple, such as getting cut by the broken glass backing of their iPhone (and the fact that on HSDPA/Wifi iPads for a very long time, we found they kept prioritising the HSDPA, making it painful for automation).
If everyone brings a roll of tape, and tapes over all the cameras, no ads might be shown, and the system will become unprofitable very quickly. Hopefully the cams need to be close by...
It opens up the possibility of providing support for the kernel for sufficiently longer periods, and essentially, it could act as an LTS kernel for distributions. Linux is not that stable at this time, and the experience is still very much a hit or miss on systems. Whilst things are certainly better than they used to be, there are still many cases where I come across systems which should work, but don't (ie, they might stutter a lot, sometimes occasionally kernel panic or in one case, I suspected it lost data).
Furthermore, fixing some of these existing bugs may significantly aid Linux development further down the line (ie, fixing some bugs may actually eliminate many other intermittant ones unknowingly simultaneously)
The local police don't decide that (the local court does), and, you can have trouble proving sometimes that the action taken was appropriate (which is one reason why Australian Police no longer carry around guns, and they need to defend themselves against criminals far more than yourself). Even worse, in a lot of incidents, people may catch you off-guard (as they did one of my mates in China), and, if they see you have a gun when they are kicking you on the ground, they might pick it up and kill you with it.
There are plenty of equally effective alternatives out there, which eliminates these risks.
The problem is, how do you know that the people using weapons to defend aren't actually the type of people who may end up getting so angry that they use it in an offensive manner?
And, defensive weapons such as Capsicum spray and Tasers are far better defensive weapons with the additional benefit that it won't kill another person if a mistake is made. They are far better defensive weapons because they almost completely eliminate the risk of accidentally murdering an innocent person, and can still incapacitate an enemy. If you can explain some reasons why semi-automatic guns are more effective that non-lethal alternatives, then feel free to let me know.
It's one thing to defend yourself with a pistol. It's another proving that you were acting in self defense, and its another entirely different case to prove why it wasn't manslaughter. Gun's are an extremely risky option to use for defense.
Yes, but, it would have been much harder for him to find an assault rifle, and his mental health would have been possibly evaluated before he was provided with a rifle.
This is one case where Gun control laws would actually be highly beneficial, as nobody is allowed to bring a weapon into an airport, so the self defense argument falls apart.
Since we've had gun control laws here in AU, such events have become not-so-common
Not sure if it is a common issue, but I have an atheros wifi card in mine, and I always found routerOS to be terrible for Wifi performance (we were getting 2MB/s over Mikrotik in bridge mode on wifi, compared to a cheap TPLink which was giving us 12, and less dropouts). Sorry, I wouldn't recommend the Mikrotik for Wifi. The software is really cool though (and, it might be better for PTP than as an AP).
And, I wouldn't recommend a computer either (its a maintenance nightmare at the end. Its really cool having stuff like Etherape, but, in practice, a router is better). Honestly, unless you really need the management features, you'd be far better off getting a cheap router, and an AP..
One of the tests is related to rendering speed (#69) not design faults. That's because it wants the test to be completed fast enough to achieve 30fps.
Under system load, or browser load (such as extra stuff being done in the rendering thread whilst the test is running), a browser may not always pass this test. Whilst its an OK test, there will be no way to reliably pass it 100% of the time, and as CPU's become faster and more efficient, its likely browsers will pass eventually regardless of if they optimise their code or not.
Its also one example of why the ACID tests are quite overrated.
I meant Darwin, not OSX darwin...
OSX sits on top of darwin though..
If Windows can be an operating system, so can OSX. Explorer isn't just an application for accessing the rest of the operating system.
So Aqua and the libraries sitting on top of Darwin can be considered its own operating system.
And my point was, if it mattered so much, there would be a lot more developers hacking at the Darwin code and changing it.. There isn't.
It wouldn't make any sense for Microsoft to go open source at this time. Firstly, the only people who should care about open source should be developers. You hear a lot of people whining in linux about how everything should be open, but barely any supporters (companies and individuals alike) look at the code. And if people aren't going to modify or analyse the code, what's the point? Secondly, developers can already do everything they need to in windows without seeing the source code. What do you guys honestly think developers can add, that they can't now? Windows is quite extendible...
I think most people misunderstand the difference between freeware, and open source. Microsoft may possibly make windows much cheaper one day to eliminate the competition (Mark Shuttleworth himself said, its difficult to compete when windows is free). However, Microsoft has enough developers, they certainly don't need community help. I don't mean to call the author of this article an idiot per say, but he clearly doesn't understand the benefits/cons between open source and freeware. Windows is already extendible enough these days to not require it being open sourced.
Furthermore, OSX Darwin is open, and nobody cares! The only reason Apple cares about open source is because they essentially take a lot of code from the community, but give very little back.
Microsoft isn't going bankrupt anytime soon so its not as though you will be making a risk by purchasing windows, and be unable to maintain it in the future!
Theres very little reason people would need to look at the source code.. Must go Open Source?? HAHAHA. NO! There is little point, both for Microsoft and users. Maybe it will go freeware though...
I tend to agree.. The flight models on X-plane tend to be a lot better, but unfortunately, its plugin list is quite limited, and so is its graphics capabilities apparently:(
Also, in Australia at least, X-plane unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything to compete against Orbx's "Full Terrain X" except Auspak (which doesn't go far enough in my opinion for VFR flight). Its a pity, but I hope X-plane eventually does get a lot better, because it not only runs a lot smoother then FSX, but if you buy a copy, it runs on OSX, Linux and windows!
Yes, and you'd have to be an idiot to vote to make wayland the default X-server, when its not even ready to run Gnome.
The project could fail by the time its done, or a better one might arise in that time.
I strongly urge people NOT to vote for this! It would be a VERY silly move
I have found the ubuntu community does not want support for the latest hardware, which is something most people would want. I posted the following brainstorm ideas...
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3868/http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3932/http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3843/
At least one is a prerequisites to allow hardware companies to support their products "out of the box".. Yet, people are still making excuses.
Linux is a programming OS, because they don't understand that a good kernel lets you load external drivers. Every flamewar involves "oh it should be added to the kernel" in terms of drivers. What people fail to acknowledge is that it may be 6 months because the distro carries the new kernel on the install CD.
Oddly enough, Linux users get better wireless support by using ndiswrapper and windows drivers then Linux wireless drivers, because they don't need to recompile each driver every kernel upgrade, just ndiswrapper. For anything not in the kernel, you have to constantly recompile. Windows fixed this years ago
I've been waiting 3 months just for linux to support my computer (and some of the hardware isn't even that old). But now, I dunno if I can be bothered honestly
Yo dood, you do know I used to work at an Apple premium reseller right?:P Oh, and I'm a paid Apple developer.
You obviously dont understand english, because I specifically compared it to Default programs and settings in windows, which allows you to easily, without screwing with extensions, or going between apps to select them as default programs. What you are saying is you need to go program to program to select them as default for basic tasks!!!
And yes, Xcode is on the CD's, but then, Java is a year behind, you get NDA'ed for everything you do, so you cant discuss issues with Apple's API to anyone but other developers. Oh, and Apple don't want people to program for the latest and greatest, because unless you pay dearly, you just need to wait for the latest OS to break your APP, and then fix it. What I said is that everyone else provides a free beta to their new os shortly before release. Apple don't. Instead apple choose to disadvantage developers by charging them to release their programs at launch (its the reason why MYOB for instance wasn't fully compatible on launch).
And we aren't talking about ancient OS's. Why not bring up Qbasic while you are at it? They charged an enormous amount then too, because hardware was more expensive then, and there wasn't much sell through, its not these days, so there are less overheads designing OS's.
Yes, I know, I'm a developer, AND its a DEVELOPER PREVIEW!!! Means its not ready for prime time, only ADC members can install it and the general crowd cant utilise Java 6 features yet.
And it was now released over a year ago.
Furthermore, you wanna code Cocoa and use the latest features? You have to pay to get access to the latest Leopard builds (I paid that money, and have just handed away all my ADC assets actually). Microsoft released Vista as a public beta, and Linux is always a constant public beta.
Believe me, Apple is not a developer friendly company. Especially for anyone making hardware. Its why companies like Natural point (who make trackIR) will never make native OSX drivers.
PDF's aren't hard.. Just saying, there is no single program to do it. In windows you can just select default email client, default webbrowser, etc. In OSX, you gotta go mess around with dozens of file extensions, go in and out of programs to do it. Your average crowd wont know how (it was one of the most common questions I had while working in sales, and with email program for instance, for a lot of people, it didn't stick for some reason, and many programs used OSX mail still). So no, maybe not almost impossible, just painful to do, and not obvious.
This is new news?? You'll notice its almost impossible too, to replace apple programs to default to other ones. Microsoft has Default program settings, Apple has nothing.
Furthermore, Apple seems to want to cripple Java by maintaining only an old version, and have depreciated the Java-Cocoa bindings (or they may be gone by now) to try to force people to use Cocoa/Objective C instead it seems.
You cant use Dtrace on their own programs, they break drivers constantly which aren't their own (Look at all the M-Audio stuff, constant breakage).
Apple is no good, and I'm surprised this needed to make front page at all. It is old news!
Microsoft has not confirmed I think. Mary Jo Foley Confirmed, and shes barely creditable..
If you don't believe me, check her write up on WWDC. http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=505 , in which case, she obviously never researched the features properly, and obviously didn't bother to research them, even while doing a follow-up on it, because the forums were full..
I think she just spoke to some guy at Microsoft, they said "yeah, its pretty much the same", and she goes "yeah, they are the same, they just changed the version".
What you will notice, is that nowhere, has she actually done anything to research that (ie, no comparison shots of changed files). Don't trust any info on SP1 at the moment. All the leaks I've seen have been proven fake thus far (ie, modified refresh 2's where it was hexed, but they forgot to change all the versions, or just refresh 2). I've even heard some idiots who base whats real or not on the filename.
Either way, until someone official from microsoft on MSDN says it, I'm not going to bother even trying SP1, otherwise, you may be stuck with a beta which wont upgrade to SP2, and I suggest everyone else do the same. Its only 2 or 3 weeks now until we know for sure
If they add support for multiple href's in a a href tag, such as <a href="http://mirror1/..." a href="http://mirror2/...">Link</a> then it would open up the possibilities of doing P2P type webserving, as the users could run a program to announce the address of their computer to the webserver after they got the download, and the webserver could give each user a long list of a href's which the client could download simultaneously off a few for larger files. It would also make having a list of mirrors for a file easier to manage, instead of posting 30 links on a page.
It really is a simple problem to solve even now effortlessly, and its only a matter of time until browsers start adding support for such a mechanism.
Open proxies I meant, with 8080 open. 99% of people with 8080 open are generally dodgy. Most businesses would have no issue as they shouldn't have it open
Slashdot Mirror
You do make a fair point.. I recall Photoshop taking a year to port, however, as it turns out, the delay was because they used carbon instead of cocoa (I didn't realise it at the time though, because I only got into Apple coding a year later).However, you are possibly right that it was pretty close most of the time (except in cases of byte ordering probably, in which case additional work would have been needed, however, such changes could probably practically be done with temporary compatibility flags in the compiler during writes/reads to external outputs)
Portable to what exactly?
Computers for starters.. Long term, we can run Android apps on Intel computers at full speed. On Apple, that won't be possible without an emulator, recompile, or switching the computer to ARM.
Ah yes, the classic Fandroid response of "Just around the corner it's gonna get better!!!"
Apple's program execution is nothing special. ART eliminates the disadvantages of using portable code, and allows the execution system to be far more flexible than Apple's. Android is using a slower system at the moment, but, better solutions do take more effort (one giant leap for mankind).
99% of Android users don't install other ROMs on their phone.
Where'd you get that figure? Anyone who purchased the humble bundles did. Part of the Apple Store's intention is to actively block competitors. That is even dodgier when you consider that Apple has stolen products in the past (which, after doing so, they will be competing against you). Also, if the hacker community wasn't there, we would have no good way to make videos of the product we developed for iPhone (we tried a video camera, it was terrible).
That to get any visibility you have to go through Google Play which has many the same terms as the Apple App Store.
Humble bundle gets plenty of visibility, and its a separate system. Also,if you spend 2 months developing software, you WILL be able to run it on the platform ultimately. On the Apple App store, you basically need to discard or Cydia the software if it isn't approved.
Finally, in 2009, it was estimated that Cydia was installed by 10% of the iPhone userbase (could be biased, from the Cydia website). And so, their app's obviously do have PLENTY of visibility on iPhone. The fact though that Cydia constantly breaks though is "hostile" towards unapproved apps. It shouldn't be necessary.
You can't afford $99? For any decent programmer that's not even 3 hours of pay.
That's $99 without any guarantee you will ever be able to sell the software you are developing on another iPhone (unless you go to Cydia). That sounds fantastic! There are so many developers on Cydia, who have developed great Apps, that Apple has screwed. I'm sure many Cydia developers LOVE Apple as much as you do.
Then maybe they should have gotten their phone replaced or put it in a case? How is it Apple's fault that someone drops their phone and is dumb enough to cut themselves on the glass?
Why is it an airplane's company fault if a pilot accidentally hits the wrong button causing the plane to crash? In the Airplane industry, they call this "Human Factors". The glass backing is an inexcusably poor design. The guy who I saw was cut, was just picking up his dropped phone . Basically, if you drop it on its back, it is designed to shatter, and if you are lucky, there are sharp glass fragments on the ground for other people to step on. Apple must have known that making the back out of glass (instead of Plastic or other materials), but instead, they decided to use an extremely fragile material (obviously weighing up whether the Apple Fanbase would care or not), and they ignored human factors in the process of designing the phone (all for the interest of making a good looking phone).
It kind of is. Of course, this excludes the fact that Android Apps are actually portable (unlike iPhone apps), and ultimately, when Google implements ART instead of Dalvik, Android will be significantly more competitive in performance (these benchmarks don't test the hardware exclusively, but the software environment also).
We can also install other Android builds easily on the Nexus phones, and so are able to do things, which are impossible on Apple (without risking completely messing up the phone on upgrades, such as screen recording).
Long term, Android is a better solution, and is is a more open environment, is less hostile to develop for, and I've found that my Nexus 5 is so snappy anyway, that the speed is irrelevent at this time. And yes, I have 3 other people in the office who are iPhone fans and my Nexus 5 has helped convert 2 of them, who are sick of all the small annoyances by Apple, such as getting cut by the broken glass backing of their iPhone (and the fact that on HSDPA/Wifi iPads for a very long time, we found they kept prioritising the HSDPA, making it painful for automation).
If everyone brings a roll of tape, and tapes over all the cameras, no ads might be shown, and the system will become unprofitable very quickly. Hopefully the cams need to be close by...
I definitely hope 4.0 is a bug-fix only kernel..
It opens up the possibility of providing support for the kernel for sufficiently longer periods, and essentially, it could act as an LTS kernel for distributions. Linux is not that stable at this time, and the experience is still very much a hit or miss on systems. Whilst things are certainly better than they used to be, there are still many cases where I come across systems which should work, but don't (ie, they might stutter a lot, sometimes occasionally kernel panic or in one case, I suspected it lost data).
Furthermore, fixing some of these existing bugs may significantly aid Linux development further down the line (ie, fixing some bugs may actually eliminate many other intermittant ones unknowingly simultaneously)
This is a great idea.
The local police don't decide that (the local court does), and, you can have trouble proving sometimes that the action taken was appropriate (which is one reason why Australian Police no longer carry around guns, and they need to defend themselves against criminals far more than yourself). Even worse, in a lot of incidents, people may catch you off-guard (as they did one of my mates in China), and, if they see you have a gun when they are kicking you on the ground, they might pick it up and kill you with it.
There are plenty of equally effective alternatives out there, which eliminates these risks.
The problem is, how do you know that the people using weapons to defend aren't actually the type of people who may end up getting so angry that they use it in an offensive manner?
And, defensive weapons such as Capsicum spray and Tasers are far better defensive weapons with the additional benefit that it won't kill another person if a mistake is made. They are far better defensive weapons because they almost completely eliminate the risk of accidentally murdering an innocent person, and can still incapacitate an enemy. If you can explain some reasons why semi-automatic guns are more effective that non-lethal alternatives, then feel free to let me know.
It's one thing to defend yourself with a pistol. It's another proving that you were acting in self defense, and its another entirely different case to prove why it wasn't manslaughter. Gun's are an extremely risky option to use for defense.
Yes, but, it would have been much harder for him to find an assault rifle, and his mental health would have been possibly evaluated before he was provided with a rifle.
This is one case where Gun control laws would actually be highly beneficial, as nobody is allowed to bring a weapon into an airport, so the self defense argument falls apart.
Since we've had gun control laws here in AU, such events have become not-so-common
Not sure if it is a common issue, but I have an atheros wifi card in mine, and I always found routerOS to be terrible for Wifi performance (we were getting 2MB/s over Mikrotik in bridge mode on wifi, compared to a cheap TPLink which was giving us 12, and less dropouts). Sorry, I wouldn't recommend the Mikrotik for Wifi. The software is really cool though (and, it might be better for PTP than as an AP).
And, I wouldn't recommend a computer either (its a maintenance nightmare at the end. Its really cool having stuff like Etherape, but, in practice, a router is better). Honestly, unless you really need the management features, you'd be far better off getting a cheap router, and an AP..
One of the tests is related to rendering speed (#69) not design faults. That's because it wants the test to be completed fast enough to achieve 30fps.
Under system load, or browser load (such as extra stuff being done in the rendering thread whilst the test is running), a browser may not always pass this test. Whilst its an OK test, there will be no way to reliably pass it 100% of the time, and as CPU's become faster and more efficient, its likely browsers will pass eventually regardless of if they optimise their code or not.
Its also one example of why the ACID tests are quite overrated.
I meant Darwin, not OSX darwin... OSX sits on top of darwin though.. If Windows can be an operating system, so can OSX. Explorer isn't just an application for accessing the rest of the operating system. So Aqua and the libraries sitting on top of Darwin can be considered its own operating system. And my point was, if it mattered so much, there would be a lot more developers hacking at the Darwin code and changing it.. There isn't.
It wouldn't make any sense for Microsoft to go open source at this time. Firstly, the only people who should care about open source should be developers. You hear a lot of people whining in linux about how everything should be open, but barely any supporters (companies and individuals alike) look at the code. And if people aren't going to modify or analyse the code, what's the point? Secondly, developers can already do everything they need to in windows without seeing the source code. What do you guys honestly think developers can add, that they can't now? Windows is quite extendible...
I think most people misunderstand the difference between freeware, and open source. Microsoft may possibly make windows much cheaper one day to eliminate the competition (Mark Shuttleworth himself said, its difficult to compete when windows is free). However, Microsoft has enough developers, they certainly don't need community help. I don't mean to call the author of this article an idiot per say, but he clearly doesn't understand the benefits/cons between open source and freeware. Windows is already extendible enough these days to not require it being open sourced.
Furthermore, OSX Darwin is open, and nobody cares! The only reason Apple cares about open source is because they essentially take a lot of code from the community, but give very little back.
Microsoft isn't going bankrupt anytime soon so its not as though you will be making a risk by purchasing windows, and be unable to maintain it in the future!
Theres very little reason people would need to look at the source code.. Must go Open Source?? HAHAHA. NO! There is little point, both for Microsoft and users. Maybe it will go freeware though...
I tend to agree.. The flight models on X-plane tend to be a lot better, but unfortunately, its plugin list is quite limited, and so is its graphics capabilities apparently :(
Also, in Australia at least, X-plane unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything to compete against Orbx's "Full Terrain X" except Auspak (which doesn't go far enough in my opinion for VFR flight). Its a pity, but I hope X-plane eventually does get a lot better, because it not only runs a lot smoother then FSX, but if you buy a copy, it runs on OSX, Linux and windows!
Yes, and you'd have to be an idiot to vote to make wayland the default X-server, when its not even ready to run Gnome. The project could fail by the time its done, or a better one might arise in that time. I strongly urge people NOT to vote for this! It would be a VERY silly move
http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml?itemId=815327&Go.x=9&Go.y=6 I suggest every australian does this and complains
I have found the ubuntu community does not want support for the latest hardware, which is something most people would want. I posted the following brainstorm ideas... http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3868/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3932/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3843/ At least one is a prerequisites to allow hardware companies to support their products "out of the box".. Yet, people are still making excuses. Linux is a programming OS, because they don't understand that a good kernel lets you load external drivers. Every flamewar involves "oh it should be added to the kernel" in terms of drivers. What people fail to acknowledge is that it may be 6 months because the distro carries the new kernel on the install CD. Oddly enough, Linux users get better wireless support by using ndiswrapper and windows drivers then Linux wireless drivers, because they don't need to recompile each driver every kernel upgrade, just ndiswrapper. For anything not in the kernel, you have to constantly recompile. Windows fixed this years ago I've been waiting 3 months just for linux to support my computer (and some of the hardware isn't even that old). But now, I dunno if I can be bothered honestly
Yo dood, you do know I used to work at an Apple premium reseller right? :P Oh, and I'm a paid Apple developer.
You obviously dont understand english, because I specifically compared it to Default programs and settings in windows, which allows you to easily, without screwing with extensions, or going between apps to select them as default programs. What you are saying is you need to go program to program to select them as default for basic tasks!!!
And yes, Xcode is on the CD's, but then, Java is a year behind, you get NDA'ed for everything you do, so you cant discuss issues with Apple's API to anyone but other developers. Oh, and Apple don't want people to program for the latest and greatest, because unless you pay dearly, you just need to wait for the latest OS to break your APP, and then fix it. What I said is that everyone else provides a free beta to their new os shortly before release. Apple don't. Instead apple choose to disadvantage developers by charging them to release their programs at launch (its the reason why MYOB for instance wasn't fully compatible on launch).
And we aren't talking about ancient OS's. Why not bring up Qbasic while you are at it? They charged an enormous amount then too, because hardware was more expensive then, and there wasn't much sell through, its not these days, so there are less overheads designing OS's.
Yes, I know, I'm a developer, AND its a DEVELOPER PREVIEW!!! Means its not ready for prime time, only ADC members can install it and the general crowd cant utilise Java 6 features yet. And it was now released over a year ago. Furthermore, you wanna code Cocoa and use the latest features? You have to pay to get access to the latest Leopard builds (I paid that money, and have just handed away all my ADC assets actually). Microsoft released Vista as a public beta, and Linux is always a constant public beta. Believe me, Apple is not a developer friendly company. Especially for anyone making hardware. Its why companies like Natural point (who make trackIR) will never make native OSX drivers.
PDF's aren't hard.. Just saying, there is no single program to do it. In windows you can just select default email client, default webbrowser, etc. In OSX, you gotta go mess around with dozens of file extensions, go in and out of programs to do it. Your average crowd wont know how (it was one of the most common questions I had while working in sales, and with email program for instance, for a lot of people, it didn't stick for some reason, and many programs used OSX mail still). So no, maybe not almost impossible, just painful to do, and not obvious.
This is new news?? You'll notice its almost impossible too, to replace apple programs to default to other ones. Microsoft has Default program settings, Apple has nothing. Furthermore, Apple seems to want to cripple Java by maintaining only an old version, and have depreciated the Java-Cocoa bindings (or they may be gone by now) to try to force people to use Cocoa/Objective C instead it seems. You cant use Dtrace on their own programs, they break drivers constantly which aren't their own (Look at all the M-Audio stuff, constant breakage). Apple is no good, and I'm surprised this needed to make front page at all. It is old news!
Microsoft has not confirmed I think. Mary Jo Foley Confirmed, and shes barely creditable..
If you don't believe me, check her write up on WWDC. http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=505 , in which case, she obviously never researched the features properly, and obviously didn't bother to research them, even while doing a follow-up on it, because the forums were full..
I think she just spoke to some guy at Microsoft, they said "yeah, its pretty much the same", and she goes "yeah, they are the same, they just changed the version".
What you will notice, is that nowhere, has she actually done anything to research that (ie, no comparison shots of changed files). Don't trust any info on SP1 at the moment. All the leaks I've seen have been proven fake thus far (ie, modified refresh 2's where it was hexed, but they forgot to change all the versions, or just refresh 2). I've even heard some idiots who base whats real or not on the filename.
Either way, until someone official from microsoft on MSDN says it, I'm not going to bother even trying SP1, otherwise, you may be stuck with a beta which wont upgrade to SP2, and I suggest everyone else do the same. Its only 2 or 3 weeks now until we know for sure
So add a hash tag as well.. easy.. And both easily implemented
I actually proposed a very simple solution to this problem recently in my blog post http://auzy.blogspot.com/2006/02/auzys-technology- predictionswishlist.html
If they add support for multiple href's in a a href tag, such as <a href="http://mirror1/..." a href="http://mirror2/...">Link</a> then it would open up the possibilities of doing P2P type webserving, as the users could run a program to announce the address of their computer to the webserver after they got the download, and the webserver could give each user a long list of a href's which the client could download simultaneously off a few for larger files. It would also make having a list of mirrors for a file easier to manage, instead of posting 30 links on a page.
It really is a simple problem to solve even now effortlessly, and its only a matter of time until browsers start adding support for such a mechanism.
Open proxies I meant, with 8080 open. 99% of people with 8080 open are generally dodgy. Most businesses would have no issue as they shouldn't have it open