Launching a new telescope has no risks? I suppose then instead of fixing bugs in applications we should just rewrite them completely. After all, nothing EVER goes wrong in a newly designed system.
Meanwhile, as many people have said, the James Webb telescope is the closest to being launched, and it won't show up until well after Hubble is dead. Even so, it is designed to "see" a completely different set of the spectrum than Hubble, so it's not a replacement at all, more of a supplement.
Bush 2004 - Limiting intelligence in any way possible.
Would it be possible to ask the user to insert the proper CD, and then just run the command-line version of installer.app to install it transparently? Or distribute your app in a metapackage, one of its dependencies being the X11 package on the CD? It still requires inserting the CD, but it would be more seamless.
Not going to defend Nicholas, but it is certainly the case that better APIs that are highly parallel can be provided by the OS for graphics and AI operations. After all, that's where the bulk of processing time goes in modern games. A lot of work will still be required on the developer's part, but I can see a good chunk bein abstraced behind an API layer.
Once again, the skillful troll peppers some positive comments with bullshit and gets modded "Interesting".
Apple has always dressed up average, underpowered personal computer components, slapped a white case around them, dropped a proprietary OS on them and sold them at three times the price to people who'll gladly pay three times the price for a computer because it's from Apple and it's "Blueberry" or whatever fruit flavour is popular.
Troll. Plain and simple. People are rational, and use Macs for the OS and overall quality. It has always been that way. When we briefly had clones, people bought them in droves because they still got the "It Just Works (tm)" Mac OS. Personally, I bought an Apple-made 7500 at that time because the industrial design on that thing was great for getting inside and working on in/upgrading. These days they buy Macs because they still just work, and provide an extremely balanced system (Firewire/USB2 on all models, 100baseT or Gigabit Ethernet on all models, etc) and are very solidly built.
I need computational power and flexibility with my desktop (I want the choice between *nix and Windows, something an Apple can't provide).
Troll. The whole point of Mac OS X is that you marry UNIX power with desktop usability and apps, and in terms of power you get what you pay for. In $500, you're not getting much (relatively speaking) from either a PC or a Mac. If you want to spend more, you can build a top-flight supercomputer.
The one thing OS X fails at is games. You said that, and I grant that you won't buy a Mac for that reason. Fine. However, computational power and flexibility is Apple's forte.
All they had to do was add a TOSLINK/spdif audio out + s-video for the hi-fi enthusiasts and they would *KILL* the home theatre market...and it could use an imbedded HDTV tuner
Not troll, just... odd. While people have speculated on these lines, so far you haven't mentioned audio/video IN, which is just as necessary for the home theater market. That said, third parties have already stepped up (El Gato).
with the CPU apple put in it, it's only good for video playback or web browsing or little functions like that. Unfortunately, there might not be enough CPU for on the fly video encoding
WTF? I guess people weren't doing video encoding or anything but "little tasks" a couple years ago. This is equivalent to Apple's top-of-the-line G4's before the G5 arrived (Mirrored Drive Door maxed out at 1.42Ghz, same as the Mac Mini), with a slower I/O subsystem. And it's only $500 and tiny. This has plenty of horsepower for anything you want to do with it.
However, the GUI Scripting framework helps to patch over some of the missing apps and such. I've successfully (although far from easily) used it to script Photoshop Elements and automate tasks.
I'm sure many people have hit this already, but Mac OS X natively supports scroll wheels as part of the USB HID specification. Plug it in, it works - no drivers. You can actually thank Intel and the USB group for that - Apple just implemented it.
I'm hard-pressed to think of any specific app that doesn't respect it (whereas I have several on my Windows box that don't - Visual Basic 6 and Lotus Notes come instantly to mind).
I would argue that ongoing support will be much more time-consuming than with a prebought system. Not to mention that any PC will be running either Windows or Linux, which no matter how you slice it is more difficult than maintaining Mac OS X.
The Mac Mini already has a built-in V92 modem, built-in video out (VGA, DVI, composite, and S-Video), built-in wireless, and built-in bluetooth (the latter two are options, but I'd certainly recommend them). As for video-in, as many others have pointed out El Gato systems makes a whole series of USB 2.0-based video-in solutions for not much money.
So, you can have everything you just mentioned, and be using just one of your USB ports.
Check the specs - Macs have traditionally put a LOT of functionality on the motherboard. Sometimes for better (ethernet for the last 15 years, recently firewire, USB2, DVI), sometimes for the worse (ADC, subpar sound output until quite recently).
Re:That little WiFi board connector
on
Mac mini Dissection
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Bluetooth module I'm unsure of, but the Airport Extreme is a mini-PCI slot, so it is a standard, although a rarely seen one. Apple sells Airport Extreme cards in their store, but I doubt you'll find a third-party one; certainly not one that will work with Apple's drivers.
This is one of those areas where it makes sense to just go ahead and buy it up front, deal with the financial squeeze for a short while, and reap the benefits for however many years you have it.
If you haven't noticed, they DO say "fuck it" and use Microsoft Office, that is, if they notice you exist at all. I thought this was about providing a usable free alternative to Office? If you want to scrap a platform, go right ahead - you just ceded that to Microsoft.
In the greatest of ironies, Microsoft's Mac business unit has been well known for many years for putting a huge amount of Mac-specific polish and features into their apps, frequently adding features not found in the Windows version. And the Open Source's answer to this is "you don't like it, fuck off"? Gee, I wonder who people will support.
Firefox is a great example of polishing a port to be "native enough" - it uses proper keybindings, menu structure, and integrates with key OS features. It *feels* like a Mac application, although it shows its heritage at a few minor seams. Meanwhile, OpenOffice requires running in a completely foreign environment with a relatively bizarre interface. Yeah, you're going to convert a lot of people with that...
Nevermind this was shown as part of the never-finished Copland from 1994. Back then they called it "saved searches", and it was supposed to be powered by V-Twin, what then became Sherlock, which then just became "Find".
What I always find amazing is Apple previewed a lot of good ideas with Copland, and has taken forever to get it to market, largely based on the hell going on in the company in those early years. Instead of Microsoft and others copying what was released, why not pull a lot of the ideas and such from the Copland demos and actually beat Apple to the punch once in a while?
Quick is relative. In my case, it takes an hour or two, but compresses a 3GB partition down to 500MB. I don't have the money for a nice 500GB drive, but I can run it overnight quite easily.
mount -t smbfs -o username:password \\10.0.1.111\backup/mnt/backup cd/mnt/drive tar -cvjf/mnt/backup.
(If I recall the commands correctly.) I use this all the time to make quick snapshots of my Gentoo installation before emerging some bleeding edge package.
Ahem, has someone forgotten the reason for the antitrust suit? Anti-competitive tying and such? Have you forgotten the conviction? And then, just as the punishment phase was to begin, a new administration came in and told the DOJ "drop it".
Your other points are valid, but this was very obviously a political decision to drop the punishment of illegal use of monopoly power.
Sure. Just tell me how I can get the music I legally purchased licenses for at iTunes converted over to any other music store, and I'll cease using iTunes.
Burn. Rip. Done. Now tell me how to do the same with WMA, with its varying DRM permissions - sometimes that will work, sometimes it won't.
The only difference is Microsoft has licensed WMA more widely than Apple has licensed FairPlay (Motorola), yet Apple has been more successful with their product than Microsoft.
You mean like you can with iTunes by burning/ripping a CD? Either way you're transcoding.
Get off your high horse about this people. For legal downloadable music, DRM is entrenched and here to stay. I say be glad that the dominant form is this lenient and easily "breakable". This guy truly had NO CHOICE whatsoever in the matter. He really couldn't do ANYTHING but purchase an iPod. People truly make me sick sometimes...
That ignores the fact that in "emergency" situations (wars, disasters, media-hyped psuedo-disasters), people spend more than they otherwise would have. Sure, they would have spent a good amount of that anyway, but they also tend to spend a fair chunk of change that they would otherwise have saved. In macroeconomics, personal savings is actually a "bad" thing.
For example, if you just had your house wiped out in a hurricane, you try telling me you're going to spend the same amount that month that you would have otherwise spent. Likewise, in a real war, the sense of urgency of fighting and winning lends itself to a "damn the budgets, full spend ahead" kind of attitude. More money is spent, said money circulates, and the economy rises (for example, our entry into WWII pulling us out of the Depression).
...not because of it's syntax (perish the thought!) or even because of its RAD capabilities (many development environments have caught up there now). No, it survives and flourishes because thousands of third party developers write add-ons for it. You can go into a project knowing that pretty much any damn thing you need, whether it's interface, backend, etc, has already been written. Furthermore, VB is able to easily interact with other applications, making it great for automation and data extraction/processing.
Gambas does look like a great IDE, but it has no chance of displacing VB.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you misunderstand, have the installer for OpenOffice run the command itself. No need for the user to even know it's happening.
Launching a new telescope has no risks? I suppose then instead of fixing bugs in applications we should just rewrite them completely. After all, nothing EVER goes wrong in a newly designed system.
Meanwhile, as many people have said, the James Webb telescope is the closest to being launched, and it won't show up until well after Hubble is dead. Even so, it is designed to "see" a completely different set of the spectrum than Hubble, so it's not a replacement at all, more of a supplement.
Bush 2004 - Limiting intelligence in any way possible.
Would it be possible to ask the user to insert the proper CD, and then just run the command-line version of installer.app to install it transparently? Or distribute your app in a metapackage, one of its dependencies being the X11 package on the CD? It still requires inserting the CD, but it would be more seamless.
Just a thought.
Not going to defend Nicholas, but it is certainly the case that better APIs that are highly parallel can be provided by the OS for graphics and AI operations. After all, that's where the bulk of processing time goes in modern games. A lot of work will still be required on the developer's part, but I can see a good chunk bein abstraced behind an API layer.
However, most graphics and AI problems are highly parallel in nature, which is exactly where video games are going.
Once again, the skillful troll peppers some positive comments with bullshit and gets modded "Interesting".
Apple has always dressed up average, underpowered personal computer components, slapped a white case around them, dropped a proprietary OS on them and sold them at three times the price to people who'll gladly pay three times the price for a computer because it's from Apple and it's "Blueberry" or whatever fruit flavour is popular.
Troll. Plain and simple. People are rational, and use Macs for the OS and overall quality. It has always been that way. When we briefly had clones, people bought them in droves because they still got the "It Just Works (tm)" Mac OS. Personally, I bought an Apple-made 7500 at that time because the industrial design on that thing was great for getting inside and working on in/upgrading. These days they buy Macs because they still just work, and provide an extremely balanced system (Firewire/USB2 on all models, 100baseT or Gigabit Ethernet on all models, etc) and are very solidly built.
I need computational power and flexibility with my desktop (I want the choice between *nix and Windows, something an Apple can't provide).
Troll. The whole point of Mac OS X is that you marry UNIX power with desktop usability and apps, and in terms of power you get what you pay for. In $500, you're not getting much (relatively speaking) from either a PC or a Mac. If you want to spend more, you can build a top-flight supercomputer.
The one thing OS X fails at is games. You said that, and I grant that you won't buy a Mac for that reason. Fine. However, computational power and flexibility is Apple's forte.
All they had to do was add a TOSLINK/spdif audio out + s-video for the hi-fi enthusiasts and they would *KILL* the home theatre market...and it could use an imbedded HDTV tuner
Not troll, just... odd. While people have speculated on these lines, so far you haven't mentioned audio/video IN, which is just as necessary for the home theater market. That said, third parties have already stepped up (El Gato).
with the CPU apple put in it, it's only good for video playback or web browsing or little functions like that. Unfortunately, there might not be enough CPU for on the fly video encoding
WTF? I guess people weren't doing video encoding or anything but "little tasks" a couple years ago. This is equivalent to Apple's top-of-the-line G4's before the G5 arrived (Mirrored Drive Door maxed out at 1.42Ghz, same as the Mac Mini), with a slower I/O subsystem. And it's only $500 and tiny. This has plenty of horsepower for anything you want to do with it.
However, the GUI Scripting framework helps to patch over some of the missing apps and such. I've successfully (although far from easily) used it to script Photoshop Elements and automate tasks.
I'm sure many people have hit this already, but Mac OS X natively supports scroll wheels as part of the USB HID specification. Plug it in, it works - no drivers. You can actually thank Intel and the USB group for that - Apple just implemented it.
I'm hard-pressed to think of any specific app that doesn't respect it (whereas I have several on my Windows box that don't - Visual Basic 6 and Lotus Notes come instantly to mind).
Not to split hairs, but I'll place bets that 1.5Ghz is not a hard limit, and it would run on the Mac Mini without complaint.
Whether it would run acceptably is obviously another issue, but I doubt that extra 80Mhz is going to make a hell of a lot of difference.
I would argue that ongoing support will be much more time-consuming than with a prebought system. Not to mention that any PC will be running either Windows or Linux, which no matter how you slice it is more difficult than maintaining Mac OS X.
The Mac Mini already has a built-in V92 modem, built-in video out (VGA, DVI, composite, and S-Video), built-in wireless, and built-in bluetooth (the latter two are options, but I'd certainly recommend them). As for video-in, as many others have pointed out El Gato systems makes a whole series of USB 2.0-based video-in solutions for not much money.
So, you can have everything you just mentioned, and be using just one of your USB ports.
Check the specs - Macs have traditionally put a LOT of functionality on the motherboard. Sometimes for better (ethernet for the last 15 years, recently firewire, USB2, DVI), sometimes for the worse (ADC, subpar sound output until quite recently).
The Bluetooth module I'm unsure of, but the Airport Extreme is a mini-PCI slot, so it is a standard, although a rarely seen one. Apple sells Airport Extreme cards in their store, but I doubt you'll find a third-party one; certainly not one that will work with Apple's drivers.
This is one of those areas where it makes sense to just go ahead and buy it up front, deal with the financial squeeze for a short while, and reap the benefits for however many years you have it.
If you haven't noticed, they DO say "fuck it" and use Microsoft Office, that is, if they notice you exist at all. I thought this was about providing a usable free alternative to Office? If you want to scrap a platform, go right ahead - you just ceded that to Microsoft.
In the greatest of ironies, Microsoft's Mac business unit has been well known for many years for putting a huge amount of Mac-specific polish and features into their apps, frequently adding features not found in the Windows version. And the Open Source's answer to this is "you don't like it, fuck off"? Gee, I wonder who people will support.
Firefox is a great example of polishing a port to be "native enough" - it uses proper keybindings, menu structure, and integrates with key OS features. It *feels* like a Mac application, although it shows its heritage at a few minor seams. Meanwhile, OpenOffice requires running in a completely foreign environment with a relatively bizarre interface. Yeah, you're going to convert a lot of people with that...
Don't use Windows Update, do you?
Nevermind this was shown as part of the never-finished Copland from 1994. Back then they called it "saved searches", and it was supposed to be powered by V-Twin, what then became Sherlock, which then just became "Find".
What I always find amazing is Apple previewed a lot of good ideas with Copland, and has taken forever to get it to market, largely based on the hell going on in the company in those early years. Instead of Microsoft and others copying what was released, why not pull a lot of the ideas and such from the Copland demos and actually beat Apple to the punch once in a while?
Quick is relative. In my case, it takes an hour or two, but compresses a 3GB partition down to 500MB. I don't have the money for a nice 500GB drive, but I can run it overnight quite easily.
Good point. I should have placed a sudo in there. That and the resulting archive will be bzipped (-j flag), so it should be a .tar.bz2:
/mnt/backup/drive.tar.bz2 .
sudo tar -cvjf
Just do an NFS or SMB mount:
/mnt/backup /mnt/drive /mnt/backup .
mount -t smbfs -o username:password \\10.0.1.111\backup
cd
tar -cvjf
(If I recall the commands correctly.) I use this all the time to make quick snapshots of my Gentoo installation before emerging some bleeding edge package.
Ahem, has someone forgotten the reason for the antitrust suit? Anti-competitive tying and such? Have you forgotten the conviction? And then, just as the punishment phase was to begin, a new administration came in and told the DOJ "drop it".
Your other points are valid, but this was very obviously a political decision to drop the punishment of illegal use of monopoly power.
Well, shit, now it DID filter out the [sarcasm] and [b] tags!
Sorry, looks like Slashdot filtered out the tags and replaced it with instead.
Sure. Just tell me how I can get the music I legally purchased licenses for at iTunes converted over to any other music store, and I'll cease using iTunes.
Burn. Rip. Done. Now tell me how to do the same with WMA, with its varying DRM permissions - sometimes that will work, sometimes it won't.
The only difference is Microsoft has licensed WMA more widely than Apple has licensed FairPlay (Motorola), yet Apple has been more successful with their product than Microsoft.
and convert it over to MP3 to listen on the go
You mean like you can with iTunes by burning/ripping a CD? Either way you're transcoding.
Get off your high horse about this people. For legal downloadable music, DRM is entrenched and here to stay. I say be glad that the dominant form is this lenient and easily "breakable". This guy truly had NO CHOICE whatsoever in the matter. He really couldn't do ANYTHING but purchase an iPod. People truly make me sick sometimes...
That ignores the fact that in "emergency" situations (wars, disasters, media-hyped psuedo-disasters), people spend more than they otherwise would have. Sure, they would have spent a good amount of that anyway, but they also tend to spend a fair chunk of change that they would otherwise have saved. In macroeconomics, personal savings is actually a "bad" thing.
For example, if you just had your house wiped out in a hurricane, you try telling me you're going to spend the same amount that month that you would have otherwise spent. Likewise, in a real war, the sense of urgency of fighting and winning lends itself to a "damn the budgets, full spend ahead" kind of attitude. More money is spent, said money circulates, and the economy rises (for example, our entry into WWII pulling us out of the Depression).
...not because of it's syntax (perish the thought!) or even because of its RAD capabilities (many development environments have caught up there now). No, it survives and flourishes because thousands of third party developers write add-ons for it. You can go into a project knowing that pretty much any damn thing you need, whether it's interface, backend, etc, has already been written. Furthermore, VB is able to easily interact with other applications, making it great for automation and data extraction/processing.
Gambas does look like a great IDE, but it has no chance of displacing VB.