...companies are aware that there's another profitable option. The rise of Google has broken MS's stranglehold on a lot of markets, just like Firefox and iPod have done in their respective markets.
There's lots of choice for strategic alliances: the aforementioned Google, of course, but also new and renewed players, like AOL. These companies seem to be focused on innovation and user experience to build their user base, rather than the parasitic control consistently exhibited by Microsoft. There's also myriad small companies touting their new technologies every day.
While there's an alternative, nobody's making a deal with the devil.
Netscape is no longer associated in any way with Mozilla, from a business standpoint. The current Netscape Browser 8.1, based on Firefox, is designed and developed by a team at America Online which deals almost exclusively with products featuring the Netscape name. Netscape is no longer a company, it is only a brand.
This truth, however, does not diminish the value of the Netscape-branded products. They are geared toward users who fall in between IE and Firefox; those who are willing to try a different browser, but aren't looking to customize the hell out of it. So, Netscape seeks to beef up Firefox, especially in the area of online security. It's a sound approach, and only time will tell if it will pan out.
Apple's use of KHTML, for example, hasn't done much at all to boost the popularity of that framework. I guess it depends on how many ways the technology can be used. Unless you're building something that renders web pages, KHTML isn't very useful to you, and there may be a more compelling alternative at the moment. MySQL, on the other hand, is indispensable.
I don't understand why someone would want to use Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X, when WebObjects comes with the developer tools, is an enterprise-class Java app server, and is way faster in both development and deployment (on Mac, Windows, Unix, or Linux) than anything else I've seen.
It really is the best kept secret in the web app world. If you've not tried it, you might want to give it a shot.
...doesn't know what its right is doing. If you get info on the file, look at its Kind in List view, or right-click it and hover over "Open With", the system definitely knows that this file will open with Terminal.app. It is getting confused, choosing to display the icon for the default app for that extension, instead of what LS is getting from the resource fork.
Indeed, you can change the extension to whatever you want (.txt will give you a TextEdit Text File icon), but the file's 'usro' resource decides what application will actually open the file.
If you use something other than Mac OS X's "BOMArchiveHelper" (great name... how about "Archiver" or something?) to extract the file's contents, you end up with a "__MACOSX" folder which contains the naughty bits. Unfortunately, on new versions of Mac OS X, BOMArchiveHelper is what gets launched by default when you double-click a.zip file.
...something to which I can comfortably donate my time. Preferably something Objective-C based. We can't all be wizards at algorithms, codecs, and engines; but some of us can really innovate closer to the front end. There's lots in AppKit, Foundation, and other frameworks to which I'd love to contribute.
Don't get me wrong... IBM makes amazing processors that can do amazing things... One day, they'll decode the human genome, discover extra-terrestrial life, combat global warming, and control an entire fleet of advanced robotic assistants. While IBM processors are amazing machines, they seem to always have futuristic applications reaching far beyond desktop computing.
Intel, on the other hand, excels in making chips for today's personal computer purposes. Yeah, it's nice to know your PowerPC CPU can project the path of an asteroid passing near Earth. In a desktop machine, however, most people just want a processor that will run Excel. Really well. And extend your laptop's battery life while doing it.
Throw in the other benefits - lower cost, giving the pundits something else to target, the ability to run WINE without an emulator - and the move to Intel looks good on all fronts. Besides, Mac OS X's roots are Intel-native... OPENSTEP never ran on PowerPC hardware.
IBM has promised big before, and failed to deliver; they made Steve look like a fool, and that's never a good idea. Don't let a late entry from Big Blue make you second-guess Apple.
Lest certain internet forums break out into a rash of OMG TAITO COPIED NINTENDO threads, I'll be very clear: it was Space Fever that was the ripoff
Most of that article, however, is about Nintendo getting ripped off, way bigger than Space Invaders. In its early days in the video game business, Nintendo did indeed make clones of Space Invaders (Nintendo's had COLOR!) and Joust. However, after Shigeru Miyamoto joined the Big N, they became the company to rip off: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Super Metroid, and Donkey Kong are all mentioned.
From what we've heard, this game should be among the Nintendo Revolution's launch titles in 2006. If it's a solid shooter, combined with the Revolution's Direct Pointing Device technology, it'll blow away every FPS on every other console. The "Nunchuku" attachment in your left hand for W-A-S-D movement, and the main controller (with its trigger-oriented B button) for the mouse. Point and fire.
...when it comes to modern video game systems - at least, emotionally. That's the problem Nintendo strives to correct. Most people, outside of a core group of gamers, won't even pick up a controller. And who can blame them? A DualShock 2 has 17 buttons! Seventeen! The Revolution controller is much more akin to a computer mouse, or even a simple pointer, offering direct manipulation of the game.
Non-gamers love direct manipulation... it's the reason my girlfriend plays her Nintendo DS so much. She won't touch my PlayStation 2. With the DS, in many games you don't use the controller to tell a representative character what to do, you just do it.
The fact that it allows adaptation for physically handicapped individuals is gravy, and a very tasty gravy indeed. Country gravy, even. Imagine that... so much is possible when a company innovates.
Definitely true, John... most people are underinformed. I think the Amelio chapter of Apple's history is one that most Mac fanatics are wrong about. The man got the right people into the company, stopped the downward slide, set the designers free (there were curvy, bondi designs long before iMac), and welcomed Steve back in to the company.
Gil could have done a lot better, but even if he had, the people would have still wanted Steve back, and quite rightly. The company needs Steve, and his influence is obvious. His ability to be prepared when opportunity strikes (some would call that luck - I don't believe in luck) is legend. Apple has an easier time dealing with huge corporations that most any other company, since Steve is at the helm.
I think that the only downside of his CEO position is that he doesn't get to spend enough time walking around, communicating with his engineers and designers, and corraling their managers.
And you'd have to rename "Preferences" to "Options", to match Windows, but every OS has its own UI heuristics. Mac OS X and places its (consistently named) "Preferences" item under the application menu.
An article comes out about Microsoft making a new handheld device, and all you can say is "xPod" and "MGage". Isn't it possible that Microsoft will innovate, making a completely new and revolutionary.. *snicker*... device that redefines... *snrk*... the industry and... and... Bwaaahahahahahahaha! Aha- aha- aha- aahahaha.
Oh, oh man, there was NO way I could make it through that. *wipes tears away*
You should use the most modern operating systems and applications, designed with security in mind, with the simplest methods of receiving, downloading, and installing updates. Good systems and software are built that way; you get what you pay for.
If we simply reported facts... how's that going to persuade anybody? We have to use hyperbole and propaganda to get people to pay attention, because Apple won't do it themselves.
Web sites should use RSS. It's for syndication of information. The whole point is to take article listings from your Harry Potter fan site, and show them on my Harry Potter fan site to enhance the user's access to relevant information. A user reading an RSS feed just seems kinda silly to me.
Now, that said, if someone were to create a feed reader that didn't take the approach of "make the XML look pretty", one might have a revolutionary product on their hands.
Apple has already broken their convention several times, for the greater good of the OS, specifically for compatability with other systems.
Apple allowed (and still allows) Mac OS 9 (Classic) applications to run with their original Platinum interface, with no interoperability with other Mac OS X apps.
They allow Java applications to run with any theme applied, without forcing an Aqua look.
Apple's X11 allows X apps to run with an Aqua-esque appearance through Apple's QuartzWM, but X apps certainly do not function like Cocoa-based apps.
Windows apps would be yet one more exception. A bundled WINE layer wouldn't be perfect, but it would allow Macs to run Windows apps, without Windows, and without Microsoft. Yeah, I think Apple will be interested in such an endeavor.
... that Intel-based Macs are a good idea. Now that there's an x86 processor in their boxen, Apple could do for WINE what it did for X11: integrate it well with the OS, and ship it as part of Mac OS X. Double-click an app, and it just runs.
The "bottles" concept makes it even better, and could work well with Mac OS X's existing heuristics for bundling and resource handling.
Slashdot Mirror
...companies are aware that there's another profitable option. The rise of Google has broken MS's stranglehold on a lot of markets, just like Firefox and iPod have done in their respective markets.
There's lots of choice for strategic alliances: the aforementioned Google, of course, but also new and renewed players, like AOL. These companies seem to be focused on innovation and user experience to build their user base, rather than the parasitic control consistently exhibited by Microsoft. There's also myriad small companies touting their new technologies every day.
While there's an alternative, nobody's making a deal with the devil.
...Apple Computer is dying!
Let's give them lots of media attention. That's sure to help a site like this stay active.
Netscape is no longer associated in any way with Mozilla, from a business standpoint. The current Netscape Browser 8.1, based on Firefox, is designed and developed by a team at America Online which deals almost exclusively with products featuring the Netscape name. Netscape is no longer a company, it is only a brand.
This truth, however, does not diminish the value of the Netscape-branded products. They are geared toward users who fall in between IE and Firefox; those who are willing to try a different browser, but aren't looking to customize the hell out of it. So, Netscape seeks to beef up Firefox, especially in the area of online security. It's a sound approach, and only time will tell if it will pan out.
Apple's use of KHTML, for example, hasn't done much at all to boost the popularity of that framework. I guess it depends on how many ways the technology can be used. Unless you're building something that renders web pages, KHTML isn't very useful to you, and there may be a more compelling alternative at the moment. MySQL, on the other hand, is indispensable.
I don't understand why someone would want to use Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X, when WebObjects comes with the developer tools, is an enterprise-class Java app server, and is way faster in both development and deployment (on Mac, Windows, Unix, or Linux) than anything else I've seen.
It really is the best kept secret in the web app world. If you've not tried it, you might want to give it a shot.
...doesn't know what its right is doing. If you get info on the file, look at its Kind in List view, or right-click it and hover over "Open With", the system definitely knows that this file will open with Terminal.app. It is getting confused, choosing to display the icon for the default app for that extension, instead of what LS is getting from the resource fork.
Indeed, you can change the extension to whatever you want (.txt will give you a TextEdit Text File icon), but the file's 'usro' resource decides what application will actually open the file.
If you use something other than Mac OS X's "BOMArchiveHelper" (great name... how about "Archiver" or something?) to extract the file's contents, you end up with a "__MACOSX" folder which contains the naughty bits. Unfortunately, on new versions of Mac OS X, BOMArchiveHelper is what gets launched by default when you double-click a .zip file.
...to drive this kind of ridiculous suit forward. Yep, lots of money and corporate power.
...something to which I can comfortably donate my time. Preferably something Objective-C based. We can't all be wizards at algorithms, codecs, and engines; but some of us can really innovate closer to the front end. There's lots in AppKit, Foundation, and other frameworks to which I'd love to contribute.
The Uncyclopedia version is much better.
Don't get me wrong... IBM makes amazing processors that can do amazing things... One day, they'll decode the human genome, discover extra-terrestrial life, combat global warming, and control an entire fleet of advanced robotic assistants. While IBM processors are amazing machines, they seem to always have futuristic applications reaching far beyond desktop computing.
Intel, on the other hand, excels in making chips for today's personal computer purposes. Yeah, it's nice to know your PowerPC CPU can project the path of an asteroid passing near Earth. In a desktop machine, however, most people just want a processor that will run Excel. Really well. And extend your laptop's battery life while doing it.
Throw in the other benefits - lower cost, giving the pundits something else to target, the ability to run WINE without an emulator - and the move to Intel looks good on all fronts. Besides, Mac OS X's roots are Intel-native... OPENSTEP never ran on PowerPC hardware.
IBM has promised big before, and failed to deliver; they made Steve look like a fool, and that's never a good idea. Don't let a late entry from Big Blue make you second-guess Apple.
Most of that article, however, is about Nintendo getting ripped off, way bigger than Space Invaders. In its early days in the video game business, Nintendo did indeed make clones of Space Invaders (Nintendo's had COLOR!) and Joust. However, after Shigeru Miyamoto joined the Big N, they became the company to rip off: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Super Metroid, and Donkey Kong are all mentioned.
From what we've heard, this game should be among the Nintendo Revolution's launch titles in 2006. If it's a solid shooter, combined with the Revolution's Direct Pointing Device technology, it'll blow away every FPS on every other console. The "Nunchuku" attachment in your left hand for W-A-S-D movement, and the main controller (with its trigger-oriented B button) for the mouse. Point and fire.
...when it comes to modern video game systems - at least, emotionally. That's the problem Nintendo strives to correct. Most people, outside of a core group of gamers, won't even pick up a controller. And who can blame them? A DualShock 2 has 17 buttons! Seventeen! The Revolution controller is much more akin to a computer mouse, or even a simple pointer, offering direct manipulation of the game.
Non-gamers love direct manipulation... it's the reason my girlfriend plays her Nintendo DS so much. She won't touch my PlayStation 2. With the DS, in many games you don't use the controller to tell a representative character what to do, you just do it.
The fact that it allows adaptation for physically handicapped individuals is gravy, and a very tasty gravy indeed. Country gravy, even. Imagine that... so much is possible when a company innovates.
Definitely true, John... most people are underinformed. I think the Amelio chapter of Apple's history is one that most Mac fanatics are wrong about. The man got the right people into the company, stopped the downward slide, set the designers free (there were curvy, bondi designs long before iMac), and welcomed Steve back in to the company.
Gil could have done a lot better, but even if he had, the people would have still wanted Steve back, and quite rightly. The company needs Steve, and his influence is obvious. His ability to be prepared when opportunity strikes (some would call that luck - I don't believe in luck) is legend. Apple has an easier time dealing with huge corporations that most any other company, since Steve is at the helm.
I think that the only downside of his CEO position is that he doesn't get to spend enough time walking around, communicating with his engineers and designers, and corraling their managers.
And you'd have to rename "Preferences" to "Options", to match Windows, but every OS has its own UI heuristics. Mac OS X and places its (consistently named) "Preferences" item under the application menu.
Windows would surely be rated M for Mature.
An article comes out about Microsoft making a new handheld device, and all you can say is "xPod" and "MGage". Isn't it possible that Microsoft will innovate, making a completely new and revolutionary.. *snicker*... device that redefines... *snrk*... the industry and... and... Bwaaahahahahahahaha! Aha- aha- aha- aahahaha.
Oh, oh man, there was NO way I could make it through that. *wipes tears away*
You should use the most modern operating systems and applications, designed with security in mind, with the simplest methods of receiving, downloading, and installing updates. Good systems and software are built that way; you get what you pay for.
... we're Apple's largest advertising force.
If we simply reported facts... how's that going to persuade anybody? We have to use hyperbole and propaganda to get people to pay attention, because Apple won't do it themselves.
Oh, and Macs don't crash, either.
Web sites should use RSS. It's for syndication of information. The whole point is to take article listings from your Harry Potter fan site, and show them on my Harry Potter fan site to enhance the user's access to relevant information. A user reading an RSS feed just seems kinda silly to me.
Now, that said, if someone were to create a feed reader that didn't take the approach of "make the XML look pretty", one might have a revolutionary product on their hands.
My idea is a using the Preview button and a checking your posts so you don't a sound like a Luigi from a Futurama.
Apple has already broken their convention several times, for the greater good of the OS, specifically for compatability with other systems.
Apple allowed (and still allows) Mac OS 9 (Classic) applications to run with their original Platinum interface, with no interoperability with other Mac OS X apps.
They allow Java applications to run with any theme applied, without forcing an Aqua look.
Apple's X11 allows X apps to run with an Aqua-esque appearance through Apple's QuartzWM, but X apps certainly do not function like Cocoa-based apps.
Windows apps would be yet one more exception. A bundled WINE layer wouldn't be perfect, but it would allow Macs to run Windows apps, without Windows, and without Microsoft. Yeah, I think Apple will be interested in such an endeavor.
... that Intel-based Macs are a good idea. Now that there's an x86 processor in their boxen, Apple could do for WINE what it did for X11: integrate it well with the OS, and ship it as part of Mac OS X. Double-click an app, and it just runs.
The "bottles" concept makes it even better, and could work well with Mac OS X's existing heuristics for bundling and resource handling.