My point is that the current system doesn't exactly have 'geographic standardization' as it is.
Check out this map of time zones that I found. It's not like they follow any sort of standard pattern, really. People just pick whatever's useful for where they live, regardless of which side of some imaginary line they live on.
People are not going to easily move to a universal time and adjust their concept of 'local time'. Lots of social inertia there. How many times would the clocktower chime!? When I roll over in the morning to hit the snooze alarm, how am I going to get a sense of what time it is when it says '22:35'?
I'm not going to disagree with you on that one, but it's just that : social inertia. If everyone was doing a lot of flying around or traveling east-to-west on high-speed trains, I'm guessing we'd be a lot more open to just using UTC and not messing with our 'local' clocks so much. Just a guess, though, people tend to be really, really, stupidly suck in their ways. If it was always 22:35 first thing in the morning, you'd know that meant first thing in the morning- how did you learn that "8:00" meant first thing in the morning? You learned it. You just don't want to learn something different, which is reasonable, really, although it does create this silly "it's a different time here than it is there" situation.
b> everyone keeps whatever time they please - "the meeting is @ 8, but in smallvile. So that's like 7:35 our time."
Isn't that basically the current system? I mean, it's less extreme, but it's "the meeting is at 8, but in Jersey. So that's like 5 AM our time."... this makes more sense ? Depending on what _county_ you are in, if you live in one state ( I think Ohio? ) you may or may not follow DST , so in a very real way, this is the system.
Option A "everyone keeps the same time the world over" is of course the one that I and the parent post were talking about, and really, "morning" being 19:00 UTC wouldn't be a confusing concept for someone who stayed in the same place a lot. Actually, you can presumably always convert local time to UTC, so this is in a sense what we do except we have local time _also_. Why have the local time at all, though?
Clearly, your choice in this area all depends on the extent of your mobility. If you never travel more than a hundred miles, it makes sense in a certain way ( if you like A.M. times in the morning ) to have lots of little time zones, as another poster on this thread actually pointed out really was the case in Great Britan not that long ago. The reason they consolidated those time zones? The introduction of rail travel.
to be sure, I was joking. Really, I was pointing out the stupidity of time zones in general, as the parent post had.
Just because it ( usually! ) takes a while to cross a time zone now doesn't change the fact that your clock is no longer correct after flying cross-country, even though it has kept correct track of the number of seconds which have past since you left. A clock that just shows GMT is always correct for that locallity, it's the local time elsewhere that's been shifted so that, for whatever reason '8:00 AM" is always morning, even Australia.
That said, I understand why it's done, but it's a convention, and a completely arbitrary one at that.
The idea that there are several places where you can drive a half-mile down the road and have to change your clock to support such an arbitrary convention is more than illogical and annoying. It's downright stupid. I can't imagine what folks do who live near a time zone demarcation line do, although I know what large cities in such a position do- they arbitrarily choose one zone or the other, which just shows how dumb the whole thing is.
Frankly it sounds like the author is just an idiot, but that's my two cents. All of his points are almost completely irrelevant or not applicable.
On top of that, might I add that Microsoft and Apple have copied each other too many times to count, and it's not necessarily good.
Thank you. Yours was the reply I was going to have to write otherwise. I'd just like to add :
1) Frustrating your installed base for "possible" future customers who've shown an extreme preference for your competition isn't always a good idea. Having a Preference to 'Use Windows-compatable control/command key mapping' or something might have more merit, but still isn't a very UI-consistient idea. The window menus say 'command'. It's not really just a labeling/placement issue, is it?
2) Mail.app, just to mention one example actually provided by Apple, has a Save As Draft button on the New Message toolbar. Not an OS issue.
3) Bringing up the single-button mouse at this point makes you just sound stupid at best, or trolling at worst, to be honest. Your point is the multi-button-mouse should be standard and the single-button one goes away ? Look back to my first point. My 3-year-old son and 70-year-old mother-in-law both prefer the one-button mouse. The Mac mini comes with no mouse. Buy the mouse you like.
4) You can always sort the results by file type, can't you? That way the ones you want to see are grouped together? And just in case you actually want to select or know about a file that's incorrectly typed ( easy to happen now with those damn windows.foo file endings ), it's actually a nice feature to have them all shown. Also, filtering those file dialog results in anything other than Apple-supplied apps is dead-easy for a Cocoa developer, so write to your favorite app's project manager if you want that feature in it. It'll take maybe a day's worth of effort to implement and test. Seriously.
5) again, sort by file Type and you get the folders grouped together. How is this a serious complaint ? When you ask for the results to be sorted by file name, you don't want the results sorted by file name if the file is a folder? What the hell is that? What if I have a group of related files and folders all starting with projectx and want to easily grab them from a folder filled with files and folders all starting projecty ? Even without Spotlight, this is a debateable feature in any OS. Windows should change in this case, I say...
6) I could easily find several places in the windows OS where control panels and the like for OS functions lack useful context-sensitive help. Any program always needs more of that kind of thing, though, and that's because it's not a critical feature.
In the final analysis, there are probably more important things that OS X could swipe from Windows. Like being able to natively run any Windows program, especially, say, full-screen apps like oh, I don't know, video games. I know that sounds like a joke, but really, that's always been the Windows users biggest excuse for not considering anything else, and frankly, we'll see what we get from the Mac Intel in that regard... what would the reason for buying Windows over OS X be if you could run full-performance Windows binary apps on either?
Please o god o god o yes. DST is evil, stupid, wrong, lame, and there just aren't enough words for how much of a PITA it is for programmers who have enough of a hard time handling an already screwed-up over-complicated and downright inaccurate time/calendar system.
I don't even want to think about what this means for everyone's VCR/DVD/microwave/coffe pot/etc clocks. Have fun remembering how to set those twice a year, grandma!
Now that you mention it, the time zones are a tad arbitrary, aren't they? If you're aiming for a universal time that the sun rises at, why not have a new time zone every 10 or 30 minutes ?
So, what are retailers doing with the games if they're going to stop selling them ? Is there somewhere I can pick up an unplayed copy cheap? Will they show up on EBay ? Or is this just driving up the price like when Ice-T's metal band's "Cop Killer" album had to be pulled ??
Really, RockStar did screw up if they left the minigame on the disc in any form. The only way they can save face in my eyes now is to release it, unlocked, with an AO rating. Really, these games are seriously violent enough, they should be rated AO anyway, for what ratings are worth.
The subtext to that is : ratings are only as good as a parent's control over their child. Meaning they're next to worthless.
So, his whole point is he doesn't get it and nobody wants to take the time to explain what it's there for, so it must be dumb, since he's clearly not the dumb one around here ?
That really says it all, doesn't it ? I can't figure out what the purpose of this website is, so it must be a dumb website. I can't figure out how to use this Linux operating system, so it must suck. These metric units of measure don't seem familiar to me, using them is dumb.
What a pompous ass.
I'm not that curious and I don't care that much, but even to the complete idiot, it should be blindingly obvious that Creative Commons is a clearing house website of sorts. It's there as an attempt to shore up freedom of use. Of course, it's NOT 'necessary', it doesn't change copyright law or even do anything revolutionary... *except* that it is a place where you can go to find things which you can use. It's an aggregator, sort of, like a limited Google or whatever, so right there it's useful. If I want, i can search out some public-domain stuff there, and I'll *know* it's public-domain and can use it as such. Or, if I'm not repackaging and selling content, I can find something there with a different license that allows commercial-free use, and use that, and know it's OK to do so, without fear of being sued or the hassle of contacting the creator for their permission.
And of course, I still have fair use at my disposal. The Creative Commons license doesn't ( and, as Dvorak points out ) can't limit that.
I haven't researched Creative Commons to pick up what I just wrote... but I think it's vaguely correct, and if I can figure that out, why is John so dumb?
If you answered because he's a part of why we've grown to dislike those in the media, because he is as usual just trolling to get hits on his website, you are right. At least, I hope so. It'd be sad if this guy is really so stupid.
From the looks of their web page, they're quite aware of this and are marketing it as such. To quote from the yellowTAB "Company" web page:
yellowTAB doesn't intend to compete with Microsoft but offers an alternative for those wanting to run a second operating system.
I definitely agree that if they want to become anything other than a niche player, they have some serious work to do. Really, though, I think that's not the goal- if Be, Inc. and NeXT, Inc. couldn't take on Microsoft, and Apple's just starting to claw their way back to the market share they once had... maybe that's not the fight yellowTAB is looking to take on, at least not this decade.
Really, though, there's nothing wrong with being a _successful_ niche player. Aside from the fact that you're going to remain a fairly small company, of course.
Showing photos on a small screen is useful, like showing off wallet-sized photos. Watching video on one is not useful, aside from the use case of mass-transit commuters.
But, to a limited extent, some users ( espeically those tempted to get a full-size iPod rather than a mini ) might like to play a little video clip on that little iPod screen - on the train, bus, airplane, waiting for class, showing off a video clip to a friend... there are uses for the feature, and that's where I'm thinking iPod video is not a *major* feature, just *another* feature.
I think it's a feature that's being added because it's easy, not a major feature that's going to be a main selling point for _most_ folks. It's just something else that makes the full-size iPod more competitive with the Windows Media and MPEG-based video playback handhelds out there.
That's just my guess, of course. I could be wrong, but with reasonable restraints on video size and use of MPEG-4, the load on the hard disk would not be *too* much- I mean, the existing MPEG and Windows Media video players use the same drives, don't they? Of course, using it for that would drain the battery, but, then, users expect that, and like you point out, you're not going to be watching video on your iPod for hours at a time. But you might be watch a new music video or Daily Show clip or show off your kid/cat/vacation footage that nobody wants to see any more than they want to see your wallet-size snapshots... 30 or 40 minutes of video at a time, tops. With 60 GB of storage, why not carry around a 30 second video of your kid playing at the beach or the latest Gorillaz video or last night's Daily Show ?
I really think even current iPods might be up to the task technically. We'll see. The video features built into iTunes by itself points to Apple doing some serious, long-term thinking about video delivery.
oto. My guess is that adding video to an iPod would add sufficient cost that it wouldn't just be a "bonus feature" but rather a primary feature.
Why do you think adding video playback to an iPod would greatly increase the cost? As long as Apple can limit the resolution of the supported video, which it can, current-generation ARM or XScale chipsets are more than powerful enough to do the job - they're used in current-generation cell phones for just that kind of thing, right?
I am not trying to be rude.. But the eternals are pretty easy to unlock. My best advice to getting Eternal #3 (the moon level) Don't fret on the small stuff, and learn where all the good clumps are. Also at about 600 meters, use the charge run thing. You need it to find islands fast enough.
No, really, thanks for the advice. I've been getting really close, around 740m, actually, and haven't really been playing very long. I unlocked the first Eternal right away, and haven't even worked on the second one... I like rolling up really big stuff the most...
It's just that it's getting frustrating because I seem to *always* roll up between 590-740m, without getting obviously better. So I've got to do something different, but I don't know really what. At least you've given me some ideas to try, thanks for that.
I think my problem has been that I *am* sweating the small stuff, trying to get everything possible, and thus wasting time going from area to area, avoiding larger stuff out of ( possibly pointless ) fear that I'll not be able to pick up smaller stuff because it'll disappear when I get too big to see it. I picked up this bit of advice:
if you want the Eternal version, you must get it up to 800m... The key to completing this goal is getting as big as you can early on by collecting many items very quickly. It may not seem like much, but those extra telephones, bikes, kids, and animals really do pay off in the end.
from IGN and the more I play, the more I'm not sure it's actually correct. It seems that "don't waste time, get bigger stuff as soon as it doesn't make your katamari too lumpy" might be better advice... I'm not sure about that, though, maybe the good advice is just "go fast", "don't run into things too large to pick up", and "get everything", and "don't pick up too large or odd shaped things which make your katamari hard to roll, save those until it's bigger" each of which are too obvious and general to be really helpful, though.
The charge-run after 600m, though, that sounds interesting, and is something I haven't done. I've not really done the charge-run much, actually, I find it kinda awkward to do. Not using it may be my whole problem.
And yea, I get the impression I'm not really good at this game. It's still pretty fun, though.
At least we now know to avoid like the plague anything attributed to Tim Rogers.
If his writing doesn't make your head hurt, you might want to up your medication. That's not a video game review, sorry- it's a demonstration of what's wrong with the concept of everyone being a content producer. Sometimes the content just sucks. Sure, he talks about the video game, but is it really the focus of the article, or is Tim Rogers the focus of the article?
Ouch, looking around the site, it looks like this guy writes a lot of 'reviews' and they're all like this. Now we know to stay away... thanks, I guess...
As for the part about fawning over the larger scope of the game - the original was short. Necessarily so given the target of a cheap-to-create, cheap-on-the-shelf game.
It may be short, but it's not like you play through it once and never look at it again. I'm playing it almost every night, mostly because I want to get the Eternal level on "Make the Moon", damn it! It's making me crazy.
So, it's short, but replay value is high. Not just because of locked "eternals" either... it'd still be fun to play even without that. Actually, I think it'd be more fun to play without a time limit, that's why I'm working to unlock it. Stupid locked features. I just want to be able to roam the world, sticking huge islands to my big silly ball of stuff, why make me do some impossible stunt first? Darn it. Making the moon and stars are their own reward, I shouldn't have to make an 800m moon to unlock a doesn't-matter-a-wit free-play level. Seriously. It's just so frustrating to unlock the eternals that one is tempted to cheat, and that's not cool. That's probably my only complaint about the game... it's stupid how fun it is otherwise.
Every now and then, though, I need an antidote, and have to fire up GTA...
I for one, welcome...
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3D Face Cameras
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oh, wait! Damn. These are the same old overlords we've had for a while now. Never mind.
Call me when we have benchmarks of major apps doing REAL work (encoding video, rendering animations, performing massive math calculations) on the x86 and the PPC platforms.
I don't even care about benchmarks for 'major applications'. I just care about benchmarks for things that 'real' application will do.
For the first time in history, we can, excuse the play on words, make and Apples to Apples comparison. It's not a perfect comparison, I realize, since optimization levels are likely to vary between the current developer OS X 10.4 build on Intel and on PPC, but it'd be a snap for a developer with an Intel Developer Kit to write a couple of simple programs that use Cocoa library calls ( say, NSImage renders of a PDF, or NSString compares or searches in large files ), a set of simple C double math operations, or an easily recompiled database ( PostgreSQL or mySQL should work ) with a client program doing a bunch of inserts and queries. Heck, you could even just recompile some standard benchmark test.
Compile and test a group of each type of program on the Intel Dev Kit and a dual G5, publish the results, and put the whole "this architecture is faster" debate to bed already. Equivalent compilers, identical codebases, a 'fair' test of CPUs. It'd be informative. Otherwise, shut up about comparative performance - an actual comparative test is easy enough to do and direct enough that it's just painfully lame B.S. to do anything else. There's no reason for the subjective nature of the article.
My guess is that Apple will squish any developer that publishes such numbers sine I suspect that the current dual PowerMac line will dwarf the performance of the developer box.
I suspect you're right about this, especially if you're going to do multi-processor-friendly tests and compare the single CPU Intel box to a dual G5. It might be more 'fair' to compare the Dev Kit machine to an iMac G5... PowerMacs aren't going to be single-CPU P4s, I'm pretty sure...
Really, though, developers with dev kits have promised not to say *anything* about them, even the subjective comments listed on AI could get them in trouble, so... if you're going to say anything, why not say something useful? If you're trying to help out Apple by hyping Rosetta, why not at the same time mention that today's G5s are faster than the first Intel-based iMacs are likely to be, so people can buy PowerMacs and assume ( probably correctly ) that they won't be really obsolete for at least a couple of years?? Or, alternately, get people excited about the Intel switch by publishing real numbers that make it look like the right choice. I don't care what the outcome is really, but I don't understand the point of the article- it should be easy to do a non-subjective comparison of performance here, and that's what we want to see.
With regards to NeXT developers, I would have thought the number of old NeXT developers on the Mac since OS X was pretty small compared to the number of seasoned Mac developers who have also been involved in cross platform applications. Most of the Mac apps I've been using for years are cross platform after all.
Oh yea, my point had perhaps a bit more to do with Cocoa itself... meaning, the libraries used for most OS X programming have seen endian issues pop up before, and NeXT had to support two different endian development libraries ( and their developers ) long ago. Of course, if you're already making a Mac app that runs under Linux or Windows, you've already thought of these things, but even if you're only writing for OS X, the libraries you're using have code in place to handle endian issues for you, and it's only places where you're storing binary data formats and making assumptions about their endianess _in_your_own_code that are likely to bite you.
Plenty of programmers know enough to avoid those issues if possible. The big picture is that it's just not the huge problem it sounds like at first glance.
This article is nothing but a vague reference to a couple of un-substantiated percentages of Rosetta performance and some completely subjective, unverified statements.
If I were AppleInsider, I'd be ashamed to print this. Of course, it's not likely that AppleInsider could be ashamed of anything, so there you go;-)
Really, wake me up when there's an article where someone publishes comparative numbers of PostgeSQL inserts or NSImage composites or timed renders of Safari web pages.
And no, I'm not really interested in Rosetta performance as much as I'm interested in native app performance. I'm interested, don't get me wrong. Just not as interested.
I'm a programmer geek -- do folks think the desktop publishing / music crowds will also hold off on buying new Macs? Or will it make little difference to them?
Normal people with normal fiscal constraints purchase anything that depreciates wildly ( like a computer or car ) only when they have to. When we *need* a new Mac, we'll buy one. High-end PowerMacs will be the *last* thing to go Intel according to what we've been told. If you want an Intel Mac *now*, spend $999 + $500 to 'loan' one from Apple now. If you want to own a G5 PowerMac, buy one now ( and get to keep it ) for just a little bit more than that. Speed is a tad relative and depends on what you're doing, but all things considered, nobody is calling my G5 'slow'. It's plenty fast.
As always, if you can wait to buy a new computer, you'll get a better deal by doing so. Very little has really changed, and sales numbers reflect that.
Something great that I've found is that a number of nation-wide chains provide online photo printing now.
That's cool. But remember, I'm talking about something like where the Unabomber went to hang out. Not middle-America-Wal-Mart 'rural', real rural. No nation-wide chain stores of any kind ( unless you count gas stations ) within 50 miles.
It's a nice thought, though. Of course, I can order prints and have them shipped to an adress that's not mine, that's how I might do it.
Still need the printer to print out an occasional map or document, though. At least until they get that whole e-Paper thing *really* right... *then* I might not need an inkjet.
You can get DSL in the Thompson Falls/Noxon area which is pretty rural.
IDSL, or SDSL ? Either way, that's really impressive. There are seriously parts of the SF Bay Area ( NOT rural ones ) where you can't get SDSL. What speed ? You'd better say IDSL, or I'm about to get pissed... how the hell does that work ? Can I hate SBC more?
Hell, even dial-up is acceptable for e-mail communications w/smaller (JPG) pictures.
Not on-topic here. I have 32 images that need to be viewable at a minimum of 3x5, preferably 5x7. I would not wish a 40-minute download on my grandmother.
In your case, just upload the photos using Shutterfly, Walmart or some other service that will snail-mail them to where ever you want.
I am indeed looking at this for the next batch we have to send. It'll save us time, if nothing else.
This is a problem only when it comes to data I/O to non-native programs ( meaning PPC code running under Rosetta ), really, isn't it ?
It's likely that Rosetta is pulling a lot of tricks, I/O level and otherwise, and when you're reading data from a hard disk or the network, using a few spare CPU cycles to swap some bytes around isn't going to be noticed *at all*, because if you're doing that sort of I/O bound processing, you'll likely have plenty of CPU cycles laying around to swap bytes in memory.
If you're not talking about Rosetta, but about multi-platform applications more generally, the long answer is in the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines PDF. The short answer is that you abstract away from your own code byte-order issues where possible, and where not possible, you otherwise have separate code paths that do the right thing depending on the targeted platform.
Seasoned developers who coded applications under NeXTStep have been through this once before, remember. This is not a new problem. We've been here before... I avoid binary data formats where it's reasonable to do so.
I have to believe that with the greater reliance on web and email for communications, along with bigger and better monitors, that most of the rest of you will cease missing their printers as well within the next few years.
As soon as my grandparents in rural Montana get broadband connections...
I was about to say they'll need computers, too, but then I realized that first part will never, ever happen, so, until someone mandates high-speed internet access for everyone in the US like they mandated telephone service, I ( and I have to imagine many others ) will need some method of printing my digital photos of their great-grandchildren onto real photo paper, so I can ( gasp ) send the pictures via snail-mail. Not everyone lives the wired life... the dot-com crash should have taught you that.
As the price-per-picture of printing services decreases, however, *I* am more likely to consider using them. Inkjet photo printers are truly an expensive pain in the ass. HP isn't going to change the expensive part, though...
Really, I'll always want *some* sort of printer, at least until I can afford laptops for *both* my wife and I. Even then, sometimes a printed map is more handy than opening a laptop... printers will always be useful, even if used less often.
The Java platform (i.e. java.lang.*), never enters into it.
Look, I don't want to make you sound silly, Yaztromo already did a fine job of that, but when Apple says that the Cocoa-Java NSObject "inherits from Object", exactly what "Object" class do you think they're talking about ?
Hint : it's in the package you don't have to import in the Java language.
Further hint: NSObject in Objective-C ( native Cocoa as opposed to Cocoa-Java, I suppose ) doesn't inherit from anything else, it's a root class.
It's hard to blame you too much for your misconceptions about Cocoa-Java, though, if you're using the Apple "Cocoa Tutorial for Java Programmers" you linked as your guide. I think they're almost intentionally misleading you there... notice there's actually no talk at all of what compiler is being used or what's going on behind the scenes ( it's javac ). Really, Cocoa-Java, IMHO, is there to lure Java programmers into Cocoa. It's a hook to get you to see how easy Objective-C really is...
Basically, there are enough application developers for OS X that Cocoa-Java serves no real purpose now. Just my own little theory, that.
Cocoa already has a fairly significant overhead (presumably due to Aqua rather then Objective C, since NeXTSTeP was quite practical on a 68030).
You're right there- if you're running on a machine with a non-hardware-acceleration graphics card, you really do need to try the turn-off-the-eye-candy tricks ( disable bouncing dock icons, window and sheet effects, etc ), and if you're on an early G3, ouch. Tiny delays imposed by Objective-C message passing are just that- tiny.
Java just gave it that little extra punch to push it over the top, kind of like turning the lag up to 11.
In fairness, most noticeable Java-related lag is going to be the first time you launch a Java app ( time to launch the JVM and allocate it's memory and threads... ). There might be a few extra instructions involved in packaging bits from the Java side and pushing them into the Cocoa-native UI classes, but it's not that bad there performance-wise.
Sure, for Intel, Java would run on it's own VM, and Cocoa compiled code would still be Intel-specific, so... the more I think about it, the more I think dropping Cocoa-Java has *nothing* to do with moving to Intel. It was in the cards already, since, as you say :
I suspect maintaining the interface has been pretty labor-intensive.
I'm thinking "not terribly labor-intensive for Apple, but how great has the benefit been, when people are already screaming for them to keep up with Sun's Java releases and so few people are really using Cocoa-java ?"
As for Swing, what does that do to the native look and feel? What's an example of an application that uses it that I can try on Mac OS X?
I can say from my own experience, it's pretty good in general. You'd be hard-pressed to notice the UI difference in most Swing programs. Of course, I can't exactly send you my app... but, unless they actually go out of their way to use the Metal Look-and-Feel ( which some apps do, I suppose in the name of avoiding possible look-and-feel bugs, or just out of laziness ), any Java app will start using the native look-and-feel by default. You could always pick up the developer tools install and look at the/Developer/Examples/Java/JFC/SwingSet2/SwingSet2.j ar "SwingSet" demo application, I guess. It runs through a majority of the UI objects.
The weak link, as with any look-and-feel it seems, is of course the file picker ( JFileChooser ). It's not *terrible*, it's just missing the sidebar and search area, really... rather than looking for "OS X Java" applications, just look for Java applications.
There are a few things you can do in Java to make your app look more like a real OS X app, though- use a screen ( instead of window ) menu bar, have Apple UI-compliant menus, support the Application menu commands ( about, preferences, quit )... that takes a small amount of actual code, but there are plenty of apps out there that just don't take that extra step. I did find one, though, after a quick google search. It's a bio-related sequence analysis program. No idea how it works, but it's an example of what you're asking about.
If you don't know what Cocoa-Java is, it's a way of gluing a Cocoa native interface onto a Java bytecode program. I suppose the idea is that you have a Java application, for portability, but don't want a Swing UI ? That description is a little simplistic, really, but it's the general concept.
Who writes programs like that ? Very few people, it turns out. I'm sure there are excellent examples of Cocoa-Java programs out there. In fact, I know there are. But really, they are neither highly portable, nor are they fully native code. It's entirely like having a Java program with an ActiveX interface. It's neither native nor cross-platform, it's a mix of technologies, and has the advantages and drawbacks of both, oddly enough.
Apple has, for some time, been moving away from full Cocoa-Java support. If you're shocked by it going away, you haven't been paying attention. If you want a multi-platform Java application, use multi-platform libraries, i.e. Swing. If you want a native application code program, write one- if you don't want use Objective-C because you'd like to port it more easily ( GNUStep aside ) , use C++. But if you want to use Java, well... use Swing. Seriously. It's not as bad as you've been told.
Then again, having native binary projects designed for their respective platforms has it's advantages, too.
Don't get me wrong. I've always thought Cocoa-Java was neat. But mostly in a 'cool trick' sort of way, not in a "I'm going to use this all the time" sort of way. If I want a chunk of code that just runs on any JVM-supported system, I'm not going to use Cocoa-Java, I'm going to use Swing and avoid having more than one build. If I want a native Mac OS X program, Objective-C is easy. Cocoa-Java fit some in-between requirements space that I guess I never really fully understood.
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Check out this map of time zones that I found. It's not like they follow any sort of standard pattern, really. People just pick whatever's useful for where they live, regardless of which side of some imaginary line they live on.
People are not going to easily move to a universal time and adjust their concept of 'local time'. Lots of social inertia there. How many times would the clocktower chime!? When I roll over in the morning to hit the snooze alarm, how am I going to get a sense of what time it is when it says '22:35'?
I'm not going to disagree with you on that one, but it's just that : social inertia. If everyone was doing a lot of flying around or traveling east-to-west on high-speed trains, I'm guessing we'd be a lot more open to just using UTC and not messing with our 'local' clocks so much. Just a guess, though, people tend to be really, really, stupidly suck in their ways. If it was always 22:35 first thing in the morning, you'd know that meant first thing in the morning- how did you learn that "8:00" meant first thing in the morning? You learned it. You just don't want to learn something different, which is reasonable, really, although it does create this silly "it's a different time here than it is there" situation.
Isn't that basically the current system? I mean, it's less extreme, but it's "the meeting is at 8, but in Jersey. So that's like 5 AM our time."... this makes more sense ? Depending on what _county_ you are in, if you live in one state ( I think Ohio? ) you may or may not follow DST , so in a very real way, this is the system.
Option A "everyone keeps the same time the world over" is of course the one that I and the parent post were talking about, and really, "morning" being 19:00 UTC wouldn't be a confusing concept for someone who stayed in the same place a lot. Actually, you can presumably always convert local time to UTC, so this is in a sense what we do except we have local time _also_. Why have the local time at all, though?
Clearly, your choice in this area all depends on the extent of your mobility. If you never travel more than a hundred miles, it makes sense in a certain way ( if you like A.M. times in the morning ) to have lots of little time zones, as another poster on this thread actually pointed out really was the case in Great Britan not that long ago. The reason they consolidated those time zones? The introduction of rail travel.
Just because it ( usually! ) takes a while to cross a time zone now doesn't change the fact that your clock is no longer correct after flying cross-country, even though it has kept correct track of the number of seconds which have past since you left. A clock that just shows GMT is always correct for that locallity, it's the local time elsewhere that's been shifted so that, for whatever reason '8:00 AM" is always morning, even Australia.
That said, I understand why it's done, but it's a convention, and a completely arbitrary one at that.
The idea that there are several places where you can drive a half-mile down the road and have to change your clock to support such an arbitrary convention is more than illogical and annoying. It's downright stupid. I can't imagine what folks do who live near a time zone demarcation line do, although I know what large cities in such a position do- they arbitrarily choose one zone or the other, which just shows how dumb the whole thing is.
Thank you. Yours was the reply I was going to have to write otherwise. I'd just like to add :
1) Frustrating your installed base for "possible" future customers who've shown an extreme preference for your competition isn't always a good idea. Having a Preference to 'Use Windows-compatable control/command key mapping' or something might have more merit, but still isn't a very UI-consistient idea. The window menus say 'command'. It's not really just a labeling/placement issue, is it?
2) Mail.app, just to mention one example actually provided by Apple, has a Save As Draft button on the New Message toolbar. Not an OS issue.
3) Bringing up the single-button mouse at this point makes you just sound stupid at best, or trolling at worst, to be honest. Your point is the multi-button-mouse should be standard and the single-button one goes away ? Look back to my first point. My 3-year-old son and 70-year-old mother-in-law both prefer the one-button mouse. The Mac mini comes with no mouse. Buy the mouse you like.
4) You can always sort the results by file type, can't you? That way the ones you want to see are grouped together? And just in case you actually want to select or know about a file that's incorrectly typed ( easy to happen now with those damn windows .foo file endings ), it's actually a nice feature to have them all shown. Also, filtering those file dialog results in anything other than Apple-supplied apps is dead-easy for a Cocoa developer, so write to your favorite app's project manager if you want that feature in it. It'll take maybe a day's worth of effort to implement and test. Seriously.
5) again, sort by file Type and you get the folders grouped together. How is this a serious complaint ? When you ask for the results to be sorted by file name, you don't want the results sorted by file name if the file is a folder? What the hell is that? What if I have a group of related files and folders all starting with projectx and want to easily grab them from a folder filled with files and folders all starting projecty ? Even without Spotlight, this is a debateable feature in any OS. Windows should change in this case, I say...
6) I could easily find several places in the windows OS where control panels and the like for OS functions lack useful context-sensitive help. Any program always needs more of that kind of thing, though, and that's because it's not a critical feature.
In the final analysis, there are probably more important things that OS X could swipe from Windows. Like being able to natively run any Windows program, especially, say, full-screen apps like oh, I don't know, video games. I know that sounds like a joke, but really, that's always been the Windows users biggest excuse for not considering anything else, and frankly, we'll see what we get from the Mac Intel in that regard... what would the reason for buying Windows over OS X be if you could run full-performance Windows binary apps on either?
I don't even want to think about what this means for everyone's VCR/DVD/microwave/coffe pot/etc clocks. Have fun remembering how to set those twice a year, grandma!
Now that you mention it, the time zones are a tad arbitrary, aren't they? If you're aiming for a universal time that the sun rises at, why not have a new time zone every 10 or 30 minutes ?
Really, RockStar did screw up if they left the minigame on the disc in any form. The only way they can save face in my eyes now is to release it, unlocked, with an AO rating. Really, these games are seriously violent enough, they should be rated AO anyway, for what ratings are worth.
The subtext to that is : ratings are only as good as a parent's control over their child. Meaning they're next to worthless.
That really says it all, doesn't it ? I can't figure out what the purpose of this website is, so it must be a dumb website. I can't figure out how to use this Linux operating system, so it must suck. These metric units of measure don't seem familiar to me, using them is dumb.
What a pompous ass.
I'm not that curious and I don't care that much, but even to the complete idiot, it should be blindingly obvious that Creative Commons is a clearing house website of sorts. It's there as an attempt to shore up freedom of use. Of course, it's NOT 'necessary', it doesn't change copyright law or even do anything revolutionary... *except* that it is a place where you can go to find things which you can use. It's an aggregator, sort of, like a limited Google or whatever, so right there it's useful. If I want, i can search out some public-domain stuff there, and I'll *know* it's public-domain and can use it as such. Or, if I'm not repackaging and selling content, I can find something there with a different license that allows commercial-free use, and use that, and know it's OK to do so, without fear of being sued or the hassle of contacting the creator for their permission.
And of course, I still have fair use at my disposal. The Creative Commons license doesn't ( and, as Dvorak points out ) can't limit that.
I haven't researched Creative Commons to pick up what I just wrote... but I think it's vaguely correct, and if I can figure that out, why is John so dumb?
If you answered because he's a part of why we've grown to dislike those in the media, because he is as usual just trolling to get hits on his website, you are right. At least, I hope so. It'd be sad if this guy is really so stupid.
If his questions about Creative Commons aren't answered in the "about" section of their website I'd be really shocked.
From the looks of their web page, they're quite aware of this and are marketing it as such. To quote from the yellowTAB "Company" web page :
I definitely agree that if they want to become anything other than a niche player, they have some serious work to do. Really, though, I think that's not the goal- if Be, Inc. and NeXT, Inc. couldn't take on Microsoft, and Apple's just starting to claw their way back to the market share they once had... maybe that's not the fight yellowTAB is looking to take on, at least not this decade.
Really, though, there's nothing wrong with being a _successful_ niche player. Aside from the fact that you're going to remain a fairly small company, of course.
But, to a limited extent, some users ( espeically those tempted to get a full-size iPod rather than a mini ) might like to play a little video clip on that little iPod screen - on the train, bus, airplane, waiting for class, showing off a video clip to a friend... there are uses for the feature, and that's where I'm thinking iPod video is not a *major* feature, just *another* feature.
I think it's a feature that's being added because it's easy, not a major feature that's going to be a main selling point for _most_ folks. It's just something else that makes the full-size iPod more competitive with the Windows Media and MPEG-based video playback handhelds out there.
That's just my guess, of course. I could be wrong, but with reasonable restraints on video size and use of MPEG-4, the load on the hard disk would not be *too* much- I mean, the existing MPEG and Windows Media video players use the same drives, don't they? Of course, using it for that would drain the battery, but, then, users expect that, and like you point out, you're not going to be watching video on your iPod for hours at a time. But you might be watch a new music video or Daily Show clip or show off your kid/cat/vacation footage that nobody wants to see any more than they want to see your wallet-size snapshots... 30 or 40 minutes of video at a time, tops. With 60 GB of storage, why not carry around a 30 second video of your kid playing at the beach or the latest Gorillaz video or last night's Daily Show ?
I really think even current iPods might be up to the task technically. We'll see. The video features built into iTunes by itself points to Apple doing some serious, long-term thinking about video delivery.
Why do you think adding video playback to an iPod would greatly increase the cost? As long as Apple can limit the resolution of the supported video, which it can, current-generation ARM or XScale chipsets are more than powerful enough to do the job - they're used in current-generation cell phones for just that kind of thing, right?
From the PortalPlayer website :
That should about do it for NTSC-resolution playback, shouldn't it??No, really, thanks for the advice. I've been getting really close, around 740m, actually, and haven't really been playing very long. I unlocked the first Eternal right away, and haven't even worked on the second one... I like rolling up really big stuff the most...
It's just that it's getting frustrating because I seem to *always* roll up between 590-740m, without getting obviously better. So I've got to do something different, but I don't know really what. At least you've given me some ideas to try, thanks for that.
I think my problem has been that I *am* sweating the small stuff, trying to get everything possible, and thus wasting time going from area to area, avoiding larger stuff out of ( possibly pointless ) fear that I'll not be able to pick up smaller stuff because it'll disappear when I get too big to see it. I picked up this bit of advice :
from IGN and the more I play, the more I'm not sure it's actually correct. It seems that "don't waste time, get bigger stuff as soon as it doesn't make your katamari too lumpy" might be better advice... I'm not sure about that, though, maybe the good advice is just "go fast", "don't run into things too large to pick up", and "get everything", and "don't pick up too large or odd shaped things which make your katamari hard to roll, save those until it's bigger" each of which are too obvious and general to be really helpful, though.The charge-run after 600m, though, that sounds interesting, and is something I haven't done. I've not really done the charge-run much, actually, I find it kinda awkward to do. Not using it may be my whole problem.
And yea, I get the impression I'm not really good at this game. It's still pretty fun, though.
If his writing doesn't make your head hurt, you might want to up your medication. That's not a video game review, sorry- it's a demonstration of what's wrong with the concept of everyone being a content producer. Sometimes the content just sucks. Sure, he talks about the video game, but is it really the focus of the article, or is Tim Rogers the focus of the article?
Ouch, looking around the site, it looks like this guy writes a lot of 'reviews' and they're all like this. Now we know to stay away... thanks, I guess...
It may be short, but it's not like you play through it once and never look at it again. I'm playing it almost every night, mostly because I want to get the Eternal level on "Make the Moon", damn it! It's making me crazy.
So, it's short, but replay value is high. Not just because of locked "eternals" either... it'd still be fun to play even without that. Actually, I think it'd be more fun to play without a time limit, that's why I'm working to unlock it. Stupid locked features. I just want to be able to roam the world, sticking huge islands to my big silly ball of stuff, why make me do some impossible stunt first? Darn it. Making the moon and stars are their own reward, I shouldn't have to make an 800m moon to unlock a doesn't-matter-a-wit free-play level. Seriously. It's just so frustrating to unlock the eternals that one is tempted to cheat, and that's not cool. That's probably my only complaint about the game... it's stupid how fun it is otherwise.
Every now and then, though, I need an antidote, and have to fire up GTA...
Say cheese!
I don't even care about benchmarks for 'major applications'. I just care about benchmarks for things that 'real' application will do.
For the first time in history, we can, excuse the play on words, make and Apples to Apples comparison. It's not a perfect comparison, I realize, since optimization levels are likely to vary between the current developer OS X 10.4 build on Intel and on PPC, but it'd be a snap for a developer with an Intel Developer Kit to write a couple of simple programs that use Cocoa library calls ( say, NSImage renders of a PDF, or NSString compares or searches in large files ), a set of simple C double math operations, or an easily recompiled database ( PostgreSQL or mySQL should work ) with a client program doing a bunch of inserts and queries. Heck, you could even just recompile some standard benchmark test.
Compile and test a group of each type of program on the Intel Dev Kit and a dual G5, publish the results, and put the whole "this architecture is faster" debate to bed already. Equivalent compilers, identical codebases, a 'fair' test of CPUs. It'd be informative. Otherwise, shut up about comparative performance - an actual comparative test is easy enough to do and direct enough that it's just painfully lame B.S. to do anything else. There's no reason for the subjective nature of the article.
My guess is that Apple will squish any developer that publishes such numbers sine I suspect that the current dual PowerMac line will dwarf the performance of the developer box.
I suspect you're right about this, especially if you're going to do multi-processor-friendly tests and compare the single CPU Intel box to a dual G5. It might be more 'fair' to compare the Dev Kit machine to an iMac G5... PowerMacs aren't going to be single-CPU P4s, I'm pretty sure...
Really, though, developers with dev kits have promised not to say *anything* about them, even the subjective comments listed on AI could get them in trouble, so... if you're going to say anything, why not say something useful? If you're trying to help out Apple by hyping Rosetta, why not at the same time mention that today's G5s are faster than the first Intel-based iMacs are likely to be, so people can buy PowerMacs and assume ( probably correctly ) that they won't be really obsolete for at least a couple of years?? Or, alternately, get people excited about the Intel switch by publishing real numbers that make it look like the right choice. I don't care what the outcome is really, but I don't understand the point of the article- it should be easy to do a non-subjective comparison of performance here, and that's what we want to see.
Oh yea, my point had perhaps a bit more to do with Cocoa itself... meaning, the libraries used for most OS X programming have seen endian issues pop up before, and NeXT had to support two different endian development libraries ( and their developers ) long ago. Of course, if you're already making a Mac app that runs under Linux or Windows, you've already thought of these things, but even if you're only writing for OS X, the libraries you're using have code in place to handle endian issues for you, and it's only places where you're storing binary data formats and making assumptions about their endianess _in_your_own_code that are likely to bite you.
Plenty of programmers know enough to avoid those issues if possible. The big picture is that it's just not the huge problem it sounds like at first glance.
If I were AppleInsider, I'd be ashamed to print this. Of course, it's not likely that AppleInsider could be ashamed of anything, so there you go ;-)
Really, wake me up when there's an article where someone publishes comparative numbers of PostgeSQL inserts or NSImage composites or timed renders of Safari web pages.
And no, I'm not really interested in Rosetta performance as much as I'm interested in native app performance. I'm interested, don't get me wrong. Just not as interested.
Normal people with normal fiscal constraints purchase anything that depreciates wildly ( like a computer or car ) only when they have to. When we *need* a new Mac, we'll buy one. High-end PowerMacs will be the *last* thing to go Intel according to what we've been told. If you want an Intel Mac *now*, spend $999 + $500 to 'loan' one from Apple now. If you want to own a G5 PowerMac, buy one now ( and get to keep it ) for just a little bit more than that. Speed is a tad relative and depends on what you're doing, but all things considered, nobody is calling my G5 'slow'. It's plenty fast.
As always, if you can wait to buy a new computer, you'll get a better deal by doing so. Very little has really changed, and sales numbers reflect that.
That's cool. But remember, I'm talking about something like where the Unabomber went to hang out. Not middle-America-Wal-Mart 'rural', real rural. No nation-wide chain stores of any kind ( unless you count gas stations ) within 50 miles.
It's a nice thought, though. Of course, I can order prints and have them shipped to an adress that's not mine, that's how I might do it.
Still need the printer to print out an occasional map or document, though. At least until they get that whole e-Paper thing *really* right... *then* I might not need an inkjet.
IDSL, or SDSL ? Either way, that's really impressive. There are seriously parts of the SF Bay Area ( NOT rural ones ) where you can't get SDSL. What speed ? You'd better say IDSL, or I'm about to get pissed... how the hell does that work ? Can I hate SBC more?
Hell, even dial-up is acceptable for e-mail communications w/smaller (JPG) pictures.
Not on-topic here. I have 32 images that need to be viewable at a minimum of 3x5, preferably 5x7. I would not wish a 40-minute download on my grandmother.
In your case, just upload the photos using Shutterfly, Walmart or some other service that will snail-mail them to where ever you want.
I am indeed looking at this for the next batch we have to send. It'll save us time, if nothing else.
It's likely that Rosetta is pulling a lot of tricks, I/O level and otherwise, and when you're reading data from a hard disk or the network, using a few spare CPU cycles to swap some bytes around isn't going to be noticed *at all*, because if you're doing that sort of I/O bound processing, you'll likely have plenty of CPU cycles laying around to swap bytes in memory.
If you're not talking about Rosetta, but about multi-platform applications more generally, the long answer is in the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines PDF. The short answer is that you abstract away from your own code byte-order issues where possible, and where not possible, you otherwise have separate code paths that do the right thing depending on the targeted platform.
Seasoned developers who coded applications under NeXTStep have been through this once before, remember. This is not a new problem. We've been here before... I avoid binary data formats where it's reasonable to do so.
As soon as my grandparents in rural Montana get broadband connections...
I was about to say they'll need computers, too, but then I realized that first part will never, ever happen, so, until someone mandates high-speed internet access for everyone in the US like they mandated telephone service, I ( and I have to imagine many others ) will need some method of printing my digital photos of their great-grandchildren onto real photo paper, so I can ( gasp ) send the pictures via snail-mail. Not everyone lives the wired life... the dot-com crash should have taught you that.
As the price-per-picture of printing services decreases, however, *I* am more likely to consider using them. Inkjet photo printers are truly an expensive pain in the ass. HP isn't going to change the expensive part, though...
Really, I'll always want *some* sort of printer, at least until I can afford laptops for *both* my wife and I. Even then, sometimes a printed map is more handy than opening a laptop... printers will always be useful, even if used less often.
Look, I don't want to make you sound silly, Yaztromo already did a fine job of that, but when Apple says that the Cocoa-Java NSObject "inherits from Object", exactly what "Object" class do you think they're talking about ?
Hint : it's in the package you don't have to import in the Java language.
Further hint: NSObject in Objective-C ( native Cocoa as opposed to Cocoa-Java, I suppose ) doesn't inherit from anything else, it's a root class.
It's hard to blame you too much for your misconceptions about Cocoa-Java, though, if you're using the Apple "Cocoa Tutorial for Java Programmers" you linked as your guide. I think they're almost intentionally misleading you there... notice there's actually no talk at all of what compiler is being used or what's going on behind the scenes ( it's javac ). Really, Cocoa-Java, IMHO, is there to lure Java programmers into Cocoa. It's a hook to get you to see how easy Objective-C really is...
Basically, there are enough application developers for OS X that Cocoa-Java serves no real purpose now. Just my own little theory, that.
You're right there- if you're running on a machine with a non-hardware-acceleration graphics card, you really do need to try the turn-off-the-eye-candy tricks ( disable bouncing dock icons, window and sheet effects, etc ), and if you're on an early G3, ouch. Tiny delays imposed by Objective-C message passing are just that- tiny.
Java just gave it that little extra punch to push it over the top, kind of like turning the lag up to 11.
In fairness, most noticeable Java-related lag is going to be the first time you launch a Java app ( time to launch the JVM and allocate it's memory and threads... ). There might be a few extra instructions involved in packaging bits from the Java side and pushing them into the Cocoa-native UI classes, but it's not that bad there performance-wise.
Sure, for Intel, Java would run on it's own VM, and Cocoa compiled code would still be Intel-specific, so... the more I think about it, the more I think dropping Cocoa-Java has *nothing* to do with moving to Intel. It was in the cards already, since, as you say :
I suspect maintaining the interface has been pretty labor-intensive.
I'm thinking "not terribly labor-intensive for Apple, but how great has the benefit been, when people are already screaming for them to keep up with Sun's Java releases and so few people are really using Cocoa-java ?"
As for Swing, what does that do to the native look and feel? What's an example of an application that uses it that I can try on Mac OS X?
I can say from my own experience, it's pretty good in general. You'd be hard-pressed to notice the UI difference in most Swing programs. Of course, I can't exactly send you my app... but, unless they actually go out of their way to use the Metal Look-and-Feel ( which some apps do, I suppose in the name of avoiding possible look-and-feel bugs, or just out of laziness ), any Java app will start using the native look-and-feel by default. You could always pick up the developer tools install and look at the /Developer/Examples/Java/JFC/SwingSet2/SwingSet2.j ar "SwingSet" demo application, I guess. It runs through a majority of the UI objects.
The weak link, as with any look-and-feel it seems, is of course the file picker ( JFileChooser ). It's not *terrible*, it's just missing the sidebar and search area, really... rather than looking for "OS X Java" applications, just look for Java applications.
There are a few things you can do in Java to make your app look more like a real OS X app, though- use a screen ( instead of window ) menu bar, have Apple UI-compliant menus, support the Application menu commands ( about, preferences, quit )... that takes a small amount of actual code, but there are plenty of apps out there that just don't take that extra step. I did find one, though, after a quick google search. It's a bio-related sequence analysis program. No idea how it works, but it's an example of what you're asking about.
Who writes programs like that ? Very few people, it turns out. I'm sure there are excellent examples of Cocoa-Java programs out there. In fact, I know there are. But really, they are neither highly portable, nor are they fully native code. It's entirely like having a Java program with an ActiveX interface. It's neither native nor cross-platform, it's a mix of technologies, and has the advantages and drawbacks of both, oddly enough.
Apple has, for some time, been moving away from full Cocoa-Java support. If you're shocked by it going away, you haven't been paying attention. If you want a multi-platform Java application, use multi-platform libraries, i.e. Swing. If you want a native application code program, write one- if you don't want use Objective-C because you'd like to port it more easily ( GNUStep aside ) , use C++. But if you want to use Java, well... use Swing. Seriously. It's not as bad as you've been told.
Then again, having native binary projects designed for their respective platforms has it's advantages, too.
Don't get me wrong. I've always thought Cocoa-Java was neat. But mostly in a 'cool trick' sort of way, not in a "I'm going to use this all the time" sort of way. If I want a chunk of code that just runs on any JVM-supported system, I'm not going to use Cocoa-Java, I'm going to use Swing and avoid having more than one build. If I want a native Mac OS X program, Objective-C is easy. Cocoa-Java fit some in-between requirements space that I guess I never really fully understood.