So let's get this right: you believe that nobody will make OSXi versions of their software because it's easier to tell their customers to boot into Windows on their Macintel systems rather than waste time porting?
First off, what about all existing Mac software? Seems like Steve did everything he could to make it easy to port OSXp to OSXi. If only the existing software were ported, the customer base is at least all the people currently using Macs plus the people who now might buy now because of the dual-boot security blanket, some of which might prefer the Mac environment more.
The reason why Macs have survived for so long in spite of their smaller market share (although their user share is significantly larger than 3%, more like 10-15%) is because the OSX user experience is compelling enough that people will pay extra for it. These people will not be happy with a software company that recommends booting into Windows to use their product. If there's a competing product on OSXi, the first company will suffer.
Conclusion: porting costs are low for existing titles, no worse than before for new titles. Titles that run natively will always do better in the Mac marketplace than ones that ask you to dual-boot, and that Mac marketplace will be bigger because of the dual-boot backup option.
I didn't want to be one of those people who held cautiously held off while those around me were having all the fun; I wanted to get on board with 10.4.0. However, since Amazon is shipping my copy of Tiger from Pennsylvania (to Portland, OR) by a combination of mule train and canal barge, I might not get it until 10.4.3 comes out! I couldn't afford the $500 to get on the Apple Developers program and play with the betas, but I might have considered the extra $4 for overnight shipping.
I know that all you anti language nazis love to mod down anybody who corrects anybody else's spelling or grammar, but what if I found a juicy one on SCO's main page:
It is the mature and proven operating system to support your most critical line of business applications, yet is affordably priced to host all compute needs.
And what if I made a lame joke about IP, like "I believe I have a patent on the use of the verb 'compute' as an implied gerund. Should I sue SCO?" Would I then not get modded into oblivion?
While I personally would never recommend it, a straightened paper clip stuck into every available hole and wiggled usually does the trick. I used to sell them for $19.95 at my old office in a package that said "Computer Upgrade Kit." Sales were low - never got the &*^%$ patent on it!
It's not surprising that valley companies are doing this. If it keeps their employees from realizing what a disfunctional environment they live in, they might be able to squeeze out a few more years labor from them. I have worked for several companies headquartered in the Bay Area, and, although I never lived there, I've spent a lot of time in San Jose, Palo Alto, and all the other places. No longer is the rush hour limited to the commute times, but there's a traffic backup during peak lunch hours. In fact, 101 is slow almost around the clock. The Valley is one of the most densely populated regions in the world where you cannot walk to anything. That quantity of people living so close together all relying on their cars to get to everything makes for a huge mess and a lot of depressing lives. These people budget an hour or more twice a day to sit in their cars, averaging about a fifth of the speed those cars were designed to operate at (how the auto industry continues to sell the illusion of "freedom" amazes me), so they can work their fairly high salary jobs - with plenty of uncompensated overtime, mind you - that just barely pay for the inflated mortgages on their sterile styrofoam cookie-cutter houses. They don't see their children, most households are forced to have both spouses work just to pay for everything, and very often find that once they've got just a little bit ahead in their careers, the threat of having to compete with some snot-nosed college grad who's willing to work for a third of the pay for another opening keeps them with the same company long after the magic is gone. I myself have been offered work in the Silicon Valley, but opted for less pay in a smaller city with plenty of real urban housing and good public transport. So, yes, I can see why some Valley companies might offer a few reasonably affordable perks to their serfs. Do they want a freaking medal?
Anyone else click on the link and try to set up an account? I mean, this is waaaaaay more exclusive than a gmail account was last year. It's still in alpha and to my knowledge has not been mentioned on/. before. Hey google, let me have my account! Not that I'll do anything useful with it or anything...
Isn't it about time you replaced the "X" icon from how it looked in 10.0 and 10.1 to a more current version? I scan the articles and see the blue X, and I wonder why people are submitting articles about a four year old OS!!!
Thanks. That's the first time someone has spelled out the XP improvements. However, six of the eleven items listed (I won't count "etc. etc" as an item) concern security - things that should have been working in the beginning. One item is.NET, which is nothing to brag about, and that leaves DirectX 9, WMP10, handwriting to Messenger, and improved wireless UI.
In the same time, covering Jaguar, Panther, and now Tiger, MacOSX offers these NEW features: Inkwell, Rendezvous (now Bon Jour), Apple-tab application switching, Expose, iChat, iChatAV, look-ahead searching, Spotlight, a functioning fax replacement, iSync, Automator, Dashboard, Printer setup in System prefs, several versions of Quicktime including H.264, fast user switching, VoiceOver (this thing actually makes computers usable for the blind, and for them, has to be the single greatest thing to happen to computers), Safari, and, of course, etc. etc. Security was excellent to begin with, and only got better since, usually with free upgrades.
Here's my take on the price: it should have been $129 for upgrades from 10.1 and below, $99 for 10.2 Jaguar users, and $69 for Panther users. Bear in mind, that the Family Pack is a great deal, and that there are no heinous license verifications with this upgrade. I ordered Tiger through Amazon, and paid less than $100. That's only $30 more than I thought I should pay, but nobody forced me to do it. I could, of course, have paid $499 for it, and got a great little computer thrown in, as well as a $99 iLife suite, but I think I'll upgrade my hardware when Ocelot comes out, which will still be before Longhorn is finished.
Not having used XP all that much (OK, never), I'd like to ask someone more knowledgeable to list all of the features that were added to XP after its original release. Let's leave out the bugfixes and the security patches, please, just put down the cool stuff. Oh, and I'm curious, does IE have tabs yet?
I have no plans to forget the first post. I just wish I had some points to mod it back up! What's wrong with (or should I say "whit") calling people for writing illogically? Spelling, grammar, and sentence structure are vital to the process of communication, and it's a testament to the human brain that we are able to decode some of the language that gets posted here in spite of the errors. If you people wrote code this way, we'd have no software!
And I am no stickler. I just want to defend someone who had a legitimate question about the meaning of another post.
A true scientist would remain open the possibility until it is proven or disproven. That is what we call a 'theory'. By insistently persecuting anything we don't yet understand, one lowers oneself to the level of certain residents of 17th Century Salem.
When these things are disproven enough, we can stop investigating. After a number of times, it truly is a waste of resources for scientists to disprove the same thing again and again. If the data were so convincing, it will get attention, so you don't have to be worried that science is going to miss something big because of undue skepticism. It's that skepticism that keeps scientists moving forward by allowing them to concentrate on the attainable.
...is accessories that actually add to the functionality of the Mac Mini. How about a firewire hard drive combined with a USB/FW hub that's the same footprint as the Mini and sits underneath it? It could even have some of the ports in the front of the unit. And it would be a 3.5' drive, so it's cheaper and faster than the Mini's internal one. Make it so there's some kind of spring-loaded connector on the top and bottom, so once you hooked up the first unit, all the other ones would automatically be hooked up when stacked. Then you could get crazy and have special modules like an audio unit (better d/a, a/d converter, optical connectors), video (the functionality of an ElGato PVR), some kind of hub for clustering multiple Minis, etc, etc. THAT would impress me, not some pieces of bent plastic.
The point about racing is to go faster than one's opponents where all participants adhere to a set of rules governing allowable technology. The general point about hybrid technology is to conserve fuel. Well, how about a racing circuit that combines these two concepts but allows the participants to use any technology, as long as it saves fuel?
This is exactly what F1 used to do about 10-15 years ago (I don't know when they dropped this rule, but I'm fairly certain it's not in place any more), where there was a set amount of fuel for each car on each race. Now, the quantities worked out to about 2-3mpg IIRC, but nonetheless, the teams had to develop technologies that allowed them to go fast without running out of fuel.
Well, why can't we have a racing circuit that severely limits the fuel one can use to complete the race, to a point where it could truly require the development of meaningful efficiencies. Perhaps there could be different classes, one that gives drivers one gallon for every ten miles of race distance, one that requires 20mpg, etc. Clearly, the average speeds would go down, but the excitement would be in the strategies each team employed. It would be very interesting to see how hybrid technology competes in this kind of racing, and if it truly beats out other types of fuel-saving technology. This would lead to the fulfillment of racing's often-stated justification (and the supposed reason that automobile companies spend so much on it) that racing drives technological improvements that end up in the cars we buy.
Why do we need to buy 300hp cars anyway? And why 350? The answer is that we've been convinced that because the other guy has a car that can do 0-60 in 4.6 sec, you need one that can do it in 4.5 sec! You know, back in the 80's, those numbers were more like 9 and 10 seconds, and people were just as happy (if you had the 9 sec car, that is). The point I'm making is that the market left to its own devices will give us more and more power at less and less efficiency, and condition us to think we need it. If the pre-eminent racing leagues in the world showcased speed AND efficiency, perhaps we'd return to a time when the car manufacturers would be bragging about mpg a little more and hp a little less, to the benefit of the whole world.
I don't see how that wasn't being fair. Here's the paragraph in question:
Mr. Schare of Microsoft does have one suggestion for those who cannot use the latest patches in Service Pack 2: buy a new personal computer. By the same reasoning, the security problems created by a car's broken door lock could be solved by buying an entirely new automobile. The analogy comes straight from Mr. Schare. "It's like buying a car," he said. "If you want to get the latest safety features, you have to buy the latest model."
Where exactly is the reporter not being fair? The Microsoft PR guy said something breathtakingly stupid, and the reporter caught him on it. In fact, nearly everything Mr. Schare said was stunningly dumb. I mean, can he tell us what were the "factors" that led people to "choose" IE in the first place? Hmmm...where does "included in the computer I bought" come on that list?
If you're complaining that Slashdotters like to pick on MS a little too much, you're right. But in this case, it's MS unwittingly picking on itself.
...Mr. Schare then went on to claim that the susceptibility to attack is a feature Microsoft's customers demand. "Every day we get millions of emails from Internet Explorer users thanking us for our design and also offering us great deals on herbal viagra and free porn."
...is pull off some third rate attack anywhere in the US, and wait for the real terror to begin once they pull the plug on GPS as a result. I could write this up in one of those silly Slashdot business plans except the last line would not be "5. Profit!" but "5. Lose," because we all would. And I guess that's the meta-goal of terrorists everywhere: to panic a country so much that its government turns on its people.
Most of the commenters are hung up on the current shortcomings of the solar industry, but the article talks about the inevitability of improvements to the efficiency of existing technology, as well as research and development of future technology. So when you say that current solar panels cost more in energy than they produce over their lifespans, that's beside the point. It stands to reason that the existing equation - that hydrocarbon based energy is cheaper to produce than alternatives - is bound to be reversed by the decreased supply of the former alone, to say nothing of the decreased cost of the latter once it is subject to proper manufacturing efficiencies and engineering improvements. If current PV cells cost too much and go bad quickly, what makes you think there won't be a version of Moore's law that describes advances in PV technology?
Those who say that solar cannot be relied on in northern lattitudes are also missing the point of the article, and missing an understanding of the economic laws in play. Lets say that we could supply all of the energy needs of only that part of the world (and only in the daytime) by solar. Would that not allow us to make our hydrocarbon supplies last longer? To think this is unworkable is like saying it's no use to read a book by the light of the day because what happens when you want to read at night. Furthermore, the grid can be supplied by a mix of wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. Because 100% of our power cannot be replaced by solar does not make it useless.
Now, of course, the nature of the free market and of human nature lead me to think that we won't come up with the replacement to a given technology or energy source until we reach a crisis in the supply of the old one. Horseshit was piling up in the cities and causing a health hazard before the automobile really caught on, and soot filled our skies before we switched over to an electrical grid for our power. I believe we are just a few years away from another such crisis with oil, and it might be a good idea to work out the kinks in alternative energy technology before we're forced to use it. A few wisely spent government dollars spent on this technology might keep us from having to rely on other countries for this technology when we need to make the transition.
Since everybody was so busy correcting the body of your post, I figured I'd tackle the subject line.
It's "surprising"!
There's also a British standard spelling. You missed them both. I'm not sure shcool can help at this point.
Is it complaining when I mention that I submitted this story yesterday but it was rejected? And I got the original link from the Oregonian, too.
I'm not bitter - perhaps my comments were not pithy enough for you - but I'd like some credit, too.
You and I are on the losing side. We're watching a slow slide from the height (not "heigth") of Western civilization to grunts and scratches on cave walls. That the keepers of the keys to technology should be the leading us on that path is the irony here.
P.S.: Try to see it in your heart to accept officially recognized American English spellings. "Spelled" is proper as the participle form, and "color" is perfectly fine here in the colonies. (We think "licence" looks strange). As for all of the incorrectly spelled business names: these companies bring a lot of grief upon themselves with their creative use of capitalization.
Slashdot Mirror
So let's get this right: you believe that nobody will make OSXi versions of their software because it's easier to tell their customers to boot into Windows on their Macintel systems rather than waste time porting?
First off, what about all existing Mac software? Seems like Steve did everything he could to make it easy to port OSXp to OSXi. If only the existing software were ported, the customer base is at least all the people currently using Macs plus the people who now might buy now because of the dual-boot security blanket, some of which might prefer the Mac environment more.
The reason why Macs have survived for so long in spite of their smaller market share (although their user share is significantly larger than 3%, more like 10-15%) is because the OSX user experience is compelling enough that people will pay extra for it. These people will not be happy with a software company that recommends booting into Windows to use their product. If there's a competing product on OSXi, the first company will suffer.
Conclusion: porting costs are low for existing titles, no worse than before for new titles. Titles that run natively will always do better in the Mac marketplace than ones that ask you to dual-boot, and that Mac marketplace will be bigger because of the dual-boot backup option.
I didn't want to be one of those people who held cautiously held off while those around me were having all the fun; I wanted to get on board with 10.4.0. However, since Amazon is shipping my copy of Tiger from Pennsylvania (to Portland, OR) by a combination of mule train and canal barge, I might not get it until 10.4.3 comes out! I couldn't afford the $500 to get on the Apple Developers program and play with the betas, but I might have considered the extra $4 for overnight shipping.
While I personally would never recommend it, a straightened paper clip stuck into every available hole and wiggled usually does the trick. I used to sell them for $19.95 at my old office in a package that said "Computer Upgrade Kit." Sales were low - never got the &*^%$ patent on it!
Dude: your sig links to the funniest fucking thing I've EVAR read! It's time we kick some ass over those hypocrites!
It's not surprising that valley companies are doing this. If it keeps their employees from realizing what a disfunctional environment they live in, they might be able to squeeze out a few more years labor from them. I have worked for several companies headquartered in the Bay Area, and, although I never lived there, I've spent a lot of time in San Jose, Palo Alto, and all the other places. No longer is the rush hour limited to the commute times, but there's a traffic backup during peak lunch hours. In fact, 101 is slow almost around the clock. The Valley is one of the most densely populated regions in the world where you cannot walk to anything. That quantity of people living so close together all relying on their cars to get to everything makes for a huge mess and a lot of depressing lives. These people budget an hour or more twice a day to sit in their cars, averaging about a fifth of the speed those cars were designed to operate at (how the auto industry continues to sell the illusion of "freedom" amazes me), so they can work their fairly high salary jobs - with plenty of uncompensated overtime, mind you - that just barely pay for the inflated mortgages on their sterile styrofoam cookie-cutter houses. They don't see their children, most households are forced to have both spouses work just to pay for everything, and very often find that once they've got just a little bit ahead in their careers, the threat of having to compete with some snot-nosed college grad who's willing to work for a third of the pay for another opening keeps them with the same company long after the magic is gone. I myself have been offered work in the Silicon Valley, but opted for less pay in a smaller city with plenty of real urban housing and good public transport. So, yes, I can see why some Valley companies might offer a few reasonably affordable perks to their serfs. Do they want a freaking medal?
You are my friend, but we fight a losing battle.
Anyone else click on the link and try to set up an account? I mean, this is waaaaaay more exclusive than a gmail account was last year. It's still in alpha and to my knowledge has not been mentioned on /. before. Hey google, let me have my account! Not that I'll do anything useful with it or anything...
Isn't it about time you replaced the "X" icon from how it looked in 10.0 and 10.1 to a more current version? I scan the articles and see the blue X, and I wonder why people are submitting articles about a four year old OS!!!
In the same time, covering Jaguar, Panther, and now Tiger, MacOSX offers these NEW features: Inkwell, Rendezvous (now Bon Jour), Apple-tab application switching, Expose, iChat, iChatAV, look-ahead searching, Spotlight, a functioning fax replacement, iSync, Automator, Dashboard, Printer setup in System prefs, several versions of Quicktime including H.264, fast user switching, VoiceOver (this thing actually makes computers usable for the blind, and for them, has to be the single greatest thing to happen to computers), Safari, and, of course, etc. etc. Security was excellent to begin with, and only got better since, usually with free upgrades.
Here's my take on the price: it should have been $129 for upgrades from 10.1 and below, $99 for 10.2 Jaguar users, and $69 for Panther users. Bear in mind, that the Family Pack is a great deal, and that there are no heinous license verifications with this upgrade. I ordered Tiger through Amazon, and paid less than $100. That's only $30 more than I thought I should pay, but nobody forced me to do it. I could, of course, have paid $499 for it, and got a great little computer thrown in, as well as a $99 iLife suite, but I think I'll upgrade my hardware when Ocelot comes out, which will still be before Longhorn is finished.
Others don't get it, but I do. People: this is sarcasm!!!!
Not having used XP all that much (OK, never), I'd like to ask someone more knowledgeable to list all of the features that were added to XP after its original release. Let's leave out the bugfixes and the security patches, please, just put down the cool stuff. Oh, and I'm curious, does IE have tabs yet?
And I am no stickler. I just want to defend someone who had a legitimate question about the meaning of another post.
Oh, I can just see telling my 80 year old mother to type that in!
Not close enough....
...is accessories that actually add to the functionality of the Mac Mini. How about a firewire hard drive combined with a USB/FW hub that's the same footprint as the Mini and sits underneath it? It could even have some of the ports in the front of the unit. And it would be a 3.5' drive, so it's cheaper and faster than the Mini's internal one. Make it so there's some kind of spring-loaded connector on the top and bottom, so once you hooked up the first unit, all the other ones would automatically be hooked up when stacked. Then you could get crazy and have special modules like an audio unit (better d/a, a/d converter, optical connectors), video (the functionality of an ElGato PVR), some kind of hub for clustering multiple Minis, etc, etc. THAT would impress me, not some pieces of bent plastic.
The point about racing is to go faster than one's opponents where all participants adhere to a set of rules governing allowable technology. The general point about hybrid technology is to conserve fuel. Well, how about a racing circuit that combines these two concepts but allows the participants to use any technology, as long as it saves fuel?
This is exactly what F1 used to do about 10-15 years ago (I don't know when they dropped this rule, but I'm fairly certain it's not in place any more), where there was a set amount of fuel for each car on each race. Now, the quantities worked out to about 2-3mpg IIRC, but nonetheless, the teams had to develop technologies that allowed them to go fast without running out of fuel.
Well, why can't we have a racing circuit that severely limits the fuel one can use to complete the race, to a point where it could truly require the development of meaningful efficiencies. Perhaps there could be different classes, one that gives drivers one gallon for every ten miles of race distance, one that requires 20mpg, etc. Clearly, the average speeds would go down, but the excitement would be in the strategies each team employed. It would be very interesting to see how hybrid technology competes in this kind of racing, and if it truly beats out other types of fuel-saving technology. This would lead to the fulfillment of racing's often-stated justification (and the supposed reason that automobile companies spend so much on it) that racing drives technological improvements that end up in the cars we buy.
Why do we need to buy 300hp cars anyway? And why 350? The answer is that we've been convinced that because the other guy has a car that can do 0-60 in 4.6 sec, you need one that can do it in 4.5 sec! You know, back in the 80's, those numbers were more like 9 and 10 seconds, and people were just as happy (if you had the 9 sec car, that is). The point I'm making is that the market left to its own devices will give us more and more power at less and less efficiency, and condition us to think we need it. If the pre-eminent racing leagues in the world showcased speed AND efficiency, perhaps we'd return to a time when the car manufacturers would be bragging about mpg a little more and hp a little less, to the benefit of the whole world.
If you're complaining that Slashdotters like to pick on MS a little too much, you're right. But in this case, it's MS unwittingly picking on itself.
...Mr. Schare then went on to claim that the susceptibility to attack is a feature Microsoft's customers demand. "Every day we get millions of emails from Internet Explorer users thanking us for our design and also offering us great deals on herbal viagra and free porn."
...is pull off some third rate attack anywhere in the US, and wait for the real terror to begin once they pull the plug on GPS as a result. I could write this up in one of those silly Slashdot business plans except the last line would not be "5. Profit!" but "5. Lose," because we all would. And I guess that's the meta-goal of terrorists everywhere: to panic a country so much that its government turns on its people.
Most of the commenters are hung up on the current shortcomings of the solar industry, but the article talks about the inevitability of improvements to the efficiency of existing technology, as well as research and development of future technology. So when you say that current solar panels cost more in energy than they produce over their lifespans, that's beside the point. It stands to reason that the existing equation - that hydrocarbon based energy is cheaper to produce than alternatives - is bound to be reversed by the decreased supply of the former alone, to say nothing of the decreased cost of the latter once it is subject to proper manufacturing efficiencies and engineering improvements. If current PV cells cost too much and go bad quickly, what makes you think there won't be a version of Moore's law that describes advances in PV technology?
Those who say that solar cannot be relied on in northern lattitudes are also missing the point of the article, and missing an understanding of the economic laws in play. Lets say that we could supply all of the energy needs of only that part of the world (and only in the daytime) by solar. Would that not allow us to make our hydrocarbon supplies last longer? To think this is unworkable is like saying it's no use to read a book by the light of the day because what happens when you want to read at night. Furthermore, the grid can be supplied by a mix of wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. Because 100% of our power cannot be replaced by solar does not make it useless.
Now, of course, the nature of the free market and of human nature lead me to think that we won't come up with the replacement to a given technology or energy source until we reach a crisis in the supply of the old one. Horseshit was piling up in the cities and causing a health hazard before the automobile really caught on, and soot filled our skies before we switched over to an electrical grid for our power. I believe we are just a few years away from another such crisis with oil, and it might be a good idea to work out the kinks in alternative energy technology before we're forced to use it. A few wisely spent government dollars spent on this technology might keep us from having to rely on other countries for this technology when we need to make the transition.
Since everybody was so busy correcting the body of your post, I figured I'd tackle the subject line. It's "surprising"! There's also a British standard spelling. You missed them both. I'm not sure shcool can help at this point.
Is it complaining when I mention that I submitted this story yesterday but it was rejected? And I got the original link from the Oregonian, too. I'm not bitter - perhaps my comments were not pithy enough for you - but I'd like some credit, too.
You and I are on the losing side. We're watching a slow slide from the height (not "heigth") of Western civilization to grunts and scratches on cave walls. That the keepers of the keys to technology should be the leading us on that path is the irony here. P.S.: Try to see it in your heart to accept officially recognized American English spellings. "Spelled" is proper as the participle form, and "color" is perfectly fine here in the colonies. (We think "licence" looks strange). As for all of the incorrectly spelled business names: these companies bring a lot of grief upon themselves with their creative use of capitalization.