Maybe it "just works" for you, but every time I've tried to use MacOS X, I had to give up in a short time and go back to KDE. This thing is just too infuriatingly dumbed down.
So much so that Mac users don't even get a proper delete key that goes forwards or a right click on the trackpad (without holding down function). The idea that this is a professional OS is laughable (doesn't even have highlight, middle-click copy).
Seriously, that's the best you got? You can right click on the trackpad by two finger tapping or clicking in the - wait for it - lower right corner. Or holding down control, not function. Forward delete on my Macbook is Fn-Delete. My full size aluminum keyboard has a dedicated forward delete key.
iTerm, which I use instead of Terminal, has auto-copy on highlight. You could certainly assign middle click to that if you wanted. I prefer auto-copy. I spend 70% of my work day in iTerm ssh'd in to remote CentOS VMs so I'm picky about my terminal functionality and I've never found the Mac wanting.
Actually, they ARE starting the walk-in on OSX. And I'm speaking from the POV of someone who loves OSX and Apple laptops but hates their mobile offerings. They're starting with a "default to no" to install apps which they haven't signed.
I personally think that is a great idea. It's not like it's exactly hard to launch the unsigned app. (Right click and choose Open. And you only have to do it once, it will launch normally every time after that.)
I will buy this game the instant there is a native OS X version available. Loved the first one but I don't have any Windows machines any more and I'm not messing around with virtualization or whatever just for a game.
But if you had nothing sitting around gathering dust, how much would it cost you to buy an equivalent amount of hardware? Keeping in mind depreciation, power , network access and infrastructure, and physical space. You also pay per hour, so if you don't need it one week, shut it all down and pay nothing. If you need something done very quick, pay for 100 cores for 1 hour instead of 1 core for 100 hours.
At the personal level (not speaking of businesses here): AMD x8 FX-8150 3.6/4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD - DYI from all-new parts, no monitor - approx $750. Let's make it a full $1750 to allow for power delivered by "gilded electrons", "diamond optical fiber" supported internet access and a bouquet of flowers once a month for the "better half" to make it for the physical storage space.
$1750 vs $175/month...10 month worth of VPS in Google's "compute" cloud (with 1 core with 4GB RAM).
What about bandwidth? What about support? What about being able to be up and running on a new box in a few minutes when the old one takes a dump?
You are totally missing the point of cloud services like this. It's not supposed to compete with your desktop machine.
You probably gave him an used iPhone which has an additional cost of $0. Not to mention that in the US they have these funky phone purchase schemes where you "pay" $99 to get an iPhone and you don't pay less per month if you bring your own phone to the deal. It used to be that the barrier to entry for programming was nil. In fact personal computers of the 80s like the C64 actually booted directly to a BASIC interpreter console. Now you have to get development tools. With the iPhone its even worse since you need the development tools (paid) and to pay for deploying the application similar to the game consoles market.
The development tools for Mac OS X/iOS are free. You don't need to pay $99/year if you just want to learn/tinker. You can run iOS apps on the Simulator on your Mac. You can't run on a hardware iOS device without paying $99/yr.
If my daughter was seriously that interested in programming I would pay the $99 in a heartbeat! Do you know how much enrichment classes generally cost?
Sorry, there may be arguments about why Apple is a crappy developer ecosystem but the price of the dev tools is not one of them.
Any smartphone practically can play something downloaded on the computer. And when everything is all planned out that's great but life happens and sometimes I'm out and about away from my computer and I want to watch something specific. iTunes on my desktop isn't helping me there.
You can download music, videos, apps from the iTunes store on the phone while out and about. You don't need to be connected to a computer. Remember the whole "PC Free" thing Apple was promoting last year? You don't really need to connect an iDevice to a desktop ever any more.
If I'm going to pay the dev cycle price of a compiled language, it should catch stuff like non-existent selectors at compile time instead of blowing up at runtime
You should know better. Obj-C is dynamic, you can create selectors at runtime.
Yes, because 60 kB/s mobile browsing sure is the future for the internet.
Excuse me, are you from the past?
You realize that mobile devices are shipping right now that can get something like 44Mb/sec down? One of the guys in my office just demoed his new iPad on LTE getting 44/20Mb/sec. Even my iPhone on AT&T's crappy oversubscribed 3G network in San Francisco can regularly pull 1Mb.
iPod Touch would be a good solution to your points above:
Seamless playback - check. (I've actually got Dark Side Of The Moon on my iPhone right now and just checked the transitions. Perfect.)
FLAC can be converted to Apple Lossless quickly and with no loss of quality if you really want to burn that much storage space on your phone. (Unless you're using a quality outboard DAC I can't see it being worth the tradeoff. Coming out of the standard mini jack, you'd be hard pressed to tell the diff between lossless and a decent mp3/aac encoding.)
You got me on the ogg point, although there are App Store apps that will play ogg. I can't speak to their utility/value as I don't use ogg.
Price - no contract, obviously, and you get a very decent little device that does way more than just play music. I personally wouldn't bother with less than 32GB which is $299, so I guess that is on the high end, but as I said, it's way more than just an mp3 player.
Controls... touchscreen is a matter of taste I guess, although I do have a pair of earbuds with an iPod remote built in that lets me change volume/pause/skip songs.
Headphone amp... see my point above re high quality DAC. If that's something that matters to you you know what to do and the iPod would be the cheapest part of your hardware chain most likely.
i'm writing a subsonic app for iPhone right now that supports offline mode... every song you play is cached (by default, user selectable option to disable) on the phone's disk and available even when the phone is in airplane mode.
The difference is, you could write your own software to run on that SPARC, you weren't at the mercy of whatever was in the 'SPARC App Store'. You weren't made to jump through many many burning hoops to get the toolchain to build new SPARC apps. You could distribute those new apps any way you wanted, you weren't dependent on the 'guardians of the gate' at the 'SPARC App Store'. You could get a wild hair up your ass, sit down, code and compile your new app however you wanted it.
Try that with your iphone.
The development tools are free, and for $99/yr you can run any app you care to write on the iPhone. No, you aren't guaranteed to be able to put it in the App Store, but that's Apple's storefront so they get to make the rules. I'm fine with that.
http://bandcamp.com/tags
I don't know how big the catalogue is, but I'd guess tens of thousands by now. And, bonus, you're not supporting the RIAA.
There are loads of shops that will sell you lossless. Here's another very good one: http://bleep.com/
I haven't found anything else with comparable audio quality.
I know the ageing ATRAC codec used on Minidiscs are inferior to the latest generation codecs, such as AAC, but the D/A converters and amplifiers were far superior to those in the latest portable units, even iPods which are not just hampered by poor amplifiers, but also shoddy encoding and a high level of dynamic compression in iTunes. And I must say that as a portable recorder they actually seem to be cheaper than comparable solid state recorders.
iPods don't encode anything. Maybe you're thinking of iTunes? If your encodings are shoddy, use a different encoder. The dynamic compression ("SoundCheck" in Apple lingo) can be disabled via the Settings menu. iPods are also capable of storing and playing Apple Lossless (ALAC) files, which sound identical to the original source.
It is new. There are two concepts here that you are confusing: off-contract and unlocked. You have always been able to buy an off-contract phone (for $599 or $699), but it would only work on AT&T (ignoring jailbreaks). As of today you can now buy an off-contract, unlocked phone direct from Apple, for $650 or $750.
Re:Perl - the COBOL of scripting languages
on
Perl 5.14 Released
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· Score: 1
So much of the language is context sensitive (e.g., this arbitrary symbol means a certain thing, except in some cases where it means something completely different) and there are so many features that I always felt overwhelmed. Sure, I always managed to get the code working but it felt hackish and thanks to "there's more than one way to do it," I was never sure if the way I implemented was the right way.
I felt that way too until I read Effective Perl Programming. It goes over all the multiple ways to do things and explains why one is better than another in a particular situation. Great book. It gave me the Perl "aha moment" I needed.
Re:Perl - the COBOL of scripting languages
on
Perl 5.14 Released
·
· Score: 1
PHP beats perl for web applications for one simple reason: it was designed from day one to work as an apache module. mod_perl was a hack, and it worked OK for a lot of people, but for me it was always more trouble than it was worth. Eventually you had heavy hitters like Yahoo putting their weight behind PHP for web code and that pretty much decided the race.
Re your specific objections:
namespaces - use classes
DBI library - use PDO
At least if there's one single interface between a website and the mic/cam we can do our best to ensure that interface isn't exploitable. If every website has to roll their own, overall it's much less secure.
I thought the printer sharing only worked with a very few "supported" printers, and wasn't actively being updated. Is this not true?
I think it works with everything. We have two airports at the office, one sharing an HP Photosmart and one sharing a Kyocera laserprinter. They just show up as regular printers on the Mac, and you select the driver in the Add Printer dialog as you would any directly-connected printer. I think the Airports just work as a 'pass thru' type of thing.
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Maybe it "just works" for you, but every time I've tried to use MacOS X, I had to give up in a short time and go back to KDE. This thing is just too infuriatingly dumbed down.
So much so that Mac users don't even get a proper delete key that goes forwards or a right click on the trackpad (without holding down function). The idea that this is a professional OS is laughable (doesn't even have highlight, middle-click copy).
Seriously, that's the best you got? You can right click on the trackpad by two finger tapping or clicking in the - wait for it - lower right corner. Or holding down control, not function. Forward delete on my Macbook is Fn-Delete. My full size aluminum keyboard has a dedicated forward delete key. iTerm, which I use instead of Terminal, has auto-copy on highlight. You could certainly assign middle click to that if you wanted. I prefer auto-copy. I spend 70% of my work day in iTerm ssh'd in to remote CentOS VMs so I'm picky about my terminal functionality and I've never found the Mac wanting.
Actually, they ARE starting the walk-in on OSX. And I'm speaking from the POV of someone who loves OSX and Apple laptops but hates their mobile offerings. They're starting with a "default to no" to install apps which they haven't signed.
I personally think that is a great idea. It's not like it's exactly hard to launch the unsigned app. (Right click and choose Open. And you only have to do it once, it will launch normally every time after that.)
I will buy this game the instant there is a native OS X version available. Loved the first one but I don't have any Windows machines any more and I'm not messing around with virtualization or whatever just for a game.
But if you had nothing sitting around gathering dust, how much would it cost you to buy an equivalent amount of hardware? Keeping in mind depreciation, power , network access and infrastructure, and physical space. You also pay per hour, so if you don't need it one week, shut it all down and pay nothing. If you need something done very quick, pay for 100 cores for 1 hour instead of 1 core for 100 hours.
At the personal level (not speaking of businesses here): AMD x8 FX-8150 3.6/4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD - DYI from all-new parts, no monitor - approx $750. Let's make it a full $1750 to allow for power delivered by "gilded electrons", "diamond optical fiber" supported internet access and a bouquet of flowers once a month for the "better half" to make it for the physical storage space. $1750 vs $175/month...10 month worth of VPS in Google's "compute" cloud (with 1 core with 4GB RAM).
What about bandwidth? What about support? What about being able to be up and running on a new box in a few minutes when the old one takes a dump? You are totally missing the point of cloud services like this. It's not supposed to compete with your desktop machine.
You probably gave him an used iPhone which has an additional cost of $0. Not to mention that in the US they have these funky phone purchase schemes where you "pay" $99 to get an iPhone and you don't pay less per month if you bring your own phone to the deal. It used to be that the barrier to entry for programming was nil. In fact personal computers of the 80s like the C64 actually booted directly to a BASIC interpreter console. Now you have to get development tools. With the iPhone its even worse since you need the development tools (paid) and to pay for deploying the application similar to the game consoles market.
The development tools for Mac OS X/iOS are free. You don't need to pay $99/year if you just want to learn/tinker. You can run iOS apps on the Simulator on your Mac. You can't run on a hardware iOS device without paying $99/yr. If my daughter was seriously that interested in programming I would pay the $99 in a heartbeat! Do you know how much enrichment classes generally cost? Sorry, there may be arguments about why Apple is a crappy developer ecosystem but the price of the dev tools is not one of them.
Any smartphone practically can play something downloaded on the computer. And when everything is all planned out that's great but life happens and sometimes I'm out and about away from my computer and I want to watch something specific. iTunes on my desktop isn't helping me there.
You can download music, videos, apps from the iTunes store on the phone while out and about. You don't need to be connected to a computer. Remember the whole "PC Free" thing Apple was promoting last year? You don't really need to connect an iDevice to a desktop ever any more.
More like Kale without.... Can't really think of anything to make that better. Damned CSA Kale with every delivery.
I make this all the time and it is fantastic. And I hate any other form of kale. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/aarti-sequeira/massaged-kale-salad-recipe/index.html
If I'm going to pay the dev cycle price of a compiled language, it should catch stuff like non-existent selectors at compile time instead of blowing up at runtime
You should know better. Obj-C is dynamic, you can create selectors at runtime.
Yes, because 60 kB/s mobile browsing sure is the future for the internet.
Excuse me, are you from the past? You realize that mobile devices are shipping right now that can get something like 44Mb/sec down? One of the guys in my office just demoed his new iPad on LTE getting 44/20Mb/sec. Even my iPhone on AT&T's crappy oversubscribed 3G network in San Francisco can regularly pull 1Mb.
iPod Touch would be a good solution to your points above: Seamless playback - check. (I've actually got Dark Side Of The Moon on my iPhone right now and just checked the transitions. Perfect.) FLAC can be converted to Apple Lossless quickly and with no loss of quality if you really want to burn that much storage space on your phone. (Unless you're using a quality outboard DAC I can't see it being worth the tradeoff. Coming out of the standard mini jack, you'd be hard pressed to tell the diff between lossless and a decent mp3/aac encoding.) You got me on the ogg point, although there are App Store apps that will play ogg. I can't speak to their utility/value as I don't use ogg. Price - no contract, obviously, and you get a very decent little device that does way more than just play music. I personally wouldn't bother with less than 32GB which is $299, so I guess that is on the high end, but as I said, it's way more than just an mp3 player. Controls... touchscreen is a matter of taste I guess, although I do have a pair of earbuds with an iPod remote built in that lets me change volume/pause/skip songs. Headphone amp... see my point above re high quality DAC. If that's something that matters to you you know what to do and the iPod would be the cheapest part of your hardware chain most likely.
i'm writing a subsonic app for iPhone right now that supports offline mode... every song you play is cached (by default, user selectable option to disable) on the phone's disk and available even when the phone is in airplane mode.
The difference is, you could write your own software to run on that SPARC, you weren't at the mercy of whatever was in the 'SPARC App Store'. You weren't made to jump through many many burning hoops to get the toolchain to build new SPARC apps. You could distribute those new apps any way you wanted, you weren't dependent on the 'guardians of the gate' at the 'SPARC App Store'. You could get a wild hair up your ass, sit down, code and compile your new app however you wanted it. Try that with your iphone.
The development tools are free, and for $99/yr you can run any app you care to write on the iPhone. No, you aren't guaranteed to be able to put it in the App Store, but that's Apple's storefront so they get to make the rules. I'm fine with that.
Valve doesn't have shareholders, it is privately held.
http://bandcamp.com/tags I don't know how big the catalogue is, but I'd guess tens of thousands by now. And, bonus, you're not supporting the RIAA. There are loads of shops that will sell you lossless. Here's another very good one: http://bleep.com/
Convert them to ALAC. You lose nothing and gain Apple compatibility.
google's high speed fiber will not speed up the slow ad server.
I haven't found anything else with comparable audio quality. I know the ageing ATRAC codec used on Minidiscs are inferior to the latest generation codecs, such as AAC, but the D/A converters and amplifiers were far superior to those in the latest portable units, even iPods which are not just hampered by poor amplifiers, but also shoddy encoding and a high level of dynamic compression in iTunes. And I must say that as a portable recorder they actually seem to be cheaper than comparable solid state recorders.
iPods don't encode anything. Maybe you're thinking of iTunes? If your encodings are shoddy, use a different encoder. The dynamic compression ("SoundCheck" in Apple lingo) can be disabled via the Settings menu. iPods are also capable of storing and playing Apple Lossless (ALAC) files, which sound identical to the original source.
Amazon has a very nice page on AWS security you can read. http://aws.amazon.com/security/
It is new. There are two concepts here that you are confusing: off-contract and unlocked. You have always been able to buy an off-contract phone (for $599 or $699), but it would only work on AT&T (ignoring jailbreaks). As of today you can now buy an off-contract, unlocked phone direct from Apple, for $650 or $750.
So much of the language is context sensitive (e.g., this arbitrary symbol means a certain thing, except in some cases where it means something completely different) and there are so many features that I always felt overwhelmed. Sure, I always managed to get the code working but it felt hackish and thanks to "there's more than one way to do it," I was never sure if the way I implemented was the right way.
I felt that way too until I read Effective Perl Programming. It goes over all the multiple ways to do things and explains why one is better than another in a particular situation. Great book. It gave me the Perl "aha moment" I needed.
PHP beats perl for web applications for one simple reason: it was designed from day one to work as an apache module. mod_perl was a hack, and it worked OK for a lot of people, but for me it was always more trouble than it was worth. Eventually you had heavy hitters like Yahoo putting their weight behind PHP for web code and that pretty much decided the race. Re your specific objections: namespaces - use classes DBI library - use PDO
At least if there's one single interface between a website and the mic/cam we can do our best to ensure that interface isn't exploitable. If every website has to roll their own, overall it's much less secure.
Yes, that's worked out great so far.
I thought the printer sharing only worked with a very few "supported" printers, and wasn't actively being updated. Is this not true?
I think it works with everything. We have two airports at the office, one sharing an HP Photosmart and one sharing a Kyocera laserprinter. They just show up as regular printers on the Mac, and you select the driver in the Add Printer dialog as you would any directly-connected printer. I think the Airports just work as a 'pass thru' type of thing.
iDevices do not have multi-output (yet?). Only iTunes running on a computer.
Sorry man. That's why I moved away from apple. Contacts and meetings should sync without iTunes
They do.