Users have adjusted, but developers have not. I generally install software as an administrator but run it as a regular user, and find problems ALL THE TIME with software that can't handle the permissions thing. TurboTax 2003 could only be run as an Administrator. TurboTax 2004 fixed that, and fails elegantly if you try to update as a regular user (i.e. it says you need to be a user who can do that). Games still get this wrong - Zoo Tycoon, Shreck 2, and the Myst IV demo all wouldn't run unless the current user had complete control over the install directory, all subdirectories, and all files found within. Photoshop Elements 3 (the most recent version!) could not use it's help system unless certain system directories had global write permissions, because of a decompress on the fly scheme.
As a Mac OS X user, I think this move by Microsoft will be great for Mac OS X, because it will for Windows developers to think about these things before they hire someone to port to Mac OS X.
1) Wouldn't a heavy tire glide over road surfaces better because of better inertia, because once it starts moving it keeps moving better than a light object?
Um, no. Lighter wheels result in smoother ride because the suspension is able to move them up and down quickly over rough surfaces. Heavier wheels don't move as quickly, and movement from uneven surfaces winds up being transmitted to the rest of the car. This is why vehicles with big wheels (like trucks) tend to have a poorer ride quality than cars.
Also, lighter wheels can be pushed back down after bouncing over a bump more quickly than a heavy wheel, which means better traction.
Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We're not going to do that again.
This is clearly a reference to Pets.com, and he got it wrong. Their mistake wasn't that they were trying to sell high margin, high markup, cheap to ship toys on the Internet. Their problem was that they were trying to sell low margin, low markup, expensive to ship dog food. It's easy to make money selling cheap to ship high margin items on the Internet - look at Amazon, or (more relavently) PETsMART.com.
Re:Well, they don't want to hurt current sales...
on
G5 PowerBook "Challenge"
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Car companies don't disguise their prototypes.
Yes, they do. Car manufacturers will put plastic bras, duct tape, cardboard, panels from existing models, and all manner of other tricks when testing out new cars. When developing new chasis and engines they often will put an existing body on the new chasis, to try out the new stuff on real roads.
Look in any car magazine and you'll find photos of "heavily disguised spy pics" or "photoshope enhanced pictures of lightly disguised" cars. Go to Death Valley in the summer and you can see disguised prototypes live and in person, getting tortured.
I tend to think that this lawsuit is primarily the result of whiners. I have a "Beige" G3 that is covered by the suit; I've bought, at full-retail price, two versions of OS X (more if you want to include the original public beta and discs for upgrades) but will NOT be sending in the disks for a refund.
Now, in my case the list of unsupported hardware is fairly long: the Rage II video isn't accelerated (but does work, and supports all the normal video resolutions); the video in and video out features don't work (my box is an AV model); the floppy drive doesn't work; the serial printer isn't supported. Boo hoo. None of this should have come as a surprise to anyone who adopted OS X early on. While Apple didn't go out of its way to announce the unsupported hardware, they didn't hide it either.
I got an awful lot by installing OS X. A modern OS that is very nearly crash proof; a solid Unix layer that made my job a lot easier; nifty new iApps; and so on. I've upgraded my video (Rage II is too pokey for ANYTHING anymore), bought a new printer and a USB card. I reboot if I need my floppy drive or the AV features, and everything still works just as well as it did when I bought the computer.
Heck, back in 1998 Apple was saying Rhapsody would support any Mac-compatible with PCI - including clones and CHRP hardware. I was disappointed to find out my beloved 6100 wouldn't be supported, but I eventually got over it and decided to go buy a new computer that WOULD be supported.
I have an antique PC that has a Soundblaster CDROM drive that hasn't been made for years and years. I don't expect any modern operating to support it, and my current machine has a modern IDE CDROM drive. It is rumored that the next major release of OS X won't support the Beige G3's at all. On the whole I think this ends up being a Pyrrhic victory.
While I agree from the user interface point of view, from a programmer's point of view I'd have to say that the PalmOS is pretty crude, especially when compared to what Apple was trying to do with the Newton OS.
In short, programming for the Palm is an awful lot like programming for the Mac, circa 1984. While the database driven storage is pretty nifty, the actual API is very basic; memory management is a joke. Contrast that against the Newton, where you had a complete object oriented environment, garbage collection, full access to internal objects, etc. etc.
Of course, you had to learn a new language to program the Newton (derived from Pascal, of all things), the tools were expensive and only available from Apple, blah blah blah. All in all, the Palm group probably made the right choice, though a pretty basic one.
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Users have adjusted, but developers have not. I generally install software as an administrator but run it as a regular user, and find problems ALL THE TIME with software that can't handle the permissions thing. TurboTax 2003 could only be run as an Administrator. TurboTax 2004 fixed that, and fails elegantly if you try to update as a regular user (i.e. it says you need to be a user who can do that). Games still get this wrong - Zoo Tycoon, Shreck 2, and the Myst IV demo all wouldn't run unless the current user had complete control over the install directory, all subdirectories, and all files found within. Photoshop Elements 3 (the most recent version!) could not use it's help system unless certain system directories had global write permissions, because of a decompress on the fly scheme.
As a Mac OS X user, I think this move by Microsoft will be great for Mac OS X, because it will for Windows developers to think about these things before they hire someone to port to Mac OS X.
Um, no. Lighter wheels result in smoother ride because the suspension is able to move them up and down quickly over rough surfaces. Heavier wheels don't move as quickly, and movement from uneven surfaces winds up being transmitted to the rest of the car. This is why vehicles with big wheels (like trucks) tend to have a poorer ride quality than cars.
Also, lighter wheels can be pushed back down after bouncing over a bump more quickly than a heavy wheel, which means better traction.
This is clearly a reference to Pets.com, and he got it wrong. Their mistake wasn't that they were trying to sell high margin, high markup, cheap to ship toys on the Internet. Their problem was that they were trying to sell low margin, low markup, expensive to ship dog food. It's easy to make money selling cheap to ship high margin items on the Internet - look at Amazon, or (more relavently) PETsMART.com.
Car companies don't disguise their prototypes.
Yes, they do. Car manufacturers will put plastic bras, duct tape, cardboard, panels from existing models, and all manner of other tricks when testing out new cars. When developing new chasis and engines they often will put an existing body on the new chasis, to try out the new stuff on real roads.
Look in any car magazine and you'll find photos of "heavily disguised spy pics" or "photoshope enhanced pictures of lightly disguised" cars. Go to Death Valley in the summer and you can see disguised prototypes live and in person, getting tortured.
I tend to think that this lawsuit is primarily the result of whiners. I have a "Beige" G3 that is covered by the suit; I've bought, at full-retail price, two versions of OS X (more if you want to include the original public beta and discs for upgrades) but will NOT be sending in the disks for a refund.
Now, in my case the list of unsupported hardware is fairly long: the Rage II video isn't accelerated (but does work, and supports all the normal video resolutions); the video in and video out features don't work (my box is an AV model); the floppy drive doesn't work; the serial printer isn't supported. Boo hoo. None of this should have come as a surprise to anyone who adopted OS X early on. While Apple didn't go out of its way to announce the unsupported hardware, they didn't hide it either.
I got an awful lot by installing OS X. A modern OS that is very nearly crash proof; a solid Unix layer that made my job a lot easier; nifty new iApps; and so on. I've upgraded my video (Rage II is too pokey for ANYTHING anymore), bought a new printer and a USB card. I reboot if I need my floppy drive or the AV features, and everything still works just as well as it did when I bought the computer.
Heck, back in 1998 Apple was saying Rhapsody would support any Mac-compatible with PCI - including clones and CHRP hardware. I was disappointed to find out my beloved 6100 wouldn't be supported, but I eventually got over it and decided to go buy a new computer that WOULD be supported.
I have an antique PC that has a Soundblaster CDROM drive that hasn't been made for years and years. I don't expect any modern operating to support it, and my current machine has a modern IDE CDROM drive. It is rumored that the next major release of OS X won't support the Beige G3's at all. On the whole I think this ends up being a Pyrrhic victory.
While I agree from the user interface point of view, from a programmer's point of view I'd have to say that the PalmOS is pretty crude, especially when compared to what Apple was trying to do with the Newton OS.
In short, programming for the Palm is an awful lot like programming for the Mac, circa 1984. While the database driven storage is pretty nifty, the actual API is very basic; memory management is a joke. Contrast that against the Newton, where you had a complete object oriented environment, garbage collection, full access to internal objects, etc. etc.
Of course, you had to learn a new language to program the Newton (derived from Pascal, of all things), the tools were expensive and only available from Apple, blah blah blah. All in all, the Palm group probably made the right choice, though a pretty basic one.