has Hollywood's latest bandwagon hit the skids already?"
Yes, and its flipped over and exploded for no readily apparent reason, and one of the burning wheels has flown off and IS COMING RIGHT OUT OF THE SCREEN AT YOU!!!
...which is the real problem with 3D: even if you pass it up and go for the 2D version you have to put up with all of the contrived "eye poke" effects.
As the long lunar night drew to a close, the spacesuit clad figures gathered around the featureless monolith. Floyd reached out with his gloved hand and brushed the frictionless surface. Just then, the bright rays of dawn reached the floor of the crater, and for the first time in two million years, the black slab felt the touch of the sun. The response was instantaneous, and the helmeted astronauts tried in vain to cover their ears as the artifact broadcast its waking message to the stars:
And you think that Apple's design and form factor of the iPad is somehow groundbreaking?
GP was refering to design patents - these cover the cosmetic design of products and the rules are quite different from the regular patents that we love to hate.
So, this isn't about the Cherrypad being a touch-sensitive tablet computer: its about how closely some of the non-functional cosmetic details resemble those of the iDevices.
Did the Dynabook concept include a stylized-fruit logo "etched" into the centre of the slightly curved "brushed aluminium" backplate?
Android does support proxies. I don't know if you're using an old version that didn't have that support, but there is a proxy option in my wireless network screen.
Looks like the latest version has proxy support - see comment 991 here - but not per-network and, apparently, failing to be picked up by all apps. So even if this version is available for your phone it sounds about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
...and Android, ChromeOS and iOS are all potential thin client operating systems.
For serious work a phone is never going to replace a desktop, no matter what operating system either one of them uses.
TFA wasn't just talking about phones: Android is going into tablets and TVs, too. iOS is already in the iPad and iTV. There's no reason that they couldn't show up in nettops, too.
At the moment, the prime candidate is the iPad, but that's a luxury item costing as much as a PC (one of the other failings of thin clients) - but the cheap Android-based tablets should be hitting the market Real Soon Now.
It's too hard to 1) get data into it (tiny keyboard)
typing on an iPad-sized device isn't so bad, though, and you can plug standard keyboards into an iPad (I assume Android and ChromeOS can likewise cope).
and 2) work with various windows, documents, etc (tiny screen).
That's something of a power-user thing - an awful lot of PC users I've watched work full screen and rely on cut&paste to get data between apps. Which is how iOS and Android work...
And once you've added a keyboard to the thing, how is it different from a desktop form factor?
Its very compact, very light, running a low-powered ARM CPU instead of an Intel space heater, is cheap (if its not an Apple), has no spinning HD, instant on/off and keeps all its data on servers. Oh, and couldn't hack running Windows 7 in a million years.
Because, if you flatten the battery on your iPod listening to tunes and playing games, You don't have to walk miles in the rain searching for the last public telephone in the western world.
when people ask me what they should buy i tell them that it doesn't really matter since they are 90% the same
...but that last 10% of consistency and attention to detail on the iDevices is a killer.
Oh, and wake me up when Android can use web proxies so I can use my Android phone over the work WiFi network... Apart from that, ymmv depending on which Android phone you have: my HTC Hero just hasn't got the CPU grunt to do justice to Android, loses all its settings when you upgrade the OS (eventually, after HTC and the carrier have done their bit), needs two separate email clients (one for Gmail push, another for POP/IMAP/Exchange) and has a joke of a media player (the alternatives have gimmicky interfaces I don't want and don't integrate with the HTC lock screen). When I upgrade, it'll either be to an iPhone or to a pure-Google Android.
Call me crazy, but I just don't see a future where our permitting clerks are sitting at the counter entering new permits and printing invoices from a phone screen.
No, but they could be easily be working on an Android, ChromeOS or iOS tablet/nettop entering data into a web-based application. Far easier to administer than a separate instance of your software on every single workstation.
I think this is the real target market for ChromeOS (which is no good for mobiles until mobile internet gets far more reliable).
Thin-client computing is a jolly good idea which has, so far, been blocked because everybody and their dog wants to run MS Office.
And anything else that is programmable and can run applications.
So, that just leaves Perl, Python, Javascript (in Safari), Ruby, PHP, Bash and Applescript that come as standard, and C, C++, Objective C, one full-blown IDE (XCode) and a drag-and-drool IDE (DashCode) that are a free, optional install from the system DVD (have I missed any?)
Jobs has got a lot more cutting to do before OS X comes with less programming tools than Windows.
Apple's appliance devices support a limited number of formats.
...including ubiquitous formats such as MP3, unprotected AAC, AIFF and WAV for audio and MPEG-4/H.264 for video. Given the iOS user-base, its hardly taxing for any supplier of media to offer it in these formats. If what you're saying is "Wah! iPad doesn't support Ogg Theora!" then, well, that's true, but its also true of most of the competition, because...
They have meagre hardware to deal with anything non-standard even if you do jailbreak the device.
You mean a tiny, battery-powered device doesn't have the grunt to run software-only video codecs, and can only play the limited range of formats for which it has hardware acceleration? No shit, Sherlock. Most mobile devices only work well with video that has been optimised for their hardware. There are plenty of free or cheap and easy-to-use transcoders around.
For the average n00b, this is very effective at separating the rest of the world from Apple.
Ever bought a MP3 file from Amazon? Or, if you've got a media file on your desktop, just double click on it and iTunes will file it for you, and sync it with all your iDevices next time you connect. Want to rip a CD? Insert CD and click "Yes" when you're asked whether you want to add it to your library.
I can assure you from bitter experience that many n00bs would have far more difficulty dealing with an "open" media player that presents as a USB storage device, because they are often incapable of copying files. Seriously - all they can do is "open" and "save as...".
The difficulty dealing with the rest will be a sufficient barrier to stop the n00bs from using alien stuff. This is why stuff like VLC is so handy on a Mac.
Sorry, what are you saying? That these n00bs will seek out and install VLC when QuickTime player won't open their files, but they won't seek out and install Handbrake (or similar) when iTunes won't open their files?
...some time after they got sued by Sun for trying to "embrace and extend" it by adding incompatible extensions.
But then:
Microsoft has a near-monopoly on desktop computing - Apple doesn't
Microsoft has a near-monopoly on desktop computing - Apple doesn't
Microsoft has a near-monopoly on desktop computing - Apple doesn't
I know that's technically only one reason but it is so important that I thought that I'd mention it three times. If Oracle or IBM doesn't pick up Java support for Mac then you get to vote with your feet and switch to Windows or Linux. It'll even run on your Mac hardware. Not so easy if you're pissed off with MS and work in a sector dominated by Windows, MS Office or Internet Exporer.
It is a strange world indeed when I turned down getting a mac for a pc running Windows and.NET over macOSX and Java for web development work. Oracle and Apple are just plain scary and it turns out Microsoft is the one who is the least evil when they were in power.
Except that, if Steve Jobs wasn't such a megalomaniac, you probably wouldn't even have the choice: Apple would most likely have gone bust in the late 90s instead of switching from the horrible proprietary OX 9 to a developer-friendly *NIX system, so it would be Windows or nothing. The OS X Mac is the only desktop platform to make inroads on the MS monoculture (Linux is significant in the server and scientific computing space, but you can't give it away on the desktop).
If I had Adobe Dreamweaver, Office, and Free Java or.NET on Linux I would switch to it.
That's the USP of Mac for some people - its a Unix with a nice GUI, MS Office and Adobe CS. Question is, is that market enough to keep Apple in business? Probably not - but hopefully its too big for Apple to want to throw it away.
Of course, if Oracle or IBM pick up Java support for Mac this will have been the biggest storm in a teacup ever - and the Mac will have become a much better Java dev system than it was before.
I thought one could download Free recordings of public domain music on a PC and then sync them to the iDevices using iTunes. When did Apple disable that?
There are certain lock-in aspects of the iDevices (particularly Apps) but the idea that you have to buy all of your media from the iTunes store is a complete myth.
iDevices can play MP3, unprotected AAC and MP4 video from any source, legal or otherwise. iTunes will happily rip your CDs (and there are third-party tools that will rip your DVDs into iDevice-friendly format) and the VLC media player was recently released for iOS. iBooks can read ePub and PDF, and there are several other reader Apps available.
You have to use the iTunes software - but not the iTunes store - to get the files onto the iPad but apart from that, the only lock-in is for Apps and firmware updates.
There are also various streaming apps - including YouTube. If the pirates aren't offering H.264 streams then complain to them, not Apple.
The $64,000 question is whether Oracle will now start offering a Java download for OS X - if so, then the Mac will have the same status as other platforms, where you get your Java VM from Oracle. Since Apple's Java releases have tended to lag quite a way behind Sun in the past that might not be a bad thing (although the downside is that the horrible Java auto-updater might make an appearance).
OTOH, if Jobs is really determined to turn the Mac into an oversized iPad that can only run native software then, yes, there will have to be a bit of an exodous. However - there's no reason to decide right now (its not like Java is going to vanish from Mac tomorrow - and you weren't expecting the next version of Java to appear on Mac anytime soon, anyway).
As Ron Gilbert just put it
"For you Apple apologists claiming Apple will never lock down the Mac, step one is in place and you all let it happen."
Except that "step one" is obvious good business sense given the success of the iOS App Store, whereas "step two" - locking down the Mac - would be a big, risky step.
Anyway, who cares? If and when Jobs locks down OS X, lost of people who currently use Macs will switch to Windows or Linux (which run quite happily on current Mac hardware) and if he locks down future Mac hardware, lots of people will start buying generic PC hardware instead. Most people buy Macs out of choice and are in a position to vote with their feet (c.f. Windows PCs which many people are obliged to use because of the MS monoculture).
OTOH, give it a few years for mobile network connectivity to improve and the smart way to develop homebrew software might well be as server-based, crossplatform webapps - for which a closed, secure and stable "HTML5" client device (like, ooh, an iPad, which doesn't require webapps to go through the App store and even lets you add "manifest" files to dress them up to look like native Apps) might be ideal.
I cannot comprehend that one accepts 0.333... = 1/3 but not 0.999... = 1.
Well, being equal to 0.3333... is just the sort of perverted behavior that you'd expect from one of them there so-called "fractions" what used to bully you at school, but 1 is a good, clean, wholesome countin' number, dammit! I thought I knew where I stood with 1, and it weren't at the end of no infinite line of 9s!
In other news, people who insist that 0.999...<1 are probably making the perfectly true observation that, if they wrote "0." and then started writing 9s, they would never reach 1.
Instead of hating them, you need to teach them about the difference between mathematician's infinity (exactly as many 9s as you need to write before 0.999... really does equal 1) and engineer's infinity (as many 9s as you need to write before your pen runs out and you give up and go for a beer).
In 10 years time, I'd hope that easily half of all books were digital only,
...and unless we have a Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense, 10 years later they'll all be unreadable because the DRM-encumbered file format they were stored in is no longer supported.
I don't think physical books will disappear completely in that time frame - they're too iconic - but the typical print run might be "one for Me, one for Mum and Dad, one for each legal deposit library and a couple of spares - everybody else can download". Modern print-on-demand technology makes that feasible.
In any case, with all the political drives to increase access to higher education, by 2030 every person who works behind a bar will require a PhD in Beverage Logistics and they'll need space to store all the theses...
Dell, HP, IBM (their PC division is quite healthy as Lenovo)
1. Dell weren't involved in the "Early desktop market" referred to in the GP post. They're young whipper-snappers, founded in 1984, making PC clones. We're talking about the early desktop market, the contemporaries of the Apple II - Commodore, Radio Shack (they're gone in the UK, if they still make PCs US they're just PC clones), OSI, Exidy, Sinclair/Timex...
2. Lenovo isn't "IBM's PC division". Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. IBM bailed from the PC market, despite being the "winning" platform of the 1980s platform wars.
3. I'll give you HP as they did indeed have their own pre-IBM desktop platform, although it was targeted at scientific and technical use rather than the general desktop market.
Of course, you could argue that Apple switched to making PC clones in 2005 - but they're still running their own OS and firmware.
How many of the old UNIX vendors that tied their implementation to overpriced hardware are still around?
I think the key there might be overpriced. Apple make premium-priced hardware. Overpriced products cost more than people are willing to pay - premium priced products, people actually buy.
Jobs' NeXT workstation was overpriced and he paid the price.
Of course, makers of Unix workstations have also had their lunch eaten by generic PCs with cheap, high-performance graphics cards (graphics was Sun and SGI's USP) and free Unix-like OSs.
CP/M was effectively cloned by Microsoft and became MS-DOS
The clone became MS-DOS. CP/M and Digital Research failed.
GEM is still available as an open-source project, although it isn't popular.
So, it failed.
Given that such lawsuits aren't really fair, IMO
GEM completely took the piss in the extent to which it cosmetically mimiced MacOS (it was nothing like it under the hood) so they pretty much had it coming.
MSX was a hardware platform, not an operating system, and an 8-bit one at that. It was, therefore, doomed to failure.
GP was talking about "the early days of desktop computing" - i.e. the Apple II era, so I think its artificial to distinguish between hardware and software platforms. The point of MSX was software compatibility.
So, MSX failed.
Unix & its various clones are still widely deployed including in Apple OS/X
Back in the early days of desktop computing "Unix(tm)" meant an OS licenced from AT&T, such as Xenix. It doesn't mean that any more. Anyway, the only Unix with a non-negligible penetration into the desktop market is OS X, and that's mainly due to Apple's proprietary extensions which they refuse to license - kinda QED, really.
Remember, Linux and BSD are not Unix(tm) and probably owe their success to being Free, which is very different from the sort of licensing the GP was talking about.
Apple is making exactly the same mistakes they made in the early desktop market: they're refusing to license their software to more nimble hardware manufacturers.
Here's a clue: which of the early makers of desktop computers survived the Wintel monoculture of the late 80s and 90s and is still an influential, if minority, platform today? Hint - it begins with "A". What happened to CP/M and GEM, MSX and Unix which were licensed to multiple manufacturers?
Anyway, Apple have already tried that. Twice, actually: Apple with "classic" Mac OS and Steve Jobs with NeXTStep before he returned to Apple. That went well, didn't it?
What has worked spectacularly since the release of the iMac in 1998 is tying the software to premium-priced "designer label" hardware (but not quite as premium-priced as the old NeXT cubes). But you're right - Apple should drop their winning formula and go with the one that has already been proven to fail.
The fly in the ointment is that "more nimble hardware manufacturers" don't care whether they ship machines with Windows or MacOS as long as they make their money (usually by selling upgrades, peripherals, extended warranties and finance rather than the computers themselves). They'll be more than happy to attract custom from existing Apple converts, cannibalizing Apple's sales, Windows users to switch. So you've got guaranteed cannibalization of Apple's existing sales but no guarantee whatsoever that the clone-makers and their resellers will aggressively promote MacOS to Windows users. Look at Dell and Asus's feeble efforts to sell Linux-based machines...
...about what us males are supposed to do, but then I realised they come in pairs! - I hope that in the event of a gas attack/viral outbreak/collapsed building our female bretheren (er...) will be generous and share their equipment.
Honestly, there's no reason to go to blu-ray when DVD is good enough and when it isn't, then (i) downloads (e.g. Amazon, Netflix) and (ii) rental service (e.g. Netflix) will be
Depends on what resolution & quality the download/streamed alternative is: I recently got a HD telly which can get streamed HD (720p I think) from BBC iPlayer, which isn't bad - and clearly better than upsampled standard def - but not so much as to blow my socks off. However, 1080p from Blu-Ray is in a different league - I recently watched 2001 on Blu Ray and my socks are definitely now in a mysterious brightly-lit hotel room somewhere on the other side of the universe (although even Blu-ray has the occasional annoying artifact). The Pixar stuff is pretty stunning in full HD, too.
I think the big threat from streaming/download is to BluRay/DVD rental (which has happily co-existed with sales since the VHS era). People might still want to own physical copies* of their personal A-list of favorite films and series to watch over and over again, but prefer to download/stream the movies that they would previously have just rented.
(MPAA wonks contemplating exciting new DRM might want to reflect on the meaning of "own physical copies" if they want to continue to flog premium-priced boxed sets and special editions to fans).
Slashdot Mirror
has Hollywood's latest bandwagon hit the skids already?"
Yes, and its flipped over and exploded for no readily apparent reason, and one of the burning wheels has flown off and IS COMING RIGHT OUT OF THE SCREEN AT YOU!!!
...which is the real problem with 3D: even if you pass it up and go for the 2D version you have to put up with all of the contrived "eye poke" effects.
Go watch 2001 again.
As the long lunar night drew to a close, the spacesuit clad figures gathered around the featureless monolith. Floyd reached out with his gloved hand and brushed the frictionless surface. Just then, the bright rays of dawn reached the floor of the crater, and for the first time in two million years, the black slab felt the touch of the sun. The response was instantaneous, and the helmeted astronauts tried in vain to cover their ears as the artifact broadcast its waking message to the stars:
FAAAARRRRTTTTT!!!!
And you think that Apple's design and form factor of the iPad is somehow groundbreaking?
GP was refering to design patents - these cover the cosmetic design of products and the rules are quite different from the regular patents that we love to hate.
So, this isn't about the Cherrypad being a touch-sensitive tablet computer: its about how closely some of the non-functional cosmetic details resemble those of the iDevices.
Did the Dynabook concept include a stylized-fruit logo "etched" into the centre of the slightly curved "brushed aluminium" backplate?
Android does support proxies. I don't know if you're using an old version that didn't have that support, but there is a proxy option in my wireless network screen.
Looks like the latest version has proxy support - see comment 991 here - but not per-network and, apparently, failing to be picked up by all apps. So even if this version is available for your phone it sounds about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
It's PC vs. thin client.
...and Android, ChromeOS and iOS are all potential thin client operating systems.
For serious work a phone is never going to replace a desktop, no matter what operating system either one of them uses.
TFA wasn't just talking about phones: Android is going into tablets and TVs, too. iOS is already in the iPad and iTV. There's no reason that they couldn't show up in nettops, too.
At the moment, the prime candidate is the iPad, but that's a luxury item costing as much as a PC (one of the other failings of thin clients) - but the cheap Android-based tablets should be hitting the market Real Soon Now.
It's too hard to 1) get data into it (tiny keyboard)
typing on an iPad-sized device isn't so bad, though, and you can plug standard keyboards into an iPad (I assume Android and ChromeOS can likewise cope).
and 2) work with various windows, documents, etc (tiny screen).
That's something of a power-user thing - an awful lot of PC users I've watched work full screen and rely on cut&paste to get data between apps. Which is how iOS and Android work...
And once you've added a keyboard to the thing, how is it different from a desktop form factor?
Its very compact, very light, running a low-powered ARM CPU instead of an Intel space heater, is cheap (if its not an Apple), has no spinning HD, instant on/off and keeps all its data on servers. Oh, and couldn't hack running Windows 7 in a million years.
but then what is the point of 2 devices?
Because, if you flatten the battery on your iPod listening to tunes and playing games, You don't have to walk miles in the rain searching for the last public telephone in the western world.
when people ask me what they should buy i tell them that it doesn't really matter since they are 90% the same
...but that last 10% of consistency and attention to detail on the iDevices is a killer.
Oh, and wake me up when Android can use web proxies so I can use my Android phone over the work WiFi network... Apart from that, ymmv depending on which Android phone you have: my HTC Hero just hasn't got the CPU grunt to do justice to Android, loses all its settings when you upgrade the OS (eventually, after HTC and the carrier have done their bit), needs two separate email clients (one for Gmail push, another for POP/IMAP/Exchange) and has a joke of a media player (the alternatives have gimmicky interfaces I don't want and don't integrate with the HTC lock screen). When I upgrade, it'll either be to an iPhone or to a pure-Google Android.
Call me crazy, but I just don't see a future where our permitting clerks are sitting at the counter entering new permits and printing invoices from a phone screen.
No, but they could be easily be working on an Android, ChromeOS or iOS tablet/nettop entering data into a web-based application. Far easier to administer than a separate instance of your software on every single workstation.
I think this is the real target market for ChromeOS (which is no good for mobiles until mobile internet gets far more reliable).
Thin-client computing is a jolly good idea which has, so far, been blocked because everybody and their dog wants to run MS Office.
And anything else that is programmable and can run applications.
So, that just leaves Perl, Python, Javascript (in Safari), Ruby, PHP, Bash and Applescript that come as standard, and C, C++, Objective C, one full-blown IDE (XCode) and a drag-and-drool IDE (DashCode) that are a free, optional install from the system DVD (have I missed any?)
Jobs has got a lot more cutting to do before OS X comes with less programming tools than Windows.
Apple's appliance devices support a limited number of formats.
...including ubiquitous formats such as MP3, unprotected AAC, AIFF and WAV for audio and MPEG-4/H.264 for video. Given the iOS user-base, its hardly taxing for any supplier of media to offer it in these formats. If what you're saying is "Wah! iPad doesn't support Ogg Theora!" then, well, that's true, but its also true of most of the competition, because...
They have meagre hardware to deal with anything non-standard even if you do jailbreak the device.
You mean a tiny, battery-powered device doesn't have the grunt to run software-only video codecs, and can only play the limited range of formats for which it has hardware acceleration? No shit, Sherlock. Most mobile devices only work well with video that has been optimised for their hardware. There are plenty of free or cheap and easy-to-use transcoders around.
For the average n00b, this is very effective at separating the rest of the world from Apple.
Ever bought a MP3 file from Amazon? Or, if you've got a media file on your desktop, just double click on it and iTunes will file it for you, and sync it with all your iDevices next time you connect. Want to rip a CD? Insert CD and click "Yes" when you're asked whether you want to add it to your library.
I can assure you from bitter experience that many n00bs would have far more difficulty dealing with an "open" media player that presents as a USB storage device, because they are often incapable of copying files. Seriously - all they can do is "open" and "save as...".
The difficulty dealing with the rest will be a sufficient barrier to stop the n00bs from using alien stuff. This is why stuff like VLC is so handy on a Mac.
Sorry, what are you saying? That these n00bs will seek out and install VLC when QuickTime player won't open their files, but they won't seek out and install Handbrake (or similar) when iTunes won't open their files?
...some time after they got sued by Sun for trying to "embrace and extend" it by adding incompatible extensions.
But then:
I know that's technically only one reason but it is so important that I thought that I'd mention it three times. If Oracle or IBM doesn't pick up Java support for Mac then you get to vote with your feet and switch to Windows or Linux. It'll even run on your Mac hardware. Not so easy if you're pissed off with MS and work in a sector dominated by Windows, MS Office or Internet Exporer.
It is a strange world indeed when I turned down getting a mac for a pc running Windows and .NET over macOSX and Java for web development work. Oracle and Apple are just plain scary and it turns out Microsoft is the one who is the least evil when they were in power.
Except that, if Steve Jobs wasn't such a megalomaniac, you probably wouldn't even have the choice: Apple would most likely have gone bust in the late 90s instead of switching from the horrible proprietary OX 9 to a developer-friendly *NIX system, so it would be Windows or nothing. The OS X Mac is the only desktop platform to make inroads on the MS monoculture (Linux is significant in the server and scientific computing space, but you can't give it away on the desktop).
If I had Adobe Dreamweaver, Office, and Free Java or .NET on Linux I would switch to it.
That's the USP of Mac for some people - its a Unix with a nice GUI, MS Office and Adobe CS. Question is, is that market enough to keep Apple in business? Probably not - but hopefully its too big for Apple to want to throw it away.
Of course, if Oracle or IBM pick up Java support for Mac this will have been the biggest storm in a teacup ever - and the Mac will have become a much better Java dev system than it was before.
I thought one could download Free recordings of public domain music on a PC and then sync them to the iDevices using iTunes. When did Apple disable that?
There are certain lock-in aspects of the iDevices (particularly Apps) but the idea that you have to buy all of your media from the iTunes store is a complete myth.
iDevices can play MP3, unprotected AAC and MP4 video from any source, legal or otherwise. iTunes will happily rip your CDs (and there are third-party tools that will rip your DVDs into iDevice-friendly format) and the VLC media player was recently released for iOS. iBooks can read ePub and PDF, and there are several other reader Apps available.
You have to use the iTunes software - but not the iTunes store - to get the files onto the iPad but apart from that, the only lock-in is for Apps and firmware updates.
There are also various streaming apps - including YouTube. If the pirates aren't offering H.264 streams then complain to them, not Apple.
The $64,000 question is whether Oracle will now start offering a Java download for OS X - if so, then the Mac will have the same status as other platforms, where you get your Java VM from Oracle. Since Apple's Java releases have tended to lag quite a way behind Sun in the past that might not be a bad thing (although the downside is that the horrible Java auto-updater might make an appearance).
OTOH, if Jobs is really determined to turn the Mac into an oversized iPad that can only run native software then, yes, there will have to be a bit of an exodous. However - there's no reason to decide right now (its not like Java is going to vanish from Mac tomorrow - and you weren't expecting the next version of Java to appear on Mac anytime soon, anyway).
It isn't Apple's "own" JVM software - it is still the Sun/Oracle JVM. Apple maintains the OS X port/distribution of Java.
As Ron Gilbert just put it "For you Apple apologists claiming Apple will never lock down the Mac, step one is in place and you all let it happen."
Except that "step one" is obvious good business sense given the success of the iOS App Store, whereas "step two" - locking down the Mac - would be a big, risky step.
Anyway, who cares? If and when Jobs locks down OS X, lost of people who currently use Macs will switch to Windows or Linux (which run quite happily on current Mac hardware) and if he locks down future Mac hardware, lots of people will start buying generic PC hardware instead. Most people buy Macs out of choice and are in a position to vote with their feet (c.f. Windows PCs which many people are obliged to use because of the MS monoculture).
OTOH, give it a few years for mobile network connectivity to improve and the smart way to develop homebrew software might well be as server-based, crossplatform webapps - for which a closed, secure and stable "HTML5" client device (like, ooh, an iPad, which doesn't require webapps to go through the App store and even lets you add "manifest" files to dress them up to look like native Apps) might be ideal.
I cannot comprehend that one accepts 0.333... = 1/3 but not 0.999... = 1.
Well, being equal to 0.3333... is just the sort of perverted behavior that you'd expect from one of them there so-called "fractions" what used to bully you at school, but 1 is a good, clean, wholesome countin' number, dammit! I thought I knew where I stood with 1, and it weren't at the end of no infinite line of 9s!
In other news, people who insist that 0.999...<1 are probably making the perfectly true observation that, if they wrote "0." and then started writing 9s, they would never reach 1.
Instead of hating them, you need to teach them about the difference between mathematician's infinity (exactly as many 9s as you need to write before 0.999... really does equal 1) and engineer's infinity (as many 9s as you need to write before your pen runs out and you give up and go for a beer).
And you're in the biggest library in the Universe! Look me up!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor
Docter redirects here. For the director/animator, see Pete Docter.
In 10 years time, I'd hope that easily half of all books were digital only,
...and unless we have a Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense, 10 years later they'll all be unreadable because the DRM-encumbered file format they were stored in is no longer supported.
I don't think physical books will disappear completely in that time frame - they're too iconic - but the typical print run might be "one for Me, one for Mum and Dad, one for each legal deposit library and a couple of spares - everybody else can download". Modern print-on-demand technology makes that feasible.
In any case, with all the political drives to increase access to higher education, by 2030 every person who works behind a bar will require a PhD in Beverage Logistics and they'll need space to store all the theses...
Is it just me or do researchers like stating the obvious.
I don't know - perhaps someone should look into that!
I'd call it a "personal computer".
Like this? or maybe this?
:-)
(Late reply - I've been away)
Dell, HP, IBM (their PC division is quite healthy as Lenovo)
1. Dell weren't involved in the "Early desktop market" referred to in the GP post. They're young whipper-snappers, founded in 1984, making PC clones. We're talking about the early desktop market, the contemporaries of the Apple II - Commodore, Radio Shack (they're gone in the UK, if they still make PCs US they're just PC clones), OSI, Exidy, Sinclair/Timex...
2. Lenovo isn't "IBM's PC division". Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. IBM bailed from the PC market, despite being the "winning" platform of the 1980s platform wars.
3. I'll give you HP as they did indeed have their own pre-IBM desktop platform, although it was targeted at scientific and technical use rather than the general desktop market.
Of course, you could argue that Apple switched to making PC clones in 2005 - but they're still running their own OS and firmware.
How many of the old UNIX vendors that tied their implementation to overpriced hardware are still around?
I think the key there might be overpriced. Apple make premium-priced hardware. Overpriced products cost more than people are willing to pay - premium priced products, people actually buy.
Jobs' NeXT workstation was overpriced and he paid the price.
Of course, makers of Unix workstations have also had their lunch eaten by generic PCs with cheap, high-performance graphics cards (graphics was Sun and SGI's USP) and free Unix-like OSs.
CP/M was effectively cloned by Microsoft and became MS-DOS
The clone became MS-DOS. CP/M and Digital Research failed.
GEM is still available as an open-source project, although it isn't popular.
So, it failed.
Given that such lawsuits aren't really fair, IMO
GEM completely took the piss in the extent to which it cosmetically mimiced MacOS (it was nothing like it under the hood) so they pretty much had it coming.
MSX was a hardware platform, not an operating system, and an 8-bit one at that. It was, therefore, doomed to failure.
GP was talking about "the early days of desktop computing" - i.e. the Apple II era, so I think its artificial to distinguish between hardware and software platforms. The point of MSX was software compatibility.
So, MSX failed.
Unix & its various clones are still widely deployed including in Apple OS/X
Back in the early days of desktop computing "Unix(tm)" meant an OS licenced from AT&T, such as Xenix. It doesn't mean that any more. Anyway, the only Unix with a non-negligible penetration into the desktop market is OS X, and that's mainly due to Apple's proprietary extensions which they refuse to license - kinda QED, really.
Remember, Linux and BSD are not Unix(tm) and probably owe their success to being Free, which is very different from the sort of licensing the GP was talking about.
Apple is making exactly the same mistakes they made in the early desktop market: they're refusing to license their software to more nimble hardware manufacturers.
Here's a clue: which of the early makers of desktop computers survived the Wintel monoculture of the late 80s and 90s and is still an influential, if minority, platform today? Hint - it begins with "A". What happened to CP/M and GEM, MSX and Unix which were licensed to multiple manufacturers?
Anyway, Apple have already tried that. Twice, actually: Apple with "classic" Mac OS and Steve Jobs with NeXTStep before he returned to Apple. That went well, didn't it?
What has worked spectacularly since the release of the iMac in 1998 is tying the software to premium-priced "designer label" hardware (but not quite as premium-priced as the old NeXT cubes). But you're right - Apple should drop their winning formula and go with the one that has already been proven to fail.
The fly in the ointment is that "more nimble hardware manufacturers" don't care whether they ship machines with Windows or MacOS as long as they make their money (usually by selling upgrades, peripherals, extended warranties and finance rather than the computers themselves). They'll be more than happy to attract custom from existing Apple converts, cannibalizing Apple's sales, Windows users to switch. So you've got guaranteed cannibalization of Apple's existing sales but no guarantee whatsoever that the clone-makers and their resellers will aggressively promote MacOS to Windows users. Look at Dell and Asus's feeble efforts to sell Linux-based machines...
...about what us males are supposed to do, but then I realised they come in pairs! - I hope that in the event of a gas attack/viral outbreak/collapsed building our female bretheren (er...) will be generous and share their equipment.
Honestly, there's no reason to go to blu-ray when DVD is good enough and when it isn't, then (i) downloads (e.g. Amazon, Netflix) and (ii) rental service (e.g. Netflix) will be
Depends on what resolution & quality the download/streamed alternative is: I recently got a HD telly which can get streamed HD (720p I think) from BBC iPlayer, which isn't bad - and clearly better than upsampled standard def - but not so much as to blow my socks off. However, 1080p from Blu-Ray is in a different league - I recently watched 2001 on Blu Ray and my socks are definitely now in a mysterious brightly-lit hotel room somewhere on the other side of the universe (although even Blu-ray has the occasional annoying artifact). The Pixar stuff is pretty stunning in full HD, too.
I think the big threat from streaming/download is to BluRay/DVD rental (which has happily co-existed with sales since the VHS era). People might still want to own physical copies* of their personal A-list of favorite films and series to watch over and over again, but prefer to download/stream the movies that they would previously have just rented.
(MPAA wonks contemplating exciting new DRM might want to reflect on the meaning of "own physical copies" if they want to continue to flog premium-priced boxed sets and special editions to fans).