They instant assumed I was some evil hacker and informed the gate personel.
I didn't know they had games like that back in the old DDR! Pity old Honecker's dead, he'd make a great next prez of the USA, or at least, a no worse than this prez.
You talk a lot of crap, none of which merits a response. Except this bit:
floating-point performance is irrelevant for normal applications
Just wrong, wrong, wrong. Most apps heavily use fp. That's why any decent machine has had either a floating point coprocessor in it (when they used to be separate) or on-board fp or vector units. It still might be true in the Windoze world that e.g. graphics are all integer based, but for doing really good graphics (e.g. Quartz) or 3D, you need fp. And if your fp performance is up there, apps will use it; if it isn't they'll use integer or fixed point to work around it.
Sculley's big mistake was joining forces with IBM and Motorola in the PowerPC debacle, but almost everyone at the time (apart from Intel) thought Risc was the future...
This wasn't a mistake, even in hindsight. The PowerPC roadmaps showed significant performance benefits over the x86 line over a ten year timeline. While the x86 did keep up better than expected, and making ten year predictions is all but impossible, the PPC DID have generally better performance than the x86 right up until about 2002. Clock for clock, the PPC could do about twice as much processing as an x86. This advantage is even more clear if you consider performance per watt. As a friend of mine remarked when he first saw by 2001 iBook - "How come the power supply is so small? Why does mine [Pentium laptop] need this housebrick?". The only reason x86 caught up and eventually passed PPC was a) they switched to a totally different (and very PPC-like) architecture and b) the AIM alliance stopped investing in new PPC designs for the desktop, because their most lucrative markets were in the embedded sector, where the PPC architecture was more than adequately powerful for those applications. Sculley did exactly the right thing, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Switching to x86 back then would not have been technically possible given the legacy of the Mac OS - something that was a sort of 68k++ was needed, and that's exactly what PPC was.
I agree though, that Spindler was the real villain of the piece.
+5 informative? Not even close. As a Mac programmer going back to 1985, I can tell you that Apple's developer support was always absolutely top-notch. They would bend over backwards to help developers of any size to solve their problems. Their developer support packages were always set at reasonable prices - you didn't have to be big to play. If there were bugs in the system APIs, they'd help you develop workarounds or get them fixed. They'd even give you source code under NDA to help you understand how things worked, if that's what it took. In the 80s and early 90s the developer publications were second to none, and were always highly anticipated. Things went a little downhill when the company hit hard times, with cutbacks at DTS as well as everywhere else, and gradually everything became a little more distant and web-based. Show me another major operating system vendor who does a better job though. Apple's developer relations have had their ups and downs and I'm not suggesting they were perfect - but ask an actual Mac developer about it sometime, I don't think you'll find their issues are anything like those you've cited.
Poor documentation for programming languages? Give me a break. The only Programming languages Apple were even remotely responsible for were Lisa Pascal (which was not much used beyond the mid-80s) and Dylan (which was never used by real developers as far as I know). Otherwise you used C, C++... which were not Apple's responsibility. Maybe you are referring to MPW? Sure, it needed a little figuring out, and its documentation wasn't the best, but then again, it wasn't that hard for someone with a technical bent, and anyway it wasn't the only development solution available for the Mac. There was also Borland's Turbo Pascal for the Mac, which was well-documented enough that I could write functional Mac apps using that documentation alone before I even got hold of Inside Macintosh. On the other hand, if you wanted documentation on the APIs, there was more than plenty. The original 6-volume Inside Macintosh was already thousands of pages when it was replaced by the even more weighty (but substantially better organised) revamped series in the early 90s. What exactly couldn't you find documentation on?
Sounds to me that your problem was you had an idea for an application but no expertise to develop it. Now that's different, and getting a tepid response from Apple is only to be expected. What you should have done is approach one of the many software houses that could have helped out. However, your post just doesn't ring true. Sounds to me like prejudice dressed up as experience. And as for your conclusion that all Apple have to do is open their doors to developers and MS will crumble - it's laughable. You do know that a) they give away a very high quality development system with every copy of the OS and b) there is more documentation and help available now than ever. Go to apple.com, look at the button bar - see that little "developer" button? Click it. Feast. Then shut the fuck up.
We are atypical organisms living beyond what we are supposed to
"Supposed to" as decided by whom? Like any evolved creature, we just do what we can to maximise our own advantage, without any real consideration of the consequences. Then, if a certain route turns out to be sufficiently disadvantageous, we modify our behaviour accordingly. Nothing is ever thought through properly because a) we don't know enough facts to make prediction possible, b) our brains are not sophisticated enough to do it and b) the system is chaotic in the mathemeatical sense anyway, so maybe it just cannot be predicted.
Basically, we push until it gets fucked up, then the balance is shifted in favour of some other behaviour, or perhaps even another species. It's what has always happened, and it's what will always happen. The planet and its ecosystems don't "care", it just IS.
Didn't you hear? We just jumped out of a tree.
Re:Add feature when they can make them work.
on
Jobs Unfazed by Zune
·
· Score: 1
It brings to mind two students that have to write a term paper that has to be 50 pages
This happened to me at uni. We were given an assignment that had to be "about 20 pages". If I recall correctly it was something to do with researching semiconductor applications for Gallium Arsenide. Well, I researched it and wrote what I found and it came to about 11 pages. My roommate fleshed his out to exactly 20 pages with diagrams and charts and graphs and it all looked very pretty, whereas mine had a few black and white illustrations and a lot of text (nicely formatted I should mention). Anyway, I got 94% for mine, he got 80%. He was pretty annoyed after all the effort he put in and complained to the lecturer. Basically he was told that it was obvious he'd padded his up to 20 pages whereas mine was about as much as could be written about the subject without unnecessary detail or irrelevant material (not perfect, as I fell short by 6%). It was a useful lesson for both of us, because prior to that I'd been sorely tempted to go the "padding" route especially after seeing how good my roommate's report looked. Ever since then I've never done more than I needed to, even if a so-called requirement is "x pages, minimum". In practice these so-called "requirements" are there to force lazy students to try a bit harder.
features [...] were missing... In the entire rest of the computing world, that's called a "beta."
Actually in the rest of the computing world a program that isn't feature-complete is called an "alpha". A beta is supposed to be feature complete but might not yet work properly, and an RC is supposed to be (nearly) finished with only the most deeply subtle bugs yet to be discovered and worked out.
What happens a few years from now, when some new dramatic improvement in turbine design happens? Or 100% efficent solar panels are invented? Or heck, maybe they even invent portable fusion reactors, who knows what is coming in the future?
I applaud your optimism, but physics says otherwise. 100% efficiency is thermodynamically impossible. For wind turbines, the maximum theoretical efficiency is 59% and that has been reached by current designs. Solar panels have lots of room for improvement, as they're only at around 20% now for direct conversion types, so there may be some cause to hope for development there. Other types of solar panels such as those that heat water are already very much more efficient than this and probably won't get much better. Portable fusion? Hmmm, let's get useful fusion of any sort first.
As a Mac user, working in an office currently that has about 90% Windows XP machines to 10% Macs, I find XP a constant source of wonder. I wonder why people put up with it, day after day. Every day I'm called over to look into some quirky fault or other on one of these machines. Yet the Macs just chug away. Another source of wonder for me is the weird UI design in XP - like menus that have to be clicked to reveal all their options - what's that all about? Whatever happened to menus being "the application's road map"? One that you have to unfold while you're driving doesn't seem like a sensible idea to me. Everyone in the office is also constantly bitching about Norton this, that and the other constantly intruding on their work - and rightly so, it's a royal pain. So why put up with it? But ask these users why don't they use the Macs instead, they're all scared of it "because it's too different". Like they haven't had to relearn everything they knew three times already since Win95, then 2000, etc. And of course the Macs just aren't that different anyway. It's funny how people will use any excuse to NOT use Macs when they are obviously much less troublesome, those that do use them never seem to complain, and manage to get their work done successfully nevertheless. There seems to be some sort of mass denial going on - what is WRONG with you people?!
I still wish the TSR-2 had been built instead and the RAAF was still flying those. They would have been über-cool. It didn't need complex swing-wings but still managed to do the same job (using blown flaps for low speed, essentially). Though it was cancelled on grounds of cost, that looks ridiculous set against the cost of other projects since - we might suppose the Americans leant on the British to stop its development given that it would still be modern if not totally cutting edge today.
Every program contains at least one bug; and every program contains at least one redundant line of code. Therefore: logically, all programs can be reduced to one line that doesn't work.
I'm sure the phones will work at more or less any height - the higher the better. The problem is that at very high altitudes, the phone "sees" hundreds of cell base stations at once, and the system isn't really designed to deal with this. Even if one cell can decide it will take the initial call, cell switching will be occurring every few seconds as the signal strength fluctuates. The problem multiplies if you are crossing those cells at 500mph. Instead the on board mini-station grabs the call and keeps hold of it, allowing a single dedicated downlink to maintain sanity in the system.
At least this is my only partially-informed assumption (a long time ago I was a radio negineer, but I don't know about the actual implementation details of GSM.) But logically, allowing in-flight GSM phone calls is a bad idea because of the reasoning above. The system is designed on the assumption that calls will be made on the ground, therefore range-limited, and thus can only possibly be routed by one or two base stations, not hundreds.
why won't iTunes let you copy music from the iPod to the computer? - It's insane!
It's not insane, but it is a bit annoying. Luckily, the music on an iPod is unencrypted, and simply arranged openly as files on its file system. Mount the device, read the files, simple as that. Or use one of any number of simple utilities that do that for you. Job jobbed.
I concede you have a point, but my Mac is a laptop too, and I still never use those buttons - I use two fingers on the trackpad. If your Mac doesn't do that, you can get a third party install that will do it. Once you get used to it, it's very very hard to live without.
After what I'd read here, I thought I'd better take a look at iTunes 7... and actually, I think the scrollbars look pretty nice. Not like Java at all to my mind. I agree they should function in the standard way, but I don't mind the look. I hope it's something that will be standard for the scrollbars in Leopard, since I DON'T like the inconsistency between apps - I mean, if I want inconsistency I can look at websites, right?
Are the masses of IT directors going to think, "Gee, monoculture is bad, I think I'll replace all my Dell desktops with iMacs"?
You're right, ain't gonna happen. But there is one shining example that should be given more attention - the Australian Roads and Traffic Authority switched to Macs a few years ago with a Linux server farm at HQ for precisely this reason (risky monoculture). As far as I can tell, it's gone very well. Every town has an RTA office with Macs on the desks, they work, their operators are happy with them (I asked when I renewed my rego, though I concede that one data point isn't evidence).
If a big quango like the RTA can be brave enough to do it, then others more timid should take their example seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
... including baking/credit card information...
Yeah, I make sure I lock down my recipes with strong encryption - can't be too sure who might want to rip off my special carrot cake!
They instant assumed I was some evil hacker and informed the gate personel.
I didn't know they had games like that back in the old DDR! Pity old Honecker's dead, he'd make a great next prez of the USA, or at least, a no worse than this prez.
You talk a lot of crap, none of which merits a response. Except this bit:
floating-point performance is irrelevant for normal applications
Just wrong, wrong, wrong. Most apps heavily use fp. That's why any decent machine has had either a floating point coprocessor in it (when they used to be separate) or on-board fp or vector units. It still might be true in the Windoze world that e.g. graphics are all integer based, but for doing really good graphics (e.g. Quartz) or 3D, you need fp. And if your fp performance is up there, apps will use it; if it isn't they'll use integer or fixed point to work around it.
I've noticed that the meeja have lately started to refer to Apple as "Apple, the IT giant". So some things do change!
Sculley's big mistake was joining forces with IBM and Motorola in the PowerPC debacle, but almost everyone at the time (apart from Intel) thought Risc was the future...
This wasn't a mistake, even in hindsight. The PowerPC roadmaps showed significant performance benefits over the x86 line over a ten year timeline. While the x86 did keep up better than expected, and making ten year predictions is all but impossible, the PPC DID have generally better performance than the x86 right up until about 2002. Clock for clock, the PPC could do about twice as much processing as an x86. This advantage is even more clear if you consider performance per watt. As a friend of mine remarked when he first saw by 2001 iBook - "How come the power supply is so small? Why does mine [Pentium laptop] need this housebrick?". The only reason x86 caught up and eventually passed PPC was a) they switched to a totally different (and very PPC-like) architecture and b) the AIM alliance stopped investing in new PPC designs for the desktop, because their most lucrative markets were in the embedded sector, where the PPC architecture was more than adequately powerful for those applications. Sculley did exactly the right thing, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Switching to x86 back then would not have been technically possible given the legacy of the Mac OS - something that was a sort of 68k++ was needed, and that's exactly what PPC was.
I agree though, that Spindler was the real villain of the piece.
They viewed programmers as weeds
+5 informative? Not even close. As a Mac programmer going back to 1985, I can tell you that Apple's developer support was always absolutely top-notch. They would bend over backwards to help developers of any size to solve their problems. Their developer support packages were always set at reasonable prices - you didn't have to be big to play. If there were bugs in the system APIs, they'd help you develop workarounds or get them fixed. They'd even give you source code under NDA to help you understand how things worked, if that's what it took. In the 80s and early 90s the developer publications were second to none, and were always highly anticipated. Things went a little downhill when the company hit hard times, with cutbacks at DTS as well as everywhere else, and gradually everything became a little more distant and web-based. Show me another major operating system vendor who does a better job though. Apple's developer relations have had their ups and downs and I'm not suggesting they were perfect - but ask an actual Mac developer about it sometime, I don't think you'll find their issues are anything like those you've cited.
Poor documentation for programming languages? Give me a break. The only Programming languages Apple were even remotely responsible for were Lisa Pascal (which was not much used beyond the mid-80s) and Dylan (which was never used by real developers as far as I know). Otherwise you used C, C++... which were not Apple's responsibility. Maybe you are referring to MPW? Sure, it needed a little figuring out, and its documentation wasn't the best, but then again, it wasn't that hard for someone with a technical bent, and anyway it wasn't the only development solution available for the Mac. There was also Borland's Turbo Pascal for the Mac, which was well-documented enough that I could write functional Mac apps using that documentation alone before I even got hold of Inside Macintosh. On the other hand, if you wanted documentation on the APIs, there was more than plenty. The original 6-volume Inside Macintosh was already thousands of pages when it was replaced by the even more weighty (but substantially better organised) revamped series in the early 90s. What exactly couldn't you find documentation on?
Sounds to me that your problem was you had an idea for an application but no expertise to develop it. Now that's different, and getting a tepid response from Apple is only to be expected. What you should have done is approach one of the many software houses that could have helped out. However, your post just doesn't ring true. Sounds to me like prejudice dressed up as experience. And as for your conclusion that all Apple have to do is open their doors to developers and MS will crumble - it's laughable. You do know that a) they give away a very high quality development system with every copy of the OS and b) there is more documentation and help available now than ever. Go to apple.com, look at the button bar - see that little "developer" button? Click it. Feast. Then shut the fuck up.
In order to keep current and keep all your software running, you have to buy a new MacOS X distribution once a year ($80-$129)
Really? Where can I buy my once-a-year upgrade? That would mean I can get 10.7 about now....
We are atypical organisms living beyond what we are supposed to
"Supposed to" as decided by whom? Like any evolved creature, we just do what we can to maximise our own advantage, without any real consideration of the consequences. Then, if a certain route turns out to be sufficiently disadvantageous, we modify our behaviour accordingly. Nothing is ever thought through properly because a) we don't know enough facts to make prediction possible, b) our brains are not sophisticated enough to do it and b) the system is chaotic in the mathemeatical sense anyway, so maybe it just cannot be predicted.
Basically, we push until it gets fucked up, then the balance is shifted in favour of some other behaviour, or perhaps even another species. It's what has always happened, and it's what will always happen. The planet and its ecosystems don't "care", it just IS.
Didn't you hear? We just jumped out of a tree.
It brings to mind two students that have to write a term paper that has to be 50 pages
This happened to me at uni. We were given an assignment that had to be "about 20 pages". If I recall correctly it was something to do with researching semiconductor applications for Gallium Arsenide. Well, I researched it and wrote what I found and it came to about 11 pages. My roommate fleshed his out to exactly 20 pages with diagrams and charts and graphs and it all looked very pretty, whereas mine had a few black and white illustrations and a lot of text (nicely formatted I should mention). Anyway, I got 94% for mine, he got 80%. He was pretty annoyed after all the effort he put in and complained to the lecturer. Basically he was told that it was obvious he'd padded his up to 20 pages whereas mine was about as much as could be written about the subject without unnecessary detail or irrelevant material (not perfect, as I fell short by 6%). It was a useful lesson for both of us, because prior to that I'd been sorely tempted to go the "padding" route especially after seeing how good my roommate's report looked. Ever since then I've never done more than I needed to, even if a so-called requirement is "x pages, minimum". In practice these so-called "requirements" are there to force lazy students to try a bit harder.
Sorry for the off-topic.
If PDF became completely proprietary tomorrow, few people would notice
Mac users would, and they're not noted for keeping meekly quiet when they get steam-rollered. PDF is here to stay, whatever MS do.
Pyongyang might be a psychotic dictator
Pyongyang is the capital of Nth Korea. The psychotic dictator you may have in mind is Kim Jong Il.
features [...] were missing ... In the entire rest of the computing world, that's called a "beta."
Actually in the rest of the computing world a program that isn't feature-complete is called an "alpha". A beta is supposed to be feature complete but might not yet work properly, and an RC is supposed to be (nearly) finished with only the most deeply subtle bugs yet to be discovered and worked out.
What happens a few years from now, when some new dramatic improvement in turbine design happens? Or 100% efficent solar panels are invented? Or heck, maybe they even invent portable fusion reactors, who knows what is coming in the future?
I applaud your optimism, but physics says otherwise. 100% efficiency is thermodynamically impossible. For wind turbines, the maximum theoretical efficiency is 59% and that has been reached by current designs. Solar panels have lots of room for improvement, as they're only at around 20% now for direct conversion types, so there may be some cause to hope for development there. Other types of solar panels such as those that heat water are already very much more efficient than this and probably won't get much better. Portable fusion? Hmmm, let's get useful fusion of any sort first.
As a Mac user, working in an office currently that has about 90% Windows XP machines to 10% Macs, I find XP a constant source of wonder. I wonder why people put up with it, day after day. Every day I'm called over to look into some quirky fault or other on one of these machines. Yet the Macs just chug away. Another source of wonder for me is the weird UI design in XP - like menus that have to be clicked to reveal all their options - what's that all about? Whatever happened to menus being "the application's road map"? One that you have to unfold while you're driving doesn't seem like a sensible idea to me. Everyone in the office is also constantly bitching about Norton this, that and the other constantly intruding on their work - and rightly so, it's a royal pain. So why put up with it? But ask these users why don't they use the Macs instead, they're all scared of it "because it's too different". Like they haven't had to relearn everything they knew three times already since Win95, then 2000, etc. And of course the Macs just aren't that different anyway. It's funny how people will use any excuse to NOT use Macs when they are obviously much less troublesome, those that do use them never seem to complain, and manage to get their work done successfully nevertheless. There seems to be some sort of mass denial going on - what is WRONG with you people?!
I still wish the TSR-2 had been built instead and the RAAF was still flying those. They would have been über-cool. It didn't need complex swing-wings but still managed to do the same job (using blown flaps for low speed, essentially). Though it was cancelled on grounds of cost, that looks ridiculous set against the cost of other projects since - we might suppose the Americans leant on the British to stop its development given that it would still be modern if not totally cutting edge today.
Murphy states the bad actuator is the last one you test
Well, yeah - because once you've found the bad one you don't test any more, right?
This reminds me of the old aphorism:
Every program contains at least one bug; and every program contains at least one redundant line of code. Therefore: logically, all programs can be reduced to one line that doesn't work.
Not to be a sarcastic, literal-taking idiot...
I thought you said not to be, etc...
I'm sure the phones will work at more or less any height - the higher the better. The problem is that at very high altitudes, the phone "sees" hundreds of cell base stations at once, and the system isn't really designed to deal with this. Even if one cell can decide it will take the initial call, cell switching will be occurring every few seconds as the signal strength fluctuates. The problem multiplies if you are crossing those cells at 500mph. Instead the on board mini-station grabs the call and keeps hold of it, allowing a single dedicated downlink to maintain sanity in the system.
At least this is my only partially-informed assumption (a long time ago I was a radio negineer, but I don't know about the actual implementation details of GSM.) But logically, allowing in-flight GSM phone calls is a bad idea because of the reasoning above. The system is designed on the assumption that calls will be made on the ground, therefore range-limited, and thus can only possibly be routed by one or two base stations, not hundreds.
I could care less about this
Could you? How much less? I think we should be told. Or perhaps you meant you couldn't care less...?
why won't iTunes let you copy music from the iPod to the computer? - It's insane!
It's not insane, but it is a bit annoying. Luckily, the music on an iPod is unencrypted, and simply arranged openly as files on its file system. Mount the device, read the files, simple as that. Or use one of any number of simple utilities that do that for you. Job jobbed.
I concede you have a point, but my Mac is a laptop too, and I still never use those buttons - I use two fingers on the trackpad. If your Mac doesn't do that, you can get a third party install that will do it. Once you get used to it, it's very very hard to live without.
After what I'd read here, I thought I'd better take a look at iTunes 7... and actually, I think the scrollbars look pretty nice. Not like Java at all to my mind. I agree they should function in the standard way, but I don't mind the look. I hope it's something that will be standard for the scrollbars in Leopard, since I DON'T like the inconsistency between apps - I mean, if I want inconsistency I can look at websites, right?
Typing this on an 8-core Mac pro, I manged to get first post! Wow, it IS fast!
Are the masses of IT directors going to think, "Gee, monoculture is bad, I think I'll replace all my Dell desktops with iMacs"?
You're right, ain't gonna happen. But there is one shining example that should be given more attention - the Australian Roads and Traffic Authority switched to Macs a few years ago with a Linux server farm at HQ for precisely this reason (risky monoculture). As far as I can tell, it's gone very well. Every town has an RTA office with Macs on the desks, they work, their operators are happy with them (I asked when I renewed my rego, though I concede that one data point isn't evidence).
If a big quango like the RTA can be brave enough to do it, then others more timid should take their example seriously.
Just get a scrollwheel mouse, and never worry about those buttons again. Ever.