A lot of Mac users will actually fit this profile. I do for example. I know about Windows, but I can probably count the total hours I've actually used it on the fingers of one hand. I've been using Macs however since 1985, and I'm a professional developer. I've also used lots of other systems with various OSes including DOS, but using Windows - nope, just never (thankfully!) had to really bother.
For me though, Boot Camp does have some attractions. There are certain apps on Windows that are not on Mac, though by and large I've managed without. However, there are a few "nice to have" things such as some 3D CAD software, (Solid Edge) and some mapmaking software (OCAD) that have no Mac versions, and no real Mac equivalents (though OCAD might be getting a run for its money someday soon;-). For everything else that I sorely need but can't find for the Mac, I write it myself. These days, with Cocoa, that is getting easier and easier...
Since the flight took place at Edwards AFB where the laid runways are several miles long and the rest of the desert is smooth and flat for miles around, either running out of runway was a non-event, or else it has a landing run of a hundred miles or more... which might need some work to fix. Like fitting brakes.
Board: So, you'd like a grant to look for evidence to support your theory?
Scientist: Yes
Board:Very well, all we need is evidence that your theory is correct, and will give you the grant.
Scientist:Ummm....
I totally agree with you. People seem to be suggesting that this could reduce the incentive to develop Mac apps, but I think it could mean the opposite. They now have OS X right there, XCode and Cocoa right there, they might just be tempted to have a look at it... and what they'll find is that Cocoa is not just streets ahead of the competition, it's also fun! Not to mention really easy to learn and will build great apps with a very straightforward learning curve. Apple have just lowered the bar on entry to this development environment, not raised it - and that's a good thing for Mac apps.
Developers who are open minded enough to give Cocoa a try (both Mac traditional and Windows developers) will probably start to realise (as I have over the last 18 months) what a lot of time other methods force you to spend just keeping the language and tools happy instead of getting your interesting app coded. I find it hard to contemplate going back to any of the old ways now, since I know how much more productive I am in Cocoa. I think it's part of Apple's reasoning for doing this dual booting to attract new developers in this fashion.
OK, pedantry mode on. Decibels are a ratiometric value, so what does 0.5 decibels mean? Nothing, that's what. And since decibels are a logarithmic measure, 0.5 decibels (less than the normal full output, say) is actually hardly anything - certainly not a difference you could hear. If you're going to bandy around technical terms, at least understand what they mean.
simple calls like HLock which used to be two instructions on the original 128K Mac are now thousands of cycles under OS X
This is highly unlikely. HLock originally only ever set a flag. It now doesn't even need to do that, since a Handle never moves under OS X, but if it did, it still would only need to set a flag. Even allowing the overhead of calling through a shim into Carbon this wouldn't amount to a huge call. There may be other APIs that do exhibit the behaviour you mention, but this was a very bad example to pick.
When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination." Think about that. Just let it sink in for a minute
This is so banal it's ludicrous. I mean, what about all that technology that just comes into being without people, huh? This is a typical example of trotting out a "celeb" (I use the word in its loosest sense) who spouts some garbage and all the people are meant to go "oh wow, man, that's so deeeep!!!". C'mon, won't somebody stick their hand up and say the emperor's got no clothes? It's just another tech gadget that really nobody needs, actually doesn't do a whole lot more that the old version doesn't do, and if it weren't for the godawful mess that the old version actually is, with all its spyware and viruses and bugs, nobody would give a flying fuck about.
The ALP is currently in unelectable self-destruct mode, and appears to show no real signs of getting that fixed before the next election. Which is unfortunate, as the incumbents are a bunch of equally obnoxious nazis, though for other reasons. I doubt that having such nanny-state type policies is likely to help them in any way. What I can't figure out is why they don't just hand over the leadership to Julia Gillard and start working towards making themselves actually attractive to voters. None of this stuff is relevant to that goal, or will help them in any way shape or form. And I speak as a parent.
The fact that through medical care and technology, we have almost eliminated "survival of the fittest" (better written as "survival of the best fit to their habitat")?
This is a fallacy. Leaving aside the fact that there are still huge populations in the world without access to such medical technology, all it does, if anything, is to change the "environment" a bit. The selection pressures don't go away, they merely shift so that other things become important selection factors. In fact medical advances are only one such change in our environment - there are hundreds of others. In fact we have vastly changed the way we live in a very short space of time, in evolutionary terms. Last tick of the evolutionary clock, we were still living in hunter-gatherer tribes. Given the huge changes we've brought upon ourselves in just 5000 years, I'd say that in fact we've probably kick-started a big evolutionary jump for ourselves and others. In what direction, it's impossible to say. In 10,000 more years we might be able to discern it, another 100,000 and it will be clear.
The Ricky Gervais podcast is the only podcast I've unsubscribed to after one episode
Same here, though unlike you I thought The Office was brilliant. The problem with the podcast is that Karl Pilkington is a fool. Laughing at fools isn't funny, merely sad.
So it's no longer just enough to "read the article", but to read the article that the article is about, and the one THAT one is about, and so on.... RTFATFATFATFATFA....
Nah. This is slashdot we're talking about here. You should count yourself lucky that I recursed even to level 1.
The REAL story here is that he has created an APPLICATION for the iPod, according to the FA. How did he do that? Apple closely guards the iPod SDKs and as far as I know have never released them to third party developers.
Maybe he went into Apple and "slurped" the SDKs using his application.... oh wait.
People who complain about the licence fee don't realise how good they've got it. Why they constantly need to look for alternatives is beyond me. What they should do is give the Brits a diet of Australian or American TV output for a month (including all the ads, but without any BBC/British content at all), then ask them what they'd prefer. It's not until you've lived with an alternative system for a while that you realise just how bloody good British TV is, and the BBC in particular. Sure, it's not perfect, but it is the best there is. The funding system has worked for years, the result is the world's best TV, so stop trying to find ways to fuck it up!
Well, it sounds like a good solution in theory, but there are some issues. One is that there is not supposed to be anything that bridges the airgap between the brick veneer and the frame, as it transmits damp. There are steel ties, but these are OK. Insulation batts (fibreglass in plastic liners) that are put in the walls have to be retained with wire so that they don't touch the bricks, maintaining the airgap. Blowing in insulation might create a damp problem, in other words.
The other issue I have with this material is that it's what I already have in the roof - and while it is fairly effective, it's a total bastard if you have to go up into the roofspace for any reason - it gets in your hair, your clothes, all over the place... and if you ever have to cut through the ceiling (I did some work that involved taking out a couple of interior non-supporting walls, and this opened up gaps in the ceiling, for example), the material pours through and gets everywhere. This was after trying to remove it from those areas that I would be opening up. Obviously this isn't something that matters in the long run, as it's not everyday I'm taking out walls... but the experience did lead me to despise that stuff with a vengeance!
When I suggested he insulate the house to save money and energy, he said "No no, it is much to hot in summer here!"
I live in Australia and it amazes me what primitive building codes they have. Most homes are timber-framed "brick veneer" and their thermal performance is abysmal. I think new regulations now force walls and roofspace to be insulated but it seems to have been a long time coming. My house was built in 1982 and it totally sucks - absolutely nothing in the walls and a limited layer of loose fill in the roof. Whenever I have done any interior work that involves exposing the frame I have insulated that bit, but it's very patchy. The roof space can be dealt with, but most of the problem is the walls and windows.
In addition, many homes are built individually to the owner's specification, and very few seem to have a clue about using the natural direction of the sun to create sensible areas of light and shade, areas that are warm in winter and cool in summer. Luckily in that respect my own house is situated correctly - in fact 180 to the orientation shown on the original plans! Obviously someone realised just before it was erected that the original orientation was stupid. Or maybe they just misread them...
The other thing that amazes me is that more homes are not built with built-in solar water heating and other solar-powered ventilation arrangements. These require no moving parts or external power, are very simple and effective. There ARE some houses that have these features and their benefits are obvious as soon as you walk into one - nice and cool in summer, and the sunnier it is, the cooler they get! Hot water for free. Instead most people fit reverse-cycle aircon to their homes to make them bearable when all it would take is some better building codes. It's about time this was forced on builders by legislation, but there appears to be no sign of it. Even the UK is forcing new homes to be built with solar water heating for god's sake!! I think outsiders think of Austrlians as being quite 'green conscious' and in some respects they are, but talk about missing the wood for the trees!
By "magic dust" you mean, "reality distortion field", right?
Yes, because that iPod you have in your hand is not really a slick neat attractive well-made device, it's a pile of parts on a veroboard hooked up with ratsnest wiring, held together with sellotape. But because of the RDF around it, you only THINK it's well-made, etc. Likewise with PIXAR films - they are all really just half-assed lazy bits of filmography barely worthy of NBN* production values, but the RDF that ships with every reel makes you THINK they are in fact slickly written, humourous, incredibly detailed and lovingly crafted pieces of fine entertainment. That RDF is powerful stuff indeed!
*NBN - Australian TV channel, possibly one of the crappiest in the western world.
I think the writer has a valid point. OS X may be arguably more inherently secure, but that is to ignore the social engineering aspects. Most Mac users never read the license agreement without hitting 'Accept', they enter their keychain password whenever it is requested without reading or understanding the message, and happily run downloaded shareware without a second thought. Given the routes to an exploit available once any of these have been breached, writing a Mac virus is trivial. Hell, even Cocoa's handy categories make the entire API a backdoor. Writing a virus for the Mac that relies on social engineering is not hard, in fact it's trivially easy, if you learn a bit of Cocoa. Apple even give you the tools for free. It only takes a few users to run a trojan to unleash a Mac virus on all of us, and it's true - we just are not ready to accept it can even happen, let alone know how to deal with it when it does.
QuickTime on the Mac is pretty decent, and has recently been rewritten (OSX 10.4) in a much more sensible and OS X- like architecture, leveraging OpenGL video cards and all that jazz. QT on Windows is a different proposition, since the original QT was heavily dependant on the QuickDraw and other Mac toolbox structures on to which it was layered. Therefore, QT on Windows includes a massive port of large parts of the Mac toolbox to Windows. That overhead is a thick layer which is probably not very efficient. It's also rather out of date now, as the old style toolbox (Carbon APIs) is probably not the best way to program OS X these days, even though it is still supported and will be for a long time.
WMP on the Mac is probably about the crappiest out there, Real included, and that's saying something. Unfortunately I've noticed that a lot of sites have started to go down the.wma file route for video content, which is a shame, but also inevitable, given the clueless PC hoards out there. There are some decent third party efforts, so that's OK, but what would be ideal would be for Apple to be allowed to develop and bundle a WM codec for QuickTime, so that content "just works" when played back, as it should. Since this would no longer be taking anything away from MS (quite the opposite), MS should go ahead and give them the rights to do this...
Of course, Apple might not want to, since it would help spread the diseases of WM even faster, but it seems that pleading with content providers to adopt QuickTime (or something else that is more cross-platform friendly) is just not working. I know, I've tried it already. They don't care, use VLC they say, or somesuch. If Apple are wise, they will recognise the reality of this and just add the format to QuickTime. Sure it's a backdown, but they must be getting used to the feeling by now.
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A lot of Mac users will actually fit this profile. I do for example. I know about Windows, but I can probably count the total hours I've actually used it on the fingers of one hand. I've been using Macs however since 1985, and I'm a professional developer. I've also used lots of other systems with various OSes including DOS, but using Windows - nope, just never (thankfully!) had to really bother.
;-). For everything else that I sorely need but can't find for the Mac, I write it myself. These days, with Cocoa, that is getting easier and easier...
For me though, Boot Camp does have some attractions. There are certain apps on Windows that are not on Mac, though by and large I've managed without. However, there are a few "nice to have" things such as some 3D CAD software, (Solid Edge) and some mapmaking software (OCAD) that have no Mac versions, and no real Mac equivalents (though OCAD might be getting a run for its money someday soon
Since the flight took place at Edwards AFB where the laid runways are several miles long and the rest of the desert is smooth and flat for miles around, either running out of runway was a non-event, or else it has a landing run of a hundred miles or more... which might need some work to fix. Like fitting brakes.
Board: So, you'd like a grant to look for evidence to support your theory?
Scientist: Yes
Board:Very well, all we need is evidence that your theory is correct, and will give you the grant.
Scientist:Ummm....
I totally agree with you. People seem to be suggesting that this could reduce the incentive to develop Mac apps, but I think it could mean the opposite. They now have OS X right there, XCode and Cocoa right there, they might just be tempted to have a look at it... and what they'll find is that Cocoa is not just streets ahead of the competition, it's also fun! Not to mention really easy to learn and will build great apps with a very straightforward learning curve. Apple have just lowered the bar on entry to this development environment, not raised it - and that's a good thing for Mac apps.
Developers who are open minded enough to give Cocoa a try (both Mac traditional and Windows developers) will probably start to realise (as I have over the last 18 months) what a lot of time other methods force you to spend just keeping the language and tools happy instead of getting your interesting app coded. I find it hard to contemplate going back to any of the old ways now, since I know how much more productive I am in Cocoa. I think it's part of Apple's reasoning for doing this dual booting to attract new developers in this fashion.
discover that it's been capped at 0.5 decibels
OK, pedantry mode on. Decibels are a ratiometric value, so what does 0.5 decibels mean? Nothing, that's what. And since decibels are a logarithmic measure, 0.5 decibels (less than the normal full output, say) is actually hardly anything - certainly not a difference you could hear. If you're going to bandy around technical terms, at least understand what they mean.
Having children requires having sex, and who on earth would willingly have sex with Ballmer? Or perhaps he adopted...
simple calls like HLock which used to be two instructions on the original 128K Mac are now thousands of cycles under OS X
This is highly unlikely. HLock originally only ever set a flag. It now doesn't even need to do that, since a Handle never moves under OS X, but if it did, it still would only need to set a flag. Even allowing the overhead of calling through a shim into Carbon this wouldn't amount to a huge call. There may be other APIs that do exhibit the behaviour you mention, but this was a very bad example to pick.
When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination." Think about that. Just let it sink in for a minute
This is so banal it's ludicrous. I mean, what about all that technology that just comes into being without people, huh? This is a typical example of trotting out a "celeb" (I use the word in its loosest sense) who spouts some garbage and all the people are meant to go "oh wow, man, that's so deeeep!!!". C'mon, won't somebody stick their hand up and say the emperor's got no clothes? It's just another tech gadget that really nobody needs, actually doesn't do a whole lot more that the old version doesn't do, and if it weren't for the godawful mess that the old version actually is, with all its spyware and viruses and bugs, nobody would give a flying fuck about.
Why is it seeing such a tiny improvement when it is 160mhz faster
Perhaps because 160 millihertz is only a 8x10E-11 % improvement.
The ALP is currently in unelectable self-destruct mode, and appears to show no real signs of getting that fixed before the next election. Which is unfortunate, as the incumbents are a bunch of equally obnoxious nazis, though for other reasons. I doubt that having such nanny-state type policies is likely to help them in any way. What I can't figure out is why they don't just hand over the leadership to Julia Gillard and start working towards making themselves actually attractive to voters. None of this stuff is relevant to that goal, or will help them in any way shape or form. And I speak as a parent.
Ah, seems there is a dual core Mini - didn't spot that.
I think you'll find the Mac Mini has a single core Intel chip, not a core duo.
The fact that through medical care and technology, we have almost eliminated "survival of the fittest" (better written as "survival of the best fit to their habitat")?
This is a fallacy. Leaving aside the fact that there are still huge populations in the world without access to such medical technology, all it does, if anything, is to change the "environment" a bit. The selection pressures don't go away, they merely shift so that other things become important selection factors. In fact medical advances are only one such change in our environment - there are hundreds of others. In fact we have vastly changed the way we live in a very short space of time, in evolutionary terms. Last tick of the evolutionary clock, we were still living in hunter-gatherer tribes. Given the huge changes we've brought upon ourselves in just 5000 years, I'd say that in fact we've probably kick-started a big evolutionary jump for ourselves and others. In what direction, it's impossible to say. In 10,000 more years we might be able to discern it, another 100,000 and it will be clear.
...and have a much, much smaller share of the market than they do now.
The Ricky Gervais podcast is the only podcast I've unsubscribed to after one episode
Same here, though unlike you I thought The Office was brilliant. The problem with the podcast is that Karl Pilkington is a fool. Laughing at fools isn't funny, merely sad.
So it's no longer just enough to "read the article", but to read the article that the article is about, and the one THAT one is about, and so on.... RTFATFATFATFATFA....
Nah. This is slashdot we're talking about here. You should count yourself lucky that I recursed even to level 1.
The REAL story here is that he has created an APPLICATION for the iPod, according to the FA. How did he do that? Apple closely guards the iPod SDKs and as far as I know have never released them to third party developers.
Maybe he went into Apple and "slurped" the SDKs using his application.... oh wait.
People who complain about the licence fee don't realise how good they've got it. Why they constantly need to look for alternatives is beyond me. What they should do is give the Brits a diet of Australian or American TV output for a month (including all the ads, but without any BBC/British content at all), then ask them what they'd prefer. It's not until you've lived with an alternative system for a while that you realise just how bloody good British TV is, and the BBC in particular. Sure, it's not perfect, but it is the best there is. The funding system has worked for years, the result is the world's best TV, so stop trying to find ways to fuck it up!
Quartz? Can't MS even come up with an internal codename without having to copy one from Apple? Talk about lacking creativity!
Well, it sounds like a good solution in theory, but there are some issues. One is that there is not supposed to be anything that bridges the airgap between the brick veneer and the frame, as it transmits damp. There are steel ties, but these are OK. Insulation batts (fibreglass in plastic liners) that are put in the walls have to be retained with wire so that they don't touch the bricks, maintaining the airgap. Blowing in insulation might create a damp problem, in other words.
The other issue I have with this material is that it's what I already have in the roof - and while it is fairly effective, it's a total bastard if you have to go up into the roofspace for any reason - it gets in your hair, your clothes, all over the place... and if you ever have to cut through the ceiling (I did some work that involved taking out a couple of interior non-supporting walls, and this opened up gaps in the ceiling, for example), the material pours through and gets everywhere. This was after trying to remove it from those areas that I would be opening up. Obviously this isn't something that matters in the long run, as it's not everyday I'm taking out walls... but the experience did lead me to despise that stuff with a vengeance!
When I suggested he insulate the house to save money and energy, he said "No no, it is much to hot in summer here!"
I live in Australia and it amazes me what primitive building codes they have. Most homes are timber-framed "brick veneer" and their thermal performance is abysmal. I think new regulations now force walls and roofspace to be insulated but it seems to have been a long time coming. My house was built in 1982 and it totally sucks - absolutely nothing in the walls and a limited layer of loose fill in the roof. Whenever I have done any interior work that involves exposing the frame I have insulated that bit, but it's very patchy. The roof space can be dealt with, but most of the problem is the walls and windows.
In addition, many homes are built individually to the owner's specification, and very few seem to have a clue about using the natural direction of the sun to create sensible areas of light and shade, areas that are warm in winter and cool in summer. Luckily in that respect my own house is situated correctly - in fact 180 to the orientation shown on the original plans! Obviously someone realised just before it was erected that the original orientation was stupid. Or maybe they just misread them...
The other thing that amazes me is that more homes are not built with built-in solar water heating and other solar-powered ventilation arrangements. These require no moving parts or external power, are very simple and effective. There ARE some houses that have these features and their benefits are obvious as soon as you walk into one - nice and cool in summer, and the sunnier it is, the cooler they get! Hot water for free. Instead most people fit reverse-cycle aircon to their homes to make them bearable when all it would take is some better building codes. It's about time this was forced on builders by legislation, but there appears to be no sign of it. Even the UK is forcing new homes to be built with solar water heating for god's sake!! I think outsiders think of Austrlians as being quite 'green conscious' and in some respects they are, but talk about missing the wood for the trees!
By "magic dust" you mean, "reality distortion field", right?
Yes, because that iPod you have in your hand is not really a slick neat attractive well-made device, it's a pile of parts on a veroboard hooked up with ratsnest wiring, held together with sellotape. But because of the RDF around it, you only THINK it's well-made, etc. Likewise with PIXAR films - they are all really just half-assed lazy bits of filmography barely worthy of NBN* production values, but the RDF that ships with every reel makes you THINK they are in fact slickly written, humourous, incredibly detailed and lovingly crafted pieces of fine entertainment. That RDF is powerful stuff indeed!
*NBN - Australian TV channel, possibly one of the crappiest in the western world.
I think the writer has a valid point. OS X may be arguably more inherently secure, but that is to ignore the social engineering aspects. Most Mac users never read the license agreement without hitting 'Accept', they enter their keychain password whenever it is requested without reading or understanding the message, and happily run downloaded shareware without a second thought. Given the routes to an exploit available once any of these have been breached, writing a Mac virus is trivial. Hell, even Cocoa's handy categories make the entire API a backdoor. Writing a virus for the Mac that relies on social engineering is not hard, in fact it's trivially easy, if you learn a bit of Cocoa. Apple even give you the tools for free. It only takes a few users to run a trojan to unleash a Mac virus on all of us, and it's true - we just are not ready to accept it can even happen, let alone know how to deal with it when it does.
QuickTime on the Mac is pretty decent, and has recently been rewritten (OSX 10.4) in a much more sensible and OS X- like architecture, leveraging OpenGL video cards and all that jazz. QT on Windows is a different proposition, since the original QT was heavily dependant on the QuickDraw and other Mac toolbox structures on to which it was layered. Therefore, QT on Windows includes a massive port of large parts of the Mac toolbox to Windows. That overhead is a thick layer which is probably not very efficient. It's also rather out of date now, as the old style toolbox (Carbon APIs) is probably not the best way to program OS X these days, even though it is still supported and will be for a long time.
WMP on the Mac is probably about the crappiest out there, Real included, and that's saying something. Unfortunately I've noticed that a lot of sites have started to go down the .wma file route for video content, which is a shame, but also inevitable, given the clueless PC hoards out there. There are some decent third party efforts, so that's OK, but what would be ideal would be for Apple to be allowed to develop and bundle a WM codec for QuickTime, so that content "just works" when played back, as it should. Since this would no longer be taking anything away from MS (quite the opposite), MS should go ahead and give them the rights to do this...
Of course, Apple might not want to, since it would help spread the diseases of WM even faster, but it seems that pleading with content providers to adopt QuickTime (or something else that is more cross-platform friendly) is just not working. I know, I've tried it already. They don't care, use VLC they say, or somesuch. If Apple are wise, they will recognise the reality of this and just add the format to QuickTime. Sure it's a backdown, but they must be getting used to the feeling by now.