...at least apps that use it appear to be - Audacity for example is dog slow. Using native widgets in OS X whether Carbon or Cocoa is a cinch. provided you keep your GUI and "engine" code well factored making cross-platform applications shouldn't be too hard.
People seem to be too willing to sit back and let corrupt governments tell them how they should live their own lives. In the past, this was not put up with so readily. Revolutions happen. Time for another one. Waiting for the election is one thing, and you know you MUST vote, and vote out that hideous representative of your sorry country that calls himself the "president", but if that fails, well, it's time the people took it into their own hands. History shows that in the end it's the only way.
Religious mania of any flavour is bad - Bush condemns Islamic fundametalist, but his own brand of sickening Christian fundamentalism is just as bad.
Bush's "war on terror" is CREATING terrorism, just as his foreign policy is fuelling it.
The rest of the world, including America's firm allies, is looking on with increasing dismay and worry. The people of America have GOT to do something about it. We are unable to vote in your election, despite the fact that the outcome has a direct impact on all our lives, so we are looking to the people to do the right thing.
The porn thing is not the issue - it's a smokescreen, but one that clearly shows the true nature of the forces in charge of YOUR country. Are you going to sit back and just let all this shit continue to deeply damage your nation's reputation and your own daily lives? There is an alternative - but you have got to make it happen.
Note - the people of Germany were in a very similar position back in 1933, and they chose NOT to make the right choice. Will the citizens of the US repeat that tradgedy?
Mac OS X printing implementation was built on much of the same software as Alan Cox Fedora install
This is the point. The raw install is barely usable, put a thoughtful, well designed interface on it and the whole complexion changes. Gruber argues that to get such an interface you have to have paid, professional developers on the case in order to deliver that genuine usability in a reasonable amount of time. I tend to agree with him. The points you make don't demolish his argument, they seem to strengthen it.
it's difficult to get BMW handling with a Kia budget
Hmmmm. In my experience, this is a bad analogy. BMW's don't generally handle that well (at least out of the box, your M3 might be a different prospect), whereas in most cases Fiat's cars do. Fiats are considerably cheaper than BMW's, so handling clearly isn't a cost issue.
Sails and oars are established propulsion methods that shipbuilders since the year dot have put a lot of time and effort in adopting them [sic]. Why are you guys with the damn screw propellors and steam engines interested in destroying this enormous value created with hard work over time and replace it with a totally unproven propulsion system that only the big shipping lines can use?
Yes they do. They stood up to your warmongering idiot president and told him to fuck off, when the other western poodles Blair and Howard couldn't manage it. That's backbone.
Let's give in, let's allow Microsoft to have everything, like they appear to want. They act like a big stupid kid in the playground, can't allow anybody else to have anything going on - they HAVE to poke their nose in, take the ball away, whatever.
GUIs, browsers, portable PCs, iPods, search engines, operating systems, you name it, they cannot leave it to someone else/better.
OK, MS, you win. Have it. Have the lot. The rest of us will stop and do something else. The computer industry will stagnate for quite a while, but we'll bide our time...
After oh, I dunno, say ten years or so with not one single innovation coming up, maybe, just maybe, people will have had enough. In the meantime, progress has quietly been made in technology. It will take just one small startup to suddenly trounce MS and come out with something so far ahead that they will be left spinning in the dust in its wake, wondering what the hell just happened. That's the trouble with all this steady gradual (and visible) progress amongst their competitors right now - it gives them too much of a chance to see what's going on. OK, it still takes them a few years, and they are consistently behind the curve, but not enough to forge the IT revolution that is so badly needed.
So leave it all to them. It's the quickest route to their oblivion in the end.
Here in Australia, Apple appear to be doing next to nothing to sell computers to schools, colleges and universities.
The other day I went to a poorly advertised "iMall" at our local university. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it wasn't this: a few rickety tables, with one iBook and one iMac, both running GarageBand. A lot of leaflets, iPod badges and a free draw to win an iPod. All the signs were scrawled in marker pen on bits of photocopy paper and sellotaped to the desk. A couple of geeky students were there to "sell" the systems, but instead hogged the two machines making music loops. Anyone wandering past would a) think it was a jumble sale and b) would be put off because there wasn't an actual machine to try out. I couldn't see the point of it, and doubt very much if it led to even one sale. I left very disappointed and pretty miffed at Apple for their lack of effort.
This same uni has about a 40% Mac usage among its staff overall. There is a strong Mac following here, but it's totally thanks to staff who are able to specify their own PCs.
The other day I met a lecturer at our local TAFE (further ed college). He teaches film and cinematography. Thanks to his own efforts, he has got two labs installed with Macs, an iMac lab for general still and basic work, and a G5 lab for Final Cut Pro. Where was Apple? Nowhere, he did all of this off his own bat. The rest of the college has PCs for all the courses they run, including desktop publishing and graphics arts courses, where they use Photoshop, Illustrator, et al - all traditional programs that are strong on the Mac. Apple Australia should be convincing TAFEs to use Macs for these courses - it's what many of these students will find in industry after all (well maybe, eventually those students will say, Oh, I used a PC for this at college, let's buy a PC). Get Macs into schools and TAFEs now, and industrial sales will pick up later. I just don't see Apple doing it here.
Another lecturer I know at a university in Sydney recently told me that after a recent policy change, there are now no Macs at all left for general student use in the uni. The only ones remaining are those that particular staff have clung on to because they refuse to have a PC. Even he, a long-time Mac fan, has had to buy a Dell laptop so he can use the same software that his students are using, and he says it's a backward step because he now has far more issues with stuff failing to work, and many projects such as creating QuickTime panoramas and so on has become a lot more long-winded and difficult. Has Apple lifted a finger to slow or reverse this trend? Not according to him, and the evidence speaks for itself.
It seems to me that Apple succeeds in its small way despite itself. It's enthusiastic users who make Apple sales in education, not Apple. At least not in Australia. I'm starting to think that the Apple Australia sales office doesn't exist - or maybe it's like a spidery old dusty corner in a building that no-one has bothered to enter in years. For fuck's sake, it's about time you made an effort guys!
Correct grammar is worth the trouble. To mock those who care should not be moderated "funny", more like "bloody moronic". If you actually check what the Nazis did, I think you'll find that calling anybody a 'Nazi' for caring about something more than the average mindless twat is extremely offensive. So stop doing it!
In honour of this message, I'll leave my standard sig as it is.
I agree with you 100%, most audiophiles are deluding themselves. But why do they do it? In fact, why do people constantly claim that x, y or z sounds better to them than a, b or c (usually a, b and c being some vanilla variety of something, be it equipment, encoding formats or what-have-you). It's ego, I reckon. They want to be able to claim that, even though the differences are small, THEIR ears are better than the average Joe's. They just want something to hold on to and be superior about. That's all. They just want one, tiny little element of their otherwise unremarkable lives to stand out from the crowd. Even if by doing so they often prove that their brains are generally inferior.
Yellow Box is the NeXTSTEP (Cocoa) environment, Blue Box is the Classic (Mac OS 9.x) environment. I never heard of a Windows environment within OS X, but it may have been mooted at one point. I have, however, seen and used OS X in an early version running on an x86 platform. Maybe that's what you were talking about?
Without Apple continuing to innovate and capture user mindshare we'd all probably be stuck using something along the lines of Windows ME.
No, without Apple continuing to innovate we'd all probably be stuck with the C:/ prompt, text displays (with maybe a graphics mode you could switch to for the odd spreadsheet graph), and an internet based on Lynx. I bet M$ would never have even thought of the GUI without Apple showing how it could be done.
It's small enough to be truly portable, powerful enough to do more or less anything reasonable you want to do with it, and it's OS kicks ass. Or you can run Linux on it if you think you'd prefer it, though my guess is that after a while of using it, you won't.
Hmmm, I don't worship Steve Jobs by any stretch, but I do appreciate his vision and his company's products. The world needs more like him. Great designs rarely come from committees - in fact, can you name one? Concorde, maybe. Most "classics" are usually one person's vision.
As for the drop in market share, that is not SJ's fault, it was John Sculley's, and the cluless mob that followed after him. Apple was about to go tits up when SJ returned and used his vision to put the company back on track. In fact, SJ's biggest error was bringing Sculley over, then making an enemy of him. One can only wonder at the shape of the industry today if that had not happened. I'm sure one Bill Gates would have far less influence, power and money, that's for sure.
...or any modern high-powered CPU, it's just too complicated to write good, clear, effective code. That's why we have compilers.
I think learning assembler is a great insight into an understanding of computers, but the old 8-bit CPUs were a lot easier to get a grip on, no pipelines, caches or parallel execution units to worry about. The C-64 was what I cut my assembly teeth on, and I still think that sort of machine is ideal.
To this end, I feel a great learning aid is a programmable emulator which can be run on a modern machine with all the nice bells and whistles, but the "chip" at its heart is something like a 6502 or 6800. The emulator environment can make the machine operation clearly visible, such as providing a graphical display, showing step by step what the "CPU" is doing. In fact the CPU doesn't even need to be real, it can be a made up device that exhibits some idealised characteristics. The system can support other devices too, such as a virtual text or graphics display that the emulated CPU can work with, memory chips, and virtual I/O devices (e.g. port adapters that show the port and DDR state as graphical LEDs etc).
About 10 years ago I developed such an emulator as a university project, and took it to a working demonstration level. Unfortunately I never did any more with it, but it was a good proof-of-concept and many of the CS profs saw it and felt it would make a great learning tool. Maybe it's time I resurrected it and finished it off/rewrote it. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with ideas about what sort of features this sort of aid should have.
My original design featured a drawing area where the system could be built from a set of predefined parts - CPU's, memories, I/O, then connected together (using dragged bus links) to create a memory map of the system. The instruction set of the CPU could be defined, which in turn was intended to generate an assembler for that CPU (this part I never got finished - I think if I started over I'd just stick to a fixed instruction set and hence a fixed assembler). In the running phase, the CPU was shown as a diagram of a generic CPU, showing all the registers, data paths, etc. This was updated and animated in real time as the user's program ran, and could be single stepped. It also had interrupts,which was pretty cool - watching exactly what happened when an interrupt occurred (the I/O adapter unit featured a timer/counter register which would cause an interrupt, or you could just click an "interrupt" button on the screen) was truly enlightening, especially as you could watch the stack being graphically pushed and popped as it happened! Naturally with all this graphical activity going on to show the working, it was pretty slow, but as a learning aid definitely good enough. I implemented a variety of animation levels to help speed things up. User's machine code programs could write characters to a 40x25 emulated text display at around 10cps, to give you an idea. This ran on a Mac with System 7, at the time typically having a 25MHz 68020. A modern machine would probably be able to do all this and turn in a half-decent emulation performance to boot.
And before you climb up on your high moral horse about "stealing" the OS, delete every piece of software and every MP3 you have downloaded and not paid for.
Apart from the fact that downloads can now be resumed, image downloads are much better. Previously, if you dragged an image from the browser to the desktop (or wherever), it would download it AGAIN. Now it simply copies the image from the cache, if it's up to date. Halve your bandwidth overnight! Also, image icons with a download in progress are no longer broken - the icon shows an animated progress bar (!) until the d/l is complete, then the proper icon shows up. The only thing missing is that the image file doesn't store a preview, so you still get the generic icon browsing downloaded images in the Open dialog.
Still to be fixed: The annoying jumping around that happens when reloading a previously scrolled page. It should stop trying to remember the old scroll position if it receives a new scroll event for that page in the meantime.
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...at least apps that use it appear to be - Audacity for example is dog slow. Using native widgets in OS X whether Carbon or Cocoa is a cinch. provided you keep your GUI and "engine" code well factored making cross-platform applications shouldn't be too hard.
People seem to be too willing to sit back and let corrupt governments tell them how they should live their own lives. In the past, this was not put up with so readily. Revolutions happen. Time for another one. Waiting for the election is one thing, and you know you MUST vote, and vote out that hideous representative of your sorry country that calls himself the "president", but if that fails, well, it's time the people took it into their own hands. History shows that in the end it's the only way.
Religious mania of any flavour is bad - Bush condemns Islamic fundametalist, but his own brand of sickening Christian fundamentalism is just as bad.
Bush's "war on terror" is CREATING terrorism, just as his foreign policy is fuelling it.
The rest of the world, including America's firm allies, is looking on with increasing dismay and worry. The people of America have GOT to do something about it. We are unable to vote in your election, despite the fact that the outcome has a direct impact on all our lives, so we are looking to the people to do the right thing.
The porn thing is not the issue - it's a smokescreen, but one that clearly shows the true nature of the forces in charge of YOUR country. Are you going to sit back and just let all this shit continue to deeply damage your nation's reputation and your own daily lives? There is an alternative - but you have got to make it happen.
Note - the people of Germany were in a very similar position back in 1933, and they chose NOT to make the right choice. Will the citizens of the US repeat that tradgedy?
Mac OS X printing implementation was built on much of the same software as Alan Cox Fedora install
This is the point. The raw install is barely usable, put a thoughtful, well designed interface on it and the whole complexion changes. Gruber argues that to get such an interface you have to have paid, professional developers on the case in order to deliver that genuine usability in a reasonable amount of time. I tend to agree with him. The points you make don't demolish his argument, they seem to strengthen it.
it's difficult to get BMW handling with a Kia budget
Hmmmm. In my experience, this is a bad analogy. BMW's don't generally handle that well (at least out of the box, your M3 might be a different prospect), whereas in most cases Fiat's cars do. Fiats are considerably cheaper than BMW's, so handling clearly isn't a cost issue.
...the Gateway chain of supermarkets in the UK (i.e. that sell food n stuff, not computers).
Oh, you weren't.
Look it up, Alanis.
Sails and oars are established propulsion methods that shipbuilders since the year dot have put a lot of time and effort in adopting them [sic]. Why are you guys with the damn screw propellors and steam engines interested in destroying this enormous value created with hard work over time and replace it with a totally unproven propulsion system that only the big shipping lines can use?
Vision? hah!
Yes they do. They stood up to your warmongering idiot president and told him to fuck off, when the other western poodles Blair and Howard couldn't manage it. That's backbone.
Let's give in, let's allow Microsoft to have everything, like they appear to want. They act like a big stupid kid in the playground, can't allow anybody else to have anything going on - they HAVE to poke their nose in, take the ball away, whatever.
GUIs, browsers, portable PCs, iPods, search engines, operating systems, you name it, they cannot leave it to someone else/better.
OK, MS, you win. Have it. Have the lot. The rest of us will stop and do something else. The computer industry will stagnate for quite a while, but we'll bide our time...
After oh, I dunno, say ten years or so with not one single innovation coming up, maybe, just maybe, people will have had enough. In the meantime, progress has quietly been made in technology. It will take just one small startup to suddenly trounce MS and come out with something so far ahead that they will be left spinning in the dust in its wake, wondering what the hell just happened. That's the trouble with all this steady gradual (and visible) progress amongst their competitors right now - it gives them too much of a chance to see what's going on. OK, it still takes them a few years, and they are consistently behind the curve, but not enough to forge the IT revolution that is so badly needed.
So leave it all to them. It's the quickest route to their oblivion in the end.
indeed. :)
Here in Australia, Apple appear to be doing next to nothing to sell computers to schools, colleges and universities.
The other day I went to a poorly advertised "iMall" at our local university. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it wasn't this: a few rickety tables, with one iBook and one iMac, both running GarageBand. A lot of leaflets, iPod badges and a free draw to win an iPod. All the signs were scrawled in marker pen on bits of photocopy paper and sellotaped to the desk. A couple of geeky students were there to "sell" the systems, but instead hogged the two machines making music loops. Anyone wandering past would a) think it was a jumble sale and b) would be put off because there wasn't an actual machine to try out. I couldn't see the point of it, and doubt very much if it led to even one sale. I left very disappointed and pretty miffed at Apple for their lack of effort.
This same uni has about a 40% Mac usage among its staff overall. There is a strong Mac following here, but it's totally thanks to staff who are able to specify their own PCs.
The other day I met a lecturer at our local TAFE (further ed college). He teaches film and cinematography. Thanks to his own efforts, he has got two labs installed with Macs, an iMac lab for general still and basic work, and a G5 lab for Final Cut Pro. Where was Apple? Nowhere, he did all of this off his own bat. The rest of the college has PCs for all the courses they run, including desktop publishing and graphics arts courses, where they use Photoshop, Illustrator, et al - all traditional programs that are strong on the Mac. Apple Australia should be convincing TAFEs to use Macs for these courses - it's what many of these students will find in industry after all (well maybe, eventually those students will say, Oh, I used a PC for this at college, let's buy a PC). Get Macs into schools and TAFEs now, and industrial sales will pick up later. I just don't see Apple doing it here.
Another lecturer I know at a university in Sydney recently told me that after a recent policy change, there are now no Macs at all left for general student use in the uni. The only ones remaining are those that particular staff have clung on to because they refuse to have a PC. Even he, a long-time Mac fan, has had to buy a Dell laptop so he can use the same software that his students are using, and he says it's a backward step because he now has far more issues with stuff failing to work, and many projects such as creating QuickTime panoramas and so on has become a lot more long-winded and difficult. Has Apple lifted a finger to slow or reverse this trend? Not according to him, and the evidence speaks for itself.
It seems to me that Apple succeeds in its small way despite itself. It's enthusiastic users who make Apple sales in education, not Apple. At least not in Australia. I'm starting to think that the Apple Australia sales office doesn't exist - or maybe it's like a spidery old dusty corner in a building that no-one has bothered to enter in years. For fuck's sake, it's about time you made an effort guys!
Correct grammar is worth the trouble. To mock those who care should not be moderated "funny", more like "bloody moronic". If you actually check what the Nazis did, I think you'll find that calling anybody a 'Nazi' for caring about something more than the average mindless twat is extremely offensive. So stop doing it!
In honour of this message, I'll leave my standard sig as it is.
if you're going to whine, at least stop exaggerating. 11 months is not "years".
I agree with you 100%, most audiophiles are deluding themselves. But why do they do it? In fact, why do people constantly claim that x, y or z sounds better to them than a, b or c (usually a, b and c being some vanilla variety of something, be it equipment, encoding formats or what-have-you). It's ego, I reckon. They want to be able to claim that, even though the differences are small, THEIR ears are better than the average Joe's. They just want something to hold on to and be superior about. That's all. They just want one, tiny little element of their otherwise unremarkable lives to stand out from the crowd. Even if by doing so they often prove that their brains are generally inferior.
Yellow Box is the NeXTSTEP (Cocoa) environment, Blue Box is the Classic (Mac OS 9.x) environment. I never heard of a Windows environment within OS X, but it may have been mooted at one point. I have, however, seen and used OS X in an early version running on an x86 platform. Maybe that's what you were talking about?
No, without Apple continuing to innovate we'd all probably be stuck with the C:/ prompt, text displays (with maybe a graphics mode you could switch to for the odd spreadsheet graph), and an internet based on Lynx. I bet M$ would never have even thought of the GUI without Apple showing how it could be done.
It's small enough to be truly portable, powerful enough to do more or less anything reasonable you want to do with it, and it's OS kicks ass. Or you can run Linux on it if you think you'd prefer it, though my guess is that after a while of using it, you won't.
Hmmm, I don't worship Steve Jobs by any stretch, but I do appreciate his vision and his company's products. The world needs more like him. Great designs rarely come from committees - in fact, can you name one? Concorde, maybe. Most "classics" are usually one person's vision.
As for the drop in market share, that is not SJ's fault, it was John Sculley's, and the cluless mob that followed after him. Apple was about to go tits up when SJ returned and used his vision to put the company back on track. In fact, SJ's biggest error was bringing Sculley over, then making an enemy of him. One can only wonder at the shape of the industry today if that had not happened. I'm sure one Bill Gates would have far less influence, power and money, that's for sure.
...addresses. Wouldn't that fix most of the stack-based overflow breaches?
..just what we all need.
In particular, Finbarr Saunders (and his double entendres). If you have no idea what I'm talking about, FIND OUT!!! You'll be glad you did ;-)
...or any modern high-powered CPU, it's just too complicated to write good, clear, effective code. That's why we have compilers.
I think learning assembler is a great insight into an understanding of computers, but the old 8-bit CPUs were a lot easier to get a grip on, no pipelines, caches or parallel execution units to worry about. The C-64 was what I cut my assembly teeth on, and I still think that sort of machine is ideal.
To this end, I feel a great learning aid is a programmable emulator which can be run on a modern machine with all the nice bells and whistles, but the "chip" at its heart is something like a 6502 or 6800. The emulator environment can make the machine operation clearly visible, such as providing a graphical display, showing step by step what the "CPU" is doing. In fact the CPU doesn't even need to be real, it can be a made up device that exhibits some idealised characteristics. The system can support other devices too, such as a virtual text or graphics display that the emulated CPU can work with, memory chips, and virtual I/O devices (e.g. port adapters that show the port and DDR state as graphical LEDs etc).
About 10 years ago I developed such an emulator as a university project, and took it to a working demonstration level. Unfortunately I never did any more with it, but it was a good proof-of-concept and many of the CS profs saw it and felt it would make a great learning tool. Maybe it's time I resurrected it and finished it off/rewrote it. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with ideas about what sort of features this sort of aid should have.
My original design featured a drawing area where the system could be built from a set of predefined parts - CPU's, memories, I/O, then connected together (using dragged bus links) to create a memory map of the system. The instruction set of the CPU could be defined, which in turn was intended to generate an assembler for that CPU (this part I never got finished - I think if I started over I'd just stick to a fixed instruction set and hence a fixed assembler). In the running phase, the CPU was shown as a diagram of a generic CPU, showing all the registers, data paths, etc. This was updated and animated in real time as the user's program ran, and could be single stepped. It also had interrupts,which was pretty cool - watching exactly what happened when an interrupt occurred (the I/O adapter unit featured a timer/counter register which would cause an interrupt, or you could just click an "interrupt" button on the screen) was truly enlightening, especially as you could watch the stack being graphically pushed and popped as it happened! Naturally with all this graphical activity going on to show the working, it was pretty slow, but as a learning aid definitely good enough. I implemented a variety of animation levels to help speed things up. User's machine code programs could write characters to a 40x25 emulated text display at around 10cps, to give you an idea. This ran on a Mac with System 7, at the time typically having a 25MHz 68020. A modern machine would probably be able to do all this and turn in a half-decent emulation performance to boot.
And before you climb up on your high moral horse about "stealing" the OS, delete every piece of software and every MP3 you have downloaded and not paid for.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Apart from the fact that downloads can now be resumed, image downloads are much better. Previously, if you dragged an image from the browser to the desktop (or wherever), it would download it AGAIN. Now it simply copies the image from the cache, if it's up to date. Halve your bandwidth overnight! Also, image icons with a download in progress are no longer broken - the icon shows an animated progress bar (!) until the d/l is complete, then the proper icon shows up. The only thing missing is that the image file doesn't store a preview, so you still get the generic icon browsing downloaded images in the Open dialog.
Still to be fixed: The annoying jumping around that happens when reloading a previously scrolled page. It should stop trying to remember the old scroll position if it receives a new scroll event for that page in the meantime.