However, I was referring to the underutilization of Altivec in G4/G5 environments. Whereas SSA will be excellent across platforms, autovectorization will be especially significant on chipsets with powerful vector processors.
Being able to optimize for this hardware, which is not as common or powerful in the x86 world, without much effort is indeed significant.
I do not disagree with your assessment in the relative worth of SSA and vectorization, but I would simply like to clarify my post.
No, most Mac applications will soon be using the new version.
Users, when discussing a compiler, is a nebulous term. Does one mean programmers developing for the compiler, or does one mean any person using the compiler directly through source or indirectly through binaries?
I consider the latter more significant; autovectorization will be extremely important on G4 and G5 hardware, and Mac OS X binaries (by far the most popular distribution method for the platform) will soon reflect this.
When coding styles in MX2004, it's best to code by hand.
The whole point about semantic styles is precisely that, the semantics. They are meant to be crafted at a code level, with all due thought to design.
If Dreamweaver is given a stylesheet to work with, it performs, in my experience, quite well for rapid development and editing. If you try to create that stylesheet on the fly, it begins to falter.
Hard to say. As a graphic designer (one of these days I'm going to figure out what exactly I do), I've always separated Macromedia and Adobe by intended media. Adobe is for print, Macromedia is for web. Their respective suites are designed as such.
Adobe's latest editions of Photoshop have become more and more emulatory of the corresponding versions of Fireworks, to the point where the two packages had almost become the same thing minus or plus a feature here or there.
Fireworks cannot handle high resolutions or the tasks necessary for print preparation, but it's interface is wonderfully optimized for lowres web work.
That being said, Adobe Illustrator has long been antiquated for the simple reason that if you are going to be involved in desktop publishing, you'd think you'd also be able to somehow do web development all in one.
but since Illustrator is already vector-based and in some ways pre-suited for web use
I'm curious where you find the correlation between Illustrator, a vector design tool, and web page design. Yes, Illustrator is great for sketching and preparing layouts, but the web is pixels, not vector. Eventually, you'll want to drop it into a raster tool to ensure your elements are exactly as you want them to be.
There's also the considerations of how the user agent will render the content, updating the content, dynamically generated content, and alternative accessibility that a layout simply cannot address; you need true web coding and appropriate tools for this.
"Do you even realize that the Active Desktop feature in Windows98 has and was doing this almost 7 years ago."
Dashboard is nothing like Active Desktop. Active Desktop lets you use a page from a server or a local file. Dashboard is a space for individual widgets, not full web pages, and the extended JavaScript allows hooks into OS X's API.
I'm not familiar with setting up Active Desktop to, say, run cron jobs or searches, poll information about the current network connection and system status. Without resorting to ActiveX or other such architecture, I do not believe Active Desktop can interact with other applications, such as iTunes or iCal. Dashboard Widgets can, and with relative ease.
Besides, you can only run one Active Desktop page at a time, not the many componentized widgets of Dashboard.
"Many products used comparable technologies. How is this innovative for Apple again?"
I ask you, who claimed this was innovative? Not I. Go argue with those that did. And those other products with comparable technologies are not part of the system. They are add ons. It's comparable to saying "Microsoft is stealing the idea of a firewall by adding it to their system." The idea of the firewall is a good one, and thus integrating it into Windows is an excellent feature.
Konfabulator has not perfected the widget. In fact, Konfabulator is rather laughable in its approach. It's a nice application, sure, but it sucks up 25MB of real memory and significant CPU cycles for each open widget. Yes, I want to lose a quarter of my system resources for a dozen widgets. Konfabulator, for all its nice JavaScript extensions, is also still fairly limited in its API hooks.
"Shall we talk about the Xerox lawsuit they won against Apple for the GUI? Funny, no one seems to mention it anymore either..."
You just did, and I thank you for it. But then again, everyone else is being sued or has been sued, as well. Apple is neither the exception nor the example.
Now, again, nowhere did I say Apple was the innovator. So, I ask you, again, why are you flaming me?
"Spotlight, the wonderful new search feature? (You say it is special because it is a Service)... Bull... MSN Desktop Search is just as freaking functional and it is an experimental beta for God's sake. It has API sets for application developers just like Spotlight (so it accessible just like your service) and also tracks and references MetaData that NTFS supports natively, as it has since 1993 as well."
Yes, MSN Desktop Search is available, but is not immediately a part of the system. Again, this is one of the points.
As far as the MSN Desktop Search API hooks, I find the documentation on them exceedingly difficult to locate. If you could point me the link (or the path in MSDN), I would appreciate it.
Again, MSN Desktop is optional. Thus, developers need to consider whether taking the time to add functionality is worth the consumer response. Since Spotlight is something that may be assumed, I warrant it will receive extensive support from Mac developers.
"How about the direct Burn to CD feature - wow.. Adaptec's DirectCD was doing this back in 1998 as well, it was an instant burn process, NO staging as well."
And Windows XP can do this?
The point, I reiterate, is that the functionality is built into the system; no third party software needed. There are technical concerns with instant segmented burning, and staging is an interface choice that allows users to add, move, rename, modify, and delete before finalizing the disc.
"There are more 'fixes' than features, and bundled concepts they have ripped off MANY other companies."
Where did you get this idea? I'm staring at the list on Apple's site, and though I'm questioning why Font Book Scriptability is listed twice, the points seem to be new features. Perhaps you could elaborate.
What companies? Besides, at the risk of redundancy, why are you telling me? I never claimed
"You're obviously making your point from a developer's point of view: mine is as an end-user, who doesn't have the tiniest idea about developer technologies."
I do believe that's a big part of the point: Tiger is more for developers then end users. CoreImage, CoreAudio, gcc 4.0, XCode 2, and all of the new scripting and searching hooks are going to be underutilized for a while. But then developers are going to start releasing software that uses these new features, much more significant in the long term.
Give it a couple of years. When you can search everything, and I do mean everything, from a single interface, the point of Spotlight may become apparent. When you can automate anything, anything, from a simple click and build GUI, the reasoning behind Automator may become apparent.
"If I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that Dashboard is different to AveDesk/Samaurise/The rest because it pulls it's information off the Internet."
No. They're webviews because they're written with extended JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. They're extremely easy to develop and design, as a result. (And in this, I recognize they're strangely similar to Konfabulator widgets. However, Konfabulator does extremely odd things with its threads and child processes, so said widgets are the most amazing resource hogs.)
Everything new in Tiger is not meant for you, oh doubtful naysayer. But when developers start releasing ever more useful applications, which would require full multiples of time to develop on another platform, please, reconsider your postings.
Users won't see Core Image, Core Data, the new gcc, and XCode 2 themselves, but they'll see the result of them. They'll see what developers can do with the new platforms, and that in itself may be more worthwhile in the long run.
Except you need them to maintain your login. And they'll be reset each time you start a new session.
It sounds like the information will be linked with your account and not your session, anyway. Data such as your gender and age isn't as easily gathered by analyzing browsing, but a Passport profile is easy pickings.
Doesn't matter if you read it when you signed up. The good ol' ever present We-reserve-the-right-to-change-our-policy -at-any-time (read "the We-reserve-the-right-to-screw-you clause") means you're left with the option to agree with the new terms or stop using the service.
I'd like to tangentisize (I love neology) and qualify that most "user errors" are the result of poor user interface and interaction design, the third of the crises listed in the article.
Indeed, the term "self-fixing" implies to me recoverability from problems including erroneous input. Input validation with range checking for reasonable values and informative feedback can catch a good amount of bad input. Add reversability and recoverability to the mix and you have a friendly software layer protecting against "user error."
Users are not machines, they are, to be cliched, only human. Bad input needs to be expected, and design decisions should reflect that.
I do want to note that Gbrowser being registered doesn't conclusively mean anything. Not that I think that's the case in this situation.
It just reminds me of the (then) Square incident when they registered ChronoCrusade.com. The gaming community went nuts expecting a new Chrono Trigger game. We're still waiting.
My high school was entirely Windows dominated. So when I was named graphics editor of the school paper, I decided to bring in my own computer. PowerBook G4 with Airport Extreme, and I managed to hook into the wireless access point next door in the computer lab (used, I assume, to update the laptops).
In any case, networking in a Windows environment was as easy as Apple makes it sound (not an advertisement, just a testimony). I simply borrowed the monitor from the computer I would have been otherwise using, as well as the mouse and keyboard, and I was set with a Mac.
Back when I was a crazy Dance Dance Revolution freak (okay, maybe I still am, shut up), I tried playing other games with my pads. Final Fantasy and such menu-based games worked fairly well, though the whole idea was innately absurd. But fun.
But that sort of diversity is one of the reasons some at Sun (and other places) are against open sourcing. The instant they start losing compatability means the language begins to lose it's (imho) main advantage.
Java is not intended to be fast (though it's respectable) or concise (come on, ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException). Java is about highly structured, controlled, compatable code. Sun cites readability and accessibility as the reason it doesn't include operator overloading, for example.
Even if there are people who continue to write "standard code," there'll still be enough version/flavor specific code to cause headaches.
If you want innovation, you probably wouldn't be using such a highly structured language in the first place. You'd be using something more tweakable, hackable, and screwing-around-able.
The whole test is mired in implementation-dependent code. A good deal about the collections (think question 2 on the AB exam) doesn't actually have much to do with the theory behind the data structures (stack, map, and their implementations by trees, hashtables, linked lists, etc.) but more on how to use the already-implemented Java provided classes.
I took (and taught, through a rather strange set of circumstances) the AB test. In fact, a great deal of the material is presented as "This is a black box class that you don't need to know about." Seemed more like they we're tying us into specific Java interfaces than generic theory.
Oh, and the Marine Biology Case Study question on AB could have easily been completed by the A testers. For crying out loud, the A MBCS question was harder than the AB.
The College Board had a new emphasis on "DO NOT DISCUSS THESE QUESTIONS, blah blah, COPYRIGHT VIOLATATION...blah blah" was funny. Yeah, like we're not going to talk about specific questions on the test.
I've always wondered how much of the free game / free stuff community (such as all the doujinshi etc.) comes as a result of the culture over there. Lost in Translation was less fictional than most people think. My relatives in Japan, born in the States, told me to watch it saying, "See, that's how I feel!"
I've also been told that those who can't really do well on the dating scene (being nerds, and I've heard that the girls really go for foreigners anyway), either work or goof off all the time. Strikes me as the perfect environment to start churning out a bunch of free, fun games. Especially when adults love playing around (think pachinko, for one) as much as the kids and teens.
A friend and I were rooting through the code and decided to work with it a little. We've got grand ideas about networked chess, but haven't really done a whole lot besides draw lots of little complex diagrams. The chess code lends itself very well to lots of little complex diagrams.
But we did notice some redundency in the code, probably because of the layering in the design. The position of the pieces, for example, are stored in several places (each of which is updated with each move). All of the validation routines pratically are screaming at us to go ahead and make modifications (even bad ones), because a surprising amount of errors are caught later on.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely.
However, I was referring to the underutilization of Altivec in G4/G5 environments. Whereas SSA will be excellent across platforms, autovectorization will be especially significant on chipsets with powerful vector processors.
Being able to optimize for this hardware, which is not as common or powerful in the x86 world, without much effort is indeed significant.
I do not disagree with your assessment in the relative worth of SSA and vectorization, but I would simply like to clarify my post.
No, most Mac applications will soon be using the new version.
Users, when discussing a compiler, is a nebulous term. Does one mean programmers developing for the compiler, or does one mean any person using the compiler directly through source or indirectly through binaries?
I consider the latter more significant; autovectorization will be extremely important on G4 and G5 hardware, and Mac OS X binaries (by far the most popular distribution method for the platform) will soon reflect this.
The whole point about semantic styles is precisely that, the semantics. They are meant to be crafted at a code level, with all due thought to design.
If Dreamweaver is given a stylesheet to work with, it performs, in my experience, quite well for rapid development and editing. If you try to create that stylesheet on the fly, it begins to falter.
Adobe's latest editions of Photoshop have become more and more emulatory of the corresponding versions of Fireworks, to the point where the two packages had almost become the same thing minus or plus a feature here or there.
Fireworks cannot handle high resolutions or the tasks necessary for print preparation, but it's interface is wonderfully optimized for lowres web work.
That being said, Adobe Illustrator has long been antiquated for the simple reason that if you are going to be involved in desktop publishing, you'd think you'd also be able to somehow do web development all in one.
but since Illustrator is already vector-based and in some ways pre-suited for web use
I'm curious where you find the correlation between Illustrator, a vector design tool, and web page design. Yes, Illustrator is great for sketching and preparing layouts, but the web is pixels, not vector. Eventually, you'll want to drop it into a raster tool to ensure your elements are exactly as you want them to be.
There's also the considerations of how the user agent will render the content, updating the content, dynamically generated content, and alternative accessibility that a layout simply cannot address; you need true web coding and appropriate tools for this.
Dashboard is nothing like Active Desktop. Active Desktop lets you use a page from a server or a local file. Dashboard is a space for individual widgets, not full web pages, and the extended JavaScript allows hooks into OS X's API.
I'm not familiar with setting up Active Desktop to, say, run cron jobs or searches, poll information about the current network connection and system status. Without resorting to ActiveX or other such architecture, I do not believe Active Desktop can interact with other applications, such as iTunes or iCal. Dashboard Widgets can, and with relative ease.
Besides, you can only run one Active Desktop page at a time, not the many componentized widgets of Dashboard.
"Many products used comparable technologies. How is this innovative for Apple again?"
I ask you, who claimed this was innovative? Not I. Go argue with those that did. And those other products with comparable technologies are not part of the system. They are add ons. It's comparable to saying "Microsoft is stealing the idea of a firewall by adding it to their system." The idea of the firewall is a good one, and thus integrating it into Windows is an excellent feature.
Konfabulator has not perfected the widget. In fact, Konfabulator is rather laughable in its approach. It's a nice application, sure, but it sucks up 25MB of real memory and significant CPU cycles for each open widget. Yes, I want to lose a quarter of my system resources for a dozen widgets. Konfabulator, for all its nice JavaScript extensions, is also still fairly limited in its API hooks.
"Shall we talk about the Xerox lawsuit they won against Apple for the GUI? Funny, no one seems to mention it anymore either..."
You just did, and I thank you for it. But then again, everyone else is being sued or has been sued, as well. Apple is neither the exception nor the example.
Now, again, nowhere did I say Apple was the innovator. So, I ask you, again, why are you flaming me?
"Spotlight, the wonderful new search feature? (You say it is special because it is a Service)... Bull... MSN Desktop Search is just as freaking functional and it is an experimental beta for God's sake. It has API sets for application developers just like Spotlight (so it accessible just like your service) and also tracks and references MetaData that NTFS supports natively, as it has since 1993 as well."
Yes, MSN Desktop Search is available, but is not immediately a part of the system. Again, this is one of the points.
As far as the MSN Desktop Search API hooks, I find the documentation on them exceedingly difficult to locate. If you could point me the link (or the path in MSDN), I would appreciate it.
Again, MSN Desktop is optional. Thus, developers need to consider whether taking the time to add functionality is worth the consumer response. Since Spotlight is something that may be assumed, I warrant it will receive extensive support from Mac developers.
"How about the direct Burn to CD feature - wow.. Adaptec's DirectCD was doing this back in 1998 as well, it was an instant burn process, NO staging as well."
And Windows XP can do this?
The point, I reiterate, is that the functionality is built into the system; no third party software needed. There are technical concerns with instant segmented burning, and staging is an interface choice that allows users to add, move, rename, modify, and delete before finalizing the disc.
"There are more 'fixes' than features, and bundled concepts they have ripped off MANY other companies."
Where did you get this idea? I'm staring at the list on Apple's site, and though I'm questioning why Font Book Scriptability is listed twice, the points seem to be new features. Perhaps you could elaborate.
What companies? Besides, at the risk of redundancy, why are you telling me? I never claimed
There is a reason, after all, that documents such as the California Driver's Handbook include footnotes that read
"Throughout this handbook, the term 'thumb print' will be used to mean a thumb print or finger print, if you have no thumbs."
"You're obviously making your point from a developer's point of view: mine is as an end-user, who doesn't have the tiniest idea about developer technologies."
I do believe that's a big part of the point: Tiger is more for developers then end users. CoreImage, CoreAudio, gcc 4.0, XCode 2, and all of the new scripting and searching hooks are going to be underutilized for a while. But then developers are going to start releasing software that uses these new features, much more significant in the long term.
Give it a couple of years. When you can search everything, and I do mean everything, from a single interface, the point of Spotlight may become apparent. When you can automate anything, anything, from a simple click and build GUI, the reasoning behind Automator may become apparent.
"If I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that Dashboard is different to AveDesk/Samaurise/The rest because it pulls it's information off the Internet."
No. They're webviews because they're written with extended JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. They're extremely easy to develop and design, as a result. (And in this, I recognize they're strangely similar to Konfabulator widgets. However, Konfabulator does extremely odd things with its threads and child processes, so said widgets are the most amazing resource hogs.)
Everything new in Tiger is not meant for you, oh doubtful naysayer. But when developers start releasing ever more useful applications, which would require full multiples of time to develop on another platform, please, reconsider your postings.
Users won't see Core Image, Core Data, the new gcc, and XCode 2 themselves, but they'll see the result of them. They'll see what developers can do with the new platforms, and that in itself may be more worthwhile in the long run.
Says the user whose userid is only 5191 less.
Except you need them to maintain your login. And they'll be reset each time you start a new session. It sounds like the information will be linked with your account and not your session, anyway. Data such as your gender and age isn't as easily gathered by analyzing browsing, but a Passport profile is easy pickings.
Doesn't matter if you read it when you signed up. The good ol' ever present We-reserve-the-right-to-change-our-policy -at-any-time (read "the We-reserve-the-right-to-screw-you clause") means you're left with the option to agree with the new terms or stop using the service.
Because other laptops are much better. My Dell has, let's see, Ctrl, Fn, the floaty Windows logo, and Alt.
Try a Japanese keyboard. Add three character set switches on the bottom row and soon your spacebar is less than three normal keys wide.
I was under the impression it was OS X's response to a kernel panic.
0 6227
http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum=1
Nintendo of America is, yes. Nintendo Co, Ltd. hails from Kyoto, Japan.
My microwave, oddly enough, would truncate 70 seconds to one minute.
Where is my extended input support, Westinghouse?
I'd like to tangentisize (I love neology) and qualify that most "user errors" are the result of poor user interface and interaction design, the third of the crises listed in the article.
Indeed, the term "self-fixing" implies to me recoverability from problems including erroneous input. Input validation with range checking for reasonable values and informative feedback can catch a good amount of bad input. Add reversability and recoverability to the mix and you have a friendly software layer protecting against "user error."
Users are not machines, they are, to be cliched, only human. Bad input needs to be expected, and design decisions should reflect that.
I do want to note that Gbrowser being registered doesn't conclusively mean anything. Not that I think that's the case in this situation.
It just reminds me of the (then) Square incident when they registered ChronoCrusade.com. The gaming community went nuts expecting a new Chrono Trigger game. We're still waiting.
My high school was entirely Windows dominated. So when I was named graphics editor of the school paper, I decided to bring in my own computer. PowerBook G4 with Airport Extreme, and I managed to hook into the wireless access point next door in the computer lab (used, I assume, to update the laptops).
In any case, networking in a Windows environment was as easy as Apple makes it sound (not an advertisement, just a testimony). I simply borrowed the monitor from the computer I would have been otherwise using, as well as the mouse and keyboard, and I was set with a Mac.
Back when I was a crazy Dance Dance Revolution freak (okay, maybe I still am, shut up), I tried playing other games with my pads. Final Fantasy and such menu-based games worked fairly well, though the whole idea was innately absurd. But fun.
But that sort of diversity is one of the reasons some at Sun (and other places) are against open sourcing. The instant they start losing compatability means the language begins to lose it's (imho) main advantage.
Java is not intended to be fast (though it's respectable) or concise (come on, ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException). Java is about highly structured, controlled, compatable code. Sun cites readability and accessibility as the reason it doesn't include operator overloading, for example.
Even if there are people who continue to write "standard code," there'll still be enough version/flavor specific code to cause headaches.
If you want innovation, you probably wouldn't be using such a highly structured language in the first place. You'd be using something more tweakable, hackable, and screwing-around-able.
The whole test is mired in implementation-dependent code. A good deal about the collections (think question 2 on the AB exam) doesn't actually have much to do with the theory behind the data structures (stack, map, and their implementations by trees, hashtables, linked lists, etc.) but more on how to use the already-implemented Java provided classes. I took (and taught, through a rather strange set of circumstances) the AB test. In fact, a great deal of the material is presented as "This is a black box class that you don't need to know about." Seemed more like they we're tying us into specific Java interfaces than generic theory. Oh, and the Marine Biology Case Study question on AB could have easily been completed by the A testers. For crying out loud, the A MBCS question was harder than the AB. The College Board had a new emphasis on "DO NOT DISCUSS THESE QUESTIONS, blah blah, COPYRIGHT VIOLATATION...blah blah" was funny. Yeah, like we're not going to talk about specific questions on the test.
I've always wondered how much of the free game / free stuff community (such as all the doujinshi etc.) comes as a result of the culture over there. Lost in Translation was less fictional than most people think. My relatives in Japan, born in the States, told me to watch it saying, "See, that's how I feel!"
I've also been told that those who can't really do well on the dating scene (being nerds, and I've heard that the girls really go for foreigners anyway), either work or goof off all the time. Strikes me as the perfect environment to start churning out a bunch of free, fun games. Especially when adults love playing around (think pachinko, for one) as much as the kids and teens.
White headphones are like a status symbol now. I'm not sure if it's sad or funny.
I was going to buy a pair of white headphones for my Sony player, but now I'm reconsidering. Yes, I simply wanted white headphones.
A friend and I were rooting through the code and decided to work with it a little. We've got grand ideas about networked chess, but haven't really done a whole lot besides draw lots of little complex diagrams. The chess code lends itself very well to lots of little complex diagrams.
But we did notice some redundency in the code, probably because of the layering in the design. The position of the pieces, for example, are stored in several places (each of which is updated with each move). All of the validation routines pratically are screaming at us to go ahead and make modifications (even bad ones), because a surprising amount of errors are caught later on.