To further on what has been said, you also should keep in mind that the law in most districts only allows for a proportionate response as self defense. If someone slaps you you are not justified in taking out a gun and shooting them (and self defense rules don't apply). In a not-so-extreme version: if someone about your size is hitting you with their fists, you are not justified in using a lethal weapon (knife, broken bottle, etc...).
There are lots of funny rules about what the different levels are, and there is a lot of special-case situations (black belts in martial arts have to be very careful about what they do, the training often counts as a lethal weapon and is an excuse to call it premeditated).
You've got the wrong idea. They are not talking about the Apollo runtime checking for updates, but rather the Application built with Apollo checking with the database behind the application for updates that happened since it last connected, and dumping down the changes made while the user was not net connected. If they can get this right and easy for developers to use then this will be huge.
And despite everyone hating flash (because of annoying flash animation) there are some really great solutions using Flex that really make Flash shine as a business development environment. Its only real competition there is WebObject's Direct-to-Java-Client technology (too bad no-one knows about either).
If you are going to do this rant, I think you have to include a bit more about how parent suing to get their children special treatment has warped how things get done. Lawsuits are a constant problem in public schools. My mother is a Special Ed teacher and has to deal with being on the periphery of 2-3 lawsuits every year. None of them ever go to court, but they all wind up very expensive for the school district in one way or another. The principals life is almost consumed with coordinating for all of them.
Do you care to explain how using a specialized processor that has the ability to do certain calculations orders of magnitude faster than a generalized CPU is a mistake? Especially when the same system decides on-the-fly which computation resource would best perform the calculation?
To give you a hint: Apple's current system already is setup to do what you say they will never do. If your CPU would better do the job, then your CPU will do the job. If it would better be put to your SIMD unit (Ativec or MMX/SSE2/SSE3/SSE4) then it will go to that unit. And if the graphics card is sitting idle and can better do the job... well...
Not being available on PCs is not a disqualifier for professional photography software. Windows has no effective system-wide color management, so color correction will always be a hit-and-miss proposition. Apple has had ColorSync in place since the MacOS 8 days, and it is a very effective system. If you are doing professional photography on a PC then you are wasting your time, that sounds harsh but it is the way things are.
I the hobbyist space this is not such an issue because you are not going to spend the money for a printer that con reproduce color reliably, and you are not going to buy the color matching hardware to make sure your output everywhere is consistent across the full spectrum.
I spent some time supporting graphic artists and working on ColorSynced workflows, so I do have experience in this area.
And that copy is licensed as an upgrade for Apple-brand computers only. Since every Apple computer that has shipped (other than the few A|IX boxes a while back) shipped with MacOS (of some sort), Apple has never sold a non-upgrade.
You are correct in that Apple does do some things to try and bind MacOS X to Apple-manufactured hardware, but you are incorrect about the TPM module being involved:
For those too lazy to click through: Apple is not using the TMP module at all. There are only the default keys installed on it, and you can wipe those and use your own without preventing the system from working.
The underlying Spotlight system is very capable of boolean serarches in 10.4, it is just the GUI that does not really support things like this. I think it was a conscious decision not to include this because they could not put a normal-user-friendly GUI on it (in time). It sounds like they might have taken a whack at doing just that, but we will have to see whenever 10.5 comes out.
That particular case was when 10.3 came out and allowed accelerated graphics to be used on computers that had AGP slots in them (since AGP allowed for enough bandwidth for this feature to be useful). Some people did find the trick to enable it on PCI-only machines (like yours), and found that because of the lack of bandwidth between memory and the graphics card it was actually slower.
So... is your argument is that Apple should have made your computer slower, or that Apple should have somehow caused your PCI clot to become a AGP slot using software only?
And since then there have been a number of changes in this sub-system. Each time Apple has allowed older computers to continue running they way they were, and allowed newer computers to be faster with a very few extra eye-candy touches (like a rotating cube). They have not created distinctly different functionality (yet). Vista does go a little further down this road, and there is a chance that 10.5 will too with CoreAnimation (I have no non-public information on this: pure speculation).
Actually... no. I don't really know how this got into textbooks, but if Christopher Columbus had to fight at all to get people to believe that the world was round then he was dealing with imbeciles.
By the the third century BC not only was it known that the world was round, but Eratosthenes (a Greek mathematician) had already put out a reasonably good estimate of what the circumference was. In fact all of the navigational techniques that Christopher Columbus used depended on the fact that the world was round, and sailors certainly would have long observed that the tops of distant object appeared over the horizon before the sea-level parts, and that being higher (like in a crows nest) let you see things sooner.
If you read Wikipedia's entry on this idea they conclude that the idea that this view of historical knowledge did not come into fashion until the 19th century. The people in the Middle Ages knew better.
Except that climatologists mostly have discounted the idea of a Medieval Warm Period altogether. Here is a article from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association. There never was a "Medieval Warm Period", it was bad interpretations and theories with little actual evidence to ever support them. Of course now people who have a political agenda to defend are siting it as evidence.
You have a decent point on #2, but I don't think you have actually worked with the Apple API for #1... it is a little thing called QuickTime and is very fast, and if you are using the new Cocoa Wrappers that have been available since 10.3 are very easy to develop with. I will agree that prior to that the QuickTime API was a little bit of a pain. But if you were "fiddling with codecs" on the Mac, then you were doing something wrong.
For those of us who have to support researchers this is old news. In fact the sumssion fails to mention two important facts: PureEdge (now under a new name since IBM bought the Canadian company) has a beta version of the viewer out for Macs (still nothing for linux), and grants.gov have already announced that they will be replaceing the PureEdge solution within the year.
That is really funny... I can't seem to find a HP laptop on HP's site with a Core 2 Duo 2.16 for less that $2,799 (the nw8440 mobile in the small business section... there was nothing that was that fast in the home section). It does have a longer warentee than the $1,999 MacBook Pro, but an equivelent warentee only cost $250 from Apple. And the Apple has a built in cammera, larger hard drive, and FireWire 800.
If you can tell me where to find the HP Laptop with a Core 2 Duo 2.16 for $800-$1000 I would love to see it. I agree with you that it can be a little difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons, but they should at least have the same processor.
And do you buy your phones from any of those compaines? Or do you buy them from a sevice vendor who locks you into a multi-year contract worth many times the value of the phone and subsidizes the initial purchase of that phone.
Have you done the math and figured out that even the highest quality streaming that this device does does not come anywhere close to filling the bandwidth of its network connection? When you start to actually look at what it does that limitation turns out to not be a limiting factor at all.
The hardware that has been announced is for the US market only. We don't know what the hardware for the European market will support for standards, and it is pretty certain that the hardware for the Japanese market will require changes as well. Since there is no 3G service in the US at this point (but the equivalent on the "CDMA" side is coming on line now), so it is not surpriseing that Apple is not talking about 3G.
And I don't know what you mean about there not being a text messaging client. During the Keynote that was nicely demonstrated. It looks like iChat's text chats.
And then there is the whole "push email" discussion. Right now Apple's IMAP email servers don't support the IDLE command, but they have already talked about doing an IMAP "push" service with Yahoo! Mail, and that most likely means that the IMAP client on the phone supports IDLE, possibly with an extension or two to better facilitate the details of phone network connections.
People don't seem to know that the IDLE command is out there, and makes any imap client/server pair that supports it into the same experience as a "push" server.
While that is probably true (there is little to no way of checking, so we have to admit that it is a guess), it misses the very important point that many of Microsoft's problems with security have been through really bad design decisions. The whole idea of letting email run scripts is just bad from the get-go, and that is exactly what Outlook was designed to do. Since then they have been trying to keep that functionality for the few corporate users who rely on it, while putting the majority of us who don't at major risk.
While it is long-since out of production (and more than a little dated now) the Apple eMate 300 just about describes what you wanted. It was a great piece of equipment for that type of use.
Then you have luckily missed out on a lot. Dell has a few major lines that have failed at nearly 100% over the course of 2 years, ATI has a few lines of video cards that need replaceing, and even Apple has been stung by some production runs of iMacs and PowerMacs.
The University I work for had major problems with the Dell models. We bought into them in a big way. The department I worked for had 2 or 3 computers fail from this problem every day for over a year.
You are close, but the real piece you are missing is that most of a conductors work goes on long before you see them up on stage conducting. The real work is in music selection (you have to know your orchestra and what its strengths and weaknesses are), properly managing rehearsal schedules (what groups should meet, and what they should work on), choosing the right players and the right section leaders (the latter is both a delegation and a political art), and the actual concert conducting is much more show than anything else (unless things start to go wrong).
I know a player in the Philadelphia Orchestra and he tells me that they largely ignore the conducting that happens during a performance (granted that conductor's stick work is impossible to precisely read). They know how he wants the piece played because of what they did in rehearsal.
Oh... and I do have the experience to comment on this, I was in orchestras for 12 years.
Beyond the (should be obvious) knowledge that simply having a gun does not mean that you know how to properly use it in a tense situation (I would bet on an unarmed combat-trained soldier rather than an armed civilian any day) this begs the question: Aboard a pressurized aircraft? You do know that putting a bullet through a pressurized cabin right next to two wings filled with fuel is not really a good idea, no? Having armed civilians sitting in an aircraft is simply a recipe for an accident waiting to happen. By doing that you are creating a much more dangerous situation than we have now.
Actually, that case is one where the truth is both of those views. Hitler did lead the German people out of a severe depression and revitalized their national pride. He then used the outstanding economy and the fierce nationalism that his policies helped create to destabilize Europe.
The problem in your argument is the assumption that Apple does not have something that competes in all of those spaces. But Apple has actually had centralized management for much longer than it has been available for Windows, and it is generally an easier-to-administer system. And system imaging is much easier on the Mac side.
Now for the details:
For the AD/GPO side you have MacOS X Server's OpenDirectory and Workgroup Management. The later product stared out in the MacOS 7 days as "Macintosh Manager" and was available as part of AppleShare IP product. You can do an awful lot of locking down on the computer with the point-and-click components, including setting the users to use network home directories (pretty much the same avrients as are available on Windows). A good begining point for this would be Apple's page on MacOS X Server: http://www.apple.com/server/desktop_management.htm l
For imaging you have a number of choices: You can make up a computer as you would like it imaged, then use the free imaging tools that are included with the OS (Disk Utility has absorbed this capability, it used to be part of ASR). Then you can either push it back onto the computer using Disk Utility again, or use the image to NetBoot computers from a MacOS X Server (technically you don't need server, but it makes it easier), use the free NetBoot/NetRestore system to allow you to cause network-based imaging to happen, use the free tool Radmind to keep the image in sync (complex settings possible, and you can update one computer then let the rest follow it automatically), or use any of the other techniques that are out there (LANRev, NetOctopus, etc).
Oh... and an image you make of one computer will boot all computers that that OS supports (computers much older, or newer than the OS won't work), there are a few tricks and traps to that, but not many that matter. And there is currently the caveat that you need 2 images: one for PPC and one for Intel.
And on the remote software install party, Apple Remote Desktop does this wonderfully. It even allows for broadcast installing and leaving a package on a server so that disconnected users will get it the next time they connect.
Oh, and then you can also use AD servers to do all of this management if you would like, either through schema modification or adding a MacOS X Server on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
To further on what has been said, you also should keep in mind that the law in most districts only allows for a proportionate response as self defense. If someone slaps you you are not justified in taking out a gun and shooting them (and self defense rules don't apply). In a not-so-extreme version: if someone about your size is hitting you with their fists, you are not justified in using a lethal weapon (knife, broken bottle, etc...).
There are lots of funny rules about what the different levels are, and there is a lot of special-case situations (black belts in martial arts have to be very careful about what they do, the training often counts as a lethal weapon and is an excuse to call it premeditated).
You've got the wrong idea. They are not talking about the Apollo runtime checking for updates, but rather the Application built with Apollo checking with the database behind the application for updates that happened since it last connected, and dumping down the changes made while the user was not net connected. If they can get this right and easy for developers to use then this will be huge.
And despite everyone hating flash (because of annoying flash animation) there are some really great solutions using Flex that really make Flash shine as a business development environment. Its only real competition there is WebObject's Direct-to-Java-Client technology (too bad no-one knows about either).
If you are going to do this rant, I think you have to include a bit more about how parent suing to get their children special treatment has warped how things get done. Lawsuits are a constant problem in public schools. My mother is a Special Ed teacher and has to deal with being on the periphery of 2-3 lawsuits every year. None of them ever go to court, but they all wind up very expensive for the school district in one way or another. The principals life is almost consumed with coordinating for all of them.
Do you care to explain how using a specialized processor that has the ability to do certain calculations orders of magnitude faster than a generalized CPU is a mistake? Especially when the same system decides on-the-fly which computation resource would best perform the calculation?
To give you a hint: Apple's current system already is setup to do what you say they will never do. If your CPU would better do the job, then your CPU will do the job. If it would better be put to your SIMD unit (Ativec or MMX/SSE2/SSE3/SSE4) then it will go to that unit. And if the graphics card is sitting idle and can better do the job... well...
Not being available on PCs is not a disqualifier for professional photography software. Windows has no effective system-wide color management, so color correction will always be a hit-and-miss proposition. Apple has had ColorSync in place since the MacOS 8 days, and it is a very effective system. If you are doing professional photography on a PC then you are wasting your time, that sounds harsh but it is the way things are.
I the hobbyist space this is not such an issue because you are not going to spend the money for a printer that con reproduce color reliably, and you are not going to buy the color matching hardware to make sure your output everywhere is consistent across the full spectrum.
I spent some time supporting graphic artists and working on ColorSynced workflows, so I do have experience in this area.
And that copy is licensed as an upgrade for Apple-brand computers only. Since every Apple computer that has shipped (other than the few A|IX boxes a while back) shipped with MacOS (of some sort), Apple has never sold a non-upgrade.
You are correct in that Apple does do some things to try and bind MacOS X to Apple-manufactured hardware, but you are incorrect about the TPM module being involved:
U TIVE_SUMMARY
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/#EXEC
For those too lazy to click through: Apple is not using the TMP module at all. There are only the default keys installed on it, and you can wipe those and use your own without preventing the system from working.
The underlying Spotlight system is very capable of boolean serarches in 10.4, it is just the GUI that does not really support things like this. I think it was a conscious decision not to include this because they could not put a normal-user-friendly GUI on it (in time). It sounds like they might have taken a whack at doing just that, but we will have to see whenever 10.5 comes out.
That particular case was when 10.3 came out and allowed accelerated graphics to be used on computers that had AGP slots in them (since AGP allowed for enough bandwidth for this feature to be useful). Some people did find the trick to enable it on PCI-only machines (like yours), and found that because of the lack of bandwidth between memory and the graphics card it was actually slower.
So... is your argument is that Apple should have made your computer slower, or that Apple should have somehow caused your PCI clot to become a AGP slot using software only?
And since then there have been a number of changes in this sub-system. Each time Apple has allowed older computers to continue running they way they were, and allowed newer computers to be faster with a very few extra eye-candy touches (like a rotating cube). They have not created distinctly different functionality (yet). Vista does go a little further down this road, and there is a chance that 10.5 will too with CoreAnimation (I have no non-public information on this: pure speculation).
Actually... no. I don't really know how this got into textbooks, but if Christopher Columbus had to fight at all to get people to believe that the world was round then he was dealing with imbeciles.
By the the third century BC not only was it known that the world was round, but Eratosthenes (a Greek mathematician) had already put out a reasonably good estimate of what the circumference was. In fact all of the navigational techniques that Christopher Columbus used depended on the fact that the world was round, and sailors certainly would have long observed that the tops of distant object appeared over the horizon before the sea-level parts, and that being higher (like in a crows nest) let you see things sooner.
If you read Wikipedia's entry on this idea they conclude that the idea that this view of historical knowledge did not come into fashion until the 19th century. The people in the Middle Ages knew better.
Except that climatologists mostly have discounted the idea of a Medieval Warm Period altogether. Here is a article from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association. There never was a "Medieval Warm Period", it was bad interpretations and theories with little actual evidence to ever support them. Of course now people who have a political agenda to defend are siting it as evidence.
Well.. sort of... nowadays we call it "marketing".
You have a decent point on #2, but I don't think you have actually worked with the Apple API for #1... it is a little thing called QuickTime and is very fast, and if you are using the new Cocoa Wrappers that have been available since 10.3 are very easy to develop with. I will agree that prior to that the QuickTime API was a little bit of a pain. But if you were "fiddling with codecs" on the Mac, then you were doing something wrong.
For those of us who have to support researchers this is old news. In fact the sumssion fails to mention two important facts: PureEdge (now under a new name since IBM bought the Canadian company) has a beta version of the viewer out for Macs (still nothing for linux), and grants.gov have already announced that they will be replaceing the PureEdge solution within the year.
That is really funny... I can't seem to find a HP laptop on HP's site with a Core 2 Duo 2.16 for less that $2,799 (the nw8440 mobile in the small business section... there was nothing that was that fast in the home section). It does have a longer warentee than the $1,999 MacBook Pro, but an equivelent warentee only cost $250 from Apple. And the Apple has a built in cammera, larger hard drive, and FireWire 800.
If you can tell me where to find the HP Laptop with a Core 2 Duo 2.16 for $800-$1000 I would love to see it. I agree with you that it can be a little difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons, but they should at least have the same processor.
And do you buy your phones from any of those compaines? Or do you buy them from a sevice vendor who locks you into a multi-year contract worth many times the value of the phone and subsidizes the initial purchase of that phone.
Have you done the math and figured out that even the highest quality streaming that this device does does not come anywhere close to filling the bandwidth of its network connection? When you start to actually look at what it does that limitation turns out to not be a limiting factor at all.
The hardware that has been announced is for the US market only. We don't know what the hardware for the European market will support for standards, and it is pretty certain that the hardware for the Japanese market will require changes as well. Since there is no 3G service in the US at this point (but the equivalent on the "CDMA" side is coming on line now), so it is not surpriseing that Apple is not talking about 3G.
And I don't know what you mean about there not being a text messaging client. During the Keynote that was nicely demonstrated. It looks like iChat's text chats.
And then there is the whole "push email" discussion. Right now Apple's IMAP email servers don't support the IDLE command, but they have already talked about doing an IMAP "push" service with Yahoo! Mail, and that most likely means that the IMAP client on the phone supports IDLE, possibly with an extension or two to better facilitate the details of phone network connections.
People don't seem to know that the IDLE command is out there, and makes any imap client/server pair that supports it into the same experience as a "push" server.
While that is probably true (there is little to no way of checking, so we have to admit that it is a guess), it misses the very important point that many of Microsoft's problems with security have been through really bad design decisions. The whole idea of letting email run scripts is just bad from the get-go, and that is exactly what Outlook was designed to do. Since then they have been trying to keep that functionality for the few corporate users who rely on it, while putting the majority of us who don't at major risk.
While it is long-since out of production (and more than a little dated now) the Apple eMate 300 just about describes what you wanted. It was a great piece of equipment for that type of use.
Then you have luckily missed out on a lot. Dell has a few major lines that have failed at nearly 100% over the course of 2 years, ATI has a few lines of video cards that need replaceing, and even Apple has been stung by some production runs of iMacs and PowerMacs.
The University I work for had major problems with the Dell models. We bought into them in a big way. The department I worked for had 2 or 3 computers fail from this problem every day for over a year.
You are close, but the real piece you are missing is that most of a conductors work goes on long before you see them up on stage conducting. The real work is in music selection (you have to know your orchestra and what its strengths and weaknesses are), properly managing rehearsal schedules (what groups should meet, and what they should work on), choosing the right players and the right section leaders (the latter is both a delegation and a political art), and the actual concert conducting is much more show than anything else (unless things start to go wrong).
I know a player in the Philadelphia Orchestra and he tells me that they largely ignore the conducting that happens during a performance (granted that conductor's stick work is impossible to precisely read). They know how he wants the piece played because of what they did in rehearsal.
Oh... and I do have the experience to comment on this, I was in orchestras for 12 years.
Beyond the (should be obvious) knowledge that simply having a gun does not mean that you know how to properly use it in a tense situation (I would bet on an unarmed combat-trained soldier rather than an armed civilian any day) this begs the question: Aboard a pressurized aircraft? You do know that putting a bullet through a pressurized cabin right next to two wings filled with fuel is not really a good idea, no? Having armed civilians sitting in an aircraft is simply a recipe for an accident waiting to happen. By doing that you are creating a much more dangerous situation than we have now.
Actually, that case is one where the truth is both of those views. Hitler did lead the German people out of a severe depression and revitalized their national pride. He then used the outstanding economy and the fierce nationalism that his policies helped create to destabilize Europe.
The problem in your argument is the assumption that Apple does not have something that competes in all of those spaces. But Apple has actually had centralized management for much longer than it has been available for Windows, and it is generally an easier-to-administer system. And system imaging is much easier on the Mac side.
m l
Now for the details:
For the AD/GPO side you have MacOS X Server's OpenDirectory and Workgroup Management. The later product stared out in the MacOS 7 days as "Macintosh Manager" and was available as part of AppleShare IP product. You can do an awful lot of locking down on the computer with the point-and-click components, including setting the users to use network home directories (pretty much the same avrients as are available on Windows). A good begining point for this would be Apple's page on MacOS X Server: http://www.apple.com/server/desktop_management.ht
For imaging you have a number of choices: You can make up a computer as you would like it imaged, then use the free imaging tools that are included with the OS (Disk Utility has absorbed this capability, it used to be part of ASR). Then you can either push it back onto the computer using Disk Utility again, or use the image to NetBoot computers from a MacOS X Server (technically you don't need server, but it makes it easier), use the free NetBoot/NetRestore system to allow you to cause network-based imaging to happen, use the free tool Radmind to keep the image in sync (complex settings possible, and you can update one computer then let the rest follow it automatically), or use any of the other techniques that are out there (LANRev, NetOctopus, etc).
Oh... and an image you make of one computer will boot all computers that that OS supports (computers much older, or newer than the OS won't work), there are a few tricks and traps to that, but not many that matter. And there is currently the caveat that you need 2 images: one for PPC and one for Intel.
And on the remote software install party, Apple Remote Desktop does this wonderfully. It even allows for broadcast installing and leaving a package on a server so that disconnected users will get it the next time they connect.
Oh, and then you can also use AD servers to do all of this management if you would like, either through schema modification or adding a MacOS X Server on the side.