I spent half of Episode randomly chuckling and pointing out to the person next to me that he (Annikin, at that point a little boy) is going to sleep with her (Amidala... an attractive young woman). I think that she got annoyed with me, but I thought it was really funny.
a) WDS is the common name used for wireless-to-wireless bridging, but it is not actually a ratified standard, it has not even been proposed. It came out of the discussions leading up to WiFi but was deliberately excluded from the standard. Therefore "WDS" can include anything the vendor wants to put under that marketing term, and there is no guarantee (or even reasonable expectation) of interoperability.
b) Apple's implementation for example does work with WPA. Other vendors devices will have different results because WDS ? WDS if you mix vendors.
There have been a long list of great Mac games that never made their way to Windows, but they are never blockbusters, so they never enter the conversation. Some examples would be:
Ferazel's Wand Ares Airburst MAFFia (an incredibly addictive and disturbed game where you shoot sheep) (thats just off the top of my head)
Not to mention the games that came out for Mac first: Myst, the Dark Castle series, the Marathon series, the Escape Velocity series, etc.
Mac gaming may not have the blockbusters, but it is not the wasteland that it is made out to be.
While this is a good piece of science, by itself it is not a step towards anything economically useable as they had to do a lot of work just to verify that there was energy released. In a viable fusion reactor this should not be difficult to prove. This might one day lead to something, but there is no obvious application at this point.
The standard way of finding MacOS software would have answered this question in a heartbeat: VersionTracker or MacUpdate, both of which list installers.
Call it luck or whatever, but Fox News was the first to report who was behind 9-11. Being first should not be the important thing. Fox when to press before they had confirmation. The whole argument in this thread is that Journalists are supposed to be the ones verifying the news and providing the public with solid news so that they (the public) can make informed decisions. Fox news tends to jump the gun and report rumors more than other media outlets (who do it far more than they should... Journalism is almost dead in the mainstream US today).
Being wrong should have a huge penalty for Journalists, but nowadays it just makes them "more entertaining".
Ah... the wonderful results of the "IP over Carrier Pigeon" April Fools joke. We geeks can take things to seriously... then make something useful of a joke.
One correction: Automater can use units that have their functions written in AppleScript, but it is built completely in Obj-C. The AppleScript units are just like AppleScript Studio applications: an Obj-C runtime that calls over an AppleScript bridge to AppleScript functions, and then the results are returned over that bridge back into the Obj-C application framework.
Automater aware apps do not expose that functionality through AppleScript, but instead through a Obj-C API (and probably a Java one as well though the JavaBridge). AppleScriptability will not be affected by Automater-ability and vise-versa, in fact I am sad to say that AppleScriptability may suffer because developers will concentrate on Automater.
I really like Automater: it will make a lot of things really easy for end users who would not be able to do them in AppleScript, but I really wish that it had been built on top of AppleEvents (what AppleScript is built on) so that people with more experience could have used the same interface/functions through AppleScript. It is a sadly missed opportunity.
Apple first showed Spotlight last June, and if you look at it you will see that it is really an extension of an old Copland technology (the project that was started to originally replace System 7.5) that came out in System 8.6 under the TwinTurbo codename (text summarizing and indexing of the hard drive). And if you are really stretching you can find glimmers of this in the marketing buzz for Microsofts Cairo (large parts of which made it into Win95 and Win98). In other words, this is not a new idea... so making it work (and well) is the only thing that counts. We are way beyond the point where anyone can claim that they thought of it first.
I don't think that Microsoft's speech recognition does dictation. I think it is just like the speech recognition that has also been built into MacOS since either MacOS 7.5 or 8: very limited commands that are a big drain on the processor, and you have to repeat yourself a lot. Nothing to see here...
And on the Dashboard comment... You are thinking of Konfabulator, and that borrowed its idea from Apple's desk accessories, which borrowed its idea from a demo at Xerox PARC (the one Apple paid for the ideas with stock). And the more you compare how the two system work, the less they look like each other. Dashboard widgets are a special form of html page with a few extra javascript hooks that live in a special environment. Konfabulator scripts are another (heavyweight) program that runs in its own special interpreter with its own language. Konfabulator was a neat idea, but the implementation sucked. Apple just extended the browser and came up with their own twists on the idea. The truth be told, Dashboard has more in common with Mozilla/Firefox's XUL than Konfabulator (and it should, since Dave Hyatt was a major mover behind both).
PDF is explicitly one of the "image" formats supported. It is also an export format (since this is MacOS X that was a given), and there is a rumor that it might also import PDFs as editable documents. Apparently one of the marketing directors said that in a presentation, but since it was a marketing guy, and he might not have understood that PDFs were only importable as semi-images, there is quite a bit of skepticism.
And as to the money question. The answer is definitely yes: $79.
I have been using this sort for a system for a while now on MacOS X. I alternate between using NetNewsWire Lite and the built-in RSS checking in OmniWeb. To take the NetNewsWire Lite example:
I setup the feeds I want to view in NNWL and then leave the application running, but either with the main window closed, or with the application hidden. Every hour it checks my feeds and then puts a badge on its dock icon with the number of changed items. I just right-click (multi-button mouse) on the dock icon and select the items I want to view (and mark-all-read the rest) and they pop up as tabs in my browser-of-choice (OmniWeb in my case).
Very simple, very quick, and without having anything in the way when I don't want it.
There are so many over-simplifications implied in your statement that the only real answer to your question is: No, that isn't it.
Just a small selection:
Longhorn is seeing quite a bit of change, but is not being built from the ground up. That would force them to toss out all old code and programs, and that is not something Microsoft is about to do. Longhorn will mark the biggest loss of compatibility with old programs in Windows history, but it is not going to be anything like what a "ground up" rewrite would cause.
MacOS X does have a BSD-ish layer in it, but much of MacOS X (and the programs on top) is not necessarily built on top of that layer. It is a very complex topic. The better statement would be: MacOS X was built on top of NeXT OS, which derived much of its base from *BSD (mostly FreeBSD 3.x, but some OpenBSD).
Your indication that Tiger is not a ground-up re-write is correct. The huge plumbing changes have already happened in MacOS X, but Tiger is going to add some major "core" changes. These include major re-writes of the text handling system, graphics systems (multiple layers and APIs), and the addition of a number of other system services (CoreData and Spotlight for instance). Many of these core changes are to further Apple's developments into areas that are being touted as major improvements in Longhorn. I am not commenting on who will have the better implementation, just on the broad areas of what they are implementing.
Apple is saying that he "induced" the leaker to give him the information. This is illegal under California law. How the whole thing will work out in court will probably depend on the exact wording of all the legalese, and precedents.
Apple's case might not be nice, but it does have merit.
Six months... umm it is already out. Keyspan announced it in November, and it just started shipping (yesterday I believe). The remote can either work directly, or through an AirportExpress.
You are right in that the XServes come with MacOS X Server, but a number of the models (used to be called cluster nodes) come with only the 10-Client version of 'Server. This does not limit them with regards to web serving (like Windows Server license does) but instead limit the number of mail, file serving, netboot, etc clients that can connect. And the $500 difference to the unlimited client is not that big when you compare it to Microsoft's licensing costs.
This is a 6.5" x 6.5" x 2" computer... what sort of expansion slot did you want them to use?
And if you are not playing games all the time, 32MB is just fine for a graphics card. Why would you expect this to be a games machine? XBox would be a bette choice.
1. Windows isn't a vendor lock in? And with the exception of some binary-only ODBC drivers I really haven't run into much that dosenot compile on PPC for linux and OpenBSD/NetBSD (not to mention Darwin). The problems are comparable to the myrid of problems when you start to look over the different linux distro's out there.
Apple has always made it a point to be interoperable with as much as they can, so you are not really "locked in" to a single platform like Windows tries to do. Apple computers have read PC disks for well over a decade, and PC's still don't read Mac disks. Who is locking you in?
Apple's major software has always been cross-platform: AppleWorks, QuickTime, WebObjects, iTunes (ok, a subset of QuickTime). And they tend to use standards far more than Microsoft (thus mitigating lock-in).
2. Care to tell me what will be coming out from Dell in 6 months? Can you give me their price-list? Or are you talking about the features of Longhorn... or it's ship date? How useful is that information when you know it is not going to be remotely close to true.
People expect things out of Apple that they don't expect out of other companies (or fool themselves into thinking they are getting).
3. The G4's were out for a while... Apple just moved the marketing name to G5 now. There were several different versions of the G4 processor in there. Just like there is a long list of very different processors that bear the Pentium 4 name... that too is simply a marketing name (and also don't fit in the same [processor sockets/slots).
If you are talking about service hardware, Apple has a service department that keeps on-hand hardware for a long time. While working for a repair shop I was always amazed at the old stuff that we could get. It cost a lot... but if you need it it is there.
And lets be honest. Do you think that a 4 year old Dell motherboard is more easily replaced than an Apple board? It is just as specific. The hard drives, memory, and processors (look at the Mac upgrade market) and all just as available (since they are mostly the same parts). And the graphics cards may have a smaller selection, but they are readily available.
The 4-10 years between upgrades is going to make Mac's much more valuable... they tend to last better than PC's (both from a usability and a durability standpoint). Just look at schools for that, they are using ancient Apple hardware next to brand new PC hardware... guess which gets more maintenance calls?
The real reason that IT has not made the switch is inertia. The people in IT have their certifications from Microsoft... that is why they got the job. They don't know anything about maintain an Apple computer, and it would be work to educate themselves. So even if the results would be better, they don't feel the need to do so, and have some incentive to try and prevent it.
A fuel cell is really more about energy storage than generation. H2 + O2 H2O + energy. This is one of the big mistakes being made in the popular culture, the myth of the "hydrogen economy".
Using fuel cells in cars does absolutely nothing to eliminate our dependance on oil unless we find a good source of putting the energy into the hydrogen that we are going to be using as "fuel". Right now the best choices are: oil derivatives, natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, etc... in about that order of economic feasibility.
The only thing that using fuel cells gets us is a little more choice in where we get the energy for high-energy mobile devices (like cars). It does not change the basic rules of the energy economy.
Except that the connection sharing feature just turns on a DHCP server and changes the routing table to match. This does nothing about calculating network paths or any of the other task necessary for mesh networks. In addition to that, the airport cards can either be in "peer-to-peer" or "infrastructure" modes. They can't share and connect to a base station at the same time.
People have already solved these issues, and there is open source to do it, but it has nothing to do with "Share My Internet Connection".
Slashdot Mirror
I spent half of Episode randomly chuckling and pointing out to the person next to me that he (Annikin, at that point a little boy) is going to sleep with her (Amidala... an attractive young woman). I think that she got annoyed with me, but I thought it was really funny.
a) WDS is the common name used for wireless-to-wireless bridging, but it is not actually a ratified standard, it has not even been proposed. It came out of the discussions leading up to WiFi but was deliberately excluded from the standard. Therefore "WDS" can include anything the vendor wants to put under that marketing term, and there is no guarantee (or even reasonable expectation) of interoperability.
b) Apple's implementation for example does work with WPA. Other vendors devices will have different results because WDS ? WDS if you mix vendors.
There have been a long list of great Mac games that never made their way to Windows, but they are never blockbusters, so they never enter the conversation. Some examples would be:
Ferazel's Wand
Ares
Airburst
MAFFia (an incredibly addictive and disturbed game where you shoot sheep)
(thats just off the top of my head)
Not to mention the games that came out for Mac first: Myst, the Dark Castle series, the Marathon series, the Escape Velocity series, etc.
Mac gaming may not have the blockbusters, but it is not the wasteland that it is made out to be.
While this is a good piece of science, by itself it is not a step towards anything economically useable as they had to do a lot of work just to verify that there was energy released. In a viable fusion reactor this should not be difficult to prove. This might one day lead to something, but there is no obvious application at this point.
The standard way of finding MacOS software would have answered this question in a heartbeat: VersionTracker or MacUpdate, both of which list installers.
Call it luck or whatever, but Fox News was the first to report who was behind 9-11.
Being first should not be the important thing. Fox when to press before they had confirmation. The whole argument in this thread is that Journalists are supposed to be the ones verifying the news and providing the public with solid news so that they (the public) can make informed decisions. Fox news tends to jump the gun and report rumors more than other media outlets (who do it far more than they should... Journalism is almost dead in the mainstream US today).
Being wrong should have a huge penalty for Journalists, but nowadays it just makes them "more entertaining".
Ah... the wonderful results of the "IP over Carrier Pigeon" April Fools joke. We geeks can take things to seriously... then make something useful of a joke.
You forgot the "uh oh...". Very critical.
One correction: Automater can use units that have their functions written in AppleScript, but it is built completely in Obj-C. The AppleScript units are just like AppleScript Studio applications: an Obj-C runtime that calls over an AppleScript bridge to AppleScript functions, and then the results are returned over that bridge back into the Obj-C application framework.
Automater aware apps do not expose that functionality through AppleScript, but instead through a Obj-C API (and probably a Java one as well though the JavaBridge). AppleScriptability will not be affected by Automater-ability and vise-versa, in fact I am sad to say that AppleScriptability may suffer because developers will concentrate on Automater.
I really like Automater: it will make a lot of things really easy for end users who would not be able to do them in AppleScript, but I really wish that it had been built on top of AppleEvents (what AppleScript is built on) so that people with more experience could have used the same interface/functions through AppleScript. It is a sadly missed opportunity.
Just a couple of comments:
Apple first showed Spotlight last June, and if you look at it you will see that it is really an extension of an old Copland technology (the project that was started to originally replace System 7.5) that came out in System 8.6 under the TwinTurbo codename (text summarizing and indexing of the hard drive). And if you are really stretching you can find glimmers of this in the marketing buzz for Microsofts Cairo (large parts of which made it into Win95 and Win98). In other words, this is not a new idea... so making it work (and well) is the only thing that counts. We are way beyond the point where anyone can claim that they thought of it first.
I don't think that Microsoft's speech recognition does dictation. I think it is just like the speech recognition that has also been built into MacOS since either MacOS 7.5 or 8: very limited commands that are a big drain on the processor, and you have to repeat yourself a lot. Nothing to see here...
And on the Dashboard comment... You are thinking of Konfabulator, and that borrowed its idea from Apple's desk accessories, which borrowed its idea from a demo at Xerox PARC (the one Apple paid for the ideas with stock). And the more you compare how the two system work, the less they look like each other. Dashboard widgets are a special form of html page with a few extra javascript hooks that live in a special environment. Konfabulator scripts are another (heavyweight) program that runs in its own special interpreter with its own language. Konfabulator was a neat idea, but the implementation sucked. Apple just extended the browser and came up with their own twists on the idea. The truth be told, Dashboard has more in common with Mozilla/Firefox's XUL than Konfabulator (and it should, since Dave Hyatt was a major mover behind both).
PDF is explicitly one of the "image" formats supported. It is also an export format (since this is MacOS X that was a given), and there is a rumor that it might also import PDFs as editable documents. Apparently one of the marketing directors said that in a presentation, but since it was a marketing guy, and he might not have understood that PDFs were only importable as semi-images, there is quite a bit of skepticism.
And as to the money question. The answer is definitely yes: $79.
I have been using this sort for a system for a while now on MacOS X. I alternate between using NetNewsWire Lite and the built-in RSS checking in OmniWeb. To take the NetNewsWire Lite example:
I setup the feeds I want to view in NNWL and then leave the application running, but either with the main window closed, or with the application hidden. Every hour it checks my feeds and then puts a badge on its dock icon with the number of changed items. I just right-click (multi-button mouse) on the dock icon and select the items I want to view (and mark-all-read the rest) and they pop up as tabs in my browser-of-choice (OmniWeb in my case).
Very simple, very quick, and without having anything in the way when I don't want it.
There are so many over-simplifications implied in your statement that the only real answer to your question is: No, that isn't it.
Just a small selection:
Longhorn is seeing quite a bit of change, but is not being built from the ground up. That would force them to toss out all old code and programs, and that is not something Microsoft is about to do. Longhorn will mark the biggest loss of compatibility with old programs in Windows history, but it is not going to be anything like what a "ground up" rewrite would cause.
MacOS X does have a BSD-ish layer in it, but much of MacOS X (and the programs on top) is not necessarily built on top of that layer. It is a very complex topic. The better statement would be: MacOS X was built on top of NeXT OS, which derived much of its base from *BSD (mostly FreeBSD 3.x, but some OpenBSD).
Your indication that Tiger is not a ground-up re-write is correct. The huge plumbing changes have already happened in MacOS X, but Tiger is going to add some major "core" changes. These include major re-writes of the text handling system, graphics systems (multiple layers and APIs), and the addition of a number of other system services (CoreData and Spotlight for instance). Many of these core changes are to further Apple's developments into areas that are being touted as major improvements in Longhorn. I am not commenting on who will have the better implementation, just on the broad areas of what they are implementing.
How is Apple different in this regard from any other company in the electronics industry? Or the Automotive industry... or the...
Apple is saying that he "induced" the leaker to give him the information. This is illegal under California law. How the whole thing will work out in court will probably depend on the exact wording of all the legalese, and precedents.
Apple's case might not be nice, but it does have merit.
Six months... umm it is already out. Keyspan announced it in November, and it just started shipping (yesterday I believe). The remote can either work directly, or through an AirportExpress.
You are right in that the XServes come with MacOS X Server, but a number of the models (used to be called cluster nodes) come with only the 10-Client version of 'Server. This does not limit them with regards to web serving (like Windows Server license does) but instead limit the number of mail, file serving, netboot, etc clients that can connect. And the $500 difference to the unlimited client is not that big when you compare it to Microsoft's licensing costs.
This is a 6.5" x 6.5" x 2" computer... what sort of expansion slot did you want them to use?
And if you are not playing games all the time, 32MB is just fine for a graphics card. Why would you expect this to be a games machine? XBox would be a bette choice.
1. Windows isn't a vendor lock in? And with the exception of some binary-only ODBC drivers I really haven't run into much that dosenot compile on PPC for linux and OpenBSD/NetBSD (not to mention Darwin). The problems are comparable to the myrid of problems when you start to look over the different linux distro's out there.
Apple has always made it a point to be interoperable with as much as they can, so you are not really "locked in" to a single platform like Windows tries to do. Apple computers have read PC disks for well over a decade, and PC's still don't read Mac disks. Who is locking you in?
Apple's major software has always been cross-platform: AppleWorks, QuickTime, WebObjects, iTunes (ok, a subset of QuickTime). And they tend to use standards far more than Microsoft (thus mitigating lock-in).
2. Care to tell me what will be coming out from Dell in 6 months? Can you give me their price-list? Or are you talking about the features of Longhorn... or it's ship date? How useful is that information when you know it is not going to be remotely close to true.
People expect things out of Apple that they don't expect out of other companies (or fool themselves into thinking they are getting).
3. The G4's were out for a while... Apple just moved the marketing name to G5 now. There were several different versions of the G4 processor in there. Just like there is a long list of very different processors that bear the Pentium 4 name... that too is simply a marketing name (and also don't fit in the same [processor sockets/slots).
If you are talking about service hardware, Apple has a service department that keeps on-hand hardware for a long time. While working for a repair shop I was always amazed at the old stuff that we could get. It cost a lot... but if you need it it is there.
And lets be honest. Do you think that a 4 year old Dell motherboard is more easily replaced than an Apple board? It is just as specific. The hard drives, memory, and processors (look at the Mac upgrade market) and all just as available (since they are mostly the same parts). And the graphics cards may have a smaller selection, but they are readily available.
The 4-10 years between upgrades is going to make Mac's much more valuable... they tend to last better than PC's (both from a usability and a durability standpoint). Just look at schools for that, they are using ancient Apple hardware next to brand new PC hardware... guess which gets more maintenance calls?
The real reason that IT has not made the switch is inertia. The people in IT have their certifications from Microsoft... that is why they got the job. They don't know anything about maintain an Apple computer, and it would be work to educate themselves. So even if the results would be better, they don't feel the need to do so, and have some incentive to try and prevent it.
A fuel cell is really more about energy storage than generation. H2 + O2 H2O + energy. This is one of the big mistakes being made in the popular culture, the myth of the "hydrogen economy".
Using fuel cells in cars does absolutely nothing to eliminate our dependance on oil unless we find a good source of putting the energy into the hydrogen that we are going to be using as "fuel". Right now the best choices are: oil derivatives, natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, etc... in about that order of economic feasibility.
The only thing that using fuel cells gets us is a little more choice in where we get the energy for high-energy mobile devices (like cars). It does not change the basic rules of the energy economy.
Except that the connection sharing feature just turns on a DHCP server and changes the routing table to match. This does nothing about calculating network paths or any of the other task necessary for mesh networks. In addition to that, the airport cards can either be in "peer-to-peer" or "infrastructure" modes. They can't share and connect to a base station at the same time.
People have already solved these issues, and there is open source to do it, but it has nothing to do with "Share My Internet Connection".
The Khmer Rouge was fairly close to an anarchy... does that count?
Hey! I like pineapple on my pizza and I'm not insa.... Ok... ya' got me there.
The AppleScript Studio lists have the same problem... people tend to skip the acronyms.
How exactly is it helpful to link to the text-only cache of a site of images?