The argument is that you should not be fooling people into thinking that they are getting a drug when they are not. Alternately some people argue that if you have a (potentially) beneficial drug you should give it to as many people as possible and that placebos are withholding that drug. However, this latter argument falls to the: we don't know that the new drug is harmless/worthwhile, that is why we are testing argument.
...and they delivered... you can buy a LCD monitor now for less then you could have bought a similarly sized CRT just a few years ago. It was not tool long ago that a 17" CRT was a luxury going for more than $500, and that is non-adjusted dollars.
Have you ever watched most users work with a 2 button mouse? I am not talking about the level of users that are on slashdot, I am talking about the stereotypical mother/grandmother. They don't use the second mouse button, and get very confused when they accidentally right-click on something (even worse if they start using the right button for the purposes of the left).
The first thing I always do with a new Mac for myself if replace the mouse with a 2 button + scroll wheel version. But as a support person I am very glad that most of my users have only a single mouse button.
As has been stated time and time again: Apple ships only a single mouse button because it forces developers to expose all of the functionality through interfaces that you can get to with only a single mouse button, and this tends to encourage better UI practices. It is all about ease-of-use.
That being said, Apple also has a lot of support in place for second mouse buttons, both in their applications and built into the frameworks that developers build their applications on.
You will be able to run 10.4 on just about any graphics card... but the new toolkits like QuartzExtreme need better cards to run. You can still use the OS, but some of the new features will not be available (eye candy, a bit of extra speed, and video processing routines).
I agree with your main point... but in the book, most of the priestesses were dedicated to the temple of the Kargish Kings, and they were doing quite well. There was only one priestesses left who was "sacrifices" and "emptied" for the nameless ones, who's temple was decaying into ruins.
I have been borrowing issues from a German friend who has them shipped over here to the US, and I have got to say that it is a good magazine. Good solid reviews, and the articles are worth reading. They are linux and MacOS X friendly (but the focus is still Windows), and I did not get the feeling that they were swayed by any of the companies they reviewed (unlike say, CNet...). I would actually consider getting a dead-tree edition of this magazine in print form, which I never thought I would do for another computer magazine.
Apple does give all of its developer tools away for free. It is just not giving pre-release software + free time with their engineers + all of their software for development purposes for a year (Select membership) to people for free. Any developer can create software with MacOS X 10.3 today and be almost completely sure that it will run on 10.4 when it comes out (the exceptions are doing things you know you shouldn't be doing).
Ya... and that is why there is a large wave of x86-64 cluster servers coming on line now... oh, wait... those are Apple X-Serves....
If you would care to point out specific hardware comparisons, then we can have a real conversation. But just saying "Macs are more expensive" without any evidence just shows that you don't know what you are talking about.
So, can you find a large-vendor system (I don't accept white box comparisons) that will beat the specs, performance, and price of either the PowerMac G5's or the X-Serve G5's? If not... please stop spreading information that is not true.
Well... there is a bit of complexity behind all of this:
For Aliases (equivalent of shortcuts) both a path and a HFS file id are stored (also a disk id that can include network information... even passwords if you choose). The file id is tried first, and if it fails, then the path it tried. Only after both are tried does the operation fail. All of this is done in low level code, so programmers don't get a chance to screw things up.
For programs that have open files... then things work this way if you use the Cocoa file handling system. It does all of that work for you, and you never have to notice. It even handles things like atomic-writes, so you never have to deal with that (although as a programmer I wish that it handled re-setting permissions better).
If you use other API's (Carbon, pure Java, or POSIX) then you get the more "normal" behaviors expected from those systems.
WINE does not currently run on PPC hardware, at all, since it is an API implementation, not a emulator. There is a project going to combine WINE with a hardware emulator (BOCHS) and that will then work, but very slowly.
There is a Mac-On-Linux project that is in some ways similar to WINE on x86, and you can run MacOS 9 on top of Linux on PPC. For more information see their site
Um... I think you are wrong on the presentation point. You can present all you want, you can even start selling the item, and you still have the (I believe) one year to file for the patent (patent pending).
The whole issue of "prior art" is a nasty one where you have to look closely at the definition, and what constitutes proof in the eyes of the USPTO.
While you are very right on some points, the US is still the current world leader in research. That is not to say that Americans are smarter than the rest of the world, or that all (or even the majority) of discoveries are made here. Now, a lot of the brain power behind that research is foreign born, and often hold non-US passports.
I am friends with three researchers here in the US, all three of whom are German nationals. All three of them work in biology, and each of their labs are at least 50% non-American. I am not what the actual percentages, but they all feel that their labs are fairly normal for their fields.
All three of them have told me that it is virtually a requirement to work abroad to get good jobs in German science labs, and that the number one place to go is the USA, because the environment is better for it here.
At that speed a brick is a "lifting body". Reminds me of the F-15 a.k.a. the "Aluminum Lawn Dart" (or world's most expensive lawn dart) because if you turn off the engine thats what your flight path looks like.
Well... you need to be a registered apple developer to have it at this point.
As a general note: Apple has rarely sent out paid upgrades as anything but a combination of both a full and upgrade installer. They are almost always bootible media (CD's or DVD's) that have disk tools on them so that you can choose to erase/repartition the disk, and "clean" upgrade options (in MacOS X's case it offers to move the "system" folder aside and the option to migrate user folders and system settings).
Next year when this is available for sale you will undoubtedly be able to move any computer capable of using 10.4 to the new OS, probably from MacOS 9.2 onward (since all of the computers that meet the minimum requirements would not run lower anyways).
I was more reminded of the shoe stores from the radio scripts.
Re:Somewhere in the middle
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While it has become harder to draw a black triangle on the screen programatically, it has become fire simpler to use an IDE to make a window that has a black triangle on it, and then draws "hello world" and asks you for your name, all well within ten lines of code (and 3 minutes of work).
With XCode and InterfaceBuilder (the IDE tools that ship with MacOS X) I can whip up a text editor with support for rich text (fonts, formatting, colors, embedded images, etc) in under 20 lines of code (half of which are written for me), and a few minutes.
I would say that it has become far easier to get complex things done in programming, and for a lot of tasks the entry level has gone down, but of course our expectations have increased enormously.
The main developers behind ZeroConf are all on Apple's payroll, and did much of the work on company time. Apple wants to make home/SOHO networking easy, so that no one can say that macs don't play well with others.
Nope... It simply requires a DVI Dual Layer connector. And the card they are selling ($599) has two of those connector on it (and can control 2 30" displays). The old DVI cannot handle the amount of data required to feed the new resolution.
This was one of the same reasons the Apple first created ADC. DVI-D could not handle the resolution on the top end Apple Studio Display of the time. Since there was no standard, and no motion in the industry to make one, they made their own.
Now that there is a standard that can handle this (and ADC can't... especially the part about the amount of power the 30" draws), they have gone with this standard (which no-one else has yet adopted).
The problems were a bit more intractable than just buying new software... for a lot of uses there simply wasn't an application out at the right time.
I bought a PowerComputing computer (Apple clone) at the time when they were providing BeOS with every computer, and likes what I saw, but there was so little I could actually do with it at the time.
To give a great example, BeOS was a "Media OS" that could not play QuickTime, the dominant media format of the time. It was a wonderful foundation for an OS... more or less, but was lacking in actual applications (both the software kind, and the activities).
Slashdot Mirror
The argument is that you should not be fooling people into thinking that they are getting a drug when they are not. Alternately some people argue that if you have a (potentially) beneficial drug you should give it to as many people as possible and that placebos are withholding that drug. However, this latter argument falls to the: we don't know that the new drug is harmless/worthwhile, that is why we are testing argument.
...and they delivered... you can buy a LCD monitor now for less then you could have bought a similarly sized CRT just a few years ago. It was not tool long ago that a 17" CRT was a luxury going for more than $500, and that is non-adjusted dollars.
Wouldn't that be: "Entire State of Rhode Island Destroyed in Moderately Big Explosion"? Maybe "Above Average"....
Have you ever watched most users work with a 2 button mouse? I am not talking about the level of users that are on slashdot, I am talking about the stereotypical mother/grandmother. They don't use the second mouse button, and get very confused when they accidentally right-click on something (even worse if they start using the right button for the purposes of the left).
The first thing I always do with a new Mac for myself if replace the mouse with a 2 button + scroll wheel version. But as a support person I am very glad that most of my users have only a single mouse button.
As has been stated time and time again: Apple ships only a single mouse button because it forces developers to expose all of the functionality through interfaces that you can get to with only a single mouse button, and this tends to encourage better UI practices. It is all about ease-of-use.
That being said, Apple also has a lot of support in place for second mouse buttons, both in their applications and built into the frameworks that developers build their applications on.
You will be able to run 10.4 on just about any graphics card... but the new toolkits like QuartzExtreme need better cards to run. You can still use the OS, but some of the new features will not be available (eye candy, a bit of extra speed, and video processing routines).
I agree with your main point... but in the book, most of the priestesses were dedicated to the temple of the Kargish Kings, and they were doing quite well. There was only one priestesses left who was "sacrifices" and "emptied" for the nameless ones, who's temple was decaying into ruins.
Nothing at all like the SiFi rendition.
I have been borrowing issues from a German friend who has them shipped over here to the US, and I have got to say that it is a good magazine. Good solid reviews, and the articles are worth reading. They are linux and MacOS X friendly (but the focus is still Windows), and I did not get the feeling that they were swayed by any of the companies they reviewed (unlike say, CNet...). I would actually consider getting a dead-tree edition of this magazine in print form, which I never thought I would do for another computer magazine.
Apple does give all of its developer tools away for free. It is just not giving pre-release software + free time with their engineers + all of their software for development purposes for a year (Select membership) to people for free. Any developer can create software with MacOS X 10.3 today and be almost completely sure that it will run on 10.4 when it comes out (the exceptions are doing things you know you shouldn't be doing).
Three Letter Acronym... just in case you weren't kidding.
For the more likely case that this was not straight: the proper quote was "What's a Nubian?"
Ya... and that is why there is a large wave of x86-64 cluster servers coming on line now... oh, wait... those are Apple X-Serves....
If you would care to point out specific hardware comparisons, then we can have a real conversation. But just saying "Macs are more expensive" without any evidence just shows that you don't know what you are talking about.
So, can you find a large-vendor system (I don't accept white box comparisons) that will beat the specs, performance, and price of either the PowerMac G5's or the X-Serve G5's? If not... please stop spreading information that is not true.
Well... there is a bit of complexity behind all of this:
For Aliases (equivalent of shortcuts) both a path and a HFS file id are stored (also a disk id that can include network information... even passwords if you choose). The file id is tried first, and if it fails, then the path it tried. Only after both are tried does the operation fail. All of this is done in low level code, so programmers don't get a chance to screw things up.
For programs that have open files... then things work this way if you use the Cocoa file handling system. It does all of that work for you, and you never have to notice. It even handles things like atomic-writes, so you never have to deal with that (although as a programmer I wish that it handled re-setting permissions better).
If you use other API's (Carbon, pure Java, or POSIX) then you get the more "normal" behaviors expected from those systems.
So... Apple is now legally responsible for the decisions made by the RIAA? Interesting idea.
WINE does not currently run on PPC hardware, at all, since it is an API implementation, not a emulator. There is a project going to combine WINE with a hardware emulator (BOCHS) and that will then work, but very slowly.
There is a Mac-On-Linux project that is in some ways similar to WINE on x86, and you can run MacOS 9 on top of Linux on PPC. For more information see their site
We have the nice plush recliners in the living room...
Um... I think you are wrong on the presentation point. You can present all you want, you can even start selling the item, and you still have the (I believe) one year to file for the patent (patent pending).
The whole issue of "prior art" is a nasty one where you have to look closely at the definition, and what constitutes proof in the eyes of the USPTO.
While you are very right on some points, the US is still the current world leader in research. That is not to say that Americans are smarter than the rest of the world, or that all (or even the majority) of discoveries are made here. Now, a lot of the brain power behind that research is foreign born, and often hold non-US passports.
I am friends with three researchers here in the US, all three of whom are German nationals. All three of them work in biology, and each of their labs are at least 50% non-American. I am not what the actual percentages, but they all feel that their labs are fairly normal for their fields.
All three of them have told me that it is virtually a requirement to work abroad to get good jobs in German science labs, and that the number one place to go is the USA, because the environment is better for it here.
At that speed a brick is a "lifting body". Reminds me of the F-15 a.k.a. the "Aluminum Lawn Dart" (or world's most expensive lawn dart) because if you turn off the engine thats what your flight path looks like.
Well... you need to be a registered apple developer to have it at this point.
As a general note: Apple has rarely sent out paid upgrades as anything but a combination of both a full and upgrade installer. They are almost always bootible media (CD's or DVD's) that have disk tools on them so that you can choose to erase/repartition the disk, and "clean" upgrade options (in MacOS X's case it offers to move the "system" folder aside and the option to migrate user folders and system settings).
Next year when this is available for sale you will undoubtedly be able to move any computer capable of using 10.4 to the new OS, probably from MacOS 9.2 onward (since all of the computers that meet the minimum requirements would not run lower anyways).
I was more reminded of the shoe stores from the radio scripts.
While it has become harder to draw a black triangle on the screen programatically, it has become fire simpler to use an IDE to make a window that has a black triangle on it, and then draws "hello world" and asks you for your name, all well within ten lines of code (and 3 minutes of work).
With XCode and InterfaceBuilder (the IDE tools that ship with MacOS X) I can whip up a text editor with support for rich text (fonts, formatting, colors, embedded images, etc) in under 20 lines of code (half of which are written for me), and a few minutes.
I would say that it has become far easier to get complex things done in programming, and for a lot of tasks the entry level has gone down, but of course our expectations have increased enormously.
The main developers behind ZeroConf are all on Apple's payroll, and did much of the work on company time. Apple wants to make home/SOHO networking easy, so that no one can say that macs don't play well with others.
Nope... It simply requires a DVI Dual Layer connector. And the card they are selling ($599) has two of those connector on it (and can control 2 30" displays). The old DVI cannot handle the amount of data required to feed the new resolution.
This was one of the same reasons the Apple first created ADC. DVI-D could not handle the resolution on the top end Apple Studio Display of the time. Since there was no standard, and no motion in the industry to make one, they made their own.
Now that there is a standard that can handle this (and ADC can't... especially the part about the amount of power the 30" draws), they have gone with this standard (which no-one else has yet adopted).
Yes... you are the only one who is using it... well... your completely re-written version of it...
so... ever thought of stress testing your version with a slashdoting?
The problems were a bit more intractable than just buying new software... for a lot of uses there simply wasn't an application out at the right time.
I bought a PowerComputing computer (Apple clone) at the time when they were providing BeOS with every computer, and likes what I saw, but there was so little I could actually do with it at the time.
To give a great example, BeOS was a "Media OS" that could not play QuickTime, the dominant media format of the time. It was a wonderful foundation for an OS... more or less, but was lacking in actual applications (both the software kind, and the activities).