Just a small note: MP3 is not free. It is owned by the Fraunhofer institute in Germany. They license it to a number of companies, in this case Apple. Apple pays a fixed sum per year to them on their customer's behalf.
There are a number of free players and encoders out there that are not liscenced, but these are explicitly infringing on Fraunhofer's patents. They simply have not been taken to court. This is very similar to the whole gif case (the algorithm behind the gif format was patented... recently expired in the US).
Ogg Vorbis is a small player, but it is a truly free one.
And as an owner of a iPod, why would you use mp3 when AAC is so much better.
Actually Adobe tends to try and drive right down the center of the road, ignoring anything on either side. They have ignored a lot of the printing advantages in MacOS X, and put in only stubs of support for AppleScript and VBScript.
The only place where they have focused on one platform or the other have been in filters (arguably where the real heavy lifting is). They have made altivec enablers, and to a lesser extent MMX filters (I am referring to this as a family.. not the specific implementation).
It is true that Altivec has given a bigger boost than the MMX family, but this is simply due to the quality of the Altivec units. Intel actually paid for a 2bit gausian blur filter for MMX for demo purposes. If you stuck with exactly a 2 bit blur (not real common) you got a great result on the Pentium, but off that magic number the PPC (604 at the time) won.
Executive summary: Photoshop with a broad array of filters/actions is about as good a general test as you can devise (for graphics artists).
I actually use AppleScript for a one-off project about every other week. I am maintaining a cluster of FileMaker Pro databases, and there is a lot of data that needs to be massaged. For things that need to touch outside files for their information, and can't be simple imports, I find AppleSctipt very useful.
I have also worked with AppleScript Studio, and it makes creating small programs on MacOS X very simple. You can even use it to glue nice GUI's onto scripts or other small program segments. I wrote a small program in ObjC and used AppleScript to connect it to iTunes. It would have been possible with other methods (AppleEvents), but much more difficult.
It is very appropriate to compare it to VBScript in Windows, but from experience it is much more elegant.
Actually it was a hostile shareholder revolt. In fact the old management has been playing a lot of games (locking the new management out of offices, removing documentation, stealing computers, etc...). There was a nice little article about it written by the new manager (can't find the link now).
So could someone drop the "Insightful" mod off the parent comment, and add an "uninformed" one?
Re:It's Not That Complicated
on
G5s Start Shipping
·
· Score: 4, Informative
LCD's win in a number of areas:
Power Consumption
Space
No Flicker (really important if you stare at a monitor all day)
Possible digital connection (never have to adjust geometry)
Weight/Portability
Better pixel-to-pixel contrast (on digitals)
And if you get the right screens (mostly LeCei or Apple), they have beautiful color correction, at a par with the best CRT's.
This is vs. CTR's advantages:
Higher luminocity
Average color space is better (with exceptions above)
lower cost
higher refresh rate (important only in games)
So, I think your "CRT's blow lcd's away" comment is unwarranted.
Apple has a long history of shipping a new a.b.x release to support new hardware, and then latter shipping another version for all hardware. In almost all cases there were few changes no directly related to supporting the new hardware.
In this case the rumors are that 10.2.7 will add libraries for handling 64 bit processes. The libraries will be in parallel to the 32 bit version, so simply by changing the library you link against will change the application from a 32 bit to a 64 bit application (in many cases... if you did something fancy.. you might have to change you code).
This is how apple apparently plans on allowing the 10.2.x series to use 64bit applications without a major re-write. Eventually MacOS X will be 64bit only... but I expect that to take a few years (thinking 5 or so).
No.. MacOS X runs on all G3's (except the PowerBook G3... not the PowerBook G3 Series, but the original one). The crux of the lawsuit was that certain features like DVD playback and OpenGL hardware acceleration did not work on some models.
This is all about people who artificially inflated their own expectations (consumers, not Apple), and the lawyers who want to profit by them.
Re:Physical issues resulting from this?
on
Chimera Twins Story
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The main thrust of the segment is about a woman who was told that her children could not be hers according to a blood typing. What was eventually discovered was that she is a Chimera, with the blood and eggs stemming from two different genetic strains (they would have been fraternal twins).
No, Adobe decided that they could not compete with Final Cut Pro and said so in a press release that had so much spin that people interpreted it to say that they were getting out of the Macintosh space.
Why would Adobe even consider getting out of the market that they earn most of their money in? For the first time ever their sales between Win and Mac were even last year... a year in which NO major version of any Mac software came out...one in which everyone on the mac side was holding out of Photoshop 7.
I have not taken many business courses, but abandoning half your revenue does not seem like a course of action they are likely to take.
But then again if you were a University of Wisconsin (at Madison/Madtown) student you would be silly to put up your own access point when most of campus (should be now) set up for wireless connections, and your access point can't provide you with more bandwidth then the housing provider gives (as a former DoIT employee I have my own opinions about them...).
Actually, in power saver mode the PowerPC family of processors varies its timing to try and save energy. If you do something demanding (say a lot of IO involved in DVD playback) the processor stays in its most 'awake' mode. If you start to use less processor power (have increasingly more no-op cycles) then it starts to slow down timings and turn off function units. Start to need more power and it starts to ramp back up. The biggest problem is that somtimes you need a lot of cycles in a sudden burst after doing nearly nothing for a while, and this takes a bit of time to wake up all the way.
All in all a much better solution than the 'if I am unpluged then drop to half performance' routine uses by the non-mobile version of the P4 that is used in high performance PC laptops.
Well... then you look to the "Software up-to-date" program which has always allowed for this. For (typically) $20 you get CD's with all the newest software on it (that would have come with your computer). That is how I got MacOS X with my Cube...
Now Microsoft on the other hand does not offer this (at leas no through HP, where I got my test machine).
With a very few exceptions, these problems are due to a locked file on a HFS(+) volume. The simplest way of correcting this is to "get info" in the finder and uncheck the locked box. There is also a way of doing this from the command line, but if you really need that you can find that yourself.
In this case it is almost definately a misunderstood feature.
My advice would be to stick with Apple' compatibility software, and forget Microsoft's. MacOS X will deal with SMB better than NT will deal with AppleTalk (not over IP).
1-3 cycles of access time would kill performance. This is one of those huge differences between PPC and x86, an emulator would constantly he hitting this wall... remember things in the registers are a 0 cycle cost.
Neither is technically an emulator, in the same way that WINE is not an emulator.
In Classic, MacOS 9 is running, but taking a number of services from the host MacOS X system through a number of special extensions. All classic apps would need an emulator (if the vendor has not rewritten for Carbon.. there is no chance they would recompile for x86).
In Carbon it is a native application, but much of the code (both in applications, and in the equivalent of shared libraries) is very PPC specific, and would probably need an emulator o be commercially viable.
The whole problem is the notion of "simple and straight-forward". In every case evolved systems seem to find their own solutions that seem to be complicated (from our point of view and rules), but if you look at it from a how-many-things-have-to-evolve point of view, their solutions are far simpler.
PPC hardware maker... umm... IBM? Several of their workstations run on PPC processors. Or what about Cisco, a lot of their routers are PPC hardware. Ohh.. you mean PPC hardware that runs MacOS X...
And then you have to start bringing IBM in as a "monopoly" on AIX computers, Sun in on Sparc computers... etc...
And if you compare Apple's prices to a similar vendor (Dell, HP, Compaq, etc..) on the Wintell side you will find that the prices are pretty close. There is a lot of room for interpretation about what is comparable, but there is no way you could argue "monopolistic prices".
Actually, there is a good chance that many of those OS's would not boot on a brand new machine. Some of them would have problems with that amount of memory, but in most cases they simply wouldn't have the drivers needed to use the motherboard. This is exactly what Apple announced, that they are not going to be making the newer versions of MacOS 9 that would be required to drive newer motherboards.
Actually, they are probably porting the GUI from SWING (where it is now) to Apple's Aqua through the Cocoa-Java version. This is an API that allows you to access basically the same API's as Obj-C Cocoa from Java. App-Kit (on of the API's in question) rocks!
The smart lists in iTunes are completely done on the client side. There is no evidence that this is a data mining scam. Apple is not known for that type of thing.
And all of the applications you named can be used without.Mac subscriptions. The iCal program can use any web server (presumably through WebDAV). Apple is provideing better services thorugh.Mac.
Personally I will regret losing my free.mac email address. But since I am not paying for it... I can't complain.
Question: Why should they look at this at all? The only possible binaries they could support would be from PPCLinux (and Yellow Dog). The resources for those two are nice, but are starting to be eclipsed by the Darwin ports lists. And since I don't know of any PPCLinux binary-only software... where would that work get them?
While I don't have much experience using Unicode, perl does support UTF-8 cueently. For more details 'man perlunicode'. The next major version of perl will be built on UTF-16. Everything will be built so that internal representations are in UTF-16 (or at least seem to be... for speed's sake).
Slashdot Mirror
Just a small note: MP3 is not free. It is owned by the Fraunhofer institute in Germany. They license it to a number of companies, in this case Apple. Apple pays a fixed sum per year to them on their customer's behalf.
There are a number of free players and encoders out there that are not liscenced, but these are explicitly infringing on Fraunhofer's patents. They simply have not been taken to court. This is very similar to the whole gif case (the algorithm behind the gif format was patented... recently expired in the US).
Ogg Vorbis is a small player, but it is a truly free one.
And as an owner of a iPod, why would you use mp3 when AAC is so much better.
Actually Adobe tends to try and drive right down the center of the road, ignoring anything on either side. They have ignored a lot of the printing advantages in MacOS X, and put in only stubs of support for AppleScript and VBScript.
The only place where they have focused on one platform or the other have been in filters (arguably where the real heavy lifting is). They have made altivec enablers, and to a lesser extent MMX filters (I am referring to this as a family.. not the specific implementation).
It is true that Altivec has given a bigger boost than the MMX family, but this is simply due to the quality of the Altivec units. Intel actually paid for a 2bit gausian blur filter for MMX for demo purposes. If you stuck with exactly a 2 bit blur (not real common) you got a great result on the Pentium, but off that magic number the PPC (604 at the time) won.
Executive summary: Photoshop with a broad array of filters/actions is about as good a general test as you can devise (for graphics artists).
I actually use AppleScript for a one-off project about every other week. I am maintaining a cluster of FileMaker Pro databases, and there is a lot of data that needs to be massaged. For things that need to touch outside files for their information, and can't be simple imports, I find AppleSctipt very useful.
I have also worked with AppleScript Studio, and it makes creating small programs on MacOS X very simple. You can even use it to glue nice GUI's onto scripts or other small program segments. I wrote a small program in ObjC and used AppleScript to connect it to iTunes. It would have been possible with other methods (AppleEvents), but much more difficult.
It is very appropriate to compare it to VBScript in Windows, but from experience it is much more elegant.
Actually it was a hostile shareholder revolt. In fact the old management has been playing a lot of games (locking the new management out of offices, removing documentation, stealing computers, etc...). There was a nice little article about it written by the new manager (can't find the link now).
So could someone drop the "Insightful" mod off the parent comment, and add an "uninformed" one?
And if you get the right screens (mostly LeCei or Apple), they have beautiful color correction, at a par with the best CRT's.
This is vs. CTR's advantages:
So, I think your "CRT's blow lcd's away" comment is unwarranted.
The latest version of MacOS X is 10.2.6.
Apple has a long history of shipping a new a.b.x release to support new hardware, and then latter shipping another version for all hardware. In almost all cases there were few changes no directly related to supporting the new hardware.
In this case the rumors are that 10.2.7 will add libraries for handling 64 bit processes. The libraries will be in parallel to the 32 bit version, so simply by changing the library you link against will change the application from a 32 bit to a 64 bit application (in many cases... if you did something fancy.. you might have to change you code).
This is how apple apparently plans on allowing the 10.2.x series to use 64bit applications without a major re-write. Eventually MacOS X will be 64bit only... but I expect that to take a few years (thinking 5 or so).
No.. MacOS X runs on all G3's (except the PowerBook G3... not the PowerBook G3 Series, but the original one). The crux of the lawsuit was that certain features like DVD playback and OpenGL hardware acceleration did not work on some models.
This is all about people who artificially inflated their own expectations (consumers, not Apple), and the lawyers who want to profit by them.
The main thrust of the segment is about a woman who was told that her children could not be hers according to a blood typing. What was eventually discovered was that she is a Chimera, with the blood and eggs stemming from two different genetic strains (they would have been fraternal twins).
No, Adobe decided that they could not compete with Final Cut Pro and said so in a press release that had so much spin that people interpreted it to say that they were getting out of the Macintosh space.
.one in which everyone on the mac side was holding out of Photoshop 7.
Why would Adobe even consider getting out of the market that they earn most of their money in? For the first time ever their sales between Win and Mac were even last year... a year in which NO major version of any Mac software came out..
I have not taken many business courses, but abandoning half your revenue does not seem like a course of action they are likely to take.
But then again if you were a University of Wisconsin (at Madison/Madtown) student you would be silly to put up your own access point when most of campus (should be now) set up for wireless connections, and your access point can't provide you with more bandwidth then the housing provider gives (as a former DoIT employee I have my own opinions about them...).
This is known issue that according to one of the Safari developer's weblog has already been correted in internal builds.
Nittany Lion? After a invented mascot animal? Or would that be for the MacOS X version that never gets released?
You have got to be from Pennsylvania....
Actually, in power saver mode the PowerPC family of processors varies its timing to try and save energy. If you do something demanding (say a lot of IO involved in DVD playback) the processor stays in its most 'awake' mode. If you start to use less processor power (have increasingly more no-op cycles) then it starts to slow down timings and turn off function units. Start to need more power and it starts to ramp back up. The biggest problem is that somtimes you need a lot of cycles in a sudden burst after doing nearly nothing for a while, and this takes a bit of time to wake up all the way.
All in all a much better solution than the 'if I am unpluged then drop to half performance' routine uses by the non-mobile version of the P4 that is used in high performance PC laptops.
Well... then you look to the "Software up-to-date" program which has always allowed for this. For (typically) $20 you get CD's with all the newest software on it (that would have come with your computer). That is how I got MacOS X with my Cube...
Now Microsoft on the other hand does not offer this (at leas no through HP, where I got my test machine).
With a very few exceptions, these problems are due to a locked file on a HFS(+) volume. The simplest way of correcting this is to "get info" in the finder and uncheck the locked box. There is also a way of doing this from the command line, but if you really need that you can find that yourself.
In this case it is almost definately a misunderstood feature.
My advice would be to stick with Apple' compatibility software, and forget Microsoft's. MacOS X will deal with SMB better than NT will deal with AppleTalk (not over IP).
1-3 cycles of access time would kill performance. This is one of those huge differences between PPC and x86, an emulator would constantly he hitting this wall... remember things in the registers are a 0 cycle cost.
Neither is technically an emulator, in the same way that WINE is not an emulator.
In Classic, MacOS 9 is running, but taking a number of services from the host MacOS X system through a number of special extensions. All classic apps would need an emulator (if the vendor has not rewritten for Carbon.. there is no chance they would recompile for x86).
In Carbon it is a native application, but much of the code (both in applications, and in the equivalent of shared libraries) is very PPC specific, and would probably need an emulator o be commercially viable.
The whole problem is the notion of "simple and straight-forward". In every case evolved systems seem to find their own solutions that seem to be complicated (from our point of view and rules), but if you look at it from a how-many-things-have-to-evolve point of view, their solutions are far simpler.
PPC hardware maker... umm... IBM? Several of their workstations run on PPC processors. Or what about Cisco, a lot of their routers are PPC hardware. Ohh.. you mean PPC hardware that runs MacOS X...
And then you have to start bringing IBM in as a "monopoly" on AIX computers, Sun in on Sparc computers... etc...
And if you compare Apple's prices to a similar vendor (Dell, HP, Compaq, etc..) on the Wintell side you will find that the prices are pretty close. There is a lot of room for interpretation about what is comparable, but there is no way you could argue "monopolistic prices".
Actually, there is a good chance that many of those OS's would not boot on a brand new machine. Some of them would have problems with that amount of memory, but in most cases they simply wouldn't have the drivers needed to use the motherboard. This is exactly what Apple announced, that they are not going to be making the newer versions of MacOS 9 that would be required to drive newer motherboards.
Actually, they are probably porting the GUI from SWING (where it is now) to Apple's Aqua through the Cocoa-Java version. This is an API that allows you to access basically the same API's as Obj-C Cocoa from Java. App-Kit (on of the API's in question) rocks!
The smart lists in iTunes are completely done on the client side. There is no evidence that this is a data mining scam. Apple is not known for that type of thing.
.Mac subscriptions. The iCal program can use any web server (presumably through WebDAV). Apple is provideing better services thorugh .Mac.
.mac email address. But since I am not paying for it... I can't complain.
And all of the applications you named can be used without
Personally I will regret losing my free
Question: Why should they look at this at all? The only possible binaries they could support would be from PPCLinux (and Yellow Dog). The resources for those two are nice, but are starting to be eclipsed by the Darwin ports lists. And since I don't know of any PPCLinux binary-only software... where would that work get them?
While I don't have much experience using Unicode, perl does support UTF-8 cueently. For more details 'man perlunicode'. The next major version of perl will be built on UTF-16. Everything will be built so that internal representations are in UTF-16 (or at least seem to be... for speed's sake).