How about the people who claim it's tedious and sprawling*?
Simple example...
Java: BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.in")); Python: in = open('foo.in') Ruby: in = File.open('foo.in') C++: ifstream in; in.open("foo.in");
To be fair, I'm no Java expert, but in my experience with it, I'd have to be masochistic to look at it all day...
Not that you should ever put too much stock in any vendors quoted ads, and bearing in mind all the inherant problems with benchmarking as a figure of merit:
Apple has some benchmarks up that show a pretty significant relative performance advantage on Apple's side. This particularly on compute-intensive work such as rendering and scientific work. Makes sense considering where the chips comes from(IBM) and where they're being used (Virginia Tech's cluster, for one).
Not that you should use this to make a buying decision or anything, but it's probably better than MHZ at telling you what is what.
Most good games do make it to the Mac, though it usually take a few months for a port. I imagine, as the market share increases, this will be less of a problem. As less serious gamers switch over and pick up a game or two a year from what's available, game developers will shift their emphasis to account for the changing market. The Mac going up from three to six percent in computer marketshare will be a great start.
Some people genuinely believe that the plural of virus is viri. While they're wrong, at least it's a mistake with a decent basis. It turns out that a bunch of words in English are derived from Latin words, and plenty of these words do follow the convention of -us postfix for singular and -i for plural.
Seesh, I myself made that mistake for a while, after years of having these endings tables drilled into my head.
Well, until Tiger, Apple was doing 12 months per release, now it's at about 18 between Panther and Tiger. Assuming the same, April 2005 + 18 months equals... November/December '06
That's "November/December '06" as in equal to or earlier than the scheduled Longhorn realease (mid-page, "The final version of Longhorn is scheduled to be broadly available in December 2006.").
Of course, we'll have to wait till WWDC or later to figure out when 10.5 is actually scheduled for release, so this is all just speculation.
Well I didn't mean to sound somewhat fan-boyish by not qualifying my argument.
Basically, it's my position between XP (late October 2001) and today (2005) the changes that have occured consist of patches and slightly extended hardware support I believe. SP2 brought us the integrated firewall and well... you know security stuff. The point being, these are not new features, because they don't add to the user's experience, even the firewall is, functionally, no different from a virus patch, or an integrated virus scanner, neither of which offer an advantage over OS X.
On the other hand, with OS X, while I've only had experience with 10.3, which came out the end of 2003, even from the 10.0 (released March 24th, 2001) or 10.1 baseline, tremendous amounts of progress have been made, and there are a number of great integrated features and frameworks that, in the view of this long-time PCer (since DOS), put current iteration of Windows to shame.
Cool little things like integrated spell checking in cocoa to inter-app services, a ton of frameworks such as core audio and the upcoming stuff, and more advanced graphical handling, and so on. And while the releases are now coming every 18 months instead of every 12 months, they're quite substantial.
And whats exceptional about this is not just that such progress has been made, but that it has been made in such little time, whith comparitively small resource pool.
Meanwhile, we don't yet know what Longhorn will be when it arrives, but the early previews are not encouraging. In any case, we'll have to make the OS X/Longhorn comparison when we actually have something to compare OS X to. And for now, I'm not taking Mr. Thurrot's word for it, that Longhorn will be spectacular. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait another 18 months or so...
If by "completely up to date," you mean, "horribly outdated," then you would be correct!
Seriously, for an OS to go 5+ years with no major releases, no new features, no new enhancements or capabilities, is a travesty, especially considering all the good Apple has done in the same time with fewer resources. IMO Mac users get way more than they pay for, even considering more frequent OS update costs and hardware costs relative to a barrel-scraper like Dell.
My own Dell laptop, (latitude C640) bought in 2002, is now less useful and less easy to use than an old late 90's original iMac my friend gave me, which, coincidentally, is about to get significantly better when Tiger comes out.
With each OS X update, Apple introduces new APIs and "under the hood" functionality that does very cool things, thus providing a single, optimized solution to serve the functionality needs of all developers, as well as removing time-cost barriers to functionality implementation. And despite Mr. Thurrot's claims, these are no minor updates. Some of them drastically affect what a developer is capable of doing.
Examples of important changes from perious updates include:
If developers didn't use these APIs in their apps, you wouldn't need to upgrade to use their apps, but you'd also lose out on all that cool functionality. A good example of this is the Quicksilver app, which is a really great UI that uses searching and a keyboard interface to let you find, open and do other things with your files and apps. Now with Spotlight, Quicksilve will be able to do the things it does, much quicker and it will be a heck of a lot easy to manage and execute the development.
I personally know people who have software ideas, who are simply waiting to get Tiger to implement them, because it will be SO much easier to actually build their app.
So you can stick with Panther or whatever, you just don't get to use the stuff developers will be using to make the stuff you want. Get it?
Apple patented stacks, years ago, thus creating intellectual property.
Apple purchased intellectual property from Xerox: "However, a significant change occurred in 1979 when Xerox bought a large chunk of Apple stock. In return for being allowed this stock purchase, Xerox allowed some of their research ideas to be used in designing an office computer."
Apple complies with the BSD license agreement, by freely distributing its improvements to the source, and including the license in the source it distributes. I'm no expert, but I imagine they'd face legal action if they were not complying with the license. Thus they use and improve the property therein in good faith, which, I thought was the whole point of open source, right?
The point is, it is only stealing if you take it from someone against their will. Apple, as far as I can tell, does things the proper way, whereas Microsoft often does not.
So is a map better if it has more information about what is where?
Is a nametag or sign better if it is easier to discern its meaning at a distance?
If an icon can help you get your work done faster by saving you from having to hunt for it... then bam! You're instantly more productive, aren't you?
But if you've never really used OS X, you wouldn't know that, now would you.
One caveat: The icon for Adium, a great OS X IM app, is a duck... Now, if nobody tells you the duck is IM, you'd never guess it... which is not a good thing. But most others are good metaphors or something related and 99% have a distinctive look that makes them easy to find. But I guess it's not a uniform advantage.
The insurance companies base their rates off a statistical analysis which, frankly, trumps your anecdote.
Basically, the expected value of any person's insurance claims can be determined based on past results of others in the same group. This applies to people as a whole as well as different age groups and social group (e.g. many insurance companies offer discounts for proof of high grades). Note the grouping can't simply be arbitrary, as they need some characteristic to link you to that group in order for the analysis to have any meaning whatsoever.
The reson the insurance companiess offer lower prices is that people in those groups, tend to rack up fewer claims, based on the histories of other drivers in the same group. In the case of married types, it just happens that people who are married are less likely to file a claim and cost the insurance company money. Whether the driver is safer because of their greater responsibilty, or thery were responsible in the first place and that won them a mate, we can not say.
"People at.1 or.08 are not automatically "drunks" and they are not the people who should be targeted for DWI enforcement. The average DWI violator is arrested with a BAC of.15 to.17 percent. Even in countries with extremely low legal BAC limits (e.g. Sweden at.02), the average DWI arrest involves a BAC of at least.15 percent."
"Myth:
Lowering the BAC to.08 % will reduce alcohol-related accidents.
TRUTH:... because alcohol at low BAC concentrations is typically NOT the CAUSE of the accident, what we have is a commensurate increase in non-alcohol-related accidents. In other words, there are the same number of accidents, with a transfer of the alcohol-related to the non-alcohol related categories."
I just read an *entire* Slashdot thread about Windows OS security and didn't read a single mention of OS X!!!
IMO the Windows OS vs. Linux OS paradigm ("simple" vs. secure) lost all meaning about 2 years ago...
I'm writing this on a PC, but darn, the more I read the words of Gates and Balmer, the more depressing it is to know that I've been paying to make these guys rich for most of my life, and for a crappy product at that. Meanwhile, I see Apple come out with great new stuff, such as the upcoming Tiger.
And unlike Microsoft, Apple is led by a man I have no desire to shoot.
Actually, Mini Macs don't ship with a mouse at all... The mouse of your choice can likely be found for around $20 So you're either quite petty, or out of reasons to complain.
Empirical studies of something as enormously complex as America's economy are difficult if not impossible to pull any useful data from.
There are so many factors and so few observable business cycles that it's just like guessing the Presidential election based on a basketball game. And nobody is stupid enough to do that... oh wait.
Not to discount the necessity of attempting to discern the truth in all cases, I'd just take this claim with a grain of salt.
Just because money is spent does not mean it is good. This is a *classic* economic fallacy.
If a kid breaks a window, money gets spent fixing it, but that doesn't make anyone better off. Yeah, the window-fixer is better off, but if people had been able to keep their money, they would spend it on something they *actually* wanted. For instance, perhaps I invest in my child's education thus supporting the teachers instead and making my family and I better off.
Right now you've got thousands of people working cushy "gov'ment" jobs on your dollar. A bunch of them basically just have to process a bunch of paperwork, or do what others in the private sector could do for less money. This premium for inefficient and unnecessary work done by the gov. is the money that is wasted.
Sure the gov workers spend that money too, but if I had been able to choose how to spend my money, they wouldn't be working there at all, they'd be teaching or cooking or building something. In other words, they'd be doing something useful. As it is they, for the most part, make us all worse off.
The conventional wisdom is that Social Security is good for the poor/unlucky/incompetent. Look closely and I believe you'll find that Social Security is bad for at least one of these groups, poor people. Consider this:
"A February 1996 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that, because of differences in life expectancy, Social Security actually transferred wealth from the poor to the rich. The RAND study also concluded that the current benefit structure disadvantages African-Americans, who have lower life expectancies and marriage rates. According to the study, whites consistently earn higher rates of return than blacks. In fact, on a lifetime basis, the income transfer from blacks to whites is as much as $10,000 per person."
Now imagine what these people could do with an addition 12% or so of their income? Thousands of dollars a year is being taken from them only to be returned, in part, many years later. No one would use the stock market if it were this horrible. SS only survives due to politics and misinformation.
As for the others, most people I know don't want to pay out of their pockets because someone they don't know made a stupid decision. and I simply don't know how to account for bad luck of good people. Charity of friends and family is one idea. This at least is subject to the test of the givers consent, that is, if someone deserves help from bad luck such as cancer, they most likely
Well, the thing I don't like about Microsoft's stuff is it works badly, if at all. Despite Apple's DRM decisions, the iPod-iTunes combo functions better than any other combo out there. So yes, the world would be better, because shit would work right.
So, methinks you can hate MS and still like Apple, in fact, you can even hate (what) Apple (is doing) and still love Apple ('s products). Whodathunk?
As for businesses, they are only as good as the people that make them up. Apple gets all the brilliance of Mr. Jobs, and some of the quirks as well. If it bothers you so much, you can always stick with Gates and Ballmer, I hear they're great guys!
There are plenty of reasonable criteria for screening out the kooks. One is having ballot access in enough states to win the Presidency, so that all those voters who have the ability to vote for you can make informed decisions. How many candidates make that? Just 6, including Bush and Kerry. There were nine in the Democratic Primaries.
Another is commisioning polls to find out if a majority of voters want to hear from each of these candidates. Open Debatescommisioned a poll and found that Nader should be included. Badnarik has commisioned his own polls, using different verbiage, that show he too should be included.
These are reasonable, easily applied criteria that will allow alternative viewpoints be heard without stealing the show.
This country needs real Presidential debates. If we'd had them in the past, we may not have been left with Bush and Kerry as our candidates now...
Before you blame the corporations (oops too late), take a quick look at the article, and you'll see that the only way they are able to prevent change is through "manipulating the political process". Everyone with an Econ 101 class under their belt should know that businesses should do everything in their power to suceed in the market, which should mean work hard, if the government is doing it's job.
But, surprise, surprise, it's not! So before you get pissed off at the corportations and ask the government to assume more power (which will inevitably be used illegitimately by the highest bidder) to kick them down, think a little, and ask the government to do less. Then the people decide which firms survive and which do not with their dollar votes. It's 1000000 times better than democracy!
Slashdot Mirror
How about the people who claim it's tedious and sprawling*?
Simple example...
Java: BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.in"));
Python: in = open('foo.in')
Ruby: in = File.open('foo.in')
C++: ifstream in; in.open("foo.in");
To be fair, I'm no Java expert, but in my experience with it, I'd have to be masochistic to look at it all day...
Not that you should ever put too much stock in any vendors quoted ads, and bearing in mind all the inherant problems with benchmarking as a figure of merit:
Apple has some benchmarks up that show a pretty significant relative performance advantage on Apple's side. This particularly on compute-intensive work such as rendering and scientific work. Makes sense considering where the chips comes from(IBM) and where they're being used (Virginia Tech's cluster, for one).
Not that you should use this to make a buying decision or anything, but it's probably better than MHZ at telling you what is what.
Well... I guess you have 2 less reasons for sticking with Windows...
Most good games do make it to the Mac, though it usually take a few months for a port. I imagine, as the market share increases, this will be less of a problem. As less serious gamers switch over and pick up a game or two a year from what's available, game developers will shift their emphasis to account for the changing market. The Mac going up from three to six percent in computer marketshare will be a great start.
Hey, while you're right, there's no need to be an ass about it.
Some people genuinely believe that the plural of virus is viri. While they're wrong, at least it's a mistake with a decent basis. It turns out that a bunch of words in English are derived from Latin words, and plenty of these words do follow the convention of -us postfix for singular and -i for plural.
Seesh, I myself made that mistake for a while, after years of having these endings tables drilled into my head.
Well, until Tiger, Apple was doing 12 months per release, now it's at about 18 between Panther and Tiger. Assuming the same, April 2005 + 18 months equals... November/December '06
That's "November/December '06" as in equal to or earlier than the scheduled Longhorn realease (mid-page, "The final version of Longhorn is scheduled to be broadly available in December 2006.").
Of course, we'll have to wait till WWDC or later to figure out when 10.5 is actually scheduled for release, so this is all just speculation.
Well I didn't mean to sound somewhat fan-boyish by not qualifying my argument.
Basically, it's my position between XP (late October 2001) and today (2005) the changes that have occured consist of patches and slightly extended hardware support I believe. SP2 brought us the integrated firewall and well... you know security stuff. The point being, these are not new features, because they don't add to the user's experience, even the firewall is, functionally, no different from a virus patch, or an integrated virus scanner, neither of which offer an advantage over OS X.
On the other hand, with OS X, while I've only had experience with 10.3, which came out the end of 2003, even from the 10.0 (released March 24th, 2001) or 10.1 baseline, tremendous amounts of progress have been made, and there are a number of great integrated features and frameworks that, in the view of this long-time PCer (since DOS), put current iteration of Windows to shame.
Cool little things like integrated spell checking in cocoa to inter-app services, a ton of frameworks such as core audio and the upcoming stuff, and more advanced graphical handling, and so on. And while the releases are now coming every 18 months instead of every 12 months, they're quite substantial.
And whats exceptional about this is not just that such progress has been made, but that it has been made in such little time, whith comparitively small resource pool.
Meanwhile, we don't yet know what Longhorn will be when it arrives, but the early previews are not encouraging. In any case, we'll have to make the OS X/Longhorn comparison when we actually have something to compare OS X to. And for now, I'm not taking Mr. Thurrot's word for it, that Longhorn will be spectacular. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait another 18 months or so...
If by "completely up to date," you mean, "horribly outdated," then you would be correct!
Seriously, for an OS to go 5+ years with no major releases, no new features, no new enhancements or capabilities, is a travesty, especially considering all the good Apple has done in the same time with fewer resources. IMO Mac users get way more than they pay for, even considering more frequent OS update costs and hardware costs relative to a barrel-scraper like Dell.
My own Dell laptop, (latitude C640) bought in 2002, is now less useful and less easy to use than an old late 90's original iMac my friend gave me, which, coincidentally, is about to get significantly better when Tiger comes out.
With each OS X update, Apple introduces new APIs and "under the hood" functionality that does very cool things, thus providing a single, optimized solution to serve the functionality needs of all developers, as well as removing time-cost barriers to functionality implementation. And despite Mr. Thurrot's claims, these are no minor updates. Some of them drastically affect what a developer is capable of doing.
Examples of important changes from perious updates include:- webkit to integrate web interfaces
- cocoa bindings to ease UI development
In Tiger we have:If developers didn't use these APIs in their apps, you wouldn't need to upgrade to use their apps, but you'd also lose out on all that cool functionality. A good example of this is the Quicksilver app, which is a really great UI that uses searching and a keyboard interface to let you find, open and do other things with your files and apps. Now with Spotlight, Quicksilve will be able to do the things it does, much quicker and it will be a heck of a lot easy to manage and execute the development.
I personally know people who have software ideas, who are simply waiting to get Tiger to implement them, because it will be SO much easier to actually build their app.
So you can stick with Panther or whatever, you just don't get to use the stuff developers will be using to make the stuff you want. Get it?
The point is, it is only stealing if you take it from someone against their will. Apple, as far as I can tell, does things the proper way, whereas Microsoft often does not.
So is a map better if it has more information about what is where?
Is a nametag or sign better if it is easier to discern its meaning at a distance?
If an icon can help you get your work done faster by saving you from having to hunt for it... then bam! You're instantly more productive, aren't you?
But if you've never really used OS X, you wouldn't know that, now would you.
One caveat: The icon for Adium, a great OS X IM app, is a duck... Now, if nobody tells you the duck is IM, you'd never guess it... which is not a good thing. But most others are good metaphors or something related and 99% have a distinctive look that makes them easy to find. But I guess it's not a uniform advantage.
The insurance companies base their rates off a statistical analysis which, frankly, trumps your anecdote.
Basically, the expected value of any person's insurance claims can be determined based on past results of others in the same group. This applies to people as a whole as well as different age groups and social group (e.g. many insurance companies offer discounts for proof of high grades). Note the grouping can't simply be arbitrary, as they need some characteristic to link you to that group in order for the analysis to have any meaning whatsoever.
The reson the insurance companiess offer lower prices is that people in those groups, tend to rack up fewer claims, based on the histories of other drivers in the same group. In the case of married types, it just happens that people who are married are less likely to file a claim and cost the insurance company money. Whether the driver is safer because of their greater responsibilty, or thery were responsible in the first place and that won them a mate, we can not say.
So is it that cell phones are too dangerous, or that .08 is too low a blood alcohol level to justify criminal charges?
From the National Motorist Association:
I just read an *entire* Slashdot thread about Windows OS security and didn't read a single mention of OS X!!!
IMO the Windows OS vs. Linux OS paradigm ("simple" vs. secure) lost all meaning about 2 years ago...
I'm writing this on a PC, but darn, the more I read the words of Gates and Balmer, the more depressing it is to know that I've been paying to make these guys rich for most of my life, and for a crappy product at that. Meanwhile, I see Apple come out with great new stuff, such as the upcoming Tiger.
And unlike Microsoft, Apple is led by a man I have no desire to shoot.
My next comp will most definately be a Mac.
Actually, Mini Macs don't ship with a mouse at all...
The mouse of your choice can likely be found for around $20
So you're either quite petty, or out of reasons to complain.
Same content, improved presentation.
Empirical studies of something as enormously complex as America's economy are difficult if not impossible to pull any useful data from.
There are so many factors and so few observable business cycles that it's just like guessing the Presidential election based on a basketball game. And nobody is stupid enough to do that... oh wait.
Not to discount the necessity of attempting to discern the truth in all cases, I'd just take this claim with a grain of salt.
Just because money is spent does not mean it is good. This is a *classic* economic fallacy.
If a kid breaks a window, money gets spent fixing it, but that doesn't make anyone better off. Yeah, the window-fixer is better off, but if people had been able to keep their money, they would spend it on something they *actually* wanted. For instance, perhaps I invest in my child's education thus supporting the teachers instead and making my family and I better off.
Right now you've got thousands of people working cushy "gov'ment" jobs on your dollar. A bunch of them basically just have to process a bunch of paperwork, or do what others in the private sector could do for less money. This premium for inefficient and unnecessary work done by the gov. is the money that is wasted.
Sure the gov workers spend that money too, but if I had been able to choose how to spend my money, they wouldn't be working there at all, they'd be teaching or cooking or building something. In other words, they'd be doing something useful. As it is they, for the most part, make us all worse off.
The conventional wisdom is that Social Security is good for the poor/unlucky/incompetent.
Look closely and I believe you'll find that Social Security is bad for at least one of these groups, poor people.
Consider this:
"A February 1996 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that, because of differences in life expectancy, Social Security actually transferred wealth from the poor to the rich. The RAND study also concluded that the current benefit structure disadvantages African-Americans, who have lower life expectancies and marriage rates. According to the study, whites consistently earn higher rates of return than blacks. In fact, on a lifetime basis, the income transfer from blacks to whites is as much as $10,000 per person."
Now imagine what these people could do with an addition 12% or so of their income? Thousands of dollars a year is being taken from them only to be returned, in part, many years later. No one would use the stock market if it were this horrible. SS only survives due to politics and misinformation.
As for the others, most people I know don't want to pay out of their pockets because someone they don't know made a stupid decision. and I simply don't know how to account for bad luck of good people. Charity of friends and family is one idea. This at least is subject to the test of the givers consent, that is, if someone deserves help from bad luck such as cancer, they most likely
Well, the thing I don't like about Microsoft's stuff is it works badly, if at all. Despite Apple's DRM decisions, the iPod-iTunes combo functions better than any other combo out there. So yes, the world would be better, because shit would work right.
So, methinks you can hate MS and still like Apple, in fact, you can even hate (what) Apple (is doing) and still love Apple ('s products). Whodathunk?
As for businesses, they are only as good as the people that make them up. Apple gets all the brilliance of Mr. Jobs, and some of the quirks as well. If it bothers you so much, you can always stick with Gates and Ballmer, I hear they're great guys!
He died of an infection from a bed-sore he got because he was laid-up all of the time.
If he had better care, and then had been cured, he would not have had the bed-sore problem.
"Sanity is not statistical" -George Orwell, "1984"
Oh Please.
There are plenty of reasonable criteria for screening out the kooks. One is having ballot access in enough states to win the Presidency, so that all those voters who have the ability to vote for you can make informed decisions. How many candidates make that? Just 6, including Bush and Kerry. There were nine in the Democratic Primaries.
Another is commisioning polls to find out if a majority of voters want to hear from each of these candidates. Open Debates commisioned a poll and found that Nader should be included. Badnarik has commisioned his own polls, using different verbiage, that show he too should be included.
These are reasonable, easily applied criteria that will allow alternative viewpoints be heard without stealing the show.
This country needs real Presidential debates. If we'd had them in the past, we may not have been left with Bush and Kerry as our candidates now...
Before you blame the corporations (oops too late), take a quick look at the article, and you'll see that the only way they are able to prevent change is through "manipulating the political process". Everyone with an Econ 101 class under their belt should know that businesses should do everything in their power to suceed in the market, which should mean work hard, if the government is doing it's job. But, surprise, surprise, it's not! So before you get pissed off at the corportations and ask the government to assume more power (which will inevitably be used illegitimately by the highest bidder) to kick them down, think a little, and ask the government to do less. Then the people decide which firms survive and which do not with their dollar votes. It's 1000000 times better than democracy!