Free offline maps for the iPhone are basically a crap shoot, since it relies on availability of free mapping data out there. For instance, when I was looking for a map of Amsterdam a few months ago, the only freeware one was very course and covered just a small part of the city.
In this department they have nothing on Nokia, who offer free offline maps for all their Symbian (and many S40) phones, which works in conjunction with GPS if you have one in your phone. It's very complete and detailed (because they bought NAVTEQ a few years back). And it's all centralized under Ovi Maps, so it's much easier to find than individual map apps for each city (the same kind of advantage that's often touted for a centralized app store).
And many people that don't care about "using their old programs or data" because they never owned a computer before.
They will care about being able to use existing Chinese apps and games, which are pretty much all Windows-only. I don't know if you've actually been in China, but Windows is even more entrenched there than it is in the West.
For them Linux is perfect (they won't have to pirate MS Office.)
For them Windows is much better, because all the Chinese software that everybody around them is already using will work, and they don't give a hoot about piracy. In fact, lots of them don't even have a concept of "software piracy". Software is just something you copy from someone else, or buy from the street vendor for a dollar.
According to this Linux filesystem developer, wear leveling as implemented in consumer level flash memory is often pretty lousy:
http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html
I think Americans - and many urban Chinese, too - tend to see the factory workers as passive victims, motivated by poverty and desperation. Spending time with these young women taught me the opposite: They are resourceful and ambitious, full of plans to improve their lot and change their fates, willing to challenge their bosses and quit their jobs for better ones, and willing to take night classes to improve themselves. When you ask these migrant workers why they came to the city, they will tell you that their families are poor, but they also talk about the opportunity and adventure of urban life. They may have very little power in our eyes, but in their own they are the leading actors in their own dramas and not victims of circumstance.
A stock install pre-SP2 XP is easy to own in a few minutes without user interaction, because there are vulnerabilities in some of the services that listen on the network. That it is not news, that's ancient history. Whether it's owned on average in 4 minutes or 16 is pretty much irrelevant.
Stock SP2 has a built in firewall. If that's exploitable without user intervention (installing apps also counts, as they might disable it, or at least open more ports in it), that would be big news. But I can't really find the configuration details of the "unpatched Windows PC" in the articles.
The dimensions of this module are 18x12x1.8mm, which is more than three times the volume of microSD (15x11x0.7mm, which includes a plastic housing). Now some of the other features are nice (IDE controller, high speeds), but the size isn't anything amazing.
"[The perfect amount of money to leave children is] enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing."
Like Bill Gates needs to take business lessons from Businessweek:
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
I don't know why this meme of "Safari, the iPhone SDK" has suddenly become so popular, but Jobs himself has said in his keynote that they really want Safari to get a much bigger market share. Interestingly, on his slides his projected market share gain came mainly at the expense of Firefox and others, rather than IE.
Don't use FLAK or some other monkey sound formats. Go with a real standard, like Windows Lossless, or Apple Lossless, they just sound sooo much better. But you do need high end Bose equipment and gold plated Monster cables to really bring out the warmer and fuller mid-range and the increased bass response.
This $89 (or $52 intro price) TrueDisc sounds rather similar to the open source dvdisaster. It builds Reed-Solomon error correction data from CD or DVD iso images, which can be either augmented to the image and burned on the same disc, or stored separately. It's somewhat similar to par2/quickpar, but dvdisaster is more specialized for CDs and DVDs.
Probably the most important utility on his site is the MakeMeAdmin script. It's can raise your priviledges for one session (say of CMD.EXE), somewhat like SU. It differs from RunAs in that you retain the non-admin user profile, so file ownership, permissions, home directories etc are set to more useful values than with RunAs.
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense for Apple to buy SUN. Their products nicely complement each other. Apple is strong in the consumer market and in the creative sector, SUN has good presence in the enterprise, tech and finance sectors. Apple has great brand value and knows marketing like no other computer vendor, SUN has technical excellence, but it's been struggling in the last years to actually sell their stuff. Their products portfolios have little overlap, and together they offer a very complete spectrum of computer products.
Mac OS X is a great consumer OS, but performance at the high end is sub-par. For servers, Solaris is fast and scalable, has nifty features like ZFS and DTrace, but the UI is pretty crude. Imagine a merger of these. Looking at their marketcaps, Apple can afford it.
In the *STEP days, Windows NT ran on MIPS, Alpha, PPC, x86, and early versions even SPARC. This was drastically reduced with the NT -> 2K transition, but then again, so was *STEP -> OS X. Nowadays, NT runs on x86-32, x86-64 and Itanium, while *STEP runs on x86-32 and PPC, so it's pretty much a wash.
Again, not a single argument why replacing BIOS with EFI is a good thing.
Did you even read your own links? There is nothing on the UEFI site that even resembles a practical benefit of replacing the BIOS with EFI on a desktop PC. Well, maybe if you count "the BIOS was never fully modernized" as an argument. Oh, and it's not x86 specific, so I guess it addresss the needs of the vast and growing non-x86 PC market...
I have read the Wikipedia entry, and the main argument appears te be the OS independent driver utopia, which 1) isn't that great an idea to begin with, and 2) is probably not going to happen anyway (want to bet it won't get any easier on the driver front for Linux and the BSDs on the EFI Macs than on the BIOS PCs?)
Sorry, but EFI is just Intel and OEM grab for more control of the hardware, with no tangible benefits to 99% of todays computer users. The BIOS should just locate the OS boot sector and get out of the way of the real OS, for which at least we still have different choices today.
USB is meant for keyboards and mice. USB2 is meant for larger data transfers that are not sustained. Firewire is meant for sustained bulk data transfers.
Yes, and e-SATA is much better than either. Yet people are using USB2 in droves, and not FW or e-SATA, because it works fine for them and about every computer they encounter understands it.
USB2 is a crap way to boot your OS. Firewire will show much better performance. All Macs shipped in the last five or six years can boot from an external Firewire disk. Why should anyone want to boot from USB2?
Because there are far more people with USB2 than FW HDs. Because USB2 enclosures are cheaper and work well enough for the majority. Because if you carry around a USB2 HD it's far more likely that it will work in any random computer you encounter than a FW enclosure.
Who ever uses the Forth interpreter in Open Transport? Exactly the people it's meant for - device driver writers and system engineers. Do you think it's there for you?
What specific advantage has this bought to the Mac? All the PPC Mac operating systems still have to provide their own drivers (Airport Extreme anyone?). Can you come up with some real world examples of the usefulness of the OF console on a Mac? The niftiest thing I've seen, FW target mode, still isn't nearly as flexible as booting a target PC (or even Mac) with a Linux live CD.
And yes, I certainly believe some anonymous guy on the Internet when he spins out stories of old PCs running pirated OS X booted off USB devices. Maybe it was booting off a USB 1.0 pen drive, you know, a 32MB one. And maybe the PC ran it faster than any Mac. Maybe he found that at his freelance gig the Mac took 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file.
No, a 4 year old PC certainly won't run OSX it faster than any Mac. But anyone with a DTK knows that a 3Ghz P4 will run it about as well as a G5, which is faster than the majority of the Macs in use. No, it won't fit on a USB stick, the install requires a 6Gb partition. You don't have to believe any AC. You could just Google for a torrent of 8f1099, burn it on a DVD and install it on just about any P4 PC on an Intel board based on a 845 or newer chipset. Of course, that would be illegal so you won't do that, but pretending that the whole forum on osx86project.org is one big hoax is silly.
Lastly, if all the BIOS had to do was point the OS to the hard drive's boot sector, no PC on Earth would boot. It contains a lot of garbage that was useful 10-20 years ago but is irrelevant now. Why go EFI? Why go 64-bit? Why get more RAM? Why get a bigger hard drive? Why move forward in technology in any way at all?
Why go 64-bit? To directly adress more than 4Gb virtual memory. To work with large datasets. To get rid of the limiting kernel/user space split.
Why get more RAM? Bigger hard drive? Because people keep writing applications that require more memory. Because people are working with larger video and image files.
Why go EFI? Yes, why?
I'm so glad that people like you don't make decisions. You'll be relegated to the sort of jobs where you don't get that choice, hopefully. When you actually look at issues, and understand the pros and cons, your opinion may carry some weight. Right now it's just hot air and fluff.
Talk about hot air, what are the pros (and cons if you will) of going with EFI? In your whole rant you haven't mentioned a single advantage of EFI.
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You can find lots of U.S. survey data on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, by occupation here: http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b15-0000 and by region here: http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm
I can't find starting salaries though.
Free offline maps for the iPhone are basically a crap shoot, since it relies on availability of free mapping data out there. For instance, when I was looking for a map of Amsterdam a few months ago, the only freeware one was very course and covered just a small part of the city.
In this department they have nothing on Nokia, who offer free offline maps for all their Symbian (and many S40) phones, which works in conjunction with GPS if you have one in your phone. It's very complete and detailed (because they bought NAVTEQ a few years back). And it's all centralized under Ovi Maps, so it's much easier to find than individual map apps for each city (the same kind of advantage that's often touted for a centralized app store).
They will care about being able to use existing Chinese apps and games, which are pretty much all Windows-only. I don't know if you've actually been in China, but Windows is even more entrenched there than it is in the West.
For them Windows is much better, because all the Chinese software that everybody around them is already using will work, and they don't give a hoot about piracy. In fact, lots of them don't even have a concept of "software piracy". Software is just something you copy from someone else, or buy from the street vendor for a dollar.
These things have been hyped on trade shows for over a year now.
Call me when they actually have something a consumer can buy in a store.
According to this Linux filesystem developer, wear leveling as implemented in consumer level flash memory is often pretty lousy: http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html
A stock install pre-SP2 XP is easy to own in a few minutes without user interaction, because there are vulnerabilities in some of the services that listen on the network. That it is not news, that's ancient history. Whether it's owned on average in 4 minutes or 16 is pretty much irrelevant.
Stock SP2 has a built in firewall. If that's exploitable without user intervention (installing apps also counts, as they might disable it, or at least open more ports in it), that would be big news. But I can't really find the configuration details of the "unpatched Windows PC" in the articles.
The dimensions of this module are 18x12x1.8mm, which is more than three times the volume of microSD (15x11x0.7mm, which includes a plastic housing). Now some of the other features are nice (IDE controller, high speeds), but the size isn't anything amazing.
Quoth the Oracle of Omaha:
"[The perfect amount of money to leave children is] enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing."
Like Bill Gates needs to take business lessons from Businessweek:
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
CNET News.com, July 2, 1998
I don't know why this meme of "Safari, the iPhone SDK" has suddenly become so popular, but Jobs himself has said in his keynote that they really want Safari to get a much bigger market share. Interestingly, on his slides his projected market share gain came mainly at the expense of Firefox and others, rather than IE.
So your point are:
- China is growing in power and influence in many subtle and not so subtle ways
- China is COMMUNIST, and may be DANGEROUS
Did I miss anything? And did you really need so many words for that?
Don't use FLAK or some other monkey sound formats. Go with a real standard, like Windows Lossless, or
Apple Lossless, they just sound sooo much better. But you do need high end Bose equipment and gold
plated Monster cables to really bring out the warmer and fuller mid-range and the increased bass response.
This $89 (or $52 intro price) TrueDisc sounds rather similar to the open source dvdisaster. It builds Reed-Solomon error correction data from CD or DVD iso images, which can be either augmented to the image and burned on the same disc, or stored separately. It's somewhat similar to par2/quickpar, but dvdisaster is more specialized for CDs and DVDs.
Seeing how MacOS and MacIntel were split up, the numbers probably came from Net Applications.
No kidding: ThinkPad anno 1992.
ThinkPad anno 1997.
ThinkPad anno 2002.
ThinkPad anno 2006.
Begun these Price Wars have.
One of the first sentences of TFA states that the 5000+ is clocked at 2.6Ghz.
Probably the most important utility on his site is the MakeMeAdmin script. It's can raise your priviledges for one session (say of CMD.EXE), somewhat like SU. It differs from RunAs in that you retain the non-admin user profile, so file ownership, permissions, home directories etc are set to more useful values than with RunAs.
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense for Apple to buy SUN. Their products nicely complement each other. Apple is strong in the consumer market and in the creative sector, SUN has good presence in the enterprise, tech and finance sectors. Apple has great brand value and knows marketing like no other computer vendor, SUN has technical excellence, but it's been struggling in the last years to actually sell their stuff. Their products portfolios have little overlap, and together they offer a very complete spectrum of computer products.
Mac OS X is a great consumer OS, but performance at the high end is sub-par. For servers, Solaris is fast and scalable, has nifty features like ZFS and DTrace, but the UI is pretty crude. Imagine a merger of these. Looking at their market caps, Apple can afford it.
More reviews here and here.
> you have to register to download it
Direct links (copied from Digg):
32-bit
64-bit.
In the *STEP days, Windows NT ran on MIPS, Alpha, PPC, x86, and early versions even SPARC. This was drastically reduced with the NT -> 2K transition, but then again, so was *STEP -> OS X. Nowadays, NT runs on x86-32, x86-64 and Itanium, while *STEP runs on x86-32 and PPC, so it's pretty much a wash.
Again, not a single argument why replacing BIOS with EFI is a good thing.
Did you even read your own links? There is nothing on the UEFI site that even resembles a practical benefit of replacing the BIOS with EFI on a desktop PC. Well, maybe if you count "the BIOS was never fully modernized" as an argument. Oh, and it's not x86 specific, so I guess it addresss the needs of the vast and growing non-x86 PC market...
I have read the Wikipedia entry, and the main argument appears te be the OS independent driver utopia, which 1) isn't that great an idea to begin with, and 2) is probably not going to happen anyway (want to bet it won't get any easier on the driver front for Linux and the BSDs on the EFI Macs than on the BIOS PCs?)
Sorry, but EFI is just Intel and OEM grab for more control of the hardware, with no tangible benefits to 99% of todays computer users. The BIOS should just locate the OS boot sector and get out of the way of the real OS, for which at least we still have different choices today.
USB is meant for keyboards and mice. USB2 is meant for larger data transfers that are not sustained. Firewire is meant for sustained bulk data transfers.
Yes, and e-SATA is much better than either. Yet people are using USB2 in droves, and not FW or e-SATA, because it works fine for them and about every computer they encounter understands it. USB2 is a crap way to boot your OS. Firewire will show much better performance. All Macs shipped in the last five or six years can boot from an external Firewire disk. Why should anyone want to boot from USB2?
Because there are far more people with USB2 than FW HDs. Because USB2 enclosures are cheaper and work well enough for the majority. Because if you carry around a USB2 HD it's far more likely that it will work in any random computer you encounter than a FW enclosure.
Who ever uses the Forth interpreter in Open Transport? Exactly the people it's meant for - device driver writers and system engineers. Do you think it's there for you?
What specific advantage has this bought to the Mac? All the PPC Mac operating systems still have to provide their own drivers (Airport Extreme anyone?). Can you come up with some real world examples of the usefulness of the OF console on a Mac? The niftiest thing I've seen, FW target mode, still isn't nearly as flexible as booting a target PC (or even Mac) with a Linux live CD.
And yes, I certainly believe some anonymous guy on the Internet when he spins out stories of old PCs running pirated OS X booted off USB devices. Maybe it was booting off a USB 1.0 pen drive, you know, a 32MB one. And maybe the PC ran it faster than any Mac. Maybe he found that at his freelance gig the Mac took 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file.
No, a 4 year old PC certainly won't run OSX it faster than any Mac. But anyone with a DTK knows that a 3Ghz P4 will run it about as well as a G5, which is faster than the majority of the Macs in use. No, it won't fit on a USB stick, the install requires a 6Gb partition. You don't have to believe any AC. You could just Google for a torrent of 8f1099, burn it on a DVD and install it on just about any P4 PC on an Intel board based on a 845 or newer chipset. Of course, that would be illegal so you won't do that, but pretending that the whole forum on osx86project.org is one big hoax is silly.
Lastly, if all the BIOS had to do was point the OS to the hard drive's boot sector, no PC on Earth would boot. It contains a lot of garbage that was useful 10-20 years ago but is irrelevant now. Why go EFI? Why go 64-bit? Why get more RAM? Why get a bigger hard drive? Why move forward in technology in any way at all?
Why go 64-bit? To directly adress more than 4Gb virtual memory. To work with large datasets. To get rid of the limiting kernel/user space split.
Why get more RAM? Bigger hard drive? Because people keep writing applications that require more memory. Because people are working with larger video and image files.
Why go EFI? Yes, why?
I'm so glad that people like you don't make decisions. You'll be relegated to the sort of jobs where you don't get that choice, hopefully. When you actually look at issues, and understand the pros and cons, your opinion may carry some weight. Right now it's just hot air and fluff.
Talk about hot air, what are the pros (and cons if you will) of going with EFI? In your whole rant you haven't mentioned a single advantage of EFI.