thought it was a matter of endianness, and not an issue with the bios/firmware. PPCs are big endian while x86 chips are little endian. Now that Macs are running on little endian chips, nothing special needs to be done with the card other than writing a driver for the OS.
I think the driver is the only thing that cares about that in the first place. I know there were firmware flashes that you could use to make a PC card work in a PPC Mac, and my understanding is they just changed the ROM to deal with the firmware and reset the the clock speed.
One bit of advice: Never buy memory from Apple. They charge ridiculous prices and with newer Macs it tends to be easy to buy the RAM sommewhere else and put it in yourself.
This applies to both newer and older macs, but there are two more things to keep in mind. The pro towers now have Xeons in them, and the memory needed to work with them is considerably more expensive than what is in the average desktop. Also, don't buy really crappy RAM. Cheap, flakey RAM is the single most common problem I've seen with mac hardware. Everyone buys their RAM cheap somewhere and then their machine starts to crash randomly and have other issues. Remove the RAM and it is stable again. Some of the RAM even works fine in PCs, but Macs are a bit more picky. Do not buy the cheapest, generic RAM you can find, but something from a quality manufacturer and save yourself the headaches.
I am confused by this. Is it Nvidia's decision for OSX to support a new card, or Apple's? In the past, Apple's high quality control has in part been a result of targeting only selected hardware.
Umm, actually in the past video cards did not support Macs for two main reasons. First, they often used ADC, which pulled power for the monitor as well as the video feed and which required extra work to support the power requirements. This has not been the case in the last several revisions of all macs. Second, the macs use EFI or OpenFirmware instead of BIOS, meaning the video card needed to support all three types of firmware. Older Nvidia cards did not support OpenFirmware which Apple used on PPC macs. Now that Apple is using EFI, Nvidia has released a couple of cards that use the DVI connector now standard on macs and which has firmware for both BIOS and EFI in the same ROM. It marketed them as video card blah for Mac and PC. Presumably, this card is continuing that beneficial trend.
The more Mac hardware resembles PC hardware, the more manufacturers will be offering Mac-compatible products. Are they automatically welcome to do so, or can Apple say, "sorry, if you put that in your case it's no longer a Mac"?
Apple is pretty open about letting anyone plug anything they want into macs and as far as I know have never locked out anything in OS X, except motherboards. As far as I know, Apple has never refused to bundle the drivers for any devices pre-installed in OS X, but should they not want to do so, the user would simply have to install them from an included CD or download.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple was holding back video card manufacturers, but as far as I know, that has never been the case. ATI and Nvidia have both had Mac offerings for a long time, often with nothing more than a different ROM and clock speed, and at half again the price of the PC version.
It looks like this is another one in Nvidia's line that includes support for Macs as well as Windows machines on the same card. At least OS X is listed in the supported OS's. Hopefully they will continue to bundle firmware for both PCs and Macs on the same card, instead of trying to gouge Mac users. Way to go Nvidia.
I personally don't think pain is going to bring about change.
But you'll never know because you will bend to MS's lock-in strategy.
The actual functionality isn't an issue across browsers, but yeah the apps I make break in FF, Opera and Safari.
Umm, then yeah it's an issue.
That said we can't afford to not cater to IE users. They make up over 95% of clients.
You must have an unusual site then. Most sites and statistical studies show all versions of IE combined at about 80% of Website hits. As for affording to not cater to them, it all depends upon how you market it to customers and the type of site you run. A simple, "This Web page uses advanced Web 1.5 features from the 1998 standards. Your current browser is out of date and may be insecure. Click here to upgrade if you want to view all formatting properly." might be viewed as a feature, rather than a nuisance, especially if a coalition of major sites decided to do it all at once, so they would no longer have to pay double the development costs to reach the whole market.
I haven't yet heard a complaint or seen some feedback come through our form stating "omg I gotta use IE!!!"
Really do you track that? I know I used to complain when any company I did business with tried to make me use IE only, although now there are more options for everything so I normally just assume they are incompetent and probably clueless. Given that, I don't want to trust any data to them, so I just go elsewhere. Try monitoring the number of hits you get using alternative browsers, which then don't hit again with IE from the same IP address. It is not hard with some basic statistical trackers that you can grab for free. You might be surprised how much business you're losing. The other issue is, alternative browsers often represent the more affluent parts of society. Apple laptops accounted for 20% of laptop sales last month and almost all of them will be using Safari. How many of those people are the ones with lots of disposable income? As I said before, it all depends upon what type of sites you make.
Personally, I'm very happy I no longer have to bother working around all of IE's failures. It has cut my workload down to less than half of what it was. I just wish everyone could have the same easy development I do, without having to worry about anything but clearly documented standards.
You're not serious, are you? if you're developing for a large company you almost always have to support IE--like it or not.
The pages are for paying customers, not our public Website. Most of them are accessible from within a Web UI for a product we sold them. The pages are viewed by network security experts at enterprise and major ISPs, not Bob Smith looking to buy something online from his home computer. None of these people really use IE. We had a major bug making one of our UIs unusable in IE and no one noticed for over a year.
CSS looks different on both so I HAVE to develop for IE because that what most users have and know.
In my experience, CSS is broken in IE and works in all other browsers. I actually think if major companies simply agreed to support Web standards and provide a disclaimer and download links, the problem would fix itself very quickly as customers moved to browsers that function properly and MS scrambled to fix IE. The problem is, developers are too scared to lose money from customers who won't upgrade (rightfully so). And since Web developers are divided Microsoft gets away with their castration of the Web and causing huge additional costs for Web developers.
Must be nice to not have to maintain public-facing pages for a large company, or otherwise actually be in the web business.
True. The network security industry usually won't touch IE with a 10 foot pole. We had a really critical IE bug in one of our Web UIs and no one found it for more than a year, until someone used a legacy machine in their testbed as a convenient terminal.
The sad thing is, if all the major companies would pledge to adhere to Web standards and use them along with the aforementioned download link, the problem would probably go away in short order as everyone would switch or MS would be under too much very public pressure and would fix IE.
CSS is a great idea, but doing it in practice blows because the browsers vary so much in their implementation.
I actually find CSS to be very simple in practice, for automated styling and real world use with one caveat: I don't support IE. Seriously. I just follow the spec and it looks great in every browser out there, Firefox, Opera, Safari, whatever. For IE I make sure it sensibly degrades to plain, unformatted hypertext with a note that IE is broken and users should upgrade to any other browser.
To me what RC1 means is that nothing big and fancy is going to get ADDED. What you see if pretty much what you get. If a major flaw is found they might rearrange a piece of functionality, but most things are going to be bug fixes.
To me RC1 means, we're going to ship this as the final version unless we run into critical bugs. This is very similar to your definition, but differs in one way, it is defined by the acronym RC (Release Candidate). Sometimes maybe there will be big changes. That is not the point of the naming though. It indicates where in the release cycle the software is and what it will take to get it out the door. From most reports, Microsoft does not plan to ship this version, if they don't get new bug reports and they knew of critical missing features and bugs before they cut this release. That means it is not an RC and the name is just marketing nonsense.
Why support something that might 90% work when you can just run Windows in Parallels and be done with it?
Parallels uses more memory and CPU to get the same job done because it runs the whole OS, not just the needed parts. Because of this, it usually runs them more slowly and without 3d graphics support. Parallels looks less integrated because you don't just get the application on your screen, you get Windows in a Window and the application in that, using more real estate and possibly providing more confusion. Both Parallels and Crossover cost about the same, but Parallels requires you license a copy of Windows, Crossover does not.
Parallels is the broad but shallow solution. It works for more software, with less hassle, but works more slowly, with more overhead and expense. Crossover works faster, with fewer resources and can support 3D graphics, but won't work for all programs. It is better for targeted use of one or two applications.
Re:Can we still not convince Apple to Users the BE
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Apple Unveils 24" iMac
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Why should Mac users have to settle for middle of the road Video performance, yet again.
Because to most users you just asked, "why should the iMac have gobbledeygook video instead of gurbledorb video." The answer, because the former is cheaper than the latter and most users don't know or care about the video so long as the average game plays on it without problems, which almost every game on the market does. The imac targets average consumers, not professionals or gamers.
Where is the industry leader that the Mac name was built on?
The Mac name was built on solid, easy to use home computers, not gaming rigs. Apple is not and likely will not be targeting hardcore gamers for a long time.
Everyone waited forever for a credible OS like OSX, and now Apple's hardware lineup has gone to middle of the road crap. Why?
Umm, because you're pricing a middle of the road machine. Why not buy a high end system if that is what you want?
Because 90% of iMac buyers (all-in-one consumer grade machine) will never want a second hard drive. Of the remaining 10%, 9% would have no idea how to install a hard drive inside a case, and would prefer to plug in a firewire drive. You're part of the remaining 1%. Seriously, they aim at common market segments. If you're outside the norm, like someone who knows how to make their own hardware expansions, and you don't want to buy the tower that lets you do all those expansions, because there is just one little expansion you want to make, you are part of a tiny minority. The vast majority of users never even change the default OS configurations, let alone add hardware. The iMac targets a portion that market segment as cheaply as possible.
This is a grossly offensive and inappropriate analogy.
It is certainly offensive.
$14.99 is still cheaper than the cost of 2 people to see a movie at the theater (in most areas), and often times less expensive than the retail DVD.
I'm not sure $14.99 plus the cost of a DVD on which to burn it is cheaper than the cost of the DVD in the store, most of the time. But then, The cost of iTunes downloads plus a CD on which to burn them is not cheaper than the record store for me either, but some people still go for it. The main differences I see is the size of the files, the way the media is used, and the benefit of granularity. It takes a lot longer to download a movie and more disk to store it. A lot of people only want to see a movie once or twice, but they want it now, compared to a lot of people who want to have to option to listen to a given song over and over and over again. A lot of people just one some songs from and album and iTunes gives them more granularity of choice. There is no such benefit to buying one DVD, unless they are buying one episode of a TV show (something less desired IMHO).
Simply because you don't like DRM doesn't give you the excuse to compare it to two violent and often times negatively life altering experiences.
No, the basic, unalienable, human right to express themselves guarantees that, just as it guarantees you the right to complain about it. Feel free to lambast the person for making comparisons you find offensive, but claiming they don't have the right to do so, is either a poor, inappropriate choice of words on your part, or a fundamental disagreement about basic human rights between yourself and most human rights organizations and myself.
Does this sound like a bad to anyone else? These guys are all out of their element.
In my opinion a successful game is composed of several parts: gameplay, graphic engine, artwork, story, and execution. These people all have good business skills. Salvatore has just the right level of not too involved story telling that would be ideal for really captivating video games. McFarlen has the artwork part down pat. They're all gamers so they have good background and possibly the ability to judge good gameplay. All that leaves missing is they need to license one of the right gaming engines and hire some good coders to make use of the gaming engine's graphics and gameplay.
Maybe it will work and maybe it won't, but these guys stand as good a chance or better than any upstart I've seen in a while. Best of luck to them.
As opposed to your reading Slashdot on company time?
I'm working as part of my salaried position right now, not billing for hours as a contractor. As a result, I'm paid for getting a job done, not for being here certain hours. My boss, my coworkers, and even the bigshots in corporate understand that it is sometimes better to let employees take breaks, read Slashdot, play a video game, or go get a bagel. It contributes to a happy work environment and means they don't have to compete against other companies solely on the mercenary criteria of money. If my boss reads this, he might reply, but I doubt he'll complain that I'm slacking. Some people here could easily get another 20K a year by moving elsewhere. They don't because they like it here. They like the work, the people, and the culture. I know I could move elsewhere and make a lot more hard cash, but if I'm spending 1/3 of my life somewhere It's going to somewhere I don't dread going every day.
Well, now that I've dragged that on for another 5 minutes, I might as well go back to some of that work:)
You can pretend that this is MS screwing with the English Lexicon or MS is trying to pass a painted pig off as a Horse, but the reality is this is a very common usage of a RC milestone naming.
...for companies run by the marketing department.
Watch the Leopard Beta if you don't believe me, and yes I have tech members participating.
Betas are normally feature complete for some predefined set of features and are often presented to a subset of the public for testing of a subset of the final features. That is fine, since "beta" is a fairly nebulous term, not an acronym for a specific thing. The Leopard beta is the same type of beta we have shipped at most companies I have worked at. I've never worked at a company that gave users something we call an RC, but which we were not actually considering as a candidate for gold master. We often have four or five RCs, as we get critical bug reports, but without those reports, we'd be shipping, and we don't know about those bugs before we cut an RC, or it would be an incremental build between RCs, not an RC.
People also act like this is a marketing ploy or a gimmick, yet MS has been very clear about this in the release notes and in the press.
I've seen dozens of articles and press releases from MS. None of them mention that the RC isn't really a release candidate, but is actually not being considered as a final release. Maybe they mention it in their dev note, but it certainly is a PR move it intentionally misrepresent a build as an RC, when it is not a candidate for release, just as it is PR to call a war a police action.
So if Microsoft is messing with the language, you should have told them this 15 years ago when they started this practice and THEIR definition of what a RC is.
Every time I've heard of MS shipping code they call an RC, but which is not, I complain.
Also while people are smacking on MS for calling this a RC, they should also call up Corel and correct them, as well as Novel, Adobe, and even Apple. As well as MANY Open Source projects that I am personally involved in that go to RC when they are no longer changing internally, but NOT YET RTM quality.
If any of these companies ship code as RC, that is not a release candidate, then I do blame them, but I've never seen it. The quality of the code is not the question. I don't care if you think it is "RTM quality." What I care about is if it is actually a candidate for release. If not, then they are being deceptive, because they are using an acronym that stands for something they are not providing.
The strange thing is I am here trying to help people understand a standard terminology in defense of Vista being dubbed RC1, and yet it is more stable and secure than a lot of RTM OSes (including WinME, Win2K, and even the latest pay for bug fixes version of OSX 10.x).
The strange thing here is you can't seem to get it through your head that RC does not mean some given quality or stability level. It means Release Candidate. All the OS's you list are gold master, not RCs. They presumably were RCs previous to being GMs because they were candidates being considered for release because they were released. It doesn't matter if that release is buggy or won't even run, so long as they are actually planning on shipping that way. RC is a term used to describe where in the process code is, and thus what the final code is likely to look like and how soon it is likely to appear. If you aren't at that stage of the cycle and you call your build an RC anyway in order to trick some into thinking you're closer to being done than you are, then you are being deceptive and misusing the term. There is no ambiguity about it. It's a fricking acronym!
Most Linux apps either have a port to the native UI, or will still run under X Windows as a child of the native UI. There is also a good selection of the commercial, professional applications including most of the very popular games. What is missing is the odd, niche application for Windows. You can run most of these by dual booting, or more conveniently using Crossover or Parallels, which both do a good job of running different apps at reasonable speeds.
I was actually looking at a MacBook, but the 24" monitor with the "tower" built in is really really slick lookin.
The imac and macbook are both "all-in-one" solutions. As such, neither is very upgradeable. Don't plan to change the video card in either, or do much else other than add RAM. Personally, I really like portability, so my solution for years has been a mac laptop, driving the built in display and a second, larger monitor when I am at my desk at work or home. But then I'm the type who does a fair bit of work in coffee shops, or under a tree in a park. Since all mac laptops now support independent displays as well as mirrored displays, this provides me with more screen real estate than a single monitor on the imac, although the total price is probably higher.
I'm also curious as to how well the GPUs perform, as I'm still into gaming and might go back to WoW.
The GPUs are nothing to write home about in either model. They are adequate. You won't have any problem playing WoW or most other mainstream games, but you're not going to be getting any bragging rights for highest FPS with the latest and greatest games. If you're a casual gamer, don't worry. If you're a hardcore gamer dude, buy something else.
I also do a lot of simulation (of multi-agent/robot systems) for my masters thesis, so I need the horsepower. What are the pros and cons, as you see them, of buying this beast, and how does it compare with what I could build myself for the same price if I wanted to?
Depending upon what type of bottlenecks you have for your modeling, a mac may or may not be right for you. The raw horsepower CPU limited, non-multithreaded program will not perform as well in most cases on OS X as it does in Linux. OS X has a number of tradeoffs in this area and they are targeted at the desktop workstation, not number crunching in the background. If you build with the right compiler options, I'm guessing you'll be in the neighborhood of 90% of the performance of the same chip running Linux. If the process is more parallel or easily offloaded to the GPU using the built in dev tools, you'll do better yet. Also, if you can take advantage of the Xgrid technology, offloading batches of work to other machines on the LAN is pretty simple.
As far as price is concerned, macs cost about the same as any other vendor, which is to say not too much more than it costs to build a machine yourself. The disadvantage is they only offer a few models, so you'll almost certainly be buying features you don't want or particularly need. It simply is not as customizable as building yourself from the full set of available hardware.
Personally, that trade off is worth it to me, but it is hard to tell for another person, without really having a good idea what they are doing. Good luck.
Ok, why is this a RC and not a Beta? Well in the MS world since about 1992 that I can personally 'testify' to, a product makes the RC milestone when it is feature complete from a DEVELOPER standpoint.
So RC is no longer an acronym for "release candidate," since by MS's newspeak definition RCs are not candidates under consideration for release? In other news MS has decided HTML no longer stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, but now means "stuff you see in explorer" and MS has declared themselves fully compliant with this new definition and their marketing department is now claiming 100% accurate HTML rendering.
I don't care how long MS has been using marketing terms to try to call a chicken a goose. If it is not a candidate for release, it shouldn't be called an RC.
Others pointed out that they don't choose between the RCs. They're just on the way to the final release. So in reality Alphas, Beta, and RCs are just pre-releases at different states.
In normal software development Alphas are working snapshots of the code. Betas are working snapshots of the code, that are feature complete, for some set of features. RCs are snapshots of the code, being considered for being named the Gold Master and shipped to customers. When you get to the end of your cycle you cut a release and call it an RC. The QA and test customers bang on it and you get bug reports back. If you don't get any serious bug fixes back, or bug fixes you intend to fix, you call that RC the gold master and ship it to people. Otherwise, you make the fixes and cut a more recent RC and see how that one does.
What MS is calling an RC, however, is something many people feel they are not even considering for the gold master, but is something with not only lots of serious bugs, but no optimization, and without some of the features they have promised. As such, it should properly be called a beta, or even an alpha. I, personally, have not spent much time with any of the pre-release versions so I don't know what it should be called. If MS is not even considering it for the gold master, it should not be called an RC.
...so is it really worth an extra $1000 to buy the 24" screen and OSX?
It all depends upon what you do with it. For me the cost savings from using OS X over Windows is significant. The cost of using OS X over Linux is very high, since I don't think I can do my job at all without software not available on Linux. I don't know the cost of a good 24" monitor and I'm indifferent to whether on not it is an all-in-one or not. The labor cost of my assembling it all, figuring two hours for assembly, installation, and drivers/troubleshooting is also pretty damn high, considering how much I make hourly. Combined with the cost of the labor every time I do an upgrade of installing an new OS, and moving all my settings, certs, software, licenses, data, accounts, etc. instead of plugging in a firewire cable and having it all automatically migrated easily combines to pay the cost difference (4-6 hours of work usually).
Everyone has different cost/value propositions though.
A more useful Mac port of WINE would be Cider / Cedega from Transgaming.
Umm, crossover is from Cedega as well. Cider is just thier tool for developers that lets them build a quick and dirty WINE-based port of a Windows app for the mac. Crossover is just running unmodified Windows applications via the same basic method. It is less refined, but does not require developers to put in any work.
That would actually be nice. Couldn't be much worse than the native (x11 only) port.
You might want to look again. There are now two versions that use the native UI and not X11; one from OpenOffice.org and one from NeoOffice. One is still a beta, but I don't recall which.
Needless to say, intel-based Macintosh users may want to snatch this up before it goes the way of Connectix Virtual Game Station. I can't imagine Microsoft letting this get by them without a fight, when there are other options that will require users to actually own a copy of Windows.
This is based on the venerable WINE project and is a clean room reverse engineering of the Windows APIs. It has been around for many years and I doubt it is going to go away anytime soon. The only difference is a mac version is now beta testing.
I don't see the point. The Mac and PC demographics are fundamentally different, as are the applications they need to run. If you need to run Windows apps on a Mac, maybe you shouldn't have bought a Mac to begin with.
Migrations usually require intermediate steps. For example, my company has a significant investment in mac software for my workstation to the tune of several thousand dollars. I need to work with some Windows only software for a new project. If I didn't already have a Windows box as well, it is cheaper to buy me a new laptop that can run the Windows software via Parallels or Crossover than to purchase new, Windows licenses for the software I use. For other people, they may have a thousand dollars invested in old video games and miscellaneous software. Until they run a mac, they don't know which of that software they will still want to use or what the cost of purchasing new versions will be. A few bucks for a virtualization environment is an easy, affordable solution.
I have to run both Windows and Mac only software every day to do my job. Right now that is accomplished with multiple computers. The PO is already in for my new MacBook, which will allow me to run Windows and Mac software as well as some custom Linux and OpenBSD systems. This will make my job more portable and require a lot less network bandwidth between the coffee shop and the office. It is also a lot cheaper than regularly upgrading three or more machines for me.
It is also interesting to note that when we hired a new sysadmin, experience with OS X was a requirement for the position. Our company does software development for really expensive network security solutions on Linux and OpenBSD.
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thought it was a matter of endianness, and not an issue with the bios/firmware. PPCs are big endian while x86 chips are little endian. Now that Macs are running on little endian chips, nothing special needs to be done with the card other than writing a driver for the OS.
I think the driver is the only thing that cares about that in the first place. I know there were firmware flashes that you could use to make a PC card work in a PPC Mac, and my understanding is they just changed the ROM to deal with the firmware and reset the the clock speed.
One bit of advice: Never buy memory from Apple. They charge ridiculous prices and with newer Macs it tends to be easy to buy the RAM sommewhere else and put it in yourself.
This applies to both newer and older macs, but there are two more things to keep in mind. The pro towers now have Xeons in them, and the memory needed to work with them is considerably more expensive than what is in the average desktop. Also, don't buy really crappy RAM. Cheap, flakey RAM is the single most common problem I've seen with mac hardware. Everyone buys their RAM cheap somewhere and then their machine starts to crash randomly and have other issues. Remove the RAM and it is stable again. Some of the RAM even works fine in PCs, but Macs are a bit more picky. Do not buy the cheapest, generic RAM you can find, but something from a quality manufacturer and save yourself the headaches.
I am confused by this. Is it Nvidia's decision for OSX to support a new card, or Apple's? In the past, Apple's high quality control has in part been a result of targeting only selected hardware.
Umm, actually in the past video cards did not support Macs for two main reasons. First, they often used ADC, which pulled power for the monitor as well as the video feed and which required extra work to support the power requirements. This has not been the case in the last several revisions of all macs. Second, the macs use EFI or OpenFirmware instead of BIOS, meaning the video card needed to support all three types of firmware. Older Nvidia cards did not support OpenFirmware which Apple used on PPC macs. Now that Apple is using EFI, Nvidia has released a couple of cards that use the DVI connector now standard on macs and which has firmware for both BIOS and EFI in the same ROM. It marketed them as video card blah for Mac and PC. Presumably, this card is continuing that beneficial trend.
The more Mac hardware resembles PC hardware, the more manufacturers will be offering Mac-compatible products. Are they automatically welcome to do so, or can Apple say, "sorry, if you put that in your case it's no longer a Mac"?
Apple is pretty open about letting anyone plug anything they want into macs and as far as I know have never locked out anything in OS X, except motherboards. As far as I know, Apple has never refused to bundle the drivers for any devices pre-installed in OS X, but should they not want to do so, the user would simply have to install them from an included CD or download.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple was holding back video card manufacturers, but as far as I know, that has never been the case. ATI and Nvidia have both had Mac offerings for a long time, often with nothing more than a different ROM and clock speed, and at half again the price of the PC version.
It looks like this is another one in Nvidia's line that includes support for Macs as well as Windows machines on the same card. At least OS X is listed in the supported OS's. Hopefully they will continue to bundle firmware for both PCs and Macs on the same card, instead of trying to gouge Mac users. Way to go Nvidia.
I personally don't think pain is going to bring about change.
But you'll never know because you will bend to MS's lock-in strategy.
The actual functionality isn't an issue across browsers, but yeah the apps I make break in FF, Opera and Safari.
Umm, then yeah it's an issue.
That said we can't afford to not cater to IE users. They make up over 95% of clients.
You must have an unusual site then. Most sites and statistical studies show all versions of IE combined at about 80% of Website hits. As for affording to not cater to them, it all depends upon how you market it to customers and the type of site you run. A simple, "This Web page uses advanced Web 1.5 features from the 1998 standards. Your current browser is out of date and may be insecure. Click here to upgrade if you want to view all formatting properly." might be viewed as a feature, rather than a nuisance, especially if a coalition of major sites decided to do it all at once, so they would no longer have to pay double the development costs to reach the whole market.
I haven't yet heard a complaint or seen some feedback come through our form stating "omg I gotta use IE!!!"
Really do you track that? I know I used to complain when any company I did business with tried to make me use IE only, although now there are more options for everything so I normally just assume they are incompetent and probably clueless. Given that, I don't want to trust any data to them, so I just go elsewhere. Try monitoring the number of hits you get using alternative browsers, which then don't hit again with IE from the same IP address. It is not hard with some basic statistical trackers that you can grab for free. You might be surprised how much business you're losing. The other issue is, alternative browsers often represent the more affluent parts of society. Apple laptops accounted for 20% of laptop sales last month and almost all of them will be using Safari. How many of those people are the ones with lots of disposable income? As I said before, it all depends upon what type of sites you make.
Personally, I'm very happy I no longer have to bother working around all of IE's failures. It has cut my workload down to less than half of what it was. I just wish everyone could have the same easy development I do, without having to worry about anything but clearly documented standards.
You're not serious, are you? if you're developing for a large company you almost always have to support IE--like it or not.
The pages are for paying customers, not our public Website. Most of them are accessible from within a Web UI for a product we sold them. The pages are viewed by network security experts at enterprise and major ISPs, not Bob Smith looking to buy something online from his home computer. None of these people really use IE. We had a major bug making one of our UIs unusable in IE and no one noticed for over a year.
CSS looks different on both so I HAVE to develop for IE because that what most users have and know.
In my experience, CSS is broken in IE and works in all other browsers. I actually think if major companies simply agreed to support Web standards and provide a disclaimer and download links, the problem would fix itself very quickly as customers moved to browsers that function properly and MS scrambled to fix IE. The problem is, developers are too scared to lose money from customers who won't upgrade (rightfully so). And since Web developers are divided Microsoft gets away with their castration of the Web and causing huge additional costs for Web developers.
Must be nice to not have to maintain public-facing pages for a large company, or otherwise actually be in the web business.
True. The network security industry usually won't touch IE with a 10 foot pole. We had a really critical IE bug in one of our Web UIs and no one found it for more than a year, until someone used a legacy machine in their testbed as a convenient terminal.
The sad thing is, if all the major companies would pledge to adhere to Web standards and use them along with the aforementioned download link, the problem would probably go away in short order as everyone would switch or MS would be under too much very public pressure and would fix IE.
CSS is a great idea, but doing it in practice blows because the browsers vary so much in their implementation.
I actually find CSS to be very simple in practice, for automated styling and real world use with one caveat: I don't support IE. Seriously. I just follow the spec and it looks great in every browser out there, Firefox, Opera, Safari, whatever. For IE I make sure it sensibly degrades to plain, unformatted hypertext with a note that IE is broken and users should upgrade to any other browser.
To me what RC1 means is that nothing big and fancy is going to get ADDED. What you see if pretty much what you get. If a major flaw is found they might rearrange a piece of functionality, but most things are going to be bug fixes.
To me RC1 means, we're going to ship this as the final version unless we run into critical bugs. This is very similar to your definition, but differs in one way, it is defined by the acronym RC (Release Candidate). Sometimes maybe there will be big changes. That is not the point of the naming though. It indicates where in the release cycle the software is and what it will take to get it out the door. From most reports, Microsoft does not plan to ship this version, if they don't get new bug reports and they knew of critical missing features and bugs before they cut this release. That means it is not an RC and the name is just marketing nonsense.
Why support something that might 90% work when you can just run Windows in Parallels and be done with it?
Parallels uses more memory and CPU to get the same job done because it runs the whole OS, not just the needed parts. Because of this, it usually runs them more slowly and without 3d graphics support. Parallels looks less integrated because you don't just get the application on your screen, you get Windows in a Window and the application in that, using more real estate and possibly providing more confusion. Both Parallels and Crossover cost about the same, but Parallels requires you license a copy of Windows, Crossover does not.
Parallels is the broad but shallow solution. It works for more software, with less hassle, but works more slowly, with more overhead and expense. Crossover works faster, with fewer resources and can support 3D graphics, but won't work for all programs. It is better for targeted use of one or two applications.
Why should Mac users have to settle for middle of the road Video performance, yet again.
Because to most users you just asked, "why should the iMac have gobbledeygook video instead of gurbledorb video." The answer, because the former is cheaper than the latter and most users don't know or care about the video so long as the average game plays on it without problems, which almost every game on the market does. The imac targets average consumers, not professionals or gamers.
Where is the industry leader that the Mac name was built on?
The Mac name was built on solid, easy to use home computers, not gaming rigs. Apple is not and likely will not be targeting hardcore gamers for a long time.
Everyone waited forever for a credible OS like OSX, and now Apple's hardware lineup has gone to middle of the road crap. Why?
Umm, because you're pricing a middle of the road machine. Why not buy a high end system if that is what you want?
why not another bay for a second hard drive?
Because 90% of iMac buyers (all-in-one consumer grade machine) will never want a second hard drive. Of the remaining 10%, 9% would have no idea how to install a hard drive inside a case, and would prefer to plug in a firewire drive. You're part of the remaining 1%. Seriously, they aim at common market segments. If you're outside the norm, like someone who knows how to make their own hardware expansions, and you don't want to buy the tower that lets you do all those expansions, because there is just one little expansion you want to make, you are part of a tiny minority. The vast majority of users never even change the default OS configurations, let alone add hardware. The iMac targets a portion that market segment as cheaply as possible.
This is a grossly offensive and inappropriate analogy.
It is certainly offensive.
$14.99 is still cheaper than the cost of 2 people to see a movie at the theater (in most areas), and often times less expensive than the retail DVD.
I'm not sure $14.99 plus the cost of a DVD on which to burn it is cheaper than the cost of the DVD in the store, most of the time. But then, The cost of iTunes downloads plus a CD on which to burn them is not cheaper than the record store for me either, but some people still go for it. The main differences I see is the size of the files, the way the media is used, and the benefit of granularity. It takes a lot longer to download a movie and more disk to store it. A lot of people only want to see a movie once or twice, but they want it now, compared to a lot of people who want to have to option to listen to a given song over and over and over again. A lot of people just one some songs from and album and iTunes gives them more granularity of choice. There is no such benefit to buying one DVD, unless they are buying one episode of a TV show (something less desired IMHO).
Simply because you don't like DRM doesn't give you the excuse to compare it to two violent and often times negatively life altering experiences.
No, the basic, unalienable, human right to express themselves guarantees that, just as it guarantees you the right to complain about it. Feel free to lambast the person for making comparisons you find offensive, but claiming they don't have the right to do so, is either a poor, inappropriate choice of words on your part, or a fundamental disagreement about basic human rights between yourself and most human rights organizations and myself.
Does this sound like a bad to anyone else? These guys are all out of their element.
In my opinion a successful game is composed of several parts: gameplay, graphic engine, artwork, story, and execution. These people all have good business skills. Salvatore has just the right level of not too involved story telling that would be ideal for really captivating video games. McFarlen has the artwork part down pat. They're all gamers so they have good background and possibly the ability to judge good gameplay. All that leaves missing is they need to license one of the right gaming engines and hire some good coders to make use of the gaming engine's graphics and gameplay.
Maybe it will work and maybe it won't, but these guys stand as good a chance or better than any upstart I've seen in a while. Best of luck to them.
As opposed to your reading Slashdot on company time?
I'm working as part of my salaried position right now, not billing for hours as a contractor. As a result, I'm paid for getting a job done, not for being here certain hours. My boss, my coworkers, and even the bigshots in corporate understand that it is sometimes better to let employees take breaks, read Slashdot, play a video game, or go get a bagel. It contributes to a happy work environment and means they don't have to compete against other companies solely on the mercenary criteria of money. If my boss reads this, he might reply, but I doubt he'll complain that I'm slacking. Some people here could easily get another 20K a year by moving elsewhere. They don't because they like it here. They like the work, the people, and the culture. I know I could move elsewhere and make a lot more hard cash, but if I'm spending 1/3 of my life somewhere It's going to somewhere I don't dread going every day.
Well, now that I've dragged that on for another 5 minutes, I might as well go back to some of that work :)
You can pretend that this is MS screwing with the English Lexicon or MS is trying to pass a painted pig off as a Horse, but the reality is this is a very common usage of a RC milestone naming.
...for companies run by the marketing department.
Watch the Leopard Beta if you don't believe me, and yes I have tech members participating.
Betas are normally feature complete for some predefined set of features and are often presented to a subset of the public for testing of a subset of the final features. That is fine, since "beta" is a fairly nebulous term, not an acronym for a specific thing. The Leopard beta is the same type of beta we have shipped at most companies I have worked at. I've never worked at a company that gave users something we call an RC, but which we were not actually considering as a candidate for gold master. We often have four or five RCs, as we get critical bug reports, but without those reports, we'd be shipping, and we don't know about those bugs before we cut an RC, or it would be an incremental build between RCs, not an RC.
People also act like this is a marketing ploy or a gimmick, yet MS has been very clear about this in the release notes and in the press.
I've seen dozens of articles and press releases from MS. None of them mention that the RC isn't really a release candidate, but is actually not being considered as a final release. Maybe they mention it in their dev note, but it certainly is a PR move it intentionally misrepresent a build as an RC, when it is not a candidate for release, just as it is PR to call a war a police action.
So if Microsoft is messing with the language, you should have told them this 15 years ago when they started this practice and THEIR definition of what a RC is.
Every time I've heard of MS shipping code they call an RC, but which is not, I complain.
Also while people are smacking on MS for calling this a RC, they should also call up Corel and correct them, as well as Novel, Adobe, and even Apple. As well as MANY Open Source projects that I am personally involved in that go to RC when they are no longer changing internally, but NOT YET RTM quality.
If any of these companies ship code as RC, that is not a release candidate, then I do blame them, but I've never seen it. The quality of the code is not the question. I don't care if you think it is "RTM quality." What I care about is if it is actually a candidate for release. If not, then they are being deceptive, because they are using an acronym that stands for something they are not providing.
The strange thing is I am here trying to help people understand a standard terminology in defense of Vista being dubbed RC1, and yet it is more stable and secure than a lot of RTM OSes (including WinME, Win2K, and even the latest pay for bug fixes version of OSX 10.x).
The strange thing here is you can't seem to get it through your head that RC does not mean some given quality or stability level. It means Release Candidate. All the OS's you list are gold master, not RCs. They presumably were RCs previous to being GMs because they were candidates being considered for release because they were released. It doesn't matter if that release is buggy or won't even run, so long as they are actually planning on shipping that way. RC is a term used to describe where in the process code is, and thus what the final code is likely to look like and how soon it is likely to appear. If you aren't at that stage of the cycle and you call your build an RC anyway in order to trick some into thinking you're closer to being done than you are, then you are being deceptive and misusing the term. There is no ambiguity about it. It's a fricking acronym!
Care to educate a noob on OS X and linux apps?
Most Linux apps either have a port to the native UI, or will still run under X Windows as a child of the native UI. There is also a good selection of the commercial, professional applications including most of the very popular games. What is missing is the odd, niche application for Windows. You can run most of these by dual booting, or more conveniently using Crossover or Parallels, which both do a good job of running different apps at reasonable speeds.
I was actually looking at a MacBook, but the 24" monitor with the "tower" built in is really really slick lookin.
The imac and macbook are both "all-in-one" solutions. As such, neither is very upgradeable. Don't plan to change the video card in either, or do much else other than add RAM. Personally, I really like portability, so my solution for years has been a mac laptop, driving the built in display and a second, larger monitor when I am at my desk at work or home. But then I'm the type who does a fair bit of work in coffee shops, or under a tree in a park. Since all mac laptops now support independent displays as well as mirrored displays, this provides me with more screen real estate than a single monitor on the imac, although the total price is probably higher.
I'm also curious as to how well the GPUs perform, as I'm still into gaming and might go back to WoW.
The GPUs are nothing to write home about in either model. They are adequate. You won't have any problem playing WoW or most other mainstream games, but you're not going to be getting any bragging rights for highest FPS with the latest and greatest games. If you're a casual gamer, don't worry. If you're a hardcore gamer dude, buy something else.
I also do a lot of simulation (of multi-agent/robot systems) for my masters thesis, so I need the horsepower. What are the pros and cons, as you see them, of buying this beast, and how does it compare with what I could build myself for the same price if I wanted to?
Depending upon what type of bottlenecks you have for your modeling, a mac may or may not be right for you. The raw horsepower CPU limited, non-multithreaded program will not perform as well in most cases on OS X as it does in Linux. OS X has a number of tradeoffs in this area and they are targeted at the desktop workstation, not number crunching in the background. If you build with the right compiler options, I'm guessing you'll be in the neighborhood of 90% of the performance of the same chip running Linux. If the process is more parallel or easily offloaded to the GPU using the built in dev tools, you'll do better yet. Also, if you can take advantage of the Xgrid technology, offloading batches of work to other machines on the LAN is pretty simple.
As far as price is concerned, macs cost about the same as any other vendor, which is to say not too much more than it costs to build a machine yourself. The disadvantage is they only offer a few models, so you'll almost certainly be buying features you don't want or particularly need. It simply is not as customizable as building yourself from the full set of available hardware.
Personally, that trade off is worth it to me, but it is hard to tell for another person, without really having a good idea what they are doing. Good luck.
Thank you for dedicating 20$ to post your comment here!
Please thank my unnamed employer, for a permissive work policy that encourages me to take breaks and visit Slashdot.
Ok, why is this a RC and not a Beta? Well in the MS world since about 1992 that I can personally 'testify' to, a product makes the RC milestone when it is feature complete from a DEVELOPER standpoint.
So RC is no longer an acronym for "release candidate," since by MS's newspeak definition RCs are not candidates under consideration for release? In other news MS has decided HTML no longer stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, but now means "stuff you see in explorer" and MS has declared themselves fully compliant with this new definition and their marketing department is now claiming 100% accurate HTML rendering.
I don't care how long MS has been using marketing terms to try to call a chicken a goose. If it is not a candidate for release, it shouldn't be called an RC.
Others pointed out that they don't choose between the RCs. They're just on the way to the final release. So in reality Alphas, Beta, and RCs are just pre-releases at different states.
In normal software development Alphas are working snapshots of the code. Betas are working snapshots of the code, that are feature complete, for some set of features. RCs are snapshots of the code, being considered for being named the Gold Master and shipped to customers. When you get to the end of your cycle you cut a release and call it an RC. The QA and test customers bang on it and you get bug reports back. If you don't get any serious bug fixes back, or bug fixes you intend to fix, you call that RC the gold master and ship it to people. Otherwise, you make the fixes and cut a more recent RC and see how that one does.
What MS is calling an RC, however, is something many people feel they are not even considering for the gold master, but is something with not only lots of serious bugs, but no optimization, and without some of the features they have promised. As such, it should properly be called a beta, or even an alpha. I, personally, have not spent much time with any of the pre-release versions so I don't know what it should be called. If MS is not even considering it for the gold master, it should not be called an RC.
It all depends upon what you do with it. For me the cost savings from using OS X over Windows is significant. The cost of using OS X over Linux is very high, since I don't think I can do my job at all without software not available on Linux. I don't know the cost of a good 24" monitor and I'm indifferent to whether on not it is an all-in-one or not. The labor cost of my assembling it all, figuring two hours for assembly, installation, and drivers/troubleshooting is also pretty damn high, considering how much I make hourly. Combined with the cost of the labor every time I do an upgrade of installing an new OS, and moving all my settings, certs, software, licenses, data, accounts, etc. instead of plugging in a firewire cable and having it all automatically migrated easily combines to pay the cost difference (4-6 hours of work usually).
Everyone has different cost/value propositions though.
A more useful Mac port of WINE would be Cider / Cedega from Transgaming.
Umm, crossover is from Cedega as well. Cider is just thier tool for developers that lets them build a quick and dirty WINE-based port of a Windows app for the mac. Crossover is just running unmodified Windows applications via the same basic method. It is less refined, but does not require developers to put in any work.
That would actually be nice. Couldn't be much worse than the native (x11 only) port.
You might want to look again. There are now two versions that use the native UI and not X11; one from OpenOffice.org and one from NeoOffice. One is still a beta, but I don't recall which.
Needless to say, intel-based Macintosh users may want to snatch this up before it goes the way of Connectix Virtual Game Station. I can't imagine Microsoft letting this get by them without a fight, when there are other options that will require users to actually own a copy of Windows.
This is based on the venerable WINE project and is a clean room reverse engineering of the Windows APIs. It has been around for many years and I doubt it is going to go away anytime soon. The only difference is a mac version is now beta testing.
I don't see the point. The Mac and PC demographics are fundamentally different, as are the applications they need to run. If you need to run Windows apps on a Mac, maybe you shouldn't have bought a Mac to begin with.
Migrations usually require intermediate steps. For example, my company has a significant investment in mac software for my workstation to the tune of several thousand dollars. I need to work with some Windows only software for a new project. If I didn't already have a Windows box as well, it is cheaper to buy me a new laptop that can run the Windows software via Parallels or Crossover than to purchase new, Windows licenses for the software I use. For other people, they may have a thousand dollars invested in old video games and miscellaneous software. Until they run a mac, they don't know which of that software they will still want to use or what the cost of purchasing new versions will be. A few bucks for a virtualization environment is an easy, affordable solution.
I have to run both Windows and Mac only software every day to do my job. Right now that is accomplished with multiple computers. The PO is already in for my new MacBook, which will allow me to run Windows and Mac software as well as some custom Linux and OpenBSD systems. This will make my job more portable and require a lot less network bandwidth between the coffee shop and the office. It is also a lot cheaper than regularly upgrading three or more machines for me.
It is also interesting to note that when we hired a new sysadmin, experience with OS X was a requirement for the position. Our company does software development for really expensive network security solutions on Linux and OpenBSD.