I think that because how a mac user runs windows games is a very important indicator of how many mac users will have that ability and hence will be able to run their particular game. If they don't consider it, then they are idiots.
If Apple includes a emulator for free, they will be able to assume all mac users can run Windows games. (not going to happen)
If you can buy an emulator for $200 and Windows for another $100 (or pirate it for free) and you need to be technically savvy to install and use it games makers can assume basically no mac users will be able to run their games and have to consider making a port or including a custom WINE for OSX+game package.
If mac users can buy a computer with windows on another partition and dual boot again game makers might assume users will be willing to do that, most likely though you will only be able to install windows after the fact and probably with a BIOS hack, so again very very few people will be able to do that.
I'm sure there will be some morons out there that don't consider how they expect mac users to play their games, but there are idiots everywhere. Most game makers will certainly take into account what percentage of mac users can play a game and at what cost and use that to decide if they want to make a port.
Sorry, but this is just as stupid. Once again, what is OS X, if not Carbon and (especially) Cocoa? Lots of developers code for X, not because it runs on PowerPC, but because, well, it's cool. Powerful apps are quite easy when you're provided a good set of frameworks.
When big name companies get involved, it is the pointy-haired-bosses that make the calls, not the developers. Notice how many products Adobe has killed for the mac. Notice the number of major industry applications that don't have a mac version?
The switch to x86 will both help and hurt the situation. Emulators will become easier and run better and faster. But at the same time, the prevalence of those emulators will lead a lot of development houses to look to cut out the native mac version entirely or look to a WINE solution to save money. Either way results in applications that run like third class citizens and don't play well with system services, scripting, proper permissions, proper resource handling, printing, PDF generation, etc. etc.
There are plenty of major development houses that don't use X-code and will be happy to abandon the mac APIs altogether if it means they can hire cheaper and more common Windows programmers. That is very bad for the end user. This is a real and valid concern to many of us. I don't care if I have to run Quake 4 in an emulator. I sure as hell care if I have to run Photoshop in one.
Hopefully this will be copied (a la the yellow information strip) into Firefox pretty soon.
This functionality really belongs in the OS, not in individual applications. At best it should be an interaction of the two. OS X does this the right way by providing a "scale to page" and several other scaling options for all printing and allowing individual programs to add their own extra panel of printing info. Safari, for example, has options for including or excluding background images and header/footers for any pages it prints. Camino offers background color specifications and options for frames. Scaling should be available for all applications though, and it is not really necessary or desirable to include in each application.
I might run a Windows version or two under vmware hosted on OS X or Linux. I could use it for testing, a nice honeypot, running Windows-only applications like games I just can't live without etc. Who in their right mind would run a stable, secure OS in a virtual machine of Windows though? I mean it would allow worms, trojans, viruses, and other malware to hose your network and you machine's performance, not to mention corrupt your data. No way! Windows runs in a locked down jail with limited privileges (like it does now with my VirtualPC software) or it can stay on it's own crappy box, far from my valuable data and machine I actually need to get work done.
No. I said that if Apple computers can run Windows, it's more reasonable for a game developer to presume you will dual boot if you want to play their games than to spend the development time porting it. Take a look at the GNU/Linux situation with games.
How much does a copy of Windows cost, retail? You seem to be making the assumption that all macs will have windows, but unlike pretty much all Linux boxes, Apple will not be paying MS a fee for every box and will not be including Windows. Any game developer who assumes that mac users can "just boot into Windows" is assuming that either all mac users will go out, buy Windows, and install it alongside or replacing OS X (which ain't gonna happen) or they are assuming everyone will pirate Windows and do the same (which is only a little less likely). There are plenty of game makers that develop for the mac because they make money doing so. Those that make stupid assumptions, like you are claiming they will, will lose a good chunk of that money. Those that continue to make mac native versions will make that money. It does not take a genius to figure out that most people are not going to install Windows on their macs (Aside from some geeks).
That said, a WINE solution is a possibility. I could see a lot of game makers contributing to and writing for WINE implementation to try to sell to the mac market with less dev time/cost.
Vector processing is not propaganda. There is a lot that can be said about the relative merits of the two systems (Altivec and SSE). I do know, however, that Altivec looked a lot easier to implement to me and I know porting code is not going to be easy. Take a look at the porting docs Apple has online. Here is a good, basic sample:
Altivec:
vec_add( A, B )
MMX:
_mm_add_epi8(A, B ) _mm_add_epi16( A, B _mm_add_epi32( A, B) _mm_add_ps( A, B )
Worse yet almost half of the Altivec functions don't seem to map to any MMX instruction. Whether or not their is a big performance difference between the two systems it is clear that porting Altivec heavy applications to MMX is going to be a pain.
Apple should have went with Gecko instead of KHTML, their choice seems bizarre (I mean Gecko is well established).
I for one am very glad they did not. Using KHTML as a base provides another major web engine and helps prevent a monoculture. I'd much rather have web designers write a page to standards+workarounds for IE, rather than Gecko+IE. It helps prevent Firefox from diverging from the published standards (which it does). In any case the stated reason for using KHTML was cleaner, smaller, better written code base than Gecko.
I actually use Omniweb most of the time, which uses Apple's WebCore, but also provides a great many security and other features above and beyond either Firefox or Safari. The nice thing about Apple using KHTML as a base is that it provides choice. Obviously, Firefox will always be there, so if you like the way Gecko works (slowly) great you can use it. If you prefer Safari or something else, you have that choice too. Choice is good.
Apple wants to make some use of OSS code in their software, but they don't want to contribute back, which is not cool.
I think you're way off base. What makes you think they don't want to contribute back? Did you read the article about KDE passing the ACID compliance test? That was due to an Apple engineer patching WebCore so Safari would pass then specifically writing a bunch of comments and micro patches for the KDE guys. For which, I might add, he was thouroughly ridiculed here on Slashdot for not providing a CVS repository (Apple does not use CVS) which one of the KDE guys had asked for a few days previously.
Now Apple is providing a CVS repository at extra work and expense to themselves and you have the gall to say that they don't want to contribute back? Are you actively trying to make the OpenSource movement look like a bunch of pricks or is it unintentional? How about when a commercial company bends over backwards, spends money and time to do exactly what is asked of them even when they have no legal obligation, and basically do everything they can to be the good guy, use and support open code and standards and give back very useful improvements you don't attribute it to them being forced to by all the bad press you've previously generated about them in a forum that they don't care about anyway?
Apple is being nice because the engineers working there are good guys and want to be nice and help out. They aren't doing it to avoid bad press. Give credit where it is due already.
Because there is no "-1 factually incorrect" moderation. The previous poster apparently had no idea what they were talking about. The KDE team made no agreement with Apple, Apple just took the code and used it in compliance with its license. Then they released the changes when they released WebCore, much to the surprise and delight of the KDE team. They have been giving back all the changes, but since the Konqueror project decided a lot of them were not the way the wanted the project to go and since both groups are using different versioning systems the KDE folks were having some difficulty extracting the changes they wanted from all the Webcore code.
After some time of this one of the KDE guys got sick of everyone telling him how easy his job was now that Apple was doing all his work for him and wrote a very reasonable and clear statement about how Apple's changes were really hard to incorporate and why and how they wished Apple would give the team access to a CVS repository. This got posted to Slashdot and horribly misinterpreted by the vast majority of the readers into some sort of "Apple is stealing open source code" thread.
Immediately thereafter one of the Safari guys fixed Safari so it would pass the acid compliance test and made sure to put in special notes just for the KDE guys. Again, Slashdot picked this up and there was a huge rehashing of the previous argument, despite Apple trying hard to be nice. Now Apple has gone to great lengths and released exactly what the KDE team asked for despite the fact that it is extra work and expense (which they might have done earlier had they actually been asked).
The previous poster of course only read a few idiot's comments on Slashdot, never read any of the articles and thus was spreading his ignorance on Slashdot even more by restating factually incorrect third-hand interpretations of opinionated and poorly informed comments from Slashdot. Hence the modding down (or so I guess since I did not mod him).
The EOD version is, indeed, easily available, but I've also seen blades that I was told can be bought in a kit that include lock picks with a detachable wrench as well as a kit that has a law enforcement belt cutter, and window breaker. I looked in a few of the usual retailers for these items as well as a google search, but nothing turned up. It is possible they are no longer available, or are only available from a brick and mortar specialty shop. If you ever find them, let me know and I'll get my friend who sells law enforcement gear online to pick up a few and put them online. I suspect there is a demand.
I agree that Apple has been trying to market macs as faster and more powerful than PCs for some time, but in truth I don't know anyone who has switched to using a mac because they wanted it to be faster in the sense that they wanted more CPU power. Everyone I know switched for security reasons, because it was "cool," because it was easier to use, because it actually worked well, because the multithreading actually works, because it has really useful and innovative OS features, etc. Really most of the people that want CPU power and damn everything else are either running a farm of x86 boxes running linux or are dumb enough that they just buy whatever has the highest GHz rating listed on the box. People who are interested in getting work done usually look at a lot more than the CPU, they look at workflows and UI and ease of use.
I'm not at all worried about the speed or marketing angle of this switch. I'm very worried about the horrible mess of applications that won't work on one platform or the other and the emulation solutions that need to be nearly perfect in order to pull this off. I have some real doubts about that.
The SOG multitool is designed with this in mind, but I'm not sure how easy it is to get all the different parts. All of the blades are swappable with a regular hex wrench, and there are specialty kits available, notably lockpicks, explosive ordinance tools, and emergency rescue kits. I know a few military people who have them, but a quick google search did not find anyplace to buy them online.
If I were a cop or DA I'd be screaming at the salesmen who sold me these machines that will not hold up in court.
Sadly this issue is mostly a failure of understanding. Most people don't understand computers or code or how code runs on a computer or how easy it is for code to be wrong either intentionally or on accident. Few people understand that code can produce inconsistent results or edge case errors. Because of this, most people don't see the importance of open code for voting machines, breathalyzers, government services, etc. The example cited in this article is a very minor one, but important and correct in principal.
If you disagree with me, listen to the following real world example. A friend of mine is working for a company that does creates DNA analysis equipment for hospitals, tracing lineage, research, and law enforcement. He writes software that takes the raw data, and among other things compares two samples to see if they are the same. He was horrified to see the algorithms prescribed for use that include completely statistically insignificant data and which throw out data that is too different from the norm as compared to a wholly arbitrary metric. Think, "well only 2% of the population has that genetic variation it is probably a bad reading we'll just pretend it is whatever the most common sequence is."
The next time you hear about a murder case being solved by a DNA match, think about this. Now think if the police decided you were a DNA match. Do you think your lawyer and an expert you hire should have access to the source code of the computer that matched your DNA to the crime scene evidence?
The odds are pretty good that you'll need to do some CLI sorcery to get an X-Server to run under OSX.
Actually, you don't. Just click install xfree86 when you run your os install and there it is. You're right about OS X in some ways it is slower than OS 8 or OS ((although with 10.4, it is also faster in quite a few ways too). Even running on an old dual 533 g4, I don't have any responsiveness problems with OS X, and the machine has been plugging away as a multipurpose server and pvr for many a year.
Other things being equal, the DIY-heavy PC gaming industry can't hope to compete in that kind of market.
I don't think you can really say all other things are equal. I mostly prefer gaming on a PC to a console because I prefer games that are complex and require a significant set of controls. I don't see consoles shipping with keyboards by default anytime soon so console games will still be written with the assumption that a player does not have access to them. This really limits any gameplay that requires player interaction via typing. Also, many PC games allow some serious customization via editing tools etc., which frankly would really suck to try to use without a keyboard and mouse and without access to other software (graphic and sound editors especially).
Console gaming often seems like a "dumbed down" version of PC gaming with fewer options and fewer controls. Additionally, with console prices going up, more and more people who already own a computer are happier to shell out $50 for a game they can play on their existing machine rather than $350 for a console and another $50 for the game. I know I am.
Since console makers really do subsidize consoles to some degree what I'd really like to see is a good, official, console emulator for Mac, PC, and Linux for each of the main consoles. They could even make money on it while expanding their market to include PC owners who don't want to buy another box. They won't do it, of course, because they are all playing to "win" and don't want you to be able to play their competitor's offerings, so they try to lock you into either their games or their competitor's. Maybe if Nintendo really starts to fall behind they will wise up.
Name two. Not CSS or XHTML, because IE does support these.
Yeah, IE supports them, if you mean partially implements five year old versions of them. How about SVG, PNG alpha channel, PDFs, RDF, InkML, RSS, MathML, etc., etc. How about just fully supporting CSS 1 and 2? If you'd ever actually tried to write a valid CSS or XHTML document you'd know half of it is not supported by IE at all. I maintain a series of web documents aimed at people who run security operations at tier-1 ISPs that are auto-generated from an expensive publishing application. You can read them with IE, but about half of the markup will not appear because they don't support necessary components of the XHTML spec (unlike Firefox, Opera, Safari, and every other current browser I have tested). I'd never implement a public web site that used these features because it would need to work with IE, hence IE is holding back adoption of XHTML. Is that plain enough for you?
Your argument seems to make the case that if MS doesn't innovate, no one else will.
Of course other people will innovate and make better browsers, but better browsers don't make the Web more innovative, they just let you view it in more innovative ways. IE has held back the adoption of pretty much every new and useful Web technology because it does not implement them and it ships by default on every machine. If MS offered IE as a separate download, that would be fine, because then a user would have to choose from among a number of browsers and they could choose the one that supported newer technologies. Instead MS integrated it and took over HTML and control of Web technologies using their existing monopoly on desktop OS's. Opera, Firefox, etc. are great, but no one develops web pages that use modern CSS, XHTML, etc. because 90% of people can't view them. Look at all the best web pages out there and you'll notice pretty much every one adheres to standards written at least 5 years ago and they also work around IE's failure to properly implement those standards. The technology behind the web has advanced to some degree, but none of it is actually implemented online except as demos because of MS's monopoly.
Why don't *they* (MPAA ETC) use BT to their advantage and get on the bandwagon.
Their day of controlling content is over, no matter how harsh they make the laws.
Because they don't actually make the movies, they just market and distribute them. Bitttorrent is a functional, if imperfect, replacement for half of what they do and a threat to their dominance of the other half. All they do is control content, without that and their marketing ability movie producers would just cut them out entirely.
I say this having just gone through my semi-annual search of third-party conversion software in the neverending quest to figure out a way to get from Word documents to rationally structured XML.
Have you tried Webworks Publisher? I've had reasonable success outputting XML from Framemaker with it and I know they have a version for Word as well. It is closed/proprietary/expensive but if you are serious about converting Word docs it is worth a try. When I used it, it was somewhat buggy, but by far the best solution I could find. Luckily we were not using Word with it, Word having been banned within the company due to numerous file corruption and compatibility problems.
With the new DRM lockdown mechanisms maybe they want to break their customers of thinking of the machine as their own:) I imagine "My Computer (except for the parts the MPAA and RIAA own) was too long to fit in the explorer window easily.
Yeah, but that is exactly a choice that distros make. RH distributes their own proprietary s/w with Linux. They don't dissapear in a puff of logic. I realise that because of the beleifs of the Debian distro, they can't distribute a JVM but again, it ain't Sun stopping them, it's their own choice to adhere to a certain set of restrictions in their distro. What's more, Sun doesn't stop them crafting their very own JVM an releasing that with their distro, again, it's not Sun's fault that they don't.
I agree with you for the most part, but you are anthropomorphizing distros to some degree. They are just collections of software written by different people with disparate goals and beliefs. Some of the organizations built around them include proprietary software and some don't. All of them are understandable hesitant about basing a lot of hard work on something that they have no control over and could just go away, hence the normal attitude towards Java.
There are a number of free Java distributions, but I don't think any of them are really finished enough to work on a daily basis with the average Java application. I really wish someone would write a really good JVM with easy and granular control of the sandbox. I'd love to be able to run applications that can only access the files it creates or that I specifically allow for example. There are a lot of problems Java could help to solve, but Java also introduces some problems of it's own. I have yet to see a cross-platform Java application that integrates completely with the host OS. I avoid them for the most part because they don't usually work as well. Almost all of them use nonstandard interface elements, and I don't know of any that integrate with system services (on OS X). Many don't respect standard keyboard shortcuts. To me, as they currently stand, Java applications are inferior and I prefer to use native applications. They have potential, but I don't really expect them to ever be my first choice and I'd only choose to develop a cross-platform Java app if I really needed it to be cross-platform. For an application that I plan to use for myself I want it to work properly with my main OS, as do most open source developers, which is probably why Java development has not really taken off as much as it could.
I'm not trying to say that better tools for making web sites or even better web sites have not been appearing, but they are all forced to rely upon old, old technology to be compatible with IE, all because of the MS monopoly. If you load Google maps and take a look at the code you will notice it is clever use of javascript and XHTML. The code even links to the XHMTL specification they use, which was written in 1999 and finally approved in January of 2000. You might notice that is a little over 5 years ago. What a coincidence. They also link to the Microsoft specific schemas they use to work around all of the IE specific failures to meet the spec.
Maybe Gmail and Google maps are innovative and useful, but they are still using five year old technology. Imagine how much better it could be if browser and web site development was not restricted by IE's stagnant tech. We'd have vector graphics on most every page, with zooming, customizable CSS schemas, RSS feeds, etc. etc. Who knows what else would have been developed.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I think that they have been unfairly treated in these "anti-trust" cases in Europe and the US. Though I prefer Netscape/Mozilla to IE, I thought the arguments about a browser monopoly were quite foolish.
Have you noticed that the state-of-the-art as far as web pages and web applications are concerned has basically not changed for the last 5 years? Have you ever wondered why all of a sudden the advancement of this field ground to a complete halt? Oh yes, wasn't it just about the time that MS dominated the web browser market by using their OS monopoly to fund development, made IE impossible to uninstall, and incorporated code in the OS to specifically break competitors software. Oh and there was that little something about shipping a default browser to 95% of the planet while intentionally breaking the published standard that they had agreed to adhere to and even helped write.
Since that time the whole field has basically ground to a halt. Developers waste billions of dollars a year coding to standards and then working around all of IE's failures to conform and bugs that they intentionally use to be incompatible. Every web developer I know has cursed Microsoft for their evil behavior and for ruining an entire field all in order to milk a little more money out of everyone.
Antitrust laws exist for several reasons. Mostly it is because a capitalist model fails to work as soon as someone becomes a monopoly. When they do, they can get money without giving customers what they want, have motivation to not only not innovate, but to hold back innovation, and basically just suck money, while doing nothing. The EU is not run by idiots and they are doing the right thing here. The U.S. should have done it long ago but MS was contributing an insane amount of money to both the Democratic and Republican parties. Guess where that money comes from, ultimately from you any time you buy any computer with or without Windows.
You can get 100 Gb or a 60Gb 7200 for the mac mini. You do only have one RAM slot, but that only limits you to 1 Gb, which is more than you'll likely need on a budget machine with limited CPU etc. I don't see the issue, if you buy a extremely small form factor machine, you are obviously not buying it with the intention of adding extra drives and cards. If you want a lot of space, buy a tower already. Just don't bitch and moan about how it is not "upgradable" when in fact it can be upgraded with of the shelf components. If your problem is that it doesn't have a pile of slots and space in the case, well duh, I should think the fact that it is smaller than most laptops should have clued you in to that.
Heh, really? You're determining probability based on known factors.
No, I'm not. Probability is a simple ratio, it's not based upon two numbers which can be determined through observation. Please, please, please go take a remedial math course and maybe one on logic and the scientific method.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
I think that because how a mac user runs windows games is a very important indicator of how many mac users will have that ability and hence will be able to run their particular game. If they don't consider it, then they are idiots.
If Apple includes a emulator for free, they will be able to assume all mac users can run Windows games. (not going to happen)
If you can buy an emulator for $200 and Windows for another $100 (or pirate it for free) and you need to be technically savvy to install and use it games makers can assume basically no mac users will be able to run their games and have to consider making a port or including a custom WINE for OSX+game package.
If mac users can buy a computer with windows on another partition and dual boot again game makers might assume users will be willing to do that, most likely though you will only be able to install windows after the fact and probably with a BIOS hack, so again very very few people will be able to do that.
I'm sure there will be some morons out there that don't consider how they expect mac users to play their games, but there are idiots everywhere. Most game makers will certainly take into account what percentage of mac users can play a game and at what cost and use that to decide if they want to make a port.
Sorry, but this is just as stupid. Once again, what is OS X, if not Carbon and (especially) Cocoa? Lots of developers code for X, not because it runs on PowerPC, but because, well, it's cool. Powerful apps are quite easy when you're provided a good set of frameworks.
When big name companies get involved, it is the pointy-haired-bosses that make the calls, not the developers. Notice how many products Adobe has killed for the mac. Notice the number of major industry applications that don't have a mac version?
The switch to x86 will both help and hurt the situation. Emulators will become easier and run better and faster. But at the same time, the prevalence of those emulators will lead a lot of development houses to look to cut out the native mac version entirely or look to a WINE solution to save money. Either way results in applications that run like third class citizens and don't play well with system services, scripting, proper permissions, proper resource handling, printing, PDF generation, etc. etc.
There are plenty of major development houses that don't use X-code and will be happy to abandon the mac APIs altogether if it means they can hire cheaper and more common Windows programmers. That is very bad for the end user. This is a real and valid concern to many of us. I don't care if I have to run Quake 4 in an emulator. I sure as hell care if I have to run Photoshop in one.
Hopefully this will be copied (a la the yellow information strip) into Firefox pretty soon.
This functionality really belongs in the OS, not in individual applications. At best it should be an interaction of the two. OS X does this the right way by providing a "scale to page" and several other scaling options for all printing and allowing individual programs to add their own extra panel of printing info. Safari, for example, has options for including or excluding background images and header/footers for any pages it prints. Camino offers background color specifications and options for frames. Scaling should be available for all applications though, and it is not really necessary or desirable to include in each application.
I might run a Windows version or two under vmware hosted on OS X or Linux. I could use it for testing, a nice honeypot, running Windows-only applications like games I just can't live without etc. Who in their right mind would run a stable, secure OS in a virtual machine of Windows though? I mean it would allow worms, trojans, viruses, and other malware to hose your network and you machine's performance, not to mention corrupt your data. No way! Windows runs in a locked down jail with limited privileges (like it does now with my VirtualPC software) or it can stay on it's own crappy box, far from my valuable data and machine I actually need to get work done.
No. I said that if Apple computers can run Windows, it's more reasonable for a game developer to presume you will dual boot if you want to play their games than to spend the development time porting it. Take a look at the GNU/Linux situation with games.
How much does a copy of Windows cost, retail? You seem to be making the assumption that all macs will have windows, but unlike pretty much all Linux boxes, Apple will not be paying MS a fee for every box and will not be including Windows. Any game developer who assumes that mac users can "just boot into Windows" is assuming that either all mac users will go out, buy Windows, and install it alongside or replacing OS X (which ain't gonna happen) or they are assuming everyone will pirate Windows and do the same (which is only a little less likely). There are plenty of game makers that develop for the mac because they make money doing so. Those that make stupid assumptions, like you are claiming they will, will lose a good chunk of that money. Those that continue to make mac native versions will make that money. It does not take a genius to figure out that most people are not going to install Windows on their macs (Aside from some geeks).
That said, a WINE solution is a possibility. I could see a lot of game makers contributing to and writing for WINE implementation to try to sell to the mac market with less dev time/cost.
Vector processing is not propaganda. There is a lot that can be said about the relative merits of the two systems (Altivec and SSE). I do know, however, that Altivec looked a lot easier to implement to me and I know porting code is not going to be easy. Take a look at the porting docs Apple has online. Here is a good, basic sample:
Altivec:
vec_add( A, B )
MMX:
_mm_add_epi8(A, B ) _mm_add_epi16( A, B _mm_add_epi32( A, B) _mm_add_ps( A, B )
Worse yet almost half of the Altivec functions don't seem to map to any MMX instruction. Whether or not their is a big performance difference between the two systems it is clear that porting Altivec heavy applications to MMX is going to be a pain.
Apple should have went with Gecko instead of KHTML, their choice seems bizarre (I mean Gecko is well established).
I for one am very glad they did not. Using KHTML as a base provides another major web engine and helps prevent a monoculture. I'd much rather have web designers write a page to standards+workarounds for IE, rather than Gecko+IE. It helps prevent Firefox from diverging from the published standards (which it does). In any case the stated reason for using KHTML was cleaner, smaller, better written code base than Gecko.
I actually use Omniweb most of the time, which uses Apple's WebCore, but also provides a great many security and other features above and beyond either Firefox or Safari. The nice thing about Apple using KHTML as a base is that it provides choice. Obviously, Firefox will always be there, so if you like the way Gecko works (slowly) great you can use it. If you prefer Safari or something else, you have that choice too. Choice is good.
Apple wants to make some use of OSS code in their software, but they don't want to contribute back, which is not cool.
I think you're way off base. What makes you think they don't want to contribute back? Did you read the article about KDE passing the ACID compliance test? That was due to an Apple engineer patching WebCore so Safari would pass then specifically writing a bunch of comments and micro patches for the KDE guys. For which, I might add, he was thouroughly ridiculed here on Slashdot for not providing a CVS repository (Apple does not use CVS) which one of the KDE guys had asked for a few days previously.
Now Apple is providing a CVS repository at extra work and expense to themselves and you have the gall to say that they don't want to contribute back? Are you actively trying to make the OpenSource movement look like a bunch of pricks or is it unintentional? How about when a commercial company bends over backwards, spends money and time to do exactly what is asked of them even when they have no legal obligation, and basically do everything they can to be the good guy, use and support open code and standards and give back very useful improvements you don't attribute it to them being forced to by all the bad press you've previously generated about them in a forum that they don't care about anyway?
Apple is being nice because the engineers working there are good guys and want to be nice and help out. They aren't doing it to avoid bad press. Give credit where it is due already.
Because there is no "-1 factually incorrect" moderation. The previous poster apparently had no idea what they were talking about. The KDE team made no agreement with Apple, Apple just took the code and used it in compliance with its license. Then they released the changes when they released WebCore, much to the surprise and delight of the KDE team. They have been giving back all the changes, but since the Konqueror project decided a lot of them were not the way the wanted the project to go and since both groups are using different versioning systems the KDE folks were having some difficulty extracting the changes they wanted from all the Webcore code.
After some time of this one of the KDE guys got sick of everyone telling him how easy his job was now that Apple was doing all his work for him and wrote a very reasonable and clear statement about how Apple's changes were really hard to incorporate and why and how they wished Apple would give the team access to a CVS repository. This got posted to Slashdot and horribly misinterpreted by the vast majority of the readers into some sort of "Apple is stealing open source code" thread.
Immediately thereafter one of the Safari guys fixed Safari so it would pass the acid compliance test and made sure to put in special notes just for the KDE guys. Again, Slashdot picked this up and there was a huge rehashing of the previous argument, despite Apple trying hard to be nice. Now Apple has gone to great lengths and released exactly what the KDE team asked for despite the fact that it is extra work and expense (which they might have done earlier had they actually been asked).
The previous poster of course only read a few idiot's comments on Slashdot, never read any of the articles and thus was spreading his ignorance on Slashdot even more by restating factually incorrect third-hand interpretations of opinionated and poorly informed comments from Slashdot. Hence the modding down (or so I guess since I did not mod him).
The EOD version is, indeed, easily available, but I've also seen blades that I was told can be bought in a kit that include lock picks with a detachable wrench as well as a kit that has a law enforcement belt cutter, and window breaker. I looked in a few of the usual retailers for these items as well as a google search, but nothing turned up. It is possible they are no longer available, or are only available from a brick and mortar specialty shop. If you ever find them, let me know and I'll get my friend who sells law enforcement gear online to pick up a few and put them online. I suspect there is a demand.
I agree that Apple has been trying to market macs as faster and more powerful than PCs for some time, but in truth I don't know anyone who has switched to using a mac because they wanted it to be faster in the sense that they wanted more CPU power. Everyone I know switched for security reasons, because it was "cool," because it was easier to use, because it actually worked well, because the multithreading actually works, because it has really useful and innovative OS features, etc. Really most of the people that want CPU power and damn everything else are either running a farm of x86 boxes running linux or are dumb enough that they just buy whatever has the highest GHz rating listed on the box. People who are interested in getting work done usually look at a lot more than the CPU, they look at workflows and UI and ease of use.
I'm not at all worried about the speed or marketing angle of this switch. I'm very worried about the horrible mess of applications that won't work on one platform or the other and the emulation solutions that need to be nearly perfect in order to pull this off. I have some real doubts about that.
The SOG multitool is designed with this in mind, but I'm not sure how easy it is to get all the different parts. All of the blades are swappable with a regular hex wrench, and there are specialty kits available, notably lockpicks, explosive ordinance tools, and emergency rescue kits. I know a few military people who have them, but a quick google search did not find anyplace to buy them online.
If I were a cop or DA I'd be screaming at the salesmen who sold me these machines that will not hold up in court.
Sadly this issue is mostly a failure of understanding. Most people don't understand computers or code or how code runs on a computer or how easy it is for code to be wrong either intentionally or on accident. Few people understand that code can produce inconsistent results or edge case errors. Because of this, most people don't see the importance of open code for voting machines, breathalyzers, government services, etc. The example cited in this article is a very minor one, but important and correct in principal.
If you disagree with me, listen to the following real world example. A friend of mine is working for a company that does creates DNA analysis equipment for hospitals, tracing lineage, research, and law enforcement. He writes software that takes the raw data, and among other things compares two samples to see if they are the same. He was horrified to see the algorithms prescribed for use that include completely statistically insignificant data and which throw out data that is too different from the norm as compared to a wholly arbitrary metric. Think, "well only 2% of the population has that genetic variation it is probably a bad reading we'll just pretend it is whatever the most common sequence is."
The next time you hear about a murder case being solved by a DNA match, think about this. Now think if the police decided you were a DNA match. Do you think your lawyer and an expert you hire should have access to the source code of the computer that matched your DNA to the crime scene evidence?
The odds are pretty good that you'll need to do some CLI sorcery to get an X-Server to run under OSX.
Actually, you don't. Just click install xfree86 when you run your os install and there it is. You're right about OS X in some ways it is slower than OS 8 or OS ((although with 10.4, it is also faster in quite a few ways too). Even running on an old dual 533 g4, I don't have any responsiveness problems with OS X, and the machine has been plugging away as a multipurpose server and pvr for many a year.
Other things being equal, the DIY-heavy PC gaming industry can't hope to compete in that kind of market.
I don't think you can really say all other things are equal. I mostly prefer gaming on a PC to a console because I prefer games that are complex and require a significant set of controls. I don't see consoles shipping with keyboards by default anytime soon so console games will still be written with the assumption that a player does not have access to them. This really limits any gameplay that requires player interaction via typing. Also, many PC games allow some serious customization via editing tools etc., which frankly would really suck to try to use without a keyboard and mouse and without access to other software (graphic and sound editors especially).
Console gaming often seems like a "dumbed down" version of PC gaming with fewer options and fewer controls. Additionally, with console prices going up, more and more people who already own a computer are happier to shell out $50 for a game they can play on their existing machine rather than $350 for a console and another $50 for the game. I know I am.
Since console makers really do subsidize consoles to some degree what I'd really like to see is a good, official, console emulator for Mac, PC, and Linux for each of the main consoles. They could even make money on it while expanding their market to include PC owners who don't want to buy another box. They won't do it, of course, because they are all playing to "win" and don't want you to be able to play their competitor's offerings, so they try to lock you into either their games or their competitor's. Maybe if Nintendo really starts to fall behind they will wise up.
Name two. Not CSS or XHTML, because IE does support these.
Yeah, IE supports them, if you mean partially implements five year old versions of them. How about SVG, PNG alpha channel, PDFs, RDF, InkML, RSS, MathML, etc., etc. How about just fully supporting CSS 1 and 2? If you'd ever actually tried to write a valid CSS or XHTML document you'd know half of it is not supported by IE at all. I maintain a series of web documents aimed at people who run security operations at tier-1 ISPs that are auto-generated from an expensive publishing application. You can read them with IE, but about half of the markup will not appear because they don't support necessary components of the XHTML spec (unlike Firefox, Opera, Safari, and every other current browser I have tested). I'd never implement a public web site that used these features because it would need to work with IE, hence IE is holding back adoption of XHTML. Is that plain enough for you?
Your argument seems to make the case that if MS doesn't innovate, no one else will.
Of course other people will innovate and make better browsers, but better browsers don't make the Web more innovative, they just let you view it in more innovative ways. IE has held back the adoption of pretty much every new and useful Web technology because it does not implement them and it ships by default on every machine. If MS offered IE as a separate download, that would be fine, because then a user would have to choose from among a number of browsers and they could choose the one that supported newer technologies. Instead MS integrated it and took over HTML and control of Web technologies using their existing monopoly on desktop OS's. Opera, Firefox, etc. are great, but no one develops web pages that use modern CSS, XHTML, etc. because 90% of people can't view them. Look at all the best web pages out there and you'll notice pretty much every one adheres to standards written at least 5 years ago and they also work around IE's failure to properly implement those standards. The technology behind the web has advanced to some degree, but none of it is actually implemented online except as demos because of MS's monopoly.
Why don't *they* (MPAA ETC) use BT to their advantage and get on the bandwagon. Their day of controlling content is over, no matter how harsh they make the laws.
Because they don't actually make the movies, they just market and distribute them. Bitttorrent is a functional, if imperfect, replacement for half of what they do and a threat to their dominance of the other half. All they do is control content, without that and their marketing ability movie producers would just cut them out entirely.
I say this having just gone through my semi-annual search of third-party conversion software in the neverending quest to figure out a way to get from Word documents to rationally structured XML.
Have you tried Webworks Publisher? I've had reasonable success outputting XML from Framemaker with it and I know they have a version for Word as well. It is closed/proprietary/expensive but if you are serious about converting Word docs it is worth a try. When I used it, it was somewhat buggy, but by far the best solution I could find. Luckily we were not using Word with it, Word having been banned within the company due to numerous file corruption and compatibility problems.
With the new DRM lockdown mechanisms maybe they want to break their customers of thinking of the machine as their own :) I imagine "My Computer (except for the parts the MPAA and RIAA own) was too long to fit in the explorer window easily.
Yeah, but that is exactly a choice that distros make. RH distributes their own proprietary s/w with Linux. They don't dissapear in a puff of logic. I realise that because of the beleifs of the Debian distro, they can't distribute a JVM but again, it ain't Sun stopping them, it's their own choice to adhere to a certain set of restrictions in their distro. What's more, Sun doesn't stop them crafting their very own JVM an releasing that with their distro, again, it's not Sun's fault that they don't.
I agree with you for the most part, but you are anthropomorphizing distros to some degree. They are just collections of software written by different people with disparate goals and beliefs. Some of the organizations built around them include proprietary software and some don't. All of them are understandable hesitant about basing a lot of hard work on something that they have no control over and could just go away, hence the normal attitude towards Java.
There are a number of free Java distributions, but I don't think any of them are really finished enough to work on a daily basis with the average Java application. I really wish someone would write a really good JVM with easy and granular control of the sandbox. I'd love to be able to run applications that can only access the files it creates or that I specifically allow for example. There are a lot of problems Java could help to solve, but Java also introduces some problems of it's own. I have yet to see a cross-platform Java application that integrates completely with the host OS. I avoid them for the most part because they don't usually work as well. Almost all of them use nonstandard interface elements, and I don't know of any that integrate with system services (on OS X). Many don't respect standard keyboard shortcuts. To me, as they currently stand, Java applications are inferior and I prefer to use native applications. They have potential, but I don't really expect them to ever be my first choice and I'd only choose to develop a cross-platform Java app if I really needed it to be cross-platform. For an application that I plan to use for myself I want it to work properly with my main OS, as do most open source developers, which is probably why Java development has not really taken off as much as it could.
Oh, and google maps, of course.
I'm not trying to say that better tools for making web sites or even better web sites have not been appearing, but they are all forced to rely upon old, old technology to be compatible with IE, all because of the MS monopoly. If you load Google maps and take a look at the code you will notice it is clever use of javascript and XHTML. The code even links to the XHMTL specification they use, which was written in 1999 and finally approved in January of 2000. You might notice that is a little over 5 years ago. What a coincidence. They also link to the Microsoft specific schemas they use to work around all of the IE specific failures to meet the spec.
Maybe Gmail and Google maps are innovative and useful, but they are still using five year old technology. Imagine how much better it could be if browser and web site development was not restricted by IE's stagnant tech. We'd have vector graphics on most every page, with zooming, customizable CSS schemas, RSS feeds, etc. etc. Who knows what else would have been developed.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I think that they have been unfairly treated in these "anti-trust" cases in Europe and the US. Though I prefer Netscape/Mozilla to IE, I thought the arguments about a browser monopoly were quite foolish.
Have you noticed that the state-of-the-art as far as web pages and web applications are concerned has basically not changed for the last 5 years? Have you ever wondered why all of a sudden the advancement of this field ground to a complete halt? Oh yes, wasn't it just about the time that MS dominated the web browser market by using their OS monopoly to fund development, made IE impossible to uninstall, and incorporated code in the OS to specifically break competitors software. Oh and there was that little something about shipping a default browser to 95% of the planet while intentionally breaking the published standard that they had agreed to adhere to and even helped write.
Since that time the whole field has basically ground to a halt. Developers waste billions of dollars a year coding to standards and then working around all of IE's failures to conform and bugs that they intentionally use to be incompatible. Every web developer I know has cursed Microsoft for their evil behavior and for ruining an entire field all in order to milk a little more money out of everyone.
Antitrust laws exist for several reasons. Mostly it is because a capitalist model fails to work as soon as someone becomes a monopoly. When they do, they can get money without giving customers what they want, have motivation to not only not innovate, but to hold back innovation, and basically just suck money, while doing nothing. The EU is not run by idiots and they are doing the right thing here. The U.S. should have done it long ago but MS was contributing an insane amount of money to both the Democratic and Republican parties. Guess where that money comes from, ultimately from you any time you buy any computer with or without Windows.
You can get 100 Gb or a 60Gb 7200 for the mac mini. You do only have one RAM slot, but that only limits you to 1 Gb, which is more than you'll likely need on a budget machine with limited CPU etc. I don't see the issue, if you buy a extremely small form factor machine, you are obviously not buying it with the intention of adding extra drives and cards. If you want a lot of space, buy a tower already. Just don't bitch and moan about how it is not "upgradable" when in fact it can be upgraded with of the shelf components. If your problem is that it doesn't have a pile of slots and space in the case, well duh, I should think the fact that it is smaller than most laptops should have clued you in to that.
Heh, really? You're determining probability based on known factors.
No, I'm not. Probability is a simple ratio, it's not based upon two numbers which can be determined through observation. Please, please, please go take a remedial math course and maybe one on logic and the scientific method.