I think she was lying when she said that the contents of "the memo" didn't say that Bin Laden was determined to attack America
She never said that. She was asked if the memo contained information that indicated that bin Laden or anybody in his organization was planning to use airplanes as weapons. The memo did not contain any such information; the memo pointed to some extremely vague intelligence about possible hijackings.
Or is this some wacky truth test that I'm a moron to use?
Yes. The moron thing.
in this representative democracy, Microsoft's voice carries more weight than yours
It should. They represent a hell of a lot more jobs than I do.
It's not scientific at all.
It's not supposed to be. You're not one of those people who mistakenly thinks everything is about the scientific method, are you?
The part where Microsoft greases palms is totally, 100% true.
No, it's not. Microsoft, like every other business in America, lobbies the government. Just like I lobby the government every time I write my Congressman a letter. It's called "representative democracy."
Lobbying the government is, unfortunately, a very inefficient process. There are lots of middle-men whose job it is to collect public opinion and communicate it to the representatives in Washington. These middle-men eat up a lot of money along the way. This is wasteful and disappointing, but it's completely wrong to describe it as "greasing palms."
And more than a dozen (Democratic) senators agree with the grandparent's analysis of what Rice did.
Are you seriously appealing to the authority of the United States Senate? Dude, if you polled the Senate, you'd find three Senators who think that desegregation was a bad thing, five who think nationalized health care is a grand idea, and a dozen more who think Elvis is still alive.
You don't have to be a brain surgeon to familiarize yourself with the events of the day and to be able to distinguish between truth and lies. That's why everybody's held to that standard, see? Because it's just not very hard to do. So when somebody (like, in this case, you yourself) fails that test, the ridicule is so long and so loud.
it's "bullshit" to think it's nice if the cops appologize to the last victim's family that they didn't have the luck to catch him one day earlier?
It's bullshit to think that it's some how not nice or just or appropriate or whatever if they don't apologize.
On September 11, our government didn't have the first damn thing to apologize for. Don't waste time crafting a politically self-serving mea culpa. Just go do what needs to be done to respond to the situation at hand.
Hell, it was Clarke's job to stop the terrorists. That was the exact and only reason why he got paid.
That's completely, 100% wrong. As a terrorism advisor, Clarke's job was to advise the President. That's it. He wasn't some kind of superhero, out there trying to chase down the bad guys. You've got completely the wrong idea of how the world works.
Whose job is it to prevent terrorism? Nobody's. It's nobody's job to prevent terrorism. It never has been, and God willing, it never will be. Because the minute you have somebody with that kind of responsibility, he's going to exercise every scrap of power given to him with little concern for niceties like civil liberties or the Bill of Rights. Because that's his job.
Think about cops. It is not a cop's job to prevent crimes. It is a cop's job to investigate crimes that have already been committed, and to act to stop crimes that are in progress. But it's not a cop's job to interdict possible future crimes. Why not? Because I, for one, like being able to watch "Ren & Stimpy" in my underwear without having to worry about some police officer beating my door in waving a warrant to search my home for signs of conspiracy.
Get it? It's nobody's job to prevent terrorism, and that's just the way it should be.
Oh my God. Dude, if you had come in here and said, "The Easter Bunny ran into my closet last night, and now Spiderman and Superman are in there trying to coax him out," your statement would have been closer to the truth.
Why would Apple go to the trouble of porting to somebody else's architecture when they're in the middle of optimizing the heck out of their OS and applications for one architecture?
It's far more likely that Apple will partner with a hardware company to build servers, workstations and enterprise desktops around the PowerPC 970 family. Apple's got the home-computer market taken care of, and nobody makes a better laptop than the PowerBook series, so the enterprise is really the only hole in Apple's strategy.
The only problem with that idea is brand dilution. Apple is the oldest personal-computer company still in existence, now that IBM is out of the business. Apple has spent 20 years creating the Mac brand, and they'd be crazy to dilute it now.
So my gut tells me that you're not going to see a computer running Mac OS X that isn't a Mac, and you're not going to see Macs that don't have the Apple logo on them.
Here's a hint for you: If you ever find yourself forming a question that follows the basic template, "Do you have a magical X that can do Y without Z?" the answer is inevitably going to be "yes," and you're going to end up looking like an idiot.
As a bonus, you could chat up the cute redhead using her PowerBook if she was using iChat AV/Rendezvous.
You can do that without an access point. Rendezvous is ad-hoc networking, remember? Any two computers can talk to each other as long as they're attached to the same physical-layer network, be it wired or wireless. All you have to do to get two Macs to network to each other over AirPort is put them in proximity to each other.
I guess you never actually tried launching a Web browser, huh? The standard configuration for public access points requires you to launch a Web browser in order to authenticate to the access point server.
Oh, goody. Mac-hating troll boy is back. Your "there's really nothing new" troll was bogus when I schooled you here, and it's bogus now. Crawl back into your hole and leave the grown-ups to talk.
I appreciate your asking me, but I'm not even going to get into that. I'm not really interested in getting into a "which features of Mac OS X should we attempt to copy next" thing.
If you want to use a state-of-the-art operating system, use a Mac. If you want to remain mired in the 20th century, use something else.
If you want to try to surpass the Mac and create whatever the next thing is going to be, use a Mac. Because you can't really innovate unless you completely understand the state of the art.
Well, an understanding of the topic we're discussing, for starters. I mean, I know what all the words mean, which is clearly something that you can't truthfully say. All you've done is pull quotes from marketing brochures! There's no evidence at all that you have even a passing familiarity with the basic concepts under discussion here.
you're going around claiming Quartz doesn't use PDF for imaging
Correct.
when every developer documentation from Apple directly states that Quartz uses the PDF imaging model
Also correct.
Gasp!
How can this be! How can Quartz 2D both be PDF and not PDF!? He's a witch!
Friend, in order to wrap your head around this topic, you're going to have to understand what the expression "imaging model" means. An imaging model is not a file format, and it's not an instruction set, and it's not an interpreter. It's not actually any type of computer software at all. Rather, it's a way of looking at things.
Back in the old days, we had QuickDraw. QuickDraw used a pixel-based imaging model. You drew to the screen by specifying coordinates in terms of pixels: integer coordinates, bottom-left origin, one pixel was exactly one seventy-second of an inch. Regions were translated literally by shifting bitmaps around in memory. That was the QuickDraw imaging model.
That worked great for drawing to the screen, but it didn't work at all for drawing to a laser printer. For drawing to a laser printer you needed a totally different imaging model. Which means you had to do one of three things in your program: Either you had to maintain an internal representation of whatever you were drawing in whatever form was appropriate for printing and then convert that to QuickDraw for on-screen display, or you had to maintain a QuickDraw representation and convert it at print time, or you had to do both.
But the advantage of QuickDraw was massive: You could draw right into video memory. Toggle a bit in memory and a pixel changed color on screen. Very efficient.
Quartz 2D is different. It uses an entirely different imaging model. Rather than representing on-screen graphics as bitmaps in memory, Quartz 2D creates a layer of mathematical abstraction. With Quartz 2D, you still have a bottom-left origin, but you're not longer on an integer plane. Coordinates are given as floating-point numbers. You don't deal in pixels, but rather in mathematically pure regions of the drawing plane.
You draw in Quartz 2D by defining regions. A region is a locus of floating-point coordinate pairs. For example, (2.1, 3.37), (6.29, 5.3), (7.889, 1.961) defines a triangle. You draw by telling Quartz 2D to fill that region with a certain color, defined by any of the supported color spaces. For instance, you might use RGBA, meaning you'd specify red, green and blue color components and a floating-point opacity value.
Sending these commands to Quartz 2D from within your program creates an in-memory data structure called a display list. This display list doesn't look like anything at all; it's just a sequence of bytes that are encoded to represent the scene you drew. The display list doesn't become anything until you send it to Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme) to be rendered into pixels.
The fundamental assumptions behind Quartz 2D drawing -- the coordinate system, the color spaces, all the low-level details --are referred to collectively as the "imaging model."
PDF has an imaging model that is very similar to Quartz 2D's imaging model. Not identical, but very similar. That's because Apple's engineers were inspired by both PostScript and PDF when they created Quartz 2D.
Because Quartz 2D and PDF use the same imaging model -- the same set of fundamental assumptions --it's very easy to convert a PDF file describing a scene to a Quartz 2D display list that describes that scene. Or you can go vice versa, starting with a Quartz 2
Dude, no offense, but it's clear that you're just googling around for keywords without really understanding anything that's being said.
If you ever get interested in the actual story, rather than just googling marketing copy, Apple's developer documentation has all the detail you'll ever need. Until then, just shut it. You're bein' a tool.
There's a lot of misinformation in there. I have no idea where some of this stuff came from.
1. Dividing it up into Quartz and OpenGL is misleading. If you want to talk about it in terms of functional block diagrams, OpenGL and Quartz 2D (note: not just "Quartz") do the same job. They take instructions from a running program and turn them into patterns of pixels on the screen. But Quartz 2D is not responsible for all 2D drawing. QuickDraw can also be used to draw to the screen; pre-Tiger, QuickDraw is quite a bit faster than Quartz for doing aliased RGB drawing. QuickTime also renders directly into the window, bypassing Quartz 2D entirely. So saying that Quartz is responsible for all 2D drawing is just plain wrong.
2. Talking about "native file types" is also misleading. There is no native Quartz 2D file type. Quartz 2D display lists can be translated into PDF and back for disk storage, but that's not the same thing.
3. The whole thing about how Quartz rasterizes PDF files is bogus. When a PDF file is loaded into a Quartz 2D drawing context, it gets converted by the file I/O code into a Quartz 2D display list. This is a resolution-agnostic floating-point-based display list format that has absolutely nothing to do with either pixels or PDF. If this display list is destined for the screen, it goes to Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme) which renders the display list into pixels. If it's destined for a printer, it goes to the printer driver. If it's destined for a file, it gets converted back to PDF format and stored on disk.
4. There is no PDF interpreter built into Mac OS X. That is, there is no piece of software that takes PDF input and spits out a bitmap. Quartz doesn't work like that.
Other than that, this comment is sorta-mostly-kinda correct. More or less.
Slashdot Mirror
The money you spend on new hardware will be far less than what you'll spend in time and trouble getting a half-assed Linux solution together.
You want Mac OS X Server. Trust me on this.
It was designed for the 1980s, and Sun's documentation is very clear about this.
What, is there a big chapter on how NIS is only useful from 1981 through 1989?
(I don't disagree with you. NIS is a joke in modern terms. I just found your wording funny.)
Pulling quotes out of context to try to prove somebody was saying something that they were not saying impresses nobody.
Well, that's not really true. It impresses a depressing number of mouth-breathers. But in a perfect world, that kind of nonsense would impress nobody.
I think she was lying when she said that the contents of "the memo" didn't say that Bin Laden was determined to attack America
She never said that. She was asked if the memo contained information that indicated that bin Laden or anybody in his organization was planning to use airplanes as weapons. The memo did not contain any such information; the memo pointed to some extremely vague intelligence about possible hijackings.
Or is this some wacky truth test that I'm a moron to use?
Yes. The moron thing.
in this representative democracy, Microsoft's voice carries more weight than yours
It should. They represent a hell of a lot more jobs than I do.
It's not scientific at all.
It's not supposed to be. You're not one of those people who mistakenly thinks everything is about the scientific method, are you?
The part where Microsoft greases palms is totally, 100% true.
No, it's not. Microsoft, like every other business in America, lobbies the government. Just like I lobby the government every time I write my Congressman a letter. It's called "representative democracy."
Lobbying the government is, unfortunately, a very inefficient process. There are lots of middle-men whose job it is to collect public opinion and communicate it to the representatives in Washington. These middle-men eat up a lot of money along the way. This is wasteful and disappointing, but it's completely wrong to describe it as "greasing palms."
And more than a dozen (Democratic) senators agree with the grandparent's analysis of what Rice did.
Are you seriously appealing to the authority of the United States Senate? Dude, if you polled the Senate, you'd find three Senators who think that desegregation was a bad thing, five who think nationalized health care is a grand idea, and a dozen more who think Elvis is still alive.
You don't have to be a brain surgeon to familiarize yourself with the events of the day and to be able to distinguish between truth and lies. That's why everybody's held to that standard, see? Because it's just not very hard to do. So when somebody (like, in this case, you yourself) fails that test, the ridicule is so long and so loud.
it's "bullshit" to think it's nice if the cops appologize to the last victim's family that they didn't have the luck to catch him one day earlier?
It's bullshit to think that it's some how not nice or just or appropriate or whatever if they don't apologize.
On September 11, our government didn't have the first damn thing to apologize for. Don't waste time crafting a politically self-serving mea culpa. Just go do what needs to be done to respond to the situation at hand.
Hell, it was Clarke's job to stop the terrorists. That was the exact and only reason why he got paid.
That's completely, 100% wrong. As a terrorism advisor, Clarke's job was to advise the President. That's it. He wasn't some kind of superhero, out there trying to chase down the bad guys. You've got completely the wrong idea of how the world works.
Whose job is it to prevent terrorism? Nobody's. It's nobody's job to prevent terrorism. It never has been, and God willing, it never will be. Because the minute you have somebody with that kind of responsibility, he's going to exercise every scrap of power given to him with little concern for niceties like civil liberties or the Bill of Rights. Because that's his job.
Think about cops. It is not a cop's job to prevent crimes. It is a cop's job to investigate crimes that have already been committed, and to act to stop crimes that are in progress. But it's not a cop's job to interdict possible future crimes. Why not? Because I, for one, like being able to watch "Ren & Stimpy" in my underwear without having to worry about some police officer beating my door in waving a warrant to search my home for signs of conspiracy.
Get it? It's nobody's job to prevent terrorism, and that's just the way it should be.
Oh my God. Dude, if you had come in here and said, "The Easter Bunny ran into my closet last night, and now Spiderman and Superman are in there trying to coax him out," your statement would have been closer to the truth.
Why would Apple go to the trouble of porting to somebody else's architecture when they're in the middle of optimizing the heck out of their OS and applications for one architecture?
It's far more likely that Apple will partner with a hardware company to build servers, workstations and enterprise desktops around the PowerPC 970 family. Apple's got the home-computer market taken care of, and nobody makes a better laptop than the PowerBook series, so the enterprise is really the only hole in Apple's strategy.
The only problem with that idea is brand dilution. Apple is the oldest personal-computer company still in existence, now that IBM is out of the business. Apple has spent 20 years creating the Mac brand, and they'd be crazy to dilute it now.
So my gut tells me that you're not going to see a computer running Mac OS X that isn't a Mac, and you're not going to see Macs that don't have the Apple logo on them.
I'm not sure I understand the basis for the arguments here.
You can say that again.
Here's a hint for you: If you ever find yourself forming a question that follows the basic template, "Do you have a magical X that can do Y without Z?" the answer is inevitably going to be "yes," and you're going to end up looking like an idiot.
As a bonus, you could chat up the cute redhead using her PowerBook if she was using iChat AV/Rendezvous.
You can do that without an access point. Rendezvous is ad-hoc networking, remember? Any two computers can talk to each other as long as they're attached to the same physical-layer network, be it wired or wireless. All you have to do to get two Macs to network to each other over AirPort is put them in proximity to each other.
I guess you never actually tried launching a Web browser, huh? The standard configuration for public access points requires you to launch a Web browser in order to authenticate to the access point server.
That's two. Wanna rise to the occasion for a third slice at it?
Oh, goody. Mac-hating troll boy is back. Your "there's really nothing new" troll was bogus when I schooled you here, and it's bogus now. Crawl back into your hole and leave the grown-ups to talk.
Once again, somebody else has come along and said it one million zillion billion skrillion times better than I did. Thank you.
I appreciate your asking me, but I'm not even going to get into that. I'm not really interested in getting into a "which features of Mac OS X should we attempt to copy next" thing.
If you want to use a state-of-the-art operating system, use a Mac. If you want to remain mired in the 20th century, use something else.
If you want to try to surpass the Mac and create whatever the next thing is going to be, use a Mac. Because you can't really innovate unless you completely understand the state of the art.
What do you have to offer other than your word?
Well, an understanding of the topic we're discussing, for starters. I mean, I know what all the words mean, which is clearly something that you can't truthfully say. All you've done is pull quotes from marketing brochures! There's no evidence at all that you have even a passing familiarity with the basic concepts under discussion here.
you're going around claiming Quartz doesn't use PDF for imaging
Correct.
when every developer documentation from Apple directly states that Quartz uses the PDF imaging model
Also correct.
Gasp!
How can this be! How can Quartz 2D both be PDF and not PDF!? He's a witch!
Friend, in order to wrap your head around this topic, you're going to have to understand what the expression "imaging model" means. An imaging model is not a file format, and it's not an instruction set, and it's not an interpreter. It's not actually any type of computer software at all. Rather, it's a way of looking at things.
Back in the old days, we had QuickDraw. QuickDraw used a pixel-based imaging model. You drew to the screen by specifying coordinates in terms of pixels: integer coordinates, bottom-left origin, one pixel was exactly one seventy-second of an inch. Regions were translated literally by shifting bitmaps around in memory. That was the QuickDraw imaging model.
That worked great for drawing to the screen, but it didn't work at all for drawing to a laser printer. For drawing to a laser printer you needed a totally different imaging model. Which means you had to do one of three things in your program: Either you had to maintain an internal representation of whatever you were drawing in whatever form was appropriate for printing and then convert that to QuickDraw for on-screen display, or you had to maintain a QuickDraw representation and convert it at print time, or you had to do both.
But the advantage of QuickDraw was massive: You could draw right into video memory. Toggle a bit in memory and a pixel changed color on screen. Very efficient.
Quartz 2D is different. It uses an entirely different imaging model. Rather than representing on-screen graphics as bitmaps in memory, Quartz 2D creates a layer of mathematical abstraction. With Quartz 2D, you still have a bottom-left origin, but you're not longer on an integer plane. Coordinates are given as floating-point numbers. You don't deal in pixels, but rather in mathematically pure regions of the drawing plane.
You draw in Quartz 2D by defining regions. A region is a locus of floating-point coordinate pairs. For example, (2.1, 3.37), (6.29, 5.3), (7.889, 1.961) defines a triangle. You draw by telling Quartz 2D to fill that region with a certain color, defined by any of the supported color spaces. For instance, you might use RGBA, meaning you'd specify red, green and blue color components and a floating-point opacity value.
Sending these commands to Quartz 2D from within your program creates an in-memory data structure called a display list. This display list doesn't look like anything at all; it's just a sequence of bytes that are encoded to represent the scene you drew. The display list doesn't become anything until you send it to Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme) to be rendered into pixels.
The fundamental assumptions behind Quartz 2D drawing -- the coordinate system, the color spaces, all the low-level details --are referred to collectively as the "imaging model."
PDF has an imaging model that is very similar to Quartz 2D's imaging model. Not identical, but very similar. That's because Apple's engineers were inspired by both PostScript and PDF when they created Quartz 2D.
Because Quartz 2D and PDF use the same imaging model -- the same set of fundamental assumptions --it's very easy to convert a PDF file describing a scene to a Quartz 2D display list that describes that scene. Or you can go vice versa, starting with a Quartz 2
Sigh. If you were wondering what I was talking about when I referred to "some very confused people," this was it.
Translation: Quartz 2D display lists can be converted to PDF files. Which is exactly what I said, which is exactly the opposite of what he said.
Sigh. Who would have thought that such a simple idea could confound so many people?
Dude, no offense, but it's clear that you're just googling around for keywords without really understanding anything that's being said.
If you ever get interested in the actual story, rather than just googling marketing copy, Apple's developer documentation has all the detail you'll ever need. Until then, just shut it. You're bein' a tool.
searching through every search engine and reading every website contradicts what you're posting
Have you considered reading Apple's developer documentation on the Quartz imaging system instead?
Is Arstechnica wrong?
In large part, yes. Please read this. (Wow. Déjà vu.)
In large part, yes. Please read this.
your post is about different rendering systems and whether they use OpenGL
Perhaps you should take a pass at reading my comment a second time. You will find that it has nothing to do with either X11 or OpenGL.
There's a lot of misinformation in there. I have no idea where some of this stuff came from.
1. Dividing it up into Quartz and OpenGL is misleading. If you want to talk about it in terms of functional block diagrams, OpenGL and Quartz 2D (note: not just "Quartz") do the same job. They take instructions from a running program and turn them into patterns of pixels on the screen. But Quartz 2D is not responsible for all 2D drawing. QuickDraw can also be used to draw to the screen; pre-Tiger, QuickDraw is quite a bit faster than Quartz for doing aliased RGB drawing. QuickTime also renders directly into the window, bypassing Quartz 2D entirely. So saying that Quartz is responsible for all 2D drawing is just plain wrong.
2. Talking about "native file types" is also misleading. There is no native Quartz 2D file type. Quartz 2D display lists can be translated into PDF and back for disk storage, but that's not the same thing.
3. The whole thing about how Quartz rasterizes PDF files is bogus. When a PDF file is loaded into a Quartz 2D drawing context, it gets converted by the file I/O code into a Quartz 2D display list. This is a resolution-agnostic floating-point-based display list format that has absolutely nothing to do with either pixels or PDF. If this display list is destined for the screen, it goes to Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme) which renders the display list into pixels. If it's destined for a printer, it goes to the printer driver. If it's destined for a file, it gets converted back to PDF format and stored on disk.
4. There is no PDF interpreter built into Mac OS X. That is, there is no piece of software that takes PDF input and spits out a bitmap. Quartz doesn't work like that.
Other than that, this comment is sorta-mostly-kinda correct. More or less.
Still waiting to hear what, if anything, that has to do with my post.