Maybe it's pre-caching application libraries or not loading certain OS code until the user requires it.
You can do a lot to improve apparent performance by building a detailed profile of what the user typically does. It won't make the processor run faster, but can improve the wait time to do stuff.
What's Leopard got to do with HDCP? As far as I'm aware, Apple haven't delivered HDCP support on any hardware or software.
They'll no doubt add it for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD playback, in which case the question becomes: "Is it in the OS or app layer, and if it's the former, how pervasive is it?"
It's not an overly elaborate promotional thing for a Middle-East release of Cloverfield is it?
I mean, we're all getting bored of the alternate reality web thingies these films do to hype themselves before release, so it sort of makes sense to kick it up a notch (bam!)
The simple matter is that you don't have problems unless you're stupid.
That has an implicit assumption that software and hardware is bug-free, flawless and relatively easy for the non-technical person to understand provided they're moderately intelligent.
Back in the world I live in, intelligent people do have problems from time to time. We don't all go nuts about them, but we work through them and sometimes (rarely) we have to call tech support. It's not that we're stupid, just that we're stuck in the real world where stuff doesn't always work perfectly.
I could detail examples from Vista (getting my wireless router to work didn't seem to follow an actual process), OS X (waking my MBP from sleep sometimes causes the mouse tracking to jump), Linux (drivers and arcane software config processes), AmigaOS (guru meditation errors appearing randomly), the C-64 (tapes not loading, games crashing), the ZX-Spectrum (random crashes while loading some games) and more if you like, but you probably get the point.
There's an attitude in some company's senior management of being prepared to take the big risks, to bet the company and win big. I've seen it in some companies I've worked for, and when the bet pays off people look great. Money's being made hand over fist, kudos are flying around and egos are being thoroughly stroked.
Bets don't always pay off though, and then it's not a good time to be near the managers involved - the stench of death and all that.
To me, this kind of attitude - bet big, win big - is all about ego and very little about what's good for the company. I'm clearly not a fan, preferring slower but surer growth.
I see this deal as one of those 'bet the company' deals, and I'd be very nervous if I were a Microsoft shareholder.
Tiny correction - Apple created WebKit as the engine behind Safari, then open sourced it. Safari itself was built from Konquerer though, which is probably the point you were going for.
You don't have to have anything in common to talk to someone. You can even go to war afterwards.
You confuse dialogue with appeasement.
I didn't talk about appeasing Bin Laden. More critically (because Bin Laden is a small part of a larger problem, and has clearly been forgotten by the US) why do so many Muslims think he's a great guy? What can we do to stem the flow of new recruits? Maybe taking away their reasons for joining would help. If they have legitimate grievances, we should hear them and respond. It's not appeasement, it's smart strategy.
Al Qaeda only exist because people keep joining them. Stop the new recruits (and kill the current bozos) and the group will no longer exist. It's not about giving people whatever they want, but engaging in some diplomacy, the first step of which is a conversation.
Hence my comment on 'starting a dialogue.'
This isn't hard, but it requires standing up to the people who prefer to pick up a gun than pick up a telephone. Given the success in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think it's time we evaluated other options as well as the current "kill them all" one.
Well, clearly *you're* not a politician. You're trying to calm people down, start a dialogue with disaffected muslims and assert reason in the face of panic.
Madness! You'll never get anywhere with clear thinking!
Yep, Microsoft is fantastically smart. At sales and marketing.
They may have *been* smart, but currently they're showing little sign of that. The marketing for Vista is non-existent and what little there has been has clearly failed to counter the perception of a buggy mass of pain and UAC pop-ups. The Zune is another case in point (squirting? seriously?), and the XB360's red ring of death is almost impossible to spin out of. Yes, all three products are pretty nice in their own right and all are perfectly usable, but the Microsoft marketing team seem either to be missing in action these days.
Contrast to Apple who really are fantastically good at marketing. Look at the hype around the iPhone compared to Windows-based phones. Microsoft managed to get Ballmer on TV to basically lie about the iPhone and that was the best they could do to counter Apple's hype. On a purely marketing level, Microsoft failed utterly to dent the bubble of their competitor's hype. Look at the perception of Apple products versus the perception of Microsoft products. Hell, look at the perception of open source products like Firefox, Linux and Apache compared to their Microsoft counterparts.
I reckon the Microsoft marketing team is dead. What skill they had has long since left and now they're down to interns and a couple of janitors.
That sounds pretty damn plausible to me. It's like a note from the future...
... hmm... are some of these ACs just people posting from the future? Maybe the future will be horrifying after all, with the goatse man ruling the world, aided by the villainous tubgirl. They've been warning us all along!
I like SQL Server, and have developed extensively for it, but this statement "certainly better then everything else in the opensource" is wrong because it infers SQL Server is an open sourced product. If you're going to compare am expensive DBMS to a free one, you need to account for the free one being free to install with a $0 per user cost. SQL Server is over-used in business today, with managers buying it for small projects where it's not warranted.
SQL Server is better for some applications than many open source DBMS's, but for some uses SQLite is far better still. It's largely down to requirements, and no DBMS is 'best' in all situations.
It may very well be superstition, in the same way that all religious beliefs are superstition. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily wrong however, as people's belief systems are often central to their view of the world and their place in it. Further, many people take comfort in their belief systems.
These aren't all secret ceremonies either. There are cultural issues around seeing images of the dead, or speaking about them. It may seem quaint to you, but it's a very real thing to them. An equivalent might be for people to talk disrespectfully about your family, living or deceased. Would you be okay for people to do that? I wouldn't, so I respect the Aboriginal culture in their wishes.
Lastly, I'd point out that Aboriginal Australian culture extends back at least 40,000 years and more likely 60,000 years. While they don't have a civilisation in the same mould as ours, they do have something that works for them and has for far longer than any other known civilisation. The destruction of their culture in the last two hundred years has been a long process of taking something unique out of the world. It may have been impossible to avoid, but with every indigenous culture destroyed the richness of the Human race is lessened, not improved.
(For the record, I'm an atheist and very much supportive of the scientific model to discover and explain the Universe. That doesn't mean destroying other cultures or religions though, as many people need to believe something beyond science. Needless destruction of a culture is often irrational.)
Yeah, all those Mac-only programs like Word and Excel, well there's no way I can use that knowledge on a Windows machine now. And those Mac-only programming languages like BASIC, C, C++ and Pascal. Useless now that I use a Windows machine at work. Even those Mac GUI concepts like copy and paste are un-transferable to Windows.
Stupid Apple. Stupid schools.
All that time spent learning apps and stuff on a Mac was totally wasted.
Basically you can gather a list of blue sky requirements, write them up in legalese and then apply for a patent. Easy! Any half-witted project manager can do that in their sleep.
It's trivial to list requirements. Actually solving the many problems in realising the requirements is where all the work is, and applications like this indicate nothing like that.
There is no technical detail here that indicates the patent applicant ever intended to make anything or worse - ever solved any of the problems involved in designing a product like this.
That's where I think the patent system fails - you can essentially patent a requirements document without ever needing to progress further. It's not rewarding an inventor, because an inventor would have either created a prototype or created a design sufficiently detailed to allow a prototype to be built.
I'm not going to argue he first few points, because they're pretty accurate. However, this one...
And third parties have to be "blessed" and pay homage to the alter of Steve Jobs.... about Apple is wrong in every respect. Third parties don't have to do anything but release a product. Apple can like or dislike, should they make the very unusual decision of taking a position on it, but the third party doesn't have to care less what Apple thinks. There's no "blessing" and that sort of obvious trolling undermines the rest of your good points.
On other points, it's hard to take a "what if" approach and consider what the world without Microsoft would have been like. There'd still be third party apps, as they existed long before Microsoft (which was itself a third party app company before the DOS days). If Apple, Amiga, BeOS or Linux were the dominant player in a Microsoft-less world, we'd still see the same amount of apps around, and probably more. Every OS vendor depends on third parties, no more and no less than Microsoft.
Did Bill Gates, or at least Microsoft, bring down the price of software? Maybe in the server room, but in a world without Microsoft we may have seen more competition in that space, leading to price wars. Maybe, maybe not. Outside the server room I'd say prices have always been about what the market will bear and Microsoft have had little effect there.
I think that history will judge Bill Gates fairly. He centralised a lot of wealth in the computing sector, leading to the behemoth that Microsoft is today. There were problems along the way (anti-trust issues, look and feel lawsuits, etc) and the lustre has faded now. The man today is doing some very worthwhile things with his riches, and that will be largely his legacy, I suspect. As with people like John Rockefeller, his won't be a simple history to write.
The PDF breaks down the WinXP and Vista security slaws/patches, listing each number. It fails to treat competing OSs similarly, leading me to wonder why it does not.
I recall that my 10.4 install had a few patches for components that, while installed with the system, are not enabled by users. I'm thinking of things like Apache here, which is provided as a convenience to developers (and while it'll work fine, it's not meant to be used as a web server on consumer-grade hardware). It's not reasonable to include OS X components that have no equivalent in a Vista (or XP) install, don't install by default and are not meant for general use. I wonder if OpenOffice was included in the Linux patches.
We could see more detail about the specifics, to help or hinder my case, if the author provided the same details for non-MS OSs that he does for MS OSs!
Sorry for replying to my own post, but I've since found out that this patch does not correct the QuickTime bug, making the first part of my parent post invalid. It looks more like an Apple screw-up than anything else right now.
I stand by my other comments about the grandparent though.
Well I didn't say Apple did change an API, just that that's one possibility. I'd be surprised if they did, and up until a few moments ago I expected it was an Adobe issue.
Digging a bit further I see that the 8.0.2 update released by Adobe does not address this QuickTime bug, making my reasoning there flawed.
Now we're back to an Apple screw-up.
And who's this "you people?" Are they the same "You people will excuse anything in Windows" or "You people will blame anything but shoddy Linux design" or some other group that you want to lump together into a single stereotypical mass?
There is no evidence that this is related to DRM. Quicktime is a very large sub-system of OS X after all, and I understand that DRM is only at the application level, not the OS level (ie it's not in the system's Quicktime layer).
Regardless, since Adobe released an update a few days ago this seems not to be a problem at Apple's end. Adobe's released indicates either that they used undocumented API behaviour (and have now fixed it) or that Apple changed the APIs in an expected manner and Adobe quickly released the patch.
Apple make shiny things for fashion victims That's right up there with "Linux is only a server OS" and "Windows is for DOS apps and games only" as far as bad stereotypes go. Maybe you're upset at Apple right now, but that doesn't make your ridiculous post accurate, true or even logical.
But it's time to admit that Apple are just as much coprporate MP/RI-AA whores as MS. Are Apple just as bad as Microsoft? Well, we see a few screw-ups here and there, some DRM in iTunes but no actual evidence of this apart from the dogma of some forum posters. You want it to be true, that's clear. Got anything real to back up that throw-away comment, or is it just more hot air? You know, something like adding DRM to non-DRM music that places limits on it that weren't present when originally sold (Zune music sharing), something that actually limits users in some way.
I can stand anti-fanbois even less than fanbois. Both groups define themselves by their relationship with a company to the exclusion of logical thought. Slashdot brings out so many of both camp that reading threads is sometimes like rubbing lemon juice into a papercut.
Now, why would Adobe release a fix if Apple screwed up? It could be that either Adobe screwed up and their code relied on some undocumented API behaviour or that Apple changed the APIs and Adobe updated their app to support the new APIs.
Regardless of which it is, it doesn't look like a testing issue or a simple screw-up by Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's pre-caching application libraries or not loading certain OS code until the user requires it.
You can do a lot to improve apparent performance by building a detailed profile of what the user typically does. It won't make the processor run faster, but can improve the wait time to do stuff.
What's Leopard got to do with HDCP? As far as I'm aware, Apple haven't delivered HDCP support on any hardware or software.
They'll no doubt add it for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD playback, in which case the question becomes: "Is it in the OS or app layer, and if it's the former, how pervasive is it?"
It's not an overly elaborate promotional thing for a Middle-East release of Cloverfield is it?
I mean, we're all getting bored of the alternate reality web thingies these films do to hype themselves before release, so it sort of makes sense to kick it up a notch (bam!)
The simple matter is that you don't have problems unless you're stupid.
That has an implicit assumption that software and hardware is bug-free, flawless and relatively easy for the non-technical person to understand provided they're moderately intelligent.
Back in the world I live in, intelligent people do have problems from time to time. We don't all go nuts about them, but we work through them and sometimes (rarely) we have to call tech support. It's not that we're stupid, just that we're stuck in the real world where stuff doesn't always work perfectly.
I could detail examples from Vista (getting my wireless router to work didn't seem to follow an actual process), OS X (waking my MBP from sleep sometimes causes the mouse tracking to jump), Linux (drivers and arcane software config processes), AmigaOS (guru meditation errors appearing randomly), the C-64 (tapes not loading, games crashing), the ZX-Spectrum (random crashes while loading some games) and more if you like, but you probably get the point.
There's an attitude in some company's senior management of being prepared to take the big risks, to bet the company and win big. I've seen it in some companies I've worked for, and when the bet pays off people look great. Money's being made hand over fist, kudos are flying around and egos are being thoroughly stroked.
Bets don't always pay off though, and then it's not a good time to be near the managers involved - the stench of death and all that.
To me, this kind of attitude - bet big, win big - is all about ego and very little about what's good for the company. I'm clearly not a fan, preferring slower but surer growth.
I see this deal as one of those 'bet the company' deals, and I'd be very nervous if I were a Microsoft shareholder.
Safari? Built off webkit.
Tiny correction - Apple created WebKit as the engine behind Safari, then open sourced it. Safari itself was built from Konquerer though, which is probably the point you were going for.
I'm not disagreeing, just adding a tiny footnote.
they bought Dos from Patterson (for about $50K upfront, and eventual payments...
... oh... the other Patterson.
I'm still waiting to see anything from that. Damn lousy Microsoft.
You don't have to have anything in common to talk to someone. You can even go to war afterwards.
You confuse dialogue with appeasement.
I didn't talk about appeasing Bin Laden. More critically (because Bin Laden is a small part of a larger problem, and has clearly been forgotten by the US) why do so many Muslims think he's a great guy? What can we do to stem the flow of new recruits? Maybe taking away their reasons for joining would help. If they have legitimate grievances, we should hear them and respond. It's not appeasement, it's smart strategy.
Al Qaeda only exist because people keep joining them. Stop the new recruits (and kill the current bozos) and the group will no longer exist. It's not about giving people whatever they want, but engaging in some diplomacy, the first step of which is a conversation.
Hence my comment on 'starting a dialogue.'
This isn't hard, but it requires standing up to the people who prefer to pick up a gun than pick up a telephone. Given the success in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think it's time we evaluated other options as well as the current "kill them all" one.
Well, clearly *you're* not a politician. You're trying to calm people down, start a dialogue with disaffected muslims and assert reason in the face of panic.
Madness! You'll never get anywhere with clear thinking!
Yep, Microsoft is fantastically smart. At sales and marketing.
They may have *been* smart, but currently they're showing little sign of that. The marketing for Vista is non-existent and what little there has been has clearly failed to counter the perception of a buggy mass of pain and UAC pop-ups. The Zune is another case in point (squirting? seriously?), and the XB360's red ring of death is almost impossible to spin out of. Yes, all three products are pretty nice in their own right and all are perfectly usable, but the Microsoft marketing team seem either to be missing in action these days.
Contrast to Apple who really are fantastically good at marketing. Look at the hype around the iPhone compared to Windows-based phones. Microsoft managed to get Ballmer on TV to basically lie about the iPhone and that was the best they could do to counter Apple's hype. On a purely marketing level, Microsoft failed utterly to dent the bubble of their competitor's hype. Look at the perception of Apple products versus the perception of Microsoft products. Hell, look at the perception of open source products like Firefox, Linux and Apache compared to their Microsoft counterparts.
I reckon the Microsoft marketing team is dead. What skill they had has long since left and now they're down to interns and a couple of janitors.
That sounds pretty damn plausible to me. It's like a note from the future...
... hmm... are some of these ACs just people posting from the future? Maybe the future will be horrifying after all, with the goatse man ruling the world, aided by the villainous tubgirl. They've been warning us all along!
Argh! (runs away)
...but I have installed Windows 1.0 on a couple of machines.
Wow, you really must have hated those users to inflict so much pain on them. What did they do to you? Kill your puppy with a tire iron?
Wait... you're not the guy who installed WinME on his wife's laptop are you? Someone here once admitted to that and... well, that's just abuse.
(I kid, I kid)
I do now!
Well, I've only used it in businesses where some IT guy adds a cost to the project.
Would the free licence extend to (say) a small set of 5-10 users in a business? With DTS packages, schedules, and all the nice bits?
I like SQL Server, and have developed extensively for it, but this statement "certainly better then everything else in the opensource" is wrong because it infers SQL Server is an open sourced product. If you're going to compare am expensive DBMS to a free one, you need to account for the free one being free to install with a $0 per user cost. SQL Server is over-used in business today, with managers buying it for small projects where it's not warranted.
SQL Server is better for some applications than many open source DBMS's, but for some uses SQLite is far better still. It's largely down to requirements, and no DBMS is 'best' in all situations.
It may very well be superstition, in the same way that all religious beliefs are superstition. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily wrong however, as people's belief systems are often central to their view of the world and their place in it. Further, many people take comfort in their belief systems.
These aren't all secret ceremonies either. There are cultural issues around seeing images of the dead, or speaking about them. It may seem quaint to you, but it's a very real thing to them. An equivalent might be for people to talk disrespectfully about your family, living or deceased. Would you be okay for people to do that? I wouldn't, so I respect the Aboriginal culture in their wishes.
Lastly, I'd point out that Aboriginal Australian culture extends back at least 40,000 years and more likely 60,000 years. While they don't have a civilisation in the same mould as ours, they do have something that works for them and has for far longer than any other known civilisation. The destruction of their culture in the last two hundred years has been a long process of taking something unique out of the world. It may have been impossible to avoid, but with every indigenous culture destroyed the richness of the Human race is lessened, not improved.
(For the record, I'm an atheist and very much supportive of the scientific model to discover and explain the Universe. That doesn't mean destroying other cultures or religions though, as many people need to believe something beyond science. Needless destruction of a culture is often irrational.)
Yeah, all those Mac-only programs like Word and Excel, well there's no way I can use that knowledge on a Windows machine now. And those Mac-only programming languages like BASIC, C, C++ and Pascal. Useless now that I use a Windows machine at work. Even those Mac GUI concepts like copy and paste are un-transferable to Windows.
Stupid Apple. Stupid schools.
All that time spent learning apps and stuff on a Mac was totally wasted.
Basically you can gather a list of blue sky requirements, write them up in legalese and then apply for a patent. Easy! Any half-witted project manager can do that in their sleep.
It's trivial to list requirements. Actually solving the many problems in realising the requirements is where all the work is, and applications like this indicate nothing like that.
There is no technical detail here that indicates the patent applicant ever intended to make anything or worse - ever solved any of the problems involved in designing a product like this.
That's where I think the patent system fails - you can essentially patent a requirements document without ever needing to progress further. It's not rewarding an inventor, because an inventor would have either created a prototype or created a design sufficiently detailed to allow a prototype to be built.
Patents like this reward the wrong people.
I'm not going to argue he first few points, because they're pretty accurate. However, this one ...
... about Apple is wrong in every respect. Third parties don't have to do anything but release a product. Apple can like or dislike, should they make the very unusual decision of taking a position on it, but the third party doesn't have to care less what Apple thinks. There's no "blessing" and that sort of obvious trolling undermines the rest of your good points.
And third parties have to be "blessed" and pay homage to the alter of Steve Jobs.
On other points, it's hard to take a "what if" approach and consider what the world without Microsoft would have been like. There'd still be third party apps, as they existed long before Microsoft (which was itself a third party app company before the DOS days). If Apple, Amiga, BeOS or Linux were the dominant player in a Microsoft-less world, we'd still see the same amount of apps around, and probably more. Every OS vendor depends on third parties, no more and no less than Microsoft.
Did Bill Gates, or at least Microsoft, bring down the price of software? Maybe in the server room, but in a world without Microsoft we may have seen more competition in that space, leading to price wars. Maybe, maybe not. Outside the server room I'd say prices have always been about what the market will bear and Microsoft have had little effect there.
I think that history will judge Bill Gates fairly. He centralised a lot of wealth in the computing sector, leading to the behemoth that Microsoft is today. There were problems along the way (anti-trust issues, look and feel lawsuits, etc) and the lustre has faded now. The man today is doing some very worthwhile things with his riches, and that will be largely his legacy, I suspect. As with people like John Rockefeller, his won't be a simple history to write.
The PDF breaks down the WinXP and Vista security slaws/patches, listing each number. It fails to treat competing OSs similarly, leading me to wonder why it does not.
I recall that my 10.4 install had a few patches for components that, while installed with the system, are not enabled by users. I'm thinking of things like Apache here, which is provided as a convenience to developers (and while it'll work fine, it's not meant to be used as a web server on consumer-grade hardware). It's not reasonable to include OS X components that have no equivalent in a Vista (or XP) install, don't install by default and are not meant for general use. I wonder if OpenOffice was included in the Linux patches.
We could see more detail about the specifics, to help or hinder my case, if the author provided the same details for non-MS OSs that he does for MS OSs!
I can see a local exploit would be possible here.
While your back is turned, I can use my own special stylus to modify the user-space contents of your pulverised tree sheet.
On the positive side, remote exploits would be very hard unless they involved some coercion.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but I've since found out that this patch does not correct the QuickTime bug, making the first part of my parent post invalid. It looks more like an Apple screw-up than anything else right now.
I stand by my other comments about the grandparent though.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but I've since found out that this patch does not correct the QuickTime bug, making my parent post invalid.
Looks more like an Apple screw-up than anything else right now.
Well I didn't say Apple did change an API, just that that's one possibility. I'd be surprised if they did, and up until a few moments ago I expected it was an Adobe issue.
Digging a bit further I see that the 8.0.2 update released by Adobe does not address this QuickTime bug, making my reasoning there flawed.
Now we're back to an Apple screw-up.
And who's this "you people?" Are they the same "You people will excuse anything in Windows" or "You people will blame anything but shoddy Linux design" or some other group that you want to lump together into a single stereotypical mass?
There is no evidence that this is related to DRM. Quicktime is a very large sub-system of OS X after all, and I understand that DRM is only at the application level, not the OS level (ie it's not in the system's Quicktime layer).
Regardless, since Adobe released an update a few days ago this seems not to be a problem at Apple's end. Adobe's released indicates either that they used undocumented API behaviour (and have now fixed it) or that Apple changed the APIs in an expected manner and Adobe quickly released the patch.
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=13&platform=Macintosh
Apple make shiny things for fashion victims
That's right up there with "Linux is only a server OS" and "Windows is for DOS apps and games only" as far as bad stereotypes go. Maybe you're upset at Apple right now, but that doesn't make your ridiculous post accurate, true or even logical.
But it's time to admit that Apple are just as much coprporate MP/RI-AA whores as MS.
Are Apple just as bad as Microsoft? Well, we see a few screw-ups here and there, some DRM in iTunes but no actual evidence of this apart from the dogma of some forum posters. You want it to be true, that's clear. Got anything real to back up that throw-away comment, or is it just more hot air? You know, something like adding DRM to non-DRM music that places limits on it that weren't present when originally sold (Zune music sharing), something that actually limits users in some way.
I can stand anti-fanbois even less than fanbois. Both groups define themselves by their relationship with a company to the exclusion of logical thought. Slashdot brings out so many of both camp that reading threads is sometimes like rubbing lemon juice into a papercut.
In part I agree with you - if Apple make a mistake they should be held responsible and they should fix it.
Interestingly, Adobe have already released an update:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=13&platform=Macintosh
Now, why would Adobe release a fix if Apple screwed up? It could be that either Adobe screwed up and their code relied on some undocumented API behaviour or that Apple changed the APIs and Adobe updated their app to support the new APIs.
Regardless of which it is, it doesn't look like a testing issue or a simple screw-up by Apple.