Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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Let's say that Apple has 99.9999999% of all desktop installs. Even then, almost none of them actually use GCC.
Mac OS X itself is compiled with GCC 4. That was the point. Hence, all Mac users depend on GCC 4. That's 40 million and counting according to the latest figures.
There was a Windows port of QuickTime long before iTunes came along to sell iPods and music.
We did it for Adobe. They wanted to run Premiere on Windows, so they paid us to port QuickTime. At least that's the story as I understand it. That was 15 years ago, way before my time here.
Are you referring to the "viral" restrictions of the GPL, or to confusion resulting from different pieces of software being made available under different licenses
The whole mess.
And as long as I'm asking silly questions, can you ask somebody in retail what's up with the still-not-announced Pioneer Place store?
Totally different department. I'm not even sure what building those guys are in, or even if they're on this campus.
Well, I suppose it is possible to re-define lying, coersion, theft, blocking competition, price fixing, impersonating law enforcement, and double-charging as actually being "ethical."
Sigh. Judge, jury and executioner, huh? Do everybody a favor and take your blind hate-mongering someplace else.
Apple's website makes a point of comparing Mac OS X to UNIX
A comparison that clearly confused you. I'll make sure to tell marketing about that. Let me explain it. Oh, wait; I already did. "Mac OS X is an evolution of Unix," I said. "It is not Unix. That's why we've never sought the Unix trademark."
What part of this is unclear, now that you've heard it a second time?
Also, if it weren't UNIX (TM or no), odds are the XServe servers wouldn't be seeing installation into big university clusters.
Complete non-sequitur. One thing has nothing to do with the other, and we both know it.
It is an opaque undocumented proprietary de facto standard that Microsoft maintains for the main purpose of customer lock-in and other monopolistic behavior.
Your prejudices are showing.
By 'standards' I mean the common case of ISO, IEEE, etc.
Ah, yes. The old de facto/de jure argument. It was boring ten years ago when it first came up, and it's boring now. Standards are standards because they're universally accepted, not because they're legislated into being.
As documents grow larger than the typical inter-office document or presentation, only tools like Latex and DocBook can scale adequately
You seem to be missing a vitally important point here. Let me repeat it: Latex and Docbook are tools for computer programmers, not for normal people. Normal people will not sit down and write a computer program just to produce a document. Will not happen.
However it is very possible to not like Microsoft for purely objective reasons (e.g., by gauging their sense of ethics
You are aware that your idea of ethics is not an objective standard, right? This part of your comment was actually a very clever joke, right?
Please. All that means is that you don't like what he writes. Calling people with whom you disagree names is grammar-school stuff.
a fiercely anti-homosexual administration
Okay, we'll that's demonstrably false. Calling somebody with whom you disagree a bigot is also grammar-school stuff.
in other words, he's a hypocrite.
Everybody's a hypocrite. I'm a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite. Everybody's a hypocrite. It's part of the human condition.
When a hypocrite claims to hate hypocrisy... what is that, but hypocrisy itself?
Translation: Don't be such a dumbass. The issue at hand had nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality or with hypocrisy. It had to do with intolerance. The blogger in question wasn't willing to tolerate a different opinion, so he launched a jihad, levelling personal attacks against somebody he didn't like, and then patting himself on the back for his cleverness. It's disgusting and it's despicable, and I don't care what side of the aisle you're on.
I guess the bright side is that you provided an excellent illustration of what I was bemoaning.
1. Who cares what he's a former of? 2. People whom you disagree with are as free to publish as anybody else; that's what "freedom of the press" means. 3. Try a little tolerance on for size. You might just find that you like the way it fits.
What? Why do you say that? Of course he was a reporter. He was employed by a news organization that paid him to write news stories for publication. That's what "reporter" means.
Are you one of those "I say he wasn't a reporter because he didn't write what I wanted him to" kind of people?
Not only is it "some blogger." It's the same blogger who, a few months ago, launched a campaign of personal destruction against a reporter he didn't like, linking that reporter to not merely homosexuality but to homosexual prostitution in order to humiliate him and drive him out of the press corps.
Bafflingly, this blogger claims to be homosexual himself.
If that's true, this blogger is the most openly bigoted homosexual person I've ever heard of.
Linux and UNIX have a userbase comparable in size to the Mac userbase
Only if you count servers, appliances and single-purpose workstations. If you count general-purpose home and work computers only, which is what we're talking about here, the number drops beyond the level of a rounding error.
Again: I know you don't like this. That's been well established already. But it doesn't change the fact.
Furthermore, please stop lumping Mac OS X in with Unix. Mac OS X is an evolution of Unix; it is not Unix. That's why we've never sought the Unix trademark. Our operating system is not meant to be Unix, nor is it meant to be Unix compatible. It takes some of the principles on which Unix was built and drags them, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
Documents posted to web pages really don't need multi-author support, a wiki or blog system is better suited to that.
That's not correct. Your documents may not need multi-author support, but others' do. The Web is a collaboration tool. Don't try to tell people that they can't use it the way they see fit.
For someone seeking comments on a standards document at a website, using a non-standard word processor doesn't make sense (LaTeX, DocBook, or even plain text are much better suited to standards documents).
Okay, that's completely wrong. First of all, Microsoft Word is the standard. Secondly, when did we start talking about "standards documents," whatever those are? Thirdly, no human being should ever be burdened with having to write a computer program just to produce a document; Latex and Docbook are tools for computer programmers, not normal people.
It may be convenient for the lazy, but that isn't an excuse.
Um. Why not, pray tell? Isn't the purpose of the computer to make things easier for us?
Let's really cut all the bullshit and get right to the bare facts here, shall we? You just don't like Microsoft. This prejudice has clouded your judgment. Isn't that the crux of the matter?
Not gonna happen. Did you actually look at that site? The type looks like it was taken from a screen shot of a Mac running System 6.
Human factors are important. No support for advanced typography? Non-starter. No support for drag-and-drop? Non-starter. No support for system services? Non-starter.
When are computer programmers finally going to understand that "good enough" isn't good enough?
When the tool you're choosing is over $300 per user, and not available on several significant computing platforms ?
Microsoft Word is available for Windows and the Mac. There are no other significant platforms. Sorry, I know you don't like hearing that, but that's how it is.
I'll stop bitching about the fact that you're too damn lazy to use PDF or HTML
You say that like PDF and HTML are equivalent to Word's file format. They're not. All three do radically different things. It's like saying "I'll stop bitching about the fact that you use a jackhammer instead of a paintbrush."
Oh, and what version of Word are you using there ?
It doesn't matter. Microsoft has, for all their faults, done a spectacular job of maintaining file-format compatibility.
Using.doc format files to share information on the internet is "just so wrong"
No, it's not. You don't like it. I get that. But for some applications, it's the perfect solution.
However, web applications are not incapable of incrementally saving state
In point of fact, they are. They're also incapable of supporting basic functions like undo.
For example, Word only saves every 10 minutes by default.
Since when have we looked to Microsoft Word as an example of good software design? There's no reason at all why an application shouldn't maintain nonvolatile state with every keystroke or control manipulation. It has to maintain undo state anyway.
Web applications don't just omit these basic features. They're technologically incapable of including them.
I am 100% certain, beyond any possibility of doubt, that your Web applications suck.
Example #1: Saving state. Let's say I'm filling out an invoice form on your cute little Web application. I get halfway through, and poof. The power to the building goes out. When my computer comes back up, all that information I entered is just gone, because Web applications are incapable of incrementally saving state.
Your applications suck. You may not realize it, but that's just because you're not thinking about it very hard.
You're ignoring the fact that Word has features no other program has. Multiple-author support is a great example.
You came at this by saying that sharing Word documents on the Web is "just so wrong." I dispute that. I say that, in many cases, it is exactly right. You should use the right tool for the job, do you not agree with that?
Because if you are posting on a website, you should use something that works for others.
Not true. If you're posting on a Web site, you should use whatever works for yourself and your intended audience. Everybody else can take a flying leap.
Wow. The commentator on NPR you heard, if he actually said that, was out of his fucking mind.
Web applications work pretty well for ordering pizza. For anything more complicated, they suck. PDF (which has nothing to do with the Web at all) and Flash won't change that.
Actually, Adobe's way more worried right now that we're going to Shake them to death.
Apple has established a track record in recent years of taking pretty decent third-party applications that were not succeeding in the market, buying them, sinking tons of capital into them, and making them industry leaders. We did it with Final Cut Pro. We basically did it with Shake as of the newly released version 4.
If we found a third-party product that does a lot of what InDesign does, bought it, and perfected it, would Adobe have a problem on their hands? Bet your ass they would.
(There are no such plans to do that right now. But that sort of thing can change on a whim around here.)
This had nothing to do with their acquisition of Macromedia, I'm sure, but it most certainly did have a lot to do with their very friendly attitude toward us over the past year. Ever since we first showed them Spotlight last spring and Core Image in the summer of 2003, they've been very attentive to us. I'm told that CS 2 reflects a lot of that... though unfortunately I haven't had a chance to see for myself yet. Different group.
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Let's say that Apple has 99.9999999% of all desktop installs. Even then, almost none of them actually use GCC.
Mac OS X itself is compiled with GCC 4. That was the point. Hence, all Mac users depend on GCC 4. That's 40 million and counting according to the latest figures.
There was a Windows port of QuickTime long before iTunes came along to sell iPods and music.
We did it for Adobe. They wanted to run Premiere on Windows, so they paid us to port QuickTime. At least that's the story as I understand it. That was 15 years ago, way before my time here.
Are you referring to the "viral" restrictions of the GPL, or to confusion resulting from different pieces of software being made available under different licenses
The whole mess.
And as long as I'm asking silly questions, can you ask somebody in retail what's up with the still-not-announced Pioneer Place store?
Totally different department. I'm not even sure what building those guys are in, or even if they're on this campus.
Well, I suppose it is possible to re-define lying, coersion, theft, blocking competition, price fixing, impersonating law enforcement, and double-charging as actually being "ethical."
Sigh. Judge, jury and executioner, huh? Do everybody a favor and take your blind hate-mongering someplace else.
Apple's website makes a point of comparing Mac OS X to UNIX
A comparison that clearly confused you. I'll make sure to tell marketing about that. Let me explain it. Oh, wait; I already did. "Mac OS X is an evolution of Unix," I said. "It is not Unix. That's why we've never sought the Unix trademark."
What part of this is unclear, now that you've heard it a second time?
Also, if it weren't UNIX (TM or no), odds are the XServe servers wouldn't be seeing installation into big university clusters.
Complete non-sequitur. One thing has nothing to do with the other, and we both know it.
Not authorable. Not open. Not attributable or encryptable. Not supported by content indexing systems.
Flash Paper is not a competitor to PDF, major or otherwise. It's not even in the same galaxy.
But the funniest part of your comment was the way you refered to "simple Cold Fusion tags." Is it 1995 all of a sudden?
It is an opaque undocumented proprietary de facto standard that Microsoft maintains for the main purpose of customer lock-in and other monopolistic behavior.
Your prejudices are showing.
By 'standards' I mean the common case of ISO, IEEE, etc.
Ah, yes. The old de facto/de jure argument. It was boring ten years ago when it first came up, and it's boring now. Standards are standards because they're universally accepted, not because they're legislated into being.
As documents grow larger than the typical inter-office document or presentation, only tools like Latex and DocBook can scale adequately
You seem to be missing a vitally important point here. Let me repeat it: Latex and Docbook are tools for computer programmers, not for normal people. Normal people will not sit down and write a computer program just to produce a document. Will not happen.
However it is very possible to not like Microsoft for purely objective reasons (e.g., by gauging their sense of ethics
You are aware that your idea of ethics is not an objective standard, right? This part of your comment was actually a very clever joke, right?
that term is 'shill.'
... what is that, but hypocrisy itself?
Please. All that means is that you don't like what he writes. Calling people with whom you disagree names is grammar-school stuff.
a fiercely anti-homosexual administration
Okay, we'll that's demonstrably false. Calling somebody with whom you disagree a bigot is also grammar-school stuff.
in other words, he's a hypocrite.
Everybody's a hypocrite. I'm a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite. Everybody's a hypocrite. It's part of the human condition.
When a hypocrite claims to hate hypocrisy
Translation: Don't be such a dumbass. The issue at hand had nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality or with hypocrisy. It had to do with intolerance. The blogger in question wasn't willing to tolerate a different opinion, so he launched a jihad, levelling personal attacks against somebody he didn't like, and then patting himself on the back for his cleverness. It's disgusting and it's despicable, and I don't care what side of the aisle you're on.
I guess the bright side is that you provided an excellent illustration of what I was bemoaning.
1. Who cares what he's a former of?
2. People whom you disagree with are as free to publish as anybody else; that's what "freedom of the press" means.
3. Try a little tolerance on for size. You might just find that you like the way it fits.
What? Why do you say that? Of course he was a reporter. He was employed by a news organization that paid him to write news stories for publication. That's what "reporter" means.
Are you one of those "I say he wasn't a reporter because he didn't write what I wanted him to" kind of people?
Not only is it "some blogger." It's the same blogger who, a few months ago, launched a campaign of personal destruction against a reporter he didn't like, linking that reporter to not merely homosexuality but to homosexual prostitution in order to humiliate him and drive him out of the press corps.
Bafflingly, this blogger claims to be homosexual himself.
If that's true, this blogger is the most openly bigoted homosexual person I've ever heard of.
Linux and UNIX have a userbase comparable in size to the Mac userbase
Only if you count servers, appliances and single-purpose workstations. If you count general-purpose home and work computers only, which is what we're talking about here, the number drops beyond the level of a rounding error.
Again: I know you don't like this. That's been well established already. But it doesn't change the fact.
Furthermore, please stop lumping Mac OS X in with Unix. Mac OS X is an evolution of Unix; it is not Unix. That's why we've never sought the Unix trademark. Our operating system is not meant to be Unix, nor is it meant to be Unix compatible. It takes some of the principles on which Unix was built and drags them, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
Documents posted to web pages really don't need multi-author support, a wiki or blog system is better suited to that.
That's not correct. Your documents may not need multi-author support, but others' do. The Web is a collaboration tool. Don't try to tell people that they can't use it the way they see fit.
For someone seeking comments on a standards document at a website, using a non-standard word processor doesn't make sense (LaTeX, DocBook, or even plain text are much better suited to standards documents).
Okay, that's completely wrong. First of all, Microsoft Word is the standard. Secondly, when did we start talking about "standards documents," whatever those are? Thirdly, no human being should ever be burdened with having to write a computer program just to produce a document; Latex and Docbook are tools for computer programmers, not normal people.
It may be convenient for the lazy, but that isn't an excuse.
Um. Why not, pray tell? Isn't the purpose of the computer to make things easier for us?
Let's really cut all the bullshit and get right to the bare facts here, shall we? You just don't like Microsoft. This prejudice has clouded your judgment. Isn't that the crux of the matter?
Not gonna happen. Did you actually look at that site? The type looks like it was taken from a screen shot of a Mac running System 6.
Human factors are important. No support for advanced typography? Non-starter. No support for drag-and-drop? Non-starter. No support for system services? Non-starter.
When are computer programmers finally going to understand that "good enough" isn't good enough?
When the tool you're choosing is over $300 per user, and not available on several significant computing platforms ?
.doc format files to share information on the internet is "just so wrong"
Microsoft Word is available for Windows and the Mac. There are no other significant platforms. Sorry, I know you don't like hearing that, but that's how it is.
I'll stop bitching about the fact that you're too damn lazy to use PDF or HTML
You say that like PDF and HTML are equivalent to Word's file format. They're not. All three do radically different things. It's like saying "I'll stop bitching about the fact that you use a jackhammer instead of a paintbrush."
Oh, and what version of Word are you using there ?
It doesn't matter. Microsoft has, for all their faults, done a spectacular job of maintaining file-format compatibility.
Using
No, it's not. You don't like it. I get that. But for some applications, it's the perfect solution.
However, web applications are not incapable of incrementally saving state
In point of fact, they are. They're also incapable of supporting basic functions like undo.
For example, Word only saves every 10 minutes by default.
Since when have we looked to Microsoft Word as an example of good software design? There's no reason at all why an application shouldn't maintain nonvolatile state with every keystroke or control manipulation. It has to maintain undo state anyway.
Web applications don't just omit these basic features. They're technologically incapable of including them.
I am 100% certain, beyond any possibility of doubt, that your Web applications suck.
Example #1: Saving state. Let's say I'm filling out an invoice form on your cute little Web application. I get halfway through, and poof. The power to the building goes out. When my computer comes back up, all that information I entered is just gone, because Web applications are incapable of incrementally saving state.
Your applications suck. You may not realize it, but that's just because you're not thinking about it very hard.
You're ignoring the fact that Word has features no other program has. Multiple-author support is a great example.
You came at this by saying that sharing Word documents on the Web is "just so wrong." I dispute that. I say that, in many cases, it is exactly right. You should use the right tool for the job, do you not agree with that?
Because if you are posting on a website, you should use something that works for others.
Not true. If you're posting on a Web site, you should use whatever works for yourself and your intended audience. Everybody else can take a flying leap.
Why not? Information is supposed to be free, isn't it?
Wrong? Why wrong? A document is a document. Why shouldn't people use whatever works for them?
Wow. The commentator on NPR you heard, if he actually said that, was out of his fucking mind.
Web applications work pretty well for ordering pizza. For anything more complicated, they suck. PDF (which has nothing to do with the Web at all) and Flash won't change that.
Actually, Adobe's way more worried right now that we're going to Shake them to death.
... though unfortunately I haven't had a chance to see for myself yet. Different group.
Apple has established a track record in recent years of taking pretty decent third-party applications that were not succeeding in the market, buying them, sinking tons of capital into them, and making them industry leaders. We did it with Final Cut Pro. We basically did it with Shake as of the newly released version 4.
If we found a third-party product that does a lot of what InDesign does, bought it, and perfected it, would Adobe have a problem on their hands? Bet your ass they would.
(There are no such plans to do that right now. But that sort of thing can change on a whim around here.)
This had nothing to do with their acquisition of Macromedia, I'm sure, but it most certainly did have a lot to do with their very friendly attitude toward us over the past year. Ever since we first showed them Spotlight last spring and Core Image in the summer of 2003, they've been very attentive to us. I'm told that CS 2 reflects a lot of that
So Microsoft would get PostScript and PDF, the main defenses against .doc propogation?
Either you don't understand what PostScript and PDF are, or you don't understand what Microsoft Word does.
No idea which, but it's definitely one of those.
Isn't it neat to learn new things?
If by "borrowed" you mean "bought." Mac OS X was largely based on NEXTSTEP, which we bought from NeXT's shareholders for more than $400 million.