If such a device could be made, I am sure it would have huge sales.
Well, that's kind of the thing, isn't it? On the one hand, we have people like yourself saying "I'm sure it will sell!" On the other hand, we have extremely highly paid experts in market research telling us that a product like that will never sell.
The fact that you want it doesn't mean it'll be a successful product.
Actually, there is. In California, which is the controlling jurisdiction, it's against the law to knowingly publish trade secrets. Unannounced product details are definitely trade secrets.
Not to mention the fact that Nick Ciarelli is apparently still actively engaged in tortious interference.
It holds up pretty well, thanks, it's currently being used for HDTV distribution.
Only at 20 Mbps or higher, which is completely impractical for all purposes but terrestrial broadcast. There's just not enough bandwidth to dedicate 20 Mbps to each and every channel.
10Mbps MPEG2 is pretty good for typical DVD content, or typical NTSC TV
Which would be fine if anybody were still creating content at those resolutions. I'm going to say it again: Come join us in the 21st century.
Also, the typical DVD MPEG2 bitrate is high enough so that there's essentialy no quality loss when encoding a typical TV show to DVD/MPEG2.
You must still be living in a low-definition world. Come join us in the 21st century, then see how your precious MPEG-2 holds up.
And no, the majority of normal people do not watch recorded TV shows on computers (where MPEG4 might make sense), they use DVD players for that.
Well, no, that's not really right, is it? Nobody actually records programming to DVD then watches it. Instead, they watch recorded programming via a PVR-type interface. In that case, MPEG-4 AVC makes perfect sense. Higher quality at lower bit rates. You can store really spectacular program quality at as low as 8 Mbps; with MPEG-2, comparable program quality costs you 20 or 25 Mbps.
Isn't this kind of stuff obsolete now? Everybody's going to MPEG-4. Both cable and satellite providers are deploying MPEG-4 AVC (a.k.a. H.264) as we speak. Only terrestrial broadcasts will stay with MPEG-2, and that's only because ATSC won't tolerate a massive change to the standard they spent more than a decade writing.
that is not sci-fi if the drama of character interaction is the primary focus of the show.
If you're wondering, this opinion explains why the vast majority of genre entertainment is just terrible. Friend, character interaction is the primary focus of every story. At least the ones worth telling.
Aside from mechanical failure, psychological disorders, some crazy disease they found on a planet, and neat special effects for the things you'd see in space, what would make up the content of the show?
How about drama? You know, characters interacting with each other under situations of conflict. Surely you must have heard of it. We've only been telling stories like that for five thousand years.
I believe that any space-based series needs either aliens or an immense crew
Well, thank God you don't tell stories for a living.
I was outed on this very Web site some weeks ago. I thought everybody knew who I was by now.
Bottom line: It sounds like you've been given some information that's either completely misleading or drastically oversimplified. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it would be great if you'd stop confusing people. I would appreciate that so much.
Thank you. I'm glad it's not just me. I just got through writing another comment where I opined humbly that, for all it had going for it, "Babylon 5" was incredibly stupid. Hugely, massively stupid.
It's not a problem to like something stupid, but the fact that it's stupid should go a long way toward explaining why the vast majority of people couldn't give a shit about "Babylon 5."
1. I think a really solid argument can be made that the old shows were way too long. You want to argue for a happy medium with lots of two-parters, fine. You want to argue for the return of the 200-minute mega-sagas consisting almost entirely of people running around styro-lined sound stages, include me out.
2. She's supposed to be bland. She's supposed to be the everyman, the one character the audience can relate to.
3. Okay, obviously that's a matter of taste. You could have saved a lot of typing by just saying "me no likey."
Everybody lauds "Babylon 5's" story arc, and rightly so. But a very important fact sometimes gets lost in the fray:
"Babylon 5" was fundamentally really stupid.
There, I said it. I'm sorry: space aliens, time travel, one deus ex machina after another, huge plot elements that just to make no sense.
If you can swallow all that, "Babylon 5" was a pretty good TV show most of the time. But let's face it. Most people just aren't willing to swallow all that.
It's entirely possible for science fiction stories to be good. It's been done. It's within the realm of possibility. But in order to get there, you have to make as few demands on the audience's bullshit detectors as possible. When it's just one piece of absurdity right after the other, we don't call it drama. We call it comedy.
Excellent post but for one point. We're shipping a 64-bit-clean Core Foundation. I don't know if it's in Tiger or not, but if it's not, it will be available soon after. We're also already shipping a 64-bit-clean CF Lite as part of Darwin, so you can have Core Foundation support across platforms.
You're never, ever going to choose between Xcode and Visual Studio. Ever. You're never going to sit down and ask yourself, "Gee, should I use Xcode or Visual Studio?" Instead, you're going to have made some other decisions like "Should I write this program for the Mac or for the PC?" and those decisions will dictate whether you use Xcode or Visual Studio.
So comparing the two makes no sense whatsoever.
The only possible motivation for anybody to want to compare them would be to come to the conclusion that one or the other sucks, which is just childish nonsense.
You're missing something massively important. The reason why we chose not to release 64-bit versions of the UI frameworks is that they run much slower than the 32-bit versions.
User interface code is really pretty messy when you get right down to it. You're doing a lot of abstraction, moving a lot of pointers and integers around. On exactly the same G5-based computer, a 64-bit UI is going to run considerably slower than a 32-bit UI because of cache exhaustion. Because you're using pointers that are twice as big as you need them to be, you can only fit half as many of them in the various caches that are there to speed up your computer's performance. That effectively cuts your caches in half.
So we had two choices: Either waste a ton of developer time releasing 64-bit-clean versions of the UI frameworks and then tell our developers not to use them, or just don't ship them at all.
Believe me, the Final Cut Pro and Shake teams were pissed off about this. Their expectation was that they'd be able to release 64-bit versions of their applications by NAB. But a 64-bit version of FCP with 64-bit Pro Kit is less interactive than the 32-bit version on the same hardware, for very marginal gains in actual utility. FCP is already very good at making use of up to 2 GB of RAM when dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of data on disk; adding 64-bit support would have helped few and hindered many.
I'm gonna make this fast because I'm sick of writing the same comment in every Tiger article. Core Image is Apple's implementation of hardware-accelerated 2D image processing. It's comparable to SGI's ImageVision Library, which you should look up right now.
Core Audio is a hyperlow-latency audio-processing framework.
Neither of these things is in any way related to Direct X, Open GL, or any form of 3D programming.
That really surprises me. The feedback we've gotten from developers trying to use Tiger builds, all the way up to A420, is that it's far too slow for everyday use. It's much slower than Panther in those builds because nothing has been optimized. It has a lot of debugging code that makes everything run very, very slowly compared to 10.3.
I suspect you might have seen a bogus "review."
Tiger is a great OS. But the development builds are not fast.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
(Why beat around the bush?)
Neither. It's filled Delphi 151 Heat Transfer Fluid which is mostly propylene glycol.
If such a device could be made, I am sure it would have huge sales.
Well, that's kind of the thing, isn't it? On the one hand, we have people like yourself saying "I'm sure it will sell!" On the other hand, we have extremely highly paid experts in market research telling us that a product like that will never sell.
The fact that you want it doesn't mean it'll be a successful product.
Actually, there is. In California, which is the controlling jurisdiction, it's against the law to knowingly publish trade secrets. Unannounced product details are definitely trade secrets.
Not to mention the fact that Nick Ciarelli is apparently still actively engaged in tortious interference.
Shake 4 and FCP 5 have been public since Christmas. No surprises here.
It holds up pretty well, thanks, it's currently being used for HDTV distribution.
Only at 20 Mbps or higher, which is completely impractical for all purposes but terrestrial broadcast. There's just not enough bandwidth to dedicate 20 Mbps to each and every channel.
10Mbps MPEG2 is pretty good for typical DVD content, or typical NTSC TV
Which would be fine if anybody were still creating content at those resolutions. I'm going to say it again: Come join us in the 21st century.
Also, the typical DVD MPEG2 bitrate is high enough so that there's essentialy no quality loss when encoding a typical TV show to DVD/MPEG2.
You must still be living in a low-definition world. Come join us in the 21st century, then see how your precious MPEG-2 holds up.
And no, the majority of normal people do not watch recorded TV shows on computers (where MPEG4 might make sense), they use DVD players for that.
Well, no, that's not really right, is it? Nobody actually records programming to DVD then watches it. Instead, they watch recorded programming via a PVR-type interface. In that case, MPEG-4 AVC makes perfect sense. Higher quality at lower bit rates. You can store really spectacular program quality at as low as 8 Mbps; with MPEG-2, comparable program quality costs you 20 or 25 Mbps.
Isn't this kind of stuff obsolete now? Everybody's going to MPEG-4. Both cable and satellite providers are deploying MPEG-4 AVC (a.k.a. H.264) as we speak. Only terrestrial broadcasts will stay with MPEG-2, and that's only because ATSC won't tolerate a massive change to the standard they spent more than a decade writing.
that is not sci-fi if the drama of character interaction is the primary focus of the show.
If you're wondering, this opinion explains why the vast majority of genre entertainment is just terrible. Friend, character interaction is the primary focus of every story. At least the ones worth telling.
Aside from mechanical failure, psychological disorders, some crazy disease they found on a planet, and neat special effects for the things you'd see in space, what would make up the content of the show?
How about drama? You know, characters interacting with each other under situations of conflict. Surely you must have heard of it. We've only been telling stories like that for five thousand years.
I believe that any space-based series needs either aliens or an immense crew
Well, thank God you don't tell stories for a living.
Yes, I am. What of it?
I was outed on this very Web site some weeks ago. I thought everybody knew who I was by now.
Bottom line: It sounds like you've been given some information that's either completely misleading or drastically oversimplified. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it would be great if you'd stop confusing people. I would appreciate that so much.
Thank you. I'm glad it's not just me. I just got through writing another comment where I opined humbly that, for all it had going for it, "Babylon 5" was incredibly stupid. Hugely, massively stupid.
It's not a problem to like something stupid, but the fact that it's stupid should go a long way toward explaining why the vast majority of people couldn't give a shit about "Babylon 5."
1. I think a really solid argument can be made that the old shows were way too long. You want to argue for a happy medium with lots of two-parters, fine. You want to argue for the return of the 200-minute mega-sagas consisting almost entirely of people running around styro-lined sound stages, include me out.
2. She's supposed to be bland. She's supposed to be the everyman, the one character the audience can relate to.
3. Okay, obviously that's a matter of taste. You could have saved a lot of typing by just saying "me no likey."
Everybody lauds "Babylon 5's" story arc, and rightly so. But a very important fact sometimes gets lost in the fray:
"Babylon 5" was fundamentally really stupid.
There, I said it. I'm sorry: space aliens, time travel, one deus ex machina after another, huge plot elements that just to make no sense.
If you can swallow all that, "Babylon 5" was a pretty good TV show most of the time. But let's face it. Most people just aren't willing to swallow all that.
It's entirely possible for science fiction stories to be good. It's been done. It's within the realm of possibility. But in order to get there, you have to make as few demands on the audience's bullshit detectors as possible. When it's just one piece of absurdity right after the other, we don't call it drama. We call it comedy.
Excellent post but for one point. We're shipping a 64-bit-clean Core Foundation. I don't know if it's in Tiger or not, but if it's not, it will be available soon after. We're also already shipping a 64-bit-clean CF Lite as part of Darwin, so you can have Core Foundation support across platforms.
You're never, ever going to choose between Xcode and Visual Studio. Ever. You're never going to sit down and ask yourself, "Gee, should I use Xcode or Visual Studio?" Instead, you're going to have made some other decisions like "Should I write this program for the Mac or for the PC?" and those decisions will dictate whether you use Xcode or Visual Studio.
So comparing the two makes no sense whatsoever.
The only possible motivation for anybody to want to compare them would be to come to the conclusion that one or the other sucks, which is just childish nonsense.
Image Units are written in the OpenGL Shading Language. The only thing it has in common with Open GL is the name.
After spending $3,800 on a new Mac, you really shouldn't be complaining about an extra $129 for a whole new set of features and functions.
is the new XCode 2 included by default? (for free?).
Yes.
How does it compare with Delphi or VS.Net?
You do know that Xcode only runs on the Mac, right? You can't compare these things. They don't run on the same platforms.
would a G4 1.x GHz w/ 1Gig of RAM be ok for development machine?
More than okay. That's about five times the computer you need for application development.
is it really practical to write Mac GUI apps (business, personal, that kind of stuff) using some high-level language (like Python or Ruby).
No. The only language that we support fully is Objective C. You can also try using Java, but I wouldn't recommend it.
You're missing something massively important. The reason why we chose not to release 64-bit versions of the UI frameworks is that they run much slower than the 32-bit versions.
User interface code is really pretty messy when you get right down to it. You're doing a lot of abstraction, moving a lot of pointers and integers around. On exactly the same G5-based computer, a 64-bit UI is going to run considerably slower than a 32-bit UI because of cache exhaustion. Because you're using pointers that are twice as big as you need them to be, you can only fit half as many of them in the various caches that are there to speed up your computer's performance. That effectively cuts your caches in half.
So we had two choices: Either waste a ton of developer time releasing 64-bit-clean versions of the UI frameworks and then tell our developers not to use them, or just don't ship them at all.
Believe me, the Final Cut Pro and Shake teams were pissed off about this. Their expectation was that they'd be able to release 64-bit versions of their applications by NAB. But a 64-bit version of FCP with 64-bit Pro Kit is less interactive than the 32-bit version on the same hardware, for very marginal gains in actual utility. FCP is already very good at making use of up to 2 GB of RAM when dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of data on disk; adding 64-bit support would have helped few and hindered many.
Good God, are you ever not a graphics developer.
I'm gonna make this fast because I'm sick of writing the same comment in every Tiger article. Core Image is Apple's implementation of hardware-accelerated 2D image processing. It's comparable to SGI's ImageVision Library, which you should look up right now.
Core Audio is a hyperlow-latency audio-processing framework.
Neither of these things is in any way related to Direct X, Open GL, or any form of 3D programming.
That really surprises me. The feedback we've gotten from developers trying to use Tiger builds, all the way up to A420, is that it's far too slow for everyday use. It's much slower than Panther in those builds because nothing has been optimized. It has a lot of debugging code that makes everything run very, very slowly compared to 10.3.
I suspect you might have seen a bogus "review."
Tiger is a great OS. But the development builds are not fast.
So yeah. Rambling incoherently then. Got it.
Wow. Prejudiced much? I suppose you're from Oxfordshire and look down your nose at anybody from north of Luton?