"Since the iPhone is running Leopard, maybe that is one of the top secret features we can expect."
I certainly think so, now that the implications of the iPhone interface have sunk in. It's clear that the interface animations are produced by Core Animation, and I think we can expect as big a leap in Leopard's interface over previous versions of OS X, as OS X was over System 9 et al. I honestly believe that Apple is deliberately waiting for Microsoft to release Vista before they start talking about Leopard, just so they can show them up by demonstrating a whole lot of gee-whiz capabilities. If you thought the iPhone interface was dazzling, you'd better buckle up for Leopard. Jobs will guarantee that it's as impressive as hell. He's waited decades to stick it to Bill, and he's going to relish every moment of it.
This is great strategy on Apple's part. It will be a major embarrassment for Microsoft, to launch a huge (and no doubt expensive) advertising campaign introducing their most advanced operating system ever, only for Apple to come out with Leopard a short time afterward and make it look totally obsolete. Vista is going to get Zuned. The worst part for Microsoft is that they saw this coming when the iPhone interface burst onto the scene. I imagine that there's some frantic damage control going on in Redmond, wondering how they're going to save face. Hmmm....Come to think of it, isn't Vista supposed to be released on January 30th? Where are the media announcements and massive ad campaign? They're being awfully low-key about such an important OS. Compare this to the hype around Windows 95; they're acting as if they're already embarrassed.
"Jobs missed a golden opportunity at this keynote. Given the momentum and the increased buzz around Apple, their slowly increasing market share, more developers on board, Bootcamp etc. he could have finally presented Apple as a serious and viable alternative to Microsoft. For everyone. But instead he decided to go with a f**king phone"
I disagree. There's been so much buzz about the iPhone that only a few people have been asking about Macs and Leopard, and why Jobs didn't even so much as mention them. I must admit that I was pretty dazzled by the iPhone's interface, and it took me a couple days to start sorting out the implications.
I'm convinced that Leopard's new interface will support multi-touch technology (MTI). Am I the only person who believes that Apple has already thought of vastly more expansive uses for MTI than a mere smartphone display? Hello? Mac Tablet anyone? The iPhone interface is merely the tip of the iceberg of possibilities. Take a look at the video demo at the Multi-Touch Interaction Research group's site and imagine some or most of these capabilities, or even greater capabilities, in Leopard. Interestingly, there's a note on the site that says they saw the keynote, and that they have some more exciting stuff coming up soon.
Jobs said nothing about new Macs, new displays, or OS X 10.5 for one reason: he believes that what he has up his sleeve will make Vista look like ancient technology to Joe Consumer, and he's deliberately waiting for Microsoft to launch their expensive media blitz introducing Vista before dropping a Leopard-spotted nuke on them. His aim is to embarrass Microsoft. And I believe that Microsoft came to that conclusion while the keynote was going on, but they still have no choice but to kick Vista out the door.
Joe Consumer has already seen the iPhone's interface, courtesy the mainstream media. He'll be primed for multi-touch interface on a personal computer, and I foresee PC salespeople having an interesting time in the aftermath of Leopard's introduction: "Yeah, that's a pretty cheap machine, but how come I can't just drag things around with my finger like the guy at the Apple Store showed me?"
As many here have pointed out, Macs don't do anything that PC's can't do (much less if you count games and enterprise apps); iPods do less than many other available DAP's; the iPhone won't offer any capabilities unavailable on other, existing smartphones. The difference in all three cases is how Apple pulls the interface together in ways that appeal and make sense to average users i.e., non-Slashdot readers. I believe that Jobs has high hopes that Leopard will present an interface that will finally, clearly, distinguish Macs from PC's in the minds of the average consumer, in the same way that their respective interfaces distinguish the iPod and iPhone from competing devices. I believe that Jobs honestly feels that 2007 is the year of destiny for the Macintosh.
I remember reading a few months ago that some reseachers had a found a higher incidence of schizophrenia among persons who, when small children, had had cats in their households, leading some to believe that Toxoplasmosis gondii may be a causal factor. Apparently, it is claimed that new research has confirmed this. This is of personal interest to me because my 14 year-old son was infected by Toxoplasmosis a couple years ago during a vist to Trinidad. Physicians suspect that the most likely source was my wife's aunt's home-made yogurt, which my kids love. My wife's aunt is an animal lover, and keeps numerous dogs and cats, as well as feeding hosts of wild birds that descend on the house every morning.
It was discovered after he complained about spots in his vision, and an opthalmological determined that there was a lesion on his retina which was flaking away. A blood test confirmed the presence of Toxoplasmosis gondii. Now he has to have an annual examination to ensure that the parasite is being kept under control by antibiotics, but it's always an extremely apprehensive time for us.
"it has also given us a bloated military and lots of wars, because that bloated military wants to do something."
OK, I'll bite. Since you're obviously an expert, please be so kind as to tell us exactly how big the US military should be to defend the US, deter would-be agressors, fulfill international treaty obligations, etc. And do you honestly believe that servicemen and women want to go into combat, and risk life and limb? For what, the excitement of battle? Or do you believe that the military dictates foreign policy to elected officials? "We're bored, and we have all this untested high-tech shit laying around. I know! Let's invade someone!" Generals and admirals are the interface with the civilian overseers of the armed services, and as such tend to be highly-political animals, especially when it comes to defending pet programs against budget cuts. But to suggest that they instigate warfare in order to validate their weapon systems, strategy, operational abilities etc, is not only naive, it is insulting.
When war breaks out, blame the politicians, not the people who have to fight it. I do agree with your comments about effective funding for research, but by calling the military a "gimmick" you're merely parading your ignorance of geopolitical reality. Do you honestly believe that the US doesn't need armed forces? Sadly, the fact that the US can more afford a more powerful military than any other nation has tempted our elected things into pursuing adventurist policies. We have leaders who have put young people in harm's way to scratch an ideological itch. *cough* neocons *cough*
"...ok, that's harsh, but the reality is that, as his publicist put it, "Justin is movie star." Hmm... seems like he got way more exposure doing the mac ads. Movie star my ass."
Yes, it is a bit harsh, and Long himself has stated that he did in fact receive far more recognition from the ads. This is part of the statement from Long's publicist: "Every ad you see Justin in is for that previous time period only...There's no long-term deal with him...Justin's a movie star, not a commercial guy."
However, the statement directly contradicts what Long himself said. He was quoted by Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times: "If I had been egotistical about the movies, I have been brought back to earth. Nine out of 10 people who recognize me recognize me from the commercials." Seems to me that his publicist should consult with her client first before saying things that could prove embarrassing for him. Or maybe her statement was scripted by Karl Rove.
I posted this comment a month ago, and more than ever I believe it to be the case:
"It's not the iPod or the iTunes Store that are so compelling. It's iTunes itself. Until a competitor produces software that makes managing your music and video collection and getting it from your computer to your music player easier than iTunes does, there'll never be an "iPod killer", regardless of features, price, or ease of use [and topping the click-wheel navigation interface is going to be a bitch of a mountain to climb]. The ease of use of iTunes made the Store possible, and it is that ease of use of the SERVICE, not the iPod, that is the real key to Apple's dominance in the legal download market. The point that most people are missing by focusing on the iPod is that Apple is already looking beyond it. Competitors who focus on the device, and not on the service ecosystem it represents, are fighting the wrong battle.
The iTunes Store is cluing in the average consumer (i.e., the multitudes who don't know or care that Slashdot exists) that buying digital content from the Web is an easy process, and when they're used to the idea, it won't matter to Apple if an "iPod killer" exists or not. They'll be too firmly entrenched in people's living rooms to give a damn, and a hell of a lot more people own TV's than own digital music players. With the prices of LCD TV's falling, how difficult would it be for Apple to stuff the iMac's guts and iTV functionality into a television and position it as THE Next Big Thing? Especially if Disney, through Jobs' connections, provides some marketing muscle? I can easily envision Apple sweetening the pot by offering free Disney classics on DVD, or via iTunes Store, exclusively with the purchase of a new "iHome" entertainment system. iTunes is the true key to Jobs' vision of the Digital Hub."
"The only way to beat Apple is to make something thats more compelling then an ipod."
It's not the iPod or the iTunes Store that are compelling. It's iTunes itself. Until a competitor produces software that makes managing your music collection and getting it from your computer to your music player easier than iTunes does, there'll never be an "iPod killer", regardless of features, price, ease of use etc. The ease of use of iTunes made the Store possible, and it is that ease of use of the service, not the iPod, that is the real key to Apple's dominance in the legal download market. The point that most people are missing by focusing on the iPod is that Apple is already looking beyond it. Competitors who focus on the device, and not on the service ecosystem it represents, are fighting the wrong battle.
The iTunes Store is cluing in the average consumer (i.e., the multitudes who don't know or care that Slashdot exists) that buying digital content from the Web is an easy process, and when they're used to the idea, it won't matter to Apple if an "iPod killer" exists or not. They'll be too firmly entrenched in people's living rooms to give a damn, and a hell of a lot more people own TV's than own digital music players. With the prices of LCD TV's falling, how difficult would it be for Apple to stuff the iMac's guts and iTV functionality into a television and position it as THE Next Big Thing? Especially if Disney, through Jobs' connections, provides some marketing muscle? I can easily envision Apple sweetening the pot by offering free Disney classic on DVD or via iTunes Store exclusively with the purchase of a new "iHome" entertainment system.
I could not agree with you more. I am so sick and fucking tired of Mac fanboys who feel that Windows has to suck for the Mac to succeed, or who seem to think that Microsoft stole everything from Apple. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that Microsoft could actually add useful features before Apple thought of them? Is it unthinkable that the same ideas could have been arrived at independently, but implemented at different times? It's as if they're insecure about their platform choice, and perceived failures in Windows somehow validate that choice. These are the morons who give the entire Mac community a bad name. How about just getting your pathetic asses back to work and let the Windows users worry about problems with Windows? If so many of you so are vehemently anti-Microsoft that you declare their products anathema on your platform, why should you care at all what they're doing with their OS or applications? I certainly don't.
Disclaimer: I have only ever used a Macintosh. I have zero experience with Windows, and anything Microsoft does is simply irrevelant to me. I certainly have no hard feelings for Microsoft, and good luck to them with Vista. Frankly, I find the entire Mac-fanatic-jihad-thing baffling. Maybe it's because I actually have a life, and my wife and children are far more deserving of my attention and love than any machine, no matter how slick and stylish.
"Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives."
Thank you for pointing out something that revisionist historians, from the comfort and safety of a decades-long separation from the events of 1945, have glossed over or ignored in their rush to tar and feather the people who made the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, as terrible as those attacks were, they did perhaps eventually save millions of American and Japanese lives.
Although estimates for casualties varied greatly, a study commissioned by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and completed by William Shockley (yes, that William Shockley; his accomplishments go far beyond the invention of the transistor) suggested that Operation Downfall, the conquest of Japan, would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities. After the events on Okinawa, in which the civilian population were used as shock troops by the Japanese Army and suffered horrific casualties, the U.S. realized that there was no chance in hell that the Japanese people would just wave the white flag and turn over their sacred homeland to an invasion fleet. The Joint Chiefs realized that not only would Japanese fatalities range between 5 and 10 million, but they were faced with the prospect of years, perhaps decades, of bitter guerilla resistance.
Think the Japanese wouldn't have carried on forever if they hadn't been nuked? Just ask 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda, who finally surrendered in the Phillipines in 1974, twenty-nine years after the end of WW II. Onoda fought a one-man guerilla campaign against the Filipino authorities the entire time, engaging in numerous shootouts with the police and military, eventually killing about thirty people. He was finally contacted by a Japanese student who had gone in search of him, and he refused to accept that hostilities between Japan and the U.S. had long since ceased. He insisted that he would only lay down his weapons if his commander, Major Taniguchi, personally ordered him to do so. The Japanese government eventually located Taniguchi (fortunately still alive, and operating a bookshop for decades) and flew him to Lubang Island, where the 53 year-old Onoda, in his dress uniform, turned over his katana and rifle, which was still in perfect condition after almost 30 years. Get the picture? Now imagine an entire frigging nation of Onodas, much better armed, operating in a much larger area and much more determined not to surrrender. And we're horrified by the relatively puny extent of the Iraqi resistance. An invasion and occupation of Japan is simply not worth thinking about. In an interesting footnote, Onoda became a national hero in Japan for his refusal to give up in the face of unbelievable hardship, wrote a bestseller about his experience, and eventually settled in Brazil to raise cattle. Despite the deaths he had caused on Lubang, the circumstances were taken into consideration by the Phillipine government and he was pardoned by Ferdinand Marcos. In 1996 he revisited Lubang and donated $10,000 to a school on the island.
As a former member of the military (U.S. Army), I adhere somewhat to the philosophy that a nuclear weapon is just another means of killing more people with less effort, and I've always been baffled that there is so much emotionalism attached to the issue. As a former soldier, my view is that the means don't matter, you end up just as dead if you're incinerated in a high-energy flash or if a commando comes through the wire and slips a knife in your kidney. The weapons of mass destruction in Rwanda in 1995 were machetes and axes, and they accounted for between 800,000 and 1 million fatalities. To my recollection no nuclear weapons were used, but had they been, would the outcome have been more horrific for the choice of weapon?
Dissed and dismissed (by Microsoft's Fanboy-in-Chief, no less) in the best comment so far on Zune's music sharing capability:
"The gimmick appears to be wireless interaction with other Zune users. Since I expect there to be about six of these by the end of the year, this could be sort of a waste of time."
Vasa had a complement of 445, of whom it is not clear how many were lost. The HMS Royal George, however, sank just off Spithead on August 29, 1782 in very similar circumstances to the Vasa with the loss of eight hundred, including an admiral of the fleet. An inquest concluded that her loss was due to structural failure. This was one of the worst marittime disasters of all time, and I'm surprised that the loss of the Vasa, and not of the Royal George, is on the list.
I saw this on a History Channel special on engineering disasters which included a couple of dam collapses. There were numerous interviews with witnesses, including fishermen who were caught on the lake and barely escaped with their lives. The voluminous news footage is breathtaking, to put it mildly. The lake did indeed empty like a colossal toilet, and the sight of boats and wreckage spiraling around is something to behold.
"There are far better mp3 players out there, but they are harder to use"
Then they aren't better. The vast majority of people could care less that Linux is "better", that Brand X mp.3 player is "better". If it's not easier to use, then it's not worth the time to fuck around with it. Most people actually have something better to do with their time than to mess around with something that's supposed to be technologically superior in order to make it work. Folks who have actual lives with kids and bills and to whom every second of time is precious could care less that some format or OS or machine is "better" than the popular alternative. They only care that it works well enough that it doesn't unduly stress them out at work or take unreasonable amounts of time from them. If it doesn't then it's more than worth it. Slashdot readers live in a different world than the vast majority of people, those who could give a shit that the GPL exists, or that Ogg Vorbis kicks the crap out of mp.3, or that "better" players than iPod are available. They have more important things to worry about. I'm a Mac user and iPod owner, but my family, and the time spent with them, are far more important to me than any computer platform or mp3 player or file format any day.
...are rubbing their hands with glee right now. Can you imagine the truckloads of "cease and desists" going out to airports all over the world asking them to stop using the word "AirPort" in their names? Yeah I know, that was pretty bad, but I had to say it. I'm so sorry.
"You are correct, I should have specified that he indeed did use multiple operating systems to see which one worked best."
Thanks for clearing that up, it certainly makes a world of difference to your assertion. Where you erred, if I may be so bold, is assuming that we knew that your former teacher was a good one. I have many horror stories about the professors I encountered in university, and I don't naturally make that assumption. Sorry if I was a bit harsh. And you're perfectly right: usability is indeed a tough concept.
"Sorry but Windows is a lot more intuitive. One of my old teachers went to China to teach kids computers. He sat them at a computer with Windows and Office. With minimal instruction the kids could easily find there way around and start typing a document."
Sorry but your claim that Windows is a lot more intuitive based on this example is spurious. A lot more intuitive than what? Did your old teacher try these Chinese kids with OS X and TextEdit, or Linux and Open Office? Giving an example without comparisons and then making such a sweeping statement is disingenuous at best."
"No one is imposing authoritarian rule on China. If the Chinese people wanted to enjoy the same democracy and human rights that we have in the West, then the Chinese people could get democracy and human rights tomorrow.
Does "Tiananmen Square" ring a bell? Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, died when the government decided that the student protesters had made their point, and decided to show them who was boss. Don't ever delude yourself that the Communist Party has neither the power nor the will to massacre citizens in a demonstration of authority.
One thing most people don't grasp about China is the extremely long term view the Chinese people have, and their acceptance that change comes very slowly. As far as they're concerned, warlords, princes, kings, emperors and political parties and systems come and go, but China will remain China through it all. Don't believe for one second that the Communist Party doesn't know this. They are fully aware that their rule is just another temporary phase in China's long, long history, and my own sense is that they're preparing China's transition to a historical period in which they don't exist. Witness their experiments with capitalism in the southern economic zone and Hong Kong, and the simple fact that they even allowed the protesters to gather in Tiananmen Square in the first place. But they're not going to let anyone push them faster than they're willing to go. The general consensus is that the rate of change will accelerate slowly when the last of the Long March veterans die off.
China is the world's oldest continuing civilization, perhaps as old as 4,000 years, and the Chinese are used to extremely long timeframes. My own grandfather came to the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th Century with his mother and brothers, but he settled in Jamaica, and the rest of his family in Trinidad. It comes as a shock to many North Americans when I tell them that my existing family records stretch back more than 800 years, and when they ask if my family were aristocrats, I tell them no, they were peasant farmers and merchants. Having family records that stretch back a thousand years or more is not in the least bit unusual for Chinese, given the customs of ancestor worship, and traditionally the welfare of the family always came before that of an individual (which is why in Chinese names the family name comes before the given name), and parents were used to deprivation so that their children and descendants would be better off than they were. Most Chinese will accept hardship with the hope that their children will benefit from their sacrifice, even if the sacrifice is freedom of speech and personal liberty. To traditionalists, the idea of individuals demanding these things for themselves, immediately, smacks of personal selfishness on the part of these individuals, and is contrary to their idealist beliefs in the greater good of China. Add to this the extreme historical xenophobia and superiority complex of the Han Chinese, and it's no wonder that they view Western values and ideals, especially those dealing with the rights of the individual, as inimical to their own traditions.
The ruling party perhaps realizes that these rights will be expected by future generations, but no Chinese person is willing to discard millennia-old cultural traditions willy-nilly. When Mao tried expunge the past and replace ancient tradition with Communist ideals during the Cultural Revolution it backfired badly, at the cost of perhaps 20 million lives, my grandfather's brother among them, and my own sense is that they're edging their way into the future, attempting to reconcile Western values with their own traditions. Then too, they could be hedging their bets, and thinking that Western civilization is just another passing historical fad, and they'll just take the wait and see attitude.
"But you just described the Linux and the WIndows communities too!"
Good point, and you're absolutely right, but as a Mac user solely, I can't speak for these communities. Suffice to say that I've had many cordial discussions with members of both communities on what we like and don't like about our respective platforms of choice. One of the points on which we all agree is that we loathe the loud-mouths and morons who infest all three communities. I've had very enjoyable interactions with many, many pleasant folks who were helpful and cordial to a Mac user interested in finding out what I could about both platforms, and I felt that I had a duty to be just as civil and welcoming to them in answering questions about Macs as they were to me.
Thanks much, that comment made me laugh out loud. Oddly, while some Mac users can be intolerant fools who sneer at Windows users as "lemmings" and "sheeple" among other much worse things, the Mac community is generally welcoming, civil, and helpful to people who ask questions out of genuine curiosity. And no, we're not some kind of cult who slavishly defend Apple and His Steveness from the Great Ignorant Unwashed. In fact you'll find that Mac users tend to be the most vocal critics of Apple, especially if they do something unpopular; fortunately they've been doing almost everything right in recent years, so there's been an extended honeymoon between Jobs and the faithful. The best description of Mac users' attitude toward Apple is to say that the Macintosh belongs to US, Apple and Steve Jobs are merely its stewards.
The vast majority of us can't be bothered to get into flame wars and childish shouting matches. Unfortunately, the rabid frothing zealots among us (most of whom are completely clueless about Macs in the first damn place) are the ones who give the entire community a bad name. These are the idiots who send obscenity-laced messages to journalists who make even the slightest derogatory remark about Apple, so it's no surprise that the prevailing view in the mainstream press is that Mac users are all "fanatics"; it's mostly only the fanatics they hear from. The rest of us are too busy doing more important things. Like reading Slashdot.
Here's a fact: Lions hunt in packs. Tigers hunt alone.
Here's a fact: Lions hunt in packs. All other cats hunt alone. It's a function of their environment; lions live on the open savannahs, and their prey will always be able to outrun them if they see them coming in time, hence their strategy of driving them into waiting ambushes. With the exception of the cheetah, all other cats are ambush hunters. But I digress. Educated guesses can be made about an animal's lifestyle if enough is known about it's environment, its likely prey etc. If some far-future paleontologists found the remains of lions and tigers (which, from a morphological standpoint, are identical animals), they could deduce how they lived from the associated plant and animal fossils eg, acacia thorn trees, abundant grasses, long-legged speedy herbivores in the case of the lion, the remains of thick tropical forests in the case of the tiger (well, tropical tigers obviously; the Siberian tiger is a different case again). It's not just looking at a skeleton or, in many cases, single bones and building a picture based on it. A skeleton can only tell you what an animal was suited for. It tells very little about what it actually did. It's all about weighing the available evidence.
[Whoever] proposed that some larger macropredators would have needed to revert from predation to scavenging in adulthood is guilty of dumbassery of the highest order.
A very simple counter-example exists. Watch a documentary about a large, muscle-bound, lumbering grizzly bear snatching a leaping fish out of thin air.
Obviously you know very little about predators. First and foremost, grizzlies are not "muscle-bound and lumbering", they are surprisingly quick and agile, and I'm willing to bet your life that you can't outrun one. I've seen film of a grizzly outrunning and catching a young elk. They have excellent reflexes, as evidenced by your fish-snatching example, but what do they catch when the salmon stop running, when the caribou have moved on for the winter, there are no berries or small game available? That's right, like almost all known large terrestrial predators, they revert to scavenging for carrion. Lions do it, wolves do it, eagles do it, they all do it. If it came down to the difference between pungent roadkill and starvation, you'd do it too. Nature isn't some Cordon Bleu restaurant where predators can send back something they don't like; they take what they can when they can get it.
There are schools of thought that believe that very large theropods (T. Rex, Giganotosaurus etc) simply grew too large as adults to be active predators, and subsisted on the colossal carcasses of dead herbivores. Others believe that like many modern predators, their lifestyles were a mixture of active hunting (probably from ambush because an animal that size couldn't sneak up on prey) and scavenging for carrion. They weren't likely to pass up a free meal, particularly when they didn't have to risk life and limb to get it.
The discovery of Mapusaurus roseae is indeed very exciting, because it offers the tantilizing possibility that these very large theropod dinosaurs were pack hunters. Which, if you think about, makes a lot of sense. It doesn't matter how large the predator is, if its prey is that much larger it would make sense that they would cooperate to bring it down. Lions are an excellent example. Young males who have been forced out of their prides are much more likely to survive if two or three of them cooperate and hunt, than if they try to go it alone. The reason is that three lions (there is a lot of evidence that three will do much better than two) have a much better chance of bringing down prey large enough to feed all three well, than a single lion has of catching enough prey to even survive.
It would be nice if that came to pass, but remember that this is MacOSrumors we're talking about, the "Weekly World News" of the Macintosh rumor industry; one should always take a large bite from the salt block before reading anything on the site. Their credibility rests somewhere between zero and zero squared, and their "rumors" appear to be nothing more than a wish list conjured up in the fevered imaginations of the site's editors. They are far and away the least accurate of the Mac rumor mills, and their information always sounds as if it was passed on to them by Bigfoot, who arrived at their office in a UFO. It always sounds interesting, but likely? Nope. It's not what they think will actually happen, it's what they hope will happen. They should just do us all a favor and change their name from "MacOSrumors" to "MacOSwishfulthinking".
Slashdot Mirror
"Since the iPhone is running Leopard, maybe that is one of the top secret features we can expect."
I certainly think so, now that the implications of the iPhone interface have sunk in. It's clear that the interface animations are produced by Core Animation, and I think we can expect as big a leap in Leopard's interface over previous versions of OS X, as OS X was over System 9 et al. I honestly believe that Apple is deliberately waiting for Microsoft to release Vista before they start talking about Leopard, just so they can show them up by demonstrating a whole lot of gee-whiz capabilities. If you thought the iPhone interface was dazzling, you'd better buckle up for Leopard. Jobs will guarantee that it's as impressive as hell. He's waited decades to stick it to Bill, and he's going to relish every moment of it.
This is great strategy on Apple's part. It will be a major embarrassment for Microsoft, to launch a huge (and no doubt expensive) advertising campaign introducing their most advanced operating system ever, only for Apple to come out with Leopard a short time afterward and make it look totally obsolete. Vista is going to get Zuned. The worst part for Microsoft is that they saw this coming when the iPhone interface burst onto the scene. I imagine that there's some frantic damage control going on in Redmond, wondering how they're going to save face. Hmmm....Come to think of it, isn't Vista supposed to be released on January 30th? Where are the media announcements and massive ad campaign? They're being awfully low-key about such an important OS. Compare this to the hype around Windows 95; they're acting as if they're already embarrassed.
"Jobs missed a golden opportunity at this keynote. Given the momentum and the increased buzz around Apple, their slowly increasing market share, more developers on board, Bootcamp etc. he could have finally presented Apple as a serious and viable alternative to Microsoft. For everyone. But instead he decided to go with a f**king phone"
I disagree. There's been so much buzz about the iPhone that only a few people have been asking about Macs and Leopard, and why Jobs didn't even so much as mention them. I must admit that I was pretty dazzled by the iPhone's interface, and it took me a couple days to start sorting out the implications.
I'm convinced that Leopard's new interface will support multi-touch technology (MTI). Am I the only person who believes that Apple has already thought of vastly more expansive uses for MTI than a mere smartphone display? Hello? Mac Tablet anyone? The iPhone interface is merely the tip of the iceberg of possibilities. Take a look at the video demo at the Multi-Touch Interaction Research group's site and imagine some or most of these capabilities, or even greater capabilities, in Leopard. Interestingly, there's a note on the site that says they saw the keynote, and that they have some more exciting stuff coming up soon.
Jobs said nothing about new Macs, new displays, or OS X 10.5 for one reason: he believes that what he has up his sleeve will make Vista look like ancient technology to Joe Consumer, and he's deliberately waiting for Microsoft to launch their expensive media blitz introducing Vista before dropping a Leopard-spotted nuke on them. His aim is to embarrass Microsoft. And I believe that Microsoft came to that conclusion while the keynote was going on, but they still have no choice but to kick Vista out the door.
Joe Consumer has already seen the iPhone's interface, courtesy the mainstream media. He'll be primed for multi-touch interface on a personal computer, and I foresee PC salespeople having an interesting time in the aftermath of Leopard's introduction: "Yeah, that's a pretty cheap machine, but how come I can't just drag things around with my finger like the guy at the Apple Store showed me?"
As many here have pointed out, Macs don't do anything that PC's can't do (much less if you count games and enterprise apps); iPods do less than many other available DAP's; the iPhone won't offer any capabilities unavailable on other, existing smartphones. The difference in all three cases is how Apple pulls the interface together in ways that appeal and make sense to average users i.e., non-Slashdot readers. I believe that Jobs has high hopes that Leopard will present an interface that will finally, clearly, distinguish Macs from PC's in the minds of the average consumer, in the same way that their respective interfaces distinguish the iPod and iPhone from competing devices. I believe that Jobs honestly feels that 2007 is the year of destiny for the Macintosh.
I remember reading a few months ago that some reseachers had a found a higher incidence of schizophrenia among persons who, when small children, had had cats in their households, leading some to believe that Toxoplasmosis gondii may be a causal factor. Apparently, it is claimed that new research has confirmed this. This is of personal interest to me because my 14 year-old son was infected by Toxoplasmosis a couple years ago during a vist to Trinidad. Physicians suspect that the most likely source was my wife's aunt's home-made yogurt, which my kids love. My wife's aunt is an animal lover, and keeps numerous dogs and cats, as well as feeding hosts of wild birds that descend on the house every morning.
It was discovered after he complained about spots in his vision, and an opthalmological determined that there was a lesion on his retina which was flaking away. A blood test confirmed the presence of Toxoplasmosis gondii. Now he has to have an annual examination to ensure that the parasite is being kept under control by antibiotics, but it's always an extremely apprehensive time for us.
"it has also given us a bloated military and lots of wars, because that bloated military wants to do something."
OK, I'll bite. Since you're obviously an expert, please be so kind as to tell us exactly how big the US military should be to defend the US, deter would-be agressors, fulfill international treaty obligations, etc. And do you honestly believe that servicemen and women want to go into combat, and risk life and limb? For what, the excitement of battle? Or do you believe that the military dictates foreign policy to elected officials? "We're bored, and we have all this untested high-tech shit laying around. I know! Let's invade someone!" Generals and admirals are the interface with the civilian overseers of the armed services, and as such tend to be highly-political animals, especially when it comes to defending pet programs against budget cuts. But to suggest that they instigate warfare in order to validate their weapon systems, strategy, operational abilities etc, is not only naive, it is insulting.
When war breaks out, blame the politicians, not the people who have to fight it. I do agree with your comments about effective funding for research, but by calling the military a "gimmick" you're merely parading your ignorance of geopolitical reality. Do you honestly believe that the US doesn't need armed forces? Sadly, the fact that the US can more afford a more powerful military than any other nation has tempted our elected things into pursuing adventurist policies. We have leaders who have put young people in harm's way to scratch an ideological itch. *cough* neocons *cough*
"...ok, that's harsh, but the reality is that, as his publicist put it, "Justin is movie star." Hmm... seems like he got way more exposure doing the mac ads. Movie star my ass."
Yes, it is a bit harsh, and Long himself has stated that he did in fact receive far more recognition from the ads. This is part of the statement from Long's publicist: "Every ad you see Justin in is for that previous time period only...There's no long-term deal with him...Justin's a movie star, not a commercial guy."
However, the statement directly contradicts what Long himself said. He was quoted by Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times: "If I had been egotistical about the movies, I have been brought back to earth. Nine out of 10 people who recognize me recognize me from the commercials." Seems to me that his publicist should consult with her client first before saying things that could prove embarrassing for him. Or maybe her statement was scripted by Karl Rove.
I posted this comment a month ago, and more than ever I believe it to be the case:
"It's not the iPod or the iTunes Store that are so compelling. It's iTunes itself. Until a competitor produces software that makes managing your music and video collection and getting it from your computer to your music player easier than iTunes does, there'll never be an "iPod killer", regardless of features, price, or ease of use [and topping the click-wheel navigation interface is going to be a bitch of a mountain to climb]. The ease of use of iTunes made the Store possible, and it is that ease of use of the SERVICE, not the iPod, that is the real key to Apple's dominance in the legal download market. The point that most people are missing by focusing on the iPod is that Apple is already looking beyond it. Competitors who focus on the device, and not on the service ecosystem it represents, are fighting the wrong battle.
The iTunes Store is cluing in the average consumer (i.e., the multitudes who don't know or care that Slashdot exists) that buying digital content from the Web is an easy process, and when they're used to the idea, it won't matter to Apple if an "iPod killer" exists or not. They'll be too firmly entrenched in people's living rooms to give a damn, and a hell of a lot more people own TV's than own digital music players. With the prices of LCD TV's falling, how difficult would it be for Apple to stuff the iMac's guts and iTV functionality into a television and position it as THE Next Big Thing? Especially if Disney, through Jobs' connections, provides some marketing muscle? I can easily envision Apple sweetening the pot by offering free Disney classics on DVD, or via iTunes Store, exclusively with the purchase of a new "iHome" entertainment system. iTunes is the true key to Jobs' vision of the Digital Hub."
"you do him an injustice. this is a serious form of the disease, called hearing AIDS."
No, Hearing AIDS is what you get from listening to assholes. Cue Bush jokes.
"The only way to beat Apple is to make something thats more compelling then an ipod."
It's not the iPod or the iTunes Store that are compelling. It's iTunes itself. Until a competitor produces software that makes managing your music collection and getting it from your computer to your music player easier than iTunes does, there'll never be an "iPod killer", regardless of features, price, ease of use etc. The ease of use of iTunes made the Store possible, and it is that ease of use of the service, not the iPod, that is the real key to Apple's dominance in the legal download market. The point that most people are missing by focusing on the iPod is that Apple is already looking beyond it. Competitors who focus on the device, and not on the service ecosystem it represents, are fighting the wrong battle.
The iTunes Store is cluing in the average consumer (i.e., the multitudes who don't know or care that Slashdot exists) that buying digital content from the Web is an easy process, and when they're used to the idea, it won't matter to Apple if an "iPod killer" exists or not. They'll be too firmly entrenched in people's living rooms to give a damn, and a hell of a lot more people own TV's than own digital music players. With the prices of LCD TV's falling, how difficult would it be for Apple to stuff the iMac's guts and iTV functionality into a television and position it as THE Next Big Thing? Especially if Disney, through Jobs' connections, provides some marketing muscle? I can easily envision Apple sweetening the pot by offering free Disney classic on DVD or via iTunes Store exclusively with the purchase of a new "iHome" entertainment system.
I could not agree with you more. I am so sick and fucking tired of Mac fanboys who feel that Windows has to suck for the Mac to succeed, or who seem to think that Microsoft stole everything from Apple. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that Microsoft could actually add useful features before Apple thought of them? Is it unthinkable that the same ideas could have been arrived at independently, but implemented at different times? It's as if they're insecure about their platform choice, and perceived failures in Windows somehow validate that choice. These are the morons who give the entire Mac community a bad name. How about just getting your pathetic asses back to work and let the Windows users worry about problems with Windows? If so many of you so are vehemently anti-Microsoft that you declare their products anathema on your platform, why should you care at all what they're doing with their OS or applications? I certainly don't.
Disclaimer: I have only ever used a Macintosh. I have zero experience with Windows, and anything Microsoft does is simply irrevelant to me. I certainly have no hard feelings for Microsoft, and good luck to them with Vista. Frankly, I find the entire Mac-fanatic-jihad-thing baffling. Maybe it's because I actually have a life, and my wife and children are far more deserving of my attention and love than any machine, no matter how slick and stylish.
"Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives."
Thank you for pointing out something that revisionist historians, from the comfort and safety of a decades-long separation from the events of 1945, have glossed over or ignored in their rush to tar and feather the people who made the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, as terrible as those attacks were, they did perhaps eventually save millions of American and Japanese lives.
Although estimates for casualties varied greatly, a study commissioned by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and completed by William Shockley (yes, that William Shockley; his accomplishments go far beyond the invention of the transistor) suggested that Operation Downfall, the conquest of Japan, would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities. After the events on Okinawa, in which the civilian population were used as shock troops by the Japanese Army and suffered horrific casualties, the U.S. realized that there was no chance in hell that the Japanese people would just wave the white flag and turn over their sacred homeland to an invasion fleet. The Joint Chiefs realized that not only would Japanese fatalities range between 5 and 10 million, but they were faced with the prospect of years, perhaps decades, of bitter guerilla resistance.
Think the Japanese wouldn't have carried on forever if they hadn't been nuked? Just ask 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda, who finally surrendered in the Phillipines in 1974, twenty-nine years after the end of WW II. Onoda fought a one-man guerilla campaign against the Filipino authorities the entire time, engaging in numerous shootouts with the police and military, eventually killing about thirty people. He was finally contacted by a Japanese student who had gone in search of him, and he refused to accept that hostilities between Japan and the U.S. had long since ceased. He insisted that he would only lay down his weapons if his commander, Major Taniguchi, personally ordered him to do so. The Japanese government eventually located Taniguchi (fortunately still alive, and operating a bookshop for decades) and flew him to Lubang Island, where the 53 year-old Onoda, in his dress uniform, turned over his katana and rifle, which was still in perfect condition after almost 30 years. Get the picture? Now imagine an entire frigging nation of Onodas, much better armed, operating in a much larger area and much more determined not to surrrender. And we're horrified by the relatively puny extent of the Iraqi resistance. An invasion and occupation of Japan is simply not worth thinking about. In an interesting footnote, Onoda became a national hero in Japan for his refusal to give up in the face of unbelievable hardship, wrote a bestseller about his experience, and eventually settled in Brazil to raise cattle. Despite the deaths he had caused on Lubang, the circumstances were taken into consideration by the Phillipine government and he was pardoned by Ferdinand Marcos. In 1996 he revisited Lubang and donated $10,000 to a school on the island.
As a former member of the military (U.S. Army), I adhere somewhat to the philosophy that a nuclear weapon is just another means of killing more people with less effort, and I've always been baffled that there is so much emotionalism attached to the issue. As a former soldier, my view is that the means don't matter, you end up just as dead if you're incinerated in a high-energy flash or if a commando comes through the wire and slips a knife in your kidney. The weapons of mass destruction in Rwanda in 1995 were machetes and axes, and they accounted for between 800,000 and 1 million fatalities. To my recollection no nuclear weapons were used, but had they been, would the outcome have been more horrific for the choice of weapon?
Even at the time
Dissed and dismissed (by Microsoft's Fanboy-in-Chief, no less) in the best comment so far on Zune's music sharing capability:
"The gimmick appears to be wireless interaction with other Zune users. Since I expect there to be about six of these by the end of the year, this could be sort of a waste of time."
Vasa had a complement of 445, of whom it is not clear how many were lost. The HMS Royal George, however, sank just off Spithead on August 29, 1782 in very similar circumstances to the Vasa with the loss of eight hundred, including an admiral of the fleet. An inquest concluded that her loss was due to structural failure. This was one of the worst marittime disasters of all time, and I'm surprised that the loss of the Vasa, and not of the Royal George, is on the list.
I saw this on a History Channel special on engineering disasters which included a couple of dam collapses. There were numerous interviews with witnesses, including fishermen who were caught on the lake and barely escaped with their lives. The voluminous news footage is breathtaking, to put it mildly. The lake did indeed empty like a colossal toilet, and the sight of boats and wreckage spiraling around is something to behold.
"There are far better mp3 players out there, but they are harder to use"
Then they aren't better. The vast majority of people could care less that Linux is "better", that Brand X mp.3 player is "better". If it's not easier to use, then it's not worth the time to fuck around with it. Most people actually have something better to do with their time than to mess around with something that's supposed to be technologically superior in order to make it work. Folks who have actual lives with kids and bills and to whom every second of time is precious could care less that some format or OS or machine is "better" than the popular alternative. They only care that it works well enough that it doesn't unduly stress them out at work or take unreasonable amounts of time from them. If it doesn't then it's more than worth it. Slashdot readers live in a different world than the vast majority of people, those who could give a shit that the GPL exists, or that Ogg Vorbis kicks the crap out of mp.3, or that "better" players than iPod are available. They have more important things to worry about. I'm a Mac user and iPod owner, but my family, and the time spent with them, are far more important to me than any computer platform or mp3 player or file format any day.
...are rubbing their hands with glee right now. Can you imagine the truckloads of "cease and desists" going out to airports all over the world asking them to stop using the word "AirPort" in their names? Yeah I know, that was pretty bad, but I had to say it. I'm so sorry.
"You are correct, I should have specified that he indeed did use multiple operating systems to see which one worked best."
Thanks for clearing that up, it certainly makes a world of difference to your assertion. Where you erred, if I may be so bold, is assuming that we knew that your former teacher was a good one. I have many horror stories about the professors I encountered in university, and I don't naturally make that assumption. Sorry if I was a bit harsh. And you're perfectly right: usability is indeed a tough concept.
"Sorry but Windows is a lot more intuitive. One of my old teachers went to China to teach kids computers. He sat them at a computer with Windows and Office. With minimal instruction the kids could easily find there way around and start typing a document."
Sorry but your claim that Windows is a lot more intuitive based on this example is spurious. A lot more intuitive than what? Did your old teacher try these Chinese kids with OS X and TextEdit, or Linux and Open Office? Giving an example without comparisons and then making such a sweeping statement is disingenuous at best."
"No one is imposing authoritarian rule on China. If the Chinese people wanted to enjoy the same democracy and human rights that we have in the West, then the Chinese people could get democracy and human rights tomorrow.
Does "Tiananmen Square" ring a bell? Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, died when the government decided that the student protesters had made their point, and decided to show them who was boss. Don't ever delude yourself that the Communist Party has neither the power nor the will to massacre citizens in a demonstration of authority.
One thing most people don't grasp about China is the extremely long term view the Chinese people have, and their acceptance that change comes very slowly. As far as they're concerned, warlords, princes, kings, emperors and political parties and systems come and go, but China will remain China through it all. Don't believe for one second that the Communist Party doesn't know this. They are fully aware that their rule is just another temporary phase in China's long, long history, and my own sense is that they're preparing China's transition to a historical period in which they don't exist. Witness their experiments with capitalism in the southern economic zone and Hong Kong, and the simple fact that they even allowed the protesters to gather in Tiananmen Square in the first place. But they're not going to let anyone push them faster than they're willing to go. The general consensus is that the rate of change will accelerate slowly when the last of the Long March veterans die off.
China is the world's oldest continuing civilization, perhaps as old as 4,000 years, and the Chinese are used to extremely long timeframes. My own grandfather came to the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th Century with his mother and brothers, but he settled in Jamaica, and the rest of his family in Trinidad. It comes as a shock to many North Americans when I tell them that my existing family records stretch back more than 800 years, and when they ask if my family were aristocrats, I tell them no, they were peasant farmers and merchants. Having family records that stretch back a thousand years or more is not in the least bit unusual for Chinese, given the customs of ancestor worship, and traditionally the welfare of the family always came before that of an individual (which is why in Chinese names the family name comes before the given name), and parents were used to deprivation so that their children and descendants would be better off than they were. Most Chinese will accept hardship with the hope that their children will benefit from their sacrifice, even if the sacrifice is freedom of speech and personal liberty. To traditionalists, the idea of individuals demanding these things for themselves, immediately, smacks of personal selfishness on the part of these individuals, and is contrary to their idealist beliefs in the greater good of China. Add to this the extreme historical xenophobia and superiority complex of the Han Chinese, and it's no wonder that they view Western values and ideals, especially those dealing with the rights of the individual, as inimical to their own traditions.
The ruling party perhaps realizes that these rights will be expected by future generations, but no Chinese person is willing to discard millennia-old cultural traditions willy-nilly. When Mao tried expunge the past and replace ancient tradition with Communist ideals during the Cultural Revolution it backfired badly, at the cost of perhaps 20 million lives, my grandfather's brother among them, and my own sense is that they're edging their way into the future, attempting to reconcile Western values with their own traditions. Then too, they could be hedging their bets, and thinking that Western civilization is just another passing historical fad, and they'll just take the wait and see attitude.
I'll be impressed when they can train the dogs to sniff out shitty movies.
"wow, i didn't know reading slashdot was that important. :P"
Really? Dude, you gotta be kidding! It ranks right up there with oxygen, food and sex! :-)"
"But you just described the Linux and the WIndows communities too!"
Good point, and you're absolutely right, but as a Mac user solely, I can't speak for these communities. Suffice to say that I've had many cordial discussions with members of both communities on what we like and don't like about our respective platforms of choice. One of the points on which we all agree is that we loathe the loud-mouths and morons who infest all three communities. I've had very enjoyable interactions with many, many pleasant folks who were helpful and cordial to a Mac user interested in finding out what I could about both platforms, and I felt that I had a duty to be just as civil and welcoming to them in answering questions about Macs as they were to me.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Thanks much, that comment made me laugh out loud. Oddly, while some Mac users can be intolerant fools who sneer at Windows users as "lemmings" and "sheeple" among other much worse things, the Mac community is generally welcoming, civil, and helpful to people who ask questions out of genuine curiosity. And no, we're not some kind of cult who slavishly defend Apple and His Steveness from the Great Ignorant Unwashed. In fact you'll find that Mac users tend to be the most vocal critics of Apple, especially if they do something unpopular; fortunately they've been doing almost everything right in recent years, so there's been an extended honeymoon between Jobs and the faithful. The best description of Mac users' attitude toward Apple is to say that the Macintosh belongs to US, Apple and Steve Jobs are merely its stewards.
The vast majority of us can't be bothered to get into flame wars and childish shouting matches. Unfortunately, the rabid frothing zealots among us (most of whom are completely clueless about Macs in the first damn place) are the ones who give the entire community a bad name. These are the idiots who send obscenity-laced messages to journalists who make even the slightest derogatory remark about Apple, so it's no surprise that the prevailing view in the mainstream press is that Mac users are all "fanatics"; it's mostly only the fanatics they hear from. The rest of us are too busy doing more important things. Like reading Slashdot.
Here's a fact: Lions hunt in packs. Tigers hunt alone.
Here's a fact: Lions hunt in packs. All other cats hunt alone. It's a function of their environment; lions live on the open savannahs, and their prey will always be able to outrun them if they see them coming in time, hence their strategy of driving them into waiting ambushes. With the exception of the cheetah, all other cats are ambush hunters. But I digress. Educated guesses can be made about an animal's lifestyle if enough is known about it's environment, its likely prey etc. If some far-future paleontologists found the remains of lions and tigers (which, from a morphological standpoint, are identical animals), they could deduce how they lived from the associated plant and animal fossils eg, acacia thorn trees, abundant grasses, long-legged speedy herbivores in the case of the lion, the remains of thick tropical forests in the case of the tiger (well, tropical tigers obviously; the Siberian tiger is a different case again). It's not just looking at a skeleton or, in many cases, single bones and building a picture based on it. A skeleton can only tell you what an animal was suited for. It tells very little about what it actually did. It's all about weighing the available evidence.
[Whoever] proposed that some larger macropredators would have needed to revert from predation to scavenging in adulthood is guilty of dumbassery of the highest order. A very simple counter-example exists. Watch a documentary about a large, muscle-bound, lumbering grizzly bear snatching a leaping fish out of thin air.
Obviously you know very little about predators. First and foremost, grizzlies are not "muscle-bound and lumbering", they are surprisingly quick and agile, and I'm willing to bet your life that you can't outrun one. I've seen film of a grizzly outrunning and catching a young elk. They have excellent reflexes, as evidenced by your fish-snatching example, but what do they catch when the salmon stop running, when the caribou have moved on for the winter, there are no berries or small game available? That's right, like almost all known large terrestrial predators, they revert to scavenging for carrion. Lions do it, wolves do it, eagles do it, they all do it. If it came down to the difference between pungent roadkill and starvation, you'd do it too. Nature isn't some Cordon Bleu restaurant where predators can send back something they don't like; they take what they can when they can get it.
There are schools of thought that believe that very large theropods (T. Rex, Giganotosaurus etc) simply grew too large as adults to be active predators, and subsisted on the colossal carcasses of dead herbivores. Others believe that like many modern predators, their lifestyles were a mixture of active hunting (probably from ambush because an animal that size couldn't sneak up on prey) and scavenging for carrion. They weren't likely to pass up a free meal, particularly when they didn't have to risk life and limb to get it.
The discovery of Mapusaurus roseae is indeed very exciting, because it offers the tantilizing possibility that these very large theropod dinosaurs were pack hunters. Which, if you think about, makes a lot of sense. It doesn't matter how large the predator is, if its prey is that much larger it would make sense that they would cooperate to bring it down. Lions are an excellent example. Young males who have been forced out of their prides are much more likely to survive if two or three of them cooperate and hunt, than if they try to go it alone. The reason is that three lions (there is a lot of evidence that three will do much better than two) have a much better chance of bringing down prey large enough to feed all three well, than a single lion has of catching enough prey to even survive.
It would be nice if that came to pass, but remember that this is MacOSrumors we're talking about, the "Weekly World News" of the Macintosh rumor industry; one should always take a large bite from the salt block before reading anything on the site. Their credibility rests somewhere between zero and zero squared, and their "rumors" appear to be nothing more than a wish list conjured up in the fevered imaginations of the site's editors. They are far and away the least accurate of the Mac rumor mills, and their information always sounds as if it was passed on to them by Bigfoot, who arrived at their office in a UFO. It always sounds interesting, but likely? Nope. It's not what they think will actually happen, it's what they hope will happen. They should just do us all a favor and change their name from "MacOSrumors" to "MacOSwishfulthinking".