It's simple. Certain classes of software have become commodities. Operating systems, window managers, compilers, powerful text editors have all been adopted by the programming community at large as community projects. As a result, some kinds of software now have a zero dollar cost.
As a professional developer you should see no contradiction in sitting in front of a workstation running nothing but Free Software and earning a fat salary in providing your employer with software to their precise specifications and unique requirements. It may be specialized software for resale, it may be for internal use, trade secrets or patents (a legitimate one let's say) may be involved, it may require more programming and domain knowledge than is available in the programming community for open source projects (Human Computer Interface experts, or cryptographers), or it may be tied to expensive/rare/controlled equipment.
In some cases a company may hire a contributor to a Free Software product that has become misison-critical for them. Imagine the difference between paying for a support contract and employing one of the lead developers (or fixing a bug rather than reporting it). I always try and build in costs for some custom coding whenever I propose an open source product, it's good for the community and gets bugs fixed.
There are many reasons to pay for software or to pay people to write it. Even if Free Software sweeps all before it. There are plenty of cases where you need software to meet a specific schedule - a game to tie in with a movie, or an accounting system to meet new regulations.
I don't enjoy most RTS games. I'll manage an economy, but I don't want to deal with workers in between managing tank assaults. I'll go Railroad Tycoon or something if I want an economy. The closest a classic RTS comes to working for me is Dawn of War - it's got a great background, excellent art and animation and it's all tactics beyond building your base. The strategic points concept really helps it.
But we do have two good sims out right now, both WW2. Silent Hunter III is an amazing sub sim. Even if you aren't keen on subs or naval sims, it's worth the $40. It's gorgeous and captivating, probably sim of the year. And for flight sims, Pacific Fighters is outstanding. This is the lates in the IL2/Forgotten Battles series. As a standalone it just covers the Pacifc theater, it can also be merged with FB to do Western Europe and Russia. The single-player mission selection in PF is lousy (lots available online), but the campaigns and online play rock. This sim looks almost movie quality, and it's got a good flight model and *great* damage models (so damaged planes look right). It's a worthwhile investment for anyone with a current video card and a joystick. Get the FB+AEWP gold edition and Pacific Fighters for full effect.
Those two are keeping it real in the sim community. I won't link to Steel Beasts (which the US and Danish armies use for training)... because I can't hit a moving target, or to LOMAC because I find modern BVR air combat boring.
How about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't completely implode if a single byte gets written incorrectly?" Or how about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't crap out when it hits two gigabytes?"
They actually DID the second one. Of course, a 2GB to 4GB improvement means somebody had been using a signed INT to index the database... I'll never understand why Microsoft is so fond of monolithic binary data stores (Registry, Entourage db etc.), the goddamn things break and can't really be fixed. Entourage 2004 does fuck up a LOT less than X did, but 2-4GB of binary data that could (should) be represented as text on disk (thank the person who advocated.mbox stores in Mail.app 1.0 for me) represents a lot of valuable data at risk because of a terrible design decision.It'd make a little more sense if Entourage used the same monolithic format Outlook or OE use, but they invented a new kind.
I swear there's a corporate directive to go with monolithic stores wherever possible (for very large values of possible).
No point, just a bad day at the office because Entourage and GroupWise don't get along.
I am *stunned* that they are still in business. I had assumed that market forces (or their local Attorney General) had extinguished those felching dirtbags a long time ago.
Don't think of trademarks as having exlusive rights to a name, a trademark is an exclusive right to a specific name for a product.
It's part of the consumer protection package: it keeps sleazy companies from making cheap knockoffs and copying the famous brand's name and logo (logos get similar protection). Go to a discount store, buy a $5 set of Snap-On screwdrivers and you might think you were getting a good deal. But when the cheap metal warps abd breaks on a tight screw, you'd be associating that with the 'real' Snap-On; you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
And that's why we have trademarks. They protect consumers and manufacturers.
Back in, oh 1994, when I was active on DuneMUSH I was experimenting with a Dvorak keyboard [1]. On chat, someone guessed I was using one because my off-by-one-key typos had changed patterns. It was probably Erich or Feyd.
[1] A nicer layout than QWERTY, takes some getting used to, and useless if you have to use QWERTY keyboards regularly (desktop support, nuthin' but other people's keyboards right now).
If you allow expansion cards to meet the port requirements then Apple would have to support every 3rd party card out there. This is one of the key problems that helps determine the upper bound of how reliable Windows can ever be. Apple doesn't want to go that route and I don't want them to.
Besides that major problem, the memory bandwidth on the beige machines sucks. The beige G3s had 10ns 168-pin SDRAM, while the Blue & White G3s had 8ns PC100 SDRAM. Big difference in memory architecture, and that's probably what Apple is really dropping support for. You can't upgrade that, and since you cna't buy a modern motherboard for the beige case you're stuck; volume limitations would probably make the price of the motherboard awful close to a much faster Mini anyway so why bother ?
The PowerBook G3 issue looks similar. The 1st gen units had 60 ns EDO DIMM and the 500MHz FireWire [1] units had 8ns SO-DIMM (so did the first iMacs, so they fall on the supported side of the line). I'm not conversant with the differences, but since the 1st unit was the only PBG3 to use EDO DIMMs there must be something Apple doesn't want to deal with.
[1] We have one of these. If I can coax it into booting on its sad battery I'm gonna try it on Tiger, it handled Panther pretty well.
We recently added RCDefaultApp to our standard build. It's a preference pane that lets you set protocol handlers and edit the default application for each extension. Very handy.
I just got tired of launching Mail.app every time the system decided one of Entourage's helper apps was the default mailto: handler.
Since the anonymous comment hasn't been modded up yet...
Stickies is a beautiful application, sheer coding elegance. It does one thing very well. All it does is display a bunch of text windows in a variety of pastel colors. Each window can be 'windowshaded', which minimizes a window in place by displaying just the title bar (toggled with a double click). I keep all of my stickies windowshaded - the first line of text shows in the title bar so you can tell them apart. And you can drag and drop in and out of a sticky.
That's all Stickies does. It displays windows you can type into. Nothing fancy, sheer minimalism in action. Adding more features would destroy the program's simplicity.
Give 'em a try, they're a great place to stash snippets of text without going to multiple clipboards.
But they aren't plain vanilla text windows. When Apple wrote the default text editing widget for Cocoa they made it very powerful. Because of that text in a sticky note can be be in any mix of fonts and faces, images can be pasted in, and the text can be kerned, and styles can be copied and re-applied. You even inherit the system-wide spellchecker by using the standard text widget.
Apple has provided a very rich application framework, which raises the quality of software produced by small shops. We've all seen the infinity variety (and range of quality) of widgets that turn up in shareware for Windows. Having a rich frameowrk provided with the OS (and the developer tools) is much better, trust me on this.
The drag and drop feature is really nice. Windows has it, but it's much more widely support in Mac apps, again because of the rich frameworks.
Mac OS 9 had that windowshading for all windows, some miss it so there are extensions for OS X that do that.
I work in one of the most pro-Apple commercial shops in North America. We're stuck recommending Firefox for an HR section of the Intranet because the SSL support in Safari is so damn slow. Fixing that before we have to roll Tiger out will be nice.
I still need to double check that we've got a current Firefox on the standard build.
1. Some weird alien dictator guy from the future. 2. Rival factions battling for control of the timeline. 3. Daniels. yes. 4. Season 4 started with the 2nd part of the last time-travel episode. P-51s firing machine guns at a shuttlepod are cool. Reptillian aliens in Nazi uniforms made me turn the S.4 premier off before the theme music started. So that's a 'no'.
However, after that they did manage to introduce a rogue Starfleet element that looks a lot like Section 31, explain why some Klingons have smooth foreheads (probably the best work they did on Enterprise), show how interspecies cooperation started and even managed to get the Vulcan's back on track (and explained why they've been such utter dicks, no the ambassador is NOT a Romulan - killing a theory I've had since the show first aired). The Dr. Sung episodes were interesting (and Brent Spiner needed the work). We get to see Romulans being devious. And Jeffrey Coombs gets a lot of work in Season 4, that's ALWAYS good.
Season 4 is definitely worth the download. If this hypothetical Season 5 continues using 2- and 3-part stories I'm all for it.
If by PC, you mean something running on commodity x86 hardware, then no. If by PC you mean "what grandpa has in the den", then Apple has something you may be interested (some of you can stop reading now).
All Cocoa and (iirc) Carbon applications support a minimal set of AppleScript commands, including Save and Close. The Finder could easily send a command to Word to save and close a document, or to close it without saving.
This would be a very handy feature for any file manager to have.
I'm calling 'fake' on these. Not for any detailed examination of the image, but merely a look at the design. It doesn't look like any other Sony product - and not in a good way. That's enough for me.
Filters in layers will be awesome. It's so obviously awesome one wonders why it hasn't been available since the first layer implementation. But then, I haven't heard anyone asking for it either.
The Gimp still needs CMYK, let alone stuff like that.
Well, AppleInsider has been pimping this for a while. Nobody else I've seen is citing build numbers unless they're quoting AppleInsider. Apple has messed with people before. I think either AI is getting bogus info from a source at Apple, or AI themselves is pranking.
But, April 1st is Apple's birthday, so it wouldn't be out of character for them to announce something big. Or prank AI, remember butt-head astronomer ?
I would have been much happier if EA had kept enough of the rights to publish BT:3025. I was in the beta for that, and they got the online FPS thing totally right. Big mechs lumbered around and blasted away, small mechs could do a pretty good job of running circles around the big ones - mess up ONCE and the big guy blasts you.
And it was a 3025 game, none of this Clan nonsense. Javelins, Wolverines, Archers, Riflemen, the Atlas, etc. We had medium lasers, SRM-6s and AC/5s and we LIKED 'em.
There was something sublime about a wolfpack of 4 JAV 10-Fs (the 4x Med Laser variant if I have the designation wrong) executing a coordinated attack. I haven't seen its like in any game since. A good group could take out much more than its own tonnage in enemy mechs.
Damn MS for buying up the rights and killing that project !
Honestly, the death of BT:3025 is the only thing I'm actively resentful of MS for.
Ok, and the crappy products I occasionally have to support.
The high population WoW servers suck and are often offline. The low pop servers are fine. SIgn up, make a character on a server listed in green, and have fun. My server has 10k people, the ones people whine about have 20k+.
The only pilfering they've done from Microsoft was fast user switching in 10.3, and Steve Jobs credited MS during his Panther keynote. Desktop searching is soemthing Apple has been working on for more than a decade. They put it into the iApps first because it is easy to implement for media libraries and of obvious utility.
The actual Spotlight implementation in 10.4 will owe much more to BeOS than to anything Microsoft has done. This is due to two things: First, Be had very sophisticated metadata in the filesystem years ago, and secondly they hired the guy who wrote Be's software to develop Spotlight. That's not stealing, that's hiring the guy who did it once before.
Lastly, through XP the local search facilities on any Microsoft OS have been mediocre at best. Up to 10.2 the Find command in the Finder did a very fast job of searching in it's own window. In 10.3 you can search from the toolbar in any Finder window (unless you've customised it out for some reason). In 10.4 saved searches will act like folders and will index all your email, music and other stuff.
Apple has been continually improving their desktop search facilties for years and Spotlight is just a logical next step. If anything it looks (vaguely) like Microsoft was trying to beat the features in Panther, and just didn't aim high enough.
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It's simple. Certain classes of software have become commodities. Operating systems, window managers, compilers, powerful text editors have all been adopted by the programming community at large as community projects. As a result, some kinds of software now have a zero dollar cost.
As a professional developer you should see no contradiction in sitting in front of a workstation running nothing but Free Software and earning a fat salary in providing your employer with software to their precise specifications and unique requirements. It may be specialized software for resale, it may be for internal use, trade secrets or patents (a legitimate one let's say) may be involved, it may require more programming and domain knowledge than is available in the programming community for open source projects (Human Computer Interface experts, or cryptographers), or it may be tied to expensive/rare/controlled equipment.
In some cases a company may hire a contributor to a Free Software product that has become misison-critical for them. Imagine the difference between paying for a support contract and employing one of the lead developers (or fixing a bug rather than reporting it). I always try and build in costs for some custom coding whenever I propose an open source product, it's good for the community and gets bugs fixed.
There are many reasons to pay for software or to pay people to write it. Even if Free Software sweeps all before it. There are plenty of cases where you need software to meet a specific schedule - a game to tie in with a movie, or an accounting system to meet new regulations.
They won't hit that limit if anyone at Apple has ever used Entourage. Hard limits on data sizes suck (in general-purpoise applications).
I missed the space sims, then I got the B5 total conversion of Freespace 2. Let me just tell you, Minbari fighters piss me off.
I don't enjoy most RTS games. I'll manage an economy, but I don't want to deal with workers in between managing tank assaults. I'll go Railroad Tycoon or something if I want an economy. The closest a classic RTS comes to working for me is Dawn of War - it's got a great background, excellent art and animation and it's all tactics beyond building your base. The strategic points concept really helps it.
But we do have two good sims out right now, both WW2. Silent Hunter III is an amazing sub sim. Even if you aren't keen on subs or naval sims, it's worth the $40. It's gorgeous and captivating, probably sim of the year. And for flight sims, Pacific Fighters is outstanding. This is the lates in the IL2/Forgotten Battles series. As a standalone it just covers the Pacifc theater, it can also be merged with FB to do Western Europe and Russia. The single-player mission selection in PF is lousy (lots available online), but the campaigns and online play rock. This sim looks almost movie quality, and it's got a good flight model and *great* damage models (so damaged planes look right). It's a worthwhile investment for anyone with a current video card and a joystick. Get the FB+AEWP gold edition and Pacific Fighters for full effect.
Those two are keeping it real in the sim community. I won't link to Steel Beasts (which the US and Danish armies use for training)... because I can't hit a moving target, or to LOMAC because I find modern BVR air combat boring.
I support products from both Apple and Microsoft:
.mbox stores in Mail.app 1.0 for me) represents a lot of valuable data at risk because of a terrible design decision.It'd make a little more sense if Entourage used the same monolithic format Outlook or OE use, but they invented a new kind.
How about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't completely implode if a single byte gets written incorrectly?" Or how about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't crap out when it hits two gigabytes?"
They actually DID the second one. Of course, a 2GB to 4GB improvement means somebody had been using a signed INT to index the database... I'll never understand why Microsoft is so fond of monolithic binary data stores (Registry, Entourage db etc.), the goddamn things break and can't really be fixed. Entourage 2004 does fuck up a LOT less than X did, but 2-4GB of binary data that could (should) be represented as text on disk (thank the person who advocated
I swear there's a corporate directive to go with monolithic stores wherever possible (for very large values of possible).
No point, just a bad day at the office because Entourage and GroupWise don't get along.
I have. They didn't use any.
I am *stunned* that they are still in business. I had assumed that market forces (or their local Attorney General) had extinguished those felching dirtbags a long time ago.
Don't think of trademarks as having exlusive rights to a name, a trademark is an exclusive right to a specific name for a product.
It's part of the consumer protection package: it keeps sleazy companies from making cheap knockoffs and copying the famous brand's name and logo (logos get similar protection). Go to a discount store, buy a $5 set of Snap-On screwdrivers and you might think you were getting a good deal. But when the cheap metal warps abd breaks on a tight screw, you'd be associating that with the 'real' Snap-On; you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
And that's why we have trademarks. They protect consumers and manufacturers.
Back in, oh 1994, when I was active on DuneMUSH I was experimenting with a Dvorak keyboard [1]. On chat, someone guessed I was using one because my off-by-one-key typos had changed patterns. It was probably Erich or Feyd.
[1] A nicer layout than QWERTY, takes some getting used to, and useless if you have to use QWERTY keyboards regularly (desktop support, nuthin' but other people's keyboards right now).
If you allow expansion cards to meet the port requirements then Apple would have to support every 3rd party card out there. This is one of the key problems that helps determine the upper bound of how reliable Windows can ever be. Apple doesn't want to go that route and I don't want them to.
Besides that major problem, the memory bandwidth on the beige machines sucks. The beige G3s had 10ns 168-pin SDRAM, while the Blue & White G3s had 8ns PC100 SDRAM. Big difference in memory architecture, and that's probably what Apple is really dropping support for. You can't upgrade that, and since you cna't buy a modern motherboard for the beige case you're stuck; volume limitations would probably make the price of the motherboard awful close to a much faster Mini anyway so why bother ?
The PowerBook G3 issue looks similar. The 1st gen units had 60 ns EDO DIMM and the 500MHz FireWire [1] units had 8ns SO-DIMM (so did the first iMacs, so they fall on the supported side of the line). I'm not conversant with the differences, but since the 1st unit was the only PBG3 to use EDO DIMMs there must be something Apple doesn't want to deal with.
[1] We have one of these. If I can coax it into booting on its sad battery I'm gonna try it on Tiger, it handled Panther pretty well.
When they release 'Kzinti' it'll have "scream-and-leap" mode. It doesn't just block script kiddies, it collects their ears for you !
We recently added RCDefaultApp to our standard build. It's a preference pane that lets you set protocol handlers and edit the default application for each extension. Very handy.
I just got tired of launching Mail.app every time the system decided one of Entourage's helper apps was the default mailto: handler.
Since the anonymous comment hasn't been modded up yet...
Stickies is a beautiful application, sheer coding elegance. It does one thing very well. All it does is display a bunch of text windows in a variety of pastel colors. Each window can be 'windowshaded', which minimizes a window in place by displaying just the title bar (toggled with a double click). I keep all of my stickies windowshaded - the first line of text shows in the title bar so you can tell them apart. And you can drag and drop in and out of a sticky.
That's all Stickies does. It displays windows you can type into. Nothing fancy, sheer minimalism in action. Adding more features would destroy the program's simplicity.
Give 'em a try, they're a great place to stash snippets of text without going to multiple clipboards.
But they aren't plain vanilla text windows. When Apple wrote the default text editing widget for Cocoa they made it very powerful. Because of that text in a sticky note can be be in any mix of fonts and faces, images can be pasted in, and the text can be kerned, and styles can be copied and re-applied. You even inherit the system-wide spellchecker by using the standard text widget.
Apple has provided a very rich application framework, which raises the quality of software produced by small shops. We've all seen the infinity variety (and range of quality) of widgets that turn up in shareware for Windows. Having a rich frameowrk provided with the OS (and the developer tools) is much better, trust me on this.
The drag and drop feature is really nice. Windows has it, but it's much more widely support in Mac apps, again because of the rich frameworks.
Mac OS 9 had that windowshading for all windows, some miss it so there are extensions for OS X that do that.
I work in one of the most pro-Apple commercial shops in North America. We're stuck recommending Firefox for an HR section of the Intranet because the SSL support in Safari is so damn slow. Fixing that before we have to roll Tiger out will be nice.
I still need to double check that we've got a current Firefox on the standard build.
1. Some weird alien dictator guy from the future.
2. Rival factions battling for control of the timeline.
3. Daniels. yes.
4. Season 4 started with the 2nd part of the last time-travel episode. P-51s firing machine guns at a shuttlepod are cool. Reptillian aliens in Nazi uniforms made me turn the S.4 premier off before the theme music started. So that's a 'no'.
However, after that they did manage to introduce a rogue Starfleet element that looks a lot like Section 31, explain why some Klingons have smooth foreheads (probably the best work they did on Enterprise), show how interspecies cooperation started and even managed to get the Vulcan's back on track (and explained why they've been such utter dicks, no the ambassador is NOT a Romulan - killing a theory I've had since the show first aired). The Dr. Sung episodes were interesting (and Brent Spiner needed the work). We get to see Romulans being devious. And Jeffrey Coombs gets a lot of work in Season 4, that's ALWAYS good.
Season 4 is definitely worth the download. If this hypothetical Season 5 continues using 2- and 3-part stories I'm all for it.
Sure !
I miss Eve, I just don't miss the griefers who like to park battleships by gates I need to use.
If by PC, you mean something running on commodity x86 hardware, then no. If by PC you mean "what grandpa has in the den", then Apple has something you may be interested (some of you can stop reading now).
All Cocoa and (iirc) Carbon applications support a minimal set of AppleScript commands, including Save and Close. The Finder could easily send a command to Word to save and close a document, or to close it without saving.
This would be a very handy feature for any file manager to have.
Looked at another way, 100% of Sony console divisions have had at least one late project.
I'm calling 'fake' on these. Not for any detailed examination of the image, but merely a look at the design. It doesn't look like any other Sony product - and not in a good way. That's enough for me.
Well, if CS2 uses CoreImage to handle those layers, then they can use the GPU to calculate it. That should be plenty fast on any 64MB+ card.
Filters in layers will be awesome. It's so obviously awesome one wonders why it hasn't been available since the first layer implementation. But then, I haven't heard anyone asking for it either.
The Gimp still needs CMYK, let alone stuff like that.
Well, AppleInsider has been pimping this for a while. Nobody else I've seen is citing build numbers unless they're quoting AppleInsider. Apple has messed with people before. I think either AI is getting bogus info from a source at Apple, or AI themselves is pranking.
But, April 1st is Apple's birthday, so it wouldn't be out of character for them to announce something big. Or prank AI, remember butt-head astronomer ?
I would have been much happier if EA had kept enough of the rights to publish BT:3025. I was in the beta for that, and they got the online FPS thing totally right. Big mechs lumbered around and blasted away, small mechs could do a pretty good job of running circles around the big ones - mess up ONCE and the big guy blasts you.
And it was a 3025 game, none of this Clan nonsense. Javelins, Wolverines, Archers, Riflemen, the Atlas, etc. We had medium lasers, SRM-6s and AC/5s and we LIKED 'em.
There was something sublime about a wolfpack of 4 JAV 10-Fs (the 4x Med Laser variant if I have the designation wrong) executing a coordinated attack. I haven't seen its like in any game since. A good group could take out much more than its own tonnage in enemy mechs.
Damn MS for buying up the rights and killing that project !
Honestly, the death of BT:3025 is the only thing I'm actively resentful of MS for.
Ok, and the crappy products I occasionally have to support.
I'll go be sad now.
The high population WoW servers suck and are often offline. The low pop servers are fine. SIgn up, make a character on a server listed in green, and have fun. My server has 10k people, the ones people whine about have 20k+.
Looked at another way: It's as bad as it's gonna get.
The only pilfering they've done from Microsoft was fast user switching in 10.3, and Steve Jobs credited MS during his Panther keynote. Desktop searching is soemthing Apple has been working on for more than a decade. They put it into the iApps first because it is easy to implement for media libraries and of obvious utility.
The actual Spotlight implementation in 10.4 will owe much more to BeOS than to anything Microsoft has done. This is due to two things: First, Be had very sophisticated metadata in the filesystem years ago, and secondly they hired the guy who wrote Be's software to develop Spotlight. That's not stealing, that's hiring the guy who did it once before.
Lastly, through XP the local search facilities on any Microsoft OS have been mediocre at best. Up to 10.2 the Find command in the Finder did a very fast job of searching in it's own window. In 10.3 you can search from the toolbar in any Finder window (unless you've customised it out for some reason). In 10.4 saved searches will act like folders and will index all your email, music and other stuff.
Apple has been continually improving their desktop search facilties for years and Spotlight is just a logical next step. If anything it looks (vaguely) like Microsoft was trying to beat the features in Panther, and just didn't aim high enough.
He's using the Camel-toe book from O'Reilly.
Actually the GP was making a Matrix reference, but who's counting ?