Even Mac apps that don't use installers need to put various pereference files, support files and the like in certain directories, such as the user's Library folder. THis is actually done at first launch. The Anandtech guy apparently thought that they were installed when he dragged the app file over; that would creep me out, too, if dragging one one file actually dragged a bunch into seemingly random locations. But the file system isn't that magical; the application just created those files/folders as needed. No mystery here, no need to feel disconnected.
I know I'm coming late to this discussion, but I've worked for over seven years now as a contractor at AT&T, primarily on their intranet, so I have a bit of a view from the inside.
I agree with the other posters that this is primarily a move to force discounts from Microsoft. AT&T is desperate to cut costs whrever it can; besides layoffs and facilities consolidation, they've gone as far as raising prices in the cafeteria by 50% over the last year, and employees have to pay our of their own pocket for water coolers. They jumped eagerly onto the Licencing 6.0 bandwagon, without realizing that the next major desktop OS upgrade would be delayed until 2006 or later, and they're not happy with what they're getting for their money.
As a Mac user at home, I'd love to see them adopt Mac OS X, but they have far too much invested in Wintel hardware, and their upgrade cycle is ridiculously long. (For example, my department only a year ago got around to replacing our 2x350MHz Dell Precision workstations, circa 1998, with crappy consumer grade Dell Optiplex boxes, and are only replacing the standard 600MHz ThinkPads with new low-end Dell laptops when the StinkPads die.)
However, this move isn't entirely inconceivable. Eslambolchi wears many hats, one of which is head of AT&T Labs, which is the last bastion of Unix in the company. ATT.com's servers run on Unix, too, as do a number of Labs systems and servers.
ActiveX is an issue, but the company has also chased off most of the internal development community. New projects are increasingly based on server-side tools such as Documentum and Plumtree. Most ASP devs I know have moves to ASP.NET, so porting to Mono would be possible. Netscape 7 and Firefox were recently approved as alternate browsers (and Netscape 4 deprecated). So the trend seems to be in a more standards-compliant, more platform-independant direction.
After years of acting like a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, AT&T has committed to work on integrating Mac OS X into the company's infrastructure. This is a huge shift for AT&T.
(Anecdote: Five years ago, our internal newsletter staff needed to upgrade their ancient PowerMac, and was told that just to order one with their own budget they would need to jump through a dozen beauracratic hoops; Mac purchases just weren't allowed. When the production editor insisted, the procurement folks offered to replace the Mac with a high-end Windows box, at their expense, just to keep the Mac out of the company.)
As it is now, there are more Macs in use at Microsoft than there are at AT&T, although that seems to be changing. Intranet traffic from Macs has tripled in the last year or so (OK, so it's 0.03% vs. 0.01%, but it's a good sign!) Fiscal pressures have loosened things up, to where management is forced to buy the right system for the job, rather than simply follow dogma.
Still, I won't be holding my breath waiting for them to convert wholesale to Linux. Microsoft has a policy of never losing to Linux, no matter the cost. AT&T, while a shadow of it's former self, is still way too high-profile a customer to let slip to Open Source. Gates & Balmer will do whatever it takes to prevent it.
I'm sure Mr. Sawyer is a fine writer and all, but really, this sort of over-optimistic drivel has been around since before SF even existed. The editor's "department" choice is ironic: we don't have flying cars because the "popular science" wonks of 40 years ago chose to ignore the realities of the world we live in.
Sawyer flat-out ignores many trends we all see in our lives right now, without justifying what would cause such drastic changes in course. Real change only comes from disruption; like, say the Internet.
Wanna get an idea how far things will progress in the next ten years? Look at what it's done in the LAST ten years...
Wake-up technology: In 1994, alarms clocks worked pretty much the same way they had for the previous 50 years. I bought one around then, that I still use, that starts playng the radio at zero volume and slowly increases it to wake me more-or-less gently. But as another poster pointed out, your employers STILL insist you be available at certain, pre-planned times, the Hell with your brain rhythms. As white-collar workers lose more and more rights and bargaining power vs. management, this will certainly not change in the next ten. (More likely: technology that subtly alters your sleep cycles, so you get more rest during sleep, then awake you on schedule, but with less stress; this will allow the ambitious to perform better in the office on a few less hours a sleep than today. White-colar OT is going the way of the dod, we'll *all* be working 60+ hour weeks ten years from now!)
Kitchens that prepare your meals: Ten years ago, family eating habits were well along on a shift away from family-group dining and home-cooked meals, towards individual eating schedules and pre-packaged meals. Parents and children have very busy, and vastly divergent, schedules do to the ever-increasing demands of work and school; don't look for that to change anytime soon. So don't expect your kitchen to cook you a meal, either; it *might* microwave you something just in time to grab and eat in the car, though. (Side note: The Atkins craze still in favor ten years from now? Riiiight. The processed food industry is already looking for ways to undercut the trend towards healthy foods, and with their marketing budgets, we'll all be back to eating crap again in a few years.)
Home appliances analysing your health: This one I can see, but instead of to protect your health, it'll exist for the benefit of your insurance companies. Blood sugar a little high? Hmmm, pre-disposition to diabetes, if you develop it later, we won't cover it. Blood pressure a bit high? Your policy will cost $500 more next month. Pre-cancerous cells? Policy cancelled, unless you'd like to spend $100,000 per year for an "assigned risk" plan...
Electric, self piloting cars: Ten years ago, personal vehicles had already gone through a cycle of increased fuel economy, which was soundly rejected by consumers. Fleet mileage has declined ever since. While some makers are trying to embrace hybrid technology, consumers are staying away in droves. (The only thing that could change this would be government incentives or mandates, but with the lobying power of Big Oil, expect just the opposite.) And while the technology is probably already here to allow cars to drive themselves, it'll take at *least* ten years just to work out the transistion: the period in which self-piloting and manually piloted cars share the road will be a disaster. Besides the human (particularly American) reluctance to give up control of their vehicle in ANY fashion, plus the potential for huge legal liability to the jurisdictions that want to try this, will keep this technology safely bottled up for several decades.
Schools teaching analytical skills: Don't I wish!! Ten years ago, the concept of education was much more holistic; now it's all about standardized testing, both to meet government requirements, as well as increasingly choosy colleges. The trend today is to view school as nothing more than job training, either directly o
Re:They score some points with me on a first skim.
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Securing Mac OS X
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· Score: 4, Informative
As a paying.Mac member, I downloaded and installed McAfee Virex 7.2, and it's actually found a few viruses: Windows viruses in software installers backed up on my OS X fileserver! It also tripped across a really ancient Mac virus on a very old Zip disk from about five years ago, and since I've got a pretty healthy collection of old pre-G3 Macs, Virex has done it's job very nicely.
A lot of people, apparently. Including me. I've been very happy with it.
I am loath to send my credit card data to a semi-shady Russian site
I don't think they even accept credit cards directly; at least, I don't recall seeing that option when I signed up.
I signed up using PayPal. That's one reason I took the plunge: a (more or less) reputable American intermediary for the financial end. I have a balance, that's deducted from for each download. When it's near empty, I go to PayPal and fill 'er up again. It's pretty painless.
Even if you believe Steve Jobs 'reality distortion field' figure fron his keynote speech that 40% of mac users are running OSX, that still leaves 60% on OS9, and we've not had a port of Mozilla for OS9 since 1.2 (which was as buggy as hell).
If you hack macs, please do the silent majority a favour and port a stable version of mozilla for us!
Not so fast there. There *is* a slightly newer version, namely 1.3.1, ported by the WaMCom folks. It also has a few features from beyond 1.3.1 backported.
Overpriced processor upgrades have a long and rich tradition on Macs.
True, but for a good reason: Mac owners tend to get kinda attached to their machines. A CPU upgrade is often the "path of least resistance"; keep the same Mac, same peripherals, same system environment, just speed it up. And it's still cheaper than a new Mac.
I did this myself a few years ago, and didn't regret it at all. Read all about it here if you'd like.
Hmm, I wonder how they managed this... I thought the G4 buss multiplier maxed out at 10x or so. Maybe they added an extra clock, synced to the main bus clock but running twice as fast, so that the CPU sees the 66MHz system bus as 133MHz?
Sonnet's a good company. Their products are rock solid. I just wish they'd come out with a dual G4 like PowerLogix. Competition is good!
Re:Legacy-free computing? Apple's way ahead, as us
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Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
I don't really understand how needing to run a virtual machine for old OS 9 apps isn't considered a "legacy issue".....
Well, the topic here is hardware, not software, but I'll take the bait.
First of all, Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 95, and IBM with OS/2: they created a compatibility environment for 16-bit software so that it could run (more or less) under a 32-bit OS with all new APIs.
That said, Apple's Classic environment does it much better. I had tons of classic software when I climbed aboard the OS X bandwagon, and was amazed how smoothly it worked. Unless it tries to access hardware directly, it'll run just fine.
But that was a walk in the park compared to Apple's real trick: the switch from 680x0 to PowerPC architecture. With help from Connectix, they wrote an on-the-fly opcode conversion that worked so well, most 68k software ran faster under emulation on PPC than they did natively.
This points up a key factor in Apple's philosophy: hardware is just a means; software, and it's interaction with the user, is the end.
That said, their control of the hardware environment allows Apple to control it evolution, and gracefully manage the very hardware legacy issues the referenced article raises.
Legacy-free computing? Apple's way ahead, as usual
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Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been running a legacy-free computer since 1987 when I bought my first Mac.
PS/2? Gee, where did IBM think of that? maybe the ADB ports on a Mac. They even used the same connectors as Apple. Of course, in the Apple version, keyboard & mouse ports were interchangable, daisy-chainable (plug the mouse into the KB, f'rinstance), and supported a variety of other devices as well (joysticks, hardware dongles, etc.).
Plug 'n' Pray? Not on a Macintosh. I've never had to set an interrupt or mave a jumper on a Mac *ever*. It's always just worked.
ISA too slow? Apple used the faster Nubus for the Mac, then later switched to PCI before the x86 crowd.
BIOS too primitive? Apple helped develop OpenFirmware, which sounds a bit like Intel's EFI to me.
4.7MB/s ATA too slow? Apple had 10MB/s (later 20MB/s) SCSI in the Mac for ages, then switched to ATA/33 once it caught up in speed.
Floppy drive? What's that? Apple dropped 'em years ago. Even before CD-R became cheap, Syquest or Zip drives were ubiquitous on Macs. They could even boot off them. Amazing concept, huh, booting off a removable drive?
See a trend here? Seems the x86 world is just now getting around to solving legacy issues that Apple solved long ago. Welcome to the future, folks.
To be honest, I think the whole "Playstation 3" thing being released in 2003 is bull. I mean, think about it... The Playstation 2 was released with a LOT of fanfare. It was announced 2 years before, pictures of the unit a year before... If this is indeed true, I would be deeply surprised. Sony's famous for it's marketing and hype machine.
That was then, this is now.
Right now, if Sony were to attempt that sort of early marketing push, I think one of the immediate effects would be to slow sales of it's own PS2, as gamers decide to hold off buying now and wait for the superior machine a bit later. The sales drop might even give the Xbox the #1 spot, which could cause a shift in developer priorities in the near term.
If I were in charge over there, I'd work feverishly to finish the PS3 design, but keep it under wraps for now, or so long as I were still eating the pants of the Xbox. Once the Xbox begins to catch up, or once the PS3 is ready to go to manufacturing, then I'd crank up the marketing machine and take the market by storm.
Oh please. Those fuel line problems might "cause catastrophic failure" on takeoff (when the engines are burning), but on re-entry, the only engines used are the maneuvering thrusters, and at the stage where Columbia failed, even those aren't used.
Really, some people are clutching at straws here... let's let the investigators do their jobs, and see what really happened.
I find myself at an uncharacteristic loss for words... so I'll borrow some from John Gillespie Magee:
Oh! I Have slipped the surley bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never Lark, or even Eagle flew -
And while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Ten bucks says Apple releases their own P2P audio sharing utility in like 2 weeks using this guy's old code.
Well, I doubt they'll use his code (they aren't that stupid, only Micro$oft has balls that big!), but Steve did demonstrate the same functionality when he introduced Rendezvous, so it's likely that the feature has been planned for a future version of iTunes for quite some time. This guy just beat Apple to the punch.
But I don't think that's why Apple has gone all swarm-of-lawyers on this poor guy, tho.
Remember the hubbub over "Rip. Mix. Burn."? Apple is walking a tightrope right now with the RIAA, trying to allow their users to make maximum use of their legally-owned music with a minimum of RIAA-mandated cruft, while also avoiding the RIAA's crosshairs. Allowing this third-part developer to mod iTunes just might upset the balance, and get Apple in serious hot water.
So, yes, you'll see this functionality in the next rev of iTunes. But you can be sure, too, that it'll have some limitations built in (like the iPod's one-way syncing) to keep the RIAA stormtroopers out of the yard.
It's absolutely ridiculous that we're well into the 21st century, and about 30 years removed from the original GUIs developed at Xerox-PARC, and WE STILL DON'T HAVE A FSCKING LAYER OF ABSTRACTION BETWEEN A FONT AND ITS ON-SCREEN DISPLAY!!!
Oh, I agree. And how.
Ideally, you'd have apps specify all graphics (including font glyphs) in real-world units (points, inches, mm, furlongs, parsecs, whatever), and the window manager / display manager would do the translation to screen pixels. Problem there is, with current OSs, you'd need to toss out all your graphics, type, and UI APIs and start from scratch. And get all your developers to do the same. Not bloody likely.
The alternative is to internally translate the idealized "pixel" of the current graphics APIs to actual screne pixels. That way, the application never notices the difference; everything it draws to the screen is adjusted to the display resolution. Problemt here is, for most displays where the actual resolution is fairly close to the idealized resolution, scaling tends to introduce lots of very ugly artifacts: jagged edges, awkward kerning and letterspacing, "one pixel off" errors, etc.
Again, though, Mac OS X's Quartz rendering engine does a pretty remarkable job with this sort of scaling; try their Screen Zoom utility (System Prefs, under Universal Access) and see what I mean. That's one reason why I think Apple might be the first to make this sort of thing work. (Ironically, the same OS won't let you choose your UI fonts or sizes. Go figger.)
Unfortunately, I don't think X is smart enough to use a different DPI setting for each screen resolution.
I think the biggest problem on X11 is the font manager. It only seems to understand 75ppi or 100ppi; for any other resolution, I assume it either chooses the nearest, or tries to scale from the nearest.
I have little experience with the "official" X11, but IMHO, XFree86 font handling is still playing catch-up with Windows and Mac. It only recently gained decent scalable fonts (TrueType), and they're still problematic; the concept of scaling these arbitrarily to match screen resolution seems a long way off.
how high can I set the resolution with having to be able to squint to see the letters that I am typing. I can barely see the letters that I type at 1600x1200. I can imagine what 3840x2400 would look like.
How high? That depends on whether or not OS developers get their sh*t together.
Current, mainstream operating systems, or more properly, windowing systems (Windows, Mac OS X, X11) all tend to assume a screen resolution, or offer limited capability to change the resolution.
X Window System: for font scaling, allows you to choose from 75dpi or 100dpi. Woo whee.
Mac OS X: no capability to scale the display resolution at all, despite the fact that their Quartz rendering engine, with it's PostScript base, should be able to handle the chore in it's sleep.
Windows: While it allows the user to choose the DPI of her monitor, this seems to be applied to application fonts only; the fonts used in many user interface elements are not scaled, making it difficult to use many UI elements at high resolutions.
None of these systems have truly separated the "internal" measurement of graphic objects with their display size; all rely on an assumed point-to-pixel ratio. The cost, of course, for this level of abstraction would be performance, i.e. display speed.
But it seems to me that modern display adapters shold be more than capable of doing this. What are lacking are the APIs to make the graphics hardware do the math, and the OS support to enable this feature. I think Mac OS X already has most of the capability already; lets see if they actually take the next step.
"I mean, once they hammer all the fun out of it by making it like cable TV what's the fucking point?"
Hey, it was inevitable. Really.
Let's look at how the other "media" have fared:
Print: While it requires a printing press to reach a large audience, people communicated on paper, one-to-one, since writing was invented. And as recently as the 19th century, it was fairly common to print and distribute pamphlets, if you had a message you wanted to get out, and most towns and cities had several thriving newspapers, each with a unique voice. Today the art of writing has been lost by nearly all but those paid to do it, people handing out leaflets on streetcorners are widely considered whackjobs, and all but a handful of cities have but one major newpaper.
Radio: I think it's asafe bet that Marconi never envisioned ClearChannel. In fact, I doubt he ever thought that millions would actually sit and listen en-masse to a single broadcaster. Radio was originally intended as a one-to-one communications medium, potentially the first long-distance P2P medium. But the vast majority of people were quite content to merely listen to what others broadcast, rather than broadcast themselves. Control of broadcasting consolidated quickly, and by the 1920's a handful of broadcasting networks controlled much of the medium, aided and abetted by the government. Want to broadcast your own station? Good luck. Just ask the FCC for a licence, and you'll find you can't play with the big boys. Sure, a few bands are reserved for "public" use (FRS, CB), but are strictly limited in wattage (hence, reach) and content (did you know it's a federal offence to broadcsat music over CB?), lest you actually provide an alternative to the conglomerates.
Television: 75 years ago this past May, AT&T demonstrated the first television transmission in the US. British researchers had staged a similar demonstration a couple months earlier. It was over wire, but was soon working over the airwaves. But, like radio, it was never intended to be a broadcast medium. For some time, the only television installations were point-to-point, videophones essentially. It took David Sarnoff of RCA (Radio Corp. of America) to realize the potential of television to become yet another corporate broadcasting medium, and that's exactly what he did.
BBSs: Even before the 'net, people had begun to network using local dial-up BBSs, which later gained regional, national, and even international reach via FidoNet and the like. There were no corporate conglomerates dumping "content" into waiting eyeballs; anyone who had something to say or share could buy a modem and put up a BBS. People geographically distant could exchange words and ideas freely. Then came the corporations: CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online. Their improved networks, broad capacity and professional management put an end to the amateur FidoNets. As time went on, each of the nationwide BBSs migrated from merely allowing their customers to interract, and succumbed to the temptation to broadcast to them, to spoonfeed them corporate "content." For an advertising fee, of course.
The Internet: Not long ago, it seemed that everyone had a web site, or at least a home page. People would spend hours just following links in hopes of stumbling across the interesting, the wild, the thought-provoking, the just plain dumb. As the volume of such pages grew, the sheer volume created a demand for an easy way to find sites that fit the viewer's interest. Two methods came about: Web rings and search engines.Web rings were strictly amateur; but investors saw the potential of search engines to "aggregate eyeballs" for sale to advertisers. Then came (and went) "push," a brutally clumsy attempt at TV-style broadcasting; but then the search engines became "portals," attracting users with actually useful functionality. These relatively few "onramps" to the Internet attracted the media corporations, and after several years of consolidation and buy-outs, a mere handful of corporations control what are for many people the only way they know of to get online.
"Knowledge is power." But knowledge doesn't travel by itself, it must be communicated. He who controls that communication controls everything. The wealthy and powerful know this, and will always strive to control what we see, hear, and hence, what we think. That's why every means of communication will inexorably move from one-to-one to a broadcast paradigm.
Why should networked personal computers be any different?
"How much longer until we see something like that in the U.S.?"
What do you mean, "when"? It's called the Social Security Number, or more accurately these days, "Taxpayer Identification Number". And besides just name, address, date of birth and gender, it's tied to your employment history (in governemnt databases), credit history, medical history, and tons more (in "private" databases).
"Now let's hope some of the Good Guys (tm) start doing the same thing."
You're laboring under the misconception that there are "good guys". Remember, this is Congress we're talking about.
(Yeah yeah, I know, Boucher seems fairly clueful on issues of importance to the Slashcrowd, but I suspect he's just playing contrarian because the RIAA/MPAA haven't stuffed him full o' cash. Yet. Dig around, I'm sure he belongs to somebody other than his voters.)
First, the plane was not a paragon of stability. The plane proved difficult to control in the days of mechanically-controlled moving surfaces.
From what I read in my days at Northrop, the YB-35 was a real handful; flying wings tend to be very short, making pitch control quite squirrelly. By the YB-49, it was reasonably stable for a pilot who'd spent time on type. That in itself was quite an acheivement, in the pre-digital age.
Second, the YB-49 used relatively inefficient turbojets, so speed and range was not a great leap forward as some people think. The B-52 used the same aerodynamic research that resulted in the breakthrough B-47, and also used the much more efficient Pratt & Whitney J57 engine
OK, so turn that on it's head: imagine how well the YB-49 would have done with those same J57 engines!
Yes, the B-52 reached it's potential with better engines. But we're talking airframes here, if you hold the engines constant, it's still hard to argue that the B-52 was superior to the YB-49.
(Oh, and you're right, the B-47 was pretty remarkable, but too small for strategic bombing.)
Finally, the YB-49's bomb bay could barely carry the large-sized atomic weapons of the day. The B-52's bomb bay could easily carry the large nuclear bombs, and improvements to the B-52 allowed additional underwing carriage of weapons.
Hmmm... the sketches I've seen of the YB-49 (yes, sketches, since the original plans were confiscated) showed some pretty cavernous bomb bays. I'm not sure the size of the bombs of the era, but it seems they designed to fit the payload requested by the customer.
The modern Northrup B-2 benefits from modern structural design (which allows for a much larger bomb bay), modern, much smaller nuclear bombs, modern jet engine technology and fly-by-wire controls, none of which was available in the 1940's when the YB-49 was being designed.
I didn't even get around to the B-2, but it certainly *did* validate the early work of Jack Northrop, as well as the Hortens. Guess they were both a bit ahead of their time.
Various flying-wing and other sort of blended body/wing designs have been proposed before (see my other post), but in the commercial market, one thing had always been a problem: existing infrastructure.
Remember the last time ya went to the airport? The skyways are designed to attach to the *side of the fuselage*. The Boeing blended body/wing design doesn't have a nice cylindrical body, and hence many of those skyways couldn't accomodate them.
If they're smart, commercial versions of this design will have a short (~12'-15') cylindrical section at the front that'll allow existing skyway systems to work without modification. Otherwise, they'll be *real* limited in which airports they can operate at. The additional wingspan compared to a 747-400 could be a problem, too...
Boeing, fielding a flying-wing-type design?? Sheesh... Boeing is the reason these sorts of planes weren't commonplace 50 years ago!!
Listen, children, to today's aerospace history lesson....
Waaaay back in the late 1940's, Boeing was the darling of the newly formed US Air Force, on the strength of their sturdy, functional WWII bomber designs (B-17, B-29).
However, they were not the only manufacturer capable of designing high-capacity long-distance aircraft.
One of the sucesses of the WWI aircraft industry was a startup called Northrop Aircraft. Led by the brilliant and iconoclastic designer John Northrop, they had started with nothing but ideas, but by the end of the war had already provided one remarkable aircraft to the war effort, the US' first dedicated radar-equipped night fighter, the P61 Black Widow, which decimated Japanese airpower in the latter stages of the war.
John Northrop was well versed in our enemies' aircraft design efforts. He was particularlry intrigued by the work of Germany's Horten brothers, who did pioneering work on "flying wing" aircraft. Much like Boeing's "blended body/wing" designs, there was no separate fuselage; the entire aircraft contributed to lift, and hence were astonistingly efficient.
(Aside: the Hortens also experimented with the use of evading technologies. Their early wings were built of plywood, but their shape, with no corners, no edges, no right-angle "reflector" areas between tail fins or between fuselage and wing, made them unusually hard to detect on the primitive radars of their day. The Hortens added conductive layers of charcoal to the plywood layup, reducing the already low signature dramatically, creating the world's first "stealth" aircraft.)
In 1940, after the defeat at Dunkirk, the US Army Air Corps was convinced that Britain would soon be overrrun by Germany, and realized that it had no way to strike at European targets from North America. They were desperate to develop a bomber that could reach the Germans if England fell. So they put out an open competition for a transcontinental bomber.
Boeing had already designed a pressurized, high-altitude bomber, the B-29, which later in the war would help decimate Japan, both with conventional ordnance as well as the the first atomic bombs. They offered up an improved version of the B-29 to the competition. (yawn)
Another established airframer, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (later Convair), borrowed heavily from Boeing's B-29, but proposed a much larger, eight(!)-engine monstrosity, the YB-36, IMHO one of the most homely aircraft ever laid out on paper.
Northrop, on the other hand, shot for the moon. They proposed a radical flying wing design, far larger and more sophisticated than the Horten designs. For the sort of long ranges missions the USAAC was proposing, the efficiency of the flying wing gave it a distinct edge. With a weight similar to the B-29, it had the range of the far larger Convair design, with the same bomb capacity. Northrop had already built experimental flying wings; they folded their accumulated experiment into an amazing prototype, the four-engine YB-35.
Suffice it to say, the USAAC wasn't all that open-minded to such a radical design. Boeing's design was a non-starter. Plus, at the time the congressional delegation from California had leadership positions in key appropriations committees... so the huge, ugly, inefficient B-36 got the nod for full production.
But that wasn't the last of Jack Northrop, or his flying wings.
Almost before the ink had dried on Japan's surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, tensions with the USSR had escalated to the point where the US military had to consider yet another intercontinental war scenario, but this time the ranges were even longer, up over the North Pole. Hence, another design competition.
Convair's B-36 proved to be a disappointment; even retrofitted with newer turboprop engines, it didn't have the sort of speed and range the new US Air Force needed.
Boeing went back to the well yet again, with a technologically modest design; huge, conventional winged airframe, with four pairs of new turbojet engines to get it off the ground.
Northrop went back to their YB-35, refined the design with the results of the extensive testing they'd done on flying wings since the YB-35, scaled it up for enough volume to carry the bombload and fuel required (and then some!), and replaced the prop engines with turbojets, to create the YB-49.
By all accounts, technologically the YB-49 cleaned up. Northrop was so enthused by their success, they set about designing commercial passenger and cargo versions.
But once again, politics won out.
The details are a but hazy, but Boeing lobbied all the right people very heavily, and in a decision that surprised the entire industry, their design was chosen to become the first nuclear-era strategic bomber: the B-52. Northrop was howling mad, and were quite public with their displeasure.
Just to make the whole affiar that much more scandelous, the Department of Defense sued Northrop, claiming that since the YB-49 was designed for them, they owned the design. They won, and the blueprints vanished from history, precluding the commercial version from ever seeing the light of day. The prototypes and test aircraft were ordered cut up for scrap, to prevent Jack Northrop from embarassing the Air Force with a better plane.
Dont' get me wrong, the B-52 has proved to be an amazing aircraft; whiel far from efficient, it's sturdy enough to allow almost endless modifications, and that has allowed it to survive as a front-line weapons platform even today, 50 years after it's first flight.
But stop and think for a moment where we might be today if the better plane had won, validating the general design. If Northrop's commercial models had been allowed to compete with the more conventional early Boeing and Lockheed airliners.
Yeah, the Blended Wing/Body looks radical in the current context. But it shouldn't.
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Even Mac apps that don't use installers need to put various pereference files, support files and the like in certain directories, such as the user's Library folder. THis is actually done at first launch. The Anandtech guy apparently thought that they were installed when he dragged the app file over; that would creep me out, too, if dragging one one file actually dragged a bunch into seemingly random locations. But the file system isn't that magical; the application just created those files/folders as needed. No mystery here, no need to feel disconnected.
I know I'm coming late to this discussion, but I've worked for over seven years now as a contractor at AT&T, primarily on their intranet, so I have a bit of a view from the inside.
I agree with the other posters that this is primarily a move to force discounts from Microsoft. AT&T is desperate to cut costs whrever it can; besides layoffs and facilities consolidation, they've gone as far as raising prices in the cafeteria by 50% over the last year, and employees have to pay our of their own pocket for water coolers. They jumped eagerly onto the Licencing 6.0 bandwagon, without realizing that the next major desktop OS upgrade would be delayed until 2006 or later, and they're not happy with what they're getting for their money.
As a Mac user at home, I'd love to see them adopt Mac OS X, but they have far too much invested in Wintel hardware, and their upgrade cycle is ridiculously long. (For example, my department only a year ago got around to replacing our 2x350MHz Dell Precision workstations, circa 1998, with crappy consumer grade Dell Optiplex boxes, and are only replacing the standard 600MHz ThinkPads with new low-end Dell laptops when the StinkPads die.)
However, this move isn't entirely inconceivable. Eslambolchi wears many hats, one of which is head of AT&T Labs, which is the last bastion of Unix in the company. ATT.com's servers run on Unix, too, as do a number of Labs systems and servers.
ActiveX is an issue, but the company has also chased off most of the internal development community. New projects are increasingly based on server-side tools such as Documentum and Plumtree. Most ASP devs I know have moves to ASP.NET, so porting to Mono would be possible. Netscape 7 and Firefox were recently approved as alternate browsers (and Netscape 4 deprecated). So the trend seems to be in a more standards-compliant, more platform-independant direction.
After years of acting like a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, AT&T has committed to work on integrating Mac OS X into the company's infrastructure. This is a huge shift for AT&T.
(Anecdote: Five years ago, our internal newsletter staff needed to upgrade their ancient PowerMac, and was told that just to order one with their own budget they would need to jump through a dozen beauracratic hoops; Mac purchases just weren't allowed. When the production editor insisted, the procurement folks offered to replace the Mac with a high-end Windows box, at their expense, just to keep the Mac out of the company.)
As it is now, there are more Macs in use at Microsoft than there are at AT&T, although that seems to be changing. Intranet traffic from Macs has tripled in the last year or so (OK, so it's 0.03% vs. 0.01%, but it's a good sign!) Fiscal pressures have loosened things up, to where management is forced to buy the right system for the job, rather than simply follow dogma.
Still, I won't be holding my breath waiting for them to convert wholesale to Linux. Microsoft has a policy of never losing to Linux, no matter the cost. AT&T, while a shadow of it's former self, is still way too high-profile a customer to let slip to Open Source. Gates & Balmer will do whatever it takes to prevent it.
I'm sure Mr. Sawyer is a fine writer and all, but really, this sort of over-optimistic drivel has been around since before SF even existed. The editor's "department" choice is ironic: we don't have flying cars because the "popular science" wonks of 40 years ago chose to ignore the realities of the world we live in.
Sawyer flat-out ignores many trends we all see in our lives right now, without justifying what would cause such drastic changes in course. Real change only comes from disruption; like, say the Internet.
Wanna get an idea how far things will progress in the next ten years? Look at what it's done in the LAST ten years...
As a paying .Mac member, I downloaded and installed McAfee Virex 7.2, and it's actually found a few viruses: Windows viruses in software installers backed up on my OS X fileserver! It also tripped across a really ancient Mac virus on a very old Zip disk from about five years ago, and since I've got a pretty healthy collection of old pre-G3 Macs, Virex has done it's job very nicely.
A lot of people, apparently. Including me. I've been very happy with it.
I don't think they even accept credit cards directly; at least, I don't recall seeing that option when I signed up.
I signed up using PayPal. That's one reason I took the plunge: a (more or less) reputable American intermediary for the financial end. I have a balance, that's deducted from for each download. When it's near empty, I go to PayPal and fill 'er up again. It's pretty painless.
Not so fast there. There *is* a slightly newer version, namely 1.3.1, ported by the WaMCom folks. It also has a few features from beyond 1.3.1 backported.
Whoops... forgot the port: http://gryffin.dyndns.org:9080/upgrade/
True, but for a good reason: Mac owners tend to get kinda attached to their machines. A CPU upgrade is often the "path of least resistance"; keep the same Mac, same peripherals, same system environment, just speed it up. And it's still cheaper than a new Mac.
I did this myself a few years ago, and didn't regret it at all. Read all about it here if you'd like.
Hmm, I wonder how they managed this... I thought the G4 buss multiplier maxed out at 10x or so. Maybe they added an extra clock, synced to the main bus clock but running twice as fast, so that the CPU sees the 66MHz system bus as 133MHz?
Sonnet's a good company. Their products are rock solid. I just wish they'd come out with a dual G4 like PowerLogix. Competition is good!
Well, the topic here is hardware, not software, but I'll take the bait.
First of all, Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 95, and IBM with OS/2: they created a compatibility environment for 16-bit software so that it could run (more or less) under a 32-bit OS with all new APIs.
That said, Apple's Classic environment does it much better. I had tons of classic software when I climbed aboard the OS X bandwagon, and was amazed how smoothly it worked. Unless it tries to access hardware directly, it'll run just fine.
But that was a walk in the park compared to Apple's real trick: the switch from 680x0 to PowerPC architecture. With help from Connectix, they wrote an on-the-fly opcode conversion that worked so well, most 68k software ran faster under emulation on PPC than they did natively.
This points up a key factor in Apple's philosophy: hardware is just a means; software, and it's interaction with the user, is the end.
That said, their control of the hardware environment allows Apple to control it evolution, and gracefully manage the very hardware legacy issues the referenced article raises.
I've been running a legacy-free computer since 1987 when I bought my first Mac.
See a trend here? Seems the x86 world is just now getting around to solving legacy issues that Apple solved long ago. Welcome to the future, folks.
That was then, this is now.
Right now, if Sony were to attempt that sort of early marketing push, I think one of the immediate effects would be to slow sales of it's own PS2, as gamers decide to hold off buying now and wait for the superior machine a bit later. The sales drop might even give the Xbox the #1 spot, which could cause a shift in developer priorities in the near term.
If I were in charge over there, I'd work feverishly to finish the PS3 design, but keep it under wraps for now, or so long as I were still eating the pants of the Xbox. Once the Xbox begins to catch up, or once the PS3 is ready to go to manufacturing, then I'd crank up the marketing machine and take the market by storm.
Oh please. Those fuel line problems might "cause catastrophic failure" on takeoff (when the engines are burning), but on re-entry, the only engines used are the maneuvering thrusters, and at the stage where Columbia failed, even those aren't used.
Really, some people are clutching at straws here... let's let the investigators do their jobs, and see what really happened.
I find myself at an uncharacteristic loss for words... so I'll borrow some from John Gillespie Magee:
I was just about to post something like this, but ya beat me to it.
Sure hope those folks packed an extra set of skivvies... they might be there a while.
Ten bucks says Apple releases their own P2P audio sharing utility in like 2 weeks using this guy's old code.
Well, I doubt they'll use his code (they aren't that stupid, only Micro$oft has balls that big!), but Steve did demonstrate the same functionality when he introduced Rendezvous, so it's likely that the feature has been planned for a future version of iTunes for quite some time. This guy just beat Apple to the punch.
But I don't think that's why Apple has gone all swarm-of-lawyers on this poor guy, tho.
Remember the hubbub over "Rip. Mix. Burn."? Apple is walking a tightrope right now with the RIAA, trying to allow their users to make maximum use of their legally-owned music with a minimum of RIAA-mandated cruft, while also avoiding the RIAA's crosshairs. Allowing this third-part developer to mod iTunes just might upset the balance, and get Apple in serious hot water.
So, yes, you'll see this functionality in the next rev of iTunes. But you can be sure, too, that it'll have some limitations built in (like the iPod's one-way syncing) to keep the RIAA stormtroopers out of the yard.
Oh, I agree. And how.
Ideally, you'd have apps specify all graphics (including font glyphs) in real-world units (points, inches, mm, furlongs, parsecs, whatever), and the window manager / display manager would do the translation to screen pixels. Problem there is, with current OSs, you'd need to toss out all your graphics, type, and UI APIs and start from scratch. And get all your developers to do the same. Not bloody likely.
The alternative is to internally translate the idealized "pixel" of the current graphics APIs to actual screne pixels. That way, the application never notices the difference; everything it draws to the screen is adjusted to the display resolution. Problemt here is, for most displays where the actual resolution is fairly close to the idealized resolution, scaling tends to introduce lots of very ugly artifacts: jagged edges, awkward kerning and letterspacing, "one pixel off" errors, etc.
Again, though, Mac OS X's Quartz rendering engine does a pretty remarkable job with this sort of scaling; try their Screen Zoom utility (System Prefs, under Universal Access) and see what I mean. That's one reason why I think Apple might be the first to make this sort of thing work. (Ironically, the same OS won't let you choose your UI fonts or sizes. Go figger.)
I think the biggest problem on X11 is the font manager. It only seems to understand 75ppi or 100ppi; for any other resolution, I assume it either chooses the nearest, or tries to scale from the nearest.
I have little experience with the "official" X11, but IMHO, XFree86 font handling is still playing catch-up with Windows and Mac. It only recently gained decent scalable fonts (TrueType), and they're still problematic; the concept of scaling these arbitrarily to match screen resolution seems a long way off.
How high? That depends on whether or not OS developers get their sh*t together.
Current, mainstream operating systems, or more properly, windowing systems (Windows, Mac OS X, X11) all tend to assume a screen resolution, or offer limited capability to change the resolution.
None of these systems have truly separated the "internal" measurement of graphic objects with their display size; all rely on an assumed point-to-pixel ratio. The cost, of course, for this level of abstraction would be performance, i.e. display speed.
But it seems to me that modern display adapters shold be more than capable of doing this. What are lacking are the APIs to make the graphics hardware do the math, and the OS support to enable this feature. I think Mac OS X already has most of the capability already; lets see if they actually take the next step.
"I mean, once they hammer all the fun out of it by making it like cable TV what's the fucking point?"
Hey, it was inevitable. Really.
Let's look at how the other "media" have fared:
"Knowledge is power." But knowledge doesn't travel by itself, it must be communicated. He who controls that communication controls everything. The wealthy and powerful know this, and will always strive to control what we see, hear, and hence, what we think. That's why every means of communication will inexorably move from one-to-one to a broadcast paradigm.
Why should networked personal computers be any different?
"How much longer until we see something like that in the U.S.?"
What do you mean, "when"? It's called the Social Security Number, or more accurately these days, "Taxpayer Identification Number". And besides just name, address, date of birth and gender, it's tied to your employment history (in governemnt databases), credit history, medical history, and tons more (in "private" databases).
"Now let's hope some of the Good Guys (tm) start doing the same thing."
You're laboring under the misconception that there are "good guys". Remember, this is Congress we're talking about.
(Yeah yeah, I know, Boucher seems fairly clueful on issues of importance to the Slashcrowd, but I suspect he's just playing contrarian because the RIAA/MPAA haven't stuffed him full o' cash. Yet. Dig around, I'm sure he belongs to somebody other than his voters.)
First, the plane was not a paragon of stability. The plane proved difficult to control in the days of mechanically-controlled moving surfaces.
From what I read in my days at Northrop, the YB-35 was a real handful; flying wings tend to be very short, making pitch control quite squirrelly. By the YB-49, it was reasonably stable for a pilot who'd spent time on type. That in itself was quite an acheivement, in the pre-digital age.
Second, the YB-49 used relatively inefficient turbojets, so speed and range was not a great leap forward as some people think. The B-52 used the same aerodynamic research that resulted in the breakthrough B-47, and also used the much more efficient Pratt & Whitney J57 engine
OK, so turn that on it's head: imagine how well the YB-49 would have done with those same J57 engines!
Yes, the B-52 reached it's potential with better engines. But we're talking airframes here, if you hold the engines constant, it's still hard to argue that the B-52 was superior to the YB-49.
(Oh, and you're right, the B-47 was pretty remarkable, but too small for strategic bombing.)
Finally, the YB-49's bomb bay could barely carry the large-sized atomic weapons of the day. The B-52's bomb bay could easily carry the large nuclear bombs, and improvements to the B-52 allowed additional underwing carriage of weapons.
Hmmm... the sketches I've seen of the YB-49 (yes, sketches, since the original plans were confiscated) showed some pretty cavernous bomb bays. I'm not sure the size of the bombs of the era, but it seems they designed to fit the payload requested by the customer.The modern Northrup B-2 benefits from modern structural design (which allows for a much larger bomb bay), modern, much smaller nuclear bombs, modern jet engine technology and fly-by-wire controls, none of which was available in the 1940's when the YB-49 was being designed.
I didn't even get around to the B-2, but it certainly *did* validate the early work of Jack Northrop, as well as the Hortens. Guess they were both a bit ahead of their time.
Various flying-wing and other sort of blended body/wing designs have been proposed before (see my other post), but in the commercial market, one thing had always been a problem: existing infrastructure.
Remember the last time ya went to the airport? The skyways are designed to attach to the *side of the fuselage*. The Boeing blended body/wing design doesn't have a nice cylindrical body, and hence many of those skyways couldn't accomodate them.
If they're smart, commercial versions of this design will have a short (~12'-15') cylindrical section at the front that'll allow existing skyway systems to work without modification. Otherwise, they'll be *real* limited in which airports they can operate at. The additional wingspan compared to a 747-400 could be a problem, too...
Boeing, fielding a flying-wing-type design?? Sheesh... Boeing is the reason these sorts of planes weren't commonplace 50 years ago!!
Listen, children, to today's aerospace history lesson....
Waaaay back in the late 1940's, Boeing was the darling of the newly formed US Air Force, on the strength of their sturdy, functional WWII bomber designs (B-17, B-29).
However, they were not the only manufacturer capable of designing high-capacity long-distance aircraft.
One of the sucesses of the WWI aircraft industry was a startup called Northrop Aircraft. Led by the brilliant and iconoclastic designer John Northrop, they had started with nothing but ideas, but by the end of the war had already provided one remarkable aircraft to the war effort, the US' first dedicated radar-equipped night fighter, the P61 Black Widow, which decimated Japanese airpower in the latter stages of the war.
John Northrop was well versed in our enemies' aircraft design efforts. He was particularlry intrigued by the work of Germany's Horten brothers, who did pioneering work on "flying wing" aircraft. Much like Boeing's "blended body/wing" designs, there was no separate fuselage; the entire aircraft contributed to lift, and hence were astonistingly efficient.
(Aside: the Hortens also experimented with the use of evading technologies. Their early wings were built of plywood, but their shape, with no corners, no edges, no right-angle "reflector" areas between tail fins or between fuselage and wing, made them unusually hard to detect on the primitive radars of their day. The Hortens added conductive layers of charcoal to the plywood layup, reducing the already low signature dramatically, creating the world's first "stealth" aircraft.)
In 1940, after the defeat at Dunkirk, the US Army Air Corps was convinced that Britain would soon be overrrun by Germany, and realized that it had no way to strike at European targets from North America. They were desperate to develop a bomber that could reach the Germans if England fell. So they put out an open competition for a transcontinental bomber.
Boeing had already designed a pressurized, high-altitude bomber, the B-29, which later in the war would help decimate Japan, both with conventional ordnance as well as the the first atomic bombs. They offered up an improved version of the B-29 to the competition. (yawn)
Another established airframer, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (later Convair), borrowed heavily from Boeing's B-29, but proposed a much larger, eight(!)-engine monstrosity, the YB-36, IMHO one of the most homely aircraft ever laid out on paper.
Northrop, on the other hand, shot for the moon. They proposed a radical flying wing design, far larger and more sophisticated than the Horten designs. For the sort of long ranges missions the USAAC was proposing, the efficiency of the flying wing gave it a distinct edge. With a weight similar to the B-29, it had the range of the far larger Convair design, with the same bomb capacity. Northrop had already built experimental flying wings; they folded their accumulated experiment into an amazing prototype, the four-engine YB-35.
Suffice it to say, the USAAC wasn't all that open-minded to such a radical design. Boeing's design was a non-starter. Plus, at the time the congressional delegation from California had leadership positions in key appropriations committees... so the huge, ugly, inefficient B-36 got the nod for full production.
But that wasn't the last of Jack Northrop, or his flying wings.
Almost before the ink had dried on Japan's surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, tensions with the USSR had escalated to the point where the US military had to consider yet another intercontinental war scenario, but this time the ranges were even longer, up over the North Pole. Hence, another design competition.
Convair's B-36 proved to be a disappointment; even retrofitted with newer turboprop engines, it didn't have the sort of speed and range the new US Air Force needed.
Boeing went back to the well yet again, with a technologically modest design; huge, conventional winged airframe, with four pairs of new turbojet engines to get it off the ground.
Northrop went back to their YB-35, refined the design with the results of the extensive testing they'd done on flying wings since the YB-35, scaled it up for enough volume to carry the bombload and fuel required (and then some!), and replaced the prop engines with turbojets, to create the YB-49.
By all accounts, technologically the YB-49 cleaned up. Northrop was so enthused by their success, they set about designing commercial passenger and cargo versions.
But once again, politics won out.
The details are a but hazy, but Boeing lobbied all the right people very heavily, and in a decision that surprised the entire industry, their design was chosen to become the first nuclear-era strategic bomber: the B-52. Northrop was howling mad, and were quite public with their displeasure.
Just to make the whole affiar that much more scandelous, the Department of Defense sued Northrop, claiming that since the YB-49 was designed for them, they owned the design. They won, and the blueprints vanished from history, precluding the commercial version from ever seeing the light of day. The prototypes and test aircraft were ordered cut up for scrap, to prevent Jack Northrop from embarassing the Air Force with a better plane.
Dont' get me wrong, the B-52 has proved to be an amazing aircraft; whiel far from efficient, it's sturdy enough to allow almost endless modifications, and that has allowed it to survive as a front-line weapons platform even today, 50 years after it's first flight.
But stop and think for a moment where we might be today if the better plane had won, validating the general design. If Northrop's commercial models had been allowed to compete with the more conventional early Boeing and Lockheed airliners.
Yeah, the Blended Wing/Body looks radical in the current context. But it shouldn't.