I don't they'll change this at all. Why should they? This, like almost all Apple news, is being blown WAY out of proportion. It's not like Apple is forbidding these people from attending MacWorld! Apple's just not giving out press passes to them! So they reserve the press passes for the real news sites. What's the big deal?
These rumour sites should be thankful they were ever allowed to be let in as a member of the press. If they want to cover MacWorld for their 2-bit rumour site, that's fine: they just have to buy a pass like a normal MacWorld attendee.
The quote from the tablet to which you were referring:
"The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching." - Assyrian stone tablet, c.2800bc
Mac-using hordes: BUY A GODDAMN $10 3-BUTTON MOUSE ALREADY!
I'm just as sick of the one-button mouse complaint as everybody else, but for the record, the vast majority of complaints are about the one-button trackpad that can't simply be replaced.
Not only that, what software does Cringely think will run on this Intel OS X? Sure, Cocoa applications could be ported relatively easily, but just about every useful commercial application for OS X is based on the Carbon APIs, and optimized for PowerPC processors.
I've read the article, and it makes no sense. Cringely seems to think that a magical port of OS X to Intel would suddenly be a worthy Microsoft competitor, with no mention of software! It's stupid. Not only that, the whole first paragraph is about how every competitor to Microsoft makes Microsoft products better and kills the competitor. This is supposed to be encouraging? A pretty OS X running on Intel hardware with a handful of Cocoa shareware applications would be no more a threat to Microsoft than the BeOS was. And we know where they are today.
Hard drive windows? Bleah! How about CHIP Windows!
For what it's worth, I used to work at a semiconductor company and we would pop the tops off of chips in the lab all the time. We'd then put a little piece of clear plastic (or tape) over the opening. They worked just fine afterwards, though I wouldn't put too much faith in their longevity. Granted most of these were CPGA and CQFP packages that can be opened very easily, but every once in a while we'd send a plastic part out to have the tops removed, usually to do some sort of failure analysis. It was even more impressive when we stuck the chip under the photoemissions microscope so we could see the hotspots on the chip while it was working. Great fun.
..and I tell ya, it would've been even better with clear hard drive covers.
It does help to make movies and games more realistic..
Y'know, what's really frightening is that we feel we need to see ads for a scene to be "real." That just goes to show you how many ads we're subjected to each day.
really I dont know why SGI dont use this chip
RM9000x2 [pmc-sierra.com] its got HYPERTRANSPORT like the AMD chips and the ol SysAD bus and Supports DDR SDRAM
Well the first reason would be that it's not actually realeased yet. PMC-Sierra has been talking about this chip for a long time, but they're still not in production on the 1Ghz model. Plus the cost is expected to be pretty substantial.
And if anybody's thinking of Sibyte's Mecurian, this chip has only been released at the first few speed grades, not 1Ghz, and because of its architecture it will severely lag behind the RM9000x2 even when it is ramped up.
Regardless, even if the RM9000x2 were available in quantity today, there's a lot more to a computer system than just the processor. SGIs new line is designed well for its intended purpose.
I think what he means is save the clean boot-up state of the classic environment (provided nothing has changed in the System folder since the last boot of classic). That way when classic needs to boot, OS X could just throw up a booted classic environment memory state in a matter of seconds instead of booting classic from scratch each time.
Funny... You don't see this happening with Apache/IIS.
Right. And you don't see it happening with Mozilla either; that's the power of open source. But then Netscape wasn't open source so the comparison to Apache is irrelevant. But hey if you're still keen on arguing by citing one example, I have one for you: WordPerfect.
Netscape lost their market because they stumbled. They got so caught up on insane stock prices and trying to be the supreme leader in the computer industry that they completely neglected to do the exact things required to achieve those goals. And they got blindsided by Microsoft. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
I'm no Netscape fan-boy, but how do you figure? If you had actually followed the events at the time, you'd know that the only reason Netscape "stumbled" was because Microsoft came along and put ten times more money into the development of IE while giving it away for free. Remember, Netscape was only free for non-commercial use (it was $30 otherwise).
Netscape was faced with a rival that had an order of magnitude more resources and cut off their major source of revenue for development. As a result their browser became a buggy mess as they didn't have the time to do the decent development there were doing before.
Let's be very frank here: Netscape died because they were forced out of business by anti-competitive business tactics of a monopoly power. Period. Netscape 4.x sucked because of this pressure, not in spite of it.
Wow, I've found quite the opposite. A friend of mine has an N64 and now a Game Cube, and while there's a lot of kiddie games, there's a whole lot of what I'd call "social games." Games that are genuinely fun, with decent graphics, that are best played with at least three or four people.
These are the games that are actually fun, and aren't the kind that you only play locked up in a dark room all night by yourself. Of course, knowing slashdot, there are probably very few people here who would actually agree that being social is a good thing.
Those stats seem intuitively more correct to me, but of course it's impossible to draw conclusions based on one site. Pseudodictionary.com, while having nothing to do with technology, would definitely draw a young audience (I'd best most are in the 18-25 demographic). That fact alone could skew the results quite a bit. Perhaps a lot of them use Windows 98 because it has the least overhead for games?
But hey, thanks for the "data point." And good work on pseudodictionary.com. I don't really see the appeal, but my brother and his friends are absolutely nuts about it, adding terms as fast as they can.
Uhm, I know that. I never said I was trying to convince anybody! If they ask for Word, I'll send Word, but that still doesn't change the fact that DOC is an atrocious format for a resume.
I receive far too many documents in M$ Word format for work, and there is no choice but to use Word on Windows if I want to see it as the sender intended. When you're dealing with layouts of forms that have been printed and are in the field, you need to have the exact same form in front of your for data entry system design - and in many other fields it's exactly the same.
That's going to be extremely difficult--even Word has problems with exact positioning between versions. The root cause is that the DOC file format was never meant for layout data, and most of the layout is dependant on how Word decides to format the content.
This is why if layout is important, people need to use a layout-centric file format like PDF. Open source programmers need to decide on a file format for word processing, and if they're not going to use PDF (an open specification, albeit controlled by Adobe), then they should invent an alternative. XML is great for content, but like HTML and SGML there's really no layout data, which can be important for many documents. Perhaps some type of style-sheets over XML? I've been really impressed with PDF v1.3, but are there (more) open alternatives?
At any rate, the DOC format desperately needs to be replaced. Not only because it's viciously controlled by Microsoft, but also because it's simply an absolute garbage hack of a file format. Either that or DOC should only be used when layout isn't terribly important.
- j
Re:My experiences with KWord
on
KOffice 1.1.1 Ships
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You just draw frames where you want to have text and type in them (if you use frames, you can also use KWord without them like a normal word processor). You can connect frames so that text flows between them, and they are automatically extended to subsequent pages.
This is how any good page layout program does things; Quark Express, InDesign, FrameMaker. After using any decent layout application I find it an absolute chore to do anything besides memos in Word. It's really unfortunate that most people don't realize that there are vastly superior alternatives.
I always knew Word was bad at anything but the absolute basics, but it was made blatantly obvious to me when I did my my latest resume in InDesign. When it comes to layout, Word is quite possibly the worst program for the job, but only a handful of companies will accept my resume in.PDF format. This is despite the fact that I have yet to find one single reason why.DOC would be a better choice than.PDF.
Oh well, that's nothing new. The world is full of frustrating inefficiencies because of the Microsoft monopoly.
PDF - Used heavily throughout OS X, and while I believe their are patents/restrictions of some kind on it (it's owned and controlled by Adobe not Apple), it is the default standard for sharing non-editable files.
A little off-topic, but for what it's worth, PDF is also a great file format for editable files as well. Lots of professional prepress and desktop publishing applications can read PDFs (provided they aren't toggled as "uneditable" backed with trivial encryption), and in fact Illustrator 10's native file format basically is PDF. It's a great file format, and it comes closer to web to print than anything else out there.
This needs to be repeated. These numbers are often bogus. Things like drugs have real street value, so that's more acceptable when they value drug busts, and they actually track street prices carefully. Microsoft numbers hype is a distortion of the system.
Actually, for what it's worth, drug bust numbers are nearly as inaccurate as software losses. The problem is that drug prices are caculated at street value, but the people they're busting, at least if they have any serious amount, aren't selling on the street. For instance if a drug trafficer gets caught with one million pills of ecstasy at the border they'll claim it's a 20 million or 30 million dollar bust when in actually that person would be lucky to get $1 per pill at those volumes. They imply that the one being busted would be making these obscene profits when in actuality their profit margins, while better than most legit practices, are still very thin by comparison.
But yeah, at least in the case of drugs somebody would actually pay it, somewhere down the line for at least a good chunk of the haul. The BSA, on the other hand, have always been full of shit. Hell, I wrote a fairly lenghty essay on that very topic in 1996 and even then it was old news. What surprised me the most about this story was that the group DOD is still around today! What's next, busting Razor 1911?:)
Hah, no kidding. They might as well have named it "RemoveThisToAvoidBuyingTheFullVersion.app":).
But really, I don't know what they're complaining about, stealing software is a behaviour problem, not a technical problem. Apple should just print Don't Steal Software on the box.:)
They do, except for in SQL Server '97. All recent versions make you set a password by default. This worm will only exploit SQL Server '97.
Re:too bad it was going to be a big leap forward
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 2
Maybe it's only because I didn't hear of the hype, but Oni is one my favourite games. Sure it would be a little longer-lasting if it had multiplayer, but I'm curious: what "awesome featuers" were touted in Oni that didn't make it into the release?
I don't think "pretentious" and "pedantic" are a good fit as while they're close, they don't specifically relate to the assumption that one knows everything. "Sophomoric" on the other hand is perfect. I completely forgot about that word! The OED definition is good, but Merriam-Webster's really shows how it relates to many recent slashdot posts:
sophomoric, adj, 1 : conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature...
I vote for a new moderation category: (-1, Sophomoric).
I've noticed that responses like this one have become very popular on slashdot recently. I can't think of a single word or soundbite to describe it, but it's something along the lines of "I have absolutely no knowledge of the subject at hand yet I feel qualified enough to state that it is of no value to anyone."
We simply must come up with a catchy phrase to describe this kind of response. "Ignoramus" and "slashbot" are both too vague, and while "Troll" is probably the closest term, it doesn't capture the nuances of this common response. Any takers?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't they'll change this at all. Why should they? This, like almost all Apple news, is being blown WAY out of proportion. It's not like Apple is forbidding these people from attending MacWorld! Apple's just not giving out press passes to them! So they reserve the press passes for the real news sites. What's the big deal?
These rumour sites should be thankful they were ever allowed to be let in as a member of the press. If they want to cover MacWorld for their 2-bit rumour site, that's fine: they just have to buy a pass like a normal MacWorld attendee.
- j
The quote from the tablet to which you were referring:
"The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching." - Assyrian stone tablet, c.2800bc
- j
That reminds me of a page I made ages ago: the penultimate page of the world wide web.
Of course with the way those links change, I quickly learned that being the second-last page on the web was much harder than being the last.
- j
Mac-using hordes: BUY A GODDAMN $10 3-BUTTON MOUSE ALREADY!
I'm just as sick of the one-button mouse complaint as everybody else, but for the record, the vast majority of complaints are about the one-button trackpad that can't simply be replaced.
- j
Not only that, what software does Cringely think will run on this Intel OS X? Sure, Cocoa applications could be ported relatively easily, but just about every useful commercial application for OS X is based on the Carbon APIs, and optimized for PowerPC processors.
I've read the article, and it makes no sense. Cringely seems to think that a magical port of OS X to Intel would suddenly be a worthy Microsoft competitor, with no mention of software! It's stupid. Not only that, the whole first paragraph is about how every competitor to Microsoft makes Microsoft products better and kills the competitor. This is supposed to be encouraging? A pretty OS X running on Intel hardware with a handful of Cocoa shareware applications would be no more a threat to Microsoft than the BeOS was. And we know where they are today.
- j
Hard drive windows? Bleah! How about CHIP Windows!
For what it's worth, I used to work at a semiconductor company and we would pop the tops off of chips in the lab all the time. We'd then put a little piece of clear plastic (or tape) over the opening. They worked just fine afterwards, though I wouldn't put too much faith in their longevity. Granted most of these were CPGA and CQFP packages that can be opened very easily, but every once in a while we'd send a plastic part out to have the tops removed, usually to do some sort of failure analysis. It was even more impressive when we stuck the chip under the photoemissions microscope so we could see the hotspots on the chip while it was working. Great fun.
..and I tell ya, it would've been even better with clear hard drive covers.
- j
It does help to make movies and games more realistic..
Y'know, what's really frightening is that we feel we need to see ads for a scene to be "real." That just goes to show you how many ads we're subjected to each day.
- j
really I dont know why SGI dont use this chip
RM9000x2 [pmc-sierra.com] its got HYPERTRANSPORT like the AMD chips and the ol SysAD bus and Supports DDR SDRAM
Well the first reason would be that it's not actually realeased yet. PMC-Sierra has been talking about this chip for a long time, but they're still not in production on the 1Ghz model. Plus the cost is expected to be pretty substantial.
And if anybody's thinking of Sibyte's Mecurian, this chip has only been released at the first few speed grades, not 1Ghz, and because of its architecture it will severely lag behind the RM9000x2 even when it is ramped up.
Regardless, even if the RM9000x2 were available in quantity today, there's a lot more to a computer system than just the processor. SGIs new line is designed well for its intended purpose.
- j
I think what he means is save the clean boot-up state of the classic environment (provided nothing has changed in the System folder since the last boot of classic). That way when classic needs to boot, OS X could just throw up a booted classic environment memory state in a matter of seconds instead of booting classic from scratch each time.
- j
Funny... You don't see this happening with Apache/IIS.
Right. And you don't see it happening with Mozilla either; that's the power of open source. But then Netscape wasn't open source so the comparison to Apache is irrelevant. But hey if you're still keen on arguing by citing one example, I have one for you: WordPerfect.
- j
Netscape lost their market because they stumbled. They got so caught up on insane stock prices and trying to be the supreme leader in the computer industry that they completely neglected to do the exact things required to achieve those goals. And they got blindsided by Microsoft. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
I'm no Netscape fan-boy, but how do you figure? If you had actually followed the events at the time, you'd know that the only reason Netscape "stumbled" was because Microsoft came along and put ten times more money into the development of IE while giving it away for free. Remember, Netscape was only free for non-commercial use (it was $30 otherwise).
Netscape was faced with a rival that had an order of magnitude more resources and cut off their major source of revenue for development. As a result their browser became a buggy mess as they didn't have the time to do the decent development there were doing before.
Let's be very frank here: Netscape died because they were forced out of business by anti-competitive business tactics of a monopoly power. Period. Netscape 4.x sucked because of this pressure, not in spite of it.
- j
Wow, I've found quite the opposite. A friend of mine has an N64 and now a Game Cube, and while there's a lot of kiddie games, there's a whole lot of what I'd call "social games." Games that are genuinely fun, with decent graphics, that are best played with at least three or four people.
These are the games that are actually fun, and aren't the kind that you only play locked up in a dark room all night by yourself. Of course, knowing slashdot, there are probably very few people here who would actually agree that being social is a good thing.
- j
Those stats seem intuitively more correct to me, but of course it's impossible to draw conclusions based on one site. Pseudodictionary.com, while having nothing to do with technology, would definitely draw a young audience (I'd best most are in the 18-25 demographic). That fact alone could skew the results quite a bit. Perhaps a lot of them use Windows 98 because it has the least overhead for games?
But hey, thanks for the "data point." And good work on pseudodictionary.com. I don't really see the appeal, but my brother and his friends are absolutely nuts about it, adding terms as fast as they can.
- j
Uhm, I know that. I never said I was trying to convince anybody! If they ask for Word, I'll send Word, but that still doesn't change the fact that DOC is an atrocious format for a resume.
- j
I receive far too many documents in M$ Word format for work, and there is no choice but to use Word on Windows if I want to see it as the sender intended. When you're dealing with layouts of forms that have been printed and are in the field, you need to have the exact same form in front of your for data entry system design - and in many other fields it's exactly the same.
That's going to be extremely difficult--even Word has problems with exact positioning between versions. The root cause is that the DOC file format was never meant for layout data, and most of the layout is dependant on how Word decides to format the content.
This is why if layout is important, people need to use a layout-centric file format like PDF. Open source programmers need to decide on a file format for word processing, and if they're not going to use PDF (an open specification, albeit controlled by Adobe), then they should invent an alternative. XML is great for content, but like HTML and SGML there's really no layout data, which can be important for many documents. Perhaps some type of style-sheets over XML? I've been really impressed with PDF v1.3, but are there (more) open alternatives?
At any rate, the DOC format desperately needs to be replaced. Not only because it's viciously controlled by Microsoft, but also because it's simply an absolute garbage hack of a file format. Either that or DOC should only be used when layout isn't terribly important.
- j
You just draw frames where you want to have text and type in them (if you use frames, you can also use KWord without them like a normal word processor). You can connect frames so that text flows between them, and they are automatically extended to subsequent pages.
.PDF format. This is despite the fact that I have yet to find one single reason why .DOC would be a better choice than .PDF.
This is how any good page layout program does things; Quark Express, InDesign, FrameMaker. After using any decent layout application I find it an absolute chore to do anything besides memos in Word. It's really unfortunate that most people don't realize that there are vastly superior alternatives.
I always knew Word was bad at anything but the absolute basics, but it was made blatantly obvious to me when I did my my latest resume in InDesign. When it comes to layout, Word is quite possibly the worst program for the job, but only a handful of companies will accept my resume in
Oh well, that's nothing new. The world is full of frustrating inefficiencies because of the Microsoft monopoly.
- j
PDF - Used heavily throughout OS X, and while I believe their are patents/restrictions of some kind on it (it's owned and controlled by Adobe not Apple), it is the default standard for sharing non-editable files.
A little off-topic, but for what it's worth, PDF is also a great file format for editable files as well. Lots of professional prepress and desktop publishing applications can read PDFs (provided they aren't toggled as "uneditable" backed with trivial encryption), and in fact Illustrator 10's native file format basically is PDF. It's a great file format, and it comes closer to web to print than anything else out there.
- j
This needs to be repeated. These numbers are often bogus. Things like drugs have real street value, so that's more acceptable when they value drug busts, and they actually track street prices carefully. Microsoft numbers hype is a distortion of the system.
:)
Actually, for what it's worth, drug bust numbers are nearly as inaccurate as software losses. The problem is that drug prices are caculated at street value, but the people they're busting, at least if they have any serious amount, aren't selling on the street. For instance if a drug trafficer gets caught with one million pills of ecstasy at the border they'll claim it's a 20 million or 30 million dollar bust when in actually that person would be lucky to get $1 per pill at those volumes. They imply that the one being busted would be making these obscene profits when in actuality their profit margins, while better than most legit practices, are still very thin by comparison.
But yeah, at least in the case of drugs somebody would actually pay it, somewhere down the line for at least a good chunk of the haul. The BSA, on the other hand, have always been full of shit. Hell, I wrote a fairly lenghty essay on that very topic in 1996 and even then it was old news. What surprised me the most about this story was that the group DOD is still around today! What's next, busting Razor 1911?
- j
Hah, no kidding. They might as well have named it "RemoveThisToAvoidBuyingTheFullVersion.app" :).
:)
But really, I don't know what they're complaining about, stealing software is a behaviour problem, not a technical problem. Apple should just print Don't Steal Software on the box.
- j
They do, except for in SQL Server '97. All recent versions make you set a password by default. This worm will only exploit SQL Server '97.
Maybe it's only because I didn't hear of the hype, but Oni is one my favourite games. Sure it would be a little longer-lasting if it had multiplayer, but I'm curious: what "awesome featuers" were touted in Oni that didn't make it into the release?
- j
I don't know why, but I just had this horrible vision of the riff from "1998" being played over and over and over and over ...
- j
Heck, Macs can even boot from an iPod. :) (sure it makes sense, as the iPod is just a harddrive, but it's still cool)
- j
I don't think "pretentious" and "pedantic" are a good fit as while they're close, they don't specifically relate to the assumption that one knows everything. "Sophomoric" on the other hand is perfect. I completely forgot about that word! The OED definition is good, but Merriam-Webster's really shows how it relates to many recent slashdot posts:
...
sophomoric, adj, 1 : conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature
I vote for a new moderation category: (-1, Sophomoric).
- j
I've noticed that responses like this one have become very popular on slashdot recently. I can't think of a single word or soundbite to describe it, but it's something along the lines of "I have absolutely no knowledge of the subject at hand yet I feel qualified enough to state that it is of no value to anyone."
We simply must come up with a catchy phrase to describe this kind of response. "Ignoramus" and "slashbot" are both too vague, and while "Troll" is probably the closest term, it doesn't capture the nuances of this common response. Any takers?
- j