I've got an open source aggregator (<plug mode="shameless">Feed for Mac OS X</plug>) and it seems most of the 'bug fixes' I have to do are directly related to some fools home-grown interpretation of how to deliver content.
Effectively, RSS (the concept, not the format) is in the 'tag soup' phase that the web was in seven years ago. While I expect this will all settle down as the concept (and value) of standardization is realized by content publishes and CMS vendors, it currently sucks rocks. It'll take time for all of this to shake out. Hell, I'm amazed anything works at all considering Dave Winer pretty much pulled it out of his ass in the first place...
As far as which standard to embrace - it really doesn't matter. You hook a namespace aware XML parser up to an HTTP request and then look for the interesting bits of information. The problem at the moment is that you have to look at lots of bits to find out which ones are the interesting ones - like writing browser sniffing web code. That'll settle down as the technology matures, though - just like web code.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the folk who abuse the entire concept by shoehorning fundamentally mismatched content into RSS. I'm looking right at you, Netflix Queue...
Phil Schiller: ""We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac,"
There is no mention of DRM anywhere in that sentence. That is the only sentence of record by any Apple exec on the issue. Your google-fu may be strong, but your reading comprehension skills need work.
the final product will be tied to an special Intel DRM chip that will prevent it from running on other machines.
I keep seeing this spouted around as fact, but I have yet to see anywhere where this was stated in any official capacity. They may do that. They may not - they haven't said one way or another. Outside of the iTMS, Apple hasn't done much with DRM, and I'm pretty sure that was only to make the labels happy - so I'd say it's still pretty much up in the air.
The public doesn't even know and most don't listen long enough to understand they are being screwed.
It's not so much that the public doesn't know - I'm sure they notice the insanity of state run liquor stores, strange distribution laws and exorbitant prices (depending on state). The problem is that most people roll over and accept it because it's a 'sin related' industry. Cigarettes, alcohol, gambling are all taxed, regulated and milked for all they're worth because they're considered 'sinful' - and people feel guilty and agree with it every time there's a vote.
No it doesn't, it encourages small brewers to grow big (and mediocre). Cases in point: Thomas Kemper and Redhook.
Which in turn opens up opportunities for new, smaller brewers to fill in those gaps - but that's not the point. A new means of distribution isn't going to change a small brewer's desire to grow and consequently stop being a true micro - they'll do that through the traditional means anyway (Deschuttes is on the way - which makes me sad). My point is that the traditional method of distribution encourages you to grow big.
You simply can't grow at all without the distributors' attention - and you can't get that attention unless you produce a certain volume of product. The stores won't stock something that has a low turnover and the distributors won't deliver without volume - so how do you share your creation?
I think that allowing small brewers to sell directly to customers over the internet would alleviate a lot of that growth pressure and provide an opportunity for them to stay small and grow their audience without having to go macro. I think it'd be fantastic if my buddy and I could simply swap links to great brews instead of having to visit each other.
And I can only hope that this continues to include beer as well.
The stigma of 'shitty American beer' could be brought low in short order if people had access to some of the fine brews coming out of Washington and Oregon. Some of the best spirits come from small, passionate producers, and eliminating the mass distribution requirement only encourages good product. We've got some of the best hops and brewers in the world around here, and nobody but the locals know it.
Oh shit, I've said too much. Don't come here - it sucks.
/me opens Terminal Gravity IPA and laughs at the Budweiser fools
Compared to OS9, X's accessing our server is like slogging through mud, I can tell most of it is it hitting the server trying to get the icons for all the files (ALL the files), and there is no way to turn off custom icon view.
Just to be fair, that's not a problem in the filesystem itself - that's a problem with the Finder. Apple has been absolutely brain dead when it comes to the Finder in OS X and for some reason doesn't seem to be interested in fixing the issues. In the OS 9 days, the Finder was nice, zippy and intuitive. Since the advent of OS X, it's been none of those things - and worse.
In addition to idiotic things like never remembering how I left my windows - which is mainly GUI related stupidity - the OS X Finder still suffers from the problem of completely hanging when you lose access to a mounted remote file server. This was annoying in the OS 9 days, but is completely inexcusable when you're running on a fully mutlithreaded, multiuser core. There is no longer a technical reason for this - it's just that nobody at Apple has bothered to spend any resources on the fixing Finder.
Pity, too, considering that the Finder is the most used application on any Mac system. Idiots.
Half the Mac diehards rate that as insightful, the other half make excuses and try to justify why the standard Mini drive is so slow.
The standard Mini drive is slow because it's a freakin $500 computer - but it's in a unique and interesting enclosure.
Apple doesn't make commodity hardware, and they never have. Even though this system falls into the 'commodity' price range (and barely, at that) that doesn't make it a commodity box. You're paying for the engineering it took to stick all that shit into a tiny, silent enclosure.
If you want power, buy power. If you want cheap, buy cheap. But understand - Apple doesn't make cheap, and they never have. You can always build something yourself if you want a good mix of powerful and cheap - but good luck shoving that into an enclosure that even resembles the Mini.
If that is accurate, then there's no reason to have the LGPL at all as it functions exactly like the GPL. How do you use a library without the headers? Do you have to write your own headers for the library? Without peeking?
When a "work that uses the Library" uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not. Whether this is true is especially significant if the work can be linked without the Library, or if the work is itself a library. The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law.
This is essentially reserving rights to catch people who wrap an LGPL library in their own library, then link to their own library to get around the license (among other similarly tricky things).
The gist of the LGPL is that your application should be able to work without the library - otherwise it's pretty much a derivative work. However, "The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law".
If you remove safari rss, mail, quicktime, spotligth and the dashboard. What's left on the update?
Fine grained kernel locks
CoreData
Enhanced filesystem (attributes, ACLs)
Qartz 2D Extreme
CoreData
Cocoa native QuickTime
UTIs for type data
CoreData
launchd
CoreData!!!
All of those things are going to be invisible to the end user, but are amazing technologies for a developer. The features you mentioned are direct from Apple to the user. The features I mentioned are from Apple to the developer.
Now you just have to wait six months to see what the developers do with those capabilities - and I'm expecting everybody to be pretty impressed with the result. They're awfully powerful features.
Value: Just because you can't see it yet doesn't mean it's not there.
As a simple example, many pizza places are beginning to charge for delivery, and are losing delivery people because they can't make money anymore.
It sounds like pizza deliverators will have to become extremely specialized professionals who carry swords. Stop trying to hold back progress in order to support your outdated business model!
Before Expose, most of these would be minimized, and a lot of time wasted hunting for the correct window to open.
Minimizing windows to the dock is about a zillion times less useful than Expose - I'll give you that. Neither of method is as useful to me as WindowShade was in the olden days, though.
I guess Expose is one of those things you like or hate. *shrug*
Agreed. I think it's utterly fantastic for the casual user type person (email,web,office) and has a lot of potential for power users as well. A little polish could go a long way toward changing my mind (better support for drag and drop via expose, for example).
One area I do wish Apple would sort out are the keyboard shortcuts for navigation. Apple-Left/Right for switching between Terminals is nice, but having to resort to Apple-~ -- not a natural chord for me -- for everything else. Shift-Apple-Left/Right for Safari tabs would be better placed on Apple-Left/Right too.
Actually, according to Apple's HI guidelines Cmd-left/right are never supposed to be used for anything but text navigation - and they violate that in a lot of their own apps! Tiger moves Safari away from Cmd-Shift-left/right to Cmd-[ and Cmd-] in order to comply (though Terminal still uses Cmd-left/right for some reason).
Apple-M for Minimize is handy, but a corresponding shortcut for maximize/zoom would be nice too.
That would be fantastic, but the problem there is the lack of clean focus (where the command should be delivered). If you have many windows for an app minimized to the dock, which window is maximized with the shortcut? I suppose you could get something going along these lines, but I'm guessing the confusion it would cause to the non-power users is what's keeping Apple from pursuing it (that and Expose!).
I love the fact that you can choose to enqueue a media file or play the file via the context menu in Windows. There is no such thing in Apple land.
That's not Apple's fault, really. The API is available, but none of the app developers do it. I've run into several CM plugins over the years, though, so they do exist!
Honestly, as an OSX user, I don't find the context menus in OSX that useful.
Well, I use the context menus to avoid having to do things with Expose. Have you ever seen a two-headed system, 25+ apps running (with multiple windows and palettes in each) thrown into Expose mode? It's totally useless.
The point is: different strokes and all that. Personally, I like to use whatever input device my hand happens to be sitting on to issue commands.
Dammit, people - can't you see that it's working?! Microsoft is having to compete! Even if that competition is just bringing their browser up to par, they're still competing. Mozilla does it's job simply by existing and is now to the point where it has forced Microsoft to play catch up.
Saying that the whole Mozilla effort hasn't been given a chance to compete is simply bogus. They have succeeded in creating a growing market of converts and forced a convicted monopolist to get up and respond. That sounds like competition to me.
Oh, come on... While the general sentiment is true, you can't deny that there are pockets of brilliance out there - even if you have to wade through shit to find them.
The thing is, the way things work these days only one person inside the 'web of people I get information from' need do the dirty work and I get a little tinkle in my RSS reader. That's cool.
Good points, actually. I looked at both libraries when 'shopping', and there were two issues that landed me on the libtorrent project (no caps) over LibTorrent: documentation and license. I didn't know what I was going to use for a license for my app, and GPL forced the issue for me. I ended up going BSD.
The API and implementation are actually pretty stable for being 'under development' code - and I didn't expect anybody to have code that qualified as done at this stage in the BT growth curve (other than Bram's reference implementation). Plus, since I'm actively developing, I don't mind building on a project that is also actively developing.
It's got it's issues, mind you - but the mailing list is active and Arvid does a good job keeping things moving forward. I just wanted to add to the list;)
Slashdot Mirror
Preach it, brother!
I've got an open source aggregator (<plug mode="shameless">Feed for Mac OS X</plug>) and it seems most of the 'bug fixes' I have to do are directly related to some fools home-grown interpretation of how to deliver content.
Effectively, RSS (the concept, not the format) is in the 'tag soup' phase that the web was in seven years ago. While I expect this will all settle down as the concept (and value) of standardization is realized by content publishes and CMS vendors, it currently sucks rocks. It'll take time for all of this to shake out. Hell, I'm amazed anything works at all considering Dave Winer pretty much pulled it out of his ass in the first place...
As far as which standard to embrace - it really doesn't matter. You hook a namespace aware XML parser up to an HTTP request and then look for the interesting bits of information. The problem at the moment is that you have to look at lots of bits to find out which ones are the interesting ones - like writing browser sniffing web code. That'll settle down as the technology matures, though - just like web code.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the folk who abuse the entire concept by shoehorning fundamentally mismatched content into RSS. I'm looking right at you, Netflix Queue...
So stop saying it like it's a fact, please.
Looks like the half-life of a slashdot story is about 7.5 hours...
Thanks for providing the link - I can't believe I've never been to to that site before!
You simply can't grow at all without the distributors' attention - and you can't get that attention unless you produce a certain volume of product. The stores won't stock something that has a low turnover and the distributors won't deliver without volume - so how do you share your creation?
I think that allowing small brewers to sell directly to customers over the internet would alleviate a lot of that growth pressure and provide an opportunity for them to stay small and grow their audience without having to go macro. I think it'd be fantastic if my buddy and I could simply swap links to great brews instead of having to visit each other.
And I can only hope that this continues to include beer as well.
/me opens Terminal Gravity IPA and laughs at the Budweiser fools
The stigma of 'shitty American beer' could be brought low in short order if people had access to some of the fine brews coming out of Washington and Oregon. Some of the best spirits come from small, passionate producers, and eliminating the mass distribution requirement only encourages good product. We've got some of the best hops and brewers in the world around here, and nobody but the locals know it.
Oh shit, I've said too much. Don't come here - it sucks.
In addition to idiotic things like never remembering how I left my windows - which is mainly GUI related stupidity - the OS X Finder still suffers from the problem of completely hanging when you lose access to a mounted remote file server. This was annoying in the OS 9 days, but is completely inexcusable when you're running on a fully mutlithreaded, multiuser core. There is no longer a technical reason for this - it's just that nobody at Apple has bothered to spend any resources on the fixing Finder.
Pity, too, considering that the Finder is the most used application on any Mac system. Idiots.
Apple doesn't make commodity hardware, and they never have. Even though this system falls into the 'commodity' price range (and barely, at that) that doesn't make it a commodity box. You're paying for the engineering it took to stick all that shit into a tiny, silent enclosure.
If you want power, buy power. If you want cheap, buy cheap. But understand - Apple doesn't make cheap, and they never have. You can always build something yourself if you want a good mix of powerful and cheap - but good luck shoving that into an enclosure that even resembles the Mini.
And good luck running OS X on it.
If that is accurate, then there's no reason to have the LGPL at all as it functions exactly like the GPL. How do you use a library without the headers? Do you have to write your own headers for the library? Without peeking?
This is essentially reserving rights to catch people who wrap an LGPL library in their own library, then link to their own library to get around the license (among other similarly tricky things).
The gist of the LGPL is that your application should be able to work without the library - otherwise it's pretty much a derivative work. However, "The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law".
LAUNCELOT: No. It's unhealthy.
- Fine grained kernel locks
- CoreData
- Enhanced filesystem (attributes, ACLs)
- Qartz 2D Extreme
- CoreData
- Cocoa native QuickTime
- UTIs for type data
- CoreData
- launchd
- CoreData!!!
All of those things are going to be invisible to the end user, but are amazing technologies for a developer. The features you mentioned are direct from Apple to the user. The features I mentioned are from Apple to the developer.Now you just have to wait six months to see what the developers do with those capabilities - and I'm expecting everybody to be pretty impressed with the result. They're awfully powerful features.
Value: Just because you can't see it yet doesn't mean it's not there.
Don't forget the most important resource of them all - the cocoa-dev mailing list at Apple and the searchable archives of the list at cocoabuilder.com.
If you're having a problem, someone there has already had it and solved it. And they're really nice - a rare thing on a mailing list these days...
I pooped light bright pegs for years!
warning: suggest parentheses around assignment used as truth value
You do realize that five to ten percent of the whole Internet is a fucking lot of people, right?
The point is: different strokes and all that. Personally, I like to use whatever input device my hand happens to be sitting on to issue commands.
Dammit, people - can't you see that it's working?! Microsoft is having to compete! Even if that competition is just bringing their browser up to par, they're still competing. Mozilla does it's job simply by existing and is now to the point where it has forced Microsoft to play catch up.
Saying that the whole Mozilla effort hasn't been given a chance to compete is simply bogus. They have succeeded in creating a growing market of converts and forced a convicted monopolist to get up and respond. That sounds like competition to me.
It doesn't have to be 50-50 to be competitive.
Oh, come on... While the general sentiment is true, you can't deny that there are pockets of brilliance out there - even if you have to wade through shit to find them.
The thing is, the way things work these days only one person inside the 'web of people I get information from' need do the dirty work and I get a little tinkle in my RSS reader. That's cool.
Adding indie TV to the equation is even cooler...
Good points, actually. I looked at both libraries when 'shopping', and there were two issues that landed me on the libtorrent project (no caps) over LibTorrent: documentation and license. I didn't know what I was going to use for a license for my app, and GPL forced the issue for me. I ended up going BSD.
;)
The API and implementation are actually pretty stable for being 'under development' code - and I didn't expect anybody to have code that qualified as done at this stage in the BT growth curve (other than Bram's reference implementation). Plus, since I'm actively developing, I don't mind building on a project that is also actively developing.
It's got it's issues, mind you - but the mailing list is active and Arvid does a good job keeping things moving forward. I just wanted to add to the list