Can we just all agree that Google is about as evil as the average corporation now? Or do some of you still believe that Google really is above the rest morally?
Not until they don't change their slogan! It'll be too confusing otherwise.
I fear the military applications of this...not like it wasn't possible before, but perhaps this might give some people ideas that would ultimately be used to kill people.
Yea... the military implications.. Well, if someone told you to go into an empty room and go very very near to a robot that's holding a sword, just, you know, don't do it.
Plus it's still easier and cheaper for An Actual Human to simply shoot you with a conventional gun, rather than use Wii-eqipped sword holding robots.
Some posts claimed that Apple didn't update iTunes so it can make Vista look bad. If you read the tech note you'll see it's not the case, they simply list the procedure for properly using and updating iTunes/iPod in Vista until they issue an update for iTunes.
Those things happen, no need to look for a conspiracy.
I suppose they learned their PR lesson from last time, when they shipped virus infected iPods and claimed it's the fault of Windows, for "getting infected so easily" (??).
Doesn't XP and Vista make it more difficult for you to upgrade your computer by making you re-register the software just for changing some components. I mean the OS is what they have control of and they are actually using it to make it more difficult to upgrade the hardware. I can drop a new video card into my mac and I wont have to deal with any licensing crap at least
That's rich.. First of all the re-activation won't fire unless you change a significant part of your PC parts. You can change your video card, sound card and all your peripherals and nothing will happen with the activation.
I have another question: your Apple motherboard fries. When you change it, does OSX... oh wait, you can't change it! There aren't any for sale by Apple. That's sure a lot better.
CGI is developing though, I've seen some stuff in the past three, four years that really captured a lot, if not all of the feel of some traditional animation techniques; something that wasn't the case previously. In a few years time, who knows how things will have progressed?
Indeed, the movements and expressions have improved immensely in CGI features. This exact thing has made a great impression to me too.
Before we had those simple math based smooth artificial moves (and we still see them on amateur movies around the net), and now it's obvious the guys mastered the art perfectly.
I used to feel bad for traditional animation since I felt way too much is lost in the transition to 3D. The gap is narrowing every day though (of course I still love Hayao Miyazaki's movies and want more of them).
I think they might have used computer animation for backgrounds and unwieldy scenes, but it was mostly clay, as far as I know.
In Flushed Away, it was CGI, including the characters. They *made* them look like clay though, and it looks pretty convincing, except their body language is kinda too smooth or versatile for a clay doll at times (required by the script though).
You know, I hate it when people talk out their asses without having any clue.
"The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI"
Go read just the userland API details on that "minor effort". If this is all a minor effort to you, you should be writing the Windows killer right now and release it by the end of the year, why deprive the world of your incredible kung-fu programming skills?
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X are normal as graphics cards improve. The news here isn't that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Direct X - that's normal, the news is that they're *not* releasing it for XP.
Did the fact that DX10 is a complete rewrite escaped your attention? The whole thing is redone so the API has much less overhead, can multithread and allow videocard virtual memory (swap)? And this is the reason why it's not ported back to XP, it's a completely different architecture.
But let me calm you down: Microsoft ported back all the new *shaders* capabilities to a DirectX9 release called "L". The same one that will also run in Vista alongside DX10.
Aero itself runs on 9L as DX10 cards aren't even done or out yet. So what exactly are you spreading FUD about?
Would the presses stop if Ubuntu added an application to it's default install package? No. No one would notice, it would just be there. So why is it revolutionary for Vista to have a DVD maker included?
I demand you give me $100 bucks if you can't find where someone claimed it's "revolutionary". Go find it. Or where the "presses stopped" because of the DVD maker. That makes it $200 bucks.
As for why it makes an impression: compare the market share (and thus real world impact) of Windows versus Ubuntu. Still, there's sufficient buzz around Ubuntu's new "media editing" oriented distro, which.. guess what.. comes with some extra prepackages applications.
It's 2007, "DOS" is no longer covering what an OS is, and should include.
Every one of the features you mention falls into the "avoiding negative publicity" category.
DVD maker and photo galleries?!
You'll do yourself a service not to interpret this category so overhyperbroadly. You can claim anything good they do is to avoid negative publicity, and then the whole "Microsoft's priorities" discussion falls apart.
So let me put it in context: features avoiding "negative publicity" in this case refers to security issues, stability issues and code quality. It doesn't refer to the millions of possible "nice to have"-s you can cram in an OS.
Scott: it's a friggin OS, not a video game, it's not supposed to have a nice plot twists, hot action and lots of suspence.
1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
Funny, that. I can see how it's bad they don't attract negative publicity and piss off their largest enterprise customers.
But tell me, how do these features fall into any of those two categories:
* New aero candy interface (I bet enterprise customers demanded this!). * DVD maker. * Photo processing. * Live thumbnails. * Updated Windows Games. * DirectX 10 * etc etc.
There's a real reason why nobody is impressed with Vista as much: we've been watching it for 5 years. Previews, alphas, betas.
Maybe Jobs is right to sue blog sites that leak product info, and release everything with a ton of hype, of the "Best. Chewing. Gum. Evah!!!".
Because you see what happens now: people who followed Longhorn's development since it's inception are now whining that they're kinda familiar with what's new. Well duh, smartass.
I was of the understanding that the Volume Shadow service is a server side function that allows network clients to roll back to previous versions of data located on a network share. ie it doesn't affect local files at all.
What can I tell you.. If you run it on the server, it affects the files on the server, if you run it locally, it affects the local files...
Jobs also said about Apple "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
Funny right.. and this is exactly what he's doing. On his last presentation they dropped the "Computers" part of their name, and it's more and more obvious they are MOVING (not EXPANDING) into consumer electronics.
The Macs are now PC's which can run Windows as well... Maybe we'll see in few years OSX as a platform running INSIDE Windows Vista? You never know.
I'd say, Jobs is pretty consistent with what he said in all cases.
Not to be completely off-topic: diesel from sugar? Good for them!
And now... can you please soften a bit this jarring, eye-popping yellow you use for the "opinion center". Yea, we get it: they pay you a lot to have it there, blazingly obvious and right on top of everything, but it's totally out of place and distracting when I want to read something.
I've always said Jobs is dangerous. We gotta be happy that things now are as they are (Mac has a mere 2-3% market share, and as for consumer products like iPod - let it thrive, no much harm done, it's just a fancy nice mp3 player).
Bill Gates' original vision was to spread computers into every home, and make hardware a commodity platform, make the real product the software that makes this hardware useful.
Job's vision is more sinister though: this guy believes in perception, in hype, in marketing, and in easy to use and swallow products fed to the masses. A control freak.
Isn't it crazy how much work they've put on the iPhone (and deliver a nice, albeit expensive product), only in the end to cripple it by not allowing to tap its power with custom software? This is pure Jobs right there.
And you can be sure Apple's strange behavior towards rumor sites is coming straight from Jobs.
And there's a site that said the product was a Apple hoax deliberately created to catch where the leaks are coming from. Possible, but we have a real world example of what possibly really happened:
Did you know that months before Microsft announced the Tablet PC platform Apple was getting ready to release their own Tablet Mac? Well, just because they couldn't be first to the market and grab that "mindshare", Jobs scrapped the project. I bet he's now waiting for the Tablet PC idea to die and be forgotten, before he tries again.
So Apple better say "Windows" or "Office" in their switcher ads, I guess...
That'd be kinda ironic given in their ads they specifically stress on the fact MS Office is available on Mac and It Is Good. They need Office on the Mac and they know that.
As for Windows.. they'd piss off someone's lawyers to directly flame the Windows brand. So they use a "PC" as a generic name, but of course talking about Windows (not Linux or BSD or anything).
Which is *again* ironic, and doubly so, as what they sell right now is exactly a PC. No more, no less. The only single difference being the DRM chip they use to lock OSX, and the EFI (versus the classic BIOS). But new PC-s are sold with EFI too, so..
I remember when they were also flaming the Pentium 2/3/4 chips, talking about how terribly slow they are compared to G4 and G5. Which was again a lie, when they switched to Intels they got away from the situation talking how hugely different Core is, a totally, totally different thing, completely different from the Pentiums we flamed just few months ago!
Of course, those better informed, know Core 1 is in fact enhanced Pentium 3 with more SIMD commands and extra power-saving features.
It's been 5 years or so. And still most of the Apple ads represent one or at most two objects (frequently human actors it seems), which are speaking about how much PC-s suck, and occasionally, ONLY occasionally, also mentioning how Mac software never has problems (lie) or how on Mac you can process photos and videos, and on the PC you can't (lie).
And you suddenly know why most people just don't buy Macs. Mac marketing makes impression of being really really desparate.
Maybe they should try some of their iPod concepts for advertising the Mac? This could work better. Show people having fun with a Mac, show Mac being used.
Ask Jamie McCarthy what kind of contortions they go through to make MySQL usable. Or CmdrTaco, who has stated his 2 biggest regrets are using mysql over postgesql and calling the iPod lame.
Can you provide links to provide context and support of your statements?
The parody site operator of getafirstlife.com should reject this letter immediately. How many companies in the future will start referring to this action as a basis to stop "fair use"? i.e., "Hey, we didn't provide you with a proceed-and-permit letter.
You should get to know Jack Thompson. My gut tells me you'll do incredible things together.
I'm a Postgres user and shrug my shoulders as to why anybody would use something with all the warts of MySQL
Don't you feel the burning irony of posting this on Slashdot, one of the more prominent MySQL users?
While you're busy with your tiny holy war, people take MySQL for what it offers and builds useful services and sites with it, among those Google, Yahoo, Digg, Apple...
bluetooth 2.0 is something like 3Mb/s..... not great for backing up your pr0n...
Is this the most compelling rant you can pull off? And do you realize bluetooth is just one option, the devices implementing DAVE can also provide USB transfer?
I suppose the only reason for bluetooth inside is because they saw some empty space in the drive left underutilized. A disk is circle, and the component is square. Catch my drift?
In a mobile device, every tiny bit of space counts, hence having built-in bluetooth makes DAVE more competitive.
Sure, some apps will continue to be single-threaded, but eventually, who would buy them? Software vendors aren't dumb.
Is utilizing efficiently 100% of the CPU was always top priority for all possible apps, we wouldn't have technologies like Java, or even let alone Python, Perl and PHP on mission/performance critical servers, worldwide.
The simple truth is lots of apps can get away with not grabbing the entire CPU for themselves.
Also you're missing something: with modern technologies you don't have to write for multiple threads to get them. If you target.NET and Avalon, your GUI is already being rendered in a separate thread and potentially separate core.
Modern computers also multitask a lot, so the cores are automatically useful there.
And last but not least: we've pretty much reached maturity of abstraction with platforms like.net / java, which run fast even on single core.
I seriously doubt we'll see more programming abstraction in terms of runtime processing. We'd instead see more technologies and API-s that work with those runtimes to delivr better results, faster (namely the Vista programming model).
You're an idiot. I suppose that if it's written into law that you must not shoot your mother in the head (like, um, it is?) that you'd go ahead and blow her head off it since all laws are so evil, right? If your tiny little brain can't figure out the difference between good laws (like the kind that say that people actually have to pay you--gasp!--for stuff you are selling) and bad laws, then I don't see any point in arguing any further. Like I said, you're an idiot, and there's no point.
First you equate my position with raping women, now you insult me and curse left and right like a drunk sailor. It's hard to have reasonable conversation with you, let alone on such a subject.
Windows: Eye candy, eye candy, and you're gonna have to upgrade. Linux: Secure stable, and I swear it's got software you can run! I mean, people give it away for free. Mac OS: I use my machine for things and I really like it. And it's pretty
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Can we just all agree that Google is about as evil as the average corporation now? Or do some of you still believe that Google really is above the rest morally?
Not until they don't change their slogan! It'll be too confusing otherwise.
I fear the military applications of this...not like it wasn't possible before, but perhaps this might give some people ideas that would ultimately be used to kill people.
Yea... the military implications.. Well, if someone told you to go into an empty room and go very very near to a robot that's holding a sword, just, you know, don't do it.
Plus it's still easier and cheaper for An Actual Human to simply shoot you with a conventional gun, rather than use Wii-eqipped sword holding robots.
Some posts claimed that Apple didn't update iTunes so it can make Vista look bad. If you read the tech note you'll see it's not the case, they simply list the procedure for properly using and updating iTunes/iPod in Vista until they issue an update for iTunes.
Those things happen, no need to look for a conspiracy.
I suppose they learned their PR lesson from last time, when they shipped virus infected iPods and claimed it's the fault of Windows, for "getting infected so easily" (??).
Doesn't XP and Vista make it more difficult for you to upgrade your computer by making you re-register the software just for changing some components. I mean the OS is what they have control of and they are actually using it to make it more difficult to upgrade the hardware. I can drop a new video card into my mac and I wont have to deal with any licensing crap at least
That's rich.. First of all the re-activation won't fire unless you change a significant part of your PC parts. You can change your video card, sound card and all your peripherals and nothing will happen with the activation.
I have another question: your Apple motherboard fries. When you change it, does OSX... oh wait, you can't change it! There aren't any for sale by Apple. That's sure a lot better.
CGI is developing though, I've seen some stuff in the past three, four years that really captured a lot, if not all of the feel of some traditional animation techniques; something that wasn't the case previously. In a few years time, who knows how things will have progressed?
Indeed, the movements and expressions have improved immensely in CGI features. This exact thing has made a great impression to me too.
Before we had those simple math based smooth artificial moves (and we still see them on amateur movies around the net), and now it's obvious the guys mastered the art perfectly.
I used to feel bad for traditional animation since I felt way too much is lost in the transition to 3D. The gap is narrowing every day though (of course I still love Hayao Miyazaki's movies and want more of them).
I think they might have used computer animation for backgrounds and unwieldy scenes, but it was mostly clay, as far as I know.
In Flushed Away, it was CGI, including the characters. They *made* them look like clay though, and it looks pretty convincing, except their body language is kinda too smooth or versatile for a clay doll at times (required by the script though).
You know, I hate it when people talk out their asses without having any clue.
"The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI"
Go read just the userland API details on that "minor effort". If this is all a minor effort to you, you should be writing the Windows killer right now and release it by the end of the year, why deprive the world of your incredible kung-fu programming skills?
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X are normal as graphics cards improve. The news here isn't that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Direct X - that's normal, the news is that they're *not* releasing it for XP.
Did the fact that DX10 is a complete rewrite escaped your attention? The whole thing is redone so the API has much less overhead, can multithread and allow videocard virtual memory (swap)? And this is the reason why it's not ported back to XP, it's a completely different architecture.
But let me calm you down: Microsoft ported back all the new *shaders* capabilities to a DirectX9 release called "L". The same one that will also run in Vista alongside DX10.
Aero itself runs on 9L as DX10 cards aren't even done or out yet. So what exactly are you spreading FUD about?
Would the presses stop if Ubuntu added an application to it's default install package? No. No one would notice, it would just be there. So why is it revolutionary for Vista to have a DVD maker included?
I demand you give me $100 bucks if you can't find where someone claimed it's "revolutionary". Go find it. Or where the "presses stopped" because of the DVD maker. That makes it $200 bucks.
As for why it makes an impression: compare the market share (and thus real world impact) of Windows versus Ubuntu. Still, there's sufficient buzz around Ubuntu's new "media editing" oriented distro, which.. guess what.. comes with some extra prepackages applications.
It's 2007, "DOS" is no longer covering what an OS is, and should include.
Every one of the features you mention falls into the "avoiding negative publicity" category.
DVD maker and photo galleries?!
You'll do yourself a service not to interpret this category so overhyperbroadly. You can claim anything good they do is to avoid negative publicity, and then the whole "Microsoft's priorities" discussion falls apart.
So let me put it in context: features avoiding "negative publicity" in this case refers to security issues, stability issues and code quality. It doesn't refer to the millions of possible "nice to have"-s you can cram in an OS.
Scott: it's a friggin OS, not a video game, it's not supposed to have a nice plot twists, hot action and lots of suspence.
1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
Funny, that. I can see how it's bad they don't attract negative publicity and piss off their largest enterprise customers.
But tell me, how do these features fall into any of those two categories:
* New aero candy interface (I bet enterprise customers demanded this!).
* DVD maker.
* Photo processing.
* Live thumbnails.
* Updated Windows Games.
* DirectX 10
* etc etc.
There's a real reason why nobody is impressed with Vista as much: we've been watching it for 5 years. Previews, alphas, betas.
Maybe Jobs is right to sue blog sites that leak product info, and release everything with a ton of hype, of the "Best. Chewing. Gum. Evah!!!".
Because you see what happens now: people who followed Longhorn's development since it's inception are now whining that they're kinda familiar with what's new. Well duh, smartass.
I was of the understanding that the Volume Shadow service is a server side function that allows network clients to roll back to previous versions of data located on a network share. ie it doesn't affect local files at all.
What can I tell you.. If you run it on the server, it affects the files on the server, if you run it locally, it affects the local files...
Jobs also said about Apple "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
Funny right.. and this is exactly what he's doing. On his last presentation they dropped the "Computers" part of their name, and it's more and more obvious they are MOVING (not EXPANDING) into consumer electronics.
The Macs are now PC's which can run Windows as well... Maybe we'll see in few years OSX as a platform running INSIDE Windows Vista? You never know.
I'd say, Jobs is pretty consistent with what he said in all cases.
Not to be completely off-topic: diesel from sugar? Good for them!
... can you please soften a bit this jarring, eye-popping yellow you use for the "opinion center". Yea, we get it: they pay you a lot to have it there, blazingly obvious and right on top of everything, but it's totally out of place and distracting when I want to read something.
And now
geophysicists now plan to enact an untested scheme to try and slow the flow: dropping concrete balls into the volcano
So basically when the volcano explodes, it won't just throw lava, but we'll also have raining canon balls. Smart!
I've always said Jobs is dangerous. We gotta be happy that things now are as they are (Mac has a mere 2-3% market share, and as for consumer products like iPod - let it thrive, no much harm done, it's just a fancy nice mp3 player).
Bill Gates' original vision was to spread computers into every home, and make hardware a commodity platform, make the real product the software that makes this hardware useful.
Job's vision is more sinister though: this guy believes in perception, in hype, in marketing, and in easy to use and swallow products fed to the masses. A control freak.
Isn't it crazy how much work they've put on the iPhone (and deliver a nice, albeit expensive product), only in the end to cripple it by not allowing to tap its power with custom software? This is pure Jobs right there.
And you can be sure Apple's strange behavior towards rumor sites is coming straight from Jobs.
And there's a site that said the product was a Apple hoax deliberately created to catch where the leaks are coming from. Possible, but we have a real world example of what possibly really happened:
Did you know that months before Microsft announced the Tablet PC platform Apple was getting ready to release their own Tablet Mac? Well, just because they couldn't be first to the market and grab that "mindshare", Jobs scrapped the project. I bet he's now waiting for the Tablet PC idea to die and be forgotten, before he tries again.
Yeah, I agree, PCs should really stop sucking. However, I wonder why you're telling that to us. Most of us aren't working on Windows.
So you're not working on a PC? What are you working on, Amiga?
So Apple better say "Windows" or "Office" in their switcher ads, I guess...
That'd be kinda ironic given in their ads they specifically stress on the fact MS Office is available on Mac and It Is Good.
They need Office on the Mac and they know that.
As for Windows.. they'd piss off someone's lawyers to directly flame the Windows brand. So they use a "PC" as a generic name, but of course talking about Windows (not Linux or BSD or anything).
Which is *again* ironic, and doubly so, as what they sell right now is exactly a PC. No more, no less. The only single difference being the DRM chip they use to lock OSX, and the EFI (versus the classic BIOS). But new PC-s are sold with EFI too, so..
I remember when they were also flaming the Pentium 2/3/4 chips, talking about how terribly slow they are compared to G4 and G5. Which was again a lie, when they switched to Intels they got away from the situation talking how hugely different Core is, a totally, totally different thing, completely different from the Pentiums we flamed just few months ago!
Of course, those better informed, know Core 1 is in fact enhanced Pentium 3 with more SIMD commands and extra power-saving features.
It's been 5 years or so. And still most of the Apple ads represent one or at most two objects (frequently human actors it seems), which are speaking about how much PC-s suck, and occasionally, ONLY occasionally, also mentioning how Mac software never has problems (lie) or how on Mac you can process photos and videos, and on the PC you can't (lie).
And you suddenly know why most people just don't buy Macs. Mac marketing makes impression of being really really desparate.
Maybe they should try some of their iPod concepts for advertising the Mac? This could work better. Show people having fun with a Mac, show Mac being used.
Stop with the "PC sucks" nonsense.
Ask Jamie McCarthy what kind of contortions they go through to make MySQL usable. Or CmdrTaco, who has stated his 2 biggest regrets are using mysql over postgesql and calling the iPod lame.
Can you provide links to provide context and support of your statements?
The parody site operator of getafirstlife.com should reject this letter immediately. How many companies in the future will start referring to this action as a basis to stop "fair use"? i.e., "Hey, we didn't provide you with a proceed-and-permit letter.
You should get to know Jack Thompson. My gut tells me you'll do incredible things together.
I'm a Postgres user and shrug my shoulders as to why anybody would use something with all the warts of MySQL
Don't you feel the burning irony of posting this on Slashdot, one of the more prominent MySQL users?
While you're busy with your tiny holy war, people take MySQL for what it offers and builds useful services and sites with it, among those Google, Yahoo, Digg, Apple...
bluetooth 2.0 is something like 3Mb/s. .... not great for backing up your pr0n ...
Is this the most compelling rant you can pull off? And do you realize bluetooth is just one option, the devices implementing DAVE can also provide USB transfer?
I suppose the only reason for bluetooth inside is because they saw some empty space in the drive left underutilized. A disk is circle, and the component is square. Catch my drift?
In a mobile device, every tiny bit of space counts, hence having built-in bluetooth makes DAVE more competitive.
Sure, some apps will continue to be single-threaded, but eventually, who would buy them? Software vendors aren't dumb.
.NET and Avalon, your GUI is already being rendered in a separate thread and potentially separate core.
.net / java, which run fast even on single core.
Is utilizing efficiently 100% of the CPU was always top priority for all possible apps, we wouldn't have technologies like Java, or even let alone Python, Perl and PHP on mission/performance critical servers, worldwide.
The simple truth is lots of apps can get away with not grabbing the entire CPU for themselves.
Also you're missing something: with modern technologies you don't have to write for multiple threads to get them. If you target
Modern computers also multitask a lot, so the cores are automatically useful there.
And last but not least: we've pretty much reached maturity of abstraction with platforms like
I seriously doubt we'll see more programming abstraction in terms of runtime processing. We'd instead see more technologies and API-s that work with those runtimes to delivr better results, faster (namely the Vista programming model).
You're an idiot. I suppose that if it's written into law that you must not shoot your mother in the head (like, um, it is?) that you'd go ahead and blow her head off it since all laws are so evil, right? If your tiny little brain can't figure out the difference between good laws (like the kind that say that people actually have to pay you--gasp!--for stuff you are selling) and bad laws, then I don't see any point in arguing any further. Like I said, you're an idiot, and there's no point.
First you equate my position with raping women, now you insult me and curse left and right like a drunk sailor. It's hard to have reasonable conversation with you, let alone on such a subject.
Summary:
Windows: Eye candy, eye candy, and you're gonna have to upgrade.
Linux: Secure stable, and I swear it's got software you can run! I mean, people give it away for free.
Mac OS: I use my machine for things and I really like it. And it's pretty
Summary: Slashdot.