...an agreement that would allow MS to buy future Apple developments. (This has a lot to do with why XP looks so much like a Macintosh OS in some ways.)
I'm not sure that's correct. Microsoft hired frogdesign to design the user interface for Windows XP ("Luna.")
frogdesign was responsible for many of the early Apple II and Macintosh industrial design (but not the Aqua user interface, which was an outgrowth of the product design of Jonathan Ives.)
For those who love -- or hate -- XP's interface, you have to thank/blame frogdesign.
At least in early versions, OmniWeb tried using a 'pure' object-oriented approach to render web pages. They wrote an object that converted HTML into SGML, then another one to convert SGML into RTF -- which was a native format for NextStep to display. Although elegant in architecture, these many conversions delayed the display of the web page quite a bit.
To make matters worse, until OS4.2, the low-level Next-supplied Text Object was not multi-threaded. (No real reason for it to be, until web browsers came along opening up multiple http connections and wanting their pages rendered ASAP.)
I believe if you get just the right combination of OpenStep 4.2 on a Turbo Cube, some rare EOF patch, and the right beta of OmniWeb, the whole rube goldberg contraption works just dandy. Otherwise, it's probably a good thing they are just outsourcing HTML rendering to WebCore nowadays.
There's some more info in an old post of mine here.
You know, I saw the same thing at BofA branch on Capitol Hill (Seattle). Macintosh SE's, circa 1988. But they were actually using the Mac's only as terminal emulators -- the screen was filled with a TN3270 or something similar. No vintage Mac graphical banking program, I'm afraid.
The "spinning pizza of death" actually originated as a graphical representation of the original NeXT hardware's only winchester-esque drive: the magnet-optical. The alternating black and white slices of the disc were meant to represent reflections on the mirror surface of the disc. (These drives were rather slow, particularly so when writing, due to the two-stage Curie Point process. If the NeXT was waiting for something, it was probably a write to finish, thus the cursor.)
Upon the release of color NeXT hardware, NeXTStep 2.x 'colorized' the disc cursor. This had the side-effect of removing it by a degree from the original visual metaphor.
OS X 1.1 and below had the same, colorized cursor, often referred to as the "spinning beach ball" due to the coloration. 10.2 Aqua-fied the icon, so it now looks... sort of like a gummi something.
(Mac OS 8 and above had their own version of the "spinning beach ball", but that originiated IIRC in HyperCard as a cursor for when the program was busy. I don't believe it was ever colorized - and it was black and white quarters of a circle, unlike the 2-bit (4 grey) NeXTStep optical disc cursor. This cursor is superficially similar to, but as the above narrative describes, historically separate from, the NeXT-derived OS X cursor.)
"RCA" is a physical cable type. Composite and RGB are electrical methods of encoding image information. Both Composite and RGB can be expressed on RCA cables - the former uses one cable, the latter uses three. SCART, being a multi-pin cable, can carry darn near anything over it's physical wires, depending on how the pins are wired at each end. It's possible to carry a Composite, S-Video, *or* RGB signal over SCART, as well as analog audio.
Intel discontinued the Dot.Station, along with all other consumer electronics, yesterday:
...the Dot.Station, a countertop Internet appliance, will fade out. The company shipped 250,000 of the devices to AOL Avant, an America Online joint venture in Spain, but there are no plans to manufacture more.
My Ericsson T39 sends and recieves names with nary a problem from Palms (and Handsprings, Clies, etc) over IrDA.
The key improvement they made over previous phones seems to be implementing vCard standard for contacts - every name on my phone can have up to four numbers assigned, as well as an email address and postal address.
vCard (and the successor iCard) allows some intelligence when sending data between different systems - rather than relying on hard-coded rules such as "take the first number only," it can extract all X numbers when the receiving system supports them, or only the most important number. For example, you may decide that the home phone number is the "primary" way to reach a contact, and set that as the one which should be transferred to a system which only supports one number.
FWIW, the T39 also comes with a really slick calendar. The calendar uses the vCal standard, so depending on how obscure the transport protocol is, it should be pretty easy for someone to grab the data from the phone via serial/IR/BlueTooth and sync it with a Linux app which supports vCard/vCal.
One problem you may run into: extremely slow performance rendering HTML. This is because OmniWeb, in those days, used the very elegant Object-Oriented architecture of NeXTStep to process HTML. In fact, the flowchart looked like this:
HTML -> SGML -> RTF
(RTF was one of the formats that the Display PostScript engine could display natively, and it was pretty easy to map HTML's bold and italic onto it.)
Sounds slick, right? Unfortunately, until NeXTStep 4.2 (?) the text object was not multi-threaded. This was never a problem until web browers were invented, and suddenly the system had to do things like format web pages based on data from the network. IIRC, later versions of the OS did have a multi-threaded text object, but the upgrade was really expensive even for Academic customers. The OS's hinderance of good browser performance contributed to the death of NeXTStep (not that it needed any help in this regard.) I suppose Omni could have re-written their rendering engine to not rely upon the OS's text object, but that would kind have defeated the purpose of developing on the platform.
I don't know enough about OmniWeb nowadays to say whether it uses equivalent services under OS X...
E. This article is a re-hash of an article that was on ZDNet and CNET last week. Notice the key bias words: inability, glitches, frustrate, annoying, frustrating, "not be able", "limit... usefulness", aggravation, lack. That's just in the headlines and first paragraph. Suspiciously like Linux reporting, eh?
Hardly. Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.
Hmm. Don't think you have that quote right.
Louis Sullivan, the mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright and one of the greatest American architects, wrote "form ever follows function" in 1896. The context for the quote was "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," which is available online at
The Bauhaus was founded in Germany in 1919, so Sullivan should probably get credit for having the idea first.
(Frank Lloyd Wright was to later say of his teacher: "Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union." This quote has been shortened over time, by various paraphrasers, as "Form and function are one.")
Slashdot Mirror
The 'monochrome' NeXT's had 2-bit graphics, not 4-bit. 2-bit results on four shades of grey, including black, white, and two inbetween.
Jo, det beror ju på vad man betyder när man säger 'de flesta orden' men enligt Oxford University Press har engelskan ganska många ord.
Many sites in Sweden use .nu because it means "now" in that language. (http://www.badminton.nu/, for example.)
...an agreement that would allow MS to buy future Apple developments. (This has a lot to do with why XP looks so much like a Macintosh OS in some ways.)
I'm not sure that's correct. Microsoft hired frogdesign to design the user interface for Windows XP ("Luna.")
frogdesign was responsible for many of the early Apple II and Macintosh industrial design (but not the Aqua user interface, which was an outgrowth of the product design of Jonathan Ives.)
For those who love -- or hate -- XP's interface, you have to thank/blame frogdesign.
At least in early versions, OmniWeb tried using a 'pure' object-oriented approach to render web pages. They wrote an object that converted HTML into SGML, then another one to convert SGML into RTF -- which was a native format for NextStep to display. Although elegant in architecture, these many conversions delayed the display of the web page quite a bit.
To make matters worse, until OS4.2, the low-level Next-supplied Text Object was not multi-threaded. (No real reason for it to be, until web browsers came along opening up multiple http connections and wanting their pages rendered ASAP.)
I believe if you get just the right combination of OpenStep 4.2 on a Turbo Cube, some rare EOF patch, and the right beta of OmniWeb, the whole rube goldberg contraption works just dandy. Otherwise, it's probably a good thing they are just outsourcing HTML rendering to WebCore nowadays.
There's some more info in an old post of mine here.
You know, I saw the same thing at BofA branch on Capitol Hill (Seattle). Macintosh SE's, circa 1988. But they were actually using the Mac's only as terminal emulators -- the screen was filled with a TN3270 or something similar. No vintage Mac graphical banking program, I'm afraid.
The "spinning pizza of death" actually originated as a graphical representation of the original NeXT hardware's only winchester-esque drive: the magnet-optical. The alternating black and white slices of the disc were meant to represent reflections on the mirror surface of the disc. (These drives were rather slow, particularly so when writing, due to the two-stage Curie Point process. If the NeXT was waiting for something, it was probably a write to finish, thus the cursor.)
Upon the release of color NeXT hardware, NeXTStep 2.x 'colorized' the disc cursor. This had the side-effect of removing it by a degree from the original visual metaphor.
OS X 1.1 and below had the same, colorized cursor, often referred to as the "spinning beach ball" due to the coloration. 10.2 Aqua-fied the icon, so it now looks... sort of like a gummi something.
(Mac OS 8 and above had their own version of the "spinning beach ball", but that originiated IIRC in HyperCard as a cursor for when the program was busy. I don't believe it was ever colorized - and it was black and white quarters of a circle, unlike the 2-bit (4 grey) NeXTStep optical disc cursor. This cursor is superficially similar to, but as the above narrative describes, historically separate from, the NeXT-derived OS X cursor.)
"RCA" is a physical cable type. Composite and RGB are electrical methods of encoding image information. Both Composite and RGB can be expressed on RCA cables - the former uses one cable, the latter uses three. SCART, being a multi-pin cable, can carry darn near anything over it's physical wires, depending on how the pins are wired at each end. It's possible to carry a Composite, S-Video, *or* RGB signal over SCART, as well as analog audio.
Yeah, these just scream class.
The key improvement they made over previous phones seems to be implementing vCard standard for contacts - every name on my phone can have up to four numbers assigned, as well as an email address and postal address.
vCard (and the successor iCard) allows some intelligence when sending data between different systems - rather than relying on hard-coded rules such as "take the first number only," it can extract all X numbers when the receiving system supports them, or only the most important number. For example, you may decide that the home phone number is the "primary" way to reach a contact, and set that as the one which should be transferred to a system which only supports one number.
FWIW, the T39 also comes with a really slick calendar. The calendar uses the vCal standard, so depending on how obscure the transport protocol is, it should be pretty easy for someone to grab the data from the phone via serial/IR/BlueTooth and sync it with a Linux app which supports vCard/vCal.
HTML -> SGML -> RTF
(RTF was one of the formats that the Display PostScript engine could display natively, and it was pretty easy to map HTML's bold and italic onto it.)
Sounds slick, right? Unfortunately, until NeXTStep 4.2 (?) the text object was not multi-threaded. This was never a problem until web browers were invented, and suddenly the system had to do things like format web pages based on data from the network. IIRC, later versions of the OS did have a multi-threaded text object, but the upgrade was really expensive even for Academic customers. The OS's hinderance of good browser performance contributed to the death of NeXTStep (not that it needed any help in this regard.) I suppose Omni could have re-written their rendering engine to not rely upon the OS's text object, but that would kind have defeated the purpose of developing on the platform.
I don't know enough about OmniWeb nowadays to say whether it uses equivalent services under OS X...
Prästen skriver brev.
Hardly. Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.
http://www.njit.edu/Library/archlib/pub-domain/sul livan-1896-tall-bldg.html
The Bauhaus was founded in Germany in 1919, so Sullivan should probably get credit for having the idea first.
(Frank Lloyd Wright was to later say of his teacher: "Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union." This quote has been shortened over time, by various paraphrasers, as "Form and function are one.")