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MacHack Yields Clever Tricks With Apples
gagganator writes: "Machack (that 72 hour nonstop hacking contest) has ended, and here are the hacks voted most interesting. also, Steve Wozniak spoke about everything from phone phreaking to the future of computing." Sounds like a fun event -- does anyone have any other first-hand stories about this year's Machack?
As soon as the PowerPC Amiga comes out, we will CRUSH Microsoft and Apple! Already, my stock Amiga 1200 is roughly 6.7x faster than the current top-of-the-line Alpha or Itanium, right out of the box. And just try to get a Video Toaster for your puny Pentium 4. Can't do it. You just can't do it.
I've been with Woz and Mitnick in the same room, on more then one ocassion, while I was down in LA. Did steve talk about how he pranked McDonalds by overriding their speaker system? Saying things like "You are too fat to eat one of our burgers" and things like that. An Old Woz Friend... who wishes to remain un-identified.
But the best ones were how he tweaked secret service agents by buying 2 dollar bills in sheets and having a friend bind them into a pad and perforate them. Lots of people think they're counterfeit when he pays with them, but they're not!
Actually, the other keynote speakers had some really good stories, too. All in all, it was probably the best keynote I've seen in the past few years.
-D
At the time that was a very big deal- and it _did_ trigger an incredible explosion of consumer interest. I'd agree that Woz invented the personal computer. It was a hell of a big change from the Altair scene, which was really 'obsessive crazed hobbyist' land.
Woz stated that he did not think it was in Apple's best interest to buy NeXT at the time it did. He didn't feel that the operating system was Apple's problem.
I'm flat out astonished that he could possibly have felt that way!
Now, I was only vaguely aware of Apple's goings-on in the 90's (I went from Amiga to Linux and pretty much avoided Apple and Microsoft) but I do recall the endlessly "coming soon" next-generation OS. But I just recently read Jim Carlton's book "Apple", and was stunned by just how much time, how much money, how many completely abandoned efforts went into the quest for a "new" Mac OS before finally merging with NeXT. And even then several more years passed before OS X finally made it out.
Now I can't guarantee that Carlton's book is an objective and unbiased account of the times. But based on that, I got the very strong impression that Apple were never going to successfully write a next-gen OS. If they had rejected NeXT (as they rejected Be..) I'm sure they would have gradually slid into bankruptcy (just as everyone predicted for so many years).
I'd love to know what the Woz thinks would have happened between 1997 and now if Apple had decided it was "not in their best interests" to buy NeXT..?
This does not match with my Mac experience. 1 months after getting my first computer (that's of all time) I had figured out how to re-install the system and done so. "you have to set it up for her".. cause everyone has got an IT department in their basement.. I mean you have to install programs for her? good lord! and configure it! wow... Do you double click on the app and do dictation to? I know many people who can "use" computers this way.
Jeez, you sound like the executives in Dilbert who get stuck in a conference room and die because they get locked in and can't figure out how to use the telephone. Why not look through the menu choices and select "Eject" to remove the floppy? That you don't understand the trash can short cut doesn't excuse you from using the obvious solution and then engaging in sarcastic, pinheaded commentary.
For those who want to know here is the historical reason for the trash can short cut. Apple introduced the ubiquitous 3-1/2" floppy disk to the world (it was made by Sony). They promised to make available an external floppy drive (this was before hard drives were readily available) but took forever because that would limit their ability to deliver computers. So the problem was how do you implement a GUI to move files from one floppy to another?
Instead of completely removing a volume when it was ejected they left behind a grayed-out image. It was still possible to interact with this ghostly image and in particular you could drag an icon from an unmounted floppy to a mounted floppy. At that point the OS would eject floppies and request the other until the transfer was complete. When you were really done with a floppy you would drag the greyed-out image to the trash.
The short cut became to drag a floppy to the trash so that it was ejected and and grayed-out image was also removed. For some mysterious reason this behavior was preserved for years before it finally became customary (with OS 8 or 9?) that ejecting a floppy would not leave behind the ghostly image. The transition phase couldn't have been more than a few months but the baggage remained for years. The damn short cut is still there in OSX!
While not amazingly funny, the above post seemed to be humor. If it wasn't clear at the beginning, the racism point sort of makes it obvious.
Really guys, turn your clue detectors on.
You have to go to the 'Start' button to shut the machine down
That's because the shutdown sequence can take several minutes on an NT Server box. So, you "start" the shutdown service.
Seriously, though, it's just shorter to just wait for the machine to crash.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Yep, I'll bet there's a pinhole eject
in every mmacine Apple's shipped with
a floppy drive this year. Uh-huh. Yep.
System 2.0 / Finder 4.1 (April 1985)
was the version that added the "Put Away" option
to the Finder for unmounting disks,
and the option to drag floppies to the trash to unmount.
Ask a Mac enthusiast one question, he answers a different one than the one you asked...
Yeah, but at least we know how to use a
search engine to fact-check.
It's not a metaphor.
Way, way, back in the day, the original Mac only had a single 400kB floppy drive. If you had some cash, you could afford a second one. (and man, would you want it - copying floppies with the paltry amount of RAM in those things was hell otherwise)
So it was customary to eject a disk you weren't using, but *leave* a copy of the icon on the system so that if it was needed it would simply prompt you for the appropriate disk to be inserted. This made sense at the time, honestly. The icons that were left were sort of dimmed, and when you wanted to get rid of them, you'd drag the dimmed icons to the trash. Ejecting the disk though, was done with a menu command.
Some developer got tired of having to eject disks twice to get them completely off the system, so he wrote code that would eject a disk all the way if it were dragged to the trash. This conflicted with the UI, and the HCI people bitched about it, but it turned out that they used it just as much as everyone else, because it was frickin' useful.
For years the idea of having an icon for eject on the desktop, or having the trash turn into one was bandied about. OS X actually implements this. (although it also conflicts with the icon = noun rule that has underlied GUIs for ages)
Personally I would've just put on a software controllable eject button on the drives, that also sent an event to the OS. But that's just me.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
What the heck has ESR got to do with the price of fish?
--
the telephone rings / problem between screen and chair / thoughts of homocide
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
... running MandrakeUpdate on my server over ssh over airport through XDarwin on my Cube.
Well, at least I thought it was neat..
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
there was a similar cornfusion when first learning win95, I wanted to remove an Icon from the desktop but it wasn't clear if clicking "delete" removed just the icon "shortcut" or the entire file!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Steve Wozniak, the man commonly credited with the invention of the personal computer,
Wow, In the Wintel mass cult the $PC_CREATOR is Ed Roberts and his Altair kit/MITS BASIC (which was actually slyly owned by Micro-soft), or if your a classiccmp collector it's Edmund Berkeley and his "Simon" PC, altho Apple probably gets the blue ribbon if you limit "PC" to something you just buy, plug in, boot up and use, no assembly (haha) required.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Ahem, there is also an eject disk menu command.
BAM!
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
true .. but I nslookup'ed www.slashdot.org and slashdot.org, and got the same ip for both.
*shrug*
it seems to be working fine now =)
Hmm, too bad there was no way that I could have gotten to MacHack. Earlier this year I transplanted the ADB controller from one of those Apple mice shaped like that into a 3 button PS/2 mouse from Digital of about the same age. I also hacked up a copy of the Mouse Key control panel from Logitech so that Mouse Key would recognize the "new" three button mouse. I really only got away with it because both mice were manufactured by Logitech and their controllers both essentially had the same pin outs. I had to hack up Mouse Key because it was designed to only recognize ADB devices with certain ADB IDs, I just replaced the IDs for one of the Logitech mice with the ID from the Apple mouse. Oddly enough this was the hardest part. I did this all before I realized that I could have used the disassembler for ResEdit and it would have been easier. The only problem is that Mouse Key thinks that the right button is the middle button and the middle button the right. This is probably my fault, but I could easily fix that by using a different Logitech Mouse ID.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
So now it's gone from entirely unintuitive to just being a "mystery meat" interface? Waving the disk icon around to try to find out where to put it is almost as annoying as the original behavior.
Kudos to Woz for his hack and all, but this is something Apple should have done on their own at least 15 years ago. It's a tragedy that it hasn't been done by now, not a great hack.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Ah, that's better then. I hadn't noticed this on the last Mac I played around with. Glad to see some thought's gone into the problem.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Hrm... this guy is likely a win-head. Here's a good windows irratation... You have to go to the 'Start' button to shut the machine down. heh...
-t
Or there is the pop-up menu option that will also do the job. Cick on a disk and you will see the 'eject' item just there to be selected.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I know some of us will be waiting to try some of the hacks. You know everyone will want to try Dock Dancer.
So the Woz uses iCab. that makes sense. Of all the people in the computer world, he stands as one worth emulating. He has not forgotten that the computers most important element is the human using it.
photosMy Photostream
If you drag an audio device to the hand do you get a "Talk to the Hand" message?
ESR was one of the keynote speakers at last year's MacHack.
I agree, it may not be intuitive but when you're used it, it sorta makes sense. But for everyone else, I really don't think it's that hard to right-click (control-click if you use the mouse that comes with the machine) and choose "eject" or just go up to the file menu and choose eject... The people who complain about it probably haven't ever used it.
-- Tim Buchheim
In all fairness, I wouldn't say Mac OS X is "brand new" - the BSD and NeXT underpinnings are pretty mature. At the same time, this isn't just another Linux distribution - the human interface components are quite new, so yes, growing pains should be expected in some areas. If the multitasking had been incomplete on release I'd be surprised, but I'm not surprised that CD-R and DVD support hasn't been completely tacked onto the lower-level OS components whose invention predate publically-accessible CD-Rs and DVDs.
Besides, CD-R burning has never been a traditional OS component. Apple's only recently added it to iTunes, and only with the latest iMacs released their own software for burning non-audio CDs. Adaptec/Roxio Toast has been the standard for burning CD-Rs. At most, Apple may not have completely documented the API that Toast would need to access CD-Rs yet. Microsoft hasn't generally included their own CD burning software, either - the standard software for CD burning on Windows all comes from third parties. And for Linux, everything but the kernel is third-party.
And because I can't help but throw in my two cents about ejecting disks in OS X...It's not very intuitive at first. You need to either find something in a manual that mentions the trash can's change to an eject icon, or you need to have gotten used to dragging the disk to the trash under OS 9 and try it nuder OS X. It isn't intuitive if the only way you're going to find out about the feature without consulting a learned source is if you're in the habit of dragging things around on the screen willy-nilly and eyeballing the dock for changes.
Naked.
What, now you're going after the Poles? Jeez, maybe there is something to this "racist" accusation...
Naked.
America - Come and save our ass! - Sir Winston Churchill
Well, the first time I ever sat at a Mac, I placed a floppy in the drive, used it, and then spent a few minutes trying to understand where should I eject it (Which eject button, kemosabe? Mac floppy drives DON'T have an eject button, which is kind of the whole point)
If a soul more acquainted with the MacOS hadn't passed by and said "Just drag it to the trash, it's ok, it won't be erased" I'd never tried it! The "logical" action associated with dragging the disk to the trash, to someone not used to the interface, would be to erase it.
Well, since on the Mac, everything that I drag to the trash gets erased including my grandma's recipes, why should it be any different with a disk? I used macs at school for years without ever realizing that I could just drag the disk to the trash.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
No, everything you drag to the trash sits in the trash, just like the real world.
...sits in the trash.... However, when I put my disk in the trash and go look in the trash, it isn't there! "Oh no! It erased my disk and ejected it!" By your logic, I should be able to go to the trash and "uneject" my disk by copying it back to the desktop.
Ok, since you like using the real world as model for a computer system, let's go with that analogy. I have "files" on my disk. Therefore, a disk is a way of collecting files into a single thing, the disk. Except I can't look at those files without a special machine, the computer. What is this like in the real world? Perhaps a microfilm reader would be a good example. So I take my microfilm and put it in the machine. When I am done, I need to take the microfilm back to the shelf. So I put it in the trash? At which point, the trash can automatically unloads the microfilm from the machine. Doesn't this seem a little backward to you?
Another point, you say
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
No, I drag your grandma's recipes to the trash.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
No, it wasn't. It was a school where we spent our time learning things. Not wasting our time dumping everything we could find on the computer into the trash.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
I should've said "in addition to the physical hardware based button".
Truth be told, I would probably never use these software solutions - rarely do I used a software disk eject feature, instead leaning over to hit the "eject" button (floppy, CD-ROM, Zip drive - of course, these last two are software controlled in some way, as you alude to).
However, I can see some people wanting a software disk ejection mechanism, and for those, what I outlined is more intuitive in that regard.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This sounds OK, but still isn't as intuitive. If you have an icon that represents a floppy (or some other removable media) drive, I can think of a few ways to intuitively eject the disk:
1. A "button" on the icon that looks like an eject button - click on it to eject the disk.
2. Drag the icon off the screen (preferably the bottom) to eject.
3. Maybe an "Open Door" type icon, showing "exitability"?
These are just my three suggestions - I am sure there are other ideas...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Here are my favorite hacks:
Some guy hacked an Apple one button mouse to make it two button. Here's a picture. Here is the relevant passage from the article:
Now that's a hack.
Here's another intersting quote about John Warnock, CEO of Adobe:
There was a big opensource sermon also.
I was actually at the Hack Show, watching Steve present his hack in the wee hours of the morning, and it was really obvious that he didn't actually patch the Finder's trash routines themselves. When he hooked up his laptop to the projector, the screen resolution on his laptop changed and that caused a small problem for his presentation. His hack depended on the location of certain icons on the desktop.
Basically, he created another folder with the same icon as the trash can, and carefully positioned it over the real trash can. Then, he attached a folder action to his new folder which watched for items dropped into the folder. The folder action would simply move most items into the real trash, or present a dialog if the item was a disk volume. The dialog would then ask the user if the disk should be ejected or erased.
There's a reason Apple didn't have a manual eject button. Did you really want a blue screen saying please insert disk with serial # into the drive and press Enter when ready?
No wonder Mac users never had Abort, retry, fail.
Control-click.
Extremely cool program, kudos man.
Valid point, but the moment you hold down the mouse button on a disk, the dock changes, no mousover needed.
The first person to actually recall the origin of my .sig? Stand up, and how about a round of applause for our fine young friend here?
echo "Apple" | sed 's|Apple|1 4M 4N 31337 M4C H4X0R|g'
Want Root?
Back when the early powerbooks came out many of them had a few bad pixels - Apple claimed at the time that this was expected and there was a certain number of bad pixels that were tollerable before Apple would replace yuor screen .... one of the MacHack entries back then was a program that would 'increase' the number of 'bad' pixels to above that number so that you could get your screen fixed
With MacOS X the control panel is not necessary for a second button and scroll wheels. For my third and fourth buttons yes, but for the first two, no.
My mom uses it just fine, and she is a non-computer-literate as they come. If you set up a login for her with just the programs she needs to use in the doc, and auto-start them, you can get a very minamalist computer experience. It does require that someone set it up for her this way, but that is no different than any other OS I have used.
Yeah... from the woz article....
Woz finished the night with numerous stories of some of his best practical jokes.
Funny one about the bills. Wish I could hear more. Bet there were some good ones.
Why? Because PC floppy drives don't generate an OS event when a disk is inserted
Umm, what? Define "OS event" please. To me, an OS event is one which is generated by software because of some status change occuring within the hardware. You would be wrong to assume that PC floppy disks cannot generate a hardware event for disk changes. Review INT 13h, function 16h - Determine Disk Change (Floppy Drive, AT, and PS/2 only). The OS can poll this function to then generate an "OS event".
One thing that people forget is that when you're using windows (which I try to do as least as possible, mind you), what happens often when you go to the top most directory in the file browser to save something? Immediately the floppy starts grinding away. Why? Because PC floppy drives don't generate an OS event when a disk is inserted. The computer has no way of keeping a record of when a floppy is sitting in the drive. The only solution to this is to poll the floppy, which generates the most grating noise. With the mac floppy drive(which probably should have an eject button that works the same way as the ones on zip drives), every time a floppy is inserted, it generates a disk event that tells the OS "Hey, there's a floppy inside you". When there's no floppy in the mac, the mac understands it's not there, so it's not going to do something futile and useless like searching for data on a floppy disk that doesn't exist. Given, the electronics required for this elegant solution raised the cost of mac floppy drives considerably. It's one of those technical superiority vs. price tradeoffs we see so much in the computer industry (SCSI vs. IDE, etc).
FWIW, in MacOS X the "trash" icon in the dock changes into an "eject" icon when you drag a disk, which is slightly more intuitive. of course you could always just eject the disk from the menubar or by right-clicking (or command-clicking) on the disk and choosing "eject."
- j
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Hardly, I think it was pretty clear that the MacHack ideal was something that he understood. The alienation of the audience is questionable as well. There were many in the audience who appreciated the lively and admittedly sometimes heated interchange. In fact, many were heard to be talking about ESR's keynote after the happy reminicense of this year's Mac engineering reunion.
Few, I think, haven't taken advantage of open source efforts as they have worked to migrate onto the BSD framework of OSX. So while the idea of open sourcing software product may rub some the wrong way, there's no denying the advantages of using open source as a starting point for development efforts, even if just as a learning tool.
In this regard, the Mac developer community has grown up over the last year, and IMHO ESR's keynote got the ball rolling.
Ultimately, the best part of the bizarre business deal that merged Apple and NeXT was the acquisition of Steve Jobs. For all his megalomania and at best offbeat management style, it's the singular vision of the The Steve that has brought Apple to where it is. Their hardware has, for sure, never been better. There is some definite question as to whether OSX can grow from a decent commercial UN*X to something more consumer oriented. My mom can't use it yet, that's for sure...
For those who have attended MacHack, ESR included, there is an understanding of the spirit of what's going on. The hack show is about rediscovering what it is that makes engineering and software design fun to begin with. Sure, some hacks are derivative and some are pure presentation with little or no coding involved. Heck, some the most legendary hacks have been pure showmanship. The reason that things like the Password sniffer went over well is because of the presentation. Blackmailing the entire audience serves as excellent marketing.
Judging a hack on merits of utility or even total originality isn't fair. That's just not what this event is about. There's more here than merely recompiling dsniff to run on OSX. I would have thought that the whole thing would be fairly obvious to the slashdot crowd at large. Clearly, some get it and some don't.
Now I need to figure out why I'm awake at 6a PDT on the Monday following 72 hours with very little sleep.
Well. I might make some errors here, but it's something like:
move.b $ff820a.w,#0
nop
move.b $ff820a.w,#1
Nuts? Well, at the end of the great demo era (-90 to 93) most demo-screens of any style would do this AND a lot of cool effects even though it was a BITCH to code it. We mostly used self-adjusting code etc that automatically filled itself inside these tightly controlled timing-loops.
Mmm .. almost forgot, the actual move.b above will switch the refresh rate between 50 and 60Hz (upper and lower border) and 50/70 for the left&right ones.
Ahh .. those were the days. And don't get me started on how this hack evolved into another hack where we could scroll the whole screen with only 7 scanlines of CPU usage .. (the Atari ST had _no_ hardware scrolling before this clever hack of refresh-rate shifting).
Credits for border removal: Alyssa, TNT-Crew, TEX, The Carebears
Credits for hardware-scrolling (also known as sync-scrolling): Sync (yee, my old group), The Carebears and Omega.
it's in my head
That's why it's such a great hack - because it really was impossible. Atari technicians themselves were totally stunned.
it's in my head
So, we can watch our dock bounce up and down, :-(
equalizer style, to the music! Maybe just maybe
that will make most of us forget that we still
can't burn CD's with OS X/iTunes.
Now why would dragging something to the trash imply that it would be erased? Where the hell did that metaphor come from? Certainly not from real life. When I put something in the trash, I want it out of my house (out, out, damn disk!), not molecularly scrambled so I can use its mass again.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I think that following the MAC desktop theme, dragging anything to the trash (including disks) should delete/erase. I don't like the trash to eject thing.
:-)
They should also put a "Hand" on the desk, dragging anything to the hand would put something physical `in your hand'. If it's a disk, it would eject, if it's a document it would print, if it's a program it would say 'insert disk to put this file onto' and eject the disk when done.
Oh and apple, if you take my idea on board, I'll have a piece of that pie thanks
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
That makes him resourceful (read: Hacker), becuase he still manages to get a conference of use out of his laptop *before* he bitches and gets it fixed. Perhaps if we had more people like him and less like you in this world, there would be a lot more doing, and a lot less bitching. Either that, or we need to bring back reruns of McGyver and the ATeam to get the do-it-yourself, hack-it-together spirit back.
_sig_ is away
"Sadly, one hacker broke the screen of his G4 PowerBook at the beginning of the conference. Only the top third of his screen still worked. Did this stop him? Did he cry out against the uncaring fates?"
No, but he did learn a new use for shirt tails when he got the bill to fix it from Micro Center...
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
No, everything you drag to the trash sits in the trash, just like the real world. You have to empty it later. Although the Mac doesn't have Garbage Chute, Compacter, Dumpster, Truck or Landfill icons to truly implement the real-world experience. Maybe "Empty Trash" should have been called "Incinerate"?
Drag-to-trash to unmount a filesystem (and also eject removable media) is odd, but since the trash doesn't erase things, it isn't as bad as could have been. The problem is really with users who are already used to a "Delete file" operation from other systems; the Mac doesn't give you that directly. So you tell people who want to delete a file to drag it to the trash, and they associate "drag to trash" with "erase the file". But, of course, it's really just moved to a special directory on the disk; the file is still there, and you can drag it back if you want.
To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button.
They compounded this on the PowerMac 6100 by putting the power button just underneath and to the right of the floppy drive! That was good for a few laughs...
Pooh. That's nothing. I can make my Palm mimic a Unix desktop, or even <shudder> a Windows desktop! Link: here
Yeah, so they weren't the only ones. It seems a silly point of contention, though.
--
Apple already confused people with the Trash/Eject function. It's not logical. To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button. Anyway, further down the article you'll notice the following:
Wozniak's hack was to change the routines of the trash so that if you drag a disk to the trash, it gave you the option of either ejecting the disk or erasing it.
The key word here is option. So, anyone used to ejecting their disks via the trash can will still be able to. However, people who want to erase the disk will also be able to. And no one is going to accidentally format the disk, especially if they don't have this hack installed anyway.
--
"To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button"
I don't recall ever seeing an eject button on Sun floppy drives.
. To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button.
Sun, SGI, Next, Alpha and possiably other didn't include physical eject buttons (expect paper clip hole) on some or all of their machines.
IMHO `eject` is the most easy to understand command to release the floppy...
Actucally it is probably more rare to physically see an eject button, the only machine that I can recall having them are x86 PCs.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Control-click. Or do like the powerusers do and buy a 2-button mouse with the required control panel.
/Brian
Have been using Macs since 1987 and dragging a disk to the trash has never felt right to me... there's no LOGIC! But then again there's no logic in many parts of the pre-OS X versions of the Mac OS. Chooser? When does one copy/move a file? memory management (or lack thereof) Hmm, I won't continue. And yes, my current desktop is OS X.
How do I right click with my 1-button puck mouse?
=P
- Toby
I do think dragging a disk to the trash is potentionally unintuitive, but after a while, it "feels right."
Nevertheless, do note that under Mac OS X and the Aqua UI, dragging a disk toward the trash in the dock will make it change into a big 3D eject icon. It's REALLY cool looking. I think it makes more sense.
Just so people realize, Apple did change that, and therefore apparantly would agree with what Woz is saying (who can often be seen wearing OS X t-shirts).
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Grandpa, what is a floppy drive?
Have none of you ever played with the menus?
Along the top, with writing on?
"Special", "Eject Disk" or "Put away disk"
"Eject" just spits the disk out, "Put away" also removes it from the desktop (so the machine forgets the disk was ever inserted).
Jeez, you guys call yourselves hackers...
alt-f4 works fine (and faster) for me
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's all Greek to me
My other sig is extremely clever...
but since macs eject the disk on powerdown it does eject the disks
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I haven't followed this whole thread, but I've heard the floppy/trash thing for years, and I"m pretty surprised that most people forget the other function for which the "drag it to the trash" event was intended. That is simply to unmount removable media (floppies, cds, jaz drives, etc.)or even to dismount fixed media/hard drive partitions if you deem it necessary. The command key to eject any inserted media is Command-Y. The menu item name for Command-Y changes based on what is receiving the action, but the concepts are similar. That menu item is either "Eject xxxmedia" or "Put Away". If you have a document that you recently dragged onto your desktop, performing Command-Y on it will put it back to wherever it was prior to being moved to the desktop (or any folder.) The exception, of oourse, is if the place where it was prior is no longer mounted or if that item was created in the folder where it currently resides.) If you stop and think of the desktop paradigm in a more simple manner, this menu item and these actions make sense. You temporarily bring you documents from whereever they were, your work on them, then you put them away. This is easily extended to removable media, because most likely you aren't intending on having them there forever. So when your're done, you also tell it to be "Put Away" (even though the menu does change to "eject" for removable media, the idea was consistent.) I'll admit that choosing the trash can to be the vehicle for both destroying stuff and putting stuff away (god knows that's how I've cleaned up my room since I was 8) but I think there's also a historical context to dragging stuff to the trash. If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs was adamant that everything be performed by the mouse. No key Word Perfect Alt-F-10-Shft-Escape key combinations in order to get words bold on the Mac! Just use the mouse, and choose "Bold" from the menu. I don't even think he was happy at ALL that the original Mac team even gave stuff command-key equivalents. I think the Mac team softa kept them there, and I"m sure they suffered the consequences of daring to deface his art. So maybe to Steve Jobs, it was worth the unfortunate association of the trash can serving double duty, because it kept things pure and it was still NOTHING like what people had to deal with with PCs. Drag was cool and hip and ART, even if it was straight into the trash. The Macintosh trash can has been quite the celebrity, at times being the only reason to play with the machine (remember Oscar the Grouch and I Love Trash?) Who cares if you dragged everything INTO that trash can then emptied it, that would make Oscar come out and sing again! Computers ARE fun, mommy!) Besides, you could also say that putting the floppy into the trash WAS NOT DELETING it ,because to delete the thing you'd have to EMPTY THE TRASH. Those floppies just had the habit of popping right out before you even got the chance to empty the trash. Smart little floppies. See, no guilt! no more angst! We can all live on, because art survives and we are not the horrible people we thought we were dragging those poor disks into the trash.
I think the real point of this is that all paradigms (or methaphors) we've used for our GUIs break down quickly when you try to extend their feature set beyond the original intent. The inconsistencies of the Macintosh trash can from its inception shows you that it is WAY time for us to move away from the desktop metaphor.
Okay, who's gonna yell at me first. Yell on, baby, I'm in the trasn with Oscar anyway and we like it!
Jack
Jack Greenwood Southern California Inland Empire Suburban Hell
They compounded this on the PowerMac 6100 by putting the power button just underneath and to the right of the floppy drive! That was good for a few laughs...
I agree, that has got to be among the stupider things Apple has done:
Me: Hey dude! Come see my new Mac! I'm just copying a big file off of my 2x CD-ROM right now.
Friend: Okay dude! I've never seen a Mac before!
Me: I've only got a old PowerMac 6100, dude!
Friend: Dude! I here Macs don't have floppy drives.
Me: Dude, that's only iMacs and stuff. I'm broke so I've only got an old Mac that I bought off some other dude. Mine has a floppy.
Friend: Dude!
[Puts floppy in drive.]
Me: And it's cool how it ej--- Dude, NOOOOOOO!!!
[Friend shuts down Power Mac 6100 while trying to eject floppy. Big file still copying.]
Me: Are you an idiot dude? That's the power button! I was copying a big file! You eject it by dragging it to the trash, dude!
[I start Mac back up only to be greeted by floppy with a flashing Question Mark]
Me: Oh crap, dude! You screwed up my disk! And I don't have Mac OS 8.1 on me!
Something like this did happen. Three days later I managed to aquire a burnt copy of OS 8.1 and found out only my Sytem File had crapped out.
--Volrath50
Please don't feed the trolls.
I've personally seen this exact same post in way to many threads to count. After a while you just tune them out, like banner ads.
If *BSD is dying or not really doesn't have anything to do with this thread, or ANY of the threads under this topic.
"Move along looky loose, nothing to see here..."
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
To avoid confusion Apple have addressed this problem in OS X . When you drag a disk to the trash in OS X, the trash icon changes into an 'eject' icon.
~~~~~~~~~ "I must create my own system, or be enslav'd by another man's." William Blake, Jerusalem.
Now that you got me talking, I may as well go ahead and burst your bubble. Mac's are not the best systems in the world. Windows PC's are not the best in the world. And...here it comes...*nix systems are not the best in the world. In summary, there is no "One True System" that trumps all the others.
People like to say that they have the best of something. The best car...the best console system...the best box...the best whatever. The truth is that your definition of "the best" is not my defninition nor is it most likley anyone elses definition. This argument is so old it is not even interesting anymore. Take the old console argument, for example. People fight over which console is the best and some even refuse to buy competing consoles. Everybody's either heard it or participated in it, I'm sure.
People spend so much time defending "their system" that they never experience the other systems or they just neglect to see the perks of the other systems. Sure, everything has imperfections. But, everything has its own beauty. By being system biased, you miss out on the other systems' beauties.
Our human nature says "be the best". Darwin said "survival of the fittest", therefore implying that the "best" will prevail. Sometimes you have to put aside all that competition crappola and see the innate beauty in things. I like Windows because I like games. I like Mac's because of their attitude and photo/video editing support. I like GNU/Linux because of the GPL and the fact that for a couple bucks I can get a CD off of the 'net that has so many GPL'ed programs I have a complete GNU system for $5 shipping. If I had a lot of cash, I would have all of them.
Mac's are beautiful, Wintel's are beautiful, *nix boxen are beautiful. If they could only live together in peace and harmony. Why can't we all just get along? Now I sound like a hippy...eh, a techno-hippy I am.
Thank you Lord Hugh Toppingham for giving me something to do while I am stuck at work. I consider the use of the internet and the reading/posting at Slashdot "research" for the IT dept. It's been fun.
-= Jigoku =-
wow. somebody busts up his screen and instead of pulling strings and screaming at people that the product broke, he writes a hack to "fix" / get around the problem by disabling the broken part of the screen. does that make him "'l33t", or does it just make him an idiot?
I don't see Apple users -- or Adobe, for that matter -- moving to Linux until there is a single robust GUI standard. Apple users like to work with a GUI, not a command line; and Adobe's products obviously require a good GUI.
The term is "survival of the fit", which has a completely different meaning from "survival of the fittest." The first means that only the "unfit" will not survive, which can range from all to none. This is just one of many cases where, thanks to the abysmal education system, people repeat the inaccurate "bumper sticker" version, because they are under the impression that tossing out the pseudo-quote will mask their lack of understanding of the subject at hand.
This is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. you are going to confuse people with erasing (as in formatting) the disk.
The easiest way to remove a disk should be pressing the eject button. All macs use automatic drives, so they can be automatically unmounted too.
So don't throw your disks in the trash can (you'll want them later) and definitely don't format them. Just eject them.
Bored with your projects?
Try Einsteinium
i use beos about 60% of my time
debian gnu/linux about 30%
windows 2000 about 10%
that's triple boot on a machine i built myself. granted i don't use macs that much. but the apple 2c+ that i have has an eject button.
Bored with your projects?
Try Einsteinium
Probably because they put a temporary system with webserver in place of the ip, serving only that error page.
.com address yourself after clicking them).
Because of the round robin dns slashdot uses, some dns servers return an address that works, and some return an address that doesn't.
slashdot.com just works (but you have the adjust the links to articles to the
www.slashdot.org probably returns a working address too, just like slashdot.com
Looks like the contest succeeded. They managed to Dos-attack Slashdot almost contineously for the last 48 hours. :)
This is undoubtedly the leanest, meanest hack I've ever seen. It's a fun project, and if you have kids they'll love it.
--
"Survival of the fittest" is actually very appropriate, since it means "best adapted to the environemnt in which it exists." Animals adapt differently to their surroundings (even within the same species) in order to be "best", and moving one adapted to place A to place B may make it go from "best" to "worse." Sounds alot like computers - get what does what you need best, and don't sweat someone else's choice.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Humm... I'd like to download that dock hack...looks like fun:) And reguarding that guy above... I think most firewire dirves do burn CD's under OS X. I actually have a yamaha drive that burns under X and not 9. All in all... toast for X is what is needed. It is a much better app. Burning in iTunes is slow. It takes to long to convert MP3s.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
*This* was voted one of the best hacks at the show? Gawd, it's not even mac-specific, it's been implemented thousands of times...I could write something like this with a Bourne shell script in about 15 minutes. My theory is that the Mac hackers at the show work at such a high level that they were not aware of how TCP/IP networking functions.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Remember that the first macs were 128K and no hard drive... The desktop metaphor was the representation of the filesystem. The Eject command (from the menu bar ) physically ejected the floppy disk (from the single floppy drive) but the floppy remained mounted in the filesystem. This way you could have multible disks mounted in the filesystem and manipulate files between them while only having one physical drive. Trashing the floppy icon is the same as umounting the disk (deleting it from the filesystem -desktop- not erasing the disk.) The lack of an eject button was to keep a user from snatching a disk from the computer before the disks directory was updated pior to unmounting the disk. Some have mentioned the location of the powerswitch below the floppy drive on the pizzabox 600-pm7100 models. that was a nightmare. I diabled the switchs on the boxes at work just to keep people from switching off the computer.... the worst possiable place to put it and it had to be deliberate, at least somebody should have changed it after the 1st models came out--- I guess nobody at apple cared at that time.
The point of dragging a disk to the trash can is not specifically to eject the disk, but to unmount it. For floppies and CDs, this also equals ejecting the disk, but for some of you who might have had SyQuest drives or try to unmount extra hard drives (for example) know that dragging to trash != ejection.
;)
Also, I would like to note that another popular operating system that you all may have heard of , Linux, also requires the user to unmount disks before ejecting.
Just my $0.02.
...no Mac built in the last three years or so has a floppy drive.
http://www.themeparks.ie