Slashdot Mirror
Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story
avitzur writes with a link to the story behind the Macintosh Graphing Calculator. An excerpt from this strange account: "It's midnight. I've been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I'm not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation."
I hope we don't hear from this person's significant other soon...
Something intruiging...
Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.
I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.
I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.
I had many sympathizers. Apple's engineers thought what I was doing was cool. Whenever I gave demos, my colleagues said, "I wish I'd had that when I was in school." Those working on Apple's project to change the microprocessor in its computers to the IBM PowerPC were especially supportive. They thought my software would show off the speed of their new machine. None of them was able to hire me, however, so I worked unofficially, in classic "skunkworks" fashion.
I knew nothing about the PowerPC and had no idea how to modify my software to run on it. One August night, after dinner, two guys showed up to announce that they would camp out in my office until the modification was done. The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code. The work was delicate surgery requiring arcane knowledge of the MacOS, the PowerPC, and my own software. It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone.
At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again. The software hadn't caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction. The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, "This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo). We had an impressive demo, but it would take months of hard work to turn it into a product.
I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Greg had unlimited energy and a perfectionist's attention to detail. He usually stayed behind closed doors programming all day, while I spent much of my time talking with other engineers. Since I had asked him to help as a personal favor, I had to keep pace with him. Thanks to an uncurtained east-facing window in my bedroom, I woke with the dawn and usually arrived ten minutes before Greg did. He would think I had been working for hours and feel obliged to work late to stay on par. I in turn felt obliged to stay as late as he did. This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity.
People around the Apple campus saw us all the time and assumed we belonged. Few asked who we were or what we were doing.When someone did ask me, I never lied, but relied on the power of corporate apathy. The conversations usually went like this:
Q: Do you work here?
A: No.
Q: You mean you're a contractor?
A: Actually, no.
Q: But then who's paying you?
A: No one.
Q: How do you live?
A: I live simply.
Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing
Wow. This story really really amazed me. It made me think of dedication. I can think of people *cough* EA employees *cough* that work those long hours, and that finish a project, but that's because they're forced to... I really wonder if this type of dedication for just the love of the work is existant anymore... I, for one, wish it was a lot more frequent.
- dshaw
An apple a day, keeps your frustrations away
"...but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."
I hear you can use Internet Explorer and ActiveX to get around any Microsoft security...
This is guy put the "insane" in "insanely great"
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"The secret to programming is having smart friends." hahaha
The last line of the story:
We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.
Too bad that security didn't translate to other areas...
Recently there have been a number of slashdot postings related to the conditions of working for EA (can't recall the exact URL, but summary best described as "slave-labour like"). I wonder what those folks think of this level of dedication?
On another note, it was a nice holiday feel-good read for the techno-geek developer. Also inspires me to finish the damn project that I am on right now so that I can "be home for Christmas".
Happy Holidays!
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
No meetings. No managers. No legal worries. Not having to kowtow to public relations or marketing. Shipping millions of copies of your software.
The only downside was not getting paid, but even that seemed to work out.
... my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley ...
Good job, Steve will probably hear about this tomorrow and start firing people working security.
Every once in awhile you find some really cool nugget on the web. This is one of those really good ones - what a cool story.
Typical. Just as it gets interesting, the server goes up in smoke :(
doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation.
In short, I'm an idiot.
Now if they could only find someone that'd work night and day to invent the 2-button mouse they'd have it made.
Actually there is only one person preventing a multibutton mouse, unfortunately no one outranks him. He won't even allow a build-to-order option when you are ordering online.
Hell, if I got to have a job like that, I don't think I'd ever need paying, as long as they gave me a cardboard box and some occasional munchies (water can be gotten out of the sewer).
Making monitors esplode!!! FUN!!!!1111
The software hadn't caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction.
Oh...Darn.
Yeah, I've heard that that Bill Gates guy is a bit of a dick...
Great... People doing free work: Apple-1 Linux-Several Million
Sitting behind a two-way mirror, watching first-time users struggle with our software, reminded me that programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends.
classic...
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation
He was simply de-hired.
Someone should write a novel about this.
Wonderful story. Amazing that this could actually happen.
I don't own a copy of OS X, but is this application still on there?
You can't legally volunteer to help a for-profit corporation. And for IT staff, there is a minimum amount you have to pay them (well above minimum wage; don't worry).
-russ
p.s. R0ML says that this is why he couldn't get a carrier-grade accounting system turned into open source.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The story he describes occurred in the early 1990's, when Apple was beginning to hit its skids. Projects would be raised with a flurry of energy, then cancelled, and there was a general sense of chaos. That was either in the latter part of the John Sculley era or the beginnings of the Michael Spindler, which were NOT good years (eg., the failed Newton, the failed Copland system, and merger talks with Sun Microsystems, etc.) Scully, Spindler, and Amelio were all shoved out of their CEO positions due to unsatisfactory performance.
The problem with fairy tale workplaces are exactly that: They are fairy tales that don't last long in reality.
Great Story, but I have no sympathy for big profit hungry coporations like Apple. They can make their own graphing calculator
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I've been burned by too many Wired stories that sounded just like this and later turned out to be "creative fiction about real events."
This one stinks of a magical "how my company got started story." I bet the real story is far more prosaic.
This just seems like Wired wrote it, bad.
In Soviet Korea, only old people get hot grits poured on them by petrified Natalie Portman.
"Sitting behind a two-way mirror, watching first-time users struggle with our software, reminded me that programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices. Humbled after five days of this, Greg and I went back and painstakingly added feedback to the software, as if we were standing next to users, explaining it ourselves."
I really wish more programmers, engineers, and managers understood this.
There's a hidden trick in OSX to get a graphic calculator from the standard one. I never knew why it wasn't there all the time - there's one or two easter eggs in there - and they're all fully functional from what I can tell.
This would explain it nicely, or at least, provide more romantic one than a plain old easter egg.
..don't panic
For those of you like me with no pity for a webserver... there's a version for OS X on the front page of pacifict.com
Man I missed that program, having to start classic just to fool around with graphs wasn't worth it to me, now it's in my Apps folder WHEEE!
-Don.
P.S. The surface demo is still schaaawweeeeet. Amazing that it had exactly the same performance on 66MHz 601 chips!
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
man forget wht What Would Jesus Do, from now on for coders it should be WWGATOGD - What Would Gregg And The Other Guy Do?
Did something like that with two other good friends at a company 12 years ago. Was not on the schedule. Not authorised. Etc. Turn out to be the best feature of the final release of the project.
Thats why I'm here so late. Did I miss anything good?
Seriously though, this "corporate hacking" is so much more impressive than that silly bike thing we had to read earlier! (and it helped teachers..always good).
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Oddly enough the mouse is one thing that Microsoft has been doing a good job at for a long time. Bash them all you like but you could at least pick an area where they deserve it.
Does anyone remember the demo Ron gave at the World Wide Developer's Conference? Was it May 1993...?
Anyway, I remember it was supposed to be a lecture about pen computing, and Apple had Ron come out and show the equation solving interface of the proto-graphing calculator. He threw a bunch o' X and Ys on the screen with some sins and coss for good measure. "Now if you want to solve for X"... and he tapped an X, dragged it to one side of the equals sign, and the equation solved itself.
We were floored. There was this deep silence for a couple of millisenconds and then everyone broke out in thunderous applause. He did more tricks with the equation interface and people hooted and hollered. It was a geek wet dream. After he finished he got a standing ovation and there was a long line of people who wanted to shake his hand.
Good times.
Yep, the evil Steve Jobs personally drove up to my door in his Mercedes and threatened physical violence when I bought my Logitech mouse for my G5.
And I'm still suffering from the torture he inflicted when I dared to use the scrollwheel.
I can't imagine what he did to the Mac OS X engineers when he found they'd built full support for multiple buttons and into the OS, or the fact that all their iApps - iTunes, iPhoto - support full functional scrollwheel movements.
Hmm...
Or maybe's it's because Apple's QA people know that best way to have software designed to be easy to use is to not encourage them to use right-click kludges. It is impossible to use a Windows machine without a two button mouse and learning context menus. That is not true of Mac OS X.
I hope you're not speaking of Microsoft-branded mice. In my experience, they're all vastly inferior to my current Logitech mouse. Their scroll wheels also tend to break easily, and wind up going both ways when scrolled one way due to mechanical failures.
to me, it seems that many of the same things that motivated this (these?) guy(s) are the same as the motivation for being an Open Source Programmer. Just my .02
-Dan
"Microsoft has effective building security." Well thank god, they at least have that.
Actually there is only one person preventing a multibutton mouse, unfortunately no one outranks him. He won't even allow a build-to-order option when you are ordering online.
:-) )
No problem. No hurry. I'll wait.
Meanwhile I'm using an Acer Travelmate 803.
I've been thinking about switching to a Powerbook for a few months but that single button truly kept me off.
In no fucking way am *I* going to change my habits due to its lack of a right button - it's a Mac, bloody hell - isn't that supposed to be user friendly?.
Btw, most of my friends who switched use external mice, which are multibutton, so they don't see that as a problem . Personally I'm good with the touchpad and don't like carrying a mouse around, so, until Uncle Steve changes his mind, I'll just wait.
(I'm surprised noone attempted a right button mod
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
Feel free to share the hidden trick with the rest of the class :)
Maybe /. isn't the place to ask, but I could use some smart friends for my own graphing calculator project. It's Java and open source.
Any takers?
... I can't imagine what he did to the Mac OS X engineers when he found they'd built full support for multiple buttons and into the OS ...
... I bought my Logitech mouse for my G5 ...
They were former Next engineers so he forgave them, at Next he allowed multibutton mice, it was a Unix workstation not a consumer system after all. Or perhaps the code came straight from Next.
The point you seem to be missing is that folks who buy a computer that is in part sold on its visual style, its look, would like to have a mouse that matches. It is also a bit embarrassing for the Apple folks doing game demos at trade shows.
It's not impossible to use windows without a two button mouse (with the exception of some games). The menu key on "windows" keyboards brings up the right click menu and lets me use most things on windows without touching the mouse at all...
I'm a keyboard freak. It comes largely from using DOS for years as a kid and using Unix and Linux when I started programming in college. I usually do most things in windows without touching the mouse. My former boss on the other hand hated anything that didn't have a GUI.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Especially in the sciences.
My dad works for the canadian gov. under 'contract' for 0$ a year, maintaining glaciological arctic research that would be seriously hit if he left. The unions hate him.
A woman he worked with did the same thing for a few years to finish off her work(except she wasn't under 'contract').
The newer cast are unfortunately more devoted to getting flat screens and credentials, though there are great exceptions.
This makes a good anecdote on how security is really built on trust, and not technology. (Or code signing, for that matter. :-)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Jebus, each page has five lines on it and requires a click. Fuck that shit.
...who thinks it would be nice to see this come full-circle and be released as Free Software? I remember many days of fooling around with it when i had no idea what it could do or why, but now that I'm getting close to where I could actually understand things, it would be really cool.
Gee, this looks a lot like NuCalc http://www.nucalc.com/
In fact, the domain of this story http://www.pacifict.com/ is mirror of NuCalc's site.
I think this guy may still be looking for red swingline stapler.
Bloody hell slashdot, cache the damn site!!!
If anyone of us puts something neat on their website then its in danger of getting slashdotted.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
He made the monitor burst into flames? Well he just upped the ante by writing that... he burst the PacificT server into flames! (I know it wasn't his fault for the monitor, but I couldn't resist :D)
My UID is prime... is yours?
Open the Calculator.app bundle. Navigate to the Contents/Resources folder. Move all of the .calcview folders to Contents/PlugIns. Now you'll have, among other things, a graphing calculator. However, it's extremely basic, supporting only 2D graphs and functions already solved for 'y', no way to animate the graph by varying a constant, etc. etc. It doesn't hold a candle to the Graphing Calculator application that this article talks about.
Get info (Commadn-I) on /Applications/Calculator.app and flip down the plugins tab. Select the grpahing interface. Open the calculator and explore the views menu (I think). there should be the graphing calculator surface there alongside the scientific and normal views.
;(
Unfortunately, this stopped working after the 10.3.6 upgrade, and still doesn't work in 10.3.7
Find the Calculator icon in the Finder, and select "Get Info" (or press Command-I after clicking on the calculator). In the plug-ins section, select the "Add" button, and in the resulting file dialog, browser your way to the Calculator -> Contents -> Resources. Select any/all of the *.calcview directories, and press "Choose". Presto -- open the Calculator and select the "View" menu item, and your new plug-in views will be available.
Now for the caveat. Ever since one of the 10.3 updates (10.3.3 maybe?), none of the plug-ins work anymore. But in the event they ever fix this, you now know how to activate different view modes.
I doubt that the graphing capability built into the calculator has anything to do with the Graphing Calculator application, as the one built into the regular Calculator is supposedly 2D only, whereas the Graphing Calculator supports 3D graphs as well.
Yaz.
You don't need a right button mod. All you need to do is hold down ctrl while clicking on the track pad. That's the equivilent of a right mouse click. I use it all the time on my powerbook.
The classic silicon valley hacker/enthusiast vs. big corporate culture. It says alot (in a positive note) on the type of people who worked there and helped these guys along.
I've worked in a big company like Apple in the past and with the right people this just shows how far someone can really go in the most ideal situation. (not really needing a job in the short term)
Good Job Ron!
I should know I was an intern there and I was doing some skunk works too.
Do I need to take a photo of my Mac?
I mean, seriously, I just bought a Cordless Optical Logitech ($20CDN, woohoo) today to replace my corded Optical Logitech mouse...
Oh, boo-fucking-hoo, I have to take the mouse Apple sent me! At least you could bitch about the cord being too damn short (they assume you'll use it with the USB Keyboard Hub)
This post brought to you by a working scroll wheel and right-click contextual menus. Because both exist in MacOSX.
Here ya go: Enable new Graphing Calculator view mode
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
The first rule of graphic calculator club...
100+ comments, and nobody's yet realized that this guy is Milton from Office Space?
"They fired him, but he doesn't know it. He just comes in every day and works."
(And despite Milton's, ah, interesting character traits, I find him the coolest character in the show; or perhaps it's because of them. So, I mean this in the most praiseworthy manner possible. Rock on!)
-Unpaid -Long, long hours -Long crunch time It is only a matter of time until EA hops on this.
Apple has so much luster it isn't suprising that people would sneak in to work there for free. More interesting than the fact that they continued to work on company projects after being laid off was that they insisted on doing it in the Apple building rather than in their bedrooms. It doesn't matter what they're doing, just being a part of Apple culture gets people real excited. Not sure whether it's the counterculture, the kind of people Apple hires, or the management style of Steve Jobless. No other company motivates as many people to spend the rest of their lives working for free on its products as Apple.
This is inspiring. Having been in a situation where projects get cancelled and working on them from home and releasing the product later its good to see that even after such an issue the corp embraced the code. I hope that Apple appreciate the die hard following that they have.
I wonder what it is like to enjoy your job
:(
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
... Isn't this called Open Source ...
- MOSKIE
It's amazing how far you can go when you don't have a 500 pound gorilla on your back.
...that the only way to get anything worthwhile done in a bureaucracy is to completely ignore the rules that are in place to thwart you, and stay under the radar to evade detection by the bureaucrats.
It's why I'll never work for a huge company again.
~Philly
Though, I don't notice the lack of a button, with the control key doing the honors.
This is how it's done. There are also a couple of other .calcviews in there that you can enable by following the same procedure.
Well you certainly got that! Wow. This is a great story!
It's just when somethings got to go those in charge usually drop usability.
Try telling you boss about 504, or the disability descrimination act and watch him give you the, don't mention that word, look.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Apple is so cool it has stalkers.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
And why didn't Apple hire the guy after this dedication? I mean he proved that he not only had the dedication, but he also proved effective inter-department communication, team managment, "hiring" skills, and the ability to produce quality. If I were Apple I would have begged him to stay and given him a nice job -- if I didn't reward him financially for the project.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Looking at pacifict it looks like you could just slap a front end on povray.
or pathetically true.
*** DRINK MORE COFFEE ***
Had you been browsing with Coral, the slashdotting wouldn't have been a problem. Someone should make a Coral bookmarklet.
So this guy is no Milton
Wozniak, of course.
:)
It's not much, but I dedicate my 1000th post to you
Get off my launchpad!
how about more than 3 paragraphs per page? it's no fun trying to load one page after another only to get 3 paragraphs each time. especially when it's on its way to getting slashdotted.
...working as an unpaid intern for a special f/x company over a decade ago. Thousands of rendered frames for a major motion picture were screwed up and there wasn't enough time to rerender them. With the help of a few fellow geeks (smart friends make a great coder) we sat there and wrote a custom program to isolate the problem areas of the frames and only rerender those parts, later compositing the results into the original frames. Every one in the company was holding their breath watching us and offering to help in any way possible. Mostly done in programming (complex compositing programs didn't even exit then) we saved the day and moments after finishing the last frame the master disk was shipped to be printed onto film for nationwide distribution. One of the most satisfying moments of my life. Got paid nothing, but the enjoyment of working towards a common goal under pressure was so satisfying. Pefectionism, obsessiveness, compulsion. For recognition maybe, but the process of complex problem solving was and always will be one of the most enjoyable things a person can partake in. Why else would be be programming?
-- andre basso
"Were Alph, the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, --Coleridge
On a related note, remember the aftermarket snap-on piece of plastic you could buy to make the original iMac's mouse usable?
In perfect shape and all, but the cable had link priblems at the tip... it was a recent laser mouse... so, no, Microsoft mice are not too great...
I love my Apple Pro mouse though! Once you get used to single button and its amazing shape, you will never want anything else... unless apple can get a scroll wheel and buttons "virtually" onto the same mouse.
Just because you're used to more buttons doesn't mean its better... a computer that is truly well designed and easy to use shouldn't require a keyboard on the mouse!
In Mozilla Suite and Firefox for Linux and Windows, the shortcut for "Open link in new tab" is already Ctrl-click. If Ctrl-click makes a context menu on the Mac, then what is the shortcut for open link in new tab in Camino and Firefox for Mac OS X? Is there a way to Ctrl-Ctrl-click?
We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security. Never thought I'd ever see "microsoft" and "effective security" in the same sentance
There is no replacement for displacement.
Nope, I don't do much graphics work. But when I do I use a mouse instead of the trackpad. I have better control over a mouse than I do with a trackpad.
It's sort of like being the test dummy at a proctology school--but it pays less.
I feel like Paul Harvey should be saying, "...and now you know......the rest of the story..."
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I thought Al Gore invented the Macintosh Graphing Calculator?
If you're doing serious enough work on a laptop to warrant not having to hold down Ctrl, then you're not using the inferior pointing device that is the trackpad, you're using an external mouse. Which, in that case, you're using one with more than one buttons.
No need to contrive examples. If you're serious about your mouse, then going and buying a serious mouse isn't a big deal.
Pacific tech, in thier site has volunteered to have this software on all machines/ PCs free - version1 or the earlier versions. They believe that educational software is best installed OEM/ in the factory along with the OS. i believe pacific T doesnt have a linux version, and that linux will be an ideal candidate for thier products and especially the fact that they will surely be recognised since they give the product away free. (nevermind that they are closed source). does linux have a similar sfware ?
The original Mac had a one-button mouse, but Steve Jobs' NeXT hardware (Cube and Slab) had a two-button mouse. I find it extremely unlikely that Steve is the only one at Apple who opposes a two-button mosue, since he allowed them at NeXT.
I think it's much more likely that Apple's HCI people recognize that a two-button mouse is a kludge for developers who don't know how to build a proper menu system.
I'm a keyboard freak. It comes largely from using DOS for years as a kid and using Unix and Linux when I started programming in college. I usually do most things in windows without touching the mouse.
This is so, so exactly me. Grew up on DOS, switched to Linux for coding at school. I remember when I'd do something simple (switching or minimizing windows, for instance) with the keyboard instead of the mouse, and the guy looking over my shoulder would blink and say, "how'd you do that?".
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
1) They are doing it because they want to. If someone wants to work on a project, I don't feel bad about asking them to do more work on it. They can always say no. However if they like working on it, and think my idea is a good one, maybe I'll get what I want.
2) Many of them like to trumpet their software as better than closed source. K, great, but it'd better be good then and part of that is fixes and updates. Firefox is a good browser, however if they decide they don't need to patch it, and it gets security holes that go unfixed, it won't be a good one any longer.
Number two is actually the one that gets many OSS projects in trouble. They want to claim OSS is a superior model, and that the software that OSS produces is better than commercial. However they also want to hide under the "It's free, no gaurentees, fix it yourself" flag. Well, you can't have it both ways.
Can you run Linux on the Graphing Calculator?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I know a lot of programmers, well actually a lot of computer people in general, that think that they are far too good to ever have to deal with user support. That's for low paid "helpdesk" types, and they should never be made to degrade themselves to that level.
This also leads to a superior sense of "The way I do it is the BEST way" which gives rise to difficult interfaces. There are plenty of things that, if you learn it, can be efficient to use. Vi would be an example. If you actually learn and memorize all the odd commands, you can edit the fuck out of some text. However you'd be really lucky to get it to do what you want the first time you sit down at it without help. Compare that to, say, UltraEdit, which you can use with no further instructions, even if you aren't technicly inclined.
It really does lead to lots of bad designs and I could fill pages with names of programs that suffer from it.
There will always be an Apple Computer.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
and say:
;-)
"Pretend you participated in a Microsoft Project about a secure open-source version of WinXP and they fired you.
See ya next year when you have the product."
Try Shift+F10 - same as a right click. Similarly CTRL+ESC is the start menu, CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is Task Manager, Windows+Pause is System Properties, etc.
Back in '94 as a teenager, I remember standing in the back of a CompUSA inspecting a new PowerPC and thinking the 3D Graphics Calculator was the coolest thing I had ever seen on any computer, ever.
You really could see the love on the screen - and this story reveals that it was really there. They didn't just "ship a million units" - they changed millions of lives.
They should team up with a good tech author like Robert Cringely and make this story into a book - it would be a best-seller.
You really should check out Sidetrack as it fully customizes the trackpad.
Almost a year ago now I was talking to a couple of Apple Employees (Powerbook and Powermac Product Managers and a Higher Education Representative) and not surprisingly this very issue came up. They were all throughly impressed by SideTrack and its usefullness in scrolling both vertically and horizontally and right-clicking. I tried to convince them that the powerbook trackpad button could have multiple sensors under the single button so that your average computer user would never need to know but that your tinkering geek would be able to set it up so that it could be a left/right(/middle?) button just by pressing different parts of it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure it doesn't have multiple sensors, but they might be hardwired in parallel so that they cannot be detected individually.
Now if they could only find someone that'd work night and day to invent the 2-button mouse they'd have it made.
Why? The keyboard has 100+ keys. Some of the best software I've used UI-wise uses the mouse in combination with the keyboard keys.
Why put another keyboard on the mouse? It ain't logical.
Table-ized A.I.
Not exactly the same thing but if you haven't read "The Cuckoos Egg" it's well worth the read. Excellent early story of a Berkley Astronomer tracking a hacker. All for stealing a around a dollar worth of computer time. A lot of fun.
What a moron. If someone can't grasp how to use a two button mouse to speed up their computer experience then maybe they do need the "short bus model 1" button mouse.
This story is guaranteed to be very boring for 99% of readers, but it's probably my only chance to tell it where anybody might be remotely interested.
Back in the 80s I was part of an IT group in a manufacturing dept at Tektronix. Our software involved inventory control, tracking batches of work through assembly steps, that sort of thing. One of the computer operators asked if I could help him solve a problem for the stockroom people. Their job was to hand out parts to assembly workers, receive and store the finished subassemblies and hand them out for additional steps until they left the area as finished goods.
All movement of material was tracked by a giant MRP system on an IBM mainframe in another building. The IBM machine generated stacks of PUNCH CARDS which were delivered to our computer room and loaded into our VAX 11/750. As the stockroom people handed out and received material, they had to manually keep track of what they did, noting shortages and errors. Then they entered the information into the 750, which wrote it nightly to a tape that was hand-carried back to the building where the IBM system was.
The stockroom data entry program was very cumbersome to use. It simply did a one-way scroll through the entire inventory -- thousands and thousands of parts and subassemblies -- and allowed the user enter a code on the few items that mattered. To get to an item near the bottom, the clerks had to hit the Page key dozens of times and wait for the slow page refresh in between. Sometimes they would hold the Page key down for a while and go away until it caught up. If they overshot they had to start over because there was no Back function. The stockroom people spent most of their time doing data entry and were consistently several weeks behind, which forced them to come up with various manual ways of keeping track of things. This affected their ability to hand out parts and was starting to have an impact on manufacturing deadlines, and ultimately profits.
In spite of the importance of the situation, the stockroom was low on the IT priority list. So we had a couple clandestine meetings in which the staff told me how the business end of the system worked and the computer operator explained the behind the scenes parts. Working a couple hours a day on the sly for about 2 weeks, I came up with a new data structure and an editor that let the users search for what they wanted and produced various on-screen reports. I also changed the loading procedures to use a tape instead of the stupid cards, and my operator friend persuaded an IBM sysop to bypass the change control process and generate a tape for us instead of cards.
When the users were satisfied with the way everything worked, we put it into production one afternoon as the swing shift person came on duty. In that one shift she cleaned up their entire 3-week backlog of data entry. When the morning people arrived they were speechless. With the extra time they now had, they set about reorganizing their operation and making improvements that they had wanted to do for months.
It was amazing to see what this change did for the morale of these people. Their jobs had been absolutely miserable when they had to work with the old system. They were so happy they brought me a great big apple pie, and were almost in tears giving it to me. Best award I ever got.
Actually stuff like UltraEdit aren't really intuitve. They all have a learning curve.
The advantage is that what you learn can be applied for other applications that follow that standard interface.
Whereas what you learn about the vi interface doesn't really help when you try to use emacs and vice-versa. IMO both interfaces suck. They were fine back in the days when emacs or vi were one of the only few major applications - but it shows signs of premature optimization. Whereas the "WIMP" stuff still works well enough for very many cases.
It's like the brake, throttle and steering wheel of cars. Even though the design isn't necessarily optimal (you have to lift off the throttle and then stomp on the brake to stop - this is error prone), since it is standardized people who already know how to drive find it "easy".
nah...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I've been using the paid version of GC for ages, and I love it to bits. If you haven't gotten it, GET IT! It's the best toy ever. In particular, the 3D objects are just plain FUN. Note that you can specify hsv or rgb values for color, so you can have parametric color shading of elaborate 3d objects. There's an entire family of interesting objects you can get with, say, summing sin(x)+sin(y)+sin(z), and animating this.
And no, I'm not a shill; I'm just a fanatic who was very happy to hear that there's finally an OS X native version of graphing calculator. I love this program.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Whats worse is seeing a project that IS making money and is NOT a redink sink being cancelled, even though it was making $2m a year in revenue out of 2.5 programmers fulltime. But we know how NASDAQ corporates like to inflate development costs by counting the managers time, the marketing staff, the HR and insurance rates etc... all up to about 120k/person even though the end person only gets 80k.
So typical company cancels the product while it is selling, and at the same time invests 100m+ into take overs that wont see a positive ROI for at least 3-4 years down the track, even with 30m in sales per year.
Damn politics and suck up managers.
Also seeing the company spend $45m per quarter on sales/marketing vs $15m per quarter on R&D is very sad too, considering that the sales/marketing staff get FREE "junkets" and meetings in great places like hawaii and paid for.
Are the engineers considered the 'farm workers' of the 21st century?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Apple squandered a great opportunity in the 90's. Macs were much faster than many Sun workstations with the kind of work we did (computational fluid dynamics), much cheaper and ran a broader selection of applications. Despite this Apple knew nothing about the scientific market. I remember going to a seminar at MacWorld Boston in 1996 on scientific uses of the Macintosh. None of the presenters talked about how a PowerMac 7500 with a 3rd party 604 accelerator smoked a Sparc 20 for about 33 percent of the price. Instead they talked about how they could use a Mac to model the behavior of a lobster. I felt as if I was in crazy world, here was Apple with this insanely great line of CPUs and they basically ignored a market that would have gone for it lock stock and barrel.
Things have gotten better since then and I have been pleased to see that Apple is targeting bioinformatics applications with the Xserve, but they're going to have a lot of work ahead of them to keep up with Linux's inroads into the market.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I am a sys admin with a semester of CS to my name. At 41 and unemployable I bullshited my way into a training course which ended up at a job at a Uni. At first like average user I was M$ centric but discovered Macs through the job. The next job at another Uni needed Unix skills and after reading Unix for Idiots I turned up for the interview and got the job. Then I really discovered Unix and now at 49 that all I do is admin Unix boxes. O I discovered Linux and four years ago i was the Linux nut at the company I work for; now we are putting our oracle finacials on Linux and have just won a major all of govt contract for Oracle on Linux. O how things change.
Anyway my point here (and no I haven't RTFA only the talk back) is this: i have had many an arguement with MS collegues I work with over the merit of OSS and FSF etc. and one of the points they try to make is that how can you guarrantee that a free open source project will continue to be supported. (not that thats relevent anyway with so much corporate support). One of my earlier incarnations was as a musician ( well wanna be rock star anyway) so I point out that those that code fro free are artists and like I never made money as a musician that i never stopped playing my guitar and spent lots on instruments (at least before the kids came along) and strings and lessons and even when I had paid gigs all the money went to costs for the roadies and beer. OSS et al will survive and florish for this very fact that those involved are artists.
Without art we'd all be lawyesrs.
We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames.
Not knowing the outcome of the fable, I thought that symbolically, this was a pretty bad thing to have happen.
As the saying goes, you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink....
well unless you make that water look really sexy, and tip a bit of salt down the horses neck just for good measure.
Advertising is to a product as salt it to the horse.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
"This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo). We had an impressive demo, but it would take months of hard work to turn it into a product.
ce until the late 1990's. Fraud????
i used it in the 80s......
It was definitely in use in the 1990 and probably much earlier; I remember a fellow student asking our English teacher what "Quartex sucks" meant. (Teacher guessed it meant "stinks".)
2.5D is just 2D with some constants in the matrix.
3D also includes front to back ordering, shading based upon specular highlights and such.
3D is way beyond 2D.
Or do you need to purchase it?
I've seen your posts here before, IO ERROR.
You're working on a "Killer App" that's going to replace a popular MS app, and you just claimed you sneaked into an MS building and stole their IP.
They could sue you for theft of trade secrets... not smart.
This is absolutely insane. Man, I was actually considering doing software development as a career... but after reading all this shit about it on Slashdot (which I'm glad I did), there's only a 0.25% chance that I will even consider going into such a BULLSHIT industry as software development (working for 16 HOURS a day with small/no pay (yes I understand that the developers doing this done it out of choice... but I predict that software development/long hours/et cetera has made them mentally nonfunctional)? If I were one of you people (working under such insane conditions) I'd be seriously concerned about my health, social status, and mental status... I've heard alot of crazy things, but what I've heard about software companies is ridiculous).
The one about Ron Avitzur's demo at WWDC.
He was being paid to do one thing and he did another. He was supposed to demo a technology critical to the company and he showed his pet project instead.
Why would you pay someone when you cannot direct them to do what you need them to do?
That's why Ron didn't get hired.
Huh? Go to http://store.apple.com and order up your Mac. Then navigate to the Mice and Keyboards section under Mac Accessories and add one of the many multi-button mice or trackballs to your order. Voila; a brand new Mac that ships with a multi-button mouse.
I think it was graphing calculator that I crashed once when playing with one of my school's macintoshes. It closed out and displayed a dialog, something to the order of, "Fatal error -11 has ocurred," with not an OK button, but a "Darn!" button. That programmer became my hero, and made me want to program :)
Anyone else see that? Was it Graphing Calculator?
"The secret to programming is having smart friends." Exactly how I passed my first programming course years ago.
Edit the fuck out of some text, you say? Well, all right, but I don't see how that's very hard:
:%s/fuck//g
I mod down pathetic posts.
We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.
Wouldn't you just know it.. the one place Microsoft has effective security is the place that keeps people from doing something useful.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
This story seems to verify that Scott Adams Dilbert is a real character http://dilbert.com/
I was struggling through algebra I not long after this program came out (1995). I just wasn't "getting it". I know the phrase is cliched now, but this program was just so *intuitive* that after a few days of fiddling I understood almost all the math I'd ever take right up to 1st semester calculus on a conceptual level.
For me, at least, seeing things in motion (that nifty little value slider) made the concepts just click. Once they were there, the actual mathematical manipulation was much easier, because I was able to visualize "they way this should work out". My teachers were trying to show it on a static chalkboard, and it just wasn't getting through.
I just got my BS in Physics, and without Graphing Calculator, I doubt I'd be where I am today. To the author, if he reads this:
Thank You.
he meant "sucks LESS" which did NOT exist until mac os system 8.6 , but typing "doesn't suck" is a cop out.
i too smell bullshit but it was an apple campus phrase
my own mac products, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 1991 and 1992 used a shell called the "Not Shitty Shell" abbreviated NS-Shell in the source code.
but that was private gui class library
but Not Shitty predates 'sucks less' in my book
This is simply one of the nicest things I have ever read on Slashdot. This, in fact, is the kind of thing I come to Slashdot to hear about.
As I would have said on my playground in the early 1980's, your logic sucks.
.. dude, what u did aint no skunworks ... u just got used man ... worst of all by urself ... get a life...
I wonder how many Apple employees have Sidetrack installed...
On a side note, something similar and free already exists for windows:
You can download Powercalc.exe from Microsoft's XP PowerToy page.
One is a suite kind of pain, the other is an intense kind of anguish.
What hell kind of typo is that?
If right-click is a kludge, what the hell is command click or apple click, or whatever it is? At least the right click can be done with one hand.
Besides, people are expected to use more than one finger on the keyboard - why is it kludgy for them to do the same on a mouse?
Now, how would the original program created by unpayed volunteers in '94 know to nag users about their future $$$ product? The answer is easy, because Graphing Calculator saves documents in simple text format. For example:Simply changing the first line to "GraphingCalculator 3.0;" and opening it again magically causes all the missing features to be supported! Of course now it doesn't let you edit the document until you change the version back. I bet both programs are compiled from the same source with a few #ifdef NAG blocks.
Nothing is really wrong with that, except for misleading claims and that nagware rather destroys the original sentiment of authors who wanted to release a useful program without even getting payed. This is not "Version 1.4", it's "Version 3.0 demo". Otherwise it would come with original documentation and examples that actually show you how to use the free program.
I just RTA which is an interesting story. To be honest I've never played with Graphing Calculator, but then I only seriously got into Mac's after OSX.
After reading the article I wanted to play with the software, and found it under the old OS9 applications folder. It runs under Classic.
Looking a at the examples on the web page that have some really cool looking colour images that have been generated by math and wondering if I would be able to do that with my relatively limited math knowledge, I copied the basic example equation
x^2 - y^2 = 1
Into the calculator and pressed enter...
Version 1.3 can't graph equations of this form. Visit www.PacificT.com to order Version 3.
"In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive."
Speaking as a middle manager with no discernible talent, that comment troubles me, somewhat.
While designing Concorde, some engineers started working on their own project without telling anyone, diverting a small part of the huge ressources needed for concorde to this.
;)
At the end of the concorde project, managers discovered with great surprise they also had almost all the plans of a working regular subsonic jet : Airbus was born.
Ironically, the unofficial project actually succeeded far better than the official one.
It doesn't happen only with software companies
Kirinyaga
Read the Design of Everyday Things, an incredible book.
Almost everything people do with a device requires some pre-knowledge. When you walk into a dark room, you reach for a lightswitch. Where is it? It's where you expect it to be. When it isn't, that is a source of frustration.
What pre-knowledge do people have of mouse buttons? None. You know that right-clicking brings up options specific to the item the mouse is pointing to, not because it's obvious, but because you learned it.
Many applications in many operating systems offer options only reachable from a right-click. These options are not visible on the screen, nor do they descend from anything marked as a menu. They're magical.
How often have you right-clicked on something, and nothing happened, because the application author didn't create any functionality there?
How many applications on Windows and other OSes have places where right-clicking doesn't provide a menu, but instead performs a specific action?
How frustrating is it when the lightswitch is on the other side of that dark room?
On Mac OS X, there is _no_ right-click action. Ever. Control-click brings up a contextual menu, which, according to the human interface guidelines, should contain no options that are not available elsewhere. Right-click is a shortcut to the contextual menu, which itself is a shortcut to other actions elsewhere in the _visible_ interface.
What does that mean? It means my Mom never has to call me to ask how to do something that's apparently a "secret" only for people who use computers on a daily basis.
I have used plenty of Macs. I've used plenty of Windows machines. I've used FreeBSD on a laptop for a year in a company where IT insisted we all use Windows. I have multi-button mice on most of my Macs, but only for the scroll wheels.
I find myself only using the right button in those applications which I use often enough that I care about shortcuts. And I typically prefer keyboard shortcuts over right-clicks.
The real question is this: if you need a second button on your mouse to be productive, why doesn't a third make you even more productive? Or a fourth? Or a fifth?
The additional buttons are for additional actions. Pointing and clicking make a lot of sense as metaphors. But multiple buttons with which to click are just bad interface design.
I imagine that left-clicking and right-clicking are hard skills to pick up for severely dyslexic folks, too.
The Graphing Calculator story just goes to show how valuable/insightful/important Google's 20% time (20% of work time to spend on their own projects) is both to their engineers, and more importantly to their company.
Remind me to do the same when I get my software co up and running.
"Imagine a world where if you didn't legally work for Apple, you couldn't write a program for their computer. If you weren't a licensed and regulated programmer, you wouldn't be able to develop your own software or develop software for other people. With signed code initiatives like TCPA/Palladium, that world could be coming to a planet near you soon."
/. in a long time. Every little advancement in the computer industry comes from a lot of hard work on the part of a few people. The rest of the industry is simply doing the glue work to connect those bits. Mind you that the glue can be interesting and complicated, it doesn't take a license to code from Microsoft.
This is the funniest paranoid schizophrenic thing I've read on
The TCPA (if it ever ships -- how many years has it been since the Microsoft Windows team has done that...) is a method to restrict certain apps from running in a specific environment with access to specific resources.
Think of it like an XBox console, only harder to crack. Basically, your PC would have a little XBox inside it which would let MS Signed apps run on a special video overlay (secure video path) and play with special encrypted content and a special digital audio plug (secure audio path).
If the idea actually takes off, which it might not (it all depends on how expensive the modifications are to make to the hardware to support it), it won't be several years before companies wrote software that took advantage of it. Likely Microsoft Office, Windows Media Player, and Adobe Acrobat would be available to take advantage of it shortly after TCPA/Palladium.
But this isn't a big deal. Anyone who didn't use TCPA/Palladium would simply be more likely to have content that would be easier to distribute. Maybe this lets people lock down content/software, or make people pay per use of content/software that they didn't pay for. That doesn't mean that you need to apply DRM to everything, but having the choice is better than not having the choice. Is that really so horrible?
Think of the applications: I'd like to be able to protect my photos so that people can't print them, but I trust IE to show them along a "secure video path". Maybe I sell desktop backgrounds. Maybe I sell wedding photographs. Why can't I chose my business model?
This doesn't just benefit large corporations. It benefits small people who create independent content. Sure, you could bootleg audio, video, documents, or photos just like you could when all the various media duplication forms came out, but the point is that this makes it harder to do so and keep up the quality that you could do with a digital copy. Thus it preserves the value of purchasing a license to use the digital data, and thus it preserves the time honored tradition of paying people who produce the content which you consume. That won't stop people from producing free content or make it any more expensive to produce free content.
Also, it means a great many standards need to be created to carry encrypted content digitally. This may take some time for hardware manufacturers to standardize on and adopt... We'll see how quickly it takes porn to use it, then we'll know that it's here. (Very seriously) Porn is always at the forefront of media technolgy trends. It's the most compelling reason VHS won out over Beta. It's also very interesting that there is no Porn IAA...
For a long time I used Windows 3.0 and 3.1 without a mouse. The only thing that was made difficult by this was drawing pictures in Paintbrush, but fortunately that didn't come up very often!
Sadly, these days most Windows applications aren't designed with the mouseless in mind. The system tray notification area, for example, is quite hard to drive without the help of the mouse.
hardware needing to get to a certian point.
Amiga. Blitter (bimmer!). Copper (co-processor!). 1980s. Cool.
Da Blog
Here's the upside - if you can find yourself a position in this kind of dumping (and people tend to get emotional and desperate in the dumping), there's money to be made.
I've also seen 90+% completed projects (like well through UAT) get ditched, and absolutely no-one looked at the value of what they had in terms of selling it. It just becomes emotional - a dead project - and becomes archived on a server somewhere and forgotten.
I should of said decentralized. Democratic is a bad connotation nowadays.
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
this is good reading. the battle of nerd vs managemend with real courage i'm inspired by this while working overtime on some coding myself
I was working for Apple during most of that period (phone support; lower than plankton in the Apple food chain), and every word of that piece rings true. Great stuff.
My idea application is a programming enviroment with an easy to use interface. Left to my own (ie no bossses hounding me with their ideas of how to do stuff) I tend to build every program I write as a program interpreter with it's very own language. (often I build on top of an existing interpreted language such as Python or Scheme) Hardcore users can manipulate the functionality in whatever ways they want using the programming language. On top of that I like to slap a user-friendly interface that allows more intuitive use of the same functionality. When possible I like to include a feature that, when turned on, gives access to a window that shows what commands the GUI is running and allows commands to be entered manually. CAD programs often have a feature like this and I think it's a great idea. The real benefit is that you get as much flexibility as you want but the UI makes it easy to slap out quick stuff and to learn the language.
I keep waiting to see a word processor that does this correctly. Personally I hate fighting with the GUI of these kinds of program because some arcane problem with the order I pressed the buttons did something undesired. I'd love to be able to just fix the underlying object model through a couple commands and then switch back to the GUI. For simply entering a document the GUI is much nicer than typing the whole document with commands as might be done with Tex or HTML.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
stayed up tryng to intergrate grapghing capibilites into Windows calculator (hint hint). and make it good (a bigger hint).
Its amazing how a story about a mac graphic calculator turns into a conversation about highway numbering. But to answer the question I believe each state or metro area can have the same numbered spur, for example DC and New York both have a 495, Both Baltimore and Philly/NJ have a 295...in fact in Maryland/DC we are so loaded up with freakin highways we have 95, 195, 295, 395, 495, 695, 795, and 895 spurs.
I don't know, is it too hard to middle-click links in Mozilla? I mean, come on, it's not like most internet users don't have incentive to browse one-handed.
Change is good, but not in a wallet.
It's ironic that when you download the free viewer from Pacific Tech you get a popup with a very cagey licence and disclaimer. After all that, if you copy or misuse their free skunkcode they will narc you.
When I first started getting into computers, these were the types of people I had the chance to learn from. There are too many people that are into IT now that are simply there for the paycheck. They don't care what they are working on, and its just a job. When you are working on a project that is fun, that can take over your life 12 hours a day and 7 days a week, and you enjoy every minute of it. Then your a true techie.
TruePunk | Games
What this story highlights is how poorly managed Apple really is. How does a project that inspires and motivates countless engineers, as well as swallows their time and effort, escape the eye of management?
This company is successful in spite of people like Steve Jobs, not because of them.
THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL
When can we have an open source unix version of this software please? I am mathematically dyslexic.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Please some producer out there read this and get 'er done!
"Based on a true story"
Kind of a Catch-22 in the office. Very Dilbertesque.
I fear all of this info suddenly appearing (along with the announces in MacUpdate of a new beta release... of version n-1, etc.) is mostlyrelated to the *disappearing* of Apple's old calculator, which is replaced as of next MacOSX release by a brand new application, bought two months ago from Arizona Software. Before being bought its name was Curvus Pro, there are a couple of places where it is stil depicted even though it has been removed on the Arizona site.
Hervé
Volunteering for the Peace Corps or Red Cross is noble. Working for a multibillion $ corporation for free is stupid.
There's a guy at my company who was let go after working here for 20 years. I work in a small company (~50 people). I've seen the same thing at big companies.
Companies don't give a hoot about you. They'll let you go no matter how 'dedicated' or 'loyal' you are to them. Your 20 years of hard work and loyalty has a high probability of being rewarded with a kick in the behind as you leave the door.
Working for free is foolish in the extreme. You should avoid doing so at every opportunity.
For coffee?
A few years ago I was going to a conference in Vancouver. Due to some visa issues (not mine) the other people travelling with me wanted to fly into Seattle and drive up to Vancouver. I agreed on one condition, we stop at vivace's for coffee on the way.
http://www.espressovivace.com/
Definitely worth the detour.
Then they told me, "Don't repeat this story."
This guy just doesn't listen does he?
How about builds for 10.1 - .2? or at least 10.2?
I think that you will find that there are quite a few mac owners who do not care for(or see value in) the annual upgrade cycle that Apple employs.
(Although, it looks as if 10.4 may finally have some real "features" worth the "upgrade" cost, and hopefully some snappiness boosting as 10.2 had. In any event, I still think that 10.2 makes for a target that is more likely to reach a larger potential audience, but I've no numbers, and would be interested in seeing some. I'd even be willing to hazard that there are still plenty out there running 8.6 - 9.2.2. (Too bad some of the extra real features were nixed in OS9, like protected memory...and that 9.5 was killed...))
This has is broken with 10.3.6 and 10.3.7. Just get a blank metalic window. If anyone has it working with either of those, please post!
This guy is whacked - anyone who sneaks into a place that he was dismissed from would rate 'stalker' in my book. Anyone who would waste a corporation's time and materials on his own evangelizing, especially when he was fired, is a nut and needs to get a grip on the relative values in life. If he was unemployed, and was sitting at home carrying on this effort to make the world a better place, at his own expense, then he'd be a folk hero. Tying up other ppl to do his bidding, while they're getting paid to do something else is theft and deception. He's not the kind of guy I'd hire.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Wow, I am impressed. This is a very inspiring story. Good luck to Ron Avitzur and PacificTech.
Keeping the dream alive.
This isn't some OpenSource GPL thing, this is a real company now with a real product. I didn't see anywhere where the story said this was free.
PowerCalc just crashed my XP box!!!
Ever here of the context button? It's the one sitting inconspicuously between the right (and sometimes the left as well) Ctrl and and Windows buttons on 85-90% of all keyboards produced in the last 5 years...
-
when I bought my Logitech mouse for my G5.
You disprove your own point, if what you say at the end is true, why did you buy a two button mouse with scroll wheel for your Mac?Or maybe's it's because Apple's QA people know that best way to have software designed to be easy to use is to not encourage them to use right-click kludges. It is impossible to use a Windows machine without a two button mouse and learning context menus. That is not true of Mac OS X.
Every serious Mac user I've ever known has told me the same thing, "the first you thing you do is throw away the mouse it comes with and buy a two button one." This speaks volumes about the logic of continuing to ship Macs with only one button mice, at least a two button one should be a freaking option for those who prefer it.
Beyond that, as a primarily Windows user (along with Linux) I absolutely HATE having to use a Mac without a two button mouse. There are far too many things I'm accustomed to doing on both Windows and Linux by right clicking that are suddenly no longer available. I have to hunt through menus to find the same functions wasting my time. I find it hard to believe that Apple's QA thing it's better to make users memorize keyboard + mouse combos or hunt through menus when a simple right click would suffice. If any interface is using "kludges" I'd say it's the Macs when used with a one button mouse.
But even if we accept the argument that right clicking as part of the interface is somehow bad, why doesn't Apple at least provide a scroll wheel? I can't see any argument to support the absence of a scroll wheel, it's so much easier, quicker, and even easier on the wrists to use one.
I don't know if it's Steve Jobs' fault that Apple still provides only one button mice or not, but whoever's fault it is it's a relic that needs to stop.
What you talkin' about, Willis? my first exposure to the term was about 1982 (5th grade), and I was a pretty sheltered kid.
Of course, it was much more explicit (in every sense of the word) exactly WHAT it sucked.
Well not technically... There's always SHIFT+F10
I don't think I've ever heard anything like it in IT, you should definitly write a book about it.
The single button mouse argument might have held water before context menus came along, but not in this day and age.
As much as it would be nice to have the graphing calculator on Windows, I shudder to think how much worse Windows could be if random people were able to sneak into Redmond to include "useful" software they had written.
New Windows FU (TM), now with SpamBot(TM), PR0NServer(TM), and Versions 5, 7, 22, and 47 of RootKit(TM) undetectably preinstalled!
No thank you.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
As I recall, the whole "sucks less" thing came about with the release of System 7. As I recall, there was a T-Shirt floating around the Apple campus about "System 7 Sucks Less".
I also recall that there was a trademark infringement thing that happened later on because Microsoft did a "Windows 95 Sucks Less" T-shirt later on, and the Apple engineer (Alex Rosenberg?) who came up with the System 7 slogan got wind of it and got Apple Legal to "engage" Microsoft on their use of the whole "sucks less" thing. As I recall, Alex got a PC out of the deal.
Someone who actually worked for Apple at the time could probably correct any errors I've made (I got all this from a hallway discussion at WWDC years and years ago).
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
On the one hand, I really grok the whole independent hackers do cool work and show up corporate pointy hairs. On the other hand...
The author admits he and his friend did MONTHS of hard work, got stealthily fed hardware and support from sympathetic engineer friends, and yet, when the app met "real" users, it needed lots more work and QA - tasks financially supported by the corporate pointy hairs that initially killed this bit of cool code. This describes lots of OSS software to me. Smart, hard working geeks develop a kernel of nifty code, but that code needs LOTS of boring, thankless, polishing to stand up to the abuse "average" users will subject it to.
How many other insanely cool things such as this have withered away in the labs of Apple, MS, HP, IBM, and other such companies? Is there a way to identify such cool things? Are there better ways to manage engineers so that these things happen more often?
What thing in the PowerPC transition would have not made it if Apple had chosen to support the Calculator?
Again, part of me cheers the little guy that bucked the system and got some really cool code respect; but part of me wonders at the forces swirling around the process.
- Jasen.
Actually, it's not invisible if you view the file with ResEdit. And yes, it is neat IMHO. Mac OS can also decipher file types via filename extensions the traditional Unix and Windows way.
The problem is that if Micros~1 had done it, it would have most likely been in a way that would intent~1 ensure it to not work with other OS's right out of the box, and it would be depend~1 on some propri~1, highly temper~1, and convol~1 database. It would also be in the least aesthe~1 pleasing, quick and dirty way, that's how Micros~2 would do it; ie our friend the registry.
grep -iw skynet
Only there is some official recognition for it: They are called powertoys.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
In fact, my friends and I used the exact phrase "It doesn't suck" in 1984.
Chnapko, where are you?//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I probably saw the guy in the parking lot.
I was working grave shift and going to San Jose State during the day. Apple was a cool place to work, if even as a lowly security guy in a polyester suit. All of the buildings had keycards so if you're in the building and nobody is complaining about you what reason would we have had to stop someone with a badge? Hell you could have printed one out, we couldn't tell.
Most of the security people were uneducated couldn't-pass-the-cop-tests-wannabes who could be fired by a well-placed complaint from a PHB. We didn't fuck with any of the REAL employees for fear of our own jobs. (One woman I trained with went around the next night turning off every computer left on, thinking they forgot. She was fired at dawn.)
It was not unusual for engineers to work (or do whatever) all night. One guy built a hut of styrofoam over his cubicle and had 20 monitors lining the walls playing those acid-trip designs. I was admiring his handiwork at 3 in the morning when I hear "Can I help you?" and turn around: he's in a sleeping bag behind his desk. This dude lived at work. Literally.
One guy was going on vacation to the Bahamas and his coworkers turned his cubicle into a beach complete with sand and water.
There was an Apple museum complete with a Lisa. The first PC was in a glass case in the corporate lobby: resplendent in its ratty briefcase. It would be mistaken for a bomb today.
Interesting place."On a side note, something similar and free already exists for windows:
/ 1/ view
You can download Powercalc.exe [microsoft.com] from Microsoft's XP PowerToy page [microsoft.com]."
---------------8<---------------
Yeah, we know. They "improved it".
http://fileforum.betanews.com/review/1095797403
~hylas
You suck!
I used to kill time at the office while I was scanning on one mac by graphing functions on a second mac. I loved this program, and missed it when OS X came out. Now I know who to thank, and my boss knows who to send the bill to.
Thanks.
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
One of the most phenominal and outstanding dev stories I have ever heard.
With a story like that even bieng a Windows slave it's hard not to run out and buy a Mac.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
...is it digitally signed?
Thats one of the most amazing stories I've read in quite some time.. I feel motivated to fire up my *OLD* Mac(only Mac unfortunatly) and fiddle a bit.. Your insane man, yet strangely very cool.. interesting...
Or maybe's it's because Apple's QA people know that best way to have software designed to be easy to use is to not encourage them to use right-click kludges.
This is true, but they could still include a scrolling wheel to the mouse (place it to the middle of the button, for example). Scrolling using scroll bars is always a real PITA once you've got used to the wheel.
Another problem are laptops. Since switching to Mac at June 2003, for a long time I was really struggling with the internal mouse of my PowerBook; It was not so much about the buttons (I use context-menus, but I'm perfectly fine with ctrl-click), but rather the lack of scolling areas on trackpad edges, and especially the insane mac-style cursor acceleration curve. Then I finally found this godsent little piece of software, which unleashes the full potential of Synaptics trackpads used by Apple.
It is just really unfortunate that it is by no means supported by Apple; I really hope they'd not forget the power users.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
this story reminds me of the seinfeld episode where kramer uses the bathroom in an office building and then just starts working for the company.
v let/showid-112/epid-2377/
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageSer
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Rubbish. A couple of months ago I bought an iBook for my wife, and ordered a package with it which included M$ Office, a laptop bag, and a two button after-market mouse. That was straight off the Apple UK site.
ThinkC was taken off the market shortly after Symantec bought it, and I'm not sure that Symantec ever sold ThinkPascal, although they might have continued supporting the product for a while. I was a student looking to learn programming in the early 90's, and it was much cheaper and simpler to get PC coding tools as demos, included in books or even for free- Macs didn't have an equivilent to GW Basic. I beleive MPW was $800 or $900. by the time it was freely downloadable, I had given up on learning Mac programming.
The original Mac had a one-button mouse, but Steve Jobs' NeXT hardware (Cube and Slab) had a two-button mouse. I find it extremely unlikely that Steve is the only one at Apple who opposes a two-button mosue, since he allowed them at NeXT.
That would be naive. The Next systems were Unix workstations, Macs are consumer systems that must be easily operated by small children.
you just have to lack common sense and have lots of spare time.
My God, what a masichist you are! First you did this project, and now you're watching the ugliness of a Slashdot discussion on your piece unfold! Please look for some constructive criticism instead of this madness!
I really enjoyed the commentary at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005 -3_archives/000024.html#more
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time -- like the root partition last week. Time to die..." -- Peter Gutmann
See here for the schemes for numbering three-digit interstates. Fascinating stuff.
See here for info on the violations that exist in interstate numbering.
I keep breathing.
I'm a slave to my metabolism.
The tyranny of respiration.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
But this causes you to identify with education, not clinical insanity?
Please, let these be different projects.
Someone with access to children ought not see mobile impressionable critters as candidates for takeover.
(Though education not always mean educating children, it tends to mean educating children.)
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Sales brings money in.
Everyfucking thing a company does happens because there is money.
The company is a device to put money in the pockets of those who own / fund / control it.
The company doesn't exist to employ you.
The company doesn't exist to invent things.
The company doesn't exist to further the state of the art.
The company exists to enrich the people who own / fund / control it.
Welcome to Earth.
Feel free to convey the lesson to your home planet.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
In fact, I are one.
We all do front line support.
We do this because we work for a tiny company, and what we do is esoteric.
Troubleshooting is informative, a source of debugging and QA.
Most of is have a good understanding of how the software is used.
Some don't.
Spending time walking through the system with articulate EUs (especially with other interested parties listening, following, and understanding) pays incredible dividends.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
you have to lift off the throttle and then stomp on the brake to stop
Naw.
I use one foot for the brake and the other for the gas.
It's like a two-button mouse for your vehicle.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
"half to be"
Seriously.
Take a halve second to consider what you posted.
Words mean things.
Slashdot - visionaries, retards, or some bastard mix.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Well one of the cars I do use is a manual.
:).
My sister does drive the way you do tho - she hardly ever drives the manual (don't recall her doing so in recent memory). I've tried it before but I'm used to the conventional way
I still do it sometimes if I have to drive through a low flood - might not be a good idea to lift off in the midst of the water just to slow down otherwise water may enter the exhaust pipe, block it and stall the engine. Shouldn't go too fast in the water either, so that's another reason for braking.... So far I've been lucky and have managed to get through a number of these without getting stuck.
I had heard a 10th "version" of that story where the programmer worked at Bell Labs and w/o being hired had worked for free to produce some pioneer Unix code, but the original story is much much better!
I have a BBEdit t-shirt picked up at a mid-90's Macworld that begs to differ.
BBEdit
It doesn't suck®
Of course that is when they were using it as a registered trademark for their corporation... I'm sure it was used among Apple engineers and Mac software developers informally for years prior to it's becoming such a catch phrase that the marketing department picked it up to register it as a trademark.
I can vouch "that sucks" meaning lousy or no good at least to the early 1970s.
I love the story of sneaking into Apple in order to do something useful. It's a wonderful explanation of the spirit of hacking.
However, on another level it reminds me of how the staff of UC Berkeley spent years donating their Unix work to AT&T, which kept it off limits to the public. When I read this, I thought, "It wouldn't have been wasted. They only had to release it as free software!" The developers were in a perfect position to release a nice free program--and they blew it.
As a result, their work was indeed wasted, in the sense that we will have to redo it. The free world will need to develop a free replacement for this non-free program.
When a free program isn't quite right technically, that's no big deal. You just fix it. But when a program falls short of being free, that's usually impossible to fix. A miss that can't be fixed is as good as a mile.
To chime in on the subject:
I know I used it on the playground as early as 1982, because I was there. I also got into trouble for using it in 1985 in public because my parents thought it had a sexual connotation. (I never figured out whether it really did or didn't. We used it interchangeably with "stinks" as a previous poster's teacher had suggested.) In the early 90s I had it auto-edited out of a post I used on a BBS which was titled "Death ****s" I was very upset about that because it made me look like I had something much worse.
Broad, sweeping statements should always be checked with care.
Or maybe's it's because Apple's QA people know that best way to have software designed to be easy to use is to not encourage them to use right-click kludges. It is impossible to use a Windows machine without a two button mouse and learning context menus. That is not true of Mac OS X.
The problem with windows and Linux as well is: applications have commands in the "context menue" which do not show up in the standard menu.
I remember that I have send back an evaluation copy (which I had to pay) without paying the bill, because it not even had "undo".
At that time (Windows 3.1) I used a 3 button mouse from logitech, and had "copy" and "paste" on button 2 and button 3.
Unfortunately I never realized that this particular program had a right mouse menu, as that was still uncommon for most programms.
Today its still the same
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yep, I was shocked when I tried to use Safari. It made me angry, actually, because I was trying to use Safari on an iBook and I had to plug a mouse in to use the browser!
However, this isn't the first thing about Mac OS X to reflect poor UI design. The most obvious of these is that they copied the same mistake Windows (and a lot of sawfish themes) made - putting the window closure button right next to the window size controls. So, say, you want to make your browser window bigger, but your hand slips while moving your mouse and you push the button too early or too late and bam! That page you wanted to fill the screen has now been closed, and who knows what the URL was...
Actually in the early 90's most Macs shipped with Hypercard, and there were tons of books on programming it. You could even write extensions to it using C or Pascal and call those from your Hypercard stacks. It was much closer to visual basic than GW Basic.
R0ML points me to these two parts of the law:f airpay /fs17e_computer.htm,
. asp
http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/
which says that if IT workers getting paid at least $455/week or $27.63 an hour don't get overtime. Sorry, I was wrong about the minimum amount. You still fall under minimum wage laws, for what that's worth.
Also, you can't volunteer for a for-profit private sector company: http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/docs/volunteers
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Mac applications don't have this problem, because application developers don't add items to context menus that can't be accessed elsewhere.
The reason they don't is because Macs come with a one button mouse. This is why Steve will never change.