Some mighty fine points there, most of which I agree with. But being a bit of an unapologetic mac fan, I'll address some of them:)
With regard to the 'hard to replace hd' comment, this is no longer true - with the macbook pro next to me I can (and have) replaced the HD by removing two screws. I replaced one on an older macbook pro and it took much longer and exposed lots of very delicate-looking computer entrails. I replaced on in a mac mini too, which required four screws, and the balls to shove a putty knife into the side of the casing. Still, all three of those was more difficult that replacing the HD in my old dell machine (one screw).
Sharp edges, you shouldn't actually rest your wrists while typing, 'cos you'll get the dreaded RSI. Perhaps Apple are trying to save your wrists for your old age? I've got to say that I don't mind that one too much. Also the sharp edges exist only on the new macbook pros, which have the easier to replace HD.
The dead space in the menu exists only on menu separators, but yes, they should not close the menu. That's just irritating now you mention it - but again it's something that I hadn't noticed before.
I don't use a mouse with my machine, preferring the trackpad, but I have noticed the odd mouse acceleration on other macs. Perhaps it's something you get used to. And speaking of getting used to, I have finally got used to the keyboard on my macbook (it took some time, a year or so), but now prefer it to any other keyboard I've used, and certainly far prefer it to any laptop keyboard I've ever used. As you rightly point out, you can plug any USB keyboard into the machine if you prefer.
I haven't noticed the throttling issue either. Would I experience this as the machine not running at 100% CPU? Because my mac mini will run at 100% on both cores when encoding video, and will get pretty hot doing it too (+65 degrees C on some component or other).
I searched for 'wallpaper' and 'picture' and 'background' using spotlight search in System Preferences, and all three took me to the correct place (as in, to the control panel that allows me to set the desktop background).
When hidden, the dock will notify you when you need it by bouncing an icon out from the edge of the screen. As opposed to a hidden windows taskbar (I'm taking of XP here, perhaps windows 7 is better in this respect), which won't tell you anything, and frequently fails to stop a window flashing even when I've attended to its needs.
Lastly though, not being able to get the machine to stay awake when you close the lid is annoying, but not as annoying as my old HP laptop that work lend me when I'm travelling which refused to sleep when I closed the lid, preferring to chew through the battery and nearly cook itself in the process. Again, and XP problem, perhaps windows 7 is better in this respect too?
What he saw convinced him that germs could be not the cause, but the result of disease; that depending on its state, the body could convert a harmless bacterium into a lethal pathogen
The last time I used Linux was something over fifteen years ago, and this exact same thing was happening then. It's hard to believe that it continues to happen, even to this day.
The strawman is that 'the left love Mao', which they obviously don't - and you end up arguing against that non-point instead of addressing the actual issue.
Or are you just being smart in some way that doesn't come across on message boards?
No there is a cut. The camera dips down momentarily to some shadow, and when it re-emerges you're in a new take. It's not a cut from a narrative point of view of course, but it's there nevertheless.
This is one of my favorite films, though I remember a bunch of friends to see it when it screened a second time (the first was at a film festival, then I think it had a slightly more general release). And they all (bar one) hated it and now they refuse to go and see any film I recommend ever again.
Another point about those takes is that Anderson doesn't even move the camera in them. It's extraordinary.
The first time I saw it it was preceded by a screening of Cronenberg's short film, Camera. Which I think is one long take, but for the final few moments.
Re:"Alice" one of the best learning languages toda
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
No, it really is bonkers. I can understand wanting to know how the compiler implements objects and inheritance and what-not - although in the end it's somewhat compiler dependent.
One might as well argue that C is merely syntactic sugar for assembler - which would be true, but rather misses the point. Syntactic sugar does more than help the medicine go down, so to speak, it frees the mind from the mundane details and allows one to concentrate on more important things. Like program structure and so-on.
Why one would want to use the ideas in that paper to write an actual computer program is utterly beyond me.
Re:"Alice" one of the best learning languages toda
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
I don't know why the preview box in slashdot is so damnably slow, but I'd be very surprised if it's anything to do with javascript.
Using Chrome's 'Resources' panel it took slashdot's server 30 seconds to respond to the ajax request. So it sounds like something is up with the perl script. Besides, if you didn't use javascript you'd have to reload an entire page for a preview. As it is, the reply content was only 1999 bytes in total.
Look, alot of things in this world work on trust. Your mail, for instance, just sits in your letterbox for anyone to open & read.
But I don't want to get bogged down in analogies since the argument tends to devolve in to the precise ways in which the analogy is flawed (which of course, it always is) rather than an argument about the actual issue.
The issue is that knowledge itself is very different from a tool. And owning a tool which has only one purpose (to steal facebook details or whatever), may very well be in the eyes of the law tantamount to intent to use the tool. Arguing that you created the tool only to 'highlight the problem', or to 'test the security of your own setup' - which in this case is an even weaker excuse - won't cut much ice in front of a Judge.
Personally, I won't be downloading it, and I certainly won't be using it. Yes it is better to have higher security everywhere on the internet, but the onus is not entirely on the owner of websites or the designers of protocols or whatever. To some extent surely the onus is on us to not use hacking tools and to not steal other people's information.
Nuclear energy is something I'd really like to see more of, as long as they don't build the plant or store the spent fuel anywhere near my house
Not saying it isn't safe or anything, but wouldn't it be better to find an energy generation solution that we don't mind having somewhere near our houses?
I don't want to sound like I'm against diagrams and textual descriptions, but often they are better done in a separate document.
Well I don't see why they're any more likely to be kept in sync just because they're in a separate document - in fact it seems to me that they'd be more likely to diverge when they're in another document.
I have a feeling that it would be valuable to me at least, and I was wondering if a tool (perhaps an MSVC plugin even) existed for the purpose.
The kind of diagram I'm talking about is (for instance) a geometric diagram that illustrates the reason that the particular bit of maths is being done in this particular way. A complex diagram in this instance in no way indicates that the code needs to be rewritten, and while you're right that it could live comfortably in another document, it would be nice to see it there right beside the code.
Well I don't think anyone here has much of an issue with writing their source code in ASCII - as it's been pointed out ASCII is simple, well understood, sufficient for our current languages and extremely portable.
But what about comments? What I'd like to get my hands on is an editor that: 1) Understands utf-8 source code (so we can get nice characters in comments) 2) Allows diagrams to be embedded in source code as comments. ASCII may be fine for code, but it sure sucks for diagrams.
In what way is the OS 'locked down'? I mean, the source code is available online. You can install what you want. There's a ton of documentation on the APIs.
Textmate seems pretty nice, but I used coda personally for web development. Not free, but nice. And yes - mac only:)
"Try getting a Mac to play some random video file"
Install Perian. Done. Never had a problem since. Install VLC too, in case you want to play something really odd (actually using VLC is pretty horrible though, but sometimes you need it).
Pulling the mpeg files off a disk? You mean ripping a DVD? There's (good) software that will do that too. Handbrake for instance.
Point is, no OS does this 'out of the box'. They all requires apps to be installed. On a mac however, these apps don't suck, they work really well. And some of them come as 'part' of the OS (by which I mean, they're installed when the OS installs. DVD player and Quicktime).
Perhaps Apple and you just disagree about what 'common formats' are. I had much more trouble getting my windows machine to deal with slightly esoteric formats. I had a windows laptop, and a fresh install of the OS couldn't play DVDs! I tried installing some DVD player app, and it fucked out spectacularly.
I can honestly say that unless Apple really drop the ball, I will never go back to another OS. My macbook pro kicks ass, and I've never been so productive on a computer in my life. My mac mini has replaced the DVD player and my earlier attempts to build a media server. And it's smaller, and probably uses less power than the DVD player did too (it certainly doesn't get as hot as the DVD player used to). Plus it rips DVDs (quietly!), whilst still being able to play video. The remote is intuitive. The kids use front row to watch movies.
Using garage band I can record low-latency audio without having to dick around with ASIO drivers, like I tried to and failed to on windows. Using iMovie I can (and have) made cute little movies with the kids. Once they get a bit older they'll be able to do this themselves, should they want to. Both those things work perfectly out of the box, with no fiddling at all. They work together, I can put garage band recordings as soundtracks to movies. It's so simple and powerful that you forget about what you're using and get on with using it as a tool.
It is, honestly, utterly beyond me why someone who actually uses a computer as a tool (rather than as something to fiddle around with as an end in itself, which is fine, but not what I'm talking about here) would want to use anything other than OSX. Unless you can't afford it, that is. But if you make a living with the thing, then it's really not all that expensive.
iTunes is awesome on any system, windows or otherwise. Are you complaining about the name of a network discovery protocol? Because it's in French??
However, that said, iTunes is also one other thing. Incredibly slow, both on windows and mac (although it's a little bit faster on osx - maybe. It's hard to tell, my windows desktop is much more powerful than my macbook so it's hard to compare).
So if iTunes were to be rewritten to speed it up, and I can't see any reason at all why it should be as slow as it is, then it would kick ass even harder.
Also - it shouldn't be a default audio/video player for anything because why would double-clicking on an audio file import it into my library. Makes no sense.
Yeah I understand it's much slower, I'm just saying that isn't it better to use swap than to fail to allocate?
I mean my machine hardly ever hits the swap, but when it does I'd rather it had the extra space than (say) causing some application to crash - not that anyone would ever write an app that failed to handle OOM conditions gracefully....
If you are working within your RAM's limits, then what benefit does disabling swap have? It wouldn't be using it anyway, so what's the advantage of turning it off?
Just a slight aside, but I was under the impression that disabling the swap was basically a bad idea. Better to keep swap there, max your machine out with RAM (I have 8gig in my laptop). That way, if something really needs a ton of RAM it won't fail to allocate it (which is surely worse than it having to resort to swap).
the translucent bar at the top of every window. It makes reading the title difficult and serves absolutely no purpose.
True that - looks appalling. I assume it can be turned off, but for all the graphic design skills that have gone into the rest of the OS (I hate the icons personally, but I can see that they... well... they obviously spent alot of time on them) why this out-of-focus translucency? It just makes titlebars and borders look untidy. Most odd.
I haven't used 7 yet though, being a shocking OSX fanboy at home, and a reluctant user of XP at work. But 7 is gradually spreading, so it will only be a matter of time.
Slashdot Mirror
(iTunes)
Totally.
(not being able to view the next picture in a folder)
Down arrow not good enough for you ? (unless you have the picture fullscreen in quicklook in which case, yes, that sucks alot).
(fullscreen)
Don't miss it. Other people do though.
Some mighty fine points there, most of which I agree with. But being a bit of an unapologetic mac fan, I'll address some of them :)
With regard to the 'hard to replace hd' comment, this is no longer true - with the macbook pro next to me I can (and have) replaced the HD by removing two screws. I replaced one on an older macbook pro and it took much longer and exposed lots of very delicate-looking computer entrails. I replaced on in a mac mini too, which required four screws, and the balls to shove a putty knife into the side of the casing. Still, all three of those was more difficult that replacing the HD in my old dell machine (one screw).
Sharp edges, you shouldn't actually rest your wrists while typing, 'cos you'll get the dreaded RSI. Perhaps Apple are trying to save your wrists for your old age? I've got to say that I don't mind that one too much. Also the sharp edges exist only on the new macbook pros, which have the easier to replace HD.
The dead space in the menu exists only on menu separators, but yes, they should not close the menu. That's just irritating now you mention it - but again it's something that I hadn't noticed before.
I don't use a mouse with my machine, preferring the trackpad, but I have noticed the odd mouse acceleration on other macs. Perhaps it's something you get used to. And speaking of getting used to, I have finally got used to the keyboard on my macbook (it took some time, a year or so), but now prefer it to any other keyboard I've used, and certainly far prefer it to any laptop keyboard I've ever used. As you rightly point out, you can plug any USB keyboard into the machine if you prefer.
I haven't noticed the throttling issue either. Would I experience this as the machine not running at 100% CPU? Because my mac mini will run at 100% on both cores when encoding video, and will get pretty hot doing it too (+65 degrees C on some component or other).
I searched for 'wallpaper' and 'picture' and 'background' using spotlight search in System Preferences, and all three took me to the correct place (as in, to the control panel that allows me to set the desktop background).
When hidden, the dock will notify you when you need it by bouncing an icon out from the edge of the screen. As opposed to a hidden windows taskbar (I'm taking of XP here, perhaps windows 7 is better in this respect), which won't tell you anything, and frequently fails to stop a window flashing even when I've attended to its needs.
Lastly though, not being able to get the machine to stay awake when you close the lid is annoying, but not as annoying as my old HP laptop that work lend me when I'm travelling which refused to sleep when I closed the lid, preferring to chew through the battery and nearly cook itself in the process. Again, and XP problem, perhaps windows 7 is better in this respect too?
What he saw convinced him that germs could be not the cause, but the result of disease; that depending on its state, the body could convert a harmless bacterium into a lethal pathogen
Perhaps because he was a loon?
The last time I used Linux was something over fifteen years ago, and this exact same thing was happening then. It's hard to believe that it continues to happen, even to this day.
The strawman is that 'the left love Mao', which they obviously don't - and you end up arguing against that non-point instead of addressing the actual issue.
Or are you just being smart in some way that doesn't come across on message boards?
This is the phone I have. And a couple of my friends too. It is so far the very pinnacle of cell phone technology.
No there is a cut. The camera dips down momentarily to some shadow, and when it re-emerges you're in a new take. It's not a cut from a narrative point of view of course, but it's there nevertheless.
This is one of my favorite films, though I remember a bunch of friends to see it when it screened a second time (the first was at a film festival, then I think it had a slightly more general release). And they all (bar one) hated it and now they refuse to go and see any film I recommend ever again.
Another point about those takes is that Anderson doesn't even move the camera in them. It's extraordinary.
The first time I saw it it was preceded by a screening of Cronenberg's short film, Camera. Which I think is one long take, but for the final few moments.
Also
The Sea
Is Full of Fish
No, it really is bonkers. I can understand wanting to know how the compiler implements objects and inheritance and what-not - although in the end it's somewhat compiler dependent.
One might as well argue that C is merely syntactic sugar for assembler - which would be true, but rather misses the point. Syntactic sugar does more than help the medicine go down, so to speak, it frees the mind from the mundane details and allows one to concentrate on more important things. Like program structure and so-on.
Why one would want to use the ideas in that paper to write an actual computer program is utterly beyond me.
That's the most bonkers thing I've ever read.
Oh the joys of angle brackets. Let me try that again:
Unless the font took <timeout> + <short interval> to load, in which case you'd get the flash again...
Unless the font took + to load, in which case you'd get the flash again...
I don't know why the preview box in slashdot is so damnably slow, but I'd be very surprised if it's anything to do with javascript.
Using Chrome's 'Resources' panel it took slashdot's server 30 seconds to respond to the ajax request. So it sounds like something is up with the perl script. Besides, if you didn't use javascript you'd have to reload an entire page for a preview. As it is, the reply content was only 1999 bytes in total.
Look, alot of things in this world work on trust. Your mail, for instance, just sits in your letterbox for anyone to open & read.
But I don't want to get bogged down in analogies since the argument tends to devolve in to the precise ways in which the analogy is flawed (which of course, it always is) rather than an argument about the actual issue.
The issue is that knowledge itself is very different from a tool. And owning a tool which has only one purpose (to steal facebook details or whatever), may very well be in the eyes of the law tantamount to intent to use the tool. Arguing that you created the tool only to 'highlight the problem', or to 'test the security of your own setup' - which in this case is an even weaker excuse - won't cut much ice in front of a Judge.
Personally, I won't be downloading it, and I certainly won't be using it. Yes it is better to have higher security everywhere on the internet, but the onus is not entirely on the owner of websites or the designers of protocols or whatever. To some extent surely the onus is on us to not use hacking tools and to not steal other people's information.
Nuclear energy is something I'd really like to see more of, as long as they don't build the plant or store the spent fuel anywhere near my house
Not saying it isn't safe or anything, but wouldn't it be better to find an energy generation solution that we don't mind having somewhere near our houses?
I don't want to sound like I'm against diagrams and textual descriptions, but often they are better done in a separate document.
Well I don't see why they're any more likely to be kept in sync just because they're in a separate document - in fact it seems to me that they'd be more likely to diverge when they're in another document.
I have a feeling that it would be valuable to me at least, and I was wondering if a tool (perhaps an MSVC plugin even) existed for the purpose.
The kind of diagram I'm talking about is (for instance) a geometric diagram that illustrates the reason that the particular bit of maths is being done in this particular way. A complex diagram in this instance in no way indicates that the code needs to be rewritten, and while you're right that it could live comfortably in another document, it would be nice to see it there right beside the code.
Well I don't think anyone here has much of an issue with writing their source code in ASCII - as it's been pointed out ASCII is simple, well understood, sufficient for our current languages and extremely portable.
But what about comments? What I'd like to get my hands on is an editor that:
1) Understands utf-8 source code (so we can get nice characters in comments)
2) Allows diagrams to be embedded in source code as comments. ASCII may be fine for code, but it sure sucks for diagrams.
Does such a thing exist?
" Scrolling is not connected to multi-touch at all."
Two-finger scroll anyone?
In what way is the OS 'locked down'? I mean, the source code is available online. You can install what you want. There's a ton of documentation on the APIs.
Textmate seems pretty nice, but I used coda personally for web development. Not free, but nice. And yes - mac only :)
"Try getting a Mac to play some random video file"
Install Perian. Done. Never had a problem since. Install VLC too, in case you want to play something really odd (actually using VLC is pretty horrible though, but sometimes you need it).
Pulling the mpeg files off a disk? You mean ripping a DVD? There's (good) software that will do that too. Handbrake for instance.
Point is, no OS does this 'out of the box'. They all requires apps to be installed. On a mac however, these apps don't suck, they work really well. And some of them come as 'part' of the OS (by which I mean, they're installed when the OS installs. DVD player and Quicktime).
Perhaps Apple and you just disagree about what 'common formats' are. I had much more trouble getting my windows machine to deal with slightly esoteric formats. I had a windows laptop, and a fresh install of the OS couldn't play DVDs! I tried installing some DVD player app, and it fucked out spectacularly.
I can honestly say that unless Apple really drop the ball, I will never go back to another OS. My macbook pro kicks ass, and I've never been so productive on a computer in my life. My mac mini has replaced the DVD player and my earlier attempts to build a media server. And it's smaller, and probably uses less power than the DVD player did too (it certainly doesn't get as hot as the DVD player used to). Plus it rips DVDs (quietly!), whilst still being able to play video. The remote is intuitive. The kids use front row to watch movies.
Using garage band I can record low-latency audio without having to dick around with ASIO drivers, like I tried to and failed to on windows. Using iMovie I can (and have) made cute little movies with the kids. Once they get a bit older they'll be able to do this themselves, should they want to. Both those things work perfectly out of the box, with no fiddling at all. They work together, I can put garage band recordings as soundtracks to movies. It's so simple and powerful that you forget about what you're using and get on with using it as a tool.
It is, honestly, utterly beyond me why someone who actually uses a computer as a tool (rather than as something to fiddle around with as an end in itself, which is fine, but not what I'm talking about here) would want to use anything other than OSX. Unless you can't afford it, that is. But if you make a living with the thing, then it's really not all that expensive.
iTunes is awesome on any system, windows or otherwise. Are you complaining about the name of a network discovery protocol? Because it's in French??
However, that said, iTunes is also one other thing. Incredibly slow, both on windows and mac (although it's a little bit faster on osx - maybe. It's hard to tell, my windows desktop is much more powerful than my macbook so it's hard to compare).
So if iTunes were to be rewritten to speed it up, and I can't see any reason at all why it should be as slow as it is, then it would kick ass even harder.
Also - it shouldn't be a default audio/video player for anything because why would double-clicking on an audio file import it into my library. Makes no sense.
Yeah I understand it's much slower, I'm just saying that isn't it better to use swap than to fail to allocate?
I mean my machine hardly ever hits the swap, but when it does I'd rather it had the extra space than (say) causing some application to crash - not that anyone would ever write an app that failed to handle OOM conditions gracefully....
If you are working within your RAM's limits, then what benefit does disabling swap have? It wouldn't be using it anyway, so what's the advantage of turning it off?
Just a slight aside, but I was under the impression that disabling the swap was basically a bad idea. Better to keep swap there, max your machine out with RAM (I have 8gig in my laptop). That way, if something really needs a ton of RAM it won't fail to allocate it (which is surely worse than it having to resort to swap).
Could be wrong, but it makes sense to me.
the translucent bar at the top of every window. It makes reading the title difficult and serves absolutely no purpose.
True that - looks appalling. I assume it can be turned off, but for all the graphic design skills that have gone into the rest of the OS (I hate the icons personally, but I can see that they... well... they obviously spent alot of time on them) why this out-of-focus translucency? It just makes titlebars and borders look untidy. Most odd.
I haven't used 7 yet though, being a shocking OSX fanboy at home, and a reluctant user of XP at work. But 7 is gradually spreading, so it will only be a matter of time.