Calling software development, network engineering, web design etc. all "IT" is a bit like calling HR, accounting and legal all "paperwork". I agree with the story author - the need to call everyone who produces or maintains software or hardware "IT" just shows how little most people understand the businesses they run and the people they employ. It's that reasoning that leads to (in small companies... hopefully) the pimply faced youth who reboots the servers being asked to design and deploy a mission-critical database because he 'knows about computers'. Your post typifies this: they're all "vaguely related to Information Technology" therefore they should be the same department? That makes no sense at all, and many companies get this wrong, wrong, wrong.
Yes, but if you look at the details of this lawsuit, it's not against YOU (so breathe a sigh of relief). This is about a company repeatedly breaking the terms of that license, the details of which they were fully aware. You may be right that those terms are unenforceable against private individuals who bought the software as a retail sale. However, this case is about a company installing the software from an unauthorised (i.e. outwith their license) source onto computers which they then sold, alongside reselling a retail copy.
The whole point of this story is that Psystar were modifying OS X without authorisation, storing the unauthorised modified copy on a server, and cloning those modified copies onto third party machines. How many companies do that (or get away with doing that) with Windows*? NONE. Office? NONE. In fact, if you took Ubuntu and modified it, then tried to resell or distribute it as "Ubuntu" and not under some other name, you would be at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
I realise here that Apple really doesn't want OS X to be a commodity OS, they want it tied to the hardware. But the case against Psystar is based on perfectly legitimate concerns, even if many Slashdotters don't like the end results. Apple are not the bad guys here, they're simply using a legitimate legal issue to achieve the end result they desire.
* before anyone starts talking about Dell etc. making installation images - they are authorised to do this by Microsoft under a licensing agreement, they aren't going out and buying retail copies of the OS.
It seems to me that there is a significant minority of people whose primary hobby is to act as gatekeepers for Wikipedia and monitor new articles. They mostly delete them, giving newbies very terse (or no) reasons.
I think a good antidote to this would be to require people to continue to produce a certain amount of new material in order to be able to moderate. Something similar to Slashdot moderation, whereby the algorithm chooses the 'middle category' and excludes lurkers and also the rabidly/obsessionally interested. Wikipedia should try to make moderation a necessary (if tiresome) responsibility for the good citizens that are genuinely interested in the community. It shouldn't be an occupation in its own right for something as wide and varied as Wikipedia.
I would also add the The Design Museum. Pretty geeky but interesting, and if you have any non-geek companions of either gender they'll probably find this interesting too.
I lived in London for 4 years, I'm pretty sure it never got as low as 4C during the daytime. It's the inner city, not a field in the country. I think you'll find 4C is the average low which would be the middle of the night. Unless it's a really cold December (which doesn't look likely at the moment) a casual jacket will be fine. I'm in the home counties (Kent) and it was 14C today.
Hmmmm, I see the idea. Really, when I'm chatting with someone on Skype / MSN / whatever then I use the file send feature to send those files, so then they're not hosted anywhere at all. Or I just email. I think this feature will die before it's even got going - advanced users will have their own hosting; novice users will get very confused, thinking they've 'uploaded' something to somewhere and then turn off their PC. Grandma will then try to access the photos and get fed up when it doesn't work.
Uh... imagine you have a Ford Mustang, and I have a 2CV. And we drive towards each other at 88mph. And someone invents a mouse that gives you electric shocks.. uh... nah, I'm lost too.
Dude, my fingers can figure out where the middle is on a 7cm-long device. The whole point of the marks on the home keys is that keyboards are big, and they vary in size and shape. Really, I can type on my iPhone without constantly looking at the keyboard. It's not as quick or convenient as a proper keyboard, but it's not intended to replace a proper keyboard. An iPhone is so small that changing position really doesn't matter - you can feel the edges of the device in your palms and you know where the keys are. Also, the keys are right below the text entry area anyway, so checking the keyboard position isn't like looking down from a monitor to a conventional keyboard. Same goes for 'heads up' touchscreens used in grocery stores.
Well, the ash floats around in the air, the cooling fan of the mac draws the ash in through the vents, it hits a nice warm bit of the logic board and sticks there. Easy, wasn't it?
That's ridiculous. The boot-up time is not the issue, the time to then load the browser, word processor, development environment etc. is. I find it bizarre that in 2009 people still shut down their computer rather than hibernate or suspend. Surely when you come to use your computer again it's more or less the same half a dozen applications you want to use. What's the point in shutting down, then the next day or a few hours later loading them all again?
I seriously doubt it had multiple guns, as the deflection coils would interfere with each other as each gun traced different parts of the screen (compare this with the three guns for RBG where they all point at the same dot at each moment in time). If you put a magnet near a CRT you'll see why it would be very difficult to get multiple guns to point different directions at the same time. I think you were just adjusting some analogue compensation circuits that tried to make the picture as linear as possible in each segment of the screen to avoid pincushion distortion.
No, it's because when you click to select an icon there's more than one thing you might want to do. I might want to move it, delete it, drag it somewhere for some reason. With a single-click system once I've clicked it will then open the application or document which might not be what I had in mind.
I guess I use a computer with my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mouse, so I switch windows/apps with Cmd-Tab. You're right about screen size, but on my MacBook (which I guess must be Apple's biggest seller) the GUI is perfect, and it's a single sweep (or at most two broad sweeps) of my finger across the trackpad from the middle of the screen to hit the menu of my choice. It's orders of magnitude slower for me to position the pointer over, e.g., Safari's Home icon because I have to do lots of little strokes on the pad to get the pointer where I want it. I also have to do lots of little strokes on Windows to get the pointer over any app menu. More and more people are buying laptops rather than desktops, and in fact netbooks rather than full laptops, so I think Apple's GUI is the better choice. I understand why you think the Dock is a poor app switcher (although I am used to it) but the taskbar is a terrible app launcher, so there's strengths and weaknesses to both.
Firstly, they haven't 'moved them' - Apple put them at the top in the first widely available GUI computer. Microsoft moved them. It is much more efficient - it's efficient for screen real estate, and it's efficient for muscle memory. I can look away from the screen and hit the menu bar for my most commonly used applications, which means I spend less time have to 'aim and fire' with the mouse. It's like playing guitar - I know where the frets are and I don't have to look. On Windows the menus move depending on where the app is on the screen. If I open multiple windows, I get multiple menus. If I make a window really small because I only need to see something really small (like a command reference when I'm programming) then parts of the menu get covered and I have to keep resizing the app to see them. So, tell me, how is the windows way more intuitive or efficient?
On the Mac, Preferences ('Options') and Exit are on the menu that shares the application's title (e.g. Safari has a 'Safari' menu which is a menu for everything to do with that application; the rest of the menus are about that application's documents). What really bugs me is that 'Page Setup' is under the 'File' menu on Word, (which should be all about what to do with this file rather than what's in it) when it should be under 'Format'. What bugs me even more is that Apple copied that misfeature when they developed Pages. Thankfully the OpenOffice developers had the sense to put it in the 'Format' menu where it belongs.
I've just wrecked my moderation in the rest of this story in order to reply to you, but I can't resist.
Locating the menu outside of the application window is better than the alternative, not just as a matter of philosophy but also according to UI metrics - it is a matter of muscle memory - push the mouse right up to the top-left and click, you always have the Apple menu, push to the top-right and you always have Spotlight search; on Windows you have to look at the screen and work out how to move and then slow the mouse down over a menu item because it could be anywhere. Pull the mouse down to the bottom-left and click - what happens? Nothing! Microsoft have made the bottom-left pixel on the screen dead, so to even hit the start button you have to position. Note that the Dock does not suffer from this - pull then click works.
Changing the menu bar with focus makes perfect sense and avoids wasting screen real estate. It means that it's possible for an application to have a small window (for instance a web browser displaying a small part of a page) and still have access to all the menus. The Windows implementation is ridiculous - tying the menus to the app window breaks muscle memory, wastes screen space and requires resizing the application window for apps that have lots of menus. Also, it's possible to have a daughter window open and be unable to access the application menus because they're tied to a minimised parent window; conversely an app with lots of windows open could have the menu bar duplicated all over the screen.
The dock can be resized and hidden, so it's ridiculous to criticise that you personally don't like its size. It's not a 'simple launcher', it contains mimised windows, alerts and status updates (via bouncing icons and progress bars overlaid on the icons), document lists (via Stacks) and indicates running applications.
You don't have to have files on the Dock, remove them if you don't like them. The Windows Start Menu also has files (under 'My Documents') BTW, as does the Gnome menu.
Buy yourself a second-hand Mac Pro from eBay, one or two decent-sized hard drives, and a load of third party RAM. You'll get a workstation-class machine for a similar price to a midrange Dell PC, and you get to run OS X and all the relevant applications without the fear that the next update will break your Hackintosh. Parallels Desktop in Coherence Mode runs Windows very nicely and hides all of the desktop UI if you happen to need and Windows only apps.
Go for it, it's worth it:). This is starting to sound like a big self-help group, but then I guess a fair proportion of us that have been on Slashdot for a decade or so are in the same boat, so I appreciate your honesty too. It's definitely an issue, and definitely one worth tackling. I want to be able to run around with my grandchildren when I'm 60 rather than complain about my bad back and dicky heart;).
Sure, I know where you're coming from, but surely feeling full would help? I work night shifts a lot at a hospital, and for months I was running on sugar buzz - every time I felt tired I bought something from the vending machine to wake me up for 30 minutes. I've been overweight almost all my life - not massively - but enough to always feel self-conscious and not want to go to the beach etc.
In the end I realised that I had to do something (or else go shopping as all my clothes were getting too tight). I decided I really wanted to do something, made a plan (which as I said was along the lines of the Hacker Diet) and also told all my friends. The last bit really helped - whenever they saw me with food (other than a meal) or on a webcam or whatever I'd feel guilty and get rid of it.
The other thing is, I found that if I cut out all of the high calorie snack foods, there's no reason at all that I can't enjoy a good meal whatever the calorie content. Since I started trying to loose weight, I've still had a takeout meal about once I week, I still eat whatever I want at a restaurant. If, like me, you eat loads of snacks, then you're actually in quite a good position to cut those out and still enjoy a decent meal when you want to. The other week I went out for a meal with my wife and sat and watched her eat cheesecake at the end - I didn't fancy any so I didn't have it - which would have been impossible for me six months ago.
Please don't think I'm being egotistical - I'm rubbish at being self-disciplined - but I just decided that I really wanted to feel OK about myself in this regard, not to suddenly be a male model but to get it under control. It is possible, harder for some than for others, but if you want it then you can do it. I think the Hacker Diet is great because it's not about a two-month crash but a long-term plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling software development, network engineering, web design etc. all "IT" is a bit like calling HR, accounting and legal all "paperwork". I agree with the story author - the need to call everyone who produces or maintains software or hardware "IT" just shows how little most people understand the businesses they run and the people they employ. It's that reasoning that leads to (in small companies... hopefully) the pimply faced youth who reboots the servers being asked to design and deploy a mission-critical database because he 'knows about computers'. Your post typifies this: they're all "vaguely related to Information Technology" therefore they should be the same department? That makes no sense at all, and many companies get this wrong, wrong, wrong.
Yes, but if you look at the details of this lawsuit, it's not against YOU (so breathe a sigh of relief). This is about a company repeatedly breaking the terms of that license, the details of which they were fully aware. You may be right that those terms are unenforceable against private individuals who bought the software as a retail sale. However, this case is about a company installing the software from an unauthorised (i.e. outwith their license) source onto computers which they then sold, alongside reselling a retail copy.
The license does say you can only use the software with Apple hardware.
The whole point of this story is that Psystar were modifying OS X without authorisation, storing the unauthorised modified copy on a server, and cloning those modified copies onto third party machines. How many companies do that (or get away with doing that) with Windows*? NONE. Office? NONE. In fact, if you took Ubuntu and modified it, then tried to resell or distribute it as "Ubuntu" and not under some other name, you would be at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
I realise here that Apple really doesn't want OS X to be a commodity OS, they want it tied to the hardware. But the case against Psystar is based on perfectly legitimate concerns, even if many Slashdotters don't like the end results. Apple are not the bad guys here, they're simply using a legitimate legal issue to achieve the end result they desire.
* before anyone starts talking about Dell etc. making installation images - they are authorised to do this by Microsoft under a licensing agreement, they aren't going out and buying retail copies of the OS.
It seems to me that there is a significant minority of people whose primary hobby is to act as gatekeepers for Wikipedia and monitor new articles. They mostly delete them, giving newbies very terse (or no) reasons.
I think a good antidote to this would be to require people to continue to produce a certain amount of new material in order to be able to moderate. Something similar to Slashdot moderation, whereby the algorithm chooses the 'middle category' and excludes lurkers and also the rabidly/obsessionally interested. Wikipedia should try to make moderation a necessary (if tiresome) responsibility for the good citizens that are genuinely interested in the community. It shouldn't be an occupation in its own right for something as wide and varied as Wikipedia.
Don't you have to yell "cor blimey gov'ner" at the same time?
I would also add the The Design Museum. Pretty geeky but interesting, and if you have any non-geek companions of either gender they'll probably find this interesting too.
I lived in London for 4 years, I'm pretty sure it never got as low as 4C during the daytime. It's the inner city, not a field in the country. I think you'll find 4C is the average low which would be the middle of the night. Unless it's a really cold December (which doesn't look likely at the moment) a casual jacket will be fine. I'm in the home counties (Kent) and it was 14C today.
Hmmmm, I see the idea. Really, when I'm chatting with someone on Skype / MSN / whatever then I use the file send feature to send those files, so then they're not hosted anywhere at all. Or I just email. I think this feature will die before it's even got going - advanced users will have their own hosting; novice users will get very confused, thinking they've 'uploaded' something to somewhere and then turn off their PC. Grandma will then try to access the photos and get fed up when it doesn't work.
How is this any better? You can already mark photos on Flickr as private.
Uh... imagine you have a Ford Mustang, and I have a 2CV. And we drive towards each other at 88mph. And someone invents a mouse that gives you electric shocks.. uh... nah, I'm lost too.
It must be really inconvenient sharing the same fingers with someone else. What do you do if you both need them the same weekend?
Hmmm, thermal. Like, it gives you a small burn when you click the mouse?
Dude, my fingers can figure out where the middle is on a 7cm-long device. The whole point of the marks on the home keys is that keyboards are big, and they vary in size and shape. Really, I can type on my iPhone without constantly looking at the keyboard. It's not as quick or convenient as a proper keyboard, but it's not intended to replace a proper keyboard. An iPhone is so small that changing position really doesn't matter - you can feel the edges of the device in your palms and you know where the keys are. Also, the keys are right below the text entry area anyway, so checking the keyboard position isn't like looking down from a monitor to a conventional keyboard. Same goes for 'heads up' touchscreens used in grocery stores.
Well, the ash floats around in the air, the cooling fan of the mac draws the ash in through the vents, it hits a nice warm bit of the logic board and sticks there. Easy, wasn't it?
That's ridiculous. The boot-up time is not the issue, the time to then load the browser, word processor, development environment etc. is. I find it bizarre that in 2009 people still shut down their computer rather than hibernate or suspend. Surely when you come to use your computer again it's more or less the same half a dozen applications you want to use. What's the point in shutting down, then the next day or a few hours later loading them all again?
I seriously doubt it had multiple guns, as the deflection coils would interfere with each other as each gun traced different parts of the screen (compare this with the three guns for RBG where they all point at the same dot at each moment in time). If you put a magnet near a CRT you'll see why it would be very difficult to get multiple guns to point different directions at the same time. I think you were just adjusting some analogue compensation circuits that tried to make the picture as linear as possible in each segment of the screen to avoid pincushion distortion.
No, it's because when you click to select an icon there's more than one thing you might want to do. I might want to move it, delete it, drag it somewhere for some reason. With a single-click system once I've clicked it will then open the application or document which might not be what I had in mind.
I guess I use a computer with my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mouse, so I switch windows/apps with Cmd-Tab. You're right about screen size, but on my MacBook (which I guess must be Apple's biggest seller) the GUI is perfect, and it's a single sweep (or at most two broad sweeps) of my finger across the trackpad from the middle of the screen to hit the menu of my choice. It's orders of magnitude slower for me to position the pointer over, e.g., Safari's Home icon because I have to do lots of little strokes on the pad to get the pointer where I want it. I also have to do lots of little strokes on Windows to get the pointer over any app menu. More and more people are buying laptops rather than desktops, and in fact netbooks rather than full laptops, so I think Apple's GUI is the better choice. I understand why you think the Dock is a poor app switcher (although I am used to it) but the taskbar is a terrible app launcher, so there's strengths and weaknesses to both.
On the Mac, it's Cmd (or Apple Key) + `
Firstly, they haven't 'moved them' - Apple put them at the top in the first widely available GUI computer. Microsoft moved them. It is much more efficient - it's efficient for screen real estate, and it's efficient for muscle memory. I can look away from the screen and hit the menu bar for my most commonly used applications, which means I spend less time have to 'aim and fire' with the mouse. It's like playing guitar - I know where the frets are and I don't have to look. On Windows the menus move depending on where the app is on the screen. If I open multiple windows, I get multiple menus. If I make a window really small because I only need to see something really small (like a command reference when I'm programming) then parts of the menu get covered and I have to keep resizing the app to see them. So, tell me, how is the windows way more intuitive or efficient?
On the Mac, Preferences ('Options') and Exit are on the menu that shares the application's title (e.g. Safari has a 'Safari' menu which is a menu for everything to do with that application; the rest of the menus are about that application's documents). What really bugs me is that 'Page Setup' is under the 'File' menu on Word, (which should be all about what to do with this file rather than what's in it) when it should be under 'Format'. What bugs me even more is that Apple copied that misfeature when they developed Pages. Thankfully the OpenOffice developers had the sense to put it in the 'Format' menu where it belongs.
I've just wrecked my moderation in the rest of this story in order to reply to you, but I can't resist.
Buy yourself a second-hand Mac Pro from eBay, one or two decent-sized hard drives, and a load of third party RAM. You'll get a workstation-class machine for a similar price to a midrange Dell PC, and you get to run OS X and all the relevant applications without the fear that the next update will break your Hackintosh. Parallels Desktop in Coherence Mode runs Windows very nicely and hides all of the desktop UI if you happen to need and Windows only apps.
Go for it, it's worth it :). This is starting to sound like a big self-help group, but then I guess a fair proportion of us that have been on Slashdot for a decade or so are in the same boat, so I appreciate your honesty too. It's definitely an issue, and definitely one worth tackling. I want to be able to run around with my grandchildren when I'm 60 rather than complain about my bad back and dicky heart ;).
Sure, I know where you're coming from, but surely feeling full would help? I work night shifts a lot at a hospital, and for months I was running on sugar buzz - every time I felt tired I bought something from the vending machine to wake me up for 30 minutes. I've been overweight almost all my life - not massively - but enough to always feel self-conscious and not want to go to the beach etc.
In the end I realised that I had to do something (or else go shopping as all my clothes were getting too tight). I decided I really wanted to do something, made a plan (which as I said was along the lines of the Hacker Diet) and also told all my friends. The last bit really helped - whenever they saw me with food (other than a meal) or on a webcam or whatever I'd feel guilty and get rid of it.
The other thing is, I found that if I cut out all of the high calorie snack foods, there's no reason at all that I can't enjoy a good meal whatever the calorie content. Since I started trying to loose weight, I've still had a takeout meal about once I week, I still eat whatever I want at a restaurant. If, like me, you eat loads of snacks, then you're actually in quite a good position to cut those out and still enjoy a decent meal when you want to. The other week I went out for a meal with my wife and sat and watched her eat cheesecake at the end - I didn't fancy any so I didn't have it - which would have been impossible for me six months ago.
Please don't think I'm being egotistical - I'm rubbish at being self-disciplined - but I just decided that I really wanted to feel OK about myself in this regard, not to suddenly be a male model but to get it under control. It is possible, harder for some than for others, but if you want it then you can do it. I think the Hacker Diet is great because it's not about a two-month crash but a long-term plan.