I would not call what Social Security provides a reasonable retirement income.
My parents are huge savers and don't need a dime from me or the government - and since they and I aren't particularly close, in all honesty I don't feel any obligation to them even if that wasn't the case.
I was addressing self-employed people because Slashdot has a large proportion of them, including myself less than a year ago. Believe me, I felt the horrendous pain of that 12.5% every year. That's why this is such a personal issue for me.
I have absolutely zero faith that what I collect from Social Security, if anything, will be enough to pay for a meal in a half-decent restaurant, let alone be capable of sustaining human life.
Social Security is 100% ripoff. Simple as that. Nobody should be forced into an investment programme that takes more and gives less.
Reagan cut taxes across the board, increased defense spending in a manner that was very effective in intimidating the soviets, and definitely helped destroy the Soviet empire. He also changed our perception of government substantially; now almost nobody talks about going to the bad old high-spending days of the 70s.
I'd say that's enough for any President - it's certainly a lot more than Clinton can claim credit for.
I've been a bit puzzled by this myself. I suspect the reason is that the consensus among commentators is that Bush is a dummy and Gore is brilliant. Slashdot people tend to appreciate raw brainpower more than the average, so they can respect Gore's command of the issues. This is the way the race has been spun in most places.
At the same time, I don't think the slashdot consensus is accurate. Consider the following issues:
The Issues
Bush had the guts to put Social InSecurity on the table, which is a HUGE issue for any independent contractors who happen to be around here - if you want to be paying 12.5% tax for the rest of your life on a program that's not going to give you a dime when you retire, by all means vote for Gore. Granted, Bush doesn't go as far as I'd like, but at least I see a glimmer of hope in where he is headed.
Gore will only cut taxes for people who behave his way; Bush's tax cuts are across the board. That's why they go mainly to the top 1% of the nation; the top 1% pays more, so they get more back. If you're single and without kids, Bush's cuts will help you a darn sight more than Gore's. And I would expect that many slashdot readers are in income brackets where tax cuts would be quite attractive. And if you're not in them now, consider what might happen in a few years. Does anyone here seriously think of government as anything but a rampaging beast out to get every dime they can? The only way to tame the beast is to cut its food supply so it won't grow and envelop us all.
His statements in the debates on net censorship are appalling - sadly, Gore's record is equally bad, if not worse. Gore has a proven record of getting serious about cultural issues such as porn and XXX-rated music lyrics; I doubt Bush will push them with any degree of enthusiasm. I could be wrong, but I'd be extremely surprised if there was any advantage to free speech in voting for Gore.
There's a definite advantage in terms of net taxes in voting for Bush; I think he'll be much more protective of the net economy than Gore.
Personality
By all accounts, Bush has been quite successful in administrating a major state and building a policy consensus. Of course you can nibble at his record at the margins, but no politician does a perfect job anywhere. Bush came to office saying he would focus on certain issues, including education. He focused, and those areas have improved significantly.
I'd count this as the mark of a successful leader of men, not a dumbass. A successful leader doesn't have to be the smartest person on the block; instead, he has to be inspirational and know what principles to work on. I'm probably smarter than my boss, the person who runs the company I work for, but he has the skills needed to rouse the troops, and he adheres to the principles that make the company successful. You could say I'm like Gore and my boss is like Bush. Guess what? He does a darn sight better job than I would, because he has skills I lack.
Same with Gore and Bush. Gore strikes me as a playground bully; Bush is a concilitator. Who's going to do better at negotiating with Congress?
Inconsistency on the Issues
Gore has perfected the chameleon-like poses of Clinton. He's swung violently from the left to the right on a wide range of issues. Take the environment. In Earth in the Balance, he wanted to ban the internal combustion engine. Now he doesn't, because it would cost him votes. He's taken enormous donations from tobacco interests, and served them well in the senate; now he's as against tobacco as anyone.
Gore has put on a large number of masks in the campaign, from populist to conservative who won't change a thing from the Clinton years. He's particularly upsetting as a populist; the mask of "fighting for the american people" feels so phony you can almost see the rubber.
I don't think we've seen the Real Gore yet. I do think we've seen the real Bush. He's been extremely consistent in his positions throughout the campaign.
Governing Policies
Bush is a lot like Reagan: Create a program consisting of four or five major points, and once in office push like crazy for those points. Keep focused.
This is why Reagan, a supposedly dumb man, managed to get a heck of a lot more done than theoretically smarter Clinton, Carter and Bush Sr. The more you are inclined to get into details, like Gore does, the more bogged down you are doing the actual work of the Presidency.
I'm going to make a prediction: Bush will be a much more effective President than Clinton or Gore if he wins. He has a disciplined, well-managed team behind him, and he's focused on the issues he cares about. I think that's an enormous plus.
I don't use Windows much, so I've only played around a little with 2000. If they've actually defeated DLL Hell after only 10-odd years of trying, I want to see it!
What's with all these companies trying to lure us in with their products and never telling us what the bill's going to be? Do they honestly think we'll let these things into our homes and then pay the $27,000 bill? (That being the price from the earlier article).
Seriously, a lot of stuff can happen in one year. Has the price of this gone down any? I love the way they stick "low cost" in their product description, when you'd be way better off buying three CRTs and shoving them together if cost-effectiveness is the goal:-(.
Actually, I think Rob got his Aibo pre-Andover - he traded it for Slashdot advertising, which is why you saw so many AIBO ads on Slashdot, even months after it sold out. Maybe Sony should have saved a few of the impressions for this next introduction?
I've read that the actual reason for the decrease in violence is a decrease in the number of people in the most violent demographics - that is, there are fewer teenagers than before due to the "baby bust" following the "baby boom". I know we now have a "mini-boom" again, but it will be a while before our adolescent population catches up again and starts breeding more crime.
I've never been comfortable with first-person shooters myself, but I think banning them would simply make them more attractive to kids. I see a heck of a lot of smoking around me despite the fact that smoking has proven to be a highly dangerous habit for as long as I can remember.
(I don't smoke or play first-person shooter games, simply because they don't appeal to me).
I recently bought a Compaq 5100 series machine that, of course, came with a legal copy of Microsoft Windows 98. I wiped the disk and installed Linux on it; it didn't work too well due to poor driver support, so I installed BeOS too. That was a little better, but not much.
Then I decided I'd really be better off selling the machine, since it performed poorly with both Linux and BeOS - I had an interested buyer, even - so I booted the recovery CD to reinstall Windows.
THE RECOVERY CD DID NOT CONTAIN A COPY OF WINDOWS. Instead, it contained references to a partition on my hard drive in which Windows was supposed to be hiding. Without this partition, no install.
Technical support had to send me a real Windows CD, which I haven't gotten around to installing yet (my sale fell through, since the buyer needed the machine right away). To be fair, the CD arrived promptly, even though they told me it would take two weeks. But that didn't erase the truly wretched experience.
Now, our friends at Microsoft might say that it serves me right for installing an alien operating system of evil on my system. At the same time, though, even if I was the world's biggest Windows fan, I would feel profoundly uneasy about this; what if the hard drive breaks down, for instance? What if I'd really like the gigabyte or so of space they're wasting on my hard drive back?
No, friends, this policy is profoundly consumer hostile. The "naked operating system page" is profoundly dishonest since it appears to be offering products that Microsoft is not actually selling.
I upgraded from Red Hat to SuSE 7 last night, and my IBM ThinkPad 770Z's X-windows configuration stopped working entirely - it gives me a totally blank screen and I have to restart - the usual ctrl-backspace won't work. I found the FN-key combination for changing from external to internal monitor garbled the display, and then I could ctrl-backspace - but that's still a long way away from getting an X-Windows system running.
Anyone know what might be wrong? I have a message in to SuSE technical support, but every little bit helps:-)
In Windows98 we have the extremely annoying "sliding" menus. The idea, I guess, is to make the menus seem like physical objects through a strange time delay/movement combination.
I always hated that, even though the only time I've used it is when checking out Windows98 systems at Fry's.
True - but even with a small dock, I felt the incursion of space was not going to look good for low-res screens.
When I got my machine, I resized the dock to about half its original size, and upped resolution from 1152x864 to 1024x768. I found that produced an excellent result.
One of the problems with OSX in my view is that it's not merciful to people with low-resolution screens. If you have something like an iBook, I'd say you pretty much have to hide the dock to have any spare screen space at all:-(.
I have a vision of Steve's office with his Cube and 22" Apple Cinema Display. I can't begrudge him either of those things, surely, but I have a feeling it affects his design sense to have a system with so much screen real estate. He probably has little mercy for iBook users.
Personally, I like keeping the dock around (and the taskbar in Windows which performs a similar function, albiet less designer-chic). But I did notice that Windows' auto-hide mode was every bit as obnoxious as it sounds like the Dock's is. It may just be an intractable problem to solve.
The main problem I've had with the Dock is that clicking in the transparent middle of icons seems like it should work, but in reality it won't. So I can click on the inside of the "e" in Microsoft Internet Explorer and become profoundly irritated that it won't come up. It took me several days to realize what was going on, and now I click on the solid part of the "e", but it still makes the system seem unreliable.
How does the Dock feel unfinished to you? It seems awfully polished and slick to me. I'm not saying it works ideally - I've read the ARSTechnica article and its objections to the Dock as opposed to the Apple Menu et al, and for the most part I agree with them. But it feels like a release-quality product in terms of how it works.
I could switch entirely to the new environment except that video editing applications (Final Cut and iMovie) simply do not work in X. At all. Pity since I spend most of my Mac-using time in them:-(.
Of course I'm a Unix geek as well as a Mac user, so the return of old faithful friends such as emacs helps make up for the dearth of native X applications, and of course the Unix directory structure is already familiar to me. That definitely helps my transition to the new system.
I think Apple will take market share from Windows due to OSX, but sadly I doubt that dominance is in the cards - Apple hardware is simply too expensive, and Jobs knows he can't make a viable business model out of cloning.
I'd like to see a reinvigourated Apple at 10-15% market share when OS X is successfully released and native software becomes available. That's good enough to be a tremendous turnaround for the company.
If my memory serves, menus in Windows 2000 fade in and then pop away. This creates an irritating delay between the time you request a menu and the time you can use it.
Menus in MacOS X pop in and fade away. No irritating delay, and the fade serves as a way of highlighting the selection you made in the menu.
That kind of thoughtful detail is the difference between Windows and MacOS X. It may seem tiny to you, but it makes users happy, fantatically loyal, even.
Despite the shadow and fading, Windows 2000 is insignificatly different in look and feel from Windows 95. The same old start menu, the same old dull grey everywhere, the same old dialogue boxes with 100 tabs on them.
MacOS X is the same radical change to MacOS that WIndows 95 was to Windows. And I find it a lot more appealing than Windows 95.
It's beautiful, for one thing. Never underestimate the power of beauty. It's sold one heck of a lot of iMacs.
When it comes to the marriage of art and technology, I think Jobs and friends did an awesome job with MacOS X.
What do you think of the complaints Mac users have had with the new system - missing Apple menu and so on? It's interesting how peripheral their concerns feel compared to a marriage between art and technology - they are talking about the day to day details, not Truth and Beauty.
Is it possible that "thinking arty" has hurt Jobs in the pure usability stakes?
The first thing you'll notice about MacOS X is how beautiful it is. The anti-aliased text looks drop-dead gorgeous on any high-resolution monitor. The photorealistic icons looks fantastic. The magnification effect in the dock is slick. Everything just looks magnificent; kudos to detail-meister Jobs.
Be's buttons look strange, and there's something about the text that's not quite right compared to a MacOS or even Windows system.
Usability.
I'd probably give a slight edge to Be here. The tracker has both a list of running applications and a start menu like launcher. MacOS X relies on a combination of the Dock and applications directory for these things.
At the same time, both are not hard to find your way around. I'd give the edge to Be, but in the end, an impartial user would have a hard time not to be seduced by the beauty of X.
Web Browser Experience.
Both browsers (IE and OmniWeb) available for X crash with a giddy abandon. OmniWeb is worse than Netscape under Linux; IE is probably comparable. I've lost lots of text typing in IE under MacOS X, though; there's a strange bug in the test widget that, let us say, does not inspire confidence.
Be's web browser almost never crashes and runs more smoothly than either MacOS X offering. This would be a clear and dramatic win for Be if it weren't for its lack of JavaScript or CSS support. Nowadays, most pages have little bits of JavaScript in them, and NetPositive simply doesn't handle it. On the other hand, if you always leave JavaScript off in fear of tiresome security problems and such, NetPositive is the ideal browser for you.
Opera exists for BeOS; I tried the beta and it was crashy and didn't work well. One of these days, I'll have to see if they have a release version out.
Stability
I've managed to crash both MacOS Beta (mainly by trying to run the OmniWeb browser's Beta 5 - moving to Beta 6 seems to have fixed the problem) and BeOS. But in normal use, both of them are roughly equivalent.
Application Support.
The clear winner has to be MacOS X. You can run Photoshop, Illustrator and other Mac applications; native web browsers that view contemporary web sites without sacrifice are available, albiet buggy.
Conclusion
It's hard to resist the sheer beauty of X. Once they get the bugs squashed, I think it will be a real ground-breaker of an OS.
I like JLG personally - he responds to his emails and has been very nice - so it pains me to report that the legendary bad-tempered Jobs has won this comparison. But he has, fair and square.
OS/X works fantastic on my G4/450 multi-processor, and the CPU monitor shows that both processors are working tirelessly on my behalf.
Only problem I have is that none of my video editing applications work well under Classic - hopefully Apple will have carbonized versions of iMovie and Final Cut (both of which I use) before release.
I checked out the Cube at an Apple dealer, and the ugly beige monitor they were running it on felt almost like an affront to the machine.
Strangely, I felt that almost as strongly when I brought home my shiny new G4/450 Multi-Processor a week or so later, and plugged it into my beige Sony 19".
I wonder how many $3,999 cinema displays they've sold to style-hungry people with more cash and flash than sense? Not to say I might not be one of them if I had a spare $ 3,999 floating around dying for a home...
(1) Go to the RAM desk, pick out two 512MB RAM chips @ $ 550 each = $ 1,100
(2) Pick out one of the Mac G4/500 multiprocessor systems ($3,500)
(3) While I'm in the systems area, pick up a nice new 21" flat screen Sony Trinitron monitor ($1,099)
(3) Grab an Adobe Dynamic Media Collection ($1,500).
(4) Swing over to the games area and pick up a fog generator (100), a Lego Mindstorms Robotics kit (200), and that bizarre looking twig game set thing ($130)
I've just blown $ 7,629 in 15 minutes. I THINK a Fry's Shopping Spree would just be too dangerous a gift idea. The only saving grace is that I don't think they stock the Apple Cinema Display:-).
D
PS Question for Fry's shoppers: What would you do if you need a 7.5vdc power supply but you need it to have a jack (so I can plug my Canon XL1 into) instead of a plug (to plug something into)? Drove me nuts yesterday - couldn't find anything, even at Fry's:-(.
I replaced my lovely but lousy Apple Pro keyboard with a new microCONNECTIONS lime cosmetic horror story, and about 90% of the problem magically cleared up. The other 10% seems to be an IE4 for MacOS X problem that other people have seen.
Time to get OmniWeb working... if it would only play nice and not bring down my system - it's done that twice so far.
Tenon wants $199 for the product during the beta phase, and apparently plans on increasing the cost significantly thereafter. (The $199 will give you the release version at no extra charge if you pay when receiving the beta).
Now, $200 is a healthy chunk of money. Even at OEM discounts, I don't think it's going to be attractive to port many applications relying on this type of support. So I don't think Apple has anything to worry about there.
The big question is "When is carbonized Photoshop arriving?" - because until we get it, I think there will be at least some doubt surrounding the platform.
Incidentally, I'm posting this from my Mac running OS/XBeta. If it weren't for the keyboard dropping characters all the time, I'd say it's darn near perfect other than non-support of video editing applications.
Slashdot Mirror
I would not call what Social Security provides a reasonable retirement income.
My parents are huge savers and don't need a dime from me or the government - and since they and I aren't particularly close, in all honesty I don't feel any obligation to them even if that wasn't the case.
I was addressing self-employed people because Slashdot has a large proportion of them, including myself less than a year ago. Believe me, I felt the horrendous pain of that 12.5% every year. That's why this is such a personal issue for me.
I have absolutely zero faith that what I collect from Social Security, if anything, will be enough to pay for a meal in a half-decent restaurant, let alone be capable of sustaining human life.
Social Security is 100% ripoff. Simple as that. Nobody should be forced into an investment programme that takes more and gives less.
Reagan cut taxes across the board, increased defense spending in a manner that was very effective in intimidating the soviets, and definitely helped destroy the Soviet empire. He also changed our perception of government substantially; now almost nobody talks about going to the bad old high-spending days of the 70s.
I'd say that's enough for any President - it's certainly a lot more than Clinton can claim credit for.
D
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Slashdot
I've been a bit puzzled by this myself. I suspect the reason is that the consensus among commentators is that Bush is a dummy and Gore is brilliant. Slashdot people tend to appreciate raw brainpower more than the average, so they can respect Gore's command of the issues. This is the way the race has been spun in most places.
At the same time, I don't think the slashdot consensus is accurate. Consider the following issues:
The Issues
Bush had the guts to put Social InSecurity on the table, which is a HUGE issue for any independent contractors who happen to be around here - if you want to be paying 12.5% tax for the rest of your life on a program that's not going to give you a dime when you retire, by all means vote for Gore. Granted, Bush doesn't go as far as I'd like, but at least I see a glimmer of hope in where he is headed.
Gore will only cut taxes for people who behave his way; Bush's tax cuts are across the board. That's why they go mainly to the top 1% of the nation; the top 1% pays more, so they get more back. If you're single and without kids, Bush's cuts will help you a darn sight more than Gore's. And I would expect that many slashdot readers are in income brackets where tax cuts would be quite attractive. And if you're not in them now, consider what might happen in a few years. Does anyone here seriously think of government as anything but a rampaging beast out to get every dime they can? The only way to tame the beast is to cut its food supply so it won't grow and envelop us all.
His statements in the debates on net censorship are appalling - sadly, Gore's record is equally bad, if not worse. Gore has a proven record of getting serious about cultural issues such as porn and XXX-rated music lyrics; I doubt Bush will push them with any degree of enthusiasm. I could be wrong, but I'd be extremely surprised if there was any advantage to free speech in voting for Gore.
There's a definite advantage in terms of net taxes in voting for Bush; I think he'll be much more protective of the net economy than Gore.
Personality
By all accounts, Bush has been quite successful in administrating a major state and building a policy consensus. Of course you can nibble at his record at the margins, but no politician does a perfect job anywhere. Bush came to office saying he would focus on certain issues, including education. He focused, and those areas have improved significantly.
I'd count this as the mark of a successful leader of men, not a dumbass. A successful leader doesn't have to be the smartest person on the block; instead, he has to be inspirational and know what principles to work on. I'm probably smarter than my boss, the person who runs the company I work for, but he has the skills needed to rouse the troops, and he adheres to the principles that make the company successful. You could say I'm like Gore and my boss is like Bush. Guess what? He does a darn sight better job than I would, because he has skills I lack.
Same with Gore and Bush. Gore strikes me as a playground bully; Bush is a concilitator. Who's going to do better at negotiating with Congress?
Inconsistency on the Issues
Gore has perfected the chameleon-like poses of Clinton. He's swung violently from the left to the right on a wide range of issues. Take the environment. In Earth in the Balance, he wanted to ban the internal combustion engine. Now he doesn't, because it would cost him votes. He's taken enormous donations from tobacco interests, and served them well in the senate; now he's as against tobacco as anyone.
Gore has put on a large number of masks in the campaign, from populist to conservative who won't change a thing from the Clinton years. He's particularly upsetting as a populist; the mask of "fighting for the american people" feels so phony you can almost see the rubber.
I don't think we've seen the Real Gore yet. I do think we've seen the real Bush. He's been extremely consistent in his positions throughout the campaign.
Governing Policies
Bush is a lot like Reagan: Create a program consisting of four or five major points, and once in office push like crazy for those points. Keep focused.
This is why Reagan, a supposedly dumb man, managed to get a heck of a lot more done than theoretically smarter Clinton, Carter and Bush Sr. The more you are inclined to get into details, like Gore does, the more bogged down you are doing the actual work of the Presidency.
I'm going to make a prediction: Bush will be a much more effective President than Clinton or Gore if he wins. He has a disciplined, well-managed team behind him, and he's focused on the issues he cares about. I think that's an enormous plus.
----
How'd they manage that?
I don't use Windows much, so I've only played around a little with 2000. If they've actually defeated DLL Hell after only 10-odd years of trying, I want to see it!
D
----
What's with all these companies trying to lure us in with their products and never telling us what the bill's going to be? Do they honestly think we'll let these things into our homes and then pay the $27,000 bill? (That being the price from the earlier article).
:-(.
Seriously, a lot of stuff can happen in one year. Has the price of this gone down any? I love the way they stick "low cost" in their product description, when you'd be way better off buying three CRTs and shoving them together if cost-effectiveness is the goal
D
----
epinions on poo-chi
AIBO has gotten a much better response:
epinions on Aibo
Hope that helps.
D
----
Actually, I think Rob got his Aibo pre-Andover - he traded it for Slashdot advertising, which is why you saw so many AIBO ads on Slashdot, even months after it sold out. Maybe Sony should have saved a few of the impressions for this next introduction?
D
----
I've read that the actual reason for the decrease in violence is a decrease in the number of people in the most violent demographics - that is, there are fewer teenagers than before due to the "baby bust" following the "baby boom". I know we now have a "mini-boom" again, but it will be a while before our adolescent population catches up again and starts breeding more crime.
I've never been comfortable with first-person shooters myself, but I think banning them would simply make them more attractive to kids. I see a heck of a lot of smoking around me despite the fact that smoking has proven to be a highly dangerous habit for as long as I can remember.
(I don't smoke or play first-person shooter games, simply because they don't appeal to me).
D
----
I recently bought a Compaq 5100 series machine that, of course, came with a legal copy of Microsoft Windows 98. I wiped the disk and installed Linux on it; it didn't work too well due to poor driver support, so I installed BeOS too. That was a little better, but not much.
Then I decided I'd really be better off selling the machine, since it performed poorly with both Linux and BeOS - I had an interested buyer, even - so I booted the recovery CD to reinstall Windows.
THE RECOVERY CD DID NOT CONTAIN A COPY OF WINDOWS. Instead, it contained references to a partition on my hard drive in which Windows was supposed to be hiding. Without this partition, no install.
Technical support had to send me a real Windows CD, which I haven't gotten around to installing yet (my sale fell through, since the buyer needed the machine right away). To be fair, the CD arrived promptly, even though they told me it would take two weeks. But that didn't erase the truly wretched experience.
Now, our friends at Microsoft might say that it serves me right for installing an alien operating system of evil on my system. At the same time, though, even if I was the world's biggest Windows fan, I would feel profoundly uneasy about this; what if the hard drive breaks down, for instance? What if I'd really like the gigabyte or so of space they're wasting on my hard drive back?
No, friends, this policy is profoundly consumer hostile. The "naked operating system page" is profoundly dishonest since it appears to be offering products that Microsoft is not actually selling.
Shameful.
D
----
I upgraded from Red Hat to SuSE 7 last night, and my IBM ThinkPad 770Z's X-windows configuration stopped working entirely - it gives me a totally blank screen and I have to restart - the usual ctrl-backspace won't work. I found the FN-key combination for changing from external to internal monitor garbled the display, and then I could ctrl-backspace - but that's still a long way away from getting an X-Windows system running.
:-)
Anyone know what might be wrong? I have a message in to SuSE technical support, but every little bit helps
Many thanks for any thoughts.
D
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If you look up ZX81 on eBay, there's another auction for two of them, all in pieces. So you have a choice :-).
D
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I think Sony owns a record label, so you could say they are the RIAA.
D
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ZX81 For Sale
(and others)
D
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In Windows98 we have the extremely annoying "sliding" menus. The idea, I guess, is to make the menus seem like physical objects through a strange time delay/movement combination.
I always hated that, even though the only time I've used it is when checking out Windows98 systems at Fry's.
D
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True - but even with a small dock, I felt the incursion of space was not going to look good for low-res screens.
When I got my machine, I resized the dock to about half its original size, and upped resolution from 1152x864 to 1024x768. I found that produced an excellent result.
D
----
One of the problems with OSX in my view is that it's not merciful to people with low-resolution screens. If you have something like an iBook, I'd say you pretty much have to hide the dock to have any spare screen space at all :-(.
I have a vision of Steve's office with his Cube and 22" Apple Cinema Display. I can't begrudge him either of those things, surely, but I have a feeling it affects his design sense to have a system with so much screen real estate. He probably has little mercy for iBook users.
Personally, I like keeping the dock around (and the taskbar in Windows which performs a similar function, albiet less designer-chic). But I did notice that Windows' auto-hide mode was every bit as obnoxious as it sounds like the Dock's is. It may just be an intractable problem to solve.
The main problem I've had with the Dock is that clicking in the transparent middle of icons seems like it should work, but in reality it won't. So I can click on the inside of the "e" in Microsoft Internet Explorer and become profoundly irritated that it won't come up. It took me several days to realize what was going on, and now I click on the solid part of the "e", but it still makes the system seem unreliable.
D
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How does the Dock feel unfinished to you? It seems awfully polished and slick to me. I'm not saying it works ideally - I've read the ARSTechnica article and its objections to the Dock as opposed to the Apple Menu et al, and for the most part I agree with them. But it feels like a release-quality product in terms of how it works.
:-(.
I could switch entirely to the new environment except that video editing applications (Final Cut and iMovie) simply do not work in X. At all. Pity since I spend most of my Mac-using time in them
Of course I'm a Unix geek as well as a Mac user, so the return of old faithful friends such as emacs helps make up for the dearth of native X applications, and of course the Unix directory structure is already familiar to me. That definitely helps my transition to the new system.
D
----
I think Apple will take market share from Windows due to OSX, but sadly I doubt that dominance is in the cards - Apple hardware is simply too expensive, and Jobs knows he can't make a viable business model out of cloning.
I'd like to see a reinvigourated Apple at 10-15% market share when OS X is successfully released and native software becomes available. That's good enough to be a tremendous turnaround for the company.
D
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Here's the difference.
If my memory serves, menus in Windows 2000 fade in and then pop away. This creates an irritating delay between the time you request a menu and the time you can use it.
Menus in MacOS X pop in and fade away. No irritating delay, and the fade serves as a way of highlighting the selection you made in the menu.
That kind of thoughtful detail is the difference between Windows and MacOS X. It may seem tiny to you, but it makes users happy, fantatically loyal, even.
Despite the shadow and fading, Windows 2000 is insignificatly different in look and feel from Windows 95. The same old start menu, the same old dull grey everywhere, the same old dialogue boxes with 100 tabs on them.
MacOS X is the same radical change to MacOS that WIndows 95 was to Windows. And I find it a lot more appealing than Windows 95.
It's beautiful, for one thing. Never underestimate the power of beauty. It's sold one heck of a lot of iMacs.
D
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When it comes to the marriage of art and technology, I think Jobs and friends did an awesome job with MacOS X.
What do you think of the complaints Mac users have had with the new system - missing Apple menu and so on? It's interesting how peripheral their concerns feel compared to a marriage between art and technology - they are talking about the day to day details, not Truth and Beauty.
Is it possible that "thinking arty" has hurt Jobs in the pure usability stakes?
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I've used both BeOS and MacOS X.
Polish.
The first thing you'll notice about MacOS X is how beautiful it is. The anti-aliased text looks drop-dead gorgeous on any high-resolution monitor. The photorealistic icons looks fantastic. The magnification effect in the dock is slick. Everything just looks magnificent; kudos to detail-meister Jobs.
Be's buttons look strange, and there's something about the text that's not quite right compared to a MacOS or even Windows system.
Usability.
I'd probably give a slight edge to Be here. The tracker has both a list of running applications and a start menu like launcher. MacOS X relies on a combination of the Dock and applications directory for these things.
At the same time, both are not hard to find your way around. I'd give the edge to Be, but in the end, an impartial user would have a hard time not to be seduced by the beauty of X.
Web Browser Experience.
Both browsers (IE and OmniWeb) available for X crash with a giddy abandon. OmniWeb is worse than Netscape under Linux; IE is probably comparable. I've lost lots of text typing in IE under MacOS X, though; there's a strange bug in the test widget that, let us say, does not inspire confidence.
Be's web browser almost never crashes and runs more smoothly than either MacOS X offering. This would be a clear and dramatic win for Be if it weren't for its lack of JavaScript or CSS support. Nowadays, most pages have little bits of JavaScript in them, and NetPositive simply doesn't handle it. On the other hand, if you always leave JavaScript off in fear of tiresome security problems and such, NetPositive is the ideal browser for you.
Opera exists for BeOS; I tried the beta and it was crashy and didn't work well. One of these days, I'll have to see if they have a release version out.
Stability
I've managed to crash both MacOS Beta (mainly by trying to run the OmniWeb browser's Beta 5 - moving to Beta 6 seems to have fixed the problem) and BeOS. But in normal use, both of them are roughly equivalent.
Application Support.
The clear winner has to be MacOS X. You can run Photoshop, Illustrator and other Mac applications; native web browsers that view contemporary web sites without sacrifice are available, albiet buggy.
Conclusion
It's hard to resist the sheer beauty of X. Once they get the bugs squashed, I think it will be a real ground-breaker of an OS.
I like JLG personally - he responds to his emails and has been very nice - so it pains me to report that the legendary bad-tempered Jobs has won this comparison. But he has, fair and square.
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OS/X works fantastic on my G4/450 multi-processor, and the CPU monitor shows that both processors are working tirelessly on my behalf.
Only problem I have is that none of my video editing applications work well under Classic - hopefully Apple will have carbonized versions of iMovie and Final Cut (both of which I use) before release.
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I checked out the Cube at an Apple dealer, and the ugly beige monitor they were running it on felt almost like an affront to the machine.
...
Strangely, I felt that almost as strongly when I brought home my shiny new G4/450 Multi-Processor a week or so later, and plugged it into my beige Sony 19".
I wonder how many $3,999 cinema displays they've sold to style-hungry people with more cash and flash than sense? Not to say I might not be one of them if I had a spare $ 3,999 floating around dying for a home
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(1) Go to the RAM desk, pick out two 512MB RAM chips @ $ 550 each = $ 1,100
:-).
:-(.
(2) Pick out one of the Mac G4/500 multiprocessor systems ($3,500)
(3) While I'm in the systems area, pick up a nice new 21" flat screen Sony Trinitron monitor ($1,099)
(3) Grab an Adobe Dynamic Media Collection ($1,500).
(4) Swing over to the games area and pick up a fog generator (100), a Lego Mindstorms Robotics kit (200), and that bizarre looking twig game set thing ($130)
I've just blown $ 7,629 in 15 minutes. I THINK a Fry's Shopping Spree would just be too dangerous a gift idea. The only saving grace is that I don't think they stock the Apple Cinema Display
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PS Question for Fry's shoppers: What would you do if you need a 7.5vdc power supply but you need it to have a jack (so I can plug my Canon XL1 into) instead of a plug (to plug something into)? Drove me nuts yesterday - couldn't find anything, even at Fry's
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I replaced my lovely but lousy Apple Pro keyboard with a new microCONNECTIONS lime cosmetic horror story, and about 90% of the problem magically cleared up. The other 10% seems to be an IE4 for MacOS X problem that other people have seen.
... if it would only play nice and not bring down my system - it's done that twice so far.
Time to get OmniWeb working
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Tenon wants $199 for the product during the beta phase, and apparently plans on increasing the cost significantly thereafter. (The $199 will give you the release version at no extra charge if you pay when receiving the beta).
Now, $200 is a healthy chunk of money. Even at OEM discounts, I don't think it's going to be attractive to port many applications relying on this type of support. So I don't think Apple has anything to worry about there.
The big question is "When is carbonized Photoshop arriving?" - because until we get it, I think there will be at least some doubt surrounding the platform.
Incidentally, I'm posting this from my Mac running OS/XBeta. If it weren't for the keyboard dropping characters all the time, I'd say it's darn near perfect other than non-support of video editing applications.
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