Just getting more people to vote won't fix the problem.
There have to be good candidates to vote for. If both candidates want to trample your freedom, it doesn't matter if you get lots of people to vote.
Eh? What's that you say? Become a candidate yourself?
This seems fine and good, except that it takes big bucks to get elected. The powerful have seen to that. Where do the $$ come from to finance a campaign? From the corporations. In order to get the big campaign contributions, you have to already bend over for the corporations, making you part of the problem.
My point: getting more people to vote isn't the only problem. We need to reform our system. What happens each time campaign finance reform comes up?
Microsoft makes in money like the auto makers make thier money. By constant maintanance and upgrades. Cars are made to fall apart.....Then they buy a Honda and get Linux on their computer. If Hardware companies are smart (IBM, Compaq, Dell, HP, etc listen up) They can sell great hardware running this opperating system...
Yeah, except those hardware companies also make money from planned obsolescence. Dell in particular. Their motherboards seem designed to limit expansion possibilities. Particularly in regard to memory. IDE controllers that don't support big drives, etc. Why would a PC have an upper limit on RAM expansion that is only 2 times what the machine ships with? (i.e. back in 1995, a 32MB machine limited to 64 MB. A recent machine with 128 MB limited to 256 MB. etc.)
In contrast inexpensive machines built by mom-and-pop shops (my Linux machine at home) typically have 768 MB or higher RAM limitations, and that was three years ago.
Surely I'm not the only one to notice this trend in PCs?
Yes, it was awesome. I've used ClarisWorks for 10 years. Prior to that, other Claris products for Mac. i.e. MacDraw, MacWrite.
I remember a friend saying many years ago "In ClarisWorks you can do anything!" And he's right.
The drawing surface is really a poor man's page layout program. You can set up multiple text boxes where the text will overflow from one box to the next. Set up complex multiple column layouts, and when you edit text in an earlier box, the text "flows" throughout the "linked" text boxes. Setup multiple "chains" of linked textboxes if you wish. Each text box has full word processing features. Wrap text around odd shaped pictures. Draw complex pictures. Paint pictures. (Paint is pixmap based, Draw is vector-object based.) Make slideshows.
Put spreadsheets into wordprocessing, to form tables. Directly draw or paint inside word processing documents. Even play a QuickTime movie inside of a word processing document. (It prints as a still image.) Spinning logos in letterhead or slideshows.
In fact, the biggest thing that I thought ClarisWorks lacked was that its pixel manipulation (i.e. Paint) is not more Photoshop like.
Re:I want my MS-Office (no, really...)
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 2
For all their faults [Microsoft] do make a nice OS and a nice Office package.
So could others. If we had a truly competitive marketplace.
MS is not the only company who knows how to make good software. The problem is that there is a big lack of incentive to invest in a product that has to compete with MS, when they are a monopolist. Everyone knows better. All they have to do is give their product away, for awhile, until you die. Special!!!!!! Six month coupon for FREE!!! Office XP! included with Windows XP!!!! Be sure to get yours today!!!!!! Limited time offer!!!! (until our competition dies)
Re:Gobe's liscensing terms actually get it
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 2
ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks) also gets it. Read the AppleWorks (or older ClarisWorks) license. If your employer buys it for you, they also let you install it at home or on your laptop.
They really seem to get the reality of the way people want to use the licensed product.
I paid real money for ClarisWorks, many years ago, for my Mac. It was a fantastic investment. Inexpensive upgrades. Reasonable licensing. NO SERIALIZATION nonsense, or copy protection, no mandatory registration, etc. Just try it. When AppleWorks or ClarisWorks is launched for the first time and asks for your name and serial number, just leave it blank and click OK. Yes, really. Try it. It's worked this way for years.
AppleWorks (and older ClarisWorks) runs on both Mac and Windows -- and serial number is not needed with either. I can say from personal experience.
They get it with the licensing. Most reasonable people don't mind paying a reasonable price in real money for an outstanding product.
On a similar note, I think The Kompany also gets it. A long time ago, so did Borland. Ever read Borland's "no nonsense license agreement"? It was in plain english, and readable.
By contrast MS makes their licensing programs vague. You never can be sure if you're in compliance. Suppose hypothetically, I have 5 workstations that are used by 8 people. Do I need 5 licenses or 8? Well, the only way I've found to correctly interpret MS's licenses is to interpret them in whatever way is most favorable to MS in terms of $$. What if the 5 workstations run the software from a central server. Do I need 5 licenses or 8? And don't even dream about a license that allows you to take your work home with you to your personal computer when using MS. Or to take your personal copy in to the office. What if I have 10 workstations shared by 5 people? Need 5 licenses or 10? What if every engineer has 3 computers in his workspace, why can't I install Product-X on each workstation for convenience? It still only benefits one person. But nooooooooo. You must get 3 seperate MS licenses.
4. Rate each codec against the original and comment on the defects. Listen to each of the codecs and rate each one in comparison with the original. Use a 1.0 to 5.0 scale, as described below:
5.0 = imperceptible (not perceptible)
4.0 = perceptible but not annoying
3.0 = slightly annoying
2.0 = annoying
1.0 = very annoying
They left out some important options. For example:
0.0 = extremely annoying, but imperceptible
-1.0 = the music is annoying
-2.0 = how do I compile the decoder again?
But it reminds me of...
Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
Feel free to suggest troll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past trolls first.
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Decoding errors, variations in speakers, dynamic IPs, firewalls, amplifier differences. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Yeah, but having MPW sure gave you a lot of power. The ability to
rm *.o
Powerful scripting. Tools like sed and awk. File globbing. etc, etc.
While I would agree that these things are not what typical Mac users would do, I would point out that MPW didn't ship with the system either. You had to add it.
And yes, I know about third party (mac) extensions to let you select all files matching a wildcard pattern. Similar features now exist in KDE.
DOS was and _is_ one of the best and cleanest operating systems to learn about the intel architecture. Where else can you issue BIOS interrupts, and play around with system memory?
An excellent point.
Could it be that a whole new generation will never learn the deep secrets? Have the barriers to low level experimentation become so high as to keep many people out?
Well, maybe not. On second thought. If you have a seperate "labrat" machine to experiment on, you can play with boot loaders, primitive OSes, OS implementation, BIOS functions, etc. But your point is still good. In the past, you didn't necessarily need a seperate "labrat" computer. But that is balanced by the fact that seperate "labrat" machines can now be had for very cheap. Probably under $100-$200.
Another point, I dont think you can ever have a successful operating system without any command prompt. Copying and moving files can never be as easy using a dumb GUI file manager.
I agree with your first sentence. But I can't agree with your second about easy. Especially on your choice of copy/move files. There are other areas of gui's which are much easier to complain about. I wouldn't want to take away anyone's non-gui tools, but don't take away my gui's. I grew up with them and have used them for 18 years now. But I couldn't do without CLI either. I just don't see it as an either/or choice. GUIs are way more productive for some things, but not do to:
Isn't this basically Security Through Obscurity. In other words, the security is entirely dependant on the secrecy. Once anyone knows the secret, through any means, all security completely vanishes. And worse, you probably won't / can't know when the secret becomes known and when an attack could be imminent.
This may be sneaky. But it isn't any real security. Decoy systems may be okay. But the real system needs to also be secure.
Maybe there is hope in the future. Perhaps all corporations will merge into one single gigantic corporation that controls everything. Then this corporation will infringe its own patents and compete with itself. Maybe it will then sue itself out of existance.
No, I didn't know this. But (given sufficient processing power) can mpeg4 also produce a given bandwidth in real-time! It's not that I want the mpeg4 to limit itself to a playback of 128 Kbps, but I want the encoding process to produce 128 Kbps.
This opens up the interesting question (can of worms?) of how do you pre-determine (calculate) the processing power required to product X bits-per-second? So you can pick which embedded processor to use in your new Phone-O-Matic design?
I agree that you should be able to open the file with any compatible application. But I think that each individual document should be tagged with the default application. So if I click this Jpeg it opens in Jpeg-O-Matic. But if I click on that Jpeg, it opens in Jpeg-Mangler. Hence the need to retain the "creator", although I would call it something else, such as app-to-launch. Yet I can drag-drop any jpeg to any jpeg-app. Or I can right-click on any jpeg and pick Open With.
Similar to your renaming the file extension to fool the software, I can do the same on the Mac. Change the filetype of a jpeg file to say text. Also change the creator to SimpleText so it opens using that (i.e. mac counterpart to notepad). The bytes in the file are still jpeg.
The point here is not that you can't fool the system. The point is that using file extension to indicate both the type of data in the file and also what application to launch is stupid and primitive. The mac uses no file extensions. The new OS can use the file extension if the type and creator fields are no set. I think this is a great design compromise.
I understand that hardware is the best way to do it. But Mpeg4 seems designed to solve a different problem -- as another poster points out. That is, the problem of fitting in minimum space.
What a sat phone needs is a way to fit a fixed bandwidth. What happens if a certian segment of your live feed, after encoding, no longer fits into XXX Kbps? What is needed is an encoding algorithm designed to fit a fixed bandwidth -- which is a very different design goal.
Though it would require massive hardware upgrades, why can't we get some low-earth orbit sats up there that are dedicated for low-latency high-bandwidth communications?
I was thinking about that too.
You must have a network of them. Enough so that one is always within reach. You must track them. You have to point your antenna at the right one, or use sufficient (still not much) power to reach whichever one is nearby. Manage hand off to different sats as they pass out of range. Track where you are at so someone can call you back, and which sat you're connected to.
It seems like you begin to design a system with complexity approaching that of GSM. (i.e. cell phones)
Yes, I know all that. I'm a 1984 Mac veteran, and even a one-time Lisa user. Also a onetime Mac developer.
But I'm getting at deeper design issues when I say no right click and no Properties. Another one I could get at, and it is really much deeper, is lack of a "focus". Something that all modern gui's have. In fact, one of the few innovations to actually come from MS. Because of a "focus", you can actually completely run Windows without a mouse. Its much easier to add great new ideas to a new system when copying from an existing system, than to get those ideas into the original system to begin with. Hindsight.
Not that I fault the original designers. Designing something in the early 80's for release in Jan 1984, they did a remarkable job -- especially for hardware of the time.
Use a third party tool such as the outstanding FileTyper. You can create specialized "AutoTypers" that you drag and drop files to, and it changes types/creators in a preset way. And it's extremely flexible. You can set conditions, such as "if this file ends in.html, then make it this type and that creator."
If this wasn't a Mac, I would make the type/creator easily editable in the "Properties" dialog box.
Slashdot Mirror
Just getting more people to vote won't fix the problem.
There have to be good candidates to vote for. If both candidates want to trample your freedom, it doesn't matter if you get lots of people to vote.
Eh? What's that you say? Become a candidate yourself?
This seems fine and good, except that it takes big bucks to get elected. The powerful have seen to that. Where do the $$ come from to finance a campaign? From the corporations. In order to get the big campaign contributions, you have to already bend over for the corporations, making you part of the problem.
My point: getting more people to vote isn't the only problem. We need to reform our system. What happens each time campaign finance reform comes up?
Microsoft makes in money like the auto makers make thier money. By constant maintanance and upgrades. Cars are made to fall apart.....Then they buy a Honda and get Linux on their computer. If Hardware companies are smart (IBM, Compaq, Dell, HP, etc listen up) They can sell great hardware running this opperating system...
Yeah, except those hardware companies also make money from planned obsolescence. Dell in particular. Their motherboards seem designed to limit expansion possibilities. Particularly in regard to memory. IDE controllers that don't support big drives, etc. Why would a PC have an upper limit on RAM expansion that is only 2 times what the machine ships with? (i.e. back in 1995, a 32MB machine limited to 64 MB. A recent machine with 128 MB limited to 256 MB. etc.)
In contrast inexpensive machines built by mom-and-pop shops (my Linux machine at home) typically have 768 MB or higher RAM limitations, and that was three years ago.
Surely I'm not the only one to notice this trend in PCs?
>>"144 PB should be enough for anybody."
;)
>>- Bowie J. Poag, November 7, 2001
>*sigh*, how easily people forget the habits of geeks and pr0n!
Forget pr0n. Given the increasing size of successive releases, wouldn't it be good if something similar were implemented by Microsoft?
Yes, it was awesome. I've used ClarisWorks for 10 years. Prior to that, other Claris products for Mac. i.e. MacDraw, MacWrite.
I remember a friend saying many years ago "In ClarisWorks you can do anything!" And he's right.
The drawing surface is really a poor man's page layout program. You can set up multiple text boxes where the text will overflow from one box to the next. Set up complex multiple column layouts, and when you edit text in an earlier box, the text "flows" throughout the "linked" text boxes. Setup multiple "chains" of linked textboxes if you wish. Each text box has full word processing features. Wrap text around odd shaped pictures. Draw complex pictures. Paint pictures. (Paint is pixmap based, Draw is vector-object based.) Make slideshows.
Put spreadsheets into wordprocessing, to form tables. Directly draw or paint inside word processing documents. Even play a QuickTime movie inside of a word processing document. (It prints as a still image.) Spinning logos in letterhead or slideshows.
In fact, the biggest thing that I thought ClarisWorks lacked was that its pixel manipulation (i.e. Paint) is not more Photoshop like.
For all their faults [Microsoft] do make a nice OS and a nice Office package.
So could others. If we had a truly competitive marketplace.
MS is not the only company who knows how to make good software. The problem is that there is a big lack of incentive to invest in a product that has to compete with MS, when they are a monopolist. Everyone knows better. All they have to do is give their product away, for awhile, until you die. Special!!!!!! Six month coupon for FREE!!! Office XP! included with Windows XP!!!! Be sure to get yours today!!!!!! Limited time offer!!!! (until our competition dies)
ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks) also gets it. Read the AppleWorks (or older ClarisWorks) license. If your employer buys it for you, they also let you install it at home or on your laptop.
They really seem to get the reality of the way people want to use the licensed product.
I paid real money for ClarisWorks, many years ago, for my Mac. It was a fantastic investment. Inexpensive upgrades. Reasonable licensing. NO SERIALIZATION nonsense, or copy protection, no mandatory registration, etc. Just try it. When AppleWorks or ClarisWorks is launched for the first time and asks for your name and serial number, just leave it blank and click OK. Yes, really. Try it. It's worked this way for years.
AppleWorks (and older ClarisWorks) runs on both Mac and Windows -- and serial number is not needed with either. I can say from personal experience.
They get it with the licensing. Most reasonable people don't mind paying a reasonable price in real money for an outstanding product.
On a similar note, I think The Kompany also gets it. A long time ago, so did Borland. Ever read Borland's "no nonsense license agreement"? It was in plain english, and readable.
By contrast MS makes their licensing programs vague. You never can be sure if you're in compliance. Suppose hypothetically, I have 5 workstations that are used by 8 people. Do I need 5 licenses or 8? Well, the only way I've found to correctly interpret MS's licenses is to interpret them in whatever way is most favorable to MS in terms of $$. What if the 5 workstations run the software from a central server. Do I need 5 licenses or 8? And don't even dream about a license that allows you to take your work home with you to your personal computer when using MS. Or to take your personal copy in to the office. What if I have 10 workstations shared by 5 people? Need 5 licenses or 10? What if every engineer has 3 computers in his workspace, why can't I install Product-X on each workstation for convenience? It still only benefits one person. But nooooooooo. You must get 3 seperate MS licenses.
How's this informative? This link is in the very short article.
It's informative because moderators don't read the article. (At least they read the post.)
Doesn't everyone start posting or moderating prior to reading the article?
5.0 = imperceptible (not perceptible)
4.0 = perceptible but not annoying
3.0 = slightly annoying
2.0 = annoying
1.0 = very annoying
They left out some important options. For example:
0.0 = extremely annoying, but imperceptible
-1.0 = the music is annoying
-2.0 = how do I compile the decoder again?
But it reminds me of...
Bill Gates
Steve Ballmer
Craig Mundie
MS points you to their new snazzy WinXP-.NET achitecture and offers to make that all go away.
I wasn't clear on what you mean. You mean, make all the existing software you've invested in go away?
These are about the only commercial "features" you get with netscape over mozilla.
Looking over your list of features, it doesn't look like it should be very difficult to implement those features into Mozilla.
(Score: -2, Clue Challenged)
the choices will be 0, 1, and Maybe
So does this mean that computers and consumer electronics devices' power switches would stop being labeled with just 0 and 1?
Doesn't it make sense that your Ternary computer from BestBuy would have a three state power switch?
MacOS did fine without a CLI until v10
Yeah, but having MPW sure gave you a lot of power. The ability to
rm *.o
Powerful scripting. Tools like sed and awk. File globbing. etc, etc.
While I would agree that these things are not what typical Mac users would do, I would point out that MPW didn't ship with the system either. You had to add it.
And yes, I know about third party (mac) extensions to let you select all files matching a wildcard pattern. Similar features now exist in KDE.
DOS was and _is_ one of the best and cleanest operating systems to learn about the intel architecture. Where else can you issue BIOS interrupts, and play around with system memory?
An excellent point.
Could it be that a whole new generation will never learn the deep secrets? Have the barriers to low level experimentation become so high as to keep many people out?
Well, maybe not. On second thought. If you have a seperate "labrat" machine to experiment on, you can play with boot loaders, primitive OSes, OS implementation, BIOS functions, etc. But your point is still good. In the past, you didn't necessarily need a seperate "labrat" computer. But that is balanced by the fact that seperate "labrat" machines can now be had for very cheap. Probably under $100-$200.
Another point, I dont think you can ever have a successful operating system without any command prompt. Copying and moving files can never be as easy using a dumb GUI file manager.
I agree with your first sentence. But I can't agree with your second about easy. Especially on your choice of copy/move files. There are other areas of gui's which are much easier to complain about. I wouldn't want to take away anyone's non-gui tools, but don't take away my gui's. I grew up with them and have used them for 18 years now. But I couldn't do without CLI either. I just don't see it as an either/or choice. GUIs are way more productive for some things, but not do to:
rm *.o
Isn't this basically Security Through Obscurity. In other words, the security is entirely dependant on the secrecy. Once anyone knows the secret, through any means, all security completely vanishes. And worse, you probably won't / can't know when the secret becomes known and when an attack could be imminent.
This may be sneaky. But it isn't any real security. Decoy systems may be okay. But the real system needs to also be secure.
This is getting ridiculous.
Maybe there is hope in the future. Perhaps all corporations will merge into one single gigantic corporation that controls everything. Then this corporation will infringe its own patents and compete with itself. Maybe it will then sue itself out of existance.
No, I didn't know this. But (given sufficient processing power) can mpeg4 also produce a given bandwidth in real-time! It's not that I want the mpeg4 to limit itself to a playback of 128 Kbps, but I want the encoding process to produce 128 Kbps.
This opens up the interesting question (can of worms?) of how do you pre-determine (calculate) the processing power required to product X bits-per-second? So you can pick which embedded processor to use in your new Phone-O-Matic design?
I agree that you should be able to open the file with any compatible application. But I think that each individual document should be tagged with the default application. So if I click this Jpeg it opens in Jpeg-O-Matic. But if I click on that Jpeg, it opens in Jpeg-Mangler. Hence the need to retain the "creator", although I would call it something else, such as app-to-launch. Yet I can drag-drop any jpeg to any jpeg-app. Or I can right-click on any jpeg and pick Open With.
Similar to your renaming the file extension to fool the software, I can do the same on the Mac. Change the filetype of a jpeg file to say text. Also change the creator to SimpleText so it opens using that (i.e. mac counterpart to notepad). The bytes in the file are still jpeg.
The point here is not that you can't fool the system. The point is that using file extension to indicate both the type of data in the file and also what application to launch is stupid and primitive. The mac uses no file extensions. The new OS can use the file extension if the type and creator fields are no set. I think this is a great design compromise.
I understand that hardware is the best way to do it. But Mpeg4 seems designed to solve a different problem -- as another poster points out. That is, the problem of fitting in minimum space.
What a sat phone needs is a way to fit a fixed bandwidth. What happens if a certian segment of your live feed, after encoding, no longer fits into XXX Kbps? What is needed is an encoding algorithm designed to fit a fixed bandwidth -- which is a very different design goal.
Though it would require massive hardware upgrades, why can't we get some low-earth orbit sats up there that are dedicated for low-latency high-bandwidth communications?
I was thinking about that too.
You must have a network of them. Enough so that one is always within reach. You must track them. You have to point your antenna at the right one, or use sufficient (still not much) power to reach whichever one is nearby. Manage hand off to different sats as they pass out of range. Track where you are at so someone can call you back, and which sat you're connected to.
It seems like you begin to design a system with complexity approaching that of GSM. (i.e. cell phones)
Yes, I know all that. I'm a 1984 Mac veteran, and even a one-time Lisa user. Also a onetime Mac developer.
But I'm getting at deeper design issues when I say no right click and no Properties. Another one I could get at, and it is really much deeper, is lack of a "focus". Something that all modern gui's have. In fact, one of the few innovations to actually come from MS. Because of a "focus", you can actually completely run Windows without a mouse. Its much easier to add great new ideas to a new system when copying from an existing system, than to get those ideas into the original system to begin with. Hindsight.
Not that I fault the original designers. Designing something in the early 80's for release in Jan 1984, they did a remarkable job -- especially for hardware of the time.
I'm genuinely happy for you that using the keyboard eases your hand pain.
But don't dare suggest taking away my mouse. I'll fight you.
This is very short sighted.
I like both CLI and GUI tools. I use both. I would not let anyone take away either one from me.
There are tools, such as FileTyper to change them en-masse.
If Apple has a "Properties" dialog box, my suggestion would be: Select all the files. Right-click, Properties, change type and/or creator.
Of course Mac has niether a Properties nor a right-click.
I'm not saying that the Mac is perfect. I'm saying that it has solved some problems that others today are completely forgetting about.
Several solutions.
.html, then make it this type and that creator."
Drag and drop the file onto IE.
Use a third party tool such as the outstanding FileTyper. You can create specialized "AutoTypers" that you drag and drop files to, and it changes types/creators in a preset way. And it's extremely flexible. You can set conditions, such as "if this file ends in
If this wasn't a Mac, I would make the type/creator easily editable in the "Properties" dialog box.