Let me get this straight: You want an institution where you are given an exam, and if you pass it you get the degree? No books, no classes, no labs, no instructors unless you ask for them specifically? I believe you are looking for The University of Phoenix at best, or a diploma mill at worst.
If you seriously think that your proposed approach would result in a quality education, you're delusional.
Well, there is a lot of DRM baggage associated with HDMI - so this could be Apple's attempt to do an end-run around the MPAA. In my mind this is a GOOD thing. We still get digital output, but we can use it as we see fit. Unless the Mini-DP also includes built-in DRM, in which case we're all screwed.
What's wrong with having an Appletalk input? Many older printers, which are still perfectly functional and don't need to be replaced, use Appletalk. Why force people to buy a new printer just because they got a new operating system?
Edit to reflect your personal favorite dead technology. And get off my lawn.
We were getting dropped about once per phone call. After a quick visit to the nearest AT&T store (with a printout listing recent dropped calls in hand) we fixed the problem - by replacing our phones with iPhone 3GS models. AT&T seems to be selectively dropping non-iPhone users to keep bandwidth available. We had just resigned earlier this year so were stuck with them no matter what.
I figure if I can't solve the issue I might as well be a part of the problem.
There's a pay-per-use or an unlimited plan. There isn't an in-between. I use enough that the pay-per-use plan makes no sense, economically. But if you're arguing that I am using the wrong plan, then by the NYT article's position there are 20 million AT&T smartphone users who are also on the wrong plan. And we're still using 10x less resources than the 9 million people on iPhones. This is supposed to be my fault how?
I paid AT&T for phone service, with data as a bonus. Thanks to network congestion primarily attributable to iPhone users, I can't even rely on my phone service, let alone data. If this is not an actionable issue I would love to have a lawyer explain to me why: AT&T clearly sold data plans for more phones than their bandwidth could accommodate, and this has negatively impacted the voice phone service millions of people signed up for.
No, they aren't. I have a Nokia smartphone on AT&T. I pay the same per month for data access as an iPhone user. Yet my phone (by my own usage estimates, and by the NYT article claims) uses 10x less resources than the iPhone. So why am I not paying 10x less for net access?
I still get the added benefit of dropping almost every single goddamned call I have made or received since the iPhone 3G model came out earlier this year - that was the start of my problems with AT&T. Before that I had an occasional drop but now it's a miracle if my wife or I get through a 5 minute conversation without a dropped call. We live in a large metro area, and according to the AT&T service folks we have no less than 4 towers within close range of us. Our service remains unacceptable despite this.
The most painful part is that we dropped landline service 6-7 years ago to get AT&T off our backs. Then they went and bought our wireless carrier. Thanks, AT&T.
Wondering here, now that the NYT has gotten the company to admit that the iPhone is causing so many problems for everyone on the service, how long before a class action suit is filed? I certainly would like to be compensated for the absolute shit service I am currently relieving - it's far less than the service I am actually paying for.
Given that I work for the government, and have to deal with the IT spending regulations, I thought you all might like an actual example of how this works.
Scenario: The keyboard I am using broke. I want a new keyboard. Our tech checks our budget and finds we have some IT money. (Any IT spending has to be earmarked as such, when requesting grant money to begin with; if we have no IT money we can't buy anything computer related, no matter how much actual cash we have left to spend total.)
I pick the keyboard I want (Apple wired keyboard, with number pad - because according to our CIO Bluetooth is a "wireless device" and thus can't be allowed in the building for fear someone will steal my precious data).
Our tech submits a request for purchase. The minions in the purchasing department check the request, check our budget, and then if everything is kosher they submit it for bids using a government ordering website.
Approved companies make bids based on the equipment requested. "Approved" means any company vetted by the government to be a company that does not support or have dealings with enemies of the US, and companies that are minority-owned or woman-owned or qualify for some other feel-good-PC affirmative-action equal-opportunity category-owned are preferred. If an approved company exists which can make the bid, great. We collect bids. If there is no such company (for example, a supplier exists but is not yet in the approved list) we have more paperwork to get the supplier checked out and added to the list of potential approved companies prior to obtaining bids.
The lowest bid is generally the one accepted. When this happens, the order is placed. Purchasing arranges payment, the supplier arranges delivery, and in only a short matter of about a month my new keyboard arrives. The paperwork in the end, on our part, was seven or eight sheets of paper including the order forms, the copies of the bids, the budget justifications, etc. (Good thing the Paperwork Reduction Act was implemented, I'd hate to see how bad it was before that!)
Effectively, what just happened is that I wanted an Apple keyboard, so the federal government paid a third party to place an order with Apple to ship the keyboard to me. The packing slip even had the Apple Store order number included. Same thing happens when we want a Dell or an HP computer - a third party places the order with Dell or HP, we can't simply call up Apple or Dell or HP and make the order ourselves, because if we did that, the third-party supplier wouldn't be able to take a cut of the costs.
Because of this, we quite often have problems when we want specific items, such as customizing computers to meet specific needs. Or, in my case, desiring a keyboard with a number pad. I am now the proud owner of a government-purchased Apple keyboard, sans number pad, thanks to the federal IT purchasing process. Forget about returning it - that would take even more paperwork than the ordering did.
It isn't that the yellow circles are not useful so much as it is that even on the interactive coverage map (which you can find here) you can see that an area is covered, but NO indication of which service provider covers that region. My in-laws are looking for home internet service; they don't want to pay for cable and don't have any phone other than cellular. I can see that SOME company covers their home if they went with WISP, but damned if I'm going to spend the next three hours combing through the listings trying to guess which one it is.
(Not to mention it took me a long time just to find the live map in the first place thanks to the horrible page design...)
This article ignores the real reason web apps suck: You have to be connected to the web to use them.
Developers keep forgetting that not everyone has broadband access, an iPhone in their pocket, or ready access to WiFi networks. Bandwidth isn't cheap, it isn't always reliable and it isn't always there. I mean, come on - I like Google Maps as much as the next guy, but if I find myself stuck in an out-of-service zone I know I can rely on the road atlas in my car.
I think web apps are great for what they do but I don't think anyone should rely on them alone. If cost is the major issue with desktop apps, open source is the answer.
Pretty much nails it right there. The system is a PowerEdge 1300, dual-500mhz PIII (single processor when I got it); it has a SCSI HDD, and two CD drives. Depending on which IDE slot the CDs were located, the system either would not boot from CD or would not be able to locate the install files post-boot.
I had so much fun building a kernel that worked. Even more fun trying to get that kernel onto a boot floppy. And when Slack 10 came out, I had gotten my hands on a second processor, so I had to go through the whole thing again - while enabling SMP.
When I did install Ubuntu on it, I expected similar issues, but it went like a dream. For an old-ass computer it's been damn useful. And for what it's worth, no, I don't miss compiling my own kernels.
First Linux distro I tried for my own box was Slackware 9, and I did it on purpose after installing a RedHat build for a server I had been asked to maintain. I wanted to run Slack on my own box because I felt it would make me learn more about Linux than RedHat did.
I stuck with it through Slack 11, and it was a pain in the ass - my beat-up crusty Dell PowerEdge server gave me fits trying to install, because it would boot from the CD-ROM and start the installer, but the install program wouldn't mount the CD it was running from to finish installing after launch... talk about a WTF. It took me forever to figure out a workaround, and every upgrade I dealt with the same issues.
I finally said to hell with it, installed Ubuntu Server and haven't had an issue with the machine since. I admit it was painful to dump the work I'd put into making Slackware work on that computer, but not as painful as keeping it working.
That's funny. I downloaded Opera 10 to test out a bug I'd noticed in v. 9.X on my own site: Anything that has an outline attribute set is drawn incorrectly. I have a dropdown list with an image below it; the image has an outline. When the dropdown is rendered, the outline of the underlying image is drawn superimposed on the dropdown. (A border on the image is drawn as expected - only outline is affected). Guess what? Opera 10 still shows the same behavior. Hell, this works in every browser I've tested that supports outline - except Opera.
Curious, I did a search for "opera outline css bug" and found this page from 2003 reporting an issue. Page works fine in Firefox. In Opera 10 it displays some weird behavior - outlines are drawn, but not removed after hover; some outlines partially disappear, and one never appears.
Opera 10 might pass Acid3 but that doesn't mean it's perfect. What matters is not whether a browser passes these relatively arbitrary tests; what matters is whether the browser is usable on a well-designed web page. I'd much rather see people get excited about compliance. I'd be a lot happier if developers would spend time working to fix longstanding bugs, and spend spare time working on other issues like the Acid tests. Real-world performance is much more important than bragging rights.
Gee, maybe someone can come up with an Acid4 test, which consists of nothing except a long list of single rendering tests based on the W3C documentation for CCS1, CSS2 and CSS3...
You don't see a reason to own a Wii? My wife is not a gamer by any means, but I have a Wii because my wife wanted one after playing it at a friend's house. This is why they are selling. Nintendo figured out that "looking like a fool" while playing can actually be fun for non-gamers. The Wii is in high demand in senior citizens homes, for pete's sake, because using the controller is so simple and natural that even your grandma can see the appeal.
To make this platform successful Nintendo doesn't need a huge number of amazing games. All they need are a small number of good games that appeal to the target audience. Guess what: You and I aren't it. Your grandma and my wife are the target here, and it's working.
On a personal note, I'm quite pleased with the machine. I don't feel that it's underpowered for the games I play (if I want real computing power I look to PC games anyway). I really like that the majority of the popular games for the platform are balanced well enough to allow me to play on an approximately equal level with my peers, or with non-gamers or novice gamers such as my wife, or my nephews, or even my parents and in-laws. The fact that it can play my old GameCube disks, and that the majority of the Nintendo, Sega and TurboGrafx back catalog can be downloaded to the device, well for me that's just gravy.
...I don't find myself affected by these sorts of changes, because I still take the old-school approach. I have a home page I wrote, hosted on a server that isn't going to change anything in my directory without my permission.
Sure I don't have any Web 2.0 coolness like live Gmail preview, but (a) it doesn't take more than a few seconds to fire up Thunderbird, and (b) I don't spend all my time complaining that the company offering me free crap on their search portal had the gall to make changes to the page I am not paying anything for.
Really. I find it pretty damn funny that so many people scoff at the idea of still having a "home page" and then scream bloody murder when Yahoo or Google make changes to the free home page they insist they don't need in the first place.
It runs, but a lot of features (like the Slideshow) don't work due to Apple's crappy OpenGL implementation in X11. Trying to add the Xquartz update + Darwine got me nowhere (except that now Picasa crashes far more often on start than it used to). I think the entire Wine on my Mac is now borked, actually, so may have to dump it all and start over. Crap.
90% of the time I just fire up Parallels or VirtualBox and have the Picasa installed there examine my Mac partition. It works, but it's a pain in the butt.
It's worth it not to use iPhoto though, as sad as that may be to say. God I hate iPhoto. It works well I suppose if you only have one computer, but I can't stand its awful lack of speed and the inability to watch folders for changes, its insistence upon copying all of my images somewhere else by default, and the sheer idiocy of not assuming that folder structure might mean something to me. Stupid iPhoto.
How about NTFS, Apple? About damn time OS X supported read-write for NTFS - hard to bring it into corporate environment when you can't read from a Windows partition. NTFS-3G drivers are stable, they ought to have been integrated with Leopard to begin with.
My current NAS/firewall/router has ISA and PCI (no AGP), a single integrated 10/100 ethernet port plus one add-on 10/100 card, shitty integrated video, no SATA at all, USB 1, and for my purposes it works just fine. I'd be happier if it consumed less power - dual 500 mhz Intel plus a 250 watt PSU isn't exactly energy efficient - but it does what I need it to do. Just because the device doesn't fit your needs doesn't make it a bad device. Mine fit my needs - it was free, and it is old but reliable.
Especially as it's damn hard to find a laptop with a parallel port these days... this would make a great CUPS server for an older LaserJet. If I didn't already have the JetDirect card for mine I'd be really interested in checking this out.
Not to mention my old (but perfectly functional) APC BackUPS requires a serial port for communication. No USB on this one.
Since switching to using a Mac at work last summer, I've been pretty happy, except for the god-awful problems with Mac Office. It's my one remaining annoyance on OS X. Office 2004 was so slow on my Mac (a 2.4 ghz core duo MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM) that opening any Word doc longer than four or five pages caused massive hiccups. Trying to open things that contained images or (god forbid) had "Track changes" enabled - well, forget it. When Office '08 was released I was happy - until I installed it.
'04 might be slow, but '08 randomly causes hard system freezes (mouse responsive, but nothing else works - forces me to reboot). No real pattern to it, either. Has never happened unless an Office program is open. Missing VBA is not so bad for Word unless you count the subsequent loss of all plug-ins, including EndNote - which as a scientist I really can't live without. Not to mention the problems with Excel, which is where I assume 90% of the VBA complains have come from. So many Excel spreadsheets rely on macros to work properly. And the user interface? The changes in Office 08 might seem like improvements for anyone that has never used Office on Windows, but going from 07 at home to 08 at work makes me want to tear my hair out. The floating "toolbox" palette is horrible and unusable, but the floating, undockable Formula bar in Excel - how did that actually make it past quality control?
The most damning thing about this all is that they are charging MORE for Mac Office than they are for Office 07 - more money for fewer programs (no OneNote, for example, no Access, no real Outlook compatibility - Entourage is not Outlook, thank god I don't have to use either, but many people need it). More money for what are essentially broken components (half the known issues with Office 08 are compatibility problems with 07, plus the loss of VBA that has caused so many problems). And now they are telling us that our problems will be solved, so long as we will just wait a few years and then hand them even more money?
There are reasons I have NeoOffice installed, and 90% of those reasons are the idiotic decisions made by the Mac BU. As much as I like open source, I would be perfectly happy using Microsoft Office if they would deliver on the Mac the same functionality they offer on Windows - but if Microsoft won't deliver, my money is going elsewhere. I have a hard time thinking I'd be the only one making the same decision.
As much work as I put in to getting Slack up and running on my server - through several version upgrades, kernel builds to enable SMS, and constant fighting with the haphazard detection of the nonstandard CD-ROMS installed in the thing - I only felt a small twinge of regret when I wiped the drive and installed Gutsy. Slack might earn me some geek cred, but Ubuntu actually works without me having to wrestle with the machine.
This is probably going off-topic, but:
I have had zero problems with it, in fact. Ah. Then you must not use any third-party add-ins, like EndNote. Or use any Excel VBA code. Or collaborate with Windows users, so you don't run into the issues of transferring files between systems. The default zoom for example, NeoOffice opens things at a "normal" resolution, so that a file saved at a reasonable zoom in NeoOffice looks the same on Windows. Same file in 08 is microscopic text, because MS can't see fit to use pixel specifications for fonts. I never understood why Mac users had Word docs saved at 150% zoom until I started using a Mac myself. Look at the known issues with Office 08. At least 80% of reported problems are interoperability issues with 07-08 file compatibility. I add a graphic in 08, send to my collaborator who uses 07 and the file either won't open, graphic is missing, or is rotated 90 degrees for no reason? Fail.
It has nothing to do with file formats. All installs of 07/08 in our lab and my own computers default to the old file format, because the new one isn't widespread enough to be certain it will work for anyone we might share documents with. My issues with 08 are failures on MS's part to take the Apple platform seriously enough to give it a full-featured Office.
Office 08 (in addition to removing VBA) takes far longer to start up than NeoOffice. It locks up more often. [Maximizing an Excel spreadsheet froze my entire system, just a few days ago - the final straw that made me install NeoOffice.] The interface is also worse: NeoOffice has an interface that is far more like Office 03 than the default Mac Office is. The floating "toolbox" pallette in Mac Office is next to useless. It's either in the way or helpfully auto-hiding the tool I want. The floating Excel formula bar in 08 is an asinine feature. NeoOffice even works better with Expose and Spaces than Mac Office does. And this is free software. For what Microsoft charges for Office, we should by all means expect and get much more.
The failure to use a unified interface cross-platform is a major mistake on MS's part. If Adobe can do it, no argument about the size of the code base or difficulty of cross-platform programming works for me. MS has the resources, they just don't care.
Feature parity in Office 07/08 stinks. Mac Office hasn't had equivalent features with the Windows version since Word 6. For a few examples, try this: Open Excel 08. Use the "insert function" feature. Your Toolbox pallette will give you a list of functions - but where's the drop-down that allows you to filter them by function type? Missing. You have to scroll through them all. If you know the name it helps, but they aren't even listed alphabetically. Now open Word 08. Bring up the Styles tool. Look at the options for visible styles. Where's the "Styles in use" option? You get "All" or "Available". In a doc that has been shared and edited by multiple users, both lists get unmanageably large very quickly. The only positive changes in 08 are that it's a universal binary, and that PowerPoint finally has the thumbnail view (present on Windows since at least Office 03) rather than the outline view.
I use NeoOffice for a lot of things now because it's easier and more reliable than opening Mac Office. For more complicated stuff I run Office 07 in Parallels or at home on my Windows box. Office 08 is simply a major disappointment, and remains the single most annoying issue I have with using a Mac.
People don't need MS Office compatibility, they need MS Office. And it has to run perfectly. Have you used Office 08? If Microsoft can't deliver what you're asking for on a Mac today, what makes you think OpenOffice is any worse? I've been running NeoOffice on my MBP for a while now, because it gives me better compatibility with Excel 07 than Excel 08 does.
Yes, the Linux office equivalents aren't as polished as Windows Office. But the crap Microsoft is handing to Apple users is probably worse.
The Mac, with the addition of Fusion or Parallels, solves a lot of people's problems, and provides a great user experience to boot. True. The only reason I have a Mac is because I can run Parallels. There are many research-specific applications that just don't run on any platform except Windows. I'm still furious that there aren't more options for software on my Mac though; so many vendors make crappy alternatives to the Windows versions (Microsoft is firmly in this camp!). Maybe if usage is increasing as the FPP implies, this will change.
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Let me get this straight: You want an institution where you are given an exam, and if you pass it you get the degree? No books, no classes, no labs, no instructors unless you ask for them specifically? I believe you are looking for The University of Phoenix at best, or a diploma mill at worst.
If you seriously think that your proposed approach would result in a quality education, you're delusional.
Well, there is a lot of DRM baggage associated with HDMI - so this could be Apple's attempt to do an end-run around the MPAA. In my mind this is a GOOD thing. We still get digital output, but we can use it as we see fit. Unless the Mini-DP also includes built-in DRM, in which case we're all screwed.
What's wrong with having an Appletalk input? Many older printers, which are still perfectly functional and don't need to be replaced, use Appletalk. Why force people to buy a new printer just because they got a new operating system?
Edit to reflect your personal favorite dead technology. And get off my lawn.
We were getting dropped about once per phone call. After a quick visit to the nearest AT&T store (with a printout listing recent dropped calls in hand) we fixed the problem - by replacing our phones with iPhone 3GS models. AT&T seems to be selectively dropping non-iPhone users to keep bandwidth available. We had just resigned earlier this year so were stuck with them no matter what.
I figure if I can't solve the issue I might as well be a part of the problem.
There's a pay-per-use or an unlimited plan. There isn't an in-between. I use enough that the pay-per-use plan makes no sense, economically. But if you're arguing that I am using the wrong plan, then by the NYT article's position there are 20 million AT&T smartphone users who are also on the wrong plan. And we're still using 10x less resources than the 9 million people on iPhones. This is supposed to be my fault how?
I paid AT&T for phone service, with data as a bonus. Thanks to network congestion primarily attributable to iPhone users, I can't even rely on my phone service, let alone data. If this is not an actionable issue I would love to have a lawyer explain to me why: AT&T clearly sold data plans for more phones than their bandwidth could accommodate, and this has negatively impacted the voice phone service millions of people signed up for.
No, they aren't. I have a Nokia smartphone on AT&T. I pay the same per month for data access as an iPhone user. Yet my phone (by my own usage estimates, and by the NYT article claims) uses 10x less resources than the iPhone. So why am I not paying 10x less for net access?
I still get the added benefit of dropping almost every single goddamned call I have made or received since the iPhone 3G model came out earlier this year - that was the start of my problems with AT&T. Before that I had an occasional drop but now it's a miracle if my wife or I get through a 5 minute conversation without a dropped call. We live in a large metro area, and according to the AT&T service folks we have no less than 4 towers within close range of us. Our service remains unacceptable despite this.
The most painful part is that we dropped landline service 6-7 years ago to get AT&T off our backs. Then they went and bought our wireless carrier. Thanks, AT&T.
Wondering here, now that the NYT has gotten the company to admit that the iPhone is causing so many problems for everyone on the service, how long before a class action suit is filed? I certainly would like to be compensated for the absolute shit service I am currently relieving - it's far less than the service I am actually paying for.
Given that I work for the government, and have to deal with the IT spending regulations, I thought you all might like an actual example of how this works.
Scenario: The keyboard I am using broke. I want a new keyboard. Our tech checks our budget and finds we have some IT money. (Any IT spending has to be earmarked as such, when requesting grant money to begin with; if we have no IT money we can't buy anything computer related, no matter how much actual cash we have left to spend total.)
I pick the keyboard I want (Apple wired keyboard, with number pad - because according to our CIO Bluetooth is a "wireless device" and thus can't be allowed in the building for fear someone will steal my precious data).
Our tech submits a request for purchase. The minions in the purchasing department check the request, check our budget, and then if everything is kosher they submit it for bids using a government ordering website.
Approved companies make bids based on the equipment requested. "Approved" means any company vetted by the government to be a company that does not support or have dealings with enemies of the US, and companies that are minority-owned or woman-owned or qualify for some other feel-good-PC affirmative-action equal-opportunity category-owned are preferred. If an approved company exists which can make the bid, great. We collect bids. If there is no such company (for example, a supplier exists but is not yet in the approved list) we have more paperwork to get the supplier checked out and added to the list of potential approved companies prior to obtaining bids.
The lowest bid is generally the one accepted. When this happens, the order is placed. Purchasing arranges payment, the supplier arranges delivery, and in only a short matter of about a month my new keyboard arrives. The paperwork in the end, on our part, was seven or eight sheets of paper including the order forms, the copies of the bids, the budget justifications, etc. (Good thing the Paperwork Reduction Act was implemented, I'd hate to see how bad it was before that!)
Effectively, what just happened is that I wanted an Apple keyboard, so the federal government paid a third party to place an order with Apple to ship the keyboard to me. The packing slip even had the Apple Store order number included. Same thing happens when we want a Dell or an HP computer - a third party places the order with Dell or HP, we can't simply call up Apple or Dell or HP and make the order ourselves, because if we did that, the third-party supplier wouldn't be able to take a cut of the costs.
Because of this, we quite often have problems when we want specific items, such as customizing computers to meet specific needs. Or, in my case, desiring a keyboard with a number pad. I am now the proud owner of a government-purchased Apple keyboard, sans number pad, thanks to the federal IT purchasing process. Forget about returning it - that would take even more paperwork than the ordering did.
It isn't that the yellow circles are not useful so much as it is that even on the interactive coverage map (which you can find here) you can see that an area is covered, but NO indication of which service provider covers that region. My in-laws are looking for home internet service; they don't want to pay for cable and don't have any phone other than cellular. I can see that SOME company covers their home if they went with WISP, but damned if I'm going to spend the next three hours combing through the listings trying to guess which one it is.
(Not to mention it took me a long time just to find the live map in the first place thanks to the horrible page design...)
This article ignores the real reason web apps suck: You have to be connected to the web to use them.
Developers keep forgetting that not everyone has broadband access, an iPhone in their pocket, or ready access to WiFi networks. Bandwidth isn't cheap, it isn't always reliable and it isn't always there. I mean, come on - I like Google Maps as much as the next guy, but if I find myself stuck in an out-of-service zone I know I can rely on the road atlas in my car.
I think web apps are great for what they do but I don't think anyone should rely on them alone. If cost is the major issue with desktop apps, open source is the answer.
There's a joke here about the importance of open-source breathalyzers vs. voting machines but I'm too full of outrage fatigue to make an effort at it.
Pretty much nails it right there. The system is a PowerEdge 1300, dual-500mhz PIII (single processor when I got it); it has a SCSI HDD, and two CD drives. Depending on which IDE slot the CDs were located, the system either would not boot from CD or would not be able to locate the install files post-boot.
I had so much fun building a kernel that worked. Even more fun trying to get that kernel onto a boot floppy. And when Slack 10 came out, I had gotten my hands on a second processor, so I had to go through the whole thing again - while enabling SMP.
When I did install Ubuntu on it, I expected similar issues, but it went like a dream. For an old-ass computer it's been damn useful. And for what it's worth, no, I don't miss compiling my own kernels.
First Linux distro I tried for my own box was Slackware 9, and I did it on purpose after installing a RedHat build for a server I had been asked to maintain. I wanted to run Slack on my own box because I felt it would make me learn more about Linux than RedHat did.
I stuck with it through Slack 11, and it was a pain in the ass - my beat-up crusty Dell PowerEdge server gave me fits trying to install, because it would boot from the CD-ROM and start the installer, but the install program wouldn't mount the CD it was running from to finish installing after launch... talk about a WTF. It took me forever to figure out a workaround, and every upgrade I dealt with the same issues.
I finally said to hell with it, installed Ubuntu Server and haven't had an issue with the machine since. I admit it was painful to dump the work I'd put into making Slackware work on that computer, but not as painful as keeping it working.
That's funny. I downloaded Opera 10 to test out a bug I'd noticed in v. 9.X on my own site: Anything that has an outline attribute set is drawn incorrectly. I have a dropdown list with an image below it; the image has an outline. When the dropdown is rendered, the outline of the underlying image is drawn superimposed on the dropdown. (A border on the image is drawn as expected - only outline is affected). Guess what? Opera 10 still shows the same behavior. Hell, this works in every browser I've tested that supports outline - except Opera.
Curious, I did a search for "opera outline css bug" and found this page from 2003 reporting an issue. Page works fine in Firefox. In Opera 10 it displays some weird behavior - outlines are drawn, but not removed after hover; some outlines partially disappear, and one never appears.
Opera 10 might pass Acid3 but that doesn't mean it's perfect. What matters is not whether a browser passes these relatively arbitrary tests; what matters is whether the browser is usable on a well-designed web page. I'd much rather see people get excited about compliance. I'd be a lot happier if developers would spend time working to fix longstanding bugs, and spend spare time working on other issues like the Acid tests. Real-world performance is much more important than bragging rights.
Gee, maybe someone can come up with an Acid4 test, which consists of nothing except a long list of single rendering tests based on the W3C documentation for CCS1, CSS2 and CSS3...
You don't see a reason to own a Wii? My wife is not a gamer by any means, but I have a Wii because my wife wanted one after playing it at a friend's house. This is why they are selling. Nintendo figured out that "looking like a fool" while playing can actually be fun for non-gamers. The Wii is in high demand in senior citizens homes, for pete's sake, because using the controller is so simple and natural that even your grandma can see the appeal.
To make this platform successful Nintendo doesn't need a huge number of amazing games. All they need are a small number of good games that appeal to the target audience. Guess what: You and I aren't it. Your grandma and my wife are the target here, and it's working.
On a personal note, I'm quite pleased with the machine. I don't feel that it's underpowered for the games I play (if I want real computing power I look to PC games anyway). I really like that the majority of the popular games for the platform are balanced well enough to allow me to play on an approximately equal level with my peers, or with non-gamers or novice gamers such as my wife, or my nephews, or even my parents and in-laws. The fact that it can play my old GameCube disks, and that the majority of the Nintendo, Sega and TurboGrafx back catalog can be downloaded to the device, well for me that's just gravy.
...I don't find myself affected by these sorts of changes, because I still take the old-school approach. I have a home page I wrote, hosted on a server that isn't going to change anything in my directory without my permission.
Sure I don't have any Web 2.0 coolness like live Gmail preview, but (a) it doesn't take more than a few seconds to fire up Thunderbird, and (b) I don't spend all my time complaining that the company offering me free crap on their search portal had the gall to make changes to the page I am not paying anything for.
Really. I find it pretty damn funny that so many people scoff at the idea of still having a "home page" and then scream bloody murder when Yahoo or Google make changes to the free home page they insist they don't need in the first place.
It runs, but a lot of features (like the Slideshow) don't work due to Apple's crappy OpenGL implementation in X11. Trying to add the Xquartz update + Darwine got me nowhere (except that now Picasa crashes far more often on start than it used to). I think the entire Wine on my Mac is now borked, actually, so may have to dump it all and start over. Crap.
90% of the time I just fire up Parallels or VirtualBox and have the Picasa installed there examine my Mac partition. It works, but it's a pain in the butt.
It's worth it not to use iPhoto though, as sad as that may be to say. God I hate iPhoto. It works well I suppose if you only have one computer, but I can't stand its awful lack of speed and the inability to watch folders for changes, its insistence upon copying all of my images somewhere else by default, and the sheer idiocy of not assuming that folder structure might mean something to me. Stupid iPhoto.
How about NTFS, Apple? About damn time OS X supported read-write for NTFS - hard to bring it into corporate environment when you can't read from a Windows partition. NTFS-3G drivers are stable, they ought to have been integrated with Leopard to begin with.
My current NAS/firewall/router has ISA and PCI (no AGP), a single integrated 10/100 ethernet port plus one add-on 10/100 card, shitty integrated video, no SATA at all, USB 1, and for my purposes it works just fine. I'd be happier if it consumed less power - dual 500 mhz Intel plus a 250 watt PSU isn't exactly energy efficient - but it does what I need it to do. Just because the device doesn't fit your needs doesn't make it a bad device. Mine fit my needs - it was free, and it is old but reliable.
Especially as it's damn hard to find a laptop with a parallel port these days... this would make a great CUPS server for an older LaserJet. If I didn't already have the JetDirect card for mine I'd be really interested in checking this out.
Not to mention my old (but perfectly functional) APC BackUPS requires a serial port for communication. No USB on this one.
Since switching to using a Mac at work last summer, I've been pretty happy, except for the god-awful problems with Mac Office. It's my one remaining annoyance on OS X. Office 2004 was so slow on my Mac (a 2.4 ghz core duo MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM) that opening any Word doc longer than four or five pages caused massive hiccups. Trying to open things that contained images or (god forbid) had "Track changes" enabled - well, forget it. When Office '08 was released I was happy - until I installed it.
'04 might be slow, but '08 randomly causes hard system freezes (mouse responsive, but nothing else works - forces me to reboot). No real pattern to it, either. Has never happened unless an Office program is open. Missing VBA is not so bad for Word unless you count the subsequent loss of all plug-ins, including EndNote - which as a scientist I really can't live without. Not to mention the problems with Excel, which is where I assume 90% of the VBA complains have come from. So many Excel spreadsheets rely on macros to work properly. And the user interface? The changes in Office 08 might seem like improvements for anyone that has never used Office on Windows, but going from 07 at home to 08 at work makes me want to tear my hair out. The floating "toolbox" palette is horrible and unusable, but the floating, undockable Formula bar in Excel - how did that actually make it past quality control?
The most damning thing about this all is that they are charging MORE for Mac Office than they are for Office 07 - more money for fewer programs (no OneNote, for example, no Access, no real Outlook compatibility - Entourage is not Outlook, thank god I don't have to use either, but many people need it). More money for what are essentially broken components (half the known issues with Office 08 are compatibility problems with 07, plus the loss of VBA that has caused so many problems). And now they are telling us that our problems will be solved, so long as we will just wait a few years and then hand them even more money?
There are reasons I have NeoOffice installed, and 90% of those reasons are the idiotic decisions made by the Mac BU. As much as I like open source, I would be perfectly happy using Microsoft Office if they would deliver on the Mac the same functionality they offer on Windows - but if Microsoft won't deliver, my money is going elsewhere. I have a hard time thinking I'd be the only one making the same decision.
As much work as I put in to getting Slack up and running on my server - through several version upgrades, kernel builds to enable SMS, and constant fighting with the haphazard detection of the nonstandard CD-ROMS installed in the thing - I only felt a small twinge of regret when I wiped the drive and installed Gutsy. Slack might earn me some geek cred, but Ubuntu actually works without me having to wrestle with the machine.
Get elected king soon, then. The world needs a better Office!
It has nothing to do with file formats. All installs of 07/08 in our lab and my own computers default to the old file format, because the new one isn't widespread enough to be certain it will work for anyone we might share documents with. My issues with 08 are failures on MS's part to take the Apple platform seriously enough to give it a full-featured Office.
Office 08 (in addition to removing VBA) takes far longer to start up than NeoOffice. It locks up more often. [Maximizing an Excel spreadsheet froze my entire system, just a few days ago - the final straw that made me install NeoOffice.] The interface is also worse: NeoOffice has an interface that is far more like Office 03 than the default Mac Office is. The floating "toolbox" pallette in Mac Office is next to useless. It's either in the way or helpfully auto-hiding the tool I want. The floating Excel formula bar in 08 is an asinine feature. NeoOffice even works better with Expose and Spaces than Mac Office does. And this is free software. For what Microsoft charges for Office, we should by all means expect and get much more.
The failure to use a unified interface cross-platform is a major mistake on MS's part. If Adobe can do it, no argument about the size of the code base or difficulty of cross-platform programming works for me. MS has the resources, they just don't care.
Feature parity in Office 07/08 stinks. Mac Office hasn't had equivalent features with the Windows version since Word 6. For a few examples, try this: Open Excel 08. Use the "insert function" feature. Your Toolbox pallette will give you a list of functions - but where's the drop-down that allows you to filter them by function type? Missing. You have to scroll through them all. If you know the name it helps, but they aren't even listed alphabetically. Now open Word 08. Bring up the Styles tool. Look at the options for visible styles. Where's the "Styles in use" option? You get "All" or "Available". In a doc that has been shared and edited by multiple users, both lists get unmanageably large very quickly. The only positive changes in 08 are that it's a universal binary, and that PowerPoint finally has the thumbnail view (present on Windows since at least Office 03) rather than the outline view.
I use NeoOffice for a lot of things now because it's easier and more reliable than opening Mac Office. For more complicated stuff I run Office 07 in Parallels or at home on my Windows box. Office 08 is simply a major disappointment, and remains the single most annoying issue I have with using a Mac.
Yes, the Linux office equivalents aren't as polished as Windows Office. But the crap Microsoft is handing to Apple users is probably worse. The Mac, with the addition of Fusion or Parallels, solves a lot of people's problems, and provides a great user experience to boot. True. The only reason I have a Mac is because I can run Parallels. There are many research-specific applications that just don't run on any platform except Windows. I'm still furious that there aren't more options for software on my Mac though; so many vendors make crappy alternatives to the Windows versions (Microsoft is firmly in this camp!). Maybe if usage is increasing as the FPP implies, this will change.
[...] this is a flagrant canard I see what you did there. [Quack.]