You can't win, Moderator. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful through meta-moderation and Excellent karma than you could possibly imagine.
Good grief! It's been YEARS!!! since we first heard about the superior nature of Linux/UNIX security, and we still see a crapflood of articles about it every time there is a slow news day, like when all the information about the first generation iPhone finally emerges and there are no more iPhone stories in the queue, then BAMMO! Right on schedule, another story about LINUX vs. Windows security. This story is even a TROLL, all on with a headline about Vista besting Linux. What crap! ENOUGH with these LINUX/Windows security shootout stories, already!
Well, let's see... for six months we've been hearing:
it's vaporware! it doesn't exist!
nobody has been able to review one, you can't say that!
it won't ship for months!
every last minute details is not yet known, therefore all you think you know is wrong!
Seriously, though, in what way is the mokOpen screen in a year going to be vastly superior to iPhone's screen, which exists today, and which is by several measures better than anything on any other phone today?
Hrm... iPhone reads PDF. If the ebooks are not delivered in some proprietary DRM format they should "just work". If there is a particular eBook service you're interested in, I suggested posting a feature request to Apple. I posted several in January after the iPhone shipped. One of my requests was support for multiple party conference calling sometimes called "six way calling" or "one plus five conferencing" (a standard GSM network feature which is not supported by many phones and barely mentioned by wireless carriers, let alone promoted) has apparently been delivered (it was mentioned in one of the major reviews, WSJ iirc). This feature isn't useful to everyone, but it was useful to me, and its lack would prevent me from switching to iPhone. I explained in my request that this advanced network feature would be most used by the people most likely to be early adopters of the iPhone. I've had very, very good luck with feature requests when I've taken the time to think it through carefully, and explain it thoroughly, including the business case. Everything I requested in the Panther days was delivered in Tiger. Nearly everything I've requested in the Tiger days appears that it will be delivered in Leopard.
Sign up for a free (fork over email) ADCaccount (upper right of this page). Then go to Radar (link on that page) to submit your requests. They won't be fulfilled right away, but if you take the time to submit a good feature request, Apple does take them seriously. The time to request features desired in iPhone 2.0 is now.
My father is visually impaired and I'm sympathetic to the perspective you raise. However, the only physical button on the front of the iPhone does exactly what you suggest -- returns you to the main screen, and without waiting some random number of seconds. The iPhone interface isn't optimized for the visually impaired, but the interface reference point is established in a method superior to what you suggest.
The higher pixel density of the screen should make the screen somewhat more accessible to those with certain low-vision issues, as compared with other screen based phones. However, phones with physical keypads are probably superior in general for that group. There are interesting technologies in Mac OS X for accessibility. As with other features, those that make sense in a phone-like device will probably migrate to the iPhone as the device matures. Some will take the form of software updates to existing models, others may require new hardware revisions, a voice recognition chip for example.
You're not nearly as sick as the rest of us are at whiny pathetic loosers who have nothing better to do than bitch about the fact that they don't want to read the article they just read and posted to. Holy crap, do you realize how much that labels you as a sheeple? "Help! I'm reading an iPhone story, and I can't stop! OMG! I'm posting! OMG! Dude. Seriously. Get a grip.
This problem occurs with any phone that has a screen that you're tempted to rest on your ear (e.g. screen faces the same direction as the ear piece) like the Motorola RAZR. In addition, the RAZR (and many other phones) have a serious design flaw which lets lint and dust from your pocket get behind the screen, rendering them even more difficult to read than they are by design. Since this doesn't seem to be a problem with iPods, I'm guessing Apple is aware of this and addresses it in their design, so the iPhone screen, like the iPod, is probably sealed better than most other phones.
So you see, Slashdot works like this: There are more stories every day than you can possibly read. Don't read the ones you are not interested in. In particular, don't post comments to those stories that have no value and do not contribute to the quality of the discussion. An example of a worthless comment is the one you posted. If you don't give a hoot about the iPhone, then move on to the next story. Its really not that difficult to grok.
AT&T deserves some credit for this novel approach to phone activation. They obviously had to work with Apple to provide an interface betwixt the companies and their computer systems.
Science is based, even moreso, on the scientific method, which, sadly, doesn't seem to be taught in schools in the U.S. It may be mentioned once or twice in ten years of education, but it's not taught, such that kids graduate from high school actually understanding it well enough to explain it to someone else.
It depends on what you want to transport. Would you like to transport... yourself? Power probably measured in "sol output minutes" (or hours, or days, or years), but I'm just guessing. Some information? Your cell phone battery is probably more than adequate.
Drat. iPhone is obsolete and it doesn't even go on sale until Friday. This whole quantum dot thing will make 3G networks obsolete before AT&T even gets it rolled out here in the U.S. I want my "iPhone Quantum". : )
Finder flipping out when network shares go missing
on
The Roadmap to Leopard?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think this issue of the Finder flipping out is due partly to the finder and partly due to the automounter (autofs), both of which appear to have received a major overhaul in Leopard. Autofs has apparently been threaded. If the Finder is instrumented with NSOperation (I can find no publicly available documentation to that effect), then the combination of those efforts should be a "Finder" which appears to be much more responsive than on previous versions of Mac OS X.
WWDC 2007 Keynote vs. Leopard feature set
on
The Roadmap to Leopard?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Everybody has their undies in a bunch about the 10 things the Jobs showed in the recent keynote. Those things were carefully chosen by Jobs, likely with a great deal of input from other executives and managers at Apple, probably more such input than any keynote ever before. Why? Because Apple was trying to motivate the 5000 developers at WWDC to be more innovative with their use of some of the Mac OS X technologies. Apple focused that keynote on things like creative use of CoverFlow in several places, and other uses of CoreAnimation, to get developers to think more creatively.
Leopard has a bunch of interesting OS level features (some described here: Leopard and here: Leopard Server
Your complaints about the menu bar are valid, but can be easily solved by adding a user preference setting to the Dock for transparency level, and making the default be "very nearly opaque".
I think you're missing the point about the iPhone.
OSX is Mac OS X, with extraneous bits removed
on
The Roadmap to Leopard?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The iPhone operating system is OS X, and it's probably a Leopard variant. Although I haven't seen reliable indications of this, I'm sure such details will emerge after people get their hands on the iPhone. There are a few hints that iPhone's OS X is probably Leopard based, however. Certainly the iPhone could have been developed *without* some of these technologies, and some could have been back-ported to Tiger, but it seems more likely that iPhone is based on Leopard code. Some of the hints include:
iPhone has a 160 dpi screen, and Leopard has been revamped with Resolution Independent Displaywhich makes support of panels with higher pixel densities essentially automatic, compared to tons of extra work required without it
DTrace and XRay would be extremely helpful in deep performance tuning required to get excellent performance on handheld class hardware. These tools were undoubtedly used to optimize many modules of the Leopard codebase. Optimizing Tiger using other tools for the iPhone is certainly possible, but would have been more resource intensive (skilled labor).
Objective C 2.0's garbage collection feature would be handy to help ensure efficient overall use of memory on low-memory devices like handhelds
multi-threaded network stack is probably useful on a device that runs multiple network connections concurrently (WiFi and cell phone voice network)
Applications on the iPhone, notably Safari and Mail, appear to perform in a much zippier fashion than their counterparts on Tiger, particularly on a lower-horsepower device. These applications have undoubtedly been optimized using XRay and DTrace. Heck you can tell this just by watching the iPhone demos in the keynote and the commercials, but also by using the Safari 3 beta, which is much, much zippier than Safari 2 was.
You are correct that this approach using a common code base for a mainstream OS and the "mobile version" is not true for Windows. Windows CE/PocketPC/Windows Mobil are radically different animals to the Windows 2000/XP/Vista operating systems that were contemporaneous with them. The early versions were actually forks from the Windows 95/98/ME code base.
This common code base between Macintosh and iPhone will prove to be a tremendous advantage to Apple as the OS X platform evolves. By contrast, Symbian has fractured into at least 3 different systems, Windows Mobile is a forked codebase from an old version of Windows, and there are at least several different Linux forks, each with a manufacturer custom middleware layer on top. It will be harder than people think for other cell phone manufacturers to catch up with, and keep up with, iPhone's OS X.
It's very likely that OS X has a great deal more in common with Mac OS X than you think. In fact, it's very likely to be built from the same source, managed in the very same respository (well, certain modules may have been forked during the secret R&D phase, but if it isn't already, it will be merged back in soon enough). I know that this is a little hard to believe, because there are too many examples to the contrary, which make it seem as if this must be "hard". However, it's really much more labor intensive to do this "wrong", e.g. to fork a code base then try to constantly back-port all the fixes and enhancements you get from the energy going into the main code branch.
If you want to better understand how this can work, examine two things. (1) The distinction between Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server is non existent. It's the only commercial operating system in the world where that's true. (One could argue that any version of FreeBSD or Linux can function equally well as a server and a client, but one could also argue that neither really functions all that well as a desktop/notebook client OS). (2) Consider the way that Cocoa applications are built for both PowerPC an
The ADC (Apple Developer Connection page has a way to sign up at the top right of the page. Once you've signed up you can log in and submit bugs to their Bug Reporter system. In my experience that is the most effective way to submit enhancement requests or defect reports to Apple. The "Feedback" pages are another option.
I know quite a few old time NeXT users who keep the Dock on the side, even though NeXTSTEP had it on the right. This is because the left side position clusters the controls better. Less mouse travel between app launch on the left and menu selection on the top/left. I know a bunch of ordinary users (old school Mac users and Windows switchers) who try it in different places and wind up with it on the left, too.
It would be interesting to know what the statistics are for dock position.
Well, not really. The unified look and feel is quite nice. It's much less of a distraction. The way emphasis of the window of current focus has improved a lot since Tiger, too.
People have complained that the dock doesn't look as cool on the side. The reflection design is really an artistic element that only works well when the dock is on the bottom, and always showing. Fine for demos in a keynote, but most people who use their computer move the dock to the side, to make more screen real estate in the vertical dimension, where it's badly needed. I guess teh menu bar looks a little "flat" to some people. I like it myself. I don't want it to be flashy and distracting.
My only hope is that you meta-moderate, every day, so that we can weed some of these idiots out of the mod pool. This place is getting to be as bad as digg.
Moderator Dudes. This was intended to be funny, as in, "your hostility toward an obviously cool new gadget like iPhone is clearly just sour grapes, because your execution date is probably scheduled for June 28, 2007, the day before iPhone is available for purchase." Granted, it's kinda subtle, but it's mildly amusing. Perhaps it isn't worthy of a Funny mod, but it's not a Troll.
Not only do you have not sense of humor, but you seem to have unlimited mod points with which to punish me for attempting to raise the level of discussion out of the fanboy sewer that you want it to wallow in. Why don't you just come out of the closet and make me a Foe, chicken?
Slashdot Mirror
You can't win, Moderator. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful through meta-moderation and Excellent karma than you could possibly imagine.
Good grief! It's been YEARS!!! since we first heard about the superior nature of Linux/UNIX security, and we still see a crapflood of articles about it every time there is a slow news day, like when all the information about the first generation iPhone finally emerges and there are no more iPhone stories in the queue, then BAMMO! Right on schedule, another story about LINUX vs. Windows security. This story is even a TROLL, all on with a headline about Vista besting Linux. What crap! ENOUGH with these LINUX/Windows security shootout stories, already!
- it's vaporware! it doesn't exist!
- nobody has been able to review one, you can't say that!
- it won't ship for months!
- every last minute details is not yet known, therefore all you think you know is wrong!
Seriously, though, in what way is the mokOpen screen in a year going to be vastly superior to iPhone's screen, which exists today, and which is by several measures better than anything on any other phone today?Hrm... iPhone reads PDF. If the ebooks are not delivered in some proprietary DRM format they should "just work". If there is a particular eBook service you're interested in, I suggested posting a feature request to Apple. I posted several in January after the iPhone shipped. One of my requests was support for multiple party conference calling sometimes called "six way calling" or "one plus five conferencing" (a standard GSM network feature which is not supported by many phones and barely mentioned by wireless carriers, let alone promoted) has apparently been delivered (it was mentioned in one of the major reviews, WSJ iirc). This feature isn't useful to everyone, but it was useful to me, and its lack would prevent me from switching to iPhone. I explained in my request that this advanced network feature would be most used by the people most likely to be early adopters of the iPhone. I've had very, very good luck with feature requests when I've taken the time to think it through carefully, and explain it thoroughly, including the business case. Everything I requested in the Panther days was delivered in Tiger. Nearly everything I've requested in the Tiger days appears that it will be delivered in Leopard.
Sign up for a free (fork over email) ADCaccount (upper right of this page). Then go to Radar (link on that page) to submit your requests. They won't be fulfilled right away, but if you take the time to submit a good feature request, Apple does take them seriously. The time to request features desired in iPhone 2.0 is now.
My father is visually impaired and I'm sympathetic to the perspective you raise. However, the only physical button on the front of the iPhone does exactly what you suggest -- returns you to the main screen, and without waiting some random number of seconds. The iPhone interface isn't optimized for the visually impaired, but the interface reference point is established in a method superior to what you suggest.
The higher pixel density of the screen should make the screen somewhat more accessible to those with certain low-vision issues, as compared with other screen based phones. However, phones with physical keypads are probably superior in general for that group. There are interesting technologies in Mac OS X for accessibility. As with other features, those that make sense in a phone-like device will probably migrate to the iPhone as the device matures. Some will take the form of software updates to existing models, others may require new hardware revisions, a voice recognition chip for example.
You're not nearly as sick as the rest of us are at whiny pathetic loosers who have nothing better to do than bitch about the fact that they don't want to read the article they just read and posted to. Holy crap, do you realize how much that labels you as a sheeple? "Help! I'm reading an iPhone story, and I can't stop! OMG! I'm posting! OMG! Dude. Seriously. Get a grip.
This problem occurs with any phone that has a screen that you're tempted to rest on your ear (e.g. screen faces the same direction as the ear piece) like the Motorola RAZR. In addition, the RAZR (and many other phones) have a serious design flaw which lets lint and dust from your pocket get behind the screen, rendering them even more difficult to read than they are by design. Since this doesn't seem to be a problem with iPods, I'm guessing Apple is aware of this and addresses it in their design, so the iPhone screen, like the iPod, is probably sealed better than most other phones.
So you see, Slashdot works like this: There are more stories every day than you can possibly read. Don't read the ones you are not interested in. In particular, don't post comments to those stories that have no value and do not contribute to the quality of the discussion. An example of a worthless comment is the one you posted. If you don't give a hoot about the iPhone, then move on to the next story. Its really not that difficult to grok.
AT&T deserves some credit for this novel approach to phone activation. They obviously had to work with Apple to provide an interface betwixt the companies and their computer systems.
You missed the point. The hardware is the package. The software is what sells a Macintosh.
Science is based, even moreso, on the scientific method, which, sadly, doesn't seem to be taught in schools in the U.S. It may be mentioned once or twice in ten years of education, but it's not taught, such that kids graduate from high school actually understanding it well enough to explain it to someone else.
Wireless service pricing models are the result of the same oligopoly that brought us cell phones that suck.
It depends on what you want to transport. Would you like to transport... yourself? Power probably measured in "sol output minutes" (or hours, or days, or years), but I'm just guessing. Some information? Your cell phone battery is probably more than adequate.
Drat. iPhone is obsolete and it doesn't even go on sale until Friday. This whole quantum dot thing will make 3G networks obsolete before AT&T even gets it rolled out here in the U.S. I want my "iPhone Quantum". : )
I think this issue of the Finder flipping out is due partly to the finder and partly due to the automounter (autofs), both of which appear to have received a major overhaul in Leopard. Autofs has apparently been threaded. If the Finder is instrumented with NSOperation (I can find no publicly available documentation to that effect), then the combination of those efforts should be a "Finder" which appears to be much more responsive than on previous versions of Mac OS X.
Everybody has their undies in a bunch about the 10 things the Jobs showed in the recent keynote. Those things were carefully chosen by Jobs, likely with a great deal of input from other executives and managers at Apple, probably more such input than any keynote ever before. Why? Because Apple was trying to motivate the 5000 developers at WWDC to be more innovative with their use of some of the Mac OS X technologies. Apple focused that keynote on things like creative use of CoverFlow in several places, and other uses of CoreAnimation, to get developers to think more creatively.
Leopard has a bunch of interesting OS level features (some described here: Leopard and here: Leopard Server
Your complaints about the menu bar are valid, but can be easily solved by adding a user preference setting to the Dock for transparency level, and making the default be "very nearly opaque".
I think you're missing the point about the iPhone.
You are correct that this approach using a common code base for a mainstream OS and the "mobile version" is not true for Windows. Windows CE/PocketPC/Windows Mobil are radically different animals to the Windows 2000/XP/Vista operating systems that were contemporaneous with them. The early versions were actually forks from the Windows 95/98/ME code base.
This common code base between Macintosh and iPhone will prove to be a tremendous advantage to Apple as the OS X platform evolves. By contrast, Symbian has fractured into at least 3 different systems, Windows Mobile is a forked codebase from an old version of Windows, and there are at least several different Linux forks, each with a manufacturer custom middleware layer on top. It will be harder than people think for other cell phone manufacturers to catch up with, and keep up with, iPhone's OS X.
It's very likely that OS X has a great deal more in common with Mac OS X than you think. In fact, it's very likely to be built from the same source, managed in the very same respository (well, certain modules may have been forked during the secret R&D phase, but if it isn't already, it will be merged back in soon enough). I know that this is a little hard to believe, because there are too many examples to the contrary, which make it seem as if this must be "hard". However, it's really much more labor intensive to do this "wrong", e.g. to fork a code base then try to constantly back-port all the fixes and enhancements you get from the energy going into the main code branch.
If you want to better understand how this can work, examine two things. (1) The distinction between Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server is non existent. It's the only commercial operating system in the world where that's true. (One could argue that any version of FreeBSD or Linux can function equally well as a server and a client, but one could also argue that neither really functions all that well as a desktop/notebook client OS). (2) Consider the way that Cocoa applications are built for both PowerPC an
The ADC (Apple Developer Connection page has a way to sign up at the top right of the page. Once you've signed up you can log in and submit bugs to their Bug Reporter system. In my experience that is the most effective way to submit enhancement requests or defect reports to Apple. The "Feedback" pages are another option.
I know quite a few old time NeXT users who keep the Dock on the side, even though NeXTSTEP had it on the right. This is because the left side position clusters the controls better. Less mouse travel between app launch on the left and menu selection on the top/left. I know a bunch of ordinary users (old school Mac users and Windows switchers) who try it in different places and wind up with it on the left, too.
It would be interesting to know what the statistics are for dock position.
You should consider providing feedback to . It sounds like the behavior of the stacks could be improved with a little effort, rather than ditching the concept altogether.
Well, not really. The unified look and feel is quite nice. It's much less of a distraction. The way emphasis of the window of current focus has improved a lot since Tiger, too.
People have complained that the dock doesn't look as cool on the side. The reflection design is really an artistic element that only works well when the dock is on the bottom, and always showing. Fine for demos in a keynote, but most people who use their computer move the dock to the side, to make more screen real estate in the vertical dimension, where it's badly needed. I guess teh menu bar looks a little "flat" to some people. I like it myself. I don't want it to be flashy and distracting.
My only hope is that you meta-moderate, every day, so that we can weed some of these idiots out of the mod pool. This place is getting to be as bad as digg.
Moderator Dudes. This was intended to be funny, as in, "your hostility toward an obviously cool new gadget like iPhone is clearly just sour grapes, because your execution date is probably scheduled for June 28, 2007, the day before iPhone is available for purchase." Granted, it's kinda subtle, but it's mildly amusing. Perhaps it isn't worthy of a Funny mod, but it's not a Troll.
Not only do you have not sense of humor, but you seem to have unlimited mod points with which to punish me for attempting to raise the level of discussion out of the fanboy sewer that you want it to wallow in. Why don't you just come out of the closet and make me a Foe, chicken?