I tried Litestep and it was great, except for one thing, it didn't allow me to change my widgets.
I don't need a frickin maximize widget, I don't think I've EVER used one in the 10 years or so I've been using windows. I prefer CLOSE to be on the left side of the title bar, and minimize could be whereever. The way MS does it is just plain stupid, and has been so since Win 1.0. I was hoping LiteStep would change that , but it didn't.
It didn't get rid of the most annoying (to me) feature of WIndows, and it seems there is no way to do that.
And then you load KDE up in Linux, and you get the same garbage as in Win95. Fuck that.
Sherlock Holmes was having a conversation with Watson, who was telling Sherlock about how it was proven that the Earth orbits around the Sun.
Holmes then rebuked Watson for filling his brain with useless trivial information - space that should be devoted to valuable information about the science of criminal investigation, which was the sole topic in which Holmes was interested. Mind you, that one topic led him to amass an enormous quantity of bizarre trivia (manufacturers of shoes by tread, paper by quality determined from microscopic analysis, poisons and drugs, bicycle tires, cigar wrappers, etc.) Such basic facts about our life and universe were of no use to Holmes, the crime fighting genius.
If your life is well served by intimately detailed knowledge of the Unix kernel, then why allow Microsoft's marketeers to occupy any of your mindshare? There's no point to it. Even if the human brain had infinite storage capabilities, it's only alive and aware for a finite time. 16 hours per day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, in 80 years with luck or even less. There's not a lot of time we really want to spend reading useless Microsoft propaganda, especially when they're likely to change the name of the DDE/OLE/COM/ActiveX/DCOM/DNA/NET thingie at their whim.
Nobody wants to design and build a system, and charge customers up the ass for it, and have them take it home, turn it on and go - heeeey, this has way more RAM and Disk Space than I actually need. When I buy machine #2, I'm going to buy the next model down. ..
I'm wondering if ISS isn't going to end up a spectacular failure.
I've read that NASA has learned that nearly twice as many spacewalks will be required to maintain the ISS, as was originally planned, so NASA is developing a robot to hopefully pick up the slack from normal manned operations.
If NASA can't get this robot to work, and/or the US Govt. cuts NASA's funding low enough (which seems to be the leaning of the current administration), we may not even be able to maintain the ISS (let alone maintain a staffing level sufficient for any decent science). So maybe Taco Bell shouldn't roll up that sign too quickly. ..
Someday, they'll make a loophole for Battlebots, allowing for any bot that is not remotely controlled to use a radio jammer.
THEN things will get interesting. . .
(think, the spinning bots will have a 360-degree field of vision, each frame updated once per revolution. . . better drivers, theoretically faster reaction time.. ..)
Yes, AOL is within their rights, just as Time Warner was within it's rights to shut ABC/Disney off of it's cable networks -
Wait, they weren't within their rights. The FCC fined them, and aren't AOL and Time Warner the same fucking company now?
Re:Its hard to take this kind of criticism serious
on
Another Look At OS X
·
· Score: 2
well, come on, a "bug" can be anything from sloppy code causing a deadlock to a misspelling in a dialog box, to, one guy thinks that the software should behave differently, etc.
There's no such thing as a perfect software release. Not everyone will agree on the definition of perfection.
Win2k had 63k bugs? No shit! It's a HUGE fucking product, it's an OS. (I've also read that a large percentage of the 63,000 bugs figure was simply some sloppy cleanup of the bug database, and that going through it thoroughly left fewer than 5000 actual open issues).
That said, software is a continuously evolving critter, and just like Homo Sapiens is not the last word in evolution (just the latest), you can't say the same of any given release.
Now; what IS *wrong* (evil, unethical, bad, stupid) is revving software, without versioning. I don't think that's the case with what's going on with OS X. It takes a stupid stupid organization to do something like that. As someone else said, it's a support nightmare. I've worked for a company that was too spineless to change the version number of their product with each release. Some releases were free patches, collections of bugfixes. 1990's version of the "service pack" in my mind, that's just spineless. It's Marketing hijacking the version numbers for their own purposes, when version numbers are freakin engineering tools for chrisssakes. That's just plain stupid. Support had to write a tool that would checksum all of our files and dump a report that the customer could email us, JUST so we could tell what fucking version they were running.
That said, I think that Microsoft may have actually hit on something good. The "year" version number. Windows 2000, is the brand name of the OS, and should not be used in any engineering sense to identify the specific OS you're running. Just what you want to buy off the shelf. Close enough. If it's not the right actual version, you just update it over the web. Versioning and updating retail inventory at brick&mortar is just a waste of time. I remember that being the reason why that company didn't want to version their products, because they didn't want 10000 boxes of "not the latest stuff" sent back from the distributors. They also didn't want it to be public knowledge that we had 8 patches in a 6 month period.
So the brand-name mechanism used by Microsoft is pretty good - unfortunately, it's not applied in any rational way to the "engineering version" that you see in the System control panel, or tech support tools. It's build such and such, service pack X. I believe that is wrong, and it's something that's trying to be a lie, and not even succeeding at that. A service pack should rev the version number of the OS, and that's all.
you have to buy a Mac from APple, you don't have to buy a PC from Dell or Compaq. There's zillions of vendors from which you can get zillions of configurations, pick and choose components, and avoid being nickel-and-dimed to death.
No, I don't bolt together my systems. I buy Macs, I prefer that - and I like many aspects of their product, but I sure wish some other aspects were a bit more flexible and open. I'm sure a lot of Mac people feel the same (but see it as a trade off vs. all the cons of buying a PC).
Well, I havent' tried the final, and I will next week, and I may actually eat some crow on this point, considering what others are saying. I just wonder if people's perceptions are colored by exuberance at having a new OS. I mean, nobody complained about PB performance until 2 weeks after it was released. The first two weeks people were just drooling at it or bitching about the dock (goddamn dock!).
On the other hand, if I believed MacOSRumors, I'd be running a Dual 1 GHz G5 monitorless iMac with a holographic display, and it would run Windows apps in RedBox.
IOW; if I'm in Fiji (opposite side of the international date line), and I check the cert at 12:00 noon GMT, could the UI tell me that the Jan 30, 2001 cert was actually dated Jan 31?
Better yet, how in hell is Microsoft goint to implement this "patch"? They can't do it securely. How can I trust that this "patch" is really the real one now, and not one that will permantently etch a back door into my system?
Ladies and Gentlemen, the barn door is open, and the genie is molesting the horses.
I said it in 1978, when I was 11 years old, and my only computer experience was a TRS-80 my Science teacher brought into the class from his own funds.
"The only legitimate use for computers is games - everything else is a waste of time"
So, can you ever trust an automated software update again?
Sure, if you never use your computer for anything important ever again. Which pretty much relegates computers to only games.
Well, games and pr0n. Even my twisted 11-year old mind could not forsee the computer's role in the pr0n revolution.
Retail prices is what I'm paying. Moreso with Apple's obnoxious markups. (have you priced their RAM upgrades lately?)
Re:We should keep it up as a monument
on
Mir Deathwatch
·
· Score: 2
It is a monument to an insane totalitarian regime bent on using space as some kind of twisted pissing contest with the US.
We want to de-orbit it so that the money spent on keeping it spaceworthy and safe can be spent on feeding starving people, or maybe killing Chechnyans, one or the other.
Just because capitalism is nasty doesn't mean that those rubles saved can't go towards something a bit more constructive and urgent.
What was that someone said about security thru obscurity? No matter how good your code is, you're still vulnerable at the hardware level, and thru social engineering.
I was greatly underwhelmed by the performance of OS X on my 300MHz G3 Beige. And I've seen it on a Dual 533 G4. Barely useable in the classic Mac GUI interaction way. (command line was snappy though).
I know a lot of that was unoptomized slowness of the PB that will be cleared up in the release, but there's a LOT of fancy schmancy eye candy in Aqua, that works very well on a G4, but slows things way down on a G3. Trust me, you won't be happy with this thing on an iMac.
What's really great is, a lot of great BSD stuff has been ported. . .
bash, Gimp, XFree86, Samba, Apache.
As far as critical apps goes, I'd say OS X is close on Linux's tail, and it currently runs pretty much all Classic Mac software already, and most critical desktop stuff, mail, web, office, has already been carbonized. There's not a lot left (other than Photoshop, which, ironically, was supposedly one of the first apps that was carbonized. What's up with THAT, I wonder?)
Funny you mention that driver upgrade, because the latest thing going through the Mac tech community is this problem upgrading the NVidia driver on Macs, there's sort of a catch 22 that requires you to write an Apple Script to get the firmware update to work, so you can install the driver (or something like that).
In other words; on a Mac, you must learn to become a programmer to do something as basic as update a driver. (in this case). I find the irony sweet to the taste.
Yes, but Apple wants MS to keep writing IE and Office for Mac, so you can bet, DOJ or no, that OpenStep for Windows NT will never see the light of day.
128MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM
iMac 600MHz
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW Drive
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
56K internal modem
Two USB ports
Two FireWire ports
VGA video mirroring
Harman Kardon speakers
Apple Pro Keyboard
Apple Pro Mouse
Here's one of my BIG complaints about Apple. Can I get the same iMac 600MHz, let's see, I don't need the 56k internal modem, I have DSL, I don't need VGA video mirroring, don't need the fancy speakers, dont need their crappy 1 button mouse, I'd like to have a 4 button model Kensington instead. Don't need the CD-RW, I'd like to use the external SCSI one I already have. hm. let's see, that's roughly what, like $500? minus the cost of the 4 button, $450. So can I get this model for $1050? fuck no. I have to buy all this useless garbage I don't need. I couldn't even leverage the SCSI CD-RW anyway, because of the extreme irony of a Mac without external SCSI connectors.
PC's for all their faults, give you this kind of flexibility. Yes, you have that flexibility with the more expensive G4 models, but then, you're adding another $1000 to the price tag, so what's the point?
Slashdot Mirror
I tried Litestep and it was great, except for one thing, it didn't allow me to change my widgets.
I don't need a frickin maximize widget, I don't think I've EVER used one in the 10 years or so I've been using windows. I prefer CLOSE to be on the left side of the title bar, and minimize could be whereever. The way MS does it is just plain stupid, and has been so since Win 1.0. I was hoping LiteStep would change that , but it didn't.
It didn't get rid of the most annoying (to me) feature of WIndows, and it seems there is no way to do that.
And then you load KDE up in Linux, and you get the same garbage as in Win95. Fuck that.
Let's put it this way;
Sherlock Holmes was having a conversation with Watson, who was telling Sherlock about how it was proven that the Earth orbits around the Sun.
Holmes then rebuked Watson for filling his brain with useless trivial information - space that should be devoted to valuable information about the science of criminal investigation, which was the sole topic in which Holmes was interested. Mind you, that one topic led him to amass an enormous quantity of bizarre trivia (manufacturers of shoes by tread, paper by quality determined from microscopic analysis, poisons and drugs, bicycle tires, cigar wrappers, etc.) Such basic facts about our life and universe were of no use to Holmes, the crime fighting genius.
If your life is well served by intimately detailed knowledge of the Unix kernel, then why allow Microsoft's marketeers to occupy any of your mindshare? There's no point to it. Even if the human brain had infinite storage capabilities, it's only alive and aware for a finite time. 16 hours per day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, in 80 years with luck or even less. There's not a lot of time we really want to spend reading useless Microsoft propaganda, especially when they're likely to change the name of the DDE/OLE/COM/ActiveX/DCOM/DNA/NET thingie at their whim.
Nobody wants to design and build a system, and charge customers up the ass for it, and have them take it home, turn it on and go - heeeey, this has way more RAM and Disk Space than I actually need. When I buy machine #2, I'm going to buy the next model down. . .
At least 500 meg of OS X (at least the Public Beta) was a few Quicktime demo movies. Easily deleted.
Yeah, what a way to make $20,000 worth of hardware run like an old 486 with 16 megs of RAM. (which is how IE Solaris performs on a Sun e250).
I'm wondering if ISS isn't going to end up a spectacular failure.
.
I've read that NASA has learned that nearly twice as many spacewalks will be required to maintain the ISS, as was originally planned, so NASA is developing a robot to hopefully pick up the slack from normal manned operations.
If NASA can't get this robot to work, and/or the US Govt. cuts NASA's funding low enough (which seems to be the leaning of the current administration), we may not even be able to maintain the ISS (let alone maintain a staffing level sufficient for any decent science). So maybe Taco Bell shouldn't roll up that sign too quickly. .
Someday, they'll make a loophole for Battlebots, allowing for any bot that is not remotely controlled to use a radio jammer.
.)
THEN things will get interesting. . .
(think, the spinning bots will have a 360-degree field of vision, each frame updated once per revolution. . . better drivers, theoretically faster reaction time.. .
From what I've heard, Bill Gates is about 40 years too old to appeal to Ellison's taste. And his skin a few shades too light.
Yes, AOL is within their rights, just as Time Warner was within it's rights to shut ABC/Disney off of it's cable networks -
Wait, they weren't within their rights. The FCC fined them, and aren't AOL and Time Warner the same fucking company now?
well, come on, a "bug" can be anything from sloppy code causing a deadlock to a misspelling in a dialog box, to, one guy thinks that the software should behave differently, etc.
There's no such thing as a perfect software release. Not everyone will agree on the definition of perfection.
Win2k had 63k bugs? No shit! It's a HUGE fucking product, it's an OS. (I've also read that a large percentage of the 63,000 bugs figure was simply some sloppy cleanup of the bug database, and that going through it thoroughly left fewer than 5000 actual open issues).
That said, software is a continuously evolving critter, and just like Homo Sapiens is not the last word in evolution (just the latest), you can't say the same of any given release.
Now; what IS *wrong* (evil, unethical, bad, stupid) is revving software, without versioning. I don't think that's the case with what's going on with OS X. It takes a stupid stupid organization to do something like that. As someone else said, it's a support nightmare. I've worked for a company that was too spineless to change the version number of their product with each release. Some releases were free patches, collections of bugfixes. 1990's version of the "service pack" in my mind, that's just spineless. It's Marketing hijacking the version numbers for their own purposes, when version numbers are freakin engineering tools for chrisssakes. That's just plain stupid. Support had to write a tool that would checksum all of our files and dump a report that the customer could email us, JUST so we could tell what fucking version they were running.
That said, I think that Microsoft may have actually hit on something good. The "year" version number. Windows 2000, is the brand name of the OS, and should not be used in any engineering sense to identify the specific OS you're running. Just what you want to buy off the shelf. Close enough. If it's not the right actual version, you just update it over the web. Versioning and updating retail inventory at brick&mortar is just a waste of time. I remember that being the reason why that company didn't want to version their products, because they didn't want 10000 boxes of "not the latest stuff" sent back from the distributors. They also didn't want it to be public knowledge that we had 8 patches in a 6 month period.
So the brand-name mechanism used by Microsoft is pretty good - unfortunately, it's not applied in any rational way to the "engineering version" that you see in the System control panel, or tech support tools. It's build such and such, service pack X. I believe that is wrong, and it's something that's trying to be a lie, and not even succeeding at that. A service pack should rev the version number of the OS, and that's all.
GNUSTEP?
you have to buy a Mac from APple, you don't have to buy a PC from Dell or Compaq. There's zillions of vendors from which you can get zillions of configurations, pick and choose components, and avoid being nickel-and-dimed to death.
No, I don't bolt together my systems. I buy Macs, I prefer that - and I like many aspects of their product, but I sure wish some other aspects were a bit more flexible and open. I'm sure a lot of Mac people feel the same (but see it as a trade off vs. all the cons of buying a PC).
Well, I havent' tried the final, and I will next week, and I may actually eat some crow on this point, considering what others are saying. I just wonder if people's perceptions are colored by exuberance at having a new OS. I mean, nobody complained about PB performance until 2 weeks after it was released. The first two weeks people were just drooling at it or bitching about the dock (goddamn dock!).
On the other hand, if I believed MacOSRumors, I'd be running a Dual 1 GHz G5 monitorless iMac with a holographic display, and it would run Windows apps in RedBox.
Just do like you have to do for every other problem with Windows.
fdisk and reinstall the OS.
Are these dates adjusted by time-zone?
IOW; if I'm in Fiji (opposite side of the international date line), and I check the cert at 12:00 noon GMT, could the UI tell me that the Jan 30, 2001 cert was actually dated Jan 31?
Better yet, how in hell is Microsoft goint to implement this "patch"? They can't do it securely. How can I trust that this "patch" is really the real one now, and not one that will permantently etch a back door into my system?
Ladies and Gentlemen, the barn door is open, and the genie is molesting the horses.
I said it in 1978, when I was 11 years old, and my only computer experience was a TRS-80 my Science teacher brought into the class from his own funds.
"The only legitimate use for computers is games - everything else is a waste of time"
So, can you ever trust an automated software update again?
Sure, if you never use your computer for anything important ever again. Which pretty much relegates computers to only games.
Well, games and pr0n. Even my twisted 11-year old mind could not forsee the computer's role in the pr0n revolution.
Retail prices is what I'm paying. Moreso with Apple's obnoxious markups. (have you priced their RAM upgrades lately?)
It is a monument to an insane totalitarian regime bent on using space as some kind of twisted pissing contest with the US.
We want to de-orbit it so that the money spent on keeping it spaceworthy and safe can be spent on feeding starving people, or maybe killing Chechnyans, one or the other.
Just because capitalism is nasty doesn't mean that those rubles saved can't go towards something a bit more constructive and urgent.
What was that someone said about security thru obscurity? No matter how good your code is, you're still vulnerable at the hardware level, and thru social engineering.
I'm not trying to FUD or Troll,
I was greatly underwhelmed by the performance of OS X on my 300MHz G3 Beige. And I've seen it on a Dual 533 G4. Barely useable in the classic Mac GUI interaction way. (command line was snappy though).
I know a lot of that was unoptomized slowness of the PB that will be cleared up in the release, but there's a LOT of fancy schmancy eye candy in Aqua, that works very well on a G4, but slows things way down on a G3. Trust me, you won't be happy with this thing on an iMac.
What's really great is, a lot of great BSD stuff has been ported. . .
bash, Gimp, XFree86, Samba, Apache.
As far as critical apps goes, I'd say OS X is close on Linux's tail, and it currently runs pretty much all Classic Mac software already, and most critical desktop stuff, mail, web, office, has already been carbonized. There's not a lot left (other than Photoshop, which, ironically, was supposedly one of the first apps that was carbonized. What's up with THAT, I wonder?)
Funny you mention that driver upgrade, because the latest thing going through the Mac tech community is this problem upgrading the NVidia driver on Macs, there's sort of a catch 22 that requires you to write an Apple Script to get the firmware update to work, so you can install the driver (or something like that).
In other words; on a Mac, you must learn to become a programmer to do something as basic as update a driver. (in this case). I find the irony sweet to the taste.
Yes, but Apple wants MS to keep writing IE and Office for Mac, so you can bet, DOJ or no, that OpenStep for Windows NT will never see the light of day.
128MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM
iMac 600MHz
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW Drive
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
56K internal modem
Two USB ports
Two FireWire ports
VGA video mirroring
Harman Kardon speakers
Apple Pro Keyboard
Apple Pro Mouse
Here's one of my BIG complaints about Apple. Can I get the same iMac 600MHz, let's see, I don't need the 56k internal modem, I have DSL, I don't need VGA video mirroring, don't need the fancy speakers, dont need their crappy 1 button mouse, I'd like to have a 4 button model Kensington instead. Don't need the CD-RW, I'd like to use the external SCSI one I already have. hm. let's see, that's roughly what, like $500? minus the cost of the 4 button, $450. So can I get this model for $1050? fuck no. I have to buy all this useless garbage I don't need. I couldn't even leverage the SCSI CD-RW anyway, because of the extreme irony of a Mac without external SCSI connectors.
PC's for all their faults, give you this kind of flexibility. Yes, you have that flexibility with the more expensive G4 models, but then, you're adding another $1000 to the price tag, so what's the point?