to further what you're saying.. i think the big problem isn't plain dumb: the problem is people who just don't try.
"you shouldn't be laughing at these people, how are they supposed to know ahead of time how it works?" sounds good until you consider that they _do_ have a very good way of knowing ahead of time how it works. It's called a manual. And if there is no manual, maybe they could spend the amount of time thinking about it and looking at the screen until you find a button or menu item labelled with what you want to do.
At the least, they might notice one of the menus is named Help.
Anyone who takes the time to look in the menus and notice something named "copy" deserves any help they want. Anyone who just immediately whines to the nearest techie "how do i work this" deserves to have a comic strip making fun of them.
Maybe it's cruel to make fun of newbies. OK. What about warner bros. cartoons, for just one random example? Isn't that cruel, a poor little cat getting run over by a truck, flattened by a piano and ground up into meatballs just because it was trying to catch some food to eat? Explain to me how that's OK and UF isn't.
ok. perhaps i was wrong about that. i'm sorry. i had been under the impression win95's multitasking was somewhat broken based on things i had heard. our school has NT, that's my main exposure to MS products, and i don't know that much about win95.
however, in my [admittedly very limited] experience with win95, i have seen programs crash the computer. frequently. That should NOT be possible in an environment with protected memory; that is NOT what i call protected memory. if the memory is protected in some way, the protected memory is fairly broken and, even if much, much better than the mac os, not nearly good enough.
i didn't mean to say that win9x had no protected memory/multitasking at _all_ (although that appears to be what i said), just that they have not yet gotten that protected memory fully working. either way it is totally irrelivant to my point, which is that apple _does_ care deeply about the technical problems at stake even though they have thus far failed to fix them. The win9x comment was just a little side-note i tossed in, and the point of _that_ wasn't even to trash 9x, i just wanted to point out the Apple would be shipping a consumer OS with the BSD kernel before MS ships something for nontechie consumers with the NT kernel.
ok, you're probably right, but consider: at the time qd3d began, opengl was embryal or nonexistant or still named IRIX GL or something. for it's time qd3d was at least uesful, although opengl rose into the place qd3d wanted to go. The RAVE standard was pretty important as well, although opengl took over that purpose as well. Seems to me the 3dmf file format would have been something really nice for everyone, although some kind of 3d object standard may have risen in its place (i doubt VRML counts, it didn't seem to serve the same purpose) i wouldn't know, i know very little on this subject.
also some people still like qd3d because it was so much more high-level; so many things were predefined, it wasn't like OpenGL's you-must-declare-every-vertex-yourself strategy, you just say "draw a sphere here" or "place this 3dmf here" and it's there. Of course you can get the same thing with opengl with graphics libraries. I assume that's what GLUT is there for. (haven't quite gotten that far yet..) Either way i'm glad to have an open, unencumbered standard like opengl instead of something like qd3d owned by a specific company [even if that company is apple]. And opengl seems better anyway, and it looks like _much_ more work has been done on it.
BTW.. qd3d is still alive in some people's minds. A group of people actally ported it to linux. their version is called "quesa" and those of you with far too much time on your hands may wanna check it out..
but yeh, maybe qd3d didn't belong on that list. it may have been nifty at first, but opengl made it irrelivant. esp. now that apple has embraced opengl fully. whatever.
i misspelled my sig, didn't i? i must be some kind of idiot.
very, very simple answer, and obvious to anyone who knows anything on the subject.
apple's whole preemptive multitasking/protected memory/etc. issue, and the fact they are not there in OS 9, has nothing to do with a "focus on interface issues". It is because, quite simply, of compatibility. Apple has been working their asses off in the software department for YEARS to solve this problem.
The problem stems from the fact that the mac os began as a single-program OS-- which, you may note, it's competitor (DOS) at the time was. The ability to run more than one program at once was retrofitted in later, through multifinder, switcher, System 6, etc. As a result, the methods of coopertaive multitasking, etc., were adopted.
It turns out that it is extremely difficult to change these methods without breaking every program ever written. Remember the mac os's biggest problem: software support. isn't a lot of software support out there; apple has a lot of trouble attracting developers. totally destroying all existing software is osmething it's difficult for them to do. Microsoft can do that, since the developers need MS [and, thus, access to 90% of the market] and not the other way around.
Ever heard of copland? Apple had a working next-gen (technically up there with the Unices) OS at about the time of the birth of BeOS and the time Mike Spindler (also known as the Source of All Evil in the Universe) was fired. apple got this OS to a usable point, and proceeded to spend at least a year working on making it compatible with the earlier Mac OSes. They failed miserably.
In the meantime of this, apple released a number of things which, in a technical sense, were truly revoloutionary. Opendoc, cyberdog, Quickdraw 3D, Quickdraw GX. These things all failed miserably, and this is not because apple "failed to keep up on technical issues". They failed merely because of marketing problems, and apple's bad habit from the time of releasing software before it's ready, then hyping it a LOT, then getting everyone exposed to a non-working 1.0 version, then after everyone's soured to it and started totally ignoring it, THEN they release a working version. And once the working version comes along, apple marketing would simply ignore it, assuming people didn't care anymore. this is, btw, basically what killed the newton. If OpenDoc had succeeded, the world would be a very different place now.
Eventually Apple scrapped Copland and started over with Rhapsody/Mac OS X. Apple has been working nonstop on this in the software department since Steve Jobs came. They have been doing almost nothing else; they have been performing miracles. What the result of this is is that in a couple of months, apple is going to release an OS with NO INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS. (unless you count the fact it will be possible to add on a BSD command line interface and run the GNU tools..) The change from OS 9 to OS X will have _nothing_ to do with "interface issues". Technical issues are the ONLY point of this upgrade, and this is the upgrade apple has been working toward with all their resources for about four or five years now. Doesn't sound like they've more focused on "pretty boxes" to me. And as to compatibility, note that apple _gave up_. The reason that OS X will be compatible with pre-OS-X software is that apple has wound up writing a hardware abstraction layer type thing, more or less the same thing as WINE. ("emulator" is the wrong word)
Note that in the meantime Apple has "technically" improved the Mac OS in every way possible without making that crucial shift into preemptive multitasking and protected memory. They've made the Finder (mac file manager) threaded; they've rewritten Appletalk to work as TCP/IP; and so on.
And thta one crucial shift--preemptive multitasking/protected memory-- is something Microsoft hasn't managed to do yet. When OS X comes out, microsoft will have yet to have released a "modern" consumer OS. They will have windows 2000, yes, but last i heard it will not be targeted at consumers-- it will be targeted at everyone who was buying NT before. It will be targeted as a server, and for businesses, and for the kind of people who read Slashdot. Meanwhile the consumers will be fed "widnows millenium", or something. whatever it is it will still have teh 9x kernel.
As for "pretty boxes"-- i assume you mean the imac-- note that pretty boxes are the only strategy apple's located that works. Apple has been producing technically superior hardware for years, and what was it that finally started selling this hardware? Certainly not the technical aspects of the hardware. The G3 is amazing for its time, but so was the 604e. No, the pretty boxes are what is making ALL of apple's money, not the highly advanced state of the inside of the case. That and advertising. It's like Prodigy; they release a very good, revoloutionary techno album, and nobody buys it; then Keith Flint gets a bad haircut and starts wearing eyeshadow for the second very good, revoloutionary techno album, and they get on MTV and sell a quadrillion records. If "pretty boxes" are the only things making apple money, you should be amazed they're paying attention to technical issues at all.
I don't know where this viewpoint comes from that because apple pays attention to interface issues and strives to create a consistent, usable user interface, that means that they don't care about technical issues. Apple _does_ work on the technical underpinnings, and if the only thing you see is the GUI, well, that's because the GUI is all you're willing to look at.
The macintosh boot mechanism-- called "open firmware"-- has a built-in Forth interpreter.
I am of course talking out of my ass here, but i wonder if you could adapt this pbForth thing to run under Open Firmware.. and use the macintosh as a kind of replacement brain for the lego mindstorms.
This would bring the number of things a macintosh can do without any kind of operating system to two-- the first being play Pong.
Meaning we're two uses ahead of all you PC users. Ha! You think you're so great, with your "linux operating system".. but without Lilo, you're NOTHING!! MWAHAHAA!!
-mcc-baka i got my head but my head is unravelling can't keep control, can't keep track of where it's travelling
no. whether or not you have bought one, they have to give you the source. from the GPL:
1. [text missing] You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
[text missing] * b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
.. so they don't neccicarily have to put the source up on an FTP server for public download. They do, however, have to give out copies to _anyone_ who asks and charge only a nominal amount, which according to this post they are already doing.
your post reminds me of those times when people my parents knew would find out i was a computer person, and their eyes would light up, and they would immediately start asking me for help. I had a lot of people ask me which they should use to "browse the internet": AOL, Yahoo, Netscape, or [insert here the name of some ISP they heard a radio commercial for]..
Windows 99 beer and cigarretes are of course very popular substances for a legal high that kills you very, very slowly and increasingly painfully over time.
However, most college students have turned to "experimenting" with various strange substances. For example, snorting of Linux laundry detergent has become unusually popular in the last year, and reported overdoses have increased by more than 10000%. The popular detergent is imported from northeastern europe.
We went to visit Steve Jobs, permanent interrim CEO of Apple Computer, to ask him his opinion on these trends. He was smoking something wrapped up in a small piece of paper-- we didn't catch what. His only response was to giggle strangely, then mumble something about "hey man, at least my liver's going to be ok" and cough loudly. he then picked up a phone, called Avie Tevanian, and ordered the entire Apple campus at 1 infinite loop (including the grass) to be painted a bright pastel blue by tomorrow. He seemed very.. relaxed throughout the entire interview.
Meanwhile a certain professor at Berkeley University has been encouraging everyone to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" by using a substance called BSD.
yes it got people's attention, but on the other hand..
people everywhere had java shoved in their faces, constantly told it was this huge new revoloutionary thing. After being told over and over how great it is, most of them actually went and looked at it, to find it was horribly slow, usually unusable, that "write-once-run-anywhere" was a joke, and that most java more or less didn't work. The simple fact was that java was not _ready_, that it was still in growing pains. But java was treated as if it were ready for _anything_, and it was all over the place, where it didn't belong. You'd open up random webpages, have your computer stall for 10 seconds while a little message that said "java VM loading" blinked, and be treated to an ugly banner app written by a 14-year-old that would sometimes crash your computer.
so yes, people got exposure to java, but they also got dissilusioned with it. It stuck in their memory but the memories were of something highly dodgy. Now that java has matured a bit and, thankfully, retreated to server applications wehre it is much better suited, i'm still sure a bunch of people are left with somewhat bad memories of it. Java seems like it does have a future ahead of it, though, despite Sun's valiant efforts at self-destruction.
What i'm hoping is that the linux hype _does_ die down before it starts getting pushed in places where it doesn't belong, paving the way for people to think linux is as dodgy as java is because they use KDE, discover it's horrid, and think that's all linux is. Hopefully linux will go from sheer unrestrained hype to steady growth and winning on its own merits in those areas where it is very strong.. and not wind up being pushed as the Next Big Thing on the desktop, where it probably isn't ready quite yet. (hmm, that's kind of what you were saying, isn't it?)
This isn't a great thing to be comparing, though, since linux is much stronger than java ever was, infinately more useful, and DEFINATELY much more mature. In fact it's about as mature as you could help for in every area except GUI, which isn't neccicarily important. ah well. Either way, we are left with one incredibly irritating byproduct of the java hype, namely that LiveScript got renamed JavaScript, forcing us all to constantly explain to people that there is no connection whatsoever between java and javascript..
-mcc-baka i hope to God that 24 hours ago i will not be running IRC.
Things will happen for the simple reason that the person who made this post and the person who made this post and people like them are going to make them happen.
The computers will be fine of course, but think about it from these people's perspective: you're sitting around, it's new years day, you have all this stockpiled ammunition.. you aren't going to bother to find out whether civilisation really collapsed or if the ATMs aren't working or if your pager doesn't work. That's too much trouble. You'll probably just assume civilisation has collapsed and start looting anyway, especialy if you've been drinking all that stockpiled vodka and whiskey.
Get enough people doing that, and civilisation will collapse with or without the computers. Happy new year!
wow.. i thought my mac os was unstable, but at least i get unlimited amounts of overtime if i don't use it. -_- never seen it crash being left on overnight, or left on unused over a couple of weeks or months.. unfortunately i always somehow wind up using the durn thing, so i get about three crashes a day. usually more.
crashes while you aren't using it.. damn.. 98 is even worse than i thought.:)
an internet petition is pointless. Who are you going to be petitioning? The DVD forum? the film association? why would they care? any petition would be operated and signedby consumers. The DVD forum and the film association have made it abundantly clear by everything they do that what consumers want does not matter one iota to them. And why should it? They have a monopoly. If the consumer wants a decent-quality copy of The matrix, there is no alternate source. Therefore whether the consumer likes or is directly hurt by any actions of the DVD forum is completely irrelivant.
Following the blue ribbon campaign is a _much_ better idea, but should be done along slightly different lines: instead of placing a simple GIF image on all pages, place the GIF image _and_ a copy of the DeCSS source on all pages. Think about it. Set up the "ribbon" so that underneath it is a link "download DeCSS from this mirror location", and have it mirrored on that server along with the webpage.
If this got any amount of support, it would make the efforts of the DVD forum to prevent people from having the right to the free speech (source code) of _describing_ how to go about performing the action of decoding CSS-- not doing it themselves, not distributing a tool to do so, but _describing_ the method-- pointless. If a sufficiently large number of people are mirroring the CSS code in an organized manner- and in the process linking back to some page explaining _why_ the DVD forum has no right to complain-- they will be powerless. The DVD forums only weapon is to put people in court knowing that the other side cannot afford the expense of hiring a lawyer and being placed in court, that simply being sued is more effective than losing a lawsuit. But if the number of defendants is sufficiently huge, then the DVD forum will be unable themselves to handle doing this to all of them.
What this problem needs is visibility to the general public, not a large show of support. People-- people in general, not just slashdot readers-- need to know _what_ the DVD forum is doing and _why_ it is wrong. If we as a community do _anything_ about this, it must be something to get this issue into the light, to make it visible so that the legal system cannot any longer ignore the ability of corporations to win any battle simply by threat of lawsuit. start shit.
i'm really kind of fascinated by this kind of thing..there's just something really cool about seeing something now commonplace in its early stages. Which is why i have a copy of the linux 0.01 source on my hard drive..just to look through, even though i don't understand 99% of it and i sure as heck can't compile it on my mac.
one thing i'd REALLY like to know about is the changing layout of suck.com. they seem purposefully quiet about this, and the only reference they have to the fact their logo originally looked totally different is hidden deep in the contributor profiles.. even teh back issues hae the new header image plastered on. yes, i realize the layout was never more than marginally tooled; i'm still really curious for some unknown reason.
oh, and real quick, cuz i haven't seen any other posters mention this: that "netscape time capsule" site is BEAUTIFUL from a layout standpoint. Whoever is responsible for the web design there is amazing.
but good LORD.. look at that clean, usable, uncluttered NSCA mosaic layout. i had no IDEA. i am amazed by what a gigantic step backward netscapes 0.97-4.7 are.. i mean a "stop" button is nice but not worth 12 other buttons that are never used.. esp. if the one ("security") next to "stop", the one you constantly hit by accident, opens up a slow-to-open dialog with a nonfunctional close box an.. sorry, i'm ranting again
-mcc-baka listen to your heartbeat delete beep beep BEEP.
> Seriously, when has Apple's reaction ever been anything but "We have no official comment at this time"?
when they have something to say. apple is not going to comment until they know exactly what is going on and have a patch.
if you'll notice and read some of the posts put up after yours, you'll discover that once apple did know what was going on and had a patch.. they commented and released the patch.
as for the apachebench bit, i think they did comment very quickly. i seem to pretty clearly remember reading a technote at apple's website about it. in fact i think that was where i first saw it, linked from macnn. i searched the Tech Info Library just now (which may not be the same as teh technotes) and was not able to locate what i thought i rememebred reading, but i did locate http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n590 05 which is a general OS X Server patch that seems to adress the apachebench problem.
i remember when the ping of death became a problem, but it was long enough ago i can't remember how apple handled it.
apple does not like to do anything unless they can be sure of what they're doing. they do not like releasing software before they think it's perfect. they do not like talking about unreleased software until they're certain it's ready to be talked about. they do not like to comment on things they don't know enough about to comment on correctly. this seems pretty reasonable to me-- at least, it's slightly better than vaporwaring and amplifying rumors based on information they haven't personally verified yet.
drifting further and further offtopic, here i go..
i wasn't saying the fact the guidelines did not exist was a particularly bad thing in itself-- simply that you should not expect linux programs to follow any interface guidelines, but you _should_ expect win/mac programs to follow guidelines because said guidelines exist.
> This is something the Linux community must adress eventually >Again, this isn't an OS level thing
no.. but it is a community thing. which seems to be how the GUIIP is handling it.
Would be nice if someone would create a distribution based entirely on consistent UI-- instead of slapping in every window manager and program known to man, along with seven almost identical "term" programs (xterm, rxvt, wterm, eterm, konsole, GNOME term.. what have i missed? none of which handle copy/paste in an intelligent manner..) and a huge number of redundant utilities with almost no orginisation to it all, and different items in the menus of each window manager.. choose GNOME one or two decent window managers, _one_ good term program (and set up GNOME to use that one, and tweak IRCII so it opens that term program instead of wterm on/window create), set up those window managers so they don't do anything redundant to the GNOME taskbar-type-thing, choose which programs you have installed somewhat carefuly, and go through and add GTK scrollbars to EVERYTHING you have included. Everything else-- KDE, redundant apps, etc. can be downloaded seperately. that's what freshmeat's for. Every distribution i've ever seen has concentrated violently on giving you _everything_ and not so heavily on how what you have relates. I can get everything at freshmeat easily-- what i don't want to do is be forced to spend a huge amount of time after i get the thing intalled tweaking the system until i've got something remotely usable. Which is why my linuxppc installation still isn't remotely consistent.
except that Microsoft claims they have a good "user friendly" GUI, something i have never heard any linux vendor or WM-maker claim.
except that microsoft allegedly has a special department to guarantee interface usability, while linux people simply get it to the point where it works.
except that microsoft has "interface guidelines". It wrote these and asks developers to follow them so that people will get a consistant, pleasurable interface when they use it. linux has no such guidelines made by anyone, and no way to dessiminate those guidelines because of the very nature of the community and x-windows. GTK and QT come almost close but in fact nowhere near to guidelines of this sort. Microsoft, by the way, despite the fact these guidelines exist, does not follow them. (the cornerstone of their GUI is a menu with many many layers of submenus, something they claim not to do.. bad example because i myself am addicted to FinderPop, a mac os utility that allows you to browse your hard drive as a menu with many layers of submenus) Developers for windows do not often follow these guidelines. Apple computer does have a very clearly defined, clearly accessible set of "human interface guidelines". Apple follows these religiously and ensures developers do as well. The result is that in the mac os you have a consistant, pleasurable experience between almost all applications (unless you run Quicktime Player 4.0 or Sherlock 2.0), something windows does not achieve and linux does not even strive for.
except that in linux if you don't like those open dialog boxes you can change them; if you don't like part of the interface you can change it. with windows, you are stuck with whatever interface they hand you, even if it's something totally inexplicable like a web browser used as a file manager.
except that microsoft has the _ability_ to have a consistant interface because all the basic OS pieces are written by the same people. what is more they are not working under the hideous restraints and limitations of the X windows system.
the point is we should not expect as much out linux as out of MS windows. MS windows is currently an average-consumer-targeted product which sells itself solely on the basis of its GUI; Linux is not. You cannot claim Linux fails at its GUI because it does not try at its GUI and a huge number of multiple people are responsible for different tiny aspects of the GUI. This is something the Linux community must adress eventually but they have more important things to deal with right now. i've typed way too much for such a simple post.
oh, and what passes for "copy and paste" in linux is truly abysmal, but that's completely irrelivant.
not "another". DVD boycotting was already more or less in effect before etoys and amazon did anything evil.
Google probably isn't going to be boycotted by anyone. After all, they run linux, so we like them, and they have a very useful product, as opposed to the other three in the list. How many people here even knew etoys existed before they were boycotting it? How many people boycotting DVD can't afford a player anyway, or were going to wait to adopt it anyway until there was some reason to buy one? Amazon is, of course, a different matter entirely. Slashdot is their target audience, and they provide a very useful service. People boycotting them may be forced to make some vague kind of sacrifice by not buying obscure books or trying to look at buy.com. Anyway, Google appears to be using patent law for the purpose it was intended (a nonobvious, specific implementation witout prior art, or something very close to that) so nobody really minds. No boycott here, nobody is angry. Well, except that guy talking about natalie portman. he seemed pretty pissed off.
Oh yeah.. every time there is an article on/. involving apple, no matter how minor, about 20 people who have never bought an apple product in their life and have no use for anything apple makes post really angry comments that end with "i will not be buying any of their products again".. so i guess you've got to include them in your list of/. boycotts.
yeh but the funny thing here is that it WASN'T smart-looking. it contained nothing more than three
s and a . Obviously anyone who would use MS Frontpage to do something _that_ simple doesn't know ANY html at all. Which is the original poster's point, that anyone who knows ppc assembly would know enough html that it would be _much easier_, at least for the level of simplicity in this page, to open notepad and do it there.. a tool may be a tool, but there are times where what you want to do is simple enough that an automatic tool like frontpage becomes more cumbersome than helpful..
Of course since the people responsible for attrition's version apparently didn't know PPC assembly after all it's a moot point, but whatever.
> A far better solution would be to not install ANY servers by default -- let the user go in and install them after the install if he wants them.
i have linuxppc 1999, and they actually do exactly what you suggest. Nothing, not even httpd or telnetd, is turned on by default, and to turn it on you have to go into whatever that file is and uncomment out the lines. Meaning nothing gets enabled unless the user cares.. which is why linuxppc makes such a big deal about their "out of the box" security, since you're no more likely to crack linuxppc "out of the box" than the proverbial server with no network connections buried in a concrete box.. there's nothing there to crack.
i believe that the thing with the crack.linuxppc.org box specifically is that they started out with nothing enabled, and then have been slowly adding services over time in order to make hacking easier..
Slashdot Mirror
to further what you're saying.. i think the big problem isn't plain dumb: the problem is people who just don't try.
"you shouldn't be laughing at these people, how are they supposed to know ahead of time how it works?" sounds good until you consider that they _do_ have a very good way of knowing ahead of time how it works. It's called a manual. And if there is no manual, maybe they could spend the amount of time thinking about it and looking at the screen until you find a button or menu item labelled with what you want to do.
At the least, they might notice one of the menus is named Help.
Anyone who takes the time to look in the menus and notice something named "copy" deserves any help they want. Anyone who just immediately whines to the nearest techie "how do i work this" deserves to have a comic strip making fun of them.
Maybe it's cruel to make fun of newbies. OK. What about warner bros. cartoons, for just one random example? Isn't that cruel, a poor little cat getting run over by a truck, flattened by a piano and ground up into meatballs just because it was trying to catch some food to eat? Explain to me how that's OK and UF isn't.
ok. perhaps i was wrong about that. i'm sorry. i had been under the impression win95's multitasking was somewhat broken based on things i had heard. our school has NT, that's my main exposure to MS products, and i don't know that much about win95.
however, in my [admittedly very limited] experience with win95, i have seen programs crash the computer. frequently. That should NOT be possible in an environment with protected memory; that is NOT what i call protected memory. if the memory is protected in some way, the protected memory is fairly broken and, even if much, much better than the mac os, not nearly good enough.
i didn't mean to say that win9x had no protected memory/multitasking at _all_ (although that appears to be what i said), just that they have not yet gotten that protected memory fully working. either way it is totally irrelivant to my point, which is that apple _does_ care deeply about the technical problems at stake even though they have thus far failed to fix them. The win9x comment was just a little side-note i tossed in, and the point of _that_ wasn't even to trash 9x, i just wanted to point out the Apple would be shipping a consumer OS with the BSD kernel before MS ships something for nontechie consumers with the NT kernel.
ok, you're probably right, but consider: at the time qd3d began, opengl was embryal or nonexistant or still named IRIX GL or something. for it's time qd3d was at least uesful, although opengl rose into the place qd3d wanted to go. The RAVE standard was pretty important as well, although opengl took over that purpose as well. Seems to me the 3dmf file format would have been something really nice for everyone, although some kind of 3d object standard may have risen in its place (i doubt VRML counts, it didn't seem to serve the same purpose) i wouldn't know, i know very little on this subject.
also some people still like qd3d because it was so much more high-level; so many things were predefined, it wasn't like OpenGL's you-must-declare-every-vertex-yourself strategy, you just say "draw a sphere here" or "place this 3dmf here" and it's there. Of course you can get the same thing with opengl with graphics libraries. I assume that's what GLUT is there for. (haven't quite gotten that far yet..)
Either way i'm glad to have an open, unencumbered standard like opengl instead of something like qd3d owned by a specific company [even if that company is apple]. And opengl seems better anyway, and it looks like _much_ more work has been done on it.
BTW.. qd3d is still alive in some people's minds. A group of people actally ported it to linux. their version is called "quesa" and those of you with far too much time on your hands may wanna check it out..
but yeh, maybe qd3d didn't belong on that list. it may have been nifty at first, but opengl made it irrelivant. esp. now that apple has embraced opengl fully. whatever.
i misspelled my sig, didn't i? i must be some kind of idiot.
very, very simple answer, and obvious to anyone who knows anything on the subject.
apple's whole preemptive multitasking/protected memory/etc. issue, and the fact they are not there in OS 9, has nothing to do with a "focus on interface issues". It is because, quite simply, of compatibility. Apple has been working their asses off in the software department for YEARS to solve this problem.
The problem stems from the fact that the mac os began as a single-program OS-- which, you may note, it's competitor (DOS) at the time was. The ability to run more than one program at once was retrofitted in later, through multifinder, switcher, System 6, etc. As a result, the methods of coopertaive multitasking, etc., were adopted.
It turns out that it is extremely difficult to change these methods without breaking every program ever written.
Remember the mac os's biggest problem: software support. isn't a lot of software support out there; apple has a lot of trouble attracting developers. totally destroying all existing software is osmething it's difficult for them to do. Microsoft can do that, since the developers need MS [and, thus, access to 90% of the market] and not the other way around.
Ever heard of copland? Apple had a working next-gen (technically up there with the Unices) OS at about the time of the birth of BeOS and the time Mike Spindler (also known as the Source of All Evil in the Universe) was fired. apple got this OS to a usable point, and proceeded to spend at least a year working on making it compatible with the earlier Mac OSes. They failed miserably.
In the meantime of this, apple released a number of things which, in a technical sense, were truly revoloutionary. Opendoc, cyberdog, Quickdraw 3D, Quickdraw GX. These things all failed miserably, and this is not because apple "failed to keep up on technical issues". They failed merely because of marketing problems, and apple's bad habit from the time of releasing software before it's ready, then hyping it a LOT, then getting everyone exposed to a non-working 1.0 version, then after everyone's soured to it and started totally ignoring it, THEN they release a working version. And once the working version comes along, apple marketing would simply ignore it, assuming people didn't care anymore. this is, btw, basically what killed the newton. If OpenDoc had succeeded, the world would be a very different place now.
Eventually Apple scrapped Copland and started over with Rhapsody/Mac OS X. Apple has been working nonstop on this in the software department since Steve Jobs came. They have been doing almost nothing else; they have been performing miracles. What the result of this is is that in a couple of months, apple is going to release an OS with NO INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS. (unless you count the fact it will be possible to add on a BSD command line interface and run the GNU tools..) The change from OS 9 to OS X will have _nothing_ to do with "interface issues". Technical issues are the ONLY point of this upgrade, and this is the upgrade apple has been working toward with all their resources for about four or five years now. Doesn't sound like they've more focused on "pretty boxes" to me.
And as to compatibility, note that apple _gave up_. The reason that OS X will be compatible with pre-OS-X software is that apple has wound up writing a hardware abstraction layer type thing, more or less the same thing as WINE. ("emulator" is the wrong word)
Note that in the meantime Apple has "technically" improved the Mac OS in every way possible without making that crucial shift into preemptive multitasking and protected memory. They've made the Finder (mac file manager) threaded; they've rewritten Appletalk to work as TCP/IP; and so on.
And thta one crucial shift--preemptive multitasking/protected memory-- is something Microsoft hasn't managed to do yet. When OS X comes out, microsoft will have yet to have released a "modern" consumer OS. They will have windows 2000, yes, but last i heard it will not be targeted at consumers-- it will be targeted at everyone who was buying NT before. It will be targeted as a server, and for businesses, and for the kind of people who read Slashdot. Meanwhile the consumers will be fed "widnows millenium", or something. whatever it is it will still have teh 9x kernel.
As for "pretty boxes"-- i assume you mean the imac-- note that pretty boxes are the only strategy apple's located that works. Apple has been producing technically superior hardware for years, and what was it that finally started selling this hardware? Certainly not the technical aspects of the hardware. The G3 is amazing for its time, but so was the 604e. No, the pretty boxes are what is making ALL of apple's money, not the highly advanced state of the inside of the case. That and advertising. It's like Prodigy; they release a very good, revoloutionary techno album, and nobody buys it; then Keith Flint gets a bad haircut and starts wearing eyeshadow for the second very good, revoloutionary techno album, and they get on MTV and sell a quadrillion records. If "pretty boxes" are the only things making apple money, you should be amazed they're paying attention to technical issues at all.
I don't know where this viewpoint comes from that because apple pays attention to interface issues and strives to create a consistent, usable user interface, that means that they don't care about technical issues. Apple _does_ work on the technical underpinnings, and if the only thing you see is the GUI, well, that's because the GUI is all you're willing to look at.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS TEHFT
This is blasphemy.
You posted that already.
Be original.
You've defamed an art
I will tell Frank Sullivan
He will kick your ass
DVD Forum
They are a bunch of assholes
ESR said so.
They abuse the courts,
ignore the first amendent
and order silence.
No legal basis
Something about trade secrets
They have no patent
They blame the hackers
for their own weak encryption
Its their own damn fault.
The macintosh boot mechanism-- called "open firmware"-- has a built-in Forth interpreter.
I am of course talking out of my ass here, but i wonder if you could adapt this pbForth thing to run under Open Firmware.. and use the macintosh as a kind of replacement brain for the lego mindstorms.
This would bring the number of things a macintosh can do without any kind of operating system to two-- the first being play Pong.
Meaning we're two uses ahead of all you PC users. Ha! You think you're so great, with your "linux operating system".. but without Lilo, you're NOTHING!! MWAHAHAA!!
-mcc-baka
i got my head but my head is unravelling
can't keep control, can't keep track of where it's travelling
no. whether or not you have bought one, they have to give you the source. from the GPL:
1. [text missing] You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
[text missing] * b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
.. so they don't neccicarily have to put the source up on an FTP server for public download. They do, however, have to give out copies to _anyone_ who asks and charge only a nominal amount, which according to this post they are already doing.
your post reminds me of those times when people my parents knew would find out i was a computer person, and their eyes would light up, and they would immediately start asking me for help. I had a lot of people ask me which they should use to "browse the internet": AOL, Yahoo, Netscape, or [insert here the name of some ISP they heard a radio commercial for]..
think.
sorry should have posted these earlier
h tml
a ges/386.html
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/16/1248216.s
http://www.hexnet.org/library/lt-start.html
http://209.24.94.208/mentos/
http://radiant.org/bubastis/deity/hemp.html
http://varla.tapehouse.com/~zebob/powerpro/mess
Windows 99 beer and cigarretes are of course very popular substances for a legal high that kills you very, very slowly and increasingly painfully over time.
However, most college students have turned to "experimenting" with various strange substances. For example, snorting of Linux laundry detergent has become unusually popular in the last year, and reported overdoses have increased by more than 10000%. The popular detergent is imported from northeastern europe.
We went to visit Steve Jobs, permanent interrim CEO of Apple Computer, to ask him his opinion on these trends. He was smoking something wrapped up in a small piece of paper-- we didn't catch what. His only response was to giggle strangely, then mumble something about "hey man, at least my liver's going to be ok" and cough loudly. he then picked up a phone, called Avie Tevanian, and ordered the entire Apple campus at 1 infinite loop (including the grass) to be painted a bright pastel blue by tomorrow. He seemed very.. relaxed throughout the entire interview.
Meanwhile a certain professor at Berkeley University has been encouraging everyone to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" by using a substance called BSD.
Trip on.
midnight GMT
happened ten minutes ago
the lights are still on
We need to stockpile
as much haiku as we can
for post-Y2K
It's neccicary.
We are not just paranoid.
Please stop mocking us
Who marked that "troll"?
You wasteful moderator..
Mark stuff up instead
people everywhere had java shoved in their faces, constantly told it was this huge new revoloutionary thing. After being told over and over how great it is, most of them actually went and looked at it, to find it was horribly slow, usually unusable, that "write-once-run-anywhere" was a joke, and that most java more or less didn't work. The simple fact was that java was not _ready_, that it was still in growing pains. But java was treated as if it were ready for _anything_, and it was all over the place, where it didn't belong. You'd open up random webpages, have your computer stall for 10 seconds while a little message that said "java VM loading" blinked, and be treated to an ugly banner app written by a 14-year-old that would sometimes crash your computer.
so yes, people got exposure to java, but they also got dissilusioned with it. It stuck in their memory but the memories were of something highly dodgy. Now that java has matured a bit and, thankfully, retreated to server applications wehre it is much better suited, i'm still sure a bunch of people are left with somewhat bad memories of it. Java seems like it does have a future ahead of it, though, despite Sun's valiant efforts at self-destruction.
What i'm hoping is that the linux hype _does_ die down before it starts getting pushed in places where it doesn't belong, paving the way for people to think linux is as dodgy as java is because they use KDE, discover it's horrid, and think that's all linux is. Hopefully linux will go from sheer unrestrained hype to steady growth and winning on its own merits in those areas where it is very strong.. and not wind up being pushed as the Next Big Thing on the desktop, where it probably isn't ready quite yet. (hmm, that's kind of what you were saying, isn't it?)
This isn't a great thing to be comparing, though, since linux is much stronger than java ever was, infinately more useful, and DEFINATELY much more mature. In fact it's about as mature as you could help for in every area except GUI, which isn't neccicarily important. ah well. Either way, we are left with one incredibly irritating byproduct of the java hype, namely that LiveScript got renamed JavaScript, forcing us all to constantly explain to people that there is no connection whatsoever between java and javascript..
-mcc-baka
i hope to God that 24 hours ago i will not be running IRC.
The computers will be fine of course, but think about it from these people's perspective: you're sitting around, it's new years day, you have all this stockpiled ammunition.. you aren't going to bother to find out whether civilisation really collapsed or if the ATMs aren't working or if your pager doesn't work. That's too much trouble. You'll probably just assume civilisation has collapsed and start looting anyway, especialy if you've been drinking all that stockpiled vodka and whiskey.
Get enough people doing that, and civilisation will collapse with or without the computers. Happy new year!
wow.. i thought my mac os was unstable, but at least i get unlimited amounts of overtime if i don't use it. -_- never seen it crash being left on overnight, or left on unused over a couple of weeks or months.. unfortunately i always somehow wind up using the durn thing, so i get about three crashes a day. usually more.
:)
crashes while you aren't using it.. damn.. 98 is even worse than i thought.
an internet petition is pointless. Who are you going to be petitioning? The DVD forum? the film association? why would they care? any petition would be operated and signedby consumers. The DVD forum and the film association have made it abundantly clear by everything they do that what consumers want does not matter one iota to them. And why should it? They have a monopoly. If the consumer wants a decent-quality copy of The matrix, there is no alternate source. Therefore whether the consumer likes or is directly hurt by any actions of the DVD forum is completely irrelivant.
Following the blue ribbon campaign is a _much_ better idea, but should be done along slightly different lines: instead of placing a simple GIF image on all pages, place the GIF image _and_ a copy of the DeCSS source on all pages. Think about it. Set up the "ribbon" so that underneath it is a link "download DeCSS from this mirror location", and have it mirrored on that server along with the webpage.
If this got any amount of support, it would make the efforts of the DVD forum to prevent people from having the right to the free speech (source code) of _describing_ how to go about performing the action of decoding CSS-- not doing it themselves, not distributing a tool to do so, but _describing_ the method-- pointless. If a sufficiently large number of people are mirroring the CSS code in an organized manner- and in the process linking back to some page explaining _why_ the DVD forum has no right to complain-- they will be powerless.
The DVD forums only weapon is to put people in court knowing that the other side cannot afford the expense of hiring a lawyer and being placed in court, that simply being sued is more effective than losing a lawsuit. But if the number of defendants is sufficiently huge, then the DVD forum will be unable themselves to handle doing this to all of them.
What this problem needs is visibility to the general public, not a large show of support. People-- people in general, not just slashdot readers-- need to know _what_ the DVD forum is doing and _why_ it is wrong. If we as a community do _anything_ about this, it must be something to get this issue into the light, to make it visible so that the legal system cannot any longer ignore the ability of corporations to win any battle simply by threat of lawsuit.
start shit.
i'm really kind of fascinated by this kind of thing..there's just something really cool about seeing something now commonplace in its early stages. Which is why i have a copy of the linux 0.01 source on my hard drive..just to look through, even though i don't understand 99% of it and i sure as heck can't compile it on my mac.
one thing i'd REALLY like to know about is the changing layout of suck.com. they seem purposefully quiet about this, and the only reference they have to the fact their logo originally looked totally different is hidden deep in the contributor profiles.. even teh back issues hae the new header image plastered on. yes, i realize the layout was never more than marginally tooled; i'm still really curious for some unknown reason.
oh, and real quick, cuz i haven't seen any other posters mention this: that "netscape time capsule" site is BEAUTIFUL from a layout standpoint. Whoever is responsible for the web design there is amazing.
but good LORD.. look at that clean, usable, uncluttered NSCA mosaic layout. i had no IDEA. i am amazed by what a gigantic step backward netscapes 0.97-4.7 are.. i mean a "stop" button is nice but not worth 12 other buttons that are never used.. esp. if the one ("security") next to "stop", the one you constantly hit by accident, opens up a slow-to-open dialog with a nonfunctional close box an.. sorry, i'm ranting again
-mcc-baka
listen to your heartbeat delete beep beep BEEP.
> Seriously, when has Apple's reaction ever been anything but "We have no official comment at this time"?
0 05
when they have something to say.
apple is not going to comment until they know exactly what is going on and have a patch.
if you'll notice and read some of the posts put up after yours, you'll discover that once apple did know what was going on and had a patch.. they commented and released the patch.
as for the apachebench bit, i think they did comment very quickly. i seem to pretty clearly remember reading a technote at apple's website about it. in fact i think that was where i first saw it, linked from macnn. i searched the Tech Info Library just now (which may not be the same as teh technotes) and was not able to locate what i thought i rememebred reading, but i did locate http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n59
which is a general OS X Server patch that seems to adress the apachebench problem.
i remember when the ping of death became a problem, but it was long enough ago i can't remember how apple handled it.
apple does not like to do anything unless they can be sure of what they're doing. they do not like releasing software before they think it's perfect. they do not like talking about unreleased software until they're certain it's ready to be talked about. they do not like to comment on things they don't know enough about to comment on correctly. this seems pretty reasonable to me-- at least, it's slightly better than vaporwaring and amplifying rumors based on information they haven't personally verified yet.
drifting further and further offtopic, here i go..
/window create), set up those window managers so they don't do anything redundant to the GNOME taskbar-type-thing, choose which programs you have installed somewhat carefuly, and go through and add GTK scrollbars to EVERYTHING you have included. Everything else-- KDE, redundant apps, etc. can be downloaded seperately. that's what freshmeat's for. Every distribution i've ever seen has concentrated violently on giving you _everything_ and not so heavily on how what you have relates. I can get everything at freshmeat easily-- what i don't want to do is be forced to spend a huge amount of time after i get the thing intalled tweaking the system until i've got something remotely usable. Which is why my linuxppc installation still isn't remotely consistent.
i wasn't saying the fact the guidelines did not exist was a particularly bad thing in itself-- simply that you should not expect linux programs to follow any interface guidelines, but you _should_ expect win/mac programs to follow guidelines because said guidelines exist.
> This is something the Linux community must adress eventually
>Again, this isn't an OS level thing
no.. but it is a community thing. which seems to be how the GUIIP is handling it.
Would be nice if someone would create a distribution based entirely on consistent UI-- instead of slapping in every window manager and program known to man, along with seven almost identical "term" programs (xterm, rxvt, wterm, eterm, konsole, GNOME term.. what have i missed? none of which handle copy/paste in an intelligent manner..) and a huge number of redundant utilities with almost no orginisation to it all, and different items in the menus of each window manager.. choose GNOME one or two decent window managers, _one_ good term program (and set up GNOME to use that one, and tweak IRCII so it opens that term program instead of wterm on
except that Microsoft claims they have a good "user friendly" GUI, something i have never heard any linux vendor or WM-maker claim.
except that microsoft allegedly has a special department to guarantee interface usability, while linux people simply get it to the point where it works.
except that microsoft has "interface guidelines". It wrote these and asks developers to follow them so that people will get a consistant, pleasurable interface when they use it. linux has no such guidelines made by anyone, and no way to dessiminate those guidelines because of the very nature of the community and x-windows. GTK and QT come almost close but in fact nowhere near to guidelines of this sort. Microsoft, by the way, despite the fact these guidelines exist, does not follow them. (the cornerstone of their GUI is a menu with many many layers of submenus, something they claim not to do.. bad example because i myself am addicted to FinderPop, a mac os utility that allows you to browse your hard drive as a menu with many layers of submenus) Developers for windows do not often follow these guidelines. Apple computer does have a very clearly defined, clearly accessible set of "human interface guidelines". Apple follows these religiously and ensures developers do as well. The result is that in the mac os you have a consistant, pleasurable experience between almost all applications (unless you run Quicktime Player 4.0 or Sherlock 2.0), something windows does not achieve and linux does not even strive for.
except that in linux if you don't like those open dialog boxes you can change them; if you don't like part of the interface you can change it. with windows, you are stuck with whatever interface they hand you, even if it's something totally inexplicable like a web browser used as a file manager.
except that microsoft has the _ability_ to have a consistant interface because all the basic OS pieces are written by the same people. what is more they are not working under the hideous restraints and limitations of the X windows system.
the point is we should not expect as much out linux as out of MS windows. MS windows is currently an average-consumer-targeted product which sells itself solely on the basis of its GUI; Linux is not. You cannot claim Linux fails at its GUI because it does not try at its GUI and a huge number of multiple people are responsible for different tiny aspects of the GUI. This is something the Linux community must adress eventually but they have more important things to deal with right now. i've typed way too much for such a simple post.
oh, and what passes for "copy and paste" in linux is truly abysmal, but that's completely irrelivant.
not "another". DVD boycotting was already more or less in effect before etoys and amazon did anything evil.
/. involving apple, no matter how minor, about 20 people who have never bought an apple product in their life and have no use for anything apple makes post really angry comments that end with "i will not be buying any of their products again".. so i guess you've got to include them in your list of /. boycotts.
Google probably isn't going to be boycotted by anyone. After all, they run linux, so we like them, and they have a very useful product, as opposed to the other three in the list. How many people here even knew etoys existed before they were boycotting it? How many people boycotting DVD can't afford a player anyway, or were going to wait to adopt it anyway until there was some reason to buy one? Amazon is, of course, a different matter entirely. Slashdot is their target audience, and they provide a very useful service. People boycotting them may be forced to make some vague kind of sacrifice by not buying obscure books or trying to look at buy.com.
Anyway, Google appears to be using patent law for the purpose it was intended (a nonobvious, specific implementation witout prior art, or something very close to that) so nobody really minds. No boycott here, nobody is angry. Well, except that guy talking about natalie portman. he seemed pretty pissed off.
Oh yeah.. every time there is an article on
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
s and a . Obviously anyone who would use MS Frontpage to do something _that_ simple doesn't know ANY html at all. Which is the original poster's point, that anyone who knows ppc assembly would know enough html that it would be _much easier_, at least for the level of simplicity in this page, to open notepad and do it there.. a tool may be a tool, but there are times where what you want to do is simple enough that an automatic tool like frontpage becomes more cumbersome than helpful..
Of course since the people responsible for attrition's version apparently didn't know PPC assembly after all it's a moot point, but whatever.
> A far better solution would be to not install ANY servers by default -- let the user go in and install them after the install if he wants them.
i have linuxppc 1999, and they actually do exactly what you suggest. Nothing, not even httpd or telnetd, is turned on by default, and to turn it on you have to go into whatever that file is and uncomment out the lines. Meaning nothing gets enabled unless the user cares..
which is why linuxppc makes such a big deal about their "out of the box" security, since you're no more likely to crack linuxppc "out of the box" than the proverbial server with no network connections buried in a concrete box.. there's nothing there to crack.
i believe that the thing with the crack.linuxppc.org box specifically is that they started out with nothing enabled, and then have been slowly adding services over time in order to make hacking easier..