That aside, a solid interview. Java looks to be pretty interesting; though in its current form it does bug the hell out of me (System.out.println()? Yeah, yeah, OO, but come on, three nested levels of scope just to get to a command line?), its progress has been impressive, and it's an innovative idea.
That's because Java's not an administrative tool like Perl. If you need to output to the console (say, if you are writing a command line program like Java's own javac compiler, or the ant build tool), you don't litter your entire program with references to the console itself. A better approach would be to encapsulate your output buffer and then in one place, alias that buffer to whichever output source you need -- in this case, the console. This could even be done in a configuration file if you needed that level of complexity.
My point is that Java is intended for more complex applications, not simple 200-line shell scripts. Your code shouldn't have any clue where it's outputting its content. Otherwise, when your requirements change, you end up with having to clean up your mess by replacing every single reference to System.out.println with some other output source, such as a file or a database or a socket connection.
I don't know.... I can see the validity to the argument that the Shuffle lowers the bar for "Apple quality" - since it's just a "me too" flash player for people who only shop for "cheap".
I already had a full-size iPod and decided I wanted the Shuffle for its portability. I now use my regular iPod at work or plugged into a Bose SoundDock at home, but I carry the shuffle in my pocket just about every single day, as well as at the gym. Why? Because the shuffle is so small I don't even notice I have it. So, it's not just for "me too" people who only shop for "cheap".
I worked in a building *owned* by Coke, and we were not even allowed to have a Pepsi machine on our floor.
I went to a university "owned" by Coke, and we did not have a Pepsi machine anywhere on the one-square-mile campus.
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 1
Personally I use an mp3 player when I go jogging, I wanted a solid state storage medium so it didn't die due to the shock. Also I listen to lectures/spoken word books when I go running. I don't want to listen to them several times so deleting them makes sense for me. For me an iPod makes no sense it uses a harddrive and has way too much storage space, I will never have that much data on it. For me there are better products than the iPod regardless of price. It just happens that the mp3 player I bought was much cheaper than an iPod.
Nonsense. iPod shuffle meets all your requirements (solid state, plays MP3s and audio books, doesn't offer too much space), and I bet it costs less than the MP3 player you bought.
Sweet, sign me up. Now I just got to find some way to reformat the library to get rid of the "sample" items that were put there when I chose "try sample library" upon first installation. Thanks for responding.
Wil, I have just one question about this product and can't seem to find the answer anywhere - is there some way I can order the items in the library arbitrarily? I keep my CD collection in chronological order by purchase date (I'm serious) and to me, Delicious Library looks like a great solution to quickly get a digital copy of all of that information, for the very reason that you describe - to make a backed-up list so that I can replace them someday. But will my ordering system be lost?
(I realize this isn't a tech support forum but my emailed question [a different question] went unanswered, so I can imagine your company has its hands full, but if you happen to be posting here on slashdot...;)
No. It's almost readable compared with assembly language, or Perl, perhaps. You shouldn't be able to "grok a fair bit" of Python, you should be able to pretty easily figure out what's going on without even knowing the language. That's one of the big draws of Python. I really couldn't have put it better than Bill Baumgartner.
OSX absolutely "just works". However, you will give up some level of configurability, because unlike on Linux the apps tend to be developed for average computer users and thus don't have the option to create dotfiles to configure every last little detail. However, the good news is that if you want or need that level of configurability, then you can probably just use whatever software lets you do that on Linux, except on the Mac. For instance, if you need fine-grained control over your HTTP user-agent header, Safari won't let you change that but you can just install Firefox or Mozilla. Many traditional Unix apps are available via DarwinPorts or Fink. But overall, you can't tweak every little aspect of the UI, and some things will take adjustment (for instance, focus-follows-mouse or whatever. Long ago I gave up my need for this level of control and dove into MacOSX and haven't looked back since, so if that's you, then you'll probably do fine.
That said, there's one huge difference with MacOSX that most Linux users just can't get accustomed to -- the best stuff isn't free. Nope. Sure, like I said you can get plenty of free software for the Mac. There's the fink and darwinports stuff. There's even some awesome totally-free software that's Mac-only, like SubEthaEdit or Desktop Manager (virtual desktops for OSX). But not everything is free or has source code available. There was a huge shareware community on the old MacOS and that has translated into a situation where there are still actual independent software developers making applications for the Mac and asking for money for them. Often not a lot of money -- obviously not every company can be Adobe or Microsoft and charge hundreds of dollars -- but if you look at some of the awesome offerings from the Omni Group (makers of Omniweb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle) or the stuff from Panic, or BareBones, you'll start to see some really awesome applications -- and then you'll be disappointed that they're not free. You got to get used to that with MacOSX, it's just the way things have evolved in this culture.
You almost never ever need to reinstall MacOSX, not even from "archive and install". Not unless that's what you really want to do. If there is a problem, it is 99% of the time always going to be some file that got overwritten, or some prefs file in your ~/Library that's causing some software or other to hiccup. I realize you only have one computer so you didn't have much choice, but if at all possible to get to a friend's house and mount your computer as a firewire hard disk and go from there, or boot from the CD and analyze your hard disk as an external disk, try to do so.
No, we were told that we couldn't use anything other than Windows 2000 (no Mac, Linux, etc). Not even on our development boxes. Even though Linux is free.
You must not be familiar with the Navy's NMCI then. It was basically an initiative by industry lobbyists to get the Navy to standardize on Windows 2000 for everything, along with a number of other commercial applications.
Why do people have such a problem with Perl? It's an excellent, high-level general purpose programming language with a huge range of extension modules available. I have personally used Perl for many projects, as do TicketMaster, ValueClick, Morgan Stanley and Ryanair
How compelling, you just named some of Slashdot's favorite companies.
I wondered about this too, surely he doesn't think the OP was suggesting patents are comparable to nukes -- the question referenced the way in which large corps gobble down patents, often with no immediate designs to follow through on a business plan or implementation.
Pike does, however, mention that he works at Google, so maybe he interpreted the question as a shot against his employer or was simply advised by Google's PR not to answer the question.
YHBT -- criticizing open source programs for having names that have nothing to do with their function when in fact they make perfect sense, and then providing counterexamples from Microsoft -- don't fall for this one.
I'm going totally offtopic, but why would your G3-using friends not want to go to Panther? The only Mac I own is a G3 and Panther improved its performance more noticeably than it did to my brother's G4. In other words, speaking only in terms of performance, if there's one MacOS that G3 users should use, it's Panther.
I'm not trying to sound critical, but your argument demonstrates that you really don't know what AppleScript is. Although both AppleScript and Unix scripting languages can both be used to automate repetitive tasks, they're not really in the same ballpark. Sure, you could do some data processing in AppleScript, but the whole point of AppleScript is not so much to be a scripting language as it is to provide an API for sending and receiving Apple Events -- a special kind of interprocess communication on MacOS and MacOSX. You can literally send a message to a running application (or start a non-running one), such as "give me the name of the artist who performs the song that is currently playing in iTunes", or "open a new window in Safari pointing to the URL http://slashdot.org/".
As Neuburg himself explains in the book being reviewed, you wouldn't want to do data processing in AppleScript, especially now that we have such easy access to Unix scripting languages (from the Terminal, or even by calling said Unix script from within an AppleScript). However, you can use AppleScript to tell Excel to return a list of every third value in column D of a given spreadsheet, which you can then hand to a Python script for processing, rather than trying to parse the Excel spreadsheet file directly (or requiring the user to export it as CSV and then process that).
However, if you purchase an Apple laptop, you cannot simple snap in a new trackpad. You are stuck with a single button. Yes, you can can purchase an external mouse, but then you're stuck using an external mouse with your laptop. This is a pain in the ass, and something that you can avoid on non-Apple laptops -- you can get nice three-button laptops elsewhere.
To right-click, just hold down Ctrl as you click the trackpad mouse button. It sounds arduous, but as an iBook owner I assure you that it becomes second-nature.
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That aside, a solid interview. Java looks to be pretty interesting; though in its current form it does bug the hell out of me (System.out.println()? Yeah, yeah, OO, but come on, three nested levels of scope just to get to a command line?), its progress has been impressive, and it's an innovative idea.
That's because Java's not an administrative tool like Perl. If you need to output to the console (say, if you are writing a command line program like Java's own javac compiler, or the ant build tool), you don't litter your entire program with references to the console itself. A better approach would be to encapsulate your output buffer and then in one place, alias that buffer to whichever output source you need -- in this case, the console. This could even be done in a configuration file if you needed that level of complexity.
My point is that Java is intended for more complex applications, not simple 200-line shell scripts. Your code shouldn't have any clue where it's outputting its content. Otherwise, when your requirements change, you end up with having to clean up your mess by replacing every single reference to System.out.println with some other output source, such as a file or a database or a socket connection.
I can use a windows box without a mouse, i can't do that on a mac, maybe thats because i'm just not smart enough to know all the hotkeys.
It's not as hard as you think - Macs have voice-recognition out of the box.
Drinking the Kool-aid is a reference to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, not the Jim Jones cult.
I don't know.... I can see the validity to the argument that the Shuffle lowers the bar for "Apple quality" - since it's just a "me too" flash player for people who only shop for "cheap".
I already had a full-size iPod and decided I wanted the Shuffle for its portability. I now use my regular iPod at work or plugged into a Bose SoundDock at home, but I carry the shuffle in my pocket just about every single day, as well as at the gym. Why? Because the shuffle is so small I don't even notice I have it. So, it's not just for "me too" people who only shop for "cheap".
Actually, Java's case conventions were popularized by Smalltalk.
I worked in a building *owned* by Coke, and we were not even allowed to have a Pepsi machine on our floor.
I went to a university "owned" by Coke, and we did not have a Pepsi machine anywhere on the one-square-mile campus.
Personally I use an mp3 player when I go jogging, I wanted a solid state storage medium so it didn't die due to the shock. Also I listen to lectures/spoken word books when I go running. I don't want to listen to them several times so deleting them makes sense for me. For me an iPod makes no sense it uses a harddrive and has way too much storage space, I will never have that much data on it. For me there are better products than the iPod regardless of price. It just happens that the mp3 player I bought was much cheaper than an iPod.
Nonsense. iPod shuffle meets all your requirements (solid state, plays MP3s and audio books, doesn't offer too much space), and I bet it costs less than the MP3 player you bought.
Sweet, sign me up. Now I just got to find some way to reformat the library to get rid of the "sample" items that were put there when I chose "try sample library" upon first installation. Thanks for responding.
Wil, I have just one question about this product and can't seem to find the answer anywhere - is there some way I can order the items in the library arbitrarily? I keep my CD collection in chronological order by purchase date (I'm serious) and to me, Delicious Library looks like a great solution to quickly get a digital copy of all of that information, for the very reason that you describe - to make a backed-up list so that I can replace them someday. But will my ordering system be lost?
(I realize this isn't a tech support forum but my emailed question [a different question] went unanswered, so I can imagine your company has its hands full, but if you happen to be posting here on slashdot... ;)
No. It's almost readable compared with assembly language, or Perl, perhaps. You shouldn't be able to "grok a fair bit" of Python, you should be able to pretty easily figure out what's going on without even knowing the language. That's one of the big draws of Python. I really couldn't have put it better than Bill Baumgartner.
OSX absolutely "just works". However, you will give up some level of configurability, because unlike on Linux the apps tend to be developed for average computer users and thus don't have the option to create dotfiles to configure every last little detail. However, the good news is that if you want or need that level of configurability, then you can probably just use whatever software lets you do that on Linux, except on the Mac. For instance, if you need fine-grained control over your HTTP user-agent header, Safari won't let you change that but you can just install Firefox or Mozilla. Many traditional Unix apps are available via DarwinPorts or Fink. But overall, you can't tweak every little aspect of the UI, and some things will take adjustment (for instance, focus-follows-mouse or whatever. Long ago I gave up my need for this level of control and dove into MacOSX and haven't looked back since, so if that's you, then you'll probably do fine.
That said, there's one huge difference with MacOSX that most Linux users just can't get accustomed to -- the best stuff isn't free. Nope. Sure, like I said you can get plenty of free software for the Mac. There's the fink and darwinports stuff. There's even some awesome totally-free software that's Mac-only, like SubEthaEdit or Desktop Manager (virtual desktops for OSX). But not everything is free or has source code available. There was a huge shareware community on the old MacOS and that has translated into a situation where there are still actual independent software developers making applications for the Mac and asking for money for them. Often not a lot of money -- obviously not every company can be Adobe or Microsoft and charge hundreds of dollars -- but if you look at some of the awesome offerings from the Omni Group (makers of Omniweb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle) or the stuff from Panic, or BareBones, you'll start to see some really awesome applications -- and then you'll be disappointed that they're not free. You got to get used to that with MacOSX, it's just the way things have evolved in this culture.
Good luck.
You almost never ever need to reinstall MacOSX, not even from "archive and install". Not unless that's what you really want to do. If there is a problem, it is 99% of the time always going to be some file that got overwritten, or some prefs file in your ~/Library that's causing some software or other to hiccup. I realize you only have one computer so you didn't have much choice, but if at all possible to get to a friend's house and mount your computer as a firewire hard disk and go from there, or boot from the CD and analyze your hard disk as an external disk, try to do so.
No, we were told that we couldn't use anything other than Windows 2000 (no Mac, Linux, etc). Not even on our development boxes. Even though Linux is free.
There goes my argument that Python promotes readable code....
You must not be familiar with the Navy's NMCI then. It was basically an initiative by industry lobbyists to get the Navy to standardize on Windows 2000 for everything, along with a number of other commercial applications.
Why do people have such a problem with Perl? It's an excellent, high-level general purpose programming language with a huge range of extension modules available. I have personally used Perl for many projects, as do TicketMaster, ValueClick, Morgan Stanley and Ryanair
How compelling, you just named some of Slashdot's favorite companies.
I wondered about this too, surely he doesn't think the OP was suggesting patents are comparable to nukes -- the question referenced the way in which large corps gobble down patents, often with no immediate designs to follow through on a business plan or implementation.
Pike does, however, mention that he works at Google, so maybe he interpreted the question as a shot against his employer or was simply advised by Google's PR not to answer the question.
YHBT -- criticizing open source programs for having names that have nothing to do with their function when in fact they make perfect sense, and then providing counterexamples from Microsoft -- don't fall for this one.
I'm going totally offtopic, but why would your G3-using friends not want to go to Panther? The only Mac I own is a G3 and Panther improved its performance more noticeably than it did to my brother's G4. In other words, speaking only in terms of performance, if there's one MacOS that G3 users should use, it's Panther.
So does Mozilla - and as we all know, it runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows platforms. Care to recant?
Oh I didn't realize Microsoft shipped Mozilla as the default web browser on their new operating systems.
Yet at the same time, Google has reported an increase in the percentage of Mac users using Google.
That would make sense, since the default web browser on MacOSX puts a Google-specific search textfield on every window.
Agreed. Why does everybody want to turn PHP into Java? If you want to use Java, then use Java. Diversity is good.
Double agreed! Man, that's the first time I've ever agreed with Tablizer.
Try Running MacOSX, which is like a younger brother to the venerable Running Linux.
I'm not trying to sound critical, but your argument demonstrates that you really don't know what AppleScript is. Although both AppleScript and Unix scripting languages can both be used to automate repetitive tasks, they're not really in the same ballpark. Sure, you could do some data processing in AppleScript, but the whole point of AppleScript is not so much to be a scripting language as it is to provide an API for sending and receiving Apple Events -- a special kind of interprocess communication on MacOS and MacOSX. You can literally send a message to a running application (or start a non-running one), such as "give me the name of the artist who performs the song that is currently playing in iTunes", or "open a new window in Safari pointing to the URL http://slashdot.org/".
As Neuburg himself explains in the book being reviewed, you wouldn't want to do data processing in AppleScript, especially now that we have such easy access to Unix scripting languages (from the Terminal, or even by calling said Unix script from within an AppleScript). However, you can use AppleScript to tell Excel to return a list of every third value in column D of a given spreadsheet, which you can then hand to a Python script for processing, rather than trying to parse the Excel spreadsheet file directly (or requiring the user to export it as CSV and then process that).
However, if you purchase an Apple laptop, you cannot simple snap in a new trackpad. You are stuck with a single button. Yes, you can can purchase an external mouse, but then you're stuck using an external mouse with your laptop. This is a pain in the ass, and something that you can avoid on non-Apple laptops -- you can get nice three-button laptops elsewhere.
To right-click, just hold down Ctrl as you click the trackpad mouse button. It sounds arduous, but as an iBook owner I assure you that it becomes second-nature.