Even better than that... having had a little advanced warning about it, I simply logged in to windows update manually, found the "critical update" for IE7, and ticked the "hide this update" option. Never had to bother the computer to even DL it in the first place.
sure, there is visual studio... there is also a gcc-like compiler for win32, but that's not the point. it's like giving a person some tools and saying that he is in theory now able to build a house to sleep tonight. a user is at a loss... most linux users are using packages nowadays and do not know/care about compiling the bits together.
So unless you changed the point being made in midstream, what was it again? Are we talking about users w/ enough knowledge to compile their stuff, or are we talking about users who only need to see a click-here-to-update interface? You're saying on one hand that linux users are even bothering with the compiler (something I don't buy at all... I always ended up mucking about with something on a command line before getting some packages installed and correctly working) and on the other hand, you're wanting a similar level of command-line tool chain to be available on windows -- a platform that made its fortunes keeping maw and paw away from the dread command line... ? Please do feel free to clarify or try again.:)
every distro has its own packaging system - diversity!
As to linux sub-system diversity, well, that's great for power-users and all that (maw and paw won't ever care, as they won't ever install something, as they ideally wouldn't run as root, and that causes its own headaches)... but all the talk of gcc and compilers and command shells and such had me thinking we were talking about developers. You can't re-frame the original point in a reply to that point.:) My own personal experience with a rather simplistic home-brew project was that, once I got the thing running, I had no idea about packaging for my own system. And, heaven forbid I wanted to share it with people, I'd have to know how to roll my app up into several different package management formats. I just ran out of time and interest, so the little stupid utility that might've been shared, didn't. But I don't bemoan that the package manager works different from, say, an OS X app bundle -- I simply ran out of mental resources to worry about it further.
I'll definitely grant you one good point: a windows developer having the ability to "hook into" the standard update system would probably be a real boon. Firefox, Java, Acrobat, AVG, iTunes, etc. all running their own update checks. Though, can't say it's really popped up on my radar screen enough for it to bother me too much, it does sound like an idea worth consideration... assuming Microsoft is still trying to curry favor with their developers/partners.
On the other hand, it comes down to this: all three environments have provided the means for people to install applications on their systems, keep them updated, and allow developers relative easy ways to connect their apps to those systems. They all work different as their origins and goals are different: windows = take money from people who know no better, and keep them from needing to know better so long as the product "mostly works"; linux = let everyone figure it out for themselves how it works -- this year (if at all) -- as a tradeoff for being free; OS X = provide a more premium product for people who value the quality of the overall experience. There's nothing really wrong with any philosophy... what would be wrong is to try to shoehorn one set of culture into the other without a careful analysis of and respect for why differences exist.
That was one of the top features on Microsoft Works
And this is generally still true of Office itself, which is one of Microsoft's top revenue source. Except, neither of those products really works as well together as iLife. And here's the point I was making: it isn't just software working well with other software -- its software, hardware, and devices/drivers all working well together. This is a higher level of "working together" than simple OLE calls between a couple semi-related home/office applications.
And otherwise, people outside of slashdot are happy with the thought of their PC as a dumb, if highly finicky and irritating, appliance. They bought "a Dell" (or whatever) and so long as they want support for it, that's every bit as closed to them as a Mac would be.
You're bemoaning the impending purchase of a new PC on the lack of a "low-end" model from Apple. (That's just odd to say, btw.) If you think you're serious about it, here's the test: buy a Mac Mini. No need to worry about keyboard/mouse/monitor (as you've clearly got that anyway). That's what sold me. I get tons of stuff done on my Mini and will be getting a full-up iMac model probably 2Q of this year. Granted, I did get the RAM boost for my Mini... still, mine's the PPC version before they switched over to Intel, so even though the newer model is 2-3X faster, and I've got exceedingly few complaints.
I'll just say that I read the middle of your reply in this way: "I rather not deal with and learn the tools Microsoft has provided* to accomplish tasks in the same fashion as I'm used to in unix/linux." That is, while cmd.exe dates from the 80's or so and hasn't had a *lot* of improvements (you actually can get filename completion if you want it, though it takes a quick reg hack) in the time since, this hasn't stopped millions of people from learning how to use it and get something done. The scripting host is also available to drive more complex tasks than a simple cmd.exe can provide (and that can be coded in vbscript or even javascript). The 1% of people who are even are of the command prompt *and* need 'grep' capabilities in cmd.exe can just install cygwin and get over the difference. This all being said, Microsoft has, I'll have to admit, added functionality at the command line than was present in the earliest days. (Whether the stuff is easily accessible or easy to find documentation about -- this is a whole different question... but don't get me started on the topic lest I drag linux tools in, too.;)
Now as to the "*" next to "provided" above: It is true that while OS X provides Xcode, and UNIX has gcc -- both out of the box for free -- Microsoft does make Visual Studio available. At cost, but available just the same. Since I've not used it more than a handful of times at the workplace to update an installer exe file for our product, I can't speak to it in detail. However, it is a compiler that creates win32 apps plus installable packages for windows. Works differently, but still provides the function. It's not entirely fair to say windows needs something like pacman since it has its own installer system. (I won't argue whether pacman gives more features, but that's not entirely relevant.) Similarly, windows provides ways to manage user's desktop and application settings too. I really haven't seen a whole lot of argument solid enough to stand on yet. (Personally, I'm looking into the free WiX toolset to create windows installer packages... I think Linux needs to adopt a concept closer to that -- something declarative as opposed to imperative. (I'm not sure its possible though given the fragmented nature of "just where things get installed" in some linux flavors... I'll return to this soapbox in a moment.:)
Microsoft is, on the other hand, in the position of having created a lot of developer inertia: they can't just up and change the intaller system, the command line, or any other developer- or power-user-facing component simply to provide support to "pesky UNIX hippies." It'd be suicide if they tried, since we just know they'll invariably break long-standing support for things their existing developer base has come to rely on: something that, while not 100% polished or as featureful as things in 'nix, can be generally relied upon to exist on the target environment. That would hardly serve the windows world any better than cmd.exe would serve the *nix world. Heck, wake me up when Linux distros ever decide on just one packaging subsystem and a well-supported (that means: actually used) common desktop API, and I'll look back into linux development. "Linux standard base" did wonders.
On the other hand, Microsofts decision to abandon menu bars in their apps (IE7, office 2007, etc) makes me wonder just what they're up to lately. It is mainly for these reasons -- radical change in UI behavior -- that I'm telling family to avoid going to it. And yes, I've seen a vista desktop running at our workplace to speak to the UI changes first hand. And to add another pointless anecdote: our boss managed to "bluescreen" it in about five minutes... something to do with having it try to open a file that probably didn't have an extension or mime type mapped to some application. That did wonders to inspire any sort of confidence on my part. <g>
I agree with your general sentiment -- I dislike what they did in vista (though I'm a Mac guy, so it doesn't matter much, and the workplace will be staying on win2k until we decouple from the exchange server, then its some linux distro that'll roll in). However, blaming MSFT for not providing a bash shell or being able to compile X apps makes as much sense (that is, none at all) as it would to accuse OS X of not providing a cmd.exe shell or being able to compile win32 apps. It's completely moot -- vista doesn't need "bash" specifically, so please strike that from future arguments and lets argue our points more intelligently.:)
You're either a moron, a FUD monster, or a liar. I've been happily using my *3* button/scroll wheel mouse since I got my Mac system and it works just fine, thanks. (And ctrl-click also works well enough that I'm considering one of their very nice bluetooth mice, single-button or not.) I can't really think of any basic operations where OS X itself requires me to use the right button... aside from the rare instance where I want to "Show Contents" or "Get Info" on something, neither of which any normal person cares about. If third party software were designed better for the user, the right button wouldn't be quite as needed -- but that's irrelevant, since multi-button mice are directly supported and have been for years.
As to your issue of drag-copying not really copying... you gotta be doing something wrong there too, or you changed a preference, or you installed some odd-ball tweaker utility that changed a preference, or (?)... but the standard behavior doesn't do that and, to my knowledge, never has.
Apple's business is not simply "hardware" either -- the value of their product is that the hardware and software work very well together, owing to a known set of hardware configurations PLUS a whole lot of integration and QA testing which they use to feedback into their own software / drivers / hardware design teams. Additionally, since they've switched over the x86 based systems, their "total package" pricing (hardware and pre-included software) will easily beat an equivalent windows-based system as from Dell, Gateway, etc. (Here, it is important to match not only the raw specs of the machines, but the quality level of the hardware bits, the level of integration testing performed, the price of the OS and included tools that come free on a Mac, etc, etc.) By way of pointless anecdote: guy at my workplace went to the local Fry's to buy a top-end system. Said he had a shopping cart loaded w/ components (cast, PSU, mobo, etc., OS, software, blah blah) and, having totalled the cost up, decided a Mac Pro system would save him not only give him slightly better specs while saving him a few hundred dollars up front, but also the few days needed to get things assembled, installed, tweaked, etc.
You should realize that one of the top features of a Mac system is that things work well together -- OS, software, and hardware. This is due to a hell of a lot of QA testing on Apple's part, and I just cannot fault them for it one bit. On the other hand, just releasing a DVD for people to install on whatever frankenbox they've cobbled together (or whatever cost-cutting box Dell sells now for $500) will mean the OS and software will no longer "just work" -- it'll turn into the driver/hardware support nightmare that Windows has enjoyed for quite some time. Given the beast that MSFT has helped create in terms of hardware diversity, there is now simply no way MSFT and/or anyone else can do the level of QA Apple performs -- at least not where the software would be meaningfully improved. I'd rather never see this happen to OS X, and if that means you turn your back on OS X as a result, that'd be just fine here. [shrug]
So you want a headless Mac desktop machine with smokin' hot video capable of running vista?? I don't think we have the same general understanding of "headless" or "desktop."
As has already been pointed out to another commenter: the ability to play DRMed iTunes files and the ability to play non-DRMed MP3 files are separate concepts. The article might have worded this better, granted.
Article might not be worded the best way, but is not lying. An iPod can play stuff from iTMS : check. An iPod can play non-DRMed MP3 files that I rip from my own CDs : check. OP is entirely correct. My own iPod has a mixture of both. If you insist on think the OP was saying just one thing, you'd first have to observe that iTMS sells AAC files, not MP3 files. Stop feeding the FUD machine.
To each their own. If you buy a PS3 and like it, great. But in counterpoint, why spend over $600 on a PS3 when I have a PS2 (and a huge library of games available I haven't played yet), a TV that won't benefit from blu-ray (etc) anyhow, and otherwise have a library of photos, music, and a mildly growing collection of home/kid movies already on my Mac in the various iLife titles -- will the PS3 stream this stuff to my TV? That's basically the reason the ~ $300 iTV box exists... get your in-Mac media libraries onto your TV with no more fuss than a click of a remote control. If someone adds internet-streaming options, thats just an extra I'm not really counting on.
Steve Jobs said, back in the Fall when he teased us with the box, that "itv" was just an in-house product code name. An official for-market name is likely forthcoming -- note that, iLife suite notwithstanding, Apple seems to be slowly moving away from the "i*" naming convention.
Except that the one thing we've finally established is that the slashdot demographic, taken as an average, exists completely outside of any commercially oriented target market. No reason Apple (or anyone) should even bother reading our comments for their own research purposes. As for the iTV thing: last we really heard back in the Fall developer conference (?) was that it will be $299. Personally, I think its great: nice concept, nice form factor / styling, and all the usual Apple QA being done. I have already budgeted for it.
Actually it just got worse: Java now has a facility called "Java Script"... included is the Rhino engine, so you can now run "Javascript" inside of "Java Script".
OO.o is working well enough that 99% of the company desktops now only have OO.o installed. (A big part of the equation is that we're cheapskates.;-) We allow the HR lady to keep her copy for resume handling purposes. The two tech writers have it for legacy document purposes. Everyone else from our boss on down has OO.o. We're an IT shop, granted, but it does what we need it to.
Part of the alleged usefulness of DITA is you can extend the default functionality to add things you need. But, if you already have a schema worked out and have some work done in that direction, no point trying to fold it over into DITA... it wouldn't be an easy thing to do. (We've done minor extensions to better annotate various bits of legalese, product information, etc... but certainly nothing of any real scale).
We're using (apache) fop 0.20.5 as we use free/OS were possible (damn that exchange server!)... while there are some higher revision numbers for fop, they seemed to break/drop support for various parts of the XML-FO spec we had been using. We're sacrificing on only one sticking point: "keeps"... that is, keep this fo:block adjacent on a page with the following fo:block, possibly by breaking the page sooner than otherwise needed. (also impacts table keeps.) Other than that, we're generally happy enough. We have one deliverable that numbers above 400 pages when fully assembled and rendered to PDF, complete with PDF bookmarks, TOC, front matter, legalese, back matter... fop doesn't have a problem with it (though that guide eats a lot of memory to assemble, fop hangs right in the game). And for those lurking on the thread: moving the material out of a word processor format into DITA xml topic files has been a godsend... re-use of content is trivial, and everything stays up to date with one file change. Anyway, best of luck.
Yes, for any reasonable "document" need, OO.o seems to support things. Figuring out the interface is another matter -- it is wholly counterintuitive how to do things looking at OO.o, but it does tables (and handles breaking them across a page), running headers and footers, TOCs, etc. The real trick to OO.o is that everything is controlled via some "style" selection, so a few things logically do drive differently than in Word. In other words, the 'zen' is different. Some things are just plain stupid: some knob related to a page property seemed to be in a paragraph property area. But the *.odt file is fairly accessible. What I did was start w/ a blank page and add just one thing to it: a header, or a table, or a graphic, then I unzipped the odt and started mucking with the XML files to learn how/where it stores things. Its about the easiest way I can think of to digest the format.
On the other hand, if you're gonna insist on authoring in XML, you might look into DITA. Our co. also has a tech guy or two that converts dev-speak into english and then into DITA xml files. Our deliverable docs are run through an in-house customized version of DITA OT 1.2.1 to create XML-FO code (and then through fop to get PDF files). DITA OT 1.2.1 also converts to (X)HTML, but we haven't played with that yet. The upshot is our docs are part of our nightly build process: the XML files are checked out, processed, and turned into PDFs every single day. What is really really painful, though, is to convert DITA XML into *.odt-based XML. I got just enough of it working to work, but it's a fairly horrid XSLT file to write.
Our co. has some OO.o template files (*.ott) set up for developers to use... they enter info into the form in proscribed places and then some XSLT (etc) I wrote converts the underlying *.odt file's XML into HTML. Our usage is all for in-house purposes. It is doable, but there are some minor niggles in the overall process. If the person filling in the info doesn't do what OO.o wants them to do and exactly how it wants them to, the underlying XML file -- technically preserving the info accurately -- might look a little shuffled up to your first-draft XSLT process. You can really only go so far in the XSLT domain before you just have the process throw an error message, after which you walk down to someone's office and smack their knuckles for doing it the wrong way.
Indeed. My point wasn't so much that religion automatically makes people good. That's hardly ever been the case. However, it isn't "religion" per se that caused the crusades or 9/11 as much as it was anger, intolerance, and a personal/collective agenda. Ego -- I'm more important than you, and to justify my feelings, I'm going to cite $ARBITRARY_REASON. Sometimes that evaluates to cultural / religious affiliation. That's too bad. The central themes of the dominant religious forms have, at their core, a desire to make the world better at the expense of the person's own self-serving motives. Religion (put quotes around it), however, has turned into more of a political / social function. The teachers mean well, but, well, people are human. So the well-meaning attempts at making the world better as a whole instead compartmentalize everyone into a "us vs. them" mentality. Personally, I was raised in non-denomination-specific Christian home and went to a very Southern Baptist private school from 1st through highschool. (One might say they were militantly Baptist.) The whole canned, board-game nature of "religion" wore thin on me at an early age: "sure, just profess belief in Jesus and all will be well... plus attend church three times per week, tithe *at least* 10% without fail, know the standard hymns, have a divinely inspired moving experience from time to time, and go converting (or for bonus points with God, go on mission trips)." My attending church in my adult years is more a matter of polite tolerance of my wife's need to go. (In the meantime, I relate much better through some philosophical models learned through years of Aikido training, but that's not really important.)
So what was the point then? Well, compared to where our discourse has taken us, it wasn't much of one, except that you seemed to rather flippantly lump the whole of modern day Christians into the blame pool of various attrocities. Sure they were committed, inexcusable, and a complete affront to the religious standard they rode into battle with. But your initial statement itself seemed tantamount to falling into the same trap: "you religious idiots!"
Care to point people (like myself) directly to a doc on getting x11 vesa configured in X? I'm trying to setup a myth box myself, except I'm tied to an ATI card. I get it all working fine via some ati-related driver on a monitor, and get it working fine w/o X on the TV, but can't get X (and thus myth) to run through the card on the TV. And with a 2.5mo. old in the house now, I'm really cramped for the time that I'm trying to let this box help me recapture. Really... not a flame, please post a direct link to the "idiots guide to X11 via VESA driver" and I'll be all the happier. Seriously... I've googled around for quite a number of wasted evenings on myth-related forums, and no one seems to care to mention getting it (well, X) through to a TV in a general purpose way. Clearly it's doable as the FC5 boot splash looks fine on the TV...
Whoa, lets be careful here. True modern-day believers of Christianity are no more a "part of" the Crusades (etc.) than true modern-day believers of Islam are "part of" terrorism. It's okay to be offended by all of the above -- hatred hiding itself under a thin, candy-coated shell of "religion."
I live in France... I pay 29.99 for this service, which includes...
Okay, we're back to calling them "freedom fries" again. Why? Because thin strips of fried potato[e], much like low priced super-DSL service, wants to be free.;-)
wait a minute -- you're complaining that linux was a hassle because you couldn't get the hardware to work, then you switched to a mac, and bingo! it all automagically worked! so mac os == good and linux == bad.
I said absolutely nothing of the kind, but great job reading that in anyway. What I'm saying is that, yeah, there are some driver problems and some systems and software integration problems. Those are indeed hard problems, and credit is and should be given to any soul brave enough to throw energy at it. The strength of the OSS community, however, is also its weakness: there's no schedule forcing something to get finished, no "customer" screaming for documentation, people work on things only to scratch their itch (then get busy elsewhere or lose interest). So projects come and projects go, many of them never really fully fleshed out on their own merit, let alone to the degree that we can attack the integration problems. It can kinda feel like trying to build a house of cards while riding a raft down class 3 rapids... the foundation just isn't stable enough.
look, macs basically support ONE wireless card, and only a handful of video cards, eg. but since the computer CAME with it when you bought it, it's no big deal.
Better the one fully featured wireless that completely works w/o hassle (plus of course the front end configuration panels, etc.) than the handful of wireless cards with limited functionality. Even those people who read "compatibility lists" ahead of time aren't guaranteed success... either the exact card they get has an undocumented minor change to a chipset on it, or their system doesn't exactly 100% match the system of the person who posted to the compatibility forum, or some other gotcha. I've just went through exactly this... it wasn't just "some hardware I had laying in my closet." But it isn't a huge deal since my wife is still using an XP box, so the card went there.
in fact, macs are probably worse, they just SEEM easier, because if it works, it works, if it doesn't, too bad. end of story, right? EASY! you fix the problem in macland by going and buying the part from the apple store.
Well, I've yet to encounter anything for my needs on my Mac that *doesn't* just work. Anyway, Linux (etc) is all roses here? If something doesn't work there, then for the majority of people, it just doesn't work. There's no recourse, unless this actually counts as a valid fix for a problem...
"Download the frobnitz source... gotta use CVS since they haven't packaged it yet for anyone... course that means you need these few dependencies which will try to hork your gcc compiler. (you do have the full dev tools and headers and kernel tree installed, right?) then you'll need to make sure your kernel has foobar compiled in... they only added that since a few versions after what your distro provided... except your distro also added some patches of their own that you won't have now, but maybe if you stand on one leg and wave a dead chicken, the patch operation won't complain too much. once that's done, this forum has half of an example about what you need to change in your/etc/frobnitz.conf file... assuming your distro's directory structure matches that of course. Feel free to run "grep/" to find it. Not there? Just create the file... nevermind that example only showed half the file, or that this other example's config file is outdated and incompatible. Once that's done, light three black candles and shave your neighbors cat. Reboot the system, but get into grub's menu so you can pass a s3cr3t boot time option. No, I don't know how to do that for lilo, but this forum over here has a partial example that might help. There's also a man page... bleh, its an 'info' page. Same difference, right? Well, once that's done, start your desktop manager so we can add in a custom launcher...::somewhe
What printing system do you think Mac OS X uses? CUPS. Just like Linux.
Great, the printing subsystem finally seems to have stabilized. (No, I'm not being snarky... that's a really good thing.) Thing is, having gone through several distros over the years (and, granted, I haven't bothered to try for over a year now) none of them ever had proper, working configurations for my printer. After lots of long nights, lost sleep, and too many web sites / forums with incomplete examples, I did finally get it to work, but only on the local machine. Access to the printer from a '98 box was still touch and go. Now, if I'm rolling my own distro from scratch (and, yes, I did survive doing LFS 6 when I accidentally had a lot of free time), that's a fair problem to have. But I'm not in the distro-hacking game, and I shouldn't have to be. Its been said many times: "Its the drivers, stupid." And isn't that partially what ESR is moaning about? I'm just chiming in my experiences here.
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Even better than that... having had a little advanced warning about it, I simply logged in to windows update manually, found the "critical update" for IE7, and ticked the "hide this update" option. Never had to bother the computer to even DL it in the first place.
So unless you changed the point being made in midstream, what was it again? Are we talking about users w/ enough knowledge to compile their stuff, or are we talking about users who only need to see a click-here-to-update interface? You're saying on one hand that linux users are even bothering with the compiler (something I don't buy at all ... I always ended up mucking about with something on a command line before getting some packages installed and correctly working) and on the other hand, you're wanting a similar level of command-line tool chain to be available on windows -- a platform that made its fortunes keeping maw and paw away from the dread command line... ? Please do feel free to clarify or try again. :)
As to linux sub-system diversity, well, that's great for power-users and all that (maw and paw won't ever care, as they won't ever install something, as they ideally wouldn't run as root, and that causes its own headaches) ... but all the talk of gcc and compilers and command shells and such had me thinking we were talking about developers. You can't re-frame the original point in a reply to that point. :) My own personal experience with a rather simplistic home-brew project was that, once I got the thing running, I had no idea about packaging for my own system. And, heaven forbid I wanted to share it with people, I'd have to know how to roll my app up into several different package management formats. I just ran out of time and interest, so the little stupid utility that might've been shared, didn't. But I don't bemoan that the package manager works different from, say, an OS X app bundle -- I simply ran out of mental resources to worry about it further.
I'll definitely grant you one good point: a windows developer having the ability to "hook into" the standard update system would probably be a real boon. Firefox, Java, Acrobat, AVG, iTunes, etc. all running their own update checks. Though, can't say it's really popped up on my radar screen enough for it to bother me too much, it does sound like an idea worth consideration ... assuming Microsoft is still trying to curry favor with their developers/partners.
On the other hand, it comes down to this: all three environments have provided the means for people to install applications on their systems, keep them updated, and allow developers relative easy ways to connect their apps to those systems. They all work different as their origins and goals are different: windows = take money from people who know no better, and keep them from needing to know better so long as the product "mostly works"; linux = let everyone figure it out for themselves how it works -- this year (if at all) -- as a tradeoff for being free; OS X = provide a more premium product for people who value the quality of the overall experience. There's nothing really wrong with any philosophy... what would be wrong is to try to shoehorn one set of culture into the other without a careful analysis of and respect for why differences exist.
And this is generally still true of Office itself, which is one of Microsoft's top revenue source. Except, neither of those products really works as well together as iLife. And here's the point I was making: it isn't just software working well with other software -- its software, hardware, and devices/drivers all working well together. This is a higher level of "working together" than simple OLE calls between a couple semi-related home/office applications.
And otherwise, people outside of slashdot are happy with the thought of their PC as a dumb, if highly finicky and irritating, appliance. They bought "a Dell" (or whatever) and so long as they want support for it, that's every bit as closed to them as a Mac would be.
You're bemoaning the impending purchase of a new PC on the lack of a "low-end" model from Apple. (That's just odd to say, btw.) If you think you're serious about it, here's the test: buy a Mac Mini. No need to worry about keyboard/mouse/monitor (as you've clearly got that anyway). That's what sold me. I get tons of stuff done on my Mini and will be getting a full-up iMac model probably 2Q of this year. Granted, I did get the RAM boost for my Mini ... still, mine's the PPC version before they switched over to Intel, so even though the newer model is 2-3X faster, and I've got exceedingly few complaints.
I'll just say that I read the middle of your reply in this way: "I rather not deal with and learn the tools Microsoft has provided* to accomplish tasks in the same fashion as I'm used to in unix/linux." That is, while cmd.exe dates from the 80's or so and hasn't had a *lot* of improvements (you actually can get filename completion if you want it, though it takes a quick reg hack) in the time since, this hasn't stopped millions of people from learning how to use it and get something done. The scripting host is also available to drive more complex tasks than a simple cmd.exe can provide (and that can be coded in vbscript or even javascript). The 1% of people who are even are of the command prompt *and* need 'grep' capabilities in cmd.exe can just install cygwin and get over the difference. This all being said, Microsoft has, I'll have to admit, added functionality at the command line than was present in the earliest days. (Whether the stuff is easily accessible or easy to find documentation about -- this is a whole different question... but don't get me started on the topic lest I drag linux tools in, too. ;)
... I think Linux needs to adopt a concept closer to that -- something declarative as opposed to imperative. (I'm not sure its possible though given the fragmented nature of "just where things get installed" in some linux flavors... I'll return to this soapbox in a moment. :)
... something to do with having it try to open a file that probably didn't have an extension or mime type mapped to some application. That did wonders to inspire any sort of confidence on my part. <g>
Now as to the "*" next to "provided" above: It is true that while OS X provides Xcode, and UNIX has gcc -- both out of the box for free -- Microsoft does make Visual Studio available. At cost, but available just the same. Since I've not used it more than a handful of times at the workplace to update an installer exe file for our product, I can't speak to it in detail. However, it is a compiler that creates win32 apps plus installable packages for windows. Works differently, but still provides the function. It's not entirely fair to say windows needs something like pacman since it has its own installer system. (I won't argue whether pacman gives more features, but that's not entirely relevant.) Similarly, windows provides ways to manage user's desktop and application settings too. I really haven't seen a whole lot of argument solid enough to stand on yet. (Personally, I'm looking into the free WiX toolset to create windows installer packages
Microsoft is, on the other hand, in the position of having created a lot of developer inertia: they can't just up and change the intaller system, the command line, or any other developer- or power-user-facing component simply to provide support to "pesky UNIX hippies." It'd be suicide if they tried, since we just know they'll invariably break long-standing support for things their existing developer base has come to rely on: something that, while not 100% polished or as featureful as things in 'nix, can be generally relied upon to exist on the target environment. That would hardly serve the windows world any better than cmd.exe would serve the *nix world. Heck, wake me up when Linux distros ever decide on just one packaging subsystem and a well-supported (that means: actually used) common desktop API, and I'll look back into linux development. "Linux standard base" did wonders.
On the other hand, Microsofts decision to abandon menu bars in their apps (IE7, office 2007, etc) makes me wonder just what they're up to lately. It is mainly for these reasons -- radical change in UI behavior -- that I'm telling family to avoid going to it. And yes, I've seen a vista desktop running at our workplace to speak to the UI changes first hand. And to add another pointless anecdote: our boss managed to "bluescreen" it in about five minutes
I agree with your general sentiment -- I dislike what they did in vista (though I'm a Mac guy, so it doesn't matter much, and the workplace will be staying on win2k until we decouple from the exchange server, then its some linux distro that'll roll in). However, blaming MSFT for not providing a bash shell or being able to compile X apps makes as much sense (that is, none at all) as it would to accuse OS X of not providing a cmd.exe shell or being able to compile win32 apps. It's completely moot -- vista doesn't need "bash" specifically, so please strike that from future arguments and lets argue our points more intelligently. :)
You're either a moron, a FUD monster, or a liar. I've been happily using my *3* button/scroll wheel mouse since I got my Mac system and it works just fine, thanks. (And ctrl-click also works well enough that I'm considering one of their very nice bluetooth mice, single-button or not.) I can't really think of any basic operations where OS X itself requires me to use the right button ... aside from the rare instance where I want to "Show Contents" or "Get Info" on something, neither of which any normal person cares about. If third party software were designed better for the user, the right button wouldn't be quite as needed -- but that's irrelevant, since multi-button mice are directly supported and have been for years.
As to your issue of drag-copying not really copying ... you gotta be doing something wrong there too, or you changed a preference, or you installed some odd-ball tweaker utility that changed a preference, or (?) ... but the standard behavior doesn't do that and, to my knowledge, never has.
Apple's business is not simply "hardware" either -- the value of their product is that the hardware and software work very well together, owing to a known set of hardware configurations PLUS a whole lot of integration and QA testing which they use to feedback into their own software / drivers / hardware design teams. Additionally, since they've switched over the x86 based systems, their "total package" pricing (hardware and pre-included software) will easily beat an equivalent windows-based system as from Dell, Gateway, etc. (Here, it is important to match not only the raw specs of the machines, but the quality level of the hardware bits, the level of integration testing performed, the price of the OS and included tools that come free on a Mac, etc, etc.) By way of pointless anecdote: guy at my workplace went to the local Fry's to buy a top-end system. Said he had a shopping cart loaded w/ components (cast, PSU, mobo, etc., OS, software, blah blah) and, having totalled the cost up, decided a Mac Pro system would save him not only give him slightly better specs while saving him a few hundred dollars up front, but also the few days needed to get things assembled, installed, tweaked, etc.
You should realize that one of the top features of a Mac system is that things work well together -- OS, software, and hardware. This is due to a hell of a lot of QA testing on Apple's part, and I just cannot fault them for it one bit. On the other hand, just releasing a DVD for people to install on whatever frankenbox they've cobbled together (or whatever cost-cutting box Dell sells now for $500) will mean the OS and software will no longer "just work" -- it'll turn into the driver/hardware support nightmare that Windows has enjoyed for quite some time. Given the beast that MSFT has helped create in terms of hardware diversity, there is now simply no way MSFT and/or anyone else can do the level of QA Apple performs -- at least not where the software would be meaningfully improved. I'd rather never see this happen to OS X, and if that means you turn your back on OS X as a result, that'd be just fine here. [shrug]
So you want a headless Mac desktop machine with smokin' hot video capable of running vista?? I don't think we have the same general understanding of "headless" or "desktop."
As has already been pointed out to another commenter: the ability to play DRMed iTunes files and the ability to play non-DRMed MP3 files are separate concepts. The article might have worded this better, granted.
Article might not be worded the best way, but is not lying. An iPod can play stuff from iTMS : check. An iPod can play non-DRMed MP3 files that I rip from my own CDs : check. OP is entirely correct. My own iPod has a mixture of both. If you insist on think the OP was saying just one thing, you'd first have to observe that iTMS sells AAC files, not MP3 files. Stop feeding the FUD machine.
To each their own. If you buy a PS3 and like it, great. But in counterpoint, why spend over $600 on a PS3 when I have a PS2 (and a huge library of games available I haven't played yet), a TV that won't benefit from blu-ray (etc) anyhow, and otherwise have a library of photos, music, and a mildly growing collection of home/kid movies already on my Mac in the various iLife titles -- will the PS3 stream this stuff to my TV? That's basically the reason the ~ $300 iTV box exists ... get your in-Mac media libraries onto your TV with no more fuss than a click of a remote control. If someone adds internet-streaming options, thats just an extra I'm not really counting on.
Steve Jobs said, back in the Fall when he teased us with the box, that "itv" was just an in-house product code name. An official for-market name is likely forthcoming -- note that, iLife suite notwithstanding, Apple seems to be slowly moving away from the "i*" naming convention.
Except that the one thing we've finally established is that the slashdot demographic, taken as an average, exists completely outside of any commercially oriented target market. No reason Apple (or anyone) should even bother reading our comments for their own research purposes. As for the iTV thing: last we really heard back in the Fall developer conference (?) was that it will be $299. Personally, I think its great: nice concept, nice form factor / styling, and all the usual Apple QA being done. I have already budgeted for it.
Actually it just got worse: Java now has a facility called "Java Script"... included is the Rhino engine, so you can now run "Javascript" inside of "Java Script".
OO.o is working well enough that 99% of the company desktops now only have OO.o installed. (A big part of the equation is that we're cheapskates. ;-) We allow the HR lady to keep her copy for resume handling purposes. The two tech writers have it for legacy document purposes. Everyone else from our boss on down has OO.o. We're an IT shop, granted, but it does what we need it to.
Part of the alleged usefulness of DITA is you can extend the default functionality to add things you need. But, if you already have a schema worked out and have some work done in that direction, no point trying to fold it over into DITA... it wouldn't be an easy thing to do. (We've done minor extensions to better annotate various bits of legalese, product information, etc... but certainly nothing of any real scale).
We're using (apache) fop 0.20.5 as we use free/OS were possible (damn that exchange server!) ... while there are some higher revision numbers for fop, they seemed to break/drop support for various parts of the XML-FO spec we had been using. We're sacrificing on only one sticking point: "keeps" ... that is, keep this fo:block adjacent on a page with the following fo:block, possibly by breaking the page sooner than otherwise needed. (also impacts table keeps.) Other than that, we're generally happy enough. We have one deliverable that numbers above 400 pages when fully assembled and rendered to PDF, complete with PDF bookmarks, TOC, front matter, legalese, back matter ... fop doesn't have a problem with it (though that guide eats a lot of memory to assemble, fop hangs right in the game). And for those lurking on the thread: moving the material out of a word processor format into DITA xml topic files has been a godsend ... re-use of content is trivial, and everything stays up to date with one file change. Anyway, best of luck.
Yes, for any reasonable "document" need, OO.o seems to support things. Figuring out the interface is another matter -- it is wholly counterintuitive how to do things looking at OO.o, but it does tables (and handles breaking them across a page), running headers and footers, TOCs, etc. The real trick to OO.o is that everything is controlled via some "style" selection, so a few things logically do drive differently than in Word. In other words, the 'zen' is different. Some things are just plain stupid: some knob related to a page property seemed to be in a paragraph property area. But the *.odt file is fairly accessible. What I did was start w/ a blank page and add just one thing to it: a header, or a table, or a graphic, then I unzipped the odt and started mucking with the XML files to learn how/where it stores things. Its about the easiest way I can think of to digest the format.
On the other hand, if you're gonna insist on authoring in XML, you might look into DITA. Our co. also has a tech guy or two that converts dev-speak into english and then into DITA xml files. Our deliverable docs are run through an in-house customized version of DITA OT 1.2.1 to create XML-FO code (and then through fop to get PDF files). DITA OT 1.2.1 also converts to (X)HTML, but we haven't played with that yet. The upshot is our docs are part of our nightly build process: the XML files are checked out, processed, and turned into PDFs every single day. What is really really painful, though, is to convert DITA XML into *.odt-based XML. I got just enough of it working to work, but it's a fairly horrid XSLT file to write.
Our co. has some OO.o template files (*.ott) set up for developers to use ... they enter info into the form in proscribed places and then some XSLT (etc) I wrote converts the underlying *.odt file's XML into HTML. Our usage is all for in-house purposes. It is doable, but there are some minor niggles in the overall process. If the person filling in the info doesn't do what OO.o wants them to do and exactly how it wants them to, the underlying XML file -- technically preserving the info accurately -- might look a little shuffled up to your first-draft XSLT process. You can really only go so far in the XSLT domain before you just have the process throw an error message, after which you walk down to someone's office and smack their knuckles for doing it the wrong way.
Indeed. My point wasn't so much that religion automatically makes people good. That's hardly ever been the case. However, it isn't "religion" per se that caused the crusades or 9/11 as much as it was anger, intolerance, and a personal/collective agenda. Ego -- I'm more important than you, and to justify my feelings, I'm going to cite $ARBITRARY_REASON. Sometimes that evaluates to cultural / religious affiliation. That's too bad. The central themes of the dominant religious forms have, at their core, a desire to make the world better at the expense of the person's own self-serving motives. Religion (put quotes around it), however, has turned into more of a political / social function. The teachers mean well, but, well, people are human. So the well-meaning attempts at making the world better as a whole instead compartmentalize everyone into a "us vs. them" mentality. Personally, I was raised in non-denomination-specific Christian home and went to a very Southern Baptist private school from 1st through highschool. (One might say they were militantly Baptist.) The whole canned, board-game nature of "religion" wore thin on me at an early age: "sure, just profess belief in Jesus and all will be well... plus attend church three times per week, tithe *at least* 10% without fail, know the standard hymns, have a divinely inspired moving experience from time to time, and go converting (or for bonus points with God, go on mission trips)." My attending church in my adult years is more a matter of polite tolerance of my wife's need to go. (In the meantime, I relate much better through some philosophical models learned through years of Aikido training, but that's not really important.)
So what was the point then? Well, compared to where our discourse has taken us, it wasn't much of one, except that you seemed to rather flippantly lump the whole of modern day Christians into the blame pool of various attrocities. Sure they were committed, inexcusable, and a complete affront to the religious standard they rode into battle with. But your initial statement itself seemed tantamount to falling into the same trap: "you religious idiots!"
Care to point people (like myself) directly to a doc on getting x11 vesa configured in X? I'm trying to setup a myth box myself, except I'm tied to an ATI card. I get it all working fine via some ati-related driver on a monitor, and get it working fine w/o X on the TV, but can't get X (and thus myth) to run through the card on the TV. And with a 2.5mo. old in the house now, I'm really cramped for the time that I'm trying to let this box help me recapture. Really... not a flame, please post a direct link to the "idiots guide to X11 via VESA driver" and I'll be all the happier. Seriously... I've googled around for quite a number of wasted evenings on myth-related forums, and no one seems to care to mention getting it (well, X) through to a TV in a general purpose way. Clearly it's doable as the FC5 boot splash looks fine on the TV...
Whoa, lets be careful here. True modern-day believers of Christianity are no more a "part of" the Crusades (etc.) than true modern-day believers of Islam are "part of" terrorism. It's okay to be offended by all of the above -- hatred hiding itself under a thin, candy-coated shell of "religion."
Okay, we're back to calling them "freedom fries" again. Why? Because thin strips of fried potato[e], much like low priced super-DSL service, wants to be free. ;-)
I said absolutely nothing of the kind, but great job reading that in anyway. What I'm saying is that, yeah, there are some driver problems and some systems and software integration problems. Those are indeed hard problems, and credit is and should be given to any soul brave enough to throw energy at it. The strength of the OSS community, however, is also its weakness: there's no schedule forcing something to get finished, no "customer" screaming for documentation, people work on things only to scratch their itch (then get busy elsewhere or lose interest). So projects come and projects go, many of them never really fully fleshed out on their own merit, let alone to the degree that we can attack the integration problems. It can kinda feel like trying to build a house of cards while riding a raft down class 3 rapids ... the foundation just isn't stable enough.
Better the one fully featured wireless that completely works w/o hassle (plus of course the front end configuration panels, etc.) than the handful of wireless cards with limited functionality. Even those people who read "compatibility lists" ahead of time aren't guaranteed success... either the exact card they get has an undocumented minor change to a chipset on it, or their system doesn't exactly 100% match the system of the person who posted to the compatibility forum, or some other gotcha. I've just went through exactly this... it wasn't just "some hardware I had laying in my closet." But it isn't a huge deal since my wife is still using an XP box, so the card went there.
Well, I've yet to encounter anything for my needs on my Mac that *doesn't* just work. Anyway, Linux (etc) is all roses here? If something doesn't work there, then for the majority of people, it just doesn't work. There's no recourse, unless this actually counts as a valid fix for a problem...
"Download the frobnitz source... gotta use CVS since they haven't packaged it yet for anyone... course that means you need these few dependencies which will try to hork your gcc compiler. (you do have the full dev tools and headers and kernel tree installed, right?) then you'll need to make sure your kernel has foobar compiled in... they only added that since a few versions after what your distro provided... except your distro also added some patches of their own that you won't have now, but maybe if you stand on one leg and wave a dead chicken, the patch operation won't complain too much. once that's done, this forum has half of an example about what you need to change in your /etc/frobnitz.conf file ... assuming your distro's directory structure matches that of course. Feel free to run "grep /" to find it. Not there? Just create the file... nevermind that example only showed half the file, or that this other example's config file is outdated and incompatible. Once that's done, light three black candles and shave your neighbors cat. Reboot the system, but get into grub's menu so you can pass a s3cr3t boot time option. No, I don't know how to do that for lilo, but this forum over here has a partial example that might help. There's also a man page... bleh, its an 'info' page. Same difference, right? Well, once that's done, start your desktop manager so we can add in a custom launcher... ::somewhe
Great, the printing subsystem finally seems to have stabilized. (No, I'm not being snarky... that's a really good thing.) Thing is, having gone through several distros over the years (and, granted, I haven't bothered to try for over a year now) none of them ever had proper, working configurations for my printer. After lots of long nights, lost sleep, and too many web sites / forums with incomplete examples, I did finally get it to work, but only on the local machine. Access to the printer from a '98 box was still touch and go. Now, if I'm rolling my own distro from scratch (and, yes, I did survive doing LFS 6 when I accidentally had a lot of free time), that's a fair problem to have. But I'm not in the distro-hacking game, and I shouldn't have to be. Its been said many times: "Its the drivers, stupid." And isn't that partially what ESR is moaning about? I'm just chiming in my experiences here.