By comparison, there is another method of transmitting data called IP which is unreliable.
My point, likely poorly made due to crankiness, was that TCP and IP are at different layers of the protocol stack, and TCP in fact assumes IP, and therefore you can't compare them. I do understand the analogy he was trying to make to abstraction layers, I was just trying to say that his language was tweaking the hell out of me.
why the hell is he talking about TCP being 'reliable' and IP being 'unreliable' when TCP is a transport protocol and IP is a routing protocol? i kept wanting to plug in 'UDP' for every instance of 'IP' when i was reading his article, and couldn't get very far down it because he was driving me up a wall. i'm all for writing up easy to understand explanations of things, but that was a wildly inaccurate way to easily explain it.
Sluggish is a great word for this. What I've noticed is that once you have something open or are in the process of doing something (like resizing), it goes lighting fast. But it seems to take OSX a moment to realize 'Oh hey, you want to resize this window'. I get around this by using keyboard shortcuts extensively, as well as LiteSwitch X for moving between apps.
Of course this doesn't fix the problem I am having getting back to this window because my bird is sitting on my touchpad....
Max Payne and Warcraft III both perform extremely well on my 800Mhz TiBook, just to add a couple more titles intothe mix. They both do better than they did on a year-old Toshiba laptop with similar specs (including a GeForce 2 Go) to the TiBook. And with the TiBook I get that nice wide aspect ratio... yum.
Re:Answer to title. (Actual experience)
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 2
I'm a professional software developer that had to port a large body of code from Windows to Mac. I've also done a signifigant amount of work on *nixes. The Finder interface in 10.0 and 10.1 is unbearably slow. I haven't had enough experience with 10.2 yet to make a call. The problem seems to be twofold, poor UI, and poor implementation.
The Finder is much faster in 10.2, probably mostly due to Quartz Extreme. It does still feel slightly sluggish when doing some things. Usually when you start to do a task, then once you're doing it it is fast.
I'm pretty fast in Windows explorer, I have to be navigating between hundreds of source files. I've learned just about all the shortcut keys and my hands move to wherever is fastest to accomplish a given task, mouse or keyboard. When I started working on the mac I was frustrated by the amount of mouse effort I had to expend. If my hands are on the keyboard and I need to do some UI navigation I don't want to have to use the mouse. I call that poor UI. I know there are probably keys there I don't know about, but they certainly aren't readily apparent in the help files. The tab between controls functionality windows has seems to be largely missing. I'm not incapable of learning new shortcut commands, I just need to be able to find out what they are without installing 4 third party applications that add them.
First, there are a fair number of shortcut keys that one can learn to speed things up. I got my first Mac recently and have learned many of them because I've got a laptop, which makes mousing even more painful for me.
Second, there's a number of utilities out there to improve the Finder's functionality. I would highly recommend LiteSwitch X if you miss the way Windows handles alt-tabbing. If there's something you don't like about the Finder, someone has almost invaribly written something to fix it for you, including the ability to create your own keyboard shortcuts. VersionTracker is a good place to start for that. I know there's one or more freeware apps that provide you with the ability to assign shortcut keys, so you might want to check that out as well.
All that said, I do wish that the Finder were somewhat more responsive, and that it came with more configuration options out of the box. I've noticed that many of the builtin MacOS X option panels are extremely dumbed down and don't provide GUI access to a lot of the more complicated options that exist in some of the underlying applications (samba and ftp are two that spring to mind in this category).
That's a very interesting argument that may in fact hold up in court, but I would imagine that the author's reson for GPLing it instead of LGPLing it was so that I would NOT be able to do that.
Of course, the author may simply have been unaware of the LGPL or the nuances of licensing; I have noticed that many people who want to 'open source' their software simply blindly GPL it these days.
My point was not about the GPL in general, my point was about the GPL in the case where it is restricting software that was government funded and therefore should be in the public domain.
How you choose to license software that you spent your own time and own money developing is up to you.
I for one am pleased to see this. I work for a company that sells software and have been pissed several times when it has been impossible for me to use software that my tax dollars have gone to pay for because it's trendy for people at universities to GPL everything that breathes.
The most recent example of this was a set of nice Java random variable distribution libraries that I found and wanted to use for some code I was writing. However, they were under the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL which would have allowed me to use library calls), so that meant that even though they were libraries, I couldn't even call them from a commercial product. If they had been in a BSD style license, I could have used them. So I ended up spending some time implementing the ones I needed.
Many people do not seem to realize that when software is protected by the GPL, it is not only 'open source' but it is also prohibiting anyone from using it if they do not also put their software under the GPL. (There are some workarounds - you can always have the GPL code run in a separate process and use IPC/RPC to get results from it and technically not break the GPL, but that can get ugly quick.)
It's fine for someone to make the decision that they want to force people who use their code to use the GPL. BUT - if it is code that was developed with a government grant, to me it seems wrong to use a license that forces a specific use of the code and promotes what is basically a political agenda (force everything to be GPL), instead of using a BSD style license which makes the code truly open. Things paid for by the government should be used to go back to the community at large if at all possible, and the GPL limits the utility of the research performed under government grants.
WOW. I used to get flaky/intermittent reception in my living room (30-40 feet away from the Netgear WAP station upstairs), and squeezing the plastic strip in the battery compartment for 10 seconds or so is giving me PERFECT reception in there. Thank you thank you thank you thank you!
i had to chance to play with one of these a couple months ago; i have a friend that works for danger and they've all had prototypes for a while now. the UI is extremely well thought out and easy to use - there's a little scrollwheel that lets you flip between menus more easily than most cellphone type things i've used. it's also fairly compact, lightweight, and cheap, compared with similar convergence devices.
the version my friend had also had a telnet client on it! he's since told me that won't be available with the release and may not ever be available for the actual product.
The author said that 'BSD' is not an operating system, but rather a type of operating system. Therefore the 'BSDs' (the collection of BSD-type operating systems) are operating systems. The author didn't make a contradiction.
I had this problem too, and it was because I had moved Mail. I actually appear to have been able to correct it by hand by opening the new package under Applications and my old package that was under Applications/network, and dragging things from the new one into the old one by hand. YMMV.
Driving is a right in America, but a privilege in Europe.
Every time I go to traffic school for speeding here in CA, they always remind us that driving in America is a privilege, not a right. We have to be licensed for it, and the privilege can be taken away if we disobey laws.
That's not to mention whether or not they have the money to buy the land that goes under said $300K custom home.
One issue with getting a custom home opposed to one that is already there is that you not only have to start paying morgtage/loans on the custom home and the land it's on, but you also have to continue paying rent for several months in wherever you're living while it's built!
It isn't theft morally. No one has any less of anything than they did before the copy was made. In fact, one could argue that if the software is good, I have a moral *obligation* to copy it, in order to increse the good in society. Again, I don't make unauthorised copies myself, but its an argument.
How is it NOT theft morally? Blizzard exists as a company because people buy software from it. That is how they pay their employees, for their servers, for their advertising, and so on. If people do not pay for their software, then Blizzard is no longer capable of existing as a company, and the games they make would not be made.
Just because you think that ideally all software should be free, it doesn't mean that Blizzard subscribes to the same ideals. Next you'll be advocating mass piracy as a means of 'breaking the system' so that software companies go out of business and people are forced to subscribe to the open source model.
When I was a student, I justified piracy to myself because I felt everything was overpriced for my budget. Now that I am employed and have a larger budget, I have changed my approach to this. I will often try out games and mp3s with illegal copies, but if it turns out I like them and want to play/listen to them frequently, I'll make a purchase. That seems fair to me and fair to them.
> I'm aware that some sites rely on hit count for ad revenue, but once it's/.ed, that becomes irrelevant.
OTOH, some small sites are charged by their web hoster based on the amount of traffic they get.. I wonder if/. has been the cause of huge bills for featuring sites of unsuspecting hobbyists.
> Dotcom bust has really helped the Herman Miller company....
Yeah, they had to start laying people off when all the companies that had bought two Aerons per employee started going under.
Without reading the article, I'll just say that after spending a while doing network design/admin work, I have often noticed that routers and switches tended to have far less security than servers. Here's three big reasons:
As far as I am aware there are no vendors that offer an ssh-like encrypted login for network equipment.
Many vendors have backdoor methods of accessing their equipment that can be learned if one is beligerent about pushing a mission critical. tech support call to a high tier. These are sometimes needed to get special diagnostic or debug information. I know one major ATM switch vendor in particular that has a high TCP port login on the management ethernet interface that has a vendor specific user/password that is used not only for diagnostics but also for modifying system parameters.
It has been my experience that many network admins simply leave the default user/password on their network gear, or use the same password for every piece of equipment.
There are a number of Hughes offices in El Segundo. The one that probably owns the satellite is a couple doors down from the LA Air Force Base (yes, there really is one, there's just no landing strip).
Basically, the submitter has no real clue, and was trying to increase his chances of getting his submission accepted by linking it to a popular geek issue, the DMCA.
I bet the submitter has a real clue. He took something innane and harmless, attached censorship and DMCA to it and lo and behold,/. posted it. , IMO, it's pretty damn funny that it got posted. The number of comments agreeing that this is some kind of horrible censorship is even funnier.
Some of the digital cable services have similar techno music 'channels' that are mixed. They're pretty good, IMO one of the most appealing things about this kind of service is that you end up with music types that most radio stations do not already play. Though I have no idea why the hell they are carrying KISS on digital satellite, one of the most damn annoying stations down here in LA.
>On the other hand, the fact that it's illegal to stiff
>your employees out of wages due them, even in a bankruptcy, isn't
>mentioned in the article...
Uhh, no. That's not the law. There is certainly a breach of contract when an employee does not get paid, but in the absence of prior intent not to pay, it's generally not a crime.
I bet that's why iXL kept 'mysteriously losing' the paychecks of ALL its contractors for at least four or five months in a row rather than actually saying that they weren't paying htem. Oddly enough, the contractors seemed the ones who were least likely to steal things from them when my office got shut down.
Furthermore, they CAN'T get themselves cleaned up without a network connection, if they are trying to download virus updates for norton or whatever virus scanner they are using.
Slashdot Mirror
I know all that.
After explaining what TCP was, joel said:
By comparison, there is another method of transmitting data called IP which is unreliable.
My point, likely poorly made due to crankiness, was that TCP and IP are at different layers of the protocol stack, and TCP in fact assumes IP, and therefore you can't compare them. I do understand the analogy he was trying to make to abstraction layers, I was just trying to say that his language was tweaking the hell out of me.
why the hell is he talking about TCP being 'reliable' and IP being 'unreliable' when TCP is a transport protocol and IP is a routing protocol? i kept wanting to plug in 'UDP' for every instance of 'IP' when i was reading his article, and couldn't get very far down it because he was driving me up a wall. i'm all for writing up easy to understand explanations of things, but that was a wildly inaccurate way to easily explain it.
Sluggish is a great word for this. What I've noticed is that once you have something open or are in the process of doing something (like resizing), it goes lighting fast. But it seems to take OSX a moment to realize 'Oh hey, you want to resize this window'. I get around this by using keyboard shortcuts extensively, as well as LiteSwitch X for moving between apps.
Of course this doesn't fix the problem I am having getting back to this window because my bird is sitting on my touchpad....
Max Payne and Warcraft III both perform extremely well on my 800Mhz TiBook, just to add a couple more titles intothe mix. They both do better than they did on a year-old Toshiba laptop with similar specs (including a GeForce 2 Go) to the TiBook. And with the TiBook I get that nice wide aspect ratio... yum.
The Finder is much faster in 10.2, probably mostly due to Quartz Extreme. It does still feel slightly sluggish when doing some things. Usually when you start to do a task, then once you're doing it it is fast.
I'm pretty fast in Windows explorer, I have to be navigating between hundreds of source files. I've learned just about all the shortcut keys and my hands move to wherever is fastest to accomplish a given task, mouse or keyboard. When I started working on the mac I was frustrated by the amount of mouse effort I had to expend. If my hands are on the keyboard and I need to do some UI navigation I don't want to have to use the mouse. I call that poor UI. I know there are probably keys there I don't know about, but they certainly aren't readily apparent in the help files. The tab between controls functionality windows has seems to be largely missing. I'm not incapable of learning new shortcut commands, I just need to be able to find out what they are without installing 4 third party applications that add them.
First, there are a fair number of shortcut keys that one can learn to speed things up. I got my first Mac recently and have learned many of them because I've got a laptop, which makes mousing even more painful for me.
Second, there's a number of utilities out there to improve the Finder's functionality. I would highly recommend LiteSwitch X if you miss the way Windows handles alt-tabbing. If there's something you don't like about the Finder, someone has almost invaribly written something to fix it for you, including the ability to create your own keyboard shortcuts. VersionTracker is a good place to start for that. I know there's one or more freeware apps that provide you with the ability to assign shortcut keys, so you might want to check that out as well.
All that said, I do wish that the Finder were somewhat more responsive, and that it came with more configuration options out of the box. I've noticed that many of the builtin MacOS X option panels are extremely dumbed down and don't provide GUI access to a lot of the more complicated options that exist in some of the underlying applications (samba and ftp are two that spring to mind in this category).
That's a very interesting argument that may in fact hold up in court, but I would imagine that the author's reson for GPLing it instead of LGPLing it was so that I would NOT be able to do that.
Of course, the author may simply have been unaware of the LGPL or the nuances of licensing; I have noticed that many people who want to 'open source' their software simply blindly GPL it these days.
My point was not about the GPL in general, my point was about the GPL in the case where it is restricting software that was government funded and therefore should be in the public domain.
How you choose to license software that you spent your own time and own money developing is up to you.
I for one am pleased to see this. I work for a company that sells software and have been pissed several times when it has been impossible for me to use software that my tax dollars have gone to pay for because it's trendy for people at universities to GPL everything that breathes.
The most recent example of this was a set of nice Java random variable distribution libraries that I found and wanted to use for some code I was writing. However, they were under the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL which would have allowed me to use library calls), so that meant that even though they were libraries, I couldn't even call them from a commercial product. If they had been in a BSD style license, I could have used them. So I ended up spending some time implementing the ones I needed.
Many people do not seem to realize that when software is protected by the GPL, it is not only 'open source' but it is also prohibiting anyone from using it if they do not also put their software under the GPL. (There are some workarounds - you can always have the GPL code run in a separate process and use IPC/RPC to get results from it and technically not break the GPL, but that can get ugly quick.)
It's fine for someone to make the decision that they want to force people who use their code to use the GPL. BUT - if it is code that was developed with a government grant, to me it seems wrong to use a license that forces a specific use of the code and promotes what is basically a political agenda (force everything to be GPL), instead of using a BSD style license which makes the code truly open. Things paid for by the government should be used to go back to the community at large if at all possible, and the GPL limits the utility of the research performed under government grants.
WOW. I used to get flaky/intermittent reception in my living room (30-40 feet away from the Netgear WAP station upstairs), and squeezing the plastic strip in the battery compartment for 10 seconds or so is giving me PERFECT reception in there. Thank you thank you thank you thank you!
TMNT was a great comic book that met its demise after a cheesey cartoon! The movie was just rubbing salt into the wound.
i had to chance to play with one of these a couple months ago; i have a friend that works for danger and they've all had prototypes for a while now. the UI is extremely well thought out and easy to use - there's a little scrollwheel that lets you flip between menus more easily than most cellphone type things i've used. it's also fairly compact, lightweight, and cheap, compared with similar convergence devices.
the version my friend had also had a telnet client on it! he's since told me that won't be available with the release and may not ever be available for the actual product.
The author said that 'BSD' is not an operating system, but rather a type of operating system. Therefore the 'BSDs' (the collection of BSD-type operating systems) are operating systems. The author didn't make a contradiction.
I had this problem too, and it was because I had moved Mail. I actually appear to have been able to correct it by hand by opening the new package under Applications and my old package that was under Applications/network, and dragging things from the new one into the old one by hand. YMMV.
Every time I go to traffic school for speeding here in CA, they always remind us that driving in America is a privilege, not a right. We have to be licensed for it, and the privilege can be taken away if we disobey laws.
That's not to mention whether or not they have the money to buy the land that goes under said $300K custom home.
One issue with getting a custom home opposed to one that is already there is that you not only have to start paying morgtage/loans on the custom home and the land it's on, but you also have to continue paying rent for several months in wherever you're living while it's built!
How is it NOT theft morally? Blizzard exists as a company because people buy software from it. That is how they pay their employees, for their servers, for their advertising, and so on. If people do not pay for their software, then Blizzard is no longer capable of existing as a company, and the games they make would not be made.
Just because you think that ideally all software should be free, it doesn't mean that Blizzard subscribes to the same ideals. Next you'll be advocating mass piracy as a means of 'breaking the system' so that software companies go out of business and people are forced to subscribe to the open source model.
When I was a student, I justified piracy to myself because I felt everything was overpriced for my budget. Now that I am employed and have a larger budget, I have changed my approach to this. I will often try out games and mp3s with illegal copies, but if it turns out I like them and want to play/listen to them frequently, I'll make a purchase. That seems fair to me and fair to them.
> I'm aware that some sites rely on hit count for ad revenue, but once it's /.ed, that becomes irrelevant.
/. has been the cause of huge bills for featuring sites of unsuspecting hobbyists.
OTOH, some small sites are charged by their web hoster based on the amount of traffic they get.. I wonder if
> Dotcom bust has really helped the Herman Miller company.... Yeah, they had to start laying people off when all the companies that had bought two Aerons per employee started going under.
Read your /. manifesto. You aren't allowed to like anything that is:
* Packaged slickly
* Designed for ease of use by non-geeks
There are a number of Hughes offices in El Segundo. The one that probably owns the satellite is a couple doors down from the LA Air Force Base (yes, there really is one, there's just no landing strip).
I bet the submitter has a real clue. He took something innane and harmless, attached censorship and DMCA to it and lo and behold, /. posted it. , IMO, it's pretty damn funny that it got posted. The number of comments agreeing that this is some kind of horrible censorship is even funnier.
Some of the digital cable services have similar techno music 'channels' that are mixed. They're pretty good, IMO one of the most appealing things about this kind of service is that you end up with music types that most radio stations do not already play. Though I have no idea why the hell they are carrying KISS on digital satellite, one of the most damn annoying stations down here in LA.
>On the other hand, the fact that it's illegal to stiff
>your employees out of wages due them, even in a bankruptcy, isn't
>mentioned in the article...
Uhh, no. That's not the law. There is certainly a breach of contract when an employee does not get paid, but in the absence of prior intent not to pay, it's generally not a crime.
I bet that's why iXL kept 'mysteriously losing' the paychecks of ALL its contractors for at least four or five months in a row rather than actually saying that they weren't paying htem. Oddly enough, the contractors seemed the ones who were least likely to steal things from them when my office got shut down.
Furthermore, they CAN'T get themselves cleaned up without a network connection, if they are trying to download virus updates for norton or whatever virus scanner they are using.