I have recommended Firefox to all of my coworkers, friends, and family over the past year. So far I have not personally heard of anyone who has fully switched to Firefox ever switch back to MSIE.
That said, I do know of MANY people who have zero interest in even trying Firefox. They don't care about tabbed browsing, they already know the ins and outs of MSIE. Generally these aren't the people who actually have to remove their spyware and virii, so they don't fully understand security issues and associated pains.
I think it boils down to this: Most geeks like Firefox and have already switched. Joe Sixpack and Ted the PHB have in interest in learning how to use a new browser, or even learn how to click on a different icon.
(And then there's the camp of newbies that think "the internet" is built into their "computer" and is only accessed by clicking on the magical blue e)
Even some Macintosh veterans have criticized the OS X GUI pretty strongly. The Mac OS X GUI is great once you stop thinking in classic Mac terms and start thinking in NeXT terms. You also have to ditch list and icon views of your folders -- column view is the only way to fly.
"Apple didn't buy NeXT, they paid NeXT to take over"
I first used a three button mouse on a Mac before the Clinton administration, of course it used the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) interface way back then. More recently I have used Logitech USB optical three button scroll wheel nice on Macs since 1999. They worked fine in Mac OS 8.5 and they work fine on Mac OS X 10.4.2.
If you want to solve the fogging issue, get a decent quality eyeglass cleaner. mine has had an anti-fog agent in it for over 3 years now and it's the cheap crap they give you at D.O.C. eyeglass centers.
DOC? Department Of Corrections? Are you posting from prison?
Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor
Finally, proof that Apple is over priced, under powered hardware.
Seems to me these color coded systems do more to confuse than they do good. Should I relax if we're at green? Should I be paranoid if we're at Red? Should I even care since I run UN*X rather than Windows? Every day there are at least a few new sploits. Every few weeks there's a sploit that affects me as a sysadmin and requires my attention to preserve the security of my servers and internet-attached LAN. Given this I still don't understand the value in these color coded alert systems. Yellow? What does that mean? Wake up an extra hour early to read the logs? The terrorists can attack just as easily if we're at green than if we are at red. I'm uncertain of the value in the announcements at the airport every 15 minutes to remind me that we're at yellow or orange.
Ok, who thinks Jobs invented the ipod. Where did he even say that? He may run the company, but he is hardly an engineer. Jobs never claimed he invented the iPod, but his name does appear on some recent Apple patents and he seems to have written the script for the Apple "Here's to the Crazy Ones..." Think Different tv commercial.
Back when Woz worked at HP, Steve Jobs was employee #40 at Atari. He bullshitted his way into the job, but he did manage to work as a technician for quite some time. He was credited for requesting small features and refinements in several 1975-era Atari games. Jobs was just as much of a perfectionist (and asshole) back than as he is now.
A year or so later he ended up conning Woz into designing Breakout for Atari and kept far more than his "50%" share. By this time development of the Apple I was underway (or at least being hashed out in Woz's head).
I thought Apple had finally swallowed their pride and submitted to making a 2 button mouse, something they _seemed_ to be against.
From what I understand, Steve Jobs calls the shots at Apple and has the final say on everything. I also understand that this was the way things were at his previous company, NeXT. When he set out to create the "perfect" computer (the NeXT Cube and NeXTstation) his mice had two buttons
The earlier, rectangular, mouse was my favorite. Both it and the keyboard were surrounded by a rubber bumper to minimize any sound that could be made if an office worker were to bump their mouse into their keyboard.
Tour just about any graphic design studio or video shop and you'll find that most of of the Mac users have third party mice with all sorts of funky ergonomic shapes and button configurations. Just because Apple ships a mouse with the PowerMac G5, iMac, and eMac doesn't mean you're forced to use it. Even a $1.99 USB mouse from OfficeMax will work just fine.
99% of optical mice use the HP/Aglient sensors, in fact they just recently announced having shipped 400 Million of those bad boys!
The sensors come in several flavors (mini, low power for cordless, high resolution, etc) but they basiclly boil down to four categories:
400 DPI - the very first batch of optical mice 800 DPI - second generation of optical mice (most popular) 1600 DPI - "high performance" models (expensive gamer mice) Laser - newest generation (currently used in the Logitech MX 1000 at 800 DPI)
OK, it's January 2005 and you've been appointed CEO of Apple. Apple is still selling computers with 1 button mice even though they have supported multiple buttons in the OS since Mac OS 8 (and via third party drivers since System 6). To make matters worse, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Logic, and Shake all work best with three mouse buttons!
So, CEO, what do you do?
A) Appologize to the public on national TV, shutdown and liquidate the company.
B) Keep selling only one-button mice forever.
C) Replace the Apple one-button mouse with a Microsoft Optical Scroll Mouse.
D) Replace the Apple one-button mouse with a Logitch MX series mouse.
E) Sell an over-engineered $49 three button + 2D scroll mouse (MightyMouse).
F) Go for simplicty and sell a $29 two button + 1D scroll wheel mouse (the kind you can buy online for $3.99).
Way back in the System 7 days I had a Kensington Thinking Mouse (4 buttons) connected to my Mac via AppleDesktopBus. The additional 3 buttons were programmed through a control panel installed along with the Kensington drivers.
In the Mac OS 8 days I had a two button mouse, Mac OS 8 had full and proper support for contextual menus (right-click or control-click, they do the same thing).
So did Mac OS 9... So does Mac OS X...
During the public beta of Mac OS X, I was able to plug in a Microsoft Optical Scroll Mouse and use both the right button and the scroll wheel without having to do any installation or configuration. Ditto for Logitch mice. This worked just as well with Mac OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and now with 10.4.
So where is Cisco in all of this? Have they released patches yet? I am hoping they will do a wide sweep of patches for all users (even those without support contracts) as they did back in 2004.
Back in the days of Apple Final Cut Pro 1.0, which was several years before Mac OS X even shipped, Apple recommended the use of a three button mouse. A year ago when Apple started selling Shake, they *required* a three button mouse to access all of the features / options.
And going back a little further, 'macdraw'. MacDraw was neat, but most Mac users in 1984 were more comfortable in the raster world with MacPaint. Bezier curves scare most folks! Still neat to work with EPS files on a Mac 512K.
Did you know that MacDraw/ClarisDraw has inspired a Mac OS X version? EazyDraw It's a bit weird but the price is right.
Well, is is a good excuse to finally learn TeX. But it's bad news for my idea of a lightweight newsletter generator. (At least without a bunch of additional support software).
I was hoping "all" I would need would be ps2pdf. Heh. Silly me.
I would expect AI to simply sit and suck for the rest of eternity until they finally roll it into Phootoshop 14 or whatever. If Adobe was ever going to roll AI into Photoshop, they would have done it around version 3.0 when they added layers. I highly doubt they will ever merge the two applications, Adobe would much rather sell you two applications than just one.
If you want a good alternative to AI, check out Corel Draw. Seriously. It's a great app once you learn its quirks. Even Corel Photopaint is a worthy competitior to Photoshop. But like Dangerfield, Corel doesn't get no respect.
I've googled for PS / EPS tutorials a few times and I either find really basic documentation or overly detailed low level documentation. I would like to know how to lay out a basic "newsletter" style document in PS.
I basiclly want to learn how to create a letter (or A4) sized self contained PS document that contains the following: * Embedded EPS logo in the upper right hand corner * Large typeface header text to the left of the logo * A line across the page * Date / Issue / etc information on one line of text across the page * Another line across the page * A bunch of text presented in three columns * An embedded raster image somewhere in the text
Yeah, I know I'm far better off to use a real DTP program, or at least do this in TeX / LaTeX. But I think it's simple enough to where it shouldn't be too impossible to do with straight PS and some sort of way to embed the EPS and raster images.
I use OmniGraffle 3.0 for doing diagrams and charts. It works absolutely fantastic for that (once you figure out the somewhat strange shapes palette so you can import several thousand additional figures). It's easy to use and the output is beautiful, I love the nice vector shadows and such, they print out really nicely. I wouldn't use this app for designing logos or other artwork though, it's pretty much strictly a diagraming program, I suppose that's why it supports Visio file formats, but not Corel Draw formats.
BTW, Apple G5 and PowerBook G4 systems have shipped with OmniGraffle (and OmniOutliner plus some other third party software) for the past couple years, so you might already have it preinstalled (or at least available in the "additional software" bundle on the CD that shipped with your G5 or PowerBook).
I know dozens of Dell owners, heck I even points friends and family towards Dell when they need a Windows PC and I don't feel like building (and supporting) one for them.
Dell shoppers look for the most specs (GHz, GB, pixels, pages per second, etc) in their price range. The Dell site is actually quite fun in that respect, they have many models and lots of accessories, one can easily spend an hour comparing prices and features.
Since when is a vice-president an engineer? Hiring away someone else's pointy-haired-boss does not create a "brain drain". Larry Tesler is about as far from a PHB as they get. He worked on the Xerox GUI machines back in the glory days of PARC. Then he worked as Cheif Scientist at Apple for almost two decades. The dude ported most of the Newton code to DYLAN during his 6 week sabatical. More recently he was involved with some Smalltalk based early childhood GUI "programming language". Stagecast software I think it was called. I didn't realize he ended up at Amazon for awhile.
Back in the Macintosh System 7, Mac OS 7.5 - 8.6 days I used to use a program called Claris Emailer. It was originally written by Fog City Software and later bought by Claris/Apple. It was a great POP email client but could also fetch mail from AOL.
The creators of Claris Emailer updated it with version 2.0, then joined the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit to create the Mac versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, and later, Entourage.
Perhaps that is a potential email download and upgrade path. Download the AOL mail into Claris Emailer, then import the Claris Emailer mailbox into Mac Outlook Express, then import into a more modern mail client such as Entourage, Mail, or Outlook.
Slashdot Mirror
I have recommended Firefox to all of my coworkers, friends, and family over the past year. So far I have not personally heard of anyone who has fully switched to Firefox ever switch back to MSIE.
That said, I do know of MANY people who have zero interest in even trying Firefox. They don't care about tabbed browsing, they already know the ins and outs of MSIE. Generally these aren't the people who actually have to remove their spyware and virii, so they don't fully understand security issues and associated pains.
I think it boils down to this: Most geeks like Firefox and have already switched. Joe Sixpack and Ted the PHB have in interest in learning how to use a new browser, or even learn how to click on a different icon.
(And then there's the camp of newbies that think "the internet" is built into their "computer" and is only accessed by clicking on the magical blue e)
Even some Macintosh veterans have criticized the OS X GUI pretty strongly.
The Mac OS X GUI is great once you stop thinking in classic Mac terms and start thinking in NeXT terms. You also have to ditch list and icon views of your folders -- column view is the only way to fly.
"Apple didn't buy NeXT, they paid NeXT to take over"
"Mac OS X 10.4: The 'X' stands for NeXT"
I first used a three button mouse on a Mac before the Clinton administration, of course it used the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) interface way back then. More recently I have used Logitech USB optical three button scroll wheel nice on Macs since 1999. They worked fine in Mac OS 8.5 and they work fine on Mac OS X 10.4.2.
Does anyone have the pinouts so I can make a NEMA 5-15P to RJ-45 crossover cable?
Muhahaha!
I wonder if I need to use Cat5 cable or lamp wire?...
Pull up the terminal on Mac OS X 10.4 and you'll find that "nano" works just fine. No Gentoo required.
If you want to solve the fogging issue, get a decent quality eyeglass cleaner. mine has had an anti-fog agent in it for over 3 years now and it's the cheap crap they give you at D.O.C. eyeglass centers.
DOC? Department Of Corrections? Are you posting from prison?
Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor
0 -2.ars
:)
Finally, proof that Apple is over priced, under powered hardware.
Why does Carmack hate Apple so much?
Read up on the flavor of PPC that is in the XBOX 360...
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox36
It's far different from the G4 and G5 that Apple currently uses.
BTW, if Apple loved PPC so much, why did they announce the switch to Pentium M ?
Seems to me these color coded systems do more to confuse than they do good. Should I relax if we're at green? Should I be paranoid if we're at Red? Should I even care since I run UN*X rather than Windows? Every day there are at least a few new sploits. Every few weeks there's a sploit that affects me as a sysadmin and requires my attention to preserve the security of my servers and internet-attached LAN. Given this I still don't understand the value in these color coded alert systems. Yellow? What does that mean? Wake up an extra hour early to read the logs? The terrorists can attack just as easily if we're at green than if we are at red. I'm uncertain of the value in the announcements at the airport every 15 minutes to remind me that we're at yellow or orange.
Ok, who thinks Jobs invented the ipod. Where did he even say that? He may run the company, but he is hardly an engineer.
Jobs never claimed he invented the iPod, but his name does appear on some recent Apple patents and he seems to have written the script for the Apple "Here's to the Crazy Ones..." Think Different tv commercial.
Back when Woz worked at HP, Steve Jobs was employee #40 at Atari. He bullshitted his way into the job, but he did manage to work as a technician for quite some time. He was credited for requesting small features and refinements in several 1975-era Atari games. Jobs was just as much of a perfectionist (and asshole) back than as he is now.
A year or so later he ended up conning Woz into designing Breakout for Atari and kept far more than his "50%" share. By this time development of the Apple I was underway (or at least being hashed out in Woz's head).
I thought Apple had finally swallowed their pride and submitted to making a 2 button mouse, something they _seemed_ to be against.
o sio.htm
w are/NextMouseAdb.jpg
From what I understand, Steve Jobs calls the shots at Apple and has the final say on everything. I also understand that this was the way things were at his previous company, NeXT. When he set out to create the "perfect" computer (the NeXT Cube and NeXTstation) his mice had two buttons
The mouse can be seen here:
http://www.allaboutapple.com/personali/alberto_cr
The later, puck-with-buttons mouse can be seen here:
http://www.simski.org/next/hardware/pictures/hard
The earlier, rectangular, mouse was my favorite. Both it and the keyboard were surrounded by a rubber bumper to minimize any sound that could be made if an office worker were to bump their mouse into their keyboard.
Tour just about any graphic design studio or video shop and you'll find that most of of the Mac users have third party mice with all sorts of funky ergonomic shapes and button configurations. Just because Apple ships a mouse with the PowerMac G5, iMac, and eMac doesn't mean you're forced to use it. Even a $1.99 USB mouse from OfficeMax will work just fine.
99% of optical mice use the HP/Aglient sensors, in fact they just recently announced having shipped 400 Million of those bad boys!
The sensors come in several flavors (mini, low power for cordless, high resolution, etc) but they basiclly boil down to four categories:
400 DPI - the very first batch of optical mice
800 DPI - second generation of optical mice (most popular)
1600 DPI - "high performance" models (expensive gamer mice)
Laser - newest generation (currently used in the Logitech MX 1000 at 800 DPI)
OK, it's January 2005 and you've been appointed CEO of Apple. Apple is still selling computers with 1 button mice even though they have supported multiple buttons in the OS since Mac OS 8 (and via third party drivers since System 6). To make matters worse, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Logic, and Shake all work best with three mouse buttons!
So, CEO, what do you do?
A) Appologize to the public on national TV, shutdown and liquidate the company.
B) Keep selling only one-button mice forever.
C) Replace the Apple one-button mouse with a Microsoft Optical Scroll Mouse.
D) Replace the Apple one-button mouse with a Logitch MX series mouse.
E) Sell an over-engineered $49 three button + 2D scroll mouse (MightyMouse).
F) Go for simplicty and sell a $29 two button + 1D scroll wheel mouse (the kind you can buy online for $3.99).
G) ______type_your_own_solution_here______
Way back in the System 7 days I had a Kensington Thinking Mouse (4 buttons) connected to my Mac via AppleDesktopBus. The additional 3 buttons were programmed through a control panel installed along with the Kensington drivers.
In the Mac OS 8 days I had a two button mouse, Mac OS 8 had full and proper support for contextual menus (right-click or control-click, they do the same thing).
So did Mac OS 9...
So does Mac OS X...
During the public beta of Mac OS X, I was able to plug in a Microsoft Optical Scroll Mouse and use both the right button and the scroll wheel without having to do any installation or configuration. Ditto for Logitch mice. This worked just as well with Mac OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and now with 10.4.
So where is Cisco in all of this? Have they released patches yet? I am hoping they will do a wide sweep of patches for all users (even those without support contracts) as they did back in 2004.
Juniper is looking better all the time.
Back in the days of Apple Final Cut Pro 1.0, which was several years before Mac OS X even shipped, Apple recommended the use of a three button mouse. A year ago when Apple started selling Shake, they *required* a three button mouse to access all of the features / options.
And going back a little further, 'macdraw'.
MacDraw was neat, but most Mac users in 1984 were more comfortable in the raster world with MacPaint. Bezier curves scare most folks! Still neat to work with EPS files on a Mac 512K.
Did you know that MacDraw/ClarisDraw has inspired a Mac OS X version? EazyDraw It's a bit weird but the price is right.
Damn.
Well, is is a good excuse to finally learn TeX. But it's bad news for my idea of a lightweight newsletter generator. (At least without a bunch of additional support software).
I was hoping "all" I would need would be ps2pdf. Heh. Silly me.
I would expect AI to simply sit and suck for the rest of eternity until they finally roll it into Phootoshop 14 or whatever.
If Adobe was ever going to roll AI into Photoshop, they would have done it around version 3.0 when they added layers. I highly doubt they will ever merge the two applications, Adobe would much rather sell you two applications than just one.
If you want a good alternative to AI, check out Corel Draw. Seriously. It's a great app once you learn its quirks. Even Corel Photopaint is a worthy competitior to Photoshop. But like Dangerfield, Corel doesn't get no respect.
I've googled for PS / EPS tutorials a few times and I either find really basic documentation or overly detailed low level documentation. I would like to know how to lay out a basic "newsletter" style document in PS.
I basiclly want to learn how to create a letter (or A4) sized self contained PS document that contains the following:
* Embedded EPS logo in the upper right hand corner
* Large typeface header text to the left of the logo
* A line across the page
* Date / Issue / etc information on one line of text across the page
* Another line across the page
* A bunch of text presented in three columns
* An embedded raster image somewhere in the text
Yeah, I know I'm far better off to use a real DTP program, or at least do this in TeX / LaTeX. But I think it's simple enough to where it shouldn't be too impossible to do with straight PS and some sort of way to embed the EPS and raster images.
Anyone have any pointers?
I use OmniGraffle 3.0 for doing diagrams and charts. It works absolutely fantastic for that (once you figure out the somewhat strange shapes palette so you can import several thousand additional figures). It's easy to use and the output is beautiful, I love the nice vector shadows and such, they print out really nicely. I wouldn't use this app for designing logos or other artwork though, it's pretty much strictly a diagraming program, I suppose that's why it supports Visio file formats, but not Corel Draw formats.
BTW, Apple G5 and PowerBook G4 systems have shipped with OmniGraffle (and OmniOutliner plus some other third party software) for the past couple years, so you might already have it preinstalled (or at least available in the "additional software" bundle on the CD that shipped with your G5 or PowerBook).
It's worse than you think...
Apple won't let me run Mac OS X 10.3 on anything other than my Apple-brand PowerPC hardware!
Seriously, though, what did you expect?
I know dozens of Dell owners, heck I even points friends and family towards Dell when they need a Windows PC and I don't feel like building (and supporting) one for them.
Dell shoppers look for the most specs (GHz, GB, pixels, pages per second, etc) in their price range. The Dell site is actually quite fun in that respect, they have many models and lots of accessories, one can easily spend an hour comparing prices and features.
Since when is a vice-president an engineer? Hiring away someone else's pointy-haired-boss does not create a "brain drain".
Larry Tesler is about as far from a PHB as they get. He worked on the Xerox GUI machines back in the glory days of PARC. Then he worked as Cheif Scientist at Apple for almost two decades. The dude ported most of the Newton code to DYLAN during his 6 week sabatical. More recently he was involved with some Smalltalk based early childhood GUI "programming language". Stagecast software I think it was called. I didn't realize he ended up at Amazon for awhile.
What OS does he use? Mac OS perchance?
Back in the Macintosh System 7, Mac OS 7.5 - 8.6 days I used to use a program called Claris Emailer. It was originally written by Fog City Software and later bought by Claris/Apple. It was a great POP email client but could also fetch mail from AOL.
The creators of Claris Emailer updated it with version 2.0, then joined the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit to create the Mac versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, and later, Entourage.
Perhaps that is a potential email download and upgrade path. Download the AOL mail into Claris Emailer, then import the Claris Emailer mailbox into Mac Outlook Express, then import into a more modern mail client such as Entourage, Mail, or Outlook.