Finally! This is something I've been preaching for a long time.
While I understand it isn't (directly) the goal of open-source to compete with Company, Inc., the next generation of computing tools is going to be heavily service-oriented. That is to say: open-source has thus far concentrated on making software "products" -- applications, utilities, libraries, and so on. In a service-oriented community, though, open content is just as important as the tools that use it.
Furthermore, I like to see when open-source products doing a little more -- wait for it -- synergy. (Shoot me.) Thus far, open projects have, apart from sharing code and libraries, stayed mostly to themselves. But partnerships like this are absolutely beneficial to creating a cohesive, seamless user experience. Via services, you create an entire open "platform" that isn't just the tools, but the content that backs it up. It also creates an entirely new market for companies to support open-source software.
I say: if you're going for standards compliance, at this point, you almost *have* to hand-code your pages. If you're running Windows, go for TopStyle. It includes HTML Tidy integration and a number of other features.
The problem is, if you're doing more than simple HTML -- and you plan to keep it updated by hand -- these days, Dreamweaver and similar products just boil down to fancy text editors. Their CSS features are far slower than simply hand-coding the tags, unlike if you were doing this in 1996, where bold and italic and colors would cut it. Dreamweaver, for example, seems to have a horrid understanding of CSS and XHTML, that is to say, you can hand-code, or you can use its "features", but don't plan on both, it's a headache.
I use to use Fireworks for a lot of "automated" web graphics, now I hand-code everything and use Fireworks for the design elements, but no table-based graphics. Web authoring has become so, well, complex -- it's not just HTML any more -- that no product made for the Old Web really cuts it any more than notepad. I'd die to have a program like Fireworks that would export my raw graphics as properly coded CSS, that compiled layers into divs properly, and that -- say I used a rounded corner with 75% transparency -- would write out the CSS3 tags for corners and opacity and have the code degrade properly for browsers that don't support it. Unfortunately, this requires more of a web-document compiler than generator, something more intelligent, that just doesn't exist right now. But someday.
Yeah, it's $999 for a lease - the package has to be returned sometime in 2006. Moreover, you have to be a Select or Premier member, which are $500 or $3,500, so if you're looking for just a shiny new OS X intel box to play with, you'll be shelling out quite a bit.:)
When crafting your flames, follow the guidelines below to ensure the highest troll-to-signal ratio.
1. Always mention gaming as the pinnacle of computing.
E.g., "The Macintosh has not proven itself to the gamers market as of yet, but excels in media production."
"Windows, whatever your complaints, has wide support for a variety of gaming technologies not yet implemented on other platforms."
2. Refine to make sure it doesn't make sense:
E.g., "Apples suck because my friend tommy once he tried to play a game on his apple iie and it puffed smoke and i was like wtf??!! WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDIEGO??!"
"I JUST PRESS A BUTTON IN MY WINDOWS SYSTEM CONTROL PANEL AND BACON COMES OUT!!!11one"
3. Make sure you're l33t. If you're not, girls won't like you. They also won't like you unless everybody else is a homosexual.
"FARGOT!! jesuz christo wtf MY 4PPL is T3H L33T BOMB ROX0R!! micro$0ft sux0rs to play fallout and i dont evan LIKE BACON"
"YOUR MOM like to play counterstrike and my W1NDOZE MACHENE IS WIN-WIN SITUATION!!! onbly liberals like bacon cocknut"
4. For clarity, just translate it into Spanish and ROT13 it. It's not like anybody's gonna read it anyway. Then go do your homework like your mom told you to half an hour ago.
See a previous Slashdot story entitled Home-brewing a 1.2TB IDE to Firewire Monster. He constructed a huge firewire "disk" out of a nice case and most importantly, a couple firewire-IDE bridges. It's not PC-based, however, it's a dumb array of drives.
So somebody clear this up for me. I'm a graphic designer, and in the past have enjoyed the Bitstream Vera line of GPL fonts, though usually I find them too 'plain' to use in much design at all.
Theoretically, do I need to be distributing the my Fireworks/PS files themselves or just the fonts? Obviously I'm a bit confused as to how this works, and hadn't considered that the GPL would apply to my "documents", many of which I've sold.
Good points. But I'd say that most criminals wouldn't go so far as to chop someone's fingers off or remove their eye -- most don't even go to the trouble of stealing the bank card.
All they have to do is point a gun at you and say "let's go to the ATM". In fact, I'd say that biometrics makes it likely that the overall fear is reduced to one of "I could lose my finger" vs. "I could lose my life" vs. "I could lose my life, and my corpse would lack a finger". And then there's the fourth option, "I could just go to the ATM and get him the damn money." Most people will just go with #4.
Jesus, that screenshot is like the browser version of my grandfather's "retirement shirts". Except, only if he lived inside Spencer's Gifts, and was a science fiction drama from 1963, and had ADD. And rabies.
Get Final Cut Pro for your Mac. Even consider enrolling in one class at your local community college ($10-100) to qualify for student discounts, because for Final Cut, it's worth it ($299 from $1299, I believe). While you're into spending money, consider the Production Suite, especially if you need cool titling effects. You may not, in which case Motion might be a bust.
Finally, try and find a local university [New] Media Center. If it's open to the public, you can most likely find a lab with the aforementioned tools.
In Janet's nipple accident, there were fines -- to the stations -- but it wasn't "illegal" in the strictest sense of the term.
People who chose to, after the Super Bowl, surf to one of their 500 other uncensored networks and view hardcore porn or anything else were free to do so. The difference is that in Germany, they're not allowed to pay $1.99 and get access to their favorite website advocating race discrimination, it was just flat out illegal. It is illegal to read that text, because apparently Germans aren't smart enough to make up their minds themselves. I call bullshit.
And it's not always just violence. France banned the outward display of religious symbols, to an extent, to reduce hate (I don't have all the details on that law).
But it seems there's always this pervasive singular evil -- terrorism, hate crimes, lust, etc. -- that must be undone, and our ability to read and write and discuss as we want is always curtailed at the expense of undoing that evil, and that limiting by the state is always ironically in the name of freedom and democracy.
Mod me down if you want, but I never got how a progressive society in any form could censor content. Now, I understand the historical contexts here, and I understand how the good 'ol USA has in some senses (or at least, in some peoples' eyes) has become a stomping ground for hate groups since nobody else will take them.. but I never got the point of "you can't post that opinion" or "that image, hurting nobody, is banned". I also understand that here in the US we have plenty of laws outlawing things which hurt nobody.. but HTML and GIFs?
Perhaps somebody from the European states could enlighten me.
I haven't seen any posts that mention the GretagMacbeth EyeOne units. They're very spiffy, and they come in cheap (monitor calibration) to expensive (match your printer setup with the color of your shoes). I have an EyeOne Display that I loan out to coworkers when I'm designing websites, since most LCDs are woeful at displaying accurate dark colors.
Worldcom purchased MCI and then filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002 after "misaccounting" for about $3.5 billion. Compaq was purchased by HP and is one of the reasons everybody's glad to see Carly leaving this week - it was largely regarded as a stupid move. Sega is a major player in independent development because their tenure in the gaming industry, tragicly, reads like a country western song.
I think the poster's point was not death, but significantly diminished power, as the point of the FA was. I mean, even the Pets.com dog is still around -- except he was auctioned off for dot com chump change ($185k) to an insurance company.
Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA
Charlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
"One more nickel."
Charlie could not get off that train.
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may ride forever
'neath the streets of Boston
He's the man who never returned.
Now all night long
Charlie rides through the tunnels
Saying, "What will become of me?
Crying "How can I afford to see
My sister in Chelsea
Or my cousin in Roxbury?"
Charlie's wife goes down
To the Scollay Square station
Every day at quarter past two
And through the open window
She hands Charlie a sandwich
As the train comes rumblin' through.
As his train rolled on
underneath Greater Boston
Charlie looked around and sighed:
"Well, I'm sore and disgusted
And I'm absolutely busted;
I guess this is my last long ride."
{this entire verse was replaced by a banjo solo}
Now you citizens of Boston,
Don't you think it's a scandal
That the people have to pay and pay
Vote for Walter A. O'Brien
Fight the fare increase!
And fight the fare increase
Vote for George O'Brien!
Get poor Charlie off the MTA.
Chorus.
The song is so catchy, it's a shame the guy didn't get elected. Or maybe not, or we'd have elections with theme songs. Wait, we do. Crap.
Most people I meet don't necessarily think computer security is a problem past virii and adware -- and it shouldn't necessarily be their problem, it requires better design. But could their be a lesson here as to the importance of real-life, practical security needs?
Just now, I decided to find how many files where in my home directory. 48,125 in 3,096 folders over about 25 GB, and I have at least four times that amount on other accounts on other machines -- not to mention, none of this is source code, so it's not headers and little text documents cluttering my clusters. And the issue is, hierarchy becomes inefficient very quickly as the number of files increase. The only way I can find anything any more is by searching -- and I suspect this is the way data storage will behave in the future. I'd like to see the lines between data and 'application' blur a little bit (securely), and I'd like to see real computer-aided file management, almost to the point where say, saving and opening a file manually would be silly, and the way programs run alongside one another is more comprehensive. Think, plugins, not applications, I guess, where the "computer" is comprehensive, not a lot of unrelated pieces occasionally communicating.
Even still, I think these problems require a radically new way of thinking about the future of computing. They can't be solved with a new window manager, or a tiny new input device, we have to think about what people will be doing 20 years down the road, and redesign. E.g., the mouse and keyboard are completely useless and space-inefficient at anything but a desk. Speakable commands, maybe, but who knows? I think the next innovations will be something so wildly different it will be both "duh, why didn't we think of this before" and "this looks completely different".
But this is all me hoping I'll get one of those gloves from Minority Report for Christmas next year.
There aren't a whole lot that come to mind, and I think that's the problem.
Somebody once said, though I can't remember the book, that a word processor did most of the same things it does now, twenty years ago, except that now we have rounded corners. The illustration is vague, but it serves to point out that there haven't been huge breakthroughs in the way we work, despite incredibly advanced technologies sitting on our doorstep. Whether this is good or bad, make your own call.
I, personally, think there are better solutions to things like top-screen menus, and file management. The number one question I get asked about in various levels of IT support is what damn function is in what damn menu. It's hard for many people to remember which functions belong to which menus, especially because we have so many menus that give no clue to the functions they hold -- e.g., File->Exit is a holdover from the days when you couldn't open more than one document. Similarly, Edit->Preferences is a good guess, except that most people associate Edit with file content, not program-level preferences, especially when there's often another menu under Tools for different options.
There's got to be a better way, said some guy, hopefully soon.
I always find it interesting that if we had taken any modern system back to 1985, the interface features that would be most ooed at would be the eyecandy, but not the productivity of the interface, since that's largely stayed the same. We still use a point and click interface for everything, and we still hold the contents of our programs in a computer-oriented interface, not a human-oriented interface -- the window. Clever solutions exist for rebottling some of these problems, e.g., scroll wheels on mice, different keyboards and input devices, and Expose, but it's still a situation that could be radically different. I'm just not sure how yet.
Many of the technologies we use now are no different than the ones created in the 1970s to solve these problems, but things have changed. An increasing number of novice users, handicapped users, etc., make many of these solutions a little too narrow. E.g., my mother, who is nearly blind and uses a screenreader, has pointed out many problems I would have never thought of as anything but accessibility issues, but they're not -- they're all interface design issues.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we talk to our computers tomorrow and then Hack Teh Gibson with our nintendo powergloves, but many of these interfaces are arcane. I'd like to see more seamless, fluid transition between programs, for example -- I should be able to use the text-editing features of Word when submitting a comment, or I should be able to insert Flash documents into my background art if I own Flash. More modular.
No, no, you've all got it wrong. They're definitely going to have Powerbooks out earlier than expected, probably as soon as next week! And the new versions will feature a magical box that turns dirt into pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt's tits that print money -- STANDARD!!
Most people use IM now, so there's less need for the casual user to read the following:
captnitro: hey whats goin on ice8229: no fuck that captnitro: what? peebles: your mother is a whore, you know it ice8229: i'm not going to buy a goddamn program just to rip ice8229: anybody know of an open one? fisher0: i kno cuz i fuckerd her d00d captnitro: what the hell is going on here? adbot: MP3Z MOVIEZ WAREZ BAGELZ go to 62.182.100.10 binaryman: 1000100011110101 captnitro: huh? binaryman: 1001111010111110 sharky: get out n00b fisher0: i am not a virgin i so fskced her! in the ears pornking: anybody want to cyber? 10yearold: yes
Slashdot Mirror
Finally! This is something I've been preaching for a long time.
While I understand it isn't (directly) the goal of open-source to compete with Company, Inc., the next generation of computing tools is going to be heavily service-oriented. That is to say: open-source has thus far concentrated on making software "products" -- applications, utilities, libraries, and so on. In a service-oriented community, though, open content is just as important as the tools that use it.
Furthermore, I like to see when open-source products doing a little more -- wait for it -- synergy. (Shoot me.) Thus far, open projects have, apart from sharing code and libraries, stayed mostly to themselves. But partnerships like this are absolutely beneficial to creating a cohesive, seamless user experience. Via services, you create an entire open "platform" that isn't just the tools, but the content that backs it up. It also creates an entirely new market for companies to support open-source software.
I was going to mod you up, but I'll comment.
I say: if you're going for standards compliance, at this point, you almost *have* to hand-code your pages. If you're running Windows, go for TopStyle. It includes HTML Tidy integration and a number of other features.
The problem is, if you're doing more than simple HTML -- and you plan to keep it updated by hand -- these days, Dreamweaver and similar products just boil down to fancy text editors.
Their CSS features are far slower than simply hand-coding the tags, unlike if you were doing this in 1996, where bold and italic and colors would cut it. Dreamweaver, for example, seems to have a horrid understanding of CSS and XHTML, that is to say, you can hand-code, or you can use its "features", but don't plan on both, it's a headache.
I use to use Fireworks for a lot of "automated" web graphics, now I hand-code everything and use Fireworks for the design elements, but no table-based graphics. Web authoring has become so, well, complex -- it's not just HTML any more -- that no product made for the Old Web really cuts it any more than notepad. I'd die to have a program like Fireworks that would export my raw graphics as properly coded CSS, that compiled layers into divs properly, and that -- say I used a rounded corner with 75% transparency -- would write out the CSS3 tags for corners and opacity and have the code degrade properly for browsers that don't support it. Unfortunately, this requires more of a web-document compiler than generator, something more intelligent, that just doesn't exist right now. But someday.
Yeah, it's $999 for a lease - the package has to be returned sometime in 2006. Moreover, you have to be a Select or Premier member, which are $500 or $3,500, so if you're looking for just a shiny new OS X intel box to play with, you'll be shelling out quite a bit. :)
tending his private logs of baseball statistics
That is perfectly normal for a four year old, so back off!
/gonna get my gumdrops yet, I tell you
When crafting your flames, follow the guidelines below to ensure the highest troll-to-signal ratio.
1. Always mention gaming as the pinnacle of computing.
E.g., "The Macintosh has not proven itself to the gamers market as of yet, but excels in media production."
"Windows, whatever your complaints, has wide support for a variety of gaming technologies not yet implemented on other platforms."
2. Refine to make sure it doesn't make sense:
E.g., "Apples suck because my friend tommy once he tried to play a game on his apple iie and it puffed smoke and i was like wtf??!! WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDIEGO??!"
"I JUST PRESS A BUTTON IN MY WINDOWS SYSTEM CONTROL PANEL AND BACON COMES OUT!!!11one"
3. Make sure you're l33t. If you're not, girls won't like you. They also won't like you unless everybody else is a homosexual.
"FARGOT!! jesuz christo wtf MY 4PPL is T3H L33T BOMB ROX0R!! micro$0ft sux0rs to play fallout and i dont evan LIKE BACON"
"YOUR MOM like to play counterstrike and my W1NDOZE MACHENE IS WIN-WIN SITUATION!!! onbly liberals like bacon cocknut"
4. For clarity, just translate it into Spanish and ROT13 it. It's not like anybody's gonna read it anyway. Then go do your homework like your mom told you to half an hour ago.
"This thread is useless without pics."
See a previous Slashdot story entitled Home-brewing a 1.2TB IDE to Firewire Monster. He constructed a huge firewire "disk" out of a nice case and most importantly, a couple firewire-IDE bridges. It's not PC-based, however, it's a dumb array of drives.
So somebody clear this up for me. I'm a graphic designer, and in the past have enjoyed the Bitstream Vera line of GPL fonts, though usually I find them too 'plain' to use in much design at all.
Theoretically, do I need to be distributing the my Fireworks/PS files themselves or just the fonts? Obviously I'm a bit confused as to how this works, and hadn't considered that the GPL would apply to my "documents", many of which I've sold.
Back to Frutiger.
Sent this to on-duty editor, but: Will Anybody Care That Your Liked Gaming Before It Was Cool?
Good points. But I'd say that most criminals wouldn't go so far as to chop someone's fingers off or remove their eye -- most don't even go to the trouble of stealing the bank card.
All they have to do is point a gun at you and say "let's go to the ATM". In fact, I'd say that biometrics makes it likely that the overall fear is reduced to one of "I could lose my finger" vs. "I could lose my life" vs. "I could lose my life, and my corpse would lack a finger". And then there's the fourth option, "I could just go to the ATM and get him the damn money." Most people will just go with #4.
Jesus, that screenshot is like the browser version of my grandfather's "retirement shirts". Except, only if he lived inside Spencer's Gifts, and was a science fiction drama from 1963, and had ADD. And rabies.
Get Final Cut Pro for your Mac. Even consider enrolling in one class at your local community college ($10-100) to qualify for student discounts, because for Final Cut, it's worth it ($299 from $1299, I believe). While you're into spending money, consider the Production Suite, especially if you need cool titling effects. You may not, in which case Motion might be a bust.
Finally, try and find a local university [New] Media Center. If it's open to the public, you can most likely find a lab with the aforementioned tools.
In Janet's nipple accident, there were fines -- to the stations -- but it wasn't "illegal" in the strictest sense of the term.
People who chose to, after the Super Bowl, surf to one of their 500 other uncensored networks and view hardcore porn or anything else were free to do so. The difference is that in Germany, they're not allowed to pay $1.99 and get access to their favorite website advocating race discrimination, it was just flat out illegal. It is illegal to read that text, because apparently Germans aren't smart enough to make up their minds themselves. I call bullshit.
And it's not always just violence. France banned the outward display of religious symbols, to an extent, to reduce hate (I don't have all the details on that law).
But it seems there's always this pervasive singular evil -- terrorism, hate crimes, lust, etc. -- that must be undone, and our ability to read and write and discuss as we want is always curtailed at the expense of undoing that evil, and that limiting by the state is always ironically in the name of freedom and democracy.
OK, I'm replying to my own post, but:
:)
"Forbidden in Germany and restricting the freedom of speech are child pornography,
Agreed.
right wing extremist "hate" sites
Not so much. Not a big fan of the state deciding what's hate and what isn't.
incitement to commit crimes
But crimes are fun.
race discrimination
I might not like it, but..
treasonable conduct as an agent for sabotage purposes
Do they have that many websites advocating the theft of German state secrets?
glorification of violence
NFL.com: outlawed.
or offence against the law for the protection of the youth.
Protect your own kids. You don't need to ban content, you just need to CHOOSE NOT TO VIEW IT.
Mod me down if you want, but I never got how a progressive society in any form could censor content. Now, I understand the historical contexts here, and I understand how the good 'ol USA has in some senses (or at least, in some peoples' eyes) has become a stomping ground for hate groups since nobody else will take them.. but I never got the point of "you can't post that opinion" or "that image, hurting nobody, is banned". I also understand that here in the US we have plenty of laws outlawing things which hurt nobody.. but HTML and GIFs?
Perhaps somebody from the European states could enlighten me.
I haven't seen any posts that mention the GretagMacbeth EyeOne units. They're very spiffy, and they come in cheap (monitor calibration) to expensive (match your printer setup with the color of your shoes). I have an EyeOne Display that I loan out to coworkers when I'm designing websites, since most LCDs are woeful at displaying accurate dark colors.
If it were like its parodized namesake, he'd take their money away when they failed! Irony is a dish best served cold.
Worldcom purchased MCI and then filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002 after "misaccounting" for about $3.5 billion. Compaq was purchased by HP and is one of the reasons everybody's glad to see Carly leaving this week - it was largely regarded as a stupid move. Sega is a major player in independent development because their tenure in the gaming industry, tragicly, reads like a country western song.
I think the poster's point was not death, but significantly diminished power, as the point of the FA was. I mean, even the Pets.com dog is still around -- except he was auctioned off for dot com chump change ($185k) to an insurance company.
For those who don't get the joke, look here.
Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA
Charlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
"One more nickel."
Charlie could not get off that train.
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may ride forever
'neath the streets of Boston
He's the man who never returned.
Now all night long
Charlie rides through the tunnels
Saying, "What will become of me?
Crying "How can I afford to see
My sister in Chelsea
Or my cousin in Roxbury?"
Charlie's wife goes down
To the Scollay Square station
Every day at quarter past two
And through the open window
She hands Charlie a sandwich
As the train comes rumblin' through.
As his train rolled on
underneath Greater Boston
Charlie looked around and sighed:
"Well, I'm sore and disgusted
And I'm absolutely busted;
I guess this is my last long ride."
{this entire verse was replaced by a banjo solo}
Now you citizens of Boston,
Don't you think it's a scandal
That the people have to pay and pay
Vote for Walter A. O'Brien
Fight the fare increase!
And fight the fare increase
Vote for George O'Brien!
Get poor Charlie off the MTA.
Chorus.
The song is so catchy, it's a shame the guy didn't get elected. Or maybe not, or we'd have elections with theme songs. Wait, we do. Crap.
Most people I meet don't necessarily think computer security is a problem past virii and adware -- and it shouldn't necessarily be their problem, it requires better design. But could their be a lesson here as to the importance of real-life, practical security needs?
Excellent points, thank you.
Just now, I decided to find how many files where in my home directory. 48,125 in 3,096 folders over about 25 GB, and I have at least four times that amount on other accounts on other machines -- not to mention, none of this is source code, so it's not headers and little text documents cluttering my clusters. And the issue is, hierarchy becomes inefficient very quickly as the number of files increase. The only way I can find anything any more is by searching -- and I suspect this is the way data storage will behave in the future. I'd like to see the lines between data and 'application' blur a little bit (securely), and I'd like to see real computer-aided file management, almost to the point where say, saving and opening a file manually would be silly, and the way programs run alongside one another is more comprehensive. Think, plugins, not applications, I guess, where the "computer" is comprehensive, not a lot of unrelated pieces occasionally communicating.
Even still, I think these problems require a radically new way of thinking about the future of computing. They can't be solved with a new window manager, or a tiny new input device, we have to think about what people will be doing 20 years down the road, and redesign. E.g., the mouse and keyboard are completely useless and space-inefficient at anything but a desk. Speakable commands, maybe, but who knows? I think the next innovations will be something so wildly different it will be both "duh, why didn't we think of this before" and "this looks completely different".
But this is all me hoping I'll get one of those gloves from Minority Report for Christmas next year.
There aren't a whole lot that come to mind, and I think that's the problem.
Somebody once said, though I can't remember the book, that a word processor did most of the same things it does now, twenty years ago, except that now we have rounded corners. The illustration is vague, but it serves to point out that there haven't been huge breakthroughs in the way we work, despite incredibly advanced technologies sitting on our doorstep. Whether this is good or bad, make your own call.
I, personally, think there are better solutions to things like top-screen menus, and file management. The number one question I get asked about in various levels of IT support is what damn function is in what damn menu. It's hard for many people to remember which functions belong to which menus, especially because we have so many menus that give no clue to the functions they hold -- e.g., File->Exit is a holdover from the days when you couldn't open more than one document. Similarly, Edit->Preferences is a good guess, except that most people associate Edit with file content, not program-level preferences, especially when there's often another menu under Tools for different options.
There's got to be a better way, said some guy, hopefully soon.
I always find it interesting that if we had taken any modern system back to 1985, the interface features that would be most ooed at would be the eyecandy, but not the productivity of the interface, since that's largely stayed the same. We still use a point and click interface for everything, and we still hold the contents of our programs in a computer-oriented interface, not a human-oriented interface -- the window. Clever solutions exist for rebottling some of these problems, e.g., scroll wheels on mice, different keyboards and input devices, and Expose, but it's still a situation that could be radically different. I'm just not sure how yet.
Many of the technologies we use now are no different than the ones created in the 1970s to solve these problems, but things have changed. An increasing number of novice users, handicapped users, etc., make many of these solutions a little too narrow. E.g., my mother, who is nearly blind and uses a screenreader, has pointed out many problems I would have never thought of as anything but accessibility issues, but they're not -- they're all interface design issues.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we talk to our computers tomorrow and then Hack Teh Gibson with our nintendo powergloves, but many of these interfaces are arcane. I'd like to see more seamless, fluid transition between programs, for example -- I should be able to use the text-editing features of Word when submitting a comment, or I should be able to insert Flash documents into my background art if I own Flash. More modular.
I'm just not sure how to do it yet.
No, no, you've all got it wrong. They're definitely going to have Powerbooks out earlier than expected, probably as soon as next week! And the new versions will feature a magical box that turns dirt into pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt's tits that print money -- STANDARD!!
How do I know? Well, I just bought a Powerbook.
Duh?
Most people use IM now, so there's less need for the casual user to read the following:
captnitro: hey whats goin on
ice8229: no fuck that
captnitro: what?
peebles: your mother is a whore, you know it
ice8229: i'm not going to buy a goddamn program just to rip
ice8229: anybody know of an open one?
fisher0: i kno cuz i fuckerd her d00d
captnitro: what the hell is going on here?
adbot: MP3Z MOVIEZ WAREZ BAGELZ go to 62.182.100.10
binaryman: 1000100011110101
captnitro: huh?
binaryman: 1001111010111110
sharky: get out n00b
fisher0: i am not a virgin i so fskced her! in the ears
pornking: anybody want to cyber?
10yearold: yes
Clearly the domain of kings.
It's traditional UNIX form -- they're not the same kinds of applications.
/Applications. /bin's.
/usr/local/bin vs. /bin for userland binaries vs. system binaries; this isn't any different.
/Applications/MyProgram.app/Contents/MacOS/MyProgr am
Application bundles and the like are in
BSD subsystem binaries are in
Nobody complains about
To run, normally, an app 'MyProgram' out of a bundle: