I've had tabbed browsing for a while now in Safari. I almost never use it, simply because I can't see any real difference between using a series of tabs and a series of windows to show multiple pages at a time.
Would someone please try to explain what's the difference, and what's the big deal?
You can use tabs to add a layer of hierarchy to organise a large number of open pages.
For example, I might open a new browser window to view Slashdot, but then that will be my "Slashdot window", and any links within Slashdot I'll open in new tabs.
I'll generally leave the leftmost tab as the front page, and drag "read more" links to the 2nd tab. I'll drag comment links to tabs further to the right, opening, closing and reusing tabs to explore the discussion without losing key branch points. When I'm done with Slashdot, I only have one window to close.
The same approach works with Google results -- leave Google in the leftmost tab, drag results to tabs to see them. Firefox doesn't switch to the new tab automatically (unless you change preferences), so you can continue to drag possible good pages to new tabs, while the first ones are loading.
For the same reason the default is 256mb of ram, and the upgrade options cost 4x what the actual parts cost. Its not supposed to be that fast, its only supposed to be fast enough for today, so that 6-12 months from now you'll decide you want something faster and buy a real mac.
I see what you're saying, but I think Apple made a big mistake having 256MB of RAM by default.
I got a Mac mini a little over a week ago, with the basic 256MB of RAM. The Tiger upgrade CD came in the box, so I installed it straight away.
The Mac Mini is basically sold as a platform on which to run iLife, but I found that switching between Finder and iPhoto would often take well over 30 seconds, with no indication that my mouse click had done anything. I would be reluctant to open another application -- even the help browser -- because of how long it would take, and how long it would take to get back to iPhoto afterwards.
I know some Tiger upgraders have experienced problems with Spotlight indexer hogging CPU, but I used Top to verify this was not the case. It was just the VM system thrashing.
Now, what I did was put in a 1GB DIMM from Crucial -- and now the system is nice and responsive. I knew I'd need to put more RAM in when I bought the Mini, but I didn't know it would be quite so bad. A non-technical potential Switcher could easily be put off Macs for good by an experience like that.
Apple should have made 512MB the standard RAM (and charged a fair price for it).
until today, I always assumed the kidney portion of that name referred to kidney beans..
'scuse me whilst I go outside to hurl at my newfound knowledge....
Are you a vegetarian or something?;)
Also, what parts of a cow go into those "100% beef patties" at your favourite fast food chain, do you reckon?.. unless it's Steak'n'Shake/me disappears into Steak'n'Shake based reverie.
British stereotype: Kidney pie (what it sounds like) [...] British stereotype: Black pudding (I'm not typing it, I just ate and want to keep my food down.)
Have you eaten either of these things?
Kidneys are a prefectly eatable part of an animal, and a good Steak & Kidney pie is a great pleasure (although you should probably avoid cheap frozen/chilled supermarket pies on your first attempt).
A good black pudding is a joy. Try it.
I think British cooking went into decline after World War II, and people lost pride in the classics -- but there are classics, and if done well, they are delicious.
If you're actually interested in classic British cooking, look at the books of Gary Rhodes, a well respected chef who champions traditional English dishes.
It is proprietary, closed source, and as such I have no opportunity to modify or study the code. But I don't want to have to do that. I want to use it. And even if I could, I wouldn't, because I don't know shit about code for audio, real-time processing, etc.
How is this a problem?
Forget your own abilities to code. Your license also prevents you from paying someone else to make modifications for you.
Now, I don't know anything about Logic Pro, but there *must* be things it doesn't do, that someone might want it to. It's possible that a plugin architecture allows some of those things to be implemented without access to the Logic Pro source, but not all of them.
In the Apple world (probably Windows too -- I've not spent as much time watching Windows people talk) there appears to be a culture of taking a piece of software, seeing what it can do, then saying "Cool, look at all these things it does".
An alternative way to look at a piece of software is to think about all the the things you want it to do, then load up the software and see how it meets those requirements. This is why *most* software I try out disappoints me.
If it's free software, I get to decide just how badly I want that feature, and if it's badly enough I can code it, or persuade someone else to code it (through cajoling, payment, whatever).
If it's non-free software, I don't have that freedom. The best I can do is send some feedback to the vendor, who will evaluate its commercial value.
If I've blocked images from an ad serving server, there's a big white space on my screen where it used to be. Occasionally I'll hit that instead of the actually empty white space I wanted (to change focus to that window), and it'll send me through to whatever it was advertising.
I don't block ads (I have some sympathy with the "breaking a social contract" view) but sometimes ads either have a transparent background, or a background that's the same colour as the space around it.
I've accidentally clicked on such ads when cancelling a pulldown menu.
However, I seized upon Squeak as a way to try out Smalltalk, because I thought it might be a way to finally shift myself into the OO paradigm. (I'm an old-school procedural programmer, and OO design has never clicked for me).
What I found was very impressive and satisfying -- I loved the way you could manipulate objects interactively and watch them update live in the GUI.
But, the available online tutorials peter out at a very, very basic level. You need to shell out real money on a book in order to learn enough Squeak to write anything remotely satisfying. I guess the free learning materials didn't give me enough confidence that Squeak as "for me", that I was prepared to spend that money.... and I'm still searching for that OO "eureka" moment.
Why do people dislike Java so much? Is it because it takes to much RAM when using Eclipse to program or NetBeans??? Is it because it's not easy enough for people to program?? What the hell??
In my case, it's because it's so end-user unfriendly.
I have several JREs installed on my machine, because different applications need different versions of Java.
Trying to get an arbitrary Java application to run is usually a headache: CLASSPATH voodoo, prerequisite classes (often from Sun) you need to find and read licenses for. It's often an hour's work just to get the thing executing.
I have a number of applications whose installers included a whole JRE, partly because they rely on a specific version, and partly because it works around the CLASSPATH voodoo. The disk bloat of this is incredible.
I have been reading a lot of comments on here where people are bitching about the fact that the system was hacked. "if you don't like DRM, don't use iTMS" - things of that nature.
WTF people. How is corporate america going to learn its lesson unless we teach it to them?
(tangent: why do you restrict your argument to America?)
Quietly working around DRM doesn't teach that lesson. Withholding our custom does teach them, to some extent.
Now, what should happen according to Free Market models, and if the average geek assumptions hold, is that commerce learns that there is a bigger market for non-DRM content than there is for DRM content. The drop DRM and everybody's happy.
The problem with this assumption is that it assumes a perfect information flow: that commerce magically knows who would buy what and for how much.
By cheerily buying DRM content, and stripping/sidestepping the DRM, we send the message "you're doing great"
By withholding our custom, we send the message "something about your product does not appeal to me".... and at the top end of the scale, with something most people probably wouldn't bother to do: By sending an email or letter saying "I would use your service if it weren't for the DRM", you give the company clear information to use for decision making.
OTOH is it our job to do companies' market research for them?
BTW. regular expressions present a complete Turing machine.
Actually no: regular expressions are a great example of a language which is not Turing complete, but is useful nonetheless.
The classic limitation of regexes is that you can't use them to parse arbitrarily nested brackets -- because there is no concept of a stack. A Turing machine would be able to do this.
(Researching this post [yes! researching!] I found a couple of mailing list posts from various peoplel suggesting that Perl regexes are Turing complete. If this is true [which I have not established], it's because Perl extends the concept of REs in various ways)
There have been many mentions of podcasting, and many of the BBC's talk output, but (visible in slashdot's top level, at least) no mention of In Our Time.
In Our Time is a show presented by Melvyn Bragg, who discusses a different subject each week, with expert guests. In general they apply a historical context to some scientific, technological, religious, philosophical or political movement.
Quality of guests is high: for example, Simon Sing was on the crypto program, Roger Penrose and John Gribbin are regulars, etc.
As well as being broadcast on Radio 4 on old fashioned analogue radio, In Our Time has the honour of being chosen as the BBC's experiment in podcasting.... and is worth installing iPodder for! My only qualm is the occasional compression artefact. They seem to crop up when the female guests are speaking...
I am not a fan of DRM but Apple has gone and put themselves on the line to convince the recording industry that there is a happy medium. You can install iTunes on what like 5 computers now. You can burn virtually unlimited CD's, can have it on your iPod etc.
But see here for how Apple is chipping away at those rights as they gather more and more market share.
Yet more and more CDs are coming copy protected, and won't play on some CD players. You also can't rip them for use on your MP3 plater.
So don't buy those either: and if you do buy one by mistake, take it back to shop for a refund -- since it is not fit for the purpose you bought it for.
If we quietly work around stuff like this (with stuff like Hymn and ever-cleverer CD copy protection defeaters), then there's no incentive for the industry to get back to giving us the usable product we want to pay them for.
Any employer with enough lawyers is going to give you guidelines on when it's OK to look at source code, and when it is not.
At my previous employer (a big IT company you'll have heard of), we were not allowed to even LOOK at GPL software without going through an approvals process first: for fear of "infecting" proprietary code with GPL methods.
I've not looked at these new Sun licenses, but maybe the idea is that a corporate legal team can look at them and far more easily say "sure, we're happy for you to look at that source".
So true. I particularly loved, back in the 9x days, how--after the computer crashes and forces you to restart--you are slapped on the wrist for shutting down the computer wrong. This was especially frustrating while working on a program or paper for class...
Since we're talking ancient history anyway, I'd like to chime in with my frustrating "computer crashes while I try to work to a coursework deadline" experience.
Macintosh System 7, 1996 (I think). Every time I opened the Supercard online help, the whole machine would crash hard. Stupid "sad mac" icon, no meaningful error message (just a number), all work lost, tedious reboot to sit through.
Those were dark days. Both Windows and Mac have improved since then. I'm sure that being BSD based, OSX is solid. I've seen about 2 blue screens of death in 3 years of running W2K.
i remember when my dad thought you had to double click hyperlinks, which causes problems on some pages with javascript.
Double clicks: good point to raise!
I've taught word processing to both children and adults with no computer experience, and in both cases, double clicking was far more of a problem than the second button.
Most new users either can't get the two clicks close enough together, or manage to move the mouse pointer between clicks so the double-click registers in the wrong place. Usually the result is confusion.
I suspect that the double-click is too embedded in the history of the GUI to be got rid of now, and that's a shame.
Look at the alternatives we could have used: - a two button mouse where button 1 equates to a single click, button 2 equates to a double click - pressure sensitive buttons (with tactile feedback)
When you click and drag a removable drive or network share's icon anywhere on the screen OS X changes the trash can icon to an eject symbol.
Dammit, you've convinced me.
When this was first explained to me, I thought it meant that the when you dragged a drive/share icon over the trashcan, the trashcan icon would transmogrify into an eject symbol. This would be daft.
But if I understand you correctly, as soon as you click and hold on a drive or a share, the trashcan disappears (because deleting a drive is impossible) and is replaced with an eject symbol.
This suddenly makes sense to me. I suppose it would make even more sense if the trashcan were to quickly swoosh offscreen, and the eject icon were to swoosh on to replace it. In other words, the object is not changing its behaviour and appearance: a different object is positioned where the old one was.
Are there other areas where Aqua rearranges the desktop depending on context? I can imagine, for example, if you start to drag a file, some area could empty itself of icons that wouldn't accept that drop, and populate itself with icons appropriate to the format of the file being dragged.
I need to try out OSX, just so I can be more informed, but the cost! the cost!
Slashdot Mirror
If enough people use MSIE, web developers who develop sites that only work on MSIE will get away with it (i.e. their boss won't make them fix it).
If enough sites only work in MSIE, more people will stick with Windows.
See?
I've had tabbed browsing for a while now in Safari. I almost never use it, simply because I can't see any real difference between using a series of tabs and a series of windows to show multiple pages at a time.
Would someone please try to explain what's the difference, and what's the big deal?
You can use tabs to add a layer of hierarchy to organise a large number of open pages.
For example, I might open a new browser window to view Slashdot, but then that will be my "Slashdot window", and any links within Slashdot I'll open in new tabs.
I'll generally leave the leftmost tab as the front page, and drag "read more" links to the 2nd tab. I'll drag comment links to tabs further to the right, opening, closing and reusing tabs to explore the discussion without losing key branch points. When I'm done with Slashdot, I only have one window to close.
The same approach works with Google results -- leave Google in the leftmost tab, drag results to tabs to see them. Firefox doesn't switch to the new tab automatically (unless you change preferences), so you can continue to drag possible good pages to new tabs, while the first ones are loading.
Good for The Hun too...
For the same reason the default is 256mb of ram, and the upgrade options cost 4x what the actual parts cost. Its not supposed to be that fast, its only supposed to be fast enough for today, so that 6-12 months from now you'll decide you want something faster and buy a real mac.
I see what you're saying, but I think Apple made a big mistake having 256MB of RAM by default.
I got a Mac mini a little over a week ago, with the basic 256MB of RAM. The Tiger upgrade CD came in the box, so I installed it straight away.
The Mac Mini is basically sold as a platform on which to run iLife, but I found that switching between Finder and iPhoto would often take well over 30 seconds, with no indication that my mouse click had done anything. I would be reluctant to open another application -- even the help browser -- because of how long it would take, and how long it would take to get back to iPhoto afterwards.
I know some Tiger upgraders have experienced problems with Spotlight indexer hogging CPU, but I used Top to verify this was not the case. It was just the VM system thrashing.
Now, what I did was put in a 1GB DIMM from Crucial -- and now the system is nice and responsive. I knew I'd need to put more RAM in when I bought the Mini, but I didn't know it would be quite so bad. A non-technical potential Switcher could easily be put off Macs for good by an experience like that.
Apple should have made 512MB the standard RAM (and charged a fair price for it).
until today, I always assumed the kidney portion of that name referred to kidney beans..
'scuse me whilst I go outside to hurl at my newfound knowledge....
Are you a vegetarian or something?
Also, what parts of a cow go into those "100% beef patties" at your favourite fast food chain, do you reckon?
British stereotype: Kidney pie (what it sounds like)
[...]
British stereotype: Black pudding (I'm not typing it, I just ate and want to keep my food down.)
Have you eaten either of these things?
Kidneys are a prefectly eatable part of an animal, and a good Steak & Kidney pie is a great pleasure (although you should probably avoid cheap frozen/chilled supermarket pies on your first attempt).
A good black pudding is a joy. Try it.
I think British cooking went into decline after World War II, and people lost pride in the classics -- but there are classics, and if done well, they are delicious.
If you're actually interested in classic British cooking, look at the books of Gary Rhodes, a well respected chef who champions traditional English dishes.
It really irritates me that there is no scale indicated on Google Maps.
On less populated parts of the US, it's all but impossible to guage the distance between features.
It is proprietary, closed source, and as such I have no opportunity to modify or study the code. But I don't want to have to do that. I want to use it. And even if I could, I wouldn't, because I don't know shit about code for audio, real-time processing, etc.
How is this a problem?
Forget your own abilities to code. Your license also prevents you from paying someone else to make modifications for you.
Now, I don't know anything about Logic Pro, but there *must* be things it doesn't do, that someone might want it to. It's possible that a plugin architecture allows some of those things to be implemented without access to the Logic Pro source, but not all of them.
In the Apple world (probably Windows too -- I've not spent as much time watching Windows people talk) there appears to be a culture of taking a piece of software, seeing what it can do, then saying "Cool, look at all these things it does".
An alternative way to look at a piece of software is to think about all the the things you want it to do, then load up the software and see how it meets those requirements. This is why *most* software I try out disappoints me.
If it's free software, I get to decide just how badly I want that feature, and if it's badly enough I can code it, or persuade someone else to code it (through cajoling, payment, whatever).
If it's non-free software, I don't have that freedom. The best I can do is send some feedback to the vendor, who will evaluate its commercial value.
If I've blocked images from an ad serving server, there's a big white space on my screen where it used to be. Occasionally I'll hit that instead of the actually empty white space I wanted (to change focus to that window), and it'll send me through to whatever it was advertising.
I don't block ads (I have some sympathy with the "breaking a social contract" view) but sometimes ads either have a transparent background, or a background that's the same colour as the space around it.
I've accidentally clicked on such ads when cancelling a pulldown menu.
Oh, I can just see telling my 80 year old mother to type that in!
/usr/local/bin/stealth, and tell her to type "stealth". ... or give it an icon.
[sigh]
Type it in for her, save it as
(As if your 80 year old mother wants stealth mode)
It's not dead?
Apparently not.
However, I seized upon Squeak as a way to try out Smalltalk, because I thought it might be a way to finally shift myself into the OO paradigm. (I'm an old-school procedural programmer, and OO design has never clicked for me).
What I found was very impressive and satisfying -- I loved the way you could manipulate objects interactively and watch them update live in the GUI.
But, the available online tutorials peter out at a very, very basic level. You need to shell out real money on a book in order to learn enough Squeak to write anything remotely satisfying. I guess the free learning materials didn't give me enough confidence that Squeak as "for me", that I was prepared to spend that money.
Something like the following ought to work in .htaccess
SetEnvIf X-moz ^prefetch prefetch_deny
Deny from env=prefetch_deny
Why do people dislike Java so much? Is it because it takes to much RAM when using Eclipse to program or NetBeans??? Is it because it's not easy enough for people to program?? What the hell??
In my case, it's because it's so end-user unfriendly.
I have several JREs installed on my machine, because different applications need different versions of Java.
Trying to get an arbitrary Java application to run is usually a headache: CLASSPATH voodoo, prerequisite classes (often from Sun) you need to find and read licenses for. It's often an hour's work just to get the thing executing.
I have a number of applications whose installers included a whole JRE, partly because they rely on a specific version, and partly because it works around the CLASSPATH voodoo. The disk bloat of this is incredible.
*yawn*
Jon breaks something for the sake of breaking it
You could say he mended it...
I have been reading a lot of comments on here where people are bitching about the fact that the system was hacked. "if you don't like DRM, don't use iTMS" - things of that nature.
WTF people. How is corporate america going to learn its lesson unless we teach it to them?
(tangent: why do you restrict your argument to America?)
Quietly working around DRM doesn't teach that lesson. Withholding our custom does teach them, to some extent.
Now, what should happen according to Free Market models, and if the average geek assumptions hold, is that commerce learns that there is a bigger market for non-DRM content than there is for DRM content. The drop DRM and everybody's happy.
The problem with this assumption is that it assumes a perfect information flow: that commerce magically knows who would buy what and for how much.
By cheerily buying DRM content, and stripping/sidestepping the DRM, we send the message "you're doing great"
By withholding our custom, we send the message "something about your product does not appeal to me".
OTOH is it our job to do companies' market research for them?
BTW. regular expressions present a complete Turing machine.
Actually no: regular expressions are a great example of a language which is not Turing complete, but is useful nonetheless.
The classic limitation of regexes is that you can't use them to parse arbitrarily nested brackets -- because there is no concept of a stack. A Turing machine would be able to do this.
(Researching this post [yes! researching!] I found a couple of mailing list posts from various peoplel suggesting that Perl regexes are Turing complete. If this is true [which I have not established], it's because Perl extends the concept of REs in various ways)
Apart from "In Our Time", Radio 4's "Listen Again" content is in streaming RealAudio format.
You can rip this to MP3, but it's tantamount to circumventing DRM, and is slightly fiddly.
In Our Time is a show presented by Melvyn Bragg, who discusses a different subject each week, with expert guests. In general they apply a historical context to some scientific, technological, religious, philosophical or political movement.
Interesting recent subjects have been:
Quality of guests is high: for example, Simon Sing was on the crypto program, Roger Penrose and John Gribbin are regulars, etc.
As well as being broadcast on Radio 4 on old fashioned analogue radio, In Our Time has the honour of being chosen as the BBC's experiment in podcasting.
I am not a fan of DRM but Apple has gone and put themselves on the line to convince the recording industry that there is a happy medium. You can install iTunes on what like 5 computers now. You can burn virtually unlimited CD's, can have it on your iPod etc.
But see here for how Apple is chipping away at those rights as they gather more and more market share.
Yet more and more CDs are coming copy protected, and won't play on some CD players. You also can't rip them for use on your MP3 plater.
So don't buy those either: and if you do buy one by mistake, take it back to shop for a refund -- since it is not fit for the purpose you bought it for.
If we quietly work around stuff like this (with stuff like Hymn and ever-cleverer CD copy protection defeaters), then there's no incentive for the industry to get back to giving us the usable product we want to pay them for.
Your employer's an idiot and has bought into the FUD.
My former employer is currently in court proving that it did not steal code from SCO.
Any employer with enough lawyers is going to give you guidelines on when it's OK to look at source code, and when it is not.
At my previous employer (a big IT company you'll have heard of), we were not allowed to even LOOK at GPL software without going through an approvals process first: for fear of "infecting" proprietary code with GPL methods.
I've not looked at these new Sun licenses, but maybe the idea is that a corporate legal team can look at them and far more easily say "sure, we're happy for you to look at that source".
So true. I particularly loved, back in the 9x days, how--after the computer crashes and forces you to restart--you are slapped on the wrist for shutting down the computer wrong. This was especially frustrating while working on a program or paper for class...
Since we're talking ancient history anyway, I'd like to chime in with my frustrating "computer crashes while I try to work to a coursework deadline" experience.
Macintosh System 7, 1996 (I think). Every time I opened the Supercard online help, the whole machine would crash hard. Stupid "sad mac" icon, no meaningful error message (just a number), all work lost, tedious reboot to sit through.
Those were dark days. Both Windows and Mac have improved since then. I'm sure that being BSD based, OSX is solid. I've seen about 2 blue screens of death in 3 years of running W2K.
i remember when my dad thought you had to double click hyperlinks, which causes problems on some pages with javascript.
Double clicks: good point to raise!
I've taught word processing to both children and adults with no computer experience, and in both cases, double clicking was far more of a problem than the second button.
Most new users either can't get the two clicks close enough together, or manage to move the mouse pointer between clicks so the double-click registers in the wrong place. Usually the result is confusion.
I suspect that the double-click is too embedded in the history of the GUI to be got rid of now, and that's a shame.
Look at the alternatives we could have used:
- a two button mouse where button 1 equates to a single click, button 2 equates to a double click
- pressure sensitive buttons (with tactile feedback)
When you click and drag a removable drive or network share's icon anywhere on the screen OS X changes the trash can icon to an eject symbol.
Dammit, you've convinced me.
When this was first explained to me, I thought it meant that the when you dragged a drive/share icon over the trashcan, the trashcan icon would transmogrify into an eject symbol. This would be daft.
But if I understand you correctly, as soon as you click and hold on a drive or a share, the trashcan disappears (because deleting a drive is impossible) and is replaced with an eject symbol.
This suddenly makes sense to me. I suppose it would make even more sense if the trashcan were to quickly swoosh offscreen, and the eject icon were to swoosh on to replace it. In other words, the object is not changing its behaviour and appearance: a different object is positioned where the old one was.
Are there other areas where Aqua rearranges the desktop depending on context? I can imagine, for example, if you start to drag a file, some area could empty itself of icons that wouldn't accept that drop, and populate itself with icons appropriate to the format of the file being dragged.
I need to try out OSX, just so I can be more informed, but the cost! the cost!