Evolution is far from confirmed, and has many, many flaws.
No, really, I think I'm going to be sick... Evolution is a confirmed, actual, demonstrable, repeatable, falsifiable honest-to-god fact. What you, and all the other creationists/guidance-ists/whatever-ists are talking about is...
Natural Selection
Which is a method by which evolution is driven. Calling natural selection "evolution" is like calling an airplane an "anti-gravity machine". Airplanes fly, but not necessarily by anti-gravity. Okay?
150 years ago, many things in physics were 'confirmed', now many of these ideas are looked at and laughed at...
Well, that's because science is a progressive, self-correcting process.
Even the theory of gravity is undergoing changes
The theory of gravity is undergoing refinements. Saying the theory of gravity is being changed is like saying that by adding another digit of significance to pi we are completely negating the validity of 3.14.
however please think and do the research before you you defend them with ignorance.
fine advice... give it a spin sometime.
don't moderate me down because of my beliefs
Christianity is a 1400 year story of sword-point converstion and persecution of those with different beliefs. You can take a -1, it's not like it's the Inquisition or anything...
Mac-on-Linux allows one to run Mac OS from within an X session... not run Linux in a Mac window
No, I know what Mac on Linux is.... I'm saying I preferr the concept behind Connectix product which, in a fit of bon-mot-ism I referred to as Linux on Mac.
Besides, it's so much slower that it almost isn't worth running.
yep. It's slow. Running multiple OS's without a reboot is like learning to play all the reed instruments. You'll always be best at tenor sax, but can haul out that clarinet in a pinch if you really need to.
Before you hit that reply button to flame me, sit back and think what you would really do
I would sit at home with my juicer, fat net connection and enjoy strolls in the park without the aid of $300,000 worth of specialized clothing.
however, my grandmother got on a leaky boat with 5 shillings in her pocket and left ireland to go to a country where she knew no-one, was destined to be the target of serious discrimination (the irish had a tough time until ww2...) and wound up in a land where the vast majority of people didn't even speak her language (Quebec). My grandmother.
Remoteness can be simulated. You want to simulate being remote from 24 hr pizza. Just don't order pizza at 3a.m. Simple. Barren can be simulated too. My highschool gym was completely devoid of plant life. Just like mars. The weird day and night cycle may be a little tougher unless you want to stay indoors where Thomas Edison's Amazing Invention can simulate any damn cycle you like. BTW, the arctic day/night cycle is still 24 hrs...
Let's look at the important stuff this does not simulate:
1. Gravity in Canada is the same as in the United States. The problem, though, is that it's different on Mars. 2. Certain metropolitan centres excepted, the air in the US is as breathable as in Canada... but on Mars, it's a different kettle of... air(?) 3. Atmospheric pressure. Same here. Different there. 4. UV radiation. What's the SPF of a space suit? Will my solar-powered beowulf cluster of palm pilots work on mars? A trip to Canada's Big Underdeveloped Simuland won't answer these questions. 5. Soil composition. Mars is the red planet. Nunavet is the white (and sometimes brown) territory. Hm. Must be different rocks.
Really, the only thing that northern Canada and Mars have in common is scenery and temperature. A couple of good Leibert air conditioners on a Holywood set could get that done in a thrice.
Context-sensitive menus were stolen from Sun's OpenWindows
ack. don't even get me started on open win! As a caveat, I love sun stuff... really I do. But any gui that moves my mouse pointer to where *it* wants it and not where I put it (ie, scrolling or the exit-openwin dialog box) should be deported to some place with bad weather and a rock-bottom economy. And that file tree view? Or how about the thousand little desktop icons all called/usr/bin/tcsh... reinstate the Smith Act and put openwin on a boat for Liberia I say...
Wow, the links alone have made coming here today worth it. I wish my lan-centre looked as cool as theirs though...
We've been using ANA wich usually works out fine, but we keep monitors and keyboard there for those emergencies (ie, it's frozen) and the resulting jumble has made me want to cry.
Can you describe the 'Mac File Open dialog box' for me?
nav services offers two: the old and the new. The new has the favourites menu on it and optional previews of everything (ha!) the old is the pared down one with the path menu and the finder-viewer. It is possible to write non-nav-services-compliant boxes... and people do.
recently added (I think like 8.blah or so) 'alt-tab' functionality?
It's command-tab actually and, no, I turned it off as several of the graphics programs I use offer scrolling through the toolbar on that keyset. I may not like it but it always works (unless you turn it off). Why not just run your app floaty menu thingy?
Bare Bones may make a good application (BBEdit) but they are lousy when it comes to a truly effective interface
no kidding. Their fonts and tabs menu option alone is such a wild violation of the human interface guidelines that there might be jail time served. I use codewarrior for what folks normally use bbedit for. No grep, but the syntax is coloured!
I guess Apple never though anyone would need to run more than one (or two) apps at once.
Again, I'll sing the praises of the app tab. Pictures or words place it wherever you want. A great thing I say.
It suprises me that a company that parades its 'UI' so much that they appear to not offer a sufficient API for their developers to build applications that are consistent.
Well, there's the appearance manager. If you want a gob of info on it here is a good place to start. After that you're into inside mac and TIL's.
I have two workstations on my desk. A Mac and a Linux workstation.
I have a mac and a solaris box on my desk and, as much as I think Solaris is a good thing, really KDE and CDE and (worst of all) openwin do nothing more for me than make me want to use my mac for anything that vaguely represents file management.
The Apple implementation of OpenFirmware does not support loading of ELF executables (like the boot-blocks for this port). This needs a workaround.
... and I don't know where I got that from, but it's old judging from the ctime on the doc. I suppose I should have gone and found the quote initially, but if you could see my filing "system"....
true. Okay, I admit I didn't think back to the all-in-wonder 68000-ers. However, I am vaugely sure that you can run obsd on an LC. I have an LC, LCIII and LC630 and had those guys in mind when I picked up obsd. I remember taking solace in the fact that the LC's could run it even if the 630 couldn't... but I didn't install it on any of those machines anyway due to disk limitations....
(Mac Plus, Classic, SE) can not run *nix
welll... if you don't mind death-by-slowness you can run the ever-emulated Minix for the Mac. But, really, you gotta have a lot of patience
Neat, but... two-hundred-and-twenty-five-goddamn-dollars? Wow. alternatively, you could get a shelf and sit them side by side (basically the same amount of rackspace)
Not really. We have shelf "racked" and rack racked machines and the shelf is just a huge behemoth of messiness. Also, the rack allows you to just roll yer expensive hardware and data out the door in the event of fire (grin). Oh yeah, macs ship with stickers so you can perform "logo uprighting" procedures independently.:)
No, I change my homepage to reflect what I'm ranting on at any particular moment. Due to holidays and my absence from this board, the last time I updated it was during some argument on IDEs for linux.
you shouldn't. Apparently the obsd guys can't get the apple firmware to run elf executables. That means lots o stuff will have to be a.out and that's no fun.
On the other hand, if you still have that Quadra, you can run obsd on that. Any m68k mac will run it except for those based on the 68LC040 processor. And don't ask theo if a port for that is forthcoming or you'll be subjected to his 20 minute tirade about how to do a chip transplant with a soldering gun a can of air and a roll of masking tape. I kid you not.
nothing except money. Clone makers (we call them OEMs sometimes, when we want them to be nice to us) usually get a deal on the OS and associated bundled software. Apple's position is that no such deal will be forthcoming. You can make a clone, but you'll pay the full $99 for the OS. If you want to throw AppleWorks in there just to keep up with cupertino, it's another $169(ish). QuickTime Pro? $40. All of a sudden it ain't such a good deal any more...
One hot topic in Linux for PPC today is the Mac on Linux emulator
Actually, I'm a fan of the Linux on Mac emulator as produced by those wizards of reverse engineering at Connectix (the people who brought you virtual Play Station). With this fine family of products I can run winders, Linux and the macOS on one machine and not have to reboot to switch. Try that on yer TRS80!
Are there any numbers on the people using Macintosh systems with Linux?
Not now, no. But consider this: The G4 cube comes with gigabit ethernet and if you take the casing off them and lay two down side by side, they fit into a rack with just enough room to spare for some fans. Hm. I could get a set up like that for less than a sparc 220r... hm. But what would I run on it to make it a good server... hm.
I think a lot of folks will be thinking like that in the next few months.
I'll say this: context-sensitive right-clicking menus were a true advance in UI.
1. context menus were invented because an unnamed operating system (well, windows if you must know) designed a UI that would give you a theoretically unlimited number of menu bars. Gee, which Edit menu do I want? This one? This one? hm. The contextual menu is a hack to make up for lack of planning at msft. 2. Uh, if you hold down the control key while clicking you get the contextual menu in the macOS. It's there as a total sop to winders users, but it's there. 3. Hot keys are fun. Use 'em I say. On the mac, your hot keys are consistent across all apps so they're actually usable. In the winders world, quit can be ctrl-x, ctrl-q or even (get this) alt-F4. Add this to the fact that close-the-only-window and quit-the-app are the same thing and that close has probably a half dozen different keys and... well you'd be using contexutal menus too if your UI was so badly crippled that keyboard was only good for text input.
Nope. Sun was selling optical mice with the SparcStations LONG ago.
Okay, I use a Sparc10 a lot, and calling that disaster of a mouse a breakthrough is an insult to, uh, lots and lots of stuff. viz.
1. It requires a special pad. If you lose the pad you have a serious problem. If you damage the pad you have a serious problem. If the pad is not big enough you have no other option. If you want a picture of whatever on your pad you're out of luck. 2. If you rotate the pad 45 degrees or more, the mouse fails to work. I find it absolutely amazing that a company like Sun that makes such hot-ass stuff would ship a mouse that fails to work if the pad is rotated. Of course, Sun, in their infinite wisdom, failed to put any grip stuff on the bottom of said pad just to ensure that I get a nice break every 15 min. to re-align my mouse pad. 3. Who here hasn't had to walk over to a rack-mount with a keyboard and bring a binder for a mid-air mousepad? Does Sun make binders for their optical mice? 4. The mouse itself is shaped like a paperback. Very ergonomic... if you're a robot. 5. The buttons are a half centimeter wide. Is Sun getting kickbacks from the Very Narrow Button Company?
If the Sun optical mouse is a "technological breakthrough" then I'm hooking up with the unabomber...
Henry Ford would have loved you. Originally, cars came only in black. Why would you need another colour? Now close your eyes and imagine a world of black cars.
Unless I'm some sort of egomaniac, why would I care what it looks like?
I'm envisioning your apartment. The walls are white. There are no paintings or pictures. Your furniture doesn't match. You have a closet full of white tee shirts and jeans. You hang sheets for curtains. Your glasses and dishes don't match.
Esthetics may not be the most important thing, but it is important nonetheless. If it wasn't we'd all dress like maoists. The fact is, I stare at my computer for 11 hours a day. Is there some reason why I want it to be ugly?
You're computer typically goes under your desk,
Nothing personal, but if you put your computer under your desk you're a fool. Computers have fans (imac and cube excepted). Floors have dust and crud. I've put this to the test at my local 200+ client lan and found that floor-bound towers have a little less than twice the crud in them than their desk-dwelling counterparts. If you have cats.... I don't even want to think about that. But cats have nothing to do with mice, I digress.
Not your girlfriend.
Why do you want your girlfriend to be good looking? Are you some kind of egomainiac?:)
Really? Here's my teach-em-double-click-in-a-nanosecond spiel: Tap the wand on the hat and out pops the rabbit.
tap tap. click click. same thing.
Now, let's look at the single-click motif. I want to drag icon x from point a to point b. click and drag... oops I let go too early. Now wait for the document to open before closing it and trying again. Hey, I wan't to select 2 icons. Wait, that's not the shift key I'm holding, it's the caps-lock. Wait for the document to yatta yatta... Okay, I want to select one icon... now how the heck would I do that? Draw a box around it? sheesh
Actually, I've written such a parser; it was a hack,
hmm... you wouldn't, uh, be, uh, posting the code for that there parser anywhere wouldya? Hm?
There is a lot more stucture to AppleScript than might be immediately apparent.
I know this to be the case... however, compared to C, the apparent laxness of syntax rules means that the number of actual parsing rules must be enormous.
See the C-like Frontier UserTalk for an example of somethig that looks a little easier to parse.
I've done the mandatory dabbling in Frontier (bought the O'reilly book, read most of it, forgot most of that within a year...) and the ever-dreaded QuickKeys. I've considered getting into the Osaxen biz, but, frankly, the number of projects on my plate expands at about twice the rate as my ability to... eat off that plate? Sorry about the poor metaphor, but you get the idea.
I discovered people much smarter than me (Henry Lieberman at MIT, for one)
I'm gonna go look for it right now... I'm also a hopeless MIT fanboy, so it's a double pleasure!
I believe AppleScript is probably the closest thing to a natural language text based interface
Actually, the really impressive thing abou AS is that it gives you the option of a natural language syntax. You can still call all the classes by their carat-enclosed names and write AppleScript with an almost-as-dense-as-perl style if you wish, but for those of us who prize readability over saving a few keystrokes, the natural language option is there.
The irony is that a friend of my gf's and I were just discussing what would be required to write a parser for AppleScript... the final conclusion was an army of people much much smarter than we...
I've been working off-and-on for the last year on an Eliza-type interface for Xf86config. It still has a few bugs, but the gist is there. It's basic interface is:
XEliza What sort of video card do you have? user it's a rage 128 XEliza Tell me more about this rage 128 user Well, uh, it's got 8 megs of ram XEliza How does 8 megs of ram make you feel? user okay, I guess. I wish I had more of course. XEliza Does it bother you that you wish you had more? user Well, I don't really play a lot of games, so maybe I'm just being greedy. XEliza Do people often say you are greedy. user Not really, I mean, they say I spend too much time and money on my computer XEliza Who says you spend too much time and money on your computer? user Well, my mom does. XEliza Tell me about your mother error: cannot parse "mother" in module "freud": no output written
is that most of the crashes occur because programs run out of their pre-allocated memory supply.
You do know you can change the memory allocation, right? Just get info on the app, follow the popup to "memory" and type the numbers you want in the boxes. Quark comes with a preferred alloc of 9000... and my first post-install task is to up it to 30000.
If you have memory problems with your finder, you can change that too by firing up resedit, opening the finder and then opening the SIZE resource. The memory alloc is waaaay down at the bottom of the window.
Slashdot Mirror
No, really, I think I'm going to be sick... Evolution is a confirmed, actual, demonstrable, repeatable, falsifiable honest-to-god fact. What you, and all the other creationists/guidance-ists/whatever-ists are talking about is...
Natural Selection
Which is a method by which evolution is driven. Calling natural selection "evolution" is like calling an airplane an "anti-gravity machine". Airplanes fly, but not necessarily by anti-gravity. Okay?
150 years ago, many things in physics were 'confirmed', now many of these ideas are looked at and laughed at...
Well, that's because science is a progressive, self-correcting process.
Even the theory of gravity is undergoing changes
The theory of gravity is undergoing refinements. Saying the theory of gravity is being changed is like saying that by adding another digit of significance to pi we are completely negating the validity of 3.14.
however please think and do the research before you you defend them with ignorance.
fine advice... give it a spin sometime.
don't moderate me down because of my beliefs
Christianity is a 1400 year story of sword-point converstion and persecution of those with different beliefs. You can take a -1, it's not like it's the Inquisition or anything...
Isn't anyone going to ask if I can imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
No, I know what Mac on Linux is.... I'm saying I preferr the concept behind Connectix product which, in a fit of bon-mot-ism I referred to as Linux on Mac.
Besides, it's so much slower that it almost isn't worth running.
yep. It's slow. Running multiple OS's without a reboot is like learning to play all the reed instruments. You'll always be best at tenor sax, but can haul out that clarinet in a pinch if you really need to.
I would sit at home with my juicer, fat net connection and enjoy strolls in the park without the aid of $300,000 worth of specialized clothing.
however, my grandmother got on a leaky boat with 5 shillings in her pocket and left ireland to go to a country where she knew no-one, was destined to be the target of serious discrimination (the irish had a tough time until ww2...) and wound up in a land where the vast majority of people didn't even speak her language (Quebec). My grandmother.
If you discover it, people will settle.
Remoteness can be simulated. You want to simulate being remote from 24 hr pizza. Just don't order pizza at 3a.m. Simple. Barren can be simulated too. My highschool gym was completely devoid of plant life. Just like mars. The weird day and night cycle may be a little tougher unless you want to stay indoors where Thomas Edison's Amazing Invention can simulate any damn cycle you like. BTW, the arctic day/night cycle is still 24 hrs...
Let's look at the important stuff this does not simulate:
1. Gravity in Canada is the same as in the United States. The problem, though, is that it's different on Mars.
2. Certain metropolitan centres excepted, the air in the US is as breathable as in Canada... but on Mars, it's a different kettle of... air(?)
3. Atmospheric pressure. Same here. Different there.
4. UV radiation. What's the SPF of a space suit? Will my solar-powered beowulf cluster of palm pilots work on mars? A trip to Canada's Big Underdeveloped Simuland won't answer these questions.
5. Soil composition. Mars is the red planet. Nunavet is the white (and sometimes brown) territory. Hm. Must be different rocks.
Really, the only thing that northern Canada and Mars have in common is scenery and temperature. A couple of good Leibert air conditioners on a Holywood set could get that done in a thrice.
ack. don't even get me started on open win! As a caveat, I love sun stuff... really I do. But any gui that moves my mouse pointer to where *it* wants it and not where I put it (ie, scrolling or the exit-openwin dialog box) should be deported to some place with bad weather and a rock-bottom economy. And that file tree view? Or how about the thousand little desktop icons all called /usr/bin/tcsh... reinstate the Smith Act and put openwin on a boat for Liberia I say...
Wow, the links alone have made coming here today worth it. I wish my lan-centre looked as cool as theirs though...
We've been using ANA wich usually works out fine, but we keep monitors and keyboard there for those emergencies (ie, it's frozen) and the resulting jumble has made me want to cry.
nav services offers two: the old and the new. The new has the favourites menu on it and optional previews of everything (ha!) the old is the pared down one with the path menu and the finder-viewer. It is possible to write non-nav-services-compliant boxes... and people do.
recently added (I think like 8.blah or so) 'alt-tab' functionality?
It's command-tab actually and, no, I turned it off as several of the graphics programs I use offer scrolling through the toolbar on that keyset. I may not like it but it always works (unless you turn it off). Why not just run your app floaty menu thingy?
Bare Bones may make a good application (BBEdit) but they are lousy when it comes to a truly effective interface
no kidding. Their fonts and tabs menu option alone is such a wild violation of the human interface guidelines that there might be jail time served. I use codewarrior for what folks normally use bbedit for. No grep, but the syntax is coloured!
I guess Apple never though anyone would need to run more than one (or two) apps at once.
Again, I'll sing the praises of the app tab. Pictures or words place it wherever you want. A great thing I say.
It suprises me that a company that parades its 'UI' so much that they appear to not offer a sufficient API for their developers to build applications that are consistent.
Well, there's the appearance manager. If you want a gob of info on it here is a good place to start. After that you're into inside mac and TIL's.
I have two workstations on my desk. A Mac and a Linux workstation.
I have a mac and a solaris box on my desk and, as much as I think Solaris is a good thing, really KDE and CDE and (worst of all) openwin do nothing more for me than make me want to use my mac for anything that vaguely represents file management.
The Apple implementation of OpenFirmware does not support loading of ELF executables (like the boot-blocks for this port). This needs a workaround.
true. Okay, I admit I didn't think back to the all-in-wonder 68000-ers. However, I am vaugely sure that you can run obsd on an LC. I have an LC, LCIII and LC630 and had those guys in mind when I picked up obsd. I remember taking solace in the fact that the LC's could run it even if the 630 couldn't... but I didn't install it on any of those machines anyway due to disk limitations....
(Mac Plus, Classic, SE) can not run *nix
welll... if you don't mind death-by-slowness you can run the ever-emulated Minix for the Mac. But, really, you gotta have a lot of patience
Neat, but... two-hundred-and-twenty-five-goddamn-dollars? Wow. alternatively, you could get a shelf and sit them side by side (basically the same amount of rackspace)
Not really. We have shelf "racked" and rack racked machines and the shelf is just a huge behemoth of messiness. Also, the rack allows you to just roll yer expensive hardware and data out the door in the event of fire (grin). Oh yeah, macs ship with stickers so you can perform "logo uprighting" procedures independently. :)
No, I change my homepage to reflect what I'm ranting on at any particular moment. Due to holidays and my absence from this board, the last time I updated it was during some argument on IDEs for linux.
dammit, yer right. Sorry.
you shouldn't. Apparently the obsd guys can't get the apple firmware to run elf executables. That means lots o stuff will have to be a.out and that's no fun.
On the other hand, if you still have that Quadra, you can run obsd on that. Any m68k mac will run it except for those based on the 68LC040 processor. And don't ask theo if a port for that is forthcoming or you'll be subjected to his 20 minute tirade about how to do a chip transplant with a soldering gun a can of air and a roll of masking tape. I kid you not.
nothing except money. Clone makers (we call them OEMs sometimes, when we want them to be nice to us) usually get a deal on the OS and associated bundled software. Apple's position is that no such deal will be forthcoming. You can make a clone, but you'll pay the full $99 for the OS. If you want to throw AppleWorks in there just to keep up with cupertino, it's another $169(ish). QuickTime Pro? $40. All of a sudden it ain't such a good deal any more...
One hot topic in Linux for PPC today is the Mac on Linux emulator
Actually, I'm a fan of the Linux on Mac emulator as produced by those wizards of reverse engineering at Connectix (the people who brought you virtual Play Station). With this fine family of products I can run winders, Linux and the macOS on one machine and not have to reboot to switch. Try that on yer TRS80!
Not now, no. But consider this: The G4 cube comes with gigabit ethernet and if you take the casing off them and lay two down side by side, they fit into a rack with just enough room to spare for some fans. Hm. I could get a set up like that for less than a sparc 220r... hm. But what would I run on it to make it a good server... hm.
I think a lot of folks will be thinking like that in the next few months.
hm...
1. context menus were invented because an unnamed operating system (well, windows if you must know) designed a UI that would give you a theoretically unlimited number of menu bars. Gee, which Edit menu do I want? This one? This one? hm. The contextual menu is a hack to make up for lack of planning at msft.
2. Uh, if you hold down the control key while clicking you get the contextual menu in the macOS. It's there as a total sop to winders users, but it's there.
3. Hot keys are fun. Use 'em I say. On the mac, your hot keys are consistent across all apps so they're actually usable. In the winders world, quit can be ctrl-x, ctrl-q or even (get this) alt-F4. Add this to the fact that close-the-only-window and quit-the-app are the same thing and that close has probably a half dozen different keys and... well you'd be using contexutal menus too if your UI was so badly crippled that keyboard was only good for text input.
spending five minutes aligning the cursor
I hope this is hyperbole.
Okay, I use a Sparc10 a lot, and calling that disaster of a mouse a breakthrough is an insult to, uh, lots and lots of stuff. viz.
1. It requires a special pad. If you lose the pad you have a serious problem. If you damage the pad you have a serious problem. If the pad is not big enough you have no other option. If you want a picture of whatever on your pad you're out of luck.
2. If you rotate the pad 45 degrees or more, the mouse fails to work. I find it absolutely amazing that a company like Sun that makes such hot-ass stuff would ship a mouse that fails to work if the pad is rotated. Of course, Sun, in their infinite wisdom, failed to put any grip stuff on the bottom of said pad just to ensure that I get a nice break every 15 min. to re-align my mouse pad.
3. Who here hasn't had to walk over to a rack-mount with a keyboard and bring a binder for a mid-air mousepad? Does Sun make binders for their optical mice?
4. The mouse itself is shaped like a paperback. Very ergonomic... if you're a robot.
5. The buttons are a half centimeter wide. Is Sun getting kickbacks from the Very Narrow Button Company?
If the Sun optical mouse is a "technological breakthrough" then I'm hooking up with the unabomber...
Henry Ford would have loved you. Originally, cars came only in black. Why would you need another colour? Now close your eyes and imagine a world of black cars.
Unless I'm some sort of egomaniac, why would I care what it looks like?
I'm envisioning your apartment. The walls are white. There are no paintings or pictures. Your furniture doesn't match. You have a closet full of white tee shirts and jeans. You hang sheets for curtains. Your glasses and dishes don't match.
Esthetics may not be the most important thing, but it is important nonetheless. If it wasn't we'd all dress like maoists. The fact is, I stare at my computer for 11 hours a day. Is there some reason why I want it to be ugly?
You're computer typically goes under your desk,
Nothing personal, but if you put your computer under your desk you're a fool. Computers have fans (imac and cube excepted). Floors have dust and crud. I've put this to the test at my local 200+ client lan and found that floor-bound towers have a little less than twice the crud in them than their desk-dwelling counterparts. If you have cats.... I don't even want to think about that. But cats have nothing to do with mice, I digress.
Not your girlfriend.
Why do you want your girlfriend to be good looking? Are you some kind of egomainiac? :)
Really? Here's my teach-em-double-click-in-a-nanosecond spiel: Tap the wand on the hat and out pops the rabbit.
tap tap. click click. same thing.
Now, let's look at the single-click motif. I want to drag icon x from point a to point b. click and drag... oops I let go too early. Now wait for the document to open before closing it and trying again. Hey, I wan't to select 2 icons. Wait, that's not the shift key I'm holding, it's the caps-lock. Wait for the document to yatta yatta... Okay, I want to select one icon... now how the heck would I do that? Draw a box around it? sheesh
hmm... you wouldn't, uh, be, uh, posting the code for that there parser anywhere wouldya? Hm?
There is a lot more stucture to AppleScript than might be immediately apparent.
I know this to be the case... however, compared to C, the apparent laxness of syntax rules means that the number of actual parsing rules must be enormous.
See the C-like Frontier UserTalk for an example of somethig that looks a little easier to parse.
I've done the mandatory dabbling in Frontier (bought the O'reilly book, read most of it, forgot most of that within a year...) and the ever-dreaded QuickKeys. I've considered getting into the Osaxen biz, but, frankly, the number of projects on my plate expands at about twice the rate as my ability to... eat off that plate? Sorry about the poor metaphor, but you get the idea.
I discovered people much smarter than me (Henry Lieberman at MIT, for one)
I'm gonna go look for it right now... I'm also a hopeless MIT fanboy, so it's a double pleasure!
Actually, the really impressive thing abou AS is that it gives you the option of a natural language syntax. You can still call all the classes by their carat-enclosed names and write AppleScript with an almost-as-dense-as-perl style if you wish, but for those of us who prize readability over saving a few keystrokes, the natural language option is there.
The irony is that a friend of my gf's and I were just discussing what would be required to write a parser for AppleScript... the final conclusion was an army of people much much smarter than we...
XEliza What sort of video card do you have?
user it's a rage 128
XEliza Tell me more about this rage 128
user Well, uh, it's got 8 megs of ram
XEliza How does 8 megs of ram make you feel?
user okay, I guess. I wish I had more of course.
XEliza Does it bother you that you wish you had more?
user Well, I don't really play a lot of games, so maybe I'm just being greedy.
XEliza Do people often say you are greedy.
user Not really, I mean, they say I spend too much time and money on my computer
XEliza Who says you spend too much time and money on your computer?
user Well, my mom does.
XEliza Tell me about your mother
error: cannot parse "mother" in module "freud":
no output written
You do know you can change the memory allocation, right? Just get info on the app, follow the popup to "memory" and type the numbers you want in the boxes. Quark comes with a preferred alloc of 9000... and my first post-install task is to up it to 30000.
If you have memory problems with your finder, you can change that too by firing up resedit, opening the finder and then opening the SIZE resource. The memory alloc is waaaay down at the bottom of the window.
Just asking.
It's a joke. You may wish to look it up if you are unfamiliar with the concept.