Why should I? The UNIX world has standards for how things work. OS X tramples all over them, often for no good reason.
If you look at '/usr', from the terminal, then everything standard is there, as for everything else there are reasons, you just need to take the time to understand them. As for other stuff most Unix implementations do things slightly differently from each other, some a lot differently (believe me I've worked on a fair number of them, including AIX, HP, Solaris and Linux). In many ways, while MacOS X is built on top of Darwin (BSD Unix derivitive), it is much more than that.
If you are just looking at the Darwin base, then it tries extending Unix into the 21st century providing support for dynamic devices and providing an object-oriented model for the drivers and other aspects of the system. There has been a lot of effort made to support legacy Unix applications, but there is only so much you can do when the needs of 2006 are no longer those of 1978.
On of that there is the graphical desktop environment and they do things a lot differently, but then again this fits in with the 'OS on top of an OS' approach. This is something that dates back from 'NeXT Step'. Sure they don't use the X11 standard, but sometimes you have to go your own way. BTW it should be noted that KDE, CDE, Gnome and other Unix graphical desktop environments rarely have an commanility beyond the fact they all use X11.
There are points when you have to appreciate what you know is no longer valid. The technology field is constantly changing, so if you can't stand change, then it will be really hard for you.
No additional widgets required. Just open Terminal and do this
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
After that, press F12 and start dragging widget.. then (while still dragging) press F12 again and drop widget on the desktop.
Thanks for that. Now just to see if they can make that offical. Actually it would be nice to have side bar like in Windows Vista to arrange them, and that application are forced to respect when zooming to full size.
It is interesting to note that they give the top five positions to the Finder. The Finder needs a lot of attention, and currently it doesn't be getting anything more than tweaks. I think the Finder is the one application that deserves a make over. Considering how much it is used it should not be an after-thought. BTW I would be interested in hearing what other pet peeves there are about the Finder.
As to UI consistency I really believe that Apple should work on this. If they want to offer different Window textures, then they should make it available at the system level and not make each program look like someone wanted to share with the world their skin of the day. It kinda makes me think of selling a Mercedes, using wood venere finish in the front and then using cheap plastic finish in the back seat.
Sounds like just one more example of one's desired conclusion ultimately altering the testing conditions and results to match. Seems to be almost a disease in this country.
Anywhere there are numbers, there is going to be a group of people wanting reinterpret them. This is classic sales approach. Reminds me of the advert I saW the other day: "we will pay the first three months for you", when in actual fact they are just paying the equivalent of the amount they jacked the price up by - doh!
This reminds me of efforts to create electronic wallets, which are basically smart-cards that you can load from the bank machine and use in much the same way as a credit card. The problem for me with these things, is that they are usually owned and controlled by a private enterprise, rather than the national mint. If physical currency was ever to be phased out we shouldn't be locked into a system controlled by a non-state enterprise, since otherwise that enterprise would have to the potential to hold the country to ransom. Whatever negative aspects physical currency has, at least the exchange is limited to human error, and doesn't add an unnecessary third party for transactions.
When you boil it right down, anyone using one of the older versions of Windows (and I count 2000 in this, as MS doesn't support it anymore) is going to have to face up to the fact that technology advances, software changes, and no matter how much they love their old machine/OS, they're going to get left behind. Backwards compatibility leads to backwards thinking.
The need for backwards compatibility, in an application, really depends on the number of users locked into older OSs and the work involved. Quite honestly what they could do is list older versions of Firefox for older version of Windows, MacOS, etc. That way people can still use Firefox, even if it isn't the latest version.
With Windows, one of the biggest sticking points is lack of Unicode support in older versions. The support can be provided through a Microsoft DLL, but the distribution license for this is quite limiting and doesn't fit well with the approach used by Mozilla.
We just need Debian enterprise or Kubuntu enterprise to have $$$ support. Then again given the amount of helpful people around not wanting a dime for the help they provide, the only people giving a damn are those people paying for an enterprise version of Linux.
Can you imagine the potential of this? Why, you could be an entire orchestra by yourself! In fact, you could even perform this kind of trick LIVE - simply substitute musicians skilled in their instruments for the samples, and in order to "control" them, you could provide them with the musical instructions somehow on paper. Of course you'd have to implement some kind of global timer to keep them all together, but it seems very doable!
I am sure it is doble and there are probably a few dozen/.s planning to prove that it is.
What makes this video interesting is the orginality and this is what art is often comes down to: it is not the ability to do it, since many people could probably do it, but actually making this real and sharing it for all to appreciate. A copy of an art piece is still art, but it not original art where the artist went the process of play, experimenting and realisation. So for those/.s thinking "meh", consider that he actually did something about doing it, no matter the approach he used.
The other thing that gets me is that if you idle over to the Australian or Japanese iTunes store, while living in Canada for example, you find something you really want to download. You can't buy it there because it is not your local iTunes store. Fair enough so you go back to you local iTunes store and try buying from there to find you can't because they don't sell it in any of the other stores!! This is what peeves me off, since I feel like I am cut off to a lot of good non-North Americain music. I don't know whether it is the record industry or Appl at fault, but it goes to illustrate that something is not right.
I would love to see Nintendo do something like this. I think allowing development using the SNES dev kit would allow those who want to get into console game development somewhere to start, yet not compromise what they are charging for their professional kit.
It's too bad Apple doesn't backport their bugfixes. They have to convince me to spend $129 on a minor version upgrade somehow, though. (Not that it's working - it's convincing me to buy the software for windows and dropkick the mac.)
While this would be nice, its like asking Adobe to backport a feature of CS3 to CS2. Basically they have moved past that point and they are now concentrating their development dollars in making the next generation of MacOS X.
The problem never has been the number of addresses left, but the number of addresses available. Before you scream that it is the same, it isn't really: One is a indication of the number of addresses in use, while the other is an indication of political or business motivation, or ability, for making the address available to those who want them. Address allocation is never going to be an efficient task, so by having more addresses available you support the fact that %10 of the addresses will never be allocated.
There are probably other good reasons for IPv6, but I am not an expert here.
The Finder is the one thing I would like to see improvements in. For example rewriting it to be a Cocoa app and actually being smarter at noticing file changes, especially with SMB volumes. There is no f5 (refresh key on Windows), so I don't want to have to wait a minute until it notices.
One other thing I would love to see, related to AppleShare volumes: server side folder size calculation, since it would be easier to cache and reduce unecessary network traffic because the client wouldn't be interogating each and every file.
I think the beta reaction instead of "wah, WTF?", should be what percentage of users actually make use of the VBA portion of office? Also, isn't Microsoft slowly migrating to C# as their high-level language of choice?
One thing I should mention is that Microsoft actually uses OLE for the document format and everything else is simply an embedded data type. OLE is part of the operating system in MS-Windows, and probably has some important optimisations because of this. On the Mac, and anywhere else that wants to support the office document format, you must first implement something to support OLE.
I should note that I am not saying the OLE is a bad technology, but it is hindered by the lack of cross-platform support for the technology and by the fact you can't tell programs to use a universal data format for a certain data type, it simply does or doesn't, depending on the application you are using (see here for one story). The other issue is the help application only includes a reference to the data and not the data itself, which is usally the cause of Word not able to display certain images, such as those from Visio!!
Can it import PowerPoint documents? There is nothing worse than migrating to a "vastly superior" product only not to support the most used format in the office place.
Went and found myself a trial version and it looks like the answer is yes. I would imagine this is one of the making MS wonder whether there is any need to continue their effort.
fork over the $80 and use keynote. it is vastly superior to powerpoint, both in terms of ease of creation and in final output quality.
Can it import PowerPoint documents? There is nothing worse than migrating to a "vastly superior" product only not to support the most used format in the office place.
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linux.
Most users want their programs to look like they were written for their OS, and they don't want to feel that it was dumped on their OS by accident. X-Windows based applications are fine as stop gap solutions for people who don't mind what their applications look like, as long as they get their work done. Most users tend to a bit more fussy and want something that does the job, while looking the part. Remember Mac users expect things to 'just work'. You can accuse them of being spoiled, but this is the markert you have to cater for. Attention to detail, such as UI design and localisation make a huge difference in your application getting accepted.
If your application is the only one that fills a certain purpose for the given OS, then they will choose your application because they have no choice. But when there is competition, skimping out on important details is going to lose you first place.
ACPI has a bad reputation and really justifies it based on how convoluted it is. I really believe that Microsoft should be pushing motherboard manufacturers to implement EFI based boards. BIOS no longer fills the requirements for a modern system and has been hacked to pieces to fill the new requirements. Apple made a good move adopting Intel's 'next-gen' BIOS known as EFI. It is now time for the rest of the x86 based industry to do the same.
At the same time if the blogs by Microsoft developers are anything to go by, then there is something seriously wrong in the whole development methodolgy at Microsoft. For an OS as large, complex and important as MS-Windows the development processes should have been much more streamlined. I suppose this one advantage of separating the base OS from the upper-level OS - this is something used by most other OSs such as "MacOS X" and Linux. MacOS X has Darwin with graphics user environment fitted on top, Linux has the base system with KDE or Gnome fitted on top.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should I? The UNIX world has standards for how things work. OS X tramples all over them, often for no good reason.
If you look at '/usr', from the terminal, then everything standard is there, as for everything else there are reasons, you just need to take the time to understand them. As for other stuff most Unix implementations do things slightly differently from each other, some a lot differently (believe me I've worked on a fair number of them, including AIX, HP, Solaris and Linux). In many ways, while MacOS X is built on top of Darwin (BSD Unix derivitive), it is much more than that.
If you are just looking at the Darwin base, then it tries extending Unix into the 21st century providing support for dynamic devices and providing an object-oriented model for the drivers and other aspects of the system. There has been a lot of effort made to support legacy Unix applications, but there is only so much you can do when the needs of 2006 are no longer those of 1978.
On of that there is the graphical desktop environment and they do things a lot differently, but then again this fits in with the 'OS on top of an OS' approach. This is something that dates back from 'NeXT Step'. Sure they don't use the X11 standard, but sometimes you have to go your own way. BTW it should be noted that KDE, CDE, Gnome and other Unix graphical desktop environments rarely have an commanility beyond the fact they all use X11.
There are points when you have to appreciate what you know is no longer valid. The technology field is constantly changing, so if you can't stand change, then it will be really hard for you.
No additional widgets required. Just open Terminal and do this
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
After that, press F12 and start dragging widget.. then (while still dragging) press F12 again and drop widget on the desktop.
Thanks for that. Now just to see if they can make that offical. Actually it would be nice to have side bar like in Windows Vista to arrange them, and that application are forced to respect when zooming to full size.
It is interesting to note that they give the top five positions to the Finder. The Finder needs a lot of attention, and currently it doesn't be getting anything more than tweaks. I think the Finder is the one application that deserves a make over. Considering how much it is used it should not be an after-thought. BTW I would be interested in hearing what other pet peeves there are about the Finder.
As to UI consistency I really believe that Apple should work on this. If they want to offer different Window textures, then they should make it available at the system level and not make each program look like someone wanted to share with the world their skin of the day. It kinda makes me think of selling a Mercedes, using wood venere finish in the front and then using cheap plastic finish in the back seat.
Forward Delete is available on MacBooks: fn-delete.
Sounds like just one more example of one's desired conclusion ultimately altering the testing conditions and results to match. Seems to be almost a disease in this country.
Anywhere there are numbers, there is going to be a group of people wanting reinterpret them. This is classic sales approach. Reminds me of the advert I saW the other day: "we will pay the first three months for you", when in actual fact they are just paying the equivalent of the amount they jacked the price up by - doh!
This reminds me of efforts to create electronic wallets, which are basically smart-cards that you can load from the bank machine and use in much the same way as a credit card. The problem for me with these things, is that they are usually owned and controlled by a private enterprise, rather than the national mint. If physical currency was ever to be phased out we shouldn't be locked into a system controlled by a non-state enterprise, since otherwise that enterprise would have to the potential to hold the country to ransom. Whatever negative aspects physical currency has, at least the exchange is limited to human error, and doesn't add an unnecessary third party for transactions.
I believe this is why Australia and New Zealand did away with any value below 5c, if you are trading with coins and notes.
When you boil it right down, anyone using one of the older versions of Windows (and I count 2000 in this, as MS doesn't support it anymore) is going to have to face up to the fact that technology advances, software changes, and no matter how much they love their old machine/OS, they're going to get left behind. Backwards compatibility leads to backwards thinking.
The need for backwards compatibility, in an application, really depends on the number of users locked into older OSs and the work involved. Quite honestly what they could do is list older versions of Firefox for older version of Windows, MacOS, etc. That way people can still use Firefox, even if it isn't the latest version.
With Windows, one of the biggest sticking points is lack of Unicode support in older versions. The support can be provided through a Microsoft DLL, but the distribution license for this is quite limiting and doesn't fit well with the approach used by Mozilla.
We just need Debian enterprise or Kubuntu enterprise to have $$$ support. Then again given the amount of helpful people around not wanting a dime for the help they provide, the only people giving a damn are those people paying for an enterprise version of Linux.
No comment :)
Can you imagine the potential of this? Why, you could be an entire orchestra by yourself! In fact, you could even perform this kind of trick LIVE - simply substitute musicians skilled in their instruments for the samples, and in order to "control" them, you could provide them with the musical instructions somehow on paper. Of course you'd have to implement some kind of global timer to keep them all together, but it seems very doable!
/.s planning to prove that it is.
/.s thinking "meh", consider that he actually did something about doing it, no matter the approach he used.
I am sure it is doble and there are probably a few dozen
What makes this video interesting is the orginality and this is what art is often comes down to: it is not the ability to do it, since many people could probably do it, but actually making this real and sharing it for all to appreciate. A copy of an art piece is still art, but it not original art where the artist went the process of play, experimenting and realisation. So for those
The other thing that gets me is that if you idle over to the Australian or Japanese iTunes store, while living in Canada for example, you find something you really want to download. You can't buy it there because it is not your local iTunes store. Fair enough so you go back to you local iTunes store and try buying from there to find you can't because they don't sell it in any of the other stores!!
This is what peeves me off, since I feel like I am cut off to a lot of good non-North Americain music. I don't know whether it is the record industry or Appl at fault, but it goes to illustrate that something is not right.
I would love to see Nintendo do something like this. I think allowing development using the SNES dev kit would allow those who want to get into console game development somewhere to start, yet not compromise what they are charging for their professional kit.
Any large black rectangular structures waiting the for the completion date? ;)
Is there an official torrent of the releases hosted somewhere reachable?
It would have been nice that had provided one before making this announcement. Maybe next time?
It's too bad Apple doesn't backport their bugfixes. They have to convince me to spend $129 on a minor version upgrade somehow, though. (Not that it's working - it's convincing me to buy the software for windows and dropkick the mac.)
While this would be nice, its like asking Adobe to backport a feature of CS3 to CS2. Basically they have moved past that point and they are now concentrating their development dollars in making the next generation of MacOS X.
The problem never has been the number of addresses left, but the number of addresses available. Before you scream that it is the same, it isn't really: One is a indication of the number of addresses in use, while the other is an indication of political or business motivation, or ability, for making the address available to those who want them. Address allocation is never going to be an efficient task, so by having more addresses available you support the fact that %10 of the addresses will never be allocated.
There are probably other good reasons for IPv6, but I am not an expert here.
The Finder is the one thing I would like to see improvements in. For example rewriting it to be a Cocoa app and actually being smarter at noticing file changes, especially with SMB volumes. There is no f5 (refresh key on Windows), so I don't want to have to wait a minute until it notices.
One other thing I would love to see, related to AppleShare volumes: server side folder size calculation, since it would be easier to cache and reduce unecessary network traffic because the client wouldn't be interogating each and every file.
Yup: http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/
I think the beta reaction instead of "wah, WTF?", should be what percentage of users actually make use of the VBA portion of office? Also, isn't Microsoft slowly migrating to C# as their high-level language of choice?
One thing I should mention is that Microsoft actually uses OLE for the document format and everything else is simply an embedded data type. OLE is part of the operating system in MS-Windows, and probably has some important optimisations because of this. On the Mac, and anywhere else that wants to support the office document format, you must first implement something to support OLE.
I should note that I am not saying the OLE is a bad technology, but it is hindered by the lack of cross-platform support for the technology and by the fact you can't tell programs to use a universal data format for a certain data type, it simply does or doesn't, depending on the application you are using (see here for one story). The other issue is the help application only includes a reference to the data and not the data itself, which is usally the cause of Word not able to display certain images, such as those from Visio!!
Can it import PowerPoint documents? There is nothing worse than migrating to a "vastly superior" product only not to support the most used format in the office place.
Went and found myself a trial version and it looks like the answer is yes. I would imagine this is one of the making MS wonder whether there is any need to continue their effort.
fork over the $80 and use keynote. it is vastly superior to powerpoint, both in terms of ease of creation and in final output quality.
Can it import PowerPoint documents? There is nothing worse than migrating to a "vastly superior" product only not to support the most used format in the office place.
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linux.
Most users want their programs to look like they were written for their OS, and they don't want to feel that it was dumped on their OS by accident. X-Windows based applications are fine as stop gap solutions for people who don't mind what their applications look like, as long as they get their work done. Most users tend to a bit more fussy and want something that does the job, while looking the part. Remember Mac users expect things to 'just work'. You can accuse them of being spoiled, but this is the markert you have to cater for. Attention to detail, such as UI design and localisation make a huge difference in your application getting accepted.
If your application is the only one that fills a certain purpose for the given OS, then they will choose your application because they have no choice. But when there is competition, skimping out on important details is going to lose you first place.
ACPI has a bad reputation and really justifies it based on how convoluted it is. I really believe that Microsoft should be pushing motherboard manufacturers to implement EFI based boards. BIOS no longer fills the requirements for a modern system and has been hacked to pieces to fill the new requirements. Apple made a good move adopting Intel's 'next-gen' BIOS known as EFI. It is now time for the rest of the x86 based industry to do the same.
At the same time if the blogs by Microsoft developers are anything to go by, then there is something seriously wrong in the whole development methodolgy at Microsoft. For an OS as large, complex and important as MS-Windows the development processes should have been much more streamlined. I suppose this one advantage of separating the base OS from the upper-level OS - this is something used by most other OSs such as "MacOS X" and Linux. MacOS X has Darwin with graphics user environment fitted on top, Linux has the base system with KDE or Gnome fitted on top.