Good point, although I tend to do other stuff with my Laptop when I'm stuck at the airport, so listening to MP3's while I'm at it is nice. If I'm not working, I'm probably using the laptop anyway to watch a DVD of Buffy or X-Files or something.
realisticly, how long can a powerbook run under load before heat becomes an issue if the server is handling requests steadily?
For years.
PPC chips use only a fraction of the power of Intel chips, and generate far, far less heat. This is why they are Motorola uses them in the embedded market, where they sometimes need six nines of continuous heavy-CPU-use uptime.
Most models of powerbooks don't even have a CPU fan installed, because they never need it.
It wasn't so long ago that people were speaking of Apple as if it were soon to be bought out and liquidated, and they were wondering why it could not be a thriving company like, for instance, Compaq.
Apple Computers: going out of business for over 20 years!
Unfortunately, a LOT of very common programs failed to conform to this guideline. Even Microsofts IE 5.2, which Apple still includes as a default browser, maximizes behind the dock... and Microsoft has a $10 Million Apple-software-only development house set up less than an hour's drive from One Infinite Loop. If they can't even remember to get it right, how often can we expect other companies to do so.
Perhaps the Apple GUI tools should be set up with defualts to force this behavior, unless the developer deliberately breaks it.
WotC could lay off because the project is done.
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Even if you really like d20 and D&D 3rd edition, this is not really bad news. All of the core rules for 3rd Ed D&D are now released, as well as most of the other books that TSR had planned. Plenty of ongoing expansions are coming out from 3rd party companies, so realistically, WotC doesn't actually need these writers for anything anymore, do they? (At least not until AD&D 4.0 comes out, which won't be for a long, long time.)
The only thing d20 still needs is a good set of software tools for GM's who like to run the game from their laptops, and due to the open nature of d20, I'm sure a lot of amitious hackers are going to fill that void anyway.
As long as WotC offered these guys a nice, fat severence package as a way of saying "thanks" for their efforts, I have no problem with seeing them cut loose.
When using most unices, I tend to agree with you, especially when at the command line (which is where I spend most of my time on a Linux box anyway). Unix is all about handling files with a million small apps, rather than running apps for handling files, so having a file that insists on being used by sed when you want to awk would ruin everything.
However, Macs have traditionally done an outstanding job of dealing with file types. You *can* trust the file type to be correct. It's never been the nightmare experience that the concept presents in Windows. Those who have been long-time Mac users would scream bloody murder if they suddenly could not double-click on a file and have the correct application open it without any further hassle.
Funny think is, I usually only hear Windows geeks talk about the advantages of integrated hardware. Apple users tend to take it for granted, mostly unware of the headaches they are avoiding.
A Windows geek sees something he likes in the Mac OS, and says, "a good example of the advantage of having integrated hardware. However, I prefer the flexibility of being able to buy motherboard swaps on pricewatch."
A Mac user sees the same feature and says, "an example of good software design, which is why I put up with the vendor lock-in of buying an Apple."
This article is just put out as fodder for their "Switch" campaign! Am I the only one who sees this???
No, you are not the only one who sees that. You would also not be the only one to see the Virgin Mary in that oak tree that was in the news this week. In other words, I think you are seeing what you want to see.
This article was written for the benifit of developers who are porting Mac apps. It happens to also be of interest to geeks like the crowd here on/. who like reading about GUI design. If their intention was to "bash Windows" to sell people on switching to OS X, there are far more damning things they could have brought up.
If anything, the article might scare some developers away from doing Mac ports, because they are basically saying "jump through these hoops or Mac users will ignore your app and all the effort you spend on proting will be wasted."
I was one of those people who was really dreading OS X's use of file extensions. I liked the old MacOS way of handling file types so much better.
However, OS X manages extensions with so much more inteligence than Windows (or any *nix windowing system I've used), that I've complety changed my tune now. I now like the way OS X uses file extensions, and don't want to go back.
An artist will sell it in whatever format he/she sees fit. If it doesn't work for you, don't buy it. End of transaction.
That was my whole point. If it doesn't work for me, I won't buy it. Keep that in mind when chosing your protection schemes.
In other words, if you want to sell me your CD, you are probably going to have to learn to live with the fact that warez dudez are going to collect unauthorized copies of your album on their shared drives, because there's no way you can prevent that without also preventing my fair use of the content you are selling to me, which I, as a buyer, will not accept.
I could have worded that better. (Two moderators understood what I meant, and modded me up, two didn't and called it a troll.)
What I meant was that making enough money to live on with nothing but your art is not an absolute right. If somebody is willing to buy it, great. If not, you are not being repressed, you are just unsuccessful.
They wanted to bash the Windows interface, but couldn't find any suitable examples of bad dialog design, so they hand crafted their own example and passed it off as the real thing.
If this was a "why OS X is better than Windows" article, you would have a point. Since this was a "common UI mistakes to avoid when porting your program to our platform" article, I think you are being a little hypersensitive.
They show you the gems of there interface compared to the most lackluster parts of thier competitors.
This was not a Win vs. Mac OS comparison. It was an article for the specific purpose of telling developers what common Windows application misfeatures one should avoid when writing a Mac port. The fact that Win95 (which is where I assume where they pasted those images from) showcases some of these misfeatures was just convenient for them.
I don't know how many Mac users I hear saying that the Mac "Launch bar" (name?) sucks.
If you are talking about the Launcher, that was a shareware App that Apple liked and offered as an optional tool in System 7, as a way to let your young kid run apps on your Mac without being able to delete your system files. Since many schools who used Macs used the Launcher to lock down their desktops and prevent studens from hacking their boxen, a lot of teens in the 90's assumed that the Launcher is what MacOS was, and wrote long screeds on message boards about how "restrictive" the OS is.
On the other hand, maybe you are talking about the Dock. The Dock is an application bar, which behaves a lot more like the one from NeXT than the menu bars from Windows and Gnome, which a lot of old-skool Mac users don't care for. I've grown to really love it, except I wish there was either an option for locking up the Dock's screen real-estate, or else a better implimentation of the window maximization feature, so windows would not sometimes extend under the Dock when I maximize them.
I found that most Windows switchers enjoy their new Mac more when they pick up a multi-button mouse. (The Microsoft Intellipoint, or whatever the hell it's called, is probably the best out there, but Kensington and Logitech make some good ones if you are an MS hayta'). Windows users have conditioned themselves to right-click for contextual menu functions. Most of the time, and OS X lets you do so. (ctrl-click or click-and-hold does the same thing as a right-click, if you like the "buttonless" Mac mouse.)
On the other hand, if you just let yourself get used to the idea that everything you need to do is on the top of your screen (and always in the same order: Apple, Application, Edit, View, App-specific stuff, Window, Help) you might find that Mac users worship the top menu concept for a reason. It makes your life easier, in the long run.
If you read the caption underneath, you would understand that they are not trying to point out that this particular Windows dialog box is crap, but rather "this is an example of a crappy dialog box". Their complaint was about more than the empty space (which was probably photoshopped in for demonstration purposes... we've all seen other dialog boxes with that problem, but they wanted a single image to demonstrate several problems). They also pointed out "superfluous group boxes and horizontal separators clutter the dialog."
This is why they caption calls it a "Windows-like dialog box," and not "a dialog box from Windows." It's just an example of things they are saying you should avoid.
Why do we need apple to tell us that we should only use one menu bar in Mac apps?
"We" don't. (If be "we" you mean "clueful programmers".) This article wasn't written for "any Mac developer worth his salt." It was written for very smart developers of other platforms that want to be aware of what the need to know to succeed on the Mac platform.
The article is interesting reading to see what Apple is currently telling coders who are new to doing a Mac port. Many companies have ported apps to the Macintosh without paying attention to Apple's UI guidelines, and were stunned to discover that the entire Mac community thought their app, which was a modest success in the Windows market, was universally dismissed as utter crap by Mac users. This info can help companies avoid repeating that mistake. It's not about conforming to what Apple wants it to look like nearly as much as what Apple users have come to expect from their apps.
One of my favorite differences is that I almost never see a dialog box with a button that only says "Yes" or "No" on it when I'm using the Mac. (Mozilla is one of the exeptions. The Mac 1.0 version is still lacking a lot of Mac-ness, but it pulls up/. pages a lot faster than IE, and doesn't break on as many sites or nag me for money the way OmniWeb does, so I'm not going to bitch too much about a "capitol-F" Free software product.) There are far too many Windows apps that pop up dialog boxes saying stuff like "You are launching proceedure $FOO without condition $BAR being properly set. Do you no longer wish to avoid autocorrecting the object status and reimplementing the enterprise settings? [Yes] [No] [Cancel]"
It should not confuse you. My point was that the film, which was horrible, used the same basic plot, situations, and settings as the book it was (loosely) based on, so it's pretty damn difficult to argue that they are completely different genres. The fact that one was deep and interesting and the other was crap doesn't mean that they aren't both of the same genre.
"The Bridges Of Madison County," as universally loved as it may be, is still just another romance novel when you get down to it. Likewise, "Stranger In A Strange Land," is still just another science fiction story.
For example, the airplane was invented as a way to travel. As soon as the military saw this, they thought, we can drop bombs from this device. Now the plane is not just for travel, but also for war. I'm sure the Wright Brothers didn't expect the creation of Stealth Bombers now did they. The same applies for developers of CD/DVD burners. I'm sure the original plan for them was to provide a great way to back up large amounts of data. Then someone said, hey, we can put multimedia on this and get our car stero, home theater to play this also.
Before the Wright Brothers' flight at Kittyhawk, armies were already using baloons for recon. I'm sure those working on the first planes were perfectly aware of the tactical advantages of powered flight. Not the specific applicaitons, but only a moron would have overlooked that something like that would end up being used as a war machine.
Likewise, the makers of the first DVD burners not only knew they would be used for multi-media, but that was the whole point. Otherwise, why spend so much effort complying with the standard of the read-only DVD, when you could just make some proprietary optical disk (like SyQuest and others used to do before DVD's came along)?
Still, there are hundreds of legal applications for a DVD burner. The ability to back up your valuable DVD collection, or transfer your LD's to DVD so you don't need to replace your old LD player when it breaks down, or myriad other uses. Look at how many of the new iMacs Apple sold to people specifically so they could edit their home videos with iMovie and burn them to DVD. DRM would kill the biggest innovation in personal movie-making since the home super-8 editing station (which came out decades ago).
I agree with most of your points, but as soon as you hit this typical rhetorical chime of railing against the big, rich corporations, I am compelled to remind you that most of the "wealth" of a big corporation is split up between thousands of middle-class investors, including whatever is left of your 401K after last year's crash. If you are like most people office drones, you might actually be a part-owner of Microsoft and not even know it.
Maybe you don't want to pay $20 for a CD. That doesn't matter. I want you to. There's a reason for that. I'll give you a hint: Its not because I got 1500 on the SATs.
The problem with most people reading Slashdot is that they don't have jobs that depend on the goodwill and kindness of the community. They're telling musicians like me that I'm supposed to. What would you do if your boss told you that unless the software sells 3 million copies, you get nothing? Welcome to our world.
If the tenuous nature of making a living off your music bothers you, maybe you should get a day job. I'm sorry, but at no point in human history did the majority of musicians make a good living at it.
If you want me to pay $20 for your CD, make damned sure you sell it in a format that I can easilly back up on my HD, and take full advantage of Fair Use whenever I want. Otherwise you won't ever sell one to me, no matter what your SAT score was.
You do not have a right to make money off your art. Most artists don't.
(mainly because he is one of the few legends in the computing industry with a real personality, IMO)
The legends of the computing industry is the most diverse cadre of odd ducks I can think of. I mean, come on. Larry Ellison? Steve "Monkey Boy" Balmer, anyone? Bill Joy? Richard Stallman!?
Maybe you meant to say he's one of the few legends who acts like a relatively normal person.
The distinction is this: Pretentious assholes who like science fiction don't want thier favorite stories (which they consider to be literature equal to the best works of Dickens and Tolstoy) to be considered part of the same genre as crappy B movies about giant spiders invading Earth, even though it is.
Therefore, they insist that "good" science fiction is a completely different genre from "bad" science fiction.
I can debunk this silly notion with 2 words: Starship Troopers. Anybody who has both read the book and seen the movie based on it knows exactly what I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, although I tend to do other stuff with my Laptop when I'm stuck at the airport, so listening to MP3's while I'm at it is nice. If I'm not working, I'm probably using the laptop anyway to watch a DVD of Buffy or X-Files or something.
For years.
PPC chips use only a fraction of the power of Intel chips, and generate far, far less heat. This is why they are Motorola uses them in the embedded market, where they sometimes need six nines of continuous heavy-CPU-use uptime.
Most models of powerbooks don't even have a CPU fan installed, because they never need it.
Apple Computers: going out of business for over 20 years!
I guess that means I can't listen whenever I want, doesn't it?
Ever since Napster, P2P apps have allowed total n00bs who barely know how to use a browser to swap files.
Usenet, on the other hand, is something which is still mainly used by hard-core geeks, and is below the radar of nearly everybody.
Perhaps the Apple GUI tools should be set up with defualts to force this behavior, unless the developer deliberately breaks it.
The only thing d20 still needs is a good set of software tools for GM's who like to run the game from their laptops, and due to the open nature of d20, I'm sure a lot of amitious hackers are going to fill that void anyway.
As long as WotC offered these guys a nice, fat severence package as a way of saying "thanks" for their efforts, I have no problem with seeing them cut loose.
However, Macs have traditionally done an outstanding job of dealing with file types. You *can* trust the file type to be correct. It's never been the nightmare experience that the concept presents in Windows. Those who have been long-time Mac users would scream bloody murder if they suddenly could not double-click on a file and have the correct application open it without any further hassle.
A Windows geek sees something he likes in the Mac OS, and says, "a good example of the advantage of having integrated hardware. However, I prefer the flexibility of being able to buy motherboard swaps on pricewatch."
A Mac user sees the same feature and says, "an example of good software design, which is why I put up with the vendor lock-in of buying an Apple."
No, you are not the only one who sees that. You would also not be the only one to see the Virgin Mary in that oak tree that was in the news this week. In other words, I think you are seeing what you want to see.
This article was written for the benifit of developers who are porting Mac apps. It happens to also be of interest to geeks like the crowd here on /. who like reading about GUI design. If their intention was to "bash Windows" to sell people on switching to OS X, there are far more damning things they could have brought up.
If anything, the article might scare some developers away from doing Mac ports, because they are basically saying "jump through these hoops or Mac users will ignore your app and all the effort you spend on proting will be wasted."
However, OS X manages extensions with so much more inteligence than Windows (or any *nix windowing system I've used), that I've complety changed my tune now. I now like the way OS X uses file extensions, and don't want to go back.
That was my whole point. If it doesn't work for me, I won't buy it. Keep that in mind when chosing your protection schemes.
In other words, if you want to sell me your CD, you are probably going to have to learn to live with the fact that warez dudez are going to collect unauthorized copies of your album on their shared drives, because there's no way you can prevent that without also preventing my fair use of the content you are selling to me, which I, as a buyer, will not accept.
What I meant was that making enough money to live on with nothing but your art is not an absolute right. If somebody is willing to buy it, great. If not, you are not being repressed, you are just unsuccessful.
If this was a "why OS X is better than Windows" article, you would have a point. Since this was a "common UI mistakes to avoid when porting your program to our platform" article, I think you are being a little hypersensitive.
This was not a Win vs. Mac OS comparison. It was an article for the specific purpose of telling developers what common Windows application misfeatures one should avoid when writing a Mac port. The fact that Win95 (which is where I assume where they pasted those images from) showcases some of these misfeatures was just convenient for them.
I don't know how many Mac users I hear saying that the Mac "Launch bar" (name?) sucks.
If you are talking about the Launcher, that was a shareware App that Apple liked and offered as an optional tool in System 7, as a way to let your young kid run apps on your Mac without being able to delete your system files. Since many schools who used Macs used the Launcher to lock down their desktops and prevent studens from hacking their boxen, a lot of teens in the 90's assumed that the Launcher is what MacOS was, and wrote long screeds on message boards about how "restrictive" the OS is.
On the other hand, maybe you are talking about the Dock. The Dock is an application bar, which behaves a lot more like the one from NeXT than the menu bars from Windows and Gnome, which a lot of old-skool Mac users don't care for. I've grown to really love it, except I wish there was either an option for locking up the Dock's screen real-estate, or else a better implimentation of the window maximization feature, so windows would not sometimes extend under the Dock when I maximize them.
On the other hand, if you just let yourself get used to the idea that everything you need to do is on the top of your screen (and always in the same order: Apple, Application, Edit, View, App-specific stuff, Window, Help) you might find that Mac users worship the top menu concept for a reason. It makes your life easier, in the long run.
This is why they caption calls it a "Windows-like dialog box," and not "a dialog box from Windows." It's just an example of things they are saying you should avoid.
"We" don't. (If be "we" you mean "clueful programmers".) This article wasn't written for "any Mac developer worth his salt." It was written for very smart developers of other platforms that want to be aware of what the need to know to succeed on the Mac platform.
The article is interesting reading to see what Apple is currently telling coders who are new to doing a Mac port. Many companies have ported apps to the Macintosh without paying attention to Apple's UI guidelines, and were stunned to discover that the entire Mac community thought their app, which was a modest success in the Windows market, was universally dismissed as utter crap by Mac users. This info can help companies avoid repeating that mistake. It's not about conforming to what Apple wants it to look like nearly as much as what Apple users have come to expect from their apps.
One of my favorite differences is that I almost never see a dialog box with a button that only says "Yes" or "No" on it when I'm using the Mac. (Mozilla is one of the exeptions. The Mac 1.0 version is still lacking a lot of Mac-ness, but it pulls up /. pages a lot faster than IE, and doesn't break on as many sites or nag me for money the way OmniWeb does, so I'm not going to bitch too much about a "capitol-F" Free software product.) There are far too many Windows apps that pop up dialog boxes saying stuff like "You are launching proceedure $FOO without condition $BAR being properly set. Do you no longer wish to avoid autocorrecting the object status and reimplementing the enterprise settings? [Yes] [No] [Cancel]"
"The Bridges Of Madison County," as universally loved as it may be, is still just another romance novel when you get down to it. Likewise, "Stranger In A Strange Land," is still just another science fiction story.
Before the Wright Brothers' flight at Kittyhawk, armies were already using baloons for recon. I'm sure those working on the first planes were perfectly aware of the tactical advantages of powered flight. Not the specific applicaitons, but only a moron would have overlooked that something like that would end up being used as a war machine.
Likewise, the makers of the first DVD burners not only knew they would be used for multi-media, but that was the whole point. Otherwise, why spend so much effort complying with the standard of the read-only DVD, when you could just make some proprietary optical disk (like SyQuest and others used to do before DVD's came along)?
Still, there are hundreds of legal applications for a DVD burner. The ability to back up your valuable DVD collection, or transfer your LD's to DVD so you don't need to replace your old LD player when it breaks down, or myriad other uses. Look at how many of the new iMacs Apple sold to people specifically so they could edit their home videos with iMovie and burn them to DVD. DRM would kill the biggest innovation in personal movie-making since the home super-8 editing station (which came out decades ago).
I agree with most of your points, but as soon as you hit this typical rhetorical chime of railing against the big, rich corporations, I am compelled to remind you that most of the "wealth" of a big corporation is split up between thousands of middle-class investors, including whatever is left of your 401K after last year's crash. If you are like most people office drones, you might actually be a part-owner of Microsoft and not even know it.
The problem with most people reading Slashdot is that they don't have jobs that depend on the goodwill and kindness of the community. They're telling musicians like me that I'm supposed to. What would you do if your boss told you that unless the software sells 3 million copies, you get nothing? Welcome to our world.
If the tenuous nature of making a living off your music bothers you, maybe you should get a day job. I'm sorry, but at no point in human history did the majority of musicians make a good living at it.
If you want me to pay $20 for your CD, make damned sure you sell it in a format that I can easilly back up on my HD, and take full advantage of Fair Use whenever I want. Otherwise you won't ever sell one to me, no matter what your SAT score was.
You do not have a right to make money off your art. Most artists don't.
The legends of the computing industry is the most diverse cadre of odd ducks I can think of. I mean, come on. Larry Ellison? Steve "Monkey Boy" Balmer, anyone? Bill Joy? Richard Stallman!?
Maybe you meant to say he's one of the few legends who acts like a relatively normal person.
Therefore, they insist that "good" science fiction is a completely different genre from "bad" science fiction.
I can debunk this silly notion with 2 words: Starship Troopers. Anybody who has both read the book and seen the movie based on it knows exactly what I mean.
Looks like you made up a couple yourself. My sincere contrafribularities to you.