This really seems like a pretty minor issue to me. Browsers would just need to adopt a policy of flagging URIs with mixed language character sets, highlighting that character in red or something.
It's not a minor issue, and it's not an insoluble issue, but it's one that needs to be positively and aggressively addressed.
And it's not just browsers: you need to flag these characters in any application that renders internationalized text with or without HTML being an intermediary. Alternatively, registered domains can be restricted to distinct subranges of Unicode, so that you couldn't (for example) register a second level domain containing glyphs outside a single national character set.
The point is, this test is just verifying that an issue that nobody really thought was going to turn out to be a problem is, in fact, not a problem. It doesn't mean that widespread use of IDNs should be considered imminent.
Like you already have with "l", "I" and "1"; or "O" and "0"; or "V" and "U", depending on the particular font you happen to use?
Indeed. This makes an existing problem much much bigger.
Phishing attacks mostly works not because people can't see a minute difference between two lookalike letters; they work because as long as nothing is utterly obviously, grossly out of order people just assume they're in the right place.
And what people see as "obviously out of order" changes as people learn about phishing. It's like conterfeiting: when the appearance of money changes you get a period where lower quality notes can be successfullt "passed", and the Treasury makes an effort to get the word outahead of time to make sure businesses at least are familiar with the new notes.
Similarly, people can learn not to be phished. That's why you have phishers hiding the address bar, emulating the address bar, creating addresses that try and push the "root" of the name off the address bar, creating addresses like "http://microsoft.com@192.168.1.1/security", and so on.
Being able to have addresses that are visually identical but encoded differently is a real problem, and one that needs to be solved before IDNs are rolled out.
1. How big is it in my pocket. 2. How much of a hassle is getting at the PDA when it's out of my pocket.
The best arrangement is a flip lid like the Palm III, particularly one you can flick open with a thumb or a toss of the unit. The worst arrangements are ones that flip the lid to one side and prevent you from holding the device comfortably and securely in your hand. I don't much care for the ones that you snap off and clip to the back, either, because it's something else to lose.
As for connectors... as you say, it's not the connector that's the problem, it's how you connect it. I've had problems with all kinds, including those nice solid-looking game-boy-style USB ones. That's why cradles are so important, and I bought a cradle for my Clie. Yeh, it cost more, but I saved money on not having to buy a case.:)
The Tungsten T is only marginally smaller than my Clie, and you have to slide it open to use the graffiti area, and the sliding body makes it almost impossible to find a small case or flipcover for it... which means that in practice it's larger than the Clie.
And my Clie's battery compartment doesn't require disassembling the handheld to get to.
Sony is not a communist organization. They need to make money to keep the shareholders happy. If they want something to be free to their users, they have to pay for it somehow.
So don't make it free for everything. Charge people to buy an "apartment" or a customizable avatar if they don't want to wander around as "Ken" or "Barbie". Read some SF. I mean, True Names was written a quarter of a century ago, there's been hundreds of "virtual reality" novels and short stories since then, surely at least one of them contains an idea or two they can use...:)
The problem, I think, is this: when the innovations are pursued on the basis of their low marginal costs, they tend to end up having marginal value too. Palm hit the innovation ball out of the park with their first generation PDAs. They scored a series of base hits with their upgrades through the Tungsten series.
Palm's own hardware has been going downhill since the end of the Palm III series. The Tungsten line were bulkier than the Palm V, cost more, and didn't really do more for most punters. For the folks who need more, the Handspring Visor would have been a whole new product *family*... and it was for a couple of years until Hawkins killed it with the Visor Edge and the Treo.
They should have keep the 68000-based family going in lower and lower priced hardware (ane I think you'd agree on that) and done whatever it took to keep Sony happy making high-end units and keeping the hard-core geeks out of their hair, while providing something like the Visor as a bridge: a basic unit that's consistent from generation to generation (like the iPod) to build an accessory market around.
The springboard module isn't that critical, long term... they could have transitioned to CF-Ie or a mini USB host connector (which would let them use everything from flash drives to iPods as preipherals, without making the base more expensive). But the add-on ecosystem that's grown around it is one of the things that's made the iPod such a success... it's a more certain lock-in than the iTunes store or Fairplay.
Palm REALLY needs to go back and unmake some really stupid decisions. I don't see how they can dig themselves out of the hole they're in now, except by playing up the Palm name and reselling other people's kit under it.
They did way better than I expected on the original ARM transition, but they totally dropped the ball on Cobalt (or whatever their next-gen PalmOS is going to be), and they've already tossed their original product in the wastebin - these days even Microsoft delivers better Graffiti emulation.
Well of course you can't just change a few things, turn around and sell it. Just like others couldn't do this with their closed code anyway... It's a little hypocritical if they want to do that. They should just do a little reading, as they could certainly benefit from OSS without having to rip it off, just like many benefit from closed source software without ripping it off.
I liked Kirk McKusick's response to the question, at one Usenix, as to whether he felt "ripped off" because Microsoft was using BSD code in Windows. What he basically said was that he wished they'd ripped off more of it, because it would have made Windows a better product and an easier one for him to deal with if they had.
There's nothing in the principle of freely redistributable / free / open source (or hwhatever the trendy buzzphrase of the moment is) software that says it can't be incorporated in commercial software. Open source and open systems are far older than the GPL... there's a lot of us who were already releasing our software under far more open licenses than the yet-to-be-written GPL when Stallman went ballistic over Emacs and wrote the GNU manifesto. And we were rather bemused by the whole thing. The fact that his ideas and the GPL have become to be identified as the model for free software (that's free, with a small f, not "Free" with a capital F and all the FSF baggage) is unfortunate.
There is an issue regarding people who have been "contaminated" with having worked on GPL'd code.... even if just at a glance... and to try and make sure some of those algorithms don't make it into the propritary code base owned by the company
And the anti-GPL extreme is heard from, in a confused and misguided defense of the GPL against something I didn't say, didn't imply, and has nothing to do with the GPL!
Yuo're confusing patents and copyrights here, mate. The GPL has nothing to do with algorithms, and you can't get "contaminated" by the GPL by using algorithms you learned working on GPLed code.
I'm not talking about patented algorithms here, I'm talking about copyrighted APIs. The GPL, in a roundabout way, copyrights the *interfaces* to the code it covers. But that's as far as it goes... the GPL hasn't created some kind of magic backdoor for software patents to infect you.
If Microsoft had done a better job of gussying up Windows after Windows 3.11 I'd be all over Coherence mode, but the double hit of Windows 95's taskbar (with all the disadvantages of Apple's menu bar and none of its dubious advantages) and their choice of screen-scraping Citrix technology instead of virtualizing GDI in Terminal Server makes the multi-windows support a bit of a dancing bear. Every time you move a window or see ALL your "Windows" windows pop up when you click on one it's clear that they'll never be first class citizens on the Mac desktop. And the task bar? Can't live with it, can't live without it. Your best bet is to run Parallels in its own full screen window... it does a good job there.
And with Coherence is coming new drag-and-drop support that makes a mockery of the ability to export only part of your Mac to the encapsulated Windows and any malware it may be harboring, because if you enable it you open up the whole Mac file system as a network share. Now, before anyone goes on about the "virus-proof" nature of the Mac: when you're running Windows in Parallels you're running Windows, with everything that implies. A virus might not be able to *infect* the Mac around it, but if it screws up your personal files trying you're not going to care much that "/System" is secure.
Parallels is a great tool, but it's a great tool with or without Coherence. And the extra complexity and insecurity just hasn't been worth it for me.
Run scripts when you change your location? You want to pay *money* for this?
Someone who's so big on using Applescript should be able to figure out how to do this. It's trivial. It's even trivial from the shell. Yeh, I can see this being a pain for the point-and-click gang, and Apple really needs a location preference pane with things like "turn on Bluetooth in this location, disable it in that" but *sheesh*.
I need to polish up my location change detector and post it on Macupdate, but I'll bet there's one in Doug's Applescripts already.
The author of the article is an unabashed iChat booster. There's a lot of myths on the Mac about which applications are "best", and iChat is one of the ones beloved of the cult. I've got co-workers that are the same way, and when there's a problem with the network and I can't get on our Jabber server I always have to eat digs about using "Brand X" instead of iChat... even though I always try iChat FIRST and verify that the problem is real before blaming the server.
Camino rather than Firefox. Same HTML rendering engine, better user interface, no security-hole XUL and Microsoft-style XPI installer. And Safari is not bad, once you turn off the daft "Open 'Safe' files after downloading" option.
It's a shame there's so little choice for good secure browsers on Windows. Mac's got an embarassment of riches here.
"Most businesses don't need red hot gaming machines on most desktops: what they need are consistent, reliable, and interchangable computers. Apple's pretty good about that all the way to their low end, so while their low end machines are anemic by home PC standards they're plenty beefy enough for business."
The article isn't about "why Mac instead of Windows", so much as "why Mac mini or Macbook instead of Mac Pro or Macbook Pro".
Actually the GPL is supposed to NOT limit modification and distribution, because if the person who holds it is trying to prevent modification and distribution, then the license is invalid for them.
From the point of view of a company writing commercial software, the GPL does limit modification and distribution, because if they distribute modified GPL software they have to make sure their modifications don't include components that would force them to release their own product's source as "derived works", or else take the plunge and release their own software under the GPL. This is an additional cost and risk that LGPL and BSDL software doesn't force them to take on, because it doesn't restrict you're ability to control the distribution of other components if you distribute modified LGPL or BSDL libraries with them.
Whether or not they should do that anyway is a separate issue. I'm not saying they're right or wrong, I'm saying that if you can't understand the viewpoint of people who disagree with you you're never going to be able to effectively deal with them.
I wonder if Apple plans on bringing any other changes for the new laptops besides hybrid HDDs and OS X.V. I'm still holding out for them to do a docking station and maybe a proper Delete key (no I don't think I should hit two keys to get the Delete function).
A decent keyboard[1] and two mouse/trackpad buttons[2] are at the top of my list.
But a docking station would be nice.
[1] I'm sure IBM Japan or Lenovo Japan or whoever it is this week would be more than happy to get together with them and put a Thinkpad-quality keyboard in a sexy-looking box.
[2] No, double-tap and other passive-aggressive tricks to keep from backing down on the one-button-mouse farce don't count.
For the kind of music I listen to on an MP3 player through earbuds (hint, this doesn't include Bach or Phillip Glass) I can't tell whether I'm hearing it at full CD quality or 128k MP3, and it's hard to even be sure with vinyl or cassette. Even when I do a comparison, I can't always tell a difference. Music that you dance to or listen to in a bar or at the beach can't depend on low noise and high fidelity... and most of it's got high levels of distortion even in the CD (or vinyl, bad recording levels is an old tradition).
This isn't like vinyl vs CD. I've listened to stuff that's supposed to be "warmer" on vinyl, and I can't tell if the difference I'm hearing is due to the difference in the media, the recording, the player, the headphones, or simply suggestion. But I can sure tell the difference between either and a 160K MP3 or AAC file, regardless of what I'm listening to it on, when I'm listening to classical music or any other music with a high dynamic range.
This doesn't mean CDs will necessarily survive. It just means that there's going to remain a significant (that is, not just the extreme audiophiles) market for higher quality recordings... and publishers will continue meet it, with higher quality or "lossless" formats whether they're sold as bits you download or pressed plastic you bring home from the store.
Looks like they're using some kind of error correction code that's better than just parity, and distributing the blocks in each ECC group around the disk. It's better than writing the file twice if this (as it sounds like) happens below the file system level.
It's kind of analogous to a super-RAID, except with the "disks" that are being redundantly striped and mirrored are all on the same physicl DVD or CDR.
I believe Login.bat is what network logins use to launch login apps in a Windows environment.
That's not something that users deal with, so it's irrelevant.
There is no sophisticated mechanism to launch apps at login, so Windows has a folder of icons in Startup (in the Start Menu, the hold over from Program Manager).
Indeed, quite similar to the mechanism Apple used in Mac OS 9 for launching applications, and what it uses today for half the plugins and helper applications. There's nothing in launching applications at login that requires anything more sophisticated. If you look at loginwindow.plist (which is where it keeps this data) you'll see some bookkeeping version stamps and AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary.
And in any case, moving the startup items in the preference pane had nothing to do with launchd. The list was in loginwindow.plist in Jaguar before the move, it was in loginwindow.plist after the move, and it's still in loginwindow.plist in Tiger. It's not in LaunchDaemons.
Which is, by the way, a directory of files that Launchd runs at system startup.
But in any case, the user doesn't need to know any of this, they just know that they can't find the preference they want, so they ask me, which is where it becomes my problem and not theirs. No matter whether they're using a Mac or a PC or running System 7 or OS 9 or OS X or MS-DOS or Netware or Xenix or OS/2 or Solaris or Windows 3.11 or Tru64 or Windows 95 or HP-UX or Linux or Windows NT or 2000 or XP...
I agree that learning an OS isn't important and that apps are - that's why Apple markets its OS as a series of applications
Right, Microsoft doesn't have to do that, because every other software company in the world, bar a percent or two, does that for them. Apple *needs* to push their applications because that's where the Mac's big weakness is.
Which is the whole point.
Again.
I mean, we're not even disagreeing on the fundamental brokenness of Windows. What we're disagreeing on is whether it matters to the market.
Apple can't "Take Microsoft on the Desktop" until it breaks the vicious cycle of people buying MS-DOS or Windows because it's safe, because that's where the applications are, and developers writing applications for MS-DOS or Windows because it's safe, because that's where the money is.
This has been *the* problem about as long as the Mac has existed, really. And a good bottom line and the Usual Software Rot in Redmond are no more relevant today than they were in 1984.
Most operating systems associate user login apps (that's a login.bat to you Windows enthusiasts) with the user's acco[u]nt, so I fail to understand the problem you describe.
Er...
login.bat? Err, no, the closest thing in Windows to the user-selected startup programs in OS X is the "Startup" folder under the applications menu. Or wherever that's moved to in Vista. In any case, *all* the preferences the user configures are associated with the account. By that logic they should all be in "System: Accounts".
The point is not that Apple is particularly bad about gratuitous changes, or even that this is a particularly bad example, it's that, ah, hell...
I have supported secretaries on both Windows and on the Mac for over a decade, and have a pretty good idea of what the support problems are. They are not related to learning Mac OS X.
20 years, friend, with Netware and UNIX as well, and I agree that "learning the OS" isn't the point. I just said that in pretty much as many words. The OS is the least of the problems.
At some point, the Windows enthusiasts will figure out they they're being used to maintain a broken system, and will switch too.
And that's pretty much irrelevant as well. Most of the people in IT who are selecting Windows aren't "Windows enthusiasts", and it's not the "Windows enthusiasts" who need to switch. If it was a matter of having plenty of "enthusiasts", Apple would have 80% of the market, Linux 20%, and Bill Gates would be making a living asking "you want fries with that?".
Windows could be a LOT worse and people would still buy it. Because they don't care, because to them it doesn't matter. It's the applications that matter. And the application developers follow the money. And the money comes from "whatever people are already using".
Turn your enthusiast brain to figuring out a way to break that cycle, instead of worrying about the OS.
As someone who uses other sustems more than Windows, but with quite a bit of Windows experience as well, I have to agree that you've hit one of the places where Windows actually shines.
The tree view on the left panel doesn't answer to keyboard commands that work on folders and files in the right panel, such as pressing Del to delete a folder. Windows Explorer is consistent in this regards.
Consistent keyboardability was one of the things that impressed me in Windows right from the start... and the first version I used was Windows 2.something... but over the years Microsoft has gratuitously broken existing shortcuts, introduced new controls with inconsistent or *no* keyboard access, and generally degraded things until I would hesitate to use Windows mouseless.
But for all that they're still better than Apple or X-11-based systems.
It doesn't get updated properly...
Another strength of Windows, though it's not consistent. Luckily F5 almost always works to refresh.
When I delete a folder...
Losing the selection when deleting files or directories, or losing the selection on refresh, is another annoyance that Windows mostly avoids. Mostly.
I can't move a file or folder with the mouse right-button.
That's something that I thought would be really useful, but I find I don't actually do it on Windows... instead I do copy/cut and paste/past-shortcut when the default drag isn't the right thing, and I'm more bothered by Finder not having "cut" on OS X.
Lastly, even though Nautilus recognize some oddly named text files as such, double clicking them is an exercise in guessing
I'm wary of double-clicking anything these days, particularly on Windows. Open With is my friend.
The things that bother me about Windows Explorer are mostly things like "you can't open that in a Window, that's on the desktop!" and "you don't really want to see these files, yes I know you said you did last time, but I'm still going to hide them anyway". That, and the whole "html desktop integration" fire drill.
If standardization is good, why did Vista randomly change the names of control panels?
I don't know, why did Panther hide people's login programs under the "System: Accounts" preferences?
1. Nobody's got clean hands here.
2. You're *both* obsessing on trivia. Unless a secretary can run the obscure application he needs to do his timecard or check his boss's expense report on the Mac, he's not going to care whether some setting that only the network geek ever touches is in the wrong place.
Slashdot Mirror
This could be automated so there's not really any problem with the phishing stuff, IMHO.
Not if it's actually implemented.
But given some of the ratbags running domain registrars, you think they'll bother?
the Japanese set contains the full alphanumeric alphabet
There are always a few special cases. You just deal with them... for example, deny names using just those characters.
This really seems like a pretty minor issue to me. Browsers would just need to adopt a policy of flagging URIs with mixed language character sets, highlighting that character in red or something.
It's not a minor issue, and it's not an insoluble issue, but it's one that needs to be positively and aggressively addressed.
And it's not just browsers: you need to flag these characters in any application that renders internationalized text with or without HTML being an intermediary. Alternatively, registered domains can be restricted to distinct subranges of Unicode, so that you couldn't (for example) register a second level domain containing glyphs outside a single national character set.
The point is, this test is just verifying that an issue that nobody really thought was going to turn out to be a problem is, in fact, not a problem. It doesn't mean that widespread use of IDNs should be considered imminent.
Like you already have with "l", "I" and "1"; or "O" and "0"; or "V" and "U", depending on the particular font you happen to use?
Indeed. This makes an existing problem much much bigger.
Phishing attacks mostly works not because people can't see a minute difference between two lookalike letters; they work because as long as nothing is utterly obviously, grossly out of order people just assume they're in the right place.
And what people see as "obviously out of order" changes as people learn about phishing. It's like conterfeiting: when the appearance of money changes you get a period where lower quality notes can be successfullt "passed", and the Treasury makes an effort to get the word outahead of time to make sure businesses at least are familiar with the new notes.
Similarly, people can learn not to be phished. That's why you have phishers hiding the address bar, emulating the address bar, creating addresses that try and push the "root" of the name off the address bar, creating addresses like "http://microsoft.com@192.168.1.1/security", and so on.
Being able to have addresses that are visually identical but encoded differently is a real problem, and one that needs to be solved before IDNs are rolled out.
That should be "mࡺcrosoft.com". Slashdot will probably need to be upgraded to support IDNs, it seems. :)
The concern I have with IDNs is that they will make it too easy to produce "lookalike" domains, like "mcrosoft.com".
Testing functionality and behaviour with "good" names is an easy bar to hurdle.
There's two main concerns I have with cases:
:)
1. How big is it in my pocket.
2. How much of a hassle is getting at the PDA when it's out of my pocket.
The best arrangement is a flip lid like the Palm III, particularly one you can flick open with a thumb or a toss of the unit. The worst arrangements are ones that flip the lid to one side and prevent you from holding the device comfortably and securely in your hand. I don't much care for the ones that you snap off and clip to the back, either, because it's something else to lose.
As for connectors... as you say, it's not the connector that's the problem, it's how you connect it. I've had problems with all kinds, including those nice solid-looking game-boy-style USB ones. That's why cradles are so important, and I bought a cradle for my Clie. Yeh, it cost more, but I saved money on not having to buy a case.
The Tungsten T is only marginally smaller than my Clie, and you have to slide it open to use the graffiti area, and the sliding body makes it almost impossible to find a small case or flipcover for it... which means that in practice it's larger than the Clie.
And my Clie's battery compartment doesn't require disassembling the handheld to get to.
Sony is not a communist organization. They need to make money to keep the shareholders happy. If they want something to be free to their users, they have to pay for it somehow.
:)
So don't make it free for everything. Charge people to buy an "apartment" or a customizable avatar if they don't want to wander around as "Ken" or "Barbie". Read some SF. I mean, True Names was written a quarter of a century ago, there's been hundreds of "virtual reality" novels and short stories since then, surely at least one of them contains an idea or two they can use...
The problem, I think, is this: when the innovations are pursued on the basis of their low marginal costs, they tend to end up having marginal value too. Palm hit the innovation ball out of the park with their first generation PDAs. They scored a series of base hits with their upgrades through the Tungsten series.
Palm's own hardware has been going downhill since the end of the Palm III series. The Tungsten line were bulkier than the Palm V, cost more, and didn't really do more for most punters. For the folks who need more, the Handspring Visor would have been a whole new product *family*... and it was for a couple of years until Hawkins killed it with the Visor Edge and the Treo.
They should have keep the 68000-based family going in lower and lower priced hardware (ane I think you'd agree on that) and done whatever it took to keep Sony happy making high-end units and keeping the hard-core geeks out of their hair, while providing something like the Visor as a bridge: a basic unit that's consistent from generation to generation (like the iPod) to build an accessory market around.
The springboard module isn't that critical, long term... they could have transitioned to CF-Ie or a mini USB host connector (which would let them use everything from flash drives to iPods as preipherals, without making the base more expensive). But the add-on ecosystem that's grown around it is one of the things that's made the iPod such a success... it's a more certain lock-in than the iTunes store or Fairplay.
Palm REALLY needs to go back and unmake some really stupid decisions. I don't see how they can dig themselves out of the hole they're in now, except by playing up the Palm name and reselling other people's kit under it.
They did way better than I expected on the original ARM transition, but they totally dropped the ball on Cobalt (or whatever their next-gen PalmOS is going to be), and they've already tossed their original product in the wastebin - these days even Microsoft delivers better Graffiti emulation.
It's distressing.
Well of course you can't just change a few things, turn around and sell it. Just like others couldn't do this with their closed code anyway... It's a little hypocritical if they want to do that. They should just do a little reading, as they could certainly benefit from OSS without having to rip it off, just like many benefit from closed source software without ripping it off.
I liked Kirk McKusick's response to the question, at one Usenix, as to whether he felt "ripped off" because Microsoft was using BSD code in Windows. What he basically said was that he wished they'd ripped off more of it, because it would have made Windows a better product and an easier one for him to deal with if they had.
There's nothing in the principle of freely redistributable / free / open source (or hwhatever the trendy buzzphrase of the moment is) software that says it can't be incorporated in commercial software. Open source and open systems are far older than the GPL... there's a lot of us who were already releasing our software under far more open licenses than the yet-to-be-written GPL when Stallman went ballistic over Emacs and wrote the GNU manifesto. And we were rather bemused by the whole thing. The fact that his ideas and the GPL have become to be identified as the model for free software (that's free, with a small f, not "Free" with a capital F and all the FSF baggage) is unfortunate.
There is an issue regarding people who have been "contaminated" with having worked on GPL'd code.... even if just at a glance... and to try and make sure some of those algorithms don't make it into the propritary code base owned by the company
And the anti-GPL extreme is heard from, in a confused and misguided defense of the GPL against something I didn't say, didn't imply, and has nothing to do with the GPL!
Yuo're confusing patents and copyrights here, mate. The GPL has nothing to do with algorithms, and you can't get "contaminated" by the GPL by using algorithms you learned working on GPLed code.
I'm not talking about patented algorithms here, I'm talking about copyrighted APIs. The GPL, in a roundabout way, copyrights the *interfaces* to the code it covers. But that's as far as it goes... the GPL hasn't created some kind of magic backdoor for software patents to infect you.
If Microsoft had done a better job of gussying up Windows after Windows 3.11 I'd be all over Coherence mode, but the double hit of Windows 95's taskbar (with all the disadvantages of Apple's menu bar and none of its dubious advantages) and their choice of screen-scraping Citrix technology instead of virtualizing GDI in Terminal Server makes the multi-windows support a bit of a dancing bear. Every time you move a window or see ALL your "Windows" windows pop up when you click on one it's clear that they'll never be first class citizens on the Mac desktop. And the task bar? Can't live with it, can't live without it. Your best bet is to run Parallels in its own full screen window... it does a good job there.
And with Coherence is coming new drag-and-drop support that makes a mockery of the ability to export only part of your Mac to the encapsulated Windows and any malware it may be harboring, because if you enable it you open up the whole Mac file system as a network share. Now, before anyone goes on about the "virus-proof" nature of the Mac: when you're running Windows in Parallels you're running Windows, with everything that implies. A virus might not be able to *infect* the Mac around it, but if it screws up your personal files trying you're not going to care much that "/System" is secure.
Parallels is a great tool, but it's a great tool with or without Coherence. And the extra complexity and insecurity just hasn't been worth it for me.
Run scripts when you change your location? You want to pay *money* for this?
Someone who's so big on using Applescript should be able to figure out how to do this. It's trivial. It's even trivial from the shell. Yeh, I can see this being a pain for the point-and-click gang, and Apple really needs a location preference pane with things like "turn on Bluetooth in this location, disable it in that" but *sheesh*.
I need to polish up my location change detector and post it on Macupdate, but I'll bet there's one in Doug's Applescripts already.
The author of the article is an unabashed iChat booster. There's a lot of myths on the Mac about which applications are "best", and iChat is one of the ones beloved of the cult. I've got co-workers that are the same way, and when there's a problem with the network and I can't get on our Jabber server I always have to eat digs about using "Brand X" instead of iChat... even though I always try iChat FIRST and verify that the problem is real before blaming the server.
Camino rather than Firefox. Same HTML rendering engine, better user interface, no security-hole XUL and Microsoft-style XPI installer. And Safari is not bad, once you turn off the daft "Open 'Safe' files after downloading" option.
It's a shame there's so little choice for good secure browsers on Windows. Mac's got an embarassment of riches here.
"Most businesses don't need red hot gaming machines on most desktops: what they need are consistent, reliable, and interchangable computers. Apple's pretty good about that all the way to their low end, so while their low end machines are anemic by home PC standards they're plenty beefy enough for business."
The article isn't about "why Mac instead of Windows", so much as "why Mac mini or Macbook instead of Mac Pro or Macbook Pro".
Actually the GPL is supposed to NOT limit modification and distribution, because if the person who holds it is trying to prevent modification and distribution, then the license is invalid for them.
From the point of view of a company writing commercial software, the GPL does limit modification and distribution, because if they distribute modified GPL software they have to make sure their modifications don't include components that would force them to release their own product's source as "derived works", or else take the plunge and release their own software under the GPL. This is an additional cost and risk that LGPL and BSDL software doesn't force them to take on, because it doesn't restrict you're ability to control the distribution of other components if you distribute modified LGPL or BSDL libraries with them.
Whether or not they should do that anyway is a separate issue. I'm not saying they're right or wrong, I'm saying that if you can't understand the viewpoint of people who disagree with you you're never going to be able to effectively deal with them.
I wonder if Apple plans on bringing any other changes for the new laptops besides hybrid HDDs and OS X.V. I'm still holding out for them to do a docking station and maybe a proper Delete key (no I don't think I should hit two keys to get the Delete function).
A decent keyboard[1] and two mouse/trackpad buttons[2] are at the top of my list.
But a docking station would be nice.
[1] I'm sure IBM Japan or Lenovo Japan or whoever it is this week would be more than happy to get together with them and put a Thinkpad-quality keyboard in a sexy-looking box.
[2] No, double-tap and other passive-aggressive tricks to keep from backing down on the one-button-mouse farce don't count.
For the kind of music I listen to on an MP3 player through earbuds (hint, this doesn't include Bach or Phillip Glass) I can't tell whether I'm hearing it at full CD quality or 128k MP3, and it's hard to even be sure with vinyl or cassette. Even when I do a comparison, I can't always tell a difference. Music that you dance to or listen to in a bar or at the beach can't depend on low noise and high fidelity... and most of it's got high levels of distortion even in the CD (or vinyl, bad recording levels is an old tradition).
This isn't like vinyl vs CD. I've listened to stuff that's supposed to be "warmer" on vinyl, and I can't tell if the difference I'm hearing is due to the difference in the media, the recording, the player, the headphones, or simply suggestion. But I can sure tell the difference between either and a 160K MP3 or AAC file, regardless of what I'm listening to it on, when I'm listening to classical music or any other music with a high dynamic range.
This doesn't mean CDs will necessarily survive. It just means that there's going to remain a significant (that is, not just the extreme audiophiles) market for higher quality recordings... and publishers will continue meet it, with higher quality or "lossless" formats whether they're sold as bits you download or pressed plastic you bring home from the store.
Looks like they're using some kind of error correction code that's better than just parity, and distributing the blocks in each ECC group around the disk. It's better than writing the file twice if this (as it sounds like) happens below the file system level.
It's kind of analogous to a super-RAID, except with the "disks" that are being redundantly striped and mirrored are all on the same physicl DVD or CDR.
I believe Login.bat is what network logins use to launch login apps in a Windows environment.
That's not something that users deal with, so it's irrelevant.
There is no sophisticated mechanism to launch apps at login, so Windows has a folder of icons in Startup (in the Start Menu, the hold over from Program Manager).
Indeed, quite similar to the mechanism Apple used in Mac OS 9 for launching applications, and what it uses today for half the plugins and helper applications. There's nothing in launching applications at login that requires anything more sophisticated. If you look at loginwindow.plist (which is where it keeps this data) you'll see some bookkeeping version stamps and AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary.
And in any case, moving the startup items in the preference pane had nothing to do with launchd. The list was in loginwindow.plist in Jaguar before the move, it was in loginwindow.plist after the move, and it's still in loginwindow.plist in Tiger. It's not in LaunchDaemons.
Which is, by the way, a directory of files that Launchd runs at system startup.
But in any case, the user doesn't need to know any of this, they just know that they can't find the preference they want, so they ask me, which is where it becomes my problem and not theirs. No matter whether they're using a Mac or a PC or running System 7 or OS 9 or OS X or MS-DOS or Netware or Xenix or OS/2 or Solaris or Windows 3.11 or Tru64 or Windows 95 or HP-UX or Linux or Windows NT or 2000 or XP...
I agree that learning an OS isn't important and that apps are - that's why Apple markets its OS as a series of applications
Right, Microsoft doesn't have to do that, because every other software company in the world, bar a percent or two, does that for them. Apple *needs* to push their applications because that's where the Mac's big weakness is.
Which is the whole point.
Again.
I mean, we're not even disagreeing on the fundamental brokenness of Windows. What we're disagreeing on is whether it matters to the market.
Apple can't "Take Microsoft on the Desktop" until it breaks the vicious cycle of people buying MS-DOS or Windows because it's safe, because that's where the applications are, and developers writing applications for MS-DOS or Windows because it's safe, because that's where the money is.
This has been *the* problem about as long as the Mac has existed, really. And a good bottom line and the Usual Software Rot in Redmond are no more relevant today than they were in 1984.
Most operating systems associate user login apps (that's a login.bat to you Windows enthusiasts) with the user's acco[u]nt, so I fail to understand the problem you describe.
Er...
login.bat? Err, no, the closest thing in Windows to the user-selected startup programs in OS X is the "Startup" folder under the applications menu. Or wherever that's moved to in Vista. In any case, *all* the preferences the user configures are associated with the account. By that logic they should all be in "System: Accounts".
The point is not that Apple is particularly bad about gratuitous changes, or even that this is a particularly bad example, it's that, ah, hell...
I have supported secretaries on both Windows and on the Mac for over a decade, and have a pretty good idea of what the support problems are. They are not related to learning Mac OS X.
20 years, friend, with Netware and UNIX as well, and I agree that "learning the OS" isn't the point. I just said that in pretty much as many words. The OS is the least of the problems.
At some point, the Windows enthusiasts will figure out they they're being used to maintain a broken system, and will switch too.
And that's pretty much irrelevant as well. Most of the people in IT who are selecting Windows aren't "Windows enthusiasts", and it's not the "Windows enthusiasts" who need to switch. If it was a matter of having plenty of "enthusiasts", Apple would have 80% of the market, Linux 20%, and Bill Gates would be making a living asking "you want fries with that?".
Windows could be a LOT worse and people would still buy it. Because they don't care, because to them it doesn't matter. It's the applications that matter. And the application developers follow the money. And the money comes from "whatever people are already using".
Turn your enthusiast brain to figuring out a way to break that cycle, instead of worrying about the OS.
As someone who uses other sustems more than Windows, but with quite a bit of Windows experience as well, I have to agree that you've hit one of the places where Windows actually shines.
The tree view on the left panel doesn't answer to keyboard commands that work on folders and files in the right panel, such as pressing Del to delete a folder. Windows Explorer is consistent in this regards.
Consistent keyboardability was one of the things that impressed me in Windows right from the start... and the first version I used was Windows 2.something... but over the years Microsoft has gratuitously broken existing shortcuts, introduced new controls with inconsistent or *no* keyboard access, and generally degraded things until I would hesitate to use Windows mouseless.
But for all that they're still better than Apple or X-11-based systems.
It doesn't get updated properly...
Another strength of Windows, though it's not consistent. Luckily F5 almost always works to refresh.
When I delete a folder...
Losing the selection when deleting files or directories, or losing the selection on refresh, is another annoyance that Windows mostly avoids. Mostly.
I can't move a file or folder with the mouse right-button.
That's something that I thought would be really useful, but I find I don't actually do it on Windows... instead I do copy/cut and paste/past-shortcut when the default drag isn't the right thing, and I'm more bothered by Finder not having "cut" on OS X.
Lastly, even though Nautilus recognize some oddly named text files as such, double clicking them is an exercise in guessing
I'm wary of double-clicking anything these days, particularly on Windows. Open With is my friend.
The things that bother me about Windows Explorer are mostly things like "you can't open that in a Window, that's on the desktop!" and "you don't really want to see these files, yes I know you said you did last time, but I'm still going to hide them anyway". That, and the whole "html desktop integration" fire drill.
If standardization is good, why did Vista randomly change the names of control panels?
I don't know, why did Panther hide people's login programs under the "System: Accounts" preferences?
1. Nobody's got clean hands here.
2. You're *both* obsessing on trivia. Unless a secretary can run the obscure application he needs to do his timecard or check his boss's expense report on the Mac, he's not going to care whether some setting that only the network geek ever touches is in the wrong place.