Back when unsolicited bulk email started, people said "that's not spam! Spam is only on usenet! We have to come up with a new word for this!"
I said then, and I say now, hogwash.
Any advertising by flooding a common communication channel can meaningfully be described as spam, whether it's Usenet, email, IM, Text messages, or search engine spamming. There's no point to trying to draw a magic circle around part of the problem and pointing outside and saying "that's not really spam".
This was hashed out long ago, back when spam was mostly theoretical and only a few of us were trying to figure out what to do about what was clearly going to be a huge problem that we couldn't get anyone to pay attention to.
And subsequent events haven't changed anything.
It doesn't matter why you're spamming, you can't treat any reason or method as "acceptable", doing so will only redirect the floodgates and destroy whatever loophole you allowed.
And lo and behold, that's what happens, whenever someone shows even the slightest sympathy for the spammer.
So that you can clean up the pic you took on your cameraphone before you upload it to your iPod Photo to impress the member-of-the-appropriate-sex next to you BEFORE THE LIGHT CHANGES!
We've a positively irrelevant methodology that leads to the presentation of a proof (as in the Cmabrigde uinervtisy rscheearch), and the meaningless proof is then served to customers as a sales argument. Isn't this a little bit of a fraud?
And as I wrote, I am not talking about whether the study is applicable to marketing. The term "hoax" has a very specific meaning, and implies that the study itself was either not actually performed, or that the methodology was deliberately falsified to produce invalid results. You haven't shown or even implied that the results are faked or even inaccurate, merely that they're being applied incorrectly.
What hoax? He disagrees with the basis of the study. That doesn't mean the study is fraudulent (that IS what the term "hoax" implies) nor that his disagreement is valid. In addition, his complaint is that the study may not actually be useful for marketeers... NOT that it's irrelevant to this discussion.
Printing is a hard problem in general and printer spooler software has serious problems on all platforms.
That's my point. Complaining that Apple hasn't miraculously made HP's and Epson's printers... in addition to their own hardware and software... "just work" is, well, churlish.
You might as well complain that Apple doesn't provide drivers for Windows-only keyboard's non-standard "Internet" keys, or that they fix bugs in Linux NFS or Windows file servers.
In the Finder the contextual menu is available [...]
The Finder is not the only application on the Mac.
In short, the list of things you can't do without a modifier key or a second button has dropped to either zero or near zero in the recent past, at least at the OS level.
In short, there have always been things you can't do, and more things you can't easily or conveniently do, without a modifier key, and while there are workarounds that make many of them easier if not more convenient... the Mac user interface supports and encourages them.
The Windows user interface style guidelines actually do more to discourage dependence on the right mouse button (for example, contextual menus are supposed to be mirrored in the main menu) than the Mac HIG discourages use of modifier keys.
In short, describing the Mac mouse as a "five button mouse with four buttons on the keyboard" (not my phrase, though I may have come up with it independantly... it was originally used by someone in support of the Mac one-button design) is not unreasonable.
PS: Google on "google triangle" and you'll see why they picked this page to prefetch...
Though I'd like them to prefetch the "next search page" as well... at least, that would tend to speed up *my* googling. I'm probably atypical, though, if they don't do it...
You get people upping bandwidth costs and slowing down browsing time because the site maintainer THINKS they'll go to some next page but the site design actually ENCOURAGES them to go to some other, unrelated page.
There are extensive studies from third parties on what people look at and do when they search on google. And you know what, they found people tend to look at and go to the top result, and don't even glance below the top few results most of the time.
I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better.
I'd expect that Google has better figures on where people go to from Google's search pages than anyone else.
They used some FreeBSD userspace tools - not kernel code
NeXTSTeP was not based on post-net-2 code, it had AT&T code in the kernel. That code had to be replaced, and FreeBSD is what they replaced it from. They have more recently imported more FreeBSD code... Panther re-imported UFS anew from FreeBSD, for example.
Name one; I'm using my iBook as of current, and I can see almost anything I would need to use a second click for in a menu somewhere.
You need control-click to bring up contextual manus in many situations. Click-and-hold doesn't work.
You need command-click or shift-click for multiple selections.
You need command-click to move or remove menu-bar objects.
You need control, shift, and option-click all over the place in Photoshop... long one of the "killer apps" for the Mac. In other apps I've run into as much as 2-keys-chorded-plus-double-click.
In OS 9, which was more consistent about this than OS X, you needed option-click to move the control strip.
Unfortunately the Mac OS interface is not designed to work with a single button. There are a lot of thing you need to use control- option- or command- click to do, and shift-click is often nearly as critical.
Really, the Mac has a 5 button mouse with 4 of them on the keyboard.
Re:Shit, who wouldn't buy a mac ..
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Thats what I can't get over, the entry price. To buy a piece of hardware, an os, and applications, that I might not even end up "liking" - let alone be more productive using (I'm pertty sure I just butchered the english language there, so forgive me).
If you buy a Mac mini for, say, $575 plus tax (so you get the 512M RAM instead of the 256M), and you don't like it... you'll be able to get almost all the money back by ebaying it, and you may even be able to sell it for MORE than $575 plus tax to someone who wants one and doesn't want to wait two weeks (or more) for his.
Re:Well, Slashdot has turned 180 degrees
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
I was actually disappointed that they ditched BeOS and went with NeXTSTeP.
Until I had an opportunity to try both Rhapsody and BeOS on the same PC. Oy! I also tried BeOS on the PowerMac. It was a bit better... and OS 8 under BeOS using SheepShaver had better disk performance than OS 8 raw!
I heard on NPR yesterday morning that they are also the biggest software thief in the world today.
Nobody who's done business in China would believe that.
Re:Well, Slashdot has turned 180 degrees
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 1
a lot of the derision was the same BS [...]
Some of it isn't BS, but that's not the point. The point is that Classic Mac OS was a horrible dog, and it is a horrible dog. Anyone who used ANY OTHER operating system or platform could see what a horrible dog it was. Its only advantage was that in the list of popular operating systems used in the '80s it was the third worst, and the most popular was the worst. When Atari cratered and Microsoft gave up on preemptive multitasking Mac OS dropped to last place, and proceeded to redefine what "last place" meant. OS 9... my god, NeXTSTep on a 68030 was more responsive than OS 9 on a G3. No, I'm not exaggerating, I've booted them both up right next to each other and compared them... and there's no bloody comparison.
I've got an ORIGINAL 128K Mac, an SE/30, a Powermac 7200 I've upgraded with an 8500 motherboard, a 7500 that was my first Powermac that I'm running OS X on. I've used Mac OS since 6.0.8, and it's always been a wonder that it worked at all. I was an early almost-adopter of the Mac, but luckily I got a pre-release copy of Inside Mac and read it cover to cover and was appalled at the API. I could tell just from that book that it was going to be nothing but pain and suffering for the poor user as soon as they tried to use it in serious hardware.
By the time I actually got a Mac, in the early '90s, it was clear even to Apple that their classic OS was a dog. A/UX was their first attempt to get out of the trap, but while System V can be quite speedy on a 68030 (or even a 68010, I've got an AT&T Unix PC as well), it can't manage it while running System 6 hosted. They floundered around pursuing Copland and BeOS through the '90s, and when they got stared down by Adobe over Rhapsody I pretty much gave up hope.
Wonderful GUI, but tied to that appalling dog of an OS... no, there wasn't anything to respect there. The rest of the calumny (much of it undeserved, yes) comes from that. Now they've turned that around, the rest of the complaints are fading. But never fool yourself that if they HADN'T turned around and dumped the old horrid dog of an OS no amount of cool white hardware would have made a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the GP's point is that SPAM in all-capitals is a registered trademark of Hormel Inc.
I don't think he would have included email spam if that was the case.
Back when unsolicited bulk email started, people said "that's not spam! Spam is only on usenet! We have to come up with a new word for this!"
I said then, and I say now, hogwash.
Any advertising by flooding a common communication channel can meaningfully be described as spam, whether it's Usenet, email, IM, Text messages, or search engine spamming. There's no point to trying to draw a magic circle around part of the problem and pointing outside and saying "that's not really spam".
This was hashed out long ago, back when spam was mostly theoretical and only a few of us were trying to figure out what to do about what was clearly going to be a huge problem that we couldn't get anyone to pay attention to.
And subsequent events haven't changed anything.
It doesn't matter why you're spamming, you can't treat any reason or method as "acceptable", doing so will only redirect the floodgates and destroy whatever loophole you allowed.
And lo and behold, that's what happens, whenever someone shows even the slightest sympathy for the spammer.
Spam is spam is spam.
Why would you need photoshop IN YOUR CAR?
So that you can clean up the pic you took on your cameraphone before you upload it to your iPod Photo to impress the member-of-the-appropriate-sex next to you BEFORE THE LIGHT CHANGES!
If you don't want to deal with CUPS, then don't use printers that require CUPS support. They do exist.
We've a positively irrelevant methodology that leads to the presentation of a proof (as in the Cmabrigde uinervtisy rscheearch), and the meaningless proof is then served to customers as a sales argument. Isn't this a little bit of a fraud?
And as I wrote, I am not talking about whether the study is applicable to marketing. The term "hoax" has a very specific meaning, and implies that the study itself was either not actually performed, or that the methodology was deliberately falsified to produce invalid results. You haven't shown or even implied that the results are faked or even inaccurate, merely that they're being applied incorrectly.
Do you mean this hoax?
What hoax? He disagrees with the basis of the study. That doesn't mean the study is fraudulent (that IS what the term "hoax" implies) nor that his disagreement is valid. In addition, his complaint is that the study may not actually be useful for marketeers... NOT that it's irrelevant to this discussion.
Ditto. Sometimes you actually learn something from slashdot... :)
Using modifiers is not the same thing as requiring a second mouse button though.
It's an extra button. Whether it's on the mouse or not, it's an extra button, and something else to memorise.
Printing is a hard problem in general and printer spooler software has serious problems on all platforms.
That's my point. Complaining that Apple hasn't miraculously made HP's and Epson's printers... in addition to their own hardware and software... "just work" is, well, churlish.
You might as well complain that Apple doesn't provide drivers for Windows-only keyboard's non-standard "Internet" keys, or that they fix bugs in Linux NFS or Windows file servers.
In the Finder the contextual menu is available [...]
The Finder is not the only application on the Mac.
In short, the list of things you can't do without a modifier key or a second button has dropped to either zero or near zero in the recent past, at least at the OS level.
In short, there have always been things you can't do, and more things you can't easily or conveniently do, without a modifier key, and while there are workarounds that make many of them easier if not more convenient... the Mac user interface supports and encourages them.
The Windows user interface style guidelines actually do more to discourage dependence on the right mouse button (for example, contextual menus are supposed to be mirrored in the main menu) than the Mac HIG discourages use of modifier keys.
In short, describing the Mac mouse as a "five button mouse with four buttons on the keyboard" (not my phrase, though I may have come up with it independantly... it was originally used by someone in support of the Mac one-button design) is not unreasonable.
PS: Google on "google triangle" and you'll see why they picked this page to prefetch...
Though I'd like them to prefetch the "next search page" as well... at least, that would tend to speed up *my* googling. I'm probably atypical, though, if they don't do it...
You get people upping bandwidth costs and slowing down browsing time because the site maintainer THINKS they'll go to some next page but the site design actually ENCOURAGES them to go to some other, unrelated page.
There are extensive studies from third parties on what people look at and do when they search on google. And you know what, they found people tend to look at and go to the top result, and don't even glance below the top few results most of the time.
I'd expect that a company with the means to do the necessary research wouldn't go about implementing this kind of hackish "feature set" until it had thought things through a little better.
I'd expect that Google has better figures on where people go to from Google's search pages than anyone else.
They used some FreeBSD userspace tools - not kernel code
NeXTSTeP was not based on post-net-2 code, it had AT&T code in the kernel. That code had to be replaced, and FreeBSD is what they replaced it from. They have more recently imported more FreeBSD code... Panther re-imported UFS anew from FreeBSD, for example.
Name one; I'm using my iBook as of current, and I can see almost anything I would need to use a second click for in a menu somewhere.
You need control-click to bring up contextual manus in many situations. Click-and-hold doesn't work.
You need command-click or shift-click for multiple selections.
You need command-click to move or remove menu-bar objects.
You need control, shift, and option-click all over the place in Photoshop... long one of the "killer apps" for the Mac. In other apps I've run into as much as 2-keys-chorded-plus-double-click.
In OS 9, which was more consistent about this than OS X, you needed option-click to move the control strip.
That's just off the top of my head.
CUPS is a p.o.s. on both Linux and Mac
And yet my son mails me his homework to print from my Mac instead of his Windows box, because CUPS actually works and Windows printing doesn't.
And Linux has come even further in the same amount of time
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because I don't see that happening.
Unfortunately the Mac OS interface is not designed to work with a single button. There are a lot of thing you need to use control- option- or command- click to do, and shift-click is often nearly as critical.
Really, the Mac has a 5 button mouse with 4 of them on the keyboard.
Thats what I can't get over, the entry price. To buy a piece of hardware, an os, and applications, that I might not even end up "liking" - let alone be more productive using (I'm pertty sure I just butchered the english language there, so forgive me).
If you buy a Mac mini for, say, $575 plus tax (so you get the 512M RAM instead of the 256M), and you don't like it... you'll be able to get almost all the money back by ebaying it, and you may even be able to sell it for MORE than $575 plus tax to someone who wants one and doesn't want to wait two weeks (or more) for his.
I was actually disappointed that they ditched BeOS and went with NeXTSTeP.
Until I had an opportunity to try both Rhapsody and BeOS on the same PC. Oy! I also tried BeOS on the PowerMac. It was a bit better... and OS 8 under BeOS using SheepShaver had better disk performance than OS 8 raw!
Hey, did you hear the Amiga's back again?
Flash advertisements? Browser busting links? Realplayer? Windows Media? A Jedi needs not these things!
Free Software would just be BSD software without any sort of legal control over the copying and distributing of derived works.
The Regents of the University of California managed to whack USL pretty hard with those "nonexistent" legal controls.
I heard on NPR yesterday morning that they are also the biggest software thief in the world today.
Nobody who's done business in China would believe that.
a lot of the derision was the same BS [...]
Some of it isn't BS, but that's not the point. The point is that Classic Mac OS was a horrible dog, and it is a horrible dog. Anyone who used ANY OTHER operating system or platform could see what a horrible dog it was. Its only advantage was that in the list of popular operating systems used in the '80s it was the third worst, and the most popular was the worst. When Atari cratered and Microsoft gave up on preemptive multitasking Mac OS dropped to last place, and proceeded to redefine what "last place" meant. OS 9... my god, NeXTSTep on a 68030 was more responsive than OS 9 on a G3. No, I'm not exaggerating, I've booted them both up right next to each other and compared them... and there's no bloody comparison.
I've got an ORIGINAL 128K Mac, an SE/30, a Powermac 7200 I've upgraded with an 8500 motherboard, a 7500 that was my first Powermac that I'm running OS X on. I've used Mac OS since 6.0.8, and it's always been a wonder that it worked at all. I was an early almost-adopter of the Mac, but luckily I got a pre-release copy of Inside Mac and read it cover to cover and was appalled at the API. I could tell just from that book that it was going to be nothing but pain and suffering for the poor user as soon as they tried to use it in serious hardware.
By the time I actually got a Mac, in the early '90s, it was clear even to Apple that their classic OS was a dog. A/UX was their first attempt to get out of the trap, but while System V can be quite speedy on a 68030 (or even a 68010, I've got an AT&T Unix PC as well), it can't manage it while running System 6 hosted. They floundered around pursuing Copland and BeOS through the '90s, and when they got stared down by Adobe over Rhapsody I pretty much gave up hope.
Wonderful GUI, but tied to that appalling dog of an OS... no, there wasn't anything to respect there. The rest of the calumny (much of it undeserved, yes) comes from that. Now they've turned that around, the rest of the complaints are fading. But never fool yourself that if they HADN'T turned around and dumped the old horrid dog of an OS no amount of cool white hardware would have made a difference.
Plenty of things don't work well on OS X: CUPS, networking, and Netinfo, to name just a few.
CUPS doesn't work any better on Linux, does it now?
I could take exception with all of those points, anyway, but I'll just make two more:
1. OS X has come a long bloody way since it first came out.
2. The alternative isn't Linux, except for a very few people.
I argued that I felt the price (which another reader dubbed "Mac Tax") it costed to get a mac, wasn't worth it.
Obviously it's not worth it to you.
It's obviously worth it to other people. And it's getting smaller all the time.