Really. I don't care much for either, after using the Thinkpad. I'd really like a laptop that invested an extra half inch of depth in a keyboard like the ones on the old Toshiba Satellites, with almost full travel keys. They were SO much better to type on than any laptop available today... most of which feel like I'm trying to type on the scales of a slightly putrified dead alligator.
The only real advantage the 12" PowerBook has over an iBook is the dual screen capabilities.
Doesn't it have a PCMCIA slot? Also, the keyboard doesn't seem to suck as much as the iBook's (though none of Apple's laptops really have a enough keyboard joy for me).
Face it people, apple makes cheap and affordable computers in the middle range
I'm a big OS X fan, and I've had several Macs (there's four beige G3s and a G4 in the house right now), but the Mac mini is the first one I could justify buying new (or even "recently used")... because Apple does *not* make "affordable" computers anywhere except the high end.
The Mac mini is affordable, but it isn't cheap, it's about $100 more than competitive Windows-based machines... but that's a major improvement: unless you're pirating Windows it's the first Mac that isn't about twice the price of a comparable PC I could put together myself (on specs, anyway... there's really no "comparable" PC to any Mac, because you can't run OS X on one and, well, that's a deal-breaker).
The eMac's display is unacceptable. For $800 I expect a Trinitron tube... if I bought an eMac it would end up under my desk hooked up to my $40 used Dell display... which is incomparably better than the tube in the eMac.
The iMac, well, it's gorgeous. But it costs like a good laptop.
The iBook? 1024x768? No PC card slots? And that keyboard is awful. The iBook hardware is about the worst laptop hardware I've seen.
Powerbook? The keyboard's better, but the screen resolution is still poor. For the price of the 12" Powerbook I can get a Thinkpad with the best laptop keyboard in the world, and more pixels than the 17" Powerbook. No thanks.
IBM collaborated with Apple on one of the early Powerbooks. I wish they'd do it again.
Hopefully the Google search-spam-ignorer trick will catch on, and this kind of comment spam will go down...
Re:No CD/DVD, and slower CPU, and what video?
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 1
Agreed, if he doesn't at least have the functional equivalent of a Mini in there, he hasn't created a PC equivalent of the Mini. I was ready to post the same comment, but you beat me to the punch.
Also, a 1 GHz Pentium-compatible CPU isn't really comparable to a 1.25 GHz G4. Neither is a VIA or S3 video card equivalent to a Radeon 9200...
In any menu system that uses clicks, EITHER left or right click will dismiss the menu and activate teh selected action. IT DOESN'T MATTER.
But I do support, and I still get users who are trying to double-click on things that only take a single click, or double-click on menus. ALL of which is Apple's fault... because with only a single button mouse they couldn't use the middle button for "action" like Xerox had... so they "invented" a second button called double-click.
No, the "stupid users" argument cuts both ways. The answer is, "stupid users are stupid... design for smart users, and train the novices, necause you have to anyway. The only "intuitive" user interface is the nipple.
Apple's "one button" mouse has five buttons. It's just that three of the buttons are on the keyboard, and one is based on timing:
Click Double-click (the equivalent of the third button on Xerox original design) Control-click (the equivalent of the second button) Command-click (the equivalent of the third button on Sun's original 3-button layout) Alt-click (the equivalent of the third button on many X11 apps) Shift-click
How this is simpler and easier to learn than two buttons, I'll never understand. Especially when these extra buttons are not just accelerateors or shortcuts but are absolutely required to perform many functions.
But anyone who claims a single button is easier had better be able to show a study that compared apples to apples... the ones Apple published really compared two-buttons plus only context menus to single buttons with menu bars, and nobody's modern two-button mice actually behave that way.
Boy, you're upset. Calm down. There's no way I'm going to even attempt to rebut your point-by-point rantings, so I'll just cut straight to the core of the matter.
ActiveX is COM
Yes, I know that, that's the problem. COM is designed for use by mutually trusting components. It's completely inappropriate as a mechanism for running components introduced by an application directly from a website. The fact that the HTML control is responsible for deciding what COM components should have the right to run, rather than the application that knows whether the component is an already-installed applet or something that's just been pulled in from "exploits-r-us.cx" is a fundamentally insecure design.
It should be no mroe acceptable for a Windows browser to have a mechanism to launch a COM object directly from a than for a UNIX browser to have a mechanism to run a shell script the same way.
No matter how you wrap this with certificates and security zones, it's a bad idea.
There are some things that both X and Windows suck at. Don't take X as your ideal. Look at Intuition, NeWS, Display Postscript as well.
For example, how about making all the gadgets independent of the app, so that an application can be slow and unresponsive without the UI getting out of sync with your actions. Put things like menus and standard buttons and panes and icons in the display server. If you want to customise them a bit, use a script. NeWS used Postsctipt, today you'd probably use Javascript.
That also buys you better remotability. Plus you can establish a lot more common policy than just mouse focus.
Re:Sounds like a pretty good idea to me...
on
Microsoft in 2008
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· Score: 1
All jokes asside, the idea of ripping out the underlying stuff while keeping the Windows UI standards for look and feel would be fine with me.
Hell no.
NT is a nice OS, with a lot of potential.
Win32 and the bits directly derived from it (much of which has been moved into the bloody kernel for performance) is a toxic ecosystem, like a cross between Love Canal, the naster parts of Eastern Europe and the Aral Sea, and those scary animated vines from Lost in Space.
What were the alternatives to the (bare bones of) GNU OS at time when Linus integrated his kernel with it?
Linux aggregated around the kernel, it wasn't integrated into an existing system. The FSF tools were not the only options, nor in some cases were they even the best... though in the process of building Linux led to big improvements in many.
But... people had been writing the userland components for over a decade at that time, starting in the late '70s with the Software Tools Virtual OS. There were two or three alternate C compilers, a huge variety of other components, and long before Linux was solid the BSD userland became available.
Linus has stated that if BSD had been ready a year earlier, he would just have used that... Linux wouldn't have existed at all. And the only major component in the open-source BSDs that came from the FSF is the C compiler... and that's not the compiler it started with.
So, if Linus hadn't existed, we'd be debating BSD and Hurd now, not Linux and Hurd. If RMS hadn't existed we'd be using some descendant of lcc or tcc... on Linux.
Just think if Windows made the shift, there would no longer be ANY operating systems in active development that weren't based on UNIX in some way.
There aren't any now. There's UNIX genes all through NT: Microsoft imported UNIX concepts and in some cases code over and over again, going back all the way to DOS 2.11.
AmigaDOS (newly re-released) is more of an independent OS than Windows NT.
Microsoft...Open Source...? As entertaining as this article is, the chances of such things materializing are thin.
That's what I thought when Steve Walli told me Microsoft would never buy Softway Systems and bury Interix. Oh, sure, they had a great product... but it used GCC, for heavens' sake! Steve Ballmer says GCC is the devil!
Boy, was I ever wrong. Not only did they buy Softway Systems (I got that right), but they shipped Interix... and they're shipping it for free!
Never again will I argue that Microsoft will "never" pull clue out of thin air. One day, they might even fix Internet Explorer and retire ActiveX...
Interix is a port of the OpenBSD userland and a BSD-based enhancement of the POSIX subsystem to the NT kernel, It's as much an OpenBSD port as Debian GNU/OpenBSD is a Debian port.
The OP's point is that with just a little bit of critical thinking you can see that there isn't any factual information to link the BBC story to something some unnamed individual said on a mailing list.
The OP made several points. The one I'm objecting to is that the fact that this was on a humorously named website had anything to do with its credibility.
I expect for my news to have really happened.
That would be in some alternate universe, then? Or do you think the fact that we can see the sausage being made means that it's being made any differently than it was in the past?
Having a contextual menu button from the beginning would have discouraged developers from adding a bunch of chord-combination clicks to make up for the lack...
Re:But what about Debian/NT?
on
Microsoft in 2008
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I want voice transcription... until it can convert continuous speech to text (offline or in the background, and with training, are OK) voice recording is just annoying.
Which only strengthens the argument that he needs to back up his comments with facts.
What does that have to do with the OP's argument that/. shouldn't have posted the article because BoingBoing was... whatever he was trying to say it was?
I'm not saying "The fact that it's Cory Doctorow means it really happened", I'm saying "Cory has enough of a reputation that this is really news". Certainly it's news by slashdot standards, sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Really. I don't care much for either, after using the Thinkpad. I'd really like a laptop that invested an extra half inch of depth in a keyboard like the ones on the old Toshiba Satellites, with almost full travel keys. They were SO much better to type on than any laptop available today... most of which feel like I'm trying to type on the scales of a slightly putrified dead alligator.
The only real advantage the 12" PowerBook has over an iBook is the dual screen capabilities.
Doesn't it have a PCMCIA slot? Also, the keyboard doesn't seem to suck as much as the iBook's (though none of Apple's laptops really have a enough keyboard joy for me).
Apple could start there own console
They did. It's called the "Mac mini".
Face it people, apple makes cheap and affordable computers in the middle range
I'm a big OS X fan, and I've had several Macs (there's four beige G3s and a G4 in the house right now), but the Mac mini is the first one I could justify buying new (or even "recently used")... because Apple does *not* make "affordable" computers anywhere except the high end.
The Mac mini is affordable, but it isn't cheap, it's about $100 more than competitive Windows-based machines... but that's a major improvement: unless you're pirating Windows it's the first Mac that isn't about twice the price of a comparable PC I could put together myself (on specs, anyway... there's really no "comparable" PC to any Mac, because you can't run OS X on one and, well, that's a deal-breaker).
The eMac's display is unacceptable. For $800 I expect a Trinitron tube... if I bought an eMac it would end up under my desk hooked up to my $40 used Dell display... which is incomparably better than the tube in the eMac.
The iMac, well, it's gorgeous. But it costs like a good laptop.
The iBook? 1024x768? No PC card slots? And that keyboard is awful. The iBook hardware is about the worst laptop hardware I've seen.
Powerbook? The keyboard's better, but the screen resolution is still poor. For the price of the 12" Powerbook I can get a Thinkpad with the best laptop keyboard in the world, and more pixels than the 17" Powerbook. No thanks.
IBM collaborated with Apple on one of the early Powerbooks. I wish they'd do it again.
Hopefully the Google search-spam-ignorer trick will catch on, and this kind of comment spam will go down...
Agreed, if he doesn't at least have the functional equivalent of a Mini in there, he hasn't created a PC equivalent of the Mini. I was ready to post the same comment, but you beat me to the punch.
Also, a 1 GHz Pentium-compatible CPU isn't really comparable to a 1.25 GHz G4. Neither is a VIA or S3 video card equivalent to a Radeon 9200...
In any menu system that uses clicks, EITHER left or right click will dismiss the menu and activate teh selected action. IT DOESN'T MATTER.
But I do support, and I still get users who are trying to double-click on things that only take a single click, or double-click on menus. ALL of which is Apple's fault... because with only a single button mouse they couldn't use the middle button for "action" like Xerox had... so they "invented" a second button called double-click.
No, the "stupid users" argument cuts both ways. The answer is, "stupid users are stupid... design for smart users, and train the novices, necause you have to anyway. The only "intuitive" user interface is the nipple.
Apple's "one button" mouse has five buttons. It's just that three of the buttons are on the keyboard, and one is based on timing:
Click
Double-click (the equivalent of the third button on Xerox original design)
Control-click (the equivalent of the second button)
Command-click (the equivalent of the third button on Sun's original 3-button layout)
Alt-click (the equivalent of the third button on many X11 apps)
Shift-click
How this is simpler and easier to learn than two buttons, I'll never understand. Especially when these extra buttons are not just accelerateors or shortcuts but are absolutely required to perform many functions.
But anyone who claims a single button is easier had better be able to show a study that compared apples to apples... the ones Apple published really compared two-buttons plus only context menus to single buttons with menu bars, and nobody's modern two-button mice actually behave that way.
Boy, you're upset. Calm down. There's no way I'm going to even attempt to rebut your point-by-point rantings, so I'll just cut straight to the core of the matter.
ActiveX is COM
Yes, I know that, that's the problem. COM is designed for use by mutually trusting components. It's completely inappropriate as a mechanism for running components introduced by an application directly from a website. The fact that the HTML control is responsible for deciding what COM components should have the right to run, rather than the application that knows whether the component is an already-installed applet or something that's just been pulled in from "exploits-r-us.cx" is a fundamentally insecure design.
It should be no mroe acceptable for a Windows browser to have a mechanism to launch a COM object directly from a than for a UNIX browser to have a mechanism to run a shell script the same way.
No matter how you wrap this with certificates and security zones, it's a bad idea.
There are some things that both X and Windows suck at. Don't take X as your ideal. Look at Intuition, NeWS, Display Postscript as well.
For example, how about making all the gadgets independent of the app, so that an application can be slow and unresponsive without the UI getting out of sync with your actions. Put things like menus and standard buttons and panes and icons in the display server. If you want to customise them a bit, use a script. NeWS used Postsctipt, today you'd probably use Javascript.
That also buys you better remotability. Plus you can establish a lot more common policy than just mouse focus.
All jokes asside, the idea of ripping out the underlying stuff while keeping the Windows UI standards for look and feel would be fine with me.
Hell no.
NT is a nice OS, with a lot of potential.
Win32 and the bits directly derived from it (much of which has been moved into the bloody kernel for performance) is a toxic ecosystem, like a cross between Love Canal, the naster parts of Eastern Europe and the Aral Sea, and those scary animated vines from Lost in Space.
What were the alternatives to the (bare bones of) GNU OS at time when Linus integrated his kernel with it?
Linux aggregated around the kernel, it wasn't integrated into an existing system. The FSF tools were not the only options, nor in some cases were they even the best... though in the process of building Linux led to big improvements in many.
But... people had been writing the userland components for over a decade at that time, starting in the late '70s with the Software Tools Virtual OS. There were two or three alternate C compilers, a huge variety of other components, and long before Linux was solid the BSD userland became available.
Linus has stated that if BSD had been ready a year earlier, he would just have used that... Linux wouldn't have existed at all. And the only major component in the open-source BSDs that came from the FSF is the C compiler... and that's not the compiler it started with.
So, if Linus hadn't existed, we'd be debating BSD and Hurd now, not Linux and Hurd. If RMS hadn't existed we'd be using some descendant of lcc or tcc... on Linux.
Just think if Windows made the shift, there would no longer be ANY operating systems in active development that weren't based on UNIX in some way.
There aren't any now. There's UNIX genes all through NT: Microsoft imported UNIX concepts and in some cases code over and over again, going back all the way to DOS 2.11.
AmigaDOS (newly re-released) is more of an independent OS than Windows NT.
Microsoft...Open Source...? As entertaining as this article is, the chances of such things materializing are thin.
That's what I thought when Steve Walli told me Microsoft would never buy Softway Systems and bury Interix. Oh, sure, they had a great product... but it used GCC, for heavens' sake! Steve Ballmer says GCC is the devil!
Boy, was I ever wrong. Not only did they buy Softway Systems (I got that right), but they shipped Interix... and they're shipping it for free!
Never again will I argue that Microsoft will "never" pull clue out of thin air. One day, they might even fix Internet Explorer and retire ActiveX...
You say that I'm a dreamer?
Well, I'm not the only one...
RMS? Linux could have come into being without RMS. It couldn't have done it without Linus.
SFU does not qualify as an OS.
Interix is a port of the OpenBSD userland and a BSD-based enhancement of the POSIX subsystem to the NT kernel, It's as much an OpenBSD port as Debian GNU/OpenBSD is a Debian port.
No I don't think you are.
The OP's point is that with just a little bit of critical thinking you can see that there isn't any factual information to link the BBC story to something some unnamed individual said on a mailing list.
The OP made several points. The one I'm objecting to is that the fact that this was on a humorously named website had anything to do with its credibility.
I expect for my news to have really happened.
That would be in some alternate universe, then? Or do you think the fact that we can see the sausage being made means that it's being made any differently than it was in the past?
Mac OS has a five-button mouse, it's just that four of the buttons are on the keyboard.
Even the most extreme X11 user with a MIT double-bucky keyboard wouldn't have thought of command-option-control-click (also here and here) or command-option-shift-click (also here)...
Having a contextual menu button from the beginning would have discouraged developers from adding a bunch of chord-combination clicks to make up for the lack...
You think I'm kidding? Microsoft's already shipping a BSD port.
Anyone else notice the date on the memo? :)
Nah, this isn't anything like Asimov. No attempt to tie it in to the Robots/Foundation/Empire universe.
I mean, the old NT codebase has some interesting capabilities. What about building a Debian/NT on top of it?
I want voice transcription... until it can convert continuous speech to text (offline or in the background, and with training, are OK) voice recording is just annoying.
Which only strengthens the argument that he needs to back up his comments with facts.
/. shouldn't have posted the article because BoingBoing was ... whatever he was trying to say it was?
What does that have to do with the OP's argument that
I'm not saying "The fact that it's Cory Doctorow means it really happened", I'm saying "Cory has enough of a reputation that this is really news". Certainly it's news by slashdot standards, sheesh.