> I would figure that it's video... specifically, probably family home movies.
Digital video has opened a HUGE new can of worms. We have problems even today viewing video created just yesterday (especially over the Web) because of all the myriad codec standards.
Imagine what it'll be like in 20 years-- anything other than NTSC, PAL, or SECAM will be effectively extinct.
"...such paper "lab on a chip" tests may lead to a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method for diagnosing diseases in countries lacking reliable health care."
How about a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method in countries where we're used to overpaying for the NON-cost-effective methods?
> WHy do you think he was driving stick? Why do you think that car had a clutch? > Sure, it LOOKED like a classic car, but what is under the hood?
*sigh* let the rationalizations begin...
As Roger Ebert pointed out, you can't judge with certainty what the filmmaker may be trying to tell you. You can only judge what he put on the screen.
On the screen, we see a classic Stingray, with a 4-speed manual transmission. If you try to interpret this as something other than what you see, you're instantly on shaky ground!
Blame the whole, "let's make trek new and sexy, and very much unlike trek. ...
That type of scene is a sign of lack of story in any movie. They're trying to make a summer action flick to attract the non-trekkies, instead of making a good Star Trek movie. Same problem they had with Enterprise (in the beginning).
Yep. Same reaction I had to "Beowulf." There's nothing wrong with a good mindless action flick, but this is the kind of thing that makes you wish GROWN-UPS had done it.
Every time I cant work out how to do anything (even simple things that would take 5 seconds on Solaris, linux, or practically any other unix I've used) every one of the pro-Mac brigade that told me how wonderful the Mac was has been unable to provide me with an answer at all.
How do I change my username? In any other unix I've used, it's a 2-second edit to/etc/passwd.
Upon reading your post, my first impulse was to tell you to look in the Mac Help - you know, the 'Help' menu in the Finder?
But when I tried this myself in 10.4 "Tiger," I searched for "change username" - it returned no results. I then searched for "change user name."
Coming up fifth on the list was: "I can't change the short name of a user account." When I clicked on it, the Mac Help informed me that "You can't change the short name for a user account after the account has been created. If you need to change the short name, you must delete the account and create a new user account with a new short name."
Which isn't true, of course; in Tiger, you can change the short name by using "NetInfo Manager" in the Utilities folder. Of course, using that utility implies that you know what you're doing, and Apple can't count on that, so they just tell you it's impossible. Remember: Apple always knows better than you!
So where do you have to type pathnames in OS X (other than after those funny strings ending with "$" or "%" in that funny "Terminal" application)?
I have used many applications that require you enter pathnames - for example, Native Instruments' music apps, which need you enter a path to a sample library, or to other necessary components which the software won't run without. A lot of Unix/Windows apps ported or cross-developed in this way seem to think paths are a pretty neat idea. You NEVER saw that on classic Mac OS.
Backwards compatibility - as it's a UN*X, the pathname separator at the lowest API layer in Mac OS X is slash, but the pathname separator in classic Mac OS was colon, and people may have had files with names with slashes in them, so....
Yes, but Macs don't use standard Unix filesystems by default - they use HFS+. The correct solution is to implement a filesystem that allows filenames to contain slashes, yet handles Unix paths correctly. How can it be done? I don't know... but I do know that the solution they came up with is very hackish and un-Maclike.
You can control whether you want that... You can also control it on a per-file basis.
Interestingly, giving the user the option of hiding filename extensions is a worse idea than just leaving them hidden or showing full-time!
It is, of course, all part of the popular GUI culture, in which the user isn't supposed to worry their pretty little head about such details. Users are assumed ignorant and illiterate, the details should be hidden from them, and the app can decide for itself what things are called and where they should reside.
Funny you should put it that way. The original Mac OS, which first popularized the "GUI culture," never made you type a pathname. It was all done through open/save dialogs and the spatial Finder. Once users learned it, they never had any trouble navigating the filesystem. The filesystem details were abstracted away.
Of course, Mac OS X threw out that little lesson and compounded the problem by implementing the silly colon-to-slash-to-colon conversion on the fly along with hiding filename extensions...
Sorry to reply to my own comment - please ignore the numbers... it's late and I'm a dumbass for copy-pasting without paying attention.
Of course that's supposed to be 115 *million* households. The data was in 1000s:-P
Still, the bottom 50% earn about $4 billion per day - barely enough to cover the interest + new debt even if they paid 100% of their income as tax!
If they all made the median $48,000, they would earn about $7.5 billion per day. Even at 100% taxation, what use does the gov't have for that small money???
The bottom 50% of taxpayers by income pay just 3.3% of the tax revenues (and a large number of them pay 0) while earning 13% of the income
I hate when people throw this particular figure out there, because it's deceptive. Know why?
There are about 115,000 households in the USA, and even if the bottom 50% paid 100% of their income as taxes, it would only come to a little over a billion dollars. The Federal government pays about a billion dollars per day just in interest on the national debt. A billion is a drop in the proverbial bucket!
Even if every household in the lower 50% were to suddenly earn the median income of $48,000, and paid 100% of their income as taxes, it would come to about $2.7 billion. By contrast, the government currently spends about $56 BILLION per day. The national debt alone increases by $3.75 BILLION per day. To recap: you could confiscate the entire incomes of the lower half of the country, and burn through it in a couple days without any new expenditures by the federal government.
Can you start to see why the working class is pissed off at having their children's and grandchildren's futures mortgaged?
Opentosh is not going to be much of a Mac OS X work-alike. From the FAQ:
* No PowerPC build
* No Classic emulation
* No HFS, HFS+ or ext3 support
* Limited Carbon support
This is without even considering the standard Apple applications, which will most likely not be cloned. I doubt the OS will run Apple's versions, because the frameworks would have to be cloned to support them, and you'd have to buy a Mac OS X install to get them legally.
Seriously, why bother? If you don't get the benefits of running Mac OS X, you might as well just use Linux or FreeBSD.
> That's not really the fault of USB-- that's the fault of the device not communicating via a sufficiently generic protocol atop USB.
It's not as simple as that - FireWire is peer-to-peer, but USB only supports a host/device relationship.
That's why you can network over FireWire but not over USB. At least you can't without a serious hack, and why bother when it's simpler to just use Ethernet and a crossover cable?
It's also why I can't use my MacBook as a surrogate USB keyboard/mouse for a desktop machine. I was looking for a long time for some kind of software that would let me plug the laptop into a desktop machine or server through USB, but there is no such thing. And that is USB's fault, because of the design.
You know what my problem is with the Mighty Mouse (and now with the new click-press trackpad)?
Dragging!
Normally when you click and hold on an object to drag it, you may reach the edge of your usable space before you've completed your drag. With a normal mouse, you hold down the button, lift up the mouse, and do another swipe to complete the drag. There's no way to do this with the Mighty Mouse - when you lift the mouse, it releases the object and you have to start a new drag.
There'd be nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes the object is over a folder or some other non-ideal area to release it, so you have to put it back where it was, let go, make room for a larger mouse movement, and drag it again.
I can't believe Apple missed this annoyance in their development cycle. But then, Apple always knows better than you what your needs are, right?
One thing I have seen students get hung up on is:
x = x + 1
It looks like an equality statement that couldn't possibly be correct. Just telling them it's "an assignment statement" doesn't seem to penetrate.
Modern programmers like to criticize BASIC, but this is one thing it got right (for an introductory language) by forcing you to write:
LET X = X + 1
IIRC, later versions allowed you to omit the "LET" keyword, defeating the purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
> ...plus blue-green lasers and a simple COBOL program which writes 1's and 0's onto the Moon.
Looks like all they've managed to write so far is: 010000110100100001000001
> I would figure that it's video... specifically, probably family home movies.
Digital video has opened a HUGE new can of worms. We have problems even today viewing video created just yesterday (especially over the Web) because of all the myriad codec standards.
Imagine what it'll be like in 20 years-- anything other than NTSC, PAL, or SECAM will be effectively extinct.
"...such paper "lab on a chip" tests may lead to a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method for diagnosing diseases in countries lacking reliable health care."
How about a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method in countries where we're used to overpaying for the NON-cost-effective methods?
> WHy do you think he was driving stick? Why do you think that car had a clutch?
> Sure, it LOOKED like a classic car, but what is under the hood?
*sigh* let the rationalizations begin...
As Roger Ebert pointed out, you can't judge with certainty what the filmmaker may be trying to tell you. You can only judge what he put on the screen.
On the screen, we see a classic Stingray, with a 4-speed manual transmission. If you try to interpret this as something other than what you see, you're instantly on shaky ground!
Yep. Same reaction I had to "Beowulf." There's nothing wrong with a good mindless action flick, but this is the kind of thing that makes you wish GROWN-UPS had done it.
"Therefore you know that a lightsaber is an amazing prop and optical effect that is able to cut through diddley squat in a matter of milliseconds."
There... broke that for you! :)
I got the free "Death Star Plans" but when I put them in my holo-projector, all it said was "BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE."
About 8 years ago, I had Time Warner (Road Runner) service in San Diego. I got about 800KBps download speeds for about $50 a month.
Then I moved to another area and had Cox High-Speed Internet for 6 years. I got about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
Now I'm back in Time Warner's area, and I get about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
The best word I can think of to describe broadband in my region is "stagnant." :-/
Upon reading your post, my first impulse was to tell you to look in the Mac Help - you know, the 'Help' menu in the Finder?
But when I tried this myself in 10.4 "Tiger," I searched for "change username" - it returned no results. I then searched for "change user name."
Coming up fifth on the list was: "I can't change the short name of a user account." When I clicked on it, the Mac Help informed me that "You can't change the short name for a user account after the account has been created. If you need to change the short name, you must delete the account and create a new user account with a new short name."
Which isn't true, of course; in Tiger, you can change the short name by using "NetInfo Manager" in the Utilities folder. Of course, using that utility implies that you know what you're doing, and Apple can't count on that, so they just tell you it's impossible. Remember: Apple always knows better than you!
Q: What's a pirate's favorite rocket propellant?
A: Arrrrgon!
Q: What's a pirate's favorite sock pattern?
A: Arrrrgyle!
Q: What's a pirate's favorite rating system?
A: Arrrrbitron!
Q: What's a pirate's favorite Dudley Moore movie?
A: Surprisingly, it's 'Micki and Maude'
I have used many applications that require you enter pathnames - for example, Native Instruments' music apps, which need you enter a path to a sample library, or to other necessary components which the software won't run without. A lot of Unix/Windows apps ported or cross-developed in this way seem to think paths are a pretty neat idea. You NEVER saw that on classic Mac OS.
Yes, but Macs don't use standard Unix filesystems by default - they use HFS+. The correct solution is to implement a filesystem that allows filenames to contain slashes, yet handles Unix paths correctly. How can it be done? I don't know... but I do know that the solution they came up with is very hackish and un-Maclike.
Interestingly, giving the user the option of hiding filename extensions is a worse idea than just leaving them hidden or showing full-time!
Funny you should put it that way. The original Mac OS, which first popularized the "GUI culture," never made you type a pathname. It was all done through open/save dialogs and the spatial Finder. Once users learned it, they never had any trouble navigating the filesystem. The filesystem details were abstracted away.
Of course, Mac OS X threw out that little lesson and compounded the problem by implementing the silly colon-to-slash-to-colon conversion on the fly along with hiding filename extensions...
Sorry to reply to my own comment - please ignore the numbers... it's late and I'm a dumbass for copy-pasting without paying attention.
Of course that's supposed to be 115 *million* households. The data was in 1000s :-P
Still, the bottom 50% earn about $4 billion per day - barely enough to cover the interest + new debt even if they paid 100% of their income as tax!
If they all made the median $48,000, they would earn about $7.5 billion per day. Even at 100% taxation, what use does the gov't have for that small money???
I hate when people throw this particular figure out there, because it's deceptive. Know why?
There are about 115,000 households in the USA, and even if the bottom 50% paid 100% of their income as taxes, it would only come to a little over a billion dollars. The Federal government pays about a billion dollars per day just in interest on the national debt. A billion is a drop in the proverbial bucket!
Even if every household in the lower 50% were to suddenly earn the median income of $48,000, and paid 100% of their income as taxes, it would come to about $2.7 billion. By contrast, the government currently spends about $56 BILLION per day. The national debt alone increases by $3.75 BILLION per day. To recap: you could confiscate the entire incomes of the lower half of the country, and burn through it in a couple days without any new expenditures by the federal government.
Can you start to see why the working class is pissed off at having their children's and grandchildren's futures mortgaged?
> PowerPC build is irrelevant to anybody trying to build a Hackintosh like Psystar
And Rosetta? How will they manage to clone that little piece of proprietary functionality? ...oh, that's right; they can't
Unfortunately there is still a lot of useful software out there which has not been updated to Universal or Intel binaries.
> Classic emulation is gone in 10.5 anyways
Which is one reason I started looking for a Mac OS alternative in the first place...
Opentosh is not going to be much of a Mac OS X work-alike. From the FAQ:
* No PowerPC build
* No Classic emulation
* No HFS, HFS+ or ext3 support
* Limited Carbon support
This is without even considering the standard Apple applications, which will most likely not be cloned. I doubt the OS will run Apple's versions, because the frameworks would have to be cloned to support them, and you'd have to buy a Mac OS X install to get them legally.
Seriously, why bother? If you don't get the benefits of running Mac OS X, you might as well just use Linux or FreeBSD.
> That's not really the fault of USB-- that's the fault of the device not communicating via a sufficiently generic protocol atop USB.
It's not as simple as that - FireWire is peer-to-peer, but USB only supports a host/device relationship.
That's why you can network over FireWire but not over USB. At least you can't without a serious hack, and why bother when it's simpler to just use Ethernet and a crossover cable?
It's also why I can't use my MacBook as a surrogate USB keyboard/mouse for a desktop machine. I was looking for a long time for some kind of software that would let me plug the laptop into a desktop machine or server through USB, but there is no such thing. And that is USB's fault, because of the design.
You know what my problem is with the Mighty Mouse (and now with the new click-press trackpad)?
Dragging!
Normally when you click and hold on an object to drag it, you may reach the edge of your usable space before you've completed your drag. With a normal mouse, you hold down the button, lift up the mouse, and do another swipe to complete the drag. There's no way to do this with the Mighty Mouse - when you lift the mouse, it releases the object and you have to start a new drag.
There'd be nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes the object is over a folder or some other non-ideal area to release it, so you have to put it back where it was, let go, make room for a larger mouse movement, and drag it again.
I can't believe Apple missed this annoyance in their development cycle. But then, Apple always knows better than you what your needs are, right?
No, actually, you don't!
For your enlightenment:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-command-line-1/
http://gtk.php.net/
http://www.php-qt.org/
http://php-tk.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
http://www.bluem.net/downloads/pashua_en/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpopengl/
> This is un-American! This is going to kill jobs, because wig makers will go out of business!
Good riddance. Have you *seen* some of the atrocities that these guys have perpetrated on the heads of American men..?
Bankruptcy is too good for them!
In that case, you ought to read the article!
Modern programmers like to criticize BASIC, but this is one thing it got right (for an introductory language) by forcing you to write:
LET X = X + 1
IIRC, later versions allowed you to omit the "LET" keyword, defeating the purpose.
I know you're being facetious, but just in case someone who doesn't know better takes you seriously:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mutations.html
Cruising bars and clubs is like a box of chocolates.
Right on, but what does that have to do with Kildall?
If anything, Kildall was guilty of not giving up his IP rights for a low price, don't you think?