See what I mean about fucking idiots? Don't try to obfuscate the situation by deliberately misinterpreting the facts. Capitol Records makes and publishes a CD. You can buy that CD for $12 (or whatever). But rather than buying it for $12 (or whatever), you come home and download it from some teenager who got a copy of it from a friend who got a copy of it from....
You have stolen. You have committed the crime of theft, just as surely as if you walked out of the Try-n-Save with the CD hidden under your shirt. There is no argument about this, and people who say things like "you can't steal music because it costs nothing to copy it" are clearly deluding themselves.
First, that only allows you to turn the mandated buttons off, not add ones that aren't presently allowed. And, as somebody else pointed out, there is no home button on the toolbar under any circumstances. There's a link on that oh-so-unnecessary "favorites bar" or whatever they call it.
What about the positives of Mozilla? Tabbed browsing? No pop-ups? Pipelining? Are you saying nothing about Mozilla interested you?
(Replying to an AC? Bad habit...)
Tabbed browsing does absolutely nothing for me. I guess I have different habits than the tabbed browsing fans.
Pop-ups? Haven't seen one since I turned on OmniWeb's "Scripts are allowed to open new windows only in response to being clicked" feature.
So yeah, basically I'm saying that nothing about Mozilla interests me. If it disappeared tomorrow, I don't think the world would miss it. No disrespect intended to the people who've worked hard on it, but guys: you've wasted your time and effort. Sorry.
In all honesty, I don't think we do. Our app is meant to be fairly modal; i.e., when a daughter window opens, the user is expected to deal with it, then close it, then go back to the main window. So we don't need to keep track of several open windows at once.
From me? Dude, you obviously have no idea who you're talking to, here.
There is a growing number of people who think that you can't "steal" music...
Yeah, and there are a growing number of people who think that Elvis is alive, too. These people are called "fucking idiots."
If somebody offers to sell you something, and then you take it from them without paying for it, you're stealing. I don't care if it's music or software or furniture or hugs or bunny rabbits or laughter. Stealing is stealing, and fucking idiots are fucking idiots, and that's the way the world is.
Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes I'm reasonable, sometimes less so. Only time will tell if I'm being reasonable right now, or if I'm in my "Zippy the Pinhead" mode.
She DID it with TWO STACKS of old PHONE BOOKS and a COPY of the MOZILLA source code in BINARY!
(Oops. Sorry.)
Why Mozilla Sucks Hard An Essay by Foobar104.
(Okay, not so much an essay as just a list, in no particular order. Also, I make no guarantee that this is my complete list of gripes. If you refute all of these, I will either just ignore you and pretend I never came back to this thread, or I'll respond with, "Yeah, but what about x and y? Bet you think Mozilla sucks now, don't you!?")
1. On both platforms I've tried-- Windows 2000 and Mac OS X-- Mozilla is significantly slower than the browser of choice on that platform. Browsers of choice being IE and OmniWeb, of course. Does it render pages faster? Who the hell cares? How fast it renders pages has no affect on me at all if I refuse to wait the eight to twelve seconds it takes to launch the application or the five seconds it takes to open a new window.
2. Mozilla's user interface does not follow the HCI standards of any known platform. It's equally quirky and wrong on Windows, Mac OS 9, or Mac OS X.
3. The Mozilla preferences dialog is completely screwed. There are dozens-- maybe as many as a hundred-- preferences listed in that dialog, grouped in categories that make little sense if any. And, on that subject, don't anybody ever say the words "edit your user.js file" to me again, okay? If I wanted to fart around with config files, I'd just write my own browser. This is my home machine, and I expect to be able to use it without firing up a text editor.
4. The Mozilla toolbar is broken and can't be fixed by mere mortals. By which I mean this: I want a home button on my toolbar, but Mozilla doesn't let me put one there. I want to show only icons in the menu bar, but Mozilla won't let me do that, either.
5. Text fields-- both plain text fields and textarea fields-- are broken. What do I mean by "broken?" I mean that these things do not work correctly. What am I, Bugzilla?
6. The sidebar "feature," which no right-minded person would ever find useful, is so bloated and overbuilt that it must take up a significant fraction of the total size of the application, both in terms of megabytes on disk and megabytes of RAM when running.
7. Speaking of megabytes, who told the Mozilla "team"-- and I use the word loosely-- that they could ship a 35 MB web browser that eats up as much RAM as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel combined? OmniWeb is 8 MB, and that's for the version with i18n.
8. "New Window" is on a fucking submenu. That's absurd. Have those guy really never read the Apple Human Interface Guidelines? No matter what OS you write software for, that book is the bible, man.
That's it. I'm done now. Mostly because I'm just bored.
Conclusive proof! Making a disparaging comment about Mozilla-- or Linux, or Gnome, or KDE, or any of that shit-- is, prima facie, enough to get moderated down on Slashdot. Somebody threw this AC a downmod just because he said that one option-- and possibly the best one-- was not to use Mozilla.
I will mail one crisp new American dollar, postage paid, to the first person who moderates this comment down. Send your claim to foobar104@yahoo.com.
Heh. This post reminds me of the old Far Side cartoon. A caveman is trying to sell another caveman a car. In the background you see lots of Fred Flintstone-style caveman cars, each with square wheels. The car in the foreground has triangular wheels. The salesman is saying, "This new, improved model. Has one less bump."
Yeah, I'm off-topic. I'm way the fuck off-topic. I'm so off-topic, I'm not even going to mention the topic (although I could, just to stay topical). Mod me down if you want. I've got karma to burn, and I'm feeling grouchy and self-destructive.
How in the hell do you go from funny to offtopic, when the post is clearly related to the one that is funny?
Funny trumps off-topic. A post that's both funny and off-topic will be moderated as funny. A post that's merely off-topic-- without being funny-- will be moderated off-topic.
This should be obvious. Perhaps your trouble is that you're an idiot?
Myself, I prefer to rely on the user closing their session(s) properly....
I mean no offense, but that's a terrible idea. I say that only because we had a pretty serious debate-- okay, shouting match-- about this in a team meeting about a year ago. On the one hand, there were us-- the managers-- saying that the software had to be resilient in the face of inconsistent or wrong user input. On the other, we had the engineers who said things like, "Browsers just don't work that way," and "Of course it's going to break if you do something stupid," and "We have to rely on the user closing their session properly." The bottom line is this: users don't do what you tell them. If you tell them not to close the window, they'll close it anyway. Your app has to be able to deal with things like that, just as it has to deal with "no such file or directory" or "out of memory." Without onunload(), it'd be impossible to write a non-trivial, resilient web application.
With an attitude like that, you most certainly are not "OS/Software agnostic".
His comment sounded pretty objective to me. Have you ever used Mozilla? Assuming the answer is yes, have you ever used a state-of-the-art browser like IE 5 or 6 or OmniWeb 4.1? Mozilla would have been great if it had been called Netscape 5.0 and released in early 1998. Since this is 2002 and the world has moved on, Mozilla sucks pretty hard.
Perhaps my lack of knowledge of JavaScript, but what exactly constitutes a legitimate use of onUnLoad?
I'll give you one example. My company sells software with web front-end interfaces. One of the techniques we use is implementing a close-to-log-out feature. In other words, when you close the main app window, a handler fires that closes all daughter windows of the main app window and ends the user's session. That depends on onunload().
We also use onunload() to make sure the application doesn't get confused if a user closes a window on which the application depends. When the users closes a window-- an alert dialog, say-- the onunload() handler checks to make sure that everything is as it should be. If it isn't, an error condition is established. Without onunload(), our application would be much less reliable in those kinds of situations.
If you wanted to run Linux, you would have built a PC instead. Idiot. And I make that call of "idiot" based not only on your comment, but your posting history, your suck-ass web site, and your offensive and lame nickname. You're an idiot.
In 1982 a 747 flew into a cloud of ash from a nearby volcano, and both engines failed.
Let's clarify this. There were two incidents of 747 engine failure involving Mt. Galunggung in 1982. In the first one, a British Airways 747 lost all four engines. It descended to 12,000 feet before the pilot was able to get 3 of the 4 engines restarted. In that case, SOP doesn't matter a bit because the choice was either restart at least one engine or glide into the sea.
In the other case mentioned with respect to Mt. Galunggung, a Singapore Airlines 747 lost two engines out of four due to the ash cloud; that aircraft didn't attempt an engine relight, but instead made an emergency landing in Jakarta.
There are many documented instances of engine failure or shutdown on commercial aircraft. But the correct procedure in that instance is to declare an emergency and head for the nearest airport. Heroic maneuvers in an attempt to restart the failed engine are confined to rare, but not unheard of, cases in which all the engines have been lost and the aircraft is gliding in.
Speaking of Tibooks, my friend bought one fairly recently, but he decided to get the low-end model. I think it has a 550 MHz processor and a CD-ROM or something. Between you and me, I think he would have been better off buying the absolute top-of-the-line iBook than the bottom-of-the-barrel PowerBook. The bigger screen is great and all, but he misses the DVD drive and the extra RAM he could have had in an iBook.
Computers aren't cars, is my point. When you buy a car, you might choose to buy the low-end model instead of the one with leather seats and heated windscreen and that little map thing that shows you which turn you missed, because you might be the sort of person who wouldn't miss those things. The car will last you just as long, and serve you just as well, with cloth seats instead of leather, so it doesn't really matter. Computers aren't like that. Buy the dual-processor model, even if you think the second CPU will sit idle most of the time. (With 10.2, it won't, by the way. I use both of my CPUs pretty hard, I've noticed.) Buy the bigger screen. Buy the Superdrive. Buy tons and tons of RAM. If you find yourself with an extra $100 in your pocket, order 256 MB of RAM. You'll use it.
Basically, figure out to the last buck how much money you can afford to blow, and then spend every bit of it. Then don't worry about buying a new computer for at least 3 years, and more likely 4 or 5.
I'd like to hear what the average rate of recovery for failed engines is, and how long the average restart time is. Not on this plane, in particular, but your average commercial airliner.
I'm talking completely out of my ass here, but I've never heard of an engine restart incident on a commercial jetliner. In order to restart an engine, you have to make certain changes to your angle of attack that the passengers might find... surprising. I believe SOP in that circumstance is just to shut the engine down, contact ATC and declare an emergency, and land at the nearest airport. When my flight to Chicago lost an engine over southern Illinois, we were already in the pattern for Midway airport, so ATC just let us skip to the front of the line. At least, that's what the pilot said over the PA. "Ladies and gentlemen, that loud noise you just heard was our starboard engine shutting down. It's nothing to worry about, but of course air traffic control has moved us to the front of the landing pattern, so we'll be on the ground in about ten minutes." Something like that.
Yes, exactly. What I've found so far-- maybe I've been luckier than average-- is that Apple's hardware and software are sufficiently good, and sufficiently consistent, that you can buy the absolute latest-and-greatest of whatever you're looking for without unreasonable concern that you're getting a buggy or quirky product. So I bought my G4 the first week they were available. I looked at the price as a function of capability-- or vice-versa, whichever-- and said, "That one's for me." Been thrilled ever since.
I think you might have missed my point. I'm saying that a better idea is to blow a big wad on the latest, greatest thing and then use it for three, four, five years, or even longer. If you buy an older, less expensive system, you're just going to be hobbled by it sooner rather than later.
Several people have written and said that you should buy systems 1-2 years after they're first released to maximize reliability.
I've bought lots of Macs over the past 20 years, and since '95 or so I've seen a pattern develop. Here's my theory: buy the most expensive brand-new system you can afford at the instant you're ready to buy.
My first Mac laptop-- a PowerBook 160-- cost me $3,000, and I used it every day for five years. It was my primary-- only!-- machine until I bought my iMac. I regret that purchase, but only a little bit. Both of my iMacs were great, reliable little machines, and I never had a complaint about either of them, but I often wished I had bought machines with more oomph.
When the "speed holes" machines came out last month, I bought again. I found a friend who was willing to give me a few bucks for my iMac, and I plopped down $3,500 on a dual processor 1 GHz with a 17" studio display. It's fast, really fast, and it's got room to grow. I'll keep it for at least three years, I imagine.
But I know, and I accept, that Apple will release faster and better machines eight months or a year from now. It won't be too long before my top-o-the-line machine looks a little pale by comparison to the newest machines shipping. But that's not the point. The point is to get the very best system you can when you're ready to buy, and then be happy with it for as long as it takes to justify the purchase in your mind.
The Spruce Goose was a seaplane. It could only land on water. Calling this plane "the next Spruce Goose" gives a pretty seriously wrong idea. So the original clarification was justified and appropriate.
What happens when a engine fails when its crusing at 20 feet and an engine fails?
A basic understanding of inertia is needed here. When a plane loses an engine-- or all the engines, for that matter-- it doesn't just drop out of the sky. It starts to slow down a bit, but only very gradually. If you lose an engine on a large multi-engine plane, you can just bump the throttles on the other engine or engines up a little and, if necessary, adjust the rudder to keep the aircraft from yawing due to off-axis thrust. It's no big deal, really. Several times I've been on commercial flights that lose one engine. If you're close to your destination, the ATCs simply move you ahead in the pattern to get you down a little faster. The only real concern is the possibility that you might, in a two-engine aircraft, lose the other engine.
As far as I know-- I'm no expert-- every civilian or military multi-engine aircraft in use today can sustain flight on just one engine. Even the big boys, like 747s, can maintain altitude, descend, and land with all the engines out but one.
InDesigns's market share is tiny, and no one's really adopting it.
Been to a newspaper or magazine lately? Since the release of version 2.0, InDesign has come to own that market. For good reason, IMHO.
In addition, the first thing any serious design, production or prepress firm does upon recieving a new machine is nuke the drive and install their own build.
You, like pretty much everybody else here, seem to be under the mistaken impression that InDesign is going to be pre-installed on new Macs, like iTunes. That's not right at all. If you buy a G4 between now and the end of the year, you can mail Adobe a coupon and they'll send you a copy of InDesign for free. If you don't want it, don't send in the coupon. On the other hand, if you like getting expensive things for free....
Funny, I was just making that same point (well, kind of) a few days ago. In English, the proper neutral third personal singular pronoun is "he." When you use "he" in that context, it refers to a person of either gender. "She," on the other hand, refers specifically to women. You can't use "she" to mean either a man or a woman, because that's not what the word means. So, in other words, "he" means anybody, while "she" means a woman specifically. How does getting your own word while men get lumped in as part of the neuter pronoun amount to sexism?
Random thought: Artistic and design tools is the one of the hardest areas for OSS to compete, because these programs (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.) are all about interface and polish.
I don't agree. Creative tools like Photoshop are all about getting the job done. If you're of an artistic bent-- I work with people who are, and I suppose I am myself-- you want to use tools that are as transparent to you as possible. You want to use tools that don't get in the way. Photoshop is a great tool because it doesn't get in the way. If all you want to do is paint, you can get from zero to painting in about five mouse clicks. It's perfect, or close enough that it doesn't matter.
It's a common misconception that these kinds of programs are all about the UI. In truth, they're all about being really great tools. OSS doesn't generally produce really great tools. It produces tools that range from utterly useless to merely mediocre. The open-source artistic tools out there (Gimp, et al.) are so bad that I happily forked out $1,000 today for yet another copy of the Adobe Design Collection. I would rather pay $1,000 and use those tools than save that money by using the tools that are available for free. And lots of people feel the same way about it.
Slashdot Mirror
See what I mean about fucking idiots? Don't try to obfuscate the situation by deliberately misinterpreting the facts. Capitol Records makes and publishes a CD. You can buy that CD for $12 (or whatever). But rather than buying it for $12 (or whatever), you come home and download it from some teenager who got a copy of it from a friend who got a copy of it from....
You have stolen. You have committed the crime of theft, just as surely as if you walked out of the Try-n-Save with the CD hidden under your shirt. There is no argument about this, and people who say things like "you can't steal music because it costs nothing to copy it" are clearly deluding themselves.
First, that only allows you to turn the mandated buttons off, not add ones that aren't presently allowed. And, as somebody else pointed out, there is no home button on the toolbar under any circumstances. There's a link on that oh-so-unnecessary "favorites bar" or whatever they call it.
What about the positives of Mozilla? Tabbed browsing? No pop-ups? Pipelining? Are you saying nothing about Mozilla interested you?
(Replying to an AC? Bad habit...)
Tabbed browsing does absolutely nothing for me. I guess I have different habits than the tabbed browsing fans.
Pop-ups? Haven't seen one since I turned on OmniWeb's "Scripts are allowed to open new windows only in response to being clicked" feature.
So yeah, basically I'm saying that nothing about Mozilla interests me. If it disappeared tomorrow, I don't think the world would miss it. No disrespect intended to the people who've worked hard on it, but guys: you've wasted your time and effort. Sorry.
In all honesty, I don't think we do. Our app is meant to be fairly modal; i.e., when a daughter window opens, the user is expected to deal with it, then close it, then go back to the main window. So we don't need to keep track of several open windows at once.
Sorry I couldn't help more.
Some humility would be refreshing.
From me? Dude, you obviously have no idea who you're talking to, here.
There is a growing number of people who think that you can't "steal" music...
Yeah, and there are a growing number of people who think that Elvis is alive, too. These people are called "fucking idiots."
If somebody offers to sell you something, and then you take it from them without paying for it, you're stealing. I don't care if it's music or software or furniture or hugs or bunny rabbits or laughter. Stealing is stealing, and fucking idiots are fucking idiots, and that's the way the world is.
Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes I'm reasonable, sometimes less so. Only time will tell if I'm being reasonable right now, or if I'm in my "Zippy the Pinhead" mode.
She DID it with TWO STACKS of old PHONE BOOKS and a COPY of the MOZILLA source code in BINARY!
(Oops. Sorry.)
Why Mozilla Sucks Hard
An Essay by Foobar104.
(Okay, not so much an essay as just a list, in no particular order. Also, I make no guarantee that this is my complete list of gripes. If you refute all of these, I will either just ignore you and pretend I never came back to this thread, or I'll respond with, "Yeah, but what about x and y? Bet you think Mozilla sucks now, don't you!?")
1. On both platforms I've tried-- Windows 2000 and Mac OS X-- Mozilla is significantly slower than the browser of choice on that platform. Browsers of choice being IE and OmniWeb, of course. Does it render pages faster? Who the hell cares? How fast it renders pages has no affect on me at all if I refuse to wait the eight to twelve seconds it takes to launch the application or the five seconds it takes to open a new window.
2. Mozilla's user interface does not follow the HCI standards of any known platform. It's equally quirky and wrong on Windows, Mac OS 9, or Mac OS X.
3. The Mozilla preferences dialog is completely screwed. There are dozens-- maybe as many as a hundred-- preferences listed in that dialog, grouped in categories that make little sense if any. And, on that subject, don't anybody ever say the words "edit your user.js file" to me again, okay? If I wanted to fart around with config files, I'd just write my own browser. This is my home machine, and I expect to be able to use it without firing up a text editor.
4. The Mozilla toolbar is broken and can't be fixed by mere mortals. By which I mean this: I want a home button on my toolbar, but Mozilla doesn't let me put one there. I want to show only icons in the menu bar, but Mozilla won't let me do that, either.
5. Text fields-- both plain text fields and textarea fields-- are broken. What do I mean by "broken?" I mean that these things do not work correctly. What am I, Bugzilla?
6. The sidebar "feature," which no right-minded person would ever find useful, is so bloated and overbuilt that it must take up a significant fraction of the total size of the application, both in terms of megabytes on disk and megabytes of RAM when running.
7. Speaking of megabytes, who told the Mozilla "team"-- and I use the word loosely-- that they could ship a 35 MB web browser that eats up as much RAM as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel combined? OmniWeb is 8 MB, and that's for the version with i18n.
8. "New Window" is on a fucking submenu. That's absurd. Have those guy really never read the Apple Human Interface Guidelines? No matter what OS you write software for, that book is the bible, man.
That's it. I'm done now. Mostly because I'm just bored.
Conclusive proof! Making a disparaging comment about Mozilla-- or Linux, or Gnome, or KDE, or any of that shit-- is, prima facie, enough to get moderated down on Slashdot. Somebody threw this AC a downmod just because he said that one option-- and possibly the best one-- was not to use Mozilla.
I will mail one crisp new American dollar, postage paid, to the first person who moderates this comment down. Send your claim to foobar104@yahoo.com.
Heh. This post reminds me of the old Far Side cartoon. A caveman is trying to sell another caveman a car. In the background you see lots of Fred Flintstone-style caveman cars, each with square wheels. The car in the foreground has triangular wheels. The salesman is saying, "This new, improved model. Has one less bump."
Yeah, I'm off-topic. I'm way the fuck off-topic. I'm so off-topic, I'm not even going to mention the topic (although I could, just to stay topical). Mod me down if you want. I've got karma to burn, and I'm feeling grouchy and self-destructive.
How in the hell do you go from funny to offtopic, when the post is clearly related to the one that is funny?
Funny trumps off-topic. A post that's both funny and off-topic will be moderated as funny. A post that's merely off-topic-- without being funny-- will be moderated off-topic.
This should be obvious. Perhaps your trouble is that you're an idiot?
Myself, I prefer to rely on the user closing their session(s) properly....
;-)
I mean no offense, but that's a terrible idea. I say that only because we had a pretty serious debate-- okay, shouting match-- about this in a team meeting about a year ago. On the one hand, there were us-- the managers-- saying that the software had to be resilient in the face of inconsistent or wrong user input. On the other, we had the engineers who said things like, "Browsers just don't work that way," and "Of course it's going to break if you do something stupid," and "We have to rely on the user closing their session properly." The bottom line is this: users don't do what you tell them. If you tell them not to close the window, they'll close it anyway. Your app has to be able to deal with things like that, just as it has to deal with "no such file or directory" or "out of memory." Without onunload(), it'd be impossible to write a non-trivial, resilient web application.
Okay, end of rant.
With an attitude like that, you most certainly are not "OS/Software agnostic".
His comment sounded pretty objective to me. Have you ever used Mozilla? Assuming the answer is yes, have you ever used a state-of-the-art browser like IE 5 or 6 or OmniWeb 4.1? Mozilla would have been great if it had been called Netscape 5.0 and released in early 1998. Since this is 2002 and the world has moved on, Mozilla sucks pretty hard.
Perhaps my lack of knowledge of JavaScript, but what exactly constitutes a legitimate use of onUnLoad?
I'll give you one example. My company sells software with web front-end interfaces. One of the techniques we use is implementing a close-to-log-out feature. In other words, when you close the main app window, a handler fires that closes all daughter windows of the main app window and ends the user's session. That depends on onunload().
We also use onunload() to make sure the application doesn't get confused if a user closes a window on which the application depends. When the users closes a window-- an alert dialog, say-- the onunload() handler checks to make sure that everything is as it should be. If it isn't, an error condition is established. Without onunload(), our application would be much less reliable in those kinds of situations.
And this is coming from someone who calls himself "Istealmymusic?" I mean, your honesty is refreshing, but come on.
If you wanted to run Linux, you would have built a PC instead. Idiot. And I make that call of "idiot" based not only on your comment, but your posting history, your suck-ass web site, and your offensive and lame nickname. You're an idiot.
In 1982 a 747 flew into a cloud of ash from a nearby volcano, and both engines failed.
Let's clarify this. There were two incidents of 747 engine failure involving Mt. Galunggung in 1982. In the first one, a British Airways 747 lost all four engines. It descended to 12,000 feet before the pilot was able to get 3 of the 4 engines restarted. In that case, SOP doesn't matter a bit because the choice was either restart at least one engine or glide into the sea.
In the other case mentioned with respect to Mt. Galunggung, a Singapore Airlines 747 lost two engines out of four due to the ash cloud; that aircraft didn't attempt an engine relight, but instead made an emergency landing in Jakarta.
There are many documented instances of engine failure or shutdown on commercial aircraft. But the correct procedure in that instance is to declare an emergency and head for the nearest airport. Heroic maneuvers in an attempt to restart the failed engine are confined to rare, but not unheard of, cases in which all the engines have been lost and the aircraft is gliding in.
Speaking of Tibooks, my friend bought one fairly recently, but he decided to get the low-end model. I think it has a 550 MHz processor and a CD-ROM or something. Between you and me, I think he would have been better off buying the absolute top-of-the-line iBook than the bottom-of-the-barrel PowerBook. The bigger screen is great and all, but he misses the DVD drive and the extra RAM he could have had in an iBook.
Computers aren't cars, is my point. When you buy a car, you might choose to buy the low-end model instead of the one with leather seats and heated windscreen and that little map thing that shows you which turn you missed, because you might be the sort of person who wouldn't miss those things. The car will last you just as long, and serve you just as well, with cloth seats instead of leather, so it doesn't really matter. Computers aren't like that. Buy the dual-processor model, even if you think the second CPU will sit idle most of the time. (With 10.2, it won't, by the way. I use both of my CPUs pretty hard, I've noticed.) Buy the bigger screen. Buy the Superdrive. Buy tons and tons of RAM. If you find yourself with an extra $100 in your pocket, order 256 MB of RAM. You'll use it.
Basically, figure out to the last buck how much money you can afford to blow, and then spend every bit of it. Then don't worry about buying a new computer for at least 3 years, and more likely 4 or 5.
Works for me.
I'd like to hear what the average rate of recovery for failed engines is, and how long the average restart time is. Not on this plane, in particular, but your average commercial airliner.
I'm talking completely out of my ass here, but I've never heard of an engine restart incident on a commercial jetliner. In order to restart an engine, you have to make certain changes to your angle of attack that the passengers might find... surprising. I believe SOP in that circumstance is just to shut the engine down, contact ATC and declare an emergency, and land at the nearest airport. When my flight to Chicago lost an engine over southern Illinois, we were already in the pattern for Midway airport, so ATC just let us skip to the front of the line. At least, that's what the pilot said over the PA. "Ladies and gentlemen, that loud noise you just heard was our starboard engine shutting down. It's nothing to worry about, but of course air traffic control has moved us to the front of the landing pattern, so we'll be on the ground in about ten minutes." Something like that.
Yes, exactly. What I've found so far-- maybe I've been luckier than average-- is that Apple's hardware and software are sufficiently good, and sufficiently consistent, that you can buy the absolute latest-and-greatest of whatever you're looking for without unreasonable concern that you're getting a buggy or quirky product. So I bought my G4 the first week they were available. I looked at the price as a function of capability-- or vice-versa, whichever-- and said, "That one's for me." Been thrilled ever since.
Personally, I side with you
I think you might have missed my point. I'm saying that a better idea is to blow a big wad on the latest, greatest thing and then use it for three, four, five years, or even longer. If you buy an older, less expensive system, you're just going to be hobbled by it sooner rather than later.
Several people have written and said that you should buy systems 1-2 years after they're first released to maximize reliability.
I've bought lots of Macs over the past 20 years, and since '95 or so I've seen a pattern develop. Here's my theory: buy the most expensive brand-new system you can afford at the instant you're ready to buy.
My first Mac laptop-- a PowerBook 160-- cost me $3,000, and I used it every day for five years. It was my primary-- only!-- machine until I bought my iMac. I regret that purchase, but only a little bit. Both of my iMacs were great, reliable little machines, and I never had a complaint about either of them, but I often wished I had bought machines with more oomph.
When the "speed holes" machines came out last month, I bought again. I found a friend who was willing to give me a few bucks for my iMac, and I plopped down $3,500 on a dual processor 1 GHz with a 17" studio display. It's fast, really fast, and it's got room to grow. I'll keep it for at least three years, I imagine.
But I know, and I accept, that Apple will release faster and better machines eight months or a year from now. It won't be too long before my top-o-the-line machine looks a little pale by comparison to the newest machines shipping. But that's not the point. The point is to get the very best system you can when you're ready to buy, and then be happy with it for as long as it takes to justify the purchase in your mind.
A clarification on... oh, you figure it out.
The Spruce Goose was a seaplane. It could only land on water. Calling this plane "the next Spruce Goose" gives a pretty seriously wrong idea. So the original clarification was justified and appropriate.
What happens when a engine fails when its crusing at 20 feet and an engine fails?
A basic understanding of inertia is needed here. When a plane loses an engine-- or all the engines, for that matter-- it doesn't just drop out of the sky. It starts to slow down a bit, but only very gradually. If you lose an engine on a large multi-engine plane, you can just bump the throttles on the other engine or engines up a little and, if necessary, adjust the rudder to keep the aircraft from yawing due to off-axis thrust. It's no big deal, really. Several times I've been on commercial flights that lose one engine. If you're close to your destination, the ATCs simply move you ahead in the pattern to get you down a little faster. The only real concern is the possibility that you might, in a two-engine aircraft, lose the other engine.
As far as I know-- I'm no expert-- every civilian or military multi-engine aircraft in use today can sustain flight on just one engine. Even the big boys, like 747s, can maintain altitude, descend, and land with all the engines out but one.
InDesigns's market share is tiny, and no one's really adopting it.
Been to a newspaper or magazine lately? Since the release of version 2.0, InDesign has come to own that market. For good reason, IMHO.
In addition, the first thing any serious design, production or prepress firm does upon recieving a new machine is nuke the drive and install their own build.
You, like pretty much everybody else here, seem to be under the mistaken impression that InDesign is going to be pre-installed on new Macs, like iTunes. That's not right at all. If you buy a G4 between now and the end of the year, you can mail Adobe a coupon and they'll send you a copy of InDesign for free. If you don't want it, don't send in the coupon. On the other hand, if you like getting expensive things for free....
Funny, I was just making that same point (well, kind of) a few days ago. In English, the proper neutral third personal singular pronoun is "he." When you use "he" in that context, it refers to a person of either gender. "She," on the other hand, refers specifically to women. You can't use "she" to mean either a man or a woman, because that's not what the word means. So, in other words, "he" means anybody, while "she" means a woman specifically. How does getting your own word while men get lumped in as part of the neuter pronoun amount to sexism?
Random thought: Artistic and design tools is the one of the hardest areas for OSS to compete, because these programs (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.) are all about interface and polish.
I don't agree. Creative tools like Photoshop are all about getting the job done. If you're of an artistic bent-- I work with people who are, and I suppose I am myself-- you want to use tools that are as transparent to you as possible. You want to use tools that don't get in the way. Photoshop is a great tool because it doesn't get in the way. If all you want to do is paint, you can get from zero to painting in about five mouse clicks. It's perfect, or close enough that it doesn't matter.
It's a common misconception that these kinds of programs are all about the UI. In truth, they're all about being really great tools. OSS doesn't generally produce really great tools. It produces tools that range from utterly useless to merely mediocre. The open-source artistic tools out there (Gimp, et al.) are so bad that I happily forked out $1,000 today for yet another copy of the Adobe Design Collection. I would rather pay $1,000 and use those tools than save that money by using the tools that are available for free. And lots of people feel the same way about it.