Ah, the beauty of the "post anonymously" button. At least when I flame, I sign my name to it. Coward.
So if I consider my time best spent securing the systems that I am paid to manage, you think I'm wasting my time?
No, if you spend your time securing systems beyond the degree that is necessary, I think you're probably padding your time sheet. See, if your boss think that computers are just little bombs waiting to explode, then your job is secure. You get to keep your high-dollar system administrator salary safe in the knowledge that your position in the technological priesthood is in no danger. What's even better, you don't have to do any thinking, or for that matter, any actual work. Keep clicking that "Windows Update" button, baby.
Just to piss you off, I have just put a default Windows 2000 install, out of the box, on the Internet without benefit of firewall or anything. There's no administrator password. I know this is making you crazy, and I love it.
A button OK might means two things depending on the context: - an acknowledge (as is the case here) - Do an action
Can you give an example of an OK button that means "do an action?" There are only two acceptable meanings for an "OK" button in an alert box: "Okay" or "Proceed." If there's only an OK button, then OK means "Okay," as in "I have received the message in this box and would like it to go away now." If there's an "OK" button and a "Cancel" button, "OK" means "proceed with what you were doing," and "Cancel" means "abort."
We had the FC JBODs lying around. They used to be part of another system, but now they're not in use. We have tons of Fibre Channel drives and JBODs lying around, leftovers from a business venture now cancelled. Combined with a spare QLA2200 and a PC, they make a fine NAS server for no money down, and no payments until never.
Even if we'd wanted to blow some cash, is there such a thing as a Fibre Channel RAID card? I don't care much for RAID cards, so I've never looked, but I've never heard of one, either.
#4: Turn off all the stuff that shouldn't have been on by default to make the system run better and more secure.
It's a NAS server. What stuff, exactly, do I need to turn off to make it run better? Does it serve files or not? Yes? Then it's perfect.
#5: Download and install all the security patches you need.
Who cares about security? This is a NAS server on a trusted network inside a couple of layers of firewall. If anybody wanted access to these files-- which are mostly software installation images for network installs-- they could just log in as "guest" and take them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. There's a time and a place for security. Security fetishists-- the kind who think that telnet on a secure LAN should be a felony-- are, in my opinion, confused. Every system in my lab has a "guest" account on it with no password. Anybody in the building-- which is a strictly limited set of people, naturally-- can log in and do whatever they want as "guest." And people often do! Just the other day a guy wanted to test some code on the 16-processor system that we use for stress testing. He didn't have an account on the machine, but he wanted to use it anyway. So he just logged in as "guest," copied his code over, and did his thing. No muss, no fuss. And no particular danger, because he was only "guest."
There's a time and a place for security. Rather than downloading security patches for a firewalled NAS box with public files on it, why don't you take a long lunch or something? Do something better with your time.
Beyond the argument of XServer speed, there will soon be the requirement for SCSI drives for the XServe. IDE just doesn't cut it under decent loads.
There's zero reason to put SCSI drives inside an Xserve. You're not doing any IO-bound tasks on the root drive anyway. If you need IO performance, you use an external Fibre Channel JBOD or RAID. (Internal RAID card? What's the point? Software RAID costs less and performs the same. If you really need performance, you use a hardware RAID controller.)
I personally would love to see Apple offer this equipment, but surely sales #'s will have to go up for the XServe..
Like, oh I don't know, Xserve RAID, maybe?
(Can't find a picture of Xserve RAID on Apple's site, since it hasn't been released yet. But if you saw or attended the Xserve roll-out, you've seen it. It's a 2 Gb storage system with dual RAID controllers and 1.6 TB of capacity per disk chassis.)
You value your time at $250 an hour, and still have time to post this much to slashdot? I think you lie.
No, I don't value my time at $250 an hour. My employer does, because that's what it costs (estimated, natch) to employ me.
Posting to Slashdot is, for me, like a coffee or smoke break. I don't drink coffee or smoke, so when I need a break I stretch my legs for a few minutes and maybe fire off a post or two to Slashdot. Then, back to work. Like right now, for example.
This is called "overhead," and it's all part of the costs of doing business.
But you would have spent time setting up the machine, whatever the OS.
Nope. Installing Windows 2000 Professional is about three ten-minute jobs, separated by big gaps of free time to do other things. Job #1: boot from the CD and partition and format the drive. Go do something else for an hour or so. Job #2: kick off the OS install. Go do something else, or have lunch, or whatever. Job #3: finish the OS install and set up the RAID set. Go home while the RAID set formats overnight.
Total time from start to finish is measured by looking at a calendar. Total time spent on the job is about half an hour.
Windows 2000 server has a built-in DHCP and DNS server, but it costs considerably more than $500, I believe. The primary purpose of this machine is a NAS server, and since I'm doing it on the cheap, I don't want to put a hardware RAID in it. Either Linux or Windows 2000 Pro (i.e., not Server) will do a software RAID-5, I believe, so those were my choices. If I'd wanted to spend more money, I could have, but I didn't want to.
With Red Hat, I get the OS and the RAID support for free for the cost of my time, and the DNS and DHCP servers are practically free because it was just a matter of copying over our DHCPD and BIND configs from another system.
That's something I'd like to see change. For me, the fact that I use Linux isn't about ideals, any more than the fact that I use Mac OS X is about ideals. Linux is far from perfect-- I have a long list of bitches about Linux-- but in some situations it offers excellent price/performance. For example, I spent about two hours the other day installing a QLA2200 fibre channel card in a PC and upgrading it from Red Hat 7.1 to 7.3. The install and upgrade were easy, but getting it to load the qla2200.o module at boot time was hard. I ended up brute-forcing it, using a modules.rc file to force loading of the module, because without it, the software RAID couldn't initialize.
For me, the cost of running Red Hat 7.3 on that machine is not zero. It was about two hours of my time. For me, that comes out to about $500, just figuring in what I cost my company in salary, benefits, and so on. But $500 for a Red Hat server is cheaper and more functional than some of the more reasonably priced alternatives. For example, I could have bought and installed a Windows 2000 license for that machine for less than $500, but I wouldn't have been able to also run DNS and DHCP services on it without more software. See? Trade-offs.
I don't use Linux for political or ideological reasons. I use it because it works well for a few jobs. I imagine-- just making an educated guess, her-- that the vast majority of Linux users are in the same situation as me. They use it because, for whatever their purpose is, it works.
Oh. Then you do think Windows is good. Never heard a mac user say that.
I think Windows isn't "bad." As in, "bad design." Windows (the NTs, of course, not the older versions) works well. It's a lousy user experience and I don't care for it, but it works.
Windows 95 didn't work as well. It crashed sometimes. Mac OS 9 and earlier also crashed sometimes. I don't think either of those is "bad," completely, but they're certainly more "bad" than either of Windows NT or Mac OS X.
How about the criteria of market share?
How about it? There are estimated to be 2 million full-time Mac OS X users out there. That's amazing for an entirely new operating system that deliberately breaks backward compatibility with applications. Normally, that sort of thing would have failed immediately. It didn't. That's success.
If Apple didn't rape their loyal customers with ridiculous pricing they wouldn't even be in business.
In other words, you're too poor to afford the machine you want, therefore Apple's prices must be too high. Whatever you say, there, AC.
I have already given you the best defense: Mac OS X works. No operating system that works as well as Mac OS X could possibly be "bad." It might have been designed with different goals from your own personal one's, or it might be the result of compromises that had to be made to get it done at all. But it is not "bad."
The fact that you've read a book and that you run Linux at home does not qualify you to say what's good and what's bad. Your attempt to disparage an operating system that, by any reasonable criteria, is a phenomenal success puts you squarely in the class that folks like me call "Monday-morning quarterback." In case there's any ambiguity, this is not intended as a compliment.
Your criticism privileges are hereby suspended for 72 hours. Go get some fresh air or something. There's a whole world out there. Don't miss it because you were sitting in your room reading about operating system design.
But most reviews indicate that OS X is quite slow.
See? That's what I'm talking about. You read a few reviews, and a couple of books, and suddenly you feel qualified to say that OS X has a "bad design." Sheesh.
Humility is a wonderful thing. Humility is whispering in your ear. It's telling you, "Just because nobody's told you why Mac OS X is a good design, that doesn't mean it's a bad one." It's whispering, "You don't know everything." It's whispering, "You're not smarter than everybody else." You should listen.
OS X is quite slow and unstable as far as UNIXs go. A lot of that has to do with bad system design.
You know, that sounds an awful lot like a troll to me, what with you making unsubstantiated statements like that and all. You might want to consider backing that up with some kind of evidence. I'm not picky; even anecdotal will do. How do you consider Darwin-- because that's what you're talking about here, right, the low level OS itself-- slow, exactly? What are you using to make that judgment? Intuition? The moral strength of virginity? Where do you get your special powers?
Furthermore, before you go around spouting off phrases like "bad system design," you'd better have done some OS design and programming yourself. Have you ever designed an operating system? Or are you just a guy who likes to play around with Linux?
Anyway this way of doing things is standard on your $10k+ Unix workstations and has been for over a decade.
No, it isn't. I have a $300,000 SGI Onyx2 workstation at my office with InfiniteReality3 graphics. The window manager is not hardware accelerated. Never has been.
Quartz Extreme hardware accelerates the window manager. This is something new.
It doesn't show up until you plug in a Wacom tablet. You may also need to install Wacom's driver, but I'm not sure about that. I know Ink shows up in System Preferences after you plug in your tablet, though.
You care to give a legitimate defense of OS X's system structure?
It works.
How was that?
Want me to elaborate? I've been running OS X full time on a G3 iMac since 10.0. The operating system has never crashed. I use the machine fairly heavily, for browsing and email, but also for publishing work with the Adobe products and for Java programming. I spend a lot of time in front of it, pounding away. It has never crashed, in any sense of the word. It has never needed a reboot. The only times I've rebooted it were for OS upgrades and back in May when I moved. That's it. The last time I rebooted was when I installed by developer seed of Jaguar 6C106. Even the prerelease version of the OS has never crashed for me.
That, my pugnacious friend, is the only defense that matters. It does everything I need with, in my case, perfect reliability.
The next thing to try will be iPhoto, which was ridiculously slow on my 500 MHz iBook.
Oh, don't exaggerate. I also have a 500 MHz iBook, and I use iPhoto almost every day. It's fine. Maybe you don't have enough RAM. Do you have at least 256 MB? Are you swapping?
Believe it or not, it's a graphics thing. Try turning off antialiasing in Terminal.app. The option is found under the application menu, in Window Settings, on the Display pane.
You must not be using Quartz Extreme. With QE, there's no difference between AA and non-AA in Terminal.app.
The default option should always be to give the user an opotunity to recover from the unexpected, the first 'ahhhh..... something weird has happened' dialog should lead the user into the recovery process and should not require the user to fully understand or even read the dialog.
Bullshit. The default option is to do what the user asked you to do. Say I tell my word processor to quit. An alert box pops up. Can't be bothered! Don't have time! I don't read it. I just slam my hand down on the "enter" key to invoke the default button, whatever it may be. Wait a minute. My program hasn't quit. I'm right back where I started, and I don't know why! Shit!
Alert boxes exist to tell a user that something exceptional has happened, or to warn them of possible consequences. (That sounds familiar. I think I'm repeating myself here, because you're not getting what I'm saying.) Alert boxes are not interactive. They don't pose questions. They merely convey information. "Hey, I know you asked me to quit, and I'm gonna do that in a second, here, but first I though you'd like to know that you're about to lose your work." The user knows that "OK" means "proceed in spite of the warning" and "Cancel" means "abort the thing I told you to do." How does the user know this? Because every alert box works that way, every time. That's the point of a human interface guideline.
'There has been an error somthing will happen' options [ok] [cancel]
so ok makes something happen, what does cancel do? does it roll-back whatever was requested before hand 'context'?
That's why error alerts don't have a Cancel button. Error alerts only have an OK button. In that context, "OK" means "I hear you."
'Continue closing the application even though you have unsaved changes' [ok] [cancel]
This is poor, the user should be given the recovery option i.e. to save there changes. [ok] [cancel] gives the user no clear path to perform an operation on there unsaved changes.
You've written a shitty alert message, and you're trying to fix it with buttons. Get this, and get it good: the message is more important than the buttons. Don't try to convey information in the buttons.
It should have been something like:
"You have made changes to 'Monica Stories.' If you quit without saving the document, you will lose those changes." [OK] [Cancel]
See? An informational alert box telling the user of a consequence that he or she may not intend, and giving the user the opportunity to proceed or to abort.
I mean no disrespect, but given what I've read from you yesterday and this morning, please tell me you don't design user interfaces for a living.
Terrible idea. The only point of saving is to retrieve. You can't retrieve a file unless you know where it was, or what name it was given, or something. If the computer automatically stashes my files away in obscure places on my computer, because it found room to do it there, how am I supposed to go back and find them months or years later? I have files on my computer that date back to my college days. I don't need them often, but when I do, I know just where they are, because I put the there. If I let the computer manage them for me, I'd never be able to find them again.
Terrible idea. You need to think about the human factors before you make these kinds of suggestions.
Actually, you've kinda got it backwards. My company is fairly small-- a couple dozen people spread across three continents in lots of tiny offices-- but we're divided about 50/50 between Mac and Windows users. This used to cause a problem, because the Windows guys insisted on sending out Word and other MS Office documents as email attachments and so on.
We recently bit down hard and bought about 10 copies of MS Office v. X. Now our Mac guys have perfect (at least so far, touch wood) interoperability with our Windows guys. And because we're all using OS X, we also enjoy a much greater degree of reliability.
So, in my opinion, Mac OS X with Office v. X (when it's needed) is a perfect user-friendly dream. It was a fairly expensive one, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Killing the floppy with the iMac was another (great that they killed it - absolutely stupid that they didn't *replace* it).
You mean with a CDRW standard in all Macs? Yeah. Sucks that they didn't add that feature....
Ah, the beauty of the "post anonymously" button. At least when I flame, I sign my name to it. Coward.
So if I consider my time best spent securing the systems that I am paid to manage, you think I'm wasting my time?
No, if you spend your time securing systems beyond the degree that is necessary, I think you're probably padding your time sheet. See, if your boss think that computers are just little bombs waiting to explode, then your job is secure. You get to keep your high-dollar system administrator salary safe in the knowledge that your position in the technological priesthood is in no danger. What's even better, you don't have to do any thinking, or for that matter, any actual work. Keep clicking that "Windows Update" button, baby.
Just to piss you off, I have just put a default Windows 2000 install, out of the box, on the Internet without benefit of firewall or anything. There's no administrator password. I know this is making you crazy, and I love it.
A button OK might means two things depending on the context:
- an acknowledge (as is the case here)
- Do an action
Can you give an example of an OK button that means "do an action?" There are only two acceptable meanings for an "OK" button in an alert box: "Okay" or "Proceed." If there's only an OK button, then OK means "Okay," as in "I have received the message in this box and would like it to go away now." If there's an "OK" button and a "Cancel" button, "OK" means "proceed with what you were doing," and "Cancel" means "abort."
We had the FC JBODs lying around. They used to be part of another system, but now they're not in use. We have tons of Fibre Channel drives and JBODs lying around, leftovers from a business venture now cancelled. Combined with a spare QLA2200 and a PC, they make a fine NAS server for no money down, and no payments until never.
Even if we'd wanted to blow some cash, is there such a thing as a Fibre Channel RAID card? I don't care much for RAID cards, so I've never looked, but I've never heard of one, either.
#4: Turn off all the stuff that shouldn't have been on by default to make the system run better and more secure.
It's a NAS server. What stuff, exactly, do I need to turn off to make it run better? Does it serve files or not? Yes? Then it's perfect.
#5: Download and install all the security patches you need.
Who cares about security? This is a NAS server on a trusted network inside a couple of layers of firewall. If anybody wanted access to these files-- which are mostly software installation images for network installs-- they could just log in as "guest" and take them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. There's a time and a place for security. Security fetishists-- the kind who think that telnet on a secure LAN should be a felony-- are, in my opinion, confused. Every system in my lab has a "guest" account on it with no password. Anybody in the building-- which is a strictly limited set of people, naturally-- can log in and do whatever they want as "guest." And people often do! Just the other day a guy wanted to test some code on the 16-processor system that we use for stress testing. He didn't have an account on the machine, but he wanted to use it anyway. So he just logged in as "guest," copied his code over, and did his thing. No muss, no fuss. And no particular danger, because he was only "guest."
There's a time and a place for security. Rather than downloading security patches for a firewalled NAS box with public files on it, why don't you take a long lunch or something? Do something better with your time.
Beyond the argument of XServer speed, there will soon be the requirement for SCSI drives for the XServe. IDE just doesn't cut it under decent loads.
There's zero reason to put SCSI drives inside an Xserve. You're not doing any IO-bound tasks on the root drive anyway. If you need IO performance, you use an external Fibre Channel JBOD or RAID. (Internal RAID card? What's the point? Software RAID costs less and performs the same. If you really need performance, you use a hardware RAID controller.)
I personally would love to see Apple offer this equipment, but surely sales #'s will have to go up for the XServe..
Like, oh I don't know, Xserve RAID, maybe?
(Can't find a picture of Xserve RAID on Apple's site, since it hasn't been released yet. But if you saw or attended the Xserve roll-out, you've seen it. It's a 2 Gb storage system with dual RAID controllers and 1.6 TB of capacity per disk chassis.)
You value your time at $250 an hour, and still have time to post this much to slashdot? I think you lie.
No, I don't value my time at $250 an hour. My employer does, because that's what it costs (estimated, natch) to employ me.
Posting to Slashdot is, for me, like a coffee or smoke break. I don't drink coffee or smoke, so when I need a break I stretch my legs for a few minutes and maybe fire off a post or two to Slashdot. Then, back to work. Like right now, for example.
This is called "overhead," and it's all part of the costs of doing business.
But you would have spent time setting up the machine, whatever the OS.
Nope. Installing Windows 2000 Professional is about three ten-minute jobs, separated by big gaps of free time to do other things. Job #1: boot from the CD and partition and format the drive. Go do something else for an hour or so. Job #2: kick off the OS install. Go do something else, or have lunch, or whatever. Job #3: finish the OS install and set up the RAID set. Go home while the RAID set formats overnight.
Total time from start to finish is measured by looking at a calendar. Total time spent on the job is about half an hour.
Windows 2000 server has a built-in DHCP and DNS server, but it costs considerably more than $500, I believe. The primary purpose of this machine is a NAS server, and since I'm doing it on the cheap, I don't want to put a hardware RAID in it. Either Linux or Windows 2000 Pro (i.e., not Server) will do a software RAID-5, I believe, so those were my choices. If I'd wanted to spend more money, I could have, but I didn't want to.
With Red Hat, I get the OS and the RAID support for free for the cost of my time, and the DNS and DHCP servers are practically free because it was just a matter of copying over our DHCPD and BIND configs from another system.
Linux appreciation/zealotry is about ideals.
That's something I'd like to see change. For me, the fact that I use Linux isn't about ideals, any more than the fact that I use Mac OS X is about ideals. Linux is far from perfect-- I have a long list of bitches about Linux-- but in some situations it offers excellent price/performance. For example, I spent about two hours the other day installing a QLA2200 fibre channel card in a PC and upgrading it from Red Hat 7.1 to 7.3. The install and upgrade were easy, but getting it to load the qla2200.o module at boot time was hard. I ended up brute-forcing it, using a modules.rc file to force loading of the module, because without it, the software RAID couldn't initialize.
For me, the cost of running Red Hat 7.3 on that machine is not zero. It was about two hours of my time. For me, that comes out to about $500, just figuring in what I cost my company in salary, benefits, and so on. But $500 for a Red Hat server is cheaper and more functional than some of the more reasonably priced alternatives. For example, I could have bought and installed a Windows 2000 license for that machine for less than $500, but I wouldn't have been able to also run DNS and DHCP services on it without more software. See? Trade-offs.
I don't use Linux for political or ideological reasons. I use it because it works well for a few jobs. I imagine-- just making an educated guess, her-- that the vast majority of Linux users are in the same situation as me. They use it because, for whatever their purpose is, it works.
Oh. Then you do think Windows is good. Never heard a mac user say that.
I think Windows isn't "bad." As in, "bad design." Windows (the NTs, of course, not the older versions) works well. It's a lousy user experience and I don't care for it, but it works.
Windows 95 didn't work as well. It crashed sometimes. Mac OS 9 and earlier also crashed sometimes. I don't think either of those is "bad," completely, but they're certainly more "bad" than either of Windows NT or Mac OS X.
How about the criteria of market share?
How about it? There are estimated to be 2 million full-time Mac OS X users out there. That's amazing for an entirely new operating system that deliberately breaks backward compatibility with applications. Normally, that sort of thing would have failed immediately. It didn't. That's success.
If Apple didn't rape their loyal customers with ridiculous pricing they wouldn't even be in business.
In other words, you're too poor to afford the machine you want, therefore Apple's prices must be too high. Whatever you say, there, AC.
Whether it's true or not has nothing to do with whether it's a good story. So nyaah. ;-)
I have already given you the best defense: Mac OS X works. No operating system that works as well as Mac OS X could possibly be "bad." It might have been designed with different goals from your own personal one's, or it might be the result of compromises that had to be made to get it done at all. But it is not "bad."
The fact that you've read a book and that you run Linux at home does not qualify you to say what's good and what's bad. Your attempt to disparage an operating system that, by any reasonable criteria, is a phenomenal success puts you squarely in the class that folks like me call "Monday-morning quarterback." In case there's any ambiguity, this is not intended as a compliment.
Your criticism privileges are hereby suspended for 72 hours. Go get some fresh air or something. There's a whole world out there. Don't miss it because you were sitting in your room reading about operating system design.
But most reviews indicate that OS X is quite slow.
See? That's what I'm talking about. You read a few reviews, and a couple of books, and suddenly you feel qualified to say that OS X has a "bad design." Sheesh.
Humility is a wonderful thing. Humility is whispering in your ear. It's telling you, "Just because nobody's told you why Mac OS X is a good design, that doesn't mean it's a bad one." It's whispering, "You don't know everything." It's whispering, "You're not smarter than everybody else." You should listen.
I think you lost the context; which was about using support chips to accelerate processing.
Oopsie. It's my fault for having such a short attention... hey, look at that!
I have a 600Mhz iBook with 384MB RAM. iPhoto isn't exactly snappy.
Well, since it works fine for me on slower hardware with 2/3rd's the RAM, it's obviously something you're doing wrong.
Have you been touching yourself? Maybe it's the sin.
(Sorry, sorry. It's just that I heard that joke at work today, and this seemed like the time to use it. No offense.)
OS X is quite slow and unstable as far as UNIXs go. A lot of that has to do with bad system design.
You know, that sounds an awful lot like a troll to me, what with you making unsubstantiated statements like that and all. You might want to consider backing that up with some kind of evidence. I'm not picky; even anecdotal will do. How do you consider Darwin-- because that's what you're talking about here, right, the low level OS itself-- slow, exactly? What are you using to make that judgment? Intuition? The moral strength of virginity? Where do you get your special powers?
Furthermore, before you go around spouting off phrases like "bad system design," you'd better have done some OS design and programming yourself. Have you ever designed an operating system? Or are you just a guy who likes to play around with Linux?
Come on, don't be shy.
Anyway this way of doing things is standard on your $10k+ Unix workstations and has been for over a decade.
No, it isn't. I have a $300,000 SGI Onyx2 workstation at my office with InfiniteReality3 graphics. The window manager is not hardware accelerated. Never has been.
Quartz Extreme hardware accelerates the window manager. This is something new.
It doesn't show up until you plug in a Wacom tablet. You may also need to install Wacom's driver, but I'm not sure about that. I know Ink shows up in System Preferences after you plug in your tablet, though.
You care to give a legitimate defense of OS X's system structure?
It works.
How was that?
Want me to elaborate? I've been running OS X full time on a G3 iMac since 10.0. The operating system has never crashed. I use the machine fairly heavily, for browsing and email, but also for publishing work with the Adobe products and for Java programming. I spend a lot of time in front of it, pounding away. It has never crashed, in any sense of the word. It has never needed a reboot. The only times I've rebooted it were for OS upgrades and back in May when I moved. That's it. The last time I rebooted was when I installed by developer seed of Jaguar 6C106. Even the prerelease version of the OS has never crashed for me.
That, my pugnacious friend, is the only defense that matters. It does everything I need with, in my case, perfect reliability.
The next thing to try will be iPhoto, which was ridiculously slow on my 500 MHz iBook.
Oh, don't exaggerate. I also have a 500 MHz iBook, and I use iPhoto almost every day. It's fine. Maybe you don't have enough RAM. Do you have at least 256 MB? Are you swapping?
command line apps seem very much slower
Believe it or not, it's a graphics thing. Try turning off antialiasing in Terminal.app. The option is found under the application menu, in Window Settings, on the Display pane.
You must not be using Quartz Extreme. With QE, there's no difference between AA and non-AA in Terminal.app.
The default option should always be to give the user an opotunity to recover from the unexpected, the first 'ahhhh..... something weird has happened' dialog should lead the user into the recovery process and should not require the user to fully understand or even read the dialog.
Bullshit. The default option is to do what the user asked you to do. Say I tell my word processor to quit. An alert box pops up. Can't be bothered! Don't have time! I don't read it. I just slam my hand down on the "enter" key to invoke the default button, whatever it may be. Wait a minute. My program hasn't quit. I'm right back where I started, and I don't know why! Shit!
Alert boxes exist to tell a user that something exceptional has happened, or to warn them of possible consequences. (That sounds familiar. I think I'm repeating myself here, because you're not getting what I'm saying.) Alert boxes are not interactive. They don't pose questions. They merely convey information. "Hey, I know you asked me to quit, and I'm gonna do that in a second, here, but first I though you'd like to know that you're about to lose your work." The user knows that "OK" means "proceed in spite of the warning" and "Cancel" means "abort the thing I told you to do." How does the user know this? Because every alert box works that way, every time. That's the point of a human interface guideline.
'There has been an error somthing will happen'
options
[ok] [cancel]
so ok makes something happen, what does cancel do? does it roll-back whatever was requested before hand 'context'?
That's why error alerts don't have a Cancel button. Error alerts only have an OK button. In that context, "OK" means "I hear you."
'Continue closing the application even though you have unsaved changes'
[ok] [cancel]
This is poor, the user should be given the recovery option i.e. to save there changes. [ok] [cancel] gives the user no clear path to perform an operation on there unsaved changes.
You've written a shitty alert message, and you're trying to fix it with buttons. Get this, and get it good: the message is more important than the buttons. Don't try to convey information in the buttons.
It should have been something like:
"You have made changes to 'Monica Stories.' If you quit without saving the document, you will lose those changes." [OK] [Cancel]
See? An informational alert box telling the user of a consequence that he or she may not intend, and giving the user the opportunity to proceed or to abort.
I mean no disrespect, but given what I've read from you yesterday and this morning, please tell me you don't design user interfaces for a living.
Terrible idea. The only point of saving is to retrieve. You can't retrieve a file unless you know where it was, or what name it was given, or something. If the computer automatically stashes my files away in obscure places on my computer, because it found room to do it there, how am I supposed to go back and find them months or years later? I have files on my computer that date back to my college days. I don't need them often, but when I do, I know just where they are, because I put the there. If I let the computer manage them for me, I'd never be able to find them again.
Terrible idea. You need to think about the human factors before you make these kinds of suggestions.
Actually, you've kinda got it backwards. My company is fairly small-- a couple dozen people spread across three continents in lots of tiny offices-- but we're divided about 50/50 between Mac and Windows users. This used to cause a problem, because the Windows guys insisted on sending out Word and other MS Office documents as email attachments and so on.
We recently bit down hard and bought about 10 copies of MS Office v. X. Now our Mac guys have perfect (at least so far, touch wood) interoperability with our Windows guys. And because we're all using OS X, we also enjoy a much greater degree of reliability.
So, in my opinion, Mac OS X with Office v. X (when it's needed) is a perfect user-friendly dream. It was a fairly expensive one, though.