Does anyone have a suggestion for a good Win16 or Win32s-compatible browser? Don't suggest Mosaic -- I have it running on WinXP and every time I load a website it crashes. I know of Netscape 4.0x and Opera 3.62.
Fun times, eh? Sounds like you've found pretty much every browser that's available for that antiquated environment. It's really too bad 16-bit Windows and the classic Mac OS have both been abandoned by modern browser developers. They would still both be perfectly good as a base to run a web browser on a lot of older hardware. That's all a lot of households really need these days. Some simple document processing and "the web".
But browsers are advancing and leaving those old operating systems behind, so we have to move on to Windows 95/98 or the few Linux distros that are actually aimed at running on older low-memory systems. Even Firefox, the beacon of the open source world, declared Win95/98 obsolete years ago and new versions only work on Win2K and later (or is it only WinXP and later now?)
It's sad, really. A lot of older Macs especially are capable of supporting a decent amount of RAM (128, 256, 512, even 1GB) and are still in good working condition but aren't compatible with any version of OS X, even with that third-party application that enables you to install OS X on some pre-OS X Macs. So, no modern web browser for you. Even if you can live without things like Flash the general web just doesn't work very well with older browsers anymore. We're finally leaving the era of tables-based pages and entering the thick of the CSS-based era, which makes the web really ugly on browsers that don't understand CSS stylesheets. Technically it "works" but it's not pretty.
So millions of functional older machines are now only good for running old games on obsolete operating systems in this totally web-oriented world. What a waste of what is often perfectly good hardware that will usually last several more years or even longer. Just the kind of thing I used to naively expect the open source world would keep from happening. Funny how few free software developers even give a crap about the previous generation of hardware much less the hardware ten generations back.
I'm being dead serious: Can you show me some examples of macroscopic animals that aren't symmetric in some way? I'm curious, I've never heard of any.
Fiddler crabs? But they're only partially asymmetrical. Don't know of any others. But 550 million years ago there were some pretty bizarre lifeforms living in the ocean where it was probably a lot easier to be asymmetrical and survive.
Once animals needed to swim, walk and fly in any specific direction bilateral symmetry would have been a significant advantage over anything else. Most animals with radial symmetry don't move very quickly even in the water. On land radial symmetry would be very difficult to use as efficiently as bilateral forms. Forget about flying with a radially symmetric form unless you're a giant helium-filled gasbag. So I don't think it was mere chance that we aren't asymmetrical as the other poster said. Competition among lifeforms basically rules out the survival of asymmetric forms over time where speed and efficiency of directional movement is a survival trait.
My thoughts exactly. The impressions of the arms are so evenly spaced that I would suspect they were joined together by some kind of membrane that was probably used for swimming propulsion. When was the last time you saw a fossil of any animal with thin extremities where all the appendages were laid out so neat and orderly?
On the other hand I once saw something very similar in a tank at a small museum somewhere in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It too had several spiraling arms around its base and a body about half an inch high. No membrane between the arms. So, it's possible.
The issue you're talking about with the keyboard in OS X has an answer, mostly. I had the same kind of annoyance because I do usually navigate web forms and dialog boxes with the keyboard. Check the Keyboard & Mouse preferences, at the bottom of the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. I try to remember to change that to "All controls" on every Mac I touch. That was also one of my main annoyances with the Mac in general especially browsers, but everything works pretty well now. With dialog boxes "return" activates the blue button and "space" activates the button with the light blue ring around it, and you can tab the ring around to each button in sequence. Just like the almost invisible highlight line in Windows dialogs.
One less thing for you to miss the hell out of.
Trust me with the two-finger scrolling on the trackpad, it works very well. I'm so spoiled now I get annoyed if I have to use any other kind of laptop for very long.
The Cmd+Shift+? shortcut was not about efficiency but the fact that it's another intuitive shortcut that's easy to remember. Question mark = answers, instead of F1 = answers.
Video codecs are definitely a bit of a sticking point with Macs, but a plugin called Perian somehow brings support for most types of video to QuickTime (so it also works in Front Row), and VLC will play almost anything else. So I'm pretty good in that area now too, finally.
The new Macs definitely run Windows pretty well either via Boot Camp or VMware Fusion which keeps improving by leaps and bounds. I don't recommend Parallels, it seems to be less stable. You can max out the RAM to 4GB for less than $80 these days from places like MacSales.com. Support for 3D video acceleration keeps advancing even in the virtual machine software so even some gaming doesn't need a reboot into Boot Camp. Not a big gamer myself.
Let's be fair here, Windows applications still cling to a lot of arbitrary stuff like F3 for Find because Microsoft did such a poor job establishing good standardized keyboard commands from the beginning. There are only a certain number of keys on the keyboard and I think Apple has done a very good job making intuitive assignments to the primary Cmd+Key combos.
Yes, the print screen commands place a file on the desktop automatically named Picture 1 (2, 3, etc.) Currently Leopard produces PNG files although that is configurable with several different third party utilities that let you access all kinds of hidden preferences in OS X. It can produce PDF or JPEG or other formats just as easily. I think PNG is a good choice now that it's fairly common and works in all browsers and image viewers. No compression artifacts on details like text, unlike JPEG. The PNGs can be converted easily in Preview back and forth between different formats like PDF, JPEG, TIFF, etc. Preview can also do simple stuff like cropping, rotating, resizing.
In any case there is no need to be opening any kind of image editing application to make screenshots on OS X. Apparently that's part of the process in Windows because it captures to the clipboard? If so, what a pain, especially for those who don't know how to use an image editor. People like that usually end up pasting the image into Word, if they can even figure out something is in the clipboard. No, seriously, most computer illiterates use Word to store and email clipboard images. They just don't know any better. If they know about Paint they usually end up saving the image as a huge bitmap file with 256 colors. Super not-helpful. The knowledge it takes to efficiently work with image files on a computer is not something most computer users have quick access to.
--------- Touch typing. See, this is where we probably differ the most. It took me a long time but I finally became a decent touch typist (long ago, now) and so I really appreciate being able to get to most of my keyboard shortcuts without having to shift my hand (at least my left hand) away from the home keys position. I also appreciate not having to take my eyes off the screen most of the time when I'm making things happen.
So it's not just a matter of having one key combination being easier than another but the combination of left hand on keyboard right hand on cursor keys or mouse is often a very powerful one-two punch that can let me run through a whole mess of text editing or cutting and pasting and repeated task switching at a much faster (and smoother) pace than I could ever do with Windows. It goes without saying that I appreciate not needing to use two hands except in rare cases to make a keyboard shortcut happen. Because of the awkwardness of the Ctrl key I did often have to use my other hand with Windows keyboard shortcuts. That meant taking my right hand off the mouse or cursor keys or home position. Every one of those actions, for me, interrupts my workflow.
But again that's just me.
I don't find Home/End difficult to get to, they just don't fit well into my touch-typing style and I'd have to practice them a lot more to reliably use them without looking, even on a standard desktop keyboard. Forget most laptop keyboards. And looking away from the screen interrupts my workflow. So does the jumping from word to word. That has nothing to do with OS X, I've just never liked my cursor jumping around in semi-random increments. Something about the way my brain works. But, I'm going to try and work it in from now on and see how it goes. I find that I can access the Option key almost as easily as the Cmd key just by stretching my thumb over to the left a bit more. Works pretty well on the new Apple ultra-thin keyboards with the flat keys.
I don't see how you can say that the Option key shortcut is ambiguous. It's simply a whole different set of keyboard shortcuts. You can accuse an action key of being ambiguous, not the modifier key. That doesn't make much sense to me. Cmd vs. Option is lik
It should have occurred to me that the accented character wasn't showing up correctly because of the translation to HTML. For local applications it still applies.
One thing I forgot to point out is that I really enjoy for the first time in my life being able to use the same shortcut keys in ALL applications including the Terminal. Linux is a total waste of my time in that respect. Every window manager and GUI toolkit has different default keyboard shortcuts. Very little progress is being made to consolidate and standardize shortcuts between all the different Unixy software. I tried to make an Alt-key based set of shortcuts for KDE but then of course it wouldn't work in GNOME apps or Tcl/TK apps and so forth. Windows in comparison isn't too bad.
Yeah, a lot of the keyboard shortcuts are the same in Windows, but there are far more multi-key combinations. The simple shortcuts all use the Control key and I could never really get used to needing to twist my pinky finger around to activate it. With the Mac way my fingers almost never need to leave the home keys. The BeOS used almost identical keys to the Mac and they used the Alt key instead of the Control key as the primary modifier. Once I started using a few shortcuts I was hooked. It's so much smoother and quicker. Of course it helps to actually be a touch typist.
I brought up the screenshot commands because that's one thing I always try to get my clients to use when they see a confusing error message. I know Windows can take screenshots but I still find the process much more fluid in OS X. You can hit Cmd+Shift+4, Space with one hand easily since the pinky is already trained to activate the shift key. Click on a window, Show Desktop, start typing P-I-C, grab the file and Cmd+Tab into an open email window, send the email. There's just something about the process that seems much easier than taking a screenshot in Windows.
OK, I'll give you the Ctrl+Home and End, but the Mac is still smarter when you're using the arrow keys and get to the first or last line of a document. If you get to the last line and hit down again, the cursor moves to the end of the line, where you can hit return and go on with editing the document. Windows just sits there like a lump and leaves the cursor at the same position, usually somewhere in the middle of the line. So you have to keep going for the Home and End keys to actually get to the end and continue editing. Not helpful. Doesn't seem like much but after you have to do it a few dozen times it gets really annoying. Definitely meets my definition of fiddle-farting.
This concept also applies... (Just now I hit Cmd+Left to go to the beginning of the line, made it into a new paragraph, and hit Down once to jump back to the end of the line and continue typing. Pure reflex action and very fast. In Windows I would have had to find the Home key on my laptop keyboard, made the paragraph and then find the End key. Those keys are not reflex actions for me like the cursor keys, so I have to actually look at the keyboard. Usually I just use the mouse instead.)
As I was saying, this concept also applies to any single-line text entry field in any application in OS X. Like the location and search fields here in Firefox. Say you have a previous search sitting in the search field and you want to re-use it but add a couple more words. No, even better example: Say you just searched for something using multiple words but you really wanted to search for that exact phrase, so you want to put quotes in front and behind the search text and do another search. Hit Cmd+K or Cmd+L,Tab. The search text will be highlighted. Hit Up, type a quote, hit Down, type another quote, hit enter. Also works in any one-line text field on any web page. Or when renaming a file in the Finder.
In Windows you will again either be using the mouse or looking for the Home and End keys, or holding down an arrow key to get to the other end. The Home/End keys are always in a different place on laptop keyboards but the cursor keys are always easy to fi
It actually took me a couple of years and a couple of revisions of OS X to really feel like things were getting smooth. I wasn't saying that it's beyond rational analysis, I meant that it's more difficult to understand the interface if you're always over-thinking it, which is what people who come from Windows tend to do. The ones who don't have assumptions about the way it works pick things up much faster.
If you like the vertical, always visible taskbar you can do the same thing with the Dock. I've never liked doing that with either Windows or OS X.
Common keyboard commands all use the Command key, which like the Alt key (and unlike the Control key) on a PC is easy to reach by simply shifting the thumb to the left off the space bar. No hand contortions or two-handed combos are usually required. Most are extremely intuitive and easy to guess and remember. Here are the ones I use most often, going down the keyboard row by row.
Cmd+backtick = cycle documents/windows Cmd+Delete = Move to Trash in Finder Cmd+Tab = Switch apps Cmd+Q = Quit Cmd+W = close Window Cmd+E = Eject device Cmd+R = Reload or Replace Cmd+T = new Tab (Firefox) Cmd+I = get Info Cmd+O = Open a file from Finder (return renames) Cmd+P = Print
Cmd+A = select All Cmd+S = Save Cmd+D = Duplicate in Finder Cmd+F = Find Cmd+G = find aGain (Cmd+Shift+G to find aGain in reverse) Cmd+H = Hide application (more useful than minimizing IMO) Cmd+K = Enter search field (Firefox) or connect to server (Finder) Cmd+L = Enter location field (Firefox)
Cmd+Z = Undo (Cmd+Shift+Z to Redo) Cmd+X = Cut Cmd+C = Copy Cmd+V = Paste (I use these three constantly. Much faster than the edit menu.) Cmd+B = Bold Cmd+N = New window (Cmd+Shift+N for new folder in Finder)
Windows still has no shortcut for "new folder". That just blows me away. You have to wait for that infernally slow context menu to pop up every... single... time you want to make a new folder.
Cmd+M = Minimize window (I don't minimize very often because it takes up space in the Dock and there is no way to deminimize without the mouse. I use "Hide application" instead. It's beautiful. But it does hide the whole application. See above.)
There are a ton of other shortcuts with additional keys involved. One that I recommend memorizing is Cmd+Shift+4. It lets you take a picture of any rectangle or window on the screen. Use the space bar to toggle between the two modes. Cmd+Shift+3 does the whole screen.
Cmd+Space = Spotlight (Start typing D-I-C-T and just hit enter when you see the Dictionary app selected. Start typing your word, hit enter when it's highlighted. Cmd+Q to exit Dictionary app. Five seconds.)
Actually there is even a faster way. Type something like "big time" directly into Spotlight and the Dictionary app definition will show up right there in Spotlight.
The foreign language input menu might want the Cmd+Space shortcut but that can be easily changed in the Keyboard & Mouse preferences.
If you're on Leopard don't forget that the space bar activates Quick Look if you have a file selected in the Finder. I'm using that all the time now rather than opening a separate application every time I want to see what a file looks like. Selecting multiple files will give you the option of a slide show or index sheet view.
Then there's the cursor navigation commands. Cmd+Home goes not just to the first line but puts
Why on earth can't they stick a gigabit ethernet port on it? That alone stops me buying it.
And no, the silly "spend an extra wadge of cash on this base thing to sit it on" is not a good solution.
Again, you can buy the next least expensive device that comes with a gigabit Ethernet port, the ReadyNAS NV+. It's only $1,000 compared to the USB Drobo + DroboShare which together costs $550, or $700 if you get the new FireWire Drobo. The DroboShare also runs Linux and will supposedly have the ability to run applications like BitTorrent soon. I think the "silly" DroboShare "base thing" is priced just about right for what it can do. It's basically a small file server that needs no configuration and costs only $199. I don't think you can find or create anything cheaper with comparable features. It's not just some dumb Ethernet card module that should cost $49.
Looks like the Drobo Apps just became available a few days ago. Thanks for reminding me to check! Christmas comes early this year!
I don't like the OSX dock, and its lumping together of "start a new task" and "return to a previous task context"... (not to mention the hopelessness of "alt-tab to the application you're thinking of, then alt-tab (or whatever) to the window in that program) instead of Window's "alt-tab to your task"
In case anyone is interested that would be the "back-tick" (aka reverse single quote) key that you use to cycle between documents or windows within a single application in Mac OS X. It's the one with the tilde character just above the tab key on Western keyboards. It's also one of the things I love the most about the Mac interface. There is no equivalent in Windows.
I can't count the number of times over the past 20 years I've had to alt-tab half a dozen times through only a few open windows just to get back to another Word document or Firefox window. Because Windows has no concept of grouping application windows, even though it will happily group them in the taskbar once there are "too many" open windows. But they even got the taskbar grouping horribly wrong. Instead of saving me time, I'm forced to click twice every single time in order to access any open window within that application. The Mac simply brings that application to the forefront when you click on the icon on the Dock, then if your document isn't in the front you can Command+back-tick to it without leaving that application.
Oh, and you've gotta love the way, in typical Microsoft fashion, the taskbar is by default set up to actually change the way it works in mid-stream just because you opened another window in the same application. Five seconds ago there were two Word tabs on the taskbar, now I opened another document and there's only one. WTF? It's like the ribbon fiasco in Office 2007. A constantly changing interface is a pain in the ass. An interface with too many elements needs to be simplified, not stacked so you can only see a small part of it at any give time. Some people may be able to get used to that but I hate it with a passion.
The combination of Command+tab and Command+back-tick is a beautiful thing. I find it a very helpful way of functionally grouping and accessing all the windows I have open. If you have six applications running with six windows in each application, Windows treats it like 36 separate windows that must be alt-tabbed between. Mac OS X treats it like six applications to Command+tab between, and six windows/documents to Command+back-tick between.
I find that usually one is either staying within a single application or leaving the same windows in the forefront in each application and just Command+tabbing between a few applications. Seems to really simplify the whole interface for me. I always know that if I switch back to Firefox all my Firefox windows will be there. In Windows I often just give up and use the mouse, clicking on six identical icons on the taskbar trying to figure out which one I want.
It's only on the Mac where I really get down and dirty with the keyboard because the Mac shortcuts are actually useful enough to be a significant time saver. I don't even access the Dock that often, I just hide it to get more screen space. Ain't that a hoot? Yes, I consider Windows to be the operating system that was designed mainly for people who only know how to use the mouse. Their keyboard shortcuts suck big time.
(Wow, I just learned that "big time" is not a compound word. I looked it up in about five seconds using the Spotlight search tool to launch the dictionary application that's included with Mac OS X. Opened the app, looked it up, closed the app and was right back here literally within five seconds and without touching my mouse.)
Most of the problems I had moving from Windows to Mac were because I had a difficult time letting go of the Windows way of doing things. Once I was able to do that I found that the Mac interface is almost always much more intuitive. You don't really "learn" or "figure out" the Mac interface, you just use it. But you first
Seriously? The Drobo is the most economical form of protected storage I've ever found. Especially the previous generation USB-only model, it's being sold for just $349 most places. One terabyte drives are down to about $135 each now. Four drives gives you 2.7TB of actual protected storage. Configure the Drobo as a 16TB volume and you can just keep upgrading the drives over the next few years as the prices come down on 1.5TB and 2TB drives. Pull the old drive, put the new one in. Wait for the light to go green and repeat. Simple.
The next closest thing to the Drobo in price and function is the ReadyNAS NV+ which is still almost $1,000 (with no drives!) and still just uses standard RAID levels, whereas I think the Drobo has something more like a ZFS filesystem and should be less likely to puke and lose the entire array. I can't say that for sure, but they do say that you can pull out your drives and place them in a different Drobo, or even rearrange the drives in a different order and it will still work. That kind of adaptability is a good sign, I think.
So, for the price and what it does, I would never complain about the Drobo being expensive. And I would seriously recommend it to anyone who needs to store up to 2.7TB of data semi-safely. It's really the cheapest way at the moment. I'm sure it's not totally fail-proof but it sure beats a bunch of individual drives holding non-backed-up data.
There is no such thing as a USB FireWire adapter and there never will be nor would there be any point to making one due to the fact that its performance would be horrible even if it were possible to make one, which it isn't.
Hence the irritation that they've created a MacBook which can never have FireWire in any way.
This is NOT the same as being able to get a USB floppy adapter or USB optical drive or USB Ethernet adapter. There is no way to add FireWire without an ExpressCard slot which the MacBook has never had.
Hence the rage. We are being forced to choose between spending more on a MacBook Pro or abandoning Apple entirely in order to keep using our perfectly good FireWire equipment that is still being manufactured this very minute. Yes, that is a difficult choice for many of us, thank you very much.
People were "annoyed" when they dropped the floppy drive. The words "outraged", "incensed", "shocked" and "confused" apply much better to the current situation.
I would also suggest that "hundreds of thousands" would get you much closer to the number of users who are pissed about this. After all, the only people you see online are the ones who already know (it was just announced on Tuesday) that the new MacBook doesn't have FireWire and have the time and energy to be posting about it online. As the news spreads they are going to come pouring out of the woodwork in droves.
As for your question, yes, it is hard to decide between shelling out $700 more or abandoning the platform we love to use every day. It's a decision we never expected to be forced to make.
If you don't care, why did you bother to post? Seriously. I am always dumbfounded by comments like yours. Good for you that you've never used it. Why should I care? Why do you take the time to open your mouth if you don't care?
A lot of people have also never used the monitor-out port on MacBooks. Should they remove that as well? It would make the MacBook absolutely useless for another large group of people, but hey, as long as you're not part of that group either, who cares?
I'm sure a lot of people never use the Ethernet port anymore either. They should probably remove that too. Anyone who complains is obviously just a "whiner".
Optical drive? Everything is downloadable these days, right? So they don't need that either. Don't listen to all that whining over there, those people don't matter because they're not me.
Not that I expect you to actually get the point here...
Christ I can't understand how idiots like this ever get a single "Insightful" moderation.
Cameras are not the only devices that require FireWire. From audio hardware to hard drives, there are millions of FireWire devices still in production this very minute. I would wager that better than 9 out of 10 of the angry people posting to forums are posting angrily because they own and use FireWire hardware. I know, crazy concept, but it's far more likely than five people standing around whining for no reason.
Guess what else? Every Mac with a FireWire port is also a FireWire device due to the fact that you can boot every FireWire Mac into what is called Target Disk Mode, where it acts like a FireWire hard drive enclosure. Many Mac users including myself have used this feature many times to do amazing things like easily migrating user accounts or cloning whole systems from one Mac to another. Or rescuing data from a Mac that won't boot, or upgrading a Mac with no DVD drive using the DVD drive of another Mac. I could go on all day with the amazingly helpful ways you can use this feature that now doesn't exist on the current MacBook.
The white MacBook is the previous generation plastic case model without the improved graphics, case and screen. Furthermore it will no doubt completely disappear at the next hardware revision. They are just getting rid of inventory. Every idiot who continues to point at the white MacBook like it solves the issue is an idiot.
I already have a white MacBook and wanted to upgrade to the aluminum MacBook but I need FireWire so the new MacBook might as well be a doorstop. I am left with two choices: Spend another $700 to get the MacBook Pro, or buy a PC. I don't particularly like Windows or Linux which is why I have a Mac in the first place. Hence the raging. We feel appropriately that we are getting screwed over.
The arrogance and ignorance of people like you is just mind boggling. FireWire has a purpose, it has no viable replacement, and it is most certainly being used on a daily basis by a large number of people who just happen to own or want to buy a MacBook.
Still ExpressCard/34, which is useless for many things, particularly CompactFlash readers used by pro photographers.
Huge black border around the screen, which is wasted space.
Yet another video adapter. We've got a BIN full of these things for when people need to use a projector. Here's another one, for absolutely no particular good reason.
Security slot in FRONT of the side-mounted DVD drive. Great. So if you want to lock your laptop up, you've got this big cable blocking the drive, and if you eject a CD, it'll eject into the cable. And probably break the drive. Why couldn't it go in the corner?
1. There are ExpressCard/34 readers for CompactFlash, and FireWire 400/800 CompactFlash readers which work great. But yes, it is annoying that they can't seem to manage to fit an ExpressCard/54 slot in the same space.
2. There's always a bezel around an LCD screen. Looks to me to be the same width as the previous MacBook.
3. I too was annoyed to find out about the new video adapter. However there are apparently good reasons to switch. It's an open standard that has backing from multiple manufacturers, so it's not nearly as stupid as the old proprietary ADC connection that made a couple of generations of perfectly good Apple monitors useless without a $150 power adapter. What makes this more annoying than it should be is the fact that even with the MacBook Pro the video adapters are ALL optional additional expenses.
4. Don't you think maybe they thought of that and designed the case specifically so that someone couldn't just walk up to your locked computer and eject whatever is in your optical drive and walk off with it? I doubt very much that it will break the drive, it will just stop and go back inside. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a switch inside that would keep the drive from even attempting to eject the disk if the lock is installed. They also designed the bottom of the case so that you can't open the battery/HDD door and walk off with the hard drive or battery when the lock slot is in use. Pretty damn thoughtful of them to find a way to protect all the removable parts of your computer in one shot.
Your other points are good. As far as glossy screens goes, I thought I would hate them too, but after a year of working on a glossy MacBook I've never even noticed it, whereas I once had an office that was much too brightly lit from a sunny window and could barely see anything on my matte desktop LCD for half the day every day. I'm sure for those who really can't stand the glossy display there will be some cheap matte screen overlays on the market soon.
Or you could just spray the screen with a light coating of matte clear-coat like the kind used to seal inkjet prints. I'd recommend Krylon UV Resistant Clear Acrylic, it's non-yellowing and water- and smudge-resistant. Satin finish would probably turn out quite nice. Since the screen is covered by a glass plate now like the current iMacs, I believe this would actually be a feasible idea and wouldn't harm the computer at all.
I find the new designs absolutely beautiful myself. The only thing I've been disappointed about is the lack of FireWire in the MacBook. This is the first Mac besides the toy MacBook Air that lacks FireWire. It boggles my mind how a decision like that ever got off the starting block, no less made it into production. There are a lot of really angry people in the forums right now talking about that, I think more so than the lack of matte screen options.
Which illustrates my point. As soon as the barrier between lawful and unlawful behavior is no longer accepted as just, a determination of "fair game" for one act spreads to circumstantially related acts.
It goes from "I'll get you," to "and your little dog, too."
The vast majority of DSLR's only have 12 bits per channel in raw mode to begin with, and certainly only 8 bits in jpeg. Get a grip.
Dear ignorant person (and everyone who reads your post and thinks you have a point):
First off, some cameras now have 14-bit data coming from the sensor and within a few years I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing the really high-end cameras with 16-bit color depth in their RAW files, straight from the sensor.
But, much more importantly, if you edit images in 8-bit mode you will be throwing away a ton of color information because the difference between one color and the next are too small. The color "slices" that the image is composed of are too few. If you are not extremely careful you end up with problems like posterization, i.e. a consolidation of the range of colors into a smaller range of colors.
This is most often seen in areas like blue sky where you'll see an obvious line between different shades of blue, which looks simply awful and is totally unacceptable to anyone who cares about their images looking good, not just professional photographers. It can also happen quite easily with skin tones of course. You need the ultra-fine gradation of color in skin tones in order for the image to look natural.
If you however convert that 8-bit image into a 16-bit image and do all your editing in 16-bit mode you can, somewhat magically, do a ton of mucking about with levels, curves, white balance and so forth without visibly damaging the image. When all the editing is complete you can then convert it back to 8-bit and it still looks just as good.
What I'm trying to explain as clearly as possible is that you DO NOT need to start with a 16-bit image in order to get a benefit from having a 16-bit color editing mode in your image editor. It is total misinformation and ignorance to argue that nobody needs 16-bit editing just because the JPEG coming from your camera only has 8-bit color or the RAW image only has 12 or 14-bit color. Image editing is by nature destructive but it is much less destructive when you're working with a color palette that is thousands of times larger.
Of course it goes without saying that the 32-bit color space is an even better place to work because it's thousands of times larger than even the 16-bit color space. You can edit and re-edit an image hundreds of times without introducing any visible damage. But 16-bit will usually suffice.
So, get a grip yourself. On some real knowledge. The higher color depths are not just fluff, they are actually useful in the real world for a large number of people.
It absolutely amazes me how many people like yourself get modded +5, Insightful in every single discussion like this, when you're all dead wrong. It amazes me how you think you're being logical and can go to incredibly great lengths to justify the continuing elitism of "if you don't know how to build the car you have no business driving it" kind of attitudes, which is exactly what you're espousing. Did you build your own car? Do you know how every single piece of it works? Can you recreate it from scratch? If not, shut your stupid pie hole.
This idea that you have to be the world's foremost expert in a particular field in order to be allowed to open your mouth is just so unbelievably ridiculous that I can't understand how it keeps being perpetuated so strongly even on a site that is supposed to be full of relatively intelligent people.
You're all constantly using obscure corner cases to try and demonstrate that any end user who ever criticizes the work of a "coder" is an idiot and wrong in all cases simply because they don't understand the precious code. Sure, users often misunderstand what the actual issue is with a program that's not working for them, so what? The fact remains that there is an issue, and blaming the user every single time solves nothing.
The longer attitudes like this get perpetuated, the longer most open source software will remain the underdog that most non-coders won't touch with a ten foot pole because it's so baffling or aggravating to use. What all you elite coders need to come to grips with is that you are too close to the code. You understand the code too well and it blinds you to the real life usability problems. You don't realize how much your knowledge of the code warps the way you see the interface. You have to learn to forget what you know about the guts of the software and look at it with fresh eyes, like any new user does.
The real question here: If you aren't making the software for people who don't know how to code, what are you doing putting a GUI on it in the first place? That is after all the entire purpose of a GUI in most cases, is it not? To make software accessible to and usable by people who don't know how to write the code themselves?
Jeebus cripes, folks. Get over yourselves. Stick to writing command-line stuff if you don't want to respond to interface criticism or suggestions like a reasonable human being.
Oh, and stop using Firefox as if it shows how great all open source code is. It's one application that has been worked on by teams of very talented people for several years and is supported by a business. Of course it's one of the best, but 99% of the open source software world falls a few miles short of that. Face up to that fact and you'll be better for it.
I realize that every operating system is vulnerable to this "feature" by default, but according to one of the links left by another poster this vulnerability doesn't affect Mac OS X if the OpenFirmware password is set because that will also disable Firewire DMA. That information is from 2004 and obviously only applies to PowerPC Macs, but I wonder if the same holds true for all the modern EFI/Intel Mac models. Anyone have more info on that?
I don't think it has anything to do with Apple thinking you're too "stupid" to use the horizontal scroll bar. Rather, I think they've noticed that most people don't like clutter and complication in their interface, so they don't make the horizontal scroll bar appear every time you click on a subfolder alias in the sidebar. You'll find that your typical computer user almost never wants to navigate to the parent folders. I rather enjoy the nice clean appearance of a Finder window with no horizontal scroll bar when I'm working with my commonly used folders. It would be nice if they had an advanced option for people like you, but Apple's target market has always been regular folks that like a clean and simple interface. I would have to say that their ability to make clean interfaces is a large part of what has gained them such a large following.
Anyways, the Finder has plenty of other flaws. If you don't like it there are other options these days with much more advanced features, such as Path Finder and ForkLift. They have view modes that will always show you the entire path. As an advanced user you may want to try them out.
There is no Ubuntu 7.0. I'd expect them to support 8.04, Hardy. Don't you think somebody might have made a simple typo and meant Ubuntu 7.10, the currently released version that most people are using right now, Mr. Nitpicky I Can't Believe You Got Plus Five Informative? It would be teh suck if they couldn't manage to release a version of their software that didn't work with the current version of Ubuntu. Many people do not upgrade to the latest version immediately so there will still be many users of Ubuntu 7.10 for anywhere from several months to a couple of years.
I would think it would be rather difficult to support something that won't be released for another three months, and rather short-sighted to not support something that will still be in use at least a year from now. Of course, after 8.04 is released I would expect them to support that version as well.
Some of us think the black boxy design is incredibly sexy. I don't think the ugliness I see comes from the black boxy design of the outside, which isn't too bad. It's kind of nice all closed up, except for that stupid multi-colored logo on top. But when you open it up the damn thing is full of various holes, marks and different colored buttons that make it look almost like they forgot to put the final case on it. Personally when I opened the linked article the first thought that came to mind was, "How do they manage to make these things so damn ugly?!" with the next thought being that this fancy new ultra-special, ultra-light laptop looks just like every ugly ThinkPad I've seen for at least ten years. But I guess I may have been corrupted by my iBook and MacBook.
I know ThinkPads are being marketed mainly to businesses, but business users are still people, and by a large majority most people seem to appreciate cleaner looking designs. It would behoove Lenovo to come up with an alternate design to compete better against the Apple laptops that even business users are buying in droves these days. You can bet your booty there will be a ton of business "frequent flyer" and presenter types that will be buying the new MacBook Air despite all it's technical shortcomings. A large part of their reason for choosing the MacBook Air will be the sleek, uncomplicated design. I don't care how technically awesome and super-light this new ThinkPad is, there are a lot of people like me who would much rather lug around a MacBook Pro than be forced to use something so ugly. The GP post was right, it still looks like it was made in 1995. I can't see how anyone would think that's good marketing. Except for die-hard ThinkPad fans, of course.
Yes, ugly is in the eye of the beholder. But there is a reason people are buying Macs by the millions, and shockingly the software is only part of it.
I don't know where this idea comes from that FireWire is somehow going to die out sometime next week. Just because your typical pee-cee and other consumer level hardware still doesn't include a usable FireWire port doesn't mean it isn't being used and appreciated in other circles. High-end DV cameras, scanners and many other pieces of equipment that actually need reliable data transfer rates that won't use up a third of your CPU cycles all use FireWire almost exclusively. FireWire and combo USB/FireWire external drives are readily available as they have been for years.
That's all without even mentioning a certain "fruity" computer company that is well on its way to grabbing 10% of the consumer computer market sometime in 2009, if they keep growing at their current rate. Every computer they've sold in the last 8 years has had at least a FireWire 400 port. For at least half that time the higher end models have also had FireWire 800 ports, and FireWire 800 ports are even starting to appear on the lower end consumer models. These are the powered 6-pin and 9-pin ports too, none of that 4-pin i.Link crap, so external devices don't need separate power in many cases. Thus a lot of the owners of these fruity computers have come to appreciate FireWire for various reasons.
As for how it will compare to USB 3.0, I believe the new FireWire 3200 spec (3.2Gbps) was finalized a few months ago and will probably be appearing later this year in new computers and devices. The best part is that the new spec uses the same connectors as FireWire 800 so it's backwards compatible. I think they managed to increase the maximum cable length in the new spec too.
No, FireWire isn't going anywhere, and I doubt that USB 3.0 will be able to outperform the new FireWire 3200 spec despite being once again technically "faster". If they didn't somehow get rid of the CPU load issues with USB any machine attempting to get close to that theoretical 4.7Gbps transfer speed will be brought to its knees. God help you if you mix a USB 2.0 or 1.1 device in with your USB 3.0 devices on the same bus. Unless they're making it so you can use the USB 3.0 contacts independently of the USB 2.0/1.1 contacts, which I doubt very much. Mixing the old USB devices will zap the top speed down to as little as 50% of the theoretical maximum, just like USB 1.1 does to a USB 2.0 bus. I'll be impressed if they've actually found a way to fix that niggling little problem.
The two technologies really aren't direct competitors like most people think. They have different things they're each good at, and I don't think that's going to change overnight. I have to second a comment another poster made about "USB On-the-Go" devices. I got one that was supposed to let you transfer data between two USB storage devices and after trying it with several flash drives and card readers I was thoroughly unimpressed, not least of all because it was only capable of USB 1.1 speeds. It only worked about one out of four times and I'm not even sure about that. FireWire, on the other hand, has been doing hostless (i.e. "computerless") device-to-device transfers since day one, because it was designed to allow that.
When you get above the level of, "I need a port to plug in my flash drive and keyboard," FireWire has always been far superior to USB in getting the job done. It's not expiring anytime soon.
Isn't this essentially the same as port knocking? Actually, it's not as good, as you can get lucky with this. With port knocking, you have to send a secret sequence of packets (possibly one that changes with time) before the port is available for your host to connect to. And you send UDP packets, so there's no indication from the server that the machine is even powered up unless you are successful. And, of course, there's the variation where you send a single UDP packet with an encrypted payload that instructs the server to open up a port for you.
So while this is a little different, it's inferior.
You misunderstand the purpose of port hopping. Port knocking is simply a way of telling the server to open a port and let you through. Once that port is open it could be found by port scanning and attacked just like any other static open port, for as long as you keep it open. The longer you hold the port open the less effective the port knocking is security-wise. Port hopping is adding another layer of security through obscurity by moving the open port around randomly according to an algorithm governed by a shared secret, like with one-time pad encryption. Your system always knows which port to use next as long as you stay in time sync with the server.
If a port scanner happens to stumble on the open port at some point it's much less of a problem because that service won't be on that port a minute later. Any subsequent attacks on that port will simply be discarded or logged, and the same port probably wouldn't be reused for at least several hours.
This is basically the same as digital spread spectrum frequency hopping, a technique co-invented in the 1940's by actress Hedy Lamar forty years ahead of its time and meant to increase the security of things such as war-time military communications. DSS is in common use today in cell phones and household cordless phones. With phones you only have a few different frequencies to hop through so it's normally used as less of a security feature and more to keep nearby devices from interfering with each other. With TCP/UDP ports on the other hand you've got around 65,000 to choose from. So if you do a good job blocking any IPs that attempt to run fast port scans on your network it will be almost impossible in the limited amount of time to:
- scan the entire port range on the target system, - identify open ports, - identify the service on that port, - identify the operating system, - exploit the service successfully, and finally - successfully run the correct sequence of commands on the exploited system that would give the attacker full access to the system even after the next port hopping cycle begins.
Sure, it may still be technically possible, but it's a lot less likely when using this technique that any attack would ever succeed beyond the part where it crashes the service. You'd have to have an army of computers (at least 30,000 or so) all around the internet and somehow coordinate them all to probe the target network on non-overlapping random ports at the same time. Even doing one scan every few seconds they would probably overwhelm most connections and eventually be detected and blocked.
Another firewall system set between the server and the internet could be set up to block any statically open ports coming from the target server and even to disable any port hopping sequences that don't fit in the currently active port hopping scheme, thus disabling most backdoor exploits from being functional for more than at most 60 seconds or so. So the only attack that could possibly continue to work beyond the initial exploit of the service would be one that manages to discover the port hopping shared secret and become part of the active port hopping scheme. Basic security precautions like giving the shared secret file a random name and location and restricting its permissions should keep that from happening too easily. Every other type of attack just becomes practically impossible, despite being technically po
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Does anyone have a suggestion for a good Win16 or Win32s-compatible browser? Don't suggest Mosaic -- I have it running on WinXP and every time I load a website it crashes. I know of Netscape 4.0x and Opera 3.62.
Fun times, eh? Sounds like you've found pretty much every browser that's available for that antiquated environment. It's really too bad 16-bit Windows and the classic Mac OS have both been abandoned by modern browser developers. They would still both be perfectly good as a base to run a web browser on a lot of older hardware. That's all a lot of households really need these days. Some simple document processing and "the web".
But browsers are advancing and leaving those old operating systems behind, so we have to move on to Windows 95/98 or the few Linux distros that are actually aimed at running on older low-memory systems. Even Firefox, the beacon of the open source world, declared Win95/98 obsolete years ago and new versions only work on Win2K and later (or is it only WinXP and later now?)
It's sad, really. A lot of older Macs especially are capable of supporting a decent amount of RAM (128, 256, 512, even 1GB) and are still in good working condition but aren't compatible with any version of OS X, even with that third-party application that enables you to install OS X on some pre-OS X Macs. So, no modern web browser for you. Even if you can live without things like Flash the general web just doesn't work very well with older browsers anymore. We're finally leaving the era of tables-based pages and entering the thick of the CSS-based era, which makes the web really ugly on browsers that don't understand CSS stylesheets. Technically it "works" but it's not pretty.
So millions of functional older machines are now only good for running old games on obsolete operating systems in this totally web-oriented world. What a waste of what is often perfectly good hardware that will usually last several more years or even longer. Just the kind of thing I used to naively expect the open source world would keep from happening. Funny how few free software developers even give a crap about the previous generation of hardware much less the hardware ten generations back.
I'm being dead serious: Can you show me some examples of macroscopic animals that aren't symmetric in some way? I'm curious, I've never heard of any.
Fiddler crabs? But they're only partially asymmetrical. Don't know of any others. But 550 million years ago there were some pretty bizarre lifeforms living in the ocean where it was probably a lot easier to be asymmetrical and survive.
Once animals needed to swim, walk and fly in any specific direction bilateral symmetry would have been a significant advantage over anything else. Most animals with radial symmetry don't move very quickly even in the water. On land radial symmetry would be very difficult to use as efficiently as bilateral forms. Forget about flying with a radially symmetric form unless you're a giant helium-filled gasbag. So I don't think it was mere chance that we aren't asymmetrical as the other poster said. Competition among lifeforms basically rules out the survival of asymmetric forms over time where speed and efficiency of directional movement is a survival trait.
My thoughts exactly. The impressions of the arms are so evenly spaced that I would suspect they were joined together by some kind of membrane that was probably used for swimming propulsion. When was the last time you saw a fossil of any animal with thin extremities where all the appendages were laid out so neat and orderly?
On the other hand I once saw something very similar in a tank at a small museum somewhere in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It too had several spiraling arms around its base and a body about half an inch high. No membrane between the arms. So, it's possible.
The issue you're talking about with the keyboard in OS X has an answer, mostly. I had the same kind of annoyance because I do usually navigate web forms and dialog boxes with the keyboard. Check the Keyboard & Mouse preferences, at the bottom of the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. I try to remember to change that to "All controls" on every Mac I touch. That was also one of my main annoyances with the Mac in general especially browsers, but everything works pretty well now. With dialog boxes "return" activates the blue button and "space" activates the button with the light blue ring around it, and you can tab the ring around to each button in sequence. Just like the almost invisible highlight line in Windows dialogs.
One less thing for you to miss the hell out of.
Trust me with the two-finger scrolling on the trackpad, it works very well. I'm so spoiled now I get annoyed if I have to use any other kind of laptop for very long.
The Cmd+Shift+? shortcut was not about efficiency but the fact that it's another intuitive shortcut that's easy to remember. Question mark = answers, instead of F1 = answers.
Video codecs are definitely a bit of a sticking point with Macs, but a plugin called Perian somehow brings support for most types of video to QuickTime (so it also works in Front Row), and VLC will play almost anything else. So I'm pretty good in that area now too, finally.
The new Macs definitely run Windows pretty well either via Boot Camp or VMware Fusion which keeps improving by leaps and bounds. I don't recommend Parallels, it seems to be less stable. You can max out the RAM to 4GB for less than $80 these days from places like MacSales.com. Support for 3D video acceleration keeps advancing even in the virtual machine software so even some gaming doesn't need a reboot into Boot Camp. Not a big gamer myself.
Take it easy.
Let's be fair here, Windows applications still cling to a lot of arbitrary stuff like F3 for Find because Microsoft did such a poor job establishing good standardized keyboard commands from the beginning. There are only a certain number of keys on the keyboard and I think Apple has done a very good job making intuitive assignments to the primary Cmd+Key combos.
Yes, the print screen commands place a file on the desktop automatically named Picture 1 (2, 3, etc.) Currently Leopard produces PNG files although that is configurable with several different third party utilities that let you access all kinds of hidden preferences in OS X. It can produce PDF or JPEG or other formats just as easily. I think PNG is a good choice now that it's fairly common and works in all browsers and image viewers. No compression artifacts on details like text, unlike JPEG. The PNGs can be converted easily in Preview back and forth between different formats like PDF, JPEG, TIFF, etc. Preview can also do simple stuff like cropping, rotating, resizing.
In any case there is no need to be opening any kind of image editing application to make screenshots on OS X. Apparently that's part of the process in Windows because it captures to the clipboard? If so, what a pain, especially for those who don't know how to use an image editor. People like that usually end up pasting the image into Word, if they can even figure out something is in the clipboard. No, seriously, most computer illiterates use Word to store and email clipboard images. They just don't know any better. If they know about Paint they usually end up saving the image as a huge bitmap file with 256 colors. Super not-helpful. The knowledge it takes to efficiently work with image files on a computer is not something most computer users have quick access to.
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Touch typing. See, this is where we probably differ the most. It took me a long time but I finally became a decent touch typist (long ago, now) and so I really appreciate being able to get to most of my keyboard shortcuts without having to shift my hand (at least my left hand) away from the home keys position. I also appreciate not having to take my eyes off the screen most of the time when I'm making things happen.
So it's not just a matter of having one key combination being easier than another but the combination of left hand on keyboard right hand on cursor keys or mouse is often a very powerful one-two punch that can let me run through a whole mess of text editing or cutting and pasting and repeated task switching at a much faster (and smoother) pace than I could ever do with Windows. It goes without saying that I appreciate not needing to use two hands except in rare cases to make a keyboard shortcut happen. Because of the awkwardness of the Ctrl key I did often have to use my other hand with Windows keyboard shortcuts. That meant taking my right hand off the mouse or cursor keys or home position. Every one of those actions, for me, interrupts my workflow.
But again that's just me.
I don't find Home/End difficult to get to, they just don't fit well into my touch-typing style and I'd have to practice them a lot more to reliably use them without looking, even on a standard desktop keyboard. Forget most laptop keyboards. And looking away from the screen interrupts my workflow. So does the jumping from word to word. That has nothing to do with OS X, I've just never liked my cursor jumping around in semi-random increments. Something about the way my brain works. But, I'm going to try and work it in from now on and see how it goes. I find that I can access the Option key almost as easily as the Cmd key just by stretching my thumb over to the left a bit more. Works pretty well on the new Apple ultra-thin keyboards with the flat keys.
I don't see how you can say that the Option key shortcut is ambiguous. It's simply a whole different set of keyboard shortcuts. You can accuse an action key of being ambiguous, not the modifier key. That doesn't make much sense to me. Cmd vs. Option is lik
It should have occurred to me that the accented character wasn't showing up correctly because of the translation to HTML. For local applications it still applies.
One thing I forgot to point out is that I really enjoy for the first time in my life being able to use the same shortcut keys in ALL applications including the Terminal. Linux is a total waste of my time in that respect. Every window manager and GUI toolkit has different default keyboard shortcuts. Very little progress is being made to consolidate and standardize shortcuts between all the different Unixy software. I tried to make an Alt-key based set of shortcuts for KDE but then of course it wouldn't work in GNOME apps or Tcl/TK apps and so forth. Windows in comparison isn't too bad.
Yeah, a lot of the keyboard shortcuts are the same in Windows, but there are far more multi-key combinations. The simple shortcuts all use the Control key and I could never really get used to needing to twist my pinky finger around to activate it. With the Mac way my fingers almost never need to leave the home keys. The BeOS used almost identical keys to the Mac and they used the Alt key instead of the Control key as the primary modifier. Once I started using a few shortcuts I was hooked. It's so much smoother and quicker. Of course it helps to actually be a touch typist.
I brought up the screenshot commands because that's one thing I always try to get my clients to use when they see a confusing error message. I know Windows can take screenshots but I still find the process much more fluid in OS X. You can hit Cmd+Shift+4, Space with one hand easily since the pinky is already trained to activate the shift key. Click on a window, Show Desktop, start typing P-I-C, grab the file and Cmd+Tab into an open email window, send the email. There's just something about the process that seems much easier than taking a screenshot in Windows.
OK, I'll give you the Ctrl+Home and End, but the Mac is still smarter when you're using the arrow keys and get to the first or last line of a document. If you get to the last line and hit down again, the cursor moves to the end of the line, where you can hit return and go on with editing the document. Windows just sits there like a lump and leaves the cursor at the same position, usually somewhere in the middle of the line. So you have to keep going for the Home and End keys to actually get to the end and continue editing. Not helpful. Doesn't seem like much but after you have to do it a few dozen times it gets really annoying. Definitely meets my definition of fiddle-farting.
This concept also applies... (Just now I hit Cmd+Left to go to the beginning of the line, made it into a new paragraph, and hit Down once to jump back to the end of the line and continue typing. Pure reflex action and very fast. In Windows I would have had to find the Home key on my laptop keyboard, made the paragraph and then find the End key. Those keys are not reflex actions for me like the cursor keys, so I have to actually look at the keyboard. Usually I just use the mouse instead.)
As I was saying, this concept also applies to any single-line text entry field in any application in OS X. Like the location and search fields here in Firefox. Say you have a previous search sitting in the search field and you want to re-use it but add a couple more words. No, even better example: Say you just searched for something using multiple words but you really wanted to search for that exact phrase, so you want to put quotes in front and behind the search text and do another search. Hit Cmd+K or Cmd+L,Tab. The search text will be highlighted. Hit Up, type a quote, hit Down, type another quote, hit enter. Also works in any one-line text field on any web page. Or when renaming a file in the Finder.
In Windows you will again either be using the mouse or looking for the Home and End keys, or holding down an arrow key to get to the other end. The Home/End keys are always in a different place on laptop keyboards but the cursor keys are always easy to fi
It actually took me a couple of years and a couple of revisions of OS X to really feel like things were getting smooth. I wasn't saying that it's beyond rational analysis, I meant that it's more difficult to understand the interface if you're always over-thinking it, which is what people who come from Windows tend to do. The ones who don't have assumptions about the way it works pick things up much faster.
If you like the vertical, always visible taskbar you can do the same thing with the Dock. I've never liked doing that with either Windows or OS X.
You mention Exposé, so you should already know about the Show Desktop, All Windows and Application Windows commands that let you see your open windows visually. If you're really visual I would think you'd be using that a lot.
Keyboard shortcuts. I just typed the accented "e" in Exposé by pressing Option+e and then typing an e. With Windows you have to either access the Character Palette or memorize an Alt+nnn number to do stuff like that. Try Option and the other vowels or the backtick key. All the accented characters at your fingertips.
Common keyboard commands all use the Command key, which like the Alt key (and unlike the Control key) on a PC is easy to reach by simply shifting the thumb to the left off the space bar. No hand contortions or two-handed combos are usually required. Most are extremely intuitive and easy to guess and remember. Here are the ones I use most often, going down the keyboard row by row.
Cmd+backtick = cycle documents/windows
Cmd+Delete = Move to Trash in Finder
Cmd+Tab = Switch apps
Cmd+Q = Quit
Cmd+W = close Window
Cmd+E = Eject device
Cmd+R = Reload or Replace
Cmd+T = new Tab (Firefox)
Cmd+I = get Info
Cmd+O = Open a file from Finder (return renames)
Cmd+P = Print
Cmd+A = select All
Cmd+S = Save
Cmd+D = Duplicate in Finder
Cmd+F = Find
Cmd+G = find aGain (Cmd+Shift+G to find aGain in reverse)
Cmd+H = Hide application (more useful than minimizing IMO)
Cmd+K = Enter search field (Firefox) or connect to server (Finder)
Cmd+L = Enter location field (Firefox)
Cmd+Z = Undo (Cmd+Shift+Z to Redo)
Cmd+X = Cut
Cmd+C = Copy
Cmd+V = Paste (I use these three constantly. Much faster than the edit menu.)
Cmd+B = Bold
Cmd+N = New window (Cmd+Shift+N for new folder in Finder)
Windows still has no shortcut for "new folder". That just blows me away. You have to wait for that infernally slow context menu to pop up every... single... time you want to make a new folder.
Cmd+M = Minimize window (I don't minimize very often because it takes up space in the Dock and there is no way to deminimize without the mouse. I use "Hide application" instead. It's beautiful. But it does hide the whole application. See above.)
There are a ton of other shortcuts with additional keys involved. One that I recommend memorizing is Cmd+Shift+4. It lets you take a picture of any rectangle or window on the screen. Use the space bar to toggle between the two modes. Cmd+Shift+3 does the whole screen.
Cmd+Space = Spotlight (Start typing D-I-C-T and just hit enter when you see the Dictionary app selected. Start typing your word, hit enter when it's highlighted. Cmd+Q to exit Dictionary app. Five seconds.)
Actually there is even a faster way. Type something like "big time" directly into Spotlight and the Dictionary app definition will show up right there in Spotlight.
The foreign language input menu might want the Cmd+Space shortcut but that can be easily changed in the Keyboard & Mouse preferences.
If you're on Leopard don't forget that the space bar activates Quick Look if you have a file selected in the Finder. I'm using that all the time now rather than opening a separate application every time I want to see what a file looks like. Selecting multiple files will give you the option of a slide show or index sheet view.
Then there's the cursor navigation commands. Cmd+Home goes not just to the first line but puts
Why on earth can't they stick a gigabit ethernet port on it? That alone stops me buying it.
And no, the silly "spend an extra wadge of cash on this base thing to sit it on" is not a good solution.
Again, you can buy the next least expensive device that comes with a gigabit Ethernet port, the ReadyNAS NV+. It's only $1,000 compared to the USB Drobo + DroboShare which together costs $550, or $700 if you get the new FireWire Drobo. The DroboShare also runs Linux and will supposedly have the ability to run applications like BitTorrent soon. I think the "silly" DroboShare "base thing" is priced just about right for what it can do. It's basically a small file server that needs no configuration and costs only $199. I don't think you can find or create anything cheaper with comparable features. It's not just some dumb Ethernet card module that should cost $49.
Looks like the Drobo Apps just became available a few days ago. Thanks for reminding me to check! Christmas comes early this year!
Drobo Apps: http://www.drobo.com/droboapps/
I don't like the OSX dock, and its lumping together of "start a new task" and "return to a previous task context"... (not to mention the hopelessness of "alt-tab to the application you're thinking of, then alt-tab (or whatever) to the window in that program) instead of Window's "alt-tab to your task"
In case anyone is interested that would be the "back-tick" (aka reverse single quote) key that you use to cycle between documents or windows within a single application in Mac OS X. It's the one with the tilde character just above the tab key on Western keyboards. It's also one of the things I love the most about the Mac interface. There is no equivalent in Windows.
I can't count the number of times over the past 20 years I've had to alt-tab half a dozen times through only a few open windows just to get back to another Word document or Firefox window. Because Windows has no concept of grouping application windows, even though it will happily group them in the taskbar once there are "too many" open windows. But they even got the taskbar grouping horribly wrong. Instead of saving me time, I'm forced to click twice every single time in order to access any open window within that application. The Mac simply brings that application to the forefront when you click on the icon on the Dock, then if your document isn't in the front you can Command+back-tick to it without leaving that application.
Oh, and you've gotta love the way, in typical Microsoft fashion, the taskbar is by default set up to actually change the way it works in mid-stream just because you opened another window in the same application. Five seconds ago there were two Word tabs on the taskbar, now I opened another document and there's only one. WTF? It's like the ribbon fiasco in Office 2007. A constantly changing interface is a pain in the ass. An interface with too many elements needs to be simplified, not stacked so you can only see a small part of it at any give time. Some people may be able to get used to that but I hate it with a passion.
The combination of Command+tab and Command+back-tick is a beautiful thing. I find it a very helpful way of functionally grouping and accessing all the windows I have open. If you have six applications running with six windows in each application, Windows treats it like 36 separate windows that must be alt-tabbed between. Mac OS X treats it like six applications to Command+tab between, and six windows/documents to Command+back-tick between.
I find that usually one is either staying within a single application or leaving the same windows in the forefront in each application and just Command+tabbing between a few applications. Seems to really simplify the whole interface for me. I always know that if I switch back to Firefox all my Firefox windows will be there. In Windows I often just give up and use the mouse, clicking on six identical icons on the taskbar trying to figure out which one I want.
It's only on the Mac where I really get down and dirty with the keyboard because the Mac shortcuts are actually useful enough to be a significant time saver. I don't even access the Dock that often, I just hide it to get more screen space. Ain't that a hoot? Yes, I consider Windows to be the operating system that was designed mainly for people who only know how to use the mouse. Their keyboard shortcuts suck big time.
(Wow, I just learned that "big time" is not a compound word. I looked it up in about five seconds using the Spotlight search tool to launch the dictionary application that's included with Mac OS X. Opened the app, looked it up, closed the app and was right back here literally within five seconds and without touching my mouse.)
Most of the problems I had moving from Windows to Mac were because I had a difficult time letting go of the Windows way of doing things. Once I was able to do that I found that the Mac interface is almost always much more intuitive. You don't really "learn" or "figure out" the Mac interface, you just use it. But you first
I want a DROBO but those are expensive as hell.
Seriously? The Drobo is the most economical form of protected storage I've ever found. Especially the previous generation USB-only model, it's being sold for just $349 most places. One terabyte drives are down to about $135 each now. Four drives gives you 2.7TB of actual protected storage. Configure the Drobo as a 16TB volume and you can just keep upgrading the drives over the next few years as the prices come down on 1.5TB and 2TB drives. Pull the old drive, put the new one in. Wait for the light to go green and repeat. Simple.
The next closest thing to the Drobo in price and function is the ReadyNAS NV+ which is still almost $1,000 (with no drives!) and still just uses standard RAID levels, whereas I think the Drobo has something more like a ZFS filesystem and should be less likely to puke and lose the entire array. I can't say that for sure, but they do say that you can pull out your drives and place them in a different Drobo, or even rearrange the drives in a different order and it will still work. That kind of adaptability is a good sign, I think.
So, for the price and what it does, I would never complain about the Drobo being expensive. And I would seriously recommend it to anyone who needs to store up to 2.7TB of data semi-safely. It's really the cheapest way at the moment. I'm sure it's not totally fail-proof but it sure beats a bunch of individual drives holding non-backed-up data.
My dearest darling dumbass:
There is no such thing as a USB FireWire adapter and there never will be nor would there be any point to making one due to the fact that its performance would be horrible even if it were possible to make one, which it isn't.
Hence the irritation that they've created a MacBook which can never have FireWire in any way.
This is NOT the same as being able to get a USB floppy adapter or USB optical drive or USB Ethernet adapter. There is no way to add FireWire without an ExpressCard slot which the MacBook has never had.
Hence the rage. We are being forced to choose between spending more on a MacBook Pro or abandoning Apple entirely in order to keep using our perfectly good FireWire equipment that is still being manufactured this very minute. Yes, that is a difficult choice for many of us, thank you very much.
People were "annoyed" when they dropped the floppy drive. The words "outraged", "incensed", "shocked" and "confused" apply much better to the current situation.
I would also suggest that "hundreds of thousands" would get you much closer to the number of users who are pissed about this. After all, the only people you see online are the ones who already know (it was just announced on Tuesday) that the new MacBook doesn't have FireWire and have the time and energy to be posting about it online. As the news spreads they are going to come pouring out of the woodwork in droves.
As for your question, yes, it is hard to decide between shelling out $700 more or abandoning the platform we love to use every day. It's a decision we never expected to be forced to make.
If you don't care, why did you bother to post? Seriously. I am always dumbfounded by comments like yours. Good for you that you've never used it. Why should I care? Why do you take the time to open your mouth if you don't care?
A lot of people have also never used the monitor-out port on MacBooks. Should they remove that as well? It would make the MacBook absolutely useless for another large group of people, but hey, as long as you're not part of that group either, who cares?
I'm sure a lot of people never use the Ethernet port anymore either. They should probably remove that too. Anyone who complains is obviously just a "whiner".
Optical drive? Everything is downloadable these days, right? So they don't need that either. Don't listen to all that whining over there, those people don't matter because they're not me.
Not that I expect you to actually get the point here...
Christ I can't understand how idiots like this ever get a single "Insightful" moderation.
Cameras are not the only devices that require FireWire. From audio hardware to hard drives, there are millions of FireWire devices still in production this very minute. I would wager that better than 9 out of 10 of the angry people posting to forums are posting angrily because they own and use FireWire hardware. I know, crazy concept, but it's far more likely than five people standing around whining for no reason.
Guess what else? Every Mac with a FireWire port is also a FireWire device due to the fact that you can boot every FireWire Mac into what is called Target Disk Mode, where it acts like a FireWire hard drive enclosure. Many Mac users including myself have used this feature many times to do amazing things like easily migrating user accounts or cloning whole systems from one Mac to another. Or rescuing data from a Mac that won't boot, or upgrading a Mac with no DVD drive using the DVD drive of another Mac. I could go on all day with the amazingly helpful ways you can use this feature that now doesn't exist on the current MacBook.
The white MacBook is the previous generation plastic case model without the improved graphics, case and screen. Furthermore it will no doubt completely disappear at the next hardware revision. They are just getting rid of inventory. Every idiot who continues to point at the white MacBook like it solves the issue is an idiot.
I already have a white MacBook and wanted to upgrade to the aluminum MacBook but I need FireWire so the new MacBook might as well be a doorstop. I am left with two choices: Spend another $700 to get the MacBook Pro, or buy a PC. I don't particularly like Windows or Linux which is why I have a Mac in the first place. Hence the raging. We feel appropriately that we are getting screwed over.
The arrogance and ignorance of people like you is just mind boggling. FireWire has a purpose, it has no viable replacement, and it is most certainly being used on a daily basis by a large number of people who just happen to own or want to buy a MacBook.
Failtastic in so many ways:
1. There are ExpressCard/34 readers for CompactFlash, and FireWire 400/800 CompactFlash readers which work great. But yes, it is annoying that they can't seem to manage to fit an ExpressCard/54 slot in the same space.
2. There's always a bezel around an LCD screen. Looks to me to be the same width as the previous MacBook.
3. I too was annoyed to find out about the new video adapter. However there are apparently good reasons to switch. It's an open standard that has backing from multiple manufacturers, so it's not nearly as stupid as the old proprietary ADC connection that made a couple of generations of perfectly good Apple monitors useless without a $150 power adapter. What makes this more annoying than it should be is the fact that even with the MacBook Pro the video adapters are ALL optional additional expenses.
4. Don't you think maybe they thought of that and designed the case specifically so that someone couldn't just walk up to your locked computer and eject whatever is in your optical drive and walk off with it? I doubt very much that it will break the drive, it will just stop and go back inside. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a switch inside that would keep the drive from even attempting to eject the disk if the lock is installed. They also designed the bottom of the case so that you can't open the battery/HDD door and walk off with the hard drive or battery when the lock slot is in use. Pretty damn thoughtful of them to find a way to protect all the removable parts of your computer in one shot.
Your other points are good. As far as glossy screens goes, I thought I would hate them too, but after a year of working on a glossy MacBook I've never even noticed it, whereas I once had an office that was much too brightly lit from a sunny window and could barely see anything on my matte desktop LCD for half the day every day. I'm sure for those who really can't stand the glossy display there will be some cheap matte screen overlays on the market soon.
Or you could just spray the screen with a light coating of matte clear-coat like the kind used to seal inkjet prints. I'd recommend Krylon UV Resistant Clear Acrylic, it's non-yellowing and water- and smudge-resistant. Satin finish would probably turn out quite nice. Since the screen is covered by a glass plate now like the current iMacs, I believe this would actually be a feasible idea and wouldn't harm the computer at all.
I find the new designs absolutely beautiful myself. The only thing I've been disappointed about is the lack of FireWire in the MacBook. This is the first Mac besides the toy MacBook Air that lacks FireWire. It boggles my mind how a decision like that ever got off the starting block, no less made it into production. There are a lot of really angry people in the forums right now talking about that, I think more so than the lack of matte screen options.
Which illustrates my point. As soon as the barrier between lawful and unlawful behavior is no longer accepted as just, a determination of "fair game" for one act spreads to circumstantially related acts.
It goes from "I'll get you," to "and your little dog, too."
You forgot "my pretty". That's the best part!
The vast majority of DSLR's only have 12 bits per channel in raw mode to begin with, and certainly only 8 bits in jpeg. Get a grip.
Dear ignorant person (and everyone who reads your post and thinks you have a point):
First off, some cameras now have 14-bit data coming from the sensor and within a few years I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing the really high-end cameras with 16-bit color depth in their RAW files, straight from the sensor.
But, much more importantly, if you edit images in 8-bit mode you will be throwing away a ton of color information because the difference between one color and the next are too small. The color "slices" that the image is composed of are too few. If you are not extremely careful you end up with problems like posterization, i.e. a consolidation of the range of colors into a smaller range of colors.
This is most often seen in areas like blue sky where you'll see an obvious line between different shades of blue, which looks simply awful and is totally unacceptable to anyone who cares about their images looking good, not just professional photographers. It can also happen quite easily with skin tones of course. You need the ultra-fine gradation of color in skin tones in order for the image to look natural.
If you however convert that 8-bit image into a 16-bit image and do all your editing in 16-bit mode you can, somewhat magically, do a ton of mucking about with levels, curves, white balance and so forth without visibly damaging the image. When all the editing is complete you can then convert it back to 8-bit and it still looks just as good.
What I'm trying to explain as clearly as possible is that you DO NOT need to start with a 16-bit image in order to get a benefit from having a 16-bit color editing mode in your image editor. It is total misinformation and ignorance to argue that nobody needs 16-bit editing just because the JPEG coming from your camera only has 8-bit color or the RAW image only has 12 or 14-bit color. Image editing is by nature destructive but it is much less destructive when you're working with a color palette that is thousands of times larger.
Of course it goes without saying that the 32-bit color space is an even better place to work because it's thousands of times larger than even the 16-bit color space. You can edit and re-edit an image hundreds of times without introducing any visible damage. But 16-bit will usually suffice.
So, get a grip yourself. On some real knowledge. The higher color depths are not just fluff, they are actually useful in the real world for a large number of people.
It absolutely amazes me how many people like yourself get modded +5, Insightful in every single discussion like this, when you're all dead wrong. It amazes me how you think you're being logical and can go to incredibly great lengths to justify the continuing elitism of "if you don't know how to build the car you have no business driving it" kind of attitudes, which is exactly what you're espousing. Did you build your own car? Do you know how every single piece of it works? Can you recreate it from scratch? If not, shut your stupid pie hole.
This idea that you have to be the world's foremost expert in a particular field in order to be allowed to open your mouth is just so unbelievably ridiculous that I can't understand how it keeps being perpetuated so strongly even on a site that is supposed to be full of relatively intelligent people.
You're all constantly using obscure corner cases to try and demonstrate that any end user who ever criticizes the work of a "coder" is an idiot and wrong in all cases simply because they don't understand the precious code. Sure, users often misunderstand what the actual issue is with a program that's not working for them, so what? The fact remains that there is an issue, and blaming the user every single time solves nothing.
The longer attitudes like this get perpetuated, the longer most open source software will remain the underdog that most non-coders won't touch with a ten foot pole because it's so baffling or aggravating to use. What all you elite coders need to come to grips with is that you are too close to the code. You understand the code too well and it blinds you to the real life usability problems. You don't realize how much your knowledge of the code warps the way you see the interface. You have to learn to forget what you know about the guts of the software and look at it with fresh eyes, like any new user does.
The real question here: If you aren't making the software for people who don't know how to code, what are you doing putting a GUI on it in the first place? That is after all the entire purpose of a GUI in most cases, is it not? To make software accessible to and usable by people who don't know how to write the code themselves?
Jeebus cripes, folks. Get over yourselves. Stick to writing command-line stuff if you don't want to respond to interface criticism or suggestions like a reasonable human being.
Oh, and stop using Firefox as if it shows how great all open source code is. It's one application that has been worked on by teams of very talented people for several years and is supported by a business. Of course it's one of the best, but 99% of the open source software world falls a few miles short of that. Face up to that fact and you'll be better for it.
I realize that every operating system is vulnerable to this "feature" by default, but according to one of the links left by another poster this vulnerability doesn't affect Mac OS X if the OpenFirmware password is set because that will also disable Firewire DMA. That information is from 2004 and obviously only applies to PowerPC Macs, but I wonder if the same holds true for all the modern EFI/Intel Mac models. Anyone have more info on that?
Here's the link I'm referring to: http://rentzsch.com/macosx/securingFirewire
Hey! That the combination on my luggage! That's the combination an idiot would have on his luggage.
No, seriously.
I don't think it has anything to do with Apple thinking you're too "stupid" to use the horizontal scroll bar. Rather, I think they've noticed that most people don't like clutter and complication in their interface, so they don't make the horizontal scroll bar appear every time you click on a subfolder alias in the sidebar. You'll find that your typical computer user almost never wants to navigate to the parent folders. I rather enjoy the nice clean appearance of a Finder window with no horizontal scroll bar when I'm working with my commonly used folders. It would be nice if they had an advanced option for people like you, but Apple's target market has always been regular folks that like a clean and simple interface. I would have to say that their ability to make clean interfaces is a large part of what has gained them such a large following.
Anyways, the Finder has plenty of other flaws. If you don't like it there are other options these days with much more advanced features, such as Path Finder and ForkLift. They have view modes that will always show you the entire path. As an advanced user you may want to try them out.
I would think it would be rather difficult to support something that won't be released for another three months, and rather short-sighted to not support something that will still be in use at least a year from now. Of course, after 8.04 is released I would expect them to support that version as well.
I know ThinkPads are being marketed mainly to businesses, but business users are still people, and by a large majority most people seem to appreciate cleaner looking designs. It would behoove Lenovo to come up with an alternate design to compete better against the Apple laptops that even business users are buying in droves these days. You can bet your booty there will be a ton of business "frequent flyer" and presenter types that will be buying the new MacBook Air despite all it's technical shortcomings. A large part of their reason for choosing the MacBook Air will be the sleek, uncomplicated design. I don't care how technically awesome and super-light this new ThinkPad is, there are a lot of people like me who would much rather lug around a MacBook Pro than be forced to use something so ugly. The GP post was right, it still looks like it was made in 1995. I can't see how anyone would think that's good marketing. Except for die-hard ThinkPad fans, of course.
Yes, ugly is in the eye of the beholder. But there is a reason people are buying Macs by the millions, and shockingly the software is only part of it.
I don't know where this idea comes from that FireWire is somehow going to die out sometime next week. Just because your typical pee-cee and other consumer level hardware still doesn't include a usable FireWire port doesn't mean it isn't being used and appreciated in other circles. High-end DV cameras, scanners and many other pieces of equipment that actually need reliable data transfer rates that won't use up a third of your CPU cycles all use FireWire almost exclusively. FireWire and combo USB/FireWire external drives are readily available as they have been for years.
That's all without even mentioning a certain "fruity" computer company that is well on its way to grabbing 10% of the consumer computer market sometime in 2009, if they keep growing at their current rate. Every computer they've sold in the last 8 years has had at least a FireWire 400 port. For at least half that time the higher end models have also had FireWire 800 ports, and FireWire 800 ports are even starting to appear on the lower end consumer models. These are the powered 6-pin and 9-pin ports too, none of that 4-pin i.Link crap, so external devices don't need separate power in many cases. Thus a lot of the owners of these fruity computers have come to appreciate FireWire for various reasons.
As for how it will compare to USB 3.0, I believe the new FireWire 3200 spec (3.2Gbps) was finalized a few months ago and will probably be appearing later this year in new computers and devices. The best part is that the new spec uses the same connectors as FireWire 800 so it's backwards compatible. I think they managed to increase the maximum cable length in the new spec too.
No, FireWire isn't going anywhere, and I doubt that USB 3.0 will be able to outperform the new FireWire 3200 spec despite being once again technically "faster". If they didn't somehow get rid of the CPU load issues with USB any machine attempting to get close to that theoretical 4.7Gbps transfer speed will be brought to its knees. God help you if you mix a USB 2.0 or 1.1 device in with your USB 3.0 devices on the same bus. Unless they're making it so you can use the USB 3.0 contacts independently of the USB 2.0/1.1 contacts, which I doubt very much. Mixing the old USB devices will zap the top speed down to as little as 50% of the theoretical maximum, just like USB 1.1 does to a USB 2.0 bus. I'll be impressed if they've actually found a way to fix that niggling little problem.
The two technologies really aren't direct competitors like most people think. They have different things they're each good at, and I don't think that's going to change overnight. I have to second a comment another poster made about "USB On-the-Go" devices. I got one that was supposed to let you transfer data between two USB storage devices and after trying it with several flash drives and card readers I was thoroughly unimpressed, not least of all because it was only capable of USB 1.1 speeds. It only worked about one out of four times and I'm not even sure about that. FireWire, on the other hand, has been doing hostless (i.e. "computerless") device-to-device transfers since day one, because it was designed to allow that.
When you get above the level of, "I need a port to plug in my flash drive and keyboard," FireWire has always been far superior to USB in getting the job done. It's not expiring anytime soon.
Isn't this essentially the same as port knocking? Actually, it's not as good, as you can get lucky with this. With port knocking, you have to send a secret sequence of packets (possibly one that changes with time) before the port is available for your host to connect to. And you send UDP packets, so there's no indication from the server that the machine is even powered up unless you are successful. And, of course, there's the variation where you send a single UDP packet with an encrypted payload that instructs the server to open up a port for you.
So while this is a little different, it's inferior.
You misunderstand the purpose of port hopping. Port knocking is simply a way of telling the server to open a port and let you through. Once that port is open it could be found by port scanning and attacked just like any other static open port, for as long as you keep it open. The longer you hold the port open the less effective the port knocking is security-wise. Port hopping is adding another layer of security through obscurity by moving the open port around randomly according to an algorithm governed by a shared secret, like with one-time pad encryption. Your system always knows which port to use next as long as you stay in time sync with the server.
If a port scanner happens to stumble on the open port at some point it's much less of a problem because that service won't be on that port a minute later. Any subsequent attacks on that port will simply be discarded or logged, and the same port probably wouldn't be reused for at least several hours.
This is basically the same as digital spread spectrum frequency hopping, a technique co-invented in the 1940's by actress Hedy Lamar forty years ahead of its time and meant to increase the security of things such as war-time military communications. DSS is in common use today in cell phones and household cordless phones. With phones you only have a few different frequencies to hop through so it's normally used as less of a security feature and more to keep nearby devices from interfering with each other. With TCP/UDP ports on the other hand you've got around 65,000 to choose from. So if you do a good job blocking any IPs that attempt to run fast port scans on your network it will be almost impossible in the limited amount of time to:
- scan the entire port range on the target system,
- identify open ports,
- identify the service on that port,
- identify the operating system,
- exploit the service successfully, and finally
- successfully run the correct sequence of commands on the exploited system that would give the attacker full access to the system even after the next port hopping cycle begins.
Sure, it may still be technically possible, but it's a lot less likely when using this technique that any attack would ever succeed beyond the part where it crashes the service. You'd have to have an army of computers (at least 30,000 or so) all around the internet and somehow coordinate them all to probe the target network on non-overlapping random ports at the same time. Even doing one scan every few seconds they would probably overwhelm most connections and eventually be detected and blocked.
Another firewall system set between the server and the internet could be set up to block any statically open ports coming from the target server and even to disable any port hopping sequences that don't fit in the currently active port hopping scheme, thus disabling most backdoor exploits from being functional for more than at most 60 seconds or so. So the only attack that could possibly continue to work beyond the initial exploit of the service would be one that manages to discover the port hopping shared secret and become part of the active port hopping scheme. Basic security precautions like giving the shared secret file a random name and location and restricting its permissions should keep that from happening too easily. Every other type of attack just becomes practically impossible, despite being technically po