Just because you happen to be used to the stupid idiosyncracies in the Mac interface doesn't mean that the Mac method is in any way better.
A) The power button doesn't turn the machine off unless you hold it down for 5 seconds. If you just press it, normally a dialog appears that lets you choose between Restart, Sleep, Cancel and Shutdown. Or, depending on your power preferences it will go to sleep, but that can be disabled and in my long experience Macs wake up a lot faster and more reliably than PCs.
B) Macs never had eject buttons on floppy drives or optical drives because they realized that control over the drive should normally be in the hands of the operating system, to avoid corrupting disks, losing files or crashing the computer by pulling out media while it was being accessed or when an application was still expecting it to be there. Once you let go of the idea that it's a good thing to be able to pull out media willy-nilly any old time, you'll realize it's a much smarter way of doing things.
C) Yes, dropping the disk on the trash is an odd way of doing things, but at least they make the trash change into a big standard eject symbol now whenever you pick up a drive. They have to keep that around for people who have been using Macs forever, which is a surprising number of people.
D) Besides the classic drag-to-trash method, there are eject icons next to any ejectable media in the Finder, there is an eject command in the File menu, there is an eject command in the context menu when you right-click on an ejectable drive, or you can use Cmd+E on the keyboard when a drive is selected. The eject key on the keyboard only applies to the optical drive, and I find that having that eject button on the keyboard is vastly better than hunting around for an often difficult to see button that may be different on each computer model and may even be under the desk or otherwise difficult to reach. Someone want to tell me why almost every optical drive has a tiny button, often almost flat, almost always the same color as the rest of the bezel? No thanks, that isn't easier than just having a standard keyboard key.
The same thing applies to the now-standard volume controls on every Mac keyboard. Last time I checked, even for PCs that do have volume controls they are often in different places using different icons with different on-screen displays and software interfaces. Blech. With any Mac I go to, I don't have to sit down and puzzle out how to operate the volume controls or look around for the little button to open the optical drive. They're all right there on the keyboard, and they all work the same way.
I was a PC person for many years and disliked Macs for a long time for these silly reasons as well, because I was used to having "control" over such things. After extensive experience using Macs in the last few years I've come to find that the way things are handled on the Mac side is almost always the more logical and useful way. I certainly wouldn't use the word idiosyncratic to describe very many Mac behaviors, in contrast to the stupidity I experienced in years of working with Windows. If that makes me a fanboi now, well, so be it. I'm in good company.
And Inuit have been living in the North for many thousands upon thousands of years (50,000 I think). Actually I am always amazed at how dark their skin is comparing to where they live. It's not like you are going to see a bunch of Inuit suntanning on the tundra...
In far northern latitudes during the summer there is sunlight up to 24 hours a day. During the winter there is snow and ice everywhere, and people tend to live near the ocean since that's often the only place to obtain food during most of the winter. Ice, snow, and water are all really good at reflecting ultraviolet light, which of course is the main component of sunlight that causes tanning. So on a lot of winter days there would actually be more UV bouncing around than on a lot of summer days. Even light cloud cover won't stop it. You can get a horrible sunburn on an overcast day on the water or on a ski trip. And strange as it may seem they weren't particularly averse to going around in loincloths at times, even in the middle of winter.
A skin near the equator that is light colored? Hmm... How about Amazon natives?
Most leaves reflect both UV and infrared light. If the natives did the smart thing and spent most of their time under the jungle canopies where it's cooler, they would also be protected from a massive amount of UV and direct sunlight over the millenia. This isn't true anymore, but in the old days you could practically travel from one side of the country to the other without crossing any open areas not covered by the jungle canopy.
So the nutshell is equator = darkness of your skin color is HOGWASH! Want me to prove it even further? How about the aboriginals of Australia when compared to an individual from Malaysia? Aboriginals are much much darker and further away from the equator than individuals from Malaysia....
Most of Australia is an arid desert with strong similarities to sub-Saharan Africa. Dry, flat, with very little tree cover. It makes perfect sense that they would develop darker skin pigmentation over time.
So you came up with some good examples of exceptions without really disproving the fact that there is a general correlation between latitude and skin color. But the main thing is that this correlation is caused by relative exposure to sunlight, so it's only natural that people who live in environments that tend to concentrate or block sunlight would have characteristics that may be different from other areas in the same latitude.
There is only one thing I really want to see "fixed" in Firefox, and it's not really specific to the Mac platform. I honestly have never understood all this whining about Firefox not fitting in with other Mac applications, even before it got a lot better looking. I've been using it on Mac OS X for years with very few problems. That whole thing about native widgets on forms is something I really don't get. To me, the form widgets in Safari are icky, not the other way around.
What I really want to see are some of the features of the "strongly unrecommended" Tabbrowser Extensions by Shimoda Hiroshi integrated into the next version of FF. As far as I'm concerned TBE is/was the best extension that has ever existed, and pushes FF from just being a decent browser to being amazingly useful for a power user at a level that no other web browser can approach. Most of the main features should have been integrated into FF by the FF developers years ago. The extensions that are usually recommended to replace TBE like Tab Mix Plus are a joke in comparison. There are various lengthy forum threads in various places where people have discussed ways of replicated some of the features of TBE, but it just can't be done. Laugh if you want but TBE has kept me using FF 1.5 to this day on my personal machine. Various features haven't quite worked 100% for a long time, but back when it was all working I had the following features and more, with cross-platform support for all of it:
- Automatic grouping of related tabs - Automatic coloring of tab groups so I can tell them apart! - Automatically stays within the tab group by moving left when rightmost group tab is closed - All popups including javascript windows forced to open in new tab - Links to other sites automatically open in new background tab, same group - Automatic wrapping of too many tabs into multiple tab rows (broken on Mac, unf.) - Ability to save/bookmark tab groups and load entire groups in background tabs - "Close group" option to quickly and easily close a ton of related tabs (much faster than closing tabs individually) - Restriction of FF to using a single window no matter what (new window command disabled) - Automatic saving/restoring of the browser state including groupings and their colors - Drag & drop tab reordering - Automatic opening of bookmarks, new address bar URLs, history, almost everything in new background tabs (I absolutely hate it when I have to manually open a new tab in Safari or regular FF just to avoid overwriting the contents of the current tab) - Export/import of my TBE preferences between computers and platforms - Probably several more features that I can't remember right now
Basically it gives me complete control of how my browser behaves and does everything in its power to help me stay organized and unconfused. It keeps the browser from making decisions on its own about when I'm done with a particular page or site. It keeps websites from being able to tell me when I should open a new window. I tell them when they're allowed to open a new window. Everything is forced into background tabs, even those idiotic javascript popup links that can't be opened in a tab the usual way. I don't lose pages just because I forgot to explicitly open a new tab before attempting to load a new URL or open a bookmark, it opens that new tab for me. It groups my sites clearly and logically in the same way that Mac OS X groups my applications clearly and logically. (OS X lets you stay within an application and cycle through all the open documents or windows in that application with Cmd+` [backtick/tilde key] instead of doing the Windows thing where you have to Alt+Tab between a bunch of unrelated application windows to get to things like Word documents that should be right next to each other. Alt+Tab on the Mac only cycles between applications. Together this makes task switching on the Mac immensely more efficient, IMNSHO.) TBE just makes things work the way they shoul
Like I said, your reaction to the word is a personal issue. You continue to make yourself upset even after I emphasized that I'm only using it as a descriptor that also applies to myself. It's a statement of fact, not an accusation or application of a blind stereotype. Furthermore you can't very well hold me responsible for not knowing your life story. I was merely responding to your initial comment that appeared to be very much in favor of the command line as being the easiest way to do things, including somehow being capable of consolidating any 10 GUI actions into a single easy to copy & paste text command.
It's very commendable that you've taken the time to create a nice GUI oriented tutorial, and it is very nicely done. I applaud your efforts and thank you for your time. However, and I'm sure you'll throw another hissy fit over this, I have to wonder how the uneducated Linux newbie is supposed to A) know such a tutorial exists, B) know how and where to find it, C) know how to interpret it, and D) why such a tutorial is even necessary or E) whether it's really safe to be telling Linux newbies to make all files with a particular file extension executable by default. Isn't that just as bad as Windows treating all.EXE/.COM/.SCR/.BAT and other file extensions as automatic executables, for which we've been berating them for years now?
When a user tries to open an autopackage file prior to doing this procedure, what happens? Nothing? Does some other application open it and display it as a text file or something? Is it somehow made obvious that the user should look around for a tutorial like this? Is it somehow obvious how to search for or get to this tutorial? Because in order to be useful to the uninitiated user it would have to be. It would need to be referenced next to ever single link to any autopackage file on the web, and in a readme file that goes along with the autopackage. But autopackages are designed to work alone, right? So it's going to be rather unlikely that an inexperienced user would quickly jump online and be able to find your tutorial.
As for the tutorial itself: Yes, I know, the pictures should make everything totally obvious and simple. But I know a lot of computer users who would even be confused by what you've presented, not least of all because it simultaneously talks about two completely different desktop environments without bothering to make that fact abundantly clear. It may be obvious to you and me what's going on, but that's because we have prior knowledge based on years of experience. Your step 3 contains no less than four different images which are apparently showing me the same thing via different interfaces and themes. The uninitiated user will be extremely confused by that. A natural assumption would be to think that you're telling the user to go to four different dialogs or tabs somehow and click four different boxes.
Even I, an experienced Linux user (KDE mostly, but I've used GNOME and others), had to look at those images for a minute to really be sure they were all telling me the same thing. There are a ridiculous number of confusing differences in those screenshots even though they only come from two different desktop environments. Those who do not understand anything about the concept of permissions will not understand or learn anything from those images. Although they may blindly follow the instructions they will be confused the entire time about what they are doing and why. I've known many people who went through a procedure many times based on my instructions and learned nothing, because they didn't have any contextual knowledge to understand the first thing about what was actually going on.
I notice you also didn't bother to make any notes about why this procedure might be dangerous, or why they shouldn't do this for other types of files that they can't open, or why they should generally never follow similar instructions from an untrusted email or website. Nor do you explain why your website might be more trustworthy than
Dude, that was an honest question. All I want is some polite discussion and then you suddenly go screaming around and calling people "elitist". Shees, what the hell is your problem?
And no I didn't bother read the rest of my post. As soon as you said "elitist" I know you're just someone with a passionate, irrational hate for technologists.
Well good for you. You say you didn't read the rest of my post as if it were an action to be proud of, so, I congratulate you. But maybe if you and the equally dumbass*/kneejerk/insecure moderator who gave me a "flamebait" mod had actually read the entire post you'd realize that I'm not a screaming luddite at all, I'm just a geek with a different opinion about how "easy" things are for regular people. An opinion based on years of experience with regular people, the kind of people who have trouble with basic email and often forget where the power button on their computer is located. I was trying to make you aware of certain assumptions you base your own opinions on, assumptions that you are probably not aware of most of the time and cause you to incorrectly assume that a particular acivity will be "easy" for everyone.
Whatever "screaming" you heard was in your own head based on your personal reaction to a word which apparently holds a lot more emotional charge for you than it does for me. I used the word in the dictionary sense of you "favoring a select group" when defining the concept of computer usability. You, ME, and most every other geek here is guilty of this unconscious attitude to some degree, usually without completely realizing it. I am making the statement that this is why the usability of "desktop Linux" still gets a failing grade in comparison to Windows and Mac OS X. Because the developers behind it are all part of our unconsciously elitist group of geeks who think the command line is perfectly simple.
To them/you/me, the command line is so simple in fact that it's obviously better than a GUI, no matter who is using the computer. So that's how they continue to design the system, and the regular users are left with a ton of gaps in the GUI where they have to acquire knowledge and copy/paste words they will never understand into a command line terminal that they will likewise never understand. Sure, they can follow instructions, but they won't learn why they're doing any of it or how to know if the instructions are telling them to do the wrong thing. There is nothing about the command line that is better for those who don't understand how it works.
I guess I should put in some smilies and LOLs next time so my "tone of voice" comes across better. Not using any exclamation points!!!1!!!one is apparently not enough to avoid being accused of screaming my head off.
Your loss.
* Too bad you aren't going to read past this word either. You might have learned something.
You know, I've been wondering this for years: is this caused by bad engineering, or is it because there are too many different broken hardware out there? I'm increasingly suspecting that it's the latter: you have to write thousands of different workarounds for thousands of different bugs in thousands of different kinds of monitors and video cards. Am I the only one who hasn't experienced any video hardware problems in Linux for 6 years now?
No, I'm sure you aren't the only one who hasn't experienced any video problems with Linux for years. But as I always try to explain to people, you're asking the wrong question. The important question is, has anyone experienced video problems with Linux, and how bad were those problems? Were they able to recover from those problems on their own recognizance? Did it stop them from being able to reach their desktop? Because for most people the desktop GUI is "the computer", and failure to display the desktop to even a single user out of ten thousand should be considered a showstopper level bug. To a user who has no idea how to use the command line (the majority of the masses that distros like Ubuntu are aimed at), it is tantamount to not being able to boot up at all. The GUI should ALWAYS come up short of a major hardware issue stopping the video card from physically working in even the most minimal graphics mode.
Sure, the ridiculous chaos of buggy PC hardware contributes to the problem, but most hardware conforms at least partially to certain standards and works fine. For instance all video cards for years have supported at least the unaccelerated VESA 2.0 video modes. When was the last time you saw a Windows machine fall back to the command line because it didn't have the correct video driver installed? You've never seen it, because Windows happily boots up in a universally supported 640x480x16bpp video mode that works on 99.9% of the cards out there. It's called "VGA". Then you fix the driver and reboot. You can even get online and find/download the driver because you aren't stuck at the command line going, "OK, what the hell do I do now?"
Developers are lazy, that's all there is to it. They would rather write lengthy wiki articles (which obviously an isolated user would be unable to read because he can't get to his desktop and GUI web browser, the only one he knows how to use) in which they describe a dozen steps each individual user can feel free to try for themselves. Would it be that hard to integrate those steps into a GUI that would run those same terminal commands in the background or do that same Google search in order to help the user apply the right hardware information? Would it be that hard to set up the GUI in a way that would allow the user to add or try out some possibly unsupported video modes manually? Nope, it's not that hard, but it's a little bit harder than writing wiki articles, so the users are left floundering.
Hardware identification is definitely not easy, but it could be conquered to a much greater extent if Linux distros would come up with some method of actively gathering precise hardware information into a centralized and automated database. A simple scripted GUI could run all the relevant terminal commands and ask the user a few questions about model numbers and brands, then shoot it all off to the central hardware information repository. The data would be either added or verified, and every time a single user of that same hardware did a Linux install the hardware detection would be automatic. They're doing it for identifying tracks on audio CDs, it should be just as easy to do the same for other hardware.
But my main gripe remains with the lack of fault tolerance and fallback modes. To LInuxites it seems that "safe mode" still translates to "command line", and that just doesn't fly. They can do better.
*Is* it? Sure, command line looks harder, but is copy & pasting a single command in the terminal and pressing Enter, really harder than clicking on 10 buttons in a GUI? Wouldn't the first be easier because it's just 1 action?
What's a terminal? Isn't that a place where planes and trains stop so people can get on and off? What's a command line? Am I supposed to line up somewhere? Copy what? Paste what where?
I know that like most geeks you don't realize or are unwilling to accept it, but you are an elitist. You judge how easy computing tasks are based on prior knowledge so extensive that you don't even consciously remember most of it, you just use it as if you were born with it. You think of this unconscious knowledge base as a set of skills and assume that all people have these skills, and that if they are confused by something you find simple they obviously aren't trying hard enough.
I know this because I'm also afflicted with this condition. I often deal with computer-illiterate people and have to bite my tongue to avoid saying something disdainful like, "How the hell can you not know how to copy and paste something into a terminal window?". They just don't. You have to accept it. When you're designing software, you have to constantly stop and ask yourself, "Do I know how to do this because it's really obvious, or because I have knowledge that helps me understand what to do?" You have to think, "Will someone who has never even seen a computer be able to understand how to fix this, or be able to easily search for and accurately find help for this issue from within the software?" If the answer is no, that's a bad sign for usability issues.
By the way, why are you comparing a single terminal command with 10 clicks in the GUI? Biased much? I know a lot of things are easier to accomplish in the shell, but worst case scenario of transferring any action to the GUI should be at most 6 total clicks. Any developer that can't get access to an action below 10 clicks is an idiot and shouldn't be working on usability issues. A smart developer should be able to provide a path to any commonly needed action within about 3 clicks or less. Doesn't the user also have to click something in the GUI just to open the terminal? Eh? Think about that.
it's confirmed now that on many laptops the kernel has to restart the ata2 interface intermittently and thereby lock up your system for up to 30 seconds at a time essentially rendering your laptop useless.
Wow. That's fantastic. I used to use Linux in various incarnations as my main desktop OS. I root for it every day to continue improving. And it has improved, in so many ways. But it seems to be approaching true polish and usability on an asymptotic curve rather than a more linear progression. When even what are widely considered the best, most usable and user friendly distributions of Linux continue to be shipped out with bad showstopper bugs in full release versions, and basic usability features like automatic determination of your video card and monitor specs are still unreliable, it isn't there yet. Fail.
I still see an awful lot of terminal commands in that article and in the wiki links for fixing problems. I can/bin/sh my way out of a wet paper bag with the best of them, but your typical computer user has never opened so much as a DOS box and has no clue what a command line interface is, nor do they want to know. So one of my most basic prerequisites before I will begin recommending any Linux distro to common users is that everything needs to be fixable without ever descending to the terminal. And I mean EVERYTHING. It's been almost a decade since I started using Linux and I have yet to meet a distro that comes anywhere near meeting this qualification. Every other wiki article or forum post still seems to contain terminal instructions for fixing various things. Fail.
And what the hell is the deal with X11 anyway? Is it really that difficult to build in some fallback safe video modes for unidentified cards or screwed up config files, or to do whatever else is necessary to make sure that the user will ALWAYS be able to get back into his GUI desktop without expert help? That's a rhetorical question, the answer is no. It isn't that difficult to build in some simple fault tolerance in places where inexperienced users often get bitten, trapped and frustrated. How exactly is the user supposed to go search the wiki online for help fixing X11 when he only has one computer available and he can't figure out how to get X11 to start? Come on people. I should not be reading recent articles from users of the most recent and popular distros that talk about getting stuck at the command line. Fail.
I don't know, maybe I'm just crazy or something, but in my opinion this stuff should be top priority for anyone building a distro aimed at non-geeks. Even geeks appreciate a system that's simple to tweak or fix with a few clicks, if the number of migrations from Linux to OS X is any indicator (count me in that group). I'm waiting for the day when a Linux distro can hold a candle to OS X, but in terms of usability it really seems like there has been only marginal improvement over the last few years. So many prerequisite desktop features still have the feeling of being hacked together out of spare parts. The individual components may be coming from standards but the overall system still has no feeling of coherence. If anyone else actually wants to see a Year of the Linux Desktop someday these simple issues have got to be addressed or it will be a loooong time coming.
Note that I have made statements here about my feelings, impressions, and opinions, so don't try to argue with me as if we're talking about factual data. If there were a distro out there that could change my mind I would have already heard about it and tried it out by now. Yes, I continue to test drive recent releases periodically, and no, they haven't changed my mind at all. "Desktop Linux" simply isn't anywhere near the level of usability and coherence it will take to actually threaten Windows or Mac OS X and begin to dominate the home computing world. Developers are aiming way too low.
My point was that comparing an operating system (Vista) that has been out for a mere few months to an operating system that is about two years old is quite unfair. When 10.5 is out we'll make some comparisons between Vista and OS X.
Um, no. You're still missing his point. Probably because it's simpler than you think it is. If you were discussing features or hardware support or something you might have a point. But this conversation is solely about which versions of the operating systems each vendor is officially supporting with patches. Congratulating either vendor on continuing to support the version just previous to the most current version is misunderstanding the point of the term "officially supported". Vista and XP are supported and Tiger and Panther are supported. The previous version of Mac OS X is always supported with security updates, so it is a given that 10.3.9 will continue to get security updates until Leopard is released.
The operating systems aren't actually being compared at all in this discussion, by the way, so the fact that Tiger is much older than Vista is irrelevant.
Guantanamo Bay does not have a prison, it is a detention facility for enemy combatants. Before jumping on the band wagon and accusing the US of treating people as "guilty until proven innocent" you should examine the subtle differences. A prison is a facility used for housing people who were convicted of crimes and sentenced to serve time in confinement. A detention facility is used during times of war to house those enemy forces who were captured on the battlefield until such time that the war is over or the captured individual will no longer pose a threat to the capturing country if released. Guantanamo Bay had released more than half of those who have come through its doors and is one of the most transparently operated detention facilities in the world.The people in Guantanamo weren't just picked up off of the streets as suspects in criminal investigations, they were captured while engaging in active combat operations and are considered prisoners of war. Read up on military law before making such ignorant accusations.
Really? Did the US Congress make a declaration of war at some point that I missed out on? Because my reserve unit seems to have forgotten to call me up to say, "We're goin' to war, Devil Dog, oorah! Report for duty in 24 hours. Semper Fi." If you're speaking of Bush's "War on Terror" that he begins and ends every other sentence with, that's called a figure of speech and has no legal backing no matter how many times he repeats it. Even if it did, it wouldn't suddenly make it acceptable to indefinitely detain people with no known connection to terrorist groups, including foreign nationals who were simply visiting some area where we happen to have some troops stationed, or in some cases were kidnapped from an adjacent area and turned in by others.
You should probably watch something besides Fox News every now and then. You might become a little less ignorant yourself. The established facts (as reported by crazy, liberal, non-Fox News stations like NPR and the BBC) are that the US military/government has been in the habit of offering rewards for the capture of "terrorists". Many of the people who have languished in the black box called Guantanamo (not allowing any communication or even access to a lawyer does not rhyme with the word "transparent") were simply random people scooped up off the street by Afghani warlords and such and turned in to the local US military posts for cash money. What makes this infinitely worse is that the military has already admitted many times that a large portion of the inmat--sorry, "detainees" have no actual evidence against them whatsoever beyond someone saying, "this guy is a terrorist, gimme some money". None, zip, zero, nada, el zilcho. They weren't keeping the evidence under wraps for security reasons, they simply didn't have any in many cases. That's already been established, from their own mouths. And yet they "detained" these people for literally years, and continue to do so, EVEN AFTER running their own investigations and finding no evidence with which to place charges. Worse yet (I know, how could it get worse!), they have done their level best to block all attempts at providing these unaccused (unaccusable!) persons with any due process, even though many have never been proven to be terrorists or enemy combatants or even that they were ever present near a location that any combat took place. The worst serial murderer/bomber/rapist/child molester gets at a minimum a chance to talk to a lawyer and due consideration by a court of law. These people got nothing. For years.
You admit yourself that they have already released many people, finally, after really having no choice due to continuing public and legal pressures. Obviously they aren't going to be releasing actual proven terrorists anytime soon, so who are all those people? There are hundreds of people in Gitmo, yet more than half have simply been released? Do you even have a functioning brain beyond the part that regulates your automatic
When you feel the urge to be pedantic it helps to actually be well-informed regarding your subject matter. Since you like that sort of thing you should enjoy this:
I think it's pretty clear to most people from the summary that the word "gagged" isn't being used in the strict legal or even literal sense, but rather in the figurative sense:
gag: verb, figurative (of a person or body with authority) prevent (someone) from speaking freely or disseminating information : the administration is trying to gag its critics.
Having the moderators (or sole moderator, if that is the case) of what is probably the main "community" discussion forum blocking any and all posts asking or making statements about a particular topic seems to fit pretty nicely into this definition. Doesn't seem all that emotional either, more like an accurate, factual description, although not written in the technically precise legal terms you would have preferred. Any emotional reaction should come from your abhorrence, hatred, loathing, detestation, execration, revulsion, disgust, repugnance, horror, odium, or aversion to the entire concept of censorship in even the most minor situation relating to the legal rights of others.
Hopefully this project will now die a horrible death after being forked yet again by people who are actually interested in maintaining and improving it for current users without attempting to exercise control over the behavior of the users. No one should put up with this behavior from the developer of any software you rely on to do something as important as keeping your business running.
Hence the emphasis I placed on the phrase "officially supported". I know you can go a lot further back both with and without hacks like XPostFactor, it's just unsupported by Apple.
Indeed, I have Panther installed on a circa 1995 Power Mac 8500 that's been upgraded with 512MB of memory (it still has free slots for another 512MB!), a 1GHz G3 processor, an IDE controller, a DVD+-RW dual layer burner, along with FireWire and USB 2.0. I also have a Gigabit ethernet card ready to throw in there. It works quite well, and worked almost as well even before upgrading the processor from the original 120Mhz PowerPC 604! That's like putting XPSP2 on a, what, original Pentium computer? It's crazy cool.
Damn! I'm a switcher in waiting and am planning on moving all of my Rock and Roll Report stuff to a Mac (blog, podcast, production for radio show, etc). I figured I would pick up my MacBook in June with the brand new iLife suite but now I suppose I will get it sooner rather than later. As a non-geek Windows user currently, how straight forward (or not) will it be for me to upgrade from one version of OS-X to another when the time comes?
Insert install DVD. Restart. Hold down C key after the chime to boot from disc. Wait. Select "Archive & Install". Start installation. Wait. Reboot. Live happily ever after. The End.
Apple introduced the "Archive & Install" feature with version 10.2 (Jaguar), I think. It does basically what the older Mac OS installers did, renames your current system folder and installs the new version. I personally have never actually used it yet, what with being OCD about system entropy after years of traumatization at the hands of a certain other operating system that used to require reinstallation every six months in order to maintain performance. I prefer to start from scratch whenever possible, but that's just me.
From the comments I have encountered online over the last few years it seems that a great many people have used this feature with great success. Many people appear to have upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 or from 10.2 straight to 10.4 without any trouble at all. It is also touted as an easy way to recover from bad system updates. I've read many accounts from people who nonchalantly Archive & Install all the time, anytime they encounter an issue like that. Apparently it's very fast and doesn't break everything, unlike when you're forced to reinstall Windows which usually wipes out your registry and turns into a nightmare. Fortunately all the user data and configuration information is properly separated from the main system folder and they don't use anything as monstrous as the delicate monolithic Windows registry, so things usually don't get broken just because you reinstalled the OS.
But, more importantly, what is so great about Mac OS X and Mac hardware is that it's so easy to make a complete bootable backup of your entire drive, a clone, onto an external FireWire or USB drive. Then even if something were to go horribly wrong with your upgrade you can just boot from that external drive and clone it back. Voila, you're right back where you started, happy as a clam and ready to try again after you figure out what you did wrong. Try that with a Windows upgrade.
Also I think that when you use Archive & Install you have the option of going to the Startup Disk preferences and choosing to reboot into the previous system folder. This can be done from any restore or install disc in case the machine won't even boot to the desktop for some reason. It's not a complete reversion since a lot of new applications will be installed with the new OS that may not be compatible with the older OS, but it can be useful.
In short, I don't think you'll have any trouble upgrading, although I would wait until the first update comes out. There are always a few issues that never show up until a new OS gets installed by millions of people, no matter how much beta testing and QA cycles you go through. Believe me, there will be plenty of people happy to blaze a trail for you and be the first to find any potential issues and help Apple fix them quickly. Even if you do have an issue, if you follow my advice and always do a backup clone on an external drive it is almost impossible to be unable to quickly recover from anything up to and including total hard drive failure, and go on about your business. AFAIC this ability to recover from almost any possible situation without being forced to reinstall applications, reset hundreds of personal preferences or restore user data piecemeal is one of the best features of owning a Mac, and a big reason that I recommend them to most of my clients (I'm a freelance computer tech).
Two and a half years after Tiger was released. Anyone remember when Apple was putting out a major release every year?
Sure do. I think that was about the same time when users kept complaining about having to buy another Mac OS X upgrade every year, and when the developers were complaining about having to keep up with Apple's breakneck development pace. Right about the same time I seem to recall Apple announcing that they would be slowing the pace of development to give everyone breathing room from here on out. Let's see, yes I do believe that was right around the time Panther came out or shortly thereafter.
Leopard will have some neat stuff and a little performance boost on 64-bit machines, but I'm pretty sure you won't die from being forced to use Tiger for another couple of months. I (for one) applaud them for making the decision to finish a proper QA cycle on the software that's going to run my computer, rather than pawning off some barely-out-of-beta crap on us at the last minute.
Call me when Apple sits on their asses for six years straight without bothering to bring out a single innovation, upgraded hardware or major OS release, while simultaneously attempting to foist a subscription licensing model on you that has you paying a yearly fee for the privilege of getting a "free" upgrade to a new product that doesn't materialize for over half a decade. Call me when Apple puts out a major OS release that isn't faster/better/more feature packed than the last one and doesn't continue to add value for owners of older Apple hardware going all the way back to the first iMac with a Firewire port (1999, that's eight years of Mac models that are officially supported by Apple's most current OS right now).
Anyway, I'd bet that Apple are just giving themselves some breathing room and we'll probably get a surprise announcement about Leopard being already done and available along with some new Mac models, hmmm, just in time for the new school year to start. Wouldn't surprise me one bit either way.
I'll just splice that bit from that torrent, that bit from that one... it should work, I mean they are all the same TV episode and they are all mpeg4 - the file name says so...
Hmmm how about which bitrates, codecs, if it was from TV whether it was started at the same time??
That guy seriously has to be joking - the byte offsets are unlikely to ever specify a suitable join - and even if they rewrote the protocol so it split by seconds rather than fixed file widths you'd still have changing codecs and bitrates to deal with. Personally I'll stick to torrents with decent known trackers
It might behoove you to actually know what you're talking about next time you post. Like maybe read up on how hash functions work, and maybe look up the definition of the word "identical" as it relates to computer data. None of the issues you raised are the slightest bit relevant to this technique. If two files have the same hash that means they are bit-for-bit identical. The same concept applies to taking a hash of smaller chunks of that file. Even if the overall file is not 100% identical, if you download two chunks that have the same hash they will be bit-for-bit identical even if they came from two different files, and even if those files both had corrupted or incomplete chunks elsewhere.
The problem they are trying to get around is that various not-very-important differences between files, like different filenames, will make the overall file hash not match, while the actual important data within the file is often identical. One of the given examples is ID3 tags on MP3 files. MP3 tags are embedded in the file, thus any change even as simple as changing a single character from uppercase to lowercase in any of those header tags will cause the overall file hash to fail. Now, I'm no file format expert but I'll bet there are a lot of formats that keep their metadata in a small, standard-length block at the beginning of the file. Thus if you were to split those files into smaller chunks and get hashes of those chunks, you would probably find that all chunks past the initial header chunk will be identical with chunks from files that previously couldn't be matched based on the overall file hash. Depending on the particular file this could vastly increase the number of possible sources that you could download from, at least for the matching chunks, which I daresay would probably be 99% or more of the total content of the file. Thus improving the efficiency of P2P applications and your ability to obtain uncommon files or files that no longer have sources available that contain your exact version of the file. You'll be able to just download the rest of the file from "similar" sources which contain "identical" pieces, where the word "similar" only relates to the overall file.
Now, just to address how your issues would even relate to this whole concept: If there are two files out there with different metadata (like bitrate or source to use your examples) and the rest of those two files consist of identical chunks of the important data (like a video or audio stream to use your example), you shouldn't care which file you're downloading those identical chunks from. The differing metadata will not affect your version of the file because it won't be downloaded. In other words, if you begin downloading a file and the metadata in your version of the file is correct, it will still be correct when you've finished downloading the file, and the overall hash of the completed file will be a perfect match with the file you initially started downloading. Where the identical chunks came from is irrelevent because bit-for-bit identical chunks are completely interchangeable. That's the whole point of the word "identical" in computer terms. What actual data is in the different files doesn't matter, because it's identical!
On the other hand if you started out by downloading a version of that file that has slightly different or
My mistake. I dyslexically misread "ipfilter" on the website as "iptables". It's nice that the next version will use pf, but I'm still wondering why everyone is basing these important security-focused products on FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD. It's just odd.
I recommend you look at Monowall for a boots from CD OpenBSD firewall router, or I prefer pfsense because it allows you to install to a hardrive and has more features.
M0n0wall uses iptables and is based on FreeBSD. PfSense at least uses PF from OpenBSD but is also FreeBSD based. Unless there are other options out there I guess really nothing has changed. Everyone talks up OpenBSD as the most secure OS and the best possible choice for a firewall, but nobody wants to take the time to make a usable dedicated firewall/router variant for regular people. Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to make an OpenBSD-based distro just as featureful and easy to configure as a FreeBSD-based version. But what do I know.
I have to lend my support towards OpenBSD's PF. It is by far the clearest yet most powerful firewalling configuration setup I've seen.
I highly recommend it over IPTables at least.
Which brings up a question I've been wanting to get a solid answer to for a long time now: Why hasn't anyone developed a simple-to-use, runs-from-CD, pre-configured, dedicated firewall/router variant of OpenBSD for turning old computers into firewall/routers? After all it is arguably the most secure operating system available and everybody and his brother seems to think pf is infinitely better than iptables, yet the only things out there that fit this description are Linux-based distros and often one or two kernels behind the mainstream. I'm speaking of IPCop, Smoothwall and such. You stick the disc in an old computer, boot it up, administer it through a web interface, often by just clicking some checkboxes. Simple, even for non-technical people.
Somebody here must know what the deal is. Even though everyone thinks OpenBSD is best for firewalls, nobody has taken the time to build one of these tools that can be used easily by non-network administrators. What the heck? Or has something changed in the last year or so?
The blurb in the ad says that it's upgradable to 2GB.
Sorry, but the new SD cards are 4GB. Devices that max out at 2GB don't even see that the card exists.
A coworker bought one to stuff in his smartphone. He should have read the fine print.
Everyone in this thread so far has apparently failed to notice that MicroSD is not the same as the regular SD card format. And MicroSD only comes in up to 2gb so far. 4gb is probably a ways away since SDHC cards have only recently reached 4gb. Even MiniSD maxes out at 2gb right now.
Isn't it great having ten million different card formats?
I see people making jokes about all these bots being Windows-based, and of course I have to assume myself that this is the case based on experience. However, neither the original article nor the site they link to seem to make any mention of any operating system, no less Windows. Are there any actual statistics for how many of these detected bots are running on Windows? It's hard to be smug about other operating systems be so much more secure without having some actual data to point to.
Yep, I've been using luks under Linux for ages. It works transparently, and is portable from system to system. I don't think that the article submitter has ever used OSX or Linux; both have nice, mature encrypted block systems.
Well, think again. I've been using both Linux and Mac OS X for years, with OS X being my primary desktop choice for a couple of years now. I'm very much aware that there are various other encryption software choices for all operating systems, which is why I said (the only?) with a question mark. Back when I was using Linux as my primary desktop I chose to use Mandrake for a while and used the built-in encryption, which didn't actually work as advertised and was only compatible with that version of Mandrake. I had to do my setup and mounting all from the command line because there were no GUI mounting tools that understood how to ask the user for a password if the volume was encrypted. LUKS at the time was just starting out, I think.
Now, looking around real quick I don't really see much that allows me to compare LUKS with TrueCrypt for usability. The LUKS website itself describes it as "the upcoming standard for Linux hard disk encryption". I see there is FreeOTFE for Windows and Windows-based PDAs, and that's great, but it still doesn't do me any good in Mac OS X. I'm also having trouble finding any Linux GUI applications, so apparently not much has changed on the Linux side in terms of usability in the last few years, besides the name of the encryption software. So LUKS is basically in the same boat as TrueCrypt, except there doesn't appear to be any stated focus on such niceties as plausible deniability, hidden volumes and all that other good stuff talked about on the TrueCrypt site.
Now, I'm all about having multiple standards to choose from, but for now I'm going to put my money on TrueCrypt being the first to come to the table with a real cross-platform (Mac/Win/Lin/etc) encrypt solution that can be used by both geeks and non-geeks. If LUKS comes first, I'll be all over it, but I don't see it happening yet.
I think what the original poster meant to say was, "With digital you either get a perfect copy, or a corrupt copy. With analog you always get a corrupt copy."
Digital content isn't unstable, it's just more sensitive to corruption because in general software expects to be able to extract a perfect copy every time, rather than a near-perfect copy. Whether you can recover partially corrupted digital data depends on several things:
A) Choice of filesystem (journaling, error correction, built-in redundancy) B) Choice of media (CD/DVD bad unless multiple copies you have, hmm?) C) Choice of physical storage method and location (store CD/DVD out of sunlight, vertical in jewel case) D) Choice of archival file formats (PAR2, anyone?) E) Choice of hardware (some hardware is more robust) F) Choice of software used to read the media (most software gives up too easily)
The cure: 1. Use the right media (with phsyical redundancy measures to counter physical damage). 2. Use a robust filesystem (preferably with error correction and redundancy measures also to counter minor physical damage). 3. Use a robust file format specifically designed for archiving data (again with built-in redundancy measures and compartmentalized structure that can work around partial corruption). 4. Use hardware that has a high tolerance for physical or digital media corruption. 5. Use software specifically designed to keep trying to extract data even after encountering partial corruption (like Unstoppable Copier).
All that being said, if you were to say that digital media, file formats, filesystems, hardware and software are too fragile, I would have to agree. There is far too little fault tolerance and redundancy built into digital storage media, hardware, software, filesystems and file formats. A lot could definitely be improved for the future. But calling most digital content unstable because a CD got scratched is disingenuous at best.
Its most noteworthy failing was the requirement to use the period punctuation mark (full stop) to end sections. This was particularly a problem for girl programmers, since at the time getting into trouble because you missed a period had serious consequences. Cobol simply put too much emphasis on a nearly invisible and easily missed period.
Haha, you told a funny!
Sadly, I had to read that like four times before I figured it out.
Slashdot Mirror
A) The power button doesn't turn the machine off unless you hold it down for 5 seconds. If you just press it, normally a dialog appears that lets you choose between Restart, Sleep, Cancel and Shutdown. Or, depending on your power preferences it will go to sleep, but that can be disabled and in my long experience Macs wake up a lot faster and more reliably than PCs.
B) Macs never had eject buttons on floppy drives or optical drives because they realized that control over the drive should normally be in the hands of the operating system, to avoid corrupting disks, losing files or crashing the computer by pulling out media while it was being accessed or when an application was still expecting it to be there. Once you let go of the idea that it's a good thing to be able to pull out media willy-nilly any old time, you'll realize it's a much smarter way of doing things.
C) Yes, dropping the disk on the trash is an odd way of doing things, but at least they make the trash change into a big standard eject symbol now whenever you pick up a drive. They have to keep that around for people who have been using Macs forever, which is a surprising number of people.
D) Besides the classic drag-to-trash method, there are eject icons next to any ejectable media in the Finder, there is an eject command in the File menu, there is an eject command in the context menu when you right-click on an ejectable drive, or you can use Cmd+E on the keyboard when a drive is selected. The eject key on the keyboard only applies to the optical drive, and I find that having that eject button on the keyboard is vastly better than hunting around for an often difficult to see button that may be different on each computer model and may even be under the desk or otherwise difficult to reach. Someone want to tell me why almost every optical drive has a tiny button, often almost flat, almost always the same color as the rest of the bezel? No thanks, that isn't easier than just having a standard keyboard key.
The same thing applies to the now-standard volume controls on every Mac keyboard. Last time I checked, even for PCs that do have volume controls they are often in different places using different icons with different on-screen displays and software interfaces. Blech. With any Mac I go to, I don't have to sit down and puzzle out how to operate the volume controls or look around for the little button to open the optical drive. They're all right there on the keyboard, and they all work the same way.
I was a PC person for many years and disliked Macs for a long time for these silly reasons as well, because I was used to having "control" over such things. After extensive experience using Macs in the last few years I've come to find that the way things are handled on the Mac side is almost always the more logical and useful way. I certainly wouldn't use the word idiosyncratic to describe very many Mac behaviors, in contrast to the stupidity I experienced in years of working with Windows. If that makes me a fanboi now, well, so be it. I'm in good company.
In far northern latitudes during the summer there is sunlight up to 24 hours a day. During the winter there is snow and ice everywhere, and people tend to live near the ocean since that's often the only place to obtain food during most of the winter. Ice, snow, and water are all really good at reflecting ultraviolet light, which of course is the main component of sunlight that causes tanning. So on a lot of winter days there would actually be more UV bouncing around than on a lot of summer days. Even light cloud cover won't stop it. You can get a horrible sunburn on an overcast day on the water or on a ski trip. And strange as it may seem they weren't particularly averse to going around in loincloths at times, even in the middle of winter.
Most leaves reflect both UV and infrared light. If the natives did the smart thing and spent most of their time under the jungle canopies where it's cooler, they would also be protected from a massive amount of UV and direct sunlight over the millenia. This isn't true anymore, but in the old days you could practically travel from one side of the country to the other without crossing any open areas not covered by the jungle canopy.
Most of Australia is an arid desert with strong similarities to sub-Saharan Africa. Dry, flat, with very little tree cover. It makes perfect sense that they would develop darker skin pigmentation over time.
So you came up with some good examples of exceptions without really disproving the fact that there is a general correlation between latitude and skin color. But the main thing is that this correlation is caused by relative exposure to sunlight, so it's only natural that people who live in environments that tend to concentrate or block sunlight would have characteristics that may be different from other areas in the same latitude.
It shouldn't be. Even full-size keyboards could be made much more compact in various ways: folding keyboards
There is only one thing I really want to see "fixed" in Firefox, and it's not really specific to the Mac platform. I honestly have never understood all this whining about Firefox not fitting in with other Mac applications, even before it got a lot better looking. I've been using it on Mac OS X for years with very few problems. That whole thing about native widgets on forms is something I really don't get. To me, the form widgets in Safari are icky, not the other way around.
What I really want to see are some of the features of the "strongly unrecommended" Tabbrowser Extensions by Shimoda Hiroshi integrated into the next version of FF. As far as I'm concerned TBE is/was the best extension that has ever existed, and pushes FF from just being a decent browser to being amazingly useful for a power user at a level that no other web browser can approach. Most of the main features should have been integrated into FF by the FF developers years ago. The extensions that are usually recommended to replace TBE like Tab Mix Plus are a joke in comparison. There are various lengthy forum threads in various places where people have discussed ways of replicated some of the features of TBE, but it just can't be done. Laugh if you want but TBE has kept me using FF 1.5 to this day on my personal machine. Various features haven't quite worked 100% for a long time, but back when it was all working I had the following features and more, with cross-platform support for all of it:
- Automatic grouping of related tabs
- Automatic coloring of tab groups so I can tell them apart!
- Automatically stays within the tab group by moving left when rightmost group tab is closed
- All popups including javascript windows forced to open in new tab
- Links to other sites automatically open in new background tab, same group
- Automatic wrapping of too many tabs into multiple tab rows (broken on Mac, unf.)
- Ability to save/bookmark tab groups and load entire groups in background tabs
- "Close group" option to quickly and easily close a ton of related tabs (much faster than closing tabs individually)
- Restriction of FF to using a single window no matter what (new window command disabled)
- Automatic saving/restoring of the browser state including groupings and their colors
- Drag & drop tab reordering
- Automatic opening of bookmarks, new address bar URLs, history, almost everything in new background tabs (I absolutely hate it when I have to manually open a new tab in Safari or regular FF just to avoid overwriting the contents of the current tab)
- Export/import of my TBE preferences between computers and platforms
- Probably several more features that I can't remember right now
Basically it gives me complete control of how my browser behaves and does everything in its power to help me stay organized and unconfused. It keeps the browser from making decisions on its own about when I'm done with a particular page or site. It keeps websites from being able to tell me when I should open a new window. I tell them when they're allowed to open a new window. Everything is forced into background tabs, even those idiotic javascript popup links that can't be opened in a tab the usual way. I don't lose pages just because I forgot to explicitly open a new tab before attempting to load a new URL or open a bookmark, it opens that new tab for me. It groups my sites clearly and logically in the same way that Mac OS X groups my applications clearly and logically. (OS X lets you stay within an application and cycle through all the open documents or windows in that application with Cmd+` [backtick/tilde key] instead of doing the Windows thing where you have to Alt+Tab between a bunch of unrelated application windows to get to things like Word documents that should be right next to each other. Alt+Tab on the Mac only cycles between applications. Together this makes task switching on the Mac immensely more efficient, IMNSHO.) TBE just makes things work the way they shoul
Like I said, your reaction to the word is a personal issue. You continue to make yourself upset even after I emphasized that I'm only using it as a descriptor that also applies to myself. It's a statement of fact, not an accusation or application of a blind stereotype. Furthermore you can't very well hold me responsible for not knowing your life story. I was merely responding to your initial comment that appeared to be very much in favor of the command line as being the easiest way to do things, including somehow being capable of consolidating any 10 GUI actions into a single easy to copy & paste text command.
.EXE/.COM/.SCR/.BAT and other file extensions as automatic executables, for which we've been berating them for years now?
It's very commendable that you've taken the time to create a nice GUI oriented tutorial, and it is very nicely done. I applaud your efforts and thank you for your time. However, and I'm sure you'll throw another hissy fit over this, I have to wonder how the uneducated Linux newbie is supposed to A) know such a tutorial exists, B) know how and where to find it, C) know how to interpret it, and D) why such a tutorial is even necessary or E) whether it's really safe to be telling Linux newbies to make all files with a particular file extension executable by default. Isn't that just as bad as Windows treating all
When a user tries to open an autopackage file prior to doing this procedure, what happens? Nothing? Does some other application open it and display it as a text file or something? Is it somehow made obvious that the user should look around for a tutorial like this? Is it somehow obvious how to search for or get to this tutorial? Because in order to be useful to the uninitiated user it would have to be. It would need to be referenced next to ever single link to any autopackage file on the web, and in a readme file that goes along with the autopackage. But autopackages are designed to work alone, right? So it's going to be rather unlikely that an inexperienced user would quickly jump online and be able to find your tutorial.
As for the tutorial itself: Yes, I know, the pictures should make everything totally obvious and simple. But I know a lot of computer users who would even be confused by what you've presented, not least of all because it simultaneously talks about two completely different desktop environments without bothering to make that fact abundantly clear. It may be obvious to you and me what's going on, but that's because we have prior knowledge based on years of experience. Your step 3 contains no less than four different images which are apparently showing me the same thing via different interfaces and themes. The uninitiated user will be extremely confused by that. A natural assumption would be to think that you're telling the user to go to four different dialogs or tabs somehow and click four different boxes.
Even I, an experienced Linux user (KDE mostly, but I've used GNOME and others), had to look at those images for a minute to really be sure they were all telling me the same thing. There are a ridiculous number of confusing differences in those screenshots even though they only come from two different desktop environments. Those who do not understand anything about the concept of permissions will not understand or learn anything from those images. Although they may blindly follow the instructions they will be confused the entire time about what they are doing and why. I've known many people who went through a procedure many times based on my instructions and learned nothing, because they didn't have any contextual knowledge to understand the first thing about what was actually going on.
I notice you also didn't bother to make any notes about why this procedure might be dangerous, or why they shouldn't do this for other types of files that they can't open, or why they should generally never follow similar instructions from an untrusted email or website. Nor do you explain why your website might be more trustworthy than
Well good for you. You say you didn't read the rest of my post as if it were an action to be proud of, so, I congratulate you. But maybe if you and the equally dumbass*/kneejerk/insecure moderator who gave me a "flamebait" mod had actually read the entire post you'd realize that I'm not a screaming luddite at all, I'm just a geek with a different opinion about how "easy" things are for regular people. An opinion based on years of experience with regular people, the kind of people who have trouble with basic email and often forget where the power button on their computer is located. I was trying to make you aware of certain assumptions you base your own opinions on, assumptions that you are probably not aware of most of the time and cause you to incorrectly assume that a particular acivity will be "easy" for everyone.
Whatever "screaming" you heard was in your own head based on your personal reaction to a word which apparently holds a lot more emotional charge for you than it does for me. I used the word in the dictionary sense of you "favoring a select group" when defining the concept of computer usability. You, ME, and most every other geek here is guilty of this unconscious attitude to some degree, usually without completely realizing it. I am making the statement that this is why the usability of "desktop Linux" still gets a failing grade in comparison to Windows and Mac OS X. Because the developers behind it are all part of our unconsciously elitist group of geeks who think the command line is perfectly simple.
To them/you/me, the command line is so simple in fact that it's obviously better than a GUI, no matter who is using the computer. So that's how they continue to design the system, and the regular users are left with a ton of gaps in the GUI where they have to acquire knowledge and copy/paste words they will never understand into a command line terminal that they will likewise never understand. Sure, they can follow instructions, but they won't learn why they're doing any of it or how to know if the instructions are telling them to do the wrong thing. There is nothing about the command line that is better for those who don't understand how it works.
I guess I should put in some smilies and LOLs next time so my "tone of voice" comes across better. Not using any exclamation points!!!1!!!one is apparently not enough to avoid being accused of screaming my head off.
Your loss.
* Too bad you aren't going to read past this word either. You might have learned something.
No, I'm sure you aren't the only one who hasn't experienced any video problems with Linux for years. But as I always try to explain to people, you're asking the wrong question. The important question is, has anyone experienced video problems with Linux, and how bad were those problems? Were they able to recover from those problems on their own recognizance? Did it stop them from being able to reach their desktop? Because for most people the desktop GUI is "the computer", and failure to display the desktop to even a single user out of ten thousand should be considered a showstopper level bug. To a user who has no idea how to use the command line (the majority of the masses that distros like Ubuntu are aimed at), it is tantamount to not being able to boot up at all. The GUI should ALWAYS come up short of a major hardware issue stopping the video card from physically working in even the most minimal graphics mode.
Sure, the ridiculous chaos of buggy PC hardware contributes to the problem, but most hardware conforms at least partially to certain standards and works fine. For instance all video cards for years have supported at least the unaccelerated VESA 2.0 video modes. When was the last time you saw a Windows machine fall back to the command line because it didn't have the correct video driver installed? You've never seen it, because Windows happily boots up in a universally supported 640x480x16bpp video mode that works on 99.9% of the cards out there. It's called "VGA". Then you fix the driver and reboot. You can even get online and find/download the driver because you aren't stuck at the command line going, "OK, what the hell do I do now?"
Developers are lazy, that's all there is to it. They would rather write lengthy wiki articles (which obviously an isolated user would be unable to read because he can't get to his desktop and GUI web browser, the only one he knows how to use) in which they describe a dozen steps each individual user can feel free to try for themselves. Would it be that hard to integrate those steps into a GUI that would run those same terminal commands in the background or do that same Google search in order to help the user apply the right hardware information? Would it be that hard to set up the GUI in a way that would allow the user to add or try out some possibly unsupported video modes manually? Nope, it's not that hard, but it's a little bit harder than writing wiki articles, so the users are left floundering.
Hardware identification is definitely not easy, but it could be conquered to a much greater extent if Linux distros would come up with some method of actively gathering precise hardware information into a centralized and automated database. A simple scripted GUI could run all the relevant terminal commands and ask the user a few questions about model numbers and brands, then shoot it all off to the central hardware information repository. The data would be either added or verified, and every time a single user of that same hardware did a Linux install the hardware detection would be automatic. They're doing it for identifying tracks on audio CDs, it should be just as easy to do the same for other hardware.
But my main gripe remains with the lack of fault tolerance and fallback modes. To LInuxites it seems that "safe mode" still translates to "command line", and that just doesn't fly. They can do better.
What's a terminal? Isn't that a place where planes and trains stop so people can get on and off? What's a command line? Am I supposed to line up somewhere? Copy what? Paste what where?
I know that like most geeks you don't realize or are unwilling to accept it, but you are an elitist. You judge how easy computing tasks are based on prior knowledge so extensive that you don't even consciously remember most of it, you just use it as if you were born with it. You think of this unconscious knowledge base as a set of skills and assume that all people have these skills, and that if they are confused by something you find simple they obviously aren't trying hard enough.
I know this because I'm also afflicted with this condition. I often deal with computer-illiterate people and have to bite my tongue to avoid saying something disdainful like, "How the hell can you not know how to copy and paste something into a terminal window?". They just don't. You have to accept it. When you're designing software, you have to constantly stop and ask yourself, "Do I know how to do this because it's really obvious, or because I have knowledge that helps me understand what to do?" You have to think, "Will someone who has never even seen a computer be able to understand how to fix this, or be able to easily search for and accurately find help for this issue from within the software?" If the answer is no, that's a bad sign for usability issues.
By the way, why are you comparing a single terminal command with 10 clicks in the GUI? Biased much? I know a lot of things are easier to accomplish in the shell, but worst case scenario of transferring any action to the GUI should be at most 6 total clicks. Any developer that can't get access to an action below 10 clicks is an idiot and shouldn't be working on usability issues. A smart developer should be able to provide a path to any commonly needed action within about 3 clicks or less. Doesn't the user also have to click something in the GUI just to open the terminal? Eh? Think about that.
Wow. That's fantastic. I used to use Linux in various incarnations as my main desktop OS. I root for it every day to continue improving. And it has improved, in so many ways. But it seems to be approaching true polish and usability on an asymptotic curve rather than a more linear progression. When even what are widely considered the best, most usable and user friendly distributions of Linux continue to be shipped out with bad showstopper bugs in full release versions, and basic usability features like automatic determination of your video card and monitor specs are still unreliable, it isn't there yet. Fail.
I still see an awful lot of terminal commands in that article and in the wiki links for fixing problems. I can
And what the hell is the deal with X11 anyway? Is it really that difficult to build in some fallback safe video modes for unidentified cards or screwed up config files, or to do whatever else is necessary to make sure that the user will ALWAYS be able to get back into his GUI desktop without expert help? That's a rhetorical question, the answer is no. It isn't that difficult to build in some simple fault tolerance in places where inexperienced users often get bitten, trapped and frustrated. How exactly is the user supposed to go search the wiki online for help fixing X11 when he only has one computer available and he can't figure out how to get X11 to start? Come on people. I should not be reading recent articles from users of the most recent and popular distros that talk about getting stuck at the command line. Fail.
I don't know, maybe I'm just crazy or something, but in my opinion this stuff should be top priority for anyone building a distro aimed at non-geeks. Even geeks appreciate a system that's simple to tweak or fix with a few clicks, if the number of migrations from Linux to OS X is any indicator (count me in that group). I'm waiting for the day when a Linux distro can hold a candle to OS X, but in terms of usability it really seems like there has been only marginal improvement over the last few years. So many prerequisite desktop features still have the feeling of being hacked together out of spare parts. The individual components may be coming from standards but the overall system still has no feeling of coherence. If anyone else actually wants to see a Year of the Linux Desktop someday these simple issues have got to be addressed or it will be a loooong time coming.
Note that I have made statements here about my feelings, impressions, and opinions, so don't try to argue with me as if we're talking about factual data. If there were a distro out there that could change my mind I would have already heard about it and tried it out by now. Yes, I continue to test drive recent releases periodically, and no, they haven't changed my mind at all. "Desktop Linux" simply isn't anywhere near the level of usability and coherence it will take to actually threaten Windows or Mac OS X and begin to dominate the home computing world. Developers are aiming way too low.
Um, no. You're still missing his point. Probably because it's simpler than you think it is. If you were discussing features or hardware support or something you might have a point. But this conversation is solely about which versions of the operating systems each vendor is officially supporting with patches. Congratulating either vendor on continuing to support the version just previous to the most current version is misunderstanding the point of the term "officially supported". Vista and XP are supported and Tiger and Panther are supported. The previous version of Mac OS X is always supported with security updates, so it is a given that 10.3.9 will continue to get security updates until Leopard is released.
The operating systems aren't actually being compared at all in this discussion, by the way, so the fact that Tiger is much older than Vista is irrelevant.
Really? Did the US Congress make a declaration of war at some point that I missed out on? Because my reserve unit seems to have forgotten to call me up to say, "We're goin' to war, Devil Dog, oorah! Report for duty in 24 hours. Semper Fi." If you're speaking of Bush's "War on Terror" that he begins and ends every other sentence with, that's called a figure of speech and has no legal backing no matter how many times he repeats it. Even if it did, it wouldn't suddenly make it acceptable to indefinitely detain people with no known connection to terrorist groups, including foreign nationals who were simply visiting some area where we happen to have some troops stationed, or in some cases were kidnapped from an adjacent area and turned in by others.
You should probably watch something besides Fox News every now and then. You might become a little less ignorant yourself. The established facts (as reported by crazy, liberal, non-Fox News stations like NPR and the BBC) are that the US military/government has been in the habit of offering rewards for the capture of "terrorists". Many of the people who have languished in the black box called Guantanamo (not allowing any communication or even access to a lawyer does not rhyme with the word "transparent") were simply random people scooped up off the street by Afghani warlords and such and turned in to the local US military posts for cash money. What makes this infinitely worse is that the military has already admitted many times that a large portion of the inmat--sorry, "detainees" have no actual evidence against them whatsoever beyond someone saying, "this guy is a terrorist, gimme some money". None, zip, zero, nada, el zilcho. They weren't keeping the evidence under wraps for security reasons, they simply didn't have any in many cases. That's already been established, from their own mouths. And yet they "detained" these people for literally years, and continue to do so, EVEN AFTER running their own investigations and finding no evidence with which to place charges. Worse yet (I know, how could it get worse!), they have done their level best to block all attempts at providing these unaccused (unaccusable!) persons with any due process, even though many have never been proven to be terrorists or enemy combatants or even that they were ever present near a location that any combat took place. The worst serial murderer/bomber/rapist/child molester gets at a minimum a chance to talk to a lawyer and due consideration by a court of law. These people got nothing. For years.
You admit yourself that they have already released many people, finally, after really having no choice due to continuing public and legal pressures. Obviously they aren't going to be releasing actual proven terrorists anytime soon, so who are all those people? There are hundreds of people in Gitmo, yet more than half have simply been released? Do you even have a functioning brain beyond the part that regulates your automatic
I think it's pretty clear to most people from the summary that the word "gagged" isn't being used in the strict legal or even literal sense, but rather in the figurative sense:
Having the moderators (or sole moderator, if that is the case) of what is probably the main "community" discussion forum blocking any and all posts asking or making statements about a particular topic seems to fit pretty nicely into this definition. Doesn't seem all that emotional either, more like an accurate, factual description, although not written in the technically precise legal terms you would have preferred. Any emotional reaction should come from your abhorrence, hatred, loathing, detestation, execration, revulsion, disgust, repugnance, horror, odium, or aversion to the entire concept of censorship in even the most minor situation relating to the legal rights of others.
Hopefully this project will now die a horrible death after being forked yet again by people who are actually interested in maintaining and improving it for current users without attempting to exercise control over the behavior of the users. No one should put up with this behavior from the developer of any software you rely on to do something as important as keeping your business running.
Hence the emphasis I placed on the phrase "officially supported". I know you can go a lot further back both with and without hacks like XPostFactor, it's just unsupported by Apple.
Indeed, I have Panther installed on a circa 1995 Power Mac 8500 that's been upgraded with 512MB of memory (it still has free slots for another 512MB!), a 1GHz G3 processor, an IDE controller, a DVD+-RW dual layer burner, along with FireWire and USB 2.0. I also have a Gigabit ethernet card ready to throw in there. It works quite well, and worked almost as well even before upgrading the processor from the original 120Mhz PowerPC 604! That's like putting XPSP2 on a, what, original Pentium computer? It's crazy cool.
Insert install DVD.
Restart.
Hold down C key after the chime to boot from disc.
Wait.
Select "Archive & Install".
Start installation.
Wait.
Reboot.
Live happily ever after.
The End.
Apple introduced the "Archive & Install" feature with version 10.2 (Jaguar), I think. It does basically what the older Mac OS installers did, renames your current system folder and installs the new version. I personally have never actually used it yet, what with being OCD about system entropy after years of traumatization at the hands of a certain other operating system that used to require reinstallation every six months in order to maintain performance. I prefer to start from scratch whenever possible, but that's just me.
From the comments I have encountered online over the last few years it seems that a great many people have used this feature with great success. Many people appear to have upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 or from 10.2 straight to 10.4 without any trouble at all. It is also touted as an easy way to recover from bad system updates. I've read many accounts from people who nonchalantly Archive & Install all the time, anytime they encounter an issue like that. Apparently it's very fast and doesn't break everything, unlike when you're forced to reinstall Windows which usually wipes out your registry and turns into a nightmare. Fortunately all the user data and configuration information is properly separated from the main system folder and they don't use anything as monstrous as the delicate monolithic Windows registry, so things usually don't get broken just because you reinstalled the OS.
But, more importantly, what is so great about Mac OS X and Mac hardware is that it's so easy to make a complete bootable backup of your entire drive, a clone, onto an external FireWire or USB drive. Then even if something were to go horribly wrong with your upgrade you can just boot from that external drive and clone it back. Voila, you're right back where you started, happy as a clam and ready to try again after you figure out what you did wrong. Try that with a Windows upgrade.
Also I think that when you use Archive & Install you have the option of going to the Startup Disk preferences and choosing to reboot into the previous system folder. This can be done from any restore or install disc in case the machine won't even boot to the desktop for some reason. It's not a complete reversion since a lot of new applications will be installed with the new OS that may not be compatible with the older OS, but it can be useful.
In short, I don't think you'll have any trouble upgrading, although I would wait until the first update comes out. There are always a few issues that never show up until a new OS gets installed by millions of people, no matter how much beta testing and QA cycles you go through. Believe me, there will be plenty of people happy to blaze a trail for you and be the first to find any potential issues and help Apple fix them quickly. Even if you do have an issue, if you follow my advice and always do a backup clone on an external drive it is almost impossible to be unable to quickly recover from anything up to and including total hard drive failure, and go on about your business. AFAIC this ability to recover from almost any possible situation without being forced to reinstall applications, reset hundreds of personal preferences or restore user data piecemeal is one of the best features of owning a Mac, and a big reason that I recommend them to most of my clients (I'm a freelance computer tech).
Sure do. I think that was about the same time when users kept complaining about having to buy another Mac OS X upgrade every year, and when the developers were complaining about having to keep up with Apple's breakneck development pace. Right about the same time I seem to recall Apple announcing that they would be slowing the pace of development to give everyone breathing room from here on out. Let's see, yes I do believe that was right around the time Panther came out or shortly thereafter.
Leopard will have some neat stuff and a little performance boost on 64-bit machines, but I'm pretty sure you won't die from being forced to use Tiger for another couple of months. I (for one) applaud them for making the decision to finish a proper QA cycle on the software that's going to run my computer, rather than pawning off some barely-out-of-beta crap on us at the last minute.
Call me when Apple sits on their asses for six years straight without bothering to bring out a single innovation, upgraded hardware or major OS release, while simultaneously attempting to foist a subscription licensing model on you that has you paying a yearly fee for the privilege of getting a "free" upgrade to a new product that doesn't materialize for over half a decade. Call me when Apple puts out a major OS release that isn't faster/better/more feature packed than the last one and doesn't continue to add value for owners of older Apple hardware going all the way back to the first iMac with a Firewire port (1999, that's eight years of Mac models that are officially supported by Apple's most current OS right now).
Anyway, I'd bet that Apple are just giving themselves some breathing room and we'll probably get a surprise announcement about Leopard being already done and available along with some new Mac models, hmmm, just in time for the new school year to start. Wouldn't surprise me one bit either way.
It might behoove you to actually know what you're talking about next time you post. Like maybe read up on how hash functions work, and maybe look up the definition of the word "identical" as it relates to computer data. None of the issues you raised are the slightest bit relevant to this technique. If two files have the same hash that means they are bit-for-bit identical. The same concept applies to taking a hash of smaller chunks of that file. Even if the overall file is not 100% identical, if you download two chunks that have the same hash they will be bit-for-bit identical even if they came from two different files, and even if those files both had corrupted or incomplete chunks elsewhere.
The problem they are trying to get around is that various not-very-important differences between files, like different filenames, will make the overall file hash not match, while the actual important data within the file is often identical. One of the given examples is ID3 tags on MP3 files. MP3 tags are embedded in the file, thus any change even as simple as changing a single character from uppercase to lowercase in any of those header tags will cause the overall file hash to fail. Now, I'm no file format expert but I'll bet there are a lot of formats that keep their metadata in a small, standard-length block at the beginning of the file. Thus if you were to split those files into smaller chunks and get hashes of those chunks, you would probably find that all chunks past the initial header chunk will be identical with chunks from files that previously couldn't be matched based on the overall file hash. Depending on the particular file this could vastly increase the number of possible sources that you could download from, at least for the matching chunks, which I daresay would probably be 99% or more of the total content of the file. Thus improving the efficiency of P2P applications and your ability to obtain uncommon files or files that no longer have sources available that contain your exact version of the file. You'll be able to just download the rest of the file from "similar" sources which contain "identical" pieces, where the word "similar" only relates to the overall file.
Now, just to address how your issues would even relate to this whole concept: If there are two files out there with different metadata (like bitrate or source to use your examples) and the rest of those two files consist of identical chunks of the important data (like a video or audio stream to use your example), you shouldn't care which file you're downloading those identical chunks from. The differing metadata will not affect your version of the file because it won't be downloaded. In other words, if you begin downloading a file and the metadata in your version of the file is correct, it will still be correct when you've finished downloading the file, and the overall hash of the completed file will be a perfect match with the file you initially started downloading. Where the identical chunks came from is irrelevent because bit-for-bit identical chunks are completely interchangeable. That's the whole point of the word "identical" in computer terms. What actual data is in the different files doesn't matter, because it's identical!
On the other hand if you started out by downloading a version of that file that has slightly different or
My mistake. I dyslexically misread "ipfilter" on the website as "iptables". It's nice that the next version will use pf, but I'm still wondering why everyone is basing these important security-focused products on FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD. It's just odd.
M0n0wall uses iptables and is based on FreeBSD. PfSense at least uses PF from OpenBSD but is also FreeBSD based. Unless there are other options out there I guess really nothing has changed. Everyone talks up OpenBSD as the most secure OS and the best possible choice for a firewall, but nobody wants to take the time to make a usable dedicated firewall/router variant for regular people. Surely it wouldn't be that difficult to make an OpenBSD-based distro just as featureful and easy to configure as a FreeBSD-based version. But what do I know.
Which brings up a question I've been wanting to get a solid answer to for a long time now: Why hasn't anyone developed a simple-to-use, runs-from-CD, pre-configured, dedicated firewall/router variant of OpenBSD for turning old computers into firewall/routers? After all it is arguably the most secure operating system available and everybody and his brother seems to think pf is infinitely better than iptables, yet the only things out there that fit this description are Linux-based distros and often one or two kernels behind the mainstream. I'm speaking of IPCop, Smoothwall and such. You stick the disc in an old computer, boot it up, administer it through a web interface, often by just clicking some checkboxes. Simple, even for non-technical people.
Somebody here must know what the deal is. Even though everyone thinks OpenBSD is best for firewalls, nobody has taken the time to build one of these tools that can be used easily by non-network administrators. What the heck? Or has something changed in the last year or so?
I thinks we's been watchink too muchs Metalocolypse.
Everyone in this thread so far has apparently failed to notice that MicroSD is not the same as the regular SD card format. And MicroSD only comes in up to 2gb so far. 4gb is probably a ways away since SDHC cards have only recently reached 4gb. Even MiniSD maxes out at 2gb right now.
Isn't it great having ten million different card formats?
I see people making jokes about all these bots being Windows-based, and of course I have to assume myself that this is the case based on experience. However, neither the original article nor the site they link to seem to make any mention of any operating system, no less Windows. Are there any actual statistics for how many of these detected bots are running on Windows? It's hard to be smug about other operating systems be so much more secure without having some actual data to point to.
Well?
Well, think again. I've been using both Linux and Mac OS X for years, with OS X being my primary desktop choice for a couple of years now. I'm very much aware that there are various other encryption software choices for all operating systems, which is why I said (the only?) with a question mark. Back when I was using Linux as my primary desktop I chose to use Mandrake for a while and used the built-in encryption, which didn't actually work as advertised and was only compatible with that version of Mandrake. I had to do my setup and mounting all from the command line because there were no GUI mounting tools that understood how to ask the user for a password if the volume was encrypted. LUKS at the time was just starting out, I think.
Now, looking around real quick I don't really see much that allows me to compare LUKS with TrueCrypt for usability. The LUKS website itself describes it as "the upcoming standard for Linux hard disk encryption". I see there is FreeOTFE for Windows and Windows-based PDAs, and that's great, but it still doesn't do me any good in Mac OS X. I'm also having trouble finding any Linux GUI applications, so apparently not much has changed on the Linux side in terms of usability in the last few years, besides the name of the encryption software. So LUKS is basically in the same boat as TrueCrypt, except there doesn't appear to be any stated focus on such niceties as plausible deniability, hidden volumes and all that other good stuff talked about on the TrueCrypt site.
Now, I'm all about having multiple standards to choose from, but for now I'm going to put my money on TrueCrypt being the first to come to the table with a real cross-platform (Mac/Win/Lin/etc) encrypt solution that can be used by both geeks and non-geeks. If LUKS comes first, I'll be all over it, but I don't see it happening yet.
I think what the original poster meant to say was, "With digital you either get a perfect copy, or a corrupt copy. With analog you always get a corrupt copy."
Digital content isn't unstable, it's just more sensitive to corruption because in general software expects to be able to extract a perfect copy every time, rather than a near-perfect copy. Whether you can recover partially corrupted digital data depends on several things:
A) Choice of filesystem (journaling, error correction, built-in redundancy)
B) Choice of media (CD/DVD bad unless multiple copies you have, hmm?)
C) Choice of physical storage method and location (store CD/DVD out of sunlight, vertical in jewel case)
D) Choice of archival file formats (PAR2, anyone?)
E) Choice of hardware (some hardware is more robust)
F) Choice of software used to read the media (most software gives up too easily)
The cure:
1. Use the right media (with phsyical redundancy measures to counter physical damage).
2. Use a robust filesystem (preferably with error correction and redundancy measures also to counter minor physical damage).
3. Use a robust file format specifically designed for archiving data (again with built-in redundancy measures and compartmentalized structure that can work around partial corruption).
4. Use hardware that has a high tolerance for physical or digital media corruption.
5. Use software specifically designed to keep trying to extract data even after encountering partial corruption (like Unstoppable Copier).
All that being said, if you were to say that digital media, file formats, filesystems, hardware and software are too fragile, I would have to agree. There is far too little fault tolerance and redundancy built into digital storage media, hardware, software, filesystems and file formats. A lot could definitely be improved for the future. But calling most digital content unstable because a CD got scratched is disingenuous at best.
Haha, you told a funny!
Sadly, I had to read that like four times before I figured it out.