You missed (or choose to be blind to) my entire point. There are already a dozen laws that make writing and distributing viruses illegal, so why do viruses still exist? Viruses are already illegal twelve times over, what good will it do to make them illegal thirteen times over? Very, very little, in the real world.
"The universe" isn't publishing filesharing apps loaded with spyware. It's not putting up online games in an effort to trick kids into putting spyware on the family computer.
Oh, so it must be some other universe doing all that stuff. I guess it doesn't happen in this universe. You might want to think about this one for a while. Like a couple of decades. It's sort of a Zen koan type of thing. You'll figure it out eventually. Maybe.
Absolutely untrue. Laws shape decisions by individuals and corporations. A large corporation is probably not going to bundle spyware with their software if they know that there is a $1000 per copy penalty for doing so.
Uh, no, they will just make their spyware conform to the law so that it will be legal, but it will still be spyware, and ignorant people will still install it. They aren't making spyware illegal, they're just requiring it to have a slightly more informative installation process. A few people will have the chance to protect themselves by being smart and actually reading the warning label. Stupid people will still wind up with an average of 28 pieces of spyware on their computer, because they don't know why they should care about their personal information and besides, the spyware came with such neat features! Yummy! And they will still have no clue why their computer has ground to a halt. The laws don't protect you from yourself.
You know damned well that is a vile distortion of what I wrote. I said that we should not abolish laws against muggings and identity theft and, instead, rely solely on self-defense classes and education about preventing identity theft.
I know exactly what you said, I read it several times. The corollary to what you said is that we don't need to rely on self-defense or education, because we have these wonderful laws, you know. You did not say that we should have both the laws and the education, and rely on the education for prevention and the laws for punishment. You just freaked out and said we shouldn't ever think about getting rid of any laws, while implying that they somehow protect everyone from their own ignorance. Which is, to put it succinctly, completely incorrect.
So some ten year old kid who wants to access an online game on the family's computer should understand the ramifications of spyware, be making value decisions about privacy, and should send a message to Microsoft about his displeasure with their OS design? Don't waste our time with the tired 'kid's parents should be surgically attached to him 24/7' argument, because that's not reality.
You're a real riot. Send a message to MS about his displeasure with their OS? If the parents had done their job, either Microsoft's OS wouldn't be on the computer, or it would be a better OS. They wouldn't need to be surgically attached to anyone. But since people tolerate shitware, look where we are. With something like 100,000 viruses and worms trying to attack our systems every day, even though worms and viruses have been illegal since before the first one was created. The children are in danger largely because of the parents putting up with it all and remaining ignorant for decades.
The fact that you can buy a gun to compensate for your inability to defend yourself using your own strength, speed, and intelligence is proof-positive that it's possible to circumvent natural selection.
Wow. You truly are a god, sir. Am I to understand that you can dodge a bullet? Amazing. Here's another corollary for you, in your own words no less: "Screw all you weak people who aren't super-strong, super-fast, and super-smart. If you can't dodge bullets like me, you shouldn't be allowed
Everyone should not have to know about everything just to avoid being victimized.
The parent poster got +5, Insightful for this (at the moment), which makes me sad. Because he's missing something BIG here. This universe could care less what should be happening. If you (and those around you) are ignorant, no amount of laws will keep you from being victimized. Laws don't keep anything from happening, except slightly, in a general way, sometimes. Laws punish those who do the victimizing, but only after they've done it and only if they can be caught. Laws punish the victimizer for creating a victim. By their very definition, they can't keep you from being victimized, since they only operate after the fact! The parent poster seems to believe that no one should ever need to be taught self-defense or how to avoid identity theft simply because we have laws against those things.
This is the same logical fallacy commonly held up by gun control advocates: i.e., You don't need a gun for self-defense because the police and their laws are here to protect you. The problem with this is that the police, except in rare situations, do not and cannot "protect" you. The police attempt to prevent crimes, but mostly what they do is enforce laws and investigate crimes that have already happened. That's when those laws come into effect: after someone has been victimized. The police will be happy to show up at your door 45 minutes after you've called 911, and grab the guy who shot you in the head and throw that book of laws right at him. I feel safer already! I have a book of laws protecting me! Too bad it didn't stop the bullet. In the same way, the police cannot protect you from spyware, no matter how many anti-spyware laws are enacted. If you're lucky they will go after the guy who has already victimized you and thousands of others like you.
The laws can't protect you, and 99% of the time the police can't protect you, so who's left? You, and those around you. You should be responsible for yourself and as many other people as you can handle, and the same for those around you. Teach them to be responsible for themselves and for you. My gosh, it's like a beowu^H^H^H^H^H^H web of personal and social responsibility. A web of personal and social safety and protection. It may not protect you from all things, but it's your best and only chance at protection in this universe. Personal responsibility, and cooperation.
So yes, get rid of the laws and become more self-reliant and this nation or any other would be better off in the short and long run. All laws can be brought down to a simple rule anyway: Don't hurt others unless it is absolutely necessary for your own survival and you have exhausted all other alternatives available to you, and when someone needs help surviving, help them.
In other words, mods, the parent post is not insightful in the slightest. It is not insightful to say that people shouldn't have to know about their universe in order to live in it safely. It's a big, bad universe. Anyone smarter than a thumbtack has the potential of learning enough about their computer to realize that they are being victimized by these spyware companies, and subsequently to realize that they are being victimized by whoever designed the software they use that allows this spyware easy access to their computer. If people would just take a bit of personal responsibility there would be no spyware or malware, because the company who makes their software (who shall remain unnamed) would have been forced by natural selection market pressures to create a product that isn't so vulnerable to such things.
It's not about learning everything there is to know about spyware. It's about learning just enough to navigate your universe safely, and not putting up with being a victim. Personal responsibility should come from both the people designing the softare and the people using it. If it doesn't come from the former there should
I'd be very interested in something a little more concrete, such as how many simple exploits like this are available for the various versions of Windows. The exploit must (A) still work on systems that are current with all available patches and (B) must crash the system hard when run as a normal user on a reasonably secured system. Anyone have numbers on this or know where you find a list? It would be more interesting than spouting Open Source philosophy to the choir.
I've found that if i need to configure something non-run of the mill, i can find it... in a config file.
Fascinating.
Now, the spatial file manager seems great for desktop file browsing. In fact, that's the only file browsing I do with a file manager... browsing source trees and other large depth things are best left to the actual programs that need to do something with that data (e.g. IDEs).
Well, congratulations. You've dug into the system far enough to find the "config file". ("Whatever that is", says Joe Public.) And you like spatial browsing. Bully for you, ol' chap. Although you simultaneously acknowledge that it fails for deeper folder structures.
(Mods: When it's not just an option but an actual requirement to edit a text file to change the behaviour of something simple on my supposedly user-friendly graphical desktop environment, it is not insightful to point out the text file can be edited by a more advanced user. It doesn't solve the problem in the slightest for the less advanced people.)
So (A) if a person is too ignorant to know about and find and edit "config files" then they shouldn't be changing those settings (leave that to the smart people like you and the GNOME developers), and (B) to browse a deeper structure of files I should learn to use the shell and/or an IDE. Basically I should be smarter, be more logical and become a programmer or developer like you. I'm all for using the right tool for the right job, but there are more kinds of deep folder strutures in the world than CVS repositories.
This is exactly what I and many others "have a beef with". You, and the author of the article on OSNews, and the GNOME developers, appear to have this attitude in varying degrees that if we aren't doing things your way we're either wrong, stupid or both. If I had half a brain I'd find that config file in nanoseconds and there would be nothing to whine about. That's what you're saying, right? There's no use getting offended, but this is exactly the impression that you are conveying. Why else would there be so many posts under this article calling the author an arrogant jerk? It's simple: He's telling everyone they're stupid and wrong. (You should do this, you should do that, you don't like spatial browsing because you have bad habits, etc, etc, etc.) Most people don't like that.
I'm sure what you said made perfect sense to you, but myself and many others don't feel like doing it your way. I'm quite comfortable in the shell and use it for a lot of filing tasks, but for many purposes I prefer the file browser in explore mode (on Windows/Linux) or in list view or column view (on OS X). I'd go nuts if my file manager forced me to open a new window for every folder, and made it difficult to find and change the setting. I'm quite happy to let you do things your way, so why do you want it to be difficult for me to do things my way?
I'm not calling GNOME a joke. I'm simply saying that because of the attitude of its developers it appears to be becoming a joke to some people. I have to say that most of the "switching" comments I've seen in the last year have not been from people switching to GNOME, but from those switching away from it, mostly to KDE 3+, and mostly because of (drumroll) easier configurability. That's the main gist of the comments that I have personally seen on this website.
But really the only reason I bother posting on this issue at all is that I want desktop Linux to get better and become more popular, and I don't see GNOME becoming more popular these days. I see it as having an awful lot of detractors, and that's bad for desktop Linux as a whole. Anyone who uses Linux as a desktop should be concerned whenever a project like this keeps getting comments from the public that say the developers are unresponsive and forcing interfaces on the users. The facts may be different, but it's the first impressions that are important. I believe in the commercial world it's called "marketing".
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site!
Holy cow. I must have skimmed this line in a dozen comments on the way down to yours and just now finally realized what it says. I can't believe anyone would say something that stupid. Now I really have to read this article.
Let's see... open the article page in a new TAB... tum-te-tum... then switch to my eBay TAB while that's loading in the background... I hope this dumbass author is reading my post and frothing at the mouth... doobee-doobee-do...
Sounds like someone with OCD of some type who can't handle "corrupting" a browser window by opening more than one website in the same window. You know, because it's "confusing". And now he wants us all to be like him. Baby steps to the web browser, buddy!
Starting to get the hang of it... after a week or so... and it is difficult to adapt to your filesystem if you have deeper directories. That's great, I like that. You've just told us why spatial nautilus is a pain to use and thus why it shouldn't be forced on people without a really easy way to disable it.
The answer to your problem according to the author of the article is that you suck and you should restructure your filesystem to fit inside the confines of an efficient spatial file structure. The file browser should never adapt to your needs, of course.
This is why I won't be trying GNOME again for a good long while. There's just been one (several, actually) too many articles about this "we're right and you're wrong" attitude of the GNOME developers. It may not be entirely correct, but it's an awfully strong impression that I've been getting for the last year or so. Perceptions made Microsoft the most powerful software company on the planet, and perceptions are bringing GNOME down day by day. The GNOME developers need to wake up.
To the parent: the word is "incomprehensible". Just FYI.
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable.
I wonder how many different people are going to have to say this in how many different ways before the oh-so-smart GNOME developers wake the f--- up and realize how much public favor they are losing, and how many current and potential users they are losing. GNOME seems to be fast becoming a joke for a lot of people. I've thought about trying it for like the 12th time after hearing about some of the new features in 2.6, but this is something like the 6th story in the last few months where I'm seeing a large portion of the comments coming from former GNOME users telling me how GNOME is both difficult to use and non-configurable. Non-configurable is the main theme I've been hearing about GNOME since the 2.0 development releases started coming out.
I think a certain parallel could be drawn here between the GNOME developers and the recent XFree86 blowup, in the sense that there seems to be a very similar sort of stupidity going on in both camps. "We're right and you're wrong, so if you want to do something in a way we haven't officially approved you can stuff it." Anyway, that's just my general impression at this point, and that's why I won't be switching to GNOME in the foreseeable future. Honestly, what are they thinking? It's really getting ridiculous.
I didn't know that they did it this way. I am not as impressed as I was before. The dog is going to realize which one is out of place just by the smell of the toy which obviously doesn't fit w/the rest. Trained dogs sniff out stuff that they recognize all the time. What's so different about them picking the one thing that is different?
You're talking about two different things there. You (a human) make the mental leap between "unrecognized object" and "unknown sound" very easily. That's one thing. Many animals can be taught to recognize various objects or smells. That's another thing. Reasoning that a new (previously unknown) object/smell might be related to a new (previously unknown) sound takes a slightly higher level of intelligence. Or so I would think.
Sniffer dogs are trained on known scents and trained in exactly what to do and how to react to those known scents. They aren't taught to react to something just because it's different. Dogs are so sensitive that there are "different" objects around them literally every time their handler comes to work (new clothes with smells of unknown people or pets on the clothes, etc). This dog does appear to make a sort of minor mental leap.
ERP systems implementations fail due to people and organizations, not due to technology.
Slap down a system made for a sane business in front of a university and tell that university to behave like a sane business in order to make the system work... well, it won't work.
Sure, the people or the organization should be nudged toward change if they are doing something in a way that is contrary to the "sane" way for no good reason. But saying that the fault lies entirely with the customer is ridiculous. You can't stuff every business model into the same mold, but you can design software with enough modularity to be able to adapt to almost any business model, even if it's technically "wrong".
Any software that costs $150 MILLION DOLLARS to implement should be flexible enough to adapt to different types of businesses and individual ways of working. It's absolutely stupid to blame the problems with a system like this entirely on the end user instead of on the software. Let me say that again: ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS. I don't know how that kind of expenditure on software could be justified even if it worked like a charm. And it obviously doesn't. You should be able to buy god-like, rock solid and infinitely adaptable software for that kind of money. Not something that "doesn't work" after several YEARS and is no longer upgradeable due to half-assed "customization" by Oracle that no doubt cost millions of dollars.
That's totally bizarre. I sympathize with you. But I also have experience with a whole range of Macs, from 350MHz to my dual G4 867 (which is I think the slowest dual CPU G4). The only slowdowns I've seen came from the one iBook that only has 128MB of memory. Its identical twin with 256MB is definitely more responsive.
I can't imagine where your expectations for responsiveness come from if Panther doesn't meet them. My recent experience with XP on brand spanking new computers showed me it isn't any more responsive than OS X, and usually less. But I did boot up BeOS Max on an older PC the other day and was depressed for hours afterward after being reminded of how responsive it was compared to anything else. It seems to react before you can finish telling it what to do. You wouldn't happen to be a fellow BeOS refugee, would you?;)
Personally I'm still looking forward to Linux improving enough on the desktop to rival OS X, but I don't see that coming for another couple of years. Otherwise even if OS X was slow for me I would still prefer it over the biggest security hole known to man (XP). The one caveat is the Mac is still a mysterious beast in some ways, and I'd prefer to know what's going on under the hood.
I'm curious now as to what does meet your expectations for responsiveness. Surely not XP.
Contrast this to the PB 667 with 1GB RAM I had less than *2* years ago that was so slow running 10.3 I eventually sold it in disgust.
I think something went wrong with your install of Panther. Seriously. I'm running Panther (10.3.3) on a dual-proc 867MHz with 768MB RAM and a 350MHz slot-loading iMac with 320MHz RAM and a couple of G3 iBooks at 700MHz with 128MB and 256MB of RAM, respectively. Most of the time I can't tell any difference besides the one with 128MB being a little slower. They're both snappy and very usable. Before you threw that machine away you probably should have tried a few more things beyond repairing permissions, like forcing a system-wide prebinding update, clearing out some caches with a tool like OnyX, and if that didn't work an Archive & Reinstall of the OS (which is a lot simpler than I ever thought it would be). Granted I only have a year of experience now with 11 old and new Macs, but by now I can tell you with some certainty that Panther should have been perfectly good on that machine. I'm sure someone else is very happy now with their new PowerBook with 1GB RAM.
I was a Mac hater until last year when I experienced OS X Jaguar. Since then I've learned a lot and found that in general Macs have good hardware (there are exceptions, but not as many as on the PC side in my experience) and OS X is an outstanding OS that just keeps improving, getting faster and more stable. And the best part is that just by knowing a small set of rules you can in most cases keep a Mac running smoothly forever just by performing a few routine maintenance tasks, and if something does go horribly wrong it can be fixed much more easily than for instance a Windows computer. There simply is no comparison. I can still get into the guts of my Linux laptop at home more easily than I can on OS X, but the hardware quality and ease of use of OS X more than make up the difference. As soon as I can afford a Mac laptop I won't be paying much attention to Linux for a while.
I can attest to OS X being very usable on a 350MHz slot-loading iMac. Just make sure you have at least 256MB of RAM, preferably 512MB or even more depending on what it will be doing. AND MAKE ABSOLUTELY DAMN SURE YOU HAVE THE LATEST FIRMWARE INSTALLed ON THAT THING. I kid you not, I fried one iMac and almost fried the other one but was able to find the right firmware and flash it which arrested the strange process it was going through. Most importantly I hadn't even installed OS X yet when the video started going wacko on me. THE ACT OF BOOTING ANY OS X BASED BOOT CD WILL DESTROY YOUR IMAC UNLESS YOU HAVE THE LATEST FIRMWARE FOR THAT MODEL INSTALLED. Yes, that's right, I'm yelling. I think this message needs to get to as many of you potential upgraders as possible, so you can avoid the problems I had.
As long as you have the right firmware and pack it with plenty of memory (go Crucial.com!) you will wind up with a machine that is just as usable with OS X (10.3+) as it was with OS 9. It's really quite amazing.
Plus as I read in a post further up, there is a haxie called Shadow Killer that will turn off the shadow rendering and give you a bit of a speed boost on older Macs. It's really amazing what Apple has managed to do between 10.0 and 10.3.4. Every version has been faster and more stable. I'm sure there are many people out there that tried OS X in the 10.0 and 10.1 days when it was still under heavy development and gave up on it because it was slow and unstable. Well, Jaguar was better and Panther is immensely better. OS X is revitalizing a lot of old hardware.
MacOS 9.1 would run much faster on an older iMac than OS X does, so it might give a better user experience in that respect.
I find this is no longer true for version 10.3 of OS X and beyond, especially 10.3.3+. Plus I just read about Shadow Killer from a post above that will make it even faster on older computers. Apple has optimized the living crap out of OS X since 10.0 to the point where it's speed and performance is now comparable or better than OS 9 on the same hardware. It's certainly more responsive due to the significantly smarter multitasking architecture. The only caveat would be that you should have 256MB of RAM in the machine, preferably more AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE ABSOLUTE LATEST FIRMWARE, OR YOU WILL FRY THE COMPUTER, LITERALLY. If you have the latest firmware everything will be peachy. DON'T EVEN BOOT ANY OS X BASED BOOT CD ON AN OLDER IMAC THAT DOESN'T HAVE THE LATEST FIRMWARE. This includes the newer TechTools diagnostic disks and probably Norton SystemWorks/Utilities boot CDs and many others as well. I don't know what happens internally but just booting OS X from the install CD will start the process of frying the logic or video board inside, and you will soon wind up with a dead computer that will not boot. Trust me, I'm not making this up. I still have one iMac sitting in storage that is unbootable.
You must realize that sooner or later someone will try to boot some CD on that old iMac that is based on an OS X kernel and your machine will get fried anyway, so taking the small risk now of upgrading it to OS X is not a big deal.
I've upgraded a 350MHz slot-loading iMac to Panther and it's just as usable as when it was running OS 9.2, if not more so. It's certainly beneficial to have all the latest OS and Internet technology on there, including for instance the ability to use any USB flash drive and read CDs that were only written with the Windows Joliet filesystem, and run FireFox. Plus it's fully multi-user, which is highly useful in situations like labs or schools.
As the parent poster notes you won't have a great choice of web browsers on OS 9, besides an old version of IE5 which is rapidly getting older, or a clunky old version of Mozilla that barely works, or Netscape 4 *gag*. I don't think OS 9 is really a good option if you're donating an iMac to someone who really has a use for a good computer. Slap some new memory in there from Crucial.com (as much as possible) and the latest version of OS X (10.3.4), and that machine will be usable for another 5-7 years. Seriously. Try slapping XP on a PC from 6 years ago and see how useful it is. OS X is a different beast, and it's truly amazing what Apple has managed to do with it between 10.0 and Panther. We have no reason to expect that Tiger won't also be faster and thus work even better on older hardware than Panther does.
Or maybe it's just mindblowing because I've lived through a decade of Windows updates that required twice the hardware every 18 months just to keep the OS responsive. With OS X it's proving to be the other way around so far.
The books about digital photography seem to assume you can't even take an autofocused picture with flash without help
Heh. I think a lot of people do have a problem doing even that, at least until they grasp the fact that they have to press the shutter down halfway and wait for the camera to focus before taking the picture.
I can recommend a good book that I've been borrowing from the local library for the past few weeks: Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Digital Photography: 107 Lessons on Taking, Making, Editing, Storing, Printing, and Sharing Better Digital Images. It is chock full of excellent examples of everything you're looking for. The printing is high quality so you can actually see the differences in pictures when he's showing what different settings will do. Every example has accompanying explanations so you know how and why he changed something to improve his pictures. There are lots of fun exploratory ideas throughout the book.
It's really one of the best digital photography books I've seen, and would serve as an excellent introductory book for anyone just getting into digital photography, or someone transitioning from film photography, or for anyone who's been at it for a while and wants to get better. There's also a lot of hands-on and very well explained Photoshop projects for enhancing or playing with your digital images.
This book is so fun and informative that I'm thinking of actually buying it, and I can't remember the last time I payed money for a book that wasn't work-related instead of just checking out websites (which I still do, of course, and there are some damn good photography websites out there). The cover price is $60 but as you can see it's available on Amazon for around $30. I feel it will be a good investment.
I've seen a few posters here who seem to think this stuff has all been done before with film, but there are some definite differences between film and digital that you will want to understand. For one thing the dynamic range of digital sensors doesn't come close to film yet, which makes photographing high-contrast scenes difficult (scenes where there are both really bright things and dark things in the picture). In turn, film never came close to the dynamic range of the human retina. There will be many cases where you will be disappointed if you aren't aware of this potential problem and know how to compensate for it. Even if you understood the problem with film, digital will have new gotchas.
There are also issues with file formats (RAW, TIFF, or JPEG?). Each choice will slightly (or strongly) affect the resulting photos. If you actually want to get into this stuff beyond point-and-shoot, it is helpful to have an understanding of how all the "old" film rules translate into the digital camera world, including how the affect of different lenses will be different due to the size of the sensor in the camera compared to the size of "standard" 35mm film. Etcetera.
I mentioned there are some good websites, so I should probably throw in a few here:
Some EXCELLENT in-depth technical articles here. I like the ones that explain why digital SLRs are better even though most only have 3MP sensors (hint: the sensors are bigger so each pixel can gather more light, meaning more signal and less noise than in a consumer chip and thus cleaner pictures and greater ISO ranges). I was stumped by that for a good long while. Couldn't understand why a 3MP DSLR could command 4-12 times the price of my 3MP compact. Lenses are important, sure, but the most important thing in digital cameras is the characteristics of the sensor. The learning section at DPReview. Good technical and non-technical stuff here.
O: Hey Mozilla. M: Yes, Opera? O: Now that we've banded together to develop new web standards, what should we call our new working group? M: WHAT working group. O: The WG we just created. M: Yes, WHATWG. O: What are you asking me for? M: I'm not asking you, I'm telling you, WHATWG. O: Well go ahead and tell me. M: I just told you. O: I mean the WG's name. M: Yes. O: Whose WG name did you tell me? M: No, WHO is the World Health Organization. O: I'm not talking about WHO, I'm asking you what is our WG's name? M: That's right. O: Urgh... I'm a baaad boy!
IMHO, for basic useability, I recommend XP to folks getting into computers, or just wanting a machine for e-mail and web surfing. Plug-ins are made for IE first, and pretty much every hardware configuration is recognized or supported.
This makes no sense to me whatsoever. IE comes with OS X, and most of the common plug-ins also work with Safari and FireFox (FireFox is my favorite Mac browser now). If you want to play Windows Media files you can download the respective media players or just use MPlayer for OS X. Etcetera for every other thing you might have wanted to do with Windows. Watch DVDs? No problem. Get pics off your digital camera? No problem. Install a new printer? No problem. So on and so forth.
If you're talking about someone who just wants a machine for email and web surfing, you're also talking about a person who is not technically inclined and would have a hard time keeping XP safe. XP is a gaping security hole and virus/trojan trap even after three years of constant updates, and we all know it. Constant vigilance is required to keep any XP computer from becoming infected or becoming unstable from adding the wrong applications or drivers. A good antivirus program and internal/external firewalls are just a step in the right direction. Plus, the XP interface is thoroughly confusing to everyone I've ever met who uses XP.
This and many other reasons are why, IMHO, for basic usability, I recommend a new Mac to folks getting into computers or just wanting a machine for email and web surfing. For that class of people there's nothing they would do on Windows that they can't do on a Mac, and on a Mac they can do it a lot safer. I feel the hardware cost has now been outweighed by the aggravation cost of trying to use XP and keep your computer safe while doing the simplest tasks, like web surfing and email.
Disclaimer: I'm in that large group of people who always hated Macs before experiencing OS X and run Linux at home because I didn't like Windows. Now the only reason I don't own a Mac running OS X is because I can't personally afford one (yet).
I think, and others can probably vouch for this, the allure of Mac OS in particular kind of wanes after a few weeks of using it. Again, excellent GUI, but there's definitely a feeling (misguided, I think) that Windows "has" to be bad because it's used everywhere. This doesn't translate to some other consumer products (PS2, anyone) so I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular. Do we hate it because we perceive everyone else hates it (the same way people who use MacOS love it more because everyone else who uses it loves it)? Probably something to bring up in a psychology class.
Um, huh? I haven't noticed anybody hating Windows because everyone else does. Everyone I know, including me, hates Windows because it wastes our time by crashing more or less on a regular basis. The only person I know that doesn't mind Windows at all seems to have one of those "miracle" PCs that never crashes. Some folks are lucky.
I have worked on a lot of PCs over the years with various versions of Windows and the majority of them will crash on a regular basis for no particular reason. Sometimes they start out fine after a fresh install, but normally after 6-12 months the machine has about a 50-50 downtime-uptime ratio. It doesn't seem to matter how often you defrag, run scandisk and try to keep your registry clean. Maybe if you never installed any new applications it could be a little more stable, but then what use would it be?
I've seen Windows crash repeatedly during a fresh install of the OS on a blank formatted hard drive. And that's on multiple different computers, so you can't just blame it on one particular instance of bad hardware. Add to that the fact that you are forced to reboot for every single installation of programs, security patches and updates, so you'll end up rebooting at least a couple dozen times on a fresh install of Windows. (Remember that most people's experience is still Win95/98/ME.)
Even if Windows remains stable longer than 12 months you can bet that performance will slow over time to about %50 or less, and no amount of defragging or scandisking will restore it.
I can't imagine where you go the idea that anyone thinks "Windows has to be bad because it's used everywhere" (except perhaps for a few Linux or BSD elitists). For most of us that's just silly. Windows is bad because our collective experience has shown that it's bad.
Also, I definitely cannot vouch for your statement that the allure of Mac OS wanes after a few weeks of using it. I've been administrating a network of 9 new Macs for the past 18 months now. Until last year I was one of those people who thought Macs were slow and stupid compared to PCs. I thought this even though I've also hated Windows for a long time now. However over the past year and even before that I have had some experience with the "classic" Mac OS, and I've found it to be a lot easier to work with and keep running than a Windows box. That's not saying I liked OS 8 or 9, they just weren't as bad as first impressions led me to believe.
On the other hand OS X is a different animal. My own computer came new last year when I was hired and was running 10.2/Jaguar. I've been loving that more and more every day. Then along came 10.3/Panther, and it's even better. I managed to upgrade all the computers here in the office from OS 9 to Panther in a few hours and I've never been happier. Keeping these computers running is a walk in the park. Plus I was able to set up iCal on every computer and an in-house WebDAV server, and so we now have a distributed auto-updating calandar system.
I'd suggest that if your interest in OS X is waning you either aren't using Panther and/or you haven't yet fully explored or exploited the system or the available software (try macupdate.com) and you should keep at it. But, to each his own, right?
Let me just pose one question: When was the last time you got a new version of Windows, installed it on the same hardware and it was faster than the last version? Panther is so f
V is paste most likely because long ago (circa 20th century) the written proofreader's symbol on your English report that means "insert the text I've written here into this spot" looks like an upside-down V. See here.
I find it quite remarkable that all three of the commands could be grouped together on the keyboard even though the qwerty keyboard was created what, 100 years before the first PCs? Kind of interesting how that worked out.
Shouldn't you have to take some sort of action to copy something?
Yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The act of selecting something and the act of copying it should be separate. Combining the two doesn't make any real sense in a GUI world. Sometimes you just want to select something in order to quickly delete it, or change the font, or whatever. Or you want to select a section of text in order to paste over it. It's a really simple concept. Having the selection copied automatically is really not helpful in most situations, unless you think and work backwards and you've already cleared out the space where you're going to paste the selected text! Why else would so many people here have shortcuts and scripts just to work around this backwardness? Like the guy above said, he's been using X since 1990 and still this feature is confusing. That should be a wake-up call.
Ditto for me. I've been using Linux on my main machine for a few years now. By most definitions I'm no dummy. I've run Debian and even compiled my own kernels from time to time. Still it's things like this that aggravate me when moving between different applications and the terminal. It's usability problems like this that keep me from even thinking of recommending Linux to any non-geek person. Because I know they'll stumble on it sooner or later and go "WTF?! You told me this system was better than Windows, but it sucks like 1993!"
Every time this comes up there's a lot of talk about history and the inevitable "it works for me, you dummy!" comments. But quite obviously it does not and will never work for a lot of people. It's not simply a matter of what you're used to. And I've never seen a valid reason brought up for why two clipboards are necessary or even desirable. If Mac OS X and Windows can go through life with a single unified clipboard, so can Linux desktops.
If more Linuxites were able to put down their egos for a few moments and acknowledge all the usability problems that still plague Linux desktops, we might have advanced much farther into the desktop world by now. Just because you've gotten used to something or it was the way it was always done before doesn't mean it's the best way.
I guess I'm also a fool. I know many people who have gotten simple adjustments from a chiropractor and afterwards were healthy and pain-free. That's after suffering with back or neck pain for months or years that the "real" doctors couldn't seem to do a damn thing about except give them more pain pills. That's all most of the "real" doctors ever do, prescribe some pills or tell you they need to cut you open.
I myself had an episode when I was a kid where I woke up one morning, sat up and stretched, turned my head to the side--and couldn't turn it back without excruciating pain. My dad happened to be going to town that day, so I went with him and we went to a chiropractor's office. The guy put some IcyHot on my neck and stuck me under a heat lamp for a few minutes to help relax the muscles, and then in 30 seconds he'd straightened me out and we were on our way. No more pain, and I could move my head left and right. Something was out of alignment, and it just so happens that a chiropractor's job is to know how to realign the spine (you know, that thing that lets you stand up and walk erect).
What do you think a "real" doctor would have done? He'd charge me $250 for an aspirin and a short chat where he tells me to get some rest, which means try and sleep it off. Maybe he'll take an X-ray so he can show me where the problem is and explain why he thinks it'll be a good idea to cut a hole in my skin so he can shove a piece of metal in there and move a tendon or something. You know, because it's always a good idea to perform an expensive operation, no matter what the root problem is.
Chiropractic medicine used to be seen as bull, but I'll tell you what a lot of good "real" doctors will do today: They'll sit right down with you and say, "Go see a chiropractor, they know about this sort of thing, and we don't." And by the way, a lot of chiropractors are "real" MDs. So please, do some research before you put chiropractics in with fortune tellers. (And from your other post: magnetic healing? Give me a break. A reputable chiropractor won't have anything to do with unproven junk like that, and I've never been to one that even brought it up.) That's just ignorant. Sure, there will be quacks in every profession, but that doesn't mean the entire profession is quackery. I sincerely hope you don't have anyone in your sphere of influence that suffers with back or neck pain that could be easily helped by a chiropractor.
I don't see what your problem is. It's really simple: The spine is the center of how we move the rest of the body. It connects and supports most of the important muscles and bones. It works best when it's aligned properly (duh) and there aren't any tendons or muscles wrapped around things they shouldn't be. Reputable chiropractors don't claim to cure cancer or anything like that, they just claim to help your musculoskelatal system work better and with less pain, and if properly trained they do that sort of thing very well. Nothing magical about it. I suppose you think yoga is bogus too, since it's just an advanced form of self-chiropractic exercise. I mean it must be bogus, because it's old and associated with various forms of mysticism.
I'm always saddened when ignorance gets modded insightful.
You've missed the whole point of why these people are scared. They are scared because it was so easy and inexpensive to modify a virus to do something good, and it will be that easy and inexpensive for someone else to modify a virus to do something horrible.
You may want to read the book "White Plague" by Frank Herbert. It's very interesting and very scary when you realize that the main plot point of the book (creating a functionaing artificial virus) has just been accomplished by these three people and $200,000. In the book it's one person and something closer to $500,000, but at the time the book was written the techniques were fictional and the result was imaginary.
This is yet another reason why Heinlein was so right when he said the human race needs to get the heck off this planet if it wants to survive. We still have all our eggs in one basket called Earth. One little biological screw-up and homo sapiens sapiens may have to make room for a more sturdy successor. It wouldn't be too difficult for a properly designed biological agent to take out not just ourselves but all other mammals as well.
The potential benefits of biological/genetic manipulation like this are obviously tremendous and amazing, and most people don't dispute that. But on the flipside the dangers raised by anyone misusing biological technology make the nuclear threats of the last 60 years look like a slight nuisance in comparison. We have a right to be scared and a responsibility to exercise extreme caution with this kind of technology.
No kidding. The only reason this is news at all is that after something like 64,000 (literally) viruses and trojans and worms have been made for Windows, someone has finally taken the trouble to sit down for five minutes and write a trojan for the new Mac OS. Bless their little hearts, we've been feeling so left out all these years. Now if only they'd start making auto-executing mail exploits and remote root exploits, we'd really feel like part of the family. Oops, that will be a little more difficult, won't it?
It's really too bad that Mac OS X/Darwin/*BSD/Linux make it so difficult for anyone but THE USER THEMSELVES to cause harm to the computer. And even the user was only allowed to destroy his own stuff. If anyone else was sharing that computer, I'll bet they're pretty happy with the way Mac OS X protected their stuff and the rest of the OS from his stupidity.
We all know this is a non-story, but unfortunately the general public will be thinking, "My God, something bad happened to a Mac user!" And no matter how often we point out that there is no defense against this on any platform short of disallowing the users to do anything at all, and that the other platform has gaping holes that allow it to be destroyed without any user interaction, they'll just say, "Quiet, fool! We're busy being ignorant, illogical and completely irrational!"
There really is only one way to mitigate this sort of problem, and that's good physically separated backups on different media. I really think new computers should start coming with two or three external FireWire drives with the same capacity, and some simple backup/restore software that just tells the user what to do. Plug in drive #1 and it mirrors the internal drive.
Rotate the drives daily or weekly, and then it doesn't matter what you do, if you blow away your home folder or the whole system, just plug in the latest backup drive and mirror the data back onto the internal drive. With a tool like CarbonCopyCloner this can be insanely easy on Mac OS X. When I upgraded to Panther I did this exact procedure and it blew my mind how easy it was to clone the whole drive and have a complete bootable backup.
Nobody with Mac OS X should be without CCC. Just don't download it from LimeWire. Haha, I made a funny!
We should always remember that UNIX-like permission systems do exactly what they were designed to do. UNIX was designed to run on mainframes and serve dozens, hundreds or even thousands of users. Normally this would be in a corporate environment or some other situation where the users would have limited space and limited reason to put a bunch of junk in their home folders. Also, the whole system including the dozens or hundreds or thousands of home folders would all be backed up by the organization. In this situation when one user does something stupid like this and hoses their home folder, they get a good scolding and their home folder is restored from backup (whenever the admin feels like being gracious). But that one user isn't allowed to destroy the entire system and bring the organization to a halt and destroy the home folders of every other user.
There really is no way to protect the user from himself. If you allow that user to change or delete their own files, there is nothing short of a good backup system that will protect those files from a bad application that is allowed to run as that user. It's as simple as that.
Or of course you could block all users from actually running any executable application outside the system "Applications" folder. I think Linux and BSD can both do this with the nodev/noexec mount options. But you'd also have to block access to things like the shell, so they couldn't run "sh rm -rf ~" and manually execute shell scripts. And you'd have to disallow any dangerous commands in AppleScript if we're still talking about Macs. In short you'd have to lock down the system so tight that it really becomes useless for most users, just to protect people like this from his inability to have a good backup and use common sense.
But, I think if the home data is so important to everyone then personal computers should come with several FireWire backup drives the same size as the internal hard drive, and an ultra-simple backup/restore system, so they can plug one drive in every day/week and have incremental backups without thinking about it too much. It really wouldn't be too difficult, just expensive for all the extra disk space. Using external FireWire drives that get disconnected would mean that the backups can't get destroyed by a simple 'sudo rm -rf/' command. With tools like CarbonCopyCloner this scenario could be quite simple and workable.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed (or choose to be blind to) my entire point. There are already a dozen laws that make writing and distributing viruses illegal, so why do viruses still exist? Viruses are already illegal twelve times over, what good will it do to make them illegal thirteen times over? Very, very little, in the real world.
"The universe" isn't publishing filesharing apps loaded with spyware. It's not putting up online games in an effort to trick kids into putting spyware on the family computer.
Oh, so it must be some other universe doing all that stuff. I guess it doesn't happen in this universe. You might want to think about this one for a while. Like a couple of decades. It's sort of a Zen koan type of thing. You'll figure it out eventually. Maybe.
Absolutely untrue. Laws shape decisions by individuals and corporations. A large corporation is probably not going to bundle spyware with their software if they know that there is a $1000 per copy penalty for doing so.
Uh, no, they will just make their spyware conform to the law so that it will be legal, but it will still be spyware, and ignorant people will still install it. They aren't making spyware illegal, they're just requiring it to have a slightly more informative installation process. A few people will have the chance to protect themselves by being smart and actually reading the warning label. Stupid people will still wind up with an average of 28 pieces of spyware on their computer, because they don't know why they should care about their personal information and besides, the spyware came with such neat features! Yummy! And they will still have no clue why their computer has ground to a halt. The laws don't protect you from yourself.
You know damned well that is a vile distortion of what I wrote. I said that we should not abolish laws against muggings and identity theft and, instead, rely solely on self-defense classes and education about preventing identity theft.
I know exactly what you said, I read it several times. The corollary to what you said is that we don't need to rely on self-defense or education, because we have these wonderful laws, you know. You did not say that we should have both the laws and the education, and rely on the education for prevention and the laws for punishment. You just freaked out and said we shouldn't ever think about getting rid of any laws, while implying that they somehow protect everyone from their own ignorance. Which is, to put it succinctly, completely incorrect.
So some ten year old kid who wants to access an online game on the family's computer should understand the ramifications of spyware, be making value decisions about privacy, and should send a message to Microsoft about his displeasure with their OS design? Don't waste our time with the tired 'kid's parents should be surgically attached to him 24/7' argument, because that's not reality.
You're a real riot. Send a message to MS about his displeasure with their OS? If the parents had done their job, either Microsoft's OS wouldn't be on the computer, or it would be a better OS. They wouldn't need to be surgically attached to anyone. But since people tolerate shitware, look where we are. With something like 100,000 viruses and worms trying to attack our systems every day, even though worms and viruses have been illegal since before the first one was created. The children are in danger largely because of the parents putting up with it all and remaining ignorant for decades.
The fact that you can buy a gun to compensate for your inability to defend yourself using your own strength, speed, and intelligence is proof-positive that it's possible to circumvent natural selection.
Wow. You truly are a god, sir. Am I to understand that you can dodge a bullet? Amazing. Here's another corollary for you, in your own words no less: "Screw all you weak people who aren't super-strong, super-fast, and super-smart. If you can't dodge bullets like me, you shouldn't be allowed
Windows (& WIMP in general) seem to be the easiest to use and most efficient GUI paradigm
I take it you haven't used a Mac, at least not one made in the last couple of years... Do so, and then we'll talk about GUIs and CLIs and efficiency.
Two words: natural selection.
Everyone should not have to know about everything just to avoid being victimized.
The parent poster got +5, Insightful for this (at the moment), which makes me sad. Because he's missing something BIG here. This universe could care less what should be happening. If you (and those around you) are ignorant, no amount of laws will keep you from being victimized. Laws don't keep anything from happening, except slightly, in a general way, sometimes. Laws punish those who do the victimizing, but only after they've done it and only if they can be caught. Laws punish the victimizer for creating a victim. By their very definition, they can't keep you from being victimized, since they only operate after the fact! The parent poster seems to believe that no one should ever need to be taught self-defense or how to avoid identity theft simply because we have laws against those things.
This is the same logical fallacy commonly held up by gun control advocates: i.e., You don't need a gun for self-defense because the police and their laws are here to protect you. The problem with this is that the police, except in rare situations, do not and cannot "protect" you. The police attempt to prevent crimes, but mostly what they do is enforce laws and investigate crimes that have already happened. That's when those laws come into effect: after someone has been victimized. The police will be happy to show up at your door 45 minutes after you've called 911, and grab the guy who shot you in the head and throw that book of laws right at him. I feel safer already! I have a book of laws protecting me! Too bad it didn't stop the bullet. In the same way, the police cannot protect you from spyware, no matter how many anti-spyware laws are enacted. If you're lucky they will go after the guy who has already victimized you and thousands of others like you.
The laws can't protect you, and 99% of the time the police can't protect you, so who's left? You, and those around you. You should be responsible for yourself and as many other people as you can handle, and the same for those around you. Teach them to be responsible for themselves and for you. My gosh, it's like a beowu^H^H^H^H^H^H web of personal and social responsibility. A web of personal and social safety and protection. It may not protect you from all things, but it's your best and only chance at protection in this universe. Personal responsibility, and cooperation.
So yes, get rid of the laws and become more self-reliant and this nation or any other would be better off in the short and long run. All laws can be brought down to a simple rule anyway: Don't hurt others unless it is absolutely necessary for your own survival and you have exhausted all other alternatives available to you, and when someone needs help surviving, help them.
In other words, mods, the parent post is not insightful in the slightest. It is not insightful to say that people shouldn't have to know about their universe in order to live in it safely. It's a big, bad universe. Anyone smarter than a thumbtack has the potential of learning enough about their computer to realize that they are being victimized by these spyware companies, and subsequently to realize that they are being victimized by whoever designed the software they use that allows this spyware easy access to their computer. If people would just take a bit of personal responsibility there would be no spyware or malware, because the company who makes their software (who shall remain unnamed) would have been forced by natural selection market pressures to create a product that isn't so vulnerable to such things.
It's not about learning everything there is to know about spyware. It's about learning just enough to navigate your universe safely, and not putting up with being a victim. Personal responsibility should come from both the people designing the softare and the people using it. If it doesn't come from the former there should
Right. Because the devil you don't know is better than the devil you do. erm...
I'd be very interested in something a little more concrete, such as how many simple exploits like this are available for the various versions of Windows. The exploit must (A) still work on systems that are current with all available patches and (B) must crash the system hard when run as a normal user on a reasonably secured system. Anyone have numbers on this or know where you find a list? It would be more interesting than spouting Open Source philosophy to the choir.
I've found that if i need to configure something non-run of the mill, i can find it... in a config file.
Fascinating.
Now, the spatial file manager seems great for desktop file browsing. In fact, that's the only file browsing I do with a file manager... browsing source trees and other large depth things are best left to the actual programs that need to do something with that data (e.g. IDEs).
Well, congratulations. You've dug into the system far enough to find the "config file". ("Whatever that is", says Joe Public.) And you like spatial browsing. Bully for you, ol' chap. Although you simultaneously acknowledge that it fails for deeper folder structures.
(Mods: When it's not just an option but an actual requirement to edit a text file to change the behaviour of something simple on my supposedly user-friendly graphical desktop environment, it is not insightful to point out the text file can be edited by a more advanced user. It doesn't solve the problem in the slightest for the less advanced people.)
So (A) if a person is too ignorant to know about and find and edit "config files" then they shouldn't be changing those settings (leave that to the smart people like you and the GNOME developers), and (B) to browse a deeper structure of files I should learn to use the shell and/or an IDE. Basically I should be smarter, be more logical and become a programmer or developer like you. I'm all for using the right tool for the right job, but there are more kinds of deep folder strutures in the world than CVS repositories.
This is exactly what I and many others "have a beef with". You, and the author of the article on OSNews, and the GNOME developers, appear to have this attitude in varying degrees that if we aren't doing things your way we're either wrong, stupid or both. If I had half a brain I'd find that config file in nanoseconds and there would be nothing to whine about. That's what you're saying, right? There's no use getting offended, but this is exactly the impression that you are conveying. Why else would there be so many posts under this article calling the author an arrogant jerk? It's simple: He's telling everyone they're stupid and wrong. (You should do this, you should do that, you don't like spatial browsing because you have bad habits, etc, etc, etc.) Most people don't like that.
I'm sure what you said made perfect sense to you, but myself and many others don't feel like doing it your way. I'm quite comfortable in the shell and use it for a lot of filing tasks, but for many purposes I prefer the file browser in explore mode (on Windows/Linux) or in list view or column view (on OS X). I'd go nuts if my file manager forced me to open a new window for every folder, and made it difficult to find and change the setting. I'm quite happy to let you do things your way, so why do you want it to be difficult for me to do things my way?
I'm not calling GNOME a joke. I'm simply saying that because of the attitude of its developers it appears to be becoming a joke to some people. I have to say that most of the "switching" comments I've seen in the last year have not been from people switching to GNOME, but from those switching away from it, mostly to KDE 3+, and mostly because of (drumroll) easier configurability. That's the main gist of the comments that I have personally seen on this website.
But really the only reason I bother posting on this issue at all is that I want desktop Linux to get better and become more popular, and I don't see GNOME becoming more popular these days. I see it as having an awful lot of detractors, and that's bad for desktop Linux as a whole. Anyone who uses Linux as a desktop should be concerned whenever a project like this keeps getting comments from the public that say the developers are unresponsive and forcing interfaces on the users. The facts may be different, but it's the first impressions that are important. I believe in the commercial world it's called "marketing".
It's a simple issue, it could
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site!
Holy cow. I must have skimmed this line in a dozen comments on the way down to yours and just now finally realized what it says. I can't believe anyone would say something that stupid. Now I really have to read this article.
Let's see... open the article page in a new TAB... tum-te-tum... then switch to my eBay TAB while that's loading in the background... I hope this dumbass author is reading my post and frothing at the mouth... doobee-doobee-do...
Sounds like someone with OCD of some type who can't handle "corrupting" a browser window by opening more than one website in the same window. You know, because it's "confusing". And now he wants us all to be like him. Baby steps to the web browser, buddy!
Starting to get the hang of it... after a week or so... and it is difficult to adapt to your filesystem if you have deeper directories. That's great, I like that. You've just told us why spatial nautilus is a pain to use and thus why it shouldn't be forced on people without a really easy way to disable it.
The answer to your problem according to the author of the article is that you suck and you should restructure your filesystem to fit inside the confines of an efficient spatial file structure. The file browser should never adapt to your needs, of course.
This is why I won't be trying GNOME again for a good long while. There's just been one (several, actually) too many articles about this "we're right and you're wrong" attitude of the GNOME developers. It may not be entirely correct, but it's an awfully strong impression that I've been getting for the last year or so. Perceptions made Microsoft the most powerful software company on the planet, and perceptions are bringing GNOME down day by day. The GNOME developers need to wake up.
To the parent: the word is "incomprehensible". Just FYI.
Some people might like GNOME, but most do not. I do not like it because it is not configureable.
I wonder how many different people are going to have to say this in how many different ways before the oh-so-smart GNOME developers wake the f--- up and realize how much public favor they are losing, and how many current and potential users they are losing. GNOME seems to be fast becoming a joke for a lot of people. I've thought about trying it for like the 12th time after hearing about some of the new features in 2.6, but this is something like the 6th story in the last few months where I'm seeing a large portion of the comments coming from former GNOME users telling me how GNOME is both difficult to use and non-configurable. Non-configurable is the main theme I've been hearing about GNOME since the 2.0 development releases started coming out.
I think a certain parallel could be drawn here between the GNOME developers and the recent XFree86 blowup, in the sense that there seems to be a very similar sort of stupidity going on in both camps. "We're right and you're wrong, so if you want to do something in a way we haven't officially approved you can stuff it." Anyway, that's just my general impression at this point, and that's why I won't be switching to GNOME in the foreseeable future. Honestly, what are they thinking? It's really getting ridiculous.
I didn't know that they did it this way. I am not as impressed as I was before. The dog is going to realize which one is out of place just by the smell of the toy which obviously doesn't fit w/the rest. Trained dogs sniff out stuff that they recognize all the time. What's so different about them picking the one thing that is different?
You're talking about two different things there. You (a human) make the mental leap between "unrecognized object" and "unknown sound" very easily. That's one thing. Many animals can be taught to recognize various objects or smells. That's another thing. Reasoning that a new (previously unknown) object/smell might be related to a new (previously unknown) sound takes a slightly higher level of intelligence. Or so I would think.
Sniffer dogs are trained on known scents and trained in exactly what to do and how to react to those known scents. They aren't taught to react to something just because it's different. Dogs are so sensitive that there are "different" objects around them literally every time their handler comes to work (new clothes with smells of unknown people or pets on the clothes, etc). This dog does appear to make a sort of minor mental leap.
ERP systems implementations fail due to people and organizations, not due to technology.
Slap down a system made for a sane business in front of a university and tell that university to behave like a sane business in order to make the system work... well, it won't work.
Sure, the people or the organization should be nudged toward change if they are doing something in a way that is contrary to the "sane" way for no good reason. But saying that the fault lies entirely with the customer is ridiculous. You can't stuff every business model into the same mold, but you can design software with enough modularity to be able to adapt to almost any business model, even if it's technically "wrong".
Any software that costs $150 MILLION DOLLARS to implement should be flexible enough to adapt to different types of businesses and individual ways of working. It's absolutely stupid to blame the problems with a system like this entirely on the end user instead of on the software. Let me say that again: ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS. I don't know how that kind of expenditure on software could be justified even if it worked like a charm. And it obviously doesn't. You should be able to buy god-like, rock solid and infinitely adaptable software for that kind of money. Not something that "doesn't work" after several YEARS and is no longer upgradeable due to half-assed "customization" by Oracle that no doubt cost millions of dollars.
That's totally bizarre. I sympathize with you. But I also have experience with a whole range of Macs, from 350MHz to my dual G4 867 (which is I think the slowest dual CPU G4). The only slowdowns I've seen came from the one iBook that only has 128MB of memory. Its identical twin with 256MB is definitely more responsive.
;)
I can't imagine where your expectations for responsiveness come from if Panther doesn't meet them. My recent experience with XP on brand spanking new computers showed me it isn't any more responsive than OS X, and usually less. But I did boot up BeOS Max on an older PC the other day and was depressed for hours afterward after being reminded of how responsive it was compared to anything else. It seems to react before you can finish telling it what to do. You wouldn't happen to be a fellow BeOS refugee, would you?
Personally I'm still looking forward to Linux improving enough on the desktop to rival OS X, but I don't see that coming for another couple of years. Otherwise even if OS X was slow for me I would still prefer it over the biggest security hole known to man (XP). The one caveat is the Mac is still a mysterious beast in some ways, and I'd prefer to know what's going on under the hood.
I'm curious now as to what does meet your expectations for responsiveness. Surely not XP.
Contrast this to the PB 667 with 1GB RAM I had less than *2* years ago that was so slow running 10.3 I eventually sold it in disgust.
I think something went wrong with your install of Panther. Seriously. I'm running Panther (10.3.3) on a dual-proc 867MHz with 768MB RAM and a 350MHz slot-loading iMac with 320MHz RAM and a couple of G3 iBooks at 700MHz with 128MB and 256MB of RAM, respectively. Most of the time I can't tell any difference besides the one with 128MB being a little slower. They're both snappy and very usable. Before you threw that machine away you probably should have tried a few more things beyond repairing permissions, like forcing a system-wide prebinding update, clearing out some caches with a tool like OnyX, and if that didn't work an Archive & Reinstall of the OS (which is a lot simpler than I ever thought it would be). Granted I only have a year of experience now with 11 old and new Macs, but by now I can tell you with some certainty that Panther should have been perfectly good on that machine. I'm sure someone else is very happy now with their new PowerBook with 1GB RAM.
I was a Mac hater until last year when I experienced OS X Jaguar. Since then I've learned a lot and found that in general Macs have good hardware (there are exceptions, but not as many as on the PC side in my experience) and OS X is an outstanding OS that just keeps improving, getting faster and more stable. And the best part is that just by knowing a small set of rules you can in most cases keep a Mac running smoothly forever just by performing a few routine maintenance tasks, and if something does go horribly wrong it can be fixed much more easily than for instance a Windows computer. There simply is no comparison. I can still get into the guts of my Linux laptop at home more easily than I can on OS X, but the hardware quality and ease of use of OS X more than make up the difference. As soon as I can afford a Mac laptop I won't be paying much attention to Linux for a while.
I can attest to OS X being very usable on a 350MHz slot-loading iMac. Just make sure you have at least 256MB of RAM, preferably 512MB or even more depending on what it will be doing. AND MAKE ABSOLUTELY DAMN SURE YOU HAVE THE LATEST FIRMWARE INSTALLed ON THAT THING. I kid you not, I fried one iMac and almost fried the other one but was able to find the right firmware and flash it which arrested the strange process it was going through. Most importantly I hadn't even installed OS X yet when the video started going wacko on me. THE ACT OF BOOTING ANY OS X BASED BOOT CD WILL DESTROY YOUR IMAC UNLESS YOU HAVE THE LATEST FIRMWARE FOR THAT MODEL INSTALLED. Yes, that's right, I'm yelling. I think this message needs to get to as many of you potential upgraders as possible, so you can avoid the problems I had.
As long as you have the right firmware and pack it with plenty of memory (go Crucial.com!) you will wind up with a machine that is just as usable with OS X (10.3+) as it was with OS 9. It's really quite amazing.
Plus as I read in a post further up, there is a haxie called Shadow Killer that will turn off the shadow rendering and give you a bit of a speed boost on older Macs. It's really amazing what Apple has managed to do between 10.0 and 10.3.4. Every version has been faster and more stable. I'm sure there are many people out there that tried OS X in the 10.0 and 10.1 days when it was still under heavy development and gave up on it because it was slow and unstable. Well, Jaguar was better and Panther is immensely better. OS X is revitalizing a lot of old hardware.
MacOS 9.1 would run much faster on an older iMac than OS X does, so it might give a better user experience in that respect.
I find this is no longer true for version 10.3 of OS X and beyond, especially 10.3.3+. Plus I just read about Shadow Killer from a post above that will make it even faster on older computers. Apple has optimized the living crap out of OS X since 10.0 to the point where it's speed and performance is now comparable or better than OS 9 on the same hardware. It's certainly more responsive due to the significantly smarter multitasking architecture. The only caveat would be that you should have 256MB of RAM in the machine, preferably more AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE ABSOLUTE LATEST FIRMWARE, OR YOU WILL FRY THE COMPUTER, LITERALLY. If you have the latest firmware everything will be peachy. DON'T EVEN BOOT ANY OS X BASED BOOT CD ON AN OLDER IMAC THAT DOESN'T HAVE THE LATEST FIRMWARE. This includes the newer TechTools diagnostic disks and probably Norton SystemWorks/Utilities boot CDs and many others as well. I don't know what happens internally but just booting OS X from the install CD will start the process of frying the logic or video board inside, and you will soon wind up with a dead computer that will not boot. Trust me, I'm not making this up. I still have one iMac sitting in storage that is unbootable.
You must realize that sooner or later someone will try to boot some CD on that old iMac that is based on an OS X kernel and your machine will get fried anyway, so taking the small risk now of upgrading it to OS X is not a big deal.
I've upgraded a 350MHz slot-loading iMac to Panther and it's just as usable as when it was running OS 9.2, if not more so. It's certainly beneficial to have all the latest OS and Internet technology on there, including for instance the ability to use any USB flash drive and read CDs that were only written with the Windows Joliet filesystem, and run FireFox. Plus it's fully multi-user, which is highly useful in situations like labs or schools.
As the parent poster notes you won't have a great choice of web browsers on OS 9, besides an old version of IE5 which is rapidly getting older, or a clunky old version of Mozilla that barely works, or Netscape 4 *gag*. I don't think OS 9 is really a good option if you're donating an iMac to someone who really has a use for a good computer. Slap some new memory in there from Crucial.com (as much as possible) and the latest version of OS X (10.3.4), and that machine will be usable for another 5-7 years. Seriously. Try slapping XP on a PC from 6 years ago and see how useful it is. OS X is a different beast, and it's truly amazing what Apple has managed to do with it between 10.0 and Panther. We have no reason to expect that Tiger won't also be faster and thus work even better on older hardware than Panther does.
Or maybe it's just mindblowing because I've lived through a decade of Windows updates that required twice the hardware every 18 months just to keep the OS responsive. With OS X it's proving to be the other way around so far.
Heh. I think a lot of people do have a problem doing even that, at least until they grasp the fact that they have to press the shutter down halfway and wait for the camera to focus before taking the picture.
I can recommend a good book that I've been borrowing from the local library for the past few weeks: Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Digital Photography: 107 Lessons on Taking, Making, Editing, Storing, Printing, and Sharing Better Digital Images. It is chock full of excellent examples of everything you're looking for. The printing is high quality so you can actually see the differences in pictures when he's showing what different settings will do. Every example has accompanying explanations so you know how and why he changed something to improve his pictures. There are lots of fun exploratory ideas throughout the book.
It's really one of the best digital photography books I've seen, and would serve as an excellent introductory book for anyone just getting into digital photography, or someone transitioning from film photography, or for anyone who's been at it for a while and wants to get better. There's also a lot of hands-on and very well explained Photoshop projects for enhancing or playing with your digital images.
This book is so fun and informative that I'm thinking of actually buying it, and I can't remember the last time I payed money for a book that wasn't work-related instead of just checking out websites (which I still do, of course, and there are some damn good photography websites out there). The cover price is $60 but as you can see it's available on Amazon for around $30. I feel it will be a good investment.
I've seen a few posters here who seem to think this stuff has all been done before with film, but there are some definite differences between film and digital that you will want to understand. For one thing the dynamic range of digital sensors doesn't come close to film yet, which makes photographing high-contrast scenes difficult (scenes where there are both really bright things and dark things in the picture). In turn, film never came close to the dynamic range of the human retina. There will be many cases where you will be disappointed if you aren't aware of this potential problem and know how to compensate for it. Even if you understood the problem with film, digital will have new gotchas.
There are also issues with file formats (RAW, TIFF, or JPEG?). Each choice will slightly (or strongly) affect the resulting photos. If you actually want to get into this stuff beyond point-and-shoot, it is helpful to have an understanding of how all the "old" film rules translate into the digital camera world, including how the affect of different lenses will be different due to the size of the sensor in the camera compared to the size of "standard" 35mm film. Etcetera.
I mentioned there are some good websites, so I should probably throw in a few here:
Some EXCELLENT in-depth technical articles here. I like the ones that explain why digital SLRs are better even though most only have 3MP sensors (hint: the sensors are bigger so each pixel can gather more light, meaning more signal and less noise than in a consumer chip and thus cleaner pictures and greater ISO ranges). I was stumped by that for a good long while. Couldn't understand why a 3MP DSLR could command 4-12 times the price of my 3MP compact. Lenses are important, sure, but the most important thing in digital cameras is the characteristics of the sensor.
The learning section at DPReview. Good technical and non-technical stuff here.
O: Hey Mozilla.
M: Yes, Opera?
O: Now that we've banded together to develop new web standards, what should we call our new working group?
M: WHAT working group.
O: The WG we just created.
M: Yes, WHATWG.
O: What are you asking me for?
M: I'm not asking you, I'm telling you, WHATWG.
O: Well go ahead and tell me.
M: I just told you.
O: I mean the WG's name.
M: Yes.
O: Whose WG name did you tell me?
M: No, WHO is the World Health Organization.
O: I'm not talking about WHO, I'm asking you what is our WG's name?
M: That's right.
O: Urgh... I'm a baaad boy!
With apologies to Abbott & Costello.
IMHO, for basic useability, I recommend XP to folks getting into computers, or just wanting a machine for e-mail and web surfing. Plug-ins are made for IE first, and pretty much every hardware configuration is recognized or supported.
This makes no sense to me whatsoever. IE comes with OS X, and most of the common plug-ins also work with Safari and FireFox (FireFox is my favorite Mac browser now). If you want to play Windows Media files you can download the respective media players or just use MPlayer for OS X. Etcetera for every other thing you might have wanted to do with Windows. Watch DVDs? No problem. Get pics off your digital camera? No problem. Install a new printer? No problem. So on and so forth.
If you're talking about someone who just wants a machine for email and web surfing, you're also talking about a person who is not technically inclined and would have a hard time keeping XP safe. XP is a gaping security hole and virus/trojan trap even after three years of constant updates, and we all know it. Constant vigilance is required to keep any XP computer from becoming infected or becoming unstable from adding the wrong applications or drivers. A good antivirus program and internal/external firewalls are just a step in the right direction. Plus, the XP interface is thoroughly confusing to everyone I've ever met who uses XP.
This and many other reasons are why, IMHO, for basic usability, I recommend a new Mac to folks getting into computers or just wanting a machine for email and web surfing. For that class of people there's nothing they would do on Windows that they can't do on a Mac, and on a Mac they can do it a lot safer. I feel the hardware cost has now been outweighed by the aggravation cost of trying to use XP and keep your computer safe while doing the simplest tasks, like web surfing and email.
Disclaimer: I'm in that large group of people who always hated Macs before experiencing OS X and run Linux at home because I didn't like Windows. Now the only reason I don't own a Mac running OS X is because I can't personally afford one (yet).
I think, and others can probably vouch for this, the allure of Mac OS in particular kind of wanes after a few weeks of using it. Again, excellent GUI, but there's definitely a feeling (misguided, I think) that Windows "has" to be bad because it's used everywhere. This doesn't translate to some other consumer products (PS2, anyone) so I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular. Do we hate it because we perceive everyone else hates it (the same way people who use MacOS love it more because everyone else who uses it loves it)? Probably something to bring up in a psychology class.
Um, huh? I haven't noticed anybody hating Windows because everyone else does. Everyone I know, including me, hates Windows because it wastes our time by crashing more or less on a regular basis. The only person I know that doesn't mind Windows at all seems to have one of those "miracle" PCs that never crashes. Some folks are lucky.
I have worked on a lot of PCs over the years with various versions of Windows and the majority of them will crash on a regular basis for no particular reason. Sometimes they start out fine after a fresh install, but normally after 6-12 months the machine has about a 50-50 downtime-uptime ratio. It doesn't seem to matter how often you defrag, run scandisk and try to keep your registry clean. Maybe if you never installed any new applications it could be a little more stable, but then what use would it be?
I've seen Windows crash repeatedly during a fresh install of the OS on a blank formatted hard drive. And that's on multiple different computers, so you can't just blame it on one particular instance of bad hardware. Add to that the fact that you are forced to reboot for every single installation of programs, security patches and updates, so you'll end up rebooting at least a couple dozen times on a fresh install of Windows. (Remember that most people's experience is still Win95/98/ME.)
Even if Windows remains stable longer than 12 months you can bet that performance will slow over time to about %50 or less, and no amount of defragging or scandisking will restore it.
I can't imagine where you go the idea that anyone thinks "Windows has to be bad because it's used everywhere" (except perhaps for a few Linux or BSD elitists). For most of us that's just silly. Windows is bad because our collective experience has shown that it's bad.
Also, I definitely cannot vouch for your statement that the allure of Mac OS wanes after a few weeks of using it. I've been administrating a network of 9 new Macs for the past 18 months now. Until last year I was one of those people who thought Macs were slow and stupid compared to PCs. I thought this even though I've also hated Windows for a long time now. However over the past year and even before that I have had some experience with the "classic" Mac OS, and I've found it to be a lot easier to work with and keep running than a Windows box. That's not saying I liked OS 8 or 9, they just weren't as bad as first impressions led me to believe.
On the other hand OS X is a different animal. My own computer came new last year when I was hired and was running 10.2/Jaguar. I've been loving that more and more every day. Then along came 10.3/Panther, and it's even better. I managed to upgrade all the computers here in the office from OS 9 to Panther in a few hours and I've never been happier. Keeping these computers running is a walk in the park. Plus I was able to set up iCal on every computer and an in-house WebDAV server, and so we now have a distributed auto-updating calandar system.
I'd suggest that if your interest in OS X is waning you either aren't using Panther and/or you haven't yet fully explored or exploited the system or the available software (try macupdate.com) and you should keep at it. But, to each his own, right?
Let me just pose one question: When was the last time you got a new version of Windows, installed it on the same hardware and it was faster than the last version? Panther is so f
Why is "V" Paste, anyway?
V is paste most likely because long ago (circa 20th century) the written proofreader's symbol on your English report that means "insert the text I've written here into this spot" looks like an upside-down V. See here.
I find it quite remarkable that all three of the commands could be grouped together on the keyboard even though the qwerty keyboard was created what, 100 years before the first PCs? Kind of interesting how that worked out.
Shouldn't you have to take some sort of action to copy something?
Yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The act of selecting something and the act of copying it should be separate. Combining the two doesn't make any real sense in a GUI world. Sometimes you just want to select something in order to quickly delete it, or change the font, or whatever. Or you want to select a section of text in order to paste over it. It's a really simple concept. Having the selection copied automatically is really not helpful in most situations, unless you think and work backwards and you've already cleared out the space where you're going to paste the selected text! Why else would so many people here have shortcuts and scripts just to work around this backwardness? Like the guy above said, he's been using X since 1990 and still this feature is confusing. That should be a wake-up call.
Ditto for me. I've been using Linux on my main machine for a few years now. By most definitions I'm no dummy. I've run Debian and even compiled my own kernels from time to time. Still it's things like this that aggravate me when moving between different applications and the terminal. It's usability problems like this that keep me from even thinking of recommending Linux to any non-geek person. Because I know they'll stumble on it sooner or later and go "WTF?! You told me this system was better than Windows, but it sucks like 1993!"
Every time this comes up there's a lot of talk about history and the inevitable "it works for me, you dummy!" comments. But quite obviously it does not and will never work for a lot of people. It's not simply a matter of what you're used to. And I've never seen a valid reason brought up for why two clipboards are necessary or even desirable. If Mac OS X and Windows can go through life with a single unified clipboard, so can Linux desktops.
If more Linuxites were able to put down their egos for a few moments and acknowledge all the usability problems that still plague Linux desktops, we might have advanced much farther into the desktop world by now. Just because you've gotten used to something or it was the way it was always done before doesn't mean it's the best way.
I guess I'm also a fool. I know many people who have gotten simple adjustments from a chiropractor and afterwards were healthy and pain-free. That's after suffering with back or neck pain for months or years that the "real" doctors couldn't seem to do a damn thing about except give them more pain pills. That's all most of the "real" doctors ever do, prescribe some pills or tell you they need to cut you open.
I myself had an episode when I was a kid where I woke up one morning, sat up and stretched, turned my head to the side--and couldn't turn it back without excruciating pain. My dad happened to be going to town that day, so I went with him and we went to a chiropractor's office. The guy put some IcyHot on my neck and stuck me under a heat lamp for a few minutes to help relax the muscles, and then in 30 seconds he'd straightened me out and we were on our way. No more pain, and I could move my head left and right. Something was out of alignment, and it just so happens that a chiropractor's job is to know how to realign the spine (you know, that thing that lets you stand up and walk erect).
What do you think a "real" doctor would have done? He'd charge me $250 for an aspirin and a short chat where he tells me to get some rest, which means try and sleep it off. Maybe he'll take an X-ray so he can show me where the problem is and explain why he thinks it'll be a good idea to cut a hole in my skin so he can shove a piece of metal in there and move a tendon or something. You know, because it's always a good idea to perform an expensive operation, no matter what the root problem is.
Chiropractic medicine used to be seen as bull, but I'll tell you what a lot of good "real" doctors will do today: They'll sit right down with you and say, "Go see a chiropractor, they know about this sort of thing, and we don't." And by the way, a lot of chiropractors are "real" MDs. So please, do some research before you put chiropractics in with fortune tellers. (And from your other post: magnetic healing? Give me a break. A reputable chiropractor won't have anything to do with unproven junk like that, and I've never been to one that even brought it up.) That's just ignorant. Sure, there will be quacks in every profession, but that doesn't mean the entire profession is quackery. I sincerely hope you don't have anyone in your sphere of influence that suffers with back or neck pain that could be easily helped by a chiropractor.
I don't see what your problem is. It's really simple: The spine is the center of how we move the rest of the body. It connects and supports most of the important muscles and bones. It works best when it's aligned properly (duh) and there aren't any tendons or muscles wrapped around things they shouldn't be. Reputable chiropractors don't claim to cure cancer or anything like that, they just claim to help your musculoskelatal system work better and with less pain, and if properly trained they do that sort of thing very well. Nothing magical about it. I suppose you think yoga is bogus too, since it's just an advanced form of self-chiropractic exercise. I mean it must be bogus, because it's old and associated with various forms of mysticism.
I'm always saddened when ignorance gets modded insightful.
You've missed the whole point of why these people are scared. They are scared because it was so easy and inexpensive to modify a virus to do something good, and it will be that easy and inexpensive for someone else to modify a virus to do something horrible.
You may want to read the book "White Plague" by Frank Herbert. It's very interesting and very scary when you realize that the main plot point of the book (creating a functionaing artificial virus) has just been accomplished by these three people and $200,000. In the book it's one person and something closer to $500,000, but at the time the book was written the techniques were fictional and the result was imaginary.
This is yet another reason why Heinlein was so right when he said the human race needs to get the heck off this planet if it wants to survive. We still have all our eggs in one basket called Earth. One little biological screw-up and homo sapiens sapiens may have to make room for a more sturdy successor. It wouldn't be too difficult for a properly designed biological agent to take out not just ourselves but all other mammals as well.
The potential benefits of biological/genetic manipulation like this are obviously tremendous and amazing, and most people don't dispute that. But on the flipside the dangers raised by anyone misusing biological technology make the nuclear threats of the last 60 years look like a slight nuisance in comparison. We have a right to be scared and a responsibility to exercise extreme caution with this kind of technology.
No kidding. The only reason this is news at all is that after something like 64,000 (literally) viruses and trojans and worms have been made for Windows, someone has finally taken the trouble to sit down for five minutes and write a trojan for the new Mac OS. Bless their little hearts, we've been feeling so left out all these years. Now if only they'd start making auto-executing mail exploits and remote root exploits, we'd really feel like part of the family. Oops, that will be a little more difficult, won't it?
It's really too bad that Mac OS X/Darwin/*BSD/Linux make it so difficult for anyone but THE USER THEMSELVES to cause harm to the computer. And even the user was only allowed to destroy his own stuff. If anyone else was sharing that computer, I'll bet they're pretty happy with the way Mac OS X protected their stuff and the rest of the OS from his stupidity.
We all know this is a non-story, but unfortunately the general public will be thinking, "My God, something bad happened to a Mac user!" And no matter how often we point out that there is no defense against this on any platform short of disallowing the users to do anything at all, and that the other platform has gaping holes that allow it to be destroyed without any user interaction, they'll just say, "Quiet, fool! We're busy being ignorant, illogical and completely irrational!"
There really is only one way to mitigate this sort of problem, and that's good physically separated backups on different media. I really think new computers should start coming with two or three external FireWire drives with the same capacity, and some simple backup/restore software that just tells the user what to do. Plug in drive #1 and it mirrors the internal drive.
Rotate the drives daily or weekly, and then it doesn't matter what you do, if you blow away your home folder or the whole system, just plug in the latest backup drive and mirror the data back onto the internal drive. With a tool like CarbonCopyCloner this can be insanely easy on Mac OS X. When I upgraded to Panther I did this exact procedure and it blew my mind how easy it was to clone the whole drive and have a complete bootable backup.
Nobody with Mac OS X should be without CCC. Just don't download it from LimeWire. Haha, I made a funny!
We should always remember that UNIX-like permission systems do exactly what they were designed to do. UNIX was designed to run on mainframes and serve dozens, hundreds or even thousands of users. Normally this would be in a corporate environment or some other situation where the users would have limited space and limited reason to put a bunch of junk in their home folders. Also, the whole system including the dozens or hundreds or thousands of home folders would all be backed up by the organization. In this situation when one user does something stupid like this and hoses their home folder, they get a good scolding and their home folder is restored from backup (whenever the admin feels like being gracious). But that one user isn't allowed to destroy the entire system and bring the organization to a halt and destroy the home folders of every other user.
/' command. With tools like CarbonCopyCloner this scenario could be quite simple and workable.
There really is no way to protect the user from himself. If you allow that user to change or delete their own files, there is nothing short of a good backup system that will protect those files from a bad application that is allowed to run as that user. It's as simple as that.
Or of course you could block all users from actually running any executable application outside the system "Applications" folder. I think Linux and BSD can both do this with the nodev/noexec mount options. But you'd also have to block access to things like the shell, so they couldn't run "sh rm -rf ~" and manually execute shell scripts. And you'd have to disallow any dangerous commands in AppleScript if we're still talking about Macs. In short you'd have to lock down the system so tight that it really becomes useless for most users, just to protect people like this from his inability to have a good backup and use common sense.
But, I think if the home data is so important to everyone then personal computers should come with several FireWire backup drives the same size as the internal hard drive, and an ultra-simple backup/restore system, so they can plug one drive in every day/week and have incremental backups without thinking about it too much. It really wouldn't be too difficult, just expensive for all the extra disk space. Using external FireWire drives that get disconnected would mean that the backups can't get destroyed by a simple 'sudo rm -rf