Cocoa has its issues, and I think some things are a bit backwards (and too verbose). Key-value pairs are actually value-key pairs, which confused me for a bit.
"Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass is all you need to get your head wrapped around it (make sure it's the latest edition, with XCode 3+ instructions).
OK, if iTunes is your music manager, why is it not managing your music? That's why people want automatically updating folders. See new file, add to library, silently. We've had inexpensive filesystem monitoring for years, and we know OS X has pretty good control over what files exist on your system.
If you hate podcasts of all types, you haven't found the right ones. I must say I do hate the WORD 'podcast', though. It's just people talking, with or without moving pictures.
If I buy tunes from eMusic with their Remote on a Mac, it automatically adds the music to iTunes. I have set it to download to the same collection folder I have the rest of the music.
Aren't Apple responsible for their drivers on OS X? Of course, if Microsoft were to do the same, they'd have one hell of a long list of hardware to support, compared to the limited list on Macs.
Do they? I seem to remember some countries, like New Zealand, being stuck with a monopolist operator which didn't offer unlimited plans. Norway didn't get any until a massive number of complaints were received. In other words, there is no requirement from Apple that they should have unlimited internet plans.
Microsoft reported they were breaking even on the 360s, I think sometime near the end of last year. They might even be profitable now. Not sure about the PS3, but it has been shockingly expensive here in Scandinavia for a long time.
Of course, that probably means Nintendo are closer to $100 profit per console by now:)=
My very tweaked XP does. 10-15 seconds, depending on its mood. Actual startup time from no power is much more, though, because the BIOS wants to write a novel's worth of POST messages. And the useless JMicron SATA controller has its own crap.
I've got a laptop with a nice BIOS which briefly flashes a message about keys you can press to enter settings or boot menu, then gets on with booting the first device it sees. About two seconds from power on to OS starting. I think it's a Phoenix or something.
Yeah, once I figured out the voices were OUTSIDE my head, I turned them off. There's also an option to not bother with popups while running anything DirectX. Avast is not annoying now.
Mac does network profiles one step better, though, so that's what Ubuntu should strive for (if it doesn't already - I don't have it on a laptop to test). Visit new wi-fi area, say yes to making an access point one of your preferred points, done. Next time you visit, it tries the last key automatically.
The problem with AnyDVD is that it's more of a driver-level solution, so I don't think it'll work very well with Wine. There would have to be support from the Wine folks to make AnyDVD run, not the other way around, just like Transgaming have their own closed-source patches to support various forms of copy protection which works at the lower levels in Windows.
I have (critical and serious) bugs dating back to 7.10, possibly older, still open in Launchpad. Confirmed, long threads, no fix in sight. At least one is easy to fix, and a permanent solution exists..the devs just don't feel like implementing it.
Yeah, KDE4 still lacks a lot of features to be considered complete. A friend of mine is bitching about plasmoids he wants to use, but are not in any public SVN. Not all the great software has been recompiled for KDE4 (and it will take some rewriting to work).
KDE3 is a more complete desktop. If it's been forced out, Kubuntu is no longer usable.
I had that exact problem on installing latest Kubuntu:) "WDC-something-some number" versus "WDC-something-some other number". I did manage to pick the right one without blowing up my Windows partition..but Grub makes the boot drive into hd0 and the other two drives random numbers. It does not follow BIOS order, and the dumb installer follows BIOS order while setting up menu.lst. So Grub tries booting from hd2.
Quickly fixed by me, since I've done this hundreds of times, but another thing that really needs foolproof automatic tools. I dunno if I'll even bother to report it as a bug, because my bugs from 7.10 are still open:(
Something good came out of it, though. I stopped installing Grub on anything but the Linux partition, and now use the BIOS boot menu. I just press F12 to get a list of boot drives, and the order never changes.
I'll give you the audio quality - that's stupidly high sometimes. But audio is pretty small compared to graphics - 50 megs or less per hour of speech and pew-pew noises with lossy compression. Double that for music which doesn't sound like a babbling brook.
Textures, on the other hand, make quite a difference. Just try different quality levels in reasonably modern MMOs and shooters. I think that they could use lossier compression on the hi-res textures without noticable perceived quality, though.
3D models and maps also eat a bunch of space. Maps with all their textures can go well past 100 megs, with tens of those megs being geometry. A single-player game can afford more detailed player models, and many will make use of that. Then there are animations and lip-sync data.
There have been custom mods to games which both reduce load and make games prettier, though. Oblivion mods are a mixed bag, but the speedier grass and forests are good examples of the devs not doing enough optimisation.
If you strip out enough services, there probably won't be much point in even updating:) Some filthy pirates made an extremely stripped variant of XP using only 50 megs of RAM, with a few services. Out of the listed features, I saw 4-5 I'm sure could be disabled, so we're talking about Win98 levels of RAM usage after all that tweaking.
Mandriva rips off Windows, KDE4 rips off Mac OS X:) I still find it amazing how different configuration of the system is between different Ubuntu desktop flavours. Gnome likes to hide or even completely remove options, while KDE likes to give it to you firehose-style.
Ibex looked fine to me, after I installed the graphics driver. On further investigation, it was not so hot - 64-bit kernel didn't detect all 4 gigs of memory. Now I can't trust it to do anything right:(
I'm hoping it well be speedily fixed, like last time. 7.10 was useless to me in beta and the first week after release, but then suddenly problems disappeared. 8.04 didn't use the full screen (resolution set right, but not using all of it), and used two different keymaps before and after login.
Ubuntu used to be easiest to set up, but too many weird problems have cropped up in the last three releases.
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Cocoa has its issues, and I think some things are a bit backwards (and too verbose). Key-value pairs are actually value-key pairs, which confused me for a bit.
"Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass is all you need to get your head wrapped around it (make sure it's the latest edition, with XCode 3+ instructions).
OK, if iTunes is your music manager, why is it not managing your music? That's why people want automatically updating folders. See new file, add to library, silently. We've had inexpensive filesystem monitoring for years, and we know OS X has pretty good control over what files exist on your system.
If you hate podcasts of all types, you haven't found the right ones. I must say I do hate the WORD 'podcast', though. It's just people talking, with or without moving pictures.
If I buy tunes from eMusic with their Remote on a Mac, it automatically adds the music to iTunes. I have set it to download to the same collection folder I have the rest of the music.
So there are options for incredibly lazy people!
I thought I was the only one paranoid enough to do this! (And I live on a mountain among luddites :)
Aren't Apple responsible for their drivers on OS X? Of course, if Microsoft were to do the same, they'd have one hell of a long list of hardware to support, compared to the limited list on Macs.
since iPhones must have unlimited data plans
Do they? I seem to remember some countries, like New Zealand, being stuck with a monopolist operator which didn't offer unlimited plans. Norway didn't get any until a massive number of complaints were received. In other words, there is no requirement from Apple that they should have unlimited internet plans.
It's not effed up at all. It's actually quite smart.
As the other reply says, you can easily set a password..but it's just as easy to just do sudo -s.
Microsoft reported they were breaking even on the 360s, I think sometime near the end of last year. They might even be profitable now. Not sure about the PS3, but it has been shockingly expensive here in Scandinavia for a long time.
Of course, that probably means Nintendo are closer to $100 profit per console by now :)=
AltGr is on the right side only. Shift works the same on either side of the keyboard.
My very tweaked XP does. 10-15 seconds, depending on its mood.
Actual startup time from no power is much more, though, because the BIOS wants to write a novel's worth of POST messages. And the useless JMicron SATA controller has its own crap.
Canon tops that with nearly 400 megs. Driver and useless software bundled into one installer.
I've got a laptop with a nice BIOS which briefly flashes a message about keys you can press to enter settings or boot menu, then gets on with booting the first device it sees. About two seconds from power on to OS starting. I think it's a Phoenix or something.
Yeah, once I figured out the voices were OUTSIDE my head, I turned them off. There's also an option to not bother with popups while running anything DirectX. Avast is not annoying now.
Mac does network profiles one step better, though, so that's what Ubuntu should strive for (if it doesn't already - I don't have it on a laptop to test). Visit new wi-fi area, say yes to making an access point one of your preferred points, done. Next time you visit, it tries the last key automatically.
Hotplugging keyboards and mice has worked fine for me as long as I've used Ubuntu. Has it really been a problem for that many until recently?
The problem with AnyDVD is that it's more of a driver-level solution, so I don't think it'll work very well with Wine. There would have to be support from the Wine folks to make AnyDVD run, not the other way around, just like Transgaming have their own closed-source patches to support various forms of copy protection which works at the lower levels in Windows.
I have (critical and serious) bugs dating back to 7.10, possibly older, still open in Launchpad. Confirmed, long threads, no fix in sight. At least one is easy to fix, and a permanent solution exists..the devs just don't feel like implementing it.
Yeah, KDE4 still lacks a lot of features to be considered complete. A friend of mine is bitching about plasmoids he wants to use, but are not in any public SVN. Not all the great software has been recompiled for KDE4 (and it will take some rewriting to work).
KDE3 is a more complete desktop. If it's been forced out, Kubuntu is no longer usable.
I think the coward's point was about the missing 5%, which WUA is using.
I had that exact problem on installing latest Kubuntu :)
"WDC-something-some number" versus "WDC-something-some other number". I did manage to pick the right one without blowing up my Windows partition..but Grub makes the boot drive into hd0 and the other two drives random numbers. It does not follow BIOS order, and the dumb installer follows BIOS order while setting up menu.lst. So Grub tries booting from hd2.
Quickly fixed by me, since I've done this hundreds of times, but another thing that really needs foolproof automatic tools. :(
I dunno if I'll even bother to report it as a bug, because my bugs from 7.10 are still open
Something good came out of it, though. I stopped installing Grub on anything but the Linux partition, and now use the BIOS boot menu. I just press F12 to get a list of boot drives, and the order never changes.
If you still DO install again, you can leave your home directory on its own partition and never reconfigure anything :)
Still a bitch to do in Windows.
I'll give you the audio quality - that's stupidly high sometimes. But audio is pretty small compared to graphics - 50 megs or less per hour of speech and pew-pew noises with lossy compression. Double that for music which doesn't sound like a babbling brook.
Textures, on the other hand, make quite a difference. Just try different quality levels in reasonably modern MMOs and shooters. I think that they could use lossier compression on the hi-res textures without noticable perceived quality, though.
3D models and maps also eat a bunch of space. Maps with all their textures can go well past 100 megs, with tens of those megs being geometry. A single-player game can afford more detailed player models, and many will make use of that. Then there are animations and lip-sync data.
There have been custom mods to games which both reduce load and make games prettier, though. Oblivion mods are a mixed bag, but the speedier grass and forests are good examples of the devs not doing enough optimisation.
If you strip out enough services, there probably won't be much point in even updating :)
Some filthy pirates made an extremely stripped variant of XP using only 50 megs of RAM, with a few services. Out of the listed features, I saw 4-5 I'm sure could be disabled, so we're talking about Win98 levels of RAM usage after all that tweaking.
The Mandriva/PCLOS drakconf isn't terribly different from KDE's system settings as seen in Kubuntu:
http://www.kubuntu.org/docs/kquickguide/C/ch03s07.html
Mandriva rips off Windows, KDE4 rips off Mac OS X :)
I still find it amazing how different configuration of the system is between different Ubuntu desktop flavours. Gnome likes to hide or even completely remove options, while KDE likes to give it to you firehose-style.
Ibex looked fine to me, after I installed the graphics driver. On further investigation, it was not so hot - 64-bit kernel didn't detect all 4 gigs of memory. Now I can't trust it to do anything right :(
I'm hoping it well be speedily fixed, like last time. 7.10 was useless to me in beta and the first week after release, but then suddenly problems disappeared. 8.04 didn't use the full screen (resolution set right, but not using all of it), and used two different keymaps before and after login.
Ubuntu used to be easiest to set up, but too many weird problems have cropped up in the last three releases.