Maybe I'm just in a good mood, but that little PS is about the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. I'm going to appropriate it shamelessly. Great post! Thanks!
Keep in mind that there's nothing perfect about paper, either. I would wager that for every pound of readable paper materials that exist, 100 pounds have been destroyed by the ravages of time and dumb people.
If you want something to survive for the ages, engrave it on stainless steel and seal it in a vacuum tomb. Otherwise, all bets are off. : )
It doesn't matter if somebody else did it first. The question is whether it's done WELL.
I'm sick and tired of the rat's nest that develops behind my computer. Fewer cables=good thing. I don't CARE who had the idea first. I just wish to God some PeeCee manufacturer would figure out the difference between ugly translucent cases and STYLE.
Point the first: The US healthcare debacle is a discussion for another day, but I will concede that in that case free enterprise has not found a viable long term solution. (You're right, you caught me in an overgeneralization.)
Point the second: Peer pressure does NOT constitute force. Nobody MAKES you do anything. They may make you think it's cool to have a polka-dot speckledy phone, but the purchaser still bears full and final responsibility for the purchase. "But my friend made me!" didn't work when I was in elementary school, and it certainly doesn't apply in consumer electronics.
Point the third: Do you see the parallel? Just because it's available doesn't mean you HAVE to buy it. If you buy a Palm M100, and don't buy a fashion faceplate, nobody is going to come to your door in the middle of the night.
Point the fourth: Despite the fact that my point was couched in barbed words (as much for humorous effect as anything else), you have not yet successfully explained how Palm selling little hunks of plastic forces you to buy little hunks of plastic. I wouldn't concede MY personal sovereignty to ANYBODY, least of all some faceless corporation that happens to make cool PDA's (I love my Palm III). Take responsibility for your own choices, and I guarantee that it will make you a happier person. (This is not meant to imply that you or anybody you know is unhappy, merely that in this individual's experience, which correlates well with logical thinking about the way the world works, personal responsibility leads to personal satisfaction. YMMV, no purchase necessary, no warrantee express or implied...)
Re-reading my posts, I realize they were a bit pointier than I had originally intended. For that, I apologize. I am seriously interested, however, in understanding this notion being put forth that options are a bad thing, and should not be sold.
You do not understand. However many face plates it comes with, it does NOT come with somebody to put a gun to your head and make you buy additional face plates. I'll bet you a Palm M110 that the product comes with one face plate, likely a fairly conservative one, and you can buy other ones for the staggering sum of $10-20. It's called free enterprise, and it's a Good Thing. When you make a product, and people want it, they give you money. There's no force involved.
I'm going to go out on a limb here. I bet you have a PC. Does anybody MAKE you buy every sound card on the market?
Say it with me. Providing options does not constitute coercion. Write it on the chalkboard 100 times.
Re:One space left in the Mac product matrix...
on
Apple Cube Confirmed
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· Score: 1
Me, I'd take a cue from the Beetle's little bud vase and design a little four-legged lucite flower pot or something. Or a coffee mug holder (warmer). The aftermarket will have this problem licked in under a month.
Though if I catch you stacking PAPERS on top of this piece of art, I'm going to take it away from you and give it a good home. : )
Re:One space left in the Mac product matrix...
on
Apple Cube Confirmed
·
· Score: 1
Why on earth would you try to balance paper on top of an 8" square surface 12 (or so) inches off your desk? Crikey, get a paper sorter!
Scroll wheel would be nice. As soon as there's one as well-designed (aesthetically) as the Apple mouse, I bet it's going to sell like hotcakes. I don't begrudge Apple wanting to bank on their simple user interface conventions. They've served well in the past. And nobody says you can't attach your Mickeysoft scrolly optical mouse to the USB system.
I dunno, if you're on a budget the cube plus a cheap 17" monitor isn't THAT much more expensive than an iMac. You have to pay for style, but frankly the price isn't that high.
Another poster mentioned that the graphics card is in an AGP slot, so I wonder if upgrades are feasible. Me, I'm a lot more excited about NVidia's partnership with Apple than whatever ATI's shilling these days...
I would be VERY happy if Apple released a subnotebook with a firewire connector and a sleek little lightweight, portable docking station with a DVD drive. Put it all in that snazzy clear plastic Apple seems to be enjoying, and it'd sell like hotcakes.
Right. If it was like Microsoft, it would have been anti-competitive behaviour. However, since it's NOT like Microsoft in one critical and significant way (that is, Apple has not been found to be a monopoly holder by a court of law...), it's NOT anti-competitive behaviour.
Ummm...so why didn't they? Let me tell you...because none of those alternatives you mentioned were at the time capable of supporting a company the size of PowerComputing. (which is unfortunate, but a reality...) Had these companies seen any way to stay viable by using alternative OSes, they would have done so. PowerComputing tried to sell Wintel boxes, for cryin' out loud! (They failed. Miserably.)
Apple did a horrible job of writing a license that could profit both the licensors and the licensees. They did cloning for the sake of cloning, as a quick-fix solution to their hemmhoraging market share. It was poorly implemented. Then they pulled the license agreement (as was their prerogative...had the cloners wanted more assurance of stability, they should have negotiated for a longer contract!) and went on to become, ohmigosh, PROFITABLE. Despite what we all wish was the case, companies exist to become and remain profitable, not to provide us with toys that we like on terms we dictate. Maybe in a different society with different values, things would shake out differently (duh) but in the meantime, castigating Apple because they *gasp* didn't want to let the cloners drive them out of business is foolish.
If memory serves, PowerComputing and the other cloners were offered a much higher-priced license for Apple's technology...they just didn't agree to the price. Had they signed while Gil Amelio was still CEO, they'd probably still be in business. However, they procrastinated and hedged until Jobs came along and killed the program. (for good reasons or ill, I don't know...but I can't argue that it wasn't effective!)
So why is it more rude for a person to talk on a cell phone in the seat behind you than it is for them to have a conversation with the person next to them? If this troubles you a lot, I might suggest an inexpensive portable music making device and some nice Brahms or Mozart.
I guarantee that there are any number of eventualities that commercial aircraft were not designed to protect you against. Engineering is hard...anticipating all possible technological developments that are going to occur in the next 40+ years (a common age for an aircraft design, and not unheard of for an actual airframe) goes far into "impossible" territory.
Cry about the engineers not doing their job if you want to, but they can still get your ass to anywhere in the world tomorrow for a relatively modest sum of money. Count yer blessings.
(Yep. I'm studying to be an engineer. I don't promise to be perfect, either.)
Rudy Rucker wrote the enormously entertaining Software/Wetware/Freeware trilogy. I found them to be really good cyberpunk-ish fiction, if a little on the short side. Great stuff. He's also a computer scientist interested in artificial life simulations. http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/
I'll agree with you when there's a truly first-rate ultra-realistic flight sim for any game console. There are exactly zero, and there will always be zero. I hope I'm wrong...
And multiplayer gaming on the console is still a really different thing from a PC. Right now, they're complimentary, not replacements for one another...
Why the hell is Romero entitled to my understanding or support? He turned out a crap game, after wasting really horrific amounts of resources that could have been channeled in much more constructive directions, and to top it all off the arrogant bastard hyped his game by telling us he was going to make us his bitch.
There are any number of proven game developers out there that could have made Daikatana a fun, innovative game. I'm not going to speculate what he did with the time he wasn't spending running his company, but having seen the pictures of his girlfriend I think I've got a pretty good guess.
What people are arguing is that 90% access is NOT ACCEPTABLE, and puts them at a competitive disadvantage to Microsoft's own apps division, and that this behavior is anticompetitive. Is that so hard to understand?
Obviously you've never played any of the Thief or System Shock games.
I got bored with Deathmatch after playing Quake 1, which was not nearly as much fun multiplayer as Marathon. (King of the Hill in that huge circular arena with the strip...oh, the memories...)
Do yourself a favor. Go spend $5 and play System Shock. With the lights off. If you dare.
I don't normally get this vehement on Slashdot, but this is utter crap.
NetBEUI can munch the peanuts out of my shite. Chattier than local talk, and it STILL doesn't freakin' work. Let's not get into having to reboot the computer to give it a different name. You wouldn't believe the number of times I pick up the phone each week to hear some poor luser crying because their NetBEUI LAN has eaten itself. Reboot all the machines, and it'll prolly come back, says I. I'm sometimes even right.
LocalTalk (and its faster cooler big brother EtherTalk) may be slower than some other protocols, but it FRIGGIN' WORKS. No if's, and's, or but's...two phone net connectors, and you're transferring files. I love the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the intrepid Mac Jedi who ran a Local Talk network (which requires only one pair of wires) over the hot and cold water pipes between two skyscrapers. (A perfunctory Google search didn't bring any references, but it's still a fun idea)
Want high performance? TCP/IP's not bad. Want DEAD STUPID EASY configurability with respectable speed? Apple networking all the way.
Let me take your points out of order. A Linux user is complaining about the difficulty of the MacOS installation procedure? If you have trouble even with the (marginally more complicated) custom install of MacOS, I don't think you should be allowed to eat without a cork on your fork. It is literally a no-brainer.
What does it mean for the OS to have a "concept of additional buttons"? Is your operating system somehow AWARE of its peripherals? Does it say "Gee, even though that mouse is sending the same electrical signal as a key combination, I'm going to do something weird and different just to give my user something to talk about!"? Mine (a venerable PowerMac 6100) just sorta responds to the input from the peripherals I've hooked to it. The mouse (four button Kensington turbo mouse you can have when I'm cold and dead) is infinitely configurable, on an app by app basis, with different commands for each button, for each button and any permutation of modifier keys, and chorded button presses.
Your garden variety user is CONFUSED by multi-button mice. I talk to people every day who don't understand the diff between left and right click. Nevertheless, in any discussion about Macs, this ridiculous one-button mouse issue gets trotted out.
The Macintosh was designed to be operated with your left hand on the kb, and your right hand on the mouse. All the apps that subscribe to Apple's HI guidelines have keyboard shortcuts that can be operated with the right hand. Proceeding from that logical bit of design work, it makes sense to give users the option (no pun) of using modifier keys with the mouse, rather than having the confusion (which, for clever people like you and me, does not exist) of having a multi-button mouse.
Note: Multi button mice are no more or less complicated or difficult to master than my preferred method of keyboard shortcuts. However, Apple's design provides a shallower learning curve, making it easier to learn. It's good engineering (when they actually follow it, which is not always) and I applaud them for it.
Now, the hockey puck iMac mouse, I don't know WHAT they were smoking. That mouse is a real hunk of crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm just in a good mood, but that little PS is about the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. I'm going to appropriate it shamelessly. Great post! Thanks!
Ummm...just a wild ass guess, but I'm thinking 640x480...
How the hell do you get a college degree and know anything about IRC? At UT (the real one, in Texas), we called it "I Repeat Classes"...
Keep in mind that there's nothing perfect about paper, either. I would wager that for every pound of readable paper materials that exist, 100 pounds have been destroyed by the ravages of time and dumb people.
If you want something to survive for the ages, engrave it on stainless steel and seal it in a vacuum tomb. Otherwise, all bets are off. : )
It doesn't matter if somebody else did it first. The question is whether it's done WELL.
I'm sick and tired of the rat's nest that develops behind my computer. Fewer cables=good thing. I don't CARE who had the idea first. I just wish to God some PeeCee manufacturer would figure out the difference between ugly translucent cases and STYLE.
Point the first: The US healthcare debacle is a discussion for another day, but I will concede that in that case free enterprise has not found a viable long term solution. (You're right, you caught me in an overgeneralization.)
Point the second: Peer pressure does NOT constitute force. Nobody MAKES you do anything. They may make you think it's cool to have a polka-dot speckledy phone, but the purchaser still bears full and final responsibility for the purchase. "But my friend made me!" didn't work when I was in elementary school, and it certainly doesn't apply in consumer electronics.
Point the third: Do you see the parallel? Just because it's available doesn't mean you HAVE to buy it. If you buy a Palm M100, and don't buy a fashion faceplate, nobody is going to come to your door in the middle of the night.
Point the fourth: Despite the fact that my point was couched in barbed words (as much for humorous effect as anything else), you have not yet successfully explained how Palm selling little hunks of plastic forces you to buy little hunks of plastic. I wouldn't concede MY personal sovereignty to ANYBODY, least of all some faceless corporation that happens to make cool PDA's (I love my Palm III). Take responsibility for your own choices, and I guarantee that it will make you a happier person. (This is not meant to imply that you or anybody you know is unhappy, merely that in this individual's experience, which correlates well with logical thinking about the way the world works, personal responsibility leads to personal satisfaction. YMMV, no purchase necessary, no warrantee express or implied...)
Re-reading my posts, I realize they were a bit pointier than I had originally intended. For that, I apologize. I am seriously interested, however, in understanding this notion being put forth that options are a bad thing, and should not be sold.
You do not understand. However many face plates it comes with, it does NOT come with somebody to put a gun to your head and make you buy additional face plates. I'll bet you a Palm M110 that the product comes with one face plate, likely a fairly conservative one, and you can buy other ones for the staggering sum of $10-20. It's called free enterprise, and it's a Good Thing. When you make a product, and people want it, they give you money. There's no force involved.
I'm going to go out on a limb here. I bet you have a PC. Does anybody MAKE you buy every sound card on the market?
Say it with me. Providing options does not constitute coercion. Write it on the chalkboard 100 times.
Since when does a company providing you an alternative "make" you buy it? Grow a spine.
$799. iMac. 350mHz, 0 fans. Tell your friends.
Me, I'd take a cue from the Beetle's little bud vase and design a little four-legged lucite flower pot or something. Or a coffee mug holder (warmer). The aftermarket will have this problem licked in under a month.
Though if I catch you stacking PAPERS on top of this piece of art, I'm going to take it away from you and give it a good home. : )
Why on earth would you try to balance paper on top of an 8" square surface 12 (or so) inches off your desk? Crikey, get a paper sorter!
Scroll wheel would be nice. As soon as there's one as well-designed (aesthetically) as the Apple mouse, I bet it's going to sell like hotcakes. I don't begrudge Apple wanting to bank on their simple user interface conventions. They've served well in the past. And nobody says you can't attach your Mickeysoft scrolly optical mouse to the USB system.
I dunno, if you're on a budget the cube plus a cheap 17" monitor isn't THAT much more expensive than an iMac. You have to pay for style, but frankly the price isn't that high.
Another poster mentioned that the graphics card is in an AGP slot, so I wonder if upgrades are feasible. Me, I'm a lot more excited about NVidia's partnership with Apple than whatever ATI's shilling these days...
I would be VERY happy if Apple released a subnotebook with a firewire connector and a sleek little lightweight, portable docking station with a DVD drive. Put it all in that snazzy clear plastic Apple seems to be enjoying, and it'd sell like hotcakes.
Right. If it was like Microsoft, it would have been anti-competitive behaviour. However, since it's NOT like Microsoft in one critical and significant way (that is, Apple has not been found to be a monopoly holder by a court of law...), it's NOT anti-competitive behaviour.
Ummm...so why didn't they? Let me tell you...because none of those alternatives you mentioned were at the time capable of supporting a company the size of PowerComputing. (which is unfortunate, but a reality...) Had these companies seen any way to stay viable by using alternative OSes, they would have done so. PowerComputing tried to sell Wintel boxes, for cryin' out loud! (They failed. Miserably.)
Apple did a horrible job of writing a license that could profit both the licensors and the licensees. They did cloning for the sake of cloning, as a quick-fix solution to their hemmhoraging market share. It was poorly implemented. Then they pulled the license agreement (as was their prerogative...had the cloners wanted more assurance of stability, they should have negotiated for a longer contract!) and went on to become, ohmigosh, PROFITABLE. Despite what we all wish was the case, companies exist to become and remain profitable, not to provide us with toys that we like on terms we dictate. Maybe in a different society with different values, things would shake out differently (duh) but in the meantime, castigating Apple because they *gasp* didn't want to let the cloners drive them out of business is foolish.
If memory serves, PowerComputing and the other cloners were offered a much higher-priced license for Apple's technology...they just didn't agree to the price. Had they signed while Gil Amelio was still CEO, they'd probably still be in business. However, they procrastinated and hedged until Jobs came along and killed the program. (for good reasons or ill, I don't know...but I can't argue that it wasn't effective!)
So why is it more rude for a person to talk on a cell phone in the seat behind you than it is for them to have a conversation with the person next to them? If this troubles you a lot, I might suggest an inexpensive portable music making device and some nice Brahms or Mozart.
I guarantee that there are any number of eventualities that commercial aircraft were not designed to protect you against. Engineering is hard...anticipating all possible technological developments that are going to occur in the next 40+ years (a common age for an aircraft design, and not unheard of for an actual airframe) goes far into "impossible" territory.
Cry about the engineers not doing their job if you want to, but they can still get your ass to anywhere in the world tomorrow for a relatively modest sum of money. Count yer blessings.
(Yep. I'm studying to be an engineer. I don't promise to be perfect, either.)
Rudy Rucker wrote the enormously entertaining Software/Wetware/Freeware trilogy. I found them to be really good cyberpunk-ish fiction, if a little on the short side. Great stuff. He's also a computer scientist interested in artificial life simulations.
http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/
I'll agree with you when there's a truly first-rate ultra-realistic flight sim for any game console. There are exactly zero, and there will always be zero. I hope I'm wrong...
And multiplayer gaming on the console is still a really different thing from a PC. Right now, they're complimentary, not replacements for one another...
At first, I thought it might be Romero himself, but the poster didn't say "bitch" once, so it can't be.
Why the hell is Romero entitled to my understanding or support? He turned out a crap game, after wasting really horrific amounts of resources that could have been channeled in much more constructive directions, and to top it all off the arrogant bastard hyped his game by telling us he was going to make us his bitch.
There are any number of proven game developers out there that could have made Daikatana a fun, innovative game. I'm not going to speculate what he did with the time he wasn't spending running his company, but having seen the pictures of his girlfriend I think I've got a pretty good guess.
Who's the bitch now, John?
Was the dolphins in space game related to Brin's Uplift War series? For those who haven't read it, it's pretty darn brilliant sci-fi stuff.
What people are arguing is that 90% access is NOT ACCEPTABLE, and puts them at a competitive disadvantage to Microsoft's own apps division, and that this behavior is anticompetitive. Is that so hard to understand?
Obviously you've never played any of the Thief or System Shock games.
I got bored with Deathmatch after playing Quake 1, which was not nearly as much fun multiplayer as Marathon. (King of the Hill in that huge circular arena with the strip...oh, the memories...)
Do yourself a favor. Go spend $5 and play System Shock. With the lights off. If you dare.
I don't normally get this vehement on Slashdot, but this is utter crap.
NetBEUI can munch the peanuts out of my shite. Chattier than local talk, and it STILL doesn't freakin' work. Let's not get into having to reboot the computer to give it a different name. You wouldn't believe the number of times I pick up the phone each week to hear some poor luser crying because their NetBEUI LAN has eaten itself. Reboot all the machines, and it'll prolly come back, says I. I'm sometimes even right.
LocalTalk (and its faster cooler big brother EtherTalk) may be slower than some other protocols, but it FRIGGIN' WORKS. No if's, and's, or but's...two phone net connectors, and you're transferring files. I love the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the intrepid Mac Jedi who ran a Local Talk network (which requires only one pair of wires) over the hot and cold water pipes between two skyscrapers. (A perfunctory Google search didn't bring any references, but it's still a fun idea)
Want high performance? TCP/IP's not bad. Want DEAD STUPID EASY configurability with respectable speed? Apple networking all the way.
Let me take your points out of order. A Linux user is complaining about the difficulty of the MacOS installation procedure? If you have trouble even with the (marginally more complicated) custom install of MacOS, I don't think you should be allowed to eat without a cork on your fork. It is literally a no-brainer.
What does it mean for the OS to have a "concept of additional buttons"? Is your operating system somehow AWARE of its peripherals? Does it say "Gee, even though that mouse is sending the same electrical signal as a key combination, I'm going to do something weird and different just to give my user something to talk about!"? Mine (a venerable PowerMac 6100) just sorta responds to the input from the peripherals I've hooked to it. The mouse (four button Kensington turbo mouse you can have when I'm cold and dead) is infinitely configurable, on an app by app basis, with different commands for each button, for each button and any permutation of modifier keys, and chorded button presses.
Your garden variety user is CONFUSED by multi-button mice. I talk to people every day who don't understand the diff between left and right click. Nevertheless, in any discussion about Macs, this ridiculous one-button mouse issue gets trotted out.
The Macintosh was designed to be operated with your left hand on the kb, and your right hand on the mouse. All the apps that subscribe to Apple's HI guidelines have keyboard shortcuts that can be operated with the right hand. Proceeding from that logical bit of design work, it makes sense to give users the option (no pun) of using modifier keys with the mouse, rather than having the confusion (which, for clever people like you and me, does not exist) of having a multi-button mouse.
Note: Multi button mice are no more or less complicated or difficult to master than my preferred method of keyboard shortcuts. However, Apple's design provides a shallower learning curve, making it easier to learn. It's good engineering (when they actually follow it, which is not always) and I applaud them for it.
Now, the hockey puck iMac mouse, I don't know WHAT they were smoking. That mouse is a real hunk of crap.
Sure.
Carbon nanotubes=>structurally stronger flywheels=>faster rotational speeds=>higher energy densities (energy stored varies quadratically with spin speed).
All better? : )