I find it frustrating every time I hear Linux users (whom I usually expect to have a clue) drool over the sickening and ugly desktop that is OSX.
But its Ok, because Darwin is free and Open Source, right? Right?
Wrong.
Apple are lying to you. Darwin is not free as in freedom. It is more restrictive than any other license, effectively asking you to accept that it covers running code, not just redistribution. Then there's the lack of privacy - any modifications have to be disclosed to a single, monopolistic party - Apple.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html. The FSF boycotted Apple, remember. Apple are not the saviour of the desktop, they are not a wonderful company, and they are not embracing freedom. Apple are just as evil, monopolistic and money-hungry as the rest of them.
so where's my fix? Right in front of you. It's called the Enter key:o)
Seriously, though, you can use the entire Windows UI without touching the mouse (which is useful when my hamster's batteries die). Learn to love the keyboard.
Re:you just dont get it
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
That's pretty much my theory. Imagine the entire universe in one moment were a little box. Now imagine that there is one of each of these little boxes for every moment ever, arranged in line a to make a string.
That string is time.
Now imagine you have a bunch of those timelines, side by side - you have every possible combination of reality ever.
Now quantum mechanics gets involved. For every possible action, there are two outcomes - it either happened or it didn't. Imagine that each of these outcomes splits a time string into two - each fork is a reality that could have happened.
When you throw in time travel, some interesting things happen. When you go back to a point in the past, the timeline splits - one string has you arriving at that point in time; the other you didn't, and reality can continue on it's merry way until the event where you decide to go back in time. Paradoxes are impossible, you're just making more possible realities. You can't kill your grandfather, but you can make a new reality where he is dead.
Sliding is even more fun. When you switch lanes, and go to one of these alternate universes, you create a fork in that timeline. Now if, as on "Sliders", the destination is quantumly random, there are an infinite number of possible universes you can end up in. This means that the timelines are split inifinitely, you end up one alternate of every alternate reality. For every universe, there is a fork where you arrived and another where you didn't.
It is possible to get home. Indeed, you will get home every single time you do slide. The problem is getting to experience the being home. Since there are two copies of your life (one that got there by chance and one that didn't) in every reality, the more you slide, the more copies of yourself can appear in other realities.
Now let's try a mindfuck. Imagine a line. Imagine a line a right angles to that line. Fine, so you have a cross. Now imagine another line at right angles to both of those. You now have a three dimensional cross. Now imagine a line at right angles to those three lines. Therein lies the mindfuck. The human mind can't deal with more than 3D but we'll have to make do. Back to three dimensions, imagine that one of them is time. So you have a 2D plane, and you can see time-slices within them. Think about the string bundle again for a bit, and look at the way they're all line next to each other. They need a dimension for that. Make that the third dimension on your cross. So you can see again a 2D plane, but this time you're seeing cross-sections of alternate realities - snapshots of the same time, but in a different reality.
So now we have five dimensions. The basic ones xyz that everyone knows about, t for time, and a fifth, p for probability. Try for a moment to imagine a five dimensional intersection. Ouch.
If you accept that any of these dimensions are infinite, you must accept that they all are. It's easy to see that time is forever because it's impossible to be anything before or after time. So the probability dimension is infinite. Which means that the impossible will happen somewhere far out on that dimension. Somewhere out there, George Bush will declare peace and Britney Spears will learn to sing.
Check out my thoughts on this, although that page is probably not as coherent as this post.
Polymorphism is the ability to treat any subclasses as if they were the type of a superclass. eg BaseClass[] baseClass = new BaseClass[2]; baseClass[0] = new BaseClass(); baseClass[1] = new SubClass();
for (int i = 0; i < baseClass.length(); i ++){
System.out.println(baseClass[i].toString()); }
Re:Never underestimate a scripting language...
on
SedSokoban
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· Score: 2
Yeah, I wrote Tetris (and a few others) in JavaScript (for DOM level 1 browsers - Mozilla or IE5 will work) a while back. I also wrote Tetris in C++ (source is here; works under Wine) when I was learning DirectX. The blocks.js became blocks.h with a few search and replaces.
So Tetris is kindof my "Hello World" when learning a new language. I don't think I'll try to write it in sed though.:o)
Some of those articles go back to 98, and yes it's been on/. several times.
Microsoft are going to use an SQL-based filesystem, and only offer hierarchical (old skool) file access though an NTFS abstraction layer. Essentially, there will be a copy of MS-SQL server bundled with the OS, which will always be faster than any SQL database running on top of the OS, which is really going to piss off Oracle.
This feature was originally planned of Blackcombe, but it was decided that another iteration was needed before then. Hence Longhorn.
1) I forgot about the Get Info window. But it's still looks bad when changing the name of a file will change it's appearance and there is no obvious way to get it back.
2) I know, it is nitpicking. It's just that I really like the way explorer does this (Windows 2000 and onwards, excluding that stupid animated dog from XP). Having file finding both by folder views and by search criteria neatly integrated just seems Right.
Newsflash : self proclaimed "Open Source junkie" too stupid to uninstall an rpm[1] loves Mac OS.
Lets try to deconstruct this article in order.
I played text based games (most of them were never finished as I couldn't get the game to accept commands like "put egg in lake" or "drop egg in lake" or "slam egg into the damn lake you stupid computer!"
Try removing the preposition - drop egg should work if it's possible to do so. And close your brackets.
Whenever I clicked on Wordperfect, the same DOS program filled the entire screen In 386 enhanced mode, you can run DOS in a window.
I'm personally convinced that Microsoft never ported DirectX 5.0 to NT 4.0 just to get people to upgrade to Windows 2000 It requires a new kernel and drivers for all hardware. That's why.
the idea of recompiling a kernel is a terrifying idea to me What's so terrifying about make menuconfig && make bzImage && cp arch/i386/bzImage/boot? The power of linux lies in the fact that you can whether or not you have to.
there were still things that just didn't work right. Like the Java plug in. I tried to install that so many times, and it just wouldn't work And yet so many people can. Is this not a case of not RTFMing? I even have the java plugin on my ppc mozilla[3] even though Sun only produce an i386 version.
But the worst, the truly worst part, was cut 'n paste Left click to select, middle button to paste. What's bad about that? It even works on a tty or a virtual console. And it's consistent throughout the entire system.
Linux was a lot like a girl named Allison that I used to date. She was a hot redhead with large, firm breasts in most of my honors classes. She was smart, she was cute - and she was totally crazy. I could only deal with her strange behavior for so long, no matter how much I loved the rest of her. I'm really not qualified to say anything about this...
of its inability to handle virtual memory Mac OS does handle virtual memory. It just makes it possible to disable it. (Now that is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard).
even smarter than what I was used to in the Linux command line The default shell in Mac OSX is tcsh, which has a different command completion behavior than bash by default. The behaviour you see in tcsh can easily be set in bash, and zsh does so by default too. It is not, however, smarter. Example : you have both a directory and a file in your current working directory, named so that the file comes before the directory (eg after unpacking somefile.tar.gz you have a directory called somefile). To change to the directory you try cd some* to go into the directory. tcsh will find the file first, then complain, whereas bash will do the right thing. Both bash and tcsh are available for linux, so the comparison is irrelevant anyway.
Right upon taking it out of the box, it just seemed so...pretty This is why most people buy Macs. Mostly people (like my boss) who think that case is actually relevant to the design of the system.
I've never understood the big deal about "anti-aliasing" And yet you seem qualified to write an objective comparison of it? Sure some of default linux fonts have terrible hinting, but get a copy of gdkpixbuf and the windows truetype fonts and you're laughing. Have you seen what cleartype looks like? Sub-pixel rendering is sweet. By comparison OSX just looks... blurry.
Running programs have a small black triangle underneath them, so it's easy to tell what's running and what's not The key word here is "small". It's not easy to tell what's running and what's not. Both long time Mac users and new converts have a lot of pet hates about the Dock. I won't reiterate them here.
When I first went to install Microsoft Office X, there was something that surprised me about the installation procedure. Basically, it was "copy this folder into your Applications directory". Or Omniweb, a competing web browser. It's just one file ls -l shows it as a directory called somefile.app. So which is it? That's the problem - the gui and prompt are inconsistent; changing any files name to somefile.app will make it always appear as application (with the file extension hidden) and it can't be fixed from the finder[2]. So installation is easy. For some programs. Others have their own installers, which variously put random files anywhere (eg Lightware) to nuking other partitions (iTunes 2) to crashing simply because you've moved an older version of the app. And there's no uninstallation routine. No way to cleanly get rid of all files, system resources and preferences. Compare this to linux. cast appname will install appname and all required dependencies from source, while dispel appname will remove it and all applications which depend on it.[3] Compare also to Windows. msiexec appname.msi will install appname, repeated invocations will give options to modify repair or remove appname. Or you can get the same effect by clicking on appname.msi.
I've never figured out how to uninstall a RPM file See again note [1]. Please now tell me how to uninstall apache from Mac OSX, because I don't need a web server. What do you mean I can't?
No messages about "I can't shut down the program" like you'd see in Windows You mean "Unable to terminate process. Access denied"? This is no different from trying to kill another users process in any unix. You can't kill other peoples processes. This is natural. This is right.
Copying programs is much like Windows - select a file, and either drag it to another directory, or select Edit->Copy Copying files by Edit/Copy didn't exist until Mac OSX. Maybe because they realised how useless the finder[2] was.
Since OS X does a great job with memory management I sincerely doubt you have evidence to back this up. Better than Mac OS, certainly, but better than any other unix? No. Considering how the ui allocates stupid chunks of memory for any window which makes it take days to resize a window (due to its dynamic de- and re- allocation of roughly a gig per window).
It would be nice to have a setting like "if all windows are closed, end the program". Don't even hope. This is Jobs' idea of usability, and it will not change.
Then there's the whole Metadata thing Yes, that sucks. We're in agreement on something.
Every tried to cut and paste text from the Windows 2000 telnet program? Somebody decided to change all the cut and paste keys to piss of the users, I'm sure So you've skipped back to something you mentioned earlier. Yes I have tried to cut and paste from Windows 2000 telnet. Left button to select, enter to copy, right button to paste. Almost identical to linux. This is needed since console programs have a habit of interrupting when they are sent a Ctrl-C:o)
It's like running a DOS program in Windows XP. Only...it actually works. Oh, you mean that Apple have done a better job at retaining backwards compatibility than Microsoft? Is that why, when they decided to use a new processor, all programs had to be shipped in two versions ("fat binaries", and they're still in use today)? Is that also why, in their new all-powerful operating system most programs won't run unless you have the older operating system installed alongside? Don't even mention how Classic allows "almost full speed" or "running natively" until you explain why Apple ditched a well used and well understood API in order to deliberately break compatibility. If Carbon can run OS9 programs properly under OSX, why not keep the entire API consistent. This is what Microsoft has done. The DOS API still exists. The Win16 API still exists. The OS2 and posix APIs still exist. The Win32 API has been continuously updated for the last seven years without breaking backwards compatibility. Why didn't Apple do the same?
I've noticed that 3D acceleration doesn't quite work for Classic programs running under OS X If they had kept the API, this would not have been a problem.
Not only did all of my Unix programs install just fine under OS X and run like they've always done, but the OS X developers crowd have even ported many of them over just for OS X Which begs the question, why build a gui on top of Unix if it is completely incompatible with X Windows? XDarwin is a stopgap solution. Any BSD program or one which uses configure correcly should work on Mac OSX, if it weren't for deliberately introduced incompatibilities.
I don't have to worry "can I get hardware X to work?" I never have to hear "oh, just recompile your kernel, or edit the configure script before you compile". And why didn't you actually ever follow that advice?
If there was a way to edit this key combination (or if someone could tell me how to change those keys), I'd be a little happier Sorry again. Jobs' idea of usability.
What do I fucking have to kill to get someone to make an OS X program that will let me mount some Novell volumes on my machine here? Steve Jobs, I think...
ATI - personally, I think your cards are the bomb. I love my ATI TV-Wonder, and I've been eyeing those 8500 All-in-Wonder DV cards. So why aren't you spreading the OS X love? You have a TV USB device for Mac, but there's no OS X drivers. And where are the All-in-Wonder cards? You'd think that was a no-brainer on the Mac. I want that screen-capturing, straight to Quicktime movie ability that I know you can give me. Now this bitching is directed at the wrong entity. ATIs hands are tied. Apple decided there would be a minimum level of hardware support, and all machines which are supported will work the same. Which means that features of more expensive cards such as the ATIs TV-out, will not be available because it is not available in lower-end machines. This is also the (stupid, stupid, stupid) reason why the nVidia cards don't do hardware T&L, of which they are more than capable (and indeed is their selling point).
I like OS X a lot, and I'm now a fully converted Mac user. It has all the power I remember in Linux, but it's easier to use, and far prettier I got so sick of the OSX gui I installed Yellow Dog so I could go back to Gnome - and yes, I can apply themes!
It has all of the editing abilities of my Windows machine, without all of the crashes. My Windows 2000 machine doesn't crash. The Windows 2000 machine I installed at work the day after starting (almost a year ago now) doesn't crash. In an office full of Macs, that (aside from my Yellow Dog box) is the only machine which doesn't crash. I guess your milage may vary, but the only reason for a Windows 2000 machine to crash is a hardware problem.
And if the other vendors can just get off their asses and realize that OS X is the future of Apple, and maybe they should be writing their drivers and apps to that system, then I wouldn't have anything to gripe about. That's what they said about copeland and pink and taligent. Adobe didn't buy into it, and so those systems never took off. It's only because Photoshop now looks crap in their deliberately crippled "Classic" mode that they are producing a Carbon version.
Where the hell am I going with this? I don't know. I just hate it when people evangelise Apple, when they should know better, or in this case, clearly don't. But who am I to argue? A clueless user who can't RTFM on RPM using an Apple? They were made for each other.
[1]clue rpm -e. Try also rpm --help or man rpm. Or even rpmdrake. [2] ever notice how the "finder" can't find anything? For that you need a completely separate app called "sherlock". Now, I ask you, is that intuitive? [3]I am in the process of porting Sorcerer (mentioned on Slashdot a couple of times) to powerpc, because quite frankly, rpm sucks.
[...]few kV of DC accelerate electrons[...]linear accelerators[...]RF fields[...]
Yes, yes, I know. But they all require a lot of power; none can be used as a power source, nor could such a source of radiation be effective in a small form factor such as a smoke detector. A small quantity of radioactive material is the only way to get ionising radiation.
In other words, smoke detectors are powered by nuclear decay in the sense that without it, the devices would not be feasible.
Apple doesn't do anything to actively stop companies from trying to compete
Tell that to Be, or any of the Mac clone makers.
Cite some examples of Apple being caught stealing the source code from other companies
I cite the example given in another reply to my original post. If you are referring to the BSD code in Win2k, then please remember that BSD is BSD licensed. Apple have done precisely the same, with the same BSD code, except they took the entire kernel, instead of a few protocol clients (ftp, finger etc)
Cite examples of Apple "embracing and extending" the work of others
Apple would never be able to. Emracing and extending is a good thing, as long as it doesn't break compatibility. Cite an example of MS breaking compatibility by doing so.
Cite any instance where Apple dragged their feet on a glaring security patch until the bad press was enough to warrant it
How about the holes they introduced into Apache?
Cite some horror stories about Apple's tech support
Have you ever had to help a Mac user get himself a clue? Apples tech support is limited and patronising.
At least Apple has actually done something that Free Software Foundation could criticize
What the fuck? Are you saying that this is a good thing? Is it also good if I commit murder, rather than another person not comminting murder, because I would have at least done something? Stupid analogy, I know, but, as they say, ask a stupid question...
In today's world, dominated by the Wicked Wizard of Redmond, the penguins and the mac heads need to hang together and understand each other
Except that Apple have their own monopoly; only their business practives are worse than those of Microsoft - the only reason their market share is so small compared to MS is the price of the hardware.
Remember, the Free Software Foundation have never imposed a boycott on Microsoft. They have on Apple.
OS X is faster, smarter, prettier, and easier to use than any version of Windows
Has he even used OSX for more than five minutes? I mean, to actually get anything done, rather than just oohing and aahing at the wibbly bits of the UI?
I won't reiterate everything I've said before, but lets just say the OSX is the reason I run Yellow Dog Linux on my computer at work.
"Faster"? Try resizing a window. Any window. That is such an omigod simple fscking thing to do in any windowing system you would expect it to happen at least within the same aeon as you began dragging the corner.
"Smarter"? The Finder is useless compared to Konqueror or Nautlius (Nautlius's icon stretching with previews is sweet). And have you ever noticed how there is no "find" option in the Finder (apart from starting a completely different app, Sherlock).
"Prettier"? Apples notion of prettier, that is. Which means transparency everywhere and NO CUSTOMISATION. There are two colour schemes - Grey or Blue. The windows are striped which hurts your eyes after twenty minutes. The animation is sooo annoying. Compare this to my KDE setup, where I have the Luna theme, so it looks like Windows XP. This actually illustrates a fundamental difference between Apple and the rest of the computing world; Apple like to dictate everything about the users environment regardless of their personal preferences, whereas any other system would be configurable.
"Easier"? Easier as in having to click the "ignore" button twice on two dialogs in completely different places on screen after inserting a CD-R before you can write to it using the app you want to use. Easier as in having to drag disc icons to the trash to eject them, rather than having a big button marked "eject" in front of the drive (how can that be 'unintuitive'?)? Easier as in having no useful keyboard navigation (finally appeared in OSX 1.1; but still not actually useful)? Easier as in having only one button on the mouse - what next, a one-button keyboard?
What would actually be far nicer is if Microsoft ported Windows to ppc hardware. The NT HAL actually makes this relatively easy. Then Microsoft would have competition with Apple for operating systems. But Apple wouldn't allow it -look what they did to Be.
And besides, Apple would never release an OS for even a wristwatch if they didn't have complete control over every single component and couldn't disallow anyone else from making that hardware. This is how Apple make their money. It is also how they keep their zealots happy.
</rant>
This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context.
The people who write dictionaries don't create the language. The people who use the language create it, and the dictionary is a record of it. How do you think the words 'aluminum' or 'color' came about? Misspellings, propagated long enough for an entire country to use that spelling.
Give a meaning to xfgdieugfdh (and maybe a pronounciation guide:o) ), and I'll happily use it.
(PS The plural of virus is virus. One virus. Two virus. Many virus. Lots of virus. An infestation of virus)
I have an algorithm which will compress any random data down to one bit. Here goes:
1: Represent the data as one big integer (this is easy, treat all the bytes in the file as one number).
2: Subtract 1 from the data.
This algorithm can be reapplied any number of times, until the data that is left is a single bit representing zero. Hell, since you know it's zero, why not get rid of it? So my algorithm can losslessly compress any data to 0k.
What do you mean you need to know how many times the algorithm was performed? How many bytes do you reckon that will take to express?
If the output weren't random, then there would be patterns in it. You could then, for example, run that through gzip and have it compress more.
The output must be the smallest possible representation of the input, which, as we all know, is truly random, or as near to as the compression algorithm can't find any patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
I have uce@ftc.gov in my .forward.
Ok, so the GNU philosphy is flamebait? Truth is flamebait? A dire warning on the consequences of OSX being successful is flamebait?
I find it frustrating every time I hear Linux users (whom I usually expect to have a clue) drool over the sickening and ugly desktop that is OSX.
But its Ok, because Darwin is free and Open Source, right? Right?
Wrong.
Apple are lying to you. Darwin is not free as in freedom. It is more restrictive than any other license, effectively asking you to accept that it covers running code, not just redistribution. Then there's the lack of privacy - any modifications have to be disclosed to a single, monopolistic party - Apple.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html. The FSF boycotted Apple, remember. Apple are not the saviour of the desktop, they are not a wonderful company, and they are not embracing freedom. Apple are just as evil, monopolistic and money-hungry as the rest of them.
so where's my fix? :o)
Right in front of you. It's called the Enter key
Seriously, though, you can use the entire Windows UI without touching the mouse (which is useful when my hamster's batteries die). Learn to love the keyboard.
But which one is worse?
That's pretty much my theory. Imagine the entire universe in one moment were a little box. Now imagine that there is one of each of these little boxes for every moment ever, arranged in line a to make a string.
That string is time.
Now imagine you have a bunch of those timelines, side by side - you have every possible combination of reality ever.
Now quantum mechanics gets involved. For every possible action, there are two outcomes - it either happened or it didn't. Imagine that each of these outcomes splits a time string into two - each fork is a reality that could have happened.
When you throw in time travel, some interesting things happen. When you go back to a point in the past, the timeline splits - one string has you arriving at that point in time; the other you didn't, and reality can continue on it's merry way until the event where you decide to go back in time. Paradoxes are impossible, you're just making more possible realities. You can't kill your grandfather, but you can make a new reality where he is dead.
Sliding is even more fun. When you switch lanes, and go to one of these alternate universes, you create a fork in that timeline. Now if, as on "Sliders", the destination is quantumly random, there are an infinite number of possible universes you can end up in. This means that the timelines are split inifinitely, you end up one alternate of every alternate reality. For every universe, there is a fork where you arrived and another where you didn't.
It is possible to get home. Indeed, you will get home every single time you do slide. The problem is getting to experience the being home. Since there are two copies of your life (one that got there by chance and one that didn't) in every reality, the more you slide, the more copies of yourself can appear in other realities.
Now let's try a mindfuck.
Imagine a line. Imagine a line a right angles to that line. Fine, so you have a cross. Now imagine another line at right angles to both of those. You now have a three dimensional cross. Now imagine a line at right angles to those three lines.
Therein lies the mindfuck. The human mind can't deal with more than 3D but we'll have to make do.
Back to three dimensions, imagine that one of them is time. So you have a 2D plane, and you can see time-slices within them. Think about the string bundle again for a bit, and look at the way they're all line next to each other. They need a dimension for that. Make that the third dimension on your cross. So you can see again a 2D plane, but this time you're seeing cross-sections of alternate realities - snapshots of the same time, but in a different reality.
So now we have five dimensions. The basic ones xyz that everyone knows about, t for time, and a fifth, p for probability. Try for a moment to imagine a five dimensional intersection. Ouch.
If you accept that any of these dimensions are infinite, you must accept that they all are. It's easy to see that time is forever because it's impossible to be anything before or after time. So the probability dimension is infinite. Which means that the impossible will happen somewhere far out on that dimension. Somewhere out there, George Bush will declare peace and Britney Spears will learn to sing.
Check out my thoughts on this, although that page is probably not as coherent as this post.
Who can take over?
ME!
Polymorphism is the ability to treat any subclasses as if they were the type of a superclass.
eg
BaseClass[] baseClass = new BaseClass[2];
baseClass[0] = new BaseClass();
baseClass[1] = new SubClass();
for (int i = 0; i < baseClass.length(); i ++){
System.out.println(baseClass[i].toString());
}
Yeah, I wrote Tetris (and a few others) in JavaScript (for DOM level 1 browsers - Mozilla or IE5 will work) a while back. I also wrote Tetris in C++ (source is here; works under Wine) when I was learning DirectX. The blocks.js became blocks.h with a few search and replaces.
:o)
So Tetris is kindof my "Hello World" when learning a new language. I don't think I'll try to write it in sed though.
How old is this?
/. several times.
Some of those articles go back to 98, and yes it's been on
Microsoft are going to use an SQL-based filesystem, and only offer hierarchical (old skool) file access though an NTFS abstraction layer. Essentially, there will be a copy of MS-SQL server bundled with the OS, which will always be faster than any SQL database running on top of the OS, which is really going to piss off Oracle.
This feature was originally planned of Blackcombe, but it was decided that another iteration was needed before then. Hence Longhorn.
And I didn't even bother to read the article.
1) I forgot about the Get Info window. But it's still looks bad when changing the name of a file will change it's appearance and there is no obvious way to get it back.
2) I know, it is nitpicking. It's just that I really like the way explorer does this (Windows 2000 and onwards, excluding that stupid animated dog from XP). Having file finding both by folder views and by search criteria neatly integrated just seems Right.
oh boy oh boy oh boy.
/boot? The power of linux lies in the fact that you can whether or not you have to.
:o)
Newsflash : self proclaimed "Open Source junkie" too stupid to uninstall an rpm[1] loves Mac OS.
Lets try to deconstruct this article in order.
I played text based games (most of them were never finished as I couldn't get the game to accept commands like "put egg in lake" or "drop egg in lake" or "slam egg into the damn lake you stupid computer!"
Try removing the preposition - drop egg should work if it's possible to do so.
And close your brackets.
Whenever I clicked on Wordperfect, the same DOS program filled the entire screen
In 386 enhanced mode, you can run DOS in a window.
I'm personally convinced that Microsoft never ported DirectX 5.0 to NT 4.0 just to get people to upgrade to Windows 2000
It requires a new kernel and drivers for all hardware. That's why.
the idea of recompiling a kernel is a terrifying idea to me
What's so terrifying about make menuconfig && make bzImage && cp arch/i386/bzImage
there were still things that just didn't work right. Like the Java plug in. I tried to install that so many times, and it just wouldn't work
And yet so many people can. Is this not a case of not RTFMing? I even have the java plugin on my ppc mozilla[3] even though Sun only produce an i386 version.
But the worst, the truly worst part, was cut 'n paste
Left click to select, middle button to paste. What's bad about that? It even works on a tty or a virtual console. And it's consistent throughout the entire system.
Linux was a lot like a girl named Allison that I used to date. She was a hot redhead with large, firm breasts in most of my honors classes. She was smart, she was cute - and she was totally crazy. I could only deal with her strange behavior for so long, no matter how much I loved the rest of her.
I'm really not qualified to say anything about this...
of its inability to handle virtual memory
Mac OS does handle virtual memory. It just makes it possible to disable it. (Now that is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard).
even smarter than what I was used to in the Linux command line
The default shell in Mac OSX is tcsh, which has a different command completion behavior than bash by default. The behaviour you see in tcsh can easily be set in bash, and zsh does so by default too. It is not, however, smarter.
Example : you have both a directory and a file in your current working directory, named so that the file comes before the directory (eg after unpacking somefile.tar.gz you have a directory called somefile). To change to the directory you try cd some* to go into the directory. tcsh will find the file first, then complain, whereas bash will do the right thing.
Both bash and tcsh are available for linux, so the comparison is irrelevant anyway.
Right upon taking it out of the box, it just seemed so...pretty
This is why most people buy Macs. Mostly people (like my boss) who think that case is actually relevant to the design of the system.
I've never understood the big deal about "anti-aliasing"
And yet you seem qualified to write an objective comparison of it? Sure some of default linux fonts have terrible hinting, but get a copy of gdkpixbuf and the windows truetype fonts and you're laughing. Have you seen what cleartype looks like? Sub-pixel rendering is sweet. By comparison OSX just looks... blurry.
Running programs have a small black triangle underneath them, so it's easy to tell what's running and what's not
The key word here is "small". It's not easy to tell what's running and what's not. Both long time Mac users and new converts have a lot of pet hates about the Dock. I won't reiterate them here.
When I first went to install Microsoft Office X, there was something that surprised me about the installation procedure. Basically, it was "copy this folder into your Applications directory". Or Omniweb, a competing web browser. It's just one file
ls -l shows it as a directory called somefile.app. So which is it? That's the problem - the gui and prompt are inconsistent; changing any files name to somefile.app will make it always appear as application (with the file extension hidden) and it can't be fixed from the finder[2]. So installation is easy. For some programs. Others have their own installers, which variously put random files anywhere (eg Lightware) to nuking other partitions (iTunes 2) to crashing simply because you've moved an older version of the app.
And there's no uninstallation routine. No way to cleanly get rid of all files, system resources and preferences.
Compare this to linux. cast appname will install appname and all required dependencies from source, while dispel appname will remove it and all applications which depend on it.[3]
Compare also to Windows. msiexec appname.msi will install appname, repeated invocations will give options to modify repair or remove appname. Or you can get the same effect by clicking on appname.msi.
I've never figured out how to uninstall a RPM file
See again note [1]. Please now tell me how to uninstall apache from Mac OSX, because I don't need a web server. What do you mean I can't?
No messages about "I can't shut down the program" like you'd see in Windows
You mean "Unable to terminate process. Access denied"? This is no different from trying to kill another users process in any unix. You can't kill other peoples processes. This is natural. This is right.
Copying programs is much like Windows - select a file, and either drag it to another directory, or select Edit->Copy
Copying files by Edit/Copy didn't exist until Mac OSX. Maybe because they realised how useless the finder[2] was.
Since OS X does a great job with memory management
I sincerely doubt you have evidence to back this up. Better than Mac OS, certainly, but better than any other unix? No. Considering how the ui allocates stupid chunks of memory for any window which makes it take days to resize a window (due to its dynamic de- and re- allocation of roughly a gig per window).
It would be nice to have a setting like "if all windows are closed, end the program".
Don't even hope. This is Jobs' idea of usability, and it will not change.
Then there's the whole Metadata thing
Yes, that sucks. We're in agreement on something.
Every tried to cut and paste text from the Windows 2000 telnet program? Somebody decided to change all the cut and paste keys to piss of the users, I'm sure
So you've skipped back to something you mentioned earlier. Yes I have tried to cut and paste from Windows 2000 telnet. Left button to select, enter to copy, right button to paste. Almost identical to linux. This is needed since console programs have a habit of interrupting when they are sent a Ctrl-C
It's like running a DOS program in Windows XP. Only...it actually works.
Oh, you mean that Apple have done a better job at retaining backwards compatibility than Microsoft? Is that why, when they decided to use a new processor, all programs had to be shipped in two versions ("fat binaries", and they're still in use today)? Is that also why, in their new all-powerful operating system most programs won't run unless you have the older operating system installed alongside? Don't even mention how Classic allows "almost full speed" or "running natively" until you explain why Apple ditched a well used and well understood API in order to deliberately break compatibility. If Carbon can run OS9 programs properly under OSX, why not keep the entire API consistent. This is what Microsoft has done. The DOS API still exists. The Win16 API still exists. The OS2 and posix APIs still exist. The Win32 API has been continuously updated for the last seven years without breaking backwards compatibility. Why didn't Apple do the same?
I've noticed that 3D acceleration doesn't quite work for Classic programs running under OS X
If they had kept the API, this would not have been a problem.
Not only did all of my Unix programs install just fine under OS X and run like they've always done, but the OS X developers crowd have even ported many of them over just for OS X
Which begs the question, why build a gui on top of Unix if it is completely incompatible with X Windows? XDarwin is a stopgap solution. Any BSD program or one which uses configure correcly should work on Mac OSX, if it weren't for deliberately introduced incompatibilities.
I don't have to worry "can I get hardware X to work?" I never have to hear "oh, just recompile your kernel, or edit the configure script before you compile".
And why didn't you actually ever follow that advice?
If there was a way to edit this key combination (or if someone could tell me how to change those keys), I'd be a little happier
Sorry again. Jobs' idea of usability.
What do I fucking have to kill to get someone to make an OS X program that will let me mount some Novell volumes on my machine here?
Steve Jobs, I think...
ATI - personally, I think your cards are the bomb. I love my ATI TV-Wonder, and I've been eyeing those 8500 All-in-Wonder DV cards. So why aren't you spreading the OS X love? You have a TV USB device for Mac, but there's no OS X drivers. And where are the All-in-Wonder cards? You'd think that was a no-brainer on the Mac. I want that screen-capturing, straight to Quicktime movie ability that I know you can give me.
Now this bitching is directed at the wrong entity. ATIs hands are tied. Apple decided there would be a minimum level of hardware support, and all machines which are supported will work the same. Which means that features of more expensive cards such as the ATIs TV-out, will not be available because it is not available in lower-end machines. This is also the (stupid, stupid, stupid) reason why the nVidia cards don't do hardware T&L, of which they are more than capable (and indeed is their selling point).
I like OS X a lot, and I'm now a fully converted Mac user. It has all the power I remember in Linux, but it's easier to use, and far prettier
I got so sick of the OSX gui I installed Yellow Dog so I could go back to Gnome - and yes, I can apply themes!
It has all of the editing abilities of my Windows machine, without all of the crashes.
My Windows 2000 machine doesn't crash. The Windows 2000 machine I installed at work the day after starting (almost a year ago now) doesn't crash. In an office full of Macs, that (aside from my Yellow Dog box) is the only machine which doesn't crash. I guess your milage may vary, but the only reason for a Windows 2000 machine to crash is a hardware problem.
And if the other vendors can just get off their asses and realize that OS X is the future of Apple, and maybe they should be writing their drivers and apps to that system, then I wouldn't have anything to gripe about.
That's what they said about copeland and pink and taligent. Adobe didn't buy into it, and so those systems never took off. It's only because Photoshop now looks crap in their deliberately crippled "Classic" mode that they are producing a Carbon version.
Where the hell am I going with this? I don't know. I just hate it when people evangelise Apple, when they should know better, or in this case, clearly don't. But who am I to argue? A clueless user who can't RTFM on RPM using an Apple? They were made for each other.
[1]clue rpm -e. Try also rpm --help or man rpm. Or even rpmdrake.
[2] ever notice how the "finder" can't find anything? For that you need a completely separate app called "sherlock". Now, I ask you, is that intuitive?
[3]I am in the process of porting Sorcerer (mentioned on Slashdot a couple of times) to powerpc, because quite frankly, rpm sucks.
[...]few kV of DC accelerate electrons[...]linear accelerators[...]RF fields[...]
Yes, yes, I know. But they all require a lot of power; none can be used as a power source, nor could such a source of radiation be effective in a small form factor such as a smoke detector. A small quantity of radioactive material is the only way to get ionising radiation.
In other words, smoke detectors are powered by nuclear decay in the sense that without it, the devices would not be feasible.
aren't powered by nuclear decay. The americium is only a source of ionizing radiation
So how do you get ionising radiation without nuclear decay? Please tell us. It would be a major breakthrough in nuclear physics...
Another acronym from little red one :
Convict Army, Nearly All Retarted, Inbred Evil Sheepshaggers.
Canaries - Lister thought it was a singing group.
Yet another Usenet-inspired Wintroll
Usenet sucks.
Apple doesn't do anything to actively stop companies from trying to compete
Tell that to Be, or any of the Mac clone makers.
Cite some examples of Apple being caught stealing the source code from other companies
I cite the example given in another reply to my original post. If you are referring to the BSD code in Win2k, then please remember that BSD is BSD licensed. Apple have done precisely the same, with the same BSD code, except they took the entire kernel, instead of a few protocol clients (ftp, finger etc)
Cite examples of Apple "embracing and extending" the work of others
Apple would never be able to. Emracing and extending is a good thing, as long as it doesn't break compatibility. Cite an example of MS breaking compatibility by doing so.
Cite any instance where Apple dragged their feet on a glaring security patch until the bad press was enough to warrant it
How about the holes they introduced into Apache?
Cite some horror stories about Apple's tech support
Have you ever had to help a Mac user get himself a clue? Apples tech support is limited and patronising.
At least Apple has actually done something that Free Software Foundation could criticize
What the fuck? Are you saying that this is a good thing? Is it also good if I commit murder, rather than another person not comminting murder, because I would have at least done something? Stupid analogy, I know, but, as they say, ask a stupid question...
In today's world, dominated by the Wicked Wizard of Redmond, the penguins and the mac heads need to hang together and understand each other
Except that Apple have their own monopoly; only their business practives are worse than those of Microsoft - the only reason their market share is so small compared to MS is the price of the hardware.
Remember, the Free Software Foundation have never imposed a boycott on Microsoft. They have on Apple.
OS X is faster, smarter, prettier, and easier to use than any version of Windows
Has he even used OSX for more than five minutes? I mean, to actually get anything done, rather than just oohing and aahing at the wibbly bits of the UI?
I won't reiterate everything I've said before, but lets just say the OSX is the reason I run Yellow Dog Linux on my computer at work.
"Faster"? Try resizing a window. Any window. That is such an omigod simple fscking thing to do in any windowing system you would expect it to happen at least within the same aeon as you began dragging the corner.
"Smarter"? The Finder is useless compared to Konqueror or Nautlius (Nautlius's icon stretching with previews is sweet). And have you ever noticed how there is no "find" option in the Finder (apart from starting a completely different app, Sherlock).
"Prettier"? Apples notion of prettier, that is. Which means transparency everywhere and NO CUSTOMISATION. There are two colour schemes - Grey or Blue. The windows are striped which hurts your eyes after twenty minutes. The animation is sooo annoying. Compare this to my KDE setup, where I have the Luna theme, so it looks like Windows XP. This actually illustrates a fundamental difference between Apple and the rest of the computing world; Apple like to dictate everything about the users environment regardless of their personal preferences, whereas any other system would be configurable.
"Easier"? Easier as in having to click the "ignore" button twice on two dialogs in completely different places on screen after inserting a CD-R before you can write to it using the app you want to use. Easier as in having to drag disc icons to the trash to eject them, rather than having a big button marked "eject" in front of the drive (how can that be 'unintuitive'?)? Easier as in having no useful keyboard navigation (finally appeared in OSX 1.1; but still not actually useful)? Easier as in having only one button on the mouse - what next, a one-button keyboard?
What would actually be far nicer is if Microsoft ported Windows to ppc hardware. The NT HAL actually makes this relatively easy. Then Microsoft would have competition with Apple for operating systems. But Apple wouldn't allow it -look what they did to Be.
And besides, Apple would never release an OS for even a wristwatch if they didn't have complete control over every single component and couldn't disallow anyone else from making that hardware. This is how Apple make their money. It is also how they keep their zealots happy.
</rant>
I already have a program for that. It's GPLd, comes with full source and can work on billions of files at a time.
It's called 'rm'. You might have heard of it.
So many people are ignoring what is quite obviusly the best source of free energy in the known universe - the past.
Think about it, there's all this stuff that's just sitting there in the past, which we could use for fuel.
But then if you mine the past, the present is degraded because the bastards in the future are doing it as well!
(This post dedicated to Douglas Adams, inventor of Past Mining)
Such as the word 'bastardized', which should have an 's'. :o)
The people who write dictionaries don't create the language. The people who use the language create it, and the dictionary is a record of it. How do you think the words 'aluminum' or 'color' came about? Misspellings, propagated long enough for an entire country to use that spelling.
Give a meaning to xfgdieugfdh (and maybe a pronounciation guide
(PS The plural of virus is virus. One virus. Two virus. Many virus. Lots of virus. An infestation of virus)
I have an algorithm which will compress any random data down to one bit. Here goes:
1: Represent the data as one big integer (this is easy, treat all the bytes in the file as one number).
2: Subtract 1 from the data.
This algorithm can be reapplied any number of times, until the data that is left is a single bit representing zero. Hell, since you know it's zero, why not get rid of it? So my algorithm can losslessly compress any data to 0k.
What do you mean you need to know how many times the algorithm was performed? How many bytes do you reckon that will take to express?
But how do you express either d or r? At least on of them must be an infinite non-recurring decimal (ie a multiple of pi).
If the output weren't random, then there would be patterns in it. You could then, for example, run that through gzip and have it compress more.
The output must be the smallest possible representation of the input, which, as we all know, is truly random, or as near to as the compression algorithm can't find any patterns.