Darwine is never coming near my machine again. I set up a drive mapping on it. It took my instruction to mean - rename home home directory to something stupid. I had a very painful couple of hours before I worked out what had happened, thinking I had lost all of my current files.
Software installation and allocation to WINE Bottles is very easy and so on, a nice experience
It does not go as far as it might to give a 'Mac-like' experience, for example running apps do not get their own dock icons - but I suppose there would be little practical value since they don't have their own screen-top menus
It uses X11 under the hood and mostly hides this. It asks you for the Apple installed disk to grab quartz-wm at install time, but Apple's actual X11 build is not used and presumably what does run runs on different ports
It avoids silly things like anti-aliasing, so that Mac users can be happy knowing that "Windows apps are ugly". Having said that, all the important stuff like font metrics is spot on.
In truth my only regrets were some crashes in Office 2003. It seemed to be unstable in the same ways that the linux version was when I last used it a couple of years ago - i.e. you will have a great experience if you stick to Office 2000, but newer stuff might come unstuck. In the end then - I hope every Mac user goes out and buys this, because at the price it is offered it is a bargain... but CodeWeavers are going to need a lot of unit sales to increase their WINE contributions.
You buy a per device license and you can then use the licenses in any ratio between the Professional Edition (which specializes in PDA management) and the OMA edition which specializes in phones. With the OMA edition - for which I developed the training class - you can establish a secure trusted connection to the handset. A 4-digit hex fingerprint is required to avoid MITM. From that point on - any action can be carried out by the central adminstrator without further user intervention, including application installation, settings, inventory, and a complete device wipe. Available applications include Blackberry and 4-5 other email solutions, Norton AV, and Pointsec flash disk encryption.
The problem is not the technology the technology is HERE. The problems are:
Persuading business to organize their handsets with the same zeal as their PCs
Selling this kind of thing through cell operators - who have a vested interest in you using your handset LESS cost effectively.
Every desk in large offices - i.e. the ones that don't need to use local contract cleaning agencies - has had a 3-compartment trash bin under the desk the whole time, for recycling. The large Finnish offices are perfect examples of energy conservation in a cold country by the correct design to naturally distribute sunlight.
I play a game in Finnish offices where if I want to carry on working after 9pm, I have to jump up and run around the office every five minutes, otherwise the lights go out to save energy.
Conservation and environmental awareness to a culture in and of itself. You don't get a genuinely high ranking like we do unless you really mean it. It certainly can and does have short term economic benefits too, maybe that is even the strategy. Who knows what motive really went in to the policy, but I guarantee you that on the ground and amongst individual Nokia people, it is a culture and one that people are happy and proud of.
Things work on a different scale in small Nokia offices. I worked out of the now defunct Peterborough, UK office a couple of years ago. They used to recycle Friday's roast dinner into Monday's curry.
I like hierarchical menus. Why couldn't writely give us Cut/Copy/Paste in a conventional Edit menu?
Now I know that I am extreme. I've had a Mac preference since the first time I used a menu based GUI in 1986. And the Mac makes menus perfect by putting them in the easily accessible top edge (where you can throw your mouse without thought) and gives you consistent commands across all applications. So I've had it better than most.
And I realize that MS rather just copied Apple for years without ever making the experience as good... menu bars in windows in the middle of the screen where precision targetting was required, and taking up duplicate screen space on every window, and having inconsistencies between applications.
Button strips on the Mac have always been shortcuts. Always always duplicates of something in the menu, so that you always can find something in a hierarchy if you didn't recognize an icon. ( PC icons have always been badly drawn. Tell me how a clipboard immediately means paste rather than... show me my clipboard.) Whereas the rot set in years ago on Windows, where buttons started appearing without menu equivalents. And I know that IE7 and Office 2007 are making things way worse. But even they allow you to turn the menus back on. So I know I have been spoiled, able to get rid of all but a bare minimum of buttons and use the real estate, able to maintain consistency, able to shoot for the easy target with my mouse, not have to actively search a 3D field of little squares for one that looked promising.
But why or why does writely have to decide that there will be no edit menu, you can't turn it back on, there will be lame icon buttons only and not even on the same place in the button strip as Windows has them, and with none of the previously mentioned mitigating factors? It is supposed to be a cross platform application. Yet it mimics if anything the unreleased Windows-specific office 2007 with which almost no real user is yet familar.
I've lost track of a famous quote from something like 1999 about the web setting back user interface design by ten years. Sadly I believe now that it will never recover.
(Note: I don't think that hierarchical menus across the top of the screen are the *only* way. It's just - well - don't mess me around with typical looking designed-by-an-engineer looking botch jobs until you can actually think of something better. I'll all for development of gestures, context sensitivity, and so on. Even simply putting everything into a right click menu would have been better because at least I wouldn't have had to go seeking out the button in a random place on the screen.)
I overstated my case. You're right about the Finder's current faults, and the MacOS 9 finder WAS better. I totally agree with the parts about never having two spatial windows of the same content. I also miss the hatched shadow effect in Classic that showed that a file or folder was open - elsewhere, if you like.
I miss pop up folders - but I am actually a fan of the dock. So a pop-up folder equivalent in the dock would suit me nicely.
You seem to have carefully considered ideas. Most of the time I find that I am arguing against dogmatic Classic people who deny the value of MacOS X innovations. The Dock is a good thing - though I preferred it in the original MacOS X public beta implementation, where there was a very clear delineation that the dock was the OS and the menubar was for the application only.
Okay, I scanned down the comments here and saw people complain about not overhauling the finder. People want...
Get rid of spatial and give me an Explorer hierarchy!
Give me more buttons!
Replace everything with Spotlight
Give me keyboard shortcuts
Am I the only person here who loves the Mac's Finder for what it is? Clean. Spatial. Mouse-driven, including Exposé gestures. I can't keep my file organized on a Windows machine. Windows' file organization makes me feel chlostrophobic and I lose stuff. With a Mac, I stay organized.
What happens when you have a profit-based medical system? Answer: natural cures are dismissed and nasty patentable drugs with serious side effects are invented instead and doctors are given one-sided information and incentive to prescribe them.
Olive garden is a perfect example of an outward mass market pretense of fancy without any actual substance. Their ingredients are cheap, their food bland, and it is made acceptable to the US mass market by having too much salt, sugar and cream. Farcically for a restaurant with that name, I failed in my quest to eat a single olive all night, presumably because this ingredient is too challenging for their average customer.
How does this relate to the PS3? Hmm. Well, it doesn't exactly. Because oddly enough the superficial dressing that is equivalent to the sugar and salt is the graphics. Which are expensive, but are the easily mass market saleable part. And the expensive ingredients and highly trained chefs of a good restaurant - the gameplay that really matters in a well designed game. But that - that is difficult to achieve.
This isn't going anywhere is it? But damn, I'm not eating in Olive garden again.
I think it depends on what you mean by "first". I don't think that the Nokia E61 is actually in the shops yet either, but it was due for release in February and looks like a far nicer device, with the same bluetooth modem/3G concept, plus WLAN, various synching and push email options and a nice screen.
Oh, and Nokia just bought Intellisync, so you can assume that Intellisync is going to provide their superior experience on these E series phones sooner rather than later.
Well... except that I have a 3G phone and use it all the time. It downgrades nicely to lower 2G stuff when I travel. It's a fantastic phone, I totally recommend it.
It's not that 3G might not happen - it's whether *some markets* will end up preferring WLAN before 3G gets a good foothold. Because either way, it's going to be IP that ties it all together before long. It all depends on good phones and good flat-rate data plans.
Case 1: [canterbury:~] gjh% telnet forgreatergood.org 80
Trying 64.202.167.129...
Connected to forgreatergood.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0
Location:/?ABCDEFGH
Connection closed by foreign host.
Case 2: [canterbury:~] gjh% telnet forgreatergood.org 80
Trying 64.202.167.129...
Connected to forgreatergood.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: forgreatergood.org
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 01:15:53 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_pointer/0.8 PHP/4.4.1
X-Redirected-By: mod_pointer - http://stderr.net/mod_pointer/
Location: http://www.wavepulse.net/forgreatergood
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
....(message text)
The only difference was that with Case 2, I pasted in the request lines atomically, whereas in Case 1, I typed it line by line.
This is probably down to a brain dead content-switching device looking packet by packet instead of reassembling the stream. It is broken.
The lack of IPv6 on consumer routers is the single greatest hurdle to wider IPv6 adoption.
Imagine for a moment if
99% of new PCs run Windows XP - which they do
IPv6 was enabled - which takes one command, but is not the case by default
over 50% of new personal NAT firewalls run 6to4 to give IPv6 LAN emulation behind your single legal IPv4 address - which is developed by the community for the wrt54g
Suddenly all machines behind all of those users have globally unique IPv6 addresses. The easy P2P access that is suddenly available would revolutionize the Internet and light a fire under IPv6. Sadly there is no immediate profit for the NAT/firewall/router vendors in it, and this firmware change represents a sad step in the wrong direction such that - even if a killer app came out for IPv6 that made this desirable - the possibilty of providing an easy IPv6 upgrade for the average users' NAT frouters is now dissolving.
In the rest of the civilized world, receiving an SMS costs you nothing either. It amazes me that that US operators can get away with squeezing the customer for money to receive unsolicited SMS messages.
I have never found myself out of range of GSM anywhere other than Japan (CDMA/WCDMA only) in the last few years.
I would recommend something like a Nokia 9500. Importantly, get a foreign SIM that will roam across multiple US operators. You will always get a signal from one of them. Bingo - ssh, vnc, web browsing, sms, mms and IM over gsm, gprs and WLAN all in one pocket device.
Seriously - do you really need satellite? Because you are going to have to carry a bigger battery, a laptop (because the devices themselves are less capable) and a car mounted aerial.
Nokia's biggest mistake in the US market was apparently to stand for so long by its belief that flip-phones are less usable, break more easily, can't show caller info as effectively and so on.
Oh gee though - who would have reckoned on the US consumer wanting to look like someone out of Star Trek?
Truly, Nokia has the usability advantage. But Finland is a long way from California.
Some of the design advantage Apple has is from being a minority for so long. It makes Apple cool. Nokia is far away the market leader outside the US and Japan, so it doesn't get minority cachet. But the fact that Motorola has ended up with the 'cool' factor in the US is laughable. Compare it to MP3 players... it reminds you a lot more of the Zen than the iPod.
It was idiotic even trying to launch this thing in the USA. Carriers have a strange-hold over this market. Nokia has a range over over 100 handsets - you can buy about 6 of these on US carrier contracts, not including decent phones with WLAN and Bluetooth.
I cannot understand why Apple is sodding around with Motorola on this. They should have partnered with Nokia.
As an aside, Apple should also partner with Shazam. The best thing that an iPod/phone combo could do is recognize music from an online database and buy it for you.
Powerpoint compatibility is diabolical, because it's native tables and graphics are rubbish, so it constantly embeds foreign application documents on the Windows side that cannot be displayed on the Mac. In the other direction, God forbid you actually paste a screenshot in, because it will be a compressed TIFF, and when that gets back to Powerpoint for Windows it will not only fail to display it, but will actively hard-replace it with a graphic of a broken red X.
Office v.X on the Mac cannot do html round-tripping. So for anyone who prefers to store files as html like I do (for easier style sheet editing - die wysiwig die - and for post processing and export), you are screwed. The html format is not interoperable between the two either, information is lost here as well.
If there's one thing that Virgin does well, it is actually honesty.
Witness Virgin UK's mobile phone SIM pack. Take any GSM phone. They will give you tips (or they did when I did it) on unlocking the phone from your previous operator. Insert the new SIM.
You can set up regular debit card payment if you want international calls - or you can pay as you go.
No monthly charge
Cheap calls
No contract, however you pay
No down payment at all, even to join.
Bring your number at no charge.
See all your billing online, however you pay.
Never pay for incoming calls.
But perhaps more importantly - they tell you all of this in plain English.
I find it sort of painful to see my two favorite benevolent companies at odds like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Darwine is never coming near my machine again. I set up a drive mapping on it. It took my instruction to mean - rename home home directory to something stupid. I had a very painful couple of hours before I worked out what had happened, thinking I had lost all of my current files.
Well, for a start, MacOS native PowerPoint is unusable round-tripping any advanced features to the Windows version.
It's very nicely put together. Some thoughts...
In truth my only regrets were some crashes in Office 2003. It seemed to be unstable in the same ways that the linux version was when I last used it a couple of years ago - i.e. you will have a great experience if you stick to Office 2000, but newer stuff might come unstuck. In the end then - I hope every Mac user goes out and buys this, because at the price it is offered it is a bargain... but CodeWeavers are going to need a lot of unit sales to increase their WINE contributions.
The industry is already aware of the problem and has solved it.... the answer is:
Nokia/IntelliSync Device Manager OMA
You buy a per device license and you can then use the licenses in any ratio between the Professional Edition (which specializes in PDA management) and the OMA edition which specializes in phones. With the OMA edition - for which I developed the training class - you can establish a secure trusted connection to the handset. A 4-digit hex fingerprint is required to avoid MITM. From that point on - any action can be carried out by the central adminstrator without further user intervention, including application installation, settings, inventory, and a complete device wipe. Available applications include Blackberry and 4-5 other email solutions, Norton AV, and Pointsec flash disk encryption.
The problem is not the technology the technology is HERE. The problems are:
Well, thing is, the Finns don't stay late. If they need to work harder, they turn up at 5 in the morning. So it's not calibrated for the likes of me :)
I have worked for Nokia since 1999.
. html
Every desk in large offices - i.e. the ones that don't need to use local contract cleaning agencies - has had a 3-compartment trash bin under the desk the whole time, for recycling. The large Finnish offices are perfect examples of energy conservation in a cold country by the correct design to naturally distribute sunlight.
I play a game in Finnish offices where if I want to carry on working after 9pm, I have to jump up and run around the office every five minutes, otherwise the lights go out to save energy.
Conservation and environmental awareness to a culture in and of itself. You don't get a genuinely high ranking like we do unless you really mean it. It certainly can and does have short term economic benefits too, maybe that is even the strategy. Who knows what motive really went in to the policy, but I guarantee you that on the ground and amongst individual Nokia people, it is a culture and one that people are happy and proud of.
Things work on a different scale in small Nokia offices. I worked out of the now defunct Peterborough, UK office a couple of years ago. They used to recycle Friday's roast dinner into Monday's curry.
Obviously I am not an official voice of Nokia. Just a happy employee currently working on http://www.nokiaforbusiness.com/americas/firewall
I like hierarchical menus. Why couldn't writely give us Cut/Copy/Paste in a conventional Edit menu?
Now I know that I am extreme. I've had a Mac preference since the first time I used a menu based GUI in 1986. And the Mac makes menus perfect by putting them in the easily accessible top edge (where you can throw your mouse without thought) and gives you consistent commands across all applications. So I've had it better than most.
And I realize that MS rather just copied Apple for years without ever making the experience as good... menu bars in windows in the middle of the screen where precision targetting was required, and taking up duplicate screen space on every window, and having inconsistencies between applications.
Button strips on the Mac have always been shortcuts. Always always duplicates of something in the menu, so that you always can find something in a hierarchy if you didn't recognize an icon. ( PC icons have always been badly drawn. Tell me how a clipboard immediately means paste rather than... show me my clipboard.) Whereas the rot set in years ago on Windows, where buttons started appearing without menu equivalents. And I know that IE7 and Office 2007 are making things way worse. But even they allow you to turn the menus back on. So I know I have been spoiled, able to get rid of all but a bare minimum of buttons and use the real estate, able to maintain consistency, able to shoot for the easy target with my mouse, not have to actively search a 3D field of little squares for one that looked promising.
But why or why does writely have to decide that there will be no edit menu, you can't turn it back on, there will be lame icon buttons only and not even on the same place in the button strip as Windows has them, and with none of the previously mentioned mitigating factors? It is supposed to be a cross platform application. Yet it mimics if anything the unreleased Windows-specific office 2007 with which almost no real user is yet familar.
I've lost track of a famous quote from something like 1999 about the web setting back user interface design by ten years. Sadly I believe now that it will never recover.
(Note: I don't think that hierarchical menus across the top of the screen are the *only* way. It's just - well - don't mess me around with typical looking designed-by-an-engineer looking botch jobs until you can actually think of something better. I'll all for development of gestures, context sensitivity, and so on. Even simply putting everything into a right click menu would have been better because at least I wouldn't have had to go seeking out the button in a random place on the screen.)
SLS!! "A soft landing from a DOS bail-out!"
I never was so comfortable with the new fangled Slackware after SLS.
:-)
I overstated my case. You're right about the Finder's current faults, and the MacOS 9 finder WAS better. I totally agree with the parts about never having two spatial windows of the same content. I also miss the hatched shadow effect in Classic that showed that a file or folder was open - elsewhere, if you like.
I miss pop up folders - but I am actually a fan of the dock. So a pop-up folder equivalent in the dock would suit me nicely.
You seem to have carefully considered ideas. Most of the time I find that I am arguing against dogmatic Classic people who deny the value of MacOS X innovations. The Dock is a good thing - though I preferred it in the original MacOS X public beta implementation, where there was a very clear delineation that the dock was the OS and the menubar was for the application only.
Okay, I scanned down the comments here and saw people complain about not overhauling the finder. People want...
Am I the only person here who loves the Mac's Finder for what it is? Clean. Spatial. Mouse-driven, including Exposé gestures. I can't keep my file organized on a Windows machine. Windows' file organization makes me feel chlostrophobic and I lose stuff. With a Mac, I stay organized.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What happens when you have a profit-based medical system? Answer: natural cures are dismissed and nasty patentable drugs with serious side effects are invented instead and doctors are given one-sided information and incentive to prescribe them.
http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/hth/tea_tree.asp
Tea tree oil turns out to be effective against MRSA. No new cure is needed.
Olive garden is a perfect example of an outward mass market pretense of fancy without any actual substance. Their ingredients are cheap, their food bland, and it is made acceptable to the US mass market by having too much salt, sugar and cream. Farcically for a restaurant with that name, I failed in my quest to eat a single olive all night, presumably because this ingredient is too challenging for their average customer.
How does this relate to the PS3? Hmm. Well, it doesn't exactly. Because oddly enough the superficial dressing that is equivalent to the sugar and salt is the graphics. Which are expensive, but are the easily mass market saleable part. And the expensive ingredients and highly trained chefs of a good restaurant - the gameplay that really matters in a well designed game. But that - that is difficult to achieve.
This isn't going anywhere is it? But damn, I'm not eating in Olive garden again.
I think it depends on what you mean by "first". I don't think that the Nokia E61 is actually in the shops yet either, but it was due for release in February and looks like a far nicer device, with the same bluetooth modem/3G concept, plus WLAN, various synching and push email options and a nice screen. Oh, and Nokia just bought Intellisync, so you can assume that Intellisync is going to provide their superior experience on these E series phones sooner rather than later.
Well... except that I have a 3G phone and use it all the time. It downgrades nicely to lower 2G stuff when I travel. It's a fantastic phone, I totally recommend it.
It's not that 3G might not happen - it's whether *some markets* will end up preferring WLAN before 3G gets a good foothold. Because either way, it's going to be IP that ties it all together before long. It all depends on good phones and good flat-rate data plans.
Case 1: /?ABCDEFGH
[canterbury:~] gjh% telnet forgreatergood.org 80
Trying 64.202.167.129...
Connected to forgreatergood.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0
Location:
Connection closed by foreign host.
Case 2:
....(message text)
[canterbury:~] gjh% telnet forgreatergood.org 80
Trying 64.202.167.129...
Connected to forgreatergood.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: forgreatergood.org
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 01:15:53 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_pointer/0.8 PHP/4.4.1
X-Redirected-By: mod_pointer - http://stderr.net/mod_pointer/
Location: http://www.wavepulse.net/forgreatergood
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
The only difference was that with Case 2, I pasted in the request lines atomically, whereas in Case 1, I typed it line by line.
This is probably down to a brain dead content-switching device looking packet by packet instead of reassembling the stream. It is broken.
Greg
The ACLU also have a tendency to screw things up, and have been accused of malice a lot longer than the EFF and with more evidence.
/ 301105aclushysters.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2005
The lack of IPv6 on consumer routers is the single greatest hurdle to wider IPv6 adoption.
Imagine for a moment if
Suddenly all machines behind all of those users have globally unique IPv6 addresses. The easy P2P access that is suddenly available would revolutionize the Internet and light a fire under IPv6. Sadly there is no immediate profit for the NAT/firewall/router vendors in it, and this firmware change represents a sad step in the wrong direction such that - even if a killer app came out for IPv6 that made this desirable - the possibilty of providing an easy IPv6 upgrade for the average users' NAT frouters is now dissolving.
In the rest of the civilized world, receiving an SMS costs you nothing either. It amazes me that that US operators can get away with squeezing the customer for money to receive unsolicited SMS messages.
I have never found myself out of range of GSM anywhere other than Japan (CDMA/WCDMA only) in the last few years.
I would recommend something like a Nokia 9500. Importantly, get a foreign SIM that will roam across multiple US operators. You will always get a signal from one of them. Bingo - ssh, vnc, web browsing, sms, mms and IM over gsm, gprs and WLAN all in one pocket device.
Seriously - do you really need satellite? Because you are going to have to carry a bigger battery, a laptop (because the devices themselves are less capable) and a car mounted aerial.
Nicely put.
Nokia's biggest mistake in the US market was apparently to stand for so long by its belief that flip-phones are less usable, break more easily, can't show caller info as effectively and so on.
Oh gee though - who would have reckoned on the US consumer wanting to look like someone out of Star Trek?
Truly, Nokia has the usability advantage. But Finland is a long way from California.
Some of the design advantage Apple has is from being a minority for so long. It makes Apple cool. Nokia is far away the market leader outside the US and Japan, so it doesn't get minority cachet. But the fact that Motorola has ended up with the 'cool' factor in the US is laughable. Compare it to MP3 players... it reminds you a lot more of the Zen than the iPod.
It was idiotic even trying to launch this thing in the USA. Carriers have a strange-hold over this market. Nokia has a range over over 100 handsets - you can buy about 6 of these on US carrier contracts, not including decent phones with WLAN and Bluetooth.
I cannot understand why Apple is sodding around with Motorola on this. They should have partnered with Nokia.
As an aside, Apple should also partner with Shazam. The best thing that an iPod/phone combo could do is recognize music from an online database and buy it for you.
Powerpoint compatibility is diabolical, because it's native tables and graphics are rubbish, so it constantly embeds foreign application documents on the Windows side that cannot be displayed on the Mac. In the other direction, God forbid you actually paste a screenshot in, because it will be a compressed TIFF, and when that gets back to Powerpoint for Windows it will not only fail to display it, but will actively hard-replace it with a graphic of a broken red X.
Office v.X on the Mac cannot do html round-tripping. So for anyone who prefers to store files as html like I do (for easier style sheet editing - die wysiwig die - and for post processing and export), you are screwed. The html format is not interoperable between the two either, information is lost here as well.
Oddly enough, it really would stick it to those execs.
:-)
I believe that the deal that movie theatres get goes something like this:
The studio gets almost all the revenue for the first week of release. After that it tails off, and theatres start to get more of the revenue.
So - support your local flea pit and watch movies late
Inefficient in terms of what?
Peak Oil is defined as the point at which oil demand continues to go up but supply turns down. It will cause massive price rises.
It makes sense to do the stuff that cab be done without jet aircraft... without jet aircraft.
If there's one thing that Virgin does well, it is actually honesty.
Witness Virgin UK's mobile phone SIM pack. Take any GSM phone. They will give you tips (or they did when I did it) on unlocking the phone from your previous operator. Insert the new SIM.
You can set up regular debit card payment if you want international calls - or you can pay as you go.
But perhaps more importantly - they tell you all of this in plain English.
I find it sort of painful to see my two favorite benevolent companies at odds like this.