Some people simply don't get the point. It is very easy to create anti-aliased fonts but the truth is that they don't look that good. They're simply too blurred and 10 and 12pt fonts simply look like crap (as this screenshot attests to that).
I guess that depends entirely on what platform you're using. I can speak from my own experience that the anti-alias effect offered by Apple in the Mac OS is exquisitely good. Anti-aliasing is not simply blurring (i.e. straight lines when anti-aliased correctly should show less signs of anti-aliasing that curves. Inner parts of curves should anti-alias differently than the outer parts.) When done properly, it makes on-screen text far more legible. I hate to work on any of my Macs at home or work without it now.
The reason why Microsoft's fonts look so good is because they are hinted and hand-tuned by humans. This is a painstakingly long process but it produces the best looking fonts.
That may be true of MS. I'd believe it. I have a Windows PC at work and a lot of times, the anti-aliasing effect seems really clunky and poorly done (yeah, I know... hard to believe MS would do something half-assed!) That becomes more evident when I'm viewing a non-MS font or looking at a font not typically used. However, once again, the anti-aliasing on the Mac is done in such a way that I have yet to see a font that looks bad.
I'm not trying to sound like a typical Mac user, hyping up my OS of choice. I'm just saying that I wouldn't write off the value of anti-aliasing on-screen text until you've seen it done properly. It really is easier on your eyes when it's done just right.
'The implications are very serious for an increasingly violent society and these students will be doing more and more bad things if they are playing games and not doing other things like reading aloud or learning arithmetic.'
What's with this either/or stance? This makes me extremely suspicious of this "research" and this guy's apparently hastily made conclusions. What about kids who play video games and read and learn arithmetic? I teach my child both and let her play games and I don't observe any negative effects.
And what about games that teach those skills? My 5-year-old daughter is doing reading and arithmetic skills two years ahead of where she should be at this time, and it's partly due to the CD-ROM games we have that teach those in a game setting ("Arthur's Reading Race", "Math Blaster", etc.)
It's interesting to me that the people I know who were gamers in their teen years (including myself) are generally the people who are most capable of self-control. There is also, in my experience, a marked lack of violent behavior in those same people, even those who play very violent games--again including myself. Sure, that's anecdotal, but if this research were correct, then should that not be the case in anyone's experience? I bet I'm not alone in this either.
Something about this "research" strikes me as screwy, if not intentionally skewed.
but I dislike how some linux users seem to not understand how any intelligent person could ever prefer the mac os.
It's called arrogance.
I love Slashdot, but I could do with a little less of the standard daily-dose of Linux user superiority. There are many things Linux doesn't do better. The best software is not always the free stuff and not all computer users are admins or developers. Imagine that!
How much genius does it takes to see that multi-buttoned mice with mousewheels are a boon to productivity?
And how much of a genius does it take to realize that Apple has a committed user base who are accustomed to the single-button mouse? There are ample third-party mouses to choose from. Apple is perfectly correct in standing their ground on this. Those who prefer one-button mouse can get what they want; likewise for people wanting a multi-button mouse. What would you say to someone wanting to use Windows and a one-button mouse? You can't. Mac OS is the only OS offering the choice. There are plenty of situations where one button is preferable (with young children for example.) If Apple started shipping Macs with 2-button mouses, they would remove that ability for their customer to choose. It's got nothing to do with the "superiority" of one over the other which is a silly topic. I've used both. Neither improved my productivity. The only people running their mouths off about that are those who have such a strong case of tunnel-vision that they are incapable of seeing any way of doing things but their own--and that's the case on both sides of the argument.
Oh, man, and don't get me started on that stupid hockey-puck mouse that Steve just refused to discontinue, no matter how many people internal to Apple complained about it.
NEWSFLASH: Apple discontinued the hockey-puck mouse ages ago. It was an interesting experiment, and I know plenty of people who love them so it's not a total failure. I used one for two years and didn't have a complaint. Despite their odd look, they were quite comfortable and easy to use. Strange looking, but good design. Obviously some people can't get around that.
Gil Amelio, the dumbass that almost finished destroying the company. He's like that idiot in every Mafia movie, than talks too much, thinks he knows too much, fucks up a lot, then he gets whacked.
Ahh... something we agree on.:^)
--Rick
Re:Get Thee Behind Me Satan
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 1
You must have missed that movie if you think Linda Blair was beautiful.
Well, she's okay, but she's no G4!;^)
OTOH, you could have some really sick fetishes which we don't want to know about
Trust me, you don't want to know.
--Rick
Get Thee Behind Me Satan
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 1
Reminds me of The Exorcist. Beautiful exterior -- evil inside.
I'll stop complaining about their hardware as soon as they stop charging $350 to UPGRADE from a GeForce2mx to a GeForce3 and selling 256 MB sticks of memory for $400. [...]charging for them as if they engineered them in their own R&D department.
I think it's fairly clear that Apple purchases and resells higher quality parts than other box makers. You can point out that one vendor has some given type of RAM or a hard drive for one price while Apple sells it for a few bucks more, but that's ignoring the likely case that Apple is getting better quality hardware, somehow. I wouldn't presume to know the details, but reality seems to line up with that assumption.
I hear PC user hardware horror stories all the time. Fried hard drive. Dead RAM. Motherboard toasted before its time had come. I've heard at least seven individual hardware failure stories from my co-workers in the last year alone. I rarely hear these kinds of dead hardware stories from Mac users. Why do you suppose that would be?
Is it possible that Apple works out purchasing deals with hardware producers and asks them to evaluate their hardware, separating out the stuff that tests better or proves to be of higher quality? Do they work out deals with hardware producers to make better quality stuff for Apple? I don't know, but that would be my guess. The reality is that Mac hardware lives on and on and on while parts in any given PC box tends to go tits-up within 2-3 years--although I know of numerous, numerous examples of parts going bad on PC users as quickly as 3 months! That's unheard-of in my experience with Macs, and I know of no fellow Mac users who have had the same experience.
Now, OK, you might well argue that Microsoft should document their kernel API too, for the masochists in the crowd. However, how many people really want to mess with low-level IO calls which may change in the next servicepack, when Win32 exposes a consistent set of filesystem calls for file creation, deletion etc.?
You're argument is weak. You expect others to argue against why MS shouldn't do it? How about you putting up some reasonable explanations of why MS should hide stuff from developers? Just claiming it's a layer of abstraction is bunk. There will always be developers interested in that lower level and MS ought not try to keep people out.
This is especially interesting to me as a Mac user and programmer to hear this kind of logic, especially from a Windows programmer. For a long time now, I've heard Windows programmers bash Apple for failing to document parts of the classic Mac API (although I've never seen any evidence for this -- more likely, just poor documentation.) It's interesting how a criticism of Apple can turn to apologist drivel for Microsoft when the tables are turned.
So far, MacOS X has not got a very good reception in this market at all.
Apple has consistently outsold their greatest expectations with both the early beta sales of OS X and their "version 1.0" release. They have interested countless people who were, until then, not even remotely interested in Apple. They have gotten a ton of great reviews. Developers are practically jumping for joy.
What do you mean "not got a very good reception"?
Not only does it mean a total rewrite of their products,
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but as a Mac developer, I can confidently (albeit gently) call bullshit on this. Obviously, you don't know anything about Carbon which requires a minimal alteration to classic Mac code to run in the OS X environment and gain all the benefits of OS X. A 10,000 line project of mine needed exactly 15 minor changes to make the leap from OS 9.x to OS X and half of those changes were simply deleting old "initialization" routines that were obsolete and automatically handled by OS X. Another quarter of those were renamed function calls that simply needed to be globally replaced. It required almost no work.
it also means they have to fight with a "real" OS, just like on NT.
As someone who works/fights with NT on a daily basis, I can can only laugh at this.
I would imagine that MacOS 9 will stay supported for a number of years because of this and other vertical market issues.
Nope. I don't expect you to look at this or this but maybe you will. Look around there and keep an eye on these sites daily if you really want to know the truth. Developers are stampeeding to OS X as evidenced by the ongoing, growing list of new OS X products coming out every day. OS 9 will be history soon.
...which of course makes hacking OS X applications a joy!:^) All you have to do is go in through the command line and remove the.app extension (which is invisible to the GUI) from the folder and it reverts to a normal folder. This allows you to snoop around through the resource files and whatnot. Certainly sounds like a lot more fun than firing up ResEdit and trying in vain to figure things out.
Find the public relations info for your country and do a little "public feedback." I will be doing so shortly. I am an Apple diehard. I have loved their products for a long time, but it makes me ill every time their spineless legal people need to justify their existence by picking on harmless projects that will only serve to heighten interest in what Apple has to offer. It's a little more than tiresome.
I find that using an OS designed for 3rd Graders/Grandmothers a bit annoying
I'm sure the people at many of the top design houses around the globe and countless print publications ranging from newspapers to high-quality magazines would be interested to hear that they do their highly-paid work on a tool designed for "3rd Graders [sic]". I'm sure many of them would find that amusing enough to laugh all the way to the bank.
--Rick Anderson
If it isn't broken take it apart and find out why.
Any critique of Aqua at this point is pretty much an exercise in futility and hardly something to write off an entire OS with. Aqua has only been released in developer previews and the much-hyped OS X beta. I think a few people are jumping the gun on Apple, especially considering that Apple has made numerous and significant changes to the Aqua interface in response to beta users' comments. Not only has Apple retained much of the (IMO) unprecedently beautiful aesthetic appeal of Aqua, but they have reintroduced older Mac navigation and interface elements side-by-side with the newer stuff, without compromising either in any significant way. Users will be able to (with the click of a button) switch between something more familiar to them and something closer to what Windows Explorer does.
I think any "professional" critique of Aqua before March 24 is pretty much wankery and not worth taking too seriously.
--Rick
If it ain't broke, take it apart and find out why.
I can't believe that a web site trafficked by what appears to be such an intelligent crowd can be so thoroughly and annoyingly misinformed about Macs. Yeah, I get it already. Apple isn't a crowd favorite, but fercrissake, it takes only someone with a grade school level competency in reading to figure out that the standard Mac OS wasn't even mentioned in any of the friggin' articles on this topic! Someone quote me a passage where it says the Mac OS will even be used. Clearly, such an experiment might be done with OS X or Darwin, although it's more likely that it will be any one of the several PPC Linux options out there. What does the Mac OS have to do with it?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that depends entirely on what platform you're using. I can speak from my own experience that the anti-alias effect offered by Apple in the Mac OS is exquisitely good. Anti-aliasing is not simply blurring (i.e. straight lines when anti-aliased correctly should show less signs of anti-aliasing that curves. Inner parts of curves should anti-alias differently than the outer parts.) When done properly, it makes on-screen text far more legible. I hate to work on any of my Macs at home or work without it now.
That may be true of MS. I'd believe it. I have a Windows PC at work and a lot of times, the anti-aliasing effect seems really clunky and poorly done (yeah, I know... hard to believe MS would do something half-assed!) That becomes more evident when I'm viewing a non-MS font or looking at a font not typically used. However, once again, the anti-aliasing on the Mac is done in such a way that I have yet to see a font that looks bad.
I'm not trying to sound like a typical Mac user, hyping up my OS of choice. I'm just saying that I wouldn't write off the value of anti-aliasing on-screen text until you've seen it done properly. It really is easier on your eyes when it's done just right.
--Rick
What's with this either/or stance? This makes me extremely suspicious of this "research" and this guy's apparently hastily made conclusions. What about kids who play video games and read and learn arithmetic? I teach my child both and let her play games and I don't observe any negative effects.
And what about games that teach those skills? My 5-year-old daughter is doing reading and arithmetic skills two years ahead of where she should be at this time, and it's partly due to the CD-ROM games we have that teach those in a game setting ("Arthur's Reading Race", "Math Blaster", etc.)
It's interesting to me that the people I know who were gamers in their teen years (including myself) are generally the people who are most capable of self-control. There is also, in my experience, a marked lack of violent behavior in those same people, even those who play very violent games--again including myself. Sure, that's anecdotal, but if this research were correct, then should that not be the case in anyone's experience? I bet I'm not alone in this either.
Something about this "research" strikes me as screwy, if not intentionally skewed.
--Rick
It's called arrogance.
I love Slashdot, but I could do with a little less of the standard daily-dose of Linux user superiority. There are many things Linux doesn't do better. The best software is not always the free stuff and not all computer users are admins or developers. Imagine that!
--Rick
And how much of a genius does it take to realize that Apple has a committed user base who are accustomed to the single-button mouse? There are ample third-party mouses to choose from. Apple is perfectly correct in standing their ground on this. Those who prefer one-button mouse can get what they want; likewise for people wanting a multi-button mouse. What would you say to someone wanting to use Windows and a one-button mouse? You can't. Mac OS is the only OS offering the choice. There are plenty of situations where one button is preferable (with young children for example.) If Apple started shipping Macs with 2-button mouses, they would remove that ability for their customer to choose. It's got nothing to do with the "superiority" of one over the other which is a silly topic. I've used both. Neither improved my productivity. The only people running their mouths off about that are those who have such a strong case of tunnel-vision that they are incapable of seeing any way of doing things but their own--and that's the case on both sides of the argument.
NEWSFLASH: Apple discontinued the hockey-puck mouse ages ago. It was an interesting experiment, and I know plenty of people who love them so it's not a total failure. I used one for two years and didn't have a complaint. Despite their odd look, they were quite comfortable and easy to use. Strange looking, but good design. Obviously some people can't get around that.
Ahh... something we agree on.
--Rick
Well, she's okay, but she's no G4! ;^)
Trust me, you don't want to know.
--Rick
Reminds me of The Exorcist. Beautiful exterior -- evil inside.
I think it's fairly clear that Apple purchases and resells higher quality parts than other box makers. You can point out that one vendor has some given type of RAM or a hard drive for one price while Apple sells it for a few bucks more, but that's ignoring the likely case that Apple is getting better quality hardware, somehow. I wouldn't presume to know the details, but reality seems to line up with that assumption.
I hear PC user hardware horror stories all the time. Fried hard drive. Dead RAM. Motherboard toasted before its time had come. I've heard at least seven individual hardware failure stories from my co-workers in the last year alone. I rarely hear these kinds of dead hardware stories from Mac users. Why do you suppose that would be?
Is it possible that Apple works out purchasing deals with hardware producers and asks them to evaluate their hardware, separating out the stuff that tests better or proves to be of higher quality? Do they work out deals with hardware producers to make better quality stuff for Apple? I don't know, but that would be my guess. The reality is that Mac hardware lives on and on and on while parts in any given PC box tends to go tits-up within 2-3 years--although I know of numerous, numerous examples of parts going bad on PC users as quickly as 3 months! That's unheard-of in my experience with Macs, and I know of no fellow Mac users who have had the same experience.
--Rick
You're argument is weak. You expect others to argue against why MS shouldn't do it? How about you putting up some reasonable explanations of why MS should hide stuff from developers? Just claiming it's a layer of abstraction is bunk. There will always be developers interested in that lower level and MS ought not try to keep people out.
This is especially interesting to me as a Mac user and programmer to hear this kind of logic, especially from a Windows programmer. For a long time now, I've heard Windows programmers bash Apple for failing to document parts of the classic Mac API (although I've never seen any evidence for this -- more likely, just poor documentation.) It's interesting how a criticism of Apple can turn to apologist drivel for Microsoft when the tables are turned.
--Rick
So far, MacOS X has not got a very good reception in this market at all.
Apple has consistently outsold their greatest expectations with both the early beta sales of OS X and their "version 1.0" release. They have interested countless people who were, until then, not even remotely interested in Apple. They have gotten a ton of great reviews. Developers are practically jumping for joy.
What do you mean "not got a very good reception"?
Not only does it mean a total rewrite of their products,
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but as a Mac developer, I can confidently (albeit gently) call bullshit on this. Obviously, you don't know anything about Carbon which requires a minimal alteration to classic Mac code to run in the OS X environment and gain all the benefits of OS X. A 10,000 line project of mine needed exactly 15 minor changes to make the leap from OS 9.x to OS X and half of those changes were simply deleting old "initialization" routines that were obsolete and automatically handled by OS X. Another quarter of those were renamed function calls that simply needed to be globally replaced. It required almost no work.
it also means they have to fight with a "real" OS, just like on NT.
As someone who works/fights with NT on a daily basis, I can can only laugh at this.
I would imagine that MacOS 9 will stay supported for a number of years because of this and other vertical market issues.
Nope. I don't expect you to look at this or this but maybe you will. Look around there and keep an eye on these sites daily if you really want to know the truth. Developers are stampeeding to OS X as evidenced by the ongoing, growing list of new OS X products coming out every day. OS 9 will be history soon.
--Rick
...which of course makes hacking OS X applications a joy! :^) All you have to do is go in through the command line and remove the .app extension (which is invisible to the GUI) from the folder and it reverts to a normal folder. This allows you to snoop around through the resource files and whatnot. Certainly sounds like a lot more fun than firing up ResEdit and trying in vain to figure things out.
Find the public relations info for your country and do a little "public feedback." I will be doing so shortly. I am an Apple diehard. I have loved their products for a long time, but it makes me ill every time their spineless legal people need to justify their existence by picking on harmless projects that will only serve to heighten interest in what Apple has to offer. It's a little more than tiresome.
--Rick
I'm sure the people at many of the top design houses around the globe and countless print publications ranging from newspapers to high-quality magazines would be interested to hear that they do their highly-paid work on a tool designed for "3rd Graders [sic]". I'm sure many of them would find that amusing enough to laugh all the way to the bank.
--Rick Anderson
If it isn't broken take it apart and find out why.
I think any "professional" critique of Aqua before March 24 is pretty much wankery and not worth taking too seriously.
--Rick
If it ain't broke, take it apart and find out why.
Do any of you read for comprehension? --Rick