Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
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· Score: 1
It's kind of awkward, on my PowerMac I prefer a multibutton mouse. However on my iBook, I prefer the one button trackpad. Whenever I use a PC laptop with two trackpad buttons I constantly click the right button accidently, and accessing the right button slows me down since I have to reposition my hand a bit to do it.
You will regret it in a month or so, when you realize there was nothing inherently easier about XP. The only easy thing was expecting things to work identically across platforms, instead of growing accustomed to the OS X way of doing things, which for me turns out to be a thousand-times easier. Of course, if all you want to do is hold onto memorized patterns of clicking here and there to get what you want, despite its questionable logic, then maybe you deserve the wife-beating, psychological torment, mental colonization that is known as a Microsoft product.
Windows isn't easier, you've just been assimilated by its ways, and suffer from a digital battered women's syndrome.
My beautiful memories shattered when I found the once simple, light and elegant Mac GUI to have grown ugly and cluttered and realized that XP was in fact, easier to use.
That's laughable. The OS X GUI is one of the cleanest, least intrusive ones I've ever seen. Though, maybe you enjoy 50 items in your task bar, constant pop-up wizards, requests to download new updates, take 'tours,' and a slew of other annoyances. Every time I boot a Windows machine I'm amazed at the things you people put up with. Even joining an open wireless network in Windows is a chore compared to OS X. Constant reminders and wizards, complicating steps that would take one keystroke in OS X.
Here is the difference between OS X and Windows: OS X is for the individual with a bit of common sense; a person who thinks logically without having his hand held -- it is intuitive for a person with a brain. XP is built for the lowest common dominator, so far that it takes into consideration those that ask "where is the any key?" You ever wonder who needs a warning on a cup of McDonald's coffee that "it may be hot?" The same person who finds Windows network configuration wizards, clippy, and the Windows UI intuitive -- i.e. the masses of people indoctrinated by consumer-based assembly line schooling with an inability to make any decision without their hand being held.
In '87, Huey released this..."Fore," their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip To Be Square." The song's so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It's also a personal statement about the band itself.
You really don't want to get a G3 these days; even though OSX will run on it, it's going to run dead-slow
It's not so much G3 vs. G4 as it is megahertz ratings. Sure a G3/300 is going to be slow, but I don't notice a huge difference between my G4 800mhz PowerMac and my G3 800mhz iBook. The speed differences between the two are due mainly to the iBook's less superior video card and slower hard drive, not the CPU.
If you're not doing anything altivec intensive, a G3 will probably perform just as well as a similarly clocked G4. So if all you can afford is a refurbed G3 iBook go for it; as long as the clock speed is reasonable it will perform fine -- certainly not 'dead-slow.' When running OS X what you really want is a nice chunk of RAM (512 or more) and a video card that can support Quartz Extreme; if those two things are in place your experience should be a good one.
May have been true once, but PearPC has made significant enhancments. I use it for testing websites under Mac IE quite successfully (and more or less usably) on my lowly 1.2 Ghz Duron machine.
You should be more worried about Safari than MacIE. The only people using MacIE nowadays are those stuck in OS 9 or lower.
Then again, I'm not sure how similar Safari and Konqueror are when it comes to rendering, since they both are based on KHTML. Would Konqueror provide a pretty good estimation of how a page looks in Safari, if one had no access to a Mac?
Yeah I know about Audio Hijack, Wiretap, and its ilk. I listen to a lot of very long lectures (an hour or more), and like to fill my MP3 player up with them about once a week. Doing it in real-time isn't a viable option.
There's an app called SoundConverter for OS X that claims to convert Real Audio files, but every time I feed it one it crashes. Oh well, I guess NT 4 isn't so bad in VPC; stuff like encoding MP3s could be so much faster though if it could take advantage of the G4.
The end of cassette tape maybe, but analog recording isn't going anywhere, preciously because many people will continue to be dismayed with the caveats of digital recording as you defined it.
The only reason I have VPC installed (aside from testing pages in WinIE) is for StreamBox Ripper, so I can convert Real Audio lectures to MP3 format and play them on my MP3 player. I've searched high and low for an app that could convert Real Audio files without doing so in real-time, but I've found nothing that will run natively in OS X. Are there any open source projects that could be compiled in OS X to accomplish this; anything for OS 9 even?
If they propagated a Mozilla-based browser such as Firefox to their users. At one time I was a defender of Google, always citing their mantra of "Don't be evil," however I'm not quite sure what their intentions may be.
Best search engine? Perhaps. But let's leave it at that.
Don't be blinded by the generosity; they're potentially gearing up to be just as wicked of a monopoly as Microsoft. Whether their intentions are clear or not, that probably should not be happening, since too much power has a tendency to corrupt -- except under very exceptional circumstances.
Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue
No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue I could not foresee this thing happening to you If I look hard enough into the settin' sun My love will laugh with me before the mornin' comes
I see a red door and I want it painted black No colors anymore I want them to turn black I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes I have to turn my head until my darkness goes Hmm, hmm, hmm,... I wanna see it painted, painted black Black as night, black as coal I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black Yeah!
Did you force the makers of Streambox Ripper to remove RealAudio conversion, when using this application is the only way I can burn perfectly legal RealAudio lectures to CD, or listen to them on my MP3 player? What makes you think I only want to listen to these files while sitting in front of a computer? What makes you think I'm interested in finding an MP3 player that will (ever) play RealAudio? Why did you even bother suing them in the first place, presumably knowing apps like Wiretap and Audio Hijack would do the same job, just in real-time?
I advise anyone with audio content to avoid Real if they actually want the end-user to be able to listen to it on a device or medium other than a Real encoded file on a PC. Have an interesting lecture you recorded? Publish it as a low-quality MP3 instead; at least 99% of the players on the market will be able to decode it. Hmm, wait -- isn't this closed mindedness what you scorned Apple for? I guess reverse engineering someone else's technology for wider support is okay when it meets your bottom line.
You seem to have the idea that intelligent users will look up the info, set everything up and then not bother anyone else. These people do not exist.
Yes they do, they just don't come to you for help, and then all of their friends go to them for assistance instead of you. The last thing any tech-savvy guy wants to do is deal with the lowly tech support drones.
The few people who actually have the technical chops to do this are the ones that bug you mercilessly when their odd configuration doesn't quite work on your system.
Well, as someone who has had to complain relentlessly to IT at my former school, I can say from experience it's usually their odd configuration (read, non-standard implementation) of something that's the problem. Again it comes back to standards, and all operating systems have things that are commonplace. As an administrator its your duty to be aware of those things.
We've got a dozen staff, who have to do everything from keeping ~500 computers up and running, email, 50 classrooms with projectors and various stuff, keeping the network running well . . . Oh yeah, and running a full time help desk to answer the flood of questions.
Well, maybe if you looked at more reliable alternatives you wouldn't need a dozen people to maintain such a small number of computers.
We can't pay a lot- we're in academia, remember? Tell me where you can find someone willing to do good PC support, good Mac support and good Linux support for what we can pay.
How about firing all the excess and finding one or two people who know what they're really doing, and paying them appropriately? The reason so many IT departments suck is because instead of hiring a few good people with intelligent solutions, they get 10 MCSE nitwits whose only solution to a problem is whatever they were taught by someone else.
Oh yeah, and as soon as we let a Linux machine into the hands of someone and claim we'll support them, we suddenly have another entire platform to test all of our custom applications against.
Well, that's why adhering to standards from the start is a good idea.
I go to NCSU, which is primarily an engineering school.
Actually that seems to be the dividing line between my school and everyone else who has posted in this thread: it had no engineering department, and the CS program wasn't particularly robust either. Its strength was more in the humanities, social sciences, and its business college -- which inevitably seemed to dominate IT decisions.
As I look at their student help desk page right now in Safari parts of it don't even render correctly. When you see that on a major state university's page its probably a good sign to stay away from any technology programs they offer.
I'd happily volunteer the name of the university, along with URLs to their substandard HTML (which they paid a design company thousands to construct), and wacky Windows only support policies if I had originally posted this anonymously. This isn't a small institution though, so one would expect better.
There are no Solaris or Linux labs on campus (dual boot or otherwise). There are two Mac labs (one for the journalism department; another for the art department), but neither are running up to date software (OS 9), and the administrators treat those labs as a kind of ghetto that no one should enter except with reason.
Servers are a mixed bag of Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
why spend a penny of already tight budgets (which, apprently, are fine to scrap for paying for Napster) on Macs and Linux PCs?
I'm in the process of writing an article that addresses this issue at great length. For time's sake though I'll give a summarization of why a Windows-only policy is stupid.
There's a big difference between training students to use technology, and actually teaching them. Training implies a kind of rote memorization -- just like an animal. For example, go to the start menu, open Microsoft Word, click open icon. That's practical and everything, but it doesn't teach one a thing about the underlying principles of using a computer, that in many cases are universal.
So you claim by using Windows-only in a school you're just preparing students for the so-called 'real-world.' Well, in the real-world they're going to have to deal with new versions of Windows that don't fit the patterns they memorized and grew accustomed to; they're going to need to troubleshoot when there is no lab administrator around. Any of this requires some technological common sense, that can only be achieved by seeing how tasks are done in a number of different environments.
I started on a c64, moved to a DOS machine, ended up playing with VMS, migrated to Windows for a spell, used various NIXs, experimented with BeOS, and am now an avid OS X user. I can't say that I had a difficult time moving between any of these platforms, and I've certainly migrated to supposedly drastically different applications over the years. Somehow I'm able to use MS Word, LaTeX, WordPerfect, GeoWrite, and a number of other word processors without having any formal training in any of them.
If you want to create technologically ignorant students, then keep feeding them regular dosages of MS. Somehow I suspect the worker who was exposed to a number of different platforms will do better than his/her colleagues with a college computer education equivalent to a "Windows 2000 for Dummies" book.
Then there's the issue of which OS promotes individuality and creativity, and which just reenforces corporate values and mediocrity. How do you want students to see computers: as office machines, or as tools of liberation? Ideally, a university environment should be more focused on the liberation side of things, while DeVry can provide the watered-down slave labor training you're looking for.
Not to mention you can record a whole semester's worth of lectures with one of these.
Network space at my university was limited (at the time) to 20mb per user; not really useful for huge media files. And even if the space were higher, transferring stuff is going to be time consuming if you live off campus (assuming they even offer FTP/WebDAV access).
If you're working with video, audio, or just don't feel like deleting your files all the time (512mb isn't very much) then the iPod is a good solution. Not to mention, USB takes a lot longer to transfer files.
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It's kind of awkward, on my PowerMac I prefer a multibutton mouse. However on my iBook, I prefer the one button trackpad. Whenever I use a PC laptop with two trackpad buttons I constantly click the right button accidently, and accessing the right button slows me down since I have to reposition my hand a bit to do it.
My Powerbook will be listed on ebay this week.
You will regret it in a month or so, when you realize there was nothing inherently easier about XP. The only easy thing was expecting things to work identically across platforms, instead of growing accustomed to the OS X way of doing things, which for me turns out to be a thousand-times easier. Of course, if all you want to do is hold onto memorized patterns of clicking here and there to get what you want, despite its questionable logic, then maybe you deserve the wife-beating, psychological torment, mental colonization that is known as a Microsoft product.
Windows isn't easier, you've just been assimilated by its ways, and suffer from a digital battered women's syndrome.
My beautiful memories shattered when I found the once simple, light and elegant Mac GUI to have grown ugly and cluttered and realized that XP was in fact, easier to use.
That's laughable. The OS X GUI is one of the cleanest, least intrusive ones I've ever seen. Though, maybe you enjoy 50 items in your task bar, constant pop-up wizards, requests to download new updates, take 'tours,' and a slew of other annoyances. Every time I boot a Windows machine I'm amazed at the things you people put up with. Even joining an open wireless network in Windows is a chore compared to OS X. Constant reminders and wizards, complicating steps that would take one keystroke in OS X.
Here is the difference between OS X and Windows: OS X is for the individual with a bit of common sense; a person who thinks logically without having his hand held -- it is intuitive for a person with a brain. XP is built for the lowest common dominator, so far that it takes into consideration those that ask "where is the any key?" You ever wonder who needs a warning on a cup of McDonald's coffee that "it may be hot?" The same person who finds Windows network configuration wizards, clippy, and the Windows UI intuitive -- i.e. the masses of people indoctrinated by consumer-based assembly line schooling with an inability to make any decision without their hand being held.
In '87, Huey released this..."Fore," their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip To Be Square." The song's so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It's also a personal statement about the band itself.
You really don't want to get a G3 these days; even though OSX will run on it, it's going to run dead-slow
It's not so much G3 vs. G4 as it is megahertz ratings. Sure a G3/300 is going to be slow, but I don't notice a huge difference between my G4 800mhz PowerMac and my G3 800mhz iBook. The speed differences between the two are due mainly to the iBook's less superior video card and slower hard drive, not the CPU.
If you're not doing anything altivec intensive, a G3 will probably perform just as well as a similarly clocked G4. So if all you can afford is a refurbed G3 iBook go for it; as long as the clock speed is reasonable it will perform fine -- certainly not 'dead-slow.' When running OS X what you really want is a nice chunk of RAM (512 or more) and a video card that can support Quartz Extreme; if those two things are in place your experience should be a good one.
Crap-E
Windows, and an unsatisfying Linux desktop experience was the whole reason I left x86 -- why would I want to bring that horror to PPC?
Indeed. At best this is a repackaging of PearPC, kind of like what the WinTel people did with Bochs.
Disk test is pretty impressive. I only have a regular ATA drive on my PC. Got the score better than my PB disk.
Probably because the PowerBook (and most laptops) only have 4200 RPM drives in their default configurations.
Stuffit files do seem to go through though.
May have been true once, but PearPC has made significant enhancments. I use it for testing websites under Mac IE quite successfully (and more or less usably) on my lowly 1.2 Ghz Duron machine.
You should be more worried about Safari than MacIE. The only people using MacIE nowadays are those stuck in OS 9 or lower.
Then again, I'm not sure how similar Safari and Konqueror are when it comes to rendering, since they both are based on KHTML. Would Konqueror provide a pretty good estimation of how a page looks in Safari, if one had no access to a Mac?
Not true. You can put YDL 4 on an old-world Mac, it's just not officially supported.
You can try and get SheepShaver working, but I haven't been very successful. OS X isn't supported, though.
So I'm assuming folks that access their Hotmail with Encourage on a Mac must pay to do so now as well?
Yeah I know about Audio Hijack, Wiretap, and its ilk. I listen to a lot of very long lectures (an hour or more), and like to fill my MP3 player up with them about once a week. Doing it in real-time isn't a viable option.
There's an app called SoundConverter for OS X that claims to convert Real Audio files, but every time I feed it one it crashes. Oh well, I guess NT 4 isn't so bad in VPC; stuff like encoding MP3s could be so much faster though if it could take advantage of the G4.
Thanks for the video RAM tip. For whatever reason I never noticed the slider below system memory.
The end of cassette tape maybe, but analog recording isn't going anywhere, preciously because many people will continue to be dismayed with the caveats of digital recording as you defined it.
The only reason I have VPC installed (aside from testing pages in WinIE) is for StreamBox Ripper, so I can convert Real Audio lectures to MP3 format and play them on my MP3 player. I've searched high and low for an app that could convert Real Audio files without doing so in real-time, but I've found nothing that will run natively in OS X. Are there any open source projects that could be compiled in OS X to accomplish this; anything for OS 9 even?
BTW: WinNT 4 runs nicely in VPC.
If they propagated a Mozilla-based browser such as Firefox to their users. At one time I was a defender of Google, always citing their mantra of "Don't be evil," however I'm not quite sure what their intentions may be.
Best search engine? Perhaps. But let's leave it at that.
Don't be blinded by the generosity; they're potentially gearing up to be just as wicked of a monopoly as Microsoft. Whether their intentions are clear or not, that probably should not be happening, since too much power has a tendency to corrupt -- except under very exceptional circumstances.
Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue
No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you
If I look hard enough into the settin' sun
My love will laugh with me before the mornin' comes
I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes
Hmm, hmm, hmm,...
I wanna see it painted, painted black
Black as night, black as coal
I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black
Yeah!
Did you force the makers of Streambox Ripper to remove RealAudio conversion, when using this application is the only way I can burn perfectly legal RealAudio lectures to CD, or listen to them on my MP3 player? What makes you think I only want to listen to these files while sitting in front of a computer? What makes you think I'm interested in finding an MP3 player that will (ever) play RealAudio? Why did you even bother suing them in the first place, presumably knowing apps like Wiretap and Audio Hijack would do the same job, just in real-time?
I advise anyone with audio content to avoid Real if they actually want the end-user to be able to listen to it on a device or medium other than a Real encoded file on a PC. Have an interesting lecture you recorded? Publish it as a low-quality MP3 instead; at least 99% of the players on the market will be able to decode it. Hmm, wait -- isn't this closed mindedness what you scorned Apple for? I guess reverse engineering someone else's technology for wider support is okay when it meets your bottom line.
As I look at their student help desk page right now in Safari parts of it don't even render correctly. When you see that on a major state university's page its probably a good sign to stay away from any technology programs they offer.
I'd happily volunteer the name of the university, along with URLs to their substandard HTML (which they paid a design company thousands to construct), and wacky Windows only support policies if I had originally posted this anonymously. This isn't a small institution though, so one would expect better.
There are no Solaris or Linux labs on campus (dual boot or otherwise). There are two Mac labs (one for the journalism department; another for the art department), but neither are running up to date software (OS 9), and the administrators treat those labs as a kind of ghetto that no one should enter except with reason.
Servers are a mixed bag of Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
I'm in the process of writing an article that addresses this issue at great length. For time's sake though I'll give a summarization of why a Windows-only policy is stupid.
There's a big difference between training students to use technology, and actually teaching them. Training implies a kind of rote memorization -- just like an animal. For example, go to the start menu, open Microsoft Word, click open icon. That's practical and everything, but it doesn't teach one a thing about the underlying principles of using a computer, that in many cases are universal.
So you claim by using Windows-only in a school you're just preparing students for the so-called 'real-world.' Well, in the real-world they're going to have to deal with new versions of Windows that don't fit the patterns they memorized and grew accustomed to; they're going to need to troubleshoot when there is no lab administrator around. Any of this requires some technological common sense, that can only be achieved by seeing how tasks are done in a number of different environments.
I started on a c64, moved to a DOS machine, ended up playing with VMS, migrated to Windows for a spell, used various NIXs, experimented with BeOS, and am now an avid OS X user. I can't say that I had a difficult time moving between any of these platforms, and I've certainly migrated to supposedly drastically different applications over the years. Somehow I'm able to use MS Word, LaTeX, WordPerfect, GeoWrite, and a number of other word processors without having any formal training in any of them.
If you want to create technologically ignorant students, then keep feeding them regular dosages of MS. Somehow I suspect the worker who was exposed to a number of different platforms will do better than his/her colleagues with a college computer education equivalent to a "Windows 2000 for Dummies" book.
Then there's the issue of which OS promotes individuality and creativity, and which just reenforces corporate values and mediocrity. How do you want students to see computers: as office machines, or as tools of liberation? Ideally, a university environment should be more focused on the liberation side of things, while DeVry can provide the watered-down slave labor training you're looking for.
Not to mention you can record a whole semester's worth of lectures with one of these.
Network space at my university was limited (at the time) to 20mb per user; not really useful for huge media files. And even if the space were higher, transferring stuff is going to be time consuming if you live off campus (assuming they even offer FTP/WebDAV access).
If you're working with video, audio, or just don't feel like deleting your files all the time (512mb isn't very much) then the iPod is a good solution. Not to mention, USB takes a lot longer to transfer files.