One of the worst keyboards I ever used was the original mini keyboard that shipped with G3 iMacs. Many of the keys were in weird, or non-standard places (arrow keys for example). I spent time at a computer lab with them once and hated every minute of it.
The so-called 'chicklet' keyboards Apple makes now I adore. I quit using my expensive Tactile Pro and purchased the latest Apple keyboard. I type far faster on it than any other keyboard, and had absolutely no learning or adjustment curve.
" Its level of integration between the components was simply jaw-dropping and as far as I know has never been approached by any other product."
I think GOBE Productive on BeOS was aiming for the kind of integration Appleworks provided. Unfortunately I never got around to purchasing it, so I can't give you a first-hand confirmation of that.
I can't answer your batch conversion question (maybe such a thing could be Apple scriptable?), but I do know that both Pages and Word for Mac will open files with the.CWK extension.
The hardware support definitely was not amazing. Mind you, I'm writing this as a fan of BeOS who would likely buy a PC (still using a PPC Mac) just to run Haiku when it matures. If you had the standard hardware of the day (a 3DFX card, Sound Blaster, external modem) you'd be safe, and fortunately I was without making any additional purchases. Anything other than that though and you were in trouble. For example, it only supported two network card chipsets, and if you wanted to have two NICs in one machine, neither could be using the same chipset. Frankly I'm shocked it had support for any winmodems.
Even with my trusty external US Robotics 56k, the most vanilla of any modem you could own, I would experience an error where the carrier would drop when uploading any files greater than about 5mb. I never figured that out, and it was never an issue with any other operating systems.
Hardware support was seriously lacking, but if you fed it the right components it was insanely stable and fun. RIP BeOS. It was my gateway drug that lead me away from Windows for good.
Since OS X was released everyone has known the/. community embraced Macs more so than in years past, but this poll tells us that at least 20% have. Knowing that technically savvy Mac folks tend to be split down the middle when it comes to Firefox / Safari usage, you might be able to add another 10-20% to that number. Very interesting to see what an effect OS X has had on the average geek's perception of Apple.
I can go to a used record shop and walk out with a huge stack of records under my arm for $30-40. You find a lot of gems that will never resurface on CD or MP3. It's a fun hobby.
At one point I was ripping a large quantity of prerecorded reel-to-reel jazz tapes so that I could convert them to MP3s. During this process I was manually cutting the.AIFF files into individual tracks, ending up with a track time slightly different than that on any of the official CD rereleases. Once I completed that, I would burn the files to CD and then import them into iTunes. Somehow, 90% of the time, iTunes would correctly identify the CD title and all of its tracks, even though the track times were different than the CD reissues. Not sure how it did that.
I don't remember citing an encyclopedia once as an undergraduate or graduate student. In fact, I told my dad just to throw a set out at the time, since they were useless to me.
I've had good results uploading my material to Archive.org's Moving Picture Archive. They even prompt you with a generator while uploading your video to build a Creative Common's license suitable for your project. Of course, it never caught on amongst the general population because they don't allow copyrighted stuff and actually enforce it. As far as simplicity though, you can upload any format you want, in streaming or downloadable form without having it converted a second time to flash.
I did an hour long documentary and used Google video for the 'preview' version, and directed people to archive.org for a high quality download. YouTube degraded the quality so much that I practically begged people in the description to view it at another location. If it weren't for YouTube's popularity I would have preferred not to include it there at all.
BeOS was the first OS to really make me enthusiastic about alternative operating systems and also enjoy using my computer again. It was a real breath of fresh air, and for the most part it had few hiccups (assuming you fed it all the right hardware). It was speedy (post to desktop in 10 seconds on an AMD k6 266), stable, had a POSIX compliant CLI, and I could have 15 MP3s playing at once with no skipping:) It took the best aspects of Amiga, MacOS, Windows, and to some extent UNIX and rolled it all into one.
OS X is the closest I've gotten to what BeOS was, and in many respects it's excelled far beyond BeOS. I still miss the leanness that was BeOS though. If Haiku would take off, perhaps I'd buy a PC just to run it.
In the late 80s Hip-Hop was filled with James Brown samples. Nobody younger than 40 cared about James Brown until then. All of a sudden you had kids buying his whole catalog, maybe initially looking for samples, but eventually appreciating the artist as a whole.
Being involved in Hip-Hop in the late 80s and early-mid 90s opened my ears to stuff I would have never checked out. I went looking for samples to some of my favorite songs and ended up finding an artist from a generation or genre far away from my own, it turned me onto tons of Jazz, Soul (though my mom had some of that around since a kid), classic rock, classical, and even world music. My iTunes library would make it hard to identify exactly what my 'favorite' genre is.
You went looking for the craziest sounds, and you ended up uncovering artists that nobody cared about. Forgotten people. All of a sudden those avant-garde guys with a few thousand pressings become Hip-Hop icons.
So my message to the original composer is simple: capitalize on this my friend. You have a chance to expose the world to how cool the demoscene is. Call CNN, MTV, somebody -- and get on and tell your story and the whole scene's story. Hell, try to contact Timberland and do it in friendly way to just get your credit. Forget about lawsuits.
I think those three words pretty much sum up why I dislike Microsoft. Here is what I mean by each:
Cultural Conflict: I wrote an article about this at one point. Basically, I'm the type of person who always admired revolutionaries, free-thinkers, oddballs, non-conformists -- you get the picture. At the same time I also appreciate a certain amount of conservativeness (not in the political sense really) as well. MS traditionally hasn't been the one to make those big, outside of the box, risk-taking steps, and a result of that is the user ends up with half-assed delayed implementations of things other folks did previously, and usually better.
When I sit in front of a Windows machine I'm presented with this attitude that I'm a moron, that I need my hand held with pop-ups, wizards, notifications. The whole OS is a dreadful distraction, right down to its Toys R Us color scheme. Let me give you one example. Look at how wireless networks are handled in XP vs. OS X. In OS X it's an elegant, non-obtrusive drop down menu; in Windows it's a mid-sized box I need to click through. In Windows I'm distracted with a barrage of virus definition update notices, anti-spyware update notices, Windows update notices, notices that my copy of Windows "isn't genuine" (even though it is).
Windows makes using my computer feel like prison, where everything is dictated to the user. Using a Windows PC is like being the boss of a company, but having to go unclog the toilet every couple hours. When I'm using my computer I don't want to think about these low level issues; I want to write, edit my video, read my RSS feeds. MS has consistently made the dream of PCs as a tool for open exchange of information a total nightmare that people fear.
History: I grew up in the 80s. I grew up when I used a C64 at home, an Apple ][e at school, and my friend down the block might have had an Amiga or Atari. You called BBS's running on Macs, PCs, Color Computers. You had this insanely diverse environment where every platform had something cool that you admired (or hated). But in the end it was all really cool, and it was that environment of friendly (or unfriendly) competition that led to the birth of some the most interesting machines, such as the Mac, Amiga, even the NeXT.
But most importantly, this environment required individuals to understand the basic mechanics of how a computer operated. You learned about computers in a universal sense so that if you sat in front of your friend's Atari 800, you'd feel relatively comfortable even as a C64 user; whether using an Amiga or Mac, you'd figure things out with a bit of toying pretty quickly. Since you learned how systems worked from a fundamental standpoint, you developed a kind of universal logic. Fast forward to the Windows era. Fast forward to how kids learn about computers now. They learn that if you go to the start menu and click X, Y happens. They don't learn about computers or systems, but they learn about Microsoft, and view the world from that vision. That's scary to me. It's scary that people actually have trouble with an OS X or Linux GUI because they've been brainwashed into believing Microsoft is synonymous with computing.
And then you see MS obliterate its competition in an unfair manner. You see the death of OS/2 and BeOS. You get frustrated that really cool stuff gets stomped on and innovation stifled for a few more years. You realize how empowering computers can be, and you witness first hand how they really are. However, you have a firm enough grip on reality to understand that one corporation dictating the standards of computing, and possibly even how Internet protocols function can have an insane effect on the future free flow of information. That's the scariest thing of all. Computers will, and are a fundamental part of individuals gaining power in ways never before possible, and one corporation should never even remotely be in a position to effect that.
You can still walk into a brick and mortar electronics store and purchase a tape deck or a turntable, because there's just so much media out there for both that were either home made or never reproduced on CD. The same thing is true of VHS video tapes so I suspect decks will linger on for at least another 10 years.
However, in the audio field there's a few perks to analog. You have DJs who want vinyl, collectors who love vinyl as a format, and folks who believe analog tape (usually in the form of reel to reel tape) provides a superior sound. So there's some legitimate reasons to hold onto analog audio, perhaps if for no other reason to take advantage of the analog hole. VHS has no real redeeming qualities. No one is going to argue that VHS has crisper video or 'warmer' video than a digital format: it just sucks. The only use I can see for it is some kind of easy way around upcoming DRM schemes, but even then there's superior ways (recording to digital tape, or some other format for example).
I know this is Slashdot and all, but you really need to get a life. It is software for Christ's sake, not your little sister.
Corny as it may sound, it's really a lot more than software. It's the device I have to deal with when I want to contact close friends thousands of miles away, edit projects, write documents, watch films and clips, read the news, apply for jobs, and be entertained. The computer is more vital to my day to day operations than an automobile, because at least when the car breaks down I can ride a bike or take the bus/train. With that in mind, when I encounter an operating system that doesn't need reinstalled every six months to be reasonably functional and doesn't require me to recompile a kernel each time I buy a new piece of hardware (assuming it can be supported anyway), I'm a pretty happy guy. And in the 20+ years I've been using a computer now, OS X has been pretty much the only environment that gets problems out of my way and just lets me focus on the task at hand -- whether it's serious or not. So yeah, I'll admit with no hesitation that I'm defensive when an OS I think rocks could potentially have its revenue for R&D lessened by people running it on vanilla hardware.
The key difference being, those who choose (notice the emphasis on choose) to run OS X to fulfill their computer needs enjoy their experience. I support Apple because I think OS X kicks ass, and have no trouble paying to enable further development of a solid OS and cool hardware. Seeing teenagers download my favorite OS for free, or seeing the experience cheapened in the eyes of others because its running on unsupported hardware bothers me.
And Microsoft already does do this; last time I checked I couldn't recompile XP to run on my PPC PowerMac. None of Microsoft's licenses are even close to open source, while a number of Apple's key technology are.
Maybe it's because we're from the camp who don't abuse their belongs though. If the cable is getting enough tension on it to cause tearing and fraying, you've been doing something wrong for a very long time. It doesn't take a genius to look at a power adapter with cabling and ribbing the size of a minijack headphone plug to realize, "maybe I should baby this a little."
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You said dyke.
I have a dedicated, unsecured AP called "Free Candy" that only randomly serves goatse, lemonparty, 1guy1cup, and bluewaffle.
MS Begins Selling Full 3D XNA Games; No One Notices.
When something so simple has to be outsourced. Seriously, one person could do this if given the right resources.
Every project this guy has touched has turned to shit.
One of the worst keyboards I ever used was the original mini keyboard that shipped with G3 iMacs. Many of the keys were in weird, or non-standard places (arrow keys for example). I spent time at a computer lab with them once and hated every minute of it.
The so-called 'chicklet' keyboards Apple makes now I adore. I quit using my expensive Tactile Pro and purchased the latest Apple keyboard. I type far faster on it than any other keyboard, and had absolutely no learning or adjustment curve.
That was a great game. Upon seeing this story in my RSS reader it was the first thing I thought of. I was tempted to load an emulator just to play it.
" Its level of integration between the components was simply jaw-dropping and as far as I know has never been approached by any other product."
I think GOBE Productive on BeOS was aiming for the kind of integration Appleworks provided. Unfortunately I never got around to purchasing it, so I can't give you a first-hand confirmation of that.
I can't answer your batch conversion question (maybe such a thing could be Apple scriptable?), but I do know that both Pages and Word for Mac will open files with the .CWK extension.
The hardware support was also amazing
The hardware support definitely was not amazing. Mind you, I'm writing this as a fan of BeOS who would likely buy a PC (still using a PPC Mac) just to run Haiku when it matures. If you had the standard hardware of the day (a 3DFX card, Sound Blaster, external modem) you'd be safe, and fortunately I was without making any additional purchases. Anything other than that though and you were in trouble. For example, it only supported two network card chipsets, and if you wanted to have two NICs in one machine, neither could be using the same chipset. Frankly I'm shocked it had support for any winmodems.
Even with my trusty external US Robotics 56k, the most vanilla of any modem you could own, I would experience an error where the carrier would drop when uploading any files greater than about 5mb. I never figured that out, and it was never an issue with any other operating systems.
Hardware support was seriously lacking, but if you fed it the right components it was insanely stable and fun. RIP BeOS. It was my gateway drug that lead me away from Windows for good.
Since OS X was released everyone has known the /. community embraced Macs more so than in years past, but this poll tells us that at least 20% have. Knowing that technically savvy Mac folks tend to be split down the middle when it comes to Firefox / Safari usage, you might be able to add another 10-20% to that number. Very interesting to see what an effect OS X has had on the average geek's perception of Apple.
I can go to a used record shop and walk out with a huge stack of records under my arm for $30-40. You find a lot of gems that will never resurface on CD or MP3. It's a fun hobby.
Hi.
At one point I was ripping a large quantity of prerecorded reel-to-reel jazz tapes so that I could convert them to MP3s. During this process I was manually cutting the .AIFF files into individual tracks, ending up with a track time slightly different than that on any of the official CD rereleases. Once I completed that, I would burn the files to CD and then import them into iTunes. Somehow, 90% of the time, iTunes would correctly identify the CD title and all of its tracks, even though the track times were different than the CD reissues. Not sure how it did that.
I don't remember citing an encyclopedia once as an undergraduate or graduate student. In fact, I told my dad just to throw a set out at the time, since they were useless to me.
I've had good results uploading my material to Archive.org's Moving Picture Archive. They even prompt you with a generator while uploading your video to build a Creative Common's license suitable for your project. Of course, it never caught on amongst the general population because they don't allow copyrighted stuff and actually enforce it. As far as simplicity though, you can upload any format you want, in streaming or downloadable form without having it converted a second time to flash.
I did an hour long documentary and used Google video for the 'preview' version, and directed people to archive.org for a high quality download. YouTube degraded the quality so much that I practically begged people in the description to view it at another location. If it weren't for YouTube's popularity I would have preferred not to include it there at all.
BeOS was the first OS to really make me enthusiastic about alternative operating systems and also enjoy using my computer again. It was a real breath of fresh air, and for the most part it had few hiccups (assuming you fed it all the right hardware). It was speedy (post to desktop in 10 seconds on an AMD k6 266), stable, had a POSIX compliant CLI, and I could have 15 MP3s playing at once with no skipping :) It took the best aspects of Amiga, MacOS, Windows, and to some extent UNIX and rolled it all into one.
OS X is the closest I've gotten to what BeOS was, and in many respects it's excelled far beyond BeOS. I still miss the leanness that was BeOS though. If Haiku would take off, perhaps I'd buy a PC just to run it.
In the late 80s Hip-Hop was filled with James Brown samples. Nobody younger than 40 cared about James Brown until then. All of a sudden you had kids buying his whole catalog, maybe initially looking for samples, but eventually appreciating the artist as a whole.
Being involved in Hip-Hop in the late 80s and early-mid 90s opened my ears to stuff I would have never checked out. I went looking for samples to some of my favorite songs and ended up finding an artist from a generation or genre far away from my own, it turned me onto tons of Jazz, Soul (though my mom had some of that around since a kid), classic rock, classical, and even world music. My iTunes library would make it hard to identify exactly what my 'favorite' genre is.
You went looking for the craziest sounds, and you ended up uncovering artists that nobody cared about. Forgotten people. All of a sudden those avant-garde guys with a few thousand pressings become Hip-Hop icons.
So my message to the original composer is simple: capitalize on this my friend. You have a chance to expose the world to how cool the demoscene is. Call CNN, MTV, somebody -- and get on and tell your story and the whole scene's story. Hell, try to contact Timberland and do it in friendly way to just get your credit. Forget about lawsuits.
I think those three words pretty much sum up why I dislike Microsoft. Here is what I mean by each:
Cultural Conflict: I wrote an article about this at one point. Basically, I'm the type of person who always admired revolutionaries, free-thinkers, oddballs, non-conformists -- you get the picture. At the same time I also appreciate a certain amount of conservativeness (not in the political sense really) as well. MS traditionally hasn't been the one to make those big, outside of the box, risk-taking steps, and a result of that is the user ends up with half-assed delayed implementations of things other folks did previously, and usually better.
When I sit in front of a Windows machine I'm presented with this attitude that I'm a moron, that I need my hand held with pop-ups, wizards, notifications. The whole OS is a dreadful distraction, right down to its Toys R Us color scheme. Let me give you one example. Look at how wireless networks are handled in XP vs. OS X. In OS X it's an elegant, non-obtrusive drop down menu; in Windows it's a mid-sized box I need to click through. In Windows I'm distracted with a barrage of virus definition update notices, anti-spyware update notices, Windows update notices, notices that my copy of Windows "isn't genuine" (even though it is).
Windows makes using my computer feel like prison, where everything is dictated to the user. Using a Windows PC is like being the boss of a company, but having to go unclog the toilet every couple hours. When I'm using my computer I don't want to think about these low level issues; I want to write, edit my video, read my RSS feeds. MS has consistently made the dream of PCs as a tool for open exchange of information a total nightmare that people fear.
History: I grew up in the 80s. I grew up when I used a C64 at home, an Apple ][e at school, and my friend down the block might have had an Amiga or Atari. You called BBS's running on Macs, PCs, Color Computers. You had this insanely diverse environment where every platform had something cool that you admired (or hated). But in the end it was all really cool, and it was that environment of friendly (or unfriendly) competition that led to the birth of some the most interesting machines, such as the Mac, Amiga, even the NeXT.
But most importantly, this environment required individuals to understand the basic mechanics of how a computer operated. You learned about computers in a universal sense so that if you sat in front of your friend's Atari 800, you'd feel relatively comfortable even as a C64 user; whether using an Amiga or Mac, you'd figure things out with a bit of toying pretty quickly. Since you learned how systems worked from a fundamental standpoint, you developed a kind of universal logic. Fast forward to the Windows era. Fast forward to how kids learn about computers now. They learn that if you go to the start menu and click X, Y happens. They don't learn about computers or systems, but they learn about Microsoft, and view the world from that vision. That's scary to me. It's scary that people actually have trouble with an OS X or Linux GUI because they've been brainwashed into believing Microsoft is synonymous with computing.
And then you see MS obliterate its competition in an unfair manner. You see the death of OS/2 and BeOS. You get frustrated that really cool stuff gets stomped on and innovation stifled for a few more years. You realize how empowering computers can be, and you witness first hand how they really are. However, you have a firm enough grip on reality to understand that one corporation dictating the standards of computing, and possibly even how Internet protocols function can have an insane effect on the future free flow of information. That's the scariest thing of all. Computers will, and are a fundamental part of individuals gaining power in ways never before possible, and one corporation should never even remotely be in a position to effect that.
Frustration: If you're a ge
You can still walk into a brick and mortar electronics store and purchase a tape deck or a turntable, because there's just so much media out there for both that were either home made or never reproduced on CD. The same thing is true of VHS video tapes so I suspect decks will linger on for at least another 10 years.
However, in the audio field there's a few perks to analog. You have DJs who want vinyl, collectors who love vinyl as a format, and folks who believe analog tape (usually in the form of reel to reel tape) provides a superior sound. So there's some legitimate reasons to hold onto analog audio, perhaps if for no other reason to take advantage of the analog hole. VHS has no real redeeming qualities. No one is going to argue that VHS has crisper video or 'warmer' video than a digital format: it just sucks. The only use I can see for it is some kind of easy way around upcoming DRM schemes, but even then there's superior ways (recording to digital tape, or some other format for example).
I know this is Slashdot and all, but you really need to get a life. It is software for Christ's sake, not your little sister.
Corny as it may sound, it's really a lot more than software. It's the device I have to deal with when I want to contact close friends thousands of miles away, edit projects, write documents, watch films and clips, read the news, apply for jobs, and be entertained. The computer is more vital to my day to day operations than an automobile, because at least when the car breaks down I can ride a bike or take the bus/train. With that in mind, when I encounter an operating system that doesn't need reinstalled every six months to be reasonably functional and doesn't require me to recompile a kernel each time I buy a new piece of hardware (assuming it can be supported anyway), I'm a pretty happy guy. And in the 20+ years I've been using a computer now, OS X has been pretty much the only environment that gets problems out of my way and just lets me focus on the task at hand -- whether it's serious or not. So yeah, I'll admit with no hesitation that I'm defensive when an OS I think rocks could potentially have its revenue for R&D lessened by people running it on vanilla hardware.
The key difference being, those who choose (notice the emphasis on choose) to run OS X to fulfill their computer needs enjoy their experience. I support Apple because I think OS X kicks ass, and have no trouble paying to enable further development of a solid OS and cool hardware. Seeing teenagers download my favorite OS for free, or seeing the experience cheapened in the eyes of others because its running on unsupported hardware bothers me.
And Microsoft already does do this; last time I checked I couldn't recompile XP to run on my PPC PowerMac. None of Microsoft's licenses are even close to open source, while a number of Apple's key technology are.
Because it seems the same songs play at certain points that I drive through in the city.
Or maybe it's not a grand conspiracy at all, but this grand idea called chance.
3 Mac laptops; 0 PSU failures.
Maybe it's because we're from the camp who don't abuse their belongs though. If the cable is getting enough tension on it to cause tearing and fraying, you've been doing something wrong for a very long time. It doesn't take a genius to look at a power adapter with cabling and ribbing the size of a minijack headphone plug to realize, "maybe I should baby this a little."
I'm selling this DIY kit for $99; my version has all white cables though. Contact me if interested.