These were more pure concept items, things that were not really going to be marketed any time soon but wanted to show off where microsoft was heading.
A friend of mine worked for Microsoft one summer as an intern, and he said that he and his fellow intern-ers were basically given a cubicle and told to "innovate". It sounds like a cool environment that encourages R&D, and would potentially produce lots of great new products and ideas.
So why do I still get popups on Internet Explorer?
but I'm not going to get rid of my MX500. It has eight buttons all over the place, and while this "horse" would be cool, it needs to be more versatile even though it might feel more comfortable how it is.
doesn't mean you should. If you're writing a blog, you should know that you are writing for the world. If you go to work and cuss out your boss, you have every right to do so, but you still may get fired for it. Blogs are no different -- it's not as if you are complaining in your own home to your friends. Your boss could be reading your blog, and if you're dumb enough to cuss him out in that type of public forum, you had better be ready to face the consequences.
They fumbled the GameCube launch pretty bad, and haven't exactly done much to fix the situation, but so far they have shown every sign of continuing their handheld dominance. DS has Picto Chat, touch-screen technology, dual-screens, and other true gaming innovations. PSP has...PS2 games that you can play in the car. The DS is also going to be released just in time for the holidays, and if the PSP really is delayed, it's going to be a long road for Sony to travel to even catch up to Nintendo.
iTunes was also agonizingly slow; ripping a CD at 192 Kbps with error correction took 53 minutes. Musicmatch did this in about 15 minutes.
I have a slow G4, at 1GHz, and it rips a CD at 192 Kbps, using VBR, with error correction, in just a couple of minutes. I guess if it's PCMag they were probably using a PC, but still...
I was using this trick to get free bottles of Mountain Dew when I was stocking milk at the grocery store back in high school. How, pray tell, did this end up on Slashdot?
From the article: I'm not telling you to buy an iPod (I don't have one and haven't tested one) I thought it was a decent review, but not a comparison by any means. He also mentions that he hasn't used an Apple computer in years. So I wouldn't read this article as if it were a true comparison of the DJ and iPod. Personally, I think it would have bee much more valuable to compare the two since the iPod is currently the de facto standard of portable audio players.
TI hasn't had a new calculator since the TI-92. The 89 was a 92 in the old 83-style case, which was nice because teachers could rarely tell the difference. In Calc 107 we weren't allowed to use 92s, so I borrowed my brother's 89 instead. Yeah, it wasn't really fair, but I'm an English major so I figured it didn't really matter. But these "new" calculators are just re-hashes of the same old same old. The 84-plus has a super low-res display, no color support, and a meager 24K of RAM.
It would be nice to see an overhaul of the TI-8X line instead of small updates here and there.
Wow, between this and the Aussie who voluntarily decided to stop sending SPAM a few weeks ago, things are really looking nice for the rest of us. For now, anyway.
Whenever a virus or worm creeps its way around the internet, my daily routines are pretty much unchanged. I don't worry about.exe files showing up that I don't know about, I don't worry about getting viruses in my email, and I often don't even worry about lots of pop-up ads. My girlfriend asks me about these viruses too, as she wants to know if her computer will be safe, and I always tell her the same thing: don't worry about it.
We both have Macs.
Traditionally, the Mac has had its share of viruses and trojan horses and everything else, but "its share" is way less than the Windows world. Market share alone tells us that only about 4% of computers out there are Macs. Simple math tells me (an English major, so correct me if I'm wrong) that there are 24 times as many people who code viruses for Windows than those who code them for Macs.
So, when these things go around, it's almost always for Windows. I do check up on the latest viruses and worms to make sure, but so far there has been no major attacks for the Mac.
What all this means is not that the Mac is any more or less secure than Windows, but that it is simply less popular. As is Linux. If Linux were on 96% of computers, there would be just as many, if not more, of these things going around than there currently are for Windows. The only reason my Mac is secure is because there aren't many of us out there compared to our Windows counterparts.
It is frustrating when Linux users (and Mac users too, though they aren't as militant about it) blather on about how insecure Windows is. To me it's almost a form of sour grapes. Microsoft has Linux outnumbered any way you slice it, so Linux users respond by pointing the finger when Windows users are bothered by these worms and such. I'd like to see what would happen if the positions were reversed.
Fark, yeah, but I thought/. had more class than this. It's not the least bit informative, and it's funny only if you like that sort of thing which most people don't.
Come on, I'm not offended here. But putting these things on/. gives them a degree of credibility which this article does not have. Stick to real news for nerds, and stuff that actually does matter.
Worms and viruses, in a well-maintained datacenter, are a non-issue, even in the windows world.
I agree, but if that's the case, why are worms and viruses, especially in the windows world, such a problem? You're right though, that many of the issues of maintaing a Windows network could be solved with competent administrators. But in my experience, at least in the last four years of college, that is hardly ever the case. Many of the lab "administrators" are regular students looking for a few extra bucks on the side. Something wrong with your PC? Try restarting it. Something wrong with your Mac? Try using the PC.
I used to use Floppies a lot, but even their low failure rate is too often when you have stuff that you just don't want to disappear. When I'm writing a ten-page paper I don't want to put it on a floppy when the odds of it failing are much greater than the odds of my FTP server failing. They are cheap and easy, but I hear about students around me losing papers due to bad floppies almost on a daily basis.
Since I got an iMac and was forced to find ways of transferring files without a floppy, I haven't lost one single paper or report. It's way less convenient to mess with FTP transfers and emailing things to myself, but I don't mind when I know I will get my data for sure.
I believe the New York Times had a piece on this last spring also. At any rate, it's too bad that Apple is slowly losing this battle too. I believe that they have had the suprerior product for years, but when only a fraction of homes have Macs, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the students to have to learn to use a Mac at school.
Case in point: I go to the University of Nebraska. They used to have Macs all over the school, but now they are all but phased out by PCs. Despite the fact that many of my classmates still have problems with papers getting lost of their floppies (floppies!) and have their computers "break down" on them, they continue to use PCs at home and at school. Just last Thursday I was at a workshop where we were all given iBooks to access a web page. The setup could not have been simpler, for the dock contained exactly three items: the finder, the applications folder, and the trash. And yet people still couldn't figure it out. Their home PCs were familiar and therefore simpler to use. And from their perspective, why should they have to use a computer at school that does not take their floppy disks and is different from their home PCs.
From an administrative standpoint, it is a lot cheaper (in the short run) to get a truckload of Dells for $400. They will break more often, they will be attacked by more worms, and they will continue to reinforce the age-old reliance on floppy disks, but the up-front cost is half that of an eMac, so it's a better solution.
I wish Apple still controlled the education market, and to a large degree, they still do. Schools keep their computers for years, but the new generation of educational PCs won't be stamped with my much-beloved Apple logo. For now Apple is still riding out their honeymoon with schools, but shortsighted thinking and short-term economics may make that a thing of the past.
when OSX stopped working on my iMac about nine months ago. I found out later that it was a problem with X not working on my model of iMac. I enjoyed X while I had it, but I've been using 9.1 ever since then. Now I'm contemplating purchasing either a big external hard drive or an eMac, but I can't think of anything I could do under X that I cannot do under 9, so I'm probably just going to stick with 9 and get that hard drive. X is nice, and it's more stable than 9, but I'm in college and most of what I do is check my email, write papers, and surf the internet. I don't need a G4 and OSX to do that.
I used to go out of my way to use Netscape. Problem was, Explorer was just better, faster, and more widely-supported. Most of all, it wasn't bloated. When Netscape 6 came out, they lost any chance at competing, and moreover, showed that they just didn't care anymore about putting out a competitive browser. Netscape 7 will be more of the same: bloated, slow, and *still* not as good of CSS support at Explorer. Sorry Netscape, you lose.
the widescreen format is inferior to pan-and-scan. I run the movie department of a local grocery store and most people don't understand the concept of "those black bars at the top and bottom." I used to get frustrated and try to explain to them that they are really seeing the whole movie, but it looks smaller on their TV, so the average person doesn't want it. I've been buying widescreen movies since they were available on VHS, and I can remember watching many of them on my 13" TV. That's not to say everyone can do it, though. Most people just want to watch a movie, and don't care about the trees on the side of the scene that get cut out in pan and scan format.
Anymore, I just explain the differences to my customers but let them discover on their own which format they prefer. I can understand the reasons behind choosing pan and scan, even though I know it means you have to effectively miss out on half of the movie.
Spoilers like this are ruining everything these days. The worst was when pictures, trailers, and cereal boxes announced the return of Gandalf in The Two Towers. Yes I'd read the book several times, but for all those who hadn't, they had a year of waiting ruined by looking at a box of candy.
I don't even read the back of books anymore. I was nearly finished with the second Harry Potter book when I finally read the back cover and found out exactly who had opened the Chamber of Secrets fifty years ago.
Too Much Smoke, Not Enough Mirrors
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
I appreciate what Siracusa is trying to do, but I think he's missing the forest for the trees. His explanations of a spatial finder is nice, and it's obvious he has the experience to back up his claims about a proper finder being spatially oriented. However, I think his solutions are rather weak. It's easy to complain, but a finder that uses an iTunes-like browser? A middle-man dock-like station for files when moving them? These may be spatially pleasing, but they are certainly not intuitive, and intuitive interface (not a spatial interface, as Siracusa claims) has always been the hallmark of the Mac OS.
It's true that the OSX Finder does have its share of problems, but it's getting better, and will only improve with time. Does he honestly think Apple forgot about their own inventions like pop-up folders and the ability to change font sizes? I agree, these things are missed (as is my favorite, the application menu. Why, Apple, why?) but I think I see the point that Apple is trying to make in all of this: OSX should be intuitive for the new user, and simple for the new user to operate, while at the same time maintaining an unprecedented level of control and functionality for the power user. It succeeds admirably at both.
Perhaps new users would understand the Finder better if it were more spatially oriented, but it is still very easy to use in its current form. And the Mac faithful? The millions of fans like who have been loyalists since the days of the 512? We know there's problems but we also see what Apple is trying to do, and that's survive in a very competitive market. Because the OSX Finder is suitable for novices, longtime users, and power users, I'm willing to forgive its inconsistencies and annoyances at the expense of the greater cause, which is to keep Apple alive in the first place.
...doesn't anyone remember the original Men in Black? Compact Discs the size of a fingernail! Probably not R/W media like CF, but still pretty dang cool.
I guess it means I'll have to buy the White Album again
While I used to enjoy the Oscars, I think they are quickly losing their relevance. Ever since Titanic won all sorts of awards back in 1997 it's been more or less evident that the Oscars are little more than a popularity contest. If this ceremony were held two months ago, which movie would have walked away with the awards? My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Here we have another underdog, Chicago, which Miramax sent out on limited release to generate lots of positive buzz, and has since carefully expanded the number of locations in which it is playing. Chicago gets fabulous word of mouth and ends up walking away with Best Picture. Fine, so lots of the voters like this movie and musicals are making a comeback. But best costume design? Best editing? The movie may be good, but certainly it doesn't deserve these. Of the hundreds of movies released last year, and of the few dozen which were truly good, does one movie deserve to win these coveted awards just because it's popular right now?
When movies start picking up several oscars, it's just a sign of that movie's popularity at the moment. The voters get all carried away with one movie and it ends up sweeping the whole show. Ridiculous.
Ok, perhaps I'm just jaded because of the movies that *didn't* win, like Two Towers for Best Editing or Episode II for Best Costume, Sound, Editing, or something. But I agree, (in order to keep this post on-topic), Spirited Away was definitely the best animated feature of the year. But what about the rest? Treasure Island, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
These were more pure concept items, things that were not really going to be marketed any time soon but wanted to show off where microsoft was heading.
A friend of mine worked for Microsoft one summer as an intern, and he said that he and his fellow intern-ers were basically given a cubicle and told to "innovate". It sounds like a cool environment that encourages R&D, and would potentially produce lots of great new products and ideas.
So why do I still get popups on Internet Explorer?
but I'm not going to get rid of my MX500. It has eight buttons all over the place, and while this "horse" would be cool, it needs to be more versatile even though it might feel more comfortable how it is.
doesn't mean you should. If you're writing a blog, you should know that you are writing for the world. If you go to work and cuss out your boss, you have every right to do so, but you still may get fired for it. Blogs are no different -- it's not as if you are complaining in your own home to your friends. Your boss could be reading your blog, and if you're dumb enough to cuss him out in that type of public forum, you had better be ready to face the consequences.
Shoot, I live in Nebraska. Curse you Steve Ballmer!
They fumbled the GameCube launch pretty bad, and haven't exactly done much to fix the situation, but so far they have shown every sign of continuing their handheld dominance. DS has Picto Chat, touch-screen technology, dual-screens, and other true gaming innovations. PSP has...PS2 games that you can play in the car. The DS is also going to be released just in time for the holidays, and if the PSP really is delayed, it's going to be a long road for Sony to travel to even catch up to Nintendo.
is this doing on Slashdot? Shouldn't weird PSAs like this belong on other sites?
as their test machine?
iTunes was also agonizingly slow; ripping a CD at 192 Kbps with error correction took 53 minutes. Musicmatch did this in about 15 minutes.
I have a slow G4, at 1GHz, and it rips a CD at 192 Kbps, using VBR, with error correction, in just a couple of minutes. I guess if it's PCMag they were probably using a PC, but still...
I was using this trick to get free bottles of Mountain Dew when I was stocking milk at the grocery store back in high school. How, pray tell, did this end up on Slashdot?
From the article:
I'm not telling you to buy an iPod (I don't have one and haven't tested one)
I thought it was a decent review, but not a comparison by any means. He also mentions that he hasn't used an Apple computer in years. So I wouldn't read this article as if it were a true comparison of the DJ and iPod. Personally, I think it would have bee much more valuable to compare the two since the iPod is currently the de facto standard of portable audio players.
TI hasn't had a new calculator since the TI-92. The 89 was a 92 in the old 83-style case, which was nice because teachers could rarely tell the difference. In Calc 107 we weren't allowed to use 92s, so I borrowed my brother's 89 instead. Yeah, it wasn't really fair, but I'm an English major so I figured it didn't really matter. But these "new" calculators are just re-hashes of the same old same old. The 84-plus has a super low-res display, no color support, and a meager 24K of RAM.
It would be nice to see an overhaul of the TI-8X line instead of small updates here and there.
Whups. Sorry about that. You're right, of course. Now, back to watching more Peter Jackson movies to get it all straightened out.
Wow, between this and the Aussie who voluntarily decided to stop sending SPAM a few weeks ago, things are really looking nice for the rest of us. For now, anyway.
Whenever a virus or worm creeps its way around the internet, my daily routines are pretty much unchanged. I don't worry about .exe files showing up that I don't know about, I don't worry about getting viruses in my email, and I often don't even worry about lots of pop-up ads. My girlfriend asks me about these viruses too, as she wants to know if her computer will be safe, and I always tell her the same thing: don't worry about it.
We both have Macs.
Traditionally, the Mac has had its share of viruses and trojan horses and everything else, but "its share" is way less than the Windows world. Market share alone tells us that only about 4% of computers out there are Macs. Simple math tells me (an English major, so correct me if I'm wrong) that there are 24 times as many people who code viruses for Windows than those who code them for Macs.
So, when these things go around, it's almost always for Windows. I do check up on the latest viruses and worms to make sure, but so far there has been no major attacks for the Mac.
What all this means is not that the Mac is any more or less secure than Windows, but that it is simply less popular. As is Linux. If Linux were on 96% of computers, there would be just as many, if not more, of these things going around than there currently are for Windows. The only reason my Mac is secure is because there aren't many of us out there compared to our Windows counterparts.
It is frustrating when Linux users (and Mac users too, though they aren't as militant about it) blather on about how insecure Windows is. To me it's almost a form of sour grapes. Microsoft has Linux outnumbered any way you slice it, so Linux users respond by pointing the finger when Windows users are bothered by these worms and such. I'd like to see what would happen if the positions were reversed.
"The chances of you actually playing in a way, by luck only, that matches one of those (counting) strategies is almost nil,"
The chances of you actually winning the jackpot at those slot machines, by any means possible, is even worse.
Fark, yeah, but I thought /. had more class than this. It's not the least bit informative, and it's funny only if you like that sort of thing which most people don't.
/. gives them a degree of credibility which this article does not have. Stick to real news for nerds, and stuff that actually does matter.
Come on, I'm not offended here. But putting these things on
Worms and viruses, in a well-maintained datacenter, are a non-issue, even in the windows world.
I agree, but if that's the case, why are worms and viruses, especially in the windows world, such a problem? You're right though, that many of the issues of maintaing a Windows network could be solved with competent administrators. But in my experience, at least in the last four years of college, that is hardly ever the case. Many of the lab "administrators" are regular students looking for a few extra bucks on the side. Something wrong with your PC? Try restarting it. Something wrong with your Mac? Try using the PC.
I used to use Floppies a lot, but even their low failure rate is too often when you have stuff that you just don't want to disappear. When I'm writing a ten-page paper I don't want to put it on a floppy when the odds of it failing are much greater than the odds of my FTP server failing. They are cheap and easy, but I hear about students around me losing papers due to bad floppies almost on a daily basis.
Since I got an iMac and was forced to find ways of transferring files without a floppy, I haven't lost one single paper or report. It's way less convenient to mess with FTP transfers and emailing things to myself, but I don't mind when I know I will get my data for sure.
I believe the New York Times had a piece on this last spring also. At any rate, it's too bad that Apple is slowly losing this battle too. I believe that they have had the suprerior product for years, but when only a fraction of homes have Macs, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the students to have to learn to use a Mac at school.
Case in point: I go to the University of Nebraska. They used to have Macs all over the school, but now they are all but phased out by PCs. Despite the fact that many of my classmates still have problems with papers getting lost of their floppies (floppies!) and have their computers "break down" on them, they continue to use PCs at home and at school. Just last Thursday I was at a workshop where we were all given iBooks to access a web page. The setup could not have been simpler, for the dock contained exactly three items: the finder, the applications folder, and the trash. And yet people still couldn't figure it out. Their home PCs were familiar and therefore simpler to use. And from their perspective, why should they have to use a computer at school that does not take their floppy disks and is different from their home PCs.
From an administrative standpoint, it is a lot cheaper (in the short run) to get a truckload of Dells for $400. They will break more often, they will be attacked by more worms, and they will continue to reinforce the age-old reliance on floppy disks, but the up-front cost is half that of an eMac, so it's a better solution.
I wish Apple still controlled the education market, and to a large degree, they still do. Schools keep their computers for years, but the new generation of educational PCs won't be stamped with my much-beloved Apple logo. For now Apple is still riding out their honeymoon with schools, but shortsighted thinking and short-term economics may make that a thing of the past.
when OSX stopped working on my iMac about nine months ago. I found out later that it was a problem with X not working on my model of iMac. I enjoyed X while I had it, but I've been using 9.1 ever since then. Now I'm contemplating purchasing either a big external hard drive or an eMac, but I can't think of anything I could do under X that I cannot do under 9, so I'm probably just going to stick with 9 and get that hard drive. X is nice, and it's more stable than 9, but I'm in college and most of what I do is check my email, write papers, and surf the internet. I don't need a G4 and OSX to do that.
I used to go out of my way to use Netscape. Problem was, Explorer was just better, faster, and more widely-supported. Most of all, it wasn't bloated. When Netscape 6 came out, they lost any chance at competing, and moreover, showed that they just didn't care anymore about putting out a competitive browser. Netscape 7 will be more of the same: bloated, slow, and *still* not as good of CSS support at Explorer. Sorry Netscape, you lose.
At the risk of a few karma points...
seriously, a porta-potty with internet access? Come on. It was one of those things that's just too ridiculous to believe from the start.
the widescreen format is inferior to pan-and-scan. I run the movie department of a local grocery store and most people don't understand the concept of "those black bars at the top and bottom." I used to get frustrated and try to explain to them that they are really seeing the whole movie, but it looks smaller on their TV, so the average person doesn't want it. I've been buying widescreen movies since they were available on VHS, and I can remember watching many of them on my 13" TV. That's not to say everyone can do it, though. Most people just want to watch a movie, and don't care about the trees on the side of the scene that get cut out in pan and scan format.
Anymore, I just explain the differences to my customers but let them discover on their own which format they prefer. I can understand the reasons behind choosing pan and scan, even though I know it means you have to effectively miss out on half of the movie.
Spoilers like this are ruining everything these days. The worst was when pictures, trailers, and cereal boxes announced the return of Gandalf in The Two Towers. Yes I'd read the book several times, but for all those who hadn't, they had a year of waiting ruined by looking at a box of candy.
I don't even read the back of books anymore. I was nearly finished with the second Harry Potter book when I finally read the back cover and found out exactly who had opened the Chamber of Secrets fifty years ago.
I appreciate what Siracusa is trying to do, but I think he's missing the forest for the trees. His explanations of a spatial finder is nice, and it's obvious he has the experience to back up his claims about a proper finder being spatially oriented. However, I think his solutions are rather weak. It's easy to complain, but a finder that uses an iTunes-like browser? A middle-man dock-like station for files when moving them? These may be spatially pleasing, but they are certainly not intuitive, and intuitive interface (not a spatial interface, as Siracusa claims) has always been the hallmark of the Mac OS.
It's true that the OSX Finder does have its share of problems, but it's getting better, and will only improve with time. Does he honestly think Apple forgot about their own inventions like pop-up folders and the ability to change font sizes? I agree, these things are missed (as is my favorite, the application menu. Why, Apple, why?) but I think I see the point that Apple is trying to make in all of this: OSX should be intuitive for the new user, and simple for the new user to operate, while at the same time maintaining an unprecedented level of control and functionality for the power user. It succeeds admirably at both.
Perhaps new users would understand the Finder better if it were more spatially oriented, but it is still very easy to use in its current form. And the Mac faithful? The millions of fans like who have been loyalists since the days of the 512? We know there's problems but we also see what Apple is trying to do, and that's survive in a very competitive market. Because the OSX Finder is suitable for novices, longtime users, and power users, I'm willing to forgive its inconsistencies and annoyances at the expense of the greater cause, which is to keep Apple alive in the first place.
...doesn't anyone remember the original Men in Black? Compact Discs the size of a fingernail! Probably not R/W media like CF, but still pretty dang cool.
I guess it means I'll have to buy the White Album again
-Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones)
While I used to enjoy the Oscars, I think they are quickly losing their relevance. Ever since Titanic won all sorts of awards back in 1997 it's been more or less evident that the Oscars are little more than a popularity contest. If this ceremony were held two months ago, which movie would have walked away with the awards? My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Here we have another underdog, Chicago, which Miramax sent out on limited release to generate lots of positive buzz, and has since carefully expanded the number of locations in which it is playing. Chicago gets fabulous word of mouth and ends up walking away with Best Picture. Fine, so lots of the voters like this movie and musicals are making a comeback. But best costume design? Best editing? The movie may be good, but certainly it doesn't deserve these. Of the hundreds of movies released last year, and of the few dozen which were truly good, does one movie deserve to win these coveted awards just because it's popular right now?
When movies start picking up several oscars, it's just a sign of that movie's popularity at the moment. The voters get all carried away with one movie and it ends up sweeping the whole show. Ridiculous.
Ok, perhaps I'm just jaded because of the movies that *didn't* win, like Two Towers for Best Editing or Episode II for Best Costume, Sound, Editing, or something. But I agree, (in order to keep this post on-topic), Spirited Away was definitely the best animated feature of the year. But what about the rest? Treasure Island, anyone?