I have a few domains of my ownsome, but I don't host them on my own. It isn't worth the trouble of making sure I always have a computer on and that it's always accessible from the outside world. I pay for a decent IMAP+webmail service instead (there's plenty of ways I could've got IMAP for free on my domain, but none were as good as what I get by paying for it).
I might host my own webpage, which is relatively unimportant (in fact, the real version's been down for a few weeks now...), but I wouldn't host my own email.
That would really suck, since I've been using that email address for 10 years.
Yahoo! does free POP access and forwarding. You can keep using it, without the cruft. I used to use this until they started filtering mail into the bulk folder on a random basis, but I had too much spam to be able to get by without a filter.
After a period of time (tree months? ninety days?) of going unchecked, Yahoo! Mail accounts stop receiving new mail and need to be reactivated. At least, that's happened to mine a few times... (It, too, is spammed to death, and Yahoo!'s antispam mechanisms are worse than nothing.)
I've only fired up Konqueror a few times, and that was to try out "fish:" to access the filesystem of a Zaurus (which is a pretty neat feature of Konqueror that, AFAIK, isn't found anywhere else).
I'm pretty sure it's a feature of KDE; and anyone who's using Linux can get a similar effect by using fuse and sshfs. When you do it at the filesystem level, you get the benefits of fully transparent ssh mounting on all your programs, even zsh (or whatever your favorite shell is).
Hah! Yeah, I did Italian for eight years at school (because I had to), and never learnt anything (and no-one else did, either). Though that was only a second language:) How well you learn a language is proportional to how useful you think it'll be...
"Options" aren't necessarily "configuration options", I suppose. For instance, I just counted up the number of menu items in the Gnome and KDE webbrowsers (respectively, Epiphany and Konqueror). Epiphany has 53 options in seven menus, whereas Konqueror has 105 options in nine menus. Of those, Epiphany has seven that I would count as configuration-related (settings dialogs, showing/hiding UI elements); whereas Konqueror has 22 such menu items—an entire (large) menu full!
Worse still (from the perspective of someone who just wants their computer to work, without having to learn or teach it), Konqueror has at least fourteen items which I can't see how they're related to web-browsing (like "Move to trash"); they're mostly disabled. By contrast, every single one of Epiphany's options are related to web browsing. Now: You might say this is unfair, because Konqueror does two things (manage files and view websites) but Epiphany only does one (view websites), but from my perspective, and very likely from a technophobe's perspective, this does matter, and fewer is better.
In neither count did I include variable menu items related to subwindows, bookmarks, document encodings or the like. (I'm not so experienced with KDE, so I might've miscounted when I include the profiles; in which case the values are 99 items in nine menus, 16 config-related.)
I don't mean this by way of criticising KDE or you for your choice; I mean it to help you understand what your GP is referring to. I can definitely understand what your GP is referring to, and I'm not surprised that superbrose's mother finds Gnome easier than KDE.
I currently use Debian on my desktop; I used to use FreeBSD. Given that both of these are aimed at being general purpose operating systems, whereas OpenBSD is at least perceived as being primarily a firewall/server operating system, why would you choose to use OpenBSD on your desktop instead of something more general purpose? What advantages and limitations does it have over GNU/Linux distributions or FreeBSD as a desktop? Is it something along the lines of you know it from your firewall so you'll use it on your desktop, or do you feel it's independently the best OS for the job?
(I use Debian GNU/Linux largely for hardware support; at least at the time I installed it, no BSD supported my PPC64. That's probably changed, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it eh?)
My desktop is a PowerPC with an nVidia card so it can't use buggy proprietary drivers; my laptop has Intel graphics so I could get well-supported free drivers. Would that it were simple as that.
(The latest Ubuntu Feisty beta seems to work on my laptop a lot better, though.)
Um. I'm a little confused. Did you misunderstand what I mean when I said "quotation marks"? (or just passed over the second word, probably). I was referring, of course, to these things: “” or ‘’ versus the angle brackets French uses or the things something like,,“ Germans use.
Not even the most pretentious Anglophones use them in their own writings; and you only very occasionally see Germans or French speakers use their own quotes when writing in English.
If on the other hand you did know exactly what I meant, I have absolutely no idea why it would be "unfortunate". English punctuation is different from French or German: Just like English spelling is different from French or German. (If you need a different example, french writers seem to have an aversion to capital letters, even on wednesdays; whereas german Writers like capital Letters a little too much.)
Not all locales use the period as the decimal indicator. Europe uses the comma...
Simple solution: When writing in French or German, use a comma. When writing in English, use a dot. You wouldn't use German or French quotation marks when writing in English would you?
Out of curiosity, were you leaving it at the bottom of the screen?
I have tried locking it to the bottom-left corner of the screen, going along the left. This helped, but my problems with Mac OS X's user interface were more extensive than just the Dock, so it hasn't stopped me running Debian on Apple hardware, and won't. (The problem with this is that it means only the trash is in a constant place; better still than having nothing in a constant place as per default, but I would like it better if the Dock was only for launching applications, not for everything.)
I love OS X and am actually pretty fond of the Dock, but for the life of me I can't figure out why Apple uses such a horrible default configuration.
It looks better. Even though (because?) it's less intrusive along the side, it doesn't have that nice symmetrical photogenic look Apple uses to sell.
If your laptop does not work, you need to get your money back. Take it back and tell them why. Better yet, test it before you buy it. Don't buy things that waste your time.
Serious question: How do you get a laptop reseller to let you install Linux on a laptop to try before you buy? Or alternatively, How do you test all hardware (including hibernate) with a live cd? Hibernate at least needs to write to a swap partition which needs repartioning... I'd love my next laptop to be a walk in the park, but I've never had much luck...
How about for those plenty of us for whom hibernate under GNU/Linux simply doesn't work? On my laptop it works about one in three times depending on the phase of the moon; on my desktop it never works. (This is irritating, because there's some program—probably soundcard driver—on my desktop which is buggy and causes the computer to hang for five minutes or until I press Ctrl-C during boot. I'd kill to get around that.)
Speaking as a frequent Mac user, I can see the concerns people have been getting at in this thread, but I find most of them are manageable. In exchange, I get a system that I don't have to become an OS expert to setup and manage (I don't want to spend my time that way anymore),
I don't either; but I did most of the work on my environment years ago. It takes me a bit to set up a new computer because I have to install programs and get all the damn hardware to work with Linux (a task I desparately wish was a thing of the past), but once there, I have a computer that knows how I like to work. I've found the once-per-computer cost well worth the payoff.
I tried switching to the Mac precisely because I thought being able to have a unix without having to worry about making the computer work would be a treat... but I'd have to deal with the Mac's UI every day if I'm running a Mac...
I'm surprised that setting preferences would be among the most common menu actions for so many people. Sounds like a lot of tinkering.
I used that as an example to show that the fact that there's the applications name in the menubar doesn't help me. I mean, obviously if I get into the wrong application's preferences menu, I've click the wrong application's name; but the way I operate, I don't really care about the application's name, so I just click on the big bold thing up near the apple.
But anyway, for most common actions on the Mac (including preferences), there are standard keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not really interested in using keyboard shortcuts. I've generally found directly using menus (especially context menus) to be a lot faster in the early stages than trying to memorise the keyboard shortcut. Then there's that research by Tog that suggests that even once you're experienced, using menus is still faster... Even for copy/paste I tend to use the mouse (altho, I'm much more comfortable with X11's PRIMARY selection copy/paste method, so that's a big part of why I use the mouse for such ops in other environments).
OTOH, my normal text editor is (G)VIM. Go figure.
One thing I would like is an intuitive keyboard-based window-switcher instead of application-switcher
Indeed; the Mac's application-centric environment (which can summarise most of my problems with the menubar/dock/window behavior) is completely contrary to my preferred way of working and thinking, which is window/task centric. I find it hard to believe that anyone could like the Mac way, especially the people who need easy-to-use systems like Apple's usually marketing at, but obviously people do. To each his own.
The point being, you need right-click much more if the interface is designed to use it, and Macs work fine most of the time without it (and that may be why Apple doesn't build in a right-click button -- so developers won't force people to use it).
Even the Finder has at least one feature you can only access via the context menu. Of course, considering you know that the right-click menu is meant to be a second-class citizen on the Mac, if you know the feature is there somewhere but not where, you won't find it! (It is a relatively technical option—looking inside an application—but I don't see why that's an excuse.)
(On GNU/Linux, I run the ROX desktop, apps for which eschew window menu bars in favor of exclusively using context menus. The command to looking inside an application is obviously on a context menu... but then so is everything!;)
As for starting applications, I assume that was a reply to mackyrae. I don't start applications often, so either the Mac everythings-in-a-folder way or the Windows use-a-menu way work fine for me; ROX encourages the Mac way so it's what I use and I probably don't open my ~/apps folder most weeks. But I tend to have programs like my music player, email client and web browser set to start automatically; and for everything else I find the file I want to open in the file manager or terminal, and open it. Almost any operating system supports this mode at least as easily as a find-an-app-start-the-app mode.
I don't know what Linux copycats do, but on the Mac the dock is only as wide as it needs to be, but:
It sits in the middle of the screen (reducing your ability to use the surrounding space)
even if there's space, you can't resize a window to take it up. So you just get this empty desktop space. Too small to do anything with it. But you can't get a few extra vertical lines in your short screen, even though you want it!
It's possible to get around both problems: The first using a command-line utility, and the second by moving a window down so it's occupying the space, then resizing it to take up some more, then moving the window back up being careful not to touch the menu bar (or else the window resizes), and then resizing the window down a bit more. But neither of them are easy. If I ever meet Steve Jobs, I will beat him to a bloody pulp for this stupid unusable piece of shit. At least the NeXTSTEP equivalents of both the menubar and the dock were vertical down the sides, so this precious vertical space is still available!
Most Linux panels I've used are either full width, or they're just an always-on-top window. I've never tried to play with any specifically Dock copycats because I dislike it:) I can't imagine it's possible for Linux Dock copycats to be quite as evil as the Mac Dock.
(Me? I use the ROX Panel, which has an auto-raise functionality activated in similar situations as the Windows taskbar/Dock's autohide, except that if it's not or partially covered... the rest is still visible!)
Hey, I remember that recording! It was the audio card driver test for Red Hat 5.1 (or whatever the first distro I had that supported my sound card was).
Any case, to my ears it sounds like "lin-ooks". Which is precisely the reason there's a debate in the first place: Some people hear the vowel as long ee (because it's more like ee in their English), and others here the vowel as short i (because it's more like short i in our English).
But like the author's page, I also pronounce Linux to rhyme with "cynics". I don't see myself as particularly cynical to do so; it's just that it's the obvious anglicisation of his pronounciation...
I find it highly counter-intuitive that the application on the right will have its menus at the top of the screen, above the other app!
Worse still, the menu for an app running on your secondary screen is on the primary screen! It can be a mile away, and if you're like me and have a laptop with a small screen (i.e. something moved around frequently) and a large external monitor, it can be very difficult working out where you need to exit the screen to get to the menu. You mention it but I just have to re-iterate how hard the menu makes multi-tasking. I usually switch between windows/apps frequently; on my computer, I just move my mouse (and I can access the menu trivially), but with a Mac you need to keep remembering to switch windows before you do something in the menu. (I can't count the number of times I've got really confused because I've wound up in the preferences dialog for the wrong program.)
(I also find the dock very irritating; on a small screen, the fixed menu and dock make a wide screen even shorter because the entire space next to the dock, no matter how much, can't be used without a very contorted moving/resizing process. The dock also has a nasty habit of grouping currently running and not-running apps, and documents with minimised windows and the trash (of all things).)
The Mac: I've given it a chance. I even gave it a second chance. But they weren't made for me. That's why this box is also known as Linux imac 2.6.18-4-powerpc64 #1 SMP Wed Feb 21 13:52:06 CET 2007 ppc64 GNU/Linux.
If it weren't for Firefox, it's likely there simply wouldn't be a good browser AT ALL on Linux.
Galeon and Epiphany are good browsers; I think they (particularly Epiphany -- I love Galeon already;) would be better without Firefox sapping development resources for things that can't be good.
The Mozilla rendering engine was great before Firefox, and remains great (although the version in Debian and Ubuntu that're based on Firefox are unusable on my computers, but that's another issue...). Please understand: I in no way wish to criticise the Firefox rendering engine, which is the necessarily complex part of Firefox. The KHTML rendering engine is also pretty good (good enough for Apple!), and if you're that way inclined you might even like Konqueror (altho, as I say, I prefer GTK+ to Qt as a user).
So I think it's clear that without Firefox there would be great browsers for GNU/Linux: Firefox is a relatively recent browser!
As to the multiplicity of desktop environments, in practical use, you only have two considerations: KDE/Qt and Gtk. A Gnome app behaves basically the same under ROX or Xfce as under Gnome (there's some minor differences, like the design of options dialog boxes; but the widgets all look and feel right). Gnome and KDE manage to exist largely independently of each other already -- at least, I manage to get buy without using KDE apps, and KDE folk are the same. It's only a handful of apps developed as cross-platform that get used by both, like Firefox and OpenOffice anyway; and average (or better) alternatives exist even to those.
(People who use AfterStep and other window managers usually either have a desktop environment based on GTK (Gnome/ROX/Xfce) or KDE, or don't give a toss and mix and match whatever.)
Anyway: I re-iterate: This is not about looks; it's about the feel. I don't use my GTK because I love my theme; I use my theme because I love my GTK. Every problem I've had with Firefox that can't be fixed with extensions has been precisely because of its cross-platform nature. You cannot write a crossplatform toolkit designed to emulate the native toolkit; a toolkit is a complex library with lots of nooks and crannies and behaviors that are unique to it, and which attract different users.
It's not just brilliant, it's obvious. Netscape 4 on Linux supported it way back when I first started using Linux (well, new window, but same diff). Probably it's been supported as far back as the first X web browser.
You're saying you don't want to run the apps because the make them write poorly written apps? Well, don't run them. Why is that so hard?
The existence of acceptible apps makes great apps dwindle and die. Firefox is an excellent: Although it has many great features, its cross-platform UI isn't one of them. It adopts my GTK+ and the standard Windows themes badly. Just about every user interface feature of GTK+ that has led me to choose to run a GTK+ desktop over a Windows, KDE or Cocoa one is missing. In general, it feels like a Windows app ported to Linux (less so now than in the past, but it's still there).
But the existence of Firefox means that we don't get great a web browser for Gnome. Galeon is EOLed, whereas Epiphany (like Firefox) needs dozens of plugins to be useful... only no-one's writing them. Galeon hasn't stagnated far enough that I can avoid running cross-platform programs with poorly adapted UIs. But at some point, I might have no choice...
Email clients are similar: If you like its style, there's Evolution. But otherwise, your only serious option on Gnome is Thunderbird. Thunderbird suffers from exactly the same problems as Firefox.
(WXWidgets apps tend to suffer from a similar problem: They use native widgets, but in a foreign way.)
And the way Flex works is that it is extremely themable.
Themability doesn't mean jack if the architecture simply isn't there to support my native widgets behaviors. I've never seen a cross-platform app that works on all its supported architectures; I very much doubt it's possible.
Anyway, it doesn't much matter; Apollo is probably never going to support minority OSes. They don't support GNU/Linux now, and Adobe don't even support Flash on Linux/ppc. Considering how easy it is to support Linux/ppc if you're already supporting Linux/x86, I very much doubt we'll be seeing Apollo for (native) NetBSD, let alone things like Zeta, eComStation, Risc OS, Menuet or Syllable.
Even if you use a good cross platform toolkit like Qt or wxWidgets, the apps are still not *identical*.
That's the point. I don't run GNU/Linux so I can pull out my hair trying to run Windows apps on a different platform; I run GNU/Linux so I can run apps that aren't even similar to Windows apps. Mac OS X users are the same.
If this goes any way towards making making GUIs even more consistent, I hope it crashes and burns. I'd rather have fewer better citizens than a lot of bad ones.
If we are looking at the phones themselves then this can't be the case.
Um... I know that most parts are in the same general area between people, but I was of the impression that there are still differences: The parts of my brain which are responsible for control of my left hand/tongue/etc will be in basically the same place, but might be relatively larger/smaller than for you. Am I wrong on this? Otherwise surely we'd need to have brains that are exactly the same.
there is the conscious knowledge of the sounds of speech--without which we would not be able to learn to read and write.
This I am even more dubious of. People have a conscious knowledge of syllables and rhythm, and we who've learnt to read and write and analyse phonetically and so forth have a conscious knowledge of the sounds of speech—but I remain unconvinced that knowledge of them is at all relevant to literacy and even to speech. For instance, I'm informed there's a Swedish dialect which distinguishes open and close e (Standard Swedish doesn't), but there's no indication of this in the orthography: Although speakers of this dialect produce and use this distinction, they're unaware of it. (I had a similar difficulty learning the distinction between voiced and voiceless th.)
Now subconciously there's obviously some means of recording the distinction, but again, I don't really know that phonemes enter into it...
I never completely bought OT, though that might be the result of who taught it to me, and the text she chose to teach from. I'm hard pressed to say that realized forms are the product of garbage going down the chute and getting sieved into grammatical constructions. If this is an unfair generalization please feel free to make a better generalization and make me a better informed individual on this matter.
Umm... Your analogy is apt. I don't know what I could say to change your opinion; you might make more concrete objections. For best results, present a viable alternative, if you know of one:)
I would love to keep going but now I have to put my children to bed.
On the internet, no-one cares (or knows) if you take half an hour (or half a day) longer to reply:)
for example : you may think "food" and immediately imagine a pizza so you would get "food pizza" instead of just "food" .
Or does it filter this out somehow ?
I assume we're looking at the parts of the brain responsible for producing speech/handwriting/touchtyping. So probably we're not going to get any more misspeaks than you would when talking to a friend anyway...
But there is a book by Michael(?) Brin about an anthropogenic blackhole in the Earth's centre that has similar computers with exactly the problem you describe; almost no-one uses them because it's very difficult to train yourself not to half-say things you don't want everyone watching you to see!
If we knew where each phoneme was stored in the brain and we could stimulate the computer via activity in this area all we would have to do is think about speaking the word. But things like allophones and the ranges of phonemes in different dialects would throw this off.
Where a phoneme is stored in the brain probably has nothing to do with allophones. Although that's relatively irrelevant because phonemes probably aren't stored in the brain anywhere. Certainly there's no indication that phonemes are a native part of our word storage mechanisms. For instance, on the one hand, syllables seem about as low-level as untrained people go; on the other, Optimality Theory (the state-of-the-art theory on such matters) predicts that words are stored in more-or-less their surface realisation, except where we can derive more information due to synchronic alternations. This means that the aspiration in "team" is just as important to the UR as the absence of it in "steam".
Now, obviously we might be able to extract the messages of the sort that would otherwise be going to the mouth and obtain entirely processed, but then phonemes are still irrelevant; we're looking at the phones themselves in all their post-processed glory. Should be *relatively* easy to find them by looking at the primary motor cortex just near Broca's area. Obviously this will be different for each person but I think at such a low level everything would be. In other words: Inter-dialectal differences probably pale in comparison to interpersonal differences.
In any case, your final conclusion is entirely correct. I however would suggest that we should train the operator as much as the computer. After all, I've learnt to use the same language things to talk, to handwrite and to touchtype on both qwerty and dvorak layouts. Why couldn't I adapt some part of my brain particularly to operate a "BCI"?
You can get confusion by using the serial comma, too: How many people are referred to in the phrase "I asked Tom, a baker, and John"? On the other hand, if the serial comma is forbidden, you have either "I asked Tom, a baker and John" (which is three) or "I asked Tom, a baker, and John" (which is identical to the ambiguous one, but unambiguously two).
In any case, if the simple exclusion of a comma could make such a great difference to what it means, you really should recast the sentence. (And actually, I would say that using "or" rather than "and" makes an interpretation of "you can't smoke, but you can eat and drink" wrong, regardless of the punctuation.)
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I have a few domains of my ownsome, but I don't host them on my own. It isn't worth the trouble of making sure I always have a computer on and that it's always accessible from the outside world. I pay for a decent IMAP+webmail service instead (there's plenty of ways I could've got IMAP for free on my domain, but none were as good as what I get by paying for it).
I might host my own webpage, which is relatively unimportant (in fact, the real version's been down for a few weeks now...), but I wouldn't host my own email.
That would really suck, since I've been using that email address for 10 years.
Yahoo! does free POP access and forwarding. You can keep using it, without the cruft. I used to use this until they started filtering mail into the bulk folder on a random basis, but I had too much spam to be able to get by without a filter.
After a period of time (tree months? ninety days?) of going unchecked, Yahoo! Mail accounts stop receiving new mail and need to be reactivated. At least, that's happened to mine a few times... (It, too, is spammed to death, and Yahoo!'s antispam mechanisms are worse than nothing.)
I've only fired up Konqueror a few times, and that was to try out "fish:" to access the filesystem of a Zaurus (which is a pretty neat feature of Konqueror that, AFAIK, isn't found anywhere else).
I'm pretty sure it's a feature of KDE; and anyone who's using Linux can get a similar effect by using fuse and sshfs. When you do it at the filesystem level, you get the benefits of fully transparent ssh mounting on all your programs, even zsh (or whatever your favorite shell is).
Hah! Yeah, I did Italian for eight years at school (because I had to), and never learnt anything (and no-one else did, either). Though that was only a second language :) How well you learn a language is proportional to how useful you think it'll be...
"Options" aren't necessarily "configuration options", I suppose. For instance, I just counted up the number of menu items in the Gnome and KDE webbrowsers (respectively, Epiphany and Konqueror). Epiphany has 53 options in seven menus, whereas Konqueror has 105 options in nine menus. Of those, Epiphany has seven that I would count as configuration-related (settings dialogs, showing/hiding UI elements); whereas Konqueror has 22 such menu items—an entire (large) menu full!
Worse still (from the perspective of someone who just wants their computer to work, without having to learn or teach it), Konqueror has at least fourteen items which I can't see how they're related to web-browsing (like "Move to trash"); they're mostly disabled. By contrast, every single one of Epiphany's options are related to web browsing. Now: You might say this is unfair, because Konqueror does two things (manage files and view websites) but Epiphany only does one (view websites), but from my perspective, and very likely from a technophobe's perspective, this does matter, and fewer is better.
In neither count did I include variable menu items related to subwindows, bookmarks, document encodings or the like. (I'm not so experienced with KDE, so I might've miscounted when I include the profiles; in which case the values are 99 items in nine menus, 16 config-related.)
I don't mean this by way of criticising KDE or you for your choice; I mean it to help you understand what your GP is referring to. I can definitely understand what your GP is referring to, and I'm not surprised that superbrose's mother finds Gnome easier than KDE.
I currently use Debian on my desktop; I used to use FreeBSD. Given that both of these are aimed at being general purpose operating systems, whereas OpenBSD is at least perceived as being primarily a firewall/server operating system, why would you choose to use OpenBSD on your desktop instead of something more general purpose? What advantages and limitations does it have over GNU/Linux distributions or FreeBSD as a desktop? Is it something along the lines of you know it from your firewall so you'll use it on your desktop, or do you feel it's independently the best OS for the job?
(I use Debian GNU/Linux largely for hardware support; at least at the time I installed it, no BSD supported my PPC64. That's probably changed, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it eh?)
My desktop is a PowerPC with an nVidia card so it can't use buggy proprietary drivers; my laptop has Intel graphics so I could get well-supported free drivers. Would that it were simple as that.
(The latest Ubuntu Feisty beta seems to work on my laptop a lot better, though.)
Um. I'm a little confused. Did you misunderstand what I mean when I said "quotation marks"? (or just passed over the second word, probably). I was referring, of course, to these things: “” or ‘’ versus the angle brackets French uses or the things something like ,,“ Germans use.
Not even the most pretentious Anglophones use them in their own writings; and you only very occasionally see Germans or French speakers use their own quotes when writing in English.
If on the other hand you did know exactly what I meant, I have absolutely no idea why it would be "unfortunate". English punctuation is different from French or German: Just like English spelling is different from French or German. (If you need a different example, french writers seem to have an aversion to capital letters, even on wednesdays; whereas german Writers like capital Letters a little too much.)
Not all locales use the period as the decimal indicator. Europe uses the comma ...
Simple solution: When writing in French or German, use a comma. When writing in English, use a dot. You wouldn't use German or French quotation marks when writing in English would you?
Out of curiosity, were you leaving it at the bottom of the screen?
I have tried locking it to the bottom-left corner of the screen, going along the left. This helped, but my problems with Mac OS X's user interface were more extensive than just the Dock, so it hasn't stopped me running Debian on Apple hardware, and won't. (The problem with this is that it means only the trash is in a constant place; better still than having nothing in a constant place as per default, but I would like it better if the Dock was only for launching applications, not for everything.)
I love OS X and am actually pretty fond of the Dock, but for the life of me I can't figure out why Apple uses such a horrible default configuration.
It looks better. Even though (because?) it's less intrusive along the side, it doesn't have that nice symmetrical photogenic look Apple uses to sell.
If your laptop does not work, you need to get your money back. Take it back and tell them why. Better yet, test it before you buy it. Don't buy things that waste your time.
Serious question: How do you get a laptop reseller to let you install Linux on a laptop to try before you buy? Or alternatively, How do you test all hardware (including hibernate) with a live cd? Hibernate at least needs to write to a swap partition which needs repartioning... I'd love my next laptop to be a walk in the park, but I've never had much luck...
How about for those plenty of us for whom hibernate under GNU/Linux simply doesn't work? On my laptop it works about one in three times depending on the phase of the moon; on my desktop it never works. (This is irritating, because there's some program—probably soundcard driver—on my desktop which is buggy and causes the computer to hang for five minutes or until I press Ctrl-C during boot. I'd kill to get around that.)
Speaking as a frequent Mac user, I can see the concerns people have been getting at in this thread, but I find most of them are manageable. In exchange, I get a system that I don't have to become an OS expert to setup and manage (I don't want to spend my time that way anymore),
... but I'd have to deal with the Mac's UI every day if I'm running a Mac...
... but then so is everything! ;)
I don't either; but I did most of the work on my environment years ago. It takes me a bit to set up a new computer because I have to install programs and get all the damn hardware to work with Linux (a task I desparately wish was a thing of the past), but once there, I have a computer that knows how I like to work. I've found the once-per-computer cost well worth the payoff.
I tried switching to the Mac precisely because I thought being able to have a unix without having to worry about making the computer work would be a treat
I'm surprised that setting preferences would be among the most common menu actions for so many people. Sounds like a lot of tinkering.
I used that as an example to show that the fact that there's the applications name in the menubar doesn't help me. I mean, obviously if I get into the wrong application's preferences menu, I've click the wrong application's name; but the way I operate, I don't really care about the application's name, so I just click on the big bold thing up near the apple.
But anyway, for most common actions on the Mac (including preferences), there are standard keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not really interested in using keyboard shortcuts. I've generally found directly using menus (especially context menus) to be a lot faster in the early stages than trying to memorise the keyboard shortcut. Then there's that research by Tog that suggests that even once you're experienced, using menus is still faster... Even for copy/paste I tend to use the mouse (altho, I'm much more comfortable with X11's PRIMARY selection copy/paste method, so that's a big part of why I use the mouse for such ops in other environments).
OTOH, my normal text editor is (G)VIM. Go figure.
One thing I would like is an intuitive keyboard-based window-switcher instead of application-switcher
Indeed; the Mac's application-centric environment (which can summarise most of my problems with the menubar/dock/window behavior) is completely contrary to my preferred way of working and thinking, which is window/task centric. I find it hard to believe that anyone could like the Mac way, especially the people who need easy-to-use systems like Apple's usually marketing at, but obviously people do. To each his own.
The point being, you need right-click much more if the interface is designed to use it, and Macs work fine most of the time without it (and that may be why Apple doesn't build in a right-click button -- so developers won't force people to use it).
Even the Finder has at least one feature you can only access via the context menu. Of course, considering you know that the right-click menu is meant to be a second-class citizen on the Mac, if you know the feature is there somewhere but not where, you won't find it! (It is a relatively technical option—looking inside an application—but I don't see why that's an excuse.)
(On GNU/Linux, I run the ROX desktop, apps for which eschew window menu bars in favor of exclusively using context menus. The command to looking inside an application is obviously on a context menu
As for starting applications, I assume that was a reply to mackyrae. I don't start applications often, so either the Mac everythings-in-a-folder way or the Windows use-a-menu way work fine for me; ROX encourages the Mac way so it's what I use and I probably don't open my ~/apps folder most weeks. But I tend to have programs like my music player, email client and web browser set to start automatically; and for everything else I find the file I want to open in the file manager or terminal, and open it. Almost any operating system supports this mode at least as easily as a find-an-app-start-the-app mode.
It's possible to get around both problems: The first using a command-line utility, and the second by moving a window down so it's occupying the space, then resizing it to take up some more, then moving the window back up being careful not to touch the menu bar (or else the window resizes), and then resizing the window down a bit more. But neither of them are easy. If I ever meet Steve Jobs, I will beat him to a bloody pulp for this stupid unusable piece of shit. At least the NeXTSTEP equivalents of both the menubar and the dock were vertical down the sides, so this precious vertical space is still available!
Most Linux panels I've used are either full width, or they're just an always-on-top window. I've never tried to play with any specifically Dock copycats because I dislike it
(Me? I use the ROX Panel, which has an auto-raise functionality activated in similar situations as the Windows taskbar/Dock's autohide, except that if it's not or partially covered
Hey, I remember that recording! It was the audio card driver test for Red Hat 5.1 (or whatever the first distro I had that supported my sound card was).
Any case, to my ears it sounds like "lin-ooks". Which is precisely the reason there's a debate in the first place: Some people hear the vowel as long ee (because it's more like ee in their English), and others here the vowel as short i (because it's more like short i in our English).
But like the author's page, I also pronounce Linux to rhyme with "cynics". I don't see myself as particularly cynical to do so; it's just that it's the obvious anglicisation of his pronounciation...
I find it highly counter-intuitive that the application on the right will have its menus at the top of the screen, above the other app!
Worse still, the menu for an app running on your secondary screen is on the primary screen! It can be a mile away, and if you're like me and have a laptop with a small screen (i.e. something moved around frequently) and a large external monitor, it can be very difficult working out where you need to exit the screen to get to the menu. You mention it but I just have to re-iterate how hard the menu makes multi-tasking. I usually switch between windows/apps frequently; on my computer, I just move my mouse (and I can access the menu trivially), but with a Mac you need to keep remembering to switch windows before you do something in the menu. (I can't count the number of times I've got really confused because I've wound up in the preferences dialog for the wrong program.)
(I also find the dock very irritating; on a small screen, the fixed menu and dock make a wide screen even shorter because the entire space next to the dock, no matter how much, can't be used without a very contorted moving/resizing process. The dock also has a nasty habit of grouping currently running and not-running apps, and documents with minimised windows and the trash (of all things).)
The Mac: I've given it a chance. I even gave it a second chance. But they weren't made for me. That's why this box is also known as Linux imac 2.6.18-4-powerpc64 #1 SMP Wed Feb 21 13:52:06 CET 2007 ppc64 GNU/Linux.
If it weren't for Firefox, it's likely there simply wouldn't be a good browser AT ALL on Linux.
Galeon and Epiphany are good browsers; I think they (particularly Epiphany -- I love Galeon already;) would be better without Firefox sapping development resources for things that can't be good.
The Mozilla rendering engine was great before Firefox, and remains great (although the version in Debian and Ubuntu that're based on Firefox are unusable on my computers, but that's another issue...). Please understand: I in no way wish to criticise the Firefox rendering engine, which is the necessarily complex part of Firefox. The KHTML rendering engine is also pretty good (good enough for Apple!), and if you're that way inclined you might even like Konqueror (altho, as I say, I prefer GTK+ to Qt as a user).
So I think it's clear that without Firefox there would be great browsers for GNU/Linux: Firefox is a relatively recent browser!
As to the multiplicity of desktop environments, in practical use, you only have two considerations: KDE/Qt and Gtk. A Gnome app behaves basically the same under ROX or Xfce as under Gnome (there's some minor differences, like the design of options dialog boxes; but the widgets all look and feel right). Gnome and KDE manage to exist largely independently of each other already -- at least, I manage to get buy without using KDE apps, and KDE folk are the same. It's only a handful of apps developed as cross-platform that get used by both, like Firefox and OpenOffice anyway; and average (or better) alternatives exist even to those.
(People who use AfterStep and other window managers usually either have a desktop environment based on GTK (Gnome/ROX/Xfce) or KDE, or don't give a toss and mix and match whatever.)
Anyway: I re-iterate: This is not about looks; it's about the feel. I don't use my GTK because I love my theme; I use my theme because I love my GTK. Every problem I've had with Firefox that can't be fixed with extensions has been precisely because of its cross-platform nature. You cannot write a crossplatform toolkit designed to emulate the native toolkit; a toolkit is a complex library with lots of nooks and crannies and behaviors that are unique to it, and which attract different users.
It's not just brilliant, it's obvious. Netscape 4 on Linux supported it way back when I first started using Linux (well, new window, but same diff). Probably it's been supported as far back as the first X web browser.
You're saying you don't want to run the apps because the make them write poorly written apps? Well, don't run them. Why is that so hard?
... only no-one's writing them. Galeon hasn't stagnated far enough that I can avoid running cross-platform programs with poorly adapted UIs. But at some point, I might have no choice...
The existence of acceptible apps makes great apps dwindle and die. Firefox is an excellent: Although it has many great features, its cross-platform UI isn't one of them. It adopts my GTK+ and the standard Windows themes badly. Just about every user interface feature of GTK+ that has led me to choose to run a GTK+ desktop over a Windows, KDE or Cocoa one is missing. In general, it feels like a Windows app ported to Linux (less so now than in the past, but it's still there).
But the existence of Firefox means that we don't get great a web browser for Gnome. Galeon is EOLed, whereas Epiphany (like Firefox) needs dozens of plugins to be useful
Email clients are similar: If you like its style, there's Evolution. But otherwise, your only serious option on Gnome is Thunderbird. Thunderbird suffers from exactly the same problems as Firefox.
(WXWidgets apps tend to suffer from a similar problem: They use native widgets, but in a foreign way.)
And the way Flex works is that it is extremely themable.
Themability doesn't mean jack if the architecture simply isn't there to support my native widgets behaviors. I've never seen a cross-platform app that works on all its supported architectures; I very much doubt it's possible.
Anyway, it doesn't much matter; Apollo is probably never going to support minority OSes. They don't support GNU/Linux now, and Adobe don't even support Flash on Linux/ppc. Considering how easy it is to support Linux/ppc if you're already supporting Linux/x86, I very much doubt we'll be seeing Apollo for (native) NetBSD, let alone things like Zeta, eComStation, Risc OS, Menuet or Syllable.
Even if you use a good cross platform toolkit like Qt or wxWidgets, the apps are still not *identical*.
That's the point. I don't run GNU/Linux so I can pull out my hair trying to run Windows apps on a different platform; I run GNU/Linux so I can run apps that aren't even similar to Windows apps. Mac OS X users are the same.
If this goes any way towards making making GUIs even more consistent, I hope it crashes and burns. I'd rather have fewer better citizens than a lot of bad ones.
If we are looking at the phones themselves then this can't be the case.
:)
:)
Um... I know that most parts are in the same general area between people, but I was of the impression that there are still differences: The parts of my brain which are responsible for control of my left hand/tongue/etc will be in basically the same place, but might be relatively larger/smaller than for you. Am I wrong on this? Otherwise surely we'd need to have brains that are exactly the same.
there is the conscious knowledge of the sounds of speech--without which we would not be able to learn to read and write.
This I am even more dubious of. People have a conscious knowledge of syllables and rhythm, and we who've learnt to read and write and analyse phonetically and so forth have a conscious knowledge of the sounds of speech—but I remain unconvinced that knowledge of them is at all relevant to literacy and even to speech. For instance, I'm informed there's a Swedish dialect which distinguishes open and close e (Standard Swedish doesn't), but there's no indication of this in the orthography: Although speakers of this dialect produce and use this distinction, they're unaware of it. (I had a similar difficulty learning the distinction between voiced and voiceless th.)
Now subconciously there's obviously some means of recording the distinction, but again, I don't really know that phonemes enter into it...
I never completely bought OT, though that might be the result of who taught it to me, and the text she chose to teach from. I'm hard pressed to say that realized forms are the product of garbage going down the chute and getting sieved into grammatical constructions. If this is an unfair generalization please feel free to make a better generalization and make me a better informed individual on this matter.
Umm... Your analogy is apt. I don't know what I could say to change your opinion; you might make more concrete objections. For best results, present a viable alternative, if you know of one
I would love to keep going but now I have to put my children to bed.
On the internet, no-one cares (or knows) if you take half an hour (or half a day) longer to reply
for example : you may think "food" and immediately imagine a pizza so you would get "food pizza" instead of just "food" .
Or does it filter this out somehow ?
I assume we're looking at the parts of the brain responsible for producing speech/handwriting/touchtyping. So probably we're not going to get any more misspeaks than you would when talking to a friend anyway...
But there is a book by Michael(?) Brin about an anthropogenic blackhole in the Earth's centre that has similar computers with exactly the problem you describe; almost no-one uses them because it's very difficult to train yourself not to half-say things you don't want everyone watching you to see!
If we knew where each phoneme was stored in the brain and we could stimulate the computer via activity in this area all we would have to do is think about speaking the word. But things like allophones and the ranges of phonemes in different dialects would throw this off.
Where a phoneme is stored in the brain probably has nothing to do with allophones. Although that's relatively irrelevant because phonemes probably aren't stored in the brain anywhere. Certainly there's no indication that phonemes are a native part of our word storage mechanisms. For instance, on the one hand, syllables seem about as low-level as untrained people go; on the other, Optimality Theory (the state-of-the-art theory on such matters) predicts that words are stored in more-or-less their surface realisation, except where we can derive more information due to synchronic alternations. This means that the aspiration in "team" is just as important to the UR as the absence of it in "steam".
Now, obviously we might be able to extract the messages of the sort that would otherwise be going to the mouth and obtain entirely processed, but then phonemes are still irrelevant; we're looking at the phones themselves in all their post-processed glory. Should be *relatively* easy to find them by looking at the primary motor cortex just near Broca's area. Obviously this will be different for each person but I think at such a low level everything would be. In other words: Inter-dialectal differences probably pale in comparison to interpersonal differences.
In any case, your final conclusion is entirely correct. I however would suggest that we should train the operator as much as the computer. After all, I've learnt to use the same language things to talk, to handwrite and to touchtype on both qwerty and dvorak layouts. Why couldn't I adapt some part of my brain particularly to operate a "BCI"?
You can get confusion by using the serial comma, too: How many people are referred to in the phrase "I asked Tom, a baker, and John"? On the other hand, if the serial comma is forbidden, you have either "I asked Tom, a baker and John" (which is three) or "I asked Tom, a baker, and John" (which is identical to the ambiguous one, but unambiguously two).
In any case, if the simple exclusion of a comma could make such a great difference to what it means, you really should recast the sentence. (And actually, I would say that using "or" rather than "and" makes an interpretation of "you can't smoke, but you can eat and drink" wrong, regardless of the punctuation.)