Now I have really never used OSX on a nice machine so I can't speak to how effortless it can be, I guess. But I have used it on a G3 and frankly I didn't find it any less effort than windows. Mind you I have antivirus software on my PC, and I keep it up to date, is that the hard part? The whole time I had macs, I had to do that same stuff. I've never had a PC wiped out by a virus that I know of, but I had plenty of trouble with them on macs. Disinfectant and Virex together finally saved me, but it was a real problem. I'm sure there's not problems like that on OSX, but the fact that users are used to entering the Administrator password to install shit means that they will probably be easily tricked into punching it in for anything. Oh no, not all of 'em, there's plenty of smart people (just with more money than me) using Macs. But, some of them. Possibly a percentage comparable to those people who open all their attachments.
Well, I don't "bleed 6 colors" as the saying goes. I didn't use Macs before OS X though I know enough about OS 9 to make it work properly and even to use it to do some system recovery. I started on the Mac with 10.1 and had been using primarly Linux at home. I started familiarising myself with OS X around January of 2002 and started porting my program to it around June of that year after putting the finishing touches on the Windows version, which I developed on a Linux machine with Win4Lin for testing.
From time to time I'd play around with the Mac a little bit. I started out just using it as an expensive radio (iTunes) and started working my way around it a bit. I made myself use it as it was intended to be used. I used the one-button mouse; I learned some of the keyboard shortcuts. I even compiled my program and tried out the Mac version just to see how much work was ahed of me. Note that I developed it with wxWindows and used autoconf and automake for my build system so moving to OS X was a breeze. The main problem was that wxMac was just not there yet.
I don't usually worry too much about viruses. As you mention, I'm required to enter an administrator password to do anything significant, even if I'm running as an administrator, which I don't but most Mac users do. Even for basic users I think there is at least some basic alarm that goes off when something asks for your password. Sure, some people will just blindly do anything but at least the people who have a functioning brain have a chance to stop a virus or other malware from entering their system.
Shortly after Jaguar was released I purchased a G4/500 for myself. Not as fast as the G4 DP/1GHz at work but it's enough. I just added some RAM bringing it up to 512 and the slowness is gone. It's still not suitable for compiling software but I have ssh access to the machine at work and rsync is very handy at shuttling files from one to the other.
To truly appreciate OS X I guess you need to be a little bit of a UNIX geek. But what also makes OS X great is that its easy to use for people of all skill levels. My mom had a Sony VAIO laptop running Windows XP (well, 2000 and then the free upgrade to XP). I did my best to make it run nicely. I made sure her account didn't have admin priviledges so she couldn't get viruses (and she didn't because she's smart and doesn't open attachments anyway). She was using the thumbnail and later the filmstrip view to manage her photos. I had a few other things on there.
I constantly got calls for help. She couldn't seem to remember how to do things. After I had been using Macs for a while I finally decided she should use one. The difference was clear. You don't have to really think to use a Mac. Once you've used one for a little bit of time the interface starts to become second nature. It's amazing when it finally happens and you just start using your computer without really thinking about how to do things. That is what makes the Mac a great experience. Sadly, you have to actually use a Mac for a couple of months bef
Ugh. The digital camera support pisses me off. Every time I insert a CD or other removeable media it asks me what I want to do. Why doesn't it just open up the root folder of the media and let me decide if I want to do something else.
Because you didn't tell it to do that? Right click on the drive in My Computer, choose Properties, and AutoPlay. Make all your default action selections in there.
Why should I have to? The only choice for removable media in OS X is to have it mount on the desktop and if it's a CD to automatically open a Finder window to its root directory. If it's a camera, iPhoto usually grabs it though Image Capture would be another choice for more advanced users.
Basically, I don't see why I need to be asked when it would be perfectly acceptable to pick some sane default. Sane default does not mean automatically run programs behind my back (i.e. CD-ROM Autorun).
Are you speaking of "thumbnail" view? Windows 2000 had that.
No, the Filmstrip view. All pictures are tumbnailed across one row on the bottom of a window. The rest of the window is the currently highlighted pictures scaled to fit with some control buttons. It's extremely fast and handy for dealing with lots of pictures.
Ah yes, now I remember. I will say I haven't seen an equivalent of this on Mac. iPhoto would be nice for this if only it didn't require you to put all your photos into your iPhoto library.
If Apple's smoothed fonts look "fine" to you, Cleartype would look spectacular. It's a much better text rendering engine and makes working on an LCD screen that much nicer.
I've used XP on laptops and OS X on laptops and honestly I haven't seen a clear difference.
As for the other things, XP isn't the first version of Windows to support inputting in other languages, it's just better than in the past. USB 2.0 isn't completely new, it's just supported without manufacturers' drivers. And brushing off stored system states? Any computer can be screwed by bad drivers, regarless of OS, XP simply provides you with a safety net.
Well, it's hard to be screwed by bad vendor drivers if you have so few of them. Apple supports out of the box just about anything you'd want to plug in to your computer. The only vendor drivers I have are for my Maxtor FW harddrive (because the standard Apple one is buggy unfortunately) and for my Sonica USB audio output. At work I don't think I have a single third party driver installed.
The argument here is that you can get Windows drivers for nearly any piece of hardware but I wonder if the $9.99 special is really worth the trouble. Even on a Windows machine I don't see the sense in buying off-brand hardware. Honestly, I've not had to use the roll back feature though I have had to recently boot a 2000 machine into safe mode to uninstall a bad video driver. The other thing is I've over the years acquired enough knowledge about Windows to know how to fix it without needing rollback. I acquired the equivalent knowledge for Linux and OS X in much less time simply because more information is out there.
You obviously love your Mac very much and have never used XP. I'm not telling you that you have to, but claiming there's nothing new from Windows 2000 is completely false. Many of the features are well worth the upgrade price to people who actually use Windows.
Hmm, I thought it was more obvious that I had used XP.:-) Certainly if you are locked in to Windows then the upgrade price is worth it but I've seen better desktop features coming from Linux distributions lately which is really saying something!
RE: iPod story, I decided against it and got a Zen Xtra. $250 for 40GB, uses standard power/data connectors, and does everything I need while I wait for the
By far the biggest advance is Remote Desktop access. Using that and a VPN connection gives our users the ability to work at home as if they were sitting at their office machine. It's worth the upgrade cost alone.
I just use VNC. It's free, easy to install, and clients are available for just about anything. On Mac there is the excellent Chicken of the VNC client. Still, I agree it's a nice feature done fairly well although VNC on Win32 works quite well enough for me.
Other updates include an actual built-in firewall,
Windows 2000 had a built in firewall, although it was pretty limited. XP has a slightly better interface. It's still not near as powerful as Linux's iptables or BSD's ipfw. For that you have to buy ISA.
nice digital camera wizards with better support for removable media, better generic video drivers,
Ugh. The digital camera support pisses me off. Every time I insert a CD or other removeable media it asks me what I want to do. Why doesn't it just open up the root folder of the media and let me decide if I want to do something else.
The generic video drivers are good, but it's just using the VESA BIOS, nothing really special although it helps when you don't have proper video drivers installed yet.
native USB 2.0 support,
Hmm, I got that in a minor update to OS 10.2. Kind of moot though since FireWire has been on Macs for years now.
a new film strip view for directories with photos in them,
Are you speaking of "thumbnail" view? Windows 2000 had that.
fast user switching in a non-domain environment,
Key: In a non-domain environment. It also doesn't work with Novell. What a pain! On my Mac I can fast user switch and still stay connected to my network resources. Same thing on my Linux machines. I find the fast user switching of XP to be inferior to that provided by other OS.
prettier icons, Cleartype (which is much nicer than Apple's attempt at it),
The pretty icons are nice and so are the clear fonts although I'm not really sure what you mean about Apple's attempt at it. It looks fine to me, although many Carbon apps unfortunately turn it off because their developers haven't modernized their drawing routines.
basic image capturing options, a network performance monitor in the Task Manager,
Network performance monitor is nice, and the basic image capturing is certainly another long overdue feature.
system state saves to allow roll-back in case of a bad install,
Yeah, and you'll need it too!;-)
and better support for inputting in other languages.
This is nice, something that the 10.1 to 10.2 and 10.2 to 10.3 upgrades also had. OS 10.2 was also the first version to support the native Hawaiian language.
That's just off the top of my head. XP is an actual upgrade from 2000, not just more of the same with a different look.
I guess I just don't find most of these very thrilling. Sure, some of them are upgrades compared to the previous version of Windows but most of them are still done better on Mac or even Linux. The last upgrade that excited me was Windows 2000 simply because it finally put the good things about Windows 9x onto the NT kernel (again, long long long overdue). XP is certainly an upgrade, but I paid for 2000 and I can't see spending money on XP especially now that I use a Mac for my primary computer and relegate my IBM compatibles to running Linux.
MS has just been piling on half-assed feature after feature and I don't see much being done to actually improve usability in any significant way. I'm no long time Mac user but I've thought for a while now that Microsoft software has not been improving very much and using a Mac has made me realize that using a computer should be effortless.
Oh, this is an iPod story: I have a second generation 20 GB. Ironically, I bought it AFTER having bought a Mac, not before.
Version numbers are major.minor (and after that there is some debate about what comes next; usually small or tiny, or small then tiny, and optionally teensy.)
I know perfectly well what version numbers are supposed to be, and like I said, Darwin does follow that version numbering scheme. However, OS X follows an Apple marketing scheme where everything is version 10 and minor version numbers are major upgrades. Sure, it's the opposite of what most other companies do and apparently some feeble minds do get confused because they feel that version numbers somehow indicate the amount of updates. Most companies will bump their version number sky high to trick people into thinking there are major uprades. Apple does exactly the opposite, they issue major updates with minor version number increments which apparently confuses some people.
As for windows updates being worth it; Windows 98 brought us a new filesystem, dramatically more stability, and so on. Windows NT4 gave us support for reasonably-sized volumes. Windows 2000 is clearly a worthy upgrade, it gives you (over NT4) USB, real plug and pray support, and so on. So I don't see how you could say that windows upgrades have been any less featureful than macos upgrades, and again we're talking major versions.
First of all, it was 95 OSR2 that brought FAT32, not Windows 98. Secondly, I expect my operating system to be stable. I find it appaling that I'm supposed to pay for an upgrade to enhance stability. Apparently you think it's a worthy expense! NT 4 was certainly leaps and bounds ahead of 3.51 but there's no reason MS couldn't have made a patch to 3.51 to support larger volumes. It seems MS is always lagging behind the current hardware. Another example of that is NT 4's lack of USB, Plug and Play, and even power management! At least MS did alllow some manufacturers to ship an NT 4 with a power management add-on. All of those features were fairly common when NT 4 was released and yet MS expected you to pay to upgrade to 2000 just to get those features?
So far you haven't listed a single new feature. Sure, you've got some better hardware support and stability but I don't think I should have to pay for that!
If they are major upgrades, increment the major revision. If they aren't (I've used 10.1 and 10.2 and they seemed like basically the same thing to me, I haven't used 10.3 but it adds what primarily, a new rendering engine? So maybe it should be 11 but I don't really think so.) So regardless, they are minor upgrades, and you have to pay for them. I find that annoying.
What difference does the version number make? It's a number, get over it. It's not as if there is some real standard for them anyway. There are several different standards to choose from. Hell, Solaris is still technically on version 2.x and has been for years except Sun simply dropped the 2. and just started calling them 7, 8, 9 instead of 2.7, 2.8, 2.9. Apple is simply doing the opposite.
10.2 was a major improvement upon 10.1. First and foremost, it was faster than its predecessor (gee, imagine that). It also had an updated sherlock, a much improved Mail application, a calendar, address book, updated iTunes, more UNIX utilities, iChat (probably the nicest AIM client out there), and many, many more.
Panther brought even more speed improvements, an improved Finder with a sidebar, improved open and save dialogs, much better Windows file server browsing, faxing, not to mention Safari and X11, which were even available in prerelease state for 10.2 customers.
What did Windows XP give you over 2000? Faster boot up time, slower overall, a ghastly default theme, an improved start menu (the XP menu really is nicer), a file browser that hides even more detail from you making it damn near impossible to admin a windows machine without changing 6 options from their default values, a Media player that looks like a cross between QuickTime, iTunes, and a chicken that just got run over by a semi while trying to cross the road, an e-mail client (Outlook Express) that hasn't been updated significantly since the Windows 98 days and still barely passes the minimum requirements to be called an e-mail client. Did I miss anything?
I have no idea why you think 10.1 to 10.2 or 10.2 to 10.3 are minor upgrades. They are major upgrades. In fact, the Darwin core is even updated. For instance, 10.2.x is Darwin 6.x, but 10.3.x is Darwin 7.x. All of the OS Ten releases have the same "major" version number so that you don't have to go around saying "OS Eleven."
And of course, minor updates are free. I didn't pay a cent to upgrade my 10.2.0 to 10.2.8 and I didn't pay a cent to upgrade my 10.3.0 to 10.3.3. Furthermore, I actually got a few new features even within those minor upgrades.
Yeah, I pay for an updated OS about once a year, but so what. Every year I am treated with so many new featues that the meager $129 price tag is well worth it. I can't remember the last time I thought that paying for a Windows upgrade was money well spent, and I've been a Mac user for a shorter time than that.
It doesn't have many developers but it's just as well since although hoards of developers have made not one but two half-assed clones of Windows the small number of developers working on GNUstep are nearly finished implementing OpenStep true to specifications.
What's exciting about GNUstep is that Cocoa is also an implementation of OpenStep with some additions. With a little spit and polish GNUstep running on Linux would make a great clone of OS X.
However, OS X is not all about the GUI. OS X also has some kernel facilities and user tools to go with it which make the OS more suitable for desktop use. For one thing, Apple has a devfs so devices show up in a sane manner and there are no extraneous entries. There is also the automounter and associated tools (comamnd line and GUI) to go with it.
Probably the most important thing about OS X that should be brought to Linux is the BSD style of an administrators group. On OS X you can have multiple admin level accounts which can sudo things as root. The root account doesn't even have a password and is entirely disabled. This makes it easier for joe user. Joe can run as an "administrator" which is actualy a fairly unpriviledged account which can gain access only if Joe enters his own password. That makes one less password for Joe to remember and prevents Joe from just giving up and running as root all the time.
At least ESPN doesn't have Dick Vitale jump out at me during a broadcast saying, "Call your satellite operator and keep us on your channel lineup, baby!"
Oh, but they do! They have been running ads on the radio (106.9 The Fox) telling people to call Cox cable and complain because Cox was supposedly going to make ESPN an a la carte instead of part of a package. Oh the humanity of not having everyone subsidize the viewing habits of those who want to watch ESPN.
If you ever visit the Coca Cola offices in Atlanta you'll learn that there were in fact several knockoffs including various permutations of "Koka Kola." I don't think Coca Cola was successful in suing any of these companies though they did succeed in beating them in marketing since the public rightly consdered them cheap knockoffs.
One thing that most people completely ignore about OS X's file renaming is that even if the file is name is selected for editing you can still do pretty much anything with it. You can drag it (by its icon) anywhere, you can Command+Delete it, and so on.
About the only thing you can't do is cut/copy/paste because those actions are context sensitive and so operate on the text instead of the file. Of course, no respectable Mac user ever actually uses Cut/Copy/Paste on files.
In any case, compare the Mac OS X behavior with the windows behavior. You click once (on a files icon or text) to activate the file, THEN you can click on the text to rename it and better hope you didn't click too fast or else you open the file. When you do get into renaming mode if you try to drag the file anywhere it interprets the mouse down on the icon as "end rename" and totally eats it so now you have to release and click on it again. The bad thing about this is that it has apparently trained people to think that entering into rename mode "accidently" is a bad thing when on a Mac it really doesn't matter and the best course of action is to simply ignore the fact that the label text just highlighted because it really doesn't make any difference.
Boy, chill out. Go ahead and put the original poster and me on your foes list because clearly you won't want to ever read anything I say. Way to post your flaming message as an anonymous coward.
So the OP made a mistake. When I read the slashdot article I too thought that the court had okayed voluntary video monitoring. What I didn't realize until I was halfway through the Lessig article was that the court okayed required video monitoring.
Don't send a flaming message when it was a simple mistake easily made by anyone who just read the slashdot article and didn't bother to read the two very lengthy articles which slashdot linked to.
I agree the cyber cafe owners have the right to install video monitors. But unfortunately the slashdot story got it wrong. The court actually said it's okay for the city to require that they install monitors. Had to read towards the bottom of the Lessig article to actually find that.
I cannot agree with the opinion that the city should require this. I would hope that all the cyber cafes who were having gang trouble would do what's in the best interests of the community and consider video monitoring as a possible way to deter gang activity.
It's important to note that only a handful of the 22 cybercafes had gang problems and so I don't think it's right to force the owners of all the cybercafes to pay for video monitoring. Furthermore, a shop that doesn't have video monitoring may decide instead to spend that money on more security guards which in my opinion would be a lot more useful. This is not an issue for the city to decide.
One thing I've always disliked about Apple is (sadly) the Apple community. They're more rabid than Linux fanatics and more clueless to boot. I have listened to various Apple-fanatics defending cooperative multitasking, lack of protected memory, benefits of RAM Doubler,
any justification at all for forked filesystems, etc. It always boggles my mind that they can talk about how much more "productive" they are because of 2-second savings in changing focus, but they suddenly go quiet when they have to wait 5 minutes during a reboot because their computer crashed. Thankfully MacOSX has fixed the foundational problems with MacOS.
(emphasis added)
I cannot justify anything else on your list but I can say having come to OS X and having used OS/2 in the past I can say with absolute certainty that file systems which store additional metadata are indeed a GOOD thing.
I rather enjoy that when I write a file no matter what I name it it will still be identifiable to the GUI as a particular type of file created by a particular application. Note that HFS+ actually has THREE forks. The main is of course the data fork and I strongly believe that all data belogns in it. The second is the resource fork which I also strongly believe should go the way of the dodo. However, the third is where type and creator information as well as a few handy bits of info are stored. This fork is really vital to a properly functioning GUI. If implemented properly (as it is in OS X) a file can be completely stripped of it and make it across the network with all file data intact. However, when on a local system (or network) the meta data that the GUI stores really adds to the user experience.
No, actually you didn't point out any facts. All you did was repeat the "common wisdom" that Macs are more proprietary than anything else.
I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to back up your arguments with hard facts and knowledge of the Mac platform then you will be modded down by people who are knowledgeable about the Mac platform and it will be because your arguments were bad and not because we have anything against PC users and are Mac fanboys
In short: your writing sucks, it's a troll, you'll get modded up by people who don't have a clue about Mac because bashing Macs makes them feel good just like it makes you feel good. And you'll get modded back down to a normal level by the people who do have a clue about Macs because none of your posts have been worth anything but the default score.
To the moderators: If you don't have a clue about Macs (liket his poster obviously doesn't) then don't moderate him one way or the other just to blow some points.
To the meta-moderators: If you don't have a clue about Macs then realize that this guy doesn't either and his opinion really doesn't matter enough to deserve any higher or lower moderation. This will be one of those posts that gets modded up and down so just leave the radio button in the middle and don't vote on the moderations one way or the other.
The way the supossedly open minded free speech Mac people have reacted to this post is tragic.
Oh for god's sake. You spread half-truths and then when someone points out the real facts you basically say what amounts to "Yeah, that's what I meant" and then add a quip inferring that Mac users are trampling on your free speech rights by exercising ours.
Nice moderated up to 4 troll. If you actually knew anything about a Mac (like, oh, say did some programming on one) you might understand that Apple hardware and software is not closed and never has been.
People run OS X on non-Mac PPC machines all the time (even though the license forbids it) and plenty of people run Linux on Macs. Apple provides all of the specifications that people need, including specifications for unique things like the G5 fan controllers. Macs (along with Sun and a lot of other UNIX vendors) have used Open Firmware for years now which makes booting any OS a lot easier than on an x86 PC.
Then again, this is Slashdot so unfounded hearsay is the norm.:-(
It is a lot of trouble which is why mom now has a PowerBook.:-) Still, I have to applaud her for actually using Windows successfully for a number of years. I never had to deal with viruses but now I sort of deal with the opposite. What, you mean I can open e-mail without getting a virus?
It's not just lack of viruses for Mac OS X or Linux but a whole different way of thinking. OS X's Mail.app can be easily configured to not load images thereby thrwarting spammers attempts at web bugs in HTML emails. It does not automatically run any attachments and you always are able to see the full extension of the file (no my.jpg.exe like in Outbreak Express).
At work I help manage a Netware network with Windows 98, 2000, and XP clients. I also work as a programmer (completely unrelated to IT). I first came across Mac OS X (10.1 at the time) because I had to port PhotoFlair to the Macintosh. We received the Mac a few months before I was finished with the Windows version and so I had a chance to play with it now and again and familiarize myself with it. Eventually when I had to do the port I got a real chance to use Mac OS X. Coming from Linux was a breeze. I eventually bought a Mac for myself at home and a few months later mom got the Powerbook.
So really, the simple solution to Windows is to trash your PC and buy a Mac. I could only hope that the Linux desktops were up to the level of Mac but they are not even close. So at this point for a normal PC user their best bet is unfortunately Microsoft Windows. At least GNUstep still looks promising as it's not been muddled by the Slashdot group-think. Shit, I shouldn't have mentioned it.:-)
Then you're obviously failing to communicate to your mother the gravity of the situation. In all the years my mother used a Windows machine her computer did not have one virus. The rules are very simple. I also have no trouble at the office. With the exception of the H.R. guy who must open attachments (primarily Word documents) in order to read people's resumes it's been a long time since we had any viruses running on any machines in the Hampton office. Furthermore, through a mistake either my boss or I had made we hadn't set his machine to update virus definitions automatically so I give the H.R. guy a lot of credit for having avoided viruses without it.
It certainly doesn't hurt to have a Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate Edition and to be running Novell GroupWise instead of Microsoft Outlook^WOutbreak but it's not the end-all of virus protection either. Proper user education is an important part of running a network. I keep the users at the office informed about how viruses work and how they propagate. I let them know that I've done all I can and that it's up to them to use their good judgement. I remind them that message headers are just as easily forgeable as the return address on an envelope.
It's worth the time. I'm not saying I just wrote one message and all viruses were gone. I wrote several. I talked face to face with people in the office about it. I ask them what they think about viruses and spam. I give them the information they need to make informed decisions. In the end, it makes my life a lot easier.
The simple problem is that people don't know unless you tell them. They only hear what Tom Brokaw or Katie Couric tells them. Tell them how it really works and they will understand and try their best. A few will slip up. Don't be mad at them, just explain things again so they understand.
The only case where this won't work is if you have a high employee turnover. If you do then let your boss know that viruses are simply another cost of high employee turnover. If you do that then he will have the information he needs to make an informed business decision. Maybe he'll decide it's worth taking some measures to keep people around. Put it in terms of dollars. Do whatever it takes but viruses can become a thing of the past if more companies started to do this.
What is the harm in not adopting such a license? Besides the possibility of open-source ultimately being crushed by patents, there is the risk of our work becoming a de facto Microsoft R&D lab. We are already seeing that future with XUL (or libglade) and Microsoft's XAML.
Aside from XUL's use of XML it is really nothing new. NeXTSTEP's Foundation and AppKit had better APIs than modern Linux desktops have and NeXT had these APIs nearly 15 years ago!
Interface Builder generates "archives" which are essentially freeze-dried UI objects archived to a binary format. XUL, libglade, and XAML are recent and still haven't learned everything they could from NeXTSTEP.
It's amusing to read Slashdot posts such as yours which have apparently no grasp of even fairly recent computing history. Sure, if all you know is Linux and Microsoft (which most Slashdotters do) then your statements make sense. If you've experienced NeXT then all other GUIs compare to NeXT and none of them do it right.
The good news is that for a reaasonable price you can go buy yourself a new Apple computer with OS X and free developer tools and you can actually learn what a good GUI toolkit it supposed to do. If you're really smart you'd then apply that knowlede and go contribute to GNUstep.
What most people here will do instead is whine about how Microsoft keeps stealing our "new" ideas.
For a Li-Ion battery you are doing the right thing by keeping it topped off as much as possible. Li-Ion is a rather difficult battery to charge. If the remaining charge is close to nothing then the battery must be charged very slowly until it reaches something like 50% capacity because otherwise it could very well explode. If the battery is discharged too much it may not be rechargeable. However, topping off a Li-Ion is relatively easy and can be done fairly quickly.
Fortunately, the battery controller that is required for Li-Ion will take care of most of this. Just remember that the Li-Ion cells really want to be topped off unless you plan to store them unused for a while in which case I believe they like around 70% charge.
However, NiCd batteries are completely different. Since nickel cadmium batteries were the first popular consumer batteries, most people still think in terms of NiCd. For a NiCd you really do want to discharge it fully because the "memory effect" has a lot to do with the chemistry of the battery and the easiest way to avoid it is to discharge the battery until it is completely and totally dead before recharging it.
NiMH is somewhere in between. It doesn't have the pronounced memory effect of NiCd but a deep discharge isn't necessarily a bad idea from time to time.
The other popular battery you'll encounter is lead acid (e.g. a car battery). Lead acid does NOT want to be discharged fully. The exception to that is a "Marine" or "Deep-cycle" battery that is specifically designed to not completely screw up when fully discharged. Still, the battery doesn't really want to be fully discharged, but it's engineered to handle the situation.
Hope that helps. I got most of this from some page someone else posted in a slashdot comment; unfortunately I didn't bookmark it. The bottom line is.. do NOT make a point of fully discharging Li-Ion. Doing so can do no good for the battery. However, sometimes the Li-Ion battery controllers will get confused and think the battery doesn't have very much power left when in fact it would be safe to discharge it a little bit more. Remember, the controller is trying to prevent damage to the battery. Discharging a Li-Ion beyond the controller's limits would damage the battery. Still, sometimes the controller's limits can get confused and so a deep-cycle will reset it.
Only do a deep-cycle of a Li-Ion if you are experiencing noticably diminished battery life. And even then, only do one deep cycle (which should reset the controller). If that doesn't help, then it's probably time to get a new battery.
The commercial issue with QT is really a non-issue. It might even be possible companies and write inhouse software without paying a license fee (since the code is never redistributed.) If companies want to make money writing with QT they will. What do *companies* want, to pay a fee to QT and own their own code, or give it away with the GPL and Gnome?
I wrote:
I think you're confused here. Qt (pronounced "Cute" not to be confused with QT which is the abbreviation for QuickTime) is dual licensed under either the GPL or the Trolltech commercial license. Qt costs a lot of money to use commercially. IIRC, Trolltech wants like $1k a seat or something ridiculous like that. Your other option with Qt is to use the GPL. So, what do *companies want*: to pay a fee to Trolltech and own their own code or to avoid the fee and "give it away" with the GPL and the GPL-licensed Qt.
You wrote:
The original poster wrote about in-house. The GPL doesn't force you to make your application available to everyone in the world. It just says that if you do so, you also have to include the source. You can do contract-work using GPL'ed libraries, the only string is that you have to hand over the source-code to your client as well (something which every reasonable client should demand anyways).
So, as you can see, while the OP opened the paragraph talking about in-house software he closed it by talking about software for sale. I was responding to the latter part.
However, the fact still remains that the client who purchased the in-house software is clearly free to redistribute the source code to others which while unlikely may or may not be acceptable for those writing in-house software. For example, let's say I write an accounting package and charge the client a lot of money for it (since it was a lot of work). Let's say part of the contract is that the client has a copy of the source code (I agree, this is reasonable). If I don't use any GPL software I am free to tell the client that they may not redistribute the source. If I do use GPL software as part of my product I now have to distribute it to my client under the GPL. The client may now legally redistribute the software to a third party and neither of them will have to pay me a dime more. One way to get around this is to put a clause in the support contract stating that if the code is redistributed then the support contract will be terminated and money will not be refunded. This would not conflict with the GPL legally (as far as I can tell) though it certainly conflicts with the spirit of it.
There is also this other sticky issue of clause 3b which essentially means that if the developer doesn't do 3a (distribute source alongside the object code) then he must (emphasis added) "Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code[...]"
Ouch! That means that if I don't give my client source alongside the binary then I must give them a written offer that states they or anyone else in the world can request it directly from me.
The GPL makes a lot of sense for applications and I can see where it makes sense for libraries that you want to limit to free software use. However, for a GUI toolkit (of which there are plenty of alternatives) it really makes zero sense to release under the GPL and force commercial developers to choose a different toolkit or in the case of Qt pay for a commercial license. If you want it to be widely adopted, then using GPL licensed libraries is simply not an option. Stallman tells you this much in the text of the LGPL (it's the reason it exists).
As a programmer, C is great because it is quick and low level. Operating systems are written in C. Network stacks are written in C.
Actually, several GUI libraries are written in C as well. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that more GUI libraries are written in C than in any other language. Win32 is written in C. Apple's Carbon and classic APIs are written in C. Numerous X toolkits are written in C. The first NeXT API was written in C. Of course, it's worth noting that Win32 stems from Win16 which was originally written in Pascal. Ditto for the classic MacOS. NeXT was later written in Objective-C and became Apple's Cocoa. Carbon is a mix of APIs modeled after both classic MacOS and more recently Cocoa.
Mac OS X is rather interesing because the entire CoreFoundation as well as the newer Carbon stuff like HIView is quite obviously modeled after Cocoa APIs except as a C API instead of an Objective-C API. The interesting thing is that even though C lacks any OO features the newer Carbon APIs are quite clearly object oriented. In fact, many CF classes are "toll-free bridged" to their Foundation (Objective-C) counterparts which means you can do neat stuff like use a CFStringRef as an NSString* because the in-memory layout of CFString and NSString is identical.
For a GUI, C is horrific. GUI just lends itself to Object Oriented programming. I know the hard core *NIX geeks will flame me for this, but why on earth would you NOT want to do a GUI in OOP. The beauty of coding for windows using MFC and.NET is you just extend classes already there. It's an elegant and tidy way to do things.
Ugh, where to begin. I'll agree that from an application developer's perspective a C interface to the GUI is horrific. That's why MS has MFC and.NET (as you mentioned) and why GTK has things like GTKMM (C++) and GTK# (C#) bindings. And I agree with you that you would want to do a GUI in OOP. Unfortunately, you neglect to realize that GTK is object oriented in many respects and for that matter so is Win32 to a lesser extent.
Even in Win32 and GTK one can do the same sort of subclassing as one would do with a C++ toolkit like MFC. The big difference is that in a toolkit like Win32 or GTK you are dealing with the toolkit's method of doing OO whereas with MFC you have a more well-known C++ syntax for OO. However, you still have to deal with the object hierarchy and design of the toolkit. MFC, Qt, wxWindows, and other C++ toolkits all have their own ideas about OO and their own APIs even if they are all written in the same language. While I've heard people call wxWindows or Qt programing elegant and tidy, I've never heard that said about MFC. That's a new one.
The commercial issue with QT is really a non-issue. It might even be possible companies and write inhouse software without paying a license fee (since the code is never redistributed.) If companies want to make money writing with QT they will. What do *companies* want, to pay a fee to QT and own their own code, or give it away with the GPL and Gnome?
I think you're confused here. Qt (pronounced "Cute" not to be confused with QT which is the abbreviation for QuickTime) is dual licensed under either the GPL or the Trolltech commercial license. Qt costs a lot of money to use commercially. IIRC, Trolltech wants like $1k a seat or something ridiculous like that. Your other option with Qt is to use the GPL. So, what do *companies want*: to pay a fee to Trolltech and own their own code or to avoid the fee and "give it away" with the GPL and the GPL-licensed Qt.
GTK on the other hand is licensed under the LGPL license which specifically allows linkage with non-free software. The only LGPL requirement is that you provide a way for the user to modify the free portions (the library). In practice that means you simply dynamically link with GTK which you must do anyway because of the design of GTK t
I 100% agree with this. The easiest way to get kids to treat porn for what it is is for you to do the same. Porn is not real. Porn is staged. It is very much a parent's job to discuss that with their children.
The only thing I take issue with is monitoring the internet connection to do it. Wouldn't it be better to try to discuss these issues periodically regardless of what the kid has or has not been viewing?
I like being on the internet without feeling like someone is looking over my shoulder at all times. It ruins the experience when you know someone is looking at everything you do.
All I can suggest is that you don't be too overly restrictive. Even the first rule is sort of bogus. Everybody needs their time alone, even kids. Sometimes it's nice to shut the door on the rest of the world and be alone for a while.
Will it lead to porn viewing? Yeah, it will. Is it really a problem? Not really. The best thing you can do for that is make it uninteresting. Porn is porn. It's not the real deal, it's people acting out a scene, sometimes a very weird scene.
Realize that kids break rules and that especially in the case of the 15 year old the best you can do is feed him or her information and let him make his own decisions.
I'd shy away from any monitoring software. It will only give your kids the impression that you don't trust them. Blocking software is even worse. However, for the 11 and 12 year olds, there is the problem that they could stumble upon some very bad material completely on accident.
However, I think even at that age they can understand that there are weirdos in the world and being online doesn't change that. Talk to your kids about this. The same advice above about pornography being a form of acting applies here although in a different way. I also suggest you install the Google Toolbar with pop-up blocking enabled because at least then they can go back and/or close the window if they do stumble upon one of those annoying porn sites that you can't get out of.
If blocking software actually worked 100% of the time it might be ideal. Unfortunately, it can never work 100% of the time, so it's better to get it out of the way and realize that stumbling on a porn site can and does happen though not so much anymore with better search engines.
Let me leave you with this: If you feel your kids are equipped to make the right decisions on their own, then you're doing your job as a parent. The converse of that is that if you feel the need to install logging software because you can't trust your children not to spend all their time looking at porn then somewhere along the line you really fucked up as a parent. Fortunately, it sounds like you are part of the former group and are just looking for confirmation that you're doing the right thing.
Re:We had been thinking about using kylix
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Kylix in Limbo
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Might I suggest you take a look at wxWindows? It is a full featured toolkit for Windows, Mac (Classic and OS 9/X Carbon), Linux/UNIX (GTK, Motif, and also plain old X11 using wxUniversal to draw the widgets), and now Cocoa (the native OS X framework). (NOTE: I am the lead (sole?) developer of wxCocoa)
AOL has used it for their new AOL Communicator. I have used it to write PhotoFlair and several other people in the same line of work as you use it on a regular basis. Support via mailing lists is excellent and almost always timely (unless you come in screaming for free support and demand an answer yesterday) and there is paid support available from almost all of the core developers.
As if that wasn't a good enough reason, Borland has announced a new C++ Builder X product which is an IDE written in Java which will feature wxWindows. Yes, I realize the IDE would be better written in wxWindows, but apparently they had a very large investment in the Java IDE long before they decided to use wxWindows.
I suggest that you go ahead and give it a shot. Download it for your platform of choice. Sign up for the wx-users mailing list and read some of the messages. Post any questions you may have to the mailing list. I have no doubt that you'll find it to be a superior toolkit.
Anyway, my two cents into this discussion is that I'll speculate the reason Kylix isn't being pushed now has something to do with the fact that C++ Builder X seems to be where Borland wants to go. A new wxWindows Software Foundation is being created with Mitch Kapor (Lotus 1-2-3 and now Open Source Application Foundation) as the chairman of the board with Julian Smart, Vadim Zeitlin, and Stefan Csomor (three core wxWindows developers) and Rob Farnum (Borland, worked on TWIN32 at a previous occupation) as board members.
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Well, I don't "bleed 6 colors" as the saying goes. I didn't use Macs before OS X though I know enough about OS 9 to make it work properly and even to use it to do some system recovery. I started on the Mac with 10.1 and had been using primarly Linux at home. I started familiarising myself with OS X around January of 2002 and started porting my program to it around June of that year after putting the finishing touches on the Windows version, which I developed on a Linux machine with Win4Lin for testing.
From time to time I'd play around with the Mac a little bit. I started out just using it as an expensive radio (iTunes) and started working my way around it a bit. I made myself use it as it was intended to be used. I used the one-button mouse; I learned some of the keyboard shortcuts. I even compiled my program and tried out the Mac version just to see how much work was ahed of me. Note that I developed it with wxWindows and used autoconf and automake for my build system so moving to OS X was a breeze. The main problem was that wxMac was just not there yet.
I don't usually worry too much about viruses. As you mention, I'm required to enter an administrator password to do anything significant, even if I'm running as an administrator, which I don't but most Mac users do. Even for basic users I think there is at least some basic alarm that goes off when something asks for your password. Sure, some people will just blindly do anything but at least the people who have a functioning brain have a chance to stop a virus or other malware from entering their system.
Shortly after Jaguar was released I purchased a G4/500 for myself. Not as fast as the G4 DP/1GHz at work but it's enough. I just added some RAM bringing it up to 512 and the slowness is gone. It's still not suitable for compiling software but I have ssh access to the machine at work and rsync is very handy at shuttling files from one to the other.
To truly appreciate OS X I guess you need to be a little bit of a UNIX geek. But what also makes OS X great is that its easy to use for people of all skill levels. My mom had a Sony VAIO laptop running Windows XP (well, 2000 and then the free upgrade to XP). I did my best to make it run nicely. I made sure her account didn't have admin priviledges so she couldn't get viruses (and she didn't because she's smart and doesn't open attachments anyway). She was using the thumbnail and later the filmstrip view to manage her photos. I had a few other things on there.
I constantly got calls for help. She couldn't seem to remember how to do things. After I had been using Macs for a while I finally decided she should use one. The difference was clear. You don't have to really think to use a Mac. Once you've used one for a little bit of time the interface starts to become second nature. It's amazing when it finally happens and you just start using your computer without really thinking about how to do things. That is what makes the Mac a great experience. Sadly, you have to actually use a Mac for a couple of months bef
Why should I have to? The only choice for removable media in OS X is to have it mount on the desktop and if it's a CD to automatically open a Finder window to its root directory. If it's a camera, iPhoto usually grabs it though Image Capture would be another choice for more advanced users.
Basically, I don't see why I need to be asked when it would be perfectly acceptable to pick some sane default. Sane default does not mean automatically run programs behind my back (i.e. CD-ROM Autorun).
Ah yes, now I remember. I will say I haven't seen an equivalent of this on Mac. iPhoto would be nice for this if only it didn't require you to put all your photos into your iPhoto library.
I've used XP on laptops and OS X on laptops and honestly I haven't seen a clear difference.
Well, it's hard to be screwed by bad vendor drivers if you have so few of them. Apple supports out of the box just about anything you'd want to plug in to your computer. The only vendor drivers I have are for my Maxtor FW harddrive (because the standard Apple one is buggy unfortunately) and for my Sonica USB audio output. At work I don't think I have a single third party driver installed.
The argument here is that you can get Windows drivers for nearly any piece of hardware but I wonder if the $9.99 special is really worth the trouble. Even on a Windows machine I don't see the sense in buying off-brand hardware. Honestly, I've not had to use the roll back feature though I have had to recently boot a 2000 machine into safe mode to uninstall a bad video driver. The other thing is I've over the years acquired enough knowledge about Windows to know how to fix it without needing rollback. I acquired the equivalent knowledge for Linux and OS X in much less time simply because more information is out there.
Hmm, I thought it was more obvious that I had used XP. :-) Certainly if you are locked in to Windows then the upgrade price is worth it but I've seen better desktop features coming from Linux distributions lately which is really saying something!
I just use VNC. It's free, easy to install, and clients are available for just about anything. On Mac there is the excellent Chicken of the VNC client. Still, I agree it's a nice feature done fairly well although VNC on Win32 works quite well enough for me.
Windows 2000 had a built in firewall, although it was pretty limited. XP has a slightly better interface. It's still not near as powerful as Linux's iptables or BSD's ipfw. For that you have to buy ISA.
Ugh. The digital camera support pisses me off. Every time I insert a CD or other removeable media it asks me what I want to do. Why doesn't it just open up the root folder of the media and let me decide if I want to do something else.
The generic video drivers are good, but it's just using the VESA BIOS, nothing really special although it helps when you don't have proper video drivers installed yet.
Hmm, I got that in a minor update to OS 10.2. Kind of moot though since FireWire has been on Macs for years now.
Are you speaking of "thumbnail" view? Windows 2000 had that.
Key: In a non-domain environment. It also doesn't work with Novell. What a pain! On my Mac I can fast user switch and still stay connected to my network resources. Same thing on my Linux machines. I find the fast user switching of XP to be inferior to that provided by other OS.
The pretty icons are nice and so are the clear fonts although I'm not really sure what you mean about Apple's attempt at it. It looks fine to me, although many Carbon apps unfortunately turn it off because their developers haven't modernized their drawing routines.
Network performance monitor is nice, and the basic image capturing is certainly another long overdue feature.
Yeah, and you'll need it too! ;-)
This is nice, something that the 10.1 to 10.2 and 10.2 to 10.3 upgrades also had. OS 10.2 was also the first version to support the native Hawaiian language.
I guess I just don't find most of these very thrilling. Sure, some of them are upgrades compared to the previous version of Windows but most of them are still done better on Mac or even Linux. The last upgrade that excited me was Windows 2000 simply because it finally put the good things about Windows 9x onto the NT kernel (again, long long long overdue). XP is certainly an upgrade, but I paid for 2000 and I can't see spending money on XP especially now that I use a Mac for my primary computer and relegate my IBM compatibles to running Linux.
MS has just been piling on half-assed feature after feature and I don't see much being done to actually improve usability in any significant way. I'm no long time Mac user but I've thought for a while now that Microsoft software has not been improving very much and using a Mac has made me realize that using a computer should be effortless.
Oh, this is an iPod story: I have a second generation 20 GB. Ironically, I bought it AFTER having bought a Mac, not before.
I know perfectly well what version numbers are supposed to be, and like I said, Darwin does follow that version numbering scheme. However, OS X follows an Apple marketing scheme where everything is version 10 and minor version numbers are major upgrades. Sure, it's the opposite of what most other companies do and apparently some feeble minds do get confused because they feel that version numbers somehow indicate the amount of updates. Most companies will bump their version number sky high to trick people into thinking there are major uprades. Apple does exactly the opposite, they issue major updates with minor version number increments which apparently confuses some people.
First of all, it was 95 OSR2 that brought FAT32, not Windows 98. Secondly, I expect my operating system to be stable. I find it appaling that I'm supposed to pay for an upgrade to enhance stability. Apparently you think it's a worthy expense! NT 4 was certainly leaps and bounds ahead of 3.51 but there's no reason MS couldn't have made a patch to 3.51 to support larger volumes. It seems MS is always lagging behind the current hardware. Another example of that is NT 4's lack of USB, Plug and Play, and even power management! At least MS did alllow some manufacturers to ship an NT 4 with a power management add-on. All of those features were fairly common when NT 4 was released and yet MS expected you to pay to upgrade to 2000 just to get those features?
So far you haven't listed a single new feature. Sure, you've got some better hardware support and stability but I don't think I should have to pay for that!
What difference does the version number make? It's a number, get over it. It's not as if there is some real standard for them anyway. There are several different standards to choose from. Hell, Solaris is still technically on version 2.x and has been for years except Sun simply dropped the 2. and just started calling them 7, 8, 9 instead of 2.7, 2.8, 2.9. Apple is simply doing the opposite.
10.2 was a major improvement upon 10.1. First and foremost, it was faster than its predecessor (gee, imagine that). It also had an updated sherlock, a much improved Mail application, a calendar, address book, updated iTunes, more UNIX utilities, iChat (probably the nicest AIM client out there), and many, many more.
Panther brought even more speed improvements, an improved Finder with a sidebar, improved open and save dialogs, much better Windows file server browsing, faxing, not to mention Safari and X11, which were even available in prerelease state for 10.2 customers.
What did Windows XP give you over 2000? Faster boot up time, slower overall, a ghastly default theme, an improved start menu (the XP menu really is nicer), a file browser that hides even more detail from you making it damn near impossible to admin a windows machine without changing 6 options from their default values, a Media player that looks like a cross between QuickTime, iTunes, and a chicken that just got run over by a semi while trying to cross the road, an e-mail client (Outlook Express) that hasn't been updated significantly since the Windows 98 days and still barely passes the minimum requirements to be called an e-mail client. Did I miss anything?
I have no idea why you think 10.1 to 10.2 or 10.2 to 10.3 are minor upgrades. They are major upgrades. In fact, the Darwin core is even updated. For instance, 10.2.x is Darwin 6.x, but 10.3.x is Darwin 7.x. All of the OS Ten releases have the same "major" version number so that you don't have to go around saying "OS Eleven."
And of course, minor updates are free. I didn't pay a cent to upgrade my 10.2.0 to 10.2.8 and I didn't pay a cent to upgrade my 10.3.0 to 10.3.3. Furthermore, I actually got a few new features even within those minor upgrades.
Yeah, I pay for an updated OS about once a year, but so what. Every year I am treated with so many new featues that the meager $129 price tag is well worth it. I can't remember the last time I thought that paying for a Windows upgrade was money well spent, and I've been a Mac user for a shorter time than that.
You must be looking for GNUstep then.
It doesn't have many developers but it's just as well since although hoards of developers have made not one but two half-assed clones of Windows the small number of developers working on GNUstep are nearly finished implementing OpenStep true to specifications.
What's exciting about GNUstep is that Cocoa is also an implementation of OpenStep with some additions. With a little spit and polish GNUstep running on Linux would make a great clone of OS X.
However, OS X is not all about the GUI. OS X also has some kernel facilities and user tools to go with it which make the OS more suitable for desktop use. For one thing, Apple has a devfs so devices show up in a sane manner and there are no extraneous entries. There is also the automounter and associated tools (comamnd line and GUI) to go with it.
Probably the most important thing about OS X that should be brought to Linux is the BSD style of an administrators group. On OS X you can have multiple admin level accounts which can sudo things as root. The root account doesn't even have a password and is entirely disabled. This makes it easier for joe user. Joe can run as an "administrator" which is actualy a fairly unpriviledged account which can gain access only if Joe enters his own password. That makes one less password for Joe to remember and prevents Joe from just giving up and running as root all the time.
Oh, but they do! They have been running ads on the radio (106.9 The Fox) telling people to call Cox cable and complain because Cox was supposedly going to make ESPN an a la carte instead of part of a package. Oh the humanity of not having everyone subsidize the viewing habits of those who want to watch ESPN.
If you ever visit the Coca Cola offices in Atlanta you'll learn that there were in fact several knockoffs including various permutations of "Koka Kola." I don't think Coca Cola was successful in suing any of these companies though they did succeed in beating them in marketing since the public rightly consdered them cheap knockoffs.
One thing that most people completely ignore about OS X's file renaming is that even if the file is name is selected for editing you can still do pretty much anything with it. You can drag it (by its icon) anywhere, you can Command+Delete it, and so on.
About the only thing you can't do is cut/copy/paste because those actions are context sensitive and so operate on the text instead of the file. Of course, no respectable Mac user ever actually uses Cut/Copy/Paste on files.
In any case, compare the Mac OS X behavior with the windows behavior. You click once (on a files icon or text) to activate the file, THEN you can click on the text to rename it and better hope you didn't click too fast or else you open the file. When you do get into renaming mode if you try to drag the file anywhere it interprets the mouse down on the icon as "end rename" and totally eats it so now you have to release and click on it again. The bad thing about this is that it has apparently trained people to think that entering into rename mode "accidently" is a bad thing when on a Mac it really doesn't matter and the best course of action is to simply ignore the fact that the label text just highlighted because it really doesn't make any difference.
Actually, I think reiggin's post was a joke too.
Thank you for playing "Who can detect the most sarcasm."
Boy, chill out. Go ahead and put the original poster and me on your foes list because clearly you won't want to ever read anything I say. Way to post your flaming message as an anonymous coward.
So the OP made a mistake. When I read the slashdot article I too thought that the court had okayed voluntary video monitoring. What I didn't realize until I was halfway through the Lessig article was that the court okayed required video monitoring.
Don't send a flaming message when it was a simple mistake easily made by anyone who just read the slashdot article and didn't bother to read the two very lengthy articles which slashdot linked to.
I agree the cyber cafe owners have the right to install video monitors. But unfortunately the slashdot story got it wrong. The court actually said it's okay for the city to require that they install monitors. Had to read towards the bottom of the Lessig article to actually find that.
I cannot agree with the opinion that the city should require this. I would hope that all the cyber cafes who were having gang trouble would do what's in the best interests of the community and consider video monitoring as a possible way to deter gang activity.
It's important to note that only a handful of the 22 cybercafes had gang problems and so I don't think it's right to force the owners of all the cybercafes to pay for video monitoring. Furthermore, a shop that doesn't have video monitoring may decide instead to spend that money on more security guards which in my opinion would be a lot more useful. This is not an issue for the city to decide.
(emphasis added)
I cannot justify anything else on your list but I can say having come to OS X and having used OS/2 in the past I can say with absolute certainty that file systems which store additional metadata are indeed a GOOD thing.
I rather enjoy that when I write a file no matter what I name it it will still be identifiable to the GUI as a particular type of file created by a particular application. Note that HFS+ actually has THREE forks. The main is of course the data fork and I strongly believe that all data belogns in it. The second is the resource fork which I also strongly believe should go the way of the dodo. However, the third is where type and creator information as well as a few handy bits of info are stored. This fork is really vital to a properly functioning GUI. If implemented properly (as it is in OS X) a file can be completely stripped of it and make it across the network with all file data intact. However, when on a local system (or network) the meta data that the GUI stores really adds to the user experience.
No, actually you didn't point out any facts. All you did was repeat the "common wisdom" that Macs are more proprietary than anything else.
I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to back up your arguments with hard facts and knowledge of the Mac platform then you will be modded down by people who are knowledgeable about the Mac platform and it will be because your arguments were bad and not because we have anything against PC users and are Mac fanboys
In short: your writing sucks, it's a troll, you'll get modded up by people who don't have a clue about Mac because bashing Macs makes them feel good just like it makes you feel good. And you'll get modded back down to a normal level by the people who do have a clue about Macs because none of your posts have been worth anything but the default score.
To the moderators: If you don't have a clue about Macs (liket his poster obviously doesn't) then don't moderate him one way or the other just to blow some points.
To the meta-moderators: If you don't have a clue about Macs then realize that this guy doesn't either and his opinion really doesn't matter enough to deserve any higher or lower moderation. This will be one of those posts that gets modded up and down so just leave the radio button in the middle and don't vote on the moderations one way or the other.
Oh for god's sake. You spread half-truths and then when someone points out the real facts you basically say what amounts to "Yeah, that's what I meant" and then add a quip inferring that Mac users are trampling on your free speech rights by exercising ours.
Do you realize how flawed that logic is?
Nice moderated up to 4 troll. If you actually knew anything about a Mac (like, oh, say did some programming on one) you might understand that Apple hardware and software is not closed and never has been.
People run OS X on non-Mac PPC machines all the time (even though the license forbids it) and plenty of people run Linux on Macs. Apple provides all of the specifications that people need, including specifications for unique things like the G5 fan controllers. Macs (along with Sun and a lot of other UNIX vendors) have used Open Firmware for years now which makes booting any OS a lot easier than on an x86 PC.
Then again, this is Slashdot so unfounded hearsay is the norm. :-(
It is a lot of trouble which is why mom now has a PowerBook. :-) Still, I have to applaud her for actually using Windows successfully for a number of years. I never had to deal with viruses but now I sort of deal with the opposite. What, you mean I can open e-mail without getting a virus?
It's not just lack of viruses for Mac OS X or Linux but a whole different way of thinking. OS X's Mail.app can be easily configured to not load images thereby thrwarting spammers attempts at web bugs in HTML emails. It does not automatically run any attachments and you always are able to see the full extension of the file (no my.jpg.exe like in Outbreak Express).
At work I help manage a Netware network with Windows 98, 2000, and XP clients. I also work as a programmer (completely unrelated to IT). I first came across Mac OS X (10.1 at the time) because I had to port PhotoFlair to the Macintosh. We received the Mac a few months before I was finished with the Windows version and so I had a chance to play with it now and again and familiarize myself with it. Eventually when I had to do the port I got a real chance to use Mac OS X. Coming from Linux was a breeze. I eventually bought a Mac for myself at home and a few months later mom got the Powerbook.
So really, the simple solution to Windows is to trash your PC and buy a Mac. I could only hope that the Linux desktops were up to the level of Mac but they are not even close. So at this point for a normal PC user their best bet is unfortunately Microsoft Windows. At least GNUstep still looks promising as it's not been muddled by the Slashdot group-think. Shit, I shouldn't have mentioned it. :-)
Then you're obviously failing to communicate to your mother the gravity of the situation. In all the years my mother used a Windows machine her computer did not have one virus. The rules are very simple. I also have no trouble at the office. With the exception of the H.R. guy who must open attachments (primarily Word documents) in order to read people's resumes it's been a long time since we had any viruses running on any machines in the Hampton office. Furthermore, through a mistake either my boss or I had made we hadn't set his machine to update virus definitions automatically so I give the H.R. guy a lot of credit for having avoided viruses without it.
It certainly doesn't hurt to have a Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate Edition and to be running Novell GroupWise instead of Microsoft Outlook^WOutbreak but it's not the end-all of virus protection either. Proper user education is an important part of running a network. I keep the users at the office informed about how viruses work and how they propagate. I let them know that I've done all I can and that it's up to them to use their good judgement. I remind them that message headers are just as easily forgeable as the return address on an envelope.
It's worth the time. I'm not saying I just wrote one message and all viruses were gone. I wrote several. I talked face to face with people in the office about it. I ask them what they think about viruses and spam. I give them the information they need to make informed decisions. In the end, it makes my life a lot easier.
The simple problem is that people don't know unless you tell them. They only hear what Tom Brokaw or Katie Couric tells them. Tell them how it really works and they will understand and try their best. A few will slip up. Don't be mad at them, just explain things again so they understand.
The only case where this won't work is if you have a high employee turnover. If you do then let your boss know that viruses are simply another cost of high employee turnover. If you do that then he will have the information he needs to make an informed business decision. Maybe he'll decide it's worth taking some measures to keep people around. Put it in terms of dollars. Do whatever it takes but viruses can become a thing of the past if more companies started to do this.
Aside from XUL's use of XML it is really nothing new. NeXTSTEP's Foundation and AppKit had better APIs than modern Linux desktops have and NeXT had these APIs nearly 15 years ago!
Interface Builder generates "archives" which are essentially freeze-dried UI objects archived to a binary format. XUL, libglade, and XAML are recent and still haven't learned everything they could from NeXTSTEP.
It's amusing to read Slashdot posts such as yours which have apparently no grasp of even fairly recent computing history. Sure, if all you know is Linux and Microsoft (which most Slashdotters do) then your statements make sense. If you've experienced NeXT then all other GUIs compare to NeXT and none of them do it right.
The good news is that for a reaasonable price you can go buy yourself a new Apple computer with OS X and free developer tools and you can actually learn what a good GUI toolkit it supposed to do. If you're really smart you'd then apply that knowlede and go contribute to GNUstep.
What most people here will do instead is whine about how Microsoft keeps stealing our "new" ideas.
For a Li-Ion battery you are doing the right thing by keeping it topped off as much as possible. Li-Ion is a rather difficult battery to charge. If the remaining charge is close to nothing then the battery must be charged very slowly until it reaches something like 50% capacity because otherwise it could very well explode. If the battery is discharged too much it may not be rechargeable. However, topping off a Li-Ion is relatively easy and can be done fairly quickly.
Fortunately, the battery controller that is required for Li-Ion will take care of most of this. Just remember that the Li-Ion cells really want to be topped off unless you plan to store them unused for a while in which case I believe they like around 70% charge.
However, NiCd batteries are completely different. Since nickel cadmium batteries were the first popular consumer batteries, most people still think in terms of NiCd. For a NiCd you really do want to discharge it fully because the "memory effect" has a lot to do with the chemistry of the battery and the easiest way to avoid it is to discharge the battery until it is completely and totally dead before recharging it.
NiMH is somewhere in between. It doesn't have the pronounced memory effect of NiCd but a deep discharge isn't necessarily a bad idea from time to time.
The other popular battery you'll encounter is lead acid (e.g. a car battery). Lead acid does NOT want to be discharged fully. The exception to that is a "Marine" or "Deep-cycle" battery that is specifically designed to not completely screw up when fully discharged. Still, the battery doesn't really want to be fully discharged, but it's engineered to handle the situation.
Hope that helps. I got most of this from some page someone else posted in a slashdot comment; unfortunately I didn't bookmark it. The bottom line is.. do NOT make a point of fully discharging Li-Ion. Doing so can do no good for the battery. However, sometimes the Li-Ion battery controllers will get confused and think the battery doesn't have very much power left when in fact it would be safe to discharge it a little bit more. Remember, the controller is trying to prevent damage to the battery. Discharging a Li-Ion beyond the controller's limits would damage the battery. Still, sometimes the controller's limits can get confused and so a deep-cycle will reset it.
Only do a deep-cycle of a Li-Ion if you are experiencing noticably diminished battery life. And even then, only do one deep cycle (which should reset the controller). If that doesn't help, then it's probably time to get a new battery.
The OP wrote:
I wrote:
You wrote:
So, as you can see, while the OP opened the paragraph talking about in-house software he closed it by talking about software for sale. I was responding to the latter part.
However, the fact still remains that the client who purchased the in-house software is clearly free to redistribute the source code to others which while unlikely may or may not be acceptable for those writing in-house software. For example, let's say I write an accounting package and charge the client a lot of money for it (since it was a lot of work). Let's say part of the contract is that the client has a copy of the source code (I agree, this is reasonable). If I don't use any GPL software I am free to tell the client that they may not redistribute the source. If I do use GPL software as part of my product I now have to distribute it to my client under the GPL. The client may now legally redistribute the software to a third party and neither of them will have to pay me a dime more. One way to get around this is to put a clause in the support contract stating that if the code is redistributed then the support contract will be terminated and money will not be refunded. This would not conflict with the GPL legally (as far as I can tell) though it certainly conflicts with the spirit of it.
There is also this other sticky issue of clause 3b which essentially means that if the developer doesn't do 3a (distribute source alongside the object code) then he must (emphasis added) "Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code[...]"
Ouch! That means that if I don't give my client source alongside the binary then I must give them a written offer that states they or anyone else in the world can request it directly from me.
The GPL makes a lot of sense for applications and I can see where it makes sense for libraries that you want to limit to free software use. However, for a GUI toolkit (of which there are plenty of alternatives) it really makes zero sense to release under the GPL and force commercial developers to choose a different toolkit or in the case of Qt pay for a commercial license. If you want it to be widely adopted, then using GPL licensed libraries is simply not an option. Stallman tells you this much in the text of the LGPL (it's the reason it exists).
Personally, I use and develop wxWindows wh
Actually, several GUI libraries are written in C as well. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that more GUI libraries are written in C than in any other language. Win32 is written in C. Apple's Carbon and classic APIs are written in C. Numerous X toolkits are written in C. The first NeXT API was written in C. Of course, it's worth noting that Win32 stems from Win16 which was originally written in Pascal. Ditto for the classic MacOS. NeXT was later written in Objective-C and became Apple's Cocoa. Carbon is a mix of APIs modeled after both classic MacOS and more recently Cocoa.
Mac OS X is rather interesing because the entire CoreFoundation as well as the newer Carbon stuff like HIView is quite obviously modeled after Cocoa APIs except as a C API instead of an Objective-C API. The interesting thing is that even though C lacks any OO features the newer Carbon APIs are quite clearly object oriented. In fact, many CF classes are "toll-free bridged" to their Foundation (Objective-C) counterparts which means you can do neat stuff like use a CFStringRef as an NSString* because the in-memory layout of CFString and NSString is identical.
Ugh, where to begin. I'll agree that from an application developer's perspective a C interface to the GUI is horrific. That's why MS has MFC and .NET (as you mentioned) and why GTK has things like GTKMM (C++) and GTK# (C#) bindings. And I agree with you that you would want to do a GUI in OOP. Unfortunately, you neglect to realize that GTK is object oriented in many respects and for that matter so is Win32 to a lesser extent.
Even in Win32 and GTK one can do the same sort of subclassing as one would do with a C++ toolkit like MFC. The big difference is that in a toolkit like Win32 or GTK you are dealing with the toolkit's method of doing OO whereas with MFC you have a more well-known C++ syntax for OO. However, you still have to deal with the object hierarchy and design of the toolkit. MFC, Qt, wxWindows, and other C++ toolkits all have their own ideas about OO and their own APIs even if they are all written in the same language. While I've heard people call wxWindows or Qt programing elegant and tidy, I've never heard that said about MFC. That's a new one.
I think you're confused here. Qt (pronounced "Cute" not to be confused with QT which is the abbreviation for QuickTime) is dual licensed under either the GPL or the Trolltech commercial license. Qt costs a lot of money to use commercially. IIRC, Trolltech wants like $1k a seat or something ridiculous like that. Your other option with Qt is to use the GPL. So, what do *companies want*: to pay a fee to Trolltech and own their own code or to avoid the fee and "give it away" with the GPL and the GPL-licensed Qt.
GTK on the other hand is licensed under the LGPL license which specifically allows linkage with non-free software. The only LGPL requirement is that you provide a way for the user to modify the free portions (the library). In practice that means you simply dynamically link with GTK which you must do anyway because of the design of GTK t
I 100% agree with this. The easiest way to get kids to treat porn for what it is is for you to do the same. Porn is not real. Porn is staged. It is very much a parent's job to discuss that with their children.
The only thing I take issue with is monitoring the internet connection to do it. Wouldn't it be better to try to discuss these issues periodically regardless of what the kid has or has not been viewing?
I like being on the internet without feeling like someone is looking over my shoulder at all times. It ruins the experience when you know someone is looking at everything you do.
All I can suggest is that you don't be too overly restrictive. Even the first rule is sort of bogus. Everybody needs their time alone, even kids. Sometimes it's nice to shut the door on the rest of the world and be alone for a while.
Will it lead to porn viewing? Yeah, it will. Is it really a problem? Not really. The best thing you can do for that is make it uninteresting. Porn is porn. It's not the real deal, it's people acting out a scene, sometimes a very weird scene.
Realize that kids break rules and that especially in the case of the 15 year old the best you can do is feed him or her information and let him make his own decisions.
I'd shy away from any monitoring software. It will only give your kids the impression that you don't trust them. Blocking software is even worse. However, for the 11 and 12 year olds, there is the problem that they could stumble upon some very bad material completely on accident.
However, I think even at that age they can understand that there are weirdos in the world and being online doesn't change that. Talk to your kids about this. The same advice above about pornography being a form of acting applies here although in a different way. I also suggest you install the Google Toolbar with pop-up blocking enabled because at least then they can go back and/or close the window if they do stumble upon one of those annoying porn sites that you can't get out of.
If blocking software actually worked 100% of the time it might be ideal. Unfortunately, it can never work 100% of the time, so it's better to get it out of the way and realize that stumbling on a porn site can and does happen though not so much anymore with better search engines.
Let me leave you with this: If you feel your kids are equipped to make the right decisions on their own, then you're doing your job as a parent. The converse of that is that if you feel the need to install logging software because you can't trust your children not to spend all their time looking at porn then somewhere along the line you really fucked up as a parent. Fortunately, it sounds like you are part of the former group and are just looking for confirmation that you're doing the right thing.
Might I suggest you take a look at wxWindows? It is a full featured toolkit for Windows, Mac (Classic and OS 9/X Carbon), Linux/UNIX (GTK, Motif, and also plain old X11 using wxUniversal to draw the widgets), and now Cocoa (the native OS X framework). (NOTE: I am the lead (sole?) developer of wxCocoa)
AOL has used it for their new AOL Communicator. I have used it to write PhotoFlair and several other people in the same line of work as you use it on a regular basis. Support via mailing lists is excellent and almost always timely (unless you come in screaming for free support and demand an answer yesterday) and there is paid support available from almost all of the core developers.
As if that wasn't a good enough reason, Borland has announced a new C++ Builder X product which is an IDE written in Java which will feature wxWindows. Yes, I realize the IDE would be better written in wxWindows, but apparently they had a very large investment in the Java IDE long before they decided to use wxWindows.
I suggest that you go ahead and give it a shot. Download it for your platform of choice. Sign up for the wx-users mailing list and read some of the messages. Post any questions you may have to the mailing list. I have no doubt that you'll find it to be a superior toolkit.
Anyway, my two cents into this discussion is that I'll speculate the reason Kylix isn't being pushed now has something to do with the fact that C++ Builder X seems to be where Borland wants to go. A new wxWindows Software Foundation is being created with Mitch Kapor (Lotus 1-2-3 and now Open Source Application Foundation) as the chairman of the board with Julian Smart, Vadim Zeitlin, and Stefan Csomor (three core wxWindows developers) and Rob Farnum (Borland, worked on TWIN32 at a previous occupation) as board members.