I just bought an 8 Gig drive for $39 USD, so the price isn't amazing. No MP3 player or slot for an SD card, nothing really technologically innovative...
We need an actual "products review" section (products.slashdot.org) in order to filter out such stories when you're not in a shopping mood.
nope - i disagree. the first thing anybody should be told before getting wheel access is "anytime you type something in as root, sit on your hands for a full minute before hitting enter."
really, this guy sounds like a perfect candidate for limited sudoers access...
You're absolutely right. The user interface is supposed to make sense: if I have an icon for a file or program selected and I hit the "Enter" key, it makes sense that I want to enter that file or program.
Whether or not F2 to rename a file "makes sense" is rather a silly argument (does F7 for spell check make sense? we all seem to have learned that one). What really pisses me off is that right-clicking (control-clicking, whatever) on an icon *doesn't* give you the option to rename in Mac like it does in Windows/GNOME/KDE. No damn good reason for that.
As others have mentioned, you can option-click the maximize button for a more complete "maximize experience," but...
what about F11 for *true* fullscreen? that's the one IE feature I always wanted on Safari (and Preview and Pages and Keynote...). yes, yes, those keys are now used by Expose by default but we can always customize keyboard shortcuts, the point is in having the basic functionality available. if by default F11 was "Expose desktop" and Ctrl-F11 was "true maximize focussed window" those who cared could easily tweak to liking, no fuss no muss.
I think even Windows behaves the same. nope, and (trust me) it deeply pains me to acknowledge any benefits to the Windows UI.
It's not a bug at all. The issue is that it doesn't behave the way you want it to. A bug is something that's not functioning as it was designed to do. I've been using Apple computers since the Apple 2e (or is that ][e?) and you're right that it's always been there since the start of the Mac GUI. So maybe it's not a bug, just a horrible user interface failure.
Granted, that behavior has always been there, but doesn't poor design still constitute a bug, intentional or not? Let's flip that around: how do you achieve an intelligent folder-hierarchy merge in the Finder? You download a third-party utility (like Path Finder) that solves the problem. Windows 3.1's File Manager was horribly anemic, so people would download superior third-party solutions such as Becker Tools; MS paid attention and introduced that functionality with the Win95 "Explorer" (admittedly not terribly polished until Win98).
I stand by my original assertion: there's no way to do intelligent folder-merges in the Finder, and this constitutes a horrible bug/oversight/shortcoming/SNAFU... call it what you will, the Mac OS UI has one major PITA that hits me every day. I will acknowledge that while Windows, KDE, GNOME and Enlightenment all do the folder-hierarchy merge thing nicely, they don't offer an option to do a destructive folder replace like the Mac does. But be honest now: when it's only one extra keystroke to destroy an old folder before copying a new one, is that a real shortcoming? I've spent twenty, thirty minutes or more on Macs trying to copy over only the (few hundred) changed files into a folder that runs four or more levels deep anytime my source directory doesn't contain all the subdirectory elements of the destination. Pronounced: ARRGGGHHHH!!!!!
Minor Issues:
1. Copying a Folder to a directory with a Folder of the same name results in the existing contents of that Folder being overwritten, rather than the merged contents of the two Folders. This makes it annoying to move around large trees of files, if you like to "sync" things manually.
I'd upgrade that to a major issue. In fact, since so many Mac users are design folks pushing around huge numbers of files, maintaining websites, etc., I call that "Finder bug number one."
But can we fairly characterize the early 'net as having a lack of fixed leaders? Usenet may have been chaotic, but to those who followed the RFCs, we had certain leaders. Jon Postel and Vint Cerf leap to mind as ones who led by example of patience, intelligence and reason. They may not have been "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictators for Life," but they did provide leadership of a sort that effectively mitigated some of the anarchy we have seen with the Debian lot. (Disclaimer: I love Debian, have provided some modest feedback to the maintainers of their documentation over the years, and am currently an Ubuntu user and evangelist.)
Yes and no... I rather agree with the grandparent poster. The scientific method offers a process, a mechanism by which we may peacefully offer competing for confirmation or refutation by others, through strictly empirical and rational terms. If you are committed fundamentally to a belief, i.e.-the mechanism for finding the truth is MY holy book!, then your beliefs really are threatened by the methods of science.
But not all religion is fundamentalist. Building on your "lightning bolts in the slime" notion, we really do have a better story on the origin of life, and it involves little more than natural selection. Stuart Kauffman, in his wonderful book At Home in the Universe offers a compelling vision of the origin of life as autocatalytic sets. (If chemicals A,B,C catalyze chemicals D,E,F and so forth until X,Y,Z in turn catalyze the production of chemicals A,B,C, then technically we have met the first minimum requirement for life: reproduction of organic matter without conscious design.)
Kauffman's work is in turn based on Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures, in particular the "Brusselator" (devised by the Brussels group) which may be the simplest known autocatalytic set in existence.
What makes this interesting is that Prigogine, a nobel laureate chemist, believes in God. It's the political and religious fundamentalism that becomes incompatible with the scientific method... so you're both right.
So how would one go about finding what monies may have transferred from Microsoft to Senator Pacheco or to the Disability Policy Consortium? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...)
Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 1
In theory, there is no gap between theory and practice, but in practice there usually is.
Good call, Hofstadter's GEB, while getting somewhat dated, is still a classic work deconstructing the whole "brain as computer" metaphor. Better would be Daneil Dennett's Consciousness Explained.
Best of all might be Gerald Edelman's "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire" (or "Wider Than The Sky"). From the back of the book, there's a quote to the effect that the functioning of the human brain more closely resembles a rainforest ecosystem than a modern digital computer. Grok it, baby!
>Surely there is a group/company more appropriate than Symantec >to scrub for bugs?!?
You damn skippy! Matter of fact, it's hard to think of a company which has used more FUD to push their products who could actually be a *worse* choice than Symantec. (Okay, I'm sure we can all think of one company that would be worse...)
What would be cool is if they funnelled the money through something like the Ubuntu bounty system.
A friend let me borrow the first two seasons of Voyager on DVD and I fail to understand why a "spinoff" that doesn't have any characters from the main franchise makes a difference in the quality of the story.
Ya know, if you'd said the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine, you'd probably have been modded "Insightful" rather than "Funny"...
Remember about 2-3 years ago, when you could pop into a CompUSA and see a couple racks filled with Linux distros?
Not anymore--now that same shelfspace is selling antimalware for Winderz. Think about it from the retailer's point of view: is this Linux thing going to help or hurt our Photoshop sales? Our antivirus software sales? Game sales?
It's back to the trenches, much like it was in '96-'97 when GNU/Linux/Apache snuck its way into IT. Now we've got to do the same thing in the user trenches (schools, businesses, nonprofits, graphic design shops, etc.). And as someone has mentioned before, it's the F/OSS applications that we can run on Mac + Winderz that ultimately solicit switchers: Firefox, GIMP, NVu, Scribus, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally look forward to the All Drug Olympics!
I'd like to set this as my desktop pic.
Anyone got a higher-res photo of this?
most of the hard-core anti-nuke reactionaries are getting old
By which, I assume, you mean those of us old enough to remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?
> "What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
That's easy: "Open Source for Dummies"
Yeah, this is a truly weak excuse for a story.
I just bought an 8 Gig drive for $39 USD, so the price isn't amazing. No MP3 player or slot for an SD card, nothing really technologically innovative...
We need an actual "products review" section (products.slashdot.org) in order to filter out such stories when you're not in a shopping mood.
Um, is the user named "As Seen On TV" still with us?
;-)
Care to comment on the veracity of that quote?
nope - i disagree. the first thing anybody should be told before getting wheel access is "anytime you type something in as root, sit on your hands for a full minute before hitting enter."
really, this guy sounds like a perfect candidate for limited sudoers access...
"... get an axe!" -Ash, Army of Darkness
You're absolutely right. The user interface is supposed to make sense: if I have an icon for a file or program selected and I hit the "Enter" key, it makes sense that I want to enter that file or program.
Whether or not F2 to rename a file "makes sense" is rather a silly argument (does F7 for spell check make sense? we all seem to have learned that one). What really pisses me off is that right-clicking (control-clicking, whatever) on an icon *doesn't* give you the option to rename in Mac like it does in Windows/GNOME/KDE. No damn good reason for that.
As others have mentioned, you can option-click the maximize button for a more complete "maximize experience," but...
what about F11 for *true* fullscreen? that's the one IE feature I always wanted on Safari (and Preview and Pages and Keynote...). yes, yes, those keys are now used by Expose by default but we can always customize keyboard shortcuts, the point is in having the basic functionality available. if by default F11 was "Expose desktop" and Ctrl-F11 was "true maximize focussed window" those who cared could easily tweak to liking, no fuss no muss.
Granted, that behavior has always been there, but doesn't poor design still constitute a bug, intentional or not? Let's flip that around: how do you achieve an intelligent folder-hierarchy merge in the Finder? You download a third-party utility (like Path Finder) that solves the problem. Windows 3.1's File Manager was horribly anemic, so people would download superior third-party solutions such as Becker Tools; MS paid attention and introduced that functionality with the Win95 "Explorer" (admittedly not terribly polished until Win98).
I stand by my original assertion: there's no way to do intelligent folder-merges in the Finder, and this constitutes a horrible bug/oversight/shortcoming/SNAFU... call it what you will, the Mac OS UI has one major PITA that hits me every day. I will acknowledge that while Windows, KDE, GNOME and Enlightenment all do the folder-hierarchy merge thing nicely, they don't offer an option to do a destructive folder replace like the Mac does. But be honest now: when it's only one extra keystroke to destroy an old folder before copying a new one, is that a real shortcoming? I've spent twenty, thirty minutes or more on Macs trying to copy over only the (few hundred) changed files into a folder that runs four or more levels deep anytime my source directory doesn't contain all the subdirectory elements of the destination. Pronounced: ARRGGGHHHH!!!!!
I'd upgrade that to a major issue. In fact, since so many Mac users are design folks pushing around huge numbers of files, maintaining websites, etc., I call that "Finder bug number one."
But can we fairly characterize the early 'net as having a lack of fixed leaders? Usenet may have been chaotic, but to those who followed the RFCs, we had certain leaders. Jon Postel and Vint Cerf leap to mind as ones who led by example of patience, intelligence and reason. They may not have been "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictators for Life," but they did provide leadership of a sort that effectively mitigated some of the anarchy we have seen with the Debian lot. (Disclaimer: I love Debian, have provided some modest feedback to the maintainers of their documentation over the years, and am currently an Ubuntu user and evangelist.)
so you can take your crap anywhere?
But not all religion is fundamentalist. Building on your "lightning bolts in the slime" notion, we really do have a better story on the origin of life, and it involves little more than natural selection. Stuart Kauffman, in his wonderful book At Home in the Universe offers a compelling vision of the origin of life as autocatalytic sets. (If chemicals A,B,C catalyze chemicals D,E,F and so forth until X,Y,Z in turn catalyze the production of chemicals A,B,C, then technically we have met the first minimum requirement for life: reproduction of organic matter without conscious design.)
Kauffman's work is in turn based on Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures, in particular the "Brusselator" (devised by the Brussels group) which may be the simplest known autocatalytic set in existence.
What makes this interesting is that Prigogine, a nobel laureate chemist, believes in God. It's the political and religious fundamentalism that becomes incompatible with the scientific method... so you're both right.
So how would one go about finding what monies may have transferred from Microsoft to Senator Pacheco or to the Disability Policy Consortium? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...)
Brilliant!
We might just have a collary to rule number eight!
methinks this is not the first 3D mouse. (that one sucked, too.) so much marketing bullshit...
Good call, Hofstadter's GEB, while getting somewhat dated, is still a classic work deconstructing the whole "brain as computer" metaphor. Better would be Daneil Dennett's Consciousness Explained.
Best of all might be Gerald Edelman's "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire" (or "Wider Than The Sky"). From the back of the book, there's a quote to the effect that the functioning of the human brain more closely resembles a rainforest ecosystem than a modern digital computer. Grok it, baby!
>Surely there is a group/company more appropriate than Symantec
>to scrub for bugs?!?
You damn skippy! Matter of fact, it's hard to think of a company which has used more FUD to push their products who could actually be a *worse* choice than Symantec. (Okay, I'm sure we can all think of one company that would be worse...)
What would be cool is if they funnelled the money through something like the Ubuntu bounty system.
C'mon, am I the only one here who read that headline and thought, "Gates, you fuckin' asshole... oh, wait..."
Ya know, if you'd said the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine, you'd probably have been modded "Insightful" rather than "Funny"...
Just a thought.
Find it in the store? Ain't gonna happen.
Remember about 2-3 years ago, when you could pop into a CompUSA and see a couple racks filled with Linux distros?
Not anymore--now that same shelfspace is selling antimalware for Winderz. Think about it from the retailer's point of view: is this Linux thing going to help or hurt our Photoshop sales? Our antivirus software sales? Game sales?
It's back to the trenches, much like it was in '96-'97 when GNU/Linux/Apache snuck its way into IT. Now we've got to do the same thing in the user trenches (schools, businesses, nonprofits, graphic design shops, etc.). And as someone has mentioned before, it's the F/OSS applications that we can run on Mac + Winderz that ultimately solicit switchers: Firefox, GIMP, NVu, Scribus, etc.
> Forks ARE bad things.
Generalizations ARE dangerous things.
X.org is a fork of the venerable XFree86 system. I like it, so I use it. You don't have to.
Free as in speech allows people to diverge and converge projects and interests as they see fit.