Was bought quite a while ago, same week as release I think, so prices will have dropped. It's also the full package, not an upgrade. I seem to remember the figure being £170, though I'm prepared to be corrected.
Headline talks of worth, blurb speaks of cost. As I'm sure the poster is aware, they're not the same thing by a long way.
For example, I run a one-man contracting business. The worth to me of my accounts package is vast, the cost of it miniscule in comparison. And that cost is...one copy of Virtual PC for around £100 I think (I run OS X), one copy of XP for around £170 (retail, used it on a physical PC I no longer have and now it's on the emulator), then around £50 for Quicken UK. I can feel the Free people ganging up on me - I must be mad! That adds up to £230, that's nearly the price of a low-end machine! Well, to me that software is worth the amount, and the price is an utterly negligible amount of the cost of running my business.
The one thing I prefer in Windows to OS X is dragging out of a visible window and dropping on to a currently hidden window.
On Windows: drag icon to the taskbar's tab for the target process, wait for the list of open windows to appear, drag to the relevant entry and that window will pop to the front. Nice - notice you're still just using the mouse.
On OS X: start to drag the icon, then hit F9 with your other hand to invoke Expose, choose the relevant window, wait for the window to come to the front and then release. Notice how you had to use both keys and the mouse there.
That's pretty much it on the UI front for me. I would definitely like to see Apple incorporate the Windows-like mouse-only behaviour though.
Sarge has been a disappoint for me. DOn't get me wrong, I'm running Sarge right now, but for a release which took such a long time, it should have been more mature, it feels like FC4 now.
Genuine interest here as I'm about to upgrade a Debian server from Woody to Sarge this weekend. What sort of issues have you run into?
Mostly, this seems to manifest itself as varying degrees of poor spelling and grammar
Assuming we're dealing with a native English speaker, I see these as different problems. Poor spelling might simply be poor typing (though if I see 'loosing' for 'losing' one more time, I will become upset...). Poor grammar is more fundamental I feel, as it implies a lack of comprehension. In coding terms, I may not remember the method name but I should at least understand the algorithm I'm attempting to implement.
...I even see the names of products and companies misspelled from time to time.
Good. They assume far too much importance in the world as it is. If people still get them wrong, perhaps indoctrination hasn't quite been completed yet.
Yes, I'd say it was. I taught myself C on Suns, an ST (so 68000) and a Mac LC. DOS still ruled the x86 world at the time, with Windows 3.1 just about kicking in.
I can remember the sheer increduality I experienced when finding out about the ridiculous NEAR, LARGE and HUGE memory models I had to decide between before allocating memory under x86. It was the thing that made me decide DOS simply wasn't for me, because the coding was far too stupid.
So yes, the x86 segmented architecture was a significant factor in me choosing the 68000 route over a PC. And before the inevitable gets posted, yes I'm fully awware of the move to x86 today. But today's x86's don't force me to type "FAR char *" to get a decent buffer. "FAR char *" indeed, I ask you. Sounds more like "How now, brown cow?" than anything computer-related.
At the moment I have ye olde stereo. Not even a subwoofer to be seen. I'd like to move to 5.1 but can't - reason? Wires.
My front room already has enough wires in it stuffed behind the TV. The thought of spreading more of them out for my kids, one three and one two, to destroy really does not appeal. It wouldn't even appeal if there were no kids there to damage them; my front room is for relaxing in, not for turning into a server room-alike.
I'm aware that wireless speakers already exist, but last I looked (a year ago?) good quality ones are very expensive, and I believe there are sync. problems with surround sound? If you know differently, please bring me up to date because I would -love- to replace my stereo speaker set up with good wireless surround.
Select the newly-created AAC, run the Make Bookmarkable script on it
Finished, and you only need to do steps 1 and 2 the once, of course. I've been using this to convert BBC radio captures to bookmarkable AAC for a while (workflow: Tivo->MP3->bookmarkable AAC).
would agree that making an AAC bookmarkable could do with being integrated into the main interface though.
A coco3 is out of my league, so I must admit ultimate defeat. My path started in 1982, Spectrum->C64->Atari ST->Mac LC->assorted PCs->OS X. With some BBC, Amiga and Solaris use inbetween.
I'm 33, but trust me - listening to some of the comments made on Slashdot I often feel in my seventies anyway. Someone told me 4Gig wasn't a lot of disk space to leave empty recently...
>>The Mac, for example, won't let you put stuff into the Applications folder unless you can supply an administrative password.
>This statement gets bandied around a lot, but it is not true. If a user is an "admin", they can copy things into/Applications (amongst other places) without needing to authenticate.
ie. If they have already authenticated themselves to be an admin of that machine...
I've posted this further up as well - it certainly isn't an architectural fault that most software requires admin to install, in fact I'm rather glad it does. The Mac, for example, won't let you put stuff into the Applications folder unless you can supply an administrative password.
It's a fault that non-util software also requires admin to run, but whether that's Windows' fault or the developer of the software is open to question at best. Personally I'd say that's the developer's fault. A great example of this is Quicken - I have to run from an admin account just to do my accounts? Nope, I don't blame Microsoft for that. I blame Intuit.
...Is the democratically elected body some how superior to the appointed body in all matters?...If so, then you may have a legitimate concern. However, if as I suspect it is not, then the system would seem to be working as it was designed and you may have a bigger fight on your hands than just one piece of legislation if you expect to stop this thing.
Absolutely. The concern remains legitimate whether the system is working as intended or not. The system itself is clearly wrong.
Europe's political scene is in chaos at the moment, with what was assumed to be the most pro-Europe country voting against a proposed constitution (France). In fact, almost everywhere politicians have dared to give people the vote instead of just waving it through the vote has gone against the European institutions, and in many places a vote will not even be chanced because of overwhelming popular opposition. Reasons are disparate (France thought the constitution was too Anglo-Saxon, Britain thinks Europe is too much slanted towards the French...) , but the point remains that these institutions have little to no popular support. Rubbish like ignoring a parliament to enact the will of civil servants will certainly not be helping.
If you value the freedom to code without worrying about getting sued, and you live in the EU, now is the time to take effective action."
It's more than that now. A democratically elected body has rejected it, an appointed body is enforcing it. It's now about more than just code. more than software patents. It's now about the primacy of elected bodies.
Cheers,
Ian
(UK - yes, I'll be writing but not merely on 'just' the software patent point)
I have a few bits of old hardware around - a Spectrum, a C64, a Mac Plus, an Astro Blaster handheld, an STe with mono monitor...a few bits. Nothing that uncommon, except perhaps the Astro Blaster.
There is something about using the old hardware which is not present when running an emulator. Take the C64 as the best example of this. Emulated you don't get the true sound of the SID (each one was different...), you get pixellated graphics if trying to play at a decent size on a monitor (versus just plugging in to a TV), you get a different keyboard layout...nope. Emulation is good, and I'm a great fan of it. But it isn't the same as using the real thing.
Most of the comments here have come down on the home-viewing side. I'm going to pick the cinema side instead though. My reasons...
It's an event. That is, you're watching something outside of your normal environment and so it feels more of an occasion. Also, you've put in effort to be in a certain place at a certain time - you're more likely to feel anticipation in such circumstances.
Screen size and sound. Unless you've paid beyond a fortune, the cinema will have your home setup beaten.
Timeliness - films are out first at the cinema, so you've got a chance of seeing it before you already know everything there is to know about it from friends who tell you the plot. I'm ignoring net-based leaks here, I really think that's a tiny minority of people.
Concentration. If I'm at home, I'm at home. I know there's work to be done, things to be cleaned or tidied, phones that might ring....generally tasks to sort out. None of that feeling in a cinema.
That's pretty much it for me. There are downsides involving ignorant cinema goers making too much noise, but not much else. If I'm taking my wife for a night out, very rare for us now as we have young kids to look after, it's likely we'll go for a film. Whilst I enjoy watching films at home, it simply doesn't feel anywhere near as special.
I have an ssh server on my home machine set up to answer on port 80, and accessible via a dyndns.org hostname. I have no need of a locally-hosted web server, so I don't miss using up 80 for something else. From there, I have a variety of options including opening up tunnels to a squid proxy.
All works like a charm, and it's set up for exactly reasons like this one. Can even be tunnelled over http to cope with proxies or packet-aware firewalls.
Cheers,
Ian
Spotlight not the be-all end-all of search
on
The Death of Folders?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I use Tiger. I upgraded from Panther. And whilst I can search meta-data to my heart's content, for finding actual files the Finder in Tiger is less powerful than Panthers, not more.
Reasons? Well, first of all Spotlight won't search the whole of your drive. Can't remember if it was in/usr/local/bin or/usr/bin? Tough. Spotlight won't help you, it doesn't look in those hierarchies.
Made a mistake typing your search term into Spotlight and on an older machine? Don't even think of hitting that backspace key, or the Finder may go into a spinning beachball hell whilst it tries to live search everything for you.
Want to find just files and nothing else (ie. no meta-data or content-related stuff, just filenames)? Well, you can use the undocumented start-your-search-with-a-double-quote feature, but that doesn't work well because it doesn't understand wildcards (so "*.java won't work, for example, whereas ".java will but would include *.java.backup).Also it seems to lose its idea of filename-only as soon as you hit backspace and try to re-edit it. In other words, typing ".java will find me *.java*, but typing that, then hitting backspace, then typing hte final 'a' character again will start finding me things with java in the content instead of just the name.
It also has poor resource usage - some seem to be lucky, but search the forms and you'll see many people complaining about processes called mdimport or similar hogging large amounts of CPU. Then there's the indexing it does every time you connect a firewire drive - if I reboot my Powerbook in target mode and hook it up to the Power Mac, a large amount of indexing is initiated which slows down my performance on that drive. I can set it to not index, but then it slows down search on that drive. What's needed is for the indexing stuff to be really low priority or user-ppausable perhaps.
Sorry, Spotlight is ok but in the Finder it's a pain more than a help for me. I wouldn't have minded it in addition to Panther's more straightforward 'find a file' bit, but as a total replacement for that it's rather lacking. I'm not even contemplating using it as a complete replacement for a normal directory structure.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheers,
Ian
For example, I run a one-man contracting business. The worth to me of my accounts package is vast, the cost of it miniscule in comparison. And that cost is...one copy of Virtual PC for around £100 I think (I run OS X), one copy of XP for around £170 (retail, used it on a physical PC I no longer have and now it's on the emulator), then around £50 for Quicken UK. I can feel the Free people ganging up on me - I must be mad! That adds up to £230, that's nearly the price of a low-end machine! Well, to me that software is worth the amount, and the price is an utterly negligible amount of the cost of running my business.
Cheers,
Ian
On Windows: drag icon to the taskbar's tab for the target process, wait for the list of open windows to appear, drag to the relevant entry and that window will pop to the front. Nice - notice you're still just using the mouse.
On OS X: start to drag the icon, then hit F9 with your other hand to invoke Expose, choose the relevant window, wait for the window to come to the front and then release. Notice how you had to use both keys and the mouse there.
That's pretty much it on the UI front for me. I would definitely like to see Apple incorporate the Windows-like mouse-only behaviour though.
Cheers,
Ian
Tools->Options->Advanced->Software Update->Check Now says nothing available.
Running on XP. I also have access to the OS X version at home, but haven't tried that yet.
Cheers,
Ian
At the time of writing, the quote at the bottom of the page is:
"To be loved is very demoralizing. -- Katharine Hepburn"
I think I'm beginning to get what she meant. Mind you, as I pointed out the first time this was posted, they do seem to have Emma Peel working for them.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
That's quite some gap. Suggests that figures are being plucked out of the air, perhaps?
Cheers,
Ian
Genuine interest here as I'm about to upgrade a Debian server from Woody to Sarge this weekend. What sort of issues have you run into?
Cheers,
Ian
Assuming we're dealing with a native English speaker, I see these as different problems. Poor spelling might simply be poor typing (though if I see 'loosing' for 'losing' one more time, I will become upset...). Poor grammar is more fundamental I feel, as it implies a lack of comprehension. In coding terms, I may not remember the method name but I should at least understand the algorithm I'm attempting to implement.
Good. They assume far too much importance in the world as it is. If people still get them wrong, perhaps indoctrination hasn't quite been completed yet.
Cheers,
Ian
Yes, I'd say it was. I taught myself C on Suns, an ST (so 68000) and a Mac LC. DOS still ruled the x86 world at the time, with Windows 3.1 just about kicking in.
I can remember the sheer increduality I experienced when finding out about the ridiculous NEAR, LARGE and HUGE memory models I had to decide between before allocating memory under x86. It was the thing that made me decide DOS simply wasn't for me, because the coding was far too stupid.
So yes, the x86 segmented architecture was a significant factor in me choosing the 68000 route over a PC. And before the inevitable gets posted, yes I'm fully awware of the move to x86 today. But today's x86's don't force me to type "FAR char *" to get a decent buffer. "FAR char *" indeed, I ask you. Sounds more like "How now, brown cow?" than anything computer-related.
Cheers,
Ian
My front room already has enough wires in it stuffed behind the TV. The thought of spreading more of them out for my kids, one three and one two, to destroy really does not appeal. It wouldn't even appeal if there were no kids there to damage them; my front room is for relaxing in, not for turning into a server room-alike.
I'm aware that wireless speakers already exist, but last I looked (a year ago?) good quality ones are very expensive, and I believe there are sync. problems with surround sound? If you know differently, please bring me up to date because I would -love- to replace my stereo speaker set up with good wireless surround.
Cheers,
Ian
A workaround for now (on OS X):
- Set your importing preferences to AAC
- Install this Make Bookmarable Applescript
- Select the MP3, go to Advanced->Convert to AAC
- Select the newly-created AAC, run the Make Bookmarkable script on it
Finished, and you only need to do steps 1 and 2 the once, of course. I've been using this to convert BBC radio captures to bookmarkable AAC for a while (workflow: Tivo->MP3->bookmarkable AAC).would agree that making an AAC bookmarkable could do with being integrated into the main interface though.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
I'm 33, but trust me - listening to some of the comments made on Slashdot I often feel in my seventies anyway. Someone told me 4Gig wasn't a lot of disk space to leave empty recently...
Cheers,
Ian
Damned newbies get everywhere. I started on Slackware 0.9 I think, 1995'ish. :-)
Cheers,
Ian
>This statement gets bandied around a lot, but it is not true. If a user is an "admin", they can copy things into
ie. If they have already authenticated themselves to be an admin of that machine...
Cheers,
Ian
It's a fault that non-util software also requires admin to run, but whether that's Windows' fault or the developer of the software is open to question at best. Personally I'd say that's the developer's fault. A great example of this is Quicken - I have to run from an admin account just to do my accounts? Nope, I don't blame Microsoft for that. I blame Intuit.
Cheers,
Ian
For execution I agree with you, but for installation I'd expect it to be impossible to install without admin rights.
Cheers,
Ian
Absolutely. The concern remains legitimate whether the system is working as intended or not. The system itself is clearly wrong.
Europe's political scene is in chaos at the moment, with what was assumed to be the most pro-Europe country voting against a proposed constitution (France). In fact, almost everywhere politicians have dared to give people the vote instead of just waving it through the vote has gone against the European institutions, and in many places a vote will not even be chanced because of overwhelming popular opposition. Reasons are disparate (France thought the constitution was too Anglo-Saxon, Britain thinks Europe is too much slanted towards the French...) , but the point remains that these institutions have little to no popular support. Rubbish like ignoring a parliament to enact the will of civil servants will certainly not be helping.
Cheers,
Ian
It's more than that now. A democratically elected body has rejected it, an appointed body is enforcing it. It's now about more than just code. more than software patents. It's now about the primacy of elected bodies.
Cheers,
Ian
(UK - yes, I'll be writing but not merely on 'just' the software patent point)
I have a few bits of old hardware around - a Spectrum, a C64, a Mac Plus, an Astro Blaster handheld, an STe with mono monitor...a few bits. Nothing that uncommon, except perhaps the Astro Blaster.
There is something about using the old hardware which is not present when running an emulator. Take the C64 as the best example of this. Emulated you don't get the true sound of the SID (each one was different...), you get pixellated graphics if trying to play at a decent size on a monitor (versus just plugging in to a TV), you get a different keyboard layout...nope. Emulation is good, and I'm a great fan of it. But it isn't the same as using the real thing.
Cheers,
Ian
That's pretty much it for me. There are downsides involving ignorant cinema goers making too much noise, but not much else. If I'm taking my wife for a night out, very rare for us now as we have young kids to look after, it's likely we'll go for a film. Whilst I enjoy watching films at home, it simply doesn't feel anywhere near as special.
Cheers,
Ian
I have an ssh server on my home machine set up to answer on port 80, and accessible via a dyndns.org hostname. I have no need of a locally-hosted web server, so I don't miss using up 80 for something else. From there, I have a variety of options including opening up tunnels to a squid proxy.
All works like a charm, and it's set up for exactly reasons like this one. Can even be tunnelled over http to cope with proxies or packet-aware firewalls.
Cheers,
Ian
Reasons? Well, first of all Spotlight won't search the whole of your drive. Can't remember if it was in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin? Tough. Spotlight won't help you, it doesn't look in those hierarchies.
Made a mistake typing your search term into Spotlight and on an older machine? Don't even think of hitting that backspace key, or the Finder may go into a spinning beachball hell whilst it tries to live search everything for you.
Want to find just files and nothing else (ie. no meta-data or content-related stuff, just filenames)? Well, you can use the undocumented start-your-search-with-a-double-quote feature, but that doesn't work well because it doesn't understand wildcards (so "*.java won't work, for example, whereas ".java will but would include *.java.backup).Also it seems to lose its idea of filename-only as soon as you hit backspace and try to re-edit it. In other words, typing ".java will find me *.java*, but typing that, then hitting backspace, then typing hte final 'a' character again will start finding me things with java in the content instead of just the name.
It also has poor resource usage - some seem to be lucky, but search the forms and you'll see many people complaining about processes called mdimport or similar hogging large amounts of CPU. Then there's the indexing it does every time you connect a firewire drive - if I reboot my Powerbook in target mode and hook it up to the Power Mac, a large amount of indexing is initiated which slows down my performance on that drive. I can set it to not index, but then it slows down search on that drive. What's needed is for the indexing stuff to be really low priority or user-ppausable perhaps.
Sorry, Spotlight is ok but in the Finder it's a pain more than a help for me. I wouldn't have minded it in addition to Panther's more straightforward 'find a file' bit, but as a total replacement for that it's rather lacking. I'm not even contemplating using it as a complete replacement for a normal directory structure.
Cheers,
Ian