Linux actually has it better over Windows and OS/X in that there is a well-defined place to dump your user's configuration that is *not* part of the Application, so the users don't clobber each other and the configuration stays even if the application is removed. This is to put it in ~/.appname. Windows suffers from a *lot* of potential locations (due to everything being writable at one time), while OS/X has a misguided attempt to put writable data into the application directory.
OS X stores user configuration in ~/Library/Preferences, and always has. While I have seen poor ports try to write things directly into the application, it's clearly the wrong way to do things, works against the design of the system, and just plain doesn't work right for multiple/non-admin users for the most part. The built-in user preferences facilities for developers (Both CFPreferences and NSUserDefaults) use the Library/Preferences locations too, so you'd have to go out of your way to NOT do this.
Yeah, I think it's just one of those things that's "true" simply because it's repeated so often. I also can't think of a good reason why MS would misrepresent that in their blog so I don't really have any suspicion that they're lying about it. It makes more sense to me that it would be totally custom.
Perhaps because of API similarities that they mention, it 'resembles' a Win2K-era machine from that point of view, and the assumption grew?
They have a bunch of other DVD releases too, but they're not all as kid friendly. For instance, in Hulk vs Wolverine, there's swearing, dismemberment, and blood. I would recommend renting (Netflix?) and screening first at any rate. It's hard to gauge what a five year old is read for without knowing him/her.
They paid the fees for the testing and certification, and made what few API and kernel changes were necessary for the certification back when 10.5/Intel was released. (They never certified the PPC edition)
Also, can you provide a reference for your assertion that it's called "Apple OS/X"? I've been using the platform in a technical capacity for many years and never before seen it written like that, either in marketing or tech docs.
At least the way they operate, people electing to Buy/Keep the game from GameFly will know they're getting the code as if they'd bought new - you get the unmolested packaging when you do that including any and every ad, code, or manual that was packed in with the game. They boxes are even in better condition than when you buy new from GameStop; devoid of impossible-to-remove stickers and crud.
It will diminish the actual RENTAL part of the service for afflicted games though, no doubt.
Just thought I'd try to be helpful and point this out if you missed it. The one-download policy is gone as part of the whole iCloud thing. You can download any song you've ever purchased from iTunes as many times as you like now, on any authorized device/computer. (Excluding any that have been delisted for whatever reason)
In iTunes itself, you click on the "Purchased" link in the pane on the right of the main iTunes Store 'page'.
I don't share you opinions on their direction, which is OK. But I find it curious to say that Tiger was the pinnacle. We're an all-Mac shop, and we have various machines still running Tiger. We also have Leopard and Snow Leopard around. Tiger is easily the worst to work with, its age shows badly.
And for what it's worth, console login was never removed. Works on all our machines up to and including 10.6.7. Same as it ever was, login as ">console".
Netkas was incorrect and making a knee-jerk attempt to dismiss their efforts for some reason. Heck, did you even read the addendum to the very article you're posting about? http://netkas.org/?p=435
Essentially it translates Source Engine calls to OpenGL commands at the same level that they get turned into DirectX commands on Windows.
I skimmed the entire page with Safari 5 (cause the math content made no sense to me!) up and down several times, and reloaded a bunch of times without any issues. Obviously I haven't had it for long, but I've observed no stability problems at all. Is it possible that page is using a special font for the math symbols that may be corrupt on your system? (Wild guess) Did/do you have any Safari "enhancers" installed? Those probably aren't compatible between releases.
Apple isn't buying up apps from suppliers to 'stock' their store. The developer has to actively sign up and pay for an account, AND agree to the terms of the App store before they even get to submit an application for sale there. I haven't checked specifically, but they might have even run into trouble with the usage terms in the SDK that they had to agree to before even building the app in the first place. None of that is beyond the developer's control, but they willfully ignored all of that and submitted the application anyway - asserting they had the right to do so.
Those are different things than the specific setting I was talking about. I checked since I wrote it, though the label (on 10.5 at least) is "Full Keyboard Access", the setting is "Text boxes and lists only" or "All controls", and it is indeed toggled by Control-F7. I do think that the OTHER shortcuts, such as Spotlight as you mention, are always on regardless however.
It also appears that there's a default-on setting called "Full Keyboard Access" that can only be toggled by Ctrl-F1 as far as I can see. That seems to enable/disable keyboard controls like "Move focus to the menu bar" and "Move focus to the Dock"
But the setting I was originally referring to controls the tab-stops in dialogs (And actually, on web forms in Safari). The default is historically more "Mac-like", but I personally greatly prefer "All controls"
What you're probably missing (besides possibly knowledge of the keys themselves) is that you need to go to System Preferences->Keyboard, and turn on "Full Keyboard Access". (IIRC, Control F7 toggles this setting by default) This is one of the first things I do on any new user account of mine on an OSX system. This allows tab-focus between UI elements in a window same as anywhere else, among other things. With that on, I can't think of much that can't be done from the keyboard alone. Perhaps physically resizing/repositioning a window...
That same System Preference panel has a "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab (might even be the same tab that has the Full Keyboard Access control) that tell you the keyboard shortcuts currently assigned to various system functions (and allows editing them), and then has an "Application Keyboard Shortcuts" section at the bottom which allows you do define both Global and Per-App keyboard shortcut sequences for named Menu Items.
If I may throw in my own anecdote, I have six friends with an XBox 360, seven with a Wii, and one of these friends additionally has a PS3. Not a single one of them (including myself) has modified any of these or pirated any games for them. But look at our game libraries and the 360 is far and away the biggest for all of us.
I think it's more a matter of the 360 having had a significant head start on the PS3, and a continuing entry price advantage. Since so many games are cross platform, and the PS3 has had so few worthwhile exclusives (obviously opinion) the momentum stays with the 360. If it's a cross platform release, I have no incentive to get a PS3 for it, the 360 was usually the lead platform for these resulting in inferior PS3 ports anyway, and the 360 version lets me add to my gamerscore.
If piracy were really the big decider here, MS's game sales (as reported by NPD) wouldn't be as high as they are.
Before the 360 development hardware was complete, there was some form of Windows running on PowerMac G5s serving as the development environment for studios, but that was a stop gap.
Re:Requirements defined by the user
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
What if you get an e-mail from a business associate asking for a price of one of your widgets? You would have to memorize what the quantity was, go to your spreadsheet app, and pull that price from the list and memorize it. Then you have to go back and write it in the e-mail. Room for error? I think so.
Not offering an opinion on multitasking vs not, but for this specific example I'd assume one would use the Copy & Paste feature. I typically do that even on my desktop just to make sure I don't brainfart and typo something even if I'm looking right at it.
As another poster correctly pointed out, you can put non-DRM books on the iPad. There's actually a number of alternative eBook applications too if you don't like iBooks - INCLUDING Amazon's Kindle for reading your Kindle content. I will, however, be interested to see if Apple's app approval no-no of "Not duplicating built-in functionality" will be retroactively applied to those applications on the iPad now that iBooks exists....
You know it can watch YouTube right? Just like the iPhone/iPod, it even has a built-in app for this. Somehow it doesn't need Flash to do that. Also, you're perfectly free to load your own videos in from your computer and watch those - or any of the increasingly common websites that are offering HTML5 video players.
But I guess that would get in the way of your uninformed ranting about being forced to buy videos from Apple.
If you'd had experience with the MacOS version of Flash, you wouldn't blame Apple for not wanting to use it. It's simply a lousy product, not only is it horribly unstable but it's a MASSIVE CPU hog, watching a 20 minute Flash video on my Mac Book Pro drives the CPU temp up a good 20 degrees C within minutes, and then the fans kick in full speed. No thanks, I'd prefer to keep some battery life on my iPod. What I like is that Apple has enough clout these days to push sites towards the HTML5 *standard* and away from Flash.
Apple has done and will continue to do a lot of questionable things that are worthy of healthy debates. But let's not pretend that giving Flash the cold shoulder is a bad thing =)
Assuming you didn't mind the incredibly short cord. That thing kept me from being able to sit on a couch while playing. I actually switched to Master System controllers (which were compatible) for games like Sonic that didn't need more than 1 button as those had insanely long cords.
It works fine in the WebKit nightlies, at least as far as comment titles and scores (Don't see any other problems either). I'd venture to guess it's a problem with the Safari 4 build - webkit itself has been updated a lot since then, and should therefore be working when Safari 4 final comes out.
Really? I never get a receipt for app updates. I do get a $0 receipt for free apps I download for the first time, but never an update to one I have installed. Not sure if deleting it, then downloading an updated version "fresh" again would be different, I haven't tried.
But anyway, you're making a lot of assumptions about how they're counting downloads. How do you know they aren't filtering out re-downloads/updates, or even free apps from the count? I can't imagine it'd be hard to do.
I don't know that they are either, but unless they published their methodology somewhere it's all just conjecture.
But why didn't Rare just use the Nintendo 64 Controller Pak, a memory card that was designed for this sort of thing?
Only thing I can think of is to prevent people from cheating by copying the file around. If the game software has to write special values into RAM that have to be quickly read by the other game, that makes it a lot harder for people who didn't earn the reward to get it.
Of course, I can't imagine that it's a big enough deal to warrant all that extra complication.
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Linux actually has it better over Windows and OS/X in that there is a well-defined place to dump your user's configuration that is *not* part of the Application, so the users don't clobber each other and the configuration stays even if the application is removed. This is to put it in ~/.appname. Windows suffers from a *lot* of potential locations (due to everything being writable at one time), while OS/X has a misguided attempt to put writable data into the application directory.
OS X stores user configuration in ~/Library/Preferences, and always has. While I have seen poor ports try to write things directly into the application, it's clearly the wrong way to do things, works against the design of the system, and just plain doesn't work right for multiple/non-admin users for the most part. The built-in user preferences facilities for developers (Both CFPreferences and NSUserDefaults) use the Library/Preferences locations too, so you'd have to go out of your way to NOT do this.
Yeah, I think it's just one of those things that's "true" simply because it's repeated so often. I also can't think of a good reason why MS would misrepresent that in their blog so I don't really have any suspicion that they're lying about it. It makes more sense to me that it would be totally custom.
Perhaps because of API similarities that they mention, it 'resembles' a Win2K-era machine from that point of view, and the assumption grew?
According to MS, neither XBox is based on the Windows kernel at all contrary to popular belief.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx
If you want kid friendly, I'd suggest you look more towards Marvel's Cartoon DVD releases. (Hope you don't mind Amazon links!)
Next Avengers is a fairly cute one where the children of the old Avengers take up their parent's mantels:
http://www.amazon.com/Next-Avengers-Heroes-Tomorrow/dp/B001B1878E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311615656&sr=8-1
Thor: Tales of Asgard is a sort-of prequel to the movie Thor, where all the principal cast is much younger:
http://www.amazon.com/Thor-Tales-Asgard-Matthew-Wolf/dp/B004PHE9FQ/ref=pd_cp_mov_4
They have a bunch of other DVD releases too, but they're not all as kid friendly. For instance, in Hulk vs Wolverine, there's swearing, dismemberment, and blood. I would recommend renting (Netflix?) and screening first at any rate. It's hard to gauge what a five year old is read for without knowing him/her.
Apple Mac OS X is in fact "actually" Unix: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/technology/unix.html
They paid the fees for the testing and certification, and made what few API and kernel changes were necessary for the certification back when 10.5/Intel was released. (They never certified the PPC edition)
Also, can you provide a reference for your assertion that it's called "Apple OS/X"? I've been using the platform in a technical capacity for many years and never before seen it written like that, either in marketing or tech docs.
At least the way they operate, people electing to Buy/Keep the game from GameFly will know they're getting the code as if they'd bought new - you get the unmolested packaging when you do that including any and every ad, code, or manual that was packed in with the game. They boxes are even in better condition than when you buy new from GameStop; devoid of impossible-to-remove stickers and crud.
It will diminish the actual RENTAL part of the service for afflicted games though, no doubt.
Just thought I'd try to be helpful and point this out if you missed it. The one-download policy is gone as part of the whole iCloud thing. You can download any song you've ever purchased from iTunes as many times as you like now, on any authorized device/computer. (Excluding any that have been delisted for whatever reason)
In iTunes itself, you click on the "Purchased" link in the pane on the right of the main iTunes Store 'page'.
I don't share you opinions on their direction, which is OK. But I find it curious to say that Tiger was the pinnacle. We're an all-Mac shop, and we have various machines still running Tiger. We also have Leopard and Snow Leopard around. Tiger is easily the worst to work with, its age shows badly.
And for what it's worth, console login was never removed. Works on all our machines up to and including 10.6.7. Same as it ever was, login as ">console".
Netkas was incorrect and making a knee-jerk attempt to dismiss their efforts for some reason. Heck, did you even read the addendum to the very article you're posting about? http://netkas.org/?p=435
Essentially it translates Source Engine calls to OpenGL commands at the same level that they get turned into DirectX commands on Windows.
I skimmed the entire page with Safari 5 (cause the math content made no sense to me!) up and down several times, and reloaded a bunch of times without any issues. Obviously I haven't had it for long, but I've observed no stability problems at all. Is it possible that page is using a special font for the math symbols that may be corrupt on your system? (Wild guess) Did/do you have any Safari "enhancers" installed? Those probably aren't compatible between releases.
That's where the Barnes and Noble analogy fails.
Apple isn't buying up apps from suppliers to 'stock' their store. The developer has to actively sign up and pay for an account, AND agree to the terms of the App store before they even get to submit an application for sale there. I haven't checked specifically, but they might have even run into trouble with the usage terms in the SDK that they had to agree to before even building the app in the first place. None of that is beyond the developer's control, but they willfully ignored all of that and submitted the application anyway - asserting they had the right to do so.
Those are different things than the specific setting I was talking about. I checked since I wrote it, though the label (on 10.5 at least) is "Full Keyboard Access", the setting is "Text boxes and lists only" or "All controls", and it is indeed toggled by Control-F7. I do think that the OTHER shortcuts, such as Spotlight as you mention, are always on regardless however.
It also appears that there's a default-on setting called "Full Keyboard Access" that can only be toggled by Ctrl-F1 as far as I can see. That seems to enable/disable keyboard controls like "Move focus to the menu bar" and "Move focus to the Dock"
But the setting I was originally referring to controls the tab-stops in dialogs (And actually, on web forms in Safari). The default is historically more "Mac-like", but I personally greatly prefer "All controls"
What you're probably missing (besides possibly knowledge of the keys themselves) is that you need to go to System Preferences->Keyboard, and turn on "Full Keyboard Access". (IIRC, Control F7 toggles this setting by default) This is one of the first things I do on any new user account of mine on an OSX system. This allows tab-focus between UI elements in a window same as anywhere else, among other things. With that on, I can't think of much that can't be done from the keyboard alone. Perhaps physically resizing/repositioning a window...
That same System Preference panel has a "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab (might even be the same tab that has the Full Keyboard Access control) that tell you the keyboard shortcuts currently assigned to various system functions (and allows editing them), and then has an "Application Keyboard Shortcuts" section at the bottom which allows you do define both Global and Per-App keyboard shortcut sequences for named Menu Items.
If I may throw in my own anecdote, I have six friends with an XBox 360, seven with a Wii, and one of these friends additionally has a PS3. Not a single one of them (including myself) has modified any of these or pirated any games for them. But look at our game libraries and the 360 is far and away the biggest for all of us.
I think it's more a matter of the 360 having had a significant head start on the PS3, and a continuing entry price advantage. Since so many games are cross platform, and the PS3 has had so few worthwhile exclusives (obviously opinion) the momentum stays with the 360. If it's a cross platform release, I have no incentive to get a PS3 for it, the 360 was usually the lead platform for these resulting in inferior PS3 ports anyway, and the 360 version lets me add to my gamerscore.
If piracy were really the big decider here, MS's game sales (as reported by NPD) wouldn't be as high as they are.
They do, but it's not Windows:
http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx
You are correct, and here is the relevant link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx
Before the 360 development hardware was complete, there was some form of Windows running on PowerMac G5s serving as the development environment for studios, but that was a stop gap.
It doesn't run Windows:
http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx
What if you get an e-mail from a business associate asking for a price of one of your widgets? You would have to memorize what the quantity was, go to your spreadsheet app, and pull that price from the list and memorize it. Then you have to go back and write it in the e-mail. Room for error? I think so.
Not offering an opinion on multitasking vs not, but for this specific example I'd assume one would use the Copy & Paste feature. I typically do that even on my desktop just to make sure I don't brainfart and typo something even if I'm looking right at it.
As another poster correctly pointed out, you can put non-DRM books on the iPad. There's actually a number of alternative eBook applications too if you don't like iBooks - INCLUDING Amazon's Kindle for reading your Kindle content. I will, however, be interested to see if Apple's app approval no-no of "Not duplicating built-in functionality" will be retroactively applied to those applications on the iPad now that iBooks exists....
You know it can watch YouTube right? Just like the iPhone/iPod, it even has a built-in app for this. Somehow it doesn't need Flash to do that. Also, you're perfectly free to load your own videos in from your computer and watch those - or any of the increasingly common websites that are offering HTML5 video players.
But I guess that would get in the way of your uninformed ranting about being forced to buy videos from Apple.
If you'd had experience with the MacOS version of Flash, you wouldn't blame Apple for not wanting to use it. It's simply a lousy product, not only is it horribly unstable but it's a MASSIVE CPU hog, watching a 20 minute Flash video on my Mac Book Pro drives the CPU temp up a good 20 degrees C within minutes, and then the fans kick in full speed. No thanks, I'd prefer to keep some battery life on my iPod. What I like is that Apple has enough clout these days to push sites towards the HTML5 *standard* and away from Flash.
Apple has done and will continue to do a lot of questionable things that are worthy of healthy debates. But let's not pretend that giving Flash the cold shoulder is a bad thing =)
Not on iPhone it doesn't.
http://developer.apple.com/Mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/Introduction/introObjectiveC.html
(Search for iPhone)
Assuming you didn't mind the incredibly short cord. That thing kept me from being able to sit on a couch while playing. I actually switched to Master System controllers (which were compatible) for games like Sonic that didn't need more than 1 button as those had insanely long cords.
It works fine in the WebKit nightlies, at least as far as comment titles and scores (Don't see any other problems either). I'd venture to guess it's a problem with the Safari 4 build - webkit itself has been updated a lot since then, and should therefore be working when Safari 4 final comes out.
Really? I never get a receipt for app updates. I do get a $0 receipt for free apps I download for the first time, but never an update to one I have installed. Not sure if deleting it, then downloading an updated version "fresh" again would be different, I haven't tried.
But anyway, you're making a lot of assumptions about how they're counting downloads. How do you know they aren't filtering out re-downloads/updates, or even free apps from the count? I can't imagine it'd be hard to do.
I don't know that they are either, but unless they published their methodology somewhere it's all just conjecture.
But why didn't Rare just use the Nintendo 64 Controller Pak, a memory card that was designed for this sort of thing?
Only thing I can think of is to prevent people from cheating by copying the file around. If the game software has to write special values into RAM that have to be quickly read by the other game, that makes it a lot harder for people who didn't earn the reward to get it.
Of course, I can't imagine that it's a big enough deal to warrant all that extra complication.