There are so many subtle positives to Aqua, and I've yet to read a negative that isn't purely preference. Aqua has tangible, solid benefits. I say its worth it for the Cocoa API alone.
I refer you to the fact that Rhapsody managed to have the Cocoa (or "Yellow Box" at the time) API with a Mac OS 9 interface for a while before the public beta releases of the OS. This has nothing to do with Aqua and neither do the performance and stability improvements. We could be having our cake and eating it to if Apple hadn't switched.
Heck, they could've even let the OS be just as "lickable" as it is now if they had done little more than give it a face-lift via a new default theme. There was no reason to get rid of tabbed folders, the Apple menu, the control strip, nor the spatial awareness of the Finder. They could've preserved every single feature that made Mac OS 9 great AND improved the performance and stability while giving a UNIX underpinning.
They just chose not to.
By the way, could you give us an example of some of the subtle positives to Aqua that weren't there in the Classic Mac OS?
[T]he dock just isn't that big a deal, certainly not enough to warrant the amount of hatred and vitriol spewed on the subject.
Granted, most users probably don't have a problem with it. Then again, a vast majority of users don't have a problem with Windows and few will dispute that Apple hasn't always had it better than MS in the UI department. Many Mac OS X users that you may know may have never been Mac OS 9 users, much less Mac OS 9 power-users.
I suppose the constant torrent of dislike for the Dock comes from having once had better. There are few things more irritating in computing to some people, like myself, than growing dependent on advanced functionality to do your work and then to have that functionality taken away against your will. This is especially irritating when you know that it was done to make an "ooo! shiny!" interface over a useable one.
There are well-known and accepted convetions of UI design based on years of psychological research that continues to this day in colleges across the nation and the world. When this expert advice is ignored, it's irritating. People have shown that there are ways to do these things right, and Mac OS 9 did them. This is proven by research.
Mac OS X tossed all of that away. It's a sign that Apple no longer listens to the very people that made their system enjoyable to use in the first place. As a power-user of the Classic Mac OS, the efficiency and quickness of working with the Finder was a large, unnoticed part of why I liked using a Mac. It's the kind of thing you never miss until it's gone.
I guess I just resent Apple for taking away a lot of what made using a Mac different from using Windows and more fun. Now it's just down to the iApps and the new Expose feature (which really isn't that much better than good multiple desktop software if you're used to it).
Putting things in the Apple menu often caused users to install their programs in the system folder (Because that's where the "Apple Menu Items" lives, natch), which is needless to say, not a good practice.
Users who ignore plainly-given instructions about where to place an application (which has always traditionally been given by strategically placed icon titles) will always have the opportunity to place an application somewhere stupid. Personally, I've never seen this.
Take a look at the average OS 9 user's desktop (Or recent OS X convert from OS 9) and see the dozens of icons and apps installed there, for lack of a better, more organized place to put them.
Like the Applications directory? Maybe those users are missing out on the Apple Menu, the Control Strip, or Folder Tabs which were all deleted from Mac OS X to be replaced by the Dock and its pathetic capacity for apps. I just can't place access to as many apps in a single, organized location as easily in Mac OS 9. Maybe those users are just those who decided to place them on the desktop for easy access rather than deal with accessing them from a folder placed in the (ever shifting) Dock.
OS 9's habit of always opening a new window for every folder only adds to the confusion. No expose either.
Mac OS 9 had two ways of navigating to manage that problem. The first was to hold down option when opening a window, which closed the window behind it. The second, less obscure way was to hold down the second click of a double-click for pop-up folders, which would allow you to quickly dig down through a folder hierarchy to what you wanted without leaving open all the other intermediary windows. I believe this was added into Mac OS X in version 10.2, but I'd already stopped using the Finder at that point, so I don't remember.
Mac OS 9 managed to do all this WITHOUT destroyed the spatial integrity of the Finder. Mac OS X can't be bother to remember where you last had the window at, especially if you make the dire mistake of opening it via List or Browser views. Heck, it used to not even bother itself with keeping the icons in the same place in a window.
The "open arrow" method of using the List View in Finder windows is a mess too.
The "open arrow" method is still available in Mac OS X. This argument is silly as a constrast between the two. Besides, it's still better than the Browse view which for a long time didn't let you even really see what the full name of a file was thanks to not being resizeable. It took a LOT of customer complaints to get that fixed.
I think "Tog" is upset just because his ideas have been brushed aside and he's watching from the sidelines.
Maybe you should actually read what he has to say. Then jot over to Ars Technica and look up the articles they have there on the Spatial Finder and why it was important. Tog's justifiably upset because he has studied and understands the underlying psychology of good user interface design and is watching the after-effects of letting marketing win over science in the early days of Mac OS X. He has words of praise for Expose, but raises good concern over numerous other little irritations of the new system.
Okay, what am I supposed to use instead? Linux? Windows?
Mac OS X happens to be the best GUI for a modern OS on the market. It's still vastly inferior to the experience of Mac OS 9, but there are numerous compelling reasons to switch. Modern application support and >31 character filenames where enough to force me to switch, but that doesn't mean that I suddenly lose my right to ask for Apple to do better.
(If there's one thing I can't stand more than anything else, it's the whole "like it or leave it" attitude. NOTHING would ever get improved if all people were like that.)
I find it much easier to use, both on the simple applications and in using Darwin.
Well, there you go, you like the apps and the command line, which has nothing to do with the Finder and Dock experience. I just miss when I didn't feel the need to use the command line for simple operations that used to be trivial with the GUI instead of a burden. I end up spending far more time in Terminal than in the Finder thanks to its horrible organization and the no-win choice of having screen clutter or Dock clutter if I actually left Finder windows open now.
It's like saying "You're such a fuckwit if you think Chocolate is better than caramel, here's why"
To further extend and utterly mangle your analogy, it's more like Apple took away the Mint, Strawberry, and Chocolate that users had come to love and use regularly and replaced it with a big block of food-colored Vanilla, saying that the rainbow swirls of dyed Vanilla more than adequately serves all the functions of Mint, Strawberry, and Chocolate despite losing a lot of the specific flavors the former solutions that made them so loved by their former users for getting the same things done differently.
Then, they make it so that you can never really get rid of Vanilla despite running third party Chocolate on your computer so that the big block of Vanilla keeps splatting itself against your screen everytime you move your spoon to the wrong place.
The analogy then falls apart because there's no good ice cream metaphor for the fact that they threw several years of HCI research out the window by ignoring the effects of muscle memory and Fitt's Law by having elements slide around as you opened and closed new applications and by no longer using the corners of the screen as a useful fixed reference. Nor can I really relate the fact that it's impossible to tell similar items apart without hunting and pecking to a banana split or to whipped cream topping.
(Just so y'all know, when it comes to MY computing experience I do like to go with what works for me, and I WILL be opinionated about what works for me)
Yeah, so what are you complaning about when others do the same? The Dock DOESN'T work for most of us. I've just gotten resigned to keyboard navigation between apps and to hunting and pecking for new applications when I want them.
Thanks you, no, but I've been a long, long critic of the Mac OS X interface. While some of the problems from the 10.0 release have been fixed over the years, I've always been extremely irritated that Apple didn't just preserve the Mac OS 9 interface like they did in the very early Rhapsody builds (in case you don't remember) rather than drop this whole new mess on us.
No, I still in many ways prefer Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. However, all my modern application require Mac OS X, and I've permanently forced myself into the newer OS via breaking out of the old 31 character filename limit. Otherwise, I'd still be using Mac OS 9 because it best fits my workflow.
Just because I disagree with you and happen to agree with someone more public doesn't make me a sheep.
Apple should've never gotten rid of its HCI group, and Tog once again shows why. For all of its advancement in underlying technologies and reliability, Mac OS X has been a huge leap backwards in useability compared to the Classic Mas OS as designed by people who cared more about useability than "lickability."
I really think that Apple forgot why a lot of its users so tenaciously stuck with the platform in the first place despite higher prices and the little irritations of cooperative multitasking. The interface matters as more than just a pretty show. Classic Mac OS pundits have been kicking the Dock for years now, and it's good to hear one of the experts chime in....Not that Apple will listen, of course.
You fail to understand the principal-agent problem. It's rational for the executives of SCO because the probability of dire consequences to the destruction of their company is very low. They are already quite wealthy, and the loss of a company is often considered a learning experience in the business community. They don't have to worry about new jobs.
The principals -- the shareholders -- will lose out, but most of SCO's shareholders at this point are either unsophisticated or realize that this is a big gamble. The agents -- the executives -- will either win big gains that they could've gotten no other way or lose little that they wouldn't have lost anyway. SCO is dead. Caldera is dead. All that's left is to make a gamble on dominating the UNIX market based on some IP that they think they have.
This is fully rational. You take an inevitable loss and try to turn it into a success, even if the chances of that success are low.
However, the term "rational self-interest" has little to do with the rationality of one's methods so much as Ayn Rand's belief that following one's own self-interest was itself inherently rational. The term "rational" is meant to highlight the idea that acting for others instead of yourself is irrational. The Principal-Agent problem is one of those problems in the business world that is inherently caused by such thinking.
It would be wiser for McBride to perpetuate the release of Open Source operating system vis-a-vis in order to accentuate the capability contained within them.
Heh. Business lingo aside, it very much wouldn't have been wiser for the owners of SCO's OpenServer UNIX to have done so. Linux has completely eaten SCO's lunch with the exception of fields where necessary products for the operation of a business are available only (or cheapest) on SCO's OS line. Real, cheap(er) *NIX for mass market hardware instead of highly marked-up "big iron" was SCO's market before Linux came along and did everything SCO did better for free. SCO's OS line is dying, and there's pretty much nothing that they could've done to save it as a sellable products.
Instead, SCO acted in what an Ayn Rand-ite would've called its own "rational self-interest." SCO knows that its major source of revenue is going to be useless soon, so it's attempting to get another one. Building essentially a completely new software product line in a new market niche is far too high-risk and too low of a payoff compared to attempting to exploit the IP that they think they own. The current spate of lawsuits is a high-risk gamble too, but it's one with a much, much larger potential payoff.
Also, there's the whole principal-agent problem caused by the fact that the future of the executives of the board is not strongly yoked to the company going down in flames. Together, you have a recipe for callous, self-interested behavior by people who are committed to the idea that money is the best measure of success.
Instead we have been deploying Solaris and Mac OS X for the satellite locations.
Congratulations, you have played into SCO's hands. You have not adopted the platform that has killed theirs, and you have given money to Sun, a company that has decided to pay SCO a license for the product you purchased. This is exactly what SCO was hoping for.
I don't get this. Why does everyone want a watch that goes slower? If you're making a digital watch, why not just reprogram the thing to count to 24:39 instead of 24:00 before wrapping around?
Adding precisely balanced extra weights to a mechanical watch and altering the frequency of the crystal or divider of a digital watch are both excessively complex measures. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
My point is that there never was a production OQO 1.0 as far as I ever heard, and I've been trying to get info on the product ever since I first heard of it about a year or two ago. Saying that this one's an upgrade over the one you have is like saying that you're a world-reknowned Duke Nukem Forever champ.
Go on groupstudy.com and see how people complain about the new laptops that don't have a serial port.
When they instead should be complaining that GPS and router manufacturers continue to be too lazy to support modern interfaces. I'm lucky to have access to a friend's PC to update my GPS -- my own machine is legacy-free, and the Garmin GPS I have is one of the few boat-anchors holding me back from no longer needing a serial port.
That's the sort of behavior that would trigger that subsection if and only if the first part were violated too:
"Any person, other than the one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer,
who willfully wears, exhibits, or uses the badge of a peace officer with the intent of fraudulently impersonating a peace officer, or of fraudulently inducing the belief that he or she is a peace officer"
You gotta abuse a real cop's badge to violate subsection (b)(1) or you gotta use a badge that imitates a cop's badge or claim that it does to violate subsection (b)(2). Now if you never claim to be an officer of the law and you never wear a badge, you can be as menacing as you want to be within relevant laws to intimidation and making threats. I think they state pretty clearly in the article that the RIAA isn't claiming to be with law enforcement and that the people giving up their stuff sign a form that says that it's a voluntarily turn-over, but they also clearly state that most of the targets are foreigners who don't know well enough to know that the RIAA agents are dressed as law enforcement is required to. It's a little side-step of the law.
The key words are "badge, insignia, emblem, device, label, certificate, card, or writing." The section on being "close enough" is all about showing false police ID. Wearing black fatigues and jackets with "RIAA" on them isn't close enough to hold up under close scrutiny in a court of law probably.
538d. (a) Any person other than one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer, who willfully wears, exhibits, or uses the authorized uniform, insignia, emblem, device, label, certificate, card, or writing, of a peace officer, with the intent of fraudulently impersonating a peace officer, or of fraudulently inducing the belief that he or she is a peace officer, is guilty of a misdemeanor.
(b) (1) Any person, other than the one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer, who willfully wears, exhibits, or uses the badge of a peace officer with the intent of fraudulently impersonating a peace officer, or of fraudulently inducing the belief that he or she is a peace officer, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, by a fine not to exceed two thousand dollars ($2,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
(2) Any person who willfully wears or uses any badge that falsely purports to be authorized for the use of one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer, or which so resembles the authorized badge of a peace officer as would deceive any ordinary reasonable person into believing that it is authorized for the use of one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer, for the purpose of fraudulently impersonating a peace officer, or of fraudulently inducing the belief that he or she is a peace officer, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, by a fine not to exceed two thousand dollars ($2,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
(c) Any person who willfully wears, exhibits, or uses, or who willfully makes, sells, loans, gives, or transfers to another, any badge, insignia, emblem, device, or any label, certificate, card, or writing, which falsely purports to be authorized for the use of one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer, or which so resembles the authorized badge, insignia, emblem, device, label, certificate, card, or writing of a peace officer as would deceive an ordinary reasonable person into believing that it is authorized for the use of one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer, is guilty of a misdemeanor, except that any person who makes or sells any badge under the circumstances described in this subdivision is subject to a fine not to exceed fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that wearing uniforms that resemble generic law enforcement uniforms but are not direct imitations of official uniforms is illegal. Basically, if you aren't using a fake badge or a damn good copy of an official police uniform, I think you can get out of this one under California law. Then, there's the US Code to consider:
Sec. 913. - Impersonator making arrest or search
Whoever falsely represents himself to be an officer, agent, or employee of the United States, and in such assumed character arrests or detains any person or in any manner searches the person, buildings, or other property of any person, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both
As long as they're careful not to represent themselves as being a federal employee, they haven't violated this law either. In other words, it's going to be hard to nail them for crimes unless they do something stupid that's not covered under their little "voluntary" contract that people must sign -- so long as said contract holds up in court as not being signed under duress. Considering that the new RIAA head is from the BATF, I'm pretty sure he's savvy about skirting the laws holding back law enforcement officers as much as possible.
There are actually several techniques to filter noise without losing significant spikes. One which I've worked with before is the minimum noise fraction transformation, which is a modified version of the principal components transformation that works based on maximizing signal rather than variance.
"Basically," you create n-dimensional coordinate system where n is the number of colors per pixel in your image and each axis is numbered by the brightness of that color in each pixel. You plot each pixel as a point in that space. Then you take your point cluster, and -- here's where the nasty magical math handwaving appears -- you rotate it so that the the first axis becomes the line through the data with the highest signal / least noise, rotate it so that the second axis becomes the next orthogonal line through the date to have the least noise, and so on.
(A principal components transformation does the same thing with highest variance instead least noise, and the most common implementation of an MNF transformation is actually a noise-adjusted PC transform. Basically, you reorder the data so that the highest signal becomes the highest variance.)
You then take the resulting image which has the highest signal in its first layer (the first "color" value per pixel) and the highest noise in the last layer and you filter out the noise layers (determined by looking at the eigenvalues for the image). You can either average them out, zero them out (inaccurate, but a useful compression mechanism), or you can run a smoothing filter over them. When you rotate the image's point cloud back into its original orientation, you get an image which has had a significant amount of noise removed.
Once you do that, you can do spectral analysis on each pixel to see how much they differ from the surrounding terrain. Since we know pretty well what the typical composition of rocks on Mars is and what their spectral profile would be, we can look for wildly aberrant points, like polished metals that shouldn't be found on the surface. You can do this without filtering noise, but you get a lot of false positives.
Now, this transformation doesn't work very well with only 3-7 wavelengths of light like in most common image data, but it's just an example of things you can do to remove noise in satellite image data. There are other techniques that might work better with this data, but those are for people better educated in the fields of remote sensing than I to describe. (I'm just a code monkey who writes software for this kind of thing based on docs handed to me by the PhDs here. I just understand it well enough to implement it.)
Ah, that's right. I keep forgetting about that. I've made a suggestion like this before to someone else in a similar situation and gotten back the same answer. Many system utilities on Solaris do have explicit link paths to avoid hacking attempts using compromised libraries elsewhere in the path (if I recall the reason correctly). My bad.
Actually, according the LA Times the issues of Creationist theories and Bush-supported religious plaques are seperate. There is a book sold in the gift shops at the Grand Canyon that advances the Creationist theory of the canyon, written by a canyon guide. It has been moved from the science section to the inspirational section. As fas as I know, the Bush administration has no stance on this issue.
Seperately, there are a few religious plaques in the canyon with inspirational Bible verses on them, but with no mention of creationism, that were ordered to be taken down since it's a public park and there is supposed to be a seperation of church and state. The Bush administration objects to that.
Two issues -- one of ignorance and one of state support of religion -- not one.
You could've also added "/newdir/usr/lib" to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to fix that. I never knew about the static binaries, though. Thanks for the info.
But then we'd h ave to agree with other countries as to what color our lazer weapons would be( USA = red, russia = blue, france = pink, etc.)...
No, no, no! Don't you know the laws of movie physics! Good is higher than evil on the on the electromagnetic spectrum. That's why good guys always use blue energy and bad guys always use red energy. Using red lasers would make US the evil empire, instead of... of...
I, uh.. hey, what's that's shiny distraction over there!
Gravistar theory replaces black holes and the concept of a singularity which white holes depend on.
White holes probably don't exist even if black holes do. They are predicted by the math of general relativity but probably are not physically possibleas they are a singularity with no mass.
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There are so many subtle positives to Aqua, and I've yet to read a negative that isn't purely preference. Aqua has tangible, solid benefits. I say its worth it for the Cocoa API alone.
I refer you to the fact that Rhapsody managed to have the Cocoa (or "Yellow Box" at the time) API with a Mac OS 9 interface for a while before the public beta releases of the OS. This has nothing to do with Aqua and neither do the performance and stability improvements. We could be having our cake and eating it to if Apple hadn't switched.
Heck, they could've even let the OS be just as "lickable" as it is now if they had done little more than give it a face-lift via a new default theme. There was no reason to get rid of tabbed folders, the Apple menu, the control strip, nor the spatial awareness of the Finder. They could've preserved every single feature that made Mac OS 9 great AND improved the performance and stability while giving a UNIX underpinning.
They just chose not to.
By the way, could you give us an example of some of the subtle positives to Aqua that weren't there in the Classic Mac OS?
Did that have anything to do with the interface?
[T]he dock just isn't that big a deal, certainly not enough to warrant the amount of hatred and vitriol spewed on the subject.
Granted, most users probably don't have a problem with it. Then again, a vast majority of users don't have a problem with Windows and few will dispute that Apple hasn't always had it better than MS in the UI department. Many Mac OS X users that you may know may have never been Mac OS 9 users, much less Mac OS 9 power-users.
I suppose the constant torrent of dislike for the Dock comes from having once had better. There are few things more irritating in computing to some people, like myself, than growing dependent on advanced functionality to do your work and then to have that functionality taken away against your will. This is especially irritating when you know that it was done to make an "ooo! shiny!" interface over a useable one.
There are well-known and accepted convetions of UI design based on years of psychological research that continues to this day in colleges across the nation and the world. When this expert advice is ignored, it's irritating. People have shown that there are ways to do these things right, and Mac OS 9 did them. This is proven by research.
Mac OS X tossed all of that away. It's a sign that Apple no longer listens to the very people that made their system enjoyable to use in the first place. As a power-user of the Classic Mac OS, the efficiency and quickness of working with the Finder was a large, unnoticed part of why I liked using a Mac. It's the kind of thing you never miss until it's gone.
I guess I just resent Apple for taking away a lot of what made using a Mac different from using Windows and more fun. Now it's just down to the iApps and the new Expose feature (which really isn't that much better than good multiple desktop software if you're used to it).
Putting things in the Apple menu often caused users to install their programs in the system folder (Because that's where the "Apple Menu Items" lives, natch), which is needless to say, not a good practice.
Users who ignore plainly-given instructions about where to place an application (which has always traditionally been given by strategically placed icon titles) will always have the opportunity to place an application somewhere stupid. Personally, I've never seen this.
Take a look at the average OS 9 user's desktop (Or recent OS X convert from OS 9) and see the dozens of icons and apps installed there, for lack of a better, more organized place to put them.
Like the Applications directory? Maybe those users are missing out on the Apple Menu, the Control Strip, or Folder Tabs which were all deleted from Mac OS X to be replaced by the Dock and its pathetic capacity for apps. I just can't place access to as many apps in a single, organized location as easily in Mac OS 9. Maybe those users are just those who decided to place them on the desktop for easy access rather than deal with accessing them from a folder placed in the (ever shifting) Dock.
OS 9's habit of always opening a new window for every folder only adds to the confusion. No expose either.
Mac OS 9 had two ways of navigating to manage that problem. The first was to hold down option when opening a window, which closed the window behind it. The second, less obscure way was to hold down the second click of a double-click for pop-up folders, which would allow you to quickly dig down through a folder hierarchy to what you wanted without leaving open all the other intermediary windows. I believe this was added into Mac OS X in version 10.2, but I'd already stopped using the Finder at that point, so I don't remember.
Mac OS 9 managed to do all this WITHOUT destroyed the spatial integrity of the Finder. Mac OS X can't be bother to remember where you last had the window at, especially if you make the dire mistake of opening it via List or Browser views. Heck, it used to not even bother itself with keeping the icons in the same place in a window.
The "open arrow" method of using the List View in Finder windows is a mess too.
The "open arrow" method is still available in Mac OS X. This argument is silly as a constrast between the two. Besides, it's still better than the Browse view which for a long time didn't let you even really see what the full name of a file was thanks to not being resizeable. It took a LOT of customer complaints to get that fixed.
I think "Tog" is upset just because his ideas have been brushed aside and he's watching from the sidelines.
Maybe you should actually read what he has to say. Then jot over to Ars Technica and look up the articles they have there on the Spatial Finder and why it was important. Tog's justifiably upset because he has studied and understands the underlying psychology of good user interface design and is watching the after-effects of letting marketing win over science in the early days of Mac OS X. He has words of praise for Expose, but raises good concern over numerous other little irritations of the new system.
If you don't like it, then don't use it.
Okay, what am I supposed to use instead? Linux? Windows?
Mac OS X happens to be the best GUI for a modern OS on the market. It's still vastly inferior to the experience of Mac OS 9, but there are numerous compelling reasons to switch. Modern application support and >31 character filenames where enough to force me to switch, but that doesn't mean that I suddenly lose my right to ask for Apple to do better.
(If there's one thing I can't stand more than anything else, it's the whole "like it or leave it" attitude. NOTHING would ever get improved if all people were like that.)
I find it much easier to use, both on the simple applications and in using Darwin.
Well, there you go, you like the apps and the command line, which has nothing to do with the Finder and Dock experience. I just miss when I didn't feel the need to use the command line for simple operations that used to be trivial with the GUI instead of a burden. I end up spending far more time in Terminal than in the Finder thanks to its horrible organization and the no-win choice of having screen clutter or Dock clutter if I actually left Finder windows open now.
It's like saying "You're such a fuckwit if you think Chocolate is better than caramel, here's why"
To further extend and utterly mangle your analogy, it's more like Apple took away the Mint, Strawberry, and Chocolate that users had come to love and use regularly and replaced it with a big block of food-colored Vanilla, saying that the rainbow swirls of dyed Vanilla more than adequately serves all the functions of Mint, Strawberry, and Chocolate despite losing a lot of the specific flavors the former solutions that made them so loved by their former users for getting the same things done differently.
Then, they make it so that you can never really get rid of Vanilla despite running third party Chocolate on your computer so that the big block of Vanilla keeps splatting itself against your screen everytime you move your spoon to the wrong place.
The analogy then falls apart because there's no good ice cream metaphor for the fact that they threw several years of HCI research out the window by ignoring the effects of muscle memory and Fitt's Law by having elements slide around as you opened and closed new applications and by no longer using the corners of the screen as a useful fixed reference. Nor can I really relate the fact that it's impossible to tell similar items apart without hunting and pecking to a banana split or to whipped cream topping.
(Just so y'all know, when it comes to MY computing experience I do like to go with what works for me, and I WILL be opinionated about what works for me)
Yeah, so what are you complaning about when others do the same? The Dock DOESN'T work for most of us. I've just gotten resigned to keyboard navigation between apps and to hunting and pecking for new applications when I want them.
Thanks you, no, but I've been a long, long critic of the Mac OS X interface. While some of the problems from the 10.0 release have been fixed over the years, I've always been extremely irritated that Apple didn't just preserve the Mac OS 9 interface like they did in the very early Rhapsody builds (in case you don't remember) rather than drop this whole new mess on us.
No, I still in many ways prefer Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. However, all my modern application require Mac OS X, and I've permanently forced myself into the newer OS via breaking out of the old 31 character filename limit. Otherwise, I'd still be using Mac OS 9 because it best fits my workflow.
Just because I disagree with you and happen to agree with someone more public doesn't make me a sheep.
Apple should've never gotten rid of its HCI group, and Tog once again shows why. For all of its advancement in underlying technologies and reliability, Mac OS X has been a huge leap backwards in useability compared to the Classic Mas OS as designed by people who cared more about useability than "lickability."
...Not that Apple will listen, of course.
I really think that Apple forgot why a lot of its users so tenaciously stuck with the platform in the first place despite higher prices and the little irritations of cooperative multitasking. The interface matters as more than just a pretty show. Classic Mac OS pundits have been kicking the Dock for years now, and it's good to hear one of the experts chime in.
You fail to understand the principal-agent problem. It's rational for the executives of SCO because the probability of dire consequences to the destruction of their company is very low. They are already quite wealthy, and the loss of a company is often considered a learning experience in the business community. They don't have to worry about new jobs.
The principals -- the shareholders -- will lose out, but most of SCO's shareholders at this point are either unsophisticated or realize that this is a big gamble. The agents -- the executives -- will either win big gains that they could've gotten no other way or lose little that they wouldn't have lost anyway. SCO is dead. Caldera is dead. All that's left is to make a gamble on dominating the UNIX market based on some IP that they think they have.
This is fully rational. You take an inevitable loss and try to turn it into a success, even if the chances of that success are low.
However, the term "rational self-interest" has little to do with the rationality of one's methods so much as Ayn Rand's belief that following one's own self-interest was itself inherently rational. The term "rational" is meant to highlight the idea that acting for others instead of yourself is irrational. The Principal-Agent problem is one of those problems in the business world that is inherently caused by such thinking.
It would be wiser for McBride to perpetuate the release of Open Source operating system vis-a-vis in order to accentuate the capability contained within them.
Heh. Business lingo aside, it very much wouldn't have been wiser for the owners of SCO's OpenServer UNIX to have done so. Linux has completely eaten SCO's lunch with the exception of fields where necessary products for the operation of a business are available only (or cheapest) on SCO's OS line. Real, cheap(er) *NIX for mass market hardware instead of highly marked-up "big iron" was SCO's market before Linux came along and did everything SCO did better for free. SCO's OS line is dying, and there's pretty much nothing that they could've done to save it as a sellable products.
Instead, SCO acted in what an Ayn Rand-ite would've called its own "rational self-interest." SCO knows that its major source of revenue is going to be useless soon, so it's attempting to get another one. Building essentially a completely new software product line in a new market niche is far too high-risk and too low of a payoff compared to attempting to exploit the IP that they think they own. The current spate of lawsuits is a high-risk gamble too, but it's one with a much, much larger potential payoff.
Also, there's the whole principal-agent problem caused by the fact that the future of the executives of the board is not strongly yoked to the company going down in flames. Together, you have a recipe for callous, self-interested behavior by people who are committed to the idea that money is the best measure of success.
Instead we have been deploying Solaris and Mac OS X for the satellite locations.
Congratulations, you have played into SCO's hands. You have not adopted the platform that has killed theirs, and you have given money to Sun, a company that has decided to pay SCO a license for the product you purchased. This is exactly what SCO was hoping for.
I don't get this. Why does everyone want a watch that goes slower? If you're making a digital watch, why not just reprogram the thing to count to 24:39 instead of 24:00 before wrapping around?
Adding precisely balanced extra weights to a mechanical watch and altering the frequency of the crystal or divider of a digital watch are both excessively complex measures. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
My point is that there never was a production OQO 1.0 as far as I ever heard, and I've been trying to get info on the product ever since I first heard of it about a year or two ago. Saying that this one's an upgrade over the one you have is like saying that you're a world-reknowned Duke Nukem Forever champ.
Your OQO 1.0, huh?
Does it get as good gas mileage as my flying car?
GPS and Routers/switches.
Go on groupstudy.com and see how people complain about the new laptops that don't have a serial port.
When they instead should be complaining that GPS and router manufacturers continue to be too lazy to support modern interfaces. I'm lucky to have access to a friend's PC to update my GPS -- my own machine is legacy-free, and the Garmin GPS I have is one of the few boat-anchors holding me back from no longer needing a serial port.
That's the sort of behavior that would trigger that subsection if and only if the first part were violated too:
You gotta abuse a real cop's badge to violate subsection (b)(1) or you gotta use a badge that imitates a cop's badge or claim that it does to violate subsection (b)(2). Now if you never claim to be an officer of the law and you never wear a badge, you can be as menacing as you want to be within relevant laws to intimidation and making threats. I think they state pretty clearly in the article that the RIAA isn't claiming to be with law enforcement and that the people giving up their stuff sign a form that says that it's a voluntarily turn-over, but they also clearly state that most of the targets are foreigners who don't know well enough to know that the RIAA agents are dressed as law enforcement is required to. It's a little side-step of the law.
The key words are "badge, insignia, emblem, device, label, certificate, card, or writing." The section on being "close enough" is all about showing false police ID. Wearing black fatigues and jackets with "RIAA" on them isn't close enough to hold up under close scrutiny in a court of law probably.
California Penal Code, Section 538d.:
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that wearing uniforms that resemble generic law enforcement uniforms but are not direct imitations of official uniforms is illegal. Basically, if you aren't using a fake badge or a damn good copy of an official police uniform, I think you can get out of this one under California law. Then, there's the US Code to consider:
As long as they're careful not to represent themselves as being a federal employee, they haven't violated this law either. In other words, it's going to be hard to nail them for crimes unless they do something stupid that's not covered under their little "voluntary" contract that people must sign -- so long as said contract holds up in court as not being signed under duress. Considering that the new RIAA head is from the BATF, I'm pretty sure he's savvy about skirting the laws holding back law enforcement officers as much as possible.
There are actually several techniques to filter noise without losing significant spikes. One which I've worked with before is the minimum noise fraction transformation, which is a modified version of the principal components transformation that works based on maximizing signal rather than variance.
"Basically," you create n-dimensional coordinate system where n is the number of colors per pixel in your image and each axis is numbered by the brightness of that color in each pixel. You plot each pixel as a point in that space. Then you take your point cluster, and -- here's where the nasty magical math handwaving appears -- you rotate it so that the the first axis becomes the line through the data with the highest signal / least noise, rotate it so that the second axis becomes the next orthogonal line through the date to have the least noise, and so on.
(A principal components transformation does the same thing with highest variance instead least noise, and the most common implementation of an MNF transformation is actually a noise-adjusted PC transform. Basically, you reorder the data so that the highest signal becomes the highest variance.)
You then take the resulting image which has the highest signal in its first layer (the first "color" value per pixel) and the highest noise in the last layer and you filter out the noise layers (determined by looking at the eigenvalues for the image). You can either average them out, zero them out (inaccurate, but a useful compression mechanism), or you can run a smoothing filter over them. When you rotate the image's point cloud back into its original orientation, you get an image which has had a significant amount of noise removed.
Once you do that, you can do spectral analysis on each pixel to see how much they differ from the surrounding terrain. Since we know pretty well what the typical composition of rocks on Mars is and what their spectral profile would be, we can look for wildly aberrant points, like polished metals that shouldn't be found on the surface. You can do this without filtering noise, but you get a lot of false positives.
Now, this transformation doesn't work very well with only 3-7 wavelengths of light like in most common image data, but it's just an example of things you can do to remove noise in satellite image data. There are other techniques that might work better with this data, but those are for people better educated in the fields of remote sensing than I to describe. (I'm just a code monkey who writes software for this kind of thing based on docs handed to me by the PhDs here. I just understand it well enough to implement it.)
Isn't tomorrow "put up or shut up" day for SCO?
What the hell does that mean, what does it do, and who do we sue[...]?
With that kind of reaction, I think you've more than proved you've got the mettle to be in management.
Ah, that's right. I keep forgetting about that. I've made a suggestion like this before to someone else in a similar situation and gotten back the same answer. Many system utilities on Solaris do have explicit link paths to avoid hacking attempts using compromised libraries elsewhere in the path (if I recall the reason correctly). My bad.
Actually, according the LA Times the issues of Creationist theories and Bush-supported religious plaques are seperate. There is a book sold in the gift shops at the Grand Canyon that advances the Creationist theory of the canyon, written by a canyon guide. It has been moved from the science section to the inspirational section. As fas as I know, the Bush administration has no stance on this issue.
Seperately, there are a few religious plaques in the canyon with inspirational Bible verses on them, but with no mention of creationism, that were ordered to be taken down since it's a public park and there is supposed to be a seperation of church and state. The Bush administration objects to that.
Two issues -- one of ignorance and one of state support of religion -- not one.
You could've also added "/newdir/usr/lib" to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to fix that.
I never knew about the static binaries, though. Thanks for the info.
But then we'd h ave to agree with other countries as to what color our lazer weapons would be( USA = red, russia = blue, france = pink, etc.) ...
No, no, no! Don't you know the laws of movie physics! Good is higher than evil on the on the electromagnetic spectrum. That's why good guys always use blue energy and bad guys always use red energy. Using red lasers would make US the evil empire, instead of... of...
I, uh.. hey, what's that's shiny distraction over there!