True, true. But hasn't apple learned anything from MS? Automatically running/installing *anything* from the internet is a bad, bad idea.
It seems there's some misinformation about how widgets are "installed" and executed.
By default, Safari and Mozilla (on Mac and Windows) download files directly to ~/Desktop. When Safari downloads a widget, it is placed in ~/Library/Widgets instead of ~/Desktop. That's the extent of the installation. Nothing is executed. To execute the widget, the user must open Dashboard, find the new widget and explicitly start it.
It's not much different than the websites that automatically download malicious applications to the user's Desktop (or download directory)
And this business about not being able to uninstall widgets is complete garbage. To uninstall, just delete it from ~/Library/Widgets. There's no reboot involved; Dashboard doesn't "eventually" find out it's been deleted, it finds out immediately. And if a widget is misbehaving you can kill it like any other application.
Personally, if a website is going to try to download a malicious application to my computer I will much prefer that they use a Dashboard widget because 1) Widgets are limited in what they can do, and 2) they're downloaded to ~/Library/Widgets instead of ~/Desktop, where they will be gleefully ignored. If it was actually downloaded to my desktop (like in Firefox) I would be more likely to inadvertently click and execute it.
That said, I suppose that it would probably be a good idea for Safari to prompt before accepting a widget, simply because it seems people don't understand what they are or how they work (Note that Firefox does not prompt before downloading a widget or application to the user's desktop. Is that any more or less a security risk?)
Personally, I like ObjC. As for Java - there's always talk that it's crappy GUI toolkits that make Java programs feel like VB in tar. Does it _feel_ considerably sleekier on Macs?
In my experience, Java performance on the Mac is impressive. As you may know, Java applications on the Mac use the same native GUI toolkit (Cocoa) as ObjC. As a result, Java apps look and feel exactly like their ObjC counterparts. From the end user's perspective, it's very hard if not impossible to tell whether an application was implemented in Java or ObjC, other than by looking at the memory usage.
I've always liked Java, but, historically, Java GUI development has been a big joke. However, with the possible exception of Eclipse or perhaps J#.NET,
OS X is the only platform on which I would consider using Java to implement a GUI application because there is really no negative impact on the end user.
...has a habit for getting totally stuck is not acceptable(with network drives - and and to add to the insult that is finder is that you can't terminate it like a regular program...
Well, that's a universal problem with any networked file system, including NFS and SMB.
The problem (as I understand it) is that you have all these network file system calls happening in kernel mode; if one of these calls takes a long time to complete or timeout, the process is stuck in kernel mode and cannot be killed.
The "no kill" problem happens on any OS, including Mac, Linux, and Windows. Try this on Windows: Open notepad, Select File->Open, and type \\google.com\foo. Notepad will hang for 5 minutes, and Task Mananger will not be able to kill it.
Using a network file system over an unreliable network is very painful. I used to blame Windows for this, but it really is a universal problem.
The unique problem with OS X is that there is only one Finder process, and most other applications depend on this process in some way. If Finder gets stuck in a system call and cannot be killed, your desktop becomes quite unusable. Microsoft has mitigated this problem somewhat in XP by running multiple Explorer.exe processes; it's harder to get the desktop and taskbar to hang, but it's still easy to lock up individual Explorer processes.
I access network drives on my Mac all the time without any trouble. But you're right, if the network goes down it is perhaps more of a pain than it needs to be.
I bought myself an iPod for Xmas, and was determined to get a Mac Mini when they came out, but I changed my mind and decided to get something I actually needed. So I got an iBook instead.
I have a linux box and an XP box, but my iBook is now far and away my primary desktop. The Mac makes for a very nice personal computer, and although I've been using Linux for about 7 years and tried on numerous occasions to use it as my primary desktop, I've only just now realized how absolutely great it is to have a mostly functional unix under a fully functional desktop (as opposed to a full unix under a partial desktop)
It's funny, in 7 years I've spent no more than $200 dollars on Microsoft products (student versions of MSVC 6 and.NET). In the last two months I've spend nearly $1800 on Apple, and it'll be $120 more when Tiger comes out...
A start menu and a task bar is pretty much what OS X uses (Apple menu, dock), together with a bunch of quick-launch buttons. Despite all the hoopla, the OS X GUI is not all that different from any other GUI: separate apps, file storage of documents, file system browsers, icons, desktop, etc.
Thank you for demonstrating my point.
Whether a system has a task bar or start menu is completely irrelevant to its quality or user experience. Yet many people (still) believe that a Windows or Mac desktop is nothing more than, as you say, a task bar, menu bar, icons, etc. It is this mentality, I believe, that prevented the interesting stuff like WindowMaker and GnuStep from gaining any traction at a time when it would have mattered.
Software has evolved and become more standardized.
A "desktop" is just that; a standard to which all of its applications conform. It is the quality of this standard and the applications' ability to adhere to it that defines the quality of the system. It has taken the X11 community a painfully long time to figure this out.
Desktops like Gnome are on the cutting edge of what is done in the real world, ahead both functionally and technologically of both Windows and OS X.
I think many people would disagree with you, but I'd love to hear some examples of this cutting edge technology and functionality.
And, please, spare us your impressions of the real world.
I find it facinating that a lot of the stuff I consider compelling in OS X existed in NeXTSTEP 14 years ago, and it reminds of how disappointed I was with the direction the Linux Desktop took in the mid to late 90s (and today) when the vast majority of support went behind the Win9x-esque KDE and Gnome desktops.
The designs, ideas, and concepts were all there in the 90s waiting to implemented. And, as hardware improved, there could have been an advanced desktop built on top of Linux that would have been a very compelling alternative to Win9x, if not the leading edge of desktop innovation.
Instead, we got a start menu, a task bar, and a dump truck full of skins.
At least nowadays the Gnome people have set their sights much higher, which is great to see.
I loved WindowMaker and wished it was so much more than a lowly window manager. Ironically, I suppose, it took Apple to make that happen for me. At least these days I can afford to buy a Mac.
It is true that the wide-spread acceptance of mp3 compression and the internet (and technology in general) will dramatically reduce the value the product and services that record companies provide, so it makes sense that Sony would want to protect its investment in the recording industry.
The irony is that while the value of traditional recorded music plummets music has never been so popular; there's never been a better time to be a music fan. Consumers are spending hundreds, or even thousands of dollars on hardware and internet access just to get in the game and take advantage of the new technology, and they're willing to do it because it really is a significant improvement over the traditional model. Music has probably never been as popular as it is right now because it's so much more accessible.
So, while Sony sits in the corner with some half-cocked proprietary solution, other electronics companies are laughing all the way to the bank. And the artist continues to get ripped off, as they always have.
Sony's mistake was believing that their Walkman name combined with Sony engineering could somehow slow or halt the acceptance of mp3, and it's a mistake that's costing them big money.
Then what's a hardware bug? A crack in the computer case?
But that's beside the point.
The article implied that non-volatile memory was somehow a solution to poorly written software, which is preposterous. You're saying that memory that doesn't fail is a solution to memory that does fail, which goes without saying.
When, or if, you americans actually do adopt the metric system, it's spelled Metre.. =) Hope that helps... Meter is more commonly known as the measuring device.
France and French-speaking Canada use the correct French spelling of mètre for both the SI unit and the measuring device.
The U.S. and English-speaking Canada use the correct English spelling of meter for both the SI unit and the measuring device. Other non-English countries, like Germany and Belgium, also use the English spelling of meter when refering to the SI unit.
But I think it's cute that the UK mixes both the French and English spellings of meter. It's quirky!
It's not that caps-lock doesn't have its purpose, but, save for those useless relics num and scroll lock, it's unlike any other key on the board: It's never used in combination with any other key, unlike control and alt, and it's sticky (it toggles a mode). Yet, it's given extremely prominent real estate on the keyboard.
Personally, if I compare number of times I could actually use caps-lock verses the number of times I hit it by accident and have to go back and fix my work, it's not even close. Not to mention how much more often I use the control key; cut and paste and such.
They can stick the caps-lock key under the keyboard or behind the monitor for all care, but its proper place is under the shift key. And it should have an extra-stiff spring to prevent accidental hits. It is 2004, after all.
I have been remapping my caps-lock key to control for years, but that doesn't help me on other people's computers, on which I look like a fool.
Does Mandrake 10 suffer from the same MBR corruption bug that currently plagues Red Hat Fedora? Apparently it's caused by some of the changes to the 2.6 kernel and is affecting other 2.6 distros.
What they mean is that the iTunes automation interface lets you control iTunes externally from script or other programming language, similarly to what you can do with AppleScript on MacOS, purple monkey dishwasher.
Obviously there was a little bit of miscommunication between the marketing person who wrote the press release and the developer who told them what COM is. Just business as usual, I guess.
Also, check out the Mixerman Diaries, documenting the attempted recording of an L.A. "bidding-war" band. $2 Million advance; big name producer; dumb-ass drummer. Hilarious stuff.
If you're at all curious about the recording process of a Major-label band, it's a must-read.
the 5 seconds it took to skim that site and decide it was a total waste of time was total worth having to look at that bloody ad that popped up for/. referrers. thanks!
And it's an Anonymous Coward post to boot, so we can't even harass the guy who submitted it.
Oh well, here's an interesting tidbit about Q*Bert, from KLOV:
... Q*Bert and Reactor both use the SC-01 speech synthesizer, although in the case of Q*Bert, it is never used for any kind of coherent speech. All the speech is generated by making the chip play random sounds at a specific pitch.
... Part of this game's unique charm is the pure gibberish that comes out of the machine's speech synthesizer.
Unfortunately, MAME (59) doesn't emulate the SC-01 speech synthesizer.
I think since QT was ported to OS X, it's easier to use native widgets with KHTML rather than gecko. Chimera for instance does not use real aqua text entry and widgets within the web page, but a theme that looks like they are.
KHTML doesn't use native widgets. Neither does IE, or Mozilla. And now that Opera 6 is obsolete, no modern rendering engine uses native widgets (with the exception of some list boxes in IE -- but that's IE's problem).
In order to support all of the wacky things one can do to with CSS, web browsers must render widgets on their own, just like all other HTML elements.
[MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of CP/M for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history.
Anyone who uses the term "popular" to describe MSDOS is either clueless or a Microsoftie.
DOS wasn't that bad of an OS. That's no bullshit. It has its high points
Oh, really? Name one good MSDOS feature.
... and has been around *much* longer, and been magnitudes more popular than nearly everything else that rose to compete with it.
MSDOS was never popular. It was ubiquitous. It was ubiquitous because from the very beginning nearly every consumer and business PC shipped with MSDOS installed. So ubiquitous that developers would choose to patch or work around MSDOS altogether rather than consider using any of the much better alternatives available at the time. So ubiquitous that it single-handedly enabled MICROS~1's rise to power despite the terrible quality of the product (not to mention the terrible quality of most MS software from the 80s). So ubiquitous that, if you consider Windows XP to be Microsoft's first non-MSDOS-based consumer OS, it took Microsoft 21 years to ditch it. Competing products never had a chance.
MSDOS was many things, but it was never popular, and it was never good at anything, ever.
Up here in Canada Sportmart runs what I assumed to be Linux on its cash registers. It was definitely Gnome with the Sawfish window manager, default 1.2 theme.
At the time I figured it was "native" (svga) gnome, since who would be crazy enough to run X on a cash register, but does svga gnome use a window manager? Yikes.
"Okay, with tax the total comes to 75 dollars and... whoops! X crashed. Hold on a minute while I hack on XF86Config."
"Hey, listen. The cash register is thrashing again. Skate or Die dude!"
Well, as long as their GUI isn't rendered in OpenGL I guess they'd be okay.
Ken Williams, Sierra's founder, swears that at a time when Apple had only sold 100,000 Apple ][ computers, Sierra had sold 25,000 copies of Softporn.
But soon thereafter, Sierra had the chance to acquire the software rights for all the Walt Disney characters...if they dropped that "nasty" game from the catalog. So of course they did.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems there's some misinformation about how widgets are "installed" and executed.
By default, Safari and Mozilla (on Mac and Windows) download files directly to ~/Desktop. When Safari downloads a widget, it is placed in ~/Library/Widgets instead of ~/Desktop. That's the extent of the installation. Nothing is executed. To execute the widget, the user must open Dashboard, find the new widget and explicitly start it.
It's not much different than the websites that automatically download malicious applications to the user's Desktop (or download directory)
And this business about not being able to uninstall widgets is complete garbage. To uninstall, just delete it from ~/Library/Widgets. There's no reboot involved; Dashboard doesn't "eventually" find out it's been deleted, it finds out immediately. And if a widget is misbehaving you can kill it like any other application.
Personally, if a website is going to try to download a malicious application to my computer I will much prefer that they use a Dashboard widget because 1) Widgets are limited in what they can do, and 2) they're downloaded to ~/Library/Widgets instead of ~/Desktop, where they will be gleefully ignored. If it was actually downloaded to my desktop (like in Firefox) I would be more likely to inadvertently click and execute it.
That said, I suppose that it would probably be a good idea for Safari to prompt before accepting a widget, simply because it seems people don't understand what they are or how they work (Note that Firefox does not prompt before downloading a widget or application to the user's desktop. Is that any more or less a security risk?)
No, because there's no way to prove that you're the owner of said cookie.
Actually, it might be kind of neat to look at the search history of random people in a relatively anonymous kind of way. That would be a cool service.
In my experience, Java performance on the Mac is impressive. As you may know, Java applications on the Mac use the same native GUI toolkit (Cocoa) as ObjC. As a result, Java apps look and feel exactly like their ObjC counterparts. From the end user's perspective, it's very hard if not impossible to tell whether an application was implemented in Java or ObjC, other than by looking at the memory usage.
I've always liked Java, but, historically, Java GUI development has been a big joke. However, with the possible exception of Eclipse or perhaps J#.NET, OS X is the only platform on which I would consider using Java to implement a GUI application because there is really no negative impact on the end user.
Well, that's a universal problem with any networked file system, including NFS and SMB.
The problem (as I understand it) is that you have all these network file system calls happening in kernel mode; if one of these calls takes a long time to complete or timeout, the process is stuck in kernel mode and cannot be killed.
The "no kill" problem happens on any OS, including Mac, Linux, and Windows. Try this on Windows: Open notepad, Select File->Open, and type \\google.com\foo. Notepad will hang for 5 minutes, and Task Mananger will not be able to kill it.
Using a network file system over an unreliable network is very painful. I used to blame Windows for this, but it really is a universal problem.
The unique problem with OS X is that there is only one Finder process, and most other applications depend on this process in some way. If Finder gets stuck in a system call and cannot be killed, your desktop becomes quite unusable. Microsoft has mitigated this problem somewhat in XP by running multiple Explorer.exe processes; it's harder to get the desktop and taskbar to hang, but it's still easy to lock up individual Explorer processes.
I access network drives on my Mac all the time without any trouble. But you're right, if the network goes down it is perhaps more of a pain than it needs to be.
I bought myself an iPod for Xmas, and was determined to get a Mac Mini when they came out, but I changed my mind and decided to get something I actually needed. So I got an iBook instead.
.NET). In the last two months I've spend nearly $1800 on Apple, and it'll be $120 more when Tiger comes out...
I have a linux box and an XP box, but my iBook is now far and away my primary desktop. The Mac makes for a very nice personal computer, and although I've been using Linux for about 7 years and tried on numerous occasions to use it as my primary desktop, I've only just now realized how absolutely great it is to have a mostly functional unix under a fully functional desktop (as opposed to a full unix under a partial desktop)
It's funny, in 7 years I've spent no more than $200 dollars on Microsoft products (student versions of MSVC 6 and
Thank you for demonstrating my point.
Whether a system has a task bar or start menu is completely irrelevant to its quality or user experience. Yet many people (still) believe that a Windows or Mac desktop is nothing more than, as you say, a task bar, menu bar, icons, etc. It is this mentality, I believe, that prevented the interesting stuff like WindowMaker and GnuStep from gaining any traction at a time when it would have mattered.
A "desktop" is just that; a standard to which all of its applications conform. It is the quality of this standard and the applications' ability to adhere to it that defines the quality of the system. It has taken the X11 community a painfully long time to figure this out. I think many people would disagree with you, but I'd love to hear some examples of this cutting edge technology and functionality.And, please, spare us your impressions of the real world.
I find it facinating that a lot of the stuff I consider compelling in OS X existed in NeXTSTEP 14 years ago, and it reminds of how disappointed I was with the direction the Linux Desktop took in the mid to late 90s (and today) when the vast majority of support went behind the Win9x-esque KDE and Gnome desktops.
The designs, ideas, and concepts were all there in the 90s waiting to implemented. And, as hardware improved, there could have been an advanced desktop built on top of Linux that would have been a very compelling alternative to Win9x, if not the leading edge of desktop innovation.
Instead, we got a start menu, a task bar, and a dump truck full of skins.
At least nowadays the Gnome people have set their sights much higher, which is great to see.
I loved WindowMaker and wished it was so much more than a lowly window manager. Ironically, I suppose, it took Apple to make that happen for me. At least these days I can afford to buy a Mac.
Dev Lead: "Hey! Monkey! What's this Lynx thing about?"
Web Monkey: "It's a web browser that old-school Unix hackers used to use."
-- later ---
Middle Manager: "Sir! An old hacker has comprimised our system!"
CTO: "Release the monkeys."
It is true that the wide-spread acceptance of mp3 compression and the internet (and technology in general) will dramatically reduce the value the product and services that record companies provide, so it makes sense that Sony would want to protect its investment in the recording industry.
The irony is that while the value of traditional recorded music plummets music has never been so popular; there's never been a better time to be a music fan. Consumers are spending hundreds, or even thousands of dollars on hardware and internet access just to get in the game and take advantage of the new technology, and they're willing to do it because it really is a significant improvement over the traditional model. Music has probably never been as popular as it is right now because it's so much more accessible.
So, while Sony sits in the corner with some half-cocked proprietary solution, other electronics companies are laughing all the way to the bank. And the artist continues to get ripped off, as they always have.
Sony's mistake was believing that their Walkman name combined with Sony engineering could somehow slow or halt the acceptance of mp3, and it's a mistake that's costing them big money.
I'm talking about all of the these webmail sites that are trying to compete with Gmail by offering 1GB+ of space.
They don't understand what it is about Gmail that makes it so good.
Bah, humbug!
Give me 100Mb of storage and an interface that is half as intuitive as GMail's is and I'll really be impressed.
Then what's a hardware bug? A crack in the computer case?
But that's beside the point.
The article implied that non-volatile memory was somehow a solution to poorly written software, which is preposterous. You're saying that memory that doesn't fail is a solution to memory that does fail, which goes without saying.
France and French-speaking Canada use the correct French spelling of mètre for both the SI unit and the measuring device.
The U.S. and English-speaking Canada use the correct English spelling of meter for both the SI unit and the measuring device. Other non-English countries, like Germany and Belgium, also use the English spelling of meter when refering to the SI unit.
But I think it's cute that the UK mixes both the French and English spellings of meter. It's quirky!
It's not that caps-lock doesn't have its purpose, but, save for those useless relics num and scroll lock, it's unlike any other key on the board: It's never used in combination with any other key, unlike control and alt, and it's sticky (it toggles a mode). Yet, it's given extremely prominent real estate on the keyboard.
Personally, if I compare number of times I could actually use caps-lock verses the number of times I hit it by accident and have to go back and fix my work, it's not even close. Not to mention how much more often I use the control key; cut and paste and such.
They can stick the caps-lock key under the keyboard or behind the monitor for all care, but its proper place is under the shift key. And it should have an extra-stiff spring to prevent accidental hits. It is 2004, after all.
I have been remapping my caps-lock key to control for years, but that doesn't help me on other people's computers, on which I look like a fool.
Does Mandrake 10 suffer from the same MBR corruption bug that currently plagues Red Hat Fedora? Apparently it's caused by some of the changes to the 2.6 kernel and is affecting other 2.6 distros.
What they mean is that the iTunes automation interface lets you control iTunes externally from script or other programming language, similarly to what you can do with AppleScript on MacOS, purple monkey dishwasher.
Obviously there was a little bit of miscommunication between the marketing person who wrote the press release and the developer who told them what COM is. Just business as usual, I guess.
Also, check out the Mixerman Diaries, documenting the attempted recording of an L.A. "bidding-war" band. $2 Million advance; big name producer; dumb-ass drummer. Hilarious stuff.
If you're at all curious about the recording process of a Major-label band, it's a must-read.
Oh well, here's an interesting tidbit about Q*Bert, from KLOV:
Unfortunately, MAME (59) doesn't emulate the SC-01 speech synthesizer.In order to support all of the wacky things one can do to with CSS, web browsers must render widgets on their own, just like all other HTML elements.
MSDOS was never popular. It was ubiquitous. It was ubiquitous because from the very beginning nearly every consumer and business PC shipped with MSDOS installed. So ubiquitous that developers would choose to patch or work around MSDOS altogether rather than consider using any of the much better alternatives available at the time. So ubiquitous that it single-handedly enabled MICROS~1's rise to power despite the terrible quality of the product (not to mention the terrible quality of most MS software from the 80s). So ubiquitous that, if you consider Windows XP to be Microsoft's first non-MSDOS-based consumer OS, it took Microsoft 21 years to ditch it. Competing products never had a chance.
MSDOS was many things, but it was never popular, and it was never good at anything, ever.
At the time I figured it was "native" (svga) gnome, since who would be crazy enough to run X on a cash register, but does svga gnome use a window manager? Yikes.
Well, as long as their GUI isn't rendered in OpenGL I guess they'd be okay.
Ken Williams, Sierra's founder, swears that at a time when Apple had only sold 100,000 Apple ][ computers, Sierra had sold 25,000 copies of Softporn.
But soon thereafter, Sierra had the chance to acquire the software rights for all the Walt Disney characters...if they dropped that "nasty" game from the catalog. So of course they did.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.