Most people I know who have done that with Macs love Macs now, because the platform is simply better, once you get to know it well enough.
I dissent. Yes, I agree with you that you have to use a system a little while before you can become familiar with its usage metaphors, and get rid of the desire to fall back patterns previously learned on another system, but the Mac simply does have deficincies compared to the Windows platform.
Its context menu support is spotty at best, and its keyboard shortcut support is abysmal. I've been doing a lot of cross-development between OS X, OS 9, Win32 and Linux lately and the Mac has the absolute worst support of consistent context menus of all of them.
Your goal may be ubiquity. For others it is simply utility.
But utility is drivin by ubiquity. A walled garden is a far more supportive environment for a small minority to push their view of usability on the users of the fruits of that garden.
This I think is demonstrated by some of the debates in the followup article, particularly the ones on creator types and keyboard usability. Mac priest (developers) and their acolytes (owners) have a way of doing things they consider proper and that many migrating over from other systems with greater usability find frustrating.
Yes, I'll give you that your garden has produced a technical marvel of seamless compatibility that the PC world can't match with all of its messy interfaces and backwards compatibility, but this same garden has actually held back the Mac UI from adopting some of the simple usability that wider adoption of the Windows platform has forced Windows to adopt.
Break your mouse on your windows machine and you can still navigate the web, launch programs, write software, write documents and so on. Break your mouse on your mac and you're hosed.
The "Frankenputer" of the Wintel world and the "walled garden" of Apple are 2 different philosophies which are largely incompatible.
And the walled garden approach doesn't encourage innovation, doesn't drive down prices till the masses all have connectivity and processing power.
It harkens back to the idea that all computers should be buried in the basements of large corporate offices attended by a small priesthood of skilled engineers.
Making computers idealogically pure is a fine goal and all, but it should be a goal that is in the service of making computers ubiquitous, not making them artistically nifty. And the walled garden approach goes against the the goal of ubiquity in the end.
You are right in that there is no legal guarantee of a warantee, but there is often a defacto warantee that stems from that fact that proprietary vendors want to make money, and if one of their customers starts complaining about bugs publically, then there is the potential to lose money.
There really should be an acronym for the opposite of FUD, because that's what this is. The comforting (and for the most part, illusory) feeling of warm fuzziness that comes from having a proprietary product purchashed from an established company. Its the flip side to FUD.
To the extent that a group will not want to leave a consumer out in the cold for reasons of publicity, Open Source is going to want to help you just as much as a closed source software maker, perhaps even more because they're error is going to be flapping around in the wind for all the world to see.
But don't think that because you're using some closed source product you're in some sort of NATO organization where the big software company is going to protect you.
Write IP drivers that treat all devices which return an old IP addres as being the old address followed by 96 zeroes. Treat all IP calls from legacy software the same way. Then when people update their drivers (or replace their NIC cards, whichever is less hassle for them), they just keep all IP settings exactly the same.
Actually, there is a standard in IPv6 for how to encode an IPv4 address as IPv6 (prepended zeros, not appended). Also, no one needs to replace a NIC. NICs talk Ethernet (typically), not IPv4 or IPv6, and the appropriate protocol is wrapped up in layers before it gets to the NIC.
And there is no such thing as a NIC card, or for that matter a PIN number. Sigh. Sorry, its just irritating.
The best bet for security has always been to unplug the network connection.
Pity the poor soul who thinks he is safe because he isn't connected to a network. Your computer probably puts out enough EM information through the air and through the power lines to read your monitor a block away.
honestly, I've never had such a good movie ruined completely by its ending
2001.
Honestly though, I really want to throttle Spielberg for re-using the 'close encounters' aliens body shape for his super-advanced robots. And I want to take out a full page ad in every major newspaper saying "There were no fucking aliens in 'A.I.'"
I think you're thinking about the new multilayer flourecent optical tech. It has an extremely high data density and you can stack layers and read from them simultanously, allowing such high bandwidth. But its primarly a read medium. You'd never get anywhere near that speed writing to them, assuming writable media was available to consumers at all.
This happens other places too. Have you tried to get a copy of an ISO document lately? It's stupid, but you have to pay 100's of bucks (or swiss francs) to get a copy of ISO standards.
How did this get modded up? Use your head. ISO is not any government's agency and is not funded by anyone's taxes, nor are standards docuements the same as laws. I have no problem with ISO charging whatever they see as a reasonable fee to maintain themselves.
When you buy a car, do you expect the dealer to teach you to drive?
No, but when I drive the car, I don't expect that because I'm going exactly 33 miles per hour when I turn on the air conditioner, the trunk explodes. Or that because I install a radio that wasn't made by the same company (or sometimes one that was), I have to replace the spark plugs because the old ones aren't compatible. But this sort of thing happens in the software world all the time.
Look, there are good arguments on both sides here. Companies don't make 'good enough' products or take 'enough' responsiblity for them. On the other hand many companies are swamped by idiots that don't take responsibility for even the most basic learning of how to operate something they've purchased.
There are horror stories on both sides, but the fact is that software is still a maturing technology. Really. Think about it. Most modern computers could probably store all eglish written information created before 1800. Your floppy drive controller contains more processing power than the apollo program and your CPU makes the original space shuttle computers look like an abacus.
Give it another generation to get rid of all the people who've never used a computer but expect them to be as easy to learn as a microwave to die. Give it that much time for software to mature to the level where computers will approach that ease of use. Then reexamine both the need for and quality of tech support.
Another major problem is customers who try to diagnose the problem. Sure, you and I may be able to determine something like "the SMTP server is down" but most customers can't... but that won't stop them from saying it. I've encountered customers who describe every problem as "The printer is broken," because ultimately someday they would want to print the document they were working on so no matter where the entire computing process went awry along the way, it must be the printer's fauly
I've been on both sides of this, being the tech support rep with someone who 'thought' they knew what was the issue, and with being the customer who was 'sure' he knew what was the problem. Granted, I've always been dead on in describing the problem as the customer but that's neither here nor there. In the instance where the customer says the SMTP server isn't responding, you shoudln't have to go through the ANSI standard robotic testing procedures until you've at least tried having him test it by following precise directions, and move on from there. As a tech support person you have to be able to find the actual problem using the fewest possible steps.
Here's the catch.
I'm smart enough to do that. But I don't work in tech support. Why? Because I'm a software engineer. Because being smart enough to do that means being smart enough to not have to talk to disgruntled people all day, because you can get a better job. Frankly its the same with most IT positions. If you're smart enough to be really good at troubleshooting IT problems, you've probably got enough knack to be getting paid more to do something else. Simple as that.
The only solution would be to either increase the number of clever people in the world such that their individual value goes down enough that they'll settle for a tech support job, or make products more foolproof. Its possible.
But then, by that logic, your argument doesn't apply to what Lucas is doing, because I doubt he's casting a CG character to act as someone who a human could pass for easily, or else what is the point?
These days we're drowned in advertisement that I can't see how anyone can take anything in ads as face value. Who is going to ring Colgate and tell them that their teeth models have had a PaintBox whitening ? Or what the f*ck happened to those McD's Burgers..? See my point ?
This is precisely the problem. We're ending up drones in a manufactured reality, and becoming complacent about distinguishing between reality and fantasy. I know it sounds like paranoia, but essentially the human race is being conditioned by advertising to accept lies, and do it blithely. I know that in the big picture, there are probably more important battles to be fought, such as world hunger, but even so, we cannot lose sight of the insidious destructive power of 'advertising', which has become synonymous with 'lies'. The more we stay silent, the more the companies begin to realize they can shaft us even more, increase their margins, lower quality on the product while raising it on the ad, until they sell us an empty box and we're convinced we're leading a better life because we bought the 'product'. I'm sure someone can come up with an example of that already. Oh, wait, I just realized, its religion.
Actually, action movies not withstanding, I'm fairly sure ordinary gas tanks won't explode if you shoot them. Gasoline in a contained space will only explode if heated to a fairly high temperature, and even then it has to have oxygen to mix with. A ruptured fuel tank is certainly dangerous and a bullet might cause a spark that could ignite gasoline at the point of impact, but it would not immediately explode.
I got the impression that the 1's and 0's referred to the 'average' turning program, which would be truly random, and therefore uncompressable. Read the compression faq.
I screwed up my terminology. In the fourth sentence input and output refer to the DE-compression algorithm, and thereafter refer to the compression algorithm.
I believe this is called the pigeon hole problem in compression research. Given that you have N bits, there has to be 2^N possible values for the bits. Any efficient lossless compression algorithm has to be able to produce one and exactly of these bit strings given a set of input bits of indeterminant size. If the input strings are always less than N bits, then there aren't enough possible values for the input strings to produce every possible output. Therefore, ANY lossless compression algorithm will have some bit strings that compress to more bits than the input, even disregarding headers and compression algorithms (like self extractors) stored in the compressed data. I believe its a corallary that if any output strings are shorter than input strings, then some will have to be bigger, as opposed to simply being the same length. I can't remember the exact proof and I'm not actually certain of that bit.
Read the compression faq, it gives a much better explanation than I do I imagine.
maybe someday we will be able to prove it all but that is a long way off.
If you'd read and comprehended any of the posts to this article concerning Godel (well the correct interpretations and explanations of Godel anyway) you would realize that this is precisely wrong. Godel proved that no formal system, including the mathmatics we use to quantify the 'real world' can be complete and consistent at the same time. Consistency I'll leave alonse since we have to assume our mathmatics are, pending evidence to the contrary, but not being complete means that there will always be theorems that are true but that we cannot prove are true, and conversely theorems that are false but unprobably so. And if I recall correctly, that there is no known-terminating test to determine if a given theorem falls into one of these two categories. Important stuff. Keeps mathmaticians in business. Or in school. Or whatever the hell it is mathmaticians do with their time.
Not at all! If you found a system of mathematics in which some theorem could be proven both true and false, mathematicians would just say that your system was inconsistent...
Don't be pedantic. I'm sure the previous poster meant any hypothesis in current number theory, which to the best of my knowledge, we believe is incomplete, but not inconsistent. Being inconsistent, and yet applying to the 'real world' would seem to mean that the universe doesn't actually exist. Actually, now that I think about it...
I should have read the other posts before posting. This doesn't refer to any version of MS mice except the new optical mice. I agree that all their old ball mice are EXTREMELY reliable, though I have to admit I still prefer logitech.
And lifetime warranty aside, it shouldn't have happened. The mouse dies for reasons having nothing to do with it being optical. Its just a bad design on the point where the cable enters the mouse proper.
And if anyone suggest a wireless mouse to solve the problem, I will make it my mission in life to decrease their level of happiness. When they make a wireless OPTICAL mouse, I will buy one. If it can't track on carpet, I don't want it.
Same problem here. The engineering on most of the optical mouse is great, but the wires inside cable at the point it goes into the mouse is susecptable to breakage from metal fatigue or simple wear. Whatever, I had one die on me as well after about the same amount of time.
Slashdot Mirror
I dissent. Yes, I agree with you that you have to use a system a little while before you can become familiar with its usage metaphors, and get rid of the desire to fall back patterns previously learned on another system, but the Mac simply does have deficincies compared to the Windows platform.
Its context menu support is spotty at best, and its keyboard shortcut support is abysmal. I've been doing a lot of cross-development between OS X, OS 9, Win32 and Linux lately and the Mac has the absolute worst support of consistent context menus of all of them.
Brad
But utility is drivin by ubiquity. A walled garden is a far more supportive environment for a small minority to push their view of usability on the users of the fruits of that garden.
This I think is demonstrated by some of the debates in the followup article, particularly the ones on creator types and keyboard usability. Mac priest (developers) and their acolytes (owners) have a way of doing things they consider proper and that many migrating over from other systems with greater usability find frustrating.
Yes, I'll give you that your garden has produced a technical marvel of seamless compatibility that the PC world can't match with all of its messy interfaces and backwards compatibility, but this same garden has actually held back the Mac UI from adopting some of the simple usability that wider adoption of the Windows platform has forced Windows to adopt.
Break your mouse on your windows machine and you can still navigate the web, launch programs, write software, write documents and so on. Break your mouse on your mac and you're hosed.
Brad
And the walled garden approach doesn't encourage innovation, doesn't drive down prices till the masses all have connectivity and processing power.
It harkens back to the idea that all computers should be buried in the basements of large corporate offices attended by a small priesthood of skilled engineers.
Making computers idealogically pure is a fine goal and all, but it should be a goal that is in the service of making computers ubiquitous, not making them artistically nifty. And the walled garden approach goes against the the goal of ubiquity in the end.
Brad
There really should be an acronym for the opposite of FUD, because that's what this is. The comforting (and for the most part, illusory) feeling of warm fuzziness that comes from having a proprietary product purchashed from an established company. Its the flip side to FUD.
To the extent that a group will not want to leave a consumer out in the cold for reasons of publicity, Open Source is going to want to help you just as much as a closed source software maker, perhaps even more because they're error is going to be flapping around in the wind for all the world to see.
But don't think that because you're using some closed source product you're in some sort of NATO organization where the big software company is going to protect you.
Actually, there is a standard in IPv6 for how to encode an IPv4 address as IPv6 (prepended zeros, not appended). Also, no one needs to replace a NIC. NICs talk Ethernet (typically), not IPv4 or IPv6, and the appropriate protocol is wrapped up in layers before it gets to the NIC.
And there is no such thing as a NIC card, or for that matter a PIN number. Sigh. Sorry, its just irritating.
Pity the poor soul who thinks he is safe because he isn't connected to a network. Your computer probably puts out enough EM information through the air and through the power lines to read your monitor a block away.
2001. Honestly though, I really want to throttle Spielberg for re-using the 'close encounters' aliens body shape for his super-advanced robots. And I want to take out a full page ad in every major newspaper saying "There were no fucking aliens in 'A.I.'"
Jherico
I think you're thinking about the new multilayer flourecent optical tech. It has an extremely high data density and you can stack layers and read from them simultanously, allowing such high bandwidth. But its primarly a read medium. You'd never get anywhere near that speed writing to them, assuming writable media was available to consumers at all.
How did this get modded up? Use your head. ISO is not any government's agency and is not funded by anyone's taxes, nor are standards docuements the same as laws. I have no problem with ISO charging whatever they see as a reasonable fee to maintain themselves.
No, but when I drive the car, I don't expect that because I'm going exactly 33 miles per hour when I turn on the air conditioner, the trunk explodes. Or that because I install a radio that wasn't made by the same company (or sometimes one that was), I have to replace the spark plugs because the old ones aren't compatible. But this sort of thing happens in the software world all the time.
Look, there are good arguments on both sides here. Companies don't make 'good enough' products or take 'enough' responsiblity for them. On the other hand many companies are swamped by idiots that don't take responsibility for even the most basic learning of how to operate something they've purchased.
There are horror stories on both sides, but the fact is that software is still a maturing technology. Really. Think about it. Most modern computers could probably store all eglish written information created before 1800. Your floppy drive controller contains more processing power than the apollo program and your CPU makes the original space shuttle computers look like an abacus.
Give it another generation to get rid of all the people who've never used a computer but expect them to be as easy to learn as a microwave to die. Give it that much time for software to mature to the level where computers will approach that ease of use. Then reexamine both the need for and quality of tech support.
Until then, buckle your fuckin' seatbelt.
Jherico
I've been on both sides of this, being the tech support rep with someone who 'thought' they knew what was the issue, and with being the customer who was 'sure' he knew what was the problem. Granted, I've always been dead on in describing the problem as the customer but that's neither here nor there. In the instance where the customer says the SMTP server isn't responding, you shoudln't have to go through the ANSI standard robotic testing procedures until you've at least tried having him test it by following precise directions, and move on from there. As a tech support person you have to be able to find the actual problem using the fewest possible steps.
Here's the catch.
I'm smart enough to do that. But I don't work in tech support. Why? Because I'm a software engineer. Because being smart enough to do that means being smart enough to not have to talk to disgruntled people all day, because you can get a better job. Frankly its the same with most IT positions. If you're smart enough to be really good at troubleshooting IT problems, you've probably got enough knack to be getting paid more to do something else. Simple as that.
The only solution would be to either increase the number of clever people in the world such that their individual value goes down enough that they'll settle for a tech support job, or make products more foolproof. Its possible.
Take this man (or woman). Show him (or her) to Congress. Watch pro-cloning legislation take off like a rocket.
Jherico
But then, by that logic, your argument doesn't apply to what Lucas is doing, because I doubt he's casting a CG character to act as someone who a human could pass for easily, or else what is the point?
This is precisely the problem. We're ending up drones in a manufactured reality, and becoming complacent about distinguishing between reality and fantasy. I know it sounds like paranoia, but essentially the human race is being conditioned by advertising to accept lies, and do it blithely. I know that in the big picture, there are probably more important battles to be fought, such as world hunger, but even so, we cannot lose sight of the insidious destructive power of 'advertising', which has become synonymous with 'lies'. The more we stay silent, the more the companies begin to realize they can shaft us even more, increase their margins, lower quality on the product while raising it on the ad, until they sell us an empty box and we're convinced we're leading a better life because we bought the 'product'. I'm sure someone can come up with an example of that already. Oh, wait, I just realized, its religion.
I irritated the crap out of people by capturing the ZModem auto-download sequence and using THAT as my sig. I was rapidly banned.
Actually, action movies not withstanding, I'm fairly sure ordinary gas tanks won't explode if you shoot them. Gasoline in a contained space will only explode if heated to a fairly high temperature, and even then it has to have oxygen to mix with. A ruptured fuel tank is certainly dangerous and a bullet might cause a spark that could ignite gasoline at the point of impact, but it would not immediately explode.
Nazi.
Hehe.... read Contact. No no.... put down the movie, go read the book. A lot was left out.
I got the impression that the 1's and 0's referred to the 'average' turning program, which would be truly random, and therefore uncompressable. Read the compression faq.
I screwed up my terminology. In the fourth sentence input and output refer to the DE-compression algorithm, and thereafter refer to the compression algorithm.
I believe this is called the pigeon hole problem in compression research. Given that you have N bits, there has to be 2^N possible values for the bits. Any efficient lossless compression algorithm has to be able to produce one and exactly of these bit strings given a set of input bits of indeterminant size. If the input strings are always less than N bits, then there aren't enough possible values for the input strings to produce every possible output. Therefore, ANY lossless compression algorithm will have some bit strings that compress to more bits than the input, even disregarding headers and compression algorithms (like self extractors) stored in the compressed data. I believe its a corallary that if any output strings are shorter than input strings, then some will have to be bigger, as opposed to simply being the same length. I can't remember the exact proof and I'm not actually certain of that bit.
Read the compression faq, it gives a much better explanation than I do I imagine.
If you'd read and comprehended any of the posts to this article concerning Godel (well the correct interpretations and explanations of Godel anyway) you would realize that this is precisely wrong. Godel proved that no formal system, including the mathmatics we use to quantify the 'real world' can be complete and consistent at the same time. Consistency I'll leave alonse since we have to assume our mathmatics are, pending evidence to the contrary, but not being complete means that there will always be theorems that are true but that we cannot prove are true, and conversely theorems that are false but unprobably so. And if I recall correctly, that there is no known-terminating test to determine if a given theorem falls into one of these two categories. Important stuff. Keeps mathmaticians in business. Or in school. Or whatever the hell it is mathmaticians do with their time.
Don't be pedantic. I'm sure the previous poster meant any hypothesis in current number theory, which to the best of my knowledge, we believe is incomplete, but not inconsistent. Being inconsistent, and yet applying to the 'real world' would seem to mean that the universe doesn't actually exist. Actually, now that I think about it...
I should have read the other posts before posting. This doesn't refer to any version of MS mice except the new optical mice. I agree that all their old ball mice are EXTREMELY reliable, though I have to admit I still prefer logitech.
And lifetime warranty aside, it shouldn't have happened. The mouse dies for reasons having nothing to do with it being optical. Its just a bad design on the point where the cable enters the mouse proper.
And if anyone suggest a wireless mouse to solve the problem, I will make it my mission in life to decrease their level of happiness. When they make a wireless OPTICAL mouse, I will buy one. If it can't track on carpet, I don't want it.
Same problem here. The engineering on most of the optical mouse is great, but the wires inside cable at the point it goes into the mouse is susecptable to breakage from metal fatigue or simple wear. Whatever, I had one die on me as well after about the same amount of time.