I think you did. Calling hypocracy is just about as bad as walking into a feminist convention and yelling out "Cu** and Bi***". It's not something that is done by accident.
Are you serious? Maybe it would be that bad if I were talking about your religion or something--
You seem to dish it out just fine, but when I throw that shit back in your face you cry foul. Who's the hypocrite?
Even if you disliked the tone of my original comment, there was a distinct difference between that and what you wrote in response. That difference was that my post attempted to say something in response to your idea. Your reply was just a cliché insult and a statement that I was wrong, and didn't mention a thing I wrote.
Maybe you like to pull hypotheses out of your ass? Maybe you like straw men? Maybe that really IS a monster under my bed? Or maybe I never said that, I never implied it, and you just made it up.
No, I wasn't trying to make a comment to shoot down. I really meant it as a possibility. Maybe you don't want mainstream people using unix. Maybe one doesn't, how about. There would be nothing wrong with feeling that way. There would be a lot of annoying things to deal with. I'm not sure how I would feel about it, really.
Don't join the Army. You'll have a very hard time if you try to interpret the Sarge's orders as loosely as you interpret what I write.
Well, since I consider the entire concept of the army to be very screwed up, and probably the last place I'd want to be, I'll take that as a compliment.
We're obviously not really doing so well in the way of debate so let's just forget it. Neither of us is going to convince the other of ANYTHING at this point, I think we can agree on that.
I didn't mean to sound originally so personally insulting.
That's kind of my point. It's pretty inconsistent overall. Basically it is "capitalization has to be exact. Except when it doesn't." I know one thing is the file system and the other is the Internet. But to the average user, it is all the computer.
I just think if requiring consistent capitalization is really that intuitive or useful, why doesn't it bother unix-inclined folk that a good portion of the web is not case-sensitive? Or maybe it does.
All I know is, I've had a number of friends try to do some basics with unix at school, and they try to type something, and I explain that what they are trying to do isn't working because the case is wrong, and the first thing they say is "why?" or "that's dumb." Deserved or not, I feel like it gets them started off on the wrong foot. Like "Welcome to unix. Prepare to be frustrated."
Just my feeling on it, not everyone is like this of course.
I would clarify if I felt like you were really interested in what I had to say about it. Oh, fine, I'll explain anyway.
You seemed to make the point of "sHE kNOWS wHAT iS wRONG wITH tHIS", therefore, she should be able to tell the difference between different capitalizations in the file system, and we shouldn't assume they are dumb.
My point was that even though the caps is all wrong, a person can still read what that sentence is trying to say. You know that "hELLO" is not technically a word, but that it means "hello". But, when a user is interacting with unix, and they type "Letter.txt" instead of "letter.txt", unix acts as though "Letter.txt" is absolutely non-existent (which is technically true), and ignores the fact that there is a "letter.txt" in that directory already, and that might be what they mean.
Why should the user remember that capitalization does matter there? It doesn't matter for email addresses and (most) URLs.
It's frustrating enough to try to remind an inexperienced computer user that they don't need to double-click web links and things like that. A lot of people are going to be confused by things like in unix like the file system, fair or not.
And maybe that's fine... maybe you don't want to encourage the mainstream users to use unix. Because then you do have to deal with stuff like that.
I understand your point about having to convert characters all the time.
But file names are such a critical part of the OS and applications, that it seems dangerous to leave it up to every application to mask it well and consistently with other applications.
Would there be more converting upper and lowercase characters? Yes. But, I think it would be worth it. It seems like nowadays the difference would be negligible, as other OSes which have the less picky filesystem seem to get along just fine.
I think of it like other space- and speed-saving techniques that were extremely valuable years ago, that just aren't worth the inconvenience now.
But I don't claim to be a UNIX expert. It could be more significant in this case.
But when it is represented inconsistently, people will get confused IMO. You're right about how the search program could be case insensitive. But what if someone writes a file and names it "letter.txt", intending to overwrite the original file, which they happened to have named "Letter.txt" before. The file is saved, and now there is "letter.txt" as well as "Letter.txt" in that directory. Maybe the application accounts for this as well. But every single hole to the "real" UNIX filesystem has to be patched up, and the user has to be shielded from ever finding it.
Not a horrible situation (as you said, DOS+Windows works that way), but IMO not the best situation. I think a case-preserving (only) system would be the best, because it is much easier to use for the normal person, and it would mean this case-issue would be consistent system-wide.
And what is lost? It may be difficult to convert everything over, which is not to be ignored. But just talking theoretically, how is this a worse filesystem (eg what is the advantage to having "Aaa.txt" exist in the same directory as "AAA.txt")?
The sooner people accept that 'Ginny' and 'gInNy' are not the same the sooner they will understand how to interact with a computer.
The sooner UNIX-based computers learn that when a person is looking in a directory for "letter.txt" that "Letter.txt" is probably what they mean, the sooner they (the computers) will understand how to interact with people.
And shouldn't that be the point of it? Not the other way around.
"Hello" and "heLLo" and "HELLO" are slightly different things. This is noticed by anyone. Yet, I am betting that if someone wrote you one of these variations, you would not tell them they were speaking nonsense. You could, but you'd be the moron, not them.
Preserving cases is good, so if I name my file "Hello.txt", the cases should be preserved. But then if I look for "hello.txt" in that very folder, or I don't remember the capitalization exactly later, the OS shouldn't act like these are two totally unrelated strings.
Having it the anal way in the system, and user friendly in the GUI or in a special shell is definitely a step in the right direction, although if the user ever ends up having to interact with the anal system, that inconsistency would be quite confusing.
iF yOU wROTE a lETTER tO yOUR aUNT gINNY lIKE tHIS wOULD sHE nOTICE sOMETHING wRONG wITH iT?
What? You are speaking gibberish. Those aren't English words. But we CAN read it, can't we? Yes, we can notice the difference AND understand what it is supposed to say without weird text.
I bet you spend half the time being rude like this when Aunt Ginny doesn't distinguish "letter.txt" and "Letter.txt". Then, when she asks "Is your email address pd@computer.net or PD@computer.net?" or "do I got to www.CNN.com or www.cnn.com?" you say, "Jeez, it's the same thing, get with it!"
You're the one insulting people's intelligence if you think the problem is that they don't grasp the ability to even distinguish upper- and lowercase.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Aunt Ginnie have to actually hold the Shift key, or press Caps Lock, in order to get anything beyond "letter.txt"? Therefore, can't it be assumed in the case of Letter.txt that she did it on purpose? Sure, I'll agree that the case of LETTER.TXT is probably a user who put capslock on and forgot about it. But why deny her the ability to express herself the way she intended, if that's what she intended?
Who is stopping her from expressing herself the way she intended? On my Mac, if I type "Letter.txt" or "lETTEr.TxT", it is preserved and displayed in this manner. But if I want to find this file and I look for "letter.txt", the computer isn't going to tell me there isn't any. Or if I try to name one file "letter.txt" and another "letter.TXT", it won't let me put them in the same directory. So while you can try to make the argument that "grannie should be able to express herself" (ignoring that she can still name the file how she wants), I don't see how 9999/10000 grannies getting confused by "letter.txt" and "Letter.txt" being considered different is the most important thing to preserve.
My solution is for the OS to ignore the caps lock key. Not only would it solve the case problem, but it would shut up a whole lot of AOL users.
This would not help. I think you are talking about your own pet peeve about people writing in all caps in chats and emails. The subject at hand is the file system. mark
This is pretty much the way things are done in translation these days. The translator uses lookups in large databases, proximity of words to one another, frequency of words, etc. Doing anything more would essentially require a computer to be able to understand the meaning of what you are saying (and probably have social and historical knowledge as well), which would be a great achievement in and of itself.
Replace "you" with "he/him" in the two appropriate places. Was that so hard?
mark
Re:You know what I think makes the difference?
on
1985 Usenet About Y2k
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· Score: 1
It doesn't even have to be something dangerous. Think about the number of times you hear somebody lay on the horn because the car in front of them didn't notice the green light for an 8th of a second. There's definitely an anonymity thing going on, IMO.
Run OS 9 forever. There's no law saying you can't. If that's exactly what you want then why are you wetting yourself over the idea that I like OS X? Go be happy with 9.
mark
You know what I think makes the difference?
on
1985 Usenet About Y2k
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Anonymity. Most people at that time used their real identities, and the community was smaller and simpler, so it would be harder to hide.
It's the same reason why bumping into someone while walking will lead to "excuse me" and "s'okay", but cutting someone off in traffic will lead to an angry honk and possibly tail-gating for the next several minutes.
Some of the newer things like the services menu and the font panel, goodies like that.
I haven't done any Cocoa programming, but it sounds like writing a Cocoa app is way easier with Objective-C (or can be done in Java as well) and the tools provided than Carbon apps.
Of course the Real Basic page doesn't mention the Cocoa programming advantages because they claim their own product that they want to sell you is the easiest.
Not Earth-shattering stuff, but I feel like Cocoa is the best place to end up for any program at some point down the road.
You're overstating the situation. The Carbon API is a subset of the ancient (in computer terms) Mac OS Toolbox APIs. You don't have to "re-write" applications, but you may need to modify them if you were using Toolbox APIs that are not included in Carbon.
Huh? Didn't you continue reading? You're talking about Carbon and that sentence was about Cocoa. For Cocoa (totally OS X native), you have to rewrite the app. For Carbon (almost native but not all the extra goodies), you have to get rid of certain old libraries and use carbonlib. Carbon was Apple's way of making the transition a lot easier, but it isn't the final goal.
My understanding is that applications have to be recompiled (and possibly modified) to run natively under OS X.
They all have to be modified. In order to be fully OS X native, they need to be re-written. In order to be a hybrid (can't use some of the extra niceties), you need to modify the program to use the "carbon" library and eliminate a bunch of obsolete ones you may be using.
To run those applications, you have to run OS 9, which is why OS 9 is included when you buy OS X. Now what I don't follow completely is whether you can somehow run OS 9 and OS X at the same time, or if you have to reboot to switch between native and legacy applications.
To run OS 9 apps in OS X, there is something called "classic" that basically means OS 9 boots up but is completely contained within OS X. The program behaves like an OS 9 app, and if an OS 9 app crashes, it can take the other OS 9 apps down with it. Right now, it is also possible to boot into OS 9 and run things the old way, without OS X at all (and a small number of special OS 9 apps don't work in OS X classic mode), and this is what Apple wants to get rid of, because OS 9 is obsolete.
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What I was trying to say by putting "win" in quotes was that there is no winning or losing in a conversation.
Now do you feel cooler or like you "won" the conversation?
Well, we'll know if they DO exist. But if they don't exist, we'll never know that for sure.
mark
What?
Are you serious? Maybe it would be that bad if I were talking about your religion or something--
OH! Wait, I get it.
mark
Even if you disliked the tone of my original comment, there was a distinct difference between that and what you wrote in response. That difference was that my post attempted to say something in response to your idea. Your reply was just a cliché insult and a statement that I was wrong, and didn't mention a thing I wrote.
No, I wasn't trying to make a comment to shoot down. I really meant it as a possibility. Maybe you don't want mainstream people using unix. Maybe one doesn't, how about. There would be nothing wrong with feeling that way. There would be a lot of annoying things to deal with. I'm not sure how I would feel about it, really.
Well, since I consider the entire concept of the army to be very screwed up, and probably the last place I'd want to be, I'll take that as a compliment.
We're obviously not really doing so well in the way of debate so let's just forget it. Neither of us is going to convince the other of ANYTHING at this point, I think we can agree on that.
I didn't mean to sound originally so personally insulting.
mark
That's kind of my point. It's pretty inconsistent overall. Basically it is "capitalization has to be exact. Except when it doesn't." I know one thing is the file system and the other is the Internet. But to the average user, it is all the computer.
I just think if requiring consistent capitalization is really that intuitive or useful, why doesn't it bother unix-inclined folk that a good portion of the web is not case-sensitive? Or maybe it does.
All I know is, I've had a number of friends try to do some basics with unix at school, and they try to type something, and I explain that what they are trying to do isn't working because the case is wrong, and the first thing they say is "why?" or "that's dumb." Deserved or not, I feel like it gets them started off on the wrong foot. Like "Welcome to unix. Prepare to be frustrated."
Just my feeling on it, not everyone is like this of course.
mark
You have to name the file. If you don't know where the file is, you also can't select it. If it never came up, nobody would even be discussing this.
mark
I would clarify if I felt like you were really interested in what I had to say about it. Oh, fine, I'll explain anyway.
You seemed to make the point of "sHE kNOWS wHAT iS wRONG wITH tHIS", therefore, she should be able to tell the difference between different capitalizations in the file system, and we shouldn't assume they are dumb.
My point was that even though the caps is all wrong, a person can still read what that sentence is trying to say. You know that "hELLO" is not technically a word, but that it means "hello". But, when a user is interacting with unix, and they type "Letter.txt" instead of "letter.txt", unix acts as though "Letter.txt" is absolutely non-existent (which is technically true), and ignores the fact that there is a "letter.txt" in that directory already, and that might be what they mean.
Why should the user remember that capitalization does matter there? It doesn't matter for email addresses and (most) URLs.
It's frustrating enough to try to remind an inexperienced computer user that they don't need to double-click web links and things like that. A lot of people are going to be confused by things like in unix like the file system, fair or not.
And maybe that's fine... maybe you don't want to encourage the mainstream users to use unix. Because then you do have to deal with stuff like that.
mark
A user has to type names of files sometimes. They just do.
I hope you don't design any GUIs.
mark
I understand your point about having to convert characters all the time.
But file names are such a critical part of the OS and applications, that it seems dangerous to leave it up to every application to mask it well and consistently with other applications.
Would there be more converting upper and lowercase characters? Yes. But, I think it would be worth it. It seems like nowadays the difference would be negligible, as other OSes which have the less picky filesystem seem to get along just fine.
I think of it like other space- and speed-saving techniques that were extremely valuable years ago, that just aren't worth the inconvenience now.
But I don't claim to be a UNIX expert. It could be more significant in this case.
mark
Yes, I have an IQ of less than 1. I have no frontal lobe. Good point.
Oh I'm sorry, I thought there was a discussion of ideas going on here. God forbid you should respond to the points I made.
mark
But when it is represented inconsistently, people will get confused IMO. You're right about how the search program could be case insensitive. But what if someone writes a file and names it "letter.txt", intending to overwrite the original file, which they happened to have named "Letter.txt" before. The file is saved, and now there is "letter.txt" as well as "Letter.txt" in that directory. Maybe the application accounts for this as well. But every single hole to the "real" UNIX filesystem has to be patched up, and the user has to be shielded from ever finding it.
Not a horrible situation (as you said, DOS+Windows works that way), but IMO not the best situation. I think a case-preserving (only) system would be the best, because it is much easier to use for the normal person, and it would mean this case-issue would be consistent system-wide.
And what is lost? It may be difficult to convert everything over, which is not to be ignored. But just talking theoretically, how is this a worse filesystem (eg what is the advantage to having "Aaa.txt" exist in the same directory as "AAA.txt")?
mark
The sooner UNIX-based computers learn that when a person is looking in a directory for "letter.txt" that "Letter.txt" is probably what they mean, the sooner they (the computers) will understand how to interact with people.
And shouldn't that be the point of it? Not the other way around.
"Hello" and "heLLo" and "HELLO" are slightly different things. This is noticed by anyone. Yet, I am betting that if someone wrote you one of these variations, you would not tell them they were speaking nonsense. You could, but you'd be the moron, not them.
Preserving cases is good, so if I name my file "Hello.txt", the cases should be preserved. But then if I look for "hello.txt" in that very folder, or I don't remember the capitalization exactly later, the OS shouldn't act like these are two totally unrelated strings.
Having it the anal way in the system, and user friendly in the GUI or in a special shell is definitely a step in the right direction, although if the user ever ends up having to interact with the anal system, that inconsistency would be quite confusing.
mark
What? You are speaking gibberish. Those aren't English words. But we CAN read it, can't we? Yes, we can notice the difference AND understand what it is supposed to say without weird text.
I bet you spend half the time being rude like this when Aunt Ginny doesn't distinguish "letter.txt" and "Letter.txt". Then, when she asks "Is your email address pd@computer.net or PD@computer.net?" or "do I got to www.CNN.com or www.cnn.com?" you say, "Jeez, it's the same thing, get with it!"
You're the one insulting people's intelligence if you think the problem is that they don't grasp the ability to even distinguish upper- and lowercase.
mark
Who is stopping her from expressing herself the way she intended? On my Mac, if I type "Letter.txt" or "lETTEr.TxT", it is preserved and displayed in this manner. But if I want to find this file and I look for "letter.txt", the computer isn't going to tell me there isn't any. Or if I try to name one file "letter.txt" and another "letter.TXT", it won't let me put them in the same directory. So while you can try to make the argument that "grannie should be able to express herself" (ignoring that she can still name the file how she wants), I don't see how 9999/10000 grannies getting confused by "letter.txt" and "Letter.txt" being considered different is the most important thing to preserve.
This would not help. I think you are talking about your own pet peeve about people writing in all caps in chats and emails. The subject at hand is the file system.
mark
This is pretty much the way things are done in translation these days. The translator uses lookups in large databases, proximity of words to one another, frequency of words, etc. Doing anything more would essentially require a computer to be able to understand the meaning of what you are saying (and probably have social and historical knowledge as well), which would be a great achievement in and of itself.
mark
That guy never said the government needs to make what he does legal.
If the RIAA wants to DoS file-sharers, fine. If they get caught they should get in trouble for it like anyone.
mark
Replace "you" with "he/him" in the two appropriate places. Was that so hard?
mark
It doesn't even have to be something dangerous. Think about the number of times you hear somebody lay on the horn because the car in front of them didn't notice the green light for an 8th of a second. There's definitely an anonymity thing going on, IMO.
mark
Run OS 9 forever. There's no law saying you can't. If that's exactly what you want then why are you wetting yourself over the idea that I like OS X? Go be happy with 9.
mark
Anonymity. Most people at that time used their real identities, and the community was smaller and simpler, so it would be harder to hide.
It's the same reason why bumping into someone while walking will lead to "excuse me" and "s'okay", but cutting someone off in traffic will lead to an angry honk and possibly tail-gating for the next several minutes.
mark
Some of the newer things like the services menu and the font panel, goodies like that.
I haven't done any Cocoa programming, but it sounds like writing a Cocoa app is way easier with Objective-C (or can be done in Java as well) and the tools provided than Carbon apps.
Of course the Real Basic page doesn't mention the Cocoa programming advantages because they claim their own product that they want to sell you is the easiest.
Not Earth-shattering stuff, but I feel like Cocoa is the best place to end up for any program at some point down the road.
mark
mark
mark
mark