The kernel doesn't keep track of "whose" event(s) are being dropped. If it had to drop any, it sends a generic FSE_EVENTS_DROPPED notification to all registered processes.
maybe we could have had a few more Zelda games this hardware generation with new plots and content... But instead they had to waste time writing a new engine.
Twilight Princess uses a slightly modified version of the Wind Waker engine.
Except that it doesn't work that way. Our patent system (flawed as it may be) works on rewarding patent to the first to invent, not the first to register for patent.
Of course after this announcement, it wasn't long before the Konfabulator guys copied the idea of (gasp!) not having the widgets hidden back there - what a concept!
First, Konfabulator widgets could always be layered along with other windows. They were never "stuck on the desktop" (although that is one of the layering options; layering settings are per-widget).
Second, Konfabulator planned what came to be called "Konsposé" long before anyone knew about Dashboard. It just so happened that Dashboard shipped first. When the Konfabulator "Heads Up Display" feature (as it had been known within the company since Konfabulator 1.0 was planned) finally shipped, the Konfabulator guys named their feature "Konsposé" as an homage to Mac OS X's Exposé feature.
(This information is straight from Arlo Rose, BTW...as opposed to the sensational speculation based solely on release dates and misinformation demonstrated in the post quoted above.)
Those files will still be read more than once under some circumstances. There's a reason you still see conditionals based on the existence of $SSH_AUTH_SOCK (or whatever) wrapping any calls to ssh-agent/add even in.login and.bash_profile.
Re:What's wrong with finder?
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Those compaints are from before 10.3 came out, which is when the OS X Finder took several leaps forward.
Slashdot does emit code to an HTML standard, it just happens to be HTML 3.2. That's a standard.
Sure, but Slashdot doesn't correctly follow it. For some reason, the W3C validator is getting "403 Forbidden" responses from the home page, but a cursory examination of the source finds an error before even leaving the HEAD tag: HTML 3.2 doesn't allow a "type" attribute in the "link" tag. My local HTML validator finds 198 other violations of the HTML 3.2 spec. But at least it "works", right?
Good luck finding a digital 900Mhz phone. I could barely find any inexpensive 5.8GHz phones when I looked. Digital 900Mhz phones seem to have dropped off the face of the earth.
I don't see how Apple or the DivX guys or anyone
else are any better or more trustworthy than Unsanity in this regard.
Do you really not see how Apple is better in this regard? It seems unlikely that anyone could be that thick, but I'll give it a go:
Apple uses talented programmers, has a QA department, doesn't allow commits without thorough code reviews (or at least, didn't in my department when I worked there), and tests in a multitude of different environments. Plus they have guidelines for acceptable programming.
...and yet Unsanity has yet to produce an installer with a novice-level bug (improper quoting in a shell script) that could cause entire disks to be erased (iTunes installer, I forget the version...remember that one?)
Everyone creates bugs. My point was that many kinds of "foreign code" is running in other applications' address spaces: QuickTime plugins, InputManagers, Contextual Menu Plug-ins, and so on, all written by many different kinds of developers and organizations, none of which are inherently inferior or superior to any other, in the aggregate.
And some people, people with an attitude like yours, will find some way around my safeguards, and then will still send me crash logs with APE in them and expect me to fix them.
A crash log with "APE in it" does not necessarily mean that an APE module caused the crash. Anyway, if you did get such a crash log, it's your choice to ignore it or not. But if 90% of your customers are running APE because they all want to use Windowshade or whatever, that's just a reality of the market. Cursing it and turning your back is not going to win you any new customers.
If I ever release any of the Cocoa apps that I whipped up for my own use to the general public, that's probably what I'll do. I don't see any compelling reason to release them right now... it would take dozens of hours of polishing, and then some sort of a volunteer beta program, all so that 0.1% of my users can send me $10 and 80% of my users can expect me to fix my bugs for them even though they haven't paid me. (I'm not a big fan of cripple-ware.) Add haxies (which I've run afoul of before, when I was doing contract work) and their ilk to that mix, requiring me to fix OTHER PEOPLE'S BUGS for free, and you'll probably never see my apps out there. They work for me, and that's all I need.
Yes, it's quite a hardship creating software for use in such an "impure" thing as the real world...;)
.If you don't like Mac OS X's user interface, you don't have to use it, but the last thing you should expect is good support for changing it.
Why shouldn't I expect OS support for something a lot of people want to do? From the article comments:
Apple should provide a way to do the things that the most popular haxies do (Apple menu customization, window minimization plug-ins, etc.), without resorting to "universal code injection." [...]
By providing clean hooks for commonly desired functionality, Apple can substantially decrease the demand for and usage of APEs (and other, worse software that, say, actually modifies your system files).
But the demand for APE-like thingies will never be eliminated entirely because there is a large class of things that users want their computers to do that, by definition, affect every running app. Themes are just one example.
The most constructive course of action for Apple is to recognize this fact and try to come up with a way to allow such software to be created as safely as possible. Thus far, Apple has tried to discourage and prevent such software, but attacking the supply side is not the answer. First, recognize the demand, then try to provide for it (or allow others to
You can take my Haxies from me when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Yes, it would be better if Apple provided clean(er) hooks for things like Windowshade and FruitMenu. But they don't, and I'll take Unsanity's implementations over nothing at all and day of the week and twice on Sunday. They make my computing life so much better that they are, by far, the best investment I have ever made in software, dollar for dollar (I bought when they were $7 too:-)
Lots of "code that you didn't write" runs in your application's process space. I don't see how Apple or the DivX guys or anyone else are any better or more trustworthy than Unsanity in this regard. If a QuickTime plugin causes a crash, disable it. If an APE Module causes a crash, disable it (or exclude that app using APE Manager). IMO, Unsanity's record is impeccable thus far, and they are certainly a lot more responsive than a big company like Apple.
Yes, being a developer is hard. Sometimes you have to debug problems caused by other people's code. Sometimes new versions of the OS break your app. How dare those users upgrade their OS! How dare they install software that runs in your process space! Sorry, but that's the right of the user.
If you want to blame anyone, blame Apple for not providing "nicer" ways to do the things that so many users so obviously want to do. Unsanity would have been out of business long ago if there wasn't a real demand for the services they provide--despite the particular way they are forced to implement them.
Basically, you've got to realise that spatial nautilus isn't meant for browsing your source code directories.
Heh, I find this particularly funny because working with extremely deeply nested source code trees it's precisely what I do all day--using as many spatial interfaces as I can get my hands on. Heck, even my FTP app now retains spatial information for each URL.
I view the usability curve of spatial vs. browser interfaces differently than most posters to this discussion. It's definitely task-dependent, but at the most extreme high-end of the task of "doing your daily work in a big tree of files" (e.g. working on a web site in its entirety: library code, web applications, HTML, images, everything) the spatial interface is truly the "experts tool" here--not the browser, and certainly not the command line.
I know because I've seen the most demanding examples of personal and project-based file management first hand for over 15 years, and I know because I've lived it myself. People can get by, get used to, and even learn to rely on and like almost any interface, no matter how measurably inefficient it is. This is especially true in the world of computers. But when confronted with the daily task of working among several huge collections of deeply nested files, the (measurably) fastest, most efficient, and (almost as importantly) happiest users have unfailingly relied upon a primarily spatial interface--one tailored over time to exactly suit their needs.
(Yet another advantage of the relentless stability of spatial interfaces: small, incremental improvements in efficiency are cumulative over time. It's almost like applying a genetic algorithm to file, folder, and window arrangement and appearance.)
If you don't buy (or don't understand) the theory behind all this "spatial" business, fine. But the practice speaks for itself.
one of the sites he's built using web standards is http://www.wired.com/
...and yet they've already strayed. Throw a validator at the wired.com home page and see for yourself. Designing with standards is one thing. Getting the people who will maintain and update the site to keep it standards complaint is something else entirely...
From the May 2003 print edition of Wired, page 153:
"We're being offered a pretty significant amount of money to sit on it until an Xbox port is done." -- John Carmack
"It" meaning Doom 3, of course. So MS is trying to get Id to delay Doom 3 for all platforms until an Xbox port is done. (Presumably, it'd come out for the PC first without any outside influence.) Do you really want to sit around while Id finishes the Xbox port, knowing that the PC version of Doom 3 is done?
Re:One small error, one huge error
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In the very first (mock?) screen shot, Mr. Sircusa will have to blame something other than his photoshop skills for this omission! That "Library" folder icon's appearance hasn't changed in any way to indicate that it is open in another window elsewhere on the screen. To me, that's a very big deal, especially in the context of his article, which emphasises the importance of a "connection" between a folder and its Finder window.
...in which case you should have concluded that the front-most window is simply another folder named "Library", and not the one shown in the background window!:) Anyway, I knew of the omission before the article was published by was too lazy to fix it due to the previously stated rationalization. It's fixed now, however.
Re:Basically, a GIVE ME BACK MY OS 9 article
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
the moment the guy writes:
"Labels - Like the feature introduced in System 7, but extensible, and with support for different scopes (e.g. globally visible labels, user-specific labels, etc.) The ability to "colorize" icons is a natural extension of the Spatial Finder, providing a quick visual cue for metadata that would otherwise have to be read as a text."
he loses credibility. Not because labels are a bad thing, they're a good thing, and I'd like to have them too, along with other metadata improvements; but labels have no connection whatsoever with the spatial metaphor he's talking about in his "spatial finder"
As I said, labels are a natural extension of the Spatial Finder in that they provide a quick visual cue for metadata that would otherwise have to be read as a text, just as the Spatial Finder provides visual cues for path/location information that would otherwise have to be read. Perhaps I should have said labels are "a natural extension of the values that form the foundation for the Spatial Finder", but I thought the intent was clear with the existing wording.
Re:OS X is in its infancy
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Bookmarks - A simplified version of this feature already exists in the form for "Favorites", but it seems only natural to expand this feature to match the bookmarking facilities found in web browsers."
How is favorites different from bookmarks again?
I could be snide and say "use each feature and find out for yourself", but I'll be nice and say that Favorites are a flat list with a fixed order, whereas most web browsers allow bookmarks to be arranged into folders, ordered arbitrarily, and include niceties like menu separators.
"Back/forward buttons with history - The OS X Finder already has back and forward buttons, but they lack history pop-up menus. And although the "Recent folders" menu item keeps track of a handful of past locations, it is very limited when compared with the robust history tracking found in most web browsers."
So he says the Finder needs' Back/forward buttons with history.' Then he goes on to say that is has them. His only complaint is that the history isn't long enough.
First, you're ignoring the request for history pop-ups on the back/forward buttons. Second, decent web browsers do more than just provide a long, linear history list. Take a look at Safari's history menu or Mozilla's history pane for some examples.
MacOS X is then everything else - not just Aqua as some suggest, but Quartz, Aqua, all the utilities/programs (finder, mac ui, control center), the iApps, Cocoa, Carbon etc. In fact, virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS.
Linux lacks Quartz, Aqua the Finder, iApps, Cocoa, Carbon, etc. Both Darwin and Linux can run all the expected command-line Unix apps (emacs, apache, Perl, GNU utils, etc.) as well as X11 and the assorted window managers and GUI toolkits. So what is this quote saying? Is it saying that Linux lacks "virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS"?
"For example, the API that allows for custom menus and icons on the right side of the top menu bar, next to the clock, prohibits all but Apple-approved menu items."
Aww, c'mon. Let's not rehash this. What the hell is an "Apple approved" menu item?!? Its not like a developer has to get an "Official Apple Menu Item" seal for his app or anything
Actually, Apple does indeed have a hard-coded list of "Apple approved" Menu Extras built into Mac OS X 10.2. If your Menu Extra is not on that list, it does not get loaded.
There are several ways to get around this. Unsanity's Menu Extra Enabler is just one. Some apps have the code to defeat this block built into them, and some rely on an external application (like MEE) to remove the block for them.
I have a feeling that I've seen it officially stated somewhere that Blue and White G3's with DVD drives and hardware decoding don't have DVD
playback under 10.2
I have seen the same reports, but I have a revision 1 blue and white G3 with DVD playback hardware, and I can play DVDs in Jaguar.
I absolutely HATE the idea of making/x the default.. To me whitespaced and commented regexps are an order of magnitude harder to read.. Let's say I want to match the phrase "this is a sentence". Here's the easiest perl5 way to do it:
/this is a sentence/
Now perl6:
/this<sp>is<sp>a<sp> sentence/
or:/this <sp> is <sp> a <sp> sentence/
or:/this <sp>
is <sp> # sentence's verb
a <sp>
sentence/ # YUCK!
...or this:
m:w/this is a sentence/
or this:
m/<'this is a sentence'>/
or this:
$match = 'this is a sentence'; /$match/
It's not so bad, just different. And it's a small price to pay to get things like named, inheritable grammars, regex objects, and so on.
Re:Where do they recommend to use 2.0 over 1.3.24?
on
Apache 2.0 Goes Gold!
·
· Score: 2
httpd.apache.org has this to say: (my emphasis)
Apache 1.3.24 is the best version of Apache currently available
...unless you want to send multiple Set-Cookie headers from mod_perl in a single response, in which case you're better off with an earlier version because this (pretty basic) functionality is broken in 1.3.24 (see the apache mailing list(s) for more details).
My favorite part is where they list the "Memory Bandwidth", "Polygon Performance", "Simultaneous Texture Fills", and "Compressed Textures" for the consoles.
Wow, look how crippled the GameCube's polygon performance is! And the GameCube doesn't even support compressed textures or "simultaneous texture fills"! It looks like GameCube games will have around less than 1/10th the polygons as the other consoles, with a single bad texture on them. This thing sucks! I'm glad I read a good in-depth technical site Tom's Hardware instead of the promotional literature produced by the console maker's themselves. I almost wasted my money on that lame-ass underpowered GameCube!
Slashdot Mirror
The kernel doesn't keep track of "whose" event(s) are being dropped. If it had to drop any, it sends a generic FSE_EVENTS_DROPPED notification to all registered processes.
Twilight Princess uses a slightly modified version of the Wind Waker engine.
That's true now, but not for long if the Patent Reform Act of 2005 passes into law. You can read more about it in this Groklaw article.
Ah, Congress...always finding a way to mak things even worse.
First, Konfabulator widgets could always be layered along with other windows. They were never "stuck on the desktop" (although that is one of the layering options; layering settings are per-widget).
Second, Konfabulator planned what came to be called "Konsposé" long before anyone knew about Dashboard. It just so happened that Dashboard shipped first. When the Konfabulator "Heads Up Display" feature (as it had been known within the company since Konfabulator 1.0 was planned) finally shipped, the Konfabulator guys named their feature "Konsposé" as an homage to Mac OS X's Exposé feature.
(This information is straight from Arlo Rose, BTW...as opposed to the sensational speculation based solely on release dates and misinformation demonstrated in the post quoted above.)
Those files will still be read more than once under some circumstances. There's a reason you still see conditionals based on the existence of $SSH_AUTH_SOCK (or whatever) wrapping any calls to ssh-agent/add even in .login and .bash_profile.
No it didn't.
Don't make me correct this quote again...
The correct line is: "The goggles do nothing!"
Sure, but Slashdot doesn't correctly follow it. For some reason, the W3C validator is getting "403 Forbidden" responses from the home page, but a cursory examination of the source finds an error before even leaving the HEAD tag: HTML 3.2 doesn't allow a "type" attribute in the "link" tag. My local HTML validator finds 198 other violations of the HTML 3.2 spec. But at least it "works", right?
Good luck finding a digital 900Mhz phone. I could barely find any inexpensive 5.8GHz phones when I looked. Digital 900Mhz phones seem to have dropped off the face of the earth.
...and yet Unsanity has yet to produce an installer with a novice-level bug (improper quoting in a shell script) that could cause entire disks to be erased (iTunes installer, I forget the version...remember that one?)
Everyone creates bugs. My point was that many kinds of "foreign code" is running in other applications' address spaces: QuickTime plugins, InputManagers, Contextual Menu Plug-ins, and so on, all written by many different kinds of developers and organizations, none of which are inherently inferior or superior to any other, in the aggregate.
A crash log with "APE in it" does not necessarily mean that an APE module caused the crash. Anyway, if you did get such a crash log, it's your choice to ignore it or not. But if 90% of your customers are running APE because they all want to use Windowshade or whatever, that's just a reality of the market. Cursing it and turning your back is not going to win you any new customers.
Yes, it's quite a hardship creating software for use in such an "impure" thing as the real world... ;)
Why shouldn't I expect OS support for something a lot of people want to do? From the article comments:
Apple should provide a way to do the things that the most popular haxies do (Apple menu customization, window minimization plug-ins, etc.), without resorting to "universal code injection." [...]
By providing clean hooks for commonly desired functionality, Apple can substantially decrease the demand for and usage of APEs (and other, worse software that, say, actually modifies your system files).
But the demand for APE-like thingies will never be eliminated entirely because there is a large class of things that users want their computers to do that, by definition, affect every running app. Themes are just one example.
The most constructive course of action for Apple is to recognize this fact and try to come up with a way to allow such software to be created as safely as possible. Thus far, Apple has tried to discourage and prevent such software, but attacking the supply side is not the answer. First, recognize the demand, then try to provide for it (or allow others to
You can take my Haxies from me when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
:-)
Yes, it would be better if Apple provided clean(er) hooks for things like Windowshade and FruitMenu. But they don't, and I'll take Unsanity's implementations over nothing at all and day of the week and twice on Sunday. They make my computing life so much better that they are, by far, the best investment I have ever made in software, dollar for dollar (I bought when they were $7 too
Lots of "code that you didn't write" runs in your application's process space. I don't see how Apple or the DivX guys or anyone else are any better or more trustworthy than Unsanity in this regard. If a QuickTime plugin causes a crash, disable it. If an APE Module causes a crash, disable it (or exclude that app using APE Manager). IMO, Unsanity's record is impeccable thus far, and they are certainly a lot more responsive than a big company like Apple.
Yes, being a developer is hard. Sometimes you have to debug problems caused by other people's code. Sometimes new versions of the OS break your app. How dare those users upgrade their OS! How dare they install software that runs in your process space! Sorry, but that's the right of the user.
If you want to blame anyone, blame Apple for not providing "nicer" ways to do the things that so many users so obviously want to do. Unsanity would have been out of business long ago if there wasn't a real demand for the services they provide--despite the particular way they are forced to implement them.
Heh, I find this particularly funny because working with extremely deeply nested source code trees it's precisely what I do all day--using as many spatial interfaces as I can get my hands on. Heck, even my FTP app now retains spatial information for each URL.
I view the usability curve of spatial vs. browser interfaces differently than most posters to this discussion. It's definitely task-dependent, but at the most extreme high-end of the task of "doing your daily work in a big tree of files" (e.g. working on a web site in its entirety: library code, web applications, HTML, images, everything) the spatial interface is truly the "experts tool" here--not the browser, and certainly not the command line.
I know because I've seen the most demanding examples of personal and project-based file management first hand for over 15 years, and I know because I've lived it myself. People can get by, get used to, and even learn to rely on and like almost any interface, no matter how measurably inefficient it is. This is especially true in the world of computers. But when confronted with the daily task of working among several huge collections of deeply nested files, the (measurably) fastest, most efficient, and (almost as importantly) happiest users have unfailingly relied upon a primarily spatial interface--one tailored over time to exactly suit their needs.
(Yet another advantage of the relentless stability of spatial interfaces: small, incremental improvements in efficiency are cumulative over time. It's almost like applying a genetic algorithm to file, folder, and window arrangement and appearance.)
If you don't buy (or don't understand) the theory behind all this "spatial" business, fine. But the practice speaks for itself.
...and yet they've already strayed. Throw a validator at the wired.com home page and see for yourself. Designing with standards is one thing. Getting the people who will maintain and update the site to keep it standards complaint is something else entirely...
From the May 2003 print edition of Wired, page 153:
"We're being offered a pretty significant amount of money to sit on it until an Xbox port is done." -- John Carmack
"It" meaning Doom 3, of course. So MS is trying to get Id to delay Doom 3 for all platforms until an Xbox port is done. (Presumably, it'd come out for the PC first without any outside influence.) Do you really want to sit around while Id finishes the Xbox port, knowing that the PC version of Doom 3 is done?
...in which case you should have concluded that the front-most window is simply another folder named "Library", and not the one shown in the background window! :) Anyway, I knew of the omission before the article was published by was too lazy to fix it due to the previously stated rationalization. It's fixed now, however.
As I said, labels are a natural extension of the Spatial Finder in that they provide a quick visual cue for metadata that would otherwise have to be read as a text, just as the Spatial Finder provides visual cues for path/location information that would otherwise have to be read. Perhaps I should have said labels are "a natural extension of the values that form the foundation for the Spatial Finder", but I thought the intent was clear with the existing wording.
I could be snide and say "use each feature and find out for yourself", but I'll be nice and say that Favorites are a flat list with a fixed order, whereas most web browsers allow bookmarks to be arranged into folders, ordered arbitrarily, and include niceties like menu separators.
First, you're ignoring the request for history pop-ups on the back/forward buttons. Second, decent web browsers do more than just provide a long, linear history list. Take a look at Safari's history menu or Mozilla's history pane for some examples.
Linux lacks Quartz, Aqua the Finder, iApps, Cocoa, Carbon, etc. Both Darwin and Linux can run all the expected command-line Unix apps (emacs, apache, Perl, GNU utils, etc.) as well as X11 and the assorted window managers and GUI toolkits. So what is this quote saying? Is it saying that Linux lacks "virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS"?
Actually, Apple does indeed have a hard-coded list of "Apple approved" Menu Extras built into Mac OS X 10.2. If your Menu Extra is not on that list, it does not get loaded.
There are several ways to get around this. Unsanity's Menu Extra Enabler is just one. Some apps have the code to defeat this block built into them, and some rely on an external application (like MEE) to remove the block for them.
In the case of the Menu Extras APIs, Apple did not change the APIs at all, but did add code to block all non-Apple Menu Extras from loading.
I have seen the same reports, but I have a revision 1 blue and white G3 with DVD playback hardware, and I can play DVDs in Jaguar.
m:w/this is a sentence/
or this:m/<'this is a sentence'>/
or this:$match = 'this is a sentence';
/$match/
It's not so bad, just different. And it's a small price to pay to get things like named, inheritable grammars, regex objects, and so on.
...unless you want to send multiple Set-Cookie headers from mod_perl in a single response, in which case you're better off with an earlier version because this (pretty basic) functionality is broken in 1.3.24 (see the apache mailing list(s) for more details).
Wow, look how crippled the GameCube's polygon performance is! And the GameCube doesn't even support compressed textures or "simultaneous texture fills"! It looks like GameCube games will have around less than 1/10th the polygons as the other consoles, with a single bad texture on them. This thing sucks! I'm glad I read a good in-depth technical site Tom's Hardware instead of the promotional literature produced by the console maker's themselves. I almost wasted my money on that lame-ass underpowered GameCube!
(Clue for the clueless: that was sarcasm.)