Actually it is a work of art. When's the last time you saw a face that pretty (complete with opengl and TRUE alpha blending/transparency) integrated into a standard desktop OS? Never. The Quartz engine is remarkable, from both an enduser and an engineering standpoint.
Don't forget that there are real apps beneath the skin. Good ol' locate is there in the terminal along with nano and dozens of other favorites. It's unix-ish under the hood with the heavily modified *bsd kernel and tools.
I think the main reason you had difficulties with the interface was that A. you were used to a different paradigm (windows, linux) or B. you didn't look at the right side of the docking panel at the bottom. That's where the running/minimized apps live. It could be more intuitive I'm sure but it makes sense...on the left are apps you CAN open, on the right are apps that ARE open. Personally I've never liked the finder's way of really hiding tons of running apps (I used to use some kind of little panel that camped in the upper left and let you click to switch apps) but I'm sure there are usability hacks like this available now. Alt-tab is nice though, just like windows and KDE and whatever else you can think of.
Basically you have to have an OS that outsmarts your end user, like MacOSX. I worked on a new 20" Imac yesterday and it locks you, in friendly ways, all over the place. You have little padlock icons on important system settings that require the admin password to unlock. It's super obvious that something is locked or unlocked and even has animations and sounds to reinforce it.
The MacOS is really a work of art from top to bottom, and if it ever got released for x86 platforms, I think something crazy would happen.:)
The first two are correct but the third one is up in the air. Sure, *in theory* police and others aren't supposed to arrest people for no reason, but it happens on a daily basis. Keep in mind this is the exception, not the rule, but it does indeed happen.
After all, Kevin Mitnick sat in jail for years without charges filed against him and an opportunity to fight back.
I just worked on a 20" Imac today (the new one, not the hemisphere) and noticed that alot of the contextual clicking is unnecessary. Many applications now have little arrows or extra buttons that you use contextually, as opposed to right or middle clicking things. It's been awhile since I had used a Mac so I was pleasantly surprised.
That's funny, I just noticed the same thing. I guess if you're the owner of Cooltechzone or one of it's fanboys you can submit anything regardless of depth or information.
Mark my words, by 9pm cst today we'll have a link on the front page to an article on CTZ about the relative cuteness between puppies and kittens.
Re:Aluminum just doesn't handle like steel does.
on
World's First BTX Mini-PC
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I think the US automakers are just cheap.
Acura has had the all-aluminum NSX out for over a decade. Take a look at the lines on that car. They only do aluminum bodies for one single car, so what's the issue with GM using aluminum? Are you telling me Acura has more money to blow on frivolous engineering?
Also, Mitsubishi knows a thing or two about working with aluminum. The Evolution 8 has an aluminum nose and front fenders, and the MR model and all of the 2005's will have an aluminum roof as well.
I was about to say..build a machine with as few moving parts inside as possible.
You build one of these mini-atx systems with passive cooling (no processor fan, just those funky cooling pipes and vanes). Same goes for the video, either onboard video or an old-school no fan card. No case fans whatsoever, the only fan you have to worry about is the power supply fan. If you jam a foam filter in the front of the case wherever the air comes in and make it accessible, you can clean it monthly and keep the power supply happy.
Oh, and NO FLOPPY. The drive will die for sure in an environment like that, and the fewer holes for dust and grit to get through, the better. Maybe even eliminate the cdrom if you can.
Why would anyone want to laser track a 747 in this day and age of paranoia? That's just like walking through the airport with a gigantic box of Black Cats.
Throw an ipsec/ssh/vpn tunnel on each endpoint and good luck cracking calls. See, VOIP udp packets don't stick around for very long, it's a stream. Try cracking a short stream of packets for a call like 'Drop the drugs at the harbor *CLICK*' or 'Bring the apple pie to your grandma's house today'. If all of the traffic going in and coming out from a network is encrypted, when will you know when to start listening and where to start looking for VOIP packets? Ports can be redirected to look like web traffic or dns queries..
Basically, it's not as easy as wire tapping. Hell, I can tap your phone line standing outside your house or apartment and holding an inductive amplifier to the line. It's ridiculously easy. VOIP tapping, on the other hand, is another can of worms.
We've just completed a VOIP project for a small business, and so far it's wonderful.
We were originally quoted around 25k for a Cisco system using all of their hardware (call manager, media server, 18 7960 phones, licenses, routers, etc.). We laughed at the quote and a local guy told us he could do it for half of that. We still laughed.
We purchased a decent 3u case and built a server with an athlon xp3200 chip, a gig of ram, nice motherboard and a few Digium tdm400 cards for our pstn outgoing lines (only 6).
Including my consulting fee and hardware costs for 18 very nice Polycom phones, we barely scratched 8k. There is no arguing with the cost/value ratio of a solution like linux + asterisk. We were pretty careless when we built the system, budget-wise, but were surprised when we totaled it all up. Needless to say the CEO was thrilled to find that we gave him a more flexible solution with zero vendor lock-in for a fraction of the projected cost. If we were to roll this same system again now with what we've learned we could do it faster and a little cheaper. AMP has been a big helper in getting things working quickly and is a nice part of our system we can readily show off.
I honestly believe 2005 will be a great year for VOIP, particularly for hardware providers.
Along the same lines of the old school h/p scene..
I used to own a C64 with a 2400 baud modem, and liked to collect games and demos from overseas and across the US and Canada. In order to do this you always needed either long distance access or IRC access. Long distance access was obtained from a number of hackable pbx's where you could just walk to the payphone with the 800 number in your hand and hack 4 digit codes all day. Then you go somewhere else and post some of your codes to other phreaker's voice mail. Everyone used to trade pbx's and codes this way (which would kill the pbx's faster but once in awhile you got something exclusive).
For internet access I'd use a standard commodore terminal program, and dial into the local telnet numbers. From there I'd hit a service that allowed you to setup net access via credit card info. The funny thing was, the company in charge would give you full access right away but they took 24-48 hours to review your credit card info, so you could type in any random 16 digit card number with whatever expiration and you were good to go. I would then get on IRC and trade away for the rest of the day/night.
The creepiest thing happened to me one day when I was connected through this chain. I was chatting with someone while dcc'ing a file, and all of a sudden irc disconnected me. At this point I was still connected via telnet to the net provider..when I saw text appearing on the screen, word by word.
"I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING"
Keep in mind I was about 15 when I saw this, and it's stuff you'd hear about but didn't believe. I started sweating. It was 2.30 am and I was not connected to anything that should be saying this.
"WE'RE COMING TO GET YOU."
At this point I was just shocked..then I got
"DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE..."
About 15 lines of that then I was kicked offline. Keep in mind the kick had to go through 2 chains...the original dialin to the local telnet AND the internet provider. To this day I don't know who that was or how they did it.
Dunno about the rest of the seasons, but the earth's tilt and elliptical orbit around the sun causes winter. We're not in a perfect, circular orbit. I guess sometime in this planet's past, something hit us (drawn towards the sun from somewhere) and screwed up our orbit. Hence we have an orbit where, for a few months, we're further from the sun and months where we're closer.
North America and other northern continents feel the effects of this tilt/orbit thing quite a bit more than equatorial countries do. The amount and duration of sunlight is greatly decreased during the far side of the elliptical orbit, making it colder and nastier.
My grandfather told me he believed that tides were caused by the earth sloshing although most of us know it's caused by the moon pulling on us. Don't feel dumb if you didn't understand this, he had a lifetime to figure that one out.:)
Crash test standards are so much higher because we're forced to share the road with H2 Hummers and SUV's all over the place. Back in the 80's when everyone built light cars, which was a result of the oil crisis in the 70's, I imagine most accidents were a little less deadly.
If we could just convince these soccer moms to hangup and drive a volvo station wagon like they used to, we'd be safer.
That reminds me of a funny thing an ex girlfriend said before. She had a crappy 1987 Mustang LX that I ended up pushing to start all the time because it had a myriad of problems. She got the car through an uncle who was a used car salesman.
On Christmas, her family was together drinking and eating and singing songs. Her uncle came up to her and asked, "so, how is your car?". She replied with a smile, "oh, it's a piece of crap and I hate it." It was so quick and well timed I couldn't help but laugh out loud. Ahh, speaking your mind to shady relatives, that's worth at least 20 points.
The OCD meme here reminds me of Laney in William Gibson's novels. He is so set upon one thing he completely ignores his chronic illness and ends up dying for his 'cause' - watching the nodal formation come to a head and making sure it happens. It can be argued that this is natural for many people throughout history, some of us are just wired differently. I couldn't imagine taking chemicals to get to this state however.
All I know is, when I was young I'd get sick alot. Now that I'm older I rarely get sick, and when I do it doesn't put me out of comission like it used to. Same should be true for you. Think about it carefully.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it is a work of art. When's the last time you saw a face that pretty (complete with opengl and TRUE alpha blending/transparency) integrated into a standard desktop OS? Never. The Quartz engine is remarkable, from both an enduser and an engineering standpoint.
Don't forget that there are real apps beneath the skin. Good ol' locate is there in the terminal along with nano and dozens of other favorites. It's unix-ish under the hood with the heavily modified *bsd kernel and tools.
I think the main reason you had difficulties with the interface was that A. you were used to a different paradigm (windows, linux) or B. you didn't look at the right side of the docking panel at the bottom. That's where the running/minimized apps live. It could be more intuitive I'm sure but it makes sense...on the left are apps you CAN open, on the right are apps that ARE open. Personally I've never liked the finder's way of really hiding tons of running apps (I used to use some kind of little panel that camped in the upper left and let you click to switch apps) but I'm sure there are usability hacks like this available now. Alt-tab is nice though, just like windows and KDE and whatever else you can think of.
Basically you have to have an OS that outsmarts your end user, like MacOSX. I worked on a new 20" Imac yesterday and it locks you, in friendly ways, all over the place. You have little padlock icons on important system settings that require the admin password to unlock. It's super obvious that something is locked or unlocked and even has animations and sounds to reinforce it.
:)
The MacOS is really a work of art from top to bottom, and if it ever got released for x86 platforms, I think something crazy would happen.
The first two are correct but the third one is up in the air. Sure, *in theory* police and others aren't supposed to arrest people for no reason, but it happens on a daily basis. Keep in mind this is the exception, not the rule, but it does indeed happen.
After all, Kevin Mitnick sat in jail for years without charges filed against him and an opportunity to fight back.
Your post is obviously a result of the lackluster educational system in Lafayette. Does anyone need more proof that the city should provide broadband?
Here's another wacky bit of info from the Shuffle page at http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
But it looks so...delicious and flavorful.
I just worked on a 20" Imac today (the new one, not the hemisphere) and noticed that alot of the contextual clicking is unnecessary. Many applications now have little arrows or extra buttons that you use contextually, as opposed to right or middle clicking things. It's been awhile since I had used a Mac so I was pleasantly surprised.
That's funny, I just noticed the same thing. I guess if you're the owner of Cooltechzone or one of it's fanboys you can submit anything regardless of depth or information.
Mark my words, by 9pm cst today we'll have a link on the front page to an article on CTZ about the relative cuteness between puppies and kittens.
I think the US automakers are just cheap.
Acura has had the all-aluminum NSX out for over a decade. Take a look at the lines on that car. They only do aluminum bodies for one single car, so what's the issue with GM using aluminum? Are you telling me Acura has more money to blow on frivolous engineering?
Also, Mitsubishi knows a thing or two about working with aluminum. The Evolution 8 has an aluminum nose and front fenders, and the MR model and all of the 2005's will have an aluminum roof as well.
GM is just plain cheap.
I was about to say..build a machine with as few moving parts inside as possible.
You build one of these mini-atx systems with passive cooling (no processor fan, just those funky cooling pipes and vanes). Same goes for the video, either onboard video or an old-school no fan card. No case fans whatsoever, the only fan you have to worry about is the power supply fan. If you jam a foam filter in the front of the case wherever the air comes in and make it accessible, you can clean it monthly and keep the power supply happy.
Oh, and NO FLOPPY. The drive will die for sure in an environment like that, and the fewer holes for dust and grit to get through, the better. Maybe even eliminate the cdrom if you can.
Why would anyone want to laser track a 747 in this day and age of paranoia? That's just like walking through the airport with a gigantic box of Black Cats.
Throw an ipsec/ssh/vpn tunnel on each endpoint and good luck cracking calls. See, VOIP udp packets don't stick around for very long, it's a stream. Try cracking a short stream of packets for a call like 'Drop the drugs at the harbor *CLICK*' or 'Bring the apple pie to your grandma's house today'. If all of the traffic going in and coming out from a network is encrypted, when will you know when to start listening and where to start looking for VOIP packets? Ports can be redirected to look like web traffic or dns queries..
Basically, it's not as easy as wire tapping. Hell, I can tap your phone line standing outside your house or apartment and holding an inductive amplifier to the line. It's ridiculously easy. VOIP tapping, on the other hand, is another can of worms.
We've just completed a VOIP project for a small business, and so far it's wonderful.
We were originally quoted around 25k for a Cisco system using all of their hardware (call manager, media server, 18 7960 phones, licenses, routers, etc.). We laughed at the quote and a local guy told us he could do it for half of that. We still laughed.
We purchased a decent 3u case and built a server with an athlon xp3200 chip, a gig of ram, nice motherboard and a few Digium tdm400 cards for our pstn outgoing lines (only 6).
Including my consulting fee and hardware costs for 18 very nice Polycom phones, we barely scratched 8k. There is no arguing with the cost/value ratio of a solution like linux + asterisk. We were pretty careless when we built the system, budget-wise, but were surprised when we totaled it all up. Needless to say the CEO was thrilled to find that we gave him a more flexible solution with zero vendor lock-in for a fraction of the projected cost. If we were to roll this same system again now with what we've learned we could do it faster and a little cheaper. AMP has been a big helper in getting things working quickly and is a nice part of our system we can readily show off.
I honestly believe 2005 will be a great year for VOIP, particularly for hardware providers.
Ah yes, Operation Sundevil. They took down alot of good men.
So what kind of cookie is it?
Along the same lines of the old school h/p scene..
I used to own a C64 with a 2400 baud modem, and liked to collect games and demos from overseas and across the US and Canada. In order to do this you always needed either long distance access or IRC access. Long distance access was obtained from a number of hackable pbx's where you could just walk to the payphone with the 800 number in your hand and hack 4 digit codes all day. Then you go somewhere else and post some of your codes to other phreaker's voice mail. Everyone used to trade pbx's and codes this way (which would kill the pbx's faster but once in awhile you got something exclusive).
For internet access I'd use a standard commodore terminal program, and dial into the local telnet numbers. From there I'd hit a service that allowed you to setup net access via credit card info. The funny thing was, the company in charge would give you full access right away but they took 24-48 hours to review your credit card info, so you could type in any random 16 digit card number with whatever expiration and you were good to go. I would then get on IRC and trade away for the rest of the day/night.
The creepiest thing happened to me one day when I was connected through this chain. I was chatting with someone while dcc'ing a file, and all of a sudden irc disconnected me. At this point I was still connected via telnet to the net provider..when I saw text appearing on the screen, word by word.
"I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING"
Keep in mind I was about 15 when I saw this, and it's stuff you'd hear about but didn't believe. I started sweating. It was 2.30 am and I was not connected to anything that should be saying this.
"WE'RE COMING TO GET YOU."
At this point I was just shocked..then I got
"DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE..."
About 15 lines of that then I was kicked offline. Keep in mind the kick had to go through 2 chains...the original dialin to the local telnet AND the internet provider. To this day I don't know who that was or how they did it.
Dunno about the rest of the seasons, but the earth's tilt and elliptical orbit around the sun causes winter. We're not in a perfect, circular orbit. I guess sometime in this planet's past, something hit us (drawn towards the sun from somewhere) and screwed up our orbit. Hence we have an orbit where, for a few months, we're further from the sun and months where we're closer.
:)
North America and other northern continents feel the effects of this tilt/orbit thing quite a bit more than equatorial countries do. The amount and duration of sunlight is greatly decreased during the far side of the elliptical orbit, making it colder and nastier.
My grandfather told me he believed that tides were caused by the earth sloshing although most of us know it's caused by the moon pulling on us. Don't feel dumb if you didn't understand this, he had a lifetime to figure that one out.
Crash test standards are so much higher because we're forced to share the road with H2 Hummers and SUV's all over the place. Back in the 80's when everyone built light cars, which was a result of the oil crisis in the 70's, I imagine most accidents were a little less deadly.
If we could just convince these soccer moms to hangup and drive a volvo station wagon like they used to, we'd be safer.
That reminds me of a funny thing an ex girlfriend said before. She had a crappy 1987 Mustang LX that I ended up pushing to start all the time because it had a myriad of problems. She got the car through an uncle who was a used car salesman.
On Christmas, her family was together drinking and eating and singing songs. Her uncle came up to her and asked, "so, how is your car?". She replied with a smile, "oh, it's a piece of crap and I hate it." It was so quick and well timed I couldn't help but laugh out loud. Ahh, speaking your mind to shady relatives, that's worth at least 20 points.
He said store them in the car, not open and drink them in the car whilst lighting a cigarette and putting on lipstick.
I'd like to think most of us slashdotters have the sense to not drive drunk.
No, we're dealing with udev now, so it'd be something like /dev/misc/breathalyzer
How did they get dusty? Because they ran it through the car wash yesterday.
Same theory as why it always rains the day after I wash my car (after it being dirty for weeks).
/me chants Sitetorrent...sitetorrent..someone make the damn app already.
The OCD meme here reminds me of Laney in William Gibson's novels. He is so set upon one thing he completely ignores his chronic illness and ends up dying for his 'cause' - watching the nodal formation come to a head and making sure it happens. It can be argued that this is natural for many people throughout history, some of us are just wired differently. I couldn't imagine taking chemicals to get to this state however.
All I know is, when I was young I'd get sick alot. Now that I'm older I rarely get sick, and when I do it doesn't put me out of comission like it used to. Same should be true for you. Think about it carefully.
Only old koreans use the Linux Desktop Migration Cookbook!
It's all good. When SiteTorrent is ready, you'll never see another slashdotted page again.