That disappears after someone places a bid, and since we all know Microsoft is never first at anything, they would have missed that chance. Microsoft always waits for somebody else to go first, so they can see whether it's a good idea.
Since when does it make sense for "Shut Down" to be classified under a little picture of an Apple? How is your average Joe or Jane going to find it there,
Damn straight. Everyone knows it should be listed under "Start".
The initial System 7 was buggy and made some fundamental changes. Most of those changes were good, although about half of them took awhile to convince everyone. System 7 eventually stabilized and the last die-hards migrated. I lived.:) MacOS 8 and 9 made a lot of great innovations, but didn't change anything fundamentally with what System 7 was doing, and so there wasn't near as much of a shakeup with upgrades until OS X, which again is making fundamental changes.
I'd never really though about it in those terms, but you're right. 7 changed the way a lot of things work. No more single Finder; MultiFinder all the way. Control panels and desk accessories could be opened as applications (and the old Control Panel was replaced by a folder full of control panels), suitcases could be opened as if they were folders (thus obsoleting the Font/DA Mover), sounds could be saved to files that would play from the Finder, aliases were introduced, Balloon Help was added to everything... I'm sure there was more.
7.1 introduced the Fonts folder, which was a bastard hack if I ever saw one. Resources in any font file or suitcase within the Fonts folder would be treated as if they were part of the System file. The amusing thing was, they didn't necessarily have to be font resources - I used ResEdit to put some icons in a font suitcase, and they work just fine. Still downloadable from my home page if anyone has an old Mac.
Most of the changes since then came in the form of extensions that added on to the existing operating system, and could be disabled if you wanted. I always appreciated that approach.
For the old unix hacker it looks like you're logging in as root, but that's not really the case. At install time the system creates two users, both have the same name and the same password!
Um, no. This may have been true in pre-release versions, but in 10.0 and later, only your regular non-root account shows up in System Preferences. The root account doesn't have your name on it, and the encrypted password is set to "*" meaning logins are disabled altogether.
One is just a user, the other is root. In previous versions ( i haven't tested it lately) you could change the password of one but it wouldn't result in a password change of the other (which gave alot of headaches).
They are not the same account, so changing a user password will not change the root password, and vice-versa.
Now if you log in you're the normal user, and you can't do anything really dangerous. You need su (which needs to be activated, it isn't possible by default) or sudo to do something as root. Also when you're doing an install that requires root the installer will ask for a super user.
If you're an Administrator, you do have write access to the contents of/Applications and/Library, just not/System. The reason su doesn't work by default is, root doesn't have a password by default. However, any Administrator can run any command as root with sudo - for example, "sudo tcsh" will get you a root prompt.
In both cases you use your own username and password (if your user is created at startup). So If somebody sneaks behind my computer when I'm gone to do something else, they can't really do anything dangerous. They would still need a password!
If you're doing something that actually requires root privaleges, such as changing system settings or installing software, you must authenticate as an Administrator, even if you're already logged in as an Administrator. If you type "sudo tcsh", sudo will prompt you for your password. It's an excellent system.
You can make more users if you want without any rights (that's easy), but the system works better than it looks because you don't log in as root!
What?
You can if you want to btw. The password of root is the same as the password of the user.
As I said before, this is wrong. As I recall, the Public Beta set the root password to the same as the user password at install time; the final version didn't do this.
If you do want to enable root logins, there are three ways to do it:
A) open NetInfo Manager, click the padlock icon, authenticate, then go to select the Domain/Security/Enable Root User menu item
B) open NetInfo Manager, click the padlock icon, authenticate, browse to/users/root, and change the value of the passwd item to an encrypted password
C) open Terminal, type "sudo passwd", authenticate, and set a root password.
It does nail down the importance of good passwords which is something that alot of macusers are new to.
I set my system to automatically log me in at boot time, so it doesn't nail down anything.
Everyone *says* they value their privacy online and off. But almost everyone also gives away their privacy for the smallest benefit - like 5% discounts at your local grocery store, in exchange for them tracking everything you ever buy from them...
When I give information to Safeway, I know exactly what information I'm giving them, I know they're tracking my purchases, and I know that if I don't want them to track a particular purchase, I can simply not use my card.
What I don't know is whether Safeway might sell my personal information to a third party, without my awareness or consent. I'd like for this to be illegal unless I opt in.
Aside from that though, I WANT Safeway to track my purchases. I want them to see what I buy. I know that the people collecting this data don't really care about me personally, I'm just a statistic - but I have no objection to being a statistic for them. What are they going to do, use my shopping habits to make my food more expensive? I don't think so.
It's like the paranoia people have with targeted TV commercials. If targeted ads mean I see more commercials for IBM and Apple and Jack in the Box and Attack of the Clones, and I don't have to see commercials for tampons, I'm all for it. If tracking my purchases enables Safeway to sell me more of the food I want for less money, great.
Keep in mind that Mac OS X uses larger fonts than Mac OS 9, and in general allows you to make things larger. The higher the resolution, then better, definitely. If you do run into something too small that you can't enlarge, you can always drop the resolution down temporarily, then set it back when you're done.
What audience are they targetting with language like that?
The kind of audience that signs purchase orders. The technical people know how to skip past the marketing nonsense, but the PHBs need it. "Ooh, shiny!"
And with BSD at its heart, it should be a lot easier to port to Intel hardware than the previous MacOS was (seems to me, anyway).
Easier than previous Mac OS, sure, but that doesn't mean easy. It has a BSD core, but that's a very small part of the system. Darwin uses its own driver model, meaning existing FreeBSD drivers won't work; new drivers have to be written (it's apparently much easier to write drivers for Darwin than for nearly anything else, but it has to be done). Darwin is pretty new, and has almost no drivers for anything, save what Apple has written for Macintosh hardware - and that's only for G3 and later systems.
There is an Intel version of Darwin available for download. Will it run on your hardware? Most likely not. Last I heard they're planning to release a version that works with AMD processors in a few weeks. If you can get Darwin to run on your hardware, and if Apple ports the rest of the OS (the entire GUI layer, Carbon and Cocoa APIs, all the bundled apps like Mail and Sherlock and QuickTime), then you still have the problem of application support. How long would it take for software developers to port their applications to Mac OS X for x86, a platform that doesn't even exist yet? Remember that most apps haven't even been ported to Mac OS X for PPC yet, and many that have are still buggy.
</rant>
It won't happen. Not soon. Don't even speculate about it. If you can't stop from speculating, go install Darwin, then hack it until it runs on your system, and then runs on your friends' systems, and THEN you can speculate.
Anyway, I was talking about evolving a new image format, not browser compatibility.
Any new format can't take off because it's limited by browser support. I mentioned PNG because PNG was a new format, and it's had trouble taking off. If we invent something new now, how long will it take before we can seriously think about adopting it?
Re:this is why the economy is so bad now
on
Games in the Workplace?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
2) your client will hire a smaller group of people to handle the business themselves, and bring it inhouse
This assumes the client can figure out how to manage support themselves. If they knew how to do that the first time, they wouldn't be outsourcing.
3) another company who staffs 15 people will make a bid to only charge your customer for 4 or 5 people, and your customer will leave.
No, they'll make a bid to charge for 15 people cheaper. The client believes they need 15.
4) your customer that is stupid enough to pay you for bloat staff will go out of business
Overstaffing a callcenter is far from the dumbest thing they're probably doing. Companies that understaff are probably more likely to go under, as all their customers leave.
He should also have explained the compression techniques using photoshop as that is a much more popular package (although I understand that many home grown websites might be using PSP, they are also the ones that don't really care about bandwidth since they're using geocities or other free hosts).
Why anyone would use a photo-editing behemoth like Photoshop for simple Web graphics has always been beyond me. I haven't really looked at Paint Shop Pro since around 1994-1995; it's Windows-only and thus useless to me.
Last I heard PSP was still shareware, but Photoshop is definitely really expensive. Two questions: 1) are these really the tools of choice for a majority of people who make Web sites? 2) what percentage of those people actually use the software LEGALLY?
When are we going to start evolving these algorithims? It would have to be done by a really fast computer, but it's been shown that natural selection applies to computing as well. I'd imagine that it is possible to come up with an algorithim that's lossless and still as small as any equivalent.jpg file.
You mean like PNG? The problem is browser support - old browsers may not render a new format consistently. Keeping two versions of every graphic and deciding which to send to the browser based on what it can handle is a pain. Having a significant percentage of potential customers see broken links all over everything is unacceptible.
It's unfortunate that the JPEG format ends up being described as the JPG, due to DOS naming constraints. Are we doom to see the usage of 3 name extension only in the future due to this lack of vision from the early implementers? I for one would tend to favor embedded MIME support and the removing of file extensions.
Here here. I'm sick of hearing people talk about HTM files. Mention assembly language, and they reply "oh, you mean ASM?" Even Windows isn't this dumb anymore; why haven't the users gotten better?
These morons are offensive to us Mac users, and they're polluting Linux too. Anyone have any suggestions for putting a stop to this?
What just might improve road safety? Compulsory driving tests after an accident or compulsory advanced motorist training might just make a difference.
I completely agree. I visited Europe in 1996, and it was startling how much everybody speeds on the Autobahn, yet it still feels perfectly safe because everybody knows how to control their vehicle, and is generally paying attention. Here in the US, in most states any 16-yr-old yahoo can get a license, without having to verify much more than that they know how to parallel park. And in general, they only have to verify that once in their lives - after they get their license at 16, they keep it until they're 90 and the state just assumes that they know how to drive.
Isn't Apple already shipping 54Mbps Airport cards? I thought I heard about that several months ago, but I just checked their site and it just says 11Mbps, so maybe I'm confused?
Re:Apple "invented" the beige Personal Computer...
on
Black Is The New Beige
·
· Score: 2
Is Jobs the industry fashion leader or something?
Yes, actually. Except that sometimes his Reality Distortion Field&trade (RDF) extends beyond the realm of computers - not long after the iMac came out, companies started selling Bondi Blue translucent plastic vaccuum cleaners, irons, etc. in addition to all the translucent plastic computer peripherals.
I'd guess they were using Netscape 4's table rendering code.
Of course not; that's stupid. The Mac Business Unit at Microsoft wrote IE/Mac, with portions taken from IE/Win.
Just trying to convince Mac users to switch over to wintel.
That's why the Mac Business Unit was formed - to make decent Mac software, instead of the pile of crap that was Word 6. Word 6 for Mac was basically a direct port of Word 6 for Windows, and Mac users refused to put up with it. Plus they introduced delay loops to make sure it wasn't too fast (wouldn't want winword seeming slow by comparison, now would we!); that annoyed people too.
Yes, OmniWeb is prettier than Mozilla: Bug 121540. When it can be fixed, it will be fixed. There's a lot of enthusiasm about this. If you know how to make text drawing work with ATSUI in CFM applications, perhaps you could contribute your skills?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft didn't use the "Buy It Now" button?
That disappears after someone places a bid, and since we all know Microsoft is never first at anything, they would have missed that chance. Microsoft always waits for somebody else to go first, so they can see whether it's a good idea.
Since when does it make sense for "Shut Down" to be classified under a little picture of an Apple? How is your average Joe or Jane going to find it there,
Damn straight. Everyone knows it should be listed under "Start".
The initial System 7 was buggy and made some fundamental changes. Most of those changes were good, although about half of them took awhile to convince everyone. System 7 eventually stabilized and the last die-hards migrated. I lived. :) MacOS 8 and 9 made a lot of great innovations, but didn't change anything fundamentally with what System 7 was doing, and so there wasn't near as much of a shakeup with upgrades until OS X, which again is making fundamental changes.
I'd never really though about it in those terms, but you're right. 7 changed the way a lot of things work. No more single Finder; MultiFinder all the way. Control panels and desk accessories could be opened as applications (and the old Control Panel was replaced by a folder full of control panels), suitcases could be opened as if they were folders (thus obsoleting the Font/DA Mover), sounds could be saved to files that would play from the Finder, aliases were introduced, Balloon Help was added to everything... I'm sure there was more.
7.1 introduced the Fonts folder, which was a bastard hack if I ever saw one. Resources in any font file or suitcase within the Fonts folder would be treated as if they were part of the System file. The amusing thing was, they didn't necessarily have to be font resources - I used ResEdit to put some icons in a font suitcase, and they work just fine. Still downloadable from my home page if anyone has an old Mac.
Most of the changes since then came in the form of extensions that added on to the existing operating system, and could be disabled if you wanted. I always appreciated that approach.
So, the question is, how much damage can one do from the MacOSX GUI at root?
/System and you can render the OS unbootable.
Muck around in
For the old unix hacker it looks like you're logging in as root, but that's not really the case. At install time the system creates two users, both have the same name and the same password!
/Applications and /Library, just not /System. The reason su doesn't work by default is, root doesn't have a password by default. However, any Administrator can run any command as root with sudo - for example, "sudo tcsh" will get you a root prompt.
/users/root, and change the value of the passwd item to an encrypted password
Um, no. This may have been true in pre-release versions, but in 10.0 and later, only your regular non-root account shows up in System Preferences. The root account doesn't have your name on it, and the encrypted password is set to "*" meaning logins are disabled altogether.
One is just a user, the other is root. In previous versions ( i haven't tested it lately) you could change the password of one but it wouldn't result in a password change of the other (which gave alot of headaches).
They are not the same account, so changing a user password will not change the root password, and vice-versa.
Now if you log in you're the normal user, and you can't do anything really dangerous. You need su (which needs to be activated, it isn't possible by default) or sudo to do something as root. Also when you're doing an install that requires root the installer will ask for a super user.
If you're an Administrator, you do have write access to the contents of
In both cases you use your own username and password (if your user is created at startup). So If somebody sneaks behind my computer when I'm gone to do something else, they can't really do anything dangerous. They would still need a password!
If you're doing something that actually requires root privaleges, such as changing system settings or installing software, you must authenticate as an Administrator, even if you're already logged in as an Administrator. If you type "sudo tcsh", sudo will prompt you for your password. It's an excellent system.
You can make more users if you want without any rights (that's easy), but the system works better than it looks because you don't log in as root!
What?
You can if you want to btw. The password of root is the same as the password of the user.
As I said before, this is wrong. As I recall, the Public Beta set the root password to the same as the user password at install time; the final version didn't do this.
If you do want to enable root logins, there are three ways to do it:
A) open NetInfo Manager, click the padlock icon, authenticate, then go to select the Domain/Security/Enable Root User menu item
B) open NetInfo Manager, click the padlock icon, authenticate, browse to
C) open Terminal, type "sudo passwd", authenticate, and set a root password.
It does nail down the importance of good passwords which is something that alot of macusers are new to.
I set my system to automatically log me in at boot time, so it doesn't nail down anything.
Not to mention, in every single article, somebody has to post something about OSX for Intel.
Everyone *says* they value their privacy online and off. But almost everyone also gives away their privacy for the smallest benefit - like 5% discounts at your local grocery store, in exchange for them tracking everything you ever buy from them...
When I give information to Safeway, I know exactly what information I'm giving them, I know they're tracking my purchases, and I know that if I don't want them to track a particular purchase, I can simply not use my card.
What I don't know is whether Safeway might sell my personal information to a third party, without my awareness or consent. I'd like for this to be illegal unless I opt in.
Aside from that though, I WANT Safeway to track my purchases. I want them to see what I buy. I know that the people collecting this data don't really care about me personally, I'm just a statistic - but I have no objection to being a statistic for them. What are they going to do, use my shopping habits to make my food more expensive? I don't think so.
It's like the paranoia people have with targeted TV commercials. If targeted ads mean I see more commercials for IBM and Apple and Jack in the Box and Attack of the Clones, and I don't have to see commercials for tampons, I'm all for it. If tracking my purchases enables Safeway to sell me more of the food I want for less money, great.
Keep in mind that Mac OS X uses larger fonts than Mac OS 9, and in general allows you to make things larger. The higher the resolution, then better, definitely. If you do run into something too small that you can't enlarge, you can always drop the resolution down temporarily, then set it back when you're done.
What audience are they targetting with language like that?
The kind of audience that signs purchase orders. The technical people know how to skip past the marketing nonsense, but the PHBs need it. "Ooh, shiny!"
Granted, the majority of these numbers are made up, but I would venture that they're on the conservative side.
I would venture that f1=0, but of course you'd say I'm crazy.
"Tell a man that there are four hundred billion stars, and he'll believe you. Say a bench has wet paint, and he has to touch it."
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important.
Um, except that we actually made it to the moon. And back.
Wait, you're fantasizing about a supermodel named Kurt?
Once I got my pretty 10000 unit certificate, and 9/11 realigned my priorities, I lost interest and removed all of my running clients.
If I may ask, which priorities were those, that prompted you to take that action?
Surely you're not discounting AOLTW/Case?
And with BSD at its heart, it should be a lot easier to port to Intel hardware than the previous MacOS was (seems to me, anyway).
Easier than previous Mac OS, sure, but that doesn't mean easy. It has a BSD core, but that's a very small part of the system. Darwin uses its own driver model, meaning existing FreeBSD drivers won't work; new drivers have to be written (it's apparently much easier to write drivers for Darwin than for nearly anything else, but it has to be done). Darwin is pretty new, and has almost no drivers for anything, save what Apple has written for Macintosh hardware - and that's only for G3 and later systems.
There is an Intel version of Darwin available for download. Will it run on your hardware? Most likely not. Last I heard they're planning to release a version that works with AMD processors in a few weeks. If you can get Darwin to run on your hardware, and if Apple ports the rest of the OS (the entire GUI layer, Carbon and Cocoa APIs, all the bundled apps like Mail and Sherlock and QuickTime), then you still have the problem of application support. How long would it take for software developers to port their applications to Mac OS X for x86, a platform that doesn't even exist yet? Remember that most apps haven't even been ported to Mac OS X for PPC yet, and many that have are still buggy.
</rant>
It won't happen. Not soon. Don't even speculate about it. If you can't stop from speculating, go install Darwin, then hack it until it runs on your system, and then runs on your friends' systems, and THEN you can speculate.
Anyway, I was talking about evolving a new image format, not browser compatibility.
Any new format can't take off because it's limited by browser support. I mentioned PNG because PNG was a new format, and it's had trouble taking off. If we invent something new now, how long will it take before we can seriously think about adopting it?
2) your client will hire a smaller group of people to handle the business themselves, and bring it inhouse
This assumes the client can figure out how to manage support themselves. If they knew how to do that the first time, they wouldn't be outsourcing.
3) another company who staffs 15 people will make a bid to only charge your customer for 4 or 5 people, and your customer will leave.
No, they'll make a bid to charge for 15 people cheaper. The client believes they need 15.
4) your customer that is stupid enough to pay you for bloat staff will go out of business
Overstaffing a callcenter is far from the dumbest thing they're probably doing. Companies that understaff are probably more likely to go under, as all their customers leave.
He should also have explained the compression techniques using photoshop as that is a much more popular package (although I understand that many home grown websites might be using PSP, they are also the ones that don't really care about bandwidth since they're using geocities or other free hosts).
Why anyone would use a photo-editing behemoth like Photoshop for simple Web graphics has always been beyond me. I haven't really looked at Paint Shop Pro since around 1994-1995; it's Windows-only and thus useless to me.
Last I heard PSP was still shareware, but Photoshop is definitely really expensive. Two questions: 1) are these really the tools of choice for a majority of people who make Web sites? 2) what percentage of those people actually use the software LEGALLY?
When are we going to start evolving these algorithims? It would have to be done by a really fast computer, but it's been shown that natural selection applies to computing as well. I'd imagine that it is possible to come up with an algorithim that's lossless and still as small as any equivalent .jpg file.
You mean like PNG? The problem is browser support - old browsers may not render a new format consistently. Keeping two versions of every graphic and deciding which to send to the browser based on what it can handle is a pain. Having a significant percentage of potential customers see broken links all over everything is unacceptible.
It's unfortunate that the JPEG format ends up being described as the JPG, due to DOS naming constraints. Are we doom to see the usage of 3 name extension only in the future due to this lack of vision from the early implementers? I for one would tend to favor embedded MIME support and the removing of file extensions.
Here here. I'm sick of hearing people talk about HTM files. Mention assembly language, and they reply "oh, you mean ASM?" Even Windows isn't this dumb anymore; why haven't the users gotten better?
These morons are offensive to us Mac users, and they're polluting Linux too. Anyone have any suggestions for putting a stop to this?
What just might improve road safety? Compulsory driving tests after an accident or compulsory advanced motorist training might just make a difference.
I completely agree. I visited Europe in 1996, and it was startling how much everybody speeds on the Autobahn, yet it still feels perfectly safe because everybody knows how to control their vehicle, and is generally paying attention. Here in the US, in most states any 16-yr-old yahoo can get a license, without having to verify much more than that they know how to parallel park. And in general, they only have to verify that once in their lives - after they get their license at 16, they keep it until they're 90 and the state just assumes that they know how to drive.
Isn't Apple already shipping 54Mbps Airport cards? I thought I heard about that several months ago, but I just checked their site and it just says 11Mbps, so maybe I'm confused?
Is Jobs the industry fashion leader or something?
Yes, actually. Except that sometimes his Reality Distortion Field&trade (RDF) extends beyond the realm of computers - not long after the iMac came out, companies started selling Bondi Blue translucent plastic vaccuum cleaners, irons, etc. in addition to all the translucent plastic computer peripherals.
I'd guess they were using Netscape 4's table rendering code.
Of course not; that's stupid. The Mac Business Unit at Microsoft wrote IE/Mac, with portions taken from IE/Win.
Just trying to convince Mac users to switch over to wintel.
That's why the Mac Business Unit was formed - to make decent Mac software, instead of the pile of crap that was Word 6. Word 6 for Mac was basically a direct port of Word 6 for Windows, and Mac users refused to put up with it. Plus they introduced delay loops to make sure it wasn't too fast (wouldn't want winword seeming slow by comparison, now would we!); that annoyed people too.
Yes, OmniWeb is prettier than Mozilla: Bug 121540. When it can be fixed, it will be fixed. There's a lot of enthusiasm about this. If you know how to make text drawing work with ATSUI in CFM applications, perhaps you could contribute your skills?