It's pretty silly that I can run the streaming server on Linux but I have to go to Windows or Mac to view the content.
If that's what you want, get the MPEG-LA to lighten up on MPEG-4 licensing.
Then you won't have a problem. It's Apple's goal, after all, to have the most open, standards-based platform. It's not quite their choice to hold Sorenson codecs from Linux.
There seems to be an assumption here that all cars have good interfaces.
Yes the steering wheel is still there, and so on, but the "skin" on the dashboard is different
And you choose the skin when you buy the car. And some colours reflect themselves on the windshield on a sunny day (very bad).
and the buttons are often placed in different places
Yes, many stupid GM cars (they finally changed this with the new Malibu, I'm not sure about other cars since) have that god-forsaken all-in-one control stick that's stupid to use no matter how good you get at it (wipers, windshield, indicators, cruise control, & more, all on one stick. What the hell were they thinking?).
Some cars are designed well enough so you don't have to spend that 8 seconds finding the buttons to change the radio station. You just let your hand rest down and boom, you've found the buttons. And they're laid out well enough so that you don't need to look. Other cars have the radio floating in the middle of the dashboard, with no hope of your hand landing on it by chance.
Some cars have digital speedometers, some have analogue ones.
And I don't see how digital speedometers are good for much (and I've used them). You have to specifically read the numbers to find out what speed your going, and it's nearly impossible to get a glance how fast your accelerating or braking (rather than watching the needle move). Analogue ones give you all that info by just looking.
And then some analogue ones are crappy too. The top speed of some cars is about 130 MPH, but the speedometer will go up to 200, for no good reason other than cool value (too many people judge the top speed of the car by looking at the speedometer). This causes the useful area of the speedometer to be smaller than it should be, which is a bad interface. And many speedometers are designed with the 'I like it' attitude, with no regard to how they will look in bright sunlight or lit up at night; some cars are far, far better than others.
Ignition is in different places, gear shifts have different configurations.
And just because the gear shifts have different configurations doesn't mean they all have the same usefulness. Some have reverse beside 1st gear. When you're in a rush (they're a truck coming up to fast behind you to slow down at a stop sign or something) you slam it as fast as you can into first, but in your excessive speed, you end up in reverse. That is bad, cars shouldn't be built that way. Yet many cars are built that way, to be eccentric or something (someone liked it).
On some cars, you can take the keys out of the ignition while the car is running (and moving!). On some cars you can open the door from the inside even though the door's locked. Fine if it's your car and you're used to it, but how many times do you have other people in your car? Or kids? (I don't think they're allowed to sell cars like that in North America).
Thinking about that, how many times have you had people in your car who couldn't find the lock to get out? And you sit there telling them, "oh, it's a little hard to get to. See that there? No that..." Granted, the place of the lock isn't too important, but some cars have them in really stupid spots because it was cheaper to build that way.
We only have regulations for only the most important safety concerns about a car; safety problems don't end at the crumple zones. Preferences really must take a back seat to safety, and in computer UI, they should often take a back seat to efficiency. This is one thing Mac OS users are groaning about OS X, there has been quite a bit of efficiency lost in the UI.
If car designers always built cars that were safe, we wouldn't need a long list of regulations to make sure that they built safe cars. They design them the way they do because they're cheaper to make or they sell better- it has nothing to do with what's good for you. Likewise, there are no 'regulations' about how to build a GUI, programmers just do whatever the hell they want. Sometimes there's a UI designer around. Often UI designers are more concerned about aesthetics or ease-of-use than efficiency.
Nope! I'm got one of those god-forsaken IBM Desktar shit-drives (OEM drive on my G4) that was mentioned on slashdot. Same model number. It's toast. I've got to get it replaced under warranty, but that's a pain in the ass. And then I think they'll just give me another shit-star (every IBM drive I've had has failed. Stupid IBM.).
However it's got 2 partitions, and the toasted part is only on one of them. So I'm currently 'clean' on one partition (15 GB out of 60 GB, sniff). I've been running that way for a few months now (damn I'm lazy), and I know it's dangerous, but, damn I'm lazy.
Lesson: always make a partition. 99.9% of the time, it's just directory damage, which DiskWarrior can clean up easily. But DiskWarrior won't operate on it if the only drive you have to run it off of is the damaged and startup drive.
A review of the review. Well, not really a review, but annotated ramblings or somethign.
Ran through the OSX registration procedure
He complains about being forced to register... this has already been commented on. But having no true option is stupid.
Big dialogue box came up: "You need an Administrator password to install the software." Below this, icon of a padlock: "Click the lock to make changes."
Totally baffled. What do I do now? No clue how to enter administrator password.
Yeah, that can be confusing. You don't know that your password is an administrator password (it never tells you about the concept of administrators, or that you're it).
Just so you know, he actually took three days to finish Alice (and that was in Easy mode and with a couple of hints on how to beat the bosses. Plus liberal use of cheat keys in final battle.)
I'm better at Alice than he is.
Getting more experience working with new Finder. No longer feel totally mummified, but still not comfortable. Column view -- bleah. (Remember using NeXT boxes in college. Didn't like column view then either.)
Bah, column view was something I always wanted in the Finder. It's good, get used to it:P It's better if you have more folders than files (it's good at finding files deeply nested, and makes it more convenient to have your files deeply nested).
Hit cmd-F to search partition. Oh, no. Sherlock. Forgot how awful Sherlock has become
Sherlock is a bane on the Mac's usefulness. Stupid Steve.
[Dock:] Can click app icon, wait for window list pop-up -- but this is slow and confusing. All Terminal windows have same name anyway
You can Get Info on a Terminal window and change the name. Very useful. Otherwise they have the ttyp# in the name.
Only missing UI element: configurable Apple menu. Or some way to do pop-up menu with hierarchical structure showing a directory tree. Needed for One True Way MacOS structure.
Well, get used to column view, and you've got it. Try this:
Click Finder icon in the Dock.
Hit Command-opt-F. This brings up Favorites. Set it to Column View.
Close window now.
Hit Command-opt-F. The finder should remember that that folder should be in Column View (it will also remember the window size, for when you open up a new window, instead of navigating from an existing window).
Here's your wonderful hierarchical list, as easy as clicking the Finder icon and hitting command-opt-f. Add folders with aliases in them as your hearts content. Alright, not as easy as the Apple menu, but people abused that thing to no end...
This animation takes approximately 0.75 seconds. After approximately 0.375 seconds, I am banging on computer top, screaming "Get move on!!"
Yup, there's too much stupid animation in OS X. A lot of it is warranted and doesn't get in your way, a lot of it (like hitting Command-S(ave), return) takes too damn long as the sheets come and go.
How hard would it be to write a freeware Dock item which navigates folder tree, without delays?
Dock menus pop up instantly if you control-click. Or if you have a two button mouse and right click. He finds that out later, but not the two-button thing. I'm happy with one button... I use two at work because I got one there.
Spent more time selecting fonts. Font selection is annoying.
Font selection is pretty awesome, the Font panel resizes. When the panel is small you get popup menus for your fonts. At a bigger size you get scrollable lists. You can organize fonts into your favorite groups (like Monospace fonts, it doesn't do it for you). And you can set your Favorite fonts, and while you're browsing your favs you get a nice little custom UI for it (favs include bold/point size in one click).
More generally: Carbon and Cocoa apps have different font-rendering.
Actually, CoreGraphics (Quartz 2D) and QuickDraw have different font rendering. The Finder is a Carbon app. Some (many) Carbon apps don't want to jump to Quartz because (a) the developers know QuickDraw and (b) Quartz 2D isn't on OS 9, so the app won't run on both platforms.
(Five minutes later: Selected "Get Mac OS X Software..." from Apple menu. Nothing happened. The hell? I've got menu option eating space in Apple menu, can't get rid of it, and it doesn't work? Stupid Steve!)
He deleted IE, and has not set his default web browser (IE is always the fallback browser if it can't find the preferred web browser). Until he goes to Internet prefs and sets his browser of choice, it (and anything else that wants to launch an http url) won't work.
I've deleted IE, the OS X version is an amazing pile of do-do; absolutely busted functionality. OmniWeb, Mozilla, and Chimera rulez.
On the other hand, have sworn off using Help system anyhow, due to annoying animations.
And it takes about 30 seconds to load.
Be careful about repartitioning a new Mac!
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Zarf in Mac OS X Land
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· Score: 2, Informative
When you've got only one internal drive, it's always a good idea to make two partitions. When one fails for whatever reason, you can still boot from the other (always keep a backup System handy!). This is essential (or at least makes it very easy) to run DiskWarrior and Norton (not that you would ever want to run Norton... at work my co-worker had a slightly old Norton, and while he was running in OS 9 it automagically scanned his hard drive for errors, and changed every.dot file to a _dot file on his mounted OS X partition. Crap on a stick.).
Back to the subject, I bought my Mac when iTunes was new. I fooled around with it for a few minutes, and found that it came with a HOARD of good MP3 files. I dumbly thought that the Software Restore CD would put them back after I wiped the drive and repartitioned.
The thing is, I just did, because I don't live in the USA. USD 5 is a lot of money, and fits lunch nicely.
That's one of the problems for subscription sites, if you have to subscribe to many of them (or even a few per month), and you're not earning USD, it adds up very, very quickly. And you never get the best exchange rates on your credit card:(
Are you serious? I havent even been ASKED to pay for software since I got on the open/free bandwagon back in 1997. (My employer's hardware is a different story.)
That's exactly my point though. Don't complain about not being able to afford software. Don't use software you can't afford, there's always something else you can use. Like Linux. If you bought a PC for Windows, you'd have to be stupid to think you can get by with without buying software.
It does not cost too much. If you can't afford it, don't use it. Did you think buying a computer was just the hardware?
There are free Zip utilities and free unzip utilities. If you can't afford WinZIP, get one of those. Mozilla comes with a free IRC client and FTP client. Use it, you'll get a better browser along with it. There are tons of free FTP clients. If you can't afford the one you want, buy a cheaper one.
You can get by with cheaper/free stuff. If you'd bother to try you might find better stuff that you like, instead of going with the popular choices.
Just because you can't afford what you want (as opposed to what you need) is no reason to deprive anyone of their livelyhood. Software doesn't grow on trees, and neither does money.
These prices do NOT include any kind of media, manuals, box, etc. All you get is to download and use the software. So why are they priced to rival boxed media?
What the hell is a box good for? Would you ever read the manual? (from my experience as a shareware author; no, 90% of people email me stupid questions like 'how do I pay' when it tells you right when you boot the program).
And seriously, I don't know what you/need/ media for. I can't remember the last time I bothered with any of the media that came in a box. I don't even know where half of that crap is. It's always easier to start from a backup archive (but then hey, I got a Mac, I don't need no stinkin' installers).
If I were to buy all 6 programs it would cost: $180.95 USD. I live in Canada, that translates to: $253.33 CAD for 6 applications with no media!
I live in Canada too. That doesn't make it any more expensive. Hell, I was shocked that it cost $6 USD for a McD's meal in NYC. I can get that for about $4 CDN here. Just be glad that you don't have to pay for customs, Canadian 15% sales tax, or shipping, because trust me, it's damn near impossible for every shareware to come through distributors and wind up on Canadian store shelves. If you wanted the media or the manuals shipped, you'd have to PAY for that.
Shareware companies need to rethink their pricing. If these applications cost $10-$20 I would buy them.
Bullshit. In my experience as an author, and as the article states, people who will pay will pay. Those who won't will whine and complain.
Don't buy them or use them if you can't afford it. You won't cripple yourself. Try a different FTP client or archiver. Duh, there are tons of free ones out there. I've bought very little shareware myself, the most notable was an archiver, because I needed it. I didn't/need/ everything I saw glittering in the stores (websites). There's always a free alternative.
(free tip, if you need SSH, drop your pirated SecureCRT and go for putty.exe at Download.com)
So, animation compresses about the same as any other video.
What I said was that they seem to use little or no temporal compression (or high key-frames).
If you play an animation DVD through stupid means (such as using a software DVD player through Virtual PC), you'll see that every single frame of the animation comes through clearly. However, if you play a video DVD, only the keyframes come through clearly; if you're lucky enough for the software playback to actually land on a keyframe. Otherwise you get a garbled mess of temporal compression.
So they are compressed differently. Of course, they use the same codec. And the Macross DYRL DVD is a dual layer disc, while most video DVDs don't require that much data (DYRL requires it).
I always thought that both spacial and temporal compression worked well with animation.
The truth is that your average codec is designed for video, which contains few colours and very few details.
Animation contains many colours with no correlation and arbitrary and fine details. The fine details change significantly from frame to frame, so you can't just calculate the difference between the two frames and get a 'good enough' approximation. Any sacrifice in colour fidelity or detail is noticeable. Any.
With video, you can often make the whole scene 50% of the original quality and not notice much difference, as long as you preserve the luminance values carefully enough. That trick doesn't work with animation.
With animation, the video is so sharp, that any degradation is noticeable. With video, you can easily wash out whole areas of the background, consisting of many colours but no definition, without noticing.
So using a video codec for animation doesn't work well. And it's hard to make a good animation codec because animation (quality animation, anyway) contains far more detail and defined colour than most video productions.
Really, if you want to compression animation, the only good way to go is to make the target medium computer graphics. Like Flash or 3D graphics. As anyone whose played the last disc of Shenmue 2 knows, we're pretty close to making full blown movies out of real time 3D graphics:)
The main difference between these tapes and DVD is that yes, even though DVD is great, it can't do high definition. It just takes up too much space. So in that regard, these D-VHS tapes have the one-up.
yes, but the solution is simple; switch to a better codec. Alright, the 'better codec' part isn't simple, but the way video compression technologies go, it will happen, if it hasn't already (MPEG-4 isn't broadcast quality).
However, for most DVDs produced the quality totally sucks. Try hooking up your favorite DVD to an HDTV, and you'll probably be quite surprised. If you'll see all the artifacts you know and love from digital video on your computer. HDTVs are great at one thing; perfectly reproducing the signal that comes in (hook up a VCR and prepare to be horrified).
Honestly, as HDTVs kick in, consumers may be looking for something that can deliver higher quality. It is possible to encode much better video than they do; but the studios target our stone-age TVs, as I'm sure it's cheaper. Animation DVDs have to be compressed differently (like a key-frame every frame or something; no or very little temporal compression), and the visual quality is almost flawless in comparison. However, I've noticed several DVD players 'hickup' when playing back animation DVDs.
Watching ST:First Contact on an HDTV, you can see lots of background blockiness other compression artifacts. Playing it back on a high-quality TV, you can't see anything wrong! Unbreakable is horrific; at times it feels like I'm watching 8-bit dithered video.
Studios may be eyeing to upgrade all our DVD players (and the DVD standard). They would get to bring us higher quality (through a newer codec or possibly updated media) and fix the CSS 'issue' at the same time. In that case, they may want to choose embrace and market D-VHS as well, as it may fill their needs now.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people.
Ok, in a humor context, good one:) But in a practical one, no.
A shitty OS that is not consistent and doesn't make sense, causes the user live in fear, fear to learn, fear that if they do something wrong they will break something. It's even worse when it causes massive damage all by itself (receiving an Outlook virus).
A good OS with consistent, secure behaviour gives the user confidence in what's going on and lets them understand it. They are not afraid to explore; why should exploring break anything? It should do what the user tells it to do, and the user should be able to understand what the user is telling the computer to do (instead of just having to accept the fact that pushing 3 toolbar buttons in the right order gets the task done).
Most people dipping their feet in the pool of Unix are not running as root (I was going to say anyone, but I'm sure there would be people here who would argue that point:). If you don't know anything about Unix, you can't cause much damage, other than deleting your files, by doing the act of deleting your files. I'm taking this from a my personal, non-GUI experience. My first dial-up ISP (pre http era) was command line only. Unix was fun; there was only one way to go, up (learn).
That's not the case for Windows. Even experienced users shoot themselves in the foot frequently.
extremely hard-pressed to understand why it has to be written the way it is written.
If you the Finder's dictionary, you'll see 'entire contents' as a property of the 'container item' class, which the Trash are a subclass of. In a French Finder dictionary, the words would be different. Locked is a property, and true is a constant. If you define a dictionary for a different language, you'll get different words.
You're argument is completely pointless, every API has this problem. What does CFURLCreateWithFileSystemPath() mean to a French programmer? AppleScript is the only one that provides a solution, by using dictionaries and dialects.
I doubt that is the case among e.g. French speakers. What if the situation were reversed?
My point was that it's hard to come across documentation for the other dialects. If you don't like AppleScript English, use Python, if it keeps you happy.
Why, exactly? Because it saves you a single keystroke? If that's your complaint, then look to Java where object member access is done with a dot
As I said in my original post, 's is good when you're typing. It's easier to type language than it is to type code (unless if you type code a lot and never learned QWERTY, as is the case for many). foo's bar and foo.bar are both pretty easy. The point in my original post is that ' is not either uglee or bad.
My point is that it would be nice if more languages would use ', as WebSiphon does in lists, as in list'4.
Computer language grammar should remain computer language grammar. Natural grammars are inefficient and can be very counter-intuitive to non-native speakers.
Yet every computer language seizes up when trying to talk to different systems. Natural language has no such issues. And that is why AppleScript's focus on nouns and verbs makes it effective.
A language that "reads like English" might be great for ego-centric Americans, but imagine having to understand the nuonces of English grammar in order to write a f*cking computer program.
Duh. First of all, the AppleScript everyone uses is AppleScript English. There are other dialects, including a C one, but AppleScript English has become the most popular (if anyone even remembers that others do exist).
You can do whatever you do in AppleScript under Perl or Python in the Mac OS, but that's besides the point.
Secondly, just because it's English, it doesn't mean possessive apostrophes are bad for programming languages. list'3 (the WebSiphon example) will always be more convenient than list[3].
C uses ' for characters, and " for strings. AppleScript only has strings. In Python, ' and " can be used interchangeably (although 'foo" is not valid). AppleScript and WebSiphon use ' for something very useful, something programmers have to do a lot, which is to access a property of some object.
people on this planet whose natural language doesn't have such a construct.
-> isn't a natural language construct for any language. Neither is !=. What's your point?
Not too sure about using it to reference array elements though, it loses some of its English semantics, and there is a lot to be said for having one operator to do one thing.
Actually, that example was from WebSiphon, not AppleScript. I was trying to show its use in another language.
In AppleScript, you'd use 'item 3 of myArray', which again, is verbose. "myArray's item 3' would probably work as well, which isn't as bad. I actually find it easier to type English words than to hit odd keys on the keyboard. It wasn't always that way, and I remember back then I'd type English very slowly:P
It'd be great if programmers had their own keyboards with their own key layout:)
Yikes! That is some urglee code. I mean come on, since when has code used a possessive apostrophe? It's just......wrong.
Uh, no, it just makes sense. Possessive apostrophes are awesome for programming languages.
c++/java: foo->bar()
AppleScript: foo's bar()
bar() of foo
It's a hell of a lot easier to type.
PHP: $myArray[3]
WebSiphon: myArray'3
It's not wrong, it makes sense. Just try typing those lines of code there. I wish more programming languages used it.
And ya, it's very easy to write. That is, once you understand that it is a programming language which has its own way of forming meaningful statements, so that something that makes sense in English doesn't necessarily mean it will make sense to AppleScript:)
AS is best for making objects from different programs work together. It's a solution to the interoperability problem. Each program can describe itself with verbs and nouns, and AppleScript's syntax is very good at mashing those things from different programs together.
It's not so great for coding intense algorithms, as it tends to be verbose.
set foo to 5
foo = 5
When you do have to make programs talk to each other, AS makes wonderful glue. AS is intended to exploit logic in other code, so rather than running awk/sed to munge my text, or use the language's text manipulation expressions (as you would in Perl), I'll get BBEdit to open the text file, and use all it's insanely powerful multi-file regex features. Apps in OS X are supposed to support opening files and doing operations on them without presenting a user interface specifically for this purpose.
On A&E Biography (I think it was there), he said while working on it, he found that he enjoyed looking out the window to the ocean than working on the remote. And that was basically the downfall of the product, because it never got the attention it needed.
He pretty much went into retirement after that. Short story, Apple II, plane crash, amnesia, quit Apple... stuff... cl9... stuff... woz.com.
And to make it clear, this is not diff. I mean duh, how stupid is that?
The software that U of T used was apparently quite intelligent, and could tell if two algorithms/problem solutions were too similar, not just the text of the stuff that was handed in.
This isn't anything new (well, the thing said '93). The University of Toronto has used this for some time. I remember often after assignments were handed in, people would be called to see the TAs or the prof because they're assignments were 'too similar.':)
The software that U of T uses was developed somewhere else, I thought it was MIT, but I could be wrong.
They didn't actually tell us that they were using this stuff, I found out after I graduated from reading it in the newspaper. So it's probably in widespread use, it's just not something CS departments brag about (I guess catching cheaters is fun).
Re:Never benchmark with Adobe products.
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2
..because they don't port their programs to x86 but instead use an emulayer. So what you're testing is not the raw speed of a dual 1ghz system but the speed of the emulayer. Which is pretty bad.
Not, it's not the emulayer (if there is one). People test filters, which exist outside of the Adobe app. They execute their own code, duh! In Photoshop's case, Intel's engineers MMX'd the filter code so they would get trounced so badly.
Do you really think a dual 1ghz p3 system is 50% slower than a 733mhz G4?
Having one sitting on my desk, yeah... I have used dual P3s at work for various data crunching (and compiling, which I do a lot of everywhere), and damn this baby shines:) Only a dumb-ass would say it's faster across the board. Steve Jobs demonstrated the first 733 MHz machines 'matching' a 2 GHz Pentium 4 at a single Photoshop task way back when the 2 GHz didn't exist. You don't really see any other vendors brave enough to step up to the plate and provide any convincing counter-arguments...
When AltiVec kicks in the performance boost is truly mind boggling. Several parts of OS 9 are written in AltiVec... I think OS X is still a work in progress in that area.
A little OT now, but one of the reasons why OS 9 is so damn fast (when it's not doing heavy multitasking) is that Apple learned a lot about the speed of their OS when they had so many components running in 68k emulation. Take those bottlenecks and apply altivec to them...
Matsushita (Panasonic) is Sony's biggest competitor and rival. Nintendo and Matsushita have become pretty friendly.
Panasonic has been taking stabs at the video game market for quite some time now. Remember that Panasonic made the first 3DO systems (the REAL). This is their second major attempt, and this time their doing it with Nintendo.
3DO did licensing too (well, they only did licensing, they weren't a real hardware company, although I remember they had some manufacturing assests). That didn't work well at all. Part of 3DO's problem is that the companies making the consoles always tried to make a profit. Nintendo has a successful business model losing money on the consoles; I'm not entirely sure what Panasonic gets out of it.
Except that (hell, I can't remember where I read it), in a few months, Nintendo expects to actually profit off of selling Gamecubes. Looking at the motherboard, it's not that hard to believe. Panasonic could make good money on the Q.
(Hmm. I don't seem to have any sort of argument here, but it is a bunch of interesting info, no?:)
"Certain company" meaning AOL, whose Netscape division contributes engineering labor to the free Mozilla web browser suite?
You see, that wouldn't have happened if Netscape and Spyglass hadn't been crushed by trying to make money. MS used their monopoly to change the rules of the market.
And yes, Photoshop LE does rock (I assume they renamed that to Elements, they were selling it standalone for a while). But people will keep buying/pirating Photoshop, using the same logic they use to buy SUVs to commute.
Or to put it more succinctly, it's gonna be a bummer for all the OS/X users if/when Apple goes out of business, and drags OS/X down with it. Users of open source operating systems have no such worries.
Isn't it better to enjoy what you've got then to live in fear of what might happen?
If you love Linux, great. I don't. I love my OS X box. Apple going out of business? You really want me to worry about that? I haven't worried about losing the Mac in the last 10 years. Apple always had enough cash in the bank, and in the case if it does tank, someone will pick it up. The Macintosh is one platform that will not just fade away. If the tools I use can no longer fulfill my needs, I'll move on to different tools. I'm not going to worry about the company making them going bankrupt.
The Gekko is a great CPU for what it has to do, but don't think because Nintendo sent some IBM people to be interviewed as a PR move that it is anything more than what it is.
The problem is that people are claiming it is an off-the-shelf G3, which it's far from. Of course the coure is going to be G3- it's by far and wide most suitable/best PowerPC they have for this. The first rev G4s were barely more than G3s with an AltiVec unit.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's what you want, get the MPEG-LA to lighten up on MPEG-4 licensing.
Then you won't have a problem. It's Apple's goal, after all, to have the most open, standards-based platform. It's not quite their choice to hold Sorenson codecs from Linux.
Yes the steering wheel is still there, and so on, but the "skin" on the dashboard is different
And you choose the skin when you buy the car. And some colours reflect themselves on the windshield on a sunny day (very bad).
and the buttons are often placed in different places
Yes, many stupid GM cars (they finally changed this with the new Malibu, I'm not sure about other cars since) have that god-forsaken all-in-one control stick that's stupid to use no matter how good you get at it (wipers, windshield, indicators, cruise control, & more, all on one stick. What the hell were they thinking?).
Some cars are designed well enough so you don't have to spend that 8 seconds finding the buttons to change the radio station. You just let your hand rest down and boom, you've found the buttons. And they're laid out well enough so that you don't need to look. Other cars have the radio floating in the middle of the dashboard, with no hope of your hand landing on it by chance.
Some cars have digital speedometers, some have analogue ones.
And I don't see how digital speedometers are good for much (and I've used them). You have to specifically read the numbers to find out what speed your going, and it's nearly impossible to get a glance how fast your accelerating or braking (rather than watching the needle move). Analogue ones give you all that info by just looking.
And then some analogue ones are crappy too. The top speed of some cars is about 130 MPH, but the speedometer will go up to 200, for no good reason other than cool value (too many people judge the top speed of the car by looking at the speedometer). This causes the useful area of the speedometer to be smaller than it should be, which is a bad interface. And many speedometers are designed with the 'I like it' attitude, with no regard to how they will look in bright sunlight or lit up at night; some cars are far, far better than others.
Ignition is in different places, gear shifts have different configurations.
And just because the gear shifts have different configurations doesn't mean they all have the same usefulness. Some have reverse beside 1st gear. When you're in a rush (they're a truck coming up to fast behind you to slow down at a stop sign or something) you slam it as fast as you can into first, but in your excessive speed, you end up in reverse. That is bad, cars shouldn't be built that way. Yet many cars are built that way, to be eccentric or something (someone liked it).
On some cars, you can take the keys out of the ignition while the car is running (and moving!). On some cars you can open the door from the inside even though the door's locked. Fine if it's your car and you're used to it, but how many times do you have other people in your car? Or kids? (I don't think they're allowed to sell cars like that in North America).
Thinking about that, how many times have you had people in your car who couldn't find the lock to get out? And you sit there telling them, "oh, it's a little hard to get to. See that there? No that..." Granted, the place of the lock isn't too important, but some cars have them in really stupid spots because it was cheaper to build that way.
We only have regulations for only the most important safety concerns about a car; safety problems don't end at the crumple zones. Preferences really must take a back seat to safety, and in computer UI, they should often take a back seat to efficiency. This is one thing Mac OS users are groaning about OS X, there has been quite a bit of efficiency lost in the UI.
If car designers always built cars that were safe, we wouldn't need a long list of regulations to make sure that they built safe cars. They design them the way they do because they're cheaper to make or they sell better- it has nothing to do with what's good for you. Likewise, there are no 'regulations' about how to build a GUI, programmers just do whatever the hell they want. Sometimes there's a UI designer around. Often UI designers are more concerned about aesthetics or ease-of-use than efficiency.
Nope! I'm got one of those god-forsaken IBM Desktar shit-drives (OEM drive on my G4) that was mentioned on slashdot. Same model number. It's toast. I've got to get it replaced under warranty, but that's a pain in the ass. And then I think they'll just give me another shit-star (every IBM drive I've had has failed. Stupid IBM.).
However it's got 2 partitions, and the toasted part is only on one of them. So I'm currently 'clean' on one partition (15 GB out of 60 GB, sniff). I've been running that way for a few months now (damn I'm lazy), and I know it's dangerous, but, damn I'm lazy.
Lesson: always make a partition. 99.9% of the time, it's just directory damage, which DiskWarrior can clean up easily. But DiskWarrior won't operate on it if the only drive you have to run it off of is the damaged and startup drive.
Ran through the OSX registration procedure
He complains about being forced to register... this has already been commented on. But having no true option is stupid.
Big dialogue box came up: "You need an Administrator password to install the software." Below this, icon of a padlock: "Click the lock to make changes." Totally baffled. What do I do now? No clue how to enter administrator password.
Yeah, that can be confusing. You don't know that your password is an administrator password (it never tells you about the concept of administrators, or that you're it).
Just so you know, he actually took three days to finish Alice (and that was in Easy mode and with a couple of hints on how to beat the bosses. Plus liberal use of cheat keys in final battle.)
I'm better at Alice than he is.
Getting more experience working with new Finder. No longer feel totally mummified, but still not comfortable. Column view -- bleah. (Remember using NeXT boxes in college. Didn't like column view then either.)
Bah, column view was something I always wanted in the Finder. It's good, get used to it :P It's better if you have more folders than files (it's good at finding files deeply nested, and makes it more convenient to have your files deeply nested).
Hit cmd-F to search partition. Oh, no. Sherlock. Forgot how awful Sherlock has become
Sherlock is a bane on the Mac's usefulness. Stupid Steve.
[Dock:] Can click app icon, wait for window list pop-up -- but this is slow and confusing. All Terminal windows have same name anyway
You can Get Info on a Terminal window and change the name. Very useful. Otherwise they have the ttyp# in the name.
Only missing UI element: configurable Apple menu. Or some way to do pop-up menu with hierarchical structure showing a directory tree. Needed for One True Way MacOS structure.
Well, get used to column view, and you've got it. Try this:
- Click Finder icon in the Dock.
- Hit Command-opt-F. This brings up Favorites. Set it to Column View.
- Close window now.
- Hit Command-opt-F. The finder should remember that that folder should be in Column View (it will also remember the window size, for when you open up a new window, instead of navigating from an existing window).
Here's your wonderful hierarchical list, as easy as clicking the Finder icon and hitting command-opt-f. Add folders with aliases in them as your hearts content. Alright, not as easy as the Apple menu, but people abused that thing to no end...This animation takes approximately 0.75 seconds. After approximately 0.375 seconds, I am banging on computer top, screaming "Get move on!!"
Yup, there's too much stupid animation in OS X. A lot of it is warranted and doesn't get in your way, a lot of it (like hitting Command-S(ave), return) takes too damn long as the sheets come and go.
How hard would it be to write a freeware Dock item which navigates folder tree, without delays?
Dock menus pop up instantly if you control-click. Or if you have a two button mouse and right click. He finds that out later, but not the two-button thing. I'm happy with one button... I use two at work because I got one there.
Spent more time selecting fonts. Font selection is annoying.
Font selection is pretty awesome, the Font panel resizes. When the panel is small you get popup menus for your fonts. At a bigger size you get scrollable lists. You can organize fonts into your favorite groups (like Monospace fonts, it doesn't do it for you). And you can set your Favorite fonts, and while you're browsing your favs you get a nice little custom UI for it (favs include bold/point size in one click).
More generally: Carbon and Cocoa apps have different font-rendering.
Actually, CoreGraphics (Quartz 2D) and QuickDraw have different font rendering. The Finder is a Carbon app. Some (many) Carbon apps don't want to jump to Quartz because (a) the developers know QuickDraw and (b) Quartz 2D isn't on OS 9, so the app won't run on both platforms.
(Five minutes later: Selected "Get Mac OS X Software..." from Apple menu. Nothing happened. The hell? I've got menu option eating space in Apple menu, can't get rid of it, and it doesn't work? Stupid Steve!)
He deleted IE, and has not set his default web browser (IE is always the fallback browser if it can't find the preferred web browser). Until he goes to Internet prefs and sets his browser of choice, it (and anything else that wants to launch an http url) won't work.
I've deleted IE, the OS X version is an amazing pile of do-do; absolutely busted functionality. OmniWeb, Mozilla, and Chimera rulez.
On the other hand, have sworn off using Help system anyhow, due to annoying animations.
And it takes about 30 seconds to load.
When you've got only one internal drive, it's always a good idea to make two partitions. When one fails for whatever reason, you can still boot from the other (always keep a backup System handy!). This is essential (or at least makes it very easy) to run DiskWarrior and Norton (not that you would ever want to run Norton... at work my co-worker had a slightly old Norton, and while he was running in OS 9 it automagically scanned his hard drive for errors, and changed every .dot file to a _dot file on his mounted OS X partition. Crap on a stick.).
:( I'd love to get those back.
Back to the subject, I bought my Mac when iTunes was new. I fooled around with it for a few minutes, and found that it came with a HOARD of good MP3 files. I dumbly thought that the Software Restore CD would put them back after I wiped the drive and repartitioned.
I was wrong
The thing is, I just did, because I don't live in the USA. USD 5 is a lot of money, and fits lunch nicely.
That's one of the problems for subscription sites, if you have to subscribe to many of them (or even a few per month), and you're not earning USD, it adds up very, very quickly. And you never get the best exchange rates on your credit card :(
That's exactly my point though. Don't complain about not being able to afford software. Don't use software you can't afford, there's always something else you can use. Like Linux. If you bought a PC for Windows, you'd have to be stupid to think you can get by with without buying software.
Lets take a look at some often used applications:
WinZip: $29
CuteFTP: $39.95
mIRC: $20
WinRAR: $29
CustomizerXP: $24
CDRWin: $39
It does not cost too much. If you can't afford it, don't use it. Did you think buying a computer was just the hardware?
There are free Zip utilities and free unzip utilities. If you can't afford WinZIP, get one of those. Mozilla comes with a free IRC client and FTP client. Use it, you'll get a better browser along with it. There are tons of free FTP clients. If you can't afford the one you want, buy a cheaper one.
You can get by with cheaper/free stuff. If you'd bother to try you might find better stuff that you like, instead of going with the popular choices.
Just because you can't afford what you want (as opposed to what you need) is no reason to deprive anyone of their livelyhood. Software doesn't grow on trees, and neither does money.
These prices do NOT include any kind of media, manuals, box, etc. All you get is to download and use the software. So why are they priced to rival boxed media?
What the hell is a box good for? Would you ever read the manual? (from my experience as a shareware author; no, 90% of people email me stupid questions like 'how do I pay' when it tells you right when you boot the program).
And seriously, I don't know what you /need/ media for. I can't remember the last time I bothered with any of the media that came in a box. I don't even know where half of that crap is. It's always easier to start from a backup archive (but then hey, I got a Mac, I don't need no stinkin' installers).
If I were to buy all 6 programs it would cost: $180.95 USD. I live in Canada, that translates to: $253.33 CAD for 6 applications with no media!
I live in Canada too. That doesn't make it any more expensive. Hell, I was shocked that it cost $6 USD for a McD's meal in NYC. I can get that for about $4 CDN here. Just be glad that you don't have to pay for customs, Canadian 15% sales tax, or shipping, because trust me, it's damn near impossible for every shareware to come through distributors and wind up on Canadian store shelves. If you wanted the media or the manuals shipped, you'd have to PAY for that.
Shareware companies need to rethink their pricing. If these applications cost $10-$20 I would buy them.
Bullshit. In my experience as an author, and as the article states, people who will pay will pay. Those who won't will whine and complain.
Don't buy them or use them if you can't afford it. You won't cripple yourself. Try a different FTP client or archiver. Duh, there are tons of free ones out there. I've bought very little shareware myself, the most notable was an archiver, because I needed it. I didn't /need/ everything I saw glittering in the stores (websites). There's always a free alternative.
(free tip, if you need SSH, drop your pirated SecureCRT and go for putty.exe at Download.com)
What I said was that they seem to use little or no temporal compression (or high key-frames).
If you play an animation DVD through stupid means (such as using a software DVD player through Virtual PC), you'll see that every single frame of the animation comes through clearly. However, if you play a video DVD, only the keyframes come through clearly; if you're lucky enough for the software playback to actually land on a keyframe. Otherwise you get a garbled mess of temporal compression.
So they are compressed differently. Of course, they use the same codec. And the Macross DYRL DVD is a dual layer disc, while most video DVDs don't require that much data (DYRL requires it).
The truth is that your average codec is designed for video, which contains few colours and very few details.
Animation contains many colours with no correlation and arbitrary and fine details. The fine details change significantly from frame to frame, so you can't just calculate the difference between the two frames and get a 'good enough' approximation. Any sacrifice in colour fidelity or detail is noticeable. Any.
With video, you can often make the whole scene 50% of the original quality and not notice much difference, as long as you preserve the luminance values carefully enough. That trick doesn't work with animation.
With animation, the video is so sharp, that any degradation is noticeable. With video, you can easily wash out whole areas of the background, consisting of many colours but no definition, without noticing.
So using a video codec for animation doesn't work well. And it's hard to make a good animation codec because animation (quality animation, anyway) contains far more detail and defined colour than most video productions.
Really, if you want to compression animation, the only good way to go is to make the target medium computer graphics. Like Flash or 3D graphics. As anyone whose played the last disc of Shenmue 2 knows, we're pretty close to making full blown movies out of real time 3D graphics :)
yes, but the solution is simple; switch to a better codec. Alright, the 'better codec' part isn't simple, but the way video compression technologies go, it will happen, if it hasn't already (MPEG-4 isn't broadcast quality).
However, for most DVDs produced the quality totally sucks. Try hooking up your favorite DVD to an HDTV, and you'll probably be quite surprised. If you'll see all the artifacts you know and love from digital video on your computer. HDTVs are great at one thing; perfectly reproducing the signal that comes in (hook up a VCR and prepare to be horrified).
Honestly, as HDTVs kick in, consumers may be looking for something that can deliver higher quality. It is possible to encode much better video than they do; but the studios target our stone-age TVs, as I'm sure it's cheaper. Animation DVDs have to be compressed differently (like a key-frame every frame or something; no or very little temporal compression), and the visual quality is almost flawless in comparison. However, I've noticed several DVD players 'hickup' when playing back animation DVDs.
Watching ST:First Contact on an HDTV, you can see lots of background blockiness other compression artifacts. Playing it back on a high-quality TV, you can't see anything wrong! Unbreakable is horrific; at times it feels like I'm watching 8-bit dithered video.
Studios may be eyeing to upgrade all our DVD players (and the DVD standard). They would get to bring us higher quality (through a newer codec or possibly updated media) and fix the CSS 'issue' at the same time. In that case, they may want to choose embrace and market D-VHS as well, as it may fill their needs now.
Ok, in a humor context, good one :) But in a practical one, no.
A shitty OS that is not consistent and doesn't make sense, causes the user live in fear, fear to learn, fear that if they do something wrong they will break something. It's even worse when it causes massive damage all by itself (receiving an Outlook virus).
A good OS with consistent, secure behaviour gives the user confidence in what's going on and lets them understand it. They are not afraid to explore; why should exploring break anything? It should do what the user tells it to do, and the user should be able to understand what the user is telling the computer to do (instead of just having to accept the fact that pushing 3 toolbar buttons in the right order gets the task done).
Most people dipping their feet in the pool of Unix are not running as root (I was going to say anyone, but I'm sure there would be people here who would argue that point :). If you don't know anything about Unix, you can't cause much damage, other than deleting your files, by doing the act of deleting your files. I'm taking this from a my personal, non-GUI experience. My first dial-up ISP (pre http era) was command line only. Unix was fun; there was only one way to go, up (learn).
That's not the case for Windows. Even experienced users shoot themselves in the foot frequently.
You're argument is completely pointless, every API has this problem. What does CFURLCreateWithFileSystemPath() mean to a French programmer? AppleScript is the only one that provides a solution, by using dictionaries and dialects.
I doubt that is the case among e.g. French speakers. What if the situation were reversed?
My point was that it's hard to come across documentation for the other dialects. If you don't like AppleScript English, use Python, if it keeps you happy.
Why, exactly? Because it saves you a single keystroke? If that's your complaint, then look to Java where object member access is done with a dot
As I said in my original post, 's is good when you're typing. It's easier to type language than it is to type code (unless if you type code a lot and never learned QWERTY, as is the case for many). foo's bar and foo.bar are both pretty easy. The point in my original post is that ' is not either uglee or bad.
My point is that it would be nice if more languages would use ', as WebSiphon does in lists, as in list'4.
Computer language grammar should remain computer language grammar. Natural grammars are inefficient and can be very counter-intuitive to non-native speakers.
Yet every computer language seizes up when trying to talk to different systems. Natural language has no such issues. And that is why AppleScript's focus on nouns and verbs makes it effective.
Try getting past the ' in my original post.
Duh. First of all, the AppleScript everyone uses is AppleScript English. There are other dialects, including a C one, but AppleScript English has become the most popular (if anyone even remembers that others do exist).
You can do whatever you do in AppleScript under Perl or Python in the Mac OS, but that's besides the point.
Secondly, just because it's English, it doesn't mean possessive apostrophes are bad for programming languages. list'3 (the WebSiphon example) will always be more convenient than list[3].
C uses ' for characters, and " for strings. AppleScript only has strings. In Python, ' and " can be used interchangeably (although 'foo" is not valid). AppleScript and WebSiphon use ' for something very useful, something programmers have to do a lot, which is to access a property of some object.
people on this planet whose natural language doesn't have such a construct.
-> isn't a natural language construct for any language. Neither is !=. What's your point?
Actually, that example was from WebSiphon, not AppleScript. I was trying to show its use in another language.
In AppleScript, you'd use 'item 3 of myArray', which again, is verbose. "myArray's item 3' would probably work as well, which isn't as bad. I actually find it easier to type English words than to hit odd keys on the keyboard. It wasn't always that way, and I remember back then I'd type English very slowly :P
It'd be great if programmers had their own keyboards with their own key layout :)
Uh, no, it just makes sense. Possessive apostrophes are awesome for programming languages.
c++/java:
foo->bar()
AppleScript:
foo's bar()
bar() of foo
It's a hell of a lot easier to type.
PHP:
$myArray[3]
WebSiphon:
myArray'3
It's not wrong, it makes sense. Just try typing those lines of code there. I wish more programming languages used it.
And ya, it's very easy to write. That is, once you understand that it is a programming language which has its own way of forming meaningful statements, so that something that makes sense in English doesn't necessarily mean it will make sense to AppleScript :)
AS is best for making objects from different programs work together. It's a solution to the interoperability problem. Each program can describe itself with verbs and nouns, and AppleScript's syntax is very good at mashing those things from different programs together.
It's not so great for coding intense algorithms, as it tends to be verbose.
set foo to 5
foo = 5
When you do have to make programs talk to each other, AS makes wonderful glue. AS is intended to exploit logic in other code, so rather than running awk/sed to munge my text, or use the language's text manipulation expressions (as you would in Perl), I'll get BBEdit to open the text file, and use all it's insanely powerful multi-file regex features. Apps in OS X are supposed to support opening files and doing operations on them without presenting a user interface specifically for this purpose.
No need for CORBA to solve those problems :P
On A&E Biography (I think it was there), he said while working on it, he found that he enjoyed looking out the window to the ocean than working on the remote. And that was basically the downfall of the product, because it never got the attention it needed.
... stuff ... cl9 ... stuff ... woz.com.
He pretty much went into retirement after that. Short story, Apple II, plane crash, amnesia, quit Apple
That is an example of unconventional thinking.
It's a lot like there's no such thing as common sense. Conventional wisdom says, there is.
The software that U of T used was apparently quite intelligent, and could tell if two algorithms/problem solutions were too similar, not just the text of the stuff that was handed in.
The software that U of T uses was developed somewhere else, I thought it was MIT, but I could be wrong.
They didn't actually tell us that they were using this stuff, I found out after I graduated from reading it in the newspaper. So it's probably in widespread use, it's just not something CS departments brag about (I guess catching cheaters is fun).
Not, it's not the emulayer (if there is one). People test filters, which exist outside of the Adobe app. They execute their own code, duh! In Photoshop's case, Intel's engineers MMX'd the filter code so they would get trounced so badly.
Do you really think a dual 1ghz p3 system is 50% slower than a 733mhz G4?
Having one sitting on my desk, yeah... I have used dual P3s at work for various data crunching (and compiling, which I do a lot of everywhere), and damn this baby shines :) Only a dumb-ass would say it's faster across the board. Steve Jobs demonstrated the first 733 MHz machines 'matching' a 2 GHz Pentium 4 at a single Photoshop task way back when the 2 GHz didn't exist. You don't really see any other vendors brave enough to step up to the plate and provide any convincing counter-arguments...
When AltiVec kicks in the performance boost is truly mind boggling. Several parts of OS 9 are written in AltiVec... I think OS X is still a work in progress in that area.
A little OT now, but one of the reasons why OS 9 is so damn fast (when it's not doing heavy multitasking) is that Apple learned a lot about the speed of their OS when they had so many components running in 68k emulation. Take those bottlenecks and apply altivec to them...
AltiVec isn't just for graphics. strlen can get quite a nice boost.
Panasonic has been taking stabs at the video game market for quite some time now. Remember that Panasonic made the first 3DO systems (the REAL). This is their second major attempt, and this time their doing it with Nintendo.
3DO did licensing too (well, they only did licensing, they weren't a real hardware company, although I remember they had some manufacturing assests). That didn't work well at all. Part of 3DO's problem is that the companies making the consoles always tried to make a profit. Nintendo has a successful business model losing money on the consoles; I'm not entirely sure what Panasonic gets out of it.
Except that (hell, I can't remember where I read it), in a few months, Nintendo expects to actually profit off of selling Gamecubes. Looking at the motherboard, it's not that hard to believe. Panasonic could make good money on the Q.
(Hmm. I don't seem to have any sort of argument here, but it is a bunch of interesting info, no? :)
You see, that wouldn't have happened if Netscape and Spyglass hadn't been crushed by trying to make money. MS used their monopoly to change the rules of the market.
And yes, Photoshop LE does rock (I assume they renamed that to Elements, they were selling it standalone for a while). But people will keep buying/pirating Photoshop, using the same logic they use to buy SUVs to commute.
Isn't it better to enjoy what you've got then to live in fear of what might happen?
If you love Linux, great. I don't. I love my OS X box. Apple going out of business? You really want me to worry about that? I haven't worried about losing the Mac in the last 10 years. Apple always had enough cash in the bank, and in the case if it does tank, someone will pick it up. The Macintosh is one platform that will not just fade away. If the tools I use can no longer fulfill my needs, I'll move on to different tools. I'm not going to worry about the company making them going bankrupt.
Duh.
The problem is that people are claiming it is an off-the-shelf G3, which it's far from. Of course the coure is going to be G3- it's by far and wide most suitable/best PowerPC they have for this. The first rev G4s were barely more than G3s with an AltiVec unit.