Yes I've tried it and it's verbose, vaugely specified, and counter-intuitive. It is not at all like SQL. I could rant for hours about the horror that is VB (another "English-like" language), and when I say AppleScript is worse, I really mean it. Thankfully there's no reason to use it (other than the IDE).
But it never really bothered me because I always assumed that the smart guys at Apple designed it for the mythical "Joe Power User" and they must know something I don't. But if you contend it is supposed to appeal to programmers, then something went horribly wrong somewhere. Oh, tell your mom that Excel Macros aren't written by "Alpha Geeks"
Geeks who make laguages for the "user" are not doing anything of the sort. They are making yet another language that promises to bring the holy grail of computer programming to mere users, but failing miserably.
The fact that you and many other persistent "AppleTurfers" are hanging out on Slashdot pretty much undermines your point.
If the Geek Vanguard is not Apple's market, why are you guys so insistent about articulating Apple's positions to them? Obviously the perceptions of this community is important to Apple's advocates or we wouldn't see you here.
Applescript is a god-awful programming language that's designed to be supposedly accessible for regular users who have no clue about programming. (I have my doubts, but maybe...)
Even a "Beta Geek" with a job to do would prefer Visual Basic (which at least has straight-forward syntax) over AppleScript. Fortunately there's hooks for Python, Javascript, etc. But the fact that Apple puts such a antagonizing scripting language in such a prominant place sorta proves the anti-alpha-geek thing.
OTOH, Apple has recognized the value of developers, and does include a lot of "geek" features (like the Unix shell and Java bindings), but that stuff is almost entirely segmentated away from the normal user experience.
Glad to see you're on your meds now Basil, but I read your AC posts. Yes, it's not executed, it just sticks an icon for a potentially malicous application in a prominent place. Off to install Tiger!
Dude, calm down before they take you to the hospital again. I've read the comments and the only person on this story who thinks this does not "install" a widget is you.
I admit that as terrible evil MS Scum, I haven't got around to installing Tiger on my Powerbook yet.
But according to the story, the code automatically runs as soom as the user presses the Fkey or whatever to bring up the Dashboard. I also don't believe it's worse, but it is (depending on implemention details) potentially just as bad as ActiveX. If Apple missed something this obvious, how good is the rest of it?
Well, I'm not a MS Zealot, but I sometimes play one on slashdot:) I've made the Dashboard/HTA/ActiveX comparision a few times: here and here (note the Mac Zealot claiming that Dashboard could not spread spyware, gloat gloat).
However, this isn't the same issue as ActiveX, in fact it's worse. Here the browser is automatically running executables downloaded from the web with no prompt. Even worse, this isn't the first time that Safari has done this, so obviously someone at Apple thinks auto-installation is a pretty keen feature and keeps intentionally sticking it in.
The other big danger with a DHTML-based application system like Dashboard is that the "sandbox" will have flaws -- and that someone can figure out how to do "dashboard-like" things (such as writing files or running programs) from javascript in an internet web page.
As far as I know, nobody's been able to do this yet, but it's only been a couple weeks. This would be a similar problem to the Mozilla thing reported this morning and countless IE flaws -- "trusted" scripts running when they should not.
Basically I agree with the conventional wisdom that ActiveX was an incredibly stupid and/or naive design back in 1997. What really confounds the fuck out of me is why Apple and Mozilla chose to copy aspects of the ActiveX years after everyone's known how terrible it is.
Agreed -- and even worse, the design was copied directly from Microsoft's ActiveX system!
It's a bit frustrating to see Firefox advocates continually prattle about "Security... activex LOL", when FF does in fact have a nearly identical feature as ActiveX. And when there's a mechanism for installing program files from webpages, people will tend to find holes in the sandbox. Hopefully this quiets the "better by design" crowd.
The Lotus/Borland case went to the supreme court and the result was that look-and-feel, menu structure, and program operation can't be copyrighted, which is what Apple was trying to claim.
Sure patents and trade dress might offer some protection over specific elements, but they are not something that Apple could have used to assert rights over the idea of a graphical interface itself.
I think what made Apple especially angry at themselves is that the contract not only allowed MS to copy UI elements, but also allowed them to "clone" the Mac Toolbox API. Even worse, it allowed MS to turn around and licence the API design to giants like IBM and HP. Apple was much more worried about OS/2 Presentation Manager than Windows at the time.
MS paying Apple a license fee for its GUI from 1984-2004, only in, the Twilight Zone
We lived through the Twilight Zone in the late 80s -- when Apple made you pay through the nose for a GUI computer. Kickass machines, but Apple's margins were upwards of 60%, and their only competitive strategy was to sue everyone. I love the computers, but those weren't really pleasant days, the industry overall was stagnent.
Well, the post was a little joke, so don't read too much into it -- Although PARC also later argued "bad lawyering" and tried to sue Apple over their deal.
The vast majority of the "Look and Feel" of a GUI system is not 'intellectual property', and therefore was not Apple's to sell anyway.
It is be possible to do this out-of-the-box with Windows networking, and some print servers do, but for whatever reason HP won't support it. (Probably because they are pushing that jetdirect stuff which is a bear on small networks.)
With Open Firmware? Apple cannot block other OSes, with an OPEN firmware
As a point of fact, they did just that with MacOS 9. One day it worked, the next day it didn't, on the exact same hardware.
Perhaps you are putting too much weight on the marketing word "Open"? Or is there some part of the spec that you are aware of that prohibits blocking certain OSes?
I'm SO tired of people complaining about "AMD quality sucks" when their only experience with them has been shitty OEM parts
Truthfully, AMD brought this perception on themselves. They spent a decade of effort positioning themsevles as the "bargain" vendor, where they'd take superior CPUs and sell them at a fraction of what Intel was asking for.
So, it's no suprise that the "cheap" CPU would be mated with poor quality parts and the consumer would be left with the impression that AMD systems were of poor quality and/or defective. After all the box has a "AMD" sticker, not one from VIA or the crappo mobo company. This has been going on since the K5 days, almost like a downward spiral that AMD was unwilling to pull out of.
And the really pathetic thing about this Bargain Bin strategy was that it was a huge money loser for AMD. Thankfully the Opteron and higher-end Athlons ar the beginnings of a sane business strategy where the product sells itself, not the price.
> the writers could have changed those characters anytime they wished.
Not true at all, the writers are handcuffed by the production, and they stated explicity that it was "Gene's vision" that Starfleet officers lacked major flaws or conflicts.
A good example is the guy in Voyager who was a anti-federation rebel in the pilot. Obviously there could have been a lot of potential there, but they immediately turned him into paper-pushing desk jockey and only highlighted his rebelious qualities once in a blue moon when it suited some contrived plot point. At which point, his motiviation had little or no traction with the audience.
Well, I think we're talking past each other here. Were many Enterprise episodes bad? Yes. Is UPN a crap network? Yes. Is the Trekkie Demographic old and less desirable? Yes.
My overall point is that Star Trek is "boring" because they've been running the concept and dramatic structures with the same producers for 15 years -- TNG, TNG on a space station, TNG in another quadrant, and TNG the prequel. Same stuff. And year after year it's become less popular, and they've done nothing fundemental to change it. Too much consistancy was the problem.
My theory is that they determined that there was no future for Star Trek other than it's declining, aging fanbase, and just chose to rode it down to the bottom. Quality? Was it really that much worse than those lousy TNG and DS9 eps that got great ratings? It might have slowed the decline, but its doubtful that better scripts and better acting alone would've bring in a new audience.
As for Law and Order, any of the sequels might as well be called "Generic Cop Show". Unlike Star Trek, the characters are largely meaningless to the stories and the plots are recycled from the newspapers. If sci-fi was in demand like cop shows, you maybe could put on a 2-dimensional "Kirk fights with aliens in rubber suits" show for 20 years, but Star Trek is supposed to be engaging on a higher level, and they've just simply run out gas on ideas how.
First of all, RedHat themselves are the ones driving a huge amount of the bleeding-edge 'enterprise' features found in Linux, and generally integrating them first. So, RH is proactively designing/writing enterprise-friendly features, while distros like Debian are "downstream" and will only get them when Linus gets around to patching them into the mainline.
Second, RedHat is actually someone that vendors like Oracle can pick up the phone and call, which certainly helps while everyone's doing QA and loadtesting.
My recollection was that in Novell's heyday (~1993), NetWare wasn't particularlly stable -- especially if you were serving Macs or OS/2 -- there was an endless series of patches and rollups available, all of which required reboots. [There may have been a way to drop out to DOS and restart the server without a hardware reboot.] Only later did NetWare really become rock solid.
Keep in mind that NetWare was basically 100% kernel -- there was no memory protection or protected user programs. So anything you did outside of file&print tended to crash ("ABEND") the things.
Actually I don't think NT4 was any different than Win2000 or XP -- if you changed IP addresses, NT4 would bitch at you to reboot, but you really didn't have to. 2000 just removed the misleading dialog.
If you change computer/domain names, your authetication tokens have to be updated, and that probably always will need a reboot because the entire OS depends on them.
Not to defend UPN too strongly, but that argument seems to be a copout. Remember that Next Generation was syndicated and became very popular with even less promotion and demographic compatibility than UPN provides.
UPN tried for about eight years straight to build a "science fiction night" around Star Trek and never found anything that worked. I think the main problem is that Star Trek fans aren't generic scifi fans nor are they generic young males or any other generic passive demographic. It was a thing that people actively sought out and tuned into, no matter where it was. That is why they got so many viewers for the Enterprise premiere, and is why that terrible Voyager episodes got 3 times the viewers of recent Enterprise episodes.
The other issue is that the ratings have been a steady straight line downward since Next Generation went off the air. This indicates that people were just getting bored of the program. Even though this was happening, Paramount never changed producers or fundementally altered the TNG-derived Formula. The decision to keep Trek conservative and ride it down to the bottom was made years ago, and promotion wouldn't have changed that much.
As I see it, every Trek series has had good characters.
As I see it, the fundemental problem with all the post-TNG series is that the characters were conceptualized as repressed boy scouts and were incapabible of generating any tension or conflict themselves. Rather than Kirk & Spock, you got wooden Rodenbury-utopia parodies of real people. In other words, the characters were bad.
And that is the main reason the the plots weren't compelling and the dialog was insipid -- the characters simply had no motiviation except "Go Starfleet" and "Prime Directive" and the writers had nothing to work with.
Flame me if I'm wrong, but SVG is an extended VML. That is, MS submitted VML to the W3C and after several years the committee produced SVG. In the meanwhile, Microsoft lost interest in web client development.
> How did that never take off?
There never was any tool support, for one. Shame because IE users could have been enjoying things like vector maps years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Cocoa's not a language, but I know what you mean -- the late-binding API makes it very useful for scripting-like tasks.
Yes I've tried it and it's verbose, vaugely specified, and counter-intuitive. It is not at all like SQL. I could rant for hours about the horror that is VB (another "English-like" language), and when I say AppleScript is worse, I really mean it. Thankfully there's no reason to use it (other than the IDE).
But it never really bothered me because I always assumed that the smart guys at Apple designed it for the mythical "Joe Power User" and they must know something I don't. But if you contend it is supposed to appeal to programmers, then something went horribly wrong somewhere. Oh, tell your mom that Excel Macros aren't written by "Alpha Geeks"
Geeks who make laguages for the "user" are not doing anything of the sort. They are making yet another language that promises to bring the holy grail of computer programming to mere users, but failing miserably.
I agree. Now go tell Apple.
The fact that you and many other persistent "AppleTurfers" are hanging out on Slashdot pretty much undermines your point.
If the Geek Vanguard is not Apple's market, why are you guys so insistent about articulating Apple's positions to them? Obviously the perceptions of this community is important to Apple's advocates or we wouldn't see you here.
Applescript is a god-awful programming language that's designed to be supposedly accessible for regular users who have no clue about programming. (I have my doubts, but maybe...)
Even a "Beta Geek" with a job to do would prefer Visual Basic (which at least has straight-forward syntax) over AppleScript. Fortunately there's hooks for Python, Javascript, etc. But the fact that Apple puts such a antagonizing scripting language in such a prominant place sorta proves the anti-alpha-geek thing.
OTOH, Apple has recognized the value of developers, and does include a lot of "geek" features (like the Unix shell and Java bindings), but that stuff is almost entirely segmentated away from the normal user experience.
Glad to see you're on your meds now Basil, but I read your AC posts. Yes, it's not executed, it just sticks an icon for a potentially malicous application in a prominent place. Off to install Tiger!
Dude, calm down before they take you to the hospital again. I've read the comments and the only person on this story who thinks this does not "install" a widget is you.
I admit that as terrible evil MS Scum, I haven't got around to installing Tiger on my Powerbook yet.
But according to the story, the code automatically runs as soom as the user presses the Fkey or whatever to bring up the Dashboard. I also don't believe it's worse, but it is (depending on implemention details) potentially just as bad as ActiveX. If Apple missed something this obvious, how good is the rest of it?
Well, I'm not a MS Zealot, but I sometimes play one on slashdot :) I've made the Dashboard/HTA/ActiveX comparision a few times: here and here (note the Mac Zealot claiming that Dashboard could not spread spyware, gloat gloat).
However, this isn't the same issue as ActiveX, in fact it's worse. Here the browser is automatically running executables downloaded from the web with no prompt. Even worse, this isn't the first time that Safari has done this, so obviously someone at Apple thinks auto-installation is a pretty keen feature and keeps intentionally sticking it in.
The other big danger with a DHTML-based application system like Dashboard is that the "sandbox" will have flaws -- and that someone can figure out how to do "dashboard-like" things (such as writing files or running programs) from javascript in an internet web page.
As far as I know, nobody's been able to do this yet, but it's only been a couple weeks. This would be a similar problem to the Mozilla thing reported this morning and countless IE flaws -- "trusted" scripts running when they should not.
Basically I agree with the conventional wisdom that ActiveX was an incredibly stupid and/or naive design back in 1997. What really confounds the fuck out of me is why Apple and Mozilla chose to copy aspects of the ActiveX years after everyone's known how terrible it is.
The design is flawed.
... activex LOL", when FF does in fact have a nearly identical feature as ActiveX. And when there's a mechanism for installing program files from webpages, people will tend to find holes in the sandbox. Hopefully this quiets the "better by design" crowd.
Agreed -- and even worse, the design was copied directly from Microsoft's ActiveX system!
It's a bit frustrating to see Firefox advocates continually prattle about "Security
The Lotus/Borland case went to the supreme court and the result was that look-and-feel, menu structure, and program operation can't be copyrighted, which is what Apple was trying to claim.
Sure patents and trade dress might offer some protection over specific elements, but they are not something that Apple could have used to assert rights over the idea of a graphical interface itself.
I think what made Apple especially angry at themselves is that the contract not only allowed MS to copy UI elements, but also allowed them to "clone" the Mac Toolbox API. Even worse, it allowed MS to turn around and licence the API design to giants like IBM and HP. Apple was much more worried about OS/2 Presentation Manager than Windows at the time.
MS paying Apple a license fee for its GUI from 1984-2004, only in, the Twilight Zone
We lived through the Twilight Zone in the late 80s -- when Apple made you pay through the nose for a GUI computer. Kickass machines, but Apple's margins were upwards of 60%, and their only competitive strategy was to sue everyone. I love the computers, but those weren't really pleasant days, the industry overall was stagnent.
Well, the post was a little joke, so don't read too much into it -- Although PARC also later argued "bad lawyering" and tried to sue Apple over their deal.
The vast majority of the "Look and Feel" of a GUI system is not 'intellectual property', and therefore was not Apple's to sell anyway.
This "Microsoft ripped off Apple" thing is nonsense.
Just because Apple later changed their minds about licencing the Mac technology to Microsoft in return for a word processor doesn't make it a rip-off.
Sure, but you can't browse for the printer on Windows without the JD software.
Actually, you should thank (or curse) HP.
It is be possible to do this out-of-the-box with Windows networking, and some print servers do, but for whatever reason HP won't support it. (Probably because they are pushing that jetdirect stuff which is a bear on small networks.)
In terms of functionality it is more similar to NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP (NBT) than UPNP.
Think of how the "network neighborhood" works via broadcasts on a local workgroup subnet.
With Open Firmware? Apple cannot block other OSes, with an OPEN firmware
As a point of fact, they did just that with MacOS 9. One day it worked, the next day it didn't, on the exact same hardware.
Perhaps you are putting too much weight on the marketing word "Open"? Or is there some part of the spec that you are aware of that prohibits blocking certain OSes?
I'm SO tired of people complaining about "AMD quality sucks" when their only experience with them has been shitty OEM parts
Truthfully, AMD brought this perception on themselves. They spent a decade of effort positioning themsevles as the "bargain" vendor, where they'd take superior CPUs and sell them at a fraction of what Intel was asking for.
So, it's no suprise that the "cheap" CPU would be mated with poor quality parts and the consumer would be left with the impression that AMD systems were of poor quality and/or defective. After all the box has a "AMD" sticker, not one from VIA or the crappo mobo company. This has been going on since the K5 days, almost like a downward spiral that AMD was unwilling to pull out of.
And the really pathetic thing about this Bargain Bin strategy was that it was a huge money loser for AMD. Thankfully the Opteron and higher-end Athlons ar the beginnings of a sane business strategy where the product sells itself, not the price.
> the writers could have changed those characters anytime they wished.
Not true at all, the writers are handcuffed by the production, and they stated explicity that it was "Gene's vision" that Starfleet officers lacked major flaws or conflicts.
A good example is the guy in Voyager who was a anti-federation rebel in the pilot. Obviously there could have been a lot of potential there, but they immediately turned him into paper-pushing desk jockey and only highlighted his rebelious qualities once in a blue moon when it suited some contrived plot point. At which point, his motiviation had little or no traction with the audience.
Well, I think we're talking past each other here. Were many Enterprise episodes bad? Yes. Is UPN a crap network? Yes. Is the Trekkie Demographic old and less desirable? Yes.
My overall point is that Star Trek is "boring" because they've been running the concept and dramatic structures with the same producers for 15 years -- TNG, TNG on a space station, TNG in another quadrant, and TNG the prequel. Same stuff. And year after year it's become less popular, and they've done nothing fundemental to change it. Too much consistancy was the problem.
My theory is that they determined that there was no future for Star Trek other than it's declining, aging fanbase, and just chose to rode it down to the bottom. Quality? Was it really that much worse than those lousy TNG and DS9 eps that got great ratings? It might have slowed the decline, but its doubtful that better scripts and better acting alone would've bring in a new audience.
As for Law and Order, any of the sequels might as well be called "Generic Cop Show". Unlike Star Trek, the characters are largely meaningless to the stories and the plots are recycled from the newspapers. If sci-fi was in demand like cop shows, you maybe could put on a 2-dimensional "Kirk fights with aliens in rubber suits" show for 20 years, but Star Trek is supposed to be engaging on a higher level, and they've just simply run out gas on ideas how.
I think it's deeper than that.
First of all, RedHat themselves are the ones driving a huge amount of the bleeding-edge 'enterprise' features found in Linux, and generally integrating them first. So, RH is proactively designing/writing enterprise-friendly features, while distros like Debian are "downstream" and will only get them when Linus gets around to patching them into the mainline.
Second, RedHat is actually someone that vendors like Oracle can pick up the phone and call, which certainly helps while everyone's doing QA and loadtesting.
My recollection was that in Novell's heyday (~1993), NetWare wasn't particularlly stable -- especially if you were serving Macs or OS/2 -- there was an endless series of patches and rollups available, all of which required reboots. [There may have been a way to drop out to DOS and restart the server without a hardware reboot.] Only later did NetWare really become rock solid.
Keep in mind that NetWare was basically 100% kernel -- there was no memory protection or protected user programs. So anything you did outside of file&print tended to crash ("ABEND") the things.
Actually I don't think NT4 was any different than Win2000 or XP -- if you changed IP addresses, NT4 would bitch at you to reboot, but you really didn't have to. 2000 just removed the misleading dialog.
If you change computer/domain names, your authetication tokens have to be updated, and that probably always will need a reboot because the entire OS depends on them.
Not to defend UPN too strongly, but that argument seems to be a copout. Remember that Next Generation was syndicated and became very popular with even less promotion and demographic compatibility than UPN provides.
UPN tried for about eight years straight to build a "science fiction night" around Star Trek and never found anything that worked. I think the main problem is that Star Trek fans aren't generic scifi fans nor are they generic young males or any other generic passive demographic. It was a thing that people actively sought out and tuned into, no matter where it was. That is why they got so many viewers for the Enterprise premiere, and is why that terrible Voyager episodes got 3 times the viewers of recent Enterprise episodes.
The other issue is that the ratings have been a steady straight line downward since Next Generation went off the air. This indicates that people were just getting bored of the program. Even though this was happening, Paramount never changed producers or fundementally altered the TNG-derived Formula. The decision to keep Trek conservative and ride it down to the bottom was made years ago, and promotion wouldn't have changed that much.
As I see it, every Trek series has had good characters.
As I see it, the fundemental problem with all the post-TNG series is that the characters were conceptualized as repressed boy scouts and were incapabible of generating any tension or conflict themselves. Rather than Kirk & Spock, you got wooden Rodenbury-utopia parodies of real people. In other words, the characters were bad.
And that is the main reason the the plots weren't compelling and the dialog was insipid -- the characters simply had no motiviation except "Go Starfleet" and "Prime Directive" and the writers had nothing to work with.
Flame me if I'm wrong, but SVG is an extended VML. That is, MS submitted VML to the W3C and after several years the committee produced SVG. In the meanwhile, Microsoft lost interest in web client development.
> How did that never take off?
There never was any tool support, for one. Shame because IE users could have been enjoying things like vector maps years ago.