> What I often wonder about is whether the added features of OS X > really justify the massive increase in power required of a machine to run it.
Yes. For me, at work at least.
That said, at home, I'd use my Cube for pretty much everything (which is just light e-mail, web browsing and a bit of illustration, writing and TeX coding) 'cept that it's in the basement 'cause the screen is so dim it's unusable in daylight upstairs.
No, OPENSTEP was a compleat re-working of the whole API and resulted in a set of parallel shared libraries which had to be loaded in addition to the NeXTstep libraries --- memory usage went up dramatically between NS 3.3 and OS 4.2.
(not using any Carbon apps)
What are you using instead of the Finder?
Does your web browser not support JavaScript? (not the same as a JVM, but yet another example of the sort of additional technology one gets these days --- the only NeXT browser w/ JS support was OmniWeb if memory serves)
Fire up TextEdit.app and examine the number of characters available in, and some of the typing possibilities for Lucida Grande or Zapfino --- text support is much richer &c.
That said, I do agree with your premise and complaint, and really wish that Carbon had never been developed or that one could set up OS X so that only Cocoa apps were used....
Because NeXTstep didn't have to load the OpenStep libraries, Java was hard to come by and Mac compatibility was in a separate program / process _if_ one loaded ARDI's Executor and one didn't get transparency effects, the system also wasn't as effectively multi-threaded as Mac OS X is (granularity of Display PostScript was one PS operator --- which was bad for any apps when that one operator was displaying a multi-megabyte TIFF on-screen) &c.
Try OPENSTEP 4.2 for a closer comparison --- just loading the OpenStep libraries (in addition to the NeXTstep ones) can be enough to push a well-performing system into swapland.
I agree with your thesis, but performance improvements have been steady since the Mac OS X public beta, the system does a lot more and one can always upgrade hardware (though I still have and use a NeXT Cube on my desk at home). Hopefully GNUstep will address some of this, but one still needs replacements for apps like Lotus Improv, Altsys Virtuoso and TIFFany.
Agreed. I was finally able to pick up a copy of this when Avalon Hill did the new edition for Wizards of the Coast and my kids have a lot of fun playing it.
To some degree it's controllable by equipment choice or judicious user modification or location.
My cubicle at work has just six indicator lights (power x3 for a PowerMac G5, two 17" Sony LCDs (though I have the one on the left covered w/ a blackened bit of Post-It[tm] Note), a Caps-lock indicator on the keyboard (WHICH IS NORMALLY NOT LIT), a blue light (which switches to green when I click) on my Wacom Intuos and a green light on the APC PowerChute UPS (hidden under my desk) --- the Mighty Mouse has an LED, but it can't be seen unless I'm cleaning it.
Right, but wouldn't it be better / cheaper / more integrated if they built the digitizer integrated into the display components?
Also, the thin piece of glass in the Tablet screen is in addition to the normal piece LCD pane --- adding this contributes to the parallax problem one gets w/ the offset caused by the display being beneath a panel to begin with.
Well, Fujitsu has been (profitably!) making pen computers for well over a decade, so I can't imagine them stopping, and they're large enough that I can't see them going away any time soon, and their warranty support is quite good by all accounts.
William (who bought a Stylistic 'cause he got tired of waiting for Apple to make a replacement for his Newton)
The touch screens and active stylus input displays have a thick glass or plexiglass or other durable substance to protect the screen, but every LCD (laptop or desktop) I've ever set up has a warning about not touching the screen in w/ the setup / operating instructions.
My boss and several co-workers regularly touch the LCDs here in the office, making the surface bend and distorting the image and it makes me wince everytime.
William (who is looking forward to _all_ LCDs coming w/ some sort of digitizer built-in after manufacturers decide the added durability and lessened expense of one manufacturing line instead of two makes economic sense)
vhogemann said: >There were also some company building a greyscale PalmOS device >with a full keyboard attached to it... but I can't remember the name.
When Bill Gates was asked if he'd develop for an object-oriented systems _years_ ahead of anything else then available his response?
``Develop for it? I'll piss on it.'' Randall Stross, _Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing_, pg. 72
Which is probably why the ``Yellow Box'' in Mac OS X was so named. But that sort of attitude on the part of Microsoft goes a long way towards explaining their hostility to a true cross-platform solution.
When you're under a deadline gun, sometimes re-creation is faster than:
- logging a job ticket w/ the help desk
- waiting for it to work its way up the queue
- waiting for IT to figure out which file to restore
- waiting for the file to be restored
William (who keeps Quark set to save 10 revisions of each file that he's working on to a backup partition (this can be a couple of GBs of data for some projects) and at a previous job where he was administering an NT Server had everyone's copy of Quark set to make these backup files in a folder on the server which was cleared out after the Friday night backup)
Oh yeah, you'd said: >If you're intimately familiar with all the rules used to determine >here-placement and the various tolerances you can configure >for the whitespace areas around a float with the different >placement options, you might be able to get good results >first time most of the time, but it's far too much like hard work.
And placing graphics and dragging them into place in Quark or InDesign isn't?
William (who has worked on projects where the graphics would take up multiple CDs or a DVD)
NeXTstep had an optional pop-up main menu which was mapped to the secondary mouse button when it was enabled --- its handiness varies on the intricacy of the motion required --- ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso is nearly a gestural command for me (esp. on my Wacom ArtZ tablet --- click, down, over to the right through two menus).
I believe there's a kext which makes this happen for Cocoa apps in Mac OS X, but it's of limited utility for those of us who have to spend a lot of time in Carbon apps.
I'd liefer not waste space on simultaneous multiple menus myself --- just crank up the mouse acceleration factor (I use MouseZoom on my dual 17" display setup at work) to get to them quickly.
pdftex now has a colour stack (see v1.40 features), so one can push on a new colour to process a running head for example, then pop back to what was being used.
Take a look at some of the othe examples in that ftp directory --- one of my co-workers at ATLIS regularly (re)wrote output routines at need. I'm still wrapping my mind around source2e.pdf, and while I hope latex3 is out before I'm done, I'm sure I'll continue to learn enough to churn out pages profitably.
As I alluded to before, InDesign and its ilk are limited by available man-hours and workstations/licenses and featureset --- the only limits to (La)TeX are processing power and human ingenuity and I've yet to plumb the latter.
Colour is easy. Either use C or M or Y and K (trivial) or use specific colours and post-process w/ PitStop to force given spot colour(s). Look at Sandefur:
One of these days I'm going to look into making use of its technique for this in LaTeX.
Placed graphics usually ``just work'' and of course, one can handle things programmatically --- although the Sandefur example above doesn't show it, there were two different ways graphics could be placed, dependent on the horizontal size, naturally there was only one macro to place a graphic, it measured the graphic and placed it appropriately. Granted when floats don't fall out properly there's a bit of wrestling involved, but at least in LaTeX everything re-flows and all one's references, ToC, index &c. update automagically.
Doing this sort of thing in InDesign and the like fills me with absolute boredom and tedium. Far better to solve things in a macro once and for all.
Convenience I'll grant, for smaller publications which fit w/in ID's featureset, power, well, my first composition job out of college was a 2,200 pg. directory, and a big part of what I do now is phone books and government looseleaf publications or specialty journals which have formatting requirements (run-in heads, complex running heads, indexes w/ multiple character styles) which ID simply doesn't handle.
Well, the LaTeX3 folks did take time out to finish documenting LaTeX2e (the 2nd edition of _The LaTeX Companion_ is _excellent_).
There aren't that many tools competing w/ TeX in the layout field:
ANT - ant is not text --- http://ant.berlios.de/ --- or at least that's where it was. Site's not responding now, hopefully temporary. Needs the ability to place a.pdf as a graphic, then I could start trying it out in some real-world cases
InDesign --- while it's getting better, it's still got a long way to go.
Quark --- the less said the better.
SoftMagic's MLayout --- www.softmagic.com - needs better H&J, but one of the more interesting efforts.
The big issue w/ the graphical tools is that they're limited by available labour, which can be an issue for jobs which can't be divided up for parallel work at multiple stations and their featuresets --- multiple-line run-in heads are _not_ easily automated in InDesign so have to be handled on an individual basis, parts of index entries or portions of section marks in a running head can't be tagged w/ character styles &c.
And of course there are TeX successors, and a continuing improvement in related tools --- LyX, http://www.lyx.org/ is one of the most innovative of these.
Legibility is markedly different from readability. For a lengthy discussion of this sort of thing there's Tinkel, et. al. Also see Dr. Asaf Degani's research for NASA, I've links to it on my web pages:
Or, ``Univers is readable, Helvetica is legible (or decipherable).''
Interestingly, there was a phonetic letterform design which took advantage of the characteristic you note though, creating variant forms for letters w/ differing pronunciations, changing only the bottom half (in such a way that it resembled the letter which normally made that sound ``gh'' in ``tough'' had the lower part of ``g'' and ``h'' altered to resemble ``f''), the idea being that using the system to learn to read would allow a person to continue reading more normal letterforms w/ minimal interruption.
As David Kindersley's experiments have shown, it's more about the interplay of light and dark as perceived by the human eye than mere physical measurements.
See his _Optical Letter Spacing For new printing systems_ for a more detailed system and account --- but as Dr. Charles Bigelow has stated, no system fully accounts for all subtleties of all designs and the perceptions of the human eye. Co-designer of the Lucida superfamily, and having worked out the spacing system used for the Optima capitals sandblasted into Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial and newly placed as a profesor at RIT he's well-worth pying attention to.
rbanffy said: (re: InkScape and FreeHand} >Calling them equivalent is a bit of a stretch, isn't it?
Yeah.
It kills me that Macromedia didn't make a Cocoa version of FreeHand (using the Altsys Virtuoso source) when they had a chance and that Adobe owns all that source now --- I really wish there where a better, up-to-date alternative to FreeHand.
FontForge (not FontLab) runs on Linux, so does LyX (and GIMP of course) --- pretty much everything else that I listed would have an equivalent on Linux (InkScape instead of FreeHand, KILE instead of WinTeXshell &c.).
However, I failed to include two apps which are Windows-specific and don't have really good analogues (yet), RitePen and ArtRage.
Also, EverNote (though Jarnal and some of the other Journal apps are close).
The other issue of course is how well the graphics app work w/o an active digitizer --- the N800 is touch-sensitive, right?
That's why I use a Windows-compatible pen computer (Fujtitsy Stylistic), so that I can have (bear with me, it's an odd-ball and eclectic list) Adobe Acrobat, FontLab, FontForge, FreeHand, LyX, PhotoFiltre (this one is on trial --- may need to go back to PhotoShop or try the GIMP again, wish I'd kept my copy of Fauve xRes), WinTeXshell (w/ both MikTeX and w32tex) &c.
William
How well would they hold up in the outdoors?
on
Can CDs Be Recycled?
·
· Score: 1
I've always wondered if one could use them as a roofing material (though fashioning a fastener for the rather large central hole would be a pain)
A quick search on Google leads one to this page though:
Slashdot Mirror
> What I often wonder about is whether the added features of OS X
> really justify the massive increase in power required of a machine to run it.
Yes. For me, at work at least.
That said, at home, I'd use my Cube for pretty much everything (which is just light e-mail, web browsing and a bit of illustration, writing and TeX coding) 'cept that it's in the basement 'cause the screen is so dim it's unusable in daylight upstairs.
William
No, OPENSTEP was a compleat re-working of the whole API and resulted in a set of parallel shared libraries which had to be loaded in addition to the NeXTstep libraries --- memory usage went up dramatically between NS 3.3 and OS 4.2.
(not using any Carbon apps)
What are you using instead of the Finder?
Does your web browser not support JavaScript? (not the same as a JVM, but yet another example of the sort of additional technology one gets these days --- the only NeXT browser w/ JS support was OmniWeb if memory serves)
Fire up TextEdit.app and examine the number of characters available in, and some of the typing possibilities for Lucida Grande or Zapfino --- text support is much richer &c.
That said, I do agree with your premise and complaint, and really wish that Carbon had never been developed or that one could set up OS X so that only Cocoa apps were used....
William
Because NeXTstep didn't have to load the OpenStep libraries, Java was hard to come by and Mac compatibility was in a separate program / process _if_ one loaded ARDI's Executor and one didn't get transparency effects, the system also wasn't as effectively multi-threaded as Mac OS X is (granularity of Display PostScript was one PS operator --- which was bad for any apps when that one operator was displaying a multi-megabyte TIFF on-screen) &c.
Try OPENSTEP 4.2 for a closer comparison --- just loading the OpenStep libraries (in addition to the NeXTstep ones) can be enough to push a well-performing system into swapland.
I agree with your thesis, but performance improvements have been steady since the Mac OS X public beta, the system does a lot more and one can always upgrade hardware (though I still have and use a NeXT Cube on my desk at home). Hopefully GNUstep will address some of this, but one still needs replacements for apps like Lotus Improv, Altsys Virtuoso and TIFFany.
William
Agreed. I was finally able to pick up a copy of this when Avalon Hill did the new edition for Wizards of the Coast and my kids have a lot of fun playing it.
William
To some degree it's controllable by equipment choice or judicious user modification or location.
My cubicle at work has just six indicator lights (power x3 for a PowerMac G5, two 17" Sony LCDs (though I have the one on the left covered w/ a blackened bit of Post-It[tm] Note), a Caps-lock indicator on the keyboard (WHICH IS NORMALLY NOT LIT), a blue light (which switches to green when I click) on my Wacom Intuos and a green light on the APC PowerChute UPS (hidden under my desk) --- the Mighty Mouse has an LED, but it can't be seen unless I'm cleaning it.
William
Right, but wouldn't it be better / cheaper / more integrated if they built the digitizer integrated into the display components?
Also, the thin piece of glass in the Tablet screen is in addition to the normal piece LCD pane --- adding this contributes to the parallax problem one gets w/ the offset caused by the display being beneath a panel to begin with.
William
Well, Fujitsu has been (profitably!) making pen computers for well over a decade, so I can't imagine them stopping, and they're large enough that I can't see them going away any time soon, and their warranty support is quite good by all accounts.
William
(who bought a Stylistic 'cause he got tired of waiting for Apple to make a replacement for his Newton)
The touch screens and active stylus input displays have a thick glass or plexiglass or other durable substance to protect the screen, but every LCD (laptop or desktop) I've ever set up has a warning about not touching the screen in w/ the setup / operating instructions.
My boss and several co-workers regularly touch the LCDs here in the office, making the surface bend and distorting the image and it makes me wince everytime.
William
(who is looking forward to _all_ LCDs coming w/ some sort of digitizer built-in after manufacturers decide the added durability and lessened expense of one manufacturing line instead of two makes economic sense)
vhogemann said:
>There were also some company building a greyscale PalmOS device
>with a full keyboard attached to it... but I can't remember the name.
That'd probably be the Dana AlphaSmart:
http://www.alphasmart.com/
William
at Microsoft.
When Bill Gates was asked if he'd develop for an object-oriented systems _years_ ahead of anything else then available his response?
``Develop for it? I'll piss on it.'' Randall Stross, _Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing_, pg. 72
Which is probably why the ``Yellow Box'' in Mac OS X was so named. But that sort of attitude on the part of Microsoft goes a long way towards explaining their hostility to a true cross-platform solution.
William
Yep.
When you're under a deadline gun, sometimes re-creation is faster than:
- logging a job ticket w/ the help desk
- waiting for it to work its way up the queue
- waiting for IT to figure out which file to restore
- waiting for the file to be restored
William
(who keeps Quark set to save 10 revisions of each file that he's working on to a backup partition (this can be a couple of GBs of data for some projects) and at a previous job where he was administering an NT Server had everyone's copy of Quark set to make these backup files in a folder on the server which was cleared out after the Friday night backup)
Oh yeah, you'd said:
>If you're intimately familiar with all the rules used to determine
>here-placement and the various tolerances you can configure
>for the whitespace areas around a float with the different
>placement options, you might be able to get good results
>first time most of the time, but it's far too much like hard work.
And placing graphics and dragging them into place in Quark or InDesign isn't?
William
(who has worked on projects where the graphics would take up multiple CDs or a DVD)
NeXTstep had an optional pop-up main menu which was mapped to the secondary mouse button when it was enabled --- its handiness varies on the intricacy of the motion required --- ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso is nearly a gestural command for me (esp. on my Wacom ArtZ tablet --- click, down, over to the right through two menus).
I believe there's a kext which makes this happen for Cocoa apps in Mac OS X, but it's of limited utility for those of us who have to spend a lot of time in Carbon apps.
I'd liefer not waste space on simultaneous multiple menus myself --- just crank up the mouse acceleration factor (I use MouseZoom on my dual 17" display setup at work) to get to them quickly.
William
pdftex now has a colour stack (see v1.40 features), so one can push on a new colour to process a running head for example, then pop back to what was being used.
Take a look at some of the othe examples in that ftp directory --- one of my co-workers at ATLIS regularly (re)wrote output routines at need. I'm still wrapping my mind around source2e.pdf, and while I hope latex3 is out before I'm done, I'm sure I'll continue to learn enough to churn out pages profitably.
As I alluded to before, InDesign and its ilk are limited by available man-hours and workstations/licenses and featureset --- the only limits to (La)TeX are processing power and human ingenuity and I've yet to plumb the latter.
William
Colour is easy. Either use C or M or Y and K (trivial) or use specific colours and post-process w/ PitStop to force given spot colour(s). Look at Sandefur:
/ TeX%20Sample%20Pages/
http://www.atlis.com/services/composition/samples
as an example. ConTeXt allows one to do arbitrary named spot colours though of course, it doesn't include any licensed colour libraries:
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Colors
One of these days I'm going to look into making use of its technique for this in LaTeX.
Placed graphics usually ``just work'' and of course, one can handle things programmatically --- although the Sandefur example above doesn't show it, there were two different ways graphics could be placed, dependent on the horizontal size, naturally there was only one macro to place a graphic, it measured the graphic and placed it appropriately. Granted when floats don't fall out properly there's a bit of wrestling involved, but at least in LaTeX everything re-flows and all one's references, ToC, index &c. update automagically.
Doing this sort of thing in InDesign and the like fills me with absolute boredom and tedium. Far better to solve things in a macro once and for all.
William
Convenience I'll grant, for smaller publications which fit w/in ID's featureset, power, well, my first composition job out of college was a 2,200 pg. directory, and a big part of what I do now is phone books and government looseleaf publications or specialty journals which have formatting requirements (run-in heads, complex running heads, indexes w/ multiple character styles) which ID simply doesn't handle.
William
Well, the LaTeX3 folks did take time out to finish documenting LaTeX2e (the 2nd edition of _The LaTeX Companion_ is _excellent_).
.pdf as a graphic, then I could start trying it out in some real-world cases
There aren't that many tools competing w/ TeX in the layout field:
ANT - ant is not text --- http://ant.berlios.de/ --- or at least that's where it was. Site's not responding now, hopefully temporary. Needs the ability to place a
LOUT - http://lout.sourceforge.net/ --- I can never get past the really rough-looking example files
InDesign --- while it's getting better, it's still got a long way to go.
Quark --- the less said the better.
SoftMagic's MLayout --- www.softmagic.com - needs better H&J, but one of the more interesting efforts.
The big issue w/ the graphical tools is that they're limited by available labour, which can be an issue for jobs which can't be divided up for parallel work at multiple stations and their featuresets --- multiple-line run-in heads are _not_ easily automated in InDesign so have to be handled on an individual basis, parts of index entries or portions of section marks in a running head can't be tagged w/ character styles &c.
And of course there are TeX successors, and a continuing improvement in related tools --- LyX, http://www.lyx.org/ is one of the most innovative of these.
William
Legibility is markedly different from readability. For a lengthy discussion of this sort of thing there's Tinkel, et. al. Also see Dr. Asaf Degani's research for NASA, I've links to it on my web pages:
h tml
http://members.aol.com/willadams/books-free-type.
Or, ``Univers is readable, Helvetica is legible (or decipherable).''
Interestingly, there was a phonetic letterform design which took advantage of the characteristic you note though, creating variant forms for letters w/ differing pronunciations, changing only the bottom half (in such a way that it resembled the letter which normally made that sound ``gh'' in ``tough'' had the lower part of ``g'' and ``h'' altered to resemble ``f''), the idea being that using the system to learn to read would allow a person to continue reading more normal letterforms w/ minimal interruption.
William
As David Kindersley's experiments have shown, it's more about the interplay of light and dark as perceived by the human eye than mere physical measurements.
See his _Optical Letter Spacing For new printing systems_ for a more detailed system and account --- but as Dr. Charles Bigelow has stated, no system fully accounts for all subtleties of all designs and the perceptions of the human eye. Co-designer of the Lucida superfamily, and having worked out the spacing system used for the Optima capitals sandblasted into Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial and newly placed as a profesor at RIT he's well-worth pying attention to.
William
rbanffy said:
(re: InkScape and FreeHand}
>Calling them equivalent is a bit of a stretch, isn't it?
Yeah.
It kills me that Macromedia didn't make a Cocoa version of FreeHand (using the Altsys Virtuoso source) when they had a chance and that Adobe owns all that source now --- I really wish there where a better, up-to-date alternative to FreeHand.
William
FontForge (not FontLab) runs on Linux, so does LyX (and GIMP of course) --- pretty much everything else that I listed would have an equivalent on Linux (InkScape instead of FreeHand, KILE instead of WinTeXshell &c.).
However, I failed to include two apps which are Windows-specific and don't have really good analogues (yet), RitePen and ArtRage.
Also, EverNote (though Jarnal and some of the other Journal apps are close).
The other issue of course is how well the graphics app work w/o an active digitizer --- the N800 is touch-sensitive, right?
William
That's why I use a Windows-compatible pen computer (Fujtitsy Stylistic), so that I can have (bear with me, it's an odd-ball and eclectic list) Adobe Acrobat, FontLab, FontForge, FreeHand, LyX, PhotoFiltre (this one is on trial --- may need to go back to PhotoShop or try the GIMP again, wish I'd kept my copy of Fauve xRes), WinTeXshell (w/ both MikTeX and w32tex) &c.
William
I've always wondered if one could use them as a roofing material (though fashioning a fastener for the rather large central hole would be a pain)
A quick search on Google leads one to this page though:
http://www.obviously.com/recycle/guides/hard.html
where it has some information and lists two addresses which will take them to recycle (and CD-Rs has ~20mg of gold --- who knew?)
William
The Tesla's writeup in Automobile magazine was quite interesting.
I'd like to see an overview of available electric vehicles, esp. including alternatives such as the Twike:
http://www.twike.com/
(which is unfortunately sold out in the US until at least the middle of 2007)
William
Or perhaps it's because people like this wargame worst-case scenarios that such have been avoided for the most part?
William