If it makes you feel better, I'm writing this out on a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 (Pentium 233 w/160MB RAM) and I still use my NeXT Cube a lot (mostly for light writing and the odd bit of PostScript programming).
How many of those apps couldn't be rewritten in Cocoa?
How many of them work completely correctly in Mac OS X? Finder certainly doesn't --- try the afore-mentioned technique on the non-main-monitor of a multi-monitor system.
How many of them support Services?
Consider how much less memory Mac OS X would use if it didn't need to load Carbon.
You don't even need to waste screenspace on this --- just command-click on the icon / name and you'll get a pop-up menu showing everything beneath the current folder.
Depends on the application and the framework it was programmed in.
Works in Cocoa apps such as CyberDuck and TeXshop.
Doesn't work in TextWrangler
Does weird things in Finder, esp. on a multiple monitor machine
Sort of works for Safari
All of which is a good argument for why Apple shouldn't've knuckled in to Microsoft and Adobe and should've stuck w/ their Rhapsody plan and never have wasted time on the foetid mess which is Carbon.
William (who wants TIFFany instead of PhotoShop, Altsys Virtuoso instead of FreeHand or Illustrator and thinks that PasteUp could've been as good as InDesign and that FrameMaker would still be available on Macs if we'd had Rhapsody)
Rather than VI and LaTeX, you may find LyX more comfortable. It's more word-processor-like, but w/ an interesting and innovative concept, it's a ``What You See Is What You Mean'' _Document_ Processor.
A closer analogy would be the ``sunburn gun'' which was featured near the beginning of John Varley's _Wizard_ (middle book of the Gaea trilogy, Titan first and Demon last).
It was actually used for crowd dispersal on a fairly indiscriminate basis if memory serves.
A Tablet PC is a replacement for paper and w/ software like Infty Reader or MathJournal means that one's notes then become interactive _and searchable_ --- also all one's notebooks are contained in one's Tablet, so there's never any running out of paper &c.
I'm in exactly the same situtation. I use a G5 at work, and at need, my wife's Powerbook at home, but mostly I use a Fujitsu Stylistic 'cause I won't give up having pen input, and I got tired of schlepping around a Wacom graphics tablet w/ a laptop back when I was using my ThinkPad 755c.
I'm on a Mac using Word 2004 --- the closest thing there is a ``Styles'' subsection of the ``Formatting Palette'' which will show me all the styles in a document which uses 5 or fewer, but won't work for any decently complex document, showing only 5 at a time out of the dozen or more that I need, requiring scrolling to get to the others.
But even on a Windows box, it doesn't encompass all of them at once, no?
AFAICT, it's just a scrolling view on a visible subset of them like on a Mac?
If you're dealing w/ a person-interaction-limited profession, yes, but if it's just a function of sales, then no.
For example, here at work, I created a several thousand line WordBASIC macro which 16 times a year crunches a ~200 pg. Word manuscript, setting about 90% of the text to have the correct style / formatting --- the remaining 10% has to be done by hand, but it's a quick search to find it, and I've created a button bar to make each style assignment a single click (why there isn't a default Word toolbar which encompasses all of the styles in a document I'll never understand) so the whole processing of the manuscript takes less than an hour --- used to be be 4--8. Then the document can be pulled into a page layout program and formatted in a few more hours (I'm still trying to convince them to use LaTeX, but they're concerned about the ``getting hit by a bus'' effect).
So while most other journals are done by a team of people (I help on them as well), this one gets done in just two days by one person (w/ another person proofreading most months), which is a huge productivity boost (and kept this journal from being outsourced overseas).
Yep. Although none are quite 200 years old yet, the oldest things at my house fall into pretty much those categories:
- ceramic milk jug which belonged to my great grandfather, ~1850 --- my daughter keeps it in her room and uses it to hold a flag
- 2 volume edition of a translation of Flavius Josephus' _History of the Treasures and Antiquities of the Jews_ roughly the same time frame --- in rough shape, but not valuable enough to justify restoration or re-binding (yet)
- an old cast iron reel lawn mower which belonged to my grandparents from 1927--- needs a new cutting blade (which unlike the one my wife and I purchased when we married is bolted, not riveted, so can be replaced), but I've already replaced the handle (branch from a crepe myrtle in our garden which my wife trimmed) and the roller (a pair of nested plastic pipes, one found in a parking lot, the other left over from adding a pipe to the T&P valve on our hot water heater). I use it to cut our grass this past summer and will again next.
I fully expect all of the above to last for a very long time and make and pass the 200 year mark.
William (who is still pretty miffed that Apple had to cave in to Adobe and Microsoft et. al., so that instead of Rhapsody w/ Yellow Box, we got Mac OS X w/ Carbon --- I'd give my interest in Hell to get back all the time I've wasted at work using foetid Carbon apps)
In the original _Dune_, the young Paul Atreides is threatened by a ``Hunter Killer'', a small, repulsor-driven device directed by remote control which would ``burrow through his flesh'' if it managed to successfully attack him. (He grabs it when it attacks the housekeeper, the ``Shadout Mapes'' who is sent to summon him and smashes its nose against the wall).
Okay, setting aside worthiness or difficulties of the OLPC project[1], what other technological device could really help people in such straits then?
A while ago, I suggested a modular ``Safety core'' which would be a 10 x 10 foot cube which would contain solar cells, a water purifier, a pedal-powered generator, lights, radio, hydroponic garden (to at least provide for vitamin C needs), sleeping facilities a composting toilet and sink and water fountain and a pantry w/ say a 6 week supply of food staples and an assortment of seeds and gardening tools --- drop one off per family in a disaster area and one could be certain that each family would have food, shelter and security --- the question is, could they be produced affordably enough to make it feasible?
Or, how about a smaller cube which was just a hydroponic garden which could also generate electricity and condense water from the air?
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to go the Linux route, 'cause I'm not willing to give up RitePen, so I'm running Windows 2000, which at least is reasonably tolerable compared to 98 or XP.
I _really_ wish Apple would work out more licensing options --- if they're not going to make a replacement for my Newton MessagePad, the least they could do would be to allow licensing Mac OS X for use on hardware which doesn't compete w/ their products.
As much as I like my NeXT Cube at home, and Mac OS X at work or on my wife's Powerbook, I'm simply not willing to give up the flexibility of having a tablet computer w/ integrated graphics tablet capability (I currently use a Fujitsu Stylistic), or to go back to schlepping a graphics tablet around w/ my laptop as I did before I got my NCR-3125.
William (who really wishes that there was a better handwriting recognition system for Linux than xscribble)
I've always wondered how the assemblage of the kits was done --- very, very good QA if it's done wholly by hand.
It really seems to me that it begs to have a fully automated system of one really long line and a series of dispensing robots putting one brick at a time into the box --- while it might be hard to amortize, you could jump start it by setting it up for just the smallest sets, doing a timetable of shifts of stocking different parts and running boxes through multiple times to fill the larger sets.
Old R&D doesn't cover the cost of replacing a mold before it wears out, or of tossing bricks back ino the recycle bin which don't meet their incredibly close tolerances.
There's an old saying, ``The world would be a better place if ignorance and stupidity were not mere contagious, but also fatal diseases.'' A bit more than painful though....
Most Tablet PC systems use Wacom digitizers through a serial connection (a few use FinePoint digitizers). There's an opensource program, TabletMagic to support such (I use it for an old ArtPad), and the source code for NeXT's Wacom tablet driver is available (I use it for an old ArtZ). I think a digitizer driver is an easily solved problem.
Licensing seems much thornier --- it saddens me Apple won't sell me a software upgrade to the copy of OpenStep 4.2 I bought from them.
Slashdot Mirror
No offense taken.
If it makes you feel better, I'm writing this out on a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 (Pentium 233 w/160MB RAM) and I still use my NeXT Cube a lot (mostly for light writing and the odd bit of PostScript programming).
William
An interesting thought here is how useful it might be as an accessory to a normal desktop or laptop?
It'll certainly make a much nicer ebook reader than most which are already available.
I'm surprised that companies like vTech and Leapster haven't looked into licensing these.
William
Apple Type Services is only found in Cocoa apps IME, NeXT had NeXTtime, I prefer links to aliases since there are fewer surprises &c.
If there had been no Carbon, Apple wouldn't've been able to defer re-writing Keychain until 10.2, which pretty much proves my point, no?
William
How many of those apps couldn't be rewritten in Cocoa?
How many of them work completely correctly in Mac OS X? Finder certainly doesn't --- try the afore-mentioned technique on the non-main-monitor of a multi-monitor system.
How many of them support Services?
Consider how much less memory Mac OS X would use if it didn't need to load Carbon.
William
You don't even need to waste screenspace on this --- just command-click on the icon / name and you'll get a pop-up menu showing everything beneath the current folder.
William
Depends on the application and the framework it was programmed in.
Works in Cocoa apps such as CyberDuck and TeXshop.
Doesn't work in TextWrangler
Does weird things in Finder, esp. on a multiple monitor machine
Sort of works for Safari
All of which is a good argument for why Apple shouldn't've knuckled in to Microsoft and Adobe and should've stuck w/ their Rhapsody plan and never have wasted time on the foetid mess which is Carbon.
William
(who wants TIFFany instead of PhotoShop, Altsys Virtuoso instead of FreeHand or Illustrator and thinks that PasteUp could've been as good as InDesign and that FrameMaker would still be available on Macs if we'd had Rhapsody)
Rather than VI and LaTeX, you may find LyX more comfortable. It's more word-processor-like, but w/ an interesting and innovative concept, it's a ``What You See Is What You Mean'' _Document_ Processor.
http://www.lyx.org/
Then, once it's done you can export to LaTeX and hack at things to your heart's content.
William
A closer analogy would be the ``sunburn gun'' which was featured near the beginning of John Varley's _Wizard_ (middle book of the Gaea trilogy, Titan first and Demon last).
It was actually used for crowd dispersal on a fairly indiscriminate basis if memory serves.
William
A Tablet PC is a replacement for paper and w/ software like Infty Reader or MathJournal means that one's notes then become interactive _and searchable_ --- also all one's notebooks are contained in one's Tablet, so there's never any running out of paper &c.
William
I'm in exactly the same situtation. I use a G5 at work, and at need, my wife's Powerbook at home, but mostly I use a Fujitsu Stylistic 'cause I won't give up having pen input, and I got tired of schlepping around a Wacom graphics tablet w/ a laptop back when I was using my ThinkPad 755c.
William
I'm on a Mac using Word 2004 --- the closest thing there is a ``Styles'' subsection of the ``Formatting Palette'' which will show me all the styles in a document which uses 5 or fewer, but won't work for any decently complex document, showing only 5 at a time out of the dozen or more that I need, requiring scrolling to get to the others.
But even on a Windows box, it doesn't encompass all of them at once, no?
AFAICT, it's just a scrolling view on a visible subset of them like on a Mac?
William
I need continued productivity improvements to keep my job from being outsourced.
William
If you're dealing w/ a person-interaction-limited profession, yes, but if it's just a function of sales, then no.
For example, here at work, I created a several thousand line WordBASIC macro which 16 times a year crunches a ~200 pg. Word manuscript, setting about 90% of the text to have the correct style / formatting --- the remaining 10% has to be done by hand, but it's a quick search to find it, and I've created a button bar to make each style assignment a single click (why there isn't a default Word toolbar which encompasses all of the styles in a document I'll never understand) so the whole processing of the manuscript takes less than an hour --- used to be be 4--8. Then the document can be pulled into a page layout program and formatted in a few more hours (I'm still trying to convince them to use LaTeX, but they're concerned about the ``getting hit by a bus'' effect).
So while most other journals are done by a team of people (I help on them as well), this one gets done in just two days by one person (w/ another person proofreading most months), which is a huge productivity boost (and kept this journal from being outsourced overseas).
William
Yep. Although none are quite 200 years old yet, the oldest things at my house fall into pretty much those categories:
- ceramic milk jug which belonged to my great grandfather, ~1850 --- my daughter keeps it in her room and uses it to hold a flag
- 2 volume edition of a translation of Flavius Josephus' _History of the Treasures and Antiquities of the Jews_ roughly the same time frame --- in rough shape, but not valuable enough to justify restoration or re-binding (yet)
- an old cast iron reel lawn mower which belonged to my grandparents from 1927--- needs a new cutting blade (which unlike the one my wife and I purchased when we married is bolted, not riveted, so can be replaced), but I've already replaced the handle (branch from a crepe myrtle in our garden which my wife trimmed) and the roller (a pair of nested plastic pipes, one found in a parking lot, the other left over from adding a pipe to the T&P valve on our hot water heater). I use it to cut our grass this past summer and will again next.
I fully expect all of the above to last for a very long time and make and pass the 200 year mark.
William
Well,there is GNUstep. http://www.gnustep.org/
At least one commercial app for Mac OS X is using it to get a Windows version, Nova Mind:
http://www.nova-mind.com/
William
(who is still pretty miffed that Apple had to cave in to Adobe and Microsoft et. al., so that instead of Rhapsody w/ Yellow Box, we got Mac OS X w/ Carbon --- I'd give my interest in Hell to get back all the time I've wasted at work using foetid Carbon apps)
Only ``Shadout'' was a title I believe --- everyone calls her ``Mapes'' so I think that seem to've been her name.
My thanks to chgros for the correction (it was ``hunter-seeker'' not ``hunter-killer'')
William
In the original _Dune_, the young Paul Atreides is threatened by a ``Hunter Killer'', a small, repulsor-driven device directed by remote control which would ``burrow through his flesh'' if it managed to successfully attack him. (He grabs it when it attacks the housekeeper, the ``Shadout Mapes'' who is sent to summon him and smashes its nose against the wall).
William
Okay, setting aside worthiness or difficulties of the OLPC project[1], what other technological device could really help people in such straits then?
A while ago, I suggested a modular ``Safety core'' which would be a 10 x 10 foot cube which would contain solar cells, a water purifier, a pedal-powered generator, lights, radio, hydroponic garden (to at least provide for vitamin C needs), sleeping facilities a composting toilet and sink and water fountain and a pantry w/ say a 6 week supply of food staples and an assortment of seeds and gardening tools --- drop one off per family in a disaster area and one could be certain that each family would have food, shelter and security --- the question is, could they be produced affordably enough to make it feasible?
Or, how about a smaller cube which was just a hydroponic garden which could also generate electricity and condense water from the air?
Or perhaps Heifer International has the right idea?
http://www.heifer.org/
William
1 - I think it's a worthy idea so long as it doesn't detract from funds for immunization and basic medical care &c.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to go the Linux route, 'cause I'm not willing to give up RitePen, so I'm running Windows 2000, which at least is reasonably tolerable compared to 98 or XP.
William
I _really_ wish Apple would work out more licensing options --- if they're not going to make a replacement for my Newton MessagePad, the least they could do would be to allow licensing Mac OS X for use on hardware which doesn't compete w/ their products.
As much as I like my NeXT Cube at home, and Mac OS X at work or on my wife's Powerbook, I'm simply not willing to give up the flexibility of having a tablet computer w/ integrated graphics tablet capability (I currently use a Fujitsu Stylistic), or to go back to schlepping a graphics tablet around w/ my laptop as I did before I got my NCR-3125.
William
(who really wishes that there was a better handwriting recognition system for Linux than xscribble)
Sad.
I've always wondered how the assemblage of the kits was done --- very, very good QA if it's done wholly by hand.
It really seems to me that it begs to have a fully automated system of one really long line and a series of dispensing robots putting one brick at a time into the box --- while it might be hard to amortize, you could jump start it by setting it up for just the smallest sets, doing a timetable of shifts of stocking different parts and running boxes through multiple times to fill the larger sets.
William
Old R&D doesn't cover the cost of replacing a mold before it wears out, or of tossing bricks back ino the recycle bin which don't meet their incredibly close tolerances.
William
Yes, after all, everyone knows it's the policeman's fault when he pulls over a person who's speeding, or arrests someone breaking the law.
North Korea has never bargained in good faith and it's way past time they were held accountable for this.
William
LOL!
There's an old saying, ``The world would be a better place if ignorance and stupidity were not mere contagious, but also fatal diseases.'' A bit more than painful though....
William
Most Tablet PC systems use Wacom digitizers through a serial connection (a few use FinePoint digitizers). There's an opensource program, TabletMagic to support such (I use it for an old ArtPad), and the source code for NeXT's Wacom tablet driver is available (I use it for an old ArtZ). I think a digitizer driver is an easily solved problem.
Licensing seems much thornier --- it saddens me Apple won't sell me a software upgrade to the copy of OpenStep 4.2 I bought from them.
William