I have seen captured video of pro quake and counterstrike players in which they reacted to something, aimed, fired, and aimed back on their original course, all within the span of a single frame. That is, the crosshair was never rendered on-screen as pointing at their target.
Bull shit. Sorry, you might have thought you saw that, but it didn't happen.
In games where precise control offers an advantage, say a shooter, a player with a mouse may have an advantage overs someone with a controller. Can the game be designed to level the playing field by introducing automatic assistance in aiming , yes, but that limits a players ability to prevail with better skills
Rifles in the real world are much less accurate than a mouse. I'm a little tired of hyper accurate mouse targeting "skills" being the centerpiece of shooter mechanics. How about some more strategy? Console games have been branching out with soldiers, planes, trucks and tanks, all of which adapt well to gamepads. Even games with 100% auto-aim can work, look at Warhawk. How can you even say "skill" when everyone has different machines running at different frame rates with different mice, and differing network latencies?
Sorry to everyone who thinks they have mad mouse "skills", but hitting a moving target at a distance _should_ be hard, and increasing movement speed to compensate for hyper accurate aim is f*cking retarded. Yah, those games are fun, but please don't say it's a level playing field, it's not, it's incredibly elitist.
Also, two men with rifles at melee distance should either result in a very short gunfight or a brawl if they are both out of ammo; not a prolonged gunfight. *sigh* starts making own game...
Balancing some cross platform games may require too many compromises to make it fair across platforms.
I agree. Same game with three wildly different input devices is going to suck badly at two of them regardless of mouse/kb/touch/gamepad etc.
In what kind of scenario would you have access to the PSU of the server you attacked? Private key servers should not be directly accessible after all.
Uh, like the scenario where you're a bank's IT admin and you're trying to steal PIN encrypting keys? BTW, you should require direct access to load or change keys if you know what's good for you.
Hardware crypto devices already tackle these problems, this research is further justification for them.
IMHO, any framework that is accessible is by default public.
What's the problem honoring someone's logical distinction between things they have committed to maintaining vs. things they have not and will remove you from their store if you depend on it not changing? We're talking stability here, not security. Lets please not introduce more access controls to protect the stupid.
How else do you explain it? If Apple did not care about the function it would leave the app's as they were, if it did care about the function it would include it in the public frameworks?
Function is the common denominator in the revoked applications, to try and say it they were retroactively revoked due to some QA seems absurd due to the fact that only applications with a specific function were targeted . It seems failing to make that particular assumption is like not being able to put two and two together (be careful with Occam's razor, it's sharp).
You don't seem to understand WHY programming interfaces are labeled public and private, or stable and unstable. If they cared about the functionality, they could whip up a technical means of restricting access. Private interfaces are private because they might not be formally documented, designed or committed to. What's private now might be made public later if there is enough demand for it and the design is solid. If they liked the design of it, it would probably already be a public interface though...
I don't know why Apple isn't picking these things up sooner, maybe they know but revoke apps only when a particular interface is about to change? It doesn't matter how they do it, using private/unstable interfaces is gamble any way you cut it.
What do you tell the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when your "network security" policies keep him from communicating with his troops in the manner of his choosing?
It's our GD military, and he should be communicating through official messaging systems, over trusted communications channels, or in person, sir.
What do you tell the grunt on the ground who can't get to his base's "official" Facebook page for no other reason than, "Well, those are the rules."
Yah, a grunt would look for a base's "official" facebook page, wouldn't he? Probably run any little activex/flash/java/click yes to all prompts etc too. POG here..;)
"Well, those are the rules."
That is EXACTLY what you say, ESPECIALLY to a grunt! Same silly answer I got for "Why do I have to wear a collared shirt, belt, and socks with shorts and open sandals?" You deal with that crap in the military.
Little is stopping a unit's IT shop from throwing up a Confluence or [insert favorite wiki/portal software] site on the NIPRNET (foo.blah.mil) for people to go nuts blogging in a secure manner. Besides, you don't want to encourage anyone with any sort of security clearance at all to blab about technical details of their job - even in meatspace.
This is a bad idea for the military, I wonder if the NOCs will be compelled to open access or left for them to decide.
Most Americans live in metropolitan areas and are dozens of miles away from the nearest small family farm. To someone living in a metro area like D.C., going out to a family farm is easily a two- or three-hour round trip.
It takes about two hours or more to drive from Dulles (DC's satellite airport in No VA) one-way to DC:P I'd be amazed if there was a farm within 2 hours one-way from DC with nobody else on the road. Farm with beef cattle anyway, not just horses and a truck with farm plates.
> When will open source folks understand that older version support, especially for server oriented things is a big deal?
LOL Debian gets it perfectly. So "open source folks" is too broad a definition.
That's not fair. The F/OSS spectrum is composed of free software, open source software, and Linux software. Almost everything derogatory said of free/open source software can be blamed on last one, which Debian is not a part of. It's only confusing because Debian uses the Linux kernel.
I mean, if the idea of taking the Linux out of your "Linux system" and replacing it with something else bothers you emotionally, you are not really in the first two camps; you are a freetard.
I typically agree with that statement, but I don't think it applies here. There are several problems with in email in this case. The person would have to load the email application, select who to send it to (or a group), type the message, and hope that one of the recipients would know how to help.
A Facebook update has many of the same properties, except it is broadcast to all friends of the person automatically. That is a much larger pool of people who would know what to do or who to contact.
I suppose, in networking terms, it is a broadcast message instead of unicast or multicast. And an SOS should really be a broadcast message. So, I think it is an correct use of the medium.
Ugggh..
A long, long time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth... high priests used "directory services" to communicate with the public and spread their message. Legend has it that common folk would even use them to hunt for potential mates. Lists of people they communicated with frequently were recorded on stone Buddy Lists. We also know from fossil records that large groups of netizens would congregate in "chat rooms" and discuss named topics. The impressive stone Buddy List is comparable to cellphone address books discovered thousands of days later, in the late portaphonic period.
We are truly blessed with today's smartphone facebook technology. With seconds to live, dwindling supply of electrons, and Internet access, you can post an SOS to an Internet site to be seen by dozens of people feigning interest in your social life - a feat that could take minutes with older cellphone address books, using only 90% of the electrons an electronic mail would take. Its also way cooler than dirt old call emergency services over copper line methods from the pre-portaphonic copper age.
Seriously, I never understood the whole "you have to spend money to save money" mentality that so many people have. When you spend money that you don't need to spend, that's a loss in my book, even if the discount is 99%.
That saying doesn't mean buying things you don't need saves you money.
value per dollar per dollar is sort of a bell curve. This applies to maaaaaaany, many things.
Oh gawd. That ad was based around a lame, confusing reference to a certain novel -- a novel that the makers obviously had not read. It doesn't make sense to anybody who doesn't already think that Apple products are Destined to Save the World. Anybody who thinks this is "best ever" needs to get out more.
What was the computing industry like back then? I've always wanted to hear from someone familiar with the industry at the time to explain what that ad was getting at.
Also, as far as bunnyhopping, that is an artifact introduced in the QuakeWorld engine with its predictive networking model. In classic NetQuake (the original IP quake protocol), bunnyhopping had no effect.
That doesn't make sense. The prediction is done by the client, and it is not authoritative, only a guess. You might be thinking one mod vs. another, or maybe the client side prediction enabled you to time a rocket jump properly because it is hard as sh*t to do on a modem with 300ms latency and no client side tricks.
Also, you're much better off going for the insta CQC knife kill than pulling out a pistol in any video game. You know, because knife fights are quick and clean, but handguns take forever.
I don't think you're remembering correctly. Decent and Duke Nukem 3D sucked ass with a mouse. Keyboard was king back then, but the later half of Quake's lifetime was ruled by mice. I'll even posit that the mouse didn't take off in Quake, but in QuakeWorld.
In Decent, you had to manhandle a dozen keys to rotate and strafe on all axes. All the mouse was good for was pulling off a steady, long distance shot, hardly a common event in that game. All three of these were DOS games, and in those, the mouse never felt right. The speed and acceleration were always different in each, and bad. There were probably more gamepads and joysticks involved with gaming then mice.
Duke Nukem 3D had a really skewed POV when you looked up and down, and was obviously not meant to be played zipping around on that axis like a modern 3D game. It felt like it was there only so they could say they did it.
Quake did not have wasd bound to movement functions, and the left and right arrow keys turned, not strafed. You had to do +mouselook in the console to look up and down with a mouse, and then explicitly turn off vertical auto aim on top of that. It was certainly designed to be played with no more than a keyboard, out the box.
It is entirely possible (and common!) for the menu bar that you see to not be related to the window that 'appears' to be active (that is, the one taking up the majority of the screen and that is atop other windows). Specifically Finder and an open application can be confused. Trying to talk my Actual Mom(tm) through the necessary clicks to perform some action is an exercise often filled with "No, that's the Finder menu. Click back on your Safari window first, then click the menu."
You're right, that has got me before too. I suppose this is why the first menu item after the apple in the top left is the application name. My eyes don't automatically track to the top left of the screen though. That must have made a lot more sense when GUIs were young and users related a screen to a sheet of paper? Or maybe wide screens are discouraging that behavior.
I think making Finder's "Go" menu a permanent fixture of the menu bar would go a long ways to address these problems. I love the Places menu on my OpenSolaris Gnome desktop, though I'm not sure if that's a Gnome or distro thing. They could fairly safely remove the "clicking desktop goes to Finder menu" functionality if they did that. Then you'd have to actually have a Finder window up to get the normal menu.
A visual indication of the active window when the menu bar is interacted with might also help. Another part of the problem is that the only part of a window that goes inactive/active are the UI widgets and backgrounds that are pretty darned sparse in OS X. It's not as big a problem on other systems with more window trim, but it will be everyone's problem as displays get bigger. There's got to be a better way to handle 'active' windows.
On Windows and Linux (KDE, Gnome...I can't speak for any other set up as I havn't used them. I'm pretty sure Xfce acts the same way though) you can scale windows from any edge or corner, but not on OS X. There seems to be no logical reason for this, and it causes problems if the scaling corner has been moved off-screen or underneath the dock. This is admitedly a minor gripe, but none the less present
I understand the issue of the little resizing tab possibly being off screen, but the logical reason for not allowing other corners ad edges to be grabbed is that there is no window borders or dressings other than the tab in the lower right corner. They could add window borders or more corner doodads, but the one on the lower right fits right under commonly used vertical scroll bar widgets and keeps the interface clean. Upper left is off limits, up right is a possibility, and I'm not sure what the implications of sticking a widget in the lower left would be. Anyway, it might not be the best, but the reasoning is pretty clear.
The menus for an application over-write the menus for the OS. Other than the Apple menu at the end, you either have the applications menus or the systems menus. On Windows, KDE and Gnome the applications menus are tied to the window, so not only can you use both system and application menus, but the menus are also visually tied to the application, giving a more obvious link to application functions
The Apple icon IS a system menu, but what you might be referring to is Finder's menu that you get when a Finder window is active, or you click on your desktop. For those who don't know, Finder is a file browser, like Explorer in Windows or Nautilus in Gnome. In OS X, the file browser is treated like any other application except that your desktop is also a Finder window of sorts. This is identical to Explorer in Windows, and pretty damned close to Nautilus aside from the 'Places' menu. I do wish Finder's 'Go' menu had a permanent placement on the menu bar next to 'Window' and 'Help'! How does collocating menu bars with windows visually tie functionality to an application? You still have to click on a menu to discover it's functionality, which on any of the systems you've mentioned changes window focus and activates a different window, closing the current menu you have open. IF there was a windowing system that allowed you to keep open multiple menu's from different apps, maybe you'd be onto something, but the benefits of such a system are not immediately obvious, and I'm not aware of any that behave that way. So, if you can't use more than at a time, what use is it to display all those menu bars at once?
The dock, to me, seems pretty broken. It is both an application launcher and task manager. Open apps have a little light under them to show that they are active. Other than that there is no visual identification for which apps are running and which aren't. Second, it gets in the way - it is all too easy to activate by accident, especially when the zoom animation is switched on. This also isn't helped by the fact that in between the icons is empty space, rather than a colid (or even transparent) bar - areas where you would expect to not activate the dock do. On Windows you have neither problem - running programs appear in the task-bar, and launcher icons in the quick launch. There is also the start menu which provides access to every installed program (with a few exceptions). It is also clear where the task-bar starts and ends. KDE is pretty much the same in that respect, and Gnome isn't far off. (I havn't tried Win 7 yet, so it should be interesting to see what that's like). As a side note, I hate to think what the dock would be like if it allowed multiple program windows like the other OSs.
Obviously the menu bars/panels in Windows and Gnome also both manage active windows and launch applications. Neither actually manage running tasks, just active windows - I'll come back to this.
But how often do you have to spend that $29? Because despite what MSFT wants you can be just fine in Windows only buying once every 5 years or so, and the way MSFT has been you are better off. Its like this... 98 good, WinME suck, XP SP2/3 good, Vista royal suck, Windows 7 good, so Windows 8 will be a hoover vac o' suck.
That figures up to spending that $100 every 5 years or so as last I checked you can get system builders Win7 HP for $104. At $29 a pop and the faster release schedule I wouldn't be surprised if it cost more in the long run for OSX, hell you Apple guys shell out all that cash on a machine just to shell out more cash just to get a decent warranty, so why not even more for the OS?
and slightly OT, but why won't Apple guys just admit it is a Ferrari and be done with it? I have seen Apple guys tie themselves in logic knots while jumping through flaming hoops trying to prove that Apple computer gear is a "good value" when we all know its bullshit. Apple is like Ferrari--It is sleek, it is sexy, it is exotic looking, it is expensive. Why is that so hard to accept? Hell according to this article more than a third of you are clearing over 100k a year, so just be happy you have money to burn on Ferraris, okay?
You can be just fine on a Mac upgrading your software every five years too. Your point? Of course not EVERY new thing will be backwards compat through five years of software upgrades and patches, and that goes with _any_ system.
What does buying a new version of OS X every five years cost? What is your basis for assuming it costs more than whatever Windows "system builder" is every five years? Is "system builder" even a fair comparison?
Macs are built largely from the same components PCs are, the same processes, and tolerances, etc. Your Ferrari analogy fails miserably. Its more like Lincoln vs. Ford, to be honest. Macs do have a fair price for their value. People like you like to cheat and discount features you don't like/don't currently have as having no value. You can't just pick every feature from a product _you_ don't want and write the value off as $0. Even if you COULD build a car with one seat, no trunk, no floor mats, one door, and big engine, that does not invalidate the price of a fully featured car, and certainly doesn't compare. To break from cars a bit, I don't need every little doodad that came with my house, but I sure as shit paid for it all. Is my water heater a little too big for two people living here? Maybe. BFD, I'll enjoy longer showers. You can't tell someone that their stuff has no value because it doesn't to _you_, that's idiotic.
Quality, consistency, aesthetics, and support are all value adding features that geeks often mistakenly write off. You see this in software and hardware alike (amongst many other things.. like cars). What's amazing are the logic knots and flaming hoops you'll jump through to poo on things that later turn out to be successful products, then scratch your head and belittle the people who buy them because _they_ are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/
rly?
More significantly, this isn't any different from what Oracle does with Oracle Enterprise Linux either.
I have seen captured video of pro quake and counterstrike players in which they reacted to something, aimed, fired, and aimed back on their original course, all within the span of a single frame. That is, the crosshair was never rendered on-screen as pointing at their target.
Bull shit. Sorry, you might have thought you saw that, but it didn't happen.
In games where precise control offers an advantage, say a shooter, a player with a mouse may have an advantage overs someone with a controller. Can the game be designed to level the playing field by introducing automatic assistance in aiming , yes, but that limits a players ability to prevail with better skills
Rifles in the real world are much less accurate than a mouse. I'm a little tired of hyper accurate mouse targeting "skills" being the centerpiece of shooter mechanics. How about some more strategy? Console games have been branching out with soldiers, planes, trucks and tanks, all of which adapt well to gamepads. Even games with 100% auto-aim can work, look at Warhawk. How can you even say "skill" when everyone has different machines running at different frame rates with different mice, and differing network latencies?
Sorry to everyone who thinks they have mad mouse "skills", but hitting a moving target at a distance _should_ be hard, and increasing movement speed to compensate for hyper accurate aim is f*cking retarded. Yah, those games are fun, but please don't say it's a level playing field, it's not, it's incredibly elitist.
Also, two men with rifles at melee distance should either result in a very short gunfight or a brawl if they are both out of ammo; not a prolonged gunfight. *sigh* starts making own game...
Balancing some cross platform games may require too many compromises to make it fair across platforms.
I agree.
Same game with three wildly different input devices is going to suck badly at two of them regardless of mouse/kb/touch/gamepad etc.
Which proves parents point, if the key is stored in drive, why go this length to fetch it since you simply can read it off the drive...
HW crypto appliances (a glorified PC server booting off a CD with a black box PCI card) don't have harddrives.
A hand rolled software crypto server might not either, and probably isn't anal about input voltages unlike the expensive appliance.
The point is cheaping out on your crypto system has measurable risks.
In what kind of scenario would you have access to the PSU of the server you attacked? Private key servers should not be directly accessible after all.
Uh, like the scenario where you're a bank's IT admin and you're trying to steal PIN encrypting keys?
BTW, you should require direct access to load or change keys if you know what's good for you.
Hardware crypto devices already tackle these problems, this research is further justification for them.
Um, if they have physical access to the computer (in order to monkey with the power), why would it be considered secure?
Because it's in a locked sheet metal box that makes every attempt to purge sensitive key material if tempering is detected?
IMHO, any framework that is accessible is by default public.
What's the problem honoring someone's logical distinction between things they have committed to maintaining vs. things they have not and will remove you from their store if you depend on it not changing? We're talking stability here, not security. Lets please not introduce more access controls to protect the stupid.
How else do you explain it? If Apple did not care about the function it would leave the app's as they were, if it did care about the function it would include it in the public frameworks?
Function is the common denominator in the revoked applications, to try and say it they were retroactively revoked due to some QA seems absurd due to the fact that only applications with a specific function were targeted . It seems failing to make that particular assumption is like not being able to put two and two together (be careful with Occam's razor, it's sharp).
You don't seem to understand WHY programming interfaces are labeled public and private, or stable and unstable.
If they cared about the functionality, they could whip up a technical means of restricting access. Private interfaces are private because they might not be formally documented, designed or committed to. What's private now might be made public later if there is enough demand for it and the design is solid. If they liked the design of it, it would probably already be a public interface though...
I don't know why Apple isn't picking these things up sooner, maybe they know but revoke apps only when a particular interface is about to change?
It doesn't matter how they do it, using private/unstable interfaces is gamble any way you cut it.
I don't get it, were you trying to prove his point?
What do you tell the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when your "network security" policies keep him from communicating with his troops in the manner of his choosing?
It's our GD military, and he should be communicating through official messaging systems, over trusted communications channels, or in person, sir.
What do you tell the grunt on the ground who can't get to his base's "official" Facebook page for no other reason than, "Well, those are the rules."
Yah, a grunt would look for a base's "official" facebook page, wouldn't he? Probably run any little activex/flash/java/click yes to all prompts etc too. POG here.. ;)
"Well, those are the rules."
That is EXACTLY what you say, ESPECIALLY to a grunt! Same silly answer I got for "Why do I have to wear a collared shirt, belt, and socks with shorts and open sandals?" You deal with that crap in the military.
Little is stopping a unit's IT shop from throwing up a Confluence or [insert favorite wiki/portal software] site on the NIPRNET (foo.blah.mil) for people to go nuts blogging in a secure manner. Besides, you don't want to encourage anyone with any sort of security clearance at all to blab about technical details of their job - even in meatspace.
This is a bad idea for the military, I wonder if the NOCs will be compelled to open access or left for them to decide.
We're talking about access from the NIPRNET, not the right of military members to use social networking sites, they could always do that.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for preventing access to social networking sites among other things, from private networks.
Most Americans live in metropolitan areas and are dozens of miles away from the nearest small family farm. To someone living in a metro area like D.C., going out to a family farm is easily a two- or three-hour round trip.
It takes about two hours or more to drive from Dulles (DC's satellite airport in No VA) one-way to DC :P
I'd be amazed if there was a farm within 2 hours one-way from DC with nobody else on the road. Farm with beef cattle anyway, not just horses and a truck with farm plates.
> When will open source folks understand that older version support, especially for server oriented things is a big deal?
LOL
Debian gets it perfectly. So "open source folks" is too broad a definition.
That's not fair. The F/OSS spectrum is composed of free software, open source software, and Linux software. Almost everything derogatory said of free/open source software can be blamed on last one, which Debian is not a part of. It's only confusing because Debian uses the Linux kernel.
I mean, if the idea of taking the Linux out of your "Linux system" and replacing it with something else bothers you emotionally, you are not really in the first two camps; you are a freetard.
This is coming from a former freetard.
Why not just use one big-ass flatscreen TV?
Less pixels is better, um right?
If you sit at a reasonable distance, yes?
Head phones.
I typically agree with that statement, but I don't think it applies here. There are several problems with in email in this case. The person would have to load the email application, select who to send it to (or a group), type the message, and hope that one of the recipients would know how to help.
A Facebook update has many of the same properties, except it is broadcast to all friends of the person automatically. That is a much larger pool of people who would know what to do or who to contact.
I suppose, in networking terms, it is a broadcast message instead of unicast or multicast. And an SOS should really be a broadcast message. So, I think it is an correct use of the medium.
Ugggh..
A long, long time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth... high priests used "directory services" to communicate with the public and spread their message. Legend has it that common folk would even use them to hunt for potential mates. Lists of people they communicated with frequently were recorded on stone Buddy Lists. We also know from fossil records that large groups of netizens would congregate in "chat rooms" and discuss named topics. The impressive stone Buddy List is comparable to cellphone address books discovered thousands of days later, in the late portaphonic period.
We are truly blessed with today's smartphone facebook technology. With seconds to live, dwindling supply of electrons, and Internet access, you can post an SOS to an Internet site to be seen by dozens of people feigning interest in your social life - a feat that could take minutes with older cellphone address books, using only 90% of the electrons an electronic mail would take. Its also way cooler than dirt old call emergency services over copper line methods from the pre-portaphonic copper age.
Seriously, I never understood the whole "you have to spend money to save money" mentality that so many people have. When you spend money that you don't need to spend, that's a loss in my book, even if the discount is 99%.
That saying doesn't mean buying things you don't need saves you money.
value per dollar per dollar is sort of a bell curve. This applies to maaaaaaany, many things.
Oh gawd. That ad was based around a lame, confusing reference to a certain novel -- a novel that the makers obviously had not read. It doesn't make sense to anybody who doesn't already think that Apple products are Destined to Save the World. Anybody who thinks this is "best ever" needs to get out more.
What was the computing industry like back then? I've always wanted to hear from someone familiar with the industry at the time to explain what that ad was getting at.
You mean get out less, right?
Also, as far as bunnyhopping, that is an artifact introduced in the QuakeWorld engine with its predictive networking model. In classic NetQuake (the original IP quake protocol), bunnyhopping had no effect.
That doesn't make sense. The prediction is done by the client, and it is not authoritative, only a guess. You might be thinking one mod vs. another, or maybe the client side prediction enabled you to time a rocket jump properly because it is hard as sh*t to do on a modem with 300ms latency and no client side tricks.
Also, you're much better off going for the insta CQC knife kill than pulling out a pistol in any video game. You know, because knife fights are quick and clean, but handguns take forever.
I don't think you're remembering correctly. Decent and Duke Nukem 3D sucked ass with a mouse. Keyboard was king back then, but the later half of Quake's lifetime was ruled by mice. I'll even posit that the mouse didn't take off in Quake, but in QuakeWorld.
In Decent, you had to manhandle a dozen keys to rotate and strafe on all axes. All the mouse was good for was pulling off a steady, long distance shot, hardly a common event in that game. All three of these were DOS games, and in those, the mouse never felt right. The speed and acceleration were always different in each, and bad. There were probably more gamepads and joysticks involved with gaming then mice.
Duke Nukem 3D had a really skewed POV when you looked up and down, and was obviously not meant to be played zipping around on that axis like a modern 3D game. It felt like it was there only so they could say they did it.
Quake did not have wasd bound to movement functions, and the left and right arrow keys turned, not strafed. You had to do +mouselook in the console to look up and down with a mouse, and then explicitly turn off vertical auto aim on top of that. It was certainly designed to be played with no more than a keyboard, out the box.
Ahhh.... the good ol days.
It is entirely possible (and common!) for the menu bar that you see to not be related to the window that 'appears' to be active (that is, the one taking up the majority of the screen and that is atop other windows). Specifically Finder and an open application can be confused. Trying to talk my Actual Mom(tm) through the necessary clicks to perform some action is an exercise often filled with "No, that's the Finder menu. Click back on your Safari window first, then click the menu."
You're right, that has got me before too. I suppose this is why the first menu item after the apple in the top left is the application name. My eyes don't automatically track to the top left of the screen though. That must have made a lot more sense when GUIs were young and users related a screen to a sheet of paper? Or maybe wide screens are discouraging that behavior.
I think making Finder's "Go" menu a permanent fixture of the menu bar would go a long ways to address these problems. I love the Places menu on my OpenSolaris Gnome desktop, though I'm not sure if that's a Gnome or distro thing. They could fairly safely remove the "clicking desktop goes to Finder menu" functionality if they did that. Then you'd have to actually have a Finder window up to get the normal menu.
A visual indication of the active window when the menu bar is interacted with might also help. Another part of the problem is that the only part of a window that goes inactive/active are the UI widgets and backgrounds that are pretty darned sparse in OS X. It's not as big a problem on other systems with more window trim, but it will be everyone's problem as displays get bigger. There's got to be a better way to handle 'active' windows.
On Windows and Linux (KDE, Gnome...I can't speak for any other set up as I havn't used them. I'm pretty sure Xfce acts the same way though) you can scale windows from any edge or corner, but not on OS X. There seems to be no logical reason for this, and it causes problems if the scaling corner has been moved off-screen or underneath the dock. This is admitedly a minor gripe, but none the less present
I understand the issue of the little resizing tab possibly being off screen, but the logical reason for not allowing other corners ad edges to be grabbed is that there is no window borders or dressings other than the tab in the lower right corner. They could add window borders or more corner doodads, but the one on the lower right fits right under commonly used vertical scroll bar widgets and keeps the interface clean. Upper left is off limits, up right is a possibility, and I'm not sure what the implications of sticking a widget in the lower left would be. Anyway, it might not be the best, but the reasoning is pretty clear.
The menus for an application over-write the menus for the OS. Other than the Apple menu at the end, you either have the applications menus or the systems menus. On Windows, KDE and Gnome the applications menus are tied to the window, so not only can you use both system and application menus, but the menus are also visually tied to the application, giving a more obvious link to application functions
The Apple icon IS a system menu, but what you might be referring to is Finder's menu that you get when a Finder window is active, or you click on your desktop. For those who don't know, Finder is a file browser, like Explorer in Windows or Nautilus in Gnome. In OS X, the file browser is treated like any other application except that your desktop is also a Finder window of sorts. This is identical to Explorer in Windows, and pretty damned close to Nautilus aside from the 'Places' menu. I do wish Finder's 'Go' menu had a permanent placement on the menu bar next to 'Window' and 'Help'!
How does collocating menu bars with windows visually tie functionality to an application? You still have to click on a menu to discover it's functionality, which on any of the systems you've mentioned changes window focus and activates a different window, closing the current menu you have open. IF there was a windowing system that allowed you to keep open multiple menu's from different apps, maybe you'd be onto something, but the benefits of such a system are not immediately obvious, and I'm not aware of any that behave that way. So, if you can't use more than at a time, what use is it to display all those menu bars at once?
The dock, to me, seems pretty broken. It is both an application launcher and task manager. Open apps have a little light under them to show that they are active. Other than that there is no visual identification for which apps are running and which aren't. Second, it gets in the way - it is all too easy to activate by accident, especially when the zoom animation is switched on. This also isn't helped by the fact that in between the icons is empty space, rather than a colid (or even transparent) bar - areas where you would expect to not activate the dock do. On Windows you have neither problem - running programs appear in the task-bar, and launcher icons in the quick launch. There is also the start menu which provides access to every installed program (with a few exceptions). It is also clear where the task-bar starts and ends. KDE is pretty much the same in that respect, and Gnome isn't far off. (I havn't tried Win 7 yet, so it should be interesting to see what that's like). As a side note, I hate to think what the dock would be like if it allowed multiple program windows like the other OSs.
Obviously the menu bars/panels in Windows and Gnome also both manage active windows and launch applications. Neither actually manage running tasks, just active windows - I'll come back to this.
But how often do you have to spend that $29? Because despite what MSFT wants you can be just fine in Windows only buying once every 5 years or so, and the way MSFT has been you are better off. Its like this... 98 good, WinME suck, XP SP2/3 good, Vista royal suck, Windows 7 good, so Windows 8 will be a hoover vac o' suck.
That figures up to spending that $100 every 5 years or so as last I checked you can get system builders Win7 HP for $104. At $29 a pop and the faster release schedule I wouldn't be surprised if it cost more in the long run for OSX, hell you Apple guys shell out all that cash on a machine just to shell out more cash just to get a decent warranty, so why not even more for the OS?
and slightly OT, but why won't Apple guys just admit it is a Ferrari and be done with it? I have seen Apple guys tie themselves in logic knots while jumping through flaming hoops trying to prove that Apple computer gear is a "good value" when we all know its bullshit. Apple is like Ferrari--It is sleek, it is sexy, it is exotic looking, it is expensive. Why is that so hard to accept? Hell according to this article more than a third of you are clearing over 100k a year, so just be happy you have money to burn on Ferraris, okay?
You can be just fine on a Mac upgrading your software every five years too. Your point? Of course not EVERY new thing will be backwards compat through five years of software upgrades and patches, and that goes with _any_ system.
What does buying a new version of OS X every five years cost? What is your basis for assuming it costs more than whatever Windows "system builder" is every five years? Is "system builder" even a fair comparison?
Macs are built largely from the same components PCs are, the same processes, and tolerances, etc. Your Ferrari analogy fails miserably.
Its more like Lincoln vs. Ford, to be honest. Macs do have a fair price for their value. People like you like to cheat and discount features you don't like/don't currently have as having no value. You can't just pick every feature from a product _you_ don't want and write the value off as $0. Even if you COULD build a car with one seat, no trunk, no floor mats, one door, and big engine, that does not invalidate the price of a fully featured car, and certainly doesn't compare. To break from cars a bit, I don't need every little doodad that came with my house, but I sure as shit paid for it all. Is my water heater a little too big for two people living here? Maybe. BFD, I'll enjoy longer showers. You can't tell someone that their stuff has no value because it doesn't to _you_, that's idiotic.
Quality, consistency, aesthetics, and support are all value adding features that geeks often mistakenly write off. You see this in software and hardware alike (amongst many other things.. like cars). What's amazing are the logic knots and flaming hoops you'll jump through to poo on things that later turn out to be successful products, then scratch your head and belittle the people who buy them because _they_ are wrong.