I made the switch recently - bought a Powerbook after years of working with Windows and some dinking around on Linux. After the hype, I was expecting great things from OS X. While I deffinitly appreciate its Unix functionality, I have been deeply dissapointed by the GUI. It pains me to say that Windows still makes the best desktop out there.
My biggest complaint, naturally, is the lack of a second mouse button. Sure Control + click generally works, but it requires a second hand, and, on many applications, the resulting context menu is often very much lacking. I guess its because Mac developers aren't expecting people to use a second mouse button - or the Contrh + click hack - so they don't bother putting anything usefull in the context menus. In Safari, if you control-click, you get 4 options - as compared to more than a dozen if you right click in either Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows. Some folks will try to sell you on the lack of options being a feature - simplicity, clean interface, or whatever - but I don't buy it. I want to be able to right click on an image in my browser and select "Properties" and there are the image properties. That doesn't work on Safari, which is one of the reasons its a poor browser to use as a development tool.
Another thing I dislike about the Macintosh GUI is the inability to maximize windows. You can't do it. They have one of those little gumdrop buttons on their windows that makes it look like you should be able to maximize a window, but it doesn't work. It just makes it bigger, according to whatever arbitrary size was picked by the developer of the application. Mac lovers will tell you otherwise, that maximizing windows is a bad thing, because it breaks up the metaphoracle desktop interface chi, or whatever. These people are delusional. I've used Windows long enough to understand that maximizing a window is the best way to not be visually distracted by desktop background clutter. Moreover, not being able to maximize a window makes it too easy - especially when using a notebook track pad - to accidentally click on one of the background windows and have it pop up in you face unexpectedly, obscuring whatever it was you were trying to do. That pisses me off. A similar problem occurs when you are trying to scroll a window using OS X's scroll bars - which are pretty, but way too thin. If you miss the scroll bar by two pixels, you wind up clicking on the background window - and it pops up in your face, causing you to swear audibly while trying to find your window again. Maybe its my fault for being uncoordinated, I don't have that problem when using maximized windows.
Another problem - the Finder is just weak in comparison to Windows Explorer or even the Konqueror on KDE. Mind you - the default Windows Explorer sucks pretty hard, but if you figure out how to configure it right, it can be a strong and usefull tool. I havn't figured out how to configure the finder in to something usefull yet - it still won't show me a decent file-tree structure, and I find myself having to guess at what subdirectory I'm in. Maybe there is a better way I could be using it, I don't know, but I thought the whole point of the Mac user interface was that it was supposed to be easy.
And it is pretty easy - if you want to do things exactly the way the Mac interface designers expect you to. Trouble is, they designed it with the expectation that you are a non-computer savy grandmother or art student, or something like that. But power users who switched for the unix goodies are left high and dry by the limitations of the user interface. I'm still awaiting a computer that will excell in both the desktop AND command line interfaces. OS X ain't it.
As far as I can tell, Java running SWT is still pretty poor on the desktop. I use Eclipse, and there are many things I like about it, but performance is not one of them. In addition to general slowness, it still feels the need to hang for 15 seconds every 10 minutes or so, I think to take care of garbage collection or something. Thats the kind of thing that should no longer be acceptable in a modern GUI.
A pilot not having access to the plane outside of the cockpit can be dangerous for other reasons. If something were to go wrong, and the pilot need to go into the cabin to get a visual assesment, of, say, the flaps on the wing... it would be a decidedly bad idea to preven him from having this access.
Funny, I had Geico and switched to Progressive, and my premiums dropped $300 / year. So Progressive will save you money over Geicho which will save you money over State Farm, which will save you money over Progressive. My head is going to explode.
We did that with the disposable cameras, and wound up with a plethora of really crappy photos of the reception. The problem was that anyone who knows enough about photography to take good pictures has already brought their own camera, so the disposable cameras end up in the hands of people who don't understand stuff like focus, good lighting, basic composition, and why you shouldn't let your finger cover the lense when taking a picture.
A large percentage the cameras ended up in the hands of various kids, who use them to take pictures of other kids making stupid faces. It sucks to pay $12 to develop 24 shots of someone's 9 year old nephew trying to take pictures up someone else's nose.
>Hell, in 1789, Congress passed a law that said you couldn't say anything bad about the government! The sedition act of 1789, was passed and sunseted (is that a word?) in 1801.
Not to be a history nerd or anything, but the Alien and Sedition acts were passed in 1798, not 1789. They were indeed sunsetted in 1801 (on the last day of the Adams Administration), though prior to that they were basically nullified by the Virgina and Kentucky Resolutions, passed at the behest of the seditionist Vice President, Thomas Jefferson.
Too bad Virginia and Kentucky can't nullify the PATRIOT Act too.
Agreed. In addition, Google ads provide a convienient way to tip a webmaster if you appreciate the content offered on a page. Just click on an add, open it up in a background tab, have it load the page and kill it. It takes you 4 seconds, and puts a little bit of money in the pocket of the person who went to the trouble of making a page useful for you in the first place.
This should be prevented by anti-trust laws. The FCC doesn't allow the RIAA to jerk radio stations around with these kind of royalty-pricing shennagins, so why can they do it to Apple?
You had me until you mentioned "the most dividing war in the history of this country." Regardless of how you feel about the Iraq War - or the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Culture, or what have you - the most dividing war in the history of this country, hands down, was the Civil War.
But I do agree that democrats and republicans both suck.
I used to work for EMC.... This wasn't my division, but if I recall, their preferred backup strategy is not to keep you EMC boxes in the same warehouse, but to have you buy two machines, keep them in geographically separate locations, and have them mirror each other over a Wide Area Network. They have some pretty tight functionality built in to handle the mirroring in real time... its features like that which make EMC boxes more than just a bunch of disks.
Its also a clever way of getting you to spend twice as much money on their products. They put the "Redundant" back in RAID.
This annoys the crap out of me... especially in regards to localhost. If I'm testing a web server on my local machine, and I'm screwing with the configurations so for whatever reason the localhost is down.... and I type in "localhost"... I would like to get an error message. Instead, Firebird I get directed to the extremely obnoxious website at http://localhost.net.au - which is a shill for search engine optimization software. I don't want to go to this stupid site, but it happens to be the number one site for a search on localhost for google. I guess their SEO software works....
If we have to be redirected - and I don't like THAT at all - I'd much prefer to go to http://www.localhost.com, which at least has a service to automatically redirect you back to 127.0.0.1.
One way to solve this, I think, is to knock the parasitic localhost.net.au from its top ranking for google "localhost" searches. To that end, please indulge me for a little bit of civic minded google bombing... localhostlocalhostlocalhostlocalhostlocalhost.
Mind you, I'm not associated with http://www.localhost.com, but I certainly appreciate their service!
Now if Microsoft was making a killing on selling certificates, there might be a conflict of interest there given their effective monopoly
Actually, Microsoft makes its killing by charging Verisign through the nose to have its certificate authority placed on the "trusted authorities" list that gets distributed with every copy of Internet Explorer. Verisign is only to happy to pay, as it keeps out the competition whilst allowing Verisign to pass on the cost to its customers.
I would love to see the Federal Trade Commission start granting digital certificates for little or no cost. Governments are already responsible for public security, and for granting identification documents such as social security cards and drivers' licenses, and for communications services such as running the postal service and opperating the Do Not Call Registry... why don't they do these things in the digital realm as well?
Mind you, I'm not calling for government regulation of the Internet... and certainly there is no way that government certificates should be in any way a requirement for opperating a secure website. There must still be commercial options available - and I'm sure they would become a lot more reasonably priced in the face of public competition. But if govenments are going to start taxing the Net (which they will), then certifying SSL certificates is the kind of service that they should be giving people in return.
Having worked with a school computer network in Tanzania, I can warn you of some difficulties you might encounter.
Shipping: It is very expensive and very slow to send equipment to Africa. Moreover, you can't do things like run out for more ethernet cable if you find yourself short. Anything you order from the west can be expected to take months to arive, and will cost a great deal of money to ship. You can also expect to pay extra to get it through customs - though since its for an educational project, they might cut you a break.
Environment: African roads are generally unpaved and therefor tend to kick up a lot of dust. Uganda is also very hot, and at times very humid. All of these factors can play havoc on computer systems. Don't expect the hardware to last as long as it would in, say, the United States. Make sure your computers are opperating in a building that is well air-conditioned, and more or less sealed from outside dust.
Electricity: Electricity in Africa tends to be unreliable - not just in the sense that the lights don't always go on, but also in that it is subject to wide variations in voltage. At my school, there was once a power surge that shorted out every computer connected to the ethernet. A powerfull UPS and good surge protection are a must.
I don't want to rain on your parade; it is a worthy project, and Africa could definiately use more computers. Just keep in mind that setting up the network itself may indeed prove to be the least of the problems you encounter.
!#/bin/python for ending in {"easier to audit.","easier to bugfix.","easier to add features to.","simply Good Stuff."}: print "Cleaner, more readable code is " + ending
I bought the Punch 3D home suite and found it to be complete and utter shite. The user interface was exeptionally limited and non intuitive, and it's overall capabilities were far less than what one ought to expect from mondern commercial software. Its like they released it before it was even half done.
My wife wanted to use it to work out the decorating for the home we are about to buy, but we found the limited and uneditable set of graphics for surfacing tiles rendered the entire excecise moot. Set aside the lack of chair rails, and the fact that they don't have a surface patern to represent a tin roof (though at the very least I should be able to create one) - the worst was that they only had a limited number of hues with which you could paint your house. There was no RBG selector, you have to select from their existing palette. Since the whole point of the excercise was to match colors of paint - and we couldn't even select the paint colors we wanted - it ended up being $58 and many hours wasted.
I didn't see anything about a %100 refund policy. Wish I had, I'd return it in a heartbeat.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats a fine solution for a desktop, but I have a laptop. I wish they would at least make it an option.
What's "inducement"?
I made the switch recently - bought a Powerbook after years of working with Windows and some dinking around on Linux. After the hype, I was expecting great things from OS X. While I deffinitly appreciate its Unix functionality, I have been deeply dissapointed by the GUI. It pains me to say that Windows still makes the best desktop out there.
My biggest complaint, naturally, is the lack of a second mouse button. Sure Control + click generally works, but it requires a second hand, and, on many applications, the resulting context menu is often very much lacking. I guess its because Mac developers aren't expecting people to use a second mouse button - or the Contrh + click hack - so they don't bother putting anything usefull in the context menus. In Safari, if you control-click, you get 4 options - as compared to more than a dozen if you right click in either Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows. Some folks will try to sell you on the lack of options being a feature - simplicity, clean interface, or whatever - but I don't buy it. I want to be able to right click on an image in my browser and select "Properties" and there are the image properties. That doesn't work on Safari, which is one of the reasons its a poor browser to use as a development tool.
Another thing I dislike about the Macintosh GUI is the inability to maximize windows. You can't do it. They have one of those little gumdrop buttons on their windows that makes it look like you should be able to maximize a window, but it doesn't work. It just makes it bigger, according to whatever arbitrary size was picked by the developer of the application. Mac lovers will tell you otherwise, that maximizing windows is a bad thing, because it breaks up the metaphoracle desktop interface chi, or whatever. These people are delusional. I've used Windows long enough to understand that maximizing a window is the best way to not be visually distracted by desktop background clutter. Moreover, not being able to maximize a window makes it too easy - especially when using a notebook track pad - to accidentally click on one of the background windows and have it pop up in you face unexpectedly, obscuring whatever it was you were trying to do. That pisses me off. A similar problem occurs when you are trying to scroll a window using OS X's scroll bars - which are pretty, but way too thin. If you miss the scroll bar by two pixels, you wind up clicking on the background window - and it pops up in your face, causing you to swear audibly while trying to find your window again. Maybe its my fault for being uncoordinated, I don't have that problem when using maximized windows.
Another problem - the Finder is just weak in comparison to Windows Explorer or even the Konqueror on KDE. Mind you - the default Windows Explorer sucks pretty hard, but if you figure out how to configure it right, it can be a strong and usefull tool. I havn't figured out how to configure the finder in to something usefull yet - it still won't show me a decent file-tree structure, and I find myself having to guess at what subdirectory I'm in. Maybe there is a better way I could be using it, I don't know, but I thought the whole point of the Mac user interface was that it was supposed to be easy.
And it is pretty easy - if you want to do things exactly the way the Mac interface designers expect you to. Trouble is, they designed it with the expectation that you are a non-computer savy grandmother or art student, or something like that. But power users who switched for the unix goodies are left high and dry by the limitations of the user interface. I'm still awaiting a computer that will excell in both the desktop AND command line interfaces. OS X ain't it.
As far as I can tell, Java running SWT is still pretty poor on the desktop. I use Eclipse, and there are many things I like about it, but performance is not one of them. In addition to general slowness, it still feels the need to hang for 15 seconds every 10 minutes or so, I think to take care of garbage collection or something. Thats the kind of thing that should no longer be acceptable in a modern GUI.
I love Python, but find its object oriented features to be lacking. Having to pass methods references to "self" just pisses me off.
A pilot not having access to the plane outside of the cockpit can be dangerous for other reasons. If something were to go wrong, and the pilot need to go into the cabin to get a visual assesment, of, say, the flaps on the wing... it would be a decidedly bad idea to preven him from having this access.
Funny, I had Geico and switched to Progressive, and my premiums dropped $300 / year. So Progressive will save you money over Geicho which will save you money over State Farm, which will save you money over Progressive. My head is going to explode.
We did that with the disposable cameras, and wound up with a plethora of really crappy photos of the reception. The problem was that anyone who knows enough about photography to take good pictures has already brought their own camera, so the disposable cameras end up in the hands of people who don't understand stuff like focus, good lighting, basic composition, and why you shouldn't let your finger cover the lense when taking a picture.
A large percentage the cameras ended up in the hands of various kids, who use them to take pictures of other kids making stupid faces. It sucks to pay $12 to develop 24 shots of someone's 9 year old nephew trying to take pictures up someone else's nose.
power, brother.
>Hell, in 1789, Congress passed a law that said you couldn't say anything bad about the government! The sedition act of 1789, was passed and sunseted (is that a word?) in 1801.
Not to be a history nerd or anything, but the Alien and Sedition acts were passed in 1798, not 1789. They were indeed sunsetted in 1801 (on the last day of the Adams Administration), though prior to that they were basically nullified by the Virgina and Kentucky Resolutions, passed at the behest of the seditionist Vice President, Thomas Jefferson.
Too bad Virginia and Kentucky can't nullify the PATRIOT Act too.
Agreed. In addition, Google ads provide a convienient way to tip a webmaster if you appreciate the content offered on a page. Just click on an add, open it up in a background tab, have it load the page and kill it. It takes you 4 seconds, and puts a little bit of money in the pocket of the person who went to the trouble of making a page useful for you in the first place.
This should be prevented by anti-trust laws. The FCC doesn't allow the RIAA to jerk radio stations around with these kind of royalty-pricing shennagins, so why can they do it to Apple?
You had me until you mentioned "the most dividing war in the history of this country." Regardless of how you feel about the Iraq War - or the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Culture, or what have you - the most dividing war in the history of this country, hands down, was the Civil War.
But I do agree that democrats and republicans both suck.
I used to work for EMC.... This wasn't my division, but if I recall, their preferred backup strategy is not to keep you EMC boxes in the same warehouse, but to have you buy two machines, keep them in geographically separate locations, and have them mirror each other over a Wide Area Network. They have some pretty tight functionality built in to handle the mirroring in real time... its features like that which make EMC boxes more than just a bunch of disks.
Its also a clever way of getting you to spend twice as much money on their products. They put the "Redundant" back in RAID.
This annoys the crap out of me... especially in regards to localhost. If I'm testing a web server on my local machine, and I'm screwing with the configurations so for whatever reason the localhost is down.... and I type in "localhost"... I would like to get an error message. Instead, Firebird I get directed to the extremely obnoxious website at http://localhost.net.au - which is a shill for search engine optimization software. I don't want to go to this stupid site, but it happens to be the number one site for a search on localhost for google. I guess their SEO software works....
If we have to be redirected - and I don't like THAT at all - I'd much prefer to go to http://www.localhost.com, which at least has a service to automatically redirect you back to 127.0.0.1.
One way to solve this, I think, is to knock the parasitic localhost.net.au from its top ranking for google "localhost" searches. To that end, please indulge me for a little bit of civic minded google bombing... localhost localhost localhost localhost localhost.
Mind you, I'm not associated with http://www.localhost.com, but I certainly appreciate their service!
One lash for every spam sent out.
Sent 10 million emails? Well, then it just gotta be 10 million licks with a cat 'o nine tails...
Bunch of Assholes
Now if Microsoft was making a killing on selling certificates, there might be a conflict of interest there given their effective monopoly
Actually, Microsoft makes its killing by charging Verisign through the nose to have its certificate authority placed on the "trusted authorities" list that gets distributed with every copy of Internet Explorer. Verisign is only to happy to pay, as it keeps out the competition whilst allowing Verisign to pass on the cost to its customers.
Or so I've heard...
I would love to see the Federal Trade Commission start granting digital certificates for little or no cost. Governments are already responsible for public security, and for granting identification documents such as social security cards and drivers' licenses, and for communications services such as running the postal service and opperating the Do Not Call Registry... why don't they do these things in the digital realm as well?
Mind you, I'm not calling for government regulation of the Internet... and certainly there is no way that government certificates should be in any way a requirement for opperating a secure website. There must still be commercial options available - and I'm sure they would become a lot more reasonably priced in the face of public competition. But if govenments are going to start taxing the Net (which they will), then certifying SSL certificates is the kind of service that they should be giving people in return.
Shipping: It is very expensive and very slow to send equipment to Africa. Moreover, you can't do things like run out for more ethernet cable if you find yourself short. Anything you order from the west can be expected to take months to arive, and will cost a great deal of money to ship. You can also expect to pay extra to get it through customs - though since its for an educational project, they might cut you a break.
Environment: African roads are generally unpaved and therefor tend to kick up a lot of dust. Uganda is also very hot, and at times very humid. All of these factors can play havoc on computer systems. Don't expect the hardware to last as long as it would in, say, the United States. Make sure your computers are opperating in a building that is well air-conditioned, and more or less sealed from outside dust.
Electricity: Electricity in Africa tends to be unreliable - not just in the sense that the lights don't always go on, but also in that it is subject to wide variations in voltage. At my school, there was once a power surge that shorted out every computer connected to the ethernet. A powerfull UPS and good surge protection are a must.
I don't want to rain on your parade; it is a worthy project, and Africa could definiately use more computers. Just keep in mind that setting up the network itself may indeed prove to be the least of the problems you encounter.
Yeah, it seems to be part of a concerted effort amongst varioius bloggers. Here is an example.
!# /bin/python
for ending in {"easier to audit.","easier to bugfix.","easier to add features to.","simply Good Stuff."}:
print "Cleaner, more readable code is " + ending
I can't think of a language that makes good OO harder while still having a "class" keyword.
I can. Python is an otherwise great language, and it has a class keyword, but its OO implementation is highly obnoxious and far worse than Java.
"An historic" always grates on my ears too. At least when Americans say it.
It sounds ok when it comes from British people though, because they don't pronounce the "H" sound.
So while Americans should say "a historic", Brits can say "an 'istoric"... as in "Blimey, what an 'istoric event! Fancy a shag, guvnor?"
I bought the Punch 3D home suite and found it to be complete and utter shite. The user interface was exeptionally limited and non intuitive, and it's overall capabilities were far less than what one ought to expect from mondern commercial software. Its like they released it before it was even half done.
My wife wanted to use it to work out the decorating for the home we are about to buy, but we found the limited and uneditable set of graphics for surfacing tiles rendered the entire excecise moot. Set aside the lack of chair rails, and the fact that they don't have a surface patern to represent a tin roof (though at the very least I should be able to create one) - the worst was that they only had a limited number of hues with which you could paint your house. There was no RBG selector, you have to select from their existing palette. Since the whole point of the excercise was to match colors of paint - and we couldn't even select the paint colors we wanted - it ended up being $58 and many hours wasted.
I didn't see anything about a %100 refund policy. Wish I had, I'd return it in a heartbeat.