Stage 1 - Phantom Menace:
"Lucas you sonofabitch, you have shat upon my childhood."
Stage 2 - Attack of the Clones:
"I still hate him even though these movies are absolutely gorgeous. Last 15 minutes were ok."
Stave 3 - Revenge of the Sith:
"Wow that was cool seeing all those early Darth Vader moments and... wha? no more? Noooooooooooooo! Make more! MAKE MORE"
And the sun shines for all of three hours in the winter, and the snow falls for eight months, and you have to get on a months-long waiting list to see certain types of doctors? I love many things about Canada, my ancestral home, but there are reasons to live in Los Angeles. Like wearing flip-flops in January. and filling your gas tank for less than $75.
Oh we're going that way are we?
See, the first post was a *slight* exaggeration of the truth. Your post is, how shall i put it, not at all true. So we'll follow that game:
There are reasons to live in Canada, such as not getting shot at every 5 minutes, dwelling within a massive toxic cloud of smog, or having to witness one of the most painfully appalling pieces of urban blight ever foisted upon the Earth by the hand of man.
I wonder if you realise the inherent flaw in your reasoning. It is precisely this attitude of "I know what is the best for the user" that leads web designers to create monstrous user-unfriendly and inaccessible Flash interfaces.
Personally I think that all your rant is rubbish. Yes, some people have no sense of style, but as long as they do it on their own computer and are happier because of that, that's great. Forcing your personal aesthetics on everyone is just sick.
I respectfully disagree.
It is easy to be offended by the implication that you do not know what is good for you, and yet I stand by that assertion. And truly I do not mean it in the sense that people are 'inept', but rather are simply ignorant, in the most innocent use of the word. I would not expect someone to be able to design their own car dashboard as well as BMW. There's certainly no 'harm' per se in doing so - hey, do whatever you like, do what makes you happy. But it will not be the best unless you've spent time and energy studying things like ergonomics, colour theory, industrial design, etc. Same goes for interfaces. If you think that each and every person is capable of arranging their computer interface in the way that is absolutely the best and most appropriate for themselves, I would have to disagree. It's not elitism. Don't be so sensitive.
There are 2 big things coming over the horizon, once Longhorn lets us have advanced 3D graphics on our desktops.
Your two things are: malware exploits, and aesthetically jarring end-user customization.
The first one I think is a bit panicky, as I fail to see why any manner of "3D" would be any more or less secure than a 2D interface. What does the extra math have to do with security?
The second one is a common complaint aired in many different ways. It is true that many end users will create ridiculous desktops using 3D - in fact they create ridiculous desktops today, using 2D. My sister has her old Aptiva loaded with every damn croaking, tweeping, fluttering rainforest-styled thing there is, complete with bad-animated-GIF desktop icons and a mouse cursor that squirms.
We all know those brutal, punishingly bad Flash animations that festoon the Intarweb. And we all moan about how bad Flash is, that it shouldn't exist, etc.
All of these arguments trace back to: people sort of suck most of the time at design and aesthetics. They're not trained for it, and they don't have an innate sense of what pleases most people. All the Longhorn Aero Glass and Macrodobe Flashter Effects in the world do is empower that flaming mediocrity into full-blown animations and desktop effects that they simply could not do before. A small (tiny, in fact) subset of people will create glorious things that we haven't dreamt of.
The Japanese way of designing things has always amused me, because it is so rigid and defined; and yet this is why we love them. They know the power of an unblemished white wall. North Americans want every little variable and control in the interface exposed so we can fuck with it to our heart's content (isn't that what we do with computers? That and minesweeper?) but the Japanese don't like to do this. Take the PSP. You cannot change the 'desktop' picture, and not only that the (very pleasing, very Mac-like) translucent wave pattern in the background has a specific colour tint. Mine was pink when I bought it. Lots of people's first comment when you turn it on was surprise: "Pink?" The background colour changes every month. There are 12 colours that have been chosen by the design samurai at Sony. You cannot change them, they are immutable. This Is How It Is Designed. We think its a bit fucked because we're used to being able to set Edwardian Dayglo Yellow Outline Dropshadowed emails but they just won't allow it. Anyways I digress a bit.
Forget worrying about whether Aero will make Windows uglier, it gets the job done by itself as it is. There will always be ways to make ugly stuff in spectacular ways with our spectacular computers, so there's no point in blaming the software for enabling spectacular Lameness.
Furthmore, do you really think Apple and Delphi would be stupid enough...
No, of course not. See my other response on this thread for my answer.
Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video
on
New Mac System Specs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't understand why people are so paranoid about water-cooling.As long as the hoses are clamped well...
Well, I did say it was an irrational fear.:)
More to the point, there's something a little hackish about needing liquid cooling for a desktop CPU. Its neat that they pulled it off, esp. in a production-line unit, but it was pretty obvious that this was the only way they were even going to get halfway to the promised '3Ghz by year end' (which still hasn't happened. Shades of Moto.) I would prefer (and in fact went with) a slightly slower part that didn't require elaborate cooling that I need to pay for.. dual 1.8 in my case. Just a personal opinion.
They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video
on
New Mac System Specs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
... on the old dual 2.5 G5. Thats a good thing I think. As impressive as the system was, there's something (irrational) in my mind that just gets nervous about things like that. I'm worried that the... juice... will leak out onto the mobo.
Nice to see the iMac getting a more decent video card. (Yes, I know it probably 'sux0rs for gam3z' but honestly, a mediocre gaming card these days will slay practically any other reasonable computing task. It makes me laugh when you see the gamers dis something like, say, a nVidia 5200. That card sucks rocks! but it will also do realtime previews in Motion on uncompressed DV. That used to take some heavy hardware. Just sayin'.)
First, Moore's Law is about transistor density. If you use these nano-crossbar thingies instead of transistors, Moore's Law no longer applies. Second, even if you allow that crossbar nano-whatsits are the equivalent of transistors in terms of Moore's Law, it still can't extend out to "near infinity", as there is an easily calculable finite limit to how small you can make a mechanical device.
Your point is well taken - although you may be arguing semantics. I was aware of the def'n being defined as transistors but really if we are replacing transistors with another device the actual point of the 'law' still stands, does it not?
Forgive my brevity on the 'infinity' - I'll amend it to say 'infinity for all practical purposes over the next few decades.'
It must suck to be Intel's CEO and be quoted 43 days ago as saying "No end in sight for Moore's Law." Especially when the person pronouncing it dead is its author.
You know, I think the CEO has it right actually, and Moore has it wrong. HP Labs' new crossbar switch technology looks set to extend Moore's law out to near infinity.
.. is that every option anyone would want for their mouse has been there, like, forever. The standard mouse is one-button, OS X supports basically any USB multibutton/scrolling mouse. So why do people make a big deal about Apple making a 2-button mouse?
Because they want a two-button mouse with an APPLE logo on it. That's the part I don't get.
will you be able to disble the advanced features to lighten the load on the CPU? or am I going to have to load linux on mac mini?
Yes, in fact it auto-disables itself. If you don't have the extra GPU, it all gets rendered by the CPU, which just skips frames when it is short on cycles. So you are never unable to do something, it just looks less fancy.
Will that Radeon 9200 32MB video be able to handle the GPU-intense graphics of OSX 10.4. I'm hoping some sites will take a look at that question when tiger is available.
Nope. Core Image basically requires a card that supports pixel shading.
(The VRAM is not the issue, but practically speaking it means 64 MB cards and greater).
The hair on the back of my neck stands up whenever I hear someone claim that "CDs cost too much." CDs are the cheapest form of entertainment, on a dollar-per-hour-enjoyed basis of anything I can think of. For the price of $12 or $15, you can buy an hour's worth of high-quality (fidelity, if not artistic merit) music and enjoy it over and over, for thousands of hours, as many times as you want. And when you finally get bored with it, you can sell it and recoup some of your money....NOTHING else is as cheap.
What the hell are you talking about?
The clear winner is books. Dozens of hours of entertainment in a paperback for (usually) $10 or less. The deal gets better if you get them from a library.
Also - some video games arguably offer much more entertainment than some CDs. This is all subjective of course because of the nature of music... you can rack up a lot of hours with CDs playing in the background but what is the actual level of 'entertainment'? I've logged 60+ hours in Grand Theft Auto (just the last version); I have a handful of CDs that I have listen to for that long... but GTA has music in the game as well, several CDs worth.
before Linus get's P.Oed at the fact that the PPC processors have built-in bottlenecks, curtesy of IBM's lack of foresight. Compare the G5 to a similar AMD 64 and you'll see quite a difference.
It'll be about forever, because its not true.
Want some justification? I don't think I'll bother. Its not like you did, troll.
Have you ever programmed for a stream processor? I haven't. I suspect neither have most game developers (although the few who have written shaders have a leg up). Writing for a stream processor is very different from writing for a general purpose CPU. I suspect few games will use it at first.
I would have suspected the same thing before there were 50 million PS2s in the world.
What address was on his other 3 licenses? Between the 19 guys, they had 63 'valid' licenses.
Sensenbrenner also has asserted that the 9/11 terrorists were able to carry out their attacks because, collectively, they were able to obtain 63 state driver's licenses. His claim has been widely circulated by anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and in Congress. But the claim is contradicted by both a 9/11 Commission staff report and a fact sheet recently issued by the 9/11 Public Discourse Project (9/11 PDP), a nationwide public education campaign created by the ten members of the 9/11 Commission (a description of the 9/11 PDP can be found on its website: www.9-11pdp.org).
The fact sheet makes clear that the claims Sensenbrenner has made about the number of licenses the hijackers obtained before 9/11 and the conclusions he draws from their use by the hijackers are both incorrect. The fact sheet reports that, in fact, the hijackers obtained only 13 (not 63) driver's licenses, and that 2 of those were duplicates. According to the fact sheet, they also had 21 U.S.A.- or state-issued ID cards. However, the fact sheet itself is somewhat misleading in including so-called U.S.A. ID cards in this number. These are not government-issued ID cards; they are cards made by a private company that sells deceptively real-looking ID cards. So the number of government-issued ID cards was actually somewhat lower than the number cited by the commission and far lower than the number cited by Sensenbrenner.
So I installed it through Software Update, the usual, hit restart. (This is a new stock dual 1.8Ghz G5.) I'm sitting there waiting, and I though man I must be zoning out because I swear I didn't see a progress bar for the boot cycle there.
So I restart again, and yes, its true - this update has increased the boot cycle on my machine to such speeds that the actual fucking progress bar is gone. The 2nd time I thought I saw a very brief flicker of the progress pane with the bar at half but it was really fast.
My CRT monitor boots slower than my Mac. Never thought I'd see the day.
(I even timed it. From chime to login window: 25 seconds.)
I think somewhere along the line a person had a bad experience with an update, repaired permissions, and things were okay. He probably posted to a message board, and people followed in believing repairing permissions is the cure to all woes.
Repair Permissions! It's the New Rebuild Desktop!
I'm gonne write a placebo utility that just says 'optimizing' and shows a progress bar for 5 minutes, and it will be a huge hit. I don't even need to say what its optimizing.
Good post - but I thought I'd chime in with a comment:
The [Mac mini] DVI out plugs right into most modern HD televisons and projectors without the need for an adapter.
In my experience, this is often not the case. Even though high end telivisions have DVI jacks on them, they are using the YUV colourspace and not the RGB used for computer displays. I was annoyed to find this out, to say the least. Jacks are the same, but no-go. So the best video output you can do with the Mac mini is using the S-video dongle, which is not bad.
Another thing worth mentioning is that OS X does not need any extra software for this video display, and includes native controls for antialiasing levels and overscan on the fly. Makes a big difference for text on a television screen.
For about a year and a half, I had to locate myself in Philly while keeping operations of our company up and running in California. My business partner and I had weekly meetings, starting out with Chat on OS X, then audio chat. When we discovered Skype, we switched to that. We found that it seemed to work a bit better. I even used my PS 2 USB headset (originally purchased for SOCOM II) and enjoyed the experience.
I'm curious... did you switch from audio iChat? If so, why?
I only ask because your post caught my eye - I chat regularly with a friend in the UK (from Canada) using iChat and a PS2 headset, and that works great... what's the advantage with using Skype in this scenario?
Hmmm. Where is FairPlay/AAC on that list? Speaking of a free press, click here to see the latest Apple stories on Slashdot. 2 or 3 on the first page alone are about Apple censoring users and closing communications. Definitely more Kim Jong Il than Johnny Appleseed here. This just does not happen nearly as much in the OSS world.
AAC is a Dolby standard and part of the MPEG-4 spec. FairPlay is not something I like either but that is one thing you mentioned.
As for the appledot stories, i did have a look, and I'm not sure what you are referring to. There is a story about ThinkSecret getting sued over leaking trade secrets, and some users who leaked their OS alpha. That does not strike me as draconian but hey, its just my opinion.
Re:One of the things that are desperately needed
on
New Apple IT Pro Section
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Within the Apple enclave, there is even less "freedom" than in the Microsoft world. Using the "communism" analogy, what you are doing is cheering on North Korea as compared to China.
That's a pretty funny analogy.
And apt, too! Apple is just like a North Korea, except that they have fair trade (open source kernal), human rights (well-designed consistent UI), a market economy (PCI, AGP, USB, SATA, IEEE 1392, GigE), a free press (TCP/IP, OpenTalk/ZeroConf, Apache, Jabber, Kerberos, SSL).... but other than that exactly like North Korea, yes.
Slashdot Mirror
"Lucas you sonofabitch, you have shat upon my childhood."
Stage 2 - Attack of the Clones:
"I still hate him even though these movies are absolutely gorgeous. Last 15 minutes were ok."
Stave 3 - Revenge of the Sith:
"Wow that was cool seeing all those early Darth Vader moments and... wha? no more? Noooooooooooooo! Make more! MAKE MORE"
Oh we're going that way are we?
See, the first post was a *slight* exaggeration of the truth. Your post is, how shall i put it, not at all true. So we'll follow that game:
There are reasons to live in Canada, such as not getting shot at every 5 minutes, dwelling within a massive toxic cloud of smog, or having to witness one of the most painfully appalling pieces of urban blight ever foisted upon the Earth by the hand of man.
Sorry - was I exaggerating?
Personally I think that all your rant is rubbish. Yes, some people have no sense of style, but as long as they do it on their own computer and are happier because of that, that's great. Forcing your personal aesthetics on everyone is just sick.
I respectfully disagree.
It is easy to be offended by the implication that you do not know what is good for you, and yet I stand by that assertion. And truly I do not mean it in the sense that people are 'inept', but rather are simply ignorant, in the most innocent use of the word. I would not expect someone to be able to design their own car dashboard as well as BMW. There's certainly no 'harm' per se in doing so - hey, do whatever you like, do what makes you happy. But it will not be the best unless you've spent time and energy studying things like ergonomics, colour theory, industrial design, etc. Same goes for interfaces. If you think that each and every person is capable of arranging their computer interface in the way that is absolutely the best and most appropriate for themselves, I would have to disagree. It's not elitism. Don't be so sensitive.
Your two things are: malware exploits, and aesthetically jarring end-user customization.
The first one I think is a bit panicky, as I fail to see why any manner of "3D" would be any more or less secure than a 2D interface. What does the extra math have to do with security?
The second one is a common complaint aired in many different ways. It is true that many end users will create ridiculous desktops using 3D - in fact they create ridiculous desktops today, using 2D. My sister has her old Aptiva loaded with every damn croaking, tweeping, fluttering rainforest-styled thing there is, complete with bad-animated-GIF desktop icons and a mouse cursor that squirms.
We all know those brutal, punishingly bad Flash animations that festoon the Intarweb. And we all moan about how bad Flash is, that it shouldn't exist, etc.
All of these arguments trace back to: people sort of suck most of the time at design and aesthetics. They're not trained for it, and they don't have an innate sense of what pleases most people. All the Longhorn Aero Glass and Macrodobe Flashter Effects in the world do is empower that flaming mediocrity into full-blown animations and desktop effects that they simply could not do before. A small (tiny, in fact) subset of people will create glorious things that we haven't dreamt of.
The Japanese way of designing things has always amused me, because it is so rigid and defined; and yet this is why we love them. They know the power of an unblemished white wall. North Americans want every little variable and control in the interface exposed so we can fuck with it to our heart's content (isn't that what we do with computers? That and minesweeper?) but the Japanese don't like to do this. Take the PSP. You cannot change the 'desktop' picture, and not only that the (very pleasing, very Mac-like) translucent wave pattern in the background has a specific colour tint. Mine was pink when I bought it. Lots of people's first comment when you turn it on was surprise: "Pink?" The background colour changes every month. There are 12 colours that have been chosen by the design samurai at Sony. You cannot change them, they are immutable. This Is How It Is Designed. We think its a bit fucked because we're used to being able to set Edwardian Dayglo Yellow Outline Dropshadowed emails but they just won't allow it. Anyways I digress a bit.
Forget worrying about whether Aero will make Windows uglier, it gets the job done by itself as it is. There will always be ways to make ugly stuff in spectacular ways with our spectacular computers, so there's no point in blaming the software for enabling spectacular Lameness.
Educate me: why is this bad? There seems to be no tangible CPU hit.
No, of course not. See my other response on this thread for my answer.
Well, I did say it was an irrational fear. :)
More to the point, there's something a little hackish about needing liquid cooling for a desktop CPU. Its neat that they pulled it off, esp. in a production-line unit, but it was pretty obvious that this was the only way they were even going to get halfway to the promised '3Ghz by year end' (which still hasn't happened. Shades of Moto.) I would prefer (and in fact went with) a slightly slower part that didn't require elaborate cooling that I need to pay for.. dual 1.8 in my case. Just a personal opinion.
Nice to see the iMac getting a more decent video card. (Yes, I know it probably 'sux0rs for gam3z' but honestly, a mediocre gaming card these days will slay practically any other reasonable computing task. It makes me laugh when you see the gamers dis something like, say, a nVidia 5200. That card sucks rocks! but it will also do realtime previews in Motion on uncompressed DV. That used to take some heavy hardware. Just sayin'.)
Your point is well taken - although you may be arguing semantics. I was aware of the def'n being defined as transistors but really if we are replacing transistors with another device the actual point of the 'law' still stands, does it not?
Forgive my brevity on the 'infinity' - I'll amend it to say 'infinity for all practical purposes over the next few decades.'
You know, I think the CEO has it right actually, and Moore has it wrong. HP Labs' new crossbar switch technology looks set to extend Moore's law out to near infinity.
Someday I will figure out where this 'oot' thing comes from. I've lived in Canada for 30 years and I don't know anyone who speaks like that.
'Eh', sure, that's very common. 'Aboot', I only hear in references to Canadians I've apparently never met.
Because they want a two-button mouse with an APPLE logo on it. That's the part I don't get.
Yes, in fact it auto-disables itself. If you don't have the extra GPU, it all gets rendered by the CPU, which just skips frames when it is short on cycles. So you are never unable to do something, it just looks less fancy.
Nope. Core Image basically requires a card that supports pixel shading.
(The VRAM is not the issue, but practically speaking it means 64 MB cards and greater).
Some good info here: AnandTech
What the hell are you talking about?
The clear winner is books. Dozens of hours of entertainment in a paperback for (usually) $10 or less. The deal gets better if you get them from a library.
Also - some video games arguably offer much more entertainment than some CDs. This is all subjective of course because of the nature of music... you can rack up a lot of hours with CDs playing in the background but what is the actual level of 'entertainment'? I've logged 60+ hours in Grand Theft Auto (just the last version); I have a handful of CDs that I have listen to for that long... but GTA has music in the game as well, several CDs worth.
It'll be about forever, because its not true.
Want some justification? I don't think I'll bother. Its not like you did, troll.
I would have suspected the same thing before there were 50 million PS2s in the world.
Sensenbrenner also has asserted that the 9/11 terrorists were able to carry out their attacks because, collectively, they were able to obtain 63 state driver's licenses. His claim has been widely circulated by anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and in Congress. But the claim is contradicted by both a 9/11 Commission staff report and a fact sheet recently issued by the 9/11 Public Discourse Project (9/11 PDP), a nationwide public education campaign created by the ten members of the 9/11 Commission (a description of the 9/11 PDP can be found on its website: www.9-11pdp.org).
The fact sheet makes clear that the claims Sensenbrenner has made about the number of licenses the hijackers obtained before 9/11 and the conclusions he draws from their use by the hijackers are both incorrect. The fact sheet reports that, in fact, the hijackers obtained only 13 (not 63) driver's licenses, and that 2 of those were duplicates. According to the fact sheet, they also had 21 U.S.A.- or state-issued ID cards. However, the fact sheet itself is somewhat misleading in including so-called U.S.A. ID cards in this number. These are not government-issued ID cards; they are cards made by a private company that sells deceptively real-looking ID cards. So the number of government-issued ID cards was actually somewhat lower than the number cited by the commission and far lower than the number cited by Sensenbrenner.
(from Dave Niewert's blog - he's freelance journalist.)
So I restart again, and yes, its true - this update has increased the boot cycle on my machine to such speeds that the actual fucking progress bar is gone. The 2nd time I thought I saw a very brief flicker of the progress pane with the bar at half but it was really fast.
My CRT monitor boots slower than my Mac. Never thought I'd see the day.
(I even timed it. From chime to login window: 25 seconds.)
Repair Permissions! It's the New Rebuild Desktop!
I'm gonne write a placebo utility that just says 'optimizing' and shows a progress bar for 5 minutes, and it will be a huge hit. I don't even need to say what its optimizing.
The [Mac mini] DVI out plugs right into most modern HD televisons and projectors without the need for an adapter.
In my experience, this is often not the case. Even though high end telivisions have DVI jacks on them, they are using the YUV colourspace and not the RGB used for computer displays. I was annoyed to find this out, to say the least. Jacks are the same, but no-go. So the best video output you can do with the Mac mini is using the S-video dongle, which is not bad.
Another thing worth mentioning is that OS X does not need any extra software for this video display, and includes native controls for antialiasing levels and overscan on the fly. Makes a big difference for text on a television screen.
I'm curious... did you switch from audio iChat? If so, why?
I only ask because your post caught my eye - I chat regularly with a friend in the UK (from Canada) using iChat and a PS2 headset, and that works great... what's the advantage with using Skype in this scenario?
Maybe you shouldn't have sold the iPod - did you happen to see this post?
Are modifications from the user/developer community being incorporated into Mac OS? Not last time I heard (a dictatorship and not a democracy?).
The answer is yes. Go have a look at apple.com/opensource, there's a handy (and verifiable) chart there.
Hmmm. Where is FairPlay/AAC on that list? Speaking of a free press, click here to see the latest Apple stories on Slashdot. 2 or 3 on the first page alone are about Apple censoring users and closing communications. Definitely more Kim Jong Il than Johnny Appleseed here. This just does not happen nearly as much in the OSS world.
AAC is a Dolby standard and part of the MPEG-4 spec. FairPlay is not something I like either but that is one thing you mentioned.
As for the appledot stories, i did have a look, and I'm not sure what you are referring to. There is a story about ThinkSecret getting sued over leaking trade secrets, and some users who leaked their OS alpha. That does not strike me as draconian but hey, its just my opinion.
That's a pretty funny analogy.
And apt, too! Apple is just like a North Korea, except that they have fair trade (open source kernal), human rights (well-designed consistent UI), a market economy (PCI, AGP, USB, SATA, IEEE 1392, GigE), a free press (TCP/IP, OpenTalk/ZeroConf, Apache, Jabber, Kerberos, SSL).... but other than that exactly like North Korea, yes.