Interestingly enough, David Foster Wallace talked about this (well, almost) in Infinite Jest. In that book, people had special make-up and sets (backdrops, etc.) where they conducted video-phone conversations.
For some people, e.g. physicists who do numerical "experiments", the benchmarks are crucial, or, at least, a large factor when considering which machine to buy.
Sure, one could buy 10 Linare boxes and Beowulf them together, but if you're a lone physicist with relatively little funding--Beowulf clusters take lots of time, money, and space to feed and maintain--you might care about being able to run floating-point intensive jobs quickly while being able to use MS Word or PowerPoint or some such.
In fact, I already know one astrophysicist who will be getting a G5 in the fall when her new research grant begins. She also happens to be one of the 3 physicists I managed to convince to switch to Mac and get a PowerBook.
I also know of plenty of very intelligent people who use Macs simply because they are easier to use and it allows them to focus on the task at hand. Not everyone takes the slop they're fed and feels that it's "good enough" (which is basically what you are saying). Some of us actually don't mind paying a little bit extra...
I agree. I've been a Unix (almost every flavor one can think of, including AIX 2.2 and SVR3 [yes, 3, not 4]) sysadmin since '91 and I love my year-old G4 PowerBook, even when I have the choice of using one of the dozen HPUX or RH Linux machines that I administer. Why? Because I'm now a grad student, and I'm much more productive on my Mac than Linux or Windows. I get the best of both worlds. If I want to do:
I still can do it on my Mac. But now, I have the OS X GUI (which has its faults -- I want the old Finder back), and the free IDE for hacking NeX... errr, I mean Cocoa and Objective C. If I want to be 1337, I can run X11 in full-screen root window mode, and use FVWM2.
Oh, yeah. And I forgot to mention, stuff just works. I spent 30 mins last week helping a friend get her WinXP laptop to notice an open 802.11b AP, but we weren't able to. My Mac found it and connected without any intervention; this was not an Apple AirPort.
A long time ago, there was a similar device that you could use on the Commodore C64 or VIC20. I forget what it's called, but it was about the size of a separate numpad, with regular keyboard keys. Each finger and thumb had 2 or 3 keys to reach, and one typed by chording.
Re:Even THAT deserves a mention in slashdot?
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I found fvwm2 to be the most "productive" window manager that I have ever used, by which I mean I didn't feel crippled or second-guessed by it, and it left out poky special features. twm was just a little too barebones for my liking. motif sucked. The most useful (for me) feature of fvwm2 was their pager.
I use KDE2 on Linux (yeah, I know it's old), and I've played a bit with the others. For me, they aren't as "facilitative" as fvwm2. Actually, even Aqua (I do most of my stuff on a Mac, now) doesn't cut it. The old Mac OS 9 GUI was better in that I could modify it without too much effort to suit the way I worked.
Because they'd be replicating effort by the Fink people, and that without adding value. When it is possible to add value, they have ported "standard" Unix software, the big example being XFree86 which they hacked to take advantage of the Quartz rendering engine.
Here's a message that I wrote to The Reg in response to that article:
Well, I note that the piece is labelled as an opinion piece. I can only assume that's to cover the author's laziness in *not* tracking down data: despite the author's wanting to "see data, not unreasoning fears", the only data the author presents to counter the airlines' regulations on RF transmitters on board is annoyance and statistically insignificant anecdotal evidence.
If the author had made any attempt at finding some hard data, he/she would have found this article published in the September 1996 issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine:
Unfortunately, only the first page of the article is available for free, but I remember reading it in the print version of the magazine. I assume the closest university library would have a copy of the issue in question.
As I said, I did read the article when it came out, and they cited one case where passengers listening to a baseball game on AM radio during a flight caused some of the navigation electronics to go wonky. Immediately after flight attendants asked them to turn off the radios, the nav system went back to normal. But these passengers would, after a few minutes, turn their radios back on again which again FUed the nav system. After a couple of warnings, the captain asked the flight attendants to confiscate the radios.
Command line tools can also be "GUI-fied": I've used exmh for a few years, and it's a prime example of "GUI-fying". And, yes, exmh supports PGP and GPG.
...I found that copying between two locations meant I had to open 2 finder windows or engage the rather feeble tree widget. It wastes space, the big icon/preview is very pretty, but 90% of the time useless as I already know what the filetype is, it just takes up a big fat wad of space that could have been used for something else.
With the spring-loaded folders feature that has just been resurrected in Jaguar, you don't need to open two finder windows.
The NeXT-style file browser view is not the default: you can get a "straight" list view. Also, icon sizes are user-selectable. Try doing that on Windows.
Address bar comes from a commandline-centric view of filesystems, which, although efficient, was not really present on the original MacOS. It was present in a sense because that's how you encode filepaths in AppleScript.
One feature I do like about the Finder is the popup menu of the directory hierarchy above the current directory by Cmd-clicking on the name of the folder in the title bar.
That said, if I want to be quick about file manipulation, I use the command line.
Yeah, there should be no limits on G-forces at all. I'd like a ride where you take people up 20 stories (200 ft -- ~70m), then drop them. The G-forces they experience when they hit the ground will be something that they have never experienced, nor ever will. (You took physics, you do the math.)
Idiot. The legal profession is a highly specialized profession that requires specific training. Try this: replace "lawyer" with "doctor" in your rant.
If you believe in capitalism, then you believe that any professional has the right to charge whatever price the market will bear.
Plus, you are ignoring the fact that there are, albeit few and far between (and overworked), lawyers who provide low-cost services. These are not very sexy, and don't get made into TV shows like LA Law or Ally McBeal.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20011205/tc/warnin g_we_know_what_you_re_typing_and_so_does_the_fbi__ 1.html
What other things do the major virus checkers skip (as mentioned by the Yahoo article above)?
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, David Foster Wallace talked about this (well, almost) in Infinite Jest. In that book, people had special make-up and sets (backdrops, etc.) where they conducted video-phone conversations.
For some people, e.g. physicists who do numerical "experiments", the benchmarks are crucial, or, at least, a large factor when considering which machine to buy.
Sure, one could buy 10 Linare boxes and Beowulf them together, but if you're a lone physicist with relatively little funding--Beowulf clusters take lots of time, money, and space to feed and maintain--you might care about being able to run floating-point intensive jobs quickly while being able to use MS Word or PowerPoint or some such.
In fact, I already know one astrophysicist who will be getting a G5 in the fall when her new research grant begins. She also happens to be one of the 3 physicists I managed to convince to switch to Mac and get a PowerBook.
I agree. I've been a Unix (almost every flavor one can think of, including AIX 2.2 and SVR3 [yes, 3, not 4]) sysadmin since '91 and I love my year-old G4 PowerBook, even when I have the choice of using one of the dozen HPUX or RH Linux machines that I administer. Why? Because I'm now a grad student, and I'm much more productive on my Mac than Linux or Windows. I get the best of both worlds. If I want to do:
I still can do it on my Mac. But now, I have the OS X GUI (which has its faults -- I want the old Finder back), and the free IDE for hacking NeX... errr, I mean Cocoa and Objective C. If I want to be 1337, I can run X11 in full-screen root window mode, and use FVWM2.Oh, yeah. And I forgot to mention, stuff just works. I spent 30 mins last week helping a friend get her WinXP laptop to notice an open 802.11b AP, but we weren't able to. My Mac found it and connected without any intervention; this was not an Apple AirPort.
Yow. The Reg has some cautionary articles about bugs in iSync, and a pssing mention of bugs in iPod.
Don't get me wrong, I love my TiBook and OS X, but I wish Apple would go back to being the reliable company it used to be.
The lid is a binary-state machine: Open and Closed.
A long time ago, there was a similar device that you could use on the Commodore C64 or VIC20. I forget what it's called, but it was about the size of a separate numpad, with regular keyboard keys. Each finger and thumb had 2 or 3 keys to reach, and one typed by chording.
I found fvwm2 to be the most "productive" window manager that I have ever used, by which I mean I didn't feel crippled or second-guessed by it, and it left out poky special features. twm was just a little too barebones for my liking. motif sucked. The most useful (for me) feature of fvwm2 was their pager.
I use KDE2 on Linux (yeah, I know it's old), and I've played a bit with the others. For me, they aren't as "facilitative" as fvwm2. Actually, even Aqua (I do most of my stuff on a Mac, now) doesn't cut it. The old Mac OS 9 GUI was better in that I could modify it without too much effort to suit the way I worked.
unfortunately, apple just bowed to the pigopolists: the new iTunes update released yesterday cripples tunes sharing for machines outside of local net.
http://www.macslash.org/articles/03/05/27/2127256Because they'd be replicating effort by the Fink people, and that without adding value. When it is possible to add value, they have ported "standard" Unix software, the big example being XFree86 which they hacked to take advantage of the Quartz rendering engine.
Here's a message that I wrote to The Reg in response to that article:
As I said, I did read the article when it came out, and they cited one case where passengers listening to a baseball game on AM radio during a flight caused some of the navigation electronics to go wonky. Immediately after flight attendants asked them to turn off the radios, the nav system went back to normal. But these passengers would, after a few minutes, turn their radios back on again which again FUed the nav system. After a couple of warnings, the captain asked the flight attendants to confiscate the radios.
You forget the primary advantage of graduate students: they can be programmed in natural language.
BOFH
What do people think of OpenACS?
Nono. Look at the M -- it looks like a stalagMite. And the T -- the vertical part looks like a stalacTite.
Command line tools can also be "GUI-fied": I've used exmh for a few years, and it's a prime example of "GUI-fying". And, yes, exmh supports PGP and GPG.
do we consider spherical men if we want to take air resistance and friction into account?
Once again, you'll be wanting an Apple.
With the spring-loaded folders feature that has just been resurrected in Jaguar, you don't need to open two finder windows.
The NeXT-style file browser view is not the default: you can get a "straight" list view. Also, icon sizes are user-selectable. Try doing that on Windows.
Address bar comes from a commandline-centric view of filesystems, which, although efficient, was not really present on the original MacOS. It was present in a sense because that's how you encode filepaths in AppleScript.
One feature I do like about the Finder is the popup menu of the directory hierarchy above the current directory by Cmd-clicking on the name of the folder in the title bar.
That said, if I want to be quick about file manipulation, I use the command line.
Get something like Legato Networker, or Arkeia.
No amount of coercion of users will guarantee their making backups.
Yup. That's why I use nmh/exmh.
Yeah, there should be no limits on G-forces at all. I'd like a ride where you take people up 20 stories (200 ft -- ~70m), then drop them. The G-forces they experience when they hit the ground will be something that they have never experienced, nor ever will. (You took physics, you do the math.)
Idiot. The legal profession is a highly specialized profession that requires specific training. Try this: replace "lawyer" with "doctor" in your rant. If you believe in capitalism, then you believe that any professional has the right to charge whatever price the market will bear. Plus, you are ignoring the fact that there are, albeit few and far between (and overworked), lawyers who provide low-cost services. These are not very sexy, and don't get made into TV shows like LA Law or Ally McBeal.
Unfortunately, the damn things run on Konqueror, as well.
> Some people, no matter how passionately they hold their beliefs, are wrong. Including you.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20011205/tc/warnin g_we_know_what_you_re_typing_and_so_does_the_fbi__ 1.html
What other things do the major virus checkers skip (as mentioned by the Yahoo article above)?