Now, the works of Woolfe, Joyce, and hundreds of authors who are mostly forgotten are read primarily by 'experts' in the field or by lit majors, while Tolkien and Lewis are two of the most recognized fiction writers in the world.
I'm sorry, but Tolkien and Lewis (CS Lewis?!?) are not great writers, and won't be considered as such in the future. Writers feted in their own time (by the public or the authorities) are often forgotten about a century later. In fact those you cited as 'read by experts' were largely ignored or vilified during their own lifetimes.
Tolkien is famous right now because of the film, and will fade back to insignificance in a few decades. He is not a great writer, and will never be considered as such, because his work really isn't that good. I read it when I was 10 (twice) and was enthralled by it, but the standard of writing is not very high; the characters are caricatures, the dialog is flat, and the jokes are tortuous buffoonery (esp the dwarves). However the plot is full of archetypal myths, and the linguistic references and languages are interesting. This doesn't make it a classic, just interesting. Huge hollywood films or comments on Slashdot claiming it's 'The best book of the 20C' will not it make a classic either.
Rowling is a mediocre writer. Just because her books have been made into blockbuster films and are popular right now doesn't make them better than average. There's a lot of other more deserving talent in Childrens' books - take a look at 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' for example. Unfortunately the way media hype works makes fame and accolades accrete on 'stars' and is divorced from any notions of quality.
The influence of Joyce on writers in this century alone means he's not going to disappear any time soon. Woolfe is also far more interesting than Tolkien (or CS Lewis, or Rowling) both in the characters she tackles, the social issues, and the language - have you read any of her books? If you want to choose someone from this century who is a 'great writer' Grahame Greene would be a good choice - accessible but writes very well.
As for the OS being clunky as hell - you can make XP look EXACTLY the same as OSX
Windows is not clunky because it doesn't have nice pulsating buttons or shadows on windows. All that stuff is very nice but ultimately incidental. It's clunky because of some basic flaws of methodology:
Wizards that present you with an unending series of screens with one text field or some default options (already filled in) and a 'next' button.
Lacklustre sleep support
Lack of HI Guidelines and resulting lack of consistency between Applications (though Apple has some work to do on this front)
So many alerts that it's difficult to pick out the important ones
Preference dialogs which have 15 tabs, that jump around as you switch between them so you never know where they are.
Those annoying anthropomorphic animals/paperclips attempting to make it more friendly and just getting in the way.
Menus in windows, so the menubars are in a different place every time.
Windows has some nice features, and had some (like previews of images in the 'Finder' I think...) before OS X, so in some ways it's better, but in so many ways it makes life more difficult rather than easier...
PS - imagine if there was an OS where you didn't have to 'keep it clean'; Wouldn't that be nice?
well, yes all this is way off. They haven't even stated this is their intention, it's all speculation. However if they want to avoid being muscled out by Microsoft, their best plan might be to offer a suite of services that are available anywhere, via the browser, and which could even host users' data (for free for light users with ads, or business users on a contract) with guaranteed uptime.
I don't think they'll ever have to write their own OS (operating system as in providing APIs, file IO services etc) or want to. However they *can* provide a range of services that the user can interact with instead of those which come from the OS vendors (MS, Apple).
Yes, MS would still make money from the real OS. However I don't see that as a problem for Google - their problem comes if they let Microsoft try to edge them out of markets like search or mail by tying in customers to an MS implementation/browser (as they have done in the past). Wresting control of some of these components away from MS would avoid that danger, but then it might just annoy MS enough to try to 'cut off their air supply'.
xCode is quite a good IDE and getting better but it's anything but clean and simple.
Why have build Styles *and* Targets?? ?!?? Why do you have to set your App's 'version' in 2 different places? Clicking to create breakpoints while compiling sometimes causes a compiler error. You have to clean targets when you change build style because the IDE doesn't do it for you. An errors pane that doesn't get cleaned when a rebuild starts, so you have to wait till the end of the build to see which errors are new (even then sometimes the old errors stay in there). The type-ahead code-completion is painfully slow. I've had to turn both that and the indexing off to work with it. When I press 'next file' and 'previous file' I get all kinds of random files from the project. I'm not sure what those are supposed to do.
There are some neat ideas in xCode (and coming up in 2.0) and it's being improved, but it feels like 2 completely different applications were thrown together and then they tried to clear up the mess, even as they are adding heaps of features with every release. There are quite a few unresolved bugs as well (see above).
Any application with 14 menus in the menubar (count em!) can't be called clean and simple in my opinion...
While a browser or browser based app is not an OS and never will be, I think the parent poster to yours had a very good point.
Most users do not even know what an 'Operating System' is. Their interaction with it comes almost entirely through the File explorer or Finder (call it what you will). As a developer there's a lot more to it (multiple APIs, file IO, multimedia etc etc), but not as a user.
Google Desktop, interestingly, can all but replace that part of the OS for most users; if they need to open a file, they no longer look for it in folders and click on it, they search and then click a link. And it's faster than the search that's built in - how embarrassing for MS.
Say Google launched photo management software (Picassa), email software (Gmail), a search function (Desktop search), a web browser (perhaps a rebranded Firefox with Desktop Search), and finally an office suite (either written in XUL or native).
As the OS tends towards a badly debugged set of device drivers, in the perception of a non-technical user Google becomes the 'OS'. Also of interest is the fact that the browser has become most peoples' universal file viewer - you can view jpegs, txt, PDFs, movies etc in there. Good or bad, this is often how they use it.
The user sees Google all day - they see Microsoft software when they go to change the printers or the desktop background. Apart from that, as far as they're concerned, their computer is run by Google...
Now whether it would be wise to poke MS with a sharp stick like this is debatable, but the premise that the OS is nothing but a skin on a kernel, filesystem etc is actually true from a user's point of view. That skin, worryingly for Microsoft, is replaceable, that's why they merged IE with the OS and made it impossible to remove, and that's why they're aiming to choke the internet again with XAML.
uhm, no you didn't know what the word means. It doesn't mean one before the ultimate as in 'almost the greatest but not quite', it means one before the last, from penult. As the poster above explained to you.
Just accept it and move on, looser and more relaxed is the way to be...
I've never heard of 'Sharpie' either. Probably like 'xeroxing' ; it's not used much elsewhere as a generic word. Looking at the pens on my desk, I have a TDK one, a Staedtler one, and an Edding one, no 'Sharpies' I'm afraid. (I'm not the original AC).
And, yes, you are an American, or at least you spell your words that way...:p
I simply do not pay much attention
on
Joel On Software
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I simply do not understand it.
Perhaps because you're so blinkered by your belief in the 'one true way'.
Err, couldn't they just let you change the comments in the comments field? As it is it's disabled for multiple selections. Wouldn't that make more sense? The Batch change is a kludge that they've tacked on - in fact I hadn't even found it (as you suspected). Thanks for letting me know about it though.
If you don't like the HTML export
If they'd done the export with templates (as they should have), it wouldn't be a problem. I'm aware there are 3rd party solutions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "custom tags"
By custom tags I meant a combination of an arbitrary fieldname and value, so I could add a tag to photos that are sold like this
sold = 25
with a different sale value for each one (or whatever, that's just an example off the top of my head). Keywords is the equivalent of one extra field.
My biggest gripe is the layout of your picture library on disk.
I understand it's useful for some people, and some things like the slideshows are really nice, but it also has serious limitations. If you take a look at iView just for example you'll see what I mean. It was really Steve Job's hubris in saying 'it's not worth bothering writing that sort of app' which got me started ranting : )
he's managed to avoid working in a soul-sucking job for a large corporation, where his creativity would dry up and his voice go unheeeded. He's managed to keep his sense of humour through it all (those barbed comments from Steve have to hurt), and he is actually more aware than ever that he's better off going his own way and creating the stuff *he* wants to make. I'd say it was inspiring in that he's happy, doing what he wants to do, and can make money doing it. Software companies always copy each other, that's the way it works, and I'm glad they do or we'd be stuck with a choice between several apps with orthogonal features none of which did everything we want.
Actually the comment from Steve about iPhoto made me laugh as it's really one of Apple's worst products and could easily be bested, even after a couple of revisions. Someone could do worse than come up with a better alternative and sell it as shareware; I'm sure a lot of people who take photos as a hobby wouldn't mind a decent app to organise their images.
One where you could edit comments for more than one image at once for example, or add custom tags to images, or which has flexible HTML export. Perhaps one where the internal file system wasn't so byzantine that once the files are in there your best bet for getting them out is to drag and drop to the desktop. One which had a decent search facility. I could go on, I'm thinking of something like iView, but with basic functionality free (to compete with iphoto) and then a few extras for registering.
The point is Spotlight uses what's already there - EXIF tags for images, word metadata, FS file mod dates etc, custom app metadata within a file (the app developer will have to write a plugin for spotlight to see that though).
It's tied to the FS in that it hooks in to find out when files are changed so that it can try to update its metadata store.
Spotlight does *not* automatically add metadata to your files - that's left up to the apps, which is probably as it should be. So metadata is just as portable as it was before across file systems, it's just that Tiger will make more use of it.
Probably very similar to Search Kit which currently does the same thing, but has to be manually set up. You can choose the type of index it creates, inverted, vector or both together.
You can use standards without doing any of the things you claim is meant by "use standards", and you can do all of the things you claim is meant by "use standards" without actually using any standards.
My point was, your definition of 'Use web-standards" varies wildly from the one which has become common-coin. Now you can complain about this, but ultimately meaning follows usage.
Your definition: Web standards - things which have been approved as ISO standards.
Commonly used definition: W3C recommendations (encompassing those 'orthogonal issues' I talked about like content/presentation separation, allowing for varied user-agents etc).
Yes the W3C isn't perfect, but it's the best we have, and if everyone agrees to the recommendations. The 'real standards' you talk of are so out of date that they are no longer relevant. So either we splinter into 100 different implementations of the same ideas and reignite the browser wars, or browser makers and content creators agree on common ground and accepted usage. This is what most people call 'standards'.
uhm. No. It is not continually indexing the data, if you read the article you'll see it only updates the meta-data for items when they're saved - you can write custom plug-ins for new data types, or just go with the bundles ones for standard file types like images, text etc.
Filesystem metadata is great, but "instantly" updated search indexes sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
On the contrary, this is a *better* solution to a very basic problem that has plagued computers since they were invented.
The problem: How do I organise and access the data I use every day (emails, letters, images, music etc)?
The old solution: You can put your files in folders (one per file). You can name the files with a short description, ending with a cryptic 3 letter code to denote the file type. Files *must* be in one category/folder only at a time. Limited meta-data (date modified, file-type etc) may be stored.
The new solution: You add meta-data to files (often automatically) saying who created them, what project it's under, whether it's 'to do' or 'unfinished' or whatever. You'd do this in a save dialog for the application, as you saved the file. All other applications which use searchlight will update their view of this stuff for free, in real time.
When you want to work on a project, you click on the live project folder, and immediately you see all the files, emails, images etc for that project, no more, no less, regardless of where they are on the disk and what other projects they're shared with.
Want to see all the stuff to do with John, 5 months ago? On this project? Containing the word gizmo? That sort of query will be easy to make.
If you have an image editing application, it can show you all the images taken in Paris in 2002, without having to build a database application into it. This makes adding this kind of feature to applications trivial.
Ideally adding meta-data tags like 'project-1', and 'To do' should be as easy as choosing them in the save dialog or applying them like a label in the Finder. It's not quite at that stage yet, but that should come later. Some of these ideas are quite old (Be), but they are long overdue in a desktop operating system.
Your analogy with WWII is pitifully narrow, and undermines your point in any case. Let me play your game of reductio ad absurdum.
If America had taken the attitude you espouse durning WWII, they would have bombed Japan to hell to retaliate for Pearl Harbour and left Europe to the Russians/Nazis, only to find themselves in a much more uncomfortable world afterwards. Instead they admirably stepped in and sacrificed many of their citizens to defend the values (and at that point in time the word had meaning) they held dear.
Fast-forward to 2004; congratulations on uniting the world against your country. Perhaps that won't seem such a smart move in 10 years. America will be paying for voting Bush for a long time.
Short term self-interest is not an intelligent survival strategy.
And why does it matter if they're not 'standards' by your narrow definition? Who cares?
Does that mean we should all go back to producing HTML like that turned out by slashcode?
When people say 'use standards' they mean
Use clean markup that validates
Keep the styling in CSS
Test on more than one browser
Try to conform to a 'best practice' that is often in line with what the w3c recommends, because that makes life an awful lot easier for browser developers, tool developers, and ultimately end users (on any device).
All these things are Good. So far you haven't come up with any suggestions, you're just whining about the semantics (heh) of one word. Stop complaining about that and tell us what we *should* be doing, and how this differs from what Eric Meyer has done.
Well, the point is that the assumed processor can cause SERIOUS endian and memory offset issues which can kill performance, introduce bugs and make porting a nightmare.
To remove that difficulty does not make porting trivial (and thus you are right in a sense, as I think that's what you're trying to say), but it does remove a big stumbling block to porting.
Say companies who port already have an established workalike API for Direct-X (which seems to be what most games use nowadays for the Xbox/PC) because they've ported a large game before.
The fact this game was tested on the same processor makes their life a whole lot easier, as it removes the endian nastiness from their porting experience. Because many games deal with large textures etc etc and have their own engines for reading them in and manipulating the memory, stuff like that does crop up.
Yes it doesn't make porting suddenly trivial, but it may remove some of the more subtle and insidious problems.
This isn't just about finding files; Spotlight (and similar systems) give you the metadata to make decisions based on a lot of file properties, and to make searches/take action based on that, instead of just on the file name or the text contents. Like BeOS used to be. So you can set up views of 'All my Family Images', or whatever else, that don't go stale like a folder does.
Folders may be one of the biggest mistakes in UI design; I'm glad we're getting away from them. In my opinion we should just get rid of them completely and have a flat store with lots of choice for metadata and versioning of files.
Why should you have to choose one category for a file, and consign it forever to that bin? The worst solution is to duplicate files or start trying to create sym links. The best solution is to rethink the views that are allowed on the data.
If we had built metadata into file systems in the first place, we wouldn't have the mess of 'file extensions' we have today. We also wouldn't be trying to shoehorn files which may have a lot of different references and uses into one category, just because our computers give us one, and exactly one, way to categorise information.
In short, by saying 'I know where everything is' you are working round a shortcoming in your Finder/Explorer/File system.
Slashdot Mirror
Chaucer??? That long-winded blowhard.
: )
Now, the works of Woolfe, Joyce, and hundreds of authors who are mostly forgotten are read primarily by 'experts' in the field or by lit majors, while Tolkien and Lewis are two of the most recognized fiction writers in the world.
I'm sorry, but Tolkien and Lewis (CS Lewis?!?) are not great writers, and won't be considered as such in the future. Writers feted in their own time (by the public or the authorities) are often forgotten about a century later. In fact those you cited as 'read by experts' were largely ignored or vilified during their own lifetimes.
Tolkien is famous right now because of the film, and will fade back to insignificance in a few decades. He is not a great writer, and will never be considered as such, because his work really isn't that good. I read it when I was 10 (twice) and was enthralled by it, but the standard of writing is not very high; the characters are caricatures, the dialog is flat, and the jokes are tortuous buffoonery (esp the dwarves). However the plot is full of archetypal myths, and the linguistic references and languages are interesting. This doesn't make it a classic, just interesting. Huge hollywood films or comments on Slashdot claiming it's 'The best book of the 20C' will not it make a classic either.
Rowling is a mediocre writer. Just because her books have been made into blockbuster films and are popular right now doesn't make them better than average. There's a lot of other more deserving talent in Childrens' books - take a look at 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' for example. Unfortunately the way media hype works makes fame and accolades accrete on 'stars' and is divorced from any notions of quality.
The influence of Joyce on writers in this century alone means he's not going to disappear any time soon. Woolfe is also far more interesting than Tolkien (or CS Lewis, or Rowling) both in the characters she tackles, the social issues, and the language - have you read any of her books? If you want to choose someone from this century who is a 'great writer' Grahame Greene would be a good choice - accessible but writes very well.
Windows is not clunky because it doesn't have nice pulsating buttons or shadows on windows. All that stuff is very nice but ultimately incidental. It's clunky because of some basic flaws of methodology:
Windows has some nice features, and had some (like previews of images in the 'Finder' I think...) before OS X, so in some ways it's better, but in so many ways it makes life more difficult rather than easier...
PS - imagine if there was an OS where you didn't have to 'keep it clean'; Wouldn't that be nice?
well, yes all this is way off. They haven't even stated this is their intention, it's all speculation. However if they want to avoid being muscled out by Microsoft, their best plan might be to offer a suite of services that are available anywhere, via the browser, and which could even host users' data (for free for light users with ads, or business users on a contract) with guaranteed uptime.
I don't think they'll ever have to write their own OS (operating system as in providing APIs, file IO services etc) or want to. However they *can* provide a range of services that the user can interact with instead of those which come from the OS vendors (MS, Apple).
Yes, MS would still make money from the real OS. However I don't see that as a problem for Google - their problem comes if they let Microsoft try to edge them out of markets like search or mail by tying in customers to an MS implementation/browser (as they have done in the past). Wresting control of some of these components away from MS would avoid that danger, but then it might just annoy MS enough to try to 'cut off their air supply'.
Anyway, thanks for the cogent responses.
It's clean, simple
xCode is quite a good IDE and getting better but it's anything but clean and simple.
Why have build Styles *and* Targets?? ?!??
Why do you have to set your App's 'version' in 2 different places?
Clicking to create breakpoints while compiling sometimes causes a compiler error.
You have to clean targets when you change build style because the IDE doesn't do it for you.
An errors pane that doesn't get cleaned when a rebuild starts, so you have to wait till the end of the build to see which errors are new (even then sometimes the old errors stay in there).
The type-ahead code-completion is painfully slow. I've had to turn both that and the indexing off to work with it.
When I press 'next file' and 'previous file' I get all kinds of random files from the project. I'm not sure what those are supposed to do.
There are some neat ideas in xCode (and coming up in 2.0) and it's being improved, but it feels like 2 completely different applications were thrown together and then they tried to clear up the mess, even as they are adding heaps of features with every release. There are quite a few unresolved bugs as well (see above).
Any application with 14 menus in the menubar (count em!) can't be called clean and simple in my opinion...
While a browser or browser based app is not an OS and never will be, I think the parent poster to yours had a very good point.
Most users do not even know what an 'Operating System' is. Their interaction with it comes almost entirely through the File explorer or Finder (call it what you will). As a developer there's a lot more to it (multiple APIs, file IO, multimedia etc etc), but not as a user.
Google Desktop, interestingly, can all but replace that part of the OS for most users; if they need to open a file, they no longer look for it in folders and click on it, they search and then click a link. And it's faster than the search that's built in - how embarrassing for MS.
Say Google launched photo management software (Picassa), email software (Gmail), a search function (Desktop search), a web browser (perhaps a rebranded Firefox with Desktop Search), and finally an office suite (either written in XUL or native).
As the OS tends towards a badly debugged set of device drivers, in the perception of a non-technical user Google becomes the 'OS'. Also of interest is the fact that the browser has become most peoples' universal file viewer - you can view jpegs, txt, PDFs, movies etc in there. Good or bad, this is often how they use it.
The user sees Google all day - they see Microsoft software when they go to change the printers or the desktop background. Apart from that, as far as they're concerned, their computer is run by Google...
Now whether it would be wise to poke MS with a sharp stick like this is debatable, but the premise that the OS is nothing but a skin on a kernel, filesystem etc is actually true from a user's point of view. That skin, worryingly for Microsoft, is replaceable, that's why they merged IE with the OS and made it impossible to remove, and that's why they're aiming to choke the internet again with XAML.
uhm, no you didn't know what the word means. It doesn't mean one before the ultimate as in 'almost the greatest but not quite', it means one before the last, from penult. As the poster above explained to you.
Just accept it and move on, looser
and more relaxed is the way to be...
If global warming does continue, we run the risk of entering a new ice age. The truth is, people don't really know what will happen.
, 12 374,1083419,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0
I've never heard of 'Sharpie' either. Probably like 'xeroxing' ; it's not used much elsewhere as a generic word. Looking at the pens on my desk, I have a TDK one, a Staedtler one, and an Edding one, no 'Sharpies' I'm afraid. (I'm not the original AC).
:p
And, yes, you are an American, or at least you spell your words that way...
I simply do not understand it.
Perhaps because you're so blinkered by your belief in the 'one true way'.
EU is going the same way.
Err, no, with Bush in power, it's probably headed in the other direction, toward direct confrontation.
Hear about the ongoing steel tariffs war?
Microsoft fined for monopolist behaviour?
GM Crops?
"Batch Change" in the photo menu
Err, couldn't they just let you change the comments in the comments field? As it is it's disabled for multiple selections. Wouldn't that make more sense? The Batch change is a kludge that they've tacked on - in fact I hadn't even found it (as you suspected). Thanks for letting me know about it though.
If you don't like the HTML export
If they'd done the export with templates (as they should have), it wouldn't be a problem. I'm aware there are 3rd party solutions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "custom tags"
By custom tags I meant a combination of an arbitrary fieldname and value, so I could add a tag to photos that are sold like this
sold = 25
with a different sale value for each one (or whatever, that's just an example off the top of my head). Keywords is the equivalent of one extra field.
My biggest gripe is the layout of your picture library on disk.
I understand it's useful for some people, and some things like the slideshows are really nice, but it also has serious limitations. If you take a look at iView just for example you'll see what I mean. It was really Steve Job's hubris in saying 'it's not worth bothering writing that sort of app' which got me started ranting : )
Doublespeak is all the rage in the USA these days :
'Patriot Act'
'Anti-Iraqi forces'
'Coalition of the willing'
'The civilised world'
If you say it enough, it becomes true.
Well,
he's managed to avoid working in a soul-sucking job for a large corporation, where his creativity would dry up and his voice go unheeeded. He's managed to keep his sense of humour through it all (those barbed comments from Steve have to hurt), and he is actually more aware than ever that he's better off going his own way and creating the stuff *he* wants to make. I'd say it was inspiring in that he's happy, doing what he wants to do, and can make money doing it. Software companies always copy each other, that's the way it works, and I'm glad they do or we'd be stuck with a choice between several apps with orthogonal features none of which did everything we want.
Actually the comment from Steve about iPhoto made me laugh as it's really one of Apple's worst products and could easily be bested, even after a couple of revisions. Someone could do worse than come up with a better alternative and sell it as shareware; I'm sure a lot of people who take photos as a hobby wouldn't mind a decent app to organise their images.
One where you could edit comments for more than one image at once for example, or add custom tags to images, or which has flexible HTML export. Perhaps one where the internal file system wasn't so byzantine that once the files are in there your best bet for getting them out is to drag and drop to the desktop. One which had a decent search facility. I could go on, I'm thinking of something like iView, but with basic functionality free (to compete with iphoto) and then a few extras for registering.
which inexplicably renders horribly
Hardly inexplicable if you look at the HTML source for Slashdot, it's an unholy mess.
The point is Spotlight uses what's already there - EXIF tags for images, word metadata, FS file mod dates etc, custom app metadata within a file (the app developer will have to write a plugin for spotlight to see that though).
It's tied to the FS in that it hooks in to find out when files are changed so that it can try to update its metadata store.
Spotlight does *not* automatically add metadata to your files - that's left up to the apps, which is probably as it should be. So metadata is just as portable as it was before across file systems, it's just that Tiger will make more use of it.
Probably very similar to Search Kit which currently does the same thing, but has to be manually set up. You can choose the type of index it creates, inverted, vector or both together.
You can use standards without doing any of the things you claim is meant by "use standards", and you can do all of the things you claim is meant by "use standards" without actually using any standards.
My point was, your definition of 'Use web-standards" varies wildly from the one which has become common-coin. Now you can complain about this, but ultimately meaning follows usage.
Your definition:
Web standards - things which have been approved as ISO standards.
Commonly used definition:
W3C recommendations (encompassing those 'orthogonal issues' I talked about like content/presentation separation, allowing for varied user-agents etc).
Yes the W3C isn't perfect, but it's the best we have, and if everyone agrees to the recommendations. The 'real standards' you talk of are so out of date that they are no longer relevant. So either we splinter into 100 different implementations of the same ideas and reignite the browser wars, or browser makers and content creators agree on common ground and accepted usage. This is what most people call 'standards'.
uhm. No. It is not continually indexing the data, if you read the article you'll see it only updates the meta-data for items when they're saved - you can write custom plug-ins for new data types, or just go with the bundles ones for standard file types like images, text etc.
:
:
:
Filesystem metadata is great, but "instantly" updated search indexes sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
On the contrary, this is a *better* solution to a very basic problem that has plagued computers since they were invented.
The problem
How do I organise and access the data I use every day (emails, letters, images, music etc)?
The old solution
You can put your files in folders (one per file). You can name the files with a short description, ending with a cryptic 3 letter code to denote the file type. Files *must* be in one category/folder only at a time. Limited meta-data (date modified, file-type etc) may be stored.
The new solution
You add meta-data to files (often automatically) saying who created them, what project it's under, whether it's 'to do' or 'unfinished' or whatever. You'd do this in a save dialog for the application, as you saved the file. All other applications which use searchlight will update their view of this stuff for free, in real time.
When you want to work on a project, you click on the live project folder, and immediately you see all the files, emails, images etc for that project, no more, no less, regardless of where they are on the disk and what other projects they're shared with.
Want to see all the stuff to do with John, 5 months ago? On this project? Containing the word gizmo? That sort of query will be easy to make.
If you have an image editing application, it can show you all the images taken in Paris in 2002, without having to build a database application into it. This makes adding this kind of feature to applications trivial.
Ideally adding meta-data tags like 'project-1', and 'To do' should be as easy as choosing them in the save dialog or applying them like a label in the Finder. It's not quite at that stage yet, but that should come later. Some of these ideas are quite old (Be), but they are long overdue in a desktop operating system.
Your analogy with WWII is pitifully narrow, and undermines your point in any case. Let me play your game of reductio ad absurdum.
If America had taken the attitude you espouse durning WWII, they would have bombed Japan to hell to retaliate for Pearl Harbour and left Europe to the Russians/Nazis, only to find themselves in a much more uncomfortable world afterwards. Instead they admirably stepped in and sacrificed many of their citizens to defend the values (and at that point in time the word had meaning) they held dear.
Fast-forward to 2004; congratulations on uniting the world against your country. Perhaps that won't seem such a smart move in 10 years. America will be paying for voting Bush for a long time.
Short term self-interest is not an intelligent survival strategy.
Does that mean we should all go back to producing HTML like that turned out by slashcode?
When people say 'use standards' they mean
All these things are Good. So far you haven't come up with any suggestions, you're just whining about the semantics (heh) of one word. Stop complaining about that and tell us what we *should* be doing, and how this differs from what Eric Meyer has done.
Can't you just do
.style
{
margin-left:2em;
}
div class="post" id="postid"
div
div
end div
end div
end div
Hardly a 'hack'. What am I missing??
err, it's a web page, and not a PDF? I'd say that's an advantage right there, as it means you can publish it to the web.
Yes you can upload a PDF but I'd rather the HTML as it's more malleable.
Well, the point is that the assumed processor can cause SERIOUS endian and memory offset issues which can kill performance, introduce bugs and make porting a nightmare.
To remove that difficulty does not make porting trivial (and thus you are right in a sense, as I think that's what you're trying to say), but it does remove a big stumbling block to porting.
Say companies who port already have an established workalike API for Direct-X (which seems to be what most games use nowadays for the Xbox/PC) because they've ported a large game before.
The fact this game was tested on the same processor makes their life a whole lot easier, as it removes the endian nastiness from their porting experience. Because many games deal with large textures etc etc and have their own engines for reading them in and manipulating the memory, stuff like that does crop up.
Yes it doesn't make porting suddenly trivial, but it may remove some of the more subtle and insidious problems.
This isn't just about finding files; Spotlight (and similar systems) give you the metadata to make decisions based on a lot of file properties, and to make searches/take action based on that, instead of just on the file name or the text contents. Like BeOS used to be. So you can set up views of 'All my Family Images', or whatever else, that don't go stale like a folder does.
Folders may be one of the biggest mistakes in UI design; I'm glad we're getting away from them. In my opinion we should just get rid of them completely and have a flat store with lots of choice for metadata and versioning of files.
Why should you have to choose one category for a file, and consign it forever to that bin? The worst solution is to duplicate files or start trying to create sym links. The best solution is to rethink the views that are allowed on the data.
If we had built metadata into file systems in the first place, we wouldn't have the mess of 'file extensions' we have today. We also wouldn't be trying to shoehorn files which may have a lot of different references and uses into one category, just because our computers give us one, and exactly one, way to categorise information.
In short, by saying 'I know where everything is' you are working round a shortcoming in your Finder/Explorer/File system.