Do anti-virus programs on the client scan email that you send out? I was under the impression they scanned files that were copied to the hard disk, it would have to be very closely integrated with the email software to scan incoming email, and frankly there are better enterprise products for scanning mail attachments on the server side anyway.
Not forwarding attachments that you don't recognise/need is common sense - why would you possibly forward an email like that??? So I think the grand-parent's point stands - until there is a virus in the wild for OS X, installing anti-virus software is not going to help anyone.
The only possible use I can see is to scan for word macro viruses which you might pass on to windows users, however there is another solution to that problem. Also, if they have anti-virus software (which they should have) it should pick that up.
If you were talking about the iTunes music store, you might have a point. As it is your post doesn't make any sense.
The iPod does NOT require DRM, I don't know where you got that idea. You can play your music in multiple formats, the most widely used being MP3. It also plays DRMed music from the music store, if you choose to use that.
If you want to get the music off it again, there are several apple scripts floating around to do it. The files are only hidden after all.
The diseased arab culture that is the source of our enemies does stifle creativity.
For the last time it's not an Arab country. Muslim does not mean Arab. Muslims and Arabs are not *necessarily* your enemy despite what Bush would have you think.
As to your abridged history of the world, no I'm afraid 'Western Civilisation' (you mean Greece and Rome?) did not create the modern world; the number system we use came from India, and Christianity came from the Middle East, just to bring up two examples.
If you want to find the source of your enemies, look to your own ignorant arrogance.
You should seriously consider getting some more memory, and leaving these apps open. There's no reason to quit them, unless you are working on a huge file in photoshop or something.
Apple will encourage you to use iPhoto and other programs which use proprietary file systems
err, I hate to deflate your paranoia, but in fact iTunes stores the music neatly in folders at
Music > Artist > Album1 >.MP3 or.AAC files for that CD
So all the music is neatly ordered on your hard disk. If you don't like AAC you can easily choose . MP3 to encode the files with instead in the preferences. Other programs can play AAC files through quicktime (though not the copy protected ones you might have bought from the music store). This is on a mac, I don't have a PC to see what they do there. There's a neat little.xml file too that you could parse if you actually did want to get some of the itunes info out. Actually the information in your MP3s is stored in ID3 tags, which are understood by just about every other music player.
As for iphoto, all the photos are stored as jpegs (last I heard that was an open standard), and exporting them is as simple as dragging and dropping out of the program. If you want the captions there are several export plugins for iphoto I believe, for going to HTML etc. The folder structure is a complete mess (incompetence or malice, you decide), but they have now added aliases to all your photo albums so you could easily write a script to extract those images if you choose to do it without a plugin. There is also an xml file with all the Album data.
Much as I agree that proprietary/closed file formats are evil, the two programs you cite just don't use them, and are in fact good examples of extending open formats (MP3, XML) to add value without locking in customers.
"a contractor's head gets cut off for no apparent reason"
He built helicopters for killing people, he's American/Western, he's in Saudia Arabia.
There's three reasons which are very apparent to me. Perhaps we should have been civil enough to rebuild Afghanistan (for free or not), but it appears that's yesterday's war, and the west doesn't need any bases there.
If you disagree with the war there, yes I think it is immoral to accept a lot of money from the US to 'rebuild', because there are a lot of people in Iraq who need the money. Unfortunately the US seems to prefer to pay their own people rather than hire anyone Iraqi (which would help the economy over there, but not the US economy).
'The country is in mourning today', as it's a collective noun and it's very abstract - you hardly ever have occasion to think of a country as a mass of individuals, and it's almost impossible to imagine. However if it was a football team you might say...
The team are ready to play today.
or even
Although this team is very aggressive, they are useless in defence.
This is also confused by the fact we use 'they' as a 3rd person singular pronoun if we don't want to specify the gender.
eg 'They arrived last night' could be singular. Not sure what the US usage is.
Maybe not completely relevant to the specific subject, but what is the best way to stop this?
Due to the global nature of the internet, the only way is to wait until the government of the United Sates changes due to public, internal pressure. Thus ensuring the people who are actually paying for and organising the spam in the USA are caught. Note that this may take some time.
Heard of the European Rapid reaction force? Still in the planning stages but they just set up a headquarters. It's been seen a nascent European Army.
It's not really a question of bigger militaries, but some people/countries do want to see a unified (and therefore more powerful) force independent of the US.
As for political pressure, you can always rely on Rumsfeld for a quote, or here's another link I imagine there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes though. Understandably the US are worried about losing control of EU actions.
yep, things are going so well with those pirates in Iraq just now aren't they. It can only get better too. Nice selective survey of hundreds of years of history there.
We already have several obligatory universal IDs in the UK, and I don't understand the parent poster's paranoia on this specific issue (this is from a fellow UKian).
We currently have National Insurance Number : given out to all adults of working age, and unique to that person (also used by the tax office) Passport Number : ditto Birth Certificate : again, legally required for various things Driving license - this is a bad example because it's not obligatory and it's tied to one function.
They are probably all in various databases combined and correlated anyway. In my opinion the poster who said in the post above that the best approach is to demand transparency and accountability in the use of these numbers is correct. We should demand more open information, rather than trying to balkanise the government departments and hope for the best; that they won't talk to each other and somehow that makes us safe from dictatorship.
If a sufficiently repressive government came to power, they have the army and police on their side, and that's where these arguments become academic. If they ask for papers you will go along with it (along with the majority), or resist. You wouldn't be complaining about which papers exactly they asked for.
We should not try to fight the tools used for singling out minorities (there are many, and many innocuous tools can be used for these ends). I'd be interested to know what documents the Nazis used to classify racial identity - probably things which before were in common use - birth certificate, family name, along with some concocted rules of their own like medical inspections. Instead we need to be observant and complain about abuse as it happens - witness the disregard for the Geneva Conventions sanctioned by our government in the UK.
Many other European countries are already using Identity cards as a substitute for passports on their internal borders - I see a lot of people at Waterloo coming off the Eurostar without passports for example. I think in the long run they'll get rid of paper passports. I found that figure of 1 million people amusing. If they try to introduce a national Identity card, I really don't think you'll get 1 million in the UK going to jail for it. That's not to say I swallow all the arguments put forward by the government (as soon as they mention terrorists I switch off), but a card would make life easier for various government departments, and it makes sense in the long term.
A Weapon of Mass Destruction would require more than one shell (much more), as many many people have pointed out. So you shouldn't be using that term. Also, a shell wouldn't really go very far, now would it; hardly the dangerous missiles stuffed full of nerve gas we were promised before the war... But please keep trying to justify your position in the face of a reality which starkly contradicts it, it's really quite funny.
oh please, are you talking about the invasion of Iraq, or some vague catch-all 'War on Evil' which will change definition every time someone asks who you're attacking?
Hate to break it to you, but Saddam ran quite a secular (though evil) government, and actually persecuted a lot of people for their muslim beliefs. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with Muslim extremism and everything to do with the crazy obsession of right wing cranks like Cheney and Rumsfeld with having a puppet regime in the gulf. Unfortunately they didn't learn from previous mistakes (remember the Iranian revolution? Remember that photo of Rumsfeld visiting Saddam in the eighties under Reagan to discuss cooperation?).
Do you really believe the roughly 10,000 people killed in Saddam's army during the invasion were actually interested in your country or in imposing Islamic law there? They didn't even have it in Iraq. Who exactly do you mean by 'them', and what exactly do you think the war in Iraq has to do with that?
The war in Afghanistan had some direct justification, and the country is still a mess, arguably in worse shape than when we invaded. No one even bothers to talk about it in the US media (or in Europe for that matter) anymore. Will that war stop a terrorist sponsoring government from taking over there? It won't if we leave the country to slide into chaos again afterward.
The software isn't 'installed', it's an application that the user actively downloads, and then chooses to run, which then does bad things, it doesn't bother to install itself or 'infect' the machine, so far as we know. So it's a trojan, and the word infection shouldn't be used.
Intego's software can only protect against this particular program, or, if they're very general, against scripts for example. It's not going to help against a carbon/cocoa/java application with a different name which does exactly the same thing. To protect against that the user might have to think a little.
There are already mechanisms in place to deal with this - for example you can set up a spare user account if you insist on downloading executables from P2P, and use that to test them out. Doing that would be much safer than using any Intego product. Personally I think Apple should come out and disown Intego publicly, as a lot of gullible people might now be tempted to buy their software, and they look like they're going to continue with their scare tactics while people still pay attention.
Err. I think you'll find most 3rd party developers of software for OS X would dissagree with you. What API do you think all Adobe software uses? All Macromedia software? I think Office is Carbon too. Of course Steve is pretty crazy, and anything is possible, but realistically...
Apple has no choice right now, they have to advance both APIs, as Carbon isn't going to go away. In fact 8 of those sessions in the link are addressed to Carbon developers, which is slightly less than the cocoa total, but still quite a few specific ones out of 30 or so.
The best thing Apple can do is make sure both APIs are consistent in terms of user experience (still a few glitches there, but it's getting better), and use the same underlying technology going forward to avoid duplication of effort. The user should not know or care if the app is a cocoa/carbon/applescript studio/python/java app, it should 'just work'.
Also, to have Finder always open up in column view.
uhm. look in the Finder preferences for this - there's a check box just for you.
I'd like to be able to write ö without having to open up the character palette.
For many characters characters, there are in fact key combos (I assume you're on a qwerty keyboard layout?)...
hit alt-u for umlaut, followed by the letter you want under the umaut. alt-e for an acute, etc etc. When you hit the key-combo you'll see a little preview of the accent you're going to get.
As for sftp, I'd rather have a specialized app that did it properly, but perhaps they'll put it in eventually (after fixing the normal FTP support?).
I assume you're not comparing the 'Gimp' (what's with that juvenile name/acronym?) with Photoshop on OS X?
Photoshop acts like every other app on OSX. The Gimp is a frankenstein child of linux and windows, and not just because it's under X11. I'd say the photoshop users are *exactly* the people the Gimp designers should be listening very hard to. There is a reason people are willing to pay good money for photoshop, and a lot of that reason is the interface, which tries hard to fit in and at the same time extend the host OS. Looking at the Gimp one on OS X, it has some serious problems:
There are two file menus, one in each document window too (If they're going to use the broken 'menu in the window' idea they could at least get it right).
There doesn't appear to be any consistent ordering for the buttons in windows, and why are their buttons to perform actions anyway? Are these dialogs or palettes? The palettes are all too large and the arrangement of tools is not at all intuitive. Why the huge patterns palette is shown by default I have no idea, because it was 'cool'?
The popup menus are enormous (sometimes for stuff like 'px' which should be in the prefs anyway) and some buttons are half-hidden by the bottom right corner of windows. The default for the layers palette appears to be not to follow the selected document, and there is a little 'auto' button for choosing this option (??!?!!?!?! Shouldn't auto be, you know, automatic?).
So, in general, the interface feels like a historical accident that no one wants to clean up, and unfortunately that history is on another platform, making it appear even uglier to someone used to native OS X programs. If it was the sort of program that you just set up a few options and leave to do its thing (rendering, batch image processing etc) that'd be acceptable, but in a graphics program where you spend all day choosing options and tools, it just can't work. If it took over the screen and imposed its own paradigm so that you forget the rest of the system (like many 3D apps) that'd be another way round it I guess, but at the moment it looks like it's trying to fit in and failing miserably.
The default install also leaves several invisible files in your user folder, so you'll have to go through and try to delete them if you choose to remove it.
This is ignoring the fact that on a default install of X11 you have to click twice on windows to actually choose a tool - though not strictly a Gimp problem, most new users would get stuck right there. If it's going to see any adoption on OS X someone needs to do a port using carbon or cocoa and throw away the horrific front end. For now I'm happy paying for photoshop. I had a quick look at the code, and boy do they have their work cut-out if they want to separate the back end from the interface. Perhaps that's why they're loath to change it?
Your business is quite particular though, as it's an engineering shop with lots of specialised apps, thus you have to stick with Windows, as that's what you chose. Fair enough. Switching costs for *you* and other shops like yours would be very high.
I was just pointing out that for the majority of corporate users (at least that I've seen, in large Insurance companies for example), there are perhaps 1 or 2 bespoke apps (for accessing the mainframe databases), and everything else was standard and available on other platforms than Windows. Thus switching would be relatively painless, particularly if they'd thought ahead and hadn't allowed a vendor to lock them in.
Java isn't the only choice obviously, it was just an example of something that was designed to address the issue you have (high costs if you ever have to switch to an incompatible version of windows/other OS). You do say that 60% of your computers are not running anything special, but perhaps you have other reasons for wanting them on Windows.
Many small businesses don't use their computers for much more than email and typing letters, but as you point out, yours does.
hmm, 'Capital Depreciation Analysis' software notwithstanding, 90% of computers in offices could be replaced with something like Linux tomorrow, and the users would notice the change of desktop background and not much else. Word processing/spreadsheets are not complicated, nor are they platform specific, and the needs of many business users are not very advanced.
To avoid locking yourself into any one platform you could build vertical business apps with java or serve them through a web-browser, and you wouldn't have any problem switching client computers (assuming your OS of choice hadn't tried to lock out java as something which would allow their business users the freedom to, oh, wait...). If current software on Linux isn't up to the task, consider OS X.
I'd use Windows where it is truly your *only* choice, for the rest of the computers, it's time to consider the alternatives (and there are several, not just linux). Windows costs a huge amount to maintain, and you have to spend a lot more on protection from things like viruses/worms and locking down the clients in the first place (because of the continual flood of security alerts).
If you're talking about switching costs you should consider the cost of staying with the platform you're on too - it is by no means negligible.
Whilst is a nice word. I suppose 'kith and kin' would be beyond the pale for you as well?
Relax. Languages are more fun if you can play with them; often half the meaning communicated falls between the strict literal meaning of the words in a sentence.
Well as you point out there are two problems, the file system support (and moving a file from one file system to another while preserving metadata), and operating system support.
If you have file system support it works very well on one machine, however when you move files across file systems which don't support this metadata and back again (unfortunately inevitable right now, particularly with lots of windows servers, FTP etc), you'll lose all that information, which seems a shame.
Still, as you point out, perhaps the way to go is to adopt a file system that supports extended metadata and hope the rest of the world follows. It'd be nice to have more metadata than just a mime type, there are loads of other things that'd be useful - among them versioning, username, application specific stuff etc.
I was thinking bundles would be handy as they *only* require a change at the operating system level, not the file system level, and they would persist even across metadata agnostic filesystems. Of course you'd have to give the user the choice of what to do when copying to such a system - copy just the flat file or copy it within the bundle folder for use by others with a bundle aware operating system.
Though I understand your reservations about bundles (eg they might seem like overkill for a simple text file), if they were a standard feature enforced by an operating system, all of a sudden all apps would know about them (and legacy ones would just get handed the file reference inside the bundle and never know, thus solving your problem with AIFFs). The user wouldn't have to deal with the question of opening packages to get at the contents (unless they wanted to).
PS
.DS_Store files are metadata - the position of the files in the finder window etc. though perhaps you wouldn't expect this to be preserved across file systems. I didn't mean to imply that they were used for resource forks.
Resource forks held/hold a mixture of what should really be meta-data (icons, file previews, version, associated files for app etc), and other stuff like images etc for apps, so they're kind of strange, but they are used on classic mac OS systems for storing info about the file (among other things).
Haven't read all of this, but this looks an interesting perspective on where file systems are headed, though heavy on XML I'm sure this stuff has been discussed many times before by people who know a lot more than me, but thanks for playing : >
Slashdot Mirror
Do anti-virus programs on the client scan email that you send out? I was under the impression they scanned files that were copied to the hard disk, it would have to be very closely integrated with the email software to scan incoming email, and frankly there are better enterprise products for scanning mail attachments on the server side anyway.
Not forwarding attachments that you don't recognise/need is common sense - why would you possibly forward an email like that??? So I think the grand-parent's point stands - until there is a virus in the wild for OS X, installing anti-virus software is not going to help anyone.
The only possible use I can see is to scan for word macro viruses which you might pass on to windows users, however there is another solution to that problem. Also, if they have anti-virus software (which they should have) it should pick that up.
If you were talking about the iTunes music store, you might have a point. As it is your post doesn't make any sense.
The iPod does NOT require DRM, I don't know where you got that idea. You can play your music in multiple formats, the most widely used being MP3. It also plays DRMed music from the music store, if you choose to use that.
If you want to get the music off it again, there are several apple scripts floating around to do it. The files are only hidden after all.
"Security through obscurity"
Don't you mean security through diversity?
The diseased arab culture that is the source of our enemies does stifle creativity.
For the last time it's not an Arab country. Muslim does not mean Arab. Muslims and Arabs are not *necessarily* your enemy despite what Bush would have you think.
As to your abridged history of the world, no I'm afraid 'Western Civilisation' (you mean Greece and Rome?) did not create the modern world; the number system we use came from India, and Christianity came from the Middle East, just to bring up two examples.
If you want to find the source of your enemies, look to your own ignorant arrogance.
nicking == stealing, nabbing
British slang.
You should seriously consider getting some more memory, and leaving these apps open. There's no reason to quit them, unless you are working on a huge file in photoshop or something.
Apple will encourage you to use iPhoto and other programs which use proprietary file systems
.MP3 or .AAC files for that CD
.xml file too that you could parse if you actually did want to get some of the itunes info out. Actually the information in your MP3s is stored in ID3 tags, which are understood by just about every other music player.
err, I hate to deflate your paranoia, but in fact iTunes stores the music neatly in folders at
Music > Artist > Album1 >
So all the music is neatly ordered on your hard disk. If you don't like AAC you can easily choose . MP3 to encode the files with instead in the preferences. Other programs can play AAC files through quicktime (though not the copy protected ones you might have bought from the music store). This is on a mac, I don't have a PC to see what they do there. There's a neat little
As for iphoto, all the photos are stored as jpegs (last I heard that was an open standard), and exporting them is as simple as dragging and dropping out of the program. If you want the captions there are several export plugins for iphoto I believe, for going to HTML etc. The folder structure is a complete mess (incompetence or malice, you decide), but they have now added aliases to all your photo albums so you could easily write a script to extract those images if you choose to do it without a plugin. There is also an xml file with all the Album data.
Much as I agree that proprietary/closed file formats are evil, the two programs you cite just don't use them, and are in fact good examples of extending open formats (MP3, XML) to add value without locking in customers.
"a contractor's head gets cut off for no apparent reason"
He built helicopters for killing people, he's American/Western, he's in Saudia Arabia.
There's three reasons which are very apparent to me. Perhaps we should have been civil enough to rebuild Afghanistan (for free or not), but it appears that's yesterday's war, and the west doesn't need any bases there.
If you disagree with the war there, yes I think it is immoral to accept a lot of money from the US to 'rebuild', because there are a lot of people in Iraq who need the money. Unfortunately the US seems to prefer to pay their own people rather than hire anyone Iraqi (which would help the economy over there, but not the US economy).
ssshhhhhhh.
>'The country are in mourning today'?
No, that'd be
'The country is in mourning today', as it's a collective noun and it's very abstract - you hardly ever have occasion to think of a country as a mass of individuals, and it's almost impossible to imagine. However if it was a football team you might say...
The team are ready to play today.
or even
Although this team is very aggressive, they are useless in defence.
This is also confused by the fact we use 'they' as a 3rd person singular pronoun if we don't want to specify the gender.
eg 'They arrived last night' could be singular. Not sure what the US usage is.
Maybe not completely relevant to the specific subject, but what is the best way to stop this?
Due to the global nature of the internet, the only way is to wait until the government of the United Sates changes due to public, internal pressure. Thus ensuring the people who are actually paying for and organising the spam in the USA are caught. Note that this may take some time.
Heard of the European Rapid reaction force? Still in the planning stages but they just set up a headquarters. It's been seen a nascent European Army.
It's not really a question of bigger militaries, but some people/countries do want to see a unified (and therefore more powerful) force independent of the US.
As for political pressure, you can always rely on Rumsfeld for a quote, or here's another link I imagine there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes though. Understandably the US are worried about losing control of EU actions.
yep, things are going so well with those pirates in Iraq just now aren't they. It can only get better too. Nice selective survey of hundreds of years of history there.
Only on Slashdot.
We already have several obligatory universal IDs in the UK, and I don't understand the parent poster's paranoia on this specific issue (this is from a fellow UKian).
We currently have
National Insurance Number : given out to all adults of working age, and unique to that person (also used by the tax office)
Passport Number : ditto
Birth Certificate : again, legally required for various things
Driving license - this is a bad example because it's not obligatory and it's tied to one function.
They are probably all in various databases combined and correlated anyway. In my opinion the poster who said in the post above that the best approach is to demand transparency and accountability in the use of these numbers is correct. We should demand more open information, rather than trying to balkanise the government departments and hope for the best; that they won't talk to each other and somehow that makes us safe from dictatorship.
If a sufficiently repressive government came to power, they have the army and police on their side, and that's where these arguments become academic. If they ask for papers you will go along with it (along with the majority), or resist. You wouldn't be complaining about which papers exactly they asked for.
We should not try to fight the tools used for singling out minorities (there are many, and many innocuous tools can be used for these ends). I'd be interested to know what documents the Nazis used to classify racial identity - probably things which before were in common use - birth certificate, family name, along with some concocted rules of their own like medical inspections. Instead we need to be observant and complain about abuse as it happens - witness the disregard for the Geneva Conventions sanctioned by our government in the UK.
Many other European countries are already using Identity cards as a substitute for passports on their internal borders - I see a lot of people at Waterloo coming off the Eurostar without passports for example. I think in the long run they'll get rid of paper passports. I found that figure of 1 million people amusing. If they try to introduce a national Identity card, I really don't think you'll get 1 million in the UK going to jail for it. That's not to say I swallow all the arguments put forward by the government (as soon as they mention terrorists I switch off), but a card would make life easier for various government departments, and it makes sense in the long term.
You are officially dense, obtuse, and pedantic.
A Weapon of Mass Destruction would require more than one shell (much more), as many many people have pointed out. So you shouldn't be using that term. Also, a shell wouldn't really go very far, now would it; hardly the dangerous missiles stuffed full of nerve gas we were promised before the war... But please keep trying to justify your position in the face of a reality which starkly contradicts it, it's really quite funny.
oh please, are you talking about the invasion of Iraq, or some vague catch-all 'War on Evil' which will change definition every time someone asks who you're attacking?
Hate to break it to you, but Saddam ran quite a secular (though evil) government, and actually persecuted a lot of people for their muslim beliefs. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with Muslim extremism and everything to do with the crazy obsession of right wing cranks like Cheney and Rumsfeld with having a puppet regime in the gulf. Unfortunately they didn't learn from previous mistakes (remember the Iranian revolution? Remember that photo of Rumsfeld visiting Saddam in the eighties under Reagan to discuss cooperation?).
Do you really believe the roughly 10,000 people killed in Saddam's army during the invasion were actually interested in your country or in imposing Islamic law there? They didn't even have it in Iraq. Who exactly do you mean by 'them', and what exactly do you think the war in Iraq has to do with that?
The war in Afghanistan had some direct justification, and the country is still a mess, arguably in worse shape than when we invaded. No one even bothers to talk about it in the US media (or in Europe for that matter) anymore. Will that war stop a terrorist sponsoring government from taking over there? It won't if we leave the country to slide into chaos again afterward.
The software isn't 'installed', it's an application that the user actively downloads, and then chooses to run, which then does bad things, it doesn't bother to install itself or 'infect' the machine, so far as we know. So it's a trojan, and the word infection shouldn't be used.
Intego's software can only protect against this particular program, or, if they're very general, against scripts for example. It's not going to help against a carbon/cocoa/java application with a different name which does exactly the same thing. To protect against that the user might have to think a little.
There are already mechanisms in place to deal with this - for example you can set up a spare user account if you insist on downloading executables from P2P, and use that to test them out. Doing that would be much safer than using any Intego product. Personally I think Apple should come out and disown Intego publicly, as a lot of gullible people might now be tempted to buy their software, and they look like they're going to continue with their scare tactics while people still pay attention.
Err. I think you'll find most 3rd party developers of software for OS X would dissagree with you. What API do you think all Adobe software uses? All Macromedia software? I think Office is Carbon too. Of course Steve is pretty crazy, and anything is possible, but realistically...
Apple has no choice right now, they have to advance both APIs, as Carbon isn't going to go away. In fact 8 of those sessions in the link are addressed to Carbon developers, which is slightly less than the cocoa total, but still quite a few specific ones out of 30 or so.
The best thing Apple can do is make sure both APIs are consistent in terms of user experience (still a few glitches there, but it's getting better), and use the same underlying technology going forward to avoid duplication of effort. The user should not know or care if the app is a cocoa/carbon/applescript studio/python/java app, it should 'just work'.
uhm. look in the Finder preferences for this - there's a check box just for you.
For many characters characters, there are in fact key combos (I assume you're on a qwerty keyboard layout?)...
hit alt-u for umlaut, followed by the letter you want under the umaut. alt-e for an acute, etc etc. When you hit the key-combo you'll see a little preview of the accent you're going to get.
As for sftp, I'd rather have a specialized app that did it properly, but perhaps they'll put it in eventually (after fixing the normal FTP support?).
err, comedy central shows are available on the web for free, albiet in Real format.
http://www.comedycentral.com/
Time to lose your cable TV : )
I assume you're not comparing the 'Gimp' (what's with that juvenile name/acronym?) with Photoshop on OS X?
Photoshop acts like every other app on OSX. The Gimp is a frankenstein child of linux and windows, and not just because it's under X11. I'd say the photoshop users are *exactly* the people the Gimp designers should be listening very hard to. There is a reason people are willing to pay good money for photoshop, and a lot of that reason is the interface, which tries hard to fit in and at the same time extend the host OS. Looking at the Gimp one on OS X, it has some serious problems:
There are two file menus, one in each document window too (If they're going to use the broken 'menu in the window' idea they could at least get it right).
There doesn't appear to be any consistent ordering for the buttons in windows, and why are their buttons to perform actions anyway? Are these dialogs or palettes? The palettes are all too large and the arrangement of tools is not at all intuitive. Why the huge patterns palette is shown by default I have no idea, because it was 'cool'?
The popup menus are enormous (sometimes for stuff like 'px' which should be in the prefs anyway) and some buttons are half-hidden by the bottom right corner of windows. The default for the layers palette appears to be not to follow the selected document, and there is a little 'auto' button for choosing this option (??!?!!?!?! Shouldn't auto be, you know, automatic?).
So, in general, the interface feels like a historical accident that no one wants to clean up, and unfortunately that history is on another platform, making it appear even uglier to someone used to native OS X programs. If it was the sort of program that you just set up a few options and leave to do its thing (rendering, batch image processing etc) that'd be acceptable, but in a graphics program where you spend all day choosing options and tools, it just can't work.
If it took over the screen and imposed its own paradigm so that you forget the rest of the system (like many 3D apps) that'd be another way round it I guess, but at the moment it looks like it's trying to fit in and failing miserably.
The default install also leaves several invisible files in your user folder, so you'll have to go through and try to delete them if you choose to remove it.
This is ignoring the fact that on a default install of X11 you have to click twice on windows to actually choose a tool - though not strictly a Gimp problem, most new users would get stuck right there. If it's going to see any adoption on OS X someone needs to do a port using carbon or cocoa and throw away the horrific front end. For now I'm happy paying for photoshop. I had a quick look at the code, and boy do they have their work cut-out if they want to separate the back end from the interface. Perhaps that's why they're loath to change it?
Your business is quite particular though, as it's an engineering shop with lots of specialised apps, thus you have to stick with Windows, as that's what you chose. Fair enough. Switching costs for *you* and other shops like yours would be very high.
I was just pointing out that for the majority of corporate users (at least that I've seen, in large Insurance companies for example), there are perhaps 1 or 2 bespoke apps (for accessing the mainframe databases), and everything else was standard and available on other platforms than Windows. Thus switching would be relatively painless, particularly if they'd thought ahead and hadn't allowed a vendor to lock them in.
Java isn't the only choice obviously, it was just an example of something that was designed to address the issue you have (high costs if you ever have to switch to an incompatible version of windows/other OS). You do say that 60% of your computers are not running anything special, but perhaps you have other reasons for wanting them on Windows.
Many small businesses don't use their computers for much more than email and typing letters, but as you point out, yours does.
oh, you weren't rude at all : )
hmm, 'Capital Depreciation Analysis' software notwithstanding, 90% of computers in offices could be replaced with something like Linux tomorrow, and the users would notice the change of desktop background and not much else. Word processing/spreadsheets are not complicated, nor are they platform specific, and the needs of many business users are not very advanced.
To avoid locking yourself into any one platform you could build vertical business apps with java or serve them through a web-browser, and you wouldn't have any problem switching client computers (assuming your OS of choice hadn't tried to lock out java as something which would allow their business users the freedom to, oh, wait...). If current software on Linux isn't up to the task, consider OS X.
I'd use Windows where it is truly your *only* choice, for the rest of the computers, it's time to consider the alternatives (and there are several, not just linux). Windows costs a huge amount to maintain, and you have to spend a lot more on protection from things like viruses/worms and locking down the clients in the first place (because of the continual flood of security alerts).
If you're talking about switching costs you should consider the cost of staying with the platform you're on too - it is by no means negligible.
Whilst is a nice word. I suppose 'kith and kin' would be beyond the pale for you as well?
Relax. Languages are more fun if you can play with them; often half the meaning communicated falls between the strict literal meaning of the words in a sentence.
Well as you point out there are two problems, the file system support (and moving a file from one file system to another while preserving metadata), and operating system support.
If you have file system support it works very well on one machine, however when you move files across file systems which don't support this metadata and back again (unfortunately inevitable right now, particularly with lots of windows servers, FTP etc), you'll lose all that information, which seems a shame. Still, as you point out, perhaps the way to go is to adopt a file system that supports extended metadata and hope the rest of the world follows. It'd be nice to have more metadata than just a mime type, there are loads of other things that'd be useful - among them versioning, username, application specific stuff etc.
I was thinking bundles would be handy as they *only* require a change at the operating system level, not the file system level, and they would persist even across metadata agnostic filesystems. Of course you'd have to give the user the choice of what to do when copying to such a system - copy just the flat file or copy it within the bundle folder for use by others with a bundle aware operating system.
Though I understand your reservations about bundles (eg they might seem like overkill for a simple text file), if they were a standard feature enforced by an operating system, all of a sudden all apps would know about them (and legacy ones would just get handed the file reference inside the bundle and never know, thus solving your problem with AIFFs). The user wouldn't have to deal with the question of opening packages to get at the contents (unless they wanted to).
PS
Resource forks held/hold a mixture of what should really be meta-data (icons, file previews, version, associated files for app etc), and other stuff like images etc for apps, so they're kind of strange, but they are used on classic mac OS systems for storing info about the file (among other things).
Haven't read all of this, but this looks an interesting perspective on where file systems are headed, though heavy on XML I'm sure this stuff has been discussed many times before by people who know a lot more than me, but thanks for playing : >