OASIS isn't even finished today! It's just the second draft. So you can't possibly offer any software that is truely using OASIS-Office as a document standard.
OASIS has reached 1.0 december 21 last year. It is impossible to ship a commercial software-product supporting a file-format that was not finished less than a month befor release!
Well you could, but that would be worse than microsofts shipping practice. Apple is not member of OASIS, so they didn't define what would go into the standard and didn't know how many changes to the draft would be made.
I bet that iWorks will have its own file-format, but will not lose more information than necessary, when saving as doc, rtf, ClarisWorks or pdf-document. StarOffice descendants will be able to import at least two of these Formats without much loss.
why apple dont you push openoffice more upfront
OO is huge and cluttered. It's hard to change it's features to smoothly fit into Apples GUI-concept. It's UI is still stuck at the beginning of the 90s.
why apple dont you push mozilla more upfront Konquerer hat the cleaner code. So Safari was based on KHTML and it was a good choice. Using Safari is bliss (but not ignorance).
why apple dont you push a native and complete workable FTP client more upfront with UTF-8 character set support!!! Mainly because Apple belives that FTP does not have much of a future. Their Web-DAV support is much better. There are a few good 3rd party products for FTP though.
It's better to use Apples own X11-Server than to rely on XFree. But even closer to the real Mac experience is a version of Open Office that is called "NeoOfficeJ". It uses Java instead of X11 and e.g. has a real menu-bar not attached to the window.
When Microsoft integrated IE in Windows they did not use a clever anf generic Framework to build the IE upon and made the framework part of the OS, but they tangled the IE with many parts of the system.
Ther is a pinciple in IT that says that components should be very cohesive but only loosely coupled with other components. Apple's Integration is closer to that standard. Exceptions are known though.
A whole lot of people here on Slashdot are by no means native speakers. Some have aquried their english in just a couple of years (say 7) while they were still in school.
It would be polite not to scare those people away, who may have a different and valuable perspective. The discussion might benefit from them.
I myself have never been to a country where the local language was any other than german. So consequently I make mistakes, that few native speakers would ever dream of;-)
Concerning Apple history: I studied a small fraction of it in the recent years and I think that Apple could have decided to ship Mac OS X without the command line. I think I would have been sceptical about that move and most probably they would not have gained me as a cusomer, if they refrained from including "Terminal.app".
However, I think that to most Mac users today, the terminal has a more pschological value. Everything you can do with it can be done as easily by point & click or Apple Script. Well except some stuff that alters the System behaviour very drastically. Those things are perhaps only beneficial if you are running "Mac OS X Server" and have a whole lot of traffic on the machine.
But I didn't expect anything else. The first track has some similaritys with Cliff Martinezs score to "Solaris". Which is of course an excellent score. But while Martinez used these bizarre chord patterns to create suspense and interwove them into a musical context, "Radiant Bells" just presents us with the raw carpet of sound, naked, brutal, soulless.
If this is christmas-music then the ideal reading for it is: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/1 2/17/ 188258
Somebody once said: computer-music is music that has been written for computers
Seriously. If you want to get a lot of students you can do this by establishing a student-lifestyle. Then the kids will tell other kids about it. Because language is all about social interactions, get the experts: young female students. Your students will most probably tell you, when they want a new electronic gizmo, and if they ask they become involved and identify with your school.
> I refer to myself as platform agnostic. I don't much care what > I'm running as long as it gets the job done.
I know many people who think like you. But I have always felt, that the platform wars are in reality about culture. So therefore giving KDE to Windows users might be like inviting strangers to your home country. The fear is that you lose your identity and have to cope with "Babarians led by Bill Gates".
If you just think about the users KDE on Windows is a good thing, as many companies try to lock their employees into their "standard environment" and the little rebellion of installing "just one small software I am accustomed to" is generally not punished. And from these small roots new converts to KDE can be found if co-workers have a look at it.
Devellopers of course have to hasse with this strange platform, but then Stallman wrote gnu-emacs for UNIX despite his expressed dislike of the system and it was a huge success.
But me? Well I am from a different culture. I grew up with home computers and after the death of the real Amiga (introduction of the A4000) I felt like homeless until OS X arrived. There it is: real UNIX and real ease of use - Its not about options, its not about freedom, its about making people happy.
Honestly, I have never seen a piece of software from Microsoft that was anywhere near to being a smooth, seamless solution.
They always chop something together. Then they release it. Then they sort out the major bugs. Then they add silly features and repeat the last two steps until nobody cares about the product anymore.
There are only two reasons for splash-images/screens to exist.
1) to give the user a feedback that the app is launching. 2) it looks beautiful
Both arguments however are flawed when it comes to experienced users. 1) should be handled uniformly by the application-manager and not require the app to do anything. And 2) is actually reversed when you are starting multiple applications. This will create the look of tv-commercial interruptions, which, I think, nobody really consideres to be beautiful.
Babar*an (C64-action like Conan in the movie)
iMaze (cocoa instead of X11)
Astro-Panic
dogfight (the one where sprite-planes hide in the clouds)
Winter-Games
The Eidolon
Shufflepuck-cafe in color and with network mode
Grand Monster Slam
Uridium
Defender of the Crown (multiplayer)
Hardware:
Competition Pro support in every game (with adapter)
Reasons for not recomending it to PC-Users
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Most of the comments seem to center around the Question wheter Macs are good at all, wheter the community is acceptable/credible or even if it is good to be a fan.
Well, of course I have an oppinion on those questions too, but I'd like to make a comment about the book. About a month ago I browsed through some pages of a book with the same subject, at first I thought it might be this one, but I cant remember enough details to really make sure.
The book I was browsing seemed rather unsatisfactory to me. The author was seemingly fascinated about some of the Mac-users he interviewed. Unfortunately the way they are presented distorts to a carricature.
While it is true that Mac-users love to talk about Macs and their benefits (maybe due to the ignorance of their peers), they are not funny in general.
The book I was browsing didn't care about that and It didn't provide too much background about the company.
There is no "Cult of Mac". There is a community, much like the Linux-community or the C# enthusiasts. Of course the image is different. It's a strange topic to write a book about, but if you enjoyed a book about bikers and Harley-Davidson-clubs, you may like it, no matter if you hack DOS or push rectangles all the time.
We had NEXTSTEP for Intel a while back. This was after NeXT was sure they would not sell enough hardware to be profitable anytime.
So if Apple released OS X for x86 this would mean the end of Apple, the last chapter of their history. Nobody in the Intel-World is waiting for a clean, stable user interface or Objective-C Frameworks. What they want is Windows without the bugs and the maybe cool snappy iLife-Applications.
So basically OS X for x86 would suffer the fate many other Intel-Unices: It would be ignored by everyone.
While the old Macs would still run flawlessly, drivers on x86 would not be updated until the whole OS is obsoleted.
I am however talking about standard PC hardware. If apple decided to create an supposedly incompatible x86-based computer and be profitable selling it, there would be hardly any difference to the world of today.
I talk to people that I already know in real life. So I am quite comfortable, yes even happy to see their faces again. Apart from teenagers I think many people would be more satisfied to see the Human they are talking to.
So IMO this is nothing more than a toy. It's like changing the pitch of your voice with some audio-processor when using the phone: It scares people.
iTunes playlists are quite nice. You are perhaps the kind of user who likes to mantain a deep hierarchical folder-structure to sub-categorize according to your own categories. As iTunes playlists are "flat" you are unhapy with it. iTunes uses the ID-tags just for the purpose they where invented for.
CDDB is sometimes really bad when it comes to proper tags, but that's not iTunes fault.
I've seen X11Amp, music match and a bunch of other mp3-players, none of them was half as good as iTunes. But there is one thing that bothers me: I sometimes change a song attribute that is a selection criteria for my current view. So the song pops away and it takes more than 3 clicks to find the song again (even if it is currently playing).:-/
I can deploy an IE patch to 5000 systems in an hour.
Although you may use SMS or whatever to update a lot of systems, you will most probably not make it to 5000 systems in any given hour during the day. That's marketing bulls**t. The only way to get this done is when nobody actually is doing work on the machines and whats the point updating then?
It should be no problem to run automatic updates at night though, if the machines are still turned on. And you can do this for three browsers at once if you like to. It doesn't make much difference which OS or browser you are using. And it's less relevant if it takes half an hour or three to update all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
... verstrichpunktet" ist deutscher. However I usually prefer to call the slash just Schäger" instead of Schrägstrich".
verschrägstrichpunktet" would be more complete.
Well, in reality geplättet" would be more understandable.
Oh, I hope the "Plain Old Text"-setting supports umlauts...
The speech of Steve was somewhere on the net a while ago.
But the images on the mac-screen and the "chariots of fire-soundtrack" have been missing in that version.
OASIS isn't even finished today! It's just the second draft. So you can't possibly offer any software that is truely using OASIS-Office as a document standard.
Well you could, but that would be worse than microsofts shipping practice. Apple is not member of OASIS, so they didn't define what would go into the standard and didn't know how many changes to the draft would be made.
I bet that iWorks will have its own file-format, but will not lose more information than necessary, when saving as doc, rtf, ClarisWorks or pdf-document. StarOffice descendants will be able to import at least two of these Formats without much loss.
OO is huge and cluttered. It's hard to change it's features to smoothly fit into Apples GUI-concept. It's UI is still stuck at the beginning of the 90s.
why apple dont you push mozilla more upfront
Konquerer hat the cleaner code. So Safari was based on KHTML and it was a good choice. Using Safari is bliss (but not ignorance).
why apple dont you push a native and complete workable FTP client more upfront with UTF-8 character set support!!!
Mainly because Apple belives that FTP does not have much of a future. Their Web-DAV support is much better. There are a few good 3rd party products for FTP though.
It's better to use Apples own X11-Server than to rely on XFree. But even closer to the real Mac experience is a version of Open Office that is called "NeoOfficeJ". It uses Java instead of X11 and e.g. has a real menu-bar not attached to the window.
When Microsoft integrated IE in Windows they did not use a clever anf generic Framework to build the IE upon and made the framework part of the OS, but they tangled the IE with many parts of the system.
Ther is a pinciple in IT that says that components should be very cohesive but only loosely coupled with other components. Apple's Integration is closer to that standard. Exceptions are known though.
A whole lot of people here on Slashdot are by no means native speakers. Some have aquried their english in just a couple of years (say 7) while they were still in school.
;-)
It would be polite not to scare those people away, who may have a different and valuable perspective. The discussion might benefit from them.
I myself have never been to a country where the local language was any other than german. So consequently I make mistakes, that few native speakers would ever dream of
Concerning Apple history: I studied a small fraction of it in the recent years and I think that Apple could have decided to ship Mac OS X without the command line. I think I would have been sceptical about that move and most probably they would not have gained me as a cusomer, if they refrained from including "Terminal.app".
However, I think that to most Mac users today, the terminal has a more pschological value. Everything you can do with it can be done as easily by point & click or Apple Script. Well except some stuff that alters the System behaviour very drastically. Those things are perhaps only beneficial if you are running "Mac OS X Server" and have a whole lot of traffic on the machine.
But I didn't expect anything else. The first track has some similaritys with Cliff Martinezs score to "Solaris". Which is of course an excellent score. But while Martinez used these bizarre chord patterns to create suspense and interwove them into a musical context, "Radiant Bells" just presents us with the raw carpet of sound, naked, brutal, soulless.
1 2/17/ 188258
If this is christmas-music then the ideal reading for it is:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/
Somebody once said: computer-music is music that has been written for computers
Seriously. If you want to get a lot of students you can do this by establishing a student-lifestyle. Then the kids will tell other kids about it. Because language is all about social interactions, get the experts: young female students. Your students will most probably tell you, when they want a new electronic gizmo, and if they ask they become involved and identify with your school.
People will folow people, not technology.
> I refer to myself as platform agnostic. I don't much care what
> I'm running as long as it gets the job done.
I know many people who think like you. But I have always felt, that the platform wars are in reality about culture. So therefore giving KDE to Windows users might be like inviting strangers to your home country. The fear is that you lose your identity and have to cope with "Babarians led by Bill Gates".
If you just think about the users KDE on Windows is a good thing, as many companies try to lock their employees into their "standard environment" and the little rebellion of installing "just one small software I am accustomed to" is generally not punished. And from these small roots new converts to KDE can be found if co-workers have a look at it.
Devellopers of course have to hasse with this strange platform, but then Stallman wrote gnu-emacs for UNIX despite his expressed dislike of the system and it was a huge success.
But me? Well I am from a different culture. I grew up with home computers and after the death of the real Amiga (introduction of the A4000) I felt like homeless until OS X arrived. There it is: real UNIX and real ease of use - Its not about options, its not about freedom, its about making people happy.
Well if this is true then there is just one question:
How would a software-company like Microsoft earn any money?
A tax on computers, distributed among software-companies according to "marketshare"?
Honestly, I have never seen a piece of software from Microsoft that was anywhere near to being a smooth, seamless solution.
They always chop something together. Then they release it. Then they sort out the major bugs. Then they add silly features and repeat the last two steps until nobody cares about the product anymore.
Is it just me? It seems to be encoded with DIVX, but VLC does not show a single frame of video.
Is this a Windows-only solution?
There are only two reasons for splash-images/screens to exist.
1) to give the user a feedback that the app is launching.
2) it looks beautiful
Both arguments however are flawed when it comes to experienced users.
1) should be handled uniformly by the application-manager and not require the app to do anything.
And 2) is actually reversed when you are starting multiple applications. This will create the look of tv-commercial interruptions, which, I think, nobody really consideres to be beautiful.
I guess even hardcore artists wouldnt fire up GIMP when the windowmanager starts up. Emacs could have a splash screen though. Wait - It does!
That's the proof! VI may be e(vi)l but Emacs is worse.
Uhh, I am terribly sorry. I should have used the preview button before submiting my posts.
shame on me!
Babar*an (C64-action like Conan in the movie) iMaze (cocoa instead of X11) Astro-Panic dogfight (the one where sprite-planes hide in the clouds) Winter-Games The Eidolon Shufflepuck-cafe in color and with network mode Grand Monster Slam Uridium Defender of the Crown (multiplayer) Hardware: Competition Pro support in every game (with adapter)
Most of the comments seem to center around the Question wheter Macs are good at all, wheter the community is acceptable/credible or even if it is good to be a fan.
Well, of course I have an oppinion on those questions too, but I'd like to make a comment about the book. About a month ago I browsed through some pages of a book with the same subject, at first I thought it might be this one, but I cant remember enough details to really make sure.
The book I was browsing seemed rather unsatisfactory to me. The author was seemingly fascinated about some of the Mac-users he interviewed. Unfortunately the way they are presented distorts to a carricature.
While it is true that Mac-users love to talk about Macs and their benefits (maybe due to the ignorance of their peers), they are not funny in general.
The book I was browsing didn't care about that and It didn't provide too much background about the company.
There is no "Cult of Mac". There is a community, much like the Linux-community or the C# enthusiasts. Of course the image is different. It's a strange topic to write a book about, but if you enjoyed a book about bikers and Harley-Davidson-clubs, you may like it, no matter if you hack DOS or push rectangles all the time.
We had NEXTSTEP for Intel a while back. This was after NeXT was sure they would not sell enough hardware to be profitable anytime.
So if Apple released OS X for x86 this would mean the end of Apple, the last chapter of their history. Nobody in the Intel-World is waiting for a clean, stable user interface or Objective-C Frameworks. What they want is Windows without the bugs and the maybe cool snappy iLife-Applications.
So basically OS X for x86 would suffer the fate many other Intel-Unices: It would be ignored by everyone.
While the old Macs would still run flawlessly, drivers on x86 would not be updated until the whole OS is obsoleted.
I am however talking about standard PC hardware. If apple decided to create an supposedly incompatible x86-based computer and be profitable selling it, there would be hardly any difference to the world of today.
Mac-Users will not learn to love ordinary PCs.
Why would anyone have problems spelling this name?
Thats funny!
So IMO this is nothing more than a toy. It's like changing the pitch of your voice with some audio-processor when using the phone: It scares people.
iTunes playlists are quite nice. You are perhaps the kind of user who likes to mantain a deep hierarchical folder-structure to sub-categorize according to your own categories. As iTunes playlists are "flat" you are unhapy with it. iTunes uses the ID-tags just for the purpose they where invented for.
CDDB is sometimes really bad when it comes to proper tags, but that's not iTunes fault.
I've seen X11Amp, music match and a bunch of other mp3-players, none of them was half as good as iTunes. But there is one thing that bothers me: I sometimes change a song attribute that is a selection criteria for my current view. So the song pops away and it takes more than 3 clicks to find the song again (even if it is currently playing). :-/
Yes. Get well Steve!
Although you may use SMS or whatever to update a lot of systems, you will most probably not make it to 5000 systems in any given hour during the day. That's marketing bulls**t. The only way to get this done is when nobody actually is doing work on the machines and whats the point updating then?
It should be no problem to run automatic updates at night though, if the machines are still turned on. And you can do this for three browsers at once if you like to. It doesn't make much difference which OS or browser you are using. And it's less relevant if it takes half an hour or three to update all of them.