Or, you could just install Darwin for free (and be up-to-date), and get rid of all those pesky features that you didn't ask for.
Can't have your cake and eat it too. This is a pretty massive upgrade, and one that I won't hesitate in paying for: for the THIRD time (Public Beta, X.0).
How the hell else are they going to fund the huge R&D budget they've got dedicated to coming up with a seemingly endless supply of killer apps?
Looks more like a knockoff of recent HP/Compaq cases to me, and I'm not too terribly sure that it's nicer than many of the compUSA/Fry's variety.
As a cheap knockoff, it looks - well - cheap to me.
Much like eMachines eMac (although it was more obviously a Mac knockoff). eMachines basically traced the form factor and the plastics, and still ended up with an incredibly ugly (and klunky) machine.
No finesse, no style, no polish.
They just don't seem to get how well the machine works as a whole. Form & function, kids.
If you DID install or compile a custom PHP version for OS X: (which I always do, personally, because I use the hell out of GDLib functionality which is disabled in the stock Apple module, but I digress...)
Go to www.entropy.ch, Marc Liyanage's site. He's usually got updated, step-by-step, precompiled versions of the latest PHP and MySQL builds that are compatible with the latest 10.x.x update -- usually within hours of release, if not a little before (I think he might have the hook-up at Apple).
Kudos Marc, and to the rest of you who rely on PHP and MySQL -- bookmark Marc's site, and just hope he keeps kicking as much ass as he has.
As (another) side note, his tutorials on compiling, installing and updating things under the command line on OS X are absolutely wonderful primers to traditional Mac users who are a bit out of their depth in the Terminal.
Re:Be Careful--Warranty-Voiding Stuff
on
Inside the eMac
·
· Score: 1
It's a little scary at first but not THAT scary.
I was a certified Apple tech about 10 years ago (age of 19 or so). Got paid about $7.50 an hour.
Before that point, I spent most of my formative years tearing apart machines... added a caps lock mod to my Apple II+ at the age of 9 unassisted and that required far more "scariness" than anything I've seen to date, with the exception of overclocking.
You sound like an MCSE fresh outta CompUSA training. Being Apple Certified might be warmer and fuzzier sounding, but it entails the same precise level of competence and aptitude. Trust me.
Apple "Certified" techs, as arrogant as SOME may sound, don't replace single chips or whip out the soldering iron. Entire components only. Your USB bus get fried by lightning? New MoBo.
Fiddling inside machines is cake for the MOST part once you get over the fear factor of being inside the machine and get a few common sense tips (unplug it, use a static strap or discharge yourself on the power supply, be gentle, and when poking at things which you don't know what are, use rubber-handled tools;)
The stuff's really not that difficult, and if you have any technical inclination at all I wouldn't worry about doing stuff like adding a hard drive, etc to an e/iMac or any other desktop model.
Note I said desktop model. Laptops are generally (technical term) bitches to get apart and back together. The Powerbook 5200c comes to mind. Think twice on these.
Mad props to the.jp Powerbook/iBook modders out there. I just don't have the balls to do half of the stuff I've seen, even once the machine is out of warranty!
A note on the CRT issue:
Keep metallic crap (and fingers) away from bare metal on CRTs. It may not end your life (unless you have a pacemaker), but it will sure as hell throw you across the room and scramble your brain for a few minutes. You won't forget the first time one discharges on you. You haven't really lived until that happens!
Yeah, yeah, some stuff'll void your warranty.
The morals of the story:
Don't be stupid Think twice before doing anything that requires a soldering iron (overclocking comes to mind) -- are you really competent enough and do you have the right tools to solder pinprick-sized points? Don't break any seals (until the warranty's up) Make sure all the screws get back in Don't use too much force in frustration
Last night she finally cracked when I installed a network point in the bathroom and told me that either the connection went or she did.
I've got a similar situation... lots of gear, a significant other who doesn't usually mind the gear, and the tendency to do stupid shit like wiring the bathroom.
Word of advice: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
For god sakes, go wireless (first off). Then you can still surf pr0n while you're dropping the kids off at the pool -- which is I assume the reason for having Cat5e running to the potty, and she probably assumes that too -- but you can also, say, surf pr0n from the porch, or the yard or elsewhere.
That said: Dammit, man! Read a book. Get outside. Unplug.
I've got a way to do live data from iTunes instead of the cron task way... (I read about the cron job on MacOShints, and it seemed a bit of a kludge). It requires the ACGI dispatcher I mentioned earlier.
Many thanks to a pile of people that wrote code for me to pick apart to get this working in my case...
My method of grabbing info like that is:
(from a PHP or Perl script):
if ($cmd == "status")
{
$itunesreadout = virtual('/cgi-bin/itunesstatus.acgi');
}
Then in the itunesstatus applescript:
tell application "iTunes" of machine "eppc://user:pass@itunes.yourplace.com"
set ThePlayerState = player state as string
[do state checking, decide what to do if it's not playing]
set ThisTrack to current track
set TrackName to name of ThisTrack
set TrackArtist to artist of ThisTrack
set TrackAlbum to album of ThisTrack
set TrackLength to time of ThisTrack
set Length to duration of ThisTrack
set Position to player position
set ReturnInfo to "iTunes currently playing: " & TrackArtist & TrackName & " whatever else you want to include"
return ReturnInfo
end tell
This stuff is from memory, but the process and flow are up and running on our network at the office.
The first time it runs, it'll be a bit slow, but should return info instantly afterward
OSAscript is pretty darned cool, but it's been my annoyance of the week as well. Been playing with it the past couple of days to write a nice-looking iTunes remote for our office jukebox -- controlled via a browser, not the shell (doing it from the shell is cake, even on remote machines.)
As Pudge mentioned, it's VERY buggy though. A few things I've noticed:
For remote scripting, you've gotta hard-code user names and passwords into the script that's getting executed. They don't get saved in the keychain like you're led to believe... documentation is very light, but eppc://user:pass@192.168.1.1 works. Beats typing in a user name and password repeatedly (possibly on multiple machines) even if it's an ugly and non-portable solution.
You can't natively launch commands via a passthru(), system() or shell_exec() command through Apache, even if they're in an external, pre-compiled.acgi or Perl file. Fortunately, I stumbled upon ACGI Dispatcher tonight (after 3 days on and off trying to control iTunes and Photoshop through apache, getting condition expected errors like mad, when the same commands work fine from the shell). Dispatcher allows you to do all of that stuff easily, and includes a iTunes remote CGI (D'oh!). Hopefully Apple will add in some provisions to facilitate OSAScript more robustly, as I'd like to stick to PHP/Perl for the heavy lifting on this stuff, and automating Photoshop (a stock photographer's back-end is one of my gigs right now) via PHP one-liners triggering 'Shop actions would absolutely rule. GDLib and Imagemagick are cool and all, but... the image quality difference on imageresample (even bicubic) and a Photoshop image size command can't even be compared when you've got people as picky about their images as photographers.
The principles of Okham's Razor almost always apply to tech support and troubleshooting.
The simplest answer is, truly, almost always the correct answer -- or at the root of the problem.
You can also call it the Tao of Tech Support if that sounds more pleasing, but if you follow problems to their most glaringly obvious potential causes, you're normally on the path to getting the problem fixed with minimal, er, resistance (couldn't resist) and energy expenditure.
The answer to your dillema is pretty straightforward: when you turn the light on, your *optical* mouse is noticing a change in the pattern on the desk, and interpreting this as the mouse being moved to wake the Mac.
The way to test this hypothisis 100%? Unplug the optical mouse, let the bugger go to sleep, and turn on the light.
Easy, neh?
P.S. It does that in a few of my setups (I work in the dark, with a Kensington Flylight over the keyboard usually) -- but the Apple optical mouse seems much more succeptible than my Logitech cordless optical. Chances are this is because the Apple mouse is mostly transparent.
These PanIP guys are so 'l33t and have been in this business innovating for so long that they use super-proprietary WebBot(R) technology on their website!
In PS7, choose "Save for Web-->Jpeg" and not "Save-->Jpeg"
Why? The images come out significantly smaller / more optimized -- and, specifically for those of us on the Mac, don't have the extra 16k of resource fork / icon data.
The RIAA's revenue falloff ultimately has more to do with control over consumers' exposure to corporate-manufactured music.
When more people begin "taste testing" music on the web than on the radio, the big corps' hold on consumers will erode -- it's already begun.
That's the issue at stake.
Online, everyone has as loud a voice and as large a marketing budget as everyone else. In that case, you're just as likely to buy a CD/MP3/etc. from a Japanese indie band that you heard and liked more than the corporate drivel that's shoved down our collective throats in the media and on the radio -- and your spare $20 that week/month that you set aside for entertainment will fall outside of the RIAA's scope.
Entertainment is the US's largest export and one of the largest consumer goods sold within the country. Think about that just for a minute.
The industry didn't give a shit when people used to tape songs off the radio (that was the MP3 of _my_ youth) because they still controlled your exposure.
Apple really has been playing up the fair use angle in all of their advertising -- and they haven't been spending gazillions of dollars protecting the copying of MP3s off the iPod.
They realize, most definitely, that there's always a way around the protection. Always has been, always will be. And 90% of their market won't notice that they just have to un-hide a directory or log in under the Terminal to copy stuff. The other 10% always will find out how to do it, no matter how much bank is thrown at making a better mousetrap.
sudo cp -R/Volumes/Ipod//Where/Ever/You/Want/
(For posterity, of course)
Disney is being pretty idiotic in possibly straining its relationship with Pixar, though, IMO. Can you remember a worthy Disney animated film since Mulan?
Pixar has produced the only respectable films to come out of the Mouse House in recent years -- the box office seems to agree resoundingly, as well. I make that distinction because as we all know too well, taste and the American consumer are usually mutually exclusive. In Pixar's case they're not. They're wonderful -- nay WONDERFUL -- films of a consistently high quality that also happen to make some serious scratch.
And if Mulan, Lion King, Aladdin et al aren't some permutation of Fair Use in an ideological sense, I'm not sure what is.
Office X does this too. One of the install options is still a drag-n-drop from the CD, and it still does that "First Run" cycle if it discovers there are no prefs for any component.
The First Run cycle then installs any necessary system components and services.
And it installs REALLY important system services, like the routine that makes it impossible to get the Entourage icon to stop bouncing on your screen whilst eroding your sanity.
Dock Detox rulez. It lets you stop bouncing icons system-wide. And why isn't this a built-in system preference?
For years now, smart Mac users have left Audio CD and CD-ROM autoplay off, because of a variety of worms that were propagated by those methods.
There was a time back in '98 or so that just about every Zip or CD-R coming back from a service bureau was infected.
Launching arbitrary code (fooling IE into thinking an.app is a.dmg) and autostart worms can be exploited in the same manner.
Microsoft has known about this problem in OS X 10.0 for a while now (it's an IE problem in X, really, as IE is what autolaunches.DMG and.SMI images) the MacOS 10.1/IE 5.1 update supposedly alleviated the hole, FWIF.
The article is speaking about a hole running with a Classic mode browser or running truly under OS 9 -- a variation on the same theme.
If you're concerned about this:
Go to your software update panel and get current -- 9.2.2 and 10.1.3 for os 9/X, respectively
Under your Quicktime control panel (OS 9) or prefpane (OS X), turn Autostart off
Get yourself a copy of Norton Antivirus for Classic or X. It's wonderful about letting you know if something is virused or if a disk image has a payload when it's being expanded.
Anyone who sends CD-Rs and Zips out and back in to their machine has no excuse for leaving autostart on, and Apple has no excuse for shipping the OS with those on by default, escpecially with the problems it has caused over the years.
As a designer and geek-by-trade, I'm going to have to side against the majority of Slashtypes here.
The importance weighting of design vs. content can vary by 180 degrees depending on the context of the site.
First off, if it's a shopping site, or "brochureware," design is 50 times more important than the content within. It's the difference between handing a customer a professionally designed brochure and a photocopy. The content on those sites is almost always brochure/catalog spooge.
Design isn't Flash, it isn't animated graphics... it's a polished, useful, easy to navigate user interface that doesn't suck or make them think. (Those are both fantastic books, BTW)
I guess that the point I'm trying to make is -- establish your priorities when designing the site. Is your primary userbase going to be the Slashcrowd? If so, you better make sure that the site is tolerable in Lynx -- and that crowd is much less likely to avoid a site just because it's ugly.
Joe Sixpack Consumer AOL User or Middle Management Stooge, on the other hand, will be less forgiving.
Bottom line -- if you're selling image or product, design matters a LOT. If you're selling community and ideas, design doesn't matter as much -- but try to make the site easy on the eyes.
And, please know that I'll personally hunt you down and kill you if you require IE5+, Win, or a plug-in to view over 50% of your site.
I have to say that, at best, the majority of these recipes are unappetizing -- at worst, they're incredibly foul looking.
I can understand the need to cook stuff in a hurry on occasion, but -- really, guys?
Not to sound like Yoda or anything, but having even halfway decent cooking skills increases the likelyhood of keeping members of the opposite sex around, or scoring in the first place.
Learn how to make 3 dishes marginally well, and mix 'em up... ie 1 (vaguely) southwestern, 1 (vaguely) italian and 1 (vaguely) asian, or whatever your tastes may be.
Then, if you're in a rut... just pop over to Epicurious and look for variations on the stuff you already mostly know how to do.
For me, putzing around in the kitchen allows me to achieve a Zen-like state of decompression after staring at code for hours and hours on end. YMMV, of course -- but don't knock it until you've tried it.
On the Mac side (classic & OS X native), BBEdit is the pro's choice... it does context-sensitive coloring, etc and is the hands-down favorite for any kind of program coding on the Mac -- and it recognizes SQL syntax as well.
Adobe just announced that Golive 6 for OS X would have the Zend debugger engine integrated within it, as well
Dreamweaver Ultradev is another good choice, but at this point in time PHP isn't exactly integrated into it unless you use 3rd party extensions or an abstraction layer like ADODB.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, you could just install Darwin for free (and be up-to-date), and get rid of all those pesky features that you didn't ask for.
Can't have your cake and eat it too. This is a pretty massive upgrade, and one that I won't hesitate in paying for: for the THIRD time (Public Beta, X.0).
How the hell else are they going to fund the huge R&D budget they've got dedicated to coming up with a seemingly endless supply of killer apps?
Looks more like a knockoff of recent HP/Compaq cases to me, and I'm not too terribly sure that it's nicer than many of the compUSA/Fry's variety.
As a cheap knockoff, it looks - well - cheap to me.
Much like eMachines eMac (although it was more obviously a Mac knockoff). eMachines basically traced the form factor and the plastics, and still ended up with an incredibly ugly (and klunky) machine.
No finesse, no style, no polish.
They just don't seem to get how well the machine works as a whole. Form & function, kids.
--dr00g
If you DID install or compile a custom PHP version for OS X: (which I always do, personally, because I use the hell out of GDLib functionality which is disabled in the stock Apple module, but I digress...)
Go to www.entropy.ch, Marc Liyanage's site. He's usually got updated, step-by-step, precompiled versions of the latest PHP and MySQL builds that are compatible with the latest 10.x.x update -- usually within hours of release, if not a little before (I think he might have the hook-up at Apple).
Kudos Marc, and to the rest of you who rely on PHP and MySQL -- bookmark Marc's site, and just hope he keeps kicking as much ass as he has.
As (another) side note, his tutorials on compiling, installing and updating things under the command line on OS X are absolutely wonderful primers to traditional Mac users who are a bit out of their depth in the Terminal.
It's a little scary at first but not THAT scary.
;)
.jp Powerbook/iBook modders out there. I just don't have the balls to do half of the stuff I've seen, even once the machine is out of warranty!
I was a certified Apple tech about 10 years ago (age of 19 or so). Got paid about $7.50 an hour.
Before that point, I spent most of my formative years tearing apart machines... added a caps lock mod to my Apple II+ at the age of 9 unassisted and that required far more "scariness" than anything I've seen to date, with the exception of overclocking.
You sound like an MCSE fresh outta CompUSA training. Being Apple Certified might be warmer and fuzzier sounding, but it entails the same precise level of competence and aptitude. Trust me.
Apple "Certified" techs, as arrogant as SOME may sound, don't replace single chips or whip out the soldering iron. Entire components only. Your USB bus get fried by lightning? New MoBo.
Fiddling inside machines is cake for the MOST part once you get over the fear factor of being inside the machine and get a few common sense tips (unplug it, use a static strap or discharge yourself on the power supply, be gentle, and when poking at things which you don't know what are, use rubber-handled tools
The stuff's really not that difficult, and if you have any technical inclination at all I wouldn't worry about doing stuff like adding a hard drive, etc to an e/iMac or any other desktop model.
Note I said desktop model. Laptops are generally (technical term) bitches to get apart and back together. The Powerbook 5200c comes to mind. Think twice on these.
Mad props to the
A note on the CRT issue:
Keep metallic crap (and fingers) away from bare metal on CRTs. It may not end your life (unless you have a pacemaker), but it will sure as hell throw you across the room and scramble your brain for a few minutes. You won't forget the first time one discharges on you. You haven't really lived until that happens!
Yeah, yeah, some stuff'll void your warranty.
The morals of the story:
Don't be stupid
Think twice before doing anything that requires a soldering iron (overclocking comes to mind) -- are you really competent enough and do you have the right tools to solder pinprick-sized points?
Don't break any seals (until the warranty's up)
Make sure all the screws get back in
Don't use too much force in frustration
--dr00gy
I've got a similar situation... lots of gear, a significant other who doesn't usually mind the gear, and the tendency to do stupid shit like wiring the bathroom.
Word of advice: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
For god sakes, go wireless (first off). Then you can still surf pr0n while you're dropping the kids off at the pool -- which is I assume the reason for having Cat5e running to the potty, and she probably assumes that too -- but you can also, say, surf pr0n from the porch, or the yard or elsewhere.
That said: Dammit, man! Read a book. Get outside. Unplug.
I've got a way to do live data from iTunes instead of the cron task way... (I read about the cron job on MacOShints, and it seemed a bit of a kludge). It requires the ACGI dispatcher I mentioned earlier.
Many thanks to a pile of people that wrote code for me to pick apart to get this working in my case...
My method of grabbing info like that is:
(from a PHP or Perl script):
Then in the itunesstatus applescript:
This stuff is from memory, but the process and flow are up and running on our network at the office.
The first time it runs, it'll be a bit slow, but should return info instantly afterward
OSAscript is pretty darned cool, but it's been my annoyance of the week as well. Been playing with it the past couple of days to write a nice-looking iTunes remote for our office jukebox -- controlled via a browser, not the shell (doing it from the shell is cake, even on remote machines.)
As Pudge mentioned, it's VERY buggy though. A few things I've noticed:
Another note: (slightly OT)
The principles of Okham's Razor almost always apply to tech support and troubleshooting.
The simplest answer is, truly, almost always the correct answer -- or at the root of the problem.
You can also call it the Tao of Tech Support if that sounds more pleasing, but if you follow problems to their most glaringly obvious potential causes, you're normally on the path to getting the problem fixed with minimal, er, resistance (couldn't resist) and energy expenditure.
The answer to your dillema is pretty straightforward: when you turn the light on, your *optical* mouse is noticing a change in the pattern on the desk, and interpreting this as the mouse being moved to wake the Mac.
The way to test this hypothisis 100%? Unplug the optical mouse, let the bugger go to sleep, and turn on the light.
Easy, neh?
P.S. It does that in a few of my setups (I work in the dark, with a Kensington Flylight over the keyboard usually) -- but the Apple optical mouse seems much more succeptible than my Logitech cordless optical. Chances are this is because the Apple mouse is mostly transparent.
These PanIP guys are so 'l33t and have been in this business innovating for so long that they use super-proprietary WebBot(R) technology on their website!
--<snip>--
<!--webbot bot="Include" U-Include="navbar.htm" TAG="BODY" startspan -->
--</snip>--
Someone should alert Microsoft that Frontpage is in clear violation of....
Oh, never mind...
FWIW: slight addendum.
In PS7, choose "Save for Web-->Jpeg" and not "Save-->Jpeg"
Why? The images come out significantly smaller / more optimized -- and, specifically for those of us on the Mac, don't have the extra 16k of resource fork / icon data.
--dr00gy
On further reflection, it appears that my girlfriend may be on to something.
It appears that Organdy (from those pillows, at least) can be Turquoise, Salmon, and even Beige!
Perhaps we give those scientists a call and let them know that if the universe is Organdy, they can't possibly be wrong.
Except, of course, if the universe is actually an intellegent shade of blue, which would just completely much up my world view.
--dr00gy
Not sure how wise it would be to correct her on this one, however fulfilling.
I think I'm only allowed to be right on matters of style and taste once a month, and I may be over my quota :)
She hates being wrong about stuff.
I, on the other hand, am quite pleased as I was beginning to think that I was the only artist on earth that wasn't aware of a newly invented colour!
--dr00gyMy girlfriend has recently been referring to a henceforth unheard of color in that range.
It's called "Organdy".
We have a game now: I ask her if that awful tafata dress is "Organdy" and she says no -- it's pinker than that.
At that point I say -- you mean salmon? And she says no. Cuz she's a girl, and salmon just doesn't sound sophisticated enough.
But the color does, apparently, exist.
It may well work out that the universe is, in fact, Organdy.
And if that's the case, then there's a damned good chance that God is a woman.
The RIAA's revenue falloff ultimately has more to do with control over consumers' exposure to corporate-manufactured music.
When more people begin "taste testing" music on the web than on the radio, the big corps' hold on consumers will erode -- it's already begun.
That's the issue at stake.
Online, everyone has as loud a voice and as large a marketing budget as everyone else. In that case, you're just as likely to buy a CD/MP3/etc. from a Japanese indie band that you heard and liked more than the corporate drivel that's shoved down our collective throats in the media and on the radio -- and your spare $20 that week/month that you set aside for entertainment will fall outside of the RIAA's scope.
Entertainment is the US's largest export and one of the largest consumer goods sold within the country. Think about that just for a minute.
The industry didn't give a shit when people used to tape songs off the radio (that was the MP3 of _my_ youth) because they still controlled your exposure.
-dr00gy
"Straight...to...video"
Pros:
1. It's colorful
2. Lots of shit blows up
3. New lightsaber colors
Cons:
EVERYTHING else. And I mean *everything*
Conclusion:
I *damned* sure won't be camping out at the theatre this time around.
If I see it at all.
Apple really has been playing up the fair use angle in all of their advertising -- and they haven't been spending gazillions of dollars protecting the copying of MP3s off the iPod.
They realize, most definitely, that there's always a way around the protection. Always has been, always will be. And 90% of their market won't notice that they just have to un-hide a directory or log in under the Terminal to copy stuff. The other 10% always will find out how to do it, no matter how much bank is thrown at making a better mousetrap.
sudo cp -R(For posterity, of course)
Disney is being pretty idiotic in possibly straining its relationship with Pixar, though, IMO. Can you remember a worthy Disney animated film since Mulan?
Pixar has produced the only respectable films to come out of the Mouse House in recent years -- the box office seems to agree resoundingly, as well. I make that distinction because as we all know too well, taste and the American consumer are usually mutually exclusive. In Pixar's case they're not. They're wonderful -- nay WONDERFUL -- films of a consistently high quality that also happen to make some serious scratch.
And if Mulan, Lion King, Aladdin et al aren't some permutation of Fair Use in an ideological sense, I'm not sure what is.
A hearty "me too" on those sentiments. Not sure we need a channel devoted to (ahem) blogs from idjuts, or regurgitated 3-day-old MacCentral feeds.
I'm fully all about worthy stuff in the channel, but the signal/noise is a bit askew right now.
Sometimes I just wish I had an expense account at ThinkGeek so I could send people RTFM T-Shirts.
"Boy, I sure like Emacs, but this new-fangled GUI stuff is a bit too confusing!"
Not Stupid Steve. Stupid User (Most of the Time)
Office X does this too. One of the install options is still a drag-n-drop from the CD, and it still does that "First Run" cycle if it discovers there are no prefs for any component.
The First Run cycle then installs any necessary system components and services.
And it installs REALLY important system services, like the routine that makes it impossible to get the Entourage icon to stop bouncing on your screen whilst eroding your sanity.
Dock Detox rulez. It lets you stop bouncing icons system-wide. And why isn't this a built-in system preference?
For years now, smart Mac users have left Audio CD and CD-ROM autoplay off, because of a variety of worms that were propagated by those methods.
There was a time back in '98 or so that just about every Zip or CD-R coming back from a service bureau was infected.
Launching arbitrary code (fooling IE into thinking an .app is a .dmg) and autostart worms can be exploited in the same manner.
Microsoft has known about this problem in OS X 10.0 for a while now (it's an IE problem in X, really, as IE is what autolaunches .DMG and .SMI images) the MacOS 10.1/IE 5.1 update supposedly alleviated the hole, FWIF.
The article is speaking about a hole running with a Classic mode browser or running truly under OS 9 -- a variation on the same theme.
If you're concerned about this:
Anyone who sends CD-Rs and Zips out and back in to their machine has no excuse for leaving autostart on, and Apple has no excuse for shipping the OS with those on by default, escpecially with the problems it has caused over the years.
As a designer and geek-by-trade, I'm going to have to side against the majority of Slashtypes here.
The importance weighting of design vs. content can vary by 180 degrees depending on the context of the site.
First off, if it's a shopping site, or "brochureware," design is 50 times more important than the content within. It's the difference between handing a customer a professionally designed brochure and a photocopy. The content on those sites is almost always brochure/catalog spooge.
Design isn't Flash, it isn't animated graphics... it's a polished, useful, easy to navigate user interface that doesn't suck or make them think. (Those are both fantastic books, BTW)
If you're building a community-based site, or an information-based site, then design falls (rightfully) into the back seat.
I guess that the point I'm trying to make is -- establish your priorities when designing the site. Is your primary userbase going to be the Slashcrowd? If so, you better make sure that the site is tolerable in Lynx -- and that crowd is much less likely to avoid a site just because it's ugly.
Joe Sixpack Consumer AOL User or Middle Management Stooge, on the other hand, will be less forgiving.
Bottom line -- if you're selling image or product, design matters a LOT. If you're selling community and ideas, design doesn't matter as much -- but try to make the site easy on the eyes.
And, please know that I'll personally hunt you down and kill you if you require IE5+, Win, or a plug-in to view over 50% of your site.
You've been warned!
Actually guys, that wasn't a joke.
Text in Photoshop 7 really *does* have spell checking via system services. I've used a beta of it off and on for a while now.
Sounds useless, but there's a lot of Web developer types who do most of their mockups for clients in 'Shop.
Reading and writing wbmp natively for WAP & palms is a bit more useful, though IMO.
--d
I have to say that, at best, the majority of these recipes are unappetizing -- at worst, they're incredibly foul looking.
I can understand the need to cook stuff in a hurry on occasion, but -- really, guys?
Not to sound like Yoda or anything, but having even halfway decent cooking skills increases the likelyhood of keeping members of the opposite sex around, or scoring in the first place.
Learn how to make 3 dishes marginally well, and mix 'em up... ie 1 (vaguely) southwestern, 1 (vaguely) italian and 1 (vaguely) asian, or whatever your tastes may be.
Then, if you're in a rut... just pop over to Epicurious and look for variations on the stuff you already mostly know how to do.
For me, putzing around in the kitchen allows me to achieve a Zen-like state of decompression after staring at code for hours and hours on end. YMMV, of course -- but don't knock it until you've tried it.
Dig men who can cook, chicks do!
--dr00gyOn the Mac side (classic & OS X native), BBEdit is the pro's choice... it does context-sensitive coloring, etc and is the hands-down favorite for any kind of program coding on the Mac -- and it recognizes SQL syntax as well.
Adobe just announced that Golive 6 for OS X would have the Zend debugger engine integrated within it, as well
Dreamweaver Ultradev is another good choice, but at this point in time PHP isn't exactly integrated into it unless you use 3rd party extensions or an abstraction layer like ADODB.
--dr00gy