I don't know, it might catch as a niche, but I don't think gaming laptops are going to be the next big thing. Gaming on a laptop is uncomfortable, you need a seperate keyboard and mouse to get really comfortable, and laptops are limited in terms of resolutions.
What I think would be a much more viable market is pizzabox formfactor computers. Towers are too bulky to lug arround, and laptops are too limited, but something in a pizzabox format (a la Mac LC II / III or sun sparcs) would be more portable without sacrificing much in the way of expandability or upgrades
Archs: Yeah, so? How many can you run Windows on? Here's a hint, most people don't change architectures every 3 months.
Filesystems: To reside on HFS, HFS+ and UFS, To read/write: a hell of a lot more
UIs: infinite, along with the fact that OS X can be run without aqua and have any windowing system you want installed (X11 my friend) you're also confusing the desktop UI with teh system itself. I can REPLACE the finder app with another utility and still maintain much of the functionality of aqua including using OS X apps natively. For a while and just for fun I replaced the finder with 3DOSX (google it). I mean the finder was replaced, that was what loaded when I logged in.
cocoa: Not very if you use the system APIs, however, cocoa is Objective C, and you can write C apps, and many other apps in OS X and they will run just fine.
vendors: Depends, define a situation
ANd yes, Apple is an answer to UI problems inherrent in OSS oses. Simply put, an OS is useless to me if it takes more effort getting it to work than it does to do the work.
Expose and minimized windows: Why should it? They're minimized for a reason. Expose is supposed to work with open windows.
Z-order: Not sure what you're talking about here, hitting F9 shows all windows. Hitting ` switches to single app view. Arrow keys are used to select individual windows.
cmdtab/`: What's so confusing? cmd-tab moves between apps, cmd-` moves between the windows in an app.
Finder: cmd-uparrow goes up one directory. cmd-click on the window title displays a hirearchy. You can customize the toolbar to present a hirearchy button to navigate to any of the above directories. Finder remembers how you left a directory. I hear people say it doesn't, but I've never seen that problem. Describe it. Same with the sort, I don't get what you're talking about. Finder uses comand-delete to trash files (key command is listed next to move to trash menu item), makes sense, if comand O opens a file, then comand delete would delete it.
Safari: Why would it change the modification date of a file it downloads? The file wasn't modified.
Windowshade: your loss. The options are there, you choose not to use it.
Closing Lid: Aside from the generaly bad idea that what you describe is, there are hacks to prevent it from sleeping with the lid closed. The reason you're not allowed to do it naturaly is because it's a stupid idea for most uses. The only really reasonable use is if it's serving as a computer, but hooked up to an external monitor and keyboard, in which case, it does stay awake when hooked up to an external monitor. But yes, closing the lid should always put the computer to sleep.
Windows: See my response here that should clear things up.
Printers: Not sure what you're talking about here, can you go more in detail, option clicking and regular clicking on add printer does the same thing. If you mean customizing the tool bar, all those options are availible from menus and you can also go to Views-> customize toolbar
Feedback: I'll admit that can be a bit of an issue, but these things have always done that. I think it's just the difference between loading a BIOS and loading open firmware.
Samba: More an issue with Microsoft, they're trying and improving with each update.
Downed Samba: I've never seen this so I can't comment. But there has to be a way to do it, maybe you just need to wait for the server timeout (~120 seconds)
Updates: The firewire drives was limited to one chipset and was a rareity, that stuff doesn't happen often.
The maximise mentality works like this. The mac OS was designed, from the ground up to be a multi application system. You were supposed to have multiple windows and multiple programs. Since that was the case, the only size a window needed to be (partialy to conserve screen space) was large enough to fit it's contents and no larger. Consequently, the maximize button on the mac OS was designed to do just that. Maximize the window to fit the content. Conversely, hitting it again will revert it to it's last size. So it works more or less as a switch between a user defined size, and a fit to content size. There was no reason to have one app take up your whole screen.
When windows was designed, it was a front to DOS, so it's roots were in single application at a time work. Therefore a maximize made sense as you weren't going to be doing much else.
Consquently, people generaly prefer with what they learned first. However, odly enough, I've noticed most users, no matter the system, prefer their web browser to be full screen.
Intuitive doesn't mean you don't learn though. Intuitive means things make sense, things are where you expect them to be, and they follow a logical train of thought.
Improving GCC on PPC doesn't help the OSS comunity? It's kind of hard to call yourself cross platform when your cross platform alternatives suck ass compared to your primary platform.
And again, why would apple spend it's resources doing anything that doesn't help itself? IOW, if Apple doesn't need new features for GCC why would they spend time writing them?
Do you randomly download source for programs you'll never use, write new features that you don't want for it and then publish them?
It always struck me as odd that Apple kept hypercard around all these years, after all even Appleworks got more updates, and given that when Apple moved to OS X, they killed off a lot of calssic stuff (and steve's declaration of the death of classic) it seemed odd they would keep it arround.
I wonder if we may see the next generation of hypercard from Apple in the near future? Something like that would be an awsome addition to OS X, and it seems to me like it could be Apple's iLife version of Keynote.
It may have been fertile for viruses, but as I recall there was only one hypercard virus.
The fun thing about the reader was that it was actualy the full application, it just had a crippled home stack. If you got the regular stack and the ad-ons you could make it the full version.
I think the joke was that Apple had an item up for sale that was 6 year out of date with no updates. And that we're expecting a powerbook update sometime soon.
Basicaly it was something like powerpoint with scripting and full user interaction. You could write games, animations,and whatever else you wanted tutorials, presentations, interactive demos. Very powerful, very small, very cool. It was also a decent intro to basic programing with seperate functions and such.
No kidding. In one of my engineering courses, we had to write a disassembler in assembly (this was an intro to assembly course) and I remember sitting there thinking to myself somewhere arround line 150 "I could do this in 30 lines in C"
I had no problems (nor do I currently) with IR and WMP being installed by default. What I do have a problem with is not being able to uninstall said apps. If I want to be able to remove an application from my system, I damn well better be able to do it. I can remove quicktime, safari, iTunes, iChat, iPhoto and any other Apple default app (including the finder itself) if I so choose and replace it with another app.
Bundling is not the issue, it's when you bundle it, and then force me to have it that I have an issue.
The problem is the image. There's nothing that kills a user's enthusiasm for their new machine faster than opening the box to a manual 200 pages thick. And yes, if Apple provided documentation for all of their softwre that they ship with the computer, it would be that long (IIRC, the NetInfo documentation alone is ~300 pages)
You know, Apple isn't pushing anyone out of the business. The fact that they are choosing not to compete is their own fault. It's not like they can't improve on the apps Apple is writing or make better products. Certainly you can make better video products than iMovie, better photo tools than iPhoto and better Sound Programs than garage band. People don't use the default programs just because they're default (witness VLC, despite quicktime being default on all Apple computers I know of very few mac users that don't also have VLC). The key to competeing with Apple is to make somethng better, but that also works with Apple
I've found Office tends to handle things worse than OO. I use OO on my mac to write up lab reports, but usualy print from the school computers (to save money on ink) so I have ot export to an office format, but everytime I open it in word, I have to go through and fix all of the images and diagrams and charts because office fucks them all up. It's gotten to the point where it's faster to export as a PDF and print it that way.
What would you like him to do? He's publicly stated on the record that it was a bad deal, which effectively makes any other company thinking about dealing with SCO think twice.
Do you want him to break the contract? Is that ethical? So long as both parties are still abiding by the contract, even if it was a bad deal, does that make it ok for him to break the contract?
I get it, so ethics are proportional to actions you support. In this case donating to linux. What if he switched entirely to Apple or Sun? Would that be the same?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, it might catch as a niche, but I don't think gaming laptops are going to be the next big thing. Gaming on a laptop is uncomfortable, you need a seperate keyboard and mouse to get really comfortable, and laptops are limited in terms of resolutions.
What I think would be a much more viable market is pizzabox formfactor computers. Towers are too bulky to lug arround, and laptops are too limited, but something in a pizzabox format (a la Mac LC II / III or sun sparcs) would be more portable without sacrificing much in the way of expandability or upgrades
Archs: Yeah, so? How many can you run Windows on? Here's a hint, most people don't change architectures every 3 months.
Filesystems: To reside on HFS, HFS+ and UFS, To read/write: a hell of a lot more
UIs: infinite, along with the fact that OS X can be run without aqua and have any windowing system you want installed (X11 my friend) you're also confusing the desktop UI with teh system itself. I can REPLACE the finder app with another utility and still maintain much of the functionality of aqua including using OS X apps natively. For a while and just for fun I replaced the finder with 3DOSX (google it). I mean the finder was replaced, that was what loaded when I logged in.
cocoa: Not very if you use the system APIs, however, cocoa is Objective C, and you can write C apps, and many other apps in OS X and they will run just fine.
vendors: Depends, define a situation
ANd yes, Apple is an answer to UI problems inherrent in OSS oses. Simply put, an OS is useless to me if it takes more effort getting it to work than it does to do the work.
Expose and minimized windows: Why should it? They're minimized for a reason. Expose is supposed to work with open windows.
Z-order: Not sure what you're talking about here, hitting F9 shows all windows. Hitting ` switches to single app view. Arrow keys are used to select individual windows.
cmdtab/`: What's so confusing? cmd-tab moves between apps, cmd-` moves between the windows in an app.
Finder: cmd-uparrow goes up one directory. cmd-click on the window title displays a hirearchy. You can customize the toolbar to present a hirearchy button to navigate to any of the above directories. Finder remembers how you left a directory. I hear people say it doesn't, but I've never seen that problem. Describe it. Same with the sort, I don't get what you're talking about. Finder uses comand-delete to trash files (key command is listed next to move to trash menu item), makes sense, if comand O opens a file, then comand delete would delete it.
Safari: Why would it change the modification date of a file it downloads? The file wasn't modified.
Windowshade: your loss. The options are there, you choose not to use it.
Closing Lid: Aside from the generaly bad idea that what you describe is, there are hacks to prevent it from sleeping with the lid closed. The reason you're not allowed to do it naturaly is because it's a stupid idea for most uses. The only really reasonable use is if it's serving as a computer, but hooked up to an external monitor and keyboard, in which case, it does stay awake when hooked up to an external monitor. But yes, closing the lid should always put the computer to sleep.
Windows: explain in more detail
Maximize: see response here
Ghosts: only seen it once and it went away as soon as the area was redrawn.
Windows: See my response here that should clear things up.
Printers: Not sure what you're talking about here, can you go more in detail, option clicking and regular clicking on add printer does the same thing. If you mean customizing the tool bar, all those options are availible from menus and you can also go to Views-> customize toolbar
Feedback: I'll admit that can be a bit of an issue, but these things have always done that. I think it's just the difference between loading a BIOS and loading open firmware.
Samba: More an issue with Microsoft, they're trying and improving with each update.
Downed Samba: I've never seen this so I can't comment. But there has to be a way to do it, maybe you just need to wait for the server timeout (~120 seconds)
Updates: The firewire drives was limited to one chipset and was a rareity, that stuff doesn't happen often.
The maximise mentality works like this. The mac OS was designed, from the ground up to be a multi application system. You were supposed to have multiple windows and multiple programs. Since that was the case, the only size a window needed to be (partialy to conserve screen space) was large enough to fit it's contents and no larger. Consequently, the maximize button on the mac OS was designed to do just that. Maximize the window to fit the content. Conversely, hitting it again will revert it to it's last size. So it works more or less as a switch between a user defined size, and a fit to content size. There was no reason to have one app take up your whole screen.
When windows was designed, it was a front to DOS, so it's roots were in single application at a time work. Therefore a maximize made sense as you weren't going to be doing much else.
Consquently, people generaly prefer with what they learned first. However, odly enough, I've noticed most users, no matter the system, prefer their web browser to be full screen.
Intuitive doesn't mean you don't learn though. Intuitive means things make sense, things are where you expect them to be, and they follow a logical train of thought.
I would disagree, I would say that form has to be part of the function.
It left?
Even though this story is a joke this guy actualy succeeded in building one.
Improving GCC on PPC doesn't help the OSS comunity? It's kind of hard to call yourself cross platform when your cross platform alternatives suck ass compared to your primary platform.
And again, why would apple spend it's resources doing anything that doesn't help itself? IOW, if Apple doesn't need new features for GCC why would they spend time writing them?
Do you randomly download source for programs you'll never use, write new features that you don't want for it and then publish them?
It always struck me as odd that Apple kept hypercard around all these years, after all even Appleworks got more updates, and given that when Apple moved to OS X, they killed off a lot of calssic stuff (and steve's declaration of the death of classic) it seemed odd they would keep it arround.
I wonder if we may see the next generation of hypercard from Apple in the near future? Something like that would be an awsome addition to OS X, and it seems to me like it could be Apple's iLife version of Keynote.
Question: Why would apple spend time giving back changes that don't improve the software?
It may have been fertile for viruses, but as I recall there was only one hypercard virus.
The fun thing about the reader was that it was actualy the full application, it just had a crippled home stack. If you got the regular stack and the ad-ons you could make it the full version.
I think the joke was that Apple had an item up for sale that was 6 year out of date with no updates. And that we're expecting a powerbook update sometime soon.
Basicaly it was something like powerpoint with scripting and full user interaction. You could write games, animations,and whatever else you wanted tutorials, presentations, interactive demos. Very powerful, very small, very cool. It was also a decent intro to basic programing with seperate functions and such.
Yeah, because we all know that realgeeks never spend money on stuff they don't need
No kidding. In one of my engineering courses, we had to write a disassembler in assembly (this was an intro to assembly course) and I remember sitting there thinking to myself somewhere arround line 150 "I could do this in 30 lines in C"
I had no problems (nor do I currently) with IR and WMP being installed by default. What I do have a problem with is not being able to uninstall said apps. If I want to be able to remove an application from my system, I damn well better be able to do it. I can remove quicktime, safari, iTunes, iChat, iPhoto and any other Apple default app (including the finder itself) if I so choose and replace it with another app.
Bundling is not the issue, it's when you bundle it, and then force me to have it that I have an issue.
The problem is the image. There's nothing that kills a user's enthusiasm for their new machine faster than opening the box to a manual 200 pages thick. And yes, if Apple provided documentation for all of their softwre that they ship with the computer, it would be that long (IIRC, the NetInfo documentation alone is ~300 pages)
You know, Apple isn't pushing anyone out of the business. The fact that they are choosing not to compete is their own fault. It's not like they can't improve on the apps Apple is writing or make better products. Certainly you can make better video products than iMovie, better photo tools than iPhoto and better Sound Programs than garage band. People don't use the default programs just because they're default (witness VLC, despite quicktime being default on all Apple computers I know of very few mac users that don't also have VLC). The key to competeing with Apple is to make somethng better, but that also works with Apple
Slashdot doesn't like any advertising material if it's mileading or false, see the Apple G5 ad threads for more information.
I've found Office tends to handle things worse than OO. I use OO on my mac to write up lab reports, but usualy print from the school computers (to save money on ink) so I have ot export to an office format, but everytime I open it in word, I have to go through and fix all of the images and diagrams and charts because office fucks them all up. It's gotten to the point where it's faster to export as a PDF and print it that way.
What would you like him to do? He's publicly stated on the record that it was a bad deal, which effectively makes any other company thinking about dealing with SCO think twice.
Do you want him to break the contract? Is that ethical? So long as both parties are still abiding by the contract, even if it was a bad deal, does that make it ok for him to break the contract?
What do you want him to do?
I get it, so ethics are proportional to actions you support. In this case donating to linux. What if he switched entirely to Apple or Sun? Would that be the same?
Well marketing is part of business, therefore:
Apple business sense > Amiga Business sense