Haha! Right on!
I did the same thing for more pedestrian reasons. My first GUI computer was a mac laptop my grandfather got me. It was beautiful because it was a learning machine and I didn't know how bad System 7 was. My second GUI computer was a mac Performa. It was 7.5ish, and flawed in many, many ways. It broke twice and the warranty replacement also broke, and so we switched to a windows PC running 95. I learned most everything I know running 95 (as another poster said, from repeatedly having to fix or reinstall it).
I really loved 2000, and have an uneasy relationship with XP. Now, wonder of wonders, I run both XP and OS X. An iBook (running 10.2 and then 10.3) was my primary for a while before I gave that to my brother, and now I sort of go back and forth between both systems.
Really, that's the beauty of both: a high degree of interoperability. I can't run iCal in windows, and I can't use VS.NET in OS X (yet), but otherwise a handy dandy USB drive is all I need to go back and forth.
This article is bunk. The content, that they are making a cafe, is true. The tone, that they are getting rid of books or pushing them to the side in any way, is very, very false.
UT has one of the largest library systems in the country. The main library is 6 stories tall and takes up the better part of a square block, and there are well over a dozen satellite libraries for various disciplines.
The worst that can possibly be said is that the university is creating a social buffer zone in front of the largest collection of books. I don't see anything wrong with this at all.
Wow, so I turned off everything I could except explorer, Csrss, and opera. I expected my external wireless device to be long dead, but I clicked on a link to make sure. Surprise, it worked! Sweet, sweet functionality.
What's more amazing is, the last few days, this computer has been losing HTTP access every few minutes. Now it works fine. Conclusion: I have a virus somewhere in the higher processes.
What?! Last year I tried to set up mythTV on a fresh FC install. There is a more-or-less standard guide for doing this (http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php). *There were compile steps*.
"I've spent countless hours (that I can't charge, and I'll NEVER get back) fixing, re-installing, helping, instructing, etc. in a support role for my parents from Windows 95 through Windows XP."
So have I, but last year I convinced my mother and brother to get iBooks. Guess how much time I've spent in the support role since then. Really, guess.
. . .
The answer is, not 30 minutes. I didn't even have to help my mother do anything. My brother, your classic Joe User (though, I point out, a geologist/biologist and smarter than a lot of qualified geeks on this site), gave her the 5 minute highlight reel of things as he did them on *his* new iBook, and she was off on her own.
Seriously, they both went off on their own without any additional support from me. They had wireless internet access without configuration tweaks or pesky connection hiccups, they had office tools out of the box and could easily install Ms Office (okay, I did that, but it was push-button), and most importantly they had *no confusing useability issues whatsoever*.
To quote my brother: "Now when I want to know how to do something, I just think about how I would want to do it intuitively, and that is almost always how it's done."
Asa said the OS X switches are a drop in the bucket compared to the Firefox switches, and he's right, but give it 5 or so years for the old Apple fear to wear off, and I think Apple switches will trump all else.
Really, Linux is hopelessly lost on the useability front. I'm one of the aforementioned "windows power users", and I *do* understand a lot of what's going on behind the screen, because I'm a goddamned programmer, and yet, after several serious attempts with different distros on different machines, after reading and learning a whole lot to understand the shell and as much of the underlying system as I could stand to read about, I still can't get comfortable with Linux. Oh, it's a blast not to have even the spectre of viruses or spyware, but it's just-not-a-comfortable-system-to-use. I'm going to go ahead and say that if I can't get used to it after many, many days attempting to actually learn it, the vast majority of people aren't ever going to get used to it. That means the vast majority of people aren't ever going to use it.
The problem is, unless you just want your machine for simple (email, browsing) type purposes, you have to change your mindset before you can become at all competent. Like the original poster said, it takes 2 hours to become proficient in OS X. By that I figure he meant comfortable, and able to use most of the basic applications you want to use. It takes forever to get to that level with almost any linux distro.
The first time I installed, I dunno, Mandrake 8, it took me a whole day to configure simple things like audio and internet. Now, I know that's probably the fault of the cardmakers and the lack of good driver support (though I still maintain that they were very common cards, and should have been supported "out of the box" by Mandrake at any cost). I mean, if you can't even listen to music or google for help, the process of migration becomes a nightmare. If you are lucky enough to have another (windows) computer to turn to for help and tunes, it just makes linux look and feel really bad.
Where the problem really happens is when you want to do something the least bit special. After the disastrous Mandrake install, I gave up on permanent migration, and I fiddled with linux multiple times over the next year or two but never stuck with it. The first time I really tried permanent migration (on one machine) was for the sake of mythTv. It took me days and days of extremely complicated setup and I never really got it working correctly. I was on common hardware, and I was doing it with a good guide for FC1/mythTV setup, and it still didn't work. I learned a lot, but it was extremely frustrating and I didn't get anything useful out of it.
Compare that with Windows, where I bought a product for use with my card. I installed it, set it up, fiddled a bit, and it worked. The whole process didn't take more than half an hour, and it was pretty obvious that even a novice Windows user could have done the same within a few hours.
I'm not sure what kind of TV tuner support there is in OS X, but I have installed applications of similar power and similar complexity; almost everything I've ever installed in OS X worked just as soon as I dragged the cute icon out from the dmg.
Working for a few weeks with FC1, and trying to configure mythTV, I did start to change my mindset, and I did find linux becoming easier to use in general because of it. However, that comfort level should have happened on the first day. The only reason I even had the kind of time and patience to spend more than a day's worth of time on the project was that I was quitting one grad program for another, and had almost a half semester of free time on my hands.
Really... normal people, not stupid people, but normal, intelligent, otherwise occupied people want the machine for use as a tool. They want a black box which works the way they expect it to work the same way I want a drill with a nice handle without having to understand what makes the drill spin.
God forbid I should ever have to take the drill apart to make my drill work, and God forbid they should ever have to muck about in the *nix guts to make their computer work.
This is stupid. He doesn't need to travel. All he needs is a complicated manifold where all the fireplaces in the world are sewn to portals inside a huge factory in the north pole. He can have the elves throw presents into the holes all night; if each elf can throw one package per ten seconds, he can get stuff to each of the, what, billion children in the world, in 10 hours, with like 300,000 elves.
So... you lift weights because you're insecure, and you need to brag? That's bad. Lift them for health, make it a personal thing. You'll probably feel better for it.
No, this is one case where american free markets favor american workers. After a few years of outsourcing, EA will be losing money to debug crazy indian code which doesn't even come close to modeling the english language game design. With the game industry's desperate need to ship early, you'll definitely see some of those problems. 5 runs for a "ground double rule" in MVP Baseball 2007? No thanks, I'll try "Former EA Guys Baseball" instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha! Right on! I did the same thing for more pedestrian reasons. My first GUI computer was a mac laptop my grandfather got me. It was beautiful because it was a learning machine and I didn't know how bad System 7 was. My second GUI computer was a mac Performa. It was 7.5ish, and flawed in many, many ways. It broke twice and the warranty replacement also broke, and so we switched to a windows PC running 95. I learned most everything I know running 95 (as another poster said, from repeatedly having to fix or reinstall it). I really loved 2000, and have an uneasy relationship with XP. Now, wonder of wonders, I run both XP and OS X. An iBook (running 10.2 and then 10.3) was my primary for a while before I gave that to my brother, and now I sort of go back and forth between both systems. Really, that's the beauty of both: a high degree of interoperability. I can't run iCal in windows, and I can't use VS.NET in OS X (yet), but otherwise a handy dandy USB drive is all I need to go back and forth.
So basically you went straight from being an asshole to being an asshole, without stopping to be an asshole in between.
This article is bunk. The content, that they are making a cafe, is true. The tone, that they are getting rid of books or pushing them to the side in any way, is very, very false.
UT has one of the largest library systems in the country. The main library is 6 stories tall and takes up the better part of a square block, and there are well over a dozen satellite libraries for various disciplines.
The worst that can possibly be said is that the university is creating a social buffer zone in front of the largest collection of books. I don't see anything wrong with this at all.
Wow, so I turned off everything I could except explorer, Csrss, and opera. I expected my external wireless device to be long dead, but I clicked on a link to make sure. Surprise, it worked! Sweet, sweet functionality.
What's more amazing is, the last few days, this computer has been losing HTTP access every few minutes. Now it works fine. Conclusion: I have a virus somewhere in the higher processes.
Hooray for knowledge!
As nice as that is, it's still a Deskstar.
How cool are you going to feel when your 500 GB drive dies?
iPod HAS no SON!
What?! Last year I tried to set up mythTV on a fresh FC install. There is a more-or-less standard guide for doing this (http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php). *There were compile steps*.
"I've spent countless hours (that I can't charge, and I'll NEVER get back) fixing, re-installing, helping, instructing, etc. in a support role for my parents from Windows 95 through Windows XP."
So have I, but last year I convinced my mother and brother to get iBooks. Guess how much time I've spent in the support role since then. Really, guess.
.
.
.
The answer is, not 30 minutes. I didn't even have to help my mother do anything. My brother, your classic Joe User (though, I point out, a geologist/biologist and smarter than a lot of qualified geeks on this site), gave her the 5 minute highlight reel of things as he did them on *his* new iBook, and she was off on her own.
Seriously, they both went off on their own without any additional support from me. They had wireless internet access without configuration tweaks or pesky connection hiccups, they had office tools out of the box and could easily install Ms Office (okay, I did that, but it was push-button), and most importantly they had *no confusing useability issues whatsoever*.
To quote my brother: "Now when I want to know how to do something, I just think about how I would want to do it intuitively, and that is almost always how it's done."
Asa said the OS X switches are a drop in the bucket compared to the Firefox switches, and he's right, but give it 5 or so years for the old Apple fear to wear off, and I think Apple switches will trump all else.
Really, Linux is hopelessly lost on the useability front. I'm one of the aforementioned "windows power users", and I *do* understand a lot of what's going on behind the screen, because I'm a goddamned programmer, and yet, after several serious attempts with different distros on different machines, after reading and learning a whole lot to understand the shell and as much of the underlying system as I could stand to read about, I still can't get comfortable with Linux. Oh, it's a blast not to have even the spectre of viruses or spyware, but it's just-not-a-comfortable-system-to-use. I'm going to go ahead and say that if I can't get used to it after many, many days attempting to actually learn it, the vast majority of people aren't ever going to get used to it. That means the vast majority of people aren't ever going to use it.
The problem is, unless you just want your machine for simple (email, browsing) type purposes, you have to change your mindset before you can become at all competent. Like the original poster said, it takes 2 hours to become proficient in OS X. By that I figure he meant comfortable, and able to use most of the basic applications you want to use. It takes forever to get to that level with almost any linux distro.
The first time I installed, I dunno, Mandrake 8, it took me a whole day to configure simple things like audio and internet. Now, I know that's probably the fault of the cardmakers and the lack of good driver support (though I still maintain that they were very common cards, and should have been supported "out of the box" by Mandrake at any cost). I mean, if you can't even listen to music or google for help, the process of migration becomes a nightmare. If you are lucky enough to have another (windows) computer to turn to for help and tunes, it just makes linux look and feel really bad.
Where the problem really happens is when you want to do something the least bit special. After the disastrous Mandrake install, I gave up on permanent migration, and I fiddled with linux multiple times over the next year or two but never stuck with it. The first time I really tried permanent migration (on one machine) was for the sake of mythTv. It took me days and days of extremely complicated setup and I never really got it working correctly. I was on common hardware, and I was doing it with a good guide for FC1/mythTV setup, and it still didn't work. I learned a lot, but it was extremely frustrating and I didn't get anything useful out of it.
Compare that with Windows, where I bought a product for use with my card. I installed it, set it up, fiddled a bit, and it worked. The whole process didn't take more than half an hour, and it was pretty obvious that even a novice Windows user could have done the same within a few hours.
I'm not sure what kind of TV tuner support there is in OS X, but I have installed applications of similar power and similar complexity; almost everything I've ever installed in OS X worked just as soon as I dragged the cute icon out from the dmg.
Working for a few weeks with FC1, and trying to configure mythTV, I did start to change my mindset, and I did find linux becoming easier to use in general because of it. However, that comfort level should have happened on the first day. The only reason I even had the kind of time and patience to spend more than a day's worth of time on the project was that I was quitting one grad program for another, and had almost a half semester of free time on my hands.
Really... normal people, not stupid people, but normal, intelligent, otherwise occupied people want the machine for use as a tool. They want a black box which works the way they expect it to work the same way I want a drill with a nice handle without having to understand what makes the drill spin.
God forbid I should ever have to take the drill apart to make my drill work, and God forbid they should ever have to muck about in the *nix guts to make their computer work.
"dumbing it down"? How can you get any dumber than Everquest?
Experiment #3:
You buy a book for your daughter. You give it to her new in the... oh wait, no box. You just give her the book, and have her read it.
Is she successful? A lot more so than a girl with a 27 inch TV, a PS2, and a Tivo.
Pssh. This is no big deal. Did you hear some guys remade Tetris?
Thank God I don't like a single one of those movies.
Kernel patch to ban that, please.
It's just a glorified android.
This is stupid. He doesn't need to travel. All he needs is a complicated manifold where all the fireplaces in the world are sewn to portals inside a huge factory in the north pole. He can have the elves throw presents into the holes all night; if each elf can throw one package per ten seconds, he can get stuff to each of the, what, billion children in the world, in 10 hours, with like 300,000 elves.
So... you lift weights because you're insecure, and you need to brag? That's bad. Lift them for health, make it a personal thing. You'll probably feel better for it.
Pfffft. That's not even 400 DVDs.
Hey, "Seinfeld" might not be a Newsradio, or a Farscape, or a Firefly, or even a Monk, but it was a good show!
reflected light is more 'natural'.
Gosh. Do the photons come with little tags that say "organically grown"?
The sun is as natural as the earth, but I'm sure you'd rather be standing on the earth. Come on, you know what he meant by "natural".
No, this is one case where american free markets favor american workers. After a few years of outsourcing, EA will be losing money to debug crazy indian code which doesn't even come close to modeling the english language game design. With the game industry's desperate need to ship early, you'll definitely see some of those problems. 5 runs for a "ground double rule" in MVP Baseball 2007? No thanks, I'll try "Former EA Guys Baseball" instead.
Michael? Michael Jackson?
See this thing in my hand? It's a CD containing the recorded works of the world's smallest violin.
*Cheaper iPods*! Not more features. Not color screens. The thing works great already. Break the $200 barrier and I'm in.
mlylecarlin
... is that there are more Macs are running pirate copies of Windows than there are running OS X.