Doing something without being asked to do so and outside the terms of your employment is called 'volunteering'. Volunteers don't get paid.
Transitioning your workplace to an unauthorized homegrown system without being directed to do so and then refusing to provide said workplace with access to the program source unless you receive some sort of payment is at best unethical and at worst extortion.
Look, you told work they could use this thing. They said they have no budget for it. You did it anyway. Thy still do not have any budget for it. You can either deploy your thing, start using it, make your work easier for yourself and your colleagues, and accept only the 'payment' of knowing you have done good work for a cash strapped organization, or you can throw your unrequested work away and do your job according to the terms of your employer - even though their way is harder and less efficient.
Seriously, they have no budget for this. They have told you they have no budget for this. Be a volunteer or don't be a volunteer, but don't be an extortionist.
I am currently doing a grad degree in CS and use my modbook and inkbook for taking notes. As others have pointed out, handwriting recognition is hit and miss, and Apple's inkwell is no different, so I usually just take notes with handwriting recognition turned off. Either way though, you can doodle on it like it's paper and add in diagrams, etc. It makes me very happy as my day-to-day all purpose machine.
Anyway, you can get them from a bunch of distributors, and if you're in the US you can order them from OWC. That said, Axiotron has been going through some financial problems for awhile now and the modbook hasn't been updated in some time to use current macbook base systems, but if you're comfortable getting a 2009 era macbook and the possibility that the company may disappear at any time (so, warranty repercussions) then I can recommend it as a great system. Personally, when my modbook eventually retires I'm not sure what I'll replace it with if Axiotron isn't still around - it will be a sad day for me when I have to give up the stylus. YMMV.
That's funny, because I had exactly the opposite experience. After spending hours getting wifi to work under ubuntu (atheros chipset, no less - spent endless hours trying to get either madwifi or ath5k to work) and having to fiddle with their little gui tool thing to select a network, I finally got it working for precisely one day before the endless barrage of daily 'system updates' broke it again. After the third time discovering that something broke my wireless I wiped the machine and installed FreeBSD. Wireless configuration was exactly one line in rc.conf, and it's been rock solid ever since. I've even updated the kernel, entire system toolchain and the whole ports tree without breakage. It Just Works.
This was back in 2009, so maybe things have gotten better on ubuntu since then, but once bitten, twice shy..
I have used a few trackballs, but have come down firmly behind the Kensington Expert Mouse. Big trackball, 4 buttons and a Scroll Ring. It's the Scroll Ring that does it for me - there's just nothing better. I have one at home, and got my boss to buy me one for work (as a programmer).
I initially switched from a mouse to a trackball because I got so sick and tired of always having to pick up the mouse and move it around the mouse pad. It would fall off the side or bump into the palm rest on my desk or something and I eventually just threw it away and got a trackball because it would be stationary on my desk. I started with the MS Trackball Explorer but later switched to the Kensington. I wouldn't go back to a mouse now, the trackball is just too comfortable. I don't know how people use the little thumb ones - maybe my thumb just isn't that dexterous.
SubEthaEdit is a Cocoa application, which means porting it for Windows / Linux would require nearly a total re-write depending on how much of it is written in Objective-C
Because it has to be said, there is always GNUstep when you need to port a Cocoa app to Windows or *nix. I have read mixed reviews, but if you stick to the core Openstep API then you should be okay porting your Cocoa app to GNUstep. As far as Obj-C goes, gcc does compile it, so it isn't the language that's the stumbling block.
All of that said, the codingmonkeys have commented in the past that their use of Apple only frameworks (rendezvous, addressbook, etc), would make a port to gnustep really difficult, and that they make pretty heavy use of the newer Apple Cocoa extensions (CoreFoundation) that aren't in Openstep or GNUstep. So doing a Windows / *nix port is hard, but not because of Obj-C or Cocoa in general, but because SubEtha uses several of the newer OS X APIs that aren't in Openstep. At least that is my understanding of it.
I can see no case where disclosing information a week early would do irreperable harm to the company.
It's about their stock price, not so much about lost sales or competition or anything. Apple's stock price is driven as much by company performance as it is by people's expectations. If Jobs goes on stage and introduces a couple of unexpected products that are really cool then people get all excited, lots of good press and buzz comes up, Apple's share price goes up, and Apple gets lots of free marketing from people talking about this new and totally unexpected thing. If people know in advance what Jobs is going to say, and Jobs delivers exactly what people expect then the reaction is more muted. Apple gets less buzz and less press, people don't talk as much, don't pay as much attention, and Apple's share price doesn't go up (or even goes down, sometimes).
I can think of a few Expos where Jobs didn't meet people's expectations, or where people were expecting more than what was delivered, and people come out of it feeling negative - even when the announcements are pretty great. But do you remember when Jobs brought out the iMac? "Oh yeah, one more thing" got just as much ink as the actual product. So it's all about delivering against peoples expectations - if people have no expectations then Apple appears to be over-delivering when they announce new products, and people talk and are happy and positive - if people have really high expectations then Apple is perceived to be under-performing when the actual announcements are made, and people talk about what Apple 'should do' and about how Apple is 'missing the target' and about how it 'could be much better' and everybody is kind of down and negative. All of this affects Apple's stock price - it affects analyst perceptions (and ratings), it affects journalists who write about tech, etc.
I hate lawsuits too, and don't necessarily agree with Apple in this instance, but so much at Apple rides on how Jobs is seen to perform at these expos - taking the wind out of his sails does materially affect the company.
So, dated - yes. Sucked from the get-go - I think (hope) you have a minority opinion there.
I'll back you up on this one. I used all kinds of versions of AppleWorks/ClarisWorks (both Apple// and Macintosh) and they were great. ClarisWorks and then AppleWorks 6 was all I used through university, and it's still the only word processor I have installed on my Mac. A little long in the tooth now, yes, but it certainly doesn't - and never did - suck.
I really do not understand how some people can harp on the OS X GUI so much. Things are so much easier than they were in OS 9. Seriously:
In OS X:
Dragging something to the trash no longer requires you to clear some windows out of the way to reveal the trash can on your desktop. The trash is always on top, always available, and never hidden or covered by something else you're doing.
Changing betwen running applications is now, at worst, a one click operation. Click the icon in the dock, app comes to the front. The OS 9 Applications Menu made me click twice - once to open the menu, once to choose the app.
I can get to any document in my file system with two clicks, at most, by just putting my HD in the dock. Right click (ctrl click, whatever) the HD in the dock, navigate nested folders, select application or file, done. Two clicks. In OS 9 I would have to double click the HD, double click the folder I wanted, and drill down to the thing I was looking for. OS 9 tabbed folders do not provide this sort of easy access to everything on the file system, since if I wanted to open something in a tabbed folder I would still have to open the tabbed folder, open the subfolder, etc etc. At best, I can have many tabbed folders, one for applications, one for documents, etc etc, and then get at most of the things I commonly want with three clicks (one to open the tab, two to open the thing). But again, the dock does this better because I can keep many folders in the dock (one for applications, one for documents, etc etc) and it only takes me two clicks to get at what I want (one right click to open the folder, one to select what I want). Alternatively, I could keep an alias to my HD in my Apple Menu Items folder, but this (a) necessarily creates one extra 'level' to navigate, as I have to navigate the Apple Menu to get to the HD icon and (b) means digging through my System Folder, which is less intuitive than just dragging a folder into the Dock.
Keeping aliases to commonly used applications in the Dock is better than keeping them on the desktop, and better than keeping them in a tabbed folder. If they're on the desktop I have to move windows out of the way to get at them. If they're in a tabbed folder I have to click three times to get at them - once to open the tab, and twice to launch the app. Launching an app in the dock is a one click operation. It's faster and easier.
Column view makes quickly browsing to a particular file or directory easier than icon view or list view. In OS 9, icon view makes you double click continuously as you drill down to what you're looking for, and it (optionally) litters your screen with intermediate windows. In OS 9, list view makes you click the triangle to open the folder, scroll the window down to show the directory contents, click the next triangle, scroll down, and so on. Column view has advantages over both icon view and list view in that it (a) only requires a single click to open a directory and (b) automatically scrolls the window to show the new directory contents. It is faster and easier.
Dragging things between windows in different apps is easier because application windows can be interleaved. So I no longer have to clear all of the windows in a particular app out of the way to reveal the window of the other app that I want to drag into
I can get at any window in any running application with two clicks, at most. Right click (ctrl click, whatever) the dock icon, pick the window I want, done. OS 9 had no equivalent. I had to switch to the application I wanted, and then try to pick out the window I was after. If I was lucky the application had a menu I could choose open documents from.
True, the OS X GUI isn't perfect. But neither was the OS 9 GUI. It most certainly cannot be said though that OS X is a 'leap backwards' in terms of functionality. In many respects, getting work done is easier in OS X than it is in OS 9. There is usually less clicking, less moving windows around to 'get at' windows below, and fewer Finder windows open cluttering up my screen.
Apple should be opening the code base to allow for Ogg playback
Someone at Apple is planning on iTunes someday supporting ogg playback. They've even got an iTunes-ogg icon all ready for when the day arrives. Go digging around in the iTunes package (at least on OS X) and look in Contents/Resources. They've got a bunch of icons there that they use for mp3, aac, wav, etc files there. Included are icons for wma and ogg. Why would they bother creating ogg and wma icons for iTunes if they didn't plan to eventually use them?
"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things." (John C. Dvorak, SF Examiner, Feb. 1984.)
This bug happens to other characters too. I once set an open firmware password with the character '{' in it, and OF wouldn't take it at boot time. The lowercase '[' worked fine though.
I think this is a problem with the Open Firmware Password application using a different character set than Open Firmware itself. So some characters you can type in the OF Password app you can't type in OF itself. Or maybe OF just doesn't like the shift key...
I suppose you could grate cheese with the fan on the back of the G4, but that would get messy real quick
And grinding a hunk of cheese against the front of a G5 isn't going to get messy? There's all kinds of fans and shit behind that apparent cheese-grater front, and you know that they'll be picking up bits of half shredded cheese and spraying it all over the RAM and the heat sink and melting all over everything.
Nooo, grating cheese on a G5 would be much messier than grating cheese on a G4.
Microsoft would make a IE plugin to read the documents (but you can't print or copy them if the document says you can't), so the users don't need a $500 product. They only need IE. Did someone mention consumer lock-in on their office product? They don't mind locking you into their browser as well, if it isn't too much trouble.
Making an IE plugin is going to work really well once IE is discontinued. I can see how Clippy it is going to explain it now: Sorry, you need Office 2003 to read this document. Don't have Office 2003? No problem, get this IE plugin and it'll work. What, you have Windows XP SPX? So no IE to plug into? I guess you'll have to get Office 2003 then.. Darn
Your own example contradicts your point. Just because MySQL is GPL that does not mean that any programs that use MySQL must also be GPL or else face licensing fees. True, MySQL is GPL, and as a result PHP no longer distributes the mysql client library, but you can still go and get the mysql libraries yourself and compile php against them on your own without breaking any rules or paying any fees to MySQL. The fact that MySQL is GPL'd now only prevents you from distributing MySQL with your closed source application. It does not prevent you from distributing your closed source code application that uses or compiles against MySQL, so long as you aren't distributing MySQL code with your closed source app. The fact that php still supports MySQL while maintaining a non-GPL license is testimony to this. If things were as you say they are then php would have to either be GPL'd or remove mysql support entirely.
Tell your clients to install their own copy of MySQL (or contract out to them to do it yourself!), then install and compile PHP against that copy of MySQL (which you obtained perfectly legally from the MySQL site), and then install your product that uses PHP, and you're fine.
The whole idea is that you can't redistribute MySQL code under a license that prevents others from redistributing that code. But you can distribute your code, and MySQL can distribute their code, and some person can take your code and MySQL's code and have them work together, and that's just fine.
Well you've got that right - Newfoundland is basically the area surrounding the highway between Quebec and Nova Scotia.:)
Sorry if I missed the sarcasm, but are you serious? There is no part of Newfoundland anywhere between Quebec and Nova Scotia. The highway between Quebec and Nova Scotia goes through New Brunswick. If you wanted to go Nova Scotia from Quebec via Newfoundland you'd have to go way the hell up by Labrador, take the ferry across to Newfoundland, drive all the way across the island, and then take another ferry (8 hours at that) to get to Cape Breton. It'd take you a couple of days at best.
Again, sorry if I missed the sarcasm, but if I didn't set it straight we'd end up with all sorts of silly Americans wandering around the Eastern Townships wondering where the fuck Newfoundland is.
Really? I always thought that Apple got it's fair share of use in the gov. The US Army has been using Macs to host it's website for years. I assumed that Apple got it's fair share of government and military use.
Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?
I don't think so really. If MS announced that Office was going to support OpenOffice native formats and KOffice formats then would we be upset? Probably not.
The difference is that Apple is supporting more standards and formats, while MS typically tries to force their own standards on you to the exclusion of all others. And when MS does implement other people's standards they typically throw in some proprietary 'feature' that fosters incompatibility.. That's what we scream bloody murder about.
If money is the measure of value then the solution that makes you the most of it is 'better'. If quick and dirty makes you more money then do it.
If you have some sort of other measure of value then your answer varies. I strongly suspect though that in business money is the only measure of value, hence the endless amounts of craptacular commercial code out there.
I can just see the guy in Japan telling his buddy in the US about his new apartment or something and MS's translation engine kicking out "All your base are belong to us.."
Here in Canada we teach kids entirely in French on a regular basis, even though much of the country is English dominated. The kids emerge being fluent in both English and French. Everybody agrees that these kids are better equipped to be successful in the world.
Similarly, teaching kids Linux in school will likely result in kids being able to efficiently use both Linux and Windows upon graduation, since they will use Linux in school, and will probably learn how to use Windows elsewhere since it is so pervasive (home, friends place, etc). Besides, even if they don't pick up Windows while in school the skills they have from Linux will make the learning curve short and easy when the time comes.
There is more to computers than the 'fundamental' applications such as MS Word, Excel, VB and IE. If you restrict your teaching to those topics then you are doing you children a disservice by refusing to teach them how a computer works. We're not training tomorrows secretaries here, we're training tomorrows computer scientists.
I seriously doubt that if they had built a brand new OS just for the Mac that we would be where we are today. Because OS X is Unix I can compile and use all kinds of Unix software with a minimum of fuss, sysadmins are comfortable using it because it's familiar, geeks love it because its open, and it is getting praise and attention in all sorts of places it otherwise wouldn't have.
If the new Mac OS had been rebuilt from the ground up I don't think we would have as much of this, or possibly any of it at all. A ground up Mac OS would probably be proprietary, closed, and Apple would be left to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to software development.
I think that Apple has made a good tradeoff here. Sure, OS X does feel a little disharmonious in the interface, but the community, sysadmin, and software support are well worth it, IMHO.
I'm a little stumped. How is Mac OS X insecure out of the box? It doesn't run any remote services out of the box. Port scan a default install of OS X and you get nothing. No file sharing, no ssh, no ftp, no rlogin, no telnet, , no webserver, no mail - no nothing. That makes it more secure by default than most standard Linux distros, and loads more secure than Windows. So how is it insecure? Granted, once you start turning services on you might have an insecure version of something running, but that's what the regular security updates are for.
How does the operating system have anything to do with how fast the processor runs? Your statements are completely devoid of meaning. At best, we can conclude from them that OS X requires more processing power in order to give the appearance of 'being as fast' as Windows 2000. This says absolutely nothing about how fast Mac hardware is, only that OS X is harder on system resources then Win2k.
Remember, how 'fast' you can browse the web has more to do with the efficiency of your web browser and your bandwidth and very much less to do with your processor and your operating system. To say that browsers under Windows 2000 render wab pages faster than browsers under OS X is quite possibly true depending on what browser you are using. But that doesn't say shit about how fast your hardware is. I would bet you that my OS X machine 'browses the web' using lynx faster than your Win2k machine does using Netscape. Does that man that my Mac is faster then your PC? No. It means that my web browser is faster and more efficient than yours. And shall we not get into the relative differences between the way OS X and Win2k draw the screen? X is harder on system resources and takes more processing power to accomplish similar tasks (drawing windows, moving windows, etc). This says nothing about how fast the processor is, only that OS X is hard on resources.
The next time you want to compare processor speed between platforms try and pick a good benchmark. The seti@home client is probably a good benchmark, rendering graphics or video is probably a good benchmark, integer or floating point tests are probably good benchmarks, Q3 is probably a good benchmark. Rendering web pages is probably not a good benchmark because it isn't dependent on processor speed so much as it is on rendering engine efficiency - that's why IE and Opera and Mozilla on identical systems will render identical pages in different times. Some browsers are faster than others, even on identical hardware. This says nothing about the speed of your hardware.
Perhaps you need to get a better programming job. I would imagine that finding a slick way to solve a problem or an elegant algorithm should stimulate you - or at the very least motivate you to find more creative / effective solutions to whatever problems you are given - at least that has been my experience..
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Doing something without being asked to do so and outside the terms of your employment is called 'volunteering'. Volunteers don't get paid.
Transitioning your workplace to an unauthorized homegrown system without being directed to do so and then refusing to provide said workplace with access to the program source unless you receive some sort of payment is at best unethical and at worst extortion.
Look, you told work they could use this thing. They said they have no budget for it. You did it anyway. Thy still do not have any budget for it. You can either deploy your thing, start using it, make your work easier for yourself and your colleagues, and accept only the 'payment' of knowing you have done good work for a cash strapped organization, or you can throw your unrequested work away and do your job according to the terms of your employer - even though their way is harder and less efficient.
Seriously, they have no budget for this. They have told you they have no budget for this. Be a volunteer or don't be a volunteer, but don't be an extortionist.
I am currently doing a grad degree in CS and use my modbook and inkbook for taking notes. As others have pointed out, handwriting recognition is hit and miss, and Apple's inkwell is no different, so I usually just take notes with handwriting recognition turned off. Either way though, you can doodle on it like it's paper and add in diagrams, etc. It makes me very happy as my day-to-day all purpose machine.
Anyway, you can get them from a bunch of distributors, and if you're in the US you can order them from OWC. That said, Axiotron has been going through some financial problems for awhile now and the modbook hasn't been updated in some time to use current macbook base systems, but if you're comfortable getting a 2009 era macbook and the possibility that the company may disappear at any time (so, warranty repercussions) then I can recommend it as a great system. Personally, when my modbook eventually retires I'm not sure what I'll replace it with if Axiotron isn't still around - it will be a sad day for me when I have to give up the stylus. YMMV.
That's funny, because I had exactly the opposite experience. After spending hours getting wifi to work under ubuntu (atheros chipset, no less - spent endless hours trying to get either madwifi or ath5k to work) and having to fiddle with their little gui tool thing to select a network, I finally got it working for precisely one day before the endless barrage of daily 'system updates' broke it again. After the third time discovering that something broke my wireless I wiped the machine and installed FreeBSD. Wireless configuration was exactly one line in rc.conf, and it's been rock solid ever since. I've even updated the kernel, entire system toolchain and the whole ports tree without breakage. It Just Works. This was back in 2009, so maybe things have gotten better on ubuntu since then, but once bitten, twice shy..
I have used a few trackballs, but have come down firmly behind the Kensington Expert Mouse. Big trackball, 4 buttons and a Scroll Ring. It's the Scroll Ring that does it for me - there's just nothing better. I have one at home, and got my boss to buy me one for work (as a programmer). I initially switched from a mouse to a trackball because I got so sick and tired of always having to pick up the mouse and move it around the mouse pad. It would fall off the side or bump into the palm rest on my desk or something and I eventually just threw it away and got a trackball because it would be stationary on my desk. I started with the MS Trackball Explorer but later switched to the Kensington. I wouldn't go back to a mouse now, the trackball is just too comfortable. I don't know how people use the little thumb ones - maybe my thumb just isn't that dexterous.
SubEthaEdit is a Cocoa application, which means porting it for Windows / Linux would require nearly a total re-write depending on how much of it is written in Objective-C
Because it has to be said, there is always GNUstep when you need to port a Cocoa app to Windows or *nix. I have read mixed reviews, but if you stick to the core Openstep API then you should be okay porting your Cocoa app to GNUstep. As far as Obj-C goes, gcc does compile it, so it isn't the language that's the stumbling block.
All of that said, the codingmonkeys have commented in the past that their use of Apple only frameworks (rendezvous, addressbook, etc), would make a port to gnustep really difficult, and that they make pretty heavy use of the newer Apple Cocoa extensions (CoreFoundation) that aren't in Openstep or GNUstep. So doing a Windows / *nix port is hard, but not because of Obj-C or Cocoa in general, but because SubEtha uses several of the newer OS X APIs that aren't in Openstep. At least that is my understanding of it.
I can see no case where disclosing information a week early would do irreperable harm to the company.
It's about their stock price, not so much about lost sales or competition or anything. Apple's stock price is driven as much by company performance as it is by people's expectations. If Jobs goes on stage and introduces a couple of unexpected products that are really cool then people get all excited, lots of good press and buzz comes up, Apple's share price goes up, and Apple gets lots of free marketing from people talking about this new and totally unexpected thing. If people know in advance what Jobs is going to say, and Jobs delivers exactly what people expect then the reaction is more muted. Apple gets less buzz and less press, people don't talk as much, don't pay as much attention, and Apple's share price doesn't go up (or even goes down, sometimes).
I can think of a few Expos where Jobs didn't meet people's expectations, or where people were expecting more than what was delivered, and people come out of it feeling negative - even when the announcements are pretty great. But do you remember when Jobs brought out the iMac? "Oh yeah, one more thing" got just as much ink as the actual product. So it's all about delivering against peoples expectations - if people have no expectations then Apple appears to be over-delivering when they announce new products, and people talk and are happy and positive - if people have really high expectations then Apple is perceived to be under-performing when the actual announcements are made, and people talk about what Apple 'should do' and about how Apple is 'missing the target' and about how it 'could be much better' and everybody is kind of down and negative. All of this affects Apple's stock price - it affects analyst perceptions (and ratings), it affects journalists who write about tech, etc.
I hate lawsuits too, and don't necessarily agree with Apple in this instance, but so much at Apple rides on how Jobs is seen to perform at these expos - taking the wind out of his sails does materially affect the company.
I'll back you up on this one. I used all kinds of versions of AppleWorks/ClarisWorks (both Apple // and Macintosh) and they were great. ClarisWorks and then AppleWorks 6 was all I used through university, and it's still the only word processor I have installed on my Mac. A little long in the tooth now, yes, but it certainly doesn't - and never did - suck.
In OS X:
Dragging something to the trash no longer requires you to clear some windows out of the way to reveal the trash can on your desktop. The trash is always on top, always available, and never hidden or covered by something else you're doing.
Changing betwen running applications is now, at worst, a one click operation. Click the icon in the dock, app comes to the front. The OS 9 Applications Menu made me click twice - once to open the menu, once to choose the app.
I can get to any document in my file system with two clicks, at most, by just putting my HD in the dock. Right click (ctrl click, whatever) the HD in the dock, navigate nested folders, select application or file, done. Two clicks. In OS 9 I would have to double click the HD, double click the folder I wanted, and drill down to the thing I was looking for. OS 9 tabbed folders do not provide this sort of easy access to everything on the file system, since if I wanted to open something in a tabbed folder I would still have to open the tabbed folder, open the subfolder, etc etc. At best, I can have many tabbed folders, one for applications, one for documents, etc etc, and then get at most of the things I commonly want with three clicks (one to open the tab, two to open the thing). But again, the dock does this better because I can keep many folders in the dock (one for applications, one for documents, etc etc) and it only takes me two clicks to get at what I want (one right click to open the folder, one to select what I want). Alternatively, I could keep an alias to my HD in my Apple Menu Items folder, but this (a) necessarily creates one extra 'level' to navigate, as I have to navigate the Apple Menu to get to the HD icon and (b) means digging through my System Folder, which is less intuitive than just dragging a folder into the Dock.
Keeping aliases to commonly used applications in the Dock is better than keeping them on the desktop, and better than keeping them in a tabbed folder. If they're on the desktop I have to move windows out of the way to get at them. If they're in a tabbed folder I have to click three times to get at them - once to open the tab, and twice to launch the app. Launching an app in the dock is a one click operation. It's faster and easier.
Column view makes quickly browsing to a particular file or directory easier than icon view or list view. In OS 9, icon view makes you double click continuously as you drill down to what you're looking for, and it (optionally) litters your screen with intermediate windows. In OS 9, list view makes you click the triangle to open the folder, scroll the window down to show the directory contents, click the next triangle, scroll down, and so on. Column view has advantages over both icon view and list view in that it (a) only requires a single click to open a directory and (b) automatically scrolls the window to show the new directory contents. It is faster and easier.
Dragging things between windows in different apps is easier because application windows can be interleaved. So I no longer have to clear all of the windows in a particular app out of the way to reveal the window of the other app that I want to drag into
I can get at any window in any running application with two clicks, at most. Right click (ctrl click, whatever) the dock icon, pick the window I want, done. OS 9 had no equivalent. I had to switch to the application I wanted, and then try to pick out the window I was after. If I was lucky the application had a menu I could choose open documents from.
True, the OS X GUI isn't perfect. But neither was the OS 9 GUI. It most certainly cannot be said though that OS X is a 'leap backwards' in terms of functionality. In many respects, getting work done is easier in OS X than it is in OS 9. There is usually less clicking, less moving windows around to 'get at' windows below, and fewer Finder windows open cluttering up my screen.
Someone at Apple is planning on iTunes someday supporting ogg playback. They've even got an iTunes-ogg icon all ready for when the day arrives. Go digging around in the iTunes package (at least on OS X) and look in Contents/Resources. They've got a bunch of icons there that they use for mp3, aac, wav, etc files there. Included are icons for wma and ogg. Why would they bother creating ogg and wma icons for iTunes if they didn't plan to eventually use them?
I think this is a problem with the Open Firmware Password application using a different character set than Open Firmware itself. So some characters you can type in the OF Password app you can't type in OF itself. Or maybe OF just doesn't like the shift key...
And grinding a hunk of cheese against the front of a G5 isn't going to get messy? There's all kinds of fans and shit behind that apparent cheese-grater front, and you know that they'll be picking up bits of half shredded cheese and spraying it all over the RAM and the heat sink and melting all over everything.
Nooo, grating cheese on a G5 would be much messier than grating cheese on a G4.
Making an IE plugin is going to work really well once IE is discontinued. I can see how Clippy it is going to explain it now: Sorry, you need Office 2003 to read this document. Don't have Office 2003? No problem, get this IE plugin and it'll work. What, you have Windows XP SPX? So no IE to plug into? I guess you'll have to get Office 2003 then.. Darn
Tell your clients to install their own copy of MySQL (or contract out to them to do it yourself!), then install and compile PHP against that copy of MySQL (which you obtained perfectly legally from the MySQL site), and then install your product that uses PHP, and you're fine.
The whole idea is that you can't redistribute MySQL code under a license that prevents others from redistributing that code. But you can distribute your code, and MySQL can distribute their code, and some person can take your code and MySQL's code and have them work together, and that's just fine.
Sorry if I missed the sarcasm, but are you serious? There is no part of Newfoundland anywhere between Quebec and Nova Scotia. The highway between Quebec and Nova Scotia goes through New Brunswick. If you wanted to go Nova Scotia from Quebec via Newfoundland you'd have to go way the hell up by Labrador, take the ferry across to Newfoundland, drive all the way across the island, and then take another ferry (8 hours at that) to get to Cape Breton. It'd take you a couple of days at best.
Again, sorry if I missed the sarcasm, but if I didn't set it straight we'd end up with all sorts of silly Americans wandering around the Eastern Townships wondering where the fuck Newfoundland is.
Really? I always thought that Apple got it's fair share of use in the gov. The US Army has been using Macs to host it's website for years. I assumed that Apple got it's fair share of government and military use.
I don't think so really. If MS announced that Office was going to support OpenOffice native formats and KOffice formats then would we be upset? Probably not.
The difference is that Apple is supporting more standards and formats, while MS typically tries to force their own standards on you to the exclusion of all others. And when MS does implement other people's standards they typically throw in some proprietary 'feature' that fosters incompatibility.. That's what we scream bloody murder about.
If you have some sort of other measure of value then your answer varies. I strongly suspect though that in business money is the only measure of value, hence the endless amounts of craptacular commercial code out there.
Similarly, teaching kids Linux in school will likely result in kids being able to efficiently use both Linux and Windows upon graduation, since they will use Linux in school, and will probably learn how to use Windows elsewhere since it is so pervasive (home, friends place, etc). Besides, even if they don't pick up Windows while in school the skills they have from Linux will make the learning curve short and easy when the time comes.
There is more to computers than the 'fundamental' applications such as MS Word, Excel, VB and IE. If you restrict your teaching to those topics then you are doing you children a disservice by refusing to teach them how a computer works. We're not training tomorrows secretaries here, we're training tomorrows computer scientists.
If the new Mac OS had been rebuilt from the ground up I don't think we would have as much of this, or possibly any of it at all. A ground up Mac OS would probably be proprietary, closed, and Apple would be left to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to software development.
I think that Apple has made a good tradeoff here. Sure, OS X does feel a little disharmonious in the interface, but the community, sysadmin, and software support are well worth it, IMHO.
It's always nice to talk to people who have done it before..
I'm a little stumped. How is Mac OS X insecure out of the box? It doesn't run any remote services out of the box. Port scan a default install of OS X and you get nothing. No file sharing, no ssh, no ftp, no rlogin, no telnet, , no webserver, no mail - no nothing. That makes it more secure by default than most standard Linux distros, and loads more secure than Windows. So how is it insecure? Granted, once you start turning services on you might have an insecure version of something running, but that's what the regular security updates are for.
Remember, how 'fast' you can browse the web has more to do with the efficiency of your web browser and your bandwidth and very much less to do with your processor and your operating system. To say that browsers under Windows 2000 render wab pages faster than browsers under OS X is quite possibly true depending on what browser you are using. But that doesn't say shit about how fast your hardware is. I would bet you that my OS X machine 'browses the web' using lynx faster than your Win2k machine does using Netscape. Does that man that my Mac is faster then your PC? No. It means that my web browser is faster and more efficient than yours. And shall we not get into the relative differences between the way OS X and Win2k draw the screen? X is harder on system resources and takes more processing power to accomplish similar tasks (drawing windows, moving windows, etc). This says nothing about how fast the processor is, only that OS X is hard on resources.
The next time you want to compare processor speed between platforms try and pick a good benchmark. The seti@home client is probably a good benchmark, rendering graphics or video is probably a good benchmark, integer or floating point tests are probably good benchmarks, Q3 is probably a good benchmark. Rendering web pages is probably not a good benchmark because it isn't dependent on processor speed so much as it is on rendering engine efficiency - that's why IE and Opera and Mozilla on identical systems will render identical pages in different times. Some browsers are faster than others, even on identical hardware. This says nothing about the speed of your hardware.
Perhaps you need to get a better programming job. I would imagine that finding a slick way to solve a problem or an elegant algorithm should stimulate you - or at the very least motivate you to find more creative / effective solutions to whatever problems you are given - at least that has been my experience..