APPLESRCIPT applescript APPLESRCIPT!!!!!
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
tell application "monad"
activate
set creator to the creatorCode
if the name of the creator is "Microsoft" then
display dialog "Fuck off" with Buttons {"bite me"}
endif end tell
applescript has been around since before OSX. Not only does it communicate with any application like an object, it can discover any applications properties, methods, and UI. And if that application is written in Cocoa, then all of those properties and methods are discovered by introspection and exported automatically for you when you build the application. Thus the scipt can call deep subroutines in your application.
Moreover it's event driven not just procedural which means it can have a GUI and repsond to clicks, drags and whatnot.
It also plays well at the shell and command line level, with perl often being a handy tool to use from within apple script. And it comes with a
The only HUGE problem with apple script besides its limitations as a full blown programming language is the english syntax. While seemingly an advantage it's not. English syntax is easy to read by anyone (good!!) but nearly impossible to write, since in english there are many nearly equivalent ways to say the same thing (but only one is acceptable applescript syntax).
That and the O'reily book on applescipt truly is the worst O'reily book ever minted.
If everyone switched to electric powered cars the electric lines could never ever handle the capacity needed. So an electric car america is NOT possible period. Additionally electtic cars cannot be used to travel long distances because there is no feasible way to recharge them except overnight or by delivering charged batteries on trucks to change out.
Here's the calculation. to move a prius shaped car down the road at 55 MPH takes about 30 Horse power or about 22.4 kilowatts. In a realistic car with conversion losses more like 30Kilowatts is needed. If you are changing speed a lot then add even more.
30 kilowatts is 108 MegaJoules per hour. if you drove your car just four hours between filling stations that would be over 400 megajoules to replenish. if you wanted to fill that car up in less than a minute that would mean a power draw of 7.2 megawatts. You are not going to see that sort of power line going to filling stations around town.
Or to put it another way, if the typical filling station has more than a car a minute, regardless of how long it takes to fill it up then you need a power line bigger than that.
And if you want to argue that you would not drive four hours between fill=ups then all that changes in the calculation is that more people are doing more frequenty fill ups. the net demand is still the same.
So the only practical way to refill an electric car is overnight. but if the whole town is jsacked in overnight then a town the size of LA would be drawing peta-watts of power over the grid. Which is not going to happen.
If you did manage to delvier that there are going to be massive losses i the delivery process. So forget it.
Not only did the patent office reject their application for a portable mp3 player if you read the article you see the other patents are equally broadly absurd or dont even apply.
for example, when the mp3 player patent was denied they came back with the "autoDJ" patent which selects ofther songs based on a seed song. Hmmm that does sound like a DJ but what has that got to do with an iPod
the writer of this article is so technically disinclined he could'nt make soup from a can. or as we southwesterners like to say, "He couln't empty piss out of a boot with a hole in the toe and instructions written on the heel."
anyhow it appears there is no relationship between the conclusion: microsoft invented the ipod, and a single one of the facts and patents cied to prove this. Perhaps this articel came from the automatic CS paper generation website?
I'm not an expert on this but I've read that basically all the SATA interfaces whether on the MOBO or in plug-in cards have their throughput limited to no more than IDE by the bus speed.
anyone care to comment on that? If so what's the point other than a groovy glow in the dark cable. Just buy IDE if you are a home user.
Exactly. MS word may be dull, unispired, and poorly designed with layers of complexity. But it does its job well and is not hard to use. Star office is slow, has an clumsy layout. is unattractive, and is even more complex.
I've tried it and hate it. It's why I use macs: linux office apps suck. My office mate is a dieshard roll-your-own linux user and has been using star office as long as it has been around. He still truggles with it's byzantine menus. My other office mate is also a pure linux user and he gave up on it. He only uses TeX. He found remebering laTex is actually a lot easier and more consistent and powerful than remembering the star-office menu confusion.
And I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time...
Oh you were that kid! I saw you in my high school. Here's a tip: the onion was supposed to go in the front of your underpants, not the back. Chicks didn't dig guys with their package in the back.
basically what happens over and over again is that someone keeps trying to add a programming language over the top of all the previous layers of abstraction.
And then someone else moves the functionality of the programming language into an abstraction layers (e.g. the OS or the browser).
then someone comes along and implements a programming language that lives over the applications api.
When I first started programming mincro computers (as they were called then) the program was entered with dip switches, then a bit later there was a computer specific rom that had enough information to operate a front panel and read a tape.
The along came things like microsoft Basic. The computer would boot into an interactive language environment. If you wanted an operating system, you wrote a program in the language that could do primitive reads of some storage device (paper tape, cassette and later 8" floppy), on that was a larger basic program that would do operating system commands like list the files on the tape/floppy and allow you to copy them.
then along came DOS. While mini computers (like vax and prime and wang) had had OS's for years these were new to Mini computers. now the computer booted to the OS and if you wanted to program you had to load BASIC or fortran to create a programming environment.
Then along came the PC. suddenly there was this thing call the BIOS that normalized a lot of hardware kinds to a more uniform hardware API. And there were these device drivers that patched the OS.
THe OS slowly became more layered in design but that was transparent to the user.
the next big leap were browsers and quickly JAVA, which were touted as a normalizing layer over the OS to make machines more common at a higher level of abstraction above the OS.
Everyone thought webapps would rule. Never happened.
Maybe it was just too soon. Or maybe it's because MS torpedoed JAVA's cross platform success.
Now were seeing the rise of Javascript and XML. A few years back that would have been a joke. But I guess computers hand interpreters and high speed internet have gotten fast enough now that you can do slick things Google maps. Fast enough for simple common operations like Calendars, editors, spreadsheets and what-not.
my own feeling is the interface itself is still pretty crude. I'd rather run local apps. On the other hand if I were a corporation I'd probably tell my employees they dont need a faincy calendar or editor they need a siimple one we can maintain on a server.
So my feeling is that for the most part this is just another layer on a rather large stack of layers. and probably the slowest one yet. It offers little improvement to the user but does simplify maintainence and offers attractive corporate benefits.
dude, 20K/hour is a teacher's annual pay every hour and a half. Most school districts are concerned about losing even a single teacher. It's not negligble if there's a way to cut it in half or a quarter.
oops, dropped a decimal point! make that $20,000 per hour to operate.
500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day.
Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive.
500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $10,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
so $20,000 per hour of operation.
Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third.
Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!
500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day.
Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive.
500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $100,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
so $200,000 per hour of operation.
Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third.
Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!
You have some interesting points but you miss the essential distinction. Microsoft did not "pioneer" let alone invent any of those technologies. They did however settle the market on choices as you say. It's geological rather than agile process.
Still be sheer market volume they did get to prefer certain technologies. Buut generally those technologies were pioneered by other companies and enabled by add-on driver. Eventually microsoft would assimilate one of them, make it the de facto standard, settling the land. So yeah some weak kudos for that as you point out.
in software it's a far more bleak. Look how long it took before cross application cut and paste work correctly. It reminds me how Microsoft's next OS wont even have a file system that has metadata... that was postpostponed. But yeah eventally they will have all the good things. They assimilate the best stuff. They got toasted on the ipod but in the end probably will win in back through force of weight leveraged by interoprability and DRM.
but the point is there's not much to admire. That does not mean the OS is unusable. but the topic was about loving MS.
"Don't you think MS and everybody else would have liked to change the 8.3 filenames faster then what was happening."
put down the crack pipe and step away from the keyboard. Are you kidding? Apple had long filenames on Windows disks long before Windows 95 did. How did they manage that? It was pretty easy, and in fact the same way windows 95 later copied. they just wrapped the old 8.3 names with a layer that looked up the short name as was actually stored on the DOS disk.
What do you think would happen to the world economy if Microsoft only would release longhorn for PPC?
Uh dude, apple has switched many times and many processors and never left their currentusers behind. I was playing crystal quest, a game from the mid 90's on my OSX computer, just yesterday. When apple switched to intel they are still going to be compiling apps for my present computer.
Pioneers get the Arrows, Settlers get the Land. Microsoft has always been a settler not a pioneer. Now one can lightly praise them for having to make a half dozen bioses, sound cards, video cards, keyboard types all work within their system. This is not a great feat these days. But back when, yeah it was an accomplishment.
A good accomplisment? Probably not. Yeah it let in some innovation but not much. Mainly it sowed confusion and prevented the establishment of standards that would have moved the industry along faster. Where it did establish standards it mainly were undesirable ones. Witness all the legacy crap like parallel ports, old fashioned serial ports, and Bioses. How long did it take just to get something sensible like USB to be implemented?
On the other hand apple was a pioneer, though not always the inventor of PC methods. First (working practical) use of dynamic memory. First widepread use of memory mapped video (yes we have gone back to graphics cards but for anyone who used CGA you now what I mean), first integration of post script, First affordable Graphical user interface, first affordable mouse system, cut and paste between applications, Firewire, first consumer freindly unix desktop. first extensible files system (HFS+), metadata in file system, long liberal file names, Application oriented message passing scripting language (apple script). Self discovering local networks (first appletalk, now bonjour) If we include NeXT then we can include an OS based on Object oriented programming, Display postscript, First use of optical drives...,
Pioneering, but not settling. Not always inventing but perfrecting. They drove innovation by adopting it early and creating needs for it. Look at the first affordable desktop publishing. That required a Gui, and the ability to edit graphics as objects, and thus a mouse.
Microsoft...hmmm what can we say... they did settle the land and run on cheap hardware. Of course Cheap is why it was also so shitty. Macs were all configured at a high level. You didnlt need a pile of add on cards or figure out the interrupts and ports the card conflicts created. When you did need cards they were autoconfigured by the OS. macs had true plug and play from the day the mac II came out. Windows never really mastered plug and play till the PXI bus.
Linux on the other hand plays to a different market. Wheras macs were at the maximally configured end of the spectrum. linux allowed you to diassemble everything and configure it exactly how you wanted. Not a shrink wrapped solution like widows that tried to do it for you and consequently invented horrors like the registrtry, incompatible DLLs, and resource conflicts. Instead Linux is a tinkerer's toychest. Of course that's why it comes in third for desktop and ease of use. But it's also starting to become an innovator in software ideas as more tinkerers get linked together.
If they really wanted to eliminate the problem, which they dont really care about by all signs, then they would pay a bounty on fraud reports. They would establish some sort of trust network, simmilar to the feedback system, to cull the whiners from real fraud reports. Finally, they would require all sellers for new items over $100 to either post a 30 day bond with e-bay for cash/western-union payments, or conduct the transaction via VISA credit card. They would post an actual method of contacting pay-pal.
If tehy were serious, they would do some sort IP address localization, and post not only where the person said they were from but also where their IP says they are from.
If they were serious they would not allow first time sellers to use western-union on new items over $100.
If they were serious they would bar private auctions for first time sellers.
Well I've heard of people it works well for and am wondering if those are isolated incidents or just scattered anecdotes.:-)
I have three data points:
1) 800Mhz Imac G4
2) 1.2 Ghz powerbook G4
3) dual 800 Mhz G4
on all of them its painfully slow.
All of these have outboard 200+gig firewire drives.
While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it. The thing keeping me from that is that I'd lose my mail search.
The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them:
1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every document witha Q in it. You cant stop it. No hacker has yet reporeted finding where they store the default time delay so you can adjust it.
2) When you sort by date you can only sort by last access date not creation date. Worse yet, if you click on one of the items on the spotlight list (to get info on it) spotlight "touches" the document and poof it has todays date as its last viewed date. So that's totally useless and even dangerous if you are relying on it to figure out the most recent version of something you were using.
3) in the same vein, over time spotlight seems to touch all the resource or meta data forks creation dates. Or maybe not, I'm not sure. but the net effect is if you try to rsync it to another drive on a unix computer (using apple_double ) to preseve the meta data it ends up detecting that EVERY file has changed and recopies it, totally defeating the point of rsync.
4) you are supposed to be able to disable it from indexing a disk by using the "mdutil -i off "command. This only works some of the time. For example I had a two partition disk and while spotlight indexing is turned off on both, it still indexes one of them but not the other. (yes I deleted the old index). If you declare something Private it does not actually delete the index but simply does not report results for that folder. This is useless for stopping indexing on removable disks.
5) if you plug in a USB thumb driver it may decide to index it even if your just copying files off of it.
6) it's buggy. Often in Mail it fails to find content you know is present. Dont know if thats Mail, Spotlight or the API thats gummed.
7) It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 imac. Oddly it seems somewhat closer to reasonable on a G5
8) there's no simple way to have it default to find by name. in the finder to find by name you have to do the following steps. press command-F, pull down the find-by-kind and change it to find by name, then enter the name in the test field. Dont type slowly or it finds everthing with the first letter you type while you wait for five minutes. You can try to change the default from find-by-kind to find-by-name but most (but not all!) users find this change is not sticky and it reverts to find_by-kind. (and who would want find-by-kind to be the default!)
9) find by name is insanley slow compared to say "locate" in unix. it's not a lot faster than "find" in unix. Apparently they must not have indexed their DB on the name. what were they thinking?
the great depression was caused by the inability of industry to raise money for expansion, and the lack of consumer liquidity. Which is a complicated way of saying debt became expensive. As the government borrows more the expense of debt grows. Taxes go up and infrastructure goes unmaintained. the price of goods rises and industries collapse for lack of viable markets. voila the depression cycle that starts with loss of liquidity.
ironically the only reason we have low interest rates right now is the influx of chinese trade dollars into our debt markets. That will dry up ten seconds after the chinese dollar floats. The debt however will remain and have to serviced on the backs of the next generation of income earners.
Slashdot Mirror
take all overlapping pairs of consecutive digits:
VI II IV
that's 6 2 4 or in leet speak: "six to four"
Now if you assume the two II in the middle were crossed for multiplication then that's 5x5 = 25
Hence we arrive at the Chicago song:
Twenty Five or Six to four
VII V = 75
tell application "monad"
activate
set creator to the creatorCode
if the name of the creator is "Microsoft" then
display dialog "Fuck off" with Buttons {"bite me"}
endif
end tell
applescript has been around since before OSX. Not only does it communicate with any application like an object, it can discover any applications properties, methods, and UI. And if that application is written in Cocoa, then all of those properties and methods are discovered by introspection and exported automatically for you when you build the application. Thus the scipt can call deep subroutines in your application.
Moreover it's event driven not just procedural which means it can have a GUI and repsond to clicks, drags and whatnot.
It also plays well at the shell and command line level, with perl often being a handy tool to use from within apple script. And it comes with a
The only HUGE problem with apple script besides its limitations as a full blown programming language is the english syntax. While seemingly an advantage it's not. English syntax is easy to read by anyone (good!!) but nearly impossible to write, since in english there are many nearly equivalent ways to say the same thing (but only one is acceptable applescript syntax).
That and the O'reily book on applescipt truly is the worst O'reily book ever minted.
dude just look up any aeronautics study of small cars. 30HP is the minimum you need to hit 55 in a car the size of an accord. google for it.
Here's the calculation. to move a prius shaped car down the road at 55 MPH takes about 30 Horse power or about 22.4 kilowatts. In a realistic car with conversion losses more like 30Kilowatts is needed. If you are changing speed a lot then add even more.
30 kilowatts is 108 MegaJoules per hour. if you drove your car just four hours between filling stations that would be over 400 megajoules to replenish. if you wanted to fill that car up in less than a minute that would mean a power draw of 7.2 megawatts. You are not going to see that sort of power line going to filling stations around town.
Or to put it another way, if the typical filling station has more than a car a minute, regardless of how long it takes to fill it up then you need a power line bigger than that.
And if you want to argue that you would not drive four hours between fill=ups then all that changes in the calculation is that more people are doing more frequenty fill ups. the net demand is still the same.
So the only practical way to refill an electric car is overnight. but if the whole town is jsacked in overnight then a town the size of LA would be drawing peta-watts of power over the grid. Which is not going to happen.
If you did manage to delvier that there are going to be massive losses i the delivery process. So forget it.
for example, when the mp3 player patent was denied they came back with the "autoDJ" patent which selects ofther songs based on a seed song. Hmmm that does sound like a DJ but what has that got to do with an iPod
the writer of this article is so technically disinclined he could'nt make soup from a can. or as we southwesterners like to say, "He couln't empty piss out of a boot with a hole in the toe and instructions written on the heel."
anyhow it appears there is no relationship between the conclusion: microsoft invented the ipod, and a single one of the facts and patents cied to prove this. Perhaps this articel came from the automatic CS paper generation website?
anyone care to comment on that? If so what's the point other than a groovy glow in the dark cable. Just buy IDE if you are a home user.
I've tried it and hate it. It's why I use macs: linux office apps suck. My office mate is a dieshard roll-your-own linux user and has been using star office as long as it has been around. He still truggles with it's byzantine menus. My other office mate is also a pure linux user and he gave up on it. He only uses TeX. He found remebering laTex is actually a lot easier and more consistent and powerful than remembering the star-office menu confusion.
Oh you were that kid! I saw you in my high school. Here's a tip: the onion was supposed to go in the front of your underpants, not the back. Chicks didn't dig guys with their package in the back.
basically what happens over and over again is that someone keeps trying to add a programming language over the top of all the previous layers of abstraction.
And then someone else moves the functionality of the programming language into an abstraction layers (e.g. the OS or the browser).
then someone comes along and implements a programming language that lives over the applications api.
oroborus.
SunRays send video over ethernet. They work well. Are we going to send video over modems? no, but overbroadband on LANs, yes. And on WANs, someday.
1.5 hours * 20K = 30K.
The typical national pay rate for grade school teachers is in the range 14K to 45K depending on locale and level of training.
If you find that shockingly low remember that next time you vote on a school bond.
The along came things like microsoft Basic. The computer would boot into an interactive language environment. If you wanted an operating system, you wrote a program in the language that could do primitive reads of some storage device (paper tape, cassette and later 8" floppy), on that was a larger basic program that would do operating system commands like list the files on the tape/floppy and allow you to copy them.
then along came DOS. While mini computers (like vax and prime and wang) had had OS's for years these were new to Mini computers. now the computer booted to the OS and if you wanted to program you had to load BASIC or fortran to create a programming environment.
Then along came the PC. suddenly there was this thing call the BIOS that normalized a lot of hardware kinds to a more uniform hardware API. And there were these device drivers that patched the OS.
THe OS slowly became more layered in design but that was transparent to the user.
the next big leap were browsers and quickly JAVA, which were touted as a normalizing layer over the OS to make machines more common at a higher level of abstraction above the OS.
Everyone thought webapps would rule. Never happened.
Maybe it was just too soon. Or maybe it's because MS torpedoed JAVA's cross platform success.
Now were seeing the rise of Javascript and XML. A few years back that would have been a joke. But I guess computers hand interpreters and high speed internet have gotten fast enough now that you can do slick things Google maps. Fast enough for simple common operations like Calendars, editors, spreadsheets and what-not.
my own feeling is the interface itself is still pretty crude. I'd rather run local apps. On the other hand if I were a corporation I'd probably tell my employees they dont need a faincy calendar or editor they need a siimple one we can maintain on a server.
So my feeling is that for the most part this is just another layer on a rather large stack of layers. and probably the slowest one yet. It offers little improvement to the user but does simplify maintainence and offers attractive corporate benefits.
dude,
20K/hour is a teacher's annual pay every hour and a half. Most school districts are concerned about losing even a single teacher. It's not negligble if there's a way to cut it in half or a quarter.
oops, dropped a decimal point! make that $20,000 per hour to operate.
500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day.
Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive.
500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $10,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
so $20,000 per hour of operation.
Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third.
Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!
500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day. Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive. 500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $100,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation) so $200,000 per hour of operation. Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third. Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!
Still be sheer market volume they did get to prefer certain technologies. Buut generally those technologies were pioneered by other companies and enabled by add-on driver. Eventually microsoft would assimilate one of them, make it the de facto standard, settling the land. So yeah some weak kudos for that as you point out.
in software it's a far more bleak. Look how long it took before cross application cut and paste work correctly. It reminds me how Microsoft's next OS wont even have a file system that has metadata... that was postpostponed. But yeah eventally they will have all the good things. They assimilate the best stuff. They got toasted on the ipod but in the end probably will win in back through force of weight leveraged by interoprability and DRM.
but the point is there's not much to admire. That does not mean the OS is unusable. but the topic was about loving MS.
put down the crack pipe and step away from the keyboard. Are you kidding? Apple had long filenames on Windows disks long before Windows 95 did. How did they manage that? It was pretty easy, and in fact the same way windows 95 later copied. they just wrapped the old 8.3 names with a layer that looked up the short name as was actually stored on the DOS disk.
What do you think would happen to the world economy if Microsoft only would release longhorn for PPC?
Uh dude, apple has switched many times and many processors and never left their currentusers behind. I was playing crystal quest, a game from the mid 90's on my OSX computer, just yesterday. When apple switched to intel they are still going to be compiling apps for my present computer.
A good accomplisment? Probably not. Yeah it let in some innovation but not much. Mainly it sowed confusion and prevented the establishment of standards that would have moved the industry along faster. Where it did establish standards it mainly were undesirable ones. Witness all the legacy crap like parallel ports, old fashioned serial ports, and Bioses. How long did it take just to get something sensible like USB to be implemented?
On the other hand apple was a pioneer, though not always the inventor of PC methods. First (working practical) use of dynamic memory. First widepread use of memory mapped video (yes we have gone back to graphics cards but for anyone who used CGA you now what I mean), first integration of post script, First affordable Graphical user interface, first affordable mouse system, cut and paste between applications, Firewire, first consumer freindly unix desktop. first extensible files system (HFS+), metadata in file system, long liberal file names, Application oriented message passing scripting language (apple script). Self discovering local networks (first appletalk, now bonjour) If we include NeXT then we can include an OS based on Object oriented programming, Display postscript, First use of optical drives...,
Pioneering, but not settling. Not always inventing but perfrecting. They drove innovation by adopting it early and creating needs for it. Look at the first affordable desktop publishing. That required a Gui, and the ability to edit graphics as objects, and thus a mouse.
Microsoft...hmmm what can we say... they did settle the land and run on cheap hardware. Of course Cheap is why it was also so shitty. Macs were all configured at a high level. You didnlt need a pile of add on cards or figure out the interrupts and ports the card conflicts created. When you did need cards they were autoconfigured by the OS. macs had true plug and play from the day the mac II came out. Windows never really mastered plug and play till the PXI bus.
Linux on the other hand plays to a different market. Wheras macs were at the maximally configured end of the spectrum. linux allowed you to diassemble everything and configure it exactly how you wanted. Not a shrink wrapped solution like widows that tried to do it for you and consequently invented horrors like the registrtry, incompatible DLLs, and resource conflicts. Instead Linux is a tinkerer's toychest. Of course that's why it comes in third for desktop and ease of use. But it's also starting to become an innovator in software ideas as more tinkerers get linked together.
If they really wanted to eliminate the problem, which they dont really care about by all signs, then they would pay a bounty on fraud reports. They would establish some sort of trust network, simmilar to the feedback system, to cull the whiners from real fraud reports. Finally, they would require all sellers for new items over $100 to either post a 30 day bond with e-bay for cash/western-union payments, or conduct the transaction via VISA credit card. They would post an actual method of contacting pay-pal.
If tehy were serious, they would do some sort IP address localization, and post not only where the person said they were from but also where their IP says they are from.
If they were serious they would not allow first time sellers to use western-union on new items over $100.
If they were serious they would bar private auctions for first time sellers.
ergo, they are not serious
10,000 songs is enough for anybody.
Spolight still blows when the drives are unplugged. They are indexed of course but disconnected.
Well I've heard of people it works well for and am wondering if those are isolated incidents or just scattered anecdotes. :-)
I have three data points:
1) 800Mhz Imac G4
2) 1.2 Ghz powerbook G4
3) dual 800 Mhz G4
on all of them its painfully slow.
All of these have outboard 200+gig firewire drives.
While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it. The thing keeping me from that is that I'd lose my mail search.
The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them:
1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every document witha Q in it. You cant stop it. No hacker has yet reporeted finding where they store the default time delay so you can adjust it.
2) When you sort by date you can only sort by last access date not creation date. Worse yet, if you click on one of the items on the spotlight list (to get info on it) spotlight "touches" the document and poof it has todays date as its last viewed date. So that's totally useless and even dangerous if you are relying on it to figure out the most recent version of something you were using.
3) in the same vein, over time spotlight seems to touch all the resource or meta data forks creation dates. Or maybe not, I'm not sure. but the net effect is if you try to rsync it to another drive on a unix computer (using apple_double ) to preseve the meta data it ends up detecting that EVERY file has changed and recopies it, totally defeating the point of rsync.
4) you are supposed to be able to disable it from indexing a disk by using the "mdutil -i off "command. This only works some of the time. For example I had a two partition disk and while spotlight indexing is turned off on both, it still indexes one of them but not the other. (yes I deleted the old index). If you declare something Private it does not actually delete the index but simply does not report results for that folder. This is useless for stopping indexing on removable disks.
5) if you plug in a USB thumb driver it may decide to index it even if your just copying files off of it.
6) it's buggy. Often in Mail it fails to find content you know is present. Dont know if thats Mail, Spotlight or the API thats gummed.
7) It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 imac. Oddly it seems somewhat closer to reasonable on a G5
8) there's no simple way to have it default to find by name. in the finder to find by name you have to do the following steps. press command-F, pull down the find-by-kind and change it to find by name, then enter the name in the test field. Dont type slowly or it finds everthing with the first letter you type while you wait for five minutes. You can try to change the default from find-by-kind to find-by-name but most (but not all!) users find this change is not sticky and it reverts to find_by-kind. (and who would want find-by-kind to be the default!)
9) find by name is insanley slow compared to say "locate" in unix. it's not a lot faster than "find" in unix. Apparently they must not have indexed their DB on the name. what were they thinking?
ironically the only reason we have low interest rates right now is the influx of chinese trade dollars into our debt markets. That will dry up ten seconds after the chinese dollar floats. The debt however will remain and have to serviced on the backs of the next generation of income earners.