Not that I'm contributing anything useful here, but I learned to type on a selectric under the tutelage of my mother, an editor.
When we finally got a computer -- an NEC 286 powerhouse -- I learned to write properly ( as in essays and the like ) on wordperfect -- the old DOS mode version, maybe 4.0 or something, without WSYWIG.
So, basically, this article and the selectric talk give me the warm-and-fuzzies for my teenage years. And frankly, I somewhat miss the proton-pack-like clank and hum of firing up the old IBM typewriter. It felt like serious industrial equipment ( it must have weighted 30 pounds ), as if looking at it wrong it might just take off my fingers.
My powerbook just doesn't have that kind of chutzpah.
Bad luck, or you know a bunch of folks with a tendency to throw/stomp/microwave/bake/take-baths-with expensive electronics.
Since we're going to take the route of non-confirmable storytelling, I wrecked my bicycle while listening to my iPod -- landing and tumbling about 20 feet more or less right on it. The metal shell was dislodged. I pushed it ( or rather, snapped it ) back into place, and voila, it was fine. Heck, you can't even see any damage.
So there. And... gasp... I've owned mine for just about a year and my battery is fine too. But then, I'm not a 24-7 iPod zombie.
So if the thicker skull of H. erectus was due to ritualized violence does that mean that the street preacher who came to campus last month was right when he called us a bunch of degenerates?
Yes, but that would require him to accept... gasp... evolution.
I guess it's a matter of luck. I have a 2002 ZX3 which has had exactly *zero* mechanical problems. As far as I can tell, it's a perfect car.
(And for what it's worth, I've owned some lemons. A 1983 Chevy citation, a 1986 nissan pulsar (which was probably good when it was new) and *two* beetles, a 1968 and a 1970.)
I'm accustomed to my cars breaking down and stranding me. I'm accustomed to driving 300 miles without heat on a frozen winter midnight. I'm accustomed to spending twice a car's worth in two years keeping it running.
My focus, however, has cost me nothing but oil changes and wiper blades.
Maybe some are bad. I've heard the 2000 or 2001 models had some bumps thanks to being the first cars out of the hermocillo ( spelling? ) plant in mexico. But I tell you, mine is great!
Yeah, god forbid we go outdoors without a video feed of the latest Brittny album. We might, you know, see something without branding and advertisement on it. What a blow to capitalism! Oh no! We'd best get back to work, fellow consumers! Because if we don't work, we can't BUY MORE USELESS CRAP!
I drink about three good sized cups of black coffee sans sugar every day, and at least one or two cups of green tea too (in the evening), again without sugar. I skip the coffee cakes, I skip the cookies, I skip the soda and the salty snacks. I also run, bicycle and go to the gym, and I'm reasonably lean.
I see people getting $4 milkshakes from starbucks constantly -- and yes, it's a milkshake, not a coffee. They get bagels and sugary cakes and so on, and don't forget all those little chocolates. And the go every day, sometimes several times a day. It's amazing what people will put in their bodies. And this is from me, an ex-smoker. Hell, my smoking habit was cheaper than all those "specialty coffees" -- and I'm in DC where packs of smokes run at least $5 each.
I think someday we as a culture will wake up and realize it's not the hamburgers and potatos; it's the sugar, the processed foods, the laziness, and most of all it's the frequency of our bad habits.
Eat a hamburger once or twice a week and you'll be *fine*. Eat a candybar now and then, same thing. But drink a gallon sized pepsi, a hamburger, a caramel-cream-frosticchino-with-extra-sugar and a cinnabun EVERY DAY and big surprise you'll be obese and have type 2 diabetes by the time you're 30.
Forgive me for being worked up here but I was a fat teenager and it took a conscientious unhooking of myself from our sugar & TV addled culture of laziness to get myself off the path I was on to an early (and oversized) grave.
It's not that hard. Cut the sugar! Within a few weeks your natural ability to taste the inherent sweetness of natural foods will return and you'll wonder (and be sickened) by how *SWEET* everything around you is. Seriously.
Well, not to be picky but I use Xcode on a 12" PB and I have no trouble at all. With decent hotkeys set up I barely even use the mouse.
Come to think of it, I develop both on my 12" PB and on a nice g4 tower running at 1600x1200 and frankly I feel more comfy on the laptop; but that's mainly because I prefer the keyboard there, and because I get my best hacking done in coffee shops.
It's all a matter of perspective. I've used laptops so long I don't feel the need to gripe about screen size.
Well, I for one am doing robotics & AI simulation on a mac.
In fact, it wasn't until I *left* x86 (linux) that I got a platform where opengl worked well enough that I could write a proper display layer on top of my system, not to mention that my PB g4 was actually cheaper than the pIII thinkpad it replaced and in my tests was significantly ( e.g. more than 3x) faster.
Now, I don't do any audio, and I don't do any video; but my simulation is pretty f*cking heavy on the cycles -- and it rips. I have no complaints.
People who gripe about mac performance just haven't actually *used* one. And they certainly haven't written any code for one.
Looking at this, I can't help but wonder, how do they intend to handle the blurriness and uneven pixel distortion that inevitably results from matrix transformations on bitmaps?
If you're on a mac running panther (like me) you can see this with Expose -- basically, when you take a window and shrink it it *will* look a little blurry -- particularly if the shrinkage is such that the window is only shrunken by a small amount, say, 90% original size -- you don't get a clear mapping of pixels, so you get weirdnesses. That's fine for uses like expose when you're not interacting with a window's widgets (you're only picking the window itself) -- but if I'm to actually work with a transformed window we had better have a display system that really acts in transformed space, rather than simply mapping a 2D bitmap.
As much as I dislike MS, and as vaporous as Aero is or whatever-its-called-this-week, it seems like MS is investing into some new kind of display mechanism -- and if it really is vector based and all that hoohah then it probably could skip the render-into-a-bitmap phase and instead draw directly into a transformed gl context, sorry , direct3d of course.
Anyway, I'll happily admit I'm short on technical details. If anybody knows anything enlightening, please, enlighten me. This is a *real* problem. You can't just transform a bitmapped window and expect people to be able to comfortably read it or interact with it.
I may lack whatever gene it is that helps to understand this double-think, or it's because I'm a programmer and it's my life to speak clearly and not use little game words like "the secret sauce we bring to the table" or other BS.
Anyway, after reading it over and over, I figured it out -- it came to me in a flash:
HP's business is *not* to help other companies dynamically hoo-ha to the ho-hum of a real-time somethingorother. Or whatever in god's name that robot was saying.
Instead, HP's business is to bilk you out of your money while seducing you with double speak.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, here. While we squabble enlessly over who's the eviller party, both are doing whatever they can to fuck us just a little bit more, every day, a little harder and deeper. But so slowly we'll never really notice.
This didn't start when Bush was put in office. I just have this horrible feeling that The Man(tm) realized -- when we didn't revolt over the circumstances of Bush's election -- that the American people no longer care about their rights.
It's open season on us, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves... or rather the people we elected to do this to us.
Continuing our farcical argument of Liberals vs Republicans just prevents us from seeing that both are at fault. They care only for the cash given to them by corporate interest. We however are simply the cattle: we buy what we're told, we watch what we're told, we believe what we're told, and when the time comes to elect somebody new, we pick one of two essentially identical people and let it begin anew.
Hey, for what it's worth, I'm the guy who started writing the core code for slicker; except when I started it back on the gentoo forums I called it CardDesk ( no puns, no excess Ks ).
I was really excited at first, because what I really wanted to do was to implement MacOS 9 Folder tabs for KDE. Then, everybody and their uncle wanted in on it. I just wanted to write code. So I let them have it, and I continued to develop the core for a while. I suspect 75% of them gave up when they realized XFree just won't do true transparency (yet).
The thing is, 2 things happened. First, I started it in the first place simply because I wanted folder tabs, and a quick break from my real work. Second... I got a mac, and ported my real work over, and haven't looked back since.
Oh well!
I hope the guys who took the helm are treating my little baby well. I'm sure I wouldn't even recognize 90% of the code at this point.
I don't mean to be snarky here but you can open several terminal windows and hit f10 to show them all at once. Open the prefs and get throbbing aqua buttons, or turn on antialiasing in "Window Settings..."
Apple builds in lightweight versions of a lot of things, which people would be screaming about if they didn't.
For example: DiscBurner The Command-tab thing Safari TextEdit DiscUtility
And so on. For each of these, there are commercial variations which are, should you need the features, better. You can always buy Toast, LightSwitch, OmniWeb, BBEdit, DiscWarrior and so on.
Is this really a big deal? LightSwitch is *better* than the built-in. I paid for it. Toast is better in some ways than DiscBurner -- I paid for it.
As far as I can tell, Apple's doing us a service. Basic versions of useful ustilities *come* with the system. Should you decide you need better, *pay* for something better from a third party.
Nobody screams when an OS comes with a text editor. We just buy a batter one, or download a good freeware.
But, speaking as a reasonably professional graphic designer, I can say you're right. This SVG import/export functionality is nice stuff -- certainly -- but for *creating* complex illustrations I'll stick with software aimed at that target.
The moc is a hack that brings key c++ functionality to even the most mediocre c++ compilers. What's wrong with that? Sure, the syntax is different, but at least then there's no confusion about what's going on.
Have you ever tried to do *heavy* templated c++ code and have it be cross-platform? Have you written complex code relying on functors and it work on dozens of different c++ compilers? Good luck, chief.
All the moc does is use preprocessor trickery to make sure that functor mechanisms are completely functional regardless of compiler. Sure, it hides string invocation of methods in a SIGNAL() and SLOT() macro. Big deal. It works, beautifully, and between KDevelop and KDE's autoconf scripts, it's all hidden.
If you don't like the moc, why don't you go out and fix all the compilers for all the platforms that Qt runs on.
Let me tell you something about the model-view-controller seperation: it is the main reason swing and mac os x's cocoa are so damned slow for certain tasks. ( try dragging the vertical scroll-bar in the files pane in ProjectBuilder sometime... )
I emphasise "certain tasks" -- my own experence is more with cocoa than swing but I can say with absolute horror that NSOutlineView and NSTableView are dog slow, thanks to the model-view-controller seperation. QT's TableView and QListView, as much less abstract APIs, hauled ass.
I know this from experience, having ported quite a bit of my own code from Qt to Cocoa in the past 8 months. I've had to redesign parts of the app's frontend to get around the fact that keeping tabular data refreshed was consuming something like 75% CPU time. Whereas it was a non-issue under Qt.
I'm not complaining: Model-view-controller design is by and large a Good Thing, and frankly, programming NSTableView via delegates is a dream. But it comes with a price.
My recommendation is that if you dissaprove of the QTable and QListView concrete approach, write an abstract model mechanism to wrap it. It shouldn't constitute more than a few evenings' work.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I'm contributing anything useful here, but I learned to type on a selectric under the tutelage of my mother, an editor.
When we finally got a computer -- an NEC 286 powerhouse -- I learned to write properly ( as in essays and the like ) on wordperfect -- the old DOS mode version, maybe 4.0 or something, without WSYWIG.
So, basically, this article and the selectric talk give me the warm-and-fuzzies for my teenage years. And frankly, I somewhat miss the proton-pack-like clank and hum of firing up the old IBM typewriter. It felt like serious industrial equipment ( it must have weighted 30 pounds ), as if looking at it wrong it might just take off my fingers.
My powerbook just doesn't have that kind of chutzpah.
Bad luck, or you know a bunch of folks with a tendency to throw/stomp/microwave/bake/take-baths-with expensive electronics.
Since we're going to take the route of non-confirmable storytelling, I wrecked my bicycle while listening to my iPod -- landing and tumbling about 20 feet more or less right on it. The metal shell was dislodged. I pushed it ( or rather, snapped it ) back into place, and voila, it was fine. Heck, you can't even see any damage.
So there. And... gasp... I've owned mine for just about a year and my battery is fine too. But then, I'm not a 24-7 iPod zombie.
Yes, but that would require him to accept... gasp... evolution.
The dirtiest word of all!
I guess it's a matter of luck. I have a 2002 ZX3 which has had exactly *zero* mechanical problems. As far as I can tell, it's a perfect car.
(And for what it's worth, I've owned some lemons. A 1983 Chevy citation, a 1986 nissan pulsar (which was probably good when it was new) and *two* beetles, a 1968 and a 1970.)
I'm accustomed to my cars breaking down and stranding me. I'm accustomed to driving 300 miles without heat on a frozen winter midnight. I'm accustomed to spending twice a car's worth in two years keeping it running.
My focus, however, has cost me nothing but oil changes and wiper blades.
Maybe some are bad. I've heard the 2000 or 2001 models had some bumps thanks to being the first cars out of the hermocillo ( spelling? ) plant in mexico. But I tell you, mine is great!
Don't people watch enough TV already? Criminy.
Yeah, god forbid we go outdoors without a video feed of the latest Brittny album. We might, you know, see something without branding and advertisement on it. What a blow to capitalism! Oh no! We'd best get back to work, fellow consumers! Because if we don't work, we can't BUY MORE USELESS CRAP!
Right on the money.
I drink about three good sized cups of black coffee sans sugar every day, and at least one or two cups of green tea too (in the evening), again without sugar. I skip the coffee cakes, I skip the cookies, I skip the soda and the salty snacks. I also run, bicycle and go to the gym, and I'm reasonably lean.
I see people getting $4 milkshakes from starbucks constantly -- and yes, it's a milkshake, not a coffee. They get bagels and sugary cakes and so on, and don't forget all those little chocolates. And the go every day, sometimes several times a day. It's amazing what people will put in their bodies. And this is from me, an ex-smoker. Hell, my smoking habit was cheaper than all those "specialty coffees" -- and I'm in DC where packs of smokes run at least $5 each.
I think someday we as a culture will wake up and realize it's not the hamburgers and potatos; it's the sugar, the processed foods, the laziness, and most of all it's the frequency of our bad habits.
Eat a hamburger once or twice a week and you'll be *fine*. Eat a candybar now and then, same thing. But drink a gallon sized pepsi, a hamburger, a caramel-cream-frosticchino-with-extra-sugar and a cinnabun EVERY DAY and big surprise you'll be obese and have type 2 diabetes by the time you're 30.
Forgive me for being worked up here but I was a fat teenager and it took a conscientious unhooking of myself from our sugar & TV addled culture of laziness to get myself off the path I was on to an early (and oversized) grave.
It's not that hard. Cut the sugar! Within a few weeks your natural ability to taste the inherent sweetness of natural foods will return and you'll wonder (and be sickened) by how *SWEET* everything around you is. Seriously.
Well, not to be picky but I use Xcode on a 12" PB and I have no trouble at all. With decent hotkeys set up I barely even use the mouse.
Come to think of it, I develop both on my 12" PB and on a nice g4 tower running at 1600x1200 and frankly I feel more comfy on the laptop; but that's mainly because I prefer the keyboard there, and because I get my best hacking done in coffee shops.
It's all a matter of perspective. I've used laptops so long I don't feel the need to gripe about screen size.
OK
let's hope not too many people look at this or Earthlink'll get PO'd.
Walking-new.mov
Well, I for one am doing robotics & AI simulation on a mac.
In fact, it wasn't until I *left* x86 (linux) that I got a platform where opengl worked well enough that I could write a proper display layer on top of my system, not to mention that my PB g4 was actually cheaper than the pIII thinkpad it replaced and in my tests was significantly ( e.g. more than 3x) faster.
Now, I don't do any audio, and I don't do any video; but my simulation is pretty f*cking heavy on the cycles -- and it rips. I have no complaints.
People who gripe about mac performance just haven't actually *used* one. And they certainly haven't written any code for one.
Looking at this, I can't help but wonder, how do they intend to handle the blurriness and uneven pixel distortion that inevitably results from matrix transformations on bitmaps?
If you're on a mac running panther (like me) you can see this with Expose -- basically, when you take a window and shrink it it *will* look a little blurry -- particularly if the shrinkage is such that the window is only shrunken by a small amount, say, 90% original size -- you don't get a clear mapping of pixels, so you get weirdnesses. That's fine for uses like expose when you're not interacting with a window's widgets (you're only picking the window itself) -- but if I'm to actually work with a transformed window we had better have a display system that really acts in transformed space, rather than simply mapping a 2D bitmap.
As much as I dislike MS, and as vaporous as Aero is or whatever-its-called-this-week, it seems like MS is investing into some new kind of display mechanism -- and if it really is vector based and all that hoohah then it probably could skip the render-into-a-bitmap phase and instead draw directly into a transformed gl context, sorry , direct3d of course.
Anyway, I'll happily admit I'm short on technical details. If anybody knows anything enlightening, please, enlighten me. This is a *real* problem. You can't just transform a bitmapped window and expect people to be able to comfortably read it or interact with it.
I may lack whatever gene it is that helps to understand this double-think, or it's because I'm a programmer and it's my life to speak clearly and not use little game words like "the secret sauce we bring to the table" or other BS.
Anyway, after reading it over and over, I figured it out -- it came to me in a flash:
HP's business is *not* to help other companies dynamically hoo-ha to the ho-hum of a real-time somethingorother. Or whatever in god's name that robot was saying.
Instead, HP's business is to bilk you out of your money while seducing you with double speak.
Thank you.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, here. While we squabble enlessly over who's the eviller party, both are doing whatever they can to fuck us just a little bit more, every day, a little harder and deeper. But so slowly we'll never really notice.
This didn't start when Bush was put in office. I just have this horrible feeling that The Man(tm) realized -- when we didn't revolt over the circumstances of Bush's election -- that the American people no longer care about their rights.
It's open season on us, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves... or rather the people we elected to do this to us.
Continuing our farcical argument of Liberals vs Republicans just prevents us from seeing that both are at fault. They care only for the cash given to them by corporate interest. We however are simply the cattle: we buy what we're told, we watch what we're told, we believe what we're told, and when the time comes to elect somebody new, we pick one of two essentially identical people and let it begin anew.
Idiot.
Wow, you must be the *life* of the party.
Hey, for what it's worth, I'm the guy who started writing the core code for slicker; except when I started it back on the gentoo forums I called it CardDesk ( no puns, no excess Ks ).
h ig hlight=slicker
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=29746&
(Sorry, the screenshots are long gone.)
I was really excited at first, because what I really wanted to do was to implement MacOS 9 Folder tabs for KDE. Then, everybody and their uncle wanted in on it. I just wanted to write code. So I let them have it, and I continued to develop the core for a while. I suspect 75% of them gave up when they realized XFree just won't do true transparency (yet).
The thing is, 2 things happened. First, I started it in the first place simply because I wanted folder tabs, and a quick break from my real work. Second... I got a mac, and ported my real work over, and haven't looked back since.
Oh well!
I hope the guys who took the helm are treating my little baby well. I'm sure I wouldn't even recognize 90% of the code at this point.
I don't mean to be snarky here but you can open several terminal windows and hit f10 to show them all at once. Open the prefs and get throbbing aqua buttons, or turn on antialiasing in "Window Settings..."
If you want tabs, download... [drummroll] iTerm.
Or, Command-Up Arrow. Voila.
Well, on the other hand, at least we know where all those pesky WMDs are.
The scroll wheel thing is easy to fix -- turn off "smooth scrolling" in the Appearance pane of the preferences.
Sorry, I can't help with anything else.
I just got a 3 stooges vibe from that:
...
HELLLOOOO!
HELOOOOOOO!!
HELLLOOOOOOOOO!!!
hello!
Apple builds in lightweight versions of a lot of things, which people would be screaming about if they didn't.
For example:
DiscBurner
The Command-tab thing
Safari
TextEdit
DiscUtility
And so on. For each of these, there are commercial variations which are, should you need the features, better. You can always buy Toast, LightSwitch, OmniWeb, BBEdit, DiscWarrior and so on.
Is this really a big deal? LightSwitch is *better* than the built-in. I paid for it. Toast is better in some ways than DiscBurner -- I paid for it.
As far as I can tell, Apple's doing us a service. Basic versions of useful ustilities *come* with the system. Should you decide you need better, *pay* for something better from a third party.
Nobody screams when an OS comes with a text editor. We just buy a batter one, or download a good freeware.
Move along now, nothing to see here.
But, speaking as a reasonably professional graphic designer, I can say you're right. This SVG import/export functionality is nice stuff -- certainly -- but for *creating* complex illustrations I'll stick with software aimed at that target.
Why don't you read the message he was replying to?
Or perhaps do you think people calling others "dumb fuck" deserve respectful responses? I thought his response was pretty level, considering.
But then you called him an asshole for it. What a shame.
So?
The moc is a hack that brings key c++ functionality to even the most mediocre c++ compilers. What's wrong with that? Sure, the syntax is different, but at least then there's no confusion about what's going on.
Have you ever tried to do *heavy* templated c++ code and have it be cross-platform? Have you written complex code relying on functors and it work on dozens of different c++ compilers? Good luck, chief.
All the moc does is use preprocessor trickery to make sure that functor mechanisms are completely functional regardless of compiler. Sure, it hides string invocation of methods in a SIGNAL() and SLOT() macro. Big deal. It works, beautifully, and between KDevelop and KDE's autoconf scripts, it's all hidden.
If you don't like the moc, why don't you go out and fix all the compilers for all the platforms that Qt runs on.
Let me tell you something about the model-view-controller seperation: it is the main reason swing and mac os x's cocoa are so damned slow for certain tasks. ( try dragging the vertical scroll-bar in the files pane in ProjectBuilder sometime... )
I emphasise "certain tasks" -- my own experence is more with cocoa than swing but I can say with absolute horror that NSOutlineView and NSTableView are dog slow, thanks to the model-view-controller seperation. QT's TableView and QListView, as much less abstract APIs, hauled ass.
I know this from experience, having ported quite a bit of my own code from Qt to Cocoa in the past 8 months. I've had to redesign parts of the app's frontend to get around the fact that keeping tabular data refreshed was consuming something like 75% CPU time. Whereas it was a non-issue under Qt.
I'm not complaining: Model-view-controller design is by and large a Good Thing, and frankly, programming NSTableView via delegates is a dream. But it comes with a price.
My recommendation is that if you dissaprove of the QTable and QListView concrete approach, write an abstract model mechanism to wrap it. It shouldn't constitute more than a few evenings' work.