I bought a 12" PB in february, when they came out, and by and large the machine has been flawless (and I don't regret it one bit).
But two things have happened, one which was cheap, and one which if fixed, would likely be hideously expensive. First, the cheap one: the little rubber feet simply won't stay on. And no matter what, the apple stores simply don't have any extras for the 12" PB (which brings up the question, why must every apple laptop use different feet?). I live in DC so there are two stores in reach for me (Tysons Corner and Arlington) -- I've gone about once every two weeks for the last couple months to ask if they have extra feet and they never do. Finally, last week, a nice apple "genius" gave me 15" PB feet and I superglued them on. I had to do some cutting, to get it to fit on the battery, but otherwise it's fine.
Now, the expensive part, which makes me wish I had apple care. back when it was snowing every day in dc (I walk 2 miles to work every day) I slipped on ice and fell on my back, landing right on top of my PB. it's fine, but I broke the magnetic latch thing. It kept working, albeit unreliably, until about 3 weeks ago when the latch finally just fell out.
So, the trouble is, to keep my PB asleep when I close the lid, I have to wrap a rubber-band around it, which has been independantly described as "ghetto" by all my friends and my GF.
So, I'd like to get it fixed, but I'm dead certain that it will cost a small fortune and require I get my machine shipped to california. I need my machine to get my work done, and three weeks without it will be, frankly, awful. And anyway, I'm certain it will be expensive, so I just can't afford it.
Now, I hear that with apple care it would probably be fixed faster, and probably be cheaper if not free.
So, well, as somebody who wishes he had apple care, I say "go for it". Yeah, warrantees are for suckers, yes, but then so is car/health/home/renter's insurance as long as nothing bad happens. When the sh*t hits the fan, though, you're going to wish you had.
[note, I'm still a proud PB owner -- I love that beautiful machine]
As a former fatty, I can say what I've done works, as I've gone from ~190 to ~160, and I *almost* have a six-pack (well, a visible two or three pack)
First: Eat less. Second: Do more.
Facetious? Yup. But seriously, that's *all* there is to it. Some people will have to work harder, of course, but the world isn't fair now is it.
Me, I began to lose weight when I gave up eating out, and began to cook for myself exclusively (except for my wonderful GF who's an athlete and a greak cook). No more sugars, no more fast food. Just lean meats and fresh vegetables. Delicious, too! And spicy food is always good for you and in principle raises the metabolism.
Then, I started riding my bike to work. It's a 10 mile commute (from downtown alexandria VA to downtown washington DC), just enough to get in a touch of workout, but not so much I'm tired. If anything, it's envigorating. I don't ever want to stop, to be frank.
And that's it. No miracle diet, no silliness. Just *more* activity, and less fake-food.
I would assume this is dependant on Qt, but I'm curious to what extent... right now I'm working on a system in which I use SWIG to bind python to c++ (and visa vera) on Mac OSX -- there's nothing wrong with the current system, but I'm eager to explore alternative mechanisms, for... you know... time wasting and just-in-case paranoia.
If Qt Script can be made to be freestanding language binding system and interpreter, but with no GUI I'd be happy as a clam.
But, the info on the trolltech page was inadequate.
I have a question for you, since you've got panther.
I installed LightSwitchX ( http://www.proteron.com/liteswitchx/ ) since I really, *really* didn't like the default command-tab implementation in OSX. As a programmer I do a lot of switching back and forth between an editor and command line, and the default command-tab made that almost impossible. Sure, it was possible, but it was a pain.
So... I'm wondering... does panther provide a useful command tab implementation?
I know I might sound snarky here, but every OS I've used seriously ( I come from BeOS, then linux ) has used the traditional stacking-order based app switching, and the OSX way of using dock ordering seems, well, *broken* to me.
Oh, and one more thing -- how much 3rd party stuff does Panther break? See, I also make good use of fruit menu ( http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu/ ), since I like being able to put apps and folders into my apple menu (I got hooked on it when I spent a short time on Mac OS 8, long ago). Does Panther break 3rd party stuff like that?
OK, thanks in advance. I'm quite curious. I love OSX, and use it exclusively now. But frankly I've come to need lightswitch and fruitmenu to make the system "feel" right.
It doesn't matter -- the source is open. If -- and I doubt it -- *if* trolltech shuts down the non-commercial version for X11 people have the right to fork and maintain any previous open version on their own.
I've spent the last 4 months porting a fair amount (> 15 kloc) of qt code to std c++ on the backend (removing *all* qt, and writing my own classes that map to qt's classes where needed) and rewriting the gui in native cocoa/objective-c.
And now I discover it was completely unnecessary!
Arg!:P
( on the other hand, it's been a good experience. cocoa is a beautiful API, and rewriting the backend in pure c++/stl has actually improved it, since the stl is really, *really* quite good. )
You know, when I came over to mac from linux/kde about 6 months ago, the first thing I did was install iTerm so I could have the tabbed terminal interface I had under KDE.
But, then I discovered cmd-~ will switch between windows; particularly at the time I was debugging an IPC implementation I was working on and as such needed to view two terminal outputs simultaneously -- I discovered that apple's stock terminal works great, for me at least.
Frankly, who needs tabs when you can command-tilde to switch, and command-m to minimize unneeded windows?
I would never have believed it but the mac snobs are right: tabs actually *are* a stopgap for an inadequate window management paradigm.
KDE (and, I assume, Gnome) are intentionally not linux specific. They run on anything with X and an unix-ish OS.
I suppose a kernel module would be OK, as long as the default implementation works as a fallback, but regardless, that's a lot of work for people who aren't all on linux.
But will they go on a spending spree? Did they last time? I and my working stiff friends (admittedly, in a slightly higher tax bracket than the quintissential working stiff, but not *much* higher) just put it in the bank. Like I do with 1/4 to 1/3 of each paycheck.
Is that this is a good thing for content producers.
I think the problem began when writers, musicians, artists etc etc came to be called "content producers".
Content producers... if that doesn't offend you, then... well... I'd say you've got some problems.
I could be wrong, but this isn't something we should bash MS about -- as far as I can tell, this can be done in many languages as long as you're comfortable with dissassembling a library or using a hex-editor. Which is to say, it's out of my reach.
This seems to happen a *LOT* in the apple world. Look at Unsanity
They've figured out a whole ton of hacks for OSX which are clearly based on undocumented code.
My guess is that this sort of stuff is easier for languages with massive run-time introspection (like objective-c)... but like I said, I'm no expert at this stuff.
I'm by no means a professional genetic algorithms programmer, but I was doing some work a couple years ago to see if a software modeled robot could be "taught" to walk, via genetic algorithms. I know, everybody and their uncle has done this now, but bear with me.
I wrote some dynamics simulation and a breeding program by which N algorithms were randomly generated, tested for fitness by allowing them to run and checking how far the robot went, how stable it was, and how much it diverge from a straight line and so on and so on. as per genetic algorithm programming, the best 2 were selected, "bred" into N new algorithms with some random "evolution" thrown in.
Long story short, it took a long time just to get the fitness checker working and the dynamics were hard. The program tended to crash after breeing about 30 generations, every time. I never solved that one, but fortunately, it saved out the breeding so it was just a matter of restarting the program. Anyway, after months of work, it finally worked and bred a very effective walk.
What kind of walk? A *silly* walk. It hopped, for f*ck's sake. The breeding favored a hop, not a walk. So I ran it again... and it hopped again, albeit differently. And again, and so on. And frankly, I was never able to tweak the fitness evaluator to not favor hopping.
That's when I decided to drop genetic algorithms and go for a cellular automata / neural net like approach, which is working but I'm still evaluating. At least I have control over it.
The moral of the story: Genetic algorithms work, but it's really, *really* hard to grow a program which does exactly what you want. It's like those stories where the protagonist makes a deal with the devil and gets *exactly* what he asked for, and it's no good at all.
We here in america, however, would never put up with such round-numbered buffoonery. People out in north dakota would see it as a sign that the UN's gonna invade and teach our children evolution and homosexuality and so on. Next thing you know we'd have a full-on religious revival that would make the left-wing conservatives cringe.
Seriously... I have a friend who's somewhat left wing (as in libertarian, not a bible-thumper). I've discussed this with him and he goes *ballistic* every time. That it's all just a conspiracy by big corporations and government and that the lowly penny is the last hallmark of our freedom (that, and guns, of course).
It'll never happen here. We're caught up in our own ignorant ways and we refuse to pay attention to the smart things the rest of the world is figuring out; we're in some ways more isolationist than we were back before WW2.
If you don't believe me, then just consider how gracefully America transitioned to metric, back in the 70's. Oh yeah... we didn't.
OK, sure. But considering that at this point (and let's be realistic) Microsoft *has* won the game.
It's extraordinarily unlikely that MS taking 8 more months on the release of product X will put them out of business, or even loosen their hold on some part of the market. I mean, what's company XYZ with possibly tens of thousands of word files, access files etc etc going to do? Sure, OpenOffice is great, but try convincing your IT dept. I have.
What I'm getting at here is that we all know MS has won and has, by virtue of being a monopoly, created an almost completely homogenous computing environment. So, much like the way a biological virus can sweep through a bunch of genetically identical engineered super-corn, we're now in a situation in which any single one of MS's mistakes could potentially bring down a major percentage of the world's systems. Think about that for a second. I'm not talking about a bunch of secretaries having solitaire crash. The potential for economic disaster is very real.
In my magic world -- the one where republicans talk about corporate responsibility but *aren't* lying through clenched teeth -- MS would recognize that by this point they simply can't lose. And as such, it's their responsibility to make DAMN sure that their products, which we have no choice but to buy, actually work.
But in truth this is all naive whining. The reality of course is that MS is at the point where thay can just fill a cardboard box with feces and gravel, sell it to us for $295.00 and we'd damned well better be gracious for the priveledge.
Well, you know, I've got nothing against the *person* calling me. I feel sorry for the schmuck. If by saying "hold on..." I can give the poor sob 10 minutes of peace in an otherwise completely hectic day of sullen, angry and/or sarcastic phonecalls then *GREAT*.
The important part is that if enough people do this stuff, the real culprit -- the companies PAYING for the advertising service -- will stop because it ceases to be profitable.
Telemarketing wouldn't happen if it didn't make money. We shouldn't punish those calling us but those paying them to call us.
Heh. I meant write an objective c++ "bridge".
If I could write a bride for myself in objective-c++ I think I'd never leave my apartment again. And my GF might be somewhat offput.
name your cocoa files filename.mm and voila -- now you can call c++ from objective-c and visa versa.
This is making my recent transition from linux to mac os x much smoother; I have waaaay too much c++ code and no compelling reason to rewrite it. So, I compile it into a framework, and write a new gui in cocoa, and write an objective-c++ bride.
Sadly however most of neuroscience these days is still far from these questions.
This is interesting to me, for several reasons. I'm working on robotics in my free time, mainly not cognitive stuff but lower level autonomous muscular control and feedback loop stuff. But anyway, my girlfriend's studying neuroscience and she, like many (too many) of her peers, finds absolutely NOTHING interesting in cognitive research.
All they care about is the mechanics (which is important) but I think they consider cognition to be a peculiar but unimportant side effect of the rest of the complex process.
So, as a fellow who's spent years writing code to try to do intelligent stuff, and more recently robots to carry these actions out, it's somewhat frustrating to be in a bar with a bunch of neuroscientists and hear them dismiss cognition as irrelevant.
One more performance boost - or at least, *percieved* performance boost -- get Fruitmenu by Unsanity.
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu/
Aside from being absolutely unarguably fantastic, it gives you an option to turn off menu fading effects. While this probably doesn't speed up any system with quartz extreme (since the fade will be done by the compositor/opengl) it does increase the perceived performance.
Speaking as an old hardcore BeOS user, it's not the *real* performance that matters, but the perception of it.
Re:If Ars Technica is so concerned about usability
on
A Better Finder?
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· Score: 1
Maybe that works for your bizarro-world eyeballs, but for the rest of humanity, and believe me (I work as a graphic designer, and have an education in art and graphic design): dark text on light/medium tones is demonstrably superior and overwhelmingly preferred for reading large sets of text. This does not include things like logos, business cards, TV adverts, etc. I'm talking about body text for essays, articles, and so on.
Feel free to say it's all a matter of opinion -- of course, it is. Some people like all sorts of naughty, painful things the rest of humanity would prefer to avoid.
The fact is, it's hard to read white on black for the *vast* majority of people. Personally, it gave me a headache and blurred vision.
And, what basis do you have to say "A medium's natural state is the easiest to read." That's the most preposterous thing I've ever heard.
I don't know about the iBook, but my powerbook 12" came with an... ahem.... *manual* and one of the first topics was "How to Calibrate a New Battery for Best Performance"
Good god. Doesn't anybody RTFM? Or is paper just too 20th century???
I don't know about you, but I think smooth scrolling shouldn't be considered "eye candy".
Smooth scrolling is there for a valid *reason* -- it makes it so much easier for your eyes to follow the vertical jump a page makes when you click up or down (or mouse-wheel, etc).
Think about it, you're at the end of some line, you mouse wheel, and now the page has jumped up (say) 20 pixels. Now, where do you bring your eye to start the next line? You might have to track the end point of the line you started on, and then progress.
With smooth scrolling it's easier to follow because there are no jumps, just transitions. Simple, obvious, and very very worthwhile.
And if you're worried about cpu usage, it's all done in the video hardware anyway. Just blit the region up one pixel and draw one new scanline at the bottom. Scrollable regions have worked this way since the early 90's anyway, even in marginal operating systems like BeOS, so it's not like this is radical new technology and really hammering your multi-gigahertz processor anyway.
Oh, and by the way, I've been using mac os x for several months now, and frankly, I find the smooth transitions to be transparent and actually completely useful. I go back to windows or linux where things just *pop* into place and I think "who did that?" and "what are you modal to" etc etc, whereas the transition effects in os x, which take up all of.25 seconds of my precious time, make relationships very clear.
I've had my AiBook for (about) 2 months now, and right now I'm going to say I love every single aspect of it. Absolutely. No waffling here. I'm a switcher, but from the linux/i386 world, and I've had no trouble porting over my servo control routines and all the other robotics related code I've written over the last couple years for linux.
So basically, I'm happy as a clam. Happier even.
But for one silly little thing: the metal drop-down catch which locks the lid shut when I close it. For some reason (most likely a mechanical defect) it doesn't pop back in when I open the lid. Trivial? Yes. All it takes is one tenth of a second to tap it with my finger when I open it and it pops back where it belongs.
Nonetheless, as a fella raised in a machine shop (my father's a machinist/sculptor/etc/luddite) this kind of thing bothers me. I examined it closely and it's very simple -- the latch's "bearing" is nothing but a hole slightly larger than the axle, so you get minimal friction and maximum simplicity. But it seems to allow sideways motion and this (in my case) is causing binding. I'm not about to oil it, for obvious reasons, though if I can find a non-conductive graphite lube ( "Dry Slide" ) I might give it a shot.
What concerns me is not so much the lack of it retracting, but that someday, if the binding gets too great, it might stop popping down when I close the lid.
So, it's a cool feature and all but my old thinkpad, with its simpler trigger mechanism never had this problem.
There's a lot to be said for simplicity. I kind of wish apple had forgone the cool and wow effect in this place for something a little more sturdy.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a 12" PB in february, when they came out, and by and large the machine has been flawless (and I don't regret it one bit).
But two things have happened, one which was cheap, and one which if fixed, would likely be hideously expensive. First, the cheap one: the little rubber feet simply won't stay on. And no matter what, the apple stores simply don't have any extras for the 12" PB (which brings up the question, why must every apple laptop use different feet?). I live in DC so there are two stores in reach for me (Tysons Corner and Arlington) -- I've gone about once every two weeks for the last couple months to ask if they have extra feet and they never do. Finally, last week, a nice apple "genius" gave me 15" PB feet and I superglued them on. I had to do some cutting, to get it to fit on the battery, but otherwise it's fine.
Now, the expensive part, which makes me wish I had apple care. back when it was snowing every day in dc (I walk 2 miles to work every day) I slipped on ice and fell on my back, landing right on top of my PB. it's fine, but I broke the magnetic latch thing. It kept working, albeit unreliably, until about 3 weeks ago when the latch finally just fell out.
So, the trouble is, to keep my PB asleep when I close the lid, I have to wrap a rubber-band around it, which has been independantly described as "ghetto" by all my friends and my GF.
So, I'd like to get it fixed, but I'm dead certain that it will cost a small fortune and require I get my machine shipped to california. I need my machine to get my work done, and three weeks without it will be, frankly, awful. And anyway, I'm certain it will be expensive, so I just can't afford it.
Now, I hear that with apple care it would probably be fixed faster, and probably be cheaper if not free.
So, well, as somebody who wishes he had apple care, I say "go for it". Yeah, warrantees are for suckers, yes, but then so is car/health/home/renter's insurance as long as nothing bad happens. When the sh*t hits the fan, though, you're going to wish you had.
[note, I'm still a proud PB owner -- I love that beautiful machine]
As a former fatty, I can say what I've done works, as I've gone from ~190 to ~160, and I *almost* have a six-pack (well, a visible two or three pack)
First: Eat less.
Second: Do more.
Facetious? Yup. But seriously, that's *all* there is to it. Some people will have to work harder, of course, but the world isn't fair now is it.
Me, I began to lose weight when I gave up eating out, and began to cook for myself exclusively (except for my wonderful GF who's an athlete and a greak cook). No more sugars, no more fast food. Just lean meats and fresh vegetables. Delicious, too! And spicy food is always good for you and in principle raises the metabolism.
Then, I started riding my bike to work. It's a 10 mile commute (from downtown alexandria VA to downtown washington DC), just enough to get in a touch of workout, but not so much I'm tired. If anything, it's envigorating. I don't ever want to stop, to be frank.
And that's it. No miracle diet, no silliness. Just *more* activity, and less fake-food.
I would assume this is dependant on Qt, but I'm curious to what extent... right now I'm working on a system in which I use SWIG to bind python to c++ (and visa vera) on Mac OSX -- there's nothing wrong with the current system, but I'm eager to explore alternative mechanisms, for ... you know... time wasting and just-in-case paranoia.
If Qt Script can be made to be freestanding language binding system and interpreter, but with no GUI I'd be happy as a clam.
But, the info on the trolltech page was inadequate.
Does anybody know?
I have a question for you, since you've got panther.
I installed LightSwitchX ( http://www.proteron.com/liteswitchx/ ) since I really, *really* didn't like the default command-tab implementation in OSX. As a programmer I do a lot of switching back and forth between an editor and command line, and the default command-tab made that almost impossible. Sure, it was possible, but it was a pain.
So... I'm wondering... does panther provide a useful command tab implementation?
I know I might sound snarky here, but every OS I've used seriously ( I come from BeOS, then linux ) has used the traditional stacking-order based app switching, and the OSX way of using dock ordering seems, well, *broken* to me.
Oh, and one more thing -- how much 3rd party stuff does Panther break? See, I also make good use of fruit menu ( http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu/ ), since I like being able to put apps and folders into my apple menu (I got hooked on it when I spent a short time on Mac OS 8, long ago). Does Panther break 3rd party stuff like that?
OK, thanks in advance. I'm quite curious. I love OSX, and use it exclusively now. But frankly I've come to need lightswitch and fruitmenu to make the system "feel" right.
It doesn't matter -- the source is open. If -- and I doubt it -- *if* trolltech shuts down the non-commercial version for X11 people have the right to fork and maintain any previous open version on their own.
And, obviously, if it comes to it they will.
I've spent the last 4 months porting a fair amount (> 15 kloc) of qt code to std c++ on the backend (removing *all* qt, and writing my own classes that map to qt's classes where needed) and rewriting the gui in native cocoa/objective-c.
:P
And now I discover it was completely unnecessary!
Arg!
( on the other hand, it's been a good experience. cocoa is a beautiful API, and rewriting the backend in pure c++/stl has actually improved it, since the stl is really, *really* quite good. )
Or command-~, like *all* mac os x apps, it will switch between windows.
Why have a differnet keybinding for the same logical action?
You know, when I came over to mac from linux/kde about 6 months ago, the first thing I did was install iTerm so I could have the tabbed terminal interface I had under KDE.
But, then I discovered cmd-~ will switch between windows; particularly at the time I was debugging an IPC implementation I was working on and as such needed to view two terminal outputs simultaneously -- I discovered that apple's stock terminal works great, for me at least.
Frankly, who needs tabs when you can command-tilde to switch, and command-m to minimize unneeded windows?
I would never have believed it but the mac snobs are right: tabs actually *are* a stopgap for an inadequate window management paradigm.
Learn to love cmd-~
Get back to work!
Your Friendly Corporate Masters
KDE (and, I assume, Gnome) are intentionally not linux specific. They run on anything with X and an unix-ish OS.
I suppose a kernel module would be OK, as long as the default implementation works as a fallback, but regardless, that's a lot of work for people who aren't all on linux.
But will they go on a spending spree? Did they last time? I and my working stiff friends (admittedly, in a slightly higher tax bracket than the quintissential working stiff, but not *much* higher) just put it in the bank. Like I do with 1/4 to 1/3 of each paycheck.
Whoops... I guess that makes me a terrorist.
I could be wrong, but this isn't something we should bash MS about -- as far as I can tell, this can be done in many languages as long as you're comfortable with dissassembling a library or using a hex-editor. Which is to say, it's out of my reach.
This seems to happen a *LOT* in the apple world. Look at Unsanity
They've figured out a whole ton of hacks for OSX which are clearly based on undocumented code.
My guess is that this sort of stuff is easier for languages with massive run-time introspection (like objective-c)... but like I said, I'm no expert at this stuff.
Easier said than done.
I'm by no means a professional genetic algorithms programmer, but I was doing some work a couple years ago to see if a software modeled robot could be "taught" to walk, via genetic algorithms. I know, everybody and their uncle has done this now, but bear with me.
I wrote some dynamics simulation and a breeding program by which N algorithms were randomly generated, tested for fitness by allowing them to run and checking how far the robot went, how stable it was, and how much it diverge from a straight line and so on and so on. as per genetic algorithm programming, the best 2 were selected, "bred" into N new algorithms with some random "evolution" thrown in.
Long story short, it took a long time just to get the fitness checker working and the dynamics were hard. The program tended to crash after breeing about 30 generations, every time. I never solved that one, but fortunately, it saved out the breeding so it was just a matter of restarting the program. Anyway, after months of work, it finally worked and bred a very effective walk.
What kind of walk? A *silly* walk. It hopped, for f*ck's sake. The breeding favored a hop, not a walk. So I ran it again... and it hopped again, albeit differently. And again, and so on. And frankly, I was never able to tweak the fitness evaluator to not favor hopping.
That's when I decided to drop genetic algorithms and go for a cellular automata / neural net like approach, which is working but I'm still evaluating. At least I have control over it.
The moral of the story: Genetic algorithms work, but it's really, *really* hard to grow a program which does exactly what you want. It's like those stories where the protagonist makes a deal with the devil and gets *exactly* what he asked for, and it's no good at all.
That's because those countries are *civilized*
We here in america, however, would never put up with such round-numbered buffoonery. People out in north dakota would see it as a sign that the UN's gonna invade and teach our children evolution and homosexuality and so on. Next thing you know we'd have a full-on religious revival that would make the left-wing conservatives cringe.
Seriously... I have a friend who's somewhat left wing (as in libertarian, not a bible-thumper). I've discussed this with him and he goes *ballistic* every time. That it's all just a conspiracy by big corporations and government and that the lowly penny is the last hallmark of our freedom (that, and guns, of course).
It'll never happen here. We're caught up in our own ignorant ways and we refuse to pay attention to the smart things the rest of the world is figuring out; we're in some ways more isolationist than we were back before WW2.
If you don't believe me, then just consider how gracefully America transitioned to metric, back in the 70's. Oh yeah... we didn't.
OK, sure. But considering that at this point (and let's be realistic) Microsoft *has* won the game.
It's extraordinarily unlikely that MS taking 8 more months on the release of product X will put them out of business, or even loosen their hold on some part of the market. I mean, what's company XYZ with possibly tens of thousands of word files, access files etc etc going to do? Sure, OpenOffice is great, but try convincing your IT dept. I have.
What I'm getting at here is that we all know MS has won and has, by virtue of being a monopoly, created an almost completely homogenous computing environment. So, much like the way a biological virus can sweep through a bunch of genetically identical engineered super-corn, we're now in a situation in which any single one of MS's mistakes could potentially bring down a major percentage of the world's systems. Think about that for a second. I'm not talking about a bunch of secretaries having solitaire crash. The potential for economic disaster is very real.
In my magic world -- the one where republicans talk about corporate responsibility but *aren't* lying through clenched teeth -- MS would recognize that by this point they simply can't lose. And as such, it's their responsibility to make DAMN sure that their products, which we have no choice but to buy, actually work.
But in truth this is all naive whining. The reality of course is that MS is at the point where thay can just fill a cardboard box with feces and gravel, sell it to us for $295.00 and we'd damned well better be gracious for the priveledge.
Choice in computing is dead.
Well, you know, I've got nothing against the *person* calling me. I feel sorry for the schmuck. If by saying "hold on..." I can give the poor sob 10 minutes of peace in an otherwise completely hectic day of sullen, angry and/or sarcastic phonecalls then *GREAT*.
The important part is that if enough people do this stuff, the real culprit -- the companies PAYING for the advertising service -- will stop because it ceases to be profitable.
Telemarketing wouldn't happen if it didn't make money. We shouldn't punish those calling us but those paying them to call us.
Heh. I meant write an objective c++ "bridge". If I could write a bride for myself in objective-c++ I think I'd never leave my apartment again. And my GF might be somewhat offput.
And don't forget: objective-c++
name your cocoa files filename.mm and voila -- now you can call c++ from objective-c and visa versa.
This is making my recent transition from linux to mac os x much smoother; I have waaaay too much c++ code and no compelling reason to rewrite it. So, I compile it into a framework, and write a new gui in cocoa, and write an objective-c++ bride.
Easy as pie.
This is interesting to me, for several reasons. I'm working on robotics in my free time, mainly not cognitive stuff but lower level autonomous muscular control and feedback loop stuff. But anyway, my girlfriend's studying neuroscience and she, like many (too many) of her peers, finds absolutely NOTHING interesting in cognitive research.
All they care about is the mechanics (which is important) but I think they consider cognition to be a peculiar but unimportant side effect of the rest of the complex process.
So, as a fellow who's spent years writing code to try to do intelligent stuff, and more recently robots to carry these actions out, it's somewhat frustrating to be in a bar with a bunch of neuroscientists and hear them dismiss cognition as irrelevant.
One more performance boost - or at least, *percieved* performance boost -- get Fruitmenu by Unsanity.
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu/
Aside from being absolutely unarguably fantastic, it gives you an option to turn off menu fading effects. While this probably doesn't speed up any system with quartz extreme (since the fade will be done by the compositor/opengl) it does increase the perceived performance.
Speaking as an old hardcore BeOS user, it's not the *real* performance that matters, but the perception of it.
Maybe that works for your bizarro-world eyeballs, but for the rest of humanity, and believe me (I work as a graphic designer, and have an education in art and graphic design): dark text on light/medium tones is demonstrably superior and overwhelmingly preferred for reading large sets of text. This does not include things like logos, business cards, TV adverts, etc. I'm talking about body text for essays, articles, and so on.
Feel free to say it's all a matter of opinion -- of course, it is. Some people like all sorts of naughty, painful things the rest of humanity would prefer to avoid.
The fact is, it's hard to read white on black for the *vast* majority of people. Personally, it gave me a headache and blurred vision.
And, what basis do you have to say "A medium's natural state is the easiest to read." That's the most preposterous thing I've ever heard.
I don't know about the iBook, but my powerbook 12" came with an... ahem.... *manual* and one of the first topics was "How to Calibrate a New Battery for Best Performance"
Good god. Doesn't anybody RTFM? Or is paper just too 20th century???
I don't know about you, but I think smooth scrolling shouldn't be considered "eye candy".
.25 seconds of my precious time, make relationships very clear.
Smooth scrolling is there for a valid *reason* -- it makes it so much easier for your eyes to follow the vertical jump a page makes when you click up or down (or mouse-wheel, etc).
Think about it, you're at the end of some line, you mouse wheel, and now the page has jumped up (say) 20 pixels. Now, where do you bring your eye to start the next line? You might have to track the end point of the line you started on, and then progress.
With smooth scrolling it's easier to follow because there are no jumps, just transitions. Simple, obvious, and very very worthwhile.
And if you're worried about cpu usage, it's all done in the video hardware anyway. Just blit the region up one pixel and draw one new scanline at the bottom. Scrollable regions have worked this way since the early 90's anyway, even in marginal operating systems like BeOS, so it's not like this is radical new technology and really hammering your multi-gigahertz processor anyway.
Oh, and by the way, I've been using mac os x for several months now, and frankly, I find the smooth transitions to be transparent and actually completely useful. I go back to windows or linux where things just *pop* into place and I think "who did that?" and "what are you modal to" etc etc, whereas the transition effects in os x, which take up all of
So there. Ptttbt.
I've had my AiBook for (about) 2 months now, and right now I'm going to say I love every single aspect of it. Absolutely. No waffling here. I'm a switcher, but from the linux/i386 world, and I've had no trouble porting over my servo control routines and all the other robotics related code I've written over the last couple years for linux.
So basically, I'm happy as a clam. Happier even.
But for one silly little thing: the metal drop-down catch which locks the lid shut when I close it. For some reason (most likely a mechanical defect) it doesn't pop back in when I open the lid. Trivial? Yes. All it takes is one tenth of a second to tap it with my finger when I open it and it pops back where it belongs.
Nonetheless, as a fella raised in a machine shop (my father's a machinist/sculptor/etc/luddite) this kind of thing bothers me. I examined it closely and it's very simple -- the latch's "bearing" is nothing but a hole slightly larger than the axle, so you get minimal friction and maximum simplicity. But it seems to allow sideways motion and this (in my case) is causing binding. I'm not about to oil it, for obvious reasons, though if I can find a non-conductive graphite lube ( "Dry Slide" ) I might give it a shot.
What concerns me is not so much the lack of it retracting, but that someday, if the binding gets too great, it might stop popping down when I close the lid.
So, it's a cool feature and all but my old thinkpad, with its simpler trigger mechanism never had this problem.
There's a lot to be said for simplicity. I kind of wish apple had forgone the cool and wow effect in this place for something a little more sturdy.