I came to OSX from a linux background, so I am pre-disposed to try all the new open-source things. The Mozilla family is central in my tests, since it is halfway reasonable on Linux.
Unfortunately, I have yet to see an open-source offering that is competitive with the Apple software. They tend to be buggy, they tend to be slow, and they tend to be awkward to use.
Given my linux background, I'll keep on trying the open-source things every few months. Surely they will at least become less buggy, although it is difficult to imagine they will become less awkward, because they are not built from the ground up on Cocoa and they were not targetted from the start at the OSX way of working.
Will the open-source applications every exceed the Apple offerings? Sure, if they offer something different. If all they do is offer a new version of an existing product, then they won't gain a lot of ground. A browser is just a browser. Safari does that well. A calendar manager is just a calendar manager. iCal does that well. Ditto for email, contact lists, etc. But if the open-source community can come up with a new idea, as opposed to a free version of something already in existence, then things could get very exciting.
PS. I realize my words are straying from the topics of the thread.
I'd love a little iPod, but I admit defeat. Installing and setting up Java software is just too much work for an old-fart C++/unix geek.
Fondly I recall those halcyon days of tar, configure and make. Oh, what the heck, throw in a make check to see if all is well in the world, and to demonstrate just how to use the software (e.g. what environment variables to set).
But those days are gone. In this brave new java world [as IBM sees through its clouds] we're presented with a weird amalgum of GUI and CLI. Click this, type that. Then point your file manager at... well, what, exactly? Where the heck is that single README or INSTALL file, to which my tired eyes are so accustomed? Nothing so simple as that. For a new language, you'd really think that Java would have been set up more simply. Heck, the installer knows where I installed the software; why doesn't it set up my environment variables, or give me a line I can cut/paste into my shell?
After I gave up, I looked on this thread to see if others found this lovely software easy to set it up. Well, at least some others had problems.
IBM should install the whole mess with either GUI or CLI, not both. The interface should set up requisite environment variables, and it should run a demo. If folks are meant to read instructions, provide just one single, aptly-named, file of instructions.
Surely this advice is worth at least an iPod Shuffle:-)
I heard a rumour that folks were buying ipods, smashing the cases, and using the disks in other equipment. Why? Because that was cheaper than buying the disks.
Having said that, the poster has a good point. This is why many products come in threes.
There is the high-price version, which should be avoided because the price:value ratio is set too high, to suck in the status seekers.
Then there is the low-price version, which is often over-priced junk with such low value that the price:value ratio is too high.
And, in the middle, there is the sweet spot: the product to buy since it has the best price:value ratio, and because the value is high enough to merit a purchase.
My basis is that word, excel, and powerpoint documents have not transferred correctly to OO, and vice versa.
I lost quite a lot of time about 1.5 years ago, making lectures in OO that then transferred badly enough to PowerPoint that I had to edit every single item, replacing things and resizing boxes.
I've also seen problems with tables in word.
As for excel, I don't have much recent experience, so I can't comment.
I suspect that, over time, OO will improve in its compatibility. So my statement was recounting experience, not predicting the future.
I really dislike ms-word and ms-excel. But I have no choice. I collaborate with folks who assume 100% compatibility with these ms products. Whether OO can give me 95% or even 99.9% is irrelevant. Anything less than 100% is unacceptable. I know, there are difficulties from version to version of the ms products, and from PC to Mac... but these are not an issue in collaboration; my collaborators accept that, but they will not accept wilful use of applications known to be incompatible. This sucks but it is reality. As I said, for my fun work -- my research -- I use open-source.
PS. I've submitted some bug reports on OO, and eventually they got fixed. The future looks bright. I have no doubt that in an environment that does not require the use of ms products, OO will be a complete and wonderful solution.
Even if there were an OO port to the standard OSX gui, would it matter?
The x11 port works as well as it does on other platforms, i.e. it's great unless you want ms-office compatibilityl. The OSX port would add eye candy and a more conventional OSX "feel." I suppose it would also support fonts (which mac users have in massive numbers). But would these things be enough to make users switch? I think not.
Folks who want full ms-office compatibility will use ms-office or, perhaps, the upcoming iWork.
nd folks who can live with something that is not ms-office compatible (and I stipulate that OO is not) will probably be just as happy to use the existing x11 interface.
Me? For committee work (which demands ms-office compatibility), I'll use ms-office. For presentations I'll use keynote, unless I'm sharing it and therefore using PowerPoint. For my research writing I'll use latex. For my friends I'll use a fountain pen. Hm... OO doesn't fit in anywhere:-(
If you had a car that wouldn't start 2/3 of the time, you'd trash it. Email is that bad. Even with two spam filters grooming my email, most of my messages are junk.
Someone can make a mint by inventing something like email, but without the spam. I'd switch in a flash.
Since everything so far has failed, perhaps we need an entirely new scheme. I don't care a whit what the scheme would be.
Postage? Fine. (I don't care a whit whether mass-mailers will have to cough up money. They have to do that if they phone me or paper-mail me.)
A trust system to identify real senders? Fine. (I don't need to hear from total strangers who know nobody who is trusted.)
A computational penalty to send messages? Fine. (I have the CPU, and I have no sympathy for mass mailers... buy some CPUs if you want to tell me about your wonderful products.)
Any scheme will do. It need not be backwards compatible. It need not have a wide subscription base, to begin with. But something has to change, and soon, because email is a candle burning in a closed box, guttering close to death.
Re:Tools, Dialogs, Filters: where to look?
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the tip. Since 90% of the time all I want is to adjust brightness/contrast, and since 'File/Save' is in an intuitive place, this will come in handy!
Tools, Dialogs, Filters: where to look?
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Don't get me wrong. I love having the gimp available for my work, at no cost. But there are aspects of the user experience that I think are flawed, needlessly.
My problem is that I do not use the gimp daily, and therefore I forget where things are hidden. But, surely, it needn't be so difficult to guess.
One thing I do a lot is to edit the contrast of an image that I've scanned. But, every time, I have to try a lot of menus to find that function. Image? Layers? Tools? Dialogs? Filters? All of these seem to be likely candidates. So, each and every time I want to adjust the contrast, I click each of these things, often a few times, missing the brightness/contrast function I'm looking for.
Does it really need to be this difficult?
I am not writing to suggest a reconfiguration of the menus -- folks have got used to the present state -- but rather to suggest something simpler. How about a menu action that stores recently chosen menus? In my case, a buffer of previously-selected menu items would contain just 3 items:
"open", "brightness/contrast" and "save as". I imagine quite a few folks would have a small list of recent commands.
Q: is it technically feasible to store recently-used commands in this way? It would seem to be, since so many applications have recently-used file menu items.
The phrase is not a euphemism. It's a recognition of the fact that we care about more than just global averages and we care about more than temperature.
The world-averaged temperature could remain unchanged by cooling some regions and warming others, and both things could be difficult in terms of crop adjustment, etc. And there is a lot of concern about water as well as heat; think drought.
The expanded phrase also includes the "climate of weather", i.e. the slowly varying statistics of the quickly varying fields. For example, we ask whether the weather would be more stormy in the future.
I've never heard it said that climate change is a euphemism... to folks like me who work in this field, it's a more encompassing phrase.
I've used a whack of languages (I once loved APL, to put a date-stamp on this), but only one passes the memory test, and that's C.
What I mean is that I don't have to look in a manual to write C code. C is simple enough that I can just open a window and start typing. (I've been known to use cat to write simple C programs.)
I do, however, have to look in a manual to write Perl. What the heck is the order of the arguments to split? How the heck does perl do else-if? Am I supposed to use a $ or a @ here? I am pretty sure that Perl is hard to remember because of the "many ways" aspect; all of those ways get blended together in memory. If there were fewer ways, then the mind might better remember the path to take.
Being hard to remember is a flaw, for a language that is so well suited to quick, one-off, applications. Too bad Perl 6 is introducing yet more ways to do "hello world". Seriously, do we need this new say when we already have print? Now users have to remember which one takes the newlines. Very little extra functionality, at the cost of more details to keep in mind.
Having said all of this, of course I'll use Perl for my next 3-liner. But it won't be perl 6.
At the university where I teach, there is an employment rule preventing dicrimination based on physical or mental ability. Yup, I said mental ability. Welcome to this side of the academic looking glass.
All modern designs must address not just the engineering (is the cable strong enough) and the economics (is moon dust worth the cost of the elevator) but also acts of terrorism.
The moon application is just a test case, of course. But when it comes to the earth application, what if someone cuts the cable mid-way, so that a strong cable plummets to earth? Instead of "do what I want or I'll cut off this head" it might be "do what I want or I'll throw this 36,000 kilometer cable at your hemisphere.
Now that our worrying caps are on, let's think about why the Bush administration is keen on weaponizing space.
How often do you have difficulty hearing on a mobile phone?
How often have you seen this portrayed on TV and in film?
I'd say it's 90% for the first and 0% for the second. (I haven't seen that Kim Basinger film yet; maybe it will be the first?) Can it be an accident that visual media producers do not portray this commonplace of our lives? Or are these folks getting rewarded by the mobile-phone industry for keeping the terrible sound quality a sort of unspoken secret?
Sinclair Scientific calculator of 197x
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Digital Retro
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I know this is a bit off-topic, but we all started with calculators, right?
The Sinclair Scientific http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sinclair___ the_pocket_calculat.htmlhere was my first calculator. It came as a kit, and it had a small-stack RPN scheme that required remembering numbers or writing down intermediate parts of calculations. I think it only had sine, so you had to get cosine by a root(1-sin**2). It had so little memory that values of e, ln(10), etc., were written on the case! (Hm, I wonder if this is why I remember ln(10) to this day, whereas my students have no clue about the value...)
I loved this little calculator, partly because it was so light compared to the fancy, expensive boxes the other kids had, but mainly because my Dad had given it to me. My heart ached when I looked up a picture of the little calculator, after reading this thread. This, I think, is why reminiscing about old technology is useful: it dredges up memories of simpler days in all our lives, when an infinity stretched before us on a path so bright and smooth.
What a bunch of standards-following wimps Canadians are. Join Kyoto protocol. Join international world court. Use the same ballot across the nation. (Count that ballot in hours.) Same-sex marriage. Soon-to-be-legal marijuana. Free health care. Soon to be free daycare.
What a crew.
Oh, and some Ogg Vorbis thingee now, too.
What will the favicon look like? The logo is nice, but work will have to be done to simplify the fine elements of the design, so that they don't turn to fuzz in small versions of the image.
Multiple-pen Wiki. I once set up a wiki for colleagues to help me write a document. Seven colleagues, seven PhDs in science. Not one of them bothered trying to edit the text. Was it too difficult? Probably. I switched to a word-processor for similar documents, and now I can get revisions from my colleagues without difficulty. I left it the wiki up for a while as an experiment. When I looked again, someone had changed it into a porn site.
Single-pen Wiki.
Now I use a (media)wiki for taking notes on a course I'm developing. I want colleagues to be able to see the work, but I know they won't contribute, and I don't want the site spammed. Therefore, the site is password protected and I permit only registered users to edit, AND I protect most pages so that only I can edit them. The wiki is no more than a convenient interface that lets me edit the webpage easily. This system works very well.
It may be that, in some cases, the most-discussed feature of wikis, the multiple-author ability, is not the most desirable feature.
This thought takes nothing away from the wonderful wiki-based communities. WikiPedia, for example, is wonderful, a true demonstration of a new way of collaborating. This is a nail well-suited to the newly invented hammer.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I have yet to see an open-source offering that is competitive with the Apple software. They tend to be buggy, they tend to be slow, and they tend to be awkward to use.
Given my linux background, I'll keep on trying the open-source things every few months. Surely they will at least become less buggy, although it is difficult to imagine they will become less awkward, because they are not built from the ground up on Cocoa and they were not targetted from the start at the OSX way of working.
Will the open-source applications every exceed the Apple offerings? Sure, if they offer something different. If all they do is offer a new version of an existing product, then they won't gain a lot of ground. A browser is just a browser. Safari does that well. A calendar manager is just a calendar manager. iCal does that well. Ditto for email, contact lists, etc. But if the open-source community can come up with a new idea, as opposed to a free version of something already in existence, then things could get very exciting.
PS. I realize my words are straying from the topics of the thread.
Yeah, most of my dating is faulty also. Oh, carbon, you say. Nevermind.
Fondly I recall those halcyon days of tar, configure and make. Oh, what the heck, throw in a make check to see if all is well in the world, and to demonstrate just how to use the software (e.g. what environment variables to set).
But those days are gone. In this brave new java world [as IBM sees through its clouds] we're presented with a weird amalgum of GUI and CLI. Click this, type that. Then point your file manager at ... well, what, exactly? Where the heck is that single README or INSTALL file, to which my tired eyes are so accustomed? Nothing so simple as that. For a new language, you'd really think that Java would have been set up more simply. Heck, the installer knows where I installed the software; why doesn't it set up my environment variables, or give me a line I can cut/paste into my shell?
After I gave up, I looked on this thread to see if others found this lovely software easy to set it up. Well, at least some others had problems.
IBM should install the whole mess with either GUI or CLI, not both. The interface should set up requisite environment variables, and it should run a demo. If folks are meant to read instructions, provide just one single, aptly-named, file of instructions.
Surely this advice is worth at least an iPod Shuffle :-)
+ Aside from the fact that sponsored links take up 1/2 the search-result window sized for a typical laptop.
Seriously, though, someone should mod the parent up because of its informative links.
Having said that, the poster has a good point. This is why many products come in threes.
- There is the high-price version, which should be avoided because the price:value ratio is set too high, to suck in the status seekers.
- Then there is the low-price version, which is often over-priced junk with such low value that the price:value ratio is too high.
- And, in the middle, there is the sweet spot: the product to buy since it has the best price:value ratio, and because the value is high enough to merit a purchase.
I use this line of reasoning in everything I buy.I lost quite a lot of time about 1.5 years ago, making lectures in OO that then transferred badly enough to PowerPoint that I had to edit every single item, replacing things and resizing boxes.
I've also seen problems with tables in word.
As for excel, I don't have much recent experience, so I can't comment.
I suspect that, over time, OO will improve in its compatibility. So my statement was recounting experience, not predicting the future.
I really dislike ms-word and ms-excel. But I have no choice. I collaborate with folks who assume 100% compatibility with these ms products. Whether OO can give me 95% or even 99.9% is irrelevant. Anything less than 100% is unacceptable. I know, there are difficulties from version to version of the ms products, and from PC to Mac ... but these are not an issue in collaboration; my collaborators accept that, but they will not accept wilful use of applications known to be incompatible. This sucks but it is reality. As I said, for my fun work -- my research -- I use open-source.
PS. I've submitted some bug reports on OO, and eventually they got fixed. The future looks bright. I have no doubt that in an environment that does not require the use of ms products, OO will be a complete and wonderful solution.
The x11 port works as well as it does on other platforms, i.e. it's great unless you want ms-office compatibilityl. The OSX port would add eye candy and a more conventional OSX "feel." I suppose it would also support fonts (which mac users have in massive numbers). But would these things be enough to make users switch? I think not.
Folks who want full ms-office compatibility will use ms-office or, perhaps, the upcoming iWork. nd folks who can live with something that is not ms-office compatible (and I stipulate that OO is not) will probably be just as happy to use the existing x11 interface.
Me? For committee work (which demands ms-office compatibility), I'll use ms-office. For presentations I'll use keynote, unless I'm sharing it and therefore using PowerPoint. For my research writing I'll use latex. For my friends I'll use a fountain pen. Hm... OO doesn't fit in anywhere :-(
Someone can make a mint by inventing something like email, but without the spam. I'd switch in a flash.
Since everything so far has failed, perhaps we need an entirely new scheme. I don't care a whit what the scheme would be.
Postage? Fine. (I don't care a whit whether mass-mailers will have to cough up money. They have to do that if they phone me or paper-mail me.)
A trust system to identify real senders? Fine. (I don't need to hear from total strangers who know nobody who is trusted.)
A computational penalty to send messages? Fine. (I have the CPU, and I have no sympathy for mass mailers ... buy some CPUs if you want to tell me about your wonderful products.)
Any scheme will do. It need not be backwards compatible. It need not have a wide subscription base, to begin with. But something has to change, and soon, because email is a candle burning in a closed box, guttering close to death.
Or are they up to 4-blade by now?
Thanks for the tip. Since 90% of the time all I want is to adjust brightness/contrast, and since 'File/Save' is in an intuitive place, this will come in handy!
My problem is that I do not use the gimp daily, and therefore I forget where things are hidden. But, surely, it needn't be so difficult to guess.
One thing I do a lot is to edit the contrast of an image that I've scanned. But, every time, I have to try a lot of menus to find that function. Image? Layers? Tools? Dialogs? Filters? All of these seem to be likely candidates. So, each and every time I want to adjust the contrast, I click each of these things, often a few times, missing the brightness/contrast function I'm looking for.
Does it really need to be this difficult?
I am not writing to suggest a reconfiguration of the menus -- folks have got used to the present state -- but rather to suggest something simpler. How about a menu action that stores recently chosen menus? In my case, a buffer of previously-selected menu items would contain just 3 items: "open", "brightness/contrast" and "save as". I imagine quite a few folks would have a small list of recent commands.
Q: is it technically feasible to store recently-used commands in this way? It would seem to be, since so many applications have recently-used file menu items.
The world-averaged temperature could remain unchanged by cooling some regions and warming others, and both things could be difficult in terms of crop adjustment, etc. And there is a lot of concern about water as well as heat; think drought.
The expanded phrase also includes the "climate of weather", i.e. the slowly varying statistics of the quickly varying fields. For example, we ask whether the weather would be more stormy in the future.
I've never heard it said that climate change is a euphemism ... to folks like me who work in this field, it's a more encompassing phrase.
What I mean is that I don't have to look in a manual to write C code. C is simple enough that I can just open a window and start typing. (I've been known to use cat to write simple C programs.)
I do, however, have to look in a manual to write Perl. What the heck is the order of the arguments to split? How the heck does perl do else-if? Am I supposed to use a $ or a @ here? I am pretty sure that Perl is hard to remember because of the "many ways" aspect; all of those ways get blended together in memory. If there were fewer ways, then the mind might better remember the path to take.
Being hard to remember is a flaw, for a language that is so well suited to quick, one-off, applications. Too bad Perl 6 is introducing yet more ways to do "hello world". Seriously, do we need this new say when we already have print? Now users have to remember which one takes the newlines. Very little extra functionality, at the cost of more details to keep in mind.
Having said all of this, of course I'll use Perl for my next 3-liner. But it won't be perl 6.
At the university where I teach, there is an employment rule preventing dicrimination based on physical or mental ability. Yup, I said mental ability. Welcome to this side of the academic looking glass.
please.
Oh, wait a sec, not everybody has switched to Mac OSX. I take it back. Do whatever. I'll use msoft until you get a real OSX version working.
These are excellent comments. Somebody should mod you up on this.
The moon application is just a test case, of course. But when it comes to the earth application, what if someone cuts the cable mid-way, so that a strong cable plummets to earth? Instead of "do what I want or I'll cut off this head" it might be "do what I want or I'll throw this 36,000 kilometer cable at your hemisphere.
Now that our worrying caps are on, let's think about why the Bush administration is keen on weaponizing space.
I notice the kernel is build-number 667, i.e. the number of the beast, plus unity. Any significance to that?
- How often do you have difficulty hearing on a mobile phone?
- How often have you seen this portrayed on TV and in film?
I'd say it's 90% for the first and 0% for the second. (I haven't seen that Kim Basinger film yet; maybe it will be the first?) Can it be an accident that visual media producers do not portray this commonplace of our lives? Or are these folks getting rewarded by the mobile-phone industry for keeping the terrible sound quality a sort of unspoken secret?The Sinclair Scientific http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sinclair___ the_pocket_calculat.htmlhere was my first calculator. It came as a kit, and it had a small-stack RPN scheme that required remembering numbers or writing down intermediate parts of calculations. I think it only had sine, so you had to get cosine by a root(1-sin**2). It had so little memory that values of e, ln(10), etc., were written on the case! (Hm, I wonder if this is why I remember ln(10) to this day, whereas my students have no clue about the value...)
I loved this little calculator, partly because it was so light compared to the fancy, expensive boxes the other kids had, but mainly because my Dad had given it to me. My heart ached when I looked up a picture of the little calculator, after reading this thread. This, I think, is why reminiscing about old technology is useful: it dredges up memories of simpler days in all our lives, when an infinity stretched before us on a path so bright and smooth.
What a bunch of standards-following wimps Canadians are. Join Kyoto protocol. Join international world court. Use the same ballot across the nation. (Count that ballot in hours.) Same-sex marriage. Soon-to-be-legal marijuana. Free health care. Soon to be free daycare. What a crew. Oh, and some Ogg Vorbis thingee now, too.
What will the favicon look like? The logo is nice, but work will have to be done to simplify the fine elements of the design, so that they don't turn to fuzz in small versions of the image.
Single-pen Wiki. Now I use a (media)wiki for taking notes on a course I'm developing. I want colleagues to be able to see the work, but I know they won't contribute, and I don't want the site spammed. Therefore, the site is password protected and I permit only registered users to edit, AND I protect most pages so that only I can edit them. The wiki is no more than a convenient interface that lets me edit the webpage easily. This system works very well.
It may be that, in some cases, the most-discussed feature of wikis, the multiple-author ability, is not the most desirable feature.
This thought takes nothing away from the wonderful wiki-based communities. WikiPedia, for example, is wonderful, a true demonstration of a new way of collaborating. This is a nail well-suited to the newly invented hammer.