Actually, there are some interesting things about Ebonics that aren't in proper English. I don't know much about it but I am still interested in learning more. The 'habitually' modifier, 'be', for instance. It's not just 'is', at all. There is an implication of frequency. For instance- "He hacking" -means he is hacking. "He be hacking" -he always hacks, he is a hacker. Thus, constructs like "He makin' sense but he don't _be_ makin' sense" which means "He is making sense but this is unusual enough to point out that usually he doesn't make sense".
Sierra On-Line's 'Mystery House' (what you'd call low quality shit? Doubtless) was THE FIRST COMMERCIAL GAME EVER!! Geez- you're comparing stuff from the peak Apple II/TRS-80/Commodore era with the _first_ stuff released back when there was only Apple II and nothing else (for a few months) and nobody had ever sold software in stores before? Spacewar wasn't sold in stores. Adventure/ADVENT wasn't sold in stores. I will admit I have _no_ Sierra games currently, nor can I think of a single one I even vaguely want- but have some historical perspective, man! Sierra On-Line were the first commercial game company _ever_, _anywhere_. Of course, open source predated 'em >;)
Oh, this is too funny. Listen: x86 is similarly as far from open source as you could possibly imagine. Apple _II_ was open. Macintosh was not. But you're glorifying, as an alternative, twenty million incompetent hardware developers none of whom are talking to each other or implement the same way? Why, exactly, doesn't Plug and Play work for MS, if the world is as you think? Forget it. You might as well suggest that Netwinders need to be totally clonable, or that Apple needs to ship everything triple-booting between MacOS, Be and Linux- or even Be, Linux and NT! Why should they get a chance to control their own products? This is nonsense, and nobody is going to listen. And most people know what you don't- that your 'survival enhancing things' are suicidal. Some have been tried, some have not- none are sensible, even though it's a pity something like Be can't be supported. The rest of the world is x86 running Windows- it _will_ be left behind by many different competitors. One of them is Apple. They're already obliterating the 'computing for Grandma' market without even major changes to MacOS, just by the iMac. That alone is putting x86 in the past for that market. Just deal with the fact that you're, well, extremely incorrect, might I say? And none of this should suggest that it'd impede Linux adoption. Diversity is more natural and healthy- the linux crowd and the iMac crowd can be _very_ different- and still overlap here and there.
...of a MacInTouch Effect! o_O I managed to get mentioned in a story about ClearType, and I'm telling you, my site got hammered. Much worse than anything I've ever seen from Slashdot, but I've never been in a _story_ in Slashdot, only comments, and that may be a difference. I figure if I can survive the MacInTouch effect, I could also survive a Slashdot Effect, as they appear to be roughly comparable and it depends on how obligatory the link seems. Many people wanted to read about ClearType issues- indeed, it may have been very indirectly Slashdottish, as I believe Slashdot was mentioning the MacInTouch Cleartype story. Mind you, MacInTouch is analogous to Slashdot and used to that kind of traffic...
I am afraid the original script and story for this game was _so_ awful that I think it may have hurt it when they were shopping it to distributors. Who here read _all_ the script? I did. They need help, desperately. If nothing else, the dialogue could be severely rewritten, but does the enemy _have_ to be a playful lovable sarcastic evil genius mad scientist? There's gotta be a better way to make players walk through prearranged battles. Also, the tiles for the terrain were _very_ strange and weird, though you have to respect the sheer volume of everything- lots of art there, of all sorts, and I'm still wondering how they planned to map some of those pictures onto objects. Any ideas on the plot?
This is about setting things up so E-commerce, programs and information can be made PIII-only. It has very little to do with privacy, and everything to do with monopoly. The serial number is Intel Only, and even PIII only. Intel are desperate to sell more highend Pentiums, and they're setting up to bribe vendors heavily to do this. You surely don't think that, for instance, the Dilbert Comic Explorer is just something Scott Adams thought would be cool and set up one day? That bit of web tech brought the site payoffs from Intel. The only problem is, you can't _require_ people to use it, and I'm not sure it's really PII only like it strongly implies. So the next attempt is a CPU dongle, so that only PIIIs can even pretend to work with the new sites and programs and content- and then Intel busily sets about paying off other vendors to help the lock-in. Who says people have to _want_ to cooperate with Intel? They can be bribed. It's exasperating to see how few people are recognizing this. The problem is, people are assuming content providers care most about their visitors. If it's possible to get paid off by Intel for putting closed content up, some people will choose to do so. Even when it's a CPU dongle that very few people currently have.
Try this, Jon- I guarantee you'll enjoy it... Since you're booting into KDE (I have some usenet posts on getting rid of KDE, kppp etc), you have the option to launch X into 'failsafe' mode, which is a little screen area without a window manager. Do that, and type 'fvwm'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X. Do that, and type 'fvwm2'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X. Do that, and type 'afterstep'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X. Do that, and type 'twm'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X. _NOW_ you've stared at a Linux Operating System, and not before. The Linux operating system is the possibility of all those window managers. You could use any of them. For extra credit, download and install Window Maker, and play with that too. If you want to get radical, install Enlightenment (eep!). I'm running Window Maker. My point is that the fvwms, afterstep etc are _on_ your box, and as the previous poster said, KDE IS NOT LINUX. Period. KDE is a determined attempt to be just like Windows but better. Some of us don't even like windows, and you should see what your options are before you decide that KDE is it. You might end up loving Afterstep, or WM, for their more NeXTian interface and the cleanness of the environment and the little dockable applets.
Are you running Windows? If so, I find your comment quite amusing. I (and Katz!) have spent years on Macs- top that for GUI deftness and task accomplishing. That isn't the end of the story: so here I am, and here Katz is, looking into the frontier. I think Jon is a little carried away with the glamor of it all- me, I'm more interested with the way that it asks me to be the top-level kernel process. I think you are approaching computers from an 'appliance' point of view. There are other ways to interact with 'em. When Jon Katz gets a tremendous kick out of kill -9ing a process, it's because he is hooking into the computer at a more direct level, and _likes_ engaging more with it rather than giving the computer suggestions and watching it scuttle about implementing them. William Gibson wrote about 'jacking in' to cyberspace in a way where the computer did all the work and went all the way towards adapting itself to the human. It'd generate visuals, frames of reference, the whole enchilada. It's also possible to jack in by going some of the way towards adapting oneself to the computer- using a shell, remembering what directory you're in, warily using starname expansion, remembering that ls -a is what shows the dotfiles. The exact letters used in the cryptic little identifiers are unimportant- the point is that it's possible to use your human ingenuity and staggering processing power to not be lazy and take some of the load off the poor computer. They're really quite stupid things, and asking them to be wise is asking for trouble. Unix lets you be wise _for_ the computer, and lets it stick to the stuff it's good at rather than the stuff it's not good at. You're free to disdain the idea of putting effort into helping the computer do its side of things, but this is not a moral imperative. It's not a sin to help a computer. It's not a sin for a computer to need such help. In some ways, the ones that try to not need such help (yes, even the Mac, and God help the Wintel PC) suffer from dreadful hubris and pay for it in reliability and trustworthiness...
This is _Jon_ _Katz_, juuri! You may never see another luser so patient and unperturbed by flames and rotten bad attitudes. He is a _luser_. He's a complete and total luser and he's not doing Linux because he has a hacker streak, like most of us. Instead he wants to do it for hero worship- and he is getting a hacker streak _grafted_ onto him, and the graft is _holding_. That's _news_, juuri. We had no reason to believe he'd _ever_ get it- his only reasons were ego-driven hero worship and wanting to be like what he considered cool people. He is _growing_ a hacker streak. He's a test case. He's just like countless total lusers out there with all the wrong reasons for running Linux- and he's being assimilated! _THIS_ _IS_ _NEWS_. And he won't even mind my calling him a complete luser. You, on the other hand, would mind my calling you an elitist luser with many of the same ego-driven motivations as Katz- so I won't say it;)
Seriously. Look at this guy. He is a _complete_ luser and doesn't mind a bit, his attempts to 'get' Linux are impeded by his dreadful hero worship, the whole process has taken weeks and he still can't get PPP working and fire up Netscape (from my experience it locks and dies if you have no PPP and go to certain control panels) and he DIDN'T GIVE UP. This is very much 3 also! It's not _easy_ to bear that sort of frustration emotionally, even physically- stress symptoms begin showing up. He's doing it- he can hack the frustration of not being quite good enough to get everything running. The fact that he keeps trying is truly hacking in sense 4, and when he's not sure what he's doing it's sense 6. (hopefully he experiments with stuff too- hope he has an install disk of some kind because reinstalling is an OK newbie way of fixing a totally hosed system when you don't know what else to do, until such time as you know to fix it properly)
If I want One True Way I can tell you right now what I'd be using. MacOS;) MacOS is seriously consistent, has a massive supply of apps with very long lifespans, and is easily fixed if anything goes wrong with it. Boot off something and shuffle stuff around in the System Folder, bam- 'no huhu'. I _don't_ _want_ 'One True Way'. I want many different ways. Currently I'm a Window Maker fan on LinuxPPC, but I also liked Afterstep. I never managed to get Enlightenment working, but if I had I'd have played with that too. I played with twm, for God's sake, and enjoyed it! (wow... it's like the void of meditation...) The KDE people are really beginning to annoy me with this attitude. I know where they got it- Microsoft- and since in their world my years of happy Mac use are a delusional fantasy and mirage, clearly they are sincere in feeling that there has to be just one 'winner' and everything else must die. Personally, I'd like to see them take that attitude right back to Windows, and LEAVE it there, and not pollute Linux with it. Linux is a 'world' where I can try out and use lots of interesting apps, the authors of which had no _clue_ they'd be having their tools compiled and run on a Powermac. It's a world where I can love the Afterstep animated backgrounds- and I'm not the only one to be impressed by, say, 'Swarm'- and can find that hack works perfectly in Window Maker- that it's more general than I thought! And it's a world in which I can use kppp to dial out from Window Maker- and struggle for days to figure out what is broken that I can't get wmppp to do the same- and find out that kppp is making _temporary_ changes in important files, so that the configuration data GOES AWAY when you stop using KDE tools! I find that little bit of 'lock-in' hard to forgive, and I wonder how many people have enough of a hacker gene to work out what's being done and look at files being used, figure out what's happening. It's fine not messing with systems that already work, but KDE has sometimes been the system default- like with the linuxppc I began using- and this is not behavior suited to helping people understand how the system really works, this quiet adding and erasing of entries in config files. I don't find it unthinkable that someday I'd treat KDE tools and applications like Microsoft code and eradicate it upon discovery- it wouldn't take much to reach that point, after my merry hunt for the pppd gremlins. The frothing, deadly advocacy of some of the KDE advocates does _not_ help. Maybe some of the less ruthless ones can try to cool off the problem cases and make 'em get with the program? Their 'KDE will march on a road of bones!!!' attitude is absolutely unacceptable.
Hey, maybe it's just my not ever having used Windows, but I _don't_ think the windows desktop is workable and useful. I detest almost all the decisions made in it. I used a Mac for years, and still use one, and I'm posting from one right now- and I _don't_ want a window manager that acts like a Mac, either. (impossible to get anything even vaguely close as far as consistency etc). On Linux, I use Window Maker, after also having enjoyed Afterstep. Some of the Window Maker decisions I absolutely love- most of all, I am fond of the clean uncluttered nature of it. If I want lots of additional tiles I'll make many workspaces and keep different apps docked on each one... the idea that I need to be subjected to a taskbar, and a start menu, and a certain way of handling virtual desktops (I'm undecided which is better, Afterstep or WM- Afterstep's mini iconic version is very nice, but WM's 'you put it there, you remember it' is gratifying, and the clip 'switcher' is damned elegant in practice) My point is that I am really pretty hostile towards KDE, due to its stated objectives and obvious goals. If I wanted the Windows desktop _I_ _WOULD_ _USE_ _IT_. Instead I used (and use) a Mac for years- and don't intend to try and change it into Windows or into WM- and using Linux, I went for Window Maker and don't intend to change it into the Mac, or into Windows. I'm really sick of the notion that we should make Linux better by making a shell that acts like Windows, only without crashing. Is that the best you can do? Do you have _any_ _idea_ how very specific that approach is? It's not that way by accident. The taskbar is there because people used to launch apps on the Mac and not understand when the app waited for them to select or create something- or switch to another app, hide the first and 'out of sight, out of mind'. The concept of relying on the user's ability to know what the hell they are doing is laughed off by this approach- it's always luser-friendly in Windows land, until you want to scream. I'm sorry, but even if I'm only some Mac weenie with a hacking gene from somewhere, I'm still not going to sit around quietly as people try to pass off the design of Windows as workable and useful. Build your own, or stay home. There already _IS!!!_ a Windows. It is obscene to attempt to build another one. Build something original. *hehe* goody, I can get flamed by KDE people for the rest of my life for _this_ one;)
Damn! I'd have thought _some_ slashdotters would clue to this! Nobody really _cares_ what Joe Schmoe does on the net. The issue here is: -chip can send out a serial number asserting 'I am a PIII chip!' ...and of course this leads by the expenditures of payola-type money to... -web sites begin REQUIRING, not suggesting, not demanding but REQUIRING Intel. Not just Intel, none of those damned Celerons- PIIIs! I am sorry but THAT is what this is about- and I see no reason to humor it. Look, if even 25% of web sites were using such an arrangement, the _first_ thing that would come to people's minds would be Intel monopolising, trying to kill off AMD not to mention Motorola and anybody else by pure market manipulation tactics. Why, why is it that when it actually starts _happening_, people flip out, totally miss the real message and start thinking Intel cares about their visiting www.pam-anderson-in-spandex.com?? Sheesh. I almost want Arizona to _pass_ this one simply because in their stupidity they are addressing the real threat of this scenario that NOBODY else seems to be cluing into. Just why do you think Windows PCs are so frickin' popular, because people chose them on the merits? No, it's because people had stuff they wanted to do that was _barred_ to anything other than a Windows PC. Now Intel is trying to set up an authentication racket. Whether or not the thing's active by default is moot- if you want to surf X or download from Y you _will_ turn it on (or throw out your celeron, go buy a real PIII and _then_ turn it on) The motive for Intel in this should be _damn_ obvious.
Borg Me, Linux I'll be the brain, personality and instincts. I'm good at that, but I cannot add with any serious impressiveness. You be the nervous system doing my every whim;)
Screen fonts? OK- I am a big fan of many of them. I wish I had ProFont on linux:/ Consistent keys for shortcuts? Aaaa! How I wish I had this on Linux! I really miss it terribly. I _use_ the keyboard. Hell, _Netscape_ does not have all the keyboard shortcuts under Linux. I guess I better learn emacs;) Type/creator? Damn straight. This _works_. It _also_ assumes you are going to be making choices about your apps and files, that you will want to customize them or have special cases. The closest we get to the Windows file mapping tyranny is Quicktime or Internet Config download mapping. Even that sometimes annoys a Mac person... The filename stuff is all basically the same in Linux- no extensions, the period is just another character it seems. Contextual menus? That's recent for MacOS- but it wasn't Windows that invented it- it was Smalltalk! My preferred Linux windowmanager is Window Maker- it uses popups heavily, and lets me assign Fkeys to help pop up the menus that normally are 2nd and 3rd button. No MDI windows! Damn straight, but you're understating how good drag and drop is on the Mac. Though it still has missing spots- every single network application I use (email, news, IRC, _ftp_ for God's sake) is totally drag-and-drop savvy from the desktop. _Netscape_ is not. I have to bounce stuff off of Simpletext to get text clippings. Text clippings _rule_. You don't even have to use a texteditor to view them- it's built into the windowmanager ("Finder"). The point about MacOS encouraging layering with offset windows is quite accurate- on the other hand, Afterstep has one type of effective virtual desktop (visual icon view) and Window Maker has one in which the arrows on the clip, when the clip is kept in the topleft corner, are clickable even with a window mostly covering the clip. I consider that as good as anything in MacOS, and I love MacOS:) Unix shells beat Applescript- with Applescript, the syntactic sugar hides the fact that it's still hard to get apps to do what you want. You have to get abstract anyway- best to not _pretend_ to be plain English:) most people do not use Applescript for anything. Color matching is still unmatched by anybody else- if you've used recent versions of ColorSync, you understand. Ironically it's marginally less powerful than earlier gamma controlpanels- but settings like accurate 50% settings for each color channel are made totally intuitive and graspable, and the process is clean and easy and direct- and Mac gamma IS GLOBAL. _All_ colors are correct, not just within certain windows like app-based color matching. I'd love to see Linux have something like this. Novice interface? Let the KDE people do that. Just keep 'em from getting in the way of my Window Maker, please;P Actually we do have tabbed dialogs, but they are new and usually part of Win ports and I personally dislike them too. They are an interface copout, an attempt to keep all options in your face at all times, like toolbar madness;P Installers more and more put stuff in the apple menu or system folder- I hate this too- the thing is, it used to be that programmers respected that we set up our _own_ systems. These days the assumption is that we want the programmers to administer everything. Blech- that'll drive me away from MacOS if it gets too bad:P Interestingly, the 'no window open' program always loses newbies- you launch a good Mac program and it waits for you to take some action and the newbie thinks nothing happened. It's like Unix- expert users want a cleaner interface. This type of Mac program is cleaner- in those cases the program's waiting for you to make a menu selection, and not drawing dancing paperclips and crap;) again, a waning style... BBEdit rules. Newswatcher rules too. There are indeed some beautiful apps there. I'm personally fond of Eudora Lite because of how light it really is, and how much you can do with keyboard shortcuts. It'd take me three times as long to handle the same load if I had to use the mouse- and I don't know the commands for Pine etc for doing this, nor do I have the same graphical overview of the messages I get in Eudora. Interestingly, all these programs are multi-overlapping-window style instead of textareas-artistically-spaced-in-a-gray-background style... I really hate when there are three little areas, one for connection, one for message list, one for the message- my priorities call for some of these to be in _background_ windows... GUI just _isn't_ tossing icons everywhere and putting all the types of information in different textareas... Mac hackers, powerusers, programmers, understand this: there is tons of serious research that's been done about this. Buy 'Tog On Interface' if you're serious about GUI- if you want to do userfriendly you do it this way or you're not doing it at all- it's a science, it's not an art or popularity contest. And Windows is hardly an example of the right way- and much of the Mac world isn't the right way either. You can get tons of Mac programs that suck. I just avoid those where possible. And yes- I program. Not well- I guess some of my ideas are OK, I guess some of my algorithms are OK. I've been implementing them in REALbasic for the Mac (like VB done right, without sucky parts, and fully compiled to native code). I anticipate having a much easier time learning C on Linux than I would learning it on the Mac (at least until I can get codewarrior) because C on Unix is _easier_ than Mac programming. Much. Mac programming is insanely hard- your program is expected to understand everything from drag+drop (and oh, that's fun to implement!;P ) to Color Quickdraw and the prospect of its windows being drawn half on a big screen at thousands of colors, half on a grayscale monitor off the side there, with meanwhile your refresh area being a region defined by the area not covered with two corners of other windows and a floating toolbar in the middle of your refresh area... this is enough to make you crazy. I'm going to find writing wee console apps much simpler- and there are things I need to do which would make fine little console apps- nothing more is needed, because this is linux, and I can pop open an xterm or use root tail to display the output of my program- or just pipe it into something or other. I have critical programs that could be reproduced by a sufficiently baroque shell script... I think, in the end, I'll be starting to program Linux simply because I expect Windows people busily programming Linux to make it work better for newbies and look and act more like they are used to- and this will hurt what it means to me, so in selfdefense I have to get involved and put some work in, stake my claim and define my territory. Not to make linux look and act like a Mac- but to retain the freedom to have it looking and acting however I please. So far I can still totally work it over and make it individual- I don't even want to lose that. I got a good, strong taste of that freedom using a Mac for years- I won't go back, I want to go forward and have even more individuality. Woohoo!:) And of course, I'd like to get my hands dirty with some techie details I'd really be able to cope with. I just _rebooted_ solely because, after hammering away at 27 different kinds of net content for 12 hours straight and then having a PPP timeout, MacOS got confused and couldn't shut down PPP effectively enough to restart it. At least in unix if I knew the correct obscure commands or whatever, I could do it myself...
This isn't about privacy at all, and never has been. I'm shocked people aren't cluing to this quicker, but maybe a lot of you are too accustomed to Windows and Intel to realize what you are saying. This is about setting up tollgates. It doesn't matter a damn whether the PIII ID is on or off by default- or what the ID even is! They could all be the same for all the difference it would make. This ID says _one_ message above all else- 'I am a Pentium III chip!' 'Okay, you may pass'. Who here has seen the 'Comic Explorer' effort on the Dilbert website? That's what we're talking about, not privacy issues. If I'm not mistaken Comic Explorer (and a silly idea it is, too- they seem to be confused about why anybody'd even want to play with such a toy) can be used by non Pentium II computers. However, Intel have paid off many people to suggest or demand that Pentium IIs, specifically, be used on their sites. Expect payoffs for people to not only demand, but _require_ the PIII ID on their sites. Yes, this cuts down the demographics- but it is not the site's idea, it is _Intel's_ idea and they are getting desperate for a way to _force_ people to get PIIIs and not keep buying those damned celerons. I picture them trying to cut a _big_ deal with some major player like Amazon.com or somewhere else that is a key web location- Microsoft might well be a target, but again this doesn't benefit the web site at all, only Intel, which is why Intel will pay off people to do it, and why it probably cannot get Microsoft to require this. MS has its own fish to fry and will refuse to play along, but Intel will surely find _somebody_ who is willing to get paid to cut off access to non-PIIIs, and then goodbye AMD, goodbye Celerons, PPC? What's that? It'll be Intel- it's not just a good idea, it's the law. And the boycotts will not stop this, and the notion that sites 'would never' do this is wrong because the site has to make a decision to intentionally hose their whole readership, or cordon off an area and deny it to their whole readership (like the Dilbert Comic Explorer?) for the purpose of requiring PIIIs alone, and getting paid off by Intel. Be ready to keep an eye out for these, because they _will_ be turning up here and there, despite how unpractical the idea is. How much would you personally have to be paid to make an area of your site PIII-only? I think I'd only require a hundred thousand bucks. How about making the whole site PIII-only and hosing everybody? That would be more like a million. Intel won't be paying _me_, but they will be able to get to some webmasters.
It's about authentication. Intel doesn't give a damn where you've been so long as they can set up a tollbooth which only Intel Pentium IIIs (not Cyrix, not AMD, not even Celerons!) can pass. If you _have_ to have a PIII to get in, maybe they will sell them. A later story seems to be saying they're backing down- fair enough, but this was never about privacy, it is about setting up an Intel Tollbooth. And why would people go along with that? Ask why the Dilbert website has a 'PII-required' Comic Explorer. Intel are quite ready to pay off people to do this sort of thing, and with a chip ID (it's really only saying 'this is a PIII!') they had a plan that would actually have forced people to not buy celerons and PPCs and what have you.
Well, fair enough, though I would point out that Jon exemplifies a type of user that you- we? Linux folk are going to be dealing with. For convenience's sake: my Email but honestly, if Katz is actually _using_ linux at all, I think he's interesting and amusing to hear from. It's like a tagalong kid brother, determined to fit in, and with such a relentlessly upbeat attitude that you can't help but warm to him eventually- Katz makes Linux sound quite hard, but _cool_, because of his relentless hero worship. I'm a different breed of Katz... er, I mean, quite another type of linux user;) I may be fairly lost on Linux, but I've been saying all along: there are Mac hackers, too, just as there are watercolor-painting geeks and slab pottery gurus out there. Frankly, the 'hacking curve' on a Mac has discontinuities- there's a pretty sharp break between resource hacking and system comprehension, and MacOS programming, and the latter requires the skills of a guru, or the purchase of expensive software from Metrowerks that has libs which can handle much of the sheer complexity of MacOS. I never quite got to that point, but you can't stop a hacker personality from fiddling with stuff, and so I'm currently looking at a MacOS desktop that looks like a weird NeXTStep design, with antialiased fonts, and with a desktop picture that has stuff to remember drawn on top of it like a more visually appealing 'root-tail' (meaning it's antialiased against the 2X picture and scaled back to size). However, doing this has meant rebooting after every picture update, because Desktop Pictures seems to not appreciate having its picture changed out from under it while it's running. I can do something like this simply using root-tail- it is far less sophisticated in some ways (my alpha MacOS tool can set all entries to different sizes and you can set positions by clicking in a little window with a small representation of the resulting screen) but it is less _fragile_, and that means it's more accessible- something you can _do_ without it blowing up in your face. THIS is what I am learning 'using the beast'. There are things I do with MacOS that I just plain like, and that I don't see a parallel to in Linux- yet. But MacOS was never intended to be customized to the extent you can customize Linux- and this is the direction I expect to be going. And, frankly, I don't think it is appropriate for Apple to take OSX in that direction- even if they can. I don't need a Slashdot license to write essays, for better or worse I am already doing that, perhaps in a less focussed manner because most of those essays began as my own Usenet posts- or Slashdot posts;) I am pleased at the kind word, AC- I'm a writer too, and we live and die by style.;) I don't think Katz should stop doing articles. There's a place for his breathless optimism and desire to belong. My own angle is more conceptual BOFHishness and gentle cynicism, combined with simple enjoyment of computer tricks and a relentless fascination with what these things _mean_ in society- and if CmdrTaco wants to find me, he knows where to look (at least now he does, since I've posted my Email;) ) As a final campaign promise, I assure you all that I don't own a copy of Microsoft Word and will not be generating mangled ASCII. Though I do own Excel. (c) 1985- the version that fits on an 800K floppy:) I believe I actually ran it once. For that matter, I also own Microsoft Typing Tutor- the 16K cassette tape version (seriously!) I have it on display in the customer area in the fixit shop where I work, but I think I ought to take it back home- nobody finds it as amusing as I do, and if they did, they'd probably steal it, and where am I going to get another copy, Redmond?;) But I digress. Am I as longwinded as Jon Katz yet?;)
I take it you ran 'top', then? I myself found it most delightful (though it's a bit frustrating what with the huge lists of processes- I must get rid of some of those silly daemons I'm not using:) ) This would mean you're running Linux, and probably the window that got stuck was some kind of KDE. Keep poking about in xterms- and do _not_ get hung up on RPMs, Jon, if you set up linuxppc on one of your Macs you'll be grateful you learned to do tar -xfz [file] and./configure make make install:) Chris, who's tickled. By God, I think he's got it!
Want a complementary (not compl_I_mentary, compl_e_mentary- I am a writer _too_;) ) set of articles? I'm getting tired enough of watching Katz to consider trying his job myself instead of just complaining. Qualifications? I'm a Mac user, always more techie about it than Jon, and two weekends ago I spent 18 hours downloading linuxppc- ever since I have been setting it up and getting more and more out of it. That means 'fighting with it merrily for late night after late night';) I started with KDE, and I might be the first person (or among the first) to run Window Maker on linuxppc. My inexperienced but tenacious onslaught on this migration to a truly personal linux box has been fraught with curiosity, shock, frustration and triumph. You can run those Afterstep animated backgrounds on WindowMaker! (shock) they are nothing more than a screensaver in the root window! You can use the resources of a mac graphics weenie to make tiles and killer backgrounds that are great on linux! www.airwindows.com/art/index.html (triumph. enjoy) You can discover that KDE does let you point and drool your way to dialup PPP access, but it _fakes_ configuring etc/resolve.conf and gets rid of its configurations afterward, leaving you hosed when you try to make wmppp work as a total newbie! (outrage) You can get really aggravated with the demented random keybindings and discover that MacOS is infinitely more supportive of keyboard shortcuts, and that many X apps are sorely lacking in keyboard shortcuts (emacs does _not_ count;) )! (astonishment) Yep, you heard right: two weeks and I'm already running Window Maker, have a smattering of themes I made myself (currently I still need to macweenie more tiling patterns to do titlebars and menu backgrounds), and last night I even got wmppp to fully work and never have to invoke kppp again! I also crashed under netscape and kppp and had to boot to manually fsck the disks, and for the very first time I figured out to go 'fsck dev/sdb5' and it worked! Nobody told me and the first time that'd happened, I didn't clue quickly enough, and simply reinstalled everything, figuring it wouldn't hurt to walk through all that again... Anyway, here I am- having a morning MacOS session (hey, I don't _run_ a server, and you can boot to MacOS for games and stuff, no harm in it) but I could just as well be posting from linuxppc and writing essays in vi in a transparent aterm (another hack I figured out through stubborn persistence). *wave* hey Rob! CmdrTaco! If you must have a Mac-fellow essaying about Linux, would you care to have one who can actually sit down and run it? I'm still a newbie- hell, I'm having trouble setting up any account other than root, so I daren't IRC to #slashdot yet- but I'd humbly suggest my experience could be every bit as valid as Jon's. I am _using_ linux. I don't think it rules the universe- but there are sure some things it does that'd be tough to do anywhere else, and I look forward to exploring that. And, again: here, I saw fit to take pretty much my entire MacOS personal texture and pattern collection, and my desktop pictures (all mine, original works) and put them up on my site for Linux people, approximately quadrupling the natural-media tile quotient I've seen out there;) www.airwindows.com/art/index.html Because it's good to share with friends. Also because I'm curious to see if slashdot will exceed the hammering I got from macintouch.com when my essay on Microsoft's ClearType and hand-antialiased fonts got mentioned. So, Rob, care for a different perspective on newbie issues and why to run Linux?:)
...and he flipped up the fan and removed the daughtercard, and took out the MB to add the ram. QED. Nice machine, too. Of course, if it takes him a half an hour to do that, he's a dreadful luser;) now, with some of the 'Chinese puzzle box' Performas I could understand, but a 9500?
No more need be said. But have fun, guys, I'm delighted to be reading about this stuff.:) *returns to fussing with linuxppc box w. windowmaker and all kinds o' funky widgets and programs:) *
I added the last comment to First Blood: basically saying 'HA! I beat Katz!'. This _is_ gratifying, but now I'm wondering if it's really worth treating it as a race. I have some advice for Jon if he's willing to hear it... So you are a Mac dude, Jon Katz? You're in luck- get an extra drive to put in your Mac, and run linux on _that_. I can tell you that it's easier that way. The bootloader is an extension and control panel (BootX, which rocks!) and is totally friendly. You can partition the drive in Drive Setup, _Mac_ style, and then simply copy the numbers for the pre-existing partitions. And you can boot back into MacOS and re-run the RAM disk for reinstalling Linux anytime you like, painlessly. Mac Linux is great, it's very effective. I really think you should be using Linux from a platform you know...
REALbasic and FutureBASIC are _Mac_ only! I know because I _use_ REALbasic and _have_ a Mac. It's at http://www.realbasic.com/. Yes, it's as good as you say it is. But you're not telling the whole story;)
Even if you insist no Mac is ever a workstation (debatable), there are things like RS/6000s etc etc, and of course the newly viable dualboot Mac running linuxppc. I just set my dualboot box up last weekend, and by God it's totally viable- you just have to find tar.gzip versions of things, which is good for you anyway, knowing how to compile things:) To _my_ viewpoint things are massively looking up for PPC Linux, because I am _running_ it, and I'm quite savvy about Mac issues and would _know_ if MacOS was going to be jerking around linux, and it ain't- MacOS thinks linux is A/UX partitions and leaves them alone, COEXISTS happily with them. Can you say the same for Windows? Does Windows consider linux partitions valid data, or mysterious garbage? Also, we have 'BootX' which replaces the need to mess about with Open Firmware- that's an ease-of-adoption issue and the effects _will_ be known. And I personally am already helping Mac newbies do things like kill kdm and install Window Maker. PPC Linux lives! Things are looking up for x86 alternatives. _try_ one! Pick up an old PCI Mac and make it a RISC Linux workstation. It's fun to have sweet hardware and a built-in respectable basic SCSI bus! It's never been easier to try Linux. Even if you download linuxPPC (no CD or floppies or anything) you only have to drag 2 files into your system folder, drag the BootX control panel/extension onto the system folder (they will be put in the right places) and reboot- undoing it all is as easy as dragging the files back out again, it's _never_ been so easy to try Linux, or so safe and convenient. Expect more PPC linux. I'm telling you, the nature of linux is to route around suckiness in the world and find the good answers. Well... looks like linux can get the most out of Apple hardware- and the Mac side _helps_ by being cooperative and adaptable, and the whole process is a _dream_ of simplicity and convenience. :):):):) There. heh. er, can you tell I'm enjoying linux and having a good experience with it? I'm just as much of a newbie as some of the PC guys who had hellish troubles and failed and gave bad press reports. Ponder that for a while;) isn't it good to encourage types of linux use that tend to create rabid frothing delighted fans?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there are some interesting things about Ebonics that aren't in proper English. I don't know much about it but I am still interested in learning more. The 'habitually' modifier, 'be', for instance. It's not just 'is', at all. There is an implication of frequency. For instance-
;)
"He hacking" -means he is hacking.
"He be hacking" -he always hacks, he is a hacker.
Thus, constructs like "He makin' sense but he don't _be_ makin' sense" which means "He is making sense but this is unusual enough to point out that usually he doesn't make sense".
-Chris be nitpicking
Sierra On-Line's 'Mystery House' (what you'd call low quality shit? Doubtless) was THE FIRST COMMERCIAL GAME EVER!!
Geez- you're comparing stuff from the peak Apple II/TRS-80/Commodore era with the _first_ stuff released back when there was only Apple II and nothing else (for a few months) and nobody had ever sold software in stores before?
Spacewar wasn't sold in stores. Adventure/ADVENT wasn't sold in stores.
I will admit I have _no_ Sierra games currently, nor can I think of a single one I even vaguely want- but have some historical perspective, man! Sierra On-Line were the first commercial game company _ever_, _anywhere_.
Of course, open source predated 'em >;)
Oh, this is too funny. Listen: x86 is similarly as far from open source as you could possibly imagine. Apple _II_ was open. Macintosh was not. But you're glorifying, as an alternative, twenty million incompetent hardware developers none of whom are talking to each other or implement the same way? Why, exactly, doesn't Plug and Play work for MS, if the world is as you think?
Forget it. You might as well suggest that Netwinders need to be totally clonable, or that Apple needs to ship everything triple-booting between MacOS, Be and Linux- or even Be, Linux and NT! Why should they get a chance to control their own products?
This is nonsense, and nobody is going to listen. And most people know what you don't- that your 'survival enhancing things' are suicidal. Some have been tried, some have not- none are sensible, even though it's a pity something like Be can't be supported.
The rest of the world is x86 running Windows- it _will_ be left behind by many different competitors. One of them is Apple. They're already obliterating the 'computing for Grandma' market without even major changes to MacOS, just by the iMac. That alone is putting x86 in the past for that market.
Just deal with the fact that you're, well, extremely incorrect, might I say? And none of this should suggest that it'd impede Linux adoption. Diversity is more natural and healthy- the linux crowd and the iMac crowd can be _very_ different- and still overlap here and there.
...of a MacInTouch Effect! o_O
I managed to get mentioned in a story about ClearType, and I'm telling you, my site got hammered. Much worse than anything I've ever seen from Slashdot, but I've never been in a _story_ in Slashdot, only comments, and that may be a difference. I figure if I can survive the MacInTouch effect, I could also survive a Slashdot Effect, as they appear to be roughly comparable and it depends on how obligatory the link seems. Many people wanted to read about ClearType issues- indeed, it may have been very indirectly Slashdottish, as I believe Slashdot was mentioning the MacInTouch Cleartype story. Mind you, MacInTouch is analogous to Slashdot and used to that kind of traffic...
I am afraid the original script and story for this game was _so_ awful that I think it may have hurt it when they were shopping it to distributors. Who here read _all_ the script? I did. They need help, desperately. If nothing else, the dialogue could be severely rewritten, but does the enemy _have_ to be a playful lovable sarcastic evil genius mad scientist? There's gotta be a better way to make players walk through prearranged battles. Also, the tiles for the terrain were _very_ strange and weird, though you have to respect the sheer volume of everything- lots of art there, of all sorts, and I'm still wondering how they planned to map some of those pictures onto objects.
Any ideas on the plot?
This is about setting things up so E-commerce, programs and information can be made PIII-only. It has very little to do with privacy, and everything to do with monopoly. The serial number is Intel Only, and even PIII only. Intel are desperate to sell more highend Pentiums, and they're setting up to bribe vendors heavily to do this. You surely don't think that, for instance, the Dilbert Comic Explorer is just something Scott Adams thought would be cool and set up one day? That bit of web tech brought the site payoffs from Intel. The only problem is, you can't _require_ people to use it, and I'm not sure it's really PII only like it strongly implies. So the next attempt is a CPU dongle, so that only PIIIs can even pretend to work with the new sites and programs and content- and then Intel busily sets about paying off other vendors to help the lock-in. Who says people have to _want_ to cooperate with Intel? They can be bribed.
It's exasperating to see how few people are recognizing this. The problem is, people are assuming content providers care most about their visitors. If it's possible to get paid off by Intel for putting closed content up, some people will choose to do so. Even when it's a CPU dongle that very few people currently have.
Try this, Jon- I guarantee you'll enjoy it...
Since you're booting into KDE (I have some usenet posts on getting rid of KDE, kppp etc), you have the option to launch X into 'failsafe' mode, which is a little screen area without a window manager. Do that, and type 'fvwm'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X.
Do that, and type 'fvwm2'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X.
Do that, and type 'afterstep'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X.
Do that, and type 'twm'. Play with it. Close the xterm, which will probably kill X.
_NOW_ you've stared at a Linux Operating System, and not before. The Linux operating system is the possibility of all those window managers. You could use any of them.
For extra credit, download and install Window Maker, and play with that too. If you want to get radical, install Enlightenment (eep!). I'm running Window Maker. My point is that the fvwms, afterstep etc are _on_ your box, and as the previous poster said, KDE IS NOT LINUX. Period. KDE is a determined attempt to be just like Windows but better. Some of us don't even like windows, and you should see what your options are before you decide that KDE is it. You might end up loving Afterstep, or WM, for their more NeXTian interface and the cleanness of the environment and the little dockable applets.
Are you running Windows? If so, I find your comment quite amusing. I (and Katz!) have spent years on Macs- top that for GUI deftness and task accomplishing.
That isn't the end of the story: so here I am, and here Katz is, looking into the frontier. I think Jon is a little carried away with the glamor of it all- me, I'm more interested with the way that it asks me to be the top-level kernel process. I think you are approaching computers from an 'appliance' point of view. There are other ways to interact with 'em. When Jon Katz gets a tremendous kick out of kill -9ing a process, it's because he is hooking into the computer at a more direct level, and _likes_ engaging more with it rather than giving the computer suggestions and watching it scuttle about implementing them.
William Gibson wrote about 'jacking in' to cyberspace in a way where the computer did all the work and went all the way towards adapting itself to the human. It'd generate visuals, frames of reference, the whole enchilada.
It's also possible to jack in by going some of the way towards adapting oneself to the computer- using a shell, remembering what directory you're in, warily using starname expansion, remembering that ls -a is what shows the dotfiles. The exact letters used in the cryptic little identifiers are unimportant- the point is that it's possible to use your human ingenuity and staggering processing power to not be lazy and take some of the load off the poor computer. They're really quite stupid things, and asking them to be wise is asking for trouble. Unix lets you be wise _for_ the computer, and lets it stick to the stuff it's good at rather than the stuff it's not good at.
You're free to disdain the idea of putting effort into helping the computer do its side of things, but this is not a moral imperative. It's not a sin to help a computer. It's not a sin for a computer to need such help. In some ways, the ones that try to not need such help (yes, even the Mac, and God help the Wintel PC) suffer from dreadful hubris and pay for it in reliability and trustworthiness...
This is _Jon_ _Katz_, juuri! You may never see another luser so patient and unperturbed by flames and rotten bad attitudes. He is a _luser_. He's a complete and total luser and he's not doing Linux because he has a hacker streak, like most of us. Instead he wants to do it for hero worship- and he is getting a hacker streak _grafted_ onto him, and the graft is _holding_. ;)
That's _news_, juuri. We had no reason to believe he'd _ever_ get it- his only reasons were ego-driven hero worship and wanting to be like what he considered cool people. He is _growing_ a hacker streak. He's a test case. He's just like countless total lusers out there with all the wrong reasons for running Linux- and he's being assimilated! _THIS_ _IS_ _NEWS_.
And he won't even mind my calling him a complete luser. You, on the other hand, would mind my calling you an elitist luser with many of the same ego-driven motivations as Katz- so I won't say it
Seriously. Look at this guy. He is a _complete_ luser and doesn't mind a bit, his attempts to 'get' Linux are impeded by his dreadful hero worship, the whole process has taken weeks and he still can't get PPP working and fire up Netscape (from my experience it locks and dies if you have no PPP and go to certain control panels) and he DIDN'T GIVE UP. This is very much 3 also! It's not _easy_ to bear that sort of frustration emotionally, even physically- stress symptoms begin showing up. He's doing it- he can hack the frustration of not being quite good enough to get everything running. The fact that he keeps trying is truly hacking in sense 4, and when he's not sure what he's doing it's sense 6. (hopefully he experiments with stuff too- hope he has an install disk of some kind because reinstalling is an OK newbie way of fixing a totally hosed system when you don't know what else to do, until such time as you know to fix it properly)
If I want One True Way I can tell you right now what I'd be using. MacOS ;) MacOS is seriously consistent, has a massive supply of apps with very long lifespans, and is easily fixed if anything goes wrong with it. Boot off something and shuffle stuff around in the System Folder, bam- 'no huhu'.
I _don't_ _want_ 'One True Way'. I want many different ways. Currently I'm a Window Maker fan on LinuxPPC, but I also liked Afterstep. I never managed to get Enlightenment working, but if I had I'd have played with that too. I played with twm, for God's sake, and enjoyed it! (wow... it's like the void of meditation...)
The KDE people are really beginning to annoy me with this attitude. I know where they got it- Microsoft- and since in their world my years of happy Mac use are a delusional fantasy and mirage, clearly they are sincere in feeling that there has to be just one 'winner' and everything else must die.
Personally, I'd like to see them take that attitude right back to Windows, and LEAVE it there, and not pollute Linux with it. Linux is a 'world' where I can try out and use lots of interesting apps, the authors of which had no _clue_ they'd be having their tools compiled and run on a Powermac. It's a world where I can love the Afterstep animated backgrounds- and I'm not the only one to be impressed by, say, 'Swarm'- and can find that hack works perfectly in Window Maker- that it's more general than I thought!
And it's a world in which I can use kppp to dial out from Window Maker- and struggle for days to figure out what is broken that I can't get wmppp to do the same- and find out that kppp is making _temporary_ changes in important files, so that the configuration data GOES AWAY when you stop using KDE tools!
I find that little bit of 'lock-in' hard to forgive, and I wonder how many people have enough of a hacker gene to work out what's being done and look at files being used, figure out what's happening. It's fine not messing with systems that already work, but KDE has sometimes been the system default- like with the linuxppc I began using- and this is not behavior suited to helping people understand how the system really works, this quiet adding and erasing of entries in config files.
I don't find it unthinkable that someday I'd treat KDE tools and applications like Microsoft code and eradicate it upon discovery- it wouldn't take much to reach that point, after my merry hunt for the pppd gremlins.
The frothing, deadly advocacy of some of the KDE advocates does _not_ help. Maybe some of the less ruthless ones can try to cool off the problem cases and make 'em get with the program? Their 'KDE will march on a road of bones!!!' attitude is absolutely unacceptable.
Hey, maybe it's just my not ever having used Windows, but I _don't_ think the windows desktop is workable and useful. I detest almost all the decisions made in it. I used a Mac for years, and still use one, and I'm posting from one right now- and I _don't_ want a window manager that acts like a Mac, either. (impossible to get anything even vaguely close as far as consistency etc). ;)
On Linux, I use Window Maker, after also having enjoyed Afterstep. Some of the Window Maker decisions I absolutely love- most of all, I am fond of the clean uncluttered nature of it. If I want lots of additional tiles I'll make many workspaces and keep different apps docked on each one... the idea that I need to be subjected to a taskbar, and a start menu, and a certain way of handling virtual desktops (I'm undecided which is better, Afterstep or WM- Afterstep's mini iconic version is very nice, but WM's 'you put it there, you remember it' is gratifying, and the clip 'switcher' is damned elegant in practice)
My point is that I am really pretty hostile towards KDE, due to its stated objectives and obvious goals. If I wanted the Windows desktop _I_ _WOULD_ _USE_ _IT_. Instead I used (and use) a Mac for years- and don't intend to try and change it into Windows or into WM- and using Linux, I went for Window Maker and don't intend to change it into the Mac, or into Windows.
I'm really sick of the notion that we should make Linux better by making a shell that acts like Windows, only without crashing. Is that the best you can do? Do you have _any_ _idea_ how very specific that approach is? It's not that way by accident. The taskbar is there because people used to launch apps on the Mac and not understand when the app waited for them to select or create something- or switch to another app, hide the first and 'out of sight, out of mind'. The concept of relying on the user's ability to know what the hell they are doing is laughed off by this approach- it's always luser-friendly in Windows land, until you want to scream. I'm sorry, but even if I'm only some Mac weenie with a hacking gene from somewhere, I'm still not going to sit around quietly as people try to pass off the design of Windows as workable and useful.
Build your own, or stay home.
There already _IS!!!_ a Windows. It is obscene to attempt to build another one. Build something original.
*hehe* goody, I can get flamed by KDE people for the rest of my life for _this_ one
Damn! I'd have thought _some_ slashdotters would clue to this! Nobody really _cares_ what Joe Schmoe does on the net. The issue here is:
-chip can send out a serial number asserting 'I am a PIII chip!'
...and of course this leads by the expenditures of payola-type money to...
-web sites begin REQUIRING, not suggesting, not demanding but REQUIRING Intel. Not just Intel, none of those damned Celerons- PIIIs!
I am sorry but THAT is what this is about- and I see no reason to humor it. Look, if even 25% of web sites were using such an arrangement, the _first_ thing that would come to people's minds would be Intel monopolising, trying to kill off AMD not to mention Motorola and anybody else by pure market manipulation tactics. Why, why is it that when it actually starts _happening_, people flip out, totally miss the real message and start thinking Intel cares about their visiting www.pam-anderson-in-spandex.com??
Sheesh. I almost want Arizona to _pass_ this one simply because in their stupidity they are addressing the real threat of this scenario that NOBODY else seems to be cluing into. Just why do you think Windows PCs are so frickin' popular, because people chose them on the merits? No, it's because people had stuff they wanted to do that was _barred_ to anything other than a Windows PC. Now Intel is trying to set up an authentication racket. Whether or not the thing's active by default is moot- if you want to surf X or download from Y you _will_ turn it on (or throw out your celeron, go buy a real PIII and _then_ turn it on)
The motive for Intel in this should be _damn_ obvious.
Borg Me, Linux ;)
I'll be the brain, personality and instincts. I'm good at that, but I cannot add with any serious impressiveness.
You be the nervous system doing my every whim
Screen fonts? OK- I am a big fan of many of them. I wish I had ProFont on linux :/ ;) :) :) most people do not use Applescript for anything. ;P ;P :P ;) again, a waning style... d style... I really hate when there are three little areas, one for connection, one for message list, one for the message- my priorities call for some of these to be in _background_ windows... ;P ) to Color Quickdraw and the prospect of its windows being drawn half on a big screen at thousands of colors, half on a grayscale monitor off the side there, with meanwhile your refresh area being a region defined by the area not covered with two corners of other windows and a floating toolbar in the middle of your refresh area... this is enough to make you crazy. I'm going to find writing wee console apps much simpler- and there are things I need to do which would make fine little console apps- nothing more is needed, because this is linux, and I can pop open an xterm or use root tail to display the output of my program- or just pipe it into something or other. I have critical programs that could be reproduced by a sufficiently baroque shell script... :)
Consistent keys for shortcuts? Aaaa! How I wish I had this on Linux! I really miss it terribly. I _use_ the keyboard. Hell, _Netscape_ does not have all the keyboard shortcuts under Linux. I guess I better learn emacs
Type/creator? Damn straight. This _works_. It _also_ assumes you are going to be making choices about your apps and files, that you will want to customize them or have special cases. The closest we get to the Windows file mapping tyranny is Quicktime or Internet Config download mapping. Even that sometimes annoys a Mac person...
The filename stuff is all basically the same in Linux- no extensions, the period is just another character it seems.
Contextual menus? That's recent for MacOS- but it wasn't Windows that invented it- it was Smalltalk! My preferred Linux windowmanager is Window Maker- it uses popups heavily, and lets me assign Fkeys to help pop up the menus that normally are 2nd and 3rd button.
No MDI windows! Damn straight, but you're understating how good drag and drop is on the Mac. Though it still has missing spots- every single network application I use (email, news, IRC, _ftp_ for God's sake) is totally drag-and-drop savvy from the desktop. _Netscape_ is not. I have to bounce stuff off of Simpletext to get text clippings. Text clippings _rule_. You don't even have to use a texteditor to view them- it's built into the windowmanager ("Finder"). The point about MacOS encouraging layering with offset windows is quite accurate- on the other hand, Afterstep has one type of effective virtual desktop (visual icon view) and Window Maker has one in which the arrows on the clip, when the clip is kept in the topleft corner, are clickable even with a window mostly covering the clip. I consider that as good as anything in MacOS, and I love MacOS
Unix shells beat Applescript- with Applescript, the syntactic sugar hides the fact that it's still hard to get apps to do what you want. You have to get abstract anyway- best to not _pretend_ to be plain English
Color matching is still unmatched by anybody else- if you've used recent versions of ColorSync, you understand. Ironically it's marginally less powerful than earlier gamma controlpanels- but settings like accurate 50% settings for each color channel are made totally intuitive and graspable, and the process is clean and easy and direct- and Mac gamma IS GLOBAL. _All_ colors are correct, not just within certain windows like app-based color matching. I'd love to see Linux have something like this.
Novice interface? Let the KDE people do that. Just keep 'em from getting in the way of my Window Maker, please
Actually we do have tabbed dialogs, but they are new and usually part of Win ports and I personally dislike them too. They are an interface copout, an attempt to keep all options in your face at all times, like toolbar madness
Installers more and more put stuff in the apple menu or system folder- I hate this too- the thing is, it used to be that programmers respected that we set up our _own_ systems. These days the assumption is that we want the programmers to administer everything. Blech- that'll drive me away from MacOS if it gets too bad
Interestingly, the 'no window open' program always loses newbies- you launch a good Mac program and it waits for you to take some action and the newbie thinks nothing happened. It's like Unix- expert users want a cleaner interface. This type of Mac program is cleaner- in those cases the program's waiting for you to make a menu selection, and not drawing dancing paperclips and crap
BBEdit rules. Newswatcher rules too. There are indeed some beautiful apps there. I'm personally fond of Eudora Lite because of how light it really is, and how much you can do with keyboard shortcuts. It'd take me three times as long to handle the same load if I had to use the mouse- and I don't know the commands for Pine etc for doing this, nor do I have the same graphical overview of the messages I get in Eudora. Interestingly, all these programs are multi-overlapping-window style instead of textareas-artistically-spaced-in-a-gray-backgroun
GUI just _isn't_ tossing icons everywhere and putting all the types of information in different textareas... Mac hackers, powerusers, programmers, understand this: there is tons of serious research that's been done about this. Buy 'Tog On Interface' if you're serious about GUI- if you want to do userfriendly you do it this way or you're not doing it at all- it's a science, it's not an art or popularity contest. And Windows is hardly an example of the right way- and much of the Mac world isn't the right way either. You can get tons of Mac programs that suck. I just avoid those where possible.
And yes- I program. Not well- I guess some of my ideas are OK, I guess some of my algorithms are OK. I've been implementing them in REALbasic for the Mac (like VB done right, without sucky parts, and fully compiled to native code). I anticipate having a much easier time learning C on Linux than I would learning it on the Mac (at least until I can get codewarrior) because C on Unix is _easier_ than Mac programming. Much. Mac programming is insanely hard- your program is expected to understand everything from drag+drop (and oh, that's fun to implement!
I think, in the end, I'll be starting to program Linux simply because I expect Windows people busily programming Linux to make it work better for newbies and look and act more like they are used to- and this will hurt what it means to me, so in selfdefense I have to get involved and put some work in, stake my claim and define my territory. Not to make linux look and act like a Mac- but to retain the freedom to have it looking and acting however I please. So far I can still totally work it over and make it individual- I don't even want to lose that. I got a good, strong taste of that freedom using a Mac for years- I won't go back, I want to go forward and have even more individuality. Woohoo!
And of course, I'd like to get my hands dirty with some techie details I'd really be able to cope with. I just _rebooted_ solely because, after hammering away at 27 different kinds of net content for 12 hours straight and then having a PPP timeout, MacOS got confused and couldn't shut down PPP effectively enough to restart it. At least in unix if I knew the correct obscure commands or whatever, I could do it myself...
This isn't about privacy at all, and never has been. I'm shocked people aren't cluing to this quicker, but maybe a lot of you are too accustomed to Windows and Intel to realize what you are saying.
This is about setting up tollgates. It doesn't matter a damn whether the PIII ID is on or off by default- or what the ID even is! They could all be the same for all the difference it would make. This ID says _one_ message above all else- 'I am a Pentium III chip!' 'Okay, you may pass'.
Who here has seen the 'Comic Explorer' effort on the Dilbert website? That's what we're talking about, not privacy issues. If I'm not mistaken Comic Explorer (and a silly idea it is, too- they seem to be confused about why anybody'd even want to play with such a toy) can be used by non Pentium II computers. However, Intel have paid off many people to suggest or demand that Pentium IIs, specifically, be used on their sites.
Expect payoffs for people to not only demand, but _require_ the PIII ID on their sites. Yes, this cuts down the demographics- but it is not the site's idea, it is _Intel's_ idea and they are getting desperate for a way to _force_ people to get PIIIs and not keep buying those damned celerons. I picture them trying to cut a _big_ deal with some major player like Amazon.com or somewhere else that is a key web location- Microsoft might well be a target, but again this doesn't benefit the web site at all, only Intel, which is why Intel will pay off people to do it, and why it probably cannot get Microsoft to require this. MS has its own fish to fry and will refuse to play along, but Intel will surely find _somebody_ who is willing to get paid to cut off access to non-PIIIs, and then goodbye AMD, goodbye Celerons, PPC? What's that? It'll be Intel- it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
And the boycotts will not stop this, and the notion that sites 'would never' do this is wrong because the site has to make a decision to intentionally hose their whole readership, or cordon off an area and deny it to their whole readership (like the Dilbert Comic Explorer?) for the purpose of requiring PIIIs alone, and getting paid off by Intel.
Be ready to keep an eye out for these, because they _will_ be turning up here and there, despite how unpractical the idea is. How much would you personally have to be paid to make an area of your site PIII-only? I think I'd only require a hundred thousand bucks. How about making the whole site PIII-only and hosing everybody? That would be more like a million. Intel won't be paying _me_, but they will be able to get to some webmasters.
It's about authentication. Intel doesn't give a damn where you've been so long as they can set up a tollbooth which only Intel Pentium IIIs (not Cyrix, not AMD, not even Celerons!) can pass.
If you _have_ to have a PIII to get in, maybe they will sell them.
A later story seems to be saying they're backing down- fair enough, but this was never about privacy, it is about setting up an Intel Tollbooth. And why would people go along with that? Ask why the Dilbert website has a 'PII-required' Comic Explorer. Intel are quite ready to pay off people to do this sort of thing, and with a chip ID (it's really only saying 'this is a PIII!') they had a plan that would actually have forced people to not buy celerons and PPCs and what have you.
Well, fair enough, though I would point out that Jon exemplifies a type of user that you- we? Linux folk are going to be dealing with. For convenience's sake: my Email but honestly, if Katz is actually _using_ linux at all, I think he's interesting and amusing to hear from. It's like a tagalong kid brother, determined to fit in, and with such a relentlessly upbeat attitude that you can't help but warm to him eventually- Katz makes Linux sound quite hard, but _cool_, because of his relentless hero worship. ;) I may be fairly lost on Linux, but I've been saying all along: there are Mac hackers, too, just as there are watercolor-painting geeks and slab pottery gurus out there. Frankly, the 'hacking curve' on a Mac has discontinuities- there's a pretty sharp break between resource hacking and system comprehension, and MacOS programming, and the latter requires the skills of a guru, or the purchase of expensive software from Metrowerks that has libs which can handle much of the sheer complexity of MacOS. ;) ;) I don't think Katz should stop doing articles. There's a place for his breathless optimism and desire to belong. My own angle is more conceptual BOFHishness and gentle cynicism, combined with simple enjoyment of computer tricks and a relentless fascination with what these things _mean_ in society- and if CmdrTaco wants to find me, he knows where to look (at least now he does, since I've posted my Email ;) ) :) I believe I actually ran it once. For that matter, I also own Microsoft Typing Tutor- the 16K cassette tape version (seriously!) I have it on display in the customer area in the fixit shop where I work, but I think I ought to take it back home- nobody finds it as amusing as I do, and if they did, they'd probably steal it, and where am I going to get another copy, Redmond? ;) ;)
I'm a different breed of Katz... er, I mean, quite another type of linux user
I never quite got to that point, but you can't stop a hacker personality from fiddling with stuff, and so I'm currently looking at a MacOS desktop that looks like a weird NeXTStep design, with antialiased fonts, and with a desktop picture that has stuff to remember drawn on top of it like a more visually appealing 'root-tail' (meaning it's antialiased against the 2X picture and scaled back to size).
However, doing this has meant rebooting after every picture update, because Desktop Pictures seems to not appreciate having its picture changed out from under it while it's running. I can do something like this simply using root-tail- it is far less sophisticated in some ways (my alpha MacOS tool can set all entries to different sizes and you can set positions by clicking in a little window with a small representation of the resulting screen) but it is less _fragile_, and that means it's more accessible- something you can _do_ without it blowing up in your face.
THIS is what I am learning 'using the beast'.
There are things I do with MacOS that I just plain like, and that I don't see a parallel to in Linux- yet. But MacOS was never intended to be customized to the extent you can customize Linux- and this is the direction I expect to be going. And, frankly, I don't think it is appropriate for Apple to take OSX in that direction- even if they can.
I don't need a Slashdot license to write essays, for better or worse I am already doing that, perhaps in a less focussed manner because most of those essays began as my own Usenet posts- or Slashdot posts
I am pleased at the kind word, AC- I'm a writer too, and we live and die by style.
As a final campaign promise, I assure you all that I don't own a copy of Microsoft Word and will not be generating mangled ASCII. Though I do own Excel. (c) 1985- the version that fits on an 800K floppy
But I digress. Am I as longwinded as Jon Katz yet?
I take it you ran 'top', then? I myself found it most delightful (though it's a bit frustrating what with the huge lists of processes- I must get rid of some of those silly daemons I'm not using :) ) ./configure make make install :)
This would mean you're running Linux, and probably the window that got stuck was some kind of KDE. Keep poking about in xterms- and do _not_ get hung up on RPMs, Jon, if you set up linuxppc on one of your Macs you'll be grateful you learned to do tar -xfz [file] and
Chris, who's tickled. By God, I think he's got it!
Want a complementary (not compl_I_mentary, compl_e_mentary- I am a writer _too_ ;) ) set of articles? ;) ;) )! (astonishment) ;) :)
I'm getting tired enough of watching Katz to consider trying his job myself instead of just complaining. Qualifications? I'm a Mac user, always more techie about it than Jon, and two weekends ago I spent 18 hours downloading linuxppc- ever since I have been setting it up and getting more and more out of it.
That means 'fighting with it merrily for late night after late night'
I started with KDE, and I might be the first person (or among the first) to run Window Maker on linuxppc. My inexperienced but tenacious onslaught on this migration to a truly personal linux box has been fraught with curiosity, shock, frustration and triumph. You can run those Afterstep animated backgrounds on WindowMaker! (shock) they are nothing more than a screensaver in the root window! You can use the resources of a mac graphics weenie to make tiles and killer backgrounds that are great on linux! www.airwindows.com/art/index.html (triumph. enjoy) You can discover that KDE does let you point and drool your way to dialup PPP access, but it _fakes_ configuring etc/resolve.conf and gets rid of its configurations afterward, leaving you hosed when you try to make wmppp work as a total newbie! (outrage) You can get really aggravated with the demented random keybindings and discover that MacOS is infinitely more supportive of keyboard shortcuts, and that many X apps are sorely lacking in keyboard shortcuts (emacs does _not_ count
Yep, you heard right: two weeks and I'm already running Window Maker, have a smattering of themes I made myself (currently I still need to macweenie more tiling patterns to do titlebars and menu backgrounds), and last night I even got wmppp to fully work and never have to invoke kppp again! I also crashed under netscape and kppp and had to boot to manually fsck the disks, and for the very first time I figured out to go 'fsck dev/sdb5' and it worked! Nobody told me and the first time that'd happened, I didn't clue quickly enough, and simply reinstalled everything, figuring it wouldn't hurt to walk through all that again...
Anyway, here I am- having a morning MacOS session (hey, I don't _run_ a server, and you can boot to MacOS for games and stuff, no harm in it) but I could just as well be posting from linuxppc and writing essays in vi in a transparent aterm (another hack I figured out through stubborn persistence). *wave* hey Rob! CmdrTaco! If you must have a Mac-fellow essaying about Linux, would you care to have one who can actually sit down and run it? I'm still a newbie- hell, I'm having trouble setting up any account other than root, so I daren't IRC to #slashdot yet- but I'd humbly suggest my experience could be every bit as valid as Jon's. I am _using_ linux. I don't think it rules the universe- but there are sure some things it does that'd be tough to do anywhere else, and I look forward to exploring that.
And, again: here, I saw fit to take pretty much my entire MacOS personal texture and pattern collection, and my desktop pictures (all mine, original works) and put them up on my site for Linux people, approximately quadrupling the natural-media tile quotient I've seen out there
www.airwindows.com/art/index.html
Because it's good to share with friends. Also because I'm curious to see if slashdot will exceed the hammering I got from macintouch.com when my essay on Microsoft's ClearType and hand-antialiased fonts got mentioned.
So, Rob, care for a different perspective on newbie issues and why to run Linux?
...and he flipped up the fan and removed the daughtercard, and took out the MB to add the ram. QED. Nice machine, too. ;) now, with some of the 'Chinese puzzle box' Performas I could understand, but a 9500?
Of course, if it takes him a half an hour to do that, he's a dreadful luser
No more need be said. But have fun, guys, I'm delighted to be reading about this stuff. :) :) *
*returns to fussing with linuxppc box w. windowmaker and all kinds o' funky widgets and programs
I added the last comment to First Blood: basically saying 'HA! I beat Katz!'. This _is_ gratifying, but now I'm wondering if it's really worth treating it as a race. I have some advice for Jon if he's willing to hear it...
So you are a Mac dude, Jon Katz? You're in luck- get an extra drive to put in your Mac, and run linux on _that_. I can tell you that it's easier that way. The bootloader is an extension and control panel (BootX, which rocks!) and is totally friendly. You can partition the drive in Drive Setup, _Mac_ style, and then simply copy the numbers for the pre-existing partitions. And you can boot back into MacOS and re-run the RAM disk for reinstalling Linux anytime you like, painlessly. Mac Linux is great, it's very effective.
I really think you should be using Linux from a platform you know...
REALbasic and FutureBASIC are _Mac_ only! I know because I _use_ REALbasic and _have_ a Mac. It's at http://www.realbasic.com/. Yes, it's as good as you say it is. But you're not telling the whole story ;)
Even if you insist no Mac is ever a workstation (debatable), there are things like RS/6000s etc etc, and of course the newly viable dualboot Mac running linuxppc. I just set my dualboot box up last weekend, and by God it's totally viable- you just have to find tar.gzip versions of things, which is good for you anyway, knowing how to compile things :) :) :) :) ;) isn't it good to encourage types of linux use that tend to create rabid frothing delighted fans? :)
To _my_ viewpoint things are massively looking up for PPC Linux, because I am _running_ it, and I'm quite savvy about Mac issues and would _know_ if MacOS was going to be jerking around linux, and it ain't- MacOS thinks linux is A/UX partitions and leaves them alone, COEXISTS happily with them. Can you say the same for Windows? Does Windows consider linux partitions valid data, or mysterious garbage? Also, we have 'BootX' which replaces the need to mess about with Open Firmware- that's an ease-of-adoption issue and the effects _will_ be known. And I personally am already helping Mac newbies do things like kill kdm and install Window Maker.
PPC Linux lives! Things are looking up for x86 alternatives. _try_ one! Pick up an old PCI Mac and make it a RISC Linux workstation. It's fun to have sweet hardware and a built-in respectable basic SCSI bus! It's never been easier to try Linux. Even if you download linuxPPC (no CD or floppies or anything) you only have to drag 2 files into your system folder, drag the BootX control panel/extension onto the system folder (they will be put in the right places) and reboot- undoing it all is as easy as dragging the files back out again, it's _never_ been so easy to try Linux, or so safe and convenient.
Expect more PPC linux. I'm telling you, the nature of linux is to route around suckiness in the world and find the good answers. Well... looks like linux can get the most out of Apple hardware- and the Mac side _helps_ by being cooperative and adaptable, and the whole process is a _dream_ of simplicity and convenience.
:)
There. heh. er, can you tell I'm enjoying linux and having a good experience with it? I'm just as much of a newbie as some of the PC guys who had hellish troubles and failed and gave bad press reports. Ponder that for a while