I realized this during a Women's Studies writing course I had to take - despite the objectification, comics and shows written for men show much stronger female characters than anything written for women.
Think about it - the female lead in almost any comic book, despite being terrible underdressed and having boobs the size of torpedoes, is an independent, intelligent equal whom works with the super-heroes as a team, or works on her own. Female villains are almost always the most dangerous due to their ability to outsmart the superheroes and charm to them their advantage.
Aside from the spandex, comic-book women are almost *exactly* the stereotype of the strong-minded, independent women that feminists are always saying women want to look up to!
Compare this to almost any show designed for girls, where the role models are concerned with dresses, flowers, and relationships and whose major plot revolves around getting her man despite the other girls after him. The women there are almost entirely submissive and domestic. Even if they are high-powered businesswomen, they are never happy until they meet mister right and have a ridiculously overcomplicated relationship with him that is generally spoiled due to their own weakness and pettiness, but is eventually saved because he is willing to put up with them.
I know which things I'd rather have my daughter reading. My guess is that nerds, who value intellectual discourse so much, actually *want* a woman who is an equal, whereas society really doesn't.
I'm so sick of this bullshit. Both of my G3's have fine battery life.
And whatever their initial position was, currently you can have apple replace the battery for free if you're still under warranty if it's life is as bad as everyone claims, or you can have a third party replace for it for the same cost as a removeable replacement battery would have been.
Lithium Ion batteries degrade, and there's no real way to make a removable one without making the device bigger. And the mini shows that yes, a lot of people *do* want something even smaller. My 40 gig is noticeably larger than my old 10 gig, and yes, it makes a difference, enough that adding even more onto that to increase battery life would make it too big to fit comfortably in a pocket.
If people's batteries are going down that quickly, why are they bitching about them on slashdot instead of calling apple and getting the replacement battery that apple has been willing to provide since the G2's were released.
Not mention that it makes scripting a pain in the ass. Quotes don't get passed around with you command line arguments, and there's no way to escape a space, so you end up with a bunch of
So what if this is the third Google post today - they're making news.
This is a great idea and a huge help to open to source. You actually RTFA, they're working with a lot of other major open source programs on this - the work isn't going directly to google.
It's basically giving students and internship with an open source foundation, something that doesn't seem like it was a huge option before.
I know I'd go for it if I hadn't already found employment this summer.
Yeah, I think they changed the behavior to make it impossible in OS X, too. In addition to the "window" menu item.
But that's the supposed original reason.
In general I like not having the extra space taken up, and rarely resize windows since they came out with expose, but I can see where they can be useful.
Which is, of course, why almost everyone is running Intel.
The reliability problem isn't the x86 platform in general, it's dell and sony and HP and compaq and every shit small-time vendor that throws the cheapest crap they can into a desktop.
I've done support for I don't know how many people and I've never seen a prefab system that looked like it had any thought at all put into the internals other than how cheap can be make it. The max out the processor and put a cheapo, slow maxtor drive in it, then toss in cheap ass, slow ram and a no-name motherboard.
*I* can put together a reliable x86 box, but I have yet to see any non computer-tech I know with one that isn't just a giant box full of troubles waiting to happen.
This is compared, of course, to the beauty of engineering inside my powerbook.
I'd like to know where you can get a well-made PC with good tech support, because that's where I'll point all my friends who refuse to buy macs. Then maybe I'll have less tech support to do.
As for the scroll arrows, it's actually a legitimate preference that they decided they didn't like enough to expose in the GUI.
Tinkertool is a utility that gives you quick access to that and a few other things.
There's actually a reason for the "only one resizer" thing. Say a window gets stuck off-screen because of a change in resolution or some other random reason (I've had it happen in windows, and I think on an old mac once or twice), and you can only see the bottom of a side. On windows, there isn't much you can do from what you can see... you can resize it, but you still can't access any controls. On old mac windows, you can drag the window back onto your workspace.
Unfortunately, you kind of lost that in the "we don't like window edges anymore... except for when we do" craziness of the current incarnation of aqua. So I don't really know.
I'll agree that an increased marketshare will increase the number of viruses and spyware on the mac platform... but don't exaggerate too much.
Windows XP has been shipping for all but the last six months with how many ports open to the public? My *job* is to write remote automation scripts - they do practically the same thing as a virus, and until SP2 I didn't need to change a damn setting on a new install to open it up for remote control.
Even with its massive market-share, if Windows XP had come out in the configuration present in SP2, we wouldn't have the massive zombie armies of today, or the five billion types of spyware. Sure, there'd be a few, and Symantec wouldn't go out of business, but the level of vulnerability of the XP defaults is more of an issue than how many different explicit exploits people can find in windows.
Despite a few potential security holes and exploits, OS X comes locked down out of the box. There's nothing I need to do to secure it from a general attack - as opposed to the XP box, where I have a >10 point checklist.
That makes a difference, even if you're the #1 in marketshare. How much better is SP2's record so far?
OS X security is a good thing to worry about, and I'm sure with greater marketshare there will eventually be some spyware and viruses. However, just because a few theoretical vulnerabilities have been in the news does NOT mean that its security is in any way comparable to pre-SP2 XP.
I own several home-made PC's myself, and I definitely like being able to throw together a powerful system for under a thousand dollars (with all the extra drives that I know I'll need).
But if I were stuck with only one system, or had to recommend something to my dad, the lack of hassles in a mac are definitely worth losing a little bit of choice.
I've never had big issues because of these choices, but if you completely ignore hardware compatibility lists, etc then yes I can see where these problems would arrise.
Read the article more carefully. He bought a prebuilt laptop from a name-brand manufacturer. If someone wasn't looking at compatibility lists, it was Sony, so I don't think that's what he was really complaining about.
The problem is that your friends and neighbors using or not using macs *does* influence your ability to use it. More mac users means...
1. More mac apps. 2. More mac developers. 3. More mac hardware. 4. More websites that don't require IE. 5. More mac games. 6. More mac support. 7. Better cultural acceptance (I'm *so* tired of walking into a lan party and getting flamed for my mac.)
Not to mention the fact that it means fewer calls to you for tech support because they can't get rid of bonzai buddy. Or fewer attack zombies wandering the internet to bring down your company's network.
In small numbers, no, it doesn't matter, but it's one of the unfortunately truths of a small platform or standard that how widely its adopted can greatly affect the user experience. You can't play a multiplayer game by yourself.
I run my own SMTP server on my laptop. It ignores anything not coming from localhost, so it's at least reasonable safe.
I use it because when I'm jumping onto a friend's wireless network, my ISP of course any mail I'm trying to send (since I'm outside their network), and it's impractical to reconfigure for every five minutes I want to spend sending something from a friend's system.
So I always send it myself. This obvious won't work if port 25 is blocked by default, as I'm also not going to call the ISP to spend five minutes on a connection.
I'd always got the impression that spam zombies were spending out enough bulk that the traffic should be pretty obvious and easy to identify. Why not just redirect anyone who sending that much to a support page for a virus scan, instead of interfereing with legitimate uses? If they're in one of the rare cases where they're ACTUALLY generating that much traffic on a consumer line, a quick email to tech support takes them off the monitor list.
I know I *could* just use webmail somewhere, but have you ever used that on Dialup? twenty-thirty minutes to check my email and send a single reply just isn't reasonable when i can do the same thing over the same connection in five through my real mail client.
I've heard that Sony used a lot of Connectix's tech to make the PS2 backwards compatible. Connectix used to make a really great PS1 emulator that Sony failed to sue into oblivion and then just bought outright. Soon after - PS2 plays playstation games.
And of course parents were never able to manage their children's lives and activities before cell phones were invented.
I'll agree that they're useful little things, but they aren't worth $40 a month to me. I don't need to reach/be reachable at all times - just need to set a time to meet beforehand.
"Almost everyone knows you "steer into a skid" but how many people do that instinctively?"
Especially when you're driving a friend's car and all your reflexes are trained for your own front wheel drive compact.
I'm not proud of it, but by the time my brain had recalled what I learned in driver's ed about handling a skid in a rear-wheel, we were sitting in the ditch, and my girlfriend had a new embarassing story to tell her family.
But still - open office feels kind of nasty to use on OS X, and although Office is pretty bad, it at least presents users with normal open and save dialog boxes.
OO you suddenly have your menus in the window and a bunch of other windows-y behaviors that feel quite out of place. I use OO and gnumeric on OS X myself, but I don't really feel like recomending them to my dad.
What functionality is there in an mp3 player? I want it to:
a) play mp3's b)...??
The interface is what makes the system. The live-search in iTune's library is IMO the *only* way to manage your library. Maybe winamp's added that by now, but last I used it it didn't come close.
Type in two characters and you have any song you want. In fact, you probably have a nice playlist of every song by the artist you were looking for, whether the ID3 tag says "Ben Folds" or "Ben Folds Five" or "Ben Fold." That feature is why I use iTunes.
Adding songs to my iPod is drag and drop - I never touch the autosync. What else do you do with an mp3 player?
What music player do you use instead on windows? WinAmp? I can't stand the interface. I practically jumped for joy when Apple released iTunes for PC, not because I had been annoyed by my third-party ipod-syncing tools, but because it mean I could finally stop rummaging through the dumpster that is the windows MP3 player market.
I tried about five different players, and none of them came close to iTunes simplicity and ease of use. I don't care if it takes up some memory - I usually have plenty free anyway. I care about the fact that winamp, the best other player I found, looks and acts like crap no matter how you skin it because no one making skins understands anything about user interface.
iTunes isn't even my favorite player on the mac, or wasn't - the soundjam it used to be before apple bought it honestly was. I still miss some of its random little features. But honestly, I'd like to hear what you would replace iTunes with that is so great.
Slashdot Mirror
I realized this during a Women's Studies writing course I had to take - despite the objectification, comics and shows written for men show much stronger female characters than anything written for women.
Think about it - the female lead in almost any comic book, despite being terrible underdressed and having boobs the size of torpedoes, is an independent, intelligent equal whom works with the super-heroes as a team, or works on her own. Female villains are almost always the most dangerous due to their ability to outsmart the superheroes and charm to them their advantage.
Aside from the spandex, comic-book women are almost *exactly* the stereotype of the strong-minded, independent women that feminists are always saying women want to look up to!
Compare this to almost any show designed for girls, where the role models are concerned with dresses, flowers, and relationships and whose major plot revolves around getting her man despite the other girls after him. The women there are almost entirely submissive and domestic. Even if they are high-powered businesswomen, they are never happy until they meet mister right and have a ridiculously overcomplicated relationship with him that is generally spoiled due to their own weakness and pettiness, but is eventually saved because he is willing to put up with them.
I know which things I'd rather have my daughter reading. My guess is that nerds, who value intellectual discourse so much, actually *want* a woman who is an equal, whereas society really doesn't.
I'm so sick of this bullshit. Both of my G3's have fine battery life.
And whatever their initial position was, currently you can have apple replace the battery for free if you're still under warranty if it's life is as bad as everyone claims, or you can have a third party replace for it for the same cost as a removeable replacement battery would have been.
Lithium Ion batteries degrade, and there's no real way to make a removable one without making the device bigger. And the mini shows that yes, a lot of people *do* want something even smaller. My 40 gig is noticeably larger than my old 10 gig, and yes, it makes a difference, enough that adding even more onto that to increase battery life would make it too big to fit comfortably in a pocket.
If people's batteries are going down that quickly, why are they bitching about them on slashdot instead of calling apple and getting the replacement battery that apple has been willing to provide since the G2's were released.
Not mention that it makes scripting a pain in the ass. Quotes don't get passed around with you command line arguments, and there's no way to escape a space, so you end up with a bunch of
replace(string, "''", """")
kludges in vbscript.
So what if this is the third Google post today - they're making news.
This is a great idea and a huge help to open to source. You actually RTFA, they're working with a lot of other major open source programs on this - the work isn't going directly to google.
It's basically giving students and internship with an open source foundation, something that doesn't seem like it was a huge option before.
I know I'd go for it if I hadn't already found employment this summer.
Yeah, I think they changed the behavior to make it impossible in OS X, too. In addition to the "window" menu item.
But that's the supposed original reason.
In general I like not having the extra space taken up, and rarely resize windows since they came out with expose, but I can see where they can be useful.
Which is, of course, why almost everyone is running Intel.
The reliability problem isn't the x86 platform in general, it's dell and sony and HP and compaq and every shit small-time vendor that throws the cheapest crap they can into a desktop.
I've done support for I don't know how many people and I've never seen a prefab system that looked like it had any thought at all put into the internals other than how cheap can be make it. The max out the processor and put a cheapo, slow maxtor drive in it, then toss in cheap ass, slow ram and a no-name motherboard.
*I* can put together a reliable x86 box, but I have yet to see any non computer-tech I know with one that isn't just a giant box full of troubles waiting to happen.
This is compared, of course, to the beauty of engineering inside my powerbook.
I'd like to know where you can get a well-made PC with good tech support, because that's where I'll point all my friends who refuse to buy macs. Then maybe I'll have less tech support to do.
Definite agreement there. It's disgustingly easy to use for the things it was meant for, and fast enough for them.
There's no reason a small business without dedicated IT should be screwing around with SQL or the crap interface in Access.
As for the scroll arrows, it's actually a legitimate preference that they decided they didn't like enough to expose in the GUI. Tinkertool is a utility that gives you quick access to that and a few other things.
There's actually a reason for the "only one resizer" thing. Say a window gets stuck off-screen because of a change in resolution or some other random reason (I've had it happen in windows, and I think on an old mac once or twice), and you can only see the bottom of a side. On windows, there isn't much you can do from what you can see... you can resize it, but you still can't access any controls. On old mac windows, you can drag the window back onto your workspace.
Unfortunately, you kind of lost that in the "we don't like window edges anymore... except for when we do" craziness of the current incarnation of aqua. So I don't really know.
I'll agree that an increased marketshare will increase the number of viruses and spyware on the mac platform... but don't exaggerate too much.
Windows XP has been shipping for all but the last six months with how many ports open to the public? My *job* is to write remote automation scripts - they do practically the same thing as a virus, and until SP2 I didn't need to change a damn setting on a new install to open it up for remote control.
Even with its massive market-share, if Windows XP had come out in the configuration present in SP2, we wouldn't have the massive zombie armies of today, or the five billion types of spyware. Sure, there'd be a few, and Symantec wouldn't go out of business, but the level of vulnerability of the XP defaults is more of an issue than how many different explicit exploits people can find in windows.
Despite a few potential security holes and exploits, OS X comes locked down out of the box. There's nothing I need to do to secure it from a general attack - as opposed to the XP box, where I have a >10 point checklist.
That makes a difference, even if you're the #1 in marketshare. How much better is SP2's record so far?
OS X security is a good thing to worry about, and I'm sure with greater marketshare there will eventually be some spyware and viruses. However, just because a few theoretical vulnerabilities have been in the news does NOT mean that its security is in any way comparable to pre-SP2 XP.
Yes, just pointing out a flaw in the argument.
I own several home-made PC's myself, and I definitely like being able to throw together a powerful system for under a thousand dollars (with all the extra drives that I know I'll need).
But if I were stuck with only one system, or had to recommend something to my dad, the lack of hassles in a mac are definitely worth losing a little bit of choice.
Do you want a hobby or a tool?
I love the people who troll slashdot to call *other* people nerds.
Read the article more carefully. He bought a prebuilt laptop from a name-brand manufacturer. If someone wasn't looking at compatibility lists, it was Sony, so I don't think that's what he was really complaining about.
The problem is that your friends and neighbors using or not using macs *does* influence your ability to use it. More mac users means...
1. More mac apps.
2. More mac developers.
3. More mac hardware.
4. More websites that don't require IE.
5. More mac games.
6. More mac support.
7. Better cultural acceptance (I'm *so* tired of walking into a lan party and getting flamed for my mac.)
Not to mention the fact that it means fewer calls to you for tech support because they can't get rid of bonzai buddy. Or fewer attack zombies wandering the internet to bring down your company's network.
In small numbers, no, it doesn't matter, but it's one of the unfortunately truths of a small platform or standard that how widely its adopted can greatly affect the user experience. You can't play a multiplayer game by yourself.
I run my own SMTP server on my laptop. It ignores anything not coming from localhost, so it's at least reasonable safe.
I use it because when I'm jumping onto a friend's wireless network, my ISP of course any mail I'm trying to send (since I'm outside their network), and it's impractical to reconfigure for every five minutes I want to spend sending something from a friend's system.
So I always send it myself. This obvious won't work if port 25 is blocked by default, as I'm also not going to call the ISP to spend five minutes on a connection.
I'd always got the impression that spam zombies were spending out enough bulk that the traffic should be pretty obvious and easy to identify. Why not just redirect anyone who sending that much to a support page for a virus scan, instead of interfereing with legitimate uses? If they're in one of the rare cases where they're ACTUALLY generating that much traffic on a consumer line, a quick email to tech support takes them off the monitor list.
I know I *could* just use webmail somewhere, but have you ever used that on Dialup? twenty-thirty minutes to check my email and send a single reply just isn't reasonable when i can do the same thing over the same connection in five through my real mail client.
Not to mention the fact that those bases add a lot to the civilian economy in most areas.
Wright Patterson, I know at least, employs quite a large portion of anyone with a science degree in Fairborn.
I agree that it'd be great to have increased game selection, but why not just run the Mac native port of Halo? ;-)
Indeed.
I've heard that Sony used a lot of Connectix's tech to make the PS2 backwards compatible. Connectix used to make a really great PS1 emulator that Sony failed to sue into oblivion and then just bought outright. Soon after - PS2 plays playstation games.
And of course parents were never able to manage their children's lives and activities before cell phones were invented.
I'll agree that they're useful little things, but they aren't worth $40 a month to me. I don't need to reach/be reachable at all times - just need to set a time to meet beforehand.
"Almost everyone knows you "steer into a skid" but how many people do that instinctively?"
Especially when you're driving a friend's car and all your reflexes are trained for your own front wheel drive compact.
I'm not proud of it, but by the time my brain had recalled what I learned in driver's ed about handling a skid in a rear-wheel, we were sitting in the ditch, and my girlfriend had a new embarassing story to tell her family.
You obviously haven't played around with Omnigraffle.
Exactly how many hits they get from IE's default setting of taking you to MSN search if you mis-type a URL.
That always seemed kind of sleazy to me, since the results were never, ever useful.
Oh, I despise Office.
But still - open office feels kind of nasty to use on OS X, and although Office is pretty bad, it at least presents users with normal open and save dialog boxes.
OO you suddenly have your menus in the window and a bunch of other windows-y behaviors that feel quite out of place. I use OO and gnumeric on OS X myself, but I don't really feel like recomending them to my dad.
The complaint with the UI OO.org for mac os x isn't that it's any worse than the OO UI on other platforms, but that it's exactly the same.
Mixing GUI metaphors can be really annoying for any sort of serious workflow.
What functionality is there in an mp3 player? I want it to:
a) play mp3's
b)...??
The interface is what makes the system. The live-search in iTune's library is IMO the *only* way to manage your library. Maybe winamp's added that by now, but last I used it it didn't come close.
Type in two characters and you have any song you want. In fact, you probably have a nice playlist of every song by the artist you were looking for, whether the ID3 tag says "Ben Folds" or "Ben Folds Five" or "Ben Fold." That feature is why I use iTunes.
Adding songs to my iPod is drag and drop - I never touch the autosync. What else do you do with an mp3 player?
What music player do you use instead on windows? WinAmp? I can't stand the interface. I practically jumped for joy when Apple released iTunes for PC, not because I had been annoyed by my third-party ipod-syncing tools, but because it mean I could finally stop rummaging through the dumpster that is the windows MP3 player market.
I tried about five different players, and none of them came close to iTunes simplicity and ease of use. I don't care if it takes up some memory - I usually have plenty free anyway. I care about the fact that winamp, the best other player I found, looks and acts like crap no matter how you skin it because no one making skins understands anything about user interface.
iTunes isn't even my favorite player on the mac, or wasn't - the soundjam it used to be before apple bought it honestly was. I still miss some of its random little features. But honestly, I'd like to hear what you would replace iTunes with that is so great.