I find that sheets suck. They're mainly used for SaveAs dialogs (saving a file or downloading a file to a certain location with a certain name in some apps). The problem is that when choosing a name for the saved file, I look at the contents of the document (or the web page containing the link that I'm downloading), but the sheet is covering the document so I can't see it; and I can't move it without dismissing it first. Quite annoying.
Someone really needs to do a double-blind sometime. Get some screenshots of an unannounced Apple theme, and some of an unannounced Microsoft theme, and see whether people masturbate over the Apple one and shit on the Microsoft one when they don't know which is which.
This is an excellent point, and most here know it to be true deep in their hearts.
I see the Aug 2005 browser stats at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp also show Firefox losing support for the 3rd straight month, including 0.9% percentage points each of the last two months. That loss in browsershare went to IE.
Microsoft will make Linux software if they determine that there's money to be made there. Many Linux users think all software should be free (as in beer, speech, or both), and a commercial software studio can't make money selling software to such a customer base.
And the ones that laugh at an obvious exercise in humor through parody and sarcasm? Where did they go? I'm disappointed in you all.
Unfortunately, it becomes difficult to distinguish parady/sarcasm from idiocy in an environment where irrational idiocy is the norm. Many here do have an irrational hatred of Microsoft, so how can one tell if one is being sarcastic recarding a Microsoft story or just plain stupid?
Good memory management in contrast to consumer OS options at the time (i.e., Win 3.1)? Yeah. It wasn't bad at all. In fact, for the early 90s, it was pretty slick how easy it was to tweak memory allocation for apps and monitor memory use through the "About" box.
LOL Are you kidding? That "feature" was evidence of how primitive the memory management system was. Don't get me started on the hell that was "Grow Zones", not to mention having to worry about "high" memory vs "low" memory vs "temp" memory vs "system" memory. And of course, all apps and OS shared the same address space (like Win3x). Win3.x was had much better memory management IMO, despite being a 16 bit OS (at the time of Win3.1, Mac OS was 24 and 32 bit).
But yeah, NT and Win9x blew away Mac OS Classic's memory management.
Agreed. As long as slashdot uses the Borg icon for Microsoft stories and the broken stained glass window pane icon for Windows stories, the site cannot be regarded as one with credibility.
I agree that the media should report virus incidents. But if they report them in an overblown or sensationalistic fashion, people might start ignoring them ala "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf". Similar to how Bush bogusly raised the terrorism threat level whenever he needed a bump in the polls, so that today nobody pays attention to the terrorism threat level.
"The lesson in this article should be also that there is something wrong with the Windows kernel if there can be written whole books about how to make rootkits for it. The same can go for the Linux kernel."
Please... I'm sure that there are those that can write books on how to break into a car, too.
"This should be an inflection point, where we see if people are willing to do the minimal but nonzero effort to get a browser other than IE on their computers. If that number turns out to be 10%, that's too bad. I'd really hoped for something closer to 40%, given how terrible IE is."
Then again, maybe IE's not as "terrible" as you think (or, wish, hope, pray, whatever...).
This is the way that exploits are normally made nowadays. The hackers wait for security updates to be released, examine the updates to determine what holes they fixed, then create exloits targetting those holes, hoping to get at the machines that haven't yet applied the update.
It's been this way for years. The three *major* worms/viruses that were released in 2000-2003 (Sasser, Blaster, and the other whose name I forget) were all released after the corresponsing patches had been released (sometimes *months* after). Only machines that hadn't been updated were compromised, but it was common a few years ago for IT departments in businesses (much more so than home machines) to be slow to apply updates, much more so that today.
(IT depts now usually take updates quickly because Microsoft went to the monthly update release schedule, allowing IT depts can plan accordingly. In the past there was no regular release schedule, so IT depts couldn't plan for updates and as a result many times simply didn't apply updates at all.)
"Foreign elements are not required to be preserved. This means that if I DO extend the standard, no other application is required to preserve any elements not in the standard. This makes it effectively useless to extend it at all, since loading it into any other word processor will likely cause your data or formatting to disappear."
Well, it's rather difficult for a word processor to faithfully preserve elements that it doesn't understand. Let's say that a word processor did try to maintain such elements by reading them when loading a document and writing them back out when saving the document. If the user edits other data in the document, that data might become inconsistent with the "foreign elements", so what can the word processor do but throw away the "foreign element" data?
Let's say that a word processing format supported text but no graphs. Let's say that Word Processor A introduced graphs as a foreign element. Let's say a user used Word Processor A to create a document containing textual data as well as graphs showing a visual display of that data. Now another user uses Word Processor B to open the document, but Word Processor B doesn't understand graphs, but loads the graph data as blobs and will write the blobs back out when the user saves the document. The user then edits the textual data and saves the document, but the textual data is no longer consistent with the graph data. The first user reloads the document in Word Processor A and behold - the document is an inconsistent mess as the text no longer matches the graphs.
"If Microsoft used their open code, it would be hard for MS to claim that open source is inherently bad, or proprietary code is inherently superior. "
Microsoft already uses open source code, just not GPL code.
"Google would demonstrate the same argument, but no one complains about Google's code remaining proprietary, because it mainly runs on their servers, which few people yet demand should be opened to outsiders."
This is how GPL will die a slow death. More and more developers are "releasing" apps as web apps rather than distributed binaries. These devs can "derive" their product from GPL code and make their products available to be used by the public without having to release their code, simply because the apps are run on their server rather than run on the user's computer. That the GPL folks continue to allow for this huge hole in the GPL license (because they don't want to step on Google's toes) shows their huge hypocrisy.
Since the guy that suggested using mod chips made the suggestion as a way to combat the $60 price for games, and explicitly talked of playing "backups", I doubt that the reason he's advocating mod chips is to enable the playing of "homebrew" games.
Assuming that an app wants to use "right click" to display a context popup menu, the Carbon Mac API supports the kEventClassWindow / kEventWindowContextualMenuSelect event which is automatically sent to the app's event handler when the user right-clicks or control-clicks; the app responds by displaying the context menu via the ContextualMenuSelect function (related functions are IsShowContextualMenuEvent, HandleControlContextualMenuSelect, PopUpMenuSelect). I'm not familiar with the Cocoa api, but I imagine that it also has explicit support for context menus (likely more high-level than Carbon).
So yes, OS X has supported this from the beginning, but no, having one default button doesn't force developers to make a system that is accessible without context menus because commands in context menus are accessible via control-click even if the user's mouse only has one button.
Note that Microsoft and Logitech mice have provided right click functionality on Macs for years (and both are better than Apple's mice, IMO).
Also note that even before OS X, apps could support "right clicks" via control-click, but they had to explicitly check whether the control key was pressed during a click, which isn't necessary for OS X's Carbon Event Manager and Cocoa api. And before OS X, if one did use a two button mouse, the mouse driver had to map a right click to a control-click since apps explicitly processed control-clicks in those days.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that sheets suck. They're mainly used for SaveAs dialogs (saving a file or downloading a file to a certain location with a certain name in some apps). The problem is that when choosing a name for the saved file, I look at the contents of the document (or the web page containing the link that I'm downloading), but the sheet is covering the document so I can't see it; and I can't move it without dismissing it first. Quite annoying.
Someone really needs to do a double-blind sometime. Get some screenshots of an unannounced Apple theme, and some of an unannounced Microsoft theme, and see whether people masturbate over the Apple one and shit on the Microsoft one when they don't know which is which.
This is an excellent point, and most here know it to be true deep in their hearts.
What the hell does this have to do with my "rights online"?
I see the Aug 2005 browser stats at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp also show Firefox losing support for the 3rd straight month, including 0.9% percentage points each of the last two months. That loss in browsershare went to IE.
Microsoft will make Linux software if they determine that there's money to be made there. Many Linux users think all software should be free (as in beer, speech, or both), and a commercial software studio can't make money selling software to such a customer base.
to undertake such a study. I wonder why?
* Yes, I'm aware this [proffesionality] isn't an actual word.
;)
Maybe it wasn't before, but it is now. Hey, words have to get their start from someplace, and a slashdot post is just as good a any.
And the ones that laugh at an obvious exercise in humor through parody and sarcasm? Where did they go? I'm disappointed in you all.
Unfortunately, it becomes difficult to distinguish parady/sarcasm from idiocy in an environment where irrational idiocy is the norm. Many here do have an irrational hatred of Microsoft, so how can one tell if one is being sarcastic recarding a Microsoft story or just plain stupid?
Good memory management in contrast to consumer OS options at the time (i.e., Win 3.1)? Yeah. It wasn't bad at all. In fact, for the early 90s, it was pretty slick how easy it was to tweak memory allocation for apps and monitor memory use through the "About" box.
LOL
Are you kidding? That "feature" was evidence of how primitive the memory management system was. Don't get me started on the hell that was "Grow Zones", not to mention having to worry about "high" memory vs "low" memory vs "temp" memory vs "system" memory. And of course, all apps and OS shared the same address space (like Win3x). Win3.x was had much better memory management IMO, despite being a 16 bit OS (at the time of Win3.1, Mac OS was 24 and 32 bit).
But yeah, NT and Win9x blew away Mac OS Classic's memory management.
Agreed.
As long as slashdot uses the Borg icon for Microsoft stories and the broken stained glass window pane icon for Windows stories, the site cannot be regarded as one with credibility.
I agree that the media should report virus incidents. But if they report them in an overblown or sensationalistic fashion, people might start ignoring them ala "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf". Similar to how Bush bogusly raised the terrorism threat level whenever he needed a bump in the polls, so that today nobody pays attention to the terrorism threat level.
"The lesson in this article should be also that there is something wrong with the Windows kernel if there can be written whole books about how to make rootkits for it. The same can go for the Linux kernel."
Please...
I'm sure that there are those that can write books on how to break into a car, too.
Pre-emptive damage control.
"This should be an inflection point, where we see if people are willing to do the minimal but nonzero effort to get a browser other than IE on their computers. If that number turns out to be 10%, that's too bad. I'd really hoped for something closer to 40%, given how terrible IE is."
Then again, maybe IE's not as "terrible" as you think (or, wish, hope, pray, whatever...).
This is the way that exploits are normally made nowadays. The hackers wait for security updates to be released, examine the updates to determine what holes they fixed, then create exloits targetting those holes, hoping to get at the machines that haven't yet applied the update.
It's been this way for years. The three *major* worms/viruses that were released in 2000-2003 (Sasser, Blaster, and the other whose name I forget) were all released after the corresponsing patches had been released (sometimes *months* after). Only machines that hadn't been updated were compromised, but it was common a few years ago for IT departments in businesses (much more so than home machines) to be slow to apply updates, much more so that today.
(IT depts now usually take updates quickly because Microsoft went to the monthly update release schedule, allowing IT depts can plan accordingly. In the past there was no regular release schedule, so IT depts couldn't plan for updates and as a result many times simply didn't apply updates at all.)
no surprise there.
Haven't you heard?
"MS Office will also support DRM. How can you have DRMed documents that can be opened in a non-DRMed, open source office suite. Answer... you can't!"
Besides DRM, there's a lot of other things that Office documents use that OASIS doesn't support (VBA, OLE objects, etc.)
"Foreign elements are not required to be preserved. This means that if I DO extend the standard, no other application is required to preserve any elements not in the standard. This makes it effectively useless to extend it at all, since loading it into any other word processor will likely cause your data or formatting to disappear."
Well, it's rather difficult for a word processor to faithfully preserve elements that it doesn't understand. Let's say that a word processor did try to maintain such elements by reading them when loading a document and writing them back out when saving the document. If the user edits other data in the document, that data might become inconsistent with the "foreign elements", so what can the word processor do but throw away the "foreign element" data?
Let's say that a word processing format supported text but no graphs. Let's say that Word Processor A introduced graphs as a foreign element. Let's say a user used Word Processor A to create a document containing textual data as well as graphs showing a visual display of that data. Now another user uses Word Processor B to open the document, but Word Processor B doesn't understand graphs, but loads the graph data as blobs and will write the blobs back out when the user saves the document. The user then edits the textual data and saves the document, but the textual data is no longer consistent with the graph data. The first user reloads the document in Word Processor A and behold - the document is an inconsistent mess as the text no longer matches the graphs.
Don't let RMS catch you advocating "dual licensing", or he'll excomunicate you from the movement. LOL
"If Microsoft used their open code, it would be hard for MS to claim that open source is inherently bad, or proprietary code is inherently superior. "
Microsoft already uses open source code, just not GPL code.
"Google would demonstrate the same argument, but no one complains about Google's code remaining proprietary, because it mainly runs on their servers, which few people yet demand should be opened to outsiders."
This is how GPL will die a slow death. More and more developers are "releasing" apps as web apps rather than distributed binaries. These devs can "derive" their product from GPL code and make their products available to be used by the public without having to release their code, simply because the apps are run on their server rather than run on the user's computer. That the GPL folks continue to allow for this huge hole in the GPL license (because they don't want to step on Google's toes) shows their huge hypocrisy.
How is it that "Office has been the reason for Windows' monopoly" when there's a Mac version of Office?
Why the hell has the parent been modded down to -1? That's absurd. Should be at least 3.
Since the guy that suggested using mod chips made the suggestion as a way to combat the $60 price for games, and explicitly talked of playing "backups", I doubt that the reason he's advocating mod chips is to enable the playing of "homebrew" games.
Assuming that an app wants to use "right click" to display a context popup menu, the Carbon Mac API supports the kEventClassWindow / kEventWindowContextualMenuSelect event which is automatically sent to the app's event handler when the user right-clicks or control-clicks; the app responds by displaying the context menu via the ContextualMenuSelect function (related functions are IsShowContextualMenuEvent, HandleControlContextualMenuSelect, PopUpMenuSelect). I'm not familiar with the Cocoa api, but I imagine that it also has explicit support for context menus (likely more high-level than Carbon).
So yes, OS X has supported this from the beginning, but no, having one default button doesn't force developers to make a system that is accessible without context menus because commands in context menus are accessible via control-click even if the user's mouse only has one button.
Note that Microsoft and Logitech mice have provided right click functionality on Macs for years (and both are better than Apple's mice, IMO).
Also note that even before OS X, apps could support "right clicks" via control-click, but they had to explicitly check whether the control key was pressed during a click, which isn't necessary for OS X's Carbon Event Manager and Cocoa api. And before OS X, if one did use a two button mouse, the mouse driver had to map a right click to a control-click since apps explicitly processed control-clicks in those days.