KOffice is free as in beer (just download it) and free as in speech.
More like free as in "Tibet." As in "a lot of people making a lot of noise about how things should be, but only a handful of people actually doing anything about it." (Note: this is not an invitation to the inevitable threadjacking that any mention of Tibet often seems to cause.)
Talk is cheap. Coding, and the time it takes away from the things that pay the bills, is not. What I've read here, with only a few notable exceptions, is mainly Monday morning quarterbacking.
Personally, I hope that a good OS X-native alternative to MF^hS Office makes it to the point of "grandma-accessible." I'd happily pay for it in some way. Cash, probably, as I don't have the time or (sadly) the know-how to make a significant technical contribution to such an endeavor.
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't that $2.2m over four years be better spent on books and teachers?
Only if those books do NOT mention the heretical "theory" of "evolution".
Note to the humor impaired: I am totally serious. Really.
I have installed AirPort cards in several TiBooks. And I have never had it take longer than 10 minutes to do so, and with absolutely none of the difficulties you purport to have encountered. And maybe if you had bothered to do even a little research on the procedure, you could have saved some time by learning that you needed to deal with the antenna lead first. or even the very basic fact that the card is meant to go internally (wasn't the $20 install fee clue enough?), leaving the PC slot free. But why should a "Computer Guy" need to do that? A more professional approach would have been to actually KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE DOING BEFORE YOU EVEN START THE JOB. Five hours is so far beyond incompetent that it makes my head spin.
If this was (and it sure sounds like it) your first TiBook experience, I'd like to point out that you're saying some pretty strong things, based on an n=1. Doesn't say much for your objectivity, for it would appear that your mind was made up long ago, and you've chosen to immediately rant and vent, and paint the world in broad strokes, believing that it supports your position.
And it's a bit of a non sequitur to link your poor job of dealing with the TiBook with a problem in the 10.2.8 upgrade. Once again, it looks like you need to justify your emotional biases however you can, and willfully disregard all the positive data reported about Apple's history of delivering solid software and updates on a pretty regular schedule.
If you care (and I see no reason to believe you will), I have witnessed many more QA problems with Dells. The IT folks across the hall from me at work spend joyous hour upon hour dealing with them, noting an especially high occurrence of "crib deaths."
And by the way, here are all the apostrophes you seem to have mislaid: '' ' ' '' (And a few extras for good luck.) We'll leave it as an exercise for the class to find the multitude of grammatical, spelling and logical errors in your diatribe.
P.S. And congratulations on curing your friend of her addiction; you're the quintessential "Computer Guy," all right.
My secondary monitor is on the built-in video port and my primary is on a PCI Radeon 7000.
A question, if I may?
I have the same setup, and am considering rearranging my desktop (not the electronic one, but rather the physical one which will require a backhoe to shift all the old papers piled up) to add a second monitor. I was planning to use the 2nd head -- the VGA connector -- on the 7000, rather than the old on-board (6 MB VRAM) video of the G3.
Why are you using the G3's on-board video? Are you using two VGA monitors? Do you not want to split the processing/VRAM of the Radeon? Do you want to see a live monitor as X boots, rather than waiting almost to the end of the boot process when the Radeon is finally live?
How good/bad is the performance of the on-board video? It seemed somewhat dog slow when I was setting up another G3 last week. When I put in an older Radeon, suddenly the machine became usable.
I still have the warning label from a particularly nasty cellular current blocker called 4-aminopyridine (4-AP) that I used to study signalling in Aplysia Californica, a lovely little snot-like sea slug.
4-AP is pretty scary stuff: the small bottle I had could have (if an appropriate delivery mechanism could be deployed) killed almost everyone in the Cleveland metro area. Good thing scientists are all well-balanced individuals, huh?
For eight years I have had to battle tooth and nail to push my Mac purchases through, in contradiction of the VA's official approved platform BS. It's not impossible, merely ludicrously convoluted.
As I am a researcher, not an "information worker," (irony at its finest) my argument has always been that I know better what I need to do my job, than does some IT clown who wouldn't know scientific computing if it bit him on the ass. Yet EVERY computer-related purchase (right down to a cable or toner cartridge) must receive IT approval at some central location before it then takes weeks/months to actually GET purchased.
One thing that has helped is that I have completely segregated our laboratory network from the hospital network (which, by the way, for the longest time used unsecured WiFi until I showed them how easy it was to rummage around), thereby avoiding having to suffer through the mandated computer "training," which I can assure you is a complete waste of time, energy and money.
The IT guys here all know me, and are amused by me attempts to keep the lab Mac-based. I, on the other hand, am always amused by the nonstop labor on their part to keep the wintel stuff from falling apart. (Blaster, anyone?)
I hope that this offical addition of OS X to the supported list will make it easier for me to buy some G5s soon... Then I can pass some G4s down the line to the "Medical Media" (graphics) department, who were forced to switch from Macs several years ago. Not a popular decision. Not in the least.
(This is a copy of my posting on Ars Tech's forum. Sorry for the repeat, but Slashdot's got a much greater number of discussants, usually.)
Am alone in this, or would others also like to see Safari implement better control over image loading? As a rule, I do NOT want all images to load on a page, as I am still using dialup from home, and graphics-rich pages take forever to load. IE allows me to load individual images as necessary (contextual menu or double-click the 'missing' icon), to load them all as a menu choice, or by a widget in the toolbar.
Safari, on the other hand, can either load all inages, or load NO images, and the setting is buried in the preferences, so it is not convenient to change often. To then load images requires reloading the entire page.
Also, I think that IE has done things correctly in regards to managing history. I like how it stores visited sites chronologically. On more than one occasion this has been a tremendous help when I was trying to recall something I had seen. I was able to find it by searching through the history for the approximate timespan.
Does anyone else think that these are useful and/or necessary features? Or am I just a crank? (For the sake of this particular discussion, read 'or' as 'xor'.)
By your interpretation 'antigravity' would also cancel out intertia.
But that's not the way it works on Star Trek...
And...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Is anyone else bothered by the loss of such basic interface clues such as grayed-out icons for open folders, or the highlighting that we used to see when clicking on the proxy icon (the mini in the title of a window) when preparing to drag it?
They don't sound like such a big deal, perhaps, but they truly convey a great deal of valuable information when implemented.
Also poorly done is the abysmal internal truncation ('...') of text in narrow fields when in list view. (Also applies to long file names in icon view.) I really miss the condensed type that 9 used in these cases.
"Get Info" functionality is limited, as it doesn't tell you how many items are in a folder, and I find it pretty useless that getting info on multiple items can not open multiple windows, to allow for easy comparisons.
And WHY do removable volumes NOT remember open windows when remounted? If I log out (or even restart!) with the drive connected, the windows are remembered. So why not when they are manually un/remounted? This is really inconvenient, since I routinely modify the contents of many directories during a normal working day, and would like those windows to remain open when I transfer my Firewire drive between computers.
I also hope the zoom-to-fit function is less broken than it currently is. Ditto for windows correctly remembering their settings. I am tired of that damned toolbar reappearing again and again in windows where I had turned it off.
And today I narrowly averted disaster, almost overwriting the wrong file, because its modification time will not update until I click on it. Ditto for adding files to a folder with a process other than the Finder. The window must be manually brought to the foreground (or actively selected if it is already there) before the files show up. Once again, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
So, rant aside, are ANY of these things addressed in Panther? I am resigned to not being able to turn off all the cycle-stealing eye candy (including the excessive use of translucency which is anathema to visual clarity), but since my next computer will be a G5, I suppose I'll just have to live with it... But I'd be greatly appreciative if more attention was paid to fixing the broken stuff than adding more new features to debug.
Still no easy way to deal with image loading?
on
Safari 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I can't make Safari my main browser until there is a way to manually load images (my preferred default is to load nothing) either individually or with a menu command.
Burrowing through levels of preferences to switch states, and then reloading the page just will not cut it.
Why is this important? Because it takes bloody forever at 56K to load a page that is chock full of lotsa pretty (but usually unnecessary) images. It seems that those of us with dialup access are rapidly becoming third-class citizens...
...is (probably) that the prey has fixed eyes, rather than mobile ones. This way, the dragonfly only needs to take the prey's body (or head, if it is not fixed, too) position into account. Otherwise the problem becomes much, much more difficult, as eye movement is generally quite a bit faster than head or body movement.
There is also a question of spatial resolution of the prey's visual system to consider, as well. A more coarse-grained vision (i.e. less photoreceptors/mm^2) would be easier to fool than a setup like our own -- which has densely packed receptors in the most sensitive central portion of the retina, called the 'fovea' -- because it would allow for more movement before the target (i.e. the dragonfly) activated more receptor units. Evolutionarily speaking, the fovea is quite new, compared to that old-school stuff you see in invertebrates. The downside is that our acuity is much lower everywhere but the fovea, so we now need a pretty intensive control system to steer the fovea where we need it to look. (But good for me, since studying this keeps me off the streets.)
Put these two limiting factors on the prey's visual system, and the dragonfly's feat is somewhat less daunting. But still pretty spiffy.
If you read my post carefully, you'd see that I do know about the preference to load all the images on a page. This however is a task that is anything but simple and immediate, requiring quite a bit of mousing and clicking to accomplish.
What I would like to see is the ability to 1) choose "Load Images" from a main menu (having a command key equivalent) and a button in the toolbar; and 2) context-click an image placeholder and select "Load Image" to see that particular image.
These are things I can currently do with IE. There are other IE functions that I also appreciate, mostly having to do with history organization and custiomizability, that I'd like Safari to include, but for now, over a pokey 56K (more like 44K) dialup, avoiding all the bandwidth wastage from poorly designed, unnecessarily graphic-laden web pages is absolutely crucial.
When I can do this with Safari, I will most probably kick IE to the curb.
As much as I like Safari (and I do!), I can really only use it at work, not at home, because of how it handles (or refuses to handle) individual loading of images.
At home I do NOT have high-speed access, just dial-up over crappy 80 year-old lines (parts of the path from wall jack to telco interface are the original wires from when the building was first wired).
I prefer NOT automatically loading images, instead individually selecting the ones I actually need to see, or in the extreme case, selecting the menu choice (or clicking the 'load images' button) to load the whole page.
As much as I'd like to say 'buh-bye' to Internet Exploiter I simply can't, at least not at home.
Perhaps there's something I'm missing, and I don't have to burrow through and change preferences in Safari each time I want to do this?
Oh, and I guess that the security fixes are also a good thing.
>Gotta be a more elegant hack for this.
>Any Mac experts with opinions?
Use Timbuktu to control the Duo. Of course, TB2 over AppleTalk is not an option if you are running OS X on your non-picture-frame computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Then let the Martians colorise their images the way they want them? I think I'd like to see the less-interpreted image, too.
More like free as in "Tibet." As in "a lot of people making a lot of noise about how things should be, but only a handful of people actually doing anything about it." (Note: this is not an invitation to the inevitable threadjacking that any mention of Tibet often seems to cause.)
Talk is cheap. Coding, and the time it takes away from the things that pay the bills, is not. What I've read here, with only a few notable exceptions, is mainly Monday morning quarterbacking.
Personally, I hope that a good OS X-native alternative to MF^hS Office makes it to the point of "grandma-accessible." I'd happily pay for it in some way. Cash, probably, as I don't have the time or (sadly) the know-how to make a significant technical contribution to such an endeavor.
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't that $2.2m over four years be better spent on books and teachers? Only if those books do NOT mention the heretical "theory" of "evolution". Note to the humor impaired: I am totally serious. Really.
I have installed AirPort cards in several TiBooks. And I have never had it take longer than 10 minutes to do so, and with absolutely none of the difficulties you purport to have encountered. And maybe if you had bothered to do even a little research on the procedure, you could have saved some time by learning that you needed to deal with the antenna lead first. or even the very basic fact that the card is meant to go internally (wasn't the $20 install fee clue enough?), leaving the PC slot free. But why should a "Computer Guy" need to do that? A more professional approach would have been to actually KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE DOING BEFORE YOU EVEN START THE JOB. Five hours is so far beyond incompetent that it makes my head spin.
If this was (and it sure sounds like it) your first TiBook experience, I'd like to point out that you're saying some pretty strong things, based on an n=1. Doesn't say much for your objectivity, for it would appear that your mind was made up long ago, and you've chosen to immediately rant and vent, and paint the world in broad strokes, believing that it supports your position.
And it's a bit of a non sequitur to link your poor job of dealing with the TiBook with a problem in the 10.2.8 upgrade. Once again, it looks like you need to justify your emotional biases however you can, and willfully disregard all the positive data reported about Apple's history of delivering solid software and updates on a pretty regular schedule.
If you care (and I see no reason to believe you will), I have witnessed many more QA problems with Dells. The IT folks across the hall from me at work spend joyous hour upon hour dealing with them, noting an especially high occurrence of "crib deaths."
And by the way, here are all the apostrophes you seem to have mislaid: '' ' ' '' (And a few extras for good luck.) We'll leave it as an exercise for the class to find the multitude of grammatical, spelling and logical errors in your diatribe.
P.S. And congratulations on curing your friend of her addiction; you're the quintessential "Computer Guy," all right.
P.P.S. In summary: 1) grow up; 2) learn to write.
A question, if I may?
I have the same setup, and am considering rearranging my desktop (not the electronic one, but rather the physical one which will require a backhoe to shift all the old papers piled up) to add a second monitor. I was planning to use the 2nd head -- the VGA connector -- on the 7000, rather than the old on-board (6 MB VRAM) video of the G3.
Why are you using the G3's on-board video? Are you using two VGA monitors? Do you not want to split the processing/VRAM of the Radeon? Do you want to see a live monitor as X boots, rather than waiting almost to the end of the boot process when the Radeon is finally live?
How good/bad is the performance of the on-board video? It seemed somewhat dog slow when I was setting up another G3 last week. When I put in an older Radeon, suddenly the machine became usable.
Enquiring minds want to know. Thanks.
Taco Bell will pre-emptively sue for bankruptcy.
4-AP is pretty scary stuff: the small bottle I had could have (if an appropriate delivery mechanism could be deployed) killed almost everyone in the Cleveland metro area. Good thing scientists are all well-balanced individuals, huh?
As I am a researcher, not an "information worker," (irony at its finest) my argument has always been that I know better what I need to do my job, than does some IT clown who wouldn't know scientific computing if it bit him on the ass. Yet EVERY computer-related purchase (right down to a cable or toner cartridge) must receive IT approval at some central location before it then takes weeks/months to actually GET purchased.
One thing that has helped is that I have completely segregated our laboratory network from the hospital network (which, by the way, for the longest time used unsecured WiFi until I showed them how easy it was to rummage around), thereby avoiding having to suffer through the mandated computer "training," which I can assure you is a complete waste of time, energy and money.
The IT guys here all know me, and are amused by me attempts to keep the lab Mac-based. I, on the other hand, am always amused by the nonstop labor on their part to keep the wintel stuff from falling apart. (Blaster, anyone?)
I hope that this offical addition of OS X to the supported list will make it easier for me to buy some G5s soon... Then I can pass some G4s down the line to the "Medical Media" (graphics) department, who were forced to switch from Macs several years ago. Not a popular decision. Not in the least.
Am alone in this, or would others also like to see Safari implement better control over image loading? As a rule, I do NOT want all images to load on a page, as I am still using dialup from home, and graphics-rich pages take forever to load. IE allows me to load individual images as necessary (contextual menu or double-click the 'missing' icon), to load them all as a menu choice, or by a widget in the toolbar.
Safari, on the other hand, can either load all inages, or load NO images, and the setting is buried in the preferences, so it is not convenient to change often. To then load images requires reloading the entire page.
Also, I think that IE has done things correctly in regards to managing history. I like how it stores visited sites chronologically. On more than one occasion this has been a tremendous help when I was trying to recall something I had seen. I was able to find it by searching through the history for the approximate timespan.
Does anyone else think that these are useful and/or necessary features? Or am I just a crank? (For the sake of this particular discussion, read 'or' as 'xor'.)
Or that they're doing what they can to reduce headcount?
But that's not the way it works on Star Trek...
And...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Thank you. That is all.
They don't sound like such a big deal, perhaps, but they truly convey a great deal of valuable information when implemented.
Also poorly done is the abysmal internal truncation ('...') of text in narrow fields when in list view. (Also applies to long file names in icon view.) I really miss the condensed type that 9 used in these cases.
"Get Info" functionality is limited, as it doesn't tell you how many items are in a folder, and I find it pretty useless that getting info on multiple items can not open multiple windows, to allow for easy comparisons.
And WHY do removable volumes NOT remember open windows when remounted? If I log out (or even restart!) with the drive connected, the windows are remembered. So why not when they are manually un/remounted? This is really inconvenient, since I routinely modify the contents of many directories during a normal working day, and would like those windows to remain open when I transfer my Firewire drive between computers.
I also hope the zoom-to-fit function is less broken than it currently is. Ditto for windows correctly remembering their settings. I am tired of that damned toolbar reappearing again and again in windows where I had turned it off.
And today I narrowly averted disaster, almost overwriting the wrong file, because its modification time will not update until I click on it. Ditto for adding files to a folder with a process other than the Finder. The window must be manually brought to the foreground (or actively selected if it is already there) before the files show up. Once again, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
So, rant aside, are ANY of these things addressed in Panther? I am resigned to not being able to turn off all the cycle-stealing eye candy (including the excessive use of translucency which is anathema to visual clarity), but since my next computer will be a G5, I suppose I'll just have to live with it... But I'd be greatly appreciative if more attention was paid to fixing the broken stuff than adding more new features to debug.
Burrowing through levels of preferences to switch states, and then reloading the page just will not cut it.
Why is this important? Because it takes bloody forever at 56K to load a page that is chock full of lotsa pretty (but usually unnecessary) images. It seems that those of us with dialup access are rapidly becoming third-class citizens...
...and look what happened to him -- impeachment. But hey, at least it's not like he got a beejay or something...
There is also a question of spatial resolution of the prey's visual system to consider, as well. A more coarse-grained vision (i.e. less photoreceptors/mm^2) would be easier to fool than a setup like our own -- which has densely packed receptors in the most sensitive central portion of the retina, called the 'fovea' -- because it would allow for more movement before the target (i.e. the dragonfly) activated more receptor units. Evolutionarily speaking, the fovea is quite new, compared to that old-school stuff you see in invertebrates. The downside is that our acuity is much lower everywhere but the fovea, so we now need a pretty intensive control system to steer the fovea where we need it to look. (But good for me, since studying this keeps me off the streets.)
Put these two limiting factors on the prey's visual system, and the dragonfly's feat is somewhat less daunting. But still pretty spiffy.
What I would like to see is the ability to 1) choose "Load Images" from a main menu (having a command key equivalent) and a button in the toolbar; and 2) context-click an image placeholder and select "Load Image" to see that particular image.
These are things I can currently do with IE. There are other IE functions that I also appreciate, mostly having to do with history organization and custiomizability, that I'd like Safari to include, but for now, over a pokey 56K (more like 44K) dialup, avoiding all the bandwidth wastage from poorly designed, unnecessarily graphic-laden web pages is absolutely crucial.
When I can do this with Safari, I will most probably kick IE to the curb.
At home I do NOT have high-speed access, just dial-up over crappy 80 year-old lines (parts of the path from wall jack to telco interface are the original wires from when the building was first wired).
I prefer NOT automatically loading images, instead individually selecting the ones I actually need to see, or in the extreme case, selecting the menu choice (or clicking the 'load images' button) to load the whole page.
As much as I'd like to say 'buh-bye' to Internet Exploiter I simply can't, at least not at home.
Perhaps there's something I'm missing, and I don't have to burrow through and change preferences in Safari each time I want to do this?
Oh, and I guess that the security fixes are also a good thing.
sorry for forgetting the URL: http://esys10287.esys.cwru.edu/peggy/index.html
>Gotta be a more elegant hack for this. >Any Mac experts with opinions? Use Timbuktu to control the Duo. Of course, TB2 over AppleTalk is not an option if you are running OS X on your non-picture-frame computer.