I do feel that most of what was presented in that movie was done in a truthful (if overly biased) manner, but it is a far cry from the way I would prefer to have seen it done. I don't feel that he's nearly as dishonest as Limbaugh, but regrettably the comparison is not entirely unfounded.
Again, I can't understand this. You admit that Moore is dishonest (not as dishonest as you view Limbaugh, but you have to admit he's dishonest). You say that most of Moore's movie is honest, yet biased. But biased is not honest.
That's why an oath in court is to tell "the truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth". Anything less is not the truth. An incomplete, biased story is misleading and is not true, nor does it serve the truth.
And to sum it up, you say Moore's movie is a "far cry" from what you would do, which presuming you're a well-reasoned and honest person reflects extremely poorly on Moore and his work.
Me thinks that the bottom line is you hate Bush enough that you're willing to put up with a pretty shoddy, very biased (i.e. misleading, untruthful) movie as long as it reaches conclusions similar to your own and possibly accomplishes goals similar to yours.
The enemy of your enemy is your friend, perhaps? In being glad that Moore created such a movie that you have to so severely cavaet, I would suggest you've compromised your integrity for the sake of a tactical advantage.
I'd suggest reading quotes of the kinds of things Moore has said about you and me (assuming you're American) to overseas audiences. He is no friend of ours and I doubt that if he achieves his immediate ends that he will work for your or my good in the long run, but he will be perceived as enormously more powerful and he's not a man to not have that go to his large head.
I recall that it was explicitly state as "42% of his time on vacation" and not just "away from D.C."
Yes, Moore got this "fact" from an off-handed comment in the Washington Post. It includes as "vacation" time weekends at Camp David -- including meetings with heads of state -- as well as a month-long working vacation in Crawford at which he also had meetings and received guests.
So basically what Moore charactarizes as "vacation" is in fact time away from Washington, only some of which is vacation in the usual sense of the word.
And that's the problem with this film and Moore. He makes a big deal of his "fact checking team" but he edits things out of context and misinterprets or reinterprets other things. It's not "documentary", and it's not even up to reality TV standards of accuracy. It uses real-world footage as the ingredients, but scrambles them around to say whatever he wants.
I can't condemn him that strongly. This film definitely isn't what I would like it to be, but I am very glad that he made it.
Why are you so glad, given that there are so many inaccuracies and reinterpretations going on in it? Moore could've made a fictional movie to make his point. (Actually, I don't believe he's talented enough to have successfully done so, but he could've tried.) Or he could've made something straight factual and let the viewer decide. Instead he cut-n-paste and twisted reality to suit his pre-conceived notions, and he calls it a "documentary". And because it does use "real" footage it does appear to be based on fact when it is (mostly) not, which to my mind reeks of Nazi propaganda films.
(Yes, in keeping with/. traditions, I've now officially raised the Nazi comparison. Someone had to do it.)
Didn't he say or imply that bin Laden family members left the US while all flights were grounded and without interviews, when in fact they left after flights resumed and they were made available for interviews, with some interviewed and some not? (The fact that some weren't is not good, but Moore's "facts" are wrong.)
Didn't he say Bush spent 42% of his time on vacation, when in fact Bush spent 42% of his time not at the White House (including weekends), but often working those days? Many of these days included meetings with foreign dignitaries, etc, but the meetings occurred in Crawford or at Camp David.
Let's see, did he not imply that the Taliban visited Bush in Texas while he was governer, when in fact Bush did not meet with them and they were in the country at the invitation of the Clinton administration?
Didn't he say that the Secret Service only guards the Saudi embassy, when in fact it's uniformed division guards many embassies?
Didn't he make a big deal of Bush et al getting hair/makeup care before public appearances, making them appear vain and shallow? If that's legitimate, I guess nearly all public figures and most women qualify. Sheesh, what a misuse of "facts"!
We could go on, but the fact is Moore is vociferous and entertaining, but not terribly talented nor concerned with the truth. If you think this is a documentary with a "whole fact-checking team" behind it, you are naive indeed. I edit videos for a living and know it's trivial to edit things together to make anyone look like a fool or villan. Heck, If I had three hours of Moore footage, I could make him look worse than anyone he's slashed.
I know in Unreal Tournament 2004, it really does help to hear which direction the action is coming from.
It's so important that I was recently faced with a choice. I'd bought some nice USB headphones with mic to use the voice chat, which is also quite useful, but the OpenAL library that ships with (Mac) UT2004 has a bug where you don't hear with a proper stereo image. Other versions of the OpenAL library fixed this problem, but do not see audio inputs.
In the end, I had to choose the accurate stereo image. Hearing which direction the battle's in, or hearing a rocket launcher being fired up to your right is just too important to miss.
The result is a mobile phone that can store all your necessary info in one pocket
The operative words here are "store" and "necessary" (in the sense of minimal). Phones still have tiny screens compared to PDAs, so you're looking at your data through a periscope. And if you want to enter or modify data, you're left with a phone keypad which has got to be the stupidest revisionist engineering accomplishment of all time in terms of inputting non-numeric data.
Of course, you can add a larger screen, and writing or a keyboard to your phone, in which case you now have something that's PDA-sized. Which means an awkward size and shape for a phone.
Next thing you know, you'll be telling me about the wonderful combination bicycle/gas grill that saves all kinds of space in the garage.
Stop by an Apple store if you can. They give more free reign on their computers than you would, since people need to try them out.
I've noticed that every night at closing time, a cron job or something fires off and all the machines put up a screen saying something like "Updating from image" and are evidently reloading themselves from a saved image to overcome the day's fiddling and messing up by customers.
I've not been a big FPS fan, but did enjoy Halo and decided to try UT2004 when it came out -- thinking of Machinima possibilities down the road. But WOW!
It's a killer game. Incredible graphics. (Run around in CTF MoonDragon sometime on a machine with a good graphics card and monitor.) All kinds of cool weapons, gametypes, vehicles, etc, and all wonderfully balanced without being symmetrical. Also Mutators which let you tweak games: force all weapons to be rocket launchers, modify gravity strength, etc.
Play with/against bots in any combination with/against human players. Let's you play those large maps with only two people, which you can't do in Halo.
Mods, mods, mods. Dozens of commercial-quality maps in the CBP's. Total mods, like Red Orchestra (WWII Russian front), Total Annihilation, etc. New gametypes such as Jailbreak. Etc. All free, from the user community.
And last, the game designers have a great sense of humor. For example, the Hellbender vehicle (think Humvee) has working break lights, backup lights, and horn. The license plate on the back displays the driver's character name on it. The horn lets humans know you want passengers, and actually causes bots to jump in. (The Flak rifle's grenade has a smiley face painted on the front. If you get a good look at it, you're in trouble.)
Cox decided a few weeks ago that every Panasonic cable modem on their network had to have its firmware updated. Most of their rentals were Panasonic, but most Panasonics were evidently privately owned. Like mine. But they went ahead and downloaded a patch without seeking permission from anyone, and...
They screwed the patch up and fried thousands of modems. We had to go in and pick up new ones. (Lost time, etc.) At first they offered me this el-cheapo that didn't even have a brand name or model number on it. A second trip yielded a Panasonic.
This is an example of what a cable company can/will do if they think they can perform "maintenance" of equipment in your home!
It is the standard on Client as well. (Or did you mean I should have said "Server" instead of "Xserve"? You're right on that.)
Nice that MacOS X now uses Postfix
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Postfix 2.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A pleasant surprise in the 10.3 was the adoption of Postfix. It's good to see that they apparently made a good choice and good things are happening on the Postfix front.
(I had been rooting for exim, which is also a great package, but Postfix seems to be a good alternative. Maybe they should also include exim on XServe's?)
I know a person is much smaller than a SCUD and not filled with explosive fuel and not spewing fire out their feet to track them, so it's a harder task. But if you could target a person, I imagine it would be very useful in, say, Najaf.
That's the difference. MS claims Windows won't work without Explorer installed. By way of contrast, drag Safari to the trash and delete it and use whatever other browser you want.
I just went to Whistler this year for my annual snowboarding vacation. (Had been doing Colorado previously.) A great place!
Until this posting. Now, when I'm wandering the streets, or eating at Mongolie grill, or riding down Horstman Glacier, I'll have this unsavory association with MS's long-awaited-now-castrated OS stuck in my brain!
The problem is that, according to you, the problems do not really exists and suggesting that OS 9 was better in some respects makes me a zealot.
The reason why I'm bashing OS X on this issue is that OS X made the trashcan an issue for me, where it wasn't before.
I think you've proved my point. You have not spent your time listing comparisons where OS 9 is "better in some respects", you have spent your time "bashing" OS X. (And no, you did not mis-state it, you have been bashing.) I've tried to give several examples to make things concrete, but I don't remember anywhere you've unequivicaly admitted that even a single one was valid.
I've not said that problems don't exist in OS X. I have simply said that most of the problems I've heard OS X critics complain about are actually improvements that are more in keeping with Apple's own design principles, which Apple lost sight of over the last decade of MacOS's evolution.
Your claim was that "Most of the "mistakes" I've read about boil down to simply operating differently."
I said "most"; you've been arguing as if I said "all". If I seem to be making a point, you seem to shift your fire elsewhere as if this were a war.
I just think that some of the big steps are in the wrong direction.
Here you're saying "some", but again, you've argued as if you mean "all". My "most" and your "some" can co-exist quite nicely, you know. Those two phrases for quantity are not mutually exclusive.
Now, I never said that OS 9 got it right, you just put those words in my mouth. I do like that the trashcan is only visible in the Finder in OS 9, because that's the only place where you use it.
The title of this thread is "Mistakes in OS X v OS 9". This is a comparison: a criticism of OS X implies it is inferior to OS 9, a criticism of OS 9 implies OS X is an improvement. So when you criticiz, for example, OS X's trashcan without qualification (which you finally added in your latest note) you are implying that OS 9 had it right and OS X has it wrong.
just think that some of the big steps are in the wrong direction.
You have even managed to argue that though OS 9 implemented some things less-well than OS X, the newer OS X implementation is still a step in the wrong direction. (See the Dock discussion, below.)
Classic OS dialogs were attached to the application, because they were considered application-centric. The application sends a message to the user. In OS X, the user is asked a question about the document the question relates to. The new dialogs are therefor document-centric.
This is revisionist history at its worst (best?). MacOS was document-centric from the start. That was the major difference from DOS and its other predecessors: you didn't invoke a program with a document as an argument, you opened a document and magically the correct application ran so you could manipulate it.
(You've heard the joke that Finder didn't find, right? That's based on the misunderstanding that Finder would find files, which the Find command currently does. In fact, Finder found the application that was appropriate to process a particular document, allowing for a document-centric view.)
The problem is, as it grew from a system where only a single document could be open in a single application to one where multiple documents could be opened in multiple applications, it was hacked together in whatever way was convenient. They bolted on features willy-nilly, and ended up with a mixed metaphor as the OS moved from a uni-tasking basis to a multi-tasking one.
The fact that you got this totally backwards tells me something about whether you're actually trying to point "some" things out to me or whether you're trying to lob every ball back over the net without exception.
This is a flawed argument. Some people are still using exclusively pen & paper and are doing fine. That doesn't mean that pen & paper is suitable for the work I want to do or that I shouldn't desire something better.
Actually, you have it backwards. I am the one that is saying the new is, on the whole, better than the old. You are the one defending pen and paper. Yes, CD's do not sound as good as the best vinyl, but they are far more convenient in most ways. Yes, pencil and paper may last longer than a hard drive and doesn't care if it's rained upon, but overall the hard drive is better.
Creating a new folder makes sense, because a folder is the key metaphore around which the old Finder resolves. It is the best choice for 'create new document'.
Two issues here. First, you say elsewhere that you only want to point out that some features of OS 9 are better than some features of OS X. But you insist in either defending every difference to the end, or you dismiss improvements you can't argue with by saying, "it's not exactly world-shattering". This goes way beyond trying to point out a few advantages of OS 9.
Second, your "best choice" is backwards here. (See my other extended note on this elsewhere in this thread.) You're basically justifying OS9's decision based on a flawed design methodology of Classic Finder.
I was being cynical. That's not leaping to conclusions.
Sorry, when your sentence starts out with "Just because you..." you are in fact attributing something to me. And if you do not know this to be true, you are leaping to conclusions. You can be cynical and leap to conclusions at the same time.
I think that many other users do drag stuff to the trash. I was looking out for their interests. Anyway, the point was that such a widget would much more flexible.
I think their interests are better served with a trashcan that is always visible and accessible (MacOS X) rather than a trashcan that is always in the same place, but not always visible or accessible (MacOS 9). Yes, a floating widget would be more useful, but last I checked, OS 9 was farther from having this than OS X, so how does this count as a criticism of OS X in comparison to OS 9? Again, you're going way beyond what you claim to be doing.
No, OS X fixed some of these and created a great many more.
Please list some more of the "great many". From the discussion so far, it's more like "fixed a great many and created some". (In your eyes, the "some" are larger than the "many", but I've seen no indication of the numberical imbalance you imply.
Drag Thing is basically a different kind of dock. The question is: why do people (including you) feel the need to have seperate dock in addition to the dock they already have? The only reasonable conclusion is bad interface design.
Why did I have the even stronger need for Drag Thing with OS 9? Would you be willing to say this stronger need indicates a worse interface design? The fact is in MacOS 9 I needed three or four Drag Thing palettes to do the work that only requires one Drag Thing palette (plus Finder and the Dock) in MacOS X 10.3. This is a dramatic improvement, which you can't bring yourself to acknowledge. You seem to insist on severely criticizing MacOS X doing better than MacOS 9 but not perfect.
didn't you bash haxies before?).
Yes, and I still do. My understanding of "haxies" are interface modifications that are not independent. In one sense Default Folder is such a haxie, while Default Folder is not. A tweak to MacOS or a program can result in Default Folder crashing the program. Default Folder is an application that stands alone.
And that's one of the philosophy changes from MacOS 9 (extensions, conflicts, crash city) to MacOS X (applications).
nothing else makes sense for Finder to create. Windows are not 'items.'
So because nothing else makes sense, we're left with no choice but to do it? (I'd disagree that nothing else makes sense, but let's leave that issue aside for the present discussion.)
You are basically saying, "Hey, we must have a CMD-N and it is supposed to basically create something new, and let's see what is closest to this or makes most sense for Finder and then implement it that way."
The problem here is that you are working bottom-up. This leads to inconsistencies and quirks in the user experience, which is one of the things that has historically made Windows inferior to MacOS even though it has many of the same visual metaphors. But the key to a consistent user experience is to work top-down instead. What should a user expect to see and how do they interface with it? Then how does this apply to the Finder? (Or not apply, in which case we don't just go ahead and do it anyhow.)
So what does CMD-N do overall? It makes a new document. What, specifically does this mean? How does it look? What does this accomplish for the user? What state does it place them in?
Imagine hitting CMD-N in an outlining program. What would you expect? A new, unselected bullet point in the current outline? No, that'd be inconsistent. Though that's what Classic Finder gives you, by analogy. Instead, you'd expect a new outline in a new window.
Hit CMD-N in a wordprocessor and do you expect a new page in the current document? (That's an analog of what Classic Finder gives you.) No, you expect a new wordprocessing document in a new window, open and ready to type into.
Hit CMD-N in a spreadsheet and do you expect a new, unselected row or column? Nope, you expect a new spreadsheet in a new window.
I could go on, but it's the same in everything from Safari to Photoshop: Open a new document in a new window, ready for input of the appropriate type. Not insert a closed object into an existing document.
You may say, "Yes, but Finder is different. Folders are its documents and by definition they are created already saved to disk, in the current document (folder)." Fine. It's different. Then perhaps it should not be mapped to CMD-N since, well, it's different.
The correspondence you want to make in Classic Finder ("documents" are "folders") simply doesn't appear the same as all other programs and also doesn't have the same ramifications. (Among other things, new documents in all other programs have not yet modified the disk, but by definition a new Folder has modified the disk.) So why the desire to still use CMD-N instead of, say, CMD-Shift-N?
There's no similar expectation of CMD-Shift-N's behavior. You would not be surprised if this created a new layer in Photoshop, or a new bullet point in Keynote, etc. So, Classic Finder was inconsistent in the big picture and MacOS X Finder is consistent. (I.e. opens a new window with default data in it.)
The level of problems in OS X that I talked about is much more serious IMHO because you can't really adapt to them.
Or more precisely, you (and other vocal critics) can't adapt to them. Many of us are doing just fine. While each OS 9 problem is not "world-shattering" there were so many layered on one another that it adds up. As you say, you get used to it and move on, but of course many people got used to DOS and moved on. The question is how inconsistent and warped is the result?
The old one was not broken in the OS 9 (since it is suitable to a spatial Finder), but it would be broken in the OS X Finder.
I'm not saying the old shortcut was totally broken in the context of the old Finder. I'm saying that the old Finder's shortcut worked differently from CMD-N in every app I've ever used and is thus broken in the context of the MacOS GUI.
And that's the problem that OS 9 lovers miss: it was inconsistent in dozens of ways because it was a Frankenstein's monster, hacked together from various body parts over the years. Sure you adapt. But that's a far cry from being well-designed.
I never claimed that using more apps makes me smarter, better or whatever.
OK, I'll skip humorour references. (It was a quote from The Princess Bride.) You weren't implying you were smarter, but you did immediately leap to the conclusion that I must surely be using fewer windows/apps than you. This is the kind of bias I've encountered again and again from MacOS 9 advocates.
Yes, the Dock is sub-optimal for managing dozens of windows/folders, though not applications. I can't think of an OS 9 alternative that was better. Two programs that were must-haves under OS9 and still are in OS X: 1) Drag Thing, and 2) Default Folder.
Then you have a static target, in the most accessible place (just give the cursor a sweep to the corner), that doesn't take unnecessary screenspace. Give users the option of linking docks and they can do the same thing they do now. Unfortunately, after so many years, the dock is still one monolitic app.
If you rarely use it, being a static target doesn't matter much. It's frequently-used things that need to rely on muscle memory. (Now that you've brought it up, it's another Finder inconsistency in OS 9: Undo. Who would buy an application with no Undo? Yet the almighty pre-OSX Finders had none. OS X has added this, making at least some trips to the trashcan unnecessary.)
The Dock is not perfect. That's why I use it for absolute-must-have apps and managing running apps and some windows, but have Drag Thing for managing most (non-running) apps and documents. What gets me is how you can so vociforously criticize MacOS X for an incompletely-implemented feature, while praising OS 9 which is a no-show in that area.
True, but it's the modern backend that makes up for the crappy interface. There is very little progress on the user-interface front (one step forward, two steps back).
It's actually more like five steps forward and two back. It boils down to this: you had twisted yourself around OS 9's dozens of inconsistencies, limitations, and bugs and it worked well for you. OS X has fixed most of those (five steps forward) but broken two or three of your favorite things so you trash it.
I could probably list pages of OS 9 limitations and inconsistencies. You would just look at each one and say, "not world-shattering". But the sum of them is world-shattering and OS X makes OS9 look more like Windows 3 by comparison.
In that example, what's broken is not that all windows move to the front (which is perfectly appropriate when windows are related, which is often the case), but that there is no easy way to navigate between windows when you have a selection.
Actually, it is broken. The direct manipulation metaphor says that when you click on something, you are selecting t
Please, the inconsistencies were relatively minor considering the history. I mean, a menu which is overloaded and an inconsistent keyboard shortcut isn't exactly world shattering.
Please, just because I list three or four does not mean that there are only three or four. I could list many more, but I thought I could make my point my listing a few that OS-9-ers insist are broken by OS X when in fact they were fixed.
Just because you only use five applications for your work, doesn't mean that I shouldn't use thirty regularly.
Ooo, hoo, hoo, who made you so smart? Just goes to show that all curmudgeons are the same. They all apparently assume that they've been using MacOS longer and that they use it harder than anyone else. (You forgot to use the standard curmudgeon terminology, "production work" to show you're a professional and I'm not.)
I doubt that you're interested in facts, but just in case, I've been using MacOS since my original Mac SE. I make my living on a Mac doing video editing, music, special effects, etc. Some of my coworkers are PC users and are always amazed by how many programs and windows I have open at any one time.
The same goes for the dock. You can only lock down one side, which means that either your regular apps will move or your trashcan will
Awww... And MacOS 9's solution of having the trashcan on the desktop -- where it's either inaccessible or you have to warp your style to make sure it's always visible -- is better? I don't trash stuff often enough that a moving (but always visible) trashcan bothers me. In fact most of the time, I CMD-DEL and don't even bother with the drag.
I'm not saying that MacOS X is perfect. But the "All bow to MacOS 9, the high point of UI for all eternity" chant really bugs me. OS X simply has fewer flaws for modern, multi-tasking usage. And most of the "broken" things are holdovers from the 9-inch-screen days.
(How about another example of "broken" from a MacOS 9 viewpoint: clicking on a single window of an app doesn't bring all of its windows to the front. Annoying at first. (Annoying always for an OS9 bigot.) But how many times was I hamstrung on OS 9 trying to use, say, drag-n-drop when everything pops to the front, obscuring your target? In MacOS X, you can still get the old behavior in multiple ways, but OS 9 offers no alternatives to get the new behavior.)
Most of the "mistakes" I've read about boil down to simply operating differently.
Remember, the OS 9 GUI was originally designed for a uni-tasking computer with a tiny screen. It was brilliant. But over the years, more and more features were welded on, Frankenstein-style and it ended up being inconsistent and unwieldy. Curmudgeons now bitterly complain that it was better, but it sucked in so many ways...
For example, the Apple menu which became the dumping grounds for anything that didn't fit elsewhere. It was originally meant to be a place where mini-applets resided to provide you with a tiny bit of multitasking. (The calculator, Chooser, etc.) And let's not even mention that the Apple menu could change on a per-program basis even though it was supposed to be independent of the currently-running program.
How about the File menu which is featured in every program and mostly contains functions that don't have anything to do with files, or even the program in which it is featured. Then we have the much-vaunted Finder which does things absolutely inconsistent with all other apps. (I.e. CMD-N creates a new folder, not a new window/document.)
How about another OS 9 Finder gem: go to one window and select some files, go to another ans select some more files. Guess, what, the files in the first window are no longer selected. Would you put up with this in any other app? NO. You'd complain about Apple's GUI guidelines, and rightly so.
But OS 9's GUI has achieved sacred status in the minds of the inflexible and so you can't argue with them.\
(The most prominent curmudgeon is the Applelinks guy, who has become a parody of himself with all of his protestations about being a MacOS X guru yet wanting his old kludgy and inconsistent OS 9 back. Sort of like the sports "expert" who complains about the end zone in baseball. He bitterly complained about performance for a long time, but it turns out he had all kinds of "haxies" to make OS X look like OS 9, then he ran in a tiny partition without enough RAM.)
That's the bottom line here. The people who shout long and hard about the government are evidently people who desperately want to believe someone cares about them and what they do.
The fact is, the government has bigger fish to fry (say Al Qaeda) and they really don't care about the college dope head or the guy pirating Simcity. Sorry. They have lots-o-money, but they also have a big world in which some very vengeful and dangerous people are hiding.
Most government types (some of my friends and people I went to school with, by the way) are scrupulously honest and have more rules to follow than you'd ever believe. There's no doubt some corruption at the top -- as in every bureacracy -- but most of the worker bees are honest and overworked and trying to stop someone from slicing your mother's throat and blowing your father up to make some kind of statement.
Yes, you can have a book deal, IF you create a perl or python. Anything short of that league and you're not getting squat.
Also note that the creators of perl, python, etc, still have day jobs last I heard where they're, gasp, paid for creating software.
Not to say that OSS is bad. I just joined an OSS team working on a game design tool for a program for MacOSX and Linux. It's fun, it's great. Contribute. Give something back. Hoorah!
But for those who actually want to be able to buy that Powerbook upon which they develop their OSS, making money may actually be a viable option, perhaps even making money selling software.
(Actually, taking the Knowledge wants to be Free philosophy literally, you shouldn't sell a book on your OSS since that's knowledge. And how can you sell your services to maintain or enhance OSS, since that's knowledge too? Sucker them in with free software that they can't understand or use, and then charge them for usability and customizability?
I see no difference between this and charging for the software directly. EXCEPT for programmers, who get the software and can use/maintain it because of their unique skills/knowledge. So it boils down to: Charge programmers == BAD but charge the unwashed masses == GOOD.)
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Again, I can't understand this. You admit that Moore is dishonest (not as dishonest as you view Limbaugh, but you have to admit he's dishonest). You say that most of Moore's movie is honest, yet biased. But biased is not honest.
That's why an oath in court is to tell "the truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth". Anything less is not the truth. An incomplete, biased story is misleading and is not true, nor does it serve the truth.
And to sum it up, you say Moore's movie is a "far cry" from what you would do, which presuming you're a well-reasoned and honest person reflects extremely poorly on Moore and his work.
Me thinks that the bottom line is you hate Bush enough that you're willing to put up with a pretty shoddy, very biased (i.e. misleading, untruthful) movie as long as it reaches conclusions similar to your own and possibly accomplishes goals similar to yours.
The enemy of your enemy is your friend, perhaps? In being glad that Moore created such a movie that you have to so severely cavaet, I would suggest you've compromised your integrity for the sake of a tactical advantage.
I'd suggest reading quotes of the kinds of things Moore has said about you and me (assuming you're American) to overseas audiences. He is no friend of ours and I doubt that if he achieves his immediate ends that he will work for your or my good in the long run, but he will be perceived as enormously more powerful and he's not a man to not have that go to his large head.
Yes, Moore got this "fact" from an off-handed comment in the Washington Post. It includes as "vacation" time weekends at Camp David -- including meetings with heads of state -- as well as a month-long working vacation in Crawford at which he also had meetings and received guests.
So basically what Moore charactarizes as "vacation" is in fact time away from Washington, only some of which is vacation in the usual sense of the word.
And that's the problem with this film and Moore. He makes a big deal of his "fact checking team" but he edits things out of context and misinterprets or reinterprets other things. It's not "documentary", and it's not even up to reality TV standards of accuracy. It uses real-world footage as the ingredients, but scrambles them around to say whatever he wants.
Why are you so glad, given that there are so many inaccuracies and reinterpretations going on in it? Moore could've made a fictional movie to make his point. (Actually, I don't believe he's talented enough to have successfully done so, but he could've tried.) Or he could've made something straight factual and let the viewer decide. Instead he cut-n-paste and twisted reality to suit his pre-conceived notions, and he calls it a "documentary". And because it does use "real" footage it does appear to be based on fact when it is (mostly) not, which to my mind reeks of Nazi propaganda films.
(Yes, in keeping with /. traditions, I've now officially raised the Nazi comparison. Someone had to do it.)
Didn't he say or imply that bin Laden family members left the US while all flights were grounded and without interviews, when in fact they left after flights resumed and they were made available for interviews, with some interviewed and some not? (The fact that some weren't is not good, but Moore's "facts" are wrong.)
Didn't he say Bush spent 42% of his time on vacation, when in fact Bush spent 42% of his time not at the White House (including weekends), but often working those days? Many of these days included meetings with foreign dignitaries, etc, but the meetings occurred in Crawford or at Camp David.
Let's see, did he not imply that the Taliban visited Bush in Texas while he was governer, when in fact Bush did not meet with them and they were in the country at the invitation of the Clinton administration?
Didn't he say that the Secret Service only guards the Saudi embassy, when in fact it's uniformed division guards many embassies?
Didn't he make a big deal of Bush et al getting hair/makeup care before public appearances, making them appear vain and shallow? If that's legitimate, I guess nearly all public figures and most women qualify. Sheesh, what a misuse of "facts"!
We could go on, but the fact is Moore is vociferous and entertaining, but not terribly talented nor concerned with the truth. If you think this is a documentary with a "whole fact-checking team" behind it, you are naive indeed. I edit videos for a living and know it's trivial to edit things together to make anyone look like a fool or villan. Heck, If I had three hours of Moore footage, I could make him look worse than anyone he's slashed.
I know in Unreal Tournament 2004, it really does help to hear which direction the action is coming from.
It's so important that I was recently faced with a choice. I'd bought some nice USB headphones with mic to use the voice chat, which is also quite useful, but the OpenAL library that ships with (Mac) UT2004 has a bug where you don't hear with a proper stereo image. Other versions of the OpenAL library fixed this problem, but do not see audio inputs.
In the end, I had to choose the accurate stereo image. Hearing which direction the battle's in, or hearing a rocket launcher being fired up to your right is just too important to miss.
This might be true if they were not a monopoly. In this world, de facto trumps de jure.
The operative words here are "store" and "necessary" (in the sense of minimal). Phones still have tiny screens compared to PDAs, so you're looking at your data through a periscope. And if you want to enter or modify data, you're left with a phone keypad which has got to be the stupidest revisionist engineering accomplishment of all time in terms of inputting non-numeric data.
Of course, you can add a larger screen, and writing or a keyboard to your phone, in which case you now have something that's PDA-sized. Which means an awkward size and shape for a phone.
Next thing you know, you'll be telling me about the wonderful combination bicycle/gas grill that saves all kinds of space in the garage.
Stop by an Apple store if you can. They give more free reign on their computers than you would, since people need to try them out.
I've noticed that every night at closing time, a cron job or something fires off and all the machines put up a screen saying something like "Updating from image" and are evidently reloading themselves from a saved image to overcome the day's fiddling and messing up by customers.
I've not been a big FPS fan, but did enjoy Halo and decided to try UT2004 when it came out -- thinking of Machinima possibilities down the road. But WOW!
It's a killer game. Incredible graphics. (Run around in CTF MoonDragon sometime on a machine with a good graphics card and monitor.) All kinds of cool weapons, gametypes, vehicles, etc, and all wonderfully balanced without being symmetrical. Also Mutators which let you tweak games: force all weapons to be rocket launchers, modify gravity strength, etc.
Play with/against bots in any combination with/against human players. Let's you play those large maps with only two people, which you can't do in Halo.
Mods, mods, mods. Dozens of commercial-quality maps in the CBP's. Total mods, like Red Orchestra (WWII Russian front), Total Annihilation, etc. New gametypes such as Jailbreak. Etc. All free, from the user community.
And last, the game designers have a great sense of humor. For example, the Hellbender vehicle (think Humvee) has working break lights, backup lights, and horn. The license plate on the back displays the driver's character name on it. The horn lets humans know you want passengers, and actually causes bots to jump in. (The Flak rifle's grenade has a smiley face painted on the front. If you get a good look at it, you're in trouble.)
An underlying Bayesian model. Not necessarily the Bayesian model used by current "Bayesian" spam filters.
Cox decided a few weeks ago that every Panasonic cable modem on their network had to have its firmware updated. Most of their rentals were Panasonic, but most Panasonics were evidently privately owned. Like mine. But they went ahead and downloaded a patch without seeking permission from anyone, and...
They screwed the patch up and fried thousands of modems. We had to go in and pick up new ones. (Lost time, etc.) At first they offered me this el-cheapo that didn't even have a brand name or model number on it. A second trip yielded a Panasonic.
This is an example of what a cable company can/will do if they think they can perform "maintenance" of equipment in your home!
Wow, I wondered when someone would find a good use for Ooblick. (Besides the standard party trick.)
It is the standard on Client as well. (Or did you mean I should have said "Server" instead of "Xserve"? You're right on that.)
A pleasant surprise in the 10.3 was the adoption of Postfix. It's good to see that they apparently made a good choice and good things are happening on the Postfix front.
(I had been rooting for exim, which is also a great package, but Postfix seems to be a good alternative. Maybe they should also include exim on XServe's?)
I know a person is much smaller than a SCUD and not filled with explosive fuel and not spewing fire out their feet to track them, so it's a harder task. But if you could target a person, I imagine it would be very useful in, say, Najaf.
That's the difference. MS claims Windows won't work without Explorer installed. By way of contrast, drag Safari to the trash and delete it and use whatever other browser you want.
I just went to Whistler this year for my annual snowboarding vacation. (Had been doing Colorado previously.) A great place!
Until this posting. Now, when I'm wandering the streets, or eating at Mongolie grill, or riding down Horstman Glacier, I'll have this unsavory association with MS's long-awaited-now-castrated OS stuck in my brain!
I need therapy!
I think you've proved my point. You have not spent your time listing comparisons where OS 9 is "better in some respects", you have spent your time "bashing" OS X. (And no, you did not mis-state it, you have been bashing.) I've tried to give several examples to make things concrete, but I don't remember anywhere you've unequivicaly admitted that even a single one was valid.
I've not said that problems don't exist in OS X. I have simply said that most of the problems I've heard OS X critics complain about are actually improvements that are more in keeping with Apple's own design principles, which Apple lost sight of over the last decade of MacOS's evolution.
I said "most"; you've been arguing as if I said "all". If I seem to be making a point, you seem to shift your fire elsewhere as if this were a war.
Here you're saying "some", but again, you've argued as if you mean "all". My "most" and your "some" can co-exist quite nicely, you know. Those two phrases for quantity are not mutually exclusive.
The title of this thread is "Mistakes in OS X v OS 9". This is a comparison: a criticism of OS X implies it is inferior to OS 9, a criticism of OS 9 implies OS X is an improvement. So when you criticiz, for example, OS X's trashcan without qualification (which you finally added in your latest note) you are implying that OS 9 had it right and OS X has it wrong.
You have even managed to argue that though OS 9 implemented some things less-well than OS X, the newer OS X implementation is still a step in the wrong direction. (See the Dock discussion, below.)
This is revisionist history at its worst (best?). MacOS was document-centric from the start. That was the major difference from DOS and its other predecessors: you didn't invoke a program with a document as an argument, you opened a document and magically the correct application ran so you could manipulate it.
(You've heard the joke that Finder didn't find, right? That's based on the misunderstanding that Finder would find files, which the Find command currently does. In fact, Finder found the application that was appropriate to process a particular document, allowing for a document-centric view.)
The problem is, as it grew from a system where only a single document could be open in a single application to one where multiple documents could be opened in multiple applications, it was hacked together in whatever way was convenient. They bolted on features willy-nilly, and ended up with a mixed metaphor as the OS moved from a uni-tasking basis to a multi-tasking one.
The fact that you got this totally backwards tells me something about whether you're actually trying to point "some" things out to me or whether you're trying to lob every ball back over the net without exception.
Actually, you have it backwards. I am the one that is saying the new is, on the whole, better than the old. You are the one defending pen and paper. Yes, CD's do not sound as good as the best vinyl, but they are far more convenient in most ways. Yes, pencil and paper may last longer than a hard drive and doesn't care if it's rained upon, but overall the hard drive is better.
Two issues here. First, you say elsewhere that you only want to point out that some features of OS 9 are better than some features of OS X. But you insist in either defending every difference to the end, or you dismiss improvements you can't argue with by saying, "it's not exactly world-shattering". This goes way beyond trying to point out a few advantages of OS 9.
Second, your "best choice" is backwards here. (See my other extended note on this elsewhere in this thread.) You're basically justifying OS9's decision based on a flawed design methodology of Classic Finder.
Sorry, when your sentence starts out with "Just because you ..." you are in fact attributing something to me. And if you do not know this to be true, you are leaping to conclusions. You can be cynical and leap to conclusions at the same time.
I think their interests are better served with a trashcan that is always visible and accessible (MacOS X) rather than a trashcan that is always in the same place, but not always visible or accessible (MacOS 9). Yes, a floating widget would be more useful, but last I checked, OS 9 was farther from having this than OS X, so how does this count as a criticism of OS X in comparison to OS 9? Again, you're going way beyond what you claim to be doing.
Please list some more of the "great many". From the discussion so far, it's more like "fixed a great many and created some". (In your eyes, the "some" are larger than the "many", but I've seen no indication of the numberical imbalance you imply.
Why did I have the even stronger need for Drag Thing with OS 9? Would you be willing to say this stronger need indicates a worse interface design? The fact is in MacOS 9 I needed three or four Drag Thing palettes to do the work that only requires one Drag Thing palette (plus Finder and the Dock) in MacOS X 10.3. This is a dramatic improvement, which you can't bring yourself to acknowledge. You seem to insist on severely criticizing MacOS X doing better than MacOS 9 but not perfect.
Yes, and I still do. My understanding of "haxies" are interface modifications that are not independent. In one sense Default Folder is such a haxie, while Default Folder is not. A tweak to MacOS or a program can result in Default Folder crashing the program. Default Folder is an application that stands alone.
And that's one of the philosophy changes from MacOS 9 (extensions, conflicts, crash city) to MacOS X (applications).
Also, "haxies", in my mind, are usually used for
So because nothing else makes sense, we're left with no choice but to do it? (I'd disagree that nothing else makes sense, but let's leave that issue aside for the present discussion.)
You are basically saying, "Hey, we must have a CMD-N and it is supposed to basically create something new, and let's see what is closest to this or makes most sense for Finder and then implement it that way."
The problem here is that you are working bottom-up. This leads to inconsistencies and quirks in the user experience, which is one of the things that has historically made Windows inferior to MacOS even though it has many of the same visual metaphors. But the key to a consistent user experience is to work top-down instead. What should a user expect to see and how do they interface with it? Then how does this apply to the Finder? (Or not apply, in which case we don't just go ahead and do it anyhow.)
So what does CMD-N do overall? It makes a new document. What, specifically does this mean? How does it look? What does this accomplish for the user? What state does it place them in?
Imagine hitting CMD-N in an outlining program. What would you expect? A new, unselected bullet point in the current outline? No, that'd be inconsistent. Though that's what Classic Finder gives you, by analogy. Instead, you'd expect a new outline in a new window.
Hit CMD-N in a wordprocessor and do you expect a new page in the current document? (That's an analog of what Classic Finder gives you.) No, you expect a new wordprocessing document in a new window, open and ready to type into.
Hit CMD-N in a spreadsheet and do you expect a new, unselected row or column? Nope, you expect a new spreadsheet in a new window.
I could go on, but it's the same in everything from Safari to Photoshop: Open a new document in a new window, ready for input of the appropriate type. Not insert a closed object into an existing document.
You may say, "Yes, but Finder is different. Folders are its documents and by definition they are created already saved to disk, in the current document (folder)." Fine. It's different. Then perhaps it should not be mapped to CMD-N since, well, it's different.
The correspondence you want to make in Classic Finder ("documents" are "folders") simply doesn't appear the same as all other programs and also doesn't have the same ramifications. (Among other things, new documents in all other programs have not yet modified the disk, but by definition a new Folder has modified the disk.) So why the desire to still use CMD-N instead of, say, CMD-Shift-N?
There's no similar expectation of CMD-Shift-N's behavior. You would not be surprised if this created a new layer in Photoshop, or a new bullet point in Keynote, etc. So, Classic Finder was inconsistent in the big picture and MacOS X Finder is consistent. (I.e. opens a new window with default data in it.)
Or more precisely, you (and other vocal critics) can't adapt to them. Many of us are doing just fine. While each OS 9 problem is not "world-shattering" there were so many layered on one another that it adds up. As you say, you get used to it and move on, but of course many people got used to DOS and moved on. The question is how inconsistent and warped is the result?
I'm not saying the old shortcut was totally broken in the context of the old Finder. I'm saying that the old Finder's shortcut worked differently from CMD-N in every app I've ever used and is thus broken in the context of the MacOS GUI.
And that's the problem that OS 9 lovers miss: it was inconsistent in dozens of ways because it was a Frankenstein's monster, hacked together from various body parts over the years. Sure you adapt. But that's a far cry from being well-designed.
OK, I'll skip humorour references. (It was a quote from The Princess Bride.) You weren't implying you were smarter, but you did immediately leap to the conclusion that I must surely be using fewer windows/apps than you. This is the kind of bias I've encountered again and again from MacOS 9 advocates.
Yes, the Dock is sub-optimal for managing dozens of windows/folders, though not applications. I can't think of an OS 9 alternative that was better. Two programs that were must-haves under OS9 and still are in OS X: 1) Drag Thing, and 2) Default Folder.
If you rarely use it, being a static target doesn't matter much. It's frequently-used things that need to rely on muscle memory. (Now that you've brought it up, it's another Finder inconsistency in OS 9: Undo. Who would buy an application with no Undo? Yet the almighty pre-OSX Finders had none. OS X has added this, making at least some trips to the trashcan unnecessary.)
The Dock is not perfect. That's why I use it for absolute-must-have apps and managing running apps and some windows, but have Drag Thing for managing most (non-running) apps and documents. What gets me is how you can so vociforously criticize MacOS X for an incompletely-implemented feature, while praising OS 9 which is a no-show in that area.
It's actually more like five steps forward and two back. It boils down to this: you had twisted yourself around OS 9's dozens of inconsistencies, limitations, and bugs and it worked well for you. OS X has fixed most of those (five steps forward) but broken two or three of your favorite things so you trash it.
I could probably list pages of OS 9 limitations and inconsistencies. You would just look at each one and say, "not world-shattering". But the sum of them is world-shattering and OS X makes OS9 look more like Windows 3 by comparison.
Actually, it is broken. The direct manipulation metaphor says that when you click on something, you are selecting t
I doubt that you're interested in facts, but just in case, I've been using MacOS since my original Mac SE. I make my living on a Mac doing video editing, music, special effects, etc. Some of my coworkers are PC users and are always amazed by how many programs and windows I have open at any one time.
Awww... And MacOS 9's solution of having the trashcan on the desktop -- where it's either inaccessible or you have to warp your style to make sure it's always visible -- is better? I don't trash stuff often enough that a moving (but always visible) trashcan bothers me. In fact most of the time, I CMD-DEL and don't even bother with the drag.I'm not saying that MacOS X is perfect. But the "All bow to MacOS 9, the high point of UI for all eternity" chant really bugs me. OS X simply has fewer flaws for modern, multi-tasking usage. And most of the "broken" things are holdovers from the 9-inch-screen days.
(How about another example of "broken" from a MacOS 9 viewpoint: clicking on a single window of an app doesn't bring all of its windows to the front. Annoying at first. (Annoying always for an OS9 bigot.) But how many times was I hamstrung on OS 9 trying to use, say, drag-n-drop when everything pops to the front, obscuring your target? In MacOS X, you can still get the old behavior in multiple ways, but OS 9 offers no alternatives to get the new behavior.)
Most of the "mistakes" I've read about boil down to simply operating differently.
Remember, the OS 9 GUI was originally designed for a uni-tasking computer with a tiny screen. It was brilliant. But over the years, more and more features were welded on, Frankenstein-style and it ended up being inconsistent and unwieldy. Curmudgeons now bitterly complain that it was better, but it sucked in so many ways...
For example, the Apple menu which became the dumping grounds for anything that didn't fit elsewhere. It was originally meant to be a place where mini-applets resided to provide you with a tiny bit of multitasking. (The calculator, Chooser, etc.) And let's not even mention that the Apple menu could change on a per-program basis even though it was supposed to be independent of the currently-running program.
How about the File menu which is featured in every program and mostly contains functions that don't have anything to do with files, or even the program in which it is featured. Then we have the much-vaunted Finder which does things absolutely inconsistent with all other apps. (I.e. CMD-N creates a new folder, not a new window/document.)
How about another OS 9 Finder gem: go to one window and select some files, go to another ans select some more files. Guess, what, the files in the first window are no longer selected. Would you put up with this in any other app? NO. You'd complain about Apple's GUI guidelines, and rightly so.
But OS 9's GUI has achieved sacred status in the minds of the inflexible and so you can't argue with them.\
(The most prominent curmudgeon is the Applelinks guy, who has become a parody of himself with all of his protestations about being a MacOS X guru yet wanting his old kludgy and inconsistent OS 9 back. Sort of like the sports "expert" who complains about the end zone in baseball. He bitterly complained about performance for a long time, but it turns out he had all kinds of "haxies" to make OS X look like OS 9, then he ran in a tiny partition without enough RAM.)
That's the bottom line here. The people who shout long and hard about the government are evidently people who desperately want to believe someone cares about them and what they do.
The fact is, the government has bigger fish to fry (say Al Qaeda) and they really don't care about the college dope head or the guy pirating Simcity. Sorry. They have lots-o-money, but they also have a big world in which some very vengeful and dangerous people are hiding.
Most government types (some of my friends and people I went to school with, by the way) are scrupulously honest and have more rules to follow than you'd ever believe. There's no doubt some corruption at the top -- as in every bureacracy -- but most of the worker bees are honest and overworked and trying to stop someone from slicing your mother's throat and blowing your father up to make some kind of statement.
Motley Fool
Yes, you can have a book deal, IF you create a perl or python. Anything short of that league and you're not getting squat.
Also note that the creators of perl, python, etc, still have day jobs last I heard where they're, gasp, paid for creating software.
Not to say that OSS is bad. I just joined an OSS team working on a game design tool for a program for MacOSX and Linux. It's fun, it's great. Contribute. Give something back. Hoorah!
But for those who actually want to be able to buy that Powerbook upon which they develop their OSS, making money may actually be a viable option, perhaps even making money selling software.
(Actually, taking the Knowledge wants to be Free philosophy literally, you shouldn't sell a book on your OSS since that's knowledge. And how can you sell your services to maintain or enhance OSS, since that's knowledge too? Sucker them in with free software that they can't understand or use, and then charge them for usability and customizability?
I see no difference between this and charging for the software directly. EXCEPT for programmers, who get the software and can use/maintain it because of their unique skills/knowledge. So it boils down to: Charge programmers == BAD but charge the unwashed masses == GOOD.)