(iii)
Well integrated GUI/CLI combo. Think Common Lisp CLIM. If you've never used it, check it out. XMLTerm is a similar idea.
(x)
Amiga-like removable media handling. Disk goes in, icon appears on desktop. Disk comes out, Icon disappears. Icon corresponds to the volume label, not the drive the disk is in. So one can take the disk out and put it in a different drive, AND THE SYSTEM DOESN'T CARE. You can install a program from your fifteenth CDROM drive, AND THE SYSTEM DOESN'T CARE.
(xi)
AppDirs. Don't confuse the user. Make the filesystem hierarchy where applications live. Means installing is "drag icon off the cdrom onto the harddrive". Don't invent an alternate hierarchy in the Start Menu like Windoze does, or glom everything together in/usr like traditional Unix does.
Mac OS has all of these (although 9 is missing the strong CLI).
Mac OSX has, in my opinion, a fantastic CLI/GUI combination. If you want the power of the CLI you can open the terminal and run your computer from there, and you can spawn as many new shells as you like. Keep the terminal app on the dock and you have one click access to a CLI from the GUI.
Since way back in the dark days of Mac OS removable disks mount only when inserted into their respective drives, and eject automatically when unmounted. There is no drive letter system, and the Finder's window isn't cluttered with icons of drives you can't use, only available volumes at the time of opening the window (or upon insertion of a disk/connection to a network volume)
Apps can be anywhere, and will load from anywhere. If you move an application from its original location it will still launch perfectly. It doesn't care where it is. The Dock doesn't care either, no do aliases (shortcuts).
Windows shortcuts, and the start menu, get stroppy when locations are changed, but Mac aliases and dock icons keep track of where their targets are without user intervention.
Installing apps is a case of dragging to where ever you want your app to be (usually the Applications folder)
Uninstalling apps is as simple as dragging it to the trash. None of the cumbersome uninstall nonsense in the Windows system.
People seem to either love or hate Mac OSX (It's too cartoony/childish/not manly like "real" unix etc etc and other such bollocks), but I think it's a very impressive system. Uniform in buttons, dialogs, menus, keyboard shortcuts and with the Dock - the best system I've seen for managing and launching apps and documents (you can keep files and folders on the Dock too).
If you dislike the eye candy (animated dock and windows) then you can turn it off. You can customise icons easily, plus, you have that all important easy access to the CLI, where you can do anything that the plain old vanilla Darwin can do to control your machine.
Oh, and if the single button mouse thing is keeping you away, budget $15 into your account and buy a standard PC USB mouse (even the wheel works). You'll find you don't really need it though.
Of all the GUIs available at the moment, I think OS X is the best of the lot.
Look at it this way, as a friend of mine told me the other day: Mac OS X is a server strength operating system with all the power of Unix that your granny could install and use (but that won't frustrate the power user through lack of functionality).
In the UK we have several channels run by the BBC that are public. That is, we pay for them with a yearly licence fee.
In return for this, there are no commercials on BBC channels (a fact that makes it well worth the licence fee).
If you own a colour TV, whether you watch the BBC or not, you must pay a yearly licence fee of £104 (about $150). If you have a black and white TV the cost is £35.
There are obviously people who try to get out of paying (pretending their TV is a microwave or something when the detector people come round).
If you're caught and you don't have a licence the fine is £1000 ($1500).
All the money goes to fund programming on the BBC's many channels (it used to only have two TV channels and 5 radio stations, it has about 5 channels now too).
There are no commercials on any of the BBC radio stations either, although there's no radio licence - it's covered in the TV licence.
Remember, it's manufactured as a aircraft, so it has much more in the way of extreme precision parts. The power/autogyro assembly alone would be about $2000 and that's just a short rod with a locking bearing in it.
to be honest, as long as your new kid doesn't put a very small jam sandwich in the drive mechanism you should be ok.
Just be careful with video editing software that supports batch capture. Media 100 (our professional video editing software) supports batch capture over firewire, and while it worked fine on the Pro hardware, the consumer equipment wasn't designed for control based on the timecode (not as accurately as the software was looking at anyway).
It resulted in the camera shunting back and forth, mangling the tape, and it can't have done the camera any good either.
Digitising a clip at a time worked fine though. Took forever though. I'm just glad that batch digitise worked well on our 184 minute DV-CAM tapes!
You can choose a plethora of codecs to use when making your quicktime movie, just like an avi or other such format.
You can even use the DV codec, which is why iMovie can capture so easily in realtime from your flashy firewire equipped camcorder without nailing the CPU - it doesn't have to do too much processing.
Hell, if you want you can use mpeg4 although this is only supported in Quicktime 6 (download the player free from apple).
I can match my friend playing against me in Quake III. He takes my PC, with a Geforce 2 and a 17" CRT and I have my humble 600MHz iBook (and optical mouse thank god - Q3 with the trackpad is a joke).
OK, so I have to throttle down the textures to 16 bit and reduce the resolution slightly (less than you might think) but it still gives a very playable game with no slowdown (only on truly giant maps when I get out into large open spaces).
I just have to work out a way to counter him when he has the railgun. He is unnaturally accurate with that thing, even on the move. Perhaps I need a graphics tablet with a built in screen... pixel point accuracy... you'd never miss!
Re:When will they fix the /windows/ problems?
on
Thursday Release Party
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Quote:
One button mouse. Keyboards that none wants to use. Paying for every service pack. Overpriced hardware. Mac zealots that hink that PCs only run Windows 95. Slow processors. Plunging share price. Slow software updates. Poor market share. Bloated GUI. Grinning idiots on Apple's homepage.
What about windoze problems?
* Inability to realise you can buy multi-button mice for $10. * Keyboards with thousands of proprietry keys from thousands of manufacturers (a "check email" key, I mean really!). * Having to deal with a buggy, broken OS that seems to develop more security holes with each patch applied. * Inability to realise that 10.1 to 10.2 is like windoze 95 > windows 98. M$ didn't give you a copy of thier peice of shit OS for free did they? * Users caught in the myth that a 50 GHz processor is useless if the rest of your hardware is rubbish. * I don't own shares in Apple * How does lower market share affect my productivity/enjoyment of Apple? * Crayola GUI in latest OS. Bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain other OS with an X in the name. Copying again M$? tch tch. * Stock photo idiots on M$'s homepage (remember M$'s supposed "switch" ad?) * Having to use your own employees to promote your OS in a fake switch ad, since no one else will. * Lacking a nice Unix core that has proved very useful to me in OSX.
Oh, and one last thing.
* Digital Rights Removal, errr, Digital Restrictions Management, err, no sorry Digital Rights Management.
Something's bust in your machine. I have less ram and Chimera 0.6 flies along. I have seven tabs open right now, plus a couple of other apps and I have no trouble.
Multiple page loading is no problem either. I can command+shift click on all the slashdot articles on the front page one after the other and have them open in background tabs all at once without it slowing up.
Sony's monster infoLithium batteries will fit both their professional DV-CAM and consumer DV units.
The pro ones are enormous (they weigh about a pound each, which is heavy for a lithium ion battery), plus they have a 3 block caddy to fit them in, which then bolts on the back.
In this way, you can fit three huge batteries to your DV-CAM, or 2, or just the one, or a mixture of small and big ones. It's a fantastic system, and it allows you to swap batteries while the camera is still on and recording.
Much better than using PAG-90 batteries to power Betacam SP cameras and recorders, although Pag have told us they're considering a lithium ion version of the 90 style battery. That will be the day!
For info, the largest sony infoLithium is the same size as a regular one in footprint, but is about an inch or so deep, possibly a bit more. Each one will run a large DV-CAM in record mode for well over an hour.
We bolted one to the back of our Sony P100 (the DV-CAM version of the consumer all in one palmcorder) and it went for 6 hours before we needed to change it.
My girlfriend upgraded to windoze XtremePants and her (HP) cd writer stopped working, as did her (Epson) scanner.
She needed new drivers for her printer and graphics card.
My parents went through masses of hassle installing drivers and troubleshooting strange issues with their new printer in Windows. I came home for the weekend with my iBook and wanted to print something out. I connected to the printer via usb and 30 seconds later, clicked print and out came a perfect printout of my document.
Same thing goes for digital cameras - my iBook saw it as a removable drive, my friend's W2k box needed drivers and special software that came with the camera to access the files.
My iBook has a firewire port - how many sub-notebooks have those? I hooked up our Sony DSR-300 (ok, a professional DV-CAM, but it works with consumer dv hardware too) and had it working as a webcam in minutes. I was also able to capture pretty decent quality video to the HD and edit it (I was limited by HD space - it will go up to 150k per frame if you have the space for it).
My scanner was a little more difficult - my model isn't supported by (I have the ultra cheap one). Fortuanately, there's a program called VueScan which works flawlessly with my scanner connected to one of the USB ports (oh, your pc laptop only has one? Guess you need a hub then).
It will come as no surprise to you that most professional video companies and stations (the BBC for example) use Macs for non-linear editing. They do "just work". Media 100 is superb.
For some reason, the US versions of many cars have almost half the mpg of their European equivalents - check out the new Beetle - 54mpg in the UK, 25mpg in the US and it's same car.
The diesels are closer in performance, but my father's Renault Laguna 2.2 litre turbodiesel still gets 50 or so mpg, even if you drive it hard and load up that cavernous boot space.
It didn't. There were several cables - one for each 'phone'. This just happened to be the longest.
They all terminate in a 6' by 6' shed ina field somewhere in the UK. It looks too small to have once been the intelligence and communications hub of an entire empire.
There was a video conference where the engineers relled off reams of evidence that stated that launch below 53F would result in catastrophic failure - they thought it would blow us the moment the SRBs were ignited.
NASA rubbished them, claiming it was a bad presentation (they only had a few hours to prepare), but they could not launch if the engineers said no. The launch had already been delayed by 3 or so days so there was huge pressure from a PR point of view.
The management team said "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat", and they then told NASA it was ok to launch.
The senior engineer on that program resigned and now lectures on safety procedures at a university.
The computer doesn't disengage on immediate input from the pilot for a very good reason - if the pilot has a hear attack or seizure and pushes the stick, you don't want the computer to think it's ok to shut off the autopilot.
Even if the copiolt recovers quickly, the amount of hot coffee spilled into people's laps and other assorted injuries would be a goldmine for lawyers.
There were software errors in the fly by wire system though, but they have been ironed out now - I hope!
As you know, junkyard wars is the US version of the British show Scrapheap Challenge.
Scrapheap Challenge came from Scrapheap, which was almost identical to SC, except that the teams were the same every week (except for the expert) and they kept score depending on who won that week's challenege.
Thus, I think it was origianlly entertaining science for kids and adults.
Slashdot Mirror
(iii) Well integrated GUI/CLI combo. Think Common Lisp CLIM. If you've never used it, check it out. XMLTerm is a similar idea.
/usr like traditional Unix does.
(x) Amiga-like removable media handling. Disk goes in, icon appears on desktop. Disk comes out, Icon disappears. Icon corresponds to the volume label, not the drive the disk is in. So one can take the disk out and put it in a different drive, AND THE SYSTEM DOESN'T CARE. You can install a program from your fifteenth CDROM drive, AND THE SYSTEM DOESN'T CARE.
(xi) AppDirs. Don't confuse the user. Make the filesystem hierarchy where applications live. Means installing is "drag icon off the cdrom onto the harddrive". Don't invent an alternate hierarchy in the Start Menu like Windoze does, or glom everything together in
Mac OS has all of these (although 9 is missing the strong CLI).
Mac OSX has, in my opinion, a fantastic CLI/GUI combination. If you want the power of the CLI you can open the terminal and run your computer from there, and you can spawn as many new shells as you like. Keep the terminal app on the dock and you have one click access to a CLI from the GUI.
Since way back in the dark days of Mac OS removable disks mount only when inserted into their respective drives, and eject automatically when unmounted. There is no drive letter system, and the Finder's window isn't cluttered with icons of drives you can't use, only available volumes at the time of opening the window (or upon insertion of a disk/connection to a network volume)
Apps can be anywhere, and will load from anywhere. If you move an application from its original location it will still launch perfectly. It doesn't care where it is. The Dock doesn't care either, no do aliases (shortcuts).
Windows shortcuts, and the start menu, get stroppy when locations are changed, but Mac aliases and dock icons keep track of where their targets are without user intervention.
Installing apps is a case of dragging to where ever you want your app to be (usually the Applications folder)
Uninstalling apps is as simple as dragging it to the trash. None of the cumbersome uninstall nonsense in the Windows system.
People seem to either love or hate Mac OSX (It's too cartoony/childish/not manly like "real" unix etc etc and other such bollocks), but I think it's a very impressive system. Uniform in buttons, dialogs, menus, keyboard shortcuts and with the Dock - the best system I've seen for managing and launching apps and documents (you can keep files and folders on the Dock too).
If you dislike the eye candy (animated dock and windows) then you can turn it off. You can customise icons easily, plus, you have that all important easy access to the CLI, where you can do anything that the plain old vanilla Darwin can do to control your machine.
Oh, and if the single button mouse thing is keeping you away, budget $15 into your account and buy a standard PC USB mouse (even the wheel works). You'll find you don't really need it though.
Of all the GUIs available at the moment, I think OS X is the best of the lot.
Look at it this way, as a friend of mine told me the other day: Mac OS X is a server strength operating system with all the power of Unix that your granny could install and use (but that won't frustrate the power user through lack of functionality).
In the UK we have several channels run by the BBC that are public. That is, we pay for them with a yearly licence fee.
In return for this, there are no commercials on BBC channels (a fact that makes it well worth the licence fee).
If you own a colour TV, whether you watch the BBC or not, you must pay a yearly licence fee of £104 (about $150). If you have a black and white TV the cost is £35.
There are obviously people who try to get out of paying (pretending their TV is a microwave or something when the detector people come round).
If you're caught and you don't have a licence the fine is £1000 ($1500).
All the money goes to fund programming on the BBC's many channels (it used to only have two TV channels and 5 radio stations, it has about 5 channels now too).
There are no commercials on any of the BBC radio stations either, although there's no radio licence - it's covered in the TV licence.
Remember, it's manufactured as a aircraft, so it has much more in the way of extreme precision parts. The power/autogyro assembly alone would be about $2000 and that's just a short rod with a locking bearing in it.
to be honest, as long as your new kid doesn't put a very small jam sandwich in the drive mechanism you should be ok.
Just be careful with video editing software that supports batch capture. Media 100 (our professional video editing software) supports batch capture over firewire, and while it worked fine on the Pro hardware, the consumer equipment wasn't designed for control based on the timecode (not as accurately as the software was looking at anyway).
It resulted in the camera shunting back and forth, mangling the tape, and it can't have done the camera any good either.
Digitising a clip at a time worked fine though. Took forever though. I'm just glad that batch digitise worked well on our 184 minute DV-CAM tapes!
You're cursed! Get away! Get away!
No, seriously, it's hard to crash OSX, even with classic running. Your experience is very much less than typical.
5:12PM up 26 days, 13:23, 3 users, load averages: 1.69, 1.03, 0.89
Alas, I had to boot into OS9 proper a few weeks ago, otherwise that would be nearer 3 months by now.
Quicktime is just the format.
You can choose a plethora of codecs to use when making your quicktime movie, just like an avi or other such format.
You can even use the DV codec, which is why iMovie can capture so easily in realtime from your flashy firewire equipped camcorder without nailing the CPU - it doesn't have to do too much processing.
Hell, if you want you can use mpeg4 although this is only supported in Quicktime 6 (download the player free from apple).
I can match my friend playing against me in Quake III. He takes my PC, with a Geforce 2 and a 17" CRT and I have my humble 600MHz iBook (and optical mouse thank god - Q3 with the trackpad is a joke).
OK, so I have to throttle down the textures to 16 bit and reduce the resolution slightly (less than you might think) but it still gives a very playable game with no slowdown (only on truly giant maps when I get out into large open spaces).
I just have to work out a way to counter him when he has the railgun. He is unnaturally accurate with that thing, even on the move. Perhaps I need a graphics tablet with a built in screen... pixel point accuracy... you'd never miss!
Quote:
One button mouse.
Keyboards that none wants to use.
Paying for every service pack.
Overpriced hardware.
Mac zealots that hink that PCs only run Windows 95.
Slow processors.
Plunging share price.
Slow software updates.
Poor market share.
Bloated GUI.
Grinning idiots on Apple's homepage.
What about windoze problems?
* Inability to realise you can buy multi-button mice for $10.
* Keyboards with thousands of proprietry keys from thousands of manufacturers (a "check email" key, I mean really!).
* Having to deal with a buggy, broken OS that seems to develop more security holes with each patch applied.
* Inability to realise that 10.1 to 10.2 is like windoze 95 > windows 98. M$ didn't give you a copy of thier peice of shit OS for free did they?
* Users caught in the myth that a 50 GHz processor is useless if the rest of your hardware is rubbish.
* I don't own shares in Apple
* How does lower market share affect my productivity/enjoyment of Apple?
* Crayola GUI in latest OS. Bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain other OS with an X in the name. Copying again M$? tch tch.
* Stock photo idiots on M$'s homepage (remember M$'s supposed "switch" ad?)
* Having to use your own employees to promote your OS in a fake switch ad, since no one else will.
* Lacking a nice Unix core that has proved very useful to me in OSX.
Oh, and one last thing.
* Digital Rights Removal, errr, Digital Restrictions Management, err, no sorry Digital Rights Management.
Something's bust in your machine. I have less ram and Chimera 0.6 flies along. I have seven tabs open right now, plus a couple of other apps and I have no trouble.
Multiple page loading is no problem either. I can command+shift click on all the slashdot articles on the front page one after the other and have them open in background tabs all at once without it slowing up.
Word!
Quake III on my iBook is a strictly "connect to the power supply" affair since it chews through my battery.
Starcraft is the same, but only because you can only play it with the CD in, so it has it spinning the whole time.
Sony's monster infoLithium batteries will fit both their professional DV-CAM and consumer DV units.
The pro ones are enormous (they weigh about a pound each, which is heavy for a lithium ion battery), plus they have a 3 block caddy to fit them in, which then bolts on the back.
In this way, you can fit three huge batteries to your DV-CAM, or 2, or just the one, or a mixture of small and big ones. It's a fantastic system, and it allows you to swap batteries while the camera is still on and recording.
Much better than using PAG-90 batteries to power Betacam SP cameras and recorders, although Pag have told us they're considering a lithium ion version of the 90 style battery. That will be the day!
For info, the largest sony infoLithium is the same size as a regular one in footprint, but is about an inch or so deep, possibly a bit more. Each one will run a large DV-CAM in record mode for well over an hour.
We bolted one to the back of our Sony P100 (the DV-CAM version of the consumer all in one palmcorder) and it went for 6 hours before we needed to change it.
As long as you're careful taking it apart (and you need a set of torx screwdivers to do it) you shouldn't have too much of a problem.
You can do all the paint stripping well away from the internal gubbins since both transparent panels come away (the top one rather more easily).
My girlfriend upgraded to windoze XtremePants and her (HP) cd writer stopped working, as did her (Epson) scanner.
She needed new drivers for her printer and graphics card.
My parents went through masses of hassle installing drivers and troubleshooting strange issues with their new printer in Windows. I came home for the weekend with my iBook and wanted to print something out. I connected to the printer via usb and 30 seconds later, clicked print and out came a perfect printout of my document.
Same thing goes for digital cameras - my iBook saw it as a removable drive, my friend's W2k box needed drivers and special software that came with the camera to access the files.
My iBook has a firewire port - how many sub-notebooks have those? I hooked up our Sony DSR-300 (ok, a professional DV-CAM, but it works with consumer dv hardware too) and had it working as a webcam in minutes. I was also able to capture pretty decent quality video to the HD and edit it (I was limited by HD space - it will go up to 150k per frame if you have the space for it).
My scanner was a little more difficult - my model isn't supported by (I have the ultra cheap one). Fortuanately, there's a program called VueScan which works flawlessly with my scanner connected to one of the USB ports (oh, your pc laptop only has one? Guess you need a hub then).
It will come as no surprise to you that most professional video companies and stations (the BBC for example) use Macs for non-linear editing. They do "just work". Media 100 is superb.
For some reason, the US versions of many cars have almost half the mpg of their European equivalents - check out the new Beetle - 54mpg in the UK, 25mpg in the US and it's same car.
The diesels are closer in performance, but my father's Renault Laguna 2.2 litre turbodiesel still gets 50 or so mpg, even if you drive it hard and load up that cavernous boot space.
It didn't. There were several cables - one for each 'phone'. This just happened to be the longest.
They all terminate in a 6' by 6' shed ina field somewhere in the UK. It looks too small to have once been the intelligence and communications hub of an entire empire.
Talk to the InternetKing, at Compuglobalmegahypernet. I'm sure he can provide you with faster nudity.
There was a video conference where the engineers relled off reams of evidence that stated that launch below 53F would result in catastrophic failure - they thought it would blow us the moment the SRBs were ignited.
NASA rubbished them, claiming it was a bad presentation (they only had a few hours to prepare), but they could not launch if the engineers said no. The launch had already been delayed by 3 or so days so there was huge pressure from a PR point of view.
The management team said "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat", and they then told NASA it was ok to launch.
The senior engineer on that program resigned and now lectures on safety procedures at a university.
The computer doesn't disengage on immediate input from the pilot for a very good reason - if the pilot has a hear attack or seizure and pushes the stick, you don't want the computer to think it's ok to shut off the autopilot.
Even if the copiolt recovers quickly, the amount of hot coffee spilled into people's laps and other assorted injuries would be a goldmine for lawyers.
There were software errors in the fly by wire system though, but they have been ironed out now - I hope!
British actually, can we have our language back now please?
I went and hunted down that very link to find you'd beaten me to it.
meh, I guess I should have checked first!
You offend me! Wel, no, I've been called worse.
We're not all American here.
Girlfriend 1.0 slept with another woman, then left me for another man.
;)
Girlfriend 2.0 is working out just fine.
Taking lead from the mac porn site, I experimented with my girlfriend.
I am having conflicts between Lad's Night Out 2.6 and Girlfriend Sex 1.0.
Do you think if I trash Girlfriend 1.0 and get an updated version I'll have more luck?
As you know, junkyard wars is the US version of the British show Scrapheap Challenge.
Scrapheap Challenge came from Scrapheap, which was almost identical to SC, except that the teams were the same every week (except for the expert) and they kept score depending on who won that week's challenege.
Thus, I think it was origianlly entertaining science for kids and adults.
Great question though.
Nearly pure water, since droplets tend to form around particles of dust, so over time it would gum up whereever it was condensing/settling on.