Max Planck institute Siggraph 2000
on
3D Face Cameras
·
· Score: 1
I believe I saw in Siggraph 2000 a near realtime algorithm that generates 3D images of a human head by given one side profile.
The example they used was actor Tom Hanks and the folks at
at the Max Planck Institute had this impressive demo that showed
a 45 degree (between front and side) angle shot of the face was the
only input data need to generate a full 3D model of the head.
It used some parameters of the human head to define what the bounds of the 3D model would be. I can't find the original video, but it seems from the link below that they have progressed this idea further.
University of Michigan's alumni and researchers prove this every day in the field of academia and industry.
Most current examples are Larry Page of Google and Tony Fadell creator of the iPod.
What I don't understand is how Brown University is consistently ranked higher than UofM in the US News & World Report every year. When is the last time you heard anything from Brown University for innovative research or their professors brought in as an expert in the fields of medicine, engineering, law...etc etc. It shows an obvious bias towards Ivy League schools and for private university over public ones. UC Berkley also suffers from this bias.
Fuck football indeed. I didn't go to our engineering school for
the football, I went there for a great engineering degree. I think its rather myopic and uninformed people who view UofM as solely a football school. Although in the case of University of Nebraska this is probably true. We Wolverines are much much more than football.
First, I certainly don't believe that Macs have a 16% globally, yet alone that market share with in the US. As a system administrator for my department at an engineering university, our department has 14% Macs. Because we promote OSX/PPC and Linux/Opteron boxes these days over Wintel machines. This number is not representative of the country or the world at large. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing Macs having a greater market share as well as Linux have an increased market share too.
The numbers break down much like this for the whole college of engineering at the university: 3401 Windows, 1188 Macs, 471 Linux, 546 Misc. Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, BSD and QNX). Countries like South Korea, China...have an unhealthy computing monoculture, which hurts them when a single debilitating worm hits their country's network. I always find it interesting when we have foreign visiting scholars who are oblivious to anything but Windows
Most webstats at our university show a 3:1 ratio of Macs:Linux (which are not that accurate in my opinion). The content of ones website will attract more or less OSX/Linux users. e.g. Slashdot will have a disproportionate Linux, OSX, BSD users compared to other websites. Where as Photoreview website will have more Mac/Windows users. Now if the NYTimes, BBC, Amazon gave us their stats I think their sampling would be more representative of what is used in the US or globally. Pulling numbers from a Polish website "may" represent usage in that country, but since I can't read Polish and can't discern the content of the website I'll take those stats with a grain of salt.
Just like when I read this article
Scientists: The Latest Mac Converts. This only represents a particular NASA's JPL facility using 90% Macs. I know NOAA uses a lot of Solaris, OSX and Linux machines too. When I see documentaries they often have a Sun or Mac on their desktop and NASA's EdGCM also like using Macs. Even then 16% of usage globally or with in the US of Mac use is clearly not representative of the realities on the ground.
Thanks for placing the transcript online. Its easier to follow
than the audio recording.
I remember using Zaptor?
I believe the program Larry Page was referring to is Zephyr messing service. People could use use zlocate and ytalk to
find and talk to their fellow students logged onto the unix
mostly Sun and HP workstations in those days at Michigan.
Marisa Coleman
President of the University of Michigan is Mary Sue Coleman.
Dean director
This confuses many people, so its understandable.
The College of Engineering's dean is Steve Director leaving this summer '05. So his name is Director, not director as a position.
Because of the FCC flag issue I decided to buy the Elgato 500
in June. Its more expensive and powerful than I need right now,
but I didn't want to be blocked from recording HDTV in the future (whenever I get it), until then I was planning on using the Elgato 500 for standard DTV with my current laptop or with a future purchase of a Mac Mini. Although, the ruling today changes my rationale for buying the 500 series. Any chance that this can be appealed or over ruled?
Personally, I was hoping would add MAPI support for its Mail.app, Addressbook.app and iCal.app for Tiger. But this is really Microsoft's Business Unit responsibility. I think Mac OSX
customers should
demand MAPI support for Entourage if they are going to be paying all that good money. Its Microsoft's very own properietary protocol, yet they don't support it on the Mac side. I've long concluded that the DoJ is asleep at the wheel. Microsoft provides the bare minimal support to show the DoJ folks that they are complying with US anti trust laws. Yet, I feel Microsoft has purposely not developed the latest versions MSN Messenger, Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer further. Yet, the latest Quicktimes and iTunes is found on the Windows side.
I hope that the FTC will require Groove Networks to support Mac OSX too.
I believe what CypherXero was saying when his father says he knows Windows, his father isn't claiming to be knowledgeable just that he's familiar with the OS and it remains in his comfort zone. The biggest resistance to change is due to people who are nervous and unsure about compatibility issues with Windows and the anticipatory frustration of learning a new system.
Yet region encoding is enforced by law. Doesn't this mean that the law exists to support the business model?
I'm not sure it is the law to enforce region encoding.
I bought a DVD player that plays ignores regional restrictions,
plays VCD, CD and MP3 CDs from Best Buy (USA) a few years ago. Anyways, in my last post that you replied to I did state that I'm not a fan of regional encoding. Just giving you the possible reasoning behind the studios need to have regional encoding.
I'm only referring to the latest versions of OS X, since early versions were, IMHO, practically unusable.
I would say Jaguar was the first version I could start for my own use, I could put up with a few performance issues and had limited installations in my department. Then with Panther I can comfortably endorse this version (although they could use a few fixes here and there). So I would agree with you on your pre-Panther opinion.
OTOH, I'm quite willing to compare to Windows NT4, 2000 or XP - they're all _vastly_ superior in terms of UI responsiveness and multitasking capabilities to OS X, in my experience. I find Windows runs more tasks, more smoothly, on lesser hardware than any version of OS X on any Mac I've ever used.
My comparisons have been and are of Windows XP (SP2) which was the original topic of the post
and with Mac OSX 10.3+. Windows XP is slower UI reponse than Win2000 and in turn Win2000 has
slower responsiveness to Windows NT, seems like we can all agree on that. Mac OSX got progressively
better with each release as Apple learnt to optimize their system for their hardware and I don't think
any one would argue that point either.
I just don't get people who say OS X multitasks well, because the one impression I always walk away from an OS X box with is how poorly it handles lots of running applications at once, but how good it is at just about everything else (except file manage, *ugh*, I hate Finder).
When it comes to multitasking with heavy loads I find Windows XP the worst, followed by Mac OSX Panther,
next Linux KDE, then Irix with 4Dwm tied with Solairs \ HP-UX both with CDE and on the top
of the list BeOS with Tracker. Thats my experience so far for modern OSes
I'd have to say screen/window redrawing is one area where OS X is unquestionably superior to Windows, primarily due to Quartz.
That is incorrect. Mac OSX Quartz gives it higher fidelity rendering and more special effects, but Windows
has faster screen and windows redrawing. Open GL based features like Expose given the impression
of speed
I'm not going to comment on your specific example because I don't have all of the facts.
Correction its examples I gave you and I won't accept that it is one anecdotal incident and your language
indicates you are still doubtful of the issues we have with Dells even though I stated several examples.
I usually call that denial or selectively dismissive.
From what you're describing Dell's QA procedures must be seriously worse in the US, or machines bound for Australia are sourced from different factories, because I've never had problems with machines showing up with the wrong hardware, etc.
To use that brilliant line of thinking, I would say that Apple hardware and the operating system must
have some quality assurance issues in OZ. Doesn't sound so logically now does it, but if you are
going to come up with reasons like that you really should think about it more before posting them.
Saha: As for industrial design its does not win any awards here. If you can send me a link where a Dell desktop or laptop won an Industrial Design award I'm all ears and I shall wait with bated breath
Since when is winning an industrial design award - there can only be one winner, after all - the only measure of good industrial design ? If I can get into a case quickly and easily to make modifications, if the internals are well laid out, easily accessible and removable and if it isn't ugly, then I call that good industrial design. The Dell machines I've used meet that criteria.
As I thought so, you couldn't give me a single example where Dell desktop or laptops where noted for their
" excellent industrial design" as you put it. Dells haven't even been runners up, now if you
have said Sony or IBM then you would have a case. It's laughable that you would say that Dell has
" excellent industrial design" and your criteria has been co
I would disagree, although you raise an interesting point in terms of dividing the world market between distributors. I'm sure when DVD regional encoding was concocted, it was made for current movies in mind, not many people thought of making money on classics in the very beginning. Besides to have regional encoding for the reasons I stated in my original post and to have non-regional encoded classics would confuse manufacturing and consumers. Consumers would probably
rebel against the movie studios if they knew that they
could produce non-regional DVDs as well and have more regional restrictions for the newer movies they bought. At least thats my theory.
The logistics of a simultaneous global release would be daunting for any movie studio. If we're talk about distributing film than shipping all those reels all across the world to all the theaters that want to show it would be one logistical nightmare, with movies and distribution going digital this would theoretically solve the problem. Although, not all countries around the world have a fat enough internet pipe to download a digital 2K (or 4K?) resolution movie. Even in the distant future with movies going digital and all nations catching up with their internet bandwidth, the other issue is marketing and promotion costs. A movie studio or distributor like Disney would find it near impossible to
promote on t.v, print, billboards, radio and preview in theaters simultaneously around the world. The current strategy to piecemeal the globe into regional release dates makes sense for the studio. Personally, I don't like the regional encoding its a pain.
well not really the regions on DVDs are so some poorer regions can get cheaper DVDs and not cut into the profits of places where a higher price is ok.
I would say Asia and others are in different zones, because a pirated DVD movie from the US region 1, can't be distributed in theory to DVD players in zones using region 5. Where the movie is still playing at the box office. That way the movie industry can release the DVD in the US and other region 1 zones, while the movie is still playing in theaters in non-region 1 zone and doesn't hurt the box office sales. I doubt the DVD regions were created as a benevolent scheme to make DVDs more affordable for impoverished nations.
My experience says your outlook on OS X is very generous and your outlook on Windows very harsh.
I would say the same just in the other way. Although mine
is based on volume purchases of Macs and PCs for my department not my own personal purchases
I really wish OS X was faster, because I like it [arstechnica.com], but it's simply too chunky on non-monstrous hardware to be a viable option. It's not so much that I can't afford a dual G5, I just refuse to shell out that much money so I can get an enjoyable, basic computing experience as a matter of _principle_
I believe its safe to say that our experiences gives us a bias towards opposite direction. Its a shame I can't sit you down in
front of my computers to show you the difference, although I suspect you probably feel the same way. Windows XP just stalls more often is 'Not Responding', more than Mac OSX Finder is 'Hung' and I'm frankly astonished you are unable to see that. The multitask abilities on Mac OSX are stronger, although launching an application or rendering a new window within an application is faster in Windows XP. I'm just more frustrated with the poor multitask capabilities than screen rendering of a new window or application launch. The difference between generating a new window is not noticeable for me between the two platforms. The noticeable perceptual difference is that WIndows XP launches applications faster, but I leave applications running all day or
sometimes weeks on my Mac OSX, therefore multitasking and application switching is paramount and much more noticeable to me. I also want to make sure you're on the same page as me when I talk about Macs OS X its version 10.3+ not the ones
below and when I'm talking about Windows XP, I'm talking about
XP SP1 and SP
I've come to the conclusion that either Dell manufacture and ship *completely* different hardware to the US than they do here to Australia, or when people like you are talking about "Dell hardware" they are restricting themselves to the cheap, low-end, consumer crap. Because, certainly, all the Precision workstations and Latitude laptops I've ever seen have had excellent industrial design and been quite reliable. The Optiplex desktops tend not to be as good, but they're still not into the territory I'd call "bad" (and they're a lot cheaper). We don't have Alienware here so I can't compare.
Perhaps its the way Dells feels Earth's 'Coriolis' acceleration perpendicular to its velocity depending on which hemisphere it
is sold:) I'm teasing and being completely facetious. I say that
in good humor and jest. To be frank I find it doubtful that Dell would sell hardware that is better in Australia than the US. I believe the Dell criticisms on Slashdot are well founded
I currently own a 12" iBook and in the past I've owned a TiBook and a Dell Latitude D600. Personally I didn't of them to be significantly better than another in terms of reliability or use. If anything, my TiBook (peeling paint) and iBook (modem was broken out of the box and recently it won't sleep because the lid sensor has broken) have given me the most problems.
You see I barely buy any of my own computers. My relatively small department purchases dozens of machines every year many of them being Dell and we are their enterprise customer being a very large university buying thousands of machines each year. My evaluation of Dell goes like this:
Competitive prices
Poor quality components and engineering and testing
Good service and turn around time
My students who purchase Dells for their own personal use,
claim that they don't receive that quality service that is given
to enterprise customers. Apple's service is better than Dells
enterprise service and SGI beats all of them hands down, although with SGI you pay through the nose for their excellent
service. We have internal teams to take care of Sun and HP hardware issues.
Precision workstations and Latitude laptops I've ever seen have had
This is a myth propogated by Mac users, soaked up by Mac suckers, all trying to make themselves feel important for spending lots of mone
I know your statement certainly not true when comparing to the AVERAGE PC to the AVERAGE Mac. Which is what I was talking about in my original post. Or are you selecting not to read portions of my post or are you practicing partial illiteracy?
Macs are certainly well constructed machines, but no better made than high end
Well I'm glad you can agree on the the fact that they are well made machines. The one vendor of PCs I can think of that uses quality hardware is Alienware desktop, although they aren't mainstream PC hardware and for laptops the high end IBM Thinkpad or Toshiba Satellite( but they aren't cheap either, which is what I was talking about paying for QUALITY!!!), I recommend IBM and Toshiba models to my department folks
who have to use Windows. As for the Dells and HPs they use poorly constructed chassis, low tolerance panels and over all industrial design is just plain cheap. The PowerMac G5 is on par with the solid engineering I've seen on the SGI Octane and the Powerbook G4 is still better than any Windows laptops I've seen. We have many different types of computers and devices in our department running nine distinctly different operating systems. The difference is that Apple is able to tightly integrate the hardware/software tightly. I'd like to see a Windows laptop resume/sleep as fast as a Powerbook can. I'd like to see SSH connection be reestablished after waking up from sleep mode. You know as a fact an OEM like Dell can't do that. Dell just slaps together a wide range of peripherals without through testing, resulting in blue screens and major issues for their customers, who shrug their shoulders and put up with these inconveniences, because naively they believe that is the way it has always been. Why isn't their target mode boot or netboot on older PCs,
its because the PC OEMS are stuck with the antiquated BIOS.
Why is it that the Preexecution Environment (PXE) still behind compared to Netboot and Target mode boot?
I could go on the advantages of Apple hardware which IS WHY YOU PAY MORE. Kapish? Myth my ass.
Then your PCs are broken, very poorly configured or crippled in some fashion (eg: much less memory than the Macs).
You know what is funny, I see the same argument the other way round on forums. If the computer is not performing well then it MUST be the users fault. Tough luck on that attempt dude, I'm a systems administrator for my entire department with 200 computers. With over 70% of them being Windows computers right now. The systems are clean install from the Windows XP SP2 CD loadset with all the necessary patches and drivers. My statement still will hold true, take any PC over four years old and any Mac over four years old and Windows XP SP2 feels slower than a Mac OSX on hardware with the same clock speed. Windows Explorer and the rest of the system is more likely to stall, as in 'Not Responding' far more than the Mac Finder being 'Hung'. I still find my SGI Irix with 4Dwm and my home BeOS Tracker to be more responsive under heavy loads and able to
mutlitask better in most situations than both Windows XP and Mac OSX. But when comparing the two in terms of multitasking
Mac OSX is better. In terms of new PC hardware running Windows XP SP2, then I would say that Windows XP is more
responsive. XP Requirements with all that eye candy on older
hardware bogs it down. Quartz Extreme seems to be the factor
that makes the difference on older hardware. I hope that clarifies
my stance. I'm not married to any particular platform and will
migrate every few years to what I feel is the best solution. Right now, overall its Mac OSX on Apple hardware. Formerly I used
an SGI O2 with an R5000 and an SGI 320 with dual Pentium III with Windows 2000 as my primary desktop machines.
This utter lack of matching enterprise-level capability is part of what keeps Macs firmly out of my company's infrastructure
I don't think you've looked at
Apple Remote Desktop which is quite powerful and can deploy apps.
1. Software Distribution
2. Asset Management
3. Remote Administration
4. Remote Assistance
On the unix\linux side there have been tools like
Radmind (also for Mac OSX), synctree, roboinst. You seem quite fond of the Microsoft offerings. In reality our university has many systems. We have different camps and on the Windows camp I've seen major issues regarding security and problems deploying Windows applications using SMS and Active Directory.
Last summer it took eleven weeks for one person to repackage 80 MCAD and ECAD applications for the Windows loadset, the same 80 CAD applications took only two weeks to repackage and deploy with a Linux loadset. As for reliability Windows servers and workstations are poor and their down time high
compared to the Sun, HP-UX and Linux workstations on campus.
The great thing about Windows is that it needs to employ more people than necessary and the inefficiency guarantees job security.
I think you've run into the old Mac eBay conundrum.
1. Macs are made with higher quality, so their users tend to
hold on to them longer than the equivalent PC and they have a higher resale value. Which is why you tend to see Macs (Toyota Avalons) be more expensive than their PC (Ford Focus) equivalent.
2. I can see you are using the archaic clockspeed (GHz or MHz) metric for measuring CPU speed and performance. I would
say that a PowerMac G4 w/ 256 RAM and a 500MHz PowerPC
processor running Mac OSX 10.3 Panther is faster than an IBM
Aptiva w/256 RAM and 500MHz Pentium III running Windows XP SP2, in that same token BeOS would run circles around both Windows and Mac OSes on the same hardware but I digress. My statement is based on the fact we have both in our department and the older Macs with Panther feel faster against older PC of the same clock speed running Windows XP SP2. Now you might think this is a smoke screen and an apologists version of CPU speeds.
So let me point to you to the company that made plenty of money on marketing the clockspeed metric years ago.
About Intel Processor Numbers
When comparing processor numbers, it's important to keep in mind that there are other key features besides clock speed that contribute to the processor's overall value. For example, there may be a case where the processor number increases because a front-side bus speed increases (e.g. from 400 MHz to 533 MHz), or cache increases (e.g. from 512KB to 1MB), while the clock speed stays constant or even decreases.
A muscle car Pontiac GrandAM may have plenty of horsepower
under the hood but it doesn't translate to speed on the road.
Compare that to a BMW 3 series which costs more can have
the same horsepower but has better performance. You're not
comparing two equal products. Take a top of the line Toshiba laptop or IBM Thinkpad and then compare that to a Apple Powerbook. Your comparisons are not comparing the same
types of products in my opinion.
HyperThreading (guessing that is like the velocity engine, although I don't know what either term means, probably slick marketing)
Actually they are quite different technologies.
SIMD is Motorola's Velocity Engine/AltiVec/VMX is equivalent to Intel's SSE2. Intel's HyperThreading is equivalent to
IBM's
simultaneous multithreading (SMT) on their Power 5 processors. CPUs like Intel's which have very deep pipelines sometimes benefit from HyperThreading and other times not.
The IBM PowerPC (not Power) line of processors don't have as deep pipelines which is why they use a more superscalar architecture like the PowerPC 970 which has four ALUs, two FPUs and two SIMD units. I hope that helps and sheds some light on the confusing technical lexicon.
Here what I would recommend if you can save up for it.
An older PowerMac G4 running at 500MHz with 256MB of
RAM and 32MB graphics card OR a newer MacMini with 512MB of RAM. Don't bother with any G3 based Mac on eBay, as the SIMD (velocity engine) makes a difference in the performance of the machine and so does any video memory below 32MB. There are other conveniences of the Apple Mac OSX platform which become more apparent with the imminent release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Good luck which ever direction you go. May your firewall protect you from worms, your web browser from spyware and your operating system not burdened by viruses.
I can safely say this is a gross exaggeration or simply you haven't been comparing prices recently. I would say at worst
case Apple's are 25% more expensive than some brand of PCs. Then again I'd rather pay more for a Toyota Avalon than a Ford Focus. iBooks and Xserves are $ for $ competitive and the Powerbook G4 and PowerMac G5 are slightly more expensive ( ~25% more ), but when you look at the construction and the quality of the components next to a Dell, that extra cost is fully justified
Aside from some of the latest games and a few CAD packages like AutoCAD, CATIA, Pro/E, Fluent. I find that 95% of what people need
on Windows can be found on Mac OSX. Plus you add all that
great ported open source application and you have the best of both worlds of commercial and open source applications.
Four years ago I would have agreed that there was a lack of native Mac OSX applications. Now, if you look
around there are many many ports to Mac OS X as it is once
again a growing and successful platform. I switched from using
a dual PIII Wiindows 2000 SGI 320 and SGI Irix O2 desktop to a
Powerbook G4. I've been quite happy since then.
PC: Mac
Microsoft Office 2003: Microsoft Office 2004
Outlook Express: Mail.app
Quicken 2005: Quicken 2005
TubroTax Premier: TubroTax Premier
Microsoft Visio: Omnigraffle
Lotus Notes: Lotus Notes
Internet Exlporer: Internet Exloprer 5.2 or better Safari
SPSS:SPSS
Adobe CS suite: Adobe CS Suite
Macromedia MX suite: Macromedia MX suite
Remote Desktop Connection: Remote Desktop Connection
Visual Studio: Xcode
WinFTP: Fetch or better RBrowser
FileZilla: Fugu
AIM client: iChat or AIM client
MSN Messenger: MSN Messenger
Skype: Skype
Bittorrent: Bitorrent
Cisco VPNClient: Cisco VPN Client
Windows Media Player: Windows Media Player 9
Realplayer: Realplayer
VLC: VLC
Visual Fortran: IBM XL Fortran or Absoft Pro Fortran
FormZ: FormZ
Ashlar CAD: Ashlar CAD
Unigrahics Parasolid: Unigraphics Parasolid
Matlab: Matlab
Modo3D: Modo3D
Lightwave: Lightwave
iTunes: iTunes
Quicktime Pro: Quicktime Pro
This is only a partial list...
Plus there the entire iLife suite and many other unique
Mac applications that aren't found anywhere else.
If you'd like to qualify your statement with some facts and
information I'm all ears.
Only the engineering stuff from work, like Autocad, Pro/E, and Mastercam, doesn't run on this thing
Here at our engineering college I've been trying to get
several vendors that make. Fluent (CFD), Star-CD (CFD), Nastran (FEA), HyperMesh , Abaqus (FEA) to port to Mac OS X. Especially when they support really exotic flavors of Unix. I simply
give them a large excel spreadsheet with the numbers for all the engineering departments and point out that Mac OS X population is larger than our Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, AIX, BSDs, QNX population combined. We are shifting to Mac OSX in a big way and would like to replace our expensive workstations like Suns and HPs with Mac OS X commodity hardware. My push over the summer is send out the same message to the product managers of Catia, Pro/E, Unigraphics NX (although they do make Parasolid for OS X), AutoCad and Rhino3D. Aside from the folks who need to use these programs on a daily basis everything else can be found for Mac OS X right now and thanks to Fink and Darwinports many of the projects from the open source community. I believe many of these engineering applications can be ported with X11 instead of Aqua. Some elitist insist on Aqua from vendors porting to OS X, but I believe in baby steps for developers to get them acclimated to the new environment, just like Matlab. Insisting on higher GUI and Apple HCI compliance will delay and chase away these ISVs.
command-tab switches between applications only and not individual windows (this also raises all windows of an app when it is switched), and there is no standard keyboard shortcut to switch between individual windows in an app
I recently learnt that command + ` is what you want to switch between individual windows. Now if you started command + tab and then used command + ` it will toggle backwards or the opposite direction to command + tab. Therefore there is that functionality is OS X, its just that with anything it takes time to learn all the hidden tricks and I've been using Mac OS X since the
public beta and only heard about this a week ago.
How to hack Exposé and application switcher?
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 1
I've been trying to find a way to hack Exposé to get it to
induce the Command-Tab application switcher with different
user input options. I think the main preference settings
are in these two files in ~/Library/Preferences
Although I can't find where the Command-Tab hack
to induce application switcher maybe. Any ideas to the folks
who have been tinkering under the hood of Panther?
As a sys admin I install all sorts of software on our computers and Adobe's Acobat team marches to a totally different drum and is one of the most messy and poorly installed software on Mac OS X. See University of Utah computer lab notes on their list of crappy applications
1. Requires write permission for all users (non-admin) permissions in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Registration Database If you installed Acrobat
after installing Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive which don't need write permissions in the Registration Database, then
the original default read only permissions correctly set by the other Adobe applications causes problems for the Acrobat application
2. Acrobat writes folders everywhere on the system. Even if you haven't bought any eBooks. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive don't need to generate legal documents in the users Document folder or place file in the/Users/Shared/ folder
~Documents/Acrobat/Legal _______ (Unnecessary)
~Documents/Acrobat Reader/Legal _______ (Unnecessary)
~Documents/eBooks _______ (Unnecessary)
~Library/Acobat User Data/ _______ (Unnecessary. Wrong place) /Users/Shared/Adobe PDF 6.0/ _______ (Unnecessary. Wrong Place) /Library/Application Support/Adobe/
~Library/Application Support/Adobe/
~Library/Preferences/Adobe/
3. Acrobat tool bar plugin "pushes" Microsoft Office tool bar around and takes up an entire row by itself. This is another pet peeve of mine
4. Acobat 6.0.2 and prior versions had issues with Microsoft Office 2004 SP1. The known issue about Excel 2004 SP1 quitting with the "Compile error in hidden module: AutoExec" was mentioned. That's actually related to the Acrobat "PDFMaker.xla" startup item. Adobe has finally fixed this in version 6.0.3. Another administrator indicated he had a user with a PowerPoint file that refuses to open in PowerPoint SP1, but will open fine otherwise in older versions Office vX and Office 2004 11.0 (and other Windows versions...)
My message to the Acrobat team is to stop writing poorly written applications for Mac OS X and to talk to your coworkers writing other well written Adobe applications. They better fix most of this in Acrobat 7.0 otherwise I'm not upgrading if there is no improvement.
If you took a few calculus you would have to learn a little history about Gottfried Leibniz and Issac Newton fathers of modern calculus. On the other hand if you say Pierre de Fermat (father of differential calculus), everyone has heard of Fermat's Last Theorem.
If you took number theory or some high level mathematics
courses and never heard about Srinivasa Ramanujan it would
be akin to studying relativistic physics and never hearing about Albert Einstein .
Most people probably heard about Ramanujan recently from the
movie
"Good Will Hunting". Where they refer to Ramanujan by name several time during the movie, although they totally butchered his name and made me cringe every time they said it. The movie is based on a Ramanujan type character, in Hollywood fashion though. Where a young good looking confidant and outgoing Matt Damon with the physique of a construction worker plays the math genius. Ramanujan was shy, introvert,
awkward and not in the best physical health.
A Frontline documentary Cyber War talked about the vulnerability of SCADA systems, and illustrated how a Red Team could hack and control facilities like solar power plants, by changing the directions the mirrors where facing for example. Richard A Clarke was interviewed for this documentary as well as many other security experts in industry, government and academia. See the #4 video segment on "the power grid". In the first 5 minutes of #3 video segment
"wake up calls" you'll see Clarke typing away on a Apple Powerbook. I recommend watching the entire 52 minute show if you have time.
For those who aren't aware Richard A Clarke was the
former cyber security and counterterrorism czar, national security counselor
to three presidents (including Democrat Bill Clinton), and a trusted member of Bush's own advisory staff until May 2003.
Putting aside partisan feelings on the man, he knows what he's talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/opinion/l19compu ters.html
"Exchanging Faces in Images"/ 20050430/index.html
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/departments/d4/spotlight
Most current examples are Larry Page of Google and Tony Fadell creator of the iPod.
What I don't understand is how Brown University is consistently ranked higher than UofM in the US News & World Report every year. When is the last time you heard anything from Brown University for innovative research or their professors brought in as an expert in the fields of medicine, engineering, law ...etc etc. It shows an obvious bias towards Ivy League schools and for private university over public ones. UC Berkley also suffers from this bias.
Fuck football indeed. I didn't go to our engineering school for the football, I went there for a great engineering degree. I think its rather myopic and uninformed people who view UofM as solely a football school. Although in the case of University of Nebraska this is probably true. We Wolverines are much much more than football.
The numbers break down much like this for the whole college of engineering at the university: 3401 Windows, 1188 Macs, 471 Linux, 546 Misc. Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, BSD and QNX). Countries like South Korea, China...have an unhealthy computing monoculture, which hurts them when a single debilitating worm hits their country's network. I always find it interesting when we have foreign visiting scholars who are oblivious to anything but Windows
Most webstats at our university show a 3:1 ratio of Macs:Linux (which are not that accurate in my opinion). The content of ones website will attract more or less OSX/Linux users. e.g. Slashdot will have a disproportionate Linux, OSX, BSD users compared to other websites. Where as Photoreview website will have more Mac/Windows users. Now if the NYTimes, BBC, Amazon gave us their stats I think their sampling would be more representative of what is used in the US or globally. Pulling numbers from a Polish website "may" represent usage in that country, but since I can't read Polish and can't discern the content of the website I'll take those stats with a grain of salt.
Just like when I read this article Scientists: The Latest Mac Converts. This only represents a particular NASA's JPL facility using 90% Macs. I know NOAA uses a lot of Solaris, OSX and Linux machines too. When I see documentaries they often have a Sun or Mac on their desktop and NASA's EdGCM also like using Macs. Even then 16% of usage globally or with in the US of Mac use is clearly not representative of the realities on the ground.
I remember using Zaptor?
I believe the program Larry Page was referring to is Zephyr messing service. People could use use zlocate and ytalk to find and talk to their fellow students logged onto the unix mostly Sun and HP workstations in those days at Michigan.
Marisa Coleman
President of the University of Michigan is Mary Sue Coleman.
Dean director
This confuses many people, so its understandable. The College of Engineering's dean is Steve Director leaving this summer '05. So his name is Director, not director as a position.
Because of the FCC flag issue I decided to buy the Elgato 500 in June. Its more expensive and powerful than I need right now, but I didn't want to be blocked from recording HDTV in the future (whenever I get it), until then I was planning on using the Elgato 500 for standard DTV with my current laptop or with a future purchase of a Mac Mini. Although, the ruling today changes my rationale for buying the 500 series. Any chance that this can be appealed or over ruled?
Personally, I was hoping would add MAPI support for its Mail.app, Addressbook.app and iCal.app for Tiger. But this is really Microsoft's Business Unit responsibility. I think Mac OSX customers should demand MAPI support for Entourage if they are going to be paying all that good money. Its Microsoft's very own properietary protocol, yet they don't support it on the Mac side. I've long concluded that the DoJ is asleep at the wheel. Microsoft provides the bare minimal support to show the DoJ folks that they are complying with US anti trust laws. Yet, I feel Microsoft has purposely not developed the latest versions MSN Messenger, Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer further. Yet, the latest Quicktimes and iTunes is found on the Windows side. I hope that the FTC will require Groove Networks to support Mac OSX too.
Read Ray Ozzie interview here
I believe what CypherXero was saying when his father says he knows Windows, his father isn't claiming to be knowledgeable just that he's familiar with the OS and it remains in his comfort zone. The biggest resistance to change is due to people who are nervous and unsure about compatibility issues with Windows and the anticipatory frustration of learning a new system.
I'm not sure it is the law to enforce region encoding. I bought a DVD player that plays ignores regional restrictions, plays VCD, CD and MP3 CDs from Best Buy (USA) a few years ago. Anyways, in my last post that you replied to I did state that I'm not a fan of regional encoding. Just giving you the possible reasoning behind the studios need to have regional encoding.
I would say Jaguar was the first version I could start for my own use, I could put up with a few performance issues and had limited installations in my department. Then with Panther I can comfortably endorse this version (although they could use a few fixes here and there). So I would agree with you on your pre-Panther opinion.
OTOH, I'm quite willing to compare to Windows NT4, 2000 or XP - they're all _vastly_ superior in terms of UI responsiveness and multitasking capabilities to OS X, in my experience. I find Windows runs more tasks, more smoothly, on lesser hardware than any version of OS X on any Mac I've ever used.
My comparisons have been and are of Windows XP (SP2) which was the original topic of the post and with Mac OSX 10.3+. Windows XP is slower UI reponse than Win2000 and in turn Win2000 has slower responsiveness to Windows NT, seems like we can all agree on that. Mac OSX got progressively better with each release as Apple learnt to optimize their system for their hardware and I don't think any one would argue that point either.
I just don't get people who say OS X multitasks well, because the one impression I always walk away from an OS X box with is how poorly it handles lots of running applications at once, but how good it is at just about everything else (except file manage, *ugh*, I hate Finder).
When it comes to multitasking with heavy loads I find Windows XP the worst, followed by Mac OSX Panther, next Linux KDE, then Irix with 4Dwm tied with Solairs \ HP-UX both with CDE and on the top of the list BeOS with Tracker. Thats my experience so far for modern OSes
I'd have to say screen/window redrawing is one area where OS X is unquestionably superior to Windows, primarily due to Quartz.
That is incorrect. Mac OSX Quartz gives it higher fidelity rendering and more special effects, but Windows has faster screen and windows redrawing. Open GL based features like Expose given the impression of speed
I'm not going to comment on your specific example because I don't have all of the facts.
Correction its examples I gave you and I won't accept that it is one anecdotal incident and your language indicates you are still doubtful of the issues we have with Dells even though I stated several examples. I usually call that denial or selectively dismissive.
From what you're describing Dell's QA procedures must be seriously worse in the US, or machines bound for Australia are sourced from different factories, because I've never had problems with machines showing up with the wrong hardware, etc.
To use that brilliant line of thinking, I would say that Apple hardware and the operating system must have some quality assurance issues in OZ. Doesn't sound so logically now does it, but if you are going to come up with reasons like that you really should think about it more before posting them.
Saha: As for industrial design its does not win any awards here. If you can send me a link where a Dell desktop or laptop won an Industrial Design award I'm all ears and I shall wait with bated breath
Since when is winning an industrial design award - there can only be one winner, after all - the only measure of good industrial design ? If I can get into a case quickly and easily to make modifications, if the internals are well laid out, easily accessible and removable and if it isn't ugly, then I call that good industrial design. The Dell machines I've used meet that criteria.
As I thought so, you couldn't give me a single example where Dell desktop or laptops where noted for their " excellent industrial design" as you put it. Dells haven't even been runners up, now if you have said Sony or IBM then you would have a case. It's laughable that you would say that Dell has " excellent industrial design" and your criteria has been co
I would disagree, although you raise an interesting point in terms of dividing the world market between distributors. I'm sure when DVD regional encoding was concocted, it was made for current movies in mind, not many people thought of making money on classics in the very beginning. Besides to have regional encoding for the reasons I stated in my original post and to have non-regional encoded classics would confuse manufacturing and consumers. Consumers would probably rebel against the movie studios if they knew that they could produce non-regional DVDs as well and have more regional restrictions for the newer movies they bought. At least thats my theory.
The logistics of a simultaneous global release would be daunting for any movie studio. If we're talk about distributing film than shipping all those reels all across the world to all the theaters that want to show it would be one logistical nightmare, with movies and distribution going digital this would theoretically solve the problem. Although, not all countries around the world have a fat enough internet pipe to download a digital 2K (or 4K?) resolution movie. Even in the distant future with movies going digital and all nations catching up with their internet bandwidth, the other issue is marketing and promotion costs. A movie studio or distributor like Disney would find it near impossible to promote on t.v, print, billboards, radio and preview in theaters simultaneously around the world. The current strategy to piecemeal the globe into regional release dates makes sense for the studio. Personally, I don't like the regional encoding its a pain.
I would say Asia and others are in different zones, because a pirated DVD movie from the US region 1, can't be distributed in theory to DVD players in zones using region 5. Where the movie is still playing at the box office. That way the movie industry can release the DVD in the US and other region 1 zones, while the movie is still playing in theaters in non-region 1 zone and doesn't hurt the box office sales. I doubt the DVD regions were created as a benevolent scheme to make DVDs more affordable for impoverished nations.
I would say the same just in the other way. Although mine is based on volume purchases of Macs and PCs for my department not my own personal purchases
I really wish OS X was faster, because I like it [arstechnica.com], but it's simply too chunky on non-monstrous hardware to be a viable option. It's not so much that I can't afford a dual G5, I just refuse to shell out that much money so I can get an enjoyable, basic computing experience as a matter of _principle_
I believe its safe to say that our experiences gives us a bias towards opposite direction. Its a shame I can't sit you down in front of my computers to show you the difference, although I suspect you probably feel the same way. Windows XP just stalls more often is 'Not Responding', more than Mac OSX Finder is 'Hung' and I'm frankly astonished you are unable to see that. The multitask abilities on Mac OSX are stronger, although launching an application or rendering a new window within an application is faster in Windows XP. I'm just more frustrated with the poor multitask capabilities than screen rendering of a new window or application launch. The difference between generating a new window is not noticeable for me between the two platforms. The noticeable perceptual difference is that WIndows XP launches applications faster, but I leave applications running all day or sometimes weeks on my Mac OSX, therefore multitasking and application switching is paramount and much more noticeable to me. I also want to make sure you're on the same page as me when I talk about Macs OS X its version 10.3+ not the ones below and when I'm talking about Windows XP, I'm talking about XP SP1 and SP
I've come to the conclusion that either Dell manufacture and ship *completely* different hardware to the US than they do here to Australia, or when people like you are talking about "Dell hardware" they are restricting themselves to the cheap, low-end, consumer crap. Because, certainly, all the Precision workstations and Latitude laptops I've ever seen have had excellent industrial design and been quite reliable. The Optiplex desktops tend not to be as good, but they're still not into the territory I'd call "bad" (and they're a lot cheaper). We don't have Alienware here so I can't compare.
Perhaps its the way Dells feels Earth's 'Coriolis' acceleration perpendicular to its velocity depending on which hemisphere it is sold :) I'm teasing and being completely facetious. I say that
in good humor and jest. To be frank I find it doubtful that Dell would sell hardware that is better in Australia than the US. I believe the Dell criticisms on Slashdot are well founded
I currently own a 12" iBook and in the past I've owned a TiBook and a Dell Latitude D600. Personally I didn't of them to be significantly better than another in terms of reliability or use. If anything, my TiBook (peeling paint) and iBook (modem was broken out of the box and recently it won't sleep because the lid sensor has broken) have given me the most problems.
You see I barely buy any of my own computers. My relatively small department purchases dozens of machines every year many of them being Dell and we are their enterprise customer being a very large university buying thousands of machines each year. My evaluation of Dell goes like this:
Competitive prices
Poor quality components and engineering and testing
Good service and turn around time
My students who purchase Dells for their own personal use, claim that they don't receive that quality service that is given to enterprise customers. Apple's service is better than Dells enterprise service and SGI beats all of them hands down, although with SGI you pay through the nose for their excellent service. We have internal teams to take care of Sun and HP hardware issues.
Precision workstations and Latitude laptops I've ever seen have had
I know your statement certainly not true when comparing to the AVERAGE PC to the AVERAGE Mac. Which is what I was talking about in my original post. Or are you selecting not to read portions of my post or are you practicing partial illiteracy?
Macs are certainly well constructed machines, but no better made than high end
Well I'm glad you can agree on the the fact that they are well made machines. The one vendor of PCs I can think of that uses quality hardware is Alienware desktop, although they aren't mainstream PC hardware and for laptops the high end IBM Thinkpad or Toshiba Satellite( but they aren't cheap either, which is what I was talking about paying for QUALITY!!!), I recommend IBM and Toshiba models to my department folks who have to use Windows. As for the Dells and HPs they use poorly constructed chassis, low tolerance panels and over all industrial design is just plain cheap. The PowerMac G5 is on par with the solid engineering I've seen on the SGI Octane and the Powerbook G4 is still better than any Windows laptops I've seen. We have many different types of computers and devices in our department running nine distinctly different operating systems. The difference is that Apple is able to tightly integrate the hardware/software tightly. I'd like to see a Windows laptop resume/sleep as fast as a Powerbook can. I'd like to see SSH connection be reestablished after waking up from sleep mode. You know as a fact an OEM like Dell can't do that. Dell just slaps together a wide range of peripherals without through testing, resulting in blue screens and major issues for their customers, who shrug their shoulders and put up with these inconveniences, because naively they believe that is the way it has always been. Why isn't their target mode boot or netboot on older PCs, its because the PC OEMS are stuck with the antiquated BIOS. Why is it that the Preexecution Environment (PXE) still behind compared to Netboot and Target mode boot? I could go on the advantages of Apple hardware which IS WHY YOU PAY MORE. Kapish? Myth my ass.
Then your PCs are broken, very poorly configured or crippled in some fashion (eg: much less memory than the Macs).
You know what is funny, I see the same argument the other way round on forums. If the computer is not performing well then it MUST be the users fault. Tough luck on that attempt dude, I'm a systems administrator for my entire department with 200 computers. With over 70% of them being Windows computers right now. The systems are clean install from the Windows XP SP2 CD loadset with all the necessary patches and drivers. My statement still will hold true, take any PC over four years old and any Mac over four years old and Windows XP SP2 feels slower than a Mac OSX on hardware with the same clock speed. Windows Explorer and the rest of the system is more likely to stall, as in 'Not Responding' far more than the Mac Finder being 'Hung'. I still find my SGI Irix with 4Dwm and my home BeOS Tracker to be more responsive under heavy loads and able to mutlitask better in most situations than both Windows XP and Mac OSX. But when comparing the two in terms of multitasking Mac OSX is better. In terms of new PC hardware running Windows XP SP2, then I would say that Windows XP is more responsive. XP Requirements with all that eye candy on older hardware bogs it down. Quartz Extreme seems to be the factor that makes the difference on older hardware. I hope that clarifies my stance. I'm not married to any particular platform and will migrate every few years to what I feel is the best solution. Right now, overall its Mac OSX on Apple hardware. Formerly I used an SGI O2 with an R5000 and an SGI 320 with dual Pentium III with Windows 2000 as my primary desktop machines.
Large enterprise with heterogeneous environment can use LANDesk Management Suite to manage their Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, Blackberry systems.
I don't think you've looked at Apple Remote Desktop which is quite powerful and can deploy apps.
1. Software Distribution
2. Asset Management
3. Remote Administration
4. Remote Assistance
On the unix\linux side there have been tools like Radmind (also for Mac OSX), synctree, roboinst. You seem quite fond of the Microsoft offerings. In reality our university has many systems. We have different camps and on the Windows camp I've seen major issues regarding security and problems deploying Windows applications using SMS and Active Directory. Last summer it took eleven weeks for one person to repackage 80 MCAD and ECAD applications for the Windows loadset, the same 80 CAD applications took only two weeks to repackage and deploy with a Linux loadset. As for reliability Windows servers and workstations are poor and their down time high compared to the Sun, HP-UX and Linux workstations on campus. The great thing about Windows is that it needs to employ more people than necessary and the inefficiency guarantees job security.
1. Macs are made with higher quality, so their users tend to hold on to them longer than the equivalent PC and they have a higher resale value. Which is why you tend to see Macs (Toyota Avalons) be more expensive than their PC (Ford Focus) equivalent.
2. I can see you are using the archaic clockspeed (GHz or MHz) metric for measuring CPU speed and performance. I would say that a PowerMac G4 w/ 256 RAM and a 500MHz PowerPC processor running Mac OSX 10.3 Panther is faster than an IBM Aptiva w/256 RAM and 500MHz Pentium III running Windows XP SP2, in that same token BeOS would run circles around both Windows and Mac OSes on the same hardware but I digress. My statement is based on the fact we have both in our department and the older Macs with Panther feel faster against older PC of the same clock speed running Windows XP SP2. Now you might think this is a smoke screen and an apologists version of CPU speeds. So let me point to you to the company that made plenty of money on marketing the clockspeed metric years ago. About Intel Processor Numbers
Intel plans to dispel the megahertz myth which served so wellA muscle car Pontiac GrandAM may have plenty of horsepower under the hood but it doesn't translate to speed on the road. Compare that to a BMW 3 series which costs more can have the same horsepower but has better performance. You're not comparing two equal products. Take a top of the line Toshiba laptop or IBM Thinkpad and then compare that to a Apple Powerbook. Your comparisons are not comparing the same types of products in my opinion.
HyperThreading (guessing that is like the velocity engine, although I don't know what either term means, probably slick marketing)
Actually they are quite different technologies. SIMD is Motorola's Velocity Engine/AltiVec/VMX is equivalent to Intel's SSE2. Intel's HyperThreading is equivalent to IBM's simultaneous multithreading (SMT) on their Power 5 processors. CPUs like Intel's which have very deep pipelines sometimes benefit from HyperThreading and other times not. The IBM PowerPC (not Power) line of processors don't have as deep pipelines which is why they use a more superscalar architecture like the PowerPC 970 which has four ALUs, two FPUs and two SIMD units. I hope that helps and sheds some light on the confusing technical lexicon.
Here what I would recommend if you can save up for it. An older PowerMac G4 running at 500MHz with 256MB of RAM and 32MB graphics card OR a newer MacMini with 512MB of RAM. Don't bother with any G3 based Mac on eBay, as the SIMD (velocity engine) makes a difference in the performance of the machine and so does any video memory below 32MB. There are other conveniences of the Apple Mac OSX platform which become more apparent with the imminent release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Good luck which ever direction you go. May your firewall protect you from worms, your web browser from spyware and your operating system not burdened by viruses.
I can safely say this is a gross exaggeration or simply you haven't been comparing prices recently. I would say at worst case Apple's are 25% more expensive than some brand of PCs. Then again I'd rather pay more for a Toyota Avalon than a Ford Focus. iBooks and Xserves are $ for $ competitive and the Powerbook G4 and PowerMac G5 are slightly more expensive ( ~25% more ), but when you look at the construction and the quality of the components next to a Dell, that extra cost is fully justified
Aside from some of the latest games and a few CAD packages like AutoCAD, CATIA, Pro/E, Fluent. I find that 95% of what people need on Windows can be found on Mac OSX. Plus you add all that great ported open source application and you have the best of both worlds of commercial and open source applications.
Four years ago I would have agreed that there was a lack of native Mac OSX applications. Now, if you look around there are many many ports to Mac OS X as it is once again a growing and successful platform. I switched from using a dual PIII Wiindows 2000 SGI 320 and SGI Irix O2 desktop to a Powerbook G4. I've been quite happy since then.
PC: Mac ...
Microsoft Office 2003: Microsoft Office 2004
Outlook Express: Mail.app
Quicken 2005: Quicken 2005
TubroTax Premier: TubroTax Premier
Microsoft Visio: Omnigraffle
Lotus Notes: Lotus Notes
Internet Exlporer: Internet Exloprer 5.2 or better Safari
SPSS:SPSS
Adobe CS suite: Adobe CS Suite
Macromedia MX suite: Macromedia MX suite
Remote Desktop Connection: Remote Desktop Connection
Visual Studio: Xcode
WinFTP: Fetch or better RBrowser
FileZilla: Fugu
AIM client: iChat or AIM client
MSN Messenger: MSN Messenger
Skype: Skype
Bittorrent: Bitorrent
Cisco VPNClient: Cisco VPN Client
Windows Media Player: Windows Media Player 9
Realplayer: Realplayer
VLC: VLC
Visual Fortran: IBM XL Fortran or Absoft Pro Fortran
FormZ: FormZ
Ashlar CAD: Ashlar CAD
Unigrahics Parasolid: Unigraphics Parasolid
Matlab: Matlab
Modo3D: Modo3D
Lightwave: Lightwave
iTunes: iTunes
Quicktime Pro: Quicktime Pro
This is only a partial list
Plus there the entire iLife suite and many other unique Mac applications that aren't found anywhere else.
If you'd like to qualify your statement with some facts and information I'm all ears.
Here at our engineering college I've been trying to get several vendors that make. Fluent (CFD), Star-CD (CFD), Nastran (FEA), HyperMesh , Abaqus (FEA) to port to Mac OS X. Especially when they support really exotic flavors of Unix. I simply give them a large excel spreadsheet with the numbers for all the engineering departments and point out that Mac OS X population is larger than our Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, AIX, BSDs, QNX population combined. We are shifting to Mac OSX in a big way and would like to replace our expensive workstations like Suns and HPs with Mac OS X commodity hardware. My push over the summer is send out the same message to the product managers of Catia, Pro/E, Unigraphics NX (although they do make Parasolid for OS X), AutoCad and Rhino3D. Aside from the folks who need to use these programs on a daily basis everything else can be found for Mac OS X right now and thanks to Fink and Darwinports many of the projects from the open source community. I believe many of these engineering applications can be ported with X11 instead of Aqua. Some elitist insist on Aqua from vendors porting to OS X, but I believe in baby steps for developers to get them acclimated to the new environment, just like Matlab. Insisting on higher GUI and Apple HCI compliance will delay and chase away these ISVs.
I recently learnt that command + ` is what you want to switch between individual windows. Now if you started command + tab and then used command + ` it will toggle backwards or the opposite direction to command + tab. Therefore there is that functionality is OS X, its just that with anything it takes time to learn all the hidden tricks and I've been using Mac OS X since the public beta and only heard about this a week ago.
com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist
com.apple.systempreferences.plist
Although I can't find where the Command-Tab hack to induce application switcher maybe. Any ideas to the folks who have been tinkering under the hood of Panther?
1. Requires write permission for all users (non-admin) permissions in
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Registration Database
If you installed Acrobat after installing Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive which don't need write permissions in the Registration Database, then the original default read only permissions correctly set by the other Adobe applications causes problems for the Acrobat application
2. Acrobat writes folders everywhere on the system. Even if you haven't bought any eBooks. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive don't need to generate legal documents in the users Document folder or place file in the /Users/Shared/ folder
/Users/Shared/Adobe PDF 6.0/ _______ (Unnecessary. Wrong Place)
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/
~Documents/Acrobat/Legal _______ (Unnecessary)
~Documents/Acrobat Reader/Legal _______ (Unnecessary)
~Documents/eBooks _______ (Unnecessary)
~Library/Acobat User Data/ _______ (Unnecessary. Wrong place)
~Library/Application Support/Adobe/
~Library/Preferences/Adobe/
3. Acrobat tool bar plugin "pushes" Microsoft Office tool bar around and takes up an entire row by itself. This is another pet peeve of mine
4. Acobat 6.0.2 and prior versions had issues with Microsoft Office 2004 SP1. The known issue about Excel 2004 SP1 quitting with the "Compile error in hidden module: AutoExec" was mentioned. That's actually related to the Acrobat "PDFMaker.xla" startup item. Adobe has finally fixed this in version 6.0.3. Another administrator indicated he had a user with a PowerPoint file that refuses to open in PowerPoint SP1, but will open fine otherwise in older versions Office vX and Office 2004 11.0 (and other Windows versions...)
My message to the Acrobat team is to stop writing poorly written applications for Mac OS X and to talk to your coworkers writing other well written Adobe applications. They better fix most of this in Acrobat 7.0 otherwise I'm not upgrading if there is no improvement.
If you took number theory or some high level mathematics courses and never heard about Srinivasa Ramanujan it would be akin to studying relativistic physics and never hearing about Albert Einstein .
Most people probably heard about Ramanujan recently from the movie "Good Will Hunting". Where they refer to Ramanujan by name several time during the movie, although they totally butchered his name and made me cringe every time they said it. The movie is based on a Ramanujan type character, in Hollywood fashion though. Where a young good looking confidant and outgoing Matt Damon with the physique of a construction worker plays the math genius. Ramanujan was shy, introvert, awkward and not in the best physical health.
For those who aren't aware Richard A Clarke was the former cyber security and counterterrorism czar, national security counselor to three presidents (including Democrat Bill Clinton), and a trusted member of Bush's own advisory staff until May 2003. Putting aside partisan feelings on the man, he knows what he's talking about.