Is it just me, or was removing the middle-leech supposed to bring down the cost of things like novels?
Looking over the FAQ for this King story, I see that it's $1 a pop (a mere few thousand words each time) for the first three installments, and $2.50 an ep after that, up to seven or eight payments total. That's $13-15.50 US for an approximately 350 page novel (being generous with his wordcount estimates, since King has tended to try and make up for lack of creativity with verbosity in the past, much as I'm doing right now). Plus you have to read the thing in installments (knowing at any point the author might pull the plug), forgo the possession of a nice compact paperback to take on vacation with you, and either bear the costs of printing it yourself (figure $2-10 US more) or make it through an entire novel on Acrobat Reader (meaning you'll probably be buying new corrective lenses later;).
I do like the concept of electronic distribution and micropayments, but what's "micro" about these? Seems like the reader is paying a lot, and King makes out like a bandit since he no longer has to pay a publisher. If the cost of advertising is the issue, then the experiment is already a failure, since only this precise sort of mediocre bestseller author could ever afford it (King is surely not hurting for cash), and ending the overpopularity of middle-of-the-road crap is supposed to be one of the main benefits ascribed to direct distribution.
Even if it were an author I liked and respected, I can't see why anyone would want to pay these rates. I think this one is just capitalising on the brief novelty most people see here.
...why the heck should someone designing a desktop OS worry about "what works" for a handheld OS?
I suppose it's a question about what we're expecting the user to learn and what they expect to learn (in the hope that their new knowledge will scale to other, similar activities that we also exert design control over). Pointing and selecting will definitely have some common elements whether it's with a stylus or a mouse, and it seems likely that the line you draw (simple PDA here, full-fledged PC there) is going to get seriously blurred, and soon. But I think the main reason for my assumption is that I basically think relative pointing devices are an intermediate, temporary hack on the way to real absolute pointers everywhere - the whole floaty cursor idea is just a recipe for trouble and a constantly inconvenient go-between.
I haven't thought that direction through well enough to say what will become of double-clicks and the like (I still think they can be safe and useful if their use is carefully constrained), but it does seem that there's only really room for one "button" action there, though there might be tap-modifiers on a stylus (which would actually bear more resemblance to "control-click" than "right-click", albeit with a one-handed take).
As for the straitjacket thing, yes, it is a deeply philosophical point, getting into all kinds of questions of free will and necessary constraint, and that's why I don't go there.;)
Today seems to be my day to follow up your comments...
I'll agree that the control-click for contextual menus is a kluge (even though it's one I use when I use a Mac), or at least that it's certainly no better than learning a second button. But I'd go farther and say that popup contextual menus are simply a bad idea, because you never actually know what you're going to find in one. If the computer were really, really smart about what it considers "context" it might know exactly what to put in that menu, but we know that it isn't, and the usual implementation is sufficiently haphazard that one has to take a couple of seconds to peruse the menu during each use. This differs from pulldown menus on the Mac or Windows, where unavailable verbs are always displayed in the same position, but dimmed. The problem is that there just isn't space for very much that's useful in one popup menu without making it hierarchical (and that's generally a disaster for new and old users alike - I'm damn good with a pointing device and I understand the "triangle of slack" in a Mac hierarchical menu, but I still basically hate them. And Windows ones are just about unusable, because they don't even have that going for them. Admittedly this is partly because I use a trackpad for everything, but this is pretty much a requirement for portable computing).
On the other hand I think the various modifier keys for such things as dragging (with instant visual feedback) are a good thing; they apply an optional modification to my action that I can change midstream, much the way people actually think about what they do ("don't just move that icon, copy it - no actually, make a symlink instead, ok, that's it"). A contextual menu might be an adjunct to that, but the problem is always requiring it. I can't drag to create a Windows shortcut without having to point and click through some damn menu when I get there, and worse still I have to enter a mode before beginning the drag - am I left-dragging or right-dragging? Oops wrong button, how do I get rid of this menu now? Maybe it's my heritage as a terminal-using Unix geek, but I find the meta key approach quicker and more agreeable to "power users" while simultaneously less confusing for newbies. And as with my reply to your previous comment, keep in mind that the GUI is designed so that a user will nearly always have her left hand on the keyboard with her thumbs over those modifier keys (including control). That doesn't work for left-handed users (and I deplore this), but it is something you need to keep in mind when questioning a UI decision. The learned context of the GUI is always important, because we're not talking about you or me, but about a hypothetical user who knows (or will know) the system as best they can.
But no, the second button isn't "just a kluge" - it's a design choice. Just not necessarily a well thought-out or defined one, particularly when you consider how it scales to other pointing devices, especially a tappable absolute one like a stylus - where's the right click on WinCE? (ok, where the hell is anything on WinCE;)
I just helped my technophobic mom set up her system. Double clicking was a much harder concept (esp. as to when you double and when you single click) than left-click.
You're correct that new users have trouble with double vs. single clicking, but that difficulty dissipates quickly when they're using the Mac OS. I'm going to assume that you were setting your mom up on a Windows box - the problem there is that there's no real consistency to double vs. single clicking on that platform, and it confounds new users as well as experienced ones. Worse yet is that Micros~1 still uses the feature in addition toright clicking; if the one was a replacement for the other then why would they do this?
Double-clicking in a properly-designed GUI is done when activating one or more elements from a list. Single-clicking selects, double-clicking "does more". A list can be a sequence of textual icons, a window full of icons, or any other grouping. The interesting thing is how quickly newbies (at least those who haven't been previously scared by Windows) pick up on that mechanism whether or not it's explained to them, because it's designed to mesh with the whole concept of icons and lists - and with the one button mouse. The only overloading of double clicking on the Mac is the behaviour in text strings, where one click selects a point, two clicks selects a word, and three selects an entire line, but this doesn't seem to cause confusion (perhaps because selecting text is fairly modal in the minds of users).
One assumes your criticism here is supposed to be directed at Apple's one-button mouse used with the system and OS it's bundled with, but making an argument that one button isn't enough (or double clicks are evil) based on the Windows implementation is pointless. Get a little broader exposure before you go on your next rant.
More importantly, why would we care? Tux is fat and happy and capable. Tux is also an icon, and icons typically don't have gender (and certainly don't require it, especially in this case). And lest you think women can't wear a tux, I can show you pictures from a good friend's wedding that argue otherwise...
If you really need a pronoun, you can use that information about penguins IRL to justify the assumption that Tux is female, and has been all along. That'll put a minor crimp in some people's assumptions, and that's always fun (one way to tell the real hackers is by the reaction when their assumptions get crimped.;)
Not bad, but it's interesting to note that this is the first Mac Apple has ever made with essentially no integrated audio hardware. It seems like the inclusion of a subwoofer in the cube case should have been a natural; it's obviously designed to sit on the floor under a desk (the web pages describing it make this point several times), and no matter how good those funky little USB satellite speakers (which ought to be included) are, they're also small, and a simple subwoofer designed into the case would have made a big difference to them. It could even be an off-the-sheld USB subwoofer with its own DAC; the main thing is including it in the case design. It isn't apparent that anyone even had the idea here, which is a real shame.
Given that this thing is basically the new 20th Anniversary Mac (it's just too expensive to be considered a modular iMac, though it's really not clear why that is), the lack of included high-quality audio seems a real omission. Yes, you can add a third-party multispeaker USB sound system, but for this price you shouldn't have to, and adding an external subwoofer negates the compact design and the single cable to the desktop. Other things like the video card will be quietly upgraded in a couple of months (the same way the beige G3s and original iMacs went from Rage II to Rage Pro), but this needed to be thought of from the beginning. Too bad it wasn't.
If a 16 year old girl can handle it, I think the people in general are intelligent enough to be able to drive while on the phone.
The sad thing is that I can't decide if this is a giveaway as to the likely trollific quality of the poster, or a clue as to her reality; the erroneous implication that a 16 year old girl would be any worse at motor tasks or less intelligent than anyone else is unfortunate either way. The person who originally taught me to drive a manual transmission was in that exact demographic, oddly enough. In point of fact most of the 16 year olds I've known (whether male or female) were pretty damn good at manipulating both cars and phones, because that's pretty much all they ever did, and practice makes perfect.
The biggest giveaway is probably that no clueful Linux-installin'/.-readin' 16 year old would be likely to create an account under his or her real name. I'm twice that old and even I'm not that dumb.;) "PMS" could be the root of so many cool self-referential nicks, too, especially given the closeness to "RMS".
For any non-troll who seriously thinks that they can drive and talk on the phone at the same time: don't. Driving is hard; For various reasons I've done an excessive amount of tricky and driving in sixteen years and I've never had an accident either, but there are lots of times I would have if I'd been just a little more distracted. Extreme sports are fun, but stick to the ones where you're the only one who gets killed, thanks.
Analogies to the real world - which is what you're really getting at here - are only useful to a point. More specifically, they're only a good idea if you're prepared at any moment to back out and remember that you're not really discussing the analogised object, but something new and different. The problem is that most people seem incapable of doing this, and they get mired by the analogy and end up making stupid decisions based on it that have no real validity otherwise. This is how the Kevin Mitnicks and such get locked up and bizarrely restricted for their whole lives - after all, they were wandering around a neighbourhood with unlocked doors breaking in, rifling through people's possessions and leaving obscene grafitti, right? Only they weren't - they were sitting at computers with weird hackish curiousity manipulating bits on a wire. Analogies are always "half-useful, and thus half-misleading" (adapted from Michael Shields, sorry dude).
The only real way to learn about and discuss some new thing in the world is to confront it directly and figure out what it really means to you and to everyone else. Using a metaphor to consider it may seem a leapfrog tool to get over the learning curve, but the danger of instilling a sort of idée fixe and being unable to see the real ramifications of the new thing is too real, and too evident from past attempts in this direction. I'd be particularly careful what metaphors you present to legistlatively powerful neophytes, because the mind pollution they can create is very hard to undo.
HFS+ preserves case but is not case-sensitive, so moof.c and Moof.c cannot coexist
The article notes that the case issue really turns out to be a non-issue, in practice. Which makes sense; how many times on a UFS filesystem have you actually seentwo filenames in one directory which differ only in case? The main remaining use of case on Unix filesystems is for sorting purposes, by utilities like ls - that is, using ASCII sort order to put Makefile and README at the top of a list by default. Even this starts to become less workable when you implement Unicode filename storage and start dealing with alphabets that won't necessarily sort that way - or add sort routines that perform more naturally than plain old ASCII (For instance I have a Mac OS extension that causes numbered filenames to sort "1, 2, 5, 10, 20").
I am an admitted compleat Unixhead, but I've long felt that case-sensitivity is more of a problem than an asset on Unix filesystems; people simply don't tend to think of case as a distinguishing feature, and it bites them more often than it serves a useful purpose. Those few cases where case is the sole distinction between two filenames generally just represent someone's bad judgement. Note that this isn't the same as case preservation, which is important (and as mentioned in the article, has always occurred on HFS and HFS+ filesystems).
Windowmaker is a window manager; its primary purpose is to manage existing windows, as well as providing some popup menus (which are included in window managers primarily so one can create new windows, with child processes running in them). It's possible to write other tools that primarily talk to Windowmaker and extend it (the Dock and Clip are examples - see below), but its function is sufficiently specific that extensions is all these tools are likely to be.
The Windowmaker Dock is a neat little app that's fairly well integrated with the window manager, but still basically separate in both concept and execution; you can run Windowmaker without it, and you could run it without Windowmaker (with a bit of work). The Clip is similarly separate, though its function (icon management) is specific enough to this window manager that it's really only useful as an adjunct to it.
From a programmer perspective, GNUStep is the real environment; it provides the API and a few other convenient commonalities for all those nice NeXTish tools (wterm, or the Windowmaker settings panel for instance). However from a user perspective, Windowmaker plus a tied-in desktop icon manager will pretty much constitute an "environment". In other words, it depends whom you ask.
IMAP is certainly the way to go, but I'll disagree with the note that telling users to read their mail through Communicator - or more specifically, the Messenger component - saves them any pain. The problem is that Messenger isn't a very good MUA (or news reader, another function which it halfheartedly attempts to confuse with mail), and neither is it really an application they're already familiar with (it's really quite different from the Navigator component). Most users, including those of the naïve variety, are perfectly ok learning a set of well-designed apps and well-bounded applications for functions that are fairly distinct, like email and web browsing. Perhaps HTML mail messages will blur that boundary, but not in the way that either Communicator or Outlook have tried so far.
What I hope to see from this thread is a clean, simple, IMAP (or POP, sigh) based GUI email client for X.
You're correct that the Apple ][ didn't strictly do this, but Woz's moneysaving homebrew video hardware did do something that made a very similar technique possible. It essentially allowed a type of subpixel addressing, if you consider the black and white 140x192 display to be the pixels. Coloured pixels were actually the left and right halves of a white pixel (blue and orange or green and magenta depending on the half-pixel shift of the set). Since a lot of people (including me) took sneaky advantage of this technique to antialias their black and white text and images (before most of us knew what "antialias" meant), it's a bit facetious for Micros~1 to use the term "unprecedented" at the top of their Cleartype page, since they really are doing the same thing, right down to the fact that they're turning a slight display weakness into a strength for one particular purpose.
The reason this comes to so many people's minds (and the real proof of the similarity, really), is probably the fact that the colour fringing on the Cleartype samples looks a lot like the colour fringing on an Apple ][ display. Try running an emulator with the colour burst simulated if you've never seen it firsthand. Quite the nostalgia trip actually.
As for whether it's really any good, well, it's merely ok. I'm looking at it on a powerbook 2400 screen (RGB striped 96dpi display pretty similar to what's in colour PDAs), and the difference with the standard grey antialiasing isn't all that great; arguably the colour fringing makes it six of one, half a dozen of the other (ObPrisoner). It seems a little clearer if you look at a gamma lower than your real screen, or maybe mine really is at 1.6 these days. I wouldn't pay extra for it, anyway.
I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned the most obvious power-saving method; turn all those computers off when they're not being used. There was a good paper (which I now can't seem to locate; URL anyone?) written by someone at Apple some years ago that Does The Math and explains why this is a win in terms of system life, leaving aside the benefits of reducing the dust and dirt accumulating from fans blowing and the chance for workplaces and homes to dissipate some of the nasty chemical outgassing from hot solid-state components. I'd be willing to bet that 13% figure in the article could be halved if desktop systems were simply shut down overnight, or for any other long idle period. It'd be nice to see people get over the myth that turning computers on and off kills them, and the industry-fed misconception that lame "Energy Star" guidelines have made it ok to leave machinery running all the time.
In fact it'd be even nicer to see systems in place to shut down workplace desktop computers automatically after hours (this can be a security feature too). The relief on the power grid might even offset the increased usage when people arrive home at six o'clock and start using all those temperature controls and home appliances (including, obviously, their home PC). This obviously doesn't solve the problem in a world with more and more computers and finite power reserves, but it'd be nice to see only those ones that are in use receiving power, and the bonus is that teaching an overall energy ethic scales automatically with each new device.
(This message required 75 Joules of hydroelectric energy and one bagel to compose)
FreeWWWeb, like most Free ISPs, contracts for ISP service in each city. In my locale they use UUNet, and I do find the service "exceedingly amazing", or at least as good as a v.90 dialup can possibly be - 5+kBps all the time for compressed data, and as good as a modem gets in terms of latency (it ought to be, it's on the UUNet backbone). I have noticed once or twice in the last few months where I couldn't authenticate for a few hours (presumably the smartnet/freewwweb Radius server was down or unreachable) but on the whole it's a darn fine service, and the service terms are totally reasonable. The portal page is even pretty good (as portal pages go), with minimal advertising.
I seem to recall that they use Earthlink for most of the US, so YMMV there (and if you abhor Earthlink for their Scientology connections that may be another issue to consider).
It doesn't really matter whether it's economically feasible for me or thee (I would argue that it can be, and that it's mostly an uncreative reliance on archaic models of commerce that makes it seem otherwise). The real point is that the FSF doesn't say it's "ok to sell anything but software". They actually don't give one whit whether you sell software or not; their entire stance is about whether you can restrict current and future access to it. Obviously other points do proceed from that, but it's still an incorrect reading of their ethos.
There are some other questionable points in the essay as well; near the top the author enumerates the "generally recognised" points of ethical consideration. IANAP, but I've sat through enough ethics classes to know that the questions ethicists ask are really about the nature of "the good", not to be confused with "the goods". "Legitimate property" doesn't have anything to do with general ethics - it's a specific application that some people believe in. A libertarian view might find that property is essential to the existence of good; a cooperative-anarchist view might not. Intellectual property is clearly even more questionable. Not that it's not good to talk about the subject of intellectual property, but it's shaky and prejudicial to use it as one of your basic assumptions before an examination of the ethics of free software.
(I Am Not A Philosopher, in case you were wondering)
Probably not very much for discrete command recognition. I used to turn on the speech input sprocket on Mac games (Marathon II et al) for laughs sometimes, just so I could yell "fist" or "shotgun" in the hopes of scaring my neighbours. It really didn't slow down the game much, even on a fairly slow old system where Marathon II was reasonably demanding. And it did work as one would expect, but I still found I preferred the keyboard.
Using the same base technology (but not input sprockets), the Mac version of Warcraft II allowed you to speak the names of cheats instead of typing them, which actually did give a slight advantage against Windows network opponents in cheat games.;) But then Warcraft's a pretty undemanding game to begin with.
I think you missed Vonnegut's point in that quote; he didn't say "Hiroshima" but "Nagasaki". Hiroshima would have been enough to secure a surrender - the lesser-evil-than-conventional-warfare argument might wash there, if it can at all. The war was effectively over after the first bomb, ergo Nagasaki was a weapons test (designed to test a different bomb but especially the different terrain). And that's obscene.
The nag movie in QT 3 & 4 does suck, but it's fairly easy to hack around it. It doesn't actually appear every time you invoke Quicktime, but the first time you do each day. Logic indicates that it needs to store the date when it does this, so you can banish it (virtually) forever by setting your computer's clock to some date far in the future (2019, say) and then opening a Quicktime movie. You'll see the nag one more time, and when you set your clock back to the present you won't see it again (until 2019;). This works on a Mac or a PC (and presumably on a Unix box when they finally get around to porting it).
I can lay claim to having come up with this idea on my own, but it's also been independently discovered by a number of people. I needed it when I was running a lab with 30 Mac & Windoze boxen, all using QT3 heavily and all nagging my users when they had better things to do.
It'd be nice if Apple would just get the message and lose the annoying advertising, of course. I'd be content if it played it one or a few times after QT was just installed, because that'd be of genuine utility to people who might want to know about the option to upgrade. Showing it every day is just dumb.
If the original text and image content of the web site was provided to company X by the ad agency, it seems possible that what company X really did is to perform a mechanical transformation of it into marked-up HTML. That is, the ad agency owns the copyright on the content, and hired company X to do some labour (which they did, albeit poorly - this would be what was bought and paid for in the original contract). The final HTML product is obviously copyrighted, but I'd suppose that it's a derivative work made from the original unformatted content (which belongs to the agency). Labour done to manipulate content needn't always create new copyrighted content. Some of the comments thus far seem to be confusing the question of whether the content is copyrighted with whether the added tags are (the latter being my interpretation of what's being asked here).
Naturally it makes no difference at all whether they used Dreamweaver, vi, or wrote up tags on a napkin - the point is that they either created content to which they own the copyright, or (as I suggest above) merely used a particular tool to manipulate existing content.
And now I've made myself sick of the vague term "content", so I'll stop.
Is it a passive matrix (STN) screen? What you describe sounds like a dual scan passive display. In fact that's why they're called "dual scan" - they're really two displays, one above the other, simultaneously refreshed to reduce the flicker.
If it's an active matrix (TFT) display then there's something wrong with it, like a bad trace or damaged display cable.
Er, statutory rape involves sex where one party is legally unable to give consent (because of their age or occasionally some other condition, like being in a coma). This is why the age of majority generally == the age of consent. Thus if you're employing "consensual" as a legal term then the hypothetical act most certainly isn't, and there's no contradiction - that's why it's called rape (again, a legal term). If you're using some more colloquial definition then that's fine, but don't expect it to provide protection from a court of law (or by extension, the media).
This is distinguished from hacker/cracker, where *both* terms are entirely colloquial (within various subcultures). The comparison is pretty inapt anyway, since there's a whole world of difference between any kind of rape and computer attacks (I wouldn't have much problem with people employing those semiautomatic whatsits on rapists, but I do have a problem with 15 year old "hackers" going to jail).
Re:Is iMovie compatible with analog?
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iMovie For Free
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iMovie really only reads DV streams, because it's designed for turning raw footage from a DV camera into finished, exportable work. It is possible to get old footage into DV format without having a Firewire port (usually with some small loss, remember that DV is 4:2:2 compressed). There's discussion on the Mac and DV sites on how to do that.
Most of the limitations of iMovie are there to keep it simple to use for people who don't want to learn all the background of video editing (especially traditional analog). You can probably do what you're looking for with the combination of the "Quicktime Pro" upgrade and iMovie, but to really get into professional editing you still need Final Cut Pro. For Apple to release iMovie for free is probably as much a loss leader for upgrades to QTPro and FCP as anything else. Both packages are extremely powerful, though, and pretty much kick butt on Premiere, After Effects, or anything else that's been available in the past (according to a friend of mine who runs a University video lab, anyway).
Actually I find it's PC keyboards that aren't "full" - they're short one metakey (this is why Microsoft does stupid things like using ASCII control characters for cut & paste). Macs have both an option and command key, which is useful in all kinds of ways both under the Mac OS and PPC Linux. And it's no better for PCs now that M$ has added the useless Windows and Menu keys to the mix (a thinly veiled ploy to get their logo on every PC keyboard), because you can't remap them in a sane manner under Windows. You can do a reasonable job within the limitations of XFree86, though, which makes xmame and Maelstrom easier.;)
No argument about the mouse, but it's easily replaced, and there are real justifications for a one-button mouse among the less computer-fixated crowd.
The unfortunate thing about this story (espeically combined with other recent developments like the Ultracade and the Hasbro lawsuits) is that it weakens one argument used by defenders of MAME et al (among whom I'd count myself). I speak of the "well you're not doing anything with these properties, and there's no other way to play them so they're slowly disappearing" position. Clearly at least some companies do plan on marketing older games in new packages, licenced to hardware manufacturers like Ultracade and Hanaho, or in this case as a vehicle for web hits and banner views.
It's not really a new idea - I bought the Digital Eclipse 68k-emulated versions of three Williams game years ago - but there does seem to be a new trend toward it. The funny thing is, of course, that the renewed market for these probably wouldn't exist if the MAME project and all those ROM sites hadn't helped bring it back, and they'll now make use of all that free work and publicity to reassert exlusive control.
It's really just another of the problems with proprietary software and copyrights that last too damn long. Should these companies be able to retain exclusive control over this code for so long? Especially when in many cases they had nothing to do with the original work, and just bought the "rights"? And even if you buy the argument that they still deserve to exercise the commercial rights to Joust right now, what about in 2050?
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Is it just me, or was removing the middle-leech supposed to bring down the cost of things like novels?
Looking over the FAQ for this King story, I see that it's $1 a pop (a mere few thousand words each time) for the first three installments, and $2.50 an ep after that, up to seven or eight payments total. That's $13-15.50 US for an approximately 350 page novel (being generous with his wordcount estimates, since King has tended to try and make up for lack of creativity with verbosity in the past, much as I'm doing right now). Plus you have to read the thing in installments (knowing at any point the author might pull the plug), forgo the possession of a nice compact paperback to take on vacation with you, and either bear the costs of printing it yourself (figure $2-10 US more) or make it through an entire novel on Acrobat Reader (meaning you'll probably be buying new corrective lenses later ;).
I do like the concept of electronic distribution and micropayments, but what's "micro" about these? Seems like the reader is paying a lot, and King makes out like a bandit since he no longer has to pay a publisher. If the cost of advertising is the issue, then the experiment is already a failure, since only this precise sort of mediocre bestseller author could ever afford it (King is surely not hurting for cash), and ending the overpopularity of middle-of-the-road crap is supposed to be one of the main benefits ascribed to direct distribution.
Even if it were an author I liked and respected, I can't see why anyone would want to pay these rates. I think this one is just capitalising on the brief novelty most people see here.
I haven't thought that direction through well enough to say what will become of double-clicks and the like (I still think they can be safe and useful if their use is carefully constrained), but it does seem that there's only really room for one "button" action there, though there might be tap-modifiers on a stylus (which would actually bear more resemblance to "control-click" than "right-click", albeit with a one-handed take).
As for the straitjacket thing, yes, it is a deeply philosophical point, getting into all kinds of questions of free will and necessary constraint, and that's why I don't go there. ;)
Today seems to be my day to follow up your comments...
;)
I'll agree that the control-click for contextual menus is a kluge (even though it's one I use when I use a Mac), or at least that it's certainly no better than learning a second button. But I'd go farther and say that popup contextual menus are simply a bad idea, because you never actually know what you're going to find in one. If the computer were really, really smart about what it considers "context" it might know exactly what to put in that menu, but we know that it isn't, and the usual implementation is sufficiently haphazard that one has to take a couple of seconds to peruse the menu during each use. This differs from pulldown menus on the Mac or Windows, where unavailable verbs are always displayed in the same position, but dimmed. The problem is that there just isn't space for very much that's useful in one popup menu without making it hierarchical (and that's generally a disaster for new and old users alike - I'm damn good with a pointing device and I understand the "triangle of slack" in a Mac hierarchical menu, but I still basically hate them. And Windows ones are just about unusable, because they don't even have that going for them. Admittedly this is partly because I use a trackpad for everything, but this is pretty much a requirement for portable computing).
On the other hand I think the various modifier keys for such things as dragging (with instant visual feedback) are a good thing; they apply an optional modification to my action that I can change midstream, much the way people actually think about what they do ("don't just move that icon, copy it - no actually, make a symlink instead, ok, that's it"). A contextual menu might be an adjunct to that, but the problem is always requiring it. I can't drag to create a Windows shortcut without having to point and click through some damn menu when I get there, and worse still I have to enter a mode before beginning the drag - am I left-dragging or right-dragging? Oops wrong button, how do I get rid of this menu now? Maybe it's my heritage as a terminal-using Unix geek, but I find the meta key approach quicker and more agreeable to "power users" while simultaneously less confusing for newbies. And as with my reply to your previous comment, keep in mind that the GUI is designed so that a user will nearly always have her left hand on the keyboard with her thumbs over those modifier keys (including control). That doesn't work for left-handed users (and I deplore this), but it is something you need to keep in mind when questioning a UI decision. The learned context of the GUI is always important, because we're not talking about you or me, but about a hypothetical user who knows (or will know) the system as best they can.
But no, the second button isn't "just a kluge" - it's a design choice. Just not necessarily a well thought-out or defined one, particularly when you consider how it scales to other pointing devices, especially a tappable absolute one like a stylus - where's the right click on WinCE? (ok, where the hell is anything on WinCE
Double-clicking in a properly-designed GUI is done when activating one or more elements from a list. Single-clicking selects, double-clicking "does more". A list can be a sequence of textual icons, a window full of icons, or any other grouping. The interesting thing is how quickly newbies (at least those who haven't been previously scared by Windows) pick up on that mechanism whether or not it's explained to them, because it's designed to mesh with the whole concept of icons and lists - and with the one button mouse. The only overloading of double clicking on the Mac is the behaviour in text strings, where one click selects a point, two clicks selects a word, and three selects an entire line, but this doesn't seem to cause confusion (perhaps because selecting text is fairly modal in the minds of users).
One assumes your criticism here is supposed to be directed at Apple's one-button mouse used with the system and OS it's bundled with, but making an argument that one button isn't enough (or double clicks are evil) based on the Windows implementation is pointless. Get a little broader exposure before you go on your next rant.
Now someone will follow up informing me of what TLCPP ripped off. ;)
More importantly, why would we care? Tux is fat and happy and capable. Tux is also an icon, and icons typically don't have gender (and certainly don't require it, especially in this case). And lest you think women can't wear a tux, I can show you pictures from a good friend's wedding that argue otherwise...
;)
If you really need a pronoun, you can use that information about penguins IRL to justify the assumption that Tux is female, and has been all along. That'll put a minor crimp in some people's assumptions, and that's always fun (one way to tell the real hackers is by the reaction when their assumptions get crimped.
Not bad, but it's interesting to note that this is the first Mac Apple has ever made with essentially no integrated audio hardware. It seems like the inclusion of a subwoofer in the cube case should have been a natural; it's obviously designed to sit on the floor under a desk (the web pages describing it make this point several times), and no matter how good those funky little USB satellite speakers (which ought to be included) are, they're also small, and a simple subwoofer designed into the case would have made a big difference to them. It could even be an off-the-sheld USB subwoofer with its own DAC; the main thing is including it in the case design. It isn't apparent that anyone even had the idea here, which is a real shame.
Given that this thing is basically the new 20th Anniversary Mac (it's just too expensive to be considered a modular iMac, though it's really not clear why that is), the lack of included high-quality audio seems a real omission. Yes, you can add a third-party multispeaker USB sound system, but for this price you shouldn't have to, and adding an external subwoofer negates the compact design and the single cable to the desktop. Other things like the video card will be quietly upgraded in a couple of months (the same way the beige G3s and original iMacs went from Rage II to Rage Pro), but this needed to be thought of from the beginning. Too bad it wasn't.
The sad thing is that I can't decide if this is a giveaway as to the likely trollific quality of the poster, or a clue as to her reality; the erroneous implication that a 16 year old girl would be any worse at motor tasks or less intelligent than anyone else is unfortunate either way. The person who originally taught me to drive a manual transmission was in that exact demographic, oddly enough. In point of fact most of the 16 year olds I've known (whether male or female) were pretty damn good at manipulating both cars and phones, because that's pretty much all they ever did, and practice makes perfect.
The biggest giveaway is probably that no clueful Linux-installin' /.-readin' 16 year old would be likely to create an account under his or her real name. I'm twice that old and even I'm not that dumb. ;) "PMS" could be the root of so many cool self-referential nicks, too, especially given the closeness to "RMS".
For any non-troll who seriously thinks that they can drive and talk on the phone at the same time: don't. Driving is hard; For various reasons I've done an excessive amount of tricky and driving in sixteen years and I've never had an accident either, but there are lots of times I would have if I'd been just a little more distracted. Extreme sports are fun, but stick to the ones where you're the only one who gets killed, thanks.
The only real way to learn about and discuss some new thing in the world is to confront it directly and figure out what it really means to you and to everyone else. Using a metaphor to consider it may seem a leapfrog tool to get over the learning curve, but the danger of instilling a sort of idée fixe and being unable to see the real ramifications of the new thing is too real, and too evident from past attempts in this direction. I'd be particularly careful what metaphors you present to legistlatively powerful neophytes, because the mind pollution they can create is very hard to undo.
I am an admitted compleat Unixhead, but I've long felt that case-sensitivity is more of a problem than an asset on Unix filesystems; people simply don't tend to think of case as a distinguishing feature, and it bites them more often than it serves a useful purpose. Those few cases where case is the sole distinction between two filenames generally just represent someone's bad judgement. Note that this isn't the same as case preservation, which is important (and as mentioned in the article, has always occurred on HFS and HFS+ filesystems).
Windowmaker is a window manager; its primary purpose is to manage existing windows, as well as providing some popup menus (which are included in window managers primarily so one can create new windows, with child processes running in them). It's possible to write other tools that primarily talk to Windowmaker and extend it (the Dock and Clip are examples - see below), but its function is sufficiently specific that extensions is all these tools are likely to be.
The Windowmaker Dock is a neat little app that's fairly well integrated with the window manager, but still basically separate in both concept and execution; you can run Windowmaker without it, and you could run it without Windowmaker (with a bit of work). The Clip is similarly separate, though its function (icon management) is specific enough to this window manager that it's really only useful as an adjunct to it.
From a programmer perspective, GNUStep is the real environment; it provides the API and a few other convenient commonalities for all those nice NeXTish tools (wterm, or the Windowmaker settings panel for instance). However from a user perspective, Windowmaker plus a tied-in desktop icon manager will pretty much constitute an "environment". In other words, it depends whom you ask.
IMAP is certainly the way to go, but I'll disagree with the note that telling users to read their mail through Communicator - or more specifically, the Messenger component - saves them any pain. The problem is that Messenger isn't a very good MUA (or news reader, another function which it halfheartedly attempts to confuse with mail), and neither is it really an application they're already familiar with (it's really quite different from the Navigator component). Most users, including those of the naïve variety, are perfectly ok learning a set of well-designed apps and well-bounded applications for functions that are fairly distinct, like email and web browsing. Perhaps HTML mail messages will blur that boundary, but not in the way that either Communicator or Outlook have tried so far.
What I hope to see from this thread is a clean, simple, IMAP (or POP, sigh) based GUI email client for X.
The reason this comes to so many people's minds (and the real proof of the similarity, really), is probably the fact that the colour fringing on the Cleartype samples looks a lot like the colour fringing on an Apple ][ display. Try running an emulator with the colour burst simulated if you've never seen it firsthand. Quite the nostalgia trip actually.
As for whether it's really any good, well, it's merely ok. I'm looking at it on a powerbook 2400 screen (RGB striped 96dpi display pretty similar to what's in colour PDAs), and the difference with the standard grey antialiasing isn't all that great; arguably the colour fringing makes it six of one, half a dozen of the other (ObPrisoner). It seems a little clearer if you look at a gamma lower than your real screen, or maybe mine really is at 1.6 these days. I wouldn't pay extra for it, anyway.
In fact it'd be even nicer to see systems in place to shut down workplace desktop computers automatically after hours (this can be a security feature too). The relief on the power grid might even offset the increased usage when people arrive home at six o'clock and start using all those temperature controls and home appliances (including, obviously, their home PC). This obviously doesn't solve the problem in a world with more and more computers and finite power reserves, but it'd be nice to see only those ones that are in use receiving power, and the bonus is that teaching an overall energy ethic scales automatically with each new device.
(This message required 75 Joules of hydroelectric energy and one bagel to compose)
FreeWWWeb, like most Free ISPs, contracts for ISP service in each city. In my locale they use UUNet, and I do find the service "exceedingly amazing", or at least as good as a v.90 dialup can possibly be - 5+kBps all the time for compressed data, and as good as a modem gets in terms of latency (it ought to be, it's on the UUNet backbone). I have noticed once or twice in the last few months where I couldn't authenticate for a few hours (presumably the smartnet/freewwweb Radius server was down or unreachable) but on the whole it's a darn fine service, and the service terms are totally reasonable. The portal page is even pretty good (as portal pages go), with minimal advertising.
I seem to recall that they use Earthlink for most of the US, so YMMV there (and if you abhor Earthlink for their Scientology connections that may be another issue to consider).
It doesn't really matter whether it's economically feasible for me or thee (I would argue that it can be, and that it's mostly an uncreative reliance on archaic models of commerce that makes it seem otherwise). The real point is that the FSF doesn't say it's "ok to sell anything but software". They actually don't give one whit whether you sell software or not; their entire stance is about whether you can restrict current and future access to it. Obviously other points do proceed from that, but it's still an incorrect reading of their ethos.
There are some other questionable points in the essay as well; near the top the author enumerates the "generally recognised" points of ethical consideration. IANAP, but I've sat through enough ethics classes to know that the questions ethicists ask are really about the nature of "the good", not to be confused with "the goods". "Legitimate property" doesn't have anything to do with general ethics - it's a specific application that some people believe in. A libertarian view might find that property is essential to the existence of good; a cooperative-anarchist view might not. Intellectual property is clearly even more questionable. Not that it's not good to talk about the subject of intellectual property, but it's shaky and prejudicial to use it as one of your basic assumptions before an examination of the ethics of free software.
(I Am Not A Philosopher, in case you were wondering)
Probably not very much for discrete command recognition. I used to turn on the speech input sprocket on Mac games (Marathon II et al) for laughs sometimes, just so I could yell "fist" or "shotgun" in the hopes of scaring my neighbours. It really didn't slow down the game much, even on a fairly slow old system where Marathon II was reasonably demanding. And it did work as one would expect, but I still found I preferred the keyboard.
;) But then Warcraft's a pretty undemanding game to begin with.
Using the same base technology (but not input sprockets), the Mac version of Warcraft II allowed you to speak the names of cheats instead of typing them, which actually did give a slight advantage against Windows network opponents in cheat games.
I think you missed Vonnegut's point in that quote; he didn't say "Hiroshima" but "Nagasaki". Hiroshima would have been enough to secure a surrender - the lesser-evil-than-conventional-warfare argument might wash there, if it can at all. The war was effectively over after the first bomb, ergo Nagasaki was a weapons test (designed to test a different bomb but especially the different terrain). And that's obscene.
The nag movie in QT 3 & 4 does suck, but it's fairly easy to hack around it. It doesn't actually appear every time you invoke Quicktime, but the first time you do each day. Logic indicates that it needs to store the date when it does this, so you can banish it (virtually) forever by setting your computer's clock to some date far in the future (2019, say) and then opening a Quicktime movie. You'll see the nag one more time, and when you set your clock back to the present you won't see it again (until 2019 ;). This works on a Mac or a PC (and presumably on a Unix box when they finally get around to porting it).
I can lay claim to having come up with this idea on my own, but it's also been independently discovered by a number of people. I needed it when I was running a lab with 30 Mac & Windoze boxen, all using QT3 heavily and all nagging my users when they had better things to do.
It'd be nice if Apple would just get the message and lose the annoying advertising, of course. I'd be content if it played it one or a few times after QT was just installed, because that'd be of genuine utility to people who might want to know about the option to upgrade. Showing it every day is just dumb.
If the original text and image content of the web site was provided to company X by the ad agency, it seems possible that what company X really did is to perform a mechanical transformation of it into marked-up HTML. That is, the ad agency owns the copyright on the content, and hired company X to do some labour (which they did, albeit poorly - this would be what was bought and paid for in the original contract). The final HTML product is obviously copyrighted, but I'd suppose that it's a derivative work made from the original unformatted content (which belongs to the agency). Labour done to manipulate content needn't always create new copyrighted content. Some of the comments thus far seem to be confusing the question of whether the content is copyrighted with whether the added tags are (the latter being my interpretation of what's being asked here).
Naturally it makes no difference at all whether they used Dreamweaver, vi, or wrote up tags on a napkin - the point is that they either created content to which they own the copyright, or (as I suggest above) merely used a particular tool to manipulate existing content.
And now I've made myself sick of the vague term "content", so I'll stop.
Is it a passive matrix (STN) screen? What you describe sounds like a dual scan passive display. In fact that's why they're called "dual scan" - they're really two displays, one above the other, simultaneously refreshed to reduce the flicker.
If it's an active matrix (TFT) display then there's something wrong with it, like a bad trace or damaged display cable.
Er, statutory rape involves sex where one party is legally unable to give consent (because of their age or occasionally some other condition, like being in a coma). This is why the age of majority generally == the age of consent. Thus if you're employing "consensual" as a legal term then the hypothetical act most certainly isn't, and there's no contradiction - that's why it's called rape (again, a legal term). If you're using some more colloquial definition then that's fine, but don't expect it to provide protection from a court of law (or by extension, the media).
This is distinguished from hacker/cracker, where *both* terms are entirely colloquial (within various subcultures). The comparison is pretty inapt anyway, since there's a whole world of difference between any kind of rape and computer attacks (I wouldn't have much problem with people employing those semiautomatic whatsits on rapists, but I do have a problem with 15 year old "hackers" going to jail).
iMovie really only reads DV streams, because it's designed for turning raw footage from a DV camera into finished, exportable work. It is possible to get old footage into DV format without having a Firewire port (usually with some small loss, remember that DV is 4:2:2 compressed). There's discussion on the Mac and DV sites on how to do that.
Most of the limitations of iMovie are there to keep it simple to use for people who don't want to learn all the background of video editing (especially traditional analog). You can probably do what you're looking for with the combination of the "Quicktime Pro" upgrade and iMovie, but to really get into professional editing you still need Final Cut Pro. For Apple to release iMovie for free is probably as much a loss leader for upgrades to QTPro and FCP as anything else. Both packages are extremely powerful, though, and pretty much kick butt on Premiere, After Effects, or anything else that's been available in the past (according to a friend of mine who runs a University video lab, anyway).
Actually I find it's PC keyboards that aren't "full" - they're short one metakey (this is why Microsoft does stupid things like using ASCII control characters for cut & paste). Macs have both an option and command key, which is useful in all kinds of ways both under the Mac OS and PPC Linux. And it's no better for PCs now that M$ has added the useless Windows and Menu keys to the mix (a thinly veiled ploy to get their logo on every PC keyboard), because you can't remap them in a sane manner under Windows. You can do a reasonable job within the limitations of XFree86, though, which makes xmame and Maelstrom easier. ;)
No argument about the mouse, but it's easily replaced, and there are real justifications for a one-button mouse among the less computer-fixated crowd.
The unfortunate thing about this story (espeically combined with other recent developments like the Ultracade and the Hasbro lawsuits) is that it weakens one argument used by defenders of MAME et al (among whom I'd count myself). I speak of the "well you're not doing anything with these properties, and there's no other way to play them so they're slowly disappearing" position. Clearly at least some companies do plan on marketing older games in new packages, licenced to hardware manufacturers like Ultracade and Hanaho, or in this case as a vehicle for web hits and banner views.
It's not really a new idea - I bought the Digital Eclipse 68k-emulated versions of three Williams game years ago - but there does seem to be a new trend toward it. The funny thing is, of course, that the renewed market for these probably wouldn't exist if the MAME project and all those ROM sites hadn't helped bring it back, and they'll now make use of all that free work and publicity to reassert exlusive control.
It's really just another of the problems with proprietary software and copyrights that last too damn long. Should these companies be able to retain exclusive control over this code for so long? Especially when in many cases they had nothing to do with the original work, and just bought the "rights"? And even if you buy the argument that they still deserve to exercise the commercial rights to Joust right now, what about in 2050?