The argument that people should use what they're comfortable with is nice, but not part of an enterprise server solution
Why ever said Mac Mini Colocation was for enterprise server solutions? Certainly not me. I said it wasn't in the post you're replying to.
And there's nothing unprofessional about developing on OSX. It's real UNIX. It has a Server edition. The only eyebrow raiser is using Mac Minis rather than rack mounted servers. But the experience seems to be that they are good.
Of course in enterprise solutions you HAVE to work with IT departments and admins that want things done their own way. But individuals, small companies and startups don't have to. That's one of those things that makes them nimble.
He told a story about some people at a university who wanted the IT department to support a unique one-off system, the IT department said no.
As I said. IT departments are like that. And as I said, this is one method of doing what it is you want to do anyone regardless of IT departments with limited skills or budgets standing in your way.
If I'm in charge of the development, I get to choose the platform. Not some IT admin.
So in the end, everyone is happy: the colo companies get their niche business, the fledgling web business gets their preferred platform, the data center admins get to stick with their core competencies, and schmucks who have never had to run a large data center get to call them assholes. Everyone wins.
My point exactly. So where you think the contradiction is, I can't imagine.
I see. You object to people using the tool that they know how to use, and insist they use your preferred tool instead. That's pretty typical of IT Admin types.
It also explains one of the reasons for the success of the Mac Mini Colo companies. People who can set Macs up don't need you anymore. They've developed a solution for a small project on their Mac. Then when they need the bandwidth, get a Colo service to host a Mac Mini for them. They get complete control, using a system they understand well, and have no need for assholes that like to say no. For a very moderate cost.
It's not something for big corporate solutions. But for small companies and individuals it can be exactly what they need.
Ah, but Apple, who are generally regarded as being a few orders of magnitude better at UI design than a random torrent-client devteam, should not have a problem here.
They are a few orders of magnitude better. And indeed they don't have a problem here. As I've explained, design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. And this particular issue has the answer: leave it out.
If you think VLC is any kind of example of a good UI, you know nothing about UIs. Its shit. It's almost as bad as the Azeureus example I gave. And follows the same same broken pattern of having options grown so out of control they need to put an option toggle to display all the options that shouldn't be there in the first place. A broken pattern you seem to think is a good thing!
What me to reel off a few of the things that makes the current VLC one of the worst UIs out there?... but it is a bit off topic.
How many people do you think prefer to control the packetizer when looking at a movie? A grand total of ten out of six billion?
Indeed. Approximately none. That option has no place in a UI. It's there because some developer wanted to tinker with the setting and was too much of a wanker to take it out, or just include it in debug builds. Possibly he, like you, thinks that there's no such thing as a bad option, or too many options.
Good designers make choices. Bad designers can't make up their minds and pass the buck down to users. Most programmers think UIs are just about squeezing as many functions as possible onto whatever screen space is available. They need executing.
How does any of that show he thought the music of his time was a stinking cesspool of shit as you put it?
You know something else about passionate people? They're not fucking literalists. They paint with words. They use metaphors, similes, exaggerations. And they lie a lot. And they get laid.
I don't usually expect this sort of hyperbole from your points either, they're usually very reasonable.
Fit the post to the subject. When you're discussing passionate people, be unreasonable!
TL;DR version: Putting options to delegate decisions to users often sound fine in isolation. But if you include them all, you end up with a horrible mess of an options UI, that most people don't understand or get lost in. For an extreme, have you ever looked as Azureus options?
And it's not 70%. It's 99%. In 99 cases out of 100, closing the laptop lid means "I've done with it for now. You can conserve power."
In most of the remaining 1% of cases too. As a developer wanting your laptop to compile in your backpack as you go, you're not even a rounding error. Even amongst developers.
"It hasn't happened to me in 4 months" has never been the arbiter of what is safe. People who balance their phone in their hand rather than hold it are far more likely to drop it. It's hardly rocket science.
Of course you think it won't happen to you personally. Everybody thinks that till it does. It's one of the fundamental flaws of human risk perception.
Before it happens you assume people that it happens to are "clumsy". After, you'll say it could have happened to anyone and curse your bad luck.
Absolutely. On the Radio yesterday they were pointing out a scam where a company charges 30UKP for "helping" you to fill out a UK passport application form. Many people thought they were on the official government passport site, because it was the first thing in the Google results. One of the points of advice on the program was to look at the URL for.gov.uk rather than.co.uk
With the number of scammers on the internet, one thing it's not sensible to lose is identification of official government sites right there in the domain name.
That's not needed, finger tips just needs to be beyond the balance point at the middle of the back. Combine that with resting the phone edge to theflat of the hand, and you actually got a pretty decent grip.
The famous last words uttered before: *SMASH* shit!
There's a big difference between holding a phone and balancing a phone.
I don't want my computer "protecting" me from doing something that could maybe be stupid.
Then as you know you have other choices of laptop than a Macbook. Not every product has to be aimed at you. Macs are for people that want their computers to do the sensible thing. And ALWAYS being in sleep or hibernate when being put in a case or backpack is one of those sensible design decisions Mac users enjoy.
The reason is that women essentially give up 25% or more of their physical size and muscle (as compared to a fraternal male twin) in order to physically birth the next generation of humans. So slapping a woman at any time is like slapping a woman who is holding a baby or is pregnant, while the man is holding extra muscle. It's not a fair fight, and it's exploiting a male advantage, so it is by definition sexist.
"fraternal male twin". Or to put it in simpler way: on average. So you may in fact have a weaker man slapping a stronger woman. In fact all slaps (and fights) are between two people of different strengths. If dissimilar strength is the issue then talk about it being wrong to slap someone weaker than you. It's sexist to categorise strength by gender.
As to why you can't slap a woman in a movie where it is just fantasy â" you can. It still happens. Only today, it's only villains that do it, because the audience vilifies them for it. If you see a man haul out and slap a woman in a movie today, 30 minutes later the guy will land on a spike or something and the audience will applaud.
And if a woman slaps a man? Should the audience expect her to die? And should we expect the audience to applaud when she does? Generally not. And that's because of the sexism of moviemaking, and what the audiences have been conditioned to expect.
There's a common abuse of language being used these last few decades. Where a gender difference advantages men, then it's "sexist". When it advantages women it's "empowering".
Now don't get me wrong, I think there are situations where it's a good thing to choose to favour women in order to change entrenched positions of unreasonable disadvantage for women. But lets be clear about what we're doing. Not play propaganda with hypocritical uses of "sexist" and "empowerment".
This is not one of those areas. Why? Because it's wrong to slap someone of either gender. Just as it is to punch them. By vilifying only the male to female variety, you're implicitly accepting the other 3 combinations.
In movies on the other hand, where violence is not only acceptable, it's a vital ingredient in many genres then anyone slapping anyone should be equally acceptable. Only when it is will real equality be reached.
Closing the laptop can be for several reasons: Want the laptop in sleep mode. Want the laptop in hibernate. Want the laptop to power off.
They're not reasons. They are marginally different technical states that the computer can be in whilst you're not using it. Not only that but 99.9% of the users of a computer don't know what the difference between "sleep" and "hibernate". You're not even beginning to think about the user, let alone his reasoning.
The reason a user closes a laptop lid is because he's finished interacting with it. There's the odd edge case where that's not the case, such as possibly doing a presentation on a projector, or using a docking station. And in both cases, the Macbook can be operated with the lid closed.
Want the laptop to stay on with the screen off, say because I'm downloading/rendering something overnight.
That's a reason. But one that is easily accomplished by pressing the screen brightness down button on the keyboard.
Different people may have different default desires.
Sure, and there's a couple of desktop OSs who's designers think that where ever you could have a different desire, extra options UI should be added to give you a choice. Even if the choice is irrelevant, or even a bad choice. Mac OS isn't one of those, it's one of the reasons why it's easier and more pleasant to use than the other two desktop OSs.
Power plans? 5 tabbed pages of what to do about power when I'm not using the computer? Some of them so long they have scroll bars. Scroll bars on a tabbed page of a power options contol panel section. I kid you not.
WTF? This is not better. It's far, far worse.
Good design. It's as much about what you leave out as what you leave in.
So you're saying if I buy a Mac, I have to give up on letting my code compile/run while my laptop is in my backpack on the way home?
IN your backpack? You do realise that CPUs run hot when they are hard at work. And compiling is one of those things that put them to hard work? You do realise that laptops have fans, and those fans only function properly if the vents are clear?
You just detailed an extremely good reason why you shouldn't be given the option to do something stupid.
It's not that the Macbook is incapable of operating with the lid closed. It does indeed have a lid closed operational mode for when it's connected to an external monitor, power and slide navigation device (external mouse or keyboard). But those things make it unlikely that you've done something as stupid as trying to run it inside a backpack.
As usual, not putting an option there is a design choice with a reason, not laziness nor lack of thought.
You're right about the focus. But simply "wanting to change your field" is not the same as being passionate. "Wanting to change your field" is a reasonable and pedestrian aspiration. Passion is an unreasonable and demanding need to replace the stinking cesspools of shit that sully the world, and replace it with beauty.
Sure, a few will learn on their own - I taught myself programming in the early 1970s when I had to break into University computer labs at night to do it - but you can't expect every child with untapped potential to somehow magically know that programming exists, and seek out his or her own education.
You're probably right. I'm probably biased by the fact that I found out about it myself as a kid, and didn't need school to point me at it. I was learning as a kid in the late 70s/early 80s. Now I think about it, it may have been easier to get that first exposure back then, in the days when a BASIC CLI was the native UI for a home computer.
Yes. Whilst looking this up, I found a video I hadn't seen before of Jobs in 1997, explaining the reasoning behind the video. Interesting. Shocking shorts and jesus boots though!
You can't become a passionate *anything* if you find the world pretty much ok as it is.
You can become a functional something. Even a good something. But not a passionate one. Passion requires the food of dissatisfaction with the status quo in order to grow.
"Here's To The Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world - are the ones who do." -- Steve Jobs.
Teach a ninth grader Scheme, and he'll be able to create the successor to Microsoft Word.
No he won't. He'll be able to draw a circle on screen. Maybe sort a list. Perhaps if he's a high flyer: solve the Tower of Hanoi.
The guy who's going to create the big important app of the future doesn't need school to teach him how to program. He taught himself at home before he arrived in ninth grade. It'll be university before the level of the teaching catches up with what he already knows.
School needs to teach mainstream topics. Things that are likely to be useful. Most people are going to end up word processing in their lives. A very small percentage are going to end up coding anything.* And they don't need schools to get them started.
(* YMMV if you live in Silicon valley. Most of the world isn't like that.)
Slashdot Mirror
The argument that people should use what they're comfortable with is nice, but not part of an enterprise server solution
Why ever said Mac Mini Colocation was for enterprise server solutions? Certainly not me. I said it wasn't in the post you're replying to.
And there's nothing unprofessional about developing on OSX. It's real UNIX. It has a Server edition. The only eyebrow raiser is using Mac Minis rather than rack mounted servers. But the experience seems to be that they are good.
Of course in enterprise solutions you HAVE to work with IT departments and admins that want things done their own way. But individuals, small companies and startups don't have to. That's one of those things that makes them nimble.
He told a story about some people at a university who wanted the IT department to support a unique one-off system, the IT department said no.
As I said. IT departments are like that. And as I said, this is one method of doing what it is you want to do anyone regardless of IT departments with limited skills or budgets standing in your way.
If I'm in charge of the development, I get to choose the platform. Not some IT admin.
So in the end, everyone is happy: the colo companies get their niche business, the fledgling web business gets their preferred platform, the data center admins get to stick with their core competencies, and schmucks who have never had to run a large data center get to call them assholes. Everyone wins.
My point exactly. So where you think the contradiction is, I can't imagine.
Those sound like FAQs to me.
http://www.macminicolo.net/faq.html
http://www.macminivault.com/faqs/
I think all the services work in a similar way.
I see. You object to people using the tool that they know how to use, and insist they use your preferred tool instead. That's pretty typical of IT Admin types.
It also explains one of the reasons for the success of the Mac Mini Colo companies. People who can set Macs up don't need you anymore. They've developed a solution for a small project on their Mac. Then when they need the bandwidth, get a Colo service to host a Mac Mini for them. They get complete control, using a system they understand well, and have no need for assholes that like to say no. For a very moderate cost.
It's not something for big corporate solutions. But for small companies and individuals it can be exactly what they need.
Or do they offer something that linux/windows hosting doesn't?
Well, genuine Unix for one thing.
Ah, but Apple, who are generally regarded as being a few orders of magnitude better at UI design than a random torrent-client devteam, should not have a problem here.
They are a few orders of magnitude better. And indeed they don't have a problem here. As I've explained, design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. And this particular issue has the answer: leave it out.
If you think VLC is any kind of example of a good UI, you know nothing about UIs. Its shit. It's almost as bad as the Azeureus example I gave. And follows the same same broken pattern of having options grown so out of control they need to put an option toggle to display all the options that shouldn't be there in the first place. A broken pattern you seem to think is a good thing!
What me to reel off a few of the things that makes the current VLC one of the worst UIs out there? ... but it is a bit off topic.
How many people do you think prefer to control the packetizer when looking at a movie? A grand total of ten out of six billion?
Indeed. Approximately none. That option has no place in a UI. It's there because some developer wanted to tinker with the setting and was too much of a wanker to take it out, or just include it in debug builds. Possibly he, like you, thinks that there's no such thing as a bad option, or too many options.
Good designers make choices. Bad designers can't make up their minds and pass the buck down to users. Most programmers think UIs are just about squeezing as many functions as possible onto whatever screen space is available. They need executing.
How does any of that show he thought the music of his time was a stinking cesspool of shit as you put it?
You know something else about passionate people? They're not fucking literalists. They paint with words. They use metaphors, similes, exaggerations. And they lie a lot. And they get laid.
I don't usually expect this sort of hyperbole from your points either, they're usually very reasonable.
Fit the post to the subject. When you're discussing passionate people, be unreasonable!
How would it be a worse design decision to have the default behaviour as it is today, but a way to toggle it in the system settings?
Already answered here.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3501713&cid=43043993
TL;DR version: Putting options to delegate decisions to users often sound fine in isolation. But if you include them all, you end up with a horrible mess of an options UI, that most people don't understand or get lost in. For an extreme, have you ever looked as Azureus options?
http://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2005/10/azureus_pt3_3large.jpg
And it's not 70%. It's 99%. In 99 cases out of 100, closing the laptop lid means "I've done with it for now. You can conserve power."
In most of the remaining 1% of cases too. As a developer wanting your laptop to compile in your backpack as you go, you're not even a rounding error. Even amongst developers.
"It hasn't happened to me in 4 months" has never been the arbiter of what is safe. People who balance their phone in their hand rather than hold it are far more likely to drop it. It's hardly rocket science.
Of course you think it won't happen to you personally. Everybody thinks that till it does. It's one of the fundamental flaws of human risk perception.
Before it happens you assume people that it happens to are "clumsy". After, you'll say it could have happened to anyone and curse your bad luck.
They changed consumer electronic goods across the board. Everyone copied them.
Even the cheap shit you prefer is a half assed copy from Apple.
Absolutely. On the Radio yesterday they were pointing out a scam where a company charges 30UKP for "helping" you to fill out a UK passport application form. Many people thought they were on the official government passport site, because it was the first thing in the Google results. One of the points of advice on the program was to look at the URL for .gov.uk rather than .co.uk
With the number of scammers on the internet, one thing it's not sensible to lose is identification of official government sites right there in the domain name.
That's not needed, finger tips just needs to be beyond the balance point at the middle of the back. Combine that with resting the phone edge to theflat of the hand, and you actually got a pretty decent grip.
The famous last words uttered before: *SMASH* shit!
There's a big difference between holding a phone and balancing a phone.
I don't want my computer "protecting" me from doing something that could maybe be stupid.
Then as you know you have other choices of laptop than a Macbook. Not every product has to be aimed at you. Macs are for people that want their computers to do the sensible thing. And ALWAYS being in sleep or hibernate when being put in a case or backpack is one of those sensible design decisions Mac users enjoy.
The reason is that women essentially give up 25% or more of their physical size and muscle (as compared to a fraternal male twin) in order to physically birth the next generation of humans. So slapping a woman at any time is like slapping a woman who is holding a baby or is pregnant, while the man is holding extra muscle. It's not a fair fight, and it's exploiting a male advantage, so it is by definition sexist.
"fraternal male twin". Or to put it in simpler way: on average. So you may in fact have a weaker man slapping a stronger woman. In fact all slaps (and fights) are between two people of different strengths. If dissimilar strength is the issue then talk about it being wrong to slap someone weaker than you. It's sexist to categorise strength by gender.
As to why you can't slap a woman in a movie where it is just fantasy â" you can. It still happens. Only today, it's only villains that do it, because the audience vilifies them for it. If you see a man haul out and slap a woman in a movie today, 30 minutes later the guy will land on a spike or something and the audience will applaud.
And if a woman slaps a man? Should the audience expect her to die? And should we expect the audience to applaud when she does? Generally not. And that's because of the sexism of moviemaking, and what the audiences have been conditioned to expect.
There's a common abuse of language being used these last few decades. Where a gender difference advantages men, then it's "sexist". When it advantages women it's "empowering".
Now don't get me wrong, I think there are situations where it's a good thing to choose to favour women in order to change entrenched positions of unreasonable disadvantage for women. But lets be clear about what we're doing. Not play propaganda with hypocritical uses of "sexist" and "empowerment".
This is not one of those areas. Why? Because it's wrong to slap someone of either gender. Just as it is to punch them. By vilifying only the male to female variety, you're implicitly accepting the other 3 combinations.
In movies on the other hand, where violence is not only acceptable, it's a vital ingredient in many genres then anyone slapping anyone should be equally acceptable. Only when it is will real equality be reached.
Without looking any further than wikipedia for signs of Beethoven's unhappiness with the way things were:
"Beethoven's personal life was troubled by his encroaching deafness and irritability brought on by chronic abdominal pain (beginning in his twenties) which led him to contemplate suicide (documented in his Heiligenstadt Testament). Beethoven was often irascible. It has been suggested he suffered from bipolar disorder.[86] Nevertheless, he had a close and devoted circle of friends all his life, thought to have been attracted by his strength of personality. Toward the end of his life, Beethoven's friends competed in their efforts to help him cope with his incapacities.[87]
Sources show Beethoven's disdain for authority, and for social rank. He stopped performing at the piano if the audience chatted amongst themselves, or afforded him less than their full attention. At soirées, he refused to perform if suddenly called upon to do so. Eventually, after many confrontations, the Archduke Rudolph decreed that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.[87]
Beethoven was attracted to the ideals of the Enlightenment. In 1804, when Napoleon's imperial ambitions became clear, Beethoven took hold of the title page of his Third Symphony and scratched the name Bonaparte out so violently that he made a hole in the paper."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beethoven
And that's YOUR choice of passionate person. I rest my case.
Closing the laptop can be for several reasons:
Want the laptop in sleep mode.
Want the laptop in hibernate.
Want the laptop to power off.
They're not reasons. They are marginally different technical states that the computer can be in whilst you're not using it. Not only that but 99.9% of the users of a computer don't know what the difference between "sleep" and "hibernate". You're not even beginning to think about the user, let alone his reasoning.
The reason a user closes a laptop lid is because he's finished interacting with it. There's the odd edge case where that's not the case, such as possibly doing a presentation on a projector, or using a docking station. And in both cases, the Macbook can be operated with the lid closed.
Want the laptop to stay on with the screen off, say because I'm downloading/rendering something overnight.
That's a reason. But one that is easily accomplished by pressing the screen brightness down button on the keyboard.
Different people may have different default desires.
Sure, and there's a couple of desktop OSs who's designers think that where ever you could have a different desire, extra options UI should be added to give you a choice. Even if the choice is irrelevant, or even a bad choice. Mac OS isn't one of those, it's one of the reasons why it's easier and more pleasant to use than the other two desktop OSs.
What happens when you have an option for everything? This:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E2rnnlp7qqI/T65rBxDThwI/AAAAAAAAB1I/5zK-VscMU-I/s1600/power+setting3.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8oJxidXG9As/T65teya0SnI/AAAAAAAAB1Y/EK6MAfkoPjc/s576/power%2520setting2.JPG
Power plans? 5 tabbed pages of what to do about power when I'm not using the computer? Some of them so long they have scroll bars. Scroll bars on a tabbed page of a power options contol panel section. I kid you not.
WTF? This is not better. It's far, far worse.
Good design. It's as much about what you leave out as what you leave in.
So you're saying if I buy a Mac, I have to give up on letting my code compile/run while my laptop is in my backpack on the way home?
IN your backpack? You do realise that CPUs run hot when they are hard at work. And compiling is one of those things that put them to hard work? You do realise that laptops have fans, and those fans only function properly if the vents are clear?
You just detailed an extremely good reason why you shouldn't be given the option to do something stupid.
It's not that the Macbook is incapable of operating with the lid closed. It does indeed have a lid closed operational mode for when it's connected to an external monitor, power and slide navigation device (external mouse or keyboard). But those things make it unlikely that you've done something as stupid as trying to run it inside a backpack.
As usual, not putting an option there is a design choice with a reason, not laziness nor lack of thought.
You're right about the focus. But simply "wanting to change your field" is not the same as being passionate. "Wanting to change your field" is a reasonable and pedestrian aspiration. Passion is an unreasonable and demanding need to replace the stinking cesspools of shit that sully the world, and replace it with beauty.
Sure, a few will learn on their own - I taught myself programming in the early 1970s when I had to break into University computer labs at night to do it - but you can't expect every child with untapped potential to somehow magically know that programming exists, and seek out his or her own education.
You're probably right. I'm probably biased by the fact that I found out about it myself as a kid, and didn't need school to point me at it. I was learning as a kid in the late 70s/early 80s. Now I think about it, it may have been easier to get that first exposure back then, in the days when a BASIC CLI was the native UI for a home computer.
Yes. Whilst looking this up, I found a video I hadn't seen before of Jobs in 1997, explaining the reasoning behind the video. Interesting. Shocking shorts and jesus boots though!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCz_SiPD_X0
You can't become a passionate *anything* if you find the world pretty much ok as it is.
You can become a functional something. Even a good something. But not a passionate one. Passion requires the food of dissatisfaction with the status quo in order to grow.
"Here's To The Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world - are the ones who do."
-- Steve Jobs.
Teach a ninth grader Scheme, and he'll be able to create the successor to Microsoft Word.
No he won't. He'll be able to draw a circle on screen. Maybe sort a list. Perhaps if he's a high flyer: solve the Tower of Hanoi.
The guy who's going to create the big important app of the future doesn't need school to teach him how to program. He taught himself at home before he arrived in ninth grade. It'll be university before the level of the teaching catches up with what he already knows.
School needs to teach mainstream topics. Things that are likely to be useful. Most people are going to end up word processing in their lives. A very small percentage are going to end up coding anything.* And they don't need schools to get them started.
(* YMMV if you live in Silicon valley. Most of the world isn't like that.)
It still reads exactly the same no matter how you try to highlight it.