He did such a great job on fontconfig and metacity. Maybe he'll bring those innovations to CDE, if he doesn't decide to work on improving xfontsel and twm instead.
Good luck, Havoc!
$999 is hefty? Have you priced an Avid system recently? One with all the features of FCP? Is one such even available?
Re:I don't agree with the article
on
A Better Finder?
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· Score: 5, Informative
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Linux (any flavor) or Windows (any flavor) has recieved nearly the same amount of scrutiny and criticism with regard to UI. Why is that? Is it simply because Apple brags about it so much? Is it a recognition that Apple does it best (usually) and therefore it is fair that they should be evaluated based on that claim? I suspect that this is the reason.
Well, somewhat. The parent post is correct in that OS X has still by far the best UI out there. Mac OS is the benchmark by which all user interfaces are judged, and so all changes to it are held to a much higher standard.
The reason why the author wrote this article, though, is that, compared to the Mac OS 9 Fnder, the X Finder really is a mess (better in 10.2, but a polished turd is still a turd). Compared to Windows Explorer, X Finder still wins, but that's saying very little, isn't it? Nautilus is much better than Windows Explorer, but it still has at least a couple more major revs ahead of it before it approaches Mac OS Finder-territory.
For those who didn't bother to read the article: the author's not saying that everything from Mac OS 9 should be brought back. He's not saying that Mac OS 9 was the end-all of user interface. He's saying that the Finder, as the center of the user's OS X experience, should be a substantial advancement over OS 9, and right now it's not. It's a kludgy, poorly-integrated hybrid of NeXT and classic Mac OS. He's saying the Finder should bring the best of NeXT and classic Mac OS into a unified whole, along with a few other much-needed enhancements.
And I think he's right. Hopefully Panther (10.3) Finder will head in the direction suggested by this article.
For any newbies out there who might be confused: the Finder is the Mac file browser, equivalent to Windows Explorer, Midnight Commander, or Nautilus. It is not the user interface to all applications -- it is the tool you use to get to (or "find") your applications and documents.
You say that like those technologies are accomplishments to be proud of. Perhaps OpenOffice is, I've not used it, but I've used the others, and I'm always left wondering with Sun technologies -- didn't anyone at Sun ever take a basic CS course?
Now, you certainly could celebrate Sun for Java and almost single-handedly keeping the Unix flame alive between '85 and '94. But NFS before version 4 is a total disaster...
2) Developer opinion. Dvorak is primarly a PC man -- I think he missed much of the outcry that occurred when we switched from 68K to PPC. For that matter, there's still bits of Carbon that date back to 68K, such as setting and unsetting the A5 world register for callback routines. Also consider that the killer apps of the Mac world (Adobe products, Quark, etc) are just now becoming native to OS X. The outcry if we had to switch to a new OS would be massive. There's also the fact that the PPC ISA is backwards compatible with the 68K -- all existing apps for Apple would have to be emulated.
You're a little uninformed here. Carbon is entirely native PowerPC code on Mac OS X. The PowerPC architecture is not compatible with 68K machine code. 68k code is emulated in classic Mac OS, running alongside native PowerPC code using a clever hack called the 'Mixed Mode Manager', which doesn't exist on X outside of the Classic/Blue Box environment.
Dvorak for a long time had a column in MacUser called 'Devil's Advocate.' It was the back page column, and he eventually ran out of really negative things to say, at which point MacUser dropped him (in the early nineties).
But you're right in that binary compatibility would be a major issue, in fact the key obstacle.
Frankly, as a long time Mac user and developer, I really appreciate that Macs are aesthetically pure inside (clean RISC architecture) and out (clean industrial design). I suspect I'm not alone.
It's not the last 25 years, it's the last fifteen or so. Leveraged buyouts in the 80's, the FCC consolidation rules in the nineties, and lax antitrust enforcement under the last four administrations. Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Shrub are all equally guilty.
Chrysler wasn't the first. Chrysler was bailed out because they had something like 500,000 employees at the time. The Democrats, who were at that point in control (Carter was president), were not about to send that many people -- mostly blue collar -- out of work, regardless of whether Chrysler deserved to die or not (and it did -- build quality at the time of Lee Iaccoca's arrival was so bad that dealers expected to substantively rebuild each car as it came in from the factory!).
Chrysler also wasn't the first large company to ask for bailout from the federal government.
But you may be happy to know that the Republicans gave Chrysler lots of shit afterwards. Even so, Chrysler did pay back the loan way early.
Get over yourself, dude. The people who *really* just "like a cool car that they find fun/sexy/exciting/good looking" drive vehicles like the Miata, Nissan 350Z, the Subaru WRX, 'rice burner' base Hondas, and other cars that aren't in the shop 75% of the time -- OR -- they drive cars like the Austin-Healey 3000 or other classic exotics.
Camaros and Mustangs and Corvettes do one thing really well: they go fast. Everything else is mediocre. They also have traditionally had poor steering and build quality. (Don't know about the new Mustang, but certainly true for them up to 2002.)
The one thing that everyone should be able to agree on: People who buy Porches most certainly are lacking in penis length.
For my 15-year old self: skip all your classes, you'll just pick it all up in books later anyway. Go to high school only to meet girls, which brings me to:
Get a decent haircut so girls will be more attracted to you. Grow your hair out longer, earlier.
I don't necessarily recommend anyone else skip classes, but I'm an autodidact and it would have saved me a lot of time.
Huh? What are you suggesting here? You're seriously saying that Sony should pass along the cost of it's own incompetence to the end consumers through higher prices on future games? This sounds like the same argument the RIAA uses to shaft artists and consumers. "If we can't make up the loss from the nine artists out of ten we lose money on, we have no reason to fund diverisity, therefore we get to keep all of your money." Well, dipshits, find better artists.
It's easy, just find an infallible way to predict before development starts which potential projects will be the best sellers
As a corporation, you need to find people who understand both the target market and the untapped possibilities within that market. (Sometimes called a "taste fairy," more often a producer.) A long time ago, record companies paid people to do this. They seem to have mostly stopped paying them sometime in the late eighties. Now all we get is Britney Spears and Eminem. Fucking great. Is that what you want to happen in the games industry?
Metrowerks CodeWarrior is the standard of excellence in IDE's (or was as of about 1997 -- later versions are bloated cross-platform junk written by people who obviously couldn't care less about the Mac).
Yeah, zcip isn't all that (yet), but:
Grab tmdns from the http://zeroconf.sourceforge.net/ CVS repo, do the usual./configure && make && sudo make install, and you have a working mDNS responder for Linux.
I think we need a new rating in addition to 'Interesting,' like say 'Accurate'.
You'd think someone who had manufactured solar panels (even some years ago) might have heard of storage batteries. Or selling excess generated electricity back to the power company (power companies in California are required by law to buy it).
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He did such a great job on fontconfig and metacity. Maybe he'll bring those innovations to CDE, if he doesn't decide to work on improving xfontsel and twm instead. Good luck, Havoc!
$999 is hefty? Have you priced an Avid system recently? One with all the features of FCP? Is one such even available?
Well, somewhat. The parent post is correct in that OS X has still by far the best UI out there. Mac OS is the benchmark by which all user interfaces are judged, and so all changes to it are held to a much higher standard.
The reason why the author wrote this article, though, is that, compared to the Mac OS 9 Fnder, the X Finder really is a mess (better in 10.2, but a polished turd is still a turd). Compared to Windows Explorer, X Finder still wins, but that's saying very little, isn't it? Nautilus is much better than Windows Explorer, but it still has at least a couple more major revs ahead of it before it approaches Mac OS Finder-territory.
For those who didn't bother to read the article: the author's not saying that everything from Mac OS 9 should be brought back. He's not saying that Mac OS 9 was the end-all of user interface. He's saying that the Finder, as the center of the user's OS X experience, should be a substantial advancement over OS 9, and right now it's not. It's a kludgy, poorly-integrated hybrid of NeXT and classic Mac OS. He's saying the Finder should bring the best of NeXT and classic Mac OS into a unified whole, along with a few other much-needed enhancements.
And I think he's right. Hopefully Panther (10.3) Finder will head in the direction suggested by this article.
For any newbies out there who might be confused: the Finder is the Mac file browser, equivalent to Windows Explorer, Midnight Commander, or Nautilus. It is not the user interface to all applications -- it is the tool you use to get to (or "find") your applications and documents.
You say that like those technologies are accomplishments to be proud of. Perhaps OpenOffice is, I've not used it, but I've used the others, and I'm always left wondering with Sun technologies -- didn't anyone at Sun ever take a basic CS course? Now, you certainly could celebrate Sun for Java and almost single-handedly keeping the Unix flame alive between '85 and '94. But NFS before version 4 is a total disaster...
You're a little uninformed here. Carbon is entirely native PowerPC code on Mac OS X. The PowerPC architecture is not compatible with 68K machine code. 68k code is emulated in classic Mac OS, running alongside native PowerPC code using a clever hack called the 'Mixed Mode Manager', which doesn't exist on X outside of the Classic/Blue Box environment.
Dvorak for a long time had a column in MacUser called 'Devil's Advocate.' It was the back page column, and he eventually ran out of really negative things to say, at which point MacUser dropped him (in the early nineties).
But you're right in that binary compatibility would be a major issue, in fact the key obstacle.
Frankly, as a long time Mac user and developer, I really appreciate that Macs are aesthetically pure inside (clean RISC architecture) and out (clean industrial design). I suspect I'm not alone.
Unix. If it had been feature-rich, it wouldn't have been portable, because features were too expensive on the 'commodity' hardware of the time...
Macintosh 128k.
Early versions of Netscape.
But it's all relative, dude.
Chrysler wasn't the first. Chrysler was bailed out because they had something like 500,000 employees at the time. The Democrats, who were at that point in control (Carter was president), were not about to send that many people -- mostly blue collar -- out of work, regardless of whether Chrysler deserved to die or not (and it did -- build quality at the time of Lee Iaccoca's arrival was so bad that dealers expected to substantively rebuild each car as it came in from the factory!).
Chrysler also wasn't the first large company to ask for bailout from the federal government.
But you may be happy to know that the Republicans gave Chrysler lots of shit afterwards. Even so, Chrysler did pay back the loan way early.
Camaros and Mustangs and Corvettes do one thing really well: they go fast. Everything else is mediocre. They also have traditionally had poor steering and build quality. (Don't know about the new Mustang, but certainly true for them up to 2002.)
The one thing that everyone should be able to agree on: People who buy Porches most certainly are lacking in penis length.
Perhaps not applicable to the Cayenne.
Get a decent haircut so girls will be more attracted to you. Grow your hair out longer, earlier.
I don't necessarily recommend anyone else skip classes, but I'm an autodidact and it would have saved me a lot of time.
You're assuming that the average developer knows how to write clean, well-designed code. That isn't necessarily the case.
It's easy, just find an infallible way to predict before development starts which potential projects will be the best sellers
As a corporation, you need to find people who understand both the target market and the untapped possibilities within that market. (Sometimes called a "taste fairy," more often a producer.) A long time ago, record companies paid people to do this. They seem to have mostly stopped paying them sometime in the late eighties. Now all we get is Britney Spears and Eminem. Fucking great. Is that what you want to happen in the games industry?
Metrowerks CodeWarrior is the standard of excellence in IDE's (or was as of about 1997 -- later versions are bloated cross-platform junk written by people who obviously couldn't care less about the Mac).
Yeah, zcip isn't all that (yet), but: Grab tmdns from the http://zeroconf.sourceforge.net/ CVS repo, do the usual ./configure && make && sudo make install, and you have a working mDNS responder for Linux.
You'd think someone who had manufactured solar panels (even some years ago) might have heard of storage batteries. Or selling excess generated electricity back to the power company (power companies in California are required by law to buy it).
I'd assume this is a troll, but maybe it's just youthful exuberance? Please.
X is so flaky you could serve it for breakfast.
X is so inefficient that GM is considering using it for an engine in the next Chevy Malibu.
X is so unstable that Ford is considering using it as tires on the next Explorer.