I don't have a problem with that as much as I have problems with the UIs themselves. All those developers, and they still haven't been able to produce a window manager that I like better than OS X.::sigh::...
You do realise that the intel Pentium 4 has a whopping 20k level 1 cache? 8k instruction, 12k data? My archaic K6-2/500 has 64k level 1 cache: 32k instruction, 32k data.
Well, the Nehemiah supposedly has 64K level 2 cache. By comparison, the 1 GHz Celeron has 256K L2 cache...
I get ADSL from my local telephone company (CenturyTel). It's a 512/256 connection, so my upload is twice what a typical cable modem user gets. And I consider this to be a relatively slow DSL connection. (But I've had very few problems with the service, especially compared to some DSL horror stories I've heard.)
I've been shopping for DSL access here because I want to host a server, but almost everything I've seen is 128 upload, hence my comment... It's different elsewhere, I guess.:-)
What an utterly appalling waste of time! They talk about the speeds of these services using a single number, as if they offered symmetric capacities. Everyone knows that the common residential Internet services are asymmetric, with upload typically being one-half to one-tenth of the download. But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
Not entirely. My upload speed is capped at around 128 Kb/s, and (unless you pay extra) most basic DSL services have similar caps. DSL provides faster uploading on average most probably, but the difference isn't big enough for you to be justified in saying that "DSL stomps all over cable's ass."
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass. Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
The only real limitation I've run into in a cable ToS is the no hosting servers thing (which is not very strictly enforced, but that's another story). I'm using Adelphia Powerlink in the Pittsburgh area, and although when we first got the service over two years ago they were not very high on supporting non-Windows OSs and didn't allow NAT, they've gotten over it and now support my Mac just fine, and they don't care that I have a router. And of course I've always left all my computers on 24/7, so I don't know where you're coming from with that.
But this "article" (more like propaganda from the cable companies) doesn't discuss any of that. They pretend that the only thing that matters is how fast you can download pr0n. And if that's what you want -- to sit in front of a mouse-driven boob tube and salivate over pictures all day long -- then sure, cable modem service is for you. Go knock yourself out.
That one made me laugh. Mmhmm, faster download speeds are only useful for pr0n. It's not as if us cable modem users have anything better to do. Riiiiiiiiiight.
I have doubts about the actual utility of this sort of thing for something like PDA functionality, just because the GBA is really not designed for text manipulation. Games could be cool, though... I'd love to play that Java Qix game I found the other day on my Game Boy.:-)
-- shayborg
It was only a matter of time
on
LCD Overtaking CRT
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
First, as previously mentioned, LCDs are more expensive per monitor than CRTs, so a smaller amount of total sales will still yield the same net revenue.
Second, the new wave in desktop computing appears to be smaller, thinner machines. Almost every computer advertisement these days sells LCD displays, because they look pretty and save space, so they make for good advertising -- and as a result they sell better.
Finally, of course, this is the year of the laptop. (Steve Jobs said so, it has to be true!) I'm afraid I can't provide any hard evidence, but I think the percentage of total computers sold that are laptops is increasing at a pretty fast clip, and that of course boosts LCD revenues.
All told, there are plenty of reasons LCDs have gained in popularity; this isn't that much of a shocker.
-- shayborg
Re:It will not be over by summer
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Why? As long as the administration has started a war you have to support it... do you ever think that this particular pointofview is fostered by them? With an attitude like that you can be assured of two things - they will continue to start new wars and you will be in a CONSTANT state of war (war on terror is a pretty good example).
Of course this point of view is fostered by any administration -- but that doesn't mean that it's a wrong point of view. As a citizen of this country, someone who is bound to the oaths taken by citizens to support this country in all it does, I cannot in good conscience wish more American military deaths or an Iraqi victory.
However, I can speak with my vote, and I do have the right of free speech, and that is how we should express our disagreement with the war, not by some illogical desire to see fellow citizens die.
-- shayborg
Re:It will not be over by summer
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
I was just being sarcastic; I wasn't intending to make, and I'm not going to make, any statement regarding how long I think the war will take or how long US troops will stay in Iraq.
In all seriousness, now that they are there, I wish them the best of luck in their mission, and I wish for the fewest possible casualties on both sides. I don't particularly want this war to have started, and I of course have a right (and in fact a duty) to disagree with the declaration of war if I believe it is unjustified, as I do. But now that this nation is at war, I do think it is my duty as a citizen -- and that of all other citizens -- to at least wish success to our troops.
The goal is to get it over with before summer. Do you know how hot those Iraqi summers can get? Can you imagine our patriotic American soldiers toiling away in defense of their country with the hot, foreign Middle Eastern sun beating down mercilessly on their heavily camouflaged backs? Heaven forbid!
If the heat isn't dispersed through the bottom, where exactly will it go? Are laptops going to feel cooler because the heat is dispersed better, or is most of the heat just going to be sent out of, say, the top of the laptop cover where it's less of a nuisance?
I don't think it's too much hyperbole to claim that the iMac was one of the most revolutionary computers -- ever. The all-in-one factor was important, certainly, though not unique by itself. Neither was USB, the lack of a floppy drive, or a round and colored case. But the combination of these (and others) in one radically different computer probably changed the history of personal computers. When was the last time you saw a large manufacturer sell a beige case? When was the last time you saw a computer that didn't come with USB? Even now, manufacturers are still slowly phasing out the floppy drive, something that Apple basically did with that one bombshell back in 1998. Love it or hate it, the iMac changed the face of computing forever, and will be remembered as such a pioneer in the annals of the history of personal computing.
GIMP is a great basic image editing app. LaTeX is very useful as well, as is Ghostview. (I never could get it working in Mac OS 9.) AxyFTP is also a solid, if unspectacular, FTP client, and is a good choice if you're familiar with WS_FTP.
Any simple search engine that has become basically a cultural icon has to be special. You don't search for anything any more, you google for it.
Google was a good search engine in the beginning. It gained popularity, which made it a better search engine, which let it gain more popularity, which made it an even better search engine, ad infinitum.
It's not an exaggeration to claim that, right now, Google has earned itself the enviable position of becoming the first (at least nearly) definitive search engine.
Notice how I said default theme. Also, you can mute Aqua as well to a more neutral color -- but, admittedly, it's still more in-your-face than the Classic theme in XP.
Heh, if fast forwarding through the ads provides the same information content as watching the whole thing, imagine what a waste of time watching advertisements is!
It's completely subjective. Personally I dont, and never have, cared for the way MacOS "looks". It has a Fisher-Price quality that annoys me. Does it make it less of an OS? No, it's just an opinion.
I'm not saying that no one should like another interface better; I agree that UI preference is purely a matter of opinion. It's perfectly valid that you think OS X looks like Fisher Price, and equally valid that I think it's the best UI around. But I don't see how, by any valid set of objective criteria, Aqua is more "in-your-face" than Luna, and that's what I was trying to say.
MacOS X has probably the most in-your-face eye candy of all the DEs compared here.
Aqua is more in-your-face than Luna? I just don't get that. In all honesty, I find the OS X interface to be far less glaring than XP's. The default Luna and Aqua themes are both focused on blue, but Aqua's blue is more muted and is far less noticeable during regular usage of the OS. Right now, on this OS X screen (and not counting application icons in the Dock), the only blue things are the Apple logo in the top left, the scroll bar, and the widgets for dropdown menus. On the XP machine beside me, the title bar of the Mozilla window is blue, the scrollbars are blue, the taskbar is blue, and the outline of the windows are blue. That's an order of magnitude more bright blue pixels on the screen... And don't get me started on shockingly bright colors. Both the start menu and the close button could stand to be a little more muted in Windows, while on OS X the only really bright non-blue parts are the window close-minimize-maximize widgets, which are shaded and not quite as bright. Everything else is a shade of white, which again is much less in-your-face. In other words, the Aqua theme focuses on white and light blue, while Luna just splashes a bright blue all over the screen. How exactly is Luna less pervasive than Aqua?
Seriously, I started out programming for the Classic Mac OS in Pascal ages ago, but haven't touched it recently; with all the C, Java, etc. tools now available for OS X Pascal has been, quite correctly, left by the wayside. It feels kind of archaic to me now, and I gather I'm not alone...
Well, at least they're consistent, and clearly indicate that a processor is a "desktop replacement" or has "low power" consumption. The Pentium-4M is not a very enlightening name, and you can't really expect a computer newbie to know that Pentium M is exactly the same thing as Centrino with a not-fully-Intel-blessed chipset.
Isn't this exactly what happened to Michael O'Toole during the years he was at the Node? They raised some interesting philosophical questions about this procedure in that book. At one point near the end, IIRC, Nicole asks Michael if he's still the same person now that the Ramans replaced his hippocampus and "improved" his body quantitatively in so many ways. He is unable to give a straight answer, replying only that he still has the same memories, and that he feels like Michael O'Toole.
The point is that replacing parts of the brain opens up a whole new can of worms. I'm not unequivocally against it, but it's an interesting and thorny philosophical issue.
I actually agree with you. Middle-clicking is much more convenient than holding down a keyboard shortcut... That said, it's certainly possible to live without it. I still have a one-button mouse on my Mac.;-)
It would be interesting to see how the low-voltage Athlon XP-M processors compare to the vaunted Centrinos. Seems to be shaping up to be an interesting battle. Still, the categorization is a good move for AMD, I think -- it's a much more intuitive naming convention than the confusion that's doubtless going to be caused by Intel's Pentium 4M/Pentium M/Centrino names.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly I'd rather have one UI I think is decent than a gazillion subpar ones.
-- shayborg
I don't have a problem with that as much as I have problems with the UIs themselves. All those developers, and they still haven't been able to produce a window manager that I like better than OS X. ::sigh:: ...
-- shayborg
Dynamically generated playlists, among others, is (are?) a potentially very cool feature. :-)
-- shayborg
You do realise that the intel Pentium 4 has a whopping 20k level 1 cache? 8k instruction, 12k data? My archaic K6-2/500 has 64k level 1 cache: 32k instruction, 32k data.
...
Well, the Nehemiah supposedly has 64K level 2 cache. By comparison, the 1 GHz Celeron has 256K L2 cache
-- shayborg
I get ADSL from my local telephone company (CenturyTel). It's a 512/256 connection, so my upload is twice what a typical cable modem user gets. And I consider this to be a relatively slow DSL connection. (But I've had very few problems with the service, especially compared to some DSL horror stories I've heard.)
... It's different elsewhere, I guess. :-)
I've been shopping for DSL access here because I want to host a server, but almost everything I've seen is 128 upload, hence my comment
-- shayborg
What an utterly appalling waste of time! They talk about the speeds of these services using a single number, as if they offered symmetric capacities. Everyone knows that the common residential Internet services are asymmetric, with upload typically being one-half to one-tenth of the download. But they don't even talk about upload, which is where DSL stomps all over cable's ass.
Not entirely. My upload speed is capped at around 128 Kb/s, and (unless you pay extra) most basic DSL services have similar caps. DSL provides faster uploading on average most probably, but the difference isn't big enough for you to be justified in saying that "DSL stomps all over cable's ass."
Nor do they talk about terms of service, which is where DSL stomps all over what was left of cable's ass. Read a typical cable modem service ToS some time -- go on, I dare you! You can't run anything but Windows, you can't run NAT, you can't run services, you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it. Now read a DSL ToS for comparison.
The only real limitation I've run into in a cable ToS is the no hosting servers thing (which is not very strictly enforced, but that's another story). I'm using Adelphia Powerlink in the Pittsburgh area, and although when we first got the service over two years ago they were not very high on supporting non-Windows OSs and didn't allow NAT, they've gotten over it and now support my Mac just fine, and they don't care that I have a router. And of course I've always left all my computers on 24/7, so I don't know where you're coming from with that.
But this "article" (more like propaganda from the cable companies) doesn't discuss any of that. They pretend that the only thing that matters is how fast you can download pr0n. And if that's what you want -- to sit in front of a mouse-driven boob tube and salivate over pictures all day long -- then sure, cable modem service is for you. Go knock yourself out.
That one made me laugh. Mmhmm, faster download speeds are only useful for pr0n. It's not as if us cable modem users have anything better to do. Riiiiiiiiiight.
-- shayborg
I have doubts about the actual utility of this sort of thing for something like PDA functionality, just because the GBA is really not designed for text manipulation. Games could be cool, though ... I'd love to play that Java Qix game I found the other day on my Game Boy. :-)
-- shayborg
First, as previously mentioned, LCDs are more expensive per monitor than CRTs, so a smaller amount of total sales will still yield the same net revenue.
Second, the new wave in desktop computing appears to be smaller, thinner machines. Almost every computer advertisement these days sells LCD displays, because they look pretty and save space, so they make for good advertising -- and as a result they sell better.
Finally, of course, this is the year of the laptop. (Steve Jobs said so, it has to be true!) I'm afraid I can't provide any hard evidence, but I think the percentage of total computers sold that are laptops is increasing at a pretty fast clip, and that of course boosts LCD revenues.
All told, there are plenty of reasons LCDs have gained in popularity; this isn't that much of a shocker.
-- shayborg
Why? As long as the administration has started a war you have to support it... do you ever think that this particular pointofview is fostered by them? With an attitude like that you can be assured of two things - they will continue to start new wars and you will be in a CONSTANT state of war (war on terror is a pretty good example).
Of course this point of view is fostered by any administration -- but that doesn't mean that it's a wrong point of view. As a citizen of this country, someone who is bound to the oaths taken by citizens to support this country in all it does, I cannot in good conscience wish more American military deaths or an Iraqi victory.
However, I can speak with my vote, and I do have the right of free speech, and that is how we should express our disagreement with the war, not by some illogical desire to see fellow citizens die.
-- shayborg
I was just being sarcastic; I wasn't intending to make, and I'm not going to make, any statement regarding how long I think the war will take or how long US troops will stay in Iraq.
In all seriousness, now that they are there, I wish them the best of luck in their mission, and I wish for the fewest possible casualties on both sides. I don't particularly want this war to have started, and I of course have a right (and in fact a duty) to disagree with the declaration of war if I believe it is unjustified, as I do. But now that this nation is at war, I do think it is my duty as a citizen -- and that of all other citizens -- to at least wish success to our troops.
-- shayborg
The goal is to get it over with before summer. Do you know how hot those Iraqi summers can get? Can you imagine our patriotic American soldiers toiling away in defense of their country with the hot, foreign Middle Eastern sun beating down mercilessly on their heavily camouflaged backs? Heaven forbid!
-- shayborg
If the heat isn't dispersed through the bottom, where exactly will it go? Are laptops going to feel cooler because the heat is dispersed better, or is most of the heat just going to be sent out of, say, the top of the laptop cover where it's less of a nuisance?
-- shayborg
I don't think it's too much hyperbole to claim that the iMac was one of the most revolutionary computers -- ever. The all-in-one factor was important, certainly, though not unique by itself. Neither was USB, the lack of a floppy drive, or a round and colored case. But the combination of these (and others) in one radically different computer probably changed the history of personal computers. When was the last time you saw a large manufacturer sell a beige case? When was the last time you saw a computer that didn't come with USB? Even now, manufacturers are still slowly phasing out the floppy drive, something that Apple basically did with that one bombshell back in 1998. Love it or hate it, the iMac changed the face of computing forever, and will be remembered as such a pioneer in the annals of the history of personal computing.
::bows and gets off his soapbox::
-- shayborg
GIMP is a great basic image editing app. LaTeX is very useful as well, as is Ghostview. (I never could get it working in Mac OS 9.) AxyFTP is also a solid, if unspectacular, FTP client, and is a good choice if you're familiar with WS_FTP.
-- shayborg
I seem to remember a big to-do about it a couple years back, but I may be mistaken ...
-- shayborg
Any simple search engine that has become basically a cultural icon has to be special. You don't search for anything any more, you google for it.
Google was a good search engine in the beginning. It gained popularity, which made it a better search engine, which let it gain more popularity, which made it an even better search engine, ad infinitum.
It's not an exaggeration to claim that, right now, Google has earned itself the enviable position of becoming the first (at least nearly) definitive search engine.
-- shayborg
Start:Control Panel:Display:Appearance:Color Scheme:
Notice how I said default theme. Also, you can mute Aqua as well to a more neutral color -- but, admittedly, it's still more in-your-face than the Classic theme in XP.
-- shayborg
Heh, if fast forwarding through the ads provides the same information content as watching the whole thing, imagine what a waste of time watching advertisements is!
-- shayborg
Who cares?
It's completely subjective. Personally I dont, and never have, cared for the way MacOS "looks". It has a Fisher-Price quality that annoys me. Does it make it less of an OS? No, it's just an opinion.
I'm not saying that no one should like another interface better; I agree that UI preference is purely a matter of opinion. It's perfectly valid that you think OS X looks like Fisher Price, and equally valid that I think it's the best UI around. But I don't see how, by any valid set of objective criteria, Aqua is more "in-your-face" than Luna, and that's what I was trying to say.
-- shayborg
MacOS X has probably the most in-your-face eye candy of all the DEs compared here.
... And don't get me started on shockingly bright colors. Both the start menu and the close button could stand to be a little more muted in Windows, while on OS X the only really bright non-blue parts are the window close-minimize-maximize widgets, which are shaded and not quite as bright. Everything else is a shade of white, which again is much less in-your-face. In other words, the Aqua theme focuses on white and light blue, while Luna just splashes a bright blue all over the screen. How exactly is Luna less pervasive than Aqua?
:-)
Aqua is more in-your-face than Luna? I just don't get that. In all honesty, I find the OS X interface to be far less glaring than XP's. The default Luna and Aqua themes are both focused on blue, but Aqua's blue is more muted and is far less noticeable during regular usage of the OS. Right now, on this OS X screen (and not counting application icons in the Dock), the only blue things are the Apple logo in the top left, the scroll bar, and the widgets for dropdown menus. On the XP machine beside me, the title bar of the Mozilla window is blue, the scrollbars are blue, the taskbar is blue, and the outline of the windows are blue. That's an order of magnitude more bright blue pixels on the screen
Let the flames commence.
-- shayborg
I have FORTRAN, I have Pascal, now hurry up and finish my COBOL compiler!
...
Seriously, I started out programming for the Classic Mac OS in Pascal ages ago, but haven't touched it recently; with all the C, Java, etc. tools now available for OS X Pascal has been, quite correctly, left by the wayside. It feels kind of archaic to me now, and I gather I'm not alone
-- shayborg
Well, at least they're consistent, and clearly indicate that a processor is a "desktop replacement" or has "low power" consumption. The Pentium-4M is not a very enlightening name, and you can't really expect a computer newbie to know that Pentium M is exactly the same thing as Centrino with a not-fully-Intel-blessed chipset.
-- shayborg
Isn't this exactly what happened to Michael O'Toole during the years he was at the Node? They raised some interesting philosophical questions about this procedure in that book. At one point near the end, IIRC, Nicole asks Michael if he's still the same person now that the Ramans replaced his hippocampus and "improved" his body quantitatively in so many ways. He is unable to give a straight answer, replying only that he still has the same memories, and that he feels like Michael O'Toole.
The point is that replacing parts of the brain opens up a whole new can of worms. I'm not unequivocally against it, but it's an interesting and thorny philosophical issue.
-- shayborg
I actually agree with you. Middle-clicking is much more convenient than holding down a keyboard shortcut ... That said, it's certainly possible to live without it. I still have a one-button mouse on my Mac. ;-)
-- shayborg
It would be interesting to see how the low-voltage Athlon XP-M processors compare to the vaunted Centrinos. Seems to be shaping up to be an interesting battle. Still, the categorization is a good move for AMD, I think -- it's a much more intuitive naming convention than the confusion that's doubtless going to be caused by Intel's Pentium 4M/Pentium M/Centrino names.
-- shayborg