because of icon scaling on the dock you can set your dock to be really, really small and still have it usable. Because windows "genie" themselves back into a specific spot on the dock, there is never a question of where to go to find the window. Because interface elements are always subtly textured, you quickly learn to ignore those portions of the screen when looking for content.
Because everything is frickin white, you find yourself constantly having to look away from the computer to give your eyes a break from the sensation of staring into a fluorescent light bulb for eight hours straight when you're at work.
Well, for one, releasing twice as many mosquitoes means releasing twice as many malaria-spreading bloodsuckers for that generation. For two, I imagine sterilizing them costs money. Possibly it's easy to sterilize the males, but not the females.
Seriously. I block pop-ups and images that don't originate from the same server as the webpage. But I click on Google ads fairly often - maybe once a week, maybe more.
It's not just the targeting - some banners do a decent job of that. It's also that they don't piss me off. I HATE animations on webpages; they're distracting.
That's silly. What if we have data that says that our potential weapon obliterates wildlife? Should we toss the idea and move on? Let's look at what we have now: Nuclear weapons obliterate wildlife. Fair enough, nuclear weapons are grossly indiscriminate; toss 'em. Conventional explosives obliterate wildlife. Ok, toss those too. Artillery isn't very green, either. In fact, machine guns aren't particularly enviro-friendly. Get rid of 'em. And let's just forget about a whole platoon of soldiers tramping through the forest, crushing wildlife, shooting guns, and throwing grenades.
I guess we don't have many options left, do we?
Sounds like a nice situation to me. A guy can dream, can't he?
And what I'm saying is, fuck the options. Why do they have to exist? They aren't there for any other program I use on my computer. As I said several posts back, I view those options not as a feature, but as a throwback to computing headaches that everyone hated (and that were a common complaint about MacOS) back in the 1990s.
You act like options are categorically good. They aren't. Manual memory management controls on a desktop application are a Bad Thing, for the same reason that manual fuel/air mixture controls are a Bad Thing on a consumer automobile.
Fine, just use whatever you see fit, but don't bother Java programmers with pointless remarks.
In the world where I live, users don't use applications for programmers, programmers write applications for users. Programmers who ignore this fact find that people don't like to use their applications.
Tell me, have you seen Java making many inroads to the desktop computing market? It seems to me that it has fared little better than Linux.
Possibly the most damning thing I ever read about the whole "violent games, violent TV" hubbub was an article about a study that suggested any TV makes kids more aggressive. Sesame Street was as bad as Power Rangers or NYPD Blue.
I would speculate that what it comes down to is that watching TV or playing video games and developing social skills are mutually exclusive activities.
That's the thing that annoys me about a lot of Java performance talks. The folks who defend it provide a lot of theory, talk about xxx JVM being faster, XXX app being faster, roundabout arguments like that.
You can provide all the hypothesis and conjecture you want. That will not change the fact that, sitting here at home, on my computer, Java apps are enough slower than equivalent native apps that it is noticeable to me, the user. Usually they are enough slower that it is annoying to me, the user. Even the poster children. Eclipse may be great to a lot of people, but personally, I'm a bit dismayed by it. I thought the days of being able to type faster than the the text would appear on the screen died back when your average modem's speed wasn't represented by a three digit number followed by the word 'baud.'
Hundreds of millions of instructions per second on a heavily multi-pipelined CPU backed up by a gigantic multi-tiered cache system and a gigabyte of RAM, and this is the best I get? Screw that. If I can use my eyes to tell that Java is slow, then it's going to take a lot more than a few fancy words to convince me that Java is not slow.
Having it be something I have to think about is what's wrong with it. Duh. This is 21st century desktop computing we're talking about, for goodness' sake. Be a good neighbor. Start with a small memory footprint, and grow it if you need to. Just like a native app.
people are still thinking in terms of 1999 and not 2005 when they think of Java
A lot of us are still using computers that were built in 1999. Java's class libraries and VM and such may have improved since then, but judging from what my computer does with Java apps here in 2005, most of that performance improvement that you're seeing is the work of Intel, not Sun.
Manually determining how much memory to give to an application was one of the things that us Mac users were more than happy to leave behind with the transition to OS X. Hell, we were more than happy to kill that "feature." Dancing on its coffin and all that. Are you seriously suggesting the world go back?
Besides, I thought the biggest examples of Java was that it was all cool and dynamic and took care of things for you. It seems fair to me to expect such a language/platform to be smart enough to figure out that it's not polite to walk to the buffet, heap three plates with a ridiculous pile of food, and go back to the table and graze on a few pieces of celery, leaving the rest of the food untouched.
Not sure the GPL really would help. Possibly if you just want to get the game out there, but if your main goal is to avoid legal action, then having already spread your work in a fine mist across the world and making it effectively impossible to stop the problem at its source may just be interpreted as begging for harsher treatment.
I think the RIAA has missed the train. If they wanted to stop this, they should have started way back when electronics started including tape recorders with their home stereo equipment.
Wow. And I used to think C was frightening when I discovered the fun you can have with a program that takes command-line arguments when you start making recursive calls to main().
When I saw that code snippet, I found myself switching back and forth between thinking "this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen" and "dear god, who ordered that monster" so rapidly my brain almost a sploded.
FileMaker _is_ a glorified spreadsheet. The only real advantage it has over one is that you can add a nice pretty GUI so you don't feel like you're staring at a boring grid all day. What little support for relational models it has can be implemented just as easily with a couple worksheets in your Excel spreadhseet and VLOOKUP. It becomes plagued with "can't get there from here" problems as soon as you find yourself in any situation where you actually need a database. Its scripting language is a farce, although I will grant that they did a way better job of it than Apple did with Autolamer. I'll grant that it's at least something, but that something is Access for people who don't need Access.
SQL is not a database, it is a database query language. But I assume you mean something free like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Either way, it's a silly substitute for something like Access or FileMaker. Are you seriously suggesting that anyone but a complete nerd - who would be doing it for fun as much as anything else - would consider banging out a database in SQL and then writing a front-end for it, just so they can track their grades or their small business's POs? Personally, I'd be back in spreadsheet-land in a heartbeat, and I'm perfectly comfortable with databases.
I can think of preceding examples for a couple of is examples of innovation, so all he's really convinced me of so far is that he didn't do his research before writing this article.
Apparently, innovation isn't developing new technology. It's noticing new technology coming out of obscure companies and the academic community and then re-implementing it for Windows and backing it with 8,000 metric tons of advertising hype.
My qualms with AppleWorks range over several things, but a few are that it lacks decent support for Office formats (it's sad that this is so important, but life never was fair), its user interface is even more boneheaded than Office, its handling of many text elements, such as bulleted lists, is painful to say the least. I used AppleWorks for word processing for about a day and then went back to TextEdit, which doesn't do as much, but for basic word processing it at least does what it does well. AppleWorks's spreadsheets are fine if you're just using them to enter tabular data, but lacking in features to the point of being almost useless in the eyes of a modern business nowadays (and I don't know many people who toy with spreadsheets at home). Its database system might as well be a glorified spreadsheet.
I'd much rather use NeoOffice (and I do; I'm not made of money), but even on it I regularly run into serious problems, such as the user interface being in my way even more often than MSOffice's.
I assume that your suggestion of AppleWorks when I had already dismissed OpenOffice and NeoOffice stems (perhaps) the fact that you nave never heard of them / used them.
Methinks the only reason why Office:Mac exists is that Microsoft needs it to exist. If the Mac lacked any decent office software (and right now, Office:Mac is the only one - OO.o on OS X and NO/J are both sub par, to say the least), the platform would stand a good chance of dying out. It's really hard to claim you aren't monopolizing a market when you have effectively zero competitors in that market.
That doesn't even address half the problem, though. Litter is a cosmetic side-effect of throwaway culture, not the main problem.
A comprehensive solution has to take into account stuff like software that comes in large display boxes containing a CD, a small install leaflet, and a business reply postcard; stuff like large blister packs for small items; like potato chip bags that are twice the size they need to be to accomodate the volume of chips they contain; restaurants that still use styrofome cups; and junk mail. Yes, a lot of this stuff becomes litter, but the vast majority of it ends up in landfills.
Hmm. They're secured WMA files. So if your MP3 player happens to be one that doesn't play Windows Media files (a strong majority of those sold sold, if I remember right), you're up a creek. If your MP3 player plays WMA files but lacks the ability to play DRM-encumbered WMA files, you're also up a creek. I suppose you can do a rip-burn-rip, but I don't want to pay even a cent extra to put music on my player, nor do I want to accept the extra loss in sound quality.
I and pretty much everyone I know listens to music on an MP3 player the majority of the time. For us, these CDs are broken, simple as that.
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Umm. . . just what exactly would be the point of HD video on a 2.5" screen with a resolution roughly equivalent to that of standard TV?
Man, trying to standardize hotkeys in the *nix world is a dangerous thing. Do we really need to piss off the vi and emacs zealots yet again?
because of icon scaling on the dock you can set your dock to be really, really small and still have it usable. Because windows "genie" themselves back into a specific spot on the dock, there is never a question of where to go to find the window. Because interface elements are always subtly textured, you quickly learn to ignore those portions of the screen when looking for content.
Because everything is frickin white, you find yourself constantly having to look away from the computer to give your eyes a break from the sensation of staring into a fluorescent light bulb for eight hours straight when you're at work.
Well, for one, releasing twice as many mosquitoes means releasing twice as many malaria-spreading bloodsuckers for that generation. For two, I imagine sterilizing them costs money. Possibly it's easy to sterilize the males, but not the females.
Seriously. I block pop-ups and images that don't originate from the same server as the webpage. But I click on Google ads fairly often - maybe once a week, maybe more.
It's not just the targeting - some banners do a decent job of that. It's also that they don't piss me off. I HATE animations on webpages; they're distracting.
That's silly. What if we have data that says that our potential weapon obliterates wildlife? Should we toss the idea and move on? Let's look at what we have now: Nuclear weapons obliterate wildlife. Fair enough, nuclear weapons are grossly indiscriminate; toss 'em. Conventional explosives obliterate wildlife. Ok, toss those too. Artillery isn't very green, either. In fact, machine guns aren't particularly enviro-friendly. Get rid of 'em. And let's just forget about a whole platoon of soldiers tramping through the forest, crushing wildlife, shooting guns, and throwing grenades.
I guess we don't have many options left, do we?
Sounds like a nice situation to me. A guy can dream, can't he?
Benchmarks! Wooo! So now we know that Java can run benchmarks and example programs really fast.
Now let's look at the real world instead. Why not download Azureus or AEJEE and compare them to similar apps that are written in native code?
And what I'm saying is, fuck the options. Why do they have to exist? They aren't there for any other program I use on my computer. As I said several posts back, I view those options not as a feature, but as a throwback to computing headaches that everyone hated (and that were a common complaint about MacOS) back in the 1990s.
You act like options are categorically good. They aren't. Manual memory management controls on a desktop application are a Bad Thing, for the same reason that manual fuel/air mixture controls are a Bad Thing on a consumer automobile.
Fine, just use whatever you see fit, but don't bother Java programmers with pointless remarks.
In the world where I live, users don't use applications for programmers, programmers write applications for users. Programmers who ignore this fact find that people don't like to use their applications.
Tell me, have you seen Java making many inroads to the desktop computing market? It seems to me that it has fared little better than Linux.
Possibly the most damning thing I ever read about the whole "violent games, violent TV" hubbub was an article about a study that suggested any TV makes kids more aggressive. Sesame Street was as bad as Power Rangers or NYPD Blue.
I would speculate that what it comes down to is that watching TV or playing video games and developing social skills are mutually exclusive activities.
That's the thing that annoys me about a lot of Java performance talks. The folks who defend it provide a lot of theory, talk about xxx JVM being faster, XXX app being faster, roundabout arguments like that.
You can provide all the hypothesis and conjecture you want. That will not change the fact that, sitting here at home, on my computer, Java apps are enough slower than equivalent native apps that it is noticeable to me, the user. Usually they are enough slower that it is annoying to me, the user. Even the poster children. Eclipse may be great to a lot of people, but personally, I'm a bit dismayed by it. I thought the days of being able to type faster than the the text would appear on the screen died back when your average modem's speed wasn't represented by a three digit number followed by the word 'baud.'
Hundreds of millions of instructions per second on a heavily multi-pipelined CPU backed up by a gigantic multi-tiered cache system and a gigabyte of RAM, and this is the best I get? Screw that. If I can use my eyes to tell that Java is slow, then it's going to take a lot more than a few fancy words to convince me that Java is not slow.
Having it be something I have to think about is what's wrong with it. Duh. This is 21st century desktop computing we're talking about, for goodness' sake. Be a good neighbor. Start with a small memory footprint, and grow it if you need to. Just like a native app.
people are still thinking in terms of 1999 and not 2005 when they think of Java
A lot of us are still using computers that were built in 1999. Java's class libraries and VM and such may have improved since then, but judging from what my computer does with Java apps here in 2005, most of that performance improvement that you're seeing is the work of Intel, not Sun.
Manually determining how much memory to give to an application was one of the things that us Mac users were more than happy to leave behind with the transition to OS X. Hell, we were more than happy to kill that "feature." Dancing on its coffin and all that. Are you seriously suggesting the world go back?
Besides, I thought the biggest examples of Java was that it was all cool and dynamic and took care of things for you. It seems fair to me to expect such a language/platform to be smart enough to figure out that it's not polite to walk to the buffet, heap three plates with a ridiculous pile of food, and go back to the table and graze on a few pieces of celery, leaving the rest of the food untouched.
Not sure the GPL really would help. Possibly if you just want to get the game out there, but if your main goal is to avoid legal action, then having already spread your work in a fine mist across the world and making it effectively impossible to stop the problem at its source may just be interpreted as begging for harsher treatment.
Why is a burger joint not a Hambuger parlour?
Because 'hamburger parlour' doesn't alliterate.
I think the RIAA has missed the train. If they wanted to stop this, they should have started way back when electronics started including tape recorders with their home stereo equipment.
Wow. And I used to think C was frightening when I discovered the fun you can have with a program that takes command-line arguments when you start making recursive calls to main().
When I saw that code snippet, I found myself switching back and forth between thinking "this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen" and "dear god, who ordered that monster" so rapidly my brain almost a sploded.
FileMaker _is_ a glorified spreadsheet. The only real advantage it has over one is that you can add a nice pretty GUI so you don't feel like you're staring at a boring grid all day. What little support for relational models it has can be implemented just as easily with a couple worksheets in your Excel spreadhseet and VLOOKUP. It becomes plagued with "can't get there from here" problems as soon as you find yourself in any situation where you actually need a database. Its scripting language is a farce, although I will grant that they did a way better job of it than Apple did with Autolamer. I'll grant that it's at least something, but that something is Access for people who don't need Access.
SQL is not a database, it is a database query language. But I assume you mean something free like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Either way, it's a silly substitute for something like Access or FileMaker. Are you seriously suggesting that anyone but a complete nerd - who would be doing it for fun as much as anything else - would consider banging out a database in SQL and then writing a front-end for it, just so they can track their grades or their small business's POs? Personally, I'd be back in spreadsheet-land in a heartbeat, and I'm perfectly comfortable with databases.
I think the "USB antennas" you're talking about are really USB wireless adapters mounted at the focal point of a parabolic reflector.
"I'm feeling lucky" for "USB parabolic antenna" gave me this.
I can think of preceding examples for a couple of is examples of innovation, so all he's really convinced me of so far is that he didn't do his research before writing this article.
Apparently, innovation isn't developing new technology. It's noticing new technology coming out of obscure companies and the academic community and then re-implementing it for Windows and backing it with 8,000 metric tons of advertising hype.
My qualms with AppleWorks range over several things, but a few are that it lacks decent support for Office formats (it's sad that this is so important, but life never was fair), its user interface is even more boneheaded than Office, its handling of many text elements, such as bulleted lists, is painful to say the least. I used AppleWorks for word processing for about a day and then went back to TextEdit, which doesn't do as much, but for basic word processing it at least does what it does well.
AppleWorks's spreadsheets are fine if you're just using them to enter tabular data, but lacking in features to the point of being almost useless in the eyes of a modern business nowadays (and I don't know many people who toy with spreadsheets at home). Its database system might as well be a glorified spreadsheet.
I'd much rather use NeoOffice (and I do; I'm not made of money), but even on it I regularly run into serious problems, such as the user interface being in my way even more often than MSOffice's.
I assume that your suggestion of AppleWorks when I had already dismissed OpenOffice and NeoOffice stems (perhaps) the fact that you nave never heard of them / used them.
Right. "We can fucking destroy you without even bothering to risk our own asses, so you better do whatever the hell we want."
Us humanitarians just love the sound of that.
Methinks the only reason why Office:Mac exists is that Microsoft needs it to exist. If the Mac lacked any decent office software (and right now, Office:Mac is the only one - OO.o on OS X and NO/J are both sub par, to say the least), the platform would stand a good chance of dying out. It's really hard to claim you aren't monopolizing a market when you have effectively zero competitors in that market.
That doesn't even address half the problem, though. Litter is a cosmetic side-effect of throwaway culture, not the main problem.
A comprehensive solution has to take into account stuff like software that comes in large display boxes containing a CD, a small install leaflet, and a business reply postcard; stuff like large blister packs for small items; like potato chip bags that are twice the size they need to be to accomodate the volume of chips they contain; restaurants that still use styrofome cups; and junk mail. Yes, a lot of this stuff becomes litter, but the vast majority of it ends up in landfills.
Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.
Hmm. They're secured WMA files. So if your MP3 player happens to be one that doesn't play Windows Media files (a strong majority of those sold sold, if I remember right), you're up a creek. If your MP3 player plays WMA files but lacks the ability to play DRM-encumbered WMA files, you're also up a creek. I suppose you can do a rip-burn-rip, but I don't want to pay even a cent extra to put music on my player, nor do I want to accept the extra loss in sound quality.
I and pretty much everyone I know listens to music on an MP3 player the majority of the time. For us, these CDs are broken, simple as that.