Agreed. I'm willing to accept that all of this porting slows down development on many FOSS projects from a technical standpoint, but I'm not into FOSS for technical reasons. I'm into it because I got fed up with the entire culture of the corporate software world, and the oftentimes immoral nature of many large software manufacturers.
While in the long run I'd love to see more truly open platforms become large players in the market, in the short run I'm much more interested in seeing the community continue to erode away at the stranglehold that Office and IE have on the office and browser markets.
Besides, if Firefox doesn't manage to gain enough market share to break Microsoft's lock on the future of the Web, Linux is doomed.
Or hey, maybe life got to earth from another planet, or vice versa. We're discovering that microbes are surprisingly resilient, and I would be willing to believe that it's possible for some bacteria to survive a billion-year-trip across space. Maybe not likely, but possible.
I think that's about how the law works in my state (WI), but I just moved here, so I'm not sure.
Regardless, penalties are a bit of a non-solution for two reasons: First, stiffer penalties have been proven time and time again to have little to no effect whatsoever on crime rates, or anything else for that matter (except, of course, for our astronomical and ever-increasing percentage of the population in jail). Second, chronic drunk drivers frequently don't get caught until they actually hit something. There just aren't that many cops on the road, and you have to be pretty damn drunk (well past the point at which your chances of causing an accident start to multiply) before it's very easy to notice from your driving that you're inebriated.
Personally, the only two I enjoyed on that list are Schindler's List and Amistad. And of those, Schindler's list is the one I would blame on the director - Amistad was merely good, not great, and I think it was mostly carried by the skill of a single actor.
Everything else up there generally fell in the "mediocre-to-forgettable melodramatic tripe" scale, in my opinion.
I'll skirt around all of that and just respond that the government has a duty to help its society remain at least remotely sane.
And maybe with this law, idiot parents will finally be forced to realize that they are responsible for what video games are brought into their house.
Which means maybe, just maybe they will finaly sit down and shut up with respect to this whole bitching-about-violent-games-making-people-violent thing.
Which is good, because I am seriously going to lose all vestiges of sanity if I hear one more idiot parent make one more idiot claim that flies in the face of the vast majority of scientific research and his/her own morals as firmly established through their own actions. (Don't you f***ing pretend to dislike violence or act like you think it's a bad way to solve your problems after voting George W. Bush in for a second term as President. Anyone who can swallow and regurgitate that set of memes without gagging is in serious need of a brain transplant or some time in a detox center or something.)
So I welcome this law, because I value my sanity. Maybe it'll move north and we'll see folks voting on it here in Wisconsin, and I will be Happy.
Maybe we can follow it up with a law that forces us to keep our children locked in closets with no lights and only a tasteless, vitamin-enhanced gruel and water for sustenance, and which bans anyone from talking to children about world history (especially American history), politics, or current social issues, because if kids are exposed to anything, ever, it just might destroy their fragile little minds because nobody is capable of evaluating any information, ever, until the age of 18 (and NO SOONER).
And I will welcome it, because (A) I don't have any kids myself, (B) I don't think I will because lately I have been getting the impression that parenthood will make you stupid faster than a really wicked sack of chronic, and (C) they're pissing me off, and somebody needs to shut them up.
How many of those were made in the past ten years? Right.
Even famous directors can lose their edge. I present as evidence every George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg movie made since Russia swore in its first president.
Not only that, but incorporating a Sirius reciever and a decent antenna into an iPod would probably result in a massive beast compared to Apple's current line. Just look at the size of XM and Sirius's current "handheld" offerings.
Also, you don't just have to be underground or inside a large Faraday cage such as your average large office building or shopping mall to lose your Sirius signal. Most people have to mount their Sirius antenna outside in a clear area because the signal generally doesn't even get through your house's roof, trees, etc.
Besides, what I really want is some sort of Tivo for my Sirius account; a great many shows that I enjoy aren't on at convenient times for me, and I would love to be able to record ones that I'm going to miss.
As to your question, if Sirius is available outside the US, it's probably only in Canada. I'm pretty sure Sirius's sattelites sit somewhere above the northern Midwest (around about Minnesota or Wisconsin, I think), and while you might be able to get decent reception in northern Mexico, I doubt that you would get anything outside of North America.
I write AppleScripts, Perl scripts, full GUI programs, Excel macros, constantly. Whenever there's something I can automate now to save time later, I do so. Things as mundane as a droplet for adding a prefix to a filename all the way up to frotzing tens of gigabytes of data at a go, all gets automated.
My work mantra is to make the computers do things that computers are good at, and free up the humans to do the things they're good at. Seems to work for me. . . since I've taken up that policy, both the quality and quantity of work that my team can do has increased appreciably.
There is a 3rd-party add-on for Game Boy Advance that allows you to store and play movies. You encode the movies in the player's format yourself, so you don't have to worry about only getting to watch the few movies that come out in Sony's format. Just rip your Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVDs and watch them on the GBA.
Multiplying this same convenience across a college campus -- to outdoor use, informal study groups in first-floor rooms, empty classrooms, etc. -- would be amazing.
It would be amazing. Amazingly expensive and kludgey and slow.
There might be a wireless technology that is suited to this sort of application, but it sure as heck isn't WiFi.
And this isn't just for internet access... it's also throwing TV (which I read to mean, "uncompressed streaming video) and phone service, both of which are huge bandwidth hogs, things for which the university probably already has perfectly good copper wire infrastructure, and things where you don't need the device to move around much. (TV should be obvious, for the phone remember that professors' offices tend to resemble closets more than caverns, a phone in a classroom wouldn't be extraordinarily useful, and administrative offices tend to be broken into small cubes.)
Well, there are a lot of definitions of science fiction floating around. For some, all it takes is that humans descended from Earth live on a planet other than earth, even if all the technology that the characters posess is no better than what we had in the 18th century. For others, it has to involve scads and scads of technology that we don't have or can't exist, preferably with lots of robots and space travel.
However, I think for a lot of science fiction writers and "high brow" literary types who get into science fiction, the boundaries of the genre are much softer. In this case, any literature which uses some piece of unusual or advanced technology as a plot element through which some human theme can be explored counts as science fiction. Apparently for Card, the technology itself doesn't even have to be given much stage time, if he considers Being John Malkovich (which I think is deep in a gray area) to be sci-fi.
Personally, I prefer this final definition. While I frequently enjoy "rocket" science fiction and used to watch TNG and DS9 almost religiously, I tend to think of the period when all sci-fi was oozing with gadgets to be pretty typical for any genre in its infancy/childhood. Sort of like in early animation where EVERYTHING was moving CONSTANTLY, even many inanimate objects.
What will probably happen is a new license will be cooked up and it too will be thorn on the side of MS. Rinse repeat.
The most fun part about this game is that as continue through more cycles of rinsing and repeating, the probability of the anti-open-source crowd's legal efforts running head-first into the First Amendment approach 1.
The only other option would be for the business world to use the nuclear option and try to get restrictions on how source code can be redistributed made illegal. I doubt any of the big players would dare go for that option. It would invalidate the BSD license and that's not a happy thought for even the likes of Microsoft.
I take issue with the idea that the GPL grants you rights. If software is distributed with source code and no license or copyright notice, you have the right to do whatever you want with it. In terms of a contract between two parties, the GPL serves to restrict the licensee's rights. Just look at the text - most of the GPL is devoted to listing things you cannot do and placing conditions on other things that you are allowed to do. Really, the GPL is pretty low on the scale of what rights a source license allows you to have. (Well-known marks on this scale would be, in order, Microsoft Public Source License, GPL, BSD, and public domain. And yes, I realize that this idea is based on the false assumption of a two-polar continuum on which source licenses could lie.)
That said, I think that the GPL is the best popular license for protecting the rights of a Free Software community as a whole. But don't think that that means that the GPL grants a whole mess of freedom. Anyone can come to the party, but they have to follow a whole lot of rules if they want to be let in.
While the Apple Public Source License is neither GPL-compatible nor copyleft, not everything Apple uses in their OS is released under the APSL.
Their compiler is GCC. The rendering engine of their web browser is LGPL. They package scads of GPL software with their OS (Ruby, Perl, MySQL. ..)
I'm not sure it would be perfectly accurate to say that Apple has embraced the GPL, and they seem to definitely keep the Linux masses at a healthy distance, but I think it is fair to say that Apple is at least a rather GPL-friendly company.
While it's definitely true that passenger cars basically don't damage the big roads compared to trucks, I don't think it's fair to say that the trucking industry is getting a free lunch from motorists. After all, we do consume the products provided to us by trucking, and I'm sure we all enjoy having those products super-cheap.
That said, I would love to have the cost of road use for the trucking industry vs. private motorists be proportional to the cost of damage to the roads inflicted by each for an entirely different reason. Under such a tax system, the costs of shipping things by road would be pushed on to the consumer in such a way that it is tagged to the product they are buying. It would put companies in a situation where they could reduce the shelf prices of their products greatly by shipping by rail instead of by truck, and would all but force them to start shipping more of their stuff by (much more environmentally-friendly) trains.
I would suggest that, while there are certain times when a dockapp is a great idea in OS X (the little red dot that shows how much new mail you have in Mail.app, for instance), and certain times when it's not perfect, but it is the only thing that will really do in some cases (Activity Monitor), for the most part dockapps have no place in OS X.
In the various X11 windowmanagers that have them, they work well because they afford you a great deal of control over where the dockapp can be placed onscreen, and because they provide that degree of freedom with everything else, too.
OS X, on the other hand, gives you a menubar that is already firmly attatched to the top of the screen which already contains a clock, battery monitor, and various other useful indicators and controls. The menubar alone simultaneously makes 3/8 of the good places for random dockapps (corners and sides) off-limits, and severely reduces their usefulness by providing most of the most popular dockapp functionality in a much more compact form. It also gives you an incredibly cramped and inflexible dock. All the user gets to control is how large its icons are, whether it is on the left, right, or bottom edge of the screen, and partial control of icons within the dock. The dock then decides where the icon's physical location on the screen is, makes adjustments to the ordering of apps by throwing new apps you run in the bottom of the first compartment (i.e., the middle), and resizes the dock as needed. And there is only one dock - no dock and clip like in WM, no whatevertheheckyouwant like in fvwm2. OS X just doesn't really leave much room for the dockapp author and its user to implement and place the dockapp's interface in such a way that it serves to be both useful and something more than ugly clutter.
While I realize there are major differences between dockapps and the "desktop widgets" model of random useful crap, I gotta say that in general it's a much better idea to buy a copy of Konfabulator or Tiger and make use of that system. Enjoy the way it allows you to put more information up there, and get used to the way it only shows that information when you want it to. (I haven't used either much, but it could be that they allow you to design widgets that "pop up" on the screen briefly when they need to tell you something right away. . . I have used other OS X apps that will do that.) In the end, the desktop widgets model just meshes much better with Aqua.
Might as well point out that in the US, you're also paying an arm and a leg to use the roads. It's just hidden in the form of taxes.
You're especially paying a lot if you have the bad luck to live somewhere like Illinois, where you get to pay all of the highway taxes, PLUS a trip from, say, Rockford to Chicago (can't be more than 90 miles) can have you forking over as much as $10 in tolls, depending on where exactly your start and stop points are.
All in all, I'm not sure which pay system I like less. On one hand, having to stop (or slow down to 5mph if you have an I-Pass) every 17 miles or so is a huge waste of gas and source of congestion, and a complete slap in the face of the entire concept of an interstate highway system. On the other hand, I get the impression that making the paying for use of a road so salient to motorists is going a long way toward encouraging people to start using Chicago's medium-range commuter rail system, Metra, instead. It's certainly a hell of a lot less expensive.
I imagine the root of this conflict is a difference in culture.
Being part of a business, I imagine that the Safari team's modus operandi is to not let anything leave their shop until they are sure that it is working and ready for release, including incremental changes. In turn, this way of releasing things is just not conducive to providing the changes to the KHTML team along with a list of what is different and why. I'm sure that from Apple's point of view, maintaining such a list would just be a waste of time and money.
Not sure if I'm thinking along the same vein as the grandparent, but the big issue I see is that small errors such as typos can become massive problems in sprawling spreadsheets. Since spreadsheet software such as Excel doesn't include many facilities for protecting data data integrity, this problem becomes rather serious after the spreadsheet grows beyond a certain size - especially if you don't have people who understand and these problems and are able to build facilities for checking this stuff into the spreadsheet.
Using Excel as an ODBC data source is a non-solution in this case. Hosed data displayed in a pretty format on a webpage or VB app is still hosed data. A more interesting solution would be if Excel could pull its data from a true RDBMS over ODBC, which would give users a familiar interface but would allow some data protection on the back-end.
Methinks the real solution is for someone to come out with a killer app that replaces the traditional spreadsheet.
At least in my experience, the limitations of spreadsheets are many. They lump input data, output data, and the processing of data into one cramped space. They are painfully single-user. The information is bound too tightly to its position within a grid, so that a careless cut-and-paste can create a real mess that is often non-obvious and difficult to untangle once you finally discover that there is a problem.
But a database is a poor solution for many folks because they take a large amount of effort to learn. It doesn't help that many database solutions require a fair bit of programming skill to manage - both in terms of working out SQL queries and hacking out an interface. Even the easy ones can get difficult to work with - I certainly spent some time scratching my head and spinning my tires figuring out how to get some things done when I was working on my first FileMaker Pro app, and I've had previous experience putting together database-driven websites in ASP and a modicum of experience with Orable.
Methinks what's needed is something that sits in between a true DBMS (even one like FileMaker) and a traditional spreadsheet. My instinct is to suggest that this killer app would be similar to Lotus Improv - I've never used it, but I've heard great things about it, and the descriptions I've read certainly make me salivate.
Of course, I still think that multiuser support is something that is sorely needed. Merging spreadsheets after they've been worked on by several people is a royal pain and terribly error-prone. But I don't want to see a client/server setup like what's used in most true database apps, though - the whole point is to create something that mitigates the mess that tends to develop as a small spreadsheet grows into a monstrosity that an entire workgroup uses for something important, and the step of transfering things to a central server isn't something that tends to be easy for a lot of folks to do. (I've seen my share of problems with people just working with files shared from a fileserver.) My guess is that the simplest solution would be something along the lines of what has been done with SubEthaEdit - and with Apple having opened up the Rendezvous protocol, it shouldn't be too hard to make an app that uses the technology and works on Windows and *nix, too.
Excel's habit of restructuring numbers as it sees fit has to be its worst feature. Particularly when it comes to how it handles opening delimited text files (read: database dumps).
The first hurdle is that you have to open the file the correct way (using File...Open) in order to have it even give you the option to open the file in a sane and controlled manner. But after you've cleared that hurdle, you need to remember to select every column in the spreadsheet and tell Excel to read it as "text" in order to keep it from, say, turning your part numbers into scientific notation, or mangling half the serial numbers in the list.
Wouldn't be such a problem except that not everyone who has to work on this kind of data is completely clueful or careful when it comes to such matters.
Even without accounting errors, I could see where simple UI hassles like this cost the business world many millions of dollars. Having to re-do an entire process because of a few truncated numbers is not an inexpensive thing.
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Agreed. I'm willing to accept that all of this porting slows down development on many FOSS projects from a technical standpoint, but I'm not into FOSS for technical reasons. I'm into it because I got fed up with the entire culture of the corporate software world, and the oftentimes immoral nature of many large software manufacturers.
While in the long run I'd love to see more truly open platforms become large players in the market, in the short run I'm much more interested in seeing the community continue to erode away at the stranglehold that Office and IE have on the office and browser markets.
Besides, if Firefox doesn't manage to gain enough market share to break Microsoft's lock on the future of the Web, Linux is doomed.
Or hey, maybe life got to earth from another planet, or vice versa. We're discovering that microbes are surprisingly resilient, and I would be willing to believe that it's possible for some bacteria to survive a billion-year-trip across space. Maybe not likely, but possible.
I think that's about how the law works in my state (WI), but I just moved here, so I'm not sure.
Regardless, penalties are a bit of a non-solution for two reasons: First, stiffer penalties have been proven time and time again to have little to no effect whatsoever on crime rates, or anything else for that matter (except, of course, for our astronomical and ever-increasing percentage of the population in jail).
Second, chronic drunk drivers frequently don't get caught until they actually hit something. There just aren't that many cops on the road, and you have to be pretty damn drunk (well past the point at which your chances of causing an accident start to multiply) before it's very easy to notice from your driving that you're inebriated.
Personally, the only two I enjoyed on that list are Schindler's List and Amistad. And of those, Schindler's list is the one I would blame on the director - Amistad was merely good, not great, and I think it was mostly carried by the skill of a single actor.
Everything else up there generally fell in the "mediocre-to-forgettable melodramatic tripe" scale, in my opinion.
I'll skirt around all of that and just respond that the government has a duty to help its society remain at least remotely sane.
t thing.
And maybe with this law, idiot parents will finally be forced to realize that they are responsible for what video games are brought into their house.
Which means maybe, just maybe they will finaly sit down and shut up with respect to this whole bitching-about-violent-games-making-people-violen
Which is good, because I am seriously going to lose all vestiges of sanity if I hear one more idiot parent make one more idiot claim that flies in the face of the vast majority of scientific research and his/her own morals as firmly established through their own actions. (Don't you f***ing pretend to dislike violence or act like you think it's a bad way to solve your problems after voting George W. Bush in for a second term as President. Anyone who can swallow and regurgitate that set of memes without gagging is in serious need of a brain transplant or some time in a detox center or something.)
So I welcome this law, because I value my sanity. Maybe it'll move north and we'll see folks voting on it here in Wisconsin, and I will be Happy.
Maybe we can follow it up with a law that forces us to keep our children locked in closets with no lights and only a tasteless, vitamin-enhanced gruel and water for sustenance, and which bans anyone from talking to children about world history (especially American history), politics, or current social issues, because if kids are exposed to anything, ever, it just might destroy their fragile little minds because nobody is capable of evaluating any information, ever, until the age of 18 (and NO SOONER).
And I will welcome it, because (A) I don't have any kids myself, (B) I don't think I will because lately I have been getting the impression that parenthood will make you stupid faster than a really wicked sack of chronic, and (C) they're pissing me off, and somebody needs to shut them up.
How many of those were made in the past ten years? Right.
Even famous directors can lose their edge. I present as evidence every George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg movie made since Russia swore in its first president.
Not only that, but incorporating a Sirius reciever and a decent antenna into an iPod would probably result in a massive beast compared to Apple's current line. Just look at the size of XM and Sirius's current "handheld" offerings.
Also, you don't just have to be underground or inside a large Faraday cage such as your average large office building or shopping mall to lose your Sirius signal. Most people have to mount their Sirius antenna outside in a clear area because the signal generally doesn't even get through your house's roof, trees, etc.
Besides, what I really want is some sort of Tivo for my Sirius account; a great many shows that I enjoy aren't on at convenient times for me, and I would love to be able to record ones that I'm going to miss.
As to your question, if Sirius is available outside the US, it's probably only in Canada. I'm pretty sure Sirius's sattelites sit somewhere above the northern Midwest (around about Minnesota or Wisconsin, I think), and while you might be able to get decent reception in northern Mexico, I doubt that you would get anything outside of North America.
I write AppleScripts, Perl scripts, full GUI programs, Excel macros, constantly. Whenever there's something I can automate now to save time later, I do so. Things as mundane as a droplet for adding a prefix to a filename all the way up to frotzing tens of gigabytes of data at a go, all gets automated.
My work mantra is to make the computers do things that computers are good at, and free up the humans to do the things they're good at. Seems to work for me. . . since I've taken up that policy, both the quality and quantity of work that my team can do has increased appreciably.
PSP isn't the only system that can play movies.
There is a 3rd-party add-on for Game Boy Advance that allows you to store and play movies. You encode the movies in the player's format yourself, so you don't have to worry about only getting to watch the few movies that come out in Sony's format. Just rip your Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVDs and watch them on the GBA.
Multiplying this same convenience across a college campus -- to outdoor use, informal study groups in first-floor rooms, empty classrooms, etc. -- would be amazing.
.. it's also throwing TV (which I read to mean, "uncompressed streaming video) and phone service, both of which are huge bandwidth hogs, things for which the university probably already has perfectly good copper wire infrastructure, and things where you don't need the device to move around much. (TV should be obvious, for the phone remember that professors' offices tend to resemble closets more than caverns, a phone in a classroom wouldn't be extraordinarily useful, and administrative offices tend to be broken into small cubes.)
It would be amazing. Amazingly expensive and kludgey and slow.
There might be a wireless technology that is suited to this sort of application, but it sure as heck isn't WiFi.
And this isn't just for internet access.
There's not much in FORTH to standardize, anyway.
push pop push pop push pop push pop push pop push pop
Well, there are a lot of definitions of science fiction floating around. For some, all it takes is that humans descended from Earth live on a planet other than earth, even if all the technology that the characters posess is no better than what we had in the 18th century. For others, it has to involve scads and scads of technology that we don't have or can't exist, preferably with lots of robots and space travel.
However, I think for a lot of science fiction writers and "high brow" literary types who get into science fiction, the boundaries of the genre are much softer. In this case, any literature which uses some piece of unusual or advanced technology as a plot element through which some human theme can be explored counts as science fiction. Apparently for Card, the technology itself doesn't even have to be given much stage time, if he considers Being John Malkovich (which I think is deep in a gray area) to be sci-fi.
Personally, I prefer this final definition. While I frequently enjoy "rocket" science fiction and used to watch TNG and DS9 almost religiously, I tend to think of the period when all sci-fi was oozing with gadgets to be pretty typical for any genre in its infancy/childhood. Sort of like in early animation where EVERYTHING was moving CONSTANTLY, even many inanimate objects.
Now I know how Boston felt last World Series.
What will probably happen is a new license will be cooked up and it too will be thorn on the side of MS. Rinse repeat.
The most fun part about this game is that as continue through more cycles of rinsing and repeating, the probability of the anti-open-source crowd's legal efforts running head-first into the First Amendment approach 1.
The only other option would be for the business world to use the nuclear option and try to get restrictions on how source code can be redistributed made illegal. I doubt any of the big players would dare go for that option. It would invalidate the BSD license and that's not a happy thought for even the likes of Microsoft.
I take issue with the idea that the GPL grants you rights. If software is distributed with source code and no license or copyright notice, you have the right to do whatever you want with it. In terms of a contract between two parties, the GPL serves to restrict the licensee's rights. Just look at the text - most of the GPL is devoted to listing things you cannot do and placing conditions on other things that you are allowed to do. Really, the GPL is pretty low on the scale of what rights a source license allows you to have. (Well-known marks on this scale would be, in order, Microsoft Public Source License, GPL, BSD, and public domain. And yes, I realize that this idea is based on the false assumption of a two-polar continuum on which source licenses could lie.)
That said, I think that the GPL is the best popular license for protecting the rights of a Free Software community as a whole. But don't think that that means that the GPL grants a whole mess of freedom. Anyone can come to the party, but they have to follow a whole lot of rules if they want to be let in.
While the Apple Public Source License is neither GPL-compatible nor copyleft, not everything Apple uses in their OS is released under the APSL.
.)
Their compiler is GCC. The rendering engine of their web browser is LGPL. They package scads of GPL software with their OS (Ruby, Perl, MySQL. .
I'm not sure it would be perfectly accurate to say that Apple has embraced the GPL, and they seem to definitely keep the Linux masses at a healthy distance, but I think it is fair to say that Apple is at least a rather GPL-friendly company.
While it's definitely true that passenger cars basically don't damage the big roads compared to trucks, I don't think it's fair to say that the trucking industry is getting a free lunch from motorists. After all, we do consume the products provided to us by trucking, and I'm sure we all enjoy having those products super-cheap.
That said, I would love to have the cost of road use for the trucking industry vs. private motorists be proportional to the cost of damage to the roads inflicted by each for an entirely different reason. Under such a tax system, the costs of shipping things by road would be pushed on to the consumer in such a way that it is tagged to the product they are buying. It would put companies in a situation where they could reduce the shelf prices of their products greatly by shipping by rail instead of by truck, and would all but force them to start shipping more of their stuff by (much more environmentally-friendly) trains.
I would suggest that, while there are certain times when a dockapp is a great idea in OS X (the little red dot that shows how much new mail you have in Mail.app, for instance), and certain times when it's not perfect, but it is the only thing that will really do in some cases (Activity Monitor), for the most part dockapps have no place in OS X.
In the various X11 windowmanagers that have them, they work well because they afford you a great deal of control over where the dockapp can be placed onscreen, and because they provide that degree of freedom with everything else, too.
OS X, on the other hand, gives you a menubar that is already firmly attatched to the top of the screen which already contains a clock, battery monitor, and various other useful indicators and controls. The menubar alone simultaneously makes 3/8 of the good places for random dockapps (corners and sides) off-limits, and severely reduces their usefulness by providing most of the most popular dockapp functionality in a much more compact form.
It also gives you an incredibly cramped and inflexible dock. All the user gets to control is how large its icons are, whether it is on the left, right, or bottom edge of the screen, and partial control of icons within the dock. The dock then decides where the icon's physical location on the screen is, makes adjustments to the ordering of apps by throwing new apps you run in the bottom of the first compartment (i.e., the middle), and resizes the dock as needed. And there is only one dock - no dock and clip like in WM, no whatevertheheckyouwant like in fvwm2. OS X just doesn't really leave much room for the dockapp author and its user to implement and place the dockapp's interface in such a way that it serves to be both useful and something more than ugly clutter.
While I realize there are major differences between dockapps and the "desktop widgets" model of random useful crap, I gotta say that in general it's a much better idea to buy a copy of Konfabulator or Tiger and make use of that system. Enjoy the way it allows you to put more information up there, and get used to the way it only shows that information when you want it to. (I haven't used either much, but it could be that they allow you to design widgets that "pop up" on the screen briefly when they need to tell you something right away. . . I have used other OS X apps that will do that.) In the end, the desktop widgets model just meshes much better with Aqua.
There's always someone claiming at least some part of the laws of physics has changed recently.
Might as well point out that in the US, you're also paying an arm and a leg to use the roads. It's just hidden in the form of taxes.
You're especially paying a lot if you have the bad luck to live somewhere like Illinois, where you get to pay all of the highway taxes, PLUS a trip from, say, Rockford to Chicago (can't be more than 90 miles) can have you forking over as much as $10 in tolls, depending on where exactly your start and stop points are.
All in all, I'm not sure which pay system I like less. On one hand, having to stop (or slow down to 5mph if you have an I-Pass) every 17 miles or so is a huge waste of gas and source of congestion, and a complete slap in the face of the entire concept of an interstate highway system. On the other hand, I get the impression that making the paying for use of a road so salient to motorists is going a long way toward encouraging people to start using Chicago's medium-range commuter rail system, Metra, instead. It's certainly a hell of a lot less expensive.
Are you pissed off at someone, or are you just a salty salty human being?
I imagine the root of this conflict is a difference in culture.
Being part of a business, I imagine that the Safari team's modus operandi is to not let anything leave their shop until they are sure that it is working and ready for release, including incremental changes. In turn, this way of releasing things is just not conducive to providing the changes to the KHTML team along with a list of what is different and why. I'm sure that from Apple's point of view, maintaining such a list would just be a waste of time and money.
Not sure if I'm thinking along the same vein as the grandparent, but the big issue I see is that small errors such as typos can become massive problems in sprawling spreadsheets. Since spreadsheet software such as Excel doesn't include many facilities for protecting data data integrity, this problem becomes rather serious after the spreadsheet grows beyond a certain size - especially if you don't have people who understand and these problems and are able to build facilities for checking this stuff into the spreadsheet.
Using Excel as an ODBC data source is a non-solution in this case. Hosed data displayed in a pretty format on a webpage or VB app is still hosed data. A more interesting solution would be if Excel could pull its data from a true RDBMS over ODBC, which would give users a familiar interface but would allow some data protection on the back-end.
Methinks the real solution is for someone to come out with a killer app that replaces the traditional spreadsheet.
At least in my experience, the limitations of spreadsheets are many. They lump input data, output data, and the processing of data into one cramped space. They are painfully single-user. The information is bound too tightly to its position within a grid, so that a careless cut-and-paste can create a real mess that is often non-obvious and difficult to untangle once you finally discover that there is a problem.
But a database is a poor solution for many folks because they take a large amount of effort to learn. It doesn't help that many database solutions require a fair bit of programming skill to manage - both in terms of working out SQL queries and hacking out an interface. Even the easy ones can get difficult to work with - I certainly spent some time scratching my head and spinning my tires figuring out how to get some things done when I was working on my first FileMaker Pro app, and I've had previous experience putting together database-driven websites in ASP and a modicum of experience with Orable.
Methinks what's needed is something that sits in between a true DBMS (even one like FileMaker) and a traditional spreadsheet. My instinct is to suggest that this killer app would be similar to Lotus Improv - I've never used it, but I've heard great things about it, and the descriptions I've read certainly make me salivate.
Of course, I still think that multiuser support is something that is sorely needed. Merging spreadsheets after they've been worked on by several people is a royal pain and terribly error-prone. But I don't want to see a client/server setup like what's used in most true database apps, though - the whole point is to create something that mitigates the mess that tends to develop as a small spreadsheet grows into a monstrosity that an entire workgroup uses for something important, and the step of transfering things to a central server isn't something that tends to be easy for a lot of folks to do. (I've seen my share of problems with people just working with files shared from a fileserver.) My guess is that the simplest solution would be something along the lines of what has been done with SubEthaEdit - and with Apple having opened up the Rendezvous protocol, it shouldn't be too hard to make an app that uses the technology and works on Windows and *nix, too.
Excel's habit of restructuring numbers as it sees fit has to be its worst feature. Particularly when it comes to how it handles opening delimited text files (read: database dumps).
The first hurdle is that you have to open the file the correct way (using File...Open) in order to have it even give you the option to open the file in a sane and controlled manner. But after you've cleared that hurdle, you need to remember to select every column in the spreadsheet and tell Excel to read it as "text" in order to keep it from, say, turning your part numbers into scientific notation, or mangling half the serial numbers in the list.
Wouldn't be such a problem except that not everyone who has to work on this kind of data is completely clueful or careful when it comes to such matters.
Even without accounting errors, I could see where simple UI hassles like this cost the business world many millions of dollars. Having to re-do an entire process because of a few truncated numbers is not an inexpensive thing.