Just think of the number of times you've seen "Warning: You are saving this in a format which may not support all the formatting you've entered. Are you sure? Enter Y to possibly lose data, N to save it in [our] standard format (recommended)."
The OpenOffice 2.0 codeline has this exact same warning when you save in any non-sxw format, be it doc, rtf, etc. I usually save rtf or doc, since nothing except OpenOffice can read sxw, and EVERY time I save, not just the first time, I get a dialog about how I might be losing data if I save in a different format. The kicker is that the default option is Yes, which saves in the OpenOffice format, so you have to click No to save in the existing format. It's very very unintuitive, and annoying to get a dialog every time you save.
Office 2004 for Mac has the right idea for saving in different formats. It can do a compatibility check on a document, and let you know what formatting, if any, you will lose if you save in a certain format. And it will warn you (the first time you save it) if you will lose formatting. But if you aren't going to actually lose anything by saving in a certain format, it won't bother you about it. It would be nice if OpenOffice could do that.
And what's up with it asking if I want to save my document if all I've done since saving it last is printing? I'm told that there's an option for that, but surely it should not ask you to save after printing by default...
Just some rants, after having to deal with OpenOffice since the company I work for decided to switch to StarOffice instead of Word. Why pay $79 each for StarOffice when OpenOffice is free? Who knows, we definitely don't use any of the magic templates it comes with...
Plus, MSN Messenger has the strange magical ability to ignore your default browser setting and find and open Internet Explorer for Hotmail and also any links you click inside of instant messages. I really wish they would unbreak that. They should at least conform to their own default browser settings...
I've noticed that the Windows XP firewall, when it pops up the dialog that claims that Windows has blocked 'application x' from using the network, and has the Keep Blocking and Unblock buttons, has in fact not blocked the application yet, and doesn't until you actually click Keep Blocking. I've noticed this multiple times, and I'm sure that's what it's doing because our company has an application that access the internet for a few seconds, and it is able to complete successfully even though the dialog box appears and claims to have blocked the evil program. This does not impress me.
Also, I found out yesterday that the Indeo codec is no longer included in Windows XP! All new installations of XP SP1 or higher don't include it, and the Windows version of the codec costs $15 from Indeo's website. I had to play my video on my laptop with OS X (OS 9 Quicktime in Classic), because OS 9 came with an Indeo codec, when previously, Indeo was pretty much the Windows codec to use (before WMV anyways)
I always liked erector sets. Like legos, but way stronger, and you could bend them yourself if you needed a new shape. Plus, they taught people the correct direction to turn screws.
Also fun was the board game Stratego, but it's been difficult to find recently, at least for me (I no longer have my copy).
When i turn the wheel in a car, it turns, but I couldn't even begin to tell you how nor do I care, because I don't need to know how it works to do this.
I would think that most of the Slashdot crowd, being inquisitive geeks, would love to learn how the wheels in a car turn and how the steering box / rack works, if they don't already. One thing the differentiates geeks from non-geeks is the need to know things that don't have anything to do with anything just to know the things. I know how every piece of my car works, not just because it's cheaper to fix it myself, but because it's fun to know how things work, especially impressive things like carbeurators (my car's a '64 dodge). Mechanical devices are just as cool as, if not more cool than, electronics. I'm constantly impressed by how carbeurators and ignition timing works on older cars, and in my opinion it's a lot more interesting than the relative simplicity of fuel injection and ignition control on modern cars.
That's scarily true. I recently took a trip THROUGH Chicago, via the SkyWay, which was of course closed, so I had to exit the skyway about 50 feet before it started, follow the detour signs around the city for 30 minutes, enter the skyway for the last 50 feet, and pay $2.70 for the privilege of getting to use the skyway that was under construction. I was pretty confused and perturbed by that.
If early in the game you had typed "turn on ligt", the game responded "I don't know what a ligt is." Then later, it describes that two alien races are sitting down to a truce after a million years of war. Through a freak wormhole, the words "turn on ligt" are heard, which happens to be the worst insult ever to one of the alien races. They fight each other for another million years, but eventually they realize that it was an Earthling who said it, and they amass a fleet to destroy Earth.
Actually, anything you type at any early point in the game can be used in that event. It could be something valid, like 'enjoy ford prefect' or something invalid. It's either random what phrase it chooses or it remembers a certain turn number or something. But after playing through multiple times, I noticed that the phrase changes each time you play it, and it's always something you entered earlier in the game.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, or WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. 6.0 has a GUI, and a few other new features, like WYSIWIG and such, but they both do much better then Word at outlines and bulleted lists. F11 (Reveal formatting) is the neatest! You can cut, copy and paste any formatting, and even search for and replace formatting information, like say change all 14pt bold courier into 16pt italic times roman or something. Anyways, I used to write outlines in WP 5.1 when I was in school, even though Word 95 and later 97 were out, simply because both of those had horrendous outline and bulleted list functions.
At least in my neighorhood, you have to pay extra for garbage pickup if it gets bigger than a certain size. So if this guy was downloading DVD torrents or something, he could have used enough bandwidth to push the library into their next bandwidth bracket (if that's how their service goes), which would cost the library money. Just like if thousands of people walked by my house and threw bottles in and around my garbage can, i'd eventually have to pay an extra fee on my garbage bill for all the garbage. In most cases, the guy isn't going to download that much stuff, or the library is on a fixed price service, in which case it doesn't matter how much bandwidth they use, just like MOST of the time, there aren't going to be enough people throwing bottles in my garbage to cost me anything.
By the way, I have never heard of people throwing bottles in other people's garbage. It seems like you would have to perpetually have your garbage can near the street/sidewalk, which is illegal here. We can have them out at earliest the evening the night before pickup and the latest the morning after pickup. Maybe in a bigger city or something it's different.
Yes, Quicken for Mac is quite horrid. I actually don't like Quicken for Windows anymore either. For all my banking needs, I have been using (for a few years now) Quicken 8 for DOS, available as a free download from Intuit. It's the newest DOS version, and actually has most of the same features as the newest Windows or Mac versions. I run it in Virtual PC, but since it's a DOS program, there's no reason you couldn't run it in a GPL emulator, like DOSEMU or something.
Apple's implementation of Internet Sharing over AirPort actually makes the card look like an AP to other devices, so they can automatically connect to it. It will distribute IP addresses (10.0.2.x I think) and otherwise be indistiguishable from an ordinary AP/Router. This is useful for impromptu Quake 3 matches with other WiFi users, and possibly for more serious work.
Yes, my car also (1964 Dodge) has a VIN of less than 10 digits, all numbers. And it's on the inside door jam, since it was made 2 years before they were required to be visible outside the car. I had trouble getting it insured, and eventually the lady just put X's for the remaining digits, and the computer was okay with that. I would think though, that just adding another field, like VIN2 or something, would be an easy cheap fix. Or fixing VIN altogether, by using the first character or 2 as a length designator, so we don't have to worry about this nonsense again.
I've found that my wife's car, a 2001 Oldsmobile Alero, while having many electrical problems, does in fact fall into it's EPA of 21-27mpg. It sits right around the low 20's usually, in mixed city/highway driving. My car, a 1964 Dodge sedan with a big block 318, gets about 25mpg in the same driving conditions. It doesn't have an EPA rating, but the manual claims it has 'nickel-squeezing gas economy' and an 'eager engine with lots of go', and it is pretty decent for an older car. Now how an Alero with a 2 liter 4 cylinder engine gets worse mileage than a 40 year old 5.2 liter V8, I have yet to figure out.
Actually, I live in Illinois, and I went through the registration, and didn't lie, told it I live in Illinois, and it worked just fine. I'm downloading the giant setup program now.
When I first moved into my house, the previous owners (who I knew) moved over the gas / electric / etc. for me, so I wouldn't have to. After 3 months in the house, I hadn't received a Gas bill yet, and I was beginning to get suspicious. I called Nicor, and they told me that there was no address on the account, so they never sent a bill. They were just kind of accumulating charges, waiting until someone called them, and I had to pay them $300 in late gas charges because they never bothered to contact me. I mean, they read the gas meter on the house once a month, it isn't like they don't know where I live!
The moral of the story is that if you don't get a bill, it isn't because they forgot, it's because they probably lost some piece of data about you, but rest assured that they're still charging you the whole time!
That's nothing! My 1964 Dodge gets 24mpg with it's 240hp, 360ft/lb V8, but since it was made before anyone cared about the environment, my driving of my current car instead of a newer one completely negates the cleaning effect of about 100 hybrids, in terms of emissions.
It's funny how the guy in the article gets 31mpg in his little 1500lb car, and I get 24mpg in my 3500lb car with it's 5.2 liter engine. All we really have to do to get better mileage is have transmissions and engines better matched to the car. If the transmission isn't geared right, or the engine is too small, the engine has to work hard, which wears it out and causes it to have to run outside of it's optimal RPM range.
The company is downplaying the issue but one security company at least is concerned that the vulnerabilities could be extremely serious. Secunia has given the five - yes, five - patches a "highly critical" rating and warned that they may allow hijacking, security bypass, data manipulation, privilege escalation, denial of service and system access.
It seems like the article writer seems to think that patches themselves are bugs... I was under the understanding that those problems are fixed by the patches, not exposed...
In other words, it makes Microsoft's current Sasser problems look no more than a nasty nip.
Okay, you just can't compare local, turned off by default (for most of them) exploits in OS X with a worm on XP that infects a service that CAN'T be disabled, and opens a REMOTE SHELL and FTP server. I mean come on, anyone could nmap their local subnet on the internet, and destroy at least 10 Windows computers by using those remote shells.
Oh, and a previous poster said they don't like downloading 50MB updates from Apple. Well, as far as all the updates I've gotten (going from 10.2.1 to 10.3.3), only actual system upgrades were bigger than 10mb or so. Security patches are usually small (1mb) unless they're QuickTime related, in which case they can be a couple of megs. But even 10.3.2 to 10.3.3, which gave us new iPhoto, iCal, etc. was less than 50mb!
If the C version used goto like the BASIC program, it wouldn't crash either. If the BASIC one used a function instead of a goto, and it was compiled, it would probably crash too.
Remember that there are two schools of user friendly interface design. Microsoft goes for the 'our users are stupid and can't learn, so let's just do it for them and name the options so people will be afraid to change things'. Apple uses 'our users are stupid, but maybe they can learn, so lets make all the options make sense and do what they say they do.' In my experience, Apple's way of doing things makes the user feel empowered, and is much less scary and overwhelming. People are more likely to know how to change their screensaver in OS X, and are less afraid to do it, because it's more accessible to them. OS X doesn't present options that imply that if you do it wrong, your computer won't work again. Notice that OS X dialogs generally don't even have Cancel or OK buttons. You change something, and it changes. You don't like it, change it back (Network options do have an apply and cancel for obvious reasons). Personally, I like Apple's way better.
If you're looking for a native OpenOffice for OS X, take a look at NeoOffice [www.neooffice.org]. It's a Java port of OpenOffice that runs natively in OS X. It's a heck of a lot smaller than OpenOffice on Mac (150MB instead of 400MB) and seems to start faster. It has a real open/save dialog, and uses OS X's print dialog. It claims to not be done yet, but I encounter no problems with it. Also nice is the fact that you don't have to start X, because after running and quitting OpenOffice, I have an X Windows and the stupid oo.org launcher still running that I have to close.
My iBook 700 16MB VRAM failed one week after going out of warranty, but also one week after they announced the logic board repair problem (whew...). On the phone, the Apple support rep told me that the new logic boards had a change made to them to prevent recurrence of the problem. I'm thinking this is why it took so long for them to start the repair program, they didn't want to just keep giving people broken boards, they wanted to fix the problem first. As further proof that the problem may have been fixed, my 16MB VRAM iBook came back a week later as a 700MHz 32MB VRAM iBook, which was never even an option you could purchase from Apple I believe, which means they probably made some sort of change to the motherboard, and instead of order tons of 16MB and 32MB boards, they just went the cheap way and bought 32MB boards for everyone.
The company I work at recently switched an in-progress web application from Redhat Linux to FreeBSD soley because of the SCO thing. All the developers wanted to use Linux, but the project manager chose FreeBSD because he thought we might have to pay SCO money at some point.
Stupid SCO...
It's very useful on networks where the admin is too paranoid to allow normal messaging clients like MSN or AIM. Also, the messenger service allows you to do "NET SEND 192.168.0.255" and send a message to everybody on the network! Great fun.
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The OpenOffice 2.0 codeline has this exact same warning when you save in any non-sxw format, be it doc, rtf, etc. I usually save rtf or doc, since nothing except OpenOffice can read sxw, and EVERY time I save, not just the first time, I get a dialog about how I might be losing data if I save in a different format. The kicker is that the default option is Yes, which saves in the OpenOffice format, so you have to click No to save in the existing format. It's very very unintuitive, and annoying to get a dialog every time you save.
Office 2004 for Mac has the right idea for saving in different formats. It can do a compatibility check on a document, and let you know what formatting, if any, you will lose if you save in a certain format. And it will warn you (the first time you save it) if you will lose formatting. But if you aren't going to actually lose anything by saving in a certain format, it won't bother you about it. It would be nice if OpenOffice could do that.
And what's up with it asking if I want to save my document if all I've done since saving it last is printing? I'm told that there's an option for that, but surely it should not ask you to save after printing by default...
Just some rants, after having to deal with OpenOffice since the company I work for decided to switch to StarOffice instead of Word. Why pay $79 each for StarOffice when OpenOffice is free? Who knows, we definitely don't use any of the magic templates it comes with...
Plus, MSN Messenger has the strange magical ability to ignore your default browser setting and find and open Internet Explorer for Hotmail and also any links you click inside of instant messages. I really wish they would unbreak that. They should at least conform to their own default browser settings...
Also, I found out yesterday that the Indeo codec is no longer included in Windows XP! All new installations of XP SP1 or higher don't include it, and the Windows version of the codec costs $15 from Indeo's website. I had to play my video on my laptop with OS X (OS 9 Quicktime in Classic), because OS 9 came with an Indeo codec, when previously, Indeo was pretty much the Windows codec to use (before WMV anyways)
Also fun was the board game Stratego, but it's been difficult to find recently, at least for me (I no longer have my copy).
I would think that most of the Slashdot crowd, being inquisitive geeks, would love to learn how the wheels in a car turn and how the steering box / rack works, if they don't already. One thing the differentiates geeks from non-geeks is the need to know things that don't have anything to do with anything just to know the things. I know how every piece of my car works, not just because it's cheaper to fix it myself, but because it's fun to know how things work, especially impressive things like carbeurators (my car's a '64 dodge). Mechanical devices are just as cool as, if not more cool than, electronics. I'm constantly impressed by how carbeurators and ignition timing works on older cars, and in my opinion it's a lot more interesting than the relative simplicity of fuel injection and ignition control on modern cars.
That's scarily true. I recently took a trip THROUGH Chicago, via the SkyWay, which was of course closed, so I had to exit the skyway about 50 feet before it started, follow the detour signs around the city for 30 minutes, enter the skyway for the last 50 feet, and pay $2.70 for the privilege of getting to use the skyway that was under construction. I was pretty confused and perturbed by that.
Actually, anything you type at any early point in the game can be used in that event. It could be something valid, like 'enjoy ford prefect' or something invalid. It's either random what phrase it chooses or it remembers a certain turn number or something. But after playing through multiple times, I noticed that the phrase changes each time you play it, and it's always something you entered earlier in the game.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, or WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. 6.0 has a GUI, and a few other new features, like WYSIWIG and such, but they both do much better then Word at outlines and bulleted lists. F11 (Reveal formatting) is the neatest! You can cut, copy and paste any formatting, and even search for and replace formatting information, like say change all 14pt bold courier into 16pt italic times roman or something. Anyways, I used to write outlines in WP 5.1 when I was in school, even though Word 95 and later 97 were out, simply because both of those had horrendous outline and bulleted list functions.
By the way, I have never heard of people throwing bottles in other people's garbage. It seems like you would have to perpetually have your garbage can near the street/sidewalk, which is illegal here. We can have them out at earliest the evening the night before pickup and the latest the morning after pickup. Maybe in a bigger city or something it's different.
Yes, Quicken for Mac is quite horrid. I actually don't like Quicken for Windows anymore either. For all my banking needs, I have been using (for a few years now) Quicken 8 for DOS, available as a free download from Intuit. It's the newest DOS version, and actually has most of the same features as the newest Windows or Mac versions. I run it in Virtual PC, but since it's a DOS program, there's no reason you couldn't run it in a GPL emulator, like DOSEMU or something.
Apple's implementation of Internet Sharing over AirPort actually makes the card look like an AP to other devices, so they can automatically connect to it. It will distribute IP addresses (10.0.2.x I think) and otherwise be indistiguishable from an ordinary AP/Router. This is useful for impromptu Quake 3 matches with other WiFi users, and possibly for more serious work.
Yes, my car also (1964 Dodge) has a VIN of less than 10 digits, all numbers. And it's on the inside door jam, since it was made 2 years before they were required to be visible outside the car. I had trouble getting it insured, and eventually the lady just put X's for the remaining digits, and the computer was okay with that. I would think though, that just adding another field, like VIN2 or something, would be an easy cheap fix. Or fixing VIN altogether, by using the first character or 2 as a length designator, so we don't have to worry about this nonsense again.
I've found that my wife's car, a 2001 Oldsmobile Alero, while having many electrical problems, does in fact fall into it's EPA of 21-27mpg. It sits right around the low 20's usually, in mixed city/highway driving. My car, a 1964 Dodge sedan with a big block 318, gets about 25mpg in the same driving conditions. It doesn't have an EPA rating, but the manual claims it has 'nickel-squeezing gas economy' and an 'eager engine with lots of go', and it is pretty decent for an older car. Now how an Alero with a 2 liter 4 cylinder engine gets worse mileage than a 40 year old 5.2 liter V8, I have yet to figure out.
Actually, I live in Illinois, and I went through the registration, and didn't lie, told it I live in Illinois, and it worked just fine. I'm downloading the giant setup program now.
When I first moved into my house, the previous owners (who I knew) moved over the gas / electric / etc. for me, so I wouldn't have to. After 3 months in the house, I hadn't received a Gas bill yet, and I was beginning to get suspicious. I called Nicor, and they told me that there was no address on the account, so they never sent a bill. They were just kind of accumulating charges, waiting until someone called them, and I had to pay them $300 in late gas charges because they never bothered to contact me. I mean, they read the gas meter on the house once a month, it isn't like they don't know where I live!
The moral of the story is that if you don't get a bill, it isn't because they forgot, it's because they probably lost some piece of data about you, but rest assured that they're still charging you the whole time!
It's funny how the guy in the article gets 31mpg in his little 1500lb car, and I get 24mpg in my 3500lb car with it's 5.2 liter engine. All we really have to do to get better mileage is have transmissions and engines better matched to the car. If the transmission isn't geared right, or the engine is too small, the engine has to work hard, which wears it out and causes it to have to run outside of it's optimal RPM range.
It seems like the article writer seems to think that patches themselves are bugs... I was under the understanding that those problems are fixed by the patches, not exposed...
In other words, it makes Microsoft's current Sasser problems look no more than a nasty nip.
Okay, you just can't compare local, turned off by default (for most of them) exploits in OS X with a worm on XP that infects a service that CAN'T be disabled, and opens a REMOTE SHELL and FTP server. I mean come on, anyone could nmap their local subnet on the internet, and destroy at least 10 Windows computers by using those remote shells.
Oh, and a previous poster said they don't like downloading 50MB updates from Apple. Well, as far as all the updates I've gotten (going from 10.2.1 to 10.3.3), only actual system upgrades were bigger than 10mb or so. Security patches are usually small (1mb) unless they're QuickTime related, in which case they can be a couple of megs. But even 10.3.2 to 10.3.3, which gave us new iPhoto, iCal, etc. was less than 50mb!
If the C version used goto like the BASIC program, it wouldn't crash either. If the BASIC one used a function instead of a goto, and it was compiled, it would probably crash too.
His sig is recursive. It will eventually run out of stack space, because none of the functions returns, and then it will die.
Your sig in C will also run out of stack space and crash very quickly.
Remember that there are two schools of user friendly interface design. Microsoft goes for the 'our users are stupid and can't learn, so let's just do it for them and name the options so people will be afraid to change things'. Apple uses 'our users are stupid, but maybe they can learn, so lets make all the options make sense and do what they say they do.'
In my experience, Apple's way of doing things makes the user feel empowered, and is much less scary and overwhelming. People are more likely to know how to change their screensaver in OS X, and are less afraid to do it, because it's more accessible to them. OS X doesn't present options that imply that if you do it wrong, your computer won't work again. Notice that OS X dialogs generally don't even have Cancel or OK buttons. You change something, and it changes. You don't like it, change it back (Network options do have an apply and cancel for obvious reasons). Personally, I like Apple's way better.
If you're looking for a native OpenOffice for OS X, take a look at NeoOffice [www.neooffice.org]. It's a Java port of OpenOffice that runs natively in OS X. It's a heck of a lot smaller than OpenOffice on Mac (150MB instead of 400MB) and seems to start faster. It has a real open/save dialog, and uses OS X's print dialog. It claims to not be done yet, but I encounter no problems with it. Also nice is the fact that you don't have to start X, because after running and quitting OpenOffice, I have an X Windows and the stupid oo.org launcher still running that I have to close.
My iBook 700 16MB VRAM failed one week after going out of warranty, but also one week after they announced the logic board repair problem (whew...). On the phone, the Apple support rep told me that the new logic boards had a change made to them to prevent recurrence of the problem. I'm thinking this is why it took so long for them to start the repair program, they didn't want to just keep giving people broken boards, they wanted to fix the problem first. As further proof that the problem may have been fixed, my 16MB VRAM iBook came back a week later as a 700MHz 32MB VRAM iBook, which was never even an option you could purchase from Apple I believe, which means they probably made some sort of change to the motherboard, and instead of order tons of 16MB and 32MB boards, they just went the cheap way and bought 32MB boards for everyone.
The company I work at recently switched an in-progress web application from Redhat Linux to FreeBSD soley because of the SCO thing. All the developers wanted to use Linux, but the project manager chose FreeBSD because he thought we might have to pay SCO money at some point.
Stupid SCO...
It's very useful on networks where the admin is too paranoid to allow normal messaging clients like MSN or AIM. Also, the messenger service allows you to do "NET SEND 192.168.0.255" and send a message to everybody on the network! Great fun.