:P btlbhltlhbltltttt. Computer programs don't appear inside computers like weeds. Every byte is placed by human design, along some part of the process. That said, even the color and shape of a toolbar button is a matter of DESIGN, not random chance. And it can be good design or bad design. (And NOT considering design, in a computer, is always BAD design. Hence the mountain of totally confusing UI layouts in cheap Windows/Linux software)
>I don't understand the question. Spotlight indices are stored >on the volume itself. It's not like you're copying data from the >removable volume to your system disk.
That's fine, and yet there is still no way for me to halt it. Dragging a disk from the desktop to a privacy pane shortly after I plug the device in doesn't stop it, though I assume it trashes the resulting index on the drive once it's finished, RIGHT? Otherwise, there's no easy way to stop Spotlight from creating an index of the volume.
What happens if I plug that volume into a 10.3 system next, and move off all my sensitive data? Is the index still there?
>>Whatever name you choose, it is definitely one thing: >> INCONSISTENT. > >A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. If you're > looking to Apple never to change anything ever, you're using > the wrong company's products.
Thanks for the quip, Captain Sarcastic. But this is a legitimate issue. I don't care about the texture of the window, in fact I find any texture to be a good unifying element, as an alternative to the needlessly lined and over-embossed UI design that Apple started with in 10.0 - 10.1. What bothers me is the big fat grey border around all the windows using the 'brushed metal' UI. I can't use it to RESIZE THE WINDOW, so WHAT GOOD IS IT? The shadow _already_ informs me that the window has an edge.
Relax, guy, sit back, have a cigar (sayeth Saddam in South Park), not everyone on Slashdot is out for an argument at the expense of discussion. I assume you're on the inside of the company and willing to share information, so I ask you: Why the big thick grey border? And will it go away, with a phasing out of Brushed Metal?
>Do me a favor and help me come up with a reason why >you would ever want to do that.
Sure, just as soon as you file a bug on it. I was moving my old build of imapd back into/usr/local/sbin, after an archive-and-install.
>>Spotlight, randomly fails to index non-boot-drive partitions > >Obviously not reproducible.
great! Now where's the little X button next to the progress bar, under the spotlight menu, that lets me STOP AN INDEXING IN PROGRESS on a volume that I'm only connecting temporarily, that may contain sensitive document data?
Spotlight has some serious UI issues as well, especially concerning the behavior of the search widget inside Finder windows.
>>System Preferences/Mail, now showing the third major >> window style on the system (Aqua, Metal, and now Plastic) > >No, that's Aqua.
Call it what you will. Whatever name you choose, it is definitely one thing: INCONSISTENT.
Nevertheless, I consider it a step in the right direction, for one reason alone: It retains the UI-consolidating visual cues of brushed metal, without those STUPID, STUPID HANDLEBARS on the edge of every window. Apple did an incredible service to their UI when they made the _shadow_ of the window into the actual border delineator, meaning there were ZERO pixels wasted on bordering. Brushed metal took that innovation and slam-dunked it into the toilet. Thus, I for one welcome this new mid-ground plastic overlord. Now if only all the iApps were in this same style.
Here's another bug for you to check off: Even if you enable the root user, you cannot drag executable files between folders in the System tree. Click the button to authenticate, enter your password -- and nothing happens. Thankfully, performing the same operations in Terminal succeeds. And hey! The finder auto-updates to reflect it! Nicely done.
As I said: No Internet, no Linux. No internet, no Open Source Software in general.
The keystone of open source projects is their appeal to previously anonymous contributors, and without the Internet, they could not be anonymous. They'd be part of a users' group, a lab, a company, a readership -- even if they were all just customers at the same coffee shop, there would be no reason for them not to form a body and take legal ownership of their work, and seek compensation for distributing it.
This also explains why, to wired-up geek collectives like the slashdot crowd, the world appears lethargic in its adoption of open-source tactics. We forget that a big chunk of what could be called "the software industry" doesn't give two shits about the internet (except perhaps as an extra storefront).
Embedded-systems developers, coders for proprietary gaming consoles, DoD contractors, and wranglers of copyrighted databases like navigational systems and medical data -- many companies in these areas have only a tenuous connection to the internet, and very little interest in making their code publicly available. Many of them work within specs that are provided to them under strict NDA. An open-source approach is worse than useless for them.
The truth is, open-source isn't a "movement", spreading from one company to another. It's an "attractor", drawing in projects that are suited to the approach, drawing in developers with idle hands and a keen interest, from the corners of the internet. Some companies have the projects and the connectivity to go this route, others don't.
Yeah, the basement is a bit far off... If you find yourself swapping media a lot you can always get a USB2.0 external DVD drive -- but that brings noise back into the equation (yeech). I don't know what the best solution for that is... buy two drives? Copy the DVD on beforehand so you only need to go downstairs once?
It's water cooled in the sense that heat is conducted from the CPU via fluid exchange, but even the majestic G5 is not a silent machine when running full-throttle. Put the machine in a closet and you don't even have to listen to DVDs spinning in the drive while you watch a movie.
So he's chucking a G5 because of fan noise... makes no sense. I've got a solution that you can apply to PC or Mac. I've been doing it for about six years now.
Buy four USB hubs and a really damn long monitor cable, and put the stupid machine in the closet. The closet of some other room, even. Or in the basement. Run the cables through a hole in the wall. The G5 even comes with Firewire 800 and optical audio jacks, both of which can support nice long cable lengths.
Presently I have a P4 in a closet, with all the cabling run through a hole in the floor, along the underside of the house, and up through another hole near the monitor and stereo. I watch movies, compose music, hack, et cetera, starting from COMPLETE SILENCE. If I had a G5 I'd do the same thing - though I might need a bigger closet. >:)
"Mommy! I know what I wanna do for a job when I grow up! I wanna be an illegal mass-marketer guy, and annoy a zillion people!"
You talk about a cycle of degradation like it's a bad thing. There's a reason we revile murderers, liars, cheats, rapists, and spammers. They all do things that cause harm to our society.
"Show some self control" indeed. We are -- we all are -- by enforcing control over this internet infrastructure we depend on for legitimate business. We punish a spammer for the same reasons we'd punish some twit who digs speed bumps into the interstate so people will state at his billboards longer. This is not a "sad day", this is a damned fine one. Big-time spammers need their big-time asses kicked big-time.
Remember those investment bankers, about 15 years ago, who caused a bunch of savings-and-loan outfits to collapse like dominoes, while the government was left to bail out the hundreds of thousands of people whose deposits were FDIC insured? How the bankers flew to and fro on private jets and ate $50 steaks, while everyone else paid billions in taxes, and thousands of people lost their jobs and met economic ruin because of the chaos the bankers caused?
A computer crime may be a computer crime to a "clueless jury", but anyone who does more than glance at the relevant facts of the case will be able to see the difference between a spammer on trial for BROADCASTING millions of messages, and a single websurfer RECEIVING copies of Metallica songs. (Things get a little blurry with partial transfers on peer-to-peer networks, but the legal basis is still different - it's becomes about content instead of form.)
This is not a battle over the content being distributed, this is a battle over the magnitude and method of the distribution process itself. Comparing spam to physical junk mail isn't really appropriate - compare it instead to a crackpot with an illegal high-power broadcast antenna who is disrupting NATIONWIDE radio communication, between consumers, businesses, and even the military and law enforcement. In a case like that, the FCC would ransack the property and jail everyone involved, in less than a week, no matter what they were actually broadcasting.
There are indeed dangers in society that need to be locked away, and sabotage of infrastructure for financial gain is one of them. I agree with you that some prison conditions are unduly harsh, and some manner of reform is necessary -- even though other prisons trade on that harsh reputation as an additional deterrent. Prison should not be a rest home, but it shouldn't be a concentration camp either.
I also agree with you that the self-perpetuating drug war is making a mess of the courts and prisons. I'd like to see kids thrown in jail for a week at most, for pot, shroom, and LSD violations. Just enough to disrupt their lives. On the other hand I'd also like to see folks like this Spam King handed a 15 year sentence, and have all his assets and equipment confiscated and donated to schools.
Well said. It's all about the mechanic at the repair shop, and the zookeepers who train the monkey -- the rest of us are more interested in doing our own work. That's why so many people have computers these days, anyway...
You're probably right... the funny bit is that the car/monkey metaphor was the last annotation I added. For the longest time I couldn't come up with a way to describe what was wrong with the original metaphor, and the original was so good that it seemed nitpicky to alter it. (Then again, the whole dang pile of annotations is an exercise in nitpicking.)
I should probably have left it out altogether. But the drill metapor... I had to focus on that, because that was the centerpiece of Neal's argument about user interface.
"The right pinky of God", I just plain didn't know what to do with. It wasn't history -- it was a good science-fiction scenario. What annotation or commentary would it need?
Is there a shell out there that operates like expandable menus do? So the output between, say, all the commands issued three or four commands ago, is collapsed behind the command? Then I could scroll up and see a nice list of what I've done, like an interactive.history dump... ?
I agree that computer use is all about amplifying and shaping one's thoughts, and that this will always be a largely subjective practice
... but as long as the computers remain on the outside of our skulls, it will require some kind of physical design, which will go a long way in influencing our thoughts as we interact with it.
I also agree with you that programming will be an ever greater part of the average person's life, as more and more of our "stuff" inherits computer-like abilities. Still, thousands of gadgets are introduced every year, and only a few of them gain widespread use. Clearly some principle is at work, sorting out the good ones from the sucky ones. What principle is it?
Actually that raises a humorous point: People use their smartcards by extracting them from their wallet, WITH THEIR FINGERS. Anyone who gets the card, also gets a great set of fingerprints. D'OH.
Personally, I prefer Apple's M4A over MP3 for several reasons:
Bit for bit, it sounds better so I have a choice of the same sound quality for a lower bitrate or better sound quality. Its psycho-acoustic model beats the pants off of MP3. Yeah, it's not lossless like FLAC is, but I can detect no audible artifacts no matter what system I play it through.
It is, in fact, AAC wrapped in the MPEG-4 format wrapper. It doesn't live or die with the whims of its parent company. It is free for anyone to use and I'm not required by law to tip the parent company anything per rip I make. It's fully documented with reference code available for just about everything capable of processing a digital data stream.
It is flexible and powerful. It supports arbitrary data encoded into the stream so things like lyrics, URLs, album art, etc. can be encoded into the stream, and anything that can play MPEG4 can understand them. In fact, the MPEG4 encapsulation protocol allows you to wrap ANYTHING into an MPEG4 stream, audio, video, or otherwse, from any codec. Bitrates can go from 0 (silence) to whatever the hell you want. Compare that with MP3 players that show unusually long play times for files with ID3v2 tags at the beginning and play garbage sound for the first second or so as it spins through the album art, or those that play silence as the song flies by at 5x normal speed.
My point being, OGG is not impressive for any of your stated reasons. MP3 has been around for about ten years and everyone has moved on since then.
That non-sequitor of an article discusses the actions of and reverence bestowed upon the RULING CLASS, some members of which were obviously women. What does it have to do with the everyday role of women in egyptian society? What does it have to do with the opinions of traders in the market bazaar and their possible insistence upon dealing with the male of a household? You, sir, are the one talking out of your arse.
A laptop cannot fit into my camera bag when I go on vacations.
Of course not, silly, that's where the camera goes!;)
Most laptops can't plug into the big-screen TV for all the relatives to get a sneak-peak at the photos I've taken during the week.
A 12-inch iBook can (and an ibook's not exactly high-end for a laptop these days.) You can also use a laptop to retouch those photos, and upload them so folks 10,000 miles away can see the pictures, along with your typed or dictated commentary. It will also hold a pile of maps and accept a GPS dongle, speak driving directions out loud to you, enable voip access, play thousands upon thousands of games (with the magic of emulators), and be FAR easier to use for all these things since you can do them with a KEYBOARD, the trackpad, and/or a USB or wireless mouse, instead of what is essentially a glorified ATARI LYNX FOR ADULTS. What's more, if you get an Apple machine, you gain the "instant on" appeal of PVRs. OS X suspends to RAM, and wakes up from it, in less than four seconds. (I haven't actually SHUT DOWN my powerbook since I bought it two years ago!)
The big thing I don't understand is, when people see this item, why don't they notice the big tether-cord that comes with it? Tying them to an actual computer - the device they HAVE TO USE to get all their crap on and off of these things? Honestly, it's just a big external hard drive with a window stuck on it. Why would anyone choose to create such a management overhead, for no reason?
I've been lusting after an Archos previously,
Ahhh, there's the reason: lust!
but the requirement of a dongle for CompactFlash reading was a limiting factor.
Alas, to avoid a dongle, you'd need something other than the 12" ibook, which lacks a PCMCIA slot.
Slashdot Mirror
:P btlbhltlhbltltttt. Computer programs don't appear inside computers like weeds. Every byte is placed by human design, along some part of the process. That said, even the color and shape of a toolbar button is a matter of DESIGN, not random chance. And it can be good design or bad design. (And NOT considering design, in a computer, is always BAD design. Hence the mountain of totally confusing UI layouts in cheap Windows/Linux software)
This is the classic method for getting extra replies, in any forum on the internet:
:)
Post something hilarious, inflammatory, or clearly wrong.
[lights up applause sign]
>I don't understand the question. Spotlight indices are stored
/usr/local/sbin, after an archive-and-install.
>on the volume itself. It's not like you're copying data from the
>removable volume to your system disk.
That's fine, and yet there is still no way for me to halt it. Dragging a disk from the desktop to a privacy pane shortly after I plug the device in doesn't stop it, though I assume it trashes the resulting index on the drive once it's finished, RIGHT? Otherwise, there's no easy way to stop Spotlight from creating an index of the volume.
What happens if I plug that volume into a 10.3 system next, and move off all my sensitive data? Is the index still there?
>>Whatever name you choose, it is definitely one thing:
>> INCONSISTENT.
>
>A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. If you're
> looking to Apple never to change anything ever, you're using
> the wrong company's products.
Thanks for the quip, Captain Sarcastic. But this is a legitimate issue. I don't care about the texture of the window, in fact I find any texture to be a good unifying element, as an alternative to the needlessly lined and over-embossed UI design that Apple started with in 10.0 - 10.1. What bothers me is the big fat grey border around all the windows using the 'brushed metal' UI. I can't use it to RESIZE THE WINDOW, so WHAT GOOD IS IT? The shadow _already_ informs me that the window has an edge.
Relax, guy, sit back, have a cigar (sayeth Saddam in South Park), not everyone on Slashdot is out for an argument at the expense of discussion. I assume you're on the inside of the company and willing to share information, so I ask you: Why the big thick grey border? And will it go away, with a phasing out of Brushed Metal?
>Do me a favor and help me come up with a reason why
>you would ever want to do that.
Sure, just as soon as you file a bug on it.
I was moving my old build of imapd back into
>>Spotlight, randomly fails to index non-boot-drive partitions
>
>Obviously not reproducible.
great! Now where's the little X button next to the progress bar, under the spotlight menu, that lets me STOP AN INDEXING IN PROGRESS on a volume that I'm only connecting temporarily, that may contain sensitive document data?
Spotlight has some serious UI issues as well, especially concerning the behavior of the search widget inside Finder windows.
>>System Preferences/Mail, now showing the third major
>> window style on the system (Aqua, Metal, and now Plastic)
>
>No, that's Aqua.
Call it what you will. Whatever name you choose, it is definitely one thing: INCONSISTENT.
Nevertheless, I consider it a step in the right direction, for one reason alone: It retains the UI-consolidating visual cues of brushed metal, without those STUPID, STUPID HANDLEBARS on the edge of every window. Apple did an incredible service to their UI when they made the _shadow_ of the window into the actual border delineator, meaning there were ZERO pixels wasted on bordering. Brushed metal took that innovation and slam-dunked it into the toilet. Thus, I for one welcome this new mid-ground plastic overlord. Now if only all the iApps were in this same style.
Here's another bug for you to check off: Even if you enable the root user, you cannot drag executable files between folders in the System tree. Click the button to authenticate, enter your password -- and nothing happens. Thankfully, performing the same operations in Terminal succeeds. And hey! The finder auto-updates to reflect it! Nicely done.
Actually the situation can be stated more simply than that.
Quality of features sells.
The keystone of open source projects is their appeal to previously anonymous contributors, and without the Internet, they could not be anonymous. They'd be part of a users' group, a lab, a company, a readership -- even if they were all just customers at the same coffee shop, there would be no reason for them not to form a body and take legal ownership of their work, and seek compensation for distributing it.
This also explains why, to wired-up geek collectives like the slashdot crowd, the world appears lethargic in its adoption of open-source tactics. We forget that a big chunk of what could be called "the software industry" doesn't give two shits about the internet (except perhaps as an extra storefront).
Embedded-systems developers, coders for proprietary gaming consoles, DoD contractors, and wranglers of copyrighted databases like navigational systems and medical data -- many companies in these areas have only a tenuous connection to the internet, and very little interest in making their code publicly available. Many of them work within specs that are provided to them under strict NDA. An open-source approach is worse than useless for them.
The truth is, open-source isn't a "movement", spreading from one company to another. It's an "attractor", drawing in projects that are suited to the approach, drawing in developers with idle hands and a keen interest, from the corners of the internet. Some companies have the projects and the connectivity to go this route, others don't.
Yeah, the basement is a bit far off ... If you find yourself swapping media a lot you can always get a USB2.0 external DVD drive -- but that brings noise back into the equation (yeech). I don't know what the best solution for that is ... buy two drives? Copy the DVD on beforehand so you only need to go downstairs once?
It's water cooled in the sense that heat is conducted from the CPU via fluid exchange, but even the majestic G5 is not a silent machine when running full-throttle. Put the machine in a closet and you don't even have to listen to DVDs spinning in the drive while you watch a movie.
Buy four USB hubs and a really damn long monitor cable, and put the stupid machine in the closet. The closet of some other room, even. Or in the basement. Run the cables through a hole in the wall. The G5 even comes with Firewire 800 and optical audio jacks, both of which can support nice long cable lengths.
Presently I have a P4 in a closet, with all the cabling run through a hole in the floor, along the underside of the house, and up through another hole near the monitor and stereo. I watch movies, compose music, hack, et cetera, starting from COMPLETE SILENCE. If I had a G5 I'd do the same thing - though I might need a bigger closet. >:)
[n/c]
You talk about a cycle of degradation like it's a bad thing. There's a reason we revile murderers, liars, cheats, rapists, and spammers. They all do things that cause harm to our society.
"Show some self control" indeed. We are -- we all are -- by enforcing control over this internet infrastructure we depend on for legitimate business. We punish a spammer for the same reasons we'd punish some twit who digs speed bumps into the interstate so people will state at his billboards longer. This is not a "sad day", this is a damned fine one. Big-time spammers need their big-time asses kicked big-time.
Yeah, none of those guys got nine years either.
This is not a battle over the content being distributed, this is a battle over the magnitude and method of the distribution process itself. Comparing spam to physical junk mail isn't really appropriate - compare it instead to a crackpot with an illegal high-power broadcast antenna who is disrupting NATIONWIDE radio communication, between consumers, businesses, and even the military and law enforcement. In a case like that, the FCC would ransack the property and jail everyone involved, in less than a week, no matter what they were actually broadcasting.
There are indeed dangers in society that need to be locked away, and sabotage of infrastructure for financial gain is one of them. I agree with you that some prison conditions are unduly harsh, and some manner of reform is necessary -- even though other prisons trade on that harsh reputation as an additional deterrent. Prison should not be a rest home, but it shouldn't be a concentration camp either.
I also agree with you that the self-perpetuating drug war is making a mess of the courts and prisons. I'd like to see kids thrown in jail for a week at most, for pot, shroom, and LSD violations. Just enough to disrupt their lives. On the other hand I'd also like to see folks like this Spam King handed a 15 year sentence, and have all his assets and equipment confiscated and donated to schools.
Well said. It's all about the mechanic at the repair shop, and the zookeepers who train the monkey -- the rest of us are more interested in doing our own work. That's why so many people have computers these days, anyway...
I should probably have left it out altogether. But the drill metapor ... I had to focus on that, because that was the centerpiece of Neal's argument about user interface.
"The right pinky of God", I just plain didn't know what to do with. It wasn't history -- it was a good science-fiction scenario. What annotation or commentary would it need?
And the peace-sign, and interpretive dance!
And the fist!!
Is there a shell out there that operates like expandable menus do? So the output between, say, all the commands issued three or four commands ago, is collapsed behind the command? Then I could scroll up and see a nice list of what I've done, like an interactive .history dump ... ?
I also agree with you that programming will be an ever greater part of the average person's life, as more and more of our "stuff" inherits computer-like abilities. Still, thousands of gadgets are introduced every year, and only a few of them gain widespread use. Clearly some principle is at work, sorting out the good ones from the sucky ones. What principle is it?
I agree. That's why I'm the code-monkey, and he's the writer.
Actually that raises a humorous point: People use their smartcards by extracting them from their wallet, WITH THEIR FINGERS. Anyone who gets the card, also gets a great set of fingerprints. D'OH.
- Bit for bit, it sounds better so I have a choice of the same sound quality for a lower bitrate or better sound quality. Its psycho-acoustic model beats the pants off of MP3. Yeah, it's not lossless like FLAC is, but I can detect no audible artifacts no matter what system I play it through.
- It is, in fact, AAC wrapped in the MPEG-4 format wrapper. It doesn't live or die with the whims of its parent company. It is free for anyone to use and I'm not required by law to tip the parent company anything per rip I make. It's fully documented with reference code available for just about everything capable of processing a digital data stream.
- It is flexible and powerful. It supports arbitrary data encoded into the stream so things like lyrics, URLs, album art, etc. can be encoded into the stream, and anything that can play MPEG4 can understand them. In fact, the MPEG4 encapsulation protocol allows you to wrap ANYTHING into an MPEG4 stream, audio, video, or otherwse, from any codec. Bitrates can go from 0 (silence) to whatever the hell you want. Compare that with MP3 players that show unusually long play times for files with ID3v2 tags at the beginning and play garbage sound for the first second or so as it spins through the album art, or those that play silence as the song flies by at 5x normal speed.
My point being, OGG is not impressive for any of your stated reasons. MP3 has been around for about ten years and everyone has moved on since then.That non-sequitor of an article discusses the actions of and reverence bestowed upon the RULING CLASS, some members of which were obviously women. What does it have to do with the everyday role of women in egyptian society? What does it have to do with the opinions of traders in the market bazaar and their possible insistence upon dealing with the male of a household? You, sir, are the one talking out of your arse.
ROFL
Of course not, silly, that's where the camera goes! ;)
Most laptops can't plug into the big-screen TV for all the relatives to get a sneak-peak at the photos I've taken during the week.
A 12-inch iBook can (and an ibook's not exactly high-end for a laptop these days.) You can also use a laptop to retouch those photos, and upload them so folks 10,000 miles away can see the pictures, along with your typed or dictated commentary.
It will also hold a pile of maps and accept a GPS dongle, speak driving directions out loud to you, enable voip access, play thousands upon thousands of games (with the magic of emulators), and be FAR easier to use for all these things since you can do them with a KEYBOARD, the trackpad, and/or a USB or wireless mouse, instead of what is essentially a glorified ATARI LYNX FOR ADULTS.
What's more, if you get an Apple machine, you gain the "instant on" appeal of PVRs. OS X suspends to RAM, and wakes up from it, in less than four seconds. (I haven't actually SHUT DOWN my powerbook since I bought it two years ago!)
The big thing I don't understand is, when people see this item, why don't they notice the big tether-cord that comes with it? Tying them to an actual computer - the device they HAVE TO USE to get all their crap on and off of these things? Honestly, it's just a big external hard drive with a window stuck on it. Why would anyone choose to create such a management overhead, for no reason?
I've been lusting after an Archos previously,
Ahhh, there's the reason: lust!
but the requirement of a dongle for CompactFlash reading was a limiting factor.
Alas, to avoid a dongle, you'd need something other than the 12" ibook, which lacks a PCMCIA slot.
While you're at it, fix these words too, Mr. Pompous Man.