No, I'm sorry. Taking 30 seconds to a minute to launch Word was a crime against humanity, not a flop. And then to be subjected to that monstrosity you call an interface.
Oh no, it was a flop. What do you think spurred a half-dozen word processing competitors in the mid-90's? Why was Office '98 such a huge deal in the Mac world? It finally made it usable again.
As someone who lived through 7.5, 7.5.1, 7.5.2, 7.5.3, and 7.5.5 (and the huge warning online "DON'T TOUCH 7.5.4!!!") and the myriad patches, updates, and fragmented installers, System 7.6 was actually the first in a revived OS strategy after Gil Amelio took the helm. The several years before that, there had been no innovation or even serious development of the Mac OS. When Gil took over, I recall a report stating there were six developers working on the entire Mac OS. Everyone else had been moved over to the Copland project.
So let's see, what did we get between 7.1 (1992?) and 7.5.5 (1996)?
- PowerTalk
- QuickDraw GX
- Speech-to-Text (which was so great, we're all using it today!)
- OpenDoc
- LOTS of bugs and bugfixes Wow, that was all very successful...
Mac OS 7.6 was the beginning of cleaning up all of this mess. First and foremost, it was the beginning of a real OS strategy for the Mac OS; something that had been absent since the System 7 development:
System 7.6: Harmony - late 1996
Mac OS 8: Tempo - mid-1997
Mac OS 8.5: Allegro - mid-1998
Mac OS 9: Sonata - mid-1999
System 7.6 cleaned up the nine different installers you had to run to get the various OS pieces installed (one for the OS, one for extras, one for desktop printing, etc). Mac OS 8 and it's classic descendents were based around the idea of getting on a regular OS shipping schedule (once a year) and salvaging all of the Copland technology possible. For a few years there, classic Mac OS saw huge leaps in functionality and performance as more Copland ideas were rehashed (and frequently recoded from scratch) to get it into the Mac OS. Everything from the multithreaded Finder, platinum appearance, Sherlock, multiple users; all of this was destined to be in Copland.
So while I agree with many on your list, 7.6 was a godsend, not a flop. Everything between 7.1.2 and 7.5.5 was a flop.
You might want to look up a topic known as "progressive disclosure" (see p35 in the original "Macintosh Human Inteface Guidelines" from Addison-Wesley, under "Managing Complexity"). In a nutshell, it means show novices an intuitive, obvious, and clear method of using the program, and offer as an option advanced features for more advanced users that don't burden users who are not aware of their presence.
Key commands are a good example. A novice user can always just go to the menu and see a list of commands and select the proper one, or browse the menus to find what they want (this is also a good argument for a single menubar, but I'll save that for another day). An advanced user can remember certain key commands or shortcuts and jump directly to them.
Or, for another example, take Photoshop. All of the tools have key shortcuts. Knowing this, you can instantly switch from the hand tool, to various selection tools, to paintbrush, to zoom. If you work in Photoshop a lot, this is a huge timesaver. While I am an advanced computer user (ph34r my l33t g3nt00 k3rn3l and all of that rubbish), I don't use Photoshop much. However, I can just click on the icons on the palette, and I'm not missing anything other than talent. The novice is not hindered; the advanced user gains more efficiency.
In the topic at hand, a single mouse button allows that novice user to always know what the button does. There's no confusion. However, an advanced user knows about control-clicking, or "click-and-hold", or even may buy a multi-button mouse. However, the novice user is not impeded by lacking this knowledge, rather the advanced user is enhanced by it.
In a world with multiple buttons being the norm, this is broken. When you click a tray icon on Windows, what shows up with left-click? With right-click? For an example, look at "Add/Remove Hardware", a standard Windows item used quite frequently on laptops. Without clicking, what menu comes up when you left-click, and what menu comes up when you right-click? On a Mac, this type of thing just does not happen, because the application developer can never assume multiple buttons. They can add nice extra features like contextual menus, scrolling, or even additional functions (and this is encouraged). But they can never assume it will be there and rely on a user knowing the difference. They must always develop first for novices, and then can add progressive features that cater to advanced users.
*****
And now for the trollish comments...
Does OS X have UI blunders? Oh heavens yes. There are a great many people at Apple today who have no concept of interface design and no "adult supervision". Consistency has no meaning and clearly many parts of the OS are no longer properly user-tested. However, what exactly does OS X's lack of interface direction have to do with the usability of a single-button mouse? Nothing - it's completely unrelated and serves as a distraction.
Finally, your attempt to link this to Steve Jobs makes no sense. If that were the case, why has Apple never offered such a mouse, even during the 12 years he was out of the company? Why did the clone makers in the mid-90's never offer it as standard (hell, I don't think they did as an option)? The OS supported it, nothing was stopping them, except for the fact that it's a bad idea.
I'm sorry, Windows 3.11 was never state of the art. For one thing, System 7 was out on the Mac (probably the second-largest upgrade in Mac OS history, after X itself), and for another thing, it was Windows 3.11 for God's sake!
As you said, mice are cheap, and people can plug any two-button scroll wheel mouse in and it will work, no drivers. Want more functionality (more buttons, some funky adaptive scrolling and whatnot), then you need drivers. But as you said, you can get them.
The real reason Apple ships machines with a single button mouse is to force developers to keep their applications simple. Since you can't guarantee that everyone will have a multibutton mouse, you have to make all your options easily and readily accessible to a single button. For one thing, this means no hiding options on contextual menus and nowhere else (which Windows suffers greatly for). Contextual menus are what they were supposed to be - a quick way to a few commands that's quicker than going to a menu or toolbar, never a requirements to use the interface.
Wow, mods are asleep today, +5 for a troll. Don't believe me? Let's dissect:
but the single button that forces her to memorize somekey+mouseclick to do basic things the rest of us do with the right mouse button and, in the case of us Linux/*BSD folks, the middle mouse button.
Carefully avoids that due to the one-button-centric design of the Mac, NOTHING requires use of a second button, much less a middle one. If she *wants* to use it that way, she can. Unlike Windows and UNIX, there is no functionality hidden that only a multi-button mouse can get at.
So yes, it is a FLAW, a big, huge, honking flaw the designers and their apologists steadfastly refuse to admit, probably for reasons of pride and irrational fandom.
So all of the posts discussing HCI reviews, simplicity of interface, lack of "hidden" multibutton options (yes, I'm talking about Windows' inconsistent use of contextual menus for EVERYTHING); all of this means nothing? Nothing rational in scientific studies of users, designing all user interface options to be immediately accessible and in-view (so you're not right clicking everything looking for an option), and keeping things simple?
I use a multi-button scrollwheel mouse on Windows. I've seen what it can do to an interface (quick, do you left or right click your taskbar icons to bring up options - you never know!). Things like "right-click drag" and contextual menus really are beyond most people. I'm more than happy to use a single button mouse on my Mac.
And everyone I know who has a mac absolutely hates the one-button mouse, again without exception
Without exception. Right.
Meanwhile, I will feed the troll by offering a solution to the theoretical girlfriend's problems: SideTrack.
Not being able to upgrade the video is a big deal to me. The radeon 9200 chip they have is ok for playing basic mpg's or tetris but that's about it.
Okay, I'm sick of this. You're a gamer, plain and simple. You have to play the latest games when they come out. You upgrade your video card every six months to a year (and it costs over half of a Mac Mini). How do I know this?
Because the built-in graphics on the Mini can handle anything but that particular subset, as can any damn video card today. You can playback any video format you want (especially since I can with an 800Mhz G3 and Radeon 7500) - they tend to be CPU bound these days, as the graphics cards are all insanely powerful. You can play any games up to a couple years ago just fine. If you're getting a Mac in the first place, you're not getting it as a gaming platform, so I see this as moot.
For example, it performs damn well in Quake 3 Arena, a standard for quick benchmarking. 96FPS at highest settings, on a budget $600 computer. Kick. Ass.
And, of course, Apple doesn't believe anyone could want better sound than what they have built in so *no* mac's have upgradable sound. wtf is that about?
Because Apple has always had integrated sound. How long did it take PC's to get beyond a simple startup beep? No, you can't buy a sound card for a Mac - Creative made a half-assed effort several years ago, but since we all already have sound, nobody bought them (that, and the drivers were some of the worst written - ATI worthy). On the other hand, since the G5's (and hopefully others with time) support fibre optic audio out, and OS X supports surround sound, what's the big deal? What would a new sound card add? You're already surround and pure digital - am I missing something?
Is there something wrong with having digital cameras and cameraphones being required to make some sort of confirmation noise when they take a picture? Then they are no more or less discreet than film cameras (shutter/film advancement noises).
I don't know, the script-writers seemed to think Tasha was the most expendable.:)
But yeah, Troi was a flake. My fiance and I got a kick out of watching "Disaster" when I called her in with "Hey, Troi's going to be competent for once!".Riker was a great character, once he grew the beard. Solid and reliable, with a playful side - I always remember him holding upa Picard doll saying:
"I don't know, I think it's a pretty good likeness." (holding the doll up and imitating Picard's intonations) "Wouldn't you agree, Number One?"
They certainly never told the employees or pushed this. Other than references to a "challenge" to the IT department to move to Linux, no one seems to have a link. I can't find anything on the w3 Intranet to confirm it.
Look, as many have pointed out, IBM is huge. Unbelievably huge. I saw references to 40,000-60,000 desktops as a target - guys, that is HALF of IBM Global Services alone. IBM quite frankly has a lot of better strategic things to be doing than a disruptive deployment of Linux enterprise-wide.
IBM can be very schizophrenic at times due to its size. I'll take your word for it that there's some kind of push to deploy Linux. There's also a push to dump Lotus SmartSuite internally and use Microsoft Office. Why? Because Smartsuite has received no development attention in years, Office works a hell of a lot better than SmartSuite, and it does little good for sales and other groups to be hobbled when collaborating with partners who want ".doc" and ".xls" files. We're also *still* in the process of certifying Windows XP Service Pack 2 for deployment (which is unbelievably annoying, as all of the patches we need to make it work with internal apps were done one week after launch, but deployment is still delayed). Technically, I saw a "push" to move all internal web use to Mozilla, then not only saw nothing further on the matter but saw more IE-only intranet apps pop up.
One final thing to understand about IBM is we are a technical company. If you can maintain your own build and satisfy inane "security" requirements, then your free to. If I can run Visio and do all of my work in Linux with Wine, no one has any problem with it, but I better not miss a deadline due to it or let it take up too much work time.
As for some specific examples of remaining Windows dependency, the company lives and breathes on Sametime for internal instant messaging, and while there are a variety of internal projects that provide it on Linux (ICT is one I'm soon to be working on), none are "supported", and none notably are from Lotus. As for Lotus, they have a Linux Notes client, but no plans on further development of SmartSuie that I can see. People have mentioned IE and ActiveX use; while several internal apps annoyingly depend on IE, I have seen none in ActiveX. No, what I have seen are Java applets that inexplicably refuse to launch in anything but IE! Something to do with the glue bewteen the web page, authentication they use, and Java. Finally, many groups use programs such as Visio, Aperture, and custom-built departmental tools in Visual Basic. We use a lot of complex Excel spreadsheets that make extensive use of scripting and automation inside the spreadsheet (not simple forumlas, whole UI's created in the spreadsheet); backend systems in Notes are then designed around these file formats to parse and send them on to other groups, further locking us to Office (or Smartsuite in some cases). None of these will work on Linux, obviously.
At this point in time, IBM could move people to Firefox, OpenOffice, and some individual OSS projects if it wanted to, but a full-on move to Linux just is not realistic at all.
You and I must have gotten different agreements - before the transition I had a 1GB/month cap on Comcast, which is why I got a Giganews account in the first place.
Sadly, their old server seems to have bitten the dust in recent weeks. I was unable to authenticate to it as of last week. FWIW...
Re:So did Comcast, what's the difference?
on
AOL Kills Usenet Access
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Comcast just "outsourced" the news to someone who knows what they're doing - GigaNews. Why should Comcast deal with running news servers and the bandwidth, feeds, and disputes involved in what feeds to distribute, when they can just point their users to a slimmed down GigaNews account?
Sure, if you're downloading a lot of binaries, you're going to hit the wall pretty fast. But if you're just doing text, the Comcast/Giganews partnership gives MUCH faster access, MUCH longer article retention, and a MUCH wider array of groups than Comcast ever did.
Meanwhile, if every time I got new furniture (bizarre analogy) I had to change out the locks on my doors and windows, yeah, that would be a pain in the ass.
Simple my ass. Unfortunately, the firewall is the best defense and the most pain in the ass to maintain. Any user who runs P2P, chat programs, etc (most users) are going to hate reconfiguring their firewall for each one's requirements.
I am completely talking out of my ass here, but I'm just going to hazard a guess and say that scalability, support, and robustness have something to do with those choices. Not to say PostgreSQL and others aren't great, but they are NOT enterprise-grade.
The difference between theory and practice is in theory quite small and in practice quite large. In theory, sure, "private investment" could continue the research, but we all know that's not going to happen.
...this is SubEthaEdit. It's a rendezvous and network-aware text editor designed for collaborative coding that seems to be finding more use. Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free (yes, I know that TextWrangler is also free now).
Is it possible to have a pre-install script search for the proper package by name, even if the CD layout changes? (Forgive my ignorance of the capabilities of the installer framework.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm sorry. Taking 30 seconds to a minute to launch Word was a crime against humanity, not a flop. And then to be subjected to that monstrosity you call an interface.
Oh no, it was a flop. What do you think spurred a half-dozen word processing competitors in the mid-90's? Why was Office '98 such a huge deal in the Mac world? It finally made it usable again.
As someone who lived through 7.5, 7.5.1, 7.5.2, 7.5.3, and 7.5.5 (and the huge warning online "DON'T TOUCH 7.5.4!!!") and the myriad patches, updates, and fragmented installers, System 7.6 was actually the first in a revived OS strategy after Gil Amelio took the helm. The several years before that, there had been no innovation or even serious development of the Mac OS. When Gil took over, I recall a report stating there were six developers working on the entire Mac OS. Everyone else had been moved over to the Copland project.
So let's see, what did we get between 7.1 (1992?) and 7.5.5 (1996)?
- PowerTalk
- QuickDraw GX
- Speech-to-Text (which was so great, we're all using it today!)
- OpenDoc
- LOTS of bugs and bugfixes
Wow, that was all very successful...
Mac OS 7.6 was the beginning of cleaning up all of this mess. First and foremost, it was the beginning of a real OS strategy for the Mac OS; something that had been absent since the System 7 development:
System 7.6 cleaned up the nine different installers you had to run to get the various OS pieces installed (one for the OS, one for extras, one for desktop printing, etc). Mac OS 8 and it's classic descendents were based around the idea of getting on a regular OS shipping schedule (once a year) and salvaging all of the Copland technology possible. For a few years there, classic Mac OS saw huge leaps in functionality and performance as more Copland ideas were rehashed (and frequently recoded from scratch) to get it into the Mac OS. Everything from the multithreaded Finder, platinum appearance, Sherlock, multiple users; all of this was destined to be in Copland.
So while I agree with many on your list, 7.6 was a godsend, not a flop. Everything between 7.1.2 and 7.5.5 was a flop.
Apple was the first major personal computer manufacturer to release a machine with a bun
Read the rest of this comment...
"Hot computer onna-bun! Hot computer onna-bun! I'm cuttin-me-own-throat at these prices!"
You might want to look up a topic known as "progressive disclosure" (see p35 in the original "Macintosh Human Inteface Guidelines" from Addison-Wesley, under "Managing Complexity"). In a nutshell, it means show novices an intuitive, obvious, and clear method of using the program, and offer as an option advanced features for more advanced users that don't burden users who are not aware of their presence.
Key commands are a good example. A novice user can always just go to the menu and see a list of commands and select the proper one, or browse the menus to find what they want (this is also a good argument for a single menubar, but I'll save that for another day). An advanced user can remember certain key commands or shortcuts and jump directly to them.
Or, for another example, take Photoshop. All of the tools have key shortcuts. Knowing this, you can instantly switch from the hand tool, to various selection tools, to paintbrush, to zoom. If you work in Photoshop a lot, this is a huge timesaver. While I am an advanced computer user (ph34r my l33t g3nt00 k3rn3l and all of that rubbish), I don't use Photoshop much. However, I can just click on the icons on the palette, and I'm not missing anything other than talent. The novice is not hindered; the advanced user gains more efficiency.
In the topic at hand, a single mouse button allows that novice user to always know what the button does. There's no confusion. However, an advanced user knows about control-clicking, or "click-and-hold", or even may buy a multi-button mouse. However, the novice user is not impeded by lacking this knowledge, rather the advanced user is enhanced by it.
In a world with multiple buttons being the norm, this is broken. When you click a tray icon on Windows, what shows up with left-click? With right-click? For an example, look at "Add/Remove Hardware", a standard Windows item used quite frequently on laptops. Without clicking, what menu comes up when you left-click, and what menu comes up when you right-click? On a Mac, this type of thing just does not happen, because the application developer can never assume multiple buttons. They can add nice extra features like contextual menus, scrolling, or even additional functions (and this is encouraged). But they can never assume it will be there and rely on a user knowing the difference. They must always develop first for novices, and then can add progressive features that cater to advanced users.
*****
And now for the trollish comments...
Does OS X have UI blunders? Oh heavens yes. There are a great many people at Apple today who have no concept of interface design and no "adult supervision". Consistency has no meaning and clearly many parts of the OS are no longer properly user-tested. However, what exactly does OS X's lack of interface direction have to do with the usability of a single-button mouse? Nothing - it's completely unrelated and serves as a distraction.
Finally, your attempt to link this to Steve Jobs makes no sense. If that were the case, why has Apple never offered such a mouse, even during the 12 years he was out of the company? Why did the clone makers in the mid-90's never offer it as standard (hell, I don't think they did as an option)? The OS supported it, nothing was stopping them, except for the fact that it's a bad idea.
I'm sorry, Windows 3.11 was never state of the art. For one thing, System 7 was out on the Mac (probably the second-largest upgrade in Mac OS history, after X itself), and for another thing, it was Windows 3.11 for God's sake!
Sounds similar to the US, except for that bit about porn in the streets. We could use that here.
As you said, mice are cheap, and people can plug any two-button scroll wheel mouse in and it will work, no drivers. Want more functionality (more buttons, some funky adaptive scrolling and whatnot), then you need drivers. But as you said, you can get them.
The real reason Apple ships machines with a single button mouse is to force developers to keep their applications simple. Since you can't guarantee that everyone will have a multibutton mouse, you have to make all your options easily and readily accessible to a single button. For one thing, this means no hiding options on contextual menus and nowhere else (which Windows suffers greatly for). Contextual menus are what they were supposed to be - a quick way to a few commands that's quicker than going to a menu or toolbar, never a requirements to use the interface.
Wow, mods are asleep today, +5 for a troll. Don't believe me? Let's dissect:
but the single button that forces her to memorize somekey+mouseclick to do basic things the rest of us do with the right mouse button and, in the case of us Linux/*BSD folks, the middle mouse button.
Carefully avoids that due to the one-button-centric design of the Mac, NOTHING requires use of a second button, much less a middle one. If she *wants* to use it that way, she can. Unlike Windows and UNIX, there is no functionality hidden that only a multi-button mouse can get at.
So yes, it is a FLAW, a big, huge, honking flaw the designers and their apologists steadfastly refuse to admit, probably for reasons of pride and irrational fandom.
So all of the posts discussing HCI reviews, simplicity of interface, lack of "hidden" multibutton options (yes, I'm talking about Windows' inconsistent use of contextual menus for EVERYTHING); all of this means nothing? Nothing rational in scientific studies of users, designing all user interface options to be immediately accessible and in-view (so you're not right clicking everything looking for an option), and keeping things simple?
I use a multi-button scrollwheel mouse on Windows. I've seen what it can do to an interface (quick, do you left or right click your taskbar icons to bring up options - you never know!). Things like "right-click drag" and contextual menus really are beyond most people. I'm more than happy to use a single button mouse on my Mac.
And everyone I know who has a mac absolutely hates the one-button mouse, again without exception
Without exception. Right.
Meanwhile, I will feed the troll by offering a solution to the theoretical girlfriend's problems: SideTrack.
Not being able to upgrade the video is a big deal to me. The radeon 9200 chip they have is ok for playing basic mpg's or tetris but that's about it.
Okay, I'm sick of this. You're a gamer, plain and simple. You have to play the latest games when they come out. You upgrade your video card every six months to a year (and it costs over half of a Mac Mini). How do I know this?
Because the built-in graphics on the Mini can handle anything but that particular subset, as can any damn video card today. You can playback any video format you want (especially since I can with an 800Mhz G3 and Radeon 7500) - they tend to be CPU bound these days, as the graphics cards are all insanely powerful. You can play any games up to a couple years ago just fine. If you're getting a Mac in the first place, you're not getting it as a gaming platform, so I see this as moot.
For example, it performs damn well in Quake 3 Arena, a standard for quick benchmarking. 96FPS at highest settings, on a budget $600 computer. Kick. Ass.
And, of course, Apple doesn't believe anyone could want better sound than what they have built in so *no* mac's have upgradable sound. wtf is that about?
Because Apple has always had integrated sound. How long did it take PC's to get beyond a simple startup beep? No, you can't buy a sound card for a Mac - Creative made a half-assed effort several years ago, but since we all already have sound, nobody bought them (that, and the drivers were some of the worst written - ATI worthy). On the other hand, since the G5's (and hopefully others with time) support fibre optic audio out, and OS X supports surround sound, what's the big deal? What would a new sound card add? You're already surround and pure digital - am I missing something?
Is there something wrong with having digital cameras and cameraphones being required to make some sort of confirmation noise when they take a picture? Then they are no more or less discreet than film cameras (shutter/film advancement noises).
haven't his balls even dropped?
I don't know, you might want to ask him.
I don't know, the script-writers seemed to think Tasha was the most expendable. :)
But yeah, Troi was a flake. My fiance and I got a kick out of watching "Disaster" when I called her in with "Hey, Troi's going to be competent for once!".Riker was a great character, once he grew the beard. Solid and reliable, with a playful side - I always remember him holding upa Picard doll saying:
"I don't know, I think it's a pretty good likeness." (holding the doll up and imitating Picard's intonations) "Wouldn't you agree, Number One?"
They certainly never told the employees or pushed this. Other than references to a "challenge" to the IT department to move to Linux, no one seems to have a link. I can't find anything on the w3 Intranet to confirm it.
Look, as many have pointed out, IBM is huge. Unbelievably huge. I saw references to 40,000-60,000 desktops as a target - guys, that is HALF of IBM Global Services alone. IBM quite frankly has a lot of better strategic things to be doing than a disruptive deployment of Linux enterprise-wide.
IBM can be very schizophrenic at times due to its size. I'll take your word for it that there's some kind of push to deploy Linux. There's also a push to dump Lotus SmartSuite internally and use Microsoft Office. Why? Because Smartsuite has received no development attention in years, Office works a hell of a lot better than SmartSuite, and it does little good for sales and other groups to be hobbled when collaborating with partners who want ".doc" and ".xls" files. We're also *still* in the process of certifying Windows XP Service Pack 2 for deployment (which is unbelievably annoying, as all of the patches we need to make it work with internal apps were done one week after launch, but deployment is still delayed). Technically, I saw a "push" to move all internal web use to Mozilla, then not only saw nothing further on the matter but saw more IE-only intranet apps pop up.
One final thing to understand about IBM is we are a technical company. If you can maintain your own build and satisfy inane "security" requirements, then your free to. If I can run Visio and do all of my work in Linux with Wine, no one has any problem with it, but I better not miss a deadline due to it or let it take up too much work time.
As for some specific examples of remaining Windows dependency, the company lives and breathes on Sametime for internal instant messaging, and while there are a variety of internal projects that provide it on Linux (ICT is one I'm soon to be working on), none are "supported", and none notably are from Lotus. As for Lotus, they have a Linux Notes client, but no plans on further development of SmartSuie that I can see. People have mentioned IE and ActiveX use; while several internal apps annoyingly depend on IE, I have seen none in ActiveX. No, what I have seen are Java applets that inexplicably refuse to launch in anything but IE! Something to do with the glue bewteen the web page, authentication they use, and Java. Finally, many groups use programs such as Visio, Aperture, and custom-built departmental tools in Visual Basic. We use a lot of complex Excel spreadsheets that make extensive use of scripting and automation inside the spreadsheet (not simple forumlas, whole UI's created in the spreadsheet); backend systems in Notes are then designed around these file formats to parse and send them on to other groups, further locking us to Office (or Smartsuite in some cases). None of these will work on Linux, obviously.
At this point in time, IBM could move people to Firefox, OpenOffice, and some individual OSS projects if it wanted to, but a full-on move to Linux just is not realistic at all.
Biology/DNA != Algoritms
(Poorly-written Slashdot HTML filter...)
Biology/DNA Algorithms.
You and I must have gotten different agreements - before the transition I had a 1GB/month cap on Comcast, which is why I got a Giganews account in the first place.
Sadly, their old server seems to have bitten the dust in recent weeks. I was unable to authenticate to it as of last week. FWIW...
Comcast just "outsourced" the news to someone who knows what they're doing - GigaNews. Why should Comcast deal with running news servers and the bandwidth, feeds, and disputes involved in what feeds to distribute, when they can just point their users to a slimmed down GigaNews account?
Sure, if you're downloading a lot of binaries, you're going to hit the wall pretty fast. But if you're just doing text, the Comcast/Giganews partnership gives MUCH faster access, MUCH longer article retention, and a MUCH wider array of groups than Comcast ever did.
You lock your windows? Sure you do...
Meanwhile, if every time I got new furniture (bizarre analogy) I had to change out the locks on my doors and windows, yeah, that would be a pain in the ass.
Simple my ass. Unfortunately, the firewall is the best defense and the most pain in the ass to maintain. Any user who runs P2P, chat programs, etc (most users) are going to hate reconfiguring their firewall for each one's requirements.
People need to learn, senstive data is only protected in ONE place, inside our minds.
Keep it there and no one can snoop it.
Amen! That's where I keep my pr0n stash too!
I am completely talking out of my ass here, but I'm just going to hazard a guess and say that scalability, support, and robustness have something to do with those choices. Not to say PostgreSQL and others aren't great, but they are NOT enterprise-grade.
The difference between theory and practice is in theory quite small and in practice quite large. In theory, sure, "private investment" could continue the research, but we all know that's not going to happen.
(apologies for horribly mangled quote)
...this is SubEthaEdit. It's a rendezvous and network-aware text editor designed for collaborative coding that seems to be finding more use. Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free (yes, I know that TextWrangler is also free now).
Is it possible to have a pre-install script search for the proper package by name, even if the CD layout changes? (Forgive my ignorance of the capabilities of the installer framework.)