I don't use OSX for the pretty interface. I use OSX for the very usable interface built on a solid BSD foundation, with a nice big utility door that I can step into when I want or need to get my hands directly onto that BSD foundation.
I don't need two machines or a dual-boot Windows/Linux box. I have my pretty, useful, friendly desktop (fully media-capable too, in a way that linux simply never has been) and if I want my unix-y goodness, I just pop up a terminal. Life is beautiful!
Sorry, I'm still not touching it with a ten foot pole unless I can do adblocking (among other things) with it. First thing I did when I fired up my new 17" Powerbook was delete the Safari icon from my dock.
Surfing without a decent adblocker is just unthinkable to me.
Oh - and none of the (non Firefox) browsers seem to have an option that saves your browser session when you close the application. How sucky is *that*?!
Think about it, who do you think of when you think of a mac user? Granted, there are many out there, but when I think of a hardcore mac user I think of somebody who is into designing music, movies, graphics editing, etc. They are designed to cater to a group of people who are more creative and right brained.
Really? I work for a huge company known for its big iron and most popular unix operating system and a silly coffee-related programming language and a CEO that has been ranked at the bottom of several CEO lists in terms of performance the last few years.
And do you know what most of the developers and engineers I know around here have with them? Their PowerBook.
Am I the only one who is completely unclear on what was intended by this comparison? I read it in the light of "look at the differences between vanilla, french vanilla and home made vanilla"...
As a recent Mac convert (okay, I owned a powerbook for awhile a couple years ago, too), I have to say that two of the three (boring, uninspired) fits for most of the Mac world, too.
Don't get me wrong, I love my powerbook. I am quickly becoming a big Apple fan. However, all of the software looks the same. It all has the same uninspired brushed-metal plastic-shiny interface. And aside from a few big applications and open source stuff, everything else is second-rate after-thoughts (that most certainly goes for games, which seem to be a last minute consideration in most developer's minds, resulting in lame five two or three year old games just-now coming out for Macs).
Yes, the Apple gui is prettier. But really, is there that much more innovation when it comes to applications and software for Apple (video and audio editing aside) than there is for any other platform? I don't really think so.
In fact, I would say that the Apple experience is very Orwellian. "Here is the interface you will use. It is the same as every other interface. Your ability to configure it and later it is very limited, but you will learn to love it and live with it.".
Let's see... in Apple, you can choose from "Aqual blue" and "aqua graphite" color schemes... and.... you can change your desktop wallpaper. Fuck, the CDE window manager has done that for years.
Not to mention, you have to pay for anything decent on the Mac. There are some nice open-source/freeware applications around, but a lot of simple things cost money. I guess Apple developers know that there are enough mac suckers who won't mind paying $10 to be able to collapse their windows into shades, since they spent $3500 on a laptop already. Fuck, even the default browser (Safari) doesn't do most of the simplest Firefox functions -- unless you install some Safari extensions... Oh - by the way - those extensions (tabbed browsing, adblocking, etc) ARE NOT FREE. That's right, you have to PAY for the Safari extensions (unless I've missed something..?) that do what Firefox does for free (except firefox is sloooow on OSX). Amen for innovation, huh?
Granted, Camino can do these things with a few free plugins installed, but they aren't nearly as good. For instance, Adblock is part of one of the plugins, but you can't configure it in any way. You just turn it on or off. So it blocks far fewer advertisements.
Anyway, Mac is great - but it is a very rigid, enforced experience. I hope that will grow as the number of Mac users increases (which I hope happens quicker after the move to Intel chips).
I don't mean that it becomes more difficult to discover new things because there is a fixed number of things to find and more are being found in that limited pool each day.
I mean that, yesterday, you could take a shit and think "I should invent something that cleans your ass. Some sort of... paper product, perhaps". And sure, plumbing could come along and then you could think "I should invent something that cleans your ass". And it would be two different inventions doing somewhat the same thing. One of them would be new tech and the other would be based on existing tech (plumbing).
But most of the big "common man with a creative mind" discoveries that occured up until the Personal Computer... well... have been discovered. Today, the discovery process is more like "I want to invent some sort of hype-directional precise speaker that emits audio in a very finite space in a small device". Of course, the guy who invented those very directional speakers is a billionaire and was before he started inventing them (I think he's the same guy that has been trying to push the hover-car he made for the last decade).
Or, alternately, someone with many years of college and a tuition debt higher than most California residential homes following up on his thesis to seek government or private funding in the millions to pursue his intent to discover some sort of nano-tech-gene-splicing technology that will help cancer patients or something...
I mean, back in the day, you couldn't piss without coming up with a new invention. "Hey, put a candle in a lamp and have portable light!".
Today, any kind of real invention of any value or worth costs money. Lots of money. For design, prototyping, testing (not to mention liability insurance in some case!) - then if you want it to become anything, lawyers, patents, marketing... The rest of the "inventions" are just silly things on the web (I'm sorry, but del.icio.us, though interesting, is not a world-changing invention. Or even a significant "invention") -- or stupid things that some house-wife invents.. like a bag of sand with pockets to latch onto your beach umbrella so it doesn't blow away. Whooptie-fucking-doo.
Oh wow! This is just like the one reported by G4TV/TechTV, Gizmodo, Engadget, every other blog and website and news outlet AND AND SLASHDOT (Cockroach-Controlled Robot)... SIX WEEKS AGO.
Way to stay on top of things, Wired and Slashdot!
Submitter... Editor... is it that fucking hard to punch the word "roach" into the search field before posting? I mean, the duplicate article is the FIRST FUCKING RESULT.
The Foreman grill sucks ass. Have you ever tried hamburger cooked on that thing? It tastes like it was made at Burgerking and left in the heating-steam-bin for six hours. Total crap!
Plus, you don't want your burgers to be compressed from the top. You should never squish your burgers when they're cooking. That dries them out and ruins the flavor.
Yeah, but you also have to admit that the more we discover, the harder it is to discover more. Remember, a couple centuries ago, Franklin was inventing hundreds of things. Well, yeah, because it was easy to invent - say - water flippers or a snorkel back then. I mean, how hard is it to say "hey, if I had a straw in my mouth pointing up, I could breathe underwater"?
But today, the easy inventions are over with. The majority of the things some general jack-of-all-trades in his garage could invent have been invented. Even the personal computer, invented in a garage, has already been invented.
If you want to make some great discovery today, you're not going ot be doing it in your garage or while going about your business. You're going to be doing it in relation to funded research, government grants, a decade in college and many degrees into it. So, yes, of course innovation is "slowing down". Because you spend so much of your life just "catching up" to the knowledge that is now needed that you're a geezer by the time you've got enough behind you to start "inventing" or "discovering". Discoveries aren't cheap. You can't just stare at the sky a few minutes every night to sketch solar flares in your log book to document the behavior of the sun. You're going to need a billion dollar facility with computers, staff, and a big ass telescope.
So yes, perhaps innovation seems to be stagnating in general - but that's largely because the entry-point for great discoveries and innovation is so high now.
Why not lower your standards and hit some torrent trackers? I would think that, unemployed and screwed over by The Man, you could easily justify catching a moderate quality rip for free rather than sticking yet more money in The Man's pockets just after he lubed you up and rode you.
Downloading movies is just like outsourcing. Everyone finds the lowest cost solution they can get away with.
Annual layoffs and cutting 50% of your workforce keeps employees in line, too. When half the offices are empty, you're happy enough to have a place to be at 9:00am, much less give a damn about any raise.
I'm not old enough to have remembered anything about anything to do with space launches and exploration, beyond historical events (landing on the moon almost a decade before I was born or updates about space probes that were sent out before I was born).
The only "big" space events and launches in my life time were the Columbia, which exploded, when I was seven years old, the next successful launch to occur after that disaster (not a big deal, other than everyone in the world tuned in to see if they made it through the launch) and then the explosion upon re-entry a couple years ago.
So really, my generation knows little more of the space program outside of historical events, save for disasters and budget crunches.
People are so narrow-minded and short-sighted that they think "we should be spending money on helping our own people here on earth instead of exploring space". Well, look, there will always be misery and poverty and hunger and war on earth. We're not going to change that and we can't sacrifice exploration and the future of the human race (and ever creature on the planet for that matter) for some fantasy date way off in the future when the world will be perfect and we can proceed with uncharted territory.
Personally, I want us to be a major player in space. We should have stations and colonies already. We should be looking toward a future when mankind has several planets and when his existence as an entire species isn't hinging on the potential devestation of any number of cosmic events that could occur on his home world.
Space exploration is inherently about the continuation of the human race. There is nothing more natural, human or - even - American than that. And damn it, I want to have the awe and thrill of watching heros do amazing things and take amazing risks to explore the universe. My generation needs their own Right Stuff. We need our own glued-to-the-television-in-anticipation experience.
I mean, does anyone even think that landing on the moon a second time is going to be much of a news story? I doubt there will be much coverage (and certainly not real-time) of the launch. And even when they make it to the moon, it will probably rank as a quick blurb in between sports scores and weather on the news. Nothing more. There won't be parades. There won't be speeches. There wont' be much of anything. And I sympathize with the astronauts who probably themselves dream of conguering new territory rather than re-hasing what others have already done.
First cynical point: They'll be using the existing shell design, because they're going to use existing everything. We pay billions, they claim to have redesigned everything, they redesign nothing. They make a few minor cosmetic changes and we all live under the assertion that we live in a brave new NASA world of progress once again while some beaurocrat reappropriates the money for his own black-ops.
Second cynical point: If our one big goal is to go BACK to the MOON within the next decade (or was it twenty years?), why do we need such new complex spacecraft? We did it in April of 1969 with the computing power of today's calculator, but we need a complete overhaul to manage to do something we already did almsot four decades ago?
I'm seeing us spending a lot of money here. Doing a lot of grunt work here. Yet, all we're achieving is the same thing we've already achieved. How disapointing.
Have seen you in the tech support the emails communications of the employees of companies outside of the america?
Seriously, if large companies don't mind outsourcing work that requires heavy communication with their customers to people who (whether or not they speak it) have less than stellar written skills - why should anyone else care? It clearly isn't a prerequisite for gainful employment.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought into the Apple Way, because I could no longer resist the Steve Jobs Personality Distortion Field.
I don't use OSX for the pretty interface. I use OSX for the very usable interface built on a solid BSD foundation, with a nice big utility door that I can step into when I want or need to get my hands directly onto that BSD foundation.
I don't need two machines or a dual-boot Windows/Linux box. I have my pretty, useful, friendly desktop (fully media-capable too, in a way that linux simply never has been) and if I want my unix-y goodness, I just pop up a terminal. Life is beautiful!
Sorry, I'm still not touching it with a ten foot pole unless I can do adblocking (among other things) with it. First thing I did when I fired up my new 17" Powerbook was delete the Safari icon from my dock.
Surfing without a decent adblocker is just unthinkable to me.
Oh - and none of the (non Firefox) browsers seem to have an option that saves your browser session when you close the application. How sucky is *that*?!
Think about it, who do you think of when you think of a mac user? Granted, there are many out there, but when I think of a hardcore mac user I think of somebody who is into designing music, movies, graphics editing, etc. They are designed to cater to a group of people who are more creative and right brained.
Really? I work for a huge company known for its big iron and most popular unix operating system and a silly coffee-related programming language and a CEO that has been ranked at the bottom of several CEO lists in terms of performance the last few years.
And do you know what most of the developers and engineers I know around here have with them? Their PowerBook.
So you're saying that Flash is inspired and exciting?!
WTF is wrong with you, sir?!
look at the changes between NT, 2k and XP
Am I the only one who is completely unclear on what was intended by this comparison? I read it in the light of "look at the differences between vanilla, french vanilla and home made vanilla"...
As a recent Mac convert (okay, I owned a powerbook for awhile a couple years ago, too), I have to say that two of the three (boring, uninspired) fits for most of the Mac world, too.
Don't get me wrong, I love my powerbook. I am quickly becoming a big Apple fan. However, all of the software looks the same. It all has the same uninspired brushed-metal plastic-shiny interface. And aside from a few big applications and open source stuff, everything else is second-rate after-thoughts (that most certainly goes for games, which seem to be a last minute consideration in most developer's minds, resulting in lame five two or three year old games just-now coming out for Macs).
Yes, the Apple gui is prettier. But really, is there that much more innovation when it comes to applications and software for Apple (video and audio editing aside) than there is for any other platform? I don't really think so.
In fact, I would say that the Apple experience is very Orwellian. "Here is the interface you will use. It is the same as every other interface. Your ability to configure it and later it is very limited, but you will learn to love it and live with it.".
Let's see... in Apple, you can choose from "Aqual blue" and "aqua graphite" color schemes... and.... you can change your desktop wallpaper. Fuck, the CDE window manager has done that for years.
Not to mention, you have to pay for anything decent on the Mac. There are some nice open-source/freeware applications around, but a lot of simple things cost money. I guess Apple developers know that there are enough mac suckers who won't mind paying $10 to be able to collapse their windows into shades, since they spent $3500 on a laptop already. Fuck, even the default browser (Safari) doesn't do most of the simplest Firefox functions -- unless you install some Safari extensions... Oh - by the way - those extensions (tabbed browsing, adblocking, etc) ARE NOT FREE. That's right, you have to PAY for the Safari extensions (unless I've missed something..?) that do what Firefox does for free (except firefox is sloooow on OSX). Amen for innovation, huh?
Granted, Camino can do these things with a few free plugins installed, but they aren't nearly as good. For instance, Adblock is part of one of the plugins, but you can't configure it in any way. You just turn it on or off. So it blocks far fewer advertisements.
Anyway, Mac is great - but it is a very rigid, enforced experience. I hope that will grow as the number of Mac users increases (which I hope happens quicker after the move to Intel chips).
Damn. Does EVERYTHING need a "conference" these days?
I think moderators should agree to start modding these posts as off-topic, unless the post has some relevant information
It had a link, you selfish bastard.
Newton.
How long until Apple sues?
I don't mean that it becomes more difficult to discover new things because there is a fixed number of things to find and more are being found in that limited pool each day.
I mean that, yesterday, you could take a shit and think "I should invent something that cleans your ass. Some sort of... paper product, perhaps". And sure, plumbing could come along and then you could think "I should invent something that cleans your ass". And it would be two different inventions doing somewhat the same thing. One of them would be new tech and the other would be based on existing tech (plumbing).
But most of the big "common man with a creative mind" discoveries that occured up until the Personal Computer... well... have been discovered. Today, the discovery process is more like "I want to invent some sort of hype-directional precise speaker that emits audio in a very finite space in a small device". Of course, the guy who invented those very directional speakers is a billionaire and was before he started inventing them (I think he's the same guy that has been trying to push the hover-car he made for the last decade).
Or, alternately, someone with many years of college and a tuition debt higher than most California residential homes following up on his thesis to seek government or private funding in the millions to pursue his intent to discover some sort of nano-tech-gene-splicing technology that will help cancer patients or something...
I mean, back in the day, you couldn't piss without coming up with a new invention. "Hey, put a candle in a lamp and have portable light!".
Today, any kind of real invention of any value or worth costs money. Lots of money. For design, prototyping, testing (not to mention liability insurance in some case!) - then if you want it to become anything, lawyers, patents, marketing... The rest of the "inventions" are just silly things on the web (I'm sorry, but del.icio.us, though interesting, is not a world-changing invention. Or even a significant "invention") -- or stupid things that some house-wife invents.. like a bag of sand with pockets to latch onto your beach umbrella so it doesn't blow away. Whooptie-fucking-doo.
Ruins.
Doesn't anyone watch Good Eats anymore?
Oh wow! This is just like the one reported by G4TV/TechTV, Gizmodo, Engadget, every other blog and website and news outlet AND AND SLASHDOT (Cockroach-Controlled Robot)... SIX WEEKS AGO.
Way to stay on top of things, Wired and Slashdot!
Submitter... Editor... is it that fucking hard to punch the word "roach" into the search field before posting? I mean, the duplicate article is the FIRST FUCKING RESULT.
The Foreman grill sucks ass. Have you ever tried hamburger cooked on that thing? It tastes like it was made at Burgerking and left in the heating-steam-bin for six hours. Total crap!
Plus, you don't want your burgers to be compressed from the top. You should never squish your burgers when they're cooking. That dries them out and ruins the flavor.
Yeah, but you also have to admit that the more we discover, the harder it is to discover more. Remember, a couple centuries ago, Franklin was inventing hundreds of things. Well, yeah, because it was easy to invent - say - water flippers or a snorkel back then. I mean, how hard is it to say "hey, if I had a straw in my mouth pointing up, I could breathe underwater"?
But today, the easy inventions are over with. The majority of the things some general jack-of-all-trades in his garage could invent have been invented. Even the personal computer, invented in a garage, has already been invented.
If you want to make some great discovery today, you're not going ot be doing it in your garage or while going about your business. You're going to be doing it in relation to funded research, government grants, a decade in college and many degrees into it. So, yes, of course innovation is "slowing down". Because you spend so much of your life just "catching up" to the knowledge that is now needed that you're a geezer by the time you've got enough behind you to start "inventing" or "discovering". Discoveries aren't cheap. You can't just stare at the sky a few minutes every night to sketch solar flares in your log book to document the behavior of the sun. You're going to need a billion dollar facility with computers, staff, and a big ass telescope.
So yes, perhaps innovation seems to be stagnating in general - but that's largely because the entry-point for great discoveries and innovation is so high now.
Why not lower your standards and hit some torrent trackers? I would think that, unemployed and screwed over by The Man, you could easily justify catching a moderate quality rip for free rather than sticking yet more money in The Man's pockets just after he lubed you up and rode you.
Downloading movies is just like outsourcing. Everyone finds the lowest cost solution they can get away with.
Hah. You must be new he... oh... nevermind.
Annual layoffs and cutting 50% of your workforce keeps employees in line, too. When half the offices are empty, you're happy enough to have a place to be at 9:00am, much less give a damn about any raise.
Oh, right. The Challenger.
And yes, I'm nine years old. You can tell by the Slashdot UID that I joined when I turned two years old!
Marshall Applewhite? Is that you?
I'm not old enough to have remembered anything about anything to do with space launches and exploration, beyond historical events (landing on the moon almost a decade before I was born or updates about space probes that were sent out before I was born).
The only "big" space events and launches in my life time were the Columbia, which exploded, when I was seven years old, the next successful launch to occur after that disaster (not a big deal, other than everyone in the world tuned in to see if they made it through the launch) and then the explosion upon re-entry a couple years ago.
So really, my generation knows little more of the space program outside of historical events, save for disasters and budget crunches.
People are so narrow-minded and short-sighted that they think "we should be spending money on helping our own people here on earth instead of exploring space". Well, look, there will always be misery and poverty and hunger and war on earth. We're not going to change that and we can't sacrifice exploration and the future of the human race (and ever creature on the planet for that matter) for some fantasy date way off in the future when the world will be perfect and we can proceed with uncharted territory.
Personally, I want us to be a major player in space. We should have stations and colonies already. We should be looking toward a future when mankind has several planets and when his existence as an entire species isn't hinging on the potential devestation of any number of cosmic events that could occur on his home world.
Space exploration is inherently about the continuation of the human race. There is nothing more natural, human or - even - American than that. And damn it, I want to have the awe and thrill of watching heros do amazing things and take amazing risks to explore the universe. My generation needs their own Right Stuff. We need our own glued-to-the-television-in-anticipation experience.
I mean, does anyone even think that landing on the moon a second time is going to be much of a news story? I doubt there will be much coverage (and certainly not real-time) of the launch. And even when they make it to the moon, it will probably rank as a quick blurb in between sports scores and weather on the news. Nothing more. There won't be parades. There won't be speeches. There wont' be much of anything. And I sympathize with the astronauts who probably themselves dream of conguering new territory rather than re-hasing what others have already done.
First cynical point: They'll be using the existing shell design, because they're going to use existing everything. We pay billions, they claim to have redesigned everything, they redesign nothing. They make a few minor cosmetic changes and we all live under the assertion that we live in a brave new NASA world of progress once again while some beaurocrat reappropriates the money for his own black-ops.
Second cynical point: If our one big goal is to go BACK to the MOON within the next decade (or was it twenty years?), why do we need such new complex spacecraft? We did it in April of 1969 with the computing power of today's calculator, but we need a complete overhaul to manage to do something we already did almsot four decades ago?
I'm seeing us spending a lot of money here. Doing a lot of grunt work here. Yet, all we're achieving is the same thing we've already achieved. How disapointing.
It's hard to go to your boss with a request for a raise when there have been company-implemented pay-raise-freezes for several straight years. :)
Have seen you in the tech support the emails communications of the employees of companies outside of the america?
Seriously, if large companies don't mind outsourcing work that requires heavy communication with their customers to people who (whether or not they speak it) have less than stellar written skills - why should anyone else care? It clearly isn't a prerequisite for gainful employment.