Well, I'll agree with you that Apple sometimes gets it wrong. But not here. On Mac OS X, you can do everything you can do with CUPS on other systems, and in addition, as you say, it "has the old Mac printing architecture..."
Also, I actually don't believe the "Macintosh printing GUI is an example of how a bad GUI is worse than none at all." If you ask me, even the admittedly flawed GUI they gave us in Printer Setup is much better than the web-based interface that comes with your stock CUPS installation. It could be better still, of course.
As far as "Aunt Tillie" goes, I happen to think it was patronizing of ESR to invent her in the first place, so I can see where the author of this article was coming from. Especially seeing as how it wasn't ESR's Aunt Tillie who needed help setting up her printer. It was ESR.
"The author is not from the OS community. He's a Mac zealot. What he is really attacking is Linux in general. I think slashdot posted it because ESR-bashing has become fashionable."
Could you possibly bury your head in the sand any deeper? Closing your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la" at the top of your voice isn't going to make the usability problem disappear.
These "power users," if they're smart enough to know how to configure CUPS on Linux, are presumably smart enough to figure out how to do the same thing on Mac OS X, right? After all, the CUPS admin panel is sitting right there at http://localhost:631/, just like you'd expect on a Linux or BSD system.
So in this particular instance, at least, your "power users" lose nothing by using a Mac and gain a great GUI. What was your point again?
Oh, come on. What are you saying that Chicken Little hasn't been yelling for hundreds of years?
Even before the industrial revolution, society was becoming more and more complicated in areas of finance, trade, religion, feudal society, you name it. You could have argued the exact same thing back in the 1600s--"We depend on bankers in Amsterdam too much! If a meteor hits Amsterdam, we're all going to be fucked!" It wasn't true then, and it's not true today.
Consider the blackout that affected the US last August. It wasn't the end of the world. I say this from my perspective in Manhattan, but even in Detroit, who got the worst of it, things were back to normal after a couple weeks.
I guess my point is this: Yes, we live according to all these complicated gadgets and social conventions. But I can't imagine a situation or an emergency that would cause us to be catapulted back to the Stone Age for longer than it takes us to get back on our feet and continue on our merry "overcomplicated" way.
Maybe I'm just not using my imagination. Can you help me out?
[OT] Thanks. I just added you as a friend for that.
On another note, Dreamhost sucks a big fat one, eh? Wish someone had told me before I signed up with them. I think I'll be calling in pretty soon to use that money-back guarantee.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that there's nothing stupid about casting your ballot strategically. Seeing as how you would refuse to do so, then, the only "idiot" here is you.
Would you call someone "idiot" to their face in a public place? Where I'm from that's sufficient grounds for a punch in the face. So why would you call someone an "idiot" here?
Don't apply a strategy to it? Why should I, a rational voter, listen to you telling me not to cast my vote strategically?
Ranked voting sucks. I agree with the OP that it looks good on paper but it would create a whole myriad of new problems in practice, more intractable than the problems it purports to solve.
People are going to strategize no matter what the system. Given that, if you ask me, we might as well just keep things simple.
So like someone up there said... "looks good on a chalkboard, but doesn't pan out in reality."
Anyway, to bring this back on topic, last week's Economist (don't be put off by the title, grasshopper) had a great survey of Chinese politics, culture and business. A fun read and enlightening, too.
I think it's a pretty clear signal that if Microsoft doesn't compete fairly in the future, then they can be expected to get hit again with more fines. "Hey Ballmer, you better clean up your act or you're gonna be donating us another $600M!" So in a way, yeah, it's forcing a change in their corporate behavior.
However, OS X discourages users from running applciations as root or administrator, so what a virus can actually do when running on a BSD-based OS X system is far less harmful that what a virus is free to accomplish on XP.
I don't think that's true. After all, an app doesn't need admin privs to go into someone's address book and email copies of itself (or even random shit in the user's Documents folder) to everyone.
On the bright side, I think you could argue Mac users are smarter than Windows people and are therefore less likely to blindly open executables in their inbox. Oh, and Mail.app gives you a stern warning before you can open an executable attachment. So maybe it's not all brains.
Ah, I was unaware of that. Thanks for clearing that up. Still, I don't think it's accurate to say a "lossy" format like AAC can never be better than a supposedly "lossless" format like CD. You know, since perceptual encoding techniques keep the most important aspects of the waveform and all that technical blah de blah.
What? I know what "fidelity" means. But why does that explain why a lossy format is never going to be more accurate than a CD?
I think you may not be aware that CD mastering is a lossy process, since the original DAT is recorded at a higher bit depth and sampling frequency than CD's 16 bit/44.1kHz.
To make this a little easier to understand, imagine if CD audio was downsampled from the master to 4 bit/2.5 kHz (which is about the quality of plain old telephone service). No way would you say a CD like that was more accurate than a 128kbps MP3 or AAC made straight from the master, right?
Like the other guy said, make it default to some sequential numbering scheme. I've said it elsewhere in this discussion, but take a look at Photoshop's History palette for a good implementation. Each snapshot defaults to "Snapshot n" and you can rename it from the palette if you wish.
Yeah, if by "quick glance" you mean "few seconds of frustration while you search for the Save button hiding in the midst of fifty other tiny toolbar icons, all alike."
Actually, I like the way the Mac handles it (with a little dot in the close window widget). Might not make logical sense, really, but you intuit what that dot means after the first couple times you see it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this post deserved better than 2, Insightful.
Yeah, you can make it look like a Mac. But does it behave like a Mac?
The answer is no.
Well, I'll agree with you that Apple sometimes gets it wrong. But not here. On Mac OS X, you can do everything you can do with CUPS on other systems, and in addition, as you say, it "has the old Mac printing architecture..." Also, I actually don't believe the "Macintosh printing GUI is an example of how a bad GUI is worse than none at all." If you ask me, even the admittedly flawed GUI they gave us in Printer Setup is much better than the web-based interface that comes with your stock CUPS installation. It could be better still, of course.
And the text of a Times article from last September, here. Looks like there's been a mechanical garage working in Hoboken since at least back then.
As far as "Aunt Tillie" goes, I happen to think it was patronizing of ESR to invent her in the first place, so I can see where the author of this article was coming from. Especially seeing as how it wasn't ESR's Aunt Tillie who needed help setting up her printer. It was ESR.
"The author is not from the OS community. He's a Mac zealot. What he is really attacking is Linux in general. I think slashdot posted it because ESR-bashing has become fashionable."
Could you possibly bury your head in the sand any deeper? Closing your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la" at the top of your voice isn't going to make the usability problem disappear.
These "power users," if they're smart enough to know how to configure CUPS on Linux, are presumably smart enough to figure out how to do the same thing on Mac OS X, right? After all, the CUPS admin panel is sitting right there at http://localhost:631/, just like you'd expect on a Linux or BSD system.
So in this particular instance, at least, your "power users" lose nothing by using a Mac and gain a great GUI. What was your point again?
No joke.
I have no idea... Norway? Monaco? Please enlighten me, I'm dying to know!
Forget it.
Oh, come on. What are you saying that Chicken Little hasn't been yelling for hundreds of years?
Even before the industrial revolution, society was becoming more and more complicated in areas of finance, trade, religion, feudal society, you name it. You could have argued the exact same thing back in the 1600s--"We depend on bankers in Amsterdam too much! If a meteor hits Amsterdam, we're all going to be fucked!" It wasn't true then, and it's not true today.
Consider the blackout that affected the US last August. It wasn't the end of the world. I say this from my perspective in Manhattan, but even in Detroit, who got the worst of it, things were back to normal after a couple weeks.
I guess my point is this: Yes, we live according to all these complicated gadgets and social conventions. But I can't imagine a situation or an emergency that would cause us to be catapulted back to the Stone Age for longer than it takes us to get back on our feet and continue on our merry "overcomplicated" way.
Maybe I'm just not using my imagination. Can you help me out?
[OT] Thanks. I just added you as a friend for that.
On another note, Dreamhost sucks a big fat one, eh? Wish someone had told me before I signed up with them. I think I'll be calling in pretty soon to use that money-back guarantee.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that there's nothing stupid about casting your ballot strategically. Seeing as how you would refuse to do so, then, the only "idiot" here is you.
Would you call someone "idiot" to their face in a public place? Where I'm from that's sufficient grounds for a punch in the face. So why would you call someone an "idiot" here?
Don't apply a strategy to it? Why should I, a rational voter, listen to you telling me not to cast my vote strategically?
Ranked voting sucks. I agree with the OP that it looks good on paper but it would create a whole myriad of new problems in practice, more intractable than the problems it purports to solve.
People are going to strategize no matter what the system. Given that, if you ask me, we might as well just keep things simple.
So like someone up there said... "looks good on a chalkboard, but doesn't pan out in reality."
Anyway, to bring this back on topic, last week's Economist (don't be put off by the title, grasshopper) had a great survey of Chinese politics, culture and business. A fun read and enlightening, too.
I think it's a pretty clear signal that if Microsoft doesn't compete fairly in the future, then they can be expected to get hit again with more fines. "Hey Ballmer, you better clean up your act or you're gonna be donating us another $600M!" So in a way, yeah, it's forcing a change in their corporate behavior.
I don't think that's true. After all, an app doesn't need admin privs to go into someone's address book and email copies of itself (or even random shit in the user's Documents folder) to everyone.
On the bright side, I think you could argue Mac users are smarter than Windows people and are therefore less likely to blindly open executables in their inbox. Oh, and Mail.app gives you a stern warning before you can open an executable attachment. So maybe it's not all brains.
yours
Not surprisingly, a lot of "cult of Mac" people are "cult of TiVo" people as well. I should know--I'm one of them.
Tell me. Is there something written on my forehead that says "beleaguered"?
Will you be my friend?
Ah, I was unaware of that. Thanks for clearing that up. Still, I don't think it's accurate to say a "lossy" format like AAC can never be better than a supposedly "lossless" format like CD. You know, since perceptual encoding techniques keep the most important aspects of the waveform and all that technical blah de blah.
Probably. GIMP ripped everything else off Photoshop, why not the History palette too? :-)
What? I know what "fidelity" means. But why does that explain why a lossy format is never going to be more accurate than a CD?
I think you may not be aware that CD mastering is a lossy process, since the original DAT is recorded at a higher bit depth and sampling frequency than CD's 16 bit/44.1kHz.
To make this a little easier to understand, imagine if CD audio was downsampled from the master to 4 bit/2.5 kHz (which is about the quality of plain old telephone service). No way would you say a CD like that was more accurate than a 128kbps MP3 or AAC made straight from the master, right?
yours
Like the other guy said, make it default to some sequential numbering scheme. I've said it elsewhere in this discussion, but take a look at Photoshop's History palette for a good implementation. Each snapshot defaults to "Snapshot n" and you can rename it from the palette if you wish.
yours
Wow. This is EXACTLY right. A post like this deserves more than Score:0... c'mon, mods.
Yeah, if by "quick glance" you mean "few seconds of frustration while you search for the Save button hiding in the midst of fifty other tiny toolbar icons, all alike."
Actually, I like the way the Mac handles it (with a little dot in the close window widget). Might not make logical sense, really, but you intuit what that dot means after the first couple times you see it.
yours