> refuse blood transfusions and organ transplants, but I don't think its against their religion to give blood samples.
Being raised in that religion*, I can tell you authoritatively that among Jehovah's Witnesses, donating organs or blood (as opposed to being the recipient of said donations) is generally left up to the discretion of the individual. The leaders and the organization itself, has taken no stance one way or the other. Some wouldn't donate blood to a blood bank, etc. But others do and have no problem with it.
There is certainly no way a J.W. would feel uncomfortable giving blood for administrative reasons like this, or blood tests for disease, etc. __ * I left that organization in 1998 or so...i guess i should say IANAJW;)
Okay, well first off I guess i didn't really take into account/.'s current status, as opposed to the proposed new designs. I still stand behind my font face statement, I oppose leaving it set to browser default because New Roman is a horrible choice in its own right, and because it makes/. look incredibly generic. And because, once again, virtually nobody "chose" TNR. They left it that way after MS chose because they don't even know there is such a thing as a choice, or that theoretically the user should be able to control the formatting of the content if they choose to. Users see the Internet as just like TV. They can't decide what actors play parts on TV shows, or whether the news anchor is a male or female, or the font used in graphics, so why would they have a choice on the computer?
As to size, however, you're right because sizes are specified as "100%" now and it's not too bad.
As for "professionally designed," from looking at many of the submissions, many of them are from professional designers, and (assuming they are the best) I would expect one of them to win. Which would make/. "professionally designed" but of course with an interesting method of paying for it (free laptop). But you're right that it's not necessarily going to be that way. But I just want it to at least look like a pro designed it, regardless of the winner's credentials.
I wouldn't--and for the same reason "100%" is not an appropriate text size. Because most browsers use a huge font size by default and the Times New Roman face, which is an abomination knockoff we owe to MS being too cheap to license the real Times. Couldn't afford it, MS??
The significance is, sure, you and I can set a sensible default font face and size. However, it is unacceptable for any professionally-designed site to look like crap on a default-configured computer. Any casual user who stumbled upon it would think/. was designed by idiots, and wouldn't stick around long enough to even know the real "philosophy" behind the design decision.
It's just that browser defaults with respect to fonts, etc. don't mean anything anymore, and the designer should just assume that settings such as those are set to their defaults and that they are not that way because the user prefers the default, but rather because they have no idea they can change it.
As much as I don't like Walmart (which is a bunch), I think they deserve some praise for being trailblazers in using these technologies in the US, for several reasons:
1. These things are mostly unheard-of on US roads. It's good that they're bringing it here. 2. Sure, they're going to realize cost savings, but they're also going to be benefiting others by not polluting the air as much. 3. Everyone follows Walmart's lead in matters of logistics efficiency (they wrote the book), so once they start using these cool new trucks, it will catch on quickly to others when they see the fuel savings.
So all the power to them. For once, they're on the right side of an issue.
Unless of course you use Verizon, in which case they've crippled your phone for you so that you have no ability to send pictures etc to and from your phone using Bluetooth.
Unless you're a geek who's willing to take your phone's life into your hands, you're screwed and can't get the pix off except through them (by paying of course).
No comment on whether I've done this with my Verizon phone.;)
> as long as they're working on it Well, we wish they were working on it...
But have they even released more than one version since OS X came out? Other than maybe a minor bugfix or something, I haven't seen it. It still looks just as god-awful as ever. I doubt anyone who wrote the Mac version of Messenger (or anything else Yahoo may have once made for Mac) is even with the company anymore.
> Even pedestrian users are more sophisticated now; I've seen Average Users. One of them sits in front of me frequently in a class at my university. She runs XP on a Compaq. She runs the brilliant screen at full brightness in a totally dark theater, blinding everyone around. When I asked her to turn her brightness down, she had no idea what that was or that it was even possible. Seeing her bewilderment, her idiot friend next to her tried to guide her into Windows' Display Properties dialog, which of course is completely unrelated to the brightness on Windows, which if you have a Windows laptop you know is controlled by an F-key in combination with your "FN" key. The little purple-on-black icons on her key caps were far beyond the level I wanted to have to educate this Average User, in whispers, in the middle of a lecture so I got up and moved far, far away from her. Also, this same Average User, every few sentences likes to save her work in MS Word. That's cool. Ctrl-S, right? Nope. "Floppy-disk" save icon on toolbar, then? Nope. File, Save? Wrong again! Try:
File,
Save As...
Navigates to and/or clicks the file she is already working in.
Save.
"Do you want to replace the file 'filename'? YES.
She does that EVERY TIME.
That is an average user. And if you don't believe me, you've been away from Users too long.
> if they run Windows, they're usually aware of the trouble that brings when you're exposed to the Internet. I think you're right, but don't you agree that most 'pedestrian' computer users, when asked, wouldn't know what operating system they ran, and wouldn't know that Windows, specifically, is the problem? They figure "The Internet" is the problem, or "hackers." If asked, "What's Windows?" they would answer... "It's part of the computer. Sometimes you have to reinstall Windows, when the computer stops working and you lose all your documents and music." Slashdot Reader: "Would you like to not use Windows?" User: Um, what do you mean? S.R.: You know you could use another operating system instead of Windows. Some people do that so they can't get Windows viruses. User: I can? What's an operating system? S.R.: Windows is an operating system, for instance. But there are others too. There's one called Mac. It's really easy and well-designed. Apple makes a couple of great Mac computers with built-in webcams. User: Would I still be able to go on the Internet Explorer? I can't miss any messages on Myspace.com. S.R.: You can still use the Internet. All OSs can go on the Internet. User: What about my MSN? S.R.: MSN? What do you mean? User: My MSN Messenger. I love to video chat on my MSN. Also I like to voice chat with my friends. S.R.: Well, actually, you can't do that on MSN Messenger on a Mac. You can only type back and forth. But on a Mac they have something like that. It's called iChat AV. User: And I can talk to my friends who are on MSN with it? S.R.: No, you can't. But if they sign up for AIM... User: No, my friends and I don't like AIM. But that's okay, I can use Yahoo! right? S.R.: Yahoo! Messenger? User: Yeah. Can I do video chat? Those cool skins and stuff? S.R.: No, there's a Yahoo! Messenger for Mac, but it's only for text chatting too. User: So I couldn't video chat with my friends anymore. S.R.: Well, you might be able to dual-boot into Windows XP and use MSN and Yahoo. User: Oh cool, so I could chat on MSN then with video, because it has that webcam. S.R.: No, the webcam only works when you're running Mac OS X. You'd have to buy a separate Webcam if y
> Apple would just release its own pro app to replace it Maybe. And maybe it'd be pretty good, too. But no one would buy it or use it. People want to use the tools they've learned and worked with for years. Nobody wants to start all over again with Apple Glamour Shot Pro (this is what apple would call its Photoshop 'replacement'). Faced with the choice of buying a cheaper computer and getting a big cross-grade discount on a great new version of Photoshop that everybody else is using, or paying full price for a v1.0 of Apple's newest pro app--that they'd have to completely relearn--on an Apple machine that cost a 20% premium already... I think the 'creatives' will choose Adobe over Apple.
> Apple's Pro apps like FCP and Aperture, which won't be ported to Windows Well Final Cut, I agree, has some value because it's so widely used in the TV industry. But it's probably the only Apple app of value. Apple might spin the group off (see FileMaker, which started out as a Mac app, and is now a Windows program developed by wholly owned subsidiary FileMaker.) As for Aperture, it's barely a year old, and has no real following. It'll be discontinued along with the rest.
> the company is in the best position it has been for years
I agree with you there. It's important to make a distinction, though, between Apple Computer, Inc.*, and the Mac. Apple Computer doesn't have to keep making computers and OS to stay profitable and stay in business. Perhaps Apple feels it would be better off putting the Mac division engineers to work on other things instead of Macs. Sure the Mac division makes a little money, but not as much as the iPod division now. And the Mac division is showing very little growth, while the iPod division is growing every quarter. Apple owes it to the shareholders to discontinue the Mac and focus on an area where they actually stand a chance at winning--consumer electronics. iPods, today. Set-top boxes, tomorrow. Mobile phone, any day now. Apple has a promising future. The Mac, however, does not. This is not the final nail in the coffin, but it's a nail nonetheless.
Apple could consider spinning the Mac division off or selling control to a third party, though, instead of killing it off itself. They could extract a little more money out of it that way.
Slashdotters: Who would be the top 3 bidders for the Mac division? My guesses:
Microsoft (yes, they'd buy it. Yes, they'd fire everyone and shut it down. Yes, the DOJ would let them get away with it.)
Adobe--might like to ship an all-in-one "creative suite" including OS and maybe hardware for easier support
Sony - has nice hardware but no real OS option besides Windows...they might like to offer the Mac OS X as an option on their PCs.
* Quit laughing. The "Computer" in Apple Computer can be like the "Telegraph" in AT&T. Purely vestigial.
The average user? REALIZE? The average user doesn't even KNOW what an operating system IS!! Not even slightly! All they know is, if there's no "Start" button, this must be some weird mac apple computer or something, and, the response: *cringe* jeez, don't you guys have any PCs?
And where the hell is the blue "e"? I guess Mac doesn't have the Internet does it. I mean, if it did, surely I'd be able to see the blue "e" somewhere...but there's no "e" anywhere!
And why isn't there a button to make this window with two icons in it COVER THE WHOLE DAMN SCREEN?!!?! WHERE IS THAT BUTTON?!! The one with a rectangle on it!
Yeeeeeah. I think you're suspecting way too much if you think average uers are going to realize ANYTHING.
> Adobe (and by default Macromedia) aren't going to alienate the Mac graphics crowd by dropping OS X.... [N]early all professionals who use Macs aren't going to stand for being told they have to boot into XP for day-to-day work.
That's right! Those professionals and designers, faced with the prospect of losing support and future development for all their software tools, wouldn't just sit there and take that! Instead they would, um... write all their own software? Um, "...would switch to using The Gimp for their entire workflow!" Hmm...that doesn't sound right either. Oh, wait:
"...would buy a Dell as their next computer and run the Windows versions!" Yeah, that sounds about right!
I actually think what will happen when vendors like Adobe announce they're dropping Mac OS X development, is that they'll give a generous crossgrade discount to owners of the Mac versions, more than enough to pay for an XP Home (or Vista HomeOneOfEightWhateverEdition) license...the end users won't even face any extra expense.
People here just don't seem to face the facts: Once a vendor (Apple) loses faith in its own platform, no amount of consumer "demand" is going to bring it back. People can wish they had a (viable) alternative to Windows all they want--there still won't be one. That's why there are no Amigas or OS/2 machines being sold today. The platforms were abandoned or died, and no matter how much their respective fan[boy]s wanted to keep them around, they faded into obsolescence and obscurity. Facts:
There will be no major firms (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, Quark, Intuit, Internet firms such as Yahoo and AOL, etc.) developing on the Mac platform, starting from about 18 months from now.
Apple will discontinue all Macs as well as Mac OS X by 2010.
PS: Written on a PowerBook, I'm no MS fanboy myself. Hate Windows with a fiery passion.
Windows is 10 times better than Myspace.com in aesthetics, ease of use, and reliability, and millions of people voluntarily sign up on Myspace every day!
Lesson: In 2006, people don't care if something's crap. They want cheap cheap cheap. (And in the case of Myspace, they want "free" and "to get laid tonight").
You make very good and interesting points. Of course, consider that the administration isn't really all that concerned with what's costly to the government. I mean, most of the money they're paying is going from the government (which they _want_ to bankrupt) directly to huge corporations like Halliburton (whom they want to have the money). So it's not expensive to them. It's expensive to the taxpayers who aren't getting tax cuts (i.e. the poor). And the poor are too often worried about stupid things like boobies on TV to oppose Republicans. Thus, they have sort of got the whole "expensive" thing all sown up. They can borrow almost infinitely and no one would stop them.
As for the white people vs brown people thing, honestly that didn't occur to me much before. It's interesting. I wonder if people really would be more upset if we were carpet bombing France instead of the middle east. I don't know the answer to that.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Now, I wonder why you're a Foe-of-Friend to me? I think i'll have to counteract it by friending you.
> They can't wage a military war and win but they can boycott our products and win.
If we could attack Iraq based on the flimsy crap we used, who's to say we wouldn't invade nations that formed an organized boycott of our products, and MAKE them buy our products? Look at how we're making Iraq use our contractors to rebuild their country.
That's awfully arbitrary. A couple pages would be okay, but chapters are sacred and must not be copied!
What if I published a 2-page book containing only two sentences? Nothing in the law would prevent me from registering a copyright on it the same as a "normal" book.
If you found that at the library or a friend's house, and read it and memorized it, would you be infringing my copyright if you wrote it down later because you found my two sentences incredibly witty? After all, it's the WHOLE BOOK! This is for personal use and not for selling or exhibiting in any way, mind you. Just like downloading music is.
What if you used my book as an e-mail or/. sig, would you be liable to be sued by me for millions?
What I'm getting at here is, the law shouldn't hold someone liable for proving someone's business model bad. The RIAA members are claiming that they own certain patterns of sound waves that are easily reproducible. What they ultimately want is to be paid every time you hear a song, not just once when you acquire it. They created commercial music radio, where copyrighted music is broadcast--for free, in the clear--and then they scream in agony because the people are choosing what they want to hear, and refusing to pay $18 for one half-assed song that they'll probably listen to 2 times. They're saying, "What you're selling is not worth $18. But I'm going to listen to it a few times for free, just like people who listen to the radio do."
Imagine you and a friend are both out eating lunch. The restaurant is playing a local radio station on the speakers. You have your iPod on, listening to a couple of songs you downloaded last night on Gnutella. Two songs come on the radio, Song A and Song B. Your friend listens to the songs. You, on your iPod, happen to be listening simultaneously to Song A and Song B at the same time!
The RIAA would have you believe that you have committed a tort against them, but your friend has not. (They actually would like for you, and the public, to believe that you've committed a felony, but that's because they're assholes.) How can that be? The two of you were listening to the exact same sound waves! It's absurd to claim that just because you can pause a track and your friend can't, that you are a "pirate"! You could hear the same music the same amount for free just by adjusting your radio dial skillfully enough! You just chose to skip that part. If their case against you in this instance has legal merit, then that means only one thing: The law is stupid, and needs to change.
That wouldn't work on most dorm systems. They tend to share a single or a few outgoing numbers, that don't work for calling in. So when you call an ANI like that, or someone with caller ID, it's not your real number. It's set up that way so they don't have to pay for like 1000 outgoing lines when only a few will be in use at a time.
A more likely way to get your number would be to call your dorm's front desk or office. Most of the PBX-type phone systems they have support a kind of "caller id" internally, even though the cheap phones they put in dorms don't have screens. Anyway, the desk probably has your number pop up when you call them.
You're wrong when you say AT&T Wireless ("ATTWS") was "100% owned by AT&T" when it was bought by Cingular. At that time, ATTWS was NOT part of AT&T. AT&T spun off ATTWS in 2001, after which point it might as well have been called 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Wireless'—it had no ownership connection with AT&T after that.
ATTWS simply retained the exclusive right to use the AT&T name in the wireless space, simply for branding reasons. Also, ATTWS had a partnership with AT&T to cross-sell wireless and local phone service, which was very similar to the partnership between DISH Network and SBC (ahem, at&t)--they cross-sold "bundles" because they had no competing services with one another. Partnership != ownership though.
My wife got one of these TaxCut CDs, too. The letter (which arrived a week or two before the CD) said the SSN would be "embedded in a very long string of digits" or something, so "don't worry, no one will ever suspect it's your SSN"...but in reality it was just something like "AB333224444" or something.
When you use safeway.com (or vons.com, etc. All the safeway-owned stores that do delivery) and add your clubcard to your account, you can view all your previous purchases. Whether in the store or online.
The first time I went to that part of the site, I was surprised to find white shoe polish that I'd bought in the store for my ex-girlfriend two years before...and quite a few similar "I remember when I bought that!!" things. It was fascinating.
It's not perfect, and it doesn't give you stats or details on how often you bought things, but it sure is neat.
Also, it shows an indicator on the product page that "you've bought this before." I think it's a thumbs-up sign. It's pretty handy for when you're not sure which variety of something you got before.
Try it if you have a Safeway-owned chain in your area. You don't have to buy anything online to sign up and add your card, so even if having your groceries delivered isn't your thing, you can test it out.
If Flash or SVG or any other of the current technologies could do any of these features, MS wouldn't have had to create this new system.
Sorry, I stopped reading right there. Are you high??
When has MS EVER looked at competitors' standards and said anything but, "Let's make our own standard that does most of the same things, but is incompatible, and we'll break everyone else's product because everyone will use whatever we put into Windows"?
Say what you want about whether competing technologies could have done the job, but don't pretend that if they did, MS would embrace them and use them. That's just foolish.
Java, proprietary HTML (how about the for and event attributes on <script>?), screwed-up CSS, JavaScript (MS: JScript), etc. etc. The list goes on for hours.
In fact, I'm surprised Microsoft use.TXT files still, instead of wrapping all plaintext files in pseudo-html and using a "new and improved" "Windows Notepad" which would really just be another shell for MSHTML (I.E.) to read them. They could have done the same for JPEG and GIF files and strike another blow for breaking all other OSs! But they didn't so there must be a limit to their evil.
Ok, i did go back and read a little more: It does [...] making a 3D Cube spin in front of a building with clouds going by, and the 3D Cube has User Controls and Interface items on it.
Oh, my, GOD. That is going to be the interface in the next Windows after Vista, isn't it? It's just sadistic enough to be true!
Child pornography (as a product) requires commiting heinous crimes to produce it.
That's not necessarily true. Maybe this is what you meant by "as a product," but in any case, consider the hypothetical case of a 15-year-old girl who takes a few sexy pictures of herself for the exclusive viewing of her 15-year-old boyfriend, who never shares them with anyone. If cops find those pics on his computer/desk/nightstand/sock drawer, he can probably get tried as an adult (and convicted and sent to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison) for possession of child pornography...that's just how powerful those two words are. I'm not taking a position on whether that's sane, but surely you don't think Miss Teen Girl or Mr. Boyfriend committed heinous crimes in that case. Sure there are a lot of sick people out there, but "child porn" is a hot-button issue which turns most people from "let's see if any harm may have been done" to "BURN THE BASTARD AT THE STAKE!!"
There is no version of MS anything that will read the disk upon insertion. You have to click the drive in moderm windows versions, or poll the drive with 'dir' or some other function in older versions. Mac on the other hand reads the disk immediately (usually to check for the file system type) which does represent a bigger hole with floppies than with windows based machines.
You are completely mistaken, unless you are defining "disk" as "only floppy disks, specifically excluding CD, DVD, removable USB media, Zip drives, LS-120, etc." Why you would do that baffles me, since floppy disks are as dead as Betamax these days.
Mac OS 9 and X DO mount all drives when they are connected or when a removable disk is inserted. MOUNT. Mac OS 9 and X DO NOT execute anything from any disk upon insertion, EVER. They mount the disk.
Windows 95 and up have a "feature," on by default unless you edit the registry or use TweakUI or a similar utility, or hunt through various obscure Windows dialogs, which upon connecting of hard drives, or insertion of removable discs besides floppies:
A: Mount the filesystem. B: Check for the existence of autorun.inf in the drive root; C: Assign any icon given in autorun.inf to the drive in Explorer; D: Execute any programs, from the disc or elsewhere, requested by autorun.inf.
Google for "autorun.inf" if you want more details on how to use this. This is probably what the behavior the grandparent was referring to.
Floppies are probably only excluded from autorun.inf because the cheap bargain-basement 3.5" floppy drives in all Windows PCs since the beginning of time are incapable of notifying the OS when a disk has been inserted. The OS would have to poll constantly to automatically mount the disk. These drives also do not have a motor to eject the disc when the OS is finished with it. Contrast this with the floppy drives in every floppy-bearing Mac since the beginning--they had both software eject AND OS notification of disk insertion.
A less likely explanation for why MS didn't enable this behavior for floppies might have (surprisingly) been security--in 1995, a CD was something you bought from a large company, which wouldn't let a virus get onto it, while a floppy was what you constantly used to transport all your data. A smart virus, any fool can see, would have exploited the autorun.inf to infect any floppies you used, and the first time the drive was accessed they would execute. Obviously now things are different, but it is still much harder for a virus to infect Write-once media, especially since most burned CDs are burned by a user's choice of burning software. USB keys, however, would be a good attack vector, especially for a deliberate malware-spreader. I use autorun.inf on my USB key to apply a custom icon (a photo of my USB key). Makes for easy recognition in "My Computer" when on someone else's machine with 5 other drives on it.
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> refuse blood transfusions and organ transplants, but I don't think its against their religion to give blood samples.
;)
Being raised in that religion*, I can tell you authoritatively that among Jehovah's Witnesses, donating organs or blood (as opposed to being the recipient of said donations) is generally left up to the discretion of the individual. The leaders and the organization itself, has taken no stance one way or the other. Some wouldn't donate blood to a blood bank, etc. But others do and have no problem with it.
There is certainly no way a J.W. would feel uncomfortable giving blood for administrative reasons like this, or blood tests for disease, etc.
__
* I left that organization in 1998 or so...i guess i should say IANAJW
Okay, well first off I guess i didn't really take into account /.'s current status, as opposed to the proposed new designs. I still stand behind my font face statement, I oppose leaving it set to browser default because New Roman is a horrible choice in its own right, and because it makes /. look incredibly generic. And because, once again, virtually nobody "chose" TNR. They left it that way after MS chose because they don't even know there is such a thing as a choice, or that theoretically the user should be able to control the formatting of the content if they choose to. Users see the Internet as just like TV. They can't decide what actors play parts on TV shows, or whether the news anchor is a male or female, or the font used in graphics, so why would they have a choice on the computer?
/. "professionally designed" but of course with an interesting method of paying for it (free laptop). But you're right that it's not necessarily going to be that way. But I just want it to at least look like a pro designed it, regardless of the winner's credentials.
As to size, however, you're right because sizes are specified as "100%" now and it's not too bad.
As for "professionally designed," from looking at many of the submissions, many of them are from professional designers, and (assuming they are the best) I would expect one of them to win. Which would make
Best topical humor ever.
Can I make that my sig?
-DP
I wouldn't--and for the same reason "100%" is not an appropriate text size. Because most browsers use a huge font size by default and the Times New Roman face, which is an abomination knockoff we owe to MS being too cheap to license the real Times. Couldn't afford it, MS??
/. was designed by idiots, and wouldn't stick around long enough to even know the real "philosophy" behind the design decision.
The significance is, sure, you and I can set a sensible default font face and size. However, it is unacceptable for any professionally-designed site to look like crap on a default-configured computer. Any casual user who stumbled upon it would think
It's just that browser defaults with respect to fonts, etc. don't mean anything anymore, and the designer should just assume that settings such as those are set to their defaults and that they are not that way because the user prefers the default, but rather because they have no idea they can change it.
As much as I don't like Walmart (which is a bunch), I think they deserve some praise for being trailblazers in using these technologies in the US, for several reasons:
1. These things are mostly unheard-of on US roads. It's good that they're bringing it here.
2. Sure, they're going to realize cost savings, but they're also going to be benefiting others by not polluting the air as much.
3. Everyone follows Walmart's lead in matters of logistics efficiency (they wrote the book), so once they start using these cool new trucks, it will catch on quickly to others when they see the fuel savings.
So all the power to them. For once, they're on the right side of an issue.
> That's what Bluetooth is for.
;)
Unless of course you use Verizon, in which case they've crippled your phone for you so that you have no ability to send pictures etc to and from your phone using Bluetooth.
Unless you're a geek who's willing to take your phone's life into your hands, you're screwed and can't get the pix off except through them (by paying of course).
No comment on whether I've done this with my Verizon phone.
> as long as they're working on it
Well, we wish they were working on it...
But have they even released more than one version since OS X came out? Other than maybe a minor bugfix or something, I haven't seen it. It still looks just as god-awful as ever. I doubt anyone who wrote the Mac version of Messenger (or anything else Yahoo may have once made for Mac) is even with the company anymore.
I've seen Average Users. One of them sits in front of me frequently in a class at my university. She runs XP on a Compaq. She runs the brilliant screen at full brightness in a totally dark theater, blinding everyone around. When I asked her to turn her brightness down, she had no idea what that was or that it was even possible. Seeing her bewilderment, her idiot friend next to her tried to guide her into Windows' Display Properties dialog, which of course is completely unrelated to the brightness on Windows, which if you have a Windows laptop you know is controlled by an F-key in combination with your "FN" key. The little purple-on-black icons on her key caps were far beyond the level I wanted to have to educate this Average User, in whispers, in the middle of a lecture so I got up and moved far, far away from her. Also, this same Average User, every few sentences likes to save her work in MS Word. That's cool. Ctrl-S, right? Nope. "Floppy-disk" save icon on toolbar, then? Nope. File, Save? Wrong again! Try:
She does that EVERY TIME.
That is an average user. And if you don't believe me, you've been away from Users too long.
> if they run Windows, they're usually aware of the trouble that brings when you're exposed to the Internet.
I think you're right, but don't you agree that most 'pedestrian' computer users, when asked, wouldn't know what operating system they ran, and wouldn't know that Windows, specifically, is the problem? They figure "The Internet" is the problem, or "hackers." If asked, "What's Windows?" they would answer...
"It's part of the computer. Sometimes you have to reinstall Windows, when the computer stops working and you lose all your documents and music."
Slashdot Reader: "Would you like to not use Windows?"
User: Um, what do you mean?
S.R.: You know you could use another operating system instead of Windows. Some people do that so they can't get Windows viruses.
User: I can? What's an operating system?
S.R.: Windows is an operating system, for instance. But there are others too. There's one called Mac. It's really easy and well-designed. Apple makes a couple of great Mac computers with built-in webcams.
User: Would I still be able to go on the Internet Explorer? I can't miss any messages on Myspace.com.
S.R.: You can still use the Internet. All OSs can go on the Internet.
User: What about my MSN?
S.R.: MSN? What do you mean?
User: My MSN Messenger. I love to video chat on my MSN. Also I like to voice chat with my friends.
S.R.: Well, actually, you can't do that on MSN Messenger on a Mac. You can only type back and forth. But on a Mac they have something like that. It's called iChat AV.
User: And I can talk to my friends who are on MSN with it?
S.R.: No, you can't. But if they sign up for AIM...
User: No, my friends and I don't like AIM. But that's okay, I can use Yahoo! right?
S.R.: Yahoo! Messenger?
User: Yeah. Can I do video chat? Those cool skins and stuff?
S.R.: No, there's a Yahoo! Messenger for Mac, but it's only for text chatting too.
User: So I couldn't video chat with my friends anymore.
S.R.: Well, you might be able to dual-boot into Windows XP and use MSN and Yahoo.
User: Oh cool, so I could chat on MSN then with video, because it has that webcam.
S.R.: No, the webcam only works when you're running Mac OS X. You'd have to buy a separate Webcam if y
Maybe. And maybe it'd be pretty good, too. But no one would buy it or use it. People want to use the tools they've learned and worked with for years. Nobody wants to start all over again with Apple Glamour Shot Pro (this is what apple would call its Photoshop 'replacement'). Faced with the choice of buying a cheaper computer and getting a big cross-grade discount on a great new version of Photoshop that everybody else is using, or paying full price for a v1.0 of Apple's newest pro app--that they'd have to completely relearn--on an Apple machine that cost a 20% premium already... I think the 'creatives' will choose Adobe over Apple.
> Apple's Pro apps like FCP and Aperture, which won't be ported to Windows
Well Final Cut, I agree, has some value because it's so widely used in the TV industry. But it's probably the only Apple app of value. Apple might spin the group off (see FileMaker, which started out as a Mac app, and is now a Windows program developed by wholly owned subsidiary FileMaker.) As for Aperture, it's barely a year old, and has no real following. It'll be discontinued along with the rest.
> the company is in the best position it has been for years
I agree with you there. It's important to make a distinction, though, between Apple Computer, Inc.*, and the Mac. Apple Computer doesn't have to keep making computers and OS to stay profitable and stay in business. Perhaps Apple feels it would be better off putting the Mac division engineers to work on other things instead of Macs. Sure the Mac division makes a little money, but not as much as the iPod division now. And the Mac division is showing very little growth, while the iPod division is growing every quarter. Apple owes it to the shareholders to discontinue the Mac and focus on an area where they actually stand a chance at winning--consumer electronics. iPods, today. Set-top boxes, tomorrow. Mobile phone, any day now. Apple has a promising future. The Mac, however, does not. This is not the final nail in the coffin, but it's a nail nonetheless.
Apple could consider spinning the Mac division off or selling control to a third party, though, instead of killing it off itself. They could extract a little more money out of it that way.
Slashdotters: Who would be the top 3 bidders for the Mac division? My guesses:
* Quit laughing. The "Computer" in Apple Computer can be like the "Telegraph" in AT&T. Purely vestigial.
n/t
> ...the average user is going to realize...
The average user? REALIZE? The average user doesn't even KNOW what an operating system IS!! Not even slightly! All they know is, if there's no "Start" button, this must be some weird mac apple computer or something, and, the response: *cringe* jeez, don't you guys have any PCs?
And where the hell is the blue "e"? I guess Mac doesn't have the Internet does it. I mean, if it did, surely I'd be able to see the blue "e" somewhere...but there's no "e" anywhere!
And why isn't there a button to make this window with two icons in it COVER THE WHOLE DAMN SCREEN?!!?! WHERE IS THAT BUTTON?!! The one with a rectangle on it!
Yeeeeeah. I think you're suspecting way too much if you think average uers are going to realize ANYTHING.
[N]early all professionals who use Macs aren't going to stand for being told they have to boot into XP for day-to-day work.
That's right! Those professionals and designers, faced with the prospect of losing support and future development for all their software tools, wouldn't just sit there and take that! Instead they would, um... write all their own software? Um, "...would switch to using The Gimp for their entire workflow!" Hmm...that doesn't sound right either. Oh, wait:
"...would buy a Dell as their next computer and run the Windows versions!"
Yeah, that sounds about right!
I actually think what will happen when vendors like Adobe announce they're dropping Mac OS X development, is that they'll give a generous crossgrade discount to owners of the Mac versions, more than enough to pay for an XP Home (or Vista HomeOneOfEightWhateverEdition) license...the end users won't even face any extra expense.
People here just don't seem to face the facts: Once a vendor (Apple) loses faith in its own platform, no amount of consumer "demand" is going to bring it back. People can wish they had a (viable) alternative to Windows all they want--there still won't be one. That's why there are no Amigas or OS/2 machines being sold today. The platforms were abandoned or died, and no matter how much their respective fan[boy]s wanted to keep them around, they faded into obsolescence and obscurity.
Facts:
PS: Written on a PowerBook, I'm no MS fanboy myself. Hate Windows with a fiery passion.
Windows is 10 times better than Myspace.com in aesthetics, ease of use, and reliability, and millions of people voluntarily sign up on Myspace every day!
Lesson: In 2006, people don't care if something's crap. They want cheap cheap cheap. (And in the case of Myspace, they want "free" and "to get laid tonight").
You make very good and interesting points. Of course, consider that the administration isn't really all that concerned with what's costly to the government. I mean, most of the money they're paying is going from the government (which they _want_ to bankrupt) directly to huge corporations like Halliburton (whom they want to have the money). So it's not expensive to them. It's expensive to the taxpayers who aren't getting tax cuts (i.e. the poor). And the poor are too often worried about stupid things like boobies on TV to oppose Republicans. Thus, they have sort of got the whole "expensive" thing all sown up. They can borrow almost infinitely and no one would stop them.
As for the white people vs brown people thing, honestly that didn't occur to me much before. It's interesting. I wonder if people really would be more upset if we were carpet bombing France instead of the middle east. I don't know the answer to that.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Now, I wonder why you're a Foe-of-Friend to me? I think i'll have to counteract it by friending you.
> They can't wage a military war and win but they can boycott our products and win.
If we could attack Iraq based on the flimsy crap we used, who's to say we wouldn't invade nations that formed an organized boycott of our products, and MAKE them buy our products? Look at how we're making Iraq use our contractors to rebuild their country.
That's awfully arbitrary. A couple pages would be okay, but chapters are sacred and must not be copied!
/. sig, would you be liable to be sued by me for millions?
What if I published a 2-page book containing only two sentences? Nothing in the law would prevent me from registering a copyright on it the same as a "normal" book.
If you found that at the library or a friend's house, and read it and memorized it, would you be infringing my copyright if you wrote it down later because you found my two sentences incredibly witty? After all, it's the WHOLE BOOK! This is for personal use and not for selling or exhibiting in any way, mind you. Just like downloading music is.
What if you used my book as an e-mail or
What I'm getting at here is, the law shouldn't hold someone liable for proving someone's business model bad. The RIAA members are claiming that they own certain patterns of sound waves that are easily reproducible. What they ultimately want is to be paid every time you hear a song, not just once when you acquire it. They created commercial music radio, where copyrighted music is broadcast--for free, in the clear--and then they scream in agony because the people are choosing what they want to hear, and refusing to pay $18 for one half-assed song that they'll probably listen to 2 times. They're saying, "What you're selling is not worth $18. But I'm going to listen to it a few times for free, just like people who listen to the radio do."
Imagine you and a friend are both out eating lunch. The restaurant is playing a local radio station on the speakers. You have your iPod on, listening to a couple of songs you downloaded last night on Gnutella. Two songs come on the radio, Song A and Song B. Your friend listens to the songs. You, on your iPod, happen to be listening simultaneously to Song A and Song B at the same time!
The RIAA would have you believe that you have committed a tort against them, but your friend has not. (They actually would like for you, and the public, to believe that you've committed a felony, but that's because they're assholes.) How can that be? The two of you were listening to the exact same sound waves! It's absurd to claim that just because you can pause a track and your friend can't, that you are a "pirate"! You could hear the same music the same amount for free just by adjusting your radio dial skillfully enough! You just chose to skip that part. If their case against you in this instance has legal merit, then that means only one thing: The law is stupid, and needs to change.
> OMG! That's not jelly!
Did anyone watch the Colbert Report today?
"Oh, that was the chicken blood. It looked just like the jam!"
That wouldn't work on most dorm systems. They tend to share a single or a few outgoing numbers, that don't work for calling in. So when you call an ANI like that, or someone with caller ID, it's not your real number. It's set up that way so they don't have to pay for like 1000 outgoing lines when only a few will be in use at a time.
A more likely way to get your number would be to call your dorm's front desk or office. Most of the PBX-type phone systems they have support a kind of "caller id" internally, even though the cheap phones they put in dorms don't have screens. Anyway, the desk probably has your number pop up when you call them.
You're wrong when you say AT&T Wireless ("ATTWS") was "100% owned by AT&T" when it was bought by Cingular. At that time, ATTWS was NOT part of AT&T. AT&T spun off ATTWS in 2001, after which point it might as well have been called 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Wireless'—it had no ownership connection with AT&T after that.
ATTWS simply retained the exclusive right to use the AT&T name in the wireless space, simply for branding reasons. Also, ATTWS had a partnership with AT&T to cross-sell wireless and local phone service, which was very similar to the partnership between DISH Network and SBC (ahem, at&t)--they cross-sold "bundles" because they had no competing services with one another. Partnership != ownership though.
My wife got one of these TaxCut CDs, too. The letter (which arrived a week or two before the CD) said the SSN would be "embedded in a very long string of digits" or something, so "don't worry, no one will ever suspect it's your SSN"...but in reality it was just something like "AB333224444" or something.
We found it pretty funny.
When you use safeway.com (or vons.com, etc. All the safeway-owned stores that do delivery) and add your clubcard to your account, you can view all your previous purchases. Whether in the store or online.
The first time I went to that part of the site, I was surprised to find white shoe polish that I'd bought in the store for my ex-girlfriend two years before...and quite a few similar "I remember when I bought that!!" things. It was fascinating.
It's not perfect, and it doesn't give you stats or details on how often you bought things, but it sure is neat.
Also, it shows an indicator on the product page that "you've bought this before." I think it's a thumbs-up sign. It's pretty handy for when you're not sure which variety of something you got before.
Try it if you have a Safeway-owned chain in your area. You don't have to buy anything online to sign up and add your card, so even if having your groceries delivered isn't your thing, you can test it out.
-Dan
If Flash or SVG or any other of the current technologies could do any of these features, MS wouldn't have had to create this new system.
.TXT files still, instead of wrapping all plaintext files in pseudo-html and using a "new and improved" "Windows Notepad" which would really just be another shell for MSHTML (I.E.) to read them. They could have done the same for JPEG and GIF files and strike another blow for breaking all other OSs! But they didn't so there must be a limit to their evil.
Sorry, I stopped reading right there. Are you high??
When has MS EVER looked at competitors' standards and said anything but, "Let's make our own standard that does most of the same things, but is incompatible, and we'll break everyone else's product because everyone will use whatever we put into Windows"?
Say what you want about whether competing technologies could have done the job, but don't pretend that if they did, MS would embrace them and use them. That's just foolish.
Java, proprietary HTML (how about the for and event attributes on <script>?), screwed-up CSS, JavaScript (MS: JScript), etc. etc. The list goes on for hours.
In fact, I'm surprised Microsoft use
Ok, i did go back and read a little more: It does [...] making a 3D Cube spin in front of a building with clouds going by, and the 3D Cube has User Controls and Interface items on it.
Oh, my, GOD. That is going to be the interface in the next Windows after Vista, isn't it? It's just sadistic enough to be true!
Child pornography (as a product) requires commiting heinous crimes to produce it.
That's not necessarily true. Maybe this is what you meant by "as a product," but in any case, consider the hypothetical case of a 15-year-old girl who takes a few sexy pictures of herself for the exclusive viewing of her 15-year-old boyfriend, who never shares them with anyone. If cops find those pics on his computer/desk/nightstand/sock drawer, he can probably get tried as an adult (and convicted and sent to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison) for possession of child pornography...that's just how powerful those two words are. I'm not taking a position on whether that's sane, but surely you don't think Miss Teen Girl or Mr. Boyfriend committed heinous crimes in that case. Sure there are a lot of sick people out there, but "child porn" is a hot-button issue which turns most people from "let's see if any harm may have been done" to "BURN THE BASTARD AT THE STAKE!!"
There is no version of MS anything that will read the disk upon insertion. You have to click the drive in moderm windows versions, or poll the drive with 'dir' or some other function in older versions. Mac on the other hand reads the disk immediately (usually to check for the file system type) which does represent a bigger hole with floppies than with windows based machines.
You are completely mistaken, unless you are defining "disk" as "only floppy disks, specifically excluding CD, DVD, removable USB media, Zip drives, LS-120, etc." Why you would do that baffles me, since floppy disks are as dead as Betamax these days.
Mac OS 9 and X DO mount all drives when they are connected or when a removable disk is inserted. MOUNT.
Mac OS 9 and X DO NOT execute anything from any disk upon insertion, EVER. They mount the disk.
Windows 95 and up have a "feature," on by default unless you edit the registry or use TweakUI or a similar utility, or hunt through various obscure Windows dialogs, which upon connecting of hard drives, or insertion of removable discs besides floppies:
A: Mount the filesystem.
B: Check for the existence of autorun.inf in the drive root;
C: Assign any icon given in autorun.inf to the drive in Explorer;
D: Execute any programs, from the disc or elsewhere, requested by autorun.inf.
Google for "autorun.inf" if you want more details on how to use this.
This is probably what the behavior the grandparent was referring to.
Floppies are probably only excluded from autorun.inf because the cheap bargain-basement 3.5" floppy drives in all Windows PCs since the beginning of time are incapable of notifying the OS when a disk has been inserted. The OS would have to poll constantly to automatically mount the disk. These drives also do not have a motor to eject the disc when the OS is finished with it. Contrast this with the floppy drives in every floppy-bearing Mac since the beginning--they had both software eject AND OS notification of disk insertion.
A less likely explanation for why MS didn't enable this behavior for floppies might have (surprisingly) been security--in 1995, a CD was something you bought from a large company, which wouldn't let a virus get onto it, while a floppy was what you constantly used to transport all your data. A smart virus, any fool can see, would have exploited the autorun.inf to infect any floppies you used, and the first time the drive was accessed they would execute. Obviously now things are different, but it is still much harder for a virus to infect Write-once media, especially since most burned CDs are burned by a user's choice of burning software. USB keys, however, would be a good attack vector, especially for a deliberate malware-spreader. I use autorun.inf on my USB key to apply a custom icon (a photo of my USB key). Makes for easy recognition in "My Computer" when on someone else's machine with 5 other drives on it.
That would be awesome.