Let's be fair and see what's actually needed for a simple no-options installation.
Windows:
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out where to buy/download it
- Obtain a copy
- Locate the installer and start it
(-- If running with separate administrator account, use runas to start the installer and enter the administrator password)
- Follow the instructions
OS X:
IF USING REGULAR OS X APPLICATIONS
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out where to buy/download it
- Obtain a copy
- Mount the disk image
- IF THE APPLICATION COMES AS AN APP BUNDLE
-- Drag the application to where you want it
-- Unmount the disk image
- IF THE APPLICATION USES AN INSTALLER
-- Locate the installer.pkg and start it
-- Enter your administrator password
-- Follow the instructions
-- Unmount the disk image
IF USING FINK
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out the corresponding package name
- Open a shell
- sudo fink install package-name
- Enter your password
Debian-based Linuces:
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out the corresponding package name
- Open a shell
- sudo apt-get install package-name
- Enter your password
Gentoo-based Linuces:
- Open a shell
- Find out which program you want/need, probably via esearch
- Find out the corresponding package name (already done if program was found via esearch
- emerge package-name
- Enter your password
RedHat-based Linuces:
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out the corresponding package name
- Open a shell
- sudo yum install package-name
- Enter your password
Doing things on the shell can be quite effective. OS X's way of installing apps is simple and easy to learn but so are modern package managers. In fact, OS X has no less than three inofficial package managers - Fink, DarwinPorts and Portage - the first of which many OS X users will sooner or later encounter.
That would find all movies which aren't Quicktime movies. Unfortunately that's about the most complex search you can do, since... ...Spotlight doesn't index the metadata of non-Quicktime video and non-AAC audio. At least not in a format accessible through the shell. ...mdfind easily gets confused and sometimes refuses to find anything if subqueries are in the wrong order, even though both orders should be equivalent (e.g. (kMDItemFSName == '*.inc' || kMDItemContentType == 'public.php-script') matches *.(php|inc), while (kMDItemContentType == 'public.php-script' || kMDItemFSName == '*.inc') matches nothing). ...it also gets confused if you have too many subqueries in one query, the exact number of which depends on the query.
I assume they've left this functionality out of the GUI because it doesn't work right yet. Let's hope that with Leopard Spotlight can stomach complex queries.
Okay, one could describe anything that we can not perceive directly as extrasensory, but I don't think that the processing of sensory input is appropriately called ESP. Also, of course our senses can't quite grasp this processing since our senses aren't built to examine neural activity.
By the way, lots of strange and difficult to understand things go on everywhere. If there wasn't there would be no point to science.
Firstly, you don't need to have a search bar if the URL bar can do the job. Having a longer URL bar can be useful, for example when you need to tinker with a long URL and the part you want to change is not at the beginning.
Secondly, the search bar is not always set to the site you want to search in. I find it less distracting to type a few letters than to press Alt+Down, examine the popup menu and then select the site I want.
Thirdly, keyworded bookmarks can be generated easily. Installing a new site in the search bar takes a bit more work.
Also, I don't know whether the Wikipedia search bar entry generates direct entry URLs or uses Wikipedia's search function. I'd strongly prefer the former case as I usually know what I want to look up and using the search function in that cased would only generate useless traffic.
I know I am a geek, which is why I use automation where possible.
1. Make a new bookmark to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25s
2. Assign a keyword to the bookmark, e.g. wp
3. Enter the following into your address bar: wp Shortcut
If you want to search for Wikipedia entries in different languages simply prefix the term with the corresponding language code and a colon: de:Abkürzung
Heh, true. I never should take my iBook with me to the States*; my power adapter developed a loose contact and in order to fix it we dremeled it open, resoldered a wire**, put the adapter back together and kept it closed with some duct tape. Even I think it kinda looks like a bomb now... It's amazing how easy it is to make something look like a movie bomb.
* And I won't, because I don't want the TSA or some other organization to randomly break it.
**...and were quite pissed off when we found out that the loose contact was due to a broken cable on the other side of the adapter...
The same thing that applies to conventional bombs (in the location they were found they were practically useless as anti-personnel weapons) applies to chem weapons - if you release a small amount of sarin in a closed environment like a subway train all hell breaks loose. If you do the same in the open air the effect is less dramatic due to the fact that the sarin dissipates into the surrounding air and there's usually fewer people per area. There's a reason why gas grenades are bigger than AA batteries - an effective range of a couple inches isn't really useful.
As for biological weapons: You'd need a pathogen that can survive air contact for a certain amount of time, is extremely infectious, can not be easily countered and has a suitable attack vector (inhalation, skin contact). That's certainly doable (although very hard if you're not a large nation's government), but there are much easier ways to infect people and have the world know it than putting up small amounts of the pathogen in easily locatable containers so that each can only infect a small group of people at best. If you want to cause mayhem you infect the city's drinking water or the contents of a blood bank and release a video after the first infection wave. The same applies to chem weapons - if you want attention, don't draw it until after the attack.
Bioweapons have another drawback: Once you used one strain of virus it's going to be identified and countermeasures are taken. Two months later they're stocked with the drugs they need to counter it and lots of vaccine to immunize people, should the same attack come again. For terrorists bioweapons are effectively hard to obtain one-shot weapons so they'd want to make sure that they hit enough people to get the message across.
Of course, terrorists could also spread around small, curious-looking contraptions that cause the bomb squads to get called for nothing. Any nation sufficiently paranoid can be affected by this; it would work in the USA and the UK. Remember, terrorism is not about killing people, it's about demoralizing them.
This kind of action is only considered an "over-reaction" when it turns out to be a false alarm.
Thus, the logical way to do things would be to assume that any thing not proven to be harmless is indeed a bomb and specialists need to come and defuse/safely detonate it.
Care to elaborate? So far, I think the "external stimuli are translated to neural impulses by special cells; these impulses then are processed by the brain" model is pretty much self-sufficient.
Actually, I don't really like Quicksilver. Most of what it does can be done just as well by putting the Applications folder in the Dock... Besides, as far as I know Quicksilver doesn't have a full terminal built-in. I need terminals for things like Portage, so anything without a decently sized, persistent I/O window is useless.
Apple does have a product for the "I need a really beefy machine" market, the Mac Pro. It doesn't have a product for the "I need to buy that GPU because it just came out" market. That market is pretty much restricted to the hardcore gamer crowd anyway and they won't consider a Mac because it doesn't immediately have all new game releases available.
By the way, one thing I'd like would be a terminal roughly equivalent to Terminal.app as a Dashboard widget. All terminal widgets I know are rather cruddy as far as terminals go.
If there's one thing I miss from Linux (currently my main system is an iBook due to hardware issues with the Linux box) is Yakuake.
BMW could make a car to compete with a Honda civic too, but it really wouldn't be a BMW anymore, imho. For those who want a BMW on a budget, buy a used one.
Not to mention that the BMW brand has a certain image. If BMW produced a low-end car they'd tarnish that image, which might actually lose them sales.
Likewise, Apple has the image of producing high-quality computers. If they suddenly produced a $300 Walmart special they'd damage their brand and risk alienating their customer base. Not competing in that market is clearly not a bad idea.
We see A, a typical "I'm a Mac" guy and B, a typical "I'm a PC" guy. A: "Hi, I'm a Mac expert." B: "And I'm a Mac user." A: "Shouldn't you be the PC expert?" B: "Yeah, but I just switched." A: "Well... They couldn't have made this ad any more blatant, could they?" Steve Jobs (offscreen): "Shut up!" A and B stand around a few seconds in uncomfortable silence. A looks at B from the side. A (mumbling): "There goes the neighbourhood." B: "What did you say?"
"Apple. It's not just for us painfully hip elitists anymore and boy, are we pissed about it."
The sad part is that this actually fits the tone of the "I'm a Mac" ads rather well...
Given the fact that some people end up spending well more than a decade in death row even though they'd rather get killed already I guess the threat of capital punishment would compel people to either do it right or not at all...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if only their protons reverse I certainly have no objection, not with these two ones. Especially as I'm on another continent.
"Where did Apple go yesterday?"
Let's be fair and see what's actually needed for a simple no-options installation.
.pkg and start it
Windows:
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out where to buy/download it
- Obtain a copy
- Locate the installer and start it
(-- If running with separate administrator account, use runas to start the installer and enter the administrator password)
- Follow the instructions
OS X:
IF USING REGULAR OS X APPLICATIONS
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out where to buy/download it
- Obtain a copy
- Mount the disk image
- IF THE APPLICATION COMES AS AN APP BUNDLE
-- Drag the application to where you want it
-- Unmount the disk image
- IF THE APPLICATION USES AN INSTALLER
-- Locate the installer
-- Enter your administrator password
-- Follow the instructions
-- Unmount the disk image
IF USING FINK
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out the corresponding package name
- Open a shell
- sudo fink install package-name
- Enter your password
Debian-based Linuces:
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out the corresponding package name
- Open a shell
- sudo apt-get install package-name
- Enter your password
Gentoo-based Linuces:
- Open a shell
- Find out which program you want/need, probably via esearch
- Find out the corresponding package name (already done if program was found via esearch
- emerge package-name
- Enter your password
RedHat-based Linuces:
- Find out which program you want/need
- Find out the corresponding package name
- Open a shell
- sudo yum install package-name
- Enter your password
Doing things on the shell can be quite effective. OS X's way of installing apps is simple and easy to learn but so are modern package managers. In fact, OS X has no less than three inofficial package managers - Fink, DarwinPorts and Portage - the first of which many OS X users will sooner or later encounter.
Actually, this stuff is already partially in Spotlight - just not in the GUI. On the shell you can do more complex searches:
...Spotlight doesn't index the metadata of non-Quicktime video and non-AAC audio. At least not in a format accessible through the shell.
...mdfind easily gets confused and sometimes refuses to find anything if subqueries are in the wrong order, even though both orders should be equivalent (e.g. (kMDItemFSName == '*.inc' || kMDItemContentType == 'public.php-script') matches *.(php|inc), while (kMDItemContentType == 'public.php-script' || kMDItemFSName == '*.inc') matches nothing).
...it also gets confused if you have too many subqueries in one query, the exact number of which depends on the query.
mdfind "kMDItemContentTypeTree == '*public.movie*' && kMDItemContentType != 'com.apple.quicktime-movie'"
That would find all movies which aren't Quicktime movies. Unfortunately that's about the most complex search you can do, since...
I assume they've left this functionality out of the GUI because it doesn't work right yet. Let's hope that with Leopard Spotlight can stomach complex queries.
Actually, looking at the site's source code shows that they require the user to have WMP9, for whichever reason.
Okay, one could describe anything that we can not perceive directly as extrasensory, but I don't think that the processing of sensory input is appropriately called ESP. Also, of course our senses can't quite grasp this processing since our senses aren't built to examine neural activity.
By the way, lots of strange and difficult to understand things go on everywhere. If there wasn't there would be no point to science.
Firstly, you don't need to have a search bar if the URL bar can do the job. Having a longer URL bar can be useful, for example when you need to tinker with a long URL and the part you want to change is not at the beginning.
Secondly, the search bar is not always set to the site you want to search in. I find it less distracting to type a few letters than to press Alt+Down, examine the popup menu and then select the site I want.
Thirdly, keyworded bookmarks can be generated easily. Installing a new site in the search bar takes a bit more work.
Also, I don't know whether the Wikipedia search bar entry generates direct entry URLs or uses Wikipedia's search function. I'd strongly prefer the former case as I usually know what I want to look up and using the search function in that cased would only generate useless traffic.
I know I am a geek, which is why I use automation where possible.
1. Make a new bookmark to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25s
2. Assign a keyword to the bookmark, e.g. wp
3. Enter the following into your address bar: wp Shortcut
If you want to search for Wikipedia entries in different languages simply prefix the term with the corresponding language code and a colon: de:Abkürzung
Heh, true. I never should take my iBook with me to the States*; my power adapter developed a loose contact and in order to fix it we dremeled it open, resoldered a wire**, put the adapter back together and kept it closed with some duct tape. Even I think it kinda looks like a bomb now... It's amazing how easy it is to make something look like a movie bomb.
...and were quite pissed off when we found out that the loose contact was due to a broken cable on the other side of the adapter...
* And I won't, because I don't want the TSA or some other organization to randomly break it.
**
The same thing that applies to conventional bombs (in the location they were found they were practically useless as anti-personnel weapons) applies to chem weapons - if you release a small amount of sarin in a closed environment like a subway train all hell breaks loose. If you do the same in the open air the effect is less dramatic due to the fact that the sarin dissipates into the surrounding air and there's usually fewer people per area. There's a reason why gas grenades are bigger than AA batteries - an effective range of a couple inches isn't really useful.
As for biological weapons: You'd need a pathogen that can survive air contact for a certain amount of time, is extremely infectious, can not be easily countered and has a suitable attack vector (inhalation, skin contact). That's certainly doable (although very hard if you're not a large nation's government), but there are much easier ways to infect people and have the world know it than putting up small amounts of the pathogen in easily locatable containers so that each can only infect a small group of people at best. If you want to cause mayhem you infect the city's drinking water or the contents of a blood bank and release a video after the first infection wave. The same applies to chem weapons - if you want attention, don't draw it until after the attack.
Bioweapons have another drawback: Once you used one strain of virus it's going to be identified and countermeasures are taken. Two months later they're stocked with the drugs they need to counter it and lots of vaccine to immunize people, should the same attack come again. For terrorists bioweapons are effectively hard to obtain one-shot weapons so they'd want to make sure that they hit enough people to get the message across.
Of course, terrorists could also spread around small, curious-looking contraptions that cause the bomb squads to get called for nothing. Any nation sufficiently paranoid can be affected by this; it would work in the USA and the UK. Remember, terrorism is not about killing people, it's about demoralizing them.
Storm. Butterflies cause storms. I don't know what's responsible for earthquakes - moles, perhaps.
This kind of action is only considered an "over-reaction" when it turns out to be a false alarm.
Thus, the logical way to do things would be to assume that any thing not proven to be harmless is indeed a bomb and specialists need to come and defuse/safely detonate it.
Care to elaborate? So far, I think the "external stimuli are translated to neural impulses by special cells; these impulses then are processed by the brain" model is pretty much self-sufficient.
Actually, I don't really like Quicksilver. Most of what it does can be done just as well by putting the Applications folder in the Dock... Besides, as far as I know Quicksilver doesn't have a full terminal built-in. I need terminals for things like Portage, so anything without a decently sized, persistent I/O window is useless.
Apple does have a product for the "I need a really beefy machine" market, the Mac Pro. It doesn't have a product for the "I need to buy that GPU because it just came out" market. That market is pretty much restricted to the hardcore gamer crowd anyway and they won't consider a Mac because it doesn't immediately have all new game releases available.
Including those people who receive piss-poor education because they can't afford going to anything but the local run-down highschool?
Success is not only a function of how much work you do. Social standing is still an important factor.
At least I know that the Linux/AMD users are rebels without a Core.
By the way, one thing I'd like would be a terminal roughly equivalent to Terminal.app as a Dashboard widget. All terminal widgets I know are rather cruddy as far as terminals go.
If there's one thing I miss from Linux (currently my main system is an iBook due to hardware issues with the Linux box) is Yakuake.
BMW could make a car to compete with a Honda civic too, but it really wouldn't be a BMW anymore, imho. For those who want a BMW on a budget, buy a used one.
Not to mention that the BMW brand has a certain image. If BMW produced a low-end car they'd tarnish that image, which might actually lose them sales.
Likewise, Apple has the image of producing high-quality computers. If they suddenly produced a $300 Walmart special they'd damage their brand and risk alienating their customer base. Not competing in that market is clearly not a bad idea.
Yes, the tiny niche of non-expert computer users.
We see A, a typical "I'm a Mac" guy and B, a typical "I'm a PC" guy.
A: "Hi, I'm a Mac expert."
B: "And I'm a Mac user."
A: "Shouldn't you be the PC expert?"
B: "Yeah, but I just switched."
A: "Well... They couldn't have made this ad any more blatant, could they?"
Steve Jobs (offscreen): "Shut up!"
A and B stand around a few seconds in uncomfortable silence.
A looks at B from the side.
A (mumbling): "There goes the neighbourhood."
B: "What did you say?"
"Apple. It's not just for us painfully hip elitists anymore and boy, are we pissed about it."
The sad part is that this actually fits the tone of the "I'm a Mac" ads rather well...
(I'm lookin' at you, Demon Days...)
+1, Insightful
* Forget that OS X was not made by IBM and write it like it was a new version of OS/2
If you make something foolproof the universe will make a better fool. Apparently we've had way too many foolproof things in the last few years.
Given the fact that some people end up spending well more than a decade in death row even though they'd rather get killed already I guess the threat of capital punishment would compel people to either do it right or not at all...