The problems were a bit more complex than that. The initial marketing and product roaddmap of OS/2 was a real mess. OS/2 1.0 shipped at the end of 87 but didn't have a GUI. That arrived about a year later with version 1.1 seem to recall. Both 1.0 and 1.1 came in standard and 'extended' editions - can't for the life of me remember what the extended edition added - networking stuff, I think.
So far, so complex. But add into that mix, the fact that OS/2 was originally announced with the PS/2 featuring the funky new micro channel bus architecture. (which came in 2 versions too). The trade press took about a month to figure out whether of not OS/2 needed microchannel - IBM weren't to keen on making that clear.
Then in 1994 was the Big OS/2 Warp (version 3) launch - a better Windows than Windows etc etc. There were many aspects of it that were really nice - it was solid, it had great pre-empitve multitasking. The GUI was extremely nice too... nearly, unfortunately lots of the user interaction wasn't sufficiently polished to be pleasant to use. I also seem to recall battling with drivers etc.
Users just weren't going to like it enough. And they didn't.
Sounds insightful... but wait a minute; which half precisely?
The whizzy minimize effects?, the rotating cube effect when using fast user switching (on a Mac). Eye candy, nothing more? Maybe? but just perhaps this type of stuff provides useful visual cues that make using the machine just a little more intuitive... you see one desktop rotate out of the way; you kind of 'know' it's waiting for you somewhere. the silly minimize effect; well it lets you know intuitively roughly on the screen where the minimized window has gone without searching.
The ripple effect when you 'drop' a dashboard widget? Doh you got me - eye candy.
You say "people just like eye candy". well maybe they do, maybe it make using the machine subjectively more pleasant in some way. Might that 'pleasant' interface not also aid productivity?
I think you're being overly sensitive. The submitter's intention was probably closer to "standards are of most value when implemented widely". Apple's use of the code will open the standard to a wider audience. The question is, a big enough audience to get content-writers interested? Maybe, maybe not.
Well, I'm based in the City of London, but I'm OK. The problem with your post isn't so much the flamebate it contains, but the way it reflects the flamebait that U.S foreign policy can on occasion seem to contain.
Let's get one thing clear, I don't like the Iranian regime, but I bloody well think that they have the right to develop nuclear power. Indeed in this globally warming world I would argue it is possibly a moral imperative. The West should be helping create a well regulated and monitored nuclear industry there, supplying technology if necessary. Instead we get: "they are going for the bomb".
That's not the kind of strategy that will "kill the insane fanatics at source", it's the kind that breeds them.
You're absolutely right, the suicider bombers etc don't care. They've made up their mind. But we shouldn't help them recruit people by being stupid ourselves.
For the record. Yes, I think the Iraq war was incredibly stupid, and yes, I think we absolutely have to keep the troops in their now while the mess is sorted out.
Exactly. I watched about a minute, but the voice acting was so bad that I couldn't watch any further. Sounded like a couple of students trying to *do* the characters.
Mark the parent insightful. As he says this is not only about cutting costs. The BBC is culling areas where it is not 'distinctive' because of complaints from the commercial sector than an (effectively) tax-supported service is competing with them.
There is also the issue of ease of understanding. Any text is written just once, it is however, likely to be read multiple times by multiple readers. Shouldn't the author try to ease the workload of the readership?
Finally, consider the following quote: "As long as you completely understand them, does it matter if a person breaks common rules of grammar and usage?" transformed thus:
"As long as the page renders correctly in my browser does it matter if the HTML fails to conform to the DTD?"
I'll play devil's advocate. The purpose of language is communication and the advantage of standardization is the avoidance of ambiguity, right? As long as you completely understand them, does it matter if a person breaks common rules of grammar and usage?
I try to use the rules, but if I understand you, what else matters?
Understanding is not binary, there are shades of meaning. The problem is that one person can believe he completely understands another, while subtly getting it wrong.
Sounds to me as if he went straight over your head. He is opposing a bill that would outlaw the the stirring up of hatred against members of a religion. That includes jedi, sith, scientologist, whatever. The bill is very loosely worded as to what could be considered stirring up hatred. "Yoda was an arsehole, it all Jedi should be done away with" might qualify.
So this is a smart guy using satire to ridicule the bill in a fairly subtle way. So yes, I suppose you could say that it does give insight into the type of people who get voted in.
And in case anyone is wondering about the obsequious thanks to Jack Cunningham in the speech, it is traditional to thank your predecessor in your first speech to the commons.
Agreed, I'm sorry, the 'red lines are bad' claim is lame. If the Windows line was in blue he would probably have claimed that it "is intended to remind you of the blue screen of death".
Moreover, he accuses the example graph makers of bad practice by re-scaling the x-axis, without rescaling the y-axis "to compensate".
Excuse me? As far as I can see the x axis was scaled in order to display the data in the most room available, not to deceive in some way. The y-axes were left alone because the data range depicted were identical.
A shame. There is some good stuff in the article, but it suffers by exaggerating its case in places.
The Macintosh hardware is essentially a dongle and always has been, (apart from the brief flirtation with hardware licensing). It so happens that the dongle has a very nice computer built into it.
Apple has simply announced that it will be changing the dongle's CPU from PowerPC to Intel.
An interesting alternative way of looking at the question: PowerPC processors are widely available, as are the rest of the standard components that sit in a Mac. But no manufacturer has ever produced and sold a wickedly nifty Linux PPC machine that just happened to Boot Mac OS X.
Why is that do you reckon? Has a hobbyist ever done it? You'd expect at least one enterprising person to pull it off. If not, what has stopped them, and would the switch to Intel remove these obstacles.
My guess is that the switch to Intel will ease the path somewhat - there are more pre-built Intel mobos out there, so the first few steps have been done for the would-be OS X booter. But I suspect that the release version of OS X86 will have enough hard-coded dependencies on custom chips, ROMs, OpenFirmware boot code, slightly modified graphics cards or whatever to make hacking the OS tricky.
It appears from this thread that the consensus is that a Web Log is "a Web page containing items that a person or people who are not journalists deem interesting, usually in reverse chronological order".
As I say, a definition so broad as to be essentially meaningless.
I find it pretty amusing that you object to 'blog-esque' given the linguistic horror that is 'blog' in the first place. Would you prefer 'bloggy'? Or do you want me to write 'having the attributes of a blog' every time?
There's no consensus on the definition of a blog, but Slashdot is not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. Things may appear on it in chronological order, but apart from that there is little about it which is blog-esque.
A blog-esque Web site consists of postings representing the views and thoughts of an individual, or tiny group. Not so with Slashdot.
If you broaden the definition of 'blog' tom incorporate the likes of Slashdot the definition becomes too broad to have much meaning.
I predict that this decision won't pan-out the way that Microsoft intends. Users will see it simply as an additional reason to buy from the iTunes store "buy AAC get Windows-version free.
Forget products, it was the company that annoyed..
on
Quark CEO Abruptly Resigns
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Parent really is insightful.
I used to be a hardcore Quark user and admin for many years (admined Quark the Quark Publshing System servers, all that workflow jazz). I liked the product. This was all about 5 years ago, just before version 4 came out.
but even back then the company really knew how to annoy their customers. They used to do fabulous stuff like issue point releases that couldn't write backwardly compatible files. Then they would stop selling the older point release.
The result? A department with 30 machines running Quark Xpress 3.5 quite happily would by an additional machine and find that only 3.6 was avaiilable now, and that the cost of updating 30 machines to 3.6 was
a) horrendous b) Didn't actually give us any functionality that we wanted (it would be something daft like the ability to have gradient filled text or something.
People really really HATED Quark the company, it was quite an achievement to make your customer base loath you that much when the product was fairly solid. This was all before the OS X debacle.
"but if you really need those apps, you buy a windows box"... But perhaps not anymore. If VPC gets to run significantly faster, or Wine, then it is likely to increase the proportion of people who by a Mac and emulate just one or two apps. In a corporate environment that "one or two" are likely to encompass MS Project or Outlook.
"And fat binaries have been tried numerous times, I've yet to see the market accept them." Ummm, what about the 68K/PPC fat binaries? They worked OK for as long as they were needed.
Ah, we disagree, I think the Ipcress file is a fabulous film, sorry. I love the characters and the small touches in the script; "he doesn't have my sense of humour..." "yes sir I will miss that". The sense of British bureaucracy is nicely done".
The direction is certainly slow-paced by today's standards, but I guess I like the old-fashioned 'texture' of the film and the way you can get to know the characters.
Interesting to note that no-one on the film had every apparently made fresh coffee with a cafetier: he adds the ground coffee and then pushes the plunger immediately, without letting it brew, ah well.
There's actually an interesting point lurking in here somewhere. I have a feeling that actually conspicuous consumption as a social attractant is a transitory phase.
I was rewatching a copy of The Ipcress File the other night and at the beginning we see Michael Cane's Harry Palmer. The opening scene is constructed to show what a sophisticated goumet, bon viveur and babe-magnet he is. They demonstrate this by showing him opening a tin of tiny mushrooms in brine , labelled 'champignon'.
Laughable, but back in the 60s, it was hip to use refined, tinned goods, rather than the fresh stuff, white bread, central heating avocados, they were hip baby. The fact that you could afford white bread showed you weren't a peasant. Hell, when I was in S. America several years ago, tinned goods were produced for honoured guests, rather than the papayas growing outside.
Now rustic loaves, wood burning stoves and locally produced produce are hip - at least around here.
I suspect it won't be long before conspicuous consumers are seen as old fashioned dullards.
Slashdot Mirror
The problems were a bit more complex than that. The initial marketing and product roaddmap of OS/2 was a real mess. OS/2 1.0 shipped at the end of 87 but didn't have a GUI. That arrived about a year later with version 1.1 seem to recall. Both 1.0 and 1.1 came in standard and 'extended' editions - can't for the life of me remember what the extended edition added - networking stuff, I think.
So far, so complex. But add into that mix, the fact that OS/2 was originally announced with the PS/2 featuring the funky new micro channel bus architecture. (which came in 2 versions too). The trade press took about a month to figure out whether of not OS/2 needed microchannel - IBM weren't to keen on making that clear.
Then in 1994 was the Big OS/2 Warp (version 3) launch - a better Windows than Windows etc etc. There were many aspects of it that were really nice - it was solid, it had great pre-empitve multitasking. The GUI was extremely nice too... nearly, unfortunately lots of the user interaction wasn't sufficiently polished to be pleasant to use. I also seem to recall battling with drivers etc.
Users just weren't going to like it enough. And they didn't.
Sounds insightful ... but wait a minute; which half precisely?
... you see one desktop rotate out of the way; you kind of 'know' it's waiting for you somewhere. the silly minimize effect; well it lets you know intuitively roughly on the screen where the minimized window has gone without searching.
The whizzy minimize effects?, the rotating cube effect when using fast user switching (on a Mac). Eye candy, nothing more? Maybe? but just perhaps this type of stuff provides useful visual cues that make using the machine just a little more intuitive
The ripple effect when you 'drop' a dashboard widget? Doh you got me - eye candy.
You say "people just like eye candy". well maybe they do, maybe it make using the machine subjectively more pleasant in some way. Might that 'pleasant' interface not also aid productivity?
I think you're being overly sensitive. The submitter's intention was probably closer to "standards are of most value when implemented widely". Apple's use of the code will open the standard to a wider audience. The question is, a big enough audience to get content-writers interested? Maybe, maybe not.
Wait a second and it would have moved several hundreds of miles courtesy of the earth's orbit. Do I win?
and yes, I'm pretty annoyed so mis-spelled 'there'.
Well, I'm based in the City of London, but I'm OK. The problem with your post isn't so much the flamebate it contains, but the way it reflects the flamebait that U.S foreign policy can on occasion seem to contain.
Let's get one thing clear, I don't like the Iranian regime, but I bloody well think that they have the right to develop nuclear power. Indeed in this globally warming world I would argue it is possibly a moral imperative. The West should be helping create a well regulated and monitored nuclear industry there, supplying technology if necessary. Instead we get: "they are going for the bomb".
That's not the kind of strategy that will "kill the insane fanatics at source", it's the kind that breeds them.
You're absolutely right, the suicider bombers etc don't care. They've made up their mind. But we shouldn't help them recruit people by being stupid ourselves.
For the record. Yes, I think the Iraq war was incredibly stupid, and yes, I think we absolutely have to keep the troops in their now while the mess is sorted out.
I suspect it was because Apple actually released Mac OS 9, not just OS 9.
Exactly. I watched about a minute, but the voice acting was so bad that I couldn't watch any further. Sounded like a couple of students trying to *do* the characters.
Mark the parent insightful. As he says this is not only about cutting costs. The BBC is culling areas where it is not 'distinctive' because of complaints from the commercial sector than an (effectively) tax-supported service is competing with them.
I meant to add:
There is also the issue of ease of understanding. Any text is written just once, it is however, likely to be read multiple times by multiple readers. Shouldn't the author try to ease the workload of the readership?
Finally, consider the following quote: "As long as you completely understand them, does it matter if a person breaks common rules of grammar and usage?" transformed thus:
"As long as the page renders correctly in my browser does it matter if the HTML fails to conform to the DTD?"
Doesn't that make you shudder?
An easy way to remember this:
i.e. - in explanation
e.g. - example given
Subbed for clarity:
I'll play devil's advocate. The purpose of language is communication and the advantage of standardization is the avoidance of ambiguity, right? As long as you completely understand them, does it matter if a person breaks common rules of grammar and usage?
I try to use the rules, but if I understand you, what else matters?
Understanding is not binary, there are shades of meaning. The problem is that one person can believe he completely understands another, while subtly getting it wrong.
You're absolutely right. I dozed off before the last paragraph. Mod this man up insightful, mod my original post down as over-rated.
Ahem, as I was saying, UK MPs are dullards and the Jedis are the worst of the bunch.
Sounds to me as if he went straight over your head. He is opposing a bill that would outlaw the the stirring up of hatred against members of a religion. That includes jedi, sith, scientologist, whatever. The bill is very loosely worded as to what could be considered stirring up hatred. "Yoda was an arsehole, it all Jedi should be done away with" might qualify.
So this is a smart guy using satire to ridicule the bill in a fairly subtle way. So yes, I suppose you could say that it does give insight into the type of people who get voted in.
And in case anyone is wondering about the obsequious thanks to Jack Cunningham in the speech, it is traditional to thank your predecessor in your first speech to the commons.
>Identity theft is extremly rare here, I never even consider it.
Sounds like there's a nice market there then ready for exploitation.
Agreed, I'm sorry, the 'red lines are bad' claim is lame. If the Windows line was in blue he would probably have claimed that it "is intended to remind you of the blue screen of death".
Moreover, he accuses the example graph makers of bad practice by re-scaling the x-axis, without rescaling the y-axis "to compensate".
Excuse me? As far as I can see the x axis was scaled in order to display the data in the most room available, not to deceive in some way. The y-axes were left alone because the data range depicted were identical.
A shame. There is some good stuff in the article, but it suffers by exaggerating its case in places.
The Macintosh hardware is essentially a dongle and always has been, (apart from the brief flirtation with hardware licensing). It so happens that the dongle has a very nice computer built into it.
Apple has simply announced that it will be changing the dongle's CPU from PowerPC to Intel.
An interesting alternative way of looking at the question: PowerPC processors are widely available, as are the rest of the standard components that sit in a Mac. But no manufacturer has ever produced and sold a wickedly nifty Linux PPC machine that just happened to Boot Mac OS X.
Why is that do you reckon? Has a hobbyist ever done it? You'd expect at least one enterprising person to pull it off. If not, what has stopped them, and would the switch to Intel remove these obstacles.
My guess is that the switch to Intel will ease the path somewhat - there are more pre-built Intel mobos out there, so the first few steps have been done for the would-be OS X booter. But I suspect that the release version of OS X86 will have enough hard-coded dependencies on custom chips, ROMs, OpenFirmware boot code, slightly modified graphics cards or whatever to make hacking the OS tricky.
It appears from this thread that the consensus is that a Web Log is "a Web page containing items that a person or people who are not journalists deem interesting, usually in reverse chronological order".
As I say, a definition so broad as to be essentially meaningless.
I find it pretty amusing that you object to 'blog-esque' given the linguistic horror that is 'blog' in the first place. Would you prefer 'bloggy'? Or do you want me to write 'having the attributes of a blog' every time?
There's no consensus on the definition of a blog, but Slashdot is not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. Things may appear on it in chronological order, but apart from that there is little about it which is blog-esque.
A blog-esque Web site consists of postings representing the views and thoughts of an individual, or tiny group. Not so with Slashdot.
If you broaden the definition of 'blog' tom incorporate the likes of Slashdot the definition becomes too broad to have much meaning.
I predict that this decision won't pan-out the way that Microsoft intends. Users will see it simply as an additional reason to buy from the iTunes store "buy AAC get Windows-version free.
Parent really is insightful.
I used to be a hardcore Quark user and admin for many years (admined Quark the Quark Publshing System servers, all that workflow jazz). I liked the product. This was all about 5 years ago, just before version 4 came out.
but even back then the company really knew how to annoy their customers. They used to do fabulous stuff like issue point releases that couldn't write backwardly compatible files. Then they would stop selling the older point release.
The result? A department with 30 machines running Quark Xpress 3.5 quite happily would by an additional machine and find that only 3.6 was avaiilable now, and that the cost of updating 30 machines to 3.6 was
a) horrendous
b) Didn't actually give us any functionality that we wanted (it would be something daft like the ability to have gradient filled text or something.
People really really HATED Quark the company, it was quite an achievement to make your customer base loath you that much when the product was fairly solid. This was all before the OS X debacle.
"but if you really need those apps, you buy a windows box" ... But perhaps not anymore. If VPC gets to run significantly faster, or Wine, then it is likely to increase the proportion of people who by a Mac and emulate just one or two apps. In a corporate environment that "one or two" are likely to encompass MS Project or Outlook.
"And fat binaries have been tried numerous times, I've yet to see the market accept them." Ummm, what about the 68K/PPC fat binaries? They worked OK for as long as they were needed.
Ah, we disagree, I think the Ipcress file is a fabulous film, sorry. I love the characters and the small touches in the script; "he doesn't have my sense of humour..." "yes sir I will miss that". The sense of British bureaucracy is nicely done".
The direction is certainly slow-paced by today's standards, but I guess I like the old-fashioned 'texture' of the film and the way you can get to know the characters.
Interesting to note that no-one on the film had every apparently made fresh coffee with a cafetier: he adds the ground coffee and then pushes the plunger immediately, without letting it brew, ah well.
There's actually an interesting point lurking in here somewhere. I have a feeling that actually conspicuous consumption as a social attractant is a transitory phase.
I was rewatching a copy of The Ipcress File the other night and at the beginning we see Michael Cane's Harry Palmer. The opening scene is constructed to show what a sophisticated goumet, bon viveur and babe-magnet he is. They demonstrate this by showing him opening a tin of tiny mushrooms in brine , labelled 'champignon'.
Laughable, but back in the 60s, it was hip to use refined, tinned goods, rather than the fresh stuff, white bread, central heating avocados, they were hip baby. The fact that you could afford white bread showed you weren't a peasant. Hell, when I was in S. America several years ago, tinned goods were produced for honoured guests, rather than the papayas growing outside.
Now rustic loaves, wood burning stoves and locally produced produce are hip - at least around here.
I suspect it won't be long before conspicuous consumers are seen as old fashioned dullards.