The sound you hear is the clock running out for Star Wars bashers.
Enough people are doing it now that it will soon be un-hip.
In fact, someday, it may even become cool to say you like it, albeit with a knowing wink, since you still have to prove that you're clever enough to realize it's just a space opera.
In the meantime, i'm going to see it a few more times and have a head start on all of you.
It was noted somewhere that Spider-Man spent about $30m more on marketing that AoTC. That has a pretty big bearing on the 90% of the filmgoing public that is obsessed with neither of the two mythologies. They both rock, and it's unfortunate that the (overlapping) audiences of Spider-Man, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings spend so much time arguing with each other over whose obsession is best, rather then just sitting back and saying, "damn, it's a freaking great time to be a movie-goer".
The three you mentioned (excalibur, luxor, mandalay bay) are already connected by their own little tram system, which is slightly better than walking. Vegas is the slowest damn place to get around in. Your choice is to either walk the deceptively long distances through gawking tourists and porn solicitors, or to take the monorails/trams between the casinos. The problem with the latter is that invariably, the entrances for them are buried deep within the casinos, so you don't get the free ride without having to navigate the casino floor (a nontrivial task). As it is, they're 'free', but they, like everything else, get people in the door.
The assumption of Windows is logical enough on the desktop, but perhaps less so with laptops. Mac laptops have always been competitive, price/performance-wise with Intel-based ones, never more so than today. Besides which, they offer features which Intel notebooks does not or cannot deliver, such as dongle- and antenna- free networking, longer battery life, and instant-on capability with OS X. Couple that with the popularity of the iBook with schools, and their attractive price, and the assumption of Windows on the part of CNN does not look so cut and dried.
Re:Sets!=Death of Imagination (The Boats)
on
Battle Over Blocks
·
· Score: 1
For lego boats, if you didn't have the preformed hull pieces (the sets sorta sucked apart from the hull pieces, and were really expensive), my solution was always to build a double hull, with plastic sandwich bag material or tape lining the area in between the two. of course, an overlooked aspect of the boat sets was the splendid weight piece they provided. tough to do with plain old bricks... the plastic-bag idea worked well for swimming pools, too.
glad to hear i wasn't the only person who thought starcom was cool, too...
As one of the Anonymous masses mentioned above, this is not merely an issue of fearing potential attack upon the expo itself. Each of these expos has 100+ exhibitors, all of whom need goods transported, on time, safely, and, worse, in this case, across international borders. This may be now, and for the next few weeks both more difficult, and probably more expensive.
Many companies nation, and even world-wide have issued directives stating that 'no one will be forced to fly'. Can you blame them for cancelling an event that may have been plagued by the resultant no-shows of the exhibitors? Business-wise it makes sense, and then, given that they are a prominent American corporation, the over-arching safety concern makes it a very sound decision indeed.
There are actually quite a few games now that run natively on OS X. The good folks at Westlake have kindly ported The Sims over, roughly a year after its initial release. Tropico shipped OSX-compatible. 4x4 Evolution ran on the Public Beta (although i don't think it runs now). Q3A works, Unreal Tournament is supposedly being worked on, and most upcoming games (Warcraft 3, too!) from here on out will be at least Carbon. As dim as the prospects seemed at one point, gaming on OS X now looks pretty darn good.
Now, if only i could get support for my iBook's rage pro so i could play these games...
i strongly agree with this statement. i used to run such an organization at RPI, and got in plenty of trouble myself, but eventually remembered to tone it down a little, keep it to a level that's fun, yet not excessive, and oh, yeah, graduate. My favorite part, though, was using an unoccupied dorm room's ethernet connection to host the site via ml.org. Right under their noses. The site's now at www.inflatablewhale.com -- the history behind it is pretty funny, despite the (mea culpa) bad html.
Actually, i started as a BSAE doing tech support for a big software company, and am still doing so. There is no promotion path to doing something 'real' in this case; the job itself is its own reward or punishment. Sadly, it is usually the latter, but occasionally i do get to do something pretty damn cool, and that's what keeps some of us here, particularly those of us who know what we're doing. At the same time, with just under a year in service, i am practically a veteran.
i'm convinced there are few jobs as thankless as technical support. Nobody you talk to is glad to hear from you, even when you have a solution for them. If the company you work for has in any way wronged that customer, you will hear about it. In my particular form of technical support, it often involves cleaning up colossal messes the customers have made of their own files, due to not understanding the (admittedly complex) software. But that's my fault too. All of it.
I have been insulted, sworn at, i have had my intellect questioned, and heard every possible form of invective that doesn't involve my mom.
Maybe technical support does suck. Maybe all of it adds up to be poor service. However, just because you only talk to people that tell you to reinstall windows and reboot, doesn't mean that all tech support people are incompetent. Sometimes they're hardworking, knowledgeable people that bend over backwards and work weekends to help you. So don't pay them back with your anger.
>Then, the US military needed a wide-bodied heavy-
>lift cargo craft. We got the C-5. The loser in
>THAT competition became the Boeing 747. Which
>further revolutionized air travel, AND kick-
>started Wide-body technology. . .
While i agree with the main point of technology transfer's value, which is at best underestimated, and more often ignored, it's worth noting here that the 747 and C-5 are completely different beasts, designed for totally divergent requirements. The 747 entered service in 1966, and the first C-5 was delivered in 1970.
However, every time some big project is undertaken by the government, a lot of money is spent, yes, but a great many new things are learned, as well. We just never hear about them due to the fiasco-of-the-week involving $30k toilet seats, which is a crying shame.
Okay, that might be easy. Now what is your mom more likely to pick when she wants to set up a printer? 'DrakConf' or 'Print Center'.
Hmmm... Let me think.
Assuming they get that far, then yes, it should be easy. As for drives, same thing; "Run Configuration Tool" from the menu or a program called "Drive Setup" with a big button marked "Initialize".
I just installed OS X last night (thanks, Staples), and what Grandma, or Little Susie see first thing is the pretty-familiar Internet Exploder button (when you mouse over it, it says what it is) and a big postage stamp that screams "Mail". There's your two main tasks right there.
OS X takes (roughly speaking here, don't bother reading too much into it) your bad-ass OS and brings it out of the Mountain Dew can-infested dorm room and into the living room or the sewing room.
It's important to note that a lot of good things can be done with the notebooks. Before i graduated from dear old RPI, i helped out in one CAD course that is now able to streamline clunky overhead-projector based lectures into something that can be viewed before class at the student's leisure. But that took years to put together, and is the exception to the rule. The rest of the classes either have half-assed Web-based watered-down tutorials, rife with animated GIFs and Java programs (although the lack of relevant content is more important than the poor presentation thereof), or they have a old curmudgeon of a professor who says to put them away. The second choice is actually the best, trust me. During my brief stint as an instructor, i was tempted to go look up the IM screen names of all the students and send them messages saying "pay attention!".
The notebooks, at least at RPI, have great potential, but to actually learn something, there needs to be a bit of restraint. All they've succeeded in so far, in six years in changing a mostly UNIX-based school to 98% Windows. Great. A bunch more people who just don't know any better, coming out of a place where they should be learning.
>b) It's got a handle! You can't carry a computer >like that by it's handle
The handle isn't for overall carrying around, and isn't meant to replace a computer bag. Do you put your notebook in a bag to carry it down the hall? No, but you might close the screen. Voila. A handle becomes very useful. Trust me, i own an iBook, and if i ever replace it, i'll definitely be looking for the handle, still, even if it's gone.
So, the handle is a good thing. The rest of the design is crap. The old ones were pretty decent-looking, if you like straight lines.
i've had a used 5300cs for about a year now, and if you're looking for a cheap notebook to wordprocess, email, and (lightly) surf on, you can do worse than a 5300. I absolutely agree with this fellow, and in additioon to the above, it gets 2.5hrs battery life, plays Marathon and Escape Velocity very well, and since (before i owned it) it had been sent to Cupertino a few times, it's now rock-solid stable (under OS 9). i use it to play MP3s in my car when i'm stuck in traffic. If you find one of these for $200, it's a steal as a usable computer, and not just a means to a discount.
HALO isn't being *ported* to the Macintosh. The reason Bungie stands out among game developers is that they develop cross-platform from the ground up. That's why it's such a seamless experience from both sides, and why neither platform looks any better than the other. Quake III was the same way; not ported, but developed; that fact alone wins over Mac users for not having to wait an extra month (or, in Blizzard's case, year) for the latest and greatest. Westlake (the major porting company) does brilliant work with things like UT, but it still has to wait for the PC code to be done. It will be truly sad when a Bungie game is filled with Direct3d, DirectPlay, Direct*, and Mark Adams et. al. have to clean that stuff out.
Careful what you ask for! Pro/ENGINEER users get to deal with going from Pro/ENGINEER version 20.1 to Pro/ENGINEER 2000i to Pro/ENGINEER 2000i^2 (that's right, i-squared). Does that make more sense?
Since someone has to say it every time, Sorenson is called Sorenson because it is NOT Apple's. It is a means of compression rolled into QuickTime 4, as it totally puts most others to shame. As for denying an entire section of the Internet these movies, what happens if they put them up as.mpg's, as you'd likely prefer? Bigger size, longer download, and only people who have their browsers properly configured will have them open up right. Face it, the choice is between QT4, Real (ugh!) and WiMP. Once again, if linux users want progress, don't rail against the closed-sourcedness of QuickTime; ask politely for a player for linux, and maybe it will show up someday.
Office for the Mac is usually half a major version behind that for windows; recall that Office 98 had a few new features over the windows version, and was, in fact, out in '98. Office '01 will likely be similar. Add to that the fact that the Mac versions of MS apps are considered by many to be much more usable than windows versions, and your argument loses steam. Furthermore, i haven't seen a whizbang feature that i *want* in a word/excel/pp program since Word 5.1. Perhaps Bill & Co have just done too good a job convincing you you need those features.
That's great. it must be nice to have such a light notebook. However, the base-model 400MHz G3 will smack a watered down notebook PII silly. Ethernet is also standardon the PowerBook, and, perhaps more importantly, the PowerBook can play Quake 3 just fine with its Rage128 board (which may be lackluster in the desktop arena, but is unparalleled for notebooks.).
It should be noted that 'pretty little icons' mean several things. What you're referring to is Microsoft's 'contribution' to the GUI, and, in large part, what seems to give GUIs a bad rap at least among the/. crowd. Early GUIs had pictures of folders that obviously meant directories or folders. The sheet of paper obviously meant a document. A simple concept was represented simply, clearly and quickly. What you're referring to is the legions of button bars in MS Word/Excel, etc. 16x16 pixel pictures cannot adequately convey the meaning 'Add New Row to table'. They just can't. That's why the early Mac interface did not have any cryptic buttons. MacPaint had the arrow, the paintbrush, the eraser, etc. Simple and obvious. Photoshop is a good example of this properly executed. Common, easily understood tasks have buttons. Anything else has a pulldown menu with a descriptive text pick. A similar example is with CAD software. Where Pro/ENGINEER says Extrude and Revolve, SolidWorks (a Windows app through and through) says 'Picture of Block' and 'Picture of Donut'. Just because most of the world uses a *bad* GUI doesn't mean that GUIs are inherently bad.
i agree wholeheartedly! how many of us still go back and play text adventures on or apple ][s or C64s (those of us lucky enough to still have either)? They aren't exactly the pinnacle of technology, but they are still a great gaming experience. Forget about the graphics, and just enjoy a great game that makes you squirm in your seat if you're in the right mood. Listen to the Pfhor surrounding you in M1 in stereo, and realize that that was late 1994, and ran on a 68020. Good games are good games, regardless of technology or time period.
With respect to the menu placement, what's quicker to execute: Aiming you mouse at a set of menus in the upper left corner of a window, which can be anywhere on the screen, or reflexively flicking the mouse to the upper left corner of the screen, where the cursor cannot overrun its target. The menus are in the same place every time. And don't say how it's confusing to have the menus change: If you're going to execute a menu command, it's for a reason. Don't tell me i'm going to pick 'Close', 'Quit', or 'Copy' without having any inkling as to what i'm doing it to, and those are general commands compared to application-specific ones. The menu location was by far my biggest concern with OS X - i'm greatly relieved to see they made the right choice.
It should be noted that the 'one window' thingy is just a more convenient location to place the #Hide Others menu pick currently located in the Applications menu. Hiding background applications, to me, at least, is much more useful than WindowShading them. Just option-click out of the app, and it goes away. Again, this is something to make it so that if Grandma gets confused as to what she's looking at, she can click on that to make everything go away for a while so she can see Netscape. This is also an option that can be done automatically in the General Controls panel. They took a relatively advanced feature (a simple one, mind you, but one whose usefulness is often overlooked.), and made it easily accessible. It certainly isn't a return to pre-MultiFinder days.
It's great to be able to have your Linux box sitting at home running apache, and being able to telnet/ftp/http to it. That's a really great thing to know, that on the other side of the world, you can get at stuff that's yours. Regardless off what they call it, Apple has given users of OS 9 a really great tool for doing that. And, as is expected from them, they made it ridiculously simple to use; another drive icon on your desktop, that, oh, yeah, can be accessed by you from anywhere in the world. Sure, Linux will let you do that. But Apple, as always, will let your grandma do that. iThink that's pretty damn cool.
>>Ah- you're forgetting that this is Slashdot, where it's a requirement to get worked up over trivial things!
No, this is merely another instance of the John Dvorak effect. Step 1. Say something (even something evenhanded and neutral about Apple). Step 2. Someone will bash Apple. (Repeat as necessary) Step 3. Someone will defend Apple. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
For ZDNet's Talkback this means an extra page view for every comment. For/., this just means a lot of crap on one page. Let's face it, nobody has really had their opinions about the formerly hexachrome fruit changed by this non-incident. Also, no one is even mentioning the real reason it was done, which was evidently employee-poaching by other companies. If any other company did this, it would be a non-issue. Nobody cares about anything, unless Apple is doing it. So, as always, continue to expound on how evil Steve and company are, but methinks thou doth protest too much. Why don't you all stop pining away, and just realize that you all secretly love Apple, and are perplexed by the mysterious ways in which it operates. Just remember, it's that same stealthy manner which allows it to shock the computer industry every 4 months for the past 2 years.
Slashdot Mirror
The sound you hear is the clock running out for Star Wars bashers.
Enough people are doing it now that it will soon be un-hip.
In fact, someday, it may even become cool to say you like it, albeit with a knowing wink, since you still have to prove that you're clever enough to realize it's just a space opera.
In the meantime, i'm going to see it a few more times and have a head start on all of you.
It was noted somewhere that Spider-Man spent about $30m more on marketing that AoTC. That has a pretty big bearing on the 90% of the filmgoing public that is obsessed with neither of the two mythologies. They both rock, and it's unfortunate that the (overlapping) audiences of Spider-Man, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings spend so much time arguing with each other over whose obsession is best, rather then just sitting back and saying, "damn, it's a freaking great time to be a movie-goer".
The three you mentioned (excalibur, luxor, mandalay bay) are already connected by their own little tram system, which is slightly better than walking. Vegas is the slowest damn place to get around in. Your choice is to either walk the deceptively long distances through gawking tourists and porn solicitors, or to take the monorails/trams between the casinos. The problem with the latter is that invariably, the entrances for them are buried deep within the casinos, so you don't get the free ride without having to navigate the casino floor (a nontrivial task). As it is, they're 'free', but they, like everything else, get people in the door.
The assumption of Windows is logical enough on the desktop, but perhaps less so with laptops. Mac laptops have always been competitive, price/performance-wise with Intel-based ones, never more so than today. Besides which, they offer features which Intel notebooks does not or cannot deliver, such as dongle- and antenna- free networking, longer battery life, and instant-on capability with OS X. Couple that with the popularity of the iBook with schools, and their attractive price, and the assumption of Windows on the part of CNN does not look so cut and dried.
For lego boats, if you didn't have the preformed hull pieces (the sets sorta sucked apart from the hull pieces, and were really expensive), my solution was always to build a double hull, with plastic sandwich bag material or tape lining the area in between the two. of course, an overlooked aspect of the boat sets was the splendid weight piece they provided. tough to do with plain old bricks... the plastic-bag idea worked well for swimming pools, too.
glad to hear i wasn't the only person who thought starcom was cool, too...
As one of the Anonymous masses mentioned above, this is not merely an issue of fearing potential attack upon the expo itself. Each of these expos has 100+ exhibitors, all of whom need goods transported, on time, safely, and, worse, in this case, across international borders. This may be now, and for the next few weeks both more difficult, and probably more expensive.
Many companies nation, and even world-wide have issued directives stating that 'no one will be forced to fly'. Can you blame them for cancelling an event that may have been plagued by the resultant no-shows of the exhibitors? Business-wise it makes sense, and then, given that they are a prominent American corporation, the over-arching safety concern makes it a very sound decision indeed.
There are actually quite a few games now that run natively on OS X. The good folks at Westlake have kindly ported The Sims over, roughly a year after its initial release. Tropico shipped OSX-compatible. 4x4 Evolution ran on the Public Beta (although i don't think it runs now). Q3A works, Unreal Tournament is supposedly being worked on, and most upcoming games (Warcraft 3, too!) from here on out will be at least Carbon. As dim as the prospects seemed at one point, gaming on OS X now looks pretty darn good.
Now, if only i could get support for my iBook's rage pro so i could play these games...
i strongly agree with this statement. i used to run such an organization at RPI, and got in plenty of trouble myself, but eventually remembered to tone it down a little, keep it to a level that's fun, yet not excessive, and oh, yeah, graduate. My favorite part, though, was using an unoccupied dorm room's ethernet connection to host the site via ml.org. Right under their noses. The site's now at www.inflatablewhale.com -- the history behind it is pretty funny, despite the (mea culpa) bad html.
Actually, i started as a BSAE doing tech support for a big software company, and am still doing so. There is no promotion path to doing something 'real' in this case; the job itself is its own reward or punishment. Sadly, it is usually the latter, but occasionally i do get to do something pretty damn cool, and that's what keeps some of us here, particularly those of us who know what we're doing. At the same time, with just under a year in service, i am practically a veteran.
i'm convinced there are few jobs as thankless as technical support. Nobody you talk to is glad to hear from you, even when you have a solution for them. If the company you work for has in any way wronged that customer, you will hear about it. In my particular form of technical support, it often involves cleaning up colossal messes the customers have made of their own files, due to not understanding the (admittedly complex) software. But that's my fault too. All of it.
I have been insulted, sworn at, i have had my intellect questioned, and heard every possible form of invective that doesn't involve my mom.
Maybe technical support does suck. Maybe all of it adds up to be poor service. However, just because you only talk to people that tell you to reinstall windows and reboot, doesn't mean that all tech support people are incompetent. Sometimes they're hardworking, knowledgeable people that bend over backwards and work weekends to help you. So don't pay them back with your anger.
>Then, the US military needed a wide-bodied heavy-
>lift cargo craft. We got the C-5. The loser in
>THAT competition became the Boeing 747. Which
>further revolutionized air travel, AND kick-
>started Wide-body technology. . .
While i agree with the main point of technology transfer's value, which is at best underestimated, and more often ignored, it's worth noting here that the 747 and C-5 are completely different beasts, designed for totally divergent requirements. The 747 entered service in 1966, and the first C-5 was delivered in 1970.
However, every time some big project is undertaken by the government, a lot of money is spent, yes, but a great many new things are learned, as well. We just never hear about them due to the fiasco-of-the-week involving $30k toilet seats, which is a crying shame.
Okay, that might be easy. Now what is your mom more likely to pick when she wants to set up a printer? 'DrakConf' or 'Print Center'.
Hmmm... Let me think.
Assuming they get that far, then yes, it should be easy. As for drives, same thing; "Run Configuration Tool" from the menu or a program called "Drive Setup" with a big button marked "Initialize".
I just installed OS X last night (thanks, Staples), and what Grandma, or Little Susie see first thing is the pretty-familiar Internet Exploder button (when you mouse over it, it says what it is) and a big postage stamp that screams "Mail". There's your two main tasks right there.
OS X takes (roughly speaking here, don't bother reading too much into it) your bad-ass OS and brings it out of the Mountain Dew can-infested dorm room and into the living room or the sewing room.
It's important to note that a lot of good things can be done with the notebooks. Before i graduated from dear old RPI, i helped out in one CAD course that is now able to streamline clunky overhead-projector based lectures into something that can be viewed before class at the student's leisure. But that took years to put together, and is the exception to the rule. The rest of the classes either have half-assed Web-based watered-down tutorials, rife with animated GIFs and Java programs (although the lack of relevant content is more important than the poor presentation thereof), or they have a old curmudgeon of a professor who says to put them away. The second choice is actually the best, trust me. During my brief stint as an instructor, i was tempted to go look up the IM screen names of all the students and send them messages saying "pay attention!".
The notebooks, at least at RPI, have great potential, but to actually learn something, there needs to be a bit of restraint. All they've succeeded in so far, in six years in changing a mostly UNIX-based school to 98% Windows. Great. A bunch more people who just don't know any better, coming out of a place where they should be learning.
>b) It's got a handle! You can't carry a computer >like that by it's handle
The handle isn't for overall carrying around, and isn't meant to replace a computer bag. Do you put your notebook in a bag to carry it down the hall? No, but you might close the screen. Voila. A handle becomes very useful. Trust me, i own an iBook, and if i ever replace it, i'll definitely be looking for the handle, still, even if it's gone.
So, the handle is a good thing. The rest of the design is crap. The old ones were pretty decent-looking, if you like straight lines.
i've had a used 5300cs for about a year now, and if you're looking for a cheap notebook to wordprocess, email, and (lightly) surf on, you can do worse than a 5300. I absolutely agree with this fellow, and in additioon to the above, it gets 2.5hrs battery life, plays Marathon and Escape Velocity very well, and since (before i owned it) it had been sent to Cupertino a few times, it's now rock-solid stable (under OS 9). i use it to play MP3s in my car when i'm stuck in traffic. If you find one of these for $200, it's a steal as a usable computer, and not just a means to a discount.
HALO isn't being *ported* to the Macintosh. The reason Bungie stands out among game developers is that they develop cross-platform from the ground up. That's why it's such a seamless experience from both sides, and why neither platform looks any better than the other. Quake III was the same way; not ported, but developed; that fact alone wins over Mac users for not having to wait an extra month (or, in Blizzard's case, year) for the latest and greatest. Westlake (the major porting company) does brilliant work with things like UT, but it still has to wait for the PC code to be done. It will be truly sad when a Bungie game is filled with Direct3d, DirectPlay, Direct*, and Mark Adams et. al. have to clean that stuff out.
Careful what you ask for! Pro/ENGINEER users get to deal with going from Pro/ENGINEER version 20.1 to Pro/ENGINEER 2000i to Pro/ENGINEER 2000i^2 (that's right, i-squared). Does that make more sense?
Since someone has to say it every time, .mpg's, as you'd likely prefer? Bigger size, longer download, and only people who have their browsers properly configured will have them open up right. Face it, the choice is between QT4, Real (ugh!) and WiMP. Once again, if linux users want progress, don't rail against the closed-sourcedness of QuickTime; ask politely for a player for linux, and maybe it will show up someday.
Sorenson is called Sorenson because it is NOT Apple's. It is a means of compression rolled into QuickTime 4, as it totally puts most others to shame. As for denying an entire section of the Internet these movies, what happens if they put them up as
Office for the Mac is usually half a major version behind that for windows; recall that Office 98 had a few new features over the windows version, and was, in fact, out in '98. Office '01 will likely be similar. Add to that the fact that the Mac versions of MS apps are considered by many to be much more usable than windows versions, and your argument loses steam. Furthermore, i haven't seen a whizbang feature that i *want* in a word/excel/pp program since Word 5.1. Perhaps Bill & Co have just done too good a job convincing you you need those features.
That's great. it must be nice to have such a light notebook. However, the base-model 400MHz G3 will smack a watered down notebook PII silly. Ethernet is also standardon the PowerBook, and, perhaps more importantly, the PowerBook can play Quake 3 just fine with its Rage128 board (which may be lackluster in the desktop arena, but is unparalleled for notebooks.).
It should be noted that 'pretty little icons' mean several things. What you're referring to is Microsoft's 'contribution' to the GUI, and, in large part, what seems to give GUIs a bad rap at least among the /. crowd. Early GUIs had pictures of folders that obviously meant directories or folders. The sheet of paper obviously meant a document. A simple concept was represented simply, clearly and quickly. What you're referring to is the legions of button bars in MS Word/Excel, etc. 16x16 pixel pictures cannot adequately convey the meaning 'Add New Row to table'. They just can't. That's why the early Mac interface did not have any cryptic buttons. MacPaint had the arrow, the paintbrush, the eraser, etc. Simple and obvious. Photoshop is a good example of this properly executed. Common, easily understood tasks have buttons. Anything else has a pulldown menu with a descriptive text pick. A similar example is with CAD software. Where Pro/ENGINEER says Extrude and Revolve, SolidWorks (a Windows app through and through) says 'Picture of Block' and 'Picture of Donut'. Just because most of the world uses a *bad* GUI doesn't mean that GUIs are inherently bad.
i agree wholeheartedly! how many of us still go back and play text adventures on or apple ][s or C64s (those of us lucky enough to still have either)? They aren't exactly the pinnacle of technology, but they are still a great gaming experience. Forget about the graphics, and just enjoy a great game that makes you squirm in your seat if you're in the right mood. Listen to the Pfhor surrounding you in M1 in stereo, and realize that that was late 1994, and ran on a 68020. Good games are good games, regardless of technology or time period.
With respect to the menu placement, what's quicker to execute: Aiming you mouse at a set of menus in the upper left corner of a window, which can be anywhere on the screen, or reflexively flicking the mouse to the upper left corner of the screen, where the cursor cannot overrun its target. The menus are in the same place every time. And don't say how it's confusing to have the menus change: If you're going to execute a menu command, it's for a reason. Don't tell me i'm going to pick 'Close', 'Quit', or 'Copy' without having any inkling as to what i'm doing it to, and those are general commands compared to application-specific ones. The menu location was by far my biggest concern with OS X - i'm greatly relieved to see they made the right choice.
It should be noted that the 'one window' thingy is just a more convenient location to place the #Hide Others menu pick currently located in the Applications menu. Hiding background applications, to me, at least, is much more useful than WindowShading them. Just option-click out of the app, and it goes away. Again, this is something to make it so that if Grandma gets confused as to what she's looking at, she can click on that to make everything go away for a while so she can see Netscape. This is also an option that can be done automatically in the General Controls panel. They took a relatively advanced feature (a simple one, mind you, but one whose usefulness is often overlooked.), and made it easily accessible. It certainly isn't a return to pre-MultiFinder days.
It's great to be able to have your Linux box sitting at home running apache, and being able to telnet/ftp/http to it. That's a really great thing to know, that on the other side of the world, you can get at stuff that's yours. Regardless off what they call it, Apple has given users of OS 9 a really great tool for doing that. And, as is expected from them, they made it ridiculously simple to use; another drive icon on your desktop, that, oh, yeah, can be accessed by you from anywhere in the world. Sure, Linux will let you do that. But Apple, as always, will let your grandma do that.
iThink that's pretty damn cool.
>>Ah- you're forgetting that this is Slashdot, where it's a requirement to get worked up over trivial things!
/., this just means a lot of crap on one page.
No, this is merely another instance of the John Dvorak effect.
Step 1. Say something (even something evenhanded and neutral about Apple).
Step 2. Someone will bash Apple. (Repeat as necessary)
Step 3. Someone will defend Apple.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
For ZDNet's Talkback this means an extra page view for every comment.
For
Let's face it, nobody has really had their opinions about the formerly hexachrome fruit changed by this non-incident. Also, no one is even mentioning the real reason it was done, which was evidently employee-poaching by other companies. If any other company did this, it would be a non-issue. Nobody cares about anything, unless Apple is doing it. So, as always, continue to expound on how evil Steve and company are, but methinks thou doth protest too much. Why don't you all stop pining away, and just realize that you all secretly love Apple, and are perplexed by the mysterious ways in which it operates. Just remember, it's that same stealthy manner which allows it to shock the computer industry every 4 months for the past 2 years.