I forgot about Mosaic. But you just reiterated my point about Microsoft's methods. When Netscape adopted it from Mosaic, they still called it "Bookmarks". But when MS adopted it, they renamed it "Favourites".
I know there are differences, but from what I understood, Active X controls were revised versions of OLE controls for the Internet. Yet, Active X controls were also used in things like Access and Visual Basic. They integrated it very well across the board, and I can't find the equivalent on the Mac platform.
Quicken came up with "QuickFill" in the mid 90's for repeated data in transaction entries. Autocomplete is basically the same thing applied to URLs in a browser. It's just another example of Microsoft using ideas that already exist, and labelling it with their own name, like "Favourites" in place of Netscape's "Bookmarks".
Microsoft does, however, have a knack for integrating existing ideas together more tightly. Active X is an example of this. A consortium of companies, including Apple, tried to implement an object oriented model called "OpenDoc" in the 90's. Microsoft came up with their own version, "OLE", later revising it as "Active X". Yet Apple no longer seems to be using OpenDoc with their applications like AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, or Safari. They used to have a browser called CyberDog that did apparently. Meanwhile MS has applied Active X throughout Office, Access, and Internet Explorer, and Visual Studio. It's a useful feature I wish was common in databases on the Mac platform.
I don't mean to sound like an Apple switch ad, but I got jealous of seeing people on Macs never have the problems I did on my PC laptop. They were never the computer-savvy types either. They never had to bother with any technical issues, while I found myself constantly fixing my computer instead of using it. One of the Apple switch ads had somebody saying they got tired of "the operating system always getting in the way", and I was sold. I'm desensetised and numb to advertising like everyone else, but that line really snagged me.
My old laptop would constantly hang whenever I tried to shut it down or put it to sleep. I would have to unplug the AC power adapter and pull out the battery because the power switch wouldn't work. Now that I switched to a PowerBook, I just love being able to wake up my computer and be on the net, using a broadband connection, literally in a second or two. I can turn it on, get on the net for a brief moment, then turn it off.
With my old laptop, I would turn it on, go to the kitchen and start to prepare a meal, come back and hit return, go back to the kitchen to make sure I'm not burning whatever I'm cooking, then come back to browse the net. I remember timing it once and it was something like 15 minutes. That was average. Turning it off would be a similar experience. I couldn't just get off the net and leave the flat. It was like waiting for someone to get dressed to go out. I would shut down the laptop and wait a while until it would hang, because I wouldn't want to interrupt the power in the middle of a disk read/write process in fear of damaging the hard drive. And then I would unplug the AC and battery.
I also got tired of worrying about security vulnerabilities in software I used to hook up to the net. I was really glad to be able to stop using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. I knew there were other browsers, but I didn't have enough hard drive space to use more than one, because of the bloat-ware factor involved with upgrading to Windows 98 on a Windows 95 laptop. I couldn't get rid of IE because I was using Visual Studio, which required it. The security holes in OE were ridiculous, with email viruses able to infect your computer without you even having to open up an attachment. But I do miss being able to place hyperlinks in an email.
However, I can't say that I'm totally satisfied with OS X. It has great features, but doesn't have the technical feel of previous Mac OS versions at the filesystem level. I keep encountering strange bugs- garbage for permissions names when doing a get info, gigabytes of missing hard drive space on my external drive after using applications, and now the help viewer application won't launch in the Finder. I would know what files to replace on a previous OS version to fix these sorts of problems, but now it is more complicated with OS X. The OS arrangement on the hard drive resembles a Windows system more now, with the graphical front-end feeling more like a superficial facade, rather than a view of the computer's internal workings. It feels like a blind-fold. Application install processes place tons of files all over the place, making them difficult to remove. I remember the old days when, if you installed software that caused conflicts, you could just manually drag out a file in the extensions folder and re-boot. You could remove software and feel secure in knowing that you would end up with the same amount of free space that you had before you installed it. Now you just don't know.
And I preferred it when the file type was separate from the file name.
It looks like Apple is making another foray into the PC market. First they adopted USB, replacing the old ADB, automatically making PC USB peripherals Mac-compatible by default at the hardware level. Then they came out with the PC-compatible iPod. Then they produced the PC version of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. Now this.
I wonder if Apple is going to try and use GarageBand and Soundtrack with iTunes and the iTunes Music Store to bypass record companies altogether. You can easily upload your own iMix playlists already. The next step would be to allow artists to easily upload their own works to the iTunes Music Store directly through iTunes, and receive royalties through something similar to a PayPal account. If that were to happen, Apple could be perceived as some kind of a record label on its own.
The recording industry steadily profited from the advance of technology, allowing them to produce more elaborate music much cheaper than in the old days of analogue recording, editing, and distribution. That benefit surpassed them in favour of the the consumer when music file-sharing became feasible. Ever since then, the industry had fought technology tooth and nail, to try and keep the benefits in their hands. Now the technology reaching a point in which the record companies may be rendered totally obsolete. Apple and the record companies probably know this, but just aren't openly admitting it.
Some users may not have been able to take advantage of the patch issued in April because of problems it can cause. Users who find their computers infected by it are actually being advised to cancel their credit cards. Presumably, users who were unable to install the patch may have no choice.
How do you mirror an encrypted home directory that has FileVault on? If you do a Get Info on one, you'll see it's a zero k alias. I tried to copy it using the cp Unix command in the console, and that didn't work.
Can it be done using the Backup application that comes free with a.Mac account? Would there be problems restoring it because of the encryption? And if it works, do you have to bother with using any of the QuickPicks, or would they just be redundant information?
I'm curious about how to do it if you say it's easy, because that's the kind of setup I'd like to have running.
I did buy a backup system. Like I mentioned, I bought a LaCie Mobile Hard Drive for use with the Backup application. It is small and draws it's power completely from the FireWire port, just like an iPod. It's a very practical setup for my PowerBook, because I don't need to use an extra AC power adapter.
The point is, with a 60 gig iPod and the Backup application, you would have a dedicated backup system by default, with all the extra functionality of the iPod. It would be very feasible setup for PowerBooks. You can set the Backup application to run automatically, and wouldn't have to deal with swapping around Firewire devices or using FireWire hubs that also use AC power adapters.
Backing up is especially important if you have a laptop. I learned this the hard way; never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. Thousands of dollars and all your data can disappear in the blink of an eye.
Apple's Backup application that comes free with a.Mac membership allows you to back up your data onto an iPod. I recently had to buy a mobile LaCie external hard drive because my old 20 gig iPod didn't have enough space to use it this way and still function as an MP3 player. Considering the importance of backups, a 60 gig iPod would be very useful.
I've been trying to find out how to do this myself for ages!!! I used to archive handwritten documents and sketches using a Visioneer PaperPort Vx sheet-feed scanner on a Windows 95 laptop years ago. I could manage to save at least a file cabinet drawer worth of pages onto a single CD-R. The setup worked great, and was even portable so I could travel with it! It scanned pages pretty quickly.
The kind of medium I was scanning could cause problems. Sheets of pad paper, paper bound notebooks, and even hard-bound notebooks that I took apart would usually have remaining bits of binding glue that would cause a paper jam. I would have to pull the page from the other end of the scanner to help it avoid jamming. Since then I've switched to using spiral-bound unruled notebooks with covers solid enough to keep the corners of the pages from curling due to wear and tear. The spiral binding insured that I didn't have to deal with binding glue jams. Crisp flat pages also prevented jams due to curled corners.
I scanned them in at 300 dpi in black and white using the text enhanced mode so that the contrast was adjusted automatically for better compression. Without this, the blank areas of a scanned page would be percieved as having some shade, and the scanned image would have some pixel dithering to represent the shade. This would cause difficulty for the compression algorithm and result in a large file size. With the text enhanced mode, the blank areas were percieved as being absolutely white, which would maximise the efficiency of the compression algorithm. This would result in much smaller file sizes. At first, I used the PaperPort software's ".MAX" proprietary file format, but I ended up converting them to LZW-compressed TIFFs so that I could open the documents on computers not equipped with PaperPort software.
If the papers you need to scan are crisp uncurled pages without residual binding glue like that you find on pads, scanning will be a breeze. You can use a scanner with an automatic document feeder, because you won't have to worry about paper jams. Otherwise, you will have to scan each page manually. The Visioneer Strobe XP 450 PDF looks like a good one for this. If they do have curls or glue but are all of a uniform size, a flatbed would be your best bet, because you wouldn't have to worry about jams and would have to only manually set the cropping size just once. If the papers vary in size a great deal (say if you were scanning in a bunch of receipts of different lengths and widths) a sheet-feed scanner would be better because they crop the pages automatically, although you would have to worry about jams. At least the Visioneer ones do. There is another sheet-feed scanner for the Mac called the TravelScan 464M, but I don't have any experience with it, so I don't know if it automatically crops.
I eventually decided that I would like to try scanning in greyscale, because although black and white was fine for printed text, I felt that it wasn't clear enough for handwriting and sketches. I knew that the file sizes would be larger, so I decided I would need to burn them onto DVD. I bought the first laptop to burn DVDs immediately when it first came out, which was the PowerBook with SuperDrive. To my disappointment, I found that Visioneer dropped support for the Mac when OS X was introduced, so I couldn't use their scanners. I got a legacy Visioneer Strobe Pro scanner on eBay, ordered the Mac OS 9 installation disk from Visioneer, and I tried installing the PaperPort software for System 9, wit
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot about Mosaic. But you just reiterated my point about Microsoft's methods. When Netscape adopted it from Mosaic, they still called it "Bookmarks". But when MS adopted it, they renamed it "Favourites".
I know there are differences, but from what I understood, Active X controls were revised versions of OLE controls for the Internet. Yet, Active X controls were also used in things like Access and Visual Basic. They integrated it very well across the board, and I can't find the equivalent on the Mac platform.
That patent list looks more like my Slashdot recent submissions list, except there aren't enough "(rejected)" items.
Quicken came up with "QuickFill" in the mid 90's for repeated data in transaction entries. Autocomplete is basically the same thing applied to URLs in a browser. It's just another example of Microsoft using ideas that already exist, and labelling it with their own name, like "Favourites" in place of Netscape's "Bookmarks".
Microsoft does, however, have a knack for integrating existing ideas together more tightly. Active X is an example of this. A consortium of companies, including Apple, tried to implement an object oriented model called "OpenDoc" in the 90's. Microsoft came up with their own version, "OLE", later revising it as "Active X". Yet Apple no longer seems to be using OpenDoc with their applications like AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, or Safari. They used to have a browser called CyberDog that did apparently. Meanwhile MS has applied Active X throughout Office, Access, and Internet Explorer, and Visual Studio. It's a useful feature I wish was common in databases on the Mac platform.
I don't mean to sound like an Apple switch ad, but I got jealous of seeing people on Macs never have the problems I did on my PC laptop. They were never the computer-savvy types either. They never had to bother with any technical issues, while I found myself constantly fixing my computer instead of using it. One of the Apple switch ads had somebody saying they got tired of "the operating system always getting in the way", and I was sold. I'm desensetised and numb to advertising like everyone else, but that line really snagged me.
My old laptop would constantly hang whenever I tried to shut it down or put it to sleep. I would have to unplug the AC power adapter and pull out the battery because the power switch wouldn't work. Now that I switched to a PowerBook, I just love being able to wake up my computer and be on the net, using a broadband connection, literally in a second or two. I can turn it on, get on the net for a brief moment, then turn it off.
With my old laptop, I would turn it on, go to the kitchen and start to prepare a meal, come back and hit return, go back to the kitchen to make sure I'm not burning whatever I'm cooking, then come back to browse the net. I remember timing it once and it was something like 15 minutes. That was average. Turning it off would be a similar experience. I couldn't just get off the net and leave the flat. It was like waiting for someone to get dressed to go out. I would shut down the laptop and wait a while until it would hang, because I wouldn't want to interrupt the power in the middle of a disk read/write process in fear of damaging the hard drive. And then I would unplug the AC and battery.
I also got tired of worrying about security vulnerabilities in software I used to hook up to the net. I was really glad to be able to stop using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. I knew there were other browsers, but I didn't have enough hard drive space to use more than one, because of the bloat-ware factor involved with upgrading to Windows 98 on a Windows 95 laptop. I couldn't get rid of IE because I was using Visual Studio, which required it. The security holes in OE were ridiculous, with email viruses able to infect your computer without you even having to open up an attachment. But I do miss being able to place hyperlinks in an email.
However, I can't say that I'm totally satisfied with OS X. It has great features, but doesn't have the technical feel of previous Mac OS versions at the filesystem level. I keep encountering strange bugs- garbage for permissions names when doing a get info, gigabytes of missing hard drive space on my external drive after using applications, and now the help viewer application won't launch in the Finder. I would know what files to replace on a previous OS version to fix these sorts of problems, but now it is more complicated with OS X. The OS arrangement on the hard drive resembles a Windows system more now, with the graphical front-end feeling more like a superficial facade, rather than a view of the computer's internal workings. It feels like a blind-fold. Application install processes place tons of files all over the place, making them difficult to remove. I remember the old days when, if you installed software that caused conflicts, you could just manually drag out a file in the extensions folder and re-boot. You could remove software and feel secure in knowing that you would end up with the same amount of free space that you had before you installed it. Now you just don't know.
And I preferred it when the file type was separate from the file name.
I didn't know that. I thought the USB standard was made to replace rs-232 serial ports and parrallel ports, which are PC standards.
It looks like Apple is making another foray into the PC market. First they adopted USB, replacing the old ADB, automatically making PC USB peripherals Mac-compatible by default at the hardware level. Then they came out with the PC-compatible iPod. Then they produced the PC version of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. Now this.
I wonder if Apple is going to try and use GarageBand and Soundtrack with iTunes and the iTunes Music Store to bypass record companies altogether. You can easily upload your own iMix playlists already. The next step would be to allow artists to easily upload their own works to the iTunes Music Store directly through iTunes, and receive royalties through something similar to a PayPal account. If that were to happen, Apple could be perceived as some kind of a record label on its own.
The recording industry steadily profited from the advance of technology, allowing them to produce more elaborate music much cheaper than in the old days of analogue recording, editing, and distribution. That benefit surpassed them in favour of the the consumer when music file-sharing became feasible. Ever since then, the industry had fought technology tooth and nail, to try and keep the benefits in their hands. Now the technology reaching a point in which the record companies may be rendered totally obsolete. Apple and the record companies probably know this, but just aren't openly admitting it.
Next ad on /.
"Enlarge your penis up to 3.5 inches..."
Some users may not have been able to take advantage of the patch issued in April because of problems it can cause. Users who find their computers infected by it are actually being advised to cancel their credit cards. Presumably, users who were unable to install the patch may have no choice.
How do you mirror an encrypted home directory that has FileVault on? If you do a Get Info on one, you'll see it's a zero k alias. I tried to copy it using the cp Unix command in the console, and that didn't work.
Can it be done using the Backup application that comes free with a .Mac account? Would there be problems restoring it because of the encryption? And if it works, do you have to bother with using any of the QuickPicks, or would they just be redundant information?
I'm curious about how to do it if you say it's easy, because that's the kind of setup I'd like to have running.
I did buy a backup system. Like I mentioned, I bought a LaCie Mobile Hard Drive for use with the Backup application. It is small and draws it's power completely from the FireWire port, just like an iPod. It's a very practical setup for my PowerBook, because I don't need to use an extra AC power adapter.
The point is, with a 60 gig iPod and the Backup application, you would have a dedicated backup system by default, with all the extra functionality of the iPod. It would be very feasible setup for PowerBooks. You can set the Backup application to run automatically, and wouldn't have to deal with swapping around Firewire devices or using FireWire hubs that also use AC power adapters.
Backing up is especially important if you have a laptop. I learned this the hard way; never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. Thousands of dollars and all your data can disappear in the blink of an eye.
Apple's Backup application that comes free with a .Mac membership allows you to back up your data onto an iPod. I recently had to buy a mobile LaCie external hard drive because my old 20 gig iPod didn't have enough space to use it this way and still function as an MP3 player. Considering the importance of backups, a 60 gig iPod would be very useful.
I've been trying to find out how to do this myself for ages!!! I used to archive handwritten documents and sketches using a Visioneer PaperPort Vx sheet-feed scanner on a Windows 95 laptop years ago. I could manage to save at least a file cabinet drawer worth of pages onto a single CD-R. The setup worked great, and was even portable so I could travel with it! It scanned pages pretty quickly.
The kind of medium I was scanning could cause problems. Sheets of pad paper, paper bound notebooks, and even hard-bound notebooks that I took apart would usually have remaining bits of binding glue that would cause a paper jam. I would have to pull the page from the other end of the scanner to help it avoid jamming. Since then I've switched to using spiral-bound unruled notebooks with covers solid enough to keep the corners of the pages from curling due to wear and tear. The spiral binding insured that I didn't have to deal with binding glue jams. Crisp flat pages also prevented jams due to curled corners.
I scanned them in at 300 dpi in black and white using the text enhanced mode so that the contrast was adjusted automatically for better compression. Without this, the blank areas of a scanned page would be percieved as having some shade, and the scanned image would have some pixel dithering to represent the shade. This would cause difficulty for the compression algorithm and result in a large file size. With the text enhanced mode, the blank areas were percieved as being absolutely white, which would maximise the efficiency of the compression algorithm. This would result in much smaller file sizes. At first, I used the PaperPort software's ".MAX" proprietary file format, but I ended up converting them to LZW-compressed TIFFs so that I could open the documents on computers not equipped with PaperPort software.
If the papers you need to scan are crisp uncurled pages without residual binding glue like that you find on pads, scanning will be a breeze. You can use a scanner with an automatic document feeder, because you won't have to worry about paper jams. Otherwise, you will have to scan each page manually. The Visioneer Strobe XP 450 PDF looks like a good one for this. If they do have curls or glue but are all of a uniform size, a flatbed would be your best bet, because you wouldn't have to worry about jams and would have to only manually set the cropping size just once. If the papers vary in size a great deal (say if you were scanning in a bunch of receipts of different lengths and widths) a sheet-feed scanner would be better because they crop the pages automatically, although you would have to worry about jams. At least the Visioneer ones do. There is another sheet-feed scanner for the Mac called the TravelScan 464M, but I don't have any experience with it, so I don't know if it automatically crops.
I eventually decided that I would like to try scanning in greyscale, because although black and white was fine for printed text, I felt that it wasn't clear enough for handwriting and sketches. I knew that the file sizes would be larger, so I decided I would need to burn them onto DVD. I bought the first laptop to burn DVDs immediately when it first came out, which was the PowerBook with SuperDrive. To my disappointment, I found that Visioneer dropped support for the Mac when OS X was introduced, so I couldn't use their scanners. I got a legacy Visioneer Strobe Pro scanner on eBay, ordered the Mac OS 9 installation disk from Visioneer, and I tried installing the PaperPort software for System 9, wit