OSS is dominated by developers, which is a strength when it comes to the quality of the software. But that's not all they need, and we know that developers want to spend their time writing code, not managing growing projects.
Perhaps we should find some zelous people to grow pointy hair and act stupid to be the OSPHBs.
It'll be a sad day for everyone if apple decide their 'embedded lifestyle device'-thing is more lucrative, more fun than the mac; which they then discontinue.
They have in the past brought a lot of small things to the consumer desktop that have made life easier for everyone who uses a GUI. You don't have to use a mac, or ever have used one, to benefit from that. I think we'll see Expose-like features on everyone's desktop soon, for instance.
Anyone else get the impression that Jobs is a little unhinged? If Apple leave (or even just stop paying so much attention to) the PC market, where else are the insane ideas that work in unexpectedly cool ways going to come from? Redmond? Or a swarm of open-source people who hate writing GUIs anyway?
In general, less competition is going to mean less innovation (and less eye-candy). So I hope Apple realise that I want to buy a mac at some distant point in the future, and keep making them.
But being honest here, trackpads are pretty annoying to use anyway, even if they have 15 buttons and whatnot. I'm using an iBook here, with a Dell optical USB mouse that I bought somewhere for 15. All in all, this is the nicest mouse I've ever used, and it's small and light. I very rarely use the trackpad, because it's so easy to carry the mouse around.
Re:The pointing device on my ibook has 105 buttons
on
Running Mac OS X Panther
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· Score: 1, Interesting
It is the case that in several macOS X application (most notably Carbon emacs, but there are others), the 'simulated' right click (i.e. ctrl+click) gives you a contextual menu, but a physical right-click with a three button mouse does something else. This is how everything should work, IMO. The sooner apple releases a mouse with optional buttons, the better.
(I don't know what a mouse with optional buttons would look like, but it'd be cool)
Apple also lost because their machines looked less powerful than they were, whereas the DOS PCs looked more powerful than they were, all because of the GUI. Ironically, the GUI made it faster as a rule to achieve the same task on the mac than on a DOS PC.
So as well as thinking through the consistency of the GUI, you could spend some time making sure that the default GUI doesn't look like it was sprayed on by some hippies on acid. (As happened to the mac, of course.) Plenty of blue LEDs on the hardware and a giant box full of noisy fans should also help dispell this effect...
Fair enough, some people are retarded and need `open other end' on coke cans or whatever.
I assume most people here need to use computers & know how right? But how many people here use a command line to manage files? Or for copying files to and from remote machines? I'm sure there's a few of you out there; but the point remains that you don't need to be an idiot to get a massive productivity boost out of using a friendly UI.
Even autocompletion in a command line shell is a UI feature. So you see, a consistent usable GUI is not just for grandma, it's for you too.
It's probably not even a good idea to think of the film and the book as the same work.
The film is a wonderful piece of work; the poor acting, ridiculous `futuristic' attitudes, the cliched technologies and sciences are all there, so you think this is just another trashy sci-fi movie. But then you meet the recruiting agent with one arm and no legs... and the propoganda television... and the execution of the prisoner... and what they do to the brain.
If you don't think of this film as an anti-jingoist attack on the values put forward by most low-grade science fiction, you should probably watch it again.
It is almost never incorrect to form a plural by using '-s'/'-es'. The exceptions generally are Old English words with established irregular plurals (children, sheep), words with latin endings where no-one ever uses the English plural (these are generally technical terms in origin) such as labium, vertebra, and words which have two different plurals which mean different things, such as index, indexes (in books), indices (in mathematics).
One very cool feature of Safari (at least 1.2.1 which is what I use) is that certain emacs keybindings work including c-k, c-a, c-e, c-d. Since I the programs I use most hevily are emacs, safari and some x11 based apps, I find this very useful, and I wish this was an accross-the-board feature of MacOS X, and not just the child of a deranged safari programmer.
And in a one-line text-box (address bar for instance) on the mac, hitting uparrow takes you to the start of the box, and hitting downarrow takes you to the end.
This is just in keeping with the idea that it's more profitable to advertise heavily than to improve your product or make it cheaper. For most durables we buy, the actual production costs are very low in comparison with the retail price; the surplus is eaten up by the cost of selling the product to us.
IANA economic historian, but surely the best description of the open source movement would be as `anarcho-syndicalism'. This is an atrocious way to run a country, where one cannot choose the citizens, but where participation is voluntary (as it is here) it seems to be working nicely.
In a socialist system, everything is owned by the people through the means of a government (which has a habit of becoming burdnsome), whereas in the anarchist model, nothing really belongs to anyone (except credit, satisfaction and other unquantifiables). The GPL, for instance, awards credit and prevents the IP from leaving the system. The IP has no financial value within the system.
As the courts see it, and I am not going to disagree, Microsoft have a near-monopoly in the PC OS market. Consequently, Dell, a mainstream PC retailer has no viable option but to buy from Microsoft at present. You want this to change, and so do I, but until it does, we might as well accept that Microsoft have a de facto stranglehold on the PC market. So yes, they can hold a gun to Dell's head (see previous post about IBM).
Microsoft is popular because it's what people want, for the sake of consistency, because of brand-recognition and because of ignorence of alternatives; each of which is a result of its near-monopoly position.
The point here is that the OS market and the various application markets are considerd as distinct (as opposed to one giant software market). If we accept this distinction, then the antitrust laws exist preciseely to prevent Microsoft from using their OS monopoly to compete unfairly (e.g. by bundling) in the application markets.
So, if Windows and the Media Player frontend are not part of a single os-application behemoth, then it should be against the law for Microsoft to bundle only Media Player with Windows.
If you interpret the noises coming out of Redmond, though, Microsoft seems to want us to regard everything as part of the same mammouth `user experience environment'(tm).
Personally, I think a judgment against MS here would be a victory for clear thinking in computer science. Of course, one might argue that the backend to the media player frontend should also be stripped from the os, but on the other hand, there is less of a clear-cut case here saying that this is an inessential part of the operating system, since, as has previously been mentioned, various other 3d party apps depend on it.
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OSS is dominated by developers, which is a strength when it comes to the quality of the software. But that's not all they need, and we know that developers want to spend their time writing code, not managing growing projects.
Perhaps we should find some zelous people to grow pointy hair and act stupid to be the OSPHBs.
It'll be a sad day for everyone if apple decide their 'embedded lifestyle device'-thing is more lucrative, more fun than the mac; which they then discontinue.
They have in the past brought a lot of small things to the consumer desktop that have made life easier for everyone who uses a GUI. You don't have to use a mac, or ever have used one, to benefit from that. I think we'll see Expose-like features on everyone's desktop soon, for instance.
Anyone else get the impression that Jobs is a little unhinged? If Apple leave (or even just stop paying so much attention to) the PC market, where else are the insane ideas that work in unexpectedly cool ways going to come from? Redmond? Or a swarm of open-source people who hate writing GUIs anyway?
In general, less competition is going to mean less innovation (and less eye-candy). So I hope Apple realise that I want to buy a mac at some distant point in the future, and keep making them.
But being honest here, trackpads are pretty annoying to use anyway, even if they have 15 buttons and whatnot. I'm using an iBook here, with a Dell optical USB mouse that I bought somewhere for 15. All in all, this is the nicest mouse I've ever used, and it's small and light. I very rarely use the trackpad, because it's so easy to carry the mouse around.
It is the case that in several macOS X application (most notably Carbon emacs, but there are others), the 'simulated' right click (i.e. ctrl+click) gives you a contextual menu, but a physical right-click with a three button mouse does something else. This is how everything should work, IMO. The sooner apple releases a mouse with optional buttons, the better.
(I don't know what a mouse with optional buttons would look like, but it'd be cool)
Apple also lost because their machines looked less powerful than they were, whereas the DOS PCs looked more powerful than they were, all because of the GUI. Ironically, the GUI made it faster as a rule to achieve the same task on the mac than on a DOS PC.
So as well as thinking through the consistency of the GUI, you could spend some time making sure that the default GUI doesn't look like it was sprayed on by some hippies on acid. (As happened to the mac, of course.) Plenty of blue LEDs on the hardware and a giant box full of noisy fans should also help dispell this effect...
Fair enough, some people are retarded and need `open other end' on coke cans or whatever.
I assume most people here need to use computers & know how right? But how many people here use a command line to manage files? Or for copying files to and from remote machines? I'm sure there's a few of you out there; but the point remains that you don't need to be an idiot to get a massive productivity boost out of using a friendly UI.
Even autocompletion in a command line shell is a UI feature. So you see, a consistent usable GUI is not just for grandma, it's for you too.
It's probably not even a good idea to think of the film and the book as the same work.
The film is a wonderful piece of work; the poor acting, ridiculous `futuristic' attitudes, the cliched technologies and sciences are all there, so you think this is just another trashy sci-fi movie. But then you meet the recruiting agent with one arm and no legs... and the propoganda television... and the execution of the prisoner... and what they do to the brain.
If you don't think of this film as an anti-jingoist attack on the values put forward by most low-grade science fiction, you should probably watch it again.
It is almost never incorrect to form a plural by using '-s'/'-es'. The exceptions generally are Old English words with established irregular plurals (children, sheep), words with latin endings where no-one ever uses the English plural (these are generally technical terms in origin) such as labium, vertebra, and words which have two different plurals which mean different things, such as index, indexes (in books), indices (in mathematics).
One very cool feature of Safari (at least 1.2.1 which is what I use) is that certain emacs keybindings work including c-k, c-a, c-e, c-d. Since I the programs I use most hevily are emacs, safari and some x11 based apps, I find this very useful, and I wish this was an accross-the-board feature of MacOS X, and not just the child of a deranged safari programmer.
And in a one-line text-box (address bar for instance) on the mac, hitting uparrow takes you to the start of the box, and hitting downarrow takes you to the end.
This is just in keeping with the idea that it's more profitable to advertise heavily than to improve your product or make it cheaper. For most durables we buy, the actual production costs are very low in comparison with the retail price; the surplus is eaten up by the cost of selling the product to us.
IANA economic historian, but surely the best description of the open source movement would be as `anarcho-syndicalism'. This is an atrocious way to run a country, where one cannot choose the citizens, but where participation is voluntary (as it is here) it seems to be working nicely.
In a socialist system, everything is owned by the people through the means of a government (which has a habit of becoming burdnsome), whereas in the anarchist model, nothing really belongs to anyone (except credit, satisfaction and other unquantifiables). The GPL, for instance, awards credit and prevents the IP from leaving the system. The IP has no financial value within the system.
As the courts see it, and I am not going to disagree, Microsoft have a near-monopoly in the PC OS market. Consequently, Dell, a mainstream PC retailer has no viable option but to buy from Microsoft at present. You want this to change, and so do I, but until it does, we might as well accept that Microsoft have a de facto stranglehold on the PC market. So yes, they can hold a gun to Dell's head (see previous post about IBM).
Microsoft is popular because it's what people want, for the sake of consistency, because of brand-recognition and because of ignorence of alternatives; each of which is a result of its near-monopoly position.
Hey! If you can't discount MacOS for 'political baggage', then recommend GPL software.
Like it or not, once you know about OSes, which one you use at home (or make your parents use) is partly a political choice.
In other news, EU to force BSD to unbundle vi...
Simply because Apple is not leveraging a monopoly in one market to give themselves a monopoly in another.
The point here is that the OS market and the various application markets are considerd as distinct (as opposed to one giant software market). If we accept this distinction, then the antitrust laws exist preciseely to prevent Microsoft from using their OS monopoly to compete unfairly (e.g. by bundling) in the application markets.
So, if Windows and the Media Player frontend are not part of a single os-application behemoth, then it should be against the law for Microsoft to bundle only Media Player with Windows.
If you interpret the noises coming out of Redmond, though, Microsoft seems to want us to regard everything as part of the same mammouth `user experience environment'(tm).
Personally, I think a judgment against MS here would be a victory for clear thinking in computer science. Of course, one might argue that the backend to the media player frontend should also be stripped from the os, but on the other hand, there is less of a clear-cut case here saying that this is an inessential part of the operating system, since, as has previously been mentioned, various other 3d party apps depend on it.