I'm sorry, but having someone steal something and then give it to you doesn't make it "public domain" or "public information", it just makes you an accomplice to the theft.
If it is information about massive fraud and criminal enterprise against the public (and let's face it, that's exactly what it is going to be), it makes you an accomplice to a fucking hero.
Until I remembered back to the days before the Free Software movement, when Unix machines that came without compilers were par for the course, and a development toolkit for any commercial platform would set you back O($10k).
I've worked on Unix machines since the 80's and while there were systems that didn't ship with compilers, our lab certainly didn't patronize those vendors. Even so, a desktop workstation easily cost $20K all-in ($50K for high-end stuff), so fat lot of difference it made. Linux killed those fuckers dead, but then fumbled the ball by going after the bottom feeders in the commodity PC market. That left the real business opportunity untapped of skimming the cream of the computing market. Apple stepped neatly into the hole that Linux ignored, and the OSS world has been saying WTF? ever since.
Unquestionably, yes. And yet it has nevertheless become the most pervasive, flexible, universal communication medium in the history of the world, so it's a glorious mess. It is questionable whether a better-specified system would have succeeded in this, because it would have been too locked down into its designer's original intent. It is precisely the hackability of HTML/http that makes it both fucking awful and fucking brilliant.
Actually, all large corporations lean to the right. Americans wouldn't recognize a real left winger if it blindfolded them, lined them up against a wall, and shot them for crimes against the proletariat.
My computer usage far predates both Windows and Mac.
Mine, too, but we're not debating the UI conventions of CP/M vs. VMS.
What are you talking about? One of us is confused about the definition of "Modal". What I can tell you is that the X button on both Linux and Windows is very consistent. It closes the window, and any of the windows children.
Modal means it does different things depending on context. Sometimes it quits the app and sometimes it doesn't, depending on what else you have open.
With MacOS, it is all over the board.
No, for a given app, the behaviour of the button is always the same. On Windows and Linux the behaviour of the button for a given app changes depending on what else you have open.
You sound ridiculous saying this. The reason that the green + button causes grief is because for as long as any of us have been alive, we have agreed that a + symbol means 'add'.
Add 1000 pixels of useless whitespace around my 100-pixel image, you mean. Just because you find that an intuitive and obvious behaviour doesn't make it so. The rest of us think it is retarded that there should be a major UI function for "cover up my entire workspace so I can't drag-and-drop anything anywhere and am forced to use the obvious shortcut of Crtl-C, Ctrl-V to move things around".
The placement of the menu was debatable back when single monitors where the only setup. Today, it isn't debatable any more.
Sorry, dude, but we're debating it. Most users these days buy laptops, and most laptops are single display. What's more, with handheld devices, things are trending even more strongly in that direction.
the Start button is useful, productive AND intuitive.
...? What do you even say to ignorant shit like this?
You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
By then, computers will be exotic pieces of machinery only used by scientists and engineers. Everyone else will just automatically network through their black turtlenecks.
OS X punches way above its weight in Flash *developers*, so it would be a very bad idea without even considering the anti-trust implications.
Also, the whole iOS Flash ban is a shitstorm in a teacup. There isn't yet a decent Flash implementation on *any* mobile OS, so it's just a stupid media circus, not a real issue. The actual iOS ban of interest is not Flash, but cross-compiling Flash to ObjC. And didn't Apple relax that ban, now that Flash is proving that it's pretty much useless on all mobile platforms?
Uhhh...I really hate to use one of the classic explanations, but maybe ur doin it wrong?... Have you tried cleaning out the registry and hard drive, with something like CCleaner or WinUtilities?
Don't these guys make fun of us Linux geeks when we bullshit like this?
What's eerie is that Apple does this with every single thing they have ever launched since time immemorial, and slashgeeks still love to think that Apple is evil, prone to making huge gaffes, and then quietly making good once they realize their colossal blunder. The "no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame" mindset is so effing retarded it's now an Internet meme, and we *still* don't get that the joke is on us. Not Taco. Us.
This is what Apple does: (1) strip every half-baked feature/freedom out of a new product until it is boiled down to its most basic essence. (2) Release it. (3) Start adding the features/freedoms back in one at a time once they are fully baked. (4) Profit! (Notice the lack of a...? step.) They do this. Every. Single. Time. iPod storage. iTunes on Windows. Virtually everything in OS X. Webkit. Macbooks and minis. iTunes DRM. iPhone cut and paste. iPhone devkits. iOS multitasking. Every single time the geekosphere gnashes its teeth and bemoans that Apple is pushing bullshit that is missing X, Y, and Z. And then Apple does X, Y, and Z, and the geekosphere congratulates itself for doing Apple's product development for them.
If we believed our own propaganda (and it is apparent that many of us do), Apple is the world's most incompetent company that barely survives thanks to nerd rage steering them back on track on a more or less continuous basis. But Occam's Razor suggests that a more likely explanation is merely that Apple polishes the consumer experience first, and the nerd experience second. I guess that angers us.
Truly lame stories are ignored, not buried. It follows that the simplest fix is to treat a large number of buries as equivalent to diggs, and put that story on the front page, because it is clearly getting lots of attention. That causes bury brigades to backfire, and as a bonus generates more controversy, attention, and flamewars for the site.
A relatively small number of buries, on the other hand, probably indicates something offensive or trollish, and can be taken at face value.
We're all poorly educated about many things, yet we ought to recognize that the opinions of scientists who specialize in the subject are the best knowledge we have. Accepting the opinions of some scientists but not others, based on how much money it makes for you, makes you neither an idiot nor an honest enquirer. It makes you a sell-out.
You are also engaging in the art of "damn lies". The actual important and telling ratio is iPhone 4 dropped calls by signal strength / iPhone 3GS dropped calls by signal strength. The iPhone 4's redesigned antenna is supposed to make it more sensitive, which means it could be connecting calls where the 3GS could not. If these are the calls that are most likely to get dropped (and it seems pretty obvious that they would be) the 4 could still be outperforming the 3GS even with this problem.
For my start-up, we just phoned our local MS sales rep and told him we were developing on Linux and were looking to build a interface layer to some MS servers, and what could they do? They sent us a full set of disks and license keys to a bunch of MS server apps, no questions asked.
Ultimately didn't help. Even with that 1st-rate support, it was still easier to just ditch the MS stuff entirely.
Well, that's true of all forms of government, even dictatorships. "Advisors" have always provided the nuts and bolts of policy, while "leaders" have communicated this policy to all the stakeholders.
The GG certainly isn't free to run amok like a half-cocked dictator, but neither is any referee. A referee's duty is to enforce the rules, but also not to interfere if the players are doing a good job of playing by the rules. Canada has generally been blessed with responsible government, so our referee basically sits on her ass and cuts ribbons most days.
Well, she alone has the power to summon and dissolve parliament, which is hardly ceremonial. She's basically the referee between rivals for the government, and considering that we have a minority government right now, and may soon have another, the referee's job is pretty significant. It only seems like there isn't much power there because the current minority has been pretty stable, and the previous majorities haven't needed much refereeing.
You don't (or shouldn't) buy shit-grade discount consumer desktops for your business. Business machines get beat on by people who don't give a crap about them, 8 hours per day, and have to survive for the duration of the company's upgrade cycle, which is typically 3-5 years. Consumer PCs have to withstand perhaps 1 hour per day of web surfing by people who treat them gently because they spent their own money, and can be engineered to fail whenever the warranty expires (say 1 year), because what are you gonna do about it? Go to BestBuy and get another $279 ShitBox(TM), that's what.
The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.
It's a Safari demo, numbskulls, not an acid2-style test case page.
There used to be a great little game in the DOS days called CROBOTS, where you built a robot that would go into an arena and fight other robots. The catch was your robot was completely autonomous and controlled by a C-like program that you had to write. There was an API for moving, scanning, and shooting, and you had only 1000 bytes to make the most of it. Once the arena fight began, your robot was on its own, and all you could do was root for it as the other robots pounded on it. You could also run in batch mode and run 100 or 1000 matches to get some stats on how well your robot was doing. Best of all was getting together with some friends and having a tournament.
It came with a bunch of stock robot models that you could practice against. They were all open-source, so you could steal from their code to get ideas for how to write your own robot methods. There was rabbit.c, who ran around so fast that nobody could hit it. There was rook.c who ran in straight lines like a raster scan, strafing everything that it passed. There was sniper.c who headed for the arena corners to reduce its exposure and then picked you off from there. So it came with some useful little algorithms to copy from.
It would be awesome if someone were to update that whole concept with some up-to-date graphics and networked play. Maybe someone has, and I've just never heard of it?
Only Apple could convince the industry that limiting features is a good idea.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 16 years before Steve Jobs was born. Apple may have good taste, but they didn't invent it.
Slashdot Mirror
Come now, Halo's not *that* complex.
I'm sorry, but having someone steal something and then give it to you doesn't make it "public domain" or "public information", it just makes you an accomplice to the theft.
If it is information about massive fraud and criminal enterprise against the public (and let's face it, that's exactly what it is going to be), it makes you an accomplice to a fucking hero.
Until I remembered back to the days before the Free Software movement, when Unix machines that came without compilers were par for the course, and a development toolkit for any commercial platform would set you back O($10k).
I've worked on Unix machines since the 80's and while there were systems that didn't ship with compilers, our lab certainly didn't patronize those vendors. Even so, a desktop workstation easily cost $20K all-in ($50K for high-end stuff), so fat lot of difference it made. Linux killed those fuckers dead, but then fumbled the ball by going after the bottom feeders in the commodity PC market. That left the real business opportunity untapped of skimming the cream of the computing market. Apple stepped neatly into the hole that Linux ignored, and the OSS world has been saying WTF? ever since.
HTML is a mess
Unquestionably, yes. And yet it has nevertheless become the most pervasive, flexible, universal communication medium in the history of the world, so it's a glorious mess. It is questionable whether a better-specified system would have succeeded in this, because it would have been too locked down into its designer's original intent. It is precisely the hackability of HTML/http that makes it both fucking awful and fucking brilliant.
Actually, all large corporations lean to the right. Americans wouldn't recognize a real left winger if it blindfolded them, lined them up against a wall, and shot them for crimes against the proletariat.
My computer usage far predates both Windows and Mac.
Mine, too, but we're not debating the UI conventions of CP/M vs. VMS.
What are you talking about? One of us is confused about the definition of "Modal". What I can tell you is that the X button on both Linux and Windows is very consistent. It closes the window, and any of the windows children.
Modal means it does different things depending on context. Sometimes it quits the app and sometimes it doesn't, depending on what else you have open.
With MacOS, it is all over the board.
No, for a given app, the behaviour of the button is always the same. On Windows and Linux the behaviour of the button for a given app changes depending on what else you have open.
You sound ridiculous saying this. The reason that the green + button causes grief is because for as long as any of us have been alive, we have agreed that a + symbol means 'add'.
Add 1000 pixels of useless whitespace around my 100-pixel image, you mean. Just because you find that an intuitive and obvious behaviour doesn't make it so. The rest of us think it is retarded that there should be a major UI function for "cover up my entire workspace so I can't drag-and-drop anything anywhere and am forced to use the obvious shortcut of Crtl-C, Ctrl-V to move things around".
The placement of the menu was debatable back when single monitors where the only setup. Today, it isn't debatable any more.
Sorry, dude, but we're debating it. Most users these days buy laptops, and most laptops are single display. What's more, with handheld devices, things are trending even more strongly in that direction.
the Start button is useful, productive AND intuitive.
...? What do you even say to ignorant shit like this?
You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
Like Google? Amazon? Or every other successful company of the last 10-15 years?
Or did you mean companies that *sell* Linux, which obviously you should not expect killer profits from.
Face the facts, fanboy. Macs are way overpriced. If the OS is as cheap as people claim, then why the fuck is there such a disparity in price?
Because there's no Windows, genius. Face the facts, some people would pay $1000 premium for that feature. And most of the rest would wish they could.
By then, computers will be exotic pieces of machinery only used by scientists and engineers. Everyone else will just automatically network through their black turtlenecks.
I also drink a lot before using Microsoft products.
OS X punches way above its weight in Flash *developers*, so it would be a very bad idea without even considering the anti-trust implications.
Also, the whole iOS Flash ban is a shitstorm in a teacup. There isn't yet a decent Flash implementation on *any* mobile OS, so it's just a stupid media circus, not a real issue. The actual iOS ban of interest is not Flash, but cross-compiling Flash to ObjC. And didn't Apple relax that ban, now that Flash is proving that it's pretty much useless on all mobile platforms?
Uhhh...I really hate to use one of the classic explanations, but maybe ur doin it wrong? ... Have you tried cleaning out the registry and hard drive, with something like CCleaner or WinUtilities?
Don't these guys make fun of us Linux geeks when we bullshit like this?
What's eerie is that Apple does this with every single thing they have ever launched since time immemorial, and slashgeeks still love to think that Apple is evil, prone to making huge gaffes, and then quietly making good once they realize their colossal blunder. The "no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame" mindset is so effing retarded it's now an Internet meme, and we *still* don't get that the joke is on us. Not Taco. Us.
This is what Apple does: (1) strip every half-baked feature/freedom out of a new product until it is boiled down to its most basic essence. (2) Release it. (3) Start adding the features/freedoms back in one at a time once they are fully baked. (4) Profit! (Notice the lack of a ...? step.) They do this. Every. Single. Time. iPod storage. iTunes on Windows. Virtually everything in OS X. Webkit. Macbooks and minis. iTunes DRM. iPhone cut and paste. iPhone devkits. iOS multitasking. Every single time the geekosphere gnashes its teeth and bemoans that Apple is pushing bullshit that is missing X, Y, and Z. And then Apple does X, Y, and Z, and the geekosphere congratulates itself for doing Apple's product development for them.
If we believed our own propaganda (and it is apparent that many of us do), Apple is the world's most incompetent company that barely survives thanks to nerd rage steering them back on track on a more or less continuous basis. But Occam's Razor suggests that a more likely explanation is merely that Apple polishes the consumer experience first, and the nerd experience second. I guess that angers us.
Truly lame stories are ignored, not buried. It follows that the simplest fix is to treat a large number of buries as equivalent to diggs, and put that story on the front page, because it is clearly getting lots of attention. That causes bury brigades to backfire, and as a bonus generates more controversy, attention, and flamewars for the site.
A relatively small number of buries, on the other hand, probably indicates something offensive or trollish, and can be taken at face value.
We're all poorly educated about many things, yet we ought to recognize that the opinions of scientists who specialize in the subject are the best knowledge we have. Accepting the opinions of some scientists but not others, based on how much money it makes for you, makes you neither an idiot nor an honest enquirer. It makes you a sell-out.
You are also engaging in the art of "damn lies". The actual important and telling ratio is iPhone 4 dropped calls by signal strength / iPhone 3GS dropped calls by signal strength. The iPhone 4's redesigned antenna is supposed to make it more sensitive, which means it could be connecting calls where the 3GS could not. If these are the calls that are most likely to get dropped (and it seems pretty obvious that they would be) the 4 could still be outperforming the 3GS even with this problem.
For my start-up, we just phoned our local MS sales rep and told him we were developing on Linux and were looking to build a interface layer to some MS servers, and what could they do? They sent us a full set of disks and license keys to a bunch of MS server apps, no questions asked.
Ultimately didn't help. Even with that 1st-rate support, it was still easier to just ditch the MS stuff entirely.
Well, that's true of all forms of government, even dictatorships. "Advisors" have always provided the nuts and bolts of policy, while "leaders" have communicated this policy to all the stakeholders.
The GG certainly isn't free to run amok like a half-cocked dictator, but neither is any referee. A referee's duty is to enforce the rules, but also not to interfere if the players are doing a good job of playing by the rules. Canada has generally been blessed with responsible government, so our referee basically sits on her ass and cuts ribbons most days.
Well, she alone has the power to summon and dissolve parliament, which is hardly ceremonial. She's basically the referee between rivals for the government, and considering that we have a minority government right now, and may soon have another, the referee's job is pretty significant. It only seems like there isn't much power there because the current minority has been pretty stable, and the previous majorities haven't needed much refereeing.
IBM's Power line of processors isn't the quite same as the PowerPC line. You can't really squeeze a 6 GHz mainframe core into an iBook.
You don't (or shouldn't) buy shit-grade discount consumer desktops for your business. Business machines get beat on by people who don't give a crap about them, 8 hours per day, and have to survive for the duration of the company's upgrade cycle, which is typically 3-5 years. Consumer PCs have to withstand perhaps 1 hour per day of web surfing by people who treat them gently because they spent their own money, and can be engineered to fail whenever the warranty expires (say 1 year), because what are you gonna do about it? Go to BestBuy and get another $279 ShitBox(TM), that's what.
The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.
It's a Safari demo, numbskulls, not an acid2-style test case page.
There used to be a great little game in the DOS days called CROBOTS, where you built a robot that would go into an arena and fight other robots. The catch was your robot was completely autonomous and controlled by a C-like program that you had to write. There was an API for moving, scanning, and shooting, and you had only 1000 bytes to make the most of it. Once the arena fight began, your robot was on its own, and all you could do was root for it as the other robots pounded on it. You could also run in batch mode and run 100 or 1000 matches to get some stats on how well your robot was doing. Best of all was getting together with some friends and having a tournament.
It came with a bunch of stock robot models that you could practice against. They were all open-source, so you could steal from their code to get ideas for how to write your own robot methods. There was rabbit.c, who ran around so fast that nobody could hit it. There was rook.c who ran in straight lines like a raster scan, strafing everything that it passed. There was sniper.c who headed for the arena corners to reduce its exposure and then picked you off from there. So it came with some useful little algorithms to copy from.
It would be awesome if someone were to update that whole concept with some up-to-date graphics and networked play. Maybe someone has, and I've just never heard of it?
Only Apple could convince the industry that limiting features is a good idea.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 16 years before Steve Jobs was born. Apple may have good taste, but they didn't invent it.