If you drag a folder called "Documents" into your home directory and click on "OK",
To be fair, I don't think it asks you whether it's ok to move that directory. It will warn you that it's going to replace that folder, and the buttons will either say, "Replace" or "Stop". It's not that ambiguous.
The only thing that makes it problematic is if you're accustomed to working in a file manager that will automatically merge directories, then you might think it's going to merge when it's actually going to replace. I would say that neither behavior is "wrong", but you certainly can get unhappy results if you're expecting one behavior and get another.
Honestly, it took me a little while to get used to it, but now that I expect it, it's fine. Usually, if I'm doing anything complicated with copying/moving lots of stuff recursively, I'm going to want to use a command line anyhow. In the command-line, "cp" and "mv" work in normal unix fashion.
Using InDesign on my mac and then switching over to InDesign on my PC, I'm constantly reminded of how blatantly deceptive and outright evil Windows' font management can be. Same thing applies to lots of other little issues - particularly color management, open/save dialogues, troubleshooting, etc...
Yeah, that's the sort of thing Adobe could control better if they had more control into the actual OS...
Part of the problem with Windows is that it just isn't built to be a professional system for things like media. The color/font management is built to look good to consumers. Cleartype, for example, makes fonts look great from a user standpoint, but makes it so fonts essentially aren't rendering the way they're designed to be rendered. If you're proofing or something, Windows kinda sucks.
One thing to note about Acrobat Reader is that they got a lot of complaints about slow load time after the release of version 6. Their response was not to cut down on the bloat, but to load it all from the Windows Startup folder, meaning it's all sitting in memory all the time. The virtues of that approach are debatable.
Well, yeah. What kind of stinks is that Photoshop is so dominant that no one wants to invest in making good image editors. But then, Photoshop is a professional tool, so it's really expensive. So what if you are just a guy who wants to do minor image editing for your website? You have to pirate Photoshop. Or else pay a ridiculous amount of money for using a small subset of Photoshop's features. They've had various kinds of Photoshop-lite over the years, but at least some of those attempts have ended up being a crippled mess.
So I think it's great that CoreImage has opened up this field a bit. It means we're seeing $40 applications that do what a lot of people need, and so people can get what they need without breaking the law or paying $700.
Yeah, I'm not in 3D stuff, but more print/web/video media. 2D-only. But yes, essentially what I'm saying is that Adobe should consider porting to Linux. And if they're going to port to Linux, they're going to have to choose a favored distribution (or a couple favored distros) and support them. Once you hit that point, they may as well sell a package of their apps bundled with that distro, since it wouldn't really cost them extra, and it would represent a level of independence from both Apple and MS.
What they would gain is true platform independence. Right now, they do a lot to support Microsoft in MS's battle against Linux. Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to screw Adobe over by creating competing applications and formats. Long-term, it's a losing proposition for Adobe. If Microsoft manages to displace PDF, Photoshop, and Flash (as is Microsoft's goal), Adobe will be severely hurt.
If they were able to support Linux/Unix (beyond OSX), then Microsoft would have a harder time forcing users into using the competing Microsoft products. Right now, if Microsoft changes their OS to break PDF while pushing their own format, it's still at the point where they could theoretically get people to drop PDF. It's not likely, but it's possible, since Adobe is still so tied to MS.
So, in short, Adobe is reliant on Microsoft and Apple to deliver their applications to users. Being able to put their apps on an open-source platform is potentially valuable. However, supporting Linux/BSD is complicated by all the different distros. They'd probably have to pick a distro to support, and at that point, they may as well take a particular distro and brand their own branded version. They could still rely on the open source community for security updates and the like, but it would enable them to build flash/PDF into the OS in interesting ways, possibly improving efficiency.
Anyway, I'm not saying it will happen or even that it should happen. I'm just saying that, if I were running Adobe, I'd be more interested in branding my own version of Linux (while continuing to make my applications for Windows and OSX) than I would be in making my products OSX-only or Windows-only. I think that if I ran Adobe, I'd probably have some level of internal development for Linux in case Ubuntu actually managed to grab some market share.
Really those applications are the result (I think, maybe I'm wrong?) of Apple giving developers CoreImage, thereby lowering the entry barrier for making a graphics application. However, they're really not up to the level of competing with Photoshop/Illustrator for professional tools. At least not yet.
People who don't understand why Adobe is so dominant are the people who don't understand the difference between editing some GIFs for your webpage vs. being a graphic design pro. Photoshop and Illustrator are very refined tools with immense amount of functionality, and their hooks into each other and into other Adobe products makes them invaluable to a modern graphics pro. Pixelmator and DrawIt may become very powerful applications as time goes on, but it'll take years of serious development in order to catch up.
In the mean time, they're great programs for home users and amateurs. And when I say that, I don't mean to be disregarding. I'm saying they're great programs. And I'm not saying that out of ego, because I'm not a real graphics pro who really takes advantage of Photoshop. But I've supported graphics pros, and sometimes they do some pretty advanced stuff that you can't do very easily without real professional level tools.
Good point. It's also worth noting that, often enough, Apple has developed applications when there's some void that no developers are servicing. If they start being too aggressive and taking over too much of their own application development, it will probably drive developers away from Mac because they won't want to compete with the sole OS/hardware vendor for the platform.
I wouldn't mind seeing iTunes's movie-purchase functionality hitched up with Netflix's online movie rental stuff, both delivered over an AppleTV.
Of course, it's not going to happen. Media companies are already too afraid of Apple, and would probably find a way to punish apple for a move like that, even if Apple were ready to go for it.
If you ask me, Adobe shouldn't be looking to be acquired by an OS-maker. Instead, Adobe should be looking to acquire an OS.
I've been working in IT for various kinds of media companies, and in a lot of cases, there are people whose entire jobs are centered around using Adobe apps. You could throw Adobe CS3 on any system and any OS, and those people would still be able to do their jobs just fine. The OS doesn't matter.
So let's say Adobe develops their own Linux/BSD variant or buys someone else's. With very little work on their end, they could actually become a competitor to Microsoft. What often keeps linux from a lot of desktop these days is the lack of specific professional media applications. Adobe could make their own port of OpenOffice/Evolution/Linux, bundle that with Adobe CS3, and have a pretty formidable media/business desktop OS.
Well the way I see it is this: buying music is good for times when you want to be able to keep the song, but subscriptions are good if you want to be able to listen to a bunch of different stuff that you don't necessarily want to keep. I have had guilty pleasure songs that I want to listen to over and over for 2 weeks, and then I never want to hear it again. Subscriptions would be great for that.
So I feel like the ideal would be some kind of a hybrid service. Like, let's say you pay a nominal fee for a monthly subscription, where you can download songs, listen to them, but if you drop the service, you can't take them with you. But then if you really like an album, you can buy it, the DRM get stripped, and you basically get to re-download it for free for life, even if you drop the subscription.
I might go for something like that. One of the things I don't like about iTunes is that, if the file gets corrupt, they won't just let me re-download it. Yes, it's happened to me. I know you're allowed to request a chance to re-download all of your purchases, but you're basically only allowed to do that once, and I don't want to do it for 2 songs.
But honestly, with me it kind of depends on how the whole thing was framed, and how the prices worked out. I wouldn't want to have to continually spend money just to keep my current music library from going away. On the other hand, I might be willing to spend *a little bit* of money every month in order to be able to get good recommendations and try music out to see if I want to buy it. There's some wiggle-room with me there.
I'm not saying that it's bad for universities to publish. Of course, as institutions built for the purpose of research and learning (Learning too!), they ought to share their research and learning.
However, I still think the "publish or die" mentality might need to be reevaluated. I do believe that some of these universities need to focus a little more of being educational institutions instead of pretending that they're only public research institutions. Do you have "students" or "interns"? If "students", then you're a school of sorts. Pay some attention to education.
But in case my earlier post wasn't clear, I'm concerned about more than the educational part of all this. I think sometimes the quality of the output suffers from the demands that are put on researchers/writers. They're pushed to publish before they're ready. They're pushed to publish when they don't have anything real to say. They're pushed to gain a reputation and grab headlines and whatever else it takes to gain a reputation for the university. Publish, publish, publish. Publish or die.
Meh... Even with Apple, I'm not sure they could make music subscriptions work. I think the real problem is that people just don't want a subscription model for music. They want to have a collection that they can keep perpetually, and not a temporary license.
You know what I was listening to on my way to work today? Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde. You know how long i've had that CD? Neither do I, but it's been a while. Now, do I want to spend $20 a month in order to keep listening to it? Absolutely not. I want to buy it once, and be able to listen to it again and again for the rest of my life (or until I get sick of it).
It could be that I'm in the minority there, but apparently not if the subscription model isn't doing well. I think there's room for somebody to improve the digital music distribution business, but it has to allow sales. People want to own the music. Also, you have to recognize that a fair amount of music sales are due to a hoarding instinct. People want to accrue "collections", even if they don't really have time to listen to it all very often. A collection that is the same as everyone else's and which evaporates when you cancel your service doesn't offer much in the way of bragging rights.
Academics are often "MANDATED" to "(not just submit, but) actually publish articles" in peer-reviewed journals, or at least publish their findings in other area-specific literature (perhaps books, etc.). Is that an "indication of arrogance and incompetence" on the part of the university/college that employs them?
It's an indication of *something* bad-- or at least "less than ideal". This intense focus on publishing, IMHO, distracts from teaching or even learning. That's right, learning. Even professors have a lot to learn in their field. We all have a lot to learn. And instead of encouraging these people to learn and teach, they're pushed to "output".
It turns into this competitive thing where their best interests are served by acting pompous and building reputations. It's better to make a big splash with what you publish than for it to focus on writing something particularly accurate and of high quality. I'm sure some people in academia manage to rise above all that and really put out good stuff, but having watched professors and doctoral students go through all this, and having read some of this "output", it seems pretty clear to me that the system has problems.
>I still maintain that the Wikipedia is only an approximation of the truth, if even that.
To say that wikipedia is an approximation of the truth is meaningless. All encyclopedias and written sources contain errors. Wikipedia has been shown to contain *fewer* errors than most of the competing sources, and if you've ever read wikipedia articles, you know they are better edited than most books and are generally very readable.
I wanted to make the minor point here that language itself is, at best, an approximation of the truth. If I look at the chair in front of me and say, "That is a chair," even something so simple and evident as that is an abstraction and approximation. I haven't captured the whole, unbiased, objective, and precise truth in that one statement.
So sure, the Wikipedia is an approximation of the truth. So is everything that's ever been typed or written or said. Even scientific equations. They indicate something. They point. Hopefully they do a good enough job pointing that the reader/listener can follow the direction you're pointing towards and catch a glimpse of the truth that you're trying to indicate. Such is the nature of communication.
In fairness, they're horrible because the design of the web browser keeps them limited and kludgy. I think that's what Mozilla is trying to fix. If you make the browser more powerful and design it more to be an application framework, web applications can be much better.
I'll certainly grant you that Portal is much better in that regard. However, even in portal, you figure out what you can do and what you can't do, and you solve the problems accordingly. So once you get used to the rules of the game, you're back in the box.
In real life, there aren't simple rules about what you can and can't do. There are limits to our current understanding and technology, but we push back on those every day. There are limits based on law, but there are also exceptions and loopholes and ways to get away with breaking the law. There are financial limits, but you can raise money. There are all these limits to what a person can do, but we're constantly changing and breaking those limits.
I think Portal starts to approach this when you get to the advanced versions of the puzzles, fewest steps, and fewest portals. You get close to breaking the rules. However, the goals set by that mode of play are still built to be achievable (even if very difficult). To me, the key difference is that in real life, problems aren't built to be solved. Many problems don't have a solution, and then there are loads of problems that might have a solution, but nobody knows whether there's a solution, let alone what that solution is. And you're confronted with several problems at once, where solving one precludes solving another. Sometimes you aren't even told what the problem is or what the solution would be, and you have to figure it out yourself. And there are no do-overs. It's a whole different ball-game.
However, many people in real life don't even really know what it's like to be responsible for solving problems. Have you ever had a time when you've been in a difficult situation, when success or failure hinged completely on your decisions, when failure held large negative consequences for multiple people, and when you didn't have anyone who could give you any guidance at all? How well can a game prepare you for that?
Also, if Leopard server offers Time Machine, it could make for a very good document server. Versioning (via Time Machine) and good indexing (via spotlight).
I mean, ultimately, if you can do it on OSX you can do it on Linux. But sometimes Apple has a nice/slick implementation.
Agreed. The idea that you'll learn to problem-solve from gaming might be a bit off. Besides the save/reload thing you mentioned, there's the fact that games usually have you solve problems using set methods. There is a set way to solve a puzzle, and there's a set way to kill the monster.
When you have to solve real problems, you start to figure out that there aren't clear solutions laid out for you. Usually, there isn't "a solution", but instead an infinite number of possible partial solutions, none of which solve the problem entirely, all of which introduce new problems, and none of which are all that certain to work. You just have to pick the one that you think is best, and hope that your judgement is good.
I'd agree that puzzles are good for keeping your brain active. I'd agree that games can help teach strategy. But as for problem solving skills, often enough you need someone who can "think outside the box" (I know it's a cliché, but it's true!). Games usually teach you specifically to think inside the box and follow the set rules, so I'm just not so sure it's good training for problem-solving.
On the other hand, completely ignoring Microsoft formats isn't essentially suicide, it is suicide.
That's why OpenOffice (and many other applications) have the ability to read and write Microsoft Office files (.doc,.xls,.ppt). But trying to make those your standard document formats for your office suite would be completely retarded, since they're not open standards and you don't know the specs. And Microsoft can change the specs and not tell you.
Slashdot Mirror
If you drag a folder called "Documents" into your home directory and click on "OK",
To be fair, I don't think it asks you whether it's ok to move that directory. It will warn you that it's going to replace that folder, and the buttons will either say, "Replace" or "Stop". It's not that ambiguous.
The only thing that makes it problematic is if you're accustomed to working in a file manager that will automatically merge directories, then you might think it's going to merge when it's actually going to replace. I would say that neither behavior is "wrong", but you certainly can get unhappy results if you're expecting one behavior and get another.
Honestly, it took me a little while to get used to it, but now that I expect it, it's fine. Usually, if I'm doing anything complicated with copying/moving lots of stuff recursively, I'm going to want to use a command line anyhow. In the command-line, "cp" and "mv" work in normal unix fashion.
Well, I also envisioned hooking up with a babe like Annette Funacello, and that didn't happen either ...
How old are you? I feel old just for knowing who Annette Funacello is.
Using InDesign on my mac and then switching over to InDesign on my PC, I'm constantly reminded of how blatantly deceptive and outright evil Windows' font management can be. Same thing applies to lots of other little issues - particularly color management, open/save dialogues, troubleshooting, etc...
Yeah, that's the sort of thing Adobe could control better if they had more control into the actual OS...
Part of the problem with Windows is that it just isn't built to be a professional system for things like media. The color/font management is built to look good to consumers. Cleartype, for example, makes fonts look great from a user standpoint, but makes it so fonts essentially aren't rendering the way they're designed to be rendered. If you're proofing or something, Windows kinda sucks.
One thing to note about Acrobat Reader is that they got a lot of complaints about slow load time after the release of version 6. Their response was not to cut down on the bloat, but to load it all from the Windows Startup folder, meaning it's all sitting in memory all the time. The virtues of that approach are debatable.
So I think it's great that CoreImage has opened up this field a bit. It means we're seeing $40 applications that do what a lot of people need, and so people can get what they need without breaking the law or paying $700.
Yeah, I'm not in 3D stuff, but more print/web/video media. 2D-only. But yes, essentially what I'm saying is that Adobe should consider porting to Linux. And if they're going to port to Linux, they're going to have to choose a favored distribution (or a couple favored distros) and support them. Once you hit that point, they may as well sell a package of their apps bundled with that distro, since it wouldn't really cost them extra, and it would represent a level of independence from both Apple and MS.
What they would gain is true platform independence. Right now, they do a lot to support Microsoft in MS's battle against Linux. Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to screw Adobe over by creating competing applications and formats. Long-term, it's a losing proposition for Adobe. If Microsoft manages to displace PDF, Photoshop, and Flash (as is Microsoft's goal), Adobe will be severely hurt.
If they were able to support Linux/Unix (beyond OSX), then Microsoft would have a harder time forcing users into using the competing Microsoft products. Right now, if Microsoft changes their OS to break PDF while pushing their own format, it's still at the point where they could theoretically get people to drop PDF. It's not likely, but it's possible, since Adobe is still so tied to MS.
So, in short, Adobe is reliant on Microsoft and Apple to deliver their applications to users. Being able to put their apps on an open-source platform is potentially valuable. However, supporting Linux/BSD is complicated by all the different distros. They'd probably have to pick a distro to support, and at that point, they may as well take a particular distro and brand their own branded version. They could still rely on the open source community for security updates and the like, but it would enable them to build flash/PDF into the OS in interesting ways, possibly improving efficiency.
Anyway, I'm not saying it will happen or even that it should happen. I'm just saying that, if I were running Adobe, I'd be more interested in branding my own version of Linux (while continuing to make my applications for Windows and OSX) than I would be in making my products OSX-only or Windows-only. I think that if I ran Adobe, I'd probably have some level of internal development for Linux in case Ubuntu actually managed to grab some market share.
Really those applications are the result (I think, maybe I'm wrong?) of Apple giving developers CoreImage, thereby lowering the entry barrier for making a graphics application. However, they're really not up to the level of competing with Photoshop/Illustrator for professional tools. At least not yet.
People who don't understand why Adobe is so dominant are the people who don't understand the difference between editing some GIFs for your webpage vs. being a graphic design pro. Photoshop and Illustrator are very refined tools with immense amount of functionality, and their hooks into each other and into other Adobe products makes them invaluable to a modern graphics pro. Pixelmator and DrawIt may become very powerful applications as time goes on, but it'll take years of serious development in order to catch up.
In the mean time, they're great programs for home users and amateurs. And when I say that, I don't mean to be disregarding. I'm saying they're great programs. And I'm not saying that out of ego, because I'm not a real graphics pro who really takes advantage of Photoshop. But I've supported graphics pros, and sometimes they do some pretty advanced stuff that you can't do very easily without real professional level tools.
Because the two most widely-used Adobe products, Flash player and Acrobat Reader, are both flaming CPU-hogging turds on whatever OS they're on.
Good point. It's also worth noting that, often enough, Apple has developed applications when there's some void that no developers are servicing. If they start being too aggressive and taking over too much of their own application development, it will probably drive developers away from Mac because they won't want to compete with the sole OS/hardware vendor for the platform.
I wouldn't mind seeing iTunes's movie-purchase functionality hitched up with Netflix's online movie rental stuff, both delivered over an AppleTV.
Of course, it's not going to happen. Media companies are already too afraid of Apple, and would probably find a way to punish apple for a move like that, even if Apple were ready to go for it.
I don't have any numbers, but I would guess that Apple could buy Adobe if they really wanted to. Apple is bigger than you'd probably think.
If you ask me, Adobe shouldn't be looking to be acquired by an OS-maker. Instead, Adobe should be looking to acquire an OS.
I've been working in IT for various kinds of media companies, and in a lot of cases, there are people whose entire jobs are centered around using Adobe apps. You could throw Adobe CS3 on any system and any OS, and those people would still be able to do their jobs just fine. The OS doesn't matter.
So let's say Adobe develops their own Linux/BSD variant or buys someone else's. With very little work on their end, they could actually become a competitor to Microsoft. What often keeps linux from a lot of desktop these days is the lack of specific professional media applications. Adobe could make their own port of OpenOffice/Evolution/Linux, bundle that with Adobe CS3, and have a pretty formidable media/business desktop OS.
Well the way I see it is this: buying music is good for times when you want to be able to keep the song, but subscriptions are good if you want to be able to listen to a bunch of different stuff that you don't necessarily want to keep. I have had guilty pleasure songs that I want to listen to over and over for 2 weeks, and then I never want to hear it again. Subscriptions would be great for that.
So I feel like the ideal would be some kind of a hybrid service. Like, let's say you pay a nominal fee for a monthly subscription, where you can download songs, listen to them, but if you drop the service, you can't take them with you. But then if you really like an album, you can buy it, the DRM get stripped, and you basically get to re-download it for free for life, even if you drop the subscription.
I might go for something like that. One of the things I don't like about iTunes is that, if the file gets corrupt, they won't just let me re-download it. Yes, it's happened to me. I know you're allowed to request a chance to re-download all of your purchases, but you're basically only allowed to do that once, and I don't want to do it for 2 songs.
But honestly, with me it kind of depends on how the whole thing was framed, and how the prices worked out. I wouldn't want to have to continually spend money just to keep my current music library from going away. On the other hand, I might be willing to spend *a little bit* of money every month in order to be able to get good recommendations and try music out to see if I want to buy it. There's some wiggle-room with me there.
I'm not saying that it's bad for universities to publish. Of course, as institutions built for the purpose of research and learning (Learning too!), they ought to share their research and learning.
However, I still think the "publish or die" mentality might need to be reevaluated. I do believe that some of these universities need to focus a little more of being educational institutions instead of pretending that they're only public research institutions. Do you have "students" or "interns"? If "students", then you're a school of sorts. Pay some attention to education.
But in case my earlier post wasn't clear, I'm concerned about more than the educational part of all this. I think sometimes the quality of the output suffers from the demands that are put on researchers/writers. They're pushed to publish before they're ready. They're pushed to publish when they don't have anything real to say. They're pushed to gain a reputation and grab headlines and whatever else it takes to gain a reputation for the university. Publish, publish, publish. Publish or die.
I think things could be handled better.
I don't disagree with you. (To be honest, I didn't read the post you were responding to, so I may have taken what you said out of context.)
Meh... Even with Apple, I'm not sure they could make music subscriptions work. I think the real problem is that people just don't want a subscription model for music. They want to have a collection that they can keep perpetually, and not a temporary license.
You know what I was listening to on my way to work today? Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde. You know how long i've had that CD? Neither do I, but it's been a while. Now, do I want to spend $20 a month in order to keep listening to it? Absolutely not. I want to buy it once, and be able to listen to it again and again for the rest of my life (or until I get sick of it).
It could be that I'm in the minority there, but apparently not if the subscription model isn't doing well. I think there's room for somebody to improve the digital music distribution business, but it has to allow sales. People want to own the music. Also, you have to recognize that a fair amount of music sales are due to a hoarding instinct. People want to accrue "collections", even if they don't really have time to listen to it all very often. A collection that is the same as everyone else's and which evaporates when you cancel your service doesn't offer much in the way of bragging rights.
Academics are often "MANDATED" to "(not just submit, but) actually publish articles" in peer-reviewed journals, or at least publish their findings in other area-specific literature (perhaps books, etc.). Is that an "indication of arrogance and incompetence" on the part of the university/college that employs them?
It's an indication of *something* bad-- or at least "less than ideal". This intense focus on publishing, IMHO, distracts from teaching or even learning. That's right, learning. Even professors have a lot to learn in their field. We all have a lot to learn. And instead of encouraging these people to learn and teach, they're pushed to "output".
It turns into this competitive thing where their best interests are served by acting pompous and building reputations. It's better to make a big splash with what you publish than for it to focus on writing something particularly accurate and of high quality. I'm sure some people in academia manage to rise above all that and really put out good stuff, but having watched professors and doctoral students go through all this, and having read some of this "output", it seems pretty clear to me that the system has problems.
I wanted to make the minor point here that language itself is, at best, an approximation of the truth. If I look at the chair in front of me and say, "That is a chair," even something so simple and evident as that is an abstraction and approximation. I haven't captured the whole, unbiased, objective, and precise truth in that one statement.
So sure, the Wikipedia is an approximation of the truth. So is everything that's ever been typed or written or said. Even scientific equations. They indicate something. They point. Hopefully they do a good enough job pointing that the reader/listener can follow the direction you're pointing towards and catch a glimpse of the truth that you're trying to indicate. Such is the nature of communication.
As a user, anything web based is just horrible.
In fairness, they're horrible because the design of the web browser keeps them limited and kludgy. I think that's what Mozilla is trying to fix. If you make the browser more powerful and design it more to be an application framework, web applications can be much better.
I'll certainly grant you that Portal is much better in that regard. However, even in portal, you figure out what you can do and what you can't do, and you solve the problems accordingly. So once you get used to the rules of the game, you're back in the box.
In real life, there aren't simple rules about what you can and can't do. There are limits to our current understanding and technology, but we push back on those every day. There are limits based on law, but there are also exceptions and loopholes and ways to get away with breaking the law. There are financial limits, but you can raise money. There are all these limits to what a person can do, but we're constantly changing and breaking those limits.
I think Portal starts to approach this when you get to the advanced versions of the puzzles, fewest steps, and fewest portals. You get close to breaking the rules. However, the goals set by that mode of play are still built to be achievable (even if very difficult). To me, the key difference is that in real life, problems aren't built to be solved. Many problems don't have a solution, and then there are loads of problems that might have a solution, but nobody knows whether there's a solution, let alone what that solution is. And you're confronted with several problems at once, where solving one precludes solving another. Sometimes you aren't even told what the problem is or what the solution would be, and you have to figure it out yourself. And there are no do-overs. It's a whole different ball-game.
However, many people in real life don't even really know what it's like to be responsible for solving problems. Have you ever had a time when you've been in a difficult situation, when success or failure hinged completely on your decisions, when failure held large negative consequences for multiple people, and when you didn't have anyone who could give you any guidance at all? How well can a game prepare you for that?
Also, if Leopard server offers Time Machine, it could make for a very good document server. Versioning (via Time Machine) and good indexing (via spotlight).
I mean, ultimately, if you can do it on OSX you can do it on Linux. But sometimes Apple has a nice/slick implementation.
Agreed. The idea that you'll learn to problem-solve from gaming might be a bit off. Besides the save/reload thing you mentioned, there's the fact that games usually have you solve problems using set methods. There is a set way to solve a puzzle, and there's a set way to kill the monster.
When you have to solve real problems, you start to figure out that there aren't clear solutions laid out for you. Usually, there isn't "a solution", but instead an infinite number of possible partial solutions, none of which solve the problem entirely, all of which introduce new problems, and none of which are all that certain to work. You just have to pick the one that you think is best, and hope that your judgement is good.
I'd agree that puzzles are good for keeping your brain active. I'd agree that games can help teach strategy. But as for problem solving skills, often enough you need someone who can "think outside the box" (I know it's a cliché, but it's true!). Games usually teach you specifically to think inside the box and follow the set rules, so I'm just not so sure it's good training for problem-solving.
I suppose that's why it's a bad idea to store documents in the MS Word format.
On the other hand, completely ignoring Microsoft formats isn't essentially suicide, it is suicide.
That's why OpenOffice (and many other applications) have the ability to read and write Microsoft Office files (.doc, .xls, .ppt). But trying to make those your standard document formats for your office suite would be completely retarded, since they're not open standards and you don't know the specs. And Microsoft can change the specs and not tell you.