Another Linux-liking switcher here
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Very well said. The motherboard in my dual Athlon Debian unstable box recently croaked, and we decided that it would be a great time to switch to a Power Mac. In addition to the reasons you mentioned (Unix under the hood, many free *nix apps available, the system Just Working), OS X appealed to me because its application-centric taskbarless interface is nearly ideal for my preferred working style and I'd heard many a good thing about Apple's interface design and the keyboard support found throughout the OS and applications conforming to Apple's HIG. Thus far, I'm very pleased. Getting used to a new GUI of course involves a learning curve that I'm still climbing, but I've only had this thing for a week and I feel quite comfortable with it already. As a whole, working with OS X and HIG-conformant applications just feels smooth and elegant. I enjoyed using XFce4 and Enlightenment on my old box, but applications and the desktop environment generally did not mesh together in the same way that many of them do on OS X.
Besides, I compose music and would like to eventually set up a home studio of sorts. The particular audio software I'm interested in is only available for OS X. GarageBand is a great basic package that came free with the computer. For more sophisticated work, I would want something like Digital Performer, which gets excellent reviews and, in my experience (a digital music lab in college) is reasonably easy to use for a powerful application.
My WordPress blog used to get the same sort of spam (advertising the same crap, nonetheless) until I installed the AuthImage plugin. It's stopped the spam completely without requiring me to keep a blacklist updated or forcing my friends to create accounts just to leave comments. It isn't a perfect solution (it's not accessible to blind visitors), but since virtually no one other than sighted friends reads my site, it works for me.
I have a similar experience. My gmail account is the whois contact for my domain names, so I expected to get the usual spam that got sent to my old contact email, but I've received much, much more than that as well although I've only given the address to a handful of trusted sources.
In the end of the movie, Charlie asks what happens to the other kids, and Willy Wonka reassures him that they've been restored to their "normal, terrible selves". The book shows that they have changed from their trip through the factory. Augustus and Mike are stretched out, Violet is blue, and Veruca is covered in garbage. There's no indication that the first three kids will turn back to normal. It's been a while since I read the book, so I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it implies that they are permanently screwed up.
But doesn't that depend on how well you can distinguish between subtle differences in sound? I agree that an average adult learning another language will have problems trying to comprehend sounds not present in their native tongue. For instance, one of my teachers in high school learned German as her first language and English second. German does not have the "th" sound found, for instance, in "bath", so she was never able to learn said sound. Conversely, some students had problems properly pronouncing the "ch" sound in words like "ich" - a short hiss that has no equivalent in English. They would wind up saying "ick" or "ish" instead (which made sense, as "ch" is essentially halfway between "k" and "sh"). I'm lucky enough to be naturally good at noticing those sorts of distinctions, so my main problem was learning to be able to produce those special sounds reliably. "Milch" is still difficult for me to pronounce because it requires going right from an "l" sound into that aforementioned short hiss.
Now that I think about it, the physical act of pronouncing various sounds is probably easier for most people to pick up as children as well, and that probably contributes to the problem at least as much as one's ability (or lack thereof) to distinguish said sounds. I think my teacher understood what "th" sounded like in English - she just physically couldn't produce it (sort of like how my husband, who grew up in a house with German-speaking grandparents, still can't roll his R's).
Having had real experience, no you cannot tell a cat what to scratch on. The cat would rather shred your furniture and drapes than scratch the three, expensive, super-fuzzy scratching posts laced with catnip distributed around the house.
In the real experience of myself and countless other people who have successfully trained cats to scratch appropriately, cats will happily use posts and other approved surfaces instead of furniture and drapes as long as said surfaces are appealing to them and the furniture and whatnot isn't. Generally speaking, cats like rough sisal or cardboard scratchers because they can dig their claws into them. In contrast, the super-fuzzy posts you mention are usually not as popular. Of course, YMMV, and the only way to be certain what the cat will like is to provide different scratchers, but the rough variety are good to try first. Not only that, a scratching post must be tall enough so that the cat can reach up and stretch while scratching. I've seen 2 feet given as a rule of thumb, but I would personally recommend an even taller post because my cats can reach the top of the 2-footer we have, and they're not even particularly large. Please read this article for more detailed information on scratching post training.
Even when declawed, cats still make the same scratching movements, so the excercise thing is bogus -- the real *point* of scratching is to sharpen the claws.
Not quite. Your conclusion assumes that the scratching movement made by declawed cats is functionally identical to that performed by a cat with intact front claws. Although the movements may appear to provide the same benefit to the cat, they really do not. A clawed cat digs their claws into a scratching surface and pulls back to isometrically exercise their leg muscles and stretch their toes. Because a declawed cat is unable to grasp the surface in a similar manner, their "scratching" cannot serve either of those purposes.
My husband and I really didn't care one way or the other until I won an auction for a spot on a wig commissioner's roster and my confirmation email never arrived. I obviously couldn't reply to an email I didn't receive, so I lost my spot. According to various complaints I read on Google, Hotmail has a reputation for delaying incoming mail or losing it entirely. To be fair, getting bumped was partially my fault for not following up in time, but that doesn't change the fact that an email service should not be randomly BALEETING incoming mail. This person is not a spammer and, to the best of my knowledge, does not share any IP blocks with spammers, so I doubt that was the problem, either.
We're currently using a Gmail account as our PayPal contact point instead. I just wish we would have switched over sooner.
This Blender User Interface Tutorial demonstrates the basics of the interface, even explaining how to create the 4-pane view you speak of. There are a slew of other tutorials on that same site as well.
I don't have extremely indepth knowledge of the differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL, especially when it comes to standards compliance, but I have developed web applications that ran on both backends. With that in mind, it didn't take me long to prefer PostgreSQL to MySQL because it supports some extremely helpful features that MySQL lacks.
In PostgreSQL, you can set up views, which are essentially predefined queries that allow you to efficiently access data without needing to know about its underlying structure. PostgreSQL uses sequences to perform the functionality given by autoincrementing fields in MySQL, which is A Good Thing(tm) because it allows for more flexibility. For example, if you have multiple tables with an ID column that you want to ensure is always unique across all of said tables, you can simply attach the same sequence to each column. This would be much more difficult (if not impossible) to accomplish in MySQL. Last I heard, the stable branch of MySQL did not support subselects, which can be run in PostgreSQL. That may have changed, but I thought it was worth a mention just in case it didn't.
Many of the LucasArts adventures were also popular because they were designed in such a way that it was impossible to get the game in an unwinnable state. In a puzzle adventure game, permanently screwing yourself over is more annoying than dying because there's generally no way to tell that you're stuck and have to start over, and it discourages you from exploring and trying new things because you might waste a necessary item or trigger a one-time event during which you must do something in order to advance. King's Quest V was particularly badly designed in that regard.
For some reason, I thought the antialiasing was going to wait until E17 came out. I knew that E16 was still in development because every now and then, a newer version would appear in Debian's unstable repositories, but I haven't looked at any changelogs or news in a very long time, so I had no idea as to what aspects of it they were actually improving.
Have you tried Xfce4? I used to run Enlightenment, but like you, I got annoyed with the font issue. Once I heard about this desktop environment, I gave it a shot, and it didn't take me very long to switch. I feel that this desktop environment represents an excellent blend of simplicity, usability, and eye candy.
Xfce4 is built with GTK2, so it will display pretty antialiased fonts. It already has an Enlightenment-ish desktop root menu and pagers, and it can be easily configured to behave more like E as well. For example, you can turn off the taskbar and replace it with an iconbox. In my experience, Xfce4 is quite stable, and it doesn't seem to hog system resources, either.
This might work for current games, but it doesn't help you if you break a CD of a game that has been out of print for a while (or was produced by a company that has since gone out of business).
RadialContext can indeed function as a context menu replacement (i.e. you click to bring it up, move the mouse to get a different set of options if you need to, click on the option you want). However, if you hold the mouse button down, you can seamlessly and quickly switch menus and choose options in a way that is basically the same as executing a mouse gesture.
I can't speak for the parent poster, but I prefer RadialContext to standard mouse gestures because the pie menu always indicates what you're doing, which makes it easier to learn the gestures and more difficult to accidentally execute the wrong one. Plus, I already learned RadialContext's gesture set, and I'm happy with its functionality, so I don't see the point in learning a different scheme.
I should also mention that I run Linux at home, and StrokeIt! isn't exactly helpful in that context. ^_^
I've burned personal-use copies of difficult-to-replace media (example: Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, a Playstation game that has been out of print for years) so I can put the original away and play the copy. I would happily do the same with my hard-to-find PS2 games (Fatal Frame, Disgaea) if I could buy a modded PS2 console without worrying about getting in trouble thanks to the DMCA. My husband and I treat our games carefully and don't have any small children or klutzy friends, but "better safe than sorry" is a motto I live by, and spending $1 or whatever on another blank DVD plus taking the time to copy the disc again would be a hell of a lot more preferable to tracking down (and paying inflated prices for) a game that I had already bought.
I use terminal emulators for two purposes: accessing the CLI on my own box and occasionally ssh'ing to another Linux machine. I don't need compatibility with a ginormous variety of Unices or various other features that are implemented in other terminal emulators but lacking in Eterm (I really don't do that much work in a shell), but I am fond of perty desktop effects. Thus, I've been a very happy camper since I figured out the command-line arguments to produce a pseudotransparent Eterm in my choice of color. ^_^
I'm a developer working on agricultural web applications. These rely very heavily on DHTML to provide a snappy interface no matter what the customer's connection is (many are still on dialup) and to take some load off our data-crunching servers. One particular application has a parent window that can pop up smaller child windows to view and edit data in a convenient format. To do its job efficiently, this application needs to be able to access a wide variety of setup information for the currently selected grower. Said variety of information takes several seconds to load and process even from our internal network, so I thought it would be most efficient to load it only once - when the current grower is changed in the root window - using JS arrays to store this data in sorted order. This scheme initially presented problems. When a different grower would load, the child windows' references to the master data arrays would break. I came up with what I thought was an elegant solution. I'd only store one set of references in the parent, tell the child windows where the root window was, and have them call the root window's functions to populate their interfaces as necessary.
This works as expected in Firefox. It causes IE 6 to crash and burn with a bizarre error message.
Some Googling revealed that IE refuses to allow you to use a JS function in a parent window to populate a select box in its child. If it refused to do something like this for security purposes (and if this idea is, indeed, poor security, I would like to know about it), but it shouldn't just die. I had to rip my code apart to add in an extra step to pass data to the child windows and then use their own functions to populate the interfaces, which annoyed me because I was having to load the same JS all over again.
It makes no sense, either. I do all of my browsing using multiple tabs in the same window for one main reason: it allows me to quickly and efficiently view lots of content. I middle-click links to open them in new tabs and then use gestures to switch between tabs and close them when I'm done. How in the hell does that relate to gluing a newspaper together?
I read an interesting thread on that particular spam scheme on NANAE a while back. All of the hacked machines serving the site submitted any input to a specific IP address owned by Comset, a Russian ISP. LARTs to said ISP seem to have been/dev/null'ed. Searching Google News for oem biz comset shows that they're still up to this tomfoolery.
I wound up with an unwinnable game because I needed to mail something, but the stamps wouldn't stick to the envelope. Eventually, I read in Nintendo Power that I had to steam the envelope open in the microwave instead of just opening it. I never understood why that magically saved the stamps but opening the envelope yourself ruined them (or why there couldn't be a bottle of glue or something to attach the stamps with). At any rate, I also think that it's A Very Good Thing (tm) to design adventure games that don't let you get permanently stuck. It gives you much more incentive to try to solve puzzles yourself because you know you're never going to mess up, and if the developers are competent, it doesn't necessarily take the challenge out of the game. Sam and Max Hit the Road, another LucasArts game that you can't screw yourself over in, is pretty tough without the hint guide.
I don't think it's necessarily silly. You can have an interface that is initially simple but has more options available for advanced users. For instance, the LogJam LiveJournal client initially shows three widgets: a box for the journal entry's subject, a box for its text, and a Submit button. If you want to specify mood, music, a user icon, and whatnot, you can quickly and intuitively show inputs for them by selecting them in the View dropdown. This keeps things easy to use for a newbie but doesn't eliminate the functionality that a more seasoned LJ user would need.
I understand your point about advanced Linux users criticizing a window manager interface that was designed to be newbie-friendly, but keep in mind that those who complain about the Gnome file selection dialogue aren't necessarily using the Gnome window manager. I run XFce4, which is a lightweight and customizable desktop environment that uses GTK2. Thus, I tend to gravitate toward GTK2 applications because they'll match my WM. (For the record, I'm not a zealot - I wouldn't refuse to run a quality app just because it used a different widget set. I'm just saying that, for example, I use GEdit over KEdit because I don't prefer the features of one over the other, so I choose the app that will look best with my setup.)
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Very well said. The motherboard in my dual Athlon Debian unstable box recently croaked, and we decided that it would be a great time to switch to a Power Mac. In addition to the reasons you mentioned (Unix under the hood, many free *nix apps available, the system Just Working), OS X appealed to me because its application-centric taskbarless interface is nearly ideal for my preferred working style and I'd heard many a good thing about Apple's interface design and the keyboard support found throughout the OS and applications conforming to Apple's HIG. Thus far, I'm very pleased. Getting used to a new GUI of course involves a learning curve that I'm still climbing, but I've only had this thing for a week and I feel quite comfortable with it already. As a whole, working with OS X and HIG-conformant applications just feels smooth and elegant. I enjoyed using XFce4 and Enlightenment on my old box, but applications and the desktop environment generally did not mesh together in the same way that many of them do on OS X.
Besides, I compose music and would like to eventually set up a home studio of sorts. The particular audio software I'm interested in is only available for OS X. GarageBand is a great basic package that came free with the computer. For more sophisticated work, I would want something like Digital Performer, which gets excellent reviews and, in my experience (a digital music lab in college) is reasonably easy to use for a powerful application.
My WordPress blog used to get the same sort of spam (advertising the same crap, nonetheless) until I installed the AuthImage plugin. It's stopped the spam completely without requiring me to keep a blacklist updated or forcing my friends to create accounts just to leave comments. It isn't a perfect solution (it's not accessible to blind visitors), but since virtually no one other than sighted friends reads my site, it works for me.
I have a similar experience. My gmail account is the whois contact for my domain names, so I expected to get the usual spam that got sent to my old contact email, but I've received much, much more than that as well although I've only given the address to a handful of trusted sources.
In the end of the movie, Charlie asks what happens to the other kids, and Willy Wonka reassures him that they've been restored to their "normal, terrible selves". The book shows that they have changed from their trip through the factory. Augustus and Mike are stretched out, Violet is blue, and Veruca is covered in garbage. There's no indication that the first three kids will turn back to normal. It's been a while since I read the book, so I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it implies that they are permanently screwed up.
Now that I think about it, the physical act of pronouncing various sounds is probably easier for most people to pick up as children as well, and that probably contributes to the problem at least as much as one's ability (or lack thereof) to distinguish said sounds. I think my teacher understood what "th" sounded like in English - she just physically couldn't produce it (sort of like how my husband, who grew up in a house with German-speaking grandparents, still can't roll his R's).
In the real experience of myself and countless other people who have successfully trained cats to scratch appropriately, cats will happily use posts and other approved surfaces instead of furniture and drapes as long as said surfaces are appealing to them and the furniture and whatnot isn't. Generally speaking, cats like rough sisal or cardboard scratchers because they can dig their claws into them. In contrast, the super-fuzzy posts you mention are usually not as popular. Of course, YMMV, and the only way to be certain what the cat will like is to provide different scratchers, but the rough variety are good to try first. Not only that, a scratching post must be tall enough so that the cat can reach up and stretch while scratching. I've seen 2 feet given as a rule of thumb, but I would personally recommend an even taller post because my cats can reach the top of the 2-footer we have, and they're not even particularly large. Please read this article for more detailed information on scratching post training.
Even when declawed, cats still make the same scratching movements, so the excercise thing is bogus -- the real *point* of scratching is to sharpen the claws.
Not quite. Your conclusion assumes that the scratching movement made by declawed cats is functionally identical to that performed by a cat with intact front claws. Although the movements may appear to provide the same benefit to the cat, they really do not. A clawed cat digs their claws into a scratching surface and pulls back to isometrically exercise their leg muscles and stretch their toes. Because a declawed cat is unable to grasp the surface in a similar manner, their "scratching" cannot serve either of those purposes.
We're currently using a Gmail account as our PayPal contact point instead. I just wish we would have switched over sooner.
This Blender User Interface Tutorial demonstrates the basics of the interface, even explaining how to create the 4-pane view you speak of. There are a slew of other tutorials on that same site as well.
In PostgreSQL, you can set up views, which are essentially predefined queries that allow you to efficiently access data without needing to know about its underlying structure. PostgreSQL uses sequences to perform the functionality given by autoincrementing fields in MySQL, which is A Good Thing(tm) because it allows for more flexibility. For example, if you have multiple tables with an ID column that you want to ensure is always unique across all of said tables, you can simply attach the same sequence to each column. This would be much more difficult (if not impossible) to accomplish in MySQL. Last I heard, the stable branch of MySQL did not support subselects, which can be run in PostgreSQL. That may have changed, but I thought it was worth a mention just in case it didn't.
Many of the LucasArts adventures were also popular because they were designed in such a way that it was impossible to get the game in an unwinnable state. In a puzzle adventure game, permanently screwing yourself over is more annoying than dying because there's generally no way to tell that you're stuck and have to start over, and it discourages you from exploring and trying new things because you might waste a necessary item or trigger a one-time event during which you must do something in order to advance. King's Quest V was particularly badly designed in that regard.
For some reason, I thought the antialiasing was going to wait until E17 came out. I knew that E16 was still in development because every now and then, a newer version would appear in Debian's unstable repositories, but I haven't looked at any changelogs or news in a very long time, so I had no idea as to what aspects of it they were actually improving.
Xfce4 is built with GTK2, so it will display pretty antialiased fonts. It already has an Enlightenment-ish desktop root menu and pagers, and it can be easily configured to behave more like E as well. For example, you can turn off the taskbar and replace it with an iconbox. In my experience, Xfce4 is quite stable, and it doesn't seem to hog system resources, either.
There are also flip top cases.
This might work for current games, but it doesn't help you if you break a CD of a game that has been out of print for a while (or was produced by a company that has since gone out of business).
RadialContext can indeed function as a context menu replacement (i.e. you click to bring it up, move the mouse to get a different set of options if you need to, click on the option you want). However, if you hold the mouse button down, you can seamlessly and quickly switch menus and choose options in a way that is basically the same as executing a mouse gesture.
I can't speak for the parent poster, but I prefer RadialContext to standard mouse gestures because the pie menu always indicates what you're doing, which makes it easier to learn the gestures and more difficult to accidentally execute the wrong one. Plus, I already learned RadialContext's gesture set, and I'm happy with its functionality, so I don't see the point in learning a different scheme. I should also mention that I run Linux at home, and StrokeIt! isn't exactly helpful in that context. ^_^
I just put such a link in my LiveJournal. I'll be amused if it becomes a meme.
I've burned personal-use copies of difficult-to-replace media (example: Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, a Playstation game that has been out of print for years) so I can put the original away and play the copy. I would happily do the same with my hard-to-find PS2 games (Fatal Frame, Disgaea) if I could buy a modded PS2 console without worrying about getting in trouble thanks to the DMCA. My husband and I treat our games carefully and don't have any small children or klutzy friends, but "better safe than sorry" is a motto I live by, and spending $1 or whatever on another blank DVD plus taking the time to copy the disc again would be a hell of a lot more preferable to tracking down (and paying inflated prices for) a game that I had already bought.
I use terminal emulators for two purposes: accessing the CLI on my own box and occasionally ssh'ing to another Linux machine. I don't need compatibility with a ginormous variety of Unices or various other features that are implemented in other terminal emulators but lacking in Eterm (I really don't do that much work in a shell), but I am fond of perty desktop effects. Thus, I've been a very happy camper since I figured out the command-line arguments to produce a pseudotransparent Eterm in my choice of color. ^_^
This works as expected in Firefox. It causes IE 6 to crash and burn with a bizarre error message.
Some Googling revealed that IE refuses to allow you to use a JS function in a parent window to populate a select box in its child. If it refused to do something like this for security purposes (and if this idea is, indeed, poor security, I would like to know about it), but it shouldn't just die. I had to rip my code apart to add in an extra step to pass data to the child windows and then use their own functions to populate the interfaces, which annoyed me because I was having to load the same JS all over again.
It makes no sense, either. I do all of my browsing using multiple tabs in the same window for one main reason: it allows me to quickly and efficiently view lots of content. I middle-click links to open them in new tabs and then use gestures to switch between tabs and close them when I'm done. How in the hell does that relate to gluing a newspaper together?
I read an interesting thread on that particular spam scheme on NANAE a while back. All of the hacked machines serving the site submitted any input to a specific IP address owned by Comset, a Russian ISP. LARTs to said ISP seem to have been /dev/null'ed. Searching Google News for oem biz comset shows that they're still up to this tomfoolery.
I wound up with an unwinnable game because I needed to mail something, but the stamps wouldn't stick to the envelope. Eventually, I read in Nintendo Power that I had to steam the envelope open in the microwave instead of just opening it. I never understood why that magically saved the stamps but opening the envelope yourself ruined them (or why there couldn't be a bottle of glue or something to attach the stamps with). At any rate, I also think that it's A Very Good Thing (tm) to design adventure games that don't let you get permanently stuck. It gives you much more incentive to try to solve puzzles yourself because you know you're never going to mess up, and if the developers are competent, it doesn't necessarily take the challenge out of the game. Sam and Max Hit the Road, another LucasArts game that you can't screw yourself over in, is pretty tough without the hint guide.
I understand your point about advanced Linux users criticizing a window manager interface that was designed to be newbie-friendly, but keep in mind that those who complain about the Gnome file selection dialogue aren't necessarily using the Gnome window manager. I run XFce4, which is a lightweight and customizable desktop environment that uses GTK2. Thus, I tend to gravitate toward GTK2 applications because they'll match my WM. (For the record, I'm not a zealot - I wouldn't refuse to run a quality app just because it used a different widget set. I'm just saying that, for example, I use GEdit over KEdit because I don't prefer the features of one over the other, so I choose the app that will look best with my setup.)
They're still text files. Why should I be limited to using a command-line editor on them just because they happen to start with a dot?