"That must be the worst product name in history along with Nintendo's Wii..."
How so? "Wii" is dumb because it sounds like a childish toilet word in English, as well as a silly exclamation.
"Viiv", aside from the goofy spelling, is just "vive", the French word for "live". I don't see how that's worse than AMD's Live, and it might be better since they don't insist on all-caps with an exclamation point. (How I loath grammatical punctuation in names.)
Dude, you're using your Mac with a Windows mentality. You clearly got a defective unit, so take it back and get it replaced for free. There's no need to grumble and pretend you have to live with it.
Sleep has worked like an absolute charm on every Mac I've owned, including the Macbook Pro I'm typing on right now. I never had a PC where it worked.
The problem with DNG, as I understand it, is that it's not really forward-compatible -- and it can't be. 'RAW' data is not a format, it's simply the raw data produced by various solid-state image sensors that are constantly increasing in complexity. DNG is designed to encode the various characteristics used by (most) current digital SLRs, but its designers were not able to foresee all the new ways of capturing and digitizing light -- mosaic patterns, colour spaces, etc. -- that future camera manufacturers will invent. I've heard there are already problems with cutting-edge CCDs whose data output can't be adequately represented in DNG.
This is possibly the reason why Aperture only supports DNG files for camera models whose RAW data it is designed to read. If software engineers haven't perfected the nuanced conversion of RAW data for a specific camera into image data, there's little point in making a half-assed attempt with an unknown flavour of DNG.
"Mac doesn't manage dependencies at all. So everything is a monolithic glob..."
Which is perfectly fine. Cocoa and Quartz APIs do most of the functions that programs share in common, and in this era of cheap hard disk space, I'd rather have self-contained globs than fiddle with correctly installing foo-gnome-lib-24.35.23.b-x86.lib which might conflict with foo-gnome-lib-24.35.22.b-x86.lib or whatever.
"or you have to manually install some other required piece of software."
I've never had one piece of software depend on another one like that.
"Mac doesn't manage system wide updates at all. For every app, you have to hope it has a 'check for update' option, somewhere. "
Amazingly, most of my apps work great out of the box, and I'm not in dire need of updates to make basic stuff like copy and paste work. That said, many or most Macs apps do check for updates automatically, and following a confirmation prompt will upgrade themselves without you lifting a finger.
"Finally, Mac apps and updates are often lazy, and request the system is restarted."
Um, that *never* happens unless it's a major Apple app and involves a bug fix to an OS X framework.
"I don't know what your Linux package management experiences are, but I've rarely had any issues installing, updating and removing apps,"
I gave Mandrake a shot not too long ago when it was still one of the major distros. I managed to successfully install fewer than 50% of the apps I tried installing, and while I'm no Linux guru, I'm better than the typical computer user. I have *never* failed to install a Mac app. I just download it and drag it to my Applications folder; it couldn't possibly be easier.
I run Webkit exclusively these days. There's no web browser on any platform that's faster or has a better rendering engine.
Some nightlies will have crash or freeze ("beachball") bugs, but the one I'm currently using is rock-stable. Hasn't crashed yet, and I've had it running constantly for 2-3 weeks. The last time I did have a buggy version of Webkit, I just logged onto the #webkit IRC channel and one of the developers suggested a different build (which was just the ticket).
I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this, but you just listed two of my favourite groups, Sherpajohn -- Conjure One and Delerium. I like Banco de Gaia too. Any chance you can give me more recommendations?:) People with my taste in music are few and far between.
Just to nitpick, beliefs that are based on non-violence by definition -- e.g. liberalism (libertarianism), pacifism, some definitions of anarchism -- cannot be categorized as behaviours intend on destroying dissenters. Likewise, non-political and non-dogmatic beliefs (like belief in Bigfoot) require no such intent.
It's quite true, though; most political doctrines are simply competing systems of using force against people. Most people in this world have never come to a life-and-let-life realization, and most never will.
"This is one of those things where the market will correct itself. "
And Slashdot is, in fact, part of the market -- warning computer users to stay away from Walmart and educating the public on the incompetence of various online music sellers. So if you're saying the market will correct itself and people shouldn't complain, you're wrong; our complaints are part of that very system.
"And everyone else who believes in the Bible and not the Book of Mormon takes a look at Revelation 22:18 and says..."
Not everyone, I'm sure. There've been numerous influential Christians, like Martin Luther, who didn't believe Revelations was divinely inspired or belonged in the Bible.
'"We agree with the word of God except in the places where we disagree with him" doesn't seem, to me, to be a horridly valid argument.'
I'm not qualified to talk about Mormonism (although their book seems the height of silliness to me), but I think some caution is warranted if you're going to claim people disagree with the Word of God because they interpret it differently than you do. Heck, the writers of the Bible themselves had to correct each other or provide countering views. See, for example, how Hosea found it necessary to set the record straight on King Jehu, condemning as wicked the same murderous actions that the writer of Kings praised and condoned.
I used to have friends who lived two houses away from each other. They wanted to split the cost of just-introduced cable Internet and also play network games together, so they got a 500-foot ethernet cable and laid it just under the sod, connecting their two homes while going around the house in between. They called their creation, aptly enough, "network neighbourhood".
Interesting -- I wonder if you get served off a different server than I do? I'm overseas, but I can download files off my US-based Usenet server at 600 KB/sec. YouTube definitely has a bandwidth bottleneck problem whenever I visit.
I agree it won't be YouTube for a number of reasons. The quality and suitability of content are too variable; the social networking aspect that draws people to specific videos is missing without the computer side; YouTube video quality is awful; and YouTube's pipe is too slow (I can never play movies without pausing and caching, and I have 54 mb fibre, more than 10x the standard US broadband connection).
The killer apps will be probably be nice Mac apps (like Xtorrent) that automate movie downloading and streaming, making things easy for the user.
I find this is mostly a complaint either from those who haven't quite gotten how the Mac UI works yet, or people who are using poorly-designed apps.
Why, in general, do we even need to resize windows? The answer, 90% of the time, is that the window is the wrong size or shape for its contents. That's what the green "optimize" button is for -- to resize the window automatically to the same size as its contents, and properly implemented, this does just what you want. With Safari, it makes my web browser just wide enough to view the current page without scrolling, and tall enough to show all or as much of the page as possible. With Pages, it resizes the document window to fit the exact size of the document at its current zoom level. I practically never need to resize these windows.
The problem comes mainly with apps that haven't implemented the optimize button properly. The list of offenders includes Camino and all those expensive turds Adobe sells (which break almost all the rules of OS X consistency).
Popo is absolutely right. Digital music is a product that should be *improved*. It should come in higher-quality formats and be more and more useful (i.e. less encumbered with encryption, patents, and other nonsense).
Perhaps that explains the declining sales right there. Would Ford Taurus sales be growing if each year's model was the same or worse in mileage and handling than the previous year's?
A good reason to move to IPv6
on
Map of the Internet
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Isn't it kind of sad that the entire continent of Africa gets the same number of IP addresses that Prudential, an insurance company gets?
Well, your Macbook is broken, and you should get Apple to fix it. I've never met a Mac user who would put up with that.
On the other hand, Windows users are used to that kind of thing. I presume you're new to the Mac?
On the right track - id should be portable.
on
The Case for OpenID
·
· Score: 1
The president of Sxip made some good points about personal identification and how it should work online, even if Sxip's implementation isn't perfect.
In the real world, we have organizations that create forms of ID, and other organizations that need to identify us. I have a birth certificate, a library card, a passport, and a credit card, for example. These all certify certain personal details about myself, and they don't all cover the same details. What's also important is that they're portable, they're secure to varying degrees (i.e. hard to duplicate or modify), and I control who sees them.
In the real world, I can use these IDs with third parties, removing the necessity for those parties to create their own IDs. A video rental store, needing to confirm my name is what I say it is, can decide it trusts the issuer of my birth certificate (the province of BC) or the issuer of my credit card (Citibank), and will thus accept those cards as proof of my identity in lieu of having to create its own identity system. A liquor store that ids customers won't care what my name is, but they might want to verify my picture and birthdate; there are several identity issuers they'll trust, and I can show cards from any one of them so long as it has the right information. Thanks to portable identity, the liquor store also has no need to maintain its own identity database.
So why can't digital identity work this way? I already have established, verified, trusted identities at several online institutions -- eBay, Amazon, Slashdot, my bank, etc. So when I go to a new website that needs to verify my identity -- an online store, a message board, whatever -- there should be no need to create yet another new identity. I should have some digital way to flash my eBay credentials, or my Amazon credentials, or credentials from any source that website chooses to trust. They should be able to create an account for me and everything, letting me log in with the credentials I already use elsewhere, just like the brick-and-mortar video store that lets me rent videos by showing my driver's license. An ideal digital identity would be portable just like the kind I carry in my wallet, except my control over it would involve password protection instead of physical possession.
There should be no need to create yet another catch-all ID system like OpenID. The dozen or so identities I already have should become portable, so I don't have to keep making more.
Scientists introduce a predator that eats lizards with long legs, and find the average leg length of the surviving lizards to be shorter! Someone give those boys a grant and a medal.
I'm contributing late to the discussion, but here goes anyway.
Drivers are users. Roads and signs are an interface. Traffic is a design problem.
The current way of handling traffic doesn't really work. It was inherited from the horse-and-buggy period -- or even earlier Roman times -- and hasn't been adapted properly to modern cities. Having hundreds of rules and posting detailed signs everywhere is the interface equivalent of a command line: quite functional once you know all the rules without having to think first, but confounding for new users or those confronted with a different (foreign) system.
A good computer interface is intuitive. It's graphical (symbolic) rather than textual, mistakes are difficult to make, and one can use it with no prior learning. Doing this requires clever, thoughtful design combined with insight and research on how users act.
From a design point of view, the North American grid-system of roads with lights and signs at every block is terrible. A well-designed road system *should* need very few signs. Roundabouts, merges, overpasses and other techniques, carefully tailored to the location, can keep the opportunity for accidents at a minimum *and* make the safest manner of driving the most obvious and intuitive -- without making drivers memorize a rulebook or take their eyes off the traffic to read signs. Many principles of human interaction, like "uncertainty results in caution" can be applied.
Slashdot Mirror
"That must be the worst product name in history along with Nintendo's Wii..."
How so? "Wii" is dumb because it sounds like a childish toilet word in English, as well as a silly exclamation.
"Viiv", aside from the goofy spelling, is just "vive", the French word for "live". I don't see how that's worse than AMD's Live, and it might be better since they don't insist on all-caps with an exclamation point. (How I loath grammatical punctuation in names.)
Dude, you're using your Mac with a Windows mentality. You clearly got a defective unit, so take it back and get it replaced for free. There's no need to grumble and pretend you have to live with it.
Sleep has worked like an absolute charm on every Mac I've owned, including the Macbook Pro I'm typing on right now. I never had a PC where it worked.
The problem with DNG, as I understand it, is that it's not really forward-compatible -- and it can't be. 'RAW' data is not a format, it's simply the raw data produced by various solid-state image sensors that are constantly increasing in complexity. DNG is designed to encode the various characteristics used by (most) current digital SLRs, but its designers were not able to foresee all the new ways of capturing and digitizing light -- mosaic patterns, colour spaces, etc. -- that future camera manufacturers will invent. I've heard there are already problems with cutting-edge CCDs whose data output can't be adequately represented in DNG.
This is possibly the reason why Aperture only supports DNG files for camera models whose RAW data it is designed to read. If software engineers haven't perfected the nuanced conversion of RAW data for a specific camera into image data, there's little point in making a half-assed attempt with an unknown flavour of DNG.
"Mac doesn't manage dependencies at all. So everything is a monolithic glob..."
Which is perfectly fine. Cocoa and Quartz APIs do most of the functions that programs share in common, and in this era of cheap hard disk space, I'd rather have self-contained globs than fiddle with correctly installing foo-gnome-lib-24.35.23.b-x86.lib which might conflict with foo-gnome-lib-24.35.22.b-x86.lib or whatever.
"or you have to manually install some other required piece of software."
I've never had one piece of software depend on another one like that.
"Mac doesn't manage system wide updates at all. For every app, you have to hope it has a 'check for update' option, somewhere. "
Amazingly, most of my apps work great out of the box, and I'm not in dire need of updates to make basic stuff like copy and paste work. That said, many or most Macs apps do check for updates automatically, and following a confirmation prompt will upgrade themselves without you lifting a finger.
"Finally, Mac apps and updates are often lazy, and request the system is restarted."
Um, that *never* happens unless it's a major Apple app and involves a bug fix to an OS X framework.
"I don't know what your Linux package management experiences are, but I've rarely had any issues installing, updating and removing apps,"
I gave Mandrake a shot not too long ago when it was still one of the major distros. I managed to successfully install fewer than 50% of the apps I tried installing, and while I'm no Linux guru, I'm better than the typical computer user. I have *never* failed to install a Mac app. I just download it and drag it to my Applications folder; it couldn't possibly be easier.
I run Webkit exclusively these days. There's no web browser on any platform that's faster or has a better rendering engine.
Some nightlies will have crash or freeze ("beachball") bugs, but the one I'm currently using is rock-stable. Hasn't crashed yet, and I've had it running constantly for 2-3 weeks. The last time I did have a buggy version of Webkit, I just logged onto the #webkit IRC channel and one of the developers suggested a different build (which was just the ticket).
"It says that apperture is SLOWER because it uses the GPU instructions."
The article is wrong. That's like saying Quake 4 is slower because it uses the GPU.
Firehose needs an option "Resubmit your post in language that makes some bloody sense."
I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this, but you just listed two of my favourite groups, Sherpajohn -- Conjure One and Delerium. I like Banco de Gaia too. Any chance you can give me more recommendations? :) People with my taste in music are few and far between.
Just to nitpick, beliefs that are based on non-violence by definition -- e.g. liberalism (libertarianism), pacifism, some definitions of anarchism -- cannot be categorized as behaviours intend on destroying dissenters. Likewise, non-political and non-dogmatic beliefs (like belief in Bigfoot) require no such intent.
It's quite true, though; most political doctrines are simply competing systems of using force against people. Most people in this world have never come to a life-and-let-life realization, and most never will.
"This is one of those things where the market will correct itself. "
And Slashdot is, in fact, part of the market -- warning computer users to stay away from Walmart and educating the public on the incompetence of various online music sellers. So if you're saying the market will correct itself and people shouldn't complain, you're wrong; our complaints are part of that very system.
So I'm not the only one who thought it was funny that the US would have a presidential candidate whose names rhyme with "Osama" and "Iraq".
"And everyone else who believes in the Bible and not the Book of Mormon takes a look at Revelation 22:18 and says..."
Not everyone, I'm sure. There've been numerous influential Christians, like Martin Luther, who didn't believe Revelations was divinely inspired or belonged in the Bible.
'"We agree with the word of God except in the places where we disagree with him" doesn't seem, to me, to be a horridly valid argument.'
I'm not qualified to talk about Mormonism (although their book seems the height of silliness to me), but I think some caution is warranted if you're going to claim people disagree with the Word of God because they interpret it differently than you do. Heck, the writers of the Bible themselves had to correct each other or provide countering views. See, for example, how Hosea found it necessary to set the record straight on King Jehu, condemning as wicked the same murderous actions that the writer of Kings praised and condoned.
Hm, the ZunePony ... will Microsoft abandon their BraysForSure platform with that one?
Soviet Russia started out freer than the US is today. My ancestors were German farmers in Russia.
I used to have friends who lived two houses away from each other. They wanted to split the cost of just-introduced cable Internet and also play network games together, so they got a 500-foot ethernet cable and laid it just under the sod, connecting their two homes while going around the house in between. They called their creation, aptly enough, "network neighbourhood".
Interesting -- I wonder if you get served off a different server than I do? I'm overseas, but I can download files off my US-based Usenet server at 600 KB/sec. YouTube definitely has a bandwidth bottleneck problem whenever I visit.
I agree it won't be YouTube for a number of reasons. The quality and suitability of content are too variable; the social networking aspect that draws people to specific videos is missing without the computer side; YouTube video quality is awful; and YouTube's pipe is too slow (I can never play movies without pausing and caching, and I have 54 mb fibre, more than 10x the standard US broadband connection).
The killer apps will be probably be nice Mac apps (like Xtorrent) that automate movie downloading and streaming, making things easy for the user.
I find this is mostly a complaint either from those who haven't quite gotten how the Mac UI works yet, or people who are using poorly-designed apps.
Why, in general, do we even need to resize windows? The answer, 90% of the time, is that the window is the wrong size or shape for its contents. That's what the green "optimize" button is for -- to resize the window automatically to the same size as its contents, and properly implemented, this does just what you want. With Safari, it makes my web browser just wide enough to view the current page without scrolling, and tall enough to show all or as much of the page as possible. With Pages, it resizes the document window to fit the exact size of the document at its current zoom level. I practically never need to resize these windows.
The problem comes mainly with apps that haven't implemented the optimize button properly. The list of offenders includes Camino and all those expensive turds Adobe sells (which break almost all the rules of OS X consistency).
Popo is absolutely right. Digital music is a product that should be *improved*. It should come in higher-quality formats and be more and more useful (i.e. less encumbered with encryption, patents, and other nonsense).
Perhaps that explains the declining sales right there. Would Ford Taurus sales be growing if each year's model was the same or worse in mileage and handling than the previous year's?
Isn't it kind of sad that the entire continent of Africa gets the same number of IP addresses that Prudential, an insurance company gets?
Well, your Macbook is broken, and you should get Apple to fix it. I've never met a Mac user who would put up with that.
On the other hand, Windows users are used to that kind of thing. I presume you're new to the Mac?
The president of Sxip made some good points about personal identification and how it should work online, even if Sxip's implementation isn't perfect.
In the real world, we have organizations that create forms of ID, and other organizations that need to identify us. I have a birth certificate, a library card, a passport, and a credit card, for example. These all certify certain personal details about myself, and they don't all cover the same details. What's also important is that they're portable, they're secure to varying degrees (i.e. hard to duplicate or modify), and I control who sees them.
In the real world, I can use these IDs with third parties, removing the necessity for those parties to create their own IDs. A video rental store, needing to confirm my name is what I say it is, can decide it trusts the issuer of my birth certificate (the province of BC) or the issuer of my credit card (Citibank), and will thus accept those cards as proof of my identity in lieu of having to create its own identity system. A liquor store that ids customers won't care what my name is, but they might want to verify my picture and birthdate; there are several identity issuers they'll trust, and I can show cards from any one of them so long as it has the right information. Thanks to portable identity, the liquor store also has no need to maintain its own identity database.
So why can't digital identity work this way? I already have established, verified, trusted identities at several online institutions -- eBay, Amazon, Slashdot, my bank, etc. So when I go to a new website that needs to verify my identity -- an online store, a message board, whatever -- there should be no need to create yet another new identity. I should have some digital way to flash my eBay credentials, or my Amazon credentials, or credentials from any source that website chooses to trust. They should be able to create an account for me and everything, letting me log in with the credentials I already use elsewhere, just like the brick-and-mortar video store that lets me rent videos by showing my driver's license. An ideal digital identity would be portable just like the kind I carry in my wallet, except my control over it would involve password protection instead of physical possession.
There should be no need to create yet another catch-all ID system like OpenID. The dozen or so identities I already have should become portable, so I don't have to keep making more.
Scientists introduce a predator that eats lizards with long legs, and find the average leg length of the surviving lizards to be shorter! Someone give those boys a grant and a medal.
I'm contributing late to the discussion, but here goes anyway.
Drivers are users. Roads and signs are an interface. Traffic is a design problem.
The current way of handling traffic doesn't really work. It was inherited from the horse-and-buggy period -- or even earlier Roman times -- and hasn't been adapted properly to modern cities. Having hundreds of rules and posting detailed signs everywhere is the interface equivalent of a command line: quite functional once you know all the rules without having to think first, but confounding for new users or those confronted with a different (foreign) system.
A good computer interface is intuitive. It's graphical (symbolic) rather than textual, mistakes are difficult to make, and one can use it with no prior learning. Doing this requires clever, thoughtful design combined with insight and research on how users act.
From a design point of view, the North American grid-system of roads with lights and signs at every block is terrible. A well-designed road system *should* need very few signs. Roundabouts, merges, overpasses and other techniques, carefully tailored to the location, can keep the opportunity for accidents at a minimum *and* make the safest manner of driving the most obvious and intuitive -- without making drivers memorize a rulebook or take their eyes off the traffic to read signs. Many principles of human interaction, like "uncertainty results in caution" can be applied.
That's an excellent outline of the things most Mac ports are missing and should have. Here are a few more:
11) Using Apple's save and open dialog boxes that correctly remember recently accessed folders and let you drag in files.
12) Having the green window-optimizing button correctly adapt the window to the size of the document.
13) Allowing re-arrangable and customizable toolbars.
14) Not requiring the right-click for essential functionality.
15) Drag-and-drop program installation and removal.
Adobe applications also get almost all these wrong, in spite of their long heritage as Mac OS programs.