Try my Refresh Folder Applescript here: http://home.comcast.net/~ryangray/applescript/ put it on your finder toolbar. Unfortunately, I think my Command Window Here script is not working lately. I may have to work in it.
Not to mention, do this and you lose ALL your browsing history. What if you want to keep some of it?
Do you mean some of the history from the private session or all your browser history? Safari's private mode only removes the history of the private session when you turn the private session off - it does not erase all of your browser history.
That's what an IBM commercial a few years ago said, and I loved it. We are obviating more and more of the need for cars with high speed networks. There will always be a need for transport, of course, but perhaps not so much of it.
The problem with predictions of the future are that they are made with the stuff of the present. Flying cars were an early fantasy when traffic jams started. The vision of being able to just fly straight around the traffic is a lovely one, but if they were really a commercial reality, then many other people would have them and you would all be trying to fly around the traffic at the same time and just create another mess just like the people who try to "fly" around a traffic jam by zooming ahead on the outside down to the merge point and jump in there, and this activity is then much of the cause of the delay in the first place.
The flying car attraction is similar in principle to the electric car: it will cost much less to operate because you don't buy gasoline which is what has the road tax in it. This is about what the diesel car idea was, but they became popular, and the tax on diesel was increased. Once electric cars become popular enough, some road tax will move to electricity. Don't think that hybrid cars are immune - the less gas used means less road tax revenue, so the tax per gallon will go up since the cost to maintain roads won't change. The flying cars will be taxed for the increase on air traffic control costs.
From my casual following of this, it seems the real claims are about "enterprise" features added to Linux (i.e., SMP and JFS). Certainly, without such features, Linux would not be a real threat in the enterprise. But a threat to who? Microsoft.
Given that the G4 iBook is fairly new, if it has these problems they might not have shown up yet for people. Or was there some notice or investigation I missed that showed the G4 iBooks don't have these problems?
Very interested in getting a G4 iBook, but these reports are making me nervous.
Microsoft needed a diversion
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 1
Since Longhorn is going to take a long time, they don't want people going all Linux in the meantime, so they needed to do something. So they get SCO to make a fake claim that'll take a long time to sort out. In the meantime, people cool on adopting Linux, and before it's all over: a new verison of Windows. One of the benefits that will be touted is that is does not have unlicensed SCO unix code.
Re: One button Mice
Let's just agree that different people prefer different things. It's not like the Mac doesn't support multi-button mice and scroll wheels. And if you're going to argue that Apple not including one causes an extra cost to get one, then I'd say that probably quite a good deal of PC users go buy another mouse from the typically crappy one that came with your typically cheap PC, causing an identical extra cost.
Re: Menubars
True, the Mac menubar system was probably greatly influenced by the small screens we all used a long time ago, but it still very true that it has a great advantage from Fitts Law. I don't buy the idea that not having to click on a background window to select a menu item for it is an advantage. That only works when the menu item is not covered by another window and when the application does not implement that stupid metaphor MS introduced of a background app ignoring the first click as a command and just using it to bring the window to the front. This metaphor is only stupid because they only implement it in some of their apps and not system wide, so you get inconsistent behavior, which is far worse than consistently using either method.
The other thing is the damn MDI (multiple document interface). Within an application using this mode, you get a one-menu system, which is like a Mac, and it invalidates the multi-menu-is-better argument unless you throw out MDI apps. The problem with MDI is that the windows are trapped within the host app, so most apps like this are used with the document maximized within the app (also since the MDI window management functions are lame). Now combine this with DDE or "smart" apps that open documents I click on as a new MDI window in an existing instance of the already open app, and I see the document open, but then unless I look, I don't know if its a new application window that I can just close or if its a new window within the existing app. Many is the time I've closed the app, thinking it was a new app window for the document, but it was really just a new window in the existing app, and I just closed the handful of other documents it had open. True, I'll not lose data, but I'll lose several places where I was. So now I have to have the habit of closing the MDI document window first, then see if there are any more - if none, then I can close the app window. This doesn't even start to talk about the fact that an MDI app cannot have document windows mixed with those of another app. In fact, MDI causes the app to have a filled background behind its child windows that obscures things behind it. This kind of thing is what makes the Windows way completely app-centric and totally unfriendly to a doc-centric way of thinking. And this even within the supposedly "integrated" office apps!
Re: App not closing when last doc window closes
I agree that it takes getting used to on a Mac the app not closing when the last doc window closes. A PC user would really like to have an app close button on the menubar, but this is again just a holdover from app-centric thinking. A PC user thinks that they are thinking "I'm done with Acrobat Reader - close Acrobat Reader", but they are really thinking "I'm done with this document". It's just that it's actually easier (ironically via Fitt's Law) to close the app rather than the document because the app close button is in the top right corner of the screen (not always if the window is not maximized, but many people do have their apps maximized), or if the app is not maximized, it is visually the primary "x" button, so you are drawn to click it first, which is made even easier since they tend to be right next to each other. This gets back to my previous point of MDIs - I wind up closing the app and every other possibly unrelated document that app had open. This is hardly acceptable UI behavior.
What has been the complaint about older Mac OS versions, is that there was no immediate visibility of apps that were open with no documents unless they were the foreground app. The app list was a drop down list, so you couldn't see the others until you dropped it down, and since there is only one menu bar, then you don't have other menubars in the background to give you a clue (but then if you had minimized a Windows window, you would not see a menubar either). Windows had a similar problem prior to Win95 with minimized apps because they went to the "desktop" behind other windows. But now Mac OS X gives visibility to the open apps via the dock so that even if they have no open windows, you know they are open. So let's not beat up OS X for a shortcoming of OS 9 and prior had, which seens to be all that many ex-Mac users seem to remember because they don't think that things may have changed with OS X. Many only remember and criticize the cooperative multitasking of OS 9 and prior while forgetting that Win 3.x used exactly that, and Win9x still used it when 3.x programs were running (did you know that Win95 could have two 32 bit programs running but be cooperatively multitasking because they were thunking down into 16 bit code a lot of the "32 bit" code just called down to 16 bit code?).
Re: Having those unclosed windowless apps open in the backround does not affect performance
I mostly disagree with this. It is true that in general, this makes opening a document for one of the open apps load quicker, but as you have enough apps open to commit all your physical memory, then opening other apps will be slower because the system will have to page out the idle background apps to make room for the new foreground app. If the OS were to implement a policy of paging out apps that have been idle for a while, then you would not have to wait for a pageout to make room when opening a new app, but you would have to wait for the idle app to be paged back in when you opened a document for that idle app. However, this would be faster than reloading the app from scratch due to not needing to initialize the app.
Since most of my job involves maintaining Fortran code, I'm a bit biased. Most points are right: lots of old code that is very debugged by now and too much to port, compilers are well worn and dependable. Many people knock F77 for the limitations of the standard, but no one uses that, they use the common extensions (Vax and Unix) like long variable names, no case sensitivity, include files and some other items. F77 is very flexible since most compilers do F90 as well. I use Compaq Visual Fortran which uses the MS Developer Studio, so there's no lack of a modern development environment.
I have to personally give it a lot of respect since many Fortran compilers have a switch to toggle F66 syntax rules - as in 1966 - the year I was born! And Fortran was already 9 or 10 by that time.
You are not prevented. There could be another listing service provider, they would just have to write all the software to operate your box and provide a way for you to wipe off the TiVo software and put theirs on in place of it. Now do you think TiVo is very interested in making that easy for another company to do?
TiVo could eventually license the data format to companies to be TiVo service providers who would then compete with each other, and TiVo go to do other stuff.
Part of the "everything" that it does is to record programs utilizing listing info provided by TiVo. If TiVo corp goes away, then that feature of your unit then becomes broken. Time to get another component. If you look at the initial price of the box plus lifetime (of the box or TiVo) service, ~$550 then you consider that the price of a high-end video component you just bought, and when it breaks (including TiVo service going away), you go get another one.
Everyone seems to be looking at this wrong. Here's the deal:
I liked the service that TiVo was providing. Sony made a box that lets me utilize that service. I bought that box and I subscribed to the TiVo service. If I had liked Microsoft's Ultimate TV service, I would have bought the other Sony box that let me utilize Microsoft's service and subscribed to it.
There's also a lot of people not understanding overhead costs. After all, Slashdot doesn't have to pay for the information posted here, so why the banner ads generating revenue? Overhead and support.
TiVo did the work of creating and maintaining the service that feeds the TiVo box. They should not be forced to give that service format to others who didn't do the work or don't pay a royalty to be able to provide service to the TiVo box.
TiVo also did the work of creating and maintaining the TiVo software that runs the units that Philips and others sell. Those companies have to pay a royalty license for TiVo software for their machine much as they have to pay a license to JVC when they make a VHS VCR. That company can not be expected to give you the hardware. However, TiVo can rebate you some money if they like, to entice you to sign on to their service (like cell phone providers).
The position of most Slashdotters who think paying for TiVo service is stupid, would be equivalent to me buying a GSM phone from somewhere and then walking into to the store of a GSM cell service provider expecting them to give me service for free. Better example: it's like buying a computer and expecting an ISP to give you Internet access for free, since it costs them "nothing" to provide it: there's no one who has to turn a crank to move the packets, they just put up FreeBSD on a bunch of boxes and turned them on right? No. There's electricity bills, rent, fiber service, tech support, configuring, maintaining accounts, paying for the equipment and new equipment, etc.
I don't expect Handspring to allow me to use a comperting handheld OS on my Visor. That's not to say you couldn't put another one on, but I don't expect them to support me. They sold me a device that provided PDA functions using the Palm OS - not a general purpose handheld computer. Once I took off the Palm OS, I essentially would have deliberately broken the device, and they can't be expected to support that.
You could take your TiVo box and put your own software on it to pull listings off a free service and use the MPEG2 hardware to make the recordings and playbacks and present the listings in an easy, readable display. I wouldn't expect Sony to support that box, and I certainly wouldn't expect TiVo to let me leech off their listings.
You have a choice of what hardware to utilize the TiVo service. You have a choice of DVR listing services. At this time, the format for providing listing service to a DVR is proprietary (for all of them). It would be nice in a perfect world for that to be a standard, so I could combine the hardware I want with the service I want like the car I want with the repair shop I like. However, until the standard was absolutely nailed down, you would likely have trouble with many of the combinations, especially with MS in the game.
In the end, the price per month for the programming guide service will be dictated by how much consumers are willing to pay for it. If too many don't want to pay $10, then the price will likely drop. If that price is lower than it costs to provide (which is likely higher than people here think), then that service will go away.
For the diff you can get TiVo sub for life
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 1
That argument is old. I don't know about now, but when I made my choice for TiVo, Replay only had one week's worth of programming, where TiVo has two. So, am I as misinformed about that as you are about TiVo subscriptions?
As for the "can't justify spending $10 a month for program data that is free on the web and comes in the Sunday newspapers", I see once again evidence of idiocy. YOU PAY FOR THE NEWSPAPER. YOU PAY FOR WEB ACCESS. NOT FREE. Sure, these are certainly cheaper ways of getting that information - the Web access by virtue of you using it for many other things. But do either of them automatically integrate the program info with the tuner? Allow you to record by show title - not caring about the time and channel? Link the program descriptions with all your recordings so that you don't have to label everything? No. The $10 per month is for the value added service to that information - not the information itself. I certainly feel it is worth it, and have the lifetime subscription, so I have no monthly fee - I just have effectively paid as much for my TiVo as I would have for a Replay unit. Replay sucked.
Don't worry, there will soon be many plain digital recorders that don't have a service, but are just like a manual VCR with a hard drive instead of video tape - probably some models with integrated tape for archiving. There will be a need for the sub $400 market using digital recording. There will likely be a price war with the subscription units which will almost be given away to keep customers from going with the non-subscription units.
I'm also so sick of all the ragging on TiVo's $10/month by people not wanting to pay it who then went and bought Replay because it didn't have a monthly fee. These idiots don't realize that the extra they paid for the Replay could also have bought them the lifetime TiVo subscription.
OS/2 System folder, System Setup folder, Mouse object, open it, Mappings tab. Change "Dragging objects" from "Button 2" to "Button 1".
As for the documentation, the online documentation is very good. RTFM also means reading/searching that too. I just right clicked on the desktop, selected help->index, scrolled down to "Mouse", selected that, then selected "Setting button+key combinations". It said:
Use Mouse - Properties Mappings page to customize
the Alt, Shift, and Ctrl key combinations.
For a detailed explanation of each field, select from
the list below:
Dragging objects
Displaying Window List
Displaying pop-up menus
Editing title text
Undo
Default
Oh yeah, the name "Warp" is soooooo much lamer than "Linux". I mean, I started using Linux because it had such a cool name - it was so cool it made up for all its other lameness.
It was there in 3.0 and probably in 2.0. Just because your rotten memory can't recall it or you didn't RTFM long ago, doesn't mean it didn't exist. I suppose you enjoy system where the same button selects and moves so that you are always moving things when you meant to select them. ENTIRE DIRECTORY TREES vanishing on a network volume from people using Windows Explorer comes to mind. Countless hours re-aligning controls on a form after trying to select them instead. More hours spent locking and unlocking same controls in an attempt to keep them in place.
I went into an Egghead store once to buy an OS/2 magazine. They sold OS/2 Warp 4, so I asked the salesman if they thought they might sell more of it if they carried some of the applications. He told me there were none. I guess the software buyers guide attached to the magazine must have been imaginary. I guess the fact that the POS system that rang up my purchase was running OS/2 was just another sign it was fading.
Do some research. OS/2 driver support has spanked Linux for some time now. Only now is it catching up. Halfway to usurping OS/390, AIX, Solaris, Winblowz, IRIX, indeed. Apparently since Linux stuff is free, this leaves more money for hallucinogens.
I found that once I had bought the TS2040 printer, it's pass through connector created a more stable connection for the RAM pack, and I rarely had a wobble crash after that.
It still had the problem of when I had been coding for many hours and it got very warm, something would go wrong and quietly march through memory and twiddle the bits on about every 40th byte. Inevitably, this either created a display file that was invalid and locked up, or created an invalid program line that you better not touch, or lockup was certain.
Almost right on the screen size. It was 32 columns of 24 lines with the bottom 2 lines reserved for entering/editing program lines and inputting data.
Very good memory on the 1K RAM display file method. If you had the 16K RAM or better, the display was fully padded with spaces and HALT codes. Of course, to do so caused the "boot" time to be longer as it grew the display file one byte at a time. A 1K machine was ready to go instantly when you jacked in the power. However, if a 1K display had several lines padded to different lengths, you had to wait for it to clear it out before getting back to your program listing. And even that was wierd to think about - since it was stored tokenized, it usually took more bytes to display the program than it did to store it, and on a 1K machine, that could mean that a long program might only display a few lines of code at a time when memory got nearly full.
Also, there were all sorts of well known memory saving tricks that relied on the tokenized BASIC. If you needed the value '3', then just saying "LET X = 3" cost you like 10 bytes (or more if memory serves) since there was a byte for each token, a byte for the character '3' and 5 bytes for the floating value of 3 stored hidden along with a 1 byte 'number' token. Well, if you used "LET X = INT PI", then that only used 5 bytes! No number to store - just tokens. "NOT PI" was a 2 byte zero, "SIGN PI" was a 2 byte '1'. In fact 'LET X = VAL "2.3"' was still cheaper than 'LET X = 2.3', especially since you didn't need parenthesis for functions with a simple argument.
The absolute coolest thing about Sinclair BASIC that no other BASIC I ever saw did, was to allow the VAL function to evaluate rather than just convert numeric constants. You could do the following: LET Y = VAL "2 * SIN(X + PI/2)". Basically, an EVAL type function, which allowed for some very powerfull stuff.
If the TiVo could pump out some standard MPEG packets over the network, then all I would need for a television was a monitor that had an MPEG decoder in it, and I could route what I was watching to any monitor in the house. Of course, that also implys that I would only need to lay data cables, and the monitor could also just as easily be a computer screen when needed.
I agree. I am a geek, I am a geek with some money, I wanted a Tivo, I am a geek with a wife who also wanted a Tivo, I bought a Tivo. To anyone else who is so cheap that they are going to wait for an open version: you are just not going to understand what this machine is about right now.
Many people seem to think it's about skipping commercials and how cool that is because I really hate those things. Well, you can't skip them on live TV, period.
Many others think it's about being able to jump back and replay live TV if you missed something, or create your own instant replay. This is useful, but still something you get anyway when you record a show.
What it's really about is the main reason I bought one. To not have to watch live TV anymore except for special events. I was fed up with being slave to the broadcast schedule because regular VCRs were so limited in recording capacity and, not difficult, but annoying to program. Every event was like it was the first time. Managing my video tapes was not impossible, but a chore that I do not care to do - not in this era of technology. So, a system that does away with these annoyances and gives me a searchable program listing rather than endlessly perusing chronological listings until my eyes glaze over, is valuable to me, and I paid for it.
I'm sure there might be a free solution at some point, but I'm sure it'll also suck.
I think software developers (particularly GUI people) should take notice that the Tivo does not display computer graphics directly, but uses a video text generator. Thank God for that. It probably also uses something more sophisticated than your typical white box video card as well as the other hardware bits. Since it runs on a PowerPC hardware, I would imagine that says something about Intel hardware.
I like being able to time shift more than 6 to 8 hours of stuff and easily access and delete any of it. I don't have to remember to have a blank high grade tape ready to go to tape that favorite movie and then have to suffer recording a sitcom at the beginning of it in order to record both wile I'm out. I just record both with the Tivo, each at the quality I desire, and dump the movie off to the tape later when I have it ready.
I can find those elusive computer shows easily that always seem to be on at 3am. Not that I couldn't look those up by other means, but none of those let me press a button when I find the show to automatically record it.
We watched live TV only out of habit and the lack of more intelligent VCRs and the lack of an easy way of finding something good on. Before, you might have a moment you just want to be passive and watch a show, so you spend forever just trying to become synchronous with the live TV schedule so that a good show was on. This often took longer than you had to spend, so you would "settle" on something that you would normally not watch (sounds a bit like Windows). Now, when I have these moments, there is always something of interest to me waiting there, and I don't have to worry about interrupting the VCR recording another show in order to watch something else I recorded.
Now with regard to this thread's general topic of commercials: since I rarely watch live TV, I can always fast-forward through the commercials. I always think how this should make advertisers worried. However, the thing that really annoys me about commercials now is the process of skipping them. For years, we've dreamed about the magical commercial skipping device, and there are even some crude things out there that will pause your VCR for some fixed interval, etc. But what I want is one of two things: 1. The commercials be targeted to my interests, and often relating to the subject matter of the show, so that I don't have to forward through the commercials because I want to see the commercials almost as much as the program; 2. the ability to pay for my programming to obviate the need for advertising, but in a way unlike PBS where even if I pay, I still have to endure the pledge drives.
I think it funny the stuff I see posted in these Slashdot discussions sometimes. The PC world doesn't even have anything that comes close, but go on and on about how it isn't "perfect" and "free", so spout on about how easy it should be to hack up out of some spare wire and string.
In the end it's not about making this stuff free. That only means that someone is going to demand some of your time in return. I work at a job that I'm good at and enjoy to make money to buy and do things that I enjoy. Wasting time waiting for these things, finding these things or listening to a sales pitch for other things I'm not interested in, is not what I want to be doing. I will pay money to avoid that. The people who created Tivo seem to grok this, when TV networks understand this, then things might get nicer. Warning: this will mean that you will pay for TV. This also applies to the Internet. However, TV is linear - I have to go forward through the commercial to get to the rest of the content. The Net is different (for now) in that I can mostly visually dodge the banner ads to get to the content I am looking for. This is not to say that my brain dodges them. Much like product placement, Web ads, probably have subconscious effects. Now, if TV were like the Web, then there would be a banner ad on the top of the screen during the whole show with the program confined to a frame below it, but the program would not otherwise be interrupted.
Finally, someone who really gets it. I laugh at all this other typical short-sighted beating on the method in the original post and lame attacks on the value of archiving scientific data.
I get so sick of these dollar values used in place of weight or volume. Gee, let's see if when you bring back that much ore, if it's still worth 20 f'n TRILLION dollars now that there's so much, the value has dropped.
Okay, I'm sick of this bickering. I thought the Linux crowd was full of programmer types and people who could think outside the box. The box that a lot seem to be stuck in is the single tool box.
Linux is only going to suffer if we continue to bicker about which desktop we "bless" as the standard face for Linux to try to achieve some apparent stability. The notion is that if we standardize on one desktop, then it's much easier for applications to be written since they don't have to work with countless different desktops. Natural selection in this situation quickly leads to one desktop dominating and all new programs written to only support it. Sound familiar?
If we had a desktop API, and the desktop managers were written to it, then the applications could be written to it as well and not care what desktop manager was being used. I could run whatever I wanted, and not worry about being compatible with the most popular desktop manager. Linux distros could be made with a GUI that worked exactly like Windows for beginners, but all their stuff would be usable with the other desktop managers they switched to as they became more advanced.
Now imagine what could be done. For example, Apple could create a Mac desktop for Linux that was not just a window manager in drag, but really looked and felt and worked like a Mac desktop, but was totally compatible with any other Linux app that interacted with the desktop (Mac app compatibility would be a separate isssue). I think they could sell something like that. I doubt they would ever do it, but maybe the guys at Easel could.
I will also say now that I am a relatively new Linux user, but have had casual experience over years with several flavors of unix. I have also used DOS, Macs, Windows and OS/2. If anyone is getting ideas that Gnome or KDE is the best there is - then you need to get out more. Oh sure, they may spank the Windows GUI in most areas, but they are almost just as shallow. I think there are far too many efforts to put makeup on Linux and not enough on making it truly sexy.
Slashdot Mirror
Try my Refresh Folder Applescript here: http://home.comcast.net/~ryangray/applescript/ put it on your finder toolbar. Unfortunately, I think my Command Window Here script is not working lately. I may have to work in it.
You just need the right software.
That's what an IBM commercial a few years ago said, and I loved it. We are obviating more and more of the need for cars with high speed networks. There will always be a need for transport, of course, but perhaps not so much of it.
The problem with predictions of the future are that they are made with the stuff of the present. Flying cars were an early fantasy when traffic jams started. The vision of being able to just fly straight around the traffic is a lovely one, but if they were really a commercial reality, then many other people would have them and you would all be trying to fly around the traffic at the same time and just create another mess just like the people who try to "fly" around a traffic jam by zooming ahead on the outside down to the merge point and jump in there, and this activity is then much of the cause of the delay in the first place.
The flying car attraction is similar in principle to the electric car: it will cost much less to operate because you don't buy gasoline which is what has the road tax in it. This is about what the diesel car idea was, but they became popular, and the tax on diesel was increased. Once electric cars become popular enough, some road tax will move to electricity. Don't think that hybrid cars are immune - the less gas used means less road tax revenue, so the tax per gallon will go up since the cost to maintain roads won't change. The flying cars will be taxed for the increase on air traffic control costs.
From my casual following of this, it seems the real claims are about "enterprise" features added to Linux (i.e., SMP and JFS). Certainly, without such features, Linux would not be a real threat in the enterprise. But a threat to who? Microsoft.
Given that the G4 iBook is fairly new, if it has these problems they might not have shown up yet for people. Or was there some notice or investigation I missed that showed the G4 iBooks don't have these problems?
Very interested in getting a G4 iBook, but these reports are making me nervous.
Since Longhorn is going to take a long time, they don't want people going all Linux in the meantime, so they needed to do something. So they get SCO to make a fake claim that'll take a long time to sort out. In the meantime, people cool on adopting Linux, and before it's all over: a new verison of Windows. One of the benefits that will be touted is that is does not have unlicensed SCO unix code.
Let's just agree that different people prefer different things. It's not like the Mac doesn't support multi-button mice and scroll wheels. And if you're going to argue that Apple not including one causes an extra cost to get one, then I'd say that probably quite a good deal of PC users go buy another mouse from the typically crappy one that came with your typically cheap PC, causing an identical extra cost.
Re: Menubars
True, the Mac menubar system was probably greatly influenced by the small screens we all used a long time ago, but it still very true that it has a great advantage from Fitts Law. I don't buy the idea that not having to click on a background window to select a menu item for it is an advantage. That only works when the menu item is not covered by another window and when the application does not implement that stupid metaphor MS introduced of a background app ignoring the first click as a command and just using it to bring the window to the front. This metaphor is only stupid because they only implement it in some of their apps and not system wide, so you get inconsistent behavior, which is far worse than consistently using either method.
The other thing is the damn MDI (multiple document interface). Within an application using this mode, you get a one-menu system, which is like a Mac, and it invalidates the multi-menu-is-better argument unless you throw out MDI apps. The problem with MDI is that the windows are trapped within the host app, so most apps like this are used with the document maximized within the app (also since the MDI window management functions are lame). Now combine this with DDE or "smart" apps that open documents I click on as a new MDI window in an existing instance of the already open app, and I see the document open, but then unless I look, I don't know if its a new application window that I can just close or if its a new window within the existing app. Many is the time I've closed the app, thinking it was a new app window for the document, but it was really just a new window in the existing app, and I just closed the handful of other documents it had open. True, I'll not lose data, but I'll lose several places where I was. So now I have to have the habit of closing the MDI document window first, then see if there are any more - if none, then I can close the app window. This doesn't even start to talk about the fact that an MDI app cannot have document windows mixed with those of another app. In fact, MDI causes the app to have a filled background behind its child windows that obscures things behind it. This kind of thing is what makes the Windows way completely app-centric and totally unfriendly to a doc-centric way of thinking. And this even within the supposedly "integrated" office apps!
Re: App not closing when last doc window closes
I agree that it takes getting used to on a Mac the app not closing when the last doc window closes. A PC user would really like to have an app close button on the menubar, but this is again just a holdover from app-centric thinking. A PC user thinks that they are thinking "I'm done with Acrobat Reader - close Acrobat Reader", but they are really thinking "I'm done with this document". It's just that it's actually easier (ironically via Fitt's Law) to close the app rather than the document because the app close button is in the top right corner of the screen (not always if the window is not maximized, but many people do have their apps maximized), or if the app is not maximized, it is visually the primary "x" button, so you are drawn to click it first, which is made even easier since they tend to be right next to each other. This gets back to my previous point of MDIs - I wind up closing the app and every other possibly unrelated document that app had open. This is hardly acceptable UI behavior.
What has been the complaint about older Mac OS versions, is that there was no immediate visibility of apps that were open with no documents unless they were the foreground app. The app list was a drop down list, so you couldn't see the others until you dropped it down, and since there is only one menu bar, then you don't have other menubars in the background to give you a clue (but then if you had minimized a Windows window, you would not see a menubar either). Windows had a similar problem prior to Win95 with minimized apps because they went to the "desktop" behind other windows. But now Mac OS X gives visibility to the open apps via the dock so that even if they have no open windows, you know they are open. So let's not beat up OS X for a shortcoming of OS 9 and prior had, which seens to be all that many ex-Mac users seem to remember because they don't think that things may have changed with OS X. Many only remember and criticize the cooperative multitasking of OS 9 and prior while forgetting that Win 3.x used exactly that, and Win9x still used it when 3.x programs were running (did you know that Win95 could have two 32 bit programs running but be cooperatively multitasking because they were thunking down into 16 bit code a lot of the "32 bit" code just called down to 16 bit code?).
Re: Having those unclosed windowless apps open in the backround does not affect performance
I mostly disagree with this. It is true that in general, this makes opening a document for one of the open apps load quicker, but as you have enough apps open to commit all your physical memory, then opening other apps will be slower because the system will have to page out the idle background apps to make room for the new foreground app. If the OS were to implement a policy of paging out apps that have been idle for a while, then you would not have to wait for a pageout to make room when opening a new app, but you would have to wait for the idle app to be paged back in when you opened a document for that idle app. However, this would be faster than reloading the app from scratch due to not needing to initialize the app.
Since most of my job involves maintaining Fortran code, I'm a bit biased. Most points are right: lots of old code that is very debugged by now and too much to port, compilers are well worn and dependable. Many people knock F77 for the limitations of the standard, but no one uses that, they use the common extensions (Vax and Unix) like long variable names, no case sensitivity, include files and some other items. F77 is very flexible since most compilers do F90 as well. I use Compaq Visual Fortran which uses the MS Developer Studio, so there's no lack of a modern development environment.
I have to personally give it a lot of respect since many Fortran compilers have a switch to toggle F66 syntax rules - as in 1966 - the year I was born! And Fortran was already 9 or 10 by that time.
You are not prevented. There could be another listing service provider, they would just have to write all the software to operate your box and provide a way for you to wipe off the TiVo software and put theirs on in place of it. Now do you think TiVo is very interested in making that easy for another company to do?
TiVo could eventually license the data format to companies to be TiVo service providers who would then compete with each other, and TiVo go to do other stuff.
Part of the "everything" that it does is to record programs utilizing listing info provided by TiVo. If TiVo corp goes away, then that feature of your unit then becomes broken. Time to get another component. If you look at the initial price of the box plus lifetime (of the box or TiVo) service, ~$550 then you consider that the price of a high-end video component you just bought, and when it breaks (including TiVo service going away), you go get another one.
Everyone seems to be looking at this wrong. Here's the deal:
I liked the service that TiVo was providing. Sony made a box that lets me utilize that service. I bought that box and I subscribed to the TiVo service. If I had liked Microsoft's Ultimate TV service, I would have bought the other Sony box that let me utilize Microsoft's service and subscribed to it.
There's also a lot of people not understanding overhead costs. After all, Slashdot doesn't have to pay for the information posted here, so why the banner ads generating revenue? Overhead and support.
TiVo did the work of creating and maintaining the service that feeds the TiVo box. They should not be forced to give that service format to others who didn't do the work or don't pay a royalty to be able to provide service to the TiVo box.
TiVo also did the work of creating and maintaining the TiVo software that runs the units that Philips and others sell. Those companies have to pay a royalty license for TiVo software for their machine much as they have to pay a license to JVC when they make a VHS VCR. That company can not be expected to give you the hardware. However, TiVo can rebate you some money if they like, to entice you to sign on to their service (like cell phone providers).
The position of most Slashdotters who think paying for TiVo service is stupid, would be equivalent to me buying a GSM phone from somewhere and then walking into to the store of a GSM cell service provider expecting them to give me service for free. Better example: it's like buying a computer and expecting an ISP to give you Internet access for free, since it costs them "nothing" to provide it: there's no one who has to turn a crank to move the packets, they just put up FreeBSD on a bunch of boxes and turned them on right? No. There's electricity bills, rent, fiber service, tech support, configuring, maintaining accounts, paying for the equipment and new equipment, etc.
I don't expect Handspring to allow me to use a comperting handheld OS on my Visor. That's not to say you couldn't put another one on, but I don't expect them to support me. They sold me a device that provided PDA functions using the Palm OS - not a general purpose handheld computer. Once I took off the Palm OS, I essentially would have deliberately broken the device, and they can't be expected to support that.
You could take your TiVo box and put your own software on it to pull listings off a free service and use the MPEG2 hardware to make the recordings and playbacks and present the listings in an easy, readable display. I wouldn't expect Sony to support that box, and I certainly wouldn't expect TiVo to let me leech off their listings.
You have a choice of what hardware to utilize the TiVo service. You have a choice of DVR listing services. At this time, the format for providing listing service to a DVR is proprietary (for all of them). It would be nice in a perfect world for that to be a standard, so I could combine the hardware I want with the service I want like the car I want with the repair shop I like. However, until the standard was absolutely nailed down, you would likely have trouble with many of the combinations, especially with MS in the game.
In the end, the price per month for the programming guide service will be dictated by how much consumers are willing to pay for it. If too many don't want to pay $10, then the price will likely drop. If that price is lower than it costs to provide (which is likely higher than people here think), then that service will go away.
That argument is old. I don't know about now, but when I made my choice for TiVo, Replay only had one week's worth of programming, where TiVo has two. So, am I as misinformed about that as you are about TiVo subscriptions?
As for the "can't justify spending $10 a month for program data that is free on the web and comes in the Sunday newspapers", I see once again evidence of idiocy. YOU PAY FOR THE NEWSPAPER. YOU PAY FOR WEB ACCESS. NOT FREE. Sure, these are certainly cheaper ways of getting that information - the Web access by virtue of you using it for many other things. But do either of them automatically integrate the program info with the tuner? Allow you to record by show title - not caring about the time and channel? Link the program descriptions with all your recordings so that you don't have to label everything? No. The $10 per month is for the value added service to that information - not the information itself. I certainly feel it is worth it, and have the lifetime subscription, so I have no monthly fee - I just have effectively paid as much for my TiVo as I would have for a Replay unit. Replay sucked.
Don't worry, there will soon be many plain digital recorders that don't have a service, but are just like a manual VCR with a hard drive instead of video tape - probably some models with integrated tape for archiving. There will be a need for the sub $400 market using digital recording. There will likely be a price war with the subscription units which will almost be given away to keep customers from going with the non-subscription units.
I'm also so sick of all the ragging on TiVo's $10/month by people not wanting to pay it who then went and bought Replay because it didn't have a monthly fee. These idiots don't realize that the extra they paid for the Replay could also have bought them the lifetime TiVo subscription.
OS/2 System folder, System Setup folder, Mouse object, open it, Mappings tab. Change "Dragging objects" from "Button 2" to "Button 1".
As for the documentation, the online documentation is very good. RTFM also means reading/searching that too. I just right clicked on the desktop, selected help->index, scrolled down to "Mouse", selected that, then selected "Setting button+key combinations". It said:
Use Mouse - Properties Mappings page to customize
the Alt, Shift, and Ctrl key combinations.
For a detailed explanation of each field, select from
the list below:
Dragging objects
Displaying Window List
Displaying pop-up menus
Editing title text
Undo
Default
Oh yeah, the name "Warp" is soooooo much lamer than "Linux". I mean, I started using Linux because it had such a cool name - it was so cool it made up for all its other lameness.
It was there in 3.0 and probably in 2.0. Just because your rotten memory can't recall it or you didn't RTFM long ago, doesn't mean it didn't exist. I suppose you enjoy system where the same button selects and moves so that you are always moving things when you meant to select them. ENTIRE DIRECTORY TREES vanishing on a network volume from people using Windows Explorer comes to mind. Countless hours re-aligning controls on a form after trying to select them instead. More hours spent locking and unlocking same controls in an attempt to keep them in place.
I went into an Egghead store once to buy an OS/2 magazine. They sold OS/2 Warp 4, so I asked the salesman if they thought they might sell more of it if they carried some of the applications. He told me there were none. I guess the software buyers guide attached to the magazine must have been imaginary. I guess the fact that the POS system that rang up my purchase was running OS/2 was just another sign it was fading.
Do some research. OS/2 driver support has spanked Linux for some time now. Only now is it catching up. Halfway to usurping OS/390, AIX, Solaris, Winblowz, IRIX, indeed. Apparently since Linux stuff is free, this leaves more money for hallucinogens.
I found that once I had bought the TS2040 printer, it's pass through connector created a more stable connection for the RAM pack, and I rarely had a wobble crash after that.
It still had the problem of when I had been coding for many hours and it got very warm, something would go wrong and quietly march through memory and twiddle the bits on about every 40th byte. Inevitably, this either created a display file that was invalid and locked up, or created an invalid program line that you better not touch, or lockup was certain.
Almost right on the screen size. It was 32 columns of 24 lines with the bottom 2 lines reserved for entering/editing program lines and inputting data.
Very good memory on the 1K RAM display file method. If you had the 16K RAM or better, the display was fully padded with spaces and HALT codes. Of course, to do so caused the "boot" time to be longer as it grew the display file one byte at a time. A 1K machine was ready to go instantly when you jacked in the power. However, if a 1K display had several lines padded to different lengths, you had to wait for it to clear it out before getting back to your program listing. And even that was wierd to think about - since it was stored tokenized, it usually took more bytes to display the program than it did to store it, and on a 1K machine, that could mean that a long program might only display a few lines of code at a time when memory got nearly full.
Also, there were all sorts of well known memory saving tricks that relied on the tokenized BASIC. If you needed the value '3', then just saying "LET X = 3" cost you like 10 bytes (or more if memory serves) since there was a byte for each token, a byte for the character '3' and 5 bytes for the floating value of 3 stored hidden along with a 1 byte 'number' token. Well, if you used "LET X = INT PI", then that only used 5 bytes! No number to store - just tokens. "NOT PI" was a 2 byte zero, "SIGN PI" was a 2 byte '1'. In fact 'LET X = VAL "2.3"' was still cheaper than 'LET X = 2.3', especially since you didn't need parenthesis for functions with a simple argument.
The absolute coolest thing about Sinclair BASIC that no other BASIC I ever saw did, was to allow the VAL function to evaluate rather than just convert numeric constants. You could do the following: LET Y = VAL "2 * SIN(X + PI/2)". Basically, an EVAL type function, which allowed for some very powerfull stuff.
[sniff..]
oh well, back to the future...
If the TiVo could pump out some standard MPEG packets over the network, then all I would need for a television was a monitor that had an MPEG decoder in it, and I could route what I was watching to any monitor in the house. Of course, that also implys that I would only need to lay data cables, and the monitor could also just as easily be a computer screen when needed.
Just get an iBook. Looks good and is wireless at 11Mbps.
Many people seem to think it's about skipping commercials and how cool that is because I really hate those things. Well, you can't skip them on live TV, period.
Many others think it's about being able to jump back and replay live TV if you missed something, or create your own instant replay. This is useful, but still something you get anyway when you record a show.
What it's really about is the main reason I bought one. To not have to watch live TV anymore except for special events. I was fed up with being slave to the broadcast schedule because regular VCRs were so limited in recording capacity and, not difficult, but annoying to program. Every event was like it was the first time. Managing my video tapes was not impossible, but a chore that I do not care to do - not in this era of technology. So, a system that does away with these annoyances and gives me a searchable program listing rather than endlessly perusing chronological listings until my eyes glaze over, is valuable to me, and I paid for it.
I'm sure there might be a free solution at some point, but I'm sure it'll also suck. I think software developers (particularly GUI people) should take notice that the Tivo does not display computer graphics directly, but uses a video text generator. Thank God for that. It probably also uses something more sophisticated than your typical white box video card as well as the other hardware bits. Since it runs on a PowerPC hardware, I would imagine that says something about Intel hardware.
I like being able to time shift more than 6 to 8 hours of stuff and easily access and delete any of it. I don't have to remember to have a blank high grade tape ready to go to tape that favorite movie and then have to suffer recording a sitcom at the beginning of it in order to record both wile I'm out. I just record both with the Tivo, each at the quality I desire, and dump the movie off to the tape later when I have it ready.
I can find those elusive computer shows easily that always seem to be on at 3am. Not that I couldn't look those up by other means, but none of those let me press a button when I find the show to automatically record it.
We watched live TV only out of habit and the lack of more intelligent VCRs and the lack of an easy way of finding something good on. Before, you might have a moment you just want to be passive and watch a show, so you spend forever just trying to become synchronous with the live TV schedule so that a good show was on. This often took longer than you had to spend, so you would "settle" on something that you would normally not watch (sounds a bit like Windows). Now, when I have these moments, there is always something of interest to me waiting there, and I don't have to worry about interrupting the VCR recording another show in order to watch something else I recorded.
Now with regard to this thread's general topic of commercials: since I rarely watch live TV, I can always fast-forward through the commercials. I always think how this should make advertisers worried. However, the thing that really annoys me about commercials now is the process of skipping them. For years, we've dreamed about the magical commercial skipping device, and there are even some crude things out there that will pause your VCR for some fixed interval, etc. But what I want is one of two things: 1. The commercials be targeted to my interests, and often relating to the subject matter of the show, so that I don't have to forward through the commercials because I want to see the commercials almost as much as the program; 2. the ability to pay for my programming to obviate the need for advertising, but in a way unlike PBS where even if I pay, I still have to endure the pledge drives.
I think it funny the stuff I see posted in these Slashdot discussions sometimes. The PC world doesn't even have anything that comes close, but go on and on about how it isn't "perfect" and "free", so spout on about how easy it should be to hack up out of some spare wire and string.
In the end it's not about making this stuff free. That only means that someone is going to demand some of your time in return. I work at a job that I'm good at and enjoy to make money to buy and do things that I enjoy. Wasting time waiting for these things, finding these things or listening to a sales pitch for other things I'm not interested in, is not what I want to be doing. I will pay money to avoid that. The people who created Tivo seem to grok this, when TV networks understand this, then things might get nicer. Warning: this will mean that you will pay for TV. This also applies to the Internet. However, TV is linear - I have to go forward through the commercial to get to the rest of the content. The Net is different (for now) in that I can mostly visually dodge the banner ads to get to the content I am looking for. This is not to say that my brain dodges them. Much like product placement, Web ads, probably have subconscious effects. Now, if TV were like the Web, then there would be a banner ad on the top of the screen during the whole show with the program confined to a frame below it, but the program would not otherwise be interrupted.
Finally, someone who really gets it. I laugh at all this other typical short-sighted beating on the method in the original post and lame attacks on the value of archiving scientific data.
I get so sick of these dollar values used in place of weight or volume. Gee, let's see if when you bring back that much ore, if it's still worth 20 f'n TRILLION dollars now that there's so much, the value has dropped.
- We do. We have KDE/QT and GNOME/GTK...
...they appear to be converging -- they are remarkably similar
You don't until they become one. You have two desktops doing exactly the same things, but with different APIs.Linux is only going to suffer if we continue to bicker about which desktop we "bless" as the standard face for Linux to try to achieve some apparent stability. The notion is that if we standardize on one desktop, then it's much easier for applications to be written since they don't have to work with countless different desktops. Natural selection in this situation quickly leads to one desktop dominating and all new programs written to only support it. Sound familiar?
If we had a desktop API, and the desktop managers were written to it, then the applications could be written to it as well and not care what desktop manager was being used. I could run whatever I wanted, and not worry about being compatible with the most popular desktop manager. Linux distros could be made with a GUI that worked exactly like Windows for beginners, but all their stuff would be usable with the other desktop managers they switched to as they became more advanced.
Now imagine what could be done. For example, Apple could create a Mac desktop for Linux that was not just a window manager in drag, but really looked and felt and worked like a Mac desktop, but was totally compatible with any other Linux app that interacted with the desktop (Mac app compatibility would be a separate isssue). I think they could sell something like that. I doubt they would ever do it, but maybe the guys at Easel could.
I will also say now that I am a relatively new Linux user, but have had casual experience over years with several flavors of unix. I have also used DOS, Macs, Windows and OS/2. If anyone is getting ideas that Gnome or KDE is the best there is - then you need to get out more. Oh sure, they may spank the Windows GUI in most areas, but they are almost just as shallow. I think there are far too many efforts to put makeup on Linux and not enough on making it truly sexy.
Ryan Gray