Re:another Linux user's experiences with OSX
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 2
There are almost no books available (BN doesn't even have a Mac section anymore, while their Linux and open source section is quite large).
Don't blame publishers for your bookstore of choice having a shoddy collection.
First, go to A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/">amazon.com and type "OS X" into the search box, choose 'books', and hit enter. I don't care if you hate Amazon, but look at their selection - "All 45 results for OS X" are worth browsing through.
Then go to www.chapters.ca and search for "OSX" (three hits) and "OS X" (140 hits, but not all are relevant - the Indigo search sucks ass; soem palm programming books grace the list, etc).
Then, check BN's website for "OS X". 44 different books.
Then join #macdev on Openprojects and ask there what books are good and which are bad for what you want to learn about.
There are lots of books out there. If your local BN doesn't carry them, pick one out from online, write down the ISBN, and call the store, get them to order it, or find a decent bookstore (or a larger BN).
Software installation is a mess. Some applications come with installers, some come as archives that you need to drag somewhere, some come as loopback mountable disk images. Linux is much better in this area, and even Windows XP seems a little better.
Yes, because in Linux, some applications come as source in tarballs, some come as source RPMs, some come as binary tarballs, some come as binary RPMs, some come as binary debian packages, some come as tarballs of installers, some come as.sh files that you have to chmod +x to run....
Windows is simple, in that you just run the installer, but in OS X, software (good software, not this ported IE crap) doesn't stick garbage in all your system directories. You can drag a folder to your desktop, and the application will Just Work. You can throw it away, and it's gone for good (except for preferences).
Anyway, that's my input. Most of the rest of what you've said I agree with, especially about the KISS philosophy. Perhaps we'll see improvement in OSS because of this. We can always hope.
Actually, this is insanely handy when you're having one of those 'where did all my space go?' days. The interface used in Jurassic Park shows large files as large, so it's easy to see a 3 gig logfile, even way off in the distance.
This would have saved a coworker and I a lot of worry and filled drives several times. *sigh*
--Dan
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't use "office" applications. Word? LaTeX. Excel? Awk and perl. Outlook? Mutt. Powerpoint? You've got to be kidding me. Yes, LaTeX and perl may have a steep "learning curve" but dammit, I can learn.
This strikes me as remarkably similar to someone complaining about how a Geo Metro is 'flawed' because it can't haul 60 cinder blocks around, can't haul a ton of gravel, etc. That's not what it's meant for.
Me, I'd rather use my computer than learn my computer. LaTeX? Sure, I could use it, but why would I want to waste my time marking something up in LaTeX when I can open Word, type it out, spend four seconds formatting it the way I need, and then save it to any of five dozen file formats (most importantly, Word).
As for Awk and Perl as replacements, you'd have to do a lot more work to do 90% of what I do in Excel in awk and perl. Takes me ten seconds to make a graph out of a set of data, I can move cells around drag 'n' drop, I can add styling and so on if I'm sharing my.xls file, I can put graphs and tables into Word or Powerpoint. Awk and Perl for this are cheap hacks. Sure, it can all be done, but it's still a cheap hack.
I didn't spend years mastering unix administration and development just to have someone hand-hold me through basic adminstration tasks.
Fine, then don't use OS X, and don't whine about it. It's not meant for every task under the sun, it's meant for people who want what it offers. If it doesn't offer you what you want, then use something else, and don't complain, but some of us are glad that we can point, click, and have new user accounts added everywhere it counts.
I had fun with Linux, but eventually I got tired of managing my computer, and wanted just to use it. OS X gives me this, but still gives me the power I need to run things like perl, vim, and so forth. If you don't want this, then don't use OS X, and we'll all get along fine.
The iPod uses an ARM processor. GCC can cross-compile to this. Doing any 'coding', however, would require replacing the firmware in the iPod, which would be rather a pain, and which I wouldn't trust at all.
Also, why would not being an Apple person lag you behind the x86 world? This makes no sense.
--Dan
Re:Why does Katz still have a keyboard?
on
The Rise of CSI
·
· Score: 2
I'm not at all saying that it's a 100% hit rate, but there is a psychological/neurological reason for it happening (i.e. it is not baseless) and it does help give you an indication (or at least, it contributes).
I wouldn't arrest someone based on it, of course, but if you have no hard, large, obvious evidence, then you may wish to follow after little scraps. Sometimes, when you have nothing else to go on, someone looking left or right can at least give you something else to investigate, some reason to keep going, something else to grab onto.
--Dan
Re:Why does Katz still have a keyboard?
on
The Rise of CSI
·
· Score: 2
I'm curious as to why anyone would classify a bar where people make a horrid mess of the place a 'proper bar'.
That aside, I didn't see the peanut episode, so I can't comment on it. The look-left/look-right thing, however, -is- true (unless someone is deliberately screwing with you). I've seen it dozens of times. It's hardly admissible in court, but it does give them a clue as to what's going on.
Is this 'fake science'? Not at all. Police all over the place use this as a hint. I've heard several cases of police questioning witnesses/suspects/whatever, and then deciding to investigate further because of which way the person looked.
That said, if you don't like the show, and you're going to ruin your wife's watching it, just don't watch it with her. No one's chaining you down (well, ok, your wife might be, but if you're that whipped you have other problems:P).
Notice how the 50-something main character resembles CBS's 50-something audience, and how impatient he can be with the headphone-wearing kids in the crimelab.
This is true, but the show also demonstrates (especially with Greg), that even 'headphone-wearing kids' are a lot more than they might appear. Greg's work has been pivotal to several cases, he's great at what he does, and half the time he's a walking encyclopedia of biochemical compounds.
So sure, he's a 'headphone-wearing kid', but just because he is doesn't make him a punk. I think this doesn't reinforce perspective but rather throws it out the window. There's more to someone than you can judge by looking at them.
That episode was actually bland, as far as episodes go. Some of them are surprisingly... I won't say riveting, but they really grab your attention, and bring you along for the ride. The hockey one, while good, was one of the more mediocre of the bunch (insofar as I can say CSI is mediocre, as it's my favourite show on TV right now).
The flip-side of this is that CD vendors in the US might be slightly more reluctant to jump through the hoops necessary to distribute Debian on CD.
Nonsense, it'll make things easier. They don't have to burn non-US CDs, which makes images easier to find, and as long as they don't ship to the export-restricted countries (which is easier to filter via mail than download), then they're fine.
Move the gas pedal to the center console, and shape it like an F15 throttle. Make the steering wheel move along an arc, and not just rotate. Tilt the seat back to 55 degrees. Move the gear shift so that you can nudge it with the elbow of the arm you control the throttle with. Make all the dash indicators green on yellow. Change every icon, like the 'oil', 'seatbelt', and so on, to various smiley faces. Change what units the spedometer and RPM gauges are. Move the radio controls to where the gas pedal was.
Chances are, someone, somewhere, would like this design. It actually sounds kind of neat to me even, at least in part, though I don't know if I'd actually want to use it. However, if someone changed a car this drastically and it fit them perfectly, is that ok? It's their car. But if you got in, would you be able to drive it without an explanation of what goes where? Even then, it'd be nearly impossible.
This is the point he's trying to make. Not changing colours and fonts, though that DOES have a subconscious impact as he points out, but rather changing the way the interface works, or even largely the way it looks, can be confusing.
First time I ran Sonique (which was also the last time, for this among other reasons), it took me a while to figure out how to close the damned thing, because it was so innovatively 'skinned'. There was no obvious clue as to what goes where, and I had to completely learn a new interface just to get rid of it, let alone to use it.
This is more of what Raskin is talking about, not just a few colours (though colours makes a good point too).
If I said we ought to design a really, really good steering wheel, and then design a car to support it, everyone (except perhaps Mr. Raskin) would say I was a fscking moron. And they'd be right.
Your straw man is fascinating. Let me elaborate on what Raskin meant.
With Linux, there was first the kernel and the command line. Then there was XFree, then GNOME and so on, and each of these layers had to be built with the previous layer in mind. In short, they were building 'up from the kernel'.
What made the MacOS so popular is that they started with the interface. They made an interface that people could relate to (desk top, folders, files, and a trash can), and then designed from there. This is building 'down from the user'.
The difference? In the first example, the most important thing is the kernel and how the kernel wants to do things, and everything else follows that, up and up the layers of abstraction until you get to the very last, which is the user interface. The kernel is written, and then the shells are built on top of that, and then the drawing routines are built with those in mind, and then the GUI (say 'desktop environment') is built with that in mind.
In the second, the most important thing is the user, and how they will interact with the system. The design then flows down, and each progressive layer takes the previous one into account. The user interface is designed with the user in mind, and then the drawing routines are designed with the user interface in mind (and maybe the developers, but they're people too), and so on, and so forth.
To fix your straw man, phrase it thusly.
'If I said we ought to design a car with the driver and passengers in mind and then work from there, instead of starting with the engine and drive mechanisms and fitting the people in wherever there was room...'
Seems to sound like a sensible design to me.
The point he's making, in short, is that of all the components of a usable system (i.e. not one that sits in a corner and does nothing), the user is the absolute most important, bar none.
First, the display isn't PDF per se, it's just similar to PDF, based on the same technologies.
Second, the PDF itself may be just text, but those pixels are not monochrome. If you have your display at millions of colours, every one of those pixels is 24-bit colour.
Thirdly, how much ram is in your powerbook G4, and what bus bandwidth does it have? Keep in mind that a desktop P3/P4 runs at a higher bus speed than most G4 powerbooks.
Finally, OS X is still a work in progress. Apple engineers are still working hard on optimizing the OS. 10.1.0 did a great job of this, and 10.2 will likely improve things drastically again. To people who complain about this practice, I say a slow OS X is better than a fast OS 9, because it gives you time to get used to it.
You forgot a few: Matrox (Montreal), and ATi (Markham, Ontario), who are (if you ask me), two of the top video card makers there are, and Ballard Power of Burnaby.
In fact, there are dozens of huge names in Canada that no one knows are Canadian, mostly for the same reason no company lets on that it's a one-man operation: no one would take them seriously. People think 'Canada? They don't have any big companies.' Surprise!;)
And I believe it's got $4 billion in debts thanks to the government who wanted to boost the competition but failed.
No, it's got $4b in debts because they would rather compete EVERYWHERE than where the money is. They run routes at 10% capaticy just because other airlines run them. They don't realize that not running a plane is cheaper than running it for two people (though it's nice to be able to get seat upgrades when First Class is empty).
The government allowing competition is great, but Air Canada forgets that it's not the only player in town. It needs to clean up its act, focus more on the profitable routes, and start cutting out waste.
There's a difference. Blue Mountain is a failed e-business that isn't worth paying for anyway. Megatokyo is an online comic done for free in spare time to entertain people and contribute to the general goodness of the internet as a whole.
Piro doesn't want people to pay for his comic, he wants people to buy merchandise from his comic. If Blue Mountain was giving cards away for free but offering to let you buy merchandise, then the situation would be the same.
Me, I'm glad Blue Mountain is going under. Now people will stop sending me these stupid goddamn cards every time they have some holiday that I don't celebrate. Death to all the online Hallmark wannabees (except that one that just has pictures of chocolate).
People will balk initially at paying for content, but I think they'll gradually get used to it. I remember being pissed that I'm paying for cable AND for the commercials they're sending me, but now I've just come to accept it.
I don't know about this. Some sites (Megatokyo, MacHall, Salon, and RPG World) I would pay for. Not $6/mo each, mind you, but they do provide quality content, and they are sites that (with the exception of Salon, whose good articles are all available to paid subscribers only) I visit regularly and would like to support, even if only in principle. This, however, presumes that I have money, which I don't, otherwise I would donate or buy 'fanboy merch'.
The thing is, most people are greedy, and, as Piro said, seem to think that once something is free, it's their God Given Right to keep getting it for free. Some people will pay more for added value (say, if I, as a subscriber, could buy limited-edition Megatokyo or MacHall prints, get fanboy swag at a discount, or get to buy/read stuff ahead of time), but very few people will pay for Salon's service after getting it all for free, even if it -is- worth it, because it once was free. Nevermind that circumstances have changed, and ad revenue has declined, and nevermind that the service might actually be worth it (I will pay Salon $10/mo before I give Blue Mountain a penny).
Personally, I think more websites should support things like paypal and so on. Oddly, most (comic) sites are -not- doing this, even shifting -away- from this, preferring to rely on revenues from merch sales and so on. Me, I'd rather throw $2 at them via paypal instead of buying a $15 shirt that they only make $2 profit from anyway. Maybe I'll buy a shirt once, but I'm not going to buy one every month, and I'd like to keep supporting Megatokyo and MacHall indefinitely.
After all, $2 won't get me anything, but if all the MacHall fans out there threw $2 at Ian, maybe he could finally get a G4 that could play Black and White on a level with Micah's machine. Problem is, most people can't or won't. I mean, $2 is not that much, but a lot of people don't have credit cards, don't have paypal, don't want to set them up, etc. This is likely why Penny Arcade's donation box didn't work too well, or at least, why they discontinued it. If every MT/PA fan donated $2/mo, these guys could have lived like kings, but most people didn't care, were too lazy, or just couldn't (like me).
Oh well. It'll come around sooner or later. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Perhaps it is slower, but it's certainly fast enough for me, and I'll trade speed for ease of use, reliability, 500+ devices on a single chain, the ability to go up to several gigabits per second (according to the spec, i.e. 'firewire 2.0 or whatever'), and so on. IDE is nothing but a pain, and you don't need performance like that in a desktop machine.
Perhaps it's not for everyone, but me, I'd like the opportunity to make that choice. Even if it's just for adding other internal devices, like CD-ROM/CD-RW drives, zip drives, disk drives, etc., and leave the main drive IDE, I think it would be a great help. Most devices don't even need 400 megabits, let alone anything ATA/133 can offer, so why waste device space? It's just silly, and the cables are much nicer anyway.
I'm getting tired of IDE garbage (let's face it, it's been suffering incremental now-it-sucks-less improvements for ten years). It's slow, buggy, and annoying. My question is, when will we see internal firewire drives?
Drives can be powered by the firewire bus, if necessarily (but why bother unless their usage is low, like zip drives), the cables are much easier to manage than ribbon cables and make getting around inside far easier (Apple has solved this in their G4 cases, but most haven't).
It's also 400 megabits (at the moment), is DMA (needs it for guaranteed bandwidth, for cameras and so on), inherantly needs no drivers, and so on. I've also seen PCI Firewire cards that have internal connectors (three external USB2, two external Firewire, and one each internal), so when will we start seeing the drives?
Speaking from a little experience (my 11 years of experience in computing started in a print shop), I can say one thing.
QuarkXPress is not something by which to gauge the Mac OS. Not by a long shot.
QuarkXPress got to where it is through one thing alone, and that is support for ultra-high-end printing equipment. It beat out Photoshop for Linotronic support, and got where it was that way. Not through quality, stability, reliability, or anything else for that matter. Examples: 8 years ago, v3.2 was the latest, and sucked. Crashy, slow, very little file type support. Two months ago, v4.1 was the latest, and also sucked. Crashy, slow, very little file type support. By and large, it was the same program as v3.2 (we actually switched from 3.2 to 4.1 recently). There are programs out there that sell for hundreds of dollars whose sole purpose is to rescue QXP docs that QXP itself trashed into garbage when saving. Quark released version 5.0 a month or two ago, without OS X support.
Secondly, we are dealing with OS X nowadays. OS9 had its own issues, and if you are running QXP, then you were running OS9. While I admit, it's a little of a cop-out, OS9 didn't have things like preemptive multitasking and memory protection (which makes it easy to cheat at games by editing memory contents), and therefore it's easy for a badly managed system or a poorly written program (of which QXP is the worst offender out there) to screw up and overwrite things that most people would consider rather important.
Check out Adobe InDesign on OS9 or OS X, and then compare. You'll notice that it's a much nicer program, and won't take your system down as often.
Stargate plays, or played, on Global. I don't know if it still does because I've got fed up with this conspiracy crap mixed in with repeats, but it used to be on Monday at 8 or 9 PM on Global TV here in BC.
The problem that I've always had is that the shows are never in the right order. Picture this: Show A, with preview for Show B next week. Show B, with preview for C. E with preview for F. F with preview for G. C for D, D for E, G for H, and so on. My guess is, Global gets the unlabelled tapes in boxes of 6 at a time and doesn't have time to watch them first.
Oh well. I'll buy the DVD box-sets, and that'll be that. I've been watching since the second half of the first episode (I've never seen the first hour, but I've tuned in an hour late for it five times), and lately, it's just not worth the hassle. Either MGM is screwing up (well, they are for sure now), or Global is screwing up (which I can easily see happening), or everyone's screwing up and no one knows wtf is going on.
Either way, DVDs are nice. Mmm, director commentary.
The US and Canada have been at arms with each other about Canada's softwood lumber exports. The US says that the government is subsidizing the mills, that we are 'dumping' our lumber across the border, and so on, so they imposed a 19% countervailing duty on ALL softwood lumber imports from Canada - which, by the way, is causing the unemployment of thousands, just to raise the profits of American mills.
Canada has taken this issue to the World Trade Organization - twice - and the courts have ruled in Canada's favour both times, and the US totally ignored the rulings and imposed the duties.
Now the US might be hurt by people paying more for exports, and it wants to go to the WTO. Does anyone else see this as blatant hypocracy?
Slashdot Mirror
There are almost no books available (BN doesn't even have a Mac section anymore, while their Linux and open source section is quite large).
.sh files that you have to chmod +x to run....
Don't blame publishers for your bookstore of choice having a shoddy collection.
First, go to A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/">amazon.com and type "OS X" into the search box, choose 'books', and hit enter. I don't care if you hate Amazon, but look at their selection - "All 45 results for OS X" are worth browsing through.
Then go to www.chapters.ca and search for "OSX" (three hits) and "OS X" (140 hits, but not all are relevant - the Indigo search sucks ass; soem palm programming books grace the list, etc).
Then, check BN's website for "OS X". 44 different books.
Then join #macdev on Openprojects and ask there what books are good and which are bad for what you want to learn about.
There are lots of books out there. If your local BN doesn't carry them, pick one out from online, write down the ISBN, and call the store, get them to order it, or find a decent bookstore (or a larger BN).
Software installation is a mess. Some applications come with installers, some come as archives that you need to drag somewhere, some come as loopback mountable disk images. Linux is much better in this area, and even Windows XP seems a little better.
Yes, because in Linux, some applications come as source in tarballs, some come as source RPMs, some come as binary tarballs, some come as binary RPMs, some come as binary debian packages, some come as tarballs of installers, some come as
Windows is simple, in that you just run the installer, but in OS X, software (good software, not this ported IE crap) doesn't stick garbage in all your system directories. You can drag a folder to your desktop, and the application will Just Work. You can throw it away, and it's gone for good (except for preferences).
Anyway, that's my input. Most of the rest of what you've said I agree with, especially about the KISS philosophy. Perhaps we'll see improvement in OSS because of this. We can always hope.
--Dan
Actually, this is insanely handy when you're having one of those 'where did all my space go?' days. The interface used in Jurassic Park shows large files as large, so it's easy to see a 3 gig logfile, even way off in the distance.
This would have saved a coworker and I a lot of worry and filled drives several times. *sigh*
--Dan
I don't use "office" applications. Word? LaTeX. Excel? Awk and perl. Outlook? Mutt. Powerpoint? You've got to be kidding me. Yes, LaTeX and perl may have a steep "learning curve" but dammit, I can learn.
.xls file, I can put graphs and tables into Word or Powerpoint. Awk and Perl for this are cheap hacks. Sure, it can all be done, but it's still a cheap hack.
This strikes me as remarkably similar to someone complaining about how a Geo Metro is 'flawed' because it can't haul 60 cinder blocks around, can't haul a ton of gravel, etc. That's not what it's meant for.
Me, I'd rather use my computer than learn my computer. LaTeX? Sure, I could use it, but why would I want to waste my time marking something up in LaTeX when I can open Word, type it out, spend four seconds formatting it the way I need, and then save it to any of five dozen file formats (most importantly, Word).
As for Awk and Perl as replacements, you'd have to do a lot more work to do 90% of what I do in Excel in awk and perl. Takes me ten seconds to make a graph out of a set of data, I can move cells around drag 'n' drop, I can add styling and so on if I'm sharing my
I didn't spend years mastering unix administration and development just to have someone hand-hold me through basic adminstration tasks.
Fine, then don't use OS X, and don't whine about it. It's not meant for every task under the sun, it's meant for people who want what it offers. If it doesn't offer you what you want, then use something else, and don't complain, but some of us are glad that we can point, click, and have new user accounts added everywhere it counts.
I had fun with Linux, but eventually I got tired of managing my computer, and wanted just to use it. OS X gives me this, but still gives me the power I need to run things like perl, vim, and so forth. If you don't want this, then don't use OS X, and we'll all get along fine.
--Dan
The iPod uses an ARM processor. GCC can cross-compile to this. Doing any 'coding', however, would require replacing the firmware in the iPod, which would be rather a pain, and which I wouldn't trust at all.
Also, why would not being an Apple person lag you behind the x86 world? This makes no sense.
--Dan
I'm not at all saying that it's a 100% hit rate, but there is a psychological/neurological reason for it happening (i.e. it is not baseless) and it does help give you an indication (or at least, it contributes).
I wouldn't arrest someone based on it, of course, but if you have no hard, large, obvious evidence, then you may wish to follow after little scraps. Sometimes, when you have nothing else to go on, someone looking left or right can at least give you something else to investigate, some reason to keep going, something else to grab onto.
--Dan
I'm curious as to why anyone would classify a bar where people make a horrid mess of the place a 'proper bar'.
:P).
That aside, I didn't see the peanut episode, so I can't comment on it. The look-left/look-right thing, however, -is- true (unless someone is deliberately screwing with you). I've seen it dozens of times. It's hardly admissible in court, but it does give them a clue as to what's going on.
Is this 'fake science'? Not at all. Police all over the place use this as a hint. I've heard several cases of police questioning witnesses/suspects/whatever, and then deciding to investigate further because of which way the person looked.
That said, if you don't like the show, and you're going to ruin your wife's watching it, just don't watch it with her. No one's chaining you down (well, ok, your wife might be, but if you're that whipped you have other problems
--Dan
Notice how the 50-something main character resembles CBS's 50-something audience, and how impatient he can be with the headphone-wearing kids in the crimelab.
This is true, but the show also demonstrates (especially with Greg), that even 'headphone-wearing kids' are a lot more than they might appear. Greg's work has been pivotal to several cases, he's great at what he does, and half the time he's a walking encyclopedia of biochemical compounds.
So sure, he's a 'headphone-wearing kid', but just because he is doesn't make him a punk. I think this doesn't reinforce perspective but rather throws it out the window. There's more to someone than you can judge by looking at them.
--Dan
That episode was actually bland, as far as episodes go. Some of them are surprisingly... I won't say riveting, but they really grab your attention, and bring you along for the ride. The hockey one, while good, was one of the more mediocre of the bunch (insofar as I can say CSI is mediocre, as it's my favourite show on TV right now).
--Dan
The flip-side of this is that CD vendors in the US might be slightly more reluctant to jump through the hoops necessary to distribute Debian on CD.
Nonsense, it'll make things easier. They don't have to burn non-US CDs, which makes images easier to find, and as long as they don't ship to the export-restricted countries (which is easier to filter via mail than download), then they're fine.
--Dan
You are using incorrect examples.
Move the gas pedal to the center console, and shape it like an F15 throttle. Make the steering wheel move along an arc, and not just rotate. Tilt the seat back to 55 degrees. Move the gear shift so that you can nudge it with the elbow of the arm you control the throttle with. Make all the dash indicators green on yellow. Change every icon, like the 'oil', 'seatbelt', and so on, to various smiley faces. Change what units the spedometer and RPM gauges are. Move the radio controls to where the gas pedal was.
Chances are, someone, somewhere, would like this design. It actually sounds kind of neat to me even, at least in part, though I don't know if I'd actually want to use it. However, if someone changed a car this drastically and it fit them perfectly, is that ok? It's their car. But if you got in, would you be able to drive it without an explanation of what goes where? Even then, it'd be nearly impossible.
This is the point he's trying to make. Not changing colours and fonts, though that DOES have a subconscious impact as he points out, but rather changing the way the interface works, or even largely the way it looks, can be confusing.
First time I ran Sonique (which was also the last time, for this among other reasons), it took me a while to figure out how to close the damned thing, because it was so innovatively 'skinned'. There was no obvious clue as to what goes where, and I had to completely learn a new interface just to get rid of it, let alone to use it.
This is more of what Raskin is talking about, not just a few colours (though colours makes a good point too).
--Dan
If I said we ought to design a really, really good steering wheel, and then design a car to support it, everyone (except perhaps Mr. Raskin) would say I was a fscking moron. And they'd be right.
Your straw man is fascinating. Let me elaborate on what Raskin meant.
With Linux, there was first the kernel and the command line. Then there was XFree, then GNOME and so on, and each of these layers had to be built with the previous layer in mind. In short, they were building 'up from the kernel'.
What made the MacOS so popular is that they started with the interface. They made an interface that people could relate to (desk top, folders, files, and a trash can), and then designed from there. This is building 'down from the user'.
The difference? In the first example, the most important thing is the kernel and how the kernel wants to do things, and everything else follows that, up and up the layers of abstraction until you get to the very last, which is the user interface. The kernel is written, and then the shells are built on top of that, and then the drawing routines are built with those in mind, and then the GUI (say 'desktop environment') is built with that in mind.
In the second, the most important thing is the user, and how they will interact with the system. The design then flows down, and each progressive layer takes the previous one into account. The user interface is designed with the user in mind, and then the drawing routines are designed with the user interface in mind (and maybe the developers, but they're people too), and so on, and so forth.
To fix your straw man, phrase it thusly.
'If I said we ought to design a car with the driver and passengers in mind and then work from there, instead of starting with the engine and drive mechanisms and fitting the people in wherever there was room...'
Seems to sound like a sensible design to me.
The point he's making, in short, is that of all the components of a usable system (i.e. not one that sits in a corner and does nothing), the user is the absolute most important, bar none.
--Dan
imagine the scriptability that could arise from a command-line image manipulator
You can already script Photoshop. They're called actions. Read the manual.
--Dan
First, the display isn't PDF per se, it's just similar to PDF, based on the same technologies.
Second, the PDF itself may be just text, but those pixels are not monochrome. If you have your display at millions of colours, every one of those pixels is 24-bit colour.
Thirdly, how much ram is in your powerbook G4, and what bus bandwidth does it have? Keep in mind that a desktop P3/P4 runs at a higher bus speed than most G4 powerbooks.
Finally, OS X is still a work in progress. Apple engineers are still working hard on optimizing the OS. 10.1.0 did a great job of this, and 10.2 will likely improve things drastically again. To people who complain about this practice, I say a slow OS X is better than a fast OS 9, because it gives you time to get used to it.
--Dan
You forgot a few: Matrox (Montreal), and ATi (Markham, Ontario), who are (if you ask me), two of the top video card makers there are, and Ballard Power of Burnaby.
;)
In fact, there are dozens of huge names in Canada that no one knows are Canadian, mostly for the same reason no company lets on that it's a one-man operation: no one would take them seriously. People think 'Canada? They don't have any big companies.' Surprise!
--Dan
And I believe it's got $4 billion in debts thanks to the government who wanted to boost the competition but failed.
No, it's got $4b in debts because they would rather compete EVERYWHERE than where the money is. They run routes at 10% capaticy just because other airlines run them. They don't realize that not running a plane is cheaper than running it for two people (though it's nice to be able to get seat upgrades when First Class is empty).
The government allowing competition is great, but Air Canada forgets that it's not the only player in town. It needs to clean up its act, focus more on the profitable routes, and start cutting out waste.
--Dan
There's a difference. Blue Mountain is a failed e-business that isn't worth paying for anyway. Megatokyo is an online comic done for free in spare time to entertain people and contribute to the general goodness of the internet as a whole.
Piro doesn't want people to pay for his comic, he wants people to buy merchandise from his comic. If Blue Mountain was giving cards away for free but offering to let you buy merchandise, then the situation would be the same.
Me, I'm glad Blue Mountain is going under. Now people will stop sending me these stupid goddamn cards every time they have some holiday that I don't celebrate. Death to all the online Hallmark wannabees (except that one that just has pictures of chocolate).
--Dan
People will balk initially at paying for content, but I think they'll gradually get used to it. I remember being pissed that I'm paying for cable AND for the commercials they're sending me, but now I've just come to accept it.
I don't know about this. Some sites (Megatokyo, MacHall, Salon, and RPG World) I would pay for. Not $6/mo each, mind you, but they do provide quality content, and they are sites that (with the exception of Salon, whose good articles are all available to paid subscribers only) I visit regularly and would like to support, even if only in principle. This, however, presumes that I have money, which I don't, otherwise I would donate or buy 'fanboy merch'.
The thing is, most people are greedy, and, as Piro said, seem to think that once something is free, it's their God Given Right to keep getting it for free. Some people will pay more for added value (say, if I, as a subscriber, could buy limited-edition Megatokyo or MacHall prints, get fanboy swag at a discount, or get to buy/read stuff ahead of time), but very few people will pay for Salon's service after getting it all for free, even if it -is- worth it, because it once was free. Nevermind that circumstances have changed, and ad revenue has declined, and nevermind that the service might actually be worth it (I will pay Salon $10/mo before I give Blue Mountain a penny).
Personally, I think more websites should support things like paypal and so on. Oddly, most (comic) sites are -not- doing this, even shifting -away- from this, preferring to rely on revenues from merch sales and so on. Me, I'd rather throw $2 at them via paypal instead of buying a $15 shirt that they only make $2 profit from anyway. Maybe I'll buy a shirt once, but I'm not going to buy one every month, and I'd like to keep supporting Megatokyo and MacHall indefinitely.
After all, $2 won't get me anything, but if all the MacHall fans out there threw $2 at Ian, maybe he could finally get a G4 that could play Black and White on a level with Micah's machine. Problem is, most people can't or won't. I mean, $2 is not that much, but a lot of people don't have credit cards, don't have paypal, don't want to set them up, etc. This is likely why Penny Arcade's donation box didn't work too well, or at least, why they discontinued it. If every MT/PA fan donated $2/mo, these guys could have lived like kings, but most people didn't care, were too lazy, or just couldn't (like me).
Oh well. It'll come around sooner or later. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
--Dan
Perhaps it is slower, but it's certainly fast enough for me, and I'll trade speed for ease of use, reliability, 500+ devices on a single chain, the ability to go up to several gigabits per second (according to the spec, i.e. 'firewire 2.0 or whatever'), and so on. IDE is nothing but a pain, and you don't need performance like that in a desktop machine.
Perhaps it's not for everyone, but me, I'd like the opportunity to make that choice. Even if it's just for adding other internal devices, like CD-ROM/CD-RW drives, zip drives, disk drives, etc., and leave the main drive IDE, I think it would be a great help. Most devices don't even need 400 megabits, let alone anything ATA/133 can offer, so why waste device space? It's just silly, and the cables are much nicer anyway.
--Dan
I'm getting tired of IDE garbage (let's face it, it's been suffering incremental now-it-sucks-less improvements for ten years). It's slow, buggy, and annoying. My question is, when will we see internal firewire drives?
Drives can be powered by the firewire bus, if necessarily (but why bother unless their usage is low, like zip drives), the cables are much easier to manage than ribbon cables and make getting around inside far easier (Apple has solved this in their G4 cases, but most haven't).
It's also 400 megabits (at the moment), is DMA (needs it for guaranteed bandwidth, for cameras and so on), inherantly needs no drivers, and so on. I've also seen PCI Firewire cards that have internal connectors (three external USB2, two external Firewire, and one each internal), so when will we start seeing the drives?
--Dan
Nope, you're right, I'm wrong. I misinterpreted smoeone's 'Office X for $150 off' as 'Office X for $150'. Prices are, in fact, as such:
:/
Office v.X for Mac, Add $459.95
Office v.X for Mac Upgrade, Add $279.95
Sorry for the confusion, I'll check my sources more accurately next time.
--Dan
Speaking from a little experience (my 11 years of experience in computing started in a print shop), I can say one thing.
QuarkXPress is not something by which to gauge the Mac OS. Not by a long shot.
QuarkXPress got to where it is through one thing alone, and that is support for ultra-high-end printing equipment. It beat out Photoshop for Linotronic support, and got where it was that way. Not through quality, stability, reliability, or anything else for that matter. Examples: 8 years ago, v3.2 was the latest, and sucked. Crashy, slow, very little file type support. Two months ago, v4.1 was the latest, and also sucked. Crashy, slow, very little file type support. By and large, it was the same program as v3.2 (we actually switched from 3.2 to 4.1 recently). There are programs out there that sell for hundreds of dollars whose sole purpose is to rescue QXP docs that QXP itself trashed into garbage when saving. Quark released version 5.0 a month or two ago, without OS X support.
Secondly, we are dealing with OS X nowadays. OS9 had its own issues, and if you are running QXP, then you were running OS9. While I admit, it's a little of a cop-out, OS9 didn't have things like preemptive multitasking and memory protection (which makes it easy to cheat at games by editing memory contents), and therefore it's easy for a badly managed system or a poorly written program (of which QXP is the worst offender out there) to screw up and overwrite things that most people would consider rather important.
Check out Adobe InDesign on OS9 or OS X, and then compare. You'll notice that it's a much nicer program, and won't take your system down as often.
You can (or could, last I checked) get Office v.X for $150 with the purchase of a new mac. Quite a deal.
--Dan
Welcome to Global incompetance.
Stargate plays, or played, on Global. I don't know if it still does because I've got fed up with this conspiracy crap mixed in with repeats, but it used to be on Monday at 8 or 9 PM on Global TV here in BC.
The problem that I've always had is that the shows are never in the right order. Picture this: Show A, with preview for Show B next week. Show B, with preview for C. E with preview for F. F with preview for G. C for D, D for E, G for H, and so on. My guess is, Global gets the unlabelled tapes in boxes of 6 at a time and doesn't have time to watch them first.
Oh well. I'll buy the DVD box-sets, and that'll be that. I've been watching since the second half of the first episode (I've never seen the first hour, but I've tuned in an hour late for it five times), and lately, it's just not worth the hassle. Either MGM is screwing up (well, they are for sure now), or Global is screwing up (which I can easily see happening), or everyone's screwing up and no one knows wtf is going on.
Either way, DVDs are nice. Mmm, director commentary.
--Dan
Read the article a little more closely. Women find him emotionally and intellectually attractive, not just physically attractive.
He's not just good looking, he has personality traits that make him attractive, and last time I checked, looks != everything.
--Dan
The US and Canada have been at arms with each other about Canada's softwood lumber exports. The US says that the government is subsidizing the mills, that we are 'dumping' our lumber across the border, and so on, so they imposed a 19% countervailing duty on ALL softwood lumber imports from Canada - which, by the way, is causing the unemployment of thousands, just to raise the profits of American mills.
Canada has taken this issue to the World Trade Organization - twice - and the courts have ruled in Canada's favour both times, and the US totally ignored the rulings and imposed the duties.
Now the US might be hurt by people paying more for exports, and it wants to go to the WTO. Does anyone else see this as blatant hypocracy?
--Dan