The beach ball referred to was the wait cursor for MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop).
It was copied widely in numerous popular 3rd party applications, but you are correct in that the official wait cursor for the OS was the watch cursor.
The spinning disc cursor used in OS X is a descendent of the wait cursor from NeXTStep, which was originally used to indicate that the Magneto-Optical disc was in use.
From the MacWorld where Newton was introduced until Apple killed it, the company I was working for was developing verical market and commercial Newton software.
Apple really missed the boat by trying to force the Newton into the consumer market when it was clearly failing, while at the same time completely missing the fact that the vertical market was taking off. Of course nowadays the vertical market is mostly served by special purpose devices.
The Newton APIs and the NewtonScript programming language were just unbelievably cool. What Java wishes it was. But Apple refused to allow third parties access to a C compiler or a standard way to load and run natively compiled code, which really hurt performance critical routines.
The OO storage system was very cool too. All and all the Newton was almost *too* revolutionary.
Someone please let the cork bulletin board down the hall from my office know that it owes Amazon.com a licensing fee. People tack up things like anti-war sheets, apartments for rent, concerts, sign-up sheets, etc. Other people sometimes scribble replies. Seems pretty clear to me that that bulletin board is in violation of this patent.
MS probably wanted to work with Apple, but Apple screwed up right?
I'm sure MS wanted to work with Stac, but they must've "messed them around"
I'm sure MS wanted to work with Cytrix, but they must've not been interested
I'm sure MS wanted to work with Netscape, but... start seeing a pattern yet? Does any company that has a relationship with MS *not* get stabbed in the back at some point? Of course, in the aftermath MS always points the finger and says (paraphrasing) "We wanted to be nice guys, but they just wouldn't let us"
Funny, how things change
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
I remember back around 1997 or so, McNealy responded to a question about the persistent rumors that Sun might buy Apple, and McNealy said that the only reason he would want Apple was for the office space (Silicon Valley's low vacancy rates were a big story back then). Now we've come full circle with an Apple-buys-Sun rumor? Haha..
Anyways, Cringely recommends that Sun bet the company on something visionary. I've got a suggestion: get into video servers and video on demand in a big big way. Don't let Hollywood control this technology (MovieLink). Partner with someone (preferrably Apple, which is focusing on standards based (MPEG-4) media)
Not that far into the future, TCP/IP will be the predominant means of moving media across various networks and to various devices.
Its much worse than that. If spammers start paying for the right to send spam, it will create a financial incentive for Microsoft (and other ISPs) to *let* them. Whats more, the spammers will start considering it their right (they paid for it after all) to have the recipients read what they send. Then you start getting into hairy situations like the suppression of spam filters, people of the same mind as Jack Valenti claiming that people that don't look at ads being "thiefs", and so on down that slippery slope.
...are at the bottom of a landfill right now. The successful ones *and* the failures. They are throw-away commodities, the worst examples of planned obsolescence in fact.
Closed box, proprietary, non-upgradable computing devices should be anathema, especially on Slashdot of all places...
The planet simply can't sustain the entire human population if they all have the same consumption rates as Americans do currently.
As downward pressure is placed on us, it will fuel pressure on us (and by extension the companies that we buy products from) to create the same standard of living using fewer resources. If my house is just as warm, my car just as nice, etc. as it was before but it costs me a fraction to operate, then I can cope with the competitive pressure that globalization will create.
With any hope globalization will cause this kind of 'same with less' thinking. In fact, if American companies can get off their asses and start thinking up the technologies and products that make that possible, we can then export them to all those other countries that will be dealing with the same problem 20 years from now. The Japanese have already figured this out, which is why the only hybrid fuel cars on the road are made by them.
The Green Revolution of the 21st century will by technologies and products that let humans lead a western lifestyle on a tiny fraction of the resources that we currently consume.
The league is divided into two conferences, the NFC and the AFC. Each of those conferences is divided into 4 divisions. The team with the best record from each division, plus 4 "wildcard" teams, 2 from each conference, go to the playoffs.
The playoffs are a single elimination system; the division winner with the overall best record having the top seed, then so on down the line. The top two seeds get a "bye" in the first week of the playoffs, i.e. don't have to play to advance to the next round. Then single elimination progresses as you would expect.
Each conference has its own playoffs, and the winner of the two conference championships advances to the Superbowl. So in that sense the Superbowl is a game between the year's best AFC team and the year's best NFC team.
This system was developed because the AFC used to be the AFL and was a completely independant league. Then it merged with the NFL to become the AFC.
The divisions are more or less geographic (this year was the first year after 'realignment' when, after decades of expansion teams and relocations the divisions no longer bore much relationship to the geographical locations of the teams, so teams were moved to different divisions to more accurately reflect their geography, and in one case - the Seattle Seahawks - a team was moved to a different conference to balance the number of teams in each). So for instance the Superbowl this year is between the Tampa Bay Bucaneers of the NFC South division, and the Oakland Raiders of the AFC West division.
This is all from the recollection of a football afficionado (I hate the term 'fan') on his first cup of coffee, so pardon any errors. Hope it helps.
"so they actually had to produce Qt wrappers and de-Qt parts to prevent it becoming GPL software."
That almost certainly is not why Apple developed KWQ (the abstraction layer that lets them tie Safari into Cocoa). They did that because Apple's own browser needs to have a good, thorough implementation of the Aqua user experience. Apple cares a lot more about the user experience (and thus is willing to go to the extra work to have it) than the typical/.'er seems to realize.
I'd have to agree with you. While it's been over a decade since I graduated with my degree in CompSci, even then the majority of my classmates didn't belong in that degree program.
At my Uni. (at that time anyways) the business school offered a degree in Information Systems Management that would have been far more appropriate for most of the CS students.
More schools should offer MIS undergrad degrees (if they don't already, I really have no idea) and they should be promoted as credible alternatives to CS degrees for students that want to pursue careers in IT rather than 'pure' CS.
(I may be coming off sounding elitist here and I really don't mean to.. I think IT is a perfectly valid career path and universities should be adequately preparing students for that. Simply put, the knowledge and skills needed to design and manage a database system (or whatever) are a lot different than the skills and knowledge needed to write the database software itself)
Its a dirty word (well actually a phrase). Still, features *do* sell software. Take any full featured commercial application. Only a few users use every feature in that app. However, of the rest of the users that may only use a fraction of the features, there is lots of overlap. User A may use features X and Y but not Z, user B uses features X and Z but not Y, and so on.
Add site licensing and this is how you get lock-in. An organization may have hundreds or thousands of users, none of whom use every single feature, but they all use different features. For the organization to replace that site licensed app with something different, the replacement would need to match all the features that they do use.
The alternative is to convince them that they don't need those features and should do without. Thats a perfectly reasonable claim, but you can understand why its more of an uphill battle.
So while Dvorak is right, software does get more bloated over time, I can assure you, no one would bother with the effort of implementing a feature if literally no one would use it. Someone somewhere finds that feature useful. Journalists love to criticize feature creep, but what they don't seem to get is that just because they don't find a particular feature to be useful in their own work doesn't mean nobody does.
As a Macintosh software developer for over 12 years, and a former Apple employee, let me try to explain why you think the Macintosh UE (User Experience) "just works' and the Linux one does not.
It's because of a combination of things:
1) Apple produces a comprehensive set of UE guidelines for application developers to follow
2) Apple spends ungodly amounts of man-hours ensuring that *all* of the API stacks (Carbon, Cocoa, Java) adhere to the guidelines
3) 3rd party software developers actually follow the guidelines (imagine that!)
4) The users are not only aware of the guidelines, they are activists when it comes to getting on a developer for breaking them (sometimes fanatically so, let me assure you!)
Do any of those 4 things seem doable in the Linux arena? If one group produced a set of guidelines, there would instantly be groups coming up with a competing set of guidelines, groups claiming that such guidelines are anti-Free(tm), and groups of developers thinking that by breaking the guidelines it makes them look rebellious.
Could one of the API stacks in Linux adhere to a set of UE guidelines? Sure, for all I know the Gnome or KDE developers already have a set of guidelines for their APIs. The key is that in order to have consistency, *all* API stacks need to adhere to the *same* set of guidelines.
The only way to have a UE on Linux that is 'good' in the same way as an Apple OS has a good UE is for a single company (say, Redhat) to develop a set of guidelines for its platform, put in the work to make all the APIs adhere to their guidelines, and evangelize developers of the advantages of following the guidelines. And then, perhaps most importantly, users need to get on the bandwagon and actually give a sh*t about how well applications that they use follow the guidelines, and give developers hell for breaking them.
I admire David Brin's writings but this time he got it wrong.
First of all, Tolkien is not so much anti-progress as he is anti-the-wrong-kind-of-progress, if you take my meaning. Most of all, he was concerned with the world progressing in a positive way, rather than a negative way.
The Elves are a tragic people. They know they must leave the world that they love, and in the trilogy itself this overshadows all their actions. They are aloof because they realize that if they 'fix things' then they will be a crutch to mortals. They realize instead that Humans, Halflings, and Dwarves must learn to deal with problems on their own. In point of fact the last War of the Ring was fought and won by the "last alliance of Elves and Humans". This time around, the mortal people of Middle-Earth will have to fight for themselves and not turn to their 'betters' to protect them.
I don't really know what Tolkien's real-life political views were, but clearly his most idealized way of life in his writings was neither the pyramidal form of rigid feudal hierarchies, nor the diamond shape of middle-class democracy, but rather the pastoral, flat shape of the Shire's society, where the Hobbits lived in a virtual vacuum of politics or class distinction.
The Nazgûl are *not* tragic. If you read their backstory, they are precisely the type of cruel, feudal men that Brin is opposed to. All of them are former kings of men, practicing the very hierarchical elitism that Brin hates, all of them wicked and power-hungry even before being seduced by Sauron. It is their downfall and demonization that most clearly demonstrates that Tolkien is not a lover of feudalism for its own sake, but rather a lover of a fair and just way of life, of the world getting progressively better for the majority of its inhabitants.
And finally, the overarching conflict in the LoTR is *not* the absolute good vs. absolute evil of the fellowship or Sauron, but rather man vs. himself. Specifically, Frodo's internal struggle against the temptation of the Ring. The Ring is the ultimate temptation, and victory comes when Frodo (with a little help from Gollum) is able to cast the Ring into the fires of Orodruin, thus proving that his reason is able to triumph over his base desires. It is this struggle, reason over passion, that is the heart of the story. The war is almost wholly irrelevant - or at best a distraction to the true struggle.
A big, big part (perhaps the most important part) of usability is consistency. Lack of consistency between apps, and between an app and the desktop environment, contributes to poor usability.
How important you consider usability to be for Linux I guess is up to you the individual. But accept that without a 'standard' GUI you can't have a good user experience.
In the immortal words of George Mallory: "because it's there"
Well, what would be the answer to the question "why do you want to climb a mountain again"? Because it's still there?
The simple fact is that the Moon isn't all that interesting a place. We can do all the science we need with satellites and robotic probes. The idea of a 'moonbase' is preposterous if you think about it a bit. Why spend the enormous amounts of energy to escape the Earth's gravity well only to drop your payload into another one? Earth orbit is a much better place for a 'base' to stage missions to other parts of the solar system.
Which really only leaves one reason to go to the moon: to prove that you can. Well, we did that already.
Now Mars, thats a different story. There is good science to do there that we can't realistically do with today's robotic probes. While implausible, the idea of a permanent human settlement is at least a lot more likely than one on the Moon. And perhaps the best reason to go to Mars: because we've never been.
Trouble is, we probably don't quite have the technology yet. But now would be a damn good time to start developing it.
This entirely depends on what you are doing with the video stream. If you are using it for videotelephony, facial recognition, eye tracking, etc. then it is a HID and not just a media capture device.
While I expect the direct use of the CLI to remain constant, with Linux and OS X on the rise I expect GUI/CLI hybrid applications to continue to grow. Combine the power of the CLI with the flexibility of the GUI and you get the best of both worlds. I would expect many, many OS X users to be using CLI tools without even realizing it. Have a look at VersionTracker and you'll see more and more recent OS X shareware releases have been like this.
Except that the usability, consistency and elegance of NeXTstep has been sacrificed to appease the Mac faithful's absolute assurance that the Macintosh Way is the one true way.
In my opinion this is unfair. Good things were lost from both sides when the two were merged.
Scroll bars are on the wrong (right) side
NeXTStep's left hand scrollbars were wrong. Think about it, within the span of 15 pixels you would a) scroll the content b) change the selection c) resize the window. That many chances to 'screw something up' by mis-clicking reduces user trust in the UI.
And the NeXTStep scrollbars lacked the undoability of the Mac scrollbars. For instance on the Mac, if I decide to cancel a scroll I can simply drag the mouse far enough away from the scrollbar perpendicular to the scrollbar's primary axis to 'snap back'. If you look at the Classic Mac UI nearly all the original UI elements had this level of undoability and NeXTStep did not.
Monolithic main menu, no pop-up right-button main menu (and the contextual menu is all-too sparsely populated most times)
NeXTStep also had a monolithic main menu, which I think you knew. Maybe you meant the horizontal menu bar? Supportably better by Fitt's law. And I have right-click menus that are fully populated in all the apps that I use, *shrug*
No tear off sub-menus
I would welcome them back provided the mechanism for tearing them off is done well (NeXTStep's were too easy to accidentally tear off when accessing the lowest menu item or a submenu)
Carbon implementations drag UI expectations down---all too often they don't support Services, File Filters &c. Sometimes not even Quartz live-window drag / re-size
Carbon application developers will add support for those things when Apple provides the APIs (or in the case of Services, *now* that Apple has provided the APIs -- they weren't available until 10.2) Of course, you could always not use Carbon applications and live in your happy little ivory tower if they bother you so much.
Verbose Mac-style menu shortcut descriptions which use weird symbols which aren't even consistently on all Apple keyboards (NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == S, Save As == S)
You've provided an excellent example of one of the things I hate(d) about NeXTStep.. uppercase vs. lowercase menu labels are extremely difficult to differentiate on a high-res monitor! The Mac way is far better, if command-shift-s is the menu equivalent, then you will see the command symbol, the shift symbol, and an s in the menu. WYSIEWYG.
Dumbed-down print dialog box w/ no Fax or Save (PostScript) buttons
Fax and Save to file are in my print dialogs. PDF rather than PostScript *shrug*.
File dialogue boxes which no longer support tab completion, filename selection to populate the filename text field, or automatically creating a path of folder(s) in which to save a file
Yet another example of something the Classic Mac implementation did very well. Why OS X regressed in this area is unexplainable, but don't blame the Classic Mac UI.
Slashdot Mirror
The beach ball referred to was the wait cursor for MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop).
It was copied widely in numerous popular 3rd party applications, but you are correct in that the official wait cursor for the OS was the watch cursor.
The spinning disc cursor used in OS X is a descendent of the wait cursor from NeXTStep, which was originally used to indicate that the Magneto-Optical disc was in use.
Neal Stephenson was most assuredly NOT the first person to apply a car analogy to computer platforms :-)
Its (at least) as old as Usenet's comp.sys.*.advocacy groups.
Yeah, I love forking over trillions of taxpayer dollars and having no idea of what its being spent on..
From the MacWorld where Newton was introduced until Apple killed it, the company I was working for was developing verical market and commercial Newton software.
Apple really missed the boat by trying to force the Newton into the consumer market when it was clearly failing, while at the same time completely missing the fact that the vertical market was taking off. Of course nowadays the vertical market is mostly served by special purpose devices.
The Newton APIs and the NewtonScript programming language were just unbelievably cool. What Java wishes it was. But Apple refused to allow third parties access to a C compiler or a standard way to load and run natively compiled code, which really hurt performance critical routines.
The OO storage system was very cool too. All and all the Newton was almost *too* revolutionary.
Someone please let the cork bulletin board down the hall from my office know that it owes Amazon.com a licensing fee. People tack up things like anti-war sheets, apartments for rent, concerts, sign-up sheets, etc. Other people sometimes scribble replies. Seems pretty clear to me that that bulletin board is in violation of this patent.
"One skilled in the arts". What a laugh.
MS probably wanted to work with Apple, but Apple screwed up right?
... start seeing a pattern yet? Does any company that has a relationship with MS *not* get stabbed in the back at some point? Of course, in the aftermath MS always points the finger and says (paraphrasing) "We wanted to be nice guys, but they just wouldn't let us"
I'm sure MS wanted to work with Stac, but they must've "messed them around"
I'm sure MS wanted to work with Cytrix, but they must've not been interested
I'm sure MS wanted to work with Netscape, but
... you're eating dog food! :-/
*rimshot*
I remember back around 1997 or so, McNealy responded to a question about the persistent rumors that Sun might buy Apple, and McNealy said that the only reason he would want Apple was for the office space (Silicon Valley's low vacancy rates were a big story back then). Now we've come full circle with an Apple-buys-Sun rumor? Haha..
Anyways, Cringely recommends that Sun bet the company on something visionary. I've got a suggestion: get into video servers and video on demand in a big big way. Don't let Hollywood control this technology (MovieLink). Partner with someone (preferrably Apple, which is focusing on standards based (MPEG-4) media)
Not that far into the future, TCP/IP will be the predominant means of moving media across various networks and to various devices.
Its much worse than that. If spammers start paying for the right to send spam, it will create a financial incentive for Microsoft (and other ISPs) to *let* them. Whats more, the spammers will start considering it their right (they paid for it after all) to have the recipients read what they send. Then you start getting into hairy situations like the suppression of spam filters, people of the same mind as Jack Valenti claiming that people that don't look at ads being "thiefs", and so on down that slippery slope.
Seriously, you make a compelling case, but why would you WANT more Californians to move near you? :-)
...are at the bottom of a landfill right now. The successful ones *and* the failures. They are throw-away commodities, the worst examples of planned obsolescence in fact.
Closed box, proprietary, non-upgradable computing devices should be anathema, especially on Slashdot of all places...
just my $.02
The planet simply can't sustain the entire human population if they all have the same consumption rates as Americans do currently.
:-)
As downward pressure is placed on us, it will fuel pressure on us (and by extension the companies that we buy products from) to create the same standard of living using fewer resources. If my house is just as warm, my car just as nice, etc. as it was before but it costs me a fraction to operate, then I can cope with the competitive pressure that globalization will create.
With any hope globalization will cause this kind of 'same with less' thinking. In fact, if American companies can get off their asses and start thinking up the technologies and products that make that possible, we can then export them to all those other countries that will be dealing with the same problem 20 years from now. The Japanese have already figured this out, which is why the only hybrid fuel cars on the road are made by them.
The Green Revolution of the 21st century will by technologies and products that let humans lead a western lifestyle on a tiny fraction of the resources that we currently consume.
At least, I hope.
nt
The league is divided into two conferences, the NFC and the AFC. Each of those conferences is divided into 4 divisions. The team with the best record from each division, plus 4 "wildcard" teams, 2 from each conference, go to the playoffs.
The playoffs are a single elimination system; the division winner with the overall best record having the top seed, then so on down the line. The top two seeds get a "bye" in the first week of the playoffs, i.e. don't have to play to advance to the next round. Then single elimination progresses as you would expect.
Each conference has its own playoffs, and the winner of the two conference championships advances to the Superbowl. So in that sense the Superbowl is a game between the year's best AFC team and the year's best NFC team.
This system was developed because the AFC used to be the AFL and was a completely independant league. Then it merged with the NFL to become the AFC.
The divisions are more or less geographic (this year was the first year after 'realignment' when, after decades of expansion teams and relocations the divisions no longer bore much relationship to the geographical locations of the teams, so teams were moved to different divisions to more accurately reflect their geography, and in one case - the Seattle Seahawks - a team was moved to a different conference to balance the number of teams in each). So for instance the Superbowl this year is between the Tampa Bay Bucaneers of the NFC South division, and the Oakland Raiders of the AFC West division.
This is all from the recollection of a football afficionado (I hate the term 'fan') on his first cup of coffee, so pardon any errors. Hope it helps.
"so they actually had to produce Qt wrappers and de-Qt parts to prevent it becoming GPL software."
/.'er seems to realize.
That almost certainly is not why Apple developed KWQ (the abstraction layer that lets them tie Safari into Cocoa). They did that because Apple's own browser needs to have a good, thorough implementation of the Aqua user experience. Apple cares a lot more about the user experience (and thus is willing to go to the extra work to have it) than the typical
I'd have to agree with you. While it's been over a decade since I graduated with my degree in CompSci, even then the majority of my classmates didn't belong in that degree program.
At my Uni. (at that time anyways) the business school offered a degree in Information Systems Management that would have been far more appropriate for most of the CS students.
More schools should offer MIS undergrad degrees (if they don't already, I really have no idea) and they should be promoted as credible alternatives to CS degrees for students that want to pursue careers in IT rather than 'pure' CS.
(I may be coming off sounding elitist here and I really don't mean to.. I think IT is a perfectly valid career path and universities should be adequately preparing students for that. Simply put, the knowledge and skills needed to design and manage a database system (or whatever) are a lot different than the skills and knowledge needed to write the database software itself)
Its a dirty word (well actually a phrase). Still, features *do* sell software. Take any full featured commercial application. Only a few users use every feature in that app. However, of the rest of the users that may only use a fraction of the features, there is lots of overlap. User A may use features X and Y but not Z, user B uses features X and Z but not Y, and so on.
Add site licensing and this is how you get lock-in. An organization may have hundreds or thousands of users, none of whom use every single feature, but they all use different features. For the organization to replace that site licensed app with something different, the replacement would need to match all the features that they do use.
The alternative is to convince them that they don't need those features and should do without. Thats a perfectly reasonable claim, but you can understand why its more of an uphill battle.
So while Dvorak is right, software does get more bloated over time, I can assure you, no one would bother with the effort of implementing a feature if literally no one would use it. Someone somewhere finds that feature useful. Journalists love to criticize feature creep, but what they don't seem to get is that just because they don't find a particular feature to be useful in their own work doesn't mean nobody does.
As a Macintosh software developer for over 12 years, and a former Apple employee, let me try to explain why you think the Macintosh UE (User Experience) "just works' and the Linux one does not.
It's because of a combination of things:
1) Apple produces a comprehensive set of UE guidelines for application developers to follow
2) Apple spends ungodly amounts of man-hours ensuring that *all* of the API stacks (Carbon, Cocoa, Java) adhere to the guidelines
3) 3rd party software developers actually follow the guidelines (imagine that!)
4) The users are not only aware of the guidelines, they are activists when it comes to getting on a developer for breaking them (sometimes fanatically so, let me assure you!)
Do any of those 4 things seem doable in the Linux arena? If one group produced a set of guidelines, there would instantly be groups coming up with a competing set of guidelines, groups claiming that such guidelines are anti-Free(tm), and groups of developers thinking that by breaking the guidelines it makes them look rebellious.
Could one of the API stacks in Linux adhere to a set of UE guidelines? Sure, for all I know the Gnome or KDE developers already have a set of guidelines for their APIs. The key is that in order to have consistency, *all* API stacks need to adhere to the *same* set of guidelines.
The only way to have a UE on Linux that is 'good' in the same way as an Apple OS has a good UE is for a single company (say, Redhat) to develop a set of guidelines for its platform, put in the work to make all the APIs adhere to their guidelines, and evangelize developers of the advantages of following the guidelines. And then, perhaps most importantly, users need to get on the bandwagon and actually give a sh*t about how well applications that they use follow the guidelines, and give developers hell for breaking them.
I admire David Brin's writings but this time he got it wrong.
First of all, Tolkien is not so much anti-progress as he is anti-the-wrong-kind-of-progress, if you take my meaning. Most of all, he was concerned with the world progressing in a positive way, rather than a negative way.
The Elves are a tragic people. They know they must leave the world that they love, and in the trilogy itself this overshadows all their actions. They are aloof because they realize that if they 'fix things' then they will be a crutch to mortals. They realize instead that Humans, Halflings, and Dwarves must learn to deal with problems on their own. In point of fact the last War of the Ring was fought and won by the "last alliance of Elves and Humans". This time around, the mortal people of Middle-Earth will have to fight for themselves and not turn to their 'betters' to protect them.
I don't really know what Tolkien's real-life political views were, but clearly his most idealized way of life in his writings was neither the pyramidal form of rigid feudal hierarchies, nor the diamond shape of middle-class democracy, but rather the pastoral, flat shape of the Shire's society, where the Hobbits lived in a virtual vacuum of politics or class distinction.
The Nazgûl are *not* tragic. If you read their backstory, they are precisely the type of cruel, feudal men that Brin is opposed to. All of them are former kings of men, practicing the very hierarchical elitism that Brin hates, all of them wicked and power-hungry even before being seduced by Sauron. It is their downfall and demonization that most clearly demonstrates that Tolkien is not a lover of feudalism for its own sake, but rather a lover of a fair and just way of life, of the world getting progressively better for the majority of its inhabitants.
And finally, the overarching conflict in the LoTR is *not* the absolute good vs. absolute evil of the fellowship or Sauron, but rather man vs. himself. Specifically, Frodo's internal struggle against the temptation of the Ring. The Ring is the ultimate temptation, and victory comes when Frodo (with a little help from Gollum) is able to cast the Ring into the fires of Orodruin, thus proving that his reason is able to triumph over his base desires. It is this struggle, reason over passion, that is the heart of the story. The war is almost wholly irrelevant - or at best a distraction to the true struggle.
..to repost this link.
Its the AFL-CIO's PayWatch resource. Find out the compensation disparity in your company.
A big, big part (perhaps the most important part) of usability is consistency. Lack of consistency between apps, and between an app and the desktop environment, contributes to poor usability.
How important you consider usability to be for Linux I guess is up to you the individual. But accept that without a 'standard' GUI you can't have a good user experience.
In the immortal words of George Mallory: "because it's there"
Well, what would be the answer to the question "why do you want to climb a mountain again"? Because it's still there?
The simple fact is that the Moon isn't all that interesting a place. We can do all the science we need with satellites and robotic probes. The idea of a 'moonbase' is preposterous if you think about it a bit. Why spend the enormous amounts of energy to escape the Earth's gravity well only to drop your payload into another one? Earth orbit is a much better place for a 'base' to stage missions to other parts of the solar system.
Which really only leaves one reason to go to the moon: to prove that you can. Well, we did that already.
Now Mars, thats a different story. There is good science to do there that we can't realistically do with today's robotic probes. While implausible, the idea of a permanent human settlement is at least a lot more likely than one on the Moon. And perhaps the best reason to go to Mars: because we've never been.
Trouble is, we probably don't quite have the technology yet. But now would be a damn good time to start developing it.
A webcam is not human-to-computer communication
This entirely depends on what you are doing with the video stream. If you are using it for videotelephony, facial recognition, eye tracking, etc. then it is a HID and not just a media capture device.
While I expect the direct use of the CLI to remain constant, with Linux and OS X on the rise I expect GUI/CLI hybrid applications to continue to grow. Combine the power of the CLI with the flexibility of the GUI and you get the best of both worlds. I would expect many, many OS X users to be using CLI tools without even realizing it. Have a look at VersionTracker and you'll see more and more recent OS X shareware releases have been like this.
Except that the usability, consistency and elegance of NeXTstep has been sacrificed to appease the Mac faithful's absolute assurance that the Macintosh Way is the one true way.
In my opinion this is unfair. Good things were lost from both sides when the two were merged.
Scroll bars are on the wrong (right) side
NeXTStep's left hand scrollbars were wrong. Think about it, within the span of 15 pixels you would a) scroll the content b) change the selection c) resize the window. That many chances to 'screw something up' by mis-clicking reduces user trust in the UI.
And the NeXTStep scrollbars lacked the undoability of the Mac scrollbars. For instance on the Mac, if I decide to cancel a scroll I can simply drag the mouse far enough away from the scrollbar perpendicular to the scrollbar's primary axis to 'snap back'. If you look at the Classic Mac UI nearly all the original UI elements had this level of undoability and NeXTStep did not.
Monolithic main menu, no pop-up right-button main menu (and the contextual menu is all-too sparsely populated most times)
NeXTStep also had a monolithic main menu, which I think you knew. Maybe you meant the horizontal menu bar? Supportably better by Fitt's law. And I have right-click menus that are fully populated in all the apps that I use, *shrug*
No tear off sub-menus
I would welcome them back provided the mechanism for tearing them off is done well (NeXTStep's were too easy to accidentally tear off when accessing the lowest menu item or a submenu)
Carbon implementations drag UI expectations down---all too often they don't support Services, File Filters &c. Sometimes not even Quartz live-window drag / re-size
Carbon application developers will add support for those things when Apple provides the APIs (or in the case of Services, *now* that Apple has provided the APIs -- they weren't available until 10.2) Of course, you could always not use Carbon applications and live in your happy little ivory tower if they bother you so much.
Verbose Mac-style menu shortcut descriptions which use weird symbols which aren't even consistently on all Apple keyboards (NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == S, Save As == S)
You've provided an excellent example of one of the things I hate(d) about NeXTStep.. uppercase vs. lowercase menu labels are extremely difficult to differentiate on a high-res monitor! The Mac way is far better, if command-shift-s is the menu equivalent, then you will see the command symbol, the shift symbol, and an s in the menu. WYSIEWYG.
Dumbed-down print dialog box w/ no Fax or Save (PostScript) buttons
Fax and Save to file are in my print dialogs. PDF rather than PostScript *shrug*.
File dialogue boxes which no longer support tab completion, filename selection to populate the filename text field, or automatically creating a path of folder(s) in which to save a file
Yet another example of something the Classic Mac implementation did very well. Why OS X regressed in this area is unexplainable, but don't blame the Classic Mac UI.