Well, I hate to say it - but it's to be expected on the Mac platform. They simply don't have enough new software titles out to keep people busy otherwise.
If the amount of new shareware and commercial software released in the PC world was released for the Mac, you'd see far fewer people who'd even bother to download and install some un-released beta of a public beta web browser.
I know not that many people own one anyway, but I have one of the Rio "MPEG car" players. IMHO, this is one of the coolest products ever sold under the Rio/SonicBlue name - even though it's discontinued and apparently wasn't ever really profitable for them.
Since it's a Linux based player, there is still active support and 3rd. party patches/updates for it. (One guy is even trying to get a working GPS system shoehorned into it!) Still, the "core" code it runs with was provided on SonicBlue's support site, and still received occasional bug-fix updates.
The last rumor I heard was that the developers were coding for a newer in-car music player product, but were doing update support for the old Rio MPEG Car players on the side, and as sort of a test-bed for changes they were thinking of putting in the new unit.
It's not only if you have old Macs lying around.... You can purchase older Macs in very nice condition for pennies on the dollar!
If you need a small web or email server, or something of that sort, a system like a PowerMac 7600 makes lots of sense to purchase.
Last time I checked, these puppies were going for as little as $20 on eBay, with no bidders. The most expensive part of getting one is usually the shipping!
I think I've supported my original claim quite well, honestly. Here's the thing: The average user doesn't really differentiate between the UI and the rest of the OS. To him/her, it's all one and the same thing. Really, I don't see how you could say it shouldn't be that way, either? A GUI should integrate with the underlying OS as seamlessly as possible, since it's simply a different way of allowing user interaction with the OS.
Perhaps part of the problem is that so many Linux users are also software programmers. Programmers like to nit-pick the details. (EG. That nasty problem you see with the background colors getting all screwed up whenever you run freeciv isn't the fault of your UI. It's just an xfree86 issue, pal!) Well, sure, that's correct - but the user simply runs his/her app in KDE or Gnome, sees the problems, and decides the whole interface is inferior.
As long as UI's like KDE or Gnome are built on top of xfree86, they'll suffer from any problems inherent in xfree86. Mac OSX, as we can see, got around most of these deficiencies, and maybe much of that is because they didn't run on top of xfree86. They simply let you install X11 to run on top of Aqua!
As for my point on XP fading in/out, I concur that like/dislike of the effect itself is subjective. I brought it up simply because KDE and interfaces like Enlightenment w/Gnome have tried to do similar special effects, and I believe with much worse results.
Huh? You haven't? I have to wonder how many apps you run in OSX then! About my *only* major complaint with OSX is that a "force quit" often doesn't - and I've sometimes had to pull the power cord out from the wall to get a crashed G4 tower to shut down and restart properly.
Granted, I strongly suspect this problem only occurs after one has been using "Classic" applications along with native OSX software -- but I can't really prove it. All I know is my boss has a G4 tower (pretty much maxxed out with RAM too) that I use on a daily basis. I don't think he shuts it down at night. It's just set up to go into sleep mode. Generally, it works well, but I've had at least 2 or 3 times now where the "Mail" app was hung and force quit didn't do a thing. I also saw this with Word X one time, and even with Appleworks 6.0 one time.
While I'm not a software developer, I was under the impression that almost all of these complaints about fixed sized dialog boxes, windows, and controls extending off the edges of the screen were due to poor programming practices.
I fail to see how they're really the fault of Windows itself. (Granted, they could probably incorporate some sort of bounds checking or limitations, so such poor coding would be disallowed.) Still, I think it's more of a case of them giving developers all the tools they need to generate fixed *or* variable size boxes and controls - and said developers making poor decisions.
I remember, for example, in older verisons of the Cakewalk MIDI sequencer, selecting "use large fonts" under your video settings in Windows '9x would cause text not to fit inside the grids drawn on the screen. That was corrected eventually in later updates to the software.
Actually, I think I'd give quite similar ratings to all of the desktops mentioned.
Bickering over small details aside, I think a pattern is immediately obvious, and it's one the "gung-ho Linux advocate" isn't going to like to admit: The best UI's have been designed as commercial efforts.
Despite the *many* complaints I have about Windows XP - the UI is pretty darn stable, and graphically pleasing to the eye. Everything that fades in or out does so in just the right amount of time to look "classy" instead of "cheezy". Accelerated graphics cards are fully utilized in almost all cases, since XP is the predominant product in use and all the manufacturers concentrate on video drivers that work well with it. Default font sizes and styles are well chosen, and provide a very workable desktop environment without requiring tweaking.
MacOSX, in a very similar vein, proves that these results can be achieved on top of a Unix environment. Of course, the deck is stacked in their favor, driver-wise, because there are FAR fewer graphics adapters to choose from that support Mac systems.
When it comes to KDE or Gnome, the refinement just isn't there. It feels more "clunky". In Gnome, especially, I've had a number of applications wreak havock with the UI. In the recent past, I've even managed to configure the desktop environment in such a way that the system was hanging upon shutdown of X until I deleted my desktop preferences/settings files and created fresh ones.
Even if KDE or Gnome was 100% bug-free, there's still the issue of how the color palettes get handled when a video card only does 256 colors. It looks amateur (and frankly, awful) when the color palette gets used up by an app in the foreground, and the background suddenly changes to some ugly black and purple colors. I can run 256 color mode all day long in WinXP or even OSX and not get that behavior.
Ah, ok. I can't argue with that. At first, I just thought you were going to side with that annoying group that wants to see McDonalds shut down (or pay big $'s plus revamp their whole menu) just because some people eat too much and get fat off their food.
I like experimenting too. I've found some truly excellent little mom and pop delis/sandwich shops that way.
On the other hand, I'm starting to get a little bit concerned about the little places when it comes to their cleanliness and proper food handling procedures. One advantage of the big chains (as a rule - with exceptions, like all things in life) is they develop guidelines for handling everything they sell. Chicken must be cooked to X temperature for Y length of time, etc. etc.
I've seen a couple privately owned Mexican restaurants out here that scared me when I got a peek in their kitchen. They had open cans of food sitting out (for who knows how long), partially used.... everything was a big mess. The food might be great, but I'd rather not take home a free case of food poisoning with my meal.
As other posters have already stated, your mom is trying too hard to find things to worry about.
I'm not calling you "paranoid". Obviously, you're just an intelligent person who became concerned by all the "facts" your mom spouted off in her quest to build a safer home.
These types of things are always worth looking into. It's just that like the recent scare about people's cellphones causing brain tumors, it's pseudo-science that sounds just believable enough to get people worrying about it needlessly.
It's pretty much all about *quantities* when you try to define what's hazardous vs. safe to be exposed to. The fact that PT lumber gives off barely measurable levels of a poison like arsenic means nothing. The sun gives off harmful UV radiation all the time, too - yet as a soceity, we're not deathly afraid of walking outside. Why is that? Obviously, we've used common sense and realized that in resonable amounts, exposure to sunlight does us more good than harm.
Seriously, I'm growing a little tired of all the Mc-Bashing as of late.
The way I see it, McDonalds is one of the best examples out there of how to successfully run a fast food business.
Everyone else is still trying to play catch-up with them. A few months ago, I stopped in a Hardee's (tried their new chicken sandwich, which is pretty darn good for fast food BTW), and a lady offered to give me $5 in Hardee's gift certificates if I filled out a survey.
The survey was mainly focused on Hardee's french-fries, and a whole group of questions asked me to compare them to McDonalds fries (texture, color, flavor, saltiness, etc. etc.).
Also, McDonalds has taken steps to serve more healthy food items on the menu. It's up to you to order smartly. What's wrong with a salad shaker, or the yogurt dessert? For that matter, a fish or chicken sandwich isn't really that terribly bad for you. Granted, it may be fried - but at least it doesn't have the cholesterol levels of beef.
I dunno.... I often used to stop at McD's for lunch at the last 2 or 3 places I worked.
Typically, you'd get an hour for lunch, and it really made the day seem to drag on forever if you spent it eating at your desk or in the company cafeteria.
On the other hand, I didn't want to spend the cash to go someplace more fancy like Starbucks. (I always total up what it would cost me to bring my own lunch to work, and try not to spend more than a dollar or so over that if I eat out instead.)
McDonalds may indeed have rather uncomfortable chairs and odd color schemes - but not to the point where it'd stop me from checking some email and web-surfing a bit over lunch for 30-40 minutes.
I'm afraid I know very well what I'm talking about. I've done quite a bit of support of systems in an MS environment.
Maintaining a "uniform environment" is always a goal (for the military, as well as for civilian corporations). All that means is they'll do a mass migration at some point from Win2K to whatever comes along next. They just won't do things piecemeal, with one dept. still on 2000 while another runs something newer.
As for having to run an OS that's certified by the DOD, ok - but all that means is Microsoft has to get DOD compliance for XP (or more likely, for its successor). Then that will no longer hold water as an excuse for not upgrading.
DOD compliance really shouldn't be THAT difficult for MS to achieve. Windows XP is quite similar to 2000, except with lots of additional code rolled in that used to be installable only as seperate options. (MSN Messenger, etc.) Sure, it has a new look to it, but you can even set that back to "classic" mode and it'll look/work just like 2000.
If the add-ons like Messenger are all that's keeping them away from DOD certification, they can just release a "compliancy patch" that inserts the registry entries needed to disable the offending features.
Actually, the hardest part seems to be getting software developers to code a centralized application that does something sensible with packaging up data into small chunks to send out for distributed processing, efficiently gets the results back, and puts them together into a useful result.
The idea of having millions of CPUs "on tap" to crunch a corporation's figures seems quite tantalizing. I think it loses much of its initial luster, though, when they start looking at what it takes to make it go.
Not only do they have to code clients (possibly for multiple platforms, if they don't want only Windows users participating), but they have to provide a level of support (updates?) to said clients, ensure everything is secure (the data is useless if people are altering the results before sending them back, and the infrastructure can't catch that and filter/block it), *and* keep the "core" of it running, so it's efficiently picking up the processed data that keeps coming in, chunk by chunk.
Actually, using a Mac isn't really the answer for my father. I agree it's a more consistent user interface.
He's just not comfortable with a mouse, period. He's convinced that a keyboard is the most logical input device for a computer, and everything should be able to be done from it.
A mouse has numerous inherent problems. For one, it forces you to take a hand off the keyboard to use it - slowing you down if you're typing. For another, mice always have those problems of eventually rolling off the edge of the mouse pad/surface, because the edge of a mosuepad doesn't correspond directly with the edge of the display screen. Both of those issues aside, mice are rather trouble-prone too. They get gummed up with lint and quit rolling smoothly. Buttons get stuck/jammed. By contrast, a decent quality keyboard will keep on going for years and years - as long as you don't dump coffee in it.
Well, it'll be interesting to see where the Marine Corps goes with things when Win2K gets "end of lifed" by MS and they're force-fed the alternates of WinXP, the successor to XP, staying with unsupported/outdated Win2K, or switching OS vendors.
Believe it - MS is itching to kill off Win 2000, and sooner or later, they'll do it.
That's why complacency will get you nowhere in the long run. The "Oh well, we don't care because we run the older version." attitude is only a short-term solution to your problems.
Umm, unfortunately, software has long been considered merely a service, rather than a product. Read the license agreements/EULAs with any program you pay for!
They make it pretty clear you paid for a license to run said product, and *not* for the product itself. A copy of the code is included on the enclosed media, basically, for your convenience, to get it installed on your system under the printed licensing terms.
I believe this stems back to the days when software was first developed for mainframes. People didn't just go to the store and pick something up for one of those puppies. They called IBM (or someone similar) and said "We need software that accomplishes task X or Y. Can we pay you for the service of having a few coders develop that for us?"
In other words, providing software was a service.
Of course, with mass acceptance of PCs and home computers - everything's mass produced and pre-packaged. That makes everyone feel like they just "bought the program" when they take home a retail boxed copy. Nonetheless, you're still just paying for rights to use the code in whatever way the seller designates in the terms of the contract/license agreement.
Yeah, actually, I've often found that people holding advanced degrees are incredibly dim-witted when it comes to operation of common electronic devices.
Perhaps it's a case of "tunnel vision" to an extent. It takes so much time and effort to master physics and earn a PhD in it - those doing so haven't spent much time working with the devices in the "real world"?
After all, getting one's head around quantum mechanics and all the hypotheticals of matter vs. anti-matter is pretty far from such concepts as H.D. defragging and mastering navigation of a Windows operating system.
(My own father is a PhD in physics and I see this with him all the time. He can barely use the mouse, and finds GUI's extremely frustrating - because things aren't strictly rule-based. I think he vastly prefers a command line based system where specific commands entered in exact ways give specific results.) He finds it odd that programs don't always have consistent menus with the quit/exit or print options in the same places each time. He wants to know why you click the Windows "START" button when you want to shut down the system (or log out). For that matter, he wants to know why the program menu button is labeled START - when that generally connotates a function performed to power on a system. I tell him "you just have to play around with it and you'll catch on to it" - but he wants something written out with clear, concise rules. Step 1, step 2, step 3, etc.
As an experiment, my wife replied to one of these scam emails when we first got it. We pretended to be interested in it, and then laughed as we led them on, for at least 5 or 6 emails in a row. "Sure, we'll meet up with you - at this place and time." Then, "Oh, sorry - we weren't able to make it. Hope you didn't wait for us long? Let's try this again." Finally, we just let things get absurd enough that the scammer realized we weren't serious, and gave up.
Well, ever since then, guess what? We get about one of these scam emails per *day*, all slightly different and from different origins.
So I guess these scammers resell mailing lists of people who reply to their original scam letters!
Just the other day, I pulled a motherboard out of an old Mac Color Classic, updated the RAM on it (a couple of 4MB 30-pin SIMMS max. it out - woo!), and slid it back in. After that, I suddenly realized it was plugged in and the power switch was on the whole time. Oops! Well, I pressed the power key on the keyboard, crossing my fingers, and yep - it booted right up.
I've also watched a former co-worker swap internal SCSI hard drives on a PowerMac 7100 while the machine was running. (Dumb idea - but again, he got away with it. Of course, I yelled at him to never do that again afterwards. Heh.)
I did, however, kill a perfectly good 2GB Micropolis hard drive just recently, because I attached it to a power connector that had been ripped loose and improperly repaired. (It looked ok, but I guess a couple leads were shorted somehow from a bad re-crimping job.) The whole system powered off as soon as I powered it on, and then I smelled smoke. Luckily, only the hard drive died though.... Everything came up fine with a different HD in it.
Ok, so maybe *one person* programming all the Korg Triton/Karma sounds was an exaggeration - but it still seems to be scarily close to accurate.
For example, look at all the people out there working their butts off to create top-notch sound patches for these synths, and despite practically begging for jobs in forums devoted to the synths, they aren't getting hired.
(For just one example, go to www.irishacts.com and look at that guy's devotion to the Korg line!)
Korg has customer service reps regularly reading the forums these people post on, so they can't claim "We never knew these guys were out there!"
The fact is, they're on a pretty tight budget for R&D of these things, and most folks who try to make a living out of developing patches for synth workstations have to start their own businesses. Then, *maybe*, you'll get paid to work on one project for a synth maker - or maybe not. It's not like they're eagerly hiring on every talented patch-developer they can get their hands on.... They've got too much of a niche market for their products.
I think this is a symptom of a larger problem.... There's just not enough of a market for effects and stomp-boxes to encourage the kind of R&D needed to get awesome/realistic sounds out of today's gear.
I mean, you only have to take a look at the synthesizer business to get an idea what I'm talking about.
Korg basically hired *one guy* to come up with all of the sounds used in their Triton and Karma synth workstations - and these are their flagship units!
When you're looking at something like a wah pedal that'll sell for under $149 or so, retail, when it's all said and done - how much are you going to pour into design research on it? Don't forget the fact that these things will only end up being sold mail order through musician's catalogs and at music stores. People won't be picking them up at their local WalMart or Best Buy store.
Right now, if I was a tube amp manufacturer, I'd probably try to maximize my return by recycling tried and true designs that I already kow sound good to most people. The majority of my buyers are either going to be A) younger kids who never heard the original design from 20-30 years ago anyway, or B) working musicians who are trying to replace their old gear that finally wore out - and would likely buy a new "work/sound-alike" of their old standby.
For something as cheap as a stomp-box or wah pedal though, I'd just have an E.E. throw together a cheap to build circuit that sounded "good enough" and go with it.
I'm not even so sure it's something that's "broken" and in need of "fixing" in the first place.
It's quite questionable that it would be a good idea for any form of government to even attempt to fix/correct it.
I think often-times, we forget that "greed" isn't a trait only held by the "more privileged" among us. It's part of all of us. The only thing is, the most successful among us tend to get fingers pointed at them by the rest of us, because their greed is much more visibly on display.
Fact is though, most of the "have nots" would swap places with the "haves" in an instant, if given the chance. Of course, as soon as they did, they'd become the very thing they claimed to despise up until that point.
Instead of being so worried that "the rich keep getting richer", it would be more productive to ask how they got their initial riches to begin with, and make more of an effort to follow in those footsteps - if wealth is of much concern to an individual.
It's not like the rich sucked up all the money from circulation, and there's simply no way to earn a dollar anymore!
this has been typical Jobs behavior all along. I think we're about to see more of it with OS X applications, too.
After courting MS to get them to release Office X for Mac, now they're out to offend MS with the Keynote presentation software to directly compete with Powerpoint, and the new Safari browser to keep IE off the OS X desktops.
Not that I fault Apple for competing. Quite the contrary. I simply think they played their hand far too soon in the game, mostly due to Jobs' arrogance and hatred for MS - and they'll pay the price. If MS retaliates in the near future, Apple is basically screwed. Fact is, they have less than half of a decent Office suite of their own right now. If they released a killer upgrade to Appleworks (maybe an "Appleworks Pro" edition?), they might be in a better position. Right now, they need MS more than they need to try to compete with them.
Let's look at the facts.
1. MS just bought Virtual PC. Sure, they say they plan on continuing Mac support for the product. (And hey, it makes some sense - because they usually sell copies of Windows with each one.) But if Apple manages to piss off MS enough, MS can simply cancel Mac support and leave Apple with no way to run PC apps anymore.
2. Apple's biggest marketing ploy right now is the "switch" thing.... convert PC users to a new Mac system. Well, these people need "bridges" to make it easier to cross over. That means the MS applications need to be there for them, so they know their documents will still be readable/printable if they do switch.
3. Apple seems to be slowly trying to find ways to leverage the BSD Unix core of OS X so the average user can fully enjoy the open source Unix apps, utils and games out there. (They've got the X11 for OS X in beta, for example.) This is smart, but will also put them on a collision course with MS at some point. Right now, MS considers Linux as enemy #1. If OS X starts preaching that it runs all the stuff Linux runs (or most of it), but with more user-friendly installations - they're on the MS "hit list" too.
I, too, was a big CoCo fan. I even went through a phase a while ago where I wanted to dig back up a complete working system with multi-pak interface, speech synthesizer, Orch-90, and all those goodies.
I decided against it though, after firing a friend's old system back up. I think the memories are fonder than the reality of that nasty text screen (32 cols. and no true lowercase), the annoyances like hitting reset until the screen was blue (or red), when starting games using artifacts, etc.
It was an awesome system back in the day. No doubt about it. I ran a BBS (Tandy Terminal) off mine for years, and had an external IBM hard drive hooked up with the Burke & Burke controller at one point. It was a blast. But things have come a long way since then - and I'm more content to keep the fond memories than revisit it and realize the relative shortcomings.
Yeah, I too, would love to see a PC version of OSX. Unfortunately, I really don't think Apple has any intention of doing so. (Well, maybe if Jobs left the company?)
While it might be a "tremendously smart" move to port OSX for PC, it would also be a tremendous change in focus for Apple. Suddenly, there would be almost no reason to buy one of their desktop computers anymore. (Honestly, who would pay a slightly premium price to get a system that's running well under 2Ghz - or a sum total of less than 3Ghz even in a dual-processor configuration? )
Now, given the problem of making decent profit margins on computer hardware nowdays - perhaps it would be fine for Apple to get out of that business and focus on being an OS/apps developer, a la Microsoft.
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Well, I hate to say it - but it's to be expected on the Mac platform. They simply don't have enough new software titles out to keep people busy otherwise.
If the amount of new shareware and commercial software released in the PC world was released for the Mac, you'd see far fewer people who'd even bother to download and install some un-released beta of a public beta web browser.
I know not that many people own one anyway, but I have one of the Rio "MPEG car" players. IMHO, this is one of the coolest products ever sold under the Rio/SonicBlue name - even though it's discontinued and apparently wasn't ever really profitable for them.
Since it's a Linux based player, there is still active support and 3rd. party patches/updates for it. (One guy is even trying to get a working GPS system shoehorned into it!) Still, the "core" code it runs with was provided on SonicBlue's support site, and still received occasional bug-fix updates.
The last rumor I heard was that the developers were coding for a newer in-car music player product, but were doing update support for the old Rio MPEG Car players on the side, and as sort of a test-bed for changes they were thinking of putting in the new unit.
Sounds like "official" support might dry up now.
It's not only if you have old Macs lying around.... You can purchase older Macs in very nice condition for pennies on the dollar!
If you need a small web or email server, or something of that sort, a system like a PowerMac 7600 makes lots of sense to purchase.
Last time I checked, these puppies were going for as little as $20 on eBay, with no bidders.
The most expensive part of getting one is usually the shipping!
I think I've supported my original claim quite well, honestly. Here's the thing: The average user doesn't really differentiate between the UI and the rest of the OS. To him/her, it's all one and the same thing. Really, I don't see how you could say it shouldn't be that way, either? A GUI should integrate with the underlying OS as seamlessly as possible, since it's simply a different way of allowing user interaction with the OS.
Perhaps part of the problem is that so many Linux users are also software programmers. Programmers like to nit-pick the details. (EG. That nasty problem you see with the background colors getting all screwed up whenever you run freeciv isn't the fault of your UI. It's just an xfree86 issue, pal!) Well, sure, that's correct - but the user simply runs his/her app in KDE or Gnome, sees the problems, and decides the whole interface is inferior.
As long as UI's like KDE or Gnome are built on top of xfree86, they'll suffer from any problems inherent in xfree86. Mac OSX, as we can see, got around most of these deficiencies, and maybe much of that is because they didn't run on top of xfree86. They simply let you install X11 to run on top of Aqua!
As for my point on XP fading in/out, I concur that like/dislike of the effect itself is subjective. I brought it up simply because KDE and interfaces like Enlightenment w/Gnome have tried to do similar special effects, and I believe with much worse results.
Huh? You haven't? I have to wonder how many apps you run in OSX then! About my *only* major complaint with OSX is that a "force quit" often doesn't - and I've sometimes had to pull the power cord out from the wall to get a crashed G4 tower to shut down and restart properly.
Granted, I strongly suspect this problem only occurs after one has been using "Classic" applications along with native OSX software -- but I can't really prove it. All I know is my boss has a G4 tower (pretty much maxxed out with RAM too) that I use on a daily basis. I don't think he shuts it down at night. It's just set up to go into sleep mode. Generally, it works well, but I've had at least 2 or 3 times now where the "Mail" app was hung and force quit didn't do a thing. I also saw this with Word X one time, and even with Appleworks 6.0 one time.
While I'm not a software developer, I was under the impression that almost all of these complaints about fixed sized dialog boxes, windows, and controls extending off the edges of the screen were due to poor programming practices.
I fail to see how they're really the fault of Windows itself. (Granted, they could probably incorporate some sort of bounds checking or limitations, so such poor coding would be disallowed.) Still, I think it's more of a case of them giving developers all the tools they need to generate fixed *or* variable size boxes and controls - and said developers making poor decisions.
I remember, for example, in older verisons of the Cakewalk MIDI sequencer, selecting "use large fonts" under your video settings in Windows '9x would cause text not to fit inside the grids drawn on the screen. That was corrected eventually in later updates to the software.
Actually, I think I'd give quite similar ratings to all of the desktops mentioned.
Bickering over small details aside, I think a pattern is immediately obvious, and it's one the "gung-ho Linux advocate" isn't going to like to admit: The best UI's have been designed as commercial efforts.
Despite the *many* complaints I have about Windows XP - the UI is pretty darn stable, and graphically pleasing to the eye. Everything that fades in or out does so in just the right amount of time to look "classy" instead of "cheezy". Accelerated graphics cards are fully utilized in almost all cases, since XP is the predominant product in use and all the manufacturers concentrate on video drivers that work well with it. Default font sizes and styles are well chosen, and provide a very workable desktop environment without requiring tweaking.
MacOSX, in a very similar vein, proves that these results can be achieved on top of a Unix environment. Of course, the deck is stacked in their favor, driver-wise, because there are FAR fewer graphics adapters to choose from that support Mac systems.
When it comes to KDE or Gnome, the refinement just isn't there. It feels more "clunky". In Gnome, especially, I've had a number of applications wreak havock with the UI. In the recent past, I've even managed to configure the desktop environment in such a way that the system was hanging upon shutdown of X until I deleted my desktop preferences/settings files and created fresh ones.
Even if KDE or Gnome was 100% bug-free, there's still the issue of how the color palettes get handled when a video card only does 256 colors. It looks amateur (and frankly, awful) when the color palette gets used up by an app in the foreground, and the background suddenly changes to some ugly black and purple colors. I can run 256 color mode all day long in WinXP or even OSX and not get that behavior.
Ah, ok. I can't argue with that. At first, I just thought you were going to side with that annoying group that wants to see McDonalds shut down (or pay big $'s plus revamp their whole menu) just because some people eat too much and get fat off their food.
I like experimenting too. I've found some truly excellent little mom and pop delis/sandwich shops that way.
On the other hand, I'm starting to get a little bit concerned about the little places when it comes to their cleanliness and proper food handling procedures. One advantage of the big chains (as a rule - with exceptions, like all things in life) is they develop guidelines for handling everything they sell. Chicken must be cooked to X temperature for Y length of time, etc. etc.
I've seen a couple privately owned Mexican restaurants out here that scared me when I got a peek in their kitchen. They had open cans of food sitting out (for who knows how long), partially used.... everything was a big mess. The food might be great, but I'd rather not take home a free case of food poisoning with my meal.
As other posters have already stated, your mom is trying too hard to find things to worry about.
I'm not calling you "paranoid". Obviously, you're just an intelligent person who became concerned by all the "facts" your mom spouted off in her quest to build a safer home.
These types of things are always worth looking into. It's just that like the recent scare about people's cellphones causing brain tumors, it's pseudo-science that sounds just believable enough to get people worrying about it needlessly.
It's pretty much all about *quantities* when you try to define what's hazardous vs. safe to be exposed to. The fact that PT lumber gives off barely measurable levels of a poison like arsenic means nothing. The sun gives off harmful UV radiation all the time, too - yet as a soceity, we're not deathly afraid of walking outside. Why is that? Obviously, we've used common sense and realized that in resonable amounts, exposure to sunlight does us more good than harm.
Seriously, I'm growing a little tired of all the Mc-Bashing as of late.
The way I see it, McDonalds is one of the best examples out there of how to successfully run a fast food business.
Everyone else is still trying to play catch-up with them. A few months ago, I stopped in a Hardee's (tried their new chicken sandwich, which is pretty darn good for fast food BTW), and a lady offered to give me $5 in Hardee's gift certificates if I filled out a survey.
The survey was mainly focused on Hardee's french-fries, and a whole group of questions asked me to compare them to McDonalds fries (texture, color, flavor, saltiness, etc. etc.).
Also, McDonalds has taken steps to serve more healthy food items on the menu. It's up to you to order smartly. What's wrong with a salad shaker, or the yogurt dessert? For that matter, a fish or chicken sandwich isn't really that terribly bad for you. Granted, it may be fried - but at least it doesn't have the cholesterol levels of beef.
I dunno.... I often used to stop at McD's for lunch at the last 2 or 3 places I worked.
Typically, you'd get an hour for lunch, and it really made the day seem to drag on forever if you spent it eating at your desk or in the company cafeteria.
On the other hand, I didn't want to spend the cash to go someplace more fancy like Starbucks. (I always total up what it would cost me to bring my own lunch to work, and try not to spend more than a dollar or so over that if I eat out instead.)
McDonalds may indeed have rather uncomfortable chairs and odd color schemes - but not to the point where it'd stop me from checking some email and web-surfing a bit over lunch for 30-40 minutes.
I don't know what I'm talking about??
I'm afraid I know very well what I'm talking about. I've done quite a bit of support of systems in an MS environment.
Maintaining a "uniform environment" is always a goal (for the military, as well as for civilian corporations). All that means is they'll do a mass migration at some point from Win2K to whatever comes along next. They just won't do things piecemeal, with one dept. still on 2000 while another runs something newer.
As for having to run an OS that's certified by the DOD, ok - but all that means is Microsoft has to get DOD compliance for XP (or more likely, for its successor). Then that will no longer hold water as an excuse for not upgrading.
DOD compliance really shouldn't be THAT difficult for MS to achieve. Windows XP is quite similar to 2000, except with lots of additional code rolled in that used to be installable only as seperate options. (MSN Messenger, etc.) Sure, it has a new look to it, but you can even set that back to "classic" mode and it'll look/work just like 2000.
If the add-ons like Messenger are all that's keeping them away from DOD certification, they can just release a "compliancy patch" that inserts the registry entries needed to disable the offending features.
Actually, the hardest part seems to be getting software developers to code a centralized application that does something sensible with packaging up data into small chunks to send out for distributed processing, efficiently gets the results back, and puts them together into a useful result.
The idea of having millions of CPUs "on tap" to crunch a corporation's figures seems quite tantalizing. I think it loses much of its initial luster, though, when they start looking at what it takes to make it go.
Not only do they have to code clients (possibly for multiple platforms, if they don't want only Windows users participating), but they have to provide a level of support (updates?) to said clients, ensure everything is secure (the data is useless if people are altering the results before sending them back, and the infrastructure can't catch that and filter/block it), *and* keep the "core" of it running, so it's efficiently picking up the processed data that keeps coming in, chunk by chunk.
Actually, using a Mac isn't really the answer for my father. I agree it's a more consistent user interface.
He's just not comfortable with a mouse, period. He's convinced that a keyboard is the most logical input device for a computer, and everything should be able to be done from it.
A mouse has numerous inherent problems. For one, it forces you to take a hand off the keyboard to use it - slowing you down if you're typing. For another, mice always have those problems of eventually rolling off the edge of the mouse pad/surface, because the edge of a mosuepad doesn't correspond directly with the edge of the display screen. Both of those issues aside, mice are rather trouble-prone too. They get gummed up with lint and quit rolling smoothly. Buttons get stuck/jammed. By contrast, a decent quality keyboard will keep on going for years and years - as long as you don't dump coffee in it.
Well, it'll be interesting to see where the Marine Corps goes with things when Win2K gets "end of lifed" by MS and they're force-fed the alternates of WinXP, the successor to XP, staying with unsupported/outdated Win2K, or switching OS vendors.
Believe it - MS is itching to kill off Win 2000, and sooner or later, they'll do it.
That's why complacency will get you nowhere in the long run. The "Oh well, we don't care because we run the older version." attitude is only a short-term solution to your problems.
Umm, unfortunately, software has long been considered merely a service, rather than a product. Read the license agreements/EULAs with any program you pay for!
They make it pretty clear you paid for a license to run said product, and *not* for the product itself. A copy of the code is included on the enclosed media, basically, for your convenience, to get it installed on your system under the printed licensing terms.
I believe this stems back to the days when software was first developed for mainframes. People didn't just go to the store and pick something up for one of those puppies. They called IBM (or someone similar) and said "We need software that accomplishes task X or Y. Can we pay you for the service of having a few coders develop that for us?"
In other words, providing software was a service.
Of course, with mass acceptance of PCs and home computers - everything's mass produced and pre-packaged. That makes everyone feel like they just "bought the program" when they take home a retail boxed copy. Nonetheless, you're still just paying for rights to use the code in whatever way the seller designates in the terms of the contract/license agreement.
Kinda sucks though, doesn't it?
Yeah, actually, I've often found that people holding advanced degrees are incredibly dim-witted when it comes to operation of common electronic devices.
Perhaps it's a case of "tunnel vision" to an extent. It takes so much time and effort to master physics and earn a PhD in it - those doing so haven't spent much time working with the devices in the "real world"?
After all, getting one's head around quantum mechanics and all the hypotheticals of matter vs. anti-matter is pretty far from such concepts as H.D. defragging and mastering navigation of a Windows operating system.
(My own father is a PhD in physics and I see this with him all the time. He can barely use the mouse, and finds GUI's extremely frustrating - because things aren't strictly rule-based. I think he vastly prefers a command line based system where specific commands entered in exact ways give specific results.) He finds it odd that programs don't always have consistent menus with the quit/exit or print options in the same places each time. He wants to know why you click the Windows "START" button when you want to shut down the system (or log out). For that matter, he wants to know why the program menu button is labeled START - when that generally connotates a function performed to power on a system. I tell him "you just have to play around with it and you'll catch on to it" - but he wants something written out with clear, concise rules. Step 1, step 2, step 3, etc.
As an experiment, my wife replied to one of these scam emails when we first got it. We pretended to be interested in it, and then laughed as we led them on, for at least 5 or 6 emails in a row. "Sure, we'll meet up with you - at this place and time." Then, "Oh, sorry - we weren't able to make it. Hope you didn't wait for us long? Let's try this again." Finally, we just let things get absurd enough that the scammer realized we weren't serious, and gave up.
Well, ever since then, guess what? We get about one of these scam emails per *day*, all slightly different and from different origins.
So I guess these scammers resell mailing lists of people who reply to their original scam letters!
Let's see here....
Just the other day, I pulled a motherboard out of an old Mac Color Classic, updated the RAM on it (a couple of 4MB 30-pin SIMMS max. it out - woo!), and slid it back in. After that, I suddenly realized it was plugged in and the power switch was on the whole time. Oops! Well, I pressed the power key on the keyboard, crossing my fingers, and yep - it booted right up.
I've also watched a former co-worker swap internal SCSI hard drives on a PowerMac 7100 while the machine was running. (Dumb idea - but again, he got away with it. Of course, I yelled at him to never do that again afterwards. Heh.)
I did, however, kill a perfectly good 2GB Micropolis hard drive just recently, because I attached it to a power connector that had been ripped loose and improperly repaired. (It looked ok, but I guess a couple leads were shorted somehow from a bad re-crimping job.) The whole system powered off as soon as I powered it on, and then I smelled smoke. Luckily, only the hard drive died though.... Everything came up fine with a different HD in it.
Ok, so maybe *one person* programming all the Korg Triton/Karma sounds was an exaggeration - but it still seems to be scarily close to accurate.
For example, look at all the people out there working their butts off to create top-notch sound patches for these synths, and despite practically begging for jobs in forums devoted to the synths, they aren't getting hired.
(For just one example, go to www.irishacts.com and look at that guy's devotion to the Korg line!)
Korg has customer service reps regularly reading the forums these people post on, so they can't claim "We never knew these guys were out there!"
The fact is, they're on a pretty tight budget for R&D of these things, and most folks who try to make a living out of developing patches for synth workstations have to start their own businesses. Then, *maybe*, you'll get paid to work on one project for a synth maker - or maybe not. It's not like they're eagerly hiring on every talented patch-developer they can get their hands on.... They've got too much of a niche market for their products.
I think this is a symptom of a larger problem.... There's just not enough of a market for effects and stomp-boxes to encourage the kind of R&D needed to get awesome/realistic sounds out of today's gear.
I mean, you only have to take a look at the synthesizer business to get an idea what I'm talking about.
Korg basically hired *one guy* to come up with all of the sounds used in their Triton and Karma synth workstations - and these are their flagship units!
When you're looking at something like a wah pedal that'll sell for under $149 or so, retail, when it's all said and done - how much are you going to pour into design research on it? Don't forget the fact that these things will only end up being sold mail order through musician's catalogs and at music stores. People won't be picking them up at their local WalMart or Best Buy store.
Right now, if I was a tube amp manufacturer, I'd probably try to maximize my return by recycling tried and true designs that I already kow sound good to most people. The majority of my buyers are either going to be A) younger kids who never heard the original design from 20-30 years ago anyway, or B) working musicians who are trying to replace their old gear that finally wore out - and would likely buy a new "work/sound-alike" of their old standby.
For something as cheap as a stomp-box or wah pedal though, I'd just have an E.E. throw together a cheap to build circuit that sounded "good enough" and go with it.
I'm not even so sure it's something that's "broken" and in need of "fixing" in the first place.
It's quite questionable that it would be a good idea for any form of government to even attempt to fix/correct it.
I think often-times, we forget that "greed" isn't a trait only held by the "more privileged" among us. It's part of all of us. The only thing is, the most successful among us tend to get fingers pointed at them by the rest of us, because their greed is much more visibly on display.
Fact is though, most of the "have nots" would swap places with the "haves" in an instant, if given the chance. Of course, as soon as they did, they'd become the very thing they claimed to despise up until that point.
Instead of being so worried that "the rich keep getting richer", it would be more productive to ask how they got their initial riches to begin with, and make more of an effort to follow in those footsteps - if wealth is of much concern to an individual.
It's not like the rich sucked up all the money from circulation, and there's simply no way to earn a dollar anymore!
this has been typical Jobs behavior all along. I think we're about to see more of it with OS X applications, too.
After courting MS to get them to release Office X for Mac, now they're out to offend MS with the Keynote presentation software to directly compete with Powerpoint, and the new Safari browser to keep IE off the OS X desktops.
Not that I fault Apple for competing. Quite the contrary. I simply think they played their hand far too soon in the game, mostly due to Jobs' arrogance and hatred for MS - and they'll pay the price. If MS retaliates in the near future, Apple is basically screwed. Fact is, they have less than half of a decent Office suite of their own right now. If they released a killer upgrade to Appleworks (maybe an "Appleworks Pro" edition?), they might be in a better position. Right now, they need MS more than they need to try to compete with them.
Let's look at the facts.
1. MS just bought Virtual PC. Sure, they say they plan on continuing Mac support for the product. (And hey, it makes some sense - because they usually sell copies of Windows with each one.) But if Apple manages to piss off MS enough, MS can simply cancel Mac support and leave Apple with no way to run PC apps anymore.
2. Apple's biggest marketing ploy right now is the "switch" thing.... convert PC users to a new Mac system. Well, these people need "bridges" to make it easier to cross over. That means the MS applications need to be there for them, so they know their documents will still be readable/printable if they do switch.
3. Apple seems to be slowly trying to find ways to leverage the BSD Unix core of OS X so the average user can fully enjoy the open source Unix apps, utils and games out there. (They've got the X11 for OS X in beta, for example.) This is smart, but will also put them on a collision course with MS at some point. Right now, MS considers Linux as enemy #1. If OS X starts preaching that it runs all the stuff Linux runs (or most of it), but with more user-friendly installations - they're on the MS "hit list" too.
I, too, was a big CoCo fan. I even went through a phase a while ago where I wanted to dig back up a complete working system with multi-pak interface, speech synthesizer, Orch-90, and all those goodies.
I decided against it though, after firing a friend's old system back up. I think the memories are fonder than the reality of that nasty text screen (32 cols. and no true lowercase), the annoyances like hitting reset until the screen was blue (or red), when starting games using artifacts, etc.
It was an awesome system back in the day. No doubt about it. I ran a BBS (Tandy Terminal) off mine for years, and had an external IBM hard drive hooked up with the Burke & Burke controller at one point. It was a blast. But things have come a long way since then - and I'm more content to keep the fond memories than revisit it and realize the relative shortcomings.
Yeah, I too, would love to see a PC version of OSX. Unfortunately, I really don't think Apple has any intention of doing so. (Well, maybe if Jobs left the company?)
While it might be a "tremendously smart" move to port OSX for PC, it would also be a tremendous change in focus for Apple. Suddenly, there would be almost no reason to buy one of their desktop computers anymore. (Honestly, who would pay a slightly premium price to get a system that's running well under 2Ghz - or a sum total of less than 3Ghz even in a dual-processor configuration? )
Now, given the problem of making decent profit margins on computer hardware nowdays - perhaps it would be fine for Apple to get out of that business and focus on being an OS/apps developer, a la Microsoft.
I just don't think they're ready.