Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time
oh pu-leez.
Their interactive instincts often collide unhappily with the traditioins and institutions of a static, passive world.
this is rediculous. i used to play a lot of games a as a kid. now i play almost none. why? because playing video games is "passive." sure it's not as passive as watching TV (which i don't do either), but they're hardly participatory to any real extent.
i hate computer games becuase they are limiting. no matter how good a game, you're still confined to what the programmers and desiners had in mind. Katz' take on the matter would definitely apply to those creating the games, but the little brat playing them for hours at a time? i don't think so.
i agree that games are "evil" like the mainstream media likes to portray sometimes, but they're hardly "revolutionary" as Katz has been proclaiming.
you want to participate? get away from the damned TV (or game machine) and go do something.
(i ignored parts one and two, why couldn't i keep away from part three? oh why!?)
but i actually used the "precision buying" part of deja. i originally went there for the Usenet feeds, but lately i've been going to deja.com for a lot of my research when buying things like consumer electronics. i find the ratings and comments from owners to be very valuable in making a choice.
it's not a big deal, i'll just go to half.com for that stuff now, but i actually found it useful to be included with the Usenet posts. i use Usenet searches as a second source for more reviews of products. i certainly never thought of it as "cruft" or "bloat" like some people here.
incidentally, what other sites out there offer a similar service? the more reviews the better! you can't trust magazines because of the potential for corporate tampering, so online reviews are great!
well that's a nice idea and all, but a company with as much money in the bank (cold hard cash -- look at their balance sheet) as Microsoft isn't going away anytime soon. not to mention the fact that they're a household name now.
plus they may loose some marketshare in the operating systems market, but that's not going to effect their game sales, server-side sales, hardware, or application software sales much at all. the people that run Microsoft aren't stupid (believe it or not:), they have spread their business out to more than just operating systems. eventually that business may become less profitable, but they're hardly on ther verge of collapse, and have plenty to fall back on.
great points, and i completely agree. in the end, there are bad Marketers out there, but there are also bad IT staff and bad Engineers. what bugs me is when people make rampant generalizations about any group (such as is often heard on slashdot against Marketing).
it's really sad because to be an effective company, Marketing and Engineering have to work very closely together! when the lines of communication are down, then the company just isn't going to be effective.
A few hints: we may be in IT, but that doesn't mean we're clueless about Marketing.
hey, don't get me the wrong way -- i understand that some IT people know what's going on. but i highly doubt the guy who started this thread does.
essentially, my message wasn't targeted at people like you, just those who are clueless and arrogant. there are Marketing people who used ot work in IT because we like it more too! (like me for instance).
there's nothing wrong with IT, but there is something wrong with ignorant attitudes (no matter what your job may be).
we have what we call the "Engineering War Room" where i work. generally the Engineers are set up in four-person megacubes (or whatever:), but when there's a big piece of the project to finish we'll all go into the "war room" for a few days.
i find that that many people working towards a common goal really get things done. the room is coated in whiteboards, and everybody is free to comment and join in.
i'm not sure if it would work on a regular basis however. the "war room" only seems to work when we have a very clear goal to achieve, and it can't be a task that spans over many weeks. but for getting specific tasks done, i definitely suggest using that model.
on a related note, i once interviewed with a consulting company called Sapient who the "war room" model almost exclusively. i imagine that this would work especially well in a consulting scenario.
hah. i suppose it did turn out as a troll, but it's too old a story to get noticed by anybody.
it's actually a result me having to deal with stupid IT people almost every day. they seem to have this idea that if you can keep a UNIX box running, you're suddenly qualified to do anything, and you're definitely qualified to tell other people how to do their jobs because hey, you're the magical IT!
anyhow, i will save the basic jist of this message and post it to a new story, perhaps when Taco makes a "Marketroid" comment in a story or something. i'd be curious to see how people respond (and the Karma can't hurt).
you IT "cerebral" types are a real pain in the ass. let me ask you something, have you ever tried marketing? have you ever tried to get an MBA?
here's a clue for you: Marketing is not a joke. it's actually real work, it's not trivial, and it's required to sell a product or service. at a technical company, the lines of communication between Engineering and Marketing must be open, and trusting. your IT superiority complex doesn't help things either, and it has been my experience (having worked in both Engineering and Marketing) that it's usually the Engineering or IT side of the equation that doesn't put in the effort to try.
Marketing people are instantly labeled "clueless" or "afraid of technology" or "phoney" but the IT staff. they make no effort to try to understand why Marketing is important and why it's essential to communicate with Marketing. in most cases, bad Marketing is a direct result of IT or Engineering personel's inability to communicate effectively. sometime's that's due to the inadequacies of the people in Engineering (ie, they're not good communicators) but more often it's a result of silly and childish attitudes such as the one you've displayed on the part of IT.
grab a clue: you need Marketing just as much as you need IT and Engineering!
there are always bad Marketers, just as ther are bad Engineers, but in my experience "bad Marketers" are usually a result of "immature Engineers."
but back on topic: what makes you think that this cracking was a result of Marketing not conveying IT's security interests to upper management? did you think for just one second that it might just be the clueless IT worker who's running an insecure Windows NT webserver?
i wonder if this occurs with the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer -- the browser that is more standards-compliant than Mozilla right now! (totally different codebase from the Windows version).
seems like they're pushing their anti-microsoft propaganda on everyone. don't they know that FUD stinks no matter who's using it?
this all comes back to the Jobs' phrase "the whole widget."
the idea is that Apple controls the hardware, so the software will work better and vice versa. it's all about adding value to their hardware.
but to address your specific point, the relevant detail here is that when you control "the whole widget" you can make changes (hopefully for the better) much faster. a great example of this is USB. as you probably know, USB is an Intel standard, but in the PC world, it just couldn't catch on. Intel wanted to replace ancient serial and parallel port, but they ran into a lot of resistance. Microsoft didn't want to make the software widely available, and peripheral and PC manufacturers had non interest in making the hardware if Microsoft wasn't going to add full support.
we all know the eventual outcome. Apple releases the iMac, completely doing away with the ancient peripherals in favour of USB.Apple, in control of both hardware and software, made the necessary changes to support this much-needed movement and made the switch. they were hammered for this by the press because there were almost no USB devices at the time, but in the end it turned out to be a pretty good idea. note that none of this would have been possible if Apple had relied on Microsoft for their operating system.
now this method doesn't always work for the best. some Apple-only technologies didn't fly (NuBus come to mind), but when they get it right, it really works. now if only PC manufacturers would get the hint and start offering better support for Firewire we'd all be better off;)
at any rate, i hope i've made my point. Apple's idea is that by controlling both hardware and software, they can make a better product, and provide value-added features in their software to better sell their hardware. this also allows them to charge a premium on thier machines: as a PC manufacturer they'd have a very difficult time justifying their profit margins.
in the end, it's an intersting model, and it may pay off for them. it works very nicely when Apple does their research and makes the right decisions (which they've been doing for the past few years). it fails miserably if they don't offer target the market effectively, for instance with the Cube and the lack of CD-Rs in their machines. i still think the model works for them however, and i own a couple of Macs myself for just this reason.
now, a model that may work for Apple in the future is to move to Intel chips (for dirt-cheap hardware and to finally break free of Motorolla who's more interested in the embedded market), but to keep an Apple-only OS. they could offer their machines, but still only run Mac OS X on them (albeit on Intel), and emulate classic applications. but that's a whole new argument all together, and involves a lot of creative workarounds;)
So when "real money" is at stake, like it was here, how do you explain to the management the benefits of free, available code?
so what's the problem here? if you're going to get Apache for the enterprise, be sure you get a support contract along with it. for big-business "cheap" is not the driving factor for buying software (and it shouldn't be either). maybe that's why you use BSD or Linux on your home firewall, but big-business will like it for other reasons
instead of pushing the "cheap" aspect, you should push that you have access to the code! the reason open source works so well is that when there is a problem, you can fix it yourself. big-business will have the resources to make changes to the code, and in the end, it becomes a lot more resource-efficient, and you get exactly what you want, without having to wait for the vendor.
so if you're going to use Apache (or whatever) in the enterprise, by all means, buy the support contract from somebody out there! then there's the "Apache people" to call, and your business will reap the real rewards of using open sourced software.
and as a bonus these big companies will effectively make open source profitable, open source will continue, and the rest of us can reap the rewards as well! everybody's happy (well, except maybe Microsoft).
someone enlighten me, what are Abuse and Golgotha and what do they have to do with crack?
this also reminds me of this great story about when my long-time drug dealer started doing crack. to make a long story short, he phoned and asked me some rediculously silly questions and a person overhearing this (with no knowledge of the situation) said "is that guy on crack?" and i actually got to say "yes." hahahahaah..
oh shit that was funny.. uh, ya just had to be there.
well i thought i'd try out this "theindex.com" thing with a quick little search of what interests me. i'm a dj and i spin two types of music: UK Hard House and Nu-NRG. i search the web for all sorts of things related to this hobby, and there are lots of pages out there on the subject.
theindex gives me:
Nu-NRG: nothing.
UK Hard House: one site. one site, completely unrelated.
sure my hobby and choice of music may be a little obscure, but it's the semi-obscure things that i want the internet for. i'll stick with google methinks.
(i should note however that my search for "stropharia cubensis" did turn up one link, and it was related, but one link is hardly enough on this subject).
i think he means you could recompile your Darwin kernel to run it on non-Apple PowerPC machines. of course you couldn't just slap OS X on top of an Intel-ported kernel.
Personally, I'd pay a lot more than $3 a month to not have to drag all my CDs to work.
uhrm, that's the point everybody's trying to make. if they ask you to re-insert the CD at (potentially) "random" intervals, you will have to bring your CDs to work just incase the "verification" decides to check you while you're a work!
of course in typical slashdot style everybody is assuming that the system will check for a legitimate CD at random intervals when we don't actually know this. but what do i care? i listen to vinyl.
i see why these people are reacting so harshly: i did the same when i started using OS X. however after using it for a while, i started to realize that while not perfect, many aspects of Aqua are very good additions. at the very end, the article even gives a quote that expresses just this:
"The more I played with it, the more accustomed to it I became," he said. "I don't need [the hacks] any more."
what it really comes down to is that people are afriad of change. still, it is nice to have a customizable GUI. keep in mind however that the MacOS has always been customizable through hacks, so this is hardly anything new.
i thought it was just one "B, A" not two. also, later Konami games changed it to "... B A Select Start".. that crazy Select threw us all off for minutes!:)
there's been a lot of talk about LaTeX on slashdot lately so i've taken the liberty to take a look at it. it seems decent enough, but apart from it being open-source, what benefits does it have over using Adobe Framemaker? Framemaker is absolutely phenomenal, and we use it where i work for all long (over 1,000 page) technical documents. does LaTeX (or LyX, or...) have any benefits over using Framemaker?
and i don't know about all of you, but i happen to like PDF documents.
yeah, i figured as much. i think they're both "pretty sweet" too.
of course, i wasn't the one who originally posted the comment, i was just the one who whored the top-listed thread for karma, as i've never tried karma whoring before. it was a hell of a lot easier than i thought it would be, though i could definitely use some practise.
i mentioned this actually, with regards to the defaults command-line tool in MacOS X.
you see, the thing is with the MacOS is that the operating system defaults to the options of the clueless user, but has a considerable number of "hidden" features for the power user. this is even more applicable to MacOS X
for instance the "developer tools" (such as gcc) are not installed in the default MacOS X install, and i'm willing to bet that even Terminal.app will be an optional component. this is to shield the newbies from their computer, and in my oppinion is a very good thing.
however, it would be wrong to assume that just because the configuration options don't jump out at you that they don't exist. there are a lot of hidden features in MacOS X that people are finding out about already, and i suspect that more will come with the final release. Apple knows that power users are going to want to tweak their machines, but they don't want new users confusing themselves and messing up their boxes by clicking preferences.
for instance, to add (real) translucence to Terminal windows, one would type the following command in the terminal: defaults write com.apple.Terminal TerminalOpaqueness x
or to add the trash to your desktop ala classic MacOS: defaults write com.apple.Finder Desktop.HasTrash 1
but i digress. the point of this little tutorial is to explain to you that MacOS X has considerable customization potential (including themes support). i wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a command to turn off the Aqua eye-candy such as: defaults com.apple.Finder Aqua.Effects 0
so please, don't write of MacOS X customizations just yet. there's already a lot of possibilities out there, and there will probably be many more in the final version
that's not "Insightful," it didn't even answer the guy's question!
sure this may be the reason why you like KDE more than Aqua, but your little rant has nothing to do with the fact that Aqua is considered "waste" and KDE is "cool."
and as far as Aqua goes, who cares if it can only be changed through options that "Apple doesn't normally want you to tweak?" in most cases these things can be changed. i would be very surprised if the final release of OS X didn't have an option to shut off Aqua's effects, perhaps through the "default" command.
but at any rate, wah, you don't like Aqua, you don't like the "Jelly Beans." that doesn't give you an excuse to write an evangelical flame in response to a legitimate question.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever been to a rave?
uh, yeah, that's the point of the sig. i spin as dj number nine at raves in Toronto.
- j
Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time
oh pu-leez.
Their interactive instincts often collide unhappily with the traditioins and institutions of a static, passive world.
this is rediculous. i used to play a lot of games a as a kid. now i play almost none. why? because playing video games is "passive." sure it's not as passive as watching TV (which i don't do either), but they're hardly participatory to any real extent.
i hate computer games becuase they are limiting. no matter how good a game, you're still confined to what the programmers and desiners had in mind. Katz' take on the matter would definitely apply to those creating the games, but the little brat playing them for hours at a time? i don't think so.
i agree that games are "evil" like the mainstream media likes to portray sometimes, but they're hardly "revolutionary" as Katz has been proclaiming.
you want to participate? get away from the damned TV (or game machine) and go do something.
(i ignored parts one and two, why couldn't i keep away from part three? oh why!?)
- j
but i actually used the "precision buying" part of deja. i originally went there for the Usenet feeds, but lately i've been going to deja.com for a lot of my research when buying things like consumer electronics. i find the ratings and comments from owners to be very valuable in making a choice.
it's not a big deal, i'll just go to half.com for that stuff now, but i actually found it useful to be included with the Usenet posts. i use Usenet searches as a second source for more reviews of products. i certainly never thought of it as "cruft" or "bloat" like some people here.
incidentally, what other sites out there offer a similar service? the more reviews the better! you can't trust magazines because of the potential for corporate tampering, so online reviews are great!
- j
well that's a nice idea and all, but a company with as much money in the bank (cold hard cash -- look at their balance sheet) as Microsoft isn't going away anytime soon. not to mention the fact that they're a household name now.
:), they have spread their business out to more than just operating systems. eventually that business may become less profitable, but they're hardly on ther verge of collapse, and have plenty to fall back on.
plus they may loose some marketshare in the operating systems market, but that's not going to effect their game sales, server-side sales, hardware, or application software sales much at all. the people that run Microsoft aren't stupid (believe it or not
- j
great points, and i completely agree. in the end, there are bad Marketers out there, but there are also bad IT staff and bad Engineers. what bugs me is when people make rampant generalizations about any group (such as is often heard on slashdot against Marketing).
it's really sad because to be an effective company, Marketing and Engineering have to work very closely together! when the lines of communication are down, then the company just isn't going to be effective.
- j
A few hints: we may be in IT, but that doesn't mean we're clueless about Marketing.
hey, don't get me the wrong way -- i understand that some IT people know what's going on. but i highly doubt the guy who started this thread does.
essentially, my message wasn't targeted at people like you, just those who are clueless and arrogant. there are Marketing people who used ot work in IT because we like it more too! (like me for instance).
there's nothing wrong with IT, but there is something wrong with ignorant attitudes (no matter what your job may be).
- j
we have what we call the "Engineering War Room" where i work. generally the Engineers are set up in four-person megacubes (or whatever :), but when there's a big piece of the project to finish we'll all go into the "war room" for a few days.
i find that that many people working towards a common goal really get things done. the room is coated in whiteboards, and everybody is free to comment and join in.
i'm not sure if it would work on a regular basis however. the "war room" only seems to work when we have a very clear goal to achieve, and it can't be a task that spans over many weeks. but for getting specific tasks done, i definitely suggest using that model.
on a related note, i once interviewed with a consulting company called Sapient who the "war room" model almost exclusively. i imagine that this would work especially well in a consulting scenario.
- j
hah. i suppose it did turn out as a troll, but it's too old a story to get noticed by anybody.
it's actually a result me having to deal with stupid IT people almost every day. they seem to have this idea that if you can keep a UNIX box running, you're suddenly qualified to do anything, and you're definitely qualified to tell other people how to do their jobs because hey, you're the magical IT!
anyhow, i will save the basic jist of this message and post it to a new story, perhaps when Taco makes a "Marketroid" comment in a story or something. i'd be curious to see how people respond (and the Karma can't hurt).
- j
you IT "cerebral" types are a real pain in the ass. let me ask you something, have you ever tried marketing? have you ever tried to get an MBA?
here's a clue for you: Marketing is not a joke. it's actually real work, it's not trivial, and it's required to sell a product or service. at a technical company, the lines of communication between Engineering and Marketing must be open, and trusting. your IT superiority complex doesn't help things either, and it has been my experience (having worked in both Engineering and Marketing) that it's usually the Engineering or IT side of the equation that doesn't put in the effort to try.
Marketing people are instantly labeled "clueless" or "afraid of technology" or "phoney" but the IT staff. they make no effort to try to understand why Marketing is important and why it's essential to communicate with Marketing. in most cases, bad Marketing is a direct result of IT or Engineering personel's inability to communicate effectively. sometime's that's due to the inadequacies of the people in Engineering (ie, they're not good communicators) but more often it's a result of silly and childish attitudes such as the one you've displayed on the part of IT.
grab a clue: you need Marketing just as much as you need IT and Engineering!
there are always bad Marketers, just as ther are bad Engineers, but in my experience "bad Marketers" are usually a result of "immature Engineers."
but back on topic: what makes you think that this cracking was a result of Marketing not conveying IT's security interests to upper management? did you think for just one second that it might just be the clueless IT worker who's running an insecure Windows NT webserver?
- j
i wonder if this occurs with the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer -- the browser that is more standards-compliant than Mozilla right now! (totally different codebase from the Windows version).
seems like they're pushing their anti-microsoft propaganda on everyone. don't they know that FUD stinks no matter who's using it?
- j
this all comes back to the Jobs' phrase "the whole widget."
the idea is that Apple controls the hardware, so the software will work better and vice versa. it's all about adding value to their hardware.
but to address your specific point, the relevant detail here is that when you control "the whole widget" you can make changes (hopefully for the better) much faster. a great example of this is USB. as you probably know, USB is an Intel standard, but in the PC world, it just couldn't catch on. Intel wanted to replace ancient serial and parallel port, but they ran into a lot of resistance. Microsoft didn't want to make the software widely available, and peripheral and PC manufacturers had non interest in making the hardware if Microsoft wasn't going to add full support.
we all know the eventual outcome. Apple releases the iMac, completely doing away with the ancient peripherals in favour of USB.Apple, in control of both hardware and software, made the necessary changes to support this much-needed movement and made the switch. they were hammered for this by the press because there were almost no USB devices at the time, but in the end it turned out to be a pretty good idea. note that none of this would have been possible if Apple had relied on Microsoft for their operating system.
now this method doesn't always work for the best. some Apple-only technologies didn't fly (NuBus come to mind), but when they get it right, it really works. now if only PC manufacturers would get the hint and start offering better support for Firewire we'd all be better off ;)
at any rate, i hope i've made my point. Apple's idea is that by controlling both hardware and software, they can make a better product, and provide value-added features in their software to better sell their hardware. this also allows them to charge a premium on thier machines: as a PC manufacturer they'd have a very difficult time justifying their profit margins.
in the end, it's an intersting model, and it may pay off for them. it works very nicely when Apple does their research and makes the right decisions (which they've been doing for the past few years). it fails miserably if they don't offer target the market effectively, for instance with the Cube and the lack of CD-Rs in their machines. i still think the model works for them however, and i own a couple of Macs myself for just this reason.
now, a model that may work for Apple in the future is to move to Intel chips (for dirt-cheap hardware and to finally break free of Motorolla who's more interested in the embedded market), but to keep an Apple-only OS. they could offer their machines, but still only run Mac OS X on them (albeit on Intel), and emulate classic applications. but that's a whole new argument all together, and involves a lot of creative workarounds ;)
- j
So when "real money" is at stake, like it was here, how do you explain to the management the benefits of free, available code?
so what's the problem here? if you're going to get Apache for the enterprise, be sure you get a support contract along with it. for big-business "cheap" is not the driving factor for buying software (and it shouldn't be either). maybe that's why you use BSD or Linux on your home firewall, but big-business will like it for other reasons
instead of pushing the "cheap" aspect, you should push that you have access to the code! the reason open source works so well is that when there is a problem, you can fix it yourself. big-business will have the resources to make changes to the code, and in the end, it becomes a lot more resource-efficient, and you get exactly what you want, without having to wait for the vendor.
so if you're going to use Apache (or whatever) in the enterprise, by all means, buy the support contract from somebody out there! then there's the "Apache people" to call, and your business will reap the real rewards of using open sourced software.
and as a bonus these big companies will effectively make open source profitable, open source will continue, and the rest of us can reap the rewards as well! everybody's happy (well, except maybe Microsoft).
- j
apparently i live in a box.
..
.. uh, ya just had to be there.
someone enlighten me, what are Abuse and Golgotha and what do they have to do with crack?
this also reminds me of this great story about when my long-time drug dealer started doing crack. to make a long story short, he phoned and asked me some rediculously silly questions and a person overhearing this (with no knowledge of the situation) said "is that guy on crack?" and i actually got to say "yes." hahahahaah
oh shit that was funny
- j
this is an excellent thing to spend your time on. the world must know about tradewars!! :)
still, i never played it much myself, but i did play the Pit all the time, and had a big tournament on my own BBS back in the day.
i don't suppose anybody has a link to the latest version of the Pit do they? i'd love to play that game again.
- j
well i thought i'd try out this "theindex.com" thing with a quick little search of what interests me. i'm a dj and i spin two types of music: UK Hard House and Nu-NRG. i search the web for all sorts of things related to this hobby, and there are lots of pages out there on the subject.
theindex gives me:
Nu-NRG: nothing.
UK Hard House: one site. one site, completely unrelated.
sure my hobby and choice of music may be a little obscure, but it's the semi-obscure things that i want the internet for. i'll stick with google methinks.
(i should note however that my search for "stropharia cubensis" did turn up one link, and it was related, but one link is hardly enough on this subject).
- j
great idea! even better, why not just dial people by their aol screen name?
call me anytime baby, jason3021.
- j
i think he means you could recompile your Darwin kernel to run it on non-Apple PowerPC machines. of course you couldn't just slap OS X on top of an Intel-ported kernel.
- j
Personally, I'd pay a lot more than $3 a month to not have to drag all my CDs to work.
uhrm, that's the point everybody's trying to make. if they ask you to re-insert the CD at (potentially) "random" intervals, you will have to bring your CDs to work just incase the "verification" decides to check you while you're a work!
of course in typical slashdot style everybody is assuming that the system will check for a legitimate CD at random intervals when we don't actually know this. but what do i care? i listen to vinyl.
- j
i see why these people are reacting so harshly: i did the same when i started using OS X. however after using it for a while, i started to realize that while not perfect, many aspects of Aqua are very good additions. at the very end, the article even gives a quote that expresses just this:
what it really comes down to is that people are afriad of change. still, it is nice to have a customizable GUI. keep in mind however that the MacOS has always been customizable through hacks, so this is hardly anything new.
- j
i thought it was just one "B, A" not two. also, later Konami games changed it to "... B A Select Start" .. that crazy Select threw us all off for minutes! :)
- j
there's been a lot of talk about LaTeX on slashdot lately so i've taken the liberty to take a look at it. it seems decent enough, but apart from it being open-source, what benefits does it have over using Adobe Framemaker? Framemaker is absolutely phenomenal, and we use it where i work for all long (over 1,000 page) technical documents. does LaTeX (or LyX, or ...) have any benefits over using Framemaker?
and i don't know about all of you, but i happen to like PDF documents.
- j
yeah, i figured as much. i think they're both "pretty sweet" too.
of course, i wasn't the one who originally posted the comment, i was just the one who whored the top-listed thread for karma, as i've never tried karma whoring before. it was a hell of a lot easier than i thought it would be, though i could definitely use some practise.
anyhow, good story submission.
- j
OSX needs 256MB of RAM. That's kinda extreme.
you are on crack.
- j
i mentioned this actually, with regards to the defaults command-line tool in MacOS X.
you see, the thing is with the MacOS is that the operating system defaults to the options of the clueless user, but has a considerable number of "hidden" features for the power user. this is even more applicable to MacOS X
for instance the "developer tools" (such as gcc) are not installed in the default MacOS X install, and i'm willing to bet that even Terminal.app will be an optional component. this is to shield the newbies from their computer, and in my oppinion is a very good thing.
however, it would be wrong to assume that just because the configuration options don't jump out at you that they don't exist. there are a lot of hidden features in MacOS X that people are finding out about already, and i suspect that more will come with the final release. Apple knows that power users are going to want to tweak their machines, but they don't want new users confusing themselves and messing up their boxes by clicking preferences.
for instance, to add (real) translucence to Terminal windows, one would type the following command in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal TerminalOpaqueness x
or to add the trash to your desktop ala classic MacOS:
defaults write com.apple.Finder Desktop.HasTrash 1
but i digress. the point of this little tutorial is to explain to you that MacOS X has considerable customization potential (including themes support). i wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a command to turn off the Aqua eye-candy such as:
defaults com.apple.Finder Aqua.Effects 0
so please, don't write of MacOS X customizations just yet. there's already a lot of possibilities out there, and there will probably be many more in the final version
- j
that's not "Insightful," it didn't even answer the guy's question!
sure this may be the reason why you like KDE more than Aqua, but your little rant has nothing to do with the fact that Aqua is considered "waste" and KDE is "cool."
and as far as Aqua goes, who cares if it can only be changed through options that "Apple doesn't normally want you to tweak?" in most cases these things can be changed. i would be very surprised if the final release of OS X didn't have an option to shut off Aqua's effects, perhaps through the "default" command.
but at any rate, wah, you don't like Aqua, you don't like the "Jelly Beans." that doesn't give you an excuse to write an evangelical flame in response to a legitimate question.
- j