1. Webmail, of any sort (including gmail), is annoying to use. No matter how sophisticated your javascript/AJAX tricks are, you can't make a webmail interface as sensible or responsive as that of an ordinary desktop mail client.
2. Most of us have university and non-university accounts. If we use webmail, we either have to forward messages from one account to the other (exactly what the OP is complaining he can't do with his harebrained Windows Live setup), or have to check more than one unresponsive, badly designed webmail site, instead of simply looking at all our messages in one desktop email client.
3. Desktop email clients tend to have much larger feature sets than webmail interfaces.
I was recently affected by my school's switch to "MyMail." In theory, the system supports IMAP, but in practice, the IMAP facility is slow and unreliable. Thankfully, the system does allow us to forward email, so my university email goes to my account at fastmail.fm (who are the world's most kick-ass IMAP provider).
IMAP is also much to be preferred over POP. All of us will have to check email from multiple machines at some point (some poster said something about Mom's house at Christmas...) By handling everything on the server side, IMAP makes it possible to look at the same directory structure on the server and in your desktop email client, or to have desktop email clients set up on multiple machines (i.e. my laptop and my big studio rig).
Great post. That's the most accurate and concise description of Windows I've ever seen.
You know it's bad when someone as cheap as me will willingly spend hundreds of dollars extra for designer hardware because it's the only hardware that will run the only alternative to Windows capable of running certain major applications.
I'm consistently surprised that Adobe, in particular, hasn't gone balls-to-the-wall to try to make CS work on some subset of Linux. At least some of its customers would love to have the commodity hardware without having to run Windows.
Was Homer being paid for his works? Was Kafka? Was Pessoa? Was Bach?
Homer, it's impossible to know for sure, because we don't know who he is. But, in general, poets at that time would have been at least fed and supported (as a slave), if not paid outright (as a contractor). Of course, if some artists were slaves, that's not really a viable argument for failing to pay them today...
Kafka, no. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to create in silence with the fragile hope that maybe, if they are really lucky, they will get recognition *after they die.* That drives tormented geniuses, but not the more ordinary artists who are responsible for most of our creative output.
Pessoa and Charles Ives are examples of the very few people who had/have enough energy to create and work a full-time job at the same time. Of course, neither of them had to work nearly as hard as your ordinary worker does today. I know that I am not ready to create consistently after working a full day at any full-time job I've ever had.
You couldn't have picked a worse example than Bach. Bach, like most composers from the beginning of recorded music until Beethoven, was paid by the state or by nobility (depending on the phase of his career). He was expected to generate a certain number of works as a condition of his employment. He did compose on the side as well, but certainly that was much easier for him since he had the apparatus of a professional composer (and church musician) at his disposal.
Composers including and after Beethoven were not state employees (most of the time), but were very responsive to the market. If Beethoven, Wagner, or Verdi had not been able to generate income from their works, because someone else could have just claimed the works as his own, they would have had no ability to continue creating.
Open-source is not a good example either. There are relatively few finished, usable projects; most are waiting for the developers to have more spare time. To the extent things do get done at all, I think that many open-source programmers are motivated at least partially by career rewards that may follow from participation in a project or from name recognition.
Altruism and creation for the sake of creation are pretty ideas, but relying on them to sustain innovation in society is foolhardy. We have discovered that the market is a much better method for meeting our other needs; we need to let creators take advantage of it as well.
I don't understand how your non-commercial but attributive system of distribution will enforce itself. If a thief steals your ideas and distributes them without attribution, but isn't making money off them (only recognition), how are you planning to recover damages (even assuming you can bring some form of legal action)? No lawyer would take your case. It seems to me that, again, you're creating a situation where whoever has the most effective publicity machine will wind up with credit for new ideas.
artists always worked *without* direct monetary compensation. The fact that we think artists just want money to make art is a cultural twist of the latest 150 years, not an obvious fact.
What planet are you on?
Artists have been paid for their work as long as there have been artists. The difference is that it was usually a sovereign doing the paying, not a bunch of individual customers.
If you expect that artists will take the time and effort to create when there is neither financial return nor any guarantee of recognition (in a copyright-less system, the best publicizer, not the inventor, will wind up with credit for new ideas), then you're ignoring both basic human nature and all of artistic history.
If we want either art or inventions, we have to find some way to compensate the artists and inventors. It's that simple. Copyright isn't perfect, and the terms these days are ludicrously long, but we can't replace it with your "it's only for the joy of creating!" garbage. If J.S. Bach had had to spend his days farming for a living, he wouldn't have had time to compose a damn thing. It's that simple.
No, his problem is not that he is running 10.3 or a G5. 10.3 is slightly less responsive in most situations than 10.4, but the difference is not huge. A G5 core is comparable clock-for-clock with a single current Intel or AMD core, although they never got quite as high in clock speed. Remember, the G5 was an ass-kicking steamroller when it first came out.
And Adobe programs run just fine on G5... for now, they run better, since (except for Acrobat 8) they are not yet Intel-native. I run Photoshop and InDesign every day on my (slow - dual 1.8GHz) G5 and the performance is more than acceptable.
His problem is probably flaky RAM or something hosed somewhere in his OS. First, the usual software troubleshooting; then, a clean reinstall; then, a different set of DIMMs. If all of those fail to solve the problem, he may have a flaky mobo or CPU, which do happen with the G5s.
I just really don't get why people are so attached to visual (as opposed to functional) consistency.
I like having my windows for each application look different, provided they fit into a reasonably cohesive whole, and provided they work in an intuitive and consistent way. The differences help me to see what's what at a glance, and provide a bit of variety. I wouldn't mind being able to subtly change the colors of windows in different apps (e.g. to give my omnipresent Activity Monitor window a subtle reddish tint).
I agree with you on the Zoom button (which, by the way, is the only one whose function is at all inconsistent between apps). For apps where there are two or more separate window modes, like iTunes, there should be a fourth button to toggle between them. The Zoom button should always toggle between the user-selected window size and the window size the system deems ideal for the window contents.
Although it is the same way in any other OS, I also agree that clicks on an out-of-focus window should act consistently. (I think they should only focus the window, unless they are directed toward the system-level window widgets, in which case they should perform the requested action.)
If you truly believe that OSX will make you more productive, then you are simply a fool
Fool here.
First of all, if Illustrator and InDesign are taking down your whole system, something is wrong with your configuration, your OS installation, or your hardware (RAM?). Illustrator is not the most stable app (although it's not that stable on Windows either) and I expect it to crash regularly, and once in a while InDesign freaks out, but I don't think either one has ever taken down my whole OS. One place to start: if you have the misfortune of having Adobe Version Cue installed, delete everything associated with it.
While PowerPC OS X is somewhat laggier than Intel OS X (which compares favorably to XP on similar hardware), I don't find the difference dramatic, and I don't see any usability problem on my PowerPC system. It's a 1.8GHz dual G5 (3GB RAM), so my experience should be nearly identical to yours, although Tiger is more responsive than Panther in most situations.
With that out of the way, I'll tell you exactly why OS X makes me more productive (and why this summer I'll pay through the nose for a Mac Pro, whose 4 cores and ECC RAM I really don't need, rather than buying a cheaper Conroe-based commodity tower). This is personal to me. YMMV. But judge for yourself whether I'm really a "fool."
1. Terminal. OS X is the only OS that can run Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and a full bash implementation natively and side-by-side. This is a godsend for those of us who really need to straddle both the business-computing and UNIX worlds.
2. Integrated color management. The OS's color management, while not perfect, is good enough to ensure relatively close color matching between different systems and between screen and print output, no matter what app I'm using. XP and all Linux distros I've used are a disaster in this regard. I don't know yet about WCM (the system in Vista).
3. Expose. I'm a very visual user and text-based taskbar buttons don't communicate the nature of open windows to me nearly as well as graphical previews.
4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)
5. Logic Pro. This won't apply to you if you're not a musician. But if you are, it's a fearsomely kick-ass mega-tool (sequencer + synthesizer + lots more) and only available for OS X.
6. OS X software development culture. OSS users are always amazed that they have to pay for so many Mac apps. But the shareware culture promotes developer accountability. Independent OS X software, by and large, is an order of magnitude more professional and useful than such software on either Windows or Linux. OS X's unique development frameworks also help with this by allowing developers to concentrate on usability and features rather than basic nuts and bolts.
7. Easily comprehensible directory structure. A non-n00b Windows or Linux user could start playing with the Finder and locate *anything* important to operation of the graphical side of an OS X system within a few minutes. This makes troubleshooting a simpler and faster process, especially when compared to Windows, where neither file nor folder names are remotely comprehensible.
8. Security (yes, this is a productivity booster). No UAC; the machine rarely asks for admin rights, and when it does, you need to give a password. No time fighting malware of any sort. No instability or slowdowns from malware.
9. OS X text rendering. Compared with other OS's, it's magic. Preserves both character shapes and legibility without any visible compromise. Not only does the increased legibility improve productivity, but it also is a big part of the reason people find OS X systems so visually striking.
If I thought about it longer I could probably figure out a few more -- but I've got work to do... productively.
...that's easily the most self-centered rant on selfishness I've seen in a long time.
I never said I wasn't selfish, only that the vast majority of parents are more selfish. I'm happy to admit that I don't like having children around because their noise, mess, and self-absorbed parents bug me.
Everyone acts in naked self-interest. All I'm trying to do is fight the notion that parenting is somehow altruistic, at least when the species or society isn't in demographic danger.
Anyway, I'd rather pass along my honesty to the next generation than your smug, self-certain parental superiority.
Right... so it's the people who have better attendance and productivity at work, pay more taxes, consume less resources, don't cause noise pollution and chaotic mess everywhere they go, and don't jabber all the time about how much better their own kids are than everyone else's who are somehow not "unselfish."
God, or anyone who's had the misfortune of flying in the last few years, knows there's no shortage of kids (and their totally self-absorbed parents.) In today's world, having a child is almost always about ego gratification. (That's why today's poor kids are being maniacally scheduled to build resumes of steel... it's so the parents can brag; most of the kids would rather aimlessly horse around with friends, and they would arguably learn just as much by doing so.) Even the few parents who have kids because they actually want kids are often the most selfish people -- as soon as people become parents, they automatically assume their needs are more important than everyone else's.
Back on topic, are people really leaving their car keys where two-year-olds can find them unsupervised? That's only marginally better than leaving guns and ammo in the same room. A really cute and clever ad (or any other speech) shouldn't be censored by parents who are only concerned because of their own sloppiness.
My experience is that Intel Macs want much more than PowerPC Macs. My PowerMac G5 has 3 GB of RAM and I *never* swap, not even when running the big stuff, and rarely go below 1GB free. My MacBook Pro has 2 GB and I swap regularly -- it's really irritating I can't upgrade further. Rosetta is a *huge* memory hog, and Intel-native apps also seem to take more room than their PPC equivalents.
My school has several Intel iMacs with 512 MB. They start swapping before the OS is done loading. Using them is like using a 1998 PowerBook G3.
Just wait... I expect an Intel Mac with Leopard will, just like a Vista box, be happiest with >= 4 GB.
People are unlikely to die because their DRAM is too slow. (Gamers are not people.)
The fact that we need to think hard about how to make life-saving drugs accessible while preserving an incentive to develop them has absolutely nothing to do with the obvious benefits of patenting this kind of expensive, innovative technology.
We've been having a lot of weird moderation lately. People have been moderating posts they disagree with "redundant" a lot. (Watch this get moderated "redundant.") I suppose the solution is to metamod as much as possible.
Any complex problem will require a multi-part solution. I think something like the Volt is very promising, even if you can't plug it in all the time, because of its flexibility. Most days, most of the time, it would be plugged in overnight and sometime during the night you'd get a full recharge. On most days, when you go to work and come home and don't do anything else, you won't use any gas. During those periods it's giving all the benefits of a pure electric car.
But you don't have to put up with the drawbacks, because on those days when you have to drive further, or when you haven't had time or "grid clearance" to recharge, you've got the hybrid capability. If everyone were driving a Volt-like machine (or even a bigger SUV variant of one) the energy savings compared with today would be staggering, even if each Volt were not optimally used every day.
Beyond the environmental implications, electric powertrains are very satisfying in stop-and-go traffic. They're quick, quiet and ultra-smooth. I think if you gave 100,000 LA commuters vehicles that could operate in electric mode in stop-and-go, we might see real movement toward a Volt-like solution.
I rode a hybrid bus in Minneapolis a few times.. Like you said, because they don't need as large a diesel engine, they are MUCH quieter. Almost as quiet as the electric only buses in San Francisco.
Actually, the interesting part with our buses is that the diesel engine is the same one that powers non-hybrid variants of the same coaches (a 330-hp Cat C9). It just spends so little time under heavy load that it doesn't have to make nearly as much noise.
Metro's decision to buy hybrid and non-hybrid buses with the exact same engine also provides an unusually good basis for comparison, since most other full hybrids do use a different motor from their normal equivalents. The hybrid buses get about 20% better gas mileage, but the biggest difference is in performance. Despite being a couple thousand pounds heavier (compared to about a 30,000 lb. baseline weight) the hybrid is *dramatically* faster, stops quicker with less brake heating or wear, and (thanks to no jerky shifts) feels much smoother. Engine wear is also reduced.
When the bus makes a full-throttle start from a dead stop, the loudest noise is the tires on the drive axle gripping the tarmac. You can slightly hear the electric motor whine; the diesel continues idling. Around 5 mph, the engine moves to high idle. At 15-20, the engine starts taking over from the electric motor and begins to sound more like normal -- but the electric motor still lends substantial help until about 40 mph, and so you spend less time at full throttle with its attendant noise. The result is that the bus never feels like it's under stress, despite performing better than any other 60-footer in the fleet, including our old M11-powered New Flyer D60s that you can hear across town when they leave a bus stop. I found the buses had a psychological effect on me when I drove them: since they felt more relaxed, and since I was almost always on time thanks to the great performance, I felt relaxed too.
Of course, this being bureaucracy, the hybrids are not being used on the routes that could benefit from them the most. For anyone who knows Seattle, it's insane that they're being used on freeway routes but not on the 5, the 358, or (most egregiously) the 48.
One last interesting note is that our initial hybrid prototype was powered by a Cummins ISM (the updated M11), not the Cat. Despite having the same horsepower rating the Cummins is a bigger, torquier engine. That bus was so quick it was scary; you could surprise cars. Unfortunately, Cummins did not meet 2004 emissions standards in time for us to use the ISM, so we had to switch to the C9.
if all us rural folk move to the big city, will the corn, wheat, and (especially) the cattle and the hogs gonna just wander their way to your neighborhood supermarket?
Of course not. The market will ensure that you have the incentive to keep selling us corn, wheat, cattle, hogs, coal, timber, or whatever else. I applaud your participation in the market, and certainly appreciate what all those products do for everyone. To be totally clear, all I want to do is stop subsidizing your living costs, in the full understanding that I might possibly pay somewhat more for those products. Rural living, while necessary, is more environmentally destructive than urban living. We shouldn't artificially encourage it, which we do now through wealth transfers from urban to rural residents, enabled by a power structure distorted in favor of rural interests.
No, I want to tax the bejesus out of people who choose to harm society as a whole by driving wasteful vehicles. The market has no mechanism to correct their excesses, so we need to find another way to make them pay the costs associated with their behavior.
Actually, stop and go is the best case for hybrids. Reciprocating engines are most efficient when they can be designed to work at fixed rpm. Starting from a stop in your car or diesel truck is very inefficient. It is much more efficient to use an electric motor for the initial start. Electric motors make max torque at 0 rpm and love low-speed operation.
When I drove transit in Seattle, I was lucky enough to drive their new New Flyer diesel-electric hybrid articulated buses. Because the big diesel didn't have to yank the bus away from a start, the buses were more fuel-efficient and much, much quieter. The lack of transmission made them unbelievably smooth. They were also the quickest transit buses I've ever driven despite being heavy 60-footers. The dynamic brakes made for a low-effort brake pedal, very smooth stops, and almost no brake wear. A full hybrid powertrain, while expensive, is absolutely ideal for urban transit buses -- which see more stop-and-go operation than any other vehicles. Fast, quiet, smooth, and fuel-efficient.
a lot of these 'trucks' are merely modern day station wagons.
That's how they're used, but not how they're built. An old-style station wagon carries a weight premium of a couple hundred pounds, max, over its sedan counterpart.
On today's SUVs, the best case is a car-based crossover, which adds a larger and higher body, bigger wheels and tires and the reinforced suspension componentry necessary to handle them, (usually) an all-wheel-drive system, and the structure necessary for a third seat: generally at least 500 pounds. The worst case is an old-style truck-based SUV, which weighs at least 1000 pounds more than a car of similar size. Some car-based SUVs are in between these two extremes.
I think the problem most people have with SUVs (and today's big pickups) is not just their size or how they're used, it's the wastefulness that leads to their being so heavy and thirsty.
So did you even read the article? (Oh, wait, this is/. )
The machine has an engine which it can use as a generator if the batteries run low. This gives the car a 640-mile range, with no waiting if you haven't been charging. If your personal vehicle gets 640 miles, congratulations... those Mercedes turbodiesels are pretty slick.
Another thing that irritates me is that there is not enough attention paid to the rural population's transportation needs. The rural population tends to have less income, yet has to travel longer distances in order to do shopping, go to the doctor, etc. and often for work. They often need the benefits that a real SUV is supposed to offer, including 4WD, larger wheels, etc because driving conditions can get really bad.
The rural population can pay their own way. I'm sick of paying enormous tax subsidies to fund their cute little lifestyle, through farm programs, expensive rural infrastructure, pork, and direct social assistance. If they don't have enough income to stay in the country using their own resources, let them find a better source of income or move to town.
The idea of letting people drive whatever they want, no matter the consequences, is stupid. This is a straightforward tragedy of the commons problem -- the damage our Ford Excursions cause is not to any one of us but to our environment. Econ 101 will tell you that the market acting alone cannot solve this problem; some kind of intervention is required.
We should raise the fuel tax to whatever level is necessary to ensure that people only use what they need. If this means most cars hold 2 people, weigh 1500 lbs., and top out at 85 mph, that's fine with me. (More likely, it will inspire the large-scale use of better technology; there's no reason something with the interior volume of an Explorer needs to weigh almost 5000 pounds and slurp down a gallon of fuel every 15 miles.) If that means life in the country becomes enormously expensive, that's fine too. I am a driving enthusiast and love fast cars, but our gluttonous fuel use and greenhouse emissions are going to kill us, and we are not going to stop it through our transactions as individual consumers.
Anyone who looks at my post history will see that I am a Mac zealot, but I have to correct a small bit of misinformation in the review.
He praises Mac OS X for dimming toolbar buttons when windows are in the background, using the example of a Safari window behind a Finder window. Unfortunately, the reason the Safari window's toolbar buttons are dimmed is not that it's in the background, but that it's not displaying any page. Put a Safari window displaying any page into the background and its toolbar buttons (unfortunately) stay active. The behavior he describes is application-specific.
For example, both the Finder and Path Finder do the right thing.
There were other inconsistencies in the review. Two examples: First, he slammed Vista for requiring UAC approval for installations where it might not seem necessary, where OS X does the same thing. Second, he praised Vista's interface consistency, without mentioning the lack of consistency that has been typical of Mac OS X in recent years. (This lack of consistency, because it is strictly cosmetic and apps have remained well-executed, is something I think is OK or even valuable... but there are a whole lot of Mac users out there who violently disagree with me.)
There's a fine line here, which you're blowing right through in your eager regurgitation of Business 101.
Yes, the ultimate purpose of management in a for-profit corporation is to maximize shareholder returns. But, whether we like it or not, for-profit corporations have unique power in our society. If management does not at least think about the social consequences of its actions, there is little individuals or government can do to repair the damage. (A good example of socially destructive profit maximization is Wal-Mart's repeated attempts to foist its employee health care expenses onto state taxpayers.)
In their pursuit of returns, managers should be bound by basic ethics, not just the letter of the law. The duties of citizenship, which are attendant on all participants in a free society, extend to for-profit corporations as well as (usually for-profit) individuals.
Deceiving employees into feelings of loyalty is beyond the pale; inspiring those same feelings legitimately by consistently treating well-performing employees better than the competition is terrific. Also, simply dismissing ineffective (but well-intentioned) employees is not always the best remedy for their ineffectiveness. Instead, shifting them to jobs where their skills allow them to be more effective, if possible, allows the company to save the expense and risk of hiring entirely new and unknown employees for those positions, while avoiding the social consequences of putting workers onto the street.
Finally, shareholder returns can be seen from several viewpoints. While loyalty (on either management's or employee's end) is unlikely to positively affect next quarter's numbers, it can be instrumental in building a business that will enjoy success and low costs in the longer term. Hiring and turnover, while good for HR departments, represent a huge cost for business, both through direct costs and the loss of (or inability to even build at all) institutional memory.
MacBook Pro. 7200rpm 100GB Seagate. 41MB/s sustained until the cows come home. It's a *laptop* disk.
Any decent SATA disk in a desktop should give you 50MB/s sustained. I have a two-disk RAID 0 in mine that will do 103MB/s. No, it's not a burst. I can write 250 GB at a time at that speed. Check out some 2004 hardware before you speak...
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Speaking as one of those "average students"...
1. Webmail, of any sort (including gmail), is annoying to use. No matter how sophisticated your javascript/AJAX tricks are, you can't make a webmail interface as sensible or responsive as that of an ordinary desktop mail client.
2. Most of us have university and non-university accounts. If we use webmail, we either have to forward messages from one account to the other (exactly what the OP is complaining he can't do with his harebrained Windows Live setup), or have to check more than one unresponsive, badly designed webmail site, instead of simply looking at all our messages in one desktop email client.
3. Desktop email clients tend to have much larger feature sets than webmail interfaces.
I was recently affected by my school's switch to "MyMail." In theory, the system supports IMAP, but in practice, the IMAP facility is slow and unreliable. Thankfully, the system does allow us to forward email, so my university email goes to my account at fastmail.fm (who are the world's most kick-ass IMAP provider).
IMAP is also much to be preferred over POP. All of us will have to check email from multiple machines at some point (some poster said something about Mom's house at Christmas...) By handling everything on the server side, IMAP makes it possible to look at the same directory structure on the server and in your desktop email client, or to have desktop email clients set up on multiple machines (i.e. my laptop and my big studio rig).
When I buy software, I expect that there's some guy in India on the other end of the phone. With freeware I'm SOL.
Let me fix that for you:
When I buy software, I expect to be SOL. With freeware I'm SOL.
Seriously, though, I just can't imagine using the unstable, resource-intensive, naggy commercial security products anymore.
Great post. That's the most accurate and concise description of Windows I've ever seen.
You know it's bad when someone as cheap as me will willingly spend hundreds of dollars extra for designer hardware because it's the only hardware that will run the only alternative to Windows capable of running certain major applications.
I'm consistently surprised that Adobe, in particular, hasn't gone balls-to-the-wall to try to make CS work on some subset of Linux. At least some of its customers would love to have the commodity hardware without having to run Windows.
Was Homer being paid for his works? Was Kafka? Was Pessoa? Was Bach?
Homer, it's impossible to know for sure, because we don't know who he is. But, in general, poets at that time would have been at least fed and supported (as a slave), if not paid outright (as a contractor). Of course, if some artists were slaves, that's not really a viable argument for failing to pay them today...
Kafka, no. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to create in silence with the fragile hope that maybe, if they are really lucky, they will get recognition *after they die.* That drives tormented geniuses, but not the more ordinary artists who are responsible for most of our creative output.
Pessoa and Charles Ives are examples of the very few people who had/have enough energy to create and work a full-time job at the same time. Of course, neither of them had to work nearly as hard as your ordinary worker does today. I know that I am not ready to create consistently after working a full day at any full-time job I've ever had.
You couldn't have picked a worse example than Bach. Bach, like most composers from the beginning of recorded music until Beethoven, was paid by the state or by nobility (depending on the phase of his career). He was expected to generate a certain number of works as a condition of his employment. He did compose on the side as well, but certainly that was much easier for him since he had the apparatus of a professional composer (and church musician) at his disposal.
Composers including and after Beethoven were not state employees (most of the time), but were very responsive to the market. If Beethoven, Wagner, or Verdi had not been able to generate income from their works, because someone else could have just claimed the works as his own, they would have had no ability to continue creating.
Open-source is not a good example either. There are relatively few finished, usable projects; most are waiting for the developers to have more spare time. To the extent things do get done at all, I think that many open-source programmers are motivated at least partially by career rewards that may follow from participation in a project or from name recognition.
Altruism and creation for the sake of creation are pretty ideas, but relying on them to sustain innovation in society is foolhardy. We have discovered that the market is a much better method for meeting our other needs; we need to let creators take advantage of it as well.
I don't understand how your non-commercial but attributive system of distribution will enforce itself. If a thief steals your ideas and distributes them without attribution, but isn't making money off them (only recognition), how are you planning to recover damages (even assuming you can bring some form of legal action)? No lawyer would take your case. It seems to me that, again, you're creating a situation where whoever has the most effective publicity machine will wind up with credit for new ideas.
artists always worked *without* direct monetary compensation. The fact that we think artists just want money to make art is a cultural twist of the latest 150 years, not an obvious fact.
What planet are you on?
Artists have been paid for their work as long as there have been artists. The difference is that it was usually a sovereign doing the paying, not a bunch of individual customers.
If you expect that artists will take the time and effort to create when there is neither financial return nor any guarantee of recognition (in a copyright-less system, the best publicizer, not the inventor, will wind up with credit for new ideas), then you're ignoring both basic human nature and all of artistic history.
If we want either art or inventions, we have to find some way to compensate the artists and inventors. It's that simple. Copyright isn't perfect, and the terms these days are ludicrously long, but we can't replace it with your "it's only for the joy of creating!" garbage. If J.S. Bach had had to spend his days farming for a living, he wouldn't have had time to compose a damn thing. It's that simple.
No, his problem is not that he is running 10.3 or a G5. 10.3 is slightly less responsive in most situations than 10.4, but the difference is not huge. A G5 core is comparable clock-for-clock with a single current Intel or AMD core, although they never got quite as high in clock speed. Remember, the G5 was an ass-kicking steamroller when it first came out.
And Adobe programs run just fine on G5... for now, they run better, since (except for Acrobat 8) they are not yet Intel-native. I run Photoshop and InDesign every day on my (slow - dual 1.8GHz) G5 and the performance is more than acceptable.
His problem is probably flaky RAM or something hosed somewhere in his OS. First, the usual software troubleshooting; then, a clean reinstall; then, a different set of DIMMs. If all of those fail to solve the problem, he may have a flaky mobo or CPU, which do happen with the G5s.
I just really don't get why people are so attached to visual (as opposed to functional) consistency.
I like having my windows for each application look different, provided they fit into a reasonably cohesive whole, and provided they work in an intuitive and consistent way. The differences help me to see what's what at a glance, and provide a bit of variety. I wouldn't mind being able to subtly change the colors of windows in different apps (e.g. to give my omnipresent Activity Monitor window a subtle reddish tint).
I agree with you on the Zoom button (which, by the way, is the only one whose function is at all inconsistent between apps). For apps where there are two or more separate window modes, like iTunes, there should be a fourth button to toggle between them. The Zoom button should always toggle between the user-selected window size and the window size the system deems ideal for the window contents.
Although it is the same way in any other OS, I also agree that clicks on an out-of-focus window should act consistently. (I think they should only focus the window, unless they are directed toward the system-level window widgets, in which case they should perform the requested action.)
If you truly believe that OSX will make you more productive, then you are simply a fool
Fool here.
First of all, if Illustrator and InDesign are taking down your whole system, something is wrong with your configuration, your OS installation, or your hardware (RAM?). Illustrator is not the most stable app (although it's not that stable on Windows either) and I expect it to crash regularly, and once in a while InDesign freaks out, but I don't think either one has ever taken down my whole OS. One place to start: if you have the misfortune of having Adobe Version Cue installed, delete everything associated with it.
While PowerPC OS X is somewhat laggier than Intel OS X (which compares favorably to XP on similar hardware), I don't find the difference dramatic, and I don't see any usability problem on my PowerPC system. It's a 1.8GHz dual G5 (3GB RAM), so my experience should be nearly identical to yours, although Tiger is more responsive than Panther in most situations.
With that out of the way, I'll tell you exactly why OS X makes me more productive (and why this summer I'll pay through the nose for a Mac Pro, whose 4 cores and ECC RAM I really don't need, rather than buying a cheaper Conroe-based commodity tower). This is personal to me. YMMV. But judge for yourself whether I'm really a "fool."
1. Terminal. OS X is the only OS that can run Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and a full bash implementation natively and side-by-side. This is a godsend for those of us who really need to straddle both the business-computing and UNIX worlds.
2. Integrated color management. The OS's color management, while not perfect, is good enough to ensure relatively close color matching between different systems and between screen and print output, no matter what app I'm using. XP and all Linux distros I've used are a disaster in this regard. I don't know yet about WCM (the system in Vista).
3. Expose. I'm a very visual user and text-based taskbar buttons don't communicate the nature of open windows to me nearly as well as graphical previews.
4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)
5. Logic Pro. This won't apply to you if you're not a musician. But if you are, it's a fearsomely kick-ass mega-tool (sequencer + synthesizer + lots more) and only available for OS X.
6. OS X software development culture. OSS users are always amazed that they have to pay for so many Mac apps. But the shareware culture promotes developer accountability. Independent OS X software, by and large, is an order of magnitude more professional and useful than such software on either Windows or Linux. OS X's unique development frameworks also help with this by allowing developers to concentrate on usability and features rather than basic nuts and bolts.
7. Easily comprehensible directory structure. A non-n00b Windows or Linux user could start playing with the Finder and locate *anything* important to operation of the graphical side of an OS X system within a few minutes. This makes troubleshooting a simpler and faster process, especially when compared to Windows, where neither file nor folder names are remotely comprehensible.
8. Security (yes, this is a productivity booster). No UAC; the machine rarely asks for admin rights, and when it does, you need to give a password. No time fighting malware of any sort. No instability or slowdowns from malware.
9. OS X text rendering. Compared with other OS's, it's magic. Preserves both character shapes and legibility without any visible compromise. Not only does the increased legibility improve productivity, but it also is a big part of the reason people find OS X systems so visually striking.
If I thought about it longer I could probably figure out a few more -- but I've got work to do... productively.
I never said I wasn't selfish, only that the vast majority of parents are more selfish. I'm happy to admit that I don't like having children around because their noise, mess, and self-absorbed parents bug me.
Everyone acts in naked self-interest. All I'm trying to do is fight the notion that parenting is somehow altruistic, at least when the species or society isn't in demographic danger.
Anyway, I'd rather pass along my honesty to the next generation than your smug, self-certain parental superiority.
2) Being unselfish enough to have had children.
Right... so it's the people who have better attendance and productivity at work, pay more taxes, consume less resources, don't cause noise pollution and chaotic mess everywhere they go, and don't jabber all the time about how much better their own kids are than everyone else's who are somehow not "unselfish."
God, or anyone who's had the misfortune of flying in the last few years, knows there's no shortage of kids (and their totally self-absorbed parents.) In today's world, having a child is almost always about ego gratification. (That's why today's poor kids are being maniacally scheduled to build resumes of steel... it's so the parents can brag; most of the kids would rather aimlessly horse around with friends, and they would arguably learn just as much by doing so.) Even the few parents who have kids because they actually want kids are often the most selfish people -- as soon as people become parents, they automatically assume their needs are more important than everyone else's.
Back on topic, are people really leaving their car keys where two-year-olds can find them unsupervised? That's only marginally better than leaving guns and ammo in the same room. A really cute and clever ad (or any other speech) shouldn't be censored by parents who are only concerned because of their own sloppiness.
Sadly, Apple's not immune to RAM creep either.
My experience is that Intel Macs want much more than PowerPC Macs. My PowerMac G5 has 3 GB of RAM and I *never* swap, not even when running the big stuff, and rarely go below 1GB free. My MacBook Pro has 2 GB and I swap regularly -- it's really irritating I can't upgrade further. Rosetta is a *huge* memory hog, and Intel-native apps also seem to take more room than their PPC equivalents.
My school has several Intel iMacs with 512 MB. They start swapping before the OS is done loading. Using them is like using a 1998 PowerBook G3.
Just wait... I expect an Intel Mac with Leopard will, just like a Vista box, be happiest with >= 4 GB.
Red herring.
People are unlikely to die because their DRAM is too slow. (Gamers are not people.)
The fact that we need to think hard about how to make life-saving drugs accessible while preserving an incentive to develop them has absolutely nothing to do with the obvious benefits of patenting this kind of expensive, innovative technology.
The QuickTake is back.
there's no fork() in Windows
You don't need to stick a fork() in. It's easy to see that Windows is done.
We've been having a lot of weird moderation lately. People have been moderating posts they disagree with "redundant" a lot. (Watch this get moderated "redundant.") I suppose the solution is to metamod as much as possible.
Any complex problem will require a multi-part solution. I think something like the Volt is very promising, even if you can't plug it in all the time, because of its flexibility. Most days, most of the time, it would be plugged in overnight and sometime during the night you'd get a full recharge. On most days, when you go to work and come home and don't do anything else, you won't use any gas. During those periods it's giving all the benefits of a pure electric car.
But you don't have to put up with the drawbacks, because on those days when you have to drive further, or when you haven't had time or "grid clearance" to recharge, you've got the hybrid capability. If everyone were driving a Volt-like machine (or even a bigger SUV variant of one) the energy savings compared with today would be staggering, even if each Volt were not optimally used every day.
Beyond the environmental implications, electric powertrains are very satisfying in stop-and-go traffic. They're quick, quiet and ultra-smooth. I think if you gave 100,000 LA commuters vehicles that could operate in electric mode in stop-and-go, we might see real movement toward a Volt-like solution.
I rode a hybrid bus in Minneapolis a few times.. Like you said, because they don't need as large a diesel engine, they are MUCH quieter. Almost as quiet as the electric only buses in San Francisco.
Actually, the interesting part with our buses is that the diesel engine is the same one that powers non-hybrid variants of the same coaches (a 330-hp Cat C9). It just spends so little time under heavy load that it doesn't have to make nearly as much noise.
Metro's decision to buy hybrid and non-hybrid buses with the exact same engine also provides an unusually good basis for comparison, since most other full hybrids do use a different motor from their normal equivalents. The hybrid buses get about 20% better gas mileage, but the biggest difference is in performance. Despite being a couple thousand pounds heavier (compared to about a 30,000 lb. baseline weight) the hybrid is *dramatically* faster, stops quicker with less brake heating or wear, and (thanks to no jerky shifts) feels much smoother. Engine wear is also reduced.
When the bus makes a full-throttle start from a dead stop, the loudest noise is the tires on the drive axle gripping the tarmac. You can slightly hear the electric motor whine; the diesel continues idling. Around 5 mph, the engine moves to high idle. At 15-20, the engine starts taking over from the electric motor and begins to sound more like normal -- but the electric motor still lends substantial help until about 40 mph, and so you spend less time at full throttle with its attendant noise. The result is that the bus never feels like it's under stress, despite performing better than any other 60-footer in the fleet, including our old M11-powered New Flyer D60s that you can hear across town when they leave a bus stop. I found the buses had a psychological effect on me when I drove them: since they felt more relaxed, and since I was almost always on time thanks to the great performance, I felt relaxed too.
Of course, this being bureaucracy, the hybrids are not being used on the routes that could benefit from them the most. For anyone who knows Seattle, it's insane that they're being used on freeway routes but not on the 5, the 358, or (most egregiously) the 48.
One last interesting note is that our initial hybrid prototype was powered by a Cummins ISM (the updated M11), not the Cat. Despite having the same horsepower rating the Cummins is a bigger, torquier engine. That bus was so quick it was scary; you could surprise cars. Unfortunately, Cummins did not meet 2004 emissions standards in time for us to use the ISM, so we had to switch to the C9.
if all us rural folk move to the big city, will the corn, wheat, and (especially) the cattle and the hogs gonna just wander their way to your neighborhood supermarket?
Of course not. The market will ensure that you have the incentive to keep selling us corn, wheat, cattle, hogs, coal, timber, or whatever else. I applaud your participation in the market, and certainly appreciate what all those products do for everyone. To be totally clear, all I want to do is stop subsidizing your living costs, in the full understanding that I might possibly pay somewhat more for those products. Rural living, while necessary, is more environmentally destructive than urban living. We shouldn't artificially encourage it, which we do now through wealth transfers from urban to rural residents, enabled by a power structure distorted in favor of rural interests.
No, I want to tax the bejesus out of people who choose to harm society as a whole by driving wasteful vehicles. The market has no mechanism to correct their excesses, so we need to find another way to make them pay the costs associated with their behavior.
Actually, stop and go is the best case for hybrids. Reciprocating engines are most efficient when they can be designed to work at fixed rpm. Starting from a stop in your car or diesel truck is very inefficient. It is much more efficient to use an electric motor for the initial start. Electric motors make max torque at 0 rpm and love low-speed operation.
When I drove transit in Seattle, I was lucky enough to drive their new New Flyer diesel-electric hybrid articulated buses. Because the big diesel didn't have to yank the bus away from a start, the buses were more fuel-efficient and much, much quieter. The lack of transmission made them unbelievably smooth. They were also the quickest transit buses I've ever driven despite being heavy 60-footers. The dynamic brakes made for a low-effort brake pedal, very smooth stops, and almost no brake wear. A full hybrid powertrain, while expensive, is absolutely ideal for urban transit buses -- which see more stop-and-go operation than any other vehicles. Fast, quiet, smooth, and fuel-efficient.
a lot of these 'trucks' are merely modern day station wagons.
That's how they're used, but not how they're built. An old-style station wagon carries a weight premium of a couple hundred pounds, max, over its sedan counterpart.
On today's SUVs, the best case is a car-based crossover, which adds a larger and higher body, bigger wheels and tires and the reinforced suspension componentry necessary to handle them, (usually) an all-wheel-drive system, and the structure necessary for a third seat: generally at least 500 pounds. The worst case is an old-style truck-based SUV, which weighs at least 1000 pounds more than a car of similar size. Some car-based SUVs are in between these two extremes.
I think the problem most people have with SUVs (and today's big pickups) is not just their size or how they're used, it's the wastefulness that leads to their being so heavy and thirsty.
So did you even read the article? (Oh, wait, this is /. )
The machine has an engine which it can use as a generator if the batteries run low. This gives the car a 640-mile range, with no waiting if you haven't been charging. If your personal vehicle gets 640 miles, congratulations... those Mercedes turbodiesels are pretty slick.
Another thing that irritates me is that there is not enough attention paid to the rural population's transportation needs. The rural population tends to have less income, yet has to travel longer distances in order to do shopping, go to the doctor, etc. and often for work. They often need the benefits that a real SUV is supposed to offer, including 4WD, larger wheels, etc because driving conditions can get really bad.
The rural population can pay their own way. I'm sick of paying enormous tax subsidies to fund their cute little lifestyle, through farm programs, expensive rural infrastructure, pork, and direct social assistance. If they don't have enough income to stay in the country using their own resources, let them find a better source of income or move to town.
The idea of letting people drive whatever they want, no matter the consequences, is stupid. This is a straightforward tragedy of the commons problem -- the damage our Ford Excursions cause is not to any one of us but to our environment. Econ 101 will tell you that the market acting alone cannot solve this problem; some kind of intervention is required.
We should raise the fuel tax to whatever level is necessary to ensure that people only use what they need. If this means most cars hold 2 people, weigh 1500 lbs., and top out at 85 mph, that's fine with me. (More likely, it will inspire the large-scale use of better technology; there's no reason something with the interior volume of an Explorer needs to weigh almost 5000 pounds and slurp down a gallon of fuel every 15 miles.) If that means life in the country becomes enormously expensive, that's fine too. I am a driving enthusiast and love fast cars, but our gluttonous fuel use and greenhouse emissions are going to kill us, and we are not going to stop it through our transactions as individual consumers.
Anyone who looks at my post history will see that I am a Mac zealot, but I have to correct a small bit of misinformation in the review.
He praises Mac OS X for dimming toolbar buttons when windows are in the background, using the example of a Safari window behind a Finder window. Unfortunately, the reason the Safari window's toolbar buttons are dimmed is not that it's in the background, but that it's not displaying any page. Put a Safari window displaying any page into the background and its toolbar buttons (unfortunately) stay active. The behavior he describes is application-specific.
For example, both the Finder and Path Finder do the right thing.
There were other inconsistencies in the review. Two examples: First, he slammed Vista for requiring UAC approval for installations where it might not seem necessary, where OS X does the same thing. Second, he praised Vista's interface consistency, without mentioning the lack of consistency that has been typical of Mac OS X in recent years. (This lack of consistency, because it is strictly cosmetic and apps have remained well-executed, is something I think is OK or even valuable... but there are a whole lot of Mac users out there who violently disagree with me.)
There's a fine line here, which you're blowing right through in your eager regurgitation of Business 101.
Yes, the ultimate purpose of management in a for-profit corporation is to maximize shareholder returns. But, whether we like it or not, for-profit corporations have unique power in our society. If management does not at least think about the social consequences of its actions, there is little individuals or government can do to repair the damage. (A good example of socially destructive profit maximization is Wal-Mart's repeated attempts to foist its employee health care expenses onto state taxpayers.)
In their pursuit of returns, managers should be bound by basic ethics, not just the letter of the law. The duties of citizenship, which are attendant on all participants in a free society, extend to for-profit corporations as well as (usually for-profit) individuals.
Deceiving employees into feelings of loyalty is beyond the pale; inspiring those same feelings legitimately by consistently treating well-performing employees better than the competition is terrific. Also, simply dismissing ineffective (but well-intentioned) employees is not always the best remedy for their ineffectiveness. Instead, shifting them to jobs where their skills allow them to be more effective, if possible, allows the company to save the expense and risk of hiring entirely new and unknown employees for those positions, while avoiding the social consequences of putting workers onto the street.
Finally, shareholder returns can be seen from several viewpoints. While loyalty (on either management's or employee's end) is unlikely to positively affect next quarter's numbers, it can be instrumental in building a business that will enjoy success and low costs in the longer term. Hiring and turnover, while good for HR departments, represent a huge cost for business, both through direct costs and the loss of (or inability to even build at all) institutional memory.
MacBook Pro. 7200rpm 100GB Seagate. 41MB/s sustained until the cows come home. It's a *laptop* disk.
Any decent SATA disk in a desktop should give you 50MB/s sustained. I have a two-disk RAID 0 in mine that will do 103MB/s. No, it's not a burst. I can write 250 GB at a time at that speed. Check out some 2004 hardware before you speak...