Last time I tried (less than 6 months ago), I was very disappointed with Eclipse/CDT.
I needed it to compile QT projects. I was not able to configure the "make" system to simple launch a "qmake && make" command. I had to create a target for "qmake" and another for "make".
Another thing I realized is that the "build"/"build all"/"clean" menu command were broken. Sometimes it was launching the make command, sometimes not.... simply doing NOTHING AT ALL. I had to use the target windows always (double click) to compile and create a "clean target" etc... As a result I reverted to nedit + console on Linux.
On windows, I used Code Blocks instead. There is a version for Linux too which I did not try. Unlike Eclipse it's not an ARMY-TANK, it loads much faster and eat less memory, and do its primary job better.. even though it lacks the bell and whistles.
That's a matter of taste, but I don't like the GUI of eclipse. For that matter, I even prefer devstudio (a Microsoft product which are famous for their horrible GUI).
Now XCode on Mac as ten times fewer windows on the screen and can do it....
Eclipse is fine for Java (I used it in the past), but the CDT support has not convinced me so far.
Ah yeah... remplace a complete IDE that generates Makefile automatically (among other things) by a texteditor. It's like using ultra-edit and the DOS console to code...
What choice will be left for me the days "normal" DVDs are gone and replaced by HD-DVDs, BluRays. Let's imagine those are not hacked (yet) and it's impossible to use VLC to play them. So what, here's the choices I have:
- I can rent a HD/BR-DVD I can't play (32bit, no Microsoft Windows.. ) - I can d/l a DRM protected file I can't play (no WMP) - I can d/l a pirate version on bittorrent, and watch it wherever/whenever I want without paying.
What will I do?
Today I'm using he 4th solution: use the VLC software ("illegal" software for DMCA) to make something morally right (buy/rent a DVD and play it). But let's not dream about it, DVDs will start to disppear and the next VLC like will be harder to code and more DMCA/EUCD risky.
The Cowon is filesystem based which is great because my mp3s are sorted by directory because they were downloaded in the days of audioglaxy and winamp 2 which didn't have a media library. The sorting I used was Genre>Artist>Filename. The iPod is id3 based and would sort this for me but a lot of my mp3s dont have any id3 info at all-and more to the point wouldn't make any difference in my case. So yes to me the interface of the iPod was not an important factor at all.
I remember those days when you downloaded an mp3 from any p2p network it was 99% sure the id3 will not existe or otherwise be screwed up, like the ID3 title field would contain the author's name and also the track number and all others would be empty. That was SO annoying. If there is something I can thank the iPod for, is that NOW thanks to iTunes and competition mimicking, ID3s are widspread and you don't have to spend too much time ID3 tagging your P2P downloaded files.
And correctly named, tagged mp3 files of good quality if a THING I would pay for (hear me RIAA). Unfortunatly, since you're only shipping music with CRAP included (DRM), which have no hope to play on my car, my ipod, my linux, windows and mac computers.... well...
I recall articles about some music publishers not liking the iTunes flat-rate price structure; so those providers may come on board. Also the Beatles (aka 'Apple records') have issues with iTunes (aka 'Apple omputer'), along with some governments. (France, I think).
Officially, France had issues with "interoperability". They were concerned that DRM protected content could only play on one platform. They wanted to oblige DRM providers to ensure that their DRM would work on any third party devices if they asked for it. This is nice for the consumer because it means "whatever you buy", you should be able to play it on "whatever device you own".
But DRM "by design" prevents interoperability... So there's a contradiction. I know everyone is focussing on Apple right now because they are successful, but if any other DRM (i mean C.R.A.P.) technology would take over Apple's, such a law would also threaten it. That's the contradiction. On one hand it prevents consumer to legally rip their own DVDs, and bypassing any DRM etc etc.... and on the other hand, they punish companies which do not give access to their DRM for making them interoperable.
In the final drafts of the law, this "interoperability" non-sense has of course disappeared, and the law (now in application) is as bad as DMCA. But it was done the French way, with a lot of promises (interopeability, no jail for p2p users etc...) which are long forgotten...
This is a cool hack, but i don't think it is "that" useful to replace a "laptop mouse".
Laptops have builtin trackpads... I assume people who use a mouse because 1) they need a more precise + ergonomic device than the trackpad. 2) have a shitty trackpad on their computer.
In both cases, I wonder if my Nokia phone is really an improvement for problem 1 or 2...
The only "useful" application is to show of in front of your friends:)
The WMV flavors which were reverse engineered just work fine with VLC/Mplayer.
Well... if Microsoft would be "kind enough" to tell the rest of the world how the WMV3 video format works, we would not have to use their crappy window media player for mac, or now (since they gave up on that one), the flip4mac shareware/freeware..... and mplayer would not have to use native windows DLL on linux. Speaking of which, now Apple has moved to Intel, there's potential to do the same trick on Mac.
However if you have DRM embedded to your wonderful WMV file, you're screwed because basically only Microsoft Windows can read it... (and otherwise it is illegal thanks to DMCA/EUCD)
Now does that make it a better system? It's the same has asking if Word is a better Word Processor because it can read DOC files correctly... the eternal chicken/egg pb.
I sure hope Microsoft will copy the idea of "non-modal" "sizable" floating windows when it comes to the next version of office, or visual studio (sure i haven't tested the latest beta.. maybe it's there...) And whoever that comes from, whether they copied it or not.. i don't care, because it's real annoying, especially when you have a list with only 4 visible items and the windows size is about one tenth of the space available on your screen, and you just can't make it bigger because some smart ass decided it's not resizable!!!
Speaking of which, the awful "customize" toolbar window is one of them (first thing I use in a windows software to get read of the 4 toolbars with 80+ buttons i won't ever use.... and make my own with the only useful buttons). That thing in visual studio/office is HORRIBLE. So if Vista could add an API to do it cleanly like in OS X or XUL/Firefox, i'd be happy.
Drag and drop. Even before Macos X, Macos had a much more decent support of it... and this might be because of the underlaying APIs... Hope Vista will fix it.
And the last one, I want a "usable" spacial file manager... even gnome has a decent one now! Windows XP has only a limited support for it, which was not improved much from Win95, and in fact it is so annoying that I simply disable it and end up like all windows user, having that Giant explorer windows with my directories on the right...
===
Now here's my list to Apple for leopard.
Make this fucking kernel run faster! Ok the 64 support bit is great (copied from M$:) ), but that pseudo micro kernel architecture which is not really one anymore and just adds 36 layers and different approach to kernel programming 1) does not really simplify the job of kernel developpers 2) performances are sluggish. Apple did a great job in Tiger by removing one funnel, and I was kind of hoping that after Tavenian left Apple, we would have a brand new kernel "mostly compatible" with what was there before... but much faster. I want a more "monolithic" apple/bsd and the mach ipc system (can't be removed and it's good).
Second, i would like some kind of virtualization manager included in the OS/kernel... I remember connectix made apple add some features in MacOS X for their virtual PC (vmm API), which disappeared on x86. It was ok, wonder why Apple threw it away... I guess the VMWare and Parrallel folks will have "each" to write their own hooks in a kext.. and make their own stuff... I would like an OS integration feature with a GUI level for "virtualized" machines and all that built-in in leopard, even if there is no apple virtualized machines.
JFS support.
NTFS writing support.
Security, I want a sandbox environment that I can trigger and watch for every application I use. Something that's builtin in safari 3, but i would rather have a Finder option "lauch in secure environement". That thing should write logs of what the application is doing and so on... and this option should be used by default to open any e-mail attachment / safari downloads... And all the bad guys that gave interest to Apple lately would be even more disgustted by the cost of writing crippleware for Mac, and would return to their well loved platform... Microsoft. And Apple could still say in their ads "no virus" on mac.
Just imagine the first landing on Mars, and the "lost video" message that will go with it some 100years later...
NASA used a special high quality encoding scheme, which was not widespread in those days. In addtition it was protected by a DRM made by company "x", which went bankrupt some 30 years ago... well we have the file, maybe we could even reverse engineer the DRM, but it's illegal because of DMCA.... Sorry dudes, the recording are lost forever because we need to protect the copyright holder rights:)
I don't think this security thing has "anything" to do with Apple.
They use an EXTERNAL wifi card, in a computer which has BUILT-IN wifi. So this card uses a DRIVER given by the manufacturer.. Chances are that the bug is in THIS driver. Chances are that THIS driver has the same bug in the windows/linux version. I suspect the classical buffer-overflow thing:) I don't believe Apple driver is able to use other cards...
Why would someone install an EXTERNAL card on a computer which already HAS INTERNAL WIFI anywy? How many Mac users are sensitive to such an attack? Not many... I would be more concerned if they did not plug this crappy card, but they did.
And everyone is talking about a failure discovered in Apple's system. Damn, it was a hell of a clever COMMUNICATION trick to use Apple hardware... Everyone talks about it. Everyone says Apple stuff is insecure although evidence tends to prove it's not even their fault. If the built-in card had the same flaw, then they should have shown it... And if they feared reprisals, they could simplly use a "no-name" windows box for the attack.
You can have the best system you wish, but anyone can write a closed source module or kernel extension that put you at risk. Period.
Microsoft is trying to solve the problem by siging drivers for the next Vista Windows. Apple does nothing at the moment. Linux says drivers should be opensource and that hooks used (for nvidia/ati drivers for instance... are illegal). Result: poor WIFI (and hardware) support on Linux....
There will always be junkies and thiefs and they do not always use ID theft even in the US where it is possible.
Chances are that if you suffer an agression, as bad as it is, you will be aware of it immediatly. Some for loosing stuff... whereas ID theft can go one for a while without you noticing it.
As for magnetic stipe, the only reason there is such a thing in France or Germany is to be compatible with "international" low security crap. Fact is, all cash machines as old as they are (in fact they are not since we changed to Euro a few years ago) will ask for your PIN. So if you card has a stripe, the only way to use it is to go abroad.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but I feel confotable that ID theft is NOT really possible.
As a European I still found amazing that you can "steal" someone else's identity by just getting his name and a social security number...
In Europe, if you want to open a bank account, apply for a credit card, or any other credit you MUST show your ID in person (you know those ID cards that scare you...). The only thing that's really insecure are credit cards, but payments with your mere number over 100 euros are reimbursed if there's a fraud, which is quite easy to prove when the delivery address is not yours:) And knows what? Normal payment cards are more secure because we use a Chip and a PIN code so you can't duplicate the magnetic stripe in 15 seconds...
Ok it's not perfect, but you'll never hear about someone getting strip of his money because he gave his name and a funny number to someone. Good old Europe:)
Well if you look at the timeframe between the widespread of "word" for the "dummy" secretaries, and the time for ODF to be in use... It's what? 15 years?
Same thinking for DRMs. Will it take another 20 yrs before we have legislations that outlaw them? 2026? Well.. I can leave with a 20yr gap without a music/video purchase. But can the RIAA and MPAA?
It's good to see that sooner or later ppl get to understand technology, and can easily get rid of abuse in a few years..
I can't help but dream of the day with all that crap outlawed: HDMI, DRM, zones on DVD, TV websites no longer blocked coz u cannot watch the program outside of the US:) Downloadable music and movies for cheap and no DRM, no fucking M$/APPLE/SONY tax. No fucking Microsoft windows needed to watch movie, read ebook, play songs...
Well if you look at the timeframe between the widespread of "word" for the "dummy" secretaries, and the time for ODF to be in use... It's what? 15 years?
Plus concurrence is back. Word is buggy and the GUI sucsk. It's not hard to do a better job, but the bottleneck is compatibility with "word" format. So what? Well. Concurrence is again possible on the word processor market. Hurra!!
Same thinking for DRMs. they're just starting out of she shelves. Will it take another 20 yrs before we have legislations that outlaw them? 2026? Well.. I can leave with a 20yrs gap without a music-video purchase. But can the RIAA and MPAA?
It's good to see that sooner or later ppl get to understand technology, and can easily get rid of abuse in a few years..
I can't help but dream of the day with HDMI, DRM, zones on DVD, TV websites no longer blocked coz u cannot watch the program outside of the US:) Downloadable music and movies for cheap and no DRM, no M$/APPLE/SONY tax.
Erling Ellingsen has also been playing with the sudden motion and ambient light sensors. He hacked a Virtual Desktop tool, where you have to hit the laptop, or put your hand over a sensitive area, in order to change desktops.
What is bad about email is that it's not always obvious to know whether some email is spam or not. And there is also the risk of phising.
Obviously it's no concern here. If they have to make it cheap, they'll use no operator and revert to pre-recorded messages. You will know right away if the person is "human" or a "recorded message"... as long as machines fail the Turing test:)
There is nothing new about it. Junk calls existed before VOIP.
Maybe they should sue CISCO? Ah no... too big of a fish.:)
Inband markers are used in the US?
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 1
I understand that the removal was automatic with ReplayTV and is not with Tivo. My point was in both cases it's piece of cake to skip ads. So I wondered why they got troubles: I guess it has more to do with the commercial programs of the affiliates not being bocked/replaced than merely erasing ads.
As for the technical solution, I wonder how the automatic skipping is done. A friend of mine was working on mplayer/memcoder based software to do that (research in a French university), and there was only one public station in France which used the inband markers. All other stations and especially commercial ones were not using those markers to be sure the ads could not be easily removed. My friend got mixed results and used a set of heurisitcs which detected "blank/cut images" and also a thing that does not exist in the US called "jinggle screens". Those screens are mandatory in France to warn TV watchers when commercials are about to start or stop: basically it's just a scree saying "advertisement" with some music and some channel's logo.
I wonder what is the situation in the US right now. Are those inband commonly used or not?
I tend to agree with you about TV ads. But since I moved to Germany, I tend to watch TV even less (I got some issues with German language) and the local netflix (Amango) aside from being outrageously expensive does not have BSG grrrr!!! I somehow left the US while season 2 was about to start they still don't have season 1 here. I'm a bit pissed off. Needless to say.. And I can't watch Alias either, not even on the web since it detects I have a foreign IP... And last thing, good thing VLC exist, or I would have had to buy a new laptop to read DVDs from Germany because of that zoning crap... Well i have the good beer though:)
Does anyone watch ads they record with Tivo?
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
ReplayTV's TiVo-like devices which featured sharing capabilities, along with automatic ad skipping; the company was sued to bankruptcy, and the reincarnated device supported neither sharing nor ad skipping
Whenever I use a VCR to record something, I really enjoy the fast forward to skip ads. In fact, I usually prefer using the VCR than watching the thing live for that very reason...
So I wonder. Does Tivo prevent you to make a fast-forward? Otherwise, wtf about this ad skipping capability... no one is gonna watch ads if they have the ability to skip them by pressing a button. No? Am wrong?
On one hand the laws let people get driving license at 16, which is a huge responsibility, but forbide them to drink alcohol until 21. Somehow young americans are adult enough to drive a large truck (which could potentially kill people), but too much of a child to learn how drink decently in a bar.
The sight of a boob sickens the good thinking of this society, whereas the US is the international headquarters of pornography. A boob flash caused a very nice and mild foreign movie called Amelie to get an "R" rating, but the Da Vinci code with its graphic pictures is PG 13... (Audrey Tautou plays in both).
How do you want young people to ever become adult, if you take out all the responsibilities for them? Stop dreaming, a society of pious and virgin devouts will NEVER exist. They will always be temptations in this world, but I prefer to be an adult teaching my kids how to grow up in a free world were such things exist rather than in an oppressive one that demonize them hypocritically.
Sex, boobs, violence, but also war in Iraq are realities. I don't want the government think that I'm too stupid to raise my kids correctly, and that my kids are too stupid to cope with that. And moreover, I guess money could be used better than paying those morons to review (=censor) movies, games or whatever the hell they are doing.
Since EBay bought Skype, new features were only added to the windows version (like the video).
In fact, I still use an older version on OS X because it is less BUGGY than the newer, and I hate this clumsy blue login screen inside the user window. The "echo cancellation" feature has also vanished (instead of bug-fixing it).
On windows they have also played some dirty tricks to limitate usage of the software on AMD processors.
I'm already planning to kiss their ass good bye when my skypein subscription is over. Some other VOIP software exist.
I heard about Wengo. It's a GPL crossplatform one. And "oh miracle" has video on Mac and Linux too. It's likely to be my next VOIP. http://www.openwengo.org/
at least we know for sure they homepage would not be overloaded with activex, and proprietary crappy HTML code... since they dropped IE on Mac.
no seriously. Who cares about these homepage stuff anyway? The first thing I do is put google, whatever portal was there before... (and the day they piss me off, i'll have no problem putting something else as my first page..;)
i know i know.. a lot of people must care about it, or there would not be such a war. But I will never understand advertising nor marketing I guess.:P
For those who are too lazy to read, here's a brief summary of the main differences between the two formats: - m$ tags are 2-3 letters long and not readble - m$ format looks more like a dump of the binary structure, and makes no attempt to separate content and style
The author was already feeling the size argument coming for m$ format, which is nonsense because both formats are compressed anyway and a XML should be readable.. but somehow, he was not expecting the "speed" issue.
Come on. If you wish something "efficient", use a binary format. If you start having a textual XML + compression, then obviously speed is not your concern. What's your concern then? Readability, processing by third party tools. In that case separation of content and style is more important. Who cares that "stuff" is written in Helvetica 12 black. I personally prefer to know it's a "title". And so on..
As for the speed, on today's computer which are virtually 1000x faster than required for typesetting document, this is laughafable. In addition, for large documents, I know many "word" addicts who separate documents in 100pages portions or so, because it become impossible to handle...
What I think about m$ XML, is that. well. it's not that bad. Even though not really "open", it's still better than before. But comon. This was done in a "rush", to fight back open document initiative. And in that case, dumping dummily the "internal binary structure" into a XML document was making more sense for them. There's nearly no development cost involved (no reasearch whatsoever) and it could be implemented very quckly.
Then Yates come and talk about "customer experience" (cf ZDNET article).. This is laughfable.
Regarding "customer experience", when will word support a real vector image format (no WMF crap please). like let's say EPS/PS/PDF... ? I personally hate having to make a raster of my images and make the word document explode in size (when i'm FORCED to use word).
It's not as closed as you think. It used to be, but things have changed a lot in the last 10 years.
I find it actually much easier. Somehow, when I open a PC I'm often scared by the spaghetti cables spreading everywhere, and the poor general design.. well there's no general design "each component was not mean to be with the others".
I don't want to start a flame war, I'm sure any PC builder could to the same thing (and I would really appreciate it), but so far I have not seen comparable. (I like those Shuttles though)
Now seriously, there's no longer any major architectural differences between a PC and a Mac. A Mac is a PC so you can buy your components anywhere. It can even boot windows. come on..
* memory, hard drives, optical drives: no more problem than on PC.
* cpu: not really easy to change. Even worse for motherboards. I think that issue is not as open as in the PC world, but the move to Intel will probably improve things.
* gfx: i have a radeon 8500 for PC working on an older G4. I had to flash the firmware of the gfx (because Mac BIOS was/is different) and be sure it'd work with the drivers on OS X. It's entirely up to the gfx manufacturers to support these, but truth is, it's not "that" easy to use PC's gfx just like that. ATI and GeForce are charging a lot for their Mac editions... (but Macs are by no way a gamer's machine anyway).
I must say I did not have a look at the code...
Anyway, I remember the guys from MySQL complaining about speed issues. Seeing numerous benchmarks etc etc... And also a bit of my personal experience.
Generally I/O and memory management on MacOS X are less efficient than on Linux or Windows and it's the fault of the kernel
Now this is important and critical for some persons, and it's not for others, or there would not be many Macs around these days:)
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I tried (less than 6 months ago), I was very disappointed with Eclipse/CDT.
I needed it to compile QT projects. I was not able to configure the "make" system to simple launch a "qmake && make" command. I had to create a target for "qmake" and another for "make".
Another thing I realized is that the "build"/"build all"/"clean" menu command were broken. Sometimes it was launching the make command, sometimes not.... simply doing NOTHING AT ALL. I had to use the target windows always (double click) to compile and create a "clean target" etc... As a result I reverted to nedit + console on Linux.
On windows, I used Code Blocks instead. There is a version for Linux too which I did not try. Unlike Eclipse it's not an ARMY-TANK, it loads much faster and eat less memory, and do its primary job better.. even though it lacks the bell and whistles.
That's a matter of taste, but I don't like the GUI of eclipse. For that matter, I even prefer devstudio (a Microsoft product which are famous for their horrible GUI).
Now XCode on Mac as ten times fewer windows on the screen and can do it....
Eclipse is fine for Java (I used it in the past), but the CDT support has not convinced me so far.
Ah yeah... remplace a complete IDE that generates Makefile automatically (among other things) by a texteditor. It's like using ultra-edit and the DOS console to code...
What choice will be left for me the days "normal" DVDs are gone and replaced by HD-DVDs, BluRays. Let's imagine those are not hacked (yet) and it's impossible to use VLC to play them. So what, here's the choices I have:
- I can rent a HD/BR-DVD I can't play (32bit, no Microsoft Windows.. )
- I can d/l a DRM protected file I can't play (no WMP)
- I can d/l a pirate version on bittorrent, and watch it wherever/whenever I want without paying.
What will I do?
Today I'm using he 4th solution: use the VLC software ("illegal" software for DMCA) to make something morally right (buy/rent a DVD and play it). But let's not dream about it, DVDs will start to disppear and the next VLC like will be harder to code and more DMCA/EUCD risky.
The Cowon is filesystem based which is great because my mp3s are sorted by directory because they were downloaded in the days of audioglaxy and winamp 2 which didn't have a media library. The sorting I used was Genre>Artist>Filename. The iPod is id3 based and would sort this for me but a lot of my mp3s dont have any id3 info at all-and more to the point wouldn't make any difference in my case. So yes to me the interface of the iPod was not an important factor at all.
I remember those days when you downloaded an mp3 from any p2p network it was 99% sure the id3 will not existe or otherwise be screwed up, like the ID3 title field would contain the author's name and also the track number and all others would be empty. That was SO annoying. If there is something I can thank the iPod for, is that NOW thanks to iTunes and competition mimicking, ID3s are widspread and you don't have to spend too much time ID3 tagging your P2P downloaded files.
And correctly named, tagged mp3 files of good quality if a THING I would pay for (hear me RIAA). Unfortunatly, since you're only shipping music with CRAP included (DRM), which have no hope to play on my car, my ipod, my linux, windows and mac computers.... well...
I recall articles about some music publishers not liking the iTunes flat-rate price structure; so those providers may come on board. Also the Beatles (aka 'Apple records') have issues with iTunes (aka 'Apple omputer'), along with some governments. (France, I think).
Officially, France had issues with "interoperability". They were concerned that DRM protected content could only play on one platform. They wanted to oblige DRM providers to ensure that their DRM would work on any third party devices if they asked for it. This is nice for the consumer because it means "whatever you buy", you should be able to play it on "whatever device you own".
But DRM "by design" prevents interoperability... So there's a contradiction. I know everyone is focussing on Apple right now because they are successful, but if any other DRM (i mean C.R.A.P.) technology would take over Apple's, such a law would also threaten it. That's the contradiction. On one hand it prevents consumer to legally rip their own DVDs, and bypassing any DRM etc etc.... and on the other hand, they punish companies which do not give access to their DRM for making them interoperable.
In the final drafts of the law, this "interoperability" non-sense has of course disappeared, and the law (now in application) is as bad as DMCA. But it was done the French way, with a lot of promises (interopeability, no jail for p2p users etc...) which are long forgotten...
This is a cool hack, but i don't think it is "that" useful to replace a "laptop mouse".
:)
Laptops have builtin trackpads... I assume people who use a mouse because
1) they need a more precise + ergonomic device than the trackpad.
2) have a shitty trackpad on their computer.
In both cases, I wonder if my Nokia phone is really an improvement for problem 1 or 2...
The only "useful" application is to show of in front of your friends
The WMV flavors which were reverse engineered just work fine with VLC/Mplayer.
Well... if Microsoft would be "kind enough" to tell the rest of the world how the WMV3 video format works, we would not have to use their crappy window media player for mac, or now (since they gave up on that one), the flip4mac shareware/freeware..... and mplayer would not have to use native windows DLL on linux. Speaking of which, now Apple has moved to Intel, there's potential to do the same trick on Mac.
However if you have DRM embedded to your wonderful WMV file, you're screwed because basically only Microsoft Windows can read it... (and otherwise it is illegal thanks to DMCA/EUCD)
Now does that make it a better system? It's the same has asking if Word is a better Word Processor because it can read DOC files correctly... the eternal chicken/egg pb.
I sure hope Microsoft will copy the idea of "non-modal" "sizable" floating windows when it comes to the next version of office, or visual studio (sure i haven't tested the latest beta.. maybe it's there...) And whoever that comes from, whether they copied it or not.. i don't care, because it's real annoying, especially when you have a list with only 4 visible items and the windows size is about one tenth of the space available on your screen, and you just can't make it bigger because some smart ass decided it's not resizable!!!
:) ), but that pseudo micro kernel architecture which is not really one anymore and just adds 36 layers and different approach to kernel programming 1) does not really simplify the job of kernel developpers 2) performances are sluggish. Apple did a great job in Tiger by removing one funnel, and I was kind of hoping that after Tavenian left Apple, we would have a brand new kernel "mostly compatible" with what was there before... but much faster. I want a more "monolithic" apple/bsd and the mach ipc system (can't be removed and it's good).
Speaking of which, the awful "customize" toolbar window is one of them (first thing I use in a windows software to get read of the 4 toolbars with 80+ buttons i won't ever use.... and make my own with the only useful buttons). That thing in visual studio/office is HORRIBLE. So if Vista could add an API to do it cleanly like in OS X or XUL/Firefox, i'd be happy.
Drag and drop. Even before Macos X, Macos had a much more decent support of it... and this might be because of the underlaying APIs... Hope Vista will fix it.
And the last one, I want a "usable" spacial file manager... even gnome has a decent one now! Windows XP has only a limited support for it, which was not improved much from Win95, and in fact it is so annoying that I simply disable it and end up like all windows user, having that Giant explorer windows with my directories on the right...
===
Now here's my list to Apple for leopard.
Make this fucking kernel run faster! Ok the 64 support bit is great (copied from M$
Second, i would like some kind of virtualization manager included in the OS/kernel... I remember connectix made apple add some features in MacOS X for their virtual PC (vmm API), which disappeared on x86. It was ok, wonder why Apple threw it away... I guess the VMWare and Parrallel folks will have "each" to write their own hooks in a kext.. and make their own stuff... I would like an OS integration feature with a GUI level for "virtualized" machines and all that built-in in leopard, even if there is no apple virtualized machines.
JFS support.
NTFS writing support.
Security, I want a sandbox environment that I can trigger and watch for every application I use. Something that's builtin in safari 3, but i would rather have a Finder option "lauch in secure environement". That thing should write logs of what the application is doing and so on... and this option should be used by default to open any e-mail attachment / safari downloads... And all the bad guys that gave interest to Apple lately would be even more disgustted by the cost of writing crippleware for Mac, and would return to their well loved platform... Microsoft. And Apple could still say in their ads "no virus" on mac.
Just imagine the first landing on Mars, and the "lost video" message that will go with it some 100years later...
:)
NASA used a special high quality encoding scheme, which was not widespread in those days. In addtition it was protected by a DRM made by company "x", which went bankrupt some 30 years ago... well we have the file, maybe we could even reverse engineer the DRM, but it's illegal because of DMCA.... Sorry dudes, the recording are lost forever because we need to protect the copyright holder rights
I don't think this security thing has "anything" to do with Apple.
:) I don't believe Apple driver is able to use other cards...
They use an EXTERNAL wifi card, in a computer which has BUILT-IN wifi. So this card uses a DRIVER given by the manufacturer.. Chances are that the bug is in THIS driver. Chances are that THIS driver has the same bug in the windows/linux version. I suspect the classical buffer-overflow thing
Why would someone install an EXTERNAL card on a computer which already HAS INTERNAL WIFI anywy? How many Mac users are sensitive to such an attack? Not many... I would be more concerned if they did not plug this crappy card, but they did.
And everyone is talking about a failure discovered in Apple's system. Damn, it was a hell of a clever COMMUNICATION trick to use Apple hardware... Everyone talks about it. Everyone says Apple stuff is insecure although evidence tends to prove it's not even their fault. If the built-in card had the same flaw, then they should have shown it... And if they feared reprisals, they could simplly use a "no-name" windows box for the attack.
You can have the best system you wish, but anyone can write a closed source module or kernel extension that put you at risk. Period.
Microsoft is trying to solve the problem by siging drivers for the next Vista Windows. Apple does nothing at the moment. Linux says drivers should be opensource and that hooks used (for nvidia/ati drivers for instance... are illegal). Result: poor WIFI (and hardware) support on Linux....
There will always be junkies and thiefs and they do not always use ID theft even in the US where it is possible.
Chances are that if you suffer an agression, as bad as it is, you will be aware of it immediatly. Some for loosing stuff... whereas ID theft can go one for a while without you noticing it.
As for magnetic stipe, the only reason there is such a thing in France or Germany is to be compatible with "international" low security crap. Fact is, all cash machines as old as they are (in fact they are not since we changed to Euro a few years ago) will ask for your PIN. So if you card has a stripe, the only way to use it is to go abroad.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but I feel confotable that ID theft is NOT really possible.
As a European I still found amazing that you can "steal" someone else's identity by just getting his name and a social security number...
:) And knows what? Normal payment cards are more secure because we use a Chip and a PIN code so you can't duplicate the magnetic stripe in 15 seconds...
:)
In Europe, if you want to open a bank account, apply for a credit card, or any other credit you MUST show your ID in person (you know those ID cards that scare you...). The only thing that's really insecure are credit cards, but payments with your mere number over 100 euros are reimbursed if there's a fraud, which is quite easy to prove when the delivery address is not yours
Ok it's not perfect, but you'll never hear about someone getting strip of his money because he gave his name and a funny number to someone. Good old Europe
Well if you look at the timeframe between the widespread of "word" for the "dummy" secretaries, and the time for ODF to be in use... It's what? 15 years?
:) Downloadable music and movies for cheap and no DRM, no fucking M$/APPLE/SONY tax. No fucking Microsoft windows needed to watch movie, read ebook, play songs...
Same thinking for DRMs. Will it take another 20 yrs before we have legislations that outlaw them? 2026? Well.. I can leave with a 20yr gap without a music/video purchase. But can the RIAA and MPAA?
It's good to see that sooner or later ppl get to understand technology, and can easily get rid of abuse in a few years..
I can't help but dream of the day with all that crap outlawed: HDMI, DRM, zones on DVD, TV websites no longer blocked coz u cannot watch the program outside of the US
Well if you look at the timeframe between the widespread of "word" for the "dummy" secretaries, and the time for ODF to be in use... It's what? 15 years?
:) Downloadable music and movies for cheap and no DRM, no M$/APPLE/SONY tax.
Plus concurrence is back. Word is buggy and the GUI sucsk. It's not hard to do a better job, but the bottleneck is compatibility with "word" format. So what? Well. Concurrence is again possible on the word processor market. Hurra!!
Same thinking for DRMs. they're just starting out of she shelves. Will it take another 20 yrs before we have legislations that outlaw them? 2026? Well.. I can leave with a 20yrs gap without a music-video purchase. But can the RIAA and MPAA?
It's good to see that sooner or later ppl get to understand technology, and can easily get rid of abuse in a few years..
I can't help but dream of the day with HDMI, DRM, zones on DVD, TV websites no longer blocked coz u cannot watch the program outside of the US
Erling Ellingsen has also been playing with the sudden motion and ambient light sensors. He hacked a Virtual Desktop tool, where you have to hit the laptop, or put your hand over a sensitive area, in order to change desktops.
l
http://blog.medallia.com/2006/05/smacbook_pro.htm
What is bad about email is that it's not always obvious to know whether some email is spam or not. And there is also the risk of phising.
:)
Obviously it's no concern here. If they have to make it cheap, they'll use no operator and revert to pre-recorded messages. You will know right away if the person is "human" or a "recorded message"... as long as machines fail the Turing test
There is nothing new about it. Junk calls existed before VOIP.
Maybe they should sue CISCO? Ah no... too big of a fish. :)
I understand that the removal was automatic with ReplayTV and is not with Tivo. My point was in both cases it's piece of cake to skip ads. So I wondered why they got troubles: I guess it has more to do with the commercial programs of the affiliates not being bocked/replaced than merely erasing ads.
:)
As for the technical solution, I wonder how the automatic skipping is done. A friend of mine was working on mplayer/memcoder based software to do that (research in a French university), and there was only one public station in France which used the inband markers. All other stations and especially commercial ones were not using those markers to be sure the ads could not be easily removed. My friend got mixed results and used a set of heurisitcs which detected "blank/cut images" and also a thing that does not exist in the US called "jinggle screens". Those screens are mandatory in France to warn TV watchers when commercials are about to start or stop: basically it's just a scree saying "advertisement" with some music and some channel's logo.
I wonder what is the situation in the US right now. Are those inband commonly used or not?
I tend to agree with you about TV ads. But since I moved to Germany, I tend to watch TV even less (I got some issues with German language) and the local netflix (Amango) aside from being outrageously expensive does not have BSG grrrr!!! I somehow left the US while season 2 was about to start they still don't have season 1 here. I'm a bit pissed off. Needless to say.. And I can't watch Alias either, not even on the web since it detects I have a foreign IP... And last thing, good thing VLC exist, or I would have had to buy a new laptop to read DVDs from Germany because of that zoning crap... Well i have the good beer though
Whenever I use a VCR to record something, I really enjoy the fast forward to skip ads. In fact, I usually prefer using the VCR than watching the thing live for that very reason...
So I wonder. Does Tivo prevent you to make a fast-forward? Otherwise, wtf about this ad skipping capability... no one is gonna watch ads if they have the ability to skip them by pressing a button. No? Am wrong?
Sometimes this country is weird to understand.
9 6&pid=813
On one hand the laws let people get driving license at 16, which is a huge responsibility, but forbide them to drink alcohol until 21. Somehow young americans are adult enough to drive a large truck (which could potentially kill people), but too much of a child to learn how drink decently in a bar.
The sight of a boob sickens the good thinking of this society, whereas the US is the international headquarters of pornography. A boob flash caused a very nice and mild foreign movie called Amelie to get an "R" rating, but the Da Vinci code with its graphic pictures is PG 13... (Audrey Tautou plays in both).
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp?ID=107
How do you want young people to ever become adult, if you take out all the responsibilities for them? Stop dreaming, a society of pious and virgin devouts will NEVER exist. They will always be temptations in this world, but I prefer to be an adult teaching my kids how to grow up in a free world were such things exist rather than in an oppressive one that demonize them hypocritically.
Sex, boobs, violence, but also war in Iraq are realities. I don't want the government think that I'm too stupid to raise my kids correctly, and that my kids are too stupid to cope with that. And moreover, I guess money could be used better than paying those morons to review (=censor) movies, games or whatever the hell they are doing.
Already in process.
Since EBay bought Skype, new features were only added to the windows version (like the video).
In fact, I still use an older version on OS X because it is less BUGGY than the newer, and I hate this clumsy blue login screen inside the user window. The "echo cancellation" feature has also vanished (instead of bug-fixing it).
On windows they have also played some dirty tricks to limitate usage of the software on AMD processors.
I'm already planning to kiss their ass good bye when my skypein subscription is over. Some other VOIP software exist.
I heard about Wengo. It's a GPL crossplatform one. And "oh miracle" has video on Mac and Linux too. It's likely to be my next VOIP.
http://www.openwengo.org/
at least we know for sure they homepage would not be overloaded with activex, and proprietary crappy HTML code... since they dropped IE on Mac.
:P
no seriously. Who cares about these homepage stuff anyway? The first thing I do is put google, whatever portal was there before... (and the day they piss me off, i'll have no problem putting something else as my first page..;)
i know i know.. a lot of people must care about it, or there would not be such a war. But I will never understand advertising nor marketing I guess.
I read this article a couple of months ago that compare M$ XML and OpenDocument
1 44611543
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125
For those who are too lazy to read, here's a brief summary of the main differences between the two formats:
- m$ tags are 2-3 letters long and not readble
- m$ format looks more like a dump of the binary structure, and makes no attempt to separate content and style
The author was already feeling the size argument coming for m$ format, which is nonsense because both formats are compressed anyway and a XML should be readable.. but somehow, he was not expecting the "speed" issue.
Come on. If you wish something "efficient", use a binary format. If you start having a textual XML + compression, then obviously speed is not your concern. What's your concern then? Readability, processing by third party tools. In that case separation of content and style is more important. Who cares that "stuff" is written in Helvetica 12 black. I personally prefer to know it's a "title". And so on..
As for the speed, on today's computer which are virtually 1000x faster than required for typesetting document, this is laughafable. In addition, for large documents, I know many "word" addicts who separate documents in 100pages portions or so, because it become impossible to handle...
What I think about m$ XML, is that. well. it's not that bad. Even though not really "open", it's still better than before. But comon. This was done in a "rush", to fight back open document initiative. And in that case, dumping dummily the "internal binary structure" into a XML document was making more sense for them. There's nearly no development cost involved (no reasearch whatsoever) and it could be implemented very quckly.
Then Yates come and talk about "customer experience" (cf ZDNET article).. This is laughfable.
Regarding "customer experience", when will word support a real vector image format (no WMF crap please). like let's say EPS/PS/PDF... ? I personally hate having to make a raster of my images and make the word document explode in size (when i'm FORCED to use word).
2030?
It's not as closed as you think. It used to be, but things have changed a lot in the last 10 years.
c les/viewarticle.jsp?id=13374
I find it actually much easier. Somehow, when I open a PC I'm often scared by the spaghetti cables spreading everywhere, and the poor general design.. well there's no general design "each component was not mean to be with the others".
Have a look at my old G4, everything is neat and clean and the cables are not an inch longer or shorter than they should be, and attached on the box:
http://audiovideo.consumerelectronicsnet.com/arti
I don't want to start a flame war, I'm sure any PC builder could to the same thing (and I would really appreciate it), but so far I have not seen comparable. (I like those Shuttles though)
Now seriously, there's no longer any major architectural differences between a PC and a Mac. A Mac is a PC so you can buy your components anywhere. It can even boot windows. come on..
* memory, hard drives, optical drives: no more problem than on PC.
* cpu: not really easy to change. Even worse for motherboards. I think that issue is not as open as in the PC world, but the move to Intel will probably improve things.
* gfx: i have a radeon 8500 for PC working on an older G4. I had to flash the firmware of the gfx (because Mac BIOS was/is different) and be sure it'd work with the drivers on OS X. It's entirely up to the gfx manufacturers to support these, but truth is, it's not "that" easy to use PC's gfx just like that. ATI and GeForce are charging a lot for their Mac editions... (but Macs are by no way a gamer's machine anyway).
I must say I did not have a look at the code... Anyway, I remember the guys from MySQL complaining about speed issues. Seeing numerous benchmarks etc etc... And also a bit of my personal experience. Generally I/O and memory management on MacOS X are less efficient than on Linux or Windows and it's the fault of the kernel Now this is important and critical for some persons, and it's not for others, or there would not be many Macs around these days :)