You're talking about bugs that cause your application to crash or destructively malfunction in some way. ACID tests bugs that might cause the menu to be 3 pixels further left than you want it. And the funny part is that as long as all browsers have difference, you'll STILL need to test on all browsers (for JS issues alone if nothing else), so you'll notice the ACID-type bugs long before putting the site live.
This doesn't test "the standard", this tests one particular facet of it: how you handle errors in code.
No browser can implement "the standard" until W3C or someone makes a reference implementation that displays the page according to the standard-- guaranteed. Then Firefox, IE, Safari, etc can just match the reference implementation and everyone's happy.
Of course that'll never happen, because it makes too much damned sense and this is the web.
Maybe they're too busy adding actual features to the browser instead of competing in pointless tests to show how well it'll handle crazy error conditions that'll never actually happen on the web-at-large. God forbid.
In the (terrible) movie, the mainframe computer that ran the "vortex" was named The Tabernacle, and its interface was small crystaline rings incorporating a projector. To see Tabernacle's output, you just aimed your ring at a nearby flat surface. (Or someone's forehead in a couple scenes.)
The candidate I saw leveraging the power of the Internet the most, early in this election, was Ron Paul -- and it looked like most people just used it to smear the guy. EG. "Nobody but spammers and a few computer geeks with loud mouths care about him!"
Uh, didn't the primaries kind of reinforce that opinion? When he gets 1% of the actual vote in the primaries, but has 50% of the comments on the Internet, what else would you expect those people to say? It's not a smear, it's an observation.
You know who else did great online? Howard Dean. All that shows me is that it's a bad idea to campaign primarily (or maybe even at all!) online... stick with the campaign trail and let the online world handle itself.
Nobody writes software *for* charity. That's a licensing program for already-written commercial software. Your little example there doesn't refute the original statement at all.
What do you mean a network that doesn't exist? An NFS or CIFS mount? I've never had these problems, but I don't have any remote file shares mounted at home either.
I worded it poorly. What I mean is that my laptop was connected to a share at work, available on that particular network but on no others. I sleep the laptop, then take it onto my commuter train with the sometimes-unreliable network connection. The first time Finder tries to do anything with the fileshare, it freezes solid for several minutes.
I don't know or care what acronym the network drive was using. I just want my computer to work, and Apple's software foiled that.
The only problems I've had with.Mac are related to syncing, but I can imagine how a slow link could possibly lead to UI delays.
It freezes the Finder the first time you touch a.Mac volume on an unreliable network connection. I think it's trying to retrieve a catalog of what icons it should be showing, but I don't know for sure. All I know is, it's doesn't fucking work. It also has huge, glaring syncing errors... like the time it decreed that all 10,000+ files on my.Mac volume had "changed" because either their server's clock, or my desktop clock, had gotten off for a minute, then asked me to resync Every Goddamned File individually.
And, of course, there was the whole ".Mac will be free forever! Now that all your data's on it, we're charging $100 for it, suckers" thing.
Out of curiosity, what have you tried to troubleshoot these issues?
Nothing. Debugging Apple's issues is their problem, not mine. I just moved to Windows, which can cope with fileshares in a sane manner.
And from my experience, as well, they're both about equally common on both OSes. "Yah, that was sarcasm." Is it really necessary for me to say I was being sarcastic? Of course they are nearly the same thing, what's the point? When someone's computer locks up, it's locked up. BSODs aren't the butt of so many jokes because they are BLUE, but because they were so common, particularly in Win95-98. No one needs to be told a kernel panic is the same as a BSOD to understand how frustrating it is.
Look, if you want to communicate clearly, don't type something obviously sarcastic then say it's sarcastic. Since sarcasm cancels out sarcasm, that's confusing as hell.
What are you talking about? The Dock works FINE for me! I'm really having a hard time understanding your frustration here. I really like my dock, and I have quite a bit of experience with many different OS interfaces. I don't know what to say to you. It's not the end-all-be-all UI, but what the heck is so wrong with it?
The changes in UI between MS Office XP (which they're mostly using now), 2003 and especially 2007 are big enough that I have to retrain my users to use them, and frankly the cost of training my users to use 2007 is enough that I've been seriously considering moving them to OpenOffice.org.
I'm calling bunk on that for two reasons: 1) Office 2003 was virtually identical to Office 2000. Cost of retraining: $0. 2) Office 2007's UI is a better interface among every single Office user I've talked to. And that's in a company that has no training on Office at all. Of course determining this involves getting out of your little IT Manager office and actually talking to your users... why not try a pilot program with a couple secretaries and see how it works out?
I think the real reason is one of: * You really, really hate Microsoft * You're cheap and don't want to pay for upgrades.
Those are fine reasons, but at least don't delude yourself into thinking you're doing your users some kind of favor by keeping them on Office 2000. Tell your accounting department that Office 2007 supports a million rows in Excel and they'll be knocking down your door.
And BTW, if you move your users to OpenOffice, they'll hate you. It has crappy Track Changes support and Mail Merge, it has no "Normal View" for typing documents, it fucks up the Word Count feature in languages other than English, it won't run any of the VBA scripts they've built up over the years, and that's ignoring the horrible performance issues.
And also BTW, there isn't a standard file format because none of the formats proposed for standardization, except Microsoft's own, actually support all the features of Word. Joel On Software covered this recently: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html... to be able to read Office files 100% correctly, your program needs to support every feature Office has and every feature Office *had* in the past. That's millions of man-hours worth of coding, and right now there's pretty much only one product that can claim that kind of feature-parity: Office.
Are you seriously an IT Manager? Do you make your users jobs easier or harder?
Except Office, using their horrible nasty proprietary file formats that give Slashdotters nightmares, is already better than all of the competition. Unless you know about some competing product I'm not aware of. Office is good because it has decades of development behind it, because Microsoft surveys their users and does on-site tests to find out what works and what doesn't (thus the new UI in 2007), and because Microsoft hires very smart people to design the features (for example, the statistical features in Excel that are unmatched in any other spreadsheet program.)
What makes you think that opening up file formats of all things would suddenly make 50 competitors to Office appear out of the woodwork and put pressure on Microsoft?
Actually, I'd really like to hear from someone why the hell I should care. 140+ comments on some crazy test that shows conditions that will never actually arise in actual websites, and, to boot, doesn't have any guarantee that the browser can render *correct* code correctly? This is a total waste of time.
I'd much rather Microsoft, or any browser maker, put in actual features rather than spending all their time testing obscure error conditions that'll never come up in practice.
Give some examples please. The biggest example that comes to my mind are sleep and hibernation modes. Mac desktops and laptops both come out of sleep quicker and connect to my wireless network far quicker than any PC I've ever had. My dell laptops take a full minute or two to connect to my WAP from wakeup. As for hibernation, I wont speak for Vista, but XP and back are absolutely f'ing horrible, while Macs do it flawlessly. Blame it on 3rd party software, USB devices, docks, whatever, Windows hibernation sucks and we all know it.
Yeah, it takes OS X 3 seconds to wake from sleep instead of 10 seconds in Vista or XP. But then Finder utterly freezes for 4 minutes trying to connect to a network that no longer exists. Then when Finder's done, it's.mac's turn to freeze for several minutes because the network connection on the train is somewhat unreliable. (They can't both freeze at the same time, they have to take turns.)
I'm pretty OS-neutral, but I'd much rather have a Windows machine that can cope with network changes than a Mac that freezes constantly.
"Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death". Oh, really???? Yah, that was sarcasm.
How isn't it? Either way, it's a hardware or low-level driver fault that puts the OS into a state where it can't continue-- it's the same damn thing. The only difference is that Windows gives some vaguely useful debugging information when it happens, and OS X opts for the user-friendly option of just saying "please restart."
And from my experience, as well, they're both about equally common on both OSes.
Make the dock smaller, turn on auto-hide? It's a 12" screen, deal with it. Have you seen a Start Menu on a 12" screen?? I'll forgive you only because the Dock options are so hidden. It's under "System Preferences", then "Dock", then use the "Dock Size" slider, and "Automatically hide and show the Dock" checkbox. Yah, I was being sarca.... never mind.
Ok, if you can't admit the Dock sucks, then you're one of those Mac users we're talking about. The Dock sucks, Finder really sucks, printer support sucks. There are lots of things in OS X that suck. (Not to say the Windows/Linux solution is any better. For instance, Linux printer support sucks even more than Apple's. And none of the systems allow you to simply drag&drop a stalled print job from one printer to another-- that sucks all-around!)
Not ALL apps work this way. Why in God's name does it drive you crazy anyway? The dock is not a task bar, quit dragging dumb Windows habits into this.
You're certainly showing that Mac users aren't stuck-up snobs! Christ.
Look, the real reason is that it's historical. Historically, Macintosh applications don't quit (i.e. remove themselves from memory) until you select Quit from the file menu, regardless of how many windows they have open. Now some Macintosh applications will actually behave like Windows applications in this area, but most still follow the old conventions. There's no reason to believe that the Windows/Linux way of doing this is "superior" to the Macintosh way.
In fact, with all the DLL caching and such that Windows Vista does, there's really no difference between leaving an OS X application open (even with no windows) and closing a Windows application-- either way, the system will be able to swap to it better in the future, since it knows you're interested in that application still.
Again, "I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac" is hysterical dude. The Windows Task Bar was last useful in the Windows 95/98 days with memory constrained machines. Those were the days when it was useful to keep tabs on the exact number of and type of applications running so your PC didn't run out of memory. On modern machines with upward of 2 freaking gigs of RAM, is that still a useful interface? I do work on Windows, and even I've learned to drop my old "must close everything when I'm done with it" behavior. Of
Ok I'll be the first to admit that this is greek to me. Someone smart figure this out and post a comment translating patentese into english.
Well, if it was a patent from Microsoft, it would mean the instant someone performed a search, if they were a child they would be put in forced contact with a sex offender. Adults just get kicked in the genitals.
But since it's Google, I assume it means that if someone performs a search and they were a child, colorful balloons fall from the ceiling and magical unicorns whisk them instantly away to Disneyland.
Stop letting off hot air on the dumbass article. See installing fedora core 8 on hyper-v . Even Ubuntu server is being used by people on HyperV. SUSE is supported in the sense of calling up MS's support desk and talking to them about it. But Linux distributions work just fine. This is just MS's way of telling people that they're on their own if they try other distributions(this is usually true for Linux servers anyway).
In the Microsoft world, "unsupported" means literally "we do not support this." i.e. "if you call us for support on this, we won't answer your question." There are a million things that Microsoft doesn't support, but still work perfectly-- Microsoft doesn't support typing in an IP address to Windows Remote Desktop Client, to use a particularly strange example I came across a few years ago, and yet it works fine and always has.
I don't know what Linux people think "unsupported" means, but they have the wrong idea whatever it is.
Starsiege Tribes is/was perhaps the greatest team-based FPS game ever made. It had no copy protection. A massive percentage of the people playing online where software pirates. Or remember the recent news about Halo on Macintosh? For every copy they sold, there was a pirate copy out.
Saying that piracy on games is no problem at all is ridiculous if you know anything about the industry.
Now, that said, there's a definite argument about *how much* piracy is enough. For instance, it's enough on Xbox to have the disk in the drive, but for PC games you have to also enter a serial key as well. I'm calling that twice as annoying as requiring a disk alone. Then again, if you have a laptop, you'd probably love to be able to just use a serial key and not need the disk... you can play your games anywhere your laptop is without lugging disks around. It's a delicate balance.
(There's also the technical issue that a PC game, even one that's virtually identical to a Xbox game like Oblivion, requires massive quantities of disk space when on Xbox it requires almost no disk space... WTF game developers? If Oblivion doesn't require a HD on Xbox, why does it on PC? It's the SAME GAME!)
I used to be a huge PC gamer, but the combination of PC game companies that don't give a flying crap about the quality of their product, and intrusive and buggy cheat/copy protection, I've moved almost entirely to the Xbox unless the PC game is free. I mean, Vista's been out and in betas for well over a year, and PunkBuster still isn't Vista-compatible!? Christ. Why the hell does *any* video game require administrative access? Blizzard, the only games company that seems capable of producing half-decent software, doesn't require administrative access for World of Warcraft... how come a FPS game like America's Army does?!
I mean, some Xbox games suck, but at least they're thoroughly tested to make sure they don't crash every 10 minutes.
The PC gaming industry is pathetic. We can only hope Microsoft's Games For Windows certifications introduces them to the concept of "products that don't suck ass" soon... when that happens, you can find me playing my Xbox.
Publishers, and sometimes even retailers, require some level of copy protection also. Sure, Galactic Civilizations is a huge famous video game with no copy protection... but where is it sold? I've never seen it at Target or Fred Meyer. (Admittedly, they have a small game selection.)
Why are you all talking about music? This is in the GAMES section! Talk about video games, PLEASE! (There are already dozens of stories about music piracy every week, please wait for one of those to talk about music, thank you.)
When the bullshit gets TOO thick there's pushback. We've been hearing nothing but lies and FUD about Vista from day one on this site, and people (now that they've actually used it awhile and saw the lies for what they were) are sick of it. Even on Slashdot.
Alas, in Civ, Superconductor only leads to spaceship parts. Civ doesn't have any weapons we haven't actually invented yet (or at least mostly-invented.)
Interestingly, this is Raymond Chen's argument against open source: that developers would then dig into the Windows source code looking for undocumented side-effects, data structures and other crap, use them on production programs, then Microsoft would never, ever be able to change or fix them in the future. I don't know how (or even if) the Linux community solves this problem, but it's a pretty sensible concern from my point of view. It's better for programmers to follow the prescribed methods, which leaves room for the OS maker to improve whatever they want internally.
I think it is going to be great for teaching new users, but it will frustrate people who already knew how to use office, and also those who try to learn on their own, as they go.
Have you talked to heavy Office users who have upgraded from 2003 to 2007? We have several dozen in our office, and I've yet to hear one complaint about the change. I think Microsoft nailed the Ribbon almost 100%. (You bring up a good issue, but it's a pretty esoteric one as well.)
There are a lot of grumpy old men on Slashdot who will resist every change tooth and nail, regardless of how positive it is. For instance, your suggestion that you're almost on the verge of dumping Explorer and going back to the CLI.
(BTW, I have no clue what you're talking about there. Big round button in the corner? Do you mean the Start Menu? Hitting the "magic" alt button shows the XP-style menu for the window, but did you actually use that in XP? Other than the first time to set view options, I think I went my entire 2000 and XP career without ever using any items from that menu.)
Yeah; can you name me a program to open those in Windows? I have a bunch of.pages files that are completely inaccessible to me, and I've Googled far and wide. Maybe I'm using the wrong keywords, but all I can find are suggestions to open the documents in Pages and export them into RTF or Word format-- that's great, but until Pages runs on Windows, it doesn't help me much.
It's one thing to say "it's a really easy format" and yet another to have a program that can actually read the damned things. As far as I'm concerned, Pages documents are as closed as anything else.
Sure. Tons of people do. XCode, Visual Studio, and Eclipse all support it.
Version control, as is done with code, should be done on a content management server in an office environment.
That's a huge pain in the ass. To view edits with comments, you'd need to download both Word files, open them both up while also keeping the CMS open, and flip back and forth between each window. Using Word's built-in functionality, it's all in one single document on one screen. (And yes, you can view revisions side-by-side if you want.)
Doing it in the doc itself leads to a mess,
It does the way OpenOffice does it, it screws up pagination. Word does it just fine.
and if you need to share with 3rd parties, disclosure of things you likely didn't want to disclose.
That's a valid point, but you just have to be careful when you save it.
Slashdot Mirror
Apples to oranges, coward.
You're talking about bugs that cause your application to crash or destructively malfunction in some way. ACID tests bugs that might cause the menu to be 3 pixels further left than you want it. And the funny part is that as long as all browsers have difference, you'll STILL need to test on all browsers (for JS issues alone if nothing else), so you'll notice the ACID-type bugs long before putting the site live.
Sorry, I think these ACID tests are near-useless.
This doesn't test "the standard", this tests one particular facet of it: how you handle errors in code.
No browser can implement "the standard" until W3C or someone makes a reference implementation that displays the page according to the standard-- guaranteed. Then Firefox, IE, Safari, etc can just match the reference implementation and everyone's happy.
Of course that'll never happen, because it makes too much damned sense and this is the web.
Maybe they're too busy adding actual features to the browser instead of competing in pointless tests to show how well it'll handle crazy error conditions that'll never actually happen on the web-at-large. God forbid.
Zardoz!
http://schend.net/images/movies/zardoz_tabernacle.png
In the (terrible) movie, the mainframe computer that ran the "vortex" was named The Tabernacle, and its interface was small crystaline rings incorporating a projector. To see Tabernacle's output, you just aimed your ring at a nearby flat surface. (Or someone's forehead in a couple scenes.)
Terrible movie, but decent sci-fi prediction.
The candidate I saw leveraging the power of the Internet the most, early in this election, was Ron Paul -- and it looked like most people just used it to smear the guy. EG. "Nobody but spammers and a few computer geeks with loud mouths care about him!"
Uh, didn't the primaries kind of reinforce that opinion? When he gets 1% of the actual vote in the primaries, but has 50% of the comments on the Internet, what else would you expect those people to say? It's not a smear, it's an observation.
You know who else did great online? Howard Dean. All that shows me is that it's a bad idea to campaign primarily (or maybe even at all!) online... stick with the campaign trail and let the online world handle itself.
Its slow
Faster than all its competition.
bloated
Nope.
ugly
Matter of opinion, I guess. I think you're thinking of Office 2003, which was most certainly ugly.
difficult to use
Nope, Office 2007 has a new interface that's easier to use than any Office version before it. Thus the innovation.
and buggy
Nope.
Uh, Office 2007?
I can refute your argument with a single product name.
Nobody writes software *for* charity. That's a licensing program for already-written commercial software. Your little example there doesn't refute the original statement at all.
What do you mean a network that doesn't exist? An NFS or CIFS mount? I've never had these problems, but I don't have any remote file shares mounted at home either.
.Mac are related to syncing, but I can imagine how a slow link could possibly lead to UI delays.
.Mac volume on an unreliable network connection. I think it's trying to retrieve a catalog of what icons it should be showing, but I don't know for sure. All I know is, it's doesn't fucking work. It also has huge, glaring syncing errors... like the time it decreed that all 10,000+ files on my .Mac volume had "changed" because either their server's clock, or my desktop clock, had gotten off for a minute, then asked me to resync Every Goddamned File individually.
.Mac stopping my system from logging out by freezing. Typically, I'd wake up to find out that, because of this error, my computer had spent the entire night turned on when I was trying to turn it off.
I worded it poorly. What I mean is that my laptop was connected to a share at work, available on that particular network but on no others. I sleep the laptop, then take it onto my commuter train with the sometimes-unreliable network connection. The first time Finder tries to do anything with the fileshare, it freezes solid for several minutes.
I don't know or care what acronym the network drive was using. I just want my computer to work, and Apple's software foiled that.
The only problems I've had with
It freezes the Finder the first time you touch a
Here's a few screenshots I took:
http://schend.net/images/blog_materials/iDisk%20Sucks%20-%20deleting%20for%2012%20solid%20hours%20only%20half%20done.png
This screenshot was taken AFTER the delete operation had been run for a solid 12 hours and hadn't yet finished
http://schend.net/images/blog_materials/iDisk%20sucks%20-%20deleting%20negative%20files.png
The lovely "-133 files remaining" dialog
http://schend.net/images/blog_materials/idisk%20sucks%20-%20sync%20error.png
And, of course, there was the whole ".Mac will be free forever! Now that all your data's on it, we're charging $100 for it, suckers" thing.
Out of curiosity, what have you tried to troubleshoot these issues?
Nothing. Debugging Apple's issues is their problem, not mine. I just moved to Windows, which can cope with fileshares in a sane manner.
And from my experience, as well, they're both about equally common on both OSes.
"Yah, that was sarcasm." Is it really necessary for me to say I was being sarcastic? Of course they are nearly the same thing, what's the point? When someone's computer locks up, it's locked up. BSODs aren't the butt of so many jokes because they are BLUE, but because they were so common, particularly in Win95-98. No one needs to be told a kernel panic is the same as a BSOD to understand how frustrating it is.
Look, if you want to communicate clearly, don't type something obviously sarcastic then say it's sarcastic. Since sarcasm cancels out sarcasm, that's confusing as hell.
What are you talking about? The Dock works FINE for me! I'm really having a hard time understanding your frustration here. I really like my dock, and I have quite a bit of experience with many different OS interfaces. I don't know what to say to you. It's not the end-all-be-all UI, but what the heck is so wrong with it?
I told you to Google for it, but you didn't. Here's Tog's take:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
Ars Technica has had great coverage of this issue since OS
The changes in UI between MS Office XP (which they're mostly using now), 2003 and especially 2007 are big enough that I have to retrain my users to use them, and frankly the cost of training my users to use 2007 is enough that I've been seriously considering moving them to OpenOffice.org.
... to be able to read Office files 100% correctly, your program needs to support every feature Office has and every feature Office *had* in the past. That's millions of man-hours worth of coding, and right now there's pretty much only one product that can claim that kind of feature-parity: Office.
I'm calling bunk on that for two reasons:
1) Office 2003 was virtually identical to Office 2000. Cost of retraining: $0.
2) Office 2007's UI is a better interface among every single Office user I've talked to. And that's in a company that has no training on Office at all. Of course determining this involves getting out of your little IT Manager office and actually talking to your users... why not try a pilot program with a couple secretaries and see how it works out?
I think the real reason is one of:
* You really, really hate Microsoft
* You're cheap and don't want to pay for upgrades.
Those are fine reasons, but at least don't delude yourself into thinking you're doing your users some kind of favor by keeping them on Office 2000. Tell your accounting department that Office 2007 supports a million rows in Excel and they'll be knocking down your door.
And BTW, if you move your users to OpenOffice, they'll hate you. It has crappy Track Changes support and Mail Merge, it has no "Normal View" for typing documents, it fucks up the Word Count feature in languages other than English, it won't run any of the VBA scripts they've built up over the years, and that's ignoring the horrible performance issues.
And also BTW, there isn't a standard file format because none of the formats proposed for standardization, except Microsoft's own, actually support all the features of Word. Joel On Software covered this recently: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
Are you seriously an IT Manager? Do you make your users jobs easier or harder?
Except Office, using their horrible nasty proprietary file formats that give Slashdotters nightmares, is already better than all of the competition. Unless you know about some competing product I'm not aware of. Office is good because it has decades of development behind it, because Microsoft surveys their users and does on-site tests to find out what works and what doesn't (thus the new UI in 2007), and because Microsoft hires very smart people to design the features (for example, the statistical features in Excel that are unmatched in any other spreadsheet program.)
What makes you think that opening up file formats of all things would suddenly make 50 competitors to Office appear out of the woodwork and put pressure on Microsoft?
Actually, I'd really like to hear from someone why the hell I should care. 140+ comments on some crazy test that shows conditions that will never actually arise in actual websites, and, to boot, doesn't have any guarantee that the browser can render *correct* code correctly? This is a total waste of time.
I'd much rather Microsoft, or any browser maker, put in actual features rather than spending all their time testing obscure error conditions that'll never come up in practice.
Give some examples please. The biggest example that comes to my mind are sleep and hibernation modes. Mac desktops and laptops both come out of sleep quicker and connect to my wireless network far quicker than any PC I've ever had. My dell laptops take a full minute or two to connect to my WAP from wakeup. As for hibernation, I wont speak for Vista, but XP and back are absolutely f'ing horrible, while Macs do it flawlessly. Blame it on 3rd party software, USB devices, docks, whatever, Windows hibernation sucks and we all know it.
.mac's turn to freeze for several minutes because the network connection on the train is somewhat unreliable. (They can't both freeze at the same time, they have to take turns.)
Yeah, it takes OS X 3 seconds to wake from sleep instead of 10 seconds in Vista or XP. But then Finder utterly freezes for 4 minutes trying to connect to a network that no longer exists. Then when Finder's done, it's
I'm pretty OS-neutral, but I'd much rather have a Windows machine that can cope with network changes than a Mac that freezes constantly.
"Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death".
Oh, really???? Yah, that was sarcasm.
How isn't it? Either way, it's a hardware or low-level driver fault that puts the OS into a state where it can't continue-- it's the same damn thing. The only difference is that Windows gives some vaguely useful debugging information when it happens, and OS X opts for the user-friendly option of just saying "please restart."
And from my experience, as well, they're both about equally common on both OSes.
Make the dock smaller, turn on auto-hide? It's a 12" screen, deal with it. Have you seen a Start Menu on a 12" screen??
I'll forgive you only because the Dock options are so hidden.
It's under "System Preferences", then "Dock", then use the "Dock Size" slider, and "Automatically hide and show the Dock" checkbox.
Yah, I was being sarca.... never mind.
Ok, if you can't admit the Dock sucks, then you're one of those Mac users we're talking about. The Dock sucks, Finder really sucks, printer support sucks. There are lots of things in OS X that suck. (Not to say the Windows/Linux solution is any better. For instance, Linux printer support sucks even more than Apple's. And none of the systems allow you to simply drag&drop a stalled print job from one printer to another-- that sucks all-around!)
Not ALL apps work this way. Why in God's name does it drive you crazy anyway? The dock is not a task bar, quit dragging dumb Windows habits into this.
You're certainly showing that Mac users aren't stuck-up snobs! Christ.
Look, the real reason is that it's historical. Historically, Macintosh applications don't quit (i.e. remove themselves from memory) until you select Quit from the file menu, regardless of how many windows they have open. Now some Macintosh applications will actually behave like Windows applications in this area, but most still follow the old conventions. There's no reason to believe that the Windows/Linux way of doing this is "superior" to the Macintosh way.
In fact, with all the DLL caching and such that Windows Vista does, there's really no difference between leaving an OS X application open (even with no windows) and closing a Windows application-- either way, the system will be able to swap to it better in the future, since it knows you're interested in that application still.
Again, "I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac" is hysterical dude. The Windows Task Bar was last useful in the Windows 95/98 days with memory constrained machines. Those were the days when it was useful to keep tabs on the exact number of and type of applications running so your PC didn't run out of memory. On modern machines with upward of 2 freaking gigs of RAM, is that still a useful interface? I do work on Windows, and even I've learned to drop my old "must close everything when I'm done with it" behavior. Of
Ok I'll be the first to admit that this is greek to me. Someone smart figure this out and post a comment translating patentese into english.
Well, if it was a patent from Microsoft, it would mean the instant someone performed a search, if they were a child they would be put in forced contact with a sex offender. Adults just get kicked in the genitals.
But since it's Google, I assume it means that if someone performs a search and they were a child, colorful balloons fall from the ceiling and magical unicorns whisk them instantly away to Disneyland.
Stop letting off hot air on the dumbass article. See installing fedora core 8 on hyper-v . Even Ubuntu server is being used by people on HyperV. SUSE is supported in the sense of calling up MS's support desk and talking to them about it. But Linux distributions work just fine. This is just MS's way of telling people that they're on their own if they try other distributions(this is usually true for Linux servers anyway).
In the Microsoft world, "unsupported" means literally "we do not support this." i.e. "if you call us for support on this, we won't answer your question." There are a million things that Microsoft doesn't support, but still work perfectly-- Microsoft doesn't support typing in an IP address to Windows Remote Desktop Client, to use a particularly strange example I came across a few years ago, and yet it works fine and always has.
I don't know what Linux people think "unsupported" means, but they have the wrong idea whatever it is.
Starsiege Tribes is/was perhaps the greatest team-based FPS game ever made. It had no copy protection. A massive percentage of the people playing online where software pirates. Or remember the recent news about Halo on Macintosh? For every copy they sold, there was a pirate copy out.
Saying that piracy on games is no problem at all is ridiculous if you know anything about the industry.
Now, that said, there's a definite argument about *how much* piracy is enough. For instance, it's enough on Xbox to have the disk in the drive, but for PC games you have to also enter a serial key as well. I'm calling that twice as annoying as requiring a disk alone. Then again, if you have a laptop, you'd probably love to be able to just use a serial key and not need the disk... you can play your games anywhere your laptop is without lugging disks around. It's a delicate balance.
(There's also the technical issue that a PC game, even one that's virtually identical to a Xbox game like Oblivion, requires massive quantities of disk space when on Xbox it requires almost no disk space... WTF game developers? If Oblivion doesn't require a HD on Xbox, why does it on PC? It's the SAME GAME!)
I used to be a huge PC gamer, but the combination of PC game companies that don't give a flying crap about the quality of their product, and intrusive and buggy cheat/copy protection, I've moved almost entirely to the Xbox unless the PC game is free. I mean, Vista's been out and in betas for well over a year, and PunkBuster still isn't Vista-compatible!? Christ. Why the hell does *any* video game require administrative access? Blizzard, the only games company that seems capable of producing half-decent software, doesn't require administrative access for World of Warcraft... how come a FPS game like America's Army does?!
I mean, some Xbox games suck, but at least they're thoroughly tested to make sure they don't crash every 10 minutes.
The PC gaming industry is pathetic. We can only hope Microsoft's Games For Windows certifications introduces them to the concept of "products that don't suck ass" soon... when that happens, you can find me playing my Xbox.
Publishers, and sometimes even retailers, require some level of copy protection also. Sure, Galactic Civilizations is a huge famous video game with no copy protection... but where is it sold? I've never seen it at Target or Fred Meyer. (Admittedly, they have a small game selection.)
Why are you all talking about music? This is in the GAMES section! Talk about video games, PLEASE! (There are already dozens of stories about music piracy every week, please wait for one of those to talk about music, thank you.)
Hi,
I must have missed where you started talking about Service Pack 1. Or were you just posting an off-topic, pointless rant?
Bye!
When the bullshit gets TOO thick there's pushback. We've been hearing nothing but lies and FUD about Vista from day one on this site, and people (now that they've actually used it awhile and saw the lies for what they were) are sick of it. Even on Slashdot.
Alas, in Civ, Superconductor only leads to spaceship parts. Civ doesn't have any weapons we haven't actually invented yet (or at least mostly-invented.)
Interestingly, this is Raymond Chen's argument against open source: that developers would then dig into the Windows source code looking for undocumented side-effects, data structures and other crap, use them on production programs, then Microsoft would never, ever be able to change or fix them in the future. I don't know how (or even if) the Linux community solves this problem, but it's a pretty sensible concern from my point of view. It's better for programmers to follow the prescribed methods, which leaves room for the OS maker to improve whatever they want internally.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481.aspx#45759 (There's a better link where he explains it in more detail, but I can't seem to find it right now.)
I think it is going to be great for teaching new users, but it will frustrate people who already knew how to use office, and also those who try to learn on their own, as they go.
Have you talked to heavy Office users who have upgraded from 2003 to 2007? We have several dozen in our office, and I've yet to hear one complaint about the change. I think Microsoft nailed the Ribbon almost 100%. (You bring up a good issue, but it's a pretty esoteric one as well.)
There are a lot of grumpy old men on Slashdot who will resist every change tooth and nail, regardless of how positive it is. For instance, your suggestion that you're almost on the verge of dumping Explorer and going back to the CLI.
(BTW, I have no clue what you're talking about there. Big round button in the corner? Do you mean the Start Menu? Hitting the "magic" alt button shows the XP-style menu for the window, but did you actually use that in XP? Other than the first time to set view options, I think I went my entire 2000 and XP career without ever using any items from that menu.)
Yeah; can you name me a program to open those in Windows? I have a bunch of .pages files that are completely inaccessible to me, and I've Googled far and wide. Maybe I'm using the wrong keywords, but all I can find are suggestions to open the documents in Pages and export them into RTF or Word format-- that's great, but until Pages runs on Windows, it doesn't help me much.
It's one thing to say "it's a really easy format" and yet another to have a program that can actually read the damned things. As far as I'm concerned, Pages documents are as closed as anything else.
You do that with your program editor?
Sure. Tons of people do. XCode, Visual Studio, and Eclipse all support it.
Version control, as is done with code, should be done on a content management server in an office environment.
That's a huge pain in the ass. To view edits with comments, you'd need to download both Word files, open them both up while also keeping the CMS open, and flip back and forth between each window. Using Word's built-in functionality, it's all in one single document on one screen. (And yes, you can view revisions side-by-side if you want.)
Doing it in the doc itself leads to a mess,
It does the way OpenOffice does it, it screws up pagination. Word does it just fine.
and if you need to share with 3rd parties, disclosure of things you likely didn't want to disclose.
That's a valid point, but you just have to be careful when you save it.