Yeah, but humanity has been altering the world for hundreds of thousands of years, and we seem to be doing ok, right?
What do you think happened to all the large land mammals that were in North America 20k years ago? Humans killed them all off. Yet... somehow... those humans didn't go extinct, or cause some kind of global disaster.
Plus it looks like it has a lot more General Grievous. He's the best villain to come out of the three prequels by FAR, and doesn't get nearly enough screen time.
Yes, but on the other hand the difference between Windows/Linux being document-based and Mac OS being application-based is a pretty significant difference that *may* (not will, but may) require even the lowest levels of logic being re-thought for your application. The "view" isn't just "where the buttons are placed", but instead everything relating to the UI. If your "model" doesn't support a single application hosting multiple documents, then you've already lost in regards to Mac OS UI.
The vast majority of the 9/11 conspiracy "evidence" is of the form:
1) Eyewitnesses don't report consistant stories. (For example, they hear multiple explosions that 'sound like bombs'.)
This is well-known to be true in crisis situations. Ask any police officer about the eyewitness reports they get after a car accident or a murder and they'll tell you that the information is correct and useful only in the widest sense. (i.e. male suspect, tall as opposed to female suspect, short). In addition to this, there's a mental component that makes people claim to be eyewitnesses when, frankly, they were too far away, or had their vision obscured by something.
And the average person on the street, frankly, has no idea what an exploding bomb sounds like.
2) The hole in the Pentagon isn't large enough, additionally there was not enough debris. (Implying it was hit by a missile or commuter jet.)
Look at this video of an F-4 hitting reinforced concrete walls:
Imagine that on a larger scale. The Boeing hitting the Pentagon was larger, of course, but its speed wasn't significantly slower than that F-4's and the walls of the Pentagon aren't much thinner than the reinforced wall used in the test also. The plane virtually vaporized on that impact.
3) The steel in the World Trade Center couldn't possibly have weakened from the fire enough to collapse.
I'm not saying here that everything reported in the media, and everything said by the government is true. The simple fact is that extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence, and the 9/11 conspiracy people simply don't have it.
Given, I'm running a PPC machine, but from my experience with open source on Linux and Mac OS X... because something always, ALWAYS, goes wrong the first time you do "configure" or "make?" Always.
Either it's missing some libraries (my experience with GD), or it requires SUDO permissions but the instructions didn't say it required SUDO permissions, or the path its writing to is wrong, or it has a Good Ol American compilation error... something always goes wrong.
If you want to write a GUI to cope with every single possible error in the 'configure' and 'make' process, more power to you. But I doubt it's possible for any computer program to handle every case in an automatic fashion.
I'm sorry, have you ever USED a Qt program on anything other than Linux? I've yet to see a single Qt application that doesn't look and behave like ass on Mac OS. (That said, I've never seen a wxWindows one that didn't look and behave like ass on Mac OS either.) My personal favorite is RealBasic, since I've seen RB apps that look and feel native on Mac and Windows, but you'll never get the open source community to use it because it's proprietary.
I really want to make a UI design course mandatory for everyone who claims that cross-platform GUIs are possible.
The real problem is that the people who think cross-platform is easy usually fit these criteria:
1) They've used a lot of Windows. 2) They've used a lot of Linux, which, frankly, has all its GUI apps modeled to follow Windows' example very closely. 3) Have never used a truly different system, like MacOS. (Or, if they have, it was so long ago that they still think Preferences belongs in the Edit menu-- when was the last we saw that, 2000?)
Doing cross-platform between Linux and Windows is pretty damned easy, frankly. The keyboards are the same, (no additional Command key to worry about), the paradigms are all the same (document==application), and the users of each are equally tolerant of crappy GUIs.
Mac OS, though, has different keyboards (difference between Enter and Return, the Command key, the different behavior of Up, Down, Page Up, Page Down, Home, End, and more), has a completely different paradigm (application!=document), and has a userbase who is keenly aware of the difference between decent UI and a crummy one, and will actively choose the decent one whenever possible.
I don't want to see any comments on cross-platform development from anybody who isn't in tune with the Macintosh way of thinking.
Don't forget the behavior of the Up Arrow, Down Arrow, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys, which is completely different in Mac OS compared to Windows and Linux. Almost every single port gets this totally and utterly wrong, including Firefox.
The real solution here is to use something like RealBasic to do your cross-application development, because it actually uses native controls on every platform and does some amount of automatic layout (i.e. moving Help and Preferences to the correct menus in Mac OS) for the programmer. Of course, it's not open source.
"Yay! Yet more Macintosh applications that won't be able to use the Services menu, drag&drop, AppleScript or the built-in spell-checker!"
Cross-platform applications suck because they are only lowest common denominator. I'd rather see more application developers build their applications in something like RealBasic, which allows *true* cross-platform performance and is native on all three major platforms. Any solution around a VM is going to suck, just like Java has sucked. (Remember when Java was going to take over the world? Yeah, never happened.)
Number 18 is the standard "The US Government Made 9/11 Happen!" paranoid conspiracy crap. If this was ignored by the media, GOOD!
The majority of the stories are either "Bush/Cheney/The US/Halliburton is evil" or "OMG panic the environment is in trouble." I'm thinking the real purpose of this list is to say "here's stuff I think is really important but most people don't. Since I don't think it was featured enough, I'll going to just claim it was censored by news networks."
Even if you don't use bookmarks, Firefox has to read and parse the bookmarks.html file when it starts up. SQLite will make that operation very very fast and consume less memory as well, so you still benefit.
Oh and by "some people" I think you mean "the vast, vast majority of people who do use bookmarks." I don't use, for instance, earrings but it would be moronic for me to say "oh well, I guess some people find earrings useful..."
I think most of the problems of the Internet stem from it being designed by scientists who really have no clue about how to make things work for business and individuals. Reading the article you linked to, this is the message that comes across loud and clear.
He talks about how the IPv6 task force is concerning themselves with setting up NAT for IPv6 when 1) NAT isn't necessary with IPv6 and 2) No sites use IPv6 anyway! This is what they're doing instead of making a realistic transition plan that has any hope of actually happening.
Also, just to be a jerk, I'll mention that it's bone-stupid to use WGET to get a single page considering every browser on earth has some kind of "save complete page" option right there in the File menu that also localizes links, downloads images/swfs/etc. In Safari, it's called "Web Archive." In Firefox, it's "Webpage (Complete)". In IE, it's "Web Archive, single file".
Since you're already viewing the site in a browser, why would you LEAVE the browser to go to a CLI to do something the browser already has built-in? Goofy.
I don't get the Linux connection. There are a thousand utilities that can do this on Mac and Windows as well. They're called "offline browsers," and they've been around since the mid-90s. My personal favorite at the moment is SiteSucker for Mac, although the older non-WebKit version seems to do a better job than the newest version, go figure.
In any case, it's not a flawless method because there are many sites that can't be downloaded in whole, due to them using Javascript links or dynamic content that confuses the downloader and will miss files. Of course, you're really no worse-off than printing, since browsers suck at that as well.
Just use the photo that came with the frame and SAY you're updating it. When she complains it's always the same photo, say it doesn't work because her multi-LAN CPAN modulator is de-multiplexed or some shit.
The last third of "The Jungle" is a basically a pointless Socialist rant. But the first two-thirds should be read, as it pretty accurately portrays an immigrant engaging in "The American Dream", and because of its impact on the public opinion. (Instead of promoting Socialism, it actually ended up promoting food safety more than anything... the FDA owes its existence to The Jungle.)
I'd also recommend "The Good Earth" by Pearl Buck.
I know this is Slashdot, so of course the Nintendo comment has to be modded highest, but have you actually tried the Xbox 360 controller? It's great, both wireless and wired, and I've never felt uncomfortable using it even after 6 hours of straight Crackdown or Oblivion. (I did notice that games that have an unusual focus on the X button become uncomfortable after long periods, but I think that's more a problem with the game design than the controller design; the X button isn't designed to be used as much as A and B.)
My personal favorite, though, remains the Logitech wireless controller for the original Xbox. Bigger than the controller-S but smaller than the Duke, with a perfect button layout and great wireless capability (including a wireless headset, which became standard equipment on the 360 controller.)
I've never liked the Playstation controllers; I think the analog sticks are placed all wrong, and they contort my thumbs in uncomfortable ways.
The problem is that I'm a Mac user; that operation has worked on Mac since the 80s, so for people like me it's not a case of being "impressive", but "expected." The very fact you find such a basic point of usability "impressive" actually says a lot about how far Linux still has to go.
I think you're being purposely dense to make your point. Most of those product names are actually pretty good.
1) Everybody knows an "amp" is an amplifier for music, and it's a Windows application. Winamp is actually not a bad name at all. IIRC, it's actually a port of a program named "amp" for Windows.
2) Photoshop is an allusion to "workshop." Duh.
3) The name of the product was "AOL Instant Messenger," for many years which, while dull, is extremely descriptive of what the product is. "AIM" is an acronym that they've adopted as the name of the program, but everybody knows what it means by this point. (Case in point: would you complain about KFC's new branding because nobody knows what "KFC" stands for?)
4) Outlook I'll give you. What they're going for is it gives you the 'Outlook' of your day, i.e. what meetings you have, how busy it is, etc. It's not as solid a name as Photoshop. It's not a bad name, but it's not a great one either.
Try volunteering for an open source project to improve their branding and website. You'll either be dismissed outright, probably rudely, or you'll be openly mocked. The open source community isn't even willing to begin to admit that perhaps marketing has a place in software development-- hell, we can't even get decent documentation most of the time.
I can't tell you how many open source project websites I've gone to that don't say (on the first page, above the fold) *what the product is, what it does, and what problems it solves*. You have to drill-down a few links to find what the hell it is. The most basic foundation of promoting a product, and it's not there.
Slashdot Mirror
He missed the whole "Han shot first" thing. Of course that was from like 1998, so maybe that one's obsolete now... I dunno.
USA seems to be saying to the world, "we don't care about the planet".
Maybe we're just not that impressed with fear-mongering.
Yeah, but humanity has been altering the world for hundreds of thousands of years, and we seem to be doing ok, right?
What do you think happened to all the large land mammals that were in North America 20k years ago? Humans killed them all off. Yet... somehow... those humans didn't go extinct, or cause some kind of global disaster.
Plus it looks like it has a lot more General Grievous. He's the best villain to come out of the three prequels by FAR, and doesn't get nearly enough screen time.
Yes, but on the other hand the difference between Windows/Linux being document-based and Mac OS being application-based is a pretty significant difference that *may* (not will, but may) require even the lowest levels of logic being re-thought for your application. The "view" isn't just "where the buttons are placed", but instead everything relating to the UI. If your "model" doesn't support a single application hosting multiple documents, then you've already lost in regards to Mac OS UI.
The vast majority of the 9/11 conspiracy "evidence" is of the form:
2 6206288868&q=jet+hitting+wall
f ari&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&rls=en&q=freeway+collapse+sa n+francisco&btnG=Search+News
a nge.html
1) Eyewitnesses don't report consistant stories. (For example, they hear multiple explosions that 'sound like bombs'.)
This is well-known to be true in crisis situations. Ask any police officer about the eyewitness reports they get after a car accident or a murder and they'll tell you that the information is correct and useful only in the widest sense. (i.e. male suspect, tall as opposed to female suspect, short). In addition to this, there's a mental component that makes people claim to be eyewitnesses when, frankly, they were too far away, or had their vision obscured by something.
And the average person on the street, frankly, has no idea what an exploding bomb sounds like.
2) The hole in the Pentagon isn't large enough, additionally there was not enough debris. (Implying it was hit by a missile or commuter jet.)
Look at this video of an F-4 hitting reinforced concrete walls:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-46642426
Imagine that on a larger scale. The Boeing hitting the Pentagon was larger, of course, but its speed wasn't significantly slower than that F-4's and the walls of the Pentagon aren't much thinner than the reinforced wall used in the test also. The plane virtually vaporized on that impact.
3) The steel in the World Trade Center couldn't possibly have weakened from the fire enough to collapse.
http://news.google.com/news?um=1&tab=wn&client=sa
Oh yeah? It's happened since in a very similar circumstance.
If you're referring to the "issues" brought up in the movie Loose Change, they've already been thoroughly debunked several times:
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/green/loose_ch
I'm not saying here that everything reported in the media, and everything said by the government is true. The simple fact is that extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence, and the 9/11 conspiracy people simply don't have it.
Given, I'm running a PPC machine, but from my experience with open source on Linux and Mac OS X... because something always, ALWAYS, goes wrong the first time you do "configure" or "make?" Always.
Either it's missing some libraries (my experience with GD), or it requires SUDO permissions but the instructions didn't say it required SUDO permissions, or the path its writing to is wrong, or it has a Good Ol American compilation error... something always goes wrong.
If you want to write a GUI to cope with every single possible error in the 'configure' and 'make' process, more power to you. But I doubt it's possible for any computer program to handle every case in an automatic fashion.
Qt if you want a good one.
I'm sorry, have you ever USED a Qt program on anything other than Linux? I've yet to see a single Qt application that doesn't look and behave like ass on Mac OS. (That said, I've never seen a wxWindows one that didn't look and behave like ass on Mac OS either.) My personal favorite is RealBasic, since I've seen RB apps that look and feel native on Mac and Windows, but you'll never get the open source community to use it because it's proprietary.
I really want to make a UI design course mandatory for everyone who claims that cross-platform GUIs are possible.
The real problem is that the people who think cross-platform is easy usually fit these criteria:
1) They've used a lot of Windows.
2) They've used a lot of Linux, which, frankly, has all its GUI apps modeled to follow Windows' example very closely.
3) Have never used a truly different system, like MacOS. (Or, if they have, it was so long ago that they still think Preferences belongs in the Edit menu-- when was the last we saw that, 2000?)
Doing cross-platform between Linux and Windows is pretty damned easy, frankly. The keyboards are the same, (no additional Command key to worry about), the paradigms are all the same (document==application), and the users of each are equally tolerant of crappy GUIs.
Mac OS, though, has different keyboards (difference between Enter and Return, the Command key, the different behavior of Up, Down, Page Up, Page Down, Home, End, and more), has a completely different paradigm (application!=document), and has a userbase who is keenly aware of the difference between decent UI and a crummy one, and will actively choose the decent one whenever possible.
I don't want to see any comments on cross-platform development from anybody who isn't in tune with the Macintosh way of thinking.
Don't forget the behavior of the Up Arrow, Down Arrow, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys, which is completely different in Mac OS compared to Windows and Linux. Almost every single port gets this totally and utterly wrong, including Firefox.
The real solution here is to use something like RealBasic to do your cross-application development, because it actually uses native controls on every platform and does some amount of automatic layout (i.e. moving Help and Preferences to the correct menus in Mac OS) for the programmer. Of course, it's not open source.
I read this and the first thing I think is:
"Yay! Yet more Macintosh applications that won't be able to use the Services menu, drag&drop, AppleScript or the built-in spell-checker!"
Cross-platform applications suck because they are only lowest common denominator. I'd rather see more application developers build their applications in something like RealBasic, which allows *true* cross-platform performance and is native on all three major platforms. Any solution around a VM is going to suck, just like Java has sucked. (Remember when Java was going to take over the world? Yeah, never happened.)
Number 18 is the standard "The US Government Made 9/11 Happen!" paranoid conspiracy crap. If this was ignored by the media, GOOD!
The majority of the stories are either "Bush/Cheney/The US/Halliburton is evil" or "OMG panic the environment is in trouble." I'm thinking the real purpose of this list is to say "here's stuff I think is really important but most people don't. Since I don't think it was featured enough, I'll going to just claim it was censored by news networks."
Even if you don't use bookmarks, Firefox has to read and parse the bookmarks.html file when it starts up. SQLite will make that operation very very fast and consume less memory as well, so you still benefit.
Oh and by "some people" I think you mean "the vast, vast majority of people who do use bookmarks." I don't use, for instance, earrings but it would be moronic for me to say "oh well, I guess some people find earrings useful..."
Y2K was a success, not a poster-boy for scare-mongering.
I think it was both. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I think most of the problems of the Internet stem from it being designed by scientists who really have no clue about how to make things work for business and individuals. Reading the article you linked to, this is the message that comes across loud and clear.
He talks about how the IPv6 task force is concerning themselves with setting up NAT for IPv6 when 1) NAT isn't necessary with IPv6 and 2) No sites use IPv6 anyway! This is what they're doing instead of making a realistic transition plan that has any hope of actually happening.
Also, just to be a jerk, I'll mention that it's bone-stupid to use WGET to get a single page considering every browser on earth has some kind of "save complete page" option right there in the File menu that also localizes links, downloads images/swfs/etc. In Safari, it's called "Web Archive." In Firefox, it's "Webpage (Complete)". In IE, it's "Web Archive, single file".
Since you're already viewing the site in a browser, why would you LEAVE the browser to go to a CLI to do something the browser already has built-in? Goofy.
I don't get the Linux connection. There are a thousand utilities that can do this on Mac and Windows as well. They're called "offline browsers," and they've been around since the mid-90s. My personal favorite at the moment is SiteSucker for Mac, although the older non-WebKit version seems to do a better job than the newest version, go figure.
In any case, it's not a flawless method because there are many sites that can't be downloaded in whole, due to them using Javascript links or dynamic content that confuses the downloader and will miss files. Of course, you're really no worse-off than printing, since browsers suck at that as well.
Just use the photo that came with the frame and SAY you're updating it. When she complains it's always the same photo, say it doesn't work because her multi-LAN CPAN modulator is de-multiplexed or some shit.
The last third of "The Jungle" is a basically a pointless Socialist rant. But the first two-thirds should be read, as it pretty accurately portrays an immigrant engaging in "The American Dream", and because of its impact on the public opinion. (Instead of promoting Socialism, it actually ended up promoting food safety more than anything... the FDA owes its existence to The Jungle.)
I'd also recommend "The Good Earth" by Pearl Buck.
I know this is Slashdot, so of course the Nintendo comment has to be modded highest, but have you actually tried the Xbox 360 controller? It's great, both wireless and wired, and I've never felt uncomfortable using it even after 6 hours of straight Crackdown or Oblivion. (I did notice that games that have an unusual focus on the X button become uncomfortable after long periods, but I think that's more a problem with the game design than the controller design; the X button isn't designed to be used as much as A and B.)
My personal favorite, though, remains the Logitech wireless controller for the original Xbox. Bigger than the controller-S but smaller than the Duke, with a perfect button layout and great wireless capability (including a wireless headset, which became standard equipment on the 360 controller.)
I've never liked the Playstation controllers; I think the analog sticks are placed all wrong, and they contort my thumbs in uncomfortable ways.
More to the point, they ARE auctioned. At least domains that were registered in the past. That's half of what Afternic.com and Sedo.com do all day.
The problem is that I'm a Mac user; that operation has worked on Mac since the 80s, so for people like me it's not a case of being "impressive", but "expected." The very fact you find such a basic point of usability "impressive" actually says a lot about how far Linux still has to go.
This one might work now, it's been awhile since I tried it.
Try copying some spreadsheet cells from OpenOffice and pasting it into a bitmap paint program.
I think you're being purposely dense to make your point. Most of those product names are actually pretty good.
1) Everybody knows an "amp" is an amplifier for music, and it's a Windows application. Winamp is actually not a bad name at all. IIRC, it's actually a port of a program named "amp" for Windows.
2) Photoshop is an allusion to "workshop." Duh.
3) The name of the product was "AOL Instant Messenger," for many years which, while dull, is extremely descriptive of what the product is. "AIM" is an acronym that they've adopted as the name of the program, but everybody knows what it means by this point. (Case in point: would you complain about KFC's new branding because nobody knows what "KFC" stands for?)
4) Outlook I'll give you. What they're going for is it gives you the 'Outlook' of your day, i.e. what meetings you have, how busy it is, etc. It's not as solid a name as Photoshop. It's not a bad name, but it's not a great one either.
Try volunteering for an open source project to improve their branding and website. You'll either be dismissed outright, probably rudely, or you'll be openly mocked. The open source community isn't even willing to begin to admit that perhaps marketing has a place in software development-- hell, we can't even get decent documentation most of the time.
I can't tell you how many open source project websites I've gone to that don't say (on the first page, above the fold) *what the product is, what it does, and what problems it solves*. You have to drill-down a few links to find what the hell it is. The most basic foundation of promoting a product, and it's not there.