I had a similar experience at the Bellevue, WA Apple Store. I bought a G3 iBook which turned out to be one of those with notorious logic board problems. I sent it in once, got it fixed. Logic board died again. Sent it in twice, got it fixed. Logic board died again. I went to the Apple Store and talked to the "genius," I explained to him that I didn't have AppleCare but this same laptop's already been repaired twice and has the same problem a third time.
He said that that model had logic board problems that never quite got all straightened out, and told me he'd send it back to Apple as a lemon. ("By the books" it has to fail 4 times and be under AppleCare to be a lemon, mine had no AppleCare and failed only three times.) He packed up my laptop, then pulled a new iBook OFF THE SHELF and a new Airport Extreme network card OFF THE SHELF, installed the network card, and handed me a 1.25 ghz G4 iBook right there in the store. No charge! I couldn't be happier with the service I got. (Even better, he let me keep the old charger and other accessories... so now I have two chargers for it, one for the case and one for my desk. He wouldn't let me keep the spare battery though.) So for putting up with about 10 days of downtime for repairs over two years, I got a brand new off-the-shelf laptop.
I used to work retail, and if I had done that at any of the stores I worked in, I would have gotten reamed by the manager. At the Apple Store, they don't care about that and put the customer satisfaction first.
To add to that, it also doesn't take into consideration the fact that IE became the most popular browser on Mac OS... not just Windows. And Apple shipped both Netscape and IE on the system CDs, neither of which was "default."
The sad fact of the matter is that Netscape versions after about 4.0.8 completely sucked. It was impossible to get *just* a browser (like IE), you had to get a whole "Communicator" package full of crap you'd never use. Which of course was bloated as hell, slow, sucked memory, and crashed a lot. (I stuck with 4.0.8 after trying Communicator, then eventually switched to IE 4 for Mac when it was clear that Netscape wasn't going to release another browser any time soon.)
If you ask me, there's one reason and only one reason Netscape lost their marketshare: Their product sucked ass compared to the competition. Period. We laugh at how crappy IE is now, but back when it was IE up against Netscape Communicator 4.x, IE was quicker, more stable, and had more features. On both Mac and PC.
Oblivion and Kameo have quite distinct graphic styles. Arguably, by emulating good war movies/detective movies, so do Call of Duty 2 and Condemned. And there's a lot of games coming out soon that have a very unique look to them... look into Blue Dragon, for instance.
And of course, realism *is* an art style, whether you like it or not.
Don't expect hard SF with the focus on technology like Vernor Vinge, but rather a more psychological and mysterious style of storytelling somewhat like Gene Wolfe. The movie by
Whoever wrote this post is a master of suspense!
But seriously, I greatly enjoyed both movie versions (I think the Clooney one was better,) but I have to admit that I've never read the book myself. Still, even if the movies are entirely 180 degrees away from the novel, they're still great movies in their own right.
Uh, it's not new on Mac OS, either. Mac OS 1 had drag&drop installs in 1984... when did Amiga come out again?
The reason it's 'fixed in stone by the OS' is that it greatly enhances usability if all applications behave in the same way. "I could drag this app to the external HD and run it from there, but when I do it from this other app it doesn't work!" Of course, OS X *does* also have an installer, and installed apps, so it kind of defeats the purpose, but go figure.
If Linux distros would all standardize on some libraries, you wouldn't need to statically link in a KDE for every app... you could just use the one provided by the system. You know, like Mac programs do with Apple's various frameworks.
The reason Apple lets you is probably more historical than anything...
Mac OS has let you move apps anywhere before the concept of an "Applications Folder" even existed. (I don't think Apple added one in until Mac OS 7... or maybe even 8.) Used to be you'd put your common applications on the root level of the drive and then make a Utilities folder for the other stuff. At least I did. But really, the whole filesystem was a playground and you could put stuff where you want.
Now OS X lets you put applications anywhere, but it's too goddamned stupid to figure it out. My Applications folder was messy, so I made categories... "Media Players," "Internet Apps," etc. The first time I ran Software Update, OS X decided to re-download ALL of the apps that come with it because it thought I deleted them. So the choice is have an organized Applications folder, or don't use Software Update... pain in ass!
Behind the Finder, Software Update is probably the stupidest application on OS X.
ThinkFree Office is Java-based, but it runs a heck of a lot better than either OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice/J and it's only $50. They've done a killer job adapting a Java app to look and feel native on OS X, and you don't notice the slowdown.
Mariner sells a good word-processor and spreadsheet combo as well... I don't remember the price, but I want to say $120 for word-processor and spreadsheet packaged together.
Why? I mean, they do... kind of, they suggest that the game is entirely open-ended (i.e. nothing stops me from going to sleep in the middle of a bunch of traps), and that the NPCs in the game carry on their own lives and their own activities (i.e. won't just disappear after the meeting, but will walk back to wherever.) The only thing this tells you about the game is that the AI isn't adept at avoiding traps, or at least not the AI on this particular NPC.
I'm enjoying the game immensely despite that quirk, and if I do want to join the Dark Brotherhood, I could always just start a new character.
After you murder a few people, make sure you don't go to sleep in a dungeon filled with traps... the Dark Brotherhood representative will come to you as you sleep, offer you a position with them, then leave the dungeon-- walking THROUGH all the traps and dying, making it impossible to join the Dark Brotherhood. Bastards!
Even in the most open-ended of games, and this is surely one, you can run into stuff the developers didn't plan for.
If people actually used their Office productivity suite for what it was meant for, then they wouldn't be tied so tightly to Office. But they are dumb, and their entire way of using computers are based on a house of cards.
Listen to yourself, buddy. If people know Office, if they can get their work done in Office, if they can save cash buying apps like Peachtree because they can replicate the features in the much-cheaper Excel, what about that exactly makes them "dumb?" It sounds pretty smart to me. Use what works, don't sweat how "correct" it is because nobody gives a flying crap.
Now, that all said, it does become a problem when the Excel/VBA-based applications become complex at all, but the only thing "stupid" about that is not knowing when to rewrite the code.
I'm a little late to this discussion, but the open source viewpoint is always, "if you can't do it with open source, you don't need to do it." (I've gotten this response about a dozen times while looking for a Microsoft Project-alike for Mac OS.)
It would be great it they said, "wow, that is neat, we should get on replicating that functionality!", but they don't, and that's not going to change any time soon.
a) Since his company archives and stores the projects, it's quite possible that secretaries and accountants will be viewing them. If only for "hey, in the next newsletter, how about an article on what we did this month?" purposes.
b) Your response entirely ignores the grandparent's point, which is, right now there's literally no competition for what Office does if it's used effectively. I've seen SharePoint used this way, and I agree with him 100%... there's no open-source solution to do this, and there's no other company out there doing it. Some do pieces, but none do the whole enchilada.
I got a call from Volt this morning (Volt recruits for Microsoft), but it wasn't related to the Google Pages resume. I have some more edits to make to it before it's "ready", but honestly, I don't expect it'll be that useful... most employers want resumes in Word format.
Cubicle, buddy, why don't you just relax before you have a massive coronary and (listen carefully, this part is important:) shop at a different store?
You make it sound as if there's only one grocery store in the universe. Even po-dunk towns have two or three. Criminy. Find something actually worth your attention to gripe about.
Finished making this with Google Pages just last night. It's actually really fun to work with... my only gripe is that there's no Safari support for us Mac users (but we can use Firefox.)
You seem on-the-ball, so let me ask you this question because it boggles my mind...
According to the website validator at w3.org (I believe...) it's an error to have an image with no alt attribute.
But, if you add an alt attribute, and make it a blank string (alt=""), it doesn't complain. Why!? It seems to me that if it's a graphic element with no need for an alt attribute it should be fine to leave the alt attribute off and save a few bytes of download. Is there a logical reason behind this? Or is the validator just being stupid?
He at least fixed the spelling and amended the story saying he needed a geek-friendly spellchecker. My first thought was, "A Slashdot editor has a SPELL CHECKER!?"
Seriously, though, editors. Use your Slashdot salary, buy a OS X machine, and use Safari to compose your "articles." It has a built-in red-underlining spellchecker which is very nice. (Side note: Why the hell doesn't any other browser have a spellchecker? People type more now in browser windows than in word processors!)
Only Japanese-RPGs. Meanwhile, western RPGs (like the Elder Scrolls series, the latest of which came out just this week) have been moving the exact opposite direction.
Make sure you qualify when you're making that point or you'll look like an idiot, because it's easy to find counter-examples in western RPGs.
Yesterday I sat though a 45-minute lecture on how positive thinking increases water quality and how we're all surrounded by powerful auras that can sour milk if we don't have a positive attitude. This lecture was from a person I work with as I was installing some software on her computer. Now, personally, I think the entire speech was New Age bullshit and it upset me that she was wasting my brain with that drivel, but I didn't say anything. I just grinned and bore it. You know why? Because I'm not a jackass.
It's called civility, and it's called that because it's what keeps civilization going.
He's welcome to have his opinion, and even to state it anywhere he likes-- Canadians have as much free speech as anyone-- but he should have kept his mouth shut and just grinned and bore it, like anyone else would have done. Because he didn't, now he's begging for scraps on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a similar experience at the Bellevue, WA Apple Store. I bought a G3 iBook which turned out to be one of those with notorious logic board problems. I sent it in once, got it fixed. Logic board died again. Sent it in twice, got it fixed. Logic board died again. I went to the Apple Store and talked to the "genius," I explained to him that I didn't have AppleCare but this same laptop's already been repaired twice and has the same problem a third time.
He said that that model had logic board problems that never quite got all straightened out, and told me he'd send it back to Apple as a lemon. ("By the books" it has to fail 4 times and be under AppleCare to be a lemon, mine had no AppleCare and failed only three times.) He packed up my laptop, then pulled a new iBook OFF THE SHELF and a new Airport Extreme network card OFF THE SHELF, installed the network card, and handed me a 1.25 ghz G4 iBook right there in the store. No charge! I couldn't be happier with the service I got. (Even better, he let me keep the old charger and other accessories... so now I have two chargers for it, one for the case and one for my desk. He wouldn't let me keep the spare battery though.) So for putting up with about 10 days of downtime for repairs over two years, I got a brand new off-the-shelf laptop.
I used to work retail, and if I had done that at any of the stores I worked in, I would have gotten reamed by the manager. At the Apple Store, they don't care about that and put the customer satisfaction first.
To add to that, it also doesn't take into consideration the fact that IE became the most popular browser on Mac OS... not just Windows. And Apple shipped both Netscape and IE on the system CDs, neither of which was "default."
The sad fact of the matter is that Netscape versions after about 4.0.8 completely sucked. It was impossible to get *just* a browser (like IE), you had to get a whole "Communicator" package full of crap you'd never use. Which of course was bloated as hell, slow, sucked memory, and crashed a lot. (I stuck with 4.0.8 after trying Communicator, then eventually switched to IE 4 for Mac when it was clear that Netscape wasn't going to release another browser any time soon.)
If you ask me, there's one reason and only one reason Netscape lost their marketshare: Their product sucked ass compared to the competition. Period. We laugh at how crappy IE is now, but back when it was IE up against Netscape Communicator 4.x, IE was quicker, more stable, and had more features. On both Mac and PC.
I live in Western Washington. And I believe that the sky is grey, ranging from light-ish to dark-ish depending on the time of year.
More people would buy your baby if you spent some time to proofread the site and correct the obvious spelling and grammar errors.
Oblivion and Kameo have quite distinct graphic styles. Arguably, by emulating good war movies/detective movies, so do Call of Duty 2 and Condemned. And there's a lot of games coming out soon that have a very unique look to them... look into Blue Dragon, for instance.
And of course, realism *is* an art style, whether you like it or not.
Yes, but it give me yet another chance to shamelessly pimp my Google Pages resume! And it's even slightly on-topic, if you squint.
|
V
Don't expect hard SF with the focus on technology like Vernor Vinge, but rather a more psychological and mysterious style of storytelling somewhat like Gene Wolfe. The movie by
Whoever wrote this post is a master of suspense!
But seriously, I greatly enjoyed both movie versions (I think the Clooney one was better,) but I have to admit that I've never read the book myself. Still, even if the movies are entirely 180 degrees away from the novel, they're still great movies in their own right.
Uh, it's not new on Mac OS, either. Mac OS 1 had drag&drop installs in 1984... when did Amiga come out again?
The reason it's 'fixed in stone by the OS' is that it greatly enhances usability if all applications behave in the same way. "I could drag this app to the external HD and run it from there, but when I do it from this other app it doesn't work!" Of course, OS X *does* also have an installer, and installed apps, so it kind of defeats the purpose, but go figure.
If Linux distros would all standardize on some libraries, you wouldn't need to statically link in a KDE for every app... you could just use the one provided by the system. You know, like Mac programs do with Apple's various frameworks.
The reason Apple lets you is probably more historical than anything...
Mac OS has let you move apps anywhere before the concept of an "Applications Folder" even existed. (I don't think Apple added one in until Mac OS 7... or maybe even 8.) Used to be you'd put your common applications on the root level of the drive and then make a Utilities folder for the other stuff. At least I did. But really, the whole filesystem was a playground and you could put stuff where you want.
Now OS X lets you put applications anywhere, but it's too goddamned stupid to figure it out. My Applications folder was messy, so I made categories... "Media Players," "Internet Apps," etc. The first time I ran Software Update, OS X decided to re-download ALL of the apps that come with it because it thought I deleted them. So the choice is have an organized Applications folder, or don't use Software Update... pain in ass!
Behind the Finder, Software Update is probably the stupidest application on OS X.
ThinkFree Office is Java-based, but it runs a heck of a lot better than either OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice/J and it's only $50. They've done a killer job adapting a Java app to look and feel native on OS X, and you don't notice the slowdown.
Mariner sells a good word-processor and spreadsheet combo as well... I don't remember the price, but I want to say $120 for word-processor and spreadsheet packaged together.
http://www.thinkfree.com/
http://www.marinersoftware.com/
I ended up buying ThinkFree because 1) I'm cheap, and 2) it's good enough. From the trials of both I'd say that Mariner is better.
Why? I mean, they do... kind of, they suggest that the game is entirely open-ended (i.e. nothing stops me from going to sleep in the middle of a bunch of traps), and that the NPCs in the game carry on their own lives and their own activities (i.e. won't just disappear after the meeting, but will walk back to wherever.) The only thing this tells you about the game is that the AI isn't adept at avoiding traps, or at least not the AI on this particular NPC.
I'm enjoying the game immensely despite that quirk, and if I do want to join the Dark Brotherhood, I could always just start a new character.
After you murder a few people, make sure you don't go to sleep in a dungeon filled with traps... the Dark Brotherhood representative will come to you as you sleep, offer you a position with them, then leave the dungeon-- walking THROUGH all the traps and dying, making it impossible to join the Dark Brotherhood. Bastards!
Even in the most open-ended of games, and this is surely one, you can run into stuff the developers didn't plan for.
If people actually used their Office productivity suite for what it was meant for, then they wouldn't be tied so tightly to Office. But they are dumb, and their entire way of using computers are based on a house of cards.
Listen to yourself, buddy. If people know Office, if they can get their work done in Office, if they can save cash buying apps like Peachtree because they can replicate the features in the much-cheaper Excel, what about that exactly makes them "dumb?" It sounds pretty smart to me. Use what works, don't sweat how "correct" it is because nobody gives a flying crap.
Now, that all said, it does become a problem when the Excel/VBA-based applications become complex at all, but the only thing "stupid" about that is not knowing when to rewrite the code.
I'm a little late to this discussion, but the open source viewpoint is always, "if you can't do it with open source, you don't need to do it." (I've gotten this response about a dozen times while looking for a Microsoft Project-alike for Mac OS.)
It would be great it they said, "wow, that is neat, we should get on replicating that functionality!", but they don't, and that's not going to change any time soon.
a) Since his company archives and stores the projects, it's quite possible that secretaries and accountants will be viewing them. If only for "hey, in the next newsletter, how about an article on what we did this month?" purposes.
b) Your response entirely ignores the grandparent's point, which is, right now there's literally no competition for what Office does if it's used effectively. I've seen SharePoint used this way, and I agree with him 100%... there's no open-source solution to do this, and there's no other company out there doing it. Some do pieces, but none do the whole enchilada.
I got a call from Volt this morning (Volt recruits for Microsoft), but it wasn't related to the Google Pages resume. I have some more edits to make to it before it's "ready", but honestly, I don't expect it'll be that useful... most employers want resumes in Word format.
Cubicle, buddy, why don't you just relax before you have a massive coronary and (listen carefully, this part is important:) shop at a different store?
You make it sound as if there's only one grocery store in the universe. Even po-dunk towns have two or three. Criminy. Find something actually worth your attention to gripe about.
None of those screenshots are pre-rendered. What are you talking about?
Finished making this with Google Pages just last night. It's actually really fun to work with... my only gripe is that there's no Safari support for us Mac users (but we can use Firefox.)
You seem on-the-ball, so let me ask you this question because it boggles my mind...
According to the website validator at w3.org (I believe...) it's an error to have an image with no alt attribute.
But, if you add an alt attribute, and make it a blank string (alt=""), it doesn't complain. Why!? It seems to me that if it's a graphic element with no need for an alt attribute it should be fine to leave the alt attribute off and save a few bytes of download. Is there a logical reason behind this? Or is the validator just being stupid?
He at least fixed the spelling and amended the story saying he needed a geek-friendly spellchecker. My first thought was, "A Slashdot editor has a SPELL CHECKER!?"
Seriously, though, editors. Use your Slashdot salary, buy a OS X machine, and use Safari to compose your "articles." It has a built-in red-underlining spellchecker which is very nice. (Side note: Why the hell doesn't any other browser have a spellchecker? People type more now in browser windows than in word processors!)
Only Japanese-RPGs. Meanwhile, western RPGs (like the Elder Scrolls series, the latest of which came out just this week) have been moving the exact opposite direction.
Make sure you qualify when you're making that point or you'll look like an idiot, because it's easy to find counter-examples in western RPGs.
Yesterday I sat though a 45-minute lecture on how positive thinking increases water quality and how we're all surrounded by powerful auras that can sour milk if we don't have a positive attitude. This lecture was from a person I work with as I was installing some software on her computer. Now, personally, I think the entire speech was New Age bullshit and it upset me that she was wasting my brain with that drivel, but I didn't say anything. I just grinned and bore it. You know why? Because I'm not a jackass.
It's called civility, and it's called that because it's what keeps civilization going.
He's welcome to have his opinion, and even to state it anywhere he likes-- Canadians have as much free speech as anyone-- but he should have kept his mouth shut and just grinned and bore it, like anyone else would have done. Because he didn't, now he's begging for scraps on Slashdot.
Actually a better comparison would be with Filemaker, which is pretty much exactly like Access except cross-platform.