Buck up. If they do two logic board replacements, you get a free brand-new iBook for the third. (At least, I did with my AppleCare purchase.) The Apple Store declared it a "lemon" and now I get a G4 iBook with a stable motherboard as my reward. Woot!
Yeah, but it IS a valid complaint when the article in question hasn't even been updated since the year 2000 and has already appeared on Slashdot before. We're here for NEW content, not rehashed content from half a decade ago.
Uh. Yeah, but if you click a cell and just start typing, the input automatically goes into the editor field... so I don't really see this as a valid complaint. You make it sound like a three-step "click, click, type" process when it's really a two-stop process "click, type."
At the risk of pissing off all of Slashdot, the reason that Apple didn't use X11 isn't for compatibility, but because X11 sucks ass. It's not even nearly as good as the window toolkit they were using in MacOS 8 and 9, and it certainly wouldn't have been a step forward if they moved from OS 9 to something based around X11.
Apple wanted to off-load window code into the video card. You can't do that with X11. Apple wanted copy and paste to work as gracefully as it did in OS 9, X11 can't provide that. Apple wanted a 'services' feature, like OpenStep had, and to my knowledge there's no way X11 could do that. And forget the features they've added since, like Expose.
There was a revealing quote on the Slashdot article where Pages was announced. (Apologies, I'm not going to spend the time to look it up.) One of the posters asked, "so Apple has a replacement for Word and Powerpoint, but where's the replacement for Excel?" And somebody replied, "they haven't figured out how to make a better spreadsheet than Excel yet."
Apple isn't trying to beat Office at its own game or anything like that. All they're doing is identifying ways the office suite can be improved, and making those improvements... that's why Excel, the most perfected of the Office apps, has no replacement yet. And for good reason... how do you beat Excel for spreadsheets?
Slashdot is just reprinting Fark.com submissions. This calculator story shows up there this afternoon, and a few hours later it's here...
Nevermind that the Fark comments ALSO point out how this site 1) is a repeat on both sites, and 2) hasn't even been updated since 2000. Good job, submitter... good job, "editor."
So do what MacOS and Windows do. Get a single window environment and make that one the system default. Then you won't need to load the libraries for every application, because they'll be part of the system. Not every MacOS application has to loads its own copy of Aqua because Aqua comes installed on all Macs. If Linux would team up, get organized, and figure it out, all these problems would be solved.
Re:The Atari Anthology emulation may be nice...
on
Back to the Classics
·
· Score: 1
I like Sega, but holy shit the guy who came up with that unlocking scheme needs to be fired. Still not as bad as Spyhunter which advertises, on the box, that it contains the original Spyhunter when it doesn't, at least not without hours of work.
This is the problem with Linux developers. Developer-centric thinking, not user-centric thinking. Think like an Apple programmer for a few minutes here:
1) A security flaw in an application is the responsibility of the company who created that distributed that application and it's their job to inform users and fix it.
2) Users don't give a crap about this, as long as their applications run. 95% of users don't know how much disk space an application takes up.
3) Again, users don't give a crap about this. 95% of users can't even tell you how much memory an appliaction is using, or how to find that out.
4) Not applicable. (But for the record, I think that's total bunk. You could make the exact same argument if each application used their own shared library.)
5) 95% of the users out there don't know what "compiling" is, nor do they care. They only care that the software works.
Now here's the kinds of problems that package managers create that users don't want to deal with:
1) You can't just go to a website, hit download, install the package. Instead, once you know the package exists, you need to go to your package manager application, find it, and download and install it from there. If it's an application that doesn't have a package yet, then you're screwed: You might be able to install it from the website, but doing so could screw up your package management utility.
2) Ditto with installing from CD.
3) Users don't want to deal with dependencies. If you tell your computer to download and install, say, a video game, the user doesn't want to see your computer downloading funky-happy-mouse-cursors.pkg... they just want to see the game.
4) DLL Hell. Enough said.
If you think like a user, shared libraries create more problems than they solve. The field of computer science won't move forward until every other platform catches up with Apple's philosophy in this regard.
Let's go over your list the OS X way. Noting that I'm not an expert:
1) PATH variable only applies to CLI applications. Apple solves this problem by putting CLI applications in the standard UNIX places.
2)/users/username/library/application support
3) Shared libraries cause as many problems as they solve. Modern computers aren't short on RAM or disk space and there's no need to use them.
4)/users/username/library/preferences
5) I have no clue what you're talking about on this one.
6) Bundles should be as self-sufficient as possible. The only external applications they should be calling are those that are *guaranteed* to be there.
1) Give me an example of these problems you're referring to. I really can't think of any way that app bundles are inferior to the Unix way.
2) What's wrong with giving the *users* of the system the easiest way of doing things and letting the Administrators or Developers, the people who KNOW computers, doing the troubleshooting? The users can't troubleshoot; Administrators and Developers can.
Re:The Atari Anthology emulation may be nice...
on
Back to the Classics
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I concur. That menu system is annoying as hell.
Also, the Sonic the Hedgehog collection does the same annoying thing where you have to play Sonic 1 to unlock, say, Comics Zone or some of the other "bonus" games on the disk. How irritating! Either put those games on the disk or don't, but making me win Sonic 2 10 times before I can play them? Moronic.
And the new Spyhunter game advertises on the box that it contains the original Spyhunter. Which is great, but what they don't mention is that you can't play the original Spyhunter until you "unlock" it by winning the new game and doing some other crap. Guh! Don't advertise a feature I can't use right away!
They did make a sequel. Tron 2.0 is a video game... a quite good one, too. As far as the game's box and manual said, the video game *is* the official sanctioned sequel to the Tron movie.
Yeah, but aim it at the right person. For once I agree with Michael... if you call up their 800 number, you're going to get an operator or a receptionist. The person you're talking to is NOT the person who invested in the spyware company, they're just working there to make a buck and feed their family.
Same reason I hate fucking Michael Moore. "Oh, this company is bad, it sells guns, let's go harass their receptionists who had nothing to do with the decision to sell guns!"
Which is actually rather refreshing... who'd have thought that we'd ever see a Slashdot article that reminds people not to be jackasses to the normal joes who work for these companies instead of harassing them with spam calls and email?
Of course, it's posted by Michael which means the next article will probably undo all that by including some smart-ass unnecessary comment...
OS X is the killer Mac app. You need to try it for a week before you bash it, seriously. You know how people here on Slashdot are constantly raving about how great it is? They're not wrong, it really is that great.
Imagine BeOS, but more stylish with more hardware support and with a hell of a lot more developer support. That's close to what OS X is like.
Especially since every version of StuffIt Expander gets harder and harder to download for free. What bothers me the most is how many MacOS software developers use StuffIt when:
1) StuffIt is proprietary, and their users have to download another piece of software to decompress the file. 2) The OS-default compression is.zip. 3).dmg images are already compressed anyway.
It's stupid as hell. Using StuffIt for software downloads might have made sense in 1995, but it sure doesn't now. And yet, most MacOS developers use it for their shareware/freeware/demo products!
That'll probably be put to an end, though, when StuffIt finally starts charging out-right for their decompressor before you download, instead of letting you download it and then nagging you constantly.
Figure out how long people are kept on hold. Figure out whether they hung up and gave up while on hold. See if they make any comments about the service rep to someone standing nearby, "they put me on hold, but I think this guy can solve my problem"-type of thing.
It's a free market. They come up with a product idea, they bring it to market. People either buy it, or they don't. If people buy it, they make money from it. If they don't, they cancel the product and move on to something else. There, I've just answered your question.
I've read books like that, too, but the faster-than-light ship always stops to pick up the people in the slowboats. Don't be stupid; it's not like nobody on Earth knew they were on their way to that planet, of course they'd stop to pick them up before going on themselves. People are jerks.
Bingo. I keep my access point unsecured on purpose because it doesn't bother me at all if people walking along want to use it. (Well, I do change the admin password, though...)
Anyway, your neighbors may not have been doing anything very wise, but at least they weren't breaking the law... the grandparent *was* breaking the law by hacking into their access points. Think about that one, and hope none of your neighbors called the cops.
Whoosh, watch my entire point go flying right over your head.
"MS people" don't need to defend the company based on Microsoft Bob because Microsoft Bob was sold for about a year a decade ago, then was dropped, and nobody has given a second thought about it since then.
That would be like criticizing Ford because their cars made in 1935 lacked seatbelts. "Ford is the worst auto-maker because their 1935 sedan had no seatbelts, they were trying to kill their users!" Does that make any sense as an argument? No.
Is Bob insecure? Sure. Does it matter? No, of course not! NOBODY USES IT! Just like nobody drives a 1935 Ford sedan on a daily basis. It doesn't matter. It's a pointless, and stupid, argument. Microsoft Bob can't be used as a hacking tool because NOBODY USES MICROSOFT BOB!
You're just as deluded as the poster I replied to. Join the rest of us here in 2005, where nobody has even seen Microsoft Bob in 8 years and few people have even heard of it. Nobody gives a shit about Microsoft Bob. Few people did when it was on store shelves, and nobody does now... except a few deluded people on Slashdot.
To be fair, very very few of Windows' security problems are at the kernel level. The vast vast majority are in software that runs as a service and is included with the OS. If you put the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel side-by-side and did a serious security audit, I would wager they'd come out about exactly even.
Slashdot Mirror
Buck up. If they do two logic board replacements, you get a free brand-new iBook for the third. (At least, I did with my AppleCare purchase.) The Apple Store declared it a "lemon" and now I get a G4 iBook with a stable motherboard as my reward. Woot!
Yeah, but it IS a valid complaint when the article in question hasn't even been updated since the year 2000 and has already appeared on Slashdot before. We're here for NEW content, not rehashed content from half a decade ago.
Uh. Yeah, but if you click a cell and just start typing, the input automatically goes into the editor field... so I don't really see this as a valid complaint. You make it sound like a three-step "click, click, type" process when it's really a two-stop process "click, type."
At the risk of pissing off all of Slashdot, the reason that Apple didn't use X11 isn't for compatibility, but because X11 sucks ass. It's not even nearly as good as the window toolkit they were using in MacOS 8 and 9, and it certainly wouldn't have been a step forward if they moved from OS 9 to something based around X11.
Apple wanted to off-load window code into the video card. You can't do that with X11. Apple wanted copy and paste to work as gracefully as it did in OS 9, X11 can't provide that. Apple wanted a 'services' feature, like OpenStep had, and to my knowledge there's no way X11 could do that. And forget the features they've added since, like Expose.
Bingo!
There was a revealing quote on the Slashdot article where Pages was announced. (Apologies, I'm not going to spend the time to look it up.) One of the posters asked, "so Apple has a replacement for Word and Powerpoint, but where's the replacement for Excel?" And somebody replied, "they haven't figured out how to make a better spreadsheet than Excel yet."
Apple isn't trying to beat Office at its own game or anything like that. All they're doing is identifying ways the office suite can be improved, and making those improvements... that's why Excel, the most perfected of the Office apps, has no replacement yet. And for good reason... how do you beat Excel for spreadsheets?
Slashdot is just reprinting Fark.com submissions. This calculator story shows up there this afternoon, and a few hours later it's here...
Nevermind that the Fark comments ALSO point out how this site 1) is a repeat on both sites, and 2) hasn't even been updated since 2000. Good job, submitter... good job, "editor."
You know, if you read Fark and Wired every day... Slashdot kind of becomes redundant.
So do what MacOS and Windows do. Get a single window environment and make that one the system default. Then you won't need to load the libraries for every application, because they'll be part of the system. Not every MacOS application has to loads its own copy of Aqua because Aqua comes installed on all Macs. If Linux would team up, get organized, and figure it out, all these problems would be solved.
I like Sega, but holy shit the guy who came up with that unlocking scheme needs to be fired. Still not as bad as Spyhunter which advertises, on the box, that it contains the original Spyhunter when it doesn't, at least not without hours of work.
This is the problem with Linux developers. Developer-centric thinking, not user-centric thinking. Think like an Apple programmer for a few minutes here:
1) A security flaw in an application is the responsibility of the company who created that distributed that application and it's their job to inform users and fix it.
2) Users don't give a crap about this, as long as their applications run. 95% of users don't know how much disk space an application takes up.
3) Again, users don't give a crap about this. 95% of users can't even tell you how much memory an appliaction is using, or how to find that out.
4) Not applicable. (But for the record, I think that's total bunk. You could make the exact same argument if each application used their own shared library.)
5) 95% of the users out there don't know what "compiling" is, nor do they care. They only care that the software works.
Now here's the kinds of problems that package managers create that users don't want to deal with:
1) You can't just go to a website, hit download, install the package. Instead, once you know the package exists, you need to go to your package manager application, find it, and download and install it from there. If it's an application that doesn't have a package yet, then you're screwed: You might be able to install it from the website, but doing so could screw up your package management utility.
2) Ditto with installing from CD.
3) Users don't want to deal with dependencies. If you tell your computer to download and install, say, a video game, the user doesn't want to see your computer downloading funky-happy-mouse-cursors.pkg... they just want to see the game.
4) DLL Hell. Enough said.
If you think like a user, shared libraries create more problems than they solve. The field of computer science won't move forward until every other platform catches up with Apple's philosophy in this regard.
Let's go over your list the OS X way. Noting that I'm not an expert:
/users/username/library/application support
/users/username/library/preferences
1) PATH variable only applies to CLI applications. Apple solves this problem by putting CLI applications in the standard UNIX places.
2)
3) Shared libraries cause as many problems as they solve. Modern computers aren't short on RAM or disk space and there's no need to use them.
4)
5) I have no clue what you're talking about on this one.
6) Bundles should be as self-sufficient as possible. The only external applications they should be calling are those that are *guaranteed* to be there.
1) Give me an example of these problems you're referring to. I really can't think of any way that app bundles are inferior to the Unix way.
2) What's wrong with giving the *users* of the system the easiest way of doing things and letting the Administrators or Developers, the people who KNOW computers, doing the troubleshooting? The users can't troubleshoot; Administrators and Developers can.
I concur. That menu system is annoying as hell.
Also, the Sonic the Hedgehog collection does the same annoying thing where you have to play Sonic 1 to unlock, say, Comics Zone or some of the other "bonus" games on the disk. How irritating! Either put those games on the disk or don't, but making me win Sonic 2 10 times before I can play them? Moronic.
And the new Spyhunter game advertises on the box that it contains the original Spyhunter. Which is great, but what they don't mention is that you can't play the original Spyhunter until you "unlock" it by winning the new game and doing some other crap. Guh! Don't advertise a feature I can't use right away!
They did make a sequel. Tron 2.0 is a video game... a quite good one, too. As far as the game's box and manual said, the video game *is* the official sanctioned sequel to the Tron movie.
Yeah, but aim it at the right person. For once I agree with Michael... if you call up their 800 number, you're going to get an operator or a receptionist. The person you're talking to is NOT the person who invested in the spyware company, they're just working there to make a buck and feed their family.
Same reason I hate fucking Michael Moore. "Oh, this company is bad, it sells guns, let's go harass their receptionists who had nothing to do with the decision to sell guns!"
Which is actually rather refreshing... who'd have thought that we'd ever see a Slashdot article that reminds people not to be jackasses to the normal joes who work for these companies instead of harassing them with spam calls and email?
Of course, it's posted by Michael which means the next article will probably undo all that by including some smart-ass unnecessary comment...
I thought the Punisher was pretty good, and it doesn't fit in with your rules.
OS X is the killer Mac app. You need to try it for a week before you bash it, seriously. You know how people here on Slashdot are constantly raving about how great it is? They're not wrong, it really is that great.
Imagine BeOS, but more stylish with more hardware support and with a hell of a lot more developer support. That's close to what OS X is like.
Especially since every version of StuffIt Expander gets harder and harder to download for free. What bothers me the most is how many MacOS software developers use StuffIt when:
.zip. .dmg images are already compressed anyway.
1) StuffIt is proprietary, and their users have to download another piece of software to decompress the file.
2) The OS-default compression is
3)
It's stupid as hell. Using StuffIt for software downloads might have made sense in 1995, but it sure doesn't now. And yet, most MacOS developers use it for their shareware/freeware/demo products!
That'll probably be put to an end, though, when StuffIt finally starts charging out-right for their decompressor before you download, instead of letting you download it and then nagging you constantly.
Figure out how long people are kept on hold. Figure out whether they hung up and gave up while on hold. See if they make any comments about the service rep to someone standing nearby, "they put me on hold, but I think this guy can solve my problem"-type of thing.
It's a free market. They come up with a product idea, they bring it to market. People either buy it, or they don't. If people buy it, they make money from it. If they don't, they cancel the product and move on to something else. There, I've just answered your question.
I've read books like that, too, but the faster-than-light ship always stops to pick up the people in the slowboats. Don't be stupid; it's not like nobody on Earth knew they were on their way to that planet, of course they'd stop to pick them up before going on themselves. People are jerks.
Bingo. I keep my access point unsecured on purpose because it doesn't bother me at all if people walking along want to use it. (Well, I do change the admin password, though...)
Anyway, your neighbors may not have been doing anything very wise, but at least they weren't breaking the law... the grandparent *was* breaking the law by hacking into their access points. Think about that one, and hope none of your neighbors called the cops.
Whoosh, watch my entire point go flying right over your head.
"MS people" don't need to defend the company based on Microsoft Bob because Microsoft Bob was sold for about a year a decade ago, then was dropped, and nobody has given a second thought about it since then.
That would be like criticizing Ford because their cars made in 1935 lacked seatbelts. "Ford is the worst auto-maker because their 1935 sedan had no seatbelts, they were trying to kill their users!" Does that make any sense as an argument? No.
Is Bob insecure? Sure. Does it matter? No, of course not! NOBODY USES IT! Just like nobody drives a 1935 Ford sedan on a daily basis. It doesn't matter. It's a pointless, and stupid, argument. Microsoft Bob can't be used as a hacking tool because NOBODY USES MICROSOFT BOB!
You're just as deluded as the poster I replied to. Join the rest of us here in 2005, where nobody has even seen Microsoft Bob in 8 years and few people have even heard of it. Nobody gives a shit about Microsoft Bob. Few people did when it was on store shelves, and nobody does now... except a few deluded people on Slashdot.
To be fair, very very few of Windows' security problems are at the kernel level. The vast vast majority are in software that runs as a service and is included with the OS. If you put the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel side-by-side and did a serious security audit, I would wager they'd come out about exactly even.