It takes several hundred years for the planet to reach its sea level equilibrium, but we're talking about (among countless other things) 1/4 of the land mass of Florida going underwater.
Anything we can do to speed this up?
More seriously, you do realize that we have these things called "dikes" and "technology-in-general", right? What bothers me most about the global warming thing is that the proponents think we're so useless as a species... we've solved a hell of a lot of problems before, we'll solve this one too.
I really dont understand this urge of blowing simple stories completely out of proportion by mentioning pedosexuals, muslims or the banking system.
Me neither.
If you're going to blow simple stories completely out of proportion, you'd be better off mentioning pedosexuals, Muslims *and* the banking system all at the same time! Do it right, people.
I ripped Up! just last week, actually. The copy works fine.
The last movie I had problems with was actually The Simpsons Movie... not sure if it was AnyDVD or Handbrake's new encoder that caused the problem, because I threw the raw files away after compressing it with Handbrake. (I always test the movies, but my test is pretty cursory and I missed the bug.)
What was weird is how it was wrong-- the movie was all in the MP4 file correctly. However, at 3 points in the movie, roughly evenly-spaced, the image would go still and greyscale and audio from the beginning of the movie would play over the still. I guess that's some artifact of the menuing system they used?
It doesn't give me a very good impression. Despite that, I don't have anything against *voluntary* Unionization-- just don't expect me to join, I'd do a better job negotiating on my own.
But my main objection with Unions is that it makes the employee and management into "opponents." Right now, I have a very friendly relationship with my management, and I understand and agree with the company's purpose. If I were in a Union, suddenly he would be considered an enemy for us to defeat and we'd have to fight for our benefits/pay every year.
It's not really a big thing, just a subtle difference, but I'd much rather work with management with mutual respect than be their "enemy."
I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
In the time it took you to grind the equipment/ships required to destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff, you could have made TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars if you had, for example, knitted dolls and sold them at craft fairs instead of playing EVE in the first place.
Once you've identified the offending DLLs, you can set their file permissions to "Everybody - Deny". When you next boot, they won't be allowed to execute and you can simply delete them. (You do, however, have to power-off your computer without shutting it down, which carries a tiny risk.)
There's a HUGE variation in Jiffy Lube quality. I've been to good ones, and I've been to ones that try to upsell me everything in the store. I try to avoid it now and go to the Texaco or Costco for oil changes.
I loathe about it is the fact that typical users including so called "light users" have to charge it daily. Insane...where is the time for such attention?
I just plug it in before I go to sleep. As do, I'm sure, 99% of cellphone owners.
"Time for such attention?" Do you sit around and *watch* your phone charge? Seriously? Most people have other, better, things to do.
I understand the concern - that MySQL will be an in-house "competitor" for resources to Oracle's database. However, why wouldn't they be complimentary?
That's the big mystery.
Microsoft seems to be doing ok with both SQL Server and SQL Server Express. It helps that the migration between the two is mind-numbingly simple.
If Oracle set up an easy way to migrate from MySQL to Oracle, and they renamed MySQL into "Oracle Express", there you go.
I'm sorry, I think you care a lot more about this subject than I do.
That's a great way to dodge a difficult question. "Well I don't have an answer but I don't care neither! Naaah."
In my opinion, the world would be infinitesimally better off if we adopted the convention that operating systems actually operate more than one non-trivial program at once, and multitask between them on an equal basis. No doubt you disagree.
Yes, because the *convention* is already established and it's not that.
What you're wanting to do is change an existing convention, and frankly you don't have the cultural influence to pull that one off, buddy.
(By the way, the only thing that makes notepad.exe on Windows an application and the Notepad desk accessory on the Mac a "desk accessory" is a distinction that the Mac itself makes. If desk accessories could do everything that applications could do, and in the same way they did it, no one would care. "Mac desk accessory" and "Mac application" would be a distinction without a difference, sort of like "BIOS" and "Boot ROM".)
Lotus Notes calls an email a "memo." Does that mean Notes isn't an email client?
You're the first person I've heard claim that an OS requires multitasking. Wikipedia, for example, lists MS-DOS as an operating system.
Yes, but Mac desk accessories were more like toys than real applications, the rough equivalent of terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) utilities like Sidekick on MS-DOS. They were programmed completely differently, had all sorts of special rules, and most particularly could use only a relatively small amount of memory.
While that's all true, you'd be hard-pressed to claim that the Notepad.exe in Windows was an application, while the Notepad Desk Accessory on Mac wasn't. Both (initially) were limited to 32k of text. But both could also run alongside/atop other applications. The only real difference is that the Windows one saves text files while the Mac one auto-saves when you close it.
Although maybe you think Notepad.exe in Windows *isn't* an application, which brings up an obvious question: what is it?
You seem to be fond of cherry-picking terms to suit your purposes.
Ok, I used Macs from 6.0.8 to 10.4, and I have a few corrections for you. The gist of your message is correct, but you're wrong in some of the details.
System 7 was a great (even outstanding) environment, to be sure, but I think it is a stretch to call it an "operating system", in the modern sense of the term. For all its advantages, it wasn't really even multitasking
OS 7 was. (I believe in OS 6, applications not in the foreground got zero processing time, but in OS 7 background applications definitely could get work done. I know; I wrote some OS 7 background apps myself.)
I should also point out that previous versions of Mac OS, back to the first version I believe, had a special class of application called a "Desk Accessory" that could run at the same time as another application. They had a much more limited API, but they were designed into the OS from day one... if you count a Desk Accessory as an application (and some were pretty featureful, like Notepad), then Mac OS has always had multitasking.
BTW, under what definition of "operation system" would DOS fit, but Mac Classic *not* fit? Or do you also believe that DOS is not an operating system?
let alone preemptively multitasking.
That's true.
More like (manual) application switching, something that was considered revolutionary in the Mac world circa 1984.
The 1984 Mac world had Desk Accessories.
No, like I said, OS 7 would give background applications time slices. The only (practical) difference between OS 7 and Windows was the pre-emptiveness. OS 7 had to wait for the application to yield time.
What this means is that a poorly-coded Mac application could prevent background tasks from ever getting time slices. In practice, however, it wans't nearly as big a deal as buggy applications didn't sell well and so not many of them existed.
Anything else would break backward compatibility with a design that had programs regularly tweaking system variables at fixed addresses in low memory and doing all sorts of other dangerous and intrusive things with no locking whatsoever.
Not really. OS 7 "faked them out" and let them twiddle with their own copy of the system globals when they wanted. The problem here is that when you switched applications, you also needed to copy all of these global variables along with it, making it a slow process. (OS 6 did the same, I believe.)
In general, you're right though: any OS 7 application could crash the system quite easily, as there was no memory protection. Then again, at that time, Mac ran on CPUs that had no hardware support for memory protection anyway.
The same could be said about Mac OS Classic, with it's two-fork filesystem. While the resource fork was *awesome* for application development, tracking of meta-data, and the like... well... you can't send the damned thing over the Internet. There's workarounds, like MacBinary or BinHex, but they were never very reliable since it was a compete crapshoot whether the Windows or Linux PC on the other end had any clue what to do with them.
(Even if you send a Mac Classic file to a Windows PC, and the Windows email client knows what a.hqx file was, the obvious problem was: where do you put the stuff in the resource fork? You could go through all the PICT resources, for example, and create separate files for all of them, but that's assuming you know how to read the image type in each PICT. Ditto with snd resources, or TEXT resources in the file.)
There's never been a good way of sending meta-data over the Internet, unfortunately. The only formats that make this work are formats that encode the meta-data in the file itself, like MP3... but that's an extremely inflexible way of doing it.
So if you want to blame anybody for the lack of meta-data in the modern computing world, blame Unix and Linux-- the Internet was all their stuff originally.
1. drive aliases. Basically the file system in Windows sucks. There are a ton of cool file systems in unix land but unless you want to really break tons of stuff AFAIK you are stuck with NTFS on Windows, no journaling FS in 7 like MS promised.
WTF? NTFS has had journaling since it was introduced. (What, mid-90s?)
Maybe you're confusing NTFS with Fat32, except everything from Windows 2000 on has defaulted to NTFS on installed. I believe Win2k and XP can run from a Fat32 disk, but they don't like doing it... Vista and Windows 7 require NTFS to run.
2. Real multitasking. The amount of things that make Windows unresponsive is mind boggling. Pop in a CD/DVD, try and print, explore the network, etc. Okay if you must, make ONE thing unresponsive, don't kill my whole OS trying to find all the printers on the network. I have 4 CPU's and 4GB of RAM etc and it's SLOW!!! WTF!
When's the last time you used Windows? That complaint applied to Windows 95, 98 and ME. But it hasn't been true in a looong time.
Ok I have two LCD monitors, one with a resolution of 1680x1050 and another that's 1280x1024. What would be the point of putting that technology in a modern machine? What good is it when we have this many pixels to start with, and LCDs running and non-native resolutions look like ass?
Remembering that the original post was "things my Amiga did that I wish my current computer would."
Slashdot Mirror
It takes several hundred years for the planet to reach its sea level equilibrium, but we're talking about (among countless other things) 1/4 of the land mass of Florida going underwater.
Anything we can do to speed this up?
More seriously, you do realize that we have these things called "dikes" and "technology-in-general", right? What bothers me most about the global warming thing is that the proponents think we're so useless as a species... we've solved a hell of a lot of problems before, we'll solve this one too.
I think you may have solved the puzzle.
I really dont understand this urge of blowing simple stories completely out of proportion by mentioning pedosexuals, muslims or the banking system.
Me neither.
If you're going to blow simple stories completely out of proportion, you'd be better off mentioning pedosexuals, Muslims *and* the banking system all at the same time! Do it right, people.
I ripped Up! just last week, actually. The copy works fine.
The last movie I had problems with was actually The Simpsons Movie... not sure if it was AnyDVD or Handbrake's new encoder that caused the problem, because I threw the raw files away after compressing it with Handbrake. (I always test the movies, but my test is pretty cursory and I missed the bug.)
What was weird is how it was wrong-- the movie was all in the MP4 file correctly. However, at 3 points in the movie, roughly evenly-spaced, the image would go still and greyscale and audio from the beginning of the movie would play over the still. I guess that's some artifact of the menuing system they used?
Enough with the union bashing, already. Read a little history of the labor movement, and then see what you think.
I do read a lot about Unions. Stuff like this: http://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/story/296557.html
It doesn't give me a very good impression. Despite that, I don't have anything against *voluntary* Unionization-- just don't expect me to join, I'd do a better job negotiating on my own.
But my main objection with Unions is that it makes the employee and management into "opponents." Right now, I have a very friendly relationship with my management, and I understand and agree with the company's purpose. If I were in a Union, suddenly he would be considered an enemy for us to defeat and we'd have to fight for our benefits/pay every year.
It's not really a big thing, just a subtle difference, but I'd much rather work with management with mutual respect than be their "enemy."
I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
In the time it took you to grind the equipment/ships required to destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff, you could have made TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars if you had, for example, knitted dolls and sold them at craft fairs instead of playing EVE in the first place.
Just FYI for next time, there is a way to remove Vundo without a boot disk:
http://blakeyrat.com/2008/10/how-to-really-get-rid-of-the-vundo-aka-virtumonde-virtumondo-ms-juan/
Once you've identified the offending DLLs, you can set their file permissions to "Everybody - Deny". When you next boot, they won't be allowed to execute and you can simply delete them. (You do, however, have to power-off your computer without shutting it down, which carries a tiny risk.)
WTF! Here in the Seattle area, every decent-sized city had at least one independent parts store. You must live in Iowa or something.
A cop did the same thing on the Hewitt Ave trestle east of Everett, WA a few years ago.
There's a HUGE variation in Jiffy Lube quality. I've been to good ones, and I've been to ones that try to upsell me everything in the store. I try to avoid it now and go to the Texaco or Costco for oil changes.
If there was another place I could get computer parts and electronics locally
There isn't?
Where the hell do you live, some post-apocalypse Mad Max future?
I loathe about it is the fact that typical users including so called "light users" have to charge it daily. Insane...where is the time for such attention?
I just plug it in before I go to sleep. As do, I'm sure, 99% of cellphone owners.
"Time for such attention?" Do you sit around and *watch* your phone charge? Seriously? Most people have other, better, things to do.
Whatever, none of that changes (or even addresses) my point: the term is already established.
That's true regardless of how "historically informed" I am. You're spouting complete bullshit, and it's starting to piss me off.
If you could talk Dreamhost into doing that, it would be awesome.
I understand the concern - that MySQL will be an in-house "competitor" for resources to Oracle's database. However, why wouldn't they be complimentary?
That's the big mystery.
Microsoft seems to be doing ok with both SQL Server and SQL Server Express. It helps that the migration between the two is mind-numbingly simple.
If Oracle set up an easy way to migrate from MySQL to Oracle, and they renamed MySQL into "Oracle Express", there you go.
Yah. Like... this empty Coke can. Or a box of Cheerios.
Any offers?
I'm sorry, I think you care a lot more about this subject than I do.
That's a great way to dodge a difficult question. "Well I don't have an answer but I don't care neither! Naaah."
In my opinion, the world would be infinitesimally better off if we adopted the convention that operating systems actually operate more than one non-trivial program at once, and multitask between them on an equal basis. No doubt you disagree.
Yes, because the *convention* is already established and it's not that.
What you're wanting to do is change an existing convention, and frankly you don't have the cultural influence to pull that one off, buddy.
(By the way, the only thing that makes notepad.exe on Windows an application and the Notepad desk accessory on the Mac a "desk accessory" is a distinction that the Mac itself makes. If desk accessories could do everything that applications could do, and in the same way they did it, no one would care. "Mac desk accessory" and "Mac application" would be a distinction without a difference, sort of like "BIOS" and "Boot ROM".)
Lotus Notes calls an email a "memo." Does that mean Notes isn't an email client?
But I love reading this story over and over again about every 2 years. It'll happen any day now!! We pinky-swear!
You're the first person I've heard claim that an OS requires multitasking. Wikipedia, for example, lists MS-DOS as an operating system.
Yes, but Mac desk accessories were more like toys than real applications, the rough equivalent of terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) utilities like Sidekick on MS-DOS. They were programmed completely differently, had all sorts of special rules, and most particularly could use only a relatively small amount of memory.
While that's all true, you'd be hard-pressed to claim that the Notepad.exe in Windows was an application, while the Notepad Desk Accessory on Mac wasn't. Both (initially) were limited to 32k of text. But both could also run alongside/atop other applications. The only real difference is that the Windows one saves text files while the Mac one auto-saves when you close it.
Although maybe you think Notepad.exe in Windows *isn't* an application, which brings up an obvious question: what is it?
You seem to be fond of cherry-picking terms to suit your purposes.
I wasn't particularly fond of the original Macs
No duh, you keep badmouthing them. :P
Ok, I used Macs from 6.0.8 to 10.4, and I have a few corrections for you. The gist of your message is correct, but you're wrong in some of the details.
System 7 was a great (even outstanding) environment, to be sure, but I think it is a stretch to call it an "operating system", in the modern sense of the term. For all its advantages, it wasn't really even multitasking
OS 7 was. (I believe in OS 6, applications not in the foreground got zero processing time, but in OS 7 background applications definitely could get work done. I know; I wrote some OS 7 background apps myself.)
I should also point out that previous versions of Mac OS, back to the first version I believe, had a special class of application called a "Desk Accessory" that could run at the same time as another application. They had a much more limited API, but they were designed into the OS from day one... if you count a Desk Accessory as an application (and some were pretty featureful, like Notepad), then Mac OS has always had multitasking.
BTW, under what definition of "operation system" would DOS fit, but Mac Classic *not* fit? Or do you also believe that DOS is not an operating system?
let alone preemptively multitasking.
That's true.
More like (manual) application switching, something that was considered revolutionary in the Mac world circa 1984.
The 1984 Mac world had Desk Accessories.
No, like I said, OS 7 would give background applications time slices. The only (practical) difference between OS 7 and Windows was the pre-emptiveness. OS 7 had to wait for the application to yield time.
What this means is that a poorly-coded Mac application could prevent background tasks from ever getting time slices. In practice, however, it wans't nearly as big a deal as buggy applications didn't sell well and so not many of them existed.
Anything else would break backward compatibility with a design that had programs regularly tweaking system variables at fixed addresses in low memory and doing all sorts of other dangerous and intrusive things with no locking whatsoever.
Not really. OS 7 "faked them out" and let them twiddle with their own copy of the system globals when they wanted. The problem here is that when you switched applications, you also needed to copy all of these global variables along with it, making it a slow process. (OS 6 did the same, I believe.)
In general, you're right though: any OS 7 application could crash the system quite easily, as there was no memory protection. Then again, at that time, Mac ran on CPUs that had no hardware support for memory protection anyway.
* Single metadata format for everything.
What killed that off was the Internet.
The same could be said about Mac OS Classic, with it's two-fork filesystem. While the resource fork was *awesome* for application development, tracking of meta-data, and the like... well... you can't send the damned thing over the Internet. There's workarounds, like MacBinary or BinHex, but they were never very reliable since it was a compete crapshoot whether the Windows or Linux PC on the other end had any clue what to do with them.
(Even if you send a Mac Classic file to a Windows PC, and the Windows email client knows what a .hqx file was, the obvious problem was: where do you put the stuff in the resource fork? You could go through all the PICT resources, for example, and create separate files for all of them, but that's assuming you know how to read the image type in each PICT. Ditto with snd resources, or TEXT resources in the file.)
There's never been a good way of sending meta-data over the Internet, unfortunately. The only formats that make this work are formats that encode the meta-data in the file itself, like MP3... but that's an extremely inflexible way of doing it.
So if you want to blame anybody for the lack of meta-data in the modern computing world, blame Unix and Linux-- the Internet was all their stuff originally.
1. drive aliases. Basically the file system in Windows sucks. There are a ton of cool file systems in unix land but unless you want to really break tons of stuff AFAIK you are stuck with NTFS on Windows, no journaling FS in 7 like MS promised.
WTF? NTFS has had journaling since it was introduced. (What, mid-90s?)
Maybe you're confusing NTFS with Fat32, except everything from Windows 2000 on has defaulted to NTFS on installed. I believe Win2k and XP can run from a Fat32 disk, but they don't like doing it... Vista and Windows 7 require NTFS to run.
2. Real multitasking. The amount of things that make Windows unresponsive is mind boggling. Pop in a CD/DVD, try and print, explore the network, etc. Okay if you must, make ONE thing unresponsive, don't kill my whole OS trying to find all the printers on the network. I have 4 CPU's and 4GB of RAM etc and it's SLOW!!! WTF!
When's the last time you used Windows? That complaint applied to Windows 95, 98 and ME. But it hasn't been true in a looong time.
Ok I have two LCD monitors, one with a resolution of 1680x1050 and another that's 1280x1024. What would be the point of putting that technology in a modern machine? What good is it when we have this many pixels to start with, and LCDs running and non-native resolutions look like ass?
Remembering that the original post was "things my Amiga did that I wish my current computer would."
Wow, way to blow away all of those Slashdotter stereotypes!!