Beautiful. I'd love to go spend a day or two taking photos there.

Since asia is biggish, for those wondering: this is apparently near Beijing. More infos.

Ron Paul waving his Liberty Wand(tm) is NSFW?

*dead as a church mouse that nibbled on too much crack.

>> ^dag:

Up until Lion I would completely disagree with you and say the UX of OS X is simply the best. Yes, I'm talking against Windows 7, Gnome, KDE et al. Now however, I'm starting to cast a wandering eye back towards Linux.
Windows 7 however, is a frigging awful experience any way you slice it. It's stupid little things like the alt-tab selecting whatever window is in the background when really you just want to cycle through the icons. Also, I can't believe they still haven't killed the dysfunctional bloatware ridden system tray. The retarded nanny-ware labyrinth that has to be navigated to connect to a wireless network makes my eyes bleed.
The way I'm feeling now is that all operating systems suck hard, but OS X sucks a little less, at least until Lion - which, again, is starting to suck much harder for all the reasons outlined in this video - and more.



Gnome, KDE, Windows et al have been scampering after the OSX UX for some years now, and I agreee have been doing it rather badly. And this is a trend I'm very skeptical of. However, if you like the workflow that OSX/Quarz imposes, I'm sure you can be happy with it. Where I take exception is having no choice except for what some people in a meeting in Cupertino decide is how I should do my work.

Things that really put me off:

- Menu bar at the top of the screen instead of attached to the individual application... Sure, thats traditional on apple computers and that made sense back in the days when the Mac didn't have real multitasking. But nowadays it's just terribly confusing and imposes longer mouse travel distances.

- Mandatory click-to-focus, which can be seen as a neccessary corrolary of the previous point. I've been using the focus-follows-mouse model (without raise-on-focus) for 15 years now and the difference is jarring. Imagine having to click away an overlay on each and every page you go to in your browser.

- Bouncy in-your-face animations and notification boxes that are reminiscent of Paperclip. Shut up already and get out of my face, I'm trying to work, not playing a game of whack-an-icon.

- Apple marketing OSX as 64 bit but delivering it in 32 bit mode and not telling you until you a) find out by accident and then b) spend 10 minutes gooling around until you find the command to switch it to 64bit default mode (no GUI level preference here for whatever reason).

I'd be a lot happier if I had a choice. Either by having real preferences that goes beyond what color scheme do I want and in what way do I want to stroke my touchpad to do what. Or open up the possibility for alternative window managers.

For all the "think different" attitude that Apple likes to spread, the OSX ecosystem seems to be hard at work to remove individual preferences. Apple turned into the opposite of what the 1984 commercial implied.

Dag, if you're looking at linux again, both KDE and Gnome (especially Gnome 3) are IMO horrible too. If you don't like them, give XFCE a go. I've been using it since '03 IIRC, when I grew tired of Blackbox. And you'd be in good company too

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Fuck Lion. I'm waiting for OSX Direwolf.


Fuck OS X. I've had these tinboxes (aka MacBook Pro) thrust on me by my ex-employer about a year ago. My last encounter with Apple computers before that was with a Mac Classic when I was in 10th grade. So I didn't really know what I was getting into. Before that I worked for 15 years on Linux.

At first I thought "Ok, Apple, you're all about UX and intuitive design. Enlighten me! (and lets forget the abomination that was itunes for the moment)". Oh boy was I sorely disappointed. The workflow that was thrust on me by MacOS X on the GUI side rubbed me the wrong way, regardless of which aspect. So I thought "Ok, fair enough, those were the default settings. Lets change things a bit.... Uh. Wait? That half dozen scared little options is _all_ I get to fiddle with?". Trying to google for solutions was just as sobering. Apple ignoring feature requests for over 8 years, other people frustrated with the same problems I was facing and the most frequent response to valid questions on (non-Apple) help sites wasn't a "I'm sorry that's not possible" but a condescending "Why would you even think of doing that?".

I lasted for one more day after that before installing Virtualbox and running a useable environment (for me) in there.

I'm not going even to get into the hardware aspects of these machines...

So what I'm taking away from my forced encounter of the turtleneck kind is, we're getting the worst of both worlds:
a) Apple is currently as arrogant as Microsoft was in the 90s
b) Apples user/fanboy base is just as bad as the Linux crowd was in the 90s.

=> It's a cult. They are producing overpriced, mediocre machines with mediocre UI that is a far cry from the intuitiveness that is so often touted.

I'm glad some people are escaping the Jobsian reality distortion field.

>> ^heropsycho:

Ugh... let's take the example of the typical American. Is someone in horrible financial shape if they owe more than they earn in a year? No.
Hate this crap...


Someone is in horrible financial shape if he can't keep up with the interest on his loan (3:45 onwards).

It's "X" or "X11" or "the x windows system", not "X-Windows". *grumbles about them young kids today*

>> ^entr0py:

>> ^Encumberance:
The fact that it is all legal gets me.

Yeah, I know a lot of people that are against gun control. But you'd think that rocket control would be more widely supported. Except self-defense and hunting rockets of course.


So I'd be allowed to bring my RPG onto the New York subway?

Of course Mr. Kibbe is reality-resistant. He isn't arguing from a position of conviction, he's arguing an ideological point he's been paid to push. He's PR, marketeer and lobbyist all wrapped into one. I think that he personally doesn't give a flying love-act either way as long as the money is right.

*blocked

Nice to see a long video made it onto the top 15. Should happen more often!

You misspelled "fiefdom" there.

>> ^lucky760:

@direpickle: I think the majority of users use the "hotness" setting, not only because it's the default, but because they, like me, prefer it. I'm curious about it now, so I'll start a poll after this one ends.


You should try newness then, because some of the hotness code seems to have been mixed in there .

I'm purely on newness and on page 3 and up I frequently get really odd "newnessessess" (how do you stop spelling this?) displayed. From page 3 for me right now, the videos displayed to me, by order on the page and truncated to most significant time increment are: 17 hours, 1 day, 3 weeks, 1 day, 1 week, 1 day, 20 hours, 1 month, 1 day, 1 day, 3 months, 1 day, 2 days, 2 days.

If new comments are made to the videos or they got recently promoted, I can see that, but that doesn't have to be the case. I've had 4+ year old videos pop up randomly in the front pages when ordered by newness with no significant activity documented for 2 years. I really hope Sifty doesn't start selling fresh seafood

A bit more on topic: The front page per se is fine for me, the top 15 could be cycled a bit more often. 48 hours in the top 15 is plenty.

Dang Alan Alda got old.