John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review • Hacker News Board

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#181

Post by exogen » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 4:30 AM UTC

iamscanner wrote: post #129

pflats wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best solution I've found: I lie on all my security questions. Give your father's middle name instead of your mother's maiden name, or something. As long as you're consistent in your lies, it's not hard to keep track of.

This is not-super-secure, but in a lot of situations I just use a rule like "third character of first word + second character of third word + first character of fourth word", and so on. You end up with gibberish most of the time, but at least you're not going to let it slip in conversation (and as long as you remember the rule and don't pass that around, you're hopefully okay).

My strategy is to pad the real answer with the same two words for each question. For example, "purple 12345 banana", "purple Smith banana", etc. Not perfect, but it should defeat even the best would-be guessers.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#182

Post by buff-a » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 4:33 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #169

ldar15 wrote: post #121

"It chose to attack the lowest-hanging fruit first, the one thing about Apple's development environment most likely to stand out as primitive and backwards to programmers coming from other platforms or even fresh out of school: manual memory management." ARC works great until you have cyclic references. Then you "just" have to add "Zeroing Weak References". Ok. Where? How do I know when I have to add them? The proble…

You can find retain cycles using the abandoned memory and ARC debugging tools in Instruments.

I can. You can. I bet most can't, and even if they could, still wouldn't know the right place to break the cycle. If you break the cycle in the wrong place then things go bye-bye when you still need them.

I've had this very discussion on here. Hell, at a games company that developed AAA titles, I had to demonstrate to a non-junior programmer that C++ references can be null. To the majority of programmers, memory management is incomprehensible voodoo. And they're all making iPhone apps. o_O

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#183

Post by buff-a » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 4:34 AM UTC

pkamb wrote: post #83

bengl3rt wrote: post #46

Siracusa strikes me as a power user type so I'm extremely surprised that he neglected to mention how patently awful and useless Mission Control is on multiple monitors. Whereas in the Spaces view in Snow Leopard I could move a window to a different space AND a different monitor with a quick drag, Mission Control doesn't allow this - I have to first move the window to the correct "Desktop", then exit MC and drag it to…

Windows is just as bad. Windows 7 doesn't ship with multiple taskbars for your secondary monitors. Seriously? What's worse is that the developers actually making these features are probably using more than one monitor. And hitting those productivity gaps every day.

I gotta say, Windows 7 nailed it when dragging maximized apps from one screen to the other.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#184

Post by jodrellblank » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 4:45 AM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #159

jodrellblank wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One puts a task bar on the same screen as the applications which makes it easy to switch applications per window, the other hides pictures of the application in a task bar on another screen which makes it harder to switch applications at all and completely ignores screen distinctions. They aren't virtually identical; they aren't even the same thing done differently, they're completely different.

What are you talking about? I'm dual monitoring with both windows and OS X right now. Both have their taskbar on my right hand monitor. Both have icons for launched applications with indicators representing each instance of the application. They both include icons for quick, often used apps that are present even when the application is not open. They're identical... Is there any chance that you're using "task bar" to…

I see; I interpreted you meaning Windows 7's solution is virtually the same effectiveness as Ultramon because of window groups. Missed that you were comparing the OS X dock and 7.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#185

Post by w1ntermute » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 5:41 AM UTC

unwantedLetters wrote: post #148

I am in India, and have a connection that is 256Kbps. This is sufficient for most things, but I cannot get Lion from Apple. I don't mind waiting for 40 hours for ~4GB to download, but the likelihood that a connection in India is sustained for more than 10-15 minutes is rather low. The problem here isn't with the speed (it is with that as well), but with the reliability of the connection. Even at 8MBPS, this download…

Well, India's the exception, not the rule, when it comes to exceedingly poor infrastructure. And considering Apple's upscale target demographic, India probably isn't a huge concern for them.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#186

Post by w1ntermute » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 5:48 AM UTC

unwantedLetters wrote: post #154

pablasso wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a faulty router that just this morning rebooted itself several times while Lion was downloading. Everytime the connection was lost it just resumed. Why don't you try leaving it some hours and see how it goes?

To be very honest, I have a 3G connection with a limit of about 1.25 GB per month. Since I wanted Lion as quick as possible, I downloaded 1 GB of material using the 3G connection (took me a very, very short time - relatively). When I tried to resume the download from the App Store using my normal internet connection it didn't, and I lost about 1GB of stuff. That's why I posted the earlier message. In the interest of…

> Even more interestingly, the provider is the same in both cases.

The wired and wireless divisions of telecoms are often managed very differently. For example, AT&T's U-Verse FTTH service is great, but I wouldn't touch AT&T's cellular service with a 10' pole.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#187

Post by blackman » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 5:52 AM UTC

shiven wrote: post #147

justinchen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Divvy for Mac for arranging windows. I love it. http://mizage.com/divvy/#divvyMac

Don't forget ShiftIt. Completely Free and does everything divvy and SizeUp can do !! A git repo, with latest chages based on https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt/network appears to be here: https://github.com/mehowte/ShiftIt Very easy to build with Xcode 4 on SL 10.6.8 ... I'll be happy to upload a binary of the latest build I made last night for those in need (just ask).

As far as I can remember I had problems when I compiled it to a universal binary so if anyone else does try compiling it directly to your architecture.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#188

Post by sharninder » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 5:52 AM UTC

unwantedLetters wrote: post #148

I am in India, and have a connection that is 256Kbps. This is sufficient for most things, but I cannot get Lion from Apple. I don't mind waiting for 40 hours for ~4GB to download, but the likelihood that a connection in India is sustained for more than 10-15 minutes is rather low. The problem here isn't with the speed (it is with that as well), but with the reliability of the connection. Even at 8MBPS, this download…

I'm in India too and have a 1Mbps connection and downloaded Lion overnight yesterday. MTNL isn't known to be very stable but the Lion install was there in my applications folder in the morning so it does support resuming.

That said, Apple suggested they'll let users download Lion at Apple stores and since this is India we always can do some "jugaad". Why not try talking to the friendly guys at your neighborhood Apple store and they'll install Lion for you.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#189

Post by sharninder » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 5:58 AM UTC

eykanal wrote: post #71

The one point (OK, one of the points) which I think will be VERY confusing to the power user is that the "Automatic Termination" function will remove programs from the application switcher. Given that they're still existing as a process, what's the point of this? The whole point is that launching and quitting apps should be transparent. Why remove it from the application switcher - which will now be the only way to s…

I've observed my parents, wife and sister using OS X and they've NEVER ever quit an application "the Mac way". They just click the red cross and think that quits the application as it does on windows. The only person who gets upset about their behavior above is me and with this change, even I don't need to bother. I think it's a change for the better. The policy for automatic termination is VERY conservative so I doubt an application will be terminated when you really don't want it to.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#190

Post by sharninder » Thu, Jul 21, 2011, 6:00 AM UTC

mmuro wrote: post #165

lambda wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Hacker News, where it is generally understood that most people will have a fairly technical background (it's not called "Hacker News" for nothing). And the review is on Ars Technica, which also targets a technical audience. John Siracusa's reviews of new versions of Mac OS X are famous, as they provide all of the technical details that most other reviewers don't. I understand that's not what you are looking f…

That's fine. My main point being the entire "Internals" section of the review could have been skipped and no one would have thought any less of it.

Is this your first time reading one of John's reviews ? The last few that I remember even had a programming section of some kind :-) And he does mention before beginning the Internals section that people can skip it and the geeks wouldn't mind.