What on earth would six simultaneous displays on Windows be useful for in the real world?
There are plenty of people who find multiple monitors very useful. Hell, I'm currently only using one 1920x1200 24" monitor and I need to use virtual desktops quite heavily to feel comfortable with this setup. An ideal setup for me would have at least two more monitors.
I've also noticed something (not directed at you) interesting in that a lot of Windows users seem incapable of understanding why one would want lots of non-maximized windows, or any non-maximized windows for that matter, it's like a whole lot of them (including a lot of sysadmins, developers and the like) view the windows as a stack, or to use the desktop metaphor, it's like covering your entire desk a stack of large sheets of paper. Now, from this perspective a six och nine monitor setup seems completely useless, but as someone who almost never runs apps maximized (except for Maya, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro and similar apps) I like being able to see all windows as once (another pet peeve, what's with windows users and avoiding multitasking as much as possible, you're not running Windows 98 anymore, newer versions of Windows are actually capable of running more than one app at a time without exploding).
No, it says that in order to do what you told it to do it has to erase music from your iPod/iPhone (not your computer) and asks you if you want to continue.
While Microsoft do have UI guidelines the truth is that practically no one follows those guidelines. In fact, for a lot of companies developing Windows software it seems to be a matter of pride to make sure your UI stands out as much as possible and constantly annoys the user by behaving strangely and demanding constant attention. Not to mention the number of apps on Windows that try to forcefully push themselves to the front every time they do anything at all.
Now while Apple's apps for Windows may not conform to Microsoft's UI guidelines they are at least usable, which is more than you can say for a lot of other apps for Windows (including several Microsoft apps).
Ah, but most geeks don't say "I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT I'M NOT SOME GEEK LIKE YOU!" (as your average user will phrase it when they can't find the Outlook icon on their desktop after "removing some stuff I didn't know what it was" (yeah, I've done my time in tech support, this is pretty much how things tend to play out 90% of the time, or they've decided to "optimize" their email settings without even knowing what a server is)), they tend to say "I don't do the whole management thing, I have no interesting in telling other people to do things, I want to do things myself" and this is hardly something that should be interpreted as being "stupid".
Also, most times when asked to deal with "business issues" IT people tend to get asked to make "decisions" based on questions that can only really be interpreted as "So do you agree with me or should we sabotage you every step of the way until we get to blame IT for the project failing?".
Exactly, it seems like the OP should just stick a weak video card in the box. It's a lot less troublesome than setting up a serial console or something along those lines (serial console on a machine designed to work with a serial console is a lot easier than doing it on some random $500 desktop).
For your first paragraph, well, that's just stupid. In order for that statement to be true you'd have to start out with the assumption that certain individuals or groups of people are in fact not people but property and since I feel somewhat safe to assume that very few people on/. or society in general feel that way then there's really no reason to say anything further.
As for destroying all the world's farm equipment, that would not be violence, unless the motivation was to cause starvation, but even then it is not violence in the more literal sense (punch to the face, bullet in the chest and so on) but rather more like violence by proxy.
I wouldn't call the US "the modern inventor of greed" but I would say that the US is the number one source of the "greed is good" mentality in the western world since at least the end of WW2.
"We're not horrible, the Chinese are worse! See?", great argument there.
As a European I can confidently say that one of the worst influences the US has had on Europe in terms of culture is the spread of the "greed is good", "cash is king" and generally egocentric and egoistic ideals. That's not to say that we were all nice and friendly to each other, but the US influence can definitely be seen when comparing my home country today and thirty years ago.
Well you see, in the US the basic rule seems to be Gordon Gekko's slogan "Greed is good", anything goes as long as you're being greedy. This explains why dishonest corporate executives and the like get off easy. As for why sex is considered so much more horrible than murder and torture, well I just don't know...
Ok, so how about Sweden and Finland then? The population density in the part of Sweden I live in (JÃmtland is about 3.3 per km with most people living in a few cities/towns, and despite this I have perfectly good GSM/GPRS coverage practically everywhere (3G tends to drop off if you're out in the woods somewhere).
Except that Geocities lacked a lot of the features that make a community website a community, the focus isn't on the profile pages of the users, the focus is on interaction between users, something that there was very little of at Geocities.
Geocities wasn't a community so much as it was free crappy webhosting.
As for AOL, well maybe it's true, I have never used AOL, the only contact I've had with people who openly admitted to using it was back in the day when I received emails from people with @aol.com email addresses telling me I was gonna go to hell for denying the existence of the baby jesus who died for my sins and similar flames due to my posts on various forums.
Well, here in Sweden "regular" people were using web-based communities in 1999. Sure, most of the were < 30 years old but it wasn't just a geek or subculture thing, and most people had lots of IRL friends that they communicated with through these communities, so this is not something that's different with Facebook, at least not in Sweden.
I've heard people call twitter "IRC with a clunky user interface" and I'm inclined to agree to a point, there is nothing marvelous about the tech behind Twitter.
As for Facebook, there were communities with guestbooks, private messages, galleries and a lot of the "standard" Facebook features in 1999 (although I've gotten the impression that this was less true in the US as Myspace seems to have been the first community website for "regular" people (as opposed to geeks and specific subcultures) that actually gained some popularity there).
In any case, both Twitter and Facebook are really just incremental improvements of existing technology and ideas.
Actually, they had a control group who were given a placebo who also died even though they had not even been given the vaccine. Also, the researchers died and through luck these two groups were each the exact same size as the group given the vaccine, thus the 300% mortality rate.
You're missing the point, you're focusing entirely on the technical side by arguing that a process on Windows can run just fine without a winform, and that just wasn't what the article was about.
The article was about design philosophies and the implications of choosing an application-centric or a document-centric GUI design.
Or does your government protect you from driving because drivers may be nutjobs too?
This shows you don't "get it". The purpose of a cannon (as in, what it was invented to do) is basically killing and maiming people, while a car can be used to kill people it is by no means its primary purpose.
Now, this guy may not intend to use his cannon to kill people, but the point is that it's still a cannon and most people don't really have any good reason to own a cannon. While I personally see nothing wrong with a properly licensed collector or enthusiast owning some pretty scary and dangerous weapons I still have issues with just letting random people build or purchase cannons, fighter jets, tanks and the like (the two latter assuming guns are still intact).
(By "properly licensed" I mean "has shown that he/she is somewhat mentally stable and capable of at least not killing innocent bystanders while playing with his cannon/tank/nukes")
Uhm, in most civilized countries the people are not "subjects of the government" although I've noticed a lot of americans like to pretend that they're the only once with even a semblance of freedom.
More likely the comment was directed at the fact that the parent felt that there is something wrong in laws that allow an 11 year-old to play around with cannons.
You see, in other countries the government, as a servant of the people, attempts to protect the sane parts of the population from nutjobs who think it's their god-given right to own artillery, bombers, nuclear weapons and other items that are highly likely to end up injuring or killing some innocent bystander.
A Mac is generally referred to as a "Mac" while an IBM PC Compatible is generally referred to as a, hold on, "PC".
Now how did this happen? Well you see, back in the good ol' days of the 1980s people, much like people today, preferred to shorten longer brandnames and phrases to fit them into their everyday use of the english language. The result of this shortening was that "Apple Macintosh" became "Mac" while "IBM PC Compatible" became "PC" even though, as you so trollishly point out, PC means "Personal Computer" and that Apple's computers fit that definition as well.
To be honest I don't think it's all that accurate to compare say, Nokia's total cellphone sales to Apple's since Apple only has one phone model while a lot of other manufacturers (like Nokia) have a wide array of models from low-end models with very few features up to high-end smartphones with every feature imaginable. A more fair comparison would be to compare the iPhone to other smartphones in the same market segment, and every such comparison I've seen seems to indicate that the iPhone is very popular.
For some more "obvious" evidence of this, how long are the lines outside stores when Nokia or another "regular" phone manufacturer releases a new phone model?
While there may have been some doubt as the whether or not Spotify for the iPhone would be approved the main reason most people I've spoken to today seem to consider the release newsworthy is because, surprise surprise, the iPhone is a very popular phone and Spotify is (at least here in Sweden) a very popular piece of software.
As a european my first thought was "that sounds really dangerous", then I read the whole summary and realized that they were talking about what some people like to refer to as a "handegg" and not an actual football.
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I know that it's 400 V between the phases, that's generally the number used.
/Mikael
What on earth would six simultaneous displays on Windows be useful for in the real world?
There are plenty of people who find multiple monitors very useful. Hell, I'm currently only using one 1920x1200 24" monitor and I need to use virtual desktops quite heavily to feel comfortable with this setup. An ideal setup for me would have at least two more monitors.
I've also noticed something (not directed at you) interesting in that a lot of Windows users seem incapable of understanding why one would want lots of non-maximized windows, or any non-maximized windows for that matter, it's like a whole lot of them (including a lot of sysadmins, developers and the like) view the windows as a stack, or to use the desktop metaphor, it's like covering your entire desk a stack of large sheets of paper. Now, from this perspective a six och nine monitor setup seems completely useless, but as someone who almost never runs apps maximized (except for Maya, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro and similar apps) I like being able to see all windows as once (another pet peeve, what's with windows users and avoiding multitasking as much as possible, you're not running Windows 98 anymore, newer versions of Windows are actually capable of running more than one app at a time without exploding).
/Mikael
3 phase 220 V? And here I was thinking 3 phase was generally 400 V.
Of course, I suppose maybe there's some country out there that uses 220 V 3 phase.
/Mikael
No, it says that in order to do what you told it to do it has to erase music from your iPod/iPhone (not your computer) and asks you if you want to continue.
/Mikael
While Microsoft do have UI guidelines the truth is that practically no one follows those guidelines. In fact, for a lot of companies developing Windows software it seems to be a matter of pride to make sure your UI stands out as much as possible and constantly annoys the user by behaving strangely and demanding constant attention. Not to mention the number of apps on Windows that try to forcefully push themselves to the front every time they do anything at all.
Now while Apple's apps for Windows may not conform to Microsoft's UI guidelines they are at least usable, which is more than you can say for a lot of other apps for Windows (including several Microsoft apps).
/Mikael
Ah, but most geeks don't say "I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT I'M NOT SOME GEEK LIKE YOU!" (as your average user will phrase it when they can't find the Outlook icon on their desktop after "removing some stuff I didn't know what it was" (yeah, I've done my time in tech support, this is pretty much how things tend to play out 90% of the time, or they've decided to "optimize" their email settings without even knowing what a server is)), they tend to say "I don't do the whole management thing, I have no interesting in telling other people to do things, I want to do things myself" and this is hardly something that should be interpreted as being "stupid".
Also, most times when asked to deal with "business issues" IT people tend to get asked to make "decisions" based on questions that can only really be interpreted as "So do you agree with me or should we sabotage you every step of the way until we get to blame IT for the project failing?".
/Mikael
Exactly, it seems like the OP should just stick a weak video card in the box. It's a lot less troublesome than setting up a serial console or something along those lines (serial console on a machine designed to work with a serial console is a lot easier than doing it on some random $500 desktop).
/Mikael
For your first paragraph, well, that's just stupid. In order for that statement to be true you'd have to start out with the assumption that certain individuals or groups of people are in fact not people but property and since I feel somewhat safe to assume that very few people on /. or society in general feel that way then there's really no reason to say anything further.
As for destroying all the world's farm equipment, that would not be violence, unless the motivation was to cause starvation, but even then it is not violence in the more literal sense (punch to the face, bullet in the chest and so on) but rather more like violence by proxy.
/Mikael
I wouldn't call the US "the modern inventor of greed" but I would say that the US is the number one source of the "greed is good" mentality in the western world since at least the end of WW2.
/Mikael
"We're not horrible, the Chinese are worse! See?", great argument there.
As a European I can confidently say that one of the worst influences the US has had on Europe in terms of culture is the spread of the "greed is good", "cash is king" and generally egocentric and egoistic ideals. That's not to say that we were all nice and friendly to each other, but the US influence can definitely be seen when comparing my home country today and thirty years ago.
/Mikael
Well you see, in the US the basic rule seems to be Gordon Gekko's slogan "Greed is good", anything goes as long as you're being greedy. This explains why dishonest corporate executives and the like get off easy. As for why sex is considered so much more horrible than murder and torture, well I just don't know...
/Mikael
Ok, so how about Sweden and Finland then? The population density in the part of Sweden I live in (JÃmtland is about 3.3 per km with most people living in a few cities/towns, and despite this I have perfectly good GSM/GPRS coverage practically everywhere (3G tends to drop off if you're out in the woods somewhere).
/Mikael
Except that Geocities lacked a lot of the features that make a community website a community, the focus isn't on the profile pages of the users, the focus is on interaction between users, something that there was very little of at Geocities.
/Mikael
Geocities wasn't a community so much as it was free crappy webhosting.
As for AOL, well maybe it's true, I have never used AOL, the only contact I've had with people who openly admitted to using it was back in the day when I received emails from people with @aol.com email addresses telling me I was gonna go to hell for denying the existence of the baby jesus who died for my sins and similar flames due to my posts on various forums.
/Mikael
Well, here in Sweden "regular" people were using web-based communities in 1999. Sure, most of the were < 30 years old but it wasn't just a geek or subculture thing, and most people had lots of IRL friends that they communicated with through these communities, so this is not something that's different with Facebook, at least not in Sweden.
/Mikael
I've heard people call twitter "IRC with a clunky user interface" and I'm inclined to agree to a point, there is nothing marvelous about the tech behind Twitter.
As for Facebook, there were communities with guestbooks, private messages, galleries and a lot of the "standard" Facebook features in 1999 (although I've gotten the impression that this was less true in the US as Myspace seems to have been the first community website for "regular" people (as opposed to geeks and specific subcultures) that actually gained some popularity there).
In any case, both Twitter and Facebook are really just incremental improvements of existing technology and ideas.
/Mikael
Actually, they had a control group who were given a placebo who also died even though they had not even been given the vaccine. Also, the researchers died and through luck these two groups were each the exact same size as the group given the vaccine, thus the 300% mortality rate.
/Mikael
You're missing the point, you're focusing entirely on the technical side by arguing that a process on Windows can run just fine without a winform, and that just wasn't what the article was about.
The article was about design philosophies and the implications of choosing an application-centric or a document-centric GUI design.
/Mikael
Or does your government protect you from driving because drivers may be nutjobs too?
This shows you don't "get it". The purpose of a cannon (as in, what it was invented to do) is basically killing and maiming people, while a car can be used to kill people it is by no means its primary purpose.
Now, this guy may not intend to use his cannon to kill people, but the point is that it's still a cannon and most people don't really have any good reason to own a cannon. While I personally see nothing wrong with a properly licensed collector or enthusiast owning some pretty scary and dangerous weapons I still have issues with just letting random people build or purchase cannons, fighter jets, tanks and the like (the two latter assuming guns are still intact).
(By "properly licensed" I mean "has shown that he/she is somewhat mentally stable and capable of at least not killing innocent bystanders while playing with his cannon/tank/nukes")
/Mikael
Uhm, in most civilized countries the people are not "subjects of the government" although I've noticed a lot of americans like to pretend that they're the only once with even a semblance of freedom.
More likely the comment was directed at the fact that the parent felt that there is something wrong in laws that allow an 11 year-old to play around with cannons.
You see, in other countries the government, as a servant of the people, attempts to protect the sane parts of the population from nutjobs who think it's their god-given right to own artillery, bombers, nuclear weapons and other items that are highly likely to end up injuring or killing some innocent bystander.
/Mikael
A Mac is generally referred to as a "Mac" while an IBM PC Compatible is generally referred to as a, hold on, "PC".
Now how did this happen? Well you see, back in the good ol' days of the 1980s people, much like people today, preferred to shorten longer brandnames and phrases to fit them into their everyday use of the english language. The result of this shortening was that "Apple Macintosh" became "Mac" while "IBM PC Compatible" became "PC" even though, as you so trollishly point out, PC means "Personal Computer" and that Apple's computers fit that definition as well.
/Mikael
To be honest I don't think it's all that accurate to compare say, Nokia's total cellphone sales to Apple's since Apple only has one phone model while a lot of other manufacturers (like Nokia) have a wide array of models from low-end models with very few features up to high-end smartphones with every feature imaginable. A more fair comparison would be to compare the iPhone to other smartphones in the same market segment, and every such comparison I've seen seems to indicate that the iPhone is very popular.
For some more "obvious" evidence of this, how long are the lines outside stores when Nokia or another "regular" phone manufacturer releases a new phone model?
/Mikael
While there may have been some doubt as the whether or not Spotify for the iPhone would be approved the main reason most people I've spoken to today seem to consider the release newsworthy is because, surprise surprise, the iPhone is a very popular phone and Spotify is (at least here in Sweden) a very popular piece of software.
/Mikael
I think you got that backwards, Americans refer to american football as football and they refer to actual football as soccer.
/Mikael
As a european my first thought was "that sounds really dangerous", then I read the whole summary and realized that they were talking about what some people like to refer to as a "handegg" and not an actual football.
/Mikael