One aspect of gui design is considering the landing area of buttons - this means how much work it is to get the mouse to land over an element. Objects that are along the edge of the screen are considered to have finite width but infinite depth (think about it, you need only aim at the side of the element, and can move your mouse as deep into it as you want). Additionally, having the tab bar be at the top - where we mentally delineate a discrete window, helps in thinking of the tabs as not really bonded to a particular window (as in Firefox), but capable of being pulled away and reconnected to a grouping of windows quickly and easily. Lastly, when not full screened, the tab bar buttons take roughly the same amount of effort to use as if placed elsewhere on the window, if only a bit unintuitive to users who are used to it being done differently.
When Chrome is full screen, you need only toss the mouse pointer in the general direction of the tab, and you are there.
You make a very good point regarding the cheap upgrade cost
Seeing as students can get Win 7 Home Premium $30, of course you're going to have all sorts of young people make the transition - and those people are going to influence other people.
Further, the main reason people avoided Vista is that when it first came out, it sincerely sucked in terms of support. Modern Vista is actually pretty darn good, but it has yet to overcome a lot of the initial bad press.
Windows 7 is exactly what those people that have been waiting since XP have been looking for - it's stable and has large support (because it is Vista 1.1 - i.e. it has already been through the grinder), it has several minor but easily visible improvements (such as a UI that doesn't look nearly as cheap - several common tasks are easier to access), and it uses less memory (... which tickles people who are into numbers in a way they like while additionally better catering to older desktops). And most importantly, it isn't Vista.
I understand your point, but the other two examples at least have "cam" somewhere in there. That way you can go "oh, they mean a camera". iSight? I thought at first it was some sort of special addon for blind people. That's the only reason I griped, and my bad for coming off as a Troll.
The name still sucks though. (iCam would of made more sense)
Oh, everyone is free to teach whatever traits they want to their kids - that's the nature of living in a free society. What I refer to is killing off the versions of our kids that are not liked because they have a genetic behavioral disposition. Not a severe disability, just a trait that makes them different or more sensitive. I'm pro-choice on the grounds that people should be aloud to control their own lives and make decisions about what they want to put their bodies through - what this represents though is termination of lives NOT on the basis of ones own body or ability to raise a child, but based upon non-life threatening genetic predispositions in our children. This line of thinking is dangerous, just as dangerous as going the other direction and banning choice.
What terrifies me is that I could easily see this form of child selection occurring. Remember how vain and cruel those girls from high school were? Well, guess what, those girls become the vain and cruel wives of rich men, placing them squarely in the realm of people who can afford to perform genetic screening on their kids and "weed out" "negative" traits.
The fact that we aren't just given sequential alphanumeric email addresses says something. We are only allowed to choose the "name" on the email address as a gimmick, to make it seem more personalized. While this man has every right to his name (it is his name after all, which is a legally defined concept), why would one expect that he should get to use his name as part of his email address? It's just a common standard because it's an easy way to implement "standardized personalization". The email address itself is still effectively owned by the company he is renting it from (and yes, he is renting it - that's what that bill every month is), and as such they have EVERY right to determine it's form.
If you don't like it, let's remove all controversy and use generated alphanumeric naming.
Yes, what you say is true, but you forget that this America! We are KINGS of misappropriating funds to defend politicians and law enforcement, and our legal system is all for supporting such practices (since it helps protect them as well). Screw what is right, what about the status quo!
Yes, this statement is perhaps pandering, but it's also painfully true (dammit).
The city CAN and HAS flown using just one ZPM (sure, it needed a little extra energy boost from a thermal vent power station, but let's give them a bit of a break as far as that goes - they were being fired on by ONE HELL of a energy weapon and had an entire fucking ocean on top of them at the time.).
Modern aircraft have high levels of computer automation and flying a commercial aircraft is largely a matter of instrumentation, which means I feel safer with my pilot being drunk than with my friend being drunk when we're driving home from a party. In a car, and you're drunk, if you start to drift to one side you hit a telephone pole or an on-coming car. In a plane, you start to drift to one side, you hit a cloud. The ground is far enough away that making one little slip has to be followed by continuing to make vastly incorrect choices for tragedy to occur (due to pilot error that is - not counting stuff that is out of his control). Other planes are (hopefully) not passing within 2-10 feet of you on a regular basis.
Lying happens - One of the more interesting family stories is one my mom shared with me from when she used to date a Chicago cop. The guy used to put super glue in peoples locks as he stood outside their door if they pissed them off (discretely of course), or if they REALLY annoyed him he would drop a little baggy of coke on them.
The guy also gave her a switchblade he confiscated (they are illegal here) to keep in her purse on the basis that "it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it".
Jesus Christ, the sort of shit that get's modded up horrifies me on Slashdot sometimes - (+5 insightful ???)
"I'd settle for being able to stretch/shrink a wallpaper image to the size of the desktop without messing up the aspect ratio. [FUD omitted] couldn't find an intern to spend 1 afternoon making it so you can just slap an image on the desktop without it looking like crap."
... Vista does do that. It's really bloody obvious too - when you pick a wallpaper the bottom 150 pixels of the page are painfully devoted to it, don't even use words anymore because apparently that's too hard for people. Just little monitor outlines with a little picture of a flower shown in the various states (centered, tiled, stretched, CROPPED TO FIT - i.e. maintaining aspect ratio.)
---
You want a good reason to be annoyed, how about how all desktops backgrounds (in Vista) are now stored as.jpg's before being displayed? This was painfully obvious after I spent a while creating a color gradient image to help calibrate color levels on some old Sun CRT's and noticed some painful compression artifacts when I set the.bmp as my background (since the image was specifically made for ocd'grade monitor calibration, out of place/blurred pixels _really_ jumped out).
What about the incidents of women who, after having to work damn hard and remain twice as professional every moment for fear of being labeled "the woman", start seeing other women as cut-throat competition for a very small set of positions in a mans world? It's easy to see how this sort of thought would result in biased appraisals by an interviewer.
It's rather discriminatory to think that only people of different sex/race/etc. can be biased against each other.
So you're really, _really_ a female? Well, there is a simple test for this as a matter of fact! What is your first instinct when I say "woman, make me a sam'ich"?
(If you think you would kick me in the balls and tell all your friends I have a small penis, then you pass. That's assuming my 'ex counts as a representative data set.)
No one else has said it yet - so I will. Why did Asus change the beautiful look and feel of the 700 Eee which was nice and had a textured surface that wasn't all smooth/shiny/fingerprint'tastic (everything I hate about cheap mass-produced technology)? The new one is... smooth/shiny/fingerprint'tastic. I.E. it looks cheap. Something I would be embarrassed to be seen with - everything the 700's weren't. I agree, the hardware stats have improved across the board, so it is a shame it has been made so ugly.
Then there is the new logo on it. I liked the old one - it was straight forward, simple, made it clear that this thing was functional and useful - not just a toy meant only to look nice but served no real use. The new logo on it looks like they're trying oh so hard to be "fancy" - effectively making it just that much more something that I would never/ever want to bad.
It's a shame because I really do want to buy one, I have been saving up to buy the 700 because I loved it - I only wished it had a nicer screen/touchpad/battery time/storage. Which is everything the 901 has. Except now the nice yet functional look has been replaced with a continuous punch in the crotch. So now I won't buy it, and I won't buy the 700 'cause I'll know what I'm missing. I'm sad now.
1.5TB a day as a huge commitment? You really think that? This is a major corporation, 1.5TB/day*14days = 21TB. That is nothing to a company of their size. Assuming triple redundancy, you could still fit all the rackmount hardware into something smaller than the average linen closet.
They probably spent more on the press release for this than it costs to maintain that hardware for a year.
This is an amazing chair that can comfortably support you from any sort of fully standing to regular sitting (and anything in between). It allows you to adjust your posture as you work, so you don't aren't limited to one stance.
The second I saw it me and a friend spent about 24 hours straight reverse engineering it and building a scale prototype out of household materials (to make sure that everything was smoothly moving in sync.)
I highly suggest watching the video of it in action (they also show it used along with the TaskMate, basically a thing that adjusts the height of your keyboard/monitor to match your working height).
While the "Great Firewall" is expansive within China's borders, it isn't all that technically impressive. There are internet gateways leading in and out of the country - you already have to have hardware managing that as those pipes lead downwards to major infrastructure backbones, government networks, individual ISP's, etc. Not particularly difficult a step to add filtering/blocking/poisoning to internet requests from the subsidiary networks (not to suggest that it isn't a lot of man hours/hardware involved, but it isn't exactly rocket science - just extensions off of established filtering techniques).
Most of the filtering isn't even being handled by the "Great Firewall" but is instead handled by individual ISP's instituting their own filtering methods and complying with government issued blocklists, as well as citizen self censorship. While I don't mean to suggest that China doesn't have the programming talent to attack other nations networks (especially our American soft and squishy ones), but the "Great Firewall" is hardly a golden example of technological achievement.
The problem here is that the system didn't shut down because it detected an error in the data collection system, instead it incorrectly detected a problem that did not in fact exist and then proceeded to take action. While the engineer in me is fairly certain that the system is designed to always fail to a safe state (as in, any automatic emergency response couldn't accidentally make things worse - at least not without raising all sorts of alarms), it is still concerning that internal control systems can be so effected by external servers.
In the article they mention that the system wasn't designed for security (since it was meant to be internal) - but this isn't a security issue at all! Any sort of system that relies upon other systems should be designed to assume failure can and will occur in other systems - that is not to say that it needs to verify/evaluate incoming data to make sure it is "good", but rather that it can tell the difference between receiving data (such as current water levels) and receiving no data at all (system failure). Once it has that it can ideally automatically switch to a backup system, or do what it did here and enter a fail-safe state (the difference being that it does so while pointing out the actual problem and not a incorrectly perceived problem in a different part of the system).
Does this actually mean that every system that effects operations in the plant _doesn't_ have a duplicate system running identical software acting as a shadow/backup? This would seem like a very basic level of system protection to have in a Nuclear Power Plant... If they had maintained such a system they would of loaded the new update onto the backup servers (which would be identical in every possible way to the mains), the system would of "broken" as it did here, and they would be able to keep operating while they figured out the problem.
Also, before you make the argument "but what if the update is critical?" - it's a Nuclear Power Plant! If any sort of update can be classified as so very urgent they couldn't put it off a couple days then I'd say we have bigger problems.
That would work great, except that TabMixPlus hasn't been ported/updated to Firefox 3 yet. It's pretty much the only reason I haven't made the switch yet.
On a side note; All-in-One Sidebar also hasn't been ported nor has Long Titles (for XKCD and the like), but I would consider those acceptable loses. Heck, if no one did Long Titles for too long I might even take a crack at it, wouldn't be the first time I'd patched up a (simple) extension.
I understand how for some users not having file management isn't something they'll notice or care about, but what about the multitudes of people that would enjoy having a choice? What if we just plain don't want something game related (save, setting, whatever) stored any more? I checked the article to see if there really weren't any options at all about your stored files, but unfortunately it gives about the same amount of information as is in the article summary.
This seems like a fairly big thing to leave out seeing as there seems to be a great deal of options and tools (import/export/backup, etc.) for controlling your data (games/saves/etc.) when it comes to the current Steam client.
Slashdot Mirror
What sort of framerate can it run Crysis at?
One aspect of gui design is considering the landing area of buttons - this means how much work it is to get the mouse to land over an element. Objects that are along the edge of the screen are considered to have finite width but infinite depth (think about it, you need only aim at the side of the element, and can move your mouse as deep into it as you want). Additionally, having the tab bar be at the top - where we mentally delineate a discrete window, helps in thinking of the tabs as not really bonded to a particular window (as in Firefox), but capable of being pulled away and reconnected to a grouping of windows quickly and easily. Lastly, when not full screened, the tab bar buttons take roughly the same amount of effort to use as if placed elsewhere on the window, if only a bit unintuitive to users who are used to it being done differently.
When Chrome is full screen, you need only toss the mouse pointer in the general direction of the tab, and you are there.
You make a very good point regarding the cheap upgrade cost
Seeing as students can get Win 7 Home Premium $30, of course you're going to have all sorts of young people make the transition - and those people are going to influence other people.
Further, the main reason people avoided Vista is that when it first came out, it sincerely sucked in terms of support. Modern Vista is actually pretty darn good, but it has yet to overcome a lot of the initial bad press.
Windows 7 is exactly what those people that have been waiting since XP have been looking for - it's stable and has large support (because it is Vista 1.1 - i.e. it has already been through the grinder), it has several minor but easily visible improvements (such as a UI that doesn't look nearly as cheap - several common tasks are easier to access), and it uses less memory (... which tickles people who are into numbers in a way they like while additionally better catering to older desktops). And most importantly, it isn't Vista.
I understand your point, but the other two examples at least have "cam" somewhere in there. That way you can go "oh, they mean a camera". iSight? I thought at first it was some sort of special addon for blind people. That's the only reason I griped, and my bad for coming off as a Troll.
The name still sucks though. (iCam would of made more sense)
... Really? iSight? They really came up with a special Apple-only name for a camera?
Okay, I give up, excuse me while I find a truck to stand in front of (... knowing my luck it will be an iTruck).
Sincerely,
iSuck.
Oh, everyone is free to teach whatever traits they want to their kids - that's the nature of living in a free society. What I refer to is killing off the versions of our kids that are not liked because they have a genetic behavioral disposition. Not a severe disability, just a trait that makes them different or more sensitive. I'm pro-choice on the grounds that people should be aloud to control their own lives and make decisions about what they want to put their bodies through - what this represents though is termination of lives NOT on the basis of ones own body or ability to raise a child, but based upon non-life threatening genetic predispositions in our children. This line of thinking is dangerous, just as dangerous as going the other direction and banning choice.
http://www.explosm.net/comics/1681/ - This is our future.
What terrifies me is that I could easily see this form of child selection occurring. Remember how vain and cruel those girls from high school were? Well, guess what, those girls become the vain and cruel wives of rich men, placing them squarely in the realm of people who can afford to perform genetic screening on their kids and "weed out" "negative" traits.
Niko Bellic is only a "bit part" in this up-coming game???
In the words of Niko, "I'll rip your fucking heart out!".
The fact that we aren't just given sequential alphanumeric email addresses says something. We are only allowed to choose the "name" on the email address as a gimmick, to make it seem more personalized. While this man has every right to his name (it is his name after all, which is a legally defined concept), why would one expect that he should get to use his name as part of his email address? It's just a common standard because it's an easy way to implement "standardized personalization". The email address itself is still effectively owned by the company he is renting it from (and yes, he is renting it - that's what that bill every month is), and as such they have EVERY right to determine it's form.
If you don't like it, let's remove all controversy and use generated alphanumeric naming.
Yes, what you say is true, but you forget that this America! We are KINGS of misappropriating funds to defend politicians and law enforcement, and our legal system is all for supporting such practices (since it helps protect them as well). Screw what is right, what about the status quo!
Yes, this statement is perhaps pandering, but it's also painfully true (dammit).
The city CAN and HAS flown using just one ZPM (sure, it needed a little extra energy boost from a thermal vent power station, but let's give them a bit of a break as far as that goes - they were being fired on by ONE HELL of a energy weapon and had an entire fucking ocean on top of them at the time.).
Modern aircraft have high levels of computer automation and flying a commercial aircraft is largely a matter of instrumentation, which means I feel safer with my pilot being drunk than with my friend being drunk when we're driving home from a party. In a car, and you're drunk, if you start to drift to one side you hit a telephone pole or an on-coming car. In a plane, you start to drift to one side, you hit a cloud. The ground is far enough away that making one little slip has to be followed by continuing to make vastly incorrect choices for tragedy to occur (due to pilot error that is - not counting stuff that is out of his control). Other planes are (hopefully) not passing within 2-10 feet of you on a regular basis.
Lying happens - One of the more interesting family stories is one my mom shared with me from when she used to date a Chicago cop. The guy used to put super glue in peoples locks as he stood outside their door if they pissed them off (discretely of course), or if they REALLY annoyed him he would drop a little baggy of coke on them.
The guy also gave her a switchblade he confiscated (they are illegal here) to keep in her purse on the basis that "it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it".
"I'd settle for being able to stretch/shrink a wallpaper image to the size of the desktop without messing up the aspect ratio. [FUD omitted] couldn't find an intern to spend 1 afternoon making it so you can just slap an image on the desktop without it looking like crap."
---
You want a good reason to be annoyed, how about how all desktops backgrounds (in Vista) are now stored as
What about the incidents of women who, after having to work damn hard and remain twice as professional every moment for fear of being labeled "the woman", start seeing other women as cut-throat competition for a very small set of positions in a mans world? It's easy to see how this sort of thought would result in biased appraisals by an interviewer.
It's rather discriminatory to think that only people of different sex/race/etc. can be biased against each other.
So you're really, _really_ a female? Well, there is a simple test for this as a matter of fact! What is your first instinct when I say "woman, make me a sam'ich"?
(If you think you would kick me in the balls and tell all your friends I have a small penis, then you pass. That's assuming my 'ex counts as a representative data set.)
want to be seen with* (not "want to bad")
Sorry, I usually am better about stuff like that.
No one else has said it yet - so I will. Why did Asus change the beautiful look and feel of the 700 Eee which was nice and had a textured surface that wasn't all smooth/shiny/fingerprint'tastic (everything I hate about cheap mass-produced technology)? The new one is... smooth/shiny/fingerprint'tastic. I.E. it looks cheap. Something I would be embarrassed to be seen with - everything the 700's weren't. I agree, the hardware stats have improved across the board, so it is a shame it has been made so ugly.
Then there is the new logo on it. I liked the old one - it was straight forward, simple, made it clear that this thing was functional and useful - not just a toy meant only to look nice but served no real use. The new logo on it looks like they're trying oh so hard to be "fancy" - effectively making it just that much more something that I would never/ever want to bad.
It's a shame because I really do want to buy one, I have been saving up to buy the 700 because I loved it - I only wished it had a nicer screen/touchpad/battery time/storage. Which is everything the 901 has. Except now the nice yet functional look has been replaced with a continuous punch in the crotch. So now I won't buy it, and I won't buy the 700 'cause I'll know what I'm missing. I'm sad now.
1.5TB a day as a huge commitment? You really think that? This is a major corporation, 1.5TB/day*14days = 21TB. That is nothing to a company of their size. Assuming triple redundancy, you could still fit all the rackmount hardware into something smaller than the average linen closet.
They probably spent more on the press release for this than it costs to maintain that hardware for a year.
http://www.healthpostures.com/ (General info, click Stance for in-action video.)
http://www.healthpostures.com/Stance-angle-chair.cfm (More detailed description.)
This is an amazing chair that can comfortably support you from any sort of fully standing to regular sitting (and anything in between). It allows you to adjust your posture as you work, so you don't aren't limited to one stance.
The second I saw it me and a friend spent about 24 hours straight reverse engineering it and building a scale prototype out of household materials (to make sure that everything was smoothly moving in sync.)
I highly suggest watching the video of it in action (they also show it used along with the TaskMate, basically a thing that adjusts the height of your keyboard/monitor to match your working height).
While the "Great Firewall" is expansive within China's borders, it isn't all that technically impressive. There are internet gateways leading in and out of the country - you already have to have hardware managing that as those pipes lead downwards to major infrastructure backbones, government networks, individual ISP's, etc. Not particularly difficult a step to add filtering/blocking/poisoning to internet requests from the subsidiary networks (not to suggest that it isn't a lot of man hours/hardware involved, but it isn't exactly rocket science - just extensions off of established filtering techniques).
Most of the filtering isn't even being handled by the "Great Firewall" but is instead handled by individual ISP's instituting their own filtering methods and complying with government issued blocklists, as well as citizen self censorship. While I don't mean to suggest that China doesn't have the programming talent to attack other nations networks (especially our American soft and squishy ones), but the "Great Firewall" is hardly a golden example of technological achievement.
(Wikipedia has a fairly good outline of China's known practices, those interested might want to take a look at it before doing some more in-depth research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China)
The problem here is that the system didn't shut down because it detected an error in the data collection system, instead it incorrectly detected a problem that did not in fact exist and then proceeded to take action. While the engineer in me is fairly certain that the system is designed to always fail to a safe state (as in, any automatic emergency response couldn't accidentally make things worse - at least not without raising all sorts of alarms), it is still concerning that internal control systems can be so effected by external servers.
In the article they mention that the system wasn't designed for security (since it was meant to be internal) - but this isn't a security issue at all! Any sort of system that relies upon other systems should be designed to assume failure can and will occur in other systems - that is not to say that it needs to verify/evaluate incoming data to make sure it is "good", but rather that it can tell the difference between receiving data (such as current water levels) and receiving no data at all (system failure). Once it has that it can ideally automatically switch to a backup system, or do what it did here and enter a fail-safe state (the difference being that it does so while pointing out the actual problem and not a incorrectly perceived problem in a different part of the system).
Does this actually mean that every system that effects operations in the plant _doesn't_ have a duplicate system running identical software acting as a shadow/backup? This would seem like a very basic level of system protection to have in a Nuclear Power Plant... If they had maintained such a system they would of loaded the new update onto the backup servers (which would be identical in every possible way to the mains), the system would of "broken" as it did here, and they would be able to keep operating while they figured out the problem.
Also, before you make the argument "but what if the update is critical?" - it's a Nuclear Power Plant! If any sort of update can be classified as so very urgent they couldn't put it off a couple days then I'd say we have bigger problems.
That would work great, except that TabMixPlus hasn't been ported/updated to Firefox 3 yet. It's pretty much the only reason I haven't made the switch yet.
On a side note; All-in-One Sidebar also hasn't been ported nor has Long Titles (for XKCD and the like), but I would consider those acceptable loses. Heck, if no one did Long Titles for too long I might even take a crack at it, wouldn't be the first time I'd patched up a (simple) extension.
I understand how for some users not having file management isn't something they'll notice or care about, but what about the multitudes of people that would enjoy having a choice? What if we just plain don't want something game related (save, setting, whatever) stored any more? I checked the article to see if there really weren't any options at all about your stored files, but unfortunately it gives about the same amount of information as is in the article summary.
This seems like a fairly big thing to leave out seeing as there seems to be a great deal of options and tools (import/export/backup, etc.) for controlling your data (games/saves/etc.) when it comes to the current Steam client.