The new taskbar alone is a step forward. The old model with the labels just doesn't scale to more than a few windows. Now I just hope the *nix desktop environments follow suit. This was in NeXTSTEP in the 1988, for Pete's sake!
Since we, users of Unix desktops, have been using virtual desktops for ages, we don't need to cram tens of windows on each desktop. So an un-crowded list works fine. If we want a full list, we can display all of our windows or all of our desktops via some of the newfangled desktop effects, or just a list of all of the opened windows sorted by desktop, as all the window managers have been able to do since pretty much forever.
Traditional Windows users don't like virtual desktops. I never understood why. Couldn't do without them myself.
BlackBerry's Desktop Manager, released today for the Mac, syncs with iTunes, and it does so without having to pretend it's an iPod. Dozens of other applications for interacting with, and syncing with the iTunes library exist, most (all?) based on the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file which iTunes maintains as a readable version of its library.
In short, Palm could definitely have implemented their own sync mechanism which syncs with iTunes, but instead opted to trick iTunes, for some reason.
That's the bit I don't get (I don't use iTunes or an iPod and the only Palm hardware I have is a Tungsten T|X). All of the data is on the disk already, it can't be so hard to just grab it and sync it with the unit. What's the point of having to hijack iTunes ? Doesn't Palm provide some kind of desktop software package any more ?
Why use two pieces of software to manage one piece of kit instead of just one ? Does Apple use strong crypto on their database (according to the above post, they don't seem to). Or is it just Palm being completely idiotic as usual ?
A few years ago I was lugging a diplomatic pouch through Dulles, and the TSA guy demanded to x-ray it. I explained to him that it was a dip pouch and he said "You people don't get special treatment here" I said "Yes, I've noticed that you regularly violate both treaties and US Code. Diplomats from other countries tell me they've started avoiding US assignments." He said "Good".
Just... Wow. Those guys are really far gone nowadays. They've started their very own little virtual ring dictatorship around the US.
So I did the right thing, then? Earlier this year I visited family in Toronto, Ontario, and flew Icelandair via Reykjavik to avoid connecting in Boston.
I've been avoiding connecting flights in the US for a while now, especially since a number of people I know seem to have been picked at random ("aha, you have a media player, bend over mister !") and subsequently missed their flights.
I suppose they have pits with stale bread and water for you to comfortably wait in for the next plane (unless they just send you back for some reason) but it's much simpler to just avoid the whole thing and go to a civilized country instead.
Why don't they just add a new line to that inane questionnaire you have to fill in at the border ? Under "have you ever planned to destabilise the US government ?" (I think it's worded along those lines), just add the line "do you plan to blow stuff the fuck up ?".
It should be at least as efficient as the current theatre, and much less expensive.
Lotus Notes, no way in hell will it succeed. Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.
Lotus Notes has always seemed to me the perfect example of that old saying about principle and practice. In principle, it's an interesting idea, whereas in practice, well, it's Lotus Notes...
Hauppauge claims it has something to do with the 64bit memory allocation or something.
Sounds like Hauppauge needs to hire competent programmers to develop a proper 64bit device driver. Other reputable hardware manufactures don't seem to have this problem. I'm just saying...
But then quite a few seem to have it. I regularly see peripheral hardware that's 32bit only (due to driver issues). Of course you only even see it in the user forums, not on the packages...
For a modest fee, I can supply her name and number. Last crapware purge netted about 400 infections. She has got herself programmed to click ok to close any popup that appears. Surprisingly few viruses, but a fine collection of fake virus scanners that insist on starting up and displaying a comforting splash screen at boot. And she was using XP.. No UAC.
According to your description, the UAC wouldn't have changed anything, she would have clicked on "yes, allow".
There is indeed a class of users that will click on "yes" or "ok" when presented with pretty much any dialog without ever reading the text. "Start disk deletion ?" yes "infect all your files ?" yes "empty your bank account ?" yes While they're not the majority, there's quite a few of them. They're usually the same that are the bane of tech support, being unable to read text displayed in front of them or to click on a clearly labeled item. How they ever get to use their machine in the first place is a mystery.
In continental Europe water doesn't get in the way, but still most people won't drive much more than 500 miles at a time for a bi-annual holiday.
Not at all, lots of Southern Spaniards just love to go spend their vacations to Cape North "just 'cause". The place is crowded with them. They're speaking of building an arena to fight reindeers. The Costa sin Sol they call it.
That's fine for people who will only ever commute or do short trips. What about an annual or even bi-annual vacation or an emergency that requires you to drive 600 miles?
Just take a spare battery.
Of course, if you have to drive more than 1000 miles, then you'll have to walk the rest of the way. There's no going around that.
Yeah, I had a terrible idea for a game, an italian plumber who breaks bricks with his head. Oooh, or some type of space royalty that has to roll up things to make a star.
Better keep your day job and leave making games to professionals. Not everyone can come up with Daikatana.
Yeah, I had a good friend who spent several weeks in the hospital- extremely sick- while they barraged him with tests to finally figure out he had a parasite from eating essentially raw meat.
Eating raw meat in the US is asking for trouble to begin with...
I've played a few games recently that did not worry about the "constraint" of being "fun".
Funny thing is, they still cost sixty bucks.
Presumably that's the "evocative experience bit". After playing them you can log on to/. and evoke all the things you could have done with $60 or with those wasted hours.
An 11-year old girl knew to pull her parents from their car when it had rolled by climbing out of a broken window because she knew from GTA that cars can catch fire when they roll upside down.
Unfortunately, that's almost exactly the wrong thing to do. Cars rarely catch fire.
Almost never in fact (apart from the odd model with a design flaw which is increasingly rare). Movies and games are a very poor source to learn from in this regard (everything just *has* to explode in a film). Unless they are conscious and moving, it's indeed safer not to move injured victims. The only exception I can think of would be when there is a risk that more vehicles may add to a pile up, frequently hurting people who managed to stop in time in the process.
As a driver, I think they need to point out that the idea is to NOT CRASH.
It all comes down to complacency. Safety items, on the vehicles and on the roads, encourages complacency. "If I stay in my lane I won't end up in an accident" - "If I follow all the rules and stop at the traffic lights I won't get in an accident"
These thoughts are fundamentally wrong.
On the other hand, since other drivers actually expect you (unless they've been around you for a while and know better by now) to follow the rules, following them actually *does* reduce the risks, or at least the level of stress all around by at least making you predictable.
"Oh, there's a traffic light, that guy is going to stop... well probably... I guess."
Our coastal cities are sinking with all this ice loss! Oh... wait.
Ever put an ice cube in water and watch it melt? Or do you people seriously just listen to CNN all day while complaining about conservatives listening to Fox all day?
Wow! Surely that is the cutting edge of both service and technology.
Come on, it actually has cut and paste. They even made a TV ad specially to mention the fact since it was so awesome. (Which must have been the most bizarre thing I've seen lately "Welcome to 2009, We have cut and paste !")
And I still don't see what the fuss is about the iPhone. But then I'm not really that fond of cell phones in general.
The real difference is going to be when you cross the border driving. There's been waaay too many documented cases of people buying guns (and I mean big guns, like assault rifles) legally in the US with their God-given 2nd ammendment right and smuggling them to the drug cartels here.
Searching "laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and any other electronics on your person or in your vehicle" will stop the gun runners how?.....
Apparently compression has made an awful lot of progress lately.
On the back trip they'll obviously be looking for mexican_family.tar.gz
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
If there actually was a push for a practical UI, we'd see *way* more pie menus which conveniently combine menus and gestures. There are lots of apps/cases where they could be used.
That this isn't the case invalidates your point IMO.
And as far as computer interfaces go, *none* are intuitive. You may have forgotten this if like a lot of us here you can figure out most apps fairly easily, but go look for a few minutes as someone who has *never* seen a mouse before and who finally figures that it is to be used upside down and you may revise your judgement. Granted some interfaces aren't very complicated (although a lot of the underlying concepts which the interface conceptors take for granted, like RAM/disk have to be thoroughly explained), but intuitive, nope.
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Or you could just not use weak passwords.
How could they figure out my password ? They'd first have to get hold of my luggage !
The new taskbar alone is a step forward. The old model with the labels just doesn't scale to more than a few windows. Now I just hope the *nix desktop environments follow suit. This was in NeXTSTEP in the 1988, for Pete's sake!
Since we, users of Unix desktops, have been using virtual desktops for ages, we don't need to cram tens of windows on each desktop. So an un-crowded list works fine. If we want a full list, we can display all of our windows or all of our desktops via some of the newfangled desktop effects, or just a list of all of the opened windows sorted by desktop, as all the window managers have been able to do since pretty much forever.
Traditional Windows users don't like virtual desktops. I never understood why. Couldn't do without them myself.
BlackBerry's Desktop Manager, released today for the Mac, syncs with iTunes, and it does so without having to pretend it's an iPod. Dozens of other applications for interacting with, and syncing with the iTunes library exist, most (all?) based on the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file which iTunes maintains as a readable version of its library.
In short, Palm could definitely have implemented their own sync mechanism which syncs with iTunes, but instead opted to trick iTunes, for some reason.
That's the bit I don't get (I don't use iTunes or an iPod and the only Palm hardware I have is a Tungsten T|X).
All of the data is on the disk already, it can't be so hard to just grab it and sync it with the unit. What's the point of having to hijack iTunes ? Doesn't Palm provide some kind of desktop software package any more ?
Why use two pieces of software to manage one piece of kit instead of just one ? Does Apple use strong crypto on their database (according to the above post, they don't seem to). Or is it just Palm being completely idiotic as usual ?
A few years ago I was lugging a diplomatic pouch through Dulles, and the TSA guy demanded to x-ray it. I explained to him that it was a dip pouch and he said "You people don't get special treatment here" I said "Yes, I've noticed that you regularly violate both treaties and US Code. Diplomats from other countries tell me they've started avoiding US assignments." He said "Good".
Just... Wow. Those guys are really far gone nowadays. They've started their very own little virtual ring dictatorship around the US.
So I did the right thing, then? Earlier this year I visited family in Toronto, Ontario, and flew Icelandair via Reykjavik to avoid connecting in Boston.
I've been avoiding connecting flights in the US for a while now, especially since a number of people I know seem to have been picked at random ("aha, you have a media player, bend over mister !") and subsequently missed their flights.
I suppose they have pits with stale bread and water for you to comfortably wait in for the next plane (unless they just send you back for some reason) but it's much simpler to just avoid the whole thing and go to a civilized country instead.
Why don't they just add a new line to that inane questionnaire you have to fill in at the border ?
Under "have you ever planned to destabilise the US government ?" (I think it's worded along those lines), just add the line "do you plan to blow stuff the fuck up ?".
It should be at least as efficient as the current theatre, and much less expensive.
Lotus Notes, no way in hell will it succeed. Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.
Lotus Notes has always seemed to me the perfect example of that old saying about principle and practice. In principle, it's an interesting idea, whereas in practice, well, it's Lotus Notes...
Sounds like Hauppauge needs to hire competent programmers to develop a proper 64bit device driver. Other reputable hardware manufactures don't seem to have this problem. I'm just saying...
But then quite a few seem to have it. I regularly see peripheral hardware that's 32bit only (due to driver issues).
Of course you only even see it in the user forums, not on the packages...
For a modest fee, I can supply her name and number. Last crapware purge netted about 400 infections. She has got herself programmed to click ok to close any popup that appears. Surprisingly few viruses, but a fine collection of fake virus scanners that insist on starting up and displaying a comforting splash screen at boot. And she was using XP.. No UAC.
According to your description, the UAC wouldn't have changed anything, she would have clicked on "yes, allow".
There is indeed a class of users that will click on "yes" or "ok" when presented with pretty much any dialog without ever reading the text. "Start disk deletion ?" yes "infect all your files ?" yes "empty your bank account ?" yes
While they're not the majority, there's quite a few of them.
They're usually the same that are the bane of tech support, being unable to read text displayed in front of them or to click on a clearly labeled item. How they ever get to use their machine in the first place is a mystery.
In continental Europe water doesn't get in the way, but still most people won't drive much more than 500 miles at a time for a bi-annual holiday.
Not at all, lots of Southern Spaniards just love to go spend their vacations to Cape North "just 'cause". The place is crowded with them. They're speaking of building an arena to fight reindeers.
The Costa sin Sol they call it.
That's fine for people who will only ever commute or do short trips. What about an annual or even bi-annual vacation or an emergency that requires you to drive 600 miles?
Just take a spare battery.
Of course, if you have to drive more than 1000 miles, then you'll have to walk the rest of the way. There's no going around that.
Yeah, I had a terrible idea for a game, an italian plumber who breaks bricks with his head. Oooh, or some type of space royalty that has to roll up things to make a star.
Better keep your day job and leave making games to professionals. Not everyone can come up with Daikatana.
Yeah, I had a good friend who spent several weeks in the hospital- extremely sick- while they barraged him with tests to finally figure out he had a parasite from eating essentially raw meat.
Eating raw meat in the US is asking for trouble to begin with...
I've played a few games recently that did not worry about the "constraint" of being "fun".
Funny thing is, they still cost sixty bucks.
Presumably that's the "evocative experience bit". /. and evoke all the things you could have done with $60 or with those wasted hours.
After playing them you can log on to
An 11-year old girl knew to pull her parents from their car when it had rolled by climbing out of a broken window because she knew from GTA that cars can catch fire when they roll upside down.
Unfortunately, that's almost exactly the wrong thing to do. Cars rarely catch fire.
Almost never in fact (apart from the odd model with a design flaw which is increasingly rare). Movies and games are a very poor source to learn from in this regard (everything just *has* to explode in a film).
Unless they are conscious and moving, it's indeed safer not to move injured victims.
The only exception I can think of would be when there is a risk that more vehicles may add to a pile up, frequently hurting people who managed to stop in time in the process.
As a driver, I think they need to point out that the idea is to NOT CRASH.
It all comes down to complacency. Safety items, on the vehicles and on the roads, encourages complacency. "If I stay in my lane I won't end up in an accident" - "If I follow all the rules and stop at the traffic lights I won't get in an accident"
These thoughts are fundamentally wrong.
On the other hand, since other drivers actually expect you (unless they've been around you for a while and know better by now) to follow the rules, following them actually *does* reduce the risks, or at least the level of stress all around by at least making you predictable.
"Oh, there's a traffic light, that guy is going to stop... well probably... I guess."
Put it on iPods and it becomes ubiquitous almost immediately. They could charge extra for a usb cable or dock.
I'm not sure it's going to be terribly efficient to charge said iPods though. Maybe Apple is going to add a power socket.
Our coastal cities are sinking with all this ice loss! Oh... wait.
Ever put an ice cube in water and watch it melt? Or do you people seriously just listen to CNN all day while complaining about conservatives listening to Fox all day?
Your mastery of geography has me awed.
Most earplugs are rated to block about 30db, bringing the sound down to around 120db, which is still very irritating.
Put several, with 3 pairs you're back to 60dB which is OK.
Wow! Surely that is the cutting edge of both service and technology.
Come on, it actually has cut and paste. They even made a TV ad specially to mention the fact since it was so awesome.
(Which must have been the most bizarre thing I've seen lately "Welcome to 2009, We have cut and paste !")
And I still don't see what the fuss is about the iPhone. But then I'm not really that fond of cell phones in general.
Obviously nothing is "traveling" inside your lan cable.
So why does your network crawl all of or sudden ?
No revolution is successful because it always ends up in evolution.
No revolution changes anything because at the end of a revolution, the system is by definition in the same state.
You need either 1/2 a revolution if you want to go in the opposite direction or 1/4 revolution if you want to go at right angles.
Revolutionaries should have figured this out by now.
The real difference is going to be when you cross the border driving. There's been waaay too many documented cases of people buying guns (and I mean big guns, like assault rifles) legally in the US with their God-given 2nd ammendment right and smuggling them to the drug cartels here.
Searching "laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and any other electronics on your person or in your vehicle" will stop the gun runners how?.....
Apparently compression has made an awful lot of progress lately.
On the back trip they'll obviously be looking for mexican_family.tar.gz
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
If there actually was a push for a practical UI, we'd see *way* more pie menus which conveniently combine menus and gestures. There are lots of apps/cases where they could be used.
That this isn't the case invalidates your point IMO.
And as far as computer interfaces go, *none* are intuitive. You may have forgotten this if like a lot of us here you can figure out most apps fairly easily, but go look for a few minutes as someone who has *never* seen a mouse before and who finally figures that it is to be used upside down and you may revise your judgement. Granted some interfaces aren't very complicated (although a lot of the underlying concepts which the interface conceptors take for granted, like RAM/disk have to be thoroughly explained), but intuitive, nope.
There already exists one: http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator
No vigor extension ??
I'll pass then.