Take a look at a Taiwanese hardware manual. A quick edit by even an ordinary, everyday English speaker would make those booklets far less embarrassing for the company. That can't possibly cost much money.
When the Boston museum closed, I'm not sure how much of a loss that was. Most of the computers were new PCs running displays showing all the neato things new PCs could do. The ones that weren't were Amigas and Ataris, but they were all covered with painted wooden boxes and wrapping paper, so you couldn't tell what they were, because that would involve showing actual computer history. The Macs had their own room with huge Apple banners all over the place, and all the machines were running game-quality edutainment software. There was no Sinclair, Commodore64, or Osbourne, but they did have Apple II computers in the Apple room, and an AtariST running the gift shop cash register. The only visible Amiga was an A2000 Toaster system connected to a camera and used a genlock to show people standing in front of psychedelic backdrops, but it has all its branding removed and had no history card. The only machine I remember that predated the 80's was (I believe) a PDP-8, but it was all in pieces. The rest of the museum was photographs of old IBM mainframes and printouts of computer art.
It was hardly a museum that showed the evolution of computer technology. It was just another showcase with brand new Ti calculators and Macs in the gift shop, although they did have a few samples of 4K core memory for sale. I still have the one I bought.
Indeed. We really don't show enough respect to young people or give them the credit for intelligence that they deserve. It's insulting to kids to suggest they can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
If you were told repeatedly at the age of 14 that you couldn't understand the difference between what's real and what isn't, or what's right or wrong, I think you'd be pretty childish and messed up by the time you were a legal adult.
Just because you can hack around a policy doesn't mean that policy should be widely accepted. I don't want my support status, or even legal status, reduced to blind luck.
You can crack a game to get it to run properly and hardly anyone will know, but if a business starts getting in involved with hacks and tricks just to get their damn software to function, they could be staring into a potential lawsuit... provided they're unlucky enough to get caught.
I get really pissed when people say walled gardens aren't a big deal because it's wicked easy to get around them. Of course they're a big deal... to certain types of people. Some people are unlucky enough to get slapped with million dollar lawsuits because they got caught downloading a file. If 99.9% of people don't get caught, does that mean it's not a big deal if that small percentage practically have their lives destroyed by chance? Will the majority still stick up for the rights of the minority, or is it every person for himself?
How to get around the policy is not the problem. The policy is the problem, and people certainly should be more vocal about it.
Because the market isn't big enough for more than one type of desktop.
Billions to develop and OS, and the things that pisses everyone off is the location of a few buttons. Nope, can't put 'em back, and you can't change a couple scripts to add/remove buttons. Want to add a shortcut to your working folder in the file requester? Nope, the UI is too hard-coded to allow that. With a billion dollar industry at stake, it costs too much money to give people options, you see.
Kind of reminds me of localization. If you want to enjoy the profit of foreign markets, you'll have to spend the money to translate to different languages. Stop whining that translation costs money, because if you don't like it, you can just lose out on millions of dollars worth of sales.
It doesn't help that some settings disappear for no reason after an update. A lot of good those tweaks will do by next version... which will take all of a week.
I'm no network engineer, but I live by this anyway. Half the time I update software, some utter stupidity about the UI pisses me off and I can't easily go back to the old version.
I got upset over Firefox Download Day. Even though Firefox 3.0 was pretty well tested at release since it has an open alpha release, the idea of turning a major update into a game or a contest was really stupid. Zero-day major updates are for people who don't do anything useful with their devices.
I can't speak for the iPhone since I don't have a smartphone at all, but on the PC and the Mac, updates are pretty much mandatory if you want to keep using them as general-purpose machines.
Walk into a store, and tell me how many Mac applications require the latest version of OSX. How many Windows applications require the latest service pack? Now that we're moving towards the Cloud (whether we like it or not), how long can we hold out on updating the OS while still being able to use new apps? 3 years? 1 year? 6 months? For Windows, it seemed like it was 6-10 years, which was plenty. For Apple, it used to be about 3 years. For smart phones, it appears to be less than that.
On the PC, we used to get updates for free that let us keep using new software. People used to buy new stuff because they wanted higher performance and newer features, not because they had to. Now that hardware is "good enough" and there's less reason to update regularly, we're in the habit of being forced to buy brilliant, revolutionary versions of the OS (ie, service packs) that make our machines massively slower and shove tons of needless eye candy down our throats to boot. I don't like it, and neither do a lot of "old timers." We know how things used to be before all these disposable devices took over the market.
Yeah, not updating isn't going to disable our old software. I'm still using XP for my workstation for crying out loud. But don't go around telling people they can just keep running their old OS and everything will be fine, because the software world just doesn't work that way once "apps" enter the picture.
I bought this book. I find it interesting how one of the definitive guides on using JavaScript is effectively a critical analysis on how crappy the language is and how to work around it. Hence, "the good parts."
Pay for the unnecessary but expensive things first, then go crying that you need money for necessities. This is a common practice in many organizations
And the reason why this is tolerated is because society as a whole is like this.
Hardly anything is "trash" in manufacturing unless it's cheaper to throw it away than to reuse/recycle it.
Sawdust is used as a filler in multiple products, is often burned to generate heat/electricity for manufacturing plants, and I just watched a TV show about how sawdust is turned into artificial fireplace logs (under high compression, the sawdust apparently glues itself together into an amazingly dense solid).
Not to mention that the function of the knob is rarely obvious. Many years ago, it was common to require people to move the mouse in a circular motion to turn a knob. Some software requires you to move the mouse either horizontally or vertically only, though this is obviously easy to learn in a second.
The worst, which seems to be the norm these days with audio software, is to click and hold on the knob, and the closer the mouse cursor is to the knob, the faster but less accurate the turn is. The further the mouse cursor is, the slower and more accurate it is. However, the angle of the knob rarely follows the angle of the mouse cursor relative to the knob. It's such a pain in the butt. Just trying to explain this to someone takes more time and effort than it's worth. Just use a damn slider! They do use those in the audio industry.
I can beat that. I own a 2005 Subaru WRX, which is hardly a fuel efficient car to begin with, but I get a solid 21 MPG when driving long roads (no stops, consistent speed) at 45 MPH. Then I took a long trip on the expressway at a near constant 90 MPH. At 90, I was getting 24 MPG.
It's almost as if wind resistance doesn't matter with my car. Driving between 55-65 would likely not make a difference. I'll have to hook up my new OBD port monitor to get more accurate info on my fuel mileage.
What's really fun is that on the rare occasion when this happens, the browser uses 100% of one of my CPU cores. Obviously, this is some sort of endless loop or race condition.
I always know when Firefox doesn't shut down properly, because when I close the browser, my CPU fan spins up. Oops -- gotta Ctrl-Alt-Del again.
Not Adobe's fault. Firefox keeps freezing on my machine with all plugins and extensions disabled. I just have to keep surfing image and scripting-heavy sites (like DeviantArt) and once memory usage gets into the 300 MB range, the pauses become noticeable. If you can push memory usage into the 600 MB range, the pauses get so long they're unbearable. A huge history or the number of tabs makes no difference. The length of the pauses are directly proportional to how much memory Firefox is using. BTW, I use Process Explorer to gauge memory usage.
There are two things I don't understand about the Firefox community. First, why people keep yelling at plug-ins for the pauses and memory problems, because that's not where the issues are (reminds me of the MacOS days when everything that went wrong on a Mac was obviously the fault of system extensions). Second, I don't get how people can keep 50+ tabs open and use Firefox for days. I do a cold start of Firefox every day, and after 15 minutes of surfing without any tabs, memory usage gets up to 300+ MB and the pauses start to show up. I usually restart Firefox every 15-30 minutes.
They also must understand what "SmartScreen" does before being able to make an educated decision. It's kind of hard to Google it when you're computer isn't even set up yet.
I can also disable "Install useless 3rd-party product?" when I download a driver or runtime platform. It's still going to annoy me when I have to very carefully scrutinize every step of an install or a EULA to make sure I don't screw myself.
I've already made my decision about Windows 8 at this point. Anything else revealed about the OS will just be icing.
Hasn't this already been going on for over 10 years?
Demo works fine but real game crashes? Needs a crack. Developer blames bad drivers but demo works flawlessly? Needs a crack. Game exits to desktop but returns no error message or "illegal operation?" Needs a crack. Use MSConfig and now the game won't work? Needs a crack. No audio tracks playing off the CD-ROM? Needs a crack.
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I wouldn't say that the presence of cars on the road makes drivers more aware of traffic.
There are more cars and congestion on the road today than ever before, and I'm sure as hell not giving up my seat belts.
Take a look at a Taiwanese hardware manual. A quick edit by even an ordinary, everyday English speaker would make those booklets far less embarrassing for the company. That can't possibly cost much money.
Then again, it also reduces the humor value.
I find this an odd point of view given Apple's considerable effort and waste to improve the "un-boxing experience."
When the Boston museum closed, I'm not sure how much of a loss that was. Most of the computers were new PCs running displays showing all the neato things new PCs could do. The ones that weren't were Amigas and Ataris, but they were all covered with painted wooden boxes and wrapping paper, so you couldn't tell what they were, because that would involve showing actual computer history. The Macs had their own room with huge Apple banners all over the place, and all the machines were running game-quality edutainment software. There was no Sinclair, Commodore64, or Osbourne, but they did have Apple II computers in the Apple room, and an AtariST running the gift shop cash register. The only visible Amiga was an A2000 Toaster system connected to a camera and used a genlock to show people standing in front of psychedelic backdrops, but it has all its branding removed and had no history card. The only machine I remember that predated the 80's was (I believe) a PDP-8, but it was all in pieces. The rest of the museum was photographs of old IBM mainframes and printouts of computer art.
It was hardly a museum that showed the evolution of computer technology. It was just another showcase with brand new Ti calculators and Macs in the gift shop, although they did have a few samples of 4K core memory for sale. I still have the one I bought.
Indeed. We really don't show enough respect to young people or give them the credit for intelligence that they deserve. It's insulting to kids to suggest they can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
If you were told repeatedly at the age of 14 that you couldn't understand the difference between what's real and what isn't, or what's right or wrong, I think you'd be pretty childish and messed up by the time you were a legal adult.
Just because you can hack around a policy doesn't mean that policy should be widely accepted. I don't want my support status, or even legal status, reduced to blind luck.
You can crack a game to get it to run properly and hardly anyone will know, but if a business starts getting in involved with hacks and tricks just to get their damn software to function, they could be staring into a potential lawsuit... provided they're unlucky enough to get caught.
I get really pissed when people say walled gardens aren't a big deal because it's wicked easy to get around them. Of course they're a big deal... to certain types of people. Some people are unlucky enough to get slapped with million dollar lawsuits because they got caught downloading a file. If 99.9% of people don't get caught, does that mean it's not a big deal if that small percentage practically have their lives destroyed by chance? Will the majority still stick up for the rights of the minority, or is it every person for himself?
How to get around the policy is not the problem. The policy is the problem, and people certainly should be more vocal about it.
Because the market isn't big enough for more than one type of desktop.
Billions to develop and OS, and the things that pisses everyone off is the location of a few buttons. Nope, can't put 'em back, and you can't change a couple scripts to add/remove buttons. Want to add a shortcut to your working folder in the file requester? Nope, the UI is too hard-coded to allow that. With a billion dollar industry at stake, it costs too much money to give people options, you see.
Kind of reminds me of localization. If you want to enjoy the profit of foreign markets, you'll have to spend the money to translate to different languages. Stop whining that translation costs money, because if you don't like it, you can just lose out on millions of dollars worth of sales.
It doesn't help that some settings disappear for no reason after an update. A lot of good those tweaks will do by next version... which will take all of a week.
I'm no network engineer, but I live by this anyway. Half the time I update software, some utter stupidity about the UI pisses me off and I can't easily go back to the old version.
I got upset over Firefox Download Day. Even though Firefox 3.0 was pretty well tested at release since it has an open alpha release, the idea of turning a major update into a game or a contest was really stupid. Zero-day major updates are for people who don't do anything useful with their devices.
I can't speak for the iPhone since I don't have a smartphone at all, but on the PC and the Mac, updates are pretty much mandatory if you want to keep using them as general-purpose machines.
Walk into a store, and tell me how many Mac applications require the latest version of OSX. How many Windows applications require the latest service pack? Now that we're moving towards the Cloud (whether we like it or not), how long can we hold out on updating the OS while still being able to use new apps? 3 years? 1 year? 6 months? For Windows, it seemed like it was 6-10 years, which was plenty. For Apple, it used to be about 3 years. For smart phones, it appears to be less than that.
On the PC, we used to get updates for free that let us keep using new software. People used to buy new stuff because they wanted higher performance and newer features, not because they had to. Now that hardware is "good enough" and there's less reason to update regularly, we're in the habit of being forced to buy brilliant, revolutionary versions of the OS (ie, service packs) that make our machines massively slower and shove tons of needless eye candy down our throats to boot. I don't like it, and neither do a lot of "old timers." We know how things used to be before all these disposable devices took over the market.
Yeah, not updating isn't going to disable our old software. I'm still using XP for my workstation for crying out loud. But don't go around telling people they can just keep running their old OS and everything will be fine, because the software world just doesn't work that way once "apps" enter the picture.
Why is Apple always the villain around here?
You mean in this thread? There's plenty of pro and anti Apple threads on Slashdot.
If you're tired of Apple being treated like the villain, the solution is simple: come back tomorrow.
Christ, people, if you suffer from this type of PARANOIA regularly, seek professional help.
I'll be sure to echo that back to you when you get an $800 speeding ticket you can't refute in court for whateverreasontheycanthinkof.
JavaScript: The Good Parts
I bought this book. I find it interesting how one of the definitive guides on using JavaScript is effectively a critical analysis on how crappy the language is and how to work around it. Hence, "the good parts."
I think "general purpose" refers to capabilities, not potential.
Jailbreak it, and then you can talk general purpose.
Pay for the unnecessary but expensive things first, then go crying that you need money for necessities. This is a common practice in many organizations
And the reason why this is tolerated is because society as a whole is like this.
OtherOS, anyone?
Hardly anything is "trash" in manufacturing unless it's cheaper to throw it away than to reuse/recycle it.
Sawdust is used as a filler in multiple products, is often burned to generate heat/electricity for manufacturing plants, and I just watched a TV show about how sawdust is turned into artificial fireplace logs (under high compression, the sawdust apparently glues itself together into an amazingly dense solid).
My first thought would be to launch a satellite. Farther away from the sun = less neutrinos.
Not to mention that the function of the knob is rarely obvious. Many years ago, it was common to require people to move the mouse in a circular motion to turn a knob. Some software requires you to move the mouse either horizontally or vertically only, though this is obviously easy to learn in a second.
The worst, which seems to be the norm these days with audio software, is to click and hold on the knob, and the closer the mouse cursor is to the knob, the faster but less accurate the turn is. The further the mouse cursor is, the slower and more accurate it is. However, the angle of the knob rarely follows the angle of the mouse cursor relative to the knob. It's such a pain in the butt. Just trying to explain this to someone takes more time and effort than it's worth. Just use a damn slider! They do use those in the audio industry.
I can beat that. I own a 2005 Subaru WRX, which is hardly a fuel efficient car to begin with, but I get a solid 21 MPG when driving long roads (no stops, consistent speed) at 45 MPH. Then I took a long trip on the expressway at a near constant 90 MPH. At 90, I was getting 24 MPG.
It's almost as if wind resistance doesn't matter with my car. Driving between 55-65 would likely not make a difference. I'll have to hook up my new OBD port monitor to get more accurate info on my fuel mileage.
What's really fun is that on the rare occasion when this happens, the browser uses 100% of one of my CPU cores. Obviously, this is some sort of endless loop or race condition.
I always know when Firefox doesn't shut down properly, because when I close the browser, my CPU fan spins up. Oops -- gotta Ctrl-Alt-Del again.
Not Adobe's fault. Firefox keeps freezing on my machine with all plugins and extensions disabled. I just have to keep surfing image and scripting-heavy sites (like DeviantArt) and once memory usage gets into the 300 MB range, the pauses become noticeable. If you can push memory usage into the 600 MB range, the pauses get so long they're unbearable. A huge history or the number of tabs makes no difference. The length of the pauses are directly proportional to how much memory Firefox is using. BTW, I use Process Explorer to gauge memory usage.
There are two things I don't understand about the Firefox community. First, why people keep yelling at plug-ins for the pauses and memory problems, because that's not where the issues are (reminds me of the MacOS days when everything that went wrong on a Mac was obviously the fault of system extensions). Second, I don't get how people can keep 50+ tabs open and use Firefox for days. I do a cold start of Firefox every day, and after 15 minutes of surfing without any tabs, memory usage gets up to 300+ MB and the pauses start to show up. I usually restart Firefox every 15-30 minutes.
They also must understand what "SmartScreen" does before being able to make an educated decision. It's kind of hard to Google it when you're computer isn't even set up yet.
I can also disable "Install useless 3rd-party product?" when I download a driver or runtime platform. It's still going to annoy me when I have to very carefully scrutinize every step of an install or a EULA to make sure I don't screw myself.
I've already made my decision about Windows 8 at this point. Anything else revealed about the OS will just be icing.
Hasn't this already been going on for over 10 years?
Demo works fine but real game crashes? Needs a crack. Developer blames bad drivers but demo works flawlessly? Needs a crack. Game exits to desktop but returns no error message or "illegal operation?" Needs a crack. Use MSConfig and now the game won't work? Needs a crack. No audio tracks playing off the CD-ROM? Needs a crack.