I agree 100%. What's sad is that Macs used a powered eject. Why not do what they did with CD-ROMs and just refuse to eject the disk while the drive is active?
My Amiga allowed me to eject the disk anytime I wanted. If I ejected the disk while it was writing data, the OS yelled at me to put the disk back in, and it finished writing. Shockingly, it managed to save everything properly in almost all cases. Printing was a different issue, of course. Heaven forbid the printer not respond, or else the OS would try to print forever no matter how many times you clicked "Cancel". But, the floppy drives actually worked quite well.
Two days ago, I saw an fully steel 70's car that looked like a house brick get creamed by an 18-wheeler. It was a rear-end accident, too, so it wasn't the car's fault. We never seem to have accidents on the interstate except when it snows or there's fog, but within a few miles of the interstate exit, there's always something getting hit by a truck.
Part of my justification for getting a Subaru WRX instead of a roadster is that a regular, small sedan with a big engine will fare better in a crash than a true sport car. (I do apologize to fellow WRX fans, but the car is too heavy to be considered a sport car).
To be fair, I think there is a difference between adding something without permission, and really going out of your way to defeat a warning notification With only a minor change, Firefox can easily detect if a plug-in exists and hasn't been run before.
Adding a plug-in for a 3rd party product is annoying but fairly common practice, and only your typical Slashdotter will hear about it. Changing the configuration files of a 3rd party product would be a PR nightmare for Microsoft... or worse. Even clearing the cache would raise hell, no matter what the reason.
Firefox doesn't even keep track of which extensions lock-up when starting up the browser. If there's a bad extension, Firefox effectively goes into an infinite loop of startup crashes. The only "easy" way to fix it is to uninstall the browser, trash the Firefox profile, and reinstall everything from scratch. Then, you can finally install extensions one at a time to find out which one causes the problem, assuming that two extensions aren't fighting with each other.
This is why the web browser should be the new OS, of course. It's just like the glory days of 1990 all over again, where we re-installed Windows every 6 months and spent countless hours enabling and disabling MacOS extensions and rebooting a zillion times. What fun.
Don't forget that I carry a communicator in my pocket smaller than Captain Kirk's ever was and I can communicate with it to my friends over the world.
Provided you are in a cell area of a few thousand meters and not surrounded by stone, and even then reception is spotty. Captain Kirk's communicator sends messages thousands of miles through anything but an ion storm. Of course, it helps that Kirk has his own, personal tech support staff.
I hate it when I find bands. I did searches recently for "supernova" and "k-car", and guess what I got? Music!
And to think, people complain that when you search for things on Google, you only get computer stuff. Do a search for minerals and rocks, and you get bombarded with software products. We do focus too much on technology.
I noticed this very quickly when the downloadable game craze started with game consoles. At first, there were many, good games for $5, but now even crap is going into the $15 to $20 area.
Despite my usual cynicism, I would assume the marketeers know what they are doing, and are increasing the prices for obvious reasons: the games sell better.
What confuses me about your summary of Garbage Collection is the phrase, "in use".
Having only glanced at Java, I was under the impression that the only way something would be marked for cleanup is if you assign NULL to the object. So, what happens if you forget to do that? Java won't clean it up, right? So, if something doesn't get cleaned up unless you "free" it, how is a GC model better at managing mistakes and handling memory leaks than a non-GC model? Does it really just boil down to the convenience of not having to free the memory and the pointers separately?
No offense, but you must not know a lot of PS3 games. Lair required motion sensing, and was very harshly criticized for it. Toy Home is another, and is unplayable because of it. That's all I've tried so far.
Don't blame the controller -- blame the game developers who insist on using every damn button available. There are plenty of games out there that use only a couple buttons, because that's all they need. Don't tell me I need a controller with fewer buttons because some marketeer says it's the "new thing". Simple interfaces do not mean simpler function, it just means it will probably look less scary to someone who has no idea how it's supposed to be used in the first place.
I had a hard time playing Mario Galaxy because I kept wanting to use a second analog stick to adjust the camera. That alone ruined the game for me. Saying I don't need a second analog stick on a game controller is like telling me all keyboards should have the keypads sawed off, because only hardcore computer users actually need it (thankfully, I don't use laptops, so I'm free to buy any keyboard I want. Game consoles don't offer that luxury.)
With that said, the Wiimote actually uses a good form factor for what it does. Tacking a motion sensor to a traditional controller was a stupid move for Sony. Trying to tilt the controller always hurts my wrist and makes it hard to hit any buttons at all.
I downloaded an app called "Regex Coach" which does this just fine. It's a Windows application, but you can call it a "web application", I suppose, since I did actually download it off the web.
Classic retort: someone has to fix the robots. Besides, large factories are already powered mostly by robots, and many people still have jobs there.
Sometimes being mobile is a necessity. A large machine can spit out 2000 burritos an hour, but if you need 4000 to meet your quota before needing to make something else, you need to retool the machines. Who does that? How long does it take? How expensive is it to make a fully auto-retooling machine vs getting a team or people to do it?
Plus, machines are unreliable. If a person calls out or "breaks down", there's backup. Machine downtime is a very, very expensive problem, and that assumes that they work properly to begin with.
Most of my local grocery stores have [tried to] replace cashiers with these stupid automated check-out lines that suck in dollars like a soda machine or use debit/credit. It's fully self-service. It's also a disaster. The machines are buggy as hell, they are annoying to use, and there's always one that isn't working for some reason or other. People would rather wait in lines then use the machines. Making a machine work perfectly with a good interface isn't an easy thing to do. One way or another, even blue-collar workers will always be more valuable than full automation.
It'd be nice if I could actually design pages that scaled to any screen resolution. Floating and positioning is a bitch unless you hard-code to a specific screen resolution, which is completely missing the whole point entirely. Most "standards compliant" pages I view don't like it when you increase the font size. Go figure!
Column layouts aren't that big a deal, but try putting together an image gallery. I've written an oekaki where the whole point is to display images at their native resolution on the left side of the screen, and have visitor comments appear on the right. That means the pictures can be all different sizes (like, 200x200, 300x200, 200x500, and so on). You have no idea how long it took me to make code that did that correctly, because if you don't know the exact size of each image, no amount of relative positioning or floating works. Block level divs simply cannot do it. Tables are the only solution.
Unless all your pictures are exactly the same size and a known size, writing standards compliant code and still making things appear side-by-side is impossible. Try fitting an image into a 120x120 container. Oh, whoops, you need to specify an exact width or height for the image, because HTML cannot figure out on its own which is the long side of the image. This is the 21st century, and I can't just tell a browser to scale an image to fit inside a rectangle? No wonder simple layout is practically black magic!
Believe me, if a table shrink-wraps the content and makes everything coherent when using pictures of all different sizes, then I'm going to use tables. If floating causes all kinds of layout havoc, including pictures overflowing their containers and completely obscuring text, then I'm going to use tables. It's just a pity that many CSS properties don't work on tables. Yeah, we'll just cripple tables to force people not to use them. So, if someone has a genuine use for tables, styling them is nearly impossible. Great. Don't let designers figure out what is appropriate for the job -- force them to do it right... without having any idea what the project requirements are. Oh, and make sure that any site's CSS is about 200K, because adding macros and constants would turn CSS into a "scripting language", which is another mysterious no-no.
HTML and CSS suck. Don't even get me started about JavaScript.
"Screw the minimalist fad and hiding things for my own good. I want my standard menus back!" - Anyone with more than 1 month experience with a computer
Windows is deliberately incompatable with anything else at the source code level. Windows makes it as difficult as possible to be cross-platform.
While I sympathize, I must ask at what point the world turned into only two major OSes: Windows and UN*X.
I remember back in the 80's when there were a dozen OSes that were all radically different, and people just sucked it up and wrote software for each platform. Each OS (and the hardware) really stood out and had its own special advantages and quirks. Those were the days of real competition and innovation. These days, if it's not UNIX-ish, it's not "standards compliant" or some crap like that. Nobody is interested in going beyond UNIX. Nobody wants to be different... except for niggling things that make source compile on one Linux distro and not another. Real innovation at the OS level is hard to come by these days.
Of course Windows is deliberately incompatible with everything else. It's not UNIX. It's pretty much the only non-UNIX OS left outside of the proprietary commercial market. Complaining about it being bad is one thing, but complaining about it being deliberately incompatible is rather silly.
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I agree 100%. What's sad is that Macs used a powered eject. Why not do what they did with CD-ROMs and just refuse to eject the disk while the drive is active?
My Amiga allowed me to eject the disk anytime I wanted. If I ejected the disk while it was writing data, the OS yelled at me to put the disk back in, and it finished writing. Shockingly, it managed to save everything properly in almost all cases. Printing was a different issue, of course. Heaven forbid the printer not respond, or else the OS would try to print forever no matter how many times you clicked "Cancel". But, the floppy drives actually worked quite well.
Like he said... standard.
Great. Now all of your molecules can join in on the fun!
Getting rid of SUVs won't get rid of UVs, though.
Two days ago, I saw an fully steel 70's car that looked like a house brick get creamed by an 18-wheeler. It was a rear-end accident, too, so it wasn't the car's fault. We never seem to have accidents on the interstate except when it snows or there's fog, but within a few miles of the interstate exit, there's always something getting hit by a truck.
Part of my justification for getting a Subaru WRX instead of a roadster is that a regular, small sedan with a big engine will fare better in a crash than a true sport car. (I do apologize to fellow WRX fans, but the car is too heavy to be considered a sport car).
I can disable JavaScript, Java, cookies, and password memorization. That's great. Now, please let me disable the most useless feature of all: iframes.
Oh, wait... then web developers will inject 3rd party web code directly into the main document with AJAX, which is even worse.
Hmm... but isn't is a red giant?
"I'm prescribing you to play more games. Oh, wait, about that Linux thing..."
Sorry. Best I could come up with in lieu of mod points.
How does it focus without some kind of lens?
Photodetectors are a piece of cake. It's the optics that adds bulk and complexity.
Okay, grown-up kids, then.
To be fair, I think there is a difference between adding something without permission, and really going out of your way to defeat a warning notification With only a minor change, Firefox can easily detect if a plug-in exists and hasn't been run before.
Adding a plug-in for a 3rd party product is annoying but fairly common practice, and only your typical Slashdotter will hear about it. Changing the configuration files of a 3rd party product would be a PR nightmare for Microsoft... or worse. Even clearing the cache would raise hell, no matter what the reason.
Firefox doesn't even keep track of which extensions lock-up when starting up the browser. If there's a bad extension, Firefox effectively goes into an infinite loop of startup crashes. The only "easy" way to fix it is to uninstall the browser, trash the Firefox profile, and reinstall everything from scratch. Then, you can finally install extensions one at a time to find out which one causes the problem, assuming that two extensions aren't fighting with each other.
This is why the web browser should be the new OS, of course. It's just like the glory days of 1990 all over again, where we re-installed Windows every 6 months and spent countless hours enabling and disabling MacOS extensions and rebooting a zillion times. What fun.
Multiple extensions, actually. You should take a look at IE's plug-in manager after installing Java.
With all those "helpers", I'm not surprised that Java apps are so slow to start up. Bloat as far as the eye can see.
Don't forget that I carry a communicator in my pocket smaller than Captain Kirk's ever was and I can communicate with it to my friends over the world.
Provided you are in a cell area of a few thousand meters and not surrounded by stone, and even then reception is spotty. Captain Kirk's communicator sends messages thousands of miles through anything but an ion storm. Of course, it helps that Kirk has his own, personal tech support staff.
I hate it when I find bands. I did searches recently for "supernova" and "k-car", and guess what I got? Music!
And to think, people complain that when you search for things on Google, you only get computer stuff. Do a search for minerals and rocks, and you get bombarded with software products. We do focus too much on technology.
I noticed this very quickly when the downloadable game craze started with game consoles. At first, there were many, good games for $5, but now even crap is going into the $15 to $20 area.
Despite my usual cynicism, I would assume the marketeers know what they are doing, and are increasing the prices for obvious reasons: the games sell better.
What confuses me about your summary of Garbage Collection is the phrase, "in use".
Having only glanced at Java, I was under the impression that the only way something would be marked for cleanup is if you assign NULL to the object. So, what happens if you forget to do that? Java won't clean it up, right? So, if something doesn't get cleaned up unless you "free" it, how is a GC model better at managing mistakes and handling memory leaks than a non-GC model? Does it really just boil down to the convenience of not having to free the memory and the pointers separately?
No offense, but you must not know a lot of PS3 games. Lair required motion sensing, and was very harshly criticized for it. Toy Home is another, and is unplayable because of it. That's all I've tried so far.
Don't blame the controller -- blame the game developers who insist on using every damn button available. There are plenty of games out there that use only a couple buttons, because that's all they need. Don't tell me I need a controller with fewer buttons because some marketeer says it's the "new thing". Simple interfaces do not mean simpler function, it just means it will probably look less scary to someone who has no idea how it's supposed to be used in the first place.
I had a hard time playing Mario Galaxy because I kept wanting to use a second analog stick to adjust the camera. That alone ruined the game for me. Saying I don't need a second analog stick on a game controller is like telling me all keyboards should have the keypads sawed off, because only hardcore computer users actually need it (thankfully, I don't use laptops, so I'm free to buy any keyboard I want. Game consoles don't offer that luxury.)
With that said, the Wiimote actually uses a good form factor for what it does. Tacking a motion sensor to a traditional controller was a stupid move for Sony. Trying to tilt the controller always hurts my wrist and makes it hard to hit any buttons at all.
I downloaded an app called "Regex Coach" which does this just fine. It's a Windows application, but you can call it a "web application", I suppose, since I did actually download it off the web.
Great. Let's see what happens when I hold a hacked iPod next to the handle.
Classic retort: someone has to fix the robots. Besides, large factories are already powered mostly by robots, and many people still have jobs there.
Sometimes being mobile is a necessity. A large machine can spit out 2000 burritos an hour, but if you need 4000 to meet your quota before needing to make something else, you need to retool the machines. Who does that? How long does it take? How expensive is it to make a fully auto-retooling machine vs getting a team or people to do it?
Plus, machines are unreliable. If a person calls out or "breaks down", there's backup. Machine downtime is a very, very expensive problem, and that assumes that they work properly to begin with.
Most of my local grocery stores have [tried to] replace cashiers with these stupid automated check-out lines that suck in dollars like a soda machine or use debit/credit. It's fully self-service. It's also a disaster. The machines are buggy as hell, they are annoying to use, and there's always one that isn't working for some reason or other. People would rather wait in lines then use the machines. Making a machine work perfectly with a good interface isn't an easy thing to do. One way or another, even blue-collar workers will always be more valuable than full automation.
Layout and styling are not the same thing!
It'd be nice if I could actually design pages that scaled to any screen resolution. Floating and positioning is a bitch unless you hard-code to a specific screen resolution, which is completely missing the whole point entirely. Most "standards compliant" pages I view don't like it when you increase the font size. Go figure!
Column layouts aren't that big a deal, but try putting together an image gallery. I've written an oekaki where the whole point is to display images at their native resolution on the left side of the screen, and have visitor comments appear on the right. That means the pictures can be all different sizes (like, 200x200, 300x200, 200x500, and so on). You have no idea how long it took me to make code that did that correctly, because if you don't know the exact size of each image, no amount of relative positioning or floating works. Block level divs simply cannot do it. Tables are the only solution.
Unless all your pictures are exactly the same size and a known size, writing standards compliant code and still making things appear side-by-side is impossible. Try fitting an image into a 120x120 container. Oh, whoops, you need to specify an exact width or height for the image, because HTML cannot figure out on its own which is the long side of the image. This is the 21st century, and I can't just tell a browser to scale an image to fit inside a rectangle? No wonder simple layout is practically black magic!
Believe me, if a table shrink-wraps the content and makes everything coherent when using pictures of all different sizes, then I'm going to use tables. If floating causes all kinds of layout havoc, including pictures overflowing their containers and completely obscuring text, then I'm going to use tables. It's just a pity that many CSS properties don't work on tables. Yeah, we'll just cripple tables to force people not to use them. So, if someone has a genuine use for tables, styling them is nearly impossible. Great. Don't let designers figure out what is appropriate for the job -- force them to do it right... without having any idea what the project requirements are. Oh, and make sure that any site's CSS is about 200K, because adding macros and constants would turn CSS into a "scripting language", which is another mysterious no-no.
HTML and CSS suck. Don't even get me started about JavaScript.
I wish I heard a lot more of the 4th response:
"Screw the minimalist fad and hiding things for my own good. I want my standard menus back!" - Anyone with more than 1 month experience with a computer
Windows is deliberately incompatable with anything else at the source code level. Windows makes it as difficult as possible to be cross-platform.
While I sympathize, I must ask at what point the world turned into only two major OSes: Windows and UN*X.
I remember back in the 80's when there were a dozen OSes that were all radically different, and people just sucked it up and wrote software for each platform. Each OS (and the hardware) really stood out and had its own special advantages and quirks. Those were the days of real competition and innovation. These days, if it's not UNIX-ish, it's not "standards compliant" or some crap like that. Nobody is interested in going beyond UNIX. Nobody wants to be different... except for niggling things that make source compile on one Linux distro and not another. Real innovation at the OS level is hard to come by these days.
Of course Windows is deliberately incompatible with everything else. It's not UNIX. It's pretty much the only non-UNIX OS left outside of the proprietary commercial market. Complaining about it being bad is one thing, but complaining about it being deliberately incompatible is rather silly.
If the car was stationary, no accident would have happened.
Ever see one of those movies where the car just won't start?