I am confused by you. Don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to be offensive, but I am confused by why you would do this. iTunes (indeed, any decent media management system) has metadata associated with music files. The application knows what album the song is from, and will even happily manage multiple copies of the same song with different meta data. Why do you care how the underlying filesystem organizes the music? Metadata also keeps track of stuff like genre, artist, even composer when composer is different than artist. Plus you can change the meta data trivially if you chose to do so. Got a copy of, say, the Dixie Chicks and classified it as country? Decided that on second thought it's more rock? Just change the genre in the metadata, no need to move everything around. Playlists are of course the final piece of the puzzle. Want to make a "beach mix"? Just create a playlist and add the songs you want from multiple albums.
I hesitate to say you're doing it wrong, as your system obviously works for you, but there are really far more effective ways to handle what you want than compulsively organizing files and directories. Also note that while iTunes can and does do everything I mention, it's hardly the only program that can, and they use an open standard for the meta data. So if you get everything setup the way you like it in iTunes and then decide to switch to Windows Media Player, VLC, or Amarok, all your metadata goes too. I'm not sure, but I think they can read each other's playlists too.
That's a big key IMO. I have lots of shitty MP3's I recorded years ago before it became a relatively trivial operation. I've been putting off rerecording them for years just becasue of the sheer volume of them. If I can trade those in for professionally mastered 256kb AAC tracks, I'll part with $25 this minute.
I don't use Macs at work, but I've made pretty extensive use of Time Machine on home computers and not experienced any issues. What didn't work for you? Why would you consider it an inappropriate backup solution for the type of setup given here? Remember, this is a very small office, likely with a very limited budget. Getting a full on tape library with Data Protector or Tivoli is unlikely to be an option. If the suggestion were to use Time Machine for backing up 100 workstations and 7 or 10 servers, I'd be in complete agreement with you. Here it seems like a pretty valid solution.
You need a better job. I don't get fired for every minor mistake I make. Often enough I don't even get in trouble. People make mistakes, in a decent company you own up to yours and try to fix them as best you can. Sure this was potentially a very big, very expensive mistake, but when you make decisions for the entire multinational company, your mistakes are likely to be correspondingly large. No way to avoid that. It's not like he hasn't also made many more very successful decisions that resulted in Google becoming one of the biggest players in the world.
If you are naive enough to believe that Microsoft, one of the biggest if not "The" biggest name in computing for the last 20 years, isn't capable of this type of rebound when necessary, then I feel sorry for you and your limited intellectual ability and foresight.
I don't think I said anything even vaguely like that. I said that Microsoft was not (yet) in a position where they feel they need to "rebound". Intellectually I'm sure plenty of people at Microsoft are a bit worried about that fact that their revenue stream depends so heavily on desktop computer OSes and Office, and that new devices and new products (tablets, improved smart phones, Android, iOS, Google Docs, ChromeOS, etc) are showing signs of cutting into those product's markets in the near future. On the other hand it's hard to get really, viscerally, scared when your profits last year beat analyst's expectations. It's hard to *really* think you're doing something wrong when you keep making tons of money.
Microsoft is going to have to feel some real pain before they change course. You rarely ever see a company successfully reinvent itself until it experiences a crisis. Once the crisis comes, of course, it's even odds on whether the company can make the right choices. Apple did it and so did IBM (probably several times as you point out), but the roadside is littered with formerly agile and powerful companies that couldn't (Sun, SGI, Compaq, DEC, Commodore... the list goes on and on). I'm sure not saying that MS can't be one of the survivors, but we're at least 5-10 year from them even having to find out. They aren't going to be hurting unless and until the predicted rise of mobile computing occurs.
As I said farther up I think the difference, in both Apple and IBM's, cases is that they had to go to the brink before they rebuilt themselves. Apple was particularly a hairsbreadth from death when Jobs returned, and IBM wasn't much better off when they started to turn around in the 90s. Microsoft remains, for now, highly profitable. They aren't growing, they aren't dominating new markets, but they're making lots of money. Until that stops, until they start to fail, they aren't likely to turn it around. There is a degree of panic required to make the kind of massive cultural and product changes that Apple and IBM made to turn around, and that panic hasn't set in yet at MS.
This is actually a pretty interesting point. Ballmer is clearly the business side, and you'd think from that he'd be socially adept. Gates is clearly all geek, and appears to be borderline Autistic on occasion, and you'd expect him to be socially inept. Yet as TFA points out, Gates has that something that makes you listen to him, makes you consider his words, makes him a leader. Ballmer doesn't and it's not something you can fake.
I'm not a Gates fan, or a Microsoft fan, but I don't think you have to admire someone to admit their strengths, and Bill Gates clearly has an almost unsurpassed ability to judge the merits of an idea, and turn a vision into reality. It's the same kind of ability that Jobs, and even Linus and RMS have. None of them is perfect, none of them always picks right, but all of them have combination of vision, follow through, and a certain kind of charisma that gets other people nodding their heads and reaching for their wallets (Obviously with RMS and Linus it's more of a figurative wallet).
Unfortunately (or fortunately if you prefer) I don't think it's enough to "save" MS. For one thing, I'm not sure MS needs "saving" yet. They're increasingly irrelevant when it comes to new and innovative ideas, but they're still making money hand over fist, and that isn't likely to change for a decade or so. Until things get really bad (which will require that death or near death of the desktop and laptop as platforms, an event at least ten years away) no one person is going to be able to fix the corporate culture. Part of the reason Jobs was able to have the affect he did on Apple, was that Apple was at rock bottom when they brought him back. People that otherwise might have resisted him or tried to maintain the status quo knew that this was probably the company's very last chance. Microsoft just isn't there yet.
I believe truth is a defense in in US libel cases, which is where the case is apparently being tried. According to the Journalism about.com article: "Libel is by definition false. Anything that is provably true cannot be libelous. " I'll grant you that "about.com" is not he most reliable source ever, but I doubt they'd get this wrong. I realize that in the UK truth is not a Libel defense (which makes no sense to me at all, but no one asked me), but in California it almost certainly is.
Even if we accept that Microsoft is exercising some level of control over Skype (an event I'd consider highly unlikely this early into the process, but believe what you want), there's still no way they'd be performing a major infrastructure change like a full OS changeover this quickly. I doubt you could get the code ported this quickly, let alone get it tested, a deployment plan written, everyone read into the plan, etc, etc. This isn't like replacing the OS on your home PC. We're talking hundreds or thousands of servers, running custom code, deployed internationally. If Microsoft decides to switch them over to Windows (and they may), it won't be a rush job done a few weeks after the announcement of intent to purchase. It'll happen after months of work and planning, and after the sale is final.
A lot of what these people "miss" is either available or trivial to emulate. One guy was crying because he missed BBN Unix's ability to command outputs a page at a time, and went on to describe exactly what happens when you pipe a command's output to "more". Better still, if you pipe it to "less" you not only get "page at a time" output, you can move back and forth through it. Obviously the keyboard thing is just a matter of spending a few bucks on a mechanical keyboard. I couldn't read the third page, but of all the things I did manage to read, it seemed like the only somewhat viable (ie, not completely trivial to overcome) complaint was the guy who missed some obscure scrolling behavior on an old window manager. Even then it seemed like a really weird complaint. A modern scroll wheel seems like a much more useful and intuitive system.
It's not a lot of money to start an "innovative company" no matter how old you are. Let's start from the premise that you can live on 20K a year as a 20 year old with very little responsibility, and a willingness to eat a lot of Ramen. Let's further assume that a "next great technology" company is going to need, at a minimum, 20k worth of servers, at least one decent workstations (2K), Hosting (At least a few hundred dollars a month for a reliable colo service with a redundant high speed pipe, redundant power, etc). You could easily burn through more than half of that money in the first few months before you even have something that might be called a product, let alone a product that makes money. Gods forbid you try to get someone to help you. Whether they're a "partner" or an "employee" they're going to need money to live on too.
This isn't a hundred K to live on and party for a couple years, it's a hundred K to build a business. Not just any business either, an innovative new business with spiffy products and new ideas.
I rather wish that the US would move to publicly funded campaigns (which I assume must be what you use), but if anything we seem to moving in the opposite direction. Here donations to an election find aren't considered bribery, as you aren't really giving money to the candidate (they can't directly touch the money in their campaign coffers), but rather to the organization that seeks to get him/her elected.
Pretty much, yes. There's no way Microsoft tried to switch Skype to Windows servers right now. They don't even have possession of the company yet. The Hotmail switch was planned for months before the attempt was even made, no one is stupid enough to try a massive OS switch on an infrastructure network, with less than a month of planning time, before the deal is even final. MS has done dumb things in it's history, but they're no where near that stupid.
Most likely because they were asked. Someone said "If you are legally required to hand over the data, what will you do?" and instead of telling an elaborate story about the weather and hoping no one noticed that they had changed the subject, they answered the question. Of course they'll comply with a legal request for the information. They're legally obligated to.
So really all that's required is for one member of either House of Parliament to publicly say, "X slept with Y", then everyone could just quote him? Seems like a great way to earn campaign contributions "For a small donation to my re-election fund, I will allow you to quote me talking about about any injuncted topic of the day."
I rather doubt I agree with everything Mr. Barlow said, even from the brief summary of his comments in the article I saw several statements that I might have argued with. I tend to be a moderate on this issue, neither favoring the total or near total evisceration of IP laws that some favor, nor the equally ridiculous calls from industry to expand them to the point that all content becomes immutable and unusable. Never the less, seeing this guy shake up the cozy little panel of "experts" makes me very happy. Nothing is going to change as long as the attitude that "the ground rules are all agreed on" is there. Until people realize that that there even is a another side in this debate, that there are radical content freedom people sitting opposite the radical content protection people, the middle ground can't be found.
Because it's Slashdot, and they're Microsoft. Duh. You're right of course. At this point not even sucking up to the potential new boss by killing some program he probably won't like doesn't even make sense. There are enough regulatory and other hurdles between here and "Microsoft takes possession of Skype" that doing any kind of actions based on that assumption is silly.
That's fine. Give it a crappy rating becasue it's a crappy album. Giving the album a crappy rating becasue Amazon screwed up the delivery system just makes legitimate bad reviews that much more lost.
Indeed. I'm not a huge fan of the Gaga, but down rating her album because Amazon is having problems is like saying the album sucks becasue the store you bought it in has roaches. It's unfair to her, and unfair to others who are trying to judge the quality of the product.
Even more to the point, once they figure out that the plus sign adds application appropriate things, the knowledge should carry over. As I said in an earlier post, the "+" is a widely reused element in the UI, It adds contacts int eh contact app, events in the calendar app, cities in the weather app... All in all the default Apple applications have a very consistent UI. Once you understand how one of them works, you're a long way toward understanding all of them (a UI which many third party apps also adopt). I think the article's point would be more valid if, only in this one place, the plus sign added alarms; and either didn't appear or performed some significantly different function elsewhere.
Apple's UI isn't always completely intuitive, but that's a nearly impossible goal; especially on such a small screen. Instead it's very unified and consistent. It might take you a minute to figure out what the plus sign does the first time, but it will continue to do what you expect thereafter, all over the place.
It's easy enough to change that button to "add an alarm" perhaps, but the "+" is used throughout the UI to add whatever is appropriate to the application in question. It adds contacts in the contact app, calendar entries in the calendar app, new notes in the note app, and new alarms in the alarm app (along with many other things). It's what's known as a "reusable element" and once you understand its function in one application it should be a relatively trivial to figure out its function later on. Rather than a million buttons in every app that say "Add a $whateverthefuckImightwannaaddhere" there's a "+" button. Would the other be easier? Maybe, in the case of the alarm app, but "Add a new Calendar Event" is probably a rather large button for a phone screen.
The reusable element is perhaps introducing a small extra learning curve to the UI, but once you understand the element's function it's actually a far more elegant solution, and carries over between applications so you only need to learn the function once. In the long run it's saving brain real estate, though it might require a bit of fiddling in the short run.
I think it's more fear that they'll break something. Most of us with at least a reasonable understanding of computers have realized that for the most part it's "safe" to play with computer settings and tools. It's rare to screw something up so badly that it can't be fixed, and in large part computer interfaces are designed with either implicit or explicit "undo" options (worst case, exiting a document without saving will nearly always take you back to a "clean" document). Like the monk in the you-tube video your sibling posted though (and if you haven't watched it, it's hysterical), many non-technical users worry that they will damage either the computer or their data if they mess around with stuff.
Personally I consider this attitude somewhat foolish (as I think do most people who fall into the "geek" category), but it's fairly common. Of course if you try to explain to the person that they're unlikely to hurt anything by playing around, they will immediately tell you that it's easy for you to say that, as you're an expert unlikely to hurt anything. It doesn't really occur to them that most of the expertise you or I have comes from a willingness to experiment.
Actually the movie repeatedly states that the hero's injuries can be treated, but he can't afford it. One of the reason he agrees to act as a spy for the Colonel in the first place is a promise to get him back to Earth for treatment on company expense. It's one of the more important sub-plots of the movie and explains most of his early motivations.
I heard an article about this on NPR this morning. He apparently has a fair amount of control and even feeling while the power is turned on. He talked about getting a shot in his lower back while the systems was powered up and being able to feel the pain, the pressure of the insertion, everything you'd expect a normal person to be able to feel. He joked about it being both bad and good, but you could tell he was really pleased.
The interesting thing is that they aren't, from what I understand, trying to bypass the damaged nerves, rather they're applying a continuous current to them, which seems to boost the natural ability of the nerves to receive signals. For lack of a better description (and assuming I understand what's going on, which is assuming a lot, even the doctors don't seem too clear on the details) the applied current allows the nerve signals to "jump" the cut in his nervous system.
Also for reasons I don't understand, they only use the system 2 hours or so a day, so for the majority of the time he's a normal paraplegic. That may explain why it's taking him so long to relearn things like walking and standing, though the article indicates that only gross movements may ever be possible so it could be that the signals just aren't strong enough still for fine motor control.
I'm reaching back in time here (I haven't emulated C-64 in a long time, not since I realized that the original "Pirates!" wasn't as much fun as I remembered), but didn't some of the C-64 emulators map the a standard keyboard to the Commodore keyboard when configured to do so? I seem to recall that I could configure it to send (for instance) " when I hit "[shift]-[Button to the right of enter]" instead of "[shift]-[2]". Maybe I'm imagining things though, it has been a long time. Seems like a nice (and trivial) feature to build into one though.
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I am confused by you. Don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to be offensive, but I am confused by why you would do this. iTunes (indeed, any decent media management system) has metadata associated with music files. The application knows what album the song is from, and will even happily manage multiple copies of the same song with different meta data. Why do you care how the underlying filesystem organizes the music? Metadata also keeps track of stuff like genre, artist, even composer when composer is different than artist. Plus you can change the meta data trivially if you chose to do so. Got a copy of, say, the Dixie Chicks and classified it as country? Decided that on second thought it's more rock? Just change the genre in the metadata, no need to move everything around. Playlists are of course the final piece of the puzzle. Want to make a "beach mix"? Just create a playlist and add the songs you want from multiple albums.
I hesitate to say you're doing it wrong, as your system obviously works for you, but there are really far more effective ways to handle what you want than compulsively organizing files and directories. Also note that while iTunes can and does do everything I mention, it's hardly the only program that can, and they use an open standard for the meta data. So if you get everything setup the way you like it in iTunes and then decide to switch to Windows Media Player, VLC, or Amarok, all your metadata goes too. I'm not sure, but I think they can read each other's playlists too.
That's a big key IMO. I have lots of shitty MP3's I recorded years ago before it became a relatively trivial operation. I've been putting off rerecording them for years just becasue of the sheer volume of them. If I can trade those in for professionally mastered 256kb AAC tracks, I'll part with $25 this minute.
I don't use Macs at work, but I've made pretty extensive use of Time Machine on home computers and not experienced any issues. What didn't work for you? Why would you consider it an inappropriate backup solution for the type of setup given here? Remember, this is a very small office, likely with a very limited budget. Getting a full on tape library with Data Protector or Tivoli is unlikely to be an option. If the suggestion were to use Time Machine for backing up 100 workstations and 7 or 10 servers, I'd be in complete agreement with you. Here it seems like a pretty valid solution.
You need a better job. I don't get fired for every minor mistake I make. Often enough I don't even get in trouble. People make mistakes, in a decent company you own up to yours and try to fix them as best you can. Sure this was potentially a very big, very expensive mistake, but when you make decisions for the entire multinational company, your mistakes are likely to be correspondingly large. No way to avoid that. It's not like he hasn't also made many more very successful decisions that resulted in Google becoming one of the biggest players in the world.
If you are naive enough to believe that Microsoft, one of the biggest if not "The" biggest name in computing for the last 20 years, isn't capable of this type of rebound when necessary, then I feel sorry for you and your limited intellectual ability and foresight.
I don't think I said anything even vaguely like that. I said that Microsoft was not (yet) in a position where they feel they need to "rebound". Intellectually I'm sure plenty of people at Microsoft are a bit worried about that fact that their revenue stream depends so heavily on desktop computer OSes and Office, and that new devices and new products (tablets, improved smart phones, Android, iOS, Google Docs, ChromeOS, etc) are showing signs of cutting into those product's markets in the near future. On the other hand it's hard to get really, viscerally, scared when your profits last year beat analyst's expectations. It's hard to *really* think you're doing something wrong when you keep making tons of money.
Microsoft is going to have to feel some real pain before they change course. You rarely ever see a company successfully reinvent itself until it experiences a crisis. Once the crisis comes, of course, it's even odds on whether the company can make the right choices. Apple did it and so did IBM (probably several times as you point out), but the roadside is littered with formerly agile and powerful companies that couldn't (Sun, SGI, Compaq, DEC, Commodore... the list goes on and on). I'm sure not saying that MS can't be one of the survivors, but we're at least 5-10 year from them even having to find out. They aren't going to be hurting unless and until the predicted rise of mobile computing occurs.
As I said farther up I think the difference, in both Apple and IBM's, cases is that they had to go to the brink before they rebuilt themselves. Apple was particularly a hairsbreadth from death when Jobs returned, and IBM wasn't much better off when they started to turn around in the 90s. Microsoft remains, for now, highly profitable. They aren't growing, they aren't dominating new markets, but they're making lots of money. Until that stops, until they start to fail, they aren't likely to turn it around. There is a degree of panic required to make the kind of massive cultural and product changes that Apple and IBM made to turn around, and that panic hasn't set in yet at MS.
This is actually a pretty interesting point. Ballmer is clearly the business side, and you'd think from that he'd be socially adept. Gates is clearly all geek, and appears to be borderline Autistic on occasion, and you'd expect him to be socially inept. Yet as TFA points out, Gates has that something that makes you listen to him, makes you consider his words, makes him a leader. Ballmer doesn't and it's not something you can fake.
I'm not a Gates fan, or a Microsoft fan, but I don't think you have to admire someone to admit their strengths, and Bill Gates clearly has an almost unsurpassed ability to judge the merits of an idea, and turn a vision into reality. It's the same kind of ability that Jobs, and even Linus and RMS have. None of them is perfect, none of them always picks right, but all of them have combination of vision, follow through, and a certain kind of charisma that gets other people nodding their heads and reaching for their wallets (Obviously with RMS and Linus it's more of a figurative wallet).
Unfortunately (or fortunately if you prefer) I don't think it's enough to "save" MS. For one thing, I'm not sure MS needs "saving" yet. They're increasingly irrelevant when it comes to new and innovative ideas, but they're still making money hand over fist, and that isn't likely to change for a decade or so. Until things get really bad (which will require that death or near death of the desktop and laptop as platforms, an event at least ten years away) no one person is going to be able to fix the corporate culture. Part of the reason Jobs was able to have the affect he did on Apple, was that Apple was at rock bottom when they brought him back. People that otherwise might have resisted him or tried to maintain the status quo knew that this was probably the company's very last chance. Microsoft just isn't there yet.
I believe truth is a defense in in US libel cases, which is where the case is apparently being tried. According to the Journalism about.com article: "Libel is by definition false. Anything that is provably true cannot be libelous. " I'll grant you that "about.com" is not he most reliable source ever, but I doubt they'd get this wrong. I realize that in the UK truth is not a Libel defense (which makes no sense to me at all, but no one asked me), but in California it almost certainly is.
Even if we accept that Microsoft is exercising some level of control over Skype (an event I'd consider highly unlikely this early into the process, but believe what you want), there's still no way they'd be performing a major infrastructure change like a full OS changeover this quickly. I doubt you could get the code ported this quickly, let alone get it tested, a deployment plan written, everyone read into the plan, etc, etc. This isn't like replacing the OS on your home PC. We're talking hundreds or thousands of servers, running custom code, deployed internationally. If Microsoft decides to switch them over to Windows (and they may), it won't be a rush job done a few weeks after the announcement of intent to purchase. It'll happen after months of work and planning, and after the sale is final.
A lot of what these people "miss" is either available or trivial to emulate. One guy was crying because he missed BBN Unix's ability to command outputs a page at a time, and went on to describe exactly what happens when you pipe a command's output to "more". Better still, if you pipe it to "less" you not only get "page at a time" output, you can move back and forth through it. Obviously the keyboard thing is just a matter of spending a few bucks on a mechanical keyboard. I couldn't read the third page, but of all the things I did manage to read, it seemed like the only somewhat viable (ie, not completely trivial to overcome) complaint was the guy who missed some obscure scrolling behavior on an old window manager. Even then it seemed like a really weird complaint. A modern scroll wheel seems like a much more useful and intuitive system.
It's not a lot of money to start an "innovative company" no matter how old you are. Let's start from the premise that you can live on 20K a year as a 20 year old with very little responsibility, and a willingness to eat a lot of Ramen. Let's further assume that a "next great technology" company is going to need, at a minimum, 20k worth of servers, at least one decent workstations (2K), Hosting (At least a few hundred dollars a month for a reliable colo service with a redundant high speed pipe, redundant power, etc). You could easily burn through more than half of that money in the first few months before you even have something that might be called a product, let alone a product that makes money. Gods forbid you try to get someone to help you. Whether they're a "partner" or an "employee" they're going to need money to live on too.
This isn't a hundred K to live on and party for a couple years, it's a hundred K to build a business. Not just any business either, an innovative new business with spiffy products and new ideas.
I rather wish that the US would move to publicly funded campaigns (which I assume must be what you use), but if anything we seem to moving in the opposite direction. Here donations to an election find aren't considered bribery, as you aren't really giving money to the candidate (they can't directly touch the money in their campaign coffers), but rather to the organization that seeks to get him/her elected.
Pretty much, yes. There's no way Microsoft tried to switch Skype to Windows servers right now. They don't even have possession of the company yet. The Hotmail switch was planned for months before the attempt was even made, no one is stupid enough to try a massive OS switch on an infrastructure network, with less than a month of planning time, before the deal is even final. MS has done dumb things in it's history, but they're no where near that stupid.
But why even make such a statement?
Most likely because they were asked. Someone said "If you are legally required to hand over the data, what will you do?" and instead of telling an elaborate story about the weather and hoping no one noticed that they had changed the subject, they answered the question. Of course they'll comply with a legal request for the information. They're legally obligated to.
So really all that's required is for one member of either House of Parliament to publicly say, "X slept with Y", then everyone could just quote him? Seems like a great way to earn campaign contributions "For a small donation to my re-election fund, I will allow you to quote me talking about about any injuncted topic of the day."
I rather doubt I agree with everything Mr. Barlow said, even from the brief summary of his comments in the article I saw several statements that I might have argued with. I tend to be a moderate on this issue, neither favoring the total or near total evisceration of IP laws that some favor, nor the equally ridiculous calls from industry to expand them to the point that all content becomes immutable and unusable. Never the less, seeing this guy shake up the cozy little panel of "experts" makes me very happy. Nothing is going to change as long as the attitude that "the ground rules are all agreed on" is there. Until people realize that that there even is a another side in this debate, that there are radical content freedom people sitting opposite the radical content protection people, the middle ground can't be found.
Because it's Slashdot, and they're Microsoft. Duh. You're right of course. At this point not even sucking up to the potential new boss by killing some program he probably won't like doesn't even make sense. There are enough regulatory and other hurdles between here and "Microsoft takes possession of Skype" that doing any kind of actions based on that assumption is silly.
That's fine. Give it a crappy rating becasue it's a crappy album. Giving the album a crappy rating becasue Amazon screwed up the delivery system just makes legitimate bad reviews that much more lost.
Indeed. I'm not a huge fan of the Gaga, but down rating her album because Amazon is having problems is like saying the album sucks becasue the store you bought it in has roaches. It's unfair to her, and unfair to others who are trying to judge the quality of the product.
Even more to the point, once they figure out that the plus sign adds application appropriate things, the knowledge should carry over. As I said in an earlier post, the "+" is a widely reused element in the UI, It adds contacts int eh contact app, events in the calendar app, cities in the weather app... All in all the default Apple applications have a very consistent UI. Once you understand how one of them works, you're a long way toward understanding all of them (a UI which many third party apps also adopt). I think the article's point would be more valid if, only in this one place, the plus sign added alarms; and either didn't appear or performed some significantly different function elsewhere.
Apple's UI isn't always completely intuitive, but that's a nearly impossible goal; especially on such a small screen. Instead it's very unified and consistent. It might take you a minute to figure out what the plus sign does the first time, but it will continue to do what you expect thereafter, all over the place.
It's easy enough to change that button to "add an alarm" perhaps, but the "+" is used throughout the UI to add whatever is appropriate to the application in question. It adds contacts in the contact app, calendar entries in the calendar app, new notes in the note app, and new alarms in the alarm app (along with many other things). It's what's known as a "reusable element" and once you understand its function in one application it should be a relatively trivial to figure out its function later on. Rather than a million buttons in every app that say "Add a $whateverthefuckImightwannaaddhere" there's a "+" button. Would the other be easier? Maybe, in the case of the alarm app, but "Add a new Calendar Event" is probably a rather large button for a phone screen.
The reusable element is perhaps introducing a small extra learning curve to the UI, but once you understand the element's function it's actually a far more elegant solution, and carries over between applications so you only need to learn the function once. In the long run it's saving brain real estate, though it might require a bit of fiddling in the short run.
I think it's more fear that they'll break something. Most of us with at least a reasonable understanding of computers have realized that for the most part it's "safe" to play with computer settings and tools. It's rare to screw something up so badly that it can't be fixed, and in large part computer interfaces are designed with either implicit or explicit "undo" options (worst case, exiting a document without saving will nearly always take you back to a "clean" document). Like the monk in the you-tube video your sibling posted though (and if you haven't watched it, it's hysterical), many non-technical users worry that they will damage either the computer or their data if they mess around with stuff.
Personally I consider this attitude somewhat foolish (as I think do most people who fall into the "geek" category), but it's fairly common. Of course if you try to explain to the person that they're unlikely to hurt anything by playing around, they will immediately tell you that it's easy for you to say that, as you're an expert unlikely to hurt anything. It doesn't really occur to them that most of the expertise you or I have comes from a willingness to experiment.
Actually the movie repeatedly states that the hero's injuries can be treated, but he can't afford it. One of the reason he agrees to act as a spy for the Colonel in the first place is a promise to get him back to Earth for treatment on company expense. It's one of the more important sub-plots of the movie and explains most of his early motivations.
I heard an article about this on NPR this morning. He apparently has a fair amount of control and even feeling while the power is turned on. He talked about getting a shot in his lower back while the systems was powered up and being able to feel the pain, the pressure of the insertion, everything you'd expect a normal person to be able to feel. He joked about it being both bad and good, but you could tell he was really pleased.
The interesting thing is that they aren't, from what I understand, trying to bypass the damaged nerves, rather they're applying a continuous current to them, which seems to boost the natural ability of the nerves to receive signals. For lack of a better description (and assuming I understand what's going on, which is assuming a lot, even the doctors don't seem too clear on the details) the applied current allows the nerve signals to "jump" the cut in his nervous system.
Also for reasons I don't understand, they only use the system 2 hours or so a day, so for the majority of the time he's a normal paraplegic. That may explain why it's taking him so long to relearn things like walking and standing, though the article indicates that only gross movements may ever be possible so it could be that the signals just aren't strong enough still for fine motor control.
I'm reaching back in time here (I haven't emulated C-64 in a long time, not since I realized that the original "Pirates!" wasn't as much fun as I remembered), but didn't some of the C-64 emulators map the a standard keyboard to the Commodore keyboard when configured to do so? I seem to recall that I could configure it to send (for instance) " when I hit "[shift]-[Button to the right of enter]" instead of "[shift]-[2]". Maybe I'm imagining things though, it has been a long time. Seems like a nice (and trivial) feature to build into one though.