>>The issue with intelligent design is it isn't science! There is nothing falsifiable about intelligent design, it makes no predictions, it's not useful to anyone outside of spreading dogma, and has no potential to be useful for any other purpose.
It can be stated so that it is falsifiable and testable.
>>There is no research done on intelligent design, you can't design an experiment to prove or disprove it
Sure you can. People just haven't yet.
As I said elsewhere on this thread, ID is essentially the theory that something intervened with the normal evolution of an organism. If this hypothesis is true, then the genome of such an organism will look statistically different than that of a normally evolved organism, so you can devise a statistical test to test for that.
Like I said, we'll need such tests (regardless of the whole evolution debate) as genetic engineering progresses, so that we can tell if the newest superflu or kudzu was likely to have been designed or naturally mutated.
>>If you make ID testable, suddenly, it's not ID anymore. So if you were still calling it ID, that's your problem.
That's somewhat circular. ID, at its heart, is the notion that some entity influenced the evolutionary process.
If we define a test for ID as simply a test that will reveal true or false (or a percentage likelihood) that an organism had been intervened with in its evolutionary process (akin to testing for a loaded die, or a rigged slot machine), then it is a falsifiable and testable hypothesis.
As I said, we'll need such a test in any event, because as our genetic engineering abilities get stronger, we will be very curious if new organisms on the scene were accidental or intentional. Especially if people suspect that, say, Kim Jong Il had released an ebola/SARS/TB/HIV supervirus on America. The answer to that question could well make a very important difference to events on the world stage.
And if we have such a test, we could apply it to existing organisms and see what we get. Or, if that's too indeterminate, watch the global genome going forward.
>>It can be a good thing for students, to expose them to real-world reactions - both civil and less than civil - to their posts. It can train them to make their posts in non-trollish manner. It may also expose them to ideas they would not have otherwise considered.
If they get civil responses, I'd be shocked.
Even when I posted a way of reformulating ID so that it is a scientificly formulated and testable hypothesis, people still flamed the shit out of me, even though at some point in the near future we WILL need a test for intelligently design. (Namely, when we have to investigate bacteria, virii, etc., to guess if they were naturally evolved or engineered by Saddam & Co.)
I think the entire freaks list here on Slashdot is from this. Note that I wasn't even defending ID, per se, merely reformulating it so that it would be "scientific". This is the objection you always hear to ID, right? (Right?)
So you'd think that people would be happy to see it formulated this way, since it would give them an opportunity to prove it false. But they're not. Instead, they rather act like rabid wombats.
>>I can understand disliking the breadcrumbs for their inconsistent sizing and placement, which as far as I have heard has been improved in Win7, but for them making you have to click more? What exactly are you doing that leads to this situation?
If you're in a folder on the desktop you can't single click to get back up to the desktop level, like you can in XP. Also, if the name is long, the breadcrumbs for higher level directories are hidden, which means you have to click, let the names resize around, click, etc., or, as you say, click, delete out everything after the C:\, and delete it.
In XP, you just whack backspace a bunch of times. Much much faster.
>>Oddly enough, my PS2 is still getting more gameplay time than my PS3 (I currently have a 20GB model) as I plow through a lot of the great older PS2 titles I missed (some JRPGs, Tales games, Ico & Shadows of the Colossus, etc).
Try playing Shadows of the Colossus on your PS3 (with software upscaling turned on), then try to play it on your PS2. It's rough. The PS3 actually added a lot of life to games like FF12, which were so horrible looking on the PS2 that I had trouble playing them. It's not a whole lot better, but it does help.
The software support is actually pretty good now. The only reason I keep my PS2 around is for: Singstar (the original), and DDR. Both of which have external controller thingys that don't work with the PS3.
As for the HIV virus, as long as it exists somewhere, new strains can and will be produced, and one of those strains might have the ability to negate or overwhelm these "retrocyclins." Once they can do that, they can reproduce, and the arms race proceeds.
It's still worth the effort though. Not researching this because HIV might mutate somewhere down the line isn't a very good argument. By "strengthening" HIV, you're talking about it becoming slightly altered so that it bypasses whatever "retrocyclin therapy" produces, not a HIV-tuberculosis-Ebola megamix.
>>Second thing on my must-have list is a pre-pre-processor.
I know you're joking, but have you ever looked at M4? It's a pre-pre-processor. We used to use them to generate arrays of N dimensions, where N could be defined at compile time. Most C programmers just define a single dimension array and then index into it with a function, but we actually generated code (nested for loops and everything) to arbitrary dimension with M4.
As I suffer from schizophrenia myself I know how bad your memory can get because of it. Maybe there is a connection between I stopped smoking and I (finally) got a diagnose on what was wrong with me. Perhaps it made the symptoms clearer? Nicotine, for over 10 years now, has been known to improve memory functioning, especially short term recall. Some of my friends were actually encouraged to start smoking by this study, before finals. I thought it was kind of silly, myself... but if memory problems are an inherent symptom of schizophrenia, then perhaps that's the mechanism it's helping.
Or I guess it could be something else entirely, since nicotine has a wide ranging impact on brain chemistry.
>>I'll bet the 'itching' pathways have other uses as well. Perhaps the tickling response is there?
Tickling, I believe, is linked with touch. Your brain suppresses/mutes touches done to yourself, which is why most people can't tickle themselves. How does the brain tell? If your motion and the sensation come within a threshold of each other, it mutes the sensation. I think there's something like a 45ms threshold involved - when people moved a machine that then moved a tickling finger, if they added a delay of more than 45ms to it, suddenly people could tickle themselves.
There's a lot of interesting hacks inside the human brain.
Part of the problem of the Turing test is that the results depend to a large degree upon the cleverness of the examiner. But Turing does not give us any guidelines for what makes a good examiner.
Partly, but I contest the very notion that a respondent being indistinguishable from a person is any evidence of sentience. For example, one could hypothetically imagine a sentient AI that would fail the test every time. Q: Are you an AI? A: Yes. Q: Calculate the square of 12371030312098? A: (.01ms later) 153042390982847539285161604. And so forth.
Contrawise, one could theoretically build up a large database of commonly asked questions on the Turing test, and just put a bit of natural language search on top of it and, voila, have a machine that does reasonably well -but with no question that it is not sentient. Unless you believe in pansentience, like Chalmers. Or something.
The question of how to determine if something is sentient really is a hard one, and until we can even figure out how HUMANS can be conscious entities, possessing subjective experience (which despite all our efforts, nobody has the slightest idea beyond wild conjecture), I doubt we'll have any test for computers either.
Any authorized company can sell OEM Windows licenses, and is as a rule of thumb loads cheaper than the retail package. The catch is, if the company you bought it from ever goes under, your Windows license is now illegal. Or at least that's what I was told by my MSDN teacher in my MSDN Windows desktop and server courses...
Hmm... so if Fry's goes out of business, Microsoft will revoke the licenses sold legally under its auspices? That seems dubious to me. Perhaps they would revoke the unsold copies.
The only downside to an OEM copy AFAICT is that you don't get the pretty $100 box to hold the DVD in.
>>The way we treat each other in society should be empirically based.
Excellent. The next time I see someone I will roll randomly on my chart, with a 1 out of 12 chance of acting rudely to them, a 1 out of 10,000 chance of committing some sort of crime towards them, and a 1 out of 300,000,000 chance of voting for them for president in the next election.
>>According to Turing, all sufficiently complicated computing devices are equivalent. The architecture may be entirely different, but there's no reason in principle one cannot be simulated on the other.
Turning machines do not work with an infinitely large symbol space, so it's hard to prove Turing equivalency with analog devices like the brain. Neurons are often simplified to simply "number of activations per second" but there's a lot of analog chemistry going on in there, which, if not simulated, will result in errors.
>>A computer can simulate the laws of physics. Therefore, a computer can simulate the brain.
This is not Turing equivalency, just so you know. =)
>>First... there is no requirement that the computer cannot be some x*n atoms.
As someone who worked in bioengineering doing software engineering for a while (the BIONOME project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center with the UCSD Bioeng department), I can say that just simulating a single cell accurately over a period of a second or two takes substantially longer than that in practice (as in a minute or more).
That's why systems that simulate lots of cells do approximations. They double check their work with the more precise simulations and with lab studies to make sure their approximations aren't wildly inaccurate, and go on from there. They can simulate a heart beat from the time the neural impulse comes in through a full contraction cycle, and you can watch the potentials propogate across the tissue and everything, but it's still not especially fast, nor probably accurate enough for doing things like simulating an actual brain.
I think you really would need something akin to what these researchers or doing in order to simulate a brain, and even then I have doubts it could be both accurate and fast.
>>It's quite possible that, say, only 1% of the atoms in the brain are required for the brain activity we'd like to simulate.
It depends. If you don't simulate things that are involved in some fashion or another in transmitting potentials, then you'll get inaccuracies and your model will be worthless. Even simulating a single cardiac heart cell is tremendously hard to do right, since the thing is essentially a giant differential equation, so things like the steady state you start the cell in matters. When Proctor and Gamble came out to look at my work, the first thing he asked was what the heart rate was of the cell BEFORE the simulation even began running - if we didn't accurately keep track of everything from that to, say, intracellular calcium, then the model doesn't just have errors, it becomes wildly wrong. In the case that I showed the P&G guy, I was driving the cell at a higher heart rate than the steady state had been set to, so the heart was, essentially, skipping a beat.
It was actually an accurate result of what would happen in that case, but it didn't mean the result was particularly useful for our purposes (we were studying what would happen if drugs affected the various constants in the simulation).
>>What do you mean there's no test for sentience? There are several tests.
No, there's not. The Turing test is rather overrated in this regard. But there's effectively no difference to the Turning test between a sentient entity and a large table of prerecorded answers that gives the same responses, but most people would agree that a giant lookup table is not sentient.
Ahem. You're not supposed to do that. That's not what one calls 'a legit Windows install'. Or am I confused? I thought OEM can't be bought separately from computers.
Fry's sells OEM WinOS disks. I think they're maybe supposed to be tied to the purchase of a motherboard, but if that's true, they certainly don't enforce it.
>>we have anti windows (leaving.. nix and osx?) heads complaining about having to know command-line switches to turn off their computer.
I wouldn't complain about knowing the shutdown command to shutdown my linux box, since linux is fundamentally a command line environment. KDE and Gnome aside.
>>Humans, office workers especially, are - get this - stupid, they make mistakes. They forget to save that document they were working on. They accidentally hit the "Shutdown" button on their retarded keyboard instead of page-up and the computer begins the shutdown process.
So what? A userland application should not be able to interrupt something at the system level. When they get a SIGKILL or whatever the windows equivalent is, the program should save and terminate. I wouldn't mind if windows even gave applications a little bit of time to exit before force killing them (in fact, I altered my registry so my computer works exactly that way), but the default settings are just stupid.
Besides, the only thing office workers use is MS Office, and office autosaves its work anyway, so there's really no excuse for it to halt a system shutdown in order to get confirmation from the user that yes he does indeed wish to save his file.
Right Click on the start bar -> Properties -> Taskbar buttons set to 'never combine'... and you have the single click you are talking about.
Many users turned off task grouping in Windows XP, you can kwityetbitchin and do it in Windows 7 too:)
I did in XP, and will do so in Win7 as well.
That's why I said, "it is standard in Win7" to require two clicks. The point is they think it's better, by default, to require two levels of indirection to do things, which is mind-bogglingly stupid.
>>However I haven't yet tried Windows 7, so maybe and hopefully it works way better than stacking in Vista and XP.
Nope. As yet another example of Microsoft demonstrating they have no concept of what usability means, two levels to switch to a window will now be standard in Win7. One mouseover to the dock, the next to click on the subwindow that pops up.
Like you, and most sane individuals, I like to be able to do everything with a single click. Making one of the most commonly used tasks take twice as long is ridiculous. But they've done the same thing with breadcrumb navigation and ribbon menus in Office 2007, which just goes to show how little they understand anything.
>>Hmph.. No comments that even remotely imply having RTFA'd, but sure enough there's an "astroturfing"-tag. Classy..
Did you bother reading the article?
Quote: "Although the look of Windows 7 may seem to be nothing more than some polish applied liberally to the Vista Aero theme, make no mistake: this is a full replacement operating system, and more than just 'Vista done right'. From driver support to multitouch groundwork for the future, from better battery management to the most easy-to-use interface Microsoft has ever had, Windows 7 is hardly half-baked."
>>Ah, but you didn't know that Windows has "shutdown -f -r" you say. Well, stop blaming the OS for your own ignorance then!
I seriously hope you're making a joke there. No normal user should ever need to know command line flags to TURN OFF HIS COMPUTER. This functionality has always been broken in windows, forcing a user to babysit his machine to make sure it successfully turns off, something you don't always have the time to do (at an airport, or you're running late for something).
Besides, the bigger problem is the immense amount of astroturfing going on for Win7. If you hated Vista (and nearly everyone does - I do tech workshops for a living) you'll hate Win7. They didn't fix the broken Vista file browser or windows explorer, and so *nothing else they did* matters.
But when you read things like this (from TFA): "Although the look of Windows 7 may seem to be nothing more than some polish applied liberally to the Vista Aero theme, make no mistake: this is a full replacement operating system, and more than just 'Vista done right'. From driver support to multitouch groundwork for the future, from better battery management to the most easy-to-use interface Microsoft has ever had, Windows 7 is hardly half-baked."
Then you know that there's something seriously screwy going on. It sounds like all the press outlets are creaming themselves for Win7, and I can't figure out why. Usability is the most important feature they should be concerned about, and both Vista and Win7 are steps backwards in usability.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The issue with intelligent design is it isn't science! There is nothing falsifiable about intelligent design, it makes no predictions, it's not useful to anyone outside of spreading dogma, and has no potential to be useful for any other purpose.
It can be stated so that it is falsifiable and testable.
>>There is no research done on intelligent design, you can't design an experiment to prove or disprove it
Sure you can. People just haven't yet.
As I said elsewhere on this thread, ID is essentially the theory that something intervened with the normal evolution of an organism. If this hypothesis is true, then the genome of such an organism will look statistically different than that of a normally evolved organism, so you can devise a statistical test to test for that.
Like I said, we'll need such tests (regardless of the whole evolution debate) as genetic engineering progresses, so that we can tell if the newest superflu or kudzu was likely to have been designed or naturally mutated.
>>If you make ID testable, suddenly, it's not ID anymore. So if you were still calling it ID, that's your problem.
That's somewhat circular. ID, at its heart, is the notion that some entity influenced the evolutionary process.
If we define a test for ID as simply a test that will reveal true or false (or a percentage likelihood) that an organism had been intervened with in its evolutionary process (akin to testing for a loaded die, or a rigged slot machine), then it is a falsifiable and testable hypothesis.
As I said, we'll need such a test in any event, because as our genetic engineering abilities get stronger, we will be very curious if new organisms on the scene were accidental or intentional. Especially if people suspect that, say, Kim Jong Il had released an ebola/SARS/TB/HIV supervirus on America. The answer to that question could well make a very important difference to events on the world stage.
And if we have such a test, we could apply it to existing organisms and see what we get. Or, if that's too indeterminate, watch the global genome going forward.
^intelligently design^intelligently designed organisms^
>>It can be a good thing for students, to expose them to real-world reactions - both civil and less than civil - to their posts. It can train them to make their posts in non-trollish manner. It may also expose them to ideas they would not have otherwise considered.
If they get civil responses, I'd be shocked.
Even when I posted a way of reformulating ID so that it is a scientificly formulated and testable hypothesis, people still flamed the shit out of me, even though at some point in the near future we WILL need a test for intelligently design. (Namely, when we have to investigate bacteria, virii, etc., to guess if they were naturally evolved or engineered by Saddam & Co.)
I think the entire freaks list here on Slashdot is from this. Note that I wasn't even defending ID, per se, merely reformulating it so that it would be "scientific". This is the objection you always hear to ID, right? (Right?)
So you'd think that people would be happy to see it formulated this way, since it would give them an opportunity to prove it false. But they're not. Instead, they rather act like rabid wombats.
>>I can understand disliking the breadcrumbs for their inconsistent sizing and placement, which as far as I have heard has been improved in Win7, but for them making you have to click more? What exactly are you doing that leads to this situation?
If you're in a folder on the desktop you can't single click to get back up to the desktop level, like you can in XP. Also, if the name is long, the breadcrumbs for higher level directories are hidden, which means you have to click, let the names resize around, click, etc., or, as you say, click, delete out everything after the C:\, and delete it.
In XP, you just whack backspace a bunch of times. Much much faster.
>>Oddly enough, my PS2 is still getting more gameplay time than my PS3 (I currently have a 20GB model) as I plow through a lot of the great older PS2 titles I missed (some JRPGs, Tales games, Ico & Shadows of the Colossus, etc).
Try playing Shadows of the Colossus on your PS3 (with software upscaling turned on), then try to play it on your PS2. It's rough. The PS3 actually added a lot of life to games like FF12, which were so horrible looking on the PS2 that I had trouble playing them. It's not a whole lot better, but it does help.
The software support is actually pretty good now. The only reason I keep my PS2 around is for: Singstar (the original), and DDR. Both of which have external controller thingys that don't work with the PS3.
As for the HIV virus, as long as it exists somewhere, new strains can and will be produced, and one of those strains might have the ability to negate or overwhelm these "retrocyclins." Once they can do that, they can reproduce, and the arms race proceeds.
It's still worth the effort though. Not researching this because HIV might mutate somewhere down the line isn't a very good argument. By "strengthening" HIV, you're talking about it becoming slightly altered so that it bypasses whatever "retrocyclin therapy" produces, not a HIV-tuberculosis-Ebola megamix.
>>Second thing on my must-have list is a pre-pre-processor.
I know you're joking, but have you ever looked at M4? It's a pre-pre-processor. We used to use them to generate arrays of N dimensions, where N could be defined at compile time. Most C programmers just define a single dimension array and then index into it with a function, but we actually generated code (nested for loops and everything) to arbitrary dimension with M4.
Yes, that's essentially the argument I was making, with minor changes for a different topic.
As I suffer from schizophrenia myself I know how bad your memory can get because of it. Maybe there is a connection between I stopped smoking and I (finally) got a diagnose on what was wrong with me. Perhaps it made the symptoms clearer?
Nicotine, for over 10 years now, has been known to improve memory functioning, especially short term recall. Some of my friends were actually encouraged to start smoking by this study, before finals. I thought it was kind of silly, myself... but if memory problems are an inherent symptom of schizophrenia, then perhaps that's the mechanism it's helping.
Or I guess it could be something else entirely, since nicotine has a wide ranging impact on brain chemistry.
Shame he didn't include "get along with people". His family didn't get along with him.
>>I'll bet the 'itching' pathways have other uses as well. Perhaps the tickling response is there?
Tickling, I believe, is linked with touch. Your brain suppresses/mutes touches done to yourself, which is why most people can't tickle themselves. How does the brain tell? If your motion and the sensation come within a threshold of each other, it mutes the sensation. I think there's something like a 45ms threshold involved - when people moved a machine that then moved a tickling finger, if they added a delay of more than 45ms to it, suddenly people could tickle themselves.
There's a lot of interesting hacks inside the human brain.
Part of the problem of the Turing test is that the results depend to a large degree upon the cleverness of the examiner. But Turing does not give us any guidelines for what makes a good examiner.
Partly, but I contest the very notion that a respondent being indistinguishable from a person is any evidence of sentience. For example, one could hypothetically imagine a sentient AI that would fail the test every time. Q: Are you an AI? A: Yes. Q: Calculate the square of 12371030312098? A: (.01ms later) 153042390982847539285161604. And so forth.
Contrawise, one could theoretically build up a large database of commonly asked questions on the Turing test, and just put a bit of natural language search on top of it and, voila, have a machine that does reasonably well -but with no question that it is not sentient. Unless you believe in pansentience, like Chalmers. Or something.
The question of how to determine if something is sentient really is a hard one, and until we can even figure out how HUMANS can be conscious entities, possessing subjective experience (which despite all our efforts, nobody has the slightest idea beyond wild conjecture), I doubt we'll have any test for computers either.
Any authorized company can sell OEM Windows licenses, and is as a rule of thumb loads cheaper than the retail package. The catch is, if the company you bought it from ever goes under, your Windows license is now illegal. Or at least that's what I was told by my MSDN teacher in my MSDN Windows desktop and server courses...
Hmm... so if Fry's goes out of business, Microsoft will revoke the licenses sold legally under its auspices? That seems dubious to me. Perhaps they would revoke the unsold copies.
The only downside to an OEM copy AFAICT is that you don't get the pretty $100 box to hold the DVD in.
>>The way we treat each other in society should be empirically based.
Excellent. The next time I see someone I will roll randomly on my chart, with a 1 out of 12 chance of acting rudely to them, a 1 out of 10,000 chance of committing some sort of crime towards them, and a 1 out of 300,000,000 chance of voting for them for president in the next election.
>>According to Turing, all sufficiently complicated computing devices are equivalent. The architecture may be entirely different, but there's no reason in principle one cannot be simulated on the other.
Turning machines do not work with an infinitely large symbol space, so it's hard to prove Turing equivalency with analog devices like the brain. Neurons are often simplified to simply "number of activations per second" but there's a lot of analog chemistry going on in there, which, if not simulated, will result in errors.
>>A computer can simulate the laws of physics. Therefore, a computer can simulate the brain.
This is not Turing equivalency, just so you know. =)
>>First... there is no requirement that the computer cannot be some x*n atoms.
As someone who worked in bioengineering doing software engineering for a while (the BIONOME project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center with the UCSD Bioeng department), I can say that just simulating a single cell accurately over a period of a second or two takes substantially longer than that in practice (as in a minute or more).
That's why systems that simulate lots of cells do approximations. They double check their work with the more precise simulations and with lab studies to make sure their approximations aren't wildly inaccurate, and go on from there. They can simulate a heart beat from the time the neural impulse comes in through a full contraction cycle, and you can watch the potentials propogate across the tissue and everything, but it's still not especially fast, nor probably accurate enough for doing things like simulating an actual brain.
I think you really would need something akin to what these researchers or doing in order to simulate a brain, and even then I have doubts it could be both accurate and fast.
>>It's quite possible that, say, only 1% of the atoms in the brain are required for the brain activity we'd like to simulate.
It depends. If you don't simulate things that are involved in some fashion or another in transmitting potentials, then you'll get inaccuracies and your model will be worthless. Even simulating a single cardiac heart cell is tremendously hard to do right, since the thing is essentially a giant differential equation, so things like the steady state you start the cell in matters. When Proctor and Gamble came out to look at my work, the first thing he asked was what the heart rate was of the cell BEFORE the simulation even began running - if we didn't accurately keep track of everything from that to, say, intracellular calcium, then the model doesn't just have errors, it becomes wildly wrong. In the case that I showed the P&G guy, I was driving the cell at a higher heart rate than the steady state had been set to, so the heart was, essentially, skipping a beat.
It was actually an accurate result of what would happen in that case, but it didn't mean the result was particularly useful for our purposes (we were studying what would happen if drugs affected the various constants in the simulation).
>>What do you mean there's no test for sentience? There are several tests.
No, there's not. The Turing test is rather overrated in this regard. But there's effectively no difference to the Turning test between a sentient entity and a large table of prerecorded answers that gives the same responses, but most people would agree that a giant lookup table is not sentient.
>>If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
Maybe. Is a tape recording of a human sentient? No, it's not. But we can't differentiate live TV from pre-recorded broadcasts.
As Searle pointed out, it's trivially easy to make a non-sentient program that *says* it is sentient.
Ahem. You're not supposed to do that. That's not what one calls 'a legit Windows install'. Or am I confused? I thought OEM can't be bought separately from computers.
Fry's sells OEM WinOS disks. I think they're maybe supposed to be tied to the purchase of a motherboard, but if that's true, they certainly don't enforce it.
>>we have anti windows (leaving.. nix and osx?) heads complaining about having to know command-line switches to turn off their computer.
I wouldn't complain about knowing the shutdown command to shutdown my linux box, since linux is fundamentally a command line environment. KDE and Gnome aside.
>>Humans, office workers especially, are - get this - stupid, they make mistakes. They forget to save that document they were working on. They accidentally hit the "Shutdown" button on their retarded keyboard instead of page-up and the computer begins the shutdown process.
So what? A userland application should not be able to interrupt something at the system level. When they get a SIGKILL or whatever the windows equivalent is, the program should save and terminate. I wouldn't mind if windows even gave applications a little bit of time to exit before force killing them (in fact, I altered my registry so my computer works exactly that way), but the default settings are just stupid.
Besides, the only thing office workers use is MS Office, and office autosaves its work anyway, so there's really no excuse for it to halt a system shutdown in order to get confirmation from the user that yes he does indeed wish to save his file.
Right Click on the start bar -> Properties -> Taskbar buttons set to 'never combine' ... and you have the single click you are talking about.
Many users turned off task grouping in Windows XP, you can kwityetbitchin and do it in Windows 7 too :)
I did in XP, and will do so in Win7 as well.
That's why I said, "it is standard in Win7" to require two clicks. The point is they think it's better, by default, to require two levels of indirection to do things, which is mind-bogglingly stupid.
>>However I haven't yet tried Windows 7, so maybe and hopefully it works way better than stacking in Vista and XP.
Nope. As yet another example of Microsoft demonstrating they have no concept of what usability means, two levels to switch to a window will now be standard in Win7. One mouseover to the dock, the next to click on the subwindow that pops up.
Like you, and most sane individuals, I like to be able to do everything with a single click. Making one of the most commonly used tasks take twice as long is ridiculous. But they've done the same thing with breadcrumb navigation and ribbon menus in Office 2007, which just goes to show how little they understand anything.
>>Hmph.. No comments that even remotely imply having RTFA'd, but sure enough there's an "astroturfing"-tag. Classy..
Did you bother reading the article?
Quote:
"Although the look of Windows 7 may seem to be nothing more than some polish applied liberally to the Vista Aero theme, make no mistake: this is a full replacement operating system, and more than just 'Vista done right'. From driver support to multitouch groundwork for the future, from better battery management to the most easy-to-use interface Microsoft has ever had, Windows 7 is hardly half-baked."
It's pure shilling for Microsoft.
>>Ah, but you didn't know that Windows has "shutdown -f -r" you say. Well, stop blaming the OS for your own ignorance then!
I seriously hope you're making a joke there. No normal user should ever need to know command line flags to TURN OFF HIS COMPUTER. This functionality has always been broken in windows, forcing a user to babysit his machine to make sure it successfully turns off, something you don't always have the time to do (at an airport, or you're running late for something).
Besides, the bigger problem is the immense amount of astroturfing going on for Win7. If you hated Vista (and nearly everyone does - I do tech workshops for a living) you'll hate Win7. They didn't fix the broken Vista file browser or windows explorer, and so *nothing else they did* matters.
But when you read things like this (from TFA):
"Although the look of Windows 7 may seem to be nothing more than some polish applied liberally to the Vista Aero theme, make no mistake: this is a full replacement operating system, and more than just 'Vista done right'. From driver support to multitouch groundwork for the future, from better battery management to the most easy-to-use interface Microsoft has ever had, Windows 7 is hardly half-baked."
Then you know that there's something seriously screwy going on. It sounds like all the press outlets are creaming themselves for Win7, and I can't figure out why. Usability is the most important feature they should be concerned about, and both Vista and Win7 are steps backwards in usability.