For the record, how can something be both unintuitive and logical?:)
For the purposes of UIs: Intuitive means "you can work out how to use it by guessing" Logical means "it makes sense once you've been told how it works"
I don't think I would ever have guessed that "yy" would yank a line: so it's unintuitive.
But once you grok the rules, they're logical. Look at "y" for yank and "d" for delete.
Hitting the same key twice acts on a line: "dd" or "yy".
Space, w, b, {, } etc. all move the cursor in various ways (one char, one word, back one work, back or forth one paragraph. That's not intuitive.
Prefixing any of these movements with a "d" or a "y" deletes or yanks the characters that the movement command covers. That's not intuitive, but it is perfectly logical. It means you can check the scope with an actionless movement before performing the action.
Prefixing any of that with a number, performs the action that many times. That's not intuitive either, but once you know it, it applies to every command, logically.
I don't think Emacs stinks: on the contrary, the reason I've tried to learn it so many times is that I see all these features it purportedly has, and my mouth waters. People are different though, and it seems clear that Emacs' UI is designed for people different to me.
I'm in exactly the same boat. I don't consider myself to be stupid, but I've made serious efforts to learn Emacs (initially, just as a text editor), using the built in tutorial and previous editions of the O'Reilly book, and none of the keybindings, obscure combinations and long commands stick in my memory.
Vi wasn't easy to learn either -- but while unintuitive, it is all logical and most of the keybindings have obvious mnemonics.
I decided to give up on Emacs, and to be honest I've never been given a reason to regret it.
When I was coming to the end of my degree, nearly 10 years ago, I took part in a consultation exercise. Another panel member complained about the lack of vocational aspects to the course, saying "We did a module on networking, yet Novell wasn't mentioned once".
But he was wrong. While Novell still exist, Novell networking as you might have recognised it in 1995 is all but dead, whereas the theories and paradigms I learnt during the degree still serve me well.
Do you need between 150 to 300 days worth of music at any given time?
As I replied to someone else, I don't need any music at all at any given time.
The beauty of a large capacity iPod is that I can defer my choice of what to listen to, to the moment. I am freed from having to plan ahead or limit my choices.
Except:
- The iPod UI makes choosing from very long lists inconvenient (Apple expects you to prepare playlists at your computer; more planning ahead)
- My collection now exceeds 20GB in any case; but that's 30 years' worth of music buying. 60GB should last me a lifetime.
Well done on using the word "profligate" though, it made you look terribly clever.
I don't need all my songs with me. I don't need any of them, after all.
But, managing what comes with me on the iPod, and what stays at home, is an administrative overhead I'd prefer not to have.
Mind you, my collection has now outgrown my 20GB player, and there's an argument that says if you'd got to do that management anyway, you may as well go the whole hog and manage it down to 4GB.
Why is he wasting paragraphs on trying things out that are there in black and white in the specs?
"It has two GB of disk space. I tried putting 1.5GB of songs on, and there was room for another 0.5GB of data to spare!"... or subjecting it to repeated drops to verify that it wouldn't skip. It's flash memory. Shocks and vibration are not going to be an issue.
It does look like quite a nice gadget -- but I wouldn't personally buy anything with less than 20GB for songs.
I guess if you want RAID, you pay more than $3,000.
What you're really buying here is closed-source software, wrapped in the hardware that turns it into an "appliance". Assume $2,000 of that $3,000 pays for the software.
By specifying the hardware in this way, and by keeping the BIOS and root passwords to themselves, Google greatly simplify their support role.
This is common practice: an IBM HMC (Hardware Management Console) is a 1U PC with a custom Linux distribution and the management software preinstalled. You don't get the root password; you just use the software as delivered.
Yes, but there is musical innovation happening with guitars. People are constantly doing new things with guitars.
Where as the 303 sound has totally stagnated.
The 303 is totally capable of making sounds other than the cliched "303 sound"; indeed I suspect that the 303 designers never expected users to turn the resonance up quite so high, to use the upper pitch range so much, to make those frequency sweeps, etc.
Remember the "TB" stands for "The Bass": they expected it to be used as a stand-in for a bass player. However, it just so happens to turn out that if you don't know what you're doing and you fiddle with a 303, you get stuff that approaches the "303 sound", and if you do know what you're doing you can make it sound very nice indeed (if still cliched) in no time at all.
But that doesn't mean people aren't using it (or its emulators) in innovative ways today. If you use a 303 in an innovative way, it won't have *that* sound, and most of us probably wouldn't recognise it as a 303.
Then again, *that* sound is cropping up in places you wouldn't expect it, which is in itself innovation.
"I Like You" from Morrissey's "You Are the Quarry" is an uptempo Smiths-y guitar driven song with a 303 twittering away halfway up the mix to fill up the sound and make it a bit more modern.
Super Furry Animals never cease to innovate, but they make frequent use off 303 (or similar noises). Try the current single "Lazer Beam" (from "Love Kraft").
Thank you for making me check my facts -- what I said was "conventional wisdom", but as a result of your challenge I Googled for more evidence, and found this:
THE MYTH: After 1 January, the liability for card fraud losses switches from the banks to the cardholder.
THE TRUTH: This is absolutely not the case. With the introduction of chip and PIN there is no change in liability for the cardholder. You will remain fully protected from the cost of card fraud and are covered under the Banking Code. From 1 January 2005 there is a shift in liability for some types of card fraud from banks to retailers, but this will not affect cardholders in any way.
When I was over in the States recently, quite a few cashiers would notice my chip'n'pin card, mention that the US would be moving over to them soon, and saying how nice it will be to have that extra security.
Sometimes I would try and explain the catch.
Since chip & pin supposedly makes fraud impossible, banks have shifted the liability for chip & pin fraud away from themselves and onto the consumer.
That is -- is someone clones your card and forges your signature with a traditional credit card, you can call the credit card company, tell them you didn't make that purchase, and (unless they can prove you were lying) they will refund you the money. They might write the money off, or they might pursue the criminals responsible; it's not your worry. Accepting this risk is all part of their business model. That's what banks are all about.
However, in the UK at least, this changes with chip & pin. If someone shoulder-surfs your PIN, pickpockets your card, and spends money on your card, the bank now says it's YOUR responsibility.
In one way: fair enough, there are precautions you can take to safeguard your PIN, but on the other hand, isn't taking on that liability one of the things we're (directly or indirectly) paying our card providers for?
I want to remind you (because people in general seem to overlook this) that you have some amount of control over both where you live and where you work.
Not wanting to sound/too/ smug, my office and my home are on the same bus route, so the half-hour bus journey takes me practically door to door. The bus comes every ten minutes, so I don't have to pay much attention to when I leave the house. I pay around £85 for a three month bus pass. That's £2,660 a year less than your £250/mo drive, and I wonder whether you've taken into account the mileage depreciation on your car, servicing costs, etc.
My point is that this is no accident. Public transport links to my workplace (not just "are there lots of buses", but "where do those buses go") were a major factor in my choice of home. Of course I don't know your personal circumstances, and you may have all kinds of reasons why you choose not to live somewhere that's more convenient for your work (or work somewhere more convenient for your home) -- but nonetheless it is a choice.
When we sold our last home, I always made a point of telling viewers about the buses that passed nearby. I was surprised at the blank looks I received. Few of them considered this a criterion for choosing a home, and IMHO more people should.
In many parts of the US, I'm given to understand, it would be much more difficult to find a nice home with good public transport than it is in the UK.
Note: I own a car; I'm not some hippy stoically tolerating bus journeys for the sake of the planet. This is about convenience and money.
I spent a couple of years not owning a car. We lived in a reasonably central part of town, which helped, with the "last mile" aspect, but here are a couple of adjustments we had to make:
- With the money we saved on owning a car, we took the angle that taking a taxi was never an extravagance. This is great if you like a drink! It's no help at peak hours when taxi demand exceeds supply. - Again, with the money saved, we were able to hire a car for occasions when we needed one: a weekend away, a trip to Ikea, etc. The local car hire place came to know us, so we'd get preferential treatment and upgrades, we got to try out a number of different cars, etc. We'd also get a car to suit the journey each time. - We took full advantage of online grocery shopping and home delivery, using local shops for low-volume last minute needs.
The real downside for me was the inability to go on weekend trips on a whim: to hire a car for the weekend you needed to have planned ahead.
Although I now own a car, I take the bus to work every day. I see plenty of people with babies, shopping or both using the bus...
What I can say is: Apple is a media-wow company. If Keynote is not the best by now, it will be exhaustively rewritten up to the point when people say "Wow" -- because this is what Apple does and what Apple's customers want/expect. Nothing less.
While there are some discriminating Mac users out there (hanging out on the Ars Technica forums, among other places), a lot of the more vocal Apple cheerleaders seem to assume Apple software is wonderful just because Apple has told them its.
Seriously, these people think iTunes, or even the very ordinary iPhoto, are revolutionary.
I agree with almost all of this. I've driven across the USA three times, so I'm more than aware of its size -- and indeed there are plenty of places you just couldn't get to without a car.
My only major obejection is that a lot of rural Americans making those routine 30 mile drives you refer to, choose to do them in absolutely enormous pickups, or other massively overpowered cars.
My own car, perfectly capable of carrying two people and their luggage in comfort for all-day drives, has a 1.2 litre engine. Yes, it strains a little with passengers in the rear, but the 1.4 model would not.
Whereas, our standard midsize rental in the US was a 3 litre V6, and nobody considers this to be a powerful car. Perhaps the answer to rising fuel prices is to start driving more economical cars.
(Other minor points: Amercicans can underestimate the size of Europe too, imagining the whole continent to be crammed full of dense cities. Although we don't have anything quite like Iowa or Nebraska, we do have some areas of emptiness.... and how very American of you to equate "Success" exclusively with GDP;)
We drive about 10x more than you guys. It's not uncommon to work in a completely different city than where you live, driving for an hour on a highway to get to work. I know a guy who commutes every day from another state, at least two hours away. In Europe, that'd be like commuting from another country.
Well, yes, and high fuel tax is partly intended to dissuade you from doing that. In "old" Europe, the roads wouldn't be able to take many more commuters, and we don't have the space to just build more roads. For the record, it's not uncommon to drive over an hour to work in the UK -- it's just that it'll take you an hour to drive 30 miles, much of that sitting in traffic.
(I laughed heartily when Slashdot reported the London congestion charge, and some American suggested "just make the roads wider")
Much of the USA is built around the car -- to the extent where it's often easier to walk from one strip mall car park to another rather than walk to the next shop. When you buy a house, you count the garages rather than think about how close the train station or bus stop is. Local shops are rare, Walmarts are common.
In rural parts of the States, it's not uncommon to live in a town of a few hundred residents, over 50 miles from the next one.
It's no wonder in the USA fuel is taxed as if it were a necessity, rather than a luxury.
Nonetheless, I've driven over 12,000 holiday miles in the USA, and even this year, with the papers full of outrage at rising oil prices, we would cackle with laughter every time we filled a tank for under $20.
Oil's going to keep getting more expensive. I hope to see a free market drive to alternative fuels. If CO2 emissions won't change people's buying habits, maybe the mighty dollar will.
The USA is capable of growing an awful lot of carbohydrates, and (as I read in a/. sig) "anything you can do with hydrocarbons can be done with carbohydrates". Already pumps in Iowa deliver fuel which is 10% ethanol from corn.
The first time I sat down in front of a Mac, really way back, probably System 1 or something, I wanted to eject a floppy. The very first thing I tried was dragging the floppy to the trash and lo and behold! The floppy ejected.
I don't know if I'm unique, but that was the very first time I ever used a graphical desktop, and I got it right the first time.
You're unlikely to be unique, but you may well be unusual.
It's a long, long time since the first time I used a Mac II-LE, in a lab at my university, where there was a technician on hand to help us out.
"How do I eject this floppy?" "Just drag it to the wastebasket" "Are you sure? It won't delete everything?" "Of course" "Really?" "Yes, really" "Well, alright then"
There's NO WAY I would have tried that without being told, and repeatedly reassured. At some primal level I was still scared it would delete everything off the disk, right up until Apple changed it so the icon became an eject symbol when you begin dragging a mount icon.
Defending Minidisc vs iTunes, bach37 wrote: If you love DRM, enjoy. Not me.
Actually I've been stung by minidisc DRM. You're basically limited to one generation of digital copying.
I was putting together a music quiz. First pass attempt was to record an "answers" disc, containing complete versions of the songs, then record snippets from that disc onto another disc, to form a "questions" disc.
It couldn't be done. Minidisc DRM wouldn't permit the second copy. I had to work around it.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, how can something be both unintuitive and logical? :)
For the purposes of UIs:
Intuitive means "you can work out how to use it by guessing"
Logical means "it makes sense once you've been told how it works"
I don't think I would ever have guessed that "yy" would yank a line: so it's unintuitive.
But once you grok the rules, they're logical. Look at "y" for yank and "d" for delete.
Hitting the same key twice acts on a line: "dd" or "yy".
Space, w, b, {, } etc. all move the cursor in various ways (one char, one word, back one work, back or forth one paragraph. That's not intuitive.
Prefixing any of these movements with a "d" or a "y" deletes or yanks the characters that the movement command covers. That's not intuitive, but it is perfectly logical. It means you can check the scope with an actionless movement before performing the action.
Prefixing any of that with a number, performs the action that many times. That's not intuitive either, but once you know it, it applies to every command, logically.
I don't think Emacs stinks: on the contrary, the reason I've tried to learn it so many times is that I see all these features it purportedly has, and my mouth waters. People are different though, and it seems clear that Emacs' UI is designed for people different to me.
I'm in exactly the same boat. I don't consider myself to be stupid, but I've made serious efforts to learn Emacs (initially, just as a text editor), using the built in tutorial and previous editions of the O'Reilly book, and none of the keybindings, obscure combinations and long commands stick in my memory.
Vi wasn't easy to learn either -- but while unintuitive, it is all logical and most of the keybindings have obvious mnemonics.
I decided to give up on Emacs, and to be honest I've never been given a reason to regret it.
I've never known a laptop screen that is remotely usable in bright sunlight.
No, Apple is simply walking the fine line between enforcing limitations that consumers will generally accept, and limitations that will kill sales.
Neglect to provide a way to rip CDs, and most consumers will walk away. Neglect to include an FM radio, and you'll lose a few sales, but not many.
If Apple thought they could sell a device that could only be populated from iTMS, do you think for a second they wouldn't do just that?
According to Idiot Toys, 'It now works for 14 "Apple hours" which is about 9 of our standard Earth hours'
As an aside, that's not a coin pocket, Levi Strauss designed it for matches when he created the jean for miners to keep the matches dry.
It's clear to me those pockets are for condoms.
When I was coming to the end of my degree, nearly 10 years ago, I took part in a consultation exercise. Another panel member complained about the lack of vocational aspects to the course, saying "We did a module on networking, yet Novell wasn't mentioned once".
But he was wrong. While Novell still exist, Novell networking as you might have recognised it in 1995 is all but dead, whereas the theories and paradigms I learnt during the degree still serve me well.
And that's just one example.
Do you need between 150 to 300 days worth of music at any given time?
As I replied to someone else, I don't need any music at all at any given time.
The beauty of a large capacity iPod is that I can defer my choice of what to listen to, to the moment. I am freed from having to plan ahead or limit my choices.
Except:
- The iPod UI makes choosing from very long lists inconvenient (Apple expects you to prepare playlists at your computer; more planning ahead)
- My collection now exceeds 20GB in any case; but that's 30 years' worth of music buying. 60GB should last me a lifetime.
Well done on using the word "profligate" though, it made you look terribly clever.
I don't need all my songs with me. I don't need any of them, after all.
But, managing what comes with me on the iPod, and what stays at home, is an administrative overhead I'd prefer not to have.
Mind you, my collection has now outgrown my 20GB player, and there's an argument that says if you'd got to do that management anyway, you may as well go the whole hog and manage it down to 4GB.
Why is he wasting paragraphs on trying things out that are there in black and white in the specs?
... or subjecting it to repeated drops to verify that it wouldn't skip. It's flash memory. Shocks and vibration are not going to be an issue.
"It has two GB of disk space. I tried putting 1.5GB of songs on, and there was room for another 0.5GB of data to spare!"
It does look like quite a nice gadget -- but I wouldn't personally buy anything with less than 20GB for songs.
That said, I'm a little concerned about how many URLs it can handle... 100,000? According to TFA, 40,000 documents overloaded this thing.
My reading of TFA was that the Mini was encumbered with an arbitrary limit of 40,000 documents.
That is, if you want to index >40,000, Google wants more money from you. It's purely to do with software licensing.
I guess if you want RAID, you pay more than $3,000.
What you're really buying here is closed-source software, wrapped in the hardware that turns it into an "appliance". Assume $2,000 of that $3,000 pays for the software.
By specifying the hardware in this way, and by keeping the BIOS and root passwords to themselves, Google greatly simplify their support role.
This is common practice: an IBM HMC (Hardware Management Console) is a 1U PC with a custom Linux distribution and the management software preinstalled. You don't get the root password; you just use the software as delivered.
Yes, but there is musical innovation happening with guitars. People are constantly doing new things with guitars.
Where as the 303 sound has totally stagnated.
The 303 is totally capable of making sounds other than the cliched "303 sound"; indeed I suspect that the 303 designers never expected users to turn the resonance up quite so high, to use the upper pitch range so much, to make those frequency sweeps, etc.
Remember the "TB" stands for "The Bass": they expected it to be used as a stand-in for a bass player. However, it just so happens to turn out that if you don't know what you're doing and you fiddle with a 303, you get stuff that approaches the "303 sound", and if you do know what you're doing you can make it sound very nice indeed (if still cliched) in no time at all.
But that doesn't mean people aren't using it (or its emulators) in innovative ways today. If you use a 303 in an innovative way, it won't have *that* sound, and most of us probably wouldn't recognise it as a 303.
Then again, *that* sound is cropping up in places you wouldn't expect it, which is in itself innovation.
"I Like You" from Morrissey's "You Are the Quarry" is an uptempo Smiths-y guitar driven song with a 303 twittering away halfway up the mix to fill up the sound and make it a bit more modern.
Super Furry Animals never cease to innovate, but they make frequent use off 303 (or similar noises). Try the current single "Lazer Beam" (from "Love Kraft").
I'm in the slightly embarassing position of having been moderated up a number of times for what turns out to be misinformation.
See here for my correction
When I was over in the States recently, quite a few cashiers would notice my chip'n'pin card, mention that the US would be moving over to them soon, and saying how nice it will be to have that extra security.
Sometimes I would try and explain the catch.
Since chip & pin supposedly makes fraud impossible, banks have shifted the liability for chip & pin fraud away from themselves and onto the consumer.
That is -- is someone clones your card and forges your signature with a traditional credit card, you can call the credit card company, tell them you didn't make that purchase, and (unless they can prove you were lying) they will refund you the money. They might write the money off, or they might pursue the criminals responsible; it's not your worry. Accepting this risk is all part of their business model. That's what banks are all about.
However, in the UK at least, this changes with chip & pin. If someone shoulder-surfs your PIN, pickpockets your card, and spends money on your card, the bank now says it's YOUR responsibility.
In one way: fair enough, there are precautions you can take to safeguard your PIN, but on the other hand, isn't taking on that liability one of the things we're (directly or indirectly) paying our card providers for?
I want to remind you (because people in general seem to overlook this) that you have some amount of control over both where you live and where you work.
/too/ smug, my office and my home are on the same bus route, so the half-hour bus journey takes me practically door to door. The bus comes every ten minutes, so I don't have to pay much attention to when I leave the house. I pay around £85 for a three month bus pass. That's £2,660 a year less than your £250/mo drive, and I wonder whether you've taken into account the mileage depreciation on your car, servicing costs, etc.
Not wanting to sound
My point is that this is no accident. Public transport links to my workplace (not just "are there lots of buses", but "where do those buses go") were a major factor in my choice of home. Of course I don't know your personal circumstances, and you may have all kinds of reasons why you choose not to live somewhere that's more convenient for your work (or work somewhere more convenient for your home) -- but nonetheless it is a choice.
When we sold our last home, I always made a point of telling viewers about the buses that passed nearby. I was surprised at the blank looks I received. Few of them considered this a criterion for choosing a home, and IMHO more people should.
In many parts of the US, I'm given to understand, it would be much more difficult to find a nice home with good public transport than it is in the UK.
Note: I own a car; I'm not some hippy stoically tolerating bus journeys for the sake of the planet. This is about convenience and money.
I spent a couple of years not owning a car. We lived in a reasonably central part of town, which helped, with the "last mile" aspect, but here are a couple of adjustments we had to make:
- With the money we saved on owning a car, we took the angle that taking a taxi was never an extravagance. This is great if you like a drink! It's no help at peak hours when taxi demand exceeds supply.
- Again, with the money saved, we were able to hire a car for occasions when we needed one: a weekend away, a trip to Ikea, etc. The local car hire place came to know us, so we'd get preferential treatment and upgrades, we got to try out a number of different cars, etc. We'd also get a car to suit the journey each time.
- We took full advantage of online grocery shopping and home delivery, using local shops for low-volume last minute needs.
The real downside for me was the inability to go on weekend trips on a whim: to hire a car for the weekend you needed to have planned ahead.
Although I now own a car, I take the bus to work every day. I see plenty of people with babies, shopping or both using the bus...
What I can say is: Apple is a media-wow company. If Keynote is not the best by now, it will be exhaustively rewritten up to the point when people say "Wow" -- because this is what Apple does and what Apple's customers want/expect. Nothing less.
While there are some discriminating Mac users out there (hanging out on the Ars Technica forums, among other places), a lot of the more vocal Apple cheerleaders seem to assume Apple software is wonderful just because Apple has told them its.
Seriously, these people think iTunes, or even the very ordinary iPhoto, are revolutionary.
I agree with almost all of this. I've driven across the USA three times, so I'm more than aware of its size -- and indeed there are plenty of places you just couldn't get to without a car.
... and how very American of you to equate "Success" exclusively with GDP ;)
My only major obejection is that a lot of rural Americans making those routine 30 mile drives you refer to, choose to do them in absolutely enormous pickups, or other massively overpowered cars.
My own car, perfectly capable of carrying two people and their luggage in comfort for all-day drives, has a 1.2 litre engine. Yes, it strains a little with passengers in the rear, but the 1.4 model would not.
Whereas, our standard midsize rental in the US was a 3 litre V6, and nobody considers this to be a powerful car. Perhaps the answer to rising fuel prices is to start driving more economical cars.
(Other minor points: Amercicans can underestimate the size of Europe too, imagining the whole continent to be crammed full of dense cities. Although we don't have anything quite like Iowa or Nebraska, we do have some areas of emptiness.
)
We drive about 10x more than you guys. It's not uncommon to work in a completely different city than where you live, driving for an hour on a highway to get to work. I know a guy who commutes every day from another state, at least two hours away. In Europe, that'd be like commuting from another country.
/. sig) "anything you can do with hydrocarbons can be done with carbohydrates". Already pumps in Iowa deliver fuel which is 10% ethanol from corn.
Well, yes, and high fuel tax is partly intended to dissuade you from doing that. In "old" Europe, the roads wouldn't be able to take many more commuters, and we don't have the space to just build more roads. For the record, it's not uncommon to drive over an hour to work in the UK -- it's just that it'll take you an hour to drive 30 miles, much of that sitting in traffic.
(I laughed heartily when Slashdot reported the London congestion charge, and some American suggested "just make the roads wider")
Much of the USA is built around the car -- to the extent where it's often easier to walk from one strip mall car park to another rather than walk to the next shop. When you buy a house, you count the garages rather than think about how close the train station or bus stop is. Local shops are rare, Walmarts are common.
In rural parts of the States, it's not uncommon to live in a town of a few hundred residents, over 50 miles from the next one.
It's no wonder in the USA fuel is taxed as if it were a necessity, rather than a luxury.
Nonetheless, I've driven over 12,000 holiday miles in the USA, and even this year, with the papers full of outrage at rising oil prices, we would cackle with laughter every time we filled a tank for under $20.
Oil's going to keep getting more expensive. I hope to see a free market drive to alternative fuels. If CO2 emissions won't change people's buying habits, maybe the mighty dollar will.
The USA is capable of growing an awful lot of carbohydrates, and (as I read in a
How is "whingeing" actually pronounced? Is it like "winging" but sounds like wine-ging? "Whining" is what I always see this as.
But, tut-tut, mate, no need to make up pet words. It tends to isolate you as being insecure with your language. Yo.
Dictionary entry for "whinge", including a pronunciation guide.
To convert "whinge" to "whinging", simply say "whinge" then "ing". It's a perfectly cromulent word. Admittedly the OP kept in an extraneous "e".
The first time I sat down in front of a Mac, really way back, probably System 1 or something, I wanted to eject a floppy. The very first thing I tried was dragging the floppy to the trash and lo and behold! The floppy ejected.
I don't know if I'm unique, but that was the very first time I ever used a graphical desktop, and I got it right the first time.
You're unlikely to be unique, but you may well be unusual.
It's a long, long time since the first time I used a Mac II-LE, in a lab at my university, where there was a technician on hand to help us out.
"How do I eject this floppy?"
"Just drag it to the wastebasket"
"Are you sure? It won't delete everything?"
"Of course"
"Really?"
"Yes, really"
"Well, alright then"
There's NO WAY I would have tried that without being told, and repeatedly reassured. At some primal level I was still scared it would delete everything off the disk, right up until Apple changed it so the icon became an eject symbol when you begin dragging a mount icon.
Instead, there's an eject button in the more logical place for it--the keyboard.
I realise I'm late to the party, but:
If you have more than one removable device, how does a Mac know which one you want to eject when you hit the keyboard eject button?
I have a Mac, but it only has one drive, and my keyboard is not an Apple keyboard, so I can't try this out...
Defending Minidisc vs iTunes, bach37 wrote:
If you love DRM, enjoy. Not me.
Actually I've been stung by minidisc DRM. You're basically limited to one generation of digital copying.
I was putting together a music quiz. First pass attempt was to record an "answers" disc, containing complete versions of the songs, then record snippets from that disc onto another disc, to form a "questions" disc.
It couldn't be done. Minidisc DRM wouldn't permit the second copy. I had to work around it.