IIRC, MP3's compression is about 10:1. Does this mean that if someone put 10 albums on a CD and sold it for the same price-per-song as a standard album----$150----you would buy it? I can't see it happening for me. <interrupt>
Perhaps MP3 album could be sold on multisession CD-Rs instead. You buy an album, the store burns it, and you walk away with, say, $5 + (num_albums * $15) out of your pocket. (Gotta allow for materials expenses.) Then, instead of buying lawyers, the RIAA could lay down some R&D money for faster CD-Rs so they could make money faster.
</interrupt> I can't/won't pay the $45 for Chronicles... and Rush is my favorite band.
Online distribution of their music is making consumers buy their CDs!
Somebody should do a study on online music exchange and the amount of piracy, then study offline music exchange and the amount of piracy. Then somebody could bring real proof to the battle. As it stands, both sides have only speculation.
"It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." ----Albus Dumbledore, speaking about truth in _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_
I am no lawyer, either by profession or by hobby. My understanding of COPPA is far from good, as I have only a few second-hand descriptions of it to work from, so correct me if I'm wrong.
By bringing COPPA to bear on Metallica, they would be forced to slog through those 300K+ names and remove all the ones of people under 13. There may not be many, but the simple act of doing it would be very expensive. Add to that any laws we can find that apply to minors. When all is said and done, it might be funny to see whether they "lost" more from Napster or the Black Attack.
Ahh, to savor the thought... this revenge would be deliriously sweet. I never thought about thanking the legal system for being a double-edged sword.
I've read some of them. 3 times is what it usually takes to get a good idea of what's happening. eGroups, for instance, nearly tricked me into thinking they would give out my info to advertisers that wanted to target me. What really goes on though (according to policy) is that advertisers say they want to target a specific group; the targeting is done on eGroup's server as it writes the HTML. This leaves a gaping hole for the advertisers to match their target group to my IP when my browser requests the GIF (if I had images on). However, they don't exercise that hole right now... the ads come off an eGroups server as well.
So of course privacy policies need improved. But is there a way to do it in English that will hold up in court?
With the way the open-source community disregards copyright, patents, etc. (see my.sig), who gets to be first to mirror? I defer the honor to the more courageous... after all, MS does hold many of my friends in its claws, unlike the MPAA.
Size, although that was a problem anyway. I hate how Word files have many lines of garbage across the top. A blank (!) Word 95 file is 4.5 KB (saved by WordPad). But if you use XML, instead of saving the information in a proprietary bytecode (0x0C for bold+italic?), it must be saved in a human-readable tag, which would be 6 bytes in HTML, and probably longer in XML (not abbreviated B and I.) In a huge document, that would mean a huge overhead.
And m68k assembler just kicks the crud out of x86... have you ever looked at that stuff?
Having had the opportunity to program both x86's (NASM) and an Amiga 500 (Assempro) in assembly, I can say that 680x0 assembly rocks. I mean, you put in MULU d7,d3 and it multiplies the LSW of d3 and d7 and puts the result in d7! None of this EDX:EAX crud. (No memory seg:ofs either, and all the fun that causes with DMA, DOS, and real vs. protected mode.) Also, note the comments in the dnet source about the x86's lack of registers. Amiga calls were a bit more involved than DOS's, but there were a lot more of them, too. It would probably be fairer to compare the Amiga (Workbench 1.3, 1989-ish) to Windows 95 in terms of complexity.
I foresee a future where x86 programming just becomes impossible because of all the layers... real, protected, virtual real, mode64, virtual protected... MMX, SSE, 64BE. Some of those were made up as a possibility of what could happen if (hypothetical) 64Bit Extensions were added to the 32bit Intel Architecture. When this future arrives, before Microsoft gets Windows onto it, a new window of entry will open... for a computer to open the gates to 64-bit computing with sensible instructions. Port Linux... add user-friendliness (hey, with a new bus arch. we could define a new protocol for graphics cards, so any X64 card would work!)... and grin. And begin development for 128-bit platforms.
I've been through two bad computer scenes--the Amiga and the Mac--
I feel obligated to ask when you were through the Amiga scene. A lot of Amiga decay and PC improvement went on between 1987 and 1994. Put an Amiga 2000 head-to-head with a 386, and guess who'll win?
Macs, OTOH, I can somewhat agree with. I nearly "destroyed" one once because I didn't understand that clicking the Close button did not Quit the program (and neither did the teacher), and it ran out of memory. Also, whenever I drag a disk to the Trash, I think I'm about to reformat it (Amiga-style) rather than Eject it. Give me hardware-based ejection controls any day! But that's not exactly "bad"----its just the quirks of the OS.
-- LoonXTall
Re:Privacy is dead: enter the Phoenix
on
The Eroded Self
·
· Score: 1
Freedom of the information could possibly lead to someone building a better bulletproof vest or maybe a nukediffuser[TM].
That takes time... time which The Enemy can deploy the destructive system. If you create a Counterdevice, can you implement it before your Enemy can blow up the world?
I guess that means information must be released to the forces of Good (TM), and released publicly only when a defense is discovered. Perhaps rolling out the defense and having it well in place before revealing the details of the attack would be an even better idea.
-- LoonXTall
Re:Privacy is dead: enter the Phoenix
on
The Eroded Self
·
· Score: 1
The MPAA believes that the DeCSS source is dangerous and should be banned. What makes you more qualified than them to determine what should be legal?
DeCSS does not have the "clear and present danger" capacity of an Explosives HOWTO. (The danger is to a pocketbook rather than a human life, which makes it a less "natural" target.) Chemistry textbook information on explosives is very different than the information in the (hypothetical, I hope) Explosives howto. So chemistry tells you TNT is explosive. Where do you get the toluene? How are you going to connect the three nitrogen atoms to it? The howto, OTOH, would solve these questions with a simple step-by-step process. No library required.
Once you open the door to censorship of information it is very difficult to close.
True. But if you open the door to free information, that is also rather difficult to close. Although I have no system to propose to enforce my ideal, there must be a middle ground----between the free flow of all information (that which privacy policies theoretically prevent) and utter control of all information.
I think no such system will ever be implemented, as nobody is perfect. At the beginning of World War I, Russia's censors were trying to keep "revolutionary" material out of the country, but they let Marx's works through: they thought it was too boring to start anything. Lenin proved them wrong, but by then it was too late.
-- LoonXTall
Privacy is dead: enter the Phoenix
on
The Eroded Self
·
· Score: 3
So you have a choice: you can either accept your loss of privacy and get the great economic and technological benefits that it brings, or attempt to cripple the system with laws, which won't bring back your lost privacy anyway.
I. What are the great economic benefits of losing my privacy? The granting of the ability to someone I got in a flame war with to open a fraudulent credit card account with my name and address? Or is it granting the right to advertising companies to follow me like a hound? Offhand, I can't remember the title, but I read a story once where a guy's supermarket sent him tons of e-mail, reminding him to restock certain goods, advising him to stop buying so much aspirin and go see a doctor, etc. Is that what you want your Inbox to look like? More spam? So much for the economic benefits... what about the technological ones? I'm not about to trade privacy for goods and services. As I mentioned above, the less traceable I am to megacorporations, the less traceable I am to my enemies. I suspect they may even be the same party....
II. Laws don't cripple the system. The lawyers that try to twist their meaning for their clients' ends do. The system tried to retain its integrity by getting wordy and specific, which left gaping loopholes and strange logic as goofy and error-prone as indirectly recursive functions.
III. Laws may not be able to bring back lost privacy, but they can make it illegal to further erode that privacy. And they give an avenue of attack if an artificial person sells you. Provided they don't become prey to what I mentioned in part II. If you want to see a broken/stupid law, go read COPPA.
If information wants to be free, then we must actively combat letting harmful information out of the cage. Indeed, censor it. Or do we wish to let the darkness freely roam the land? The ability to make bombs confers power... power that is as blind to its consequences as greed is to those it treads on. "Human resources" takes on a sinister new meaning.
Disclaimer: I am not anti-capitalist, anti-US, or pro-political correctness. I choose to exercise thought in determining policy on a particular situation. Saying how to make bombs and saying "Personnel" are quite different, and should be given different rules of censorship.
Client-side, if the user-agent claims to support it. It requires 3000 computer-pages to translate one page 3000 times. If 2000 of those computers are not the server, the server can pretend to translate 3 times as fast, because it's only doing 1000 computer-pages.
OTOH, the translations could be cached on the server (/cache/index.html.*) so that the most frequently requested pages wouldn't have to be translated each time.
But I still think it should be client-side if possible, as it is then cheaper for the server to not-upgrade as swiftly.
I mene, it can't be THAT tuf tu figure out sum rules for reforming that monster knone as inglish spelling....
I thought about that once. 'C' sounds like 'S' or 'K', so why do we need it? To sound like 'CH', of course. 'X' can sound like 'KS' or 'Z', so we can change that to 'SH' (like one of the Chinese to English naming standards we learned about in high school.) "I before E, except after C, or when sounding like A, as in neighbor and weigh." Duh... if it sounds like 'A', spell it with an 'A'! And if it sounds like a long 'E', spell it 'EE'. And so on.
All I did was create a spectacularly unreadable mess ("physics"=="fiziks")... probably because I didn't have any practice. Speech is largely natural; reading is entirely learned.
No, the problem with losing information when you compress things is that it's sometimes hard to get it back when you uncompress it. I still haven't figured out "FWIW", for example. I just hear it in my mind as "Effweeou."
For this reason, the language can never be "entirely converted into Acronyms." A side note: if it did, it would still be English, just acronymized and unreadable.
Edit your keyboard layout. With statistics and the right sample population, you can prove that a Dvorak layout is 600% faster than Qwerty. Unfortunately, those rigged numbers will break in the real world, because out there, it's only a little faster, because (in English) twice as many keystrokes are in the home row.
Or you could redesign the keyboard entirely. With two 5-button mouse-like things that you hold in your hand, you wouldn't have to move your fingers at all. IIRC, someone actually did this, and it was faster, but the learning curve was insane.
Or to hell with typing! Get voice-recognition, and speak at your computer. English's slow speaking rate (relative to the Spanish I've heard) means that it will (did?) become practical on processors sooner. Throw a 2 GHz CPU under the hood, and you've got 100,000 clock cycles per voice cycle to analyze the waveform and translate it into phonetics (assuming the wave is nearly at the highest audible frequency), which can be looked up in the dictionary. You'll actually get less cycles than that due to multitasking, but it sounds impressive. With SMP, though...
I am confident that jurors will understand that this basic right cannot be abridged.
I am not confident of anything. Jurors are human, and therefore subject to stupidity. Add on to that the American legal system, and you get a real-world version of quantum uncertainty.
And what about applications that pull themselves into the foreground when THEY want attention.
Focus should ideally follow my stream of consciousness. Failing that, it should stay where I put it. I am not a touch typist: I look at my keyboard. When an AOL IM window comes up and steals the last half of my sentence, it is most annoying. That's why I don't use it much anymore. As I told Google (but they didn't listen)... "Multitasking is worthless when the last half of my ICQ password ends up in the search box."
Hmmm, I think I've found a solution. The OS should learn the typing rate of the current user, and avoid allowing the focus to move until a break in the typing. Then it can make a "focus moved" sound to inform the user (that's me) about what's up.
Have you ever seen people clicking on a window background, getting beeps back, just because there's a modal dialog open and they don't really realize it?
Under MacOS, the titlebar likes to flash when you do that. This inevitably drags my mental focus up there, where nothing is happening. What needs to be done is for the dialog to move to where you just clicked (centered under it?) and/or get a nice big (8px?) border around it in some contrasting color. Just don't let it blink.
But GUIs, they move things around a lot from one to another. They change the appearance of things, and generally make it confusing to learn a new GUI. Thus, the lack of conformaty in UIs makes it so you have to re-learn each UI instead of being able to apply previous knowledge and pick it up quickly.
I disagree. In transmuting from Amiga to Windows, I put all the Windows gadgets in terms of Amiga ones. "Minimize" is roughly equivalent to "move to back", and "Maximize" is "drag this thing up to the corner and resize it". I would like to shoot the scrollbars, though, for not being active when the mouse strays too far from them (during a drag).
So all one really has to do is learn where they put a particular action. For instance, instead of a size gadget, Windows has an incredibly narrow strip around the entire window which you can grab to resize. And there are no front/back gadgets. You're just stuck with having the window with focus in the front.
I've always wished the mouse cursor could be controlled by arrow keys
The Amiga can do that. You hold either the right or left Amiga key and an arrow, and your mouse goes that direction. You hit the left Amiga and Alt, you get a left click. Right Amiga + Alt = right click.
You can also do it in Windows, just not very well. Activate MouseKeys in your Accessiblity Options. You can then use the numpad to drive the mouse, single- or double-click, and click-and-hold. Unfortunately, you have to remember to hit / (left), * (both), or - (right) if you want to change the mouse button.
This looks like a good spot to mention IBM's thingamajig on their laptops. A little post sits kind of between the F, G, and V keys (I think). It's pressure-sensitive, very intuitive, small enough not to get in the way of typing, and you never have to leave the home row to use it. IIRC, buttons are right in thumb-range below the spacebar.
it's the difference between using a box wrench to turn a nut, and a ratchet wrench with extension levers and flexible shafts or other goodies.
There needs to be a third level to that analogy. Most of the scripts in my \bat directory are named for what I happen to like from various other UI's (cdup, mkd, list) or something that I do a lot (z <command> = pipe <command>'s output through More), not necessarily stuff that takes many steps. (And a couple of jokes... you must type "lose" to start Windows instead of "win".) I see myself in this analogy as using a crescent wrench over a normal wrench: I take something and stretch it to fit, but it's not like writing configurable setup batches that use choice, errorlevel, Norton BE commands, etc..... that's where the ratchet wrench comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
Give me quality mp3s to buy, and I will buy mp3s.
IIRC, MP3's compression is about 10:1. Does this mean that if someone put 10 albums on a CD and sold it for the same price-per-song as a standard album----$150----you would buy it? I can't see it happening for me. <interrupt>
Perhaps MP3 album could be sold on multisession CD-Rs instead. You buy an album, the store burns it, and you walk away with, say, $5 + (num_albums * $15) out of your pocket. (Gotta allow for materials expenses.) Then, instead of buying lawyers, the RIAA could lay down some R&D money for faster CD-Rs so they could make money faster.
</interrupt> I can't/won't pay the $45 for Chronicles... and Rush is my favorite band.
-- LoonXTall
Online distribution of their music is making consumers buy their CDs!
Somebody should do a study on online music exchange and the amount of piracy, then study offline music exchange and the amount of piracy. Then somebody could bring real proof to the battle. As it stands, both sides have only speculation.
"It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." ----Albus Dumbledore, speaking about truth in _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_
-- LoonXTall
I am no lawyer, either by profession or by hobby. My understanding of COPPA is far from good, as I have only a few second-hand descriptions of it to work from, so correct me if I'm wrong.
By bringing COPPA to bear on Metallica, they would be forced to slog through those 300K+ names and remove all the ones of people under 13. There may not be many, but the simple act of doing it would be very expensive. Add to that any laws we can find that apply to minors. When all is said and done, it might be funny to see whether they "lost" more from Napster or the Black Attack.
Ahh, to savor the thought... this revenge would be deliriously sweet. I never thought about thanking the legal system for being a double-edged sword.
-- LoonXTall
I've read some of them. 3 times is what it usually takes to get a good idea of what's happening. eGroups, for instance, nearly tricked me into thinking they would give out my info to advertisers that wanted to target me. What really goes on though (according to policy) is that advertisers say they want to target a specific group; the targeting is done on eGroup's server as it writes the HTML. This leaves a gaping hole for the advertisers to match their target group to my IP when my browser requests the GIF (if I had images on). However, they don't exercise that hole right now... the ads come off an eGroups server as well.
So of course privacy policies need improved. But is there a way to do it in English that will hold up in court?
-- LoonXTall
In the PDF, it says that viewing it means you agreed to the license... reproduced at the end.
-- LoonXTall
With the way the open-source community disregards copyright, patents, etc. (see my .sig), who gets to be first to mirror? I defer the honor to the more courageous... after all, MS does hold many of my friends in its claws, unlike the MPAA.
-- LoonXTall
". . . what are the drawbacks?"
Size, although that was a problem anyway. I hate how Word files have many lines of garbage across the top. A blank (!) Word 95 file is 4.5 KB (saved by WordPad). But if you use XML, instead of saving the information in a proprietary bytecode (0x0C for bold+italic?), it must be saved in a human-readable tag, which would be 6 bytes in HTML, and probably longer in XML (not abbreviated B and I.) In a huge document, that would mean a huge overhead.
-- LoonXTall
And m68k assembler just kicks the crud out of x86... have you ever looked at that stuff?
Having had the opportunity to program both x86's (NASM) and an Amiga 500 (Assempro) in assembly, I can say that 680x0 assembly rocks. I mean, you put in MULU d7,d3 and it multiplies the LSW of d3 and d7 and puts the result in d7! None of this EDX:EAX crud. (No memory seg:ofs either, and all the fun that causes with DMA, DOS, and real vs. protected mode.) Also, note the comments in the dnet source about the x86's lack of registers. Amiga calls were a bit more involved than DOS's, but there were a lot more of them, too. It would probably be fairer to compare the Amiga (Workbench 1.3, 1989-ish) to Windows 95 in terms of complexity.
I foresee a future where x86 programming just becomes impossible because of all the layers... real, protected, virtual real, mode64, virtual protected... MMX, SSE, 64BE. Some of those were made up as a possibility of what could happen if (hypothetical) 64Bit Extensions were added to the 32bit Intel Architecture. When this future arrives, before Microsoft gets Windows onto it, a new window of entry will open... for a computer to open the gates to 64-bit computing with sensible instructions. Port Linux... add user-friendliness (hey, with a new bus arch. we could define a new protocol for graphics cards, so any X64 card would work!)... and grin. And begin development for 128-bit platforms.
-- LoonXTall
I've been through two bad computer scenes--the Amiga and the Mac--
I feel obligated to ask when you were through the Amiga scene. A lot of Amiga decay and PC improvement went on between 1987 and 1994. Put an Amiga 2000 head-to-head with a 386, and guess who'll win?
Macs, OTOH, I can somewhat agree with. I nearly "destroyed" one once because I didn't understand that clicking the Close button did not Quit the program (and neither did the teacher), and it ran out of memory. Also, whenever I drag a disk to the Trash, I think I'm about to reformat it (Amiga-style) rather than Eject it. Give me hardware-based ejection controls any day! But that's not exactly "bad"----its just the quirks of the OS.
-- LoonXTall
Freedom of the information could possibly lead to someone building a better bulletproof vest or maybe a nukediffuser[TM].
That takes time... time which The Enemy can deploy the destructive system. If you create a Counterdevice, can you implement it before your Enemy can blow up the world?
I guess that means information must be released to the forces of Good (TM), and released publicly only when a defense is discovered. Perhaps rolling out the defense and having it well in place before revealing the details of the attack would be an even better idea.
-- LoonXTall
The MPAA believes that the DeCSS source is dangerous and should be banned. What makes you more qualified than them to determine what should be legal?
DeCSS does not have the "clear and present danger" capacity of an Explosives HOWTO. (The danger is to a pocketbook rather than a human life, which makes it a less "natural" target.) Chemistry textbook information on explosives is very different than the information in the (hypothetical, I hope) Explosives howto. So chemistry tells you TNT is explosive. Where do you get the toluene? How are you going to connect the three nitrogen atoms to it? The howto, OTOH, would solve these questions with a simple step-by-step process. No library required.
Once you open the door to censorship of information it is very difficult to close.
True. But if you open the door to free information, that is also rather difficult to close. Although I have no system to propose to enforce my ideal, there must be a middle ground----between the free flow of all information (that which privacy policies theoretically prevent) and utter control of all information.
I think no such system will ever be implemented, as nobody is perfect. At the beginning of World War I, Russia's censors were trying to keep "revolutionary" material out of the country, but they let Marx's works through: they thought it was too boring to start anything. Lenin proved them wrong, but by then it was too late.
-- LoonXTall
So you have a choice: you can either accept your loss of privacy and get the great economic and technological benefits that it brings, or attempt to cripple the system with laws, which won't bring back your lost privacy anyway.
I. What are the great economic benefits of losing my privacy? The granting of the ability to someone I got in a flame war with to open a fraudulent credit card account with my name and address? Or is it granting the right to advertising companies to follow me like a hound? Offhand, I can't remember the title, but I read a story once where a guy's supermarket sent him tons of e-mail, reminding him to restock certain goods, advising him to stop buying so much aspirin and go see a doctor, etc. Is that what you want your Inbox to look like? More spam? So much for the economic benefits... what about the technological ones? I'm not about to trade privacy for goods and services. As I mentioned above, the less traceable I am to megacorporations, the less traceable I am to my enemies. I suspect they may even be the same party....
II. Laws don't cripple the system. The lawyers that try to twist their meaning for their clients' ends do. The system tried to retain its integrity by getting wordy and specific, which left gaping loopholes and strange logic as goofy and error-prone as indirectly recursive functions.
III. Laws may not be able to bring back lost privacy, but they can make it illegal to further erode that privacy. And they give an avenue of attack if an artificial person sells you. Provided they don't become prey to what I mentioned in part II. If you want to see a broken/stupid law, go read COPPA.
If information wants to be free, then we must actively combat letting harmful information out of the cage. Indeed, censor it. Or do we wish to let the darkness freely roam the land? The ability to make bombs confers power... power that is as blind to its consequences as greed is to those it treads on. "Human resources" takes on a sinister new meaning.
Disclaimer: I am not anti-capitalist, anti-US, or pro-political correctness. I choose to exercise thought in determining policy on a particular situation. Saying how to make bombs and saying "Personnel" are quite different, and should be given different rules of censorship.
-- LoonXTall
(server side perhaps)
Client-side, if the user-agent claims to support it. It requires 3000 computer-pages to translate one page 3000 times. If 2000 of those computers are not the server, the server can pretend to translate 3 times as fast, because it's only doing 1000 computer-pages.
OTOH, the translations could be cached on the server (/cache/index.html.*) so that the most frequently requested pages wouldn't have to be translated each time.
But I still think it should be client-side if possible, as it is then cheaper for the server to not-upgrade as swiftly.
-- LoonXTall
I mene, it can't be THAT tuf tu figure out sum rules for reforming that monster knone as inglish spelling....
I thought about that once. 'C' sounds like 'S' or 'K', so why do we need it? To sound like 'CH', of course. 'X' can sound like 'KS' or 'Z', so we can change that to 'SH' (like one of the Chinese to English naming standards we learned about in high school.) "I before E, except after C, or when sounding like A, as in neighbor and weigh." Duh... if it sounds like 'A', spell it with an 'A'! And if it sounds like a long 'E', spell it 'EE'. And so on.
All I did was create a spectacularly unreadable mess ("physics"=="fiziks")... probably because I didn't have any practice. Speech is largely natural; reading is entirely learned.
-- LoonXTall
y,IafcolwebeciA.
IANAL
IIRC
JlatetoM.c
h://s.o/c.p?s=00/04/28/1411231&c=134
Ihsa, awaatb.
No, the problem with losing information when you compress things is that it's sometimes hard to get it back when you uncompress it. I still haven't figured out "FWIW", for example. I just hear it in my mind as "Effweeou."
For this reason, the language can never be "entirely converted into Acronyms." A side note: if it did, it would still be English, just acronymized and unreadable.
-- LoonXTall
Edit your keyboard layout. With statistics and the right sample population, you can prove that a Dvorak layout is 600% faster than Qwerty. Unfortunately, those rigged numbers will break in the real world, because out there, it's only a little faster, because (in English) twice as many keystrokes are in the home row.
Or you could redesign the keyboard entirely. With two 5-button mouse-like things that you hold in your hand, you wouldn't have to move your fingers at all. IIRC, someone actually did this, and it was faster, but the learning curve was insane.
Or to hell with typing! Get voice-recognition, and speak at your computer. English's slow speaking rate (relative to the Spanish I've heard) means that it will (did?) become practical on processors sooner. Throw a 2 GHz CPU under the hood, and you've got 100,000 clock cycles per voice cycle to analyze the waveform and translate it into phonetics (assuming the wave is nearly at the highest audible frequency), which can be looked up in the dictionary. You'll actually get less cycles than that due to multitasking, but it sounds impressive. With SMP, though...
-- LoonXTall
What is the difference between English, Chineese, Russian, Esperanto, Assembly, Prolog, C, C++, Java, Perl, VB, Pascal, Fortran, PL1, Cobol, Ada, Lisp, Scheme, ML etc etc etc etc Greek?
C uses more {}'s than English and fewer ©'s than Lawyerian.
-- LoonXTall
I am confident that jurors will understand that this basic right cannot be abridged.
I am not confident of anything. Jurors are human, and therefore subject to stupidity. Add on to that the American legal system, and you get a real-world version of quantum uncertainty.
-- LoonXTall
And what about applications that pull themselves into the foreground when THEY want attention.
Focus should ideally follow my stream of consciousness. Failing that, it should stay where I put it. I am not a touch typist: I look at my keyboard. When an AOL IM window comes up and steals the last half of my sentence, it is most annoying. That's why I don't use it much anymore. As I told Google (but they didn't listen)... "Multitasking is worthless when the last half of my ICQ password ends up in the search box."
Hmmm, I think I've found a solution. The OS should learn the typing rate of the current user, and avoid allowing the focus to move until a break in the typing. Then it can make a "focus moved" sound to inform the user (that's me) about what's up.
-- LoonXTall
The buttons in the Win95 taskbar don't go all the way to the edge of the screen.
True. But I've gotten so used to trying to hit the resize-line on my way through that the taskbutts are huge targets.
-- LoonXTall
Have you ever seen people clicking on a window background, getting beeps back, just because there's a modal dialog open and they don't really realize it?
Under MacOS, the titlebar likes to flash when you do that. This inevitably drags my mental focus up there, where nothing is happening. What needs to be done is for the dialog to move to where you just clicked (centered under it?) and/or get a nice big (8px?) border around it in some contrasting color. Just don't let it blink.
-- LoonXTall
(5) Allow the sysadmin to lock keyboard mappings, or allow an un-remappable combination to reset it to default.
The open computer labs at my college would become a disaster without this.
-- LoonXTall
But GUIs, they move things around a lot from one to another. They change the appearance of things, and generally make it confusing to learn a new GUI. Thus, the lack of conformaty in UIs makes it so you have to re-learn each UI instead of being able to apply previous knowledge and pick it up quickly.
I disagree. In transmuting from Amiga to Windows, I put all the Windows gadgets in terms of Amiga ones. "Minimize" is roughly equivalent to "move to back", and "Maximize" is "drag this thing up to the corner and resize it". I would like to shoot the scrollbars, though, for not being active when the mouse strays too far from them (during a drag).
So all one really has to do is learn where they put a particular action. For instance, instead of a size gadget, Windows has an incredibly narrow strip around the entire window which you can grab to resize. And there are no front/back gadgets. You're just stuck with having the window with focus in the front.
-- LoonXTall
I've always wished the mouse cursor could be controlled by arrow keys
The Amiga can do that. You hold either the right or left Amiga key and an arrow, and your mouse goes that direction. You hit the left Amiga and Alt, you get a left click. Right Amiga + Alt = right click.
You can also do it in Windows, just not very well. Activate MouseKeys in your Accessiblity Options. You can then use the numpad to drive the mouse, single- or double-click, and click-and-hold. Unfortunately, you have to remember to hit / (left), * (both), or - (right) if you want to change the mouse button.
This looks like a good spot to mention IBM's thingamajig on their laptops. A little post sits kind of between the F, G, and V keys (I think). It's pressure-sensitive, very intuitive, small enough not to get in the way of typing, and you never have to leave the home row to use it. IIRC, buttons are right in thumb-range below the spacebar.
-- LoonXTall
it's the difference between using a box wrench to turn a nut, and a ratchet wrench with extension levers and flexible shafts or other goodies.
There needs to be a third level to that analogy. Most of the scripts in my \bat directory are named for what I happen to like from various other UI's (cdup, mkd, list) or something that I do a lot (z <command> = pipe <command>'s output through More), not necessarily stuff that takes many steps. (And a couple of jokes... you must type "lose" to start Windows instead of "win".) I see myself in this analogy as using a crescent wrench over a normal wrench: I take something and stretch it to fit, but it's not like writing configurable setup batches that use choice, errorlevel, Norton BE commands, etc..... that's where the ratchet wrench comes in.
-- LoonXTall