If you're not angry with me you're not expressing yourself very well, or you have really odd obsessions.
Right, so you can bitch about the trackpad, which sucks on all laptops
It didn't suck on my T23, because it had two buttons.
Right click is not necessary to use Mac OS X.
It's not about what's "necessary". If you want to go by what's "necessary" I suppose I can always log in as ">console" and use my Macbook as a command line UNIX laptop like my old Toshiba Satellite.
I recommend a BT mouse.
I use a very small USB mouse so I don't have to worry about batteries. It works the same way. But it means I can't just flip my laptop open and go to work, so I still have to use the trackpad on occasion, and I look forward to those occasions like a trip to the dentist.
It doesn't have to be that way.
But only Apple can change that. And they won't, because they've got this really weird obsession about mouse buttons.
Oh, one more thing... I've found that OS X is in general a lot better about doing things the way I want to than Windows. There's a lot of glue available, at all levels:
UNIX - the shell and everything that implies, including all the open source programs and scripting languages. OSX comes with Perl, Tcl, SQLite (Apple uses SQLite internally... you can make SQL queries on your Apple mail database!), PHP, Apache,...
Mac OS - Applescript gives you amazing GUI glue to everything. For example, iTunes normally doesn't include podcasts in party shuffle, because they're usually not music. But I subscribe to some Jazz feeds, so I go in and select them and then run this script from the iTunes scripts menu:
tell application "iTunes"
if selection is not {} then
set sel to selection
repeat with this_track in sel
try
set shufflable of this_track to 1
end try
end repeat
display dialog "Done!" buttons {"Thanks"} default button 1 with icon 1 giving up after 15
else
display dialog "Select some tracks first..." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 with icon 2 giving up after 15
end if end tell
Mac OS + UNIX: You can call Applescripts from the shell with the "osascript" command, and vice versa. So to put he computer to sleep right now I can do this:
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to sleep'
NeXTstep: The Cocoa libraries are amazingly discoverable and reflective, and OS X ships with all the debuggers and everything. You can go in and catch calls and make global changes to system libraries. There's at least one company (Unsanity) that sells nothing but cool runtime changes for cocoa libraries. There's also a Smalltalk workalike scripting language called FScript that you can "hook" into any application and extend it using FScript.
More: to make the "focus problem" even less of an issue, there's a third party application framework called "Growl" that applications can use to post notifications, and they come up any way you want. So with an iTunes plugin (growltunes) I get an MTV-style popup at the bottom of my screen when tracks change, but other application notifications get redirected to smoke-grey rectangles on the side of the screen that time out after a few seconds.
And because so much of this stuff is written by people coming to the Mac from UNIX, a lot of them (like growl) are open source.
The first time we tried it from within iTunes, it turned out iTunes acted like it copied the files but had instead only indexed them, so once the flash drive was removed things were confused.
The only way that could happen is if your friend went into the iTunes preferences and turned off "copy tracks". iTunes copies files by default, but it has the option to leave them where they are on the disk so that people can leave their tracks organized the way they have them in some other music program without having them duplicated.
And, really, if you had opened the files on the flash drive in Microsoft Word, would you have expected Word to copy them from the flash drive to the computer?
On the Mac *or* the PC when I'm copying files from a flash drive, I copy them to a folder on the computer first and then pull the flash drive out. Then I worry about getting them into some program or other. That way I don't have to worry about how long the program takes to "do its thing", or the flash drive being temperamental.
The Mac people I know don't go anywhere near the underlying OS, they barely understand the finder.
I think that applies to all computer users. I was a network administrator for a group of between 150 and 400 (depending on the project load) software developers for 20 years, and it is AMAZING how naive computer users, even professional programmers, can be. We had secretaries who were more computer-savvy than some of the Engineering PhDs I had to shepherd. And these were all using Windows.
And that's not a problem with the Mac, that's a problem with the users.
the one-button mouse
One of my bugaboos, but these days it's really a hardware problem, not a software one. OS X supported multi-button mice from the start. And pre-OS-X Mac OS was so bloody horrible that it wasn't even on my radar. I had a Mac years ago... the original 128k Mac... and it was SO unpleasant that until I could get OS X on an upgraded Powermac I bought used there was no way I was going to mess with it for anything but the experience.
the PC has an annoying habit of "stealing focus"
That's something that the Mac is a lot better with. Not all programs follow the human interface guidelines, not even all the ones from Apple, but it takes at least a minor effort to violate this one: when a program wants your attention it doesn't pop up and steal focus unless the programmer deliberately goes out of their way to make it do so. Instead the program's icon starts bouncing in the dock, to let you know that the program needs your attention.
It's not perfect, sometimes programs run a separate program to open a window, and as a new program it opens on top. Some ported programs use toolkits that ignore the guidelines (and Mac users get downright sarcastic about them in reviews). But most of the time your focus is safe.
Ye gods, having modules optional, or even present but enabled or disabled depending on what you have licensed, is almost as old as the computer business.
Windows: plug in the drive, wait through a few 'recognized a new device' dialogs, double-click to open it, and drag the files from it. Then unmount it from the task bar and walk off.
Mac: plug in the drive, double-click to open it, and drag the files from it. Then unmount it from Finder and walk off.
What is the difference? You don't like iTunes? Don't use it, it's just an applications, and runs on both Windows and Mac. There are other applications for both platforms.
And I really don't get what you're talking about with the "My Documents" comment. I keep most of my files on my Mac in "/Local". I keep most of my files on Windows in "My Documents" because there's too much clutter in "C:\". Neither system forces me to do it another way... what exactly is it that you've got a problem with?
... and the only support issues I have with Windows 2000 are caused by software that refuses to run under Windows 2000, one way or another. Whether it's Microsoft components that check before they run, or third party installers that check before they install, the result is the same: there is no fundamental difference between 2000 and XP.
Unfortunately they seem to have learned their lesson and changed many driver models for Vista.
Apart from the widely questions "scrappy upstart" bit, Apple's had mixed success on the "innovation" front, and there's plenty of people willing to lay the mantle of "evil" on Google's shoulders.
Doesn't matter what order you do it in, if you use a single-stage boot loader like Booteasy (which comes with FreeBSD) or a smart boot loader like the BeOS one. I think your problem is that the Linux boot loaders are even more screwed up than the Windows one.
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates.
ITYM "upstart".
When exactly was that? I guess maybe back in the '70s before he went ballistic over people copying Microsoft Basic. Microsoft had a decent reputation through the early '80s - C80 and L80 were solid, and for a while they were shipping a really good (for the time) UNIX port, but I don't recall Gates personally being "loved"... at least not by people who actually had to use Basic or DOS.
I'm pretty sure that by '82 I'd been ready to kill him at least once, probably after the DOS 'format' command decided to format the current drive instead of the drive I told it on the command line.
Ever try to install Windows alongside an existing OS?
I had Windows NT4, FreeBSD, BeOS, and Rhapsody DR1 running on the same PC.
It's not that bloody hard.
Hell, I had Windows 2000, FreeBSD, and BSD running on a Toshiba Libretto. That puppy was maxed out with 64M RAM.
IT'S NOT THAT HARD, except that Microsoft deliberately makes it harder than it needs to be.
The way I see it, it's good that we have a mostly homogeneous OS market.
Well, except for Windows, we do. Pretty much everything else is UNIX.
As for Microsoft, I wouldn't mind them so much being an evil empire if they were a competent evil empire. But it's over 10 years now and they STILL haven't fixed the whole IE / ActiveX security mess.
Mr. Rimm-Kaufman said the new Google service also diminishes a Web publisher's role in helping users find potentially useful content. "You may want to editorialize differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content," he said. "This moves you further out of the loop."
So when you see a "Referrer" that matches/.*google.*site:$mysite/ parse the search they used out of it.
There are a bunch of sites that I habitually search by googling "site:company.example.com rest of search".
And others where I use the site's search, because it works better than google.
All this is doing is shortcutting that step, and when I just tried it for Best Buy and did a secondary search for "linksys router", I didn't get any links outside Best Buy and I didn't get any ads.
The ISPs made their own bed but we all have to sleep in it now.
The ISPs fought tooth and nail against even modest municipal wifi limited to public areas like libraries and shopping districts, because they wanted to make money from it. So rather than municipally funded projects they promoted these ad-hoc "partnerships" that didn't, in the end, make money.
both the situation described in this article and Earthlink's experience are more examples of the same problem: ISPs set up a lot of community and municipal networks for failure by feeding them a poison pill. I'm not saying that the ISPs deliberately created a situation that was doomed to fail... I'm sure they wanted to make money... but the effect was the same.
No, for me, it's like not liking a Porsche 911 because I can't adjust the seat to fit me: it physically hurts to use the keyboard and trackpad.
Actually, it's more like a complaint that no car made by Volkswagen-Porsche-Audi has a seat that can be adjusted to fit someone taller than 5'11". That would be a ludicrous issue for a car company... it just wouldn't happen... but for Apple none of their laptops has a two-button trackpad. None of their laptops has a good quality keyboard (no, the Macbook Pro keyboard is not a good keyboard, it's an absolute farce compared to my old Thinkpad). There's a long list of things that you can't replace in their laptops that turn off some of the potential buyers, and every one of those things is an actual problem.
I'm just going to go out on a limb and suggest that probably less than 1% of potential buyers have passed on a MBP because it lacked a right click button.
I suspect that you're off by a factor of 50, at least. Why? Because there's a real reluctance to admit to making mistakes at Apple, so the fact that Apple's even come out with the mighty mouse and the two-finger tap at all is a strong indication that they're seeing signs that avoiding putting a context menu button on the controller itself is seriously hurting them.
The mighty mouse isn't a big deal. You can replace the mouse.
You can't replace the trackpad.
And it's not the people who take them back. It's the people who don't even consider them seriously.
A deeper issue that is exposed is this concept of new Mac converts insisting that their old habits (WinXP) translate literally in Mac OSX land.
That's not a deeper issue, it's an irrelevant one. This has nothing to do with OS X... which has had context menu button support right from the start. It's all about the hardware, and only the hardware. If I could legally run OS X on a Thinkpad I'd be a happier man.
And, of course, thsi is also about the absolutely over the top responses to suggestions that Apple's made mistakes at all. Like the ones I've received in this thread.
Have you TRIED two-finger scroll or right mouse click with non-Apple laptops?
No, I don't need them on no-apple laptops. I've used them on Apple laptops, and they don't work for me.
Do you even own a MacBook/MacBook Pro?
I've had a Macbook pro since the first month the Macbook Pro was out.
[appalling ad-hominem insults deleted]
I haven't made personal attacks on you, and I won't "take the bait" and start now. I would appreciate it if you would return the favor instead of providing a charming demonstration of exactly the kind of "wrath" that this whole topic is about. I've tried it, I've also tried using tap-click as left click and the trackpad button as right-click, and I've tried it the other way around, and the least broken solution I have found is to use Sidetrack to make a corner-tap into right click.
It's still not a good solution. Any solution that requires turning a tap into a click causes too many errors for me, but at least with sidetrack a mistap doesn't turn into a mouse motion. In addition, when I turned Apple's hack on I seemed to get more missed taps. Maybe I don't bash the trackpad hard enough, or maybe I bash it too hard, but either way... Apple's trick is not a workaround I can live with.
Apple is limiting their potential user base by forcing workarounds that simply do not work for many people instead of spending an extra 50c per laptop for a second microswitch for a second trackpad button. Apple's user base is further limiting it by making personal attacks on people who don't want to deal with their video-game tap-tap-double-tap-control-option-command-cokebottle tricks.
Actually, the Thinkpad line is generally considered to have the best keyboard on any laptop, and while some Apple fans tout the quality of the Apple laptop they really are not considered particularly good. Reviews of Apple laptops are nothing to go by, since they're of necessity comparing them to other Apple laptops... having the best keyboard of a line of products that has traditionally had bad keyboards is not much of an advantage.
In my case, the Macbook Pro keyboard causes me severe pain if I use it for more than about 15 minutes. My Thinkpad T23 never did that.
Not only is there a good workaround, there is arguably a BETTER feature.
The double-tap hack is so poor an alternative for me that I ended up buying Sidetrack which lets me designate a corner of the trackpad as the right mouse button.
You don't have a Macbook Pro, you haven't used one. I do, and I have, and it's got a lousy keyboard and the two-finger tap hack is more of Apple's passive-aggressive refusal to admit that the one-button mouse was a bad idea. It's decades too late and still far too little.
What about a 24" iMac would suggest that you'd need a second monitor?
I have two computers, and only enough room on my desk for one monitor. And, no, virtual machines and remote desktop are not workable alternatives at the current time. I've tried them, hell I bought BOTH Parallels Desktop *and* VMWare Fusion to try and get around it, but without better 3d support they just don't cut it.
Finally, I didn't disparage anyone who looks at an Apple product and passes.
There's plenty of Mac fanatics out there who do. And your original post was defending them against the comments in this thread... and those include both trivial and serious problems with Apple hardware.
I DO disparage those who see a minor shortcoming [...] and fail to accept the fact that real and simple solutions exist.
And I'm saying that these are not minor shortcomings, that I'm putting up with them despite the fact that the workarounds that Apple provides are so bad they need workarounds themselves. There are no good solutions, simple or not, just a choice of bad ones. And I'm saying that from experience.
If you need a mid-sized consumer tower and value the interoperability of components, then by all means, don't buy a new Mac.
I don't need a midsize consumer tower. I didn't say anything about a tower. I don't want to spend my time swapping out components. The iMac would be fine... except that I can't get one without a built-in display. A "mini Pro" that didn't have crippled components would be fine, but they don't make one.
But I do need an operating system that doesn't suck. I didn't pass, I bought the damn things, but according to the Mac fanatics when I did that I gave up the right to complain about the crummy hardware I had to buy to get the software I wanted. I don't see that. If anything, I have a better understanding of just how flawed these computers are.
I use a Mac. In fact I've got two Macs. The hardware problems that I put up with to get an OS that doesn't suck are not minor.
There's no good workaround for the horrible keyboard on the Macbook Pro. There's no good workaround for the missing right button on the trackpad. Having to pull out an external keyboard and mouse when you want to use your laptop for more than a few minutes sucks, but it's what I have to do, it's what I put up with.
There's no workaround for the lack of a normal desktop Mac. I've got a Mac mini, and it's usable, but it's woefully underpowered. The iMac is out of the question, for me... yes, I could go get a bigger desk and rearrange my office so I could have room for two monitors, but this is a computer, not a lifestyle.
I prefer to put up with the nasty shortcomings of Apple products than to use Windows for everything, but that doesn't mean they're not real shortcomings, or that people are being unreasonable when they look at what Apple asks of them and say "No thanks".
My point about Vista is that no-one is saying "This is the most wonderful OS ever".
Oh man, I have had some major ear-bashing from Windows nuts. Of course I live in Texas, not California, and there's people here who are honestly surprised when I let slip I don't actually believe in creationism.
Boy, are you ever proving the original article right. Come on, baby, give me more of that hot Apple Fanboy wrath.
I have a right mouse button on my Bluetooth mouse. [...]
Your bluetooth mouse is not on the trackpad.
[...] NO, multi-touch isn't an admission of a so-called "issue". [...]
It's a passive-aggressive attempt to avoid admitting that an issue exists. BTW: You got control-click and command click mixed up, which kind of helps me prove my point, no?
So, was adding a third button to PC mice a few years back addressing an "issue"?
No, and adding multi-button support in OS X is not either.
I didn't say one word about OS X supporting or not supporting multiple buttons. I was talking specifically about the lack of a second mouse button on the trackpad. Which is still a problem. And using multitouch to fake it doesn't work... it doesn't work SO much that I ended up ditching it and using Sidetrack to let me use tap-in-a-corner to fake it better. It still sucks, but it's a dry suck.
There's a big difference between having code which just happens to somehow work, and having code which works because the code is clearly written and documented, where the person in charge of maintaining it actually understands what the code is doing.
But the point is that when the code is the documentation, which is what you have when you have undocumented code, you're throwing out the documentation with the code if you start from scratch. Refactoring includes documenting the code you're rewriting. In fact I've found that comments added when refactoring do a lot more to explain why the code does what it does than the comments that were already there. I don't mean that the existing comments were wrong, or didn't match the code, but that the comments added by the person who did the refactoring describe the things that were hard to understand in the original code, and often explain why the battle scars were necessary.
I've found that happening with my code that other people have worked on, with other people's code that I have worked on, with other people's code that other people have worked on, and with my code that I have worked on (because, after all, "you three years ago" might as well be another person... if that's not the case for you, you better ask yourself if you've stopped learning).
The author correctly points out that when you do a total rewrite, then the undocumented special cases handled by the old code will make themselves felt. As these problems present themselves, it takes time to fix them.
Sometimes. And sometimes they don't... yet. Sometimes you're reinstalling a time bomb that you thought you'd already defused.
With either a rewrite or a refactoring, too, you need to understand and document the result. If by the end of a refactoring project you haven't documented the depth charges... then you haven't really finished the job yet.
Your judgment whether to maintain or to rewrite should take both of these factors into consideration.
Indeed. I love rewriting code, myself. Start over from scratch. Throw out the old and crufty. But I gotta keep telling myself to watch out for deceptive arguments about why I'm rewriting... and I think this is one of the ones I've tried on myself often enough that I just don't trust it any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Do we need to look up what wrath means now?
If you're not angry with me you're not expressing yourself very well, or you have really odd obsessions.
Right, so you can bitch about the trackpad, which sucks on all laptops
It didn't suck on my T23, because it had two buttons.
Right click is not necessary to use Mac OS X.
It's not about what's "necessary". If you want to go by what's "necessary" I suppose I can always log in as ">console" and use my Macbook as a command line UNIX laptop like my old Toshiba Satellite.
I recommend a BT mouse.
I use a very small USB mouse so I don't have to worry about batteries. It works the same way. But it means I can't just flip my laptop open and go to work, so I still have to use the trackpad on occasion, and I look forward to those occasions like a trip to the dentist.
It doesn't have to be that way.
But only Apple can change that. And they won't, because they've got this really weird obsession about mouse buttons.
UNIX - the shell and everything that implies, including all the open source programs and scripting languages. OSX comes with Perl, Tcl, SQLite (Apple uses SQLite internally... you can make SQL queries on your Apple mail database!), PHP, Apache,
Mac OS - Applescript gives you amazing GUI glue to everything. For example, iTunes normally doesn't include podcasts in party shuffle, because they're usually not music. But I subscribe to some Jazz feeds, so I go in and select them and then run this script from the iTunes scripts menu: Mac OS + UNIX: You can call Applescripts from the shell with the "osascript" command, and vice versa. So to put he computer to sleep right now I can do this: NeXTstep: The Cocoa libraries are amazingly discoverable and reflective, and OS X ships with all the debuggers and everything. You can go in and catch calls and make global changes to system libraries. There's at least one company (Unsanity) that sells nothing but cool runtime changes for cocoa libraries. There's also a Smalltalk workalike scripting language called FScript that you can "hook" into any application and extend it using FScript.
More: to make the "focus problem" even less of an issue, there's a third party application framework called "Growl" that applications can use to post notifications, and they come up any way you want. So with an iTunes plugin (growltunes) I get an MTV-style popup at the bottom of my screen when tracks change, but other application notifications get redirected to smoke-grey rectangles on the side of the screen that time out after a few seconds.
And because so much of this stuff is written by people coming to the Mac from UNIX, a lot of them (like growl) are open source.
The first time we tried it from within iTunes, it turned out iTunes acted like it copied the files but had instead only indexed them, so once the flash drive was removed things were confused.
The only way that could happen is if your friend went into the iTunes preferences and turned off "copy tracks". iTunes copies files by default, but it has the option to leave them where they are on the disk so that people can leave their tracks organized the way they have them in some other music program without having them duplicated.
And, really, if you had opened the files on the flash drive in Microsoft Word, would you have expected Word to copy them from the flash drive to the computer?
On the Mac *or* the PC when I'm copying files from a flash drive, I copy them to a folder on the computer first and then pull the flash drive out. Then I worry about getting them into some program or other. That way I don't have to worry about how long the program takes to "do its thing", or the flash drive being temperamental.
The Mac people I know don't go anywhere near the underlying OS, they barely understand the finder.
I think that applies to all computer users. I was a network administrator for a group of between 150 and 400 (depending on the project load) software developers for 20 years, and it is AMAZING how naive computer users, even professional programmers, can be. We had secretaries who were more computer-savvy than some of the Engineering PhDs I had to shepherd. And these were all using Windows.
And that's not a problem with the Mac, that's a problem with the users.
the one-button mouse
One of my bugaboos, but these days it's really a hardware problem, not a software one. OS X supported multi-button mice from the start. And pre-OS-X Mac OS was so bloody horrible that it wasn't even on my radar. I had a Mac years ago... the original 128k Mac... and it was SO unpleasant that until I could get OS X on an upgraded Powermac I bought used there was no way I was going to mess with it for anything but the experience.
the PC has an annoying habit of "stealing focus"
That's something that the Mac is a lot better with. Not all programs follow the human interface guidelines, not even all the ones from Apple, but it takes at least a minor effort to violate this one: when a program wants your attention it doesn't pop up and steal focus unless the programmer deliberately goes out of their way to make it do so. Instead the program's icon starts bouncing in the dock, to let you know that the program needs your attention.
It's not perfect, sometimes programs run a separate program to open a window, and as a new program it opens on top. Some ported programs use toolkits that ignore the guidelines (and Mac users get downright sarcastic about them in reviews). But most of the time your focus is safe.
Ye gods, having modules optional, or even present but enabled or disabled depending on what you have licensed, is almost as old as the computer business.
Windows: plug in the drive, wait through a few 'recognized a new device' dialogs, double-click to open it, and drag the files from it. Then unmount it from the task bar and walk off.
Mac: plug in the drive, double-click to open it, and drag the files from it. Then unmount it from Finder and walk off.
What is the difference? You don't like iTunes? Don't use it, it's just an applications, and runs on both Windows and Mac. There are other applications for both platforms.
And I really don't get what you're talking about with the "My Documents" comment. I keep most of my files on my Mac in "/Local". I keep most of my files on Windows in "My Documents" because there's too much clutter in "C:\". Neither system forces me to do it another way... what exactly is it that you've got a problem with?
... and the only support issues I have with Windows 2000 are caused by software that refuses to run under Windows 2000, one way or another. Whether it's Microsoft components that check before they run, or third party installers that check before they install, the result is the same: there is no fundamental difference between 2000 and XP.
Unfortunately they seem to have learned their lesson and changed many driver models for Vista.
Apart from the widely questions "scrappy upstart" bit, Apple's had mixed success on the "innovation" front, and there's plenty of people willing to lay the mantle of "evil" on Google's shoulders.
Doesn't matter what order you do it in, if you use a single-stage boot loader like Booteasy (which comes with FreeBSD) or a smart boot loader like the BeOS one. I think your problem is that the Linux boot loaders are even more screwed up than the Windows one.
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates.
ITYM "upstart".
When exactly was that? I guess maybe back in the '70s before he went ballistic over people copying Microsoft Basic. Microsoft had a decent reputation through the early '80s - C80 and L80 were solid, and for a while they were shipping a really good (for the time) UNIX port, but I don't recall Gates personally being "loved"... at least not by people who actually had to use Basic or DOS.
I'm pretty sure that by '82 I'd been ready to kill him at least once, probably after the DOS 'format' command decided to format the current drive instead of the drive I told it on the command line.
I wrote: "I had Windows 2000, FreeBSD, and BSD running on a Toshiba Libretto."
That should read "I had Windows 2000, FreeBSD, and BeOS running on a Toshiba Libretto."
Pardon me.
Ever try to install Windows alongside an existing OS?
I had Windows NT4, FreeBSD, BeOS, and Rhapsody DR1 running on the same PC.
It's not that bloody hard.
Hell, I had Windows 2000, FreeBSD, and BSD running on a Toshiba Libretto. That puppy was maxed out with 64M RAM.
IT'S NOT THAT HARD, except that Microsoft deliberately makes it harder than it needs to be.
The way I see it, it's good that we have a mostly homogeneous OS market.
Well, except for Windows, we do. Pretty much everything else is UNIX.
As for Microsoft, I wouldn't mind them so much being an evil empire if they were a competent evil empire. But it's over 10 years now and they STILL haven't fixed the whole IE / ActiveX security mess.
39, you can fit 3 radix-50 characters in a 16-bit word.
Time for Google to move to Vancouver?
Mr. Rimm-Kaufman said the new Google service also diminishes a Web publisher's role in helping users find potentially useful content. "You may want to editorialize differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content," he said. "This moves you further out of the loop."
/.*google.*site:$mysite/ parse the search they used out of it.
So when you see a "Referrer" that matches
a**holes sends 3 shipping containers, odds are at least 2 make it to destination
And the one that doesn't leads to their arrest.
There are a bunch of sites that I habitually search by googling "site:company.example.com rest of search".
And others where I use the site's search, because it works better than google.
All this is doing is shortcutting that step, and when I just tried it for Best Buy and did a secondary search for "linksys router", I didn't get any links outside Best Buy and I didn't get any ads.
No, for me, it's like not liking a Porsche 911 because I can't adjust the seat to fit me: it physically hurts to use the keyboard and trackpad.
Actually, it's more like a complaint that no car made by Volkswagen-Porsche-Audi has a seat that can be adjusted to fit someone taller than 5'11". That would be a ludicrous issue for a car company... it just wouldn't happen... but for Apple none of their laptops has a two-button trackpad. None of their laptops has a good quality keyboard (no, the Macbook Pro keyboard is not a good keyboard, it's an absolute farce compared to my old Thinkpad). There's a long list of things that you can't replace in their laptops that turn off some of the potential buyers, and every one of those things is an actual problem.
I'm just going to go out on a limb and suggest that probably less than 1% of potential buyers have passed on a MBP because it lacked a right click button.
I suspect that you're off by a factor of 50, at least. Why? Because there's a real reluctance to admit to making mistakes at Apple, so the fact that Apple's even come out with the mighty mouse and the two-finger tap at all is a strong indication that they're seeing signs that avoiding putting a context menu button on the controller itself is seriously hurting them.
The mighty mouse isn't a big deal. You can replace the mouse.
You can't replace the trackpad.
And it's not the people who take them back. It's the people who don't even consider them seriously.
A deeper issue that is exposed is this concept of new Mac converts insisting that their old habits (WinXP) translate literally in Mac OSX land.
That's not a deeper issue, it's an irrelevant one. This has nothing to do with OS X... which has had context menu button support right from the start. It's all about the hardware, and only the hardware. If I could legally run OS X on a Thinkpad I'd be a happier man.
And, of course, thsi is also about the absolutely over the top responses to suggestions that Apple's made mistakes at all. Like the ones I've received in this thread.
Have you TRIED two-finger scroll or right mouse click with non-Apple laptops?
No, I don't need them on no-apple laptops. I've used them on Apple laptops, and they don't work for me.
Do you even own a MacBook/MacBook Pro?
I've had a Macbook pro since the first month the Macbook Pro was out.
[appalling ad-hominem insults deleted]
I haven't made personal attacks on you, and I won't "take the bait" and start now. I would appreciate it if you would return the favor instead of providing a charming demonstration of exactly the kind of "wrath" that this whole topic is about. I've tried it, I've also tried using tap-click as left click and the trackpad button as right-click, and I've tried it the other way around, and the least broken solution I have found is to use Sidetrack to make a corner-tap into right click.
It's still not a good solution. Any solution that requires turning a tap into a click causes too many errors for me, but at least with sidetrack a mistap doesn't turn into a mouse motion. In addition, when I turned Apple's hack on I seemed to get more missed taps. Maybe I don't bash the trackpad hard enough, or maybe I bash it too hard, but either way... Apple's trick is not a workaround I can live with.
Apple is limiting their potential user base by forcing workarounds that simply do not work for many people instead of spending an extra 50c per laptop for a second microswitch for a second trackpad button. Apple's user base is further limiting it by making personal attacks on people who don't want to deal with their video-game tap-tap-double-tap-control-option-command-cokebottle tricks.
Actually, the Thinkpad line is generally considered to have the best keyboard on any laptop, and while some Apple fans tout the quality of the Apple laptop they really are not considered particularly good. Reviews of Apple laptops are nothing to go by, since they're of necessity comparing them to other Apple laptops... having the best keyboard of a line of products that has traditionally had bad keyboards is not much of an advantage.
In my case, the Macbook Pro keyboard causes me severe pain if I use it for more than about 15 minutes. My Thinkpad T23 never did that.
Not only is there a good workaround, there is arguably a BETTER feature.
The double-tap hack is so poor an alternative for me that I ended up buying Sidetrack which lets me designate a corner of the trackpad as the right mouse button.
You don't have a Macbook Pro, you haven't used one. I do, and I have, and it's got a lousy keyboard and the two-finger tap hack is more of Apple's passive-aggressive refusal to admit that the one-button mouse was a bad idea. It's decades too late and still far too little.
What about a 24" iMac would suggest that you'd need a second monitor?
I have two computers, and only enough room on my desk for one monitor. And, no, virtual machines and remote desktop are not workable alternatives at the current time. I've tried them, hell I bought BOTH Parallels Desktop *and* VMWare Fusion to try and get around it, but without better 3d support they just don't cut it.
Finally, I didn't disparage anyone who looks at an Apple product and passes.
There's plenty of Mac fanatics out there who do. And your original post was defending them against the comments in this thread... and those include both trivial and serious problems with Apple hardware.
I DO disparage those who see a minor shortcoming [...] and fail to accept the fact that real and simple solutions exist.
And I'm saying that these are not minor shortcomings, that I'm putting up with them despite the fact that the workarounds that Apple provides are so bad they need workarounds themselves. There are no good solutions, simple or not, just a choice of bad ones. And I'm saying that from experience.
If you need a mid-sized consumer tower and value the interoperability of components, then by all means, don't buy a new Mac.
I don't need a midsize consumer tower. I didn't say anything about a tower. I don't want to spend my time swapping out components. The iMac would be fine... except that I can't get one without a built-in display. A "mini Pro" that didn't have crippled components would be fine, but they don't make one.
But I do need an operating system that doesn't suck. I didn't pass, I bought the damn things, but according to the Mac fanatics when I did that I gave up the right to complain about the crummy hardware I had to buy to get the software I wanted. I don't see that. If anything, I have a better understanding of just how flawed these computers are.
I use a Mac. In fact I've got two Macs. The hardware problems that I put up with to get an OS that doesn't suck are not minor.
There's no good workaround for the horrible keyboard on the Macbook Pro. There's no good workaround for the missing right button on the trackpad. Having to pull out an external keyboard and mouse when you want to use your laptop for more than a few minutes sucks, but it's what I have to do, it's what I put up with.
There's no workaround for the lack of a normal desktop Mac. I've got a Mac mini, and it's usable, but it's woefully underpowered. The iMac is out of the question, for me... yes, I could go get a bigger desk and rearrange my office so I could have room for two monitors, but this is a computer, not a lifestyle.
I prefer to put up with the nasty shortcomings of Apple products than to use Windows for everything, but that doesn't mean they're not real shortcomings, or that people are being unreasonable when they look at what Apple asks of them and say "No thanks".
My point about Vista is that no-one is saying "This is the most wonderful OS ever".
Oh man, I have had some major ear-bashing from Windows nuts. Of course I live in Texas, not California, and there's people here who are honestly surprised when I let slip I don't actually believe in creationism.
Boy, are you ever proving the original article right. Come on, baby, give me more of that hot Apple Fanboy wrath.
I have a right mouse button on my Bluetooth mouse. [...]
Your bluetooth mouse is not on the trackpad.
[...] NO, multi-touch isn't an admission of a so-called "issue". [...]
It's a passive-aggressive attempt to avoid admitting that an issue exists. BTW: You got control-click and command click mixed up, which kind of helps me prove my point, no?
So, was adding a third button to PC mice a few years back addressing an "issue"?
Yes.
No, and adding multi-button support in OS X is not either.
I didn't say one word about OS X supporting or not supporting multiple buttons. I was talking specifically about the lack of a second mouse button on the trackpad. Which is still a problem. And using multitouch to fake it doesn't work... it doesn't work SO much that I ended up ditching it and using Sidetrack to let me use tap-in-a-corner to fake it better. It still sucks, but it's a dry suck.
The biggest impediment to cellular data is the cellphone industry.
Until they figure out that they need to sell access, rather than services, at least.
There's a big difference between having code which just happens to somehow work, and having code which works because the code is clearly written and documented, where the person in charge of maintaining it actually understands what the code is doing.
But the point is that when the code is the documentation, which is what you have when you have undocumented code, you're throwing out the documentation with the code if you start from scratch. Refactoring includes documenting the code you're rewriting. In fact I've found that comments added when refactoring do a lot more to explain why the code does what it does than the comments that were already there. I don't mean that the existing comments were wrong, or didn't match the code, but that the comments added by the person who did the refactoring describe the things that were hard to understand in the original code, and often explain why the battle scars were necessary.
I've found that happening with my code that other people have worked on, with other people's code that I have worked on, with other people's code that other people have worked on, and with my code that I have worked on (because, after all, "you three years ago" might as well be another person... if that's not the case for you, you better ask yourself if you've stopped learning).
The author correctly points out that when you do a total rewrite, then the undocumented special cases handled by the old code will make themselves felt. As these problems present themselves, it takes time to fix them.
Sometimes. And sometimes they don't... yet. Sometimes you're reinstalling a time bomb that you thought you'd already defused.
With either a rewrite or a refactoring, too, you need to understand and document the result. If by the end of a refactoring project you haven't documented the depth charges... then you haven't really finished the job yet.
Your judgment whether to maintain or to rewrite should take both of these factors into consideration.
Indeed. I love rewriting code, myself. Start over from scratch. Throw out the old and crufty. But I gotta keep telling myself to watch out for deceptive arguments about why I'm rewriting... and I think this is one of the ones I've tried on myself often enough that I just don't trust it any more.