Okay, go reread his post and mine. We're talking about acronyms which are pronounced spelled out ('HP' being the specific acronym with which he took issue, as well as 'HTML' and 'PHP' as examples of his crazy made up rule). I understand the difference between 'a' and 'an', I'm just saying that 'an' is always the correct one before 'H' pronounced as a letter. So, it's always 'An HP' because nobody pronounces HP as 'haitch pee'.
This is not a grammatical disagreement, this is a pronuciation disagreement.
Exhibit A Yeah, they weren't at an all-time high in 2004, although they were on an upswing in terms of raw numbers sold.
Exhibit B But come 2005, their unit sales were up 43%. So, taking a 3500KMac as the 2004 number, that means the 2005 number is around 5000KMac, which beats the 1996 spike.
So, apparently the ad campaign is working better than you think.
In standard US English speech, pronounciation of the letter 'H' is never aspirated. So HTML is 'aitch-tee-em-el' and HP is 'aitch-pee', and 'An HP' is correct.
I recently had to write some date-validity checking code which brought to mind the fact that Unix dates will break in 2038. If this pans out, we won't have to worry about that, so that'll be nice.
(Also, my date-validity code, even if the 2038 issue weren't there, breaks in February of 2100. So that's two problems I won't have to worry about)
"News for Nerds" and "Stuff that matters" are separate categories. There is certainly some overlap, but Slashdot makes no claim that the news for nerds will matter, or that the stuff that matters will be news for nerds.
Re:Single mouse button idea has no strength.
on
Re-Imagining Apple
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· Score: 1
Go download a 1.x version of Gimp (thankfully, they fixed this in 2.x).
Notice that when you right-click on something, you get the entire menu bar.
This sort of thing is what we're talking about when we say having a one-button mouse leads to better software design. The context menu should be for context. If a user's smart enough to know about it, then the features are available to them. If the user's not smart enough to know about the context menu, then the commands should be available in traditional menus.
Defaulting to two-button mice leads to lazy developers ruining the utility of the context menu by putting every damn thing that comes to mind into them instead of keeping it short and simple.
> how many real mice register a click when you touch the mouse without clicking it?
Um. A trackpad is not a mouse. It seems like you're applying a UI design "bad metaphor" argument to hardware. A trackpad isn't a metaphorical mouse--It's a trackpad.
For those of us who use tap to click, we wouldn't have it any other way. I realize that some people don't like it (my father, for instance, can't stand it), but for those of us who do, it's indespensible. The only time I use the actual buttons on my laptops is for right-clicking (and on one of my laptops, I don't even do that--right and middle clicks are handled by different styles of taps).
Input device preferences are a very personal thing. I've used trackballs, trackpads, and eraser-tip pointers. I've had no problems with any of them, but the trackpad has been my favorite.
You know, I want to support Linux vendors, but the model with Linux costs *$500* more than the version with Windows direct from Sharp. That seems a little pricey for a free OS, eh?
(And I have to assume the sort of person who'd spend $3500 on a laptop to run Linux on either knows how to install Linux themselves or has people paid to do it for them)
Better ones: 1. One-button mice lead to better UI design. If you can't rely on there being a right-click, you can't put every damn thing in the right-click menu. Having everything in the contextual menu was one of the things that made GIMP 1.x suck so hard. If you ever use a Windows tablet for any length of time, you'll wish that Microsoft had designed Windows with a one-button mouse in mind, too.
2. One-button mice won't confuse the slow users. Power users rarely stick with the supplied mouse even in the PC world. MacOS supports multiple-button mice. Hell, Apple even sells multiple-button mice. Apple just doesn't make them. So there's nothing to keep you from going out and getting a better mouse, and no Apple tech-support workers ever have to go through the "Right click. No, *right click*. No, don't write click, click with the right mouse button!" pain.
So, and this is important, Jef Raskin wanted a two button mouse NOT so you could have context menus and such on the right button, but rather to replace *double-clicking*.
No one would. I'm guessing this move is 90% just to get the Slashdot "Why oh why can't they have a two button mouse" crowd to shut the hell up. Shipping a model without a mouse at all (so you'd be forced to buy a mouse with however many buttons your heart desires) didn't work, so they've moved on to plan B.
Psst: When criticizing someone else for their stupidity, try to get your "your" right.
And actually the poster brings up a good point that I'd never considered before (since there's already ample reasons for Apple to stick with a one-button mouse by default). With a one-button mouse, left-handed people don't have to deal with switching back and forth if they use someone else's machine.
Reread my reply. I was agreeing with you. My post was saying (basically) "Yeah, it's a dumb way to do it, but they had a reason for doing it that way."
On a vaguely related note, my dad had a PowerMac 6100 for a long time. One feature of this case design was that it had the power button on the front, right below the floppy drive.
My father's a computer geek. He's been on the Internet since it was called the Arpanet. His first Unix experience was hacking the source code so it would run on a customized PDP11 his company was using.
He bought a Mac in 1984, and has been an ardent Mac fan ever since, although he works with PCs a lot for work.
Even with all of this, when he got the 6100, he had to put a stapler in front of the power button to keep himself from turning the power off accidentally every time he wanted to eject a floppy.
I'm specifically talking about dumb users here. Competent users pick it up in seconds. The sort of people who regularly call help desks take a long, long time.
Yeah, it's a relic of times when the Mac was floppy-based and had to do a lot of disk swapping. You needed a way to eject the disk without actually unmounting it, so they had to distinguish between the 'Eject' command (in the menu) and the 'Unmount' (drag to trash).
On the other hand, clued users were able to grasp this instantly, and non-clued users were able to grasp it after a minute. Compare this with the amount of time it takes to get a dumb PC user to figure out the difference between the right and left mouse buttons (which ranges from many, many years to infinite, as some users will confuse them their entire lives).
Also, since OSX, the trash turns into an eject icon when you grab a disk. And there's an 'Eject' button on the keyboard. So this complaint is now moot.
Re "The floppy drives were like this on many of the Macs for years": No they weren't. Apple never made a Mac with a floppy-eject button. You may have been using a Mac with a third-party external floppy disk.
As to "why they stopped doing it lately", well, ignoring the fact that they never did it to begin with, they're not doing it now because Apple hasn't shipped a machine with a floppy drive in years.
Also, Apple keyboards have an eject button on them. It'll eject the CDROM drive for you (although I don't know how it handles multiple drives)
Or it could be poor communication skills combined with being an insufferable prick.
You don't know everything there is to know about IT. If you think you do, you're probably going to make a really bad programmer, because you'll refuse to learn new techniques to make your code better.
I spent the last two months working with a guy like you. He refused to use the C++ Standard Template Library and as much as called me a liar when I implied that such a thing existed.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, go reread his post and mine. We're talking about acronyms which are pronounced spelled out ('HP' being the specific acronym with which he took issue, as well as 'HTML' and 'PHP' as examples of his crazy made up rule). I understand the difference between 'a' and 'an', I'm just saying that 'an' is always the correct one before 'H' pronounced as a letter. So, it's always 'An HP' because nobody pronounces HP as 'haitch pee'.
This is not a grammatical disagreement, this is a pronuciation disagreement.
Exhibit A
Yeah, they weren't at an all-time high in 2004, although they were on an upswing in terms of raw numbers sold.
Exhibit B
But come 2005, their unit sales were up 43%. So, taking a 3500KMac as the 2004 number, that means the 2005 number is around 5000KMac, which beats the 1996 spike.
So, apparently the ad campaign is working better than you think.
So are these rules you just made up just now?
In standard US English speech, pronounciation of the letter 'H' is never aspirated. So HTML is 'aitch-tee-em-el' and HP is 'aitch-pee', and 'An HP' is correct.
Your revenue increased, but slightly less than you expected it to be!
Take *that*, evil empire!
Look for OSX 10.4.1, "Litigious Assholes", in stores this weekend.
"Combine a hundred little special purpose languages"?
Sounds like Perl.
Didn't work.
I recently had to write some date-validity checking code which brought to mind the fact that Unix dates will break in 2038. If this pans out, we won't have to worry about that, so that'll be nice.
(Also, my date-validity code, even if the 2038 issue weren't there, breaks in February of 2100. So that's two problems I won't have to worry about)
"News for Nerds" and "Stuff that matters" are separate categories. There is certainly some overlap, but Slashdot makes no claim that the news for nerds will matter, or that the stuff that matters will be news for nerds.
Go download a 1.x version of Gimp (thankfully, they fixed this in 2.x).
Notice that when you right-click on something, you get the entire menu bar.
This sort of thing is what we're talking about when we say having a one-button mouse leads to better software design. The context menu should be for context. If a user's smart enough to know about it, then the features are available to them. If the user's not smart enough to know about the context menu, then the commands should be available in traditional menus.
Defaulting to two-button mice leads to lazy developers ruining the utility of the context menu by putting every damn thing that comes to mind into them instead of keeping it short and simple.
> how many real mice register a click when you touch the mouse without clicking it?
Um. A trackpad is not a mouse. It seems like you're applying a UI design "bad metaphor" argument to hardware. A trackpad isn't a metaphorical mouse--It's a trackpad.
For those of us who use tap to click, we wouldn't have it any other way. I realize that some people don't like it (my father, for instance, can't stand it), but for those of us who do, it's indespensible. The only time I use the actual buttons on my laptops is for right-clicking (and on one of my laptops, I don't even do that--right and middle clicks are handled by different styles of taps).
Input device preferences are a very personal thing. I've used trackballs, trackpads, and eraser-tip pointers. I've had no problems with any of them, but the trackpad has been my favorite.
You know, I want to support Linux vendors, but the model with Linux costs *$500* more than the version with Windows direct from Sharp. That seems a little pricey for a free OS, eh?
(And I have to assume the sort of person who'd spend $3500 on a laptop to run Linux on either knows how to install Linux themselves or has people paid to do it for them)
Hockey puck mice make the little baby Jesus cry.
Better ones:
1. One-button mice lead to better UI design. If you can't rely on there being a right-click, you can't put every damn thing in the right-click menu. Having everything in the contextual menu was one of the things that made GIMP 1.x suck so hard. If you ever use a Windows tablet for any length of time, you'll wish that Microsoft had designed Windows with a one-button mouse in mind, too.
2. One-button mice won't confuse the slow users. Power users rarely stick with the supplied mouse even in the PC world. MacOS supports multiple-button mice. Hell, Apple even sells multiple-button mice. Apple just doesn't make them. So there's nothing to keep you from going out and getting a better mouse, and no Apple tech-support workers ever have to go through the "Right click. No, *right click*. No, don't write click, click with the right mouse button!" pain.
The left-handedness thing was just a bonus.
So, and this is important, Jef Raskin wanted a two button mouse NOT so you could have context menus and such on the right button, but rather to replace *double-clicking*.
Raskin was a putz.
No one would. I'm guessing this move is 90% just to get the Slashdot "Why oh why can't they have a two button mouse" crowd to shut the hell up. Shipping a model without a mouse at all (so you'd be forced to buy a mouse with however many buttons your heart desires) didn't work, so they've moved on to plan B.
Which is why, once people become more serious Mac users, they often spend a couple of bucks on a multi-button mouse.
Seriously, any USB mouse out there will work. You can get 'em for roughly a dollar nowadays.
Please stop being on my side. You make my side look bad.
Psst: When criticizing someone else for their stupidity, try to get your "your" right.
And actually the poster brings up a good point that I'd never considered before (since there's already ample reasons for Apple to stick with a one-button mouse by default). With a one-button mouse, left-handed people don't have to deal with switching back and forth if they use someone else's machine.
Reread my reply. I was agreeing with you. My post was saying (basically) "Yeah, it's a dumb way to do it, but they had a reason for doing it that way."
Honest mistake.
On a vaguely related note, my dad had a PowerMac 6100 for a long time. One feature of this case design was that it had the power button on the front, right below the floppy drive.
My father's a computer geek. He's been on the Internet since it was called the Arpanet. His first Unix experience was hacking the source code so it would run on a customized PDP11 his company was using.
He bought a Mac in 1984, and has been an ardent Mac fan ever since, although he works with PCs a lot for work.
Even with all of this, when he got the 6100, he had to put a stapler in front of the power button to keep himself from turning the power off accidentally every time he wanted to eject a floppy.
I'm specifically talking about dumb users here. Competent users pick it up in seconds. The sort of people who regularly call help desks take a long, long time.
You get out a paperclip and use the emergency-eject hole on the front, which has been there since Apple's very first 3.5" floppy drive back in 1984.
Yeah, it's a relic of times when the Mac was floppy-based and had to do a lot of disk swapping. You needed a way to eject the disk without actually unmounting it, so they had to distinguish between the 'Eject' command (in the menu) and the 'Unmount' (drag to trash).
On the other hand, clued users were able to grasp this instantly, and non-clued users were able to grasp it after a minute. Compare this with the amount of time it takes to get a dumb PC user to figure out the difference between the right and left mouse buttons (which ranges from many, many years to infinite, as some users will confuse them their entire lives).
Also, since OSX, the trash turns into an eject icon when you grab a disk. And there's an 'Eject' button on the keyboard. So this complaint is now moot.
Re "The floppy drives were like this on many of the Macs for years": No they weren't. Apple never made a Mac with a floppy-eject button. You may have been using a Mac with a third-party external floppy disk.
As to "why they stopped doing it lately", well, ignoring the fact that they never did it to begin with, they're not doing it now because Apple hasn't shipped a machine with a floppy drive in years.
Also, Apple keyboards have an eject button on them. It'll eject the CDROM drive for you (although I don't know how it handles multiple drives)
Or it could be poor communication skills combined with being an insufferable prick.
You don't know everything there is to know about IT. If you think you do, you're probably going to make a really bad programmer, because you'll refuse to learn new techniques to make your code better.
I spent the last two months working with a guy like you. He refused to use the C++ Standard Template Library and as much as called me a liar when I implied that such a thing existed.