I'm a straight up coder, and even I know that HCI isn't analogous to 'interior design'.
True, I don't know where that horrible analogy come from. Analogies always suck, and become the focus of discussion rather than the topic. Analogies are analogous to metaphors, maybe.
HCI is supposed to cover all the ways that you interact with your computer - keyboard shortcuts (and yes, that includes the idea of having the cut/copy/paste keys right next to each other - that happens *because* of HCI work, not in spite of it)
No, it was not because of HCI work. No more than MII work (musical instrument interaction). Musicians have flexible equipment that is designed by musicians not MIIs. They have some of the most ergonomic devices, and I have never studied those in any ergonomics class. Musicians have to be able to play their equipment quickly and easily. A few milliseconds of stutter screws up the whole thing. Failure is not an option.
Are you sure you want to play the symphonic III midi voice?
Yes, No, Cancel, Apply
Symphonic III midi device not found.
OK.
Other musicians, WTF are you doing?
I've got to consult my MII again.
OK or Cancel?
muscle memory, principle of least surprise, hotspots (e.g. it's easier to move your cursor to one of the four corners of the screen than it is to any other location) and so on.
If HCI were so important, why do some programs place so many "drop down" items that they fill the screen, go forward and backward across the edges of the screen? I'm thinking of a common interface item that is used by millions of people every day that is labeled "Start". The same place you go to turn the computer off. Stop, and logout. Then a familiar silly sound, probably designed by another HCI guy, that goes something like duh de de duh, annoys everyone else in the otherwise quiet area.
I am growing increasingly weary of this attitude. Design is just as much an aspect of engineering as engineering is an aspect of design. A bunch of designers going willy-nilly with no handle on engineering is just as bad as a bunch of engineers doing the same thing to design.
Design sells.
CRT TVs and monitors are starting to look like something from the 50s.
I can't tell you how many of the newly designed Mustangs are in the parking lot, and a few of the classic ones. The ones from '79 or so though much of the '80s are in land fills.
Architectural design is integral with a roof over the head. And no, they don't need a HBI (Human Building Inteface) guru to figure that out, its part of their job. They also oversee the general contractor to make sure they put the junk in the right place.
Furniture design is almost 100% of the sale, unless its for the grey cubicle that is surrounding you. That is because of other reasons.
Art is useless, but is on about every wall of every building that I know of.
Yes, design is just as much an aspect of engineering as engineering is an aspect of design.
Well put.
Human factors is a part of engineering and it complicates things. HF gurus know nothing about making shit work (usually) they just tell the engineer to rework the device so that it is better for humans "this way", the engineer says, well it simply won't work then. The HF guy says, that is how it has to be. The engineer says the damn thing needs to work first. Manufacturing will change, components will get smaller, and we can adjust the other 10,000 things you didn't think about in the next revision. The PHB wonders why the HF guy is making the product release not make the deadline. The engineer wonders the same. The HF guy says we should all get along.
Yes, I was going to post the ubiquitous "Nothing to see here, move along..."
First, I doubt (hope) that there is not much that will be done to Longhorn's interface at this point. They have already done away with the the only reason that I have heard of to upgrade, WinFS.
Second, I have done a human-machine interaction stuff, and I think it is akin to interior decorating as compared to being an architect. Interior design is something that looks nice, but its fluff beyond that. Find me a remote control that can 1) be used by wife (sorry, but I have no wife, but have heard about WAF many, many times, Wife Acceptance, Factor, YMMV) 2) work with a dog or cat or person or anything else that is in line of sight with the components (hint RF, not IR) 3) have feedback from the device to the remote about what is going on 4) I can buy it in a store for around $50 and not pay $10k to have it custom programmed with IR hacks taped to the front of the devices.
To me, this is basic shit. We can hire somebody to make sure the colors match and set the proper mood, but we cannot easily turn on devices and adjust the volume.
Ergonomics and hci is not very interesting to me. Ergonomic mice are excellent if you sit upright, use your right hand only, don't use the scroll wheel too much, don't use the mouse too much, don't put it on top of the shelf, or do anything that is not approved by the ergonomist. Sure, the thing has to fit into your hand, but I don't see figuring that out as a full time job.
This guy did appear to do HCI and possibly GUI stuff at Xerox PARC. Keep in mind that is almost the exact same interface and capabilities that we have today, and that was over 20 years ago. The WIMP interface, network shares, shared printers, clipboard, doesn't this stuff seem familiar?
HCI often ignores human learning and "scalability" of said learning. Look at vi or emacs or notepad or textedit. I'll use notepad first since this is a Windows article, and I know almost nothing about it. OK, to copy text, hit ^C. Control C. OK C means Copy right? OK. Control means what? Just do it, after 2 times you will remember, and after 5 times you will not think about it anymore than pushing that funny pedal at the bottom of your car with your foot to make it go and the other one to make it stop. Lets continue. To paste the copied material, Control-V. We still don't know what control is, but V is short for Paste right? No. P is. Why is that? That makes no sense, it is not HCI. Oh, ^P prints. Why the hell does ^V supersede ^P. Look down at your keyboard. Odds are the top left characters are QWERTY then ASDFG then ZXCVB. Look, the C and the V are right next to each other. A quick ^C ^V would be much more difficult to to to the other hand on the other side of the keyboard. Still makes no sense (HCI guy pissed off), but its simple and it works. How about cut? ^X. WTF? Oh, it too is next to ^C.
OK, what about vi and/or computer games? In many you do something like j to go down (yes, I had to test this I don't think about it) k to go up, h to go left, l to go right. WTF? l goes right. Oh, that keyboard is layed out that way, and it is easier to learn than l for left u for up r for right and d for down.
Now, why the hell are the letters on the keyboard that way? Well, back when people typed on manual typewriters they would jam when people typed too fast. Especially when contra-lateral keying happened (left hand then right). OK, lets put the often used keys on the left hand side since 90% of the population is right handed, so they will use their slower, weaker (typewriters were actually manual!) hand will use the common keys in a bass-ackwards configuration to improve overall performance. That was in the 1800's, much before many of you younguns were born.
We still use that layout today. Are there "better" layouts. Yes! I've designed one, but would never, ever use it. Nobody else does, the 1800's model enables me to type between I guess 40 to 100 WPM dependin
At least it appears that the graphics they'll be using will be limited in scope. Hopefully this isn't a precursor to flash ads and animated gifs. The day they start using pop-over flash ads is the first day of Google's demise.
I'm an avid flash avoider and _any_ 3rd party plugins in general.
Plugins kill the portability of the web that is starting to finally come together after Microsoft wrecked the web with IE and frontpage. Aside from implementation and security issues, the late 90s and early 00s were not close enough browser independence.
Add 3rd party plugins, well they may not work on my wrist watch that I run a 16-bit version of Linux that has a 100% standards compliant browser, but the 3rd party proprietary plugin does not work. This gets multiplied linearly with each "essential" plugin. This is parallel to the 3rd party "ricer" mods that have become illegal in many areas like those tin can "mufflers" that made any slow low powered motor sound like a loud slow moving car that was still in need of paint over top of the bondo. The 3rd party stuff was simply not necessary to go from point A to B, and was a distraction to other drivers, and had issues with inspections and whatnot because they were nonstandard. The same goes with plugins. If any website requires a 3rd party plugin to operate, they are in the "perpetual maintenance" mode to maintain an almost functional portable version and the plugin happy version that yells at you to get the 3rd party plugin. Rinse and repeat when ever any of the required 3rd party plugins has a major version change and the PHB wants it to now spin the new way, and now you have an old plugin page yelling at you that you need not only a plugin, but a plugin that is newer than the one you already have, maybe an old page that does not spin the way the PHB wants, and of course the standard page that yells at you to use the other 2, preferably the new one.
The day they start using pop-over flash ads is the first day of Google's demise.
The day that flash has serious privacy or security issues will be the end of flash as well. Preferences:: disable plugins is in my _security_ section on my browser. Says volumes to me, that is one of many reasons it is off.
Now more offtopic!!!
CT: Sorry folks. My email is broken this morning and i'm not getting error reports.
Ha! Taco is now a PHB manager type! No self respecting geek has "broken email". cat/var/spool/mail/cmdrtaco or better tail -f/var/spool/mail/cmdrtaco - or - telnet mailhost 110 or 143 or whatever port for your preferred protocol. telnet mailhost 25 to send mail or echo contents of message | mail -s "Subject here!" subscriber@example.com to send a mail, or with mailx or a Perl script or something.
Broken email. Geek badge at the door and don't let the door slam into you on the way out.
One thing you may not want to ask is: "Is there any advancement?" or something similar.
That depends. It could be good or bad. A "no" to "Is there any advancement?" means that the person is looking to go in some direction. If there is no advancement, and the person takes the job, they will leave the job to get advancement when the time comes. Sometimes advancement means "We like what you are doing, so here is a raise or bonus, thanks!" I've heard of that kind of thing, I don't have any advancement or pay to speak of, guess what I'm casually doing???
They don't want you to steal their job.
I let other people's insecurities and inabilities speak for themselves. I surely don't want to work "underneath" of them and have to undo the crap that they have done before it gets right.
They need to fill a specific position and want to hire somebody that will be satisfied with working in that position for the next 15 years.
I don't think in my lifetime that I have heard of an interview and new job hire with the intention of 15 years of service for the same position. Especially in 15 years of IT work. Think 1990 to 2005. Sysadmin is similar, but much of the other things are drastically different. Think 1975 to 1990. Even disco died during that time!
As anybody who's run a successful business knows: consumers are often pleased by the most surprising and insignificant things.
I've never run a successful or unsuccessful business, but I would almost agree that consumer are often pleased by the most surprising and insignificant things.
Surprising just means unexpected, nice, and often a sign of attention to detail. I'm pleasantly surprised with my car's design feature of a gas cap holder inside of the locking gas cap cover. My car is not a BMW, but they had that feature at least 20 years ago, and I though it was cool then. I've heard that a Lincoln is going to put heated windshield washer fluid in cars or has already. Pretty cool. Volvo has for years put a $0.02 piece of plastic on the windshield for valet tickets. Nice attention to detail.
I completely disagree with people liking insignificant things. Otherwise they would not notice or care about them.
And in fact the smartest people are often unable to sell a product!
Smart people often put up with junk that is in my opinion is dumb. I don't think that smart has to do necessarily with selling a product, although most smart people usually do other thing than sales. Smart people often have the inability to think outside of their smartness so their product is more of a niche thing that may or may not be tolerated by similar people. UNIX is similar (command line world). It was primarily created by and indirectly for developers and hackers. Nothing does anything really, but chain a few goodies together and in no time, you have everything. grep used to do nothing if you simply typed 'grep'. And, the usual ^C did not break out of it either. Of course you had to use ^D to tell grep that there was an EOF. More mature coding and GNU/Linux has fixed many of the limitations and gotchas of UNIX from ~15 years ago (thankfully!). I read the UNIX haters handbook (from 1992 if I remember correctly) for the first time recently, and almost all of its issues have been fixed.
Sure, UNIX/Linux and OS X have inconstancies and silly stuff in them, but much less than some other guys. I used to have to use annoyances.org as documentation of how to do things (or not) in Windows. There appears to be similar things for other products, but as I said, annoyances.org was essential 10 years ago, and I would assume it is still pretty good today.
We're not interested in telling people what they can't do.
And on the same vein, "There is more than one way to do it".
I love Perl.
Is it pretty? Not really.
Does it do OO? Pretty much, but its not pretty.
Can it go from a one liner to a pretty large app? Yup.
Is it portable and extensible. Hell yeah.
Is it fast? Fast enough. -- I remember on older machines you would run a perl script, and you could "feel" it compile itself by a slight lag before input or output, but I only notice a lag on machines that have not used that perl app yet (not cached) and uses tons of modules or whatever that need to be found on the disk. Once the program has been run, it starts as fast as any other. The runtime speed is anywhere between much slower to 4x slower than C or C++, but being that it usually takes 10x time to write C or C++ that Perl can do better, I'll go by the maxim of optimize later if needed.
I've not looked into Perl 6. 5 is fine with me. 6 embeds 5, so there is supposed to be no or very little backwards compatibility issues. 4 was not that good compared to 5, and the compatibility was not as good. Yuck, those people who still do &subroutine(); Thankfully, I don't see module'subroutine() syntax any more if it is still even supported (I think I remember the syntax correctly).
Perl is very powerful. Not the right tool for every job, but many of them. For most everything you want to do, there is a module that can be easily and portably installed (or 2 or 3) that can reduce the "reinventing the wheel" issue. The CPAN module and module dependancy can not be as fun as apt-get install CGI.pm, but perl is excellent and I hope it does not become an "old school" language. Its simply too easy to start to use, and go from there.
"And with this change, every mac on the internet will become even more secure than their Windows based counterparts."
Remove this brain dead inflamatory comment, and there's nothing really left of this story.
Very true. I was going to comment on that and the usual dupe, but both were caught by others (-1 Redundant for me).
However, the "brain dead inflammatory comment" was probably added by an "editor". I decipher the story topics as the following (reading slashcode would confirm that, but I rarely read articles before knowing everything about them:)
user_xyx writes "Something interesting in italics" Followed by editor slant to begin flamewar in regular font.
An "unedited" comment looks like (the next article on the front page):
evilduckie writes "According to this BBC article photos taken by the Mars Global Surveyor show the European Beagle 2 probe which was lost after it apparently crash-landed on Mars."
No extra flamage needed on this!
Since this is a dupe, go ahead and read my -1 Redundant post about IE on Mac "support" here. I tried to be more factual, and not as trollish but IE is clearly a substandard product on a Mac. And I said once before, that IE was either never or at least has not been supported for at least a few years.
I've found it unnecessary for so long that I'm not sure if its installed on my Tiger box, and I have not used it in a very, very long time on my Panther box.
This is pure mathematics, it's number theory. Don't expect practical applications; if they turn up, they're a nice bonus, but they're not why you do mathematics.
This isin't about saving a few bucks (yes I know its more then a few bucks) on medical testing its about not respecting human life in an equal manner.
"Third World lives are worth much less than the European lives. That is what colonialism was all about," said Srirupa Prasad, a visiting assistant professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yeah, everybody's life is respected equally. That is why every person in the world has the protection that the president of a nation has. Everybody is paid equally, imprisoned equally, everything is always equal. Always has been, always will be.
I hate to break it to people, but humans are no different than turtle doves, reindeer, partridges, calling birds, geese, or any of those other dumb animals.
The strong live, the weak die.
Humans are a pretty new species of animal on this rock that is approximated to be 4 to 5 billion years old.
Who on this site would volunteer or be subjected to this kind of testing or have it offered to them or consider it or have it as even something more than a thought "man, that would suck to be these guys in the article I didn't read"?
Rhetorical question, please put your hands down or quickly go to the line over there, we have some papers for you to sign.
Where does this equal crap come from? I've never even heard of identical twins that were 100% equal, but much of the human population believes this crap without a single shred of evidence in human history.
Look out while I part seas, walk on water, navigate reindeer across the world in a night (except to those that don't believe in reindeer riding sleds).
Lets get rid of the naughty and nice list too. Everybody is equal in the eyes of the Coca-Cola red dude now.
I'm special though because I was immaculately conceived by the One with the Noodly Appendage.
I wish I enjoyed the fantasy world as much as other people. It simply does not make sense to me because it makes no sense.
For those that still think that PCB stands for printed circuit board, or it may mean this, in this context it is "plasma kinetics of procarbazine" that appears to be an anti-cancer thing.
For me being a white boy, I wouldn't take something that was 100x more toxic in people over there. I'll stick to the stuff that isn't known to readily kill any human after determining that its OK (by the survival or death of others, right?!?).
No, I don't mean the stuff that they just put on TV ads like this. I'd take a risk of an STD (standard deviation) to get to know the author of this piece.
I can't tell if he's being serious, but if he truly does have no moral qualms about that last statement, then he frightens me.
Ethics is something you can either away with in your own mind and/or other people. Even killing a baby to prevent it from crying that would certainly kill a large group of people including the baby can be considered ethical. (Classic ethics "what if" kinda like the silly tree falling in the woods thing).
I've often wondered who really does human testing of new drugs. There has to be a jump from feeding them to animals to evaluate LD50 values and other side effects to humans. I have to refrain from the details, but there have been pretty nasty government experiments by on syphilis and other countries with a variety of stuff (horrible nasty stuff, I'll save the details from the children that read this site) that although it was not deemed ethical or moral, but the information was used because the results were interesting and could or would not be performed by others.
I can't be any more specifically vague today. I'm sure a few people know or can find out the details that I'm alluding to.
FWIW, the last time I heard, Linus uses vi. Its not common for hackers to change their editor.
He also is big into 8 character tabs with a wide window, but does not prefer too much nesting to make it "too" wide.
Vi with ts (tabstop) set to 8 and sw (shiftwidth) set to 4 is the only correct way to code according to me:)
4 character tab stops should be illegal by law or the users should be shot illegally because it is not portable across users, different editors, or other programs. Try to make sense of a 4 character tabstop when catting or tailing a file (yeah, you can change your terminal settings to have 4 character tabstops, and then make everything else not make sense. I've tried it.)
With the above settings in vi, it simply does "the right thing" unless another user cannot cope with the 4 space indention or worse sets it to 4 space tabstop, so I see Linus' point. I just don't like code as wide as it is long. I prefer thin code, meaningful comments, meaningful variable names, and free of bugs. The Linux kernel is good code. KDE and Gnome both suck, but suck less than they did before.
Mutt, the email program, aka, the mongrel of mailers, is the only piece of software that openly states "All email clients suck, mutt just sucks less" or similar. It certainly does suck less IMHO, but scares off younger children to see email in a terminal window without a "Send" button, but I enjoy scaring young children from time to time.
Because I typed the post in vi before the story went live, and the cut and paste from the terminal window into the browser did strange stuff with some of the carriage returns and whatnot. I guess I could have tried a different way to do the cut and paste, but I left my car running to warm it up, and wanted to get the post up before it got to far below the prime real estate section of the article.
To me, I believe it would make for better discussions if the top level posts were distributed randomly instead of only forwards or backwards, or at least have it as an option, but its not that big of a deal. I tend to notice that the first top level posts that make any sense get nominal moderation or more, and many replies that divert into whatever go from there, and the following discussions don't get much moderation or replies regardless of what the top level poster has to say.
To my knowledge, no user request has been rewarded since slashdot opened their doors, and this is not that big of a deal, but it would seem to me to invite more on topic and interesting threads if the top level replies were random.
When did Congress or the government become the people that decide the proper business model for privately owned businesses?
If an ISP doesn't want to give email access, burgers, usenet, peer-to-peer, DNS, or anything for that matter, and people are willing to pay for it, who cares?
I care about many of the things on the list, but I don't care to pay salaries for people that work for me, to spend their time making laws that gives me nothing or less than I have today, so that a minority of people can get permission to collude their stupid or obsolete business model into a cartel, and make regular supply and demand businesses illegal to operate.
Yes, Congress has the right to govern interstate commerce. Makes sense. But if I want to start a local, privately owned ISP with my private funds that only caters to housewives that only want to read 2 websites and receive 3 emails a month, that is my prerogative and right, and if it fails due to a lack of interest by the general public, that is OK too.
Its not OK to make illegal laws to make legal stuff that the majority of the public doesn't want. It doesn't seem to agree with democracy or capitalism. Must need new definition like science has been redefined by Kansas, and other definitions that are modified by the government from time to time.
Although it seems difficult for the slashdot editors to know the content of their site by reading it, reading their email, or searching it, if there were a way for us paying subscribers to make suggestions, at least I would appreciate it. Maybe others as well.
This is a borderline dupe or trupe, or maybe a logical continuation of a topic.
Other media that I have read, watched, or listened to call these things a "series", and they preface the stories as such. Is it our job to make almost 100% of the content, suggest the stories, and correct them too with our comments?
Just how did you conflate "helping the Iraqis build" -- as in: 'not done yet' -- with "immediately moving" -- as in: it's already done?
That was not my intention. My point was twofold. First, anybody that alludes or explicitly says to the fact that the United States is a peaceful country is either a liar, misinformed, or stupid. Second, although the United States still has a number of freedoms left, they are being eroded fairly quickly. To my knowledge, the changes to the rights and freedoms of "regular" US citizens over the past 5 years has not been previously done in US history to the degree, frequency, and magnitude than in any other half a decade. I say "regular" because the government used to differentiate more between "regular" (ie, white males) and "other" citizens (eg, females and minorities) much more overtly than they do today.
I'm almost amused that at least 2 of my 3 predictions came true with my grandparent post. I got troll and insightful, but not flamebate. I also forgot that I would get the nebulous "overrated" which I assume is mostly reserved for the slashdot staff to keep controversy out of public view, which may in turn help me in the future.
This is fascism, by definition, yet we keep saying, "Thank you sir; may I have another?"
I agree with the latter, but not the former. As the quoted definition says, fascism has a "dictator" which is someone who convinces up to many millions of people that he (or never to date that I know of, a she) rules almost exclusively, and usually is pretty nasty to people of their country and others as well. Mentioning Hitler automatically lowers ones perceived knowledge and respect based on common knowledge, but he is the most well known, and probably the nastiest of all fascists.
Bush, although I don't believe he is a man in power says silly stuff.
Yesteday, he said "On the political side, we know that free societies are peaceful societies, so we're helping the Iraqis build a free society with inclusive democratic institutions that will protect the interests of all Iraqis." I thought of immediately moving to Iraq in order to have freedom and to live in a peaceful society, but my intuition and all of the other junk that I have heard from other people makes me believe that Iraq is not very free or peaceful.
I've got other things to do now while I get moderated between flamebate, insightful, and troll.
I forgot that the lack of pirates is proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real (see intelligent design or read the book "What is wrong with Kansas"
Terminology descriptions for those that do not know or do not speak English natively:
legislation - conversation amongst lawmakers and people in power to perpetuate their power through making new laws (see circular reasoning)"Analog Hole" - Hole does not have particularly positive connotation,but the denotation is pretty benign. It just means a void, butsometimes a void is not good such as a hole in an argument (unlike circular reasoning). Analog means parallel or "old school" electronicsspeak where the signals are much more like the real world, especially interms of audio and video signals, but digital signals that are quantizedor algorithmically fuzzed encoded of analog signals is currentlyprefered because it is easier to manipulate with digital electronics andit has little to no signal loss when being transferred from one device to another. "Analog Hole" is a term used to increase the validity of end users' ability to copy material that is much easier to copy digitally except the people that "own" the data don't like people to copy it because it threatens their business model of profit of content distribution even though people are more than willing to distribute content for free or at a much lower price than the people that do it now. This is a very similar job of those that do legislation.
"last-ditch pirating mechanism" - another term to increase the validity of end users' skill and ability to copy content without the permission of the people that try to make a profit off of content distribution. Pirate used to be associated with people that used to rob ships at sea. For some reason, this is not much of an occupation despite the lack of physical or legal protection of goods on ships. Pirates today are more known for distributing digital content without the consent of those that try to profit from distributing digital content. "last-ditch" is a strange term meaning a desperate attempt to do something that has not been successfully done through more conventional means (see last-resort)
DRM - aka Digital Rights Management. A funny term to describe a way for those who try to make a profit from distributing digital content by making it more difficult to distribute digital content (see eliptical reasoning)
I hope this clears things up, and that it gets seen as a post on slashdot.org because it is something that actually took time and effort to think about so it will be placed lower in the ordered list of quicker, less thought out posts of others.
It must be Tuesday, I could never get the hang of Tuesdays.
there are three programs in the 'Internet' folder: Safari, Firefox, & MacIE. For the Mac users, they all go for Safari or Firefox.,
Who in their right mind would pick an internet web browser with a filename of "Safari" or "Firefox" over a web browser with a filename of "Internet Explorer"? I'm banking that Internet Explorer was not really renamed to "MacIE".
I've seen people that were mostly Mac users that used IE because they simply did not know what "Safari" was. I think that Firefox is not a very good name either for a fairly niche product that is mostly installed by geeks like us on friends and families computers from what I hear are often renamed to "Internet" or similar. I've done it with roommates that use my accounts on my Mac where I put a symlink of/Applications/Safari on the desktop named "Internet". No one questioned what it was, or had problems using it.
My Mac came with IE when I got it in 2004 (I guess Apple does not fear competition). It is the currently available version when I choose Internet Explorer -- About.... It shows me the version number and copyright information and that it is the currently available version. Also, there is a Support... button. That brings up a dialog box that ignores my "Click to here on a slider vs a page at a time" global setting that shows a bunch of text that is not selectable to copy and paste, but formatted in a readable format. There is a Save... button that saves all of this information to a extensionless file that when you click on it, it loads IE with that document that is not formatted which you will find exactly as follows including all formatting and the Times font at the end of this post. What kind of support is this, and how is this different than what is at least 2 years old? I've only used IE on my Mac to either debug a buggy website maybe a year to 18 months ago before compatabilites or whatever has changed that I can use Safari for everything. I've never came across software that has ever had this kind of "support".
I've heard that Office is good for the Mac, but I've only seen it, mostly PowerPoint, but have never used it. IE for the Mac is old and pretty lame. Windows Media Player is also old, very resource intensive, and does not play so many of the WMVs out there that I only download one if I'm very curios in the video and it is not available in another format, and it may or may not work.
Below is the "Support Information" file's contents formatted exactly as it is displaying in IE now:
This dialog contains essential hardware and software configuration information that describes your computer system. This information is needed by Technical Support to assist you in resolving any problems you may encounter. Explorer Version: 5.2.3 (5815.1) Encryption: 128 Bit User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.23; Mac_PowerPC) Machine Type: Unknown System Version: System 10.3.9 TCP/IP Software: Open Transport - version 16.3.0 Drag Manager: 68K & PPC Version Text Encoding Converter: Version 1.9.0 System Memory: 2097,148K Bytes Loaded plug-ins: DRM Plugin.bundle (no version info): Mimetypes currently handled by DRM Plugin.bundle: application/x-drm Flash Player Enabler.plugin (8.0 r22): Mimetypes currently handled by Flash Player Enabler.plugin: application/x-shockwave-flash application/futuresplash Java Applet Plugin Enabler (no version info): Mimetypes currently handled by Java Applet Plugin Enabler: application/x-java-applet application/x-java-applet;version=1.3.1 application/x-java-applet;version=1.3 application/x-java-applet;version=1.2.2 application/x-java-applet;version=1.2.1 application/x-java-applet;version=1.2 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1.3 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1.2 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1.1 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1 application/x-java-vm NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave (9.0): Mimetypes currently handled by NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave: application/x-director QuickTime Plugin.plugin (7.0.3): Mimetypes currently handled by QuickTime Plugin.plugin: application/sdp application/x-sdp application/x-rtsp video/msvideo video/flc audio/mid audio/vnd.qcelp audio/vnd.qcelp audio/AMR audio/x-gsm audio/aac audio/x-aac audio/x-caf video/x-mpeg video/3gpp audio/3gpp video/3gpp2 audio/3gpp2 audio/x-m4a audio/x-m4p audio/x-m4b video/sd-video application/x-mpeg video/x-m4v audio/x-mpeg video/mp4 audio/mp4 audio/x-mpeg audio/mpeg3 audio/x-mpeg3 image/x-macpaint image/pict image/x-quicktime image/x-sgi image/x-targa image/x-tiff image/jp2 image/jpeg2000 image/jpeg2000-image image/x-jpeg2000-image image/x-bmp Other mimetypes QuickTime Plugin.plugin can handle: video/quicktime video/x-msvideo video/avi video/quicktime audio/x-wav audio/wav audio/aiff audio/x-aiff audio/basic audio/x-midi audio/midi video/mpeg audio/mpeg audio/mpeg audio/mp3 audio/x-mp3 image/x-pict image/png image/x-png image/tiff RealPlayer Plugin (no version info): Other mimetypes R
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True, "sex" used to always be #1 and similar.
I guess google is doing no harm here.
ssh tunnels to avoid spying firewalls and I guess VPNs aid in those times of need. Not that I know anything about these things.
I'm a straight up coder, and even I know that HCI isn't analogous to 'interior design'.
True, I don't know where that horrible analogy come from. Analogies always suck, and become the focus of discussion rather than the topic. Analogies are analogous to metaphors, maybe.
HCI is supposed to cover all the ways that you interact with your computer - keyboard shortcuts (and yes, that includes the idea of having the cut/copy/paste keys right next to each other - that happens *because* of HCI work, not in spite of it)
No, it was not because of HCI work. No more than MII work (musical instrument interaction). Musicians have flexible equipment that is designed by musicians not MIIs. They have some of the most ergonomic devices, and I have never studied those in any ergonomics class. Musicians have to be able to play their equipment quickly and easily. A few milliseconds of stutter screws up the whole thing. Failure is not an option.
Are you sure you want to play the symphonic III midi voice?
Yes, No, Cancel, Apply
Symphonic III midi device not found.
OK.
Other musicians, WTF are you doing?
I've got to consult my MII again.
OK or Cancel?
muscle memory, principle of least surprise, hotspots (e.g. it's easier to move your cursor to one of the four corners of the screen than it is to any other location) and so on.
If HCI were so important, why do some programs place so many "drop down" items that they fill the screen, go forward and backward across the edges of the screen? I'm thinking of a common interface item that is used by millions of people every day that is labeled "Start". The same place you go to turn the computer off. Stop, and logout. Then a familiar silly sound, probably designed by another HCI guy, that goes something like duh de de duh, annoys everyone else in the otherwise quiet area.
I am growing increasingly weary of this attitude. Design is just as much an aspect of engineering as engineering is an aspect of design. A bunch of designers going willy-nilly with no handle on engineering is just as bad as a bunch of engineers doing the same thing to design.
Design sells.
CRT TVs and monitors are starting to look like something from the 50s.
I can't tell you how many of the newly designed Mustangs are in the parking lot, and a few of the classic ones. The ones from '79 or so though much of the '80s are in land fills.
Architectural design is integral with a roof over the head. And no, they don't need a HBI (Human Building Inteface) guru to figure that out, its part of their job. They also oversee the general contractor to make sure they put the junk in the right place.
Furniture design is almost 100% of the sale, unless its for the grey cubicle that is surrounding you. That is because of other reasons.
Art is useless, but is on about every wall of every building that I know of.
Yes, design is just as much an aspect of engineering as engineering is an aspect of design.
Well put.
Human factors is a part of engineering and it complicates things. HF gurus know nothing about making shit work (usually) they just tell the engineer to rework the device so that it is better for humans "this way", the engineer says, well it simply won't work then. The HF guy says, that is how it has to be. The engineer says the damn thing needs to work first. Manufacturing will change, components will get smaller, and we can adjust the other 10,000 things you didn't think about in the next revision. The PHB wonders why the HF guy is making the product release not make the deadline. The engineer wonders the same. The HF guy says we should all get along.
Yes, I was going to post the ubiquitous "Nothing to see here, move along..."
First, I doubt (hope) that there is not much that will be done to Longhorn's interface at this point. They have already done away with the the only reason that I have heard of to upgrade, WinFS.
Second, I have done a human-machine interaction stuff, and I think it is akin to interior decorating as compared to being an architect. Interior design is something that looks nice, but its fluff beyond that. Find me a remote control that can 1) be used by wife (sorry, but I have no wife, but have heard about WAF many, many times, Wife Acceptance, Factor, YMMV) 2) work with a dog or cat or person or anything else that is in line of sight with the components (hint RF, not IR) 3) have feedback from the device to the remote about what is going on 4) I can buy it in a store for around $50 and not pay $10k to have it custom programmed with IR hacks taped to the front of the devices.
To me, this is basic shit. We can hire somebody to make sure the colors match and set the proper mood, but we cannot easily turn on devices and adjust the volume.
Ergonomics and hci is not very interesting to me. Ergonomic mice are excellent if you sit upright, use your right hand only, don't use the scroll wheel too much, don't use the mouse too much, don't put it on top of the shelf, or do anything that is not approved by the ergonomist. Sure, the thing has to fit into your hand, but I don't see figuring that out as a full time job.
This guy did appear to do HCI and possibly GUI stuff at Xerox PARC. Keep in mind that is almost the exact same interface and capabilities that we have today, and that was over 20 years ago. The WIMP interface, network shares, shared printers, clipboard, doesn't this stuff seem familiar?
HCI often ignores human learning and "scalability" of said learning. Look at vi or emacs or notepad or textedit. I'll use notepad first since this is a Windows article, and I know almost nothing about it. OK, to copy text, hit ^C. Control C. OK C means Copy right? OK. Control means what? Just do it, after 2 times you will remember, and after 5 times you will not think about it anymore than pushing that funny pedal at the bottom of your car with your foot to make it go and the other one to make it stop. Lets continue. To paste the copied material, Control-V. We still don't know what control is, but V is short for Paste right? No. P is. Why is that? That makes no sense, it is not HCI. Oh, ^P prints. Why the hell does ^V supersede ^P. Look down at your keyboard. Odds are the top left characters are QWERTY then ASDFG then ZXCVB. Look, the C and the V are right next to each other. A quick ^C ^V would be much more difficult to to to the other hand on the other side of the keyboard. Still makes no sense (HCI guy pissed off), but its simple and it works. How about cut? ^X. WTF? Oh, it too is next to ^C.
OK, what about vi and/or computer games? In many you do something like j to go down (yes, I had to test this I don't think about it) k to go up, h to go left, l to go right. WTF? l goes right. Oh, that keyboard is layed out that way, and it is easier to learn than l for left u for up r for right and d for down.
Now, why the hell are the letters on the keyboard that way? Well, back when people typed on manual typewriters they would jam when people typed too fast. Especially when contra-lateral keying happened (left hand then right). OK, lets put the often used keys on the left hand side since 90% of the population is right handed, so they will use their slower, weaker (typewriters were actually manual!) hand will use the common keys in a bass-ackwards configuration to improve overall performance. That was in the 1800's, much before many of you younguns were born.
We still use that layout today. Are there "better" layouts. Yes! I've designed one, but would never, ever use it. Nobody else does, the 1800's model enables me to type between I guess 40 to 100 WPM dependin
At least it appears that the graphics they'll be using will be limited in scope. Hopefully this isn't a precursor to flash ads and animated gifs. The day they start using pop-over flash ads is the first day of Google's demise.
:: disable plugins is in my _security_ section on my browser. Says volumes to me, that is one of many reasons it is off.
/var/spool/mail/cmdrtaco or better tail -f /var/spool/mail/cmdrtaco - or - telnet mailhost 110 or 143 or whatever port for your preferred protocol. telnet mailhost 25 to send mail or echo contents of message | mail -s "Subject here!" subscriber@example.com to send a mail, or with mailx or a Perl script or something.
I'm an avid flash avoider and _any_ 3rd party plugins in general.
Plugins kill the portability of the web that is starting to finally come together after Microsoft wrecked the web with IE and frontpage. Aside from implementation and security issues, the late 90s and early 00s were not close enough browser independence.
Add 3rd party plugins, well they may not work on my wrist watch that I run a 16-bit version of Linux that has a 100% standards compliant browser, but the 3rd party proprietary plugin does not work. This gets multiplied linearly with each "essential" plugin. This is parallel to the 3rd party "ricer" mods that have become illegal in many areas like those tin can "mufflers" that made any slow low powered motor sound like a loud slow moving car that was still in need of paint over top of the bondo. The 3rd party stuff was simply not necessary to go from point A to B, and was a distraction to other drivers, and had issues with inspections and whatnot because they were nonstandard. The same goes with plugins. If any website requires a 3rd party plugin to operate, they are in the "perpetual maintenance" mode to maintain an almost functional portable version and the plugin happy version that yells at you to get the 3rd party plugin. Rinse and repeat when ever any of the required 3rd party plugins has a major version change and the PHB wants it to now spin the new way, and now you have an old plugin page yelling at you that you need not only a plugin, but a plugin that is newer than the one you already have, maybe an old page that does not spin the way the PHB wants, and of course the standard page that yells at you to use the other 2, preferably the new one.
The day they start using pop-over flash ads is the first day of Google's demise.
The day that flash has serious privacy or security issues will be the end of flash as well. Preferences
Now more offtopic!!!
CT: Sorry folks. My email is broken this morning and i'm not getting error reports.
Ha! Taco is now a PHB manager type! No self respecting geek has "broken email". cat
Broken email. Geek badge at the door and don't let the door slam into you on the way out.
One thing you may not want to ask is: "Is there any advancement?" or something similar.
That depends. It could be good or bad. A "no" to "Is there any advancement?" means that the person is looking to go in some direction. If there is no advancement, and the person takes the job, they will leave the job to get advancement when the time comes. Sometimes advancement means "We like what you are doing, so here is a raise or bonus, thanks!" I've heard of that kind of thing, I don't have any advancement or pay to speak of, guess what I'm casually doing???
They don't want you to steal their job.
I let other people's insecurities and inabilities speak for themselves. I surely don't want to work "underneath" of them and have to undo the crap that they have done before it gets right.
They need to fill a specific position and want to hire somebody that will be satisfied with working in that position for the next 15 years.
I don't think in my lifetime that I have heard of an interview and new job hire with the intention of 15 years of service for the same position. Especially in 15 years of IT work. Think 1990 to 2005. Sysadmin is similar, but much of the other things are drastically different. Think 1975 to 1990. Even disco died during that time!
Smart people often put up with junk that is in my opinion is dumb.
Yes, I am dumb and often don't proofread my posts and look dumb taking about dumb. I know better, but do worse...
As anybody who's run a successful business knows: consumers are often pleased by the most surprising and insignificant things.
I've never run a successful or unsuccessful business, but I would almost agree that consumer are often pleased by the most surprising and insignificant things.
Surprising just means unexpected, nice, and often a sign of attention to detail. I'm pleasantly surprised with my car's design feature of a gas cap holder inside of the locking gas cap cover. My car is not a BMW, but they had that feature at least 20 years ago, and I though it was cool then. I've heard that a Lincoln is going to put heated windshield washer fluid in cars or has already. Pretty cool. Volvo has for years put a $0.02 piece of plastic on the windshield for valet tickets. Nice attention to detail.
I completely disagree with people liking insignificant things. Otherwise they would not notice or care about them.
And in fact the smartest people are often unable to sell a product!
Smart people often put up with junk that is in my opinion is dumb. I don't think that smart has to do necessarily with selling a product, although most smart people usually do other thing than sales. Smart people often have the inability to think outside of their smartness so their product is more of a niche thing that may or may not be tolerated by similar people. UNIX is similar (command line world). It was primarily created by and indirectly for developers and hackers. Nothing does anything really, but chain a few goodies together and in no time, you have everything. grep used to do nothing if you simply typed 'grep'. And, the usual ^C did not break out of it either. Of course you had to use ^D to tell grep that there was an EOF. More mature coding and GNU/Linux has fixed many of the limitations and gotchas of UNIX from ~15 years ago (thankfully!). I read the UNIX haters handbook (from 1992 if I remember correctly) for the first time recently, and almost all of its issues have been fixed.
Sure, UNIX/Linux and OS X have inconstancies and silly stuff in them, but much less than some other guys. I used to have to use annoyances.org as documentation of how to do things (or not) in Windows. There appears to be similar things for other products, but as I said, annoyances.org was essential 10 years ago, and I would assume it is still pretty good today.
Bye bye MSIE on OS X. Nice knowing you.
We're not interested in telling people what they can't do.
And on the same vein, "There is more than one way to do it".
I love Perl.
Is it pretty? Not really.
Does it do OO? Pretty much, but its not pretty.
Can it go from a one liner to a pretty large app? Yup.
Is it portable and extensible. Hell yeah.
Is it fast? Fast enough. -- I remember on older machines you would run a perl script, and you could "feel" it compile itself by a slight lag before input or output, but I only notice a lag on machines that have not used that perl app yet (not cached) and uses tons of modules or whatever that need to be found on the disk. Once the program has been run, it starts as fast as any other. The runtime speed is anywhere between much slower to 4x slower than C or C++, but being that it usually takes 10x time to write C or C++ that Perl can do better, I'll go by the maxim of optimize later if needed.
I've not looked into Perl 6. 5 is fine with me. 6 embeds 5, so there is supposed to be no or very little backwards compatibility issues. 4 was not that good compared to 5, and the compatibility was not as good. Yuck, those people who still do &subroutine(); Thankfully, I don't see module'subroutine() syntax any more if it is still even supported (I think I remember the syntax correctly).
Perl is very powerful. Not the right tool for every job, but many of them. For most everything you want to do, there is a module that can be easily and portably installed (or 2 or 3) that can reduce the "reinventing the wheel" issue. The CPAN module and module dependancy can not be as fun as apt-get install CGI.pm, but perl is excellent and I hope it does not become an "old school" language. Its simply too easy to start to use, and go from there.
"And with this change, every mac on the internet will become even more secure than their Windows based counterparts."
:)
Remove this brain dead inflamatory comment, and there's nothing really left of this story.
Very true. I was going to comment on that and the usual dupe, but both were caught by others (-1 Redundant for me).
However, the "brain dead inflammatory comment" was probably added by an "editor". I decipher the story topics as the following (reading slashcode would confirm that, but I rarely read articles before knowing everything about them
user_xyx writes "Something interesting in italics" Followed by editor slant to begin flamewar in regular font.
An "unedited" comment looks like (the next article on the front page):
evilduckie writes "According to this BBC article photos taken by the Mars Global Surveyor show the European Beagle 2 probe which was lost after it apparently crash-landed on Mars."
No extra flamage needed on this!
Since this is a dupe, go ahead and read my -1 Redundant post about IE on Mac "support" here. I tried to be more factual, and not as trollish but IE is clearly a substandard product on a Mac. And I said once before, that IE was either never or at least has not been supported for at least a few years.
I've found it unnecessary for so long that I'm not sure if its installed on my Tiger box, and I have not used it in a very, very long time on my Panther box.
This is pure mathematics, it's number theory. Don't expect practical applications; if they turn up, they're a nice bonus, but they're not why you do mathematics.
But someday, we will be able to factor them!
This isin't about saving a few bucks (yes I know its more then a few bucks) on medical testing its about not respecting human life in an equal manner.
"Third World lives are worth much less than the European lives. That is what colonialism was all about," said Srirupa Prasad, a visiting assistant professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yeah, everybody's life is respected equally. That is why every person in the world has the protection that the president of a nation has. Everybody is paid equally, imprisoned equally, everything is always equal. Always has been, always will be.
I hate to break it to people, but humans are no different than turtle doves, reindeer, partridges, calling birds, geese, or any of those other dumb animals.
The strong live, the weak die.
Humans are a pretty new species of animal on this rock that is approximated to be 4 to 5 billion years old.
Who on this site would volunteer or be subjected to this kind of testing or have it offered to them or consider it or have it as even something more than a thought "man, that would suck to be these guys in the article I didn't read"?
Rhetorical question, please put your hands down or quickly go to the line over there, we have some papers for you to sign.
Where does this equal crap come from? I've never even heard of identical twins that were 100% equal, but much of the human population believes this crap without a single shred of evidence in human history.
Look out while I part seas, walk on water, navigate reindeer across the world in a night (except to those that don't believe in reindeer riding sleds).
Lets get rid of the naughty and nice list too. Everybody is equal in the eyes of the Coca-Cola red dude now.
I'm special though because I was immaculately conceived by the One with the Noodly Appendage.
I wish I enjoyed the fantasy world as much as other people. It simply does not make sense to me because it makes no sense.
PETA stands for "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals".
They don't care about humans except for arguably pretty, rich, famous ones that wear animal skins.
From my dead, cold back, waste, and hands will they take my leather coat, leather belt, and cheeseburger. People are so much weirder than "animals".
For those that still think that PCB stands for printed circuit board, or it may mean this, in this context it is "plasma kinetics of procarbazine" that appears to be an anti-cancer thing.
For me being a white boy, I wouldn't take something that was 100x more toxic in people over there. I'll stick to the stuff that isn't known to readily kill any human after determining that its OK (by the survival or death of others, right?!?).
No, I don't mean the stuff that they just put on TV ads like this. I'd take a risk of an STD (standard deviation) to get to know the author of this piece.
I can't tell if he's being serious, but if he truly does have no moral qualms about that last statement, then he frightens me.
Ethics is something you can either away with in your own mind and/or other people. Even killing a baby to prevent it from crying that would certainly kill a large group of people including the baby can be considered ethical. (Classic ethics "what if" kinda like the silly tree falling in the woods thing).
I've often wondered who really does human testing of new drugs. There has to be a jump from feeding them to animals to evaluate LD50 values and other side effects to humans. I have to refrain from the details, but there have been pretty nasty government experiments by on syphilis and other countries with a variety of stuff (horrible nasty stuff, I'll save the details from the children that read this site) that although it was not deemed ethical or moral, but the information was used because the results were interesting and could or would not be performed by others.
I can't be any more specifically vague today. I'm sure a few people know or can find out the details that I'm alluding to.
FWIW, the last time I heard, Linus uses vi. Its not common for hackers to change their editor.
He also is big into 8 character tabs with a wide window, but does not prefer too much nesting to make it "too" wide.
Vi with ts (tabstop) set to 8 and sw (shiftwidth) set to 4 is the only correct way to code according to me
4 character tab stops should be illegal by law or the users should be shot illegally because it is not portable across users, different editors, or other programs. Try to make sense of a 4 character tabstop when catting or tailing a file (yeah, you can change your terminal settings to have 4 character tabstops, and then make everything else not make sense. I've tried it.)
With the above settings in vi, it simply does "the right thing" unless another user cannot cope with the 4 space indention or worse sets it to 4 space tabstop, so I see Linus' point. I just don't like code as wide as it is long. I prefer thin code, meaningful comments, meaningful variable names, and free of bugs. The Linux kernel is good code. KDE and Gnome both suck, but suck less than they did before.
Mutt, the email program, aka, the mongrel of mailers, is the only piece of software that openly states "All email clients suck, mutt just sucks less" or similar. It certainly does suck less IMHO, but scares off younger children to see email in a terminal window without a "Send" button, but I enjoy scaring young children from time to time.
Because I typed the post in vi before the story went live, and the cut and paste from the terminal window into the browser did strange stuff with some of the carriage returns and whatnot. I guess I could have tried a different way to do the cut and paste, but I left my car running to warm it up, and wanted to get the post up before it got to far below the prime real estate section of the article.
To me, I believe it would make for better discussions if the top level posts were distributed randomly instead of only forwards or backwards, or at least have it as an option, but its not that big of a deal. I tend to notice that the first top level posts that make any sense get nominal moderation or more, and many replies that divert into whatever go from there, and the following discussions don't get much moderation or replies regardless of what the top level poster has to say.
To my knowledge, no user request has been rewarded since slashdot opened their doors, and this is not that big of a deal, but it would seem to me to invite more on topic and interesting threads if the top level replies were random.
When did Congress or the government become the people that decide the proper business model for privately owned businesses?
If an ISP doesn't want to give email access, burgers, usenet, peer-to-peer, DNS, or anything for that matter, and people are willing to pay for it, who cares?
I care about many of the things on the list, but I don't care to pay salaries for people that work for me, to spend their time making laws that gives me nothing or less than I have today, so that a minority of people can get permission to collude their stupid or obsolete business model into a cartel, and make regular supply and demand businesses illegal to operate.
Yes, Congress has the right to govern interstate commerce. Makes sense. But if I want to start a local, privately owned ISP with my private funds that only caters to housewives that only want to read 2 websites and receive 3 emails a month, that is my prerogative and right, and if it fails due to a lack of interest by the general public, that is OK too.
Its not OK to make illegal laws to make legal stuff that the majority of the public doesn't want. It doesn't seem to agree with democracy or capitalism. Must need new definition like science has been redefined by Kansas, and other definitions that are modified by the government from time to time.
Although it seems difficult for the slashdot editors to know the content of their site by reading it, reading their email, or searching it, if there were a way for us paying subscribers to make suggestions, at least I would appreciate it. Maybe others as well.
This is a borderline dupe or trupe, or maybe a logical continuation of a topic.
Other media that I have read, watched, or listened to call these things a "series", and they preface the stories as such. Is it our job to make almost 100% of the content, suggest the stories, and correct them too with our comments?
Just how did you conflate "helping the Iraqis build" -- as in: 'not done yet' -- with "immediately moving" -- as in: it's already done?
That was not my intention. My point was twofold. First, anybody that alludes or explicitly says to the fact that the United States is a peaceful country is either a liar, misinformed, or stupid. Second, although the United States still has a number of freedoms left, they are being eroded fairly quickly. To my knowledge, the changes to the rights and freedoms of "regular" US citizens over the past 5 years has not been previously done in US history to the degree, frequency, and magnitude than in any other half a decade. I say "regular" because the government used to differentiate more between "regular" (ie, white males) and "other" citizens (eg, females and minorities) much more overtly than they do today.
I'm almost amused that at least 2 of my 3 predictions came true with my grandparent post. I got troll and insightful, but not flamebate. I also forgot that I would get the nebulous "overrated" which I assume is mostly reserved for the slashdot staff to keep controversy out of public view, which may in turn help me in the future.
This is fascism, by definition, yet we keep saying, "Thank you sir; may I have another?"
I agree with the latter, but not the former. As the quoted definition says, fascism has a "dictator" which is someone who convinces up to many millions of people that he (or never to date that I know of, a she) rules almost exclusively, and usually is pretty nasty to people of their country and others as well. Mentioning Hitler automatically lowers ones perceived knowledge and respect based on common knowledge, but he is the most well known, and probably the nastiest of all fascists.
Bush, although I don't believe he is a man in power says silly stuff.
Yesteday, he said "On the political side, we know that free societies are peaceful societies, so we're helping the Iraqis build a free society with inclusive democratic institutions that will protect the interests of all Iraqis." I thought of immediately moving to Iraq in order to have freedom and to live in a peaceful society, but my intuition and all of the other junk that I have heard from other people makes me believe that Iraq is not very free or peaceful.
I've got other things to do now while I get moderated between flamebate, insightful, and troll.
I forgot that the lack of pirates is proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real (see intelligent design or read the book "What is wrong with Kansas"
Terminology descriptions for those that do not know or do not speak English natively:
legislation - conversation amongst lawmakers and people in power to perpetuate their power through making new laws (see circular reasoning)"Analog Hole" - Hole does not have particularly positive connotation,but the denotation is pretty benign. It just means a void, butsometimes a void is not good such as a hole in an argument (unlike circular reasoning). Analog means parallel or "old school" electronicsspeak where the signals are much more like the real world, especially interms of audio and video signals, but digital signals that are quantizedor algorithmically fuzzed encoded of analog signals is currentlyprefered because it is easier to manipulate with digital electronics andit has little to no signal loss when being transferred from one device to another. "Analog Hole" is a term used to increase the validity of end users' ability to copy material that is much easier to copy digitally except the people that "own" the data don't like people to copy it because it threatens their business model of profit of content distribution even though people are more than willing to distribute content for free or at a much lower price than the people that do it
now. This is a very similar job of those that do legislation.
"last-ditch pirating mechanism" - another term to increase the validity of end users' skill and ability to copy content without the permission
of the people that try to make a profit off of content distribution.
Pirate used to be associated with people that used to rob ships at sea.
For some reason, this is not much of an occupation despite the lack of
physical or legal protection of goods on ships. Pirates today are more
known for distributing digital content without the consent of those
that try to profit from distributing digital content. "last-ditch" is a
strange term meaning a desperate attempt to do something that has not
been successfully done through more conventional means (see last-resort)
DRM - aka Digital Rights Management. A funny term to describe a way
for those who try to make a profit from distributing digital content by
making it more difficult to distribute digital content (see eliptical
reasoning)
I hope this clears things up, and that it gets seen as a post on
slashdot.org because it is something that actually took time and effort
to think about so it will be placed lower in the ordered list of
quicker, less thought out posts of others.
It must be Tuesday, I could never get the hang of Tuesdays.
Don't ask why the formatting is weird.
there are three programs in the 'Internet' folder: Safari, Firefox, & MacIE. For the Mac users, they all go for Safari or Firefox.,
/Applications/Safari on the desktop named "Internet". No one questioned what it was, or had problems using it.
Who in their right mind would pick an internet web browser with a filename of "Safari" or "Firefox" over a web browser with a filename of "Internet Explorer"? I'm banking that Internet Explorer was not really renamed to "MacIE".
I've seen people that were mostly Mac users that used IE because they simply did not know what "Safari" was. I think that Firefox is not a very good name either for a fairly niche product that is mostly installed by geeks like us on friends and families computers from what I hear are often renamed to "Internet" or similar. I've done it with roommates that use my accounts on my Mac where I put a symlink of
My Mac came with IE when I got it in 2004 (I guess Apple does not fear competition). It is the currently available version when I choose Internet Explorer -- About.... It shows me the version number and copyright information and that it is the currently available version. Also, there is a Support... button. That brings up a dialog box that ignores my "Click to here on a slider vs a page at a time" global setting that shows a bunch of text that is not selectable to copy and paste, but formatted in a readable format. There is a Save... button that saves all of this information to a extensionless file that when you click on it, it loads IE with that document that is not formatted which you will find exactly as follows including all formatting and the Times font at the end of this post. What kind of support is this, and how is this different than what is at least 2 years old? I've only used IE on my Mac to either debug a buggy website maybe a year to 18 months ago before compatabilites or whatever has changed that I can use Safari for everything. I've never came across software that has ever had this kind of "support".
I've heard that Office is good for the Mac, but I've only seen it, mostly PowerPoint, but have never used it. IE for the Mac is old and pretty lame. Windows Media Player is also old, very resource intensive, and does not play so many of the WMVs out there that I only download one if I'm very curios in the video and it is not available in another format, and it may or may not work.
Below is the "Support Information" file's contents formatted exactly as it is displaying in IE now:
This dialog contains essential hardware and software configuration information that describes your computer system. This information is needed by Technical Support to assist you in resolving any problems you may encounter. Explorer Version: 5.2.3 (5815.1) Encryption: 128 Bit User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.23; Mac_PowerPC) Machine Type: Unknown System Version: System 10.3.9 TCP/IP Software: Open Transport - version 16.3.0 Drag Manager: 68K & PPC Version Text Encoding Converter: Version 1.9.0 System Memory: 2097,148K Bytes Loaded plug-ins: DRM Plugin.bundle (no version info): Mimetypes currently handled by DRM Plugin.bundle: application/x-drm Flash Player Enabler.plugin (8.0 r22): Mimetypes currently handled by Flash Player Enabler.plugin: application/x-shockwave-flash application/futuresplash Java Applet Plugin Enabler (no version info): Mimetypes currently handled by Java Applet Plugin Enabler: application/x-java-applet application/x-java-applet;version=1.3.1 application/x-java-applet;version=1.3 application/x-java-applet;version=1.2.2 application/x-java-applet;version=1.2.1 application/x-java-applet;version=1.2 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1.3 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1.2 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1.1 application/x-java-applet;version=1.1 application/x-java-vm NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave (9.0): Mimetypes currently handled by NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave: application/x-director QuickTime Plugin.plugin (7.0.3): Mimetypes currently handled by QuickTime Plugin.plugin: application/sdp application/x-sdp application/x-rtsp video/msvideo video/flc audio/mid audio/vnd.qcelp audio/vnd.qcelp audio/AMR audio/x-gsm audio/aac audio/x-aac audio/x-caf video/x-mpeg video/3gpp audio/3gpp video/3gpp2 audio/3gpp2 audio/x-m4a audio/x-m4p audio/x-m4b video/sd-video application/x-mpeg video/x-m4v audio/x-mpeg video/mp4 audio/mp4 audio/x-mpeg audio/mpeg3 audio/x-mpeg3 image/x-macpaint image/pict image/x-quicktime image/x-sgi image/x-targa image/x-tiff image/jp2 image/jpeg2000 image/jpeg2000-image image/x-jpeg2000-image image/x-bmp Other mimetypes QuickTime Plugin.plugin can handle: video/quicktime video/x-msvideo video/avi video/quicktime audio/x-wav audio/wav audio/aiff audio/x-aiff audio/basic audio/x-midi audio/midi video/mpeg audio/mpeg audio/mpeg audio/mp3 audio/x-mp3 image/x-pict image/png image/x-png image/tiff RealPlayer Plugin (no version info): Other mimetypes R