McDonald's ubiquity demonstrates that for the market it's targeting, it is indeed, the best restaurant.
No, you are making the same old mistake. McDonalds is the most popular restaurant, and it is the most successful restaurant, but those are not at all the same thing as being the "best".
What does "best" mean? In the context of the market McDonalds targets, "best" means the optimum combination of low prices, efficient service, and food that looks, smells, and tastes consistently good. But the fact that McDonalds is more popular and more successful than any other fast-food chain does not mean that it actually scores better on any of these metrics: it just means that people think it does. In other words, we're talking about quality of marketing, not quality of product.
And it's not even a great analogy, because the fast food market is very competitive, while the computer operating system market is about as uncompetitive as they come.
People don't choose Microsoft because it's the best. People don't choose Microsoft because it costs less, or because it's more secure, or because it's more reliable, or even because it's easier to use. People choose Microsoft because it's familiar, because everyone else chooses Microsoft, because nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Most people never even get so far as evaluating alternatives or trying to decide whether or not Microsoft provides the best fit for their needs -- Windows is so ubiquitous that people simply stick with it automatically!
There are reasons for Microsoft's ubiquity.
Of course there are. The main one is that about 15 years ago Microsoft managed to achieve a situation where there was no serious alternative on the desktop, and then they leveraged the power this gave them brilliantly to entrench themselves firmly enough to become almost impossible to dislodge, however good the would-be competition becomes.
To take your fast-food analogy in a different and possibly more successful direction, the reason Microsoft dominates the desktop is pretty similar to the reason fast food is more successful than haute cuisine: the vast majority of people don't care about quality, they just want to stay in their comfort zone and stick with what they've always been used to having. Whether Linux + OpenOffice.org is better or worse than Windows is completely irrelevant: most people will reject it purely because it's different.
(The fact that you and your poor friend had trouble getting wireless to work in Ubuntu, on the other hand, is totally meaningless. I can counter that anecdote with another: I and a very IT-literate friend spent the best part of a weekend unsuccessfully trying to get wireless to work in Windows XP. Wow, now we have two opposing stories, and neither of them is a valid argument. [In fact, neither of us can even prove we're not exaggerating!] Can we drop the FUDdy silliness now and get back to rational discussion? Thanks.)
Newsflash to USA: the world does not revolve around you.
China has many pressing reasons to be interested in India that have nothing whatsoever to do with the USA: thousands of miles of disputed borders, for one, and rivalry in the race for economic and political influence as both nations develop. The fact that a handful of US-based companies may be storing information in Indian databases probably doesn't even make it into the top 50 reasons why China might want to conduct cyberwaar in India, let alone the top 10...
Rowling is specifically "outraged" because she's been working on her own compendium. Should she just scrap one of the secondary projects for her Potter franchise so that shmucko McFanboi can publish his?
Yeah, you know, if you'd actually read the fucking article you'd know that it actually addresses this point...
Basically, the key fact you've missed is that there is not in fact a law stating that there can be only one Harry Potter encyclopedia in the world. A 10,000-copy print run of a fan book is not going to stop Rowling publishing her own compendium or doing anything else she damn well likes. The kind of people who will buy this fan book will also automatically buy anything Rowling publishes, so it wouldn't even reduce her sales!
It wasn't originally a book, but a short story. ... then it was stretched out into a book... ... then the book was stretched out into a series... ... then the series was stretched out into a career... Oh, it really IS like a Harry Potter story after all...
To be fair, Arthur C. Clarke did pretty much the same thing with 2001...
Also, what is the deal with basic OS programs being referred to by their name? Dolphin? Why not just call it 'file browser'? This is really confusing and overwhelming for new users.
A default OS X setup presents the user with unintuitive names like "Finder" and "Safari". But nobody complains about that.
Why? Possibly because it actually isn't a big deal. It only takes a few minutes to learn that "Safari" is the web browser, or that "Excel" deals with big tables, or that "Dolphin" is a file browser. Humans are good at associating arbitrary symbols with meanings: that's what language is.
If it's not easy for people to find the file browser in KDE 4, then the problem lies in where that file browser is located and how it's launched, not what it's called.
Yeah, every time I do my yearly let's give Linux another chance the first thing that jumps out at me are the awful font rendering.
I'll grant you, the default settings do truly suck. FreeType auto-hinting is hideous. This was a big sticking point for me as well.
However, it does only take a few minutes to change the configuration to something that looks just as good as OS X. Clearly there are other things putting you off Linux, which is fine (it isn't the right choice for everyone), but next time you give it another chance, take the time to disable auto-hinting and watch as the fonts become bearable before your very eyes...
Ugh, this sounds terrible. The reasoning in that paragraph basically runs like this:
"We noticed that a lot of you users out there are using the Desktop in a way we don't approve of. So we took away your ability to do that."
What a stunningly user-hostile approach.
Well, yeah, if you deliberately twist their words, apply the worst possible interpretation to everything, and invent a secret evil motive to project onto them, then I guess you could see it that way.
Personally, I read it as "We wanted to let you do all kinds of things with your desktop that you can't currently do because they don't work well if the desktop is set up to be a file dump, so we've removed that feature in order to be able to give you loads more options."
I don't think taking away the ability to write files to the desktop is a big deal, because there are plenty of other places to store files that are just as convenient to access. The only reason I've ever known anyone use the desktop to store files is simply because it was the default location for whatever application they were using.
Note that I'm not a KDE fanboy, by the way. I don't use KDE at all. My favourite desktop environment is actually CDE (yes, seriously!) -- which also doesn't allow you to store files on the desktop. In CDE, the desktop is where you put minimised windows. It works very well; it's very convenient to be able to arrange my programs in a spatial 2D grid, rather than having to use the cramped and inefficient 1D taskbar/dock that every other desktop environment seems inexplicably to have adopted.
You aren't alone. I loathe awesomebar. It boggles my mind why there isn't an option to turn it off/revert to traditional behavior. From reading on the forums, the devs have pretty dismissed any anti-AB sentiments.
Largely because most of the anti-AB reaction is the usual resistance to change that we've seen time and time again.
Look, I hated the AB at first myself. Practically the first thing I did when I upgraded to FF3b5 was to hit Google and start searching for a way to switch it off and get the old behaviour back. Now, a few weeks on, it doesn't strike me as so bad at all. Searching on page titles has actually been useful a few times. It's learnt which pages I like, so it generally comes up with sensible suggestions now. I may even end up liking it.
The same thing has happened time and time again. It's hard to believe now, but once I even hated the search-bar at the bottom of the screen, and desperately hoped they'd bring back the old search dialog! Seriously, this is just normal human behaviour. Give it a bit more time, and eventually you'll get used to the AB and stop hating it.
(Whether you'll ever love the name is another question. "Awesomebar" is not quite as stunningly disastrous as the GIMP's use of a pejorative term for someone with physical disabilities, but it's certainly embarrassingly lame.)
As *any* conversation grows longer, the probability of *any* subject to come up approaches unity.
This is far from self-evident. It will only be true if the number of subjects discussed is proportional to the length of a conversation. I consider this doubtful; some of the longest conversations I've ever had have been rigidly limited to a single subject, while some of the shorter ones have covered a wide range of topics. However, I haven't done any scientific studies, so I'm not in a position to make any meaningful judgement either way. Have you actually studied any corpora of conversations and found such a correlation, or is your assertion equally baseless?
"...the Web site looks so consistently nice and polished no matter which browser or resolution is used to access it."
Except it doesn't; for me the text in the far left column overflows its space, so e.g. "ALL CLASSIFIEDS" is overlapping with the headline to the right. Not exactly what I'd call "polished". (The problem, in case any NY Times folks are reading this and care, is that my eyesight isn't perfect, so I use largish fonts, which the NY Times website apparently doesn't account for.)
It's nice to see that not only does the New York Times hire the best writers, they also hire the best techs.
It would be nice to see that, but if their techs can't even cope with people who use the "Increase Font Size" option in their browser, they hardly qualify as "the best".
(Your fundamental point is sound, of course; the specific problem I have with their site is one that would still occur even if they were using 100%-compliant XHTML Strict and CSS. It's a flaw of the type that standards cannot prevent. But it's one that "the best techs" wouldn't have any trouble handling...)
With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein?
Movies are not targeted at fans of "actual literature", who generally prefer to consume their literature directly from the book, without the massive cuts required to cram it into 2 hours and the massive changes required to translate from a verbal to a visual medium.
Yes, there are pointers flying around, but they are out of sight, and managed by code that actually does things properly for you.
Right up until the moment that you need to use inheritance, and suddenly you realise that you're screwed, because the only way you can use an STL container with C++'s broken OO is if you're sticking pointers in that container. Pointers that you have to manage.
(Oh, sure, there's a Boost library that offers STL-like containers that can manage pointers to polymorphic objects for you, but by the time you find out about that, you've already written reams of code that's totally broken in subtle ways...)
No, a trade secret is for something you don't want copied. A patent is for something where you want to make money off of the copies.
Except when the thing you don't want copied is something sufficiently trivial or obvious that there's a very high risk that other people will invent it independently. In that case, the only way to stop them copying it is to patent it; that buys you 20 years or so.
In theory the obviousness tests are supposed to stop this happening, but these days the patent office motto seems to be "rubber-stamp 'em all, let the courts sort 'em out"...
Re:the imminent return of the really cool language
on
The Return of Ada
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· Score: 1
Fortran and cobol are recently making a comeback as well. It seems to be cool, again. Does this mean we will see them as a.net application? Suppose so.. I can see it now Visual Cobol, and Visual Ada and Visual Fortran....
It's actually tricky to differentiate nonexistent subdomains vs. unregistered domains [...] I'm pretty optimistic that, now that the issue's been identified, everyone will stop violating trademarks.
But even serving ads on a completely-non-existent domain might violate a trademark. For example, there is no such domain as coca-cola.museum, but I really don't think Coca-Cola would be very happy if an ISP started serving ads to anyone who tried to visit it.
Now when I ask otherwise normal geeks if they have a PGP key, they just look at me like I'm from Mars. I don't understand, PGP has gotten only easier to use, there's a great Firefox extension for it, but it has faded in popularity.
Of course it has; it's a solution looking for a problem. Sorry to say, but most of us don't have anything to hide, and that does mean that there's not much point hiding it.
What's happened is that we have, in general, grown up a bit and realised that encrypting everything is not "protecting our freedoms" or "sticking it to the man", it's just making our own lives inconvenient for no real gain whatsoever. I don't believe the government has orbital mind control satellites, I don't believe that CCTV cameras have secret face-recognition software that is tracking my every move in public, I don't believe that HM the Queen and George W. Bush are actually reptilian aliens in human costumes, and I don't believe that there is a magical Echelon system reading all my emails and using magical AI to separate the sheep from the terrorists.
Amazingly enough, growing out of childish conspiracy theories is tremendously liberating. Paranoia is not liberty. Get too obsessed with "protecting your freedom" and you will find that you've locked yourself up in a prison of your own making. Instead, recognise that you are not the centre of the universe and that, frankly, the government doesn't give a damn about your emails unless you're actually plotting a terrorist atrocity, and you can get on with enjoying your life.
(Now, using public-key technology to sign emails is a different matter. It would be great if that kind of thing were more common; it would deal a bitter blow to phishing if all bank emails were signed, for example.)
So, people who lean left are completely convinced that Wikipedia is biased to the right, and people who lean right are completely convinced that Wikipedia is biased to the left?
Hmm, I wonder what possible situation could lead to those two perceptions? Nah... couldn't be.
since effectively his "reference count" will never go below one......he has become immortal!
Oh, please. God would not use a slow and flawed method like reference counting; deterministic finalisation may be a big advantage for some human programmers, but the Almighty has no need of such crutches. God uses proper garbage collection: mark, sweep, and occasionally rain down fire and brimstone for good measure.
(To be fair, the impressive thing about the US highway system is its sheer size. Those of us living in far smaller countries can't really criticise you for not maintaining everything in perfect condition -- we have it much easier!)
Right click the title bar and select the "always on top" option, miraculously these windows will always be placed on top of a focused window.
Including focused windows belonging to other applications, which you might actually want to be on top of the GIMP windows.
Use the stick/pin option to have toolboxes accessible on all your virtual desktops and then distribute the document windows accordingly or shade/rollup document windows you're not using. This becomes second nature in no time and is a clear workflow enhancement when compared against MDI.
Provided you only use your computer for GIMP, yeah. If you actually wanted to multitask, you've just made it a whole lot less efficient to use all those other applications.
Thanks, but I'd rather set my desktop up for my own convenience, not to work around the UI deficiencies of a single idiosyncratic application.
On Linux what you want is to set Preferences->Window Management:Hint for Toolbox to "Utility". You may as well set it to that for "Hint for other Docks" as well. Now you will only have image windows appearing in the taskbar, and clicking on the image window will raise the toolbox and other docks with it.
Except that this doesn't work in compiz, which is what the GP said he was using, so your wonderful suggestion won't help him in the slightest.
"Change your window manager" is not the answer people want to hear. Why should he have to change his window manager just for one application, when every single other application he uses works just fine with the window manager he wants to use?
The point here is that jpeg is 8-bit per channel. Unless your shooting in tiff or raw, there is no need for 16-bit channels.
Unless you're doing any postprocessing, of course; in that case you want to use 16-bit channels even if the original was only 8-bit, or you'll be losing information every time you apply a filter.
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What does "best" mean? In the context of the market McDonalds targets, "best" means the optimum combination of low prices, efficient service, and food that looks, smells, and tastes consistently good. But the fact that McDonalds is more popular and more successful than any other fast-food chain does not mean that it actually scores better on any of these metrics: it just means that people think it does. In other words, we're talking about quality of marketing, not quality of product.
And it's not even a great analogy, because the fast food market is very competitive, while the computer operating system market is about as uncompetitive as they come.
People don't choose Microsoft because it's the best. People don't choose Microsoft because it costs less, or because it's more secure, or because it's more reliable, or even because it's easier to use. People choose Microsoft because it's familiar, because everyone else chooses Microsoft, because nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Most people never even get so far as evaluating alternatives or trying to decide whether or not Microsoft provides the best fit for their needs -- Windows is so ubiquitous that people simply stick with it automatically!Of course there are. The main one is that about 15 years ago Microsoft managed to achieve a situation where there was no serious alternative on the desktop, and then they leveraged the power this gave them brilliantly to entrench themselves firmly enough to become almost impossible to dislodge, however good the would-be competition becomes.
To take your fast-food analogy in a different and possibly more successful direction, the reason Microsoft dominates the desktop is pretty similar to the reason fast food is more successful than haute cuisine: the vast majority of people don't care about quality, they just want to stay in their comfort zone and stick with what they've always been used to having. Whether Linux + OpenOffice.org is better or worse than Windows is completely irrelevant: most people will reject it purely because it's different.
(The fact that you and your poor friend had trouble getting wireless to work in Ubuntu, on the other hand, is totally meaningless. I can counter that anecdote with another: I and a very IT-literate friend spent the best part of a weekend unsuccessfully trying to get wireless to work in Windows XP. Wow, now we have two opposing stories, and neither of them is a valid argument. [In fact, neither of us can even prove we're not exaggerating!] Can we drop the FUDdy silliness now and get back to rational discussion? Thanks.)
Newsflash to USA: the world does not revolve around you.
China has many pressing reasons to be interested in India that have nothing whatsoever to do with the USA: thousands of miles of disputed borders, for one, and rivalry in the race for economic and political influence as both nations develop. The fact that a handful of US-based companies may be storing information in Indian databases probably doesn't even make it into the top 50 reasons why China might want to conduct cyberwaar in India, let alone the top 10...
Basically, the key fact you've missed is that there is not in fact a law stating that there can be only one Harry Potter encyclopedia in the world. A 10,000-copy print run of a fan book is not going to stop Rowling publishing her own compendium or doing anything else she damn well likes. The kind of people who will buy this fan book will also automatically buy anything Rowling publishes, so it wouldn't even reduce her sales!
Why? Possibly because it actually isn't a big deal. It only takes a few minutes to learn that "Safari" is the web browser, or that "Excel" deals with big tables, or that "Dolphin" is a file browser. Humans are good at associating arbitrary symbols with meanings: that's what language is.
If it's not easy for people to find the file browser in KDE 4, then the problem lies in where that file browser is located and how it's launched, not what it's called.
However, it does only take a few minutes to change the configuration to something that looks just as good as OS X. Clearly there are other things putting you off Linux, which is fine (it isn't the right choice for everyone), but next time you give it another chance, take the time to disable auto-hinting and watch as the fonts become bearable before your very eyes...
Personally, I read it as "We wanted to let you do all kinds of things with your desktop that you can't currently do because they don't work well if the desktop is set up to be a file dump, so we've removed that feature in order to be able to give you loads more options."
I don't think taking away the ability to write files to the desktop is a big deal, because there are plenty of other places to store files that are just as convenient to access. The only reason I've ever known anyone use the desktop to store files is simply because it was the default location for whatever application they were using.
Note that I'm not a KDE fanboy, by the way. I don't use KDE at all. My favourite desktop environment is actually CDE (yes, seriously!) -- which also doesn't allow you to store files on the desktop. In CDE, the desktop is where you put minimised windows. It works very well; it's very convenient to be able to arrange my programs in a spatial 2D grid, rather than having to use the cramped and inefficient 1D taskbar/dock that every other desktop environment seems inexplicably to have adopted.
Look, I hated the AB at first myself. Practically the first thing I did when I upgraded to FF3b5 was to hit Google and start searching for a way to switch it off and get the old behaviour back. Now, a few weeks on, it doesn't strike me as so bad at all. Searching on page titles has actually been useful a few times. It's learnt which pages I like, so it generally comes up with sensible suggestions now. I may even end up liking it.
The same thing has happened time and time again. It's hard to believe now, but once I even hated the search-bar at the bottom of the screen, and desperately hoped they'd bring back the old search dialog! Seriously, this is just normal human behaviour. Give it a bit more time, and eventually you'll get used to the AB and stop hating it.
(Whether you'll ever love the name is another question. "Awesomebar" is not quite as stunningly disastrous as the GIMP's use of a pejorative term for someone with physical disabilities, but it's certainly embarrassingly lame.)
- Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera
- Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, or Skype
- Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, or Eudora
- Windows Media Player, Quicktime Player, or RealPlayer
Man, no wonder Windows has such a tiny market share, with all that consumer-unfriendly choice!(Your fundamental point is sound, of course; the specific problem I have with their site is one that would still occur even if they were using 100%-compliant XHTML Strict and CSS. It's a flaw of the type that standards cannot prevent. But it's one that "the best techs" wouldn't have any trouble handling...)
(Oh, sure, there's a Boost library that offers STL-like containers that can manage pointers to polymorphic objects for you, but by the time you find out about that, you've already written reams of code that's totally broken in subtle ways...)
In theory the obviousness tests are supposed to stop this happening, but these days the patent office motto seems to be "rubber-stamp 'em all, let the courts sort 'em out"...
What's happened is that we have, in general, grown up a bit and realised that encrypting everything is not "protecting our freedoms" or "sticking it to the man", it's just making our own lives inconvenient for no real gain whatsoever. I don't believe the government has orbital mind control satellites, I don't believe that CCTV cameras have secret face-recognition software that is tracking my every move in public, I don't believe that HM the Queen and George W. Bush are actually reptilian aliens in human costumes, and I don't believe that there is a magical Echelon system reading all my emails and using magical AI to separate the sheep from the terrorists.
Amazingly enough, growing out of childish conspiracy theories is tremendously liberating. Paranoia is not liberty. Get too obsessed with "protecting your freedom" and you will find that you've locked yourself up in a prison of your own making. Instead, recognise that you are not the centre of the universe and that, frankly, the government doesn't give a damn about your emails unless you're actually plotting a terrorist atrocity, and you can get on with enjoying your life.
(Now, using public-key technology to sign emails is a different matter. It would be great if that kind of thing were more common; it would deal a bitter blow to phishing if all bank emails were signed, for example.)
So, people who lean left are completely convinced that Wikipedia is biased to the right, and people who lean right are completely convinced that Wikipedia is biased to the left?
Hmm, I wonder what possible situation could lead to those two perceptions? Nah... couldn't be.
(To be fair, the impressive thing about the US highway system is its sheer size. Those of us living in far smaller countries can't really criticise you for not maintaining everything in perfect condition -- we have it much easier!)
Thanks, but I'd rather set my desktop up for my own convenience, not to work around the UI deficiencies of a single idiosyncratic application.
"Change your window manager" is not the answer people want to hear. Why should he have to change his window manager just for one application, when every single other application he uses works just fine with the window manager he wants to use?