I learned that values should be expressed as variables even if the coder does not expect them to change.
It's not unheard of to hardcore values while debugging. Say for example that one wanted to find the problems in the getTime() function. You might go through and comment out alot of the calls from getTime() to other functions, replacing them with values that you knew were correct . For example sendTimeRequest(getNTPServerAddress()) might be replaced with sendTimeRequest("128.105.39.11:23457"). Now suppose that after you had isolated and fixed the problem you forget to reinstate one of those calls. Now you have a piece of software that appears to work except that it always sends requests to the same server+port.
This might have been caused by a simple mistake and not the really stupid design flaw that declaring the time server as a constant would be.
This gives me an idea for a similar sytem. Make two plates(ie out of plastic) and glue springs to each corner of one plate, facing upwards. The springs should be just strong enough to hold up the second plate. Now glue metal contacts onto each of the plates and wire them to an electric buzzer. Place the top plate on top of the springs. In order to activate the system simply place hand on top of the plate, the weight alone should force the two contacts together, activating the buzzer. If you cut a section out of a nightstand and install the device so that the top plate is flush with the stand's surface she can rest her hand on the stand and activate the buzzer by moving her hand an inch or two so that it rests on the device. For added security you can connect the system to an autodialer that will call you/911 with a pre-recorded message.
heh.. Just shows how much I know about conversions.. Got confused... 160pounds is 70 something kilos
Yes it does. Kilos are a unit of mass, pounds are a unit of weight (or force). There is no such thing as a conversion between the two. It just happens that on this planet at sea level a 1 Kg object has a weight of about 2.2 lbs.
My question is why didn't Yoda sacrafice those wankers for the greater good
You're not thinking in character. Yoda follows the light side of the force which would make him lawfull good. That means not sacrificing party members. To quote Lord Helmet: "Evil will always triumph because good is stupid".
I think, as in any major, you get those who are dedicated and those who are slackers.
At my university we have RECREATION students. They have courses like "theory of play". Do you think they come home at the end of the day and bitch about their ultimate frisby exam?
Do you really, seriously, think that if France (never mind the rest of Western Europe) were to have been integrated into Germany, and Germany's industrial base thusly expanded, that Britain would have stayed independant?
That did happen. Half of France was under direct German control while the other was run by a puppet government headed by a nazi more extreme than Hitler himself. Said government did in fact force its citizens to work for the german war effort.
Watch for RE 2 coming out next summer. True to the game it will be almost exactly like the first movie except with a male character running around doing similar stuff. Wait a second, that's a pretty good description of all hollywood sequels...
There is no such thing as "bending" visible light around a macroscopic object Light passing by massive objects will bend, I think this explains the ample endowments of the woman in the drawing.
According to the article they don't listen to metal, wear skimpy clothes or include those from the left hand path. So what exactly do these people do for fun?
According to the page OSX-server had only 1 vulnerability in 5 years. I doubt this is very accurate (if it is feel free to chime in with recommendations that we all switch OS's immediately). I think we need to keep in mind that This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, double counting, unreported bugs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I noticed this scene-dropping one day on a re-run of "the simpsons"... some scenes had been removed
I've noticed that at least one station (CFMT) consistently cuts out the last joke before every commercial break during the Simpsons. Keep in mind that these tend to be some of the best material on the show. As far as I'm concerned they should be forced to disclose at the beginning of the show "This programme has been modified from its original version. It has been modified to fit in more commercials." - just like movies.
What was also infuriating was that a lot of these cases involved MP3s that had been posted by the band to their own website
Have you considered suing said labels for wasting your time(or whatever else you can get them on)? If they saw that there were penalties for their intimidation tactics, maybe they would stop using them.
Your math says that total student downloads are about 7-8 times that of non-students. I notice however that my classes have 1 prof and 50-100 students. Add in support staff with access to the network (not many) and you still end up with an order of magnitude more students than non-students. Therefore your numbers do not indicate that the average student uses more bandwith than the average non-student, only that the former group is larger.
It's not like pop music should be taken as a personal affront by anyone. No one is making you listen to it.
Unless of course you ever go out to a club, or walk by restaurants with a radio playing, or walk down the street (people in cars), or live next to someone who likes their music, or for that matter, ever exit your sound-proofed living container.
Oh, and those teenage girls who like N'Sync? Most of them are in their low teens, I'm not. If Jason Timberly wants some 14 year old girl I'm not going to fight him for her.
Does anyone have personal, practical experience of being threatened by foreign governments or government bodies for material put up on the Net?
"Hey Mom, just so you don't hear any wild rumours, I'm being indicted for fraud in Australia." - Bart Simpson. Notice he didn't have to go to Australia, they can't force him to, only his own government can. While I might be worried about breaking those laws if you regularly go to the country in question, there's no reason for most of us to worry about restrictions in China or the Middle East.
I'm going to assume that most if not all of your comments come from a lack of experience with the mac, so here are some corrections:
The Task Switcher - requires 2 clicks to switch application
You can tear off the application switcher (just hold down the mouse and continue to drag past the bottom of the menu).
This is one of the disadvantages of having a single top-level menubar
Have you ever run ie on windows? Every bloody window requires huge menu/taskbar that simply eats up all available screen realestate. The one menu bar always takes up a constant space.
Of course OS X has both a panel and a top-level menubar
Older systems also had a control strip (different in function, but also taking up a comparable part of the screen).
Except that now about a third of your screen is unavailable for application windows
We've already saved that space by using one menubar, but if you really need it you can always make the panel smaller or autohide it.
It is possible to tell the Finder to close the previous directory window when opening a new one, but only with a non-obvious keyboard modifier when double-clicking
If you've used the mac very long at all you should have realised that whenever you want a program to clean up after itself (or do the obvious thing for you) you hold down the option key. Non-intuitive? maybe. But just how intuitive is the whole double click the icon to open a file thing that is now commonly accepted. Give yourself some time.
Also, if the previous directory window has been closed, it is now impossible to navigate backwards
Try command-up. Or in the OS X side-sliding view just use the scroll bar.
The lack of a second button on the standard Mac mouse is for some a boon in terms of simplicity
Damn I'm tired of hearing about this one but here goes: My PC came with a crappy mouse, but instead of cursing the fates I went out and bought a new one. The same option is available on a mac. This is like complaining that the screen came set at the wrong resolution. And of course you can always just hold down the control key. Chances are that you have 2 hands and only require one of them to operate the mouse. If you find that locating the key in the extreme lower-left corner of the keyboard is too much of a hassle go get the afforementioned new mouse.
You're stuffed on a Mac if you can't use the mouse. The menubar is totally off limits to you
Command -key equivalents. Notice how all your programs have the same basic set of command-keys for pretty much every task you perform regularly? Learn them , love them. Granted this doesn't cover everything you'll ever need to do, but neither does the menubar in any system, deal with it.
The Finder allows a certain amount of keyboard navigation, but again, without access to the menubar you have a problem.
Like what exactly? I can navigate through the finder without ever moving my hands across the keyboard. Thank you Bill for deciding to make me jump from the arrow keys to the enter and backspace keys to navigate, on a mac no such worries.
Remember, not everyone has the faculties to use a mouse, and if this is the case for you, forget every other question about usability - a Mac just isn't usable.
If you're talking about the disabled there's plenty of software built in as well as optional hardware to get you going if you are capable of a)speech or b)the ability to move your head and blink. In fact I can't imagine using any other OS if I were disabled
good ideas that Apple hasn't even touched on - like the universal viewer application
God only knows why you would assume that one massive bloated app would be the best one for every single file but you should be able to open pretty much anything that can be opened with IE for windows using IE for mac (or netscape for that matter).
thumbnailing of all pictures, not just the ones that the creator app decided to attach a thumbnail to.
Great, XP makes me wait 30 seconds every time I reopen a window so it can show me the same black tile representing the inevitable first frame of virtually every video file I have. Although you're right, having that as a standard feature for all graphics files (not just the 99% of files created in apps that already do this automatically) would be nice.
I'd respond to the rest of the comments but it would really just come down to zealotry, and I don't think we need any more of that in a discussion like this one.
Where exactly does one line up for tickets this far in advance? You can't park yourself in front of a teller as people need to use those to buy tickets now. Nor can you simply stand at a random point in front of a theater, someone is going to come along 3 months from now and decide that they are at the front of the line (remember lining up in grade school?). The only thing I can see working is some representative of the movie theater placing a "line for Attack of the Clones starts here" sign somewhere in front of the theater. Of course this will never happen - who wants a couple of dirty, shiftless bums in front of their place of business scaring away the other customers?
I think you mean Columbine high school (and I think we're all just a little tired of hearing about that anyway (wait, just previewed and saw the next line, ain't irony fun?))
Actually I'm hoping satch is really just playing nice until he gets the job. It isn't that I'm against impartiality, but I've seen XP trash 3 different systems (2 of them multiple times) in the last week so I'm about ready to go give bill a good 'talking to' myself.
If you're interested in a standards compliant browser for the mac allow me to recomend icab. It also has great ad filtering and a number of other features that ie lacks.
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It's not unheard of to hardcore values while debugging. Say for example that one wanted to find the problems in the getTime() function. You might go through and comment out alot of the calls from getTime() to other functions, replacing them with values that you knew were correct . For example sendTimeRequest(getNTPServerAddress()) might be replaced with sendTimeRequest("128.105.39.11:23457"). Now suppose that after you had isolated and fixed the problem you forget to reinstate one of those calls. Now you have a piece of software that appears to work except that it always sends requests to the same server+port.
This might have been caused by a simple mistake and not the really stupid design flaw that declaring the time server as a constant would be.
This gives me an idea for a similar sytem.
Make two plates(ie out of plastic) and glue springs to each corner of one plate, facing upwards. The springs should be just strong enough to hold up the second plate.
Now glue metal contacts onto each of the plates and wire them to an electric buzzer.
Place the top plate on top of the springs.
In order to activate the system simply place hand on top of the plate, the weight alone should force the two contacts together, activating the buzzer.
If you cut a section out of a nightstand and install the device so that the top plate is flush with the stand's surface she can rest her hand on the stand and activate the buzzer by moving her hand an inch or two so that it rests on the device. For added security you can connect the system to an autodialer that will call you/911 with a pre-recorded message.
Yes it does. Kilos are a unit of mass, pounds are a unit of weight (or force). There is no such thing as a conversion between the two. It just happens that on this planet at sea level a 1 Kg object has a weight of about 2.2 lbs.
You're not thinking in character. Yoda follows the light side of the force which would make him lawfull good. That means not sacrificing party members. To quote Lord Helmet: "Evil will always triumph because good is stupid".
At my university we have RECREATION students. They have courses like "theory of play". Do you think they come home at the end of the day and bitch about their ultimate frisby exam?
Has anyone ever even made a movie acknowledging Poland's cryptanalytical work during WWII? Does anyone even realise that they were involved?
That did happen. Half of France was under direct German control while the other was run by a puppet government headed by a nazi more extreme than Hitler himself. Said government did in fact force its citizens to work for the german war effort.
Watch for RE 2 coming out next summer. True to the game it will be almost exactly like the first movie except with a male character running around doing similar stuff. Wait a second, that's a pretty good description of all hollywood sequels...
There is no such thing as "bending" visible light around a macroscopic object
Light passing by massive objects will bend, I think this explains the ample endowments of the woman in the drawing.
Absolutely, I plan to back up my local video store's inventory in case it ever burns down.
According to the article they don't listen to metal, wear skimpy clothes or include those from the left hand path. So what exactly do these people do for fun?
According to the page OSX-server had only 1 vulnerability in 5 years. I doubt this is very accurate (if it is feel free to chime in with recommendations that we all switch OS's immediately). I think we need to keep in mind that This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, double counting, unreported bugs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
...all the duplicate frames does this mean that South Park episodes will take one minute to air?
I've noticed that at least one station (CFMT) consistently cuts out the last joke before every commercial break during the Simpsons. Keep in mind that these tend to be some of the best material on the show. As far as I'm concerned they should be forced to disclose at the beginning of the show "This programme has been modified from its original version. It has been modified to fit in more commercials." - just like movies.
What was also infuriating was that a lot of these cases involved MP3s that had been posted by the band to their own website
Have you considered suing said labels for wasting your time(or whatever else you can get them on)? If they saw that there were penalties for their intimidation tactics, maybe they would stop using them.
Your math says that total student downloads are about 7-8 times that of non-students. I notice however that my classes have 1 prof and 50-100 students. Add in support staff with access to the network (not many) and you still end up with an order of magnitude more students than non-students. Therefore your numbers do not indicate that the average student uses more bandwith than the average non-student, only that the former group is larger.
It's not like pop music should be taken as a personal affront by anyone. No one is making you listen to it.
Unless of course you ever go out to a club, or walk by restaurants with a radio playing, or walk down the street (people in cars), or live next to someone who likes their music, or for that matter, ever exit your sound-proofed living container.
Oh, and those teenage girls who like N'Sync? Most of them are in their low teens, I'm not. If Jason Timberly wants some 14 year old girl I'm not going to fight him for her.
Nb. the Simpsons is fictional ... it should not be construed as providing legal advice.
Nor, for that matter, should the advice of the average
Does anyone have personal, practical experience of being threatened by foreign governments or government bodies for material put up on the Net?
"Hey Mom, just so you don't hear any wild rumours, I'm being indicted for fraud in Australia." - Bart Simpson. Notice he didn't have to go to Australia, they can't force him to, only his own government can. While I might be worried about breaking those laws if you regularly go to the country in question, there's no reason for most of us to worry about restrictions in China or the Middle East.
The Task Switcher - requires 2 clicks to switch application
You can tear off the application switcher (just hold down the mouse and continue to drag past the bottom of the menu).
This is one of the disadvantages of having a single top-level menubar
Have you ever run ie on windows? Every bloody window requires huge menu/taskbar that simply eats up all available screen realestate. The one menu bar always takes up a constant space.
Of course OS X has both a panel and a top-level menubar
Older systems also had a control strip (different in function, but also taking up a comparable part of the screen).
Except that now about a third of your screen is unavailable for application windows
We've already saved that space by using one menubar, but if you really need it you can always make the panel smaller or autohide it.
It is possible to tell the Finder to close the previous directory window when opening a new one, but only with a non-obvious keyboard modifier when double-clicking
If you've used the mac very long at all you should have realised that whenever you want a program to clean up after itself (or do the obvious thing for you) you hold down the option key. Non-intuitive? maybe. But just how intuitive is the whole double click the icon to open a file thing that is now commonly accepted. Give yourself some time.
Also, if the previous directory window has been closed, it is now impossible to navigate backwards
Try command-up. Or in the OS X side-sliding view just use the scroll bar.
The lack of a second button on the standard Mac mouse is for some a boon in terms of simplicity
Damn I'm tired of hearing about this one but here goes: My PC came with a crappy mouse, but instead of cursing the fates I went out and bought a new one. The same option is available on a mac. This is like complaining that the screen came set at the wrong resolution. And of course you can always just hold down the control key. Chances are that you have 2 hands and only require one of them to operate the mouse. If you find that locating the key in the extreme lower-left corner of the keyboard is too much of a hassle go get the afforementioned new mouse.
You're stuffed on a Mac if you can't use the mouse. The menubar is totally off limits to you
Command -key equivalents. Notice how all your programs have the same basic set of command-keys for pretty much every task you perform regularly? Learn them , love them. Granted this doesn't cover everything you'll ever need to do, but neither does the menubar in any system, deal with it.
The Finder allows a certain amount of keyboard navigation, but again, without access to the menubar you have a problem.
Like what exactly? I can navigate through the finder without ever moving my hands across the keyboard. Thank you Bill for deciding to make me jump from the arrow keys to the enter and backspace keys to navigate, on a mac no such worries.
Remember, not everyone has the faculties to use a mouse, and if this is the case for you, forget every other question about usability - a Mac just isn't usable.
If you're talking about the disabled there's plenty of software built in as well as optional hardware to get you going if you are capable of a)speech or b)the ability to move your head and blink. In fact I can't imagine using any other OS if I were disabled
good ideas that Apple hasn't even touched on - like the universal viewer application
God only knows why you would assume that one massive bloated app would be the best one for every single file but you should be able to open pretty much anything that can be opened with IE for windows using IE for mac (or netscape for that matter).
thumbnailing of all pictures, not just the ones that the creator app decided to attach a thumbnail to.
Great, XP makes me wait 30 seconds every time I reopen a window so it can show me the same black tile representing the inevitable first frame of virtually every video file I have. Although you're right, having that as a standard feature for all graphics files (not just the 99% of files created in apps that already do this automatically) would be nice.
I'd respond to the rest of the comments but it would really just come down to zealotry, and I don't think we need any more of that in a discussion like this one.
Where exactly does one line up for tickets this far in advance? You can't park yourself in front of a teller as people need to use those to buy tickets now. Nor can you simply stand at a random point in front of a theater, someone is going to come along 3 months from now and decide that they are at the front of the line (remember lining up in grade school?). The only thing I can see working is some representative of the movie theater placing a "line for Attack of the Clones starts here" sign somewhere in front of the theater. Of course this will never happen - who wants a couple of dirty, shiftless bums in front of their place of business scaring away the other customers?
I think you mean Columbine high school (and I think we're all just a little tired of hearing about that anyway (wait, just previewed and saw the next line, ain't irony fun?))
Actually I'm hoping satch is really just playing nice until he gets the job. It isn't that I'm against impartiality, but I've seen XP trash 3 different systems (2 of them multiple times) in the last week so I'm about ready to go give bill a good 'talking to' myself.
If you're interested in a standards compliant browser for the mac allow me to recomend icab. It also has great ad filtering and a number of other features that ie lacks.
Damn straight, when was the last time you saw an aprent taking responsibility for their ikds?