I'm curious as to what it is you feel would be the more correct behaviour when foregrounding an application whose windows are on another desktop.... Or are you suggesting that some new application behaviour should be created in which an application can be topped in some general sense, but with none of its windows focused?
Yes. However, it's not really a totally new application behavior. In most apps, I can have them front-most even if the app has no windows at all.
I have a hard time imagining many cases in which that would be anything other than the exact opposite of what a person would want. "Yes, I want to talk to this application. Yes, I want to talk to an actual fucking window this application has open, that's why I fucking switched to it!"
That's why I suggested it should be a Preference. You want it one way and I want it another.
I've been an obsessive multiple desktop user for fifteen years now, and I have found Spaces to be the best implementation I've ever seen on any platform.
The only other OS that I've used that has the ability for multiple desktops is Linux/X11 with a window manager of my choice running in point-to-focus mode. In non-Mac Unix environments, apps like XTerm are one window per process as opposed to one process for all windows (like Terminal). Hence, switching desktops under X11 doesn't suffer from the problem I described since (a) each XTerm is its own process and (b) it's point-to-focus.
(Oh, and for the particular case of wanting to create a new terminal window in your current space: right-click the terminal in the dock, and select New Window. It shows up where you are, no switching.)
That doesn't work since "New Window" has a submenu from which I have to select which type of new window I want. It's not exactly convenient or fast to do all those mouse motions when all I want to do is Command-N.
Suppose I have Terminal windows in space 1 and Safari in space 2. I'm currently browsing in space 2 and I now want another Terminal window here in space 2. I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal. I'm immediately brought back to space 1 which isn't what I wanted. I'm forced to create the new Terminal window in space 1 and move it to space 2. Note that if instead I immediately switch back to space 2, Terminal will no longer be the front-most app.
If I already have a Terminal window in space 2 and want to create another one, this fact doesn't help because Spaces keeps track of the space the front-most window of an application is in. So even if there is a Terminal window in space 2 but a Terminal window in space 1 is more "front-most" than the one in space 2, then when I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal, I'll be brought back to space 1. Again, this isn't what I wanted.
The current behavior of Spaces whereby it auto-switches spaces or changes what the front-most app is (presumably to be "helpful"), IMHO, makes Spaces broken and unusable. Spaces should never automatically switch spaces nor change the front-most app no matter what (or at least have a Preference to make this the case).
I've been an Apple fan-boy since my Apple ][plus, but Leopard is the first version of OS X that I thought wasn't very compelling (and kind of broken) on release.
As I suspected. Most consumers simply don't need or want what you want. If they want an external drive, FireWire is good enough. The factory CD/DVD is good enough. Most consumers don't even know what eSATA is. Yes, it sucks to be a geek in a consumer world.
... it's a reasonable config that Apple doesn't make: a consumer level expandable desktop...
Do you equate "expandable" with "has slots for cards?"
If Apple's marketing research group has done their homework, well, obviously, they don't think most consumers need (and thus not want) such a desktop. Most people just want to plug in a printer and maybe a digital camera for which USB is sufficient. Everything else (GigE, 802.11n, USB2, FireWire, DVD, webcam) is already built-in. Out of curiosity, what exactly would you put in those PCI slots if Apple made such a consumer machine? Gamers and geeks simply aren't their target consumer market.
... is why ISPs want to be in the business of monitoring their networks for certain content. Aren't they supposed to have common-carrier status (which, AFAIK, is supposed to mean that they're agnostic about and not responsible for the traffic on their networks)? Why do they want to spend money on engineering and PR damage-control for all this if they could just ignore it?
He interviews scientists and editors who have lost their jobs for printing/writing papers that claim our DNA has a 'code' with information that could not have happened in nature.
And they should have lost their jobs if they work for a scientific or educational institution.
I fear that the ostracized members of the scientific community will make the evolutionists look just as much like religious zealots trying to purge their ranks of people with open minds.
Claiming that bits of DNA could not have happened in nature (and therefore must have happened by some supernatural being) does not mean the person making the claim has an "open mind." It means that (1) the person's mind is deluded by religion and (2) the person doesn't understand the DNA. (This is the infamous "God of the gaps" argument, i.e., we don't know X, therefore X must have been done by god.)
As for zealotry, scientist peers shouldn't spend any time entertaining "god made DNA" ideas any more than Flying Spaghetti Monster ideas.
I'm sure there's sound criticism against these papers...
Scientists have no obligation to disprove religious ideas. The burden is on the religious to prove theirs.
If you have friends who believe in Creationism, respect them and provide for them sound arguments against it.
Whether or not GW is natural or man made is still debated... and largely unknown.
The Earth has never -- in its entire history -- warmed so much so fast. The only people who refuse to accept reality and continue to claim there's still scientific (as opposed to political) debate still going on are (1) those whose pockets are lined by Big Business for whom it would either be costly to make their facilities carbon-neutral or shut them down entirely and (2) those who naively believe in the infallibility of their political leaders (who are in group 1).
Of course there's probably a high correlation between those in group 2 and those who believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, and who believe that their god would never give them an imperfect planet whose environment could become hostile to human life, or, if it did, it would mean that the Rapture is at hand. Some of these people actually want to hasten the destruction of the Earth because they think it will hasten the Rapture. These people scare me more than terrorists.
You're not keeping up.
Chronic Myeloid Leukemia has been cured by gene therapy.
The problem, as another poster pointed out, is that "cancer" is a broad label for many thousands of individual diseases.
A particular gene therapy targets only one kind of cancer.
Actually, I use a bag like this.
(Mine is an older model, but essentially the same.)
It's just a simple "wrapper" with some padding and a handle -- quite sufficient.
If I want to carry more stuff, I put that inside a larger back-pack.
(I find it kind of funny that some people buy thin/small laptops only to carry them around in big, hulking bags.)
But, currently, I still have to remove the laptop from the bag because nobody on the TSA security lines is permitted to think.
These 6-inch extension cords, while they not have grounded outlets, are just the right thing for all those gadget power bricks that have the plug coming right out of the brick (and most of those are non-grounded anyway).
I tried Google's free 411 directory assistance recently. I asked for a local business and gave the street and cross street. I was given a voice menu of about 7 results. Most of the results seemed either duplicate or redundant since they were all for the business I was looking for. So which one do I pick? And, even if they were different, I have to listen to all of them to see which matches the best. Of course by the time one gets to, say, the 6th result, one's forgotten whether the best-so-far was number 2 -- or was it number 4? So I picked the one I thought I remembered to be the best and my call was connected. It turned out that it was a number for some unrelated business that was closed. Sigh....
I called my wireless carrier's 411 directory assistance and I got the right number on the first try. Yes, it cost me an exorbitant $1.50, but at least it was quick and accurate. I do hope Google's 411 directory assistance improves. If nothing else, I hope Google's service prompts wireless carriers to lower the cost of their 411 service.
Java development tools didn't really reach maturity until things like Eclipse came onto the scene about 5 years ago.
While I agree that Eclipse did a lot to improve Java development, I have to say that, having used both it and Intellij IDEA, IDEA just seems better. Yes, this could be just another instance of vi vs. emacs, but, to me, IDEA just seems better thought out and works more smoothly. Yes, I know IDEA costs money, but I get things done faster using IDEA, and that's worth a lot.
The thing that's strange about HAL's ability to speech-read is that it seems very unlikely that Dr. Chandra would have taught HAL how to do this.
From an interview with Arthur C. Clarke:
Stork: So HAL recognized the drawings of the crewman. He did lip-reading and speech-reading. Tell us about HAL's vision and visual abilities.
Clarke:The one ability that I was doubtful about, and this was Stanley's idea, was his power of lip-reading. First of all, I didn't think it was possible for a computer to lip-read. Secondly, why should they bother to give him that facility anyway? That's an interesting point that I don't think is ever explained. Anyway, it certainly produced the most effective sequence. And, of course, it's led to a number of careers in the business.
Stork: But perhaps lip-reading just emerges. Once you've got speech-recognition, once you've got vision. HAL would somehow put them together. After all, you were never taught how to lip-read, never the less you do lip-read.
Clarke: Well, I can't lip-read, except of course I probably do it unconsciously. And now that I'm getting quite deaf, I might be doing more and more lip-reading. But it seems incredible to me that a really good lip-reader can fool people around into thinking that they have normal hearing.
... I knew some of the Cyc people back in the 1980s, when they were pursuing the same idea. They're still at it.... But after twenty years of their claiming "Strong AI, Real Soon Now", it's probably not happening.
I don't know whether they're actively still trying to get "true AI" or just milking what they've got; but, assuming the former, some things in science take a really longtime.
It seems pretty obvious that any intelligence requires a vast amount of knowledge to be useful and that takes a lot of time, not only to type into a computer, but to even to know what it is we know.
The path Cyc is following may be a dead-end by itself until neuroscientists figure out how Nature makes brains work or hardware engineers figure out how to interconnect 100 billion transistors to approximate brain-sized neural networks. But the encoding of "world knowledge" and "common sense" by Cyc is definitely useful for future scientists. It would be nice if that knowledge and representation were open-sourced.
"The theory of Evolution" is very much different today than what Darwin proposed.
That's where so many people get this wrong. Evolution is a fact; natural selection is but one theory to explain the fact of evolution. This is analogous to gravity. Gravity is a fact. Mechanics was Newton's theory of gravity; it has since been replaced by Einstein's General Relativity, but at no time did gravity stop being a fact.
In general they won't bump you off a machine unless they need to demo it for a customer.
In my experience, that's a problem. If I want to try out a computer, or have me show one to a friend, doing either without a shiny-happy salesperson hovering over me/us, it's next to impossible to get at a computer.
I'm all for try-before-you-buy, but clearly there are lots of people (kids, even) at the computers who have no intent to buy anything ever. They use those computers instead of the ones at the library or local coffee shops.
I'm sick of the censorship tag. 300 passengers sitting elbow-to-elbow for hours on end REQUIRES "censorship".
The sad thing is that the/. crowd doesn't understand that it's not even censorship. Censorship, by definition, can be done only by the government. So unless filtering is imposed by the FAA, it's not censorship.
Ok, so YOU too can't keep a copy of the software after you first sold it. Sell it once.
That's like saying a car company can sell only one car.
Why not? Wouldn't it be great if everyone had a car?
Aside from the fact that the increased CO2 emissions would be really bad for the planet, no: the car companies would no longer exist. I think you've stopped being rational a while ago and aren't worth my time responding any more.
hat's why everyone and their brother have a couple of accounts on some provider or another (and many people on more than one). Don't you? Not even a hotmail account for MSN or Spam?
No, I don't. Why do I want to check more than one personal account daily? I want all my e-mail in one place. As far as having "special" accounts: having my own domain, I can create new addresses at will, use them for a bit for some special purpose, then delete them.
Gmail had the best UI and gave 500-1000x the storage of the competition when it first started, that's why they got so big so soon.
The best UI for webmail. And I simply don't need that amount of storage. I actually delete e-mail I no longer need. Shocking perhaps, but true.
Slashdot Mirror
If I already have a Terminal window in space 2 and want to create another one, this fact doesn't help because Spaces keeps track of the space the front-most window of an application is in. So even if there is a Terminal window in space 2 but a Terminal window in space 1 is more "front-most" than the one in space 2, then when I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal, I'll be brought back to space 1. Again, this isn't what I wanted.
The current behavior of Spaces whereby it auto-switches spaces or changes what the front-most app is (presumably to be "helpful"), IMHO, makes Spaces broken and unusable. Spaces should never automatically switch spaces nor change the front-most app no matter what (or at least have a Preference to make this the case).
I've been an Apple fan-boy since my Apple ][plus, but Leopard is the first version of OS X that I thought wasn't very compelling (and kind of broken) on release.
But Macs come with all that stuff already, so, again, why do you need slots?
As I suspected. Most consumers simply don't need or want what you want. If they want an external drive, FireWire is good enough. The factory CD/DVD is good enough. Most consumers don't even know what eSATA is. Yes, it sucks to be a geek in a consumer world.
... is why ISPs want to be in the business of monitoring their networks for certain content. Aren't they supposed to have common-carrier status (which, AFAIK, is supposed to mean that they're agnostic about and not responsible for the traffic on their networks)? Why do they want to spend money on engineering and PR damage-control for all this if they could just ignore it?
As for zealotry, scientist peers shouldn't spend any time entertaining "god made DNA" ideas any more than Flying Spaghetti Monster ideas.
Scientists have no obligation to disprove religious ideas. The burden is on the religious to prove theirs. It's a waste of time. As for respect, see Richard Dawkins' Call to Arms.Of course there's probably a high correlation between those in group 2 and those who believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, and who believe that their god would never give them an imperfect planet whose environment could become hostile to human life, or, if it did, it would mean that the Rapture is at hand. Some of these people actually want to hasten the destruction of the Earth because they think it will hasten the Rapture. These people scare me more than terrorists.
But, currently, I still have to remove the laptop from the bag because nobody on the TSA security lines is permitted to think.
These 6-inch extension cords, while they not have grounded outlets, are just the right thing for all those gadget power bricks that have the plug coming right out of the brick (and most of those are non-grounded anyway).
I called my wireless carrier's 411 directory assistance and I got the right number on the first try. Yes, it cost me an exorbitant $1.50, but at least it was quick and accurate. I do hope Google's 411 directory assistance improves. If nothing else, I hope Google's service prompts wireless carriers to lower the cost of their 411 service.
The path Cyc is following may be a dead-end by itself until neuroscientists figure out how Nature makes brains work or hardware engineers figure out how to interconnect 100 billion transistors to approximate brain-sized neural networks. But the encoding of "world knowledge" and "common sense" by Cyc is definitely useful for future scientists. It would be nice if that knowledge and representation were open-sourced.
I'm all for try-before-you-buy, but clearly there are lots of people (kids, even) at the computers who have no intent to buy anything ever. They use those computers instead of the ones at the library or local coffee shops.