So the issue that's irritating you is a lack of equal representation?
What if the same thing happened during, say, the 1800s? England or someone invaded, took over, and forced us to allow women the vote? Would we appreciate that? Would it be justified?
How about voting age? What if we take the same scenario, but with a country feeling that our voting age wasn't low enough, and the people that *couldn't* vote didn't have any ability to change the system? And they forcibly make us lower our voting age to 13?
Or, even better, what if another country, which is governed by a direct democracy, feels that our country is controlled by two tyranical parties that don't allow people to express their particular views on a given issue -- for example, I may like conservative Christian family values but not favor tax breaks for the wealthy. I don't have a single party that expresses exactly my viewpoint, so I'm politically suppressed to some degree. Anyway, this other country marches in, and forces us to change to a direct democracy. Is that legitimate?
Basically, what I'm upset about is mostly that the "we [US] should act as a global policeman" bit seems to be mostly used to provide a moral justification for us doing whatever we feel like doing.
You are certainly right about S.A. and US military involvement...I'm more fired up over Iraq than over S.A.
That isn't how patents work. A device that violates any claim is in violation of the patent. Claim one, at least, is invalid, which means that the application *should* be rejected.
There's more than a 'few high-up (?) die-hard UI (?!?) people' (that statement doesn't make any sense at all actually, it's not a UI issue, and who's high up? Some nameless Apple industrial designers?)
A couple of Apple hardware engineers came to give a speech that I attended. Afterwards, I asked them the Big One Button Question -- why? They responded that there were a few important people (Jobs was one) who are tremendous fans of the one button concept.
It's very easy to forget, but when you've spent coutless hours in a UI lab watching Random Person stumble through what you consider to be the most trivial tasks... trust me
Perhaps at one point, when offices were slowly transitioning from typewriters to computers. It's now irrelevant. An overwhelming percentage of the population has been familiarized with Windows -- at my high school, you were required to use Windows and learn MS productivity app usage, and Windows is used in office everywhere. The right mouse button being a contextual menu button is not an issue any more. Users *have* to know how to interact with Windows. It's a sunk cost.
Lefties like to use their mice on the left side of the computer.
My mother and brother both learned to originally and now intentionally use the mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard.
It's important that your primary 'click' is your index finger.
No -- I disagree. A friend's mouse broke once (one of those Razor Boomslang things) when I needed to use his computer for an extensive period of time. I was happily using a thumb-click as a primary click within a day, despite many, many years of training myself to use my index finger to primary-click. As a matter of fact, I tend to think that swapping buttons around causes worse problems -- in the current state of computing, you cannot globally migrate preferences. That means that you have to be able to use left-right mice, QWERTY layout, and the normal Windows color scheme, even if it's not what you use most of the time. Swapping back and forth causes a *lot* of readjustment cost, in my experience.
Oh spare me. The cost must be in the neighbourhood of $5, a vanishing percentage of the overall expense.
Well, they retail for $60. Granted, Apple tends to have hefty markups, but not anything like 12 to 1. Furthermore, if users resell these useless mice, it drives down demand and hence prices for individually-purchased mice.
The Apple keyboard is forced on you too, no one seems to complain about that.
The Apple keyboard is also fairly well designed. After Apple got over their poorly-designed membrane keyboards that shipped up to the Mac SE or so, they've tended to ship very good keyboards.
So, putting the shoe on the other foot, you feel that it would be entirely legitimate for China (assuming China develops some kind of superweapon) to waltz in and legalize drugs in the United States?
How hard is it really to hold down the control key with your left hand when you're clicking?
When I browse the Web on my Linux box, I can do so with a single hand. I can put the other on the arm of my chair, which is much more comfortable.
This is not a matter of getting used to the input method. I was born and bred on Macs, and got quite used to the "right hand on mouse, left hand on left half of keyboard" forced posture that the Mac places on one. Technology has moved on, and Apple has not. Using a multiple button mouse becomes a relief.
No -- you use two fingers. However, Apple's patent is *not* for a device that is scrolled with one finger. It's for an input device with a housing and a dial parallel to the housing.
Take a look at the Magellan Space Mouse, which has an oversize twistable (analog) hat switch. (Granted, they didn't mount it on a mouse, but if mounting an existing device on a mouse makes it patentable, something is seriously broken with our patent system)
You can't scale it. Indexing systems that could be used as a foundation for regexes (CDAWG structures or similar) don't scale to the level of the Web.
If you want to do searching of a small intranet, you might be able to get away with it. You might be able to do globbing, but currently using regexes won't work.
The main regex-related features I suspect people might want are:
* Phrases. Google and almost all other search engines can already do this, with quotes.
* NEAR. foo NEAR bar in the document requests documents where foo occurs "near" bar. This is of somewhat more dubious utility, but there are some searches that it's convenient for.
* Boolean NOT. Google and almost all other search engines can already do this.
While the vanilla X11 setup doesn't do this for normal windows, there are projects that do cause it to do so. Mplayer has the option of using OpenGL for its scaling backend, and E17 uses OpenGL. The main problem with using the 3d subsystem of a card instead of the 2d is that there isn't much point. You can already do accelerated pixmap copies...so why would you want to add the overhead of ramming it through a 3d engine?
Over what period? If that's over anything less than five years, I'd perhaps be looking towards the conditions the drives are in; are they well ventilated, or near any hot components?
You haven't bought a consumer IDE hard drive in the last few years, have you? Quality has gone to the dogs.
Linux users get that from other people, and Windows users get it from Mac users (MacAddict or some other rag prints a list of flaws in Windows and years later, Mac users are still spouting it, even though it's long, long out of date). Constantly.
As for the rest of it:
"Did you know that Apple has a server box?"
Apple has sold servers forever and ever. The average Joe doesn't know about that, but also doesn't know that HP sells servers.
"Did you know those new Apple laptops use 802.11g?"
[shrug] This is not exactly a huge deal. You can get new PC laptops with 802.11g, and when 802.11g actually sees wide deployment, you won't be able to get one without it.
"Hey, OS X shunts all the quartz compositing off to the video card! That's a neat idea".
No, that's not a new idea. 2d video acceleration has been around since at *least* the 80s, and I would assume well before. Windows uses it and has for ages, XFree86 uses it and has for ages. Hell, even classic MacOS had support for 2d video acceleration -- it's the only reason you'd pay top dollar for the IIfx. The only reason you heard about hardware acceleration support in Quartz is because (incredibly) Apple shipped without support for (large chunks, if not all) of the support for hardware acceleration. That *should* have been there on release, and performance was so piss-poor that finally releasing an update with support was a big deal. The Quartz hardware acceleration fiasco was not something for Apple to brag about in the least.
The rather large difference is that Dell's el-cheapo mouse doesn't have *one button*. And, of course, the fact that Apple's mouse doesn't add $5 to the cost like Dell's mouse does.
And now you should have to go to the trouble of selling crap on *eBay* just to avoid paying for the damn mouse?
No, I don't care how much you like the Mac, forcing you to buy a one-button mouse is *bad*. You may say that the things you like about the Mac outweigh it, but the forced purchasing of a crap mouse is not cool.
It's only fair to point out that the current design is widely disliked, that the only reason that it is still in place is because there's a few high-up die-hard UI people who were originally sold on the one-button mouse, and it's their baby (Jobs is one).
The point is that you should *not* have to run out and drop *more* money to get another peripheral to make your spangling new Mac not suck. Apple had a (tenuous) reason to not include a second button...up until they introduced context menus triggered by *control-clicking*. At this point, they're just being stupid. It's quite easy to have a one-button design and still include a clickable scroll wheel up front.
It's called a hat switch. It's on lots of nice joysticks to control the direction you're looking. I've been after one to be put on a good mouse forever. If Logitech would put one on one of their corded MX models, I'd be in heaven.
There is definitely prior art. Take a look at the mouse component of this Saitek mouse/action pad bundle.
Hasn't the USA just gone to war, partly (so we are told) to give another country a chance of democracy, and not just to be ruled by the select few ?
How did the United States become a democracy? Because Spain decided that its rights were being violated, marched in, and set up a puppet government, along with installing a forced set of Spanish values and exploiting US natural resources?
Hell, no. It was because enough people decided that they wanted a different system to revolt. I don't think you can march in and simply set something like that up and have everyone there buy into it (as evidenced by the collapse of US puppet governments -- Vietnam, Iran -- and the need for continued US influence propping up others -- the Saudi royal family).
Democracy is fairly robust, but it's certainly not necessarily the only system of government that works well. A republic -- well, what we have in the United States is a republic instead of a democracy, so that's pretty obvious. There are a couple of places that have had good parlimentary monarchies -- England and Spain. As a matter of fact, prior to two hundred years ago, there were plenty of monarchies around -- a monarchy doesn't have to be a failure or oppressive. Kuwait still has a monarchy today. I think communism tends to have some serious problems, but even so, a significant factor in it failing in lots of smaller countries is effort from the US in undermining it, not fundamental flaws.
Hasn't the USA just gone to war, partly (so we are told) to give another country a chance of democracy, and not just to be ruled by the select few ?
How is it, I have to ask, that it's justified for the USA to go to war to give other countries the chance for "democracy", but not for the Soviet Union or China to go to war to give them a chance for communism? Because we have a bigger army and might makes right? If the Chinese came up with a superweapon tomorrow, would your opinions change?
I really take issues with these et tu falacies. The US has a history of racial problems -- it also has a history of correcting them.
We had race-based slavery *long* after most of the rest of the world had abolished it. We built our nation by making bogus deals which we promptly broke and then force-marched entire populations of natives, into progressively worse wastelands where most of them died. Because of the sheer amount of immigration to the United States, we've also had lesser problems with many other races -- Chinese, Irish, Mexican -- that make things like English blue-collar dislike of Indian immigration look like nothing.
Apartheid is a legitimate choice that the people of South Africa decided to live with for a while (and as it happened, went away after a while). I think it's a bit silly, but the US has no business waltzing in and shaking things up. The US has a far darker history of racial problems than most nations do.
I *do* think that it might be legitimate for the US to push the idea that if someone wants to emmigrate to the United States, and the United States is willing, that the host country should be forced to allow him to do so (barring a few international crimes like spying or espionage). That would solve quite a few problems...if the US wants to allow people to have the US's value system, they can open their arms to the people that want to take part.
Communism?
Communism is also a perfectly legitimate view. The only time it's potentially nasty is when it's advocating global revolution and actively trying to foment revolution. Communism was quite popular among intelligentsia for a long time, and we have a Communist Party in the United States.
Taking over a country to wipe out a communist regime is pretty disgusting, frankly. The US promotes the concept of self-determination, and then simply waltzes into other countries and forces a government and political system on them. You can't have it both ways.
I suppose you think it's perfictly alright for a club keep out black people?
Sure, I don't have any problem with it. It's perfectly legitimate for organizations that practice discrimination along just about any lines they want to exist. There are a few very specific rules: government organizations and even private businesses when it comes to employment have some constraints on them. It's part of letting ideas flow freely. If people want to hang out with a bunch of other white supremacists and not let blacks join a club, I think they should certainly be entitled to do so. Trying to prohibit something like this becomes completely unenforceable, because race plays a role in all sorts of small organizations.
However, a business is more than entitled not to sell their product to anyone they want to, if they so choose.
or for a company not to hire mexicans?
As long as they're Mexican-Americans, legal citizens of the United States of America, I don't think it's legal to hire based on race, though it can be hard to prove.
Actually, I wish even this restriction was eliminated. Let natural selection take over. If IBM decides that it doesn't want to hire any Hispanics at all, and Apple does, and Miguel de Izaca works for Apple instead, it's IBM's loss.
When I see lawsuits like the infamous Hooters one (where a male was suing because he couldn't work as a waiter in a Hooters restauraunt), I get a little disgusted with the state of enforced PCness.
Slashdot Mirror
of course preferable something with porn ..
The Feds have started doing bad things to people who they think are consumers of kiddie porn...hmm...
So the issue that's irritating you is a lack of equal representation?
What if the same thing happened during, say, the 1800s? England or someone invaded, took over, and forced us to allow women the vote? Would we appreciate that? Would it be justified?
How about voting age? What if we take the same scenario, but with a country feeling that our voting age wasn't low enough, and the people that *couldn't* vote didn't have any ability to change the system? And they forcibly make us lower our voting age to 13?
Or, even better, what if another country, which is governed by a direct democracy, feels that our country is controlled by two tyranical parties that don't allow people to express their particular views on a given issue -- for example, I may like conservative Christian family values but not favor tax breaks for the wealthy. I don't have a single party that expresses exactly my viewpoint, so I'm politically suppressed to some degree. Anyway, this other country marches in, and forces us to change to a direct democracy. Is that legitimate?
Basically, what I'm upset about is mostly that the "we [US] should act as a global policeman" bit seems to be mostly used to provide a moral justification for us doing whatever we feel like doing.
You are certainly right about S.A. and US military involvement...I'm more fired up over Iraq than over S.A.
That isn't how patents work. A device that violates any claim is in violation of the patent. Claim one, at least, is invalid, which means that the application *should* be rejected.
2D technology has remained relatively dormant while there have been tremendous advances in 3D hardware.
Yes, but not in an area that's relevant to doing hardware-accelerated 2D blitting.
There's more than a 'few high-up (?) die-hard UI (?!?) people' (that statement doesn't make any sense at all actually, it's not a UI issue, and who's high up? Some nameless Apple industrial designers?)
A couple of Apple hardware engineers came to give a speech that I attended. Afterwards, I asked them the Big One Button Question -- why? They responded that there were a few important people (Jobs was one) who are tremendous fans of the one button concept.
It's very easy to forget, but when you've spent coutless hours in a UI lab watching Random Person stumble through what you consider to be the most trivial tasks... trust me
Perhaps at one point, when offices were slowly transitioning from typewriters to computers. It's now irrelevant. An overwhelming percentage of the population has been familiarized with Windows -- at my high school, you were required to use Windows and learn MS productivity app usage, and Windows is used in office everywhere. The right mouse button being a contextual menu button is not an issue any more. Users *have* to know how to interact with Windows. It's a sunk cost.
Lefties like to use their mice on the left side of the computer.
My mother and brother both learned to originally and now intentionally use the mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard.
It's important that your primary 'click' is your index finger.
No -- I disagree. A friend's mouse broke once (one of those Razor Boomslang things) when I needed to use his computer for an extensive period of time. I was happily using a thumb-click as a primary click within a day, despite many, many years of training myself to use my index finger to primary-click. As a matter of fact, I tend to think that swapping buttons around causes worse problems -- in the current state of computing, you cannot globally migrate preferences. That means that you have to be able to use left-right mice, QWERTY layout, and the normal Windows color scheme, even if it's not what you use most of the time. Swapping back and forth causes a *lot* of readjustment cost, in my experience.
Oh spare me. The cost must be in the neighbourhood of $5, a vanishing percentage of the overall expense.
Well, they retail for $60. Granted, Apple tends to have hefty markups, but not anything like 12 to 1. Furthermore, if users resell these useless mice, it drives down demand and hence prices for individually-purchased mice.
The Apple keyboard is forced on you too, no one seems to complain about that.
The Apple keyboard is also fairly well designed. After Apple got over their poorly-designed membrane keyboards that shipped up to the Mac SE or so, they've tended to ship very good keyboards.
So, putting the shoe on the other foot, you feel that it would be entirely legitimate for China (assuming China develops some kind of superweapon) to waltz in and legalize drugs in the United States?
How hard is it really to hold down the control key with your left hand when you're clicking?
When I browse the Web on my Linux box, I can do so with a single hand. I can put the other on the arm of my chair, which is much more comfortable.
This is not a matter of getting used to the input method. I was born and bred on Macs, and got quite used to the "right hand on mouse, left hand on left half of keyboard" forced posture that the Mac places on one. Technology has moved on, and Apple has not. Using a multiple button mouse becomes a relief.
Take a look at E17.
No -- you use two fingers. However, Apple's patent is *not* for a device that is scrolled with one finger. It's for an input device with a housing and a dial parallel to the housing.
(Even if it does make it patentable, it doesn't matter. The patent application doesn't claim that the device needs to be mounted on a mouse.)
Apple's claim is invalid.
Take a look at the Magellan Space Mouse, which has an oversize twistable (analog) hat switch. (Granted, they didn't mount it on a mouse, but if mounting an existing device on a mouse makes it patentable, something is seriously broken with our patent system)
You can't scale it. Indexing systems that could be used as a foundation for regexes (CDAWG structures or similar) don't scale to the level of the Web.
If you want to do searching of a small intranet, you might be able to get away with it. You might be able to do globbing, but currently using regexes won't work.
The main regex-related features I suspect people might want are:
* Phrases. Google and almost all other search engines can already do this, with quotes.
* NEAR. foo NEAR bar in the document requests documents where foo occurs "near" bar. This is of somewhat more dubious utility, but there are some searches that it's convenient for.
* Boolean NOT. Google and almost all other search engines can already do this.
While the vanilla X11 setup doesn't do this for normal windows, there are projects that do cause it to do so. Mplayer has the option of using OpenGL for its scaling backend, and E17 uses OpenGL. The main problem with using the 3d subsystem of a card instead of the 2d is that there isn't much point. You can already do accelerated pixmap copies...so why would you want to add the overhead of ramming it through a 3d engine?
Over what period? If that's over anything less than five years, I'd perhaps be looking towards the conditions the drives are in; are they well ventilated, or near any hot components?
You haven't bought a consumer IDE hard drive in the last few years, have you? Quality has gone to the dogs.
Linux users get that from other people, and Windows users get it from Mac users (MacAddict or some other rag prints a list of flaws in Windows and years later, Mac users are still spouting it, even though it's long, long out of date). Constantly.
As for the rest of it:
"Did you know that Apple has a server box?"
Apple has sold servers forever and ever. The average Joe doesn't know about that, but also doesn't know that HP sells servers.
"Did you know those new Apple laptops use 802.11g?"
[shrug] This is not exactly a huge deal. You can get new PC laptops with 802.11g, and when 802.11g actually sees wide deployment, you won't be able to get one without it.
"Hey, OS X shunts all the quartz compositing off to the video card! That's a neat idea".
No, that's not a new idea. 2d video acceleration has been around since at *least* the 80s, and I would assume well before. Windows uses it and has for ages, XFree86 uses it and has for ages. Hell, even classic MacOS had support for 2d video acceleration -- it's the only reason you'd pay top dollar for the IIfx. The only reason you heard about hardware acceleration support in Quartz is because (incredibly) Apple shipped without support for (large chunks, if not all) of the support for hardware acceleration. That *should* have been there on release, and performance was so piss-poor that finally releasing an update with support was a big deal. The Quartz hardware acceleration fiasco was not something for Apple to brag about in the least.
The rather large difference is that Dell's el-cheapo mouse doesn't have *one button*. And, of course, the fact that Apple's mouse doesn't add $5 to the cost like Dell's mouse does.
And now you should have to go to the trouble of selling crap on *eBay* just to avoid paying for the damn mouse?
No, I don't care how much you like the Mac, forcing you to buy a one-button mouse is *bad*. You may say that the things you like about the Mac outweigh it, but the forced purchasing of a crap mouse is not cool.
It's only fair to point out that the current design is widely disliked, that the only reason that it is still in place is because there's a few high-up die-hard UI people who were originally sold on the one-button mouse, and it's their baby (Jobs is one).
The point is that you should *not* have to run out and drop *more* money to get another peripheral to make your spangling new Mac not suck. Apple had a (tenuous) reason to not include a second button...up until they introduced context menus triggered by *control-clicking*. At this point, they're just being stupid. It's quite easy to have a one-button design and still include a clickable scroll wheel up front.
It's called a hat switch. It's on lots of nice joysticks to control the direction you're looking. I've been after one to be put on a good mouse forever. If Logitech would put one on one of their corded MX models, I'd be in heaven.
There is definitely prior art. Take a look at the mouse component of this Saitek mouse/action pad bundle.
Hasn't the USA just gone to war, partly (so we are told) to give another country a chance of democracy, and not just to be ruled by the select few ?
How did the United States become a democracy? Because Spain decided that its rights were being violated, marched in, and set up a puppet government, along with installing a forced set of Spanish values and exploiting US natural resources?
Hell, no. It was because enough people decided that they wanted a different system to revolt. I don't think you can march in and simply set something like that up and have everyone there buy into it (as evidenced by the collapse of US puppet governments -- Vietnam, Iran -- and the need for continued US influence propping up others -- the Saudi royal family).
Democracy is fairly robust, but it's certainly not necessarily the only system of government that works well. A republic -- well, what we have in the United States is a republic instead of a democracy, so that's pretty obvious. There are a couple of places that have had good parlimentary monarchies -- England and Spain. As a matter of fact, prior to two hundred years ago, there were plenty of monarchies around -- a monarchy doesn't have to be a failure or oppressive. Kuwait still has a monarchy today. I think communism tends to have some serious problems, but even so, a significant factor in it failing in lots of smaller countries is effort from the US in undermining it, not fundamental flaws.
Hasn't the USA just gone to war, partly (so we are told) to give another country a chance of democracy, and not just to be ruled by the select few ?
How is it, I have to ask, that it's justified for the USA to go to war to give other countries the chance for "democracy", but not for the Soviet Union or China to go to war to give them a chance for communism? Because we have a bigger army and might makes right? If the Chinese came up with a superweapon tomorrow, would your opinions change?
"Legitimate" as in legal under our current system, which means the majority has presumably agreed with me. ;-)
I really take issues with these et tu falacies. The US has a history of racial problems -- it also has a history of correcting them.
We had race-based slavery *long* after most of the rest of the world had abolished it. We built our nation by making bogus deals which we promptly broke and then force-marched entire populations of natives, into progressively worse wastelands where most of them died. Because of the sheer amount of immigration to the United States, we've also had lesser problems with many other races -- Chinese, Irish, Mexican -- that make things like English blue-collar dislike of Indian immigration look like nothing.
I really liked the parent post, and would recommend reading it over to moderators.
Apartheid?
Apartheid is a legitimate choice that the people of South Africa decided to live with for a while (and as it happened, went away after a while). I think it's a bit silly, but the US has no business waltzing in and shaking things up. The US has a far darker history of racial problems than most nations do.
I *do* think that it might be legitimate for the US to push the idea that if someone wants to emmigrate to the United States, and the United States is willing, that the host country should be forced to allow him to do so (barring a few international crimes like spying or espionage). That would solve quite a few problems...if the US wants to allow people to have the US's value system, they can open their arms to the people that want to take part.
Communism?
Communism is also a perfectly legitimate view. The only time it's potentially nasty is when it's advocating global revolution and actively trying to foment revolution. Communism was quite popular among intelligentsia for a long time, and we have a Communist Party in the United States.
Taking over a country to wipe out a communist regime is pretty disgusting, frankly. The US promotes the concept of self-determination, and then simply waltzes into other countries and forces a government and political system on them. You can't have it both ways.
I suppose you think it's perfictly alright for a club keep out black people?
Sure, I don't have any problem with it. It's perfectly legitimate for organizations that practice discrimination along just about any lines they want to exist. There are a few very specific rules: government organizations and even private businesses when it comes to employment have some constraints on them. It's part of letting ideas flow freely. If people want to hang out with a bunch of other white supremacists and not let blacks join a club, I think they should certainly be entitled to do so. Trying to prohibit something like this becomes completely unenforceable, because race plays a role in all sorts of small organizations.
However, a business is more than entitled not to sell their product to anyone they want to, if they so choose.
or for a company not to hire mexicans?
As long as they're Mexican-Americans, legal citizens of the United States of America, I don't think it's legal to hire based on race, though it can be hard to prove.
Actually, I wish even this restriction was eliminated. Let natural selection take over. If IBM decides that it doesn't want to hire any Hispanics at all, and Apple does, and Miguel de Izaca works for Apple instead, it's IBM's loss.
When I see lawsuits like the infamous Hooters one (where a male was suing because he couldn't work as a waiter in a Hooters restauraunt), I get a little disgusted with the state of enforced PCness.
I'll estimate two weeks after this post until ThinkGeek has something...