You might love your easy interface right now but later on think of how much time you'd save if it were less "intuitive" and more efficient. Blender's interface thrives in efficiency...
And who says these are mutually exclusive goals?
Granted, it does seem to be that interfaces that are easier to learn and a bit slower, but they don't have to be much slower at all. Think if you kept all the keyboard shortcuts in Blender but added a decent intuitive interface. Or even if you added another mode that was easier.
On a side note, I've heard your same argument for other programs such as 3DS and Maya. What isn't intuitive for you isn't like that for everyone, apparently.
OTOH, I doubt you've ever heard anyone say Blender is intuitive.
No, if you click on the link that's presented to you regardless of OS and download it, you'll have it. It doesn't need to run on your computer to IM you; in fact, that's the exact opposite of what would happen.
That's the problem, not the fact that they were changing their own property, as they saw fit, and reselling it -- which IS allowed by the law.
No, it's NOT allowed by the law. Whether you agree with the DMCA or not, I don't see any wiggle room in the position that they broke it. The DMCA prohibits the circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms except in limited circumstances, none of which appear to apply. They circumvented the XBox's copyright protection mechanisms. Case closed.
It's not like the Lexmark case, where you could argue that the company selling printer refills reverse engineered it for compatibility, or even that there was no copyright in place to protect. Whether it SHOULD be illegal is also another issue. But the only way you can say that the XBox modification is legal is if you think those provisions of the DMCA are unconstitutional. (There's a case to be made there but I doubt any court would agree.)
(BTW, my thoughts on the DMCA are as follows. I liken the circumvention of copyright protection to picking someone's lock. I lock my door deliberately to keep people I don't want in my house outside; MS puts a TCPAish chip in the XBox to keep programs that they don't want running from running. The analogy is far from perfect (or even good) because it's MY house and it's not MS's XBox, but stick with me for a moment.
(Now, pretty much anywhere if I get locked out of my house I can break in. In most places, I can carry around a lock pick set and break in using that so I don't damage anything. To me, this is like circumventing the protection for purposes that would be otherwise legal; running Linux, running a backup of a game you made, etc. This should be legal. (Just as I think jurdictions that outlaw mere posession of lockpicks are in the wrong.)
(Now, breaking into someone else's house is illegal, just as breaking copyright laws is illegal. But if you break into someone eles's house using a lockpick, many jurisdictions will add the posession of a lockpick onto your robbery charges. The analogy would be if you circumvent an active copyright protection scheme in the course of committing another crime, than the penalties would be made more severe. In both situations I see this as being a perfectly reasonable solution.)
And pretty poorly too. It has this bug where scrolling the buddy list doesn't update the whole window, and sometimes the tooltips stay up or even spontaneously pop up when the mouse is not in the window. I don't know how much is Gaim's fault though; I suspect the blame lies more with GTK. (And you can hardly blame Gaim for not switching from GTK either; their main target is Linux anyway.)
There's a huge difference between comparing Firefox to the Mozilla suite and the options that are available in version-2 and pre-version-2 Gaim. The Mozilla suite isn't Firefox with extra options (though it does easily expose more options). It's Firefox with an entirely different (and much less standard and, IMO, uglier) UI, a POP email client and Newsreader, a composer program, and maybe more. The Mozilla suite download is over twice the size of Firefox's. It's not a matter of different options.
(And even given all that, about:config in Firefox probably gives you any applicable option in Mozilla, though much harder to use.)
There are a number of options that have been removed. Two that some have specifically lamented missing are setting what defines when you are idle (Gaim or Windows/X usage) and whether talking while away sets your status to back.
Which ignores what is in my guess the biggest use of saving the passwords: to avoid having to type it.
I don't have Gaim, AIM, etc. remember my passwords for me because I don't want to be bothered; I know all my passwords so I can sign on elsewhere. I have it remember them so that when I log on it signs on automatically.
If you encrypt it with something behind another password, you either have to store THAT password in which case we're right back where we began or you lose that application.
I think testing on children, while it would give interesting results, isn't what they're aiming for. In the real world most people WILL be moving from Windows, so if you're interested in doing this study to help, for instance, distributions or new users choose between them, or help the developers fix problems, this is what you should test.
Also, a lot of the tasks you'd be interested in testing a child wouldn't know about. If you were to ask, for instance, the user to write a formal letter in a word processor of their choice (or pick one, whatever), save it, then print it to a specific printer, a kid's not gonna be able to do that.
Are there any (properly marked) obsolete or not valid theories or articles concerning obsolete theories in the Encylopedia Britannica?
Sure. It has entries for both the ether and phlogiston, under those names. In both cases it says the theory has been disproved, though not immediately at the start of the article like in Wikipedia.
Apparently not. The submitter's statement was -- to paraphrase in order to highlight the hypothetical even more blatently: Had I been in this kid's shoes, I would have committed the same crime in a different way which would have resulted in a higher probability of not getting caught.
How do you know that was the hypothetical?
Maybe the hypothetical was if I were to commit the same crime, in which case not committing it wouldn't be an option.
The problem with studies like this is they don't test the effects of this program at all. They are testing what occurs if you change the speed limit, while this program will actually affect the speed people drive at.
In fact, the more you are right about the statement that changing the speed limit has no effect on the speed people that drive, they more the results of the study are inapplicable in this situation.
It could very easily be that while artifical means of limiting speeds (speed limits) has little effect and can decrease accidents, things that actively try to prevent you from speeding very well could. Only a substantial test program (i.e. more than what they are doing) would give you results you could use.
First, the devices don't make it impossible to speed, just make it increasingly difficult to push the accelerator. You can still overcome it if you need to. (Especially in an emergency if you're not already over the limit.)
Second, they are giving the program more thought before making it mandatory. They have 10 volunteers testing it. (Though I do think that more would be good.)
1) I've never heard of such a law. (I'm not saying there isn't such a law, just I've never head of it.) Where do you live?
And what happens if there's no place to pull over? There are lots of places with no shoulder and a guardrail right up against the road because they only cleared that much space before a nice steep hill.
3) While that's all nice and good, situations can change. What happens if the driver of the vehicle you're passing is an asshole and speeds up? Now you suddenly need a lot more space to pass, but you still will probably find it very difficult to drop back into your lane behind it. The only absolutely safe way to pass is to not do it.
The "run over by a car" thing is actually a really, really lame demonstration. The pressure per sq. inch really isn't that great. Nonetheless, it's always the example that's brought up.
For clothes though, it probably is a perfectly acceptable test. Reason being, if something you're wearing is being run over by a car, you probably have concerns on your mind more "pressing" than what song your iPod is playing.
Agreed. I was using Penn State's webmail for a while because I could access it anywhere (and from either my Windows or Linux boot!), but then it lost my entire inbox. That pretty much put me off of webmail permanently it looks like.
I have Outlook Express backups (yes, I used Outlook Express for a while) dating back from 7 years ago, and every email I've ever gotten in a POP program since then spread across between Outlook Express, Outlook, Opera, Mozilla, Evolution, and (currently) Thunderbird files. (I don't really find it worth it to combine them all into one place.) I don't have backups of any webmail stuff. (It may be possible, as I think it stores it on our network drives, but the question is now moot.)
Now I have it set up so that both Webmail and Thunderbird will leave mail on the server for a few days or something so I have most of my mail both places, so I get the reliability and control of a local app with the ability to get it anywhere. (Though I think if their firewalls let me run remote desktop or VNC I'd just go with that...)
Two disclaimers: 1. Penn State's webmail, near as I can tell, SUCKS ASS compared to a lot of what's out there.
2. It seems pretty silly to me to be turned off of what could potentially be a very well done tool by one experience, but blame the human psyche.
Reminds me of a Daily Show clip from the democratic convention:
Stewart: "[Bill] Clinton also became speaker number 683 to mention Kerry's naval service:"
Clinton: "Since we're all in the same boat, we should choose a captain of our ship who is a brave, good man, who knows how to steer a vessel through troubled waters, to the calm seas and clear skies of our more perfect union."
Stewart: "Saying 'ahoy' to prosperity. Ending our economic scurvy... with the oranges of fiscal responsibility. Kerry's the right man to lead (pirate-like 'arr') country."
I did intend to say the S/390 architecture (and wasn't confusing it with the S/360). I wasn't sure if S/360 stuff was still compatible, whereas I did know that S/390 stuff definitely is.
I did though think the 390 was released in the very early 80's, which is false; it was announced it 1990. (I was probably thinking of the S/370's XA addresses, which were added in 1982.)
So by my understanding, most four-decade-old S/360 binaries can run on today's z/Series. That to me is pretty darn impressive.
Didn't the XP SP2 break compatability with a significant amount of software? I know our company waited as long as possible to deploy it because the SP had such a bad reputation. I also remember people reporting that their computers were not working correctly after the 'upgrade'.
I don't know the exact extent of SP2 problems, but yes, there were some. But I would suggest that they still affected a pretty small percentage of programs. I personally didn't run into any.
And that's saying something, because it seems that SP2 may be MS's most damaging break of backward compatibility. Probably the prohibition in XP of accessing HW directly broke more software (pretty much any DOS game that uses the sound card for example), but since SP2 affected recent software it was probably bigger in terms of effect.
And it's notable to point out that MS's main motivation with SP2 was security, and the changes that broke compatibilty were set along that goal.
The OP's point was, I think, that wine is being coded to run programs intended for any windows release from 3.1 onward, so programs will eventally have better probable compatability with wine than with a given legacy version of Windows
May have been *a* point, even the main point, but is really irrelevant to what I'm saying. I was mostly addressing the comment that not only does MS break compatibility for a significant number of applications (which is just plain false), they do it intentionally. The latter especially is pure BS.
my TV card capture program and its codecs are one of them
Hauppauge perhaps?
I forgot about the Win 9x version of their TV app since it came with one for 2000/XP line, so I guess that makes two programs for me.
Or that work on XP, but not as intended, but I supposed that counts as "works" for you
No, I would count that as not working. That's why Clue makes it into the list.
Look no further than Windows XP SP2....which is probably the second biggest change they've made. (Second to only the blocking of HW access by DOS programs with XP.) And yet, I HAVE STILL HAD NO PROBLEMS WITH IT!
I don't put a ton of stress on my computer or anything like that, but I don't go lightly either. And the numbers work out so that I had more Firefox extensions break with the 1.5 upgrade than I have had Windows programs break by a Windows upgrade, and I've got fewer than a dozen extensions installed. (I don't bring this up to denegrate Firefox at all, or even really to compare an OS to a web browser; I brought it up merely to illustrate that there are very few upgrade problems.)
I'm not claiming that all programs still work, but there's no denying that ALMOST all do.
I took an informal poll over IM of four friends; three said perhaps they've had problems with 1 or 2 programs stop working, the fourth said he's had a lot, but upon further questioning I established that they were pretty much all DOS games that hit the sound card directly.
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You might love your easy interface right now but later on think of how much time you'd save if it were less "intuitive" and more efficient. Blender's interface thrives in efficiency...
And who says these are mutually exclusive goals?
Granted, it does seem to be that interfaces that are easier to learn and a bit slower, but they don't have to be much slower at all. Think if you kept all the keyboard shortcuts in Blender but added a decent intuitive interface. Or even if you added another mode that was easier.
On a side note, I've heard your same argument for other programs such as 3DS and Maya. What isn't intuitive for you isn't like that for everyone, apparently.
OTOH, I doubt you've ever heard anyone say Blender is intuitive.
No, if you click on the link that's presented to you regardless of OS and download it, you'll have it. It doesn't need to run on your computer to IM you; in fact, that's the exact opposite of what would happen.
I personally liked the old British version of AOL that, when you signed on, would go "You've got post"
That's the problem, not the fact that they were changing their own property, as they saw fit, and reselling it -- which IS allowed by the law.
No, it's NOT allowed by the law. Whether you agree with the DMCA or not, I don't see any wiggle room in the position that they broke it. The DMCA prohibits the circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms except in limited circumstances, none of which appear to apply. They circumvented the XBox's copyright protection mechanisms. Case closed.
It's not like the Lexmark case, where you could argue that the company selling printer refills reverse engineered it for compatibility, or even that there was no copyright in place to protect. Whether it SHOULD be illegal is also another issue. But the only way you can say that the XBox modification is legal is if you think those provisions of the DMCA are unconstitutional. (There's a case to be made there but I doubt any court would agree.)
(BTW, my thoughts on the DMCA are as follows. I liken the circumvention of copyright protection to picking someone's lock. I lock my door deliberately to keep people I don't want in my house outside; MS puts a TCPAish chip in the XBox to keep programs that they don't want running from running. The analogy is far from perfect (or even good) because it's MY house and it's not MS's XBox, but stick with me for a moment.
(Now, pretty much anywhere if I get locked out of my house I can break in. In most places, I can carry around a lock pick set and break in using that so I don't damage anything. To me, this is like circumventing the protection for purposes that would be otherwise legal; running Linux, running a backup of a game you made, etc. This should be legal. (Just as I think jurdictions that outlaw mere posession of lockpicks are in the wrong.)
(Now, breaking into someone else's house is illegal, just as breaking copyright laws is illegal. But if you break into someone eles's house using a lockpick, many jurisdictions will add the posession of a lockpick onto your robbery charges. The analogy would be if you circumvent an active copyright protection scheme in the course of committing another crime, than the penalties would be made more severe. In both situations I see this as being a perfectly reasonable solution.)
That's cause it has.
And pretty poorly too. It has this bug where scrolling the buddy list doesn't update the whole window, and sometimes the tooltips stay up or even spontaneously pop up when the mouse is not in the window. I don't know how much is Gaim's fault though; I suspect the blame lies more with GTK. (And you can hardly blame Gaim for not switching from GTK either; their main target is Linux anyway.)
There's a huge difference between comparing Firefox to the Mozilla suite and the options that are available in version-2 and pre-version-2 Gaim. The Mozilla suite isn't Firefox with extra options (though it does easily expose more options). It's Firefox with an entirely different (and much less standard and, IMO, uglier) UI, a POP email client and Newsreader, a composer program, and maybe more. The Mozilla suite download is over twice the size of Firefox's. It's not a matter of different options.
(And even given all that, about:config in Firefox probably gives you any applicable option in Mozilla, though much harder to use.)
There are a number of options that have been removed. Two that some have specifically lamented missing are setting what defines when you are idle (Gaim or Windows/X usage) and whether talking while away sets your status to back.
'Affect' is used as a verb
Not entirely true: 'affect' can be used as either a noun or a verb, but means 'an expression of emotion or feeling' when used as a noun.
Nobody sane is gonna steal my eye for my password.
There are a lot of people who aren't sane
Which ignores what is in my guess the biggest use of saving the passwords: to avoid having to type it.
I don't have Gaim, AIM, etc. remember my passwords for me because I don't want to be bothered; I know all my passwords so I can sign on elsewhere. I have it remember them so that when I log on it signs on automatically.
If you encrypt it with something behind another password, you either have to store THAT password in which case we're right back where we began or you lose that application.
I think testing on children, while it would give interesting results, isn't what they're aiming for. In the real world most people WILL be moving from Windows, so if you're interested in doing this study to help, for instance, distributions or new users choose between them, or help the developers fix problems, this is what you should test.
Also, a lot of the tasks you'd be interested in testing a child wouldn't know about. If you were to ask, for instance, the user to write a formal letter in a word processor of their choice (or pick one, whatever), save it, then print it to a specific printer, a kid's not gonna be able to do that.
I think it would be enlightening to see it both ways.
But for the tweaking, I would not answer questions about how you can set up things a certain way.
You could even conduct a usability study on how easy it is to change the settings; in that case, you *should* start with defaults.
Are there any (properly marked) obsolete or not valid theories or articles concerning obsolete theories in the Encylopedia Britannica?
Sure. It has entries for both the ether and phlogiston, under those names. In both cases it says the theory has been disproved, though not immediately at the start of the article like in Wikipedia.
(This is based on the online version)
On broadcast TV.
The FCC doesn't have jurisdiction over CABLE (though they are trying) let alone movie theatres.
Apparently not. The submitter's statement was -- to paraphrase in order to highlight the hypothetical even more blatently:
Had I been in this kid's shoes, I would have committed the same crime in a different way which would have resulted in a higher probability of not getting caught.
How do you know that was the hypothetical?
Maybe the hypothetical was if I were to commit the same crime, in which case not committing it wouldn't be an option.
The problem with studies like this is they don't test the effects of this program at all. They are testing what occurs if you change the speed limit, while this program will actually affect the speed people drive at.
In fact, the more you are right about the statement that changing the speed limit has no effect on the speed people that drive, they more the results of the study are inapplicable in this situation.
It could very easily be that while artifical means of limiting speeds (speed limits) has little effect and can decrease accidents, things that actively try to prevent you from speeding very well could. Only a substantial test program (i.e. more than what they are doing) would give you results you could use.
Did you RTFA at all?
First, the devices don't make it impossible to speed, just make it increasingly difficult to push the accelerator. You can still overcome it if you need to. (Especially in an emergency if you're not already over the limit.)
Second, they are giving the program more thought before making it mandatory. They have 10 volunteers testing it. (Though I do think that more would be good.)
1) I've never heard of such a law. (I'm not saying there isn't such a law, just I've never head of it.) Where do you live?
And what happens if there's no place to pull over? There are lots of places with no shoulder and a guardrail right up against the road because they only cleared that much space before a nice steep hill.
3) While that's all nice and good, situations can change. What happens if the driver of the vehicle you're passing is an asshole and speeds up? Now you suddenly need a lot more space to pass, but you still will probably find it very difficult to drop back into your lane behind it. The only absolutely safe way to pass is to not do it.
The "run over by a car" thing is actually a really, really lame demonstration. The pressure per sq. inch really isn't that great. Nonetheless, it's always the example that's brought up.
For clothes though, it probably is a perfectly acceptable test. Reason being, if something you're wearing is being run over by a car, you probably have concerns on your mind more "pressing" than what song your iPod is playing.
Agreed. I was using Penn State's webmail for a while because I could access it anywhere (and from either my Windows or Linux boot!), but then it lost my entire inbox. That pretty much put me off of webmail permanently it looks like.
I have Outlook Express backups (yes, I used Outlook Express for a while) dating back from 7 years ago, and every email I've ever gotten in a POP program since then spread across between Outlook Express, Outlook, Opera, Mozilla, Evolution, and (currently) Thunderbird files. (I don't really find it worth it to combine them all into one place.) I don't have backups of any webmail stuff. (It may be possible, as I think it stores it on our network drives, but the question is now moot.)
Now I have it set up so that both Webmail and Thunderbird will leave mail on the server for a few days or something so I have most of my mail both places, so I get the reliability and control of a local app with the ability to get it anywhere. (Though I think if their firewalls let me run remote desktop or VNC I'd just go with that...)
Two disclaimers:
1. Penn State's webmail, near as I can tell, SUCKS ASS compared to a lot of what's out there.
2. It seems pretty silly to me to be turned off of what could potentially be a very well done tool by one experience, but blame the human psyche.
Reminds me of a Daily Show clip from the democratic convention:
Stewart: "[Bill] Clinton also became speaker number 683 to mention Kerry's naval service:"
Clinton: "Since we're all in the same boat, we should choose a captain of our ship who is a brave, good man, who knows how to steer a vessel through troubled waters, to the calm seas and clear skies of our more perfect union."
Stewart: "Saying 'ahoy' to prosperity. Ending our economic scurvy... with the oranges of fiscal responsibility. Kerry's the right man to lead (pirate-like 'arr') country."
Yes, because God knows we all regularily search Wikipedia for any claims that we assassinated someone.
You really think he would've left it there? NO! He didn't even know about it! It's not a matter of go in and fix it if you don't know about it.
He had every right and reason to get indignant.
Uh... sorta, but not really.
I did intend to say the S/390 architecture (and wasn't confusing it with the S/360). I wasn't sure if S/360 stuff was still compatible, whereas I did know that S/390 stuff definitely is.
I did though think the 390 was released in the very early 80's, which is false; it was announced it 1990. (I was probably thinking of the S/370's XA addresses, which were added in 1982.)
So by my understanding, most four-decade-old S/360 binaries can run on today's z/Series. That to me is pretty darn impressive.
Didn't the XP SP2 break compatability with a significant amount of software? I know our company waited as long as possible to deploy it because the SP had such a bad reputation. I also remember people reporting that their computers were not working correctly after the 'upgrade'.
I don't know the exact extent of SP2 problems, but yes, there were some. But I would suggest that they still affected a pretty small percentage of programs. I personally didn't run into any.
And that's saying something, because it seems that SP2 may be MS's most damaging break of backward compatibility. Probably the prohibition in XP of accessing HW directly broke more software (pretty much any DOS game that uses the sound card for example), but since SP2 affected recent software it was probably bigger in terms of effect.
And it's notable to point out that MS's main motivation with SP2 was security, and the changes that broke compatibilty were set along that goal.
The OP's point was, I think, that wine is being coded to run programs intended for any windows release from 3.1 onward, so programs will eventally have better probable compatability with wine than with a given legacy version of Windows
May have been *a* point, even the main point, but is really irrelevant to what I'm saying. I was mostly addressing the comment that not only does MS break compatibility for a significant number of applications (which is just plain false), they do it intentionally. The latter especially is pure BS.
my TV card capture program and its codecs are one of them
...which is probably the second biggest change they've made. (Second to only the blocking of HW access by DOS programs with XP.) And yet, I HAVE STILL HAD NO PROBLEMS WITH IT!
Hauppauge perhaps?
I forgot about the Win 9x version of their TV app since it came with one for 2000/XP line, so I guess that makes two programs for me.
Or that work on XP, but not as intended, but I supposed that counts as "works" for you
No, I would count that as not working. That's why Clue makes it into the list.
Look no further than Windows XP SP2.
I don't put a ton of stress on my computer or anything like that, but I don't go lightly either. And the numbers work out so that I had more Firefox extensions break with the 1.5 upgrade than I have had Windows programs break by a Windows upgrade, and I've got fewer than a dozen extensions installed. (I don't bring this up to denegrate Firefox at all, or even really to compare an OS to a web browser; I brought it up merely to illustrate that there are very few upgrade problems.)
I'm not claiming that all programs still work, but there's no denying that ALMOST all do.
I took an informal poll over IM of four friends; three said perhaps they've had problems with 1 or 2 programs stop working, the fourth said he's had a lot, but upon further questioning I established that they were pretty much all DOS games that hit the sound card directly.