Perhaps I might ask if you believe that China does not actually have a billion people and is in fact a large desert. Would you simply shun me, or would you suddenly go "well, I've just read about China in books and seen photos and video of it [I am assuming you have not been there]... better be skeptical about the fact that China is an inhabitable land mass." I should hope not. So what's the difference here? (And BTW, there is a fair amount of "positive" evidence; the fact that the USSR didn't cry foul when they do doubt had the tracking technology to make sure we were actually doing something other than stay in orbit, the rocks that have been recovered from the moon [you forgot about this above], etc.)
Same here, only at Penn State we got Wi XP, Offixe XP, Visual Studio.NET, Frontpage, and a number of other things. Since I use stuff like VS.NS that most people don't, I figure they are partly subsidizing my use of Visual Studio. (Though that deal has since run out; we not just get discounts, though bigger discounts than the normal education price.)
>>I get the feeling that Windows makes you do a lot of stuff with a contextual menu with no alternative, which would really piss me off.
This is not the case, with the arguable exception of on the desktop. In explorer for instance, the context menu is mirrored (though less convieniently) in the file menu. Then there're keyboard shortcuts and dragging you can do for many/most actions.
That said, sometimes programs have context menus that provide the only way to access something. Again, I've done some studying of HCI and program interfaces, and most of the sources I've seen say this is extremely poor UI design. So you have a right to get annoyed. (Though, I can't see alternatives for some... for instance, let's say you want to save a picture on a web site. I don't see a good way to do this without context menus.)
BTW, I'll state my bias as well: I love context menus. I feel I work faster with them as I don't have to go up to the top of the screen.
>>The fact that the "eject" icon turns into a "burn" icon AFTER I start dragging the CD icon is shockingly bad UI design - the UI element needed is invisible until you start dragging things around. Why would I blindly pick up the CD icon without knowing what I was going to drop it on? Why would I want to drop it on anything if I can't see a "burn" control on the screen? I don't want to eject it yet!
Having done some basic studing of HCI and interface design, I must echo this view.
>>FWIW, the WinOnCD that came with my very first CD-RW (many years ago) came with a UDF packet-writing driver. REAL drag-and-drop CD-writing. You dragged the file, it got written. NOW. (was a bit unstable though, so I didn't use it much)
Precisely. DirectCD shipped with the first drive we owned, a HP 7100 external or something like that. A whoopping 2x1x6, plugged into the parallel port to give you an idea of when this was.
Well, considering you can't start either Windows or Linux on my box without my 10-character, dictionary-attack impervous, mixed alpha-numeric password, anyone who stole my system wouldn't have much of a choice but to reinstall...
I disagree. Most common functions are covered by keyboard shortcuts. If they're not, you can always use the hotkeys associated with the menu; that's just an extra stroke usually. So use of programs are not hindered by the fact that they're GUIs. (The only exception to this I can think of is actually starting programs, but that's not *that* common an activity that the performance hit from using menus is overruled.) Even if command line access is slightly *faster*, GUIs are *much* easier to learn and use. Well, if the GUI is well done. I tend to use the command box when I use AutoCAD 'cause I can't figure out what half the icons are.
While there are a breed of hackers who would consider "many hours" getting to a point where a system is set up, most people just want to use a computer and would consider that time fustrating rather than "gratifying." I know I got extremely fustrated trying to get XFree working under Mandrake, and the gratification of getting the nVidia drivers downloaded through Lynx and installed only slightly made up for it. Oh, the reason I had Mandrake? Mainly because I was having problems getting Red Hat to talk to my sound card. Despite many hours of work on that, I made no progress at all.
That story. The reason the company that Apple Computer sued chose Apple Comminucations for their name (the company that is now known as Green) is in response to another company that called itself Orange.
Yes, but as another poster pointed out, it's political message stays within the realm of computer programs. This license steps over into areas unreleted to technology.
I think there's a lot more potential for confusion among "Windows Backup Wizard" as being endorsed by MS than there is for someone to get "Apple Communications" and "Apple Computer" confused.
On the other hand, you don't see MS going after construction companies. MS was at least going after software products... Apple is going into moderately different territory.
Re:Yeah, and no one will ever need more than 256k,
on
Bricklin on Tablet PCs
·
· Score: 2
>>But the metadata text labels you place on those graphics can be converted, & allow you to search and catagorize those graphics.
Precisely. So while I may not be able to say "find the picture I drew of fluid moving through a pipe", I can say "find where I mention 'Berneulli's Theorem'" (After I look up how it's spelled...)
>>O yeah right, I can't imagine any way for anyone to benefit from any technological advance. We really should go back to stamping ideograms on clay tablets, everything since then has cost much more than it has been worth.
Uses for technology tend to emerge after the technology. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is often only the first half of the story; after that it becomes "invention is the mother of necessity."
Which is why you wait for later generations. You can't get a system that has the qualities you described without development. You don't get development without earlier versions. The current systems will be good enough for some people, and other will want to have them just 'cause they're cool. It's like most technology; the market grows as it matures.
If you saw my notes you'd see. I draw arrows to related stuff, to reorganize, etc.; draw pictures and stuff like mathematical symbols (let's see you type an integral or parital derivative faster than I can write one) and the like.
If I have five notebooks full of notes, can I pull up an application that will search through them in a minute or two to find a particular fact that you want?
>>What student would buy this instead of a PowerBook G4?
Maybe because it's a tablet PC. I'm not sure about you, but I couldn't type notes. I need to write them. Which means that the G4's out.
>>the tablet PC is $2,000 more than anybody would ever pay for it.
Of course, I could have said the same thing about ENIAC: it was $450,000 more than anyone would pay. And I'd be wrong. Because there were people (the gov't) who built it. There are people who will buy the tablet PC because there's nothing else like it on the market, at least that I'm aware of. And the people who can afford it will spur development of more models that won't be expensive.
Well, without saying that this rule is independently in place elsewhere, it is just a CA Dept. of Transportation regulation, so yeah, it's a California thing.
No, all it does is show information from which people can determine what perhaps 30% of the people around them are (they can detect 60% of what people listen to, and caters to the majority. That assumes there are two stations. With more, you could have a plurality in which case 30% could drop to 10 or 15%.
Slashdot Mirror
Including, I might add [since not everyone has access to it] the OED.
Perhaps I might ask if you believe that China does not actually have a billion people and is in fact a large desert. Would you simply shun me, or would you suddenly go "well, I've just read about China in books and seen photos and video of it [I am assuming you have not been there]... better be skeptical about the fact that China is an inhabitable land mass." I should hope not. So what's the difference here? (And BTW, there is a fair amount of "positive" evidence; the fact that the USSR didn't cry foul when they do doubt had the tracking technology to make sure we were actually doing something other than stay in orbit, the rocks that have been recovered from the moon [you forgot about this above], etc.)
Same here, only at Penn State we got Wi XP, Offixe XP, Visual Studio .NET, Frontpage, and a number of other things. Since I use stuff like VS.NS that most people don't, I figure they are partly subsidizing my use of Visual Studio. (Though that deal has since run out; we not just get discounts, though bigger discounts than the normal education price.)
Just out of curiosity, are you speaking of PSU or its branch campuses, or the actual commonwealth colleges?
>>I get the feeling that Windows makes you do a lot of stuff with a contextual menu with no alternative, which would really piss me off.
This is not the case, with the arguable exception of on the desktop. In explorer for instance, the context menu is mirrored (though less convieniently) in the file menu. Then there're keyboard shortcuts and dragging you can do for many/most actions.
That said, sometimes programs have context menus that provide the only way to access something. Again, I've done some studying of HCI and program interfaces, and most of the sources I've seen say this is extremely poor UI design. So you have a right to get annoyed. (Though, I can't see alternatives for some... for instance, let's say you want to save a picture on a web site. I don't see a good way to do this without context menus.)
BTW, I'll state my bias as well: I love context menus. I feel I work faster with them as I don't have to go up to the top of the screen.
>>The fact that the "eject" icon turns into a "burn" icon AFTER I start dragging the CD icon is shockingly bad UI design - the UI element needed is invisible until you start dragging things around. Why would I blindly pick up the CD icon without knowing what I was going to drop it on? Why would I want to drop it on anything if I can't see a "burn" control on the screen? I don't want to eject it yet!
Having done some basic studing of HCI and interface design, I must echo this view.
>>FWIW, the WinOnCD that came with my very first CD-RW (many years ago) came with a UDF packet-writing driver. REAL drag-and-drop CD-writing. You dragged the file, it got written. NOW. (was a bit unstable though, so I didn't use it much)
Precisely. DirectCD shipped with the first drive we owned, a HP 7100 external or something like that. A whoopping 2x1x6, plugged into the parallel port to give you an idea of when this was.
Well, considering you can't start either Windows or Linux on my box without my 10-character, dictionary-attack impervous, mixed alpha-numeric password, anyone who stole my system wouldn't have much of a choice but to reinstall...
I disagree. Most common functions are covered by keyboard shortcuts. If they're not, you can always use the hotkeys associated with the menu; that's just an extra stroke usually. So use of programs are not hindered by the fact that they're GUIs. (The only exception to this I can think of is actually starting programs, but that's not *that* common an activity that the performance hit from using menus is overruled.) Even if command line access is slightly *faster*, GUIs are *much* easier to learn and use. Well, if the GUI is well done. I tend to use the command box when I use AutoCAD 'cause I can't figure out what half the icons are.
While there are a breed of hackers who would consider "many hours" getting to a point where a system is set up, most people just want to use a computer and would consider that time fustrating rather than "gratifying." I know I got extremely fustrated trying to get XFree working under Mandrake, and the gratification of getting the nVidia drivers downloaded through Lynx and installed only slightly made up for it. Oh, the reason I had Mandrake? Mainly because I was having problems getting Red Hat to talk to my sound card. Despite many hours of work on that, I made no progress at all.
Yeah, and it also turns off anyone who struggles with Windows or MacOS now. Or even just subsists in them
Others in a different branch of this thread calculate it to be 515 GB.
That story. The reason the company that Apple Computer sued chose Apple Comminucations for their name (the company that is now known as Green) is in response to another company that called itself Orange.
But my guess would still be no.
Yes, but as another poster pointed out, it's political message stays within the realm of computer programs. This license steps over into areas unreleted to technology.
I think there's a lot more potential for confusion among "Windows Backup Wizard" as being endorsed by MS than there is for someone to get "Apple Communications" and "Apple Computer" confused.
On the other hand, you don't see MS going after construction companies. MS was at least going after software products... Apple is going into moderately different territory.
>>But the metadata text labels you place on those graphics can be converted, & allow you to search and catagorize those graphics.
Precisely. So while I may not be able to say "find the picture I drew of fluid moving through a pipe", I can say "find where I mention 'Berneulli's Theorem'" (After I look up how it's spelled...)
>>O yeah right, I can't imagine any way for anyone to benefit from any technological advance. We really should go back to stamping ideograms on clay tablets, everything since then has cost much more than it has been worth.
Uses for technology tend to emerge after the technology. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is often only the first half of the story; after that it becomes "invention is the mother of necessity."
Which is why you wait for later generations. You can't get a system that has the qualities you described without development. You don't get development without earlier versions. The current systems will be good enough for some people, and other will want to have them just 'cause they're cool. It's like most technology; the market grows as it matures.
If you saw my notes you'd see. I draw arrows to related stuff, to reorganize, etc.; draw pictures and stuff like mathematical symbols (let's see you type an integral or parital derivative faster than I can write one) and the like.
If I have five notebooks full of notes, can I pull up an application that will search through them in a minute or two to find a particular fact that you want?
>>What student would buy this instead of a PowerBook G4?
Maybe because it's a tablet PC. I'm not sure about you, but I couldn't type notes. I need to write them. Which means that the G4's out.
>>the tablet PC is $2,000 more than anybody would ever pay for it.
Of course, I could have said the same thing about ENIAC: it was $450,000 more than anyone would pay. And I'd be wrong. Because there were people (the gov't) who built it. There are people who will buy the tablet PC because there's nothing else like it on the market, at least that I'm aware of. And the people who can afford it will spur development of more models that won't be expensive.
They don't need to get a judge to buy it. All they need to do is cause a judge to consider it until their opponent runs out of legal money.
Unlike many people, you're not computer illiterate. (Or for that matter, illiterate in general)
First, the DMCA is of dubious constitutinality (that aspect has not been properly tested in courts).
Second, see the ruling... the ruling SUPPORTS the ability to create/distribute such software.
Well, without saying that this rule is independently in place elsewhere, it is just a CA Dept. of Transportation regulation, so yeah, it's a California thing.
No, all it does is show information from which people can determine what perhaps 30% of the people around them are (they can detect 60% of what people listen to, and caters to the majority. That assumes there are two stations. With more, you could have a plurality in which case 30% could drop to 10 or 15%.