Great, we now have all this stuff imported from over seas but now that very American can't buy it because he has no job and no money to pay for it. Hmmm, things must equalize somehow...
Execpt that's the point when the so-called "free market" government of the US suddenly forgets about free marketeering and becomes protectionist. Think steel import tariffs.
You seem to think that just because 3rd world countries make products for the USA that we're somehow exploiting them. Did you ever think that it's better then having no job at all?
Does the phrase "economic leverage" mean anything to you? US (or european, for that matter) importers of goods can dictate prices at will to 3rd world (sweatshop) manufacturers, because if the workers complain the sweatshop just gets moved somewhere else. It may be better than no job at all, but I'd still call that "exploitation", wouldn't you?
I fail to see how my statement and my sig are related.
I'm not sure either, but the juxtaposition just struck me as funny. Maybe it's because you seem to be advocating "america first" isolationism in your post, and open (=open to everyone) standards in your sig.
Looking at your web address (I cannot reach the site from here)
Do try again, it's hilarious. Well I thought it was funny.
(It's hosted in the US, BTW (at least according to
ARIN). Funny how there are actually no.kp sites, and the DPRK "PR dept" operates through.jp and US-hosted.com sites, i.e. countries is threatens to nuke on a regular basis, isn't it?)
If I was going to try to go to a government funded school in Korea, I'd certainly expect to only be admitted after all the Korean citizens who wanted to go were enrolled.
This is OT, but you remember about the Japanese people who were abducted by north korea? One of them, it turns out, got married (in NK) to an american defector. Strange, or what?
Once the world sees what it's like without the USA to run to, perhaps they'll be a little more appreciative of what we offer to them.
And once the USA sees what it's like without oil imports and cheap 3rd world labour, maybe it'll be a little more appreciative of what the world offers to it.
Truth is, the average American works their ass off to make a living.
Not as much as the slaves^W people that make all those "made in $3RD_WORLD_COUNTRY" goods you buy, because no american worker will get out of bed to make $CHEAP_GENERIC_PRODUCT for 20 cents an hour. The american way of life (the one that's "not up for negotiation" according to GWB) is based on the economic exploitation of other countries.
Though it is critical that the study/data be released so that others can improve on that work, it is also critical that information not fall into the wrong hands. Imagine China/Pakistan/North Korea having satellite technology 20 yrs ago.
Yeah. Like, imagine if someone had gone to Afghanistan 20 years ago and taught a bunch of insane fanatics to build bombs.
Or someone had sold poison gas-making technology to mad Iraqi dictators.
There is a difference between race and national origin.
True, but many people use "racist" as shorthand for "bigoted" or "discriminatory on the basis of race/ethic origin/religion/nationality", on the grounds that they are morally interchangeably misguided concepts.
(the exception of this is rightwing americans, who restrict the term 'racist' to some nebulous (and erroneous) biological notion so they can justify their bigoted statements along the lines of "I'm not a racist, because 'raghead' isn't a race".)
It's not a matter of racism, it is the idea that government assisted programs (like state universities) should benefit the citizens of that government FIRST.
--
All closed file formats should be illegal, they just aid monopolies.
I'm not trying to imply that the United States is somehow more sophisticated, I'm suggesting that Americans tend to view cellphones ringing about as enjoyable as listening to a car alarm going off. And not because they're boring, monotone and tedious, either. We dislike the phone because it represents an interruption, rendered jarringly, like an audial ICQ popup (though I'm told they don't do that anymore).
If ring tones are a european thing, how come it's always americans that bitch about people leaving their phone on (or even having conversations) in cinemas? I've NEVER heard a phone go off in a cinema over here... (then again, many cinemas do show a little "turn your phone off NOW" reminder splash after the adverts, and it obviously works). Or do I just go to cinemas frequented only by considerate people?
(cell phone rings, owner picks up immediately) Everyone else in the room isn't bothered.
Now:
(cell phone rings with irritating tune, owner leaves it on until it's finished playing so everyone know what great taste in music he/she has) Everyone else in the room: Must....KILL! KILL! KILL!!!..
The unsuspecting google goatse trick! [google.com]
I never figured out what these were about, until I tried looking at it (the link not the page) in IE...
(In mozilla, they show up in the status bar as "http://www.google.com/BLAH_BLAH_BLAH...http://goa tse.cx", - it always shows the last bit of the URL. One more reason why mozilla rocks! Thanks for listening.)
IIRC there is actually scientific evidence that supports this, i.e. our eyes are better attuned to resolving dark on light than light on dark. It may be an urban myth though.
In any case, I agree with you, although as the other respondent said, reducing the contrast does help.
Seriously though, signal strength where I live seems to be declining rather than improving. I blame the "mobile phone masts give cancer" idiots.
Of course, anyone who understands the inverse square law realises that more masts = less max power (if the minimun signal strength required is constant, more masts means the maximum distance to the nearest mast decreases), but you try explaining that to the man/woman on the street...
And party like it's 1986! Don't go there! (nightmare visions of a zx spectrum enter my mind...."look, it's the yellow and blue pattern and the random static noise! that means it's loading the program!");-)
It's not intuition that makes people try to right-click. It's prior familiarity with a different system.
So is "if I move this funny object on the table, the arrow on the screen moves as well".
Or "if I press down on this button, the letter on the button appears on the screen, next to where the blinking line is".
That's exactly the force Dvorak was arguing against:)
Sure, but: Baby. Bathwater. Don't throw out with. Change for the sake of change is a tricky thing, and often leads to disaster (or as linus would say, "that way lies crapness").
I used Mac OS X as an example -- it's still the basic idea as Windows, but there are a lot of differences. The point wasn't that "OS X rulz! Windows winBLOWZZ!" it was that there can be large differences/innovations in a Desktop, like them or not, and it can still be easy to switch from Windows.
I was talking about balance, and you went off on a typical Anti-Mac troll.
Troll, maybe. (whoever modded me as flamebait, I wanted "troll", dammit! i have tons of flamebaits already!)
But to me, "if in doubt, right-click on it" is a fundamental part of most modern GUIs - I first encountered it in Win95, so the fact that the Mac doesn't support it (without extra hardware) makes the "using a mac" experience fundamentally different. Not to mention the fact that the application menu bar doesn't appear in that application's window. To me the MacOS GUI is very different indeed from Windows (or any other sane GUI) in the same way that OpenWindows (URGH) is - the differences far outweigh the similarities.
Combine this with the Streamed Audio Kernel source, and it's only a matter of time before people leave patches on Linus' voicemail! The great thing is that to patch an audio kernel, you only need a tape recorder....:P
the problem isn't the Mac way of handling burning, it's the way Winblowz taught them that burning a CD is different than using other media. for example, think of a floppy disk instead of a CD.[...]
decide they're done, and go to eject the disk.
Sorry, won't work.
I know that the files haven't been burned yet, because MacOS (like WinXP) does non-on-the-fly writing, so why would I want to eject it? I'm looking for a button that says "Write files now" that as easily accessed as right-clicking on the CD in WinXP.
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!
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)
... don't blame the Mac because they can't figure it out
I thought the Mac was supposed to be super-duper-intuitive? The computer you can use without being a geek?
instead of watching everyone make the same mistake over and over and over, maybe you should take the time to advise everyone
I do, explaining the way it works with great patience (no, really). They invariably say, "this is really stupid". I say, "yes, I know".
and if wasting CD's is a real issue for you
It's more of a case of being frustrated that basic functionality which I had under Windoze 5 years ago is still considered an "extra" on the Mac (I think multi-sessions are supported in MacOS 10.1, or sth like that, but apparently you can only erase CD-RWs if the original was written by a user with the same UID as you, cos only then do you "own" the volume... anyone who thinks this is good design needs their head examined).
Well is Mac OS X "similar" to Windows? I mean, it's similar, but there are some major differences...
Yeah, like there's no right-click context-sensitive menu, which IMHO is one of the best UI features since GUIs have been around.
(Getting OT here, but...)
I don't mean to troll against macs here (although I will;-) ), but MacOS X is (IMHO) the most counter-intuitive UI ever designed.
We've had an iMac (one of the flatscreen with DVD-writer) in the office for a while - it's the only CD-writer there is, and it's hilarious watching people use it...
"Hmmm, pretty"
"Now, how do I burn a CD?"
"Let's try putting the blank CD in first."
"Where's the eject button???"
(someone walks past and points out the eject key on the keyboard)
"OK, name the CD....'untitled' will do"
"Hey, the icon appeared on the desktop! Neat!"
"Now all I do is right-click on the CD icon and..."
"How do I right-click with this thing????"
(much later)
"OK, there's 500MB left on the CD so I can just add another session..."
"What do you mean 'read-only'? What happened to multi-session?"
"What do you mean, I have to be administrator to erase a CD-RW???? It's meant to be rewritable, isn't it???"
"SO, there's a mere 100K of data on this CD-RW but there's no logical way I can write ANY more data on it?"
(user walks away in digust and finds someone with winblows on their laptop)
Slashdot Mirror
Execpt that's the point when the so-called "free market" government of the US suddenly forgets about free marketeering and becomes protectionist. Think steel import tariffs.
You seem to think that just because 3rd world countries make products for the USA that we're somehow exploiting them. Did you ever think that it's better then having no job at all?
Does the phrase "economic leverage" mean anything to you? US (or european, for that matter) importers of goods can dictate prices at will to 3rd world (sweatshop) manufacturers, because if the workers complain the sweatshop just gets moved somewhere else. It may be better than no job at all, but I'd still call that "exploitation", wouldn't you?
I'm not sure either, but the juxtaposition just struck me as funny. Maybe it's because you seem to be advocating "america first" isolationism in your post, and open (=open to everyone) standards in your sig.
Looking at your web address (I cannot reach the site from here)
Do try again, it's hilarious. Well I thought it was funny.
(It's hosted in the US, BTW (at least according to ARIN). Funny how there are actually no .kp sites, and the DPRK "PR dept" operates through .jp and US-hosted .com sites, i.e. countries is threatens to nuke on a regular basis, isn't it?)
If I was going to try to go to a government funded school in Korea, I'd certainly expect to only be admitted after all the Korean citizens who wanted to go were enrolled.
This is OT, but you remember about the Japanese people who were abducted by north korea? One of them, it turns out, got married (in NK) to an american defector. Strange, or what?
And once the USA sees what it's like without oil imports and cheap 3rd world labour, maybe it'll be a little more appreciative of what the world offers to it.
Not as much as the slaves^W people that make all those "made in $3RD_WORLD_COUNTRY" goods you buy, because no american worker will get out of bed to make $CHEAP_GENERIC_PRODUCT for 20 cents an hour. The american way of life (the one that's "not up for negotiation" according to GWB) is based on the economic exploitation of other countries.
In soviet russia, the blog bandwagon jumps on you!
Yeah. Like, imagine if someone had gone to Afghanistan 20 years ago and taught a bunch of insane fanatics to build bombs.
Or someone had sold poison gas-making technology to mad Iraqi dictators.
But that would NEVER happen, would it?
True, but many people use "racist" as shorthand for "bigoted" or "discriminatory on the basis of race/ethic origin/religion/nationality", on the grounds that they are morally interchangeably misguided concepts.
(the exception of this is rightwing americans, who restrict the term 'racist' to some nebulous (and erroneous) biological notion so they can justify their bigoted statements along the lines of "I'm not a racist, because 'raghead' isn't a race".)
--
All closed file formats should be illegal, they just aid monopolies.
Oh, the sweet irony...
People with elephants hurt people! Bring on tougher elephant control laws!
If ring tones are a european thing, how come it's always americans that bitch about people leaving their phone on (or even having conversations) in cinemas? I've NEVER heard a phone go off in a cinema over here... (then again, many cinemas do show a little "turn your phone off NOW" reminder splash after the adverts, and it obviously works). Or do I just go to cinemas frequented only by considerate people?
Then:
Now:
I never figured out what these were about, until I tried looking at it (the link not the page) in IE...
(In mozilla, they show up in the status bar as "http://www.google.com/BLAH_BLAH_BLAH...http://goa tse.cx", - it always shows the last bit of the URL. One more reason why mozilla rocks! Thanks for listening.)
I always thought it was a pun on "Splashback", as in urinal.
In any case, I agree with you, although as the other respondent said, reducing the contrast does help.
Of course, the most annoying instance of this is went the fonts aren't actually text, but GIFs with text in them....
"Hello? I'm on the train."
Seriously though, signal strength where I live seems to be declining rather than improving. I blame the "mobile phone masts give cancer" idiots.
Of course, anyone who understands the inverse square law realises that more masts = less max power (if the minimun signal strength required is constant, more masts means the maximum distance to the nearest mast decreases), but you try explaining that to the man/woman on the street...
And party like it's 1986! Don't go there! (nightmare visions of a zx spectrum enter my mind...."look, it's the yellow and blue pattern and the random static noise! that means it's loading the program!") ;-)
So is "if I move this funny object on the table, the arrow on the screen moves as well".
Or "if I press down on this button, the letter on the button appears on the screen, next to where the blinking line is".
That's exactly the force Dvorak was arguing against :)
Sure, but: Baby. Bathwater. Don't throw out with. Change for the sake of change is a tricky thing, and often leads to disaster (or as linus would say, "that way lies crapness").
I was talking about balance, and you went off on a typical Anti-Mac troll.
Troll, maybe. (whoever modded me as flamebait, I wanted "troll", dammit! i have tons of flamebaits already!)
But to me, "if in doubt, right-click on it" is a fundamental part of most modern GUIs - I first encountered it in Win95, so the fact that the Mac doesn't support it (without extra hardware) makes the "using a mac" experience fundamentally different. Not to mention the fact that the application menu bar doesn't appear in that application's window. To me the MacOS GUI is very different indeed from Windows (or any other sane GUI) in the same way that OpenWindows (URGH) is - the differences far outweigh the similarities.
But that's just IM(H?)O.
Combine this with the Streamed Audio Kernel source, and it's only a matter of time before people leave patches on Linus' voicemail! The great thing is that to patch an audio kernel, you only need a tape recorder.... :P
Sorry, won't work.
I know that the files haven't been burned yet, because MacOS (like WinXP) does non-on-the-fly writing, so why would I want to eject it? I'm looking for a button that says "Write files now" that as easily accessed as right-clicking on the CD in WinXP.
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!
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)
I thought the Mac was supposed to be super-duper-intuitive? The computer you can use without being a geek?
instead of watching everyone make the same mistake over and over and over, maybe you should take the time to advise everyone
I do, explaining the way it works with great patience (no, really). They invariably say, "this is really stupid". I say, "yes, I know".
and if wasting CD's is a real issue for you
It's more of a case of being frustrated that basic functionality which I had under Windoze 5 years ago is still considered an "extra" on the Mac (I think multi-sessions are supported in MacOS 10.1, or sth like that, but apparently you can only erase CD-RWs if the original was written by a user with the same UID as you, cos only then do you "own" the volume... anyone who thinks this is good design needs their head examined).
you like feeling superior to everyone else
Guilty as charged, your honour. ;-)
must resist....too easy....
Yeah, like there's no right-click context-sensitive menu, which IMHO is one of the best UI features since GUIs have been around.
(Getting OT here, but...)
I don't mean to troll against macs here (although I will ;-) ), but MacOS X is (IMHO) the most counter-intuitive UI ever designed.
We've had an iMac (one of the flatscreen with DVD-writer) in the office for a while - it's the only CD-writer there is, and it's hilarious watching people use it...
"Hmmm, pretty"
"Now, how do I burn a CD?"
"Let's try putting the blank CD in first."
"Where's the eject button???"
(someone walks past and points out the eject key on the keyboard)
"OK, name the CD....'untitled' will do"
"Hey, the icon appeared on the desktop! Neat!"
"Now all I do is right-click on the CD icon and..."
"How do I right-click with this thing????"
(much later)
"OK, there's 500MB left on the CD so I can just add another session..."
"What do you mean 'read-only'? What happened to multi-session?"
"What do you mean, I have to be administrator to erase a CD-RW???? It's meant to be rewritable, isn't it???"
"SO, there's a mere 100K of data on this CD-RW but there's no logical way I can write ANY more data on it?"
(user walks away in digust and finds someone with winblows on their laptop)
Seen it happen many times... I'm not joking
"This function is void, it takes two args/The first is sec a pointer to 2048 unsigned bytes/That are the encrypted disk sector and will be decrypted"
What, to get around US export restrictions, like PGP used to?
(they would print out their source code, export it in paper form and OCR it in switzerland to make the PGPi codebase. at least so I've heard.)