I dunno about you, but the default XP theme is visually asthetic to use. Easy to read, easy to distinguish icons/visual alerts and "simple".
I'm just wondering how the rounded edges and hints of blue I'm seeing in the screenshots translate to making it 'feel XP-ish'. Perhaps the icons help a bit, though I still see a lot more jagged edges than I care for (though that could be an issue with the screenshots).
Personally, I like the silver XP theme. The blue is a bit too jarring for me and doesn't mesh well with my usual colour choices for the system. The silver still looks a bit like the older Windows versions, without having the disadvantages of reverting completely to 'Classic'. I used the olive theme for a while, but would really prefer something using a darker green colour. Olive seems to make window titles and some other text impossible to read at high resolutions.
- if red on the A/C controls indicated "cooler" and blue indicated "warmer"
Perhaps a localization issue? Colourblind? There are a lot of reasons that these kinds of adjustments could be made, though in reality most users don't do customizations to their systems that swap things in a way to make them the exact opposite of the originals, unless they're doing it to someone else's machine.for the purpose of screwing them up. Personally, I don't look at the colours on my AC/heat controls, I simply spin them clockwise if it's cold and counterclockwise if it's hot, yet other cars have the controls in a straight line rather than as knobs.
-- if the colors on the A/C controls were green and yellow
Again this could be the same as above. What if red and blue don't have the same heat/cold associations for other people? What if someone just has a hard time telling the two colours apart?
-- if the largest knob/button on the stereo didn't control volume or tuning (instead controlling bass or fade, maybe?)
The stock stereo in my car does this, though, admittedly, because it's actually 4 knobs on 2 posts it's easy to understand if you've ever used a stereo with that type of setup. Try figuring out what all the knobs do on a bass or guitar sometime when they have a similar setup.
-- if shifting from one gear to the next, instead of requiring motion in the general forward/back motion, required motion in the general left/right direction (imagine the standard H on its side)
My car requires that you lift off the gas when it's time to shift gears, and it's an automatic. If you don't life off the gas it shifts hard (hard as in you could get the same motion in your neck by tapping the brake moderately hard and letting off very quickly). The car is designed to do this, though, and the feature can be disabled through an obscurely labelled switch on the dash, all stock from the manufacturer.
I could go on (if I kept trying).
These are the types of tweaks that are really wanting to be done...
Of course, colour-related tweaks can often be done without any APIs, if the resources used are accessable to any degree, and the article said those weren't an issue. Things like, say, changing a volume knob to a slider should be possible if you have the knowledge of how to do it, and I'm sure people would've loved full skinning capability in QuickTime back when they had a volume knob on the player (as opposed to having to embed the skin in the media).
I don't believe theme or skin creation capabilities should replace a solid UI design from the developer. However, I do believe that it should be available at the operating system level. That's more important to me than anything at the application level, because it allows applications to remain consistent across the user's desktop (not the platform, but the user). Getting back to the default theme should also be extremely easy to do, even if it means preventing the user from changing the method for reverting the skin in any way. With all of the major operating systems now having proper multiuser support, there shouldn't even be a major issue of problems with users going to another machine (and, as someone else mentioned, the guest account should only be able to use the default, though there should be an option for a network administrator to set certain defaults for the network that are observed by the guest account, due to corporate desktop needs being what they are).
I believe all 3 of them do. I used LiteStep for a while on 2k, but have never tried it under XP. WindowBlinds has a specific version for XP that hooks into the theme interface built into XP. WinStep I've never used, but it says it's built to work with 9x/Me/2k/XP. There are a lot of apps for that sort of thing, though, and most of the community seems to focus on LiteStep and/or WindowBlinds.
Wouldn't it suck if you sat down in a car, and turning the steering wheel to the right made the car go left instead? Or if the gas and brake pedals were switched? I think it's the same idea.
-Wouldn't it suck if you got in a car and it had 3 pedals? -Wouldn't it suck if you got in a car and the driver's seat was on the other side? -Wouldn't it suck if the driver's seat was in the middle? -Wouldn't it suck if the gas tank was filled from the other side of the car (or the middle)? -if the RPM guage wasn't there? -if the guages turned the opposite way? -if the guages were LCD/LED? -if the infrared HUD wasn't on all cars? -if the stereo didnt have knobs? -if the horn button was in a different place? -where's the parking brake? etc.
cars have very little in the way of a standard interface. Essentially you've got a wheel and (sometimes) 2 pedals. How those 3 items are oriented varies greatly from one car to another and affects your purchasing decision. The best you can usually hope for is some similarity between cars from a different manufacturer. For instance, GM uses similar controls for AC/heat and headlights on most of their cars, yet they're not quite the same as what Ford and others use, and sometimes aren't obvious unless you've driven a GM before. Let's not even get started on the multifunction stick hanging off the side of my steering wheel that does everything from cruise control and windshield whipers to brights and turn signals. Accidentally turning on the cruise control and/or brights in the rain is NOT a good thing by any stretch of the imagination.
The difference is that MS uses the undocumented APIs in their OS to DRIVE OUT COMPETITIORS IN THE APPLICATIONS AND INTERNET BUSINESSES.
According to the 18 states and DoJ (especially the 9 dissenting states) it doesn't matter if MS is shipping a product outside of Windows that uses the API. If someone else decides they want to make a product that functions as 'middleware' which could be helped by an undocumented API, then Microsoft would be obliged to document that API. If I want to replace explorer.exe, the APIs have to be documented. If explorer.exe accesses a dll file to gain it's start menu functionality and I want to make a start menu replacement without replacing the whole thing, they have to document the API (just a note that it only works like this if the 9 states get their way, I'm not sure that it would be quite so liberal if the DoJ settlement is upheld, or if another settlement is used).
If MS kept their undocumented APIs solely in the OS part of the company and released them to everyone when they were ready, that is one thing.
But the majority of the APIs MS recently released to reach compliance with the DoJ settlement were not used in MS products outside of what ships with Windows. A few of them were for the task manager functionality, for instance.
But if the applications/internet sections need a special API then the OS people build it in. And somehow fail to tell their competitiors.
hmm... is IE still a separate product? As far as the applications part goes, I believe the complaint was that the applications (IE, Office, Windows Media Player) would change OS components or add new components to the system directory, not that the OS would change the components for the applications. The latter part (adding components) ignores the fact that many application developers do the same thing if they plan to share the components between different applications, and that the components in the system directory are not always OS components (IE components are shared with Office and Visual Studio as well as Windows, Visual Studio may also use Office components if they're installed, some 'Office' products don't ship as part of Office, but use the same components). In fact, until recently most applications designed for Windows looked in the Windows directory first to resolve dependencies (to find components), rather than in it's own directory, so you could even achieve a minor speed increase by placing the components there (and people want to know why their Win directory bloats, maybe if you really knew where things like ICQ put everything...).
Microsoft got a lot of hits from the press over this, but the case centered mostly on contracts with vendors, ISPs, and OEMs, which certainly prevented other products from having as many roads into the market. The level to which these were proven and upheld through the appeals tends to amount to the differences between the DoJ and 9 states' settlements, as the DoJ revised their demands quite heavily when portions of their case were thrown out or remanded relating to those portions of the settlement. That's why the level of API disclosures and the involvement of Office show such a large disparity between the two settlement proposals.
But I have never heard anyone complain about MS undocumented API's that I gave credence to. It definitly isn't a mainstream complaint. And if anyone (MS propoent or opponent) complains about an undocumented API changing, they deserve a swift kick in the pants, and whatever else they get.
It was a mainstream enough complaint to become a big part of the settlements proposed by both the DoJ and the 9 states that still haven't agreed on a settlement. According to that case Microsoft doesn't even have to ship something separately that uses the APIs, someone else just has to have a reason to want to include them in a product they are shipping.
I don't discount that it may have been done in the multi-window-manager world of the unices, but i've personally never seen the equivalents, and as far as windows? forget about it.
LiteStep? WinStep? WindowBlinds?
There are so many shell replacements and mods that can be used in Windows it's hard to keep track of them.
Think different means solve your problems creatively; it does not mean dress yourself creatively.
It's been a few minutes since I read the article, so I might be remembering this wrong, but didn't the article point to the fact that you can change the APPEARANCE of many things in OS X fairly easily, but can't change the behavior?
Personally, I stay away from a lot of interface 'enhancements' on my systems, but when I find a good one that does something I want to do, I use it. What makes Apple breaking 3rd party software any better than any other OS developer breaking 3rd party software? Why should Apple be the only company allowed to design software that hooks into certain parts of the interface or is part of the interface itself?
MS has a monopoly on computer operating systems - a whole class of products.
Actually, according to the case that was brought against them, they have a monopoly on x86 desktop computer operating systems. This means that the Mac is in a completely different market (they justified this by pointing to the hardware cost for switching platforms, in addition to the normal software cost for switching operating systems).
By the same reasoning, Apple does have a monopoly on their market. That being said, no one's going to care until their market becomes as large as Microsoft's current desktop market.
MS went to court, not because they had a monopoly, but because they abused their monopolistic position in order to gain market share in other markets.
and modified APIs as well as making deals with other companies to exclude other companies' products from the market. The API modifications are a big deal, as it could be seen as restraint of trade. There is some protection in the fact that the APIs were not published (and not supported), but then this leads down the arguments about 'secret APIs' being leveraged to give the OS developer an advantage over 3rd party developers. All of this should sound pretty similar to the accusations brought against Microsoft, the only real difference here is that 3rd party interface designers usually don't make much of a fuss when an API changes between OS versions, whereas certain developers of certain types of software seem to have a real problem with this sort of thing.
A sharp zaurus handheld, a cell phone, and a digital camera. I like to have all this stuff on me at all times. But, it's kind of a lot to walk around with everywhere.
I can understand that, but how much of it would really be as useful as the existing devices if they were combined? Usually you sacrifice something for combining the devices, even moreso than with things like PC hardware or stereo equipment.
Hence a 3G phone might make sense for me.
3G is just the networking side of things, and doesn't really have anything to do with combining the different types of devices.
Normally if you wanted to connect multiple computers via USB you'd just get a standard ethernet hub/switch and USB->ethernet converters. Obviously at this point it's only really useful if you don't already have NICs in the computers, and USB.org doesn't recommend connecting large numbers of computers together with USB due to some vague safety hazards. http://www.usb.org/faq/ans5.html#q9
I believe the future is wireless everything. The idea of just being in the same room and being able to sync my Palm, or out on the porch getting the latest data from the Internet is just too nice to go back to wires.
For you, that might work fine. Personally, I'd rather have all of my immobile equipment wired, including mouse & keyboard (everyone seems to be moving to wireless mouse & keyboard, yet I still have not seen one that's as responsive as USB), with wireless access for things like palmtops & notebooks. Besides, if you have more than one computer in your home, the speed for file transfers doesn't even compare between wired & wireless.
Incidentally - I don't mean to start a flame war on the benefits of Firewire v. USB - so don't get started. The transfer speed I threw out above is a valid benchmark for a external RAID array (that has drives fast enough to support that transfer rate and a equivalent RAID configuration to boot).
Unfortunately most firewire cards (or the ports built into most computers) don't support those speeds yet, and a fast IDE drive can saturate that in bursts.
I don't follow USB2 developments closely, so if I'm mistaken on its real-world speeds, forgive me and don't waste/. bandwidth by flaming me:)
I don't know what it's real-world speeds are myself, much like you I don't follow it closely, but probably for a different reason: USB is for mice and keyboards, I don't WANT to hook everything in the world to my USB hub. I will be very reluctant to ever pull my printer off of the parallel port (especially since I'll have to buy a parallel-USB adapter to do it), and I'm not a fan of external drives of any type (if I want removable storage, I use a removable hard drive bay or CD-R).
Then again, my current home PC has front-panel USB ports and spaces for front-panel Firewire. Currently the USB ports are used by the mouse & keyboard (omg, I can get an extra 2 feet away from my computer without going through a USB hub). If I somehow did a sudden reversal and started going gadget-crazy, the ideal would be to throw a firewire card in the system and connect it to the front panel so I wouldn't have to disturb my mouse & keyboard or use my USB hub.
It's like firewire network. if i remember well, there is only one company which made available necessary softwares...
Last I heard you don't need extra software to network computers together with firewire, both Windows and Mac OS support it (as long as the firewire interface is supported).
All that I can really see a combo device being useful for is the shared address/phone book and not having to carry two things around. The first could be solved with a standard for the storage of the address/phone information and simple communications protocols, whether bluetooth or firewire, it doesn't really matter, as long as you could synch the information reliably (and in a non-destructive manner).
Then again, people look at me strange because I don't have a cell phone or a pager, so maybe I'm underestimating the usefulness of combining devices that I don't have.
From the article: "The companies have not practiced the pricing agreement since 2000. At that time, they agreed in settling a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that they would refrain from MAP pricing for seven years."
Yet CD prices have increased more in 2000 and 2001 than in the years they were doing this. Sounds like it's really working out well.
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
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lol, yeah, it's the *only* thing you can't remove from the XP desktop without a registry edit. It was the first thing I checked when I noticed that option in XP, because I actually use the other two icons (especially right-click Network Neighborhood/My Network Places and select properties to set TCP/IP settings or My Computer to get to Device Mangler instead of going through the control panel).
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
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In windows, pressing F2 when a file is highlighted will rename that file.
Damn, after all these years I'm just now finding this out.
They could also have the digital books be viewable on monitors in the store. Personally, I find it fairly annoying when I have to go around looking for a particular book, and I only buy maybe 10% of my books as impulse buys while in the store.
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
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Do you realize what you just said? Reg hacking, playing with buried settings? Yea, some Joe User is going to be able to do all that.
Actually, all of that (except for the removal of the recycle bin from the desktop) is available simply by right-clicking on the recycle bin and clicking properties in the menu. The property page that it presents is fairly easy to understand in most cases, though some people may be confused by the fact that the recycle bin is actually multiple recycle bins if you have multiple drive letters for hard disks.
These settings are hardly buried, and if people were taught more often that the settings for things are available by right-clicking them and selecting 'properties', it would be the first place they would check. It's certainly more intuitive than looking in the control panel (you'd have to know there was a control panel first, and the control panel doesn't contain settings for everything). I don't know how many times I've overheard people telling others that in order to change their colour depth (because some game requires a change usually) they need to go to the control panel, when all they really have to do is right-click on the desktop and select properties.
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
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If you single click twice slowly, it lets you rename too. I prefer this over waiting for the right click menu to find all the NEW|> options and render.
hmm I don't seem to get the NEW|> option when I right-click on most file types;) Also, you have to be sure to click on the file name for the second click, or it won't do anything. Of course, the best way to handle it would be to have a key combination for rename, but I guess that's too obvious, so we end up with wonderful things like ALT+F,M rather than CTRL+R (which is refresh, something I really don't need a key sequence for).
Frankly, with all of the other issues that come up when renaming file types that have previews in explorer, I usually just open a command prompt and use that instead for renaming (and thanks to tab-completion it's not that big a deal).
However, it does, I would suggest, support the point I was stumbling over making, namely that 1984 wasn't set in 1984 for any mythical "30 year rule".
Well, I would guess that if the given date hadn't been sufficiently far in the future (ie an xx year rule of some type), he may have compromised with something like 30 years in the future. However, since it wasn't 1944 or 1945, he was ok with using the title that fit his story. That being said, the title did not hurt the story even though I first read it over 5 years after that year had passed. Space 1999, on the other hand, doesn't hold up as well;)
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
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That command can delete anywhere from 0 to all of your files depending on how they are named. And if you accidentally type *a*f*c*.* you might delete the wrong thing. Doesn't happen in windows, unless you are using cygwin.
How does this differ from using the del command in Windows' command prompt, especially with the/Q option?
Furthermore, given the proximity of Delete in the right-click menu for files to the Create Shortcut and Rename options (oh how many times I've hit delete when trying to rename something), how does doing this in a graphical interface help?
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I dunno about you, but the default XP theme is visually asthetic to use. Easy to read, easy to distinguish icons/visual alerts and "simple".
I'm just wondering how the rounded edges and hints of blue I'm seeing in the screenshots translate to making it 'feel XP-ish'. Perhaps the icons help a bit, though I still see a lot more jagged edges than I care for (though that could be an issue with the screenshots).
Personally, I like the silver XP theme. The blue is a bit too jarring for me and doesn't mesh well with my usual colour choices for the system. The silver still looks a bit like the older Windows versions, without having the disadvantages of reverting completely to 'Classic'. I used the olive theme for a while, but would really prefer something using a darker green colour. Olive seems to make window titles and some other text impossible to read at high resolutions.
- if red on the A/C controls indicated "cooler" and blue indicated "warmer"
...
Perhaps a localization issue? Colourblind? There are a lot of reasons that these kinds of adjustments could be made, though in reality most users don't do customizations to their systems that swap things in a way to make them the exact opposite of the originals, unless they're doing it to someone else's machine.for the purpose of screwing them up. Personally, I don't look at the colours on my AC/heat controls, I simply spin them clockwise if it's cold and counterclockwise if it's hot, yet other cars have the controls in a straight line rather than as knobs.
-- if the colors on the A/C controls were green and yellow
Again this could be the same as above. What if red and blue don't have the same heat/cold associations for other people? What if someone just has a hard time telling the two colours apart?
-- if the largest knob/button on the stereo didn't control volume or tuning (instead controlling bass or fade, maybe?)
The stock stereo in my car does this, though, admittedly, because it's actually 4 knobs on 2 posts it's easy to understand if you've ever used a stereo with that type of setup. Try figuring out what all the knobs do on a bass or guitar sometime when they have a similar setup.
-- if shifting from one gear to the next, instead of requiring motion in the general forward/back motion, required motion in the general left/right direction (imagine the standard H on its side)
My car requires that you lift off the gas when it's time to shift gears, and it's an automatic. If you don't life off the gas it shifts hard (hard as in you could get the same motion in your neck by tapping the brake moderately hard and letting off very quickly). The car is designed to do this, though, and the feature can be disabled through an obscurely labelled switch on the dash, all stock from the manufacturer.
I could go on (if I kept trying).
These are the types of tweaks that are really wanting to be done
Of course, colour-related tweaks can often be done without any APIs, if the resources used are accessable to any degree, and the article said those weren't an issue. Things like, say, changing a volume knob to a slider should be possible if you have the knowledge of how to do it, and I'm sure people would've loved full skinning capability in QuickTime back when they had a volume knob on the player (as opposed to having to embed the skin in the media).
I don't believe theme or skin creation capabilities should replace a solid UI design from the developer. However, I do believe that it should be available at the operating system level. That's more important to me than anything at the application level, because it allows applications to remain consistent across the user's desktop (not the platform, but the user). Getting back to the default theme should also be extremely easy to do, even if it means preventing the user from changing the method for reverting the skin in any way. With all of the major operating systems now having proper multiuser support, there shouldn't even be a major issue of problems with users going to another machine (and, as someone else mentioned, the guest account should only be able to use the default, though there should be an option for a network administrator to set certain defaults for the network that are observed by the guest account, due to corporate desktop needs being what they are).
I believe all 3 of them do. I used LiteStep for a while on 2k, but have never tried it under XP. WindowBlinds has a specific version for XP that hooks into the theme interface built into XP. WinStep I've never used, but it says it's built to work with 9x/Me/2k/XP. There are a lot of apps for that sort of thing, though, and most of the community seems to focus on LiteStep and/or WindowBlinds.
Wouldn't it suck if you sat down in a car, and turning the steering wheel to the right made the car go left instead? Or if the gas and brake pedals were switched? I think it's the same idea.
-Wouldn't it suck if you got in a car and it had 3 pedals?
-Wouldn't it suck if you got in a car and the driver's seat was on the other side?
-Wouldn't it suck if the driver's seat was in the middle?
-Wouldn't it suck if the gas tank was filled from the other side of the car (or the middle)?
-if the RPM guage wasn't there?
-if the guages turned the opposite way?
-if the guages were LCD/LED?
-if the infrared HUD wasn't on all cars?
-if the stereo didnt have knobs?
-if the horn button was in a different place?
-where's the parking brake?
etc.
cars have very little in the way of a standard interface. Essentially you've got a wheel and (sometimes) 2 pedals. How those 3 items are oriented varies greatly from one car to another and affects your purchasing decision. The best you can usually hope for is some similarity between cars from a different manufacturer. For instance, GM uses similar controls for AC/heat and headlights on most of their cars, yet they're not quite the same as what Ford and others use, and sometimes aren't obvious unless you've driven a GM before. Let's not even get started on the multifunction stick hanging off the side of my steering wheel that does everything from cruise control and windshield whipers to brights and turn signals. Accidentally turning on the cruise control and/or brights in the rain is NOT a good thing by any stretch of the imagination.
The difference is that MS uses the undocumented APIs in their OS to DRIVE OUT COMPETITIORS IN THE APPLICATIONS AND INTERNET BUSINESSES.
According to the 18 states and DoJ (especially the 9 dissenting states) it doesn't matter if MS is shipping a product outside of Windows that uses the API. If someone else decides they want to make a product that functions as 'middleware' which could be helped by an undocumented API, then Microsoft would be obliged to document that API. If I want to replace explorer.exe, the APIs have to be documented. If explorer.exe accesses a dll file to gain it's start menu functionality and I want to make a start menu replacement without replacing the whole thing, they have to document the API (just a note that it only works like this if the 9 states get their way, I'm not sure that it would be quite so liberal if the DoJ settlement is upheld, or if another settlement is used).
If MS kept their undocumented APIs solely in the OS part of the company and released them to everyone when they were ready, that is one thing.
But the majority of the APIs MS recently released to reach compliance with the DoJ settlement were not used in MS products outside of what ships with Windows. A few of them were for the task manager functionality, for instance.
But if the applications/internet sections need a special API then the OS people build it in. And somehow fail to tell their competitiors.
hmm... is IE still a separate product? As far as the applications part goes, I believe the complaint was that the applications (IE, Office, Windows Media Player) would change OS components or add new components to the system directory, not that the OS would change the components for the applications. The latter part (adding components) ignores the fact that many application developers do the same thing if they plan to share the components between different applications, and that the components in the system directory are not always OS components (IE components are shared with Office and Visual Studio as well as Windows, Visual Studio may also use Office components if they're installed, some 'Office' products don't ship as part of Office, but use the same components). In fact, until recently most applications designed for Windows looked in the Windows directory first to resolve dependencies (to find components), rather than in it's own directory, so you could even achieve a minor speed increase by placing the components there (and people want to know why their Win directory bloats, maybe if you really knew where things like ICQ put everything...).
Microsoft got a lot of hits from the press over this, but the case centered mostly on contracts with vendors, ISPs, and OEMs, which certainly prevented other products from having as many roads into the market. The level to which these were proven and upheld through the appeals tends to amount to the differences between the DoJ and 9 states' settlements, as the DoJ revised their demands quite heavily when portions of their case were thrown out or remanded relating to those portions of the settlement. That's why the level of API disclosures and the involvement of Office show such a large disparity between the two settlement proposals.
But I have never heard anyone complain about MS undocumented API's that I gave credence to. It definitly isn't a mainstream complaint. And if anyone (MS propoent or opponent) complains about an undocumented API changing, they deserve a swift kick in the pants, and whatever else they get.
It was a mainstream enough complaint to become a big part of the settlements proposed by both the DoJ and the 9 states that still haven't agreed on a settlement. According to that case Microsoft doesn't even have to ship something separately that uses the APIs, someone else just has to have a reason to want to include them in a product they are shipping.
I don't discount that it may have been done in the multi-window-manager world of the unices, but i've personally never seen the equivalents, and as far as windows? forget about it.
LiteStep? WinStep? WindowBlinds?
There are so many shell replacements and mods that can be used in Windows it's hard to keep track of them.
Think different means solve your problems creatively; it does not mean dress yourself creatively.
It's been a few minutes since I read the article, so I might be remembering this wrong, but didn't the article point to the fact that you can change the APPEARANCE of many things in OS X fairly easily, but can't change the behavior?
Personally, I stay away from a lot of interface 'enhancements' on my systems, but when I find a good one that does something I want to do, I use it. What makes Apple breaking 3rd party software any better than any other OS developer breaking 3rd party software? Why should Apple be the only company allowed to design software that hooks into certain parts of the interface or is part of the interface itself?
MS has a monopoly on computer operating systems - a whole class of products.
Actually, according to the case that was brought against them, they have a monopoly on x86 desktop computer operating systems. This means that the Mac is in a completely different market (they justified this by pointing to the hardware cost for switching platforms, in addition to the normal software cost for switching operating systems).
By the same reasoning, Apple does have a monopoly on their market. That being said, no one's going to care until their market becomes as large as Microsoft's current desktop market.
MS went to court, not because they had a monopoly, but because they abused their monopolistic position in order to gain market share in other markets.
and modified APIs as well as making deals with other companies to exclude other companies' products from the market. The API modifications are a big deal, as it could be seen as restraint of trade. There is some protection in the fact that the APIs were not published (and not supported), but then this leads down the arguments about 'secret APIs' being leveraged to give the OS developer an advantage over 3rd party developers. All of this should sound pretty similar to the accusations brought against Microsoft, the only real difference here is that 3rd party interface designers usually don't make much of a fuss when an API changes between OS versions, whereas certain developers of certain types of software seem to have a real problem with this sort of thing.
A sharp zaurus handheld, a cell phone, and a digital camera. I like to have all this stuff on me at all times. But, it's kind of a lot to walk around with everywhere.
I can understand that, but how much of it would really be as useful as the existing devices if they were combined? Usually you sacrifice something for combining the devices, even moreso than with things like PC hardware or stereo equipment.
Hence a 3G phone might make sense for me.
3G is just the networking side of things, and doesn't really have anything to do with combining the different types of devices.
Normally if you wanted to connect multiple computers via USB you'd just get a standard ethernet hub/switch and USB->ethernet converters. Obviously at this point it's only really useful if you don't already have NICs in the computers, and USB.org doesn't recommend connecting large numbers of computers together with USB due to some vague safety hazards.
http://www.usb.org/faq/ans5.html#q9
I believe the future is wireless everything. The idea of just being in the same room and being able to sync my Palm, or out on the porch getting the latest data from the Internet is just too nice to go back to wires.
For you, that might work fine. Personally, I'd rather have all of my immobile equipment wired, including mouse & keyboard (everyone seems to be moving to wireless mouse & keyboard, yet I still have not seen one that's as responsive as USB), with wireless access for things like palmtops & notebooks. Besides, if you have more than one computer in your home, the speed for file transfers doesn't even compare between wired & wireless.
Incidentally - I don't mean to start a flame war on the benefits of Firewire v. USB - so don't get started. The transfer speed I threw out above is a valid benchmark for a external RAID array (that has drives fast enough to support that transfer rate and a equivalent RAID configuration to boot).
/. bandwidth by flaming me :)
Unfortunately most firewire cards (or the ports built into most computers) don't support those speeds yet, and a fast IDE drive can saturate that in bursts.
I don't follow USB2 developments closely, so if I'm mistaken on its real-world speeds, forgive me and don't waste
I don't know what it's real-world speeds are myself, much like you I don't follow it closely, but probably for a different reason: USB is for mice and keyboards, I don't WANT to hook everything in the world to my USB hub. I will be very reluctant to ever pull my printer off of the parallel port (especially since I'll have to buy a parallel-USB adapter to do it), and I'm not a fan of external drives of any type (if I want removable storage, I use a removable hard drive bay or CD-R).
Then again, my current home PC has front-panel USB ports and spaces for front-panel Firewire. Currently the USB ports are used by the mouse & keyboard (omg, I can get an extra 2 feet away from my computer without going through a USB hub). If I somehow did a sudden reversal and started going gadget-crazy, the ideal would be to throw a firewire card in the system and connect it to the front panel so I wouldn't have to disturb my mouse & keyboard or use my USB hub.
It's like firewire network. if i remember well, there is only one company which made available necessary softwares ...
Last I heard you don't need extra software to network computers together with firewire, both Windows and Mac OS support it (as long as the firewire interface is supported).
All that I can really see a combo device being useful for is the shared address/phone book and not having to carry two things around. The first could be solved with a standard for the storage of the address/phone information and simple communications protocols, whether bluetooth or firewire, it doesn't really matter, as long as you could synch the information reliably (and in a non-destructive manner).
Then again, people look at me strange because I don't have a cell phone or a pager, so maybe I'm underestimating the usefulness of combining devices that I don't have.
This is what I get, and to think the story's been up a while:
Too many users... blah blah blah
Probable cause: http://www.slashdot.org
Try again in a few seconds...
-xian@idsoftware.com
You mean like F2?
Are you sure? Because, you know, I really need to hear it from 10 people before I decide to check it out, and I think we're only half way there.
From the article: "The companies have not practiced the pricing agreement since 2000. At that time, they agreed in settling a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that they would refrain from MAP pricing for seven years."
Yet CD prices have increased more in 2000 and 2001 than in the years they were doing this. Sounds like it's really working out well.
lol, yeah, it's the *only* thing you can't remove from the XP desktop without a registry edit. It was the first thing I checked when I noticed that option in XP, because I actually use the other two icons (especially right-click Network Neighborhood/My Network Places and select properties to set TCP/IP settings or My Computer to get to Device Mangler instead of going through the control panel).
In windows, pressing F2 when a file is highlighted will rename that file.
Damn, after all these years I'm just now finding this out.
They could also have the digital books be viewable on monitors in the store. Personally, I find it fairly annoying when I have to go around looking for a particular book, and I only buy maybe 10% of my books as impulse buys while in the store.
Do you realize what you just said? Reg hacking, playing with buried settings? Yea, some Joe User is going to be able to do all that.
Actually, all of that (except for the removal of the recycle bin from the desktop) is available simply by right-clicking on the recycle bin and clicking properties in the menu. The property page that it presents is fairly easy to understand in most cases, though some people may be confused by the fact that the recycle bin is actually multiple recycle bins if you have multiple drive letters for hard disks.
These settings are hardly buried, and if people were taught more often that the settings for things are available by right-clicking them and selecting 'properties', it would be the first place they would check. It's certainly more intuitive than looking in the control panel (you'd have to know there was a control panel first, and the control panel doesn't contain settings for everything). I don't know how many times I've overheard people telling others that in order to change their colour depth (because some game requires a change usually) they need to go to the control panel, when all they really have to do is right-click on the desktop and select properties.
If you single click twice slowly, it lets you rename too. I prefer this over waiting for the right click menu to find all the NEW|> options and render.
;) Also, you have to be sure to click on the file name for the second click, or it won't do anything. Of course, the best way to handle it would be to have a key combination for rename, but I guess that's too obvious, so we end up with wonderful things like ALT+F,M rather than CTRL+R (which is refresh, something I really don't need a key sequence for).
hmm I don't seem to get the NEW|> option when I right-click on most file types
Frankly, with all of the other issues that come up when renaming file types that have previews in explorer, I usually just open a command prompt and use that instead for renaming (and thanks to tab-completion it's not that big a deal).
However, it does, I would suggest, support the point I was stumbling over making, namely that 1984 wasn't set in 1984 for any mythical "30 year rule".
;)
Well, I would guess that if the given date hadn't been sufficiently far in the future (ie an xx year rule of some type), he may have compromised with something like 30 years in the future. However, since it wasn't 1944 or 1945, he was ok with using the title that fit his story. That being said, the title did not hurt the story even though I first read it over 5 years after that year had passed. Space 1999, on the other hand, doesn't hold up as well
That command can delete anywhere from 0 to all of your files depending on how they are named. And if you accidentally type *a*f*c*.* you might delete the wrong thing. Doesn't happen in windows, unless you are using cygwin.
/Q option?
How does this differ from using the del command in Windows' command prompt, especially with the
Furthermore, given the proximity of Delete in the right-click menu for files to the Create Shortcut and Rename options (oh how many times I've hit delete when trying to rename something), how does doing this in a graphical interface help?