IIRC that's dynamic instability, where the airframe is inherently unstable but the computer keeps adjusting the surfaces to maintain level flight. This lets fighter jets react much faster when a pilot actually moves his stick. Analogous to standing on the balls of your feet while playing tennis--you have to keep adjusting your balance, but you can react and move much faster in any direction than if you were standing flat-footed.
I imagine the pilot will have a very bad day if the computer fails, though...
A few weeks ago a drunk driver got onto a divided freeway (4 lanes each way) around 1 am, going the wrong way, speeding, with headlights off. With few cars on the road, he went on like this for about 2km, then hit an oncoming car head-on in the fast lane right around the top of a crest in the freeway, i.e. visibility drops below 100m as you reach the top of the crest. At a closing speed well above 200 km/h, the driver in the other car had a fraction of a second to react. The drunk driver (not wearing a seatbelt either) died on impact, the victims in the other car suffered serious injuries.
I don't care how good a driver you are, there's just no way to manage a totally unexpected threat like that on an empty freeway. In fact, what saved the people in the other car was probably NOT having enough time to swerve--they were hit dead on, instead of an angled or side impact where airbags are less effective or aren't available.
Americans aren't exactly all behind the free speech wagon either.
In the wake of 9/11, over half of Americans surveyed said free speech should be restricted, especially on the press (in the context of criticizing the new war on terror).
That's not even recent; a 1987 survey said the same thing (assuming the post-date is correct for a digitized article).
So while by law America has free speech and China does not, a large percentage of citizens from both countries believe free speech should be restricted in some way.
A coworker once relayed how her husband, working hospital IT, was regularly frustrated by doctors (specifically some surgeons) kept having to ask stuff about their computers, and how is it very smart and intelligent people making over $100,000 couldn't figure out such simple concepts?
She probably thought that as a computer geek myself I'd be completely sympathetic to this. She was floored when I said I'd complain about these surgeons not getting technology, if IT people were able to perform an appendectomy.
Honest question, since you develop for both: which platform's users generates a better return for your company? If it's iOS, then does it outweigh the hassle of setting up for iOS development and the days-long approval process?
And if the driver is only looking at the car in front of them, they're going to have a lot of accidents.
I typically look through the car in front of me to see how the next car is driving, and how the driver in front of me will react to that.
I do this too. Or try to... Cars with heavy rear tint annoy me, and it's yet another reason I dislike SUVs.
Incidentally, raised, secondary brake lights was one of the best mandated additions to cars in the last 20 years, along with daytime headlights (in Canada anyway; they're low-power, just enough that on long straight stretches of undivided highway you know that small blob is another vehicle coming your way).
So instead of a legal scalpel to take care of the edge cases (there might be a lot of individual examples of over-the-top behaviour, but they're still a very small percentage), they're going at the problem with a shotgun blast.
I used to laugh at all the silly laws out there, but damn if they weren't specific in their intent. We've moved too far away from that.
Funny, my primary reason for getting a manual version of my car was saving $1500 off the automatic option, and getting another $1000 back for the "eco-rebate" program the government was running at the time (the automatic fell outside the required fuel economy to qualify). When I drove my new car off the lot, I had driven manual a total of 3 times in my life.
It's not my fault it turned out to be a lot more fun to drive than an automatic.
Higher monthly rates are not an "iPhone tax", they're "smartphone data fees".
Sure there are some feature phones with a browser or Facebook applet and "unlimited" internet that might charge only $25-30 a month, but my brother had that the last two years and the user experience on those was so atrocious he never bothered with it after the first week.
This. And it doesn't even have to be proof of suicidal thoughts. I once entered "mild depression" on a company health insurance application form. I was denied extended coverage even after my doctor wrote to clarify it was more social anxiety than depression. It didn't matter; my HR rep said that insurance companies will use ANY mental health issue listed as an excuse to deny extended coverage.
It isn't that we're against national defence. It's that they chose an unproven fighter that has severe cost overruns, is unsuited for the vast Canadian north (with hundreds or even thousands of kilometres between a landing strip capable of landing a fighter, you want two engines for redundancy, not one) and gave a pricetag that even the Americans are saying is unrealistically lowballed (they're reusing the Liberal estimates, but those were from the early 2000s).
Replacing the aging CF-18s, most Canadians will agree on. But we should have gone with the Super Hornets, which are vastly superior to the 80s-era F-18s we have now. They're available now, the costs are known, and they have two engines. No, they don't have stealth, and they're one generation behind the F-35, F-22 and whatever the Russians have now. But they're far better than what we have now, they're affordable, they have two engines, and let's face it Canada will NEVER be at the forefront of fighter/interceptor aircraft anyway. We gave up that claim forever when the Conservatives axed the Avro Arrow program in the late 1950s.
I live in Ottawa (the national capital, for the benefit of non-Canadians). Unlike the US and Australia, we weren't smart enough to make the capital a distinct jurisdiction, so we have municipal, provincial and federal governments playing havoc with our city, and nothing gets done in any reasonable time. Worse, the "national capital region" extends into Gatineau, which is in a different province altogether (Quebec). There are actually two independent bus systems because of this, and language laws that make no sense to visitors (English and French on all government and traffic signs on the Ottawa side, French-only in Gatineau).
We've been arguing light rail for over a decade, ground still hasn't been broken on the latest plan, and it probably won't be completed until 2025 with serious cost overruns, thanks to it having to pass through municipal and federal-managed lands (leaving aside all the NIMYism, of course). This for a population of less than a million people in the city proper.
Indeed. On the subject of politics and deception, the far-right in the US often make the ridiculous claim that the Nazis were left-wing, simply because they had the word "socialist" in their official name (translated as "National Socialist German Workers' Party"), but that was simply an act to get into power, after which the very first groups of people they persecuted included the socialists and communists.
By their twisted logic, North Korea ("Democratic People's Republic of Korea") must therefore be democratic, for the people, and a republic.
You can't. There might be 3rd party utilities but nothing built in. And while it's nice Win7 has the ungroup option, it inexplicably took away the power user options I want in my task bar configuration.
To me the taskbar paging is worse than not having a single-click window selector on a Mac, because the UI model that's specific to Windows is broken or just not quite configurable enough, wheras in the Mac UI model I can easily get by without the all-window selector.
As I said, the Mac is program-centric instead of task-centric. It's been this way since maybe 1990, when Macs got the ability to switch between more than one program. This gives certain advantages but it's not without drawbacks or compromises.
Even when Macs added command-tab (late 90s), inherited the Dock from NeXT (early 2000s) and added all-window Exposé mode (mid 2000s), the program-centric model remained consistent. Meanwhile Microsoft tried several windowing and task-grouping/switching methods, often making things worse. The new alt- and win-tabbing in Win7 are just recent examples, IMHO the worst was the abomination that is MDI which tried to mimic the Mac's program-centric model without any consideration for doing it properly.
I think you'll agree that the Win7 default of grouping tasks is also a 2-step operation, if there's more than one window (click task group, then click again to select window).
To your question about OSX and multiple windows: this can be done using Exposé, in as little as two steps: 1) invoke Exposé's "Show all windows" function (either by keyboard, designated mouseclick, gesture, or moving mouse to a designated screen corner), then 2) use mouse or arrow keys to select from thumbnails of windows, which are laid out in a grid instead of a cycling stack. It's not perfect, for instance it won't show windows for apps that are hidden/"minimized" (this may have changed in the latest OSX).
The other nice thing about OSX is that it's program/app oriented first, not task/window-based. The Exposé "all windows" mode is nice to have as a power option, but I almost never use it... jumping between programs with command-tab brings up all that program's windows, and 95% of the time the window I left at the top of a program's window stack is the one I want anyway (the other 5% of the time I command-` to cycle within the windows once I switch to that program).
I use Windows 7 at work, ungrouped windows. I put my taskbar on the screen's left because on a widescreen monitor, doubling-up the task bar on the bottom is a waste of space. This is very frustrating for a power user who also keeps lots of task windows open, though.
Once I get beyond the number of task buttons that'll fit into the vertical taskbar, it splits them onto two "pages". It's impossible to have more than one task column visible like you could in XP. A new task in a newly launched program will appear on the second page, forcing me to click back to the first page to access older tasks (no keyboard command to jump taskbar pages that I've found). And unlike XP, Win7 groups child tasks together even if they appear in the taskbar separately. Very annoying. And the whole reason I ungroup tasks in the first place is I want to not only switch tasks with a single click, but also MINIMIZE tasks with a single click.
Default Alt-tab behaviour in Win7 is also brain-dead. When I first hit alt-tab I get the task list, but if I haven't selected something inside a second, it does that Aero peek. Continuing to alt-tab at that point is useless when I have peek at 30 freaking windows. I disabled Aero peek to keep a proper task switching palette the whole time have alt held down.
Win-tab behaviour is also of limited use if you have more than a half-dozen windows open, it's a useless stack animation where you can't tell the contents of most windows until you've cycled it to the front of the stack.
Wait a minute.... a Republican government, in the midst of patriotic swell not seen since the red scare and McCarthyism.... *nationalized* the airport security industry?
We have in our province an Apology Act that passed in 2009. It removed this very misconception, so an apology could no longer be used later in court as admission of guilt or wrongdoing.
A lot of reactionaries panned the law, but it makes perfect sense, for exactly the reason you brought up. There's definite merit in the thinking that being able to apologize up front for a mistake can avert or at least reduce the likelihood and severity of a drawn out court battle.
Last week actually. I have old clothes going back almost 20 years that I'll wear in the house or for yard and dirty work. I was never obsessed with fashion and style and trends, though I have a good enough selection to blend in with my social circles
Throwaway clothes is another sign of a wasteful culture, or one that has no appreciation of resources. At least clothes can be patched when they start falling apart.
For me at least, at $100 these are practically disposable.
And that attitude is what's wrong with consumer electronics these days. Whatever's cheap, people don't take care of, and don't care if it breaks down, or they replace it on a regular cycle. Inkjet printers, PCs, cell phones, dollar store electronics. I've seen people do stuff to their work phones and laptops that they wouldn't dream of doing had they paid for it themselves.
Gotta support the economy through constant churn, I guess.
Indeed, and IIRC as primary "owner" of the format, Philips declared that Sony audio CDs with Windows rootkits were not allowed to carry the Compact Disc logo.
Worse are SFX shots in space where the virtual camera shakes when ships or weapon blasts rumble or whiz past.
Folks, they're travelling in a vacuum, and while artistic license permits sound in space, they ADD to our sensory experience. Shaky cam on otherwise great special effects detract.
Sadly, this didn't even start with BSG--I remember a Babylon 5 episode in season 5 (1998) doing this, it was annoying as hell coming from my favourite series at the time.
I found out, too late, that just yesterday they had screened 2001 and 2010 at a local arthouse theatre. I've seen 2001 on TV, where it's frankly unimpressive, but have been told that it must be seen on a big screen because more than most films, Kubrick made it a visual artpiece.
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IIRC that's dynamic instability, where the airframe is inherently unstable but the computer keeps adjusting the surfaces to maintain level flight. This lets fighter jets react much faster when a pilot actually moves his stick. Analogous to standing on the balls of your feet while playing tennis--you have to keep adjusting your balance, but you can react and move much faster in any direction than if you were standing flat-footed.
I imagine the pilot will have a very bad day if the computer fails, though...
Sometimes you just have no chance.
A few weeks ago a drunk driver got onto a divided freeway (4 lanes each way) around 1 am, going the wrong way, speeding, with headlights off. With few cars on the road, he went on like this for about 2km, then hit an oncoming car head-on in the fast lane right around the top of a crest in the freeway, i.e. visibility drops below 100m as you reach the top of the crest. At a closing speed well above 200 km/h, the driver in the other car had a fraction of a second to react. The drunk driver (not wearing a seatbelt either) died on impact, the victims in the other car suffered serious injuries.
I don't care how good a driver you are, there's just no way to manage a totally unexpected threat like that on an empty freeway. In fact, what saved the people in the other car was probably NOT having enough time to swerve--they were hit dead on, instead of an angled or side impact where airbags are less effective or aren't available.
Americans aren't exactly all behind the free speech wagon either.
In the wake of 9/11, over half of Americans surveyed said free speech should be restricted, especially on the press (in the context of criticizing the new war on terror).
That's not even recent; a 1987 survey said the same thing (assuming the post-date is correct for a digitized article).
A survey of American youth in 2005 isn't encouraging either.
So while by law America has free speech and China does not, a large percentage of citizens from both countries believe free speech should be restricted in some way.
Mod up.
A coworker once relayed how her husband, working hospital IT, was regularly frustrated by doctors (specifically some surgeons) kept having to ask stuff about their computers, and how is it very smart and intelligent people making over $100,000 couldn't figure out such simple concepts?
She probably thought that as a computer geek myself I'd be completely sympathetic to this. She was floored when I said I'd complain about these surgeons not getting technology, if IT people were able to perform an appendectomy.
Honest question, since you develop for both: which platform's users generates a better return for your company? If it's iOS, then does it outweigh the hassle of setting up for iOS development and the days-long approval process?
And if the driver is only looking at the car in front of them, they're going to have a lot of accidents.
I typically look through the car in front of me to see how the next car is driving, and how the driver in front of me will react to that.
I do this too. Or try to... Cars with heavy rear tint annoy me, and it's yet another reason I dislike SUVs.
Incidentally, raised, secondary brake lights was one of the best mandated additions to cars in the last 20 years, along with daytime headlights (in Canada anyway; they're low-power, just enough that on long straight stretches of undivided highway you know that small blob is another vehicle coming your way).
So instead of a legal scalpel to take care of the edge cases (there might be a lot of individual examples of over-the-top behaviour, but they're still a very small percentage), they're going at the problem with a shotgun blast.
I used to laugh at all the silly laws out there, but damn if they weren't specific in their intent. We've moved too far away from that.
Funny, my primary reason for getting a manual version of my car was saving $1500 off the automatic option, and getting another $1000 back for the "eco-rebate" program the government was running at the time (the automatic fell outside the required fuel economy to qualify). When I drove my new car off the lot, I had driven manual a total of 3 times in my life.
It's not my fault it turned out to be a lot more fun to drive than an automatic.
Higher monthly rates are not an "iPhone tax", they're "smartphone data fees".
Sure there are some feature phones with a browser or Facebook applet and "unlimited" internet that might charge only $25-30 a month, but my brother had that the last two years and the user experience on those was so atrocious he never bothered with it after the first week.
This. And it doesn't even have to be proof of suicidal thoughts. I once entered "mild depression" on a company health insurance application form. I was denied extended coverage even after my doctor wrote to clarify it was more social anxiety than depression. It didn't matter; my HR rep said that insurance companies will use ANY mental health issue listed as an excuse to deny extended coverage.
It isn't that we're against national defence. It's that they chose an unproven fighter that has severe cost overruns, is unsuited for the vast Canadian north (with hundreds or even thousands of kilometres between a landing strip capable of landing a fighter, you want two engines for redundancy, not one) and gave a pricetag that even the Americans are saying is unrealistically lowballed (they're reusing the Liberal estimates, but those were from the early 2000s).
Replacing the aging CF-18s, most Canadians will agree on. But we should have gone with the Super Hornets, which are vastly superior to the 80s-era F-18s we have now. They're available now, the costs are known, and they have two engines. No, they don't have stealth, and they're one generation behind the F-35, F-22 and whatever the Russians have now. But they're far better than what we have now, they're affordable, they have two engines, and let's face it Canada will NEVER be at the forefront of fighter/interceptor aircraft anyway. We gave up that claim forever when the Conservatives axed the Avro Arrow program in the late 1950s.
I live in Ottawa (the national capital, for the benefit of non-Canadians). Unlike the US and Australia, we weren't smart enough to make the capital a distinct jurisdiction, so we have municipal, provincial and federal governments playing havoc with our city, and nothing gets done in any reasonable time. Worse, the "national capital region" extends into Gatineau, which is in a different province altogether (Quebec). There are actually two independent bus systems because of this, and language laws that make no sense to visitors (English and French on all government and traffic signs on the Ottawa side, French-only in Gatineau).
We've been arguing light rail for over a decade, ground still hasn't been broken on the latest plan, and it probably won't be completed until 2025 with serious cost overruns, thanks to it having to pass through municipal and federal-managed lands (leaving aside all the NIMYism, of course). This for a population of less than a million people in the city proper.
It is indeed a total clusterfuck.
Indeed. On the subject of politics and deception, the far-right in the US often make the ridiculous claim that the Nazis were left-wing, simply because they had the word "socialist" in their official name (translated as "National Socialist German Workers' Party"), but that was simply an act to get into power, after which the very first groups of people they persecuted included the socialists and communists.
By their twisted logic, North Korea ("Democratic People's Republic of Korea") must therefore be democratic, for the people, and a republic.
You can't. There might be 3rd party utilities but nothing built in. And while it's nice Win7 has the ungroup option, it inexplicably took away the power user options I want in my task bar configuration.
To me the taskbar paging is worse than not having a single-click window selector on a Mac, because the UI model that's specific to Windows is broken or just not quite configurable enough, wheras in the Mac UI model I can easily get by without the all-window selector.
As I said, the Mac is program-centric instead of task-centric. It's been this way since maybe 1990, when Macs got the ability to switch between more than one program. This gives certain advantages but it's not without drawbacks or compromises.
Even when Macs added command-tab (late 90s), inherited the Dock from NeXT (early 2000s) and added all-window Exposé mode (mid 2000s), the program-centric model remained consistent. Meanwhile Microsoft tried several windowing and task-grouping/switching methods, often making things worse. The new alt- and win-tabbing in Win7 are just recent examples, IMHO the worst was the abomination that is MDI which tried to mimic the Mac's program-centric model without any consideration for doing it properly.
I think you'll agree that the Win7 default of grouping tasks is also a 2-step operation, if there's more than one window (click task group, then click again to select window).
To your question about OSX and multiple windows: this can be done using Exposé, in as little as two steps: 1) invoke Exposé's "Show all windows" function (either by keyboard, designated mouseclick, gesture, or moving mouse to a designated screen corner), then 2) use mouse or arrow keys to select from thumbnails of windows, which are laid out in a grid instead of a cycling stack. It's not perfect, for instance it won't show windows for apps that are hidden/"minimized" (this may have changed in the latest OSX).
The other nice thing about OSX is that it's program/app oriented first, not task/window-based. The Exposé "all windows" mode is nice to have as a power option, but I almost never use it... jumping between programs with command-tab brings up all that program's windows, and 95% of the time the window I left at the top of a program's window stack is the one I want anyway (the other 5% of the time I command-` to cycle within the windows once I switch to that program).
I use Windows 7 at work, ungrouped windows. I put my taskbar on the screen's left because on a widescreen monitor, doubling-up the task bar on the bottom is a waste of space. This is very frustrating for a power user who also keeps lots of task windows open, though.
Once I get beyond the number of task buttons that'll fit into the vertical taskbar, it splits them onto two "pages". It's impossible to have more than one task column visible like you could in XP. A new task in a newly launched program will appear on the second page, forcing me to click back to the first page to access older tasks (no keyboard command to jump taskbar pages that I've found). And unlike XP, Win7 groups child tasks together even if they appear in the taskbar separately. Very annoying. And the whole reason I ungroup tasks in the first place is I want to not only switch tasks with a single click, but also MINIMIZE tasks with a single click.
Default Alt-tab behaviour in Win7 is also brain-dead. When I first hit alt-tab I get the task list, but if I haven't selected something inside a second, it does that Aero peek. Continuing to alt-tab at that point is useless when I have peek at 30 freaking windows. I disabled Aero peek to keep a proper task switching palette the whole time have alt held down.
Win-tab behaviour is also of limited use if you have more than a half-dozen windows open, it's a useless stack animation where you can't tell the contents of most windows until you've cycled it to the front of the stack.
Wait a minute.... a Republican government, in the midst of patriotic swell not seen since the red scare and McCarthyism.... *nationalized* the airport security industry?
Those damn leftist socialist Republicans!
Or even better: Sony PS3. You buy based on an actual shipping, advertised feature. And then they take it away with an update.
We have in our province an Apology Act that passed in 2009. It removed this very misconception, so an apology could no longer be used later in court as admission of guilt or wrongdoing.
A lot of reactionaries panned the law, but it makes perfect sense, for exactly the reason you brought up. There's definite merit in the thinking that being able to apologize up front for a mistake can avert or at least reduce the likelihood and severity of a drawn out court battle.
Last week actually. I have old clothes going back almost 20 years that I'll wear in the house or for yard and dirty work. I was never obsessed with fashion and style and trends, though I have a good enough selection to blend in with my social circles
Throwaway clothes is another sign of a wasteful culture, or one that has no appreciation of resources. At least clothes can be patched when they start falling apart.
For me at least, at $100 these are practically disposable.
And that attitude is what's wrong with consumer electronics these days. Whatever's cheap, people don't take care of, and don't care if it breaks down, or they replace it on a regular cycle. Inkjet printers, PCs, cell phones, dollar store electronics. I've seen people do stuff to their work phones and laptops that they wouldn't dream of doing had they paid for it themselves.
Gotta support the economy through constant churn, I guess.
Mod up. Thanks for a view from the front line (or at least far closer to it than most /.ers).
Indeed, and IIRC as primary "owner" of the format, Philips declared that Sony audio CDs with Windows rootkits were not allowed to carry the Compact Disc logo.
Worse are SFX shots in space where the virtual camera shakes when ships or weapon blasts rumble or whiz past.
Folks, they're travelling in a vacuum, and while artistic license permits sound in space, they ADD to our sensory experience. Shaky cam on otherwise great special effects detract.
Sadly, this didn't even start with BSG--I remember a Babylon 5 episode in season 5 (1998) doing this, it was annoying as hell coming from my favourite series at the time.
I found out, too late, that just yesterday they had screened 2001 and 2010 at a local arthouse theatre. I've seen 2001 on TV, where it's frankly unimpressive, but have been told that it must be seen on a big screen because more than most films, Kubrick made it a visual artpiece.