The power needed is available in the higher end graphics cards out in the market. I'm sure if someone is willing to spring for a 3000x2400 resolution display, they won't have a problem with buying a $250 graphics card for it.
My apartment complex has the hallway lights on 24/7. Luckily, they are CF bulbs, but I would still estimate that there are about 50 bulbs for the 12 apartments in my building, which means about 1.25kW to run them all (they appear to be 100W equilivent CF bulbs, so about 25W each). If you figure a 1 bedroom apartment pulls 300W or so average, that means 1/4 the draw for the entire building is just the lighting for the common area.
It's not always that obvious. My drier might pull 4kW, but gets used 10 hours a month. If I ran my computer 24/7, and it pulls a constant 150W, the math shows that the computer is going to use about three times the electricity. However, I don't run the computer 24/7 - it turns out in my case that the biggest offender is actually the fridge.
There are quite a few devices where "off" is basically kill the video/audio out and (optionally) shut off the display. But there is no reason for many devices to behave that way, and most of them don't (except for cable TV/satellite boxes it seems).
Before you flame (excuse the pun) the original poster, you might want to consider that gas leaks can occur for reasons other than a pilot light going out.
Trees have to be replenished when they are used up. If we keep are usage below or at the replenishing rate, the resource is continually renewed - it's "renewable".
Solar energy is different. We don't have to worry about moderating our usage of the sun's output - the sun will shine for billions of years even if we use 100% of its output. Nor do we have to worry about renewing the sun as a resource (atleast, not anytime remotely soon).
Hardly. USB2 is 480Mbps. Even if you were able to hit the theoretical maximum, that's only 60MB/s, a number that isn't very impressive compared to what 7200RPM drives can do in real world benchmarks.
Supposedly though, it's good because flash drives are much faster at seeking, since they don't actually have to seek. I'm doubtful, but supposedly Vista does a performance benchmark on your flash drive, and if it's not faster than your harddrive then it won't use it.
Design flaw? You mean the same behaviour that's existed since 1984, unchanged and consistent across all OS revisions?
Just because it's consistent with itself doesn't mean it isn't flawed, though you could certainly make an argument against changing it just because it would definently annoy some people.
(It took someone at work to tell me that F2 goes to rename files. F2? Who thought that was obvious?)
I'm pretty sure that in earlier versions of Windows, the keyboard shortcut was listed in the File (or Edit?) menu so that users who had to hit the Rename option more than a couple of times would figure it out. Now, in XP atleast it seems that the is helpful hint is missing from the File menu, so only us old timers know it anymore.
Opening a document can be an extremely expensive operation if the owning application isn't already running (think Photoshop). Opening the WRONG document can be a WASTED extremely expensive operation. When fat-fingering the return/enter keys, I would much rather the Finder toggle me into 'edit filename' mode than have it launch Photoshop.
On the other hand, if I'm in "fat-fingered" mode, I don't want to be accidently renaming files either. Atleast if I accidently launch Photoshop, it's easy enough to close.
Why, in general, do we even need to resize windows? The answer, 90% of the time, is that the window is the wrong size or shape for its contents. That's what the green "optimize" button is for -- to resize the window automatically to the same size as its contents, and properly implemented, this does just what you want. With Safari, it makes my web browser just wide enough to view the current page without scrolling, and tall enough to show all or as much of the page as possible. With Pages, it resizes the document window to fit the exact size of the document at its current zoom level. I practically never need to resize these windows.
I would have to constantly resize the window. Sure, the zoom button may resize the web browser to the perfect size, but then I click on a link change tabs, and then it's the wrong size again! Annoying. I would rather just have it take up the whole screen, especially if web browsing is the only activity I'm engaged in at the moment. I agree that the optomize is button is not a bad idea on its own, but it's a shitty replacement for the Maximize button.
Because OS X only has one button by default, all developers code to that standard and all functions are available to users of all these devices.
Are you sure about this? Apple's very own Shake application lists a 3 button mouse right in the requirements, which I found especially amusing before they came out with the Mighty Mouse.
Well, with every other Windowing system I've ever used, you hit the maximize button, and you are done. On the Mac, you have to drag the window to the top left, and then drag the bottom right corner to the other side of the monitor because the bottom right corner is the only corner that's resizable. Be sure to not undershoot the edges either, or you'll do something you don't want when you aimlessly go to the side of the screen to scroll like you can do with every other Windowing system I've ever used. It's not like the Maximize button is a terribly complicated concept, and I'm sure Apple could implement it into OSX in about 5 minutes. It boggles the mind that they don't.
Do you really expect Microsoft to continue to support old versions of Windows indefinently? Heck, they finally cut Windows 98 off of extended support this year. Those of you running Windows 2000, a 7 year old OS, have nearly 4 years of extended support left. How many other desktop OS's from 1998 were supported in 2006? (Though in defense of Linux and BSD, it's not like the upgrading costs you any money).
Besides, your Windows 98SE systems will still run until the hardware gives out. You'll probably find that eventually you won't be able to find new software for it, and you might find that evetually you won't be able to put it on a public network. But it'll still work. Though I do see the potential for Microsoft to actually try to kill off Windows XP and later versions by simply refusing to activate it at some point in the future.
You can still get plenty of 95% copper cents at face value. Go get a few rolls from the bank, sort out the copper ones, spend or reroll the rest. I've heard that about 20% of cents are still the copper ones, but that might be a bit high as they get pulled out of circulation, lost, etc.
Do you like carrying around a wad full of $1 bills too? The way things stand now, you shouldn't have to carry around more than 4 dollar coins at once. If we could convince people to use the $2 denomination, you would only have to carry no more than a single dollar coin at one time.
Actually, the drop test is a good one. Take a pre-1982 cent, and a post-1982 cent, and drop them on a hard surface. The copper one will ring, and the zinc one will make more of a thud sound. Once you get the hang of that, telling 1982 cents apart from your change is easy.
Also works well for silver (1964 and earlier) coins versus the later clad coins. I can definently tell from the way a handful of coins sound if there is a silver one lurking in there.
The way they are commonly stored is in a jar immersed in an oil it won't react with. I'm sure that security would question anyone with such a jar, but as you say, it would not be hard to figure out a way to smuggle in some elemental cesium that wouldn't draw any attention.
The same is true on any OS. The question is do you remove functionality under the assumption they don't know what they're doing, or leave the functionality and design the system to teach them.
I guess it depends on what you are aiming for - Macs are supposed to be intuitive and easy to use, and this behavior clashes with that idea. This is something more I would expect from Linux or similar - if you want the application to do X, then click here. If you want it to do Y, then click there. If you want it to do Z, then right click there, etc. Great for power users, confusing for novices.
I take it you don't use a Mac regularly. I have 14 applications open right now, including three that are enormous resource hogs (Photoshop and Parallels). Even with a full version of Windows running in a VM, sitting in the background, my programs are responsive because OS X has pretty reasonable multitasking for the desktop. I don't even bother to quit my big applications when I go to LAN parties, something that always astounds the Windows only players.
Sounds like you have a pretty short term memory. It's mid-2005, and Apple's base model system came with a 1.25Ghz processor, 256MB of memory, and a 4200RPM harddrive. Even doing one thing at a time, a stock Mac Mini was slow. 14 applications open at once, and the poor thing would be unusable. Apple's entire line of laptops weren't much better. Like OSX, Windows runs pretty well if you throw enough hardware at it.
The system tray has always been a hack. Basically some programs that are open all the time took up too much space in the taskbar, so those applications were given smaller icons that behave differently. It is a UI disaster. So what about programs you don't want to run all the time, but that don't need any Windows to function? We all know how this is commonly handled, by creating a useless Window to get around the limitation. It also is used as a hack to avoid the problem of users who want to close a document and then open a new one in the same application.
It may seem like a hack, but I don't see what Windows would do otherwise with an application like Word with no documents. I guess now that Office sports ribbons, I guess you could just have a few ribbons sitting out there in space looking silly. And speaking of UI trainwrecks, that pretty much sums up the program menu being at the top of the main display in these days of 20"+ monitors and dual head computers. Why should I have to travel completely accross my screen, or even to a completely different monitor to interact with a program that the mouse is already over? I don't see why Apple sticks with a model that was designed for a 9" screen. Atleast the Windows model, the menu is right there.
It also is used as a hack to avoid the problem of users who want to close a document and then open a new one in the same application. In fact, Windows tends to keep programs loaded in memory as another hack under the assumption that people do this, rather than fixing the problem. Others train themselves to always open a second document before closing the first one, resulting in systems needing more memory so they don't bog down when this is done for large files.
I don't see it as a big problem - keeping a closed application in memory so long as something else doesn't need is smart memory management - there is no point in simply wiping the memory for the sake of it. I've found that Windows' memory management actually works quite well for 256-512MB systems, though it does fall apart for 1GB+ systems. I'm also not aware of anyone who opens a 2nd document before closing the first one - anyone who made a habit of that would probably quickly discover that it's actually slower to do so - though I'm sure there are some out there.
I'm with the original poster here - I may be old school, but I tend to view entire albums as efforts. If only one part of the album is any good, then the album is a failure. Of course, part of this does come from the fact that a lot of the stuff I listen to (electronica, progressive rock) is put together as one long mix or atleast a lot of consideration is given to the album as whole, as opposed to the "grouping of single songs" model that seems present in other genres. As such, seperating out one track by inself makes it sound awkward. Of course, there are parts of the CD that are stronger and parts that are weaker, but to pick and choose here seems like just listening to that guitar riff you like out of a Nirvana song rather than the whole thing.
Another thing is, you must listen to the same few songs over and over a lot if you are so choosy. My "Best of the best" of my absolute favorites (songs that I like that do stand well on their own) is about 1.5 CD lengths long, and easily fits in my 512MB MP3 player. That's not a lot of music.
Of course, I do have single tracks, mostly things like TLC and Will Smith so I can get all nostaligic over my High School days when I listened to the radio, which pretty much agrees with the idea that if you only like one track from the CD, then it's crappy music.
On the other hand, Apple does have a tendency to limit what you can do with older hardware. For example, you have to have built in firewire ports to install 10.4, which is a completely arbitrary restriction that Apple put into the OS, in an attempt to force people to upgrade. You can bet that 10.5 will also have some arbitrary restriction - If I had to guess it quite likely run on any G3 based computer.
Also, that whole every release runs faster than the previous is no longer true. It was true for a while, mainly because 10.0 was such a dog, but memory and CPU hogging features Apple has added into the latest releases like Spotlight and Dashboard really tax the older machines out there.
On the other hand, if you have the most widely used office suite in the world, then you must be doing something right. So why the drastic changes? Quite frankly, most of the changes I have seen in Windows/Office since the Windows 2000/Office 2000 combination seems to be change purely for the sake of change, rather than for any innovative or logical reason.
And don't forget inertia too. Office 2003 certainly is not everything it could be, but it does have the advantage that people know how to use it. Even if Office 2007 is better, is it better enough to make it worthwhile to invest the time and effoct to learn how to use it over previous versions?
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The power needed is available in the higher end graphics cards out in the market. I'm sure if someone is willing to spring for a 3000x2400 resolution display, they won't have a problem with buying a $250 graphics card for it.
My apartment complex has the hallway lights on 24/7. Luckily, they are CF bulbs, but I would still estimate that there are about 50 bulbs for the 12 apartments in my building, which means about 1.25kW to run them all (they appear to be 100W equilivent CF bulbs, so about 25W each). If you figure a 1 bedroom apartment pulls 300W or so average, that means 1/4 the draw for the entire building is just the lighting for the common area.
It's not always that obvious. My drier might pull 4kW, but gets used 10 hours a month. If I ran my computer 24/7, and it pulls a constant 150W, the math shows that the computer is going to use about three times the electricity. However, I don't run the computer 24/7 - it turns out in my case that the biggest offender is actually the fridge.
Exactly. My Socket A system pulls an easy 150W at idle, and upto 180-190W under load. And that's just the tower!
There are quite a few devices where "off" is basically kill the video/audio out and (optionally) shut off the display. But there is no reason for many devices to behave that way, and most of them don't (except for cable TV/satellite boxes it seems).
Most of those strands of lights run straight off AC, and hence flicker at 60Hz. I sure hope that the LED "light bulbs" don't make that mistake.
On the other hand, if you can rig up your LED christmas lights to run off of DC, they should be even brighter than they are now.
Before you flame (excuse the pun) the original poster, you might want to consider that gas leaks can occur for reasons other than a pilot light going out.
I believe it's exactly the same thing as with mice. Does anybody still buy/use mice without a scroll wheel?
Umm.... a whole lot of Mac users?
Trees have to be replenished when they are used up. If we keep are usage below or at the replenishing rate, the resource is continually renewed - it's "renewable".
Solar energy is different. We don't have to worry about moderating our usage of the sun's output - the sun will shine for billions of years even if we use 100% of its output. Nor do we have to worry about renewing the sun as a resource (atleast, not anytime remotely soon).
Hardly. USB2 is 480Mbps. Even if you were able to hit the theoretical maximum, that's only 60MB/s, a number that isn't very impressive compared to what 7200RPM drives can do in real world benchmarks.
Supposedly though, it's good because flash drives are much faster at seeking, since they don't actually have to seek. I'm doubtful, but supposedly Vista does a performance benchmark on your flash drive, and if it's not faster than your harddrive then it won't use it.
But it didn't do so via DRM.
What do you think the TPM chip is doing in the Intel Macs?
Design flaw? You mean the same behaviour that's existed since 1984, unchanged and consistent across all OS revisions?
Just because it's consistent with itself doesn't mean it isn't flawed, though you could certainly make an argument against changing it just because it would definently annoy some people.
(It took someone at work to tell me that F2 goes to rename files. F2? Who thought that was obvious?)
I'm pretty sure that in earlier versions of Windows, the keyboard shortcut was listed in the File (or Edit?) menu so that users who had to hit the Rename option more than a couple of times would figure it out. Now, in XP atleast it seems that the is helpful hint is missing from the File menu, so only us old timers know it anymore.
Opening a document can be an extremely expensive operation if the owning application isn't already running (think Photoshop). Opening the WRONG document can be a WASTED extremely expensive operation. When fat-fingering the return/enter keys, I would much rather the Finder toggle me into 'edit filename' mode than have it launch Photoshop.
On the other hand, if I'm in "fat-fingered" mode, I don't want to be accidently renaming files either. Atleast if I accidently launch Photoshop, it's easy enough to close.
Why, in general, do we even need to resize windows? The answer, 90% of the time, is that the window is the wrong size or shape for its contents. That's what the green "optimize" button is for -- to resize the window automatically to the same size as its contents, and properly implemented, this does just what you want. With Safari, it makes my web browser just wide enough to view the current page without scrolling, and tall enough to show all or as much of the page as possible. With Pages, it resizes the document window to fit the exact size of the document at its current zoom level. I practically never need to resize these windows.
I would have to constantly resize the window. Sure, the zoom button may resize the web browser to the perfect size, but then I click on a link change tabs, and then it's the wrong size again! Annoying. I would rather just have it take up the whole screen, especially if web browsing is the only activity I'm engaged in at the moment. I agree that the optomize is button is not a bad idea on its own, but it's a shitty replacement for the Maximize button.
Because OS X only has one button by default, all developers code to that standard and all functions are available to users of all these devices.
Are you sure about this? Apple's very own Shake application lists a 3 button mouse right in the requirements, which I found especially amusing before they came out with the Mighty Mouse.
Well, with every other Windowing system I've ever used, you hit the maximize button, and you are done. On the Mac, you have to drag the window to the top left, and then drag the bottom right corner to the other side of the monitor because the bottom right corner is the only corner that's resizable. Be sure to not undershoot the edges either, or you'll do something you don't want when you aimlessly go to the side of the screen to scroll like you can do with every other Windowing system I've ever used. It's not like the Maximize button is a terribly complicated concept, and I'm sure Apple could implement it into OSX in about 5 minutes. It boggles the mind that they don't.
Do you really expect Microsoft to continue to support old versions of Windows indefinently? Heck, they finally cut Windows 98 off of extended support this year. Those of you running Windows 2000, a 7 year old OS, have nearly 4 years of extended support left. How many other desktop OS's from 1998 were supported in 2006? (Though in defense of Linux and BSD, it's not like the upgrading costs you any money).
Besides, your Windows 98SE systems will still run until the hardware gives out. You'll probably find that eventually you won't be able to find new software for it, and you might find that evetually you won't be able to put it on a public network. But it'll still work. Though I do see the potential for Microsoft to actually try to kill off Windows XP and later versions by simply refusing to activate it at some point in the future.
You can still get plenty of 95% copper cents at face value. Go get a few rolls from the bank, sort out the copper ones, spend or reroll the rest. I've heard that about 20% of cents are still the copper ones, but that might be a bit high as they get pulled out of circulation, lost, etc.
Do you like carrying around a wad full of $1 bills too? The way things stand now, you shouldn't have to carry around more than 4 dollar coins at once. If we could convince people to use the $2 denomination, you would only have to carry no more than a single dollar coin at one time.
Actually, the drop test is a good one. Take a pre-1982 cent, and a post-1982 cent, and drop them on a hard surface. The copper one will ring, and the zinc one will make more of a thud sound. Once you get the hang of that, telling 1982 cents apart from your change is easy.
Also works well for silver (1964 and earlier) coins versus the later clad coins. I can definently tell from the way a handful of coins sound if there is a silver one lurking in there.
The way they are commonly stored is in a jar immersed in an oil it won't react with. I'm sure that security would question anyone with such a jar, but as you say, it would not be hard to figure out a way to smuggle in some elemental cesium that wouldn't draw any attention.
The same is true on any OS. The question is do you remove functionality under the assumption they don't know what they're doing, or leave the functionality and design the system to teach them.
I guess it depends on what you are aiming for - Macs are supposed to be intuitive and easy to use, and this behavior clashes with that idea. This is something more I would expect from Linux or similar - if you want the application to do X, then click here. If you want it to do Y, then click there. If you want it to do Z, then right click there, etc. Great for power users, confusing for novices.
I take it you don't use a Mac regularly. I have 14 applications open right now, including three that are enormous resource hogs (Photoshop and Parallels). Even with a full version of Windows running in a VM, sitting in the background, my programs are responsive because OS X has pretty reasonable multitasking for the desktop. I don't even bother to quit my big applications when I go to LAN parties, something that always astounds the Windows only players.
Sounds like you have a pretty short term memory. It's mid-2005, and Apple's base model system came with a 1.25Ghz processor, 256MB of memory, and a 4200RPM harddrive. Even doing one thing at a time, a stock Mac Mini was slow. 14 applications open at once, and the poor thing would be unusable. Apple's entire line of laptops weren't much better. Like OSX, Windows runs pretty well if you throw enough hardware at it.
The system tray has always been a hack. Basically some programs that are open all the time took up too much space in the taskbar, so those applications were given smaller icons that behave differently. It is a UI disaster. So what about programs you don't want to run all the time, but that don't need any Windows to function? We all know how this is commonly handled, by creating a useless Window to get around the limitation. It also is used as a hack to avoid the problem of users who want to close a document and then open a new one in the same application.
It may seem like a hack, but I don't see what Windows would do otherwise with an application like Word with no documents. I guess now that Office sports ribbons, I guess you could just have a few ribbons sitting out there in space looking silly. And speaking of UI trainwrecks, that pretty much sums up the program menu being at the top of the main display in these days of 20"+ monitors and dual head computers. Why should I have to travel completely accross my screen, or even to a completely different monitor to interact with a program that the mouse is already over? I don't see why Apple sticks with a model that was designed for a 9" screen. Atleast the Windows model, the menu is right there.
It also is used as a hack to avoid the problem of users who want to close a document and then open a new one in the same application. In fact, Windows tends to keep programs loaded in memory as another hack under the assumption that people do this, rather than fixing the problem. Others train themselves to always open a second document before closing the first one, resulting in systems needing more memory so they don't bog down when this is done for large files.
I don't see it as a big problem - keeping a closed application in memory so long as something else doesn't need is smart memory management - there is no point in simply wiping the memory for the sake of it. I've found that Windows' memory management actually works quite well for 256-512MB systems, though it does fall apart for 1GB+ systems. I'm also not aware of anyone who opens a 2nd document before closing the first one - anyone who made a habit of that would probably quickly discover that it's actually slower to do so - though I'm sure there are some out there.
I'm with the original poster here - I may be old school, but I tend to view entire albums as efforts. If only one part of the album is any good, then the album is a failure. Of course, part of this does come from the fact that a lot of the stuff I listen to (electronica, progressive rock) is put together as one long mix or atleast a lot of consideration is given to the album as whole, as opposed to the "grouping of single songs" model that seems present in other genres. As such, seperating out one track by inself makes it sound awkward. Of course, there are parts of the CD that are stronger and parts that are weaker, but to pick and choose here seems like just listening to that guitar riff you like out of a Nirvana song rather than the whole thing.
Another thing is, you must listen to the same few songs over and over a lot if you are so choosy. My "Best of the best" of my absolute favorites (songs that I like that do stand well on their own) is about 1.5 CD lengths long, and easily fits in my 512MB MP3 player. That's not a lot of music.
Of course, I do have single tracks, mostly things like TLC and Will Smith so I can get all nostaligic over my High School days when I listened to the radio, which pretty much agrees with the idea that if you only like one track from the CD, then it's crappy music.
On the other hand, Apple does have a tendency to limit what you can do with older hardware. For example, you have to have built in firewire ports to install 10.4, which is a completely arbitrary restriction that Apple put into the OS, in an attempt to force people to upgrade. You can bet that 10.5 will also have some arbitrary restriction - If I had to guess it quite likely run on any G3 based computer.
Also, that whole every release runs faster than the previous is no longer true. It was true for a while, mainly because 10.0 was such a dog, but memory and CPU hogging features Apple has added into the latest releases like Spotlight and Dashboard really tax the older machines out there.
On the other hand, if you have the most widely used office suite in the world, then you must be doing something right. So why the drastic changes? Quite frankly, most of the changes I have seen in Windows/Office since the Windows 2000/Office 2000 combination seems to be change purely for the sake of change, rather than for any innovative or logical reason.
And don't forget inertia too. Office 2003 certainly is not everything it could be, but it does have the advantage that people know how to use it. Even if Office 2007 is better, is it better enough to make it worthwhile to invest the time and effoct to learn how to use it over previous versions?