Yes, but the problem with DisplayPort is that it's a royalty-free standard, so to implement it the manufacturer has to pay royalties to no one, making it expensive. In contrast, HDMI requires implementers to pay $10,000 per year plus a royalty rate of $0.15 per unit, reduced to $0.05 if the HDMI logo is used, and further reduced to $0.04 if HDCP is also implemented, making it cheaper. Or something.
The reason for the separate menu bar is Fitts' Law, which determines the ease of clicking on something. It's a function of the time taken to move the cursor and the time taken to stop. The stopping time depends on the size of the target. When the menu bar is at the top of the screen, its height is effectively infinite because the cursor stops moving as soon as it hits the edge, even if you keep moving the mouse[1] up. The down side is that it is further away. You need the in-window menu to be about double the size of the edge-of-the-screen menu for it to be as easy to hit. The down side is that it takes longer to move the mouse to the menu bar from the window. On laptop screens and smallish desktop screens, there's a clear win for the Mac-style menus. For larger desktop screens, the in-window menus win. For touchscreens, radial menus in the bottom corners are best, but I don't know of any popular UI that uses them.
[1] Of course, this also applies to a trackpad / trackball, but not to a touchscreen.
example having to make a window active to see the menu
True, although you generally do focus something when your attention is on it.
and having the menu separate from the window itself.
Not sure I can give you this one, as the menu is in an obvious place and the name of the active app is the first item.
"Closing" an app the window goes away but the application is still running.
Actually, it probably isn't. This is one of the things I think is sensible about OS X: closing an application is not a meaningful user interaction, it's an implementation detail. Whether the application is running but not visible, or not running is completely irrelevant to anyone except power users. Most modern OS X application support sudden termination, so if they're hidden and unused for a while they'll have saved their state and, if system resources are required for something else, will be terminated. Next time you click on them, they'll relaunch, or be there already. It doesn't matter to the end user which happens, any more than it matters whether the application is read from disk or from the buffer cache. Applications are the user abstraction, not processes.
Also IMO the min, max, close buttons are both too small and all the same size which doesn't indicate importance (either individual or relative to each other) well.
Yes, this one is weird. As is hiding their icons unless you move over them with the mouse. In my opinion, these buttons should be on the menu bar anyway.
So how is a novice user expected to discover the keyboard shortcuts? I tried alt-F4 and it worked, but that's because I learned to hit alt-F4 to close things in Windows 3.1, and I learned it because if you went to the quit item in the menu, it was right there. From a Metro app there is no menu so how do you learn this?
I use hot corners on OS X, but they are just for fast task switching and are configurable. There's nothing for which they are the only UI. Everything on OS X is intended to be discoverable. The menu is always visible and all of the commands can be reached from there.
No one who actually knows anything about HCI will describe an interface as intuitive: it's hard to quantify and largely nonsense. Being discoverable is far more important. For example, are all of the things that you can click on visually distinct from things that are just labels? OS X has made some some steps backwards in this regard, but Windows 8 appears to abandon the idea entirely. If you don't know how to do something, are there signposts to help you on the way? With OS X, you go to the menu, and if you can't quickly find what you want to do, you type it into the text field in the help menu, which searches the menu and presents it to you, even if it's in a nested submenu. With Windows 8, apparently I need to know that some parts of the screen are magic and I need to put my mouse there to make things happen (no idea what happens if I'm using a touchscreen).
A large population that believes that the state has the right to collect taxes
A legal requirement that the taxes be paid in US dollars
The ability for the state to enforce this on people who choose not to pay.
The value of the US dollar is then backed by the requirement that some proportion of all income from US citizens and residents will have to be transformed into US dollars every year to pay taxes. In contrast, to create a new crypto 'currency', you need an off-the-shelf algorithm. The value of the new 'currency' is backed by the belief among speculators that someone else is more stupid than them and will but it for more money.
It only seems like a scam if you forget one of the main purposes of money: to provide liquidity. When a bank issues a loan, they require some capital in a non-currency form as collateral. This is typically (some proportion of) real estate or a company. The bank is effectively buying whatever the capital is, but giving you the option to have it back at a fixed price in the future. If the amount of currency in circulation could not expand to match the amount of capital then you have deflation and myriad other economic problems.
The protagonists in Cryptonomicon were planning on launching a new, private, currency backed by gold. They didn't ever work out that what they were really doing was attempting to launch an unregulated commodities exchange, which is something that most governments frown upon if the transaction volume exceeds a certain threshold.
There's no evidence of any historical societies that used barter. The first currencies were backed by far cheaper commodities, in particular by grain. Early metal-based currencies were just lumps of the metal. You made smaller denominations by cutting the coin in half, and you calculated its value by weighing it. This was problematic, because people could mix in cheaper metals. Later metal-backed currencies were effectively promissory notes: a bank kept the metal in its vault and promised to exchange a token for the metal if you presented the token. For example, the Pound Sterling meant that the Bank of England promised to exchange one pound coin or note for a pound of sterling silver. Fiat currencies then evolved because people realised that keeping a load of a commodity in a bank was not a very productive use of it (and made the value of the currency fluctuate randomly with the value of the commodity) when no one was actually exchanging the tokens for the commodities.
You can use commodities in a similar manner to currencies, but they are not currencies. The point of a currency is that it does not intrinsically have value in and of itself, but there is a strong belief by its users that it can be exchanged for something that does. This can be because a bank issued it and has a large pile of precious metal in its vaults that it promises to give you back in exchange, or because a country requires its citizens to use it to pay taxes and therefore there will be a demand for it equal to some proportion of that country's GDP.
The difference between a cigarette or a bottle of vodka and a currency unit is that the value of these commodities is defined by their utility. You can smoke a cigarette or drink a bottle of vodka. All that you can do with currency is exchange it for something else of value, on the premise that the person who receives it can do the same thing later.
My mother got a new laptop just before Christmas that came preloaded with Windows 8. Over Christmas, she installed the 8.1 upgrade. The amount of swearing did appear to decrease very slightly, but it still did things like pop up the People app for no obvious reason (e.g. when she was in the middle of filling in a password in a field in a web page) with no obvious way of closing it, or send her to the home screen without making it obvious how she got back to the doing-stuff screen. The only way I found to get from one of the randomly popping up Metro apps back to whatever she was doing was hit alt-F4. Hardly the most discoverable UI I've seen...
Yes it is. The value of the dollar is established by the US law stating that it the US government must accept it in payment for taxes and that US citizens must accept it in restitution for debts. In contrast, Bitcoin has its value established by the belief among speculators that they can sell it for more than they paid.
Yes, Bitcoin is an alternative to fiat currencies. A fiat currency, by definition, has a fiat enforcing its value. Bitcoin, in contrast, derives its value from unregulated speculation. It's not a good alternative, but it is an alternative.
The grandparent said that his 9-year-old completed 50% of it. I'd have been able to complete 50% of several of my university courses at around that age (and, indeed, some of them were revision of things my father taught me at that age), but the remaining 50% was a lot harder. It's fairly common for 50% to be the high-level overview and the remaining 50% to be the detail. To understand the first half, you need to be reasonably intelligent, but to complete the second half you also need a lot of background knowledge (especially in mathematical techniques) that you probably don't have aged 9.
Religion A says that pill X is against their religion. Insurance company is a Religion A organization, but government says that Insurance company cannot refuse to give pill X regardless of what they believe. In short, the government has decided that you must provide a service you believe is immoral.
Jehovah's Witnesses believe that blood transfusions are immoral. Christian Scientists believe that most modern medicine is immoral. The Church of the Holy Buck believes that any treatment that negatively affects the bottom line is immoral. Should all of those be allowed to refuse to pay for any of them? If a religious organisation finds that it is immoral to perform a particular service, then they are welcome to get out of the business of providing that service.
No one is forcing churches to be in the insurance business and I can cite several passages from the bible, including quotes from Jesus and St. Paul that indicate that they shouldn't them. If they want to be religions, they can have any crazy rules that they want. If they want to be businesses, then they have to abide by the rules that apply to businesses.
While it's a pretty damning statistic in comparison to other first-world countries, it's worth remembering that a lot of other countries have lower incarceration rates because they flog or execute people for more minor crimes.
I've not heard of this approach, but it does quite closely model how most adults read. You can substitute a lot of letters retaining the word shape without the reader noticing unless they're explicitly looking for errors. I suspect that it's not a very good way of getting from not-reading to writing though...
No, it's really not about the educational *system*. The education is there; pretty much EVERYONE in the US (at least those not homeschooled) has been taught about evolution in school.
There are many ways of being taught about evolution. You can have it presented as yet another dogma, which is different from the dogma of your parents and community and so easy to ignore. Or you can have it presented as a set of observations that clearly show strong evidence for evolution and discuss why each of the competing theories failed to explain the observations and so was discarded. This is one of the problems with removing Intelligent Design from schools: you can't teach evolution properly without the historical context and the competing theories, just as you can't teach special relativity without looking at the luminiferous aether and how Michelson and Morley demonstrated that it could not account for observations.
There are several references to other gods in the Old Testament, although all of them in the context that the Jews' god is more powerful and therefore better.
I bought a machine with similar specs (second hand) for £100 around 2006, so I don't think you can credit tablets with the fact that second-hand laptops have fallen in price by a factor of 3-4 over 6-7 years.
I have an ASUS TransformerPad which has the advantage of a dockable keyboard with an extra battery in it, which is great for when I'm going to be spending a long time on trains / at airports / on planes, because the keyboard also works well as a stand and fits on the tray table in most places. It can play back films for 7 hours and can show PDFs and run vim. There's actually a nice LaTeX app for Android that will load the packages you use on demand (a feature I'd love to have on the desktop, to avoid the 2GB TeXLive download for the few MBs of LaTeX that I actually use, without having to manually work out what they and their dependencies are).
It doesn't replace a laptop, but it does augment it nicely.
I really don't understand the reason for pulseaudio in the first place, I heard that when wanting to change and modify their sound system in (was it?) freebsd? they just updated the audio driver, they didnt include some ridiculously slow, horrible to setup daemon to do it
There's a lot of history involved. OSS was originally contributed to Linux under the GPL, then to *BSD under the BSDL. It was maintained in both, but then the original author took it commercial. FreeBSD just forked the last BSDL version and kept maintaining compatibility with new versions. Linux ripped it out and replaced it with the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).
One of the drawbacks with early OSS was that you had a single/dev/dsp and so only one application could play sound at once. With ALSA, you still only had one/dev/dsp, but if your card did hardware mixing, and you rewrite your applications to use ALSA, then you could get mixing. Unfortunately, most things weren't rewritten to use ASLA and most cheap cards back then didn't do hardware mixing, so userspace sound daemons started appearing. Unfortunately, GNOME and KDE each had their own (incompatible) ones. Meanwhile, FreeBSD just implemented in-kernel sound mixing.
Over 10 years ago, this was why I switched to FreeBSD. I wanted XMMS to play music and my KDE IM client and GNOME mail client to be able to make notification bings, and maybe have a game in the foreground playing sound. This was trivial with FreeBSD, impossible with Linux. Now, it's possible with Linux, but only by requiring every single audio-playing app (or, at least, library) to be rewritten with the Linux fad-of-the-day API. This underlines the philosophical difference between FreeBSD and Linux, and is why I remain a FreeBSD user.
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Yes, but the problem with DisplayPort is that it's a royalty-free standard, so to implement it the manufacturer has to pay royalties to no one, making it expensive. In contrast, HDMI requires implementers to pay $10,000 per year plus a royalty rate of $0.15 per unit, reduced to $0.05 if the HDMI logo is used, and further reduced to $0.04 if HDCP is also implemented, making it cheaper. Or something.
[1] Of course, this also applies to a trackpad / trackball, but not to a touchscreen.
example having to make a window active to see the menu
True, although you generally do focus something when your attention is on it.
and having the menu separate from the window itself.
Not sure I can give you this one, as the menu is in an obvious place and the name of the active app is the first item.
"Closing" an app the window goes away but the application is still running.
Actually, it probably isn't. This is one of the things I think is sensible about OS X: closing an application is not a meaningful user interaction, it's an implementation detail. Whether the application is running but not visible, or not running is completely irrelevant to anyone except power users. Most modern OS X application support sudden termination, so if they're hidden and unused for a while they'll have saved their state and, if system resources are required for something else, will be terminated. Next time you click on them, they'll relaunch, or be there already. It doesn't matter to the end user which happens, any more than it matters whether the application is read from disk or from the buffer cache. Applications are the user abstraction, not processes.
Also IMO the min, max, close buttons are both too small and all the same size which doesn't indicate importance (either individual or relative to each other) well.
Yes, this one is weird. As is hiding their icons unless you move over them with the mouse. In my opinion, these buttons should be on the menu bar anyway.
So how is a novice user expected to discover the keyboard shortcuts? I tried alt-F4 and it worked, but that's because I learned to hit alt-F4 to close things in Windows 3.1, and I learned it because if you went to the quit item in the menu, it was right there. From a Metro app there is no menu so how do you learn this?
I use hot corners on OS X, but they are just for fast task switching and are configurable. There's nothing for which they are the only UI. Everything on OS X is intended to be discoverable. The menu is always visible and all of the commands can be reached from there.
No one who actually knows anything about HCI will describe an interface as intuitive: it's hard to quantify and largely nonsense. Being discoverable is far more important. For example, are all of the things that you can click on visually distinct from things that are just labels? OS X has made some some steps backwards in this regard, but Windows 8 appears to abandon the idea entirely. If you don't know how to do something, are there signposts to help you on the way? With OS X, you go to the menu, and if you can't quickly find what you want to do, you type it into the text field in the help menu, which searches the menu and presents it to you, even if it's in a nested submenu. With Windows 8, apparently I need to know that some parts of the screen are magic and I need to put my mouse there to make things happen (no idea what happens if I'm using a touchscreen).
Move the mouse to a random corner of the screen? You think that't intuitive?
The value of the US dollar is then backed by the requirement that some proportion of all income from US citizens and residents will have to be transformed into US dollars every year to pay taxes. In contrast, to create a new crypto 'currency', you need an off-the-shelf algorithm. The value of the new 'currency' is backed by the belief among speculators that someone else is more stupid than them and will but it for more money.
It only seems like a scam if you forget one of the main purposes of money: to provide liquidity. When a bank issues a loan, they require some capital in a non-currency form as collateral. This is typically (some proportion of) real estate or a company. The bank is effectively buying whatever the capital is, but giving you the option to have it back at a fixed price in the future. If the amount of currency in circulation could not expand to match the amount of capital then you have deflation and myriad other economic problems.
The protagonists in Cryptonomicon were planning on launching a new, private, currency backed by gold. They didn't ever work out that what they were really doing was attempting to launch an unregulated commodities exchange, which is something that most governments frown upon if the transaction volume exceeds a certain threshold.
There's no evidence of any historical societies that used barter. The first currencies were backed by far cheaper commodities, in particular by grain. Early metal-based currencies were just lumps of the metal. You made smaller denominations by cutting the coin in half, and you calculated its value by weighing it. This was problematic, because people could mix in cheaper metals. Later metal-backed currencies were effectively promissory notes: a bank kept the metal in its vault and promised to exchange a token for the metal if you presented the token. For example, the Pound Sterling meant that the Bank of England promised to exchange one pound coin or note for a pound of sterling silver. Fiat currencies then evolved because people realised that keeping a load of a commodity in a bank was not a very productive use of it (and made the value of the currency fluctuate randomly with the value of the commodity) when no one was actually exchanging the tokens for the commodities.
You can use commodities in a similar manner to currencies, but they are not currencies. The point of a currency is that it does not intrinsically have value in and of itself, but there is a strong belief by its users that it can be exchanged for something that does. This can be because a bank issued it and has a large pile of precious metal in its vaults that it promises to give you back in exchange, or because a country requires its citizens to use it to pay taxes and therefore there will be a demand for it equal to some proportion of that country's GDP.
The difference between a cigarette or a bottle of vodka and a currency unit is that the value of these commodities is defined by their utility. You can smoke a cigarette or drink a bottle of vodka. All that you can do with currency is exchange it for something else of value, on the premise that the person who receives it can do the same thing later.
My mother got a new laptop just before Christmas that came preloaded with Windows 8. Over Christmas, she installed the 8.1 upgrade. The amount of swearing did appear to decrease very slightly, but it still did things like pop up the People app for no obvious reason (e.g. when she was in the middle of filling in a password in a field in a web page) with no obvious way of closing it, or send her to the home screen without making it obvious how she got back to the doing-stuff screen. The only way I found to get from one of the randomly popping up Metro apps back to whatever she was doing was hit alt-F4. Hardly the most discoverable UI I've seen...
Yes it is. The value of the dollar is established by the US law stating that it the US government must accept it in payment for taxes and that US citizens must accept it in restitution for debts. In contrast, Bitcoin has its value established by the belief among speculators that they can sell it for more than they paid.
Yes, Bitcoin is an alternative to fiat currencies. A fiat currency, by definition, has a fiat enforcing its value. Bitcoin, in contrast, derives its value from unregulated speculation. It's not a good alternative, but it is an alternative.
Open season on hunters and PETA members?
The grandparent said that his 9-year-old completed 50% of it. I'd have been able to complete 50% of several of my university courses at around that age (and, indeed, some of them were revision of things my father taught me at that age), but the remaining 50% was a lot harder. It's fairly common for 50% to be the high-level overview and the remaining 50% to be the detail. To understand the first half, you need to be reasonably intelligent, but to complete the second half you also need a lot of background knowledge (especially in mathematical techniques) that you probably don't have aged 9.
Religion A says that pill X is against their religion. Insurance company is a Religion A organization, but government says that Insurance company cannot refuse to give pill X regardless of what they believe. In short, the government has decided that you must provide a service you believe is immoral.
Jehovah's Witnesses believe that blood transfusions are immoral. Christian Scientists believe that most modern medicine is immoral. The Church of the Holy Buck believes that any treatment that negatively affects the bottom line is immoral. Should all of those be allowed to refuse to pay for any of them? If a religious organisation finds that it is immoral to perform a particular service, then they are welcome to get out of the business of providing that service.
No one is forcing churches to be in the insurance business and I can cite several passages from the bible, including quotes from Jesus and St. Paul that indicate that they shouldn't them. If they want to be religions, they can have any crazy rules that they want. If they want to be businesses, then they have to abide by the rules that apply to businesses.
While it's a pretty damning statistic in comparison to other first-world countries, it's worth remembering that a lot of other countries have lower incarceration rates because they flog or execute people for more minor crimes.
I've not heard of this approach, but it does quite closely model how most adults read. You can substitute a lot of letters retaining the word shape without the reader noticing unless they're explicitly looking for errors. I suspect that it's not a very good way of getting from not-reading to writing though...
No, it's really not about the educational *system*. The education is there; pretty much EVERYONE in the US (at least those not homeschooled) has been taught about evolution in school.
There are many ways of being taught about evolution. You can have it presented as yet another dogma, which is different from the dogma of your parents and community and so easy to ignore. Or you can have it presented as a set of observations that clearly show strong evidence for evolution and discuss why each of the competing theories failed to explain the observations and so was discarded. This is one of the problems with removing Intelligent Design from schools: you can't teach evolution properly without the historical context and the competing theories, just as you can't teach special relativity without looking at the luminiferous aether and how Michelson and Morley demonstrated that it could not account for observations.
There are several references to other gods in the Old Testament, although all of them in the context that the Jews' god is more powerful and therefore better.
I bought a machine with similar specs (second hand) for £100 around 2006, so I don't think you can credit tablets with the fact that second-hand laptops have fallen in price by a factor of 3-4 over 6-7 years.
I have an ASUS TransformerPad which has the advantage of a dockable keyboard with an extra battery in it, which is great for when I'm going to be spending a long time on trains / at airports / on planes, because the keyboard also works well as a stand and fits on the tray table in most places. It can play back films for 7 hours and can show PDFs and run vim. There's actually a nice LaTeX app for Android that will load the packages you use on demand (a feature I'd love to have on the desktop, to avoid the 2GB TeXLive download for the few MBs of LaTeX that I actually use, without having to manually work out what they and their dependencies are).
It doesn't replace a laptop, but it does augment it nicely.
And what happens as a result? Will anyone stop shopping at Safeway? Or will it get a little bit of a brand recognition boost?
I really don't understand the reason for pulseaudio in the first place, I heard that when wanting to change and modify their sound system in (was it?) freebsd? they just updated the audio driver, they didnt include some ridiculously slow, horrible to setup daemon to do it
There's a lot of history involved. OSS was originally contributed to Linux under the GPL, then to *BSD under the BSDL. It was maintained in both, but then the original author took it commercial. FreeBSD just forked the last BSDL version and kept maintaining compatibility with new versions. Linux ripped it out and replaced it with the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).
One of the drawbacks with early OSS was that you had a single /dev/dsp and so only one application could play sound at once. With ALSA, you still only had one /dev/dsp, but if your card did hardware mixing, and you rewrite your applications to use ALSA, then you could get mixing. Unfortunately, most things weren't rewritten to use ASLA and most cheap cards back then didn't do hardware mixing, so userspace sound daemons started appearing. Unfortunately, GNOME and KDE each had their own (incompatible) ones. Meanwhile, FreeBSD just implemented in-kernel sound mixing.
Over 10 years ago, this was why I switched to FreeBSD. I wanted XMMS to play music and my KDE IM client and GNOME mail client to be able to make notification bings, and maybe have a game in the foreground playing sound. This was trivial with FreeBSD, impossible with Linux. Now, it's possible with Linux, but only by requiring every single audio-playing app (or, at least, library) to be rewritten with the Linux fad-of-the-day API. This underlines the philosophical difference between FreeBSD and Linux, and is why I remain a FreeBSD user.