Yeah, the opening scene of Pushing Tin has some jumbo jets flying near the WTC towers. I was surprised (and relived) that they hadn't re-editted that scene for the DVD.
OK, take a complete newbie and stick 'em infront of Win9x - allow them to select their CDROM, and then let them eject it by pressing the load button on the drive - BLUESCREEN
So in other words, the Mac doesn't have an eject button on the drive because it's completely impossible to build a machine that doesn't crash when you press the eject button? Whatever.
1. the idea of the menu being at the top of the screen is that it provides a fixed target to aim at - this has been proved time and time again to be faster
Proven. Really. Please cite some research that backs that up. In reality, having only one place for menus to appear causes problems if you're switching back and forth between multiple applications, because you have to click on the application's window before its menu will appear at the top of the screen. And for applications that have a small window, then menu bar at the top of the screen can be easily ignored. This means users often aren't even aware of its presence.
2. have you never seen the application switcher?
First, you were taking about the "classic" Mac UI. The application switcher wasn't added to the MacOS until 8.5 in 1998.
Second, the task bar which defaults to the bottom edge of the screen is better than the tear-off menu application switcher. As much as I dislike Microsoft, I have to give them dredit for actually doing studies on the usability of the task bar. The bottom of the screen was deemed the best place because it is both obvious, yet easy to ignore when not needed.
Incidently, it isn't very obvious that a list of the currently open applications is lurking behind the Picasso-Mac logo, let alone that the applications menu can be torn off.
3. you're right! imagine selecting "eject" from the special menu to eject a disk
Yeah. "special" menu. That's really intuitive. It's so intuitive that I wonder why they didn't put all commonly used functions in the wonderful "special" menu...
or "eject" from the contextual menu,
Assuming you're in the Finder. What if I'm in an application, and realize that I want to save a file to a different disk?
or "put away" or pressing CMD-E
WTF does "put away" mean? And if CMD-E is your idea of intuitive, well, that's pretty sad.
You forgot the best way of ejecting a disk on the Mac: drag the icon to the trashcan. That's so intuitive you can smell it a mile away.
I prefer the Win9x method where you remove the disk from the drive and the machine bluescreens until you replace it - much more sensible.
Now you're really showing your desperation. Sure, Windows is unstable as heck. That's why I rarely use Windows. I've never seen it crash because I ejected a disk though.
If you took a complete computer newbie (who had never used Windows or a Mac), and showed them a Mac and a PC, and then placed a disk in the drive of each one and said "eject the disks", which computer do you honestly think they'd have a harder time figuring out? The one with the eject button right next to the slot, just like a CD-player or VCR, or the one that has a tiny pin-hole next to the slot?
The best UI for ejecting a disk is to have an eject button right next to where the disk comes out. Pretty freaking obvious, don't you think? When was the last time you had to press CMD-E on your car stero?
The Classic Mac UI has its own flaws. Some prime flaws are:
menus at the top of the screen, completely disconnected from the application window
apps that only have menus, and so they completely disappear into that hidden menu in the top right corner of the screen if you accidentally click on the desktop. The "taskbar" in Windows (or even the window list that twm has) is far better than the Mac's stealth applications menu
complete lack of a sensible way to eject a disk
Perhaps they neglected to test the usability of those features in their experiments...
It's one thing to program in good style, but it's another to have the language force you to. Yes, I'm still resentful over that.
If you ever have to maintain code written by others, you'll be glad that Python encouraged them to use good style. (I say "encouraged", because no language really forces good or bad style.) It's a well known fact, even among Perl advocates, that the vast majority of Perl code is indecipherable. It isn't impossible to write fairly clean code in Perl, but the language certainly doesn't encourage it.
I'm not anti-Mac. I still think the new iMac looks dumb. It's just way too obvious. I liked the original iMac's shape. It looked different than anything else out there. The new iMac looks like a flat-panel monitor with the base from a desk lamp. That's so... boring. I think the only people who claim this thing looks nice are either rabidly pro-mac, or they have no sense of aesthetics.
That isn't true anymore. Try searching for "to be or not to be". Google used to require you to put +'s on the stop words, but they stopped requiring that in phrases a while ago.
BTW, You might notice that some pages don't actually have the phrase you were looking for. That generally means that there's are links pointing to that page with that phrase in them. For example, if you search for "html 4 spec" you get this page. That page doesn't contain the phrase "html 4 spec", but there are lots of links pointing at it that contain that phrase, so it's probably the page you want if that's your query.
Re:Yeah, but rectangular is, you know, square...
on
New iMac Announced
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· Score: 1
Saying it looks avant-garde is giving them too much credit. It looks dopey. It probably took about 5 minutes to design.
"Okay, so we need a container for the CPU, and a flat-panel. How about a box connected to the panel by a stick."
"No, not a box, iMacs are round. It needs to be round."
"Okay, fine, a ball connected to the screen by a stick."
"Then it'll roll off the table."
"Okay, fine, half of a ball."
"Perfect!"
If someone had asked me 6 months ago to draw the worst possible design for a flat-panel iMac, it would've looked remarkably like the real thing. I really can't believe how dumb they made it look.
Maybe they figured cubes were jinxed or something? After all, Jobs has had bad luck with 2 cubes so far... At least both of the cubes (Mac & NeXT) looked good, which is way more than I can say for the truncated volleyball.
Re:Yeah, but rectangular is, you know, square...
on
New iMac Announced
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· Score: 1
It's already butt-ugly. A dome, a stick, and a rectangle. How is that aesthetically pleasing? The original iMac looked "cute". The flat-panel version looks obvious, boring, and ugly. I was wondering how Apple was going to make a flat-panel imac that looked good. Now I see that they failed. Oh well...:-(
90% of credit card processors don't verify that the expiration date matches the one on the card. They just make sure it's in the future. So the expiration date doesn't provide any security at all for the vast majority of credit cards.
It's overly general. You should be able to patent a specific implementation of a DVR. You should not be able to patent DVRs in general though. Heck, who hadn't already thought of the idea of a DVR way before 1998? It's an obvious idea that was just waiting for computer and hard drive technology to catch up and become cheap enough. You shouldn't be able to patent ideas, only implementations. Imagine where we'd be today if "small computer for personal use" was patented.
Not really. One would think that most reasonable crawlers would cache the parsed robots.txt in memory while crawling a site, rather than re-reading the one on disk that it just tried (and failed) to write. It's very surprising that wget behaves the way it does. Your solution relies on a quirk of wget, as does mine. Mine works for ordinary users though, while yours requires root access. Mine is also shorter.:-)
You're kidding, right? Most of the time I've had to install stuff that used xmkmf, I ended up spending an hour or more fixing the Makefile. autoconf may be a bloated beast, but at least it works most of the time.
Check out Tipping Jakob's Ladder by Julie Meloni. She has some interesting responses to Nielsen's "Flash: 99% Bad" essay.
It pretty much boils down to Nielsen saying Flash is bad because it encourages bad design, and Meloni counters that this is the fault of bad designers.
I have to go with Neilsen on this one. He points out that part of the reason most Flash is bad is that producing usable Flash is expensive. Meloni mentions all sorts of workarounds, like simulating links that change color once you've clicked on them. This only proves Neilsen's point: producing usable Flash is possible, but it's a lot more expensive that producing usable HTML. This point seems to have gone right over Meloni's head.
There are cases where Flash does make sense, but 99% of the cases where it's used are bad. The best way to correct that is to make web designers realize that they should only use Flash if they really have a good reason, and they're willing to expend all of those extra resources to make it usable.
Actually, the 128 had an 8502. The Commodore 64 had a 6510. The 8502 was basically a 6510 with an MMU, I believe.
And I do remember reading something about the Z80 being used in the start-up process of the 128, in addition to being used for CP/M. So I think the original poster was correct -- if he isn't running CP/M then his Z80 only does one thing, which is to help boot up the machine.
Note the -nc ("no clobber") option, so you don't have to screw around with su. (and you don't need to download the whole site twice if you take a minute to think about where the robots.txt will go...)
Yes, I know about the.wgetrc setting, but this is good if you want to grab something off of just one site (like http://www.xml.com/axml/testaxml.htm) but don't want to have to worry about forgetting to re-enable robots.txt handling.
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Yeah, the opening scene of Pushing Tin has some jumbo jets flying near the WTC towers. I was surprised (and relived) that they hadn't re-editted that scene for the DVD.
Hmmm... last I checked, blonds came in both sexes.
OK, take a complete newbie and stick 'em infront of Win9x - allow them to select their CDROM, and then let them eject it by pressing the load button on the drive - BLUESCREEN
So in other words, the Mac doesn't have an eject button on the drive because it's completely impossible to build a machine that doesn't crash when you press the eject button? Whatever.
You have officially lost the argument.
1. the idea of the menu being at the top of the screen is that it provides a fixed target to aim at - this has been proved time and time again to be faster
Proven. Really. Please cite some research that backs that up. In reality, having only one place for menus to appear causes problems if you're switching back and forth between multiple applications, because you have to click on the application's window before its menu will appear at the top of the screen. And for applications that have a small window, then menu bar at the top of the screen can be easily ignored. This means users often aren't even aware of its presence.
2. have you never seen the application switcher?
First, you were taking about the "classic" Mac UI. The application switcher wasn't added to the MacOS until 8.5 in 1998.
Second, the task bar which defaults to the bottom edge of the screen is better than the tear-off menu application switcher. As much as I dislike Microsoft, I have to give them dredit for actually doing studies on the usability of the task bar. The bottom of the screen was deemed the best place because it is both obvious, yet easy to ignore when not needed.
Incidently, it isn't very obvious that a list of the currently open applications is lurking behind the Picasso-Mac logo, let alone that the applications menu can be torn off.
3. you're right! imagine selecting "eject" from the special menu to eject a disk
Yeah. "special" menu. That's really intuitive. It's so intuitive that I wonder why they didn't put all commonly used functions in the wonderful "special" menu...
or "eject" from the contextual menu,
Assuming you're in the Finder. What if I'm in an application, and realize that I want to save a file to a different disk?
or "put away" or pressing CMD-E
WTF does "put away" mean? And if CMD-E is your idea of intuitive, well, that's pretty sad.
You forgot the best way of ejecting a disk on the Mac: drag the icon to the trashcan. That's so intuitive you can smell it a mile away.
I prefer the Win9x method where you remove the disk from the drive and the machine bluescreens until you replace it - much more sensible.
Now you're really showing your desperation. Sure, Windows is unstable as heck. That's why I rarely use Windows. I've never seen it crash because I ejected a disk though.
If you took a complete computer newbie (who had never used Windows or a Mac), and showed them a Mac and a PC, and then placed a disk in the drive of each one and said "eject the disks", which computer do you honestly think they'd have a harder time figuring out? The one with the eject button right next to the slot, just like a CD-player or VCR, or the one that has a tiny pin-hole next to the slot?
The best UI for ejecting a disk is to have an eject button right next to where the disk comes out. Pretty freaking obvious, don't you think? When was the last time you had to press CMD-E on your car stero?
- menus at the top of the screen, completely disconnected from the application window
- apps that only have menus, and so they completely disappear into that hidden menu in the top right corner of the screen if you accidentally click on the desktop. The "taskbar" in Windows (or even the window list that twm has) is far better than the Mac's stealth applications menu
- complete lack of a sensible way to eject a disk
Perhaps they neglected to test the usability of those features in their experiments...Hopefully google will provide a trial or some sort of free version for those of us without $20K to spend though.
They already do. If you go to www.google.com they'll let you search the web for free.
Maybe because all of the other people who though of the idea realized how dumb it would look.
I'm not anti-Mac. I still think the new iMac looks dumb. It's just way too obvious. I liked the original iMac's shape. It looked different than anything else out there. The new iMac looks like a flat-panel monitor with the base from a desk lamp. That's so... boring. I think the only people who claim this thing looks nice are either rabidly pro-mac, or they have no sense of aesthetics.
That isn't true anymore. Try searching for "to be or not to be". Google used to require you to put +'s on the stop words, but they stopped requiring that in phrases a while ago.
BTW, You might notice that some pages don't actually have the phrase you were looking for. That generally means that there's are links pointing to that page with that phrase in them. For example, if you search for "html 4 spec" you get this page. That page doesn't contain the phrase "html 4 spec", but there are lots of links pointing at it that contain that phrase, so it's probably the page you want if that's your query.
Interesting/amusing query: "click here"
Maybe they figured cubes were jinxed or something? After all, Jobs has had bad luck with 2 cubes so far... At least both of the cubes (Mac & NeXT) looked good, which is way more than I can say for the truncated volleyball.
It's already butt-ugly. A dome, a stick, and a rectangle. How is that aesthetically pleasing? The original iMac looked "cute". The flat-panel version looks obvious, boring, and ugly. I was wondering how Apple was going to make a flat-panel imac that looked good. Now I see that they failed. Oh well... :-(
90% of credit card processors don't verify that the expiration date matches the one on the card. They just make sure it's in the future. So the expiration date doesn't provide any security at all for the vast majority of credit cards.
StarCraft, also by Blizzard, also has spawn ability. Unfortunately, the Brood War expansion set can't be spawned, as far as I can tell. :-(
Pay attention. There's a link to "First mass spamming (Green Card spam)" right there on the timeline page.
It's overly general. You should be able to patent a specific implementation of a DVR. You should not be able to patent DVRs in general though. Heck, who hadn't already thought of the idea of a DVR way before 1998? It's an obvious idea that was just waiting for computer and hard drive technology to catch up and become cheap enough. You shouldn't be able to patent ideas, only implementations. Imagine where we'd be today if "small computer for personal use" was patented.
You slept 21 hours a day! Slacker.
Not really. One would think that most reasonable crawlers would cache the parsed robots.txt in memory while crawling a site, rather than re-reading the one on disk that it just tried (and failed) to write. It's very surprising that wget behaves the way it does. Your solution relies on a quirk of wget, as does mine. Mine works for ordinary users though, while yours requires root access. Mine is also shorter. :-)
Heck, I thought just about everyone had switches in the wall jacks for a long time now.
You're kidding, right? Most of the time I've had to install stuff that used xmkmf, I ended up spending an hour or more fixing the Makefile. autoconf may be a bloated beast, but at least it works most of the time.
Check out Tipping Jakob's Ladder by Julie Meloni. She has some interesting responses to Nielsen's "Flash: 99% Bad" essay.
It pretty much boils down to Nielsen saying Flash is bad because it encourages bad design, and Meloni counters that this is the fault of bad designers.
I have to go with Neilsen on this one. He points out that part of the reason most Flash is bad is that producing usable Flash is expensive. Meloni mentions all sorts of workarounds, like simulating links that change color once you've clicked on them. This only proves Neilsen's point: producing usable Flash is possible, but it's a lot more expensive that producing usable HTML. This point seems to have gone right over Meloni's head.
There are cases where Flash does make sense, but 99% of the cases where it's used are bad. The best way to correct that is to make web designers realize that they should only use Flash if they really have a good reason, and they're willing to expend all of those extra resources to make it usable.
Actually, the 128 had an 8502. The Commodore 64 had a 6510. The 8502 was basically a 6510 with an MMU, I believe.
And I do remember reading something about the Z80 being used in the start-up process of the 128, in addition to being used for CP/M. So I think the original poster was correct -- if he isn't running CP/M then his Z80 only does one thing, which is to help boot up the machine.
This is much simpler:
.wgetrc setting, but this is good if you want to grab something off of just one site (like http://www.xml.com/axml/testaxml.htm) but don't want to have to worry about forgetting to re-enable robots.txt handling.
mkdir -p example.com
touch example.com/robots.txt
wget -r -nc http://example.com/
Note the -nc ("no clobber") option, so you don't have to screw around with su. (and you don't need to download the whole site twice if you take a minute to think about where the robots.txt will go...)
Yes, I know about the
Yeah. It's a bet. You're betting that your stuff will be destroyed.
One question: how do you get a deer to pee in a jar?