The important part is to note that different things work well for different people. For instance, I find the OS X GUI to be extremely intuitive, much more so than KDE 3 (KDE 4 rates about the same as Windows, way behind KDE 3). Things just work in a way that makes sense to me. However, I know someone who can't understand any of the design decisions Apple made. He just thinks the OS X GUI is completely horrible. We just happen to have different expectations of what and how the GUI should do.
In the end it boils down to "you can't make an informed decision about a desktop environment without having used it for a few weeks".
They do have some pretty solid usability advances. For example, the search field in the help menu. Don't know in which sub-menu the command for flipping text is hidden? Type "flip" and you get a list of all menu items containing the string "flip". Mouse over one and the correct menu pops up (in addition to the help menu) and a big friendly arrow points out the item you seek. That search field alone makes menus much more accessible without having much of a learning curve.
The problem is, however, that the ribbons need to be 100% compatible with the regular menus, otherwise you end up with extensions being platform-specific even though they shouldn't need to be.
Given that German history class (mandatory after elementary school) is about 50% history of WW2, Nazi Germany and everything concerning it, "it didn't happen" is as much the German opinion on the Third Reich as "we wish we were British" is the American opinion on their history.
We're actually past the "lightning rod" phase; somewhere within the last ten years we decided that we can't define ourselves through out past forever. Swastikas are still unwelcome on their own but you can do things like parodying a comedy "reality" show about a thoroughly unlikable office worker by making it a mockumentary about the Third Reich, complete with Hitler Greeting and swastikas everywhere. As long as you don't glorify the Nazis, in which case you thoroughly deserve the beating you hopefully get. Essentially though, if you show it in something resembling a historical setting and don't go out of your way to glorify, you're good.
Video games are just overscrutinized. That's a general trend in Germany.
They probably think: "Man, I love Indiana Jones movies." Use of swastikas is allowed in many contexts. Video games are just treated more strictly, as usual.
I take it that you are merely ignorant and not trying to actively insult all Germans. Denying the Holocaust is a pretty serious crime over here. Besides, free speech is guaranteed by out constitution, with the exception of... denying the Holocaust, which is a special form of libel. Okay, and the swastika and the Hitler Greeting. That's it.
Meanwhile, to respond in your tone, I still don't see the United States recognizing the right to dignity. It's time to give human rights a try.
Also, they're just being rather strict for video games (which is a general trend in Germany; video game violence is also much less tolerated than movie violence). I can watch the Indiana Jones movies with all their swastikas and Heil Hitlers as much as I want.
We went over this about a million times on/.. American society was built on the notion that there is nothing worse than lack of freedom. This is reflected in American laws and mores. German society was built on the notion that there is one thing worse then lack of freedom: National socialism. Thus, German laws and mores place "be free" high and "don't be a Nazi" higher. (Actually, the first article of our Basic Law is "Human dignity shall be inviolable", but the Nazi thing sits deeper.)
That doesn't mean we're cool with any kind of censorship. In fact, one of the most contested laws as of late was an (immediately subverted) anti-child porn internet censorship bill. Non-total freedom does not mean the country immediately devolves into a banana republic, as we demonstrate - just as you demonstrate that a lack of Nazi suppression does not mean the country immediately becomes the incarnation of all evil.
Besides, we have lots of "enemies of the state". If I wanted to, I could vote for the Marxist-Leninist party, but I'm not that stupid. Besides, there are a couple ultra-right-wing parties in Germany who are essentially skinhead congregations. They're more popular than the communists but still decidedly fringe.
The Euro's what are shaking and why? Because an American architect built a car in America? I mean, the Euro wasn't even around back then and it only was on the American-architects-don't-build-cars standard very shortly.
Run my ISP's web accelerator software (simply doesn't run)
Do you know how this software works? I can't quite subscribe to the concept of a software that magically gives you more bandwidth so there has to be either some kind of compression or caching (although it's beyond me why they'd need special software for that) or they simply give you a degraded bandwidth unless you use that software, which is just shady.
More like: "Oh no, cheating software can be undetectably installed on TI calculators, thus they can't be used in schools and colleges anymore, killing one major source of revenue for TI!"
I meant the lights on cars. The mention of illuminated roads was in case you have never been outside a city where most streets are illuminated at light.
The point is that informing people about the car's presence is a good thing. Humans have two long-range senses and not everyone can use both, so it's a good idea to broadcast your presence on both "channels". Also, both car lights and sound help people infer the presence of a car without seeing it directly, which is useful when sight is obstructed (such as around some street corners or when a pedestrian wants to cross a street with many parking cars).
Furthermore, some current non-hybrid/electric cars are really quite and don't seem to cause a problem.
Except other posters mentioned that they do tend to sneak up on you because in your average city it's too noisy to hear the sound of their wheels at low speeds. I know that "data" is not the plural of "anecdote" but I don't see any scientific studies to show the opposite to that point.
Lights on at night are so the driver can see dumb-ass.:-)
Such as dumbasses who, without the light, would have no way of telling there's an ultra-silent car coming at them? Not every road is illuminated 24/7.
Your post is ridiculous and assumes that the seeing and inattentive notice any visual image all the time. Should it also be *required* to have lights on at night?
Actually, I think the rationale behind 10.0 being slow was that they wanted to implement it correctly and worry about optimizations later. The result is that the early versions of OS X had lousy performance but every subsequent release gets faster - until they hit the cap where they don't have any unoptimized code left. Although I think that the expectation of a faster OS will then drive them to add other means of speeding things up (see Grand Central, OpenCL etc).
I still have a 486DX4/100 machine. Someone was insane enough to install Windows 95 on it. If my "scream" you mean "bare run notepad.exe if you wait a minute for it to load" then yes, Windows 95 screams on 486 machines.
Couldn't this also be used to create new plastic? Of course regular recycling is probably more energy efficient but this might work for cases where you have a huge lump of mixed plastics where separating them is either really uneconomical or not possible. Cook it down to pseudo-petrol and sludge, then use the pseudo-petrol to make new plastic and the sludge (as others pointed out) as lubricant or to pave roads.
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The important part is to note that different things work well for different people. For instance, I find the OS X GUI to be extremely intuitive, much more so than KDE 3 (KDE 4 rates about the same as Windows, way behind KDE 3). Things just work in a way that makes sense to me. However, I know someone who can't understand any of the design decisions Apple made. He just thinks the OS X GUI is completely horrible. We just happen to have different expectations of what and how the GUI should do.
In the end it boils down to "you can't make an informed decision about a desktop environment without having used it for a few weeks".
They do have some pretty solid usability advances. For example, the search field in the help menu. Don't know in which sub-menu the command for flipping text is hidden? Type "flip" and you get a list of all menu items containing the string "flip". Mouse over one and the correct menu pops up (in addition to the help menu) and a big friendly arrow points out the item you seek. That search field alone makes menus much more accessible without having much of a learning curve.
The problem is, however, that the ribbons need to be 100% compatible with the regular menus, otherwise you end up with extensions being platform-specific even though they shouldn't need to be.
Edit the menubar and select "Small icons". Yes, that changes nothing but the back button. Yes, the big back button is stupid.
Seeing that the php.net function reference doesn't know pconnect() I'd guess that using it to connect to MySQL wouldn't quite work.
Given that German history class (mandatory after elementary school) is about 50% history of WW2, Nazi Germany and everything concerning it, "it didn't happen" is as much the German opinion on the Third Reich as "we wish we were British" is the American opinion on their history.
We're actually past the "lightning rod" phase; somewhere within the last ten years we decided that we can't define ourselves through out past forever. Swastikas are still unwelcome on their own but you can do things like parodying a comedy "reality" show about a thoroughly unlikable office worker by making it a mockumentary about the Third Reich, complete with Hitler Greeting and swastikas everywhere. As long as you don't glorify the Nazis, in which case you thoroughly deserve the beating you hopefully get. Essentially though, if you show it in something resembling a historical setting and don't go out of your way to glorify, you're good.
;)
Video games are just overscrutinized. That's a general trend in Germany.
Also, I am not an ass.
They probably think: "Man, I love Indiana Jones movies." Use of swastikas is allowed in many contexts. Video games are just treated more strictly, as usual.
I take it that you are merely ignorant and not trying to actively insult all Germans. Denying the Holocaust is a pretty serious crime over here. Besides, free speech is guaranteed by out constitution, with the exception of... denying the Holocaust, which is a special form of libel. Okay, and the swastika and the Hitler Greeting. That's it.
Meanwhile, to respond in your tone, I still don't see the United States recognizing the right to dignity. It's time to give human rights a try.
Also, they're just being rather strict for video games (which is a general trend in Germany; video game violence is also much less tolerated than movie violence). I can watch the Indiana Jones movies with all their swastikas and Heil Hitlers as much as I want.
We went over this about a million times on /.. American society was built on the notion that there is nothing worse than lack of freedom. This is reflected in American laws and mores. German society was built on the notion that there is one thing worse then lack of freedom: National socialism. Thus, German laws and mores place "be free" high and "don't be a Nazi" higher. (Actually, the first article of our Basic Law is "Human dignity shall be inviolable", but the Nazi thing sits deeper.)
That doesn't mean we're cool with any kind of censorship. In fact, one of the most contested laws as of late was an (immediately subverted) anti-child porn internet censorship bill. Non-total freedom does not mean the country immediately devolves into a banana republic, as we demonstrate - just as you demonstrate that a lack of Nazi suppression does not mean the country immediately becomes the incarnation of all evil.
Besides, we have lots of "enemies of the state". If I wanted to, I could vote for the Marxist-Leninist party, but I'm not that stupid. Besides, there are a couple ultra-right-wing parties in Germany who are essentially skinhead congregations. They're more popular than the communists but still decidedly fringe.
No, by making them rebuy all their tools, allowing them to become an economic superpower within ten years.
The Euro's what are shaking and why? Because an American architect built a car in America? I mean, the Euro wasn't even around back then and it only was on the American-architects-don't-build-cars standard very shortly.
Dr. Forbin, is that you?
I, myself, am partial to the name "Diarrheaper".
Do you know how this software works? I can't quite subscribe to the concept of a software that magically gives you more bandwidth so there has to be either some kind of compression or caching (although it's beyond me why they'd need special software for that) or they simply give you a degraded bandwidth unless you use that software, which is just shady.
Thank you for sharing this piece of information.
Don't all cable-less vibrators take their batteries in series anyway? I mean, that's what I heard. Yes.
More like: "Oh no, cheating software can be undetectably installed on TI calculators, thus they can't be used in schools and colleges anymore, killing one major source of revenue for TI!"
I meant the lights on cars. The mention of illuminated roads was in case you have never been outside a city where most streets are illuminated at light.
The point is that informing people about the car's presence is a good thing. Humans have two long-range senses and not everyone can use both, so it's a good idea to broadcast your presence on both "channels". Also, both car lights and sound help people infer the presence of a car without seeing it directly, which is useful when sight is obstructed (such as around some street corners or when a pedestrian wants to cross a street with many parking cars).
Except other posters mentioned that they do tend to sneak up on you because in your average city it's too noisy to hear the sound of their wheels at low speeds. I know that "data" is not the plural of "anecdote" but I don't see any scientific studies to show the opposite to that point.
Such as dumbasses who, without the light, would have no way of telling there's an ultra-silent car coming at them? Not every road is illuminated 24/7.
Yeah, if they can't do everything a healthy human can do they obviously can't possibly contribute to society and must be purged. Oh wait, they don't.
Your post is ridiculous and assumes that the seeing and inattentive notice any visual image all the time. Should it also be *required* to have lights on at night?
Actually, I think the rationale behind 10.0 being slow was that they wanted to implement it correctly and worry about optimizations later. The result is that the early versions of OS X had lousy performance but every subsequent release gets faster - until they hit the cap where they don't have any unoptimized code left. Although I think that the expectation of a faster OS will then drive them to add other means of speeding things up (see Grand Central, OpenCL etc).
I still have a 486DX4/100 machine. Someone was insane enough to install Windows 95 on it. If my "scream" you mean "bare run notepad.exe if you wait a minute for it to load" then yes, Windows 95 screams on 486 machines.
Couldn't this also be used to create new plastic? Of course regular recycling is probably more energy efficient but this might work for cases where you have a huge lump of mixed plastics where separating them is either really uneconomical or not possible. Cook it down to pseudo-petrol and sludge, then use the pseudo-petrol to make new plastic and the sludge (as others pointed out) as lubricant or to pave roads.