If that's what the Mac is like as well it will probably take me about an hour or less to cross the system edge to edge and get exceptionally pissed off with it.
I wish it had only taken me an hour. It took me 15 days, which was one day longer that the period in which I could have returned the thing. During the first 14 days, I just figured it was simply different, and I would adjust to it in time. It took a while to realize there wasn't any adjusting to it, and it was just as you said: it makes it easy for beginners, and you'll be a beginner forever.
I'd loved to have returned it and bought a more linux-compatible laptop with an LCD that isn't postively the bottom of the line. It would have been well worth it to simply lose the $100 restocking fee.
I'm pretty sure that cheap LCD screen is the reason why black isn't an option for a solid background color: You can't see black over the entire screen no matter what angle you view the screen from, but if you can't get solid black over the screen, then you can't tell it has that problem. The truly sad thing is that they try to pass off the "glossy" screen as an optional "feature" to the people who buy the MacBook Pro.
Having said that, I'll probably buy a Mac instead. Functionality without the risk or hassle...
I wasted some $1200 thinking I'd get something more functional than Linux with a Mac. In the end, I simply ended up with a Linux laptop which probably doesn't work as well as if I had done some research and specifically bought a well-supported laptop for Linux.
Mac's may "just work" but they acheive that by hardly doing anything. I was constantly trying to right-click on things because I was always looking for functionality that I couldn't find. I don't remember it all as I really only tried it for about a month, and it was more than a year ago, but there were stupid little things missing everywhere. For example, if you wanted to change the background color of your desktop, you could only choose one of about eight colors, and none of those choices were black. There wasn't a color-picker for a solid background color, but ironically enough, if you chose an image for a background and it didn't fill the entire screen, you did get a color picker to choose the color that surrounds that image. I worked around it by using a small transparent PNG image so that I could use the color picker, but people shouldn't have to work around stuff like that....and the Mac is swamped with shit you have to work around because Apple decided that basic features were simply too complicated for people to understand.
What got me the most was the problem with the mouse acceleration. The acceleration curve has a very steep point at which it goes from very slow to very fast, which makes it incredibly difficult to control with precision. So you think "that's no problem, I'll just adjust it in the mouse settings," but like everything else in Mac OS, it has been simplified beyond comprehension, and so you can control the overall speed of the mouse, but you have zero options as far as the acceleration curve is concerned.
So I searched the web, and I found several utilities that were supposed to fix it by playing with hidden variables, but none of them actually fixed it, and one of them rendered the OS rather crash-prone....or, no, what rendered it crash-prone was the utility I installed to eliminate the start-up sound, the noise the BIOS makes when you boot the computer. By default it is at whatever volume level the laptop was last used at, so you listen to something at high volume in a noisy environment, then pack up and go to the library, and as soon as you turn on your laptop, it makes the loudest fucking noise ever. The utility simply muted the audio at shutdown and restored it after startup, but somehow it also caused the thing to fail to shut down every other time I tried. Naturally, there was no configuration option in the OS for the volume of that stupid sound, as Apple simply thinks that options confuse people....and then there's that whole deal with the menu bars being at the top of the screen. I don't care how many usibility studies say it's better that way, it's completely fucking obvious that it isn't....and, Apple not wanting to confuse people, there's naturally no option to configure the GUI. Your only choice is menu bars at the top of the screen. Your only choice for a taskbar is the row of icons at the bottom of the screen which get a blue dot under them if that application is running. Your only choice is that when you close a window, the application continues to run with no windows open. I loved that one. I was told it was because Mac OS was a document-oriented OS rather than an application-oriented OS. I never understood how forcing me to take note of when I have closed all of the windows belonging to an application so that I can manually close that application as well makes the OS more document-oriented and less application-oriented.
Eventually, you realize the sad truth: If you want stuff to "just work" then you need Mac OS. If, on the other hand, you want your computer to do what you want it to do, then you
Though technically(and legally) student is in the care of the school while at school, it is important to understand the distiction between this and something like a prison.
Not only that, but were a parent to strip-search their child, do you think the child protection agency would be OK with that? Schools don't just assume they have equal rights with the parent, they assume their rights are even greater.
My favorite bullshit from when I was in school was that no kid in the entire town was allowed to have hair dyed an unusual color because the school decared it a distraction to education. (The rule was no funky dyed hair in school, but if you had it outside of school, you necessarily had to bring it to school with you.) When pressed about the issue they'd come up with nonsense like comparing it to real-world scenerios like a job which requires a certain appearance, despite the fact that going to school doesn't offer nearly the freedom of a real job. When it comes to which school a child attends, the child has no choice, they can't simply choose one with rules that better fit their personality. Even the parents only have a choice if they're willing to rearrange their lives in order to move to a new school district. One can easily get a new job without finding a new place to live and moving away from family and friends, but getting a new school isn't nearly so easy.
The result is that school officials get to effectively be little dictators of whatever community they are in.
I'm sure we could have fixed spam by now, were it not for the type of people behind that form. I once saw a spam solution which, aside from irrelevant items such as "this is what I think about you," had nothing marked against it except for "it won't work for mailing lists." Well, fuck, why don't we replace mailing lists with something else? We could use RSS feeds instead, or create a special mailing list protocol (call it the newspaper protocol or something clever like that)....but no, it seems the rule is that any solution to spam cannot involve changing anything.
Email was designed to be like real mail. Anyone can send anyone anything. So like real mail, email has its own version of junk mail, but email lacks the one thing that limits junk mail to acceptable levels: stamps. Now since no one wants to do that, we obviously need to change something else, otherwise we'll always have spam.
The problem is too many fucktards who get their panties in a knot whenever anyone talks about doing anything differently. For some reason they dream of an email system where everyone can send anything to anyone, but yet, no one can send certain things to everyone. It's dumb. If you want something to change, then obviously you're going to have to change something, but there are too many elitist morons with funny little forms for any real discussion to take place. No matter what you suggest changing, there's some dumbass somewhere who happens to like that aspect of email exactly the way it is, and he'll promtly append a new objection to that form.
There's a simple reason TWC pays for these channels. They plaster their own commercials all over them. Cable companies are in the advertising business. Call them up and you can get your ads on any channel you like, even Viacom channels, and only in your local area.
So, given that TWC gets to put the ads on the channels, why shouldn't TWC pay for the channels?
Condorcet is easy, it's just that no one knows how to explain it. Look at it this way: You have everyone create their ordered lists of candidates just like with instant runoff voting. The you take each pair of candidates and put them in their own elections, using the ordered lists to decide how to cast each person's vote. The winner is the person who wins their election against every other person. While more complicated than IRV, it's still simple enough to understand, and no one can argue that the candidate who would win going one-on-one against all of the other candidates is the one who should be the winner.
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If that's what the Mac is like as well it will probably take me about an hour or less to cross the system edge to edge and get exceptionally pissed off with it.
I wish it had only taken me an hour. It took me 15 days, which was one day longer that the period in which I could have returned the thing. During the first 14 days, I just figured it was simply different, and I would adjust to it in time. It took a while to realize there wasn't any adjusting to it, and it was just as you said: it makes it easy for beginners, and you'll be a beginner forever.
I'd loved to have returned it and bought a more linux-compatible laptop with an LCD that isn't postively the bottom of the line. It would have been well worth it to simply lose the $100 restocking fee.
I'm pretty sure that cheap LCD screen is the reason why black isn't an option for a solid background color: You can't see black over the entire screen no matter what angle you view the screen from, but if you can't get solid black over the screen, then you can't tell it has that problem. The truly sad thing is that they try to pass off the "glossy" screen as an optional "feature" to the people who buy the MacBook Pro.
Having said that, I'll probably buy a Mac instead. Functionality without the risk or hassle...
I wasted some $1200 thinking I'd get something more functional than Linux with a Mac. In the end, I simply ended up with a Linux laptop which probably doesn't work as well as if I had done some research and specifically bought a well-supported laptop for Linux.
Mac's may "just work" but they acheive that by hardly doing anything. I was constantly trying to right-click on things because I was always looking for functionality that I couldn't find. I don't remember it all as I really only tried it for about a month, and it was more than a year ago, but there were stupid little things missing everywhere. For example, if you wanted to change the background color of your desktop, you could only choose one of about eight colors, and none of those choices were black. There wasn't a color-picker for a solid background color, but ironically enough, if you chose an image for a background and it didn't fill the entire screen, you did get a color picker to choose the color that surrounds that image. I worked around it by using a small transparent PNG image so that I could use the color picker, but people shouldn't have to work around stuff like that. ...and the Mac is swamped with shit you have to work around because Apple decided that basic features were simply too complicated for people to understand.
What got me the most was the problem with the mouse acceleration. The acceleration curve has a very steep point at which it goes from very slow to very fast, which makes it incredibly difficult to control with precision. So you think "that's no problem, I'll just adjust it in the mouse settings," but like everything else in Mac OS, it has been simplified beyond comprehension, and so you can control the overall speed of the mouse, but you have zero options as far as the acceleration curve is concerned.
So I searched the web, and I found several utilities that were supposed to fix it by playing with hidden variables, but none of them actually fixed it, and one of them rendered the OS rather crash-prone. ...or, no, what rendered it crash-prone was the utility I installed to eliminate the start-up sound, the noise the BIOS makes when you boot the computer. By default it is at whatever volume level the laptop was last used at, so you listen to something at high volume in a noisy environment, then pack up and go to the library, and as soon as you turn on your laptop, it makes the loudest fucking noise ever. The utility simply muted the audio at shutdown and restored it after startup, but somehow it also caused the thing to fail to shut down every other time I tried. Naturally, there was no configuration option in the OS for the volume of that stupid sound, as Apple simply thinks that options confuse people. ...and then there's that whole deal with the menu bars being at the top of the screen. I don't care how many usibility studies say it's better that way, it's completely fucking obvious that it isn't. ...and, Apple not wanting to confuse people, there's naturally no option to configure the GUI. Your only choice is menu bars at the top of the screen. Your only choice for a taskbar is the row of icons at the bottom of the screen which get a blue dot under them if that application is running. Your only choice is that when you close a window, the application continues to run with no windows open. I loved that one. I was told it was because Mac OS was a document-oriented OS rather than an application-oriented OS. I never understood how forcing me to take note of when I have closed all of the windows belonging to an application so that I can manually close that application as well makes the OS more document-oriented and less application-oriented.
Eventually, you realize the sad truth: If you want stuff to "just work" then you need Mac OS. If, on the other hand, you want your computer to do what you want it to do, then you
Though technically(and legally) student is in the care of the school while at school, it is important to understand the distiction between this and something like a prison.
Not only that, but were a parent to strip-search their child, do you think the child protection agency would be OK with that? Schools don't just assume they have equal rights with the parent, they assume their rights are even greater.
My favorite bullshit from when I was in school was that no kid in the entire town was allowed to have hair dyed an unusual color because the school decared it a distraction to education. (The rule was no funky dyed hair in school, but if you had it outside of school, you necessarily had to bring it to school with you.) When pressed about the issue they'd come up with nonsense like comparing it to real-world scenerios like a job which requires a certain appearance, despite the fact that going to school doesn't offer nearly the freedom of a real job. When it comes to which school a child attends, the child has no choice, they can't simply choose one with rules that better fit their personality. Even the parents only have a choice if they're willing to rearrange their lives in order to move to a new school district. One can easily get a new job without finding a new place to live and moving away from family and friends, but getting a new school isn't nearly so easy.
The result is that school officials get to effectively be little dictators of whatever community they are in.
I'm sure we could have fixed spam by now, were it not for the type of people behind that form. I once saw a spam solution which, aside from irrelevant items such as "this is what I think about you," had nothing marked against it except for "it won't work for mailing lists." Well, fuck, why don't we replace mailing lists with something else? We could use RSS feeds instead, or create a special mailing list protocol (call it the newspaper protocol or something clever like that). ...but no, it seems the rule is that any solution to spam cannot involve changing anything.
Email was designed to be like real mail. Anyone can send anyone anything. So like real mail, email has its own version of junk mail, but email lacks the one thing that limits junk mail to acceptable levels: stamps. Now since no one wants to do that, we obviously need to change something else, otherwise we'll always have spam.
The problem is too many fucktards who get their panties in a knot whenever anyone talks about doing anything differently. For some reason they dream of an email system where everyone can send anything to anyone, but yet, no one can send certain things to everyone. It's dumb. If you want something to change, then obviously you're going to have to change something, but there are too many elitist morons with funny little forms for any real discussion to take place. No matter what you suggest changing, there's some dumbass somewhere who happens to like that aspect of email exactly the way it is, and he'll promtly append a new objection to that form.
There's a simple reason TWC pays for these channels. They plaster their own commercials all over them. Cable companies are in the advertising business. Call them up and you can get your ads on any channel you like, even Viacom channels, and only in your local area.
So, given that TWC gets to put the ads on the channels, why shouldn't TWC pay for the channels?
Condorcet is easy, it's just that no one knows how to explain it. Look at it this way: You have everyone create their ordered lists of candidates just like with instant runoff voting. The you take each pair of candidates and put them in their own elections, using the ordered lists to decide how to cast each person's vote. The winner is the person who wins their election against every other person. While more complicated than IRV, it's still simple enough to understand, and no one can argue that the candidate who would win going one-on-one against all of the other candidates is the one who should be the winner.