"...Microsoft is the only one that actually has it right, since if you think back to the old typewriter, you have to have a Carriage Return, and a Line Feed to get to the start of the next line when typing."
Thank God Microsoft maintains backwards compatibility with those old typewriters!
Depends on the LCD. A new, high quality LCD is much, much sharper than a CRT of comparable size. LCDs have fixed pixels; CRTs create them on the fly depending on how the electron gun moves. The downside is, LCDs are not meant to scale resolutions (except to double or triple pixels) so don't try.
Brightness is much better than it used to be, too. Response time is getting better, too, though it's not quite there yet.
Sub-pixel rendering is not the same as anti-aliasing...anti-aliasing does "blur" the corners of text, but sub-pixel rendering actually increases the resolution of text.
If SPR is making your text blurrier, you may have on of several problems.
SPR does only work on LCDs; don't turn it on if you're using a CRT.
If your LCD is sufficiently old, then the pixels may be so large that the color elements are visible when used in this way. There's no real way around this.
If you are viewing very small text, the sub-pixels may be making up too much of the characters. You should be able to turn off SPR for font sizes below some specified limit.
Finally, if you're staring at the screen closely enough to see the sub-pixels, you may want to get your eyes checked.
As a general rule? Yes, do whatever the wife says.
It's a lot easier to buy a replacement computer than find a replacement wife.
And, who's to say he knows anything more than she does about this particular field? He didn't give one reason why the Mac mini would be unsuitable for his wife to use.
You're right. The problem lies not with the Star Trek "universe," but with the production team. I'm not going to bash Berman et al, as others have already done. I'm not sure it's because they're necessarily bad at what they do. I just think that the creative team behind Star Trek has seen too many seasons of workaday script production.
By and large, the people who started working on TNG in 1987 kept working on DS9, Voyager, and now Enterprise. Somewhere along the way, producing the series became a routine, repetitive job. Wake up, drive to the Paramount backlot, write a script, hand it over to the current cast, go home. Every three years, produce a feature film. Repeat as necessary. That kind of routine makes real creativity hard.
My point is not to be pedantic, but to point out that our ideas of what is "male" and "female" extend beyond anatomy. There are many social and cultural aspects to the sexes.
( * Except in the linguistic sense, in which "gender" refers to the difference between masculine and feminine nouns and articles. See linked definition.)
The current doctrine that is present in most schools and society will not allow a view to exist even if it could be backed with fact.We are too concerned with feelings compared to facts.
Indeed. Care to back up the contention that "females are naturally bad at math" with some fact?
No, "everybody knows that" and "it's always been this way" do not count as fact.
I've heard claims that, in other countries, math is considered a "female" discipline, which men avoid because their society views it too theoretical, and not practical at all. Different social reality, different "facts."
No argument there. Both Boeing and the Airbus parents have discovered that subsidies are good for the bottom line. But the grandparent faulted Boeing for accepting those oh-so-lucrative contracts, while conveniently failing to mention Airbus' cozy relationship with its governments. Just trying to tell both sides of the sordid story
Okay, so from what I gather, Creative's software is promising because:
- You have to use some other program (which probably will cost money) to burn audio CDs - It does not allow you to use your music from other computers on your local network - You have to use some other program (which probably will cost money) to back up your music library - Its interface may or may not be as good as iTunes - It's not "hip" or "cool," which makes it acceptable for the anti-hip counterculture people.
and
- It may or may not have other features, and the hardware players or may not be significantly cheaper than the iPod.
I think "premature" is definitely the right word to use.
Yes, but now that the European defense contractors have banded together to form the Airbus consortium, they recieve both direct subsidies, in the form of loans from European governments, and indirect subsidies, in the form of NATO defense contracts to EADS and BAE Systems.
In the PC market, the real "entry-level" machines have "Integrated Intel Extreme(TM)" graphics on the mobo. Which is a polite way of saying, "no graphics card at all." So, yes, a Radeon 9200 is entry level for a graphics card, but it's a nice step up from what you get standard on the cheapest machines.
If Microsoft is complaining about the performance of graphics hardware on low-end PCs, it's a solid bet that the integrated graphics cards will be the first target.
The 'special apple [command] keys' are used to actuate keyboard shortcuts (command-c for copy, command-v for paste, etc.) like the CTRL keys on a PC keyboard.
The control keys on a Mac keyboard are used to call up the contextual (right-click) menus.
Plug a PC keyboard into a Mac, though, and the ctrl keys will work like command keys (or something like that, IIRC.)
I hate the current Apple keyboard too. In addition to the points you raise, the keyboard will not lie flat (keeps the wrists straight, more ergonomic than the angle most people set their keyboards to.)
Kensington has a line of mac-style keyboards, including an US$80 model with mechanical (metal spring) switches.
Note that the only difference between a "Mac keyboard" and any other keyboard are the labels and positions of the keys (Return, Apple/Command, Option.) You can use a standard PC USB keyboard with a Mac, if you're willing to acommodate those differences.
Looking at old magazines from the time, you get a different perspective. When the two formats were first introduced, (very early 80s) Betamax had a slight edge in quality over VHS. However, by the mid 80s, VHS had basically caught up in quality. As nearly as I can tell, had Beta won the format wars, we wouldn't have any better picture quality from our analog recordings than we do now. The idea that we're all watching inferior-quality recordings today because the superior technology lost is pretty much bunk.
When Apple has near-total control over the market (say, 90% market share) then it will be a monopoly.
What you describe is called Vertical Integration. Vertical integration can be used to acquire or strenghten a monopoly, but it does not confer a monopoly.
Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft is not a monopoly because they make a wide variety of products. Microsoft is a monopoly because they have no viable competition.
To say that Apple has no competition would be ridiculous in the extreme. Apple is in no danger of becoming a dominant force in the market. A disruptive force, perhaps, but not dominant.
The GUI was developed at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI) by a team including Doug Engelbart (who invented the mouse.) The early system, called NLS, was somewhere between a demo and a product. It was used internally by SRI, but never developed into a product. Until...
Xerox refined it and tried to commercialize it. Xerox did build a functional computer (the Star) which sold poorly.
Apple refined it further, creating the Lisa, and finally succeeded in commercializing it, with the much cheaper Macintosh. The Lisa/Mac interface was probably the first interface that was designed for absolute beginners who had no previous computer experience. The Xerox and SRI systems were stunning, but required user training.
Microsoft, as you said, capitalized on the work of Apple, Xerox, and SRI before it, while adding essentially nothing original.
The original Mac had a one-button mouse, but Steve Jobs' NeXT hardware (Cube and Slab) had a two-button mouse. I find it extremely unlikely that Steve is the only one at Apple who opposes a two-button mosue, since he allowed them at NeXT.
I think it's much more likely that Apple's HCI people recognize that a two-button mouse is a kludge for developers who don't know how to build a proper menu system.
Slashdot Mirror
"...Microsoft is the only one that actually has it right, since if you think back to the old typewriter, you have to have a Carriage Return, and a Line Feed to get to the start of the next line when typing."
Thank God Microsoft maintains backwards compatibility with those old typewriters!
Depends on the LCD. A new, high quality LCD is much, much sharper than a CRT of comparable size. LCDs have fixed pixels; CRTs create them on the fly depending on how the electron gun moves. The downside is, LCDs are not meant to scale resolutions (except to double or triple pixels) so don't try. Brightness is much better than it used to be, too. Response time is getting better, too, though it's not quite there yet.
Sub-pixel rendering is not the same as anti-aliasing...anti-aliasing does "blur" the corners of text, but sub-pixel rendering actually increases the resolution of text.
If SPR is making your text blurrier, you may have on of several problems.
SPR does only work on LCDs; don't turn it on if you're using a CRT.
If your LCD is sufficiently old, then the pixels may be so large that the color elements are visible when used in this way. There's no real way around this.
If you are viewing very small text, the sub-pixels may be making up too much of the characters. You should be able to turn off SPR for font sizes below some specified limit.
Finally, if you're staring at the screen closely enough to see the sub-pixels, you may want to get your eyes checked.
As a general rule? Yes, do whatever the wife says.
It's a lot easier to buy a replacement computer than find a replacement wife.
And, who's to say he knows anything more than she does about this particular field? He didn't give one reason why the Mac mini would be unsuitable for his wife to use.
You're right. The problem lies not with the Star Trek "universe," but with the production team. I'm not going to bash Berman et al, as others have already done. I'm not sure it's because they're necessarily bad at what they do. I just think that the creative team behind Star Trek has seen too many seasons of workaday script production.
By and large, the people who started working on TNG in 1987 kept working on DS9, Voyager, and now Enterprise. Somewhere along the way, producing the series became a routine, repetitive job. Wake up, drive to the Paramount backlot, write a script, hand it over to the current cast, go home. Every three years, produce a feature film. Repeat as necessary. That kind of routine makes real creativity hard.
Gender is a phyisical condition.
Gender is "the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex* The word "gender" explicitly excludes the physical characteristics of human sexuality.
My point is not to be pedantic, but to point out that our ideas of what is "male" and "female" extend beyond anatomy. There are many social and cultural aspects to the sexes.
( * Except in the linguistic sense, in which "gender" refers to the difference between masculine and feminine nouns and articles. See linked definition.)
The current doctrine that is present in most schools and society will not allow a view to exist even if it could be backed with fact.We are too concerned with feelings compared to facts.
Indeed. Care to back up the contention that "females are naturally bad at math" with some fact?
No, "everybody knows that" and "it's always been this way" do not count as fact.
I've heard claims that, in other countries, math is considered a "female" discipline, which men avoid because their society views it too theoretical, and not practical at all. Different social reality, different "facts."
"One thing I have noticed over the years, is that when anyone says something "controversial" people get in an uproar.
Ahh, so you have discovered the definition of "controversial."
No argument there. Both Boeing and the Airbus parents have discovered that subsidies are good for the bottom line. But the grandparent faulted Boeing for accepting those oh-so-lucrative contracts, while conveniently failing to mention Airbus' cozy relationship with its governments. Just trying to tell both sides of the sordid story
Okay, so from what I gather, Creative's software is promising because:
- You have to use some other program (which probably will cost money) to burn audio CDs
- It does not allow you to use your music from other computers on your local network
- You have to use some other program (which probably will cost money) to back up your music library
- Its interface may or may not be as good as iTunes
- It's not "hip" or "cool," which makes it acceptable for the anti-hip counterculture people.
and
- It may or may not have other features, and the hardware players or may not be significantly cheaper than the iPod.
I think "premature" is definitely the right word to use.
Yes, but now that the European defense contractors have banded together to form the Airbus consortium, they recieve both direct subsidies, in the form of loans from European governments, and indirect subsidies, in the form of NATO defense contracts to EADS and BAE Systems.
NASA really has something to learn about broadcasting
Seriously. I mean, what happened to the proud organization that faked the moon landings?
Yeah, and the same thing for Hollywood.
In the PC market, the real "entry-level" machines have "Integrated Intel Extreme(TM)" graphics on the mobo. Which is a polite way of saying, "no graphics card at all." So, yes, a Radeon 9200 is entry level for a graphics card, but it's a nice step up from what you get standard on the cheapest machines.
If Microsoft is complaining about the performance of graphics hardware on low-end PCs, it's a solid bet that the integrated graphics cards will be the first target.
The 'special apple [command] keys' are used to actuate keyboard shortcuts (command-c for copy, command-v for paste, etc.) like the CTRL keys on a PC keyboard.
The control keys on a Mac keyboard are used to call up the contextual (right-click) menus.
Plug a PC keyboard into a Mac, though, and the ctrl keys will work like command keys (or something like that, IIRC.)
I hate the current Apple keyboard too. In addition to the points you raise, the keyboard will not lie flat (keeps the wrists straight, more ergonomic than the angle most people set their keyboards to.)
Kensington has a line of mac-style keyboards, including an US$80 model with mechanical (metal spring) switches.
Note that the only difference between a "Mac keyboard" and any other keyboard are the labels and positions of the keys (Return, Apple/Command, Option.) You can use a standard PC USB keyboard with a Mac, if you're willing to acommodate those differences.
So long as you're into overkill, why not get a dual 2.5GHz G5 and a Cinema display to use as a terminal?
I agree that it was an oversimplification.
Looking at old magazines from the time, you get a different perspective. When the two formats were first introduced, (very early 80s) Betamax had a slight edge in quality over VHS. However, by the mid 80s, VHS had basically caught up in quality. As nearly as I can tell, had Beta won the format wars, we wouldn't have any better picture quality from our analog recordings than we do now. The idea that we're all watching inferior-quality recordings today because the superior technology lost is pretty much bunk.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's also Version 1.0
When Apple has near-total control over the market (say, 90% market share) then it will be a monopoly.
What you describe is called Vertical Integration. Vertical integration can be used to acquire or strenghten a monopoly, but it does not confer a monopoly.
Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft is not a monopoly because they make a wide variety of products. Microsoft is a monopoly because they have no viable competition.
To say that Apple has no competition would be ridiculous in the extreme. Apple is in no danger of becoming a dominant force in the market. A disruptive force, perhaps, but not dominant.
The GUI was developed at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI) by a team including Doug Engelbart (who invented the mouse.) The early system, called NLS, was somewhere between a demo and a product. It was used internally by SRI, but never developed into a product. Until...
Xerox refined it and tried to commercialize it. Xerox did build a functional computer (the Star) which sold poorly.
Apple refined it further, creating the Lisa, and finally succeeded in commercializing it, with the much cheaper Macintosh. The Lisa/Mac interface was probably the first interface that was designed for absolute beginners who had no previous computer experience. The Xerox and SRI systems were stunning, but required user training.
Microsoft, as you said, capitalized on the work of Apple, Xerox, and SRI before it, while adding essentially nothing original.
There's an accessory for that, too.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/0488528073016041/
Of course not. If I'm not mistaken, most of the patent holders for the various DVD formats are Japanese companies.
If you look at the About Us page, you'll see lots of "Corporate Sponsors," including Akamai.
From the looks of things, the bandwith and servers necessary to deliver the site are not being paid for with your precious tax money.
The original Mac had a one-button mouse, but Steve Jobs' NeXT hardware (Cube and Slab) had a two-button mouse. I find it extremely unlikely that Steve is the only one at Apple who opposes a two-button mosue, since he allowed them at NeXT.
I think it's much more likely that Apple's HCI people recognize that a two-button mouse is a kludge for developers who don't know how to build a proper menu system.